Shadow of Victory

by David Weber

  Actually, as she knew full well, if it all “dropped into the pot,” she’d do the best she could because she was senior to Commander Henry Creswell, HMS Feng Meng’s CO. That meant it would be her job, and she’d damned well do it. But she’d never expected to find herself in command, however temporary, of a combat formation, and—

  “Clean separation,” Primikynos announced.

  “Lieutenant Mallard confirms acquisition, Ma’am,” Lieutenant Sughavanam said a moment later.

  “Very good,” she acknowledged both reports and smiled more broadly at Lieutenant Commander Nakhimov. “And now, Mitya, I think we should go elsewhere, so”—she smiled—“let’s be about it.”

  * * *

  “Excuse me, Sir,” Bradley Levine said, and Tamaguchi turned from the plot to face him.

  “Sir, the freighter’s just reversed acceleration and five of the combatants are going with it. It looks like the Culverins and one of the light cruisers. We’re designating the remaining warships as Sierra One and the group that’s decelerating as Sierra Two. Looks like Sierra Two’s decel’s holding steady at five-point-seven KPS squared.”

  “Getting the freighter out of harm’s way, do you think, Sir?” Yountz asked, crossing to Tamaguchi’s shoulder to contemplate the plot.

  “It seems a trifle…excessive,” Tamaguchi replied after a moment. “Especially after this long. The freighter has to be well into its compensator margin to hold that accel; it’s already pulling twelve percent or so more than one of ours could even with military nodes and a zero margin. If they just wanted to park it safely somewhere, all they really had to do was have it reduce acceleration and fall astern. That would have to increase its compensator margin, and they could’ve done that any time after they went in pursuit in the first place.”

  “And if they’re just letting it fall back, there’s no need to send almost half their warships to keep an eye on it, either,” his chief of staff murmured with a nod of agreement, and Tamaguchi nodded back, his eyes thoughtful.

  “Sir, Sierra One’s just increased accel,” Levine announced. “Looks like they’re going to about six hundred gravities, maybe a little higher.” The ops officer studied his displays for a moment, then looked up. “Six hundred and five, Sir. Call it five-point-niner KPS squared.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Tamaguchi acknowledged. He frowned and turned back to the master plot, gazing into its depths. Sierra One’s increased acceleration seemed to confirm that the Manties had detached the freighter to free up the warships’ acceleration, and an additional twenty-five gravities was impressive. The maximum accel an SLN ship that heavy cruiser’s size could have pulled was only five hundred and one gravities, and that was with a zero safety margin on its inertial compensator. Somehow he doubted Captain Tremaine was willing to run his compensators flat out—if that acceleration number from New Tuscany was accurate, he definitely wasn’t—but he was clearly coming close, or the uptick would be higher than four percent. With that slight an increase…

  “What does their new accel do to their approach to the hyper limit, Astro?” he asked Captain Shreeyash.

  “It cuts their arrival time a little, Sir,” Shreeyash said so promptly he knew she’d already worked the figures. “They’ll shave off about four minutes, but they’ll still be five-one-point-four minutes behind us.”

  “And at its current deceleration, where will the freighter be when we clear the limit?”

  “Just a second, Sir.” The astrogator crunched some more numbers, then looked back up. “Assuming all accelerations remain constant, it’ll recross its entry hyper limit about eighteen-point seven minutes before we hit the exit limit, Sir.”

  Tamaguchi nodded and frowned at the master plot some more.

  “I wonder…” he said softly. Yountz looked at him, and he shrugged. “I’m wondering what’s in that freighter’s holds,” he expanded.

  “Logistical support, I imagine, Sir,” Yountz said. “Unless it’s a transport. I suppose they could be hauling Marines to support what’s been going on down on the planet.”

  “I can’t imagine they expected to need much ground combat capability.” Tamaguchi’s tone was desert dry. “The one thing there doesn’t seem to be any of dirtside is local opposition to Szponder’s coup. No, it’s a freighter. I think you’re probably right that it’s along to provide logistical support…and I’ll bet you most of that support is ammunition. Cruisers and destroyers can’t have huge magazines. Not for weapons the size any sort of multiple-drive missile has to be.” He snorted. “That’s probably the reason they’re building such big damned ships and calling them ‘heavy cruisers’!”

