"I'm dithering," she said.
"I wouldn't go quite that far," Heather disagreed. "You do seem to have something on your mind, though. So why don't you just go ahead and tell me what it is?"
"It's just—" Jackson began, only to break off. She looked down again, staring at her own hands as her fingers methodically shredded the crust away from her sandwich's bread. Then she inhaled deeply and looked back up, meeting Heather's eyes squarely, and her own gaze was no longer hesitant. This time, it burned.
"It's just that I know I shouldn't, but what I really want is for Admiral Gold Peak to blow every one of those fucking bastards right out of space!" she said fiercely. "I know it's wrong to feel that way. I know most of the people aboard those ships didn't have any voice at all in what happened. I even know that the last thing we need is a war with the Solarian League. But still, I think about what happened to Thor—to all those people—for absolutely no good reason at all, and I don't want the 'right response.' I want one that kills the people who killed my brother and his friends!"
She stopped speaking abruptly, and her lips thinned as she closed her mouth tightly. She looked away for a moment, then made herself smile. It was a tight, hard expression—more of a grimace than a smile, really—but at least she was trying, Heather thought.
"Sorry about that," Jackson said.
"About what?" Heather looked at her quizzically. "Sorry because you want them dead? Don't be ridiculous—of course you want them dead! They killed someone you love, and you're a naval officer. One who chose a combat specialty. So should it really surprise you when your instincts and your emotions want the people who killed your brother to pay for it?"
"But it's not professional," Jackson half-protested. Heather quirked an eyebrow, and the EWO made an impatient, frustrated gesture. "I mean, I ought to be able to stand back and recognize that the best thing all around would be for us to settle this without anyone else getting hurt."
"Oh, don't be so silly!" Heather shook her head. "You do recognize that, that's the reason you're upset with yourself for wanting something else! And if you want me to tell you you're right to be upset with yourself for that, I'm not going to. Now, if you were in a position to dictate the outcome, and you let your emotions push you into a massacre that could have been avoided, then you'd have a problem. But you're not, and I suspect that if you were, you'd still do that 'right thing' you really don't want to happen. In the meantime, I'm sure a young, attractive, female officer of your precocious bent can go out and find all sorts of better things to spend your time regretting!"
"Coming up on the hyper wall, Sir," Lieutenant Bruner announced.
"Very well," Lewis Denton told his astrogator, and glanced at the quartermaster of the watch. "Pass the word, PO."
"Aye, aye, Sir," the quartermaster said, and pressed a button. "All hands," he announced over the ship's com system, "stand by for translation into normal-space."
Thirty-two seconds later, HMS Reprise's crew experienced the familiar but never really describable queasiness of an alpha translation as their ship crossed the hyper wall and the G0 star called Meyers blazed twenty-two light minutes ahead of her. She'd come out almost exactly on the hyper limit, in a piece of virtuoso hyper navigation, and Denton smiled at Bruner.
"Well done!" he said, and the lieutenant smiled back at him as Reprise altered heading slightly, aligning her prow on the spot in space the planet Meyers would occupy in two hours and fifty-three minutes, and went to five hundred gravities of acceleration. Then Denton's smile faded and he turned his attention to Heather McGill.
"Deploy the platforms, Guns," he said.
"Aye, aye, Sir. Deploying the alpha platforms now."
Heather nodded to Jackson, who gave her readouts one last check, then pressed the key. Heather watched red lights flash to green and watched her own panel carefully.
"Alpha patterns have cleared the wedge, Sir," she announced a few moments later. "Stealth is active and deployment appears nominal." She glanced at a time display. "Beta platforms prepped for launch in . . . ten minutes and thirty-one seconds."
"Very good," Denton said again, and as he leaned back in his chair, his earlier smile was not even a memory. His imagination pictured the Ghost Rider platforms speeding outwards, peering at the emptiness around them, and his eyes were hard with the memory of the last Solarian-occupied star system a Manticoran destroyer force had entered.
Not this time, you bastards, he thought coldly. Not this time.
