“Truman,” she said. “Talk to me.”
“Me, Ma’am,” Captain Benjamin Masters, her chief of staff, said tersely from the display. “System Defense HQ just commed. They’ve detected incoming hyper footprints. They didn’t get a good count on the footprints, but the impeller wedges confirmsa minimum—I repeat, a minimum—of four hundred point sources, most of them battlecruiser range.”
Holmon-Sanders inhaled sharply and Truman’s stomach muscles clenched. The Beowulf Terminus was 362 LM from the system primary, and Beowulf itself was currently in opposition to the Terminus, almost on the far side of the star. Even with the FTL com, it took over six minutes for a message from System Defense to come this far.
“Where are they?” She heard her own voice ask with what seemed like preposterous calm.
“Opposite side of the system, one-point-three light-minutes outside the limit, two degrees above the ecliptic, Ma’am. System Defense says they’re inbound at four hundred twelve gravities from zero-zero-two on what looks like a direct heading for Cassandra. As of the time chop on the message, distance from Cassandra was seven-point-nine light-minutes and current velocity was roughly six hundred KPS. From that geometry, they can cut the limit’s chord and make a zero-zero with the Cassandra Yards in just under three and a half hours with turnover at ninety-six minutes and some change.”
Truman nodded tightly. The Sollies had timed it well, she thought, because Cassandra was just past western quadrature from Beowulf, with its elongation perpendicular to the direction of the primary, forming a right triangle with the sun. They were well over fourteen light-minutes apart—closer to fifteen, really—so any grief headed for Cassandra was headed away from Beowulf. That was the good news. The bad news was that Cassandra was barely four light-minutes inside the hyper-limit and that the Sollies’ astrogation had been damned near perfect. They could go for a zero-zero with the planet, spend a couple of hours wrecking its yards, and be back out and across the limit in less than two hours when they were done, barely eight hours after crossing the limit inbound. Or they could blow past in a maximum-velocity firing run. If they did that, they could be at minimum range in just over two hours and ten minutes, moving at almost thirty-four thousand KPS, and arc back across the limit in another hundred minutes or so—in and out and back into hyper in well under four hours.
The civilian casualties would be horrendous in a successful hit-and-run attack like that, given the limited time to evacuate the yards. Normally, that would have given an attacker pause under both the Deneb Accords and the Eridani Edict, but Solarian restraint hadn’t been very noticeable even before the “Mesa Atrocity”; Hypatia and the captured Buccaneer ops orders were proof enough of that. After Mesa and the way the Solarian newsies had portrayed it, “restraint” seemed even more unlikely.
“Light off the impellers and spin up the hyper generators, Benjamin,” she said. “And tell Steve to start plotting the jump. I want multiple options for intercepting them on their way out whether they go for a zero-zero or a high-speed run.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Good. I’ll be on flag bridge in ten minutes.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
She cut the circuit and turned back to her guests.
“I think you and Henriette had better be getting back to Lysander, Marianne. It seems we have guests.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Holmon-Sanders’s smile was two-thirds snarl. “Hopefully it’ll all be over before we ever get there.”
“That would be the best outcome from our perspective,” Truman agreed.
Aside from the two squadrons of Agamemnon-class BC(P)s of the ready response force, Third Fleet’s hyper generators were powered completely down. It would take a Saganami-class cruiser thirty-seven minutes—and an SD like Lysander or a CLAC like her own Fafnir over forty—to bring up their generators and translate. For that matter, except for the ready response squadrons, every ship would have to bring her impeller nodes up from scratch at the same time, and that alone would take forty minutes, so not even the Saganami was getting into hyper any sooner than Fafnir.
