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But Honor had insisted it would work, and her subordinates' skepticism had begun to change as she walked them through the numbers. By her calculations, they could sustain a full-powered burn on their main thrusters for thirty-five minutes and still retain sufficient hydrogen in their bunkers to run the battlecruisers' fusion plants at full power for twelve hours and the heavy cruisers' for almost eight. Those were the minimum reserve levels she was willing to contemplate, and they represented the strongest argument against Operation Nelson. Thanks to the huge StateSec tank farm orbiting Hell, they would be able to completely refill the bunkers of every ship afterward, and twelve hours would be more than sufficient to decide any engagement they could possibly hope to win, but none of her ships would have the reactor mass to run for it if the battle fell apart on them.
Well, I told them it worked for Cortez, she thought wryly. Of course, most of them don't have any idea who Cortez was...
As far as her subordinates' other concerns went, a half-hour at five gravities would be punishing but endurable—most humans didn't begin graying out until they hit six or seven g, and heavy-worlders like Honor had even more tolerance than that. And it would take a ship over three million kilometers down-range and impart a velocity of almost thirty-one hundred KPS. That wasn't terribly impressive compared to what an impeller drive could have done in the same length of time, but it offered one huge advantage.
With no impeller signature, a ship might as well be invisible at any sort of extended range.
On the scale to which God built star systems, active sensors had a limited range at the best of times. Officially, most navies normally monitored a million-kilometer bubble with their search radar. In fact, most sensor techs—even in the RMN—didn't bother with active sensors at all at ranges much above a half-million kilometers. There was no real point, since getting a useful return off anything much smaller than a superdreadnought was exceedingly difficult at greater ranges. Worse, virtually all warships incorporated stealth materials into their basic hull matrices. That made them far smaller radar targets than, say, some big, fat merchantman when their drives were down... and when their drives were up, there was no reason to look for them on active, anyway, since passive sensors—and especially gravitic sensors—had enormously greater range and resolution. Of course, they couldn't pick up anything that wasn't emitting, but that was seldom a problem. After all, any ship coming in under power would have to have its wedge up, wouldn't it?
Stealth systems could do quite a bit to make an impeller signature harder to spot, but they were even more effective against other sensors, and so, again, gravitics became the most logical first line of defense. They might not be perfect, but they were the best system available, and captains and sensor techs alike had a pronounced tendency to rely solely upon them.
But Honor's ships didn't have impeller signatures. She had waited two and a half hours, watching the Peeps and plotting their vector carefully before she committed to the thruster burn. The acceleration period had been as bad as she had anticipated, but now her ships were slicing through space at a steady thirty-one hundred KPS, and she smiled again—this time with a predator's snarl—as she watched their projected vector reach out across her plot. Assuming her initial estimate of the Peeps' intentions had been accurate (and their flight profile so far suggested that it had been), she would cut across their base course some three minutes before they slowed to zero relative to Hell. She would be somewhere between six hundred and nine hundred thousand kilometers from them at the moment their courses intersected... and their bows would be towards her.
The two transports—and that was the only thing those two big, slow ships could be—had dropped back to ride a million and a half kilometers behind the main task group, ready to hand but safely screened against any unpleasant surprises. A single warship—probably a heavy cruiser, and most likely one of the older Sword-class ships, from her impeller signature—had been detached as a close escort for them, but Honor wasn't worried about that. If her maneuver worked, she should be in a position to send enough firepower after them to swat the escort without much difficulty, and all three of those ships were much too far inside the hyper limit for the transports to possibly escape before her cruisers ran them down.
"I see it, but I didn't really think you could pull it off, Ma'am," a quiet voice said, and she looked up to find Warner Caslet standing beside her command chair.
"Between you, me, and the bulkhead, I had a few doubts of my own," she said quietly, and smiled at him.
"You certainly didn't act like it," he told her wryly, then paused and snapped his fingers explosively. Honor blinked as she tasted the bright sunburst of his emotions as he abruptly realized or remembered something.
"What?" she asked, and he looked down at her with a strange expression.
"I just realized something," he said, "and I certainly hope it's a good omen."
"What?" she asked again, a bit more testily, and he gave her an odd smile.
"It's exactly two years and one day since you were captured, Ma'am," he said quietly, and both of Honor's eyebrows flew up. He couldn't be right! Could he? She gawked at him for a moment, then darted a look at the time/date display. He was right!
She sat very still for a moment, then shook herself and grinned crookedly at her.
"You should be a little cautious about surprising your CO that way just before a battle, Warner!" She shook her head. "I'd actually forgotten the date."
"Well, you have been a bit busy for the last couple of years," he pointed out, "and I figure the Committee of Public Safety is going to be more than a little bit put out when it discovers how you've been spending your time. But it does seem appropriate somehow to kick some 'Peep' butt as an anniversary present."
"So it does," she agreed, and he smiled at her again, then turned and headed back for his own station. She watched him go, then gave herself another bemused little shake and looked back at her plot.
You're so right, Warner, she thought. I do owe these people an "anniversary present"... and if we can take them intact, and if they're big enough, and have enough life support—
She pushed that thought back into its mental cubbyhole. One thing at a time, girl, she told herself. One thing at a time.
But there were times he agreed with his colleagues, and this was one of them. Not that he could call the slow, dragging approach to Hades boring, precisely. It was hard to feel bored when the acid of fury and the chill of a fear one couldn't quite suppress, however hard one tried, gnawed at one's stomach lining. Besides, this was a time for action, not thought. Thinking was what had alerted him to the problem and brought him here, but what he wanted now was vengeance.
He checked the time display. Another eleven minutes. And whoever was in control on Hades had begun to figure out what Citizen Rear Admiral Yearman had in mind, he thought with cold, vicious pleasure. They were still trying to bluff, but their "com officers" had grown increasingly nervous, questioning the task group's vector and asking for clarification of its intentions. They'd been doing that for the better part of two hours now, and at first, Yearman had dictated a series of glib responses, each of which had seemed to ease their minds a bit, at least temporarily. But for the last twenty minutes, the citizen rear admiral had simply ignored their transmissions, and the bastards had to be becoming frantic.
Good, he thought coldly. You go right ahead and sweat it, you pricks. You've killed my friend—I'm sure of it now—and for that, I'm going to kill you. So enjoy the minutes you've got left!
And my estimate of their flight path was just about on the money, too, she reflected. In fact, the intercept she was about to achieve would be a far better one than she'd dared hope for. With only minimal steering burns to adjust her own trajectory, her ships would split the interval between the two Peep forces almost exactly in half: seven hundred and seventy k-klicks from the lead force, and seven hundred and thirty from the trailer. She smiled at the thought, but then her smile faded as she raised her head and looked around her bridge once more.
So far, her plan appeared to be working almost perfectly. That was rare enough to make her automatically suspicious, with the irrational certainty that Murphy's Law had to be waiting to strike and she simply couldn't see it. But even if everything continued to go perfectly, she was very badly outnumbered by the Peeps' firepower, and her people were still hardly what she could call a well-drilled, efficient fighting force.
And most of us don't have skinsuits, either, she thought, then smiled once more, grimly. This seems to be becoming a habit for me. I suppose I'd better see about breaking it.
She snorted at the thought, and Nimitz laughed quietly with her in the back of her mind. Not that it was actually all that humorous. But since there was nothing she could do about it, she might as well laugh. It beat crying over it, at any rate!
The problem was that skinsuits, whether Peep or Allied, were essentially custom built for their intended wearers. They were permanently assigned equipment, and modifying one to fit someone else was a daunting task even for a fully equipped maintenance and service depot. But Hell didn't have an M&S depot for skinsuits, because it had never needed one. Her available techs had done the best they could, but they'd been able to fit no more than thirty-five percent of her crewmen; the remainder wore only their uniforms. If one of the Peep ships took a hit and lost pressure in a compartment, the people in it who survived the initial hit would survive the pressure loss; if one of her ships took a hit and lost pressure, two-thirds of the people in the compartment would die... messily.
And frantically though Alistair McKeon, Andrew LaFollet, and Horace Harkness had searched, they had not turned up a single Peep skinsuit designed for a one-armed woman a hundred and eighty-eight centimeters tall.
Despite her friends' anxiety, Honor was almost relieved that they'd failed. It was irrational, no doubt, but she preferred to share the risks of the people under her command, and she would have felt unbearably guilty if she'd been suited and they hadn't. And there was another point, as well—one she had chosen not to look too closely at even in the privacy of her own mind. Nimitz's custom-designed suit had been confiscated by StateSec and lost with Tepes, and he had no emergency life-support module. If pressure was lost, the 'cat would die, and the part of her mind Honor had decided not to examine shied like a frightened animal from the thought of not dying with him.
