by David Weber
* * *
"Intolerant reports loss of her entire starboard sidewall aft of midships, Your Grace. She has at least three core hull breaches, and one fusion plant's off-line. Her shipboard fire control and point defense are seriously compromised."
Honor nodded, keeping her expression calm as she listened to Jaruwalski's report.
"Harper, get me Captain Sharif."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am."
"Captain," Honor said, moments later as Captain James Sharif appeared on her com display.
"Your Grace." Sharif's face was taut, but his expression and voice were under firm control.
"How bad is it over there, James?"
"Honestly?" Sharif shrugged. "Not good, Your Grace. I've got serious personnel casualties, and Engineering's lost about twenty-five percent of its damage control remotes-almost a hundred percent in the missile core. Our compensator's undamaged, and we've got enough node redundancy to maintain military power, but our offensive combat capability outside energy range is shot. And I'm afraid our missile defense pretty much sucks right now."
"That's what I was afraid of." Honor glanced at the astrogation display, then looked back at Sharif. "We've run out of Bogey Four's MDM range, and on our present heading, we'll just scrape by outside Bogey Three's envelope. But that's going to take us within range of the pods they've got deployed around Arthur in about another fourteen minutes. How much missile defense can you restore in that much time?"
"Not a lot," Sharif said grimly. "We've lost both Keyholes. I don't think we can get either of them back this side of an all-up shipyard visit, Your Grace, and we still have a major fire in secondary fire control. My shipboard control links to starboard have taken a real beating, too. We're mostly intact to port, so as long as I can keep that side of the ship towards the threat, we'll be able to control three or four CM salvos, but, at best, I figure we'll be at maybe forty percent of design missile defense capability."
"Do what you can," she said. "Go ahead and roll ship now. I'll try to adjust the formation to give you a little more cover."
"Thank you, Your Grace." Sharif smiled tightly. "I'm glad you're thinking about us."
"Take care, James," Honor replied. "Clear."
She looked over her shoulder at Lieutenant Brantley.
"Admiral Henke, Harper," she said.
"Aye, aye, Ma'am."
Less than ten seconds later, Michelle Henke's face had replaced Sharif's on the com display.
"Mike," Honor began without preamble, "Intolerant's in trouble. Her missile defense is way below par, and we're headed into the planetary pods' envelope. I know Ajax's taken a few licks of her own, but I want your squadron moved out on our flank. I need to interpose your point defense between Intolerant and Arthur. Are you in shape for that?"
"Of course we are." Henke nodded vigorously. "Ajax's the only one who's been kissed, and our damage is all pretty much superficial. None of it'll have any effect on our missile defense."
"Good! Andrea and I will shift the LACs as well, but they've expended a lot of CMs against those two monster launches from Bogey Four." Honor shook her head. "I didn't think they could stack that many pods without completely saturating their own fire control. It looks like we're going to have to rethink a few things."
"That's the nature of the beast, isn't it?" Henke responded with a shrug. "We live and learn."
"Those of us fortunate enough to survive," Honor agreed, just a bit grimly. Then she gave herself a little shake. "All right, Mike. Get your people moving. Clear."
* * *
"They're shifting formation, Admiral," Selma Thackeray reported. "It looks like they're moving their battlecruisers between their damaged superdreadnought and Arthur."
"Sounds like we got a pretty good piece of her, Sir," Gozzi observed.
"I'd have preferred a better one," Giscard said, his eyes on the damage control report from Conquete scrolling up his display.
Despite the disparity in firepower, the Manties' stubborn concentration on a single target had paid them dividends. Conquete was the only one of Giscard's ships they'd damaged, but they'd hammered her severely. Her max acceleration was down by almost twenty-two percent, her point defense had been significantly degraded, she had over two hundred casualties, and like all Giscard's SD(P)s, she'd effectively exhausted her offensive missile capacity.
But superdreadnoughts were tough, and the Republic's damage control capabilities had improved dramatically over the past few years. Conquete might be hurt, but she would still have been combat capable... if there'd been any one in range for her to fight.
"Their present course is going to carry them clear of Sewall, isn't it, Marius?" he asked after a moment.
"Yes, Sir, I'm afraid it is," Gozzi replied. Rear Admiral Hildegard Sewall commanded the Republican task group closing in from system south. "Not by very much, though," the chief of staff continued. "If Deutscher manages to inflict more impeller damage, I think she'll probably be able to bring them into her engagement envelope."
"And with one of their superdreadnoughts already beat up on." Giscard nodded. "Well, I suppose it's all up to Deutscher, then."
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Additional damage reports came in over the next several minutes, and Honor settled back in her command chair as she digested them. Intolerant's damages were the worst, and from the medical reports, it sounded very much as if Alistair McKeon was going to require a new CO for his battle squadron's first division. Honor had never gotten to know Allen Morowitz as well as she would have liked... and it didn't look as if she would ever have the chance to.
