At All Costs

"Any word on Vizeadmiral Hasselberg's units?" she asked, after a moment.

"Welllllll..." Jaruwalski said, and Honor looked at her sharply, one eyebrow rising as she tasted the ops officer's emotions.

"Spit it out, Andrea."

"Well, I know Admiral Yanakov can't use the all-up Ghost Rider capabilities, and I know we're supposed to be letting Vizeadmiral Morser call all the shots on this one. But I couldn't quite resist the temptation to deploy a few drones of my own, Your Grace. None of the take from them is going to Morser, but it sort of lets me keep an eye on things."

"I see. And no doubt you simply forgot to display the positions of Vizeadmiral Hasselberg and his ships. The fact that you were attempting to conceal your transgression from my eagle eye had nothing to do with the omission, right?"

"Well, maybe a little, Your Grace," Jaruwalski admitted with a grin. "You want to see him?"

"Go ahead and show me."

"Coming up now," Jaruwalski said, and the understrength Forty-First Battle Squadron of Vizeadmiral Hwa-zhyou Reinke, screened by the sixteen battlecruisers of Konteradmiral Hen-zhi Seifert and Konteradmiral Tswei-yun Wollenhaupt and accompanied by Rear Admiral Harding Stuart's Mermaid and Harpy, appeared suddenly on the master plot.

Mermaid and Harpy formed Carrier Division Thirty-Four, detached from Truman's CLAC squadron to give the Andermani a carrier element. At the moment, they and the superdreadnoughts they were accompanying were well ahead of Yanakov's force, closing in on an almost directly converging heading, and Honor frowned.

Reinke's squadron had only six SD(P)s, which meant Yanakov's wallers outnumbered him by better than two-to-one. Stuart's carriers were outnumbered by three-to-one, and even in battlecruisers, Hasselberg was outnumbered four-to-three. That was bad enough, but coming in as he was, he'd be in MDM engagement range at least a half-hour before Morser closed up from behind Yanakov, and a half-hour was a long time in an engagement between pod-layers.

She started to say something, then changed her mind. She didn't really care for tactics which split an attacking fleet up into pe

But that was a point for her to make to him privately, where he could be positive she wasn't criticizing him in front of his juniors. She wasn't afraid Jaruwalski would have let anything slip to anyone else even if she'd commented on Hasselberg's error, but it was a bad habit to get into, even with her own staff. And so she possessed her soul in silence, watching the situation unfold.

And then-

"Your Grace, look at this!" Jaruwalski said suddenly, and Honor frowned. It took her an instant to recognize what she was seeing, but when she did, she decided she was glad she hadn't criticized Hasselberg's timing after all.

"Is he doing what I think he's doing, Your Grace?" Jaruwalski asked, and Honor chuckled.

"He is, indeed, Andrea. And I'll be interested to see how Judah reacts. This is very like something he once pulled in a training exercise in Yeltsin."

She stepped over closer to Jaruwalski, resting her right hand lightly on the ops officer's shoulder as they both watched the plot. Hasselberg had obviously just deployed Ghost Rider drones of his own. These weren't sensor platforms, though; they were EW platforms configured to counterfeit the emissions signatures of Morser's superdreadnoughts. And he was being subtle about it. The signal strength off the drones was very weak-barely more than ten percent higher than what could have been expected to leak through a standard Andermani stealth field. Given the way Yanakov's sensor capabilities had been dialed back for the exercise, his tac officers were going to have a hard time recognizing what Hasselberg was doing.

In fact, as became apparent a few moments later, they hadn't recognized it. Yanakov was changing course, turning away from the threat he'd just detected, and launching his LACs. With only Republican levels of capability allowed to his reco

It was clear Yanakov didn't intend to allow himself to be drawn into automatically assuming he was seeing what his tactical sections thought they were seeing. At the same time, he'd equally clearly decided he had to honor the threat and shift his formation to meet it.

Which was exactly what Hasselberg had wanted him to do.

The next thirty minutes passed slowly as Honor and Jaruwalski watched the shifting patterns in the plot. Yanakov's turn away from Hasselberg had the effect of closing the range to Morser even more rapidly, but at such ranges "rapid" was a purely relative term.

Hasselberg was playing the game well, Honor decided. Once he'd given Yanakov a sniff of his position and drawn an obvious response, he cycled down the power of his decoys' signatures. It looked exactly as if he wasn't positive he'd been detected and he was reducing acceleration to cut back the strength of his impeller signatures and make his stealth systems more effective. The maneuver both lent verisimilitude to his deception and made it even harder to penetrate by requiring the reco

Honor pursed her lips thoughtfully as the range from Morser's squadrons to Yanakov's dropped steadily. Yanakov was already in MDM range, and in another few minutes his LACs were going to get close enough to see through Hasselberg's masquerade. So if she were Morser, she'd be firing just about-

"Vizeadmiral Morser's opened fire, Your Grace," Jaruwalski said, and Honor nodded.

"So I see," she said mildly, folded her hands behind her once again, and walked calmly back to her command chair.

Judah was going to be... irritated with himself, she thought with a mental grin. He'd obviously taken Hasselberg's bait, after all. He might not have allowed himself to go charging after it, but Hasselberg and his skillfully deployed drones had riveted Yanakov's attention on the smaller of the Andermani task groups. His tac crews hadn't been paying as much attention to other possible axes of threat, and when Morser launched, Yanakov's screen-and Katanas-were badly out of position, with very poor shots at the incoming tide of missiles. Moreover, Morser had stacked her pods deeply. Her sixteen superdreadnoughts had deployed almost six hundred pods; now they launched a total of 4,608 attack and EW missiles... and five hundred and seventy-six Apollo control missiles.

Flight time was still almost six minutes, which gave Yanakov some time to adjust, but it wasn't long enough to significantly reposition his units. And as the missiles came streaking in, for the first time, Eighth Fleet units found themselves on the receiving end of an Apollo attack.

It was not, Honor thought, watching the first few damage codes appear on her display, like the first drifting flakes of a Sphinx mountain blizzard, going to be a pleasant experience.

"Admiral, it's time," Captain DeLaney said quietly over the com, and Lester Tourville nodded.

"Yes, I suppose it is," he agreed. "Send the Fleet to battle stations, Molly. I'll be up directly."