by David Weber
"I see." Honor nodded and glanced at Jaruwalski. "And that other project we discussed, Andrea?"
"That much is on schedule, Your Grace," Jaruwalski assured her. "The data is tucked away as per instructions, and Commander Reynolds and I have already had a few thoughts about it. We're not quite ready to share them yet, but I don't think you'll be disappointed."
"Good." Honor smiled thinly. It was a strangely hungry smile, but it became broader and warmer as she tasted the puzzlement of her senior subordinates. Well, there would be time enough to enlighten them later. She didn't expect any of them to have any objections at all to the little side project she'd codenamed Operation Wilberforce. But given the . . . sensitive nature of the intelligence data which would make Wilberforce possible, she preferred to restrict the details to the smallest possible circle until they were safely in Silesia.
"So you think the LAC crews are going to be up to snuff by the time we reach Sidemore?" she asked, turning her attention back to Truman, and her second in command raised one hand and waggled it back and forth in a maybe-maybe not gesture.
"I think they ought to be," she said. "I'm confident that they'll be up to Scotty's standards eventually, but I won't absolutely guarantee that 'eventually' will happen before we reach our station."
"You're the LAC expert here, Alice," McKeon said, "but I think you may be being a bit overly pessimistic. To me, they look like they're already starting to shape up nicely from what I've seen in the sims. But what do I know? As I understand it, Her Grace," he grinned at Honor, "asked me along to ride herd on the old-fashioned side of things."
"Not all that old-fashioned," Honor demurred.
"More old-fashioned than you may have thought, Ma'am," Jaruwalski said sourly. She grimaced when Honor glanced at her. "The latest from Admiral Chakrabarti's office is that we're going to have to leave one of our squadrons of Medusas here with Home Fleet. They're going to give us two squadrons of the pre-pod types, instead. And according to my sources, at least two of the non-pod ships are going to be dreadnoughts, not superdreadnoughts."
"Only two squadrons?" Mercedes Brigham demanded, and turned to face Honor. "I know you warned me they were being tight about turning tonnage loose, Your Grace, but that's ridiculous! There's no way two squadrons of pre-pod ships equate to a single squadron of SD(P)s!"
"No, there isn't," Honor agreed with massive restraint. Privately, she wondered if it was possible that some of Benjamin's apprehensions about the Republic of Haven might finally have begun to percolate through what passed for the brain of ONI. She reminded herself that she still had to bring William Alexander and Elizabeth up to speed on all of Benjamin's concerns . . . including Erewhon's possible intentions. But at the moment, that was secondary to her own immediate concerns, and she certainly couldn't think of any other reason to reduce the ships being sent off to deter the Andermani so severely. If the new force levels held up, the Admiralty would be giving her task force only one squadron of SD(P)s. Admittedly, there would be eighteen older-style superdreadnoughts—or dreadnoughts, if Andrea is right, she corrected herself—to back them, plus the two weak battle squadrons already on station under Admiral Hewitt. And it was also true that six of the new ships ought to be capable of destroying an entire fleet of the older types all by themselves, but it still seemed like a foolhardy move.
Should I tell them about the Protector's Own? she wondered. There was no real reason she shouldn't . . . except that she and Benjamin had agreed that no one would be told—except Alfredo Yu himself—until the Grayson ships actually reached Silesia. The Protector had decided upon more mature consideration that the simplest way to avoid potential domestic arguments over his decision was simply not to tell anyone about it. As far as the rest of the Navy and the Grayson population at large were concerned, the Protector's Own was merely being dispatched on an extended deep-space training cruise, accompanied by its organic support ships. The primary purpose was to demonstrate its ability to sustain itself out of its own logistic resources in long-distance, independent operations. The fact that its training cruise would just happen to take the entire Protector's Own to the star system where its official commander just happened to have been stationed by the RMN would just happen to be one of those happy coincidences which just happened to happen from time to time.
