* * *
“What do you think he’s going to decide, Tom?” Honor asked quietly.
“Given the options, he’s going to strike his wedges and blow those pods, unless he’s a complete and total idiot,” Theisman replied succinctly. “Of course, he may be a complete and total idiot, but I think you made our position eloquently clear. For that matter,” he smiled slightly, “I doubt my own modest contribution hurt.”
“No, I don’t think it did,” she agreed, right cheek dimpling with a sudden, much broader smile of her own.
“You do realize you weren’t exactly truthful with the poor shmuck, Your Grace,” Rafe Cardones pointed out from his com screen, and she cocked an eyebrow at him. “You didn’t fall all over yourself giving him accurate info on our capabilities,” her flag captain expanded, and she shrugged.
“I disagree with your assessment, Rafe. I didn’t tell him we could do a single thing we can’t do, I just…understated the numbers a bit. Sooner or later, at least some of these people will be going home again—at least I darned well hope they will!—and I don’t see any reason to give away all our little secrets before they do. Hopefully, we’re finally going to put the brakes on this thing today. If we don’t, though, I want to keep the Sollies guessing about the actual ceiling on our abilities for as long as I can.”
“I agree completely.” Theisman nodded firmly. “Keeping at least some of your capabilities in reserve as long as possible is always a good idea. Besides,” he snorted dryly, “they might not have believed you if you’d told them how good your tech—our tech—really is! He might’ve decided you were lying and running a bluff after all.”
“I’m with Admiral Theisman, Your Grace,” Mercedes Brigham offered. “Besides, you didn’t need to tell the bastards everything. What you did tell them was plenty bad enough from their perspective, and while I’ll agree you were both pretty eloquent, I think the tactical situation’s even more persuasive.” She shook her head. “I’ve never seen a fleet in a worse hole than this one, even in a simulation, and”—she glanced at Theisman for a moment—“that’s saying something, after some of the scrapes we’ve been in.” She shook her head again. “Surrender’s the only option you’ve left him.”
“That was the general idea, Mercedes,” Honor said softly, her eyes on the crimson icons of Eleventh Fleet.
* * *
Massimo Filareta took one last look at the horrific array of firepower which had closed its battle steel jaws on his command. He remembered the shock with which the SLN had responded to the surrender of Josef Byng’s task force. The even greater shock—and disbelief—of what had happened to Sandra Crandall. The impact of this was going to dwarf all of those other shocks, all of that other disbelief.
And there wasn’t one damned thing he could do about it.
Well, actually, there is, he told himself. I can at least put one right in those Mesan bastards’ eye and refuse to be an even more disastrous Crandall for them.
“Very well.” His voice sounded flat, defeated and broken, even to him. “Strike our wedges and send the pod self-destruct command, Bill.”
“Yes, Sir,” Daniels said.
“I suppose you should go ahead and get Harrington back, Reuben,” Filareta continued, turning to the communications officer. “She’ll want—”
Admiral William Daniels reached for his console to transmit the orders Admiral Filareta had given him. He was still in a state of shock, of disbelief, yet what he felt most strongly was relief. Relief that Filareta had been willing to recognize reality. Relief that Eleventh Fleet wasn’t going to be destroyed after all.
Relief that abruptly vanished as he saw his own hand flip up a plastic shield and hit the button under it.
Filareta stiffened in horrified disbelief as fifty-one hundred pods launched fifty-one thousand missiles in a single enormous salvo.
“What the fuck d’you think you’re do—?!”
The fleet admiral never completed the question. Before he could, William Daniels’ hand, still under someone—or something—else’s command kept right on moving. The operations officer fought desperately to stop it, but it moved smoothly, efficiently, punching in a numerical command code he’d never learned or even seen before.
The command that detonated the bomb a petty officer named Harder had installed in his console and killed every man and woman on SLNS Philip Oppenheimer’s flag bridge.
* * *
“Missile launch!” Andrea Jaruwalski barked. “Multiple missile launches! Fifty thousand-plus, incoming!”
