Battle of Manticore, Part I.
He turned from the visual display to regard the huge master plot, and allowed himself a feeling of satisfaction as he studied the icons of the new fortresses. A year ago, the Manticoran Wormhole Junction's permanent fortifications had been virtually nonexistent. In fact, they'd been so sparse he'd been forced to hang Home Fleet all the way out at the Junction to cover the critical central nexus of the Star Kingdom's economy against attack.
He hadn't liked that, but the Janacek Admiralty's failure to update the fortresses had left him no choice. And at least the Manticore System's astrography had let him get away with it for a while.
The Janacek Admiralty apparently halted work on the new fortresses, little more than heavily defended control nodes for thousands of missile pods.
Classic system-defense doctrine, developed over centuries of experience, taught that a covering fleet should be deployed in an interior position. Habitable planets inevitably lay inside any star's hyper limit, and habitable planets were generally what made star systems valuable. That being the case, the smart move was to position your own combat power where it could reach those habitable planets before any attacker coming in from outside the limit could do the same thing.
Unfortunately, one could argue that the Wormhole Junction was what truly made the Manticore System valuable. D'Orville didn't happen to like that argument, but he couldn't deny that it had a certain applicability. Without the Junction, the Star Kingdom would never have had the economic and industrial muscle to take on something the Republic of Haven's size. And it was certainly the Junction which made the Manticore System so attractive to potential aggressors like Haven in the first place.
Seems the hyper limit always exists outside the Goldilocks Band, and the Junction is naturally well outside the hyper limit. In fact, it's seven and eleven light-hours from the two stars of the system, respectively.
But theory, as Sebastian D'Orville had learned over the years, had a nasty habit of biting one on the backside at the most inopportune moment. That was why he'd never really been happy with his enforced deployment. And now that Sphinx would clear the RZ in less than four T-months, he was even less comfortable with hanging his fleet on the Junction. The planet had lost too much of the additional "depth" the zone had created for him, and even in a best-case scenario, his need to make two separate hyper translations from the Junction would have placed him well astern of his hypothetical attacker, since he couldn't make even the first of them until after the aggressor force arrived and started accelerating towards its targets.
At closest approach, Sphinx is less than an hour inside the hyper limit, meaning a defending fleet could theoretically micro-jump from the Junction to close enough to defend the planet. However, this happy circumstance only lasts a handful of months.
Which was why D'Orville was so relieved the new forts were finally operational. Much smaller than the old prewar fortifications which had been decommissioned to provide the manpower to crew new construction, they were actually more powerfully armed, thanks to the same increased automation and weapons developments which had gone into the Navy's new warships. And each of those forts was surrounded by literally hundreds of missile pods, with the fire control to handle stupendous salvos. It would take an attack in overwhelming force to break those defenses, which had freed D'Orville to move Home Fleet closer to a more traditional covering position, locating his command in Sphinx orbit.
His new station provided Sphinx with badly needed, close-in protection. And with the planet of Manticore still trailing its orbital position, and so still deeper into the zone and (as always) further inside the hyper-limit, he was actually better placed to cover Manticore than he would have been anywhere else. Any least-time course to Manticore would require the attacker to get past his position at Sphinx, first, and he could easily intercept the opposing fleet short of its objective.
The new Junction Forts, and for now Home Fleet is sitting on Sphinx since they can still intercept any hypothetical attacker short of Manticore itself from there.
The solution wasn't perfect, of course. For one thing, the move left Manticore-B and its inhabited planet of Gryphon more exposed than it had been when Home Fleet was stationed at the Junction, since D'Orville would now have to get clear of the zone before he could hyper out to the system's secondary component. But the extra danger wasn't very great, now that Sphinx was within eight light-minutes of the zone's boundary. And more vulnerable or not, Gryphon had the smallest population and industrial base of any of the Star Kingdom's original inhabited worlds. If something had to be exposed, cold logic said Gryphon was a better choice than the other two planets, and the Admiralty had compensated as best it could by assigning the buildup of Manticore-B's fixed defenses a higher priority than Manticore-A's. In fact, Manticore-B's forts and space station were already refitting with Keyhole II and would begin deploying the first of the system-defense Apollo pods within the next three weeks, on the theory that it would need them worse since it couldn't call as readily on Home Fleet's protection.
