by David Weber
He shrugged again, helplessly, and Capriotti tried not to glare at him. It was scarcely Rutgers’s fault, but that did nothing about the icy fist closing around the admiral’s heart. He sat back in his command chair, looking down at the tactical plot deployed from its base, and his mind raced.
If he’d been in command on the other side, those missiles would have been targeted solely on his battlecruisers, ignoring everything else on his sensors, but would he have concentrated on only some of those battlecruisers, or spread his fire among them all? Spread evenly, that would work out to right on fifteen birds per ship, which wouldn’t have been enough—for most people’s missiles, at any rate—to saturate the individual ships’ missile defense. On the other hand, the SLN had discovered the hard way that no battlecruiser was likely to be combat-capable after more than three or four—at most five—hits from Manticoran capital missiles, so they might not feel the need to completely overpower his missile defense. On the other other hand, even the Manties had to have some doubts about the accuracy of their fire at this range. So at what point did their faith in their systems and their recognition of Murphy’s impartiality intersect? Had they fired this hurricane of missiles at less than all of his battlecruisers in order to get enough concentration for decisive results? Or had they spread their fire evenly? And was this all they had, or had they retained a reserve for follow-up salvos? He certainly wouldn’t have used everything he had in the first launch!
But there was no sign of a second launch—yet, at least. Of course there wasn’t, he thought after an instant. Without FTL control platforms closer to him, they couldn’t coordinate a second salvo tightly in terms of time. Even with FTL sensor platforms right on top of TF 790, any evaluation of the first strike would take over ten minutes to get back to the first strike’s launch point, and without forward-deployed FTL control platforms, it would take several more minutes for any targeting corrections based on that evaluation to catch up with missiles streaking towards him.
Even in a worst-case scenario which assumed they really could maintain this monster acceleration all the way to TF 790, he had sixteen minutes—fourteen, now, he noted almost absently—before the first salvo could reach him. If they were going to fire a second one, they’d probably want to have at least ten or fifteen minutes after that for the first strike evaluation to get back to them and any adjustments to their follow-on missiles’ targeting orders to catch up before they entered attack range. So if they did launch a second wave, the timing on it would probably provide a window on when the first one was likely to arrive.
Which was all very interesting but didn’t solve his immediate problem.
“Execute Breakaway now,” he said.
“Executing Breakaway, aye, Sir!” Rutgers acknowledged, and Capriotti looked up from the tactical plot to find Helland standing beside him.
“Still sixteen minutes to second stage launch, Sir,” she said quietly.
“Understood. But as far as we can tell, they’re busy shooting at us, not anything closer in. And, frankly, by this point, there’s not that much they could do to stop the second stages. In which case, I’m a little more concerned about surviving, and those twelve minutes might just help that happen, don’t you think?”
System Defense HQ
City of Columbia
Beowulf
Beowulf System
“Sir, they’ve altered course!” Dunstan-Meyers announced sharply. “They’re breaking off their run on Cassandra and they’ve increased acceleration to four hundred and sixty-eight gravities!”
“I see it, Cheryl.”
McAvoy crossed the huge, dimly lit chamber to stand beside the ops officer, watching vectors shift and flow as Ghost Rider reported the Sollies’ changing heading, and he frowned as he wondered what the hell they were up to now.
Their initial velocity of six hundred KPS towards Cassandra had increased to 12,236 KPS since their arrival. That meant that, at their initial acceleration, it would have taken them forty-eight minutes just to decelerate to zero and start back the way they’d come. But that wasn’t what they were doing. They’d turned directly out-system, instead, at right angles to their current vector, and they’d started their run from so far out that they were still barely six million kilometers inside the limit. With that acceleration, bending their vector that sharply, they could be back across the wall in barely twenty-seven minutes.
