War Of Honor

They were all dead . . . and for nothing.

The thought stabbed through Sarah Flanagan's mind with cold, unspeakable bitterness as she realized how utterly the Royal Navy had failed in its most basic responsibilities to its Queen and to its own people. It wasn't just al-Salil and Schumacher after all. It was the entire Navy, from ONI to Flanagan herself, and something deep inside her—the something which had sent her into her Queen's uniform in the first place—shriveled in shame.

The Peeps had CLACs . . . and no one had even suspected it. Or, even worse, if anyone had, they'd kept their suspicions to themselves. And this was the result. Disaster unmitigated.

Even as the huge cloud of LACs flashed towards her, some detached observer in her brain was visualizing all of the other system pickets. Most of them, unlike Tequila, had at least a division of capital ships, or a battlecruiser squadron, or a dozen cruisers or so, to back up the LACs expected to bear the brunt of system defense. But it wasn't going to matter. If the Peeps had committed three CLACs to Tequila, where they had to know the picket was so understrength, then they'd committed more to the systems where they expected something approaching respectable resistance. And no one in any of those systems knew what was headed for them any more than al-Salil and Schumacher had.

It would be like an avalanche. Not one of snow and tumbling boulders, but of laser heads and grasers. Waves of LACs and thundering broadsides. Of broken Manticoran starships and shattered light attack craft. And there was nothing at all that anyone could do to stop it. Not now.

She heard her own voice issuing orders, overriding the COLAC's targeting designations. Her own Shrikes' tac officers responded quickly, almost as if they didn't realize how complete the catastrophe was. She heard al-Salil frantically issuing commands of his own, but she paid them little heed. They were half incoherent to begin with, and even if they hadn't been, it was too late.

Her squadron launched even while al-Salil was still gibbering away. She launched on her own authority, with no orders, and at the oncoming enemy LACs rather than the starships whose defenses her Shrikes' light missile loads could never have penetrated.

Then she hunkered down in her command chair, braced her forearms on the armrests, and watched the holocaust come.

De Groot grimaced as a single Manty LAC squadron launched every bird it had. The rotary launchers which were the central feature of modern LAC design couldn't be "flushed" in a single salvo the way the old-style box launchers could be. But they could come close, and that single squadron got every offensive missile away before her own squadrons reached launch range.

That fire reached deep into her LACs' formation. Eighteen of them were destroyed outright. Seven more were crippled, five so badly that there wouldn't be any point in repairing them. Another eight took lighter damage.

But then it was the turn of the remaining seven hundred and sixty Cimeterres.

Commander Clapp's "triple ripple" roared outward. The magazines of two hundred of the Republican vessels fed that onrushing wave of missiles. The other five hundred and sixty held their fire, waiting.

Agnes de Groot watched the first wave of ferocious detonations sweeping away Manty EW drones like a broom of brimstone. Even from here, she could almost feel the despair enveloping the enemy as they realized what was happening, but it was far too late for them to do anything about it.

The second wave of explosions lashed at the Manties, hashing their sensors, crippling their onboard electronics ever so briefly. And then, exactly as Clapp had predicted, the third wave of missiles swept through the hopelessly disorganized Manticoran defensive envelope.

Thirty-three Manticoran LACs survived the triple ripple.

None of them survived the single massive salvo which followed it up.

De Groot's total losses were less than forty.

Chapter Fifty Six

"We're coming up on translation in five minutes, Sir," Lieutenant Commander Akimoto said.

"Thank you, Joyce." Admiral Wilson Kirkegard thanked his staff astrogator as gravely as if he hadn't been watching the translation clock for the last hour.

"You're welcome, Sir," Akimoto replied, and the grin she gave him told him that she knew perfectly well that her formal a

Kirkegard smiled back, then turned to Captain Janina Auderska, his chief of staff.

"Any last-minute details waiting to bite us on the ass, Janina?" he asked quietly.

"Can't think of any, Sir," she said, wrinkling her nose in thought. "Of course, if I could think of them ahead of time, they wouldn't be waiting to bite us on the ass, I suppose."

"As profound an analysis as I've ever heard," Kirkegard approved, and she chuckled.

"Sorry. Bad habit of mine to indulge myself in the obvious when I'm nervous."

"Well, you're not alone in that," Kirkegard assured her, and turned his attention back to the maneuvering plot as his overstrength task group headed towards the alpha wall. He spared the visual display a brief glance, struck even now by the familiar, flickering beauty of his flagship's Warshawski sails. He could pick out the sails of at least another half-dozen of his starships, but he had other things on his mind and the maneuvering plot gave him a far more accurate idea of their positions.

He had less carrier support than some of the other attack forces set up by Operation Thunderbolt, but he shouldn't need it, either. Maastricht, according to NavInt, was picketed by a single reinforced division of pre-pod superdreadnoughts, supported by one CLAC and a battlecruiser squadron. Given the draw-down in Manticoran naval units, that was a fairly hefty picket for a single system which was far less important to the Manticoran Alliance than it was to the Republic of Haven. And by the standards of the earlier war years, it should have been able to give an excellent account of itself even against a task group as large as Kirkegard's.

But those standards no longer obtained . . . as Kirkegard was about to teach the Manties.

"Admiral Kirkegard should be hitting Maastricht just about now, Sir," Commander Francis Tibolt, chief of staff for Task Force Eleven observed, and Admiral Chong Chin-ri nodded.

"I'm sure Wilson has the situation well in hand," the tall, dark haired admiral agreed. "Do we?"

"Unless the Manties have run substantial reinforcements into Thetis on us at the last minute without NavInt catching them at it," Tibolt replied.

"I suppose there's nothing anyone can do about that possibility," Chong agreed. "Not that a proper chief of staff wouldn't be busy reassuring me that they couldn't possibly have done that."

"Believe me, Sir. If I'd observed any signs of pre-battle jitters, I'd be reassuring the hell out of you."

"They're there," Chong told him. "I'm just better at concealing them than most."

"That's one way to put it, I guess," Tibolt said with a smile, and Chong chuckled, then glanced at the date/time display.

"Well, we'll probably be finding out whether or not they're justified in about forty minutes," he said.

"That's fu

"What?" Lieutenant Jack Vojonovic looked up from the solitaire game on his hand comp.

"Did I miss something important on the shipping schedule?" Ensign Eldridge Beale replied, turning his head to look at his training officer.

"What are you talking about?" Vojonovic set the hand comp aside and swiveled his chair to face his own display. "We don't have anything big on the ship sched until tomorrow, Eldridge. Why? Did you—"