There were only so many options for a commander faced by a normal space action inside the hyper limit of a star. It was relatively simple to hide even a capital ship (at longer ranges, anyway) by simply shutting down her impellers and dropping off the enemy's passive scanners, but the impeller drive wasn't magic. Even at the five hundred-plus gravities a destroyer or light cruiser could manage, it took time to generate respectable vector changes, so hiding by cutting power was of strictly limited utility. After all, it did no good to hide if the enemy went charging away from you at fifty or sixty percent of light-speed, and you couldn't hide if you accelerated in pursuit.
All of which meant an admiral simply couldn't conceal her maneuvers from an opponent without risking loss of contact. And since hiding was normally pointless, that left only two real options: meet the enemy in a head-on, brute power clash, or try misdirection by showing him something that wasn't quite what he thought it was. Given Admiral Hemphill's material-oriented prejudices, it had taken all of Honor's persuasiveness to build any misdirection at all into the battle plan, for Lady Sonja believed in massing overwhelming firepower and simply smashing away until something gave, which at least had the virtue of simplicity.
Without Grimaldi's support, it was unlikely a lowly commander, even one specially selected to command Hemphill's secret weapon, could have convinced the admiral, but that was fine with Honor. Admiral D'Orville knew Hemphill as well as anyone else, and the last thing he'd expect from her was sneakiness. If the Defenders could mislead him into misinterpreting what he saw, so much the better; if they couldn't, they lost very little of importance. Only Fearless.
And so Honor watched the rest of the Defender task force moving towards her. In another sixteen minutes, the entire force would overrun her and keep right on going, leaving her single light cruiser alone and lonely almost in the Aggressors' path.
Admiral of the Green Sebastian D'Orville frowned over his own plot aboard the superdreadnought HMS King Roger, then glanced at the visual display. Visuals were useless for coordinating battles at deep-space ranges, but they were certainly spectacular. D'Orville's ships were charging ahead at almost a hundred and seventy thousand kilometers per second—just under .57 c —and the starfield in the forward screens was noticeably blue-shifted. But King Roger raced along between the inclined "roof" and "floor" of her impeller wedge, and the effect of a meter-deep band in which local gravity went from zero to over ninety-seven thousand MPS² grabbed photons like a lake of glue and bent the strongest energy weapon like flimsy wire. Stars seen through a stress band like that red-shifted radically and displaced their images by a considerable margin in direct vision displays, though knowing exactly how powerful the gravity field was made it fairly simple for the computers to compensate and put them back where they belonged.
But what was possible for the generating warship was impossible for its foes. Civilian impeller drives generated a single stress band in each aspect; military impeller drives generated a double band and filled the space between them with a sidewall, for good measure. Hostile sensors might be able to analyze the outermost band, but they couldn't get accurate readings on the inner ones, and that was why no one could target something on their far side.
"Admiral Hemphill's deceleration is holding steady, Sir." His chief of staff broke into D'Orville's thoughts with a fresh update from Tactical. "We should enter missile range in another twenty minutes."
"What's the latest on her detached squadron?"
"We got a good cross-cut on their transmissions about twelve minutes ago, Sir. They're way the hell and gone in-system."
Captain Lewis's completely neutral tone almost shouted his derision for their opponent, and D'Orville hid a smile of agreement. Sonja was going to look mighty bad when they got done kicking her posterior clear back to the capital, and that was exactly what was going to happen to her if she tried a stand-up fight without those detached dreadnoughts. She should have gone on running until they could join up, not challenged this soon, but at least their absence explained her course. She was well off a direct heading for the planets she was supposed to be defending for the simple reason that it was the shortest route to the ships she'd forgotten to bring to the dance, and D'Orville was sadly tempted to ignore her and go kiting straight for the objective. It would be highly satisfying to "nuke" Manticore without letting Sonja fire a single shot in its defense, but his assigned objective was to capture the capital planet, not just raid it. Besides, no tactician worth his gold braid would pass up the opportunity to crush two-thirds of the enemy's forces in detail. Especially in one of the rare cases in which the opposition couldn't disengage without uncovering an objective they must hold.
"Is our deployment complete?" he asked.
"Yes, Sir. The scouts are falling back behind the wall now."
"Good."
D'Orville glanced into the huge main tactical tank, double-checking Lewis's report in pure reflex. His capital ships had spread into the traditional "wall of battle," stacked both longitudinally and vertically into a formation one-ship wide and as tight as their impeller wedges permitted. It wasn't a very maneuverable arrangement, but it allowed the maximum possible broadside fire; and since they could no more shoot out through their impeller bands than an enemy could shoot in through them, it was the only practical way to accomplish that.
He checked the chronometer against Tactical's projections again. Seventeen minutes to extreme missile range.
The first missiles went out as the range dropped. Not a lot of them—the chances of a hit at this distance were slight, and not even capital ships could pack in an inexhaustible supply of them—but enough to keep the other side honest.
And enough to give any good Liberal or Progressive a serious case of the hives, Honor thought, watching them go. Each of those projectiles massed just under seventy-five tons and cost upward of a million Manticoran dollars, even without warheads or penaids. No one would be fool enough to use weapons that could actually get through and damage their targets, but the Fleet had steadfastly refused every political pressure to abandon live-fire exercises. Computer simulations were invaluable, and every officer and rating of whatever branch spent long, often grueling hours in the simulators, but actual firings were the only way to be sure the hardware really worked. And, expensive or not, live-fire exercises taught the missile crews things no simulation could.
But she had other things to worry about as Admiral D'Orville charged towards her, and worry she did, for Honor wasn't precisely the RMN's best mathematician. Despite aptitude tests which regularly said she ought to be an outstanding number-cruncher, her Academy performance scores had steadfastly refused to live up to that potential. In point of fact, she'd nearly flunked out of multi-dimensional math in her third form, and while she'd graduated in the top ten percent overall, she'd also held the embarrassing distinction of standing two-hundred-thirty-seventh (out of a class of two hundred and forty-one) in Mathematics.
Her math scores hadn't done much for her own selfconfidence at the time—and they'd driven her instructors to distraction. The profs had known she could handle the math. The aptitude tests said so, her tac simulator scores had blown the roof off the curve—which wasn't exactly the mark of a mathematical moron—and her maneuvering scores had been just as high. Her kinesthetic sense was acute, she could solve multi-unit three-dimensional vector intercepts in her head (as long as she didn't think about what she was doing), and none of that ability had shown up in her applied mathematics grades. The only person it never seemed to have bothered was Admiral Courvosier—only he'd been Captain Courvosier, then—and he'd ridden her mercilessly until she came to believe in herself, whatever the grades said. Give her a real-time, real-world maneuver to worry about and she was fine, but even today she was a poor astrogator—and she could worry herself into panic attacks just thinking about math tests. Which, she knew, was the reason for her present, carefully hidden jitters; she'd had too much time to worry about today's maneuver.