At All Costs

Chapter Sixty-Five

"Sir, their acceleration's dropping," Captain Gwynett said.

D'Orville stepped across to her console, accompanied by Captain Ayrault, and she looked up at him.

"How much is it coming down?" he asked.

"Only about a half a KPS2, so far, Sir."

"What the hell are they up to now?" Ayrault wondered aloud.

"Putting pods on tow, maybe," D'Orville replied.

"I suppose that could be it, Sir," Gwynett raid. "Their pods are almost as stealthy as ours are, and the recon platforms wouldn't be able to see them at this range. But those are superdreadnoughts. They'd have to have an awful lot of tractors to be able to tow so many pods they'd have to tow them outside their wedges."

D'Orville nodded. Pods towed inside a ship's wedge didn't degrade its acceleration. That, after all, was exactly what his own pre-pod designs were doing with the tractor-equipped pods glued to their hulls. But superdreadnought wedges were huge; for the Peeps to be towing so many pods they couldn't fit them all inside their wedges, they'd have to have hundreds of tractors per ship. So they had to be up to something else.

But what?

"Maybe they've got tech problems," Ayrault suggested. "Could be one of their SDs has lost a couple of beta nodes and had to reduce accel. The others might be reducing so she can stay in company."

"Possible," D'Orville conceded. "Or it could be even simpler than that. Maybe they've just decided to ease off on their compensator margins now that they know we're coming out to meet them."

Ayrault nodded, but D'Orville wasn't really satisfied with his own hypothesis. It made sense, but it just didn't feel right, somehow.

"How far do you want to close before opening fire, Sir?" Gwynett asked, after a moment, and he looked back down at her. Despite the fact that he and Ayrault were standing right beside her, she had to pitch her voice very low to keep it from being overheard, because it was very quiet on HMS Invictus' flag bridge. Everyone had had time to realize what was going to happen, and fear hung in the background. There was no panic, no hesitation, but they knew what they faced, and the people on that bridge wanted to live just as much as anyone else. The knowledge that they very probably wouldn't was a cold, invisible weight, pressing down upon them.

D'Orville knew it, and he wished there was something he could say or do. Not to make the fear go away, because no one could have done that. But to tell them how much they meant to him, how bitterly he regretted taking them on this death ride.

"We have to make them count," he told Gwynett, equally quietly. "We know our accuracy and penaids are better, but we've still got to get in close. They're going to bury us whenever we open fire, and according to the recon drones, every single one of their wallers is a pod design. They aren't going to face the same 'use them or lose them' constraints we are.

"So we're either going to wait until they open fire, or else until the range drops to sixty-five million klicks."

Gwynett looked at him for a moment, then nodded slowly.

"I know. I know," he said softly. "But we've got to get our hits through at all costs. We've got to, Madelyn. If we don't, all of this," a slight motion of his head, almost as much imagined as seen, indicated his flag bridge and the fleet beyond it, "is for nothing."

"Yes, Sir. I understand."

"Which fire plan do you want to use, Sir?" Ayrault asked.

"We'll go with Avalanche," D'Orville said grimly. "Madelyn, I want you to start shifting formation to Sierra Three. How many LACs have managed to overtake us?"

"Just over thirty-five hundred so far, Sir. Another five hundred will be here by the time we reach the range you've specified."

"How many are Katanas?"

"I'm not positive, Sir. Under half-I know that much."

"I wish we had more," D'Orville said, "but what we have is all we've got. Pull them forward and spread them vertically. I want their Vipers positioned for the best firing arcs we can build."

"Yes, Sir."

"And set up your firing sequences to have the older ships deploy their pods first. We'll try to hold the internal pods as long as we can. I want the Keyhole ships to manage as many of the other units' pods as possible in the opening salvos."

"Yes, Sir. I understand."

"Good, Madelyn. Good." D'Orville patted her gently on the shoulder. "I'll let you get on with it, then."