  “Makes sense, Sir,” Yountz agreed.

  “Well, it looks like this Tremaine’s been able to crank his compensator a bit higher, but even at this rate—” he twitched his head in Shreeyash’s direction “—he’s not going to catch us. So I’m wondering if he’s decided to kill two birds with one stone.”

  Yountz raised a respectfully inquiring eyebrow, and Tamaguchi turned his back to the plot and clasped his hands behind him.

  “Dropping the freighter obviously helps Sierra One’s acceleration curve, but not enough to catch us unless we let him. And the fact that it’s decelerating so hard—and that he’s sending so many combat units with it—seems…odd. I suppose it could have been to allow Sierra One’s other warships to increase their acceleration. Correct me if I’m wrong,” he smiled thinly, “but doesn’t Jayne’s say their Culverins entered service before the turn of the century? That makes some of them at least twenty-two T-years old, and it’s always possible they haven’t been refitted with these newer, more efficient compensators of theirs. I think it’s unlikely all of them wouldn’t have been, though. The tactical advantages are glaringly obvious, and they’d be even greater for such light units. So it may be possible that’s why he detached them, but I don’t think it is.”

  “I agree it wouldn’t make much sense, Sir,” Yountz agreed. “But if that’s not why he did it, what is he up to?”

  “At least one nasty possibility suggests itself to me, especially since he hasn’t cranked his own accel more. I mean, if a freighter can pull five-point-seven, a warship eighty percent less massive could sure as hell pull more than that with the same safety margin! But suppose he doesn’t have any intention of actually trying to catch us with Sierra One and that his freighter’s loaded with those god-awful system-defense missile pods they used on Crandall? It’d make sense to send some of them along to help secure the system once Szponder hands it over to them. And suppose he’s sent Sierra Two back across the hyper limit so it can micro-jump across the system to the farther hyper limit? Eighteen minutes would be enough for our freighter friend to translate into hyper, use the local grav wave to kill its velocity, and make the jump ahead of us. The astrogation might be tricky, but it’s doable. And suppose Tremaine intends for that freighter to run ahead of us and deploy a hundred or so of those same missile pods while Sierra One stays close enough on our tail to discourage us from breaking back to avoid them? Somehow I doubt even their military support ships have the fire control to do anything with pods like that, but what if the reason he’s splitting his warships. sending along the cruisers and destroyers, is to provide that fire control?”

  “That’s an ugly thought, Sir,” Yountz observed after a moment.

  “Indeed. But our Manty may’ve outsmarted himself, too. He’s clearly reacting to the fact that he can’t overhaul us before we cross the limit, despite his higher acceleration rates. But he’s also—as you just observed, Lorne—sending forty-five percent of his warships off to ambush us six hundred million kilometers from where we are right now. And, if that freighter is his ammunition ship, he’s also just sent away a bunch of additional pods he might have deployed against us in the inner system.”

  Yountz was nodding, and Tamaguchi pursed his lips. Then he shrugged.

  “He’s split his forces, and we’ve got Flight Two Cataphracts. His birds may still be
faster than ours, but we’ve got just as much range as he does. In fact, we may have more; no one’s reported any ballistic segments in any of their missile flight profiles, so it’s possible they don’t have that capability. And along with the freighter’s ‘escorts,’ he’s sending away forty-five percent of his missile defense.”

  The admiral smiled coldly at his chief of staff.

  “We don’t know how big an edge their missiles actually have, but it’s not as big as they probably think it is, especially against the Flight Twos. So if they’re confident enough—arrogant enough—to let us engage half their force in detail, they’re giving us the best chance anyone’s had yet to collect hard reads on how good their hardware really is. And if they aren’t confident enough to let us into range, that will tell us a lot about how good they think their birds are.”

  * * *

  “Looks like they bought it, Sir,” Harkness observed, and Tremaine nodded.

