by David Weber
And what creates problems for a single ship tends to create a lot more of them when multiple ships execute a micro-jump together. Even when a single ship runs the master clock for the jump and every ship initiates its downward translation simultaneously, there’s some variance when they actually hit the alpha wall between hyper and normal-space. Crossing the wall is akin to encountering atmospheric turbulence in an aircraft, and the wall fluctuates as the result of a complex interaction with any local n-space gravity wells or wormholes. The degree to which that fluctuation can be adjusted for depends upon how well the astrogation computers have analyzed it, and that, too, is a factor of how long they’ve had for the analysis.
Bearing all those factors in mind, merchant captains generally refuse to put wear on their alpha nodes and hyper generators for anything less than a half light-hour. Their schedules are seldom so time-critical as to make shorter micro-jumps worth the trouble, the effort, and the uncertainty. Naval astrogators, on the other hand, are specifically trained to make those shorter micro-jumps, although things can get tricky even for them if the total distance is much less than, say, three light-minutes.
Task Force 1027’s micro-jump was only twenty-three light-seconds, however, and Isadore Hampton had the disruptive influence of the terminus itself to contend with, as well.
Inevitably, there was going to be a certain…sloppiness about it.
* * *
“Hyper footprints!” Thomas Wozniak announced 4.5 minutes after thirty Solarian battlecruisers, twelve light cruisers, and twenty destroyers had vanished from CruRon 912’s sensors. “Many footprints,” he continued, studying the data. “The nearest is…seven hundred thousand kilometers!”
* * *
The terminus’s approaches were a storm of blue lightning, flashing against the Stygian dark as sixty-two starships returned to normal-space. Under the circumstances, it was a tight formation, Jane Isotalo thought as the hyper footprints flared upon SLNS Foudroyant’s master plot. “Tight,” however was a relative term, and her two task groups were still scattered over an enormous volume. One division of Nevadas from TG 1027.2’s BatCruRon 615 was over a million kilometers from the rest of its squadron. That was the worst dispersal, however, and she smiled fiercely as she saw how tight Isadore Hampton’s astrogation had actually been. He had, indeed, hit very close on the distance. If four of her battlecruisers were 1.6 million kilometers from the Manties, eight more were barely beyond energy weapon range. Flight time for a Javelin at 700,000 kilometers would be thirty-nine seconds, well within the cycle time on a heavy cruiser’s hyper generator, and the communications lag would be only 2.3 seconds. At that range, all the ECM in the universe wouldn’t save the Manties.
She would have preferred energy range, but she’d settle for what she had.
“Fire Plan Delta!” she snapped.
Delta relied solely on her ships’ internal launchers, because there wasn’t time to redeploy the extended chains of Huskies and missile pods which had been drawn in close enough for the battlecruisers’ hyper translation fields to extend around them. Still, the eight Nevadas—including Foudroyant—closest to the Manties belched 224 missiles two seconds after she’d given the order.
* * *
“Not bad astrogation,” Commodore Lessem observed as the master plot stabilized. “Those bastards at zero-three-eight did especially well.”
He twitched his head at the closely grouped clump of hyper footprints off Clas Fleming’s starboard quarter. The Solarians weren’t moving relative to his command—a ship translating out of hyper shed over ninety percent of its velocity in transit energy bleed-off, and they hadn’t been moving especially fast through hyper even before they translated back down—but those eight ships had maintained an extremely tight formation. In fact, he doubted very many Manticoran squadrons could have matched their performance.
“Better than I expected, Sir,” Commander Thúri admitted.
“Nobody ever said the Sollies weren’t competent spacers,” Lessem pointed out. “We tend to forget that because—”
“Missile launch!” Wozniak said. “Two hundred-plus inbound from zero-three-eight, one-six-three at niner-three-five-point-three KPS squared. They look like Javelins, Sir. Time-of-flight…three-niner-point-two seconds.”
“Acknowledged,” Lessem replied, never looking away from the plot. “As I was saying,” he resumed calmly, “we tend to forget that because of how one-sided the actual fighting’s been so far. But they’re not going to keep their heads inserted into their anal orifices on that front forever, Lester. And when they get them extracted, they’re still going to be competent in all those other areas.”
“Point, Sir,” Thúri said.
Lessem turned his head to smile at him, then glanced at Lieutenant Commander Kivlochan. The astrogator’s expression was intense as he watched his console, but there was remarkably little concern on Clas Fleming’s bridge as the missiles accelerated towards her. And then—
* * *
“Damn,” Admiral Isotalo said as the entire Manticoran squadron disappeared into hyper fourteen seconds after her missiles had launched.
“Aborting salvo,” Rear Admiral Rosiak said, and transmitted the destruct code to the Javelins which had been hurtling towards their foes. They self-destructed a second later, and Isotalo grimaced.
“I hate it when the other side has a brain,” she said.
“All due respect, Ma’am, it didn’t take a whole lot of brain to figure our options,” Ramaalas pointed out. “Like you said, Two-Step was really our only chance to get into effective range before they bugged out, anyway. And I believe you were also the one who said only ‘a drooling idiot’ would let us get away with it. It was worth trying, but they had to have had their generators ready to cycle the instant they saw us go into hyper.”
