War Of Honor

Chapter Twenty

The brilliant white icon representing Trevor's Star glared at the center of the enormous holographic plot in Sovereign of Space's CIC, but Shannon Foraker had no attention to spare for unimportant distractions like suns and planets. Her eyes were riveted to the dense rash of crimson dots sweeping outward from the larger bloody icons of the defending fleet.

"Looks like they've got us on their sensors, Ma'am," Captain Anders observed quietly beside her, and she nodded. Despite all the Republican Navy's improvements in its stealth technology, its systems remained far inferior to those available to the Manticorans. It had been a given that they would be detected on their inbound vector; what remained uncertain was how much of an edge that would give the other side.

"We're getting initial contact reports back from the lead LACs," Commander Clapp announced, and Foraker turned to look at him. "Composition is about what we'd projected, Admiral," the commander told her, cupping one hand over the earbug screwed into his right ear and listening intently. "It looks as if their missile LACs are taking the lead." He listened a moment longer, then grimaced. "We can't absolutely confirm that, Ma'am. Their EW is still too good to penetrate at this range, and CIC's interpretation of the contact reports suggests that they may already be seeding their formation with decoys."

"Understood," Foraker acknowledged, and returned her attention to the plot. Like Clapp, she would have preferred for CIC to have been able to download the raw sensor data directly, rather than relying on the interpretive reports of the LACs' tactical officers. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible . . . yet. On the other hand, no one on the other side (we hope, she amended dutifully) had any reason to suspect that the Republican Navy had finally managed to crack the secret of the Royal Manticoran Navy's faster than light communications capability. Actually, the RHN had known roughly what the Manties were doing for years; they just hadn't known how to do it themselves. Until now.

To be honest, Foraker's techs had needed a bit of a leg up from the Solarian League firms which had been trading military technology to Rob Pierre's People's Republic in return for combat reports and the largest payments the cash-starved Committee had been able to scrape up. But it had been a very small leg up, and Foraker felt a deep, uncomplicated sense of pride in the way her own R&D people had picked it up and run with it. She was far too self-honest to believe Haven's researchers were in the same league as Manticore's, yet they were much better than they had been. They were still playing catch-up, but they'd managed to considerably narrow the gap between themselves and their potential enemies.

And that's another of the things we can "thank" Pierre and his butchers for, she thought. At least they blasted loose the old R&D hierarchies and actually found a few people who could think to take over instead!

"I wish we could deploy drones like the Manties'," Anders murmured beside her, and her mouth twitched in a small, wry grin at the confirmation that he'd been thinking exactly what she had. The power requirements and mass costs of the RHN's current grav-pulse transmitters were far too high to permit it to employ the remote drones the RMN and its allies could deploy. The Manties were considerably ahead in super-dense fusion bottle technology and several other areas—including the newest generation of superconductor capacitor systems—and Haven was unable to match the onboard power levels of their remote platforms. But even without that, the sheer size of the early-generation RHN hardware would have made it impossible to squeeze it into such tight quarters. Indeed, it could be fitted into nothing smaller than a LAC. And, as Foraker strongly suspected had been the case for the Manties when they first developed the system themselves, any LAC or starship had to temporarily cut its acceleration to zero in order to transmit a message. Coupled with the slow pulse repetition frequency rate they'd so far managed to achieve, that limited them to very short and simple messages or to the use of preplanned ones which could be transmitted in shorthand code groups. Which was the reason Sovereign of Space's CIC couldn't receive the raw sensor data directly; there simply wasn't enough bandwidth available.

Yet, she reminded herself once again.

"They're coming in for a head-on engagement," Commander Clapp reported. "Our lead LACs are reporting radar and lidar hits consistent with known Manty fire control systems."

"Now that's a surprise," Commander Doug Lampert observed ironically. As Captain Reumann's tactical officer, he really ought to have been on Sovereign's command deck, but this battle was going to be fought beyond the reach of even her broadsides. Since that was the case, Lampert had opted for a ringside seat here in CIC, with its superb instrumentation and far more detailed master plot.

"Maybe not," Anders replied. "But I'm still not sure this is their most logical response. They've got to realize we're sending in a wave of LACs, and they must know we wouldn't be doing it unless we figured our LACs can stand up to theirs."

"I think it was reasonable to assume this was how they'd respond," Foraker disagreed quietly, her eyes never leaving the plot as the crimson hostile icons swept closer and closer to the incoming green light codes of her own light attack craft. "Of course they realize we're sending in LACs. But they've never seen the new birds in action. As far as we know, they're not even aware the Cimeterre class exists. So the only way for them to find out what they're up against is to come out and see. And when you couple that with the edge their hardware's always enjoyed, this is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do."

