A Rising Thunder

by David Weber

“Incoming message from Admiral Truman, Your Grace!” Lieutenant Commander Harper Brantley announced.

  “Throw it on Display Two,” Honor said without ever taking her eyes from the main plot.

  Nimitz pressed his nose against her cheek with a confident, buzzing purr, but the icons on that plot were getting decidedly complicated. Her Ghost Rider platforms updated the data on the intruding Solarian fleet, and she frowned at the hurricane of MDMs which had erupted from Eighth Fleet’s missile pods eighteen seconds ago. The massive salvo streaked towards the glaring red codes of the enemy, and her frown deepened as Admiral Filareta’s ships spawned an answering cloud of tiny ruby chips.

  “Yes, Alice?” she said as Truman’s larger-than-life, golden-haired image appeared on the display which had just opened in the plot’s upper quadrant.

  “My advanced LACs and the recon platforms all confirm the bastards are towing pods, Honor,” she said without preamble, her expression somewhere between irritated, exasperated, and just plain pissed off.

  “Yes, CIC just put them up on the plot.” Honor’s tone was considerably calmer than Truman’s. “And they just launched from them,” she continued. “Which I doubt they’d be doing at twenty million kilometers if they didn’t have the range for it.”

  “Enemy launch at one-point-three light-minutes!” Captain Andrea Jaruwalski, Honor’s operations officer, reported crisply, as if to confirm Honor’s statement. Jaruwalski was looking at her own displays. “Acceleration approximately forty-eight thousand KPS, Your Grace. Assuming constant acceleration, time of flight is five-point-two minutes. CIC makes their closing velocity at the inner defense perimeter approximately point-four-niner cee!”

  That was actually a bit better—about 2,000 KPS better, in fact—than the RMN’s own Mark 23 could do, Honor reflected. Obviously, the same thought had occurred to Truman, as well.

  “Damn it, that’s ridiculous!” the other admiral snapped.

  “Which doesn’t mean it isn’t happening,” Honor pointed out.

  “But—” Truman stopped herself, then gave her head a shake.

  “Point taken,” she conceded more calmly.

  Honor smiled, but it was a thin smile, and her eyes had already moved back to the plot. Five minutes wasn’t much time to be making changes, yet if the Sollies’ missile acceleration exceeded projections by this much, there was no telling how much better their targeting systems and penaids might be as well.

  I think “a lot” is probably a pretty fair estimate, she thought tartly. Which suggests—

  “It looks like we’re going to have leakers, Andrea. Get the Loreleis deployed. It seems we’re going to find out how well they work after all.”

  “Deploying Lorelei, aye, Your Grace!”

  “As soon as you’ve done that, go to Tango-Two.”

  “Tango-Two, aye,” Jaruwalski acknowledged, and Honor turned back to Truman.

  “Alice, push your perimeter squadrons out on the threat axis.”

  “How far out do you want them?”

  “As far as you can get them.” Honor smiled crookedly. “One way or the other, this isn’t going to last long, so you’re not going to get them as far out as either of us would like. Choose your own deployment package.”

  “Consider it done.”

  Truman disappeared from the display, and Honor turned to Commodore Mercedes Brigham.

  “Alice’s LACs will give the defense zone a little depth, but there’s a pretty good chance we’re still going to get hammered. Get on the horn. Request release of the system-defense pods.” She showed her teeth. “We may just need a bigger hammer of our own.”

  “Yes, Your Grace!” her chief of staff acknowledged, and Honor turned to the display tied permanently to HMS Imperator’s command deck.

  “I assume you heard all that, Rafe?”

  “Yes, Your Grace,” Captain Rafael Cardones replied.

  “We can hope the Loreleis will take at least some of the sting out, but I’m afraid your damage-control parties are about to get busy.” Cardones nodded quickly, and she shrugged. “Fight your ship, Rafe.”

  “Yes, Your Grace.”

  Honor returned her attention to the master plot.

