A Rising Thunder

  “Thank you.”

  Honor never looked away from the plot as she considered the numbers, which confirmed her own initial rough estimate. As she thought about them, however, she was acutely conscious of the brown-haired officer who stood gazing into the plot beside her with another skinsuited treecat on his shoulder. Some people might have worried that an officer of Thomas Theisman’s towering seniority would be tempted to do a little backseat driving, or at least kibitz, no matter whose flagship he was on. Yet what Honor tasted from him most clearly was something very like serenity, and she wondered if she’d ever be able to stand on someone else’s flag bridge at a moment like this without simply itching to start giving orders.

  That question was only a secondary thought, however, while the majority of her attention was on the coming engagement’s geometry.

  The maximum powered range from rest of the SLN’s standard shipkillers was just under 7,576,000 kilometers. From a launch speed of 7,900 KPS, that powered range would be as close to 9 million kilometers as made no difference, however. So within the next thirty-five minutes or so, Filareta would have brought anything in orbit around Sphinx into his powered missile envelope…assuming, of course, that nothing changed.

  And assuming”standard shipkillers” are what he has in his tubes, she reminded herself. We still don’t know exactly what Mesa used on Rozsak at Congo, Honor. Of course, we also don’t know that this ‘Alignment’ is prepared to hand the same weapons to the Sollies, either.

  Under their initial defensive planning, they would have concentrated on stopping Filareta short of the limit (and convincing him to withdraw), long before he ever got that close to the planet. She still intended to stop him before he got that close to her home world, but as for the rest of it…

  “I don’t see any reason to change our minds at this stage,” she said out loud, her soprano as cold as it was calm. “We’ll go with Cannae.” She looked up from the plot at Lieutenant Commander Brantley. “Pass the preparatory signal to High Admiral Yanakov and Timberlake, Harper.”

  * * *

  “Signal from Flag, Ma’am.”

  “And that signal would be exactly what, Vitorino?” Lieutenant Commander Jacqueline Summergate, HMS Timberlake’s commanding officer, inquired, looking up from the small tactical repeater deployed from the base of her chair.

  “Sorry, Ma’am.” Ensign Vitorino Magalhães was on the young side for the senior communications officer in any starship’s company, even that of a somewhat elderly destroyer like Timberlake, and he colored slightly. But if he was flustered, there was no sign of it in his tone, at least. “‘Execute Cannae Alpha,’ Ma’am.”

  “Very well.” Summergate nodded, she’d been anticipating exactly that since the first Solarian superdreadnought made its alpha translation.

  Now, now, Jackie, she reminded herself. You mean the first unidentified superdreadnought. After all, there’s no proof these are Sollies invading your home star system without benefit of any formal declaration of war. Why, they could be from Andromeda, instead!

  She smiled very slightly at the thought, then glanced at Lieutenant Selena Kupperman, Timberlake’s tactical officer.

  “Is your tac data updated yet, Guns?”

  “Just about, Ma’am,” Kupperman replied. “The last of its coming in now.”

  “Very good.” Summergate nodded. “Astro, take us out of here. We have some mail to deliver.”

  * * *

  So far, so good. Filareta felt his lips twitch, but he restrained the smile as he sat motionless in his command chair, watching the plot. I wonder what’s going through their minds?

  “Nice job, Yvonne,” he said out loud.

  “Thank you, Sir,” Admiral Yvonne Uruguay replied.

  Eleventh Fleet’s alpha translation had been as neat as any Filareta had ever seen, with minimal scatter of its units and on almost the exact heading he’d wanted. Oh, Uruguay had been off slightly—he’d wanted to shave the margin on the hyper limit even tighter—but that was inevitable after such a long hyper trip. The hyper log gave an astrogator a reasonably accurate running position, but “reasonably accurate” over interstellar distances could leave just a bit to be desired, and allowing for the difference in intrinsic velocities between departure point and the arrival star system could be tricky, too. Getting an entire fleet to the right place at the right time, in the right formation, and keeping it that way through an alpha translation while simultaneously carrying the desired relative velocity across the hyper wall was an art, as well as science, in a lot of ways.

