by David Weber
The Manticoran systems were far more effective, especially with the remote Ghost Rider platforms to spread the EW envelope wider and deeper. Despite the increases in accuracy Foraker had managed to engineer into the Republic's MDMs, the Allies' targeting systems were at least fifty percent more effective simply because of the difference in the two sides' electronic warfare capabilities.
Active defenses engaged the weapons which slashed their way through the screen of electronic protection. The latest generation Manticoran counter missiles had increased their effective intercept range to just over two million kilometers, although the probability of a kill in excess of one and a half million was low. Shannon Foraker's best efforts, even with reverse-engineered Solarian technology, had a maximum intercept range of little more than one and a half million. That meant Honor's missile defenses had sufficient depth for two counter missile launches to engage each incoming missile before the attacking birds could reach effective laserhead range. Foraker could get off only a single launch at each incoming wave of Allied missiles, but she'd compensated by increasing the number of launchers by more than thirty percent. Her missiles were individually less effective, but there were many more of them per launch, and Second Fleet threw up a wall of them in the path of the incoming warheads.
Impeller wedge met impeller wedge, obliterating counter missile and MDM alike in blinding flashes as impeller nodes and capacitors vaporized one another. Both sides were using layered defenses, ripple-fired, multiple waves of counter missiles backed by point defense laser clusters in the innermost interception zones, and Foraker and Commander Clapp had integrated the Cimeterres into the Republican Navy's missile defense doctrine, as well. Even a LAC's laser clusters could kill an incoming missile if it could hit it, and very few of those missiles would deign to attack something as insignificant as a LAC.
Space was a blinding, roiling cauldron of energy around Second Fleet as counter missiles, shipboard lasers and grasers, and LACs poured fire into the phalanx of destruction sweeping down upon it. At least sixty percent of the Allies' fire was defeated by ECM or picked off by active defenses. But that meant that forty percent wasn't, and Lester Tourville's ships spun and twisted like dervishes, fighting to interpose wedges and sidewalls against the ravening fury of bomb-pumped lasers as the Manticoran warheads began to detonate.
At least half of those lasers wasted themselves harmlessly against the impenetrable stress bands of superdreadnought impeller wedges, or found themselves bent and twisted wide of their targets by sidewalls. But some of them got through.
* * *
Lester Tourville clung to the arms of his command chair as RHNS Majestic staggered and bucked. No one sent damage reports to the flag bridge. Those were the concern of Captain Hughes on her own command deck, but Tourville could feel the big ship's wounds as laser after laser crashed into her. Even her massive armor yielded to that savage pounding, and he knew Manticoran fire was smashing away sensors, energy weapons, missile tubes . . . and the human beings who crewed them.
He felt that wave of destruction in the back of his brain, but he made himself ignore it. If it was Hughes' job to deal with Majestic's wounds it was Tourville's job to save what he could of Second Fleet.
It didn't look as if he would be able to save very much of it.
Both the Manticoran and the Grayson fire had concentrated mercilessly upon his own SD(P)s and CLACs. Quite a few missiles—like the ones targeting Majestic—had lost track and gone after other victims, yet it was obvious that they amounted to little more than errant shots which had initially been intended for the newer types. He wondered, at first, how the Manties could have targeted them so accurately, picked them out of his formation so unerringly, when the Allies had no emissions signatures or targeting profiles on file for them. But then he realized how absurdly easy it actually was. They hadn't picked the new ships out; they'd simply chosen not to fire at the ships they could positively identify as pre-pod designs. By process of elimination, that concentrated their fire on the newer, more dangerous designs.
They were tough, superdreadnoughts. The most massively armored and protected mobile structures ever built by man. They could soak up almost inconceivable amounts of punishment and survive. More than survive, continue to strike back from the heart of a holocaust which would have vaporized any lesser ship. But there were limits to all things, including the toughness of superdreadnoughts, and he watched the damage report sidebars flicker and change as incoming missiles sledgehammered his own SD(P)s again and again and again.
