She’d told herself it wasn’t Ramaalas’s fault. And, given the sheer depth of the crap in which the SLN had found itself since Josef Byng’s New Tuscan stupidity, the last thing anyone could afford was for her to create any avoidable friction with her new chief of staff. None of which had made her happy to see him aboard SLNS Foudroyant, her battlecruiser flagship.
It had helped that, also like Lamizana, Ramaalas was smart and tactful. That wasn’t enough to endear him to his Battle Fleet fellows, but it helped, and he and Isotalo had established a firm mutual respect.
“It’s inconvenient, Kimmo,” she acknowledged now. “But I suggest we look upon it as an opportunity, not a liability.” Ramaalas cocked his head at her, and she showed her teeth briefly. “I still don’t know that I accept all the horror stories Maleen and Bart have been telling us about Manty missile ranges,” she went on, twitching her head at Lamizana and Rosiak, “but I’m not about to assume they’re wrong, either. The bastards’ve sure as hell been kicking the crap out of us with something! But however good their missiles are, we’ve got a hundred thousand pods worth of improved Cataphracts of our own just aboard the colliers. They can’t possibly match the depth of our magazines, and an engagement way out here won’t play to their strengths the way one inside the hyper-limit would. The question in my mind is whether they’re here on their own or if they’re here to hold the door open for someone else?”
“You’re thinking they may have staged through Prime en route to Agueda, Ma’am?” Ramaalas said.
“It would make sense, given this wormhole-seizure strategy of theirs,” Isotalo pointed out. “And if that’s what’s happening, kicking them off the terminus and keeping them off it could play hell with their logistics. It might even force whoever they sent to Agueda to fall back on Manticore the long way.” She smiled nastily. “That’d take their entire force out of action for almost two T-months without anyone even firing a shot.”
“Agreed, Ma’am.” Ramaalas nodded. “But whatever else happens, they’re bound to send a dispatch boat back through the wormhole to Ajay.”
“That’s true,” Isotalo conceded. “I don’t know how much good that will do them, though. I expect we’ll get a read on that shortly. If they’ve got enough firepower in Ajay to give us a fight, they’ll either call it forward to support their pickets here, or else they’ll fall back through the terminus to concentrate their forces if we come through after them.”
Which, she added silently, I have no intention whatsoever of doing. The last thing I need is to send the task force through in a wormhole assault against a prepared defense!
She thought about that as she contemplated the main plot. The range to the Manties was just over five light-minutes. At this distance, all Foudroyant’s onboard sensors could see were the enemy’s impeller signatures. The recon platforms speeding ahead of TF 1027 would begin providing better data in another twenty minutes or so, but she was unhappily certain the Manties already had that “better data” on her own command. ONI had been forced to accept that the Royal Manticoran Navy and its allies truly did have an FTL com capability—with sufficient bandwidth for recon drones—over at least intra-system ranges. It seemed unlikely any Manty commander would allow herself to be caught with her trousers down, so there was undoubtedly a shell of sensor platforms exactly like that spread out around the wormhole.
“Time to the terminus, Magumo?” she asked without looking away from the plot.
“We’re ninety-four million kilometers out, Ma’am,” Commodore Magumo Saintula, her astrogator, replied. “At current acceleration, we’d make turnover for a zero-zero intercept in eighty-four minutes. Velocity at turnover would be one-eight-point-six thousand KPS.”
“Thank you,” she said.
That was the geometry for an n-space approach, of course. They could have micro-jumped the three hundred-odd light-seconds through hyper in a fraction of the same time, and if the Manties chose to stand and fight on this side of the wormhole, she suspected there’d be quite a few micro-jumps in the not-too-distant future. Astrogation was more than a little dicey on short-range jumps, though, and she didn’t plan on making any of them she didn’t have to. Besides, a normal-space approach would give Rosiak, Lamizana, and their light-speed-limited drones more time to pry loose additional tactical data.
She studied the plot’s bland icons for another fifteen or twenty seconds, then shrugged.