Nimitz made a small, soft sound, crooning to her as he sensed the darker tide buried deep in her emotions. He might not understand its cause—in fact, she hoped he didn't—but he tasted it in her and snuggled his muzzle more firmly into her tunic while his love flowed into her.
Chernock cocked his head and smiled at the Navy officer. Yearman had clearly accepted his own conclusions about what had happened on Hades, even if neither of them had the slightest idea of how the prisoners had pulled it off. And he'd become increasingly, if quietly, bloodthirsty as his ships headed in and the people on the ground kept lying to him.
"I believe Citizen Secretary Saint-Just and the Treasury would probably appreciate it if we could talk them into surrendering, Citizen Admiral," the SS general said wryly. "I doubt that they will, though. And if they don't, you can go ahead and blast holes in their defenses to your heart's content, and the Treasury will just have to live with its unhappiness over replacing the destroyed equipment."
"With all due respect, Citizen General, my heart bleeds for the Treasury," Yearman said. It was a daring remark to make to a StateSec general, even for a flag officer, but Chernock only laughed. Then he sobered, and his expression turned grim.
"Between you and me, Citizen Admiral, I agree completely," he said, and his space-black eyes were cold.
"Understood." The tension on Farnese's bridge was a physical thing now, coiled about them like some hungry beast, and Honor made her voice come out calm, almost gentle, soothing the beast. Her command chair's drive motors whined softly as she turned it, sweeping her gaze across the bridge. With the loss of her left eye, she didn't trust herself to look over her shoulder as she normally would have, and she'd lost some of the peripheral ability to watch the nest of repeater displays wreathed about her chair, as well. But the battle board glowed a reassuring crimson at Tactical—for Farnese's port broadside, at least—and her helmsman sat tautly poised and ready at his station. The impeller board beside him burned the steady amber that indicated nodes at standby, ready to bring up instantly, and Honor inhaled deeply. The oxygen burned in her lungs like fiery wine, and she glanced at Warner Caslet.
"Firing solutions?"
"Locked and updating steadily, Ma'am," he replied, and like Honor herself, there was something profoundly unnatural about how calm he sounded.
She nodded and returned her attention to her plot, watching the icons on it creep steadily closer to one another. Unlike her ships, the Peeps' impeller wedges made them glaring beacons of gravitic energy. Honor's active sensors were off-line—instantly ready, but locked down tight to prevent any betraying emission—but Tactical had run a constantly updated firing plot on passive for over half an hour. The Peeps were dialed in to a fare-thee-well, she thought grimly, and she was about to accomplish something no Manticoran officer had ever managed to pull off. She was about to pass directly between two components of a superior enemy force in a position to rake both of them... and do it from within effective energy range.
"Two minutes to course intersect," Caslet said, his voice flat with trained, professional calm.
"Stand by to engage," Honor Harrington said softly.
"Citizen Captain!"
"What?" Citizen Captain Jayne Preston twisted around in her chair, frowning her disapproval for the undisciplined shout from her tactical section.
"Bogies, Ma'am!" DesCours' fingers flew across his console as he brought the powerful emitters of his electronically-steered fire control radar to bear on the suspect blips. It had a much narrower field of view than his search radar, but it was also much more powerful, and his face went white as more points of light blinked to life on his display. "Three—no, ten of them! Bearing three-five-niner by oh-oh-five, range... seven hundred and thirty thousand klicks!"
Raw disbelief twisted his voice as the range numbers blinked up at him, and for just one instant, Jayne Preston's mind froze. Less than a million kilometers? Preposterous! But then the bearing registered, as well, and panic harsh as poison exploded deep inside her. They were in front of her. Whatever the hell they were, they were directly ahead of her! That meant there was no sidewall, and with no sidewall to interdict them, the effective range of modern, grav-lens energy weapons was—! "Helm! Hard skew turn p—"
The main Peep force lay fifty degrees off the starboard bow for most of her units as they crossed its course, but Farnese was inverted relative to the others. The Peeps lay off her port bow, and all down her left side, heavy graser and laser mounts fired with lethal accuracy. Her impellers and sidewalls came up in the same instant, but Honor hardly noticed. Short as the range was by the normal standards of space combat, it was still over two and a half light-seconds. The massive beams lashed out across the kilometers, and they were light-speed weapons. Despite the range, despite the nerve-racking wait for the people who had fired them, the ships they had been fired at never saw them coming. They were already on the way before Jayne Preston even opened her mouth to order a course change... and they arrived before she finished giving it.
The range was long, but it had never as much as crossed Paul Yearman's mind that he might actually face mobile units, as well as the fixed defenses. And even if he had, surely they would have been picked up before they could get into energy range! He'd detached Rapier to watch his back, but the decision had been strictly pro forma, taken out of reflex professionalism rather than any genuine sense of danger. And because he'd seen no sign of hostile mobile units, the ships of his command had held an absolutely unswerving course for over six hours... and Honor's fire control teams had plotted their positions with excruciating precision. Ninety-three percent of her energy weapons scored direct hits, and there were no sidewalls to deflect them as they slashed straight down the wide-open throats of the Peeps' wedges.
The consequences were unimaginable, even for Honor—or perhaps especially for Honor. She was the one who had planned the maneuver, the one who had conceived it and carried it through, but deep down inside, she'd never quite let herself believe she would get away with it. And surely she wouldn't get her first broadsides in utterly undetected and unopposed!
But she had. It wasn't really Yearman's fault. No one had ever attempted an ambush like it, and so no one had any kind of meterstick to estimate the carnage such an attack might wreak. But the dimensions of the disaster became appallingly clear as Honor's fire smashed over his ships like a Sphinx tidal bore.
The battlecruisers Ivan IV,Subutai, and Yavuz lurched madly as grasers and lasers crashed into their bows. Ivan IV's entire forward impeller ring went down, all of her forward chase armament was destroyed, and the ship staggered bodily sideways as hull plating shattered and the demonic beams ripped straight down her long axis. They could not possibly have come in from a more deadly bearing, and damage alarms shrieked as compartments blew open to space and electronics spiked madly. Molycircs exploded like prespace firecrackers, massive bus bars and superconductor capacitors blew apart like ball lightning, trapped within the hollow confines of a warship, and almost half her crew was killed or wounded in the space of less than four seconds.
But Ivan IV was the lucky one; her forward fusion plants went into emergency shutdown in time. Subutai's and Yavuz's didn't, and the two of them vanished into blinding balls of plasma with every man and woman of their crews.
Nor did they die alone. Their sisters Boyar and Cassander went with them; the heavy cruisers Morrigan,Yama, and Excalibur blew up almost as spectacularly as Subutai ; and every surviving ship was savagely damaged. The battlecruisers Modred,Pappenheim,Tammerlane,Roxana, and Cheetah lived through the initial carnage, but like Ivan IV, they were crippled and lamed, and the cruiser Broadsword was at least as badly hurt. Durandel, the only other heavy cruiser of the main force, reeled out of formation, her forward half smashed like a rotten stick while life pods erupted from her hull, and chaos reigned as the crews of maimed and broken ships fought their damage and rescue parties charged into gutted compartments in frantic search for wounded and trapped survivors. Yet chaotic as the shouts and confusion over the internal com systems were, the intership circuits were even worse, for one of ENS Huan-Ti's grasers had scored a direct hit on Tammerlane's flag bridge.
Citizen Rear Admiral Yearman was dead. Citizen General Chernock had died with him, and neither of them had ever even known their task group was under attack. The grasers' light-speed death had claimed both too quickly, and with their deaths, command devolved upon Citizen Captain Isler, in Modred. But the StateSec officer had no idea at all what to do. In fairness, it was unlikely any officer— even a modern day Edward Saganami—would have been able to react effectively to such a devastating surprise. But Isler was no Saganami, and the sharp, high note of panic in his voice as he gabbled incoherent orders over the command net finished any hint of cohesiveness in his shattered force. It came apart at the seams, each surviving captain realizing that his or her only chance of survival lay in independent action.
A few missiles got off, and Pappenheim actually managed to turn and fire her entire surviving starboard broadside at Wallenstein, but it was a pitifully inadequate response to what Honor's ships had done to them. Wallenstein's sidewall shrugged Pappenheim's energy fire aside with contemptuous ease, and despite the short range, point defense crews picked off the handful of Peep missiles which actually launched.
And then Honor's entire squadron fired a second time, and there was no more incoming fire. Five of the enemy hulks remained sufficiently intact that someone might technically describe them as ships; all the rest were spreading patterns of wreckage, dotted here and there with the transponder signals of life pods or a handful of people in skinsuits.
"Cease fire!" she snapped before her gunners could wipe out all of the cripples, as well. And, almost to her surprise, they obeyed. She felt a distant amazement at their compliance, for she knew how dreadfully most of them had hungered for revenge. But perhaps they were as stunned by the sheer magnitude of their success as she was.
