Yountz and Levine looked at him, and he shrugged.
“We always knew this was a possibility,” he pointed out much more calmly than he felt. “And we’ve got the range to reach them from here, if we have to, far less from thirty million kilometers. It doesn’t really change anything.”
From the look in their eyes, they didn’t buy that last sentence any more than he did, but neither of them was about to say so.
“We could increase our acceleration a little more, Sir,” Yountz suggested in a tentative tone.
“No.” Tamaguchi shook his head. “I’m worried enough about Kronprinz Wilhelm’s and Poltava’s compensators at ninety percent. I’m not about to take them any higher than that.”
Yountz looked relieved, despite the fact that he’d been the one to raise the possibility. Eighty percent was the SLN’s standard “never exceed” compensator setting. Tremaine’s most recent little surprise only underscored something which had become unhappily apparent T-months ago; no SLN ship could stay with its Manticoran counterpart without radically reducing safety margins. But compensator failure was one of any spacer’s worst nightmares, and unless acceleration rates were very, very low, no one survived when it happened. And what made the nightmare even worse was how little warning compensators typically gave before they failed. Which was also why, given the parlous state of his squadron’s maintenance history, Tamaguchi had already pushed his luck much farther than anyone could consider even remotely prudent.
“Besides,” he said, clasping his hands behind him once again and turning back to the master plot, “it’s obvious Captain Tremaine really does intend to engage us. It looks like he’s bringing himself right to the edge of his own missile envelope, and I’ll admit he’s arranged it very neatly. But the whole time he’s been arranging that, he’s also been arranging to bring his own ships into our range.” The admiral smiled thinly. “I suspect he wouldn’t have…unless he’s underestimated our capabilities just a bit.”
* * *
“So according to the recon platforms, each of the battlecruisers has a couple of dozen pods tractored to her hull,” Adam Golbatsi said.
Tremaine stood at his elbow, looking down at the detailed profile of Tamaguchi’s force displayed on Flag Bridge’s primary tactical plot. Eighty-seven minutes had passed since they’d increased their deceleration, and the Ghost Rider platforms had spent that time getting ever better reads on the Sollies. By now, two of them had actually gotten in close enough to read the ships’ names.
“If they’re like the ones Filareta had at Manticore,” Golbatsi continued, “they’ll have ten birds each. So, call it nineteen hundred, maybe two thousand.”
“And with a ballistic phase, they’ve got the range to reach us right now,” Horace Harkness pointed out from the ops officer’s other elbow.
“Yes, and they’ve had that ever since we started after them,” Tremaine replied, his eyes thoughtful. “That’s sort of what we’re counting on, isn’t it, Horace? What they don’t have is anything like our targeting capability at extended ranges. And judging from the Nevadas we’ve been able to strip down and examine, they can’t control anywhere near as many birds as we can, either.”
“And even without Barricade, we’ve got a lot more missile defense than they do, Horace,” Golbatsi added. “Of course, they probably don’t think that.”
“No, I imagine they don’t,” Tremaine agreed.
“Point Wayfarer in two minutes, Sir,” Dreyfus said, and Tremaine nodded.
“Tell Lieutenant Marsden he can make his presence known, Stilson.”
* * *
“Thirty million klicks in twenty seconds,” Captain Shreeyash announced.
“I don’t imagine it’ll be much longer,” Tamaguchi said. He sat in his command chair and the display in front of him was tied into Triumphant’s bridge. “Unless it’s a lot heavier salvo than these people ought to be able to throw, I don’t see any reason to rush our own launch, Captain Vangelis.”
“Understood, Sir,” Vangelis replied. “Commander Peng’s solutions are better than I anticipated at this range, really, but—”
“Status change!” Levine barked, his voice so sharp Tamaguchi’s head jerked up, eyes whipping to the display. “Additional bogeys! Three…four…eight of them, Sir!”
“What?!”