“In that case, I imagine we’ll be finding out what they have in mind in a couple of hours,” she observed. She clasped her hands behind her, turned from the plot, and walked to her command chair. “In the meantime, Bart,” she continued, “let’s get the Huskies deployed and open the intervals between the task groups. Put Santini in the van, but I want at least three light-seconds between the groups.”
Rosiak looked at her and she smiled.
“If they decide to stand and fight, I’m more than willing to help them waste as much ammunition as possible,” she said. “So at the same time you’re passing the order to open the intervals, inform Tsukahara, Bonrepaux, and Santini that I want their best astrogators—I don’t care whether they’re on the flagships or somewhere else in the group—ready to compute the tightest micro-jumps they can give me if I ask for them.”
Rosiak’s eyes narrowed. Then he nodded with a smile of his own.
“Understood, Ma’am,” he said.
* * *
“Sir, CIC is reporting something…odd,” Commander Wozniak said.
Commodore Lessem turned from his conversation with Commander Thúri, raising an index finger at the chief of staff in a “hold onto that thought” gesture.
“What sort of ‘odd,’ Tom?”
“It looks almost like four or five thousand recon drones, Sir.”
“Four or five thousand drones?” Lessem’s eyebrows rose, and Wozniak nodded.
“That’s what it looks like…almost, Sir, but I don’t think it’s what it is.”
Lessem crossed the flag bridge and looked over Wozniak’s shoulder at the ops officer’s display. Given the scale of the plot, the impeller signatures of the “drones” Wozniak had reported formed a sort of haze around the deploying Solarian battlecruisers rather than registering as distinct point sources. A digital sidebar spun upward as the sensors aboard the Ghost Rider platforms keeping an eye on the intruders—well, he supposed, the most recently arrived intruders, if he wanted to be fair about it—detected and plotted the blossoming signatures.
“You’re right,” he said. “They can’t be recon drones, not staying that tight in around their formation. I don’t know what else they could be, though.”
“You can’t really tell from the display, Sir, but CIC says they’re definitely forming constellations around the battlecruisers. Whatever they are, there are approximately a hundred of them associated with each battlecruiser. I guess they could be some kind of missile defense—maybe they’ve come up with new decoy platforms to replace or supplement Halo and they’re establishing as dense a pattern of them as they can around our priority targets—but that doesn’t feel right, either. Whatever else they are, though, they aren’t stealthy enough for reconnaissance platforms. We’re actually picking up a sniff of them on Clas Fleming’s shipboard sensors, even at this range. We’re not resolving individual signatures clearly—not the way Ghost Rider is—but we can see them, and we shouldn’t be seeing even Solarian drones at this range.”
“Which doesn’t even count the fact that there’s no sane reason to launch recon drones and then keep them tied in that tight to your ships,” Lessem said, nodding his head in agreement. He stood gazing at the display for ten or fifteen seconds, hands clasped behind him and lips pursed in thought, then shrugged.
“Well, I imagine we’ll find out what they’re up to in due time. And at least any discovering we have to do is going to happen outside anyone’s hyper-limit.”
* * *
“Commodore Quigley’s on station, Ma’am,” Rear Admiral Rosiak said.
&nbs
p; “Thank you, Bart.”
Jane Isotalo nodded as she leaned back in her command chair and studied the master plot. Millicent Quigley’s TG 1027.4 was the real reason she was prepared to spend missiles like water against a Manty squadron outside a limit. Unless she somehow managed to close to a much shorter range than the opposing commander was likely to allow, she didn’t expect to kill very many of the Manties—not when they could duck into hyper to avoid her fire. No doubt the Manty CO would be willing to let her waste a lot of missiles trying for kills, and under normal circumstances, Isotalo would have been concerned about the sorts of ammunition expenditures involved. In this case, however, Quigley’s three 7,500,000-ton Voyager-class freighters gave her rather deeper magazines than usual.
