Mission of Honor

Chapter Twenty-Two

SLNS Joseph Buckley plowed implacably closer to the planet Flax, decelerating steadily. Task Force 496's approach velocity dropped towards nineteen thousand KPS, and the tension on Sandra Crandall's flag deck ratcheted steadily upward.

No one was going to admit that, of course. But as Hago Shavarshyan watched the men and women around him, he'd realized that quite a few more of them were more aware of the implications of what was about to happen than they cared to reveal. Or than he himself had suspected.

Part of the tension was an odd mix of apprehension and anticipation. For some, it represented eagerly sought retribution for the destruction of Jean Bart , but for the majority it was something far less welcome: the anticipation of launching the first real war the Solarian League had ever fought. Because that was what this really was. Crandall could present it any way she wanted, but this no simple "police action." For the first time in its history, the Solarian Navy faced an adversary which had a genuine battle fleet, a true wall of battle, even if that wall was far smaller than the SLN's. And little though any Solarian officer wanted to admit it, most of the men and women around Shavarshyan were clearly aware that they were about to go up against an experienced adversary. Confident in their own equipment and doctrine or not, however contemptuous of "neobarbs" they might be, they were far from immune to the anxious butterflies which always affected the novice when he looked across the field of battle at a grimly prepared veteran foe in battered, well-used armor.

And this particular bunch of novices is suddenly realizing just how grateful it is that it's not up against ships-of-the-wall this time , he reflected with grim humor.

* * *

"Range five-six-point-seven-five million kilometers," Lieutenant Commander Golbatsi announced, and his eyes flitted from the icons on his plot to the time-to-range display ticking steadily down to one side. "Closing velocity one-nine-point-three-eight thousand KPS. Point Longbow in three minutes from . . . now."

"Thank you, Adam," Scotty Tremaine acknowledged, and quirked an eyebrow at Lieutenant MacDonald. "May I assume you would have mentioned anything we'd heard from Commodore Terekhov, Stilson?"

"You may, Sir," the com officer replied, and Tremaine smiled.

Every member of his staff, with the exception of Lieutenant Yelland, had seen combat before. None of the others had seen as much of it as he and Horace Harkness, but none were showing any signs of panic, either. Which, given the sheer tonnage rumbling towards them, was a not insignificant accomplishment, technical superiority or no technical superiority, he supposed.

"Any changes in their EW, Chief?" he asked.

"No, Sir." Harkness shook his head, his eyes intent as he studied his own displays. "We're picking up a little activity on those 'Halo' platforms of theirs, but nobody's bringing them online just yet. We should see them pretty soon, though—this looks like pre-battle systems tests to me."

* * *

Sandra Crandall crossed her arms and chewed her lower lip thoughtfully as she gazed into the tactical plot.

"Halo system test completed, Ma'am," Ou-yang Zhing-wei told her. "EW appears nominal."

The admiral nodded curtly, and her frown deepened. Assuming the range numbers from the New Tuscany dispatch boat were accurate, her task force was little more than ten million kilometers outside the maximum powered missile envelope of those ships orbiting Flax. It still seemed likely the Manties would wait to open fire at their maximum effective range, however. The longer the range, the less accurate their fire control would be under any circumstances, and when she cranked in her task force's better EW ability and active defenses, "effective range" got a lot shorter against an alert fleet of superdreadnoughts than it would have been against Josef Byng's surprised battlecruisers. Still, if Ou-yang was right about what those fleeing impeller wedges had dropped off, the Manties probably had far more missiles than they could possibly control, and no special reason to conserve ammunition. Under those circumstances, they'd want to start whittling away at her as soon as possible, even at relatively poor hit probabilities. She was committed to close combat with them now, which meant they were committed to close combat with her , as well, and they'd want to reduce her offensive power as much as possible before that happened. And they might always get lucky. Even unlikely things sometimes happened.

But there were also those grav pulses Ou-yang had reported, and some of them seemed to be originating from surprisingly short ranges. If they really were from FTL recon platforms, the fact that they could get that close and survive said unhappy things about how stealthy they were. That was bad enough, but it also meant the Manties were getting disgustingly good looks at her SDs, and she felt no inclination to start showing them an active Halo system any sooner than she had to. There was no point giving their computers additional time to analyze her EW. Still . . . .

"Activate Halo at forty million kilometers," she said.

* * *

"Point Longbow in one minute, Ma'am."

