Honor Harrington 9 - Ashes of Victory, page 61
―I did not have Hughes killed,‖ he said firmly. ―As for the rest of it, any ‗crimes‘ I may or may not have committed were in the name of all of Grayson and of God Himself.‖
―I haven‘t said otherwise, My Lord,‖ Baird said mildly. ―Honesty requires me to say that I believe ambition has played a part in your actions, but only God can know what truly lies within any man‘s heart, and I might well be wrong. But the fact remains that however justified your actions may be in the Tester‘s eyes, in the eyes of the Sword, they remain crimes. Serious crimes, I fear, to which serious penalties attach.‖
―You‘re mad,‖ Mueller said. ―Think about what you‘re doing, man! Are you really willing to throw away all we‘ve already accomplished this way?‖
―We have no desire to throw anything away,‖ Baird said in that same mild tone. ―We see no reason we can‘t continue to cooperate in the future as in the past, unless you foolishly force us to hand our information to the Sword. And before you ask, My Lord, yes. We do think securing proof of the Protector‘s annexation plans justifies the risk that you might force us to do just that. Besides—‖ Baird allowed himself a thin smile ―—some of us believe the public furor which would be generated by going public with our evidence would actually give us the platform we require to force the steaders of Grayson to recognize what the Sword truly intends. In which case—‖ he shrugged ―—we accomplish as much as we could hope to accomplish with the recordings we need your help to obtain.‖
Mueller sat motionless, staring at the other man, and his heart was a stone. Baird meant it, he realized sickly. He and his allies were genuinely ready to throw away everything, including the life and future of Samuel Mueller, on the off chance that their recording devices could be smuggled past Planetary Security and the Manticorans, capture something incriminating, and be recovered in a deep-space interception afterward. And the fact that they were insane to even contemplate such an operation meant nothing. They had the blackmail evidence to force him to go along with them.
At least they’re only recorders, he told himself, trying to pretend he didn‘t know he was grasping at straws. Even if they’re found, and tied to me, all the Sword would have would be an attempt to obtain privileged information. That’s serious, but nowhere near evidence of complicity in murder! And I am a steadholder. And the leader of the Opposition. Under the circumstances, they probably wouldn’t even want to go public with the charges.
The man who called himself Anthony Baird gazed into Samuel Mueller‘s eyes and watched the defiance run out of them like water.
―Thank Tester, he actually fell for it.‖
―Why, ‗Brian,‘ ‖ James Shackleton said, his voice gently mocking. ―How could you possibly have doubted me?‖
―I didn‘t doubt you, Jim. I just had trouble believing he‘d cave in with so little proof we had the goods on him.‖ Angus Stone, whom Samuel Mueller knew as Brian Kennedy, shook his head.
― ‗The guilty flee where no man pursueth,‘ ‖ Shackleton quoted. ―The only real question was whether or not Hughes was actually working for him. That was always a possibility . . . up until we got our hands on that camera button. Hughes must have been on his way to deliver it to someone else. If he‘d been working for Mueller, he would‘ve handed it over before he left Mueller House that night. And we were lucky there were several days worth of imagery stored on the chip. If Mueller‘d insisted on more proof, we could have shown him some of that footage without starting him wondering why the only evidence we had was recorded the night Hughes died.‖ Shackleton shrugged. ―Once we convinced him we had any evidence, his reaction was completely predictable, Angus. After all, he had to be guilty of things we didn‘t know a thing about.‖
―Um.‖ Stone leaned back in the passenger seat of the air car, gazing out at the night sky, and frowned. ―I wish we knew who Hughes had been working for.‖
―If it wasn‘t us, and it wasn‘t Mueller, then it almost has to have been Planetary Security,‖ Baird said equably, ―though I suppose it might be one of his fellow Keys. From all I‘ve heard, Harrington would certainly be capable of taking direct action against him if she suspected the sort of action he was contemplating against her or Benjamin. It doesn‘t really matter in either case, though. The man‘s been dead for months. If whoever he was working for felt they had sufficient evidence to nail Mueller, they would certainly have acted by now. And if they don‘t have sufficient evidence to charge him, then they have no choice but to pretend nothing‘s happened at all.‖
―And do you really think this is going to work?‖ Stone asked much more quietly.
