Shadow of Freedom

  And let’s be honest here. Borden’s got a point—Dueñas was luckier than hell I had even four BCs that could get here in time! If we hadn’t, he’d be well and truly stuck in orbit in a leaky skinsuit right now.

  The rest of Battlecruiser Squadron 491 was either dispersed to other star systems or in shipyard hands, but that was par for the course for Frontier Fleet. Its squadrons were always understrength, and there were always too many places they needed to be at the same time. But in this instance, at least, Dueñas truly had lucked out.

  Always assuming Borden’s right about the Manties screwing up, of course, she reminded herself conscientiously. Yet even as she did, she knew she didn’t really think McGillicuddy was wrong.

  Assume Kelvin’s estimate is off, or that they really do have more range than we do, and they get a couple of dozen missiles through our defensive basket before we get close enough to hammer them, she thought. No, make it fifty to be on the safe side. Against four Indefatigables? Hell, even Javelin-range laser heads would hardly scratch our paint!

  No, even if Borden didn’t get everything right, there’s no way these bastards can hope to take me on and walk away from it. They’re truly and royally screwed, whatever happens, and I think I’ll be able to live with being the first Solarian admiral to smack them down the way they deserve.

  “Well,” she said mildly, “since they know we’re here now, I suppose we might as well go ahead and get our wedges up so we can welcome them properly.”

  * * *

  “They’re coming out to meet us, Ma’am,” Abigail Hearns announced three minutes later, as the battlecruisers’ nodes went fully online and a quartet of impeller wedges appeared on the tactical display and began moving away from their original position between Shona Station and DesRon 301.

  “I see them, Guns,” Naomi Kaplan replied almost absently, but Abigail knew that tone of voice. Tristram’s CO was putting on her warrior’s face, settling into predator mode while her brain whirred like another computer.

  “We’ll just have to see how serious they are about this, I suppose,” Kaplan added a moment later, and her smile was hungry. For DesRon 301, and especially for HMS Tristram, the Star Empire of Manticore’s confrontation with the Solarian League was personal.

  Very personal.

  That was as true for Abigail as for anyone else in the ship’s company, and she found herself wondering if that was one of the reasons Lady Gold Peak had picked Captain Zavala’s squadron for this operation in the first place.

  * * *

  Vice Admiral Dubroskaya’s battlecruisers accelerated towards the oncoming Manticoran destroyers at 3.89 KPS squared, eighty percent of their maximum theoretical rate of acceleration. There was no particular hurry, and even at that low accel, they’d move over four million kilometers closer to the Manties before Zavala’s twenty-seven-minute time limit expired. Of course, during that same time the Manties would move forty-two million kilometers closer to Cinnamon. The range between the two forces would be down to “only” 36,700,000 kilometers at that point, and the closing speed between them would give the Solarians’ Javelin anti-ship missiles an effective powered envelope at launch of better than twelve million kilometers.

  Dubroskaya was more willing than Kelvin Diadoro to admit that the Manties tube-launched missiles might have more range than hers, but nothing the size a light cruiser could stow internally was going to have a lot more, she thought as she watched her ships’ icons moving across the display. For that matter, assuming constant accelerations on both sides, it would require only an additional fifteen and a half minutes for her to reach her own powered range of the Manties. Two of her ships—Success and Paladin—were Flight V Indefatigables, with the old SL-11-b launcher, with a forty-five-second launch cycle, but Vanquisher and Inexorable had the newer SL-13 launcher with a cycle time of only thirty-five seconds, and the Manties could probably do a bit better than that. Solarian destroyers and light cruisers certainly could have, given the smaller and lighter missiles with which they were armed, but any internally launched missile with enough range to threaten her squadron at this kind of range was going to have to be at least as large as her own Javelins. That was bound to slow their rate of fire, so call it thirty seconds for the other side’s launch cycle. That meant they’d have time for roughly thirty-one broadsides before she could range on them, but with no more than eight to ten tubes per broadside, that would be only three hundred and ten missiles, maximum, per platform, delivered in combined salvos of no more than fifty each. And as Diadoro had pointed out, at least some of those missiles were going to have to be configured as penetration aids and electronic warfare platforms. Her four battlecruisers mounted eight counter missile tubes and sixteen point defense stations in each broadside, which gave the squadron thirty-two CMs and sixty-four laser clusters against a probable threat of no more than forty shipkillers per launch.

