Field Of Dishonor hh-4 Read online

  Field Of Dishonor

  ( Honor Harrington - 4 )

  David Weber

  The surprise attack of the Republic of Haven on Manticore has failed. The Peeps are in disarray, their leaders fighting for power in a bloody revolution, and the Royal Manitcoran Navy stands victorious. But success can be more treacherous than defeat for Honor Harrington.

  David Weber

  Field Of Dishonor

  "It is always a bad thing when political matters are allowed to affect... the planning of operations."

  Field Marshal Erwin Rommel 160 Ante-Diaspora (1943 C.E.)

  PROLOGUE

  It was very quiet in the huge, dimly lit room. The Advanced Tactical Training Course's main lecture hall boasted the second largest holo tank of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and the rising, amphitheaterlike seats facing the tank seated over two thousand at full capacity. At the moment, thirty-seven people, headed by Admiral Sir Lucien Cortez, Fifth Space Lord, and Vice Admiral The Honorable Alyce Cordwainer, the RMN's Judge Advocate General, sat in those seats and watched the tank intently.

  The image of a tall, strong-faced woman floated in it, sitting erect and square-shouldered yet calmly in her chair, hands folded on the tabletop before her beside the white beret of a starship's commander. The golden planets of a senior-grade captain gleamed on the collar of her space-black tunic, and she wore no expression at all as she faced the HD camera squarely.

  "And what, precisely, happened after the task group's final course change, Captain Harrington?" The voice came from off-camera, and a blood-red caption in the holo tank identified the speaker as Commodore Vincent Capra, head of the board of inquiry whose recommendations had brought the audience here.

  "The enemy altered course to pursue us, Sir." Captain Harrington's soprano was surprisingly soft and sweet for a woman of her size, but it was also cool, almost remote.

  "And the tactical situation?" Capra pressed.

  "The task group was under heavy fire, Sir," she replied in that same, impersonal tone. "I believe Circe was destroyed almost as we altered course. Agamemnon was destroyed approximately five minutes after course change, and several of our other units suffered both damage and casualties."

  "Would you call the situation desperate, Captain?"

  "I would call it... serious, Sir," Harrington responded after a moments thought.

  There was a brief silence, as if her invisible questioner were waiting for her to say something more. But her detached calm was impregnable, and Commodore Capra sighed.

  "Very well, Captain Harrington. The situation was 'serious,' the enemy had altered course to pursue you, and Agamemnon had been destroyed. Were you in contact with Nike 's flag bridge and Admiral Sarnow?"

  "Yes, Sir, I was."

  "So it was at this time he started to order the task group to scatter?"

  "I believe that was his intention, Sir, but if so, he was interrupted before he actually gave orders to that effect."

  "And how was he interrupted, Captain?"

  "By a report from our sensor net, Sir. Our platforms had picked up the arrival of Admiral Danislav's dreadnoughts."

  "I see. And did Admiral Sarnow then order the task group not to scatter?"

  "No, Sir. He was wounded before he could pass any other orders," the quiet, unshadowed soprano replied.

  "And how was he wounded, Captain? What were the circumstances?" The off-camera voice was almost irritated now, as if frustrated by Harrington's clinical professionalism.

  "Nike was hit several times by enemy fire, Sir. One hit took out Boat Bay One, CIC, and Flag Bridge. Several members of the Admiral's staff were killed, and he himself was severely injured."

  "He was rendered unconscious?"

  "Yes, Sir."

  "And did you pass command of the task group to the next senior officer?"

  "I did not, Sir."

  "You retained command?" Harrington nodded wordlessly. "Why, Captain?"

  "In my judgment, Sir, the tactical situation was too serious to risk confusion in the chain of command. I was in possession of knowledge—the fact that Admiral Danislav had arrived—which might not be known to Captain Rubenstein, the next senior officer, and time was very limited."

  "So you took it upon yourself to assume command of the entire task group in Admiral Sarnow's name?" Capra's question was sharp—not condemnatory, but with the air of making a crucial point—and Harrington nodded once more.

