Uncompromising honor, p.16
Uncompromising Honor, page 16
part #19 of Honor Harrington Series
True, seeing the impeller signature of a target really was technological child’s play in many ways. Unfortunately, impeller-drive starships were extremely maneuverable, their wedges sharply limited the vulnerable aspects from which they could be successfully attacked, and they mounted both active and passive defenses designed to make the task of any attack missile’s seekers as un-simple as possible.
Given the way in which a missile’s own impeller wedge narrowed its onboard seekers’ field of view (one RMN training manual likened it to steering an air car while looking at the outside world through a soda straw), the small size of its effective target (the narrow gap between the impeller wedge’s roof and floor), the decoys and electronic warfare systems designed to defeat those seekers, and the target’s ability to rapidly roll ship in order to interpose its own impeller wedge, the probability of a hit by any single missile had always been low. Higher for laserheads than for contact weapons, but still low. And prior to the introduction of the modern missile pod, salvo densities had also been low, which had made it essential to find a way to increase that probability.
The solution had been to turn every salvo into a network of dispersed sensor platforms. Any given missile might not see the target very well—if at all—during an attack run, especially when coming in on a profile designed to make it as difficult as possible for that target’s active defenses to intercept it. But when all the seekers aboard every missile in the attack reported what they could see to the ship which had launched them, the data could be collated, combined, and analyzed. A far better tactical picture could be assembled; enemy electronic warfare tactics could be mapped and allowed for; probable decoys could be identified and excluded from the targeting queues; the other side’s evasion maneuvers could be plugged in, tracked, and projected; and refined instructions could be sent back not simply to the missiles which had supplied the data, but to every other missile in the salvo. Not only did that increase accuracy against assigned targets, but it permitted tactical officers to adjust targeting queues on the fly, redirecting missiles as their original targets were crippled or destroyed or as newer, higher-value targets were discovered. As the range increased, transmission lag set in and grew steadily worse until it reached the point at which new instructions from the firing ship were inevitably out of date and actually began degrading its missiles’ accuracy, at which point the links were cut and each missile reverted to onboard control.
And that was TF 1027’s problem.
Missiles attacking targets 36,000,000 kilometers from their launch platforms were far beyond the effective control range of light-speed systems. Admiral Isotalo had no choice but to rely on her birds’ internal seekers and targeting AI, and that AI had always been rudimentary because it was designed to work in tandem with shipboard direction. That was what truly made Apollo so lethal, although the SLN as yet had no clue of just how true that was. The Mark 23-E control missiles could accept shipboard telemetry at sixty-four times the range light-speed telemetry made possible, but the Echoes had also been designed specifically for use beyond even Apollo’s shipboard control range, with every control missile in the salvo talking to every other control missile and acting as an individual processing node for the data even when relay to—and through—the mothership was unavailable. Its autonomous accuracy was no more than thirty percent or so of its accuracy under tight shipboard control, but that thirty percent was many times more accurate than any current-generation Solarian missile could achieve.
Sir Martin Lessem’s Mark 16s weren’t Apollo-capable, and neither were his cruisers. But the Ghost Rider platforms’ FTL links cut the telemetry loop in half. They could see better than any missile’s sensors, they could report what they saw at FTL speeds—just as they were doing now on the massive incoming Solarian salvo—and that meant TG 47.3’s telemetry lasers could continue to update far longer than its Solarian opponents.
Despite that, he chose not to waste any of his fire on Isotalo’s ships just yet. His opponent had a hell of a lot more missile pods than he did. In fact, he was pretty sure the Solly CO saw this salvo as a test, a way to get a better read on his defensive capabilities, rather than a full-blooded attempt to destroy his ships. Lessem couldn’t keep him from doing that, but he wasn’t prepared to waste any of his own ammunition on targets that could disappear into hyper before his fire ever reached them.
And under the circumstances, he had no objection to showing the Sollies that they’d have to get a lot closer before their fire posed any realistic threat to his command.
