by David Weber
* * *
“Jesus Christ!” Patricia Richtmann blurted as nine hundred thousand tons of battlecruiser—and twenty-three hundred men and women—disappeared in the titanic fireball of failed fusion bottles. She stared at her plot in stark disbelief, then sucked in a shocked breath.
“Impeller signatures!” Her professional voice was frayed and harrowed as the impeller wedges of Menendez’s LACs sprang to malevolent life on her display. “Many impeller signatures! Estimate ninety-plus. Bearings—”
She broke off, slamming her heel on the button that locked her bridge chair’s shock frame.
“Missiles incoming,” she said flatly. “Estimate seventy-five—no, eighty—inbound. Time-of-flight, twenty seconds.”
* * *
Arja Menendez’s eyes glittered with fierce satisfaction as the first Solly battlecruiser blew apart. Her Shrikes’ heavy grasers could have blown through battlecruiser sidewalls at this range with contemptuous ease, but they didn’t even have to do that. And while two of her squadrons dealt with Hindustan, three more of them launched against the Solarian destroyers who’d never seen them coming.
The Shrike-B carried fourteen shipkillers, and the attacking LACs’ rotary launchers spat them out in a deadly stream. The range was so short they could easily have taken the Sollies down with graser fire, but the Achilles’ heel of the Shrike’s massive energy armament was that its fission reactor couldn’t recharge its plasma capacitors in battle. The energy budget simply wasn’t there. That meant her units’ energy fire was at least as limited as their magazine capacity, and she wanted all the graser shots she could bank against future need.
* * *
“What the h—?” Captain Chayula Hackenbroch blurted, snapping upright in her command chair as Océan emerged on the Ajay side of the terminus. One moment the tactical display had shown only the calm, orderly line of battlecruisers queued up for transit. The next it was littered with missile traces, impeller signatures, and the homing beacons of a bare handful of life pods, speeding away from the fading fireball which must be all that remained of Hindustan.
“Impeller signatures! Many impeller signatures!” her tac officer screamed.
And then the holocaust which had hammered Hindustan came for Océan, as well.
* * *
SLNS Ohio, Neptune, and Minotaur followed into the furnace one by one, emerging at neat twenty-five-second intervals into the devastating fire of LAC Group 117, and the fire in Commander Menendez’s eyes grew cold and bleak.
They don’t have a chance—not a chance. My God! It’s not even shooting ducks; it’s clubbing kittens! These poor bastards don’t even know we’re here until they sail right into our sights and we blow them to hell!
Her jaw tightened, and her nostrils flared. Whatever their high command and political masters might have done, surely the men and women aboard those dying ships were not so different from the men and women aboard her ships.
“Targeting change,” she heard her voice say. “Go for the hammerheads, Sarah. Take out the impeller rings and the poor bastards are toast if they don’t surrender as soon as we get back around to them.” She grimaced. “Let’s not make any more orphans today than we have to.”
Prime Terminus
Prime-Ajay Hyper Bridge
Vice Admiral Helmut Santini accepted the cup of tea from his steward with a nod of thanks, but his expression was unhappy. He sipped the hot brew and gazed at the blandly uninformative tactical plot on SLNS Colossus’s flag bridge for a handful of seconds. The comforting green icons of his task group floated in place, barring the Prime Terminus to all comers, and that was good. But then he flipped his eyes to the master astrogation plot and glared at the handful of red icons floating tauntingly twenty-seven light-minutes from the Terminus. He treated them to fifteen seconds of silent, fulminating bile, then turned to the tall, broad-shouldered rear admiral at his side.
“I don’t like it, Jansen,” he said—unnecessarily, he was sure. “I don’t like it one damned bit.”
“I don’t like it either, Sir,” Jansen Vasiliou, Task Group 1027.3’s chief of staff, replied. “And I wish we had some kind of explanation for it.”
“You and me both.”
Santini sipped more tea, brooding at that damnable plot—both those damnable plots—and checked the time display…again.
Admiral Isotalo’s scheduled update on Buccaneer’s status was far overdue.
