He let the thought trail off, because he didn't really know what would be waiting "at the end of it."
Except for the biggest naval battle in human history, of course.
Chapter Sixty-Three
"How does it look now, Andrea?"
"Better, Your Grace."
Captain Jaruwalski flipped a sighting circle into the main plot, dropping it neatly around the icons of Battle Squadrons 36 and 38, Imperial Andermani Navy. The light codes of the sixteen superdreadnoughts burned steadily in the display, giving no indication of how hard they were to find, even for Imperator's sensors. The numbers in the CIC sidebar giving detected signal strength were another story, however, indicating exactly how hard they would have been to detect had Imperator not known exactly where to look for them. Not quite as hard as Manticoran ships might have been, but harder than anyone else's, Honor noted, and nodded in approval. Not so much of the EW capabilities, as of Vizeadmiral Morser's tactics.
"She's slipped around behind Admiral Yanakov," Jaruwalski continued. "I don't think he knows she's there, but he's a sneaky one. He may just be playing dumb until she's got him right where he wants her."
"Why do you think that might be?"
"Partly because of where he's got his carriers, Your Grace. He's got them pulled around, further ahead of his trailing battle squadron than his usual cruising dispositions. That puts the SD(P)s' onboard point defense between them and Morser's batteries. But they're still far enough astern that he could get their Katanas launched to thicken his task force missile defenses in a hurry. It may not mean anything, but it looks to me as if he's at least thinking about the possibility of being jumped from astern."
"I see."
Honor folded her hands behind her, standing beside her command chair while Nimitz draped bonelessly over its back, and contemplated the plot. Andrea had a point, she decided. Both about Judah's sneakiness, and about his formation. Personally, Honor gave it a sixty-forty chance Yanakov didn't know Morser was back there. Or, at least, how close she was. For the purposes of this exercise, he'd been denied the use of Ghost Rider's extended platform endurance, his sensor capability had been stepped down to no more than twenty percent better than ONI's current best estimate of the Republic's capabilities, and his acceleration rate had been reduced to match that of Republican superdreadnoughts. That meant he was more myopic than he was accustomed to being, and he must feel heavy-footed, slow to maneuver. So it made sense for him to be particularly wary about the possibility of being overhauled from behind.
Still, he was sneaky....
Then again, so was Bin-hwei Morser. Honor still didn't like her much, and she was aware-painfully, one might say, given her ability to taste mind-glows-that Morser's feelings for her went far beyond "didn't like much." But the vizeadmiral was a superior tactician, and her very dislike for Manticore had inspired her to drive her personnel even harder over the five days since Aivars Terekhov's return from Monica. She hadn't come off very well in that series of exercises, and she hadn't liked that much, either. The last thing she wanted was to look inferior to the RMN.
When you're number two, you try harder, Honor thought wryly. Especially when you resent the heck out of your number two status. Well, whatever works. I don't really care why she does it, as long she does do it.
She began to pace slowly back and forth, watching the gradually developing tactical situation. At the moment, Imperator was tagging along behind Konteradmiral Syou-tung Waldberg's Battle Squadron Thirty-Eight at the rear of Morser's formation. Yanakov had his own Fifteenth Battle Squadron and Vice Admiral Baez's Twenty-Third, plus Samuel Mikl¢s' Fifth Carrier Squadron and all four of Eighth Fleet's Manticoran and Grayson battlecruiser squadrons. Alistair McKeon's Sixty-First Battle Squadron, most of Alice Truman's carriers, and the rest of Honor's cruisers and destroyers had stayed home, near the Trevor's Star terminus of the Junction with Admiral Kuzak's Third Fleet, for this one. The object was to give her Andermani units a significant force advantage, since they were tasked as the aggressors in this particular system defense exercise.
"Any word on Vizeadmiral Hasselberg's units?" she asked, after a moment.
"Welllllll..." Jaruwalski said, and Honor looked at her sharply, one eyebrow rising as she tasted the ops officer's emotions.
"Spit it out, Andrea."
"Well, I know Admiral Yanakov can't use the all-up Ghost Rider capabilities, and I know we're supposed to be letting Vizeadmiral Morser call all the shots on this one. But I couldn't quite resist the temptation to deploy a few drones of my own, Your Grace. None of the take from them is going to Morser, but it sort of lets me keep an eye on things."
"I see. And no doubt you simply forgot to display the positions of Vizeadmiral Hasselberg and his ships. The fact that you were attempting to conceal your transgression from my eagle eye had nothing to do with the omission, right?"
"Well, maybe a little, Your Grace," Jaruwalski admitted with a grin. "You want to see him?"
"Go ahead and show me."
"Coming up now," Jaruwalski said, and the understrength Forty-First Battle Squadron of Vizeadmiral Hwa-zhyou Reinke, screened by the sixteen battlecruisers of Konteradmiral Hen-zhi Seifert and Konteradmiral Tswei-yun Wollenhaupt and accompanied by Rear Admiral Harding Stuart's Mermaid and Harpy, appeared suddenly on the master plot.
Mermaid and Harpy formed Carrier Division Thirty-Four, detached from Truman's CLAC squadron to give the Andermani a carrier element. At the moment, they and the superdreadnoughts they were accompanying were well ahead of Yanakov's force, closing in on an almost directly converging heading, and Honor frowned.
Reinke's squadron had only six SD(P)s, which meant Yanakov's wallers outnumbered him by better than two-to-one. Stuart's carriers were outnumbered by three-to-one, and even in battlecruisers, Hasselberg was outnumbered four-to-three. That was bad enough, but coming in as he was, he'd be in MDM engagement range at least a half-hour before Morser closed up from behind Yanakov, and a half-hour was a long time in an engagement between pod-layers.
She started to say something, then changed her mind. She didn't really care for tactics which split an attacking fleet up into penny packets. It was too good a way to fritter away a numerical advantage and invite defeat in detail, especially if your timing screwed up, and that seemed to be what was about to happen to Hasselberg and Morser. It looked as if Hasselberg had planned on a simultaneous attack, enveloping Yanakov from ahead and astern at the same time. If he had, however, his timing was decidedly off.
But that was a point for her to make to him privately, where he could be positive she wasn't criticizing him in front of his juniors. She wasn't afraid Jaruwalski would have let anything slip to anyone else even if she'd commented on Hasselberg's error, but it was a bad habit to get into, even with her own staff. And so she possessed her soul in silence, watching the situation unfold.
And then-
"Your Grace, look at this!" Jaruwalski said suddenly, and Honor frowned. It took her an instant to recognize what she was seeing, but when she did, she decided she was glad she hadn't criticized Hasselberg's timing after all.
"Is he doing what I think he's doing, Your Grace?" Jaruwalski asked, and Honor chuckled.
"He is, indeed, Andrea. And I'll be interested to see how Judah reacts. This is very like something he once pulled in a training exercise in Yeltsin."
She stepped over closer to Jaruwalski, resting her right hand lightly on the ops officer's shoulder as they both watched the plot. Hasselberg had obviously just deployed Ghost Rider drones of his own. These weren't sensor platforms, though; they were EW platforms configured to counterfeit the emissions signatures of Morser's superdreadnoughts. And he was being subtle about it. The signal strength off the drones was very weak-barely more than ten percent higher than what could have been expected to leak through a standard Andermani stealth field. Given the way Yanakov's sensor capabilities had been dialed back for the exercise, his tac officers were going to have a hard time recognizing what Hasselberg was doing.