by David Weber
Crandall snapped around to the master plot as twenty-one fresh icons flared into existence four and a half light-minutes behind her own ships. Whatever they were, they'd popped out of hyper-space in an exhibition of pinpoint-precise astrogation. Their tightly groupedcrash translation put them right on the limit, approaching it at almost five thousand kilometers per second, and everyone on Joseph Buckley's flag bridge seemed to hold his or her breath while they waited for the sensor platforms Ou-yang had left behind to identify the newcomers.
Or almost everyone, at least.
"Turnover in fifteen seconds, Ma'am," Haarhuis announced.
Crandall's eyes flicked to the astrogator, then back to the plot, and her expression was grim. Whatever else those new icons might be, they had to be Manticoran warships—warships which had been waiting in hyper until her own force was deeply mired inside the star's hyper limit. And if it should happen that they were superdreadnoughts, her potential losses had just climbed drastically . . . .
"The platforms make it fourteen of those big battlecruisers, what look like four light cruisers, and three ships in the four to five million-ton range," Ou-yang finally announced. The icons in the master plot blinked, changing color and shape to reflect the IDs CIC had assigned to each of them as lightspeed data on their emissions came in. "From their formation and emission s, it looks like the three biggies are probably freighters. Ammunition ships, I'd guess."
Her voice was taut, but it also carried an undeniable note of relief, and Hago Shavarshyan felt his own clenched stomach muscles relax. Crandall said nothing for a moment or two, but then she gave a sharp bark of a laugh.
"Well, I'll give them credit for audacity," she said as Bautista and Ou-yang looked at her. "This Gold Peak's obviously an ambitious bitch, isn't she?" The admiral jutted her chin at the icons beginning to accelerate in-system after her own forces. "And she must've used quite a bit of ingenuity arranging her ambush. But ingenious or not, she's no mental giant!"
Crandall gazed at the plot for a few more seconds, then glanced at Haarhuis.
"Go ahead and make turnover, Barend. Kick our decel to get us back on profile, then drop back to eighty percent."
"Yes, Ma'am," the astrogator acknowledged, and began passing orders as she turned back to Bautista and Ou-yang.
"Like I say, I'll give them marks for audacity," she said with a grim smile, "but falling in love with your own ingenuity can be painful sometimes." Her chuckle was harsh. "Bad enough for them to even think about 'ambushing' someone our size—reminds me of the story about the kid who tried to catch a house cat and wound up catching a tiger!—but they fucked up their timing, too. I don't care how much acceleration advantage they've got, they can't possibly overtake us until well after we've reached the planet and dealt with their friends in orbit."
"Did they screw up their timing, Ma'am?" Ou-yang asked. The admiral gave her a sharp look, and the ops officer shrugged. "I agree with what you just said about their ability to overtake us, but it strikes me as a bit of a coincidence that they should just happen to come in at almost exactly the same time we were scheduled to make turnover."
Crandall considered that for several moments, then grimaced.
"You may be right that the timing was deliberate. I can't imagine what kind of an advantage they'd think it would give them, though. And I don't think we should completely rule out the possibility that it really was a coincidence they hit so close to our turnover point. In fact, I'm still inclined to think that's exactly what it was. We know they've got a range advantage, at least as long as they stick to their missile pods, and we also know from what they did at New Tuscany that they can obviously tow at least a fair number of pods inside their wedges without compromising their acceleration. So what they probably wanted to do was to catch us in-system of them, stuck inside the hyper limit, with them outside us but close enough they could get into their range of us well before we reached the planet. There's no way we could match their acceleration rate, so as long as they were careful about it, they could probably get into their range of us while staying outside our missile range of them, and use their accel advantage to cut back out across the limit and escape into hyper if we reversed course to come after them. That's why I'm pretty sure they screwed the pooch with their timing, because even with the accel rates Gruner reported, they can't catch us with the geometry they've actually got. And they damn sure can't do it before we get to the planet, pound every warship in orbit around it out of space, and bring the entire system's infrastructure—such as it is and what there is of it—into our own range. At which point they've got three options: surrender to keep us from trashing all that infrastructure; go ahead and fight us on our terms, in which case we still wreck their infrastructure and they all get dead; or turn around and run away with their tails between their legs when they run out of missiles."