Star Ranger was the next most badly damaged. Her personnel casualties were even worse than Intolerant's, but that was largely because she was one of the older, manpower-intensive Star Knight-class ships. From the her reports, her people seemed to have things under control, but she, too, was going to require an extensive shipyard stay. Given her age, and how long repairs were likely to take, it was probable BuShips would simply write her off, but at least Honor should be able to get her home.
Ajax's damage was much less severe. Assuming nothing else happened to her, her repairs should be both routine and rapid.
Taken altogether, things could have been far worse, she told herself. She'd allowed her task force to be mousetrapped, and the fact that the Havenites had used a variant of her own Sidemore tactics to do it lent it an additional sting. But the thing which had made it effective at Sidemore was the same thing which had made it equally effective here: no one in normal-space could "see" into hyper-space to detect units there. And at least she'd gotten the carriers clear before the bad guys dropped in on her.
"Is Rifleman still clear, Mercedes?" she asked looking up from the damage reports.
"As far as we can tell, they don't haven't a clue where she is," Brigham replied.
"Good. But tell her to stay where she is until we clear the hyper limit." Brigham looked a question at her, and Honor smiled thinly. "Whoever's in charge on the other side has already demonstrated she's pretty good. At the moment, it looks like all her available units, aside from Bogey Four, are still accelerating in-system. They probably hope we'll take enough lumps from the Arthur pods to slow us down, let them overhaul. But if I were in command on the other side, and if I had enough hulls for it, I'd have at least one more task group waiting in hyper."
"To drop just outside the limit, right in our faces just when we think we're about to get away clean," Brigham said.
"Exactly. Mind you, I think the odds are good that they've committed everything they have already, but let's make sure before Rifleman hypers out to tell Samuel where to pick up his LACs."
"Yes, Your Grace. I'll see to it."
* * *
"Is Moriarty ready?" Rear Admiral Emile Deutscher asked his chief of staff.
"Yes, Sir," the chief of staff replied.
"Good." Deutscher returned his attention to his tactical display. His two obsolete wallers had almost certainly been completely dismissed b
y the Manties as a threat. And, by and large, the Manties would have been correct about that. After all, at this range, without pods on tow, they couldn't possibly have a weapon with the range to reach them.
But the superdreadnoughts' real purpose, from the beginning, had simply been to attract the Manties' attention away from the real threat.
"Sir?"
Deutscher looked back up at his chief of staff.
"Yes?"
"Sir, why did Admiral Foraker call it 'Moriarty'? I've been trying to figure it out for weeks now."
"I don't really know," Deutscher admitted. "I asked Admiral Giscard the same question. He said one of Admiral Foraker's staffers had introduced her to some old, pre-space fiction. 'Detective stories,' he called them. Apparently this 'Moriarty' was some kind of mastermind character in one of them." He shrugged.
"Mastermind," the chief of staff repeated, then chuckled. "Well, I guess that does make sense, in a way, doesn't it?"
* * *
"We'll be entering the estimated range of Arthur's pods in another forty-five seconds, Your Grace," Jaruwalski said.
"Thank you." Honor turned her command chair to face the Ops officer. "Remind all of our tac officers of that."
"Yes, Ma'am."
* * *
"They're entering range now, Sir."
"Thank you," Deutscher said. "Send the execute."
"Aye, Sir!"
* * *
"Missile launch! Multiple missile launches, multiple sources!"
Honor snapped her command chair back around, staring at the master plot at Jaruwalski's sudden sharp announcement.
"Estimate seventeen thousand-I say again, one-seven thousand-inbound! Time to attack range, seven-point-one minutes!"
For just a moment, Honor's brain flatly refused to believe the numbers. Their scout ships' arrays had detected only four hundred pods in orbit around Arthur. The maximum number of missiles aboard them should only have been four thousand!
Her eyes darted across the plot, and then flared wide in sudden understanding. The others-all the others-were coming from the nine ships of Bogey One. Which was flatly impossible. Two superdreadnoughts and seven battlecruisers couldn't possibly have fired or controlled that many missiles, even if they'd all been pod designs! But-
"Where the hell did they all come from?" Brigham demanded, and Honor looked at her.
"The battlecruisers," she said, her mind going back to the Battle of Hancock.
"Battlecruisers?" Brigham looked incredulous, and Honor chuckled without any humor at all.
"They aren't battlecruisers, Mercedes; they're minelayers. The Havenites build their fast fleet minelayers on battlecruiser hulls, just like we do. And we were so busy worrying about superdreadnoughts and pod-layers it never occurred to us to look closely at the 'battlecruisers.' So they've been sitting there, ever since they stopped accelerating, doing nothing but lay pods."
"Jesus!" Brigham murmured softly, and it was a prayer, not an imprecation. Then she drew a deep breath. "Well, at least they can't have the fire control to handle it all!"
