Shadow of Victory

by David Weber

  “Definitely Manties, then,” Vice-Admiral Yountz observed.

  “Yes, Sir,” Levine said again. “And it indicates they aren’t pursuing us as hard as they could be if they dropped the freighter back.”

  “Five hundred and eighty gravities sounds to me like they’re pushing it pretty hard,” the chief of staff said. “Dropping the freighter probably wouldn’t help much.”

  “Probably not enough for them to overhaul us, no, Sir,” Levine agreed. “But if the wilder reports we’ve had are accurate, they should easily hit six hundred or even six-fifty. In fact, even that would be fairly low for Manties.”

  “Low?” Yountz’s eyebrows rose, and Levine shrugged irritably.

  “I did say they were ‘wilder reports,’ Sir. But according to the only Solarian report we have from New Tuscany, their battlecruisers were pulling over six-ten before they took out Jean Bart. And Admiral O’Cleary’s debrief after Spindle suggests the same sort of accelerations.”

  “The report from New Tuscany’s hardly conclusive. And with all due respect,” Yountz didn’t sound particularly respectful, “there’s bound to be some CYA in Keeley O’Cleary’s debrief. I’d take anything coming out of Spindle with a grain of salt.”

  “Which, unless the term ‘wilder reports’ means something different to you than it does to me, is precisely what Bradley just did,” Tamaguchi pointed out with an edge of frost. “He also brought it to our attention, however…which is precisely what he was supposed to do.”

  “I know, Sir. And I didn’t mean to sound like I was biting your head off, Brad.” Yountz smiled crookedly at the ops officer. “I just find it a teeny bit hard to accept that a Manty battlecruiser can out-accelerate one of our destroyers. I’ll grant ONI’s badly underestimated their capabilities, but that’s still a mighty steep leap in compensator tech.”

  “Agreed.” Tamaguchi nodded, then folded his hands behind himself and stood gazing at the main display while he considered his options.

  If CIC’s analysis was accurate—and he was confident it was—there were no true capital ships, or even battlecruisers, in that pursuing force. The freighter didn’t count once the actual shooting started, and without it, any comparison of tonnage ratios came down in BatCruRon 720’s favor by a ludicrous margin. All the Manty warships, together, couldn’t mass more than a million and a half tons, whereas his battlecruisers, alone, massed over seven. But as the Manties had demonstrated to Admiral Crandall and Admiral Filareta, simple tonnage was no longer the best meterstick when it came to evaluating relative combat power. The admission left a bitter taste, but Winslet Tamaguchi had no desire to follow in the footsteps of such luminaries as Sandra Crandall or Josef Byng.

  His mental jury was still out on Massimo Filareta—as a naval commander, at least. As a human being, Tamaguchi could only be grateful the Manties had eliminated him from the gene pool.

  Still, Levine had a point about Manty acceleration rates.

  He’d never really expected to be able to outrun Manties in a straight up race. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending upon one’s perspective—he didn’t have to. If the Manties wanted to bring his far larger force to action, they had to catch him before he raced across the inner system to the farther hyper limit and translated out. The thought of ignominiously fleeing from an opponent one out-massed better than five-to-one was hardly the stuff of derring-do and heroic news stories, and it might well have negative career repercussions when word got back to Old Terra. For that matter, it wasn’t a thought Tamaguchi found appealing. Given his enormous velocity advantage, however, the Manties should find it impossible to overhaul him unless he chose to let them.

  Should.

  It was currently—he checked the astrogation display—687,191,428 kilometers to the limit. At his best acceleration, his force could reach it in roughly three hours and thirty minutes. At their current acceleration, it would take the Manties sixty-one minutes longer than that to reach the same destination. But if they had additional acceleration in reserve—especially if it was the ridiculous sort of acceleration some of Levine’s “wilder reports” ascribed to them—his ability to outrun them was far from assured, even if that was what he decided to do. Oh, he could always tweak his own accel, but the absolute best he could do, even cutting his compensator safety margin to zero, was only 4.78 KPS²…almost a full kilometer per second squared lower than the Manties were demonstrating even with the freighter to slow them. And three of his eight battlecruisers had been overdue for major overhauls well before Josef Byng blew up the League’s relations with Manticore and put maintenance schedules on indefinite hold. He frankly doubted their compensators were up to that sort of strain.

