At All Costs

"Admiral Fisher's task force just came in, Sir," Captain DeLaney said.

"I see. Thank you, Molly. I'll meet you on Flag Bridge in fifteen minutes."

"Yes, Sir. DeLaney, clear," she said, and broke the com co

Lester Tourville sat at his desk for several seconds, looking around his day cabin, feeling the massive megaton bulk of RHNS Guerriere around him. At that particular moment, his flagship felt oddly small, almost fragile.

He stood and walked across to the view screen configured to show him the diamond-studded depths of space. He gazed deep into it, seeing the dim sparks of reflected light from the nameless star system's red dwarf primary.

Each of those specks of light was a starship, most of them as massive and powerfully armed as Guerriere herself. Now that Fisher had arrived on schedule, the reinforced Second Fleet was complete, as was Admiral Chin's Fifth Fleet, and both were under Tourville's command. Three hundred and thirty-six SD(P)s, the flower of the reborn Republican Navy, and by any standards, the most powerful battle force ever assembled for a single operation by any known star nation. They lay all about him, floating in distant orbit around the star system's second gas giant, waiting for his orders, and he felt a shiver of apprehensive anticipation flow through him.

I never really thought it would all come together, even after Tom told me. But it has. And now it's all mine.

It should have been Javier Giscard's command, he thought. Javier should have had Second Fleet and overall command, while he had Fifth, but Javier was gone, and so the task had fallen to him.

He thought about his orders, the different sets of contingency instructions, the pla

He hadn't liked that. In fact, it was the one part of the operational plan which he'd actually protested. Simulations were all well and good, but no one had ever put a fleet this size together before. He'd needed to practice coordinating with Chin, needed to drill the actual units, put the subunit commanders physically through their paces where he could watch them, evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. He'd asked-almost pleaded-for the chance to do that, but his request had been turned down. And even though he was the one who'd asked for it, he'd understood why Thomas Theisman had refused it.

It wasn't because Theisman didn't understand exactly why Tourville had made the request in the first place. It wasn't because Theisman disagreed with him, either. But for Operation Beatrice to succeed, complete strategic surprise was an absolute prerequisite. Indeed, surprise was so important it had trumped even the need to conduct extensive hands-on training exercises. Given the activity of the Manty scouting forces, they'd dared not withdraw their picket forces early. Even more, they hadn't dared to combine Tourville's units somewhere where a Manty reco

But we still have over a week before we sortie, plus the transit time, he thought. It won't be as good as I would have preferred, but we can do a lot in that much time. And we'd better, because at the end of it....

He let the thought trail off, because he didn't really know what would be waiting "at the end of it."

Except for the biggest naval battle in human history, of course.

Chapter Sixty-Three

"How does it look now, Andrea?"

"Better, Your Grace."

Captain Jaruwalski flipped a sighting circle into the main plot, dropping it neatly around the icons of Battle Squadrons 36 and 38, Imperial Andermani Navy. The light codes of the sixteen superdreadnoughts burned steadily in the display, giving no indication of how hard they were to find, even for Imperator's sensors. The numbers in the CIC sidebar giving detected signal strength were another story, however, indicating exactly how hard they would have been to detect had Imperator not known exactly where to look for them. Not quite as hard as Manticoran ships might have been, but harder than anyone else's, Honor noted, and nodded in approval. Not so much of the EW capabilities, as of Vizeadmiral Morser's tactics.

"She's slipped around behind Admiral Yanakov," Jaruwalski continued. "I don't think he knows she's there, but he's a sneaky one. He may just be playing dumb until she's got him right where he wants her."

"Why do you think that might be?"

"Partly because of where he's got his carriers, Your Grace. He's got them pulled around, further ahead of his trailing battle squadron than his usual cruising dispositions. That puts the SD(P)s' onboard point defense between them and Morser's batteries. But they're still far enough astern that he could get their Katanas launched to thicken his task force missile defenses in a hurry. It may not mean anything, but it looks to me as if he's at least thinking about the possibility of being jumped from astern."

"I see."

Honor folded her hands behind her, standing beside her command chair while Nimitz draped bonelessly over its back, and contemplated the plot. Andrea had a point, she decided. Both about Judah's sneakiness, and about his formation. Personally, Honor gave it a sixty-forty chance Yanakov didn't know Morser was back there. Or, at least, how close she was. For the purposes of this exercise, he'd been denied the use of Ghost Rider's extended platform endurance, his sensor capability had been stepped down to no more than twenty percent better than ONI's current best estimate of the Republic's capabilities, and his acceleration rate had been reduced to match that of Republican superdreadnoughts. That meant he was more myopic than he was accustomed to being, and he must feel heavy-footed, slow to maneuver. So it made sense for him to be particularly wary about the possibility of being overhauled from behind.

Still, he was sneaky....

Then again, so was Bin-hwei Morser. Honor still didn't like her much, and she was aware-painfully, one might say, given her ability to taste mind-glows-that Morser's feelings for her went far beyond "didn't like much." But the vizeadmiral was a superior tactician, and her very dislike for Manticore had inspired her to drive her perso

When you're number two, you try harder, Honor thought wryly. Especially when you resent the heck out of your number two status. Well, whatever works. I don't really care why she does it, as long she does do it.

She began to pace slowly back and forth, watching the gradually developing tactical situation. At the moment, Imperator was tagging along behind Konteradmiral Syou-tung Waldberg's Battle Squadron Thirty-Eight at the rear of Morser's formation. Yanakov had his own Fifteenth Battle Squadron and Vice Admiral Baez's Twenty-Third, plus Samuel Mikl¢s' Fifth Carrier Squadron and all four of Eighth Fleet's Manticoran and Grayson battlecruiser squadrons. Alistair McKeon's Sixty-First Battle Squadron, most of Alice Truman's carriers, and the rest of Honor's cruisers and destroyers had stayed home, near the Trevor's Star terminus of the Junction with Admiral Kuzak's Third Fleet, for this one. The object was to give her Andermani units a significant force advantage, since they were tasked as the aggressors in this particular system defense exercise.