Ou-yang nodded slowly, although Shavarshyan wasn't at all sure the ops officer shared Crandall's conclusions. Or, at least, that she shared her admiral's confidence. It was fairly obvious to the Frontier Fleet officer that Ou-yang expected Task Force 496 to get hurt a lot worse than Crandall did, yet even the operations officer had to admit that two widely separated forces, each massively inferior to the single enemy force between them, were unlikely (to say the very least) to achieve victory.
* * *
"Well," Michelle Henke said, gazing into the master plot on HMS Artemis' flag bridge, "at least we know what she's going to do now."
"Yes, Ma'am," Dominica Adenauer said. "Our arrival doesn't seem to have fazed her, does it?"
"Fair's fair." Michelle shrugged. "There's not a lot else she could do, really."
Adenauer nodded, although Michelle sensed her continuing disgruntlement. It wasn't so much that Adenauer disagreed with anything Michel had just said as that the ops officer was accustomed to dealing with Havenite opponents, and no Havenite admiral would ever have ambled this confidently towards a Manticoran foe. The fact that Sandra Crandall was doing just that did not give Dominica Adenauer a flattering estimate of the Solly's IQ.
Michelle shared that opinion, but she also stood by her observation about Crandall's alternatives. Her superdreadnoughts were holding their acceleration to just over three hundred and thirty-seven gravities, in strict accordance with the "eighty percent of maximum power" which was the galactic naval standard inertial compensator safety margin. At maximum military power, they could have managed almost four hundred and twenty-two gravities, but that was it. At eighty percent power, Michelle's trio of four million-ton milspec ammunition ships—HMS Mauna Loa, New Popocatépetl, and Nova Kilimanjaro—could manage a hundred gravities more than the Solly SDs' maximum military acceleration; running flat out they could manage over six hundred and fifty gravities, while her Nikes could top six hundred and seventy.
What that meant was that Crandall's ships-of-the-wall could neither run away from her nor catch her if they tried to go in pursuit. And with Michelle outside Crandall's position, coming up her ships' wakes, there was really no way she could dodge, either. Nor could she possibly make it all the way across the hyper sphere to the opposite edge of the limit without being brought to action. And however confident Crandall might be of her task force's defensive capabilities, the Solarian admiral had to know her missiles were substantially out-ranged. In fact, just on the basis of what Michelle had done at New Tuscany before that first dispatch boat translated out, Crandall damned well ought to know her own anti-ship missiles' maximum powered envelope from rest was at best less than a quarter of that of the missiles which had killed Jean Bart. So, given her unpalatable menu of maneuver options, the one she was pursuing actually made the most sense. However nimble Michelle's ships might be, the planet couldn't dodge, and it was what Michelle had to defend. So if Crandall could get into her own range of Flax with what she no doubt believed to be her crushing superiority in missile tubes, she could compel Michelle to either come to her or concede strategic defeat regardless of any tactical advantages the RMN might p
ossess.
And if we're wrong about our ability to penetrate their defenses, it could still work for her, Michelle conceded grimly.
She gazed into the plot for several more seconds, then turned and crossed to her command station. She settled into the chair, looking down at the com which was kept permanently tied in to Artemis' command deck.
"Captain Armstrong, please," she told the com rating monitoring the link.
"Yes, Ma'am!"
The rating disappeared. The crossed arrows of Artemis' wallpaper replaced her image for a moment, then disappeared in turn as Captain Victoria Armstrong appeared on Michelle's display.
"You called, Admiral?" she inquired. Her dark green eyes were guileless, but Michelle had long since discovered the wicked sense of humor which was just as much a part of Armstrong as the chestnut-haired flag captain's confidence and rock-steady competence.
"I believe I did," she replied. "Now, let me see . . . There was something I wanted to discuss with you, but . . . ."
Her voice trailed off, and Armstrong grinned appreciatively at her.
"Could it have had something to do with that unpleasant person headed for Flax, Ma'am?" the captain suggested in a politely helpful tone, and Michelle snapped her fingers.
"That was what I wanted to talk about!" she said wonderingly, and heard someone behind her chuckling. Then own expression sobered. "So far, it looks pretty much like the alpha plan right down the line, Vicki."