And once Manticore-B's defenses were fully up to speed, Sphinx would receive the next highest priority, despite the fact that the planet of Manticore had the largest population and the greatest economic and industrial value of any of the binary system's worls. Like Manticore-B, Sphinx was simply more exposed than Manticore.
The planet Manticore itself is going to be the last to get the systems defense Apollo pods, because the other two are just that much more exposed.
But today, Sebastian D'Orville and half of Home Fleet were back out at the Junction, waiting. Waiting not for an enemy attack, but to welcome back two of the Manticoran Navy's own.
Specifically
Hexapuma and
Warlock for the end of SoS. and I guess that display we saw was only half of Home Fleet.
If she'd had the choice, she would have loved to have been back in the Manticore System in about half an hour. Unfortunately, she didn't really have that choice. Vizeadmiral Lyou-yung Hasselberg, Graf von Kreuzberg, and the leading elements of his Task Force 16, IAN, had arrived at Trevor's Star less than a week earlier. Two of his three battle squadrons were at full strength, and the Imperial Andermani Navy, like the Republic of Haven's, still used eight-ship squadron organizations. His third battle squadron remained short one of its four divisions, but what had already arrived had added twenty-two SD(P)s—every one of them Keyhole II-capable—to Eighth Fleet's order of battle.
Unfortunately, none of those ships had ever functioned as part of Eighth Fleet before, and eleven of them had finished their post-refit working up exercises less than two weeks before they deployed forward to Trevor's Star. And, just to add a little more interest to the situation, Vizeadmiral Bin-hwei Morser, Graffin von Grau, Hasselberg's second-in-command, was not one of the Royal Manticoran Navy's greater admirers. In fact, she was a holdover from the same anti-Manticoran faction within the IAN which had produced Graf von Sternhafen, who'd done so much to help make Honor's last duty assignment . . . interesting.
The rest of Hasselberg's senior flag officers seemed much more comfortable with the notion of their Emperor's decision to ally himself with the Star Kingdom, and she suspected that Chien-lu Anderman had had more than a little to do with their selection for their present assignments. Morser obviously had patrons of her own, however, since she'd received command of the very first squadron of refitted Andermani SD(P)s. And, Honor admitted just a bit grudgingly, she also appeared to be very good at her job. It was just unfortunate that she found it difficult to conceal the fact that she would have preferred to be shooting at the rest of Honor's fleet, rather than accepting her orders.
The Andermani are here, or most of them. 22 Apollo-equipped podnoughts. But there is some friction a Vizeadmiral with a real stick up her rear regarding Manticore and other difficulties integrating the Andy units, so it's drill, drill, drill.
The bottom line, though, was that the Manticoran and Grayson navies were the explored galaxy's most experienced, battle—hardened fleets. Their margin of superiority over the revitalized navy of Thomas Theisman was far narrower than it once had been, but it remained the Alliance's most significant advantage. And the Andermani, although they were very, very good by any less Darwinian standard, simply weren't up to their allies' weight.
Yet, at least.
The Andermani haven't fought a desperate war for their survival recently, nor had the opportunity to purge an awful lot of senior officers who climbed the ladder based on connections and political reliability rather than skill like Manticore.
Each of those specks of light was a starship, most of them as massive and powerfully armed as Guerriere herself. Now that Fisher had arrived on schedule, the reinforced Second Fleet was complete, as was Admiral Chin's Fifth Fleet, and both were under Tourville's command. Three hundred and thirty-six SD(P)s, the flower of the reborn Republican Navy, and by any standards, the most powerful battle force ever assembled for a single operation by any known star nation. They lay all about him, floating in distant orbit around the star system's second gas giant, waiting for his orders, and he felt a shiver of apprehensive anticipation flow through him.
Tourvilles Second and Fifth fleets are ready to begin their long jump to Manticore.