"Yes, Sir," Captain Gwynett said.

"We're in range, Admiral," Commander Adamson pointed out, and Lester Tourville nodded.

"I'm aware of that, Frazier, thank you."

"Yes, Sir."

Tourville tipped back in his command chair and glanced at Molly DeLaney.

"So Tom was right," he said quietly.

"It looks that way," DeLaney agreed, and Tourville wondered if the relief hidden behind her calm expression could possibly be as great as the one roaring through him.

He looked at the master plot, with its sprawl of light codes. Second Fleet had been accelerating towards Sphinx for the last hour. Given the system's geometry, Tourville's present vector cut a chord at an angle of almost exactly forty-five degrees to the outer wall of the hugely elongated, "skinny" resonance zone. His phalanx of superdreadnoughts, was up to 18,560 KPS, relative to the system primary, and they'd traveled over 35,600,000 kilometers. The Manties' Home Fleet had been under acceleration for only forty-seven minutes, on an almost exactly reciprocal course, but with its higher base acceleration, its velocity relative to the primary was already up to better than 17,000 KPS, and it had traveled just over 24,000,000 kilometers from its initial station.

Although Tourville's command was still almost half an hour from its turnover point for a zero/zero intercept of Sphinx, the range between the opposing forces had fallen to just a shade over 84,000,000 kilometers, and their closing speed was up to 45,569 KPS. That geometry gave Tourville's MDMs an effective range of better than 85,369,000 kilometers, which, as Frazier Adamson had just observed, meant they were in extreme missile range of Home Fleet.

But Manticoran MDMs' acceleration rate was just over thirty-four KPS2 higher than his birds could pull. That gave them a current effective range of better than 90,370,000 kilometers, which meant he'd been in their effective range for over two minutes.

"It doesn't just look like he was right," he told DeLaney after a moment. "He was. If they had those God awful missiles, they'd already be launching. They'd have spent the last ten minutes doing nothing but rolling pods, and they'd be punching them down our throats right this instant, not letting us close into our own effective range."

"You don't think they might just be letting the range fall a little more for their own fire control, Boss?"

"That's exactly what they're doing, which is why I know they don't have the new missiles. They've got less than a hundred wallers over there. Even assuming they've got heavy external pod loads-which they very well could, despite their accel, if NavInt's right about their new pod designs-they're outnumbered better than two-to-one. They wouldn't be closing straight into salvos the size they know we can throw if they had any choice at all. But they don't. They've got to get closer to improve their accuracy, just like we do."

"It's going to be ugly when we do open fire," Delaney said quietly, and Tourville nodded again.

"That it certainly is," he agreed grimly. "On the other hand, we planned for it, didn't we?"

"Yes, Sir."

Tourville studied the icons of the oncoming Home Fleet superdreadnoughts for another few moments, then looked at a secondary display and shook his head in admiration. He'd always known Shannon Foraker had a talent for thinking outside the box. Way back when she'd been his operations officer, he'd recognized her knack for coming up with solutions which simply didn't occur to other people-concepts so elegantly simple everyone wondered why they hadn't thought of them.

When NavInt reported that the new Manty pods incorporated onboard tractors as a way to allow their pre-pod ships to tow greater numbers of them, it had seemed impossible for the Republic to respond. Their pods were already too big, and they had too limited a power budget, to permit the designers to cram a tractor into them (and power the damned thing), as well. But Shannon had decided to turn the problem on its head. Instead of fitting additional tractors into the pods, she'd come up with the "donkey." That was what everyone was calling it, although it had a suitably esoteric alphabet-soup designation, and it was another of those elegantly simple Foraker specialties.