His cruisers and destroyers mounted a total of 520 counter-missile launchers and 672 point defense clusters, and range from rest for the Royal Manticoran Navy’s Mark 31 counter-missile was 3,585,556 kilometers. The first of Lessem’s CMs went out 205 seconds after Isotalo’s launch, one second after the Cataphracts’ second-stage impellers lit off. A second wave of Mark 31s launched ten seconds after that. A third launched ten seconds after that. Then a fourth. The fifth and final wave of counter-missiles launched forty seconds after the first—thirty-five seconds before the Cataphracts could reach attack range. And then, with 2,080 Mark 31s headed downrange, every one of TG 47.3’s units rolled ship, turning up on their sides relative to TF 1027 to present only the bellies of their impeller wedges to the enemy.
Jane Isotalo’s jaw clenched as she saw the incredible waves of counter-missiles lashing outward from the Manties.
Should’ve expected it, she told herself harshly. If the bastards routinely throw around missile salvos of their own this size, they’ve got to have been working on defensive measures, too. Damn it, you knew that going in!
Indeed she had, and she and Ramaalas and Rosiak had done their damnedest to allow for it, but their worst-case estimates hadn’t visualized something like this. No Solarian ship mounted that many CM tubes per ton of displacement, and the bastards were actually launching counter-missiles from both broadsides simultaneously. No Solarian ship could have done that, either.
Nor were counter-missiles all those ships had launched.
“Dazzlers in five seconds, Sir,” Commander Constanta Solis, CruRon 912’s electronic warfare officer, announced, and Lessem nodded.
The Dazzlers had been originally devised as a penetration aid, designed to knock down and blind the sensors feeding a target’s defensive fire control with massive spikes of electromagnetic and gravitic interference. They were especially effective against counter-missiles, which relied on their ability to home in on the impeller signatures of their targets, because counter-missiles were designed to be produced in the largest possible numbers, and the fact that they didn’t need sophisticated seekers helped hold the price down. Nothing in the galaxy was more glaringly obvious than the impeller signature of a missile accelerating at 98,000 gravities, after all. Spotting one of them was rather like trying to see a million-candlepower searchlight in a darkened room. Only a blind man could have missed it.
But that was what the Dazzler produced: blind men. The counter-missiles’ seekers couldn’t possibly cope with those enormous bubbles of jamming. That meant they lost lock on their targets, and if it was timed correctly, both they and their targets were moving too rapidly for them to reacquire after the Dazzler’s pulse. Even if they reacquired something, their onboard electronic brains were seldom up to the task of reacquiring the proper something without guidance from their human masters.
That was what the Dazzler had been designed to do, but as the Fleet’s missile officers played around with it, they’d quickly realized it had another function. After all, attack missiles and the ships controlling them relied on their onboard sensors, too.
“Ma’am!” Rear Admiral Rosiak said sharply. “The Manties—”
He broke off, looking over his shoulder at Admiral Isotalo, and Isotalo gave him a choppy nod as the tactical plot went momentarily berserk.
“What the hell is that?” she demanded.
“Some kind of jamming,” Rosiak replied. “I don’t know how they’re doing it, though. We can’t see shi— That is, we can’t see very much through all the garbage, but CIC’s computers say it’s coming from at least a couple of dozen sources. That means it has to be some kind of independent platform. I don’t see how they could sustain emissions at this intensity for very long without burning out any emitter you could put into a drone, though, and—”
He paused again, pressing the fingers of his right hand against the earbug in his right ear and listening intently. His lips tightened, and he looked back at Isotalo.
“CIC doesn’t think they are sustaining emissions for more than ten to fifteen seconds per platform, Ma’am. But there are a lot of them, and they’re running them in a cascade pattern. That’s going to play hell with the attack birds’ seekers.”
Task Force 1027’s upgraded Cataphract-Cs were far superior to the Cataphracts Commodore Adrian Luft and the ill-fated People’s Navy in Exile had taken to disaster at the Battle of Congo. They were longer-ranged, faster, equipped with heavier warheads, and fitted with seeking systems which relied upon both better sensors and more effective onboard software. They were far more capable of thinking for themselves, and their ability to differentiate between false targets and real ones and to penetrate enemy ECM was at least thirty percent better than Luft’s had been.