  At such ranges, even MDMs seemed to crawl, but the Solarian fire swept remorselessly towards Eighth Fleet, and there was a lot of it—at least three times ONI’s estimate of Filareta’s firepower. The LACs assigned to the fleet’s perimeter accelerated to meet that incoming tide, adjusting their own formation as they went, and the Grayson-designed Katanas, with their potent missile armaments and heavy loads of Viper missiles, led.

  Manticoran doctrine had hardened in favor of using LACs as the wall of battle’s primary screen. They were strictly sublight, but that wasn’t a significant factor inside a star’s hyper limit, and very few engagements took place outside a hyper limit. And while even a Manticoran LAC had far less long-range offensive firepower than, say, a Roland, the Katanas, especially, had nearly as much anti-missile capability. They couldn’t take as much damage, but the laser heads carried by multidrive missiles made that pretty much a moot point. Destroyers couldn’t survive more than a hit or two from weapons that powerful, either, and they were far easier to hit in the first place than something as agile as a LAC.

  While Truman’s bantamweights headed out, the rest of Eighth Fleet turned away and began to shift into Formation Tango-Two. No one on Honor’s staff had really anticipated Solarian MDMs or such a heavy weight of fire, but the RMN believed in being prepared. That was why she and her task-force and task-group commanders had brainstormed situations very like this one in their planning sessions. And, after analyzing the tactical data from every engagement against the Republic of Haven and interpolating the data from Michelle Henke’s engagements in the Talbott Quadrant, Honor and her staff had evolved a new defensive doctrine.

  Traditional missile defense wove every platform into a single, tight-knit pattern designed to bring every defensive system to bear on the threat axis. In order to focus that concentration of defensive fire, the units of a task force or fleet maintained a close, unflinching formation with every squadron meticulously slotted into the most advantageous position. That sort of precision maneuvering even in the heart of furious combat required highly experienced, steel-nerved personnel, and it had been a hallmark of the Royal Manticoran Navy for generations.

  But the massive weight of pod-launched MDM salvos placed unprecedented strains on that doctrine. When the threat was measured in tens of thousands of laser heads, instead of scores or hundreds, not even the most precise stationkeeping was enough to stave off disaster. As the threat grew progressively worse, Manticore had countered by increasing the density, power, and accuracy of its anti-missile armaments, yet many of the RMN’s tacticians had come to the conclusion that, absent some significant improvement in the available defensive systems, simply packing in more point defense clusters and counter-missile tubes had reached a point of diminishing returns.

  Honor was one of the tacticians who suspected that was the case. She had cautiously optimistic hopes for the new Lorelei platforms, which represented an entirely new generation of highly capable decoys, and she’d strongly supported the decision to massively upgrade the Keyhole platforms’ defensive armament. Despite that, she’d been forced to the conclusion that the Navy owed its survival to date at least as much to the inherent inaccuracy of extremely long-range missile fire as to any improvements in its defenses. Worse, it had never been anything more than a matter of time before someone as inventive as the Republic of Haven’s navy had become under Thomas Theisman and Shannon Foraker managed to duplicate—or at least approximate—Apollo’s long-range accuracy. At which point, things were going to get ugly.

  Ultimately, if ships-of-the-wall weren’t going to become simply very expensive target drones, they needed to begin intercepting missiles farther out, expand the fleet’s active interception envelope beyond the roughly 3.6 million-kilometer reach of the current Mark 31 counter-missile. The problem
was how to accomplish that. Pushing the perimeter LACS farther out, getting those screening platforms deeper into the threat zone, was one approach, but what Honor really wanted was an organic capability for the wallers to extend their own intercept range. She and her staff had a few thoughts on how that might be accomplished, and she knew Sonja Hemphill was looking at the question as well, but for now, she had to fight with what she had, not what she’d like to have, which was why Eighth Fleet’s formation wasn’t quite what The Book envisioned.