Tourville terminated the connection and stood. He patted his skinsuit's cargo pocket automatically, checking to be certain his trademark cigars were where they were supposed to be. They'd become so much a part of his image that he probably could have demoralized his entire flag bridge crew by the simple expedient of giving up smoking.
The man jokes. but if he quit smoking he just might send the morale of his immediate subordinates down the crapper.
He ran one hand over the hair in question, and chuckled again, much more naturally . . . just as the music began to play.
One of Thomas Theisman's reforms had been to allow the captains of capital units the right to substitute more personalized selections for the stridency of the standard fleet alarms. Captain Houellebecq had a fondness for really old opera, much of it actually dating from pre-space Old Earth. Tourville had cherished private doubts when she decided to use some of it aboard Guerriere, but he had to admit she'd come up with a suitable selection for this particular signal. In fact, he'd thought it was an appropriate one even before she told him what it was called.
"Now here this! Now here this! All hands, man Battle Stations! Repeat, all hands man Battle Stations!" Captain Celestine Houellebecq's calm, crisp voice said through the ancient, surging strains of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries.
Havenite captains, at least the ones on capital ships, can now use whatever sound clip they like as a GQ alarm, and I have to admit
Ride of the Valkyries is probably a good way to start the largest space battle ever. Give your side a little shot of confidence before dropping from hyper.
In fact, as both he and Zucker knew perfectly well, the Mantie's system platforms had detected and pinpointed their hyper footprints the instant they arrived. There was no point trying to fool those stupendous arrays. With dimensions measured in thousands of kilometers on a side, they could pick up even the most gradual translation into normal-space at a range of literally light-weeks, much less the signatures of two battlecruiser squadrons only six light-hours from the primary.
Oliver Diamato is commanding two BC squadrons sent to scout the Junction and report any major reinforcements coming through it. Pretty much spamming recon drones every time the defenders get one wave. Manty early warning arrays around the homeworld.
She wasn't the only one thinking dark thoughts, she noticed, watching the huge astro plot's sidebars as the Junction forts rushed to battle stations. It would take a lot of SDs to deal with them, she told herself, but that didn't make her feel a great deal better. There were several hundred freighters, passenger liners, mail boats, and exploration vessels either already in transit through the Junction's various termini or else lined up in the transit queues awaiting their turns, and the thought of MDMs tearing around amidst all that defenseless civilian shipping made her physically sick to her stomach.
She flipped up a plastic shield and punched a large, red button on her console. A harsh, strident buzzer sounded, and every other sound on the command deck of HMSS DaGama, the Junction's central ACS platform ceased abruptly. Every eye turned towards her as the saw-edged audio alarm jerked her personnel's attention to her.
"It hasn't been declared yet, but we have damned sure got ourselves a Case Zulu, people," she announced in a flat, tense voice. "I'm declaring Condition Delta on my own authority. Clear the Junction—all traffic, wherever it is in the queue, not just the outbounds already on final. I want anything that might draw an MDM's attention way the hell away from here ASAP.
The Junction Forts scrambling to battle stations, the Junction traffic is getting cleared and the ACS is preparing for inbound reinforcements as they send a warning to Trevor's Star.
"Good," Grimm said quietly, and looked back at the plot. The first Ghost Rider platforms were already twenty-five thousand kilometers out, accelerating at just over five thousand gravities. She couldn't see them, though she knew they were there. But she could see the blossoming impeller signatures of Junction Defense Command's LACs. Over thirty-five hundred were already in space, and more were appearing with metronome precision as the LAC platforms launched.
5,000 Gs accel for Ghost Rider recon drones, and at least 3500 LACs deployed from or near the Junction FOrts.
"They're coming straight down our throats, Sir," Captain Maurice Ayrault, his chief of staff, replied flatly. "The only finesse I can see is their approach vector. It looks like they think they're going to take out Home Fleet and Sphinx first, then roll on over Manticore, but they're trying to leave themselves an out just in case, and their astrogation was first rate. They came in right on the intersection of the resonance zone and the hyper limit and split the angle almost exactly. It's not a least-time approach, but it means they can break back across the zone boundary if it gets too deep instead of being committed to the inner-system. At the moment, they're eight light-minutes out, closing at fifteen hundred KPS, and they're pouring on the accel. They must be running their compensators at at least ninety percent of full military power, because current acceleration is right on four-point-eight KPS-squared."
