by David Weber
"And whether that happens or not, my decision has been made. Although we still have to complete the detailed plans for a scaled-back Oyster Bay, our studies indicate that it will be completely feasible for us to do so. And on that basis, I have instructed Benjamin to plan for an execution date of a modified Oyster Bay strike no later than six T-months from today."
Chapter Thirty-Four
"Contact!" Isaiah Pettigrew called out. "Multiple contacts, bearing zero-one-five, two-eight-eight, range three-point-eight-niner light-minutes, closing velocity six-zero-niner-one-six kilometers per second, accelerating at four-eight-seven-point-three gravities!"
"Acknowledged," Abigail Hearns said crisply. "Number of contacts?"
"Uncertain at this time, Ma'am," Pettigrew replied. His eyes never moved from his display's sidebars as he and Tristram's Combat Information Center both worked the contacts, trying to pry more information out of them, and his voice was just as crisp, just as professional—and just as devoid of any excess "My Ladies"—as Abigail's.
"It looks like they just got close enough to the beta platforms for their impeller signatures to burn through stealth. Shall I go active on the platforms, Ma'am?"
Abigail considered for a moment, then nodded.
"Go active on the betas," she said, "but remain passive with the others."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Going active on the beta platforms only."
Pettigrew tapped in commands at his console, and the data codes on his display began to shift and change.
"CIC makes it three destroyer-range and three heavy cruiser or battlecruiser-range signatures," Pettigrew reported as the beta line of Ghost Rider reconnaissance platforms reported at FTL speeds. "Designate these targets Alpha One through Alpha Five."
"Understood." Abigail turned her head and looked at Lieutenant (JG) Gladys Molyneux. "Any IDs?"
"Negative, Ma'am," Molyneux replied. "CIC is still—Wait a minute." Tristram's junior tactical officer peered at her own displays, then raised her head. "CIC has tentative class IDs on the heavies. Alpha One is a Solarian Indefatigable-class battlecruiser, and CIC's calling Alpha One and Alpha Two Mikasa-class heavy cruisers. No positive ID on the destroyer-range contacts at this time."
"Acknowledged."
Abigail gazed at her own display, thinking hard and fast. This particular simulation had been loaded to Tristram's computers before the ship ever left Manticore. There were whole reams of similar sims tucked away in there, and she'd had no more idea than any of her subordinates had of what the computers were about to throw at them. They would hardly have constituted learning experiences if she'd known ahead of time what she was going to have to do in them, after all. Lieutenant Nicasio Xamar, Tristram's assistant tactical officer, on the other hand, knew exactly what this particular simulation contained, since it had been his job to tweak the parameters just a little, just as Abigail did for him when it was his turn in the barrel. Fortunately, Xamar didn't seem to resent the fact that someone with over seven T-months less in grade than him had been assigned as his boss. On the other hand, he'd have been more than human if he hadn't taken advantage of the simulation to see what he could get past her.
Okay, she thought. We've got these six coming at us from starboard and low, and they're headed almost directly for the convoy. That means they knew where we were long enough ago to build an intercept vector, and a pretty respectable one, too. So that means they've had us under observation, probably using their own remote platforms, for quite a while. Now, it's unlikely their passives are sensitive enough to track the Ghost Rider platforms, especially under these sensor conditions, but I don't know enough about Solly tech levels to be positive about that. They might have known exactly where we deployed our recon shells, and if they do, then that means they have to be pretty confident we'd manage to pick them up pretty soon now. Their stealth is pretty good for them to get this close without our seeing them, but even if we hadn't seen them coming with the remotes, we'd start picking them up ourselves on shipboard passives by the time they got down to a light-minute and a half. So, assuming they have working brains over there, they'd figure that we had to pick them up sometime in the next twelve minutes or so . . . unless they dropped their acceleration a lot.
