by David Weber
Honor pursed her lips thoughtfully as the range from Morser's squadrons to Yanakov's dropped steadily. Yanakov was already in MDM range, and in another few minutes his LACs were going to get close enough to see through Hasselberg's masquerade. So if she were Morser, she'd be firing just about-
"Vizeadmiral Morser's opened fire, Your Grace," Jaruwalski said, and Honor nodded.
"So I see," she said mildly, folded her hands behind her once again, and walked calmly back to her command chair.
Judah was going to be... irritated with himself, she thought with a mental grin. He'd obviously taken Hasselberg's bait, after all. He might not have allowed himself to go charging after it, but Hasselberg and his skillfully deployed drones had riveted Yanakov's attention on the smaller of the Andermani task groups. His tac crews hadn't been paying as much attention to other possible axes of threat, and when Morser launched, Yanakov's screen-and Katanas-were badly out of position, with very poor shots at the incoming tide of missiles. Moreover, Morser had stacked her pods deeply. Her sixteen superdreadnoughts had deployed almost six hundred pods; now they launched a total of 4,608 attack and EW missiles... and five hundred and seventy-six Apollo control missiles.
Flight time was still almost six minutes, which gave Yanakov some time to adjust, but it wasn't long enough to significantly reposition his units. And as the missiles came streaking in, for the first time, Eighth Fleet units found themselves on the receiving end of an Apollo attack.
It was not, Honor thought, watching the first few damage codes appear on her display, like the first drifting flakes of a Sphinx mountain blizzard, going to be a pleasant experience.
* * *
"Admiral, it's time," Captain DeLaney said quietly over the com, and Lester Tourville nodded.
"Yes, I suppose it is," he agreed. "Send the Fleet to battle stations, Molly. I'll be up directly."
"Yes, Sir."
Tourville terminated the connection and stood. He patted his skinsuit's cargo pocket automatically, checking to be certain his trademark cigars were where they were supposed to be. They'd become so much a part of his image that he probably could have demoralized his entire flag bridge crew by the simple expedient of giving up smoking.
The thought made him chuckle, and he was glad he was alone as he detected the edge of nervousness in the sound.
Let's just get that out of our system right here, Lester. No butterflies in front of the troops. They deserve a hell of a lot better than that out of you.
He glanced at himself in a bulkhead mirror. It was probably just as well none of his personnel knew he'd been sitting here, already skinsuited, for the last fifteen minutes. Not that it had been because of any opening-night jitters. Or, at least, not very much so. It was more calculating than that. By suiting up early, he could take the time to do it right and arrive on flag bridge calm and collected, looking as if he'd just stepped out of a training holo. Just another of those little tricks to inspire his subordinates to pretend, even to themselves, that he was an unflappable, calm, confident leader. So sure of himself he would turn up perfectly turned out, without a single hair out of place.
He ran one hand over the hair in question, and chuckled again, much more naturally... just as the music began to play.
One of Thomas Theisman's reforms had been to allow the captains of capital units the right to substitute more personalized selections for the stridency of the standard fleet alarms. Captain Houellebecq had a fondness for really old opera, much of it actually dating from pre-space Old Earth. Tourville had cherished private doubts when she decided to use some of it aboard Guerriere, but he had to admit she'd come up with a suitable selection for this particular signal. In fact, he'd thought it was an appropriate one even before she told him what it was called.
"Now here this! Now here this! All hands, man Battle Stations! Repeat, all hands man Battle Stations!" Captain Celestine Houellebecq's calm, crisp voice said through the ancient, surging strains of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries.
* * *
"Ma'am, the Alpha Arrays are reporting-sweet Jesus!"
Lieutenant Commander Angelina Turner turned quickly, eyes flashing angrily.
"Just what the hell kind of report do you call that, Hellerstein?" she demanded harshly, even angrier because Chief Petty Officer Bryant Hellerstein was one of her best, steadiest people.
"Commander-Ma'am-this can't be right!" Hellerstein blurted, and Turner strode quickly towards his station. She'd opened her mouth in another, still sharper reprimand, but Hellerstein's shocked expression when he turned to look at her stopped it unspoken. She'd never seen the tough, competent noncom look... terrified before.
"What can't be right, Bryant?" she asked, much more gently than she'd intended to speak.
"Ma'am," Hellerstein said hoarsely, "according to the Alpha Arrays, three hundred-plus unidentified ships just made their alpha translations right on the limit."
Chapter Sixty-Four
"All right, Robert. Let's get those drones deployed."
"Aye, Sir!" Commander Zucker began punching in commands at his console, and Rear Admiral Oliver Diamato turned to his chief of staff.
"It's not going to take them long to figure out we're out here, Serena," he said, one hand gesturing at the master plot which showed the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. Just getting this close to the Junction made Diamato's skin crawl, because if there was one point-besides their home system's inhabited worlds-guaranteed to make the Manties respond like a wounded swamp tiger, it was the Junction.
"As a matter of fact, Sir," Commander Taverner replied with a mirthless smile, "I sort of suspect they already know, don't you?"
