War Of Honor

"It looks like we're going with Delta-Three, at least initially," Benedict told her.

"Time till launch?" she asked, and he checked the launch clock on his console.

"Thirty-one minutes," he said. "Station Engineering started bringing the nodes up on remote as soon as GQ sounded. They'll be optimal in another twenty-eight minutes."

"What about missile loadout?"

"Nothing on my screen, Skip," Benedict replied with a shrug. "Looks like we're going to launch with a standard package."

Flanagan managed not to stare at him in disbelief, which would undoubtedly have been terrible for morale, but it wasn't easy. The standard missile package consisted of a little bit of everything and not enough of anything. It was intended as a standby weapons load, one that gave at least limited capability under almost any circumstances. But it was effectively an emergency load. Standard tactical doctrine assumed that any COLAC would tailor his missile loads to the tactical mission—deleting the ordnance he wouldn't need to make room for the weapons he did—unless he found himself forced to launch under emergency conditions at minimal range. That wasn't the case here. Even if the Peeps had been able to match the extended range of the RMN's capital ship missiles, it would have taken them the better part of three hours to get into effective attack range of "the Tamale." That was plenty of time for the 1007th to strip the standby packages off of its LACs and replace them with a load that made sense, especially since the high-speed magazine tubes were the one part of T-001's conversion which had always worked perfectly.

But apparently al-Salil and Schumacher didn't see things that way.

Sera Flanagan hovered on the brink of comming the COLAC to suggest that it might be time for a little sanity. She had no doubt that most of the group's perso

She almost did it. She ought to have done it, and she knew it. But she was the most junior squadron commander of the group, and she knew precisely how al-Salil would react. Given the circumstances, she had no particular desire to spend any of the time she had left in fruitless debate with a feckless incompetent. Or to be stripped of command and left behind when her people went off to die.

"Override Group's ammunitioning instructions," she told Benedict flatly. The exec looked at her, and she shrugged. "We've got time if you get right on it," she said. "Use the squadron interlinks to the station magazine queue. I want a Lima-Roger-Two package loaded to all ships ASAP. Anybody in the station crew asks any questions, refer them to me."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am!" Benedict said sharply, and she nodded and reached for her own skinsuit.

She peeled out of her uniform and started climbing into the skinsuit with the lack of body modesty which was part and parcel of LAC operations here in Tequila. While she did, she heard Benedict working at his console, and she bared her teeth in an almost-smile.

Lima-Roger-Two—or "Standard Missile Load, Long-Ranged Intercept, Mod Two"—was hardly a tailor-made armament package, but it would give Flanagan's LACs at least some chance of penetrating the envelope of a superdreadnought's defensive fire. It was designed to help LACs which had to go out and meet heavy combatants from outside the supporting missile range of their own wall of battle. As such, it was EW-heavy, with emphasis on counter missiles, jammers, and decoys.

It wasn't much, she thought harshly as she sealed the skinsuit. It was simply all she could offer her people under the circumstances.

"Missile reload complete in approximately nine minutes, Ma'am," Benedict reported formally. "Time to launch now eleven-point-three minutes." He looked up from his displays. "It'll be tight, Skip," he said much more informally, "but we'll make it."

"Good," Flanagan said, picturing the high-speed missile pallets and robotic arms blurring and flashing as they rearranged Switchblade's missile loads. "Any reaction from Captain al-Salil?" she asked after a moment.

"No, Ma'am," Benedict replied in a painfully neutral tone, and Flanagan snorted mentally.

Of course there wasn't anything from al-Salil. And there'd probably be precious little in the way of any sort of briefing on the battle plan he undoubtedly didn't have. This was not only going to be an ugly battle, it was also going to the most fucked up one since Elvis Santino got his entire task group wiped out at Seaford.

And there was absolutely nothing Sarah Flanagan could do to change that.

Vice Admiral Agnes de Groot studied the flag deck master plot in a mood of pronounced satisfaction.

De Groot had approached Operation Thunderbolt with less than total enthusiasm. Not because she didn't want to get some of the Navy's own back from the Manties. And not because she didn't agree with President Pritchart that the Star Kingdom of Manticore damned well deserved to have its ass kicked up between its ears over its diplomatic doubledealing and chicanery. Not even because she disagreed with the ops plan's underlying assumptions or strategy.

No, de Groot's reservations had stemmed from the fact that the Staff had expressly ruled out any pre-attack reco

Agnes de Groot had risen to flag rank in a fleet which had experienced a seemingly unending series of drubbings—interrupted only occasionally by something like Operation Icarus—at the hands of the Manticoran Alliance. In light of that experience, she'd found it . . . difficult to accept NavInt's estimates of the enormous decline in the efficiency of the Royal Manticoran Navy. She'd been certain that the spooks had to be overestimating the degree to which the Manties had lost their edge. Or thrown it away, if there was a difference. Which meant that she had also found it difficult to accept that they could have been stupid enough to reduce their picket in Tequila to the levels NavInt insisted they had.

She knew all about the reports the intelligence types had generated. But she also knew that the data on which those reports were based had come solely from the civilian-grade sensors of merchantmen passing through the system. It wouldn't have been hard for any navy, and especially not for one with the Manties' EW capabilities, to hide an entire fleet from a merchie's sensor suite, and de Groot had been privately certain that that must be what had happened.

It seemed she'd been wrong.

Her own recon drones were twelve million klicks—over forty light-seconds—ahead of her screen, with a secondary shell thrown out to cover her flanks and rear. While she was always prepared to recognize the Manticorans' supremacy in the field of electronic warfare, she found it difficult to believe that she wouldn't have gotten at least a sniff of any heavy units closing to missile range of her own command. Of course, there was missile range, and then there was missile range. Judging from their performance immediately before the cease-fire, Manty multi-drive missiles had a powered attack range of somewhere around sixty-five million klicks, which was at least eight million more than the RHN's new weapons could manage. But not even Manties were going to score many hits against alert targets at ranges of better than three and a half light-minutes. To be effective, they were going to have to come a lot closer than that, and her platforms should have started getting a sniff of them well before they got within five light-minutes of the outer shell, much less her actual starships.