A Rising Thunder-ARC (46 page)

Well, you wanted them to understand there was a price to war, Honor
, she thought bitterly.
Maybe when they add this to what happened to Crandall, they’ll finally start to get the message. It would be nice if
something
good came out of it, anyway
.

Her pain was almost worse because Grand Fleet’s casualties had been so light. She’d learned long ago that every death took its own tiny bite out of her soul, yet she’d also learned the lesson she’d wanted the
Sollies
to learn. Wars cost. They cost starships, and they cost billions of dollars, and they cost
lives
. No matter how well you planned, how hard you trained, they cost lives, and she’d been incredibly fortunate to escape with “just” two thousand dead, most in her screening LACs, and minor, readily repairable damage to eleven of her own superdreadnoughts.

That was still two thousand dead men and women too many, though. And what hurt worst of all was that she’d been so certain Filareta was going to recognize the hopelessness of his situation. His expression, his body language, his obviously bitter appreciation of the tactical situation…all of them had convinced her he would accept surrender on honorable terms rather than see so many of his spacers killed.

“It must have been a panic reaction,” Thomas Theisman said slowly, reaching up to the treecat on his shoulder as Springs From Above’s muzzle pressed against the side of his neck. “I didn’t see it coming either, Honor, but that has to have been what it was.”

“I think Admiral Theisman’s right,” High Admiral Judah Yanakov said. He stood beside Admiral Alfedo Yu, technically Honor’s second-in-command of the Protector’s Own but for all practical purposes its actual CO. “It wasn’t even coordinated fire!”

“
Was
it a panic reaction, though?” Admiral Yu asked softly.

Everyone turned to look at him, and he smiled faintly at Theisman. Once upon a time, Alfredo Yu had been Thomas Theisman’s commanding officer, mentor, and friend. In fact, he’d transmitted his interest in the history the Legislaturalists and the Committee of Public Safety had both, each for its own reasons, done their very best to erase or rewrite, to a very junior Liueutenant Theisman. And it was his own study of that history which had helped lead a much more senior Citizen Admiral Theisman into his ultimate opposition to Rob S. Pierre and Oscar Saint-Just. Of course, that had been twenty T-years ago. A lot had changed in the intervening decades, but the Havenite-turned-Grayson still recognized the look in his old student’s eyes.

“No, it’s not a trick question, Tom,” he said with a crooked smile. “I mean it.
Was
it a panic reaction?”

“It had to be, Alfredo,” Yanakov said. “That was a classic gone-to-hell desperation launch. They couldn’t possibly have targeted that much fire.”

“Oh, I agree,” Yu replied. “They just flushed the pods at us, threw everything they had right at Lady Harrington’s command in hopes the missiles’ onboard seekers would find something to kill, even without any direction, and that the sheer mass of fire would saturate her defenses. I’ve planned last-ditch, desperation attacks like that of my own.”

“Exactly,” Honor said slowly, her eyes intent as she tasted the emotions behind Yu’s handsome, bony face. Some thought was working its way out in his brain. She could feel it, even though she had no idea what it was. She wasn’t even certain
he
knew what it was, yet. But she knew Alfredo Yu well, and she respected his instincts.

“We’ve all put together that kind of fire plan,” she continued, waving her right hand in a gesture which took in the assembled flag officers. “Even when you don’t expect to
need
it, you put it together, just in case. But, Alfredo, you don’t
use
it when someone’s offering to let you surrender your ships and your people
alive
. You just don’t.”

“No, you don’t,” Hamish Alexander-Harrington said softly. “But I think that’s Alfredo’s point, Honor.”

White Haven was gazing very thoughtfully at Yu, and Samantha cocked her head to one side, considering Yu even more intently than her person.

“It is,” Yu said after a moment. “My point, I mean. Look, when you set something like that up, you know it’s only going to be used when the tactical situation’s gone totally straight to hell, right?”

Honor nodded, almond eyes intent, and he shrugged.

“So you set it up so you can get the shot off with zero lost time,” he continued. “I don’t know for sure about the
Solly
Navy, but I do know that when we set up something like that in the GSN or the Protector’s Own, we usually tie it to a single macro, or at the most a very short, easily remembered keycode on the ops officer’s panel. That’s the way the People’s Navy did it, too.”