She supposed it would go into the history books as the Battle of Cerberus, but it shouldn't. She felt an appalled sense of horror at the totality—as unanticipated on her part as on Paul Yearman's— of what she had accomplished. She had killed more people than this at the Fourth Battle of Yeltsin, but the sheer, blazing speed of it all stunned her. "Massacre of Cerberus" would be more accurate, she thought numbly. It had been like pushing Terran chicks into deep water filled with hungry Sphinx sabrepike. For the first time she could recall, she had fought a battle in which not one single person under her own command had been so much as injured, much less killed!
She glanced at her plot again. The transports had swerved wildly, turning to lumber uselessly towards the hyper limit, but they wouldn't get far. Already Scotty Tremaine was taking Krashnark in pursuit of one of them while Geraldine Metcalf went after the other in Barbarosa. There would be no one to oppose either of them, for the single Peep heavy cruiser had been the target of the port broadsides of every one of her ships except for Farnese herself. The failure of her fusion bottles hadn't blown PNS Rapier apart; they'd simply illuminated the splintered fragments of her hull in the instant that they consumed them along with her entire crew.
Honor sat a moment longer, staring at her plot, and then she shook herself, drew a deep, deep breath, and pressed the stud that connected her to the all-ships circuit.
"Well done, people—all of you. Thank you. You did us proud. Now do us even prouder by rescuing every survivor out there, People's Navy or State Security. I—"
She looked up without closing the circuit as Warner Caslet unlocked his shock frame and climbed out of his own chair. He turned to face her and came to attention, and her eyebrows rose as his hand snapped up in a parade ground salute. She started to say something, but then she saw other people standing, turning away from their consoles, looking at her. The storm of their exultation raged at her as, for the first time, they fully realized what their victory—and the capture of the transports—might mean, and she felt the entire universe hold its breath for just an instant.
Then the instant shattered as her flag bridge exploded in cheers. She tried to speak, tried to hush them, but it was impossible. And then someone opened the ship's intercom, and the thunder of voices redoubled as the cheers echoing through every compartment of her flagship rolled out of the speakers. The same deep, braying triumph came at her over the com from the other ships of the squadron, powerful enough to shake a galaxy, and Lady Dame Honor Harrington sat frozen at its heart while the wild tide of her people's emotions ripped through her with all the binding, cleansing fury of a nova.
They'd done it, the tiny corner of her brain which could still work realized. These were the people who had done the impossible—who had conquered Hell itself for her—and she couldn't think now, could no longer plan or anticipate. And it didn't matter that she'd led them, or that the odds had been unbeatable, or that no one could possibly have done what they had. None of that mattered at all.
She was taking them home, and they were taking her home, and that was all in the universe that mattered.
Epilogue
Appendix
HMS Minotaur
(1) Shrike LAC (shown for scale)
(2) Gravitic Detection Array
(3) Weapon Ports
(4) Missile Tubes
(5) Phased Radar Array
(6) Lidar Array
(7) Life Pod Escape Hatches
(8) Life Pod Escape Tubes
(9) LAC Bay Hatch
(10) LAC Bay
(11) Personnel/Missile Loading Tubes
(12) Docking/Umbilical Cradle
(12A) Docking Arms
(13) Life Pod
(14) Isler Corporation GRAVMAK (Gravity-Magnitnaya)
Fusion Reactor Burning Hydrogen/Boron-11 Mix
15) Hydrogen/Boron Feed Channels
(16) Gravity Generators
(17) Magnetic Field Housing
(18) Boat Bay
(19) Radiation/Particle Shield Generator
(20) Sidewall Generator
(21) Vectored Thrust Auxiliary Fusion Reactor Thruster
(22) After Impeller Ring
(23) Broadside Phased Array Radar
(24) Broadside Gravitic Array
Shrike LAC
(1) Point Defense Laser Cluster
(2) GRASER main armament
(3) Anti-ship Missile Tube
(4) Anti-ship Missile "Revolver" Magazine Cell
(5) Point Defense Missile Tube
(6) Small Craft Hangar
(7) Folding Wing Cutter/Lifeboat
(8) Anti-ship Missile
(9) Sidewall ("Bow Wall") Generator
Engineering Details
(1) Point Defense Laser Cluster Emitters
(2) Standard Beta Node
(3) New "Beta-Squared" Beta Node
(4) Alpha Node
(5) Graser Broadside Armament
Well, I told them it worked for Cortez, she thought wryly. Of course, most of them don't have any idea who Cortez was...
As far as her subordinates' other concerns went, a half-hour at five gravities would be punishing but endurable—most humans didn't begin graying out until they hit six or seven g, and heavy-worlders like Honor had even more tolerance than that. And it would take a ship over three million kilometers down-range and impart a velocity of almost thirty-one hundred KPS. That wasn't terribly impressive compared to what an impeller drive could have done in the same length of time, but it offered one huge advantage.
With no impeller signature, a ship might as well be invisible at any sort of extended range.
On the scale to which God built star systems, active sensors had a limited range at the best of times. Officially, most navies normally monitored a million-kilometer bubble with their search radar. In fact, most sensor techs—even in the RMN—didn't bother with active sensors at all at ranges much above a half-million kilometers. There was no real point, since getting a useful return off anything much smaller than a superdreadnought was exceedingly difficult at greater ranges. Worse, virtually all warships incorporated stealth materials into their basic hull matrices. That made them far smaller radar targets than, say, some big, fat merchantman when their drives were down... and when their drives were up, there was no reason to look for them on active, anyway, since passive sensors—and especially gravitic sensors—had enormously greater range and resolution. Of course, they couldn't pick up anything that wasn't emitting, but that was seldom a problem. After all, any ship coming in under power would have to have its wedge up, wouldn't it?
Stealth systems could do quite a bit to make an impeller signature harder to spot, but they were even more effective against other sensors, and so, again, gravitics became the most logical first line of defense. They might not be perfect, but they were the best system available, and captains and sensor techs alike had a pronounced tendency to rely solely upon them.
But Honor's ships didn't have impeller signatures. She had waited two and a half hours, watching the Peeps and plotting their vector carefully before she committed to the thruster burn. The acceleration period had been as bad as she had anticipated, but now her ships were slicing through space at a steady thirty-one hundred KPS, and she smiled again—this time with a predator's snarl—as she watched their projected vector reach out across her plot. Assuming her initial estimate of the Peeps' intentions had been accurate (and their flight profile so far suggested that it had been), she would cut across their base course some three minutes before they slowed to zero relative to Hell. She would be somewhere between six hundred and nine hundred thousand kilometers from them at the moment their courses intersected... and their bows would be towards her.
The two transports—and that was the only thing those two big, slow ships could be—had dropped back to ride a million and a half kilometers behind the main task group, ready to hand but safely screened against any unpleasant surprises. A single warship—probably a heavy cruiser, and most likely one of the older Sword-class ships, from her impeller signature—had been detached as a close escort for them, but Honor wasn't worried about that. If her maneuver worked, she should be in a position to send enough firepower after them to swat the escort without much difficulty, and all three of those ships were much too far inside the hyper limit for the transports to possibly escape before her cruisers ran them down.
"I see it, but I didn't really think you could pull it off, Ma'am," a quiet voice said, and she looked up to find Warner Caslet standing beside her command chair.
"Between you, me, and the bulkhead, I had a few doubts of my own," she said quietly, and smiled at him.
"You certainly didn't act like it," he told her wryly, then paused and snapped his fingers explosively. Honor blinked as she tasted the bright sunburst of his emotions as he abruptly realized or remembered something.
"What?" she asked, and he looked down at her with a strange expression.
"I just realized something," he said, "and I certainly hope it's a good omen."
"What?" she asked again, a bit more testily, and he gave her an odd smile.
"It's exactly two years and one day since you were captured, Ma'am," he said quietly, and both of Honor's eyebrows flew up. He couldn't be right! Could he? She gawked at him for a moment, then darted a look at the time/date display. He was right!
She sat very still for a moment, then shook herself and grinned crookedly at her.
"You should be a little cautious about surprising your CO that way just before a battle, Warner!" She shook her head. "I'd actually forgotten the date."
"Well, you have been a bit busy for the last couple of years," he pointed out, "and I figure the Committee of Public Safety is going to be more than a little bit put out when it discovers how you've been spending your time. But it does seem appropriate somehow to kick some 'Peep' butt as an anniversary present."
"So it does," she agreed, and he smiled at her again, then turned and headed back for his own station. She watched him go, then gave herself another bemused little shake and looked back at her plot.
You're so right, Warner, she thought. I do owe these people an "anniversary present"... and if we can take them intact, and if they're big enough, and have enough life support—
She pushed that thought back into its mental cubbyhole. One thing at a time, girl, she told herself. One thing at a time.
