by David Weber
"Of course, Your Grace."
Brigham's slightly mystified tone almost set Honor off on another chuckle, but she suppressed the temptation sternly.
"Anything yet from Vizeadmiral Hasselberg, Andrea?" she asked instead, turning her head to look at Jaruwalski.
"No, Your Grace. I think it's still a little early. His recon drones can't be fully into position yet."
"I realize that," Honor said quietly, pitching her voice low enough so that only Jaruwalski and Brigham could hear her, "but his first wave platforms have to be close enough by now to be picking up at least the outer edge of Alistair's screen."
"You think he's waiting until he has a more fully developed picture?" Brigham asked.
"I think so, yes." Honor nodded. "The question is why he's waiting. Is it strictly because he wants to watch the situation develop a little more, get a better feel for it himself, before he reports it to the flagship? And if that's why he's waiting, is it because he's exercising intelligent initiative or because he resents being tied so tightly to our apron strings?"
"And which do you think it is, Your Grace, if I can ask?"
"Honestly, if it were Morser, I'd call it a tossup," Honor admitted. "In this case, though, I think it's probably the former. And that's good. But we need to find a way to tactfully suggest to him that it's more important to inform us immediately, even if he has only partial information."
"Kapitan der Sterne Teischer is a tactful sort," Brigham said. "I could probably have a little discussion with him-one chief of staff to another. He's pretty good at post-exercise analysis, too."
"That's an excellent idea, Mercedes," Honor approved. "I'd much rather have any suggestions come to him in-house, as it were, rather than sound as if I'm stepping on his toes. Especially when he's pulling out all the stops to make this work the way he is."
"I'll see to it, Your Grace."
* * *
"Astro Control reports that Hexapuma and Warlock are making transit, Admiral," Lieutenant Commander Ekaterina Lazarevna, Sebastian D'Orville's communications officer announced.
"Very good." D'Orville turned from the main plot to the screen which showed his flagship's captain. "Let's get it right, Sybil," he said.
"We'll get it done, Sir," Captain Gilraven assured him.
"Good."
"Junction transit completed, Admiral," Lazarevna said.
"Very good. Send the first message, Katenka."
"Aye, aye, Sir. Transmitting... now."
D'Orville watched his chrono carefully as his message congratulating Aivars Terekhov and his surviving personnel for their accomplishments in the Battle of Monica flashed across to HMS Hexapuma. The two damaged heavy cruisers' icons blinked on his plot, accelerating slowly out of the Junction, and D'Orville felt something he hadn't felt since the day he'd watched the broken and crippled light cruiser HMS Fearless limp painfully home from Basilisk station.
Odd, he thought. The second time, and Warlock was involved in both of them. But a bit differently this time. I'm glad. She needed her name cleared.
"Now, Sybil," he said quietly, and the hundred and thirty-eight starships and seventeen hundred LACs of the Home Fleet detachment brought up their impeller wedges in perfect sequence. The impeller signatures radiated outward from Invictus, but Invictus wasn't in the traditional flagship's slot at the center of that stupendous globe.
That space was occupied by HMS Hexapuma and HMS Warlock.
"Second message for Hexapuma," Fleet Admiral Sebastian D'Orville said quietly. "'Yours is the honor.'"
"Aye, aye, Sir," Lazarevna said, equally quietly, and Home Fleet moved steadily in-system around the two battered, half-crippled heavy cruisers which had saved their Star Kingdom from a two-front war it could not possibly have won.
* * *
"Admiral Fisher's task force just came in, Sir," Captain DeLaney said.
"I see. Thank you, Molly. I'll meet you on Flag Bridge in fifteen minutes."
"Yes, Sir. DeLaney, clear," she said, and broke the com connection.
Lester Tourville sat at his desk for several seconds, looking around his day cabin, feeling the massive megaton bulk of RHNS Guerriere around him. At that particular moment, his flagship felt oddly small, almost fragile.