  The problem, he thought grimly, is that they didn’t send me these up-rated missiles just to run away from the big, bad Manties. I’m sure someone’s going to point that out when I get home…and they damned well should. Sooner or later we have to take it to them and actually win a frigging battle! But after Saltash, I’ve got to think twice as many Manty launch platforms could rip the ass off any SLN battlecruiser squadron. All Dubroskaya’s survivors insist the Manties only had five of their light cruisers—and these people have at least eleven…not to mention that damned heavy cruiser. If I let them fight their kind of battle, I’m going to get a lot of people killed, but if I don’t fight some kind of battle when I’ve got this kind of tonnage advantage, when the hell will we be able to face these people?

  It was an unhappy thought, and not just because of the potential criticism he’d face if he avoided action. Resuming his acceleration away from the Manties had been an instinct reaction to at least preserve his velocity advantage while he considered his options. And he knew avoiding action was almost certainly the smart tactical move, despite the apparent force imbalance. Yet if they were ever going to pin back a Manty naval force’s ears, dealing with this one would—

  “Excuse me, Sir.” It was his com officer, Commander Phanindra Broadmoor.

  “Yes, Commander?”

  “We have a message from the Manty commander, Sir. It just came in.”

  “Ah. I wondered when we’d hear from him.” Tamaguchi smiled thinly. “Put it up on the display, please.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  The main display shifted to com mode and a remarkably young senior-grade captain in Manticore’s black and gold looked out of it with cold blue eyes.

  “I’m Captain Prescott Tremaine, Royal Manticoran Navy.” His voice was even colder than those eyes. “In the name of my Empress and her allies, I call upon you to drop your wedges and surrender to avoid needless bloodshed. If you choose not to cut your acceleration and surrender, I will engage and destroy your force. Tremaine, clear.”

  Well, that was certainly succinct and to the point, Bradley Levine thought, watching over his admiral’s shoulder. Arrogant as hell, and mighty bold talk from someone with so little tonnage, but definitely to the point.

  Tamaguchi gazed expressionlessly at the display and Tremaine’s frozen image, for several seconds. Then he glanced at the com officer again.

  “Record for transmission, please, Commander,” he told him, and turned his head to face the pickup.

  “Live mic, Sir.”

  “This is Admiral Winslet Tamaguchi, Solarian League Navy,” the admiral said in wintry tones. “You apparently have a very high opinion of both yourself and your capabilities, Captain Tremaine. Unfortunately, I don’t share it. If you believe you have the capability to engage and destroy my force, I cordially invite you to make the attempt. Tamaguchi, clear.”

  “Good recording, Sir,” Broadmoor said after a moment.

  “Then send it.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Tamaguchi nodded and returned his attention to the display, waiting out the ten-minute communication loop.

  * * *

  “For a fellow who’s eager to fight, he’s running awfully hard,” Commander Francine Klusener, Scotty Tremaine’s chief of staff, observed dryly.

  “Probably
, unfortunately, because he’s not an idiot,” Tremaine replied, his expression thoughtful. “Even assuming he’s got the missiles they gave Filareta before he moved on Manticore, anyone with a clue would realize we’ve still got every advantage in missile combat. And if he’s heard about what happened in Saltash, he can’t possibly want to take on four times as many Manticoran missile platforms with only twice as many battlecruisers.”

  He frowned for a moment, then looked at his intelligence officer.

  “What, if anything, do we know about this fellow, Adelita?”

  “Not a lot, Sir,” Lieutenant Adelita Salazar y Menéndez replied, looking up from the data search she’d just completed. “There’s a bare-bones bio entry in the ONI files, but very little beyond a list of commands he’s held. There is a note that he’s considered by the Sollies to be a determined sort of man. Apparently he’s been handed several sticky jobs here in the Verge and accomplished all of them. There’s also a note from SIS, not ONI, that he’s viewed as not especially bloodthirsty but perfectly willing to kill however many ‘neobarbs’ he has to to complete a mission.”

