At All Costs

"Those of us fortunate enough to survive," Honor agreed, just a bit grimly. Then she gave herself a little shake. "All right, Mike. Get your people moving. Clear."

"They're shifting formation, Admiral," Selma Thackeray reported. "It looks like they're moving their battlecruisers between their damaged superdreadnought and Arthur."

"Sounds like we got a pretty good piece of her, Sir," Gozzi observed.

"I'd have preferred a better one," Giscard said, his eyes on the damage control report from Conquete scrolling up his display.

Despite the disparity in firepower, the Manties' stubborn concentration on a single target had paid them dividends. Conquete was the only one of Giscard's ships they'd damaged, but they'd hammered her severely. Her max acceleration was down by almost twenty-two percent, her point defense had been significantly degraded, she had over two hundred casualties, and like all Giscard's SD(P)s, she'd effectively exhausted her offensive missile capacity.

But superdreadnoughts were tough, and the Republic's damage control capabilities had improved dramatically over the past few years. Conquete might be hurt, but she would still have been combat capable... if there'd been any one in range for her to fight.

"Their present course is going to carry them clear of Sewall, isn't it, Marius?" he asked after a moment.

"Yes, Sir, I'm afraid it is," Gozzi replied. Rear Admiral Hildegard Sewall commanded the Republican task group closing in from system south. "Not by very much, though," the chief of staff continued. "If Deutscher manages to inflict more impeller damage, I think she'll probably be able to bring them into her engagement envelope."

"And with one of their superdreadnoughts already beat up on." Giscard nodded. "Well, I suppose it's all up to Deutscher, then."

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Additional damage reports came in over the next several minutes, and Honor settled back in her command chair as she digested them. Intolerant's damages were the worst, and from the medical reports, it sounded very much as if Alistair McKeon was going to require a new CO for his battle squadron's first division. Honor had never gotten to know Allen Morowitz as well as she would have liked... and it didn't look as if she would ever have the chance to.

Star Ranger was the next most badly damaged. Her perso

Ajax's damage was much less severe. Assuming nothing else happened to her, her repairs should be both routine and rapid.

Taken altogether, things could have been far worse, she told herself. She'd allowed her task force to be mousetrapped, and the fact that the Havenites had used a variant of her own Sidemore tactics to do it lent it an additional sting. But the thing which had made it effective at Sidemore was the same thing which had made it equally effective here: no one in normal-space could "see" into hyper-space to detect units there. And at least she'd gotten the carriers clear before the bad guys dropped in on her.

"Is Rifleman still clear, Mercedes?" she asked looking up from the damage reports.

"As far as we can tell, they don't haven't a clue where she is," Brigham replied.

"Good. But tell her to stay where she is until we clear the hyper limit." Brigham looked a question at her, and Honor smiled thinly. "Whoever's in charge on the other side has already demonstrated she's pretty good. At the moment, it looks like all her available units, aside from Bogey Four, are still accelerating in-system. They probably hope we'll take enough lumps from the Arthur pods to slow us down, let them overhaul. But if I were in command on the other side, and if I had enough hulls for it, I'd have at least one more task group waiting in hyper."

"To drop just outside the limit, right in our faces just when we think we're about to get away clean," Brigham said.

"Exactly. Mind you, I think the odds are good that they've committed everything they have already, but let's make sure before Rifleman hypers out to tell Samuel where to pick up his LACs."

"Yes, Your Grace. I'll see to it."

"Is Moriarty ready?" Rear Admiral Emile Deutscher asked his chief of staff.

"Yes, Sir," the chief of staff replied.

"Good." Deutscher returned his attention to his tactical display. His two obsolete wallers had almost certainly been completely dismissed by the Manties as a threat. And, by and large, the Manties would have been correct about that. After all, at this range, without pods on tow, they couldn't possibly have a weapon with the range to reach them.

But the superdreadnoughts' real purpose, from the begi

"Sir?"

Deutscher looked back up at his chief of staff.

"Yes?"

"Sir, why did Admiral Foraker call it 'Moriarty'? I've been trying to figure it out for weeks now."

"I don't really know," Deutscher admitted. "I asked Admiral Giscard the same question. He said one of Admiral Foraker's staffers had introduced her to some old, pre-space fiction. 'Detective stories,' he called them. Apparently this 'Moriarty' was some kind of mastermind character in one of them." He shrugged.

"Mastermind," the chief of staff repeated, then chuckled. "Well, I guess that does make sense, in a way, doesn't it?"

"We'll be entering the estimated range of Arthur's pods in another forty-five seconds, Your Grace," Jaruwalski said.

"Thank you." Honor turned her command chair to face the Ops officer. "Remind all of our tac officers of that."

"Yes, Ma'am."

"They're entering range now, Sir."

"Thank you," Deutscher said. "Send the execute."

"Aye, Sir!"

"Missile launch! Multiple missile launches, multiple sources!"

Honor snapped her command chair back around, staring at the master plot at Jaruwalski's sudden sharp a

"Estimate seventeen thousand-I say again, one-seven thousand-inbound! Time to attack range, seven-point-one minutes!"

For just a moment, Honor's brain flatly refused to believe the numbers. Their scout ships' arrays had detected only four hundred pods in orbit around Arthur. The maximum number of missiles aboard them should only have been four thousand!

Her eyes darted across the plot, and then flared wide in sudden understanding. The others-all the others-were coming from the nine ships of Bogey One. Which was flatly impossible. Two superdreadnoughts and seven battlecruisers couldn't possibly have fired or controlled that many missiles, even if they'd all been pod designs! But-

"Where the hell did they all come from?" Brigham demanded, and Honor looked at her.

"The battlecruisers," she said, her mind going back to the Battle of Hancock.

"Battlecruisers?" Brigham looked incredulous, and Honor chuckled without any humor at all.

"They aren't battlecruisers, Mercedes; they're minelayers. The Havenites build their fast fleet minelayers on battlecruiser hulls, just like we do. And we were so busy worrying about superdreadnoughts and pod-layers it never occurred to us to look closely at the 'battlecruisers.' So they've been sitting there, ever since they stopped accelerating, doing nothing but lay pods."