But they still had to see their targets…and thanks to the Dazzlers, they couldn’t for several long, long seconds. Their electronic brains knew where to look when the interference cleared, however, and eventually, it had to clear, since their targets had to be able to see them if they meant to intercept them. And so the Cataphracts’ computers waited with uncaring, incurious patience for the range to clear and let them find their targets once more.
“Decoys coming up…now,” Commander Solis said calmly, and the fusion-powered Lorelei platforms keeping station on Sir Martin Lessem’s cruisers and destroyers suddenly switched on their emitters. Powered by the same micro-fusion reactors that made Ghost Rider possible, Lorelei had a far higher energy budget than anyone else’s ECM or EW platforms. With no need for beamed power from the ships they were protecting, however, the platforms could actually maneuver independently, mimicking moving starships almost perfectly. And even as the cruisers’ stealth systems knocked back their emission signatures; the Loreleis’ emitters deliberately enhanced theirs. They couldn’t match the full power of a Saganami-C or Saganami-B’s actual signature but they could—and did—duplicate the signature of a Saganami-C or Saganami-B hiding under stealth.
And there were dozens of them.
The master plot aboard SLNS Foudroyant cleared as the jamming platforms went down at last, and Isotalo found herself leaning forward in her command chair, eyes narrowed as she watched the icons of the Manticoran ships reappear upon it. There they were, and—
“Ma’am, we’re picking up—”
“I see it, Bart.” She cut Rosiak off and shook her head. “Not quite the same thing as believing it, I’m afraid,” she added harshly.
The number of targets on her tactical plot had quintupled. From this range, not even her passive shipboard sensors could positively differentiate between the sudden rash of false targets and the real ones. Her shipboard sensors had lost lock thanks to the jamming, just as the Cataphracts had, and the Manties had used their temporary cloak of invisibility well. The energy budget on those decoys had to be much higher than the SLN’s Halo platforms, and they were clearly maneuvering independently, so they obviously weren’t using beamed power from their motherships. However the Manties were doing it, though, their decoys had come online when no one in TF 1027 could see a thing. There’d been no way to plot them and keep track of them as they came up, and once the jammers shut down, Foudroyant and her consorts found themselves trying—and failing—to tell which of the sixty “cruisers” on the plot were real and which were false.
Even as she watched, numbers flickered under each of the cruiser icons—percentage values, changing rapidly to reflect CIC’s confidence as its analysis winnowed through the input to find the Manty starships once more. They were unlikely to accomplish that before her missiles reached attack range, unfortunately, and there was no way the less capable sensors the missiles themselves mounted would be able to.
That was…disconcerting, and she glanced across at Maleen Lamizana.
The intelligence officer looked back steadily, and Isotalo made herself nod. Lamizana had warned her and Rosiak that all their data on Manty EW was sketchy. “Problematic,” was the way she’d delicately put it as they reviewed ONI’s current guesstimates. Isotalo and Rosiak had tried hard to bear that in mind, but her intel officer had made it tactfully clear that she’d believed they were still underestimating the problem.
Now it would appear that even Lamizana had underestimated it.
Commodore Lessem watched the plot with an expression which was rather calmer than he actually felt. Intellectually, he knew the 6,000 missiles sweeping towards his command were far less capable than a similar launch by the RMN’s old Havenite opponents would have been. But 6,000 missiles were still 6,000 missiles, and it looked like all of them had been directed at his heavy cruisers.
What’s to worry about, Martin? he thought sardonically. That’s only about four hundred birds per ship, isn’t it?
Neither Clas Fleming nor any of his other ships mounted the Keyhole-Two platforms which were the secret of Apollo. Without those—and without the Mark 23-E control missiles—he couldn’t have taken full advantage of the Mark 23s aboard David K. Brown, which was why he’d decided against even trying to.
