by David Weber
Some of those shipkillers locked on to LACs (or tried to, at any rate) when the LACs’ impeller signatures blocked their lines of sight to their original targets. At their enormous velocity, their new victims had only seconds to defend themselves, and point defense clusters spat coherent light with frantic speed. Fortunately for the Katanas and Shrikes, current-generation Manticoran and Grayson LACs were extraordinarily difficult targets, and “only” sixty-three were destroyed. Their surviving consorts spun, yawing through a hundred and eighty degrees to bring their laser clusters and the Shrikes’ energy armaments to bear. Anti-ship missiles’ terminal attack maneuvers were designed to use their wedges to protect them from their targets’ energy weapons as they scorched in on their final attack runs. The SLN had given virtually no thought to evading fire coming from astern, however, and in the handful of seconds before they swept out of the LACs’ range, another thousand shipkillers were blown out of space.
The survivors burst past the light attack craft, roaring down on the ships-of-the-wall they’d come to kill, but the majority had lost sight—briefly, at least—of Eighth Fleet’s wallers. They still knew where to look to reacquire their targets, of course. Unfortunately, when they did, there were far too many of those targets.
Conceptually, Lorelei was light-years beyond Halo. Powered with the same onboard fusion technology the RMN had developed for Ghost Rider, the Mark 23, and the Mark 16, the Lorelei platforms had independent energy budgets beyond the dreams of any Solarian designer. They needed no line of sight for broadcast power to drive their powerful EW systems, and their onboard AI was even better than the Mark 23-E’s.
Halo provided false targets to confuse an incoming missile, but those lures had to be relatively close to the missile’s actual target, and even with broadcast power available, Halo’s false targets were significantly weaker—dimmer—than a ship-of-the-wall’s actual emissions.
Lorelei didn’t need to be in close proximity to anyone, and its emitters were much more powerful than Halo’s. The false targets Lorelei generated were still far weaker than those of genuine superdreadnoughts, but they could be interposed between those superdreadnoughts and the threat. More, they could be physically separated from the ships they were trying to protect … and the signatures they generated had been artfully camouflaged. Yes, they were weaker and dimmer than a true starship might have produced, but what they looked like was an all-up starship using its own EW systems to make its signature as weak and dim as possible.
And, as a final touch, over a third of Andrea Jaruwalski’s Loreleis had been deployed to keep formation on one another as complete, false squadrons of ships-of-the-wall. Squadrons which maneuvered in perfect synchronization with Eighth Fleet’s real squadrons but lay on the threat axis, deliberately exposed to the incoming tsunami of Solarian missiles.
Those missiles took the targets they’d been offered.
Not all of them were spoofed. Not even Lorelei was that good. But where multiple thousands of Manticoran laser heads had ravaged Filareta’s fleet, no more than seven hundred actually reached Honor’s, and they were no match for the defensive fire of her dispersed squadrons and their attached close-defense LACs. Seventeen of her superdreadnoughts took hits; only two took significant damage.
Honor looked at the main plot’s damage sidebar and felt her eyebrows rise. When she’d seen the initial acceleration rates on the Solarian missiles, she’d anticipated severe losses of her own. Instead—
“Simulation concluded,” a voice announced, and the displays froze. “I can see we’re going to have to go back to the drawing board to make you people work for it, Your Grace.”
“Thank you, Captain Emerson,” she said to the smiling senior-grade captain whose image had just replaced her “tactical plot.” She nodded to him, then looked at her staff.
“Good work, people,” she told them. “That was solid. Dinner at Harrington House tonight, down on the beach. The beer’s on me; the surf forecast looks good; my dad’s already basting the barbecue; and Mac’s got something special planned for desert. So don’t be late—and bring friends, if you’ve got them!”
“All right!” Brigham responded, and Honor smiled as the others whistled and applauded enthusiastically.
“I hope it doesn’t take you very long to touch up those scuff marks on your paintwork,” another, closer voice said dryly under cover of the staffers’ obvious pleasure.