  On the other hand, skilled at her job or not, Uruguay would have been much too senior for a staff astrogator, in most navies, even on the staff of a fleet the size of Filareta’s current command. He knew that, and ever since this business with the Manties had blown up, he’d been thinking about the rank inflation that was such an integral, ancient, and time-honored part of the Solarian League Navy.

  Assuming we don’t end up finishing this whole business this afternoon, he reflected, we’re going to have to do something about that. Our entire rank structure’s so frigging bloated it’s no wonder we’ve all got hardening of the professional arteries! But I have to say, Yvonne did do a damned good job.

  “How long do you think it’s going to take them to get around to challenging us, Sir?” Admiral Burrows asked.

  “Well, they have to have noticed we’re here,” Filareta replied dryly. “We didn’t exactly go for subtle, after all.”

  He pursed his lips thoughtfully, considering Burrows’ question. His orders had left how he presented the League’s demands to the Manties to his own discretion, and he and Burrows had considered the matter at some length. One thing Filareta had been determined to avoid was any repeat of Sandra Crandall’s asinine antics at Spindle. He wasn’t going to hold any two-way conversations with minutes-long delays built into the middle of them. And he wasn’t going to hang around for a couple of days before getting down to business, either.

  On the other hand, there was something to be said for letting the other side sweat. The ancient term “swinging in the wind” came forcibly to mind, as well, and he’d decided to let the Manties worry about opening communication. Four hundred-plus superdreadnoughts ought to be enough to get their attention…especially when the superdreadnoughts in question were headed straight for their capital star system’s hyper limit. The psychological advantage in forcing the other side to initiate contact might seem like a small thing, but at this point Massimo Filareta was prepared to go for any edge he could beg, borrow, or steal.

  “We’re over a light-minute from Sphinx,” he continued out loud, “and whether or not this FTL communicator they’re supposed to have actually exists, we sure as hell don’t have it. Give them four or five minutes to kick the original sighting report upstairs and their superior officers to stop crapping their drawers, then another couple of minutes for them to kick it over to the civilians. Three or four minutes for the civilians to get back to the uniforms, and then a minute of light-speed lag to get the challenge to us.” He shrugged. “To be honest, I’ll be surprised if we actually hear anything from them in less than ten minutes or so.”

  Burrows nodded slowly, his own expression thoughtful, and Filareta climbed out of his chair and strolled across to Admiral Daniels’ station. The operations officer was monitoring CIC’s data and seemed unaware of Filareta’s approach for a moment. Then he looked up quickly with an apologetic smile.

  “Sorry, Sir. Didn’t notice you.”

  “If it’s a choice between noticing me and keeping your eye on the Manties, I’d just as soon you kept your eye on the Manties,” Filareta replied dryly, and Daniels’ smile broadened for a moment. “I know it’s early, Bill,” the fleet admiral went on, “but is there anything you can tell us yet?”

  “Not really, Sir.” Daniels shrugged. “The recon platforms are headed in-system, but we haven’t been here long enough to pick up anything from our light-speed systems. We’ve got quite a few impeller sign
atures on the gravitics, but they’re scattered around the inner system—or moving back and forth between the inner system and the Junction, it looks like, which takes them well clear of our approach vector—and all of them appear to be civilian traffic. We are picking up a scattering of gravitic pulses, though.”