At six light-hours, the transit would eat up another twenty-seven minutes or so in the Beta bands. She could carve four and a half minutes off that by going as high as the Gamma bands, but that seriously increased the chance of scatter when they re-entered n-space. Either way, she was looking at a best-case time requirement of well over an hour before she could be in position to intercept them on their withdrawal, and with their head start inside the limit, it was already impossible for her to actually intercept short of Cassandra. Apollo was long-ranged enough she could bring them under effective fire from outside the limit, while they were still at least ninety minutes short of a zero-zero with the yards, but they were already technically in range for a Cataphract launch of their own. Their accuracy would suck at such an extended range, but they’d demonstrated at Hypatia that enough Cataphracts could kill anything, even with a lengthy ballistic phase in its flight profile. They might be as inefficient as a Neanderthal with a club, but if you had enough Neanderthals with clubs, that didn’t matter. Worse, every minute they had to close the range would tweak that accuracy upward, and she couldn’t take those minutes away from them.
Shouldn’t matter, she reflected grimly. This is exactly what Mycroft’s for, and those poor bastards don’t have a clue what’s going to happen to them when Admiral McAvoy opens up. Not that I plan to sit on my posterior and wait! If nothing else, we’ll probably need all hands for search-and-rescue after the shooting stops.
She grimaced as that thought brought up pictures of Hypatia, but she made herself put it aside.
“I‘ll walk the two of you to the lifts,” she told her guests, and smiled thinly. “It’s on my way, you might say.”
Private Yacht Anachronism
Beowulf System
“—repeat: System Defense Central has declared Code Red,” the com said. “Enemy warships have entered the Beowulf System, bearing zero-zero-two, zero-two-five true, range two-two-point-four light-minutes. All vessels and platforms are to implement Code Red procedures immediately. This is not a drill. This is not a drill. I repeat: System Defense Central has declared—”
Hamish Alexander-Harrington killed the sound and looked at Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou.
“Jesus!” he said. “I hope to hell you know what the Code Red procedures are!”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said grimly, and punched the com button on his joystick. “Beowulf Alpha Flight Control, Sierra-Lima-Charlie-One-Niner-Six-Five-Tango requests diversion instructions as per Code Red procedures.”
He glanced at White Haven and grimaced.
“Terry may be a bit getting back to me, under the circumstances,” he said. “Why don’t you check in and see if you can dig out any more info?”
White Haven nodded and punched a com code from his uni-link into Anachronism’s much more powerful com.
“Hamish?” a voice replied almost immediately.
“What can you tell us, Tom?” he asked.
“Not a hell of a lot more than System Defense,” Sir Thomas Caparelli replied. “Our initial reports are still coming in—nobody thought Beowulf Alpha needed to be tied into their secure tactical net—but it looks like they’re going for the Cassandra yards. I don’t have any kind of hard numbers yet, except ‘in excess of four hundred.’” White Haven didn’t need to see the First Space Lord’s shrug; he heard it in Caparelli’s harsh tone. “Sounds like they mean business, but they’re headed straight into Mycroft.”
“But do they know they are?” White Haven asked, looking back at Benton-Ramirez y Chou, who was listening.
“That’s sort of the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” Caparelli replied. “If they don’t now, they’re going to find out soon enough, though.”
“At least they’re not headed for Beowulf. That’s something.”
“After Hypatia, it’s a hell of a lot of ‘something,’” Caparelli agreed. ??
?God, I hate to think of a lunatic like Hajdu or Gogunov loose in Beowulf near-space!”
“You and me both. Hopefully, I’ll see you soon.”
“I’ll try to have more info when we do. Caparelli, clear.”
“Surely the Sollies have to’ve figured out we’d have something like Mycroft,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said.
“Maybe that’s one of the reasons they’re going after Cassandra. They don’t have to get very deep inside the limit to bring it into Cataphract range,” White Haven pointed out. “Hell, for that matter, they’re already ‘in range’ for Cataphracts if they settle for a firing pass without time for evacuation. And let’s face it: if they’re here to hit the yards, there’s no way in hell they could give us time to evacuate and still get out without being intercepted. They’d be cutting it close enough as it is, even without Mycroft. They have to know they can’t have more than an hour, maybe ninety minutes, before Truman and Holmon-Sanders micro-jump in behind them on their best vector out of the system.”
“So what would you do in their shoes?”