He felt a moment of bitter shame leavened by relief as he realized most of the Manties were virtually ignoring his own flagship. He'd chosen Majestic because she'd been designed as a command ship, with the best communications and battle management systems available. But she was a pre-pod design, and so, for all her damage, she was largely spared as that first, deadly exchange of fire completely gutted a third of Tourville's SD(P)s. Two more were damaged almost as badly, and a seventh lost two alpha nodes. Only one of them escaped totally undamaged . . . and fresh Manticoran missiles were already howling in upon her in follow-on salvos.
* * *
Honor watched the return Havenite fire rip into her own formation. Her wall of battle was too far from its enemies for shipboard sensors to resolve what was happening to Second Fleet in any detail, but the Ghost Rider sensor platforms she'd had deployed were another matter entirely. Not even Manticore had yet been able to find a way for the platforms to send targeting information directly to MDMs, and even an MDM was too small for BuWeaps to cram in an FTL receiver which would have allowed real-time targeting telemetry to be relayed through the ships who'd launched them. But she could at least evaluate what happened when those missiles reached their targets, and her eyes narrowed in respectful surprise at the sheer toughness of that multilayered, tightly coordinated defensive envelope.
It was obvious that the Republic recognized the technical inferiority of its defensive systems. But Shannon Foraker's touch was equally obvious in the way in which those individually inferior systems had been carefully coordinated. The same approach would have been redundantly wasteful of capabilities given Manticoran system efficiencies. Given Republican hardware, it represented a brilliant adaptation of existing capabilities. An answer in mass to the individual superiority of Allied weapons.
And it worked.
Like Tourville, Honor had chosen her flagship for the effectiveness of its command systems more than its ship-to-ship offensive power. And even more than Second Fleet's commander, she found that flagship virtually ignored by the incoming Republican missiles. It made sense, she supposed, although she hadn't really considered it when she made her choice. After all, a carrier which had already launched its LACs automatically had a lower priority than superdreadnoughts which were busy launching missiles of their own or providing fire control to pods laid by another SD(P).
Werewolf was miraculously and completely untouched in that first, crushing exchange of fire. Other ships were less fortunate. Alistair McKeon's Troubadour was a priority target. Almost a dozen missiles broke through every electronic and active defense, and the SD(P)'s icon flashed and flickered on Honor's plot as she took damage. Her sistership Hancock was hit equally hard, and Trevor's Star took at least ten hits from individual lasers. The pre-pod ships Horatius, Romulus, and Yawata took their share of the punishment, as well, and the battlecruiser Retaliation strayed into the path of a full broadside intended for the dreadnought King Michael. All of the ships of the wall survived; Retaliation didn't.
Honor watched the battlecruiser's data code disappear from her plot and wondered how many hundreds—or thousands—of her people were wounded or dying aboard the other ships of her task force. She felt those fresh deaths pressing upon her, joining their weight to all the rest of her dead, but even as the toll mounted among her own ships, she knew the enemy was being hammered even harder.
* * *
Lester Tourville watched the mounting tide of destruction swelling
up in the plot's sidebars and fought to keep his despair out of his expression and voice.
Despite the incredible range, despite the MDMs' long flight times, the Manties' deadly concentration on his SD(P)s had crippled his offensive firepower in the first two salvos . . . and, for all intents and purposes, destroyed it completely in less than thirty minutes. Only one of his long-range missile ships, Battle Squadron 21's flagship, RHNS Hero, remained in action. Two of her sisters had been totally destroyed, four had been abandoned, with scuttling charges set, three more would have to be abandoned very quickly if their nodes could not be brought back online, and if she herself was still in action, she was also heavily damaged. Her fire control had been gutted by the same missile salvo which had destroyed her flag bridge . . . and killed Rear Admiral Zrubek instantly. She was effectively blind and deaf, yet she continued to roll pods at her maximum possible rate, turning them over to her older sisters' fire control. It let Second Fleet continue to spit defiance at the Manties, but Hero was the only ship he had which could still deploy pods at all, and she had only a finite number of them.