“I know. I know!” Isotalo snorted. “I guess I’m mostly pissed off at myself for letting them suck me into firing those missiles. Like you say, they had to’ve known when we’d be turning up and they could have hypered out four damn minutes before we translated back down. The only reason they didn’t was because they wanted to sit here long enough to let me fire at them. It was a little…cheeky of them, but given the timing, we’d’ve had to hit n-space less than ninety thousand kilometers out to catch them with a missile launch. And at that range, we’d have been ripping them apart with energy fire, and damn the missiles! But what were the chances even Isadore could put us that close?” She shook her head. “No, the Manties did that on purpose. And they did it to make the point that they could do it.”
“Beg your pardon, Ma’am?” Ramaalas’s eyebrows furrowed.
“We could’ve fired ten times that many birds without making a hole in our internal magazines, much less what Quigley’s got in the support ships. I think we can assume they’re smart enough to figure that out, too. So they damned well didn’t expect that convincing us to waste missiles chasing them into hyper was going to affect our combat readiness in any way. No, those people only waited because they were thumbing their noses at us before they ran away.”
“Maybe so,” Ramaalas acknowledged after a moment, “but that could end up costing them. Especially if they really can’t fire salvos bigger than the one they already threw at us, Ma’am. We’re on top of the terminus now, not them, and if they don’t have the firepower to blow us back off of it, they’re stuck on this side of it. At best—from their perspective—that would mean they’d have to go home the long way.”
“You could be right, but I’m not convinced someone as smart as this wouldn’t be a jump or two ahead of that logic. I’m thinking she probably chose to stay on the side of the terminus.”
“Because he’s expecting friends, Ma’am?”
“It’s certainly a possibility.” Isotalo turned and walked back to her command chair while the task groups’ scattered units began accelerating back toward Foudroyant. Given the separation, it would take at least fifteen minutes for them to coalesce around the flagship once more
. The Manties would probably translate back out of hyper well before that.
“They didn’t have time to put that many ships through the terminus after we went into hyper,” she pointed out, settling into her chair. A beckoning index finger summoned Rosiak to join her and Ramaalas and she leaned back. “Not in a sequenced transit, anyway. The minimum time for that would’ve been—what? A hundred and sixty seconds? And that would’ve been with all of them lined up in a tight transit queue. But if they’d intended to fall back on Ajay, they could’ve done that any time they wanted to before we translated out. For that matter, if they’d been planning on falling back, they could’ve been positioned for a simultaneous transit of their entire force. This terminus isn’t as big as some, but it’s more than big enough to handle that many cruisers simultaneously. And if they’d made transit to Ajay, we’d know they were sitting right on the other side of the terminus ready to rip our arses off with energy fire when we came through after them.”
Her staffers nodded, expressions somber. A starship transited a wormhole under Warshawski sails, not impeller drive, and that meant it emerged with neither an impeller wedge nor sidewalls. It took several seconds—about eighty in the case of the Prime Terminus—to clear the wormhole sufficiently to reconfigure to wedge. During those eighty seconds, the ship in question was mother naked against defensive fire. That was one of the reasons Isotalo and her staff were quietly convinced that all the savage vituperation in the newsfaxes—and the Assembly—against Beowulf was completely unjustified in at least one respect. Colluding with the Manties or not, the Beowulfers had saved hundreds of thousands of SLN lives when they blocked the Beowulf Terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction against Fleet Admiral Tsang. If Tsang had made transit into the teeth of the unshaken Manticoran defenses, her entire fleet would have been massacred even more completely than Filareta’s had been. The politicians and the talking heads could say whatever they liked, but after what had happened to Eleventh Fleet, any naval officer with two brain cells to rub together knew what would have happened to Tsang would have been even worse. Far worse.
“There has to be a reason they didn’t choose to do that,” Isotalo went on. “And the most likely one that springs to my mind is that they are, indeed, supposed to be picketing this terminus while another of their task forces takes out the Agueda-Stine bridge. If that’s the case, then they need to keep an eye on us to keep us from setting up an ambush to greet that other task force when it arrives.” She showed her teeth. “Wouldn’t it be sweet if we were the ones sitting on the terminus with a few thousand of our missile pods deployed in the area defense role when the Manties came back? They wouldn’t have any of those damned invisible recon platforms deployed, and even their shipboard sensors would be degraded until the transit energy bled fully away. By the time they picked us up through our stealth, they’d probably be in range for a mass launch, and I would cheerfully use up a half million or so missiles to kick the shit out of one of their point-of-the-spear task forces!”
“That would be nice, Ma’am.” Ramaalas sounded a bit wistful.
“And that’s what they’re primarily worried about, I think,” Isotalo continued. “They want to maintain a sufficient force on this side of the terminus to play watchdog for their friends. An incoming task force wouldn’t need recon platforms if there’s already an entire damned cruiser squadron sitting here to tell them about us.”
