by David Weber
He considered nipping back into hyper and trying to micro-jump his way to the terminus, but he rejected the notion almost instantly. Superficially appealing though it might be, a hyper jump this short was actually more difficult for an astrogator to calculate, not less. That, no doubt, was the reason the Manty picket commander was headed for Medusa in n-space instead of hyper. Control had to be so fine at such low ranges that something as small as a tiny difference in the cycle time of the hyper generators of two different ships could throw their n-space emergences off by light-seconds and hopelessly scramble his formation. No, either he pulled out completely, or he went back the hard way. Dicking around with still more hyper jumps would simply invite the ancient curse of order, counter order, disorder, and he had enough crap to deal with already.
He glanced at Citizen Commissioner Leopold.
"With your permission, Sir, I believe we should reverse course immediately and come back at the terminus."
"Can we still defeat the fortresses?" Leopold asked, not even glancing at Huff—which, Darlington reflected, boded ill for the citizen commander when Leopold turned in his report.
"I believe so, Sir. We'll take heavier losses than the ops plan originally contemplated, but we should be able to secure control of the terminus. Whether we can carry through and maintain control until Citizen Admiral Giscard rejoins us is another matter, however. The terminus picket has almost as many dreadnoughts as we do. They can be here well before Citizen Admiral Giscard if they reverse course promptly, and if they do that and we've taken heavy damage from the forts, then I doubt we could stand them off and pick off anything making transit from the Manties' Home Fleet. On the other hand, we're well outside the hyper limit here. If we see a force we can't fight coming at us, we can retreat into hyper immediately. That," he added quietly, "was the reason Citizen Admiral Giscard was willing to contemplate this maneuver in the first place, Sir. Because we can always run away if the odds turn to crap on us."
"I see." Leopold considered for several seconds, then nodded. "Very well, Citizen Admiral. Make it so."
"Citizen Commander," Darlington said, turning to Huff, "we'll go with the least-time course. We should have time to decelerate and come back again—" he managed, somehow, not to stress the adverb " —if their terminus picket wants a fight, and I want to cross their forts' missile zone as quickly as possible."
"Aye, Citizen Admiral," Huff said, and began passing maneuvering orders to the rest of the task group.
* * *
Reynaud smothered a groan as the fresh Peep force began to decelerate. He knew exactly what they'd intended to do, and exactly how it had gone wrong, but the fact that it had didn't make him feel much better. He could run the numbers just as well as they could, and his fingers flew as he punched them into his plot. But then he felt his spine slowly stiffen as the new vectors blinked in the plot before him.
The Peeps could be here in roughly eighty-five minutes — into missile range, even with the jamming, in about eighty-four—and unlike the Peeps, Reynaud knew that the operational forts' supply of missile pods was dangerously low. The two of them together probably couldn't put more than a hundred and fifty into space. But Eighth Fleet's first destroyer would arrive in eleven minutes... and its first super-dreadnought would be here in twenty-six. And assuming White Haven could actually pull it off without turning his capital ships into billiard balls (or expanding plasma), another SD would arrive every one hundred and thirteen seconds after that. So he could have...
The Astro Control vice admiral's fingers flashed, and a most unpleasant smile appeared on his face.
* * *
Vice Admiral Markham felt his heart spasm as the FTL net reported the arrival of still more enemies. He realized as quickly as Reynaud what the original Peep intent had been, and the bitterness and despair he fought to keep out of his expression deepened at the fresh proof of how utterly the RMN had underestimated the "defensive minded" People's Navy.
But he also knew, thanks to the FTL com relays between the terminus and Medusa, that Eighth Fleet was on its way, and he bared his teeth in a death's head grin as he, too, worked the numbers on its arrival time. It didn't change what was going to happen to his own task group, of course. Nothing short of a direct act of God could have changed that. But it did change what was going to happen to the Peep bastards who thought they were going to kill the terminus forts and then wait to ambush Home Fleet if it tried to respond.