Besides, as Wesley Matthews had pointed out when his opinion was sought, if someone like Sir Edward Janacek or Simon Chakrabarti knew Grayson was planning to make up the difference in the force levels Honor would require, their response almost certainly would be to see it as an opportunity to reduce the purely Manticoran forces available to her even further. Which analysis took on an additional point in the wake of Jaruwalski's news.
No, she decided. It's not really fair for me to tell them when Benjamin won't even be telling his own people about it. And even though it may not be very nice of me, if I don't tell them about it, it'll probably encourage them to try even harder to make what we do officially have adequate. Besides, she hid a sudden mental grin, think what a pleasant surprise it will be for them when Alfredo turns up in Marsh. Assuming, of course, that they don't decide to lynch the admiral who didn't warn them he was coming!
"Well," she said aloud, "we'll just have to find a way to get along without them, I suppose, won't we?"
Chapter Twenty
The brilliant white icon representing Trevor's Star glared at the center of the enormous holographic plot in Sovereign of Space's CIC, but Shannon Foraker had no attention to spare for unimportant distractions like suns and planets. Her eyes were riveted to the dense rash of crimson dots sweeping outward from the larger bloody icons of the defending fleet.
"Looks like they've got us on their sensors, Ma'am," Captain Anders observed quietly beside her, and she nodded. Despite all the Republican Navy's improvements in its stealth technology, its systems remained far inferior to those available to the Manticorans. It had been a given that they would be detected on their inbound vector; what remained uncertain was how much of an edge that would give the other side.
"We're getting initial contact reports back from the lead LACs," Commander Clapp announced, and Foraker turned to look at him. "Composition is about what we'd projected, Admiral," the commander told her, cupping one hand over the earbug screwed into his right ear and listening intently. "It looks as if their missile LACs are taking the lead." He listened a moment longer, then grimaced. "We can't absolutely confirm that, Ma'am. Their EW is still too good to penetrate at this range, and CIC's interpretation of the contact reports suggests that they may already be seeding their formation with decoys."
"Understood," Foraker acknowledged, and returned her attention to the plot. Like Clapp, she would have preferred for CIC to have been able to download the raw sensor data directly, rather than relying on the interpretive reports of the LACs' tactical officers. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible . . . yet. On the other hand, no one on the other side (we hope, she amended dutifully) had any reason to suspect that the Republican Navy had finally managed to crack the secret of the Royal Manticoran Navy's faster than light communications capability. Actually, the RHN had known roughly what the Manties were doing for years; they just hadn't known how to do it themselves. Until now.
To be honest, Foraker's techs had needed a bit of a leg up from the Solarian League firms which had been trading military technology to Rob Pierre's People's Republic in return for combat reports and the largest payments the cash-starved Committee had been able to scrape up. But it had been a very small leg up, and Foraker felt a deep, uncomplicated sense of pride in the way her own R&D people had picked it up and run with it. She was far too self-honest to believe Haven's researchers were in the same league as Manticore's, yet they were much better than they had been. They were still playing catch-up, but they'd managed to considerably narrow the gap between themselves and their potential enemies.
And that's another of the things we can "thank" Pierre and his butchers for, she thought. At least they blasted loose the old
R&D hierarchies and actually found a few people who could think to take over instead!
"I wish we could deploy drones like the Manties'," Anders murmured beside her, and her mouth twitched in a small, wry grin at the confirmation that he'd been thinking exactly what she had. The power requirements and mass costs of the RHN's current grav-pulse transmitters were far too high to permit it to employ the remote drones the RMN and its allies could deploy. The Manties were considerably ahead in super-dense fusion bottle technology and several other areas—including the newest generation of superconductor capacitor systems—and Haven was unable to match the onboard power levels of their remote platforms. But even without that, the sheer size of the early-generation RHN hardware would have made it impossible to squeeze it into such tight quarters. Indeed, it could be fitted into nothing smaller than a LAC. And, as Foraker strongly suspected had been the case for the Manties when they first developed the system themselves, any LAC or starship had to temporarily cut its acceleration to zero in order to transmit a message. Coupled with the slow pulse repetition frequency rate they'd so far managed to achieve, that limited them to very short and simple messages or to the use of preplanned ones which could be transmitted in shorthand code groups. Which was the reason Sovereign of Space's CIC couldn't receive the raw sensor data directly; there simply wasn't enough bandwidth available.
