At All Costs

by David Weber

  "I think I agree with you, Boss," DeLaney said, then chuckled. "I know Beatrice Bravo was specifically planned to mousetrap Eighth Fleet, and I guess I ought to be disappointed if we're not going to get it, too. But having seen what the lady can do, I'll be just delighted if 'the Salamander' is somewhere else while we're taking on the Manty home system's defenses!"

  "I'm tempted to concur," Tourville agreed. "Taking out Eighth Fleet on top of everything else would certainly be a deathblow, but even with Eighth Fleet intact and Harrington to run it, the Manties are done if we take out this system's shipyards and both of the fleets they have defending them."

  * * *

  "We're coming down on sixty-five and a half million kilometers, Sir," Commander Adamson said.

  "Thank you, Frazier."

  Lester Tourville drew a deep breath. Eight minutes had passed since Adamson first informed him that they were into MDM range of the Manties. Second Fleet was still nineteen minutes short of its projected turnover point, but the range couldn't keep dropping forever without the Manties firing. The range between the two fleets had already fallen to 65,767,000 kilometers. Second Fleet's velocity was up to 20,866 kilometers per second; Home Fleet's was 19,923 KPS, and they'd closed the range between them by almost seventy-seven million kilometers. Tourville was still better than 98,835,000 kilometers from Sphinx, but from his current base velocity, his MDMs' range against the planet was almost 72,030,000 kilometers. The Manties weren't going to let him get much closer unchallenged.

  "Open fire, Frazier," he said.

  * * *

  The first missile impeller signatures began to speckle the plot, and Sebastian D'Orville drew a deep breath as the first, massive salvo streaked towards his command. Obviously, they had had a lot of pods on tow, he thought as he contemplated its numbers. More than he'd thought they had tractors for, actually. But their first salvo would be the least accurate against his EW, he reminded himself. And in the meantime, he had a few missile pods of his own.

  "Engage as specified, Captain Gwynett," he said formally and watched his own missile's icons streaking outward across the plot.

  That was when the enemy launched his second impossibly dense salvo.

  * * *

  Sebastian D'Orville's forty-eight pre-pod superdreadnoughts carried 27,840 pods externally, and theoretically, they could have deployed all of them in a single massive wave. In fact, Home Fleet carried a total of almost forty-nine thousand pods, with well over half a million missiles. Lester Tourville's slightly larger superdreadnoughts carried fewer pods, and each of those pods carried fewer missiles, because of the size penalty their bulkier MDMs imposed. So although he had two and a half times as many ships, he had barely twice as many pods, and each of those pods carried seventeen percent fewer missiles. He actually had "only" sixty-four percent more total missiles than Home Fleet.

  But Lester Tourville also had Shannon Foraker's "donkey," and that meant every one of Sebastian D'Orville assumptions about the number and size of the salvos he could throw was fatally flawed. And what else he had was far more control channels for the missiles he carried. Not all of the forty-two Manticoran, Grayson, and Andermani SD(P)s confronting him were Keyhole-capable. Still, the majority of them were, and the pod-layers as a group could simultaneously control an average of four hundred missiles each. But the older, pre-pod ships could control only a hundred apiece, whereas each of Tourville's ships had control links for three hundred and fifty missiles, and by using Shannon Foraker's rotating control technique, they could increase that number by approximately sixty percent. So whereas Home Fleet could effectively control a total of just under twenty-two thousand missiles per salvo, Second Fleet could control eighty-four thousand without rotating control links. Worse, it could have increased that total to almost a hundred and thirty-five thousand, if it was prepared to accept somewhat lower hit probabilities, and the "donkey" meant Tourville could actually have deployed the pods to fire that many.

  Manticoran fire control was better, Manticoran electronic warfare capabilities and penetration aids were better, and Manticoran MDM's were both faster and more agile. Sebastian D'Orville could confidently expect to score a significantly higher percentage of hits, but that couldn't offset the fact that Second Fleet could control over six times as many missiles. Even if Tourville's hit probabilities had been only half as good as his, the Republic would have scored three times as many hits.

