War Of Honor

"I don't look forward to a war with the Andies. I don't want one. No one in her right mind does. But," Lady Dame Honor Harrington told her admirals softly, "if they want one, I intend to make them regret their choice.

"Seriously."

Chapter Forty Three

"I'm afraid we have another one, Your Grace."

Honor looked up from the report on her display, and her mouth tightened as she tasted Mercedes Brigham's emotions. The chief of staff's mood wasn't dark enough for a report of heavy casualties, but if there was no death in it, there was something else. Something which had provoked a fresh anxiety in her.

"How bad this time?" Honor asked quietly.

"Not as bad as the last one," Brigham reassured her quickly. "And a hell of a lot better than what happened to Jessica Epps. The dispatch is from Captain Ellis—"

"He has Royalist, doesn't he?" Honor interrupted.

"Yes, Your Grace," Brigham confirmed, and Honor nodded. Royalist was a Reliant —class ship, like Honor's own one and only battlecruiser command, HMS Nike. The Reliants were no longer the latest, most modern ships in the Royal Navy's inventory, but they remained large and powerful units, capable of taking on anything below the wall, and they'd had priority for refits and upgrades.

"He and his division were picketing the Walther System, over in the Breslau Sector. They'd been on station there for just under five days when an Andermani cruiser squadron entered the system. As per your orders, Ellis transmitted a warning to the Andies to stay clear of his ships."

Honor nodded again. Her standing instructions to all of her units now required them to instruct any Andermani warships they might encounter to maintain a minimum separation of twenty million klicks between themselves and any Manticoran or Sidemorian vessel or be fired upon. The same warning carried a brief summary, outlined as dispassionately as possible, of what had happened in Zoraster from the Manticoran viewpoint. She had no doubt that any Andermani skipper who received that warning and had already made up her mind about who'd fired the first shot in Zoraster would be less than impressed by the Manticoran version. In fact, in some cases that summary would probably only inflame tempers which were already ru

Not that it will do all that much good if one of my units does open fire, she thought. But at least my skippers will be covered, whatever Janacek and his geniuses back home decide about my judgment.

"Apparently," Brigham continued, "the Andies weren't impressed by his warning. They split up into two four-ship divisions and started maneuvering to sandwich Ellis between them. According to his report, he was inclined to play tag with them in order to maintain our position on freedom of navigation, but he'd deployed his long-range recon drones, and one of them got close enough to pull a clear visual up the kilt of one Andie wedge. It saw this, Your Grace."

The chief of staff handed over a memo board, and Honor keyed the flatscreen display alive. Unfortunately, its image was too tiny for her to make out any details, so she pressed another control and activated the holographic display, instead. The much larger "light sculpture" version of the imagery appeared above the board, and she frowned. There was something odd about it. . . .

"What are those things?" she murmured, mostly to herself, and felt Nimitz raising his head on the back of her chair to gaze at the imagery with her as he tasted her intent curiosity. Then her lips tightened.

"Those are missile pods," she answered herself, and looked up at Brigham with arched eyebrows.

"More precisely, Your Grace, according to Ellis—and George's first run at the data agrees with him—those are half missile pods. It looks like they sawed a conventional pod in half lengthwise and bolted the resulting abortion onto the ship right at the upper turn of the hull."

"My God." Honor looked back at the imagery and did a quick mental estimate. Assuming that the spacing of the handful of undersized pods she could see was maintained uniformly for the length of the ship between its hammerheads, then the cruiser floating before her had to have mounted at least thirty-five or forty of them. "What about the lower turn?" she asked.

"We don't know, Your Grace. Let's face it, Royalist was dead lucky to get as much as she did. If I had to guess, though, I'd guess they probably mounted them top and bottom both. If it were me, that's certainly what I would have done, and I think we have to assume the Andies are at least as smart as I am." She smiled with absolutely no humor. "Assuming they are top and bottom, George and I estimate they probably have between sixty and eighty of them in each broadside. That gives them a maximum salvo throw weight of between three hundred and four hundred birds."

Honor's lips pursed in a silent whistle of dismay. No non-pod ship in her order of battle could even come close to that heavy a broadside. And mounting the pods directly onto the hull of the ship also put them inside the cruiser's impeller wedge and sidewalls, protecting them from the proximity "soft kills" which threatened pods deployed behind ships on tractors. Which meant the ship would be much freer of the "use them or lose them" constraints which normally affected pods deployed by light and medium combatants.

"Unless they've upgraded their fire control suites massively," she thought out loud, "no ship this size could manage a salvo that heavy."

"No, Your Grace," Brigham agreed. "They wouldn't have the telemetry links, even if they could see past the wedge interference of that many missiles to guide them in the first place. But if they use them right, they can probably fire broadsides of up to fifty, maybe even sixty, missiles each. Assuming that there's some way for them to see around the pods themselves, that it is."

"I see your point." Honor rubbed the tip of her nose in thought. The long row of pods was mounted well clear of the cruiser's standard weapon decks. As Mercedes had observed, they were carried at the turn of the hull, where the central spindle of a warship curled over into the relatively flat top and bottom of her hull. Those areas, protected by the impenetrable roof and floor of her wedge, were effectively unarmored. And they were also where most warships mounted additional active sensor arrays for their missile defenses and offensive fire control. The main arrays would be clear, but not the supporting ones used to manage individual missile telemetry links or for dedicated laser cluster fire control. Which meant that the Andie's pods almost certainly had to be interfering with her ability to see her targets . . . not to mention incoming fire.

"I'll bet you these things are designed to jettison," she told Brigham. "Probably mounted on some sort of external hard point."

"That's what's George and I think," Brigham said with a nod. "For that matter, that was Ellis' conclusion, as well."

"Yes, Ellis." Honor shook herself and turned off the holo display, then leaned back in her chair and frowned at the chief of staff. "You say he got this visual using his long-range drones?"

"Yes, Your Grace. And he doesn't think the Andies spotted them, either. Which is a little reassuring. At least they haven't broken all of Ghost Rider's advantages!"

"Let's not fret ourselves into assigning them superhuman powers, Mercedes," Honor said with a small, crooked smile. "I'm sure they have some additional surprises for us, but by the same token, I'm sure we have some for them. And everything we've seen out of them so far is still effectively a case of their playing catch-up with where we already are. Which inclines me to think that whether they want us to realize it or not, they have to be at least as nervous about what we might be able to do to them as we are about what they might be able to do to us."