  "I did, Sir," she said, without even a flicker of emotion as she admitted violating at least five separate articles of war.

  "Why, Captain?" Capra pressed. "What made the situation time critical enough to justify such an action on your part?"

  "We were approaching our preplanned scatter point, Sir. Admiral Danislav's arrival gave us the opportunity to lead the enemy into a position from which he could not escape interception, but only if we remained concentrated and offered him a target worth pursuing. Given the damage I knew Captain Rubinsteins' com facilities had suffered, I judged there was too great a risk that the task group would scatter as previously planned before Captain Rubenstein could be fully apprised of the situation and assert tactical control."

  "I see." There was another lengthy moment of silence, broken only by what might have been the soft, off-camera sound of snuffling paper. Then Capra spoke once more.

  "Very well, Captain Harrington. Please tell the Board what happened approximately fourteen minutes after Admiral Sarnow was wounded."

  The first, faint trace of emotion crossed Captain Harrington's calm face. Her almond-shaped eyes seemed to harden with a cold, dangerous glitter and her mouth tightened. But only for an instant. Then all expression vanished once more, and no hint of whatever had glittered in her eyes colored that dispassionate soprano when she replied with a question of her own.

  "I assume, Sir, that you're referring to the actions of CruRon Seventeen?"

  "Yes, Captain. I am."

  "It was at approximately that time, Sir, that CruRon Seventeen scattered and detached from the remainder of the task group," Harrington said, and her voice was colder and even more emotionless than before.

  "On whose responsibility?"

  "That of Captain Lord Young, Sir, acting squadron CO following Commodore Van Slyke's death earlier in the action."

  "Did you instruct him to detach?"

  "No, Sir, I did not."

  "Did he inform you of his intentions before he detached his squadron?"

  "No, Sir, he did not."

  "So he acted entirely on his own initiative and without orders from the flagship?"

  "Yes, Sir, he did."

  "Did you instruct him to return to formation?"

  "Yes, Sir, I did."

  "More than once?"

  "Yes, Sir."

  "And did he obey your instructions, Captain?" Capra asked quietly.

  "No, Sir," Harrington replied like a soprano-voiced machine. "He did not."

  "Did the remainder of CruRon Seventeen return to its station when so instructed?"

  "Yes, Sir, they did."

  "And Captain Lord Young's own ship—?"

  "Continued to withdraw, Sir," Honor Harrington's recorded image said very, very softly, and an echo of that hard, frightening glitter gleamed in her eyes as the HD tank froze, then the tank blanked. The lights came up, and all eyes turned to the JAG Corps captain standing behind the speakers lectern as she cleared her throat.

  "That completes the relevant portion of Lady Harrington's statement to the Board of Inquiry, ladies and gentlemen." Her crisp alto carried well, with the easy courtroom manner of the experienced lawyer she was. "The entire statement, as well as all other testimony taken before the Board is, of course, available. Would you care to review any further port
ions of it before we proceed?"

  Admiral Cordwainer glanced at Cortez and crooked an eyebrow, wondering if the Fifth Space Lord had caught the same nuances she had. Probably. She might be a jurist by training, more alive to the things that weren't said—and the way they weren't—than most people, but Sir Lucien Cortez was a line officer who'd seen combat, and it had showed in his eyes and the tightening of his lips as he listened to Lady Harrington's cold, bloodless recitation of events.

  Bat Cortez shook his head, and the JAG looked back at the woman behind the lectern.

  "If there are any questions, we can view the rest of the transcript following your brief, Captain Ortiz," she said. "Carry on."

  "Yes, Ma'am." Ortiz nodded and glanced down, tapping keys to scroll through the notes in her memo pad, then looked back up. "This next portion is the real reason I asked ATC to make the main tank available to us, Ma'am. What you're about to see is a recreation of the relevant portion of the actual engagement, drawn from the sensor logs of all surviving units of Task Group Hancock-Zero-Zero-One. There are holes in the data, due to the task group's heavy losses, but we've been able to fill most of them by interpolating captured data from Admiral Chin's dreadnoughts. Using that information, ATC's computers have generated the equivalent of a combat information center display at a time compression of—" Ortiz glanced back at her memo pad "—approximately five-to-one, beginning shortly before Admiral Sarnow's death."