―Yes, I do,‖ Shackleton replied, his own eyes on the instrument panel. ―I wasn‘t especially confident to begin with. The whole thing seemed like such an outside shot that I was afraid to let myself hope for too much. But whatever anyone may suspect about Mueller, it would never cross Palace Security‘s mind that such a prominent member of the Keys would risk trying to plant electronic devices on the Protector‘s guests. If they do—‖ he shrugged ―—all we lose is Mueller.‖
―And the opportunity to strike.‖
―And this opportunity to strike,‖ Shackleton corrected. ―And I don‘t think we will lose it. When Donizetti came through with the weapons, I began to think it might succeed. And when he came up with the molycircs for the memory stones as well—‖
He shrugged once more.
―I only wish we weren‘t so reliant on Donizetti in the first place.‖ Stone sighed.
―He‘s an infidel and a mercenary,‖ Shackleton agreed, ―and I‘m sure he‘s taken a bigger
‗commission‘ off the top than he says he has. But he‘s also managed to come up with everything we needed.
Not as quickly as I might have wished, especially on the memory stones, but he got it all in the end, and we couldn‘t have done it without him. And the bottom line, Anson, is that we have to remember we‘re about God‘s work. He won‘t let us fail Him as long as we trust in His guidance and protection.‖
―I know.‖ Stone drew a deep breath and nodded. ―This world is God‘s,‖ he said softly, and Shackleton nodded back.
―This world is God‘s,‖ he promised.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
―We‘ve got a solid lock, Skipper,‖ Audrey Pyne announced, and Scotty Tremain nodded.
According to ONI, the MacGregor System lacked the enormous passive arrays which could pick up hyper transits light-days and even further out. That was why the CLACs had made their hyper translation one full light-day out . . . and why Bad Penny and the rest of her silent brood had been slicing in-system for over two days.
Their acceleration had been held down to a leisurely four hundred and fifty gravities to help the efficiency of their stealth systems. At that rate, it had taken them over sixteen hours just to accelerate to the eighty percent of light-speed their particle shielding could handle. Once they‘d done that, they‘d taken their wedges down entirely and simply coasted for twenty-one hours. They‘d come swooping in out of the outer darkness at almost two hundred and forty thousand kilometers per second and blown right past the outer perimeter sensor platforms like hyper-velocity ghosts. The mid-system arrays had been a little trickier, and the destroyer screen had been trickiest of all, for they‘d had to begin decelerating before they hit it, and even at a mere 4.127 KPS2, they‘d had to be careful about their EW. Their active sensor suites were down for the same reason, but the Ghost Rider teams had provided the LACs with their own FTL recon drones. Their drives had a very short endurance compared to the all-up drones, but Tremaine had deployed them hours ago and let their base acceleration carry them inward without any drive power at all. They‘d come ghosting in even more stealthily than the LACs themselves, and their very weak, directional gravitic transmissions had told Bad Penny‘s passive sensors exactly where to look.
―Have all our birds confirmed data receipt, Gene?‖ he asked now, and Lieutenant Eugene Nordbrandt, Bad Penny‘s com officer, nodded.
―Aye, Skip. All ships report locked and ready to fire.‖
―All right, then,‖ Tremaine said, with a nod of his own. ―Put Audrey on voice.‖
―Me, Skip?‖ Pyne sounded surprised, and Tremaine grinned.
―You‘re the tac officer who set this up, Ensign. The shot is yours to call.‖
―Uh . . . yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir!‖
―Thank me if it works,‖ Tremaine advised her, and looked back at Nordbrandt.
―Ready, Gene?‖
―Live mike, Skipper,‖ Nordbrandt confirmed, and Tremaine waved a hand at Pyne, who drew a deep breath.
