Several heads nodded, and she grimaced.
“I know,” she said. “But somebody way back in one of the ancient wet-navies on Old Terra said something one time that I’m afraid applies here. To paraphrase: some things have to be left to chance in a battle. I know that’s anathema to any good Battle Fleet CO, but in this case,” she smiled tightly at Ramaalas and Lamizana, “I think we’re going to have to try it the sloppy, make-it-up-as-you-go-along Frontier Fleet way.”
A chuckle ran around the briefing room, despite the tension, and she sat back again.
“Instead of sending in one of the task groups, Bart, I want Bonrepaux and Tsukahara to take the lead together. We’ll hold Santini back as the follow-through. And since we’re talking about shortening our command loops, we might as well go whole hog on it.”
This time, her smile could have been a shark’s.
* * *
“That’s interesting, Sir,” Commander Wozniak said.
“What’s interesting, Tom?” Lessem asked, looking up from the tactical problem he’d been playing through on his command chair’s repeater plot.
“It looks like those ‘donkeys’ of theirs may have more internal endurance than we’d thought,” the ops officer replied. “With your permission—?”
He raised his eyebrows, a finger hovering over one of the icons on his touchscreen, and Lessem nodded. Wozniak’s finger touched the icon and a time-compressed tracking recording appeared on Lessem’s display. The commodore gazed at it, then grunted.
“Wonderful,” he said sourly.
“Don’t know how useful it’d be under normal battle conditions,” Wozniak said, “but it does give them some interesting options, doesn’t it?”
“One way to put it,” Lessem acknowledged.
The Solarian task force had started decelerating hard after the dismal failure of its initial attack. In fact, they’d gone to 4.4 KPS², ninety-two percent power for a Nevada. He didn’t think for a moment that they’d given up, though. If they’d wanted to do that, all they had to do was translate out. No, they were only buying themselves more time to think. Assuming they maintained their increased deceleration, they would reach a zero velocity relative to the terminus twelve minutes sooner—and 824,935 kilometers farther from it. And from a resting launch, a range of 2.7 light-seconds would give missile flight times of almost exactly forty-two seconds for the SLN’s prewar standard missile.
Which was…interesting, given the 42.7-second hyper generator cycle time of a Saganami-C.
In the meantime, however, a host of tiny impeller signatures sped towards the decelerating battlecruisers from the far larger freighters following well behind them. Apparently the Solarian version of the donkey could forward-deliver itself—and, presumably, its missile pods—to a designated end-user. As Wozniak said, not something that was likely to be critically important under most battle circumstances, but irritating as hell, nonetheless.
And maybe more than just irritating, too, he thought. I wonder…
“Get me Captain Amberline, please, George,” he said.
“Aye, Sir,” the com officer replied, and three seconds later Captain Harriet Amberline appeared on Lessem’s com display. Behind her, he could see the bridge of HMS David K. Brown and the FSV’s tactical section.
“Yes, Sir?” she said.
“I don’t trust these people,” Lessem told her. “They’ve obviously picked their decel to get inside our hyper generator cycles in a normal-space approach. In fact, I think they’ve picked it a little bit too obviously. I really hope they don’t think I’m stupid enough to let them actually get to that point without translating the hell out of here, and if they don’t, that suggests they have something else in mind.”
“A micro-jump that short’s tricky as hell, Sir. At the very least they’re likely to get a lot of scatter,” she pointed out, and he nodded at the confirmation that she was thinking the same thing he was.
“Might not matter a lot,” he pointed out in turn. “They’ve got ten times the hulls we do, and the Nevadas actually have more broadside tubes than a Saganami-C. I know we can fire off-bore and they can’t, but that’s still a lot of missiles if they can ever get into their effective range of us. For that matter, the Nevadas have half again our energy broadside, too. If they could get really close…”
He let his voice trail off, and Amberline nodded soberly. Just this once, she was delighted that his collar carried the twin planets of a commodore and hers carried only the four golden pips of a junior grade captain.
“Given how much slower your generator’s going to cycle, I think it’s time you went elsewhere,” he continued. “I promise we’ll look after your waifs, and I’m giving you Minion and Lancaster for escorts. They’ve got less of the astro control people on board than Obusier.”