Instead of the typically Manty bells-and-whistles approach of putting the tractor inside the pod, Shannon had simply built a very stealthy pod-sized platform which consisted of nothing except a solid mass of tractor beams and a receiver for beamed power from the ships which deployed it. Each "donkey" had the capacity to tow ten pods, and a Sovereign of Space-class SD(P) had enough tractors to tow twenty of them. Better yet, they could actually be ganged together, as long as all the pods in the gang could be lined up for power transmission from the mother ship. In theory, they could have been stacked three tiers deep, with each donkey towing ten more donkeys, each towing ten more donkeys, each....

If Lester Tourville had so chosen, his two hundred and forty superdreadnoughts could-in theory-have towed 4.8 million pods. Except for the minor fact that the drag would have reduced them to negative acceleration numbers. Not to mention the fact that he didn't begin to have the power transmission capability to feed that many donkeys. Still, he could tow quite a lot of them, and the readiness numbers on the display gave him a sense of profound satisfaction. He studied them a moment longer, then looked at Lieutenant Anita Eisenberg, his absurdly youthful communications officer.

"What's the latest from Admiral Diamato, Ace?"

"No change, Sir. He still can't get a clear look. Their fortresses and the LACs deployed to cover the Junction are picking off his recon platforms before they get close enough for that. But he still hasn't seen any hyper-capable units headed his way, and he's positive they're still coming through from Trevor's Star. No one's started in-system yet, though."

"Thank you," Tourville said, and cocked an eyebrow at DeLaney.

The chief of staff clearly had been running through the same mental math he had, and she grimaced.

"They've been coming through for over forty-five minutes now, Boss. By my calculations, that means at least twenty-four wallers so far."

"And it means they're planning on bringing through a lot more than that," Tourville agreed. "They could have put twenty-seven through in a mass transit and been headed after us over half an hour ago. The only reason to delay this long is because they figure they can't afford to lock the Junction down... because they've got one hell of a lot more than twenty-seven wallers waiting to come up our backside."

"Still, Boss, if I were them, I might be thinking about sending some of the ships I've already got through the Junction after us."

"No way." Tourville shook his head. "I wish to hell they would, but the Manties picked their best people to command Home Fleet, Third Fleet, and Eighth Fleet. I've studied NavInt's files on all three of them, and they aren't going to cooperate with our plans worth a damn.

"D'Orville's probably the most conventional thinker of the three, but he's also got the simplest equation... and plenty of guts. He can't let us get any closer to Sphinx than he can possibly help, so he's going to hit us head on, as far out as he can. He's going to get clobbered. In fact, I'll be surprised if any of his superdreadnoughts survive. But like you just said, it's going to be ugly for both sides, and our own losses are going to be heavy. He knows that, and he probably figures he can score at least a one-for-one exchange rate, despite the tonnage ratios. I think he may be being a little optimistic, but not very much. So given the combat strength he thinks he's up against, he probably figures he'll hurt us so badly we won't be able to close through the fixed inner-system defenses and missile pods. And if his analysis of the balance of forces was correct, he'd be right."

Tourville and his chief of staff looked at one another, and this time their smiles were hard. It was entirely possible RHNS Guerriere would be among the "heavy losses" the admiral had just predicted his fleet was going to suffer. But at this moment, an even exchange rate was actually heavily in the Republic's favor in the merciless mathematics of war... and those losses were also part of the bait in the trap Thomas Theisman and his Octagon planning staff had crafted.

"Kuzak's more of a free-thinker than D'Orville," Tourville continued. "I'm sure what she's doing right now has their Admiralty's approval, but even if it didn't, she'd do it anyway, on her own initiative. She knows exactly what's going to happen to D'Orville, and to us, and she knows she can't possibly get here in time to affect that outcome. So she's not going to split up her forces and send them in where we could chop them up in detail. Yes, she could've sent a couple of battle squadrons ahead, micro-jumped out to the side and then come back in directly behind us, assuming their astrogation was good enough. But unless she's got those new missiles, any small force she sent after us would get torn apart by the weight of fire we could send back at it.