―All Hydras, Hydra One,‖ she announced crisply into the mike. ―Tango. I say again, tango, tango, tango! ‖
Citizen Commodore Gianna Ryan sat in her tipped-back command chair on the flag deck of PNS
Rene d’Aiguillon, legs crossed, and nursed a cup of coffee. The MacGregor System was fairly important to the PRH. It had long served as a sentinel for Barnett‘s northeastern flank, but it also boasted a robust economy. The system population was over two billion, and despite decades of bureaucratic management, it was one of the few systems in the Republic which continued to generate a positive revenue flow every year.
Despite that, MacGregor had never received a genuine deep-space sensor net (the financially-strapped PRH was parsimonious about emplacing those anywhere), and its picket force had been steadily reduced over the last several years. The lengthy stalemate on the Barnett front after the fall of Trevor‘s Star helped explain a lot of that, but so did Citizen Secretary McQueen‘s decision to reinforce Barnett so heavily. The strength Citizen Admiral Theisman had received had made a flexible, nodal defense practical, and Ryan‘s job was not to try to stave off the Allied Hordes all by herself. Her job was to fend off raiding squadrons and serve as a distant early warning post. If the Manties came after her in strength, she was supposed to avoid action but remain in-system, shadowing and harassing the intruders, if possible, but staying the hell away from a serious fight while she screamed for help from Barnett.
Unfortunately, she reflected as she sipped at her coffee, that had presupposed Theisman would be allowed to keep his reinforcements. A mere citizen commodore was not, of course, privy to the inner deliberations of the Octagon, but Ryan doubted Citizen Secretary McQueen could have been very happy about the need to take away so much of the strength she‘d scraped up for Barnett. If the rumor mill was correct about Twelfth Fleet‘s successes down on the southern flank, it was unlikely the enemy was going to feel like showing any sudden activity on the Barnett front. Even so, depleting Theisman‘s strength was risky. MacGregor, along with the Owens, Mylar, and Slocum Systems, represented a valuable little cluster of prizes, and Barnett, at the center of the rough square they formed, was the lynchpin of their joint survival.
Ryan was confident the PRH could survive even if it lost all four of them but as her staff intelligence officer had remarked the other day, ―A system here, a system there . . . keep it up long enough, and pretty soon you‘re talking about some serious real estate, Citizen Commodore.‖
Still, there‘d been no sign of any—
Alarms whooped, suddenly and savagely, and Gianna Ryan threw her coffee cup aside as she hurled herself out of her command chair. That was the proximity alarm!
She spun to her dreadnought flagship‘s flag plot, and her heart seemed to stop as she saw the rash of angry red icons. There were hundreds of them . . . and they were less than eight million klicks out and closing at twenty-five thousand kilometers per second! How in God‘s name had even Manties gotten that close without a single one of her scanner arrays or starships spotting them?!
There was no way to answer that question, and she leaned on the rail around the main plot, hands white-knuckled with the force of her grip, and watched disaster roar down on her command. Only her ready squadron of battlecruisers and the three squadrons of picket destroyers the Manties had somehow slipped right past had hot impeller nodes. All the rest were at standby, for she‘d been confident no force big enough to pose a serious threat could slip through her sensor net, even with Manty stealth systems. But these Manties could, and at their current velocity, they‘d be right on top of her two squadrons of dreadnoughts and battleships in five minutes . . . and they were already within missile range. Had been for at least a full minute, and—
―Hostile launch! I have multiple hostile launches!‖ someone barked.
Tremaine‘s Nineteenth Wing led the assault, and he watched his Ferrets salvo their shipkillers. A deadly swarm of missiles streaked towards the sitting targets of the main Peep force, and the crest of that wave of destruction was heavily seeded with Dazzlers and Dragons‘ Teeth, two more selections from the LACs‘ arsenal of Ghost Rider systems. The downsized versions which could be crammed into a LAC-sized missile were far less individually capable than the versions capital missiles could carry, but they were nastier than anything any LAC had ever been able to deploy before.