  “So even if he’s willing to run, he’s not the sort of fellow who’d like to run,” Tremaine murmured, rubbing the tip of his nose thoughtfully. None of the other members of his staff noticed Sir Horace Harkness’ slight smile as he recognized who that mannerism had been acquired from.

  “Sir, excuse me for pointing this out,” Klusener said, “but he’s got a lot of missile defense over there. Not as good as ours, but a lot. And Filareta had a god-awful number of pods riding his hulls. Tamaguchi may, too.”

  “Oh, trust me, I’m well aware of that.” Tremaine smiled coldly. “And once the RDs get close enough, I definitely want a look at what he might be carrying externally. On the other hand, we’ve got a bit of missile defense of our own…and a lot more accurate birds. I have no intention of trading hit-for-hit with these people, Frannie. But I don’t think we have to, given what Horace, Adam and I have been thinking about since we got the intel reports about their new missiles. If they want to use all that range to shoot at us, they’ll be very disappointed in the number of hits they manage to score. The problem’s convincing them to let us get close enough to shoot at them.”

  He rubbed the tip of his nose some more, then turned to his astrogator.

  “Tell me about our friend Tamaguchi, Elspeth.”

  “He’s pulling a steady three hundred and ninety gravs, Sir, which is about right for a standard eighty percent margin on a Nevada.” Lieutenant Dreyfus shrugged. “That means he’s got some in reserve, although how much depends on a lot of factors, like his compensators’ maintenance state. At the moment, he’s up to two-niner-point-two thousand KPS and he’s opened the range by just under fifteen million kilometers. Our accel’s cutting into his speed advantage—we’re up to four-point-niner thousand KPS—but at present rates it’ll take us another three-point-six hours just to match velocities.”

  “And he’ll clear the far hyper limit well before that.”

  “Yes, Sir. About eleven minutes before we equalize.”

  “And the range at that time?”

  “We’ll be two-seven-seven-point-seven million kilometers behind him.”

  “And if we went to maximum acceleration?”

  “Our overtake accel—assuming he doesn’t change his—would almost double, Sir. We’d match velocities in an hour and three minutes, eighty-seven minutes before he hits the limit. At that point, we’d be roughly two-zero-niner million kilometers behind him and he’d still be the next best thing to three-five-zero million kilometers from the limit. We’d begin making up distance, but he’d still cross the limit about twenty-eight minutes before us, and the range when he did would be one-six-seven million kilometers.”

  “About what I’d estimated.” Tremaine nodded. “So, we can’t catch him.”

  None of his staffers, he noticed, commented that given the disparity in tonnage, his task group was rather like a treecat pursuing a hexapuma.

  Except, of course, that in this case the ’cat’s packing a pulse rifle, he reminded himself. But if he can’t get the damned thing into range…

  “Break back across the limit and micro-jump across to intercept him on the far side, Sir?” Lieutenant Commander Golbatsi suggested.

  “Time to do that, Elspeth?”

  “Just a second, Sir.” Dreyfus bent back over her panel and crunched numbers. Then she looked back up. “Eleven-point-five minutes to decelerate to zero relative to Włocławek, Sir, assuming we detached Charles Ward and took only the warships at McKeon’s maximum decel. We’d be roughly two-zero-seven million kilometers inside the limit at that point, so we’d need another forty minutes to get back across. Call it an hour and forty-three minutes.”

  “At which point he’d still be better’n two hours short of the limit,” Horace Harkness pointed out.

  “Yes, but he’d realize what we’re up to the minute we start decelerating,” Tremaine said. “What happens if he goes to, say, ninety percent of a Nevada’s max acceleration, Elspeth?”

  “At ninety percent,” Dreyfus said, inputting numbers, “he clears the limit in…two hundred minutes. At a hundred percent, he’d do it roughly ten minutes earlier.”

  “So we’d still have an hour to work with before he could translate out.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Golbatsi agreed. “And pushing his margin to zero’s not something a Solly’s likely to do. Especially when he’s got that much tonnage advantage.”

