"Yes, Your Grace?"
"Activate the Mistletoe platforms."
"What the-?"
Commander MacNaughton stiffened in consternation.
"Admiral Giovanni! We've got-"
Giovanni was still turning towards her display when the explosions began.
The Havenite tracking crews had become accustomed to the fact that they simply couldn't localize and destroy the highly stealthy Manticoran reconnaissance platforms used to scout their star systems. It was galling, but true. And so, aside from a certain deep-seated irritation, they'd actually paid relatively little attention to the long-endurance Ghost Rider reconnaissance drones the Manticorans had distributed throughout the inner system of Lovat.
Which was unfortunate.
Sonja Hemphill had personally chosen the name "Mistletoe" in honor of the dart which had killed the god Balder in Norse mythology, and the name proved apt.
"Where the hell are they coming from?" Giovanni demanded.
"I don't know, Ma'am!" MacNaughton replied, his voice as anguished as his expression as the Manticoran laser heads ripped into the Moriarty platforms. Not just one of the platforms; all three of them. The stealth and dispersion which were supposed to have protected them obviously hadn't, he thought, and closed his eyes for a moment as the relentless avalanche of fire blew them apart.
Alessandra Giovanni's face was white with shock. With the Moriarty platforms gone, she had nothing that could control missile salvos of the size needed to batter down Manticoran missile defenses. And given what the Manties had already done to Admiral Giscard's forces, it was painfully obvious her own anti-missile defenses were going to be at best marginally effective.
"The recon platforms!" MacNaughton said suddenly. "The bastards put laser heads on their goddamned recon platforms!"
Giovanni blinked, then shook her head and looked sharply at MacNaughton. He was right, she realized. It was the only explanation.
"But how did they find Moriarty?" she demanded. "Unless-"
"Unless what, Ma'am?" MacNaughton asked when she broke off suddenly.
"Suarez," she said sharply. "That's what Suarez was all about! They figured out what happened to them at Solon, and they used their EW drones to trick us into activating the Moriarty net at Suarez after they'd already planted their recon platforms deep enough in-system to see them. They had complete, detailed fingerprints on what they were looking for!"
"And then they mixed in armed recon drones to kill them after they found them," MacNaughton said through clenched teeth.
"That's exactly what they did," Giovanni agreed harshly. "Damn! They can't have the acceleration to be very effective against moving targets at any sort of range, but against fixed targets, especially when the attack birds know exactly what to look for...."
"Commander MacNaughton!" a rating called, and MacNaughton whipped back to his own displays. His shoulders went absolutely rigid for a moment, then slumped, and he looked back at Giovanni.
"Not just Moriarty, Ma'am," he grated. "It looks like we're going to have to start deploying the system defense pods further apart. They just took out three-quarters of the Beta echelon and almost that many of the Delta birds."
"How?" Giovanni asked flatly.
"More of their damned recon platforms. It had to be. They got old-fashioned nukes-the yields are somewhere in the five hundred megaton range-close enough to the pods to take them out with proximity explosions."
Giovanni nodded silently. Of course. If you could put laser heads on the things, then why not regular nukes? Not that they'd really had to. Given the accuracy they'd just shown against Giscard, they could take the pods out with proximity-armed MDM launches from beyond any range at which she could possibly expect to score hits in return.
"Admiral Giovanni," a shaken communications officer said, "Admiral Trask is asking for you."
Alessandra Giovanni glanced once more at the plot where the heart and mind of her defenses had just been annihilated, then drew a deep breath. Of course Trask wanted to speak to her. His obsolescent superdreadnoughts were going to be little more than targets for Harrington's SD(P)s, and Giovanni wasn't optimistic about her LACs' chance to get through Harrington's defensive fire and damned Katanas without the support of massed attacks from the system defense missile pods.
Which meant that if she committed Admiral Wentworth Trask's ships, he and all of his people were going to die..
"According to the standard recon platforms, we just took out all three of their control stations, Your Grace!" Jaruwalski announced jubilantly.
"Very good, Andrea. In that case, we'll proceed with the Alpha plan. Let's whittle their deployed pods down as far as we can before we enter their envelope."
"Aye, aye, Your Grace."
Honor nodded and turned back to her plot, hoping that whoever was in command over there would realize how helpless her defensive starships were and surrender before she had to kill them all.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
"How bad is it?" Eloise Pritchart asked flatly.
Thomas Theisman looked at her for a moment before he replied.
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.