  Given the nature of the threat and the expansion of each ship’s defensive field of fire courtesy of Keyhole, she’d decided to loosen Eighth Fleet’s formation rather than seeking to tighten it still further. Since her Keyhole-equipped units had more “reach” than they’d ever had before, she’d reasoned, they could target threats across a greater volume, provide mutual support without maintaining such close, rigid station on one another. There were trade-offs, of course—there always were—and the greater distance between subunits inevitably decreased the accuracy of the support they could offer one another. But what they lost in pinpoint precision they got back (hopefully) by broadening and deepening the total defensive basket. Each defensive shot had an individually lower probability of a kill, but there were more of them, and allowing squadrons to maneuver more independently also permitted their individual units to interpose their impeller wedges against incoming fire most effectively and with far less risk of the accidental wedge-on-wedge fratricide that would destroy the most powerful superdreadnought.

  Andrea Jaruwalski and the rest of Eighth Fleet’s operations and tactical officers had spent hours tweaking both software and doctrine to put it all together. Honor was delighted by how well they’d run with her concepts, and they’d come up with a few wrinkles all their own. At Jaruwalski’s suggestion, for example, they’d detached half of Eighth Fleet’s total LAC strength from the perimeter force and tasked the reassigned groups to operate not between the wall and the threat but inside the wall, maneuvering in close coordination with individually assigned squadrons of capital ships to cover the expanded gaps between those squadrons.

  Well, that’s the theory, anyway, Honor thought now, reaching up to stroke Nimitz’s ears while she watched the plot.

  “Lorelei platforms active, Your Grace,” Jaruwalski reported.

  “Thank you,” Honor replied as scores of small blue starbursts suddenly spangled the plot. Lorelei was the latest addition to the Ghost Rider stable … the last one the R&D staff on HMSS Weyland had produced before the space station’s destruction. Given how recently it had gone into production (and how quickly destruction of the production lines had followed), the RMN had a lot fewer of the new platforms than anyone would have liked, and she hated the thought of expending so many of them.

  You’d hate expending your wallers even worse, Honor, she told herself tartly. Of course, if they don’t work the way we expect them to, you may just have expended both of them. Wouldn’t that be fun?

  Her lips twitched ever so slightly, but her eyes were intent. She’d launched her own shipkillers first. That meant her massive attack was going to reach its target fifteen seconds before Filareta’s reached her, despite the Solarian missiles’ unanticipated performance. Unfortunately, the Solarians, without Apollo, would have cut their telemetry links long before that, and their missiles would follow their seekers into the targets they’d been ordered to attack, whatever had happened to the humans who’d given those orders. If they lost lock on those targets, they’d be forced to quest around for replacements on their own, strictly limited initiative, but either way, they’d already have switched to autonomous mode, and not even the total destruction of the ships which had launched them would make any difference at all.

  Which wasn’t the case for her missiles.

  “Enemy ECM is within projections, Your Grace,” Jaruwalski reported, monitoring the FTL telemetry coming back from the Mark 23-E control missiles which were the heart of the Apollo system. “Halo platforms are active, and from the density of their counter-missile targeting systems, CIC estimates they may have fewer Aegis upgrades than we’d anticipated.”

  “Nice to find out we got something right, Your Grace,” Brigham muttered, and Honor snorted.

  “Now, Mercedes! You don’t really think this is ONI’s fault, do you?”

  Brigham’s answering snort was considerably more sour than Honor’s had been, but she nodded.

  “Looks like they’ve done some Halo tweaking,” Jaruwalski continued, “but the filter upgrades seem to be coping.”

  Honor nodded. Michelle Henke had sent back working examples of Halo EW platforms from Sandra Crandall’s surrendered ships, and Solarian security protocols left a bit to be desired. BuWeaps had been able to analyze them literally down to the molecular level, and Sonja Hemphill’s people had not been impressed.

  From a manufacturing standard, the decoys were as good as anything Manticore could have produced, but they’d never been designed to confront this sort of threat environment. They’d been designed to face a Solarian-style missile threat—one with single-drive missiles, less capable sensors, and enormously less capable fire control, and one without the massive density of pod-launched salvos. They were also range-limited, because they had to stay close enough to their motherships to receive broadcast power. And the same restriction also meant they could operate only in the plane of those ships’ own fields of fire, since no broadcast power transmission could be driven through an impeller wedge.