Chapter Fifty
"Hyper footprint, Lieutenant," the sensor tech announced, and Lieutenant Oliver Bristow raised an eyebrow and bent over the tech's shoulder to eyeball the display himself.
Despite its status as the administrative center of the Madras Sector, the Meyers System was scarcely a bustling hive of interstellar commerce. In fact, it was a rare day that saw more than two or three hyper translations, and it was scarcely unheard of for days or even weeks to go by with no new arrivals at all.
Traffic had been a bit more brisk since the fiasco in the Monica System, but most of the "special investigators" and representatives of the Inspector General's office had already come and gone. Most of them hadn't even bothered to unpack, as far as Bristow could tell. The fact that they'd come all the way out to Meyers was sufficient proof of their devotion to duty, and there was no point actually investigating anything, since most of them had been informed of their reports' conclusions before they were dispatched in the first place.
But business had been picking up again for Meyers Astro Control lately. The arrival of Admiral Crandall's task force three weeks earlier had been as much excitement as Bristow had ever seen here in Meyers. Admiral Byng's battlecruiser squadrons had represented more firepower than any system out in the Verge was ever likely to see, but they were dwarfed by Task Force 496. Bristow couldn't think of the last time he'd seen even one actual ship of the wall all the way out here, far less an entire task force of them with appropriate screening elements! He wasn't sure what Admiral Crandall was doing out here, but he was fairly confident she hadn't made the trip just for her health, and that made every unexpected arrival interesting. One never knew which of them might be whatever the hell it was Crandall was waiting for.
"What do you make of it, Coker?" he asked.
"Hard to say from this range, Sir."
Petty Officer 2/c Alan Coker, like Bristow, was Frontier Fleet, and the lieutenant suspected that a Battle Fleet officer like the ones on Byng's staff or aboard Crandall's superdreadnoughts would have found the petty officer's tone lamentably unprofessional. Bristow didn't. Which probably had a little to do with the fact that he assumed that, unlike most Battle Fleet officers he could name, Petty Officer Coker could actually find his own posterior if he got to use both hands.
"We've been telling them for months that we need to replace the arrays covering that sector," the petty officer continued more than a little sourly, "and resolution's not anything I'd care to screen home about. If I had to guess, though, I'd say it's probably a destroyer from the impeller signature. Might be a light cruiser—some of the piss pot 'navies' out here still have some awfully small 'cruisers' in inventory—but I don't think it's anything bigger than that, anyway."
"A light cruiser?" Bristow straightened slowly, scratching one eyebrow.
"Maybe, Sir. Like I say, though, it's more likely a destroyer," Coker replied, and Bristow nodded.
"Keep an eye on it. Let me know as soon as it squawks its transponder."
"Yes, Sir."
Bristow patted him absently on the shoulder, folded his hands behind himself, and began to pace slowly and thoughtfully back and forth across the limited width of the compartment. Coker was right about the condition of the arrays in question, but the petty officer was also a past master at getting balky equipment to do his bidding, and he had a good eye for ship IDs. So if he said that was a destroyer, it probably was a destroyer. Which was interesting, since so far as Bristow knew, the only Solarian destroyers in the sector were all either
off with Admiral Byng or already right here in-system.
* * *
"Permission to enter the bridge, Captain?"
Gregor O'Shaughnessy might have had his odd moments of disagreement with the Star Kingdom's military, but it was clear he'd learned the rudiments of naval courtesy along the way, and he was always careful to observe protocol aboard ship. It wasn't what Denton had expected out of someone with his prickly reputation, and the commander had found himself wondering if perhaps O'Shaughnessy was so careful because of that history of his. Whether that was the case or not, though, he'd gone out of his way—successfully—to be a pleasant passenger on the almost six-week voyage from Spindle to Meyers.
"Permission granted, Mr. O'Shaughnessy," Denton said now, and pointed at the chair at Heather McGill's left elbow. It would have been occupied by Ensign Varislav, the junior assistant tactical officer, at battle stations, but it was empty at the moment.
"Have a seat," he invited.
"Thank you, Captain."
