Страница 110 из 128
The chief of staffs vicious voice carried an outright hatred he would never have allowed to show a month before. It cut like a lash, but Honeker didn't even bat an eyelid. He'd had plenty of time during the voyage here to realize he was just as doomed as Tourville and his officers. He supposed he should blame Tourville for that, but he couldn't. He'd gone into it with open eyes, and he was still convinced the Navy officer had been right. Cordelia Ransom's determination to have Honor Harrington judicially murdered was going to be a disaster for everyone, not just for the people who'd tried to prevent it. The Solarian League would be almost as infuriated as the Manties and their allies, which could have devastating consequences for the movement of technology from the League to the PRH, and altogether too many members of the Republic’s own military would be just as sickened and shamed by it as Tourville had predicted. And quite aside from all the pragmatic considerations that made executing her an act of lunacy, trying to keep Harrington alive had been the right thing to do morally, as well.
No, much as he regretted, and feared, the consequences, Honeker couldn't fault Tourville for making the effort or enlisting his own tacit support. And that had produced an odd effect on Everard Honeker. He'd come aboard Count Tilly, and before that aboard Tourville’s old flagship, Rash al-Din, to spy on him for StateSec and the Committee of Public Safety, and though he'd learned to like the aggressive, hard-fighting rear admiral, he'd never forgotten he was Tourville's keeper. That there must always be that sense of separation, of standing apart and watching warily for signs of unreliability.
But the separation had vanished now. Perhaps it was only because Honeker knew they were both doomed, yet it was a vast relief nonetheless. And partly, he knew, it was because he no longer had to lie, to others or to himself, to justify actions he'd always known deep inside couldn't be justified. By betraying and condemning him for trying to do his duty despite its own idiocy, the system had finally freed him from his bondage to it, and he realized, now, that "unreliables" like Lester Tourville and his staff were far better champions of the cause he'd once thought the Committee served than people like Cordelia Ransom could ever be.
Unaware of the thoughts behind his people's commissioner's silence, Tourville simply nodded to Bogdanovich, for the citizen captain was obviously correct. The entire Cerberus System was a monumental tribute to the institutional paranoia of the PRH’s security services, old and new alike. Its coordinates weren't even in Count Tilly's astrogation database, for the very existence of the system, much less its location, had been classified by the Office of Internal Security when the old regime first authorized Camp Charon's construction. Even today, or perhaps especially today, that information was a fanatically guarded secret known only to StateSec, and the fact that no one else had the slightest idea of where to find it was but the first layer of a defense in depth.
In all his years of naval service, Tourville had seldom seen orbital defenses as massive as those which surrounded Hades, otherwise known as Cerberus-B-2, and its three largish moons. The data on it available to Count Tilly was severely limited, but Citizen Captain Vladovich had given her a fragmentary download when it was assumed she would accompany Tepes all the way in. He'd had to, for the planet-moon system was literally smothered with firepower which would have made short work of any ship which made a single wrong move. Yet even a cursory glance at Vladovich's information had been enough to show that StateSec's chronic distrust had produced a bizarre defensive arrangement whose like neither Tourville nor any member of his staff had ever imagined.
There wasn't a single ma
To be sure, minefields and energy platforms were cheaper than ma
He didn't know the answer to that, and he doubted he ever would. Nor did he understand why they'd bothered with orbital defenses at all. If they weren't going to let the Navy know where the system was and put a picket force into it, then all the mines and remote energy platforms in the galaxy were ultimately useless, for a planet suffered from one enormous tactical disadvantage: it couldn't dodge. An attacker always knew exactly where it was, and that meant a single battlecruiser, probably even a heavy cruiser, could take out every weapon orbiting Hades with old-fashioned nuclear warheads launched on purely ballistic courses from beyond the defenses' own range. A few dozen fifty or sixty-megaton detonations would blow gaping holes in the massive, interlocking shells of mines, and not even modern hardening could have prevented the EMP from at least temporarily crippling the electronics of any spaceborne platform that survived outright destruction. He supposed ground-based missiles on the planet or its moons (if, in fact, there were some) would survive, but any competent defensive pla
The only explanation he could come up with was that whoever had ordered the immense (and wasted) expenditure to put this abortion together hadn't bothered to consult a competent defensive pla
But whatever the rationale behind the emplacements, Yuri was right; the paranoiacs who'd put them up would never allow a warship ma