"Yes, Ma'am," Armstrong replied, equally seriously. "Wilton and Ron and I were just discussing that. I have to wonder what's going through this Crandall's mind at the moment, though."
"I'd guess we gave her a bad few minutes when we turned up, judging by the way she delayed her turnover, but I imagine she got over it once she figured out we don't have any superdreadnoughts. At any rate, I don't expect her to be screening us with any surrender offers anytime soon."
"That would make it simpler, wouldn't it, Ma'am?"
"Probably. But it looks like it's going to take Admiral Khumalo and Commodore Terekhov to convince her of that, after all. In the meantime, go ahead with the Agincourt Alpha variant. We'll just quietly follow along behind until—and unless—we're needed."
"Yes, Ma'am."
Michelle nodded to the captain, then turned back to the plot, tipping back her chair and crossing her legs as she considered the imagery.
At this scale, even Crandall's task force seemed to crawl across the display, and her own ships' motion was barely perceptible as they began building on the vector they'd carried across the alpha wall with them. Given the steady, consistent improvements in compensator design over the last ten or fifteen T-years, Manticoran captains—and admirals, she thought wryly—no longer fretted anywhere near as much as the officers of other navies over compensator safety margins. The fact that they'd been operating on a wartime basis for twenty T-years or so, rather than the peacetime basis of the rest of the galaxy had something to do with that, as well. The RMN had discovered that even with old-style compensators, "Book" safety margins had been excessively cautious, and Michelle's current acceleration rate was 6.5 KPS2. She'd thought about restricting her accel, but there wasn't really much point. Even if the acceleration she'd displayed at New Tuscany hadn't been reported to Crandall, it must have already been reported to the SLN back on Old Earth in Sigbee's official report. And if Crandall hadn't already been aware of it, perhaps seeing it now might rattle the Solly.
Not that Michelle really expected it to have any impact on what was about to happen, and her mouth tightened as she recognized an all-too-familiar awareness deep down inside herself. She'd seen too many tactical plots like this one not to know what was coming, not to sense the inevitability. It was like watching two ground cars slide towards one another, knowing it was too late, that nothing anyone did could possibly prevent the oncoming collision.
She remembered the first time she'd seen a plot like this and known it wasn't a simulation. She'd trained for that moment her entire professional life, and yet, deep inside, she hadn't quite believed it was real. Or that it couldn't somehow be averted at the very last moment, at least. She'd done her best to prepare herself, and she'd thought, in her inexperience, that she'd succeeded.
She'd been wrong. Despite the most realistic exercises the Royal Manticoran Navy had been able to provide, she hadn't been ready—not truly—for mortality. Still hadn't come face-to-face with the reality that she could die as easily as anyone else. That the universe could survive her personal extinction and go right on. And, even worse perhaps, she hadn't really recognized that all the weapons and targeting systems would do precisely—and inevitably—what they'd been designed to do. That once those missiles were fired in earnest, other people were going to die in shocking, horrifying numbers, whether she did or not.
And now it was the turn of Sandra Crandall and all of the officers and enlisted personnel aboard her starships to face that recognition. She wondered how many would survive the experience?
* * *
Gervais Archer watched his admiral and wondered what was going through her mind. As a rule, he felt generally confident of his ability to read her moods. She wasn't the most inscrutable person he'd ever met, after all. She could be as tactically sneaky and subtle as anyone he'd ever seen, but her personality was open and direct, not to mention stubborn, with a distinct tendency to come at things head on.
Yet at this moment, he couldn't read her body language. Not clearly. There was no sign of hesitance or uncertainty, no indication of second guessing herself, no sign any concern over future consequences would be permitted to erode present determination. But there was something. Something he wasn't accustomed to seeing from her, and he wondered why the word he kept thinking of was "sorrow."
* * *
Michelle Henke drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders, unaware of her flag lieutenant's thoughts as she ordered her own to attend to the business at hand.
Whatever's going to happen, it's going to happen. Too late to change that, and the decision wasn't really yours to begin with, girl. So instead of thinking about what Crandall's too damned stupid to see coming, think about what she is doing right this moment.