Inbound Havenite accel and vector.
D'Orville considered what Ayrault had said. Home Fleet was still rushing to Battle Stations, but at least it was standing policy to hold his ships' nodes permanently at standby readiness, despite the additional wear that put on the components. He'd be able to get underway in the next twelve to fifteen minutes. The question was what he did when he could.
Home Fleet always runs their impellers hot.
"Tracking makes it two hundred and forty superdreadnoughts, Sir. At this time, it looks like they're all pod-layers, but we're trying to get drones in closer to confirm that. They've also got what looks like sixteen CLACs and a screen of roughly ninety cruisers and lighter units, as well."
"Thank you, Madelyn."
D'Orville was pleased, in a distant sort of way, by how calm he sounded, but he understood why Gwynett's shoulders had stiffened. Home Fleet contained forty-two SD(P)s and forty-eight older superdreadnoughts. He was outnumbered by better than two and a half-to-one in capital ships, but the ratio was almost six-to-one in SD(P)s. He had twelve pod-laying battlecruisers, as well, but they'd be spit on a griddle against superdreadnoughts.
Forces for the opening.
Haven: 240 SD(P) 16 CLAC and 90 screen
Manticore: 42 SD(P) 48 SD, 16 CLAC, 12 BC(P) and an unknown number of smaller units. At least 36 cruisers and 33 destroyers.
Still, he told himself as firmly as possible, the situation wasn't quite as bad as the sheer numbers suggested. The new tractor-equipped "flat-pack" missile pods would allow each of his older superdreadnoughts to "tow" almost six hundred pods inside their wedges, glued to their hulls like high-tech limpets. That was a hundred and twenty percent of a Medusa-class' internal pod loadout, and the ships were already loading up with them. Unfortunately, they didn't have the fire control to manage salvos as dense as a Medusa could throw. Worse, they'd have to flush the majority of their pods early in order to clear the sensor and firing arcs of their point defense and its fire control arrays. So he was going to have to use them at the longest range, where their accuracy was going to be lowest.
Flatpack pods make every ship a podlayer, to an extent. But do nothing for fire-control links and leave you stuck with the basic "use it or lose it" nature of pods, even if the situation is generally a lot better.
The inner system defenses relied heavily on MDM pods, and they'd been deployed in massive numbers. Unfortunately, he thought, the numbers weren't massive enough. They'd been designed to stop any likely attack cold, but the defensive planners hadn't counted on an adversary who was prepared to throw over two hundred modern podnaughts, and all the anti-missile defenses that implied, straight into their teeth. They might still be able to beat off the attack, but not without letting the attackers into their own missile range of the hideously vulnerable dispersed shipyards in which the Royal Manticoran Navy's entire next-generation of superdreadnoughts was approaching completion. He couldn't let the Peeps close enough to do to the home system shipyards what had already happened to Grendelsbane's.
And that doesn't even count what could happen if they open fire on the inner system from that far out and a couple of their missiles run into Manticore or Sphinx at seventy or eighty percent of light-speed, he thought with a shudder.
MDM system-defense pods not thick enough to do the job in this case, and too close to the major shipyards which they are
not letting a massive Haven fleet into MDM range of.
"So far, they've stayed away from anything which might look like a violation of the Eridani Edict," Caparelli pointed out.
"And so far they haven't invaded our home system, either," D'Orville shot back. The Manticoran tradition was that the Admiralty did not second guess a fleet CO when battle threatened—not even Home Fleet's commander. What D'Orville did with his fleet was his decision. Admiralty House might advise, might provide additional intelligence or suggest tactics, but the decision was his, and it wasn't like Thomas Caparelli to try to change that.
But D'Orville wasn't really surprised by Caparelli's reluctance to admit what he knew as well as D'Orville did had to happen. The First Space Lord knew too many of the men and women aboard D'Orville's ships . . . and he couldn't join them. He would be safely back on Manticore when the hammer came down on Home Fleet, and Sebastian D'Orville knew Caparelli too well, knew exactly what the other admiral was feeling, the miracle he wanted to find. But there were no miracles, not today, and so D'Orville shook his head.