The Dazzlers were an in-your-face, burn-out-your-sensors jammer of unprecedented power. They were burst emitters (no missile a LAC could carry could sustain such power loads for more than a few seconds), but before their EW warheads burned out, they produced savage strobes of jamming. They started going off like a cascade of prespace magnesium flares, beating down the fire control of any Peep ship which might manage to get her sensors on-line in the first place.
The Dragons‘ Teeth came behind them, and Tremaine smiled nastily as they flashed to life.
Personally, he thought they might be the nastiest offensive EW system the LACs had been given, for each missile was basically a powerful decoy. As it headed for the enemy, it made itself look like a Ferret‘s entire missile load, roaring down in a concentrated salvo which had to draw heavy countermissile fire. Which, of course, meant the same countermissiles couldn‘t go after the real shipkillers.
Not that either Dazzlers or Dragons‘ Teeth were actually going to be necessary this time, he realized. A single battlecruiser squadron appeared to have its point defense on-line, and it looked as if a couple of its ships were far enough away, and alert enough, to get their wedges and sidewalls up before the missiles arrived. The remainder of the Peep picket force had been caught almost as flatfooted as Commodore Yeargin at Adler. And with far more justification, Tremaine thought, remembering the picketing destroyers his attack force had passed on its way in. Nothing larger than a LAC, and no LAC
which had lacked the Shrikes’ and Ferrets’ EW, for that matter, could have penetrated that screen undetected, and he allowed himself a moment of sympathy for the Peep CO.
But only a moment, for he had the Nineteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Wings under his command, and his missiles were in final acquisition. The Peeps had stopped less than three percent of his original launch, and the explosions began as twenty-seven hundred shipkillers speared into their formation.
Citizen Commissioner Halket arrived on the flag deck just as the first missiles came in, but Ryan never even noticed him. Her attention was locked to the plot, and she heard one of her staff officers groan in horror as missiles began to detonate.
They were small, the sort of missiles which might come from destroyers or light cruisers, and a corner of Ryan‘s mind nodded in bitter understanding. LACs. These had to be the Manty ―super LACs‖
StateSec had assured one and all couldn‘t possibly exist. Well, they did exist, and they were about to rip the guts right out of her command.
Under normal circumstances, such light laser heads would have posed no threat to dreadnoughts.
They could have hurt battleships, though it was unlikely they could have killed even a battleship outright, and enough of them could have crippled a battlecruiser easily enough. But dreadnoughts were simply super dreadnoughts writ small, with the same massive armoring scheme and active and passive defensive systems. Those missiles ought to have been mere fleabites to such vessels.
But the Manties had caught the deep-space equivalent of an anchored fleet. Her ships couldn‘t maneuver, their weapon systems were down, and the absence of wedges and sidewalls was fatal. The loss of their sidewalls was bad enough, but even that paled beside the consequences of their cold impeller nodes, for the wedges which should have protected their topsides and bellies were nonexistent. And the spine and belly of a ship of the wall was completely unarmored, because nothing could get to them to inflict damage in the first place . . . as long as its wedge was up. Which meant the designers could use all the mass devoted to its stupendous armor on its vulnerable flanks and even more vulnerable hammerheads.
And not a single one of those Manty missiles showed the least interest in attacking any of Gianna Ryan‘s ship‘s sides or hammerheads.
Tremaine‘s missiles streaked ―across‖ and ―under‖ the helpless Peep leviathans at ranges as short as five hundred kilometers, and as they crossed their targets, they detonated. Their lasers struck with lethal accuracy, knifing into hulls which might as well have been totally unarmored, and thin battle steel skins shattered under the transfer energy. Clouds of atmosphere and water vapor exploded from the hideous rents, and Tremaine‘s jaw clenched as he pictured the carnage aboard his targets. It was obvious no one had seen them coming, and that meant there‘d been no time for the Peeps to set general quarters, evacuate atmosphere from the outer hull segments, insure internal hull integrity . . . get into their skin suits.
A wave of flame marched through the Peep formation, tearing its ships apart. Three dreadnoughts, five battleships, and at least a dozen battlecruisers and cruisers died under its pounding. One of the ships of the wall completely vanished as one of her fusion bottles failed, and the others were beaten into wreckage.
