* * *
“Well, so far, you seem to’ve read them pretty well, Sir,” Lester Thúri said quietly as he and Commodore Lessem stood watching the master plot and Lessem’s steward replenished their coffee mugs.
They’d been watching the Solarians through the Ghost Rider platforms they’d left behind for almost nine hours now. The wormhole and its approaches formed a zone three-quarters of a light-second across, defining a sphere with circumference of 2.36 light-seconds and a volume of over 5.9 quadrillion cubic kilometers. The Solarian warships were a handful of minute specks in that enormity, and it was impossible for the plot to show the individual missile pods they’d been busily deploying ever since they’d taken possession of it. The hidden recon platforms and the computers were keeping track, though, and according to them, the Solarian CO had placed approximately seventy thousand pods. Judging from the earlier firing pattern, each of thiose pods containined only six missiles, considerably fewer than Eleventh Fleet’s pods at Manticore, but that still came to roughly 420,000 missiles, which would be enough to give just about anyone pause.
They’d also sent a quartet of destroyers through to Ajay, clearly probing the terminus with light units before their battlecruisers made transit into the face of something unpleasant. One of those DD’s had returned five hours ago, so it would appear So-po and Obusier had executed Lessem’s orders and kept right on accelerating away from the far side of the terminus. No doubt the other three Sollies were making sure the approaches to the Ajay Terminus stayed as clear as they were just then.
“Maybe,” Lessem replied to the chief of staff’s comment, his voice as low as Thúri’s had been. “But I have to admit, there’s one thing—at least one thing—I can’t figure out, and that worries me.”
“And what’s that, Sir?”
“What the hell they’re after.” The commodore shook his head, eyes narrowed in thought. “I mean, there are only two reasons for them to be here. One is to take control of the terminus before we do, and they obviously didn’t manage that. I don’t care how many missile pods these people are deploying, they won’t have enough—not without Ghost Rider and Apollo—to keep Admiral Correia from kicking their asses all the way from here to Old Chicago when Pierrier catches him with our dispatch.”
He paused, quirking an eyebrow at the commander as if to invite a response, but Thúri only nodded. It was a given that the Culverin-class destroyer would bring back a quick response from the rest of the task force as soon as she reached it.
“Well, in that case, what we’re seeing is an exercise in futility. If they’d gotten here before we did—before the Admiral headed for Agueda—then all this activity of theirs might make sense as a way to fortify the terminus against anything coming through from Ajay. If they’re attacked from this side, though, not so much. So from that perspective, they should already have headed home. Or, if not that, I don’t see any reason for them to invest this many missile pods on this side of the terminus in an effort to prevent the inevitable. Transit to Ajay and fortify hell out of the Ajay Terminus, sure. Failing that, hang around, make us maneuver against them, make us use up missiles the way we made them use up missiles—all of that I could see…sort of. But any of that would come in a piss-poor second to forting up in Ajay, and even if they can churn the things out like cookies, seventy thousand of them—the next best thing to eighty thousand—is an awful lot of industrial effort to just toss out the airlock.”
He paused again, puffing his cheeks and frustration, then sipped coffee.
“But that brings us to the second reason for them to be here, and that’s because they intended to raid Ajay. What it looks to me like they’re doing is fortifying the terminus against us—our task group, not Admiral Correia—before they poke their noses into Ajay. They want to keep us from sneaking back in and re-taking the Prime Terminus to ambush them when they come home again while they move on Ajay. But they’ve got to know we’ve had plenty of time to evacuate all of our ships and personnel from the system, if that’s what we’ve decided to do. So why raid an empty cookie jar? I mean, I suppose it would be an exercise in showing the flag, turning up in Ajay after they’ve ‘chased the nasty Manties out of town,’ but that’d be a purely cosmetic accomplishment. Again, stacking half a million missiles out where they’re likely to lose them for little or no return, strikes me as a pretty stiff price tag for a symbolic ‘victory’!”
“That’s a valid point, Sir,” Thúri said after gazing down into his own coffee mug for several thoughtful seconds. “And I don’t have an answer.”
