David Weber - At All Costs

She looked... broken, he thought. Not in spirit, not in her determination to meet her responsibilities. But if those remained intact, something else, deep inside was a bleeding wound, and his own heart ached in sympathy. She wasn't just his President. She was his friend, just as Javier had, been and Javier's death, after all he and she been through, all they'd faced and survived under the Committee of Public Safety, was a bitter, bitter blow.

She returned his gaze across her desk, her eyes as flat and lifeless as her voice, and he knew she knew what he was thinking. But she said nothing more. She simply waited, motionless.

"It's very bad," he said finally. "Lovat, and all the LACs, support ships, and munitions we were building there, are simply gone. Harrington took them all out. Not to mention destroying thirty-two podnaughts, four CLACs, all twenty-four of Admiral Trask's older superdreadnoughts, and something like ten thousand LACs. I can't even begin to compute the straight economic cost. Rachel's people are still in a state of shock just looking at the preliminary numbers, but I think you can safely assume that they just at least doubled the total economic and industrial cost of all their previous raids combined." He shook his head." Compared to this, what we did to Zanzibar was a love tap."

Pritchart's face had tightened with fresh pain as the litany of destruction rolled out.

"Fortunately, the loss of life was much lower than it might have been," Theisman continued. "Admiral Giovanni had the sense to order Trask to stand down his superdreadnoughts when Harrington started punching out her system defense missile pods with proximity warheads. He scuttled them himself, to prevent their capture, but all of his people got off alive first. We lost more of the LAC crews. They had to at least try, and no one can fault Giovanni for thinking there ought to have been enough of them to let them swarm Harrington's lead task force. Except that every single one of the LACs covering that task force was a Katana. Combined with their new counter-missiles and whatever they used on our wallers, they massacred our Cimeterres. Even the new Alpha birds."

"How did they do it?" she asked in that same flat, terrible voice.

"We're still evaluating the preliminary reports. From what we've seen so far, it looks like they used two new weapons on us. What makes it hurt worse is that both their new systems appear to be absolutely logical progressions from their damned Ghost Rider technology, and we never even saw them coming.

"We should have realized that sooner or later they were going to strap weapons onto their recon drones. They've demonstrated they can operate them deep inside our defended areas with virtual impunity, and they probably took a certain pleasure from applying a variant of the same technique Saint-Just used to destroy Elizabeth's yacht in Yeltsin. The bad news is how close they can get them; the good news-such as it is-is that, even so, they can't get them all the way into attack range in stealth. They still have to get into range to execute their attacks, and not even Manty stealth systems can hide them during the last hundred thousand kilometers or so of their runs. They don't have the sort of acceleration rates missiles do, either, and to be used properly, they have to attack virtually from rest, or else they can't loiter until the proper moment. So they have relatively low closing velocities when they come in, and they can be engaged by counter-missiles and standard point defense, now that we know they're out there. Our intercept probabilities won't be good, especially given how little warning we'll have between the moment their drives peak and the moment they reach attack range, but we can probably cope with the threat."

He paused for a moment, then shrugged.

"Actually, this part of it's largely my own personal fault," he said unflinchingly. "Shannon warned me from the beginning that the Moriarty platforms' stealth wouldn't be good enough to hide them if the Manties figured out what they should be looking for. She wanted to build them into purpose-built superdreadnoughts, or at least add them as strap-on components to larger, more heavily defended platforms. I overruled her because of the need to get Moriarty into service as quickly as possible. I shouldn't have. She was right."

"So were you. We did-do-need them. You didn't see some sort of invisible attack coming, but neither did anyone else. Don't second-guess yourself on this one."

Theisman bobbed his head, but he knew that was one presidential directive he wasn't going to be able to obey.

"The other new weapon they deployed is actually much more frightening," he continued. "The accuracy it demonstrated is bad enough, but what it did to our EW capabilities and counter-missiles may even have been worse. I'm trying very hard to remember we're looking at preliminary reports, but I'll be frank, Eloise. It's hard not to panic over this one.

"I've talked it over with Linda Trenis and Victor Lewis. Obviously, we haven't been able to get Shannon's input yet, but I'll be surprised if she reaches any different conclusions on the basis of the data we have so far.

"They've obviously incorporated an FTL link into their missile telemetry. I'm guessing it has to be an entirely separate, dedicated platform-a roughly missile-sized bird they've managed to squeeze the grav-pulse com into-that serves as an advanced data processing node. Nobody ever considered doing anything like that before, because there really wasn't any point. Light-speed limitations were light-speed limitations, and using this sort of approach must tie all the missiles the command platform is controlling into a fairly tightly bunched cluster. That should make them more vulnerable to interception, and before the FTL com came along, any control platform would have been just as far from home and just as sluggish responding to telemetry commands as any other missile.

"But what they've done gives their missiles real-time command control input from their shipboard tac sections, Eloise. You aren't a professional naval officer, so you may not realize just what a huge advantage that is. Even with conventional single-drive missiles, there's always been a light-speed telemetry lag which makes it impossible to exert effective shipboard control at extended missile ranges.

"But apparently that isn't true for the Manties anymore. They don't have to preprogram evasion maneuvers into their missiles. Don't have to launch with a locked-in attack profile, or even prepackaged EW profiles. They can make changes on the fly, adjust everything as they get steadily closer, get steadily better data on the defenses they have to penetrate. They can command their electronic warfare missiles to activate at precisely the most effective moment-decided by the capabilities of a superdreadnought's tactical computers, not just what can be squeezed into a missile body-and they can direct the flight of their attack missiles to take the greatest possible advantage of the holes their EW opens up.

"In short, their accuracy's going to be enormously greater than ours in any maximum-range engagement, and their missiles' ability to penetrate our defenses is going to be much higher, as well. So they're going to get through with more laser heads, and those laser heads are going to be much more accurate when they arrive."

"So our numerical superiority just evaporated," Pritchart said grimly.

"Not... necessarily," Theisman said, and for the first time since he'd entered her office, emotion flickered in her topaz eyes.

It was incredulity.

"You just said they can kill our ships-like they did Javier's-at ranges where we can't even hurt them," she said curtly.

"Yes, they can. With at least some of their ships."

"What do you mean?"

She cocked her head, eyes suddenly intent, and Theisman shrugged.