He stood and walked across to the view screen configured to show him the diamond-studded depths of space. He gazed deep into it, seeing the dim sparks of reflected light from the nameless star system's red dwarf primary.
Each of those specks of light was a starship, most of them as massive and powerfully armed as Guerriere herself. Now that Fisher had arrived on schedule, the reinforced Second Fleet was complete, as was Admiral Chin's Fifth Fleet, and both were under Tourville's command. Three hundred and thirty-six SD(P)s, the flower of the reborn Republican Navy, and by any standards, the most powerful battle force ever assembled for a single operation by any known star nation. They lay all about him, floating in distant orbit around the star system's second gas giant, waiting for his orders, and he felt a shiver of apprehensive anticipation flow through him.
I never really thought it would all come together, even after Tom told me. But it has. And now it's all mine.
It should have been Javier Giscard's command, he thought. Javier should have had Second Fleet and overall command, while he had Fifth, but Javier was gone, and so the task had fallen to him.
He thought about his orders, the different sets of contingency instructions, the planning and coordination and incredible industrial effort his huge fleet represented. The Republic's defenses had been unflinchingly reduced everywhere, despite the Manties' widespread scouting activities. Hopefully, however, the enemy wasn't aware of that. Not yet. All of his units had been left where they were, each drilling relentlessly in the simulators, until the operation actually began expressly to keep the Manties blissfully unaware of what was coming.
He hadn't liked that. In fact, it was the one part of the operational plan which he'd actually protested. Simulations were all well and good, but no one had ever put a fleet this size together before. He'd needed to practice coordinating with Chin, needed to drill the actual units, put the subunit commanders physically through their paces where he could watch them, evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. He'd asked-almost pleaded-for the chance to do that, but his request had been turned down. And even though he was the one who'd asked for it, he'd understood why Thomas Theisman had refused it.
It wasn't because Theisman didn't understand exactly why Tourville had made the request in the first place. It wasn't because Theisman disagreed with him, either. But for Operation Beatrice to succeed, complete strategic surprise was an absolute prerequisite. Indeed, surprise was so important it had trumped even the need to conduct extensive hands-on training exercises. Given the activity of the Manty scouting forces, they'd dared not withdraw their picket forces early. Even more, they hadn't dared to combine Tourville's units somewhere where a Manty reconnaissance drone might have picked them up and started their Office of Naval Intelligence wondering just why the Republic might have concentrated such a huge percentage of its total battle fleet in one place.
But we still have over a week before we sortie, plus the transit time, he thought. It won't be as good as I would have preferred, but we can do a lot in that much time. And we'd better, because at the end of it....
He let the thought trail off, because he didn't really know what would be waiting "at the end of it."
Except for the biggest naval battle in human history, of course.
Chapter Sixty-Three
"How does it look now, Andrea?"
"Better, Your Grace."
Captain Jaruwalski flipped a sighting circle into the main plot, dropping it neatly around the icons of Battle Squadrons 36 and 38, Imperial Andermani Navy. The light codes of the sixteen superdreadnoughts burned steadily in the display, giving no indication of how hard they were to find, even for Imperator's sensors. The numbers in the CIC sidebar giving detected signal strength were another story,
however, indicating exactly how hard they would have been to detect had Imperator not known exactly where to look for them. Not quite as hard as Manticoran ships might have been, but harder than anyone else's, Honor noted, and nodded in approval. Not so much of the EW capabilities, as of Vizeadmiral Morser's tactics.
"She's slipped around behind Admiral Yanakov," Jaruwalski continued. "I don't think he knows she's there, but he's a sneaky one. He may just be playing dumb until she's got him right where he wants her."
"Why do you think that might be?"