Unfortunately, the Voyagers were part of the Navy’s TUFT fleet: civilian vessels designated to be “Taken Up From Trade” in an emergency. The Federal Government subsidized the construction of TUFT units, which gave it first call on them if the Navy decided to call in its markers, but they weren’t designed to military-grade specifications and the Voyagers were a civilian design. They were unarmed and carried no active defenses. They were also sluggish compared to warships their size, which was why she’d moved Quigley’s freighters, the Atlas-class fleet repair vessel Hercules, and their escorting light cruisers and destroyers, to a position a half million kilometers astern of Vice Admiral Tsukahara’s TG 1027.3, her trailing group of battlecruisers. That gave them more time to dodge if anything nasty came their way, but it left them close enough to deploy additional Huskies for Tsukahara’s battlecruisers if they were needed.
She glanced at the plot’s sidebar. TF 1027 had made turnover eight and a half minutes ago. The range had dropped to thirty-eight million kilometers, and the closing velocity toward the motionless Manties had fallen to 16,704 KPS.
Seventy-five minutes to a zero-zero with the terminus, she thought. Wonder what’s going through their heads over there?
* * *
“Goodness me,” Sir Martin Lessem murmured. “I do believe those people want the wormhole.”
“Do you really, Sir?” Commander Thúri asked. Lessem glanced at him and nodded. “What was your first indication, Sir?”
Lessem snorted in amusement, although, truth to tell, watching that many battlecruisers advancing towards his command wasn’t the most amusing thing he’d ever done. Especially given their acceleration rate. The Ghost Rider platforms had confirmed class IDs on the Sollies, and even at standard peacetime safety margins, the Indefatigable and Nevada-class battlecruisers could have produced an acceleration of 3.83 KPS². They were showing only 3.68 KPS², however—fifteen gravities lower than their eighty-percent settings. That might not seem like a vast difference, but it had suggested—and the platforms had confirmed—just what those mystery “recon drone” impellers signatures were all about.
Each of the incoming battlecruisers was towing a chain of missile pods outside its wedge, and the pods in question appeared nowhere in Tom Wozniak’s databases on enemy capabilities.
It was tempting to assume they represented a jury rigged lash-up, improvised because of the Sollies’ technological inferiority. Come to that, that might actually be accurate. But those pods looked suspiciously like the “donkeys” Shannon Foraker had devised for the Republic of Haven Navy before the Republic’s attack on Manticore. There were far too many of them for the number of ships on his display to be towing on individual tractors, and the clustered deployment patterns strongly suggested something more like the donkey than Manticore’s tractor-equipped missile pods. More to the point, although the Solarians’ acceleration was on the low side, it wasn’t as low as it ought to be with that many pods on tow. And the reason it wasn’t was that unlike Manticoran or Havenite missile pods, these had impellers of their own.
From the modest strength of their wedges, it appeared the Sollies had probably grafted the impeller nodes of a standard recon drone onto them, which would explain CIC’s initial confusion over what they were. Packing in those nodes had to have cut deeply into the pods’ volume, and he doubted they could maintain their current acceleration level for an extended period out of onboard power. But if they were, indeed, the conceptual equivalent of Havenite “donkeys,” they were equipped only with tractors of their own and power and telemetry relays. The squeeze on their volume wouldn’t cost the Solly commander any missiles, since they’d never been intended to carry missiles in the first place, and their impellers would go quite some way towards reducing the SLN’s acceleration disadvantage vis-à-vis the Grand Alliance. Clas Fleming’s eighty-percent acceleration rate was 5.697 KPS², sixty gravities higher than a Nevada could turn out with no safety margin at all. If both ships went to maximum military acceleration, Clas Fleming’s advantage would be over two hundred and forty gravities. Nothing was going to let a Nevada overhaul a Saganami-C from a standing start, but towing that many unpowered pods would have drastically reduced the Sollies’ already sluggish acceleration rates. With the built-in drives, the battlecruisers’ acceleration curves were only grossly inferior to his own, not hopelessly so.
Jury rigged or carefully thought through, though, they had to be a response to what the Grand Alliance’s missiles had done to the Sollies ever since New Tuscany. The SLN’s system-defense pods—system defense was the only role in which the prewar Sollies had ever considered employing missile pods—had neither needed nor possessed impellers of their own. So these things had to have been designed and put into production since the shooting started. In some ways, that was a small thing, scarcely likely to affect the balance of combat power in any significant way. As a harbinger of possible Solarian activity, though, it was…worrisome to see it so soon.
