Ashes of Victory by David Weber
Bledsoe had always disliked Donizetti. The man was an abrasive, loud-mouthed, irreverent infidel who didn't even pretend to respect the Faith. But he was also a citizen of the Solarian League and an established interstellar merchant (actually, Bledsoe was pretty certain, a smuggler) with outwardly legitimate trading interests on Masada and in the League. Despite his distaste, Bledsoe knew it was only Donizetti who'd made the final plan workable, for he was the one who'd managed to procure the Solarian hardware it required. In many ways, Bledsoe wished they could have used Manticoran or Havenite equipment, for there would have been something deeply satisfying about using the technology of the infidel powers whose confrontation had laid the Faithful low. The delays built into actually delivering the hardware to the Endicott System would have been shorter, as well, since Donizetti would have had to travel so much shorter a distance. Unfortunately, his suppliers were all in the League, and it was probably just as well. Slow it may have been, but the indirect, laborious delivery of the needed tools had evaded the scrutiny of any of the infidel and apostate intelligence services.
And now all was ready. The occupiers' insistence on "building bridges" between Endicott and Yeltsin's Star had been enormously helpful in bringing that about. Denied any military industry, the yards in orbit around Masada had been turning out commercial designs, including the new asteroid extraction plants and freighters for both Yeltsin's Star and the nascent deep-space industry of Endicott. Bledsoe's own command was one of those freighters, a big, slow sublight ore hauler, with none of the greyhound leanness of a warship.
But he was not unarmed.
Gavin Bledsoe let his fingertips caress the alphanumeric keypad on his command chair's arm. His ship had been unarmed when he arrived in Grayson space . . . in pieces. It would have taken the sublight ship years to make the trip from Endicott to Yeltsin's Star under his own power, and so his components had been shipped in aboard hyper-capable freighters and assembled on-site. It was hardly the most economical way to go about it, but the local yards were swamped with military construction, and the entire operation had been designed as a Manticoran-subsidized ploy to encourage Masadan industrial concerns to establish working relationships with Grayson ones.
But the Council had known the ship's parts would be subjected to intense examination, particularly in light of the yard which had built them, and so he'd been exactly what the specs called for, no more and no less. But his crew had been another matter. Hired through one of the Faithful of Grayson who, like Shackleton's partner Angus Stone, had somehow evaded the breakup of the Maccabeus network, they possessed impeccable Grayson papers. And they had been very careful to draw no attention to themselves. Bledsoe and his crew had worked hard here in Yeltsin's Star for over three T-years, until they blended perfectly into the background. They and their ship were a familiar sight, and Bledsoe himself was known by name and face to most of the GSN officers assigned to policing commercial traffic in the system.
But none of those officers knew about the repair ship Donizetti had hired for the Faithful. It hadn't been particularly difficult to find a pretext for Bledsoe's ship to take a week or two off, nor had it been difficult for Bledsoe to quietly move beyond the reaches of the outer system of Yeltsin's Star to rendezvous with the equally surreptitious repair ship. Getting it out there had cost a fortune in fees and risk bonuses, but its Solarian technicians had done their job well, and when he returned to service, no one could possibly be blamed for not realizing he now carried two shipkiller missiles in concealed launchers just inside his outer skin plating.
They weren't proper missiles. For one thing, it would have been impossible to conceal an all-up naval missile tube and its grav drivers. And it would have been equally impossible to disguise a military-grade fire control and sensor suite. But that had been allowed for, and the missiles actually had more in common with recon drones than with conventional missiles. They were relatively slow (though with vastly more acceleration than any manned vessel), but they were also very stealthy, and they carried extremely sensitive homing systems. Their drone-style drives also had far more endurance than the drives missiles used, which gave them a very wide attack envelope. Of course, despite their stealth features and homing systems, they would have been virtually useless against a reasonably alert ship of war underway. But they weren't intended to attack alert warships, and they should prove quite adequate for their true purpose.
The final delay while they awaited the last piece of hardware had been infuriating, and Bledsoe suspected Donizetti had intentionally drawn it out—and exaggerated the difficulties he faced—to negotiate his fees upward, but it had been delivered at last. And Donizetti's ship had suffered an "accident" as it left Masadan orbit. Bledsoe had been a bit surprised by the Council's ruthlessness in disposing of their infidel tool so speedily, but in retrospect, it made sense. It cut off their future access to Solarian technology, but if this operation worked properly, that would scarcely matter, and eliminating the infidel middle man would greatly ease their post-operation security problems.
The one thing which really concerned Bledsoe at the moment was the fact that the Harlot and her Prime Minister were on separate ships. No one had counted on that, and he wasn't certain what he should do. The beacons in the memory stones Shackleton and Stone had maneuvered the apostate steadholder into giving the targets were designed to transmit on frequencies no one used and at very low strength, which should keep anyone from noticing them until it was too late to matter. The signals they generated were not identical, however, and one missile had been programmed to home on each of them. The idea had been to assure redundancy, with one missile-beacon combination ready to back up the other if there should be a failure at any point in the system.
