David Weber - At All Costs

"How seriously would you assess their threat to our wall of battle, Alice?" Honor asked.

"That's impossible to say without a better fix on their capabilities and the numbers we may be looking at. I'm not trying to waffle, Honor. We simply genuinely don't know. I've got some highly problematical performance parameters on them, but under the circumstances, I think we have to consider them minimal. They were operating with the older designs, and that would have restricted them to the Cimeterres' performance envelope. Scotty's been kicking at our tentative numbers around with the rest of my COLACs, and what I'd really like to do is to have him set up some simulations built around our best estimates and game out what happens. I think the combination of the Katanas and our own wall's defensive fire ought to be able to manage the threat, but I'll feel better if we're able to confirm that, at least in the sims."

"I see." Honor regarded Truman thoughtfully, then nodded. "It makes sense to me. And let's be sure to draw BuWeaps' attention to the data you've managed to record on them."

"I'll see to it, Your Grace," Brigham said, punching a note to herself into her memo pad.

"Good. In that case, let's look at possible approach courses. Obviously, were going to want to scout the system thoroughly, so it seems to me that-"

Her officers leaned forward, listening intently, as she began to sketch out her own preliminary thoughts on the operation.

Fleet Admiral Sebastian D'Orville walked slowly onto his flag bridge, hands clasped behind him, expression suitably grave, and contemplated the perversity of the universe.

He'd spent his entire career in the service of the Crown, honing his professional skills, amassing seniority, proving his abilities. And what had all those decades of perseverance and professional excellence bought him? The most prestigious command in the Royal Manticoran Navy, of course.

Which meant he'd spent the dreary months since the Peeps' sneak attack doing absolutely nothing.

That's not true, Sebastian, and you know it, he scolded himself as he nodded pleasantly to the flag bridge personnel and crossed to the visual display. You've turned Home Fleet back into a proper weapon, after that asshole Janacek let training levels go straight into the crapper. And commanding the fleet charged with protecting the home star system hasn't exactly been the least stressful duty slot you've ever held down.

Which hasn't kept it from being boring as hell, of course.

He chuckled inside at the thought, but that didn't make it untrue, and he suppressed an unworthy stab of envy as he thought of Honor Alexander-Harrington.

She always has had a way of putting your nose out of joint, hasn't she? he asked himself wryly. Starting with the way she blew your flagship out of space in that Fleet maneuver back when she was-what? Just a commander, wasn't it? He shook his head in memory. On the other hand, I don't suppose it's really fair to blame her for being so good. And she is awfully junior to you. Junior enough she gets the fun command-the one Admiralty House figures it can take chances with-while you get to be the Queen's one and only Admiral of the Fleet and stay stuck at home with the one command that can't be risked.

He chuckled mentally again, and then his thoughts saddened as he remembered James Webster. The two of them had been friends since Saganami Island, and it had been Webster's unenviable lot to command Home Fleet last time around. D'Orville remembered how he'd teased Webster at the time, and he snorted. What went round, came around, he supposed, and he'd clearly laid up enough bad karma to deserve what had happened to him.

Of course, there were compensations.

He turned from the visual display to regard the huge master plot, and allowed himself a feeling of satisfaction as he studied the icons of the new fortresses. A year ago, the Manticoran Wormhole Junction's permanent fortifications had been virtually nonexistent. In fact, they'd been so sparse he'd been forced to hang Home Fleet all the way out at the Junction to cover the critical central nexus of the Star Kingdom's economy against attack.

He hadn't liked that, but the Janacek Admiralty's failure to update the fortresses had left him no choice. And at least the Manticore System's astrography had let him get away with it for a while.

Classic system-defense doctrine, developed over centuries of experience, taught that a covering fleet should be deployed in an interior position. Habitable planets inevitably lay inside any star's hyper limit, and habitable planets were generally what made star systems valuable. That being the case, the smart move was to position your own combat power where it could reach those habitable planets before any attacker coming in from outside the limit could do the same thing.

Unfortunately, one could argue that the Wormhole Junction was what truly made the Manticore System valuable. D'Orville didn't happen to like that argument, but he couldn't deny that it had a certain applicability. Without the Junction, the Star Kingdom would never have had the economic and industrial muscle to take on something the Republic of Haven's size. And it was certainly the Junction which made the Manticore System so attractive to potential aggressors like Haven in the first place.

And therein lay the problem. Or, at least, one of the problems.

The Junction was almost seven light-hours from Manticore-A. Which meant any fleet stationed to cover the Junction was light-hours away from the planets on which the vast majority of Queen Elizabeth III's subjects happened to live. As the man charged with protecting those subjects, that was... inconvenient for one Sebastian D'Orville.

The Junction's position also put it over eleven light-hours from Manticore-B, which created Home Fleet's commander's second problem. But, fortunately, Manticore-B also lay far outside the resonance zone-volume of space between the Junction and Manticore-A in which it was virtually impossible to translate between normal-space and hyper-space. Any wormhole terminus associated with a star formed a conical volume in hyper, with the wormhole at its apex and a base centered on the star and twice as wide as its hyper limit, in which astrogation was extraordinarily difficult and dangerous. The bigger the terminus, the stronger the resonance effect... and the Manticoran Wormhole Junction was the largest ever discovered. The resonance wave it produced was more of a tsunami, and it didn't just make astrogation "difficult." It made it the next best thing to flatly impossible, and any transition within the resonance (assuming someone could have plotted one in the first place) would have been no more than a complicated way to commit suicide. But since the Manticore Binary System's secondary component lay outside the resonance (and would for the next few hundred years or so), Home Fleet had actually been closer from its position covering the Junction-in terms of travel time-to Manticore-B than to Manticore-A.

As for Manticore-A, the planets of Manticore and Sphinx-Home Fleet's major inner-system defensive obligations-had been well inside the same resonance zone when he took up command of Home Fleet, with Manticore, with its smaller orbital radius, steadily "overtaking" Sphinx as it moving towards opposition. Each planet spent half its year inside the zone, and Sphinx's year was more than five T-years long. That meant it took thirty-one T-months to cross through the RZ, and it had been almost in the middle of the zone when he took up his command.

Actually, Sphinx's position was the third, and in many ways worst, problem confronting any Home Fleet CO, because the planet's orbital radius was only 15.3 million kilometers-less than nine-tenths of a light-minute-shorter than the GO primary's twenty-two-light-minute hyper limit. In an era of MDMs, that meant an attacker could translate out of hyper with the planet, and its entire orbital infrastructure, already fifty million kilometers inside his missile range. Even a conventionally armed fleet, with old-style compensators, and a relative velocity on translation of zero, could have achieved a zero/zero intercept with the planet in under an hour. A fleet of superdreadnoughts with modern Alliance compensators could have done it in barely fifty minutes.