Uncompromising Honor - eARC

by David Weber

  Yet not even that fire could have stopped all of them. There literally weren’t enough places on ships that size to put enough laser clusters to take out that many threats. Dozens—scores—of them must have gotten through unscathed. Unfortunately, she knew, the defenders had concentrated on the ones that could have hurt them, and most of those surviving dozens and scores would have wasted themselves against their targets’ wedges and sidewalls. But the missiles crossing ahead of the Manties would be another matter. A ship simply couldn’t pack as many laser clusters into her fore and aft hammerheads, and it was obvious from the timing that a higher percentage of missiles attacking the throats of the Manticoran wedges had shut down their impellers rather than being picked off on the way in. By rights, most of the birds who’d reached shutdown positions should have gotten their lasers off before they could be destroyed, and the throat of a starship’s impeller wedge was far deeper than its sidewalls. That made it a much, much bigger target.

  * * *

  Seventy-three laserheads detonated directly ahead of HMS Clas Fleming, and seven hundred and thirty bomb-pumped lasers ripped down the throat of her wedge.

  But unlike the Solarian Navy’s warships, the throats of current-generation Manticoran warships were no longer the traditional gaping chink in their armor. The bow-wall and its smaller cousin, the buckler, had finally provided the equivalent of a sidewall—and a very powerful sidewall—to cover that lethally vulnerable aspect of the wedge. That was one reason Sir Martin Lessem had waited motionless in space. He couldn’t accelerate with the full bow-wall up, and he didn’t trust the smaller buckler to provide sufficient cover. But he also hadn’t wanted to suddenly stop accelerating at the instant the wall went up lest the Sollies figure out that something was covering that aspect of Manticoran ships.

  The laserheads detonating in front of Clas Fleming were never able to properly localize their target, because they simply couldn’t see it clearly enough through the bow-wall’s focused gravitic plane. All they could do was fire blindly, trying to saturate the entire volume in which the heavy cruiser might be located. That was an awfully wide volume for even seven hundred lasers to cover, and the bow-wall bent and degraded even those which had managed to find a target in the first place.

  * * *

  Admiral Isotalo reminded herself to breathe as she waited for the laggard photons to tell her how many of her missiles had survived to attack…and how well they’d fared. The human eye was notoriously unreliable at moments like this, but CIC’s uncaring, hyper-efficient computers’ count had already confirmed that the Manties had picked off at least seventy-five percent of her total launch before the surviving missiles dropped their wedges to attack.

  That was yet another conclusion she didn’t much like, and she made a mental note to grab those over-optimistic idiots in the Office of Technical Analysis by their throats and choke some sense into them as soon as she got back to Sol. They had to start coming closer to realistic assessments, or the Manties were going to go right on kicking the Navy’s arse. She had the numbers to punch out a force this small, despite the…flawed enemy capability estimates with which she’d been sent out, but somebody else was going to run into a proper Manty task force, and when they did—

  The thought broke off and her lips drew back in a snarl of satisfaction as the light-speed sensors finally updated the plot and hundreds of laserheads erupted in bubbles of nuclear fusion. Even as she snarled, she knew her most pessimistic estimate of how many had gotten through had been overly optimistic, but her targets were only cruisers, and at least fifty or sixty laserheads detonated directly ahead of four of them.

  They sent the deadly stilettos of their bomb-pumped lasers straight down the wide-open throats of their victims’ wedges…and absolutely nothing happened.

  * * *

  “We took one hit forward, Sir,” Commander Wozniak told Lessem. “Graser One’s gone, and so is Point Defense Four. Seven casualties, nonfatal.” He looked back down at his display. “Robert L. Gartner reports one hit starboard, Frame Seven-Five. That one cost two counter-missile launchers, but Captain Reicher thinks he can get one of them back and reports no personnel casualties. Michael Cucchiarelli took two hits, but she was lucky. Captain Disall’s lost both of his secondary grav sensor arrays, but he reports no personnel casualties or weapon systems damage. Edward Dravecky took two hits; one down her throat and one portside, Frame Two Hundred. The hit forward knocked out a beta node and the power surge killed two ratings in her forward impeller room. The portside hit destroyed Graser Eight and Counter-missile Thirty-Seven. Nine casualties there, two fatal, I’m afraid.”