Honor Alexander-Harrington’s breath stopped. For just an instant, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Couldn’t believe anyone, even a Solly, could be that insane. That arrogant. That willing to see his men and women slaughtered.
But someone obviously could.
She looked at that incoming tide of destruction for perhaps another two seconds. Then she drew a deep breath.
“Engage the enemy,” her soprano voice said evenly. “Fire Plan Thermopylae.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Fleet Admiral Imogene Tsang sat up as the attention signal on her bedside communicator chimed. She raked hair out of her eyes, glanced at the bedside time display, and grimaced. She’d been down for less than three hours, her eyes felt dry and scratchy, and the throbbing ache behind her forehead suggested that last pair of tequila sunrises might have been just a bit too much.
The com chimed again, and she stabbed the voice-only key with a vicious forefinger.
“What?” she snapped.
“Sorry to disturb you, Ma’am,” Admiral Pierre Takeuchi said quickly, “but the dispatch boat just came through the terminus.”
“It did?” Tsang turned sideways, sitting on the edge of her bed and planting her feet on the decksole. “How long ago?”
“Just over three minutes, Ma’am.” She sensed Takeuchi’s unseen shrug. “It took Lieutenant Trudeau, the dispatch boat’s skipper, a couple of minutes to spot Ranger and for Ranger to relay to us.”
“Understood.” Tsang felt a spike of irritation she knew was completely irrational (and probably owed at least a little of its strength to her headache). There was no way this Trudeau could have known where TF 116 was located relative to the Beowulf Terminus before he actually arrived. And it wasn’t as if the slight extra delay was going to make any difference to Tsang’s movements.
She’d deliberately held the task force ten million kilometers clear of the terminus. It was inconvenient as hell, and it was going to take the better part of an hour to reach the terminus with a zero-zero velocity and make transit, but it had the benefit of keeping her far enough out to avoid offending Beowulfan sensibilities any worse than she had to. She’d considered deploying recon platforms and communications relays closer to the terminus, where she could cut down on any confusion on the part of the incoming courier boat. That would have been pretty blatant, though. It would undoubtedly have undone her efforts to placate Beowulf’s ire, and it wasn’t as if the Beowulfers were going to sneak up on her and attack!
Even from here, though, her gravitic sensor sections had monitored the impeller signatures of at least sixty or seventy Beowulfan freighters shuttling back and forth through the terminus. Obviously, while that terminus might be closed to other Solarian shipping, the Beowulfers were doing quite a bit of trade with the Star Empire. She’d gone so far as to ask the system government for an explanation, and been informed that what she was seeing were “humanitarian relief” efforts, not anything so crass as “trade.”
Sure, and I can believe just as much of that as I want to, she thought sardonically. Oh, I don’t doubt those cargoes are being used as part of the Manties’ rebuilding effort, but I’ll bet Beowulf’s making a pretty centicred off their “humanitarian” concern!
Beowulfan profiteering hadn’t been very high on her list of concerns, however; steering clear of any avoidable incident had been, and so she’d contented herself with observing their activities from afar. And she’
d also concentrated on staying far enough out from the terminus that none of those freighters were likely to see very much of her actual strength. There was no telling which of the merchant skippers sailing back and forth through the terminus might be tempted to tell friends in Manticore about the enormous SLN task force hovering on the far side. Fortunately, commercial-grade sensors weren’t going to pick up diddley at just over half a light-minute.
She’d gone ahead and posted a single destroyer, SLNS Ranger, closer in, however, with her transponder online. The courier boat ought to have spotted that without too much difficulty, even allowing for the limitations of dispatch boat’s sensor suites, but there was no point pissing or moaning over a couple of minutes either way.
“Have you already waked Franz?” she asked, massaging her temples with both hands.
“I told Sherwood to get him up while I got you up, Ma’am,” Takeuchi said wryly, and Tsang snorted. Admiral Franz Quill, her operations officer, tended to wake up grumpy, and he didn’t like Captain Sherwood Marceau, her com officer, very much anyway.
