by David Weber
"He doesn't have a lot of choice," White Haven pointed out. "To be honest, I'm quite certain that was a part of Protector Benjamin's calculus when he hatched this entire notion. And while it would never do for me to accuse the Protector of meddling in the internal political affairs of an ally, I think he put High Ridge into his current position with malice aforethought."
MacDonnell looked a question at him, and the earl shrugged.
"High Ridge's only option is to pretend he's in favor of Benjamin's actions. Anything else would make him look at best weak and ineffectual, since he couldn't keep Benjamin from doing it anyway. At worst, if it turns out we're right and he's wrong about the Peeps' intentions, he'd look like a complete and total idiot if he'd sat around protesting the fact that we're saving him from his own stupidity. Not," White Haven added with a particularly nasty smile, "that we're not going to make him look stupid anyway, if the ball does go up."
MacDonnell cocked his head. White Haven sounded almost as if he wanted the Peeps to attack because of the damage it would do the High Ridge Government. The Grayson knew he was being unfair. That the earl most certainly didn't want the Republic of Haven to go back to war with the Star Kingdom. But White Haven had clearly passed beyond the point of hoping that that wouldn't happen. Unlike MacDonnell, who continued to cherish his doubts, despite the fact that the original warning had come from Lady Harrington, the earl had completely accepted the proposition that a Havenite attack was imminent. And since he'd done all he could to prepare for that looming catastrophe, he was ready to look for whatever silver lining he might be able to find.
And, MacDonnell conceded, anything that offered to remove Baron High Ridge from power had to be considered a silver lining.
The Grayson returned his attention to Benjamin the Great's flag plot. It was appropriate that he and White Haven should be standing on that ship's bridge at this particular moment, he thought. The "Benjie," as the Navy affectionately referred to Benjamin the Great, had been White Haven's flagship from the day she commissioned until the conclusion of Operation Buttercup. But although the ship was still less than eight T-years old, Benjie belonged to a class of only three ships. Her design had been superseded by the Harrington-class SD(P)s, and MacDonnell knew that some of those in the Office of Shipbuilding wanted to designate his flagship for disposal. He hated the very thought of sending her to the breakers for reclamation, although he had to admit that there was a certain cold-blooded logic to it. Grayson was straining every sinew to build and maintain the fleet it had. It couldn't afford to retain ships, however new, or however beloved, whose design had been rendered obsolescent.
Personally, MacDonnell hoped Shipbuilding would adopt one of the alternate proposals, instead, and refit the Benjie's shipboard launchers to handle the latest generation of multi-drive missiles. But that was someone else's decision. For right now, Benjamin the Great was exactly where she needed to be. Designed from the keel out as a fleet command ship, she had arguably the finest flag deck and fleet information center of any ship in commission anywhere.
"Whatever High Ridge might think of all this," White Haven said, stepping closer to MacDonnell and gazing into the plot with him, "Admiral Kuzak doesn't seem to have any reservations, does she?"
"No, she doesn't," MacDonnell agreed. His eyes moved from the plot which showed his own command to the secondary display set for astrographic mode. The Trevor's Star terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction lay much closer to the system primary than the Junction itself lay to Manticore-A. Still, there was the better part of three light-hours between it and Trevor's Star itself. Even with the powerful forts which had been built to cover it, the sheer distance between the system's inhabited planet and the terminus had created an almost insuperable difficulty for Admiral Theodosia Kuzak.
Her Third Fleet could be in only one place at a time, unless she wanted to accept an extremely dangerous dispersion of its strength. In theory, the forts could deal with most attacks on the terminus itself. Actually, calling them "forts" was something of a misnomer. To most people, the term "fort" implied a fixed fortification, something ponderous and immobile. But while the terminus forts were certainly ponderous, they were not—quite—immobile. Instead, they might be better thought of as enormous sublight superdreadnoughts. Ships so huge that their low acceleration made them totally unsuited to mobile operations, but which remained capable of at least minimal combat maneuvers . . . and which could generate the impeller wedges which were the first line of defense for any warship.