  Lessem nodded heavily, his expression tight. Four hits and eighteen casualties, only four of them fatal, was a minuscule return for six thousand pod-launched missiles. He knew that, and knowing did absolutely nothing to make it hurt less, because those eighteen casualties were his people.

  On the other hand, he thought grimly, I have to wonder how the other side’s reacting to this?

  * * *

  Isotalo heard Barthilu Rosiak inhale sharply, swallowing what probably would have been a curse, as the same shock lashed through the operations officer.

  There should have been some sign of damage, she thought almost numbly. They’d just fired over eight hundred Cataphracts right down the Manties’ throats, each with the warhead of a Trebuchet capital missile, and CIC confirmed that at least a quarter of them—more probably a third—of the crossing shots had detonated before interception. Call it two hundred and thirty to split the difference, and that was still twenty-three hundred lasers against perfect targets.

  Hit probabilities at that insane crossing speed against a target which couldn’t even be seen clearly until the attack missiles’ sensors cleared that target’s wedge and could look down its throat had to be tiny, despite the ideal geometry of any “crossing-the-T” attack. She and Rosiak had estimated no more than a one-percent hit ratio in such circumstances, rather than the thirty-eight percent ratio they would have expected at a pre-Cataphract crossing rate, but that was still twenty-three hits. That might not inflict crippling damage, scattered across ten ships the size of the Manty cruisers, but it damned well should have inflicted some, and the Manties’ emissions hadn’t even flickered.

  “I see we’re going to need heavier salvos,” Admiral Jane Isotalo said coldly.

  * * *

  “What do you expect them to try next, Sir?” Commander Thúri asked quietly. Commodore Lessem glanced at him, then returned his gaze to the tactical plot. He stood that way for several moments, hands clasped behind him, whistling soundlessly.

  “The one thing I don’t expect him to do is to try another long-range launch, unless he’s able to put a hell of a lot more missiles into it,” he said then. “We didn’t expect their new accelerations, and their projected accuracy was better than we expected at that range, too,” he acknowledged with a shrug. “But not enough better to offset our advantages in missile defense, and judging from their attack profile, they don’t know about the bow-wall, either. But unless they’re idiots—and, frankly, whoever this fellow is, he doesn’t strike me as another Crandall or Filareta—he’ll have figured out that something sure as hell knocked back the damage all those down-the-throat shots should’ve inflicted.”

  He turned away from the plot, pacing slowly across the flag bridge to his command chair. He sank into the chair and turned it to face the astrogation plot while the chair’s displays deployed around him.

  “He’ll want to get closer,” he said then, his eyes narrowing. “If we can take all those down-the-throat shots without showing more damage than we did, he needs every scrap of accuracy he can get. That means getting into effective telemetry range—his effective telemetry range. And out here, he just might pull that off.”

  The chief of staff nodded, his expression thoughtful, then smiled.

  “In that case, Sir, it’s probably a good thing that you’re—and I say this with the utmost respect—a sneaky bastard.”


  “I’ll take that as a compliment, Commander,” Sir Martin Lessem replied with an answering smile.

  * * *

  “—so Technodyne’s accuracy estimates at extended range were almost on the money,” Rear Admiral Rosiak said, using the hand unit to highlight a column of numbers on the briefing room’s bulkhead smart wall. “We can’t be positive, but the hot wash analysis suggests Technodyne’s estimate was accurate to within five or six percent. Which—” he looked around the unhappy faces of Admiral Isotalo’s staff “—was higher than the estimate Maleen and I plugged into our pre-battle planning. Unfortunately, ONI’s estimate of the Manty missile defense’s capabilities was nowhere near accurate, so even with the better-than-expected accuracy, the actual hit ratio still sucked vaccum.”