  Within those limitations, they were actually a well-thought-out, workmanlike proposition. Which, unfortunately for the Solarian League Navy, was nowhere near good enough.

  The same thing was true of the Aegis program, the SLN’s effort to thicken its counter-missile launchers. Within the limitations of the missile threat its designers had visualized, Aegis represented a significant upgrade by increasing the number of CMs its wall could control. In an MDM-dominated environment, however, all Aegis actually accomplished was to increase the density of its defensive fire from total futility to something which was merely hopelessly inadequate.

  And then there were Ghost Rider and Apollo.

  “Estimate twenty seconds to their missile defense perimeter, Your Grace,” Jaruwalski said. “Attack profile EW coming up in fifteen seconds. Ten. Five … four … three … two … one … now.”

  Eighth Fleet’s missiles—13.2 million kilometers downrange and traveling at .36 c—were still 9.8 million kilometers short of their targets, but the maximum powered endurance of Solarian counter-missiles was just under 1.8 million kilometers before their overpowered drives burned out and the impeller wedges they used to “sweep up” incoming missiles disappeared. Given the attack’s geometry, that worked out to a range at launch of 9.2 million kilometers … which the still-accelerating Manticoran MDM would reach in approximately another five seconds.

  Which was why the electronic warfare platforms seeded thoughout that massive salvo had come online now.

  The Solarian missile defense officers had been tracking the incoming tide of destruction, allocating their counter-missiles, refining their tracking data, for the better part of four full minutes. At their velocity, the MDMs would cross the entire counter-missile engagement zone in barely twelve seconds, which meant there would be no time for a second wave of CMs. Aware that one launch was all they were going to get, the SLN officers were totally focused on making it as effective as possible.

  Then the Dazzler platforms suddenly activated, radiating huge, blinding spikes of jamming. Tracking systems shuddered in electronic shock under the brutal assault, and the humans and computers behind those tracking systems were just as shocked. They did their best, but they had only sixty seconds in which to react, and at the same moment, the Dragon’s Teeth came online as well, radiating hundreds—thousands—of false targets.

  Given more time, the defenders might have differentiated between the true threats and the counterfeits. Or if their targeting systems hadn’t been driven back
in confusion by the Dazzlers, they might have been able to keep track of the genuine shipkillers they’d already identified, ignore the masqueraders. But they had no more time, and their targeting systems had been driven back in confusion.

  A defense which would have been grossly inadequate under the best of circumstances had just become irrelevant, instead.

  Eighth Fleet’s MDMs ripped through the pathetic scatter of counter-missiles and smashed into the final, desperate inner perimeter of laser clusters at forty-nine percent of the speed of light, and those laser clusters’ fire control was just as confused, just as befuddled, as the CMs had been. The Solarians managed to stop perhaps two percent of the incoming fire; all the rest of the shipkillers reached attack range, under the direction of Mark 23-Es’ AIs with complete updates from the ships which had launched them which were barely five seconds old.

  The crimson icons didn’t vanish from Honor’s plot with anything so gentle as “metronome precision.” No, they disappeared—completely blotted away as the ships they represented were ripped to pieces or transformed into the purple icons of broken, technically still intact wrecks—in one cataclysmic instant. Their killers were upon them, then through them, in less time than it would have taken to cough twice. The Ghost Rider recon platforms brought the hideous wash of detonating laser heads, the seemingly solid carpet of nuclear fire, to HMS Imperator’s visual displays with dreadful clarity and at faster-than-light speeds, but no merely human brain could possibly have sorted out the details.

  Honor had almost ten seconds to absorb the destruction of the Solarian fleet … and then those slaughtered superdreadnoughts’ fire crashed into her own command.

  There were almost as many missiles in the Solarian launch as there’d been in Eighth Fleet’s, and their closing velocity was actually a bit higher. Yet there was no comparison between the outcomes of the two attacks.

  Alice Truman’s perimeter LACs met the incoming salvo first. The Katanas’ rotary launchers punched out Viper missiles at maximum-rate fire, and the Vipers (with exactly the same drive and oversized wedge as the Mark 31) ripped holes in the wave of Solarian shipkillers.