O'Shaughnessy crossed to the indicated bridge chair and settled into it, careful to keep his hands well away from the console in front of it or the chair arm keypads. Heather turned her head to smile at him, and he smiled back. The ATO's place was where Commander Denton normally parked him when he visited the bridge, and Heather had gotten to know the analyst rather better than she'd ever expected to.
She'd also locked out the control pads he was so carefully avoiding, though she had no intention of telling him so. First, because she didn't want to risk rubbing in any perceived distrust in his ability to keep his hands out of trouble, and, second, because there was something rather touching—almost endearing—about how cautious he actually was.
She turned back to her own displays, watching the expanding hemisphere covered by her Ghost Rider platforms. As Reprise proceeded deeper into the system and the platforms closed in astern of her, watching her back, that hemisphere would become a complete sphere, but at the moment, CIC's attention—and Heather's—was focused on the leading edge of the surveillance zone.
Reprise's hyper translation lay thirty-five minutes in the past. The destroyer's closing velocity relative to the system primary had risen to 20,296 KPS, and she'd traveled just under thirty-two million kilometers farther in-system. In that same interval, the Ghost Rider platforms, loping along at the low (for them) acceleration of only five thousand gravities in order to stay stealthy, had already moved three minutes past their turnover time. They were over sixty million kilometers ahead of the destroyer, with their velocity back down to a mere 85,413 KPS, which also meant they were only seventy-three million kilometers from Meyers, and four light-minutes was close enough for their passive instrumentation to begin picking up more detailed information.
She waited patiently, since Commander Denton had decided they would rely on directed lasers rather than the platforms' FTL capability. As a result, anything Heather saw would be just over four minutes old by the time it reached her. Not that she expected the delay to have any significant consequences, and it wasn't as if anyone—
An unanticipated icon blinked suddenly into existence on her display. Another one followed, and another, and the data sidebar began to flicker and change.
"Captain," she heard her own voice say calmly, "I'm picking up some unexpected readings. A lot of them."
"You're confident about this, Captain?"
"Yes, Mr. O'Shaughnessy, I am," Lewis Denton said, speaking rather more coolly to Baroness Medusa's personal representative than was his wont.
"I'm sorry," O'Shaughnessy said quickly. "I didn't mean to sound as if I were challenging the competency of any of your personnel, and particularly not Lieutenant McGill's. It's just that I'm having trouble wrapping my own mind around the implications. I guess it comes under the heading of asking redundant questions while I spar for time to get my brain working again."
"No apology necessary," Denton said in a more normal tone. "And I don't blame you. I never expected to see something like this out in the Verge, either. And just between you and me, I'm not very happy to be seeing it now."
"Amazing how we're thinking the same thing, isn't it?" O'Shaughnessy replied, and Denton snorted harshly, then turned back to the updated tactical plot.
Reprise had stopped accelerating and started coasting ballistically twenty-six minutes earlier. During that interval, her recon platforms had reached their destinations, spreading out to englobe the planet Meyers at a range of barely fifteen light-seconds. At that distance, there could be no mistake. There really were seventy-one Solarian superdreadnoughts, accompanied by sixteen battlecruisers, twelve heavy cruisers, twenty-three light cruisers, and eighteen destroyers orbiting the planet.
Not to mention three repair ships, what have to be a couple of dozen stores ships, and what looks like a pair of straight ammunition carriers. It would appear New Tuscany isn't the only star system out this way benefitting from Battle Fleet's attention of late, he thought ironically.
"May I ask a question, Mr. O'Shaughnessy?" he said.
"Captain, you can ask anything you like." The analyst turned to face him, his expression serious. "Believe me, you're cleared for anything you think you need to know in a situation like this one."
"Thank you, Sir. I appreciate that. What I was wondering was whether or not any one's come up with a better theory for how a Battle Fleet admiral ended up in command of a Frontier Fleet task group?"
"Given what we know about Byng, it didn't just happen by the luck of the draw," O'Shaughnessy said grimly. "Byng hates Frontier Fleet. Not as much as he hates us, maybe, but badly enough. He's got the connections to avoid an assignment like this one without even raising a sweat, too. And that completely ignores the fact that Frontier Fleet must've screamed bloody murder when it found out it was expected to hand a command like that over to anyone from Battle Fleet, far less Byng. Somebody with a lot of influence had to get him nominated for the command, and he had to want to accept it."
