by David Weber
"You heard, Rafe?"
"Yes, Ma'am. Bravo-Two, it is. Shall I pass the word to Admiral McKeon and Admiral Truman?"
"Yes, please. And tell them we'll be setting up a four-way com conference in fifteen minutes, as well."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. I'll see to it."
"Thank you," she said, and slid into her command chair, then rotated it to face her staff once more.
"And now, ladies and gentlemen," she said calmly, "the Chair will entertain theories as to just what these people think they're doing."
* * *
Ninety minutes trickled past without a single transmission from the incoming strangers. The transports—or whatever they were—had fallen back, trailing along behind the probable ships of the wall with what looked like three light cruisers or large destroyers riding herd on them. The rest of the unidentified formation simply continued to bore straight in, and tension had ratcheted steadily higher on Werewolf's flag deck as the range continued to drop just as steadily.
"Scotty is about fifteen minutes from contact, Ma'am," Jaruwalski reported.
"Has he gotten a visual yet?" Honor asked.
"No, Ma'am," the ops officer admitted with an unmistakable edge of chagrin. "Whoever this is, they're clearly familiar with our remote sensor platform doctrines. They haven't tried to take any of them out, but the formation they've adopted makes that unnecessary . . . so far, at least."
Honor nodded in understanding. The strangers' formation was unorthodox, to say the least. Rather than a conventional wall formation, the capital ships had settled into a roughly spherical alignment, then rotated ever so slightly on their axes. The result was to turn the roofs and floors of their impeller wedges, which had just as powerful a warping effect on visible light as on anything else, outward in all directions. In effect, they had created a series of blind spots directed towards their flanks, which just happened to be where doctrine called for sensor drones to be deployed.
"Has Scotty considered vectoring his drones around behind them for a look up their kilts?" she asked.
There wasn't that much to choose between looking down the throat or up the kilt of an impeller wedge, except that the throat was deeper than the kilt, which gave a sensor drone a better angle on its target. Unfortunately, the forward sensors and point defense armament of a warship were better than those guarding its stern precisely because the throat was more vulnerable than the kilt. Given these people's apparent awareness of the defenders' probable doctrine, it was a fairly safe bet that any drone, however stealthy, which wandered in front of them would be dead meat unless they chose not to kill it.
"Yes, Ma'am, he has," Jaruwalski acknowledged. "But they should be going for turnover in another ten minutes or so."
"Understood," Honor said. When the bogeys flipped to begin decelerating towards Sidemore, they'd turn their own kilts directly towards Scotty's shipboard sensors.
She leaned back in her command chair, with Nimitz curled comfortably in her lap, and let her gaze wander around her flag bridge. The tension was palpable, but her people were functioning smoothly and efficiently under it. None of them had been able to come up with an explanation for the intruders' actions, but from the taste of their emotions, most of them had come to the conclusion that the bogeys were most probably Andermani.
Mercedes and George Reynolds, Honor knew, both suspected that this was one more provocation, this time on a grand scale. A sort of interstellar game of chicken between task forces. Jaruwalski disagreed. She didn't know who these people were, but she was firmly convinced they weren't Andies. There was entirely too much potential for someone to panic and start shooting if those were Andermani warships out there, and nothing anyone had reported, including Thomas Bachfisch, suggested that the Andermani could possibly be able to overcome such unfavorable numerical odds. If Honor's staff was aware of that, then surely the Andermani were, as well, and risking that much tonnage and the personnel required to crew those ships just to "send a message" was a far cry from risking a single cruiser here or there. And whatever else the Andies might be, it struck her as extremely unlikely that any senior Andermani officer could be crazy enough to take such a chance. She'd been polite about it, but she'd also made her disagreement with both the chief of staff and the staff spook clear, and Honor smiled ever so slightly at the thought. Then she glanced at the time and date display on the bulkhead, and beckoned to Timothy Meares.
"Yes, Your Grace?" the youthful flag lieutenant said quietly as he stopped beside her command chair.
