Mission of Honor-ARC (45 page)

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 Pépé 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, Pépé," 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!"