She nodded again.
“Randy will have the rendezvous coordinates for you in a minute.” Lessem waved one hand at Lieutenant Commander Ranald Kivlochan, CruRon 912’s staff astrogator. “Somebody will be along, one way or the other, to let you know how things work out.”
“I’ll be expecting good news, Sir.”
“Then we’ll try our best to give it to you. And your going away present’s probably going to help in that regard. Lessem, clear.”
* * *
“That freighter or whatever of theirs just translated out, Ma’am,” Rear Admiral Rosiak reported. “Looks like a couple of their destroyers went with it.”
“Damn,” Admiral Isotalo said mildly. “Obviously, she isn’t a drooling idiot. Not a surprise, but one could always hope.”
“Nothing wrong with hoping, Ma’am,” Rear Admiral Ramaalas observed. The chief of staff stood beside her command chair, watching the master plot with her. “Not as long as you don’t let yourself get wedded to building your plans based on what you hope will happen, and in this case, you haven’t done that.”
“Nice of you to say so, anyway.”
Isotalo swiveled her chair thoughtfully from side to side while she pondered the plot. The icon of what she’d become privately convinced had to be a purpose-built fast support ship had just vanished from it, accompanied by two more impeller signatures CIC had tagged as destroyers, which suggested the Manty CO had figured out what she was up to. On the other hand, she might not have, too. The task force had been decelerating at its current rate for twenty-three minutes and its approach velocity was down to 10,179 KPS. In just over nine and a half minutes, it would enter the 7.6 million-kilometer maximum powered range of a standard Javelin missile. The chance of a Javelin scoring a hit at 25.3 light-seconds against the defenses which had turned a six thousand-strong Cataphract launch into mincemeat was nonexistent, but the range was going to go on falling. She needed to get at least another ten or fifteen light-seconds closer if she hoped for a decent hit percentage, and the odds that the Manty CO would sit still for another fourteen minutes while she closed another 5.3 million kilometers struck her as…low. It was possible the Manty expected her to try it, but neither one of them expected Isotalo to get away with it.
On the other hand, Isotalo had already fired a six thousand-missile salvo at her, and she had to have seen the Huskies streaming forward from Isotalo’s own supply ships to replenish TG 1027.3. That meant she knew Isotalo could fire a much, much larger salvo of Cataphracts if she flushed all of her task groups’ pods at once. Nor would Isotalo need to incorporate a ballistic phase this time. The Manties were already inside her powered Cataphract envelope, with a total flight time of “only” 210 seconds. No doubt the Manty wished TF 1027 would fire a bazillion or so missiles in her direction. There’d be plenty of time for her damned cruisers to translate safely into hyper, laughing down their sleeves at the stupid Sollies as a couple of hundred thousand expensive Cataphracts saw their targets abruptly vanish and self-destructed at the end of their powered runs.
But the support ship’s cycle time had to be close to two minutes, so it was at least possible the Manty CO was simply getting it safely out
of harm’s way before the Cataphracts got inside her cycle time. That didn’t necessarily mean she knew what Isotalo was actually planning.
Sure it doesn’t, Jane, she thought sardonically. On the other hand, even if she does know what you’re thinking, you may still get away with it.
* * *
“Any time now, I think,” Commodore Lessem murmured, watching the range continue to fall.
“I beg your pardon, Sir?” Commander Thúri said, and the commodore shook himself and smiled crookedly.
“Just making a bet with myself about when this fellow’s going to pull the trigger,” he said.
“I’m wondering that myself, Sir,” the chief of staff admitted.
“And the other thing I’m wondering is how cautious this particular rat is when it comes to sniffing the cheese.” Lessem shoved back up out of his command chair and crossed the flag bridge to stand looking over Lieutenant Commander Kivlochan’s shoulder. “I’d hate to have them leave before the party begins.”
Thúri nodded, standing at Kivlochan’s other shoulder and watching the plot.
The Sollies had been decelerating for thirty-four minutes. The range was down to seven million kilometers, and their closing velocity had fallen to 7,293 KPS. They were actually in extreme Javelin range now, and they couldn’t expect CruRon 912 to let them close much further.
Under normal circumstances, at least.
Lessem considered the geometry a moment longer, then nodded decisively.
