At All Costs

"Maybe, and maybe not, Sandra." Beach put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently. "Odds are Supply would've been sending us their regrets again."

He understood Inchman's frustration-and anger-perfectly. The additional pods they'd been promised would have increased their long-range missile power hugely. Then again, they'd been "promised" for quite some time.

"I know, Sir. It's just-" Inchman bit off what she'd been about to say, and Beach sighed.

"They're shipping them to the front line systems as quickly as they can, Sandra. Someone's got to suck hind teat when quantities are limited. And to be fair, if you'd been in charge of prioritizing deliveries, would you have predicted an attack on Gaston, of all damned places?"

"No, Sir," she admitted.

"So we do the best we can with what we've got," Beach said as philosophically as he could. He looked over his shoulder at Randall.

"How long until we can get underway, Myron?"

"Another twelve minutes," Randall said, after checking his chrono quickly. "Captain Steigert's engineers are doing their best, but-"

"Understood." Beach gave a bitter chuckle, and squeezed Inchman's shoulder again. "If I'd listened to Sandra, at least I'd have had our impellers at a higher state of readiness."

He brooded down at the ops officer's plot, then drew a deep breath and turned away.

"They'll be in range to engage us in another thirty-five minutes, even if we just sit here in orbit. To be honest, if I thought it would do any good, I'd order all of our hyper-capable units to just bug out."

Randall looked at him with an expression which mingled surprise and disapproval, and Beach snorted.

"Of course I would, Myron! It might not be particularly glorious, but if those are pod-laying battlecruisers out there-and their deceleration profile certainly suggests they are-then we're truly and royally screwed. Dying gloriously sounds good in bad historical novels. Speaking for myself, I think doing it in real life when you don't have to is fucking stupid, and it irritates the hell out of me that we don't appear to have any choice."

He couldn't quite keep the bitterness out of his voice, but he drew another breath and gave himself a mental shake.

"Since we can't avoid action with them, and since we can't match their engagement range, I want all of our ships moved around to the far side of the planet. We'll keep it between us and them as long as we can."

Randall looked vaguely rebellious. He didn't say anything, but Beach read his thoughts without much difficulty.

"No, it's not particularly glorious. And I doubt it's going to make a lot of difference in the end, for that matter. But if whoever's in command over there is feeling particularly stupid, he may send in his LACs to flush us out of cover. If he does, we might actually manage to pick a few of them off. Even if he doesn't, he'll have to maneuver his MDM-capable units to clear the planet if he wants a shot at us. For that matter, he may decline to fire from extended range at us at all, if we're close enough to the planet."

"I think the Admiral has a point, Myron," Inchman said. Both men looked at her, and she shrugged. "Given all the other irons the Manties have in the fire right now, they certainly aren't going to court a violation of the Eridani Edict, and even their MDMs' targeting discrimination is pretty shaky at long range. This is our best chance to at least draw them into a range where we'll get to shoot back."

"They're pulling back behind the planet, Ma'am," Commander Oliver Manfredi said.

"Not very obliging of them," Michelle Henke observed dryly, and Manfredi chuckled without much humor.

Henke smiled and tipped back in her command chair, steepling her fingers under her chin in a posture she'd seen Honor assume scores of times. She couldn't say the Peep CO's choice of tactics was totally unexpected, but that didn't make it any more welcome.

"All right, Oliver," she told her golden-haired chief of staff after a moment. "Make sure Dame Alice has that information, and inform her that unless she disapproves my actions, I intend to execute Grand Divide."

"Aye, Ma'am," Manfredi replied.

The chief of staff's own smile creased his classically chiseled features and showed perfect white teeth, and Henke suppressed a mental laugh as he turned towards Lieutenant Kaminski, her communications officer. It wasn't anything Manfredi had done; it was simply the way he looked. He was as competent as he was decorative, but he really ought to have been on Truman's staff, not Henke's. For some reason, Alice Truman always seemed to have an executive officer, or a chief of staff, or a flag captain who was as golden-haired and blue-eyed as she was.

But not this time, Henke thought with amused satisfaction. This time, I've got him... not to mention the rest of my "harem."

It was harder not to laugh this time. Unlike her friend Honor, Truman had always enjoyed an... energetic love-life, although she'd never allowed it to spill over on to her professional life. This time, though, it had been Honor's turn to twit her from the moment Henke had invited her to di

She pushed the thought aside and straightened in her chair. Grand Divide was the approach she'd worked out with her staff to deal with a situation like this one. It wasn't a perfect solution, but that was because there weren't any "perfect solutions." It was just the best available.

She glanced at the master plot, watching the projected vectors of her ships began to shift. She had only four of her six battlecruisers actually under her own command-her third division, HMS Hector and HMS Achilles-had been attached to Samuel Mikl¢s' force for the attack on Tambourin, which left her only Agamemnon, Ajax (her own flagship), and the second division's Priam and Patrocles. They had four of the Edward Saganami-class heavy cruisers in support, including Henke's old ship, the Saganami herself, but none of them were equipped to fire internally launched MDMs. On the other hand, they did have several dozen of the new-style missile pods tractored to their hulls.

Now Agamemnon and Ajax, accompanied by two of the heavy cruisers, began to angle away from Priam, Patrocles, and the other two heavy cruisers. By spreading her forces, she ought to be able to bring the defenders' starships under fire with at least one of them. After all, the opposition Commander couldn't keep the planet between her ships and everybody. But it meant Henke would probably be able to engage with only half her total platforms. Worse, it meant her two attack groups were moving steadily out of mutual support range for missile defense.

If the destroyers which had scouted the system had detected larger numbers of deployed missile pods, Henke would never have dared put Grand Divide into action. Even against the number of pods the destroyers had detected, she was risking significant damage. But they couldn't take out the system's industrial base without going in close, not when virtually all of it orbited the system's inhabited planet. Which meant the defending ships had to be neutralized first.

Well, at least it should be interesting, she told herself.

"They are splitting up, Sir," Inchman reported. Her in-system sensor platforms had the Manticoran units under observation, and she indicated the changing vector analyses under the icons of the two diverging cruiser forces. "CIC is designating this force Alpha and this one Beta."

"They're going to pincer us," Beach grunted. "About what I expected. Too bad they didn't just go ahead and send in the LACs as beaters."