  Forty-one minutes had passed since his task group had gone in pursuit of the Solarians, and HMS Charles Ward, the light cruiser Feng Meng, and all four of Commander Jemima Toulouse’s Culverin-class destroyers had reversed course five minutes earlier.

  At ninety percent of military power, Charles Ward’s compensator and impeller nodes could have managed six hundred and thirty-five gravities with no cargo pods riding the racks to slow her, but she hadn’t revealed that fact to the Sollies. Alistair McKeon, Lieutenant Commander Jansen Slagle’s light cruiser Rama, and Commodore Priscilla Tanager’s four Rolands, on the other hand, had increased to eighty-three percent of McKeon’s maximum…which Tremaine devoutly hoped the Sollies would conclude was the best he could do—or was willing to do, at any rate—now that he’d detached the auxiliary which had been “slowing” them. At that rate, the range from McKeon to Tamaguchi’s squadron had increased by 58,644,475 kilometers, but the Sollies’ velocity advantage had fallen from the 26,448 KPS it had been immediately following the start of his pursuit to only 21,297 KPS.

  And Tamaguchi had just reversed acceleration. Not only that, he’d increased it considerably—to ninety percent of a Nevada’s maximum military power—which seemed a pretty clear declaration of his resolve to seek battle. He was decelerating back towards Tremaine at four hundred and thirty-nine gravities now, for a closing acceleration of over 10.2 KPS². Assuming they maintained current headings and accelerations, they’d overfly one another in just over two hours at a closing velocity of 61,668 KPS.

  Now, what I ought to do, thinking conventionally and assuming I wanted to be smart about this, would be to turn Ginger back around. But the whole object is to convince Tamaguchi I’m not smart. Tremaine smiled mirthlessly. Now if he just doesn’t figure out the real reason our accel’s been so low…

  * * *

  Winslet Tamaguchi sat in his command chair, gazing at the master plot and the bands of overlaid color which showed engagement ranges. At the moment, his ships were enormously far outside the Manties’ estimated range envelope, but the crimson sphere representing that envelope expanded steadily as the velocity differential between BatCruRon 720 and Sierra One shrank. Paring his compensators’ safety margins so low represented a substantial risk, but if he was going to do this, he wanted the highest closing velocity Tremaine would allow.

  The latest estimates from ONI gave the Manties’ missiles a sprint acceleration of 92,000 gravities and a sustained acceleration of 46,000 gravities. That was for a reported six-minute burn, which was twice the endurance of any SLN missile drive, even the Cataphract’s. Assuming those numbers were accurate, the 30,000,000-kilometer range ascribed to them was probably equally accurate. On the other hand, no one had yet seen—or no one’s reported seeing, at any rate, he reminded himself—a Manty missile which accelerated, stopped accelerating, and then resumed accelerating. No one had ever managed to build a missile drive that did that, either, and once a missile’s drive burned out and it could no longer maneuver, it had virtually no chance of penetrating alert, active defenses. It didn’t matter what its velocity might be; what mattered was that it was an easy, non-evading target for counter-missiles and point defense…and that its target could maneuver at several hundred gravities to generate a miss. So it was at least possible Manticoran missiles used a single drive whose endurance had somehow been hugely increased rather than separate drives, like the Cataphract. And if that was the case, it meant they weren’t capable of integrating a ballistic phase into their attack profiles…and couldn’t reach beyond that admittedly impressive 30,000,000-kilometer range and still attack effectively.

  The Cataphract, on the other hand, did have two separate drive systems. Indeed, doctrine—as much of it as the SLN had been able to evolve in the time since the Cataphract had become available—specifically called for using ballistic flight to boost its range to match or even exceed that of the RMN. And at any range, it would still have terminal maneuver time on its clock when it got there.

  So far so good, he thought. The problem is that Filareta had that capability at Manticore, and it doesn’t seem to’ve helped him one damned bit.

