by David Weber
"Turn us around, Andrianna," she said. "It looks like we've got some fresh customers."
* * *
Eighth Fleet spent three minutes rolling pods. In that time, it deployed 7,776.
Then it fired.
* * *
"What the-?" Andrianna Spiropoulo looked at the tracking report in disbelief. That didn't make any sense at all!
"Ma'am," she said, turning to Admiral Chin, "the Manties have just fired."
"They've what?" Genevieve Chin looked up from a discussion with NicodŠme Sabourin.
"They've fired, Ma'am," Spiropoulo repeated. "It doesn't make any sense. They're still at least seven million kilometers out of range!"
"That doesn't make any sense," Chin agreed, walking across to stare at the preposterous missile icons in the master display.
"Maybe they're trying to panic us, Admiral," Sabourin suggested. She looked at him, eyebrows rising in disbelief, and he shrugged. "I know it sounds silly, Ma'am, but I don't have any better suggestion. I mean, we've just hammered two entire Manty fleets into so much scrap metal, and these people are outnumbered by at least three-to-one. Maybe they figure this is the only way to distract us from finishing off the system."
"I suppose it's possible," Chin said slowly, watching the icons come. "But it doesn't seem like a Manty sort of thing to do. On the other hand, I don't see what else they could expect to accomplish."
* * *
Honor watched her own plot, sitting very still in her command chair. Nimitz sat upright in her lap, leaning back against her chest. She wrapped her right arm about him, holding him, and felt his cold, focused determination-an echo of her own-as his grass green eyes followed the same icons, watched the missiles speeding outward.
Apollo had done several things. It provided real-time control of her missiles at any range. By using the Apollo birds to control the other missiles from their pods, it effectively multiplied the number of MDMs each ship could control by a factor of eight. And it provided her tactical officers with unprecedented control over their missiles' fight profiles.
Eighth Fleet was the only formation in space fully equipped with the new system, and Honor and her captains had spent long, thoughtful hours exploring Apollo's ramifications. Now she was prepared to use them.
* * *
"They can't be serious," Spiropoulo said in exasperation as every single impeller signature disappeared from her plot simultaneously. She glared at the plot with an affronted sense of professionalism, then punched a radical course change into the fleet tactical net.
Fifth Fleet obeyed the order immediately, rolling through a skew turn which would take it over thirty thousand kilometers from its predicted position by the time the Manticoran missiles reached it.
"What is it, Andrianna?" Chin asked, looking up from her com display and a hasty conference with her squadron commanders.
"Ma'am, you aren't going to believe this," Spiropoulo said, "but they're sending their birds in ballistic."
"What?" Chin looked back down at her com. "Excuse me for a moment, please," she told the flag officers on its compartmentalized display. "I think I need to see this for myself."
She climbed out of her command chair and walked over to stand beside Spiropoulo, her eyes seeking out the missile icons. She found them, but they were rapidly strobing flickers, not the steady light of the hard position fixes active impeller drives would have provided.
"They boosted for six minutes at forty-six thousand gravities, Ma'am," Spiropoulo said. "Then they just shut the hell down. I altered course as soon as their impellers went down, which they have to know is going to play hell with whatever accuracy they might have achieved. And that's not the only screwy thing they're up to. Look at this."
The ops officer punched a macro, and Chin frowned as an additional cluster of impeller signatures blinked into existence. For some reason known only to itself and God, the Manty task force ahead of them had just fired another pattern of pods-one pattern of pods, with less than sixty missiles in it. And it hadn't fired them at Chin's ships; the missile vectors made it obvious the Manties had fired at Second Fleet, almost 150,000,000 kilometers away them, inside the resonance zone.
"Well, at least now we know how they think they can get them to make attack runs once they get them into range," Sabourin said.
"I suppose," Chin said, but her expression was troubled.
Actually, it was their only real option, assuming they were going to fire from such a long range in the first place. At 46,000 g, their missiles had accelerated to almost 162,400 kilometers per second and traveled 29,230,000 kilometers before they'd shut down. That left the MDMs' third stage available for a powered attack run when they reached their targets. In sixty seconds of maximum acceleration, the remaining drive would add another 54,000 kilometers per second to the missiles' velocity. Or they could go for half that much power, and add another 81,000 over the space of three minutes. More importantly, it would permit the oncoming missiles to maneuver to engage their targets. She understood that. What she didn't understand was how they could believe it was anything but an utter waste of their missiles. They'd had to establish the targeting parameters when they launched. That meant they were gong to be looking for targets where Fifth Fleet would have been on its original heading and acceleration, and Spiropoulo's course chance during the long ballistic portion in their flight profile's center would hopelessly compromise the weapons' already poor accuracy at long range.