The Ajay Terminus was 342 LM from the system primary. A trip that long through normal-space would have required over twenty-three hours, allowing for a zero-zero arrival at the hyper-limit. But 5.7 light-hours didn’t qualify as a “micro-jump” in anyone’s book, and in hyper, going only as high as the Gamma bands, TF 1027’s other task groups should have made the trip in just under thirty-seven minutes. By that calculation, Isotalo had crossed into the inner system over nine hours ago. Even assuming there’d been some reason she couldn’t send a destroyer back to the terminus with dispatches, a light-speed message announcing her arrival in orbit around Elm, the system’s only inhabited planet, should have reached the damned picket destroyers three and a half damned hours ago. At which point, one of them should damned well have returned to the Prime Terminus to give him some damned idea what was going on.
He wished—more than he could possibly have said—he could blame it on Isotalo’s sloppiness, but the one thing Jane Isotalo wasn’t was “sloppy.” There was a reason—a compelling reason—she hadn’t sent him that update, and he was unhappily certain he wouldn’t have liked Vasiliou’s explanation if they’d had it.
Not that not having it was inspiring any cartwheels of joy.
“Send one of the tin cans through to check with the picket, Sir?” Vasiliou asked, quietly enough no one else on Flag Bridge was likely to hear him.
“Tempting,” Santini acknowledged. “But Admiral Isotalo took over fifty starships through that terminus. If there’s something on the other side nasty enough to keep her from sending us even an update, what do you think it’s going to do to a destroyer?”
“I thought about that, Sir.” Vasiliou’s voice was even softer, and although his expression remained merely calm and attentive, there was something very dark at the backs of his eyes. But they were unflinching, those eyes, and they met Santini’s levelly. “The thing is, Sir, that that would be a message of its own, wouldn’t it?”
Santini’s jaw tightened and he clamped down on an urge to rip off his chief of staff’s head for even suggesting the cold-blooded sacrifice of a destroyer and its crew. Unfortunately, it was an eminently sound suggestion. There was no way he could justify taking his entire task group through, even in a simultaneous transit, without some idea of what had happened to the rest of the task force. The one thing he did know was that there were—or had been, he amended grimly—three Solarian destroyers directly atop the far side of the terminus. If something had gotten close enough to prevent even one of them from escaping back to Prime, it was probably nasty enough to deal with sixteen battlecruisers, all but two of them the older Indefatigable-class, and fourteen destroyers if he was obliging enough to deliver them without impeller wedges or sidewalls.
So, yes, Jansen’s right, he thought, and he’s got the guts to say it. If we send a tin can through and it doesn’t come back, I’ll have no choice but to conclude that the Admiral’s been cut off from retreat through the terminus, at the very least. I can always assume that’s what’s happened without sacrificing a destroyer, but an assumption would be all it was. The truth is, I need some sort of confirmation, and paying the price of a destroyer would be a hell of a lot cheaper than losing the entire task group. But say I do send a tin can through and lose it, what do I do for my next trick?
On the one hand, with the thousands upon thousands of missile pods deployed around the Prime Terminus and with his own battlecruisers’ energy batteries poised to eliminate any hostile unit emerging from it, his position was a powerful one. Indeed, against any threat from the Ajay side, it was una
ssailable. So he could stay right where he was indefinitely, waiting to see if Isotalo could work her way around whatever was blockading her—and God, he hoped she was only blockaded!—in Ajay and return to Prime. For that matter, staying put would continue to keep the terminus corked against the Manty task force which had probably already been summoned back to Prime from Agueda.
At least until they turn up and deploy their damned pods to blow us all to dustbunnies, he reflected harshly, glaring once more at the heavy cruisers maintaining their prudent distance from his battlecruisers and the Cataphracts.
On the other hand, he was a vice admiral in the Solarian League Navy. Vice admirals weren’t supposed to sit around with their thumbs up their arses hoping something would come along to save them from making the hard decisions. No matter what he chose, somebody far, far away in a nice, safe office was going to second-guess him. He knew that, and he didn’t like it, but he cared one hell of a lot less about that than he did about the rest of the task force. The thought of leaving them unsupported turned his stomach into a vacuum flask. Yet there was nothing he could do to support them, not when the far side of the terminus was a hundred and three light-years away through Einsteinian space.