“As soon as you and I are done here,” Takeuchi continued, “I’m getting Captain Robillard up, too. I already put out the general order to bring up the task force’s impellers, and I figure she’ll forgive me for waking you up first.”
“Probably.”
Actually, Tsang wasn’t all that sure about Sanelma Robillard’s forgiveness. Robillard was good, or Tsang wouldn’t have picked her as her flag captain, but she was also a prima donna, even by the often prickly standards of the Solarian Navy. She was likely to make herself a pain in the ass if she decided Takeuchi had trespassed against her prerogatives by passing an order which would have her engineering department up and stirring before she was informed, even if he was the task force’s operations officer.
“All right,” the fleet admiral said. “It sounds like you’ve done everything right so far, Pierre. I’ll meet you and the rest of the staff on Flag Bridge in twenty minutes. Clear.”
* * *
It was actually twenty-five minutes later, not twenty, when Tsang, headache banished by a quick squirt from her preferred morning-after inhaler, stepped onto SLNS Adrienne Warshawski’s flag deck. Not that the extra five minutes really mattered. A quick glance at the readiness display showed that Warshawski’s impeller nodes were still fifteen minutes from full readiness.
“Where are we, Pierre?” she asked brusquely.
“We should be able to get moving in another fifteen or twenty minutes, Ma’am,” he replied, twitching his head in the direction of the display Tsang had already consulted. “Franz transmitted the preparatory order for Arbela twenty minutes ago, and all tactical crews have acknowledged. And Sherwood’s copied Lieutenant Trudeau’s transmission to your console if you want to view it personally.”
“I’ll take a look at it in a minute,” she said. “Unless there’s something in it you think would affect Arbela?”
“No, Ma’am.” Takeuchi grimaced. “All he knows is that the system was reported under attack. Well, that and he did confirm that assuming the Manty traffic control people were giving accurate time chops, they really do have FTL com capability.”
“Marvelous,” Tsang said sourly. It wasn’t that much of a surprise by now, but the confirmation emphasized the Manties’ tech capabilities unpleasantly. Especially now, when Operation Arbela had moved from a future probability to a present certainty.
“All right,” she went on a moment later. “I’ll take a look at Truman’s message. Meanwhile I think you and Franz should probably get on the net and touch base with our squadron commanders. Be sure we’re not looking at any unanticipated delays.”
* * *
“Captain Robillard would like to speak to you, Fleet Admiral,” Sherwood Marceau said, and Tsang looked up from her CIC repeater.
“Put the Captain through,” she said.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
The image of Adrienne Warshawski’s commanding officer appeared on Tsang’s com a moment later.
“Sanelma,” Tsang said. “What can I do for you?”
“I just wanted to report we’re ready to proceed, Ma’am,” Robillard replied, and Tsang suppressed an ignoble temptation to smile. Her flag captain’s tone could not have been more respectful, yet there was a certain tartness to it. She was obviously still irritated by Takeuchi’s decision to wake Tsang—and to order the entire task force (including her ship) to bring up its impellers—before he woke Robillard. She must have been sitting there, watching the engineering displays with her thumb on the call key to make sure she got Tsang notified before Takeuchi could. For that matter, she might even have instructed her engineer not to simultaneously report readiness to her and the task force operations officer, as SOP required.
“Thank you, Sanelma,” the fleet admiral said as gravely as she could.
“You’re welcome, Ma’am,” Robillard responded with barely a trace of satisfaction, and Tsang chuckled as the display blanked.
“So I guess I did piss her off,” Admiral Takeuchi observed with a wry smile.
“She’ll recover,” Tsang said dryly, and glanced at Admiral Quill.
“Let’s get the task force moving, Franz,” she said.
“At once, Fleet Admiral!”
Of all of Tsang’s staffers, Quill came closest to being genuinely enthusiastic about Operation Arbela. In fact, he was the one who’d come up with the operation’s name. Personally, Tsang was less confident than he was that it was going to work out as well for TF 11.6 as the original battle had for Alexander of Macedon, but she’d been willing to go along with his chosen name. And at least it wasn’t as if Quill were one of those hidebound, blinkered, Solarian bigots who refused to acknowledge the possibility that the Manties might actually be able to give the SLN a genuine fight. A skeptic where the more extravagant claims about Manticoran technology were concerned, yes, but not a blind skeptic…unlike certain other officers Tsang could have named.