“Oh, I think we can probably manage our repairs fairly promptly,” she replied, still smiling as she turned to face Thomas Theisman.
The two of them stood in the Advanced Tactical Course Center’s main tactical simulator. It was far from Honor’s first visit—she’d commanded ATC after her return from Cerberus—but Theisman had been obviously impressed by the facility even before the simulation had begun. Now he looked around the enormous room and shook his head.
“That was scary,” he admitted frankly, turning back to Honor. “I knew we were screwed as soon as you people got Apollo deployed, but I genuinely hadn’t realized how badly screwed we’d have been if you hadn’t convinced the Empress to negotiate with us.”
“I was scarcely the only one who ‘convinced’ Elizabeth, Tom. And by now you realize as well as I do that however good she may be at holding grudges, she really doesn’t like killing people.”
“Neither do I.” Theisman’s tone was light, and he grinned, but Honor tasted the emotions behind his words and realized yet again why Nimitz had assigned Thomas Theisman the name “Dreams of Peace.”
“Neither do I,” he repeated, “and I especially don’t like killing my own people by sending them out to face that kind of combat differential. So if it’s all the same to you, I’m just delighted I’m not going to be doing that again anytime soon.”
She nodded, and the two of them started across the huge room towards the exit while Brigham oversaw the simulation’s formal shutdown.
“Did you know they were going to throw MDMs at you?” Theisman asked, and she shook her head.
“No, somehow that managed to slip Captain Emerson’s mind when he was describing the mission parameters,” she said dryly.
“I suspected that might’ve been the case, given Admiral Truman’s reaction,” Theisman said, and she chuckled.
“I’m not certain, but I suspect that that particular wrinkle may have come from a suggestion on the part of my beloved husband.”
“Having faced your ‘beloved husband,’ I can believe that.” Theisman’s voice was equally dry. “Both of you always did have that nasty tendency to think outside the box.”
“We weren’t the only ones.” Honor gave him a level look. “Once you got rid of Saint-Just and State Security, you turned up a bunch of capable COs. In some ways, though, I’d really never realized just how good you were until we finally got a look at just how bad the Sollies are!”
“Please!” Theisman grimaced in mock pain. “I’d like to think you could find someone better than that to compare us to!”
Honor chuckled again and Nimitz bleeked a laugh as they stepped through the exit. Spencer Hawke, Clifford McGraw, and Joshua Atkins fell in behind them, and Waldemar Tümmel, who’d been promoted to lieutenant commander following their return from Nouveau Paris, had been waiting with her personal armsmen. She smiled at him, and he smiled back, although the dark memory of the parents, brother, and sister he’d lost with Hephaestus was still there, behind the smile.
“How far ahead of schedule are we, Waldemar?” she asked.
“Almost an hour, Your Grace,” the flag lieutenant who was no longer a lieutenant replied, and his smile got a bit broader. “I don’t think the umpires expected you to polish them off quite that quickly.”
“Well, let’s not get too carried away patting ourselves on the back,” she said. She was speaking to Tümmel, but she met Theisman’s eyes as she spoke. “All something like this can really tell us is how well we’re likely to perform against the threats we think we know about, and Filareta seems to be several cuts
above the Sollies we’ve seen in Talbott. If it turns out someone with a working brain has something we didn’t know about …”
The Havenite nodded soberly. They’d both had enough unpleasant experience with that sort of discovery.
Honor nodded back. She’d always liked Theisman, and the better she got to know him, the more strongly he reminded her of Alistair McKeon. Although—her lips twitched in a faint, fond smile of memory—he was definitely less inclined than Alistair had been to simply head for the nearest enemy and start slugging.