And if all they’re really doing is running the hell away, that’s fine, he thought. Maybe this is a panic reaction. Maybe they didn’t expect to see Apollo coming at them at all and now that it has they’re headed for the high timber. But it’s hard to imagine they could’ve been that stupid; they had to realize we’d deploy MDMs to cover our critical star systems! The acceleration change does suggest they’ve just cut loose whatever pods they were towing, though, and they haven’t launched a damn thing back at us, which sure looks like a panic reaction, plain and simple. If I were them—and if I didn’t care any more about civilian casualties than whatever bastard came up with Buccaneer and Parthian Shot—I’d’ve launched everything I had before I turned away on the theory that even inaccurate birds had to be more effective than birds that were never launched at all! But they didn’t do that. Or at least it sure looks like they just jettisoned their pods without even trying to launch. Does that mean they’ve decided Parthian Shot was a bad idea? That could make sense after what happened in Mesa, if they want to try to convince people they hold the moral high ground. But it also suggests they really thought they could get close enough to Cassandra to target their fire accurately. So does that mean Hamish was right? Were they as surprised as we were by what happened to Mycroft? Or were they really dumb enough to not anticipate system-defense MDMs at all? Or did they—?
He shook himself. There was no way in hell he could answer any of those questions. All he could do now was wait and hope the POWs could answer them for him later.
SLNS Québec
Task Force 790
Beowulf System
“We have a second launch, Sir,” Lyang-tau Rutgers said quietly, and Vincent Capriotti looked across at him, then checked the time.
Fourteen minutes had passed since the defenders’ first launch, and he smiled in ironic amusement. The first launch had gone ballistic six minutes and 65,766,900 kilometers after launch. That sounded a hell of a lot like two separate drives with pretty close to standard endurance, which confirmed quite a bit of speculation back home. No one had any notion—yet—how it might be done, but it certainly sounded like the Manties had managed to graft separate sets of impeller nodes into the same missile body without their eating each other before they were successively brought on-line. Assuming that was what was actually happening, and if the missiles packed in a third stage with identical performance, they should resume their acceleration another in roughly three more minutes…and arrive three minutes after that, just over nineteen minutes after launch.
At least now I know now how big an interval they figure their FTL systems can handle without the dispersed platforms, he thought almost whimsically. If they could’ve closed that interval any, they damned well would’ve done it.
“CIC makes it another five thousand, Sir.”
“Very impressive,” Capriotti replied. “On the other hand, we’ll be across the limit and gone by the time they can reach us. I’m sure they can figure that out for themselves, so this is probably intended to encourage us to keep moving right along. And to pick off any cripples, I suppose. But in the meantime—”
He looked at another display.
Beowulf System
19,913,317 Kilometers from Beowulf Orbit
The Hastas had been launched fifty-seven minutes earlier.
They’d started their journey at an acceleration of a mere 15,000 KPS², hardly a crawl compared to the 46,000 KPS² a Mark 23 turned out at even its lowest acceleration bracket. On the other hand, they were far, far stealthier than any MDM ever built. In fact, they were no more than the mating of a sligh
tly modified Explorator recon drone with a Cataphracht-C’s second stage. They retained all of the Explorator’s original stealthiness, and their acceleration rates had been stepped down a bit further to make them even harder to detect. The result was something that was almost impossible to detect, even under acceleration, at ranges lower than seventy to eighty light-seconds. Once it went ballistic, it was effectively invisible even to active sensors at anything above 500,000 kilometers, and Operation Fabius had taken steps to make them even harder to spot by sending a host of regular reconnaissance drones ahead of them, with an acceleration rate thirty percent higher than theirs, programmed to spread out and chatter back and forth.