  “In fairness to ONI, Ma’am,” Rear Admiral Lamizana put in, “nobody who’s gone toe-to-toe with the Manties has gotten home again to tell us how good their defenses really are. The best anyone’s been able to do is extrapolate from the loss ratios, using our own capabilities as a baseline.” She shrugged ever so slightly. “It seems pretty clear that baseline was too optimistic, but it was the only one they had.”

  Jane Isotalo’s jaw tightened at that unpalatable reminder, but it was exactly the sort of reminder Lamizana was supposed to give her, and she nodded in recognition.

  “So your recommendation is what, Bart?” she asked after a second.

  “We have two options, Ma’am, either of which has pros and cons,” Rosiak replied. “One is to simply fire the biggest damned missile salvo the galaxy’s ever seen. I don’t care how good their defenses are on a ship-for-ship basis. Hit them with enough birds to completely saturate their counter-missiles and point defense, and something’s getting through. Assuming we’re right about the blind fire hit probabilities, my people estimate that a thirty thousand-missile launch should produce a minimum of four hundred hits, despite their defensive capabilities.”

  “Assuming they’ve actually shown us all of those capabilities yet,” Lamizana added in a carefully neutral tone.

  “Assuming that,” Rosiak acknowledged, nodding at the intelligence officer. “I think Maleen’s right that we have to assume they may not have, although I also have to say I find it a little difficult to believe anyone could see six thousand missiles coming at him and not pull out all the stops against them, however good he thought his defenses were. Having said that, I don’t have any desire at all to get caught with our our arses hanging out the way certain other people have.”

  Two or three people, Isotalo among them, surprised themselves with smiles at his last sentence. Although it wasn’t really funny, given how many of their fellows—officers and enlisted—those “other people” had gotten killed.

  And Bart can say that when Ramaalas or Maleen couldn’t, she reflected, because he’s Battle Fleet, just like Crandall and Filareta.

  And he does have a point.

  “I realize we have deep pockets where missile pods are concerned,” she said then. “I’d really prefer not to use them up at the rate of five or six thousand per heavy cruiser, though,” she added in a desert-dry tone, “so let’s hear option two, Bart. Should I assume you’re thinking in terms of Two-Step?”

  “Yes, Ma’am, I am.”

  Rosiak waved at the smart wall without looking away from Isotalo.

  “On top of their active defenses and EW, Foudroyant’s CIC agrees with my own people’s conclusion that the Manties have to have found some way to protect against down-the-throat shots. Nobody’s prepared to go out on a limb over exactly how they’re doing that, but my own feeling is that they have to’ve found some way to create a sidewall to cover the ahead and astern aspects of a wedge.”

  “Not to dispute Bart’s conclusion, Ma’am,” Rear Admiral Ramaalas said, “but if they’ve managed that, they have to be playing even faster and looser with physics than our worst-case assumptions.”

  “Not…necessarily,” Captain Malati Raghavendra said.

  Foudroyant’s captain sat at Isotalo’s left elbow, directly across from Ramaalas, both because it was her right as the task force’s flag captain and because Isotalo respected her levelheaded—one might almost have said phlegmatic—common sense. Like Isotalo and Rosiak, Raghavendra was Battle Fleet, but she’d started in Engineering, not Tactical, which helped explain why she had so far attained only captain’s rank in the admiral-heavy SLN.

  “What do you mean, Malati?” the admiral asked.

  “Well, Ma’am, speaking as an ex-snipe, there’s no real problem with generating a…call it a ‘bow-wall,’ for want of a better term. You’d need generators that were a lot bigger and more powerful to produce a wall with that much area, but that’s pretty straightforward. Just a matter of engineering, really. The problem—” she nodded at Ramalaas “—is that every time you put it up and closed the front of the wedge, your ship wouldn’t be able to accelerate. But these people weren’t accelerating. In fact, if they have something like that, it might be the reason they weren’t.”

  “They were rolling ship, Captain,” Ramaalas pointed out, but his expression was thoughtful, not dismissive.

  “Yes, and a lot faster than they could have on thrusters,” Raghavendra agreed. “They have to be using their wedges for that. But we don’t know how quickly they could put the thing up or down, and none of us were looking for any evidence of it at the time. One thing my tactical officer noticed, though, was that after they initially rolled up against our fire, none of their ships ever changed attitude twice in a row.”