  She smiled coldly, contemplating the plot. No cruiser-sized missile ever built was going to get through that strong a defense in sufficient numbers to stop her before she was able to bring her own tubes into action, and her ships mounted twenty-nine of them in each broadside. Once she got into range, she’d be firing salvos of a hundred and sixteen missiles each…at which point her heavier Javelins would reduce the Manties to drifting wreckage in quick order.

  * * *

  “They don’t seem to be very impressed, Sir,” George Auerbach observed quietly, and Jacob Zavala nodded.

  “It’s been my observation that the best way to impress a Solly is to shoot him squarely between the eyes,” he told his chief of staff, never looking away from the plot. “You wouldn’t want to shoot him anywhere else, though. You might hurt him.”

  Auerbach winced slightly at his CO’s idea of humor, yet he couldn’t deny that Zavala had a point. Still, he was the squadron’s chief of staff, which gave him certain responsibilities.

  “We’ll be coming up on Point Alpha in about ten minutes, Sir. Are you sure you want to go with Sledgehammer?”

  “Doing your job again, I see, George,” Zavala said, turning away from the tactical display to smile briefly at Auerbach.

  “As you say, Sir, it is my job.”

  “I know, George. I know.”

  Zavala reached up to put his hand on the taller Auerbach’s shoulder and squeezed gently. And, he admitted to himself, the chief of staff had a point. No one in DesRon 301 had been particularly happy with Fire Plan Zephyr, the alternative to Sledgehammer, yet he had to concede that it would be more elegant and might—might!—reduce the severity of the incident which was about to occur here in Saltash.

  The problem was that it would also be riskier…and far less personally satisfying.

  I wonder how honest I’ve been with myself about this? Zavala thought. It would be riskier, but how much have I allowed that satisfaction quotient to color my thinking?

  He made himself stand back and consider the alternatives one more time.

  Zephyr would be more in the way of a demonstration of the consequences of unreasonableness than a serious attack: a concentrated salvo of Mark 16s fired from far beyond the Sollies’ effective range to penetrate their defenses without hitting anything, much as Duchess Harrington had done to the Havenites’ Second Fleet with Apollo at First Manticore and Captain Ivanov had done more recently, in Zunker. In theory, a reasonable Solarian commander would realize most of his ships would be pounded into ruin in the fifteen or sixteen minutes it would take him to get into his own range of Zavala’s squadron. At which point, that hypothetical reasonable Solarian commander would conclude he had no alternative but to stand down after all.

  There was, however, a minor weakness in that logic: it presupposed a reasonable Solarian commander. There’d been precious few of those in evidence since Josef Byng had come upon the scene. Worse, if the commander on the other side refused to take the hint, Zavala would have wasted one of his salvos for no return, and a Roland’s limited magazine space was its Achilles’ heel. With only twenty rounds
for each of his tubes, he couldn’t afford to “waste” ammunition. And, still worse, even a Solly who wasn’t totally unreasonable might decide he could survive whatever DesRon 301 could throw at him for fifteen minutes and still get to grips with the destroyers. Zavala didn’t think Dubroskaya could, but his analysis of the only engagement between a Mark 16-armed force and Solarian-designed battlecruisers suggested that they might. Of course, Aivars Terekhov had been equipped with the first-generation Mark 16 at the Battle of Monica, whereas DesRon 301’s birds mounted the latest Mod G laser heads. That probably changed the equation considerably, but there was no way for Zavala to know that.