"I understand the logic, Ma'am," her chief of staff replied in a tone of quiet stubbornness. "I'm just uncomfortable planning our entire doctrine around that assumption."

"With all due respect, Captain," Clapp put in diffidently, "we're not actually planning doctrine around this specific response. We simply anticipated it for the first few engagements."

"Granted," Anders acknowledged. "But I can't help feeling that 'the first few engagements' are going to set the pattern for our doctrine. All I'm saying, Mitchell, is that we need to be aware that they're going to adjust their operational patterns as soon as they realize what we've got. Which means what we really ought to be modeling at this point is not only how we expect them to react the first time they see the Cimeterres, but also what we expect them to do to adapt to the new threat."

"No one's disagreeing with you, Five," Foraker intervened mildly. "Obviously they're going to adapt, just like we've done in introducing the Cimeterres in reaction to their LACs. But the only thing worse than not allowing for adaptation on their part at all would be to project too far ahead with too little data. We believe we know more about their hardware and capabilities at the moment than they know about ours, but there are still a lot of things we're only guessing about. Without a more definite idea of what their options are, we could easily doublethink our way into a complete misestimate of the ones they'll choose."

"I know." Anders glowered at the plot for a moment, then puffed his cheeks, exhaled, and gave his admiral a slightly sheepish smile. "Sorry about that," he said. "I guess it's the engineer in me. I know we live in the real universe, where we can't nail things down the way we would in an R&D program. Especially not when the one thing we can count on a potential enemy doing is whatever it is we didn't want him to do in the first place." He grimaced and nodded to Clapp. "I didn't mean to sound like I was carping, Commander. It's just—"

"Just that one of a chief of staff's jobs is to play Cassandra, especially when everyone else seems to be feeling overly optimistic," Foraker completed for him with a smile. "Not that you'd make a very good Greek princess, Five," she added, and her smile turned into a grin as she contemplated the shininess of his hairless pate.

"Thanks . . . I think," Anders replied.

"They're about to enter missile range," Lampert put in. Sovereign of Space's tactical officer was not a student of Old Earth mythology at the best of times, and, unlike the other three, he'd never taken his eyes from the onrushing wavefronts of icons in the plot. Now his announcement pulled their attention back to it, as well.

He was right, and as Foraker's eyes sought out the tactical sidebars, she saw the icons of the Manticoran LACs double, then redouble, then redouble yet again as the combination of their hellishly effective onboard EW and even more frustrating drones and remote platforms came online.

"Right on schedule," Clapp murmured to himself at her elbow, and she glanced at him. The commander was clearly unaware he'd spoken aloud, and Foraker hid a smile as she recognized an echo of her old self in him.

Mitchell Clapp had come to his present duties via a less than orthodox route. Unlike the majority of naval officers who aspired to senior command, he'd never even considered the shipboard engineering or tactical career tracks. His first love and lasting allegiance had been given to the Navy's small craft, and he'd made quite a name for himself as one of the relatively few homegrown officers to distinguish himself almost equally on the engineering and test pilot sides of the People's Navy's pinnace and shuttle development and upgrade programs. The job he'd done was a vital one, but it was also one which partook of very little martial glory, at least in the estimation of his fellow officers. Which was one reason a man who had accomplished so much had been a mere lieutenant when Oscar Saint-Just suffered a mischief.

"Just about . . . now," the commander breathed, and the plot altered suddenly as a vast wave of still tinier icons separated from the green dots of the Republican LACs and sped to meet the oncoming sea of red.

Foraker felt herself holding her breath as she watched his tiny, fiery green darts slashing into the Manties' faces. No doubt any Manticoran who saw that launch would have put it down to panic. Manifestly, no Republican LAC missile seeker was going to be able to penetrate the solid wall of decoys and jammers the Manties had thrown up, much less defeat the onboard electronic warfare systems of the Manticoran LACs themselves. Counter missiles raced to meet them anyway, of course, but not in the numbers one might have expected against more capable missiles from larger combatants. Scores of the incoming birds were wiped away, but clearly the Manty missile defense officers were holding onto their limited stores of counter missiles for use against a more credible threat than Havenite LAC missiles.

After all, they knew that the hundreds of Havenite missiles racing toward them couldn't possibly hurt them.

As it happened, they were even correct about that . . . up to a point. The point which was reached as the Republican missiles reached the ends of their runs while still almost forty thousand kilometers short of the Manticoran vessels and the first echelon detonated.

They had no standoff attack range against spacecraft, because they weren't laser heads. Nor were they standard nuclear warheads in any usual sense of the word. And they didn't carry any of the sophisticated and devilishly capable electronic warfare systems the Manticorans had produced, either, because much though it galled Shannon Foraker to admit it, it would be years—probably decades—before the Republic of Haven was able to match the technical competence of the Star Kingdom of Manticore. So as Commander Clapp had suggested to her over two T-years ago, the only practical solution was to find a way around the Manties' technological advantage.