  Of course, the fragmentary—very fragmentary—information and speculation about what had happened to Massimo Filareta suggested the Manties and their friends had ambushed him well inside their own range, presumably because their frigging stealth technology was better than the League’s, too. Unlike Filareta, however, Winslet Tamaguchi had entered this system first and seen his enemies arrive after him, which pretty much made stealth technology a non-issue. He’d discovered the hard way that Manty counter-missiles had more range than his, as well, which was depressing and had cost every recon drone Levine had sent closer than four or five light-seconds. He’d have preferred to get them in closer, and Levine was still trying. But the important point was that there was no way BatCruRon 720 was going to lose track of warship impeller wedges even at ranges ten times that great, so ambushes were unlikely to become a factor.

  But this Tremaine knows I know that. And the Manties didn’t just see Cataphracts in action at Manticore; the bastards must’ve captured a lot of them, too. That being the case, they have t’ve tested them enough to be aware of their characteristics. So why is he deliberately courting an engagement?

  In light of all those unknowns, he needed to get as close as possible. He had no intention of opening fire before Sierra One did. Given how poor accuracy was bound to be at such ranges, he had no missiles to waste, especially with so much of his heavy punch—the next best thing to two thousand Cataphract-Cs—in the pods riding his battlecruisers’ hulls. He needed to make their presence felt…and to avoid exposing them to incoming fire as long as possible. In fact, he’d love to keep right on closing all the way down to a range of zero. He was damned sure he’d have every advantage there was in a short-range energy duel, and until the range dropped to seven million kilometers or so, his escorting destroyers’ missile tubes were useless. Admittedly, a War Harvest had only six of them, but more to the point, if they kept closing all the way in at their current accelerations, he’d overfly Sierra One with so much velocity advantage his surviving units might well escape across the nearer hyper limit.

  The odds of that happening were…remote, since a thirty million-kilometer range gave the Manties a sixty million-kilometer engagement envelope. Even assuming Sierra One didn’t alter acceleration at all, BatCruRon 720 would still need over fifteen minutes to completely cross a sphere that deep. That didn’t mean it couldn’t happen, though, and so far this Tremaine seemed as eager to close the range as Tamaguchi was.

  The Manticoran commander could have avoided that by simply using his higher deceleration rate to hold the range open and use his missiles’ greater range against him. Instead, Sierra One had maintained acceleration…and the freighter and its escorts had continued to race back towards the hyper limit astern of him. The range between BatCruRon 720 and Sierra One had grown to 171,832,356 kilometers, but Tamaguchi’s velocity advantage was down to only 16,709 KPS. As he continued to decelerate and Sierra One co
ntinued to accelerate, the rate at which the range was opening would steadily decrease. In fact, BatCruRon 720 would still be a half light-hour from the farther hyper limit when they reached a relative zero velocity, assuming both sides maintained their current accelerations. More importantly, even at his current risky acceleration rate, Tamaguchi would be two hundred and sixty-three minutes’ flight time from the limit at that point…and Sierra One would be only two hundred and twenty-seven minutes from it. If Tamaguchi turned back at that point, Sierra One would run him down in barely two hours and ten minutes at its current acceleration, 49,358,000 kilometers short of the hyper limit.

  In short, it would be physically impossible for him to avoid action unless they chose to avoid him.

  Which, given their approach so far, seemed…unlikely.

  The question Tamaguchi’s mind kept picking at was why Tremaine was so stubbornly closing. He had to know at least something about the Cataphracts. He couldn’t know whether or not Tamaguchi had them, but he had to assume it was possible…and that Tamaguchi had the reach to engage him. Knowing that, why would such light combatants charge headlong into range of eight battlecruisers?

  No, he’s not just going to rush all the way in, whatever I’d like him to do. So what the hell is he planning?

  “He’s up to something,” he murmured. “This isn’t just a young officer being stupid.”

  “I beg your pardon, Sir?”

  Tamaguchi looked up, eyes narrowing as the question intruded into his thoughts, and realized he’d spoken aloud. That was probably not a good sign, he thought dryly.

  “I couldn’t quite hear you, if you were speaking to me, Sir,” Captain Levine half apologized.

  “I wasn’t. I was talking to myself. But I wasn’t getting any answers back, so I suppose additional input would be welcome.” Tamaguchi smiled thinly. “I’m just trying to figure out what this Tremaine has in mind.”