Chapter Ten

"Will you look at that" Yuri Bogdanovich murmured almost reverently. "Its actually working!"

"Your surprise is hardly becoming, Yuri," Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville chided from within a cloud of cigar smoke. "And now that I think about it, it displays an appalling lack of confidence in our operations officer."

"You're right, Citizen Rear Admiral." Bogdanovich turned from his contemplation of the main holo sphere to bow in Shannon Foraker's direction. "Im still surprised, you understand," he went on, "but that's just because the Manties keep sneaking up on us. And may I say, Shannon, that it's a pleasure to be the ones doing the sneaking for a change!"

"Here, here!" Karen Lowe muttered, and a chorus of laughter, muted, and mostly a bit more nervous than its authors would care to have admitted, ran around the bridge.

People's Commissioner Honeker listened appreciatively. He heard the anxiety within it, but he also knew how rare any sign of levity at a time like this had become for the People’s Navy. He wasn't immune to ambition of his own, and once the domestic situation had stabilized enough, he intended to pursue a civilian political career, where having a stint as commissioner to a successful officer like Tourville on his record was going to look very good. Yet in fairness to him, he was more impressed with the citizen rear admiral's ability to motivate people to fight than he was by his own career prospects.

"How much longer, Citizen Commander Foraker?" he asked quietly. Foraker tapped numbers into a keypad, then studied the results for a moment.

"Assuming I've estimated their sensor platform availability correctly and that they really put the ones they had where I'm predicting, Sir, and assuming NavInt's estimate of their passive sensor capability is close to accurate, they should be in a position to begin picking us up within the next seven and a half hours," she said. "Of course, we're not emitting a thing, which will make their job a lot harder. As far as active sensors are concerned, the only ones I'm picking up at the moment are a long, long way outside detection ranges, and they look like standard navigation radars, civilian radars, from local intrasystem traffic."

"No active military sensors at all?" Honeker couldn't quite keep the skepticism out of his voice, and Foraker shrugged.

"Sir, any star system's a mighty big fishpond, and our approach course was designed to stay well clear of the ecliptic to avoid blundering into any of the local traffic’s sensor envelopes. Unless a starship already has a pretty good idea about where another ship is hiding, its active sensor reach is simply too short for any realistically useful sweeps. That's one of the things that makes the Manties' remotes such pains. Their sensor arrays, signal amplification, and dedicated software are better than any of our shipboard systems can come close to matching, and just to be on the safe side, they like to seed the things so densely and generate so much overlap that active sensors can pick up anyone who tries to sneak through. Which doesn't even mention the fact that an intact sensor net lets them shut down their mobile systems completely and rely on relayed data without revealing their own positions. But everything we've seen so far supports the theory that they're short on platforms, and we'll pick up any active sensor emissions long before they can get a useful return off of us."

Honeker's grunt was as much an apology for doubting her as an acceptance of her explanation, for she'd been very careful not to add, "I already told you that, dummy!" And the fact was that she had explained the entire plan in detail after she, Bogdanovich, and Lowe had worked out the final points.

Tourville’s squadron was doing something which was virtually unheard of: moving deeper and deeper into an enemy-held system without a single scout deployed to probe its line of advance. Instead, all four battlecruisers and all of their attached units were gathered into the tightest possible formation and coasting ballistically towards an interception with Samovar... and so far, it seemed clear that no one had seen them at all.

It was always possible Bogdanovich and Foraker were wrong about that, Honeker mused. Manty stealth systems were better than those of the People’s Navy, and it was at least possible that the entire Allied picket force was headed straight for Count Tilly and her consorts at this very moment. It seemed unlikely, however, for as Foraker had just pointed out, so far the squadron had yet to take a single active sensor hit, and only active sensors stood any realistic chance of picking them up.

"What the...?" Lieutenant Holden Singer frowned at his display, then made a tiny adjustment. His frown deepened, and he scratched his nose with a perplexed finger.

"What is it?" Commander Dillinger, HMS Enchanters executive officer, crossed the bridge to peer over Singers shoulder.

"Not sure, Sir." Singer stopped scratching his nose and reached to one side, never taking his eyes from the display as he ran his fingers down a bank of touchpad controls with the precision of a blind concert pianist. The display shifted as the heavy cruisers com lasers queried the other units tied into her tactical net for additional sensor data, and Singer made a disgusted sound. A single data code hung in the displays holo projection, but it wasn't the crisp, clear icon of a known starship. Instead, it was the weak, flickering amber of a possible, completely unidentified contact.