He sipped more tea, thinking about that distance. He could make the trip to Ajay through n-space in a bit over twelve and a half days, although he doubted there was much his single task group could do to reverse Isotalo’s fortunes, even assuming she was still in Ajay the next best thing to two weeks from now. No, that was a non-option, for a whole host of reasons. But at the very least, he had to inform Old Terra about the rest of TF 1027’s disquieting silence. Only he didn’t really have anything to tell Admiral Kingsford, did he? “They went into the terminus and they didn’t come out again” wasn’t a hell of a lot of information.
No, it’s not. But he does need to know about it, because if the Manties really did come up with some kind of mousetrap—a mousetrap so well hidden three destroyers posted specifically to watch for it never saw it coming—that could…prevent the Admiral from returning to Prime, this may not be the only place they’ve done it. And, his eyes grew grimmer, she may not be the only one they’ve done it to, either.
“We have to send a dispatch back to Wincote for the Admiralty,” he said quietly. “I know there’s damn-all we can tell them at this point, but if something has happened to Admiral Isotalo, they’ve got to know about it.”
“Agreed, Sir. But do we send dispatches now, or wait a while longer in hopes somebody does come back to tell us what’s going on?”
“I don’t know.” Santini sipped more tea, then grimaced. “No, I do know,” he said. “We’ll wait twenty-four hours. If we send anyone back to Wincote before that, some idiot somewhere along the chain of command’ll decide we jumped the gun because we’ve had the shit scared out of us.” He grimaced again, more deeply. “The fact that I think I have had the shit scared out of me doesn’t make me any more eager to give the idiot in question any ammunition I don’t have to. If we wait a T-day, that’s a nice, solid interval. Long enough to show we thought it over carefully before we did what we already know we damned well need to do. And it’s not like anything’s going to sneak up on us here on this side of the terminus, is it?”
“No, Sir,” Vasiliou agreed.
“Then have Sheila and Franziska put together a complete file for us, all the tac data from Sheila and the entire communications chain from Franziska.”
Vasiliou nodded. Commodore Sheila O’Reilly was TG 1027.3’s operations officer, and Captain Franziska Ridolfi was Santini’s staff communications officer.
“I want the best analysis Sheila can give us, and I want to see it before I write my cover dispatch for it.” He shook his head, staring into the plot again. “Actually, I’m hoping like hell the Admiral will come back in one piece before I have to send the thing.
“The problem—” he turned his head to meet Vasiliou’s eyes once more “—is that I feel like I’m a kid back home in Faraday, whistling in a graveyard at midnight.”
* * *
“I think it’s time,” Sir Martin Lessem said.
Commander Thúri glanced at him across the table in his dining cabin, and the commodore shrugged.
“The fact that nothing’s come back from Ajay suggests Commander Menendez and her people kicked their asses pretty conclusively.” He paused, one eyebrow arched, and Thúri nodded. “Well, I’d hoped whoever they left command on this side would be foolish enough—or impatient enough—to bash on through, trying to find out what happened. Clearly, he’s too smart to do that. So if he’s not going to oblige us by sticking his head into the noose, I suppose it’s time for Descabello.”
Thúri pursed his lips in thought, then nodded. He wondered if Lessem realized just how completely he’d revealed the revulsion underlying his professionalism when he named his ops plans. The descabello was the deathblow—the second, spine-cutting deathblow if the first one was clumsy and unsuccessful—in the ancient bullfighting tradition which had been revived on some of the more decadent Core Worlds. Lessem had been dragged to one of them before the war, when he’d been assigned as the military attaché in the Sebastopol System, and “deeply disgusted” was a pale shadow of his response to it.
Which didn’t mean “Descabello” wasn’t a perfectly apt word for the ops plan to which he’d appended it.
Not that there’d been anything clumsy or unsuccessful about his actions so far.