“And the Republican Navy still does it the same way,” Theisman said.

“Of course it does.” Yu nodded. “You don’t want something that’s going to go off by accident—not unless you’re criminally insane, anyway!—but you
do
want something that can get that shot off
no matter what else is happening
with the shortest possible delay between the order to fire and the actual launch. And what does that suggest?”

“Are you saying,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou asked in a very careful tone, “that you think we’re looking at another example of McBryde’s damned nanotech, Admiral?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Pritchart said, yet her voice was far more thoughtful than denying, and Yu looked at her.

“Why, Madam President? If you assume they could get to Filareta’s ops officer at all, why not set up something like this? Especially if there was some way for the people who programmed him to know or to guess how
he’d
go about setting up a gone-to-hell fire plan? Maybe they had access to recordings of simulations where he’d set up plans like that. For that matter, maybe they had someone else inside Filareta’s staff passing them that kind of information, probably with no idea at all what the Alignment meant to do with it. I can think of at least three ways, right off hand, a Peep flag officer back in the bad old days could’ve gotten that information about any operations or tactical officer in the People’s Navy anytime he’d wanted to, and the SLN’s at least as badly riddled by patronage and ‘favor buying’ as the Legislaturalists ever were. And if Filareta’s tac officer
did
have a pattern, did have a standard way of setting up for that kind of plan…”

His voice trailed off, and silence enveloped the conference room as the people in it looked at one another.

“Tester, you may be right,” Yanakov said softly into that silence at last. “It
could
be, anyway.”

“I think he
is
right,” White Haven said grimly. “Think about it. If they’d gone with a standard fire plan, they had the fire control channels to’ve fired at least three
targeted
salvos out of those missile pods. There’d have been time to feed actual target coordinates to their birds, and those salvos would have been in final acquisition by the time anything
we
fired could’ve reached their ships. Sure, we’d have stopped a lot of them—most of them—before they inflicted any damage, but their chances of actually getting through with at least some hits would have been a lot higher than they could do simply trying to saturate our defenses without even assigning targets!”

“And look at the delay between that first launch and the first follow-on salvo from their broadside tubes,” Lester Tourville said, eyes distant. “It was a good—what? Ten seconds? Something like that?”

“Thirteen,” Theisman said. “You’re right, Les.”

“Pat hasn’t had time for any prisoner interviews yet,” Sir Thomas Caparelli said thoughtfully, lips pursed. “I wonder if anyone’s going to be able to explain that delay to us? It does almost sound like there was a hole of some kind in the order queue, doesn’t it?”

“Possibly,” White Haven agreed. “But that doesn’t change the fact that Filareta could have used the time Honor gave him to set up a sequenced, targeted,
controlled
launch, and he didn’t. Why not?”

“Because that would have required a
series
of actions?” Yu murmured, then nodded slowly. “They’d have to select the pods to be enabled. Then they’d have to choose the targets, feed the coordinates, enable at least the first salvo’s telemetry links, update their electronic warfare plan. It would have taken more than one man, and it would have taken a
complex
series of commands and keystrokes. Whereas—”

“Whereas this way, if you’re right, all they needed was for some poor damned soul to punch one button and they could count on
me
to kill over a million people for them,” Honor grated harshly.

More than one of the humans present winced. Her husband reached out to lay one hand on her forearm, and she looked at him with bitter eyes.

“You didn’t have any choice,” he told her. “Not with fifty thousand missiles coming at your command.”

“I could have just taken the fire,” Honor replied flatly. “Look at how few people we lost anyway! I could’ve waited to be sure—”

“Oh, stop it!” Thomas Theisman snapped, and Honor’s head snapped around in surprise at the genuine anger in his voice.

“No, you could
not
have ‘just taken the fire’!” the Republic’s Secretary of War told her sharply. “And if you
had
done something that stupid, you’d deserve to be broken for it!”

“But—”

“Don’t you ‘but’
me!
You didn’t know—you
couldn’t
know—if they’d come up with some kind of fire control fix we’d never heard of before. You had no right, not one
shred
of a moral justification, to risk the lives of personnel under your command just because somebody on the other side had done something suicidal! Your responsibility is to
your
people, not theirs! It’s your job to neutralize an enemy before he kills
them
, and you’d
damned
well better do it if you’re going to be worthy of the uniform you wear!”