She glanced at the time display while she did some mental math. Assume they waited until the birds were, say, eighty seconds out and then kicked in the last stage at 46,000 gravities. That would give them eighty seconds of maneuver time, for however much good that would do them at this extended range.
If they let the missiles come all the way in ballistic, flight time from shutdown would be about four and a half minutes. But they won't. So say they do bring the drives back up eighty seconds out-that would put them about three minutes before attack range on a straight ballistic profile-they'd still have about 13,000,000 kilometers to go. So if they kick the remaining drive at 46,000 gees at that point, they'll shave maybe seven seconds off their arrival time, and they'll be coming in somewhere around 200,000 KPS. But their accuracy will still suck. And what the hell do they think they're doing with this other little cluster?
Andrianna was right. It didn't make sense, unless NicodŠme was right and they were trying to panic her. But if Third Fleet was what they'd just finished destroying, then these people had to be Eighth Fleet, which meant Honor Harrington. And Harrington didn't do things that didn't make sense. So what-?
Her eyes opened wide in horror.
"General signal all units!" she shouted, spinning towards her com section. "Hyper out immediately! Repeat, hyper out-"
But it had taken Genevieve Chin two minutes too long to realize what was happening.
* * *
"Drives going active... now, Your Grace," Andrea Jaruwalski said, and the missiles thirteen million kilometers short of Fifth Fleet suddenly brought their final drive stages on-line. Their icons burned abruptly bright and strong once again as they lit off their impellers... and hurled themselves at their targets under full shipboard control.
They blazed in across the remaining distance, tracking with clean, lethal precision, and their ballistic flight had dropped them off of the Republic's sensors. Chin's ships knew approximately where they were, but not exactly, and their supporting EW platforms and penetration aids came up with their impellers. They hurtled in across the Republican SD(P)s' defensive envelope at over half the speed of light, and the sudden eruption of jamming, of Dragons Teeth spilling false targets, hammered those defenses mercilessly.
The fact that the missile defense crews aboard those ships had known, without question, that the attacking missiles would be clumsy, half-blind, only made a disastrous situation even worse.
Eighth Fleet had deployed almost eight thousand pods. Those pods launched 69,984 missiles. Of that total, 7,776
were Apollo birds. Another 8,000 were electronic warfare platforms. Which meant that 54,208 carried laser heads-laser heads which homed on Genevieve Chin's ships with murderously accurate targeting.
Second Fleet's missile defenses did their best.
Their best was not good enough.
* * *
Honor sat hugging Nimitz and watched the real-time tactical download from one of the Apollos. It felt unnatural, as if she were right there, on top of the Havenite fleet, not over seventy million kilometers away. She watched the enemy counter-missiles fire late and wide. She watched the attack missiles' accompanying EW platforms beating down the defenses. She watched the missiles themselves sliding through those defenses like assassins' daggers.
Fifth Fleet stopped almost thirty percent of them, which was a truly miraculous total, under the circumstances. But over thirty-seven thousand got through.
It was, she decided coldly, a case of overkill.
* * *
Lester Tourville stared at his plot in horror as the impeller signatures of sixty-eight Republican ships of the wall abruptly vanished. Seventeen continued to burn on the display for another handful of seconds. Then they, too, vanished in what he devoutly hoped was a frantic hyper translation.
There was total silence on Guerriere's flag bridge.
He never knew exactly how long he simply sat there, his mind a great, singing emptiness around a core of ice. It couldn't have been the eternity that it seemed to be, but eventually he forced his shoulders to straighten.
"Well," he said in a voice he couldn't quite recognize, "it would appear our time estimate on the deployment of their new system was slightly in error."
He turned his command chair to face Frazier Adamson.
"Cease fire, Commander."
Adamson blinked twice, then shook himself.
"Yes, Sir," he said hoarsely, and Second Fleet ceased firing at Third Fleet's tattered remnants as Adamson transmitted the order.
* * *
"Dear Lord," Dame Alice Truman murmured feelingly. "Talk about last-second reprieves."
"Did what I think happened really just happen, Ma'am?"
Wraith Goodrick's voice sounded shaky, and Truman didn't blame him a bit. Only seven of Theodosia Kuzak's superdreadnoughts were still in action, and all of them were brutally damaged. Another three had technically survived, but Truman doubted any of the ten would be worth repairing. All four of Kuzak's CLACs had been killed, and of Truman's own eight, three had been destroyed, one was a drifting cripple without impellers, and the other four-including Chimera-were severely damaged. For all intents and purposes, Third Fleet had been as totally destroyed Home Fleet.
But the merciless hail of missiles had at least stopped pounding its remnants.
And, Truman thought with grim survivor's humor, I don't blame whoever gave that order a bit, either.
* * *
"Missile trace!" Frazier Adamson barked suddenly, and Lester Tourville's belly muscles clenched.