But for all their massive size, thick armor, and potent weaponry, they—like Benjamin the Great—were an obsolescent design. Their rate of fire in a missile engagement was only a fraction of that which a Harrington-class ship could produce. If they had time to deploy missile pods before a battle, they could throw stupendous salvos as long as the pods lasted, of course. But that was another way of saying they could fire for as long as no one could get warheads close enough to take out their pods with proximity kills.
When only the Manticoran Alliance had possessed SD(P)s, no one had worried particularly about pod vulnerability. First, because no other navy in space could produce the weight of fire an SD(P) was capable of, and, second, because no other navy in space could match the range of the Alliance's multi-drive missiles. Which meant that the forts' pods would be able to wreak havoc on any attacker before that attacker could possibly get close enough to kill their remaining pods. But the navy Thomas Theisman had built did have SD(P)s. And it was just possible that those SD(P)s had multi-drive missiles of their own.
And under those circumstances, pod vulnerability became a very serious concern, indeed.
All of which helped to explain why a conscientious system commander like Theodosia Kuzak had been so unhappy about her mutually contradictory defense obligations. The official Admiralty view, that there was no evidence that the forts could no longer look after themselves against anything the Peeps might bring to bear against them, was cold comfort for the officer on the spot. Completely ignoring the potential consequences for her career if the Peeps managed to get in and destroy the forts, the sheer loss of life such attack would entail had undoubtedly been enough to give her nightmares. So it was with enormous relief that she had turned responsibility for supporting the forts over to MacDonnell's task force while she concentrated her own SD(P)s and supporting CLACs to cover San Martin and the inner system.
"If you were the Peeps, and you were planning to attack this system, My Lord," he asked White Haven now, "which would you concentrate on? The terminus, or San Martin? Or would you go for both simultaneously?"
"I asked myself those same questions a lot when I was trying to take the system away from the Peeps," White Haven replied. "The biggest problem is that the terminus and the inner system are close enough to offer each other a degree of mutual support that just isn't possible at the Manticore end. It's not the easiest thing in the galaxy for the defense to arrange, you understand, but an attacker going after one objective can never afford to forget about what can come up his backside from the other while he's doing it. That was bad enough for us when the Peeps held the system. For the Peeps, who can never be absolutely certain that a sizable chunk of Home Fleet isn't in range for an emergency transit direct from Manticore, it's even worse."
"Granted," MacDonnell agreed. "But if you're going to attack this system at all, you have to pick one objective."
"Oh, certainly!" White Haven grinned wryly. "In my case, I chose to concentrate on their fleet, squeezing it to defend the inner system. After all, San Martin was a lot more important to them than the terminus of a wormhole junction they couldn't use anyway! And they didn't have anywhere near the terminus fortifications we've put into place since we took the system away from them. Even so, I had to be pretty cautious."
"That's not exactly the way I heard it, My Lord," MacDonnell told him with a smile. "I heard that in the end you threw an assault straight through the Junction."
"Well, yes," the earl said with
a slightly uncomfortable expression. "It was something close to a council of despair, you understand. Esther McQueen was commanding here at the time, and she was a holy terror. Just between you and me, I've often thought that she may well have been a better tactician than I was, and she was a devilishly good strategist, as well. She'd forted up here with battleships and superdreadnoughts in a defense in depth, and however I maneuvered, she managed to stay close enough to keep me from having a free hand for either objective. So I settled in to convince her that I was prepared for what amounted to a siege of the inner system, and when I'd convinced her—or, rather, her replacement, after Pierre and Saint-Just pulled her out for Octagon duty—to redeploy to face it, well—"
"So basically, you forced the Peeps to commit to protecting one objective, then hit the other one with a surprise attack," MacDonnell observed.