"I'm an admiral. That means I can put the best face on things if I want to." Diamato countered with a taut, answering smile.
In fact, as both he and Tucker knew perfectly well, the Mantie's system platforms had detected and pinpointed their hyper footprints the instant they arrived. There was no point trying to fool those stupendous arrays. With dimensions measured in thousands of kilometers on a side, they could pick up even the most gradual translation into normal-space at a range of literally light-weeks, much less the signatures of two battlecruiser squadrons only six light-hours from the primary.
"I suppose so, Sir," Taverner agreed. "Maybe that's why I'm just a commander."
"And don't you forget it." Diamato could almost feel his flag bridge crew relaxing at the banter between him and the chief of staff, and that was good. But there were more serious things to consider, as well.
"What I meant," he continued, "is that I'd like to put as much distance-very stealthily-as we can between us and our arrival points. I doubt we'll be able to drop off their systems, but it's worth a try."
"Yes, Sir," Taverner said more seriously. She gazed at the plot along with him. Their recon drones were out, racing for the Junction to keep a close eye on things, and already the faint sensor ghosts which were all they ever seemed to see of the Manties' all-too-aptly named "Ghost Rider" drones were appearing, headed (as nearly as they could tell) in their direction.
"What about going to Shell Game, Sir?" she asked after a moment.
"That's what I was thinking," Diamato agreed.
His ships' job was to keep as close an eye as possible on the Junction. At least the Manty defenses hade made it easy for the planners to decide against sending in recon LACs, since none of them could have hoped to survive long enough to see a damned thing. That meant he wouldn't have LAC crews' deaths on his conscience, but it didn't exactly solve his other problems. Specifically, his drones , while more capable than they'd ever been before as recon platforms, still were nowhere near as stealthy as the Manties' drones. That meant he had to stay close enough to keep sending in fresh waves as the defenders picked off the earlier ones.
At the same time, there was no point pretending his command could fight off what the Manties could send its direction if they so chose. So instead of any deluded notions of martial glory and stand-up battle, it was time-as Tavrerner
had just suggested-to rely on speed and dispersal. This far out from the system primary (and well to the side of the resonance zone), Diamato's sixteen battlecruisers were free to bob and weave. And if things looked like getting too hot anyway, they could always disappear into hyper. The trick was to avoid letting anything with MDMs get within four or five light-minutes of them.
"Should I pass the orders, then, Sir?" Taverner asked, and he nodded.
"Do it," he said.
* * *
"Oh, shit," Admiral Stephania Grimm, Royal Astrogation Control Service, said to herself very, very quietly as a soft but urgent audio alarm sounded. The napkin she'd been using to brush cake crumbs from her tunic was suddenly a crushed ball in her hand, and the people who'd just been wishing her happy birthday turned as one to look at the plot.
Figures, a corner of her brain thought. They would decide to come calling on my birthday!
She looked around at the suddenly taut faces of her co-workers. ACS was a civil service organization, despite its military ranks, and most of her subordinates and staff had never imagined in their darkest nightmares that they might ever actually see combat. But Grimm's position as the commanding officer of the Manticoran Junction's traffic control service required her to cooperate closely with its military hierarchy. Not all ACS commanders had been comfortable fits for that side of their duties, but it helped that Grimm was herself ex-Navy. In fact, she'd reached the rank of captain of the list before transferring to ACS, and she'd quickly acquired a reputation among her military colleagues for efficiency and brains. That was especially welcome in the wake of her immediate predecessor, Admiral Allen Stokes, whose sole claim to his position had been his brother-in-law's close ties to Baron High Ridge and First Lord Janacek.
But right at this moment, knowing she was well thought of was remarkably little comfort to Admiral Grimm. The huge hyper footprint just outside the system hyper-limit was bad enough, but for her, personally, the scattered footprints and spreading impeller signatures eight light-minutes out from the Junction were just as bad. There were going to be incoming drones very shortly, and there might be more superdreadnoughts hovering out there on the other side of the hyper wall, waiting to pounce, depending on what those drones told their masters.
She wasn't the only one thinking dark thoughts, she noticed, watching the huge astro plot's sidebars as the Junction forts rushed to battle stations. It would take a lot of SDs to deal with them, she told herself, but that didn't make her feel a great deal better. There were several hundred freighters, passenger liners, mail boats, and exploration vessels either already in transit through the Junction's various termini or else lined up in the transit queues awaiting their turns, and the thought of MDMs tearing around amidst all that defenseless civilian shipping made her physically sick to her stomach.
She flipped up a plastic shield and punched a large, red button on her console. A harsh, strident buzzer sounded, and every other sound on the command deck of HMSS DaGama, the Junction's central ACS platform ceased abruptly. Every eye turned towards her as the saw-edged audio alarm jerked her personnel's attention to her.
"It hasn't been declared yet, but we have damned sure got ourselves a Case Zulu, people," she announced in a flat, tense voice. "I'm declaring Condition Delta on my own authority. Clear the Junction-all traffic, wherever it is in the queue, not just the outbounds already on final. I want anything that might draw an MDM's attention way the hell away from here ASAP.