“What about protecting Ajay, though, Ma’am?” Rosiak asked. She raised an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged. “That has to be fairly high on their priority list, too, I’d think,” he pointed out.
“I think we have two main possibilities,” Isotalo said. “Either what we’ve been looking at here on the Prime side of the terminus is all they’ve got—or their primary force, at any rate—or it’s not. Given how many missiles they threw at us in that one salvo, and given what we’ve heard so far about the kind of salvos Manty capital ships can throw, I’m inclined to think there can’t be any wallers on the Ajay side. I don’t care what some of our less brilliant colleagues might do if they’d brought a couple of those ‘podnoughts’ of theirs along, but all I’d have done would have been to run the hell away, and they’d have to assume any SLN admiral with a brain would be thinking exactly that. No way are we going to cross swords with something that can do what those damned things did to Filareta!”
Both her subordinates nodded in agreement—and profound relief—at that.
“From their perspective, maintaining control of this side of the terminus has to be more attractive than simply defending it from the other side, especially if they’re operating against Agueda. So, again, if they’d had that kind of firepower available, I’m pretty sure they’d have brought it through to chase us off or at least make us keep our distance from the terminus. Given all that, I’m inclined to assume—provisionally, at least—that what we’ve seen is pretty much all they’ve got. It looks to me like they’ve decided it’s more important to hold this terminus—and probably slam the door shut behind us, if we go through it—than it is to defend from the Ajay side.”
“But that leaves everything in Ajay exposed, Ma’am,” Rosiak said.
“It does, but think about it.” Isotalo’s expression had turned to stone. “What’s it exposed to, as far as they know? Any of their shipping—or anyone else’s in Ajay, for that matter—should have plenty of time to run for it before we turn up. Manties are damned good at commerce protection, everybody knows that, and that’s what’s going to be on their minds, because they don’t know about Buccaneer. They can’t.”
Rosiak inhaled deeply, and Ramaalas’s expression turned almost as stonelike as Isotalo’s.
Of course it did, the admiral thought. Kimmo doesn’t like Buccaneer one bit more than I do. We’ll do it, because those are our orders and because there’s no other way we can hurt the frigging Manties at the moment. But he doesn’t like it, and he and Bart both know as well as I do that no Manticoran naval officer would imagine for a moment that the Solarian League, of all star nations, would start systematically destroying entire star systems’ industrial and orbital infrastructures. Stopping that sort of thing was one of the main reasons the League was created in the first place!
The very thought revolted her, but she’d had plenty of time to get over that. And the critical point was that the Manties didn’t know about—and would never expect—anything like Buccaneer. A commerce raid, yes. An attack on any Manty warships they encountered, the seizure of any merchant vessel they met—any and all of that, they would anticipate. And if anything in the galaxy was certain, it was that the Manty CO had sent one of her units back to Ajay to tell every single legitimate commerce-raiding target to get the hell out of the star system. That meant she’d cleared her responsibilities in Ajay, and that meant it would actually make strategic sense for her to let TF 1027 through the terminus into Ajay and then close it behind Isotalo, forcing her ships to take the long way home the way she’d anticipated forcing the Manties’ Agueda force to do.
“Either way,” she said, “we still have Buccaneer to carry out.”
She settled herself in her chair, contemplating the consolidating icons on the plot, then looked at Rosiak.
“I want Quigley here on the terminus.”
The operations officer looked startled, and she chuckled harshly.
“Not to stay, Bart,” she reassured him. “Trust me, I want her task group in and out as quickly as possible. By the time she gets here, you’re going to have put together a pod deployment plan that will let me detach Santini with enough firepower to give even a division of Manty superdreadnoughts something to worry about. Ideally, I want him to be able to hold the terminus against anything they throw at it long enough for us to withdraw from Ajay, hopefully with Buccaneer’s mission objectives completed.”
And, please, God, without Parthian on my conscience, she added silently.
“Everything we’ve heard about their operational stance suggests they’re seizing the wormhol
es primarily with battlecruisers and cruisers,” she continued serenely. “I think that’s most likely the case here and that we won’t be looking at superdreadnoughts whenever their Agueda force gets back. If we are, though, then Santini’s orders will be to punch as many missiles at them as he can from as short a range as possible, accepting that they’ll be blind fire, before he translates out and runs the hell back to Wincote. And before he does that, one of his tin cans will transit to Ajay and warn the rest of us what’s coming up our collective backside.
“Frankly, given the combat differential, they probably wouldn’t really need wallers to kick our butts,” she said frankly. “A half-dozen of those big battlecruisers of theirs could do the job without breaking a sweat, especially since that logistics vessel of theirs is sitting out there somewhere with a load of additional pods for them. And, Kimmo, I want Santini’s orders to be clear. I don’t care whether it’s superdreadnoughts, battlecruisers, or a horde of outraged gerbils, if the Manties turn up and start firing shit pots of missiles at him, then he had better get his arse into hyper and out of here before any of them get a chance to hit anything.”
“Understood, Ma’am.”