"Well?" Dillinger prompted, and Singer shook his head.

"Probably just a sensor ghost, Sir," he said, but he sounded unsure of his own conclusion.

"What kind of ghost?" Dillinger demanded.

"Sir, if I knew what it was, it wouldn't be a ghost," Singer pointed out, and Dillinger inhaled deeply and reminded himself that all tac officers were smartass hotdogs. He should know; he'd come up the tac officer career track himself.

"Then tell me what you do know," he said after a moment, speaking with such elaborate patience that Singer had the grace to blush.

"All I know for certain, Sir, is that something twanged the passives aboard one of my remotes about..." he checked the time "...eleven minutes ago. I don't know what it was, I didn't pick it up from here, and no one else in the net saw it at all. Battle Comp's calling it 'an anomalous electromagnetic spike,' which is the computers' way of saying they don't know what it was, either. What it looked like was a scrap of an encrypted burst transmission, but there doesn't seem to be anything out there to produce it."

"Is it inside our active envelope, assuming it's really there at all?" Dillinger asked.

"Can't say, Sir. All I've got is a bearing to where something might have been. I couldn't even begin to estimate the range. Assuming something really is out there, it's beyond our proximity warning radar, which means it's still at least a quarter million klicks out, but from the bearing on the 'anomalous spike,' it has to have originated in-system from our drone shell. That's all I can tell you for sure."

"I see." Dillinger rubbed his jaw for a moment. Given that none of Enchanters enormously sensitive passive arrays had picked up anything, it seemed most likely that Singer's "ghost" was just that: an electronic glitch with no existence in real space. For it to be anything else would have required a starship to be coasting in-system under total EmCon, and that sort of maneuver took more balls than any Peep CO was likely to boast. Especially after the way Manticoran perimeter sensor platforms had repeatedly spotted incoming hostiles far short of the inner system. Still...

"Go active," he said.

Singer glanced up over his shoulder and raised an eyebrow. Commodore Yeargin had specifically instructed her orbiting units to maintain a passive sensor watch only. Active sensors were too short ranged to do much good, anyway, and their only practical function would have been to turn the emitting ships into brilliant electronic beacons for anyone who'd managed to make it past the limited number of platforms her understrength "task group" had been able to deploy. But her orders had included a proviso authorizing officers of the watch to make targeted, short-duration active sweeps if they felt they were required, and Dillinger nodded to Singer to get on with it.

"Aye, aye, Sir," the ops officer said, and reached for his console once more.

"Radar pulse!"

Shannon Foraker’s harsh announcement cut through Count Tilly's flag bridge like a saw. Despite their confidence in their tac witch, Tourville and his staff (including Peoples Commissioner Honeker) had felt the tension ratcheting to almost unbearable heights as they swept closer and closer to Samovar. It seemed impossible that they could have gotten so close to a Manty force without being detected... unless the enemy's supply of sensor platforms was even smaller than Foraker had estimated.

"Strength?" Tourville snapped.

"Well above detection values," Foraker replied, never taking her eyes from her display as she worked her passive sensors. "They've got us... but I've got them, too!" She looked up at last and bared her teeth at her commanding officer. "I make it right on two-point-four million klicks, Sir, and I've got a good fix on whoever just pulsed us!"

"Set it up!" Tourville looked at Citizen Lieutenant Fraiser. "Pass the word," he told the com officer. "We launch in thirty seconds!"

"My God!"

Holden Singer snapped upright in his chair, eyes wide. It took eight seconds for his radar pulse to reach Count Tilly and her consorts, and another eight seconds for it to return. During that time, the Peeps' approach speed had cut the range by over a million kilometers... and brought them well into missile range. It took the lieutenant another two seconds to realize what he was seeing and shout a warning, and it took Commander Dillinger another second and a half to order the General Quarters alarm sounded. In all, twenty seconds elapsed between the time Tourville passed his order to fire and the moment the atonal, two-toned howl of the alarm actually began to sound.

HMS Enchanters crew had barely begun to race to their battle stations when four battlecruisers, eight heavy cruisers, and six light cruisers, with a combined total of fifty-six missile pods on tow behind them, opened fire. Peep missiles were less efficient than those of the RMN, but in compensation, Peep warships mounted more tubes... and so did their missile pods.

By the time Singers assistant tac officer flung herself into the chair beside his, over nine hundred missiles were in space and streaking for his ship.

"Yessss!"

