But ships which stopped outside that range from Charon would be the next best thing to immune to missile attack. Oh, the defenders might get lucky and pop a laser head or two through their defensive fire. But once the missiles' drives went down, they would be dead meat for the attackers' laser clusters, and the orbital launchers, which lacked the powerful grav drivers built into a warship's missile tubes, could impart a maximum final velocity of only a little over seventy-six thousand KPS. That was much too slow to give modern point defense fire control any real problems against a target which would no longer be protected by its own wedge or able to execute evasive maneuvers as it closed. Even worse, the attackers (unlike the orbital launchers) were mobile. They could dodge, roll ship to interpose their wedges, and otherwise make it almost impossible for birds which could no longer maneuver to register on them.
"You really think they'll come in that close, Ma'am?" someone asked.
"Yes," she said simply. "Either that, or they wouldn't have come in at all. If they wanted to be really safe from our fire, they would have made translation further out, accelerated to maximum velocity, and launched from several light-minutes out. Their birds would come in at point-nine-cee or more, much too fast for our fire control, and we'd never be able to intercept them effectively."
"Why didn't they do that, then, Ma'am?" the same officer asked.
"Either because they're still not positive Camp Charon is now hostile, or because they're worried about accidentally hitting the planet," she replied. "The inner-shell launchers are dangerously close to Hell for that kind of work. Even a slight malfunction in a proximity fuse or a targeting solution, and they could ram a bird right into it. I don't think they'd worry unduly about killing fifty or sixty thousand prisoners, but they've got people of their own down there. Whoever's in charge of this task group doesn't want to kill her own personnel by mistake, and she probably knows all there is to know about the defenses. That means she knows we're weak on point defense and counter-missiles, so she'll come right to the edge of our envelope, stop, and send her missiles in at lower velocities. We'll stop a lot of them—initially, at least—but she doesn't need to score direct hits on us, and we do need to score them against her ships."
More heads nodded. Modern warships did not succumb to proximity soft kills—unless, like Farnese or Hachiman, the proximity was very close and the explosion very violent indeed and none of their passive defenses, like impeller wedges, sidewalls, and radiation shielding, were on-line. Orbital launchers and weapons platforms did. Which meant the exchange rate in destroyed weapons would be hugely in the attackers' favor.
Usually, Honor thought with a shark-like grin, and felt Nimitz's fierce approval in the back of her brain. Oh, yes. Usually. And maybe this time, too. But I will by God let them know they've been in a fight, first!
"Lieutenant Thurman, please return to the bridge," she said calmly. "Inform Commander Caslet that the squadron will execute Operation Nelson. He will pass the word to the other ships by whisker, then lay in a course for Point Trafalgar and prepare ship for acceleration. Is that understood?"
"Aye, aye, Ma'am!" Thurman snapped back to attention, saluted, spun on her heel, and hurried away. Honor watched her leave, then turned back to her dinner guests.
"I'm afraid our meal has been interrupted," she said calmly. "All of you will be needed at your posts shortly. First, however—" She reached out and lifted her wineglass, raising it before her.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, the toast is 'Victory!'"
Chapter Forty-Nine
"That," Citizen General Chernock said flatly, "is not Dennis Tresca."
He jabbed a savage finger at the face of the man still speaking from the main com screen. His own bridge chair was well outside the field of Citizen Colonel Therret's audio and visual pickups as "Tresca" spoke to the chief of staff, and Citizen Rear Admiral Yearman looked at the citizen general oddly.
"With all due respect, how can you be so certain, Citizen General?" he asked quietly. Chernock glanced at him, and the Navy officer shrugged. "Whoever he is, he's fielded every question we've asked him so far, Sir," he pointed out. "And I don't see any signs of hesitation or that he's being coerced."
"I don't think he is—assuming that it's actually a 'he' at all!" Chernock growled, and one of Yearman's eyebrows rose, almost as if against his will. Chernock saw it and barked a short, hard laugh that did absolutely nothing to still the fury pulsing in his heart. Dennis Tresca was—or had been—his friend. But if that wasn't Tresca on the com, then he could only assume the warden was a prisoner or dead. And from what he knew of Tresca's treatment of enemies of the People, it was highly unlikely any of the elitist scum on Hades had been interested in allowing him to surrender.
"My own guess is that we're looking at an AI," the citizen general went on after a moment. Yearman cocked his head, his expression painfully neutral, and Chernock laughed again, this time almost naturally. "I know it's better than we could probably produce, although some of the work at Public Information's special effects department might surprise you, Citizen Admiral!" Like the imagery of that pain in the ass Harrington's execution, he didn't add. "But there are quite a few recently captured Manty POWs down there, and their cyberneticists have always been better than ours. One of them, or several working together, could have put together something much more sophisticated than we could."
"But in that case, how can you tell it's a fake at all?"
"Because he hasn't asked to speak to me, even though Dennis knows Therret is my chief of staff and wouldn't be here without me. Besides, the word choice isn't quite right," Chernock told him. "I suspect what we're actually seeing is an Al-filtered image of someone else's responses to our transmissions. Someone is sitting down there in Charon Control ad libbing replies to whatever we send, and the AI is translating them into Dennis' voice, adding his mannerisms, and probably dipping into his personnel records and file copies of earlier com conversations for any background information it needs. But good as whoever built the damned thing was, he didn't quite get it perfect. Unlike the real Dennis would have done, it hasn't made the association between Therret's presence and mine. Either that, or whoever's running it is trying to avoid talking to me because he's afraid I'll trip him up. And either the AI's word selection criteria is a little off the money, or else its override filters aren't sensitive enough, because the occasional 'non-Tresca' word choice is leaking through. At any rate, it isn't Dennis. I'll stake my life on that."
"I see." Yearman looked grave, and Chernock smiled in somewhat caustic sympathy. For all his dutiful attention to detail, the citizen general knew, Yearman hadn't truly believed unarmed, dispersed prisoners, with no tech support whatsoever, could somehow make an open-sea crossing and mount a successful amphibious assault on Styx Island. He hadn't said so, and Chernock couldn't possibly have faulted how hard he'd worked at whipping his task group together, but the citizen general had known that deep down inside, the Navy officer had been essentially humoring him.