  It wasn't quite as bad for the Alliance as the raw numbers suggested. For one thing, deploying that many missiles and launching them without allowing their impeller wedges to cut one another's telemetry links, was a far from trivial challenge. In fact, Tourville had decided to limit himself to no more than eighty percent of his theoretical maximum weight of fire. And to clear the firing and control arcs for even that many missiles, he'd been forced to spread his squadrons and their lumpy trails of donkeys and pods more broadly than he'd really wanted to. The separation between his units, necessary for effective offensive fire control, made it more difficult for them to coordinate their defensive fire. On the other hand, Havenite counter-missile doctrine relied so much more heavily than Manticoran doctrine did on mass, as opposed to accuracy, that the sacrifice was less significant than it might have been.

  Even now, no one on either side knew exactly what would happen when fleets of pod-layers this size engaged one another. There was simply no experiential meterstick, because no one had ever done it before. For that matter, no battle in history had yet seen almost three hundred and fifty superdreadnoughts of any kind engage in what could only be a fight to the death. Over the centuries, tactical formalism had become the rule, with indecisive battles and limited losses. That might have changed, at least in this corner of the galaxy, but even here, most of the combatants were still feeling their way into the changing realities of interstellar carnage.

  The Battle of Manticore would be something new and unique in the annals of deep-space combat. Everyone in both fleets knew that.

  But that was all they knew as the missiles began to launch.

  * * *

  The range at launch was 65,770,000 kilometers. Flight time for Home Fleet's faster MDMs was 7.6 minutes, and their closing speed as they streaked into Second Fleet's teeth was 246,972 kilometers per second. Second Fleet's slower missiles took fifteen more seconds to reach their targets, and had a closing speed of "only" 237,655 KPS.

  At those speeds, both sides' defenses were stretched to and beyond the theoretical limits of their capabilities. Manticore's longer-ranged counter-missiles, and the greater capability of the Katanas' in the fleet defense role, gave D'Orville's ships a significant advantage, but nota big enough one. Not the one he'd anticipated against the weight of fire he'd expected.

  Home Fleet's Fire Plan Avalanche called for the pre-pod superdreadnoughts to deploy their pods as quickly as possible. They had to jettison them anyway, in order to clear their own defensive systems, and D'Orville had known from the beginning that he was going to lose a huge percentage of their total pod loads without ever actually firing their missiles. There was nothing he could do about that, however, and the older ships passed control of as many of their additional missiles as they could to their more capable consorts.

  The Medusa, Harrington, Adler, and Invictus-class ships didn't deploy a single pod of their own in the initial broadsides. They used solely the pods deployed by D'Orville's older ships, reserving their better protected, internally stowed pods for the follow-up salvos it was at least possible they might live to launch. And since they were firing pods which had been effectively deployed in a single massive pattern, Avalanche also fired its salvos in closer, more tightly spaced intervals than the Republican Navy had yet seen out of any Allied fleet. In fact, Avalanche was almost-not quite, but almost-conceptually identical to Shannon Foraker's rotating control doctrine.

  Each fleet's salvo density took the other fleet by surprise. Neither had anticipated such heavy fire... but Tourville's projections had been closer than D'Orville
's to what he actually got. D'Orville had expected the battle to be short and violent, lasting no more than fifteen or twenty minutes.

  The first half of his expectations was more than fulfilled.

  In the seven and a half minutes it took the lead salvo to cross between Home Fleet and Second Fleet, Sebastian D'Orville's ships fired seven salvos at sixty-five-second intervals, each of 1,800 pods, containing a total of 21,600 missiles. Over a hundred and fifty thousand missiles, the maximum Home Fleet's fire control could manage, went screaming through space... and 524,000 Havenite missiles rampaged out to meet them. Fire control sensors and reconnaissance platforms all over the star system found themselves half-blinded by the interference and massive impeller source of almost seven hundred thousand attack missiles and many times that many counter-missiles. And then the EW platforms began to add their own blinding efforts to the chaos.