  She pressed buttons, and the lights dimmed once more. There was a brief blur of light in the stupendous HD tank; then everything snapped into sharp focus once more, and Cordwainer felt Cortez stiffen beside her as the glowing icons of a battle display burned before them.

  The larger portion of the two-level projection displayed the inner system of the red dwarf star called Hancock, as far out as the eleven-light-minute hyper limit. The widespread light codes of planets and the green dot of the fleet repair base that was the heart of Hancock Station blazed within it, but three brighter, flashing light codes drew the eye like magnets. Not even ATC's huge tank was able to display individual warships on such a scale, but only one of the flashing lights was the bright green of friendly units; both of the others glared the sullen crimson of hostiles, and funnel-like cores of light joined each of them to exploded-view projections which could display individual ships and their formations.

  The JAG was no trained tactician, but it didn't take one to understand Cortez's sudden tension. One crimson smear—the larger, by far—hung all but motionless, barely halfway from the hyper limit to Hancock Station, and the icons of the projection linked to it identified a blood-chilling number of superdreadnoughts of the People's Navy. But the second enemy force was far closer to the repair base, closing on it rapidly even as it slowly overhauled Task Group H-001, and the handful of green dots representing Manticoran units was horribly outnumbered—and even more horribly outgunned—by the glaring red dots of the warships pursuing them. The heaviest Manticoran units were six battlecruisers, three of them already circled by the flashing yellow bands of combat damage, and six super-dreadnoughts led the Peeps charging up their wakes.

  Cordwainer winced as the glittering sparkles of missiles streaked back and forth between the two formations. The Peeps poured fire into TG H-001 on at least a three-for-one ratio. It was hard to be certain—the compressed time scale reduced missile flight times drastically and made any real estimate of numbers impossible—but it looked as if the Manticorans were scoring at least as many actual hits. Unfortunately, the Peeps could take a great many more hits.

  "The task group has already lost two battlecruisers at this point," Captain Ortiz's detached, invisible voice said from of the darkness. "The Peeps have lost much more heavily thanks to Admiral Sarnow's initial ambush, but it's important to note that the Admiral has lost both his senior divisional commanders and Commodore Van Slyke. In short, there are no surviving flag officers, other than Admiral Sarnow himself, in the task group at this time."

  Cordwainer nodded silently, listening to Cortez's harsh breathing beside her, and winced as another Manticoran ship—this one a light cruiser—vanished from the display with heart-stopping suddenness. Two of the damaged battlecruisers took more hits, as well. The yellow band around one of them—she squinted her eyes to make out the name AGAMEMNON beside its icon—was tinged with the red of critical damage, and she shuddered as she tried to imagine how it must feel to know eight or nine times your own firepower had you in killing range.

  "We're coming up on the task group's final course change," Ortiz said quietly, and the JAG watched TG H-001's vector suddenly angle away from its previous course by at least fifteen degrees. She bit her lip as the Peep dreadnoughts turned to cut the chord of the angle, and the tank suddenly froze.

  "This is the point at which Admiral Sarnow made his final bid to draw the enemy away from the repair base and its personnel," Captain Ortiz said, and the tank flickered once more. The exploded-view formation displays burned unchanged, but the system-scale display shrank into a tiny fraction of its former volume to make room for three new projections. Not of battle codes and warships, this time, but of command decks and Manticoran officers eerily frozen in midmotion, as if awaiting the restoration of the time stream.