“If I were in their shoes, I wouldn’t have come in the first place! But, then, I do know about Mycroft. Assuming I didn’t—that the only things I was worried about were Holmon-Sanders in-system and Truman on the terminus—I’d probably come in on the shallowest penetration profile I could, bend it towards Cassandra, launch at my closest approach, and keep right on running at my maximum possible acceleration.”
“You wouldn’t just launch from outside the limit and accept a long ballistic phase?”
“Their accuracy would suck at that range, unless they’ve managed to improve their Cataphracts’ onboard systems at least a thousand percent or so from the ones we’ve captured and evaluated, and I’ve got to assume System Defense’s got a lot of EW capability out there to protect Cassandra. That means the Sollies need to at least be able to give their birds detailed emission signatures on their targets—the kind of tac details their missiles will need to pull targets out of that kind of electronic soup—so they’ll have to hold fire at least until they get drones close enough to give them that kind of data. Besides, I know there aren’t as many people on Cassandra as on Beowulf, but there are more than enough to constitute an Eridani violation if some of those missiles wander off target. The yards are only—what? Thirty thousand kilometers? Forty thousand?—from the planet. Unless they’re completely insane, they’ll want to minimize the possibility of smacking a missile or two into Cassandra at point-five cee! Nobody wants a six or seven-gigaton energy transfer to an inhabited planet.”
“Nobody who’s sane and smart enough to figure out water’s wet, anyway,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou agreed bleakly.
“Well, yes. There is that,” White Haven acknowledged, feeling Samantha press against the back of his neck. “And while we’re hoping they have measurable IQ’s, delaying their launch as long as they can wouldn’t just make it more accurate. It would also give the yards longer to evacuate as many people as they could.”
“I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for Sollies to—”
“Sierra-Lima-Charlie-One-Niner-Six-Five-Tango, Beowulf Alpha Flight Control,” the com interrupted. “Acknowledge your request. You are diverted to beacon Sierra-Oscar-Kilo-Seven-Two-Zero-Zero-Bravo. Repeat: beacon Sierra-Oscar-Kilo-Seven-Two-Zero-Zero-Bravo.” The alphanumeric designation came up on Benton-Ramirez y Chou’s astrogation display simultaneously. “Confirm destination.”
“Beowulf Alpha Flight Control, SLC-One-Niner-Six-Five-Tango confirms destination beacon Sierra-Oscar-Kilo-Seven-Two-Zero-Zero-Bravo,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou acknowledged. “Am I cleared for impeller approach?”
“That is negative, One-Niner-Six-Five,” flight control replied. “Beowulf Alpha is at Defcon Romeo.”
“Flight Control, SLC-One-Niner-Six-Five-Tango confirms Defcon Romeo. Initiating fifty-gravity reaction burn for two minutes.”
“Flight control copies five-zero gravities’ acceleration for two minutes, One-Niner-Six-Five. Get your head down, Jacques. Beowulf Alpha Flight Control, clear.”
Anachronism quivered as Benton-Ramirez y Chou opened the throttle on her main reaction thrusters. Without her impellers, she had no inertial compensator, but her gravity plates handled the acceleration easily. The limiting factor was the amount of reaction mass in her tanks. Benton-Ramirez y Chou could have gone for a longer burn at both ends—or even accelerated and decelerated continuously—and cut the transit time to as little as sixteen minutes, but that profile would have cut into his safety reserve. And the profile he’d chosen gave a flight time only five minutes greater than that. On the other hand—
“I could wish Terry had found us a better destination,” he commented sourly. “Between them, though, Code Red and Defcon Romeo didn’t leave him a lot of choice. ‘Nearest safe point of refuge,’ I believe they say. And without impellers, our ‘nearest safe point’ is way the hell and gone out in the boonies.”
“It is?” Samantha had swarmed down into White Haven’s arms and he cradled her comfortingly as he raised an eyebrow at his pilot.
“Let’s just put it this way—you won’t be seeing Admiral Caparelli face-to-face quite as soon as either of you hoped.” Benton-Ramirez y Chou twitched his head at the stupendous structure now growing more rapidly before them. “Terry’s diverting us to a service lock on one of Alpha’s engineering booms. If you really want that face-to-face, you’ll have to spend a lovely forty or fifty minutes on slidewalks and lift cars. Might be even longer, now that I think about it. Some of the transit shafts to Engineering are pretty bare-bones.” He grimaced. “Looks like the Sollies’ visit’s going to give you a tour of some of Alpha most tourists never get to see.”