No one on the other side had noticed that the talkative recon drones’ stealth systems were working at no more than eighty percent of normal efficiency, and no one had suspected that their sole purpose was to attract any sensor systems to their impeller wedges rather than the weaker, stealthier ones coming along behind. Nor had anyone on the other side realized Vincent Capriotti’s battlecruisers hadn’t been towing Cataphracts when they crossed the hyper-limit. All their towing capacity had been devoted to the Hastas, and their relatively low acceleration rate after the Hastas launched had been designed solely to convince the system’s defenders they were towing heavy Cataphract loads for the attack on Cassandra they had absolutely no intention of making. The last thing TF 790 had wanted Sky Watch or System Defense HQ to realize was that it had never intended to penetrate more than 4,500,000 kilometers inside the limit before turning and breaking for the safety of the Alpha bands at ninety percent of maximum power.
Vincent Capriotti had nourished his private doubts about the elaborate deception plan, but it had worked almost perfectly. It wouldn’t have been enough to save TF 790 from Mycroft without the unexpected assistance of Silver Bullet. For that matter, it might turn out that it still wasn’t enough. The ops plan had worked to get all the bits and pieces to where they needed to be at the critical moments, however, and there was a certain irony in that. If the Mesan Alignment had realized that would happen, they wouldn’t have needed to reveal Silver Bullet’s existence. Unfortunately, Benjamin Detweiller and his planners hadn’t known how the original Fabius plans would be modified once Winston Kingsford realized what Hasta could do, and so they’d expected the attackers to require all the help they could get on their run in to the target.
The impeller endurance of the interference-running recon drones was measured in hours, even in days if it was husbanded properly. A Hasta’s endurance was barely ten minutes. At the end of that brief interval, its impellers went down forever and it sliced onward through the void at a constant velocity of 88,260 KPS, as invisible as the vacuum about it.
But now AIs aboard that shoal of invisible assassins noted that the time had almost come. They checked their targeting criteria and instructions against the take from their own sensors—not nearly so good as a regular recon drone’s, but far better than any previous generation of Solarian missile, even the improved Cataphracts, had ever mounted. A few corrections were necessary, and they make them.
Then they began the prep cycle.
System Defense HQ
City of Columbia
Beowulf
Beowulf System
“Third stage activation in approximately sixty seconds, Sir,” Cheryl Dunstan-Meyers said quietly, and Corey McAvoy nodded without looking away from his com connection to Gabriel Caddell-Markham.
What could reasonably be described as “a host” of staggeringly senior spectators had gathered behind the defense director, watching the huge display in the enormous conference room deep within Beowulf Alpha which fifteen minutes or so of frenzied tech improvisation had turned into a repeater for the master plot in System Defense HQ.
“Not going to tag them with the second launch,” Sir Thomas Caparelli noted. Then he glanced at McAvoy and shook his head quickly. “Not criticizing, Corey! I’d’ve done exactly the same thing, and you probably will pick off some cripples. And while I’d like to get more of them, I’m all in favor of scaring the ever-living hell out of them, too. The longer and the harder they keep on running, the better I’ll like it!”
“I’ll second that,” High Admiral Judah Yanakov’s soft Grayson accent couldn’t hide the iron implacability at the core of his voice. “Especially the ‘like to get more of them,’ I’m afraid.” He bared his teeth. “I’m sure Reverend Sullivan will have something to say to me about that the next time I see him.”
“Don’t worry, Judah,” Michael Mayhew, Grayson’s senior representative to the conference, told him with a smile. “I’ve got connections. I’ll run interference for you.”
“I appreciate it, My Lord,” Yanakov said. “On the other hand, I’ve noticed the Reverend doesn’t get diverted very easily.”
“He does have a certain way about him,” Mayhew conceded.
“Excuse me,” McAvoy said, eyes scanning the assemblage. “Have we figured out where Earl White Haven and Director Benton-Ramirez y Chou are?”
“We’re not sure.” Caddell-Markham shook his head, his expression wry. “Flight Control stuck them out in the boonies, and the last time I talked to Jacques—about five minutes ago—he and Hamish were delivering heartfelt maledictions upon one of the freight lift shafts. They were stuck in one of the boom sections between the industrial annex where they got docked and the main habitat. Maintenance promises to get them out ‘very soon now,’ but the people in charge of doing that seem to be just a little preoccupied.” He snorted. “Go figure!”