* * *
Seth Chernock was a much more experienced interstellar traveler than his colleague Citizen Major General Thornegrave. As a general rule, he rather enjoyed such trips. Unlike many of his fellow StateSec officers, he was a cerebral type, a man who treasured the chance to catch up on his reading, to think and ponder, and he was accustomed to turning what others saw as boredom into profitable—and enjoyable—time in which to do just that.But there were times he agreed with his colleagues, and this was one of them. Not that he could call the slow, dragging approach to Hades boring, precisely. It was hard to feel bored when the acid of fury and the chill of a fear one couldn't quite suppress, however hard one tried, gnawed at one's stomach lining. Besides, this was a time for action, not thought. Thinking was what had alerted him to the problem and brought him here, but what he wanted now was vengeance.
He checked the time display. Another eleven minutes. And whoever was in control on Hades had begun to figure out what Citizen Rear Admiral Yearman had in mind, he thought with cold, vicious pleasure. They were still trying to bluff, but their "com officers" had grown increasingly nervous, questioning the task group's vector and asking for clarification of its intentions. They'd been doing that for the better part of two hours now, and at first, Yearman had dictated a series of glib responses, each of which had seemed to ease their minds a bit, at least temporarily. But for the last twenty minutes, the citizen rear admiral had simply ignored their transmissions, and the bastards had to be becoming frantic.
Good, he thought coldly. You go right ahead and sweat it, you pricks. You've killed my friend—I'm sure of it now—and for that, I'm going to kill you. So enjoy the minutes you've got left!
* * *
"Seven minutes to vector cross, Ma'am," Warner Caslet reported, and Honor nodded. They were right on one-point-three million klicks short of the invisible spot in space she had named "Point Trafalgar," and there was no sign that the enemy had noticed them yet. The capabilities of Peep electronic warfare systems were limited compared to those mounted in Allied ships, but her people were using the ones they had for all they were worth. And given the fact that their sensor hardware, active and passive alike, was identical to that of their opponents, they had a very clear idea of what the Peeps might be in a position to see. So far, the strength of the radar pulses being picked up by their threat receivers remained well below detection values, and unless something changed, they should stay that way until the range had dropped to no more than eight hundred thousand kilometers.And my estimate of their flight path was just about on the money, too, she reflected. In fact, the intercept she was about to achieve would be a far better one than she'd dared hope for. With only minimal steering burns to adjust her own trajectory, her ships would split the interval between the two Peep forces almost exactly in half: seven hundred and seventy k-klicks from the lead force, and seven hundred and thirty from the trailer. She smiled at the thought, but then her smile faded as she raised her head and looked around her bridge once more.
So far, her plan appeared to be working almost perfectly. That was rare enough to make her automatically suspicious, with the irrational certainty that Murphy's Law had to be waiting to strike and she simply couldn't see it. But even if everything continued to go perfectly, she was very badly outnumbered by the Peeps' firepower, and her people were still hardly what she could call a well-drilled, efficient fighting force.
And most of us don't have skinsuits, either, she thought, then smiled once more, grimly. This seems to be becoming a habit for me. I suppose I'd better see about breaking it.
She snorted at the thought, and Nimitz laughed quietly with her in the back of her mind. Not that it was actually all that humorous. But since there was nothing she could do about it, she might as well laugh. It beat crying over it, at any rate!
The problem was that skinsuits, whether Peep or Allied, were essentially custom built for their intended wearers. They were permanently assigned equipment, and modifying one to fit someone else was a daunting task even for a fully equipped maintenance and service depot. But Hell didn't have an M&S depot for skinsuits, because it had never needed one. Her available techs had done the best they could, but they'd been able to fit no more than thirty-five percent of her crewmen; the remainder wore only their uniforms. If one of the Peep ships took a hit and lost pressure in a compartment, the people in it who survived the initial hit would survive the pressure loss; if one of her ships took a hit and lost pressure, two-thirds of the people in the compartment would die... messily.
And frantically though Alistair McKeon, Andrew LaFollet, and Horace Harkness had searched, they had not turned up a single Peep skinsuit designed for a one-armed woman a hundred and eighty-eight centimeters tall.
Despite her friends' anxiety, Honor was almost relieved that they'd failed. It was irrational, no doubt, but she preferred to share the risks of the people under her command, and she would have felt unbearably guilty if she'd been suited and they hadn't. And there was another point, as well—one she had chosen not to look too closely at even in the privacy of her own mind. Nimitz's custom-designed suit had been confiscated by StateSec and lost with Tepes, and he had no emergency life-support module. If pressure was lost, the 'cat would die, and the part of her mind Honor had decided not to examine shied like a frightened animal from the thought of not dying with him.
Nimitz made a small, soft sound, crooning to her as he sensed the darker tide buried deep in her emotions. He might not understand its cause—in fact, she hoped he didn't—but he tasted it in her and snuggled his muzzle more firmly into her tunic while his love flowed into her.
* * *
"We'll be coming up on our firing point in five minutes, Sir," Citizen Rear Admiral Yearman reported. "Do you wish to offer them a chance to surrender, or should I simply open fire?"Chernock cocked his head and smiled at the Navy officer. Yearman had clearly accepted his own conclusions about what had happened on Hades, even if neither of them had the slightest idea of how the prisoners had pulled it off. And he'd become increasingly, if quietly, bloodthirsty as his ships headed in and the people on the ground kept lying to him.
"I believe Citizen Secretary Saint-Just and the Treasury would probably appreciate it if we could talk them into surrendering, Citizen Admiral," the SS general said wryly. "I doubt that they will, though. And if they don't, you can go ahead and blast holes in their defenses to your heart's content, and the Treasury will just have to live with its unhappiness over replacing the destroyed equipment."
"With all due respect, Citizen General, my heart bleeds for the Treasury," Yearman said. It was a daring remark to make to a StateSec general, even for a flag officer, but Chernock only laughed. Then he sobered, and his expression turned grim.
"Between you and me, Citizen Admiral, I agree completely," he said, and his space-black eyes were cold.
* * *
"Radar hits from the main body are approaching the detection threshold, Ma'am.""Understood." The tension on Farnese's bridge was a physical thing now, coiled about them like some hungry beast, and Honor made her voice come out calm, almost gentle, soothing the beast. Her command chair's drive motors whined softly as she turned it, sweeping her gaze across the bridge. With the loss of her left eye, she didn't trust herself to look over her shoulder as she normally would have, and she'd lost some of the peripheral ability to watch the nest of repeater displays wreathed about her chair, as well. But the battle board glowed a reassuring crimson at Tactical—for Farnese's port broadside, at least—and her helmsman sat tautly poised and ready at his station. The impeller board beside him burned the steady amber that indicated nodes at standby, ready to bring up instantly, and Honor inhaled deeply. The oxygen burned in her lungs like fiery wine, and she glanced at Warner Caslet.
"Firing solutions?"
"Locked and updating steadily, Ma'am," he replied, and like Honor herself, there was something profoundly unnatural about how calm he sounded.
She nodded and returned her attention to her plot, watching the icons on it creep steadily closer to one another. Unlike her ships, the Peeps' impeller wedges made them glaring beacons of gravitic energy. Honor's active sensors were off-line—instantly ready, but locked down tight to prevent any betraying emission—but Tactical had run a constantly updated firing plot on passive for over half an hour. The Peeps were dialed in to a fare-thee-well, she thought grimly, and she was about to accomplish something no Manticoran officer had ever managed to pull off. She was about to pass directly between two components of a superior enemy force in a position to rake both of them... and do it from within effective energy range.
"Two minutes to course intersect," Caslet said, his voice flat with trained, professional calm.
"Stand by to engage," Honor Harrington said softly.
* * *
"What the—?" Citizen Lieutenant Henry DesCours straightened abruptly on PNS Subutai's bridge as a single icon blinked into abrupt existence on his display. Then a second appeared with it. And a third!"Citizen Captain!"
"What?" Citizen Captain Jayne Preston twisted around in her chair, frowning her disapproval for the undisciplined shout from her tactical section.
"Bogies, Ma'am!" DesCours' fingers flew across his console as he brought the powerful emitters of his electronically-steered fire control radar to bear on the suspect blips. It had a much narrower field of view than his search radar, but it was also much more powerful, and his face went white as more points of light blinked to life on his display. "Three—no, ten of them! Bearing three-five-niner by oh-oh-five, range... seven hundred and thirty thousand klicks!"