"After that, Jordan," she continued, turning to her exec, who still held half a slice of cake, "get ready for the ride of your life. Unless I miss my guess, what Admiral Yestremensky had to deal with when Earl White Haven took Eighth Fleet to Basilisk was a walk in the park compared to what's coming our way. Get a dispatch boat away to Trevor's Star with a sitrep immediately. Then go ahead and start setting up for a minimum-interval transit of everything Admiral Kuzak and Duchess Harrington have. I'm not sure what their deployments are, but we could have close to a hundred wallers coming through that terminus nose-to-arse. And if a couple of SDs misjudge their intervals and collide-or bring their wedges up too close together-we are going to have one hell of a mess."
"No joke," Captain Jordan Lamar said feelingly.
"So I want our best controllers on that lane," Grimm said. "Forget about the standard watch schedule. Pull in the best from wherever the hell they are and get them at those consoles-" she jabbed a finger at the Trevor's Star traffic controllers' section "-ten minutes ago. Then see what we've got available for tugs."
"Yes, Ma'am. I'm on it," Lamar said. He looked down, saw the cake as if for the first time, and stared at it for just a moment. Then he chuckled harshly, shoved it into his mouth, and turned to his own com to begin giving orders.
"Bradley," Grimm went on, turning to her official liaison to Admiral Thurston Havlicek, the Junction Defense Command's commanding officer, "bring Admiral Havlicek up to speed on what we've already done. I'm sure we're going to have drones incoming from these people in the next thirty or forty minutes, and I'm sure he's got his own plans for dealing with them, but ask him if there's anything we can do to help. I'm thinking we may need to be looking at ways to stack the incoming wallers to block the drones' LOS to the terminus, keep them from getting a close enough look to tell the Peeps what's coming or when. Whatever JDC needs and we can do, he's got, but I need to know what he wants now."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am!" Commander Bradley Hampton said with a grateful smile. "I'll get right on it."
"Good," Grimm said quietly, and looked back at the plot. The first Ghost Rider platforms were already twenty-five thousand kilometers out, accelerating at just over five thousand gravities. She couldn't see them, though she knew they were there. But she could see the blossoming impeller signatures of Junction Defense Command's LACs. Over thirty-five hundred were already in space, and more were appearing with metronome precision as the LAC platforms launched.
You bastards just go right ahead and come in on us, she thought venomously at the impeller signatures of the battlecruisers trying to spy on her command area. Come right ahead. We've got something for you.
* * *
Sebastian D'Orville's thoughts about the boredom of his assignment ran through the back of his brain like a bitter, distant echo as he strode onto HMS Invictus' flag bridge. Despite all his training, all his preparation, all the simulations and wargames and contingency planning, he suddenly discovered that he'd never really believed it would happen. That the Peeps would have the sheer, unadulterated nerve to actually attack the Star Kingdom of Manticore's home star system.
And why the hell didn't you believe it? his brain demanded contemptuously. You were ready enough to think about invading their home system during Buttercup, weren't you? Pissed off because Saint-Just's "cease-fire" ploy stopped the operation, weren't you? Well it seems they can think big too, can't they?
"Talk to me, Maurice," he said harshly.
"They're coming straight down our throats, Sir," Captain Maurice Ayrault, his chief of staff, replied flatly. "The only finesse I can see is their approach vector. It looks like they think they're going to take out Home Fleet and Sphinx first, then roll on over Manticore, but they're trying to leave themselves an out just in case, and their astrogation was first rate. They came in right on the intersection of the resonance zone and the hyper limit and split the angle almost exactly. It's not a least-time approach, but it means they can break back across the zone boundary if it gets too deep instead of being committed to the inner-system. At the moment, they're eight light-minutes out, closing at fifteen hundred KPS, and they're pouring on the accel. They must be running their compensators at at least ninety percent of full military power, because current acceleration is right on four-point-eight KPS-squared."
"Well," D'Orville said, "that's why we deployed this way. What does it look like for a zero/zero intercept on the planet?"
"Just under three hours," Ayrault said. "Turnover in roughly eighty-six minutes. They'll be up to twenty-six tho
usand KPS at that point." The chief of staff grimaced. "I suppose we should be grateful for small favors, Sir. They could have cut their time by over thirty minutes if they'd come straight in across the zone boundary."
"Time to range on the planet if they decide to go for maximum-range shots?" D'Orville asked levelly, hoping his tone and expression hid the icy chill running down his spine at the thought of weapons as notoriously inaccurate as long-range MDMs screaming through the inner system.
"On a zero/zero profile, ninety-four minutes. If they go for a least-time approach, without turnover, they can shave roughly a minute off of that. Either way, it's about an hour and a half."
"I see."
D'Orville considered what Ayrault had said. Home Fleet was still rushing to Battle Stations, but at least it was standing policy to hold his ships' nodes permanently at standby readiness, despite the additional wear that put on the components. He'd be able to get underway in the next twelve to fifteen minutes. The question was what he did when he could.