Ever since Beowulf’s initial warning, however, Honor had studied everything Pat Givens’ ONI had on Massimo Filareta, and Theisman had joined the effort from the moment Pritchart and her delegation arrived. Admittedly, Haven hadn’t had a lot to add to ONI’s meager bio on Filareta, but there’d been enough for her to be cautiously confident that she and Theisman had a feel for his basic personality. He was clearly very different from the late Sandra Crandall, and he had her horrible example to make him even less like her. Whatever the rest of the Solarian League Navy might think, Filareta was unlikely to reject reports of Manticoran technological superiority out of hand. Perhaps he might have, once, but despite some hints in ONI’s dossier about objectionable personal habits, he was obviously too smart to do that after the Battle of Spindle.
“I take your point,” Theisman said. “That’s one reason I’m so happy—now, at any rate—to see you people base your training on the assumption that the other side’s better than it really is.”
“If you don’t push your own systems and doctrine to the max, all you’re doing is practicing things you already know how to do.” Honor shrugged. “And that’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that you get fat, happy, and dumb. If I had a dollar for every spacer some stupid, overconfident flag officer’s gotten killed—”
She cut herself short, and Theisman nodded again.
“Been there, seen that,” he agreed.
They were silent for a moment as they continued down a hallway towards the lifts. Then Theisman gave himself a little shake.
“I have to say the look inside your hardware’s been even more fascinating than watching the way you set up simulations,” he said. “We’ve never had the opportunity to examine Apollo, of course, and I’m afraid your security arrangements have worked a lot better in general than we really would’ve preferred. Shannon’s been especially frustrated. We’ve managed to recover enough to give us a leg up in quite a few areas, but they’ve mainly been matters of gross engineering.”
Honor nodded. Like every other navy, the Royal Manticoran Navy routinely incorporated security protocols into its sensitive technology. There wasn’t a lot they could do to disguise things like mini-fusion plants or improvements in laser-head grav lenses, but computers and molecular circuitry were another matter. Without the proper authorization codes, efforts to access, study, or analyze those triggered nanotech security protocols that reconfigured them into so much useless, inert junk. Trying to find ways to crack, spoof, acquire, or otherwise evade those codes was part of the never-ending cycle of cyber warfare, and she’d been pleased by the confirmation that Manticore had stayed in front of Haven in that contest.
“To be honest,” Theisman continued, “the most useful things we recovered right after Thunderbolt were some of your tech manuals.” He did not, Honor noted, mention the fact that far more tech manuals had come into Havenite hands from their Erewhonese allies before Thunderbolt. Tactful of him. “But those weren’t much help when your new-generation technology started coming online, and by then, you were the ones capturing most of the tech that got captured, anyway. All of which”—he turned his head to look at her sharply—“is my way of segueing tactfully into the question of shared hardware.”
“You know my position, Tom,” Honor replied. “That’s Elizabeth and Hamish’s position, too, and as nearly as I can tell, Sonja Hemphill’s firmly on board, as well. So there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s going to happen. The question is how soon, and I think that’s going to depend on how soon we get formal ratification of the treaties.”
She looked at him as sharply as he’d looked at her, and he shrugged.
“You’ve seen the political calculus back in Nouveau Paris, Honor,” he said. “I don’t even want to think about how Younger and McGwire must’ve reacted when the draft terms got home and they found out where their President and two thirds of Capital Fleet had wandered off to!” He shook his head. “I’m sure a lot of Eloise’s political opponents must be screaming bloody murder about now, and I imagine Tullingham and Younger are making all kinds of veiled—or not so veiled—comments about people exceeding their constitutional authority. But the truth is that she isn’t exceeding her authority, and your own diplomatic mission had significantly changed public opinion even before the Yawata strike and Simões.”
“Really?” she raised an eyebrow as they reached the lifts, and Theisman chuckled.
“Most Havenites, whether they’d admit it or not, have always felt a sneaking admiration for you. Even when that pyschopath Ransom was in charge of Pierre’s propaganda. Of course, there was a lot of ‘bogeyman’ about it, too. You had this really irritating habit of kicking the shit out of us.”
“I never—”
Honor broke off, unsure how to respond, and he laughed out loud.