Raw disbelief twisted his voice as the range numbers blinked up at him, and for just one instant, Jayne Preston's mind froze. Less than a million kilometers? Preposterous! But then the bearing registered, as well, and panic harsh as poison exploded deep inside her. They were in front of her. Whatever the hell they were, they were directly ahead of her! That meant there was no sidewall, and with no sidewall to interdict them, the effective range of modern, grav-lens energy weapons was—! "Helm! Hard skew turn p—"
* * *
"Fire!" Honor Harrington snapped.The main Peep force lay fifty degrees off the starboard bow for most of her units as they crossed its course, but Farnese was inverted relative to the others. The Peeps lay off her port bow, and all down her left side, heavy graser and laser mounts fired with lethal accuracy. Her impellers and sidewalls came up in the same instant, but Honor hardly noticed. Short as the range was by the normal standards of space combat, it was still over two and a half light-seconds. The massive beams lashed out across the kilometers, and they were light-speed weapons. Despite the range, despite the nerve-racking wait for the people who had fired them, the ships they had been fired at never saw them coming. They were already on the way before Jayne Preston even opened her mouth to order a course change... and they arrived before she finished giving it.
The range was long, but it had never as much as crossed Paul Yearman's mind that he might actually face mobile units, as well as the fixed defenses. And even if he had, surely they would have been picked up before they could get into energy range! He'd detached Rapier to watch his back, but the decision had been strictly pro forma, taken out of reflex professionalism rather than any genuine sense of danger. And because he'd seen no sign of hostile mobile units, the ships of his command had held an absolutely unswerving course for over six hours... and Honor's fire control teams had plotted their positions with excruciating precision. Ninety-three percent of her energy weapons scored direct hits, and there were no sidewalls to deflect them as they slashed straight down the wide-open throats of the Peeps' wedges.
The consequences were unimaginable, even for Honor—or perhaps especially for Honor. She was the one who had planned the maneuver, the one who had conceived it and carried it through, but deep down inside, she'd never quite let herself believe she would get away with it. And surely she wouldn't get her first broadsides in utterly undetected and unopposed!
But she had. It wasn't really Yearman's fault. No one had ever attempted an ambush like it, and so no one had any kind of meterstick to estimate the carnage such an attack might wreak. But the dimensions of the disaster became appallingly clear as Honor's fire smashed over his ships like a Sphinx tidal bore.
The battlecruisers Ivan IV,Subutai, and Yavuz lurched madly as grasers and lasers crashed into their bows. Ivan IV's entire forward impeller ring went down, all of her forward chase armament was destroyed, and the ship staggered bodily sideways as hull plating shattered and the demonic beams ripped straight down her long axis. They could not possibly have come in from a more deadly bearing, and damage alarms shrieked as compartments blew open to space and electronics spiked madly. Molycircs exploded like prespace firecrackers, massive bus bars and superconductor capacitors blew apart like ball lightning, trapped within the hollow confines of a warship, and almost half her crew was killed or wounded in the space of less than four seconds.
But Ivan IV was the lucky one; her forward fusion plants went into emergency shutdown in time. Subutai's and Yavuz's didn't, and the two of them vanished into blinding balls of plasma with every man and woman of their crews.
Nor did they die alone. Their sisters Boyar and Cassander went with them; the heavy cruisers Morrigan,Yama, and Excalibur blew up almost as spectacularly as Subutai ; and every surviving ship was savagely damaged. The battlecruisers Modred,Pappenheim,Tammerlane,Roxana, and Cheetah lived through the initial carnage, but like Ivan IV, they were crippled and lamed, and the cruiser Broadsword was at least as badly hurt. Durandel, the only other heavy cruiser of the main force, reeled out of formation, her forward half smashed like a rotten stick while life pods erupted from her hull, and chaos reigned as the crews of maimed and broken ships fought their damage and rescue parties charged into gutted compartments in frantic search for wounded and trapped survivors. Yet chaotic as the shouts and confusion over the internal com systems were, the intership circuits were even worse, for one of ENS Huan-Ti's grasers had scored a direct hit on Tammerlane's flag bridge.
Citizen Rear Admiral Yearman was dead. Citizen General Chernock had died with him, and neither of them had ever even known their task group was under attack. The grasers' light-speed death had claimed both too quickly, and with their deaths, command devolved upon Citizen Captain Isler, in Modred. But the StateSec officer had no idea at all what to do. In fairness, it was unlikely any officer— even a modern day Edward Saganami—would have been able to react effectively to such a devastating surprise. But Isler was no Saganami, and the sharp, high note of panic in his voice as he gabbled incoherent orders over the command net finished any hint of cohesiveness in his shattered force. It came apart at the seams, each surviving captain realizing that his or her only chance of survival lay in independent action.
A few missiles got off, and Pappenheim actually managed to turn and fire her entire surviving starboard broadside at Wallenstein, but it was a pitifully inadequate response to what Honor's ships had done to them. Wallenstein's sidewall shrugged Pappenheim's energy fire aside with contemptuous ease, and despite the short range, point defense crews picked off the handful of Peep missiles which actually launched.
And then Honor's entire squadron fired a second time, and there was no more incoming fire. Five of the enemy hulks remained sufficiently intact that someone might technically describe them as ships; all the rest were spreading patterns of wreckage, dotted here and there with the transponder signals of life pods or a handful of people in skinsuits.
"Cease fire!" she snapped before her gunners could wipe out all of the cripples, as well. And, almost to her surprise, they obeyed. She felt a distant amazement at their compliance, for she knew how dreadfully most of them had hungered for revenge. But perhaps they were as stunned by the sheer magnitude of their success as she was.
She supposed it would go into the history books as the Battle of Cerberus, but it shouldn't. She felt an appalled sense of horror at the totality—as unanticipated on her part as on Paul Yearman's— of what she had accomplished. She had killed more people than this at the Fourth Battle of Yeltsin, but the sheer, blazing speed of it all stunned her. "Massacre of Cerberus" would be more accurate, she thought numbly. It had been like pushing Terran chicks into deep water filled with hungry Sphinx sabrepike. For the first time she could recall, she had fought a battle in which not one single person under her own command had been so much as injured, much less killed!
She glanced at her plot again. The transports had swerved wildly, turning to lumber uselessly towards the hyper limit, but they wouldn't get far. Already Scotty Tremaine was taking Krashnark in pursuit of one of them while Geraldine Metcalf went after the other in Barbarosa. There would be no one to oppose either of them, for the single Peep heavy cruiser had been the target of the port broadsides of every one of her ships except for Farnese herself. The failure of her fusion bottles hadn't blown PNS Rapier apart; they'd simply illuminated the splintered fragments of her hull in the instant that they consumed them along with her entire crew.
Honor sat a moment longer, staring at her plot, and then she shook herself, drew a deep, deep breath, and pressed the stud that connected her to the all-ships circuit.
"Well done, people—all of you. Thank you. You did us proud. Now do us even prouder by rescuing every survivor out there, People's Navy or State Security. I—"
She looked up without closing the circuit as Warner Caslet unlocked his shock frame and climbed out of his own chair. He turned to face her and came to attention, and her eyebrows rose as his hand snapped up in a parade ground salute. She started to say something, but then she saw other people standing, turning away from their consoles, looking at her. The storm of their exultation raged at her as, for the first time, they fully realized what their victory—and the capture of the transports—might mean, and she felt the entire universe hold its breath for just an instant.
Then the instant shattered as her flag bridge exploded in cheers. She tried to speak, tried to hush them, but it was impossible. And then someone opened the ship's intercom, and the thunder of voices redoubled as the cheers echoing through every compartment of her flagship rolled out of the speakers. The same deep, braying triumph came at her over the com from the other ships of the squadron, powerful enough to shake a galaxy, and Lady Dame Honor Harrington sat frozen at its heart while the wild tide of her people's emotions ripped through her with all the binding, cleansing fury of a nova.
They'd done it, the tiny corner of her brain which could still work realized. These were the people who had done the impossible—who had conquered Hell itself for her—and she couldn't think now, could no longer plan or anticipate. And it didn't matter that she'd led them, or that the odds had been unbeatable, or that no one could possibly have done what they had. None of that mattered at all.
She was taking them home, and they were taking her home, and that was all in the universe that mattered.
Epilogue
Admiral White Haven sat at his terminal, watching another of the endless, dreary ONI reports which had become all too familiar in the past eight T-months scroll up his terminal. Casualties and damages, ships lost, people killed, millions—billions—of dollars worth of industrial investment blown away...
There had been no more runaway Peep triumphs like the series of attacks with which Esther McQueen had announced the change in the military management of the PRH, for the Allies had not allowed themselves to become that overconfident a second time. But the momentum which had been with the Alliance for so long had disappeared. It hadn't gone entirely to the Peep side of the board, but it was clearly McQueen and Bukato who were pushing the operational pace now. And unlike Citizen Secretary Kline, McQueen understood she had the ships to lose if spending them bought her victories.