"So, she's going to wait until she gets everything she's got through the Junction. Then she's going to do her micro-jumping and come in behind us-or more likely on our flank, especially, if we're driven back from Sphinx by our losses-as quickly as she can. She'll be too far behind to overhaul us, even with her acceleration advantage, if she has to come in astern, but she'll figure to put enough time pressure on us to limit the amount of damage we can do. At least, she'll figure, she can keep us from moving on from Sphinx to Manticore, and that would save about seventy percent of the system's total industry.

"The fact that she's waiting is the conclusive proof that she doesn't have any-or not very many, at least-of the new missiles, either. If she had a couple of battle squadrons equipped with them, then it would have made enormous sense to send them in, even in isolation. Their accuracy advantage would have been crushing enough to let them do heavy damage to us before we ever met D'Orville. Probably not enough to stop us, but maybe enough to even the odds between us and Home Fleet."

"And what about Harrington, Boss?" DeLaney asked quietly, when he paused.

"Harrington's probably the most dangerous of the lot," Tourville said, "and not just because we know Eighth Fleet's reequipped with at least some of the new missiles. She's got more actual combat experience than D'Orville or Kuzak, and she's sneaky as hell.

"But what's happening out at the Junction is tempting me to hope we filled an inside straight on the draw. If Eighth Fleet had been in position to intervene, Kuzak wouldn't be coming through the Junction; Harrington would, and we'd have had two or three of her battle squadrons ripping our ass off already. Assuming of course that Admiral Chin didn't have a little to say about it. So it's beginning to look as if Eighth Fleet really may be off on an operation of its own. I'm not planning on counting on that just yet-there could be any number of other explanations-but that's not going to keep me from hoping."

"I think I agree with you, Boss," DeLaney said, then chuckled. "I know Beatrice Bravo was specifically planned to mousetrap Eighth Fleet, and I guess I ought to be disappointed if we're not going to get it, too. But having seen what the lady can do, I'll be just delighted if 'the Salamander' is somewhere else while we're taking on the Manty home system's defenses!"

"I'm tempted to concur," Tourville agreed. "Taking out Eighth Fleet on top of everything else would certainly be a deathblow, but even with Eighth Fleet intact and Harrington to run it, the Manties are done if we take out this system's shipyards and both of the fleets they have defending them."

"We're coming down on sixty-five and a half million kilometers, Sir," Commander Adamson said.

"Thank you, Frazier."

Lester Tourville drew a deep breath. Eight minutes had passed since Adamson first informed him that they were into MDM range of the Manties. Second Fleet was still nineteen minutes short of its projected turnover point, but the range couldn't keep dropping forever without the Manties firing. The range between the two fleets had already fallen to 65,767,000 kilometers. Second Fleet's velocity was up to 20,866 kilometers per second; Home Fleet's was 19,923 KPS, and they'd closed the range between them by almost seventy-seven million kilometers. Tourville was still better than 98,835,000 kilometers from Sphinx, but from his current base velocity, his MDMs' range against the planet was almost 72,030,000 kilometers. The Manties weren't going to let him get much closer unchallenged.

"Open fire, Frazier," he said.

The first missile impeller signatures began to speckle the plot, and Sebastian D'Orville drew a deep breath as the first, massive salvo streaked towards his command. Obviously, they had had a lot of pods on tow, he thought as he contemplated its numbers. More than he'd thought they had tractors for, actually. But their first salvo would be the least accurate against his EW, he reminded himself. And in the meantime, he had a few missile pods of his own.

"Engage as specified, Captain Gwynett," he said formally and watched his own missile's icons streaking outward across the plot.

That was when the enemy launched his second impossibly dense salvo.

Sebastian D'Orville's forty-eight pre-pod superdreadnoughts carried 27,840 pods externally, and theoretically, they could have deployed all of them in a single massive wave. In fact, Home Fleet carried a total of almost forty-nine thousand pods, with well over half a million missiles. Lester Tourville's slightly larger superdreadnoughts carried fewer pods, and each of those pods carried fewer missiles, because of the size penalty their bulkier MDMs imposed. So although he had two and a half times as many ships, he had barely twice as many pods, and each of those pods carried seventeen percent fewer missiles. He actually had "only" sixty-four percent more total missiles than Home Fleet.