Prepare for Sebastian D'Orville's death ride against a vastly larger fleet. The pain of fighting in the home system is having the entire Admiralty and political bodies looking over your shoulder, but at least they have a strong tradition of not meddling with the man on the spot, unlike in, say, Star by Star.
"I've ordered the Case Zulu message transmitted to all commands," he said, his voice more clipped, his dread of what was to come cloaked in reflex professionalism. "Theodosia can start responding from Trevor's Star in about fifteen minutes, but most of Eighth Fleet is off the terminus, on maneuvers. I don't know how quickly it can get back there, but I'm guessing it'll take at least a couple of hours just for Duchess Harrington to get to the terminus. I'm recalling Jessup Blaine's squadrons from the Lynx Terminus, as well, but our best estimate on his current response time is even longer than Eighth Fleet's."
"And even Theodosia can't do it in a mass transit," D'Orville said grimly. "She's going to have to do it one ship at a time, the same way Hamish did it when the bastards hit Basilisk, because we're going to need everything she's got."
Kuzak could have put almost thirty superdreadnoughts through the Junction in a single mass transit, but the destabilizing effect would have locked down the Trevor's Star-Manticore route for almost seventeen hours. Even in a sequenced transit, each ship of the wall would close the route for almost two minutes before the next in the queue could use it.
Time to reinforcements, and another callback to the beginning of the series (all these callbacks are on reason it really feels like a fitting
ending) in reminding us that the wormholes have an upper limit on how much mass can move through, if they over load the wormholes they'll shutdown for almost a full day and there will be no chance for further reinforcement, in the case of Third Fleet, that means a mass transit would lock EIghth Fleet out of the fight and that's one thing they simply cannot do. So one at a time over the course of 2 hours.
"We're scrambling every LAC we've got," Caparelli said. "We should be able to get five or six thousand of them to you by the time you engage."
"That will help—a lot," D'Orville said. "But they've got sixteen carriers with them. That gives them over three thousand of their own."
System defense LACs. Back to roughly 200 LACs to a carrier, if it were the earlier larger number he'd have said over
four thousand.
"Forget the screen!" Admiral Theodosia Kuzak snapped. "We can cut fifteen minutes off our total transit time if we leave them behind, and it's not like cruisers and destroyers are going to make any difference, is it?"
Kuzak preparing to transit. Might I suggest you instead send the screen last? It will probably still not inconvenience Eighth Fleet's transit in a few hours.
"Actually, Ma'am," Smithson continued in a low-pitched voice, "I've just had a rather nasty thought. What if this isn't their only fleet? What if they've got another one waiting to hit Trevor's Star as soon as we pull out for Manticore?"
"The same thought occurred to me," Kuzak replied, equally quietly. "Unfortunately, there's not a lot we can do about it, if they do. We've got to hold the home system. If they punch out Hephaestus and Vulcan, take out the dispersed yards, it'll be a thousand times worse than what happened at Grendelsbane. I hate to say it, but if it's a choice between San Martin and Sphinx or Manticore, San Martin loses."
At least thinking about the possibilities.
"Admiral Kuzak," she replied, then continued, getting straight to business, in light of the delay. "I assume you're already planning an immediate transit to Manticore with Third Fleet. I'm sending my battlecruisers ahead, but it's going to take most of my units another two hours-plus to reach the terminus. With your permission, I'll temporarily assign Admiral McKeon's battle squadron and Admiral Truman's carriers to you."
"Thank you, Admiral," Kuzak said very, very sincerely.
"The sooner they get there, the better," Honor replied eight seconds later. "And please remember that three of Alistair's superdreadnoughts are Apollo-capable. I don't know how much difference it's going to make, but—"
Third Fleet is coming through with Eighth's BC(P)s, carriers and one extra squadron of podnoughts, 3 of them with Apollo. In the last war, Third Fleet was the primary offensive element under first White Haven, then Kuzak until they took Trevor's Star, thereafter they were condemned to sit on that critical system while Eighth Fleet was formed to take the fight to the enemy. Well here's their epic comeback.
