Honor frowned and rubbed her chin thoughtfully. She considered for several seconds, then lowered her hand to point a long index finger at McGinley.
"If I understand correctly, you disagree with Jasper not over what would constitute a rational Peep strategy but over Theisman's probable resources. Is that correct?"
"Essentially," McGinley agreed. "So far we don't have any reports of attacks on convoys in the area, so I'm also inclined to doubt that the Peeps have caught onto our new shipping patterns yet, but that's a minor point. If, in fact, they have the strength to punch out one of our pickets even temporarily, there's no question but that it would be the smart move on their part. Not only would they get the shot at incoming traffic that Jasper's just described, but they'd also have an excellent opportunity to inflict significant losses on the picket they attacked. I simply find it difficult to believe that they're willing to pour more capital ships down a rat hole for a system they can't hope to hold in the end. And even if they did send him any substantial reinforcements, I question whether or not Theisman would dare risk them in some sort of unauthorized forward operation."
"Thomas Theisman might fool you, Marcia," Honor murmured. She rocked her chair back and forth for several thoughtful moments, then focused once more on McGinley.
"You may well be right about Barnett's resources," she said, "but I think Jasper has his finger on our worst potential danger. Whether it actually happens or not, we have to assume it's at least possible that the enemy will choose to attack our forward pickets rather than carry out search and destroy operations against convoys between star systems. How do we protect ourselves against both possibilities?"
"If we had a larger escort, I'd vote for the Sarnow Deployment," McGinley replied promptly, and Honor nodded once more.
Any commerce raider knew that the best chance to hit a merchantman (or a convoy of them) was immediately after it translated from hyper- to normal-space, before its sensors had time to locate potential threats and while its velocity was at its lowest. Since the general volumes in which traffic was likely to make translation could be predicted with a fair degree of accuracy, placing a raider in position to hit merchantmen at their most vulnerable wasn't particularly difficult. Covering all probable target areas might require a goodly number of hulls, but their actual placement was straightforward.
By the same token, the best relative position from which to attack a convoy, whether in hyper- or n-space, was from directly ahead of it, where its velocity would carry it straight towards you. The execution of any effective evasion maneuver would require its ships to overcome a potentially enormous relative closing velocity, and no vast, lumbering merchantman, with its commercial grade inertial compensator and impellers, could match the acceleration and maneuverability of a warship. As a consequence, raiders preferred to get ahead of a convoy and let it come to them.
The classic defensive gambit was for the escort commander to place the majority of her strength ahead of her charges, so as to put her warships between them and the most probable axis of threat while one or two pickets watched the rear as a hedge against the lesser threat of a raider overtaking from astern. Against pirates, whose primary goal was to take prizes (and those prizes' cargoes) intact, that remained RMN convoy doctrine, but against Peep commerce raiders, the Navy had adopted the new strategy proposed by Vice Admiral Mark Sarnow. Instead of massing the escorts ahead, they were concentrated on the flanks and astern of the convoy, with relatively weak scouting elements deployed at least thirty to forty minutes of flight time ahead of the entire formation.
It made sense, given that Peeps, unlike pirates, were interested only in denying a convoy's cargo to the Alliance. They might prefer capturing it, but simply destroying it would do the job just as well, so from their perspective, it only made sense to open fire the moment they reached attack range of the merchies, which, in turn, made it imperative for the escorts to keep them out of range. The new doctrine placed the escorts' main fighting strength in a position which let them use their superior speed to intercept a threat coming in on any attack vector, and the forward scouting elements served to "sanitize" the convoy's projected course in order to prevent surprises. It also, of course, meant that the ships assigned to break trail were the most exposed units of the escort, but that couldn't be helped, and the scouts should have time to fall back on the main body of the escort before they could be overwhelmed in isolation.
That, at least, was the theory, and Honor's own experience suggested that it should work effectively. Unfortunately, as McGinley had just implied, her understrength squadron lacked the numbers to deploy multiple units ahead without unacceptably weakening the close-in escort. That meant that whoever she put out there was going to be dangerously exposed, with no one to watch his or her back.
She considered briefly, then looked at McKeon.
"Alistair?" she invited, and the heavyset captain leaned forward to brace his forearms on the table.
"I agree that the worst thing the Peeps could do from our perspective would be to punch out one of our system pickets. Commander McGinley may well be right that they don't have the strength to do it, but I think Lieutenant Mayhew is right about Theisman. As you may recall," he smiled wryly, "you and I have both had the pleasure of making his acquaintance. If he's got enough firepower to give him a realistic chance at a system raid, he'll go for it unless someone higher up the chain specifically orders him not to.
"At the same time, I don't think it matters a great deal to us which strategy he adopts. Commander McGinley is correct that a Sarnow Deployment will give us the best coverage against either possibility."
"And just who do we put on point?" Captain Greentree's question could have been a challenge, worded as it was, but his tone was mild, and he'd cut to the heart of Honor's own concerns. "We don't have enough hulls to put as many as the Book calls for out in front—not unless we reduce our flank strength and defeat the entire point of the deployment," the flag captain went on. "If we had a few destroyers along things would be different; we could put two or three of them up front to cover one another's backs. As it is, though, we'd have to detail a single ship, and whoever we stick out there will be badly exposed. He'll be much too far ahead for us to cover him if he's attacked."
"True enough," McKeon agreed. "But our first responsibility is to the convoy. If it comes right down to it, any escort is expendable, and a Sarnow deployment will stretch the convoy's sensor envelope by a good nine light-minutes. Even those of us who don't have built in FTL coms have recon drones that do, and that means the picket will be able to see any bad guys and report them to the flagship long before they see the flagship. At worst, that should at least let us keep the merchies clear of them; at best, we'll have a pretty fair shot of sucking any weak raiding force into an ambush of our own."
"I don't disagree," Greentree said. "I'm simply asking who we put out in front."
"That's the easy part." McKeon grinned. "I'd say Prince Adrian is the only logical choice, wouldn't you?"
Greentree opened his mouth, then closed it, and Honor felt his irritation—not at McKeon, but at McKeon's logic. She not only felt it but understood it, for like Greentree, she would much prefer to take point herself. Position of maximum risk or no, it was also the one from which the escort would most probably have its first glimpse of any oncoming threat. Any good tactician hungered to be able to gauge the situation for herself, not through someone else's reports. Besides, she hated the thought of sending people into any danger she couldn't share with them. It was irrational, and a weakness she knew a flag officer had to learn to overcome, but that didn't make it any less real.