But Lester Tourville also had Shannon Foraker's "donkey," and that meant every one of Sebastian D'Orville assumptions about the number and size of the salvos he could throw was fatally flawed. And what else he had was far more control channels for the missiles he carried. Not all of the forty-two Manticoran, Grayson, and Andermani SD(P)s confronting him were Keyhole-capable. Still, the majority of them were, and the pod-layers as a group could simultaneously control an average of four hundred missiles each. But the older, pre-pod ships could control only a hundred apiece, whereas each of Tourville's ships had control links for three hundred and fifty missiles, and by using Shannon Foraker's rotating control technique, they could increase that number by approximately sixty percent. So whereas Home Fleet could effectively control a total of just under twenty-two thousand missiles per salvo, Second Fleet could control eighty-four thousand without rotating control links. Worse, it could have increased that total to almost a hundred and thirty-five thousand, if it was prepared to accept somewhat lower hit probabilities, and the "donkey" meant Tourville could actually have deployed the pods to fire that many.

Manticoran fire control was better, Manticoran electronic warfare capabilities and penetration aids were better, and Manticoran MDM's were both faster and more agile. Sebastian D'Orville could confidently expect to score a significantly higher percentage of hits, but that couldn't offset the fact that Second Fleet could control over six times as many missiles. Even if Tourville's hit probabilities had been only half as good as his, the Republic would have scored three times as many hits.

It wasn't quite as bad for the Alliance as the raw numbers suggested. For one thing, deploying that many missiles and launching them without allowing their impeller wedges to cut one another's telemetry links, was a far from trivial challenge. In fact, Tourville had decided to limit himself to no more than eighty percent of his theoretical maximum weight of fire. And to clear the firing and control arcs for even that many missiles, he'd been forced to spread his squadrons and their lumpy trails of donkeys and pods more broadly than he'd really wanted to. The separation between his units, necessary for effective offensive fire control, made it more difficult for them to coordinate their defensive fire. On the other hand, Havenite counter-missile doctrine relied so much more heavily than Manticoran doctrine did on mass, as opposed to accuracy, that the sacrifice was less significant than it might have been.

Even now, no one on either side knew exactly what would happen when fleets of pod-layers this size engaged one another. There was simply no experiential meterstick, because no one had ever done it before. For that matter, no battle in history had yet seen almost three hundred and fifty superdreadnoughts of any kind engage in what could only be a fight to the death. Over the centuries, tactical formalism had become the rule, with indecisive battles and limited losses. That might have changed, at least in this corner of the galaxy, but even here, most of the combatants were still feeling their way into the changing realities of interstellar carnage.

The Battle of Manticore would be something new and unique in the annals of deep-space combat. Everyone in both fleets knew that.

But that was all they knew as the missiles began to launch.

The range at launch was 65,770,000 kilometers. Flight time for Home Fleet's faster MDMs was 7.6 minutes, and their closing speed as they streaked into Second Fleet's teeth was 246,972 kilometers per second. Second Fleet's slower missiles took fifteen more seconds to reach their targets, and had a closing speed of "only" 237,655 KPS.

At those speeds, both sides' defenses were stretched to and beyond the theoretical limits of their capabilities. Manticore's longer-ranged counter-missiles, and the greater capability of the Katanas' in the fleet defense role, gave D'Orville's ships a significant advantage, but nota big enough one. Not the one he'd anticipated against the weight of fire he'd expected.

Home Fleet's Fire Plan Avalanche called for the pre-pod superdreadnoughts to deploy their pods as quickly as possible. They had to jettison them anyway, in order to clear their own defensive systems, and D'Orville had known from the beginning that he was going to lose a huge percentage of their total pod loads without ever actually firing their missiles. There was nothing he could do about that, however, and the older ships passed control of as many of their additional missiles as they could to their more capable consorts.