  No human could have hoped to sort it out, keep track of it. There was simply no way protoplasmic brains could do it. Tactical officers concentrated on their own tiny pieces of the howling maelstrom, guiding their attack missiles, allocating their defensive missiles. Counter-missiles and MDMs blotted one another from existence as their impeller wedges slammed together. Decoys, jammers, Dazzlers, and Dragons Teeth matched electronic wiles against tactical officers' telemetry links and onboard control systems. Standard counter-missiles, Mark 31s, and Vipers hurled themselves into the teeth of the mighty salvos. Great gaps and gulfs appeared in the onrushing wavefronts of destruction, but the gaps closed. The gulfs filled in. Laser clusters blazed in desperate last-ditch efforts to intercept missiles with closing speeds eighty percent that of light. MDMs lost their targets, reacquired, lost them again in the howling confusion. Onboard AIs took whatever targets they could find, and the sudden, abrupt changes in their targeting solutions made their final approach runs even more erratic and unpredictable.

  And then wave after wave of laser heads began to detonate. Not in scores, or hundreds, or even in thousands. In tens of thousands in each roaring comber of fury.

  The battle no one had been able to adequately envision was over in 11.9 minutes from the moment the first missile launched.

  * * *

  "My God," someone whispered on HMS King Roger III's flag bridge.

  Theodosia Kuzak didn't know who it was. It didn't matter. The imagery coming in from the FTL surveillance platforms was brutally clear.

  Home Fleet was... gone. Simply gone.

  Ninety superdreadnoughts, thirty-one battlecruisers and heavy cruisers, and twenty-six light cruisers had been effectively destroyed in less than twelve minutes. At least twenty shattered, broken hulks continued to coast towards the hyper limit, but they were only wrecks, gutted hulls streaming atmosphere, debris, and life pods while deep within them frantic rescue parties raced against time, fighting with grim determination and courage about which all too often no one would ever know, to rescue trapped and wounded crewmates.

  But Home Fleet had not died alone. Sebastian D'Orville mght have been taken by surprise by the weight of Second Fleet's fire, and his computation of the exchange rate might have been overly optimistic as a result, but his ships and people had struck back hard. Ninety-seven Republican ships of the wall had been destroyed outright or beaten into dead, shattered hulks. Nineteen more had lost at least one impeller ring completely. And of the remaining hundred and twenty-four SD(P)s Lester Tourville had taken into the battle, exactly eleven were undamaged.

  Second Fleet's brutally winnowed ranks continued onward, but its acceleration had been reduced to less than 2.5 KPS2 by its cripples. At that rate, it would be unable to decelerate for its zero/zero intercept with Sphinx, and the Manticoran System's defenders weren't done with it yet.

  Home Fleet's LAC screen had suffered massive losses of its own, mostly from MDMs which had lost their original targets and taken whatever they could find in exchange. Despite that, over two thousand of them survived, and they were driving hard to get into their own range of Second Fleet. They could expect to take fewer losses, now that they were free to maneuver defensively and to protect themselves, not Home Fleet's superdreadnoughts, and their crews had only one thought in mind.

  More LACs were still streaming towards Second Fleet from the inner system, as well, and it was obvious the Havenites had no desire to tangle with Sphinx's fixed defenses, at least until they could get their own damages sorted out. Second Fleet was changing course, crabbing away from Sphinx as it shepherded its cripples protectively out of harm's way.

  But that, Theodosia Kuzak thought grimly, was going to prove just a bit more difficult than the bastards thought.

  "How much longer?" she asked harshly.

  "Our last units should clear the Junction in the next eleven minutes, Ma'am," Captain Smithson said.

  "Good." Kuzak nodded once, then turned to Commander Astrid Steen, her staff astrogator.

  "Plot me a couple of micro jumps, Astrid," she said coldly. "Those people have just had the crap kicked out of them. Now we're going to finish the job Home Fleet began."

  * * *

  "Admiral Kuzak's preparing to head in-system, Your Grace," Harper Brantley said quietly.