"So I see," Oliver Diamato murmured. Like Zucker, he was delighted he wasn't already having to play tag with hordes of Manty battlecruisers or—worse!—those damned MDM-armed heavy cruisers he'd heard so much about from NavInt since that business at Monica. But the shoals of LAC impeller signatures sweeping outward from the Junction were building a solid wall of interference which made it almost impossible for his shipboard sensors to see a damned thing, even at this piddling little range. The density of that LAC shell also augured poorly for the survival of his recon drones when they finally got close enough for a look of their own.
The Junction forces are using the LACs to keep Diamato from getting a good look at the Junction, but....
"Much as we may hate to admit it, a one-on-one engagement with one of us would be a Manty BC skipper's wet dream. So if they're not sending them after us, then they must've had wallers in place and ready to start coming through almost immediately, instead. And they're going right on doing it. Which suggests they have quite a few of them on call."
He frowned some more, then looked over his shoulder at his com officer.
"Record for transmission to Guerriere, attention Captain DeLaney."
Diamato's smart enough to figure it out.
"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 KPS squared, 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.
Oh dear, I remember this bit.
"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."
Planned range to fire, and why.
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.
The "donkey" (I could have sworn it was Mule the first time I read it) Foraker's answer to the flat-pack pods making every ship a podlayer, a pod-like cluster of ten tractor beams that can tow ten pods, or ten donkeys, or a mix. Sure they can only stack them in three rows of donkey towing donkey before their ability to feed it power breaks down but that adds up to a lot of pods. With it's 20 tractor beams a Haven podnought can tow between 200 and 20,000 pods without even touching it's internal pod-bay. In short, the opening salvo here is going to be excessive, even for this series.
"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's thoughts on his opponents today and what each will do, starting with D'Orville.
"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 even if we've got enough left to risk engaging the Sphinx system-defense pods. 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 Kuzak.
"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."
And Honor. They have a plan for handling Honor and Eighth Fleet's crushing advantage, and it's entirely down to luck that it doesn't work. Just the luck of the draw that Honor was running exercises so she could respond to the Zulu alert but not as part of the first wave from Trevor's Star.
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.
The difference in MDM accel rate. Maybe Terraltha or Simon can pull something interesting from the numbers, just trying makes my head hurt.
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.
Oh yes, very excessive.
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.
Relative Haven and Manticoran advantages.
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.
Fire Plan Avalanche, get off all the flatpack pods first, save the podnoughts. With the Sd(P)s providing fire control links they can about pull it off. And I guess the Andermani podnoughts are
Adler (Eagle) class.
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 Dragon's 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.
Our biggest missile swarm yet, and yeah this is where it kind of just became too much. The mind struggles to encapsulate most of a million missiles exchanged between hundreds of ships, and around this time a lot of the personal elements of combat are lost seeing people we know and care about struggling around battle damage, straining to manage missile defense, it's just not there anymore.
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.
Casualties of that first exchange, and our most accurate count of Home Fleet comes only in Home Fleet's total destruction. But they achieved a slightly better than 1:1 exchange rate in capital ships, crippled almost twenty more and damaged almost all to a greater or lesser extent.
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 and reammunition. Second Fleet was changing course, crabbing away from Sphinx as it shepherded its cripples protectively out of harm's way.
The Manty LACs are still in the game and going on their own death ride.
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.
The increasingly diverse nature of Home Fleet, before it's end.
"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."
Time to Eighth Fleet arrival.
"I agree, too," Honor said. "But two things. First, I want to start rolling pods now. Use their onboard tractors to limpet them to the hulls. I want a third of our total pod loadout out there, if we can manage it."
"Yes, Your Grace," Brigham acknowledged.
"And, second," Honor continued, "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. Admiral Bradshaw and Commodore Fanaafi, you and your Saganami-Cs are attached to Admiral Oversteegen." 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."
Honor wants to attach half the podnought loadouts outside their hull for immediate deployment after a wormhole transit and micro-jump. She's also sending through some of the light units to chase of Diamato's observers.