"Missile range in thirty-nine minutes, Sir," his ops officer said quietly, and he nodded.
* * *
"I wonder how Citizen Admiral Giscard is making out," Citizen Commissioner Leopold said quietly, and Darlington turned his head to meet his eyes. The people's commissioner had spoken softly enough no one else could have heard, and the citizen admiral replied equally quietly.
"Probably just fine, so far, Sir," he said. "I doubt he's made contact with their main force yet."
"I wish we could know what was happening to him," Leopold said, and Darlington shrugged.
"If we had the FTL relays the Manties have, we could, Sir. Without them, we can only guess. But it doesn't really matter. Nothing that happens that far in-system can have any immediate effect on us, and even if the Medusa picket turned out to be a hell of a lot heavier than we thought and it killed every one of the Citizen Admiral's ships and then came after us, we'd have plenty of warning to hyper out before it got here."
He glanced back up, and his mouth twitched as he saw the stricken look on Leopold's face.
"I didn't mean that I think anything of the sort is going to happen, Citizen Commissioner," he said with a barely suppressed chuckle. "I only meant to present a worst-possible-case scenario."
"Oh." Leopold swallowed, then smiled wanly. "I see. But in future, Citizen Admiral, please tell me ahead of time that that's what you're doing."
"I'll remember, Sir," Darlington promised.
* * *
The air-conditioned chill of Basilisk ACS' control room was a thing of the past. Vice Admiral Reynaud felt the sweat dripping down his face as his controllers hovered over their consoles, and even though he saw it with his own eyes, he could scarcely believe what was happening.
Thirty-nine destroyers hovered just beyond the terminus threshold. They'd come through in a steady stream, as rapidly and remorselessly as an old, prespace freight train, and Reynaud had felt like some small, terrified animal frozen on the rails as the train's headlamp thundered down upon him. But he'd handed each warship off to its own controller, cycling through the available list with feverish speed, and somehow—he still wasn't sure how—they'd managed to avoid outright collisions.
But not all damage. HMS Glorioso had been just a fraction of a second too slow reconfiguring from sails to wedge, and HMS Vixen had run right up her backside. Fortunately, perhaps, the second destroyer had gotten her wedge up quickly, for it had come on-line one bare instant before Glorioso's had, but without building to full power. Which meant that only Glorioso's after nodes had blown. The resultant explosion had vaporized two-thirds of her after impeller room, and Reynaud had no desire at all to think about how many people it must have killed when it went, but it hadn't destroyed her hull or her compensator, and the fail-safes had blown in time to save her forward impellers. Momentum, coupled with instantaneous and brilliant evasive action on Vixen's part, had been just sufficient to carry her clear of an outright collision, and two of her sisters had speared her with tractors and dragged her bodily out of the way of Vixen's next astern. But for all that, it had been impossibly close. A thousandth of a second's difference in when either wedge came on-line, a dozen meters difference in their relative locations, a single split-second of distraction on the part of Vixen's watch officer or helmsman, and not only would they have collided, but the next ship in line would have plowed straight into their molten wreckage in the beginning of a chain-reaction collision that could have killed thousands.
But they'd avoided it, and now the first superdreadnoughts wer
e coming through. The huge ships were much slower on the helm, but they were almost as quick to reconfigure from sails to wedge, and their longer transit windows gave them precious additional seconds to maneuver. They were actually easier to handle than the destroyers had been, and Reynaud leaned back in his chair and mopped the skim of sweat from his forehead.
"Did it, by God," someone whispered, and he looked over his shoulder. All four watches had assembled, which meant he had more controllers than he did consoles, and the off-duty people with nothing to do were probably in the least enviable position of all. They knew how insanely dangerous this entire maneuver was, but there was nothing they could do about it except hold their breaths and pray whenever things looked dicey. But now Neville Underwood, the number-three man on the fourth watch, stepped up beside his own command chair and shook his head as he gazed down into the plot.