"Thank you, Dominica."

Michelle Henke's acknowledgment of Dominica Adenauer's report sounded preposterously calm. Particularly, Michelle realized a moment later, because that was exactly how she felt. This moment lacked the vengefulness of New Tuscany. Instead, there was a balanced, singing tension at her core. A sense of something almost but not quite like detachment. A poised, cat-like something, she realized, that she'd seen more than once in Honor Alexander-Harrington but never expected to experience herself.

God, I refuse to turn into another Honor! The thought sent a ripple of amusement through her, a flicker of welcome warmth. Lord knows I love her, and we all need her, but I flat out refuse to grow up that much!

She shook her head, unaware of the way her staff was looking at her, or the way her sudden smile swept across her flag deck like a calming breeze.

* * *

"Point Longbow, Sir."

Stillwell Lewis' taut-voiced announcement cut through the disciplined silence of Quentin Saint-James ' flag deck, and Sir Aivars Terekhov nodded.

"Engage," he said simply.

* * *

"Missile launch! "

Jacomina van Heutz twitched as Commander Sambroth's warning rapped out sharply, and her eyes flicked to the fountain of fresh icons which suddenly speckled the plot.

"Range at launch five-three-point-niner-six million kilometers." Sambroth sounded as if she couldn't really believe her own numbers. "Assuming constant accelerations, time of flight seven-point-five minutes!"

"Stand by missile defense," van Heutz heard her own voice say, but it seemed to come from someone else, far away, as she saw the impossible number of missiles screaming towards her ship.

* * *

The Saganami-C -class heavy cruiser massed four hundred and eighty thousand tons. It mounted forty missile launchers in each broadside, and it had been designed to fire double broadsides at its enemies, then provided with a sixty percent redundancy in control links as a reserve against battle damage. That gave each of Aivars Terekhov's cruisers one hundred and twenty eight telemetry links, and each of those links was assigned to one Mark 23-E missile, which, in turn, controlled eight standard Mark 23s.

The twelve ships of Cruiser Squadron 94 and Cruiser Division 96.1 fired just over fifteen hundred missile pods at Task Force 496, Solarian League Navy.

* * *

"Estimate twelve thousand—repeat, twelve thousand— incoming!"

Sandra Crandall's head snapped around at Ou-yang Zhing-wei's hard, flat announcement. She stared at her ops officer, eyes huge, too shocked by the numbers to register even disbelief. At that, she was doing better than Pйpй Bautista. Her chief of staff's expression was that of someone infuriated by a lie rather than someone stupefied by astonishment.

"Halo active," Ou-yang continued. "Missile Defense Plan Able activated."

* * *

"Commodore Terekhov's opened fire, Ma'am."

Dominica Adenauer's report was one of the least necessary ones Michelle Henke had ever heard. The thousands upon thousands of icons streaking across the master plot were painfully evident. None of which absolved Adenauer of her formal responsibility to tell her admiral about it.

"Acknowledged," Michelle said softly.

* * *

Scotty Tremaine watched the hurricane racing toward the Sollies with something very like a sense of awe. He'd seen larger salvos—not once, but many times. For that matter, the mutual holocausts Home Fleet and Lester Tourville's Second Fleet had inflicted upon one another at the Battle of Manticore dwarfed even this. But a full third of these missiles had come from ships under his command, and that realization sent an icy chill through his blood.

He glanced for just a moment at Horace Harkness' profile and felt an obscure, irrational flicker of reassurance. Harkness' elemental solidity, his unflappable sense of who and what he was, was like a touchstone. It was a reminder of all the challenges Tremaine had met and surmounted in the twenty T-years since he'd first set eyes on that battered, competent face, and in the wake of finding himself cast in the role of Juggernaut, Scotty Tremaine took a warm and very human comfort from it.

* * *

Helen Zilwicki stood at Terekhov's side, watching the same plot, and thought about how different this was from the Battle of Monica.

As Terekhov's flag lieutenant, she'd been there when he and Admiral Gold Peak and Admiral Oversteegen and their ops officers threshed out their plans for Operation Agincourt. Fire distribution had been one of the critical points, and no one had been prepared to make any unwarranted assumptions about the ease with which Solly missile defenses might be penetrated. They'd all been aware that Solarian anti-missile doctrine and capabilities were . . . seriously flawed compared to those of the Republican Navy, but they'd forced themselves to adopt the most pessimistic estimates of their ability to capitalize on those flaws.

