House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (22 page)

“What do we make it so far, Trev?” he asked after a moment.

“CIC’s calling it twenty-two of the wall, ten battleships—there could be a couple more of those hiding behind the wedge clutter—twenty to thirty battlecruisers, forty-six cruisers, and thirty or forty destroyers. Looks like they’ve got forty to forty-five of their forts on-line, as well, and there’s one hell of a lot of LACs swanning around in that mess. CIC figures it for a minimum of seven hundred.”

“Um.” White Haven rubbed his chin. Seven hundred
was
a lot of LACs . . . for a navy that didn’t have the RMN’s
Shrikes
or
Ferrets
. Older style LACs simply weren’t effective enough to build in huge numbers, and Esther McQueen must have scraped the bottom of the barrel to put that many in one system. Unless, of course, the PN had started building the things again themselves. Unlike Sonja Hemphill’s brainchildren—his lips quirked as he remembered their monumental clashes . . . and the way a certain Steadholder by the name of Harrington had ripped his head off for being such a stiff-necked idiot about the new weapons mix—they’d be largely useless against hyper-capable warships, but enough of them could still inflict painful losses on the newer LAC types. The exchange rate would be ruinously in favor of the
Shrikes
and the
Ferrets
, but McQueen had already proved herself capable of playing the attrition game when that was her only option.

Not that seven hundred old-style LACs or even twice that many were going to be much of a problem for Alice Truman’s boys and girls.

Assuming they had to fight them at all.

“Range to their forces?”

“We’ve been inbound for thirty-seven minutes, Sir. Range to zero/zero is roughly four hundred sixty-six million klicks—call it twenty-six light-minutes—and we’re up to a smidge over seventy-two hundred KPS. Long way to go yet, even for Ghost Rider, Sir.”

“Agreed. Agreed.” White Haven rubbed his chin some more. The final—or
currently
“final”; the WDB was promising even better ones soon—version of the long-range missiles could reach 96,000 gravities of acceleration. That gave them a powered attack range from rest of almost fifty-one light-seconds at maximum acceleration. By stepping the drives down to 48,000
g
, endurance could be tripled, however, and that upped the maximum powered envelope to well over three and a half light-
minutes
and a terminal velocity of .83
c
. That was crowding the very limits of the fire control technology available even to the Royal Manticoran Navy, however.

But given that the maximum possible engagement range from rest for the
enemy,
even at low accel, was going to be on the order of less than thirty light-
seconds
, things were about to get very ugly for the Peeps.

Thank you, Vice Admiral Adcock,
he thought quietly, thinking about those numbers.
And you, too, I suppose, Sonja. Thank you very, very much.

Citizen Admiral Dimitri accepted another cup of coffee from a signals yeoman. It was good coffee, brewed just the way he liked it, and it tasted like corrosion-strength industrial cleaner. Not surprisingly, he supposed. Five hours and thirty-eight minutes had passed since the Manties’ translation, and the bastards had come the next best thing to four hundred and sixty million kilometers in that time. They were down to just a hair over fifteen million klicks from Enki, decelerating now, and their velocity was back down to a little over ninety-three hundred KPS.

He still didn’t understand their approach, and his brain continued to pick at its apparent illogic like a tongue probing a sore tooth. No doubt they were coming in heavy with missile pods—
he
certainly would have been in their place!—but Manty SDs could pull a lot more than three hundred gees, even with full pod loads on tow. So why had they wasted so much time? And why hadn’t they gone for a least-time course at whatever accel they were willing to use? The logical thing would have been to translate into n-space on a heading that pinned Enki between them and Barnett. As it was, they’d not only come in too far out and too slowly, but they were approaching Enki’s position to intercept at a shallow angle. At the moment, their icons and those of the mobile units positioned to intercept them weren’t even on anything approaching a direct line with the blue dot that marked Enki’s position.

It all looked and felt dreadfully unorthodox, which was enough to make Dimitri instantly suspicious, especially knowing that if that was Eighth Fleet out there, he was up against White Haven, who’d systematically kicked the crap out of every Republican CO he’d ever faced. Which suggested there had to be
some
reason for the Manties’ apparently inept and clumsy approach, even if Dimitri couldn’t come up with a single one that made sense. It was almost as if White Haven was intentionally giving the defenders plenty of time to concentrate their full forces to meet him, but that was ridiculous. Granted, Manty hardware was superior, but there were limits in all things. Not even
Manties
could be ballsy enough to deliberately throw away any chance of catching him before he concentrated. Any flag officer worth his braid schemed furiously in search of some way to catch the defenders with their forces spread out so he could engage and crush them in detail rather than facing all of them at once!