The Medusa, Harrington, Adler, and Invictus-class ships didn't deploy a single pod of their own in the initial broadsides. They used solely the pods deployed by D'Orville's older ships, reserving their better protected, internally stowed pods for the follow-up salvos it was at least possible they might live to launch. And since they were firing pods which had been effectively deployed in a single massive pattern, Avalanche also fired its salvos in closer, more tightly spaced intervals than the Republican Navy had yet seen out of any Allied fleet. In fact, Avalanche was almost-not quite, but almost-conceptually identical to Shannon Foraker's rotating control doctrine.

Each fleet's salvo density took the other fleet by surprise. Neither had anticipated such heavy fire... but Tourville's projections had been closer than D'Orville's to what he actually got. D'Orville had expected the battle to be short and violent, lasting no more than fifteen or twenty minutes.

The first half of his expectations was more than fulfilled.

In the seven and a half minutes it took the lead salvo to cross between Home Fleet and Second Fleet, Sebastian D'Orville's ships fired seven salvos at sixty-five-second intervals, each of 1,800 pods, containing a total of 21,600 missiles. Over a hundred and fifty thousand missiles, the maximum Home Fleet's fire control could manage, went screaming through space... and 524,000 Havenite missiles rampaged out to meet them. Fire control sensors and reconnaissance platforms all over the star system found themselves half-blinded by the interference and massive impeller source of almost seven hundred thousand attack missiles and many times that many counter-missiles. And then the EW platforms began to add their own blinding efforts to the chaos.

No human could have hoped to sort it out, keep track of it. There was simply no way protoplasmic brains could do it. Tactical officers concentrated on their own tiny pieces of the howling maelstrom, guiding their attack missiles, allocating their defensive missiles. Counter-missiles and MDMs blotted one another from existence as their impeller wedges slammed together. Decoys, jammers, Dazzlers, and Dragons Teeth matched electronic wiles against tactical officers' telemetry links and onboard control systems. Standard counter-missiles, Mark 31s, and Vipers hurled themselves into the teeth of the mighty salvos. Great gaps and gulfs appeared in the onrushing wavefronts of destruction, but the gaps closed. The gulfs filled in. Laser clusters blazed in desperate last-ditch efforts to intercept missiles with closing speeds eighty percent that of light. MDMs lost their targets, reacquired, lost them again in the howling confusion. Onboard AIs took whatever targets they could find, and the sudden, abrupt changes in their targeting solutions made their final approach runs even more erratic and unpredictable.

And then wave after wave of laser heads began to detonate. Not in scores, or hundreds, or even in thousands. In tens of thousands in each roaring comber of fury.

The battle no one had been able to adequately envision was over in 11.9 minutes from the moment the first missile launched.

"My God," someone whispered on HMS King Roger III's flag bridge.

Theodosia Kuzak didn't know who it was. It didn't matter. The imagery coming in from the FTL surveillance platforms was brutally clear.

Home Fleet was... gone. Simply gone.

Ninety superdreadnoughts, thirty-one battlecruisers and heavy cruisers, and twenty-six light cruisers had been effectively destroyed in less than twelve minutes. At least twenty shattered, broken hulks continued to coast towards the hyper limit, but they were only wrecks, gutted hulls streaming atmosphere, debris, and life pods while deep within them frantic rescue parties raced against time, fighting with grim determination and courage about which all too often no one would ever know, to rescue trapped and wounded crewmates.

But Home Fleet had not died alone. Sebastian D'Orville mght have been taken by surprise by the weight of Second Fleet's fire, and his computation of the exchange rate might have been overly optimistic as a result, but his ships and people had struck back hard. Ninety-seven Republican ships of the wall had been destroyed outright or beaten into dead, shattered hulks. Nineteen more had lost at least one impeller ring completely. And of the remaining hundred and twenty-four SD(P)s Lester Tourville had taken into the battle, exactly eleven were undamaged.