  “The fact that he’s not already decelerating indicates he’s not your typical Solly, Adam,” Tremaine pointed out. “If he realizes what we’re doing and he’s really determined not to fight, he splits his force and sends them on diverging courses for different spots on the limit, and he’s got more of them than we do. We’d play hell trying to intercept just his battlecruisers. Then there’s the problem that astrogation’s not exactly precise on such a short micro-jump. We’d almost certainly end up a couple of million kilometers off on our alpha translation, and it could be a lot worse than that. No offense, Elspeth.”

  He smiled at the astrogator, and she smiled back.

  “None taken, Sir,” she assured him.

  “If we chase them hard, we could still get at least a couple just from compensator failures, Sir,” Harkness pointed out. “I could live with that all day long, Sir.”

  “But I don’t want ‘a couple of them,’” Tremaine said grimly. “I want all of them.”

  And without killing any more of them than I have to. After what happened in Saltash, we know how outclassed they are even if they haven’t figured it out, and however pissed I may be with Sollies in general, massacring them in job lots isn’t real high on my priority list.

  Pulling back and micro-jumping across would almost certainly get us into position, despite what I just said, but my options would be limited. Given his closing velocity, I’d have to go for kill shots on all his units to keep them from sliding across the limit and translating out. Even if they went to maximum decel, they’d be well across the limit before they could stop, and no way do I have enough warm bodies to put prize crews on that many ships. Not to mention the fact that my pinnaces couldn’t even match accel with them to put people onboard short of the limit! But how do I…?

  The hand rubbing his nose stopped suddenly. He stood gazing at the display for another dozen seconds or so. Then he began to smile and turned to Lieutenant Stilson MacDonald, his com officer.

  “I think I need to speak to Captain Lewis, Stilson,” he said.

  Chapter Seventy-One

  “Coming up on the mark, Ma’am,” Lieutenant Commander Nakhimov announced, and Ginger Lewis looked up from her smaller maneuvering plot, where she’d been reviewing Scotty Tremaine’s proposed movements, and turned her command chair back towards the main display.

  “Run away. Run away!” she murmured under her breath.

  It was one of her favorite lines from one of the incredibly ancient “movies” to which Du
chess Harrington had introduced her (and much of the rest of HMS Wayfarer’s crew) on her very first cruise. Fortunately, however, none of her bridge crew heard her. Somehow she doubted it would have comported well with the gravitas of a proper CO.

  Charles Ward was just over 136,580,000 kilometers inside the hyper limit, and her velocity relative to Włocławek had risen to 13,908 KPS. Like all the rest of TG 10.2.9, she continued to lose ground on the Sollies, although the rate at which they lost it was decreasing steadily. It was going to start increasing for CW in just another few seconds, however.

  It felt…odd to be about to run away from the enemy, but Ginger Lewis had been aboard another armed fleet auxiliary which had taken on battlecruisers, and she hadn’t enjoyed the experience. True, there was a universe of difference between her present command and Wayfarer. There were a few similarities, too, however, and CW had a few disadvantages all her own.

  The most noteworthy of which, she thought dryly, is just a teeny difference in the command experience of their COs.

  She looked around her bridge. CW might be armed, but she’d dispensed with the separate backup command deck of a true warship. There was a secondary tactical station located down in the big ship’s CIC, which was currently manned by Lieutenant (JG) Burgulya Gödert, her assistant tactical officer, and Lieutenant Yolanda Cornelisz, CW’s electronic warfare officer, while Lieutenant Commander Atkins manned the bridge tac station with Paulo d’Arezzo as his EWO. At the moment—and hopefully for the foreseeable future—none of them had much to do.

  Also at the moment, however, Nakhimov had a point. So—

  “Initiate separation, Oliver,” she said in a rather louder tone.

  “Initiating separation, aye, Ma’am,” Lieutenant Primikynos replied from his cargo control panel, and she smiled. She might not be a proper tac officer herself, but she could appreciate deviousness when it came along.

  Never saw this one coming, she thought wryly. I’m a frigging engineer, not a tac officer! But I really like it. Scotty and Harkness always were a sneaky pair, and the Duchess would be proud of them this time. It’s probably a damn good thing my job’s as simple as it is, though. And if it all drops into the pot anyway, Creswell can probably bail me out.