  “Twice in a row?” Isotalo repeated.

  “What I mean, Ma’am, is that they were obviously clearing telemetry or sensor channels to take peeks downrange at our birds, but they did it in a staggered sequence, using a different ship each time. I’m wondering if that was because of the time it took to deactivate and activate the ‘bow-wall’ generators. The actual engagement time was too short for us to draw any kind of conclusions, but I think it’s worth bearing the possibility in mind.”

  “Agreed.” Ramaalas nodded and returned his gaze to Isotalo. “And I think I see where Bart was going with this. For them to handle that much fire without any evidence of significant damage, whatever they’re using to protect the forward aspect of their wedges must be a hell of a lot tougher than anything ships that size ought to mount. I wouldn’t like to face that kind of beating with a superdreadnought’s sidewalls, to be honest, and as the Captain points out, the sheer area they’re covering means they must have given up a lot of volume and power supply to cram the suckers in. You have to wonder if they can mount sidewall generators equally heavy, don’t you?”

  “That question did cross my mind, Sir,” Rosiak replied. “If so, we may be looking at a flipped situation, one in which we can expect better penetration and more hits going for the other fellow’s sidewalls rather than trying to cross his ‘T.’ And that’s a much narrower target, which means we need more accuracy to hit it. Again, a big enough deluge of missiles would probably give us the hits we need through blind chance, but Admiral Isotalo’s right about the number of birds we’d need on a per-ship basis. Expenditures like that would burn through even our ammo supply before we ever got to the primary missions, but to avoid them, we need to get close enough to maintain our control links right up to the terminal phase. Which,” he pointed out, turning back to Isotalo,“is one of the things Two-Step is designed to do.”

  “Yes, it is,” she acknowledged. She thought about it for a moment, then sat forward in her chair and tapped her index finger on the surface of the briefing room table.

  “Yes, it is,” she repeated more briskly. “To be honest, I still have reservations about the concept. God knows we’ve discussed it enough for all of you to know what they are. But I think Bart’s right. We’ve got to shorten the control loop if we’re going to hurt these bastards. In fact, I’d love to get close enough to be able to launch inside their hyper generator cycle loops, and only a drooling idiot would let us get that close
with an n-space approach. So I’m afraid that only leaves Two-Step, Isadore.”

  She turned to Captain Isadore Hampton, the task force’s staff astrogator. Hampton was a swarthy, dark-eyed fellow who normally radiated an impression of calm competence. He still looked competent, but calm would have been pushing it at the moment, she thought, and with good reason.

  “I can’t see another approach,” she told him. “I realize it’ll be putting a lot of pressure on you, but if anybody can pull it off, you can. And before we start, let me say that I don’t see where the tactical situation’s likely to be a lot worse even if your numbers are off in the end. What I’m saying—and this is for the record—is that I fully realize the difficulty of what I’m asking you to do. I’ve made my decision to try it anyway based on all the information available to me, but I don’t expect or demand miracles. Having said that, I do expect you to do your damnedest to make it work anyway.”

  “Ma’am, we can do it,” Hampton replied. “We’ll have to come in on the ‘far side’ to avoid the resonance zone, though.”

  “Understood,” Isotalo said. Every wormhole created a resonance zone in the volume between it and the n-space star with which it was associated. Translations out of hyper and back into n-space in those areas weren’t merely risky; they were extremely dangerous. So TF 1027 would be forced to approach the terminus from the side farthest from Prime. That would extend the jump somewhat, but the Manties were also positioned “outside” the terminus. Probably because they knew she couldn’t micro-jump into the area between them and the primary even if she’d wanted to.

  “We figured that when we first started looking at Two-Step,” she reminded him. “And at least the Manties seem to be cooperating.”

  “So far, Ma’am,” Hampton acknowledged. “And I’m fairly confident of hitting the distance pretty close. Translation scatter’s likely to turn formation keeping into a god-awful mess, though, especially that close to the terminus.”