Citizen Captain Bogdanovich’s exultant, sibilant whisper said it all as Tourville and his staff watched their massive salvo stream towards the enemy. Even as the missiles went out, Tourville's engineers were bringing up his ships' impellers and sidewalls, for there was no longer any reason to hide. Unlike the Manties, Tourville's officers had known their drives and defensive systems would be needed, and they'd been at standby for over fifteen hours, but even with hot impeller nodes, they would need at least another thirteen minutes to bring their wedges up.

Yet that still put them far ahead of the Manties, for the Manties hadn't known this was coming. Their missile-defense fire control started to come on-line, blossoming on Shannon Foraker’s display in bursts of light, but their passive defenses could never be brought up in time. And against the hurricane of fire coming at them, all their radar and lidar could really do was provide targeting beacons for her missiles' onboard seekers.

Commodore Frances Yeargin hurled herself onto her flag bridge almost before the lift doors opened. She hadn't waited to don her skinsuit; she came charging out of the lift in shirt sleeves, without even her tunic... just in time to see the first laser heads detonate in the depths of her visual display.

Lester Tourville stared into the master plot, unable even now to truly believe what it showed. A Manty task group had been caught totally unprepared, and that wasn't supposed to happen. But it had, and Shannon’s plan had taken merciless advantage of the Manties' fatal over-confidence. He watched targeting codes blossom and change as the missiles reported back over their telemetry links. They were on their own, but Foraker had told them precisely what to look for, and the steady procession of fire control systems coming on-line before them beckoned to their homing sensors. The massive flight of missiles began to spread and disperse, apportioning itself among the victims in its path.

It wasn't a perfect distribution, a corner of his brain noted. One or two of those ships were going to get off with no more than a dozen or so birds, while others were going to be attacked by scores of them, but it didn't really matter. Shannon was already reprogramming the missiles waiting in her broadside tubes, and even as Tourville watched, a second salvo, much smaller than the first, but carefully targeted on the handful of Manties who might survive the first one, spat from his ships.

For all intents and purposes, surprise was total. Commodore Yeargin's crews were still scrambling frantically to their stations when the first wave came in. Of her six heavy cruisers, two never got their point defense on-line at all. Three more managed, somehow, to bring their laser clusters up under computer control, but only Enchanter got off a single salvo of counter-missiles. Not that it made much difference. One hundred and six incoming missiles were picked off before they reached attack range; the other eight hundred and sixty-two raced in to twenty-thousand kilometers and detonated in rippling succession.

Nuclear explosions pocked space, each one generating a thicket of bomb-pumped X-ray lasers. It wasn't even a massacre, for there was nothing, absolutely nothing, between those lasers and their targets. It took less than four seconds for all eight hundred-plus warheads to attack. Sixteen seconds later, Shannon Foraker's second salvo streaked down on the stunned, mangled survivors, and when the last of them detonated, the Manticoran Alliance had lost six RMN heavy cruisers, three RMN and seven GSN light cruisers, and nine destroyers... without getting a single shot off at their attackers.

Commander Jessica Dorcett sat frozen in her command chair, staring with numb incomprehension at the impossible tactical imagery. Hers was the senior ship of the destroyer division assigned to cover the main processing platform of the Adler System's asteroid extraction industry. The platform's Peep-built technology wasn't much by Manticoran standards, but it was still an important facility, and it was presently over fifty light-minutes from Samovar, well away from the course the enemy must have followed on his way in-system. Which meant that Dorcett's three ships had survived... and that she was now the system's senior officer. It was up to her to decide what had to be done, but what in God's name could she do?

The task group was gone. Only her own division remained, and it would be less than useless against the force decelerating towards the fresh wreckage orbiting Samovar. She had just witnessed the most crushing, one-sided defeat in the history of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and there was nothing at all she could do about it.

A dull ache told her her teeth were clamped in a deathlike rictus, and she sucked in an enormous breath and made her jaw relax. Then she shook herself, like a dog throwing water from its coat, and turned to her exec. Lieutenant Commander Dreyfus was still staring at the plot, his normally dark face pale, and Dorcett cleared her throat loudly.

Dreyfus twitched as if she'd stuck a pin into him, then closed his eyes for just a moment. When he opened them again, the shock had been dragged under a ruthless pretense of control, and he met his captain's gaze squarely.

"Pass the word. We'll hyper out to Clairmont ourselves. Rondeau and Balladeer will head for Quest and Treadway respectively."

"But..." Dreyfus paused. "That won't leave anyone to picket the system and keep an eye on them, Ma'am," he pointed out quietly.