"Don't bet on it," Honor said grimly. "They wouldn't have gone to all the trouble of setting this up if they hadn't figured they could actually hit something with it after they did."
* * *
"Moriarty confirms control, Sir."
"Good," Deutscher said, and sat back with a hungry smile.
* * *
"Engage Bogey One!" Honor snapped.
"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Jaruwalski responded. "Should I use the Agamemnons, too?"
"Yes," Honor replied. "Gamma sequence."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Jaruwalski repeated, and began issuing orders over the task force's tactical net.
Given the geometry-the effective closing speed between TF 82 and the launch platforms was almost thirty-six thousand KPS-the battlecruisers' Mark 16 MDMs, with one less "stage" than Imperator's larger missiles, had a maximum powered range of forty-two million kilometers. But the range was over fifty-three million, which meant the Mark 16s would have to coast ballistically for eleven million kilometers between stage activations. That would add an additional minute and a half to their flight time, bringing it to a total of thirteen and a half minutes, whereas Imperator's more powerful missiles could make the entire run under power, in only seven. Moreover, the smaller missiles' closing speed relative to their targets would be over twenty thousand KPS lower.
But by using the gamma sequence she and Jaruwalski had worked out months ago, Imperator would roll her first half dozen patterns with missile settings which duplicated those of the Mark 16s. The Agamemnons would roll six patterns each at the same rate, which would take seventy-two seconds, and those six salvos-each of two hundred and seventy-six missiles-would make the crossing at the Mark 16s' speed.
Only after the smaller MDMs were away would Imperator begin firing full-power patterns of her own, one double pattern every twenty-four seconds. The first of her 120-strong salvos would arrive on target eight and a half minutes after she first began rolling pods, five minutes before the battlecruisers' fire.
* * *
In Arthur orbit, the installation codenamed Moriarty came fully on-line for the first time. It wasn't a very huge installation. In fact, it was no larger than a heavy cruiser, and it had been transported in two prefabricated modules aboard a fleet supply ship, then assembled in place in less than forty-eight hours.
As a warship tonnages went, four hundred thousand wasn't a lot... unless all of it was dedicated to fire control.
Moriarty was Shannon Foraker's system defense answer to the individual inferiority of the Republic's missile pods. The control station was a flat, light-drinking black, constructed of radar absorbent materials. It was almost impossible to detect, as long as it practiced strict emission-control discipline, and the Manticoran recon arrays had missed it entirely.
Now it reached out through the other innocent looking orbital platforms which had been seeded about the system at the same time. Each of those platforms was, in effect, a less capable, simpler minded version of the RMN's own Keyholes. They formed a network, an expanding spray of tentacles, which gave Moriarty literally thousands of fire control telemetry links. And what those links lacked in Manticoran-style sophistication they made up in numbers, because they could control the missiles assigned to them without break all the way to their targets.
Moriarty had only one real weakness, aside from the fact that if it had been detected, killing it would have been relatively simple. That weakness was the light-speed limitation on its telemetry. It simply couldn't provide real-time corrections as its missiles raced down range. On the other hand, neither could Honor's telemetry links. Aside from the superior seeking systems and more capable AIs aboard the Manticoran missiles, the accuracy playing field had just been leveled.
And the Republic's salvo contained sixty-two times as many missiles as the largest salvo TF 82 was firing.
* * *
"Get on them! Get on them now!"
Captain Amanda Brankovski, Samuel Mikl¢s's senior COLAC, knew her people didn't need any exhortations from her, but she couldn't help it. She watched the incredible cyclone of missile icons streaking across her plot towards the task force, and it seemed impossible that any of its ships could survive.
The five LAC wings, arranged "above" and "below" the heavier ships and fifty thousand kilometers closer to Arthur, belched an answering hurricane. Vipers and standard counter-missiles began to launch from the LACs as Mark 31s roared away from the starships, and incoming missiles began to vanish.
Brankovski had five hundred and sixty LACs, one for every thirty attack missiles, and they punched a steady stream of counter-missiles into their teeth. Tethered and free-flying Ghost Rider decoys sang to the Republican MDMs' sensors. Dazzlers were launched into their faces, exploding in bursts of blinding interference. And Imperator and her consorts punched out wave after wave of Mark 31s.
The front of the Republic's missile attack eroded under TF 82's defensive
fire like a cliff, crumbling under the assault of a stormy sea. But, like the cliff, it was only the front of a far larger mass. Thousands of MDMs were killed, yet more thousands remained, and Honor Harrington watched them reaching out for her command.
* * *
Emile Deutscher watched Moriarty's fire race towards the enemy. Even from here, he could see that virtually none of the attack missiles were becoming lost in midflight, as normally happened in MDM combat. All of them held their courses, and he felt totally certain no defenses, not even the Manties', could stop them.
Which left the little problem of the fire coming at him.