"That's pretty much the way I figured it already," Denton said. "The reason I asked is that I have to find myself doubting that these people"—he pointed at the display with his chin—"just happen to be here by the luck of the draw, either. I think there's a connection between them and Byng. In fact, the evidence seems to be screaming pretty loudly that we're looking at a setup."
"I'm very much afraid I agree with you," O'Shaughnessy said heavily. "I wish to God I didn't, and I suppose there might be some other explanation for it,. But if there is, I haven't been able to think of what it might be yet, either."
"I don't think Byng fired on Commodore Chatterjee by accident or in a panic." Denton's voice was hard, harsh-edged. "Not anymore. I don't know who's behind it, although I'd be willing to hazard a few guesses based on what's already happened here in the Quadrant, but someone wants us in a war with the League. And these people"—another quick, angry jut of his chin at the master plot—"are the hammer that's supposed to make sure it's a short, nasty war."
"We probably don't want to wed ourselves too immovably to that conclusion, Captain. I say that purely as a professional analyst who's gone a bit too far out on a limb upon occasion only to see it sawed off behind him. Having cast my professional sheet anchor to windward, however, I think you're absolutely right. But unlike you, I don't have any idea of just how bad the military odds really are, given these people's presence, and I'd like to get one."
"Against what we've got in the Quadrant right now?" Denton raised an eyebrow at him, and he nodded. "Not good," the commander said. "In fact, that's understating the situation fairly significantly. In technical terms, I believe the phrase would be 'We're screwed.' "
"I was afraid that was what you were going to say."
"Don't get me wrong, Mr. O'Shaughnessy. We could hurt them, probably even pretty badly, but no way in the galaxy could we stop them if they're prepared to keep coming. The battlecruisers and the small fry—phfffft!" Denton snapped his fingers. "But those big bastards are something else entirely. We could prob
ably rip hell out of them as long as the Mark 23 pods hold out, but it would take a lot of hits—even with the Mark 23—to kill one of them, and we don't have an unlimited supply of the pods. Worse than that, we don't have any podnoughts. That means we can only carry and deploy pods externally, which makes them a lot more vulnerable and tactically less flexible. They'd be at their most effective in a purely defensive deployment, with lots of shipboard control links to manage them, but to make that work, we'd have to figure out where we needed them far enough in advance to get them—and enough ships to control them in worthwhile salvos—there before the Sollies came calling, and that wouldn't exactly be a trivial challenge.
"It's more likely we'd find ourselves having to face up to them without a powerful pod reserve—especially if we decide we have to insure the security of Spindle and dump most of the pods there. If that happens, we'll have to use mobile units to cover the Quadrant's other systems, and that means nothing heavier than a Nike or a Saganami-C. And that means using primarily whatever we can fire from our internal tubes . . . which sure as hell doesn't mean Mark 23s.
"From what I've heard about the new Mark 16 warhead mods, we could probably get in some good licks even against wallers, once the pods are gone, but I don't think we could do enough to knock them out. Certainly not in large enough numbers to do us any good. And that's assuming they didn't just decide to split up into smaller task units and go after each of the Quadrant's star systems individually—which, by the way, would require us to parcel out everything we've got, not just the Mark 23 pods—on a penny-packet basis if we wanted to try to give some cover to the Quadrant as a whole. But our only real chance of inflicting significant damage on wallers would be to stay concentrated and hammer them with everything we've got from outside their effective powered envelope. Splitting up into smaller units to defend multiple targets would hurt us more than it would hurt them."
"What about the Lynx Terminus?"
"That's probably another story, Sir. For one thing, most of the forts are on-line now, and each of them is a hell of a lot tougher than any piece-of-crap Solly superdreadnought ever built. And for another thing, Home Fleet is right on the other side of the terminus. Trust me. If these people want to dance with Duchess Harrington after what she did to the Peeps at Manticore, they're toast."