Honor looked at the Havenite President for a second or two, then nodded. Pritchart was probably right about that, but that didn’t make Honor feel any better over two hundred and ninety-six destroyed Solarian superdreadnoughts…and 1.2 million dead Solarians.
Why? she asked herself yet again. Why did he do it? Because I humiliated him in the way I demanded his surrender? Was hereally so stupid, so…vain, that he was willing to get himself and all of those other men and women killed rather than swallow his pride and back down in front of a bunch of “neobarbs”?
She didn’t know, and she never would, for there had been no survivors from SLNS Philip Oppenheimer. And of the four hundred and twenty-seven superdreadnoughts Massimo Filareta had led into the Manticore Binary System, only sixty had managed to surrender undamaged. Two hundred and ninety-six — including Oppenheimer—had been destroyed (most of them outright, although some had merely been turned into hopelessly shattered and broken hulks), and another seventy-one might have been repairable, assuming anyone was interested in returning such obsolete, outmoded deathtraps to service.
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…”