What was left of Third Fleet had stopped firing when he did. Were they insane enough to resume the action? If they did, he'd have no choice but to-
"Sir, they're coming in from outside the zone!" Adamson said.
"What?" Molly DeLaney demanded incredulously. "That's ridiculous! They're a hundred fifty million klicks away!"
"Well, they're coming in on us now anyway," Tourville said sharply as Guerriere's missile defense batteries began to fire once more.
They didn't do much good. He watched sickly as the missiles which had suddenly brought up their impellers, appearing literally out of nowhere, hurtled down on his battered and broken command. They drove straight in, swerving, dancing, and his sick feeling of helplessness frayed around the edges as he realized there were less than sixty of them. Whatever they were, they weren't a serious attack on his surviving ships, so what-?
His jaw tightened as the missiles made their final approach. But they didn't detonate. Instead, they hurtled directly through his formation, straight through the teeth of his blazing laser clusters.
His point defense crews managed to nail two-thirds of them. The other twenty pirouetted, swerved to one side, then detonated in a perfectly synchronized, deadly accurate attack... on absolutely nothing.
Lester Tourville exhaled the breath he hadn't realized he was holding. He sensed the confusion of his flag bridge crew, and this time, he had no answer at all for them. Then-
"Sir," Lieutenant Eisenberg said in a very small voice, "I have a com request for you."
He turned his command chair to look at her, and she swallowed.
"It's... from Duchess Harrington, Sir."
The silence on Guerriere's flag bridge was complete. Then Tourville cleared his throat.
"Throw it on my display, Ace," he said.
"Yes, Sir. Coming up now."
An instant later, a face appeared on Tourville's display. He'd seen that face before, when its owner surrendered to him. And again, when she had been clubbed down by the pulse rifle butts of State Security goons. Now she looked at him, her eyes like two more missile tubes.
"We meet again, Admiral Tourville," she said, and her soprano voice was cold.
"Admiral Harrington," he replied. "This is a surprise. I thought you were about eight light-minutes away."
"I am. I'm speaking to you over what we call a 'Hermes buoy.' It's an FTL relay with standard sub-light communication capability. We can load it into a cell in one of our new missile pods." The expression she produced was technically a smile, but it was one that belonged on something out of deep, dark oceanic depths.
"It accompanied my missile launch so I could speak directly to you," she continued in that same, icy-cold voice. "I'm sure you observed my birds' terminal performance. I'm also sure you understand I have the capability to blow every single one of your remaining ships out of space from my present position. I hope you aren't going to make it necessary for me to do so."
Tourville looked at her, and knew that last statement wasn't really accurate. Knew a part of her-the part behind those frozen eyes, that icy voice-hoped he would make it necessary. But too many people had already died for him to kill still more out of sheer stupidity.
"No, Your Grace," he said quietly. "I won't make it necessary."
"My acceptance of your surrender," she told him, "is contingent upon the surrender of your ships-and their databases-in their present condition. Is that clearly understood, Admiral Tourville?"
He hovered on the brink of refusing, of declaring that he would scrub his databases, as was customary, before surrendering a ship. But then he looked into those icy eyes again, and the temptation vanished.
"It's... understood, Your Grace," he made himself say.
"Good. Decelerate to zero relative to the system primary. You'll be boarded by prize officers once you do. In the meantime," she smiled again, that same terrifying smile, "my ships will remain here, where we can... keep an eye on things."
* * *
"Your Grace," Andrea Jaruwalski said, as Honor turned away from her conversation with Lester Tourville.
"Yes, Andrea?"
Honor felt drained and empty. She supposed she should feel triumph. After all, she'd just destroyed almost seventy superdreadnoughts, and captured another seventy-five. That had to be an interstellar record, and for a bonus, her people had saved the Star Kingdom's capital system from invasion. But after so much carnage, so much destruction, how was a woman supposed to feel triumphant?
"Your Grace, we're getting IDs off Admiral Kuzak's surviving ships from the inner system recon platforms."
"Yes?" Honor felt herself tightening inside. The pitiful handful of icons where Third Fleet had been mocked her. If she'd been able to get her ships into position even a few minutes earlier, perhaps-
She forced that thought aside, and looked Andrea in the eye.
"Your Grace, most of our ships are gone," Jaruwalski said softly, "but I've got transponder codes on both Chimera and Intransigent."
Honor's heart spasmed, and the ice about her soul seemed to crack, ever so slightly. Nimitz stirred in her lap, sitting up once again, leaning back against her and reaching up to touch the side of her face with a long-fingered true-hand.
"I've been trying to contact them," Harper Brantley put in, drawing Honor's attention to him, and her eyes burned as she tasted his emotions. Like Jaruwalski, he wanted desperately to give her some sort of good news, to tell her someone she loved had survived. Something to balance at least some of the pain and the blood.