  "Thank you, Harper."

  Honor looked up from the holographic com display hovering above the briefing room's table at which she, Nimitz, Mercedes Brigham, Rafael Cardones, and Andrea Jaruwalski sat under her armsmen's watchful eye. The display was separated into individual quadrants, showing the faces of Vizeadmiral Hasselberg, Judah Yanakov, Samuel Mikl¢s, and the commanders of every squadron in company with Imperator. Alice Truman and Alistair McKeon weren't there, and she tried to hide the cold, bleak anxiety she felt at their absence.

  "Please inform the Admiral that we're still on schedule for our own ETA," Honor continued.

  "Of course, Your Grace," her communications officer said quietly, and withdrew. The briefing room hatch closed behind him, and Honor returned her attention to the discussion at hand.

  Most of the faces on her display showed a greater or lesser degree of shock at the total destruction of Home Fleet, and no wonder. Not only had the sheer weight of the Havenites' fire come as a complete surprise, but all of the Alliance's partners had taken losses when it hit. Of the ninety superdreadnoughts which had just been destroyed, twelve had been units of the Grayson Space Navy, and another twenty-six had been Andermani.

  Of all her subordinates, Yanakov seemed least shocked. Or, at least, the least affected by whatever shock he felt. But, then, Judah had been present when Giscard leveled the Basilisk System's infrastructure in the last war, and his command had been part of Hamish's fleet for Operation Buttercup. And before that, he'd been at the First and Fourth Battles of Yeltsin. Three quarters of the pre-Alliance Grayson Space Navy had been wiped out in First Yeltsin, and half its superdreadnought strength had been destroyed at Fourth Yeltsin. And he was the man whose task force had crushed the defensive forces deployed to cover Lovat. Despite his youth-and he was almost as young as his prolong made him look-he'd seen more carnage than any other flag officer on Honor's display.

  Almost as much as she had.

  Hasselberg had looked almost stunned when the initial reports came in. It hadn't been just the scale of the destruction. It had also been its speed, for the Andermani Navy had never experienced anything like it. Well, to be fair, neither had the Manticoran Navy, until this afternoon, but at least Manticore and Grayson had been granted some prior experience. They'd had firsthand practice adjusting to abrupt, wrenching changes in the paradigm of combat. The Empire had not, and the reality had come to the vizeadmiral like some hideous nightmare, despite all the effort he'd spent conscientiously trying to prepare himself for the realities of modern warfare.

  But of them all, Honor thought, Bin-hwei Morser's reaction was the most interesting. She wasn't simply an admiral; she was also Graffin von Grau. Like Hasselberg himself, she was a member of the Empire's warrior aristocracy, and she was clearly one of those who took the Andermani martial tradition serious
ly. She might cherish doubts about her Emperor's decision to ally himself with the Star Kingdom which had been the Empire's traditional rival in areas like Silesia for so long, but that didn't matter. Not anymore, not now. Her dark eyes-remarkably like Allison Harrington's, or Honor's own, now that Honor thought about it-were narrow and intense, focused and fiery with purpose.

  "I wish Admiral Kuzak had waited for us," Mikl¢s said after a moment. "I'd feel a lot better if we were going in with her, especially after seeing how many birds these people can launch. She's still outnumbered better than two-to-one in wallers, and Alice is going to be outnumbered almost that badly in LACs."

  "She can't wait, Samuel," Yanakov disagreed. "I don't have any idea how long it took the Peeps to deploy that many pods, however the hell they did it, but they had to use up most of their ammo to do it. She needs to hit them before they can pull out and restock their magazines. And even if that weren't a consideration, right now, the Peeps are edging away from Sphinx. She can't be sure they'll continue to do that if she doesn't move in now. If they get themselves sorted out, decide their damages aren't that bad after all, they've still got the strength-or close to it-to stand up to Sphinx's close-in defenses. And even if the defenses destroyed everything they've got left, they'd last long enough to take out virtually all of the planet's orbital infrastructure."