“Neither do I, and that’s why it worries me.” Lessem waved his mug at the icons of the Solarian ships. “We’re missing something. There’s got to be a reason they’re doing this, and I can’t shake the suspicion that whatever it is, it represents a significant shift in their strategy.”
“Well, maybe we can find out what it’s all about from the survivors, Sir,” Thúri said. “You’re right about what’s going to happen to them on this side when the Admiral comes back—assuming your own brainchild doesn’t send them on their way even sooner than that. But whatever they’ve got in mind for Ajay, I think they’re going to find it just a little more difficult to carry out than they think.”
“Maybe.” Lessem smiled briefly. It was remarkably cold, that smile. “We put enough effort into the cheese, anyway.”
* * *
“The Task Force is ready to proceed, Ma’am,” Rear Admiral Ramaalas said formally, and Jane Isotalo nodded.
“I’m assuming that if we’d heard anything untoward from Captain Ogelsby’s division, you’d have brought that minor fact to my attention.”
“Yes, Ma’am. I believe you could safely assume that.”
“Very good,” she said. “In that case, Admiral, proceed.”
“Aye, aye, Ma’am.” Ramaalas looked at Rear Admiral Rosiak. “Execute,” he said.
“Aye, aye, Sir. Executing now.”
Rosiak touched a macro, and the carefully orchestrated movement plan unfolded with metronome precision.
Isotalo sat back in her command chair, fingers of her right hand toying absently with the closure of her skinsuit while she did her primary job: radiating serene confidence as her subordinates executed her directives.
She still didn’t like the idea of Buccaneer one bit, but she felt a deep sense of satisfaction as her task force rumbled toward its objective. After the seemingly unending tide of Manticoran triumphs and Solarian debacles, TF 1027 was about to execute its orders flawlessly. According to Captain Hieronymus Oglesby and his three destroyers, the far side of the terminus was just as naked as she’d hoped it would be. The destroyers’ recon drones had confirmed—as she’d expected—that any Manticoran or neutral shipping in Ajay had cleared the limit and disappeared into hyper long since, and that was a pity. But Buccaneer’s true objective couldn’t escape into hyper, and there wasn’t a trace of a Manty warship to be found.
She reminded herself of how astoundingly good Manticoran electronic warfare had proved both against Eleventh Fleet and against her own missile salvo right here on the terminus. It was possible there were still Manty warships hiding under stealth somewhere in Ajay, but it would have required direct divine intervention to hide anything bigger than a frigate from her destroyers and their reconnaissance platforms within ten or twenty light-seconds of the terminus. The terminus itself was enough to interfere with sensors—enough to make it more difficult to detect gravitic and electronic emissions signatures in the first place, although not seriously enough to significantly degrade fire control once the target had been picked up in the first place—but it was also, for all its size, a limited volume. Any ship large enough to pose a threat to her battlecruisers that couldn’t be picked up by Warshawskis or radar would have a hard time—a very hard time—hiding from visual and thermal detection.
No, she thought. The henhouse door really is wide open…damn it.
SLNS Hindustan, leading Lamont Bonrepaux’s TG 1027.1 headed i
nto the terminus and flickered into nonexistence on her way to join the destroyers in Ajay.
Ajay Terminus
Prime-Ajay Hyper Bridge
“So, you still liking the odds Giselle gave you, Andy?” Commander Arjun Menendez inquired, turning her command chair to face Andreas Bazignos, her executive officer.
Lieutenant Bazignos looked back without saying a word, and Sarah Chi, Boomslang’s tactical officer, chuckled without taking her attention from her own displays.
“Should’ve known better, Andy,” she told him. “First, because the Commodore…well, he’s the Commodore. When was the last time you saw him get it wrong? Whenever it was, I’m pretty sure it was the first time, too. But even leaving that aside, nobody in his right mind bets against Giselle. And even if they did, nobody’d be—I hate to say it, but ‘dumb’ is the only word that comes to mind—to do it when she offers odds. What were you thinking?”