"I think it's about time, Tim," she told him, equally quietly.
"Yes, Ma'am," he said, and walked casually across the bridge towards Lieutenant Harper Brantley, Honor's staff communications officer.
She watched him go, then turned her head as she tasted a sudden spike in Mercedes Brigham's emotions. Her chief of staff was gazing at her in intent speculation. Speculation that became something else when Honor grinned cheerfully at her. Brigham's eyes narrowed, then snapped from Honor to Meares and Brantley, and Honor felt Nimitz's delighted amusement. Which was only to be expected from someone whose treecat name was "Laughs Brightly," she reflected.
Brigham looked back at Honor and opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it again and shook her head severely at her admiral, instead.
None of the other staffers had noticed the silent exchange. They were all far too intent on their own duties to pay any attention to Meares' movements or the chief of staff's expression. Nor did they notice when the flag lieutenant bent over Brantley's shoulder to whisper quietly in his ear.
The com officer's head popped up, and he looked incredulously at Meares for just a moment, then darted a half-accusing, half-amused looked at his admiral before he bent back over his console. He murmured something into his hush mike, then leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms.
Nothing at all happened for perhaps ninety seconds, and then quite a lot of things happened in rapid succession.
The incoming bogeys suddenly and simultaneously made turnover over ten minutes early, and as they did their icons began to multiply in the plot. Dozens—scores—of additional light codes appeared, spreading outward like captive constellations, and Honor tasted her staffers' consternation as they recognized what they were seeing. It was a sight they'd seen scores of times over the past three or four T-years; it was just that they'd never seen anyone else lunching full deckloads of LACs.
For a few, brief moments consternation (and something just a bit more akin to panic than any of them would ever have admitted) was all they felt as they grappled with the sudden awareness of how far the bogeys' unexpected possession of LACs would go towards evening the tactical imbalance they had assumed favored Task Force Thirty-Four so heavily. But before they could react, the flood of LAC icons began to blink from the crimson of unknown, assumed hostiles to the steady green of friendly units. The color change flowed through the formation in a cascade, one LAC squadron at a time as each of them brought its transponders online. And as each LAC group completed its transition, its mothership's icon blinked to green, in turn.
"Your Grace," Jaruwalski began, "we know those ships! They're—"
She chopped herself off abruptly and turned to favor Honor with a much more old-fashioned glance than the one Brigham and turned upon her as she realized how superfluous her report actually was. Honor returned her look—it would never have done to call it a glare, of course—with her best innocent smile.
"Yes, Andrea?" she said.
"Never mind, Your Grace." For a moment, the ops officer sounded remarkably like a Grayson nanny who had surprised her charges in the act of painting the nursery purple. But then, almost against her will, she began to grin and shook her head at her Admiral.
"Never mind, Your Grace," she repeated, in quite a different tone. "I suppose by now we should all be accustomed to what passes for your sense of humor."
Chapter Thirty
"I expected better than this from you, Edward."
Michael Janvier, Baron
High Ridge and Prime Minister of Manticore, looked down his aristocratic nose at his First Lord of Admiralty, and his tone was rich with disapproval. The conference room's smart wall had been reprogrammed to create a moonlit forest glade behind him, but he appeared totally oblivious to the bizarre contrast between its calm tranquility and his own almost petulant expression.
"Not seven months ago," he went on in precisely metered words, "you assured us that the Republic of Haven had no pod-superdreadnoughts. Now you're reporting that they have a minimum of at least sixty in commission . . . which is only four less than we have. And, I might add, that they've managed to assemble this force without our so much as suspecting they might be doing so."
He paused, gazing at his First Lord with his best, patented look of disappointment, and Sir Edward Janacek resisted a powerful urge to glare back at him. It was just like High Ridge to try to make this all his fault, he reflected. But of course he couldn't say that. And however typical of the Prime Minister the automatic search for a scapegoat might be, his own position at the Admiralty made him the natural choice for the role in this case, which meant this conference had to be handled very carefully, indeed.