“I didn’t say you were the only Manty who managed that. You were just the most … noticeable. Let’s face it, even the Sollies figured you made good copy, and it didn’t hurt that you were reasonably photogenic, unlike your humble servant.”
“Yeah, sure!” She rolled her eyes.
“I did compare you to me,” he pointed out. Then his smile faded.
“But all joking aside, you had a pretty damned towering reputation in the Republic, and a big part of that was the fact that you were an honorable enemy. That’s the real reason StateSec and Public Information went to such lengths to blacken your name when they decided to hang you.”
His smile vanished, and she tasted the bleakness of remembered shame as he relived his own helplessness in the face of Cordelia Ransom’s determination to have Honor judicially murdered.
“Anyway”—he twitched his shoulders—“you were already pretty visible, let’s say, in the Republic even before they gave you Eighth Fleet and turned you loose on our rear areas. And then there was that little business of the Battle of Manticore. For better or worse, you’d become the personification of the Star Kingdom as far as our public opinion was concerned.
“Then you turned up in Haven itself. Not to attack the system when everyone knew you could’ve trashed it. No, you were there to negotiate a peace settlement … and since we got rid of Saint-Just, we’ve never tried to deny our people access to the Star Empire’s news services. It didn’t take long for most people to figure out you were there to do the negotiating because you wanted to be there. It was your own idea.”
The two of them stepped into the lift, followed by Tümmel and Honor’s armsmen, and the door closed behind them.
“I doubt you have any idea, even now, how much goodwill you’ve built up for yourself,” Theisman said very seriously. “Trust me, though: there’s a lot of it. And, frankly, Eloise’s notion of proposing an actual military alliance, not just a peace treaty, was a stroke of genius.” He shook his head. “Talk about resolving the ‘reparations issue’! And it gets her—and all of us—out from under the stigma of caving in. Even under the most magnanimous terms you could’ve offered before the Yawata strike, we’d still have been surrendering. On far better terms than we could ever have demanded, given the balance of power, maybe, but still surrendering. Now we’re not. I doubt anyone like Younger or McGwire’s going to be able to get much traction against that!”
Honor nodded slowly. Theisman’s analysis matched her own, although she was inclined to think he was probably overestimating her stature among his fellow Havenites.
“I don’t much like politics,” he continued as the lift car m
oved upward, “but I’ve seen enough of it to figure out how it works. I’m not saying there won’t be some people screaming not just ‘No,’ but ‘Hell, no!’ I’m just saying there won’t be nearly enough of them to slow ratification up appreciably. Especially not if Filareta’s smart enough to back down. Manticore and Haven, standing shoulder to shoulder to face down the Solarian League? Talk about your public relations bonanzas!”
He shook his head, and Honor nodded again.
“Well,” she said, “assuming this masterly summation of yours bears some nodding acquaintance to reality, I imagine the first technical mission to Bolthole—and I do hope you intend to tell us just where that is”—she gave him a speaking look—“is going to be heading your way sometime very soon now. And I don’t think Mesa’s going to be a bit happy about that!”
Chapter Seventeen
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“What did you say?”
Albrecht Detweiler stared at his oldest son, and the consternation in his expression would have shocked any of the relatively small number of people who’d ever met him.
“I said our analysis of what happened at Green Pines seems to have been a little in error,” Benjamin Detweiler said flatly. “That bastard McBryde wasn’t the only one trying to defect.” Benjamin had had at least a little time to digest the information during his flight from the planetary capital of Mendel, and if there was less consternation in his expression, it was also grimmer and far more frightening than his father’s. “And the way the Manties are telling it, the son-of-a-bitch sure as hell wasn’t trying to stop Cachat and Zilwicki. They haven’t said so, but he must’ve deliberately suicided to cover up what he’d done!”
Albrecht stared at him for several more seconds. Then he shook himself and inhaled deeply.
“Go on,” he grated. “I’m sure there’s more and better yet to come.”