Echoes Of Honor

ONI had warned him, and so had Jaruwalski, but he hadn't believed it. Oh, he'd heard the reports, nodded at the warnings, but he hadn't believed. He'd seen the Manticoran missile storm loosed upon the Peeps, but he had never seen an answering storm front, and somewhere deep down inside him, he'd believed he never would. Now he knew he'd been wrong.

Yet he'd been almost right, after all; he would only see it once.

Heinrich Gaines and Andrea Jaruwalski huddled together as if for warmth, their sick eyes locked to the display. Cantrip was safely beyond the Peeps' reach, with a velocity advantage which would take her across the hyper limit and to safety long before any Havenite ship could even think about interfering with her. But none of the Peeps were thinking about anything as unimportant as a fleeing heavy cruiser. Their attention was on more important prey, and Gaines groaned as he read the data codes beside the icons.

ONI was wrong, Jaruwalski thought detachedly. They said the Solly systems had probably improved the Peeps' point defense by fifteen percent; it's got to be closer to twenty. And their penaids must be better than we thought, too. Of course, with that many incoming birds to swamp the systems—

Her detached thoughts froze as the Peep missiles reached attack range. Santino's desperate point defense had thi

It was over quickly, she thought numbly. That was the only mercy. One moment, three RMN superdreadnoughts led four battlecruisers and eight heavy cruisers on a firing run; nineteen seconds after the first Peep laser head detonated, there were two damaged heavy cruisers, one crippled hulk of a battlecruiser... and nothing else but wreckage and the eye-tearing fury of failing fusion bottles. She heard someone cursing in a harsh, flat monotone—heard the tears and rage and helplessness behind the profanity—but she never looked away from the display as the Peeps' internal launchers dealt with the cripples.

Santino's return fire hadn't been entirely futile, she saw. A single Peep SD blew apart as violently as his own flagship had, and a second reeled out of formation, her wedge down, shedding lifepods and wreckage. But the rest of the Peep armada didn't even hesitate. It just kept driving straight ahead, and she looked away at last as the missile batteries which had massacred men and women she had known and worked with for over two T-years came into range of the orbital facilities. Old-fashioned nuclear warheads bloomed intolerably bright as the enemy fleet methodically blew the abandoned, defenseless installations into half-vaporized wreckage, and Andrea Jaruwalski felt old and beaten and useless as she turned her back upon the hideous plot at last and made her way from Cantrip's CIC.

Chapter Thirty-Three

"Do you believe this crap, Maxie?" Scooter Smith demanded in a disgusted mutter. He and PO Maxwell sat in the rear of the briefing room, listening while Lieutenant Gearman explained the day's program to the wing's engineering staff. Commander Stackowitz and Captain Harmon would brief in the squadron and section leaders a bit later, but as always, everyone else's efforts ultimately depended on the engineers. Which meant they had to get the word first, and at the moment, Smith wanted to spit as he glanced at Maxwell.

"What's not to believe?" his hirsute friend replied, using the junior officers and senior noncoms seated between him and the briefing lectern for cover as he scratched his ribs industriously. Then he shrugged. "The brass has decided to screw the Mi

"Is that all you have to say about it?" Smith regarded him with pronounced disfavor, and Maxwell shrugged again.

"Hey, what I say—or you say—don't matter squat, Scooter. What matters is that that asshole Holderman's decided we're go

"You never look outside your toolbox, do you?" Smith snorted.

"Nope," Maxwell agreed, then gri

"Well, that's true enough, anyway!" Smith grunted with a laugh. "You've had more experience at that than just about anyone else in the Service, 'Silver Spa

"A low blow," Maxwell observed sadly, "but no lower than I'd expect from someone like yourself."

Smith gri

But at least they'd get to try it in real space, not the simulators, he reminded himself. If nothing else, that would prevent Holderman and his merry band from fudging the exercise's parameters still further once it was actually underway—and Scooter Smith wouldn't put even that past this bunch. Unlike Maxwell, he had at least a suspicion of what had punched Holderman's buttons, and he wondered what in heaven's name had possessed the Skipper to do something that dumb.

Well, I guess even captains can fuck up, he thought as philosophically as he could, and at least there won't be all that many "bad guys" looking for us. Aside from the base itself, there's only five SDs and the battlecruisers. That's a lot of sensor ability, but Captain Harmon's a sneaky one. I'll bet she and Commander Stackowitz will figure out a way to get a hell of a lot closer in before detection than old Holderman even dreams is possible!

"Time to translation?" Citizen Rear Admiral Kellet asked her staff astrogator quietly as she and Citizen Commissioner Ludmilla Penevski stepped onto PNS Schaumberg's flag deck.

"Approximately six hours, forty-three minutes, Citizen Admiral!" Citizen Commander Jackson a

"Good." She acknowledged his report with a nod and looked at Penevski. The other woman looked back impassively, then produced a smile.

"Our people seem confident, Citizen Admiral," she remarked quietly as the two of them walked towards the master plot, and Kellet shrugged.

"They should be, Citizen Commissioner. I could wish for a little more to

"Even if, unlike us, they do have superdreadnoughts?" Penevski asked still more quietly, and this time it was Kellet who bared even white teeth in a thin smile. It was hungry, that smile, and most unpleasant despite its whiteness, and her dark eyes gleamed.

"The gap between our onboard systems efficiency and the enemy's has fallen since the war began, Citizen Commissioner," she said. "Oh, they still have an edge, but our best estimate is that our technology transfers have reduced it by at least fifty percent. What's really made them so dangerous to us for the last several years has been the fact that they had missile pods and we didn't. The overwhelming advantage that gave them in the initial missile exchanges would be very difficult to exaggerate. Certainly the sheer volume of a pod salvo was enough to make any real difference between our missile defense capabilities largely irrelevant. But now we have pods of our own, with a sixty percent edge in the number of birds per pod, and that means the playing field just got leveled big time, Ma'am."