He looked up from the terminal, running a weary hand through hair streaked with more white since the Battle of Basilisk, and grimaced as his eye lit on the star map frozen on the mural wall display in his quarters. The Barnett System still burned the spiteful red of the PRH, and Thomas Theisman had not sat still. When no attack had come from Eighth Fleet—which had been busy protecting what was left of Basilisk Station until a proper replacement could be scraped up from somewhere—Theisman had nipped out from Barnett to retake Seabring in an audacious raid. He'd hit that system and the Barnes System both, and then gotten his striking force back to Barnett before Theodosia Kuzak learned of its activities and reacted to its absence. It was unlikely she could have gotten permission to uncover Trevor's Star to move on Barnett anyway, given the shock which had temporarily paralyzed the Alliance's command structure and political leadership, but Theisman had been so quick that she couldn't have hit him even if she'd had permission.
Which, White Haven thought with admiration-tinged bitterness, only reemphasized the danger of allowing an officer of Theisman's caliber time to recover his balance and plan his own shots.
We should be moving on Barnett right now, the Earl thought. Hell, we should've concentrated Eighth Fleet two years ago, as originally planned, and damned well hit Theisman then! But even granted that we lost that chance a long time ago, we're still back at Trevor's Star and concentrated again, and why the hell did the Admiralty and the Joint Chiefs send us back out here if they didn't mean for us to carry out our original orders?
But he hadn't been given permission to reactivate his original attack plan, and despite his need to vent frustration, he knew why. The Alliance was afraid... and this time it had too much to lose.
He snorted savagely at the thought, yet it was true. He suspected that Queen Elizabeth and Protector Benjamin were as determined as he himself was that the initiative had to be regained, and he had complete faith in Sir Thomas Caparelli's fighting spirit. Lack of courage had never been one of the things he'd held against the burly First Space Lord. But even though Elizabeth and Benjamin were, by any measure, the two most important heads of state in the Alliance, they weren't the only ones, and their smaller allies saw what had happened to Zanzibar and Alizon—and Basilisk—and were terrified that the same would happen to them. Nor had the Star Kingdom or the Protectorate of Grayson maintained as unified a front as their rulers must have desired.
The Manticoran Opposition had been as stunned as anyone else for the first few weeks. But then, as the true scope of the disaster became clear, that had changed. Their leaders had stormed into the public eye, plastering the 'faxes and domestic news services with condemnations of the Cromarty Government's "lax and inefficient," "inexcusably overconfident," and "culpably negligent" conduct of the war. Never mind that the Opposition had done its level best in the decades leading up to that self-same war to ensure that the Star Kingdom would never have had the Navy to survive its opening weeks. Or that it had paralyzed the Star Kingdom's government and delayed military operations for months following the Harris Assassination, and so allowed the Committee of Public Safety to get its feet under it. Nothing in the universe had a shorter half-life than a politician's memory for inconvenient facts, and people like Countess New Kiev, Baron High Ridge, Lady Descroix, and their tame military analysts like Reginald Houseman and Jeremiah Crichton had even shorter memories than most. They sensed an opening, an opportunity to blacken Cromarty and his advisers in the eyes of the electorate, and they'd seized it with both hands.
The political fire on Grayson had come from another source... and been leveled upon a different target. A group of dissident steadholders had coalesced under the leadership of Steadholder Meuller, denouncing not the war as such, but rather the fashion in which Grayson's "so-called allies unfairly—and unwisely—dominate the decision-making process." They knew better than to expect the Grayson people to shrink from the dangers of war, but they had hit a responsive nerve in at least some of their people. Centuries of isolation could not be totally forgotten in a few years, and there were those on Grayson who believed Meuller was right when he implied that their world would be better off if it were to go its own way rather than marrying its military power and policy to someone—like the Star Kingdom—who had obviously miscalculated so hideously.
And listening to all that drivel were the voters of the Star Kingdom and the steaders of Grayson. Men and women who had steeled themselves for the perils of war before the shooting began, but who had become increasingly confident as the actual fighting went on. Few of them had been happy about the war's cost, or about the lives which were being lost, or about rising taxes, reduced civilian services, or any of the hundreds of other petty and not so petty inconveniences they'd been forced to endure. But they had been confident in their navies, sure the ultimate victory would be theirs.
Now they were confident no longer. Esther McQueen had accomplished that much, at least, and the repercussions had been severe. Now all too many voters demanded that the Navy hold all it had taken, as a glacis against additional Peep attacks. They had gotten out of the habit of thinking in the stark terms of victory or slavery, and with the loss of that habit, they had also lost the one of accepting that risks had to be run. That an outnumbered Navy had to take chances to seize and control the initiative. Indeed, they no longer even thought of themselves as outnumbered, for how could an overmatched fleet have accomplished all theirs had? That was why the shock of McQueen's offensives had cut so deep... and why the critics vociferously demanded that "the incumbent incompetents be replaced by new, better informed leaders who will let our incomparable Navy safeguard our star systems and our worlds!"
Which came down in the end to calling the Navy home to "stand shoulder to shoulder" in defense of the inner perimeter... which was the worst possible thing they could do.
White Haven scrubbed a hand over his face and took himself sternly to task. Yes, things were worse now than he remembered their ever having been before. And, yes, the Opposition was making inroads into Alien Summervale's authority and popular support. But the Manticoran electorate was not composed solely of credulous fools. In the long run, he estimated, the damage popular trust in the Cromarty Government had suffered might take years to completely heal, but it would be healed in the end. And quite possibly faster than White Haven might believe at this moment that it could be, given the Queen's unwavering, iron support for her embattled prime minister and his cabinet. As for Grayson... White Haven snorted a laugh. Samuel Meuller might have assembled a coterie of vocal supporters, but they were a definite minority, and Hamish Alexander knew he wouldn't care to be the one who challenged Benjamin Mayhew's strength of will!
Nor was the military front hopeless. Despite heavy losses, Alice Truman, Minotaur, and the carrier's LAC wing had proved the new LAC concept brilliantly at Hancock, and ONI's best estimate was that the Peeps still hadn't figured out exactly what had hit them, though they must obviously have some suspicions. In the meantime, the new construction programs were going full blast. Within another few months, the first of an entire wave of LAC-carriers would be joining the Fleet, and the new Medusa-class—
No, he corrected himself. Not the Medusa-class. For the first time in its history, the Royal Manticoran Navy had followed the lead of a foreign fleet, and the Medusa-class missile pod superdreadnoughts—the wisdom of whose construction no one doubted any longer—had been redesignated as the Harrington-class.
White Haven felt a familiar bittersweet loss as he contemplated the change, but the pain had become less. It would never go completely away. He knew that now. But it had become something he could cope with because he had accepted the nature and depth of his feelings for her. And she would have been proud of the way her namesake had performed at the Battle of Basilisk. Almost as proud as she would have been of how furiously her adopted navy had fought not just at Basilisk but in half a dozen engagements since. The GSN was young, but it continued to expand explosively, and the RMN was beginning to realize its true quality. Manticoran officers had begun to pay it the supreme compliment: they truly were as confident going into battle with GSN units in support as they were with fellow Manticorans.
The Alliance was regaining its balance. It had been knocked back on its heels, but it was still a long way from on the ropes, and while people like Hamish Alexander sparred for time, the massive construction programs behind them were churning out the ships which would take the war to the Peeps again someday much sooner than most people would have believed possible, and—
The chirp of his com interrupted his thoughts, and he hit the acceptance key. Lieutenant Robards' face appeared on it, but White Haven had never seen his aide with an expression like the one he wore. His eyes were huge, and he looked as stunned as if someone had used his head for target practice with a blunt object.
"Nathan? What is it?" the admiral asked quickly, and Robards cleared his throat.
"Sir, I think—" He stopped, with an air of helpless confusion which would have been almost comical if it had been even a trace less deep.
"Go on," White Haven encouraged.
"Admiral, System Surveillance picked up a cluster of unidentified hyper footprints about twelve minutes ago," the Grayson lieutenant said.
"And?" White Haven prompted when he paused once more.
"Sir, they made transit quite close to one of the FTL platforms and were identified almost immediately as Peeps."
"Peeps?" White Haven sat suddenly straighter in his chair, and Robards nodded.
"Yes, Sir." He glanced down at something White Haven presumed was a memo pad display, cleared his throat once more, and read aloud. "Tracking made it five battlecruisers, four heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, and two of their Roughneck-class assault transports."
"What?" White Haven blinked. He couldn't possibly have heard right. That was a decent enough squadron for something like a commerce raid, or possibly even a strike at some lightly picketed rear system, but twelve ships, without even one of the wall among them, wouldn't stand a snowflake's chance in hell against the firepower stationed here at Trevor's Star. And what in the name of sanity would a pair of transports be doing here? They'd be dead meat for any decent warship—even one of the old-fashioned, pre-Shrike LACs—if they moved inside the hyper limit.