"Partly because of where he's got his carriers, Your Grace. He's got them pulled around, further ahead of his trailing battle squadron than his usual cruising dispositions. That puts the SD(P)s' onboard point defense between them and Morser's batteries. But they're still far enough astern that he could get their Katanas launched to thicken his task force missile defenses in a hurry. It may not mean anything, but it looks to me as if he's at least thinking about the possibility of being jumped from astern."
"I see."
Honor folded her hands behind her, standing beside her command chair while Nimitz draped bonelessly over its back, and contemplated the plot. Andrea had a point, she decided. Both about Judah's sneakiness, and about his formation. Personally, Honor gave it a sixty-forty chance Yanakov didn't know Morser was back there. Or, at least, how close she was. For the purposes of this exercise, he'd been denied the use of Ghost Rider's extended platform endurance, his sensor capability had been stepped down to no more than twenty percent better than ONI's current best estimate of the Republic's capabilities, and his acceleration rate had been reduced to match that of Republican superdreadnoughts. That meant he was more myopic than he was accustomed to being, and he must feel heavy-footed, slow to maneuver. So it made sense for him to be particularly wary about the possibility of being overhauled from behind.
Still, he was sneaky....
Then again, so was Bin-hwei Morser. Honor still didn't like her much, and she was aware-painfully, one might say, given her ability to taste mind-glows-that Morser's feelings for her went far beyond "didn't like much." But the vizeadmiral was a superior tactician, and her very dislike for Manticore had inspired her to drive her personnel even harder over the five days since Aivars Terekhov's return from Monica. She hadn't come off very well in that series of exercises, and she hadn't liked that much, either. The last thing she wanted was to look inferior to the RMN.
When you're number two, you try harder, Honor thought wryly. Especially when you resent the heck out of your number two status. Well, whatever works. I don't really care why she does it, as long she does do it.
She began to pace slowly back and forth, watching the gradually developing tactical situation. At the moment, Imperator was tagging along behind Konteradmiral Syou-tung Waldberg's Battle Squadron Thirty-Eight at the rear of Morser's formation. Yanakov had his own Fifteenth Battle Squadron and Vice Admiral Baez's Twenty-Third, plus Samuel Mikl¢s' Fifth Carrier Squadron and all four of Eighth Fleet's Manticoran and Grayson battlecruiser squadrons. Alistair McKeon's Sixty-First Battle Squadron, most of Alice Truman's carriers, and the rest of Honor's cruisers and destroyers had stayed home, near the Trevor's Star terminus of the Junction with Admiral Kuzak's Third Fleet, for this one. The object was to give her Andermani units a significant force advantage, since they were tasked as the aggressors in this particular system defense exercise.
"Any word on Vizeadmiral Hasselberg's units?" she asked, after a moment.
"Welllllll..." Jaruwalski said, and Honor looked at her sharply, one eyebrow rising as she tasted the ops officer's emotions.
"Spit it out, Andrea."
"Well, I know Admiral Yanakov can't use the all-up Ghost Rider capabilities, and I know we're supposed to be letting Vizeadmiral Morser call all the shots on this one. But I couldn't quite resist the temptation to deploy a few drones of my own, Your Grace. None of the take from them is going to Morser, but it sort of lets me keep an eye on things."
"I see. And no doubt you simply forgot to display the positions of Vizeadmiral Hasselberg and his ships. The fact that you were attempting to conceal your transgression from my eagle eye had nothing to do with the omission, right?"
"Well, maybe a little, Your Grace," Jaruwalski admitted with a grin. "You want to see him?"
"Go ahead and show me."
"Coming up now," Jaruwalski said, and the understrength Forty-First Battle Squadron of Vizeadmiral Hwa-zhyou Reinke, screened by the sixteen battlecruisers of Konteradmiral Hen-zhi Seifert and Konteradmiral Tswei-yun Wollenhaupt and accompanied by Rear Admiral Harding Stuart's Mermaid and Harpy, appeared suddenly on the master plot.
