A Rising Thunder-ARC (30 page)

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 thoughtout 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.

Some of those shipkillers locked onto 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.