"I assume they hypered back out immediately?" he heard himself say. The only logical explanation was that someone on the other side had made a mistake. Perhaps the Peeps were planning a major attack on Trevor's Star and the transport echelon had simply arrived too soon... or the main attack force was late. In either case, the sensible thing for the Peep CO to do would be to flee back into hyper-space—at once.
"No, Sir," Robards said, and drew a deep breath. "They didn't do anything at all, Sir. Except sit there and transmit a message to System Command HQ."
"What sort of message?" White Haven was beginning to be irritated. Whatever ailed his flag lieutenant, prying the facts out of him one by one was like pulling teeth. What in God's name could have someone normally as levelheaded as young Robards so off-balance and hesitant?
"They said— But, of course it can't be, only— I mean, she's—" Robards broke off again and shrugged helplessly. "Sir, I think you'd better see the message for yourself," he said, and disappeared from White Haven's terminal before the earl could agree or disagree.
The admiral frowned ferociously. He and Nathan were going to have to have a little talk about the courtesy due a flag officer, he thought thunderously, and after that they'd—
His thoughts chopped off in a harsh, strangled gasp as another face appeared on his display. Other people might not have recognized it with the hair which framed it reduced to a short, feathery mass of curls and one side paralyzed, but Hamish Alexander had seen that same face in exactly that same condition once before, and his heart seemed to stop beating.
It can't be, he thought numbly. It can't be! She's dead! She's—
His thoughts disintegrated into chaos and incoherence as the shock roared through him, and then the woman on his display spoke.
"Trevor System Command, this is Admiral Honor Harrington." Her voice sounded calm and absolutely professional—or would have, to someone who didn't know her. But White Haven saw the emotion burning in her good eye, heard it hovering in the slurred soprano. "I'm sure no one in the Alliance expected to see me again, but I assure you that the rumors of my recent death have been exaggerated. I am accompanied by approximately one hundred and six thousand liberated inmates of the prison planet Hades, and I expect the arrival of another quarter million or so within the next eleven days—our transports have military hyper generators and we made a faster passage than they will. I regret any confusion or alarm we may have caused by turning up in Peep ships, but they were the only ones we could... appropriate for the voyage."
The right side of her mouth smiled from the display, but her voice went husky and wavered for a moment, and she stopped to clear her throat. White Haven reached out, his fingers trembling, and touched her face on the com as gently as he might have touched a terrified bird, yet the terror was his, and he knew it.
"We will remain where we are, with our drives, sidewalls, weapons, and active sensors down until you've had time to check us out and establish our bona fides," she went on after a moment, struggling to maintain her professional tone, "but I'd appreciate it if you could expedite. We were forced to pack these ships to the deckheads to get all our people aboard, and our life support could be in better shape. We—"
She broke off, blinking hard, and Hamish Alexander's heart was an impossible weight in his chest—heavy as a neutron star and yet soaring and thundering with emotions so powerful they terrified him—as he stared at her face. He was afraid to so much as breathe lest the oxygen wake him and destroy this impossible dream, and he realized he was weeping only when his display shimmered. And then she spoke again, and this time everyone heard the catch in her breath, the proud tears she refused to shed hanging in her soft voice.
"We're home, System Command," she said. "It took us a while, but we're home."
There had been no more runaway Peep triumphs like the series of attacks with which Esther McQueen had announced the change in the military management of the PRH, for the Allies had not allowed themselves to become that overconfident a second time. But the momentum which had been with the Alliance for so long had disappeared. It hadn't gone entirely to the Peep side of the board, but it was clearly McQueen and Bukato who were pushing the operational pace now. And unlike Citizen Secretary Kline, McQueen understood she had the ships to lose if spending them bought her victories.
He looked up from the terminal, running a weary hand through hair streaked with more white since the Battle of Basilisk, and grimaced as his eye lit on the star map frozen on the mural wall display in his quarters. The Barnett System still burned the spiteful red of the PRH, and Thomas Theisman had not sat still. When no attack had come from Eighth Fleet—which had been busy protecting what was left of Basilisk Station until a proper replacement could be scraped up from somewhere—Theisman had nipped out from Barnett to retake Seabring in an audacious raid. He'd hit that system and the Barnes System both, and then gotten his striking force back to Barnett before Theodosia Kuzak learned of its activities and reacted to its absence. It was unlikely she could have gotten permission to uncover Trevor's Star to move on Barnett anyway, given the shock which had temporarily paralyzed the Alliance's command structure and political leadership, but Theisman had been so quick that she couldn't have hit him even if she'd had permission.
Which, White Haven thought with admiration-tinged bitterness, only reemphasized the danger of allowing an officer of Theisman's caliber time to recover his balance and plan his own shots.
We should be moving on Barnett right now, the Earl thought. Hell, we should've concentrated Eighth Fleet two years ago, as originally planned, and damned well hit Theisman then! But even granted that we lost that chance a long time ago, we're still back at Trevor's Star and concentrated again, and why the hell did the Admiralty and the Joint Chiefs send us back out here if they didn't mean for us to carry out our original orders?
But he hadn't been given permission to reactivate his original attack plan, and despite his need to vent frustration, he knew why. The Alliance was afraid... and this time it had too much to lose.
He snorted savagely at the thought, yet it was true. He suspected that Queen Elizabeth and Protector Benjamin were as determined as he himself was that the initiative had to be regained, and he had complete faith in Sir Thomas Caparelli's fighting spirit. Lack of courage had never been one of the things he'd held against the burly First Space Lord. But even though Elizabeth and Benjamin were, by any measure, the two most important heads of state in the Alliance, they weren't the only ones, and their smaller allies saw what had happened to Zanzibar and Alizon—and Basilisk—and were terrified that the same would happen to them. Nor had the Star Kingdom or the Protectorate of Grayson maintained as unified a front as their rulers must have desired.
The Manticoran Opposition had been as stunned as anyone else for the first few weeks. But then, as the true scope of the disaster became clear, that had changed. Their leaders had stormed into the public eye, plastering the 'faxes and domestic news services with condemnations of the Cromarty Government's "lax and inefficient," "inexcusably overconfident," and "culpably negligent" conduct of the war. Never mind that the Opposition had done its level best in the decades leading up to that self-same war to ensure that the Star Kingdom would never have had the Navy to survive its opening weeks. Or that it had paralyzed the Star Kingdom's government and delayed military operations for months following the Harris Assassination, and so allowed the Committee of Public Safety to get its feet under it. Nothing in the universe had a shorter half-life than a politician's memory for inconvenient facts, and people like Countess New Kiev, Baron High Ridge, Lady Descroix, and their tame military analysts like Reginald Houseman and Jeremiah Crichton had even shorter memories than most. They sensed an opening, an opportunity to blacken Cromarty and his advisers in the eyes of the electorate, and they'd seized it with both hands.
The political fire on Grayson had come from another source... and been leveled upon a different target. A group of dissident steadholders had coalesced under the leadership of Steadholder Meuller, denouncing not the war as such, but rather the fashion in which Grayson's "so-called allies unfairly—and unwisely—dominate the decision-making process." They knew better than to expect the Grayson people to shrink from the dangers of war, but they had hit a responsive nerve in at least some of their people. Centuries of isolation could not be totally forgotten in a few years, and there were those on Grayson who believed Meuller was right when he implied that their world would be better off if it were to go its own way rather than marrying its military power and policy to someone—like the Star Kingdom—who had obviously miscalculated so hideously.
And listening to all that drivel were the voters of the Star Kingdom and the steaders of Grayson. Men and women who had steeled themselves for the perils of war before the shooting began, but who had become increasingly confident as the actual fighting went on. Few of them had been happy about the war's cost, or about the lives which were being lost, or about rising taxes, reduced civilian services, or any of the hundreds of other petty and not so petty inconveniences they'd been forced to endure. But they had been confident in their navies, sure the ultimate victory would be theirs.
Now they were confident no longer. Esther McQueen had accomplished that much, at least, and the repercussions had been severe. Now all too many voters demanded that the Navy hold all it had taken, as a glacis against additional Peep attacks. They had gotten out of the habit of thinking in the stark terms of victory or slavery, and with the loss of that habit, they had also lost the one of accepting that risks had to be run. That an outnumbered Navy had to take chances to seize and control the initiative. Indeed, they no longer even thought of themselves as outnumbered, for how could an overmatched fleet have accomplished all theirs had? That was why the shock of McQueen's offensives had cut so deep... and why the critics vociferously demanded that "the incumbent incompetents be replaced by new, better informed leaders who will let our incomparable Navy safeguard our star systems and our worlds!"