His brown eyes blazed, and she tasted the white-hot fury, the total sincerity, behind them.

“
That’s
your responsibility, Admiral Harrington, and you lived up to it! You reacted to the threat you knew about, the one you saw, and I was right there on that flag bridge with you. It took those missiles three minutes to reach us, and you had a Hermes buoy sitting right off his flagship’s bow. There was
plenty
of time for him to get on the com and tell you the launch was a mistake, if he hadn’t meant to launch it! Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe he did that, now did he? Not only that, but thirteen-second lag or not, the
rest
of his damned fleet was firing full broadsides at you on its heels! I understand that realizing you gave the order to kill that many people has to make you sick to your stomach. It makes
me
want to puke, and I didn’t have to give it. But the only ones responsible for what happened to Filareta and the people under his command are whoever arranged to get him sent here and—assuming there’s any basis to all this speculation in the first place—whoever got to his tac officer. Not you; not me—
them
!”

She looked around the conference room and saw the agreement in every other face. More than that, she
tasted
the agreement, and her brain knew they were right. Maybe someday she’d be able to accept that as easily as they did. But even if that day came, she would never be free of the soul-deep regret, she felt at this moment.

Silence lingered for several moments, then Pritchart cleared her throat.

“How do you think the League is going to react to all this?” she asked the group at large.

“Poorly?” Tourville suggested with a sour smile.

“Oh, I think you can take that for granted,” White Haven agreed. “And I don’t think it’s going to be a very good idea for us to suggest Mesa somehow manipulated Filareta into firing.” He rolled his eyes. “Even if anyone in Old Chicago was willing to entertain any evidence which might support our ‘ridiculous conspiracy theory paranoia’ in the first place, we don’t
have
any evidence. We’d play straight into Abruzzi’s hands if we handed him that kind of propaganda hook.”

“And there are plenty of Sollies ready to go along with him,” Elizabeth agreed sourly, then gave herself a shake and drew a deep breath. “Not that I suppose I can blame them, really, given the official party line, Solly newsies’ well known impartial reporting, and how ridiculous the whole notion still seems to
me
sometimes!”

“The fact that we can’t blame them for it doesn’t keep their refusal to entertain the truth from being inconvenient as hell,” Pritchart observed even more sourly. “And the fact that Tsang is going to get to Old Terra with what happened in Beowulf well before anybody in Old Chicago finds out what happened out here isn’t going to help one bit. The Mandarins are going to have at least a few days to start drumming up anti-Beowulf sentiment before word of what happened to Filareta lands on them like a nuke, and just imagine what the ’faxes are going to be like
then
.”

“Not exactly something we didn’t anticipate,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou sighed. “Mind you, we’d all have been happier if Tsang had been bright enough to back down without Admiral Truman having to take a hand.”

“At least she was smart enough not to pull a Crandall or a Filareta,” Honor observed grimly.

“Or else Mesa didn’t have time to get to anyone on
her
staff,” Tourville muttered.

“They can’t get to
everybody
, Les,” Theisman said pointed out a bit tartly.

“And they can’t predict every situation,” Yanakov added, nodding his agreement with Theisman’s observation. “Tester knows they seem to do a better job of anticipating and manipulating than I’d like, but there have to be limits somewhere. And, frankly, the last thing we can afford is to actually succumb to—what was it you called it, Hamish? ‘Ridiculous conspiracy theory paranoia’?—and start seeing Alignment machinations behind
everything
that happens.”

“Either way, Honor has a point,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou observed. “Nobody got killed in Beowulf, and as the President says, they won’t have a clue what happened to Filareta until the first newsies get to the Sol System from Manticore. So they’re going to come out like attack dogs, without any idea of the next bit of news in the pipeline. I’m not sure how that’s going to play with League public opinion, but I’m pretty damned sure that when word of Filareta’s disaster reaches Old Chicago, things are going to go to hell in a handbasket. I wouldn’t be too surprised if some of the real lunatics don’t press for direct military action against Beowulf.”