Bazignos maintained his dignified silence, but his lips twitched. Chi had a point. At forty T-years, Lieutenant Giselle Parkkinen, Fire Snake’s executive officer, was the “old woman” of the group, seven T-months older than Commander Menendez. Her relatively ancient age for her rank had nothing to do with lack of competence; she’d just been busy doing other things until the People’s Republic of Haven’s Operation Thunderbolt brought her a direct commission from the merchant service. If she didn’t end up with an admiral’s stars, it would only be because somebody managed to kill her along the way.
And, as his good friend Chi had just so kindly pointed out, Parkkinen never had the wrong end of the odds in a friendly wager. She also had a nasty—and expensive—knack for filling inside straights. For that matter, she was one of the best TOs he’d ever met, and her analysis of Plan Estocada—and what the hell was an “estocada,” anyway?—had been spot-on so far. He didn’t see much chance that was going to change anytime soon, and he wondered what he’d been sniffing when he took her bet.
“Well, I’d have to say it’s not looking too good from your side,” Menendez said now, twitching her head at the red icons of the three Solarian destroyers on Boomslang’s smallish master plot. “Those three seem to be doing exactly what she—and the Commodore; let’s not forget him—predicted.”
“I know,” Bazignos admitted finally. “And I knew it’d probably work out exactly that way from the beginning. But the odds were so good!”
“I only hope you’re luckier in love than you are at cards and betting,” Menendez told him.
“Oh, I am—I am!” he assured her with a broad smile.
“Funny,” Chi offered, still watching the quiescent destroyers. “That’s not what Sally Parkins down in Engineering said.”
“You don’t want to believe everything you hear from snipes,” Bazignos warned her. “Besides, I think she was uncomfortable in my presence because of my godlike good looks.” He shook his head sadly. “One of the crosses I bear. The women in my life realize they just can’t compete with my superhuman physical beauty.”
Both women guffawed, and lieutenant (JG) Josh Whitaker, Boomslang’s communications officer, looked across the cramped command deck at him with round, admiring eyes.
“Is that what you call it, Sir?” he asked in awed tones. “And here I thought your last name derived from the…lordly dimensions of your proboscis.”
Bazignos lifted the proboscis in question—which was indeed of “lordly dimensions”—with an equally lordly sniff.
“Alas, it’s ever my fate to be maligned by the little people,” he said. “But that’s okay! I’m used to it.” He heaved a deep sigh. “I’ve been dealing with it since high school, after all.”
“Yeah, sure,” Chi said. “Not the way I remember it,” she added, and it was Bazignos’s turn to chuckle. He and Chi had known each other since childhood, and she was probably his closest friend in the galaxy.
“That’s because your mind is starting to go and—”
“Hyper footprint!” Chi snapped, cutting him off in midsentence. “Somebody transiting the terminus, Ma’am!”
“Acknowledged.” Menendez’s voice had turned crisp and coldly professional as quickly as Chi’s had, and glanced at Whitaker. The com officer had been waiting.
“Hot mic, Ma’am!” he confirmed, and Menendez’s finger stabbed the transmit key on her command chair armrest before he finished speaking.
“Typhon,” she announced over the suddenly live network of short-range whisker communications lasers in that same cold, hard voice. “Typhon, Typhon.” Then she released the key and looked around her command deck. “Here we go, boys and girls,” she said. “Make it count.”
As battle cries went, it lacked a little something in drama, she reflected, but that was all right. There’d be plenty of drama to go around without her adding to it.
* * *
“Hyper footprint,” Commander Patricia Richtmann, SLNS Voltigeur’s tactical officer, announced calmly. It wasn’t as if the arrival was a surprise. They’d been expecting it for at least the last three hours, but they were waiting for battlecruisers, after all. Every destroyer officer knew that the time required for any task expanded geometrically in proportion to the tonnage of the ship involved.
Be fair, Pat, she scolded herself. It wasn’t just the standard transit prep this time. And unless you really want to walk home the long way, you should be happy they took the time to lay those pods. Because guess who’d be sent through to check for any Manty visitors if Admiral Santini wasn’t watching the back door?
“Got the transponder code?” Captain Oglesby asked.