  He met Filareta’s eyes, and the fleet admiral nodded, thinking about his earlier comments to Burrows about FTL coms. The Manties’ apparent ability to transmit data at faster-than-light speeds had given all of them more concern than they really wanted to admit. The advantages of real-time or near real-time communication of tactical data were enough to make anyone who didn’t have them nervous about facing anyone who did. And all the fragmentary information available to Eleventh Fleet when it pulled out of Tasmania had insisted the Manties were doing it using grav pulses, possibly to somehow manufacture modulated ripples along the alpha wall’s boundary with normal-space. Theoretical gravitics were scarcely Filareta’s area of expertise, and he had no idea how the Manties might be pulling it off. For that matter, it didn’t sound to him like any of the gravitic theorists—even among the handful who would admit it might be possible—had a clue about how to actually do it. Given the penalties the SLN had already paid for its institutional arrogance, however, he and his staff had decided to accept the probability that the Manties could do it.

  Funny how the apparent confirmation that we were right doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better, he thought.

  “Any pattern to the sources?”

  “Not really, Sir. Or not one we can identify yet, at any rate. It looks like they’re directional as hell, so the only ones we’re actually getting a good look at are coming from directly out-system of us. They might be scattered all around the system periphery without my being able to pick them up yet.” He grimaced apologetically. “We’re still spreading the platforms, Sir. And, to be honest, I’m not sure how good they’ll be picking up this sort of datum in the first place. Their gravitic arrays just aren’t set up or calibrated to detect or differentiate signals like this.”

  “The best you can do is all you can do,” Filareta said, much more philosophically than he actually felt.

  Daniels nodded and returned his attention to his displays.

  Filareta walked back across to the master plot and unobtrusively checked the waterfall display on one of the secondary plots which showed the status of Eleventh Fleet’s hyper generators. A hyper generator built to the scale of a superdreadnought like Philip Oppenheimer was a substantial piece of equipment, and it took time to cycle. In fact, it would have taken Oppenheimer thirty-two minutes—over half an hour—to go from powered-down status to translation into hyper. Recovering from a translation took time, as well, although nowhere near that long. In fact, Oppenheimer’s generator could return to stand-by readiness in only twelve minutes, but it would take another four to cycle all the way up to an actual translation, for a total of sixteen minutes. Unfortunately, they’d been only about nineteen minutes flight time from Manticore-A’s hyper limit when they made their alpha translation. That was why his operations plan had specified bringing those generators back to full readiness as quickly as possible, and he gave a mental nod of satisfaction as he observed their progress and then glanced at the time display.

  Five minutes since they’d crossed the alpha wall, he noticed.

  * * *

  “Looks like this is it, Sir,” Ensign Brynach Lacharn said quietly (and redundantly, in Lieutenant Hamilton Trudeau’s opinion).

  The Junction traffic control net had just gone berserk as the bulk carriers and passenger vessels queued up for transit got their first intimation that something untoward was occurring a few light-hours away in the direction of Manticore-A. Given what had happened to the star system a few months ago—and the possibility that the people who’d done that might choose to hit the Junction after all, if they went for a repeat visit—Trudeau could hardly fault the merchies’ evident consternation. Not that he was particularly pleased by how quickly that consternation had manifested itself. It only confirmed what he and the rest of the ship’s company of SLNS DB 17025 had already decided had to be the case: the Manties really did have FTL communications.

  “Anything from Junction Astro Control?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” Lacharn replied, then shrugged. “Well, aside from the initial announcement that ‘unidentified starships’ are approaching the Manticore-A limit, at any rate. That’s what set off this entire cluster fuck!” He waved in the direction of the obviously overworked petty officer monitoring the communications net. “Now that everyone’s yammering away, I don’t have any idea how soon ACS is going to manage to restore some kind of order.”

  “Great.”

  Trudeau shook his head in disgust. When he and the rest of DB 17025’s crew had been designated for this operation, he’d thought it was a particularly…ill-advised notion. He’d even said so—tactfully, of course—although no one had paid him any attention. Which just went to show that brain power wasn’t necessarily a requirement for high rank. They were a miserable dispatch boat, for God’s sake! Even assuming Junction ACS would be willing to let anyone make transit through the Junction at a time like this, a dip-shit little courier boat wasn’t going to be very high in the queue. Which completely overlooked the fact that DB 17025 was a Solarian vessel. Of course, the geniuses who’d come up with this had probably done it before they realized the Manties were closing every wormhole terminus they could reach against Solarian traffic, but still…

  On the other hand, we’re not just any Solarian dispatch boat, he reflected.