Which was precisely what the Cimeterre —class LAC and its armament were designed to do. Clapp's solution undoubtedly owed a great deal to how much time he'd spent thinking about and modeling the short-range, cluttered, high-threat environment in which pinnaces and assault shuttles routinely operated. Very few tactical officers thought in terms of that sort of combat where "proper" spacecraft were concerned, even when the spacecraft in question were mere LACs. Pinnaces and assault shuttles, after all, were expendable. Everyone knew a certain percentage of them were going to be lost, whatever tactical doctrine they followed. Fortunately, they were cheap enough and had small enough crews compared to starships that even a relatively high degree of attrition was acceptable as long as it allowed them to accomplish their missions.

But that, Clapp had pointed out, was also the primary tactical advantage of the LAC. It was just that because it weighed in at thirty or forty thousand tons, people didn't really think of it that way. Even those who'd grasped the tactical reality intellectually hadn't done the same thing on a deep, emotional level. And so they'd continued to think in terms of standoff engagement ranges, sophisticated shipboard systems, and all the other elements which made a LAC a miniaturized version of larger, vastly more capable hyper-capable ships.

Mitchell Clapp had begun his own design process by going back to a blank piece of paper. Rather than designing a starship in miniature, he'd seen it as an opportunity to design a pinnace on the macro scale. He'd ruthlessly stripped out everything that wasn't absolutely essential to the combat role as he visualized it, and along the way he'd discovered it was possible to save a truly amazing amount of tonnage.

He'd started out by accepting a life support endurance of only ninety-six hours rather than the weeks and months which most LAC designers insisted upon. Next, he'd eliminated all energy armament, aside from an extremely austere outfit of point defense laser clusters. It was pretty clear to NavInt that the Manties had adopted radical innovations to provide the energy supply their new LACs required. Those EW systems had to be energy hogs, and the humongous graser they'd wrapped at least one of their LAC classes around was even worse. NavInt's best current guess was that they'd gone to some sort of advanced fission plant with enormously improved and/or enlarged superconductor capacitor rings to manage their energy budget. They'd also done something distinctly unnatural with their beta nodes to produce impeller wedges of such power without completely unacceptable tonnage demands. Again, all of those were things Haven would be unable to match for years to come, but by ruthlessly suppressing the energy armament and accepting such a vast decrease in life support—and by eliminating over half of the triple-redundancy damage control and repair systems routinely designed into "real" warships—Clapp had managed to produce a LAC hull which came amazingly close to matching the performance of the Manties' designs. Its less efficient inertial compensator meant its maximum acceleration rate was more sluggish, but it was actually a bit more nimble and maneuverable than the observational data suggested the Manty LACs were.

Of course, it had also been effectively unarmed compared to the Manticoran designs, but that was the point at which Clapp had recruited others to his project. In the absence of energy weapons, the Cimeterre carried a pure missile armament, and the R&D teams had made enormous advances in marrying reverse-engineered Solarian technology with their own indigenous design concepts. The missiles they'd come up with, like the LACs which would carry them, weren't up to Manticoran standards, but they were much, much better than anything any previous Havenite LAC had ever boasted. Unless NavInt was entirely wrong about the performance parameters of the Manticoran weapons, the Cimeterre's birds could approximately match their range and acceleration in a package which was only a very little larger. Once again, sacrifices had had to be made to cram that performance into something the Republic could produce, and in this instance that something had been the sophisticated seeking systems and penetration aids built into the Manticoran missiles. But when Clapp and his colleagues were done, they'd produced a ship which was faster on the helm, had almost as good an acceleration rate, and was armed with weapons which were almost as long-ranged as anything the Manticorans had yet demonstrated.

And because Clapp had been so ruthless in suppressing every single system which wasn't absolutely essential to the Cimeterre's mission as he visualized it, each LAC could cram a truly amazing number of missiles into its sophisticated rotary-magazine launchers.

Like the missiles which suddenly detonated long before any Manticoran would have expected them to. Missiles which contained absolutely no seeking systems, no penetration aides, no standoff laser heads—only the biggest, nastiest, dirtiest nuclear warheads Mitchell Clapp or anyone he could recruit had been able to design. Those warheads weren't designed to destroy enemy LACs; they were designed to strip away the enemy's EW advantages, and it was evident from the plot that they'd done just that.