“Yeah, I don’t even have good contact with Hamish’s uni-link at the moment,” Caparelli said with an even broader smile. “And I can tell you he’s going to be so pissed when he finds out all of us were watching the master plot at the moment—”
“Status change!” Dunstan-Meyers said suddenly, and her face went white. “Oh my God! Missile activation! Many missiles! Range to Beowulf orbit niner-point-three million kilometers! Velocity eight-eight-point-two thousand KPS. Acceleration niner-six-one KPS squared. Impact seventy seconds!”
McAvoy stared at her for two heartbeats, then wrenched his eyes to the master plot. At least a thousand missile icons glared upon it, driving in on the inner system. CIC projected their vectors with merciless clarity, and the only good thing was that none of them were headed for the civilian habitats. They were driving in on Ivaldi of Beowulf and the other critical component manufacturers, and it came to him in an instant of total clarity.
A diversion. The entire run on Cassandra was a fucking diversion, and we fell for it! We fell for it!
But then he shook himself. They’d never seen this coming—and he hoped like hell they’d be able to figure out just how the Sollies had gotten their birds in this close before anybody got even a sniff of them—but they weren’t quite mother naked.
“All block ships activate now!”
SLNS Québec
Task Force 790
Beowulf System
“Second stage activation!” Rear Admiral Rutgers crowed as twelve hundred impeller drives glared suddenly on his display. “They’re in, Sir—they’re in!”
“I see it, Lyang-tau,” Capriotti said, and his smile was fierce. Whatever else happened, they’d gotten their birds inside the Manties’ defenses, and—
“Enemy missile activation!” Rutgers announced in a very different tone. “Implement missile defense plan Able-Seven.”
Counter-missiles slid into launchers, laser clusters trained out on the threat axis, decoys spun up, and ECM went active. The faces on Québec’s flag bridge were tight, tension and fear burred in the staff officers’ voices, but there was no panic, and Capriotti’s fists clenched on the armrests of his command couch. His estimate had been almost perfect, but at least their attack was going to go in two minutes before the Manty MDMs swarmed TF 790. With any luck, they’d get good evaluation of the strike from all those recon drones before the task force’s survivors raced across the hyper-limit.
You knew from th
e minute they proposed Fabius that it was a high-risk op, he told himself. You knew it. You just…didn’t want to expect it to be this high-risk.
No, he hadn’t, and he hated what it was going to cost his people, but at least he’d get to see what happened to his targets first.
Of course, you may not have very long to enjoy it, he thought mordantly, but a man can’t have everything. And at least—
“Status change!” One of Rutgers’s ratings announced just as the first counter-missiles roared off the launchers. “We’re picking up additional impeller wedges in-system—between our birds and their targets!”
Ivaldi Orbital Works No. 1
Beowulf System
“Come on! Come on, damn you!”
Jacqueline Somerset-Caruso pounded on the arm of her chair as she watched the block ships’ wedges come up. As the manager of Ivaldi of Beowulf’s Orbital Works One, she’d long since realized that if the Sollies ever got into Beowulf space her facility and her people had to be priority targets. But like everyone else and Beowulf, she’d known the Sollies were going after Cassandra, not Beowulf.
“Move your arse!” she snarled at the unmanned ships moving with molasses-like slowness to protect the sprawling platform. “Why can’t you—?!”
They’d been jockeyed into position on reation thrusters to prevent the Sollies from spotting them sooner, but if they didn’t get their wedges fully on line in time…
“In position!” Barney Fetukov-Stimson announced over the intercom. “Block ship wedges are up and in position!”
“Yes!” Somerset-Carusopounded the chair arm even harder. “Yes!”
System Defense HQ
City of Columbia