Of the 12,288 standard Mark 23s in that stupendous initial launch, fully one quarter—just over three thousand—were EW platforms. The remaining nine thousand plus were distributed over twenty-three of Sandra Crandall's seventy-one superdreadnoughts. Experience against the Republic of Haven indicated that two hundred to two hundred and fifty Mark 23 hits would destroy—or mission-kill, at least—even the latest Havenite SD(P) . . . which was why Fire Plan Alpha had allocated four hundred missiles to each of its targets.

"Spot and allocate the Bravo launch," Sir Aivars Terekhov said.

* * *

The wavefront of destruction roared towards Sandra Crandall's superdreadnoughts from far, far beyond the Solarians' own range of Aivars Terekhov's command. There was no fear-pumped adrenaline surging through the minds of the tactical officers behind that stupendous missile launch. Despite the pygmy size of their own vessels, compared to those of their opponents, they recognized the full, deadly depth of their advantages. Knew the men and women aboard those superdreadnoughts could not effectively threaten them in any way.

Knowing that, those minds ticked with cool, merciless precision, watching their displays, monitoring their missiles and the EW environment with hawk-like attentiveness.

* * *

There was no matching coolness aboard Joseph Buckley or the other units of Task Force 496.

No one in the entire task force, in his darkest nightmare, could have anticipated the sheer weight of fire streaking towards them. By any meterstick of the Solarian League Navy, it was simply and starkly impossible. The surprise and disbelief that generated were total, yet for all of the SLN's institutional arrogance and complacency, all of their own shock, the men and women of Sandra Crandall's command were professionals. Astonishment, even terror, might reach out to paralyze them, but training slotted into place, like a bulwark between them and panic's palsy.

Jacomina van Heutz heard the quick, purposeful flow of orders and responses around her, and even in the midst of her own shock, she felt a glow of pride. Fear might flatten her people's voices, incredulity might echo in their tones, but they were doing their jobs. They were responding , doing their best, not simply gaping in horror.

Yet behind that pride, there was another emotion—sorrow. Because however well they did their jobs, it wasn't going to matter in the end.

* * *

Hago Shavarshyan watched Ou-yang Zhing-wei and her assistants grapple with the horrifying surprise of that massive missile launch.

Shavarshyan was no tac officer, but he'd had enough tactical training to know that what was coming at them was not the blind-fired covering barrage Ou-yang had suggested to Crandall and Bautista. The most cursory analysis of those missile signatures showed that every one of them was maneuvering as part of a coherent, carefully managed whole. The fact that that was flatly impossible didn't mean it wasn't happening, and the ops officer was totally focused on her displays, on her earbug, on the reports flowing in to her from the task force's huge array of sensor platforms.

The intelligence officer envied her. At least she had something to distract her.

"It's got to be some kind of EW!" Bautista protested hoarsely. The chief of staff was staring at the plot, shaking his head again and again.

"That's no ECM, Pйpй," Crandall grated. She jabbed her chin at the secondary displays showing Joseph Buckley 's combat information center's analysis of the incoming impeller signatures. "They're there."

"But . . . but they can't possibly control them." Bautista turned his head to stare at Crandall. "They can't have the control links! And . . . and even if they did , at this range their accuracy has to suck!"

"I doubt even Manties would have fired missiles they can't control." Despite her own shock, despite her truculence and undeniable arrogance, Sandra Crandall's eyes were dark with a refusal to hide behind simple denial. "You may be right about the accuracy penalty, but if they can throw enough salvos this size, even crappy accuracy's going to rip our ass off."

Bautista's eyes went even wider at her harsh-voiced admission. He opened his mouth once more, as if to say something, but no words came, and he closed it again.

Crandall never even noticed.

* * *

"Good telemetry from the advanced platforms, Sir." Stillwell Lewis sounded almost jubilant. "They're bringing up their Halo platforms, but their shipboard systems show very little change. No surprises so far."

"Let's not get overconfident, Stilt," Terekhov replied calmly.

"No, Sir."

Helen suppressed an inappropriate urge to smile. Lewis' tone was chastened as he acknowledged Terekhov's admonition, and she knew the commodore was right. Yet at the same time, she understood exactly where the ops officer's confidence came from.