"Maybe yes, and maybe no," Reynaud replied. "We've got three— no, four—SDs through with no collisions so far. But if two of those babies bump—" He shuddered, and Underwood nodded soberly. "And even if we don't have any collisions, there's always the chance the Peeps'll detect them and stay the hell out of range."
"Maybe," Underwood conceded. "But they'll need damned good sensors to pick up their arrivals through all the jamming the forts are putting out. And once our people maneuver clear and take their wedges down to station-keeping levels, they should be downright invisible at anything above a few light-seconds. Besides," he summoned up a ragged smile, "at this point I'll be delighted to settle for the Peeps staying the hell away. It beats the crap out of what I thought was going to happen to us, Mike!"
"Yeah," Reynaud grunted, turning back to his console. "Yeah, I guess it does, at that. But I want these bastards, Nev. I want them bad."
Underwood eyed him sidelong. Michel Reynaud was one of the easiest going—and least military—people he knew. In fact, Underwood had always suspected that the reason Reynaud had gone ACS instead of Navy in the first place was his deep-seated, fundamental horror at the thought of deliberately taking another human being's life. But he didn't feel that way now, and when Underwood glanced at the display tied into the FTL sensors, he understood exactly why that was.
Vice Admiral Markham's gallant charge was less than twenty minutes from contact with the main Peep force, and Reynaud and Underwood both knew what would happen then.
* * *
"Their EW is getting even better, Citizen Admiral," Darlington's ops officer reported. The citizen rear admiral walked over to stand beside him, looking down at the hazy sphere that had enveloped the terminus, and frowned.
"Are their jammers hitting us harder?" he asked.
"No, Citizen Admiral. Or I don't think so, at least. But look here and here." The ops officer keyed a command, and the plot blinked as it replayed what had happened over the last several minutes at a compressed time rate. "See?" He pointed at the flickering shift of questionable icons in the display. "It looks to me like their decoys must be considerably more advanced and flexible than we'd thought, Citizen Admiral. We've still got probable fixes on the forts themselves, but our confidence in them is degrading steadily because they're throwing so damned many false impeller signatures at us."
"Well, we knew it was going to happen." Darlington sighed after a moment. "Do your best, Citizen Commander."
"Yes, Citizen Admiral."
* * *
White Haven stood stock still on Benjamin the Great's flag bridge and stared at the order slowly gelling in the depths of the master plot. He'd brought his Grayson SDs through first, because even if it might hurt the Royal Navy's pride to admit it, they were newer, more powerful units than most of his Manticoran ships. Eight of them were through the Junction now, with three more to go and the first Manticoran units following on behind them. He'd gotten here in time to defend the terminus against the second prong of the Peep attack, but his pride at his achievement tasted of ashes and gall.
It wasn't because of the damage to Glorioso, or even the loss of life entailed. The destroyer's list of known dead already stood at thirty-five, and dozens of people remained unaccounted for, dead or trapped in the tangled wreckage of her after half. He felt the weight of those deaths, knew they were his responsibility and his alone. But in eight bloody years of war he had learned that there were always deaths. The best a wartime commander could hope for was to minimize the toll, to lose no more than he could possibly avoid... and to make certain the lives he could not save were not bartered away too cheaply.
Nor did this leaden fist crush down upon his heart because Rear Admiral Hanaby hadn't even tried to reverse course. That was her smartest move, he conceded—for all the good it would accomplish. The only thing she could realistically hope to do now was to put some sense of time pressure on the main Peep force, and she could never have gotten back to the terminus in time to affect the outcome there, anyway.
But she wasn't going to save Vice Admiral Markham... and neither was White Haven's brilliant transfer from Trevor's Star.
He drew a deep breath and made himself turn away from the main plot to look at the smaller display tied into the in-system FTL net. He didn't want to. There was a peculiarly detached, mesmerizing horror about seeing something like this in real-time and yet not being close enough to somehow forbid it or alter the outcome. But he could no more not have looked than he could have stopped it from happening.