But that seemed to be exactly what White Haven wasn’t doing, Dimitri thought irritably, then shrugged. In another twelve minutes it would no longer matter what the Manty CO thought he
was
doing, because the range would be down to six million klicks. Given the geometry of the Manties’ approach vector, they’d be in his powered missile envelope—technically speaking—for at least two minutes before that, but against Manty electronic warfare, even six million klicks against a closing enemy might be a little optimistic. Which meant he and his people were going to have to take their lumps from the Manties before any of their own birds got home. But he’d be sending the mine-armed drones out in another four minutes, and at least he ought to be able to flush all of his pods before any of the incoming arrived, and—

A shrill, strident alarm sliced through the war room’s tense calm like a buzz saw.

“Coming down on fifteen million kilometers, Sir,” Trevor Haggerston said quietly, and White Haven nodded.

“Anything more on those unidentified bogies?”

“We still can’t be positive, but it looks like most of them are missile pods, Sir. We’re a bit more puzzled by some of the others, though. They’re smaller than pods, but they seem to be bigger than individual missiles ought to be. About the size of a recon drone, actually.”

“I see.” The earl frowned, then shrugged. Missiles or drones, a saturation pattern of heavy warheads should take them out with proximity kills handily enough . . . and before they could do anything nasty.

The Peeps obviously didn’t know it, but they’d been in his powered missile range for well over an hour. Unfortunately, even with his RDs hovering just beyond the range of the Peeps’ weapons, targeting solutions would have been very poor at sixty-five million kilometers . . . not to mention that flight time would have been the next best thing to nine minutes. That was plenty of time for an alert captain to roll ship and take the brunt of the incoming fire on his wedge, and even with Project Ghost Rider’s EW goodies along for company, it might have given the defenders time to achieve effective point defense solutions.

Besides, there was no need to do any such thing. He still had over twelve minutes before he entered the
Peeps’
effective envelope, and each of his hollow-cored
Harrington/Medusas
could get off sixty six-pod salvos in that time. That was over a hundred and eleven thousand multidrive missiles from the SD(P)s alone.

But they
weren’t
alone, and he checked his plot one last time.

Between the input from his drones and the long, unhurried time his fire control officers had been given to refine their data, his ships had tight locks on most of the Peep capital ships. Of course, “tight lock” at this sort of range didn’t mean what it would have at lower ranges, and accuracy was going to suffer accordingly. On the other hand, the Peeps hadn’t yet deployed a single decoy, and their jammers were only beginning to come on line.

“Very well, Commander Haggerston,” he said formally. “You may fire.”

Citizen Admiral Dimitri’s mug hit the floor, but he never noticed. Neither the sound of breaking china nor the sudden pool of steaming coffee registered even peripherally, for he could
not
be seeing what he saw.

But the sensors and the computers didn’t care what their human masters thought was possible. They insisted on presenting the preposterous data anyway, and Dimitri heard other voices, several shrill with rising panic, as the war room’s normal discipline disintegrated as completely as his broken cup. It was inexcusable. They were trained military men and women, manning the nerve center of the system’s entire defense structure. Above all else, it was their duty to remain calm and collected, exerting the control over their combat units upon which any hope of victory depended.

But Dimitri couldn’t blame them, and even if he could have, it wouldn’t have mattered. No conceivable calm, collected response could have affected the outcome of this battle in the least.

No one in the history of interstellar warfare had ever seen anything like the massive salvo coming in on his ships. Those missiles were turning out at least ninety-six
thousand
gravities, launched from pods and shipboard tubes which were themselves moving at over nine thousand kilometers per second, and that didn’t even consider the initial velocity imparted to them by their launchers’ grav drivers. A corner of Dimitri’s brain wanted to believe the Manties had gone suddenly insane and thrown away their entire opening salvo at a range from which hits would be impossible. That the incredible acceleration those missiles were cranking meant they couldn’t possibly have more than a minute of drive endurance. That they would be dead, unable to maneuver against his evading units, when they reached the ends of their runs.

But one thing the Earl of White Haven was not was insane. If he’d launched from that range, his birds had the range to attack effectively . . . and none of Dimitri’s did.

He watched numbly as the missiles roared down on his wall. The entire front of the salvo was a solid wall of jamming and decoys, and he clamped his jaw as he pictured the panic and terror crashing through the men and women on those ships.
His
men and women. He’d put them out there in the sober expectation that their ships would be destroyed, that many—even most—of them would be killed. But he’d at least believed they’d be able to strike back before they died. Now their point defense couldn’t even
see
the missiles coming to kill them.

It seemed to take forever, and he heard someone groan behind him as the Manty wall belched a
second
salvo, just as heavy as the first. Which was also impossible. That
had
to be the firepower of a full pod load out for every ship in White Haven’s wall. He
couldn’t
have still more of them on tow! But apparently no one had told the Manties what they could and couldn’t do, and yet a third launch followed.