Second Fleet's brutally winnowed ranks continued onward, but its acceleration had been reduced to less than 2.5 KPS2 by its cripples. At that rate, it would be unable to decelerate for its zero/zero intercept with Sphinx, and the Manticoran System's defenders weren't done with it yet.

Home Fleet's LAC screen had suffered massive losses of its own, mostly from MDMs which had lost their original targets and taken whatever they could find in exchange. Despite that, over two thousand of them survived, and they were driving hard to get into their own range of Second Fleet. They could expect to take fewer losses, now that they were free to maneuver defensively and to protect themselves, not Home Fleet's superdreadnoughts, and their crews had only one thought in mind.

More LACs were still streaming towards Second Fleet from the inner system, as well, and it was obvious the Havenites had no desire to tangle with Sphinx's fixed defenses, at least until they could get their own damages sorted out. Second Fleet was changing course, crabbing away from Sphinx as it shepherded its cripples protectively out of harm's way.

But that, Theodosia Kuzak thought grimly, was going to prove just a bit more difficult than the bastards thought.

"How much longer?" she asked harshly.

"Our last units should clear the Junction in the next eleven minutes, Ma'am," Captain Smithson said.

"Good." Kuzak nodded once, then turned to Commander Astrid Steen, her staff astrogator.

"Plot me a couple of micro jumps, Astrid," she said coldly. "Those people have just had the crap kicked out of them. Now we're going to finish the job Home Fleet began."

"Admiral Kuzak's preparing to head in-system, Your Grace," Harper Brantley said quietly.

"Thank you, Harper."

Honor looked up from the holographic com display hovering above the briefing room's table at which she, Nimitz, Mercedes Brigham, Rafael Cardones, and Andrea Jaruwalski sat under her armsmen's watchful eye. The display was separated into individual quadrants, showing the faces of Vizeadmiral Hasselberg, Judah Yanakov, Samuel Mikl¢s, and the commanders of every squadron in company with Imperator. Alice Truman and Alistair McKeon weren't there, and she tried to hide the cold, bleak anxiety she felt at their absence.

"Please inform the Admiral that we're still on schedule for our own ETA," Honor continued.

"Of course, Your Grace," her communications officer said quietly, and withdrew. The briefing room hatch closed behind him, and Honor returned her attention to the discussion at hand.

Most of the faces on her display showed a greater or lesser degree of shock at the total destruction of Home Fleet, and no wonder. Not only had the sheer weight of the Havenites' fire come as a complete surprise, but all of the Alliance's partners had taken losses when it hit. Of the ninety superdreadnoughts which had just been destroyed, twelve had been units of the Grayson Space Navy, and another twenty-six had been Andermani.

Of all her subordinates, Yanakov seemed least shocked. Or, at least, the least affected by whatever shock he felt. But, then, Judah had been present when Giscard leveled the Basilisk System's infrastructure in the last war, and his command had been part of Hamish's fleet for Operation Buttercup. And before that, he'd been at the First and Fourth Battles of Yeltsin. Three quarters of the pre-Alliance Grayson Space Navy had been wiped out in First Yeltsin, and half its superdreadnought strength had been destroyed at Fourth Yeltsin. And he was the man whose task force had crushed the defensive forces deployed to cover Lovat. Despite his youth-and he was almost as young as his prolong made him look-he'd seen more carnage than any other flag officer on Honor's display.

Almost as much as she had.

Hasselberg had looked almost stunned when the initial reports came in. It hadn't been just the scale of the destruction. It had also been its speed, for the Andermani Navy had never experienced anything like it. Well, to be fair, neither had the Manticoran Navy, until this afternoon, but at least Manticore and Grayson had been granted some prior experience. They'd had firsthand practice adjusting to abrupt, wrenching changes in the paradigm of combat. The Empire had not, and the reality had come to the vizeadmiral like some hideous nightmare, despite all the effort he'd spent conscientiously trying to prepare himself for the realities of modern warfare.