"We don't have that luxury." Dorcett’s tone was as bleak as her expression. "I don't know what the schedule was, but I do know GHQ's already detailed reinforcements for this system. The warships will probably be coming in in ones and twos, which is bad enough, but Logistics Command has supply ships and troop transports in the pipeline, as well. Individual warships won't stand a chance against a force that size, but at least they may have the speed to run for it. Transports won't... but Logistics Command is bound to stage them through Clairmont, Quest, or Treadway. Which means we have to catch them in one of those systems and warn them off in time. Besides..." she managed a death's head grin "...we're all there is. Someone's got to alert the other local pickets about what's happened here, and the only people who can do that are us."

"Yes, Ma'am." Dreyfus beckoned to the com officer, and Dorcett heard the urgent, low-pitched murmur of his voice as he passed her orders on. She knew she should be listening to be sure he'd gotten those orders right, but they'd served together for over a T-year. He wasn't the sort to make mistakes, and even if he had been, it was physically impossible for her to look away from her display and the icons of the Peep warships settling into orbit around Samovar.

Compared to the tonnages routinely destroyed when walls of battle clashed, the loss of Commodore Yeargin's task group would hardly be noticed, but Dorcett knew tonnage was the least of what had been lost here. Even the personnel casualties, terrible as they must have been, were secondary to what she'd just seen. It was the speed, the brutal, overwhelming power and efficiency, with which the task group had been killed that mattered. That was what was going to stick in the craws of the Alliance and, especially, the Manticoran Navy.

This wasn't the first victory the Peeps had won, but its totality put it in a category all its own. A category the RMN had believed was reserved for it, not for the clumsy, outclassed stumblebums of the Peoples Navy.

Well, Dorcett told herself grimly, we were wrong. And from the salvo density, they had to have been using missile pods, too. They outthought us, they outplanned us, and they outshot us, and if they can do that here, then where else can they pull it off?

She didn't know. The only two things she did know were that it was her job to spread the warning before more ships sailed into the trap this system had just become... and that whatever else happened in her career, she and every officer aboard her three ships would always be known as the people who'd watched the worst disaster in Manticoran naval history and done nothing to prevent it. It wasn't their fault. There was nothing they could have done. But that wouldn't matter, and she knew it.

"Rondeau and Balladeer are ready to pull out, Ma'am,"

Lieutenant Commander Dreyfus reported quietly, and Dorcett nodded.

"Very well, Arnie. Send the self-destruct code to the sensor platforms, then get us moving," she said.

Chapter Eleven

At his age, Howard Clinkscales was out of the habit of feeling ill at ease in public. He'd begun his career as a Sword armsman recruit, not even an officer cadet, but an enlisted man, sixty-seven T-years ago and climbed to the rank of brigadier in palace security by age thirty-six. By the time of the Mayhew Restoration, he'd been commanding general of Planetary Security, a post he'd held under Benjamin IX's father, as well, and an unofficial member of the royal family. Along the way, he'd dealt with street criminals, serial killers and other psychotics, assassination plots, and treason, and taken them all in stride.

Even more surprisingly, he'd also learned to take the monumental social changes of his home world in stride, which was something no one who'd known him before Grayson joined the Alliance would ever have predicted. He'd been almost eighty when the treaty was signed, and a more hidebound reactionary would have been hard to find. Not even his best friends would have called Clinkscales a brilliant man, he was no fool, certainly, and he liked to think he'd learned a few things in eight decades, but no one had ever considered him a genius, and that was one reason so many people had expected him to reject any sort of accommodation with the reforms rolling through the society he'd known since boyhood. But those people had overlooked the three qualities which had carried him so high from such humble beginnings: inexhaustible energy, an unyielding sense of duty, and an iron-bound integrity.

It was the last quality which had turned the trick in the end, for his was a personal integrity. Many people could be conscientiously honest in dealing with public responsibilities or other people; Clinkscales was one of those much rarer individuals whose integrity extended to himself, and that meant he could no more shut his eyes to the truth just because it was unpalatable than he could have flown without a counter-grav belt.

That was why Benjamin IX had appointed him as Honor Harrington's regent, for his sense of duty had been the Protectors insurance policy. It was unthinkable that Howard Clinkscales would do anything less than his best to serve his Steadholder and her steading, and the fact that the planets other conservatives knew he shared their philosophical leanings made him uniquely valuable as Harrington Steading’s regent. If he could do his duty and live with the changes he personally detested, then they could, as well, or that, at least, had been Benjamin’s theory.