  "We're now approaching the actions significant to the board of inquiry's determinations," Ortiz went on. "A perusal of Admiral Sarnow's pre-battle briefings and discussions with his squadron commanders and captains will, I feel, make it abundantly evident that all of them understood his intention to divert the enemy from the base by any means possible, specifically including the use of his own ships as decoys. At the same time, in fairness to Lord Young, I should perhaps also point out that those same discussions had also covered the Admiral's intention for his force to scatter and evade independently once it became evident that further diversion had become impossible, although execution of such an evolution was, of course, contingent upon express orders from the flagship."

  She paused a moment, as if awaiting comment, but there was none, and her voice resumed.

  "From this point on, the time scale drops to one-to-one, and the command deck projections—drawn from the relevant ships' bridge recorders—are synchronized with the events in the tactical display. For the record, this—" one of the projections flashed brighter "—is the flag deck of HMS Nike . This—" another projection flashed "—is Nike's bridge deck, and this—" the third projection flashed "—is the bridge deck of the heavy cruiser HMS Warlock." She paused again to invite questions, then the entire complex light sculpture in the tank sprang back to life as if she'd touched it with a magic wand, and this time the silence was shattered by the wail of alarms, the beep of priority signals, and the frantic background crackle of battle chatter.

  The command deck projections were frighteningly lifelike. They weren't things of cool, lifeless light; they were red, and Cordwainer knew she was leaning forward on the edge of her comfortable chair as their reality swept over her. Nor was she alone. She heard someone groan behind her as at least four Peep missiles scored direct hits on the heavy cruiser Circe and the ship blew apart under their bomb-pumped x-ray lasers, but her eyes were riveted to Nike's bridge and a woman who was nothing at all like the cool, detached captain whose testimony they'd already viewed.

  "Formation Reno, Com—get those cruisers in tighter!"

  Honor Harrington's snapped order crackled with authority, and the entire task group shifted like a machine in the tactical display, realigning itself instantly. The change made the formations missile defenses far more effective—even Cordwainer could tell that—yet the observation was peripheral, almost unimportant, as she watched Harrington ride her command chair like a Valkyrie's winged steed. As if it were inevitable she should be there—impossible that she should be anywhere else in the universe. She was the heart and core of the frantic, disciplined activity of her ship's bridge, yet there was nothing frantic about her. Her face was cold—expressionless not with detachment but with purpose, a killer's total, focused conc
entration—and her brown eyes flashed frozen flame. Cordwainer could feel the tendrils of her concentration reaching out to every officer on her bridge like a maestro gathering a superbly trained orchestra into her hands and driving its musicians to perform on a plateau they could never have reached without her. She was in her element, doing the one thing she'd been born to do and carrying the others with her as she fought her ship and her ship led the embattled task group.

  The white-faced, sweating man in HMS Warlock's command chair was a nonentity beside Harrington, something so small, so trivial, it barely registered, but a corner of the JAG's eye watched Admiral Sarnow and his staff. Her intellect recognized the admiral's skill and a purpose at least as focused as Harrington's, his uncanny ability to carry the entire complex tactical situation in his head, the authority radiating from him, yet even he seemed strangely distant. Not diminished, but... pushed back, set at one remove beside the icy, brighter than life fire of Nike's captain. His was the task group's brain, Cordwainer thought, but Harrington was its soul, and something deep inside her was amazed by her own thoughts. Such dramatic metaphors were alien to her, clashed with all her jurist's cold, analytical training, yet they were the only ones that fit.

  "We've lost Agamemnon, Skipper!" someone snapped from Nike's bridge, and Cordwainer bit her lip as another green icon vanished, but her eyes were fixed on Harrington's face, watching the slight tick at the right corner of her mouth as her ship's division mate died.

  "Close us up on Intolerant. Tactical, tie into her missile defense net."

  Acknowledgments rattled back, but her eyes were fixed on the com screen linking her to Admiral Sarnow's flag bridge, and there was something else in those eyes. A bitter something, raw as poison, as her admiral looked back at her. The price the task group was paying was too high for a mere diversion from a base it couldn't save, and both of them knew it. Their ships were dying for nothing, and Sarnow opened his mouth to order them to scatter.