"I've noted your concerns, Captain. On the other hand, we have twenty-two ships, seventeen of them battlecruisers, to only nineteen, total, Manties. Admittedly, their 'battlecruisers' are bigger than ours—probably tougher, too, for that matter—but each of ours has as many missile launchers as one of theirs, and they only have six, and their heavy cruisers only have twenty-tube broadsides! That gives us a significant advantage in tubes and an even bigger one in throw weight. And, with all due respect, I'm not prepared to discount intelligence appreciations formulated by analysts with access to all the information coming to us on the basis of appreciations generated independently, with partial information, by officers who—justifiably, I might add—have every reason to adopt pessimistic assumptions in order to avoid underestimating a potential enemy's capabilities. Granted, their acceleration rates are higher than Intelligence predicted, but that single point aside, there is absolutely no evidence, aside from apocryphal accounts, that the Manties have the capabilities you're ascribing to them, and I cannot in good conscience permit a third-rate neobarb navy with delusions of grandeur to even attempt to dictate terms to the Solarian League Navy. The precedent would be disastrous from any foreign policy perspective, and the insult to the honor of the Fleet would be intolerable."
"Sir, I'm not suggesting you cave in to their demands. I'm simply suggesting that it may be time to try negotiating a stand down on both sides. They say they've sent a diplomatic note to Meyers. All right, what if we were to refuse to surrender our ships to them but agreed to return to orbit and maintain the status quo here in New Tuscany while we sent a dispatch boat back to Meyers to seek Commissioner Verrochio's instructions? If they accept, then the decision of how we respond to their demands legitimately becomes a political decision to be made by the highest local political authority. And if this Gold Peak accepts, it would also give Commissioner Verrochio an opportunity to dispatch reinforcements in the event that—as would almost certainly be the case—he decides that we are correct to reject her demands. At the very least, it would allow us to play for time while—"
"Any negotiations such as you're suggesting would immediately be seen as a sign of weakness by Gold Peak," Byng interrupted. "In my opinion, she's running a colossal bluff—in fact, that's probably the reason she's accelerating so hard; to convince us that all the wild stories about Manticore's 'technical superiority' are true—and I'm not going to encourage her to believe it's working. For that matter, even assuming for a moment that they have the weapons capability you're worrying about, she'd have to be not simply a lunatic but stupid beyond belief to pull the trigger on us! I don't care what kind of magic bullets they've got over there, Captain. Hell, they could have every single thing in Commodore Thurgood's most pessimistic assessment! That doesn't change the fact that it's the Solarian League they're fucking around with, and if they fire on Solarian battlecruisers in neutral space, they really will have an act of war on their hands. Do you seriously think any bunch of neobarbs is going to deliberately create that kind of situation? Especially when they're already at war with another bunch of neobarbs who can't wait to wipe them out?"
"I didn't say it would be smart of them, Sir. I only said they may have the capability to do it. And, respectfully, Sir, if we give them what they initially demanded, it will be an act of war against the League, anyway. It could—and should—be construed that way, at any rate. They're obviously willing to risk that, so what makes you assume they aren't willing to risk a different act of war?"
"Captain," Byng said frostily, "it's obvious you and I are not in agreement. Accordingly, I have to ask you whether or not our disagreement runs deep enough that you are unwilling to execute my orders?"
"Admiral," Mizawa said, his voice equally frigid, "I am prepared to execute any lawful order I may receive. With respect, however, one of my functions as your flag captain is to offer my best judgment and advice."
"I realize that. If, however, you are sufficiently . . . uncomfortable with my proposed course of action, then I will relieve you—without prejudice, of course—of your present duties."
Their eyes locked through the electronic medium of the ship's communications system. Tension hummed and vibrated between them for several seconds, but then Mizawa shook his head. It was a jerky gesture, hard with his own suppressed anger.
"Admiral, if you choose to relieve me, that's clearly your privilege. I do not, however, request relief."
"Very good, Captain. But in that case, I have other matters which require my attention. Byng, clear."
"Still no sign of sanity breaking out over there, I see," Michelle murmured to Captain Lecter.