“Yes, Sir,” Richtmann replied. “It’s Hindu—”
* * *
“Firing…now!” Sarah Chi announced, and pressed the key.
HMS Echidna was a Hydra-class LAC carrier. The Hydras were 33,000 tons smaller than the Minotaurs which had preceded them, but they managed to pack in an additional dozen LAC bays. All one hundred and eleven of her serviceable LACs—one of the brood was downchecked by the group engineering officer because its stealth systems had a stubbornly persistent glitch—had been launched and left behind, hiding in the midnight depths of the Ajay Terminus when Echidna and the rest of the Ajay picket took themselves elsewhere in obedience to HMS So-po’s relayed order from Commodore Lessem. They’d sat there, waiting, watching the Solarian destroyers checking for defenders, and now it was their turn.
It wasn’t Patricia Richtmann’s fault no one had noticed them. She and her fellow tactical officers aboard Chamberlin and Timberlake, Voltigeur’s division mates, had searched diligently for any sign of warships. The problem was that no one in the Solarian League Navy who’d ever encountered the RMN’s Shrikes and Katanas had gotten home to tell anyone else about it. As a consequence, no one in Task Force 1027 had ever imagined that something that small—a Shrike massed only twenty-one thousand tons and was barely seventy meters long—could possibly pose a threat to any genuine ship of war. Voltigeur, at 112,500 tons, had no business in a fleet engagement, and her officers and crew knew it. The thought that anyone should worry about something less than a fifth their size would have been absurd. There was a reason—in fact, there were a lot of reasons—no serious navy had built LACs for the past century or so, and even those which were in service were purely sublight system-defense or patrol vessels. Without Warshawski sails and hyper generators of their own, which no one could possibly fit into a hull that size—or the LAC carriers no Solarian knew a thing about—they couldn’t have been here in Ajay space anyway.
And even if they’d known about CLACs and the new generation LACs, nothing else in the galaxy was as stealthy as a Shrike or Katana. The only way to really spot one of them, with its impellers down and its stealth systems up was for it to occlude a star, and Commander Menendez, who was Echidna’s COAC as well as Boomslang’s CO, had made sure her deadly little ships were motionless relative to the terminus. The chance that something their size and holding that still might occlude a star (or anything else, for that matter) were…slight.
Had the Solarian destroyers looked hard enough and long enough, they might still have spotted them. But people look for the threats they know about, and none of the men and women aboard those ships knew one damned thing about Shrikes.
For example, none of them were aware that in addition to the Shrike-B’s internal rotary missile launcher, it carried a single spinal-mounted graser as heavy as many a superdreadnought’s broadside armament.
* * *
“I have the destroyers’ impeller signatures, Sir,” Captain Absolon Badrani’s plotting officer announced as SLNS Hindustan reemerged into everyone else’s universe.
“Very good,” Badrani acknowledged absently. His attention was on his helmswoman as the Nevada-class battlecruiser glided out of the terminus. Hindustan’s sister ship Océan was on her heels, and Captain Hackenbroch had an acid personality backed up by a scalpel-sharp sarcasm. She was bound to say something rude if Hindustan was clumsy about getting out of her way.
Not that Océan would be coming through that quickly. Admiral Isotalo had ordered a twenty-five second interval between transits. That was far longer than anyone would ever need. True, it would be another—he checked the display—fifty-three seconds before he could reconfigure from Warshawski sail to impellers, but those sails provided all the acceleration he’d need to keep Hindustan out of Océan’s way.
Not that Hackenbroch’ll see it that way. If not for the fact that she’s just as competent as she is annoying, that mouth of hers would’ve—
Twenty-four grasers, each designed to rip straight through a superdreadnought’s armor, slammed into SLNS Hindustan like the curse of God.
It was like hitting a puppy with a ground lorry, only worse.
Far worse.
Not one shot missed. There were no sidewalls to stop the fire coming from Hindustan’s flanks, and her side armor was woefully inadequate against graser fire that heavy delivered from such brutally short range. Even worse, half the fire came in from above, where there wasn’t any armor, because designers didn’t armor areas of the hull normally protected by the wedge that ought to have been there.