More to the point at the moment, however, Thomas Wozniak couldn’t manage the defensive engagement nearly as effectively as he might have with Keyhole-One or Keyhole-Two available. His ability to hand off his interceptors between different control platforms was much more limited, and he couldn’t establish direct telemetry links around the “dead spots” created by his own ships’ impeller wedges. What he could do, however, was to spread his Ghost Rider drones as broadly as possible and use their sensors to track the incoming fire. He could also—albeit with a certain degree of risk—roll ship to bring Clas Fleming’s or one of her consorts’ control links to bear on those dead zones and update the counter-missiles’ targeting solutions. At the current range, the risk was small; as the range closed, and time to roll back up disappeared, it could get risky indeed.
Ghost Rider couldn’t substitute for Keyhole’s telemetry links to the CMs, but it could feed the cruiser’s tactical section just fine, even in Clas Fleming’s current attitude, and the effect of the Loreleis was immediately obvious. At least a thousand of the incoming missile swarm peeled off, targeting one or another of the decoys. It was always possible some of them would reacquire one of his cruisers, or even lock onto one of the destroyers in default of its betters. That was unlikely, but unlikely things happened, and missiles which reacquired were often more dangerous than missiles which had never lost lock in the first place.
Missile defense was a game of probabilities, and one of the defender’s critical objectives was to assess those probabilities. Missile defense officers had only a limited number of counter-missiles and point defense clusters, and those limited numbers were allocated dependent on the threat hierarchy established by analyzing the incoming fire. Those missiles most likely to hit were targeted first, working from most likely to least likely in descending order until the defenders ran out of CMs or PD, and missiles which had clearly lost lock were at the very end of the targeting queue. So when one of those missiles suddenly reacquired a target at the very last instant, there was seldom a counter-missile or point defense cluster available to deal with it.
On the other hand…
Admiral Isotalo looked back at the plot just as the first wave of counter-missiles reached her oncoming attack. Then her jaw tightened in fresh consternation. Solarian interception probabilities on a first-launch, at maximum range, against the Cataphracts’ accompanying electronic warfare platforms and penetration aids, would have been on the order of ten percent.
The Manties did just a bit better than that.
The first wave of CruDiv 912.1’s CMs ripped into the oncoming Cataphracts.
The improved Solarian missile drives were accompanied by better penetration aids than the RMN had anticipated based on BuShips’ analysis of the contents of Massimo Filareta’s magazines. The difference was slight, but quantifiable, and Clas Fleming’s CIC took due note of it for the squadron’s after-action report.
In terms of the Mark 31 counter-missile’s performance, however, it was a negligible factor.
Five hundred and twenty Manticoran CMs slammed into the oncoming Cataphracts. A first-wave counter-missile launch, intercepting at maximum range, was always the least accurate of a defensive engagement. That was true in this case, as well, and the 520 Mark 31s intercepted only 152 of TF 1027’s Cataphracts…just under three times the kill ratio Barthilu Rosiak had estimated.
Jane Isotalo’s eyes narrowed and fury burned in their depths.
She’d thought the Manties’ decision to remain at rest relative to the terminus had indicated they intended to translate out as soon as a serious attack came their way. And, to be honest, she hadn’t intended her first salvo as a serious attack. She had expected them to either disappear into hyper or take some significant damage from it, however.
Not going to happen, Jane, she thought now, hands tightening on her command chair’s armrests as the second wave of CMs, with more time to acquire their targets, intercepted 260 attack missiles.
They’re still feeding at least some telemetry to those damned things, she thought grimly. They have to be. But how in hell can they even see my birds through their frigging wedges?
The third wave intercepted 300 attack missiles. The fourth intercepted 393, and the fifth took down 471, a staggering 90.5% interception rate. All told, the Manticoran counter-missiles intercepted 1,183 Cataphracts, almost twenty percent of her total launch, and like all good missile defense officers, the Manties had concentrated on the fire most likely to find a target. They’d done a remarkably good job of ignoring the hundreds of Cataphracts which veered off to chase decoys or simply went off on a vector to God only knew where when they lost both sensor lock and telemetry.