  Either way, given their closing velocity, the Sollies were going to overfly his own ships before they could decelerate, and any of the battlecruisers which survived the crossing might well escape into hyper after all. Zavala doubted any of them would survive, and even if they did get into their own missile range of DesRon 301 before they were knocked out, a Roland-class destroyer’s missile defenses were actually considerably tougher than an Indefatigable’s, given the superiority of Manticore’s counter missiles, decoys, and ECM.

  But his destroyers were no better armored than any other destroyer or light cruiser. If Zavala was wrong about his defenses’ ability to fend off incoming missiles, and if the Sollies got lucky, it wouldn’t take very many Javelin hits to ruin a Roland’s entire day.

  Besides, he thought grimly, we don’t owe these bastards a frigging thing, and I’m damned if I’m going to put my people at risk trying to keep the arrogant pricks from getting themselves killed!

  It was possible, he conceded, that he wasn’t cut from the right material for a successful diplomat. On the other hand, Countess Gold Peak had known that when she sent him out.

  “I’ve thought about it, George,” he said. “I really have. But no, we’re not going with Zephyr.”

  “Yes, Sir.” Commander Auerbach gazed into the display or a second or two, then shrugged.

  “Actually, Sir, I’m fine with that,” he said.

  * * *

  “Com request from the Manties, Ma’am,” Commander Gervasio Urbanowicz said. Vice Admiral Dubroskaya glanced at him, and the communications officer shrugged. “It’s that Captain Zavala, Ma’am, and I think his signal’s being relayed by whatever he used to speak to the Governor FTL. It’s a standard com laser coming from some kind of platform just ahead of us, at any rate.”

  Dubroskaya glanced at Captain Kiernan.

  “Interesting timing, Ma’am,” Kiernan said. “Maybe McGillicuddy was onto something after all.”

  “I suppose we’re about to find out,” Dubroskaya said, and nodded to Urbanowicz. “Put it on the main display, Gervasio.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  The same officer whose image Governor Dueñas had relayed to Dubroskaya appeared on the master communications display. He looked out of it for a moment, then his eyes narrowed as he saw her image. It had taken less than two seconds for him to react, even though they were still better than two light minutes apart, but at least she’d had enough forewarning to keep her unhappiness at that proof of his FTL capabilities from reaching her eyes or her expression.

  “I am Vice Admiral Oxana Dubroskaya, Solarian League Navy,” she said coldly. “What can I do for you, Captain Zavala?”

  “You might consider standing down and abandoning ship in the next two minutes or so, Admiral Dubroskaya,” he replied, and an icy centipede seemed to sidle along her spine as his unflinching eyes and level tone registered. If this was a man who’d just discovered his bluff had failed, he was one hell of a poker player.

  “And what makes you think I might be interested in doing that, Captain?” she asked. “I believe Governor Dueñas has made the Solarian League’s position abundantly clear. If, however, you’d care to surrender your vessels before I turn them into a drifting debris field, feel free.”

  “You know,” Zavala said coldly, “I’m perpetually astonished by Solarian arrogance. My recon platforms picked up your battlecruisers less than forty-five minutes after my alpha translation, Admiral. That’s how long they’ve been all over you. And I knew not just where you were but what you were better than a half hour before I made turnover, and I’ve got over two hundred gravities of accel in reserve. Think about that. If I’d been worried about what you might do to me, I could’ve been all the way back across the hyper limit and headed home before I even spoke to Governor Dueñas.”

  The centipede seemed to have invited its entire family to keep it company, Dubroskaya reflected.

  “That’s a bold statement, Captain,” she heard her own voice say. “You’ll forgive me if I point out that I have only your word for your remarkable acceleration rate and the amazing capabilities and supernatural stealthiness of those recon drones of yours. Personally, I find things like the Tooth Fairy a bit difficult to believe in.”

  “So should I assume from your skepticism that you think you’ve managed to track my actual recon platforms? You know exactly where each of them is?”