“I always like to get off the beaten path when I can,” White Haven replied, and tried very hard to not think about some of the other potential consequences of “the Sollies’ visit.”
System Defense HQ
City of Columbia
Beowulf
Beowulf System
“Sky Watch confirms its numbers, Sir,” Admiral Cheryl Dunstan-Meyers, Admiral Corey McAvoy’s operations officer said. “CIC makes it four hundred and seven battlecruisers and one hundred and twelve lighter units.”
“I’m assuming that’s solely from their impeller signatures?” McAvoy said, and Dunstan-Meyers nodded.
“Yes, Sir. I’m afraid so. We’re vectoring Ghost Riders in their direction, but they‘ve put out hefty shells of recon drones.” She grimaced. “Can’t really blame them, given ghow nearsighted their systems are. They probably want to make sure they’re not running into another Hypatia!”
McAvoy nodded. The intruders had been back in normal-space for almost twenty-minutes now, and the very first thing they’d done was launch their RDs. And as Dunstan-Meyers had just suggested, he couldn’t blame them, either, after what had happened at Hypatia. Or to Eleventh Fleet at Manicore, for that matter. After the nmber of buzzsaws the SLN had run itself into, he’d have launched a recon shell dense enough he could damned well walk to his target across it, if he’d been the Solly CO.
“Their recon birds aren’t as stealthy as ours,” Dunstan-Meyers continued, “but that’s actually helping them just now. The RDs are ‘noisy’ enough their interference is knocking back our passives’ look at their ships’ signatures, and none of our active systems ran really see them at all—at least until we can get Ghost Rider into position. As I say, though, Sky Watch is pretty confident.”
McAvoy nodded again. Active sensors or no, there really wasn’t anything else the intruders could be. Their acceleration numbers were right on the eighty percent level for Solly battlecruisers, which was actually a bit high by prewar Solly standards, since they had to be towing hefty swarms of Cataphracts. Unless he wanted to suppose they’d dropped by his star system to let him blow them all out of space without bothering to bring any offensive punch with them.
“What’s the status on Mycroft?”
“Uploading the targeting queue now, Sir. S
ky Watch estimates eleven minutes to complete the uploads to the master platforms and confirm receipt.”
“Good. And Cassandra Defense?”
“The block ships are spinning up their impellers now. They should be at full readiness within another five minutes.”
“Very good.” McAvoy smiled fiercely at her.
The block ships were mostly freighters—God knew Operation Lacoön had idled enough merchantmen!—deployed around priority targets throughout the Beowulf System. They mounted no weapons, but they stood ready to interpose their impeller wedges between the targets under their protection and the threat axis from any attacking force. They’d been reduced to skeleton crews, and the handful of people still aboard them would be leaving shortly, transferring control of their ships to remote stations dirtside or on the orbital platforms they’d been tasked to protect. It was unlikely they’d be directly targeted, at least in the initial wave of any missile attack, but it was virtually certain one or more of them would end up eating a missile which had been aimed at the platform it was guarding. Given merchant ship’s lack of armor, active defenses, or compartmentalization, even one hit would probably be fatal, but until and unless that happened, it would shield that platform against incoming fire.
“Let me know if there’s any change or the instant those bastards launch anything towards Cassandra,” the CNO added.
“Yes, Sir.”
McAvoy nodded, then looked back at the com display connecting him to Gabriel Caddell-Markham. The director of defense—along with over half the planetary Board of Directors—was aboard Beowulf Alpha for the conference Alpha was hosting. At the moment, Admiral McAvoy would vastly have preferred for all of them—and especially Caddell-Markham—to be right here in Columbia.
“You heard, Sir?” he said.
“I did.” Caddell-Markham nodded. “We’re keeping tabs up here as well as we can, Corey, but you’re the man in the chair. You’re authorized to launch whenever seems best to you.”