It hadn't quite worked out that way, however. Oh, Clinkscales' role as regent had undoubtedly had an impact on the more reasonable among Grayson's conservatives, but it hadn't prevented the true fanatics from plotting against Honor and the Mayhew reforms. Of course, realistically speaking it was unlikely that anything could have dissuaded people whose minds were that far gone, so expecting his appointment to slow them down had probably been wishful thinking, anyway. But that appointment had had one effect which Benjamin had never anticipated and would, in fact, have denied was possible. It hadn't precisely turned Clinkscales into a radical reformer (to be honest, the mind still boggled at the thought of him in that role), but he'd actually come to see the changes in his world as beneficial. And that was because his position had brought him into regular contact with Honor Harrington at the same time it required him to superintend the mountain range of details involved in creating the first new Grayson steading in over seventy-two T-years. Not only had he been forced to confront the reality of a woman whose capability, courage, and, perhaps most importantly of all, sense of duty at least matched his own, but he'd also been forced to actually work out the details of implementing the reforms as he labored on the blank canvas which was to become Harrington Steading. It was a tribute to him that he could make such major adjustments to his thinking so late in life, although he didn't see it that way himself. As far as he was concerned, he was still a conservative trying to mitigate the more extreme demands of the reformers, but that was all right. He was actually quite a few strides in front of the curve, and Honor had been gently amused on more than one occasion by his irate reaction to "troublemakers" who tried to get in the way and slow things back down.

If anyone could have screwed up the nerve to ask him why he supported the changes, his answer would have been simple enough. It was his duty to his Steadholder. If pressed, he would have admitted (not without a choleric expression and a fearsome glower) that his support stemmed not simply from duty, but from devotion to a woman he'd come to respect deeply. What he would not have admitted was that he had come to view his Steadholder through a curiously mixed set of lenses, as a warrior, a leader, his personal liege lady... and also as one of his own daughters. He was proud of her, as proud as if she actually were his own child, and he would have killed anyone who dared to say so, for like so many people who care deeply, Howard Clinkscales went to great lengths to conceal his feelings from the world. Emotions had been dangerous chinks in a policeman's armor, and so the man who had become the commander-in-chief of a planet's security forces had learned to hide them, lest they be used against him. It was a habit he had never learned to break... but that didn't mean he was unaware of what he felt.

And that was part of the reason he felt uneasy at this particular public function, for his Steadholder should have been here for it, and his mental antennae insisted that the reasons she'd given him for departing again so quickly weren't her actual motives. Oh, all of them were true enough, he'd never known Honor Harrington to lie; in fact, he wasn't at all certain she knew how to, but they hadn't been the real cause for her decision, and that worried him. She was his Steadholder, and it was his job to know when something worried her and to deal with it. Besides, if the fanatics plotting against her under the late, unlamented Lord Burdette and Brother Marchant hadn't been enough to drive her off-planet, anything that could do the trick obviously needed seeing to.

But even that was only a partial explanation for his uneasiness, and he drew a deep breath and admitted the rest of it to himself as he watched the shuttle descend. He might have become more comfortable with the reforms around him, but at heart he was still an old-fashioned Grayson patriarch. He'd learned to admit that there were women in the galaxy, including quite a few homegrown Graysons, who were at least as capable as he was, but in the final analysis, that was an intellectual admission, not an emotional one. He had to have personal contact with a woman, actually see her demonstrate her abilities, before his emotions made the same connection. It was foolish of him, not to mention patronizing, and he knew it, yet it was nonetheless true. He did his best to overcome it, and much as it might affect his attitudes he managed to keep it from affecting his actions, but he'd come to the conclusion that it was too fundamental a part of his societal programming for him ever to be fully free of it. And that was a problem today, for the shuttle about to touch down contained a person his brain knew had to be one of the smartest, most capable individuals he was ever likely to meet... and she was a woman. The fact that she was also the mother of his Steadholder and thus, whether she knew it or not, one of the two or three hundred most important people on the entire planet, didn't help, and neither did where she had been born and raised.

Dr. Allison Chou Harrington was a native of Beowulf in the Sigma Draconis System, and Beowulf's society had a reputation for... liberal mores which would have curled a Manticorans hair, much less a Graysons. Clinkscales was fairly certain (or, at least, he thought he was) that that reputation had grown in the telling, but there was no denying that Beowulf was as famed for the many, and imaginative, marital and sexual arrangements of its citizens as it was for providing the human race's best medical researchers, and...