  “Probably not all of them,” Dubroskaya admitted. In fact, they’d managed to localize no more than a dozen of them, and all of those had remained beyond effective engagement range from her battlecruisers. She’d used up twenty or thirty missiles before she’d accepted that, but they were devilishly elusive targets and they kept disappearing back into stealth and zipping away from their plotted positions before her missiles could get there. She felt confident the Manties would have deployed more than that, and her sensor sections had been picking up backscatter from grav pulses which might represent additional platforms or have something to do with the Manties’ obvious ability to transmit broadband data at faster-than-light speeds. Still, there couldn’t be a lot more of them without her people having picked them up.

  “Your stealth systems obviously are better than we’d expected, but I imagine we’ve located the majority of them at least approximately,” she continued, her tone only slightly more confident than she actually felt.

  “Then watch your plot, Admiral,” Zavala invited in that same, cold voice, and Dubroskaya heard Diadoro inhale sharply. Her eyes darted to the main plot as CIC updated it…and an entire globe of icons—thirty of them, at least—appeared around her battlecruisers, keeping pace with them effortlessly at ranges as low as a light-second and a half, as they dropped their stealth. They glittered there, taunting her with their proximity, for at least ten seconds. Then, before her startled fire control officers could lock them up, they vanished mockingly once more. She had no doubt they were all busily streaking away to completely different positions from which to keep her under observation from within their protective cloak of invisibility.

  “Admiral Dubroskaya, I can read the names on your ships’ hulls from here,” Zavala told her as the dusting of icons disappeared from her plot once again, “and I still haven’t shown you all of my platforms. I warn you once again that I knew exactly what your battlecruisers were before I contacted Dueñas and I have real-time data on every move you make. You can abandon ship now and save a lot of lives, or what’s left of your people can abandon what’s left of your ships when I’m done with them. And if you think for one moment that I’ll hesitate to pull the trigger, Admiral, you just reflect that the ships Josef Byng slaughtered at New Tuscany came from this destroyer squadron. I’m giving you a chance to save your people’s lives, which is a hell of a lot more than he gave Commodore Chatterjee or any of our other shipmates. But that’s as far as the ship goes, Admiral, and you now have seventy-five seconds to tell me you’re going to abandon.”

  They locked eyes, and despite her best effort, Dubroskaya couldn’t convince herself he was bluffing. He might be wrong—in fact, he probably was—but he wasn’t bluffing. If she didn’t accept his terms, he would open fire as soon as he was in range.

  But she couldn’t. She simply couldn’t surrender four battlecruisers to only five light cruisers. She couldn’t…and not just because of Dueñas’ orders. Maybe the stories about New Tu
scany, even the wild rumors coming out of Spindle, were true after all. But if they were, that only made it even more imperative that the Navy draw a line somewhere, stop the chain of humiliations and reclaim its honor.

  And I will be damned before I let this arrogant little prick of a captain dictate terms to me, by God, she thought harshly. No. Not this time, Captain Zavala!

  “Captain Diadoro.” She never took her eyes from Zavala’s face and raised her voice enough to be sure the Manticoran could hear her.

  “Yes, Ma’am?”

  “We will maintain this course and acceleration. Prepare to engage the enemy,” Vice Admiral Oxana Dubroskaya said, and cut the com connection.

  * * *

  “Well, so much for that,” Jacob Zavala said, turning away as Dubroskaya’s image disappeared from his own com.

  “Hard to blame her in some ways, I suppose, Sir,” Auerbach said. Zavala arched an eyebrow at him, and the chief of staff smiled crookedly. “All she can have at this point about Spindle are rumors, if that. And it’d take somebody with a lot more imagination than we’ve seen out of any of the Sollies yet to really believe five tincans could take out four battlecruisers on the basis of rumors. For that matter, most of our officers would refuse to believe it if we were looking at it from the Sollies’ perspective. I mean, on the face of it, it’s ridiculous.”

  “I’ll grant you it would take at least a soupçon of imagination,” Zavala acknowledged. “On the other hand, Dubroskaya sure as hell knows about New Tuscany, and she ought to be asking herself just how it was we came out on top there. And she damned sure ought to be asking herself why I’d have kept right on coming if I had any doubt of my ability to take her out.”