Twenty-five minutes had passed since her second message to Byng, and the Solarian battlecruisers' velocity had increased to 7,192 KPS. Her own ships' velocity was up to over thirty thousand kilometers per second, giving them a closing velocity of better than thirty-seven thousand KPS, and the range was down to a little over one hundred and thirteen million kilometers.
"Not so anyone would notice, at any rate," her chief of staff agreed equally quietly. The two of them stood before the master plot, gazing into its depths. Around them, Artemis' flag deck was quiet, almost hushed, as the men and women manning their stations concentrated on their duties.
"You know," Lecter continued, "I've studied our dossier on Byng until my eyes ache, and I still can't figure out how much of him is bluster, how much is raw arrogance, and how much of it is simply sheer stupidity." She shook her head. "Do you think he really wants to fight, or is he just going to play chicken with us while he tries to break past and hyper out?"
"I don't know, and it doesn't matter," Michelle said grimly. "Our orders are clear enough, and so are the alternatives I spelled out to him. And I don't have any intention of waiting until he fires first."
"Excuse me, Ma'am," Dominica Adenauer said, and Michelle turned towards her, eyebrows raised.
"CIC's just picked up a status change," the operations officer said. "The Sollies have deployed some sort of passive defensive system."
"Such as?" Michelle asked, crossing to Adenauer's console and gazing down at the ops officer's displays.
"Hard to say, really, Ma'am. Whatever it is, Max and I don't think they've brought it fully on-line yet. What it looks like is a variation on the tethered decoy concept. From what the recon platforms can tell us, each of their ships has just deployed a half-dozen or so captive platforms on either flank. They have to have a defensive function, and I don't think they're big enough to carry the sort of on-board point defense stations our Keyhole platforms do. I don't want to get too overconfident, but it looks to me like they've got to be decoys, and we already know Solly stealth technology is pretty damned good. If their decoys are equally good, this is probably going to degrade our accuracy considerably, especially at extended ranges."
"Where is Apollo when you need it?" Michelle asked half-whimsically.
"When you say 'degrade our accuracy considerably,' do you have any sort of guesstimate for just how considerably we're talking about?" Lecter asked.
"Not really, Ma'am," Tersteeg replied for both of them. "Until we've seen it in action—and confirmed that it actually is a decoy system, for that matter—there's no way we could give you any real estimate."
Lecter grimaced, although the response was hardly a surprise, and looked at Michelle.
"Do you want to let the range drop a little lower than we'd originally planned, Ma'am?"
"I don't know." Michelle frowned and tugged at the lobe of her right ear as she considered Lecter's question.
ONI and BuWeaps had evaluated the weapons aboard the Solarian-built battlecruisers captured intact at Monica. The energy weapons, although individually smaller and lighter than was current Manticoran practice, had been quite good. The passive defensive systems had been good, as well, although not up to Manticoran standards, but the missiles—and counter-missiles—had been another story entirely, and the software support for the ships' sensors had been sadly out of date by those
same standards. For that matter, the sensors themselves were little, if any, better than the hardware the RMN had deployed at the beginning of the First Havenite War, twenty-odd T-years before.
There was some division of opinion among the analysts as to whether or not the prize ships' electronics reflected the best the Sollies had. The standard Solarian policy for supplying military vessels to allies and dependencies had always been to provide them with downgraded, "export versions" of critical weapons technologies, which suggested the same thing had been done with the battlecruisers intended for Roberto Tyler. Except, of course, that those battlecruisers had come from recent service with Frontier Fleet, which should have meant they carried close to first-line, current-generation technology, and a bunch of outlaws like the ones at Technodyne probably wouldn't have gone to the expense of replacing that technology with less capable versions for what was already a thoroughly illegal transaction.
For the moment, BuWeaps had decided to split the difference and assume that everything they'd seen from Monica represented a minimum benchmark. The existence of the defensive system Adenauer and Tersteeg had just described—assuming their analysis was accurate—suggested that that decision had been wise, since none of the ships at Monica had been equipped with anything like it. But that also suggested it would probably be unwise to rely too heavily on the demonstrated range and acceleration rates of the anti-ship missiles those battlecruisers had carried, as well.
