At All Costs

"I don't like the sound of that," Vice Admiral Morris Baez, commander of Battle Squadron 23 said.

"From the acceleration numbers, they don't have the new beta nodes yet," Truman said. "But their energy budget is obviously higher than it used to be, and, defensively, I suspect they've added at least bow walls. One of the two possible new classes we've tentatively identified seems to be the closest they could come to a clone of the Shrike. It packs a laser, instead of a graser, but it's an awful lot more powerful than any energy weapons we've ever seen out of a Peep LAC before. We're not absolutely certain about the other possible new design. We think they've done their best to duplicate the Ferret, as well. If they have, they still can't get as much out of the design as we can, though, because of the inferiority of their missiles."

"The Katanas seem to have handled them fairly easily, though," Matsuzawa Hirotaka said.

"At Lovat, yes, Hiro." Truman nodded. "On the other hand, they were present in strictly limited numbers. The vast majority of what they threw at us in Lovat were old-style Cimeterres. That suggests to me that these new birds are still available in only limited numbers. But it doesn't take very long to build a LAC, and we're talking about not launching Sanskrit II for another two months. They could have a lot more of them available, by then. And since we hit Lovat, they're going to be reinforcing their central systems with everything they can, as quickly as they can."

"How seriously would you assess their threat to our wall of battle, Alice?" Honor asked.

"That's impossible to say without a better fix on their capabilities and the numbers we may be looking at. I'm not trying to waffle, Honor. We simply genuinely don't know. I've got some highly problematical performance parameters on them, but under the circumstances, I think we have to consider them minimal. They were operating with the older designs, and that would have restricted them to the Cimeterres' performance envelope. Scotty's been kicking at our tentative numbers around with the rest of my COLACs, and what I'd really like to do is to have him set up some simulations built around our best estimates and game out what happens. I think the combination of the Katanas and our own wall's defensive fire ought to be able to manage the threat, but I'll feel better if we're able to confirm that, at least in the sims."

"I see." Honor regarded Truman thoughtfully, then nodded. "It makes sense to me. And let's be sure to draw BuWeaps' attention to the data you've managed to record on them."

"I'll see to it, Your Grace," Brigham said, punching a note to herself into her memo pad.

"Good. In that case, let's look at possible approach courses. Obviously, were going to want to scout the system thoroughly, so it seems to me that-"

Her officers leaned forward, listening intently, as she began to sketch out her own preliminary thoughts on the operation.

Chapter Sixty-Two

Fleet Admiral Sebastian D'Orville walked slowly onto his flag bridge, hands clasped behind him, expression suitably grave, and contemplated the perversity of the universe.

He'd spent his entire career in the service of the Crown, honing his professional skills, amassing seniority, proving his abilities. And what had all those decades of perseverance and professional excellence bought him? The most prestigious command in the Royal Manticoran Navy, of course.

Which meant he'd spent the dreary months since the Peeps' sneak attack doing absolutely nothing.

That's not true, Sebastian, and you know it, he scolded himself as he nodded pleasantly to the flag bridge perso

Which hasn't kept it from being boring as hell, of course.

He chuckled inside at the thought, but that didn't make it untrue, and he suppressed an unworthy stab of envy as he thought of Honor Alexander-Harrington.

She always has had a way of putting your nose out of joint, hasn't she? he asked himself wryly. Starting with the way she blew your flagship out of space in that Fleet maneuver back when she was-what? Just a commander, wasn't it? He shook his head in memory. On the other hand, I don't suppose it's really fair to blame her for being so good. And she is awfully junior to you. Junior enough she gets the fun command-the one Admiralty House figures it can take chances with-while you get to be the Queen's one and only Admiral of the Fleet and stay stuck at home with the one command that can't be risked.

He chuckled mentally again, and then his thoughts saddened as he remembered James Webster. The two of them had been friends since Saganami Island, and it had been Webster's unenviable lot to command Home Fleet last time around. D'Orville remembered how he'd teased Webster at the time, and he snorted. What went round, came around, he supposed, and he'd clearly laid up enough bad karma to deserve what had happened to him.

Of course, there were compensations.

He turned from the visual display to regard the huge master plot, and allowed himself a feeling of satisfaction as he studied the icons of the new fortresses. A year ago, the Manticoran Wormhole Junction's permanent fortifications had been virtually nonexistent. In fact, they'd been so sparse he'd been forced to hang Home Fleet all the way out at the Junction to cover the critical central nexus of the Star Kingdom's economy against attack.

He hadn't liked that, but the Janacek Admiralty's failure to update the fortresses had left him no choice. And at least the Manticore System's astrography had let him get away with it for a while.

Classic system-defense doctrine, developed over centuries of experience, taught that a covering fleet should be deployed in an interior position. Habitable planets inevitably lay inside any star's hyper limit, and habitable planets were generally what made star systems valuable. That being the case, the smart move was to position your own combat power where it could reach those habitable planets before any attacker coming in from outside the limit could do the same thing.

Unfortunately, one could argue that the Wormhole Junction was what truly made the Manticore System valuable. D'Orville didn't happen to like that argument, but he couldn't deny that it had a certain applicability. Without the Junction, the Star Kingdom would never have had the economic and industrial muscle to take on something the Republic of Haven's size. And it was certainly the Junction which made the Manticore System so attractive to potential aggressors like Haven in the first place.

And therein lay the problem. Or, at least, one of the problems.

The Junction was almost seven light-hours from Manticore-A. Which meant any fleet stationed to cover the Junction was light-hours away from the planets on which the vast majority of Queen Elizabeth III's subjects happened to live. As the man charged with protecting those subjects, that was... inconvenient for one Sebastian D'Orville.

The Junction's position also put it over eleven light-hours from Manticore-B, which created Home Fleet's commander's second problem. But, fortunately, Manticore-B also lay far outside the resonance zone-volume of space between the Junction and Manticore-A in which it was virtually impossible to translate between normal-space and hyper-space. Any wormhole terminus associated with a star formed a conical volume in hyper, with the wormhole at its apex and a base centered on the star and twice as wide as its hyper limit, in which astrogation was extraordinarily difficult and dangerous. The bigger the terminus, the stronger the resonance effect... and the Manticoran Wormhole Junction was the largest ever discovered. The resonance wave it produced was more of a tsunami, and it didn't just make astrogation "difficult." It made it the next best thing to flatly impossible, and any transition within the resonance (assuming someone could have plotted one in the first place) would have been no more than a complicated way to commit suicide. But since the Manticore Binary System's secondary component lay outside the resonance (and would for the next few hundred years or so), Home Fleet had actually been closer from its position covering the Junction-in terms of travel time-to Manticore-B than to Manticore-A.