And there were a lot of the whatever-the-hell-they-were out there.
He didn’t like the implications of that at all. What it said about the number of missiles which might shortly be fired in his command’s direction was bad enough, although the Sollies’ hit probabilities at extended range would still suck wind. The speed with which this new system had appeared was a lot worse, though. It would seem the Darwinian process he’d worried about had begun, and at least as bad, a single task force this far from home had deployed just under five thousand of them, and they were towing towing a total of what appeared to be 30,000 unpowered missile pods. Assuming six to ten cells per pod, that would represent between 180,000 and 300,000 missiles, and given the presence of what looked suspiciously like ammunition ships tagging along behind the battlecruisers, he suspected that was only the tip of the iceberg. So in addition to evidence of Solarian adaptiveness, he was looking at proof of the League industrial infrastructure’s capacity to put a brand new system into production in staggering numbers very, very quickly.
Not good, he thought. Not good at all.
But those implications were for the future—and for the attention of better paid, more highly placed brains than his—he reminded himself. Best he focus his attention on whatever the Solly CO had in mind for TG 47.3.
The Sollies had opened their formation as they closed, and the deployment they’d adopted wasn’t exactly standard. They’d split into three roughly equal-sized sub-formations—he suspected they represented the other side’s task group organization—advancing almost in a column formation, or perhaps like beads on a string, towards the terminus. CIC had designated them Alpha One through Alpha Three, and they were spaced almost nine hundred thousand kilometers apart which suggested the Solarian commander had something clever in mind. Lessem was pretty sure he’d figured out what the “something clever” was, but he had no intention of getting too tightly wedded to his own cleverness. It was entirely possible the Solly had come up with something completely different.
“Current range, Palko?” he asked.
“Thirty-six million klicks, Sir,” Commander Palko Nakada, TG 47.3’s astrogator replied. “Closing at one-six-two-seven-seven KPS.”
“Thank you.”
“They seem confident, Sir,” Thúri observed. “O
f course, I expect Byng was pretty confident up until—”
“Missile launch,” Commander Wozniak announced suddenly. “Multiple launches from Alpha One. Estimate eight thousand—repeat, eight-zero-zero-zero—inbound.”
* * *
“First launch away, Ma’am,” Rear Admiral Rosiak announced.
“Thank you, Bart,” Jane Isotalo said as courteously as if she hadn’t already seen the outgoing missile tracks from Vice Admiral Elvis Tsukahara’s TG 1027.2. It was Rosiak’s job to tell her that, after all.
That familiar observation ran under the surface of her thoughts as she watched that first wave of improved Cataphracts streak towards the Manties.
Whatever the war might mean for the Solarian League in general, its timing had proved…fortuitous for Technodyne of Yildun. The huge transstellar had faced enough criminal charges to make survival doubtful, even for a mega corporation its size. Over thirty members of its senior management had been sentenced to actual prison terms in light of certain embarrassing revelations—like the minor fact that the Republic of Monica had come into possession of a number of fully functional SLN battlecruisers, with all classified tech systems intact and operational—which had been previously scrapped by Technodyne. In Isotalo’s opinion, that “minor fact” had been a principal contributor—probably the principal contributor, come to that—to the unholy mess in which the League currently found itself, but any additional penalties against Technodyne had evaporated in the face of the “Grand Alliance’s” demonstrably superior war-fighting technology.
They hadn’t evaporated because all was forgiven, but rather because Technodyne was one of the Navy’s more important suppliers—one might more accurately have said the most important supplier—and its R&D staff had hit the ground running in the face of the Manties’ superiority. Indeed, Isotalo suspected Technodyne had been paying closer attention than the Office of Naval Intelligence to reports out of the Haven Sector for quite some time, given how speedily the first Cataphract multi-stage missiles had emerged from its workshops. The Cataphract was both outsized and crude compared to current-generation Manty technology—it was effectively no more than a standard missile with a laserhead-armed “counter-missile” glued to its nose—but at least it provided the Navy with a weapon which could actually reach the enemy.