She felt the pressure to start making decisions, but she resisted it. Even at their present closing velocity and acceleration, it would take eleven and a half minutes for anyone equipped with single-drive missiles to get into their powered attack range, and they weren't going to fire before that. Admittedly, they were going after a convoy of merchantman, which meant any last-minute evasive maneuvers by their targets were going to be sluggish, at best, but even a merchie had a darned good chance of outmaneuvering a missile which had gone ballistic. They couldn't get out of the range basket of the attack bird's laser heads (unless the missile in question had one almighty long ballistic component), but they could maneuver to interpose their impeller wedges between those laser heads and their own hulls, which would be just as good. So there was still time for her to think things through.
But not a lot of it, she reminded herself grimly.
The problem was that she didn't know whether this particular simulation had been set up with a smart and sneaky op force or a sloppy one. With a sloppy one, the force Pettigrew and CIC had picked up would be the only threat, and its commander could probably be excused for thinking it was a pretty darned good one, actually. A battlecruiser and two heavy cruisers packed a lot of firepower, and the convoy's escort was only five destroyers. So a head-on attack, disdaining subtlety in order to get into decisive range as quickly as possible, would probably work. And if the bad guys didn't know the defending destroyers were all Rolands, with magazines full of Mark 16 dual-drive missiles, then they didn't know Tristram's powered missile envelope was three times their own. Which, assuming the geometry remained unchanged, meant Tristram and her consorts could open fire at over fifty-one million kilometers. But if the bandits didn't realize that, then they were probably anticipating a massive superiority in missile firepower when they entered their own effective range.
But missile superiority or not, they're still going to get hurt, at least a little, and if they'd just reduced their impeller strength—or even come in ballistic—they wouldn't have burned through their stealth fields yet. They didn't have to let us know they were coming. Not this soon, anyway. Not in h-space. So why . . . ?
Her eyes narrowed suddenly as she realized that whoever had designed this simulation—or tweaked it, she reminded herself, thinking about Xamar—had assumed a very smart and sneaky op force, indeed.
Detection ranges in hyper-space were far lower than in normal-space, due to the higher particle density and general background levels of radiation which obtained there. The attackers had caught the convoy between gravity waves, where their impeller nodes were configured to produce standard impeller wedges, rather than the Warshawski sails necessary to navigate in the stressed and potentially deadly volume of a grav wave. And where impeller-drive missiles could be used. But that detection difficulty, coupled with the fact that the attackers had obviously known where to wait for the convoy and—especially—the intercept vector they'd managed to generate, told her a lot. In particular, it told her they knew exactly where she and every ship of her convoy was, and that there'd been absolutely no need for them to come in this close under power at all.
The convoy consisted of merchantships with a maximum acceleration less than half that of the attackers. There was no way a fat, wallowing herd of merchies could possibly evade them at this point. So they could have killed their drives long ago and come in ballistic without the betraying grav signature of their impeller wedges. Which, under these conditions, would probably have allowed them to get all the way into their own powered missile range before they were ever seen. For that matter, against someone without the Ghost Rider platforms—and without the platforms deployed even in hyper, she allowed herself to reflect with a certain complacency—they could very well have gotten into energy
range before anyone saw them coming.
So why hadn't they'd done that?
Because they want me concentrating on these people, she thought. They showed themselves to me on purpose, when they didn't have to. Which means that sometime in the next five or six minutes . . .
"Priority active and passive sensor sweep," she said sharply. "I want Galahad's and Lancelot's alpha and beta platforms sweeping astern. Have Roland sweep directly ahead of the convoy. Ivanhoe is to continue to hold the known contacts on her platforms. And I want ours to sweep this volume, right here."
She dropped a cursor into the master plot, using it to sketch an arc directly on the opposite side of the convoy from the known contacts.