"Yes. But I had certain advantages Theisman and his people wouldn't have in attacking the system. Despite the disadvantages a fleet faces in using a junction as an avenue of attack, the element of surprise tends to offset them to a considerable degree. But Theisman won't have a friendly fleet sitting at the other end of the terminus. So he can't really threaten it from two directions at once, the way I did. That would have given Theodosia the opportunity to repeat McQueen's defensive deployments against him.
"In the end, I suspect he could probably have taken her anyway. If our more pessimistic assumptions about what he may have added to his fleet mix without mentioning it to anyone are accurate, the odds swing even further in his favor. But in answer to your question, if I were him, I'd concentrate on the inner system."
"But as long as the Star Kingdom continues to hold the terminus, it can always reinforce or counterattack," MacDonnell pointed out.
"That assumes it has something to counterattack with," White Haven said in a much grimmer tone, and waved a hand at the gleaming icons of the inner system. At this range and on such a scale, all of Third Fleet's ships of the wall formed a single green bead. "Third Fleet has almost a hundred ships of the wall in its order of battle, including forty-eight of our SD(P)s, Niall, and two SD(P)s are down for local refit. We have exactly two—count them; two—more squadrons of them with Home Fleet. We have another squadron of them assigned to Sidemore Station. We have a fourth squadron assigned to Grendelsbane. And we have, at the moment, four more of them in various stages of overhaul and working up back home but not assigned to Home Fleet. That's it, even with the dribs and drabs Janacek has managed to add to his order of battle. If Theisman could take out Third Fleet, he'd destroy around a third of our pre-pod wall and two-thirds of our total modern wall. That makes Theodosia's ships his true objective, and if he can pin them against the star, force her to defend San Martin, he has an opportunity to destroy them.
"If he pulled that off, he could deal with anything we had left with relative ease. To be perfectly honest, the only remaining counterweight the Alliance would have would be your own fleet, and Grayson would find itself facing much the same quandary the Manticore System faces. How much of your home fleet can you afford to commit to offensive operations?"
"To be honest?" MacDonnell shook his head. "We've probably actually exceeded that limit by what we've deployed here. Not that I think it was a mistake to send us," he added hastily. "I think Lady Harrington and Mr. Paxton are correct in arguing that the Peeps are unlikely to make Grayson one of their priority objectives. That could change, of course, especially once word gets back to them that a sizable portion of our Navy is reinforcing here at Trevor's Star. But at the moment, they almost have to be assuming the GSN is still concentrated at Yeltsin, and they aren't going to want to provoke us until after they've dealt with your SD(P)s."
"Exactly," White Haven agreed, hiding any trace of the instinctive irritation he felt. It wasn't anything MacDonnell had actually said. Nor was it anything White Haven could have disagreed with, even if the Grayson had put it into so many words. But it was unutterably galling for any senior Manticoran admiral to hear a Grayson calmly assessing the RMN as only the second ranking navy of the Alliance.
Especially given the fact that, at the moment, that assessment was entirely accurate.
"Actually," he went on, "the best-case scenario would be for Theisman to realize that you've reinforced us here before he kicks off any attack. The realization that the GSN is prepared to reinforce us this promptly, despite any . . . difficulties you may be experiencing working with our present deplorable Prime Minister, would almost have to give him pause. He'd also have to rethink any ops plan he'd already drawn up on the assumption that you wouldn't be. And if we can win that jackass Janacek just another four or five months, the ships he's finally resumed construction on will begin to come into commission in something like genuinely useful numbers. Especially the ones in the Grendelsbane shadow yards. They were further along in construction when they were suspended, and the first of them will be ready for acceptance trials in just a couple of weeks."
"From your lips to the Tester's ears," MacDonnell said fervently.
* * *
"It's confirmed, Sir. All of them."
Admiral of the Red Allen Higgins was a man of only middling height, with a round, almost chubby face that was usually a faithful mirror of his affable nature. At the moment, that face was the color of old oatmeal and the eyes were haunted.