Nor had the SD(P)s been his only fatalities. Five more superdreadnoughts had been destroyed or so badly damaged that he'd had no option but to leave them behind while his survivors continued to run. At least one more had taken critical impeller damage; like the lamed SD(P)s, he'd be forced to leave her behind when he made translation into hyper if she couldn't get the missing alpha node back. One of his CLACs had also been destroyed, and two more were little more than air-bleeding wrecks, which meant that at least seven hundred of his two thousand LACs were going to have to be written off, whatever happened to the rest of his fleet.
He checked the maneuvering plot again, and his face clenched with pain. He was still two hours from the hyper limit, and if Harrington's task force had begun losing ground as the geometry of his vector change crabbed away from her, the Graysons were closing in steadily. Not that it mattered. He might be slowly, painfully opening the range from her launchers, but he was still over two light-minutes inside their reach.
At least some of Harrington's ships had been sufficiently battered to fall astern in the chase, he thought grimly. Some of them, judging from the recon drone's' reports, had taken serious damage. Two of her battlecruisers had been completely destroyed, as had at least three destroyers or light cruisers. CIC wasn't certain which at this range—especially when they hadn't been targeted in the first place. But MDMs were proving as indiscriminate in their targeting at long-range as Shannon had predicted. Most of them went after their programmed victims; a significant percentage wound up going after whatever targets they could see at the ends of their runs.
Even as he watched his fleet being pounded towards destruction, he felt a fresh flicker of admiration for Shannon and her staff. Second Fleet could not have found itself in a more disastrous tactical situation than trapped between two separate enemy forces with more long-range firepower than it could muster. No tactical doctrine could have nullified those disadvantages, but although Second Fleet's offensive firepower had been all but destroyed, he was astonished by how many of its ships still survived. They could no longer realistically hope to damage the enemy, but as long as they held together, they could continue to defend one another against the storm of destruction beating upon them. And if his single remaining SD(P) was running low on ammunition, then surely Harrington's SD(P)s had to be doing the same thing. Maybe he could outlast her firepower after all.
* * *
"Our magazines are down to twenty percent," Alistair McKeon told Honor from her com screen. His face was grim, and Honor knew from the sidebars in her plot that Troubadour had taken serious damage and heavy casualties. But McKeon's flagship was still in action, still rolling pods, and whatever had happened to Honor's command, what had happened to the Havenites was worse.
"The older SDs are in better shape on a percentage basis," he went on, "but they can't pump the kinds of broadsides the SD(P)s can. We've got maybe another fifteen minutes. After that, we'll be down to salvos too light to penetrate that damned defense of theirs from this range."
"Alistair's right, Honor," Alice Truman said from her own screen. "And my LACs can't catch them from here. Not before they make it across the limit. Alfredo's could intercept, but we can't support them."
Honor nodded—not in agreement, but in acknowledgment of unpalatable reality. She'd sprung her trap perfectly and savaged the Havenites brutally. Her own losses were painful, but only a fraction of what she'd done to them, and she knew it. But even so, almost half of the enemy fleet was going to escape. They'd held together with too much discipline, and their missile defense doctrine had proven too hard a nut to crack without more MDM firepower then she had. And even if her LACs had been able to intercept, she knew what would happen if she committed them against the close-in defenses which had so badly blunted her missile attack.
Which was the reason she couldn't possibly commit Alfredo's LACs to an unsupported attack.
"You're right—both of you," she said after a moment. She looked back at her plot, where only a handful of missiles continued to launch from the shattered ranks of the Havenite fleet. The enemy was decisively routed and broken, but even though every bone in her body longed to run the survivors down and complete their destruction, she knew she couldn't do it.