Study of the HD clips of the presentation ceremony told Bledsoe which beacon had been given to the Harlot and which to her Prime Minister, and he was tempted to reprogram both missiles to seek the Harlot's . . . especially since God, in His infinite wisdom, had seen fit to put both the Harlot and the apostate Mayhew aboard a single ship. No more glorious blow could be struck for the Faithful than to eliminate both of those targets! But until he actually sent the activation code to the beacons, he couldn't even be positive both of them were going to work, and even if they did, the geometry of the yachts' approach to Blackbird might mask one or, in a worst case, both of them from the missiles' seekers at the critical moment. In the end, he'd decided to leave the original programming unchanged. It was better to have at least one chance at each of the two targets than to commit himself entirely to engaging only one which might or might not be available at the moment of launch.
Now he gazed into his plot one last time, eyes fixed on the light codes of his prey, and nodded to his com officer.
"Send the activation code," he said without raising his eyes from the icons.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
"That's odd."
"What?" Lieutenant Judson Hines, GSN, swiveled his command chair towards the tactical section of GNS Intrepid's flight deck as the LAC loafed along, keeping precise station on Grayson One. The voyage out from Grayson had been a combination of boredom and intensity for Hines and his crew. Their slow pace had seemed to stretch the hours out, yet awareness of their responsibilities kept them glued to their instruments.
"I don't know `what,' " Lieutenant (jg) Willis, his tac officer, replied reasonably. "If I knew what it was, it wouldn't be odd."
"I see." Hines gazed at Willis steadily, and, after several seconds, sighed. "Let me put this into simple, one-syllable language, Alf. What . . . did . . . you . . . see?"
"A sensor ghost, I think."
"Where?"
"Right about there." Willis threw a feed from the main plot to Hines' repeater. A small icon flickered in it, flashing alternatively amber and red to indicate a possible contact, and Hines frowned. The light code was very close to a larger green arrowhead which indicated a civilian vessel, and he punched an inquiry into the plot. An instant later, a small string of cha
"What did it look like?" he asked, his tone crisper, and Willis answered much more seriously than before.
"It's hard to say, Skipper. It wasn't much. Just a little flicker, like an up tick on the ore boat's wedge strength. I wouldn't even have noticed if it hadn't happened twice."
"Twice?" Hines felt one of his eyebrows arch.
"Yes, Sir. It was like a double flash."
"Um." Hines rubbed his chin. His was the closest unit to the ore boat, and from what Willis was saying, it was unlikely anyone else had been in a position to see whatever Intrepid's gravitics had picked up. But still . . .
"It was probably only a ripple in her wedge," he said. "Lord knows they work those boats hard enough for the nodes to flip an occasional surge. But just in case, put us on a vector to close for a closer look. And while Alf does that, Bob," he turned to the com officer, "pass his report and a copy of his data to the screen commander."
Honor Harrington frowned. Her com was tied into the screen's net, and her earbug carried Intrepid's routine message to her. She approved of Lieutenant Hines' attention to detail, although it didn't sound like his sensors had actually picked up much. Yet something about the report nagged at the back of her brain. She couldn't have said why, unless, perhaps, it was that she'd picked up only the verbal report. Her runabout wasn't tied into the screen's tac net, which meant she hadn't seen Willis' actual data.
She grinned at her own compulsiveness, but the truth was that she would always be a tac officer at heart. Whenever she could get it, she wanted the raw data so she could draw her own conclusions about it. Well, why not? Candless was no warship, and the unarmed runabout scarcely needed fire control, but she had an excellent sensor suite. A considerably better one, in fact, than any other "civilian pleasure craft" had ever boasted, and Honor punched a command into her main console.
Candless' central computer considered the command for a sliver of a second, and then a fresh data window blossomed in Honor's HUD as her own sensors reached out towards Intrepid's sensor ghost. Honor noted the ore freighter and nodded. No doubt Hines was right about the ripple in the ore boat's wedge, and—
She froze, staring at the HUD as another icon blinked briefly in it. No, not one icon. There'd been two . . . and they were an awful lot closer than Willis' original "ghost" had been. She blinked and frowned, trying to come up with any reasonable explanation, but there wasn't one.
She entered more commands, and her frown deepened as a vector back-plot appeared. It strobed rapidly, indicating that the computer considered it tentative, but it connected the ghosts she'd just seen with the ones Willis had reported, and her eyes narrowed as she saw the accel value the plot had assigned. If there actually was a physical object out there, then it had to be under a high acceleration to account for that great a displacement. But the accel figure was far too low for any sort of missile. Besides, at this ridiculously low range, any missile drive would have showed up like a deep-space flare! So it couldn't possibly—
Her plot flickered again. The ghosts were no stronger than before, but they'd continued to close, and Honor Harrington sucked in a shuddering breath as the tactical intuition she'd never been able to explain to anyone else realized what she was seeing.
Her right hand shifted on the stick, her second finger stabbing the button that accessed the screen's guard channel, and her voice rapped from every bridge speaker and com officer's earbug aboard every unit of the screen and both yachts.
"Vampire! Vampire! Inbound missiles, bearing zero-three-zero zero-zero-two from Grayson One!"