Which came down in the end to calling the Navy home to "stand shoulder to shoulder" in defense of the inner perimeter... which was the worst possible thing they could do.
White Haven scrubbed a hand over his face and took himself sternly to task. Yes, things were worse now than he remembered their ever having been before. And, yes, the Opposition was making inroads into Alien Summervale's authority and popular support. But the Manticoran electorate was not composed solely of credulous fools. In the long run, he estimated, the damage popular trust in the Cromarty Government had suffered might take years to completely heal, but it would be healed in the end. And quite possibly faster than White Haven might believe at this moment that it could be, given the Queen's unwavering, iron support for her embattled prime minister and his cabinet. As for Grayson... White Haven snorted a laugh. Samuel Meuller might have assembled a coterie of vocal supporters, but they were a definite minority, and Hamish Alexander knew he wouldn't care to be the one who challenged Benjamin Mayhew's strength of will!
Nor was the military front hopeless. Despite heavy losses, Alice Truman, Minotaur, and the carrier's LAC wing had proved the new LAC concept brilliantly at Hancock, and ONI's best estimate was that the Peeps still hadn't figured out exactly what had hit them, though they must obviously have some suspicions. In the meantime, the new construction programs were going full blast. Within another few months, the first of an entire wave of LAC-carriers would be joining the Fleet, and the new Medusa-class—
No, he corrected himself. Not the Medusa-class. For the first time in its history, the Royal Manticoran Navy had followed the lead of a foreign fleet, and the Medusa-class missile pod superdreadnoughts—the wisdom of whose construction no one doubted any longer—had been redesignated as the Harrington-class.
White Haven felt a familiar bittersweet loss as he contemplated the change, but the pain had become less. It would never go completely away. He knew that now. But it had become something he could cope with because he had accepted the nature and depth of his feelings for her. And she would have been proud of the way her namesake had performed at the Battle of Basilisk. Almost as proud as she would have been of how furiously her adopted navy had fought not just at Basilisk but in half a dozen engagements since. The GSN was young, but it continued to expand explosively, and the RMN was beginning to realize its true quality. Manticoran officers had begun to pay it the supreme compliment: they truly were as confident going into battle with GSN units in support as they were with fellow Manticorans.
The Alliance was regaining its balance. It had been knocked back on its heels, but it was still a long way from on the ropes, and while people like Hamish Alexander sparred for time, the massive construction programs behind them were churning out the ships which would take the war to the Peeps again someday much sooner than most people would have believed possible, and—
The chirp of his com interrupted his thoughts, and he hit the acceptance key. Lieutenant Robards' face appeared on it, but White Haven had never seen his aide with an expression like the one he wore. His eyes were huge, and he looked as stunned as if someone had used his head for target practice with a blunt object.
"Nathan? What is it?" the admiral asked quickly, and Robards cleared his throat.
"Sir, I think—" He stopped, with an air of helpless confusion which would have been almost comical if it had been even a trace less deep.
"Go on," White Haven encouraged.
"Admiral, System Surveillance picked up a cluster of unidentified hyper footprints about twelve minutes ago," the Grayson lieutenant said.
"And?" White Haven prompted when he paused once more.
"Sir, they made transit quite close to one of the FTL platforms and were identified almost immediately as Peeps."
"Peeps?" White Haven sat suddenly straighter in his chair, and Robards nodded.
"Yes, Sir." He glanced down at something White Haven presumed was a memo pad display, cleared his throat once more, and read aloud. "Tracking made it five battlecruisers, four heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, and two of their Roughneck-class assault transports."
"What?" White Haven blinked. He couldn't possibly have heard right. That was a decent enough squadron for something like a commerce raid, or possibly even a strike at some lightly picketed rear system, but twelve ships, without even one of the wall among them, wouldn't stand a snowflake's chance in hell against the firepower stationed here at Trevor's Star. And what in the name of sanity would a pair of transports be doing here? They'd be dead meat for any decent warship—even one of the old-fashioned, pre-Shrike LACs—if they moved inside the hyper limit.
"I assume they hypered back out immediately?" he heard himself say. The only logical explanation was that someone on the other side had made a mistake. Perhaps the Peeps were planning a major attack on Trevor's Star and the transport echelon had simply arrived too soon... or the main attack force was late. In either case, the sensible thing for the Peep CO to do would be to flee back into hyper-space—at once.
"No, Sir," Robards said, and drew a deep breath. "They didn't do anything at all, Sir. Except sit there and transmit a message to System Command HQ."
"What sort of message?" White Haven was beginning to be irritated. Whatever ailed his flag lieutenant, prying the facts out of him one by one was like pulling teeth. What in God's name could have someone normally as levelheaded as young Robards so off-balance and hesitant?
"They said— But, of course it can't be, only— I mean, she's—" Robards broke off again and shrugged helplessly. "Sir, I think you'd better see the message for yourself," he said, and disappeared from White Haven's terminal before the earl could agree or disagree.
The admiral frowned ferociously. He and Nathan were going to have to have a little talk about the courtesy due a flag officer, he thought thunderously, and after that they'd—
His thoughts chopped off in a harsh, strangled gasp as another face appeared on his display. Other people might not have recognized it with the hair which framed it reduced to a short, feathery mass of curls and one side paralyzed, but Hamish Alexander had seen that same face in exactly that same condition once before, and his heart seemed to stop beating.
It can't be, he thought numbly. It can't be! She's dead! She's—
His thoughts disintegrated into chaos and incoherence as the shock roared through him, and then the woman on his display spoke.
"Trevor System Command, this is Admiral Honor Harrington." Her voice sounded calm and absolutely professional—or would have, to someone who didn't know her. But White Haven saw the emotion burning in her good eye, heard it hovering in the slurred soprano. "I'm sure no one in the Alliance expected to see me again, but I assure you that the rumors of my recent death have been exaggerated. I am accompanied by approximately one hundred and six thousand liberated inmates of the prison planet Hades, and I expect the arrival of another quarter million or so within the next eleven days—our transports have military hyper generators and we made a faster passage than they will. I regret any confusion or alarm we may have caused by turning up in Peep ships, but they were the only ones we could... appropriate for the voyage."
The right side of her mouth smiled from the display, but her voice went husky and wavered for a moment, and she stopped to clear her throat. White Haven reached out, his fingers trembling, and touched her face on the com as gently as he might have touched a terrified bird, yet the terror was his, and he knew it.
"We will remain where we are, with our drives, sidewalls, weapons, and active sensors down until you've had time to check us out and establish our bona fides," she went on after a moment, struggling to maintain her professional tone, "but I'd appreciate it if you could expedite. We were forced to pack these ships to the deckheads to get all our people aboard, and our life support could be in better shape. We—"
She broke off, blinking hard, and Hamish Alexander's heart was an impossible weight in his chest—heavy as a neutron star and yet soaring and thundering with emotions so powerful they terrified him—as he stared at her face. He was afraid to so much as breathe lest the oxygen wake him and destroy this impossible dream, and he realized he was weeping only when his display shimmered. And then she spoke again, and this time everyone heard the catch in her breath, the proud tears she refused to shed hanging in her soft voice.
"We're home, System Command," she said. "It took us a while, but we're home."
Appendix
(1) Shrike LAC (shown for scale)
(2) Gravitic Detection Array
(3) Weapon Ports
(4) Missile Tubes
(5) Phased Radar Array
(6) Lidar Array
(7) Life Pod Escape Hatches
(8) Life Pod Escape Tubes
(9) LAC Bay Hatch
(10) LAC Bay
(11) Personnel/Missile Loading Tubes
(12) Docking/Umbilical Cradle
(12A) Docking Arms
(13) Life Pod
(14) Isler Corporation GRAVMAK (Gravity-Magnitnaya)
Fusion Reactor Burning Hydrogen/Boron-11 Mix
15) Hydrogen/Boron Feed Channels
(16) Gravity Generators
(17) Magnetic Field Housing
(18) Boat Bay
(19) Radiation/Particle Shield Generator
(20) Sidewall Generator
(21) Vectored Thrust Auxiliary Fusion Reactor Thruster
(22) After Impeller Ring
(23) Broadside Phased Array Radar
(24) Broadside Gravitic Array
* * *
Shrike LAC
(1) Point Defense Laser Cluster
(2) GRASER main armament
(3) Anti-ship Missile Tube
(4) Anti-ship Missile "Revolver" Magazine Cell
(5) Point Defense Missile Tube
(6) Small Craft Hangar
(7) Folding Wing Cutter/Lifeboat
(8) Anti-ship Missile
(9) Sidewall ("Bow Wall") Generator
* * *
(1) Point Defense Laser Cluster Emitters
(2) Standard Beta Node
(3) New "Beta-Squared" Beta Node
(4) Alpha Node
(5) Graser Broadside Armament