In Enemy Hands

"Hm." Honor rubbed her nose once more, then quirked an eyebrow at Mayhew.

"Jasper?"

"Commander McGinley’s certainly got a point, My Lady," the lieutenant conceded, "but her conclusion rests on two assumptions. One is that the Peeps won't cut loose the battlecruisers needed to take out one of our system pickets, and the other is that the lighter forces available to them would willingly attack our shipping. In response to the first, we can only guess at exactly what higher command authority is likely to assign to Theisman. Yes, they've probably written Barnett off. I know ONIs concluded that, on the basis of available shipping, they can't do anything else, and the logic is compelling. But even if they decide Barnett is expendable, they may make a fight for it anyway. I certainly would, if only to compel us to commit the maximum strength against that system and away from operations around Trevor."

He paused, and Honor nodded noncommittally. Mayhew was sticking his neck out by disagreeing with the received wisdom handed down by better paid, higher ranking heads. It took a certain amount of courage, or ego, for a mere lieutenant to dispute ONIs view, but Mayhew's very lack of seniority might actually make it easier for him in at least one sense. He could disagree and offer alternative hypotheses all day long, but he lacked the rank to make any of his interpretations stick. Even if one of his seniors chose to act upon his advice, the ultimate responsibility (and blame) for the outcome would rest not on Mayhew, but on the senior officer in question.

None of which changed the fact that the strategy Mayhew had just sketched out was the same one which Honor would have adopted in the Peeps' place.

"In response to the second point, that lighter Peep units would willingly attack our shipping," the lieutenant resumed, "I'd simply point out that our local shipping patterns have been materially altered to consolidate our escort capability over the past months. We're sending out more ships per convoy, but the total number of convoys, and thus potential targets, has been cut in half, which means, theoretically, at least, that the available escort strength per convoy has been doubled. The Peeps may not know that yet, though anyone sent out to raid our shipping lanes will catch on in a hurry. But what if they already realize how our deployments are shifting? Command Central is sending us out to escort a single convoy, which means that there will be six heavy cruisers waiting for any raiders. That comes close to matching the strength available to more than a third of our local system pickets, so why go after a moving target? The enemy would have to spread his available strength widely to locate a convoy in hyper, even if he knew its exact schedule, and that very dispersal would mean he was unlikely to have enough combat power to engage its escort if he managed to find it at all. On the other hand, star systems don't dodge around. He knows exactly where they are, and if he does have battlecruisers available and chooses to operate them aggressively, he'd be like a spider in a web. If he managed to seize a system, it would be impossible to warn any ships already en route to it until they arrived... at which point his concentrated strength would be available to take out any escorts before he massacred the merchantmen.

Especially if he could suck them inside the hyper limit to keep them from simply translating out on him."

Honor frowned and rubbed her chin thoughtfully. She considered for several seconds, then lowered her hand to point a long index finger at McGinley.

"If I understand correctly, you disagree with Jasper not over what would constitute a rational Peep strategy but over Theisman's probable resources. Is that correct?"

"Essentially," McGinley agreed. "So far we don't have any reports of attacks on convoys in the area, so I'm also inclined to doubt that the Peeps have caught onto our new shipping patterns yet, but that's a minor point. If, in fact, they have the strength to punch out one of our pickets even temporarily, there's no question but that it would be the smart move on their part. Not only would they get the shot at incoming traffic that Jaspers just described, but they'd also have an excellent opportunity to inflict significant losses on the picket they attacked. I simply find it difficult to believe that they're willing to pour more capital ships down a rat hole for a system they can't hope to hold in the end. And even if they did send him any substantial reinforcements, I question whether or not Theisman would dare risk them in some sort of unauthorized forward operation."

"Thomas Theisman might fool you, Marcia," Honor murmured. She rocked her chair back and forth for several thoughtful moments, then focused once more on McGinley.

"You may well be right about Barnett's resources," she said, "but I think Jasper has his finger on our worst potential danger. Whether it actually happens or not, we have to assume it's at least possible that the enemy will choose to attack our forward pickets rather than carry out search and destroy operations against convoys between star systems. How do we protect ourselves against both possibilities?"

"If we had a larger escort, I'd vote for the Sarnow Deployment," McGinley replied promptly, and Honor nodded once more.

Any commerce raider knew that the best chance to hit a merchantman (or a convoy of them) was immediately after it translated from hyper— to normal-space, before its sensors had time to locate potential threats and while its velocity was at its lowest. Since the general volumes in which traffic was likely to make translation could be predicted with a fair degree of accuracy, placing a raider in position to hit merchantmen at their most vulnerable wasn't particularly difficult. Covering all probable target areas might require a goodly number of hulls, but their actual placement was straightforward.

By the same token, the best relative position from which to attack a convoy, whether in hyper— or n-space, was from directly ahead of it, where its velocity would carry it straight towards you. The execution of any effective evasion maneuver would require its ships to overcome a potentially enormous relative closing velocity, and no vast, lumbering merchantman, with its commercial grade inertial compensator and impellers, could match the acceleration and maneuverability of a warship. As a consequence, raiders preferred to get ahead of a convoy and let it come to them.

The classic defensive gambit was for the escort commander to place the majority of her strength ahead of her charges, so as to put her warships between them and the most probable axis of threat while one or two pickets watched the rear as a hedge against the lesser threat of a raider overtaking from astern. Against pirates, whose primary goal was to take prizes (and those prizes' cargoes) intact, that remained RMN convoy doctrine, but against Peep commerce raiders, the Navy had adopted the new strategy proposed by Vice Admiral Mark Sarnow. Instead of massing the escorts ahead, they were concentrated on the flanks and astern of the convoy, with relatively weak scouting elements deployed at least thirty to forty minutes of flight time ahead of the entire formation.

It made sense, given that Peeps, unlike pirates, were interested only in denying a convoys cargo to the Alliance. They might prefer capturing it, but simply destroying it would do the job just as well, so from their perspective, it only made sense to open fire the moment they reached attack range of the merchies, which, in turn, made it imperative for the escorts to keep them out of range. The new doctrine placed the escorts' main fighting strength in a position which let them use their superior speed to intercept a threat coming in on any attack vector, and the forward scouting elements served to "sanitize" the convoys projected course in order to prevent surprises. It also, of course, meant that the ships assigned to break trail were the most exposed units of the escort, but that couldn't be helped, and the scouts should have time to fall back on the main body of the escort before they could be overwhelmed in isolation.