The Ghost Rider platforms watching the Solarians were three light-minutes from Quentin Saint-James . But those three light-minutes equated to less than three seconds of transmission lag for their FTL transmitters. For all intents and purposes, Lewis was watching Crandall's ships in real time. Without Keyhole-Two platforms, there was no FTL telemetry link between Terekhov's cruisers and their missiles, yet the time lag built into their fire control and EW loop was still only half that of any navy without Ghost Rider.

That would have been bad enough from the Sollies' perspective even if there'd been no Apollo birds driving along behind the attack missiles. But the Mark 23-Es were there, and each of them represented a far more sophisticated and capable advanced control node than the SLN had ever imagined. The Echoes had been preloaded with dozens of alternative attack profiles, based on every permutation of Solarian defensive measures Tenth Fleet's tactical officers and the simulators had been able to come up, and their extraordinarily competent onboard AIs were far more capable of adjusting and reshaping those profiles on the fly than any previous attack missile would have been. Of course, even with those stored profiles and AIs, Lewis' fire wouldn't be remotely as effective as it would have been if he'd had the all up Keyhole-Two systems, instead.

It was simply incomparably better than anything anyone else had.

* * *

"Halo active." Horace Harkness gazed at his displays, hands moving with the precision of a pianist as he refined the data. "Looks like about a twenty percent increase on their battlecruisers' efficiency, but the filters should be solid unless it gets a lot worse. We're seeing a lot of lidar lighting off, too, though. I think we'll be looking at the first counter-missiles pretty soon."

Scotty Tremaine nodded. Twenty percent was a lower increase than the ops plan had allowed for, and he wasn't about to assume it wasn't going to go up over the next couple of minutes. But even if it did . . . .

"Bravo pods in position," Commander Golbatsi said, and a fresh wave of missile pod icons blinked with the red data codes of readiness on Tremaine's plot. "Launch codes receipted and acknowledged by all pods."

"Thank you, Guns."

"Profile Alpha- Quйbec-One-Seven," Stilson MacDonald announced suddenly.

"Execute," Tremaine said sharply.

"Executing Alpha-Quйbec-One-Seven, aye!" Adam Golbatsi responded, and sent the command that locked the entire division's first wave missiles into the final attack profile Aivars Terekhov had just ordered.

A strange spike—almost a sense of relief, or perhaps of commitment—swept Alistair McKeon 's flag bridge, as if everyone on it had inhaled simultaneously.

* * *

The same awareness flickered across Quentin Saint-James ' flag deck, but Terekhov didn't seem to notice. His eyes, like his thoughts, were on the master tactical plot, and those eyes were blue ice.

"Launch the Bravo birds," he said, and a second salvo, as massive as the first, roared out of the pods.

* * *

Thirty seconds and 14,177,748 kilometers short of their targets, the Mark 23-Es of Operation Agincourt's Alpha launch receipted their final instructions and switched to attack profile AQ-17. Their closing velocity was up to 207,412 KPS, just over sixty-nine percent of the speed of light, which was over four and a half times the maximum any Solarian missile could have generated, given the same geometry, and the differential would only increase over the last half-minute of their existence.

The Apollo missiles' AIs didn't really care about that, or about their own rapidly approaching destruction, except inasmuch as it simplified their task. They simply obeyed their instructions, considering the information transmitted to them from their slaved attack missiles' sensors and comparing the warp and woof of the Solarian defenses to the requirements of AQ-17. Certain minor adjustments were in order, and the AIs made them calmly, then sent out fresh instructions.

The EW platforms and penetration aids seeded throughout the salvo responded.

* * *

Solarian counter-missile doctrine had never envisioned a salvo density like this. Traditional missile defense planning focused on identifying the attack missiles most likely to achieve hits and then targeting each of them with multiple counter-missile launches. But there wasn't going to be time for that in the face of such a ferocious closing velocity. In fact, there would be time for only a single CM launch before the MDMs screamed completely across their engagement envelope, and even taking full advantage of the additional fire control of the Aegis refits a third of Crandall's ships had received, her superdreadnoughts could produce less than two thousand counter-missiles per launch. That was approximately one CM for every 6.5 Mark 23s slicing towards them, which would have been hopelessly inadequate under any circumstances.

Now "inadequate" became "futile" as the control missiles activated their slaved electronic warfare platforms.

Missile defense officers stared in disbelief as their displays went berserk. Dragon's Teeth blossomed like seductive flowers, flooding Task Force 496's fire control with false targets. The number of threat sources doubled, then doubled yet again, and again , hopelessly swamping the Solarian systems' ability to discriminate the true threats from the counterfeit. The computers driving those systems, and the men and women behind those computers, did their best, but their best wasn't good enough.