Yet, she reminded herself once again.
"They're coming in for a head-on engagement," Commander Clapp reported. "Our lead LACs are reporting radar and lidar hits consistent with known Manty fire control systems."
"Now that's a surprise," Commander Doug Lampert observed ironically. As Captain Reumann's tactical officer, he really ought to have been on Sovereign's command deck, but this battle was going to be fought beyond the reach of even her broadsides. Since that was the case, Lampert had opted for a ringside seat here in CIC, with its superb instrumentation and far more detailed master plot.
"Maybe not," Anders replied. "But I'm still not sure this is their most logical response. They've got to realize we're sending in a wave of LACs, and they must know we wouldn't be doing it unless we figured our LACs can stand up to theirs."
"I think it was reasonable to assume this was how they'd respond," Foraker disagreed quietly, her eyes never leaving the plot as the crimson hostile icons swept closer and closer to the incoming green light codes of her own light attack craft. "Of course they realize we're sending in LACs. But they've never seen the new birds in action. As far as we know, they're not even aware the Cimeterre class exists. So the only way for them to find out what they're up against is to come out and see. And when you couple that with the edge their hardware's always enjoyed, this is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do."
"I understand the logic, Ma'am," her chief of staff replied in a tone of quiet stubbornness. "I'm just uncomfortable planning our entire doctrine around that assumption."
"With all due respect, Captain," Clapp put in diffidently, "we're not actually planning doctrine around this specific response. We simply anticipated it for the first few engagements."
"Granted," Anders acknowledged. "But I can't help feeling that 'the first few engagements' are going to set the pattern for our doctrine. All I'm saying, Mitchell, is that we need to be aware that they're going to adjust their operational patterns as soon as they realize what we've got. Which means what we really ought to be modeling at this point is not only how we expect them to react the first time they see the Cimeterres, but also what we expect them to do to adapt to the new threat."
"No one's disagreeing with you, Five," Foraker intervened mildly. "Obviously they're going to adapt, just like we've done in introducing the Cimeterres in reaction to their LACs. But the only thing worse than not allowing for adaptation on their part at all would be to project too far ahead with too little data. We believe we know more about their hardware and capabilities at the moment than they know about ours, but there are still a lot of things we're only guessing about. Without a more definite idea of what their options are, we could easily doublethink our way into a complete misestimate of the ones they'll choose."
"I know." Anders glowered at the plot for a moment, then puffed his cheeks, exhaled, and gave his admiral a slightly sheepish smile. "Sorry about that," he said. "I guess it's the engineer in me. I know we live in the real universe, where we can't nail things down the way we would in an R&D program. Especially not when the one thing we can count on a potential enemy doing is whatever it is we didn't want him to do in the first place." He grimaced and nodded to Clapp. "I didn't mean to sound like I was carping, Commander. It's just—"
"Just that one of a chief of staff's jobs is to play Cassandra, especially when everyone else seems to be feeling overly optimistic," Foraker completed for him with a smile. "Not that you'd make a very good Greek princess, Five," she added, and her smile turned into a grin as she contemplated the shininess of his hairless pate.
"Thanks . . . I think," Anders replied.
"They're about to enter missile range," Lampert put in. Sovereign of Space's tactical officer was not a student of Old Earth mythology at the best of times, and, unlike the other three, he'd never taken his eyes from the onrushing wavefronts of icons in the plot. Now his announcement pulled their attention back to it, as well.
He was right, and as Foraker's eyes sought out the tactical sidebars, she saw the icons of the Manticoran LACs double, then redouble, then redouble yet again as the combination of their hellishly effective onboard EW and even more frustrating drones and remote platforms came online.