Those missiles' powered range envelope from rest generated a maximum range of just over 5,900,000 km, with a terminal velocity of 66,285 KPS. Given their current closing velocity, that equated to a range at launch of a shade better than 12,680,000 kilometers, whereas the Mark 23 had a range at launch of 85,930,000 given the same geometry. Even the Mark 16 had a range at launch of well over 42 million kilometers under current conditions. So even if she assumed Byng's battlecruisers carried missiles twice as capable as those captured at Monica, she still had better than three times his maximum powered range on her Mark 16s, much less her Mark 23s.
"What will our closing velocity be at forty million klicks?" she asked Adenauer, and the ops officer punched numbers.
"Approximately five-four-point-seven thousand KPS, Ma'am. We'll be there in roughly twenty-six minutes."
"Um."
Michelle pulled harder on her ear lobe while she did the math. At that velocity, the Sollies would cross through her Mark 16s' range to her ships in about thirteen minutes. At one launch every eighteen seconds her shipboard launchers could fire forty-three missiles each in that timeframe, and she had six hundred and twenty tubes aboard her Nikes and Saganami-Cs, alone. That worked out to better than twenty-six thousand missiles, which she suspected—decoys or no—would be a fairly significant case of overkill.
On the other hand, the Mark 23s from the pods limpeted to the exterior of her ships' hulls would have a powered envelope at launch of well over ninety-six million kilometers, assuming the target's acceleration held constant, which would let her she could open fire with almost fifty million kilometers sooner. Her accuracy would be lower, but . . .
"What will our closing velocity be at eighty million klicks?"
"Four-six-point-zero-five thousand KPS," Adenauer replied. "We'll reach that range in almost exactly thirteen minutes."
"Given that geometry, what do our Mark 23 envelopes look like?"
"Assuming constant target acceleration, a two-drive burn would give us . . ." Adenauer punched numbers ". . . just over four-six-point-one million klicks at launch. An all-up burn would make it about nine-one-four million."
"Thank you."
Michelle folded her hands behind her and walked slowly back across to the main plot to stand gazing into its depths. Lecter followed her, standing quietly at her right shoulder, waiting while she thought. After what seemed like hours but probably wasn't actually more than a handful of seconds, Michelle turned her head to look at Lecter.
"We'll send Byng one more message," she said. "That's it. If he doesn't stop this horse shit after that, we'll go with William Tell at forty-five million klicks."
For a moment, it looked as if Lecter were going to say something, but then she simply nodded and contented herself with a simple, "Yes, Ma'am," and Michelle smiled faintly.
It is sort of a balancing act, isn't it, Cindy? she thought dryly. Unless I'm prepared to go ahead and kill all of them, anyway—which, while tempting, would probably upset Beth just a smidgen, given the foreign policy implications and all—firing at that range is going to tell the Sollies a lot about our capabilities, and that could very well come under the heading of a Bad Thing. If this situation turns as nasty as I expect it to, given the fact that Byng is obviously even stupider than I thought, I'm sure the Admiralty would prefer to keep them ignorant of the Mark 23's real reach for as long as we can. But I'll still be holding over twenty million klicks of range in reserve, and the best way to keep this situation from going completely south on everyone is to finish up with the lowest possible casualties here in New Tuscany.
In her more pessimistic moments, she was certain the situation was already beyond retrieval, but she wasn't ready to simply go ahead and surrender to the inevitable despite the fact that, in many ways, the wholesale massacre of Byng's entire force would actually be a far simpler proposition. Instead, she was faced with the problem of convincing the idiots to surrender before she had to kill them, and that was far trickier. If she could ever break through the typically Solarian assumption of inevitable superiority, then Byng—or his successor in command, at least—might prove more amenable. That was the real reason she'd come in at such a high rate of acceleration. She wanted them thinking about that, wondering what other technological advantages she might have tucked up her sleeve. And if she had to fire on them at all, then the greater the range at which she did so, the more likely they were to recognize how outclassed they were before it was too late . . . for them.
And there's always the other factor, she thought grimly. If we open fire at sixty million and they don't begin decelerating immediately, it would take over twelve hours for us to match velocities with them. And they'd be across the hyper limit and into hyper in an hour and forty minutes. So if we can't convince them to stop and begin immediately decelerating themselves, I'll have no choice but to take them all out before they pull out of range.