The brutal wavefronts of plasma and radiation lashed out from the tsunami of missiles. No one had adopted such a brute force application to clearing away decoys and jammers in centuries. Even after the missile pod had reemerged, with its vulnerability to proximity "soft kills," no one had ever attempted to apply the same technique to electronic warfare drones and remote platforms. But that was because of the ranges at which deep space engagements were fought, and the dispersal which warships with impeller wedges hundreds of kilometers across were forced to maintain. Neither of those factors applied to the overgrown pinnaces Clapp had designed. The Cimeterre, even more than its Manticoran counterparts, was designed to get in close. It was a knife-fighter, not a sniper, and it eschewed sophistication and finesse for up close and personal, bare-knuckle, eye-gouging combat.

The initial detonations ripped a thermonuclear hole straight through the electronic shield which had sheltered the Manticoran LACs, and a second echelon of the same massive salvo raced through the opening. Its birds detonated ten thousand kilometers closer to the Manties, ripping the hole even deeper and wider, and the next echelon exploited the opening the second had created. The third echelon closed to within as little as two or three thousand kilometers of the Manticoran LACs before it detonated in a final wavefront of blast, heat, and hard radiation.

The cumulative effect was devastating. The "triple ripple," as Clapp had dubbed it, not only irradiated and seriously degraded the remote platforms (those it didn't destroy outright), but also wreaked grievous carnage, however briefly, on the Manticorans' onboard fire control systems and sensors. Like all warship sensors, they were hardened against EMP, but nothing had prepared them for the precisely synchronized and timed detonations of that many multi-megaton warheads in so small a volume of space and time. Indeed, it was unlikely that anything could have prepared them. It was as if they'd suddenly found themselves staring directly into the belly of a star, and for precious seconds they were dazzled and confused by the sheer, unimaginable ferocity of the event.

And while they were still dazzled, the Cimeterres' second salvo came slashing in. Inferior as the seekers and penetration aids of that salvo's missiles undoubtedly were, they were more than sufficiently effective against defensive systems which could barely even see them coming. They roared down on their targets, homing ruthlessly, following their intended victims through the last-minute, desperate evasion attempts which were all their half-blinded state allowed, and then they detonated at ranges as low as five thousand kilometers.

This time, they were standoff weapons, and the crimson icons of the Manticoran "super-LACs" which had mangled one Havenite fleet after another during Eighth Fleet's offensive, began to vanish with dreadful speed.

"Eighty-two percent kills, by God!" Commander Lampert announced exultantly as the numbers came in. "Eighty-two percent!"

"Eighty-two percent so far," Foraker corrected quietly, and Lampert nodded in acknowledgment as the Cimeterres continued to charge down upon the broken and harrowed ranks of their Manticoran opponents.

The massive energy mounts of the Manticoran Shrike —class LACs came into their own, even with targeting systems that remained partially degraded, and Republican LACs disappeared from the plot as the powerful grasers harvested them. But there weren't very many of the Shrikes left, and those which remained found themselves targeted by storms of individually less capable but numerically overwhelming short-range missiles. The first four, or five, or six missiles might be evaded or picked off by active defenses, but the seventh, or eighth, or ninth got through. The Cimeterres lost perhaps ten percent of their total number, but in return, they destroyed every single one of the Manticoran LACs. The absolute tonnage loss was less one-sided, but even that was hugely in the Republic's favor, and Commander Clapp staggered as Captain Anders pounded him on the back in jubilation.

"Simulation concluded," a voice announced, but it was almost drowned out by the babble of excited exultation surging through Sovereign of Space's CIC.

"It's only a simulation!" Clapp pointed out as coherently as he could through the background racket and Anders' pounding.

"But it's the best simulation we've been able to build," Foraker responded. "And we used the most pessimistic assumptions we could about our relative capabilities when we modeled it in the first place." She shook her head, grinning almost as broadly as Anders. "If anything, this understates the probable outcome, Mitchell!"

"But only for the initial engagements," Clapp countered, and gestured at her chief of staff. "As Captain Anders pointed out, once we've done this to them a time or two, they're going to begin adapting their tactics. If nothing else, they'll accept a greater degree of dispersal and use sequenced waves of EW drones to make it harder for us to kill them before we close."

"Of course they will," she agreed. "And," she went on more somberly, "you're quite right—our relative losses will go up steeply when that happens. But the entire point of your operational concept is that since we can't match their ability to kill starships with LACs, the best we can hope to do is to impose attritional losses on them. To neutralize their anti-shipping strike capability because we don't have the tech base to create a matching capability of our own. And that, Mitchell, is precisely what you've accomplished here. It isn't pretty, and it isn't elegant, but it is something more important than either of those things—it works." She shook her head. "To be honest, I hope we never get the opportunity to validate your creation, but if we do, I think it's going to do exactly what you set out to do."