“All right,” the commodore said now. “Go ahead and tell Tom to execute in—” he checked his chrono “—twenty minutes.”
“Yes, Sir,” the commander said quietly, sliding his chair back from the table. “With your permission, Sir, I’ll do that in person.”
“Fine.” Lessem nodded and Thúri came briefly to attention, then turned and left the dining cabin.
Lessem watched the hatch slide shut behind him, then picked up his wineglass and sipped again. The rich port seemed vinegary on his tongue, and he set the glass back down with a disgusted air.
I miss you, Sara Kate, he thought, looking at the light portrait on his bulkhead. I miss you for so many reasons, but right now, I need someone I can talk to who isn’t one of my officers. Somebody who lets me put my head in her lap and tell her I feel like a murderer.
He closed his eyes, remembering his elation when he and his people danced rings around what was obviously a smart, competent adversary. Remembering how clever he’d felt when he realized Menendez and her LACs must have evaded detection by the destroyers the Solly CO had sent through. He’d predicted exactly what the Sollies would do, and they’d done it because it was what competent people who lacked critical knowledge did…and the fact that none of them had come back yet meant none of them ever would.
What must it have been like aboard those ships, in the fleeting seconds they had to realize what they’d just sailed into? They’d done everything right…and they were just as dead, in just as staggering numbers, as if they’d been commanded by Josef Byng or Sandra Crandall or Massimo Filareta.
And whoever might have commanded the LAC executioners, he was the one who’d killed them. That was almost the worst part of it, but not quite.
No, the worst part of it—the part he needed Sara Kate to save him from—was the fear that in the months and the years ahead, he’d learn to forget the horror…and remember the pride.
* * *
The Shrikes and Katanas in Ajay weren’t the only LACs the SLN had failed to detect. Three of David K. Brown’s interchangeable modules had been configured as ammunition holds stuffed with pods of Mark 23s and Mark 16s, but the fourth had been configured to support three full squadrons of LACs, in addition to the eight LACs of her understrength organic squadron.
To be fair, there was an even better reason TG 1027.3 hadn’t spotted the deadly minnows here on the Prime side of the terminus. The FSV had dropped all forty-four of her brood over seventeen million kilometers from the terminus, on the side farthest away from Lessem’s heavy cruisers,
on her way to the rendezvous point three light-days away in interstellar space. At that range, a superdreadnought would have been invisible with its wedge down, even without benefit of stealth, and Shrikes were far stealthier than any superdreadnought.
Now CruRon 912’s FTL com sent them the single codeword “Descabello.” It took over twenty-six minutes for even that message to reach them, but they knew what to do when it did.
* * *
“Coming up on the mark, Sir,” Commander Wozniak said quietly, sixty-one minutes after the transmission had been sent, and Sir Martin Lessem turned from the master plot and crossed to his command chair. He seated himself and methodically deployed his repeater displays. Then he nodded to Wozniak, and the operations officer looked at Ranald Kivlochan.
“Execute on the mark,” he said.
“Aye, aye, Sir. Executing on the mark.”
Everyone on Clas Fleming’s flag bridge knew that precise timing wasn’t vital this time around, but they were the Royal Manticoran Navy, and that—by God—meant they would do this by the numbers.
“Standing by,” Kivlochan replied formally.
“In ten,” Wozniak said, reading the time display as the maneuver already locked into the ship’s computers counted down. “Nine…eight…seven…six…five…four…three…two…one…execute.”
Clas Fleming and her consorts disappeared into hyper.
* * *
“Status change!” a tracking rating sang out in SLNS Colossus’s CIC. He turned to the officer of the watch, his expression tight. “Ma’am, the Manties just translated out.”
* * *
“After sitting there all this time, now he suddenly decides to move,” Helmut Santini snarled. He’d been just about to step into the shower when the message from CIC reached them. Now he stood in his bathrobe, glowering at Vasiliou’s image on his sleeping cabin’s com display.
“I’m afraid so, Sir.” Vasiliou looked at something outside his own visual pickup’s field of view. “They translated out roughly three minutes ago, Sir.”