Acknowledgments came back quickly. There were still rough spots in Tristram's tactical crews, and they'd only come in second in the squadron's "top gun" competition. It had been a very close second, however, and they'd actually been edged out of first primarily because HMS Gawain had managed (somehow) to squirm around and block what should have been the fatal shot from Tristram's broadside lasers with her wedge. That particular turn of events had scarcely been the tactical department's fault, and everyone in it knew that. In fact, in some ways, Abigail's people seemed to take a sort of perverse pride in being robbed of what they considered to have been their rightful victory by the intervention of the Demon Murphy. And the exercise had pulled them together as a group. They'd really buckled down since, and their rough spots were nowhere near as rough as they had been.
"New contacts!" Pettigrew announced suddenly. "I have three battlecruiser-range contacts on the alpha platform shell! Bearing one-niner-six, two-five-three, range one-point-eight-two light-minutes, closing velocity five-niner-three-three-zero kilometers per second. CIC designates them Beta One through Beta Three. No, I repeat, no impeller signatures!"
My, aren't we clever? Abigail thought, so intent on watching the three new scarlet icons blink into existence on the plot that she didn't even notice the looks she got from one or two of the simulator's occupants as they spotted the enemy exactly where Lieutenant Hearns had obviously expected to spot him. The five we already knew about to keep us looking in that direction while these three come whooping in on almost an exactly reverse heading to pincer us. If we see the first five and turn away from them, we run directly into the others. And if we don't see them, if we concentrate on the ones we know about, then these people sneak in close and put daggers in our backs just about the time their buddies are starting to get into range.
"Designate the new contacts the Beta group," she heard her own voice saying. "Prepare to flush the pods. Attack pattern Papa-Three and set for forty-six thousand gravities. We'll put all of them on the Beta targets and take the Alphas with internal tubes!"
"Aye, aye, Ma'am! Setting pods for Papa-Three on the Beta targets; drive setting four-six thousand gravities."
Abigail itched to enter the firing commands herself. If this had been a real combat situation, rather than a simulation, that was exactly what she would have been doing. But it was a simulation, and its purpose was not to have her doing things she knew perfectly well she could handle at need. It was to train the rest of her team to do those things . . . and her to rely upon them to do it.
"Beta targets designated and locked in, Ma'am," Lieutenant Molyneux reported barely twenty seconds later. "Missile drives set for four-six-thousand gravities acceleration."
"All units report pod separation and on-board fusion initiation," MT 1/c Kaneshiro announced at almost the same instant.
"Target acquisition!" Molyneux reported as the computers aboard the "flat pack" missile pods which had just fallen away from the destroyers' hulls and cleared their impeller wedges, turned on their on-board thrusters to align themselves with their designated targets.
"Launch!"
"Launching, aye!"
None of the destroyers had been carrying the maximum possible external load of pods. They couldn't without beginning to block shipboard sensor arcs or the firing arcs of their defensive laser clusters. But each of the five of them had carried fifteen of the pods, limpeted to their motherships' hulls with their internal tractors, and each of those pods contained ten Mark 23 MDMs.
Seven hundred and fifty capital missiles went shrieking away from the convoy, straight into the teeth of only three targets. Three targets which had continued closing at the next best thing to sixty thousand kilometers per second for just under thirty-two seconds since they'd been detected . . . and whose impeller wedges were still just starting to come up when the missiles launched. It took those missiles two hundred and sixty-one seconds to reach their destinations, and two hundred and fifty of them went slashing in on each of the battlecruisers.
The Solarian ships had clearly been prepared for the possibility that they might be detected on the way in. Their missile defense crews had obviously been waiting at maximum readiness, because their counter-missiles began launching almost instantly, and they were firing a lot of them. But Abigail had anticipated that anyone smart enough to set up something like this and actually pull it off wouldn't exactly be just sitting there with her hands in her lap. That was why she'd committed all of her pods to this attack. It was almost certainly going to be a case of overkill, but she wanted nothing threatening her back while she dealt with the more numerous but individually weaker Alpha bandits, and that meant putting the Beta targets out of action as quickly—and thoroughly—as possible.