But of them all, Honor thought, Bin-hwei Morser's reaction was the most interesting. She wasn't simply an admiral; she was also Graffin von Grau. Like Hasselberg himself, she was a member of the Empire's warrior aristocracy, and she was clearly one of those who took the Andermani martial tradition seriously. She might cherish doubts about her Emperor's decision to ally himself with the Star Kingdom which had been the Empire's traditional rival in areas like Silesia for so long, but that didn't matter. Not anymore, not now. Her dark eyes-remarkably like Allison Harrington's, or Honor's own, now that Honor thought about it-were narrow and intense, focused and fiery with purpose.

"I wish Admiral Kuzak had waited for us," Mikl¢s said after a moment. "I'd feel a lot better if we were going in with her, especially after seeing how many birds these people can launch. She's still outnumbered better than two-to-one in wallers, and Alice is going to be outnumbered almost that badly in LACs."

"She can't wait, Samuel," Yanakov disagreed. "I don't have any idea how long it took the Peeps to deploy that many pods, however the hell they did it, but they had to use up most of their ammo to do it. She needs to hit them before they can pull out and restock their magazines. And even if that weren't a consideration, right now, the Peeps are edging away from Sphinx. She can't be sure they'll continue to do that if she doesn't move in now. If they get themselves sorted out, decide their damages aren't that bad after all, they've still got the strength-or close to it-to stand up to Sphinx's close-in defenses. And even if the defenses destroyed everything they've got left, they'd last long enough to take out virtually all of the planet's orbital infrastructure."

He smiled thinly.

"We Graysons have had a lot of experience worrying about what might happen to our orbital habitats. Trust me, I know exactly what's going through Admiral Kuzak's mind. She's got to keep the pressure on if she's going to keep them running."

"Judah's right," Honor said. "Our lead superdreadnought won't even transit the Junction for another eight minutes. We'll need another seventy-five minutes just to get the superdreadnoughts and your carriers through, Samuel. That's almost an hour and a half. She can't give them that long to think about things, not when they're already so close to the planet."

She spoke calmly, almost dispassionately, but she tasted the emotions of her staffers and, especially, her flag captain. They knew what was hidden behind that fa‡ade, she thought. Knew she couldn't forget that the planet they were talking about was the world of her birth. That all too many of the people on it were people she'd known all her life-family, friends. That it was the homeworld of the entire treecat species.

But what not even they knew was that at this very moment, both of her parents, and her sister and brother, were on Sphinx visiting Honor's Aunt Clarissa.

"The question before us," she continued, "is what we do after we make transit."

"We'll probably have instructions from the Admiralty, Your Grace," Mercedes Brigham pointed out. She smiled without any humor at all. "Thanks to the grav com, the central command can actually give real-time orders at interplanetary distances now."

"You may be right," Honor acknowledged. "So far, though, Admiral Caparelli's been refraining from backseat driving. And even if he doesn't, I want all of us to be thinking on the same page."

"One thing I don't believe we can do, Your Grace," Cardones said, "is commit ourselves before all our units have passed through the Junction."

Despite his relatively junior rank, the flag officers listened carefully. As Honor's flag captain, he was her tactical deputy.

"I strongly agree, Your Grace," Brigham said. "And at least we should have time to see how the situation's developing before we commit."

"I agree, too," Honor said. "But let's get some lighter units through as quickly as we can. Admiral Oversteegen, I want your squadron to take lead and transit as soon as you reach the terminus. Commodore Bradshaw and Commodore Fanaafi, you and your Saganami-Cs are attached to Admiral Oversteegan." She smiled grimly. "If the Havenites are still trying to keep an eye on the Junction, let's give whoever's minding their drones something else to worry about."