"What I'd like to know," Lady Elaine Descroix put in as the Prime Minister's pause lingered, "is exactly how bad the situation really is."
"Yes," Countess New Kiev agreed. "And not just the military situation, either." She gave the Foreign Secretary a sharp glance, to which Descroix did her best to appear completely oblivious.
"I believe Elaine speaks for all of us, Edward," High Ridge pronounced in those same, measured tones, and Janacek gritted his teeth for a heartbeat or two.
"Obviously," he began once he was confident he could keep his own tone level, "the fact that we've suffered an Intelligence failure on this scale makes any precise estimate of the situation difficult, if not impossible. I have, of course, discussed the nature and extent of that Intelligence failure with Admiral Jurgensen, and I assure you that we will be using every resource available to us in our efforts to repair it."
"Is Jurgensen the right man to be repairing anything?" Descroix asked, and twitched one shoulder when Janacek looked at her. "Whatever else may have happened, Edward, one thing is certain. As you just said, we've suffered an enormous intelligence failure, and Admiral Jurgensen is Second Space Lord. Ultimately, the performance of ONI is his responsibility, and it would appear to me that he's failed in it."
"Francis Jurgensen is a dedicated and conscientious officer," Janacek replied. He spoke with careful, deliberate emphasis, every centimeter the First Lord of Admiralty defending a subordinate, even as he heaved a huge internal sigh of relief that Descroix had pointed her accusing finger at someone besides himself. "Obviously, we're currently engaged in a major reassessment of ONI's performance, and we believe we've already identified several weak links. The majority of them are holdovers from the Mourncreek Admiralty, but I must admit that a substantial percentage of them are people we put into place after assuming office. The problem is that someone can look very good on paper or even on the basis of his past record and still conceal serious weaknesses. Unfortunately, those sorts of weaknesses only become apparent after a failure calls attention to them. That happens fairly frequently in intelligence work, I'm afraid, but this time the failure was rather more . . . spectacular than most.
"I feel it would be inappropriate to relieve Admiral Jurgensen at this time. In part, that's because I believe he deserves an opportunity to correct the problems he's only recently discovered rather than being scapegoated individually for the failures of a great many people. But I also feel that 'changing horses in midstream' is often a serious mistake. Any newcomer as Second Space Lord would start from scratch in his new position. He'd have to learn everything about his job, and there would be an inevitable period of disruption and distraction while he did so. Admiral Jurgensen, on the other hand, already has ample evidence of things which have gone wrong. With that evidence in hand and the intimate familiarity with the mechanics and internal dynamics of his command which he's gained over the last several T-years, I feel he's in a position to offer a continuity and effectiveness any new appointee would find very difficult to match."
"Um." High Ridge frowned, and Janacek waited, his expression calm, while he pondered. Then the Prime Minister nodded slowly.
"I'm not certain I entirely agree with you, Edward," he said pontifically, "but the Admiralty is your shop. And certainly your loyalty to your subordinates is commendable. I would advise you not to allow that loyalty to blind you to realities. Or to create a situation in which someone else's incompetence destroys your own career. But I'm not prepared to overrule you where Jurgensen is concerned at this time."
"Thank you, Michael. I appreciate that," Janacek said gravely, and it was true. He especially appreciated the fact that keeping Jurgensen around offered him a ready made scapegoat he could blame and—regretfully, of course—sack after all if any other disasters came home to roost.
"In the meantime," the First Lord continued, "and having admitted that, for whatever reason, we've suffered an Intelligence failure of the first magnitude, I would like to point out two things. First, the only source we have for the number and capabilities of the Peeps'—I mean, the Republic's—new ships is Theisman's own news conference. There is absolutely no independent confirmation of any of his claims at this time. Second, the mere fact that they may possess pod-superdreadnoughts doesn't necessarily equate to anything like equal capabilities in combat."