Gavin Bledsoe swore softly as the nearest LAC altered course. The vector projection showed the warship's new heading bringing him within a mere forty thousand klicks of the ore carrier, yet that wasn't what had drawn Bledsoe's curse. He and his crew had accepted from the beginning that the screen would figure out where the missiles had come from after the fact, and they'd never had any hope of outrunning the apostate's retribution. But a course change this soon meant the LAC must have detected the launch, and the shipkillers' low acceleration would give the screen far too long to engage them.
Yet there was nothing he could do about it, and he closed his eyes, apologizing to God for his profanity before he offered a silent prayer of dedication . . . and for victory.
Honor's warning hit the screen and the yachts' crews like a thunderbolt. Had it come from anyone else, many of the officers involved would have discounted the absurd alarm. Even knowing who'd sounded it, disbelief held them all for precious seconds. But then trained reactions shook off the paralysis, and tac officers aboard the screening LACs swung their own sensors to the indicated bearing, searching frantically while point defense systems sprang from standby to ready status.
But they couldn't see the targets! There was nothing there . . . except . . .
"Well, Alf?" Lieutenant Hines snapped, and the tac officer shrugged.
"Skip, I can't find the bastards!" Willis said desperately. "I— Wait!" He stabbed a key, then swore savagely. "I thought I had it for a second, Skip, but it's too damned faint a signal—nothing but a frigging ghost! I can't get anything solid enough for a lock!"
"Shit!" Hines glared at his plot, then looked at the helmsman. "Close the son-of-a-bitch who launched them, Allen," he grated through barred teeth.
Honor swung Candless' nose, bringing her bow sensors to bear on the ghosts without any interfering wedge, and her strong-boned face was carved from stone as her plot refused to hold them. She'd never seen anything like it. Never imagined anything like it. Not in what was obviously an attack bird of some sort. The bogies were coming in very slowly, at little more than the acceleration to be expected from a long-endurance recon drone, and they obviously incorporated heavy stealth capabilities to conceal their low-powered wedges. Her sensors probably had a better look at them than any of the LACs in the screen, for she was only a few hundred klicks off the flank of Grayson One's impeller wedge, and the incoming birds were obviously targeted on one or both of the yachts. But even looking straight at them, with her bow sensors against the deepest, most easily detected portion of their wedges, she still couldn't get a solid lock. Not the kind point defense needed.
She punched more keys, routing her sensor readouts direct to the screen command ship, and her brain raced.
They had to be some sort of specially configured drone. Nothing else was that slow and long ranged. But where had it come from? The Alliance didn't have anything like it, and neither did the Peeps, so who had built it? And what was it doing here?
She shook her head impatiently, brushing off the extraneous questions. What mattered was what they were and how to stop them, not where they'd come from.
Low as their acceleration rates were compared to missiles, they were still much too high for any manned vessel to keep away from. Worse, they were coming in silent, with no active targeting emissions. That meant they were homers and, presumably, that they'd been homing from the moment of launch, but how could they be doing that? They'd been launched from outside the screen, and their tracks had taken them within less than five hundred klicks of one of Intrepid's sister ships, so why hadn't their seeking systems locked onto the LAC instead of the yachts? A LAC didn't look a lot like Grayson One or Queen Adrienne, but at that close a range, its impeller signature ought to have utterly blotted out the yachts' signatures. At the very least the things should have lost lock temporarily and been forced to reacquire it, but that obviously hadn't happened.
And the fact that they were coming in silent made stopping them exponentially more difficult. They were already far stealthier than any missile ought to be, and their lack of active sensors deprived the missile defense officers of any active emissions to track. They could see the missiles only in glimpses, no more than brief flashes before those damnably efficient ECM systems blanked them out again, and that wasn't enough. Not against a target as hard to kill as a missile or drone pr
Countermissiles streaked out, but that only complicated the problem. The fantastically over-powered countermissiles were even less effective than their mother ships'. Worse, their wedges and emissions could be picked up . . . and blotted out even the feeble ghost returns Honor had managed to detect.
She started to bark an order, but the screen commander had already seen what she had, and his own order beat her to it. The countermissiles vanished from her plot as the LACs which had launched them sent the self-detonation commands, and she breathed a sigh of relief as she managed to find the missiles again.
They were closer, and her mouth dried as the time to attack range counter spun downward on her HUD. Some of the LACs were firing their own point defense clusters, though the range was long for those weapons, and even their grasers at their best-guess positions on the missiles, but they had virtually no chance of hitting them. Grayson One and Queen Adrienne were also responding, turning away from the threat and rolling ship in an effort to interpose their wedges. Neither yacht carried any armament, but both were equipped with comprehensive EW fits, and their electronic defenses sprang to life. Yet there was little for those defenses to defend against, for the silently pursuing killers radiated no active targeting systems to be jammed, and they seemed utterly oblivious to the efforts to confuse them with decoys.
Major Francis Ney's head jerked up as Duchess Harrington's warning crackled from his earbug, and he punched a quick code into his personal com, dropping his earbug into the bridge circuits. It took him a few moments to realize what was happening. When he did, his face went pale, but he was already wheeling to throw open the stateroom hatch even as he snapped orders to his staff and the startled ministers.