War Of Honor

Her Third Fleet could be in only one place at a time, unless she wanted to accept an extremely dangerous dispersion of its strength. In theory, the forts could deal with most attacks on the terminus itself. Actually, calling them "forts" was something of a misnomer. To most people, the term "fort" implied a fixed fortification, something ponderous and immobile. But while the terminus forts were certainly ponderous, they were not—quite—immobile. Instead, they might be better thought of as enormous sublight superdreadnoughts. Ships so huge that their low acceleration made them totally unsuited to mobile operations, but which remained capable of at least minimal combat maneuvers . . . and which could generate the impeller wedges which were the first line of defense for any warship.

But for all their massive size, thick armor, and potent weaponry, they—like Benjamin the Great—were an obsolescent design. Their rate of fire in a missile engagement was only a fraction of that which a Harrington —class ship could produce. If they had time to deploy missile pods before a battle, they could throw stupendous salvos as long as the pods lasted, of course. But that was another way of saying they could fire for as long as no one could get warheads close enough to take out their pods with proximity kills.

When only the Manticoran Alliance had possessed SD(P)s, no one had worried particularly about pod vulnerability. First, because no other navy in space could produce the weight of fire an SD(P) was capable of, and, second, because no other navy in space could match the range of the Alliance's multi-drive missiles. Which meant that the forts' pods would be able to wreak havoc on any attacker before that attacker could possibly get close enough to kill their remaining pods. But the navy Thomas Theisman had built did have SD(P)s. And it was just possible that those SD(P)s had multi-drive missiles of their own.

And under those circumstances, pod vulnerability became a very serious concern, indeed.

All of which helped to explain why a conscientious system commander like Theodosia Kuzak had been so unhappy about her mutually contradictory defense obligations. The official Admiralty view, that there was no evidence that the forts could no longer look after themselves against anything the Peeps might bring to bear against them, was cold comfort for the officer on the spot. Completely ignoring the potential consequences for her career if the Peeps managed to get in and destroy the forts, the sheer loss of life such attack would entail had undoubtedly been enough to give her nightmares. So it was with enormous relief that she had turned responsibility for supporting the forts over to MacDo

"If you were the Peeps, and you were pla

"I asked myself those same questions a lot when I was trying to take the system away from the Peeps," White Haven replied. "The biggest problem is that the terminus and the i

"Granted," MacDo

"Oh, certainly!" White Haven gri

"That's not exactly the way I heard it, My Lord," MacDo

"Well, yes," the earl said with a slightly uncomfortable expression. "It was something close to a council of despair, you understand. Esther McQueen was commanding here at the time, and she was a holy terror. Just between you and me, I've often thought that she may well have been a better tactician than I was, and she was a devilishly good strategist, as well. She'd forted up here with battleships and superdreadnoughts in a defense in depth, and however I maneuvered, she managed to stay close enough to keep me from having a free hand for either objective. So I settled in to convince her that I was prepared for what amounted to a siege of the i

"So basically, you forced the Peeps to commit to protecting one objective, then hit the other one with a surprise attack," MacDo

"Yes. But I had certain advantages Theisman and his people wouldn't have in attacking the system. Despite the disadvantages a fleet faces in using a junction as an avenue of attack, the element of surprise tends to offset them to a considerable degree. But Theisman won't have a friendly fleet sitting at the other end of the terminus. So he can't really threaten it from two directions at once, the way I did. That would have given Theodosia the opportunity to repeat McQueen's defensive deployments against him.

"In the end, I suspect he could probably have taken her anyway. If our more pessimistic assumptions about what he may have added to his fleet mix without mentioning it to anyone are accurate, the odds swing even further in his favor. But in answer to your question, if I were him, I'd concentrate on the i

"But as long as the Star Kingdom continues to hold the terminus, it can always reinforce or counterattack," MacDo

"That assumes it has something to counterattack with," White Haven said in a much grimmer tone, and waved a hand at the gleaming icons of the i

"If he pulled that off, he could deal with anything we had left with relative ease. To be perfectly honest, the only remaining counterweight the Alliance would have would be your own fleet, and Grayson would find itself facing much the same quandary the Manticore System faces. How much of your home fleet can you afford to commit to offensive operations?"