"Are you suggesting that the Republic doesn't, in fact, have the ships it claims it does?" New Kiev managed not to sound overtly incredulous, but her automatic distaste for and distrust of all things military still colored her voice.
"I'm not suggesting anything where numbers of hulls are concerned," he replied, his eyes hard. "I'm simply pointing out that the only numbers we have are the ones Theisman supplied. It's certainly possible he exaggerated those numbers. By the same token, it's equally possible that he under represented them, instead."
"Why would he do either of those?" Descroix asked.
"I haven't said he did do either of them." Janacek heard an edge of exasperation creeping into his voice and made himself stop and draw a deep breath. Then he continued. "What I said was that he might have done either of them, and that we wouldn't have any way of knowing which—if either—it was. As to why he might have announced inaccurate numbers, I can think of at least a handful of reasons to go either way. If this is the first step towards a more aggressive and assertive foreign policy, then obviously it would be to the Republic's advantage for its opponents to overestimate its military potential. In that case, telling us that they have more ships than they actually do would be a reasonable piece of disinformation for them to throw out. That might also be true if they're concerned about the possibility of preemptive action on our part. On the other hand, if their objective is to lull us into a sense of false security, then it would make sense for them to understate their actual strength in order to avoid alarming us. For that matter, they might also believe that understating their true strength would cause us to feel less alarmed and so be less likely to act preemptively. The problem, of course, is that we have absolutely no way to know which, if any, of those possibilities might actually be true. That's why I raised the point in the first place. We need to be aware—all of us need to be aware—of exactly how limited our current information really is. Not only about these new ships of theirs, but about their possible intentions, as well."
He paused again, this time without grinding his teeth together, and glanced around the conference room. The expressions on the faces looking back at him had become at least a little more thoughtful as he spoke, and he allowed himself to feel a very slight flicker of satisfaction at the evidence that his own reasoned manner was having an effect.
"Whatever their intentions, though," he continued, "the second point I raised is probably the more important one. In the final analysis, ships of the wall are only platforms for weapon
s. What really matters is the weapons those platforms carry, and at the moment nothing we know suggests that the Republic has somehow managed to overcome the technological gap between our capabilities. While Theisman and Pritchart may have managed to build a shipyard complex somewhere that we didn't know about, the mere fact that a yard exists says nothing about the sophistication of its technical capabilities. It's going to take longer for us to develop that sort of information, but Admiral Jurgensen's technical people have been running continual threat update assessments of the Republic's technology."
He made certain that neither his tone nor his expression revealed his awareness that he was heading out onto thin ice.
"By their most pessimistic estimates, the Republic's R&D is still years from matching our capabilities. In that regard, it's significant that Theisman hasn't claimed that they've managed to put any CLACs into commission. Building the carriers themselves isn't any more difficult than building SD(P)s. In fact, it's a simpler problem in naval design. So the fact that they apparently don't have any of them may well be an indicator that their tech base still isn't up to the task of producing a LAC design good enough to justify building carriers to put it on.
"Obviously, that's nothing more than a hypothesis at this point. We certainly can't prove or disprove it on the basis of the evidence available to us. But if it's true, then it's just one more indication of the wide gap between our basic military technology and theirs, and that's the significant point. Until they can deploy weapons systems which match the range and accuracy of ours—or, perhaps even more important, the defensive capabilities of our electronic warfare systems—the actual tonnage ratios are relatively unimportant."
"Unimportant?" New Kiev repeated. The single word came out with an utter lack of emphasis which, in its own way, was as emphatic as a snort of disbelief.
"Relatively unimportant," he corrected in a voice just barely on the warm side of frosty. "Obviously that's not the same thing as 'insignificant,' Marisa. But as Eighth Fleet demonstrated in Operation Buttercup, capability trumps simple numbers. To put it in its simplest possible terms, if our ships can kill their ships at twice their effective range, then it really doesn't matter if they have more hulls than we do. All it does is give our fire control crews more targets."