The other side's counter-missiles were actually more effective than she'd expected, and she wondered if BuWeaps had updated their projected effectiveness on the basis of the captured Solly hardware the Navy had been able to examine after the Battle of Monica. They were certainly more effective than the Monicans' counter-missile fire had been then! On the other hand, those were supposed to be Solarian crews behind those launchers this time around, too, which could also explain why BuWeaps might have increased their kill probabilities.
She watched narrowly as the counter-missiles picked off almost three hundred of the attack birds. Manticoran defenses would have done considerably better than that, but, then, Manticoran defenses had been designed to survive against the volume of fire produced by pod-launched missiles, and the Sollies' defenses . . . hadn't been.
Despite everything the Solarian counter-missiles could do, four hundred and fifty-plus Manticoran missiles got through to the inner defensive zone, and laser clusters fired desperately. But those missiles were coming in at an effective velocity of sixty percent of light-speed. That didn't give very much engagement time, and to make matters far worse, the attack missiles had been liberally seeded with electronic warfare missiles specifically programmed to penetrate the inner boundary defenses. Dazzlers flared, beating holes in the Solarians' defensive coverage with massive spikes of interference, and in the same instant, the Dragon's Teeth platforms spun up, generating hundreds of false images to confuse any of the sensors which somehow managed to see past the Dazzlers.
Abigail couldn't tell exactly how many of her attack birds actually survived long enough to detonate, but it was obviously enough.
Beta One simply disappeared. Beta Two staggered, the impeller wedge which had just come up and stabilized fluctuating madly as x-ray lasers slammed into—and through—her sidewalls and armor. Then her forward impeller room went down completely, and she turned away, leaking atmosphere and water vapor in clear proof of massive penetrations of her core hull. Her active sensor emissions vanished almost completely in equally clear proof that her missile defenses and fire control had been hammered into wreckage.
Beta Three didn't seem to have been hammered quite as badly as Beta Two. Not at first. But then, ten seconds after Beta One, she suddenly broke in half. There was no stupendous explosion, no sudden, insane spike in her impeller wedge to explain it. She simply . . . broke up.
It was only a simulation, but even so, Abigail felt an icy chill blowing up and down her spine as she tried to picture the structural failure which could have produced that result. But
then she shook herself. The Alpha bandits were still out there. They probably had no idea—yet—what had happened to the Beta bandits, given their limitation to light-speed transmissions from any recon platforms they might have deployed. But they were going to find out shortly.
Five minutes had elapsed since she gave the order to fire. Only five minutes, in which two battlecruisers had been totally destroyed and a third had been hulked. And during which the range to the Alpha bandits had fallen to 51,474,268 kilometers . . . which just happened to be 21,000 kilometers inside the range of a Mark 16 dual-drive missile against a target closing at 61,000 km per second. It would take the bandits another nine minutes to reach their own range of the convoy, however, and the Mark 16's new Mod G laser heads were going to make that just a bit difficult for them, she thought with a sharklike smile.
"Fire Plan Tango-Seven," she said.
"So, how do you really like her, Naomi?"
Aivars Terekhov grinned mischievously as Commander Naomi Kaplan gave him a very sharp glance, indeed. Her own Tristram, as well as Terekhov's heavy cruiser flagship and their various squadron mates were boring steadily through hyper-space under impeller drive, between gravity waves, and Terekhov had invited her aboard Quentin Saint-James for a private dinner. Joanna Agnelli had done her customary superb job with the meal, and the after-dinner wine was a vintage port from the O'Daley Vineyards, a Gryphon winery which had been established by Sinead O'Daley Terekhov's many-times-great-grandfather better than three hundred T-years ago. Kaplan didn't really understand why it had to be properly defined as a Gryphon vintage porto, but she suspected it had something to do with the ferocity with which wine-sticklers guarded the classifications of their favorite beverage. In this case, however, she had to admit that its rich, fruity flavor (whatever it was properly called) was a wonderful choice to accompany the wedges of cheese Agnelli had left on the table between her and Terekhov.