“Better to encourage them, I think,” he said, and looked over his shoulder at Commander Wozniak. “Execute Picador, Tom.”
* * *
“Missile launch!” Rear Admiral Rosiak announced sharply. “Estimate eight hundred and twenty-four—repeat, eight-two-four—inbound at four-five-one KPS squared! Time-of-flight two-point-seven minutes.”
Jane Isotalo’s head snapped around from her conversation with Kimmo Ramaalas. She’d dreaded this moment—and, frankly, been astonished it hadn’t happened earlier. But—
“Confirm that missile count!”
“Tracking’s confidence is high, Ma’am,” Rosiak replied, looking up from the master plot to meet her gaze.
“That can’t be all they’ve got, Ma’am,” Ramaalas said quietly.
“Maybe not, but it’s damned well more than even those big-assed cruisers of theirs should be able to launch from internal tubes.”
Isotalo’s voice was equally low. She turned to the maneuvering plot, eyes focused and intense while her mind whirred. All the reports and analyses insisted that Manty capital ships routinely threw thousands of missiles at their opponents, and there was no way in hell these people weren’t operating with pre-deployed pods of their own. Not when missiles were the Manties’ Hammer of God! Admittedly, these Manties were only heavy cruisers, but that many missiles couldn’t have come from ten cruisers’ internal tubes. They had to have been pod-launched, yet the numbers seemed ridiculously low if they were coming from a huge stack of pods. Unless…
“Maybe they don’t have enough control links,” she said. Ramaalas cocked his head at her, and she shrugged. “So far, we don’t have any hard evidence of how many birds a single one of their cruisers can manage, and all the really big launches we know about have been handled by capital ships. Except for Spindle, maybe, and that was a launch from planetary orbit. God only know how many platforms they had controlling that one.”
“That’s true, Ma’am, but don’t forget the reports that they can launch off-bore. We just got confirmation they can launch counter-missiles that way, and that argues pretty strongly that they can launch shipkillers the same way. And if you crunch the numbers, this sounds like it could be a double salvo from each broadside—hell, maybe even their chase tubes, too. I’m wondering if they might’ve designed the damned things to handle double broadsides.”
“Stack ’em, you mean?” Isotalo considered that, then nodded. “Could be. It’d be a logical steppingstone for heavier salvo density on something that can’t carry their frigging pods internally, at least. They’d have to stagger the light-off sequence a bit, but we’d never see them at this range till their impellers went live, so how could we know they had?” Her eyes narrowed. “But if you’re right, that might mean this is the biggest salvo they have the channels to manage, even launching from deployed pods.”
And it would be nice if there was some limit on their damned salvo densities, she added mentally.
“Could be, Ma’am,” the rear admiral agreed. “On the other hand, they might just not want to piss away any more birds than they have to out here.” It was his turn to shrug.
“And maybe it’s all they think they’re going to need, too,” she said more bitingly, then raised her voice and looked at Rosiak again. “Projected targeting?” she requested.
“Hard to say this early, Ma’am. It looks like they’re coming in on Vice Admiral Bonrepaux, but that could be evasive routing.”
“Probably is, actually.” Her tone was almost absent this time, and she looked back at the maneuvering plot. Thirty seconds since the Manties’ launch.
“Execute Two-Step in seventy seconds from…mark,” she said. “All task groups will initiate translation, but if your projected targeting holds, Group Three will abort and hold position here in n-space.”
* * *
“I hope you’re ready to punch that button, Randy,” Commodore Lessem said as the squadron’s missile launch slashed toward its target.
If he’d chosen to dip into the missile pods tractored to the hulls of his ships, the older cruisers could have added more than six hundred additional missiles to his attack, and he’d been tempted to do just that, on the theory that fifteen hundred Mark 16s would turn any Solarian battlecruiser squadron ever built into wreckage. Unfortunately, there was no way in hell he was going to hit anything under the current circumstances, unless the Solly commander guessed very wrong about his target selection, and Picador was specifically designed to help the other fellow guess correctly. Under the circumstances, he wasn’t about to waste any of the pods limpeted to his ships, so he’d elected to rely solely on his cruisers’ internal launchers.