She glanced at the time display, considering when to send her next—and final—message to Josef Byng.
"Admiral Byng," the face of the woman on the com display might have been chipped from obsidian, and her voice was harder still, "I have warned you twice of the consequences of failing to comply with my requirements. If you do not immediately reverse your heading at maximum deceleration, preparatory to reentering New Tuscany orbit, as per my directions, I will open fire. You have five minutes from the receipt of this message. There will be no additional warnings."
Byng glared at the display, but he was through talking to the impertinent bitch. Maybe she did have better missiles than he did, but they couldn't be enough better to back up her preposterous threats, and with Halo and the other recent upgrades in his anti-missile defenses, the odds were overwhelming that most of his ships would survive to break past her, no matter what she did. She simply didn't have enough tubes for any other outcome. And once his task force was across the hyper limit, running free and clear, her days—and the days of her wretched little "Star Kingdom"—would be numbered. There could be only one response from the Solarian League Navy for something like this, and Manticore couldn't possibly stave off the vengeful avalanche headed its way.
"Deploy the pods," Michelle said quietly, watching the time display tick down towards Byng's deadline.
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Deploying pods now," Dominica Adenauer replied, and the task group's acceleration rate dropped as the pods which had been tractored tight against its ships' hulls moved beyond the perimeter of their impeller wedges.
The battlecruisers' Keyhole platforms were already deployed, but the Keyholes' m
ass was low enough that the Nikes' acceleration curves hadn't been significantly affected. Deploying the missile pods, still tractored to their motherships but clear of those motherships' sidewalls (and wedges), was another matter entirely, and the task group's acceleration dropped from six hundred and three gravities to only five hundred and eighty.
"Flip us, Sterling," Michelle told Commander Casterlin.
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Reversing heading now."
The entire task group flipped, putting its sterns towards Byng's battlecruisers and beginning to decelerate. Even with the pods deployed, Michelle's command had an advantage of almost a hundred gravities, and the rate of closure began to slow.
"Execute William Tell on the tick, Dominica."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am." Commander Adenauer depressed a key, locking in the firing commands and sequence, then sat back. "William Tell enabled and locked, Ma'am."
"Very good," Michelle said, and leaned back in her command chair, watching the last few seconds speed into eternity.
Josef Byng sat in his own command chair, watching another time display count down towards zero, and his belly was a knotted lump of tension.
Captain Mizawa had tried one last time to convince him to lie down, like a dog rolling belly-up to show its submission. Now they were no longer speaking, for there was nothing to speak about.
It was easy for Mizawa to put forward his arguments, Byng thought resentfully. Mizawa wouldn't be the one censored for cowardice. Mizawa wouldn't be the first Solarian flag officer in history to surrender to an enemy force. Mizawa wouldn't be known as the officer who'd rolled over for a batch of neobarbs without firing even a single shot.
It's not just "easy" for him, a voice said in Byng's brain. It's also his way of making sure I'll never be in a position to hammer him like the disloyal, traitorous bastard he is. Well, it's not going to happen, Captain—trust me! It's not going to be that simple for you.
Despite his fury at Mizawa, he'd come to the conclusion that there probably was at least a little something to the flag captain's arguments. Oh, there was no way the Manties had the magic missiles Mizawa was yammering about, but they could have substantially better missiles than Intelligence had suggested. If they did, it was entirely likely he was going to lose at least a few ships on his way out of the system. That would be regrettable, of course, but with the recent upgrades in the SLN missile defense and so many targets to spread their fire between, it was extremely unlikely that the Manties could get through with enough missiles to cripple more than a handful—half a dozen at the most. And they were only Frontier Fleet units. They could be replaced relatively easily, and once the survivors were past the Manties, the decisiveness of Byng's actions would be obvious. As the admiral who'd cut his way past the Manties to carry home word of their unprovoked attack on the Solarian League, he'd be immunized against the sort of wild allegations Mizawa had threatened to make about events in New Tuscany. In fact, he'd be well positioned to crush Mizawa, after all, and he couldn't deny that he'd take a sweetly savage satisfaction when the time came.