The incredible horde of false signatures guaranteed the limited number of counter-missiles the Solarians could bring to bear would be effectively useless, but Michelle Henke and her officers had been unwilling to settle for that. Even as the Dragon's Teeth spawned, the Dazzler platforms spread across the front of the attack salvo activated in a carefully sequenced chain, ripping huge, blinding holes in Task Force 496's sensor coverage. The Dazzlers' exquisitely choreographed chaos reduced even the last ditch laser clusters of their targets' point defense systems to impotence.

Of the ninety-two hundred Mark 23 attack birds in Aivars Terekhov's Alpha launch, Sandra Crandall's task force managed to stop exactly one thousand and seven. The other 8,209 got through.

* * *

SLNS Joseph Buckley lurched indescribably as the Manticoran missiles detonated and x-ray lasers ripped at her massive armor.

Thick as that armor was, it was no match for the stilettos of focused radiation punching into it like brimstone awls. It shattered under the transfer energy as the lasers ripped deeper and deeper, and the huge ship bucked in agony.

Jacomina van Heutz clung to the arms of her command chair as her shock frame hammered her. The fleeting instant in which the Manticoran missiles could bring their lasers to bear against her ship's sidewalls as they penetrated the Solarian formation with a closing velocity which had climbed to seventy-three percent of light-speed was far too brief for any of Joseph Buckley 's damage to register on merely human senses as individual hits. It was all delivered in one stroboscopic lightning bolt of devastation, too sudden and intense for even the ship's computers to register or sort out.

Those missile-born talons gouged and tore. Energy mounts and missile tubes, counter-missile launchers, radar arrays, point defense clusters, boat bays, gravitic sensors, impeller nodes—all of them shattered, exploding into tattered ruin in a single catastrophic moment, faster than a man could have blinked. In less time than it would have taken to cough, Sandra Crandall's flagship was transformed into a broken wreck, a splintered hulk, coasting onward under momentum alone, with three quarters of her crew wiped out of existence.

Nor did van Heutz' ship die alone. Her squadron mates Joseph Lister, Max Planck , and Joseph Hutton died with her. Like Buckley, Hutton at least avoided immediate and total destruction, but Lister and Planck were less fortunate. Lister shattered, breaking into three distinct pieces; Planck simply disappeared in a flash of white-hot fury.

Archimedes, Andreas Vesalius, Hipparchus ,Leonardo da Vinci, Gregor Mendel, Marie Curie, Wilhelm Roлntgen, Alfred Wegener, Avicenna, al-Kawarizmi . . . every one of the Alpha launch's twenty-three targets—thirty-two percent of Crandall's total wall of battle—was reduced to splinters and wreckage in that single inconceivable, exquisitely synchronized explosion.

* * *

Sir Aivars Terekhov watched a third of the superdreadnought icons on his plot blink virtually simultaneously from the glaring crimson of hostile units into the purple crosses of dead ships . . . or into nothing at all. His arctic blue eyes didn't even flicker at the proof of how utterly outclassed the Solarian League Navy truly was, but his nostrils flared. He gazed at the display for almost a full minute, absorbing the results, watching the sudden disintegration of the Solarian wall's formation as individual captains tried to avoid the debris of slaughtered consorts or swerved in frantic, independent evasion patterns as the Bravo launch swept towards them. Then he turned to look at Stillwell Lewis.

"Execute Exclamation Point," he said.

"Executing Exclamation Point, aye, Sir!"

Lewis' finger stabbed a key at his console, and twenty seconds later, every one of the Bravo launch missiles detonated as one, millions of kilometers short of their targets.

"Spot the Charlie pods but hold launch," Terekhov said.

"Holding Charlie launch, aye, Sir," Lewis replied, and Terekhov sat back in his chair, waiting.

* * *

Forty-five more seconds ticked past. A minute. Ninety seconds. Then, abruptly, every surviving Solarian starship's wedge went down simultaneously.

Another two and a half minutes oozed into eternity while light-speed limited transmissions sped towards HMS Hercules and Quentin Saint-James . Then—

"Sir," Captain Loretta Shoupe told Augustus Khumalo quietly, "Communications is picking up an all-ships transmission from an Admiral Keeley O'Cleary. She wants to surrender, Sir."