  “Stay on it, Brynach,” he said. “Sooner or later, they’re going to start taking calls from somebody, so lean on them. Remind them about our INS credentials.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Lacharn nodded, although he had even more reservations about their orders’ basic assumptions than Trudeau. One of his sisters worked for the Ministry of Education and Information, which meant he knew exactly how the “independent reportage” of the Solarian media worked, and in his opinion, Sloarian newsies were the very last people the Manties ought to be allowing to use the Junction. For that matter, the Interstellar News Service Corporation had never been high on the Manties’ list of favorite people—something to do with INS’ “accommodations” with the People’s Republic of Haven’s Office of Public Information. Still, it might work, he supposed, since—unlike the League—the Manties actually gave at least a little more than pure lip service to the concept of a free and independent press.

  And if it didn’t work, it was no skin off Ensign Brynach Lacharn’s nose.

  * * *

  “Fleet Admiral, we’ve got impeller signatures!” William Daniels reported sharply, and Filareta nodded as he saw the crimson codes of starship impeller wedges appearing in the plot. They weren’t moving, just sitting there.

  “CIC’s identified two separate groups,” Daniels continued. “The larger group—designate Tango One—is about midway between Sphinx and Manticore, range approximately two-seven-zero-point-niner million kilometers. Call it fifteen light-minutes. The smaller group—designate Tango Two—is a lot closer. Range one-five-point-one million kilometers, about two million klicks this side of Sphinx. All we’ve got right now are the signatures themselves—they just lit off—but preliminary count makes Tango One approximately sixty sources. Tango Two’s only about forty and—”

  The operations officer paused for a moment, listening to the earbug linked to Oppenheimer’s Combat Information Center, then nodded.

  “Tango One’s begun to accelerate towards us, Fleet Admiral,” he said. “Acceleration’s just under four hundred and seventy gravities—call if four-point-six KPS-squared. Assuming constant acceleration, they could make a zero-zero with our current position in just under four-point-two hours. A least time approach would get them here in right on three hours, but they’ve have a final velocity of almost fifty thousand KPS.”

  “Understood,” Filareta acknowledged, eyes nar
row as he considered the new signatures and projected vectors in the master plot.

  Eleventh Fleet had been accelerating towards Sphinx for almost twelve minutes now, and his task forces had traveled roughly 1.8 million kilometers, half way to the hyper limit. They were up to a closing velocity of 3,683 KPS, 17.1 million kilometers from the planet. But Daniels’ recon platforms, with their far higher acceleration, were only about 5.3 million kilometers from the nearer Manty formation, closing on it at 36,603 KPS. That meant they were 9.8 million kilometers ahead of Eleventh Fleet’s battle squadrons, however, which imposed a transmission delay of almost thirty-three seconds on their telemetry, so it was going to be a while before they got light-speed confirmation of the FTL-detectable impeller signatures.

  “It may be smaller, but Tango Two’s also directly between us and the planet, Sir,” Burrows observed quietly in Filareta’s ear.

  “Like I said, we didn’t exactly go for ‘subtle,’” Filareta replied equally quietly. “And how much of a mastermind would it take to figure this was any attack force’s most probable approach vector?” He shrugged. “It looks like they’re screwed anyway, though, given how far away Tango One is.” He jutted his chin in the direction of the larger cluster of crimson icons beginning to scramble towards the approaching sledgehammer of his fleet. “I don’t care if they do have a powered missile envelope of forty or fifty frigging million kilometers, there’s no way anybody this side of God could hit a missile target at the next best damned thing to three hundred million!” He shook his head. “No, they’ve let us catch them outside mutual support range. Tango Two’s on its own, and whoever’s in command over there, he’s got to be pissing himself about now.”