"Right on schedule," Clapp murmured to himself at her elbow, and she glanced at him. The commander was clearly unaware he'd spoken aloud, and Foraker hid a smile as she recognized an echo of her old self in him.
Mitchell Clapp had come to his present duties via a less than orthodox route. Unlike the majority of naval officers who aspired to senior command, he'd never even considered the shipboard engineering or tactical career tracks. His first love and lasting allegiance had been given to the Navy's small craft, and he'd made quite a name for himself as one of the relatively few homegrown officers to distinguish himself almost equally on the engineering and test pilot sides of the People's Navy's pinnace and shuttle development and upgrade programs. The job he'd done was a vital one, but it was also one which partook of very little martial glory, at least in the estimation of his fellow officers. Which was one reason a man who had accomplished so much had been a mere lieutenant when Oscar Saint-Just suffered a mischief.
"Just about . . . now," the commander breathed, and the plot altered suddenly as a vast wave of still tinier icons separated from the green dots of the Republican LACs and sped to meet the oncoming sea of red.
Foraker felt herself holding her breath as she watched his tiny, fiery green darts slashing into the Manties' faces. No doubt any Manticoran who saw that launch would have put it down to panic. Manifestly, no Republican LAC missile seeker was going to be able to penetrate the solid wall of decoys and jammers the Manties had thrown up, much less defeat the onboard electronic warfare systems of the Manticoran LACs themselves. Counter missiles raced to meet them anyway, of course, but not in the numbers one might have expected against more capable missiles from larger combatants. Scores of the incoming birds were wiped away, but clearly the Manty missile defense officers were holding onto their limited stores of counter missiles for use against a more credible threat than Havenite LAC missiles.
After all, they knew that the hundreds of Havenite missiles racing toward them couldn't possibly hurt them.
As it happened, they were even correct about that . . . up to a point. The point which was reached as the Republican missiles reached the ends of their runs while still almost forty thousand kilometers short of the Manticoran vessels and the first echelon detonated.
They had no standoff attack range against spacecraft, because they weren't laser heads. Nor were they standard nuclear warheads in any usual sense of the word. And they didn't carry any of the so
phisticated and devilishly capable electronic warfare systems the Manticorans had produced, either, because much though it galled Shannon Foraker to admit it, it would be years—probably decades—before the Republic of Haven was able to match the technical competence of the Star Kingdom of Manticore. So as Commander Clapp had suggested to her over two T-years ago, the only practical solution was to find a way around the Manties' technological advantage.
Which was precisely what the Cimeterre-class LAC and its armament were designed to do. Clapp's solution undoubtedly owed a great deal to how much time he'd spent thinking about and modeling the short-range, cluttered, high-threat environment in which pinnaces and assault shuttles routinely operated. Very few tactical officers thought in terms of that sort of combat where "proper" spacecraft were concerned, even when the spacecraft in question were mere LACs. Pinnaces and assault shuttles, after all, were expendable. Everyone knew a certain percentage of them were going to be lost, whatever tactical doctrine they followed. Fortunately, they were cheap enough and had small enough crews compared to starships that even a relatively high degree of attrition was acceptable as long as it allowed them to accomplish their missions.
But that, Clapp had pointed out, was also the primary tactical advantage of the LAC. It was just that because it weighed in at thirty or forty thousand tons, people didn't really think of it that way. Even those who'd grasped the tactical reality intellectually hadn't done the same thing on a deep, emotional level. And so they'd continued to think in terms of standoff engagement ranges, sophisticated shipboard systems, and all the other elements which made a LAC a miniaturized version of larger, vastly more capable hyper-capable ships.
Mitchell Clapp had begun his own design process by going back to a blank piece of paper. Rather than designing a starship in miniature, he'd seen it as an opportunity to design a pinnace on the macro scale. He'd ruthlessly stripped out everything that wasn't absolutely essential to the combat role as he visualized it, and along the way he'd discovered it was possible to save a truly amazing amount of tonnage.