At All Costs

"Does Tracking have a breakdown yet, Madelyn?" he asked, turning to his operations officer.

"It's just coming in now, Sir," Captain Madelyn Gwynett told him. She watched the information come up on her display, and he saw her shoulders tighten.

"Tracking makes it two hundred and forty superdreadnoughts, Sir. At this time, it looks like they're all pod-layers, but we're trying to get drones in closer to confirm that. They've also got what looks like sixteen CLACs and a screen of roughly ninety cruisers and lighter units, as well."

"Thank you, Madelyn."

D'Orville was pleased, in a distant sort of way, by how calm he sounded, but he understood why Gwynett's shoulders had stiffened. Home Fleet contained forty-two SD(P)s and forty-eight older superdreadnoughts. He was outnumbered by better than two and a half-to-one in capital ships, but the ratio was almost six-to-one in SD(P)s. He had twelve pod-laying battlecruisers, as well, but they'd be spit on a griddle against superdreadnoughts.

Still, he told himself as firmly as possible, the situation wasn't quite as bad as the sheer numbers suggested. The new tractor-equipped "flat-pack" missile pods would allow each of his older superdreadnoughts to "tow" almost six hundred pods inside their wedges, glued to their hulls like high-tech limpets. That was a hundred and twenty percent of a Medusa-class's internal pod loadout, and the ships were already loading up with them. Unfortunately, they didn't have the fire control to manage salvos as dense as a Medusa could throw. Worse, they'd have to flush the majority of their pods early in order to clear the sensor and firing arcs of their point defense and its fire control arrays. So he was going to have to use them at the longest range, where their accuracy was going to be lowest.

"Katenka," he said to Lieutenant Commander Lazarevna "get me Admiral Caparelli."

"Aye, aye, Sir."

Caparelli appeared on D'Orville's com display almost instantly.

"Sebastian," he said, his voice level but his expression taut.

"Tom." D'Orville nodded back, thinking about how many times they'd greeted one another exactly the same way before... and wondering if they'd ever do it again.

"I think I've got to go out to meet them," D'Orville continued.

"If you do, you lose the i

"And if I don't take them head-to-head, I let them into range of the planet," D'Orville countered harshly.

"So far, they've stayed away from anything which might look like a violation of the Eridani Edict," Caparelli pointed out.

"And so far they haven't invaded our home system, either," D'Orville shot back. The Manticoran tradition was that the Admiralty did not second guess a fleet CO when battle threatened-not even Home Fleet's commander. What D'Orville did with his fleet was his decision. Admiralty House might advise, might provide additional intelligence or suggest tactics, but the decision was his, and it wasn't like Thomas Caparelli to try to change that.

But D'Orville wasn't really surprised by Caparelli's reluctance to admit what he knew as well as D'Orville did had to happen. The First Space Lord knew too many of the men and women aboard D'Orville's ships... and he couldn't join them. He would be safely back on Manticore when the hammer came down on Home Fleet, and Sebastian D'Orville knew Caparelli too well, knew exactly what the other admiral was feeling, the miracle he wanted to find. But there were no miracles, not today, and so D'Orville shook his head.

"No, Tom," he said almost gently. "I'd like to hang back-believe me, I would. But we can't count on continued restraint where their targeting's concerned. This one is for all the marbles. They've got thirty squadrons of SD(P)s-the equivalent of forty of our squadrons, with over a million people aboard them-coming at us, right into the heart of our defenses. That means they're ready for massive losses. I don't think we can expect them to take that kind of punishment without handing out whatever they can in return, and even if they never intentionally fire a single shot at the planet, think about how damned inaccurate end-of-run MDMs are. I can't let hundreds of those things go flying around this close to Sphinx."

"I know." Caparelli closed his eyes for a moment, then inhaled deeply and opened them once more.

"I've ordered the Case Zulu message transmitted to all commands," he said, his voice more clipped, his dread of what was to come cloaked in reflex professionalism. "Theodosia can start responding from Trevor's Star in about fifteen minutes, but most of Eighth Fleet is off the terminus, on maneuvers. I don't know how quickly it can get back there, but I'm guessing it'll take at least a couple of hours just for Duchess Harrington to get to the terminus. I'm recalling Jessup Blaine's squadrons from the Lynx Terminus, as well, but our best estimate on his current response time is even longer than Eighth Fleet's."

"And even Theodosia can't do it in a mass transit," D'Orville said grimly. "She's going to have to do it one ship at a time, the same way Hamish did it when the bastards hit Basilisk, because we're going to need everything she's got."

Kuzak could have put almost thirty superdreadnoughts through the Junction in a single mass transit, but the destabilizing effect would have locked down the Trevor's Star-Manticore route for almost seventeen hours. Even in a sequenced transit, each ship of the wall would close the route for almost two minutes before the next in the queue could use it.

"You're right," Caparelli agreed. "Allowing for her screening units, she's going to need almost two hours just to make transit."

"By which time these people will be about an hour out from Sphinx, and she can't possibly catch them," D'Orville said.

"We're scrambling every LAC we've got," Caparelli said. "We should be able to get five or six thousand of them to you by the time you engage."

"That will help-a lot," D'Orville said. "But they've got sixteen carriers with them. That gives them over three thousand of their own."

"I know." Caparelli looked out of the display, his eyes and face grim. "All you can do is the best you can do, Sebastian. We'll do whatever we can to support you, but it isn't going to be much."

"Who would have thought they'd throw something this size at us?" D'Orville asked almost whimsically.

"Nobody on the Strategy Board, that's for sure." Caparelli's voice was briefly saw-edged with bitter self-reproach, as if there were some way he could have kept this nightmare from coming. Then he got control of it again. "Actually, I suspect Harrington's the only one who would have believed they might throw the dice this way. And I honestly don't think even she would have expected them to."

"Well, they're here now, and my nodes are coming up. It looks like we're going to be pretty busy in a little while, Tom. Clear."

"Your Grace!"

Honor stepped back from her sparring match with Clifford McGraw and looked up in astonishment as one of Major Lorenzetti's Marines came skidding through the gymnasium hatch. Spencer Hawke and Joshua Atkins wheeled towards the sudden, unexpected arrival, hands flashing to their pulsers, and she spat out her mouth protector and threw up her own hand.

"No threat!" she snapped.

Hawke continued his draw, but his pulser stayed pointed at the deck. He didn't even look at her; his attention was locked on the Marine, who, Honor knew, didn't begin to realize how close he'd just come to being shot. In fact, probably the only thing that had saved him was her armsmen's faith in her and Nimitz's ability to sense what was going on inside someone else.