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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The faces in Nike's briefing room were unhappy, and Honor leaned back in her chair as Commander Houseman unburdened himself.
"... realize the gravity of the situation, Admiral Sarnow, but surely Sir Yancey must realize we can't possibly hold this system against an attack in force! We don't begin to have the firepower, and—"
"That's enough, Commander." There was no expression at all in Mark Sarnow's voice, but Houseman closed his mouth with a snap, and the admiral bestowed a wintry smile upon the assembled commodores, captains, and staff officers of what was about to become Task Group Hancock 001.
"I asked for your frank opinions, ladies and gentlemen, and I want them. But let us stick to the relevant, if you please. Whether or not our orders are the best possible ones is beside the point. Our concern has to be making them work. Correct?"
"Absolutely, Sir." Commodore Van Slyke gave his chief of staff a rare public look of disapproval and nodded emphatically.
"Good." Sarnow ignored Houseman's flush and looked at Commodore Banton, his senior divisional commander. "Have you and Commander Turner completed that study Ernie and I discussed with you Monday, Isabella?"
"Just about, Sir, and it looks like Captain Corell and Dame Honor are right. The sims say it should work, anyway, but we've got to nail down exactly what fire control modifications will be required, and the availability numbers are still up in the air. I'm afraid Gryphon has other things on her mind than our data requests just now." Banton allowed herself a smile that matched her admiral's, and one or two people actually chuckled.
"At the moment, Sir, I'd have to say that, unless Admiral Parks changes his mind and takes them with him, there should be enough pods to pull it off. I gave Captain Corell our latest figures when we came aboard this evening, and Commander Turner is working out the software changes now."
Sarnow glanced at Corell, who nodded in confirmation. A few people—notably Commander Houseman—looked skeptical, but Honor felt a trickle of satisfaction. The concept might be a tactical antique, yet its very outdatedness should keep the Peeps from expecting it in the first place.
A parasite pod was nothing more than a drone slaved to the fire control of the ship towing it astern on a tractor. Each pod mounted several, usually a half-dozen or so, single-shot missile launchers similar to those LACs used. The idea was simple—to link the pod with the ship's internal tubes and launch a greater number of birds in a single salvo in order to saturate an opponent's defenses—but they hadn't been used in a fleet engagement for eighty T-years because advances in antimissile defenses had rendered them ineffective.
The old pods' launchers had lacked the powerful mass-drivers which gave warships' missiles their initial impetus. That, in turn, gave them a lower initial velocity, and since their missiles had exactly the same drives as any other missile, they couldn't make up the velocity differential unless the ship-launched birds were stepped down to less than optimal power settings. If you didn't step your shipboard missiles down, you lost much of the saturation effect because the velocity discrepancy effectively split your launch into two separate salvos. Yet if you did step them down, the slower speed of your entire launch not only gave the enemy more time to evade and adjust his ECM, but also gave his active defenses extra tracking and engagement time.
It was the tracking time that was the real killer, for point defense had improved enormously over the last century. Neither LAC launchers nor the old-style pods had been able to overcome the advantage it now held (which was one reason the Admiralty had stopped all new LAC construction twenty Manticoran years ago). Moreover, the RMN's data on the People's Navy's point defense, available in no small part thanks to Captain Dame Honor Harrington, indicated that the Peeps' missile defenses, while poorer than Manticore's, were still more than sufficient to eat old-style pod salvos for breakfast.
But the Weapons Development Board, not without opposition from its then head, Lady Sonja Hemphill, had resurrected the pods and given them a new and heavier punch. Hemphill rejected the entire concept as "retrograde," but her successor at the WDB had pushed the project energetically and Honor couldn't quite see the logic behind Hemphill's objections. Given her vocal advocacy of material-based tactics, Honor would have expected her to embrace the pods with enthusiasm... unless it was simply that something inside the admiral equated "old" weapon systems with "inherently inferior" ones.
As far as Honor was concerned, an idea's age didn't necessarily invalidate it—especially not with the new launchers, whose development Hemphill herself had overseen. Of course, Hemphill hadn't intended them to be used in something as ancient as pods. She'd been looking for a way to make LACs effective once more as part of the tactical approach her critics called the "Sonja Swarm." The new launchers were far more expensive than traditional LAC launchers, which was the official core of Hemphill's opposition to "wasting" them in pods, but expense hadn't bothered her where the LACs were concerned. Building one with the new launchers pushed its price tag up to about a quarter of a destroyer's, especially with the fire control upgrade needed to take full advantage of the launchers' capabilities, yet Hemphill had lobbied hard for the resumption of LAC construction, and she'd succeeded.
Like most of her jeune ecole fellows, she still regarded LACs as expendable, single-salvo assets (which didn't endear her to their crews), but at least she'd seen the virtue in increasing their effectiveness while they lasted. The fact that it also gave them a better chance of survival was probably immaterial to her thinking, but that was all right with Honor. She didn't care why Horrible Hemphill did something, on the rare occasions when it was the right something. And however loudly the cost effectiveness analysts might complain, Honor had a pretty shrewd notion how LAC skippers felt about the notion of living through an engagement.
But the point at hand was that the same improvements could be applied to parasite pods, and, despite Hemphill's objections, they had been. Of course, the new pods—with ten tubes each, not six—were intended for ships of the wall, which had plenty of redundant fire control to manage them, not battlecruisers. But it sounded like Turner was finding the answer to that, and their missiles were actually heavier than the standard ship-to-ship birds. With the new lightweight mass-drivers BuShips had perfected, their performance could equal or even exceed that of normal, ship-launched missiles, and their warheads were more destructive to boot. The pods were clumsy, of course, and towing them did unfortunate things to a warship's inertial compensator field, which held down maximum accelerations by twenty-five percent or so. They were also vulnerable to proximity soft kills, since they carried neither sidewalls nor radiation shielding of their own, but if they got their shots off before they were killed, that hardly mattered.
"Good, Isabella," Sarnow's voice recalled Honor to the conversation at hand. "If we can get him to leave them here, we can put at least five on tow behind each of our battlecruisers—six, for the newer ships. Even the heavy cruisers can manage two or three," He smiled thinly. "It may not help in a long engagement, but our initial salvos should make anyone on the other side wonder if they've run into dreadnoughts instead of battlecruisers!"
Unpleasant smiles were shared about the table, but Houseman wasn't quite finished, though he was careful about his tone when he spoke up again.