Diamond dust icons speckled the plot as both sides flushed their pods and the missiles went out. Markham launched first, and his fire control was better, but the Peeps had many more birds than he did. There was a mechanistic inevitability to it, a sense that he was watching not the clash of human adversaries, but some dreadful, insensate disaster produced by the unthinking forces of nature.
A distant corner of his mind noted the huge numbers of incoming missiles Markham's ships picked off or fooled with their ECM and decoys, but it wasn't enough. It couldn't have been, and he bit his lip until he tasted blood as the first Manticoran superdreadnought vanished from the plot. Then another died—a second. A third. A fourth. A fifth. Three of them survived the opening exchange, led by King William, but the flickering sidebars of damage codes told how savagely wounded they were as they closed to energy range of the Peeps behind their flagship. The butchery grew suddenly even worse, yet no one flinched, no one surrendered—not on either side.
Two Peep superdreadnoughts had died with King William's consorts, and others had been damaged, if none had been hurt so dreadfully as the Manticoran ships of the wall. Now the two forces slammed together and interpenetrated, short-range weapons ripping and tearing with brief, titanic fury.
It took only seconds, and when it was over, two more Peep SDs had been destroyed. At least three more were severely damaged... and every single ship of Vice Admiral Silas Markham's task group had been obliterated.
A spreading lacework of life pods beaded the display, Manticoran and Havenite alike. The pattern they made was less dense than the missile storms had been, and here and there one winked out as battle-damaged life-support systems or transponders failed. White Haven's lips worked as if to spit, but then he wrenched his eyes away from the secondary plot as the first Manticoran superdreadnought of Eighth Fleet came out of the Junction behind him. He darted a bitter, hating look at the dreadnoughts and battleships accelerating steadily towards him, and his face was hard.
"Our turn now, you bastards," he murmured to himself, so softly no one else ever heard at all, and beckoned Commander Haggerston over beside him.
* * *
Javier Giscard handed the memo board back to the skinsuited yeoman. The hammering Salamis had taken in the last few seconds of the engagement made him wonder if the Manties had somehow deduced that she was the task group flagship, but it turned out that Citizen Captain Short had had good reason to feel confident about the quality of her techs back in Secour. Giscard intended to have a little talk with her, find out just how she'd managed to pull the strings to get her hands on a fully qualified engineerin
g department in the present day People's Navy, but for now it didn't really matter. What mattered was that, according to the report he'd just been handed, Salamis would have all of her alpha nodes back within twenty-five minutes. That was good. In fact, it was outstanding, for it meant his flagship—unlike her consort Guichen —would be able to withdraw if that became necessary.
He sighed and lowered himself into his command chair, then raised a hand at Julia Lapisch. The com officer looked up, then trotted over to him.
"Yes, Citizen Admiral?" she asked. That withdrawn, disconnected edge remained somewhere inside her, but her gray-green eyes glowed with a sort of dark fire. Giscard wasn't certain what that meant. It was almost as if in the last few minutes she had seen something more terrifying than even StateSec could be, a threat which had put the relative threat of the SS into a different perspective in her mind. Or it could simply be that she had just discovered that, as someone on Old Earth had once put it, "Nothing in the world is so exhilarating as to be shot at... and missed."
"Are you ready to transmit?" he asked her now, and she nodded.
"Yes, Citizen Admiral."
"Then do so," he instructed, and she nodded again and headed back towards her console, right hand above her head while she whirled her index finger in a "crank it up" signal to her assistants.
Giscard leaned back in his chair and rubbed his closed eyes. His ships had been decelerating from the moment they opened fire on the Manties, and they were still decelerating hard. But their base velocity was too high to kill. He was going to slide right past Medusa, and all he could do was slow it down, stretch the pass out a bit... and give the Manties a little longer to evacuate their orbital installations.