Mermaid and Harpy formed Carrier Division Thirty-Four, detached from Truman's CLAC squadron to give the Andermani a carrier element. At the moment, they and the superdreadnoughts they were accompanying were well ahead of Yanakov's force, closing in on an almost directly converging heading, and Honor frowned.
Reinke's squadron had only six SD(P)s, which meant Yanakov's wallers outnumbered him by better than two-to-one. Stuart's carriers were outnumbered by three-to-one, and even in battlecruisers, Hasselberg was outnumbered four-to-three. That was bad enough, but coming in as he was, he'd be in MDM engagement range at least a half-hour before Morser closed up from behind Yanakov, and a half-hour was a long time in an engagement between pod-layers.
She started to say something, then changed her mind. She didn't really care for tactics which split an attacking fleet up into penny packets. It was too good a way to fritter away a numerical advantage and invite defeat in detail, especially if your timing screwed up, and that seemed to be what was about to happen to Hasselberg and Morser. It looked as if Hasselberg had planned on a simultaneous attack, enveloping Yanakov from ahead and astern at the same time. If he had, however, his timing was decidedly off.
But that was a point for her to make to him privately, where he could be positive she wasn't criticizing him in front of his juniors. She wasn't afraid Jaruwalski would have let anything slip to anyone else even if she'd commented on Hasselberg's error, but it was a bad habit to get into, even with her own staff. And so she possessed her soul in silence, watching the situation unfold.
And then-
"Your Grace, look at this!" Jaruwalski said suddenly, and Honor frowned. It took her an instant to recognize what she was seeing, but when she did, she decided she was glad she hadn't criticized Hasselberg's timing after all.
"Is he doing what I think he's doing, Your Grace?" Jaruwalski asked, and Honor chuckled.
"He is, indeed, Andrea. And I'll be interested to see how Judah reacts. This is very like something he once pulled in a training exercise in Yeltsin."
She stepped over closer to Jaruwalski, resting her right hand lightly on the ops officer's shoulder as they both watched the plot. Hasselberg had obviously just deployed Ghost Rider drones of his own. These weren't sensor platforms, though; they were EW platforms configured to counterfeit the emissions signatures of Morser's superdreadnoughts. And he was being subtle about it. The signal strength off the drones was very weak-barely more than ten percent higher than what could have been expected to leak through a standard Andermani stealth field. Given the way Yanakov's sensor capabilities had been dialed back for the exercise, his tac officers were going to have a hard time recognizing what Hasselberg was doing.
In fact, as became apparent a few moments later, they hadn't recognized it. Yanakov was changing course, turning away from the threat he'd just detected, and launching his LACs. With only Republican levels of capability allowed to his reconnaissance drones, his LACs were his best long-range sensor platforms, despite their far lower acceleration rates, and he was sending them out to check out the suspect contacts. At the same time, as a precaution, he was deploying the bulk of his Katanas between his battle squadrons and Hasselberg. His battlecruisers were redeploying, as well, shifting to cover the threat axis with their anti-missile defenses.
It was clear Yanakov didn't intend to allow himsel
f to be drawn into automatically assuming he was seeing what his tactical sections thought they were seeing. At the same time, he'd equally clearly decided he had to honor the threat and shift his formation to meet it.
Which was exactly what Hasselberg had wanted him to do.
The next thirty minutes passed slowly as Honor and Jaruwalski watched the shifting patterns in the plot. Yanakov's turn away from Hasselberg had the effect of closing the range to Morser even more rapidly, but at such ranges "rapid" was a purely relative term.
Hasselberg was playing the game well, Honor decided. Once he'd given Yanakov a sniff of his position and drawn an obvious response, he cycled down the power of his decoys' signatures. It looked exactly as if he wasn't positive he'd been detected and he was reducing acceleration to cut back the strength of his impeller signatures and make his stealth systems more effective. The maneuver both lent verisimilitude to his deception and made it even harder to penetrate by requiring the reconnaissance LACs to close to much shorter range for positive identification.