"We'll continue the pursuit." Her soprano was calm, giving no more hint of her intense frustration than it did of the pain of her own losses. "Alistair, I want you to reprioritize our missile fire. We're not going to be able to hammer our way through those defenses by saturating them, so I want you to slow your rate of fire and pick your targets carefully. Use delayed activation launches to thicken your broadsides while the pods last and try to concentrate on SDs with undamaged impellers. If we can slow some more of them down, our older ships of the wall can take them out as we overhaul, or else we can commit Alice's LACs to deal with them as we go by."
"Yes, Ma'am," McKeon acknowledged.
"Alice, I know you're frustrated by not getting your LACs into this yet," Honor went on, "but at least half a dozen of those Havenite ships are going to be too slow and too beat up to get away from you. When you're free to commit to go in after them, I want you to be sure to offer them the chance to surrender first. They're a long way from home and badly hurt, and I don't want to kill anyone who wants to give up."
"Of course," Truman agreed.
"Very well then." Honor sat back in her command chair and nodded to both of her senior subordinates. "Harper will pass similar instructions to Alfredo. In the meantime, we have a battle to finish up. So let's be about it, People."
Chapter Fifty-Nine
The planet of Manticore was a blue-and-white-swirled beauty as the pinnace from GSNS Seneca Gilmore swooped into its outermost atmosphere. Admiral Lady Dame Honor Harrington, Duchess and Steadholder Harrington, sat in its large passenger compartment, alone but for her three-man security team, and watched the seas of featureless white turn into fluffy, wind-textured billows of cloud as the pinnace swept lower and lower towards the City of Landing.
It was a short flight, the last leg of the journey home from Sidemore which had begun two weeks earlier when the Protectors' Own was finally recalled to Grayson by way of Manticore, and she sat very still, feeling the emptiness and the tension within her as the pinnace banked gracefully onto its final heading and settled towards the private landing pad behind Mount Royal Palace.
Queen Elizabeth had wanted to welcome Honor home in the manner in which she insisted Honor deserved to be welcomed, but Honor had managed to avoid that ordeal, at least. It was already obvious to her that there would be other ordeals, just as public and just as exhausting, which she would not be able to avoid. She'd seen the HD of the cheering crowds, celebrating wildly in the capital's streets when news of the Second Battle of Sidemore was announced, and she dreaded what would happen when those same crowds learned "the Salamander" was home. But in this instance, her monarch—well, one of her monarchs, she
supposed—had agreed to relent, and so there was no huge honor guard, no crowd of newsies, to observe her arrival once again upon the soil of her birth-kingdom's capital planet.
There was a greeting party, however. One that consisted of four humans and three treecats. Queen Elizabeth herself and her consort, Prince Justin, headed the small group of two-footed people awaiting her. Ariel rode on Elizabeth's left shoulder, while Monroe rode on Justin's right shoulder. Behind them stood Lord William Alexander and his brother, the Earl of White Haven, with Samantha standing high and proud on his shoulder, eyes glowing as she tasted the mind-glow of her mate for the first time in far too long. Colonel Ellen Shemais stood alertly to one side, overseeing the small squad of Palace Security and Queen's Own personnel guarding the perimeter of the landing pad, but that was their only function here. There were no bands, no flourishes and salutes. There were only seven people, friends all of them, waiting for her as she came home once more.
"Honor." Elizabeth held out a hand to her, and Honor took it, only to find herself enveloped in a fierce hug. Five or six T-years before, she wouldn't have had a clue how to respond to her Queen's embrace. Now she simply returned it, tasting the equally fierce welcome which came with it.
Other emotions washed over her, flooding through her as she, too, sampled the mind-glows of those about her. Samantha's spiraling joy and delight as she rose still higher on White Haven's shoulder and began signing to Nimitz in joyous welcome. Prince Justin, as glad to see her, in his own way, as Elizabeth, and William Alexander, her friend, political mentor, and ally.