Actually, she rather suspected Crandall was doing exactly the same thing she was—staring at icons in a plot. Of course, her own data was far better than anything Crandall could have. Michelle had seeded the entire star system with FTL sensor platforms, and she'd paid special attention to the volume inside the hyper limit, particularly along the plane of the ecliptic. At the moment, her plot was being driven by a highly stealthy platform less than one light-second from Crandall's flagship, and the directional transmissions from the platform were less than five seconds old by the time she saw them on the display. Aside from the actual impeller signatures of Tenth Fleet's ships, any data Crandall had was almost five minutes old. At the moment, that meant little, but when the missiles started to fly, it was going to mean a great deal, indeed.
Thank you, Michael and Sir Aivars, she thought sardonically. And thank you, Admiral Hemphill.
She glanced at the time display. Five minutes had passed since her battlecruiser squadrons reentered normal-space. Crandall clearly had no idea she was already in Michelle's powered range, assuming Michelle was prepared to accept a two-and-a-half-minute ballistic phase between her second and third missile drives. Powered range wasn't necessarily the same thing as accurate range, though, and she wasn't about to waste birds from this far out unless she had to.
The range from Crandall to Khumalo and Terekhov was shrinking steadily, however. And when it fell to three light-minutes . . . .
About another seventeen minutes, Admiral Crandall, Vice Admiral Gloria Michelle Samantha Evelyn Henke thought grimly. Another seventeen minutes.
* * *
"I make it another seventeen minutes, Sir," Commander Pope said quietly, and Aivars Terekhov nodded, then looked at Commander Stillwell Lewis.
"Let's go ahead and spot the alpha launch, Stilt."
/> "Yes, Sir."
Commander Lewis began inputting commands, and as those commands reached the shoals of pods the withdrawing ammunition ships had left behind, onboard tractors began reaching out from clusters of them. They locked onto the ships designated to control them, moving out of the planetary shadow, settling into launch position. And as if that had been a signal—which it had—the LACs which had been left behind by the CLACs began jockeying into position. If everything went as planned, those LACs wouldn't be needed, except to sweep up the pieces. Neither would Gold Peak's battlecruisers, for that matter. In fact, if everything went as planned, those battlecruisers would represent no more than an insurance policy which hadn't been needed after all. And, possibly, an additional threat to shape the thinking of the Solly CO.
Of course, everything seldom went "as planned," Terekhov thought, remembering his battle plans at Monica and a star called Hyacinth.
He watched Lewis, then glanced over his shoulder at Ensign Zilwicki and his somber mood lightened suddenly. In fact, he found it difficult not to smile, despite the approaching Solarian juggernaut. His extraordinarily youthful flag lieutenant's eyes were bright with concentration, watching everything on Quentin Saint-James' flag deck. If she'd been a cat, the lashing of her tail would have presented a serious safety hazard.
"Calmly, Helen," he said softly, barely loud enough for her to hear, and she looked at him quickly. Their eyes met, and then she grinned crookedly.
"That obvious, was I, Sir?"
"Let's just say it's reasonably apparent that what you'd really like to be doing just now is Commander Lewis' job."
"Sorry, Sir." She grimaced. "It's just—"
"Just that the last time, you and Abigail were sitting in the hot seats," he acknowledged. "And you will be again, someday. Promise."
"Yes, Sir."
He gave her another smile, then turned back to his own displays and his own thoughts.
Despite the best efforts of both BuWeaps and BuShips, the Royal Manticoran Navy's missile pods kept obstinately proliferating, spinning off one new variant after another, and of late, pod capacity had trended steadily downward. The original "flatpack" pods, which had come in with the final generation of superconductor capacitors, had carried twelve MDMs each. Then along had come the next-generation flatpacks, with internal tractor systems. They'd still managed to keep capacity up to a dozen birds, but only until they'd shifted to the fusion-powered Mark 23. At that point, the designers had been forced to figure out how to cram in the pod's own fusion plant, since its new power budget had to be able to spin up the Mark 23s' plants at launch. The Bureau of Weapons had opted to hold the pod's dimensions constant in order to simplify handling and manufacturing constraints, despite the fact that it had dropped its capacity to only ten Mark 23s.