She stood watching the master plot for two or three minutes as her task force began accelerating towards the terminus. Then she turned back to Marceau.
“Sherwood.”
“Yes, Ma’am?”
“I suppose you’d better go ahead and notify Terminus Traffic Control that we’re going to be making transit shortly.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Well, I bet that’s going to make the Beowulfers happy,” Takeuchi murmured, his voice low enough for only Tsang to hear.
“They’re just going to have to live with it,” Tsang replied flatly. “And it’s not as if they haven’t had enough time to adjust—”
“Excuse me, Fleet Admiral.”
Tsang broke off in midsentence and turned back towards Marceau, eyebrows rising as the com officer’s peculiar tone registered.
“Yes, Sherwood?”
“You’ve got an incoming priority com request, Ma’am.”
“From Traffic Control?” Tsang was surprised. She didn’t doubt the traffic control authorities were going to be unhappy with her announcement that she was coming through their terminus anyway, whatever the Beowulfan system government might have decreed. But the terminus was thirty-three light-seconds from Warshawski; there was no way Marceau’s transmission could have reached it yet, and any response would be at least a half-minute behind that.
“No, Ma’am,” Marceau said, still with that peculiar edge to his voice. “It’s originating from near the terminus, but it’s from Vice Admiral Holmon-Sanders, not Traffic Control.”
Tsang glanced quickly at Takeuchi. Marianne Holmon-Sanders was the Beowulf System Defense Force’s senior in-space officer, ranking just behind Admiral Corey McAvoy, the chief of naval operations. She was also the commanding officer of the BSDF’s First Fleet—its only fleet, really—which made the fact that the incoming message was from her even more interesting.
“I see,” the fleet admiral said after a moment, and walked across the flag bridge to her command chair. She took her time, settling herself c
omfortably, then nodded to Marceau.
“Put her through, Sherwood.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
The woman who appeared on Tsang’s display a moment later had brown hair, brown eyes, a wide, firm-lipped mouth, and a determined chin which went just a little oddly with her pert, undeniably snub nose. But what Tsang noticed most strongly, what caused her eyes to widen, was the fact that Holmon-Sanders wore not the maroon tunic and charcoal gray trousers of the Beowulf System Defense Force’s usual uniform, but a skinsuit.
And so did every other officer and rating visible behind her. The officers and ratings manning their consoles and displays on what was obviously a capital ship’s flight deck at general quarters.
“Vice Admiral?” Tsang said after a moment, slightly but firmly emphasizing Holmon-Sanders’ lower rank. “What can I do for you today?”
She sat back, to wait the minute necessary for her transmission to reach the terminus and Holmon-Sanders’ reply to reach her, but then, barely one second later—
“You can stand down your impellers and assure me you have no intention of making transit through this terminus against the expressed will of my star system, Fleet Admiral,” Holmon-Sanders said flatly.
Tsang’s head whipped around towards Sherwood Marceau’s station. She heard Takeuchi mutter something short, pungent, and surprised sounding, then cursed herself almost instantly for revealing her own astonishment so clearly. But—
Marceau was staring at his own console and looked, if possible, even more surprised than she felt. He looked down for another moment, then raised his eyes to hers.
“Another transmitter just came online, Ma’am,” he said. “It must be some kind of relay. It’s less than ten thousand klicks out from Warshawski!”
“No doubt your com section has detected my communications relay, Admiral Tsang,” Holmon-Sanders’ voice continued, and Tsang looked back at her display. “It’s a receiver, as well as a transmitter, you know. I thought it would probably be a good idea not to have any…avoidable delays in our conversation. Particularly not given the strength and clarity with which my government has set forth the Beowulf System’s position on your proposed operation. Again, I formally request clarification of your intentions.”