The Saganami-C mounted twenty tubes in each broadside and its telemetry links were designed to “stack” forty-missile salvos of Mark 16s two deep, so ships like Clas Fleming routinely launched eighty missiles at a time. She’d also been designed with a sixty percent control link redundancy as a hedge against battle damage and to let her wring maximum utility out of the RMN’s missile pods.
A Saganami-B-class cruiser actually mounted two more tubes than a Charlie, counting its chase armament, and had also been designed to stack salvos, which gave it stacked salvos eighty-four missiles “deep,” although it had only about half the Charlie’s control link redundancy. The Bravos weren’t equipped to fire the Mark 16, with its internal fusion plant, either, but they were armed with the Mark 14 Extended Range missile with its enhanced endurance impeller nodes. The Mark 14 had only fifty-six percent of the Mark 16’s powered range, and its onboard power budget was much lower, which impacted things like ECM capability. But even with those limitations, it had eighty percent more powered range than the Cataphracts the RMN had discovered in Massimo Filareta’s magazines. Inferior to the Mark 16 and the Mark 23 they might be, but they were superior to anything the Sollies had, and more than enough for his present purposes.
And it would be really nice if those people were clumsy enough to let us actually hit them, too, he reflected. Not going to happen, though.
* * *
“Bastards were trying to sneak one in on us, Ma’am,” Rear Admiral Ramaalas observed as the entire Manty salvo swerved at the last possible moment, shifting target from Vice Admiral Bonrepaux’s TG 1027.1 to Vice Admiral Tsukahara’s TG 1027.2.
“And it’s going to bite them on the butt,” Isotalo agreed, studying the attack’s geometry with profound satisfaction. The Manty missiles’ course change had placed Helmut Santini’s TG 1027.3 well outside their envelope. Even a
t their acceleration, they couldn’t reorient to acquire his ships, given the separation she’d inserted between her task groups.
“Com, confirm Two-Step abort to Admiral Santini,” she said.
“Yes, Ma’am!” Commodore ad Kadidu, her communications officer acknowledged.
“I’ll probably piss Helmut off by belaboring the obvious,” Isotalo said quietly to Ramaalas, “but it never hurts.”
“True, Ma’am,” the chief of staff replied. The Manticoran missiles were barely fifteen seconds from detonation, but Ramaalas seemed unperturbed by the looming destruction of a third of TF 1027’s battlecruisers.
With good reason, Isotalo thought with a glance at the digital time display. In just about—
* * *
“Why am I not surprised?” Commodore Lessem observed as two thirds of the Solarian warships disappeared into hyper five seconds before CruRon 912’s missiles reached attack range. “George, send So-po and Obusier through to Ajay.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” Lieutenant Gordon acknowledged, and Lessem turned to Commander Kivlochan.
“Start the clock, Randy.”
“Aye, aye, Sir. Executing in…two-eight-zero seconds.”
* * *
Astrogators hate micro-jumps, which are defined by most of the galaxy’s merchant spacers as any hyper-space trip which covers less than four or five light-minutes in normal-space. Actually, anything short of half a light-hour could be reasonably considered a micro-jump, but 72,000,000 kilometers is generally considered to be absolutely the shortest hyper “voyage” any reasonable person wants to make.
A large part of that is due to the fact that although a ship’s maximum acceleration rate is identical in n-space and h-space—outside a grav wave, at least—its apparent acceleration rate to an observer in normal-space is much, much greater. In the Alpha bands, the differential is approximately 640%, which gives a Solarian Nevada-class battlecruiser an apparent maximum acceleration of 32,112 gravities—over 370 KPS². That acceleration doesn’t make an astrogator’s calculations any more difficult, but it does mean any small errors have much larger consequences when the ship returns to normal-space. And some error is inevitable. The hyper log which keeps track of a starship’s location in hyper, much the way ancient inertial navigation systems kept track of pre-space submarines’ submerged positions, have to calibrate after any translation into hyper-space, and that calibration depends on a series of complex comparisons between the vessel’s actual energy readings and those projected by a “perfect” model run over a period of time. There’s not enough time for the hyper log to complete its comparisons in a micro-jump. Depending upon the jump’s duration, the hyper log may be able to refine its accuracy; it can never achieve anything like complete accuracy.