He stared down at the pitiless display and felt like a fly in the path of Juggernaut as the Peep attack force rumbled down upon him. Thirty-two superdreadnoughts, an unknown number of them SD(P)s. There were also at least some CLACs in that oncoming freight train of destruction. There had to be, because the four hundred-strong LAC strike he'd sent out to meet them had been ripped apart by an even stronger LAC counterattack.
And to oppose it, once his LACs had been effectively destroyed, he'd had seven SD(P)s, sixteen pre-pod SDs, four CLACs with less than thirty LACs between them, and nineteen battlecruisers and cruisers. He'd thought he might still be able to accomplish something, given his outnumbered SD(P)s' range advantage. But he'd been wrong. As the Peeps had just demonstrated by destroying all seven of them from a range in excess of forty million kilometers.
His remaining twenty capital ships were hopelessly outclassed. The incredible missile storm which had wiped away his SD(P)s was proof enough of that. Thank God that at least he'd held them back when he sent in the SD(P)s! Thousands of RMN personnel were still alive because of that simple decision on his part. A decision he'd tossed off almost casually at the time.
But that was the only mercy which had been vouchsafed to him.
"We can't stop them," he said softly and looked up to meet his chief of staff's equally shocked eyes at last. "Anything we send out to meet them will only end up giving them extra target practice," he grated. "And the same thing is true of the shipyards. Hell, we always depended on the mobile force for the system's real security. Why bother to upgrade the forts to fire MDMs? That's what the frigging Fleet was for! Goddamn that bastard Janacek."
"Sir, how—I mean, what do we do now?" the chief of staff asked almost desperately.
"There's only one thing we can do," Higgins ground out. "I am not going to be another Elvis Santino, or even another Silas Markham. No more of my people are going to be killed in a battle we can't win anyway."
"But, Sir, if you just abandon the yards, the Admiralty will—"
"Fuck the Admiralty!" Higgins snarled. "If they want to court-martial me, so much the better. I'd love to have an opportunity to discuss their excuse for a naval policy in front of a formal court! But right now what matters is saving everyone and everything we can . . . and we can't save the yards."
The chief of staff swallowed hard, but he couldn't disagree.
"We don't have time to set scuttling charges," Higgins went on in a harsh, flat voice. "Get every work crew back to the main facility. I want all secure data wiped now. Once you've done that, set the charges and blow the entire computer core, as well. I don't want the bastards getting squat from our records. We've
got about a ninety-minute window to evacuate anyone we're going to get out, and we wouldn't have the personnel lift to take more than twenty percent of the total base personnel even if we had time to embark them all. Grab the priority list and find everyone on it that you can. We're not going to be able to get all of them to a pickup point in time, but I want to pull out every tech with critical knowledge that we can."
"Yes, Sir!" The chief of staff turned away and started barking orders, obviously grateful for something—anything—to do, and Higgins rounded on his ops officer.
"While Chet handles that, I've got another job for you, Juliet." His corpse-like smile held no humor at all. "We may not have enough missiles with the legs to take those bastards on," he said, waving a hand at the tactical display. "But there's one target we can reach."
"Sir?" The ops officer looked as confused as her voice sounded, and Higgins barked a travesty of a laugh.
"We don't have time to set demolition charges, Juliet. So I want you to lay in a fire plan. As we pull out, I want an old-fashioned nuke on top of every building slip, every immobile ship, every fabrication center. Everything. The only thing you don't hit are the personnel platforms. You understand me?"
"Aye, aye, Sir," she got out, her expression aghast at the thought of the trillions upon trillions of dollars of irreplaceable hardware and half-completed hulls she was about to destroy.
"Then do it," he grated, and turned back to the pitiless display once more.
* * *
Javier Giscard checked the time again. It was odd. Nothing could be calmer or more orderly than Sovereign of Space's flag bridge. There were no raised voices, no excitement. No one rushed from console to console or conferred in urgent, anxious tones.
And yet for all of the order and serenity, the tension was palpable. Task Force Ten had yet to fire a shot, but the war had already begun. Or resumed. Or whatever future historians would agree it had done.