The sudden announcement snapped even Tamaguchi’s sang-froid. They’d been watching Sierra One for over three hours! How the hell could anything have hidden from them this long?!
But the new icons blinked mockingly, burning sharp and clear in the plot’s depths, and they were between his flagship and Sierra One, almost thirty thousand kilometers closer to BatCruRon 720.
“They aren’t starships, Sir,” Levine said, hands flying across his panel as he and his assistants tried to sort out the new data. “The impeller signatures’re too small.”
“They look pretty damned big to me,” Yountz said, leaning over a sensor tech’s shoulder to study the woman’s readouts. “Christ, Bradley! The frigging things’re showing almost as much power as a War Harvest’s wedge!”
“But they aren’t big enough,” Levine shot back. “The drones’re getting good specs on them—not what I’d like, but enough to determine the wedge’s physical parameters—and they’re too small even for a dispatch boat! It’s almost…almost like some kind of LAC with a destroyer’s nodes shoved up its ass.”
Levine’s language was an indication of his stress, Tamaguchi thought, but as he pulled up the same readouts in a window on his own display, he realized the ops officer had a point.
“Well, whatever they are,” he said as levelly as he could, “we hadn’t exactly counted on them, had we?”
* * *
“I sure would like to be a little birdie on Tamaguchi’s flag bridge about now, Skipper,” Ensign Jethro Sanders said as Her Majesty’s Light Attack Craft Nożownik brought her wedge to full power.
“No, you wouldn’t, Jethro,” Lieutenant Benjamin Marsden, Nożownik’s commander and Senior Officer in Command of LAC Detachment-FSV-39, replied with a small. cold smile. “In about ten minutes, that flag bridge’s going to be the last place anyone wants to be. Trust me.”
* * *
“The Old Lady would’ve loved this one, Sir,” Harkness said quietly, standing beside Tremaine’s command chair.
“I like to think we wouldn’t’ve embarrassed her, anyway,” Tremaine agreed. “‘Surprise—’”
“‘—is what happens when you didn’t recognize something you saw all along,’” Harkness finished for him, then smiled wickedly. “Of course, in this case, it’s something they didn’t see all along.”
Tremaine nodded and watched the icons of the eight LACs Charles Ward had left behind. At Alistair McKeon’s acceleration—a rather sedate one by the standards of a current-generation Shrike or Katana—a Manticoran LAC could be a very hard target to find. In this case, he’d cheated and made it even harder, however, by tractoring six of them to his starships and completely concealing them inside the larger ships’ impeller wedges. But the other two, under Lieutenant Rhonda Mallard, the skipper of HMLAC Raven, had relied solely on their EW systems, their low acceleration, and their greater separation from the rest of his ships. It had helped that the Sollies had tried so persistently to get their recon platforms into range of McKeon and her consorts, and Tremaine had deliberately avoided any but the most rudimentary emissions control to keep the Sollies looking at them rather than hunting for anything else. It appeared to have worked, too; the Sollies had been so fixated on the targets they knew about but couldn’t get close to that they hadn’t even tried deploying any of their drones to sweep the vast volume of space between McKeon and the rapidly departing CW.
Which meant they almost certainly hadn’t had a clue the LACs were there…and that they equally almost certainly hadn’t noticed the pair of Mark-17 CUMV(L)s Charles Ward had dropped off along with her LACs.
The UMVs weren’t huge compared to CW herself, but the fleet sup
port vessel had loaded four of them on her external racks before leaving Montana, and the Mark 17 variant had been designed to let ammunition colliers provide reloads to multiple SD(P)s simultaneously. Each of the unmanned, automated vehicles had the capacity to stow up to three hundred Mark 23 flatpack missile pods, and they were equipped with high-speed, high-volume cargo handling equipment to transfer them rapidly to the RMN’s SD(P)s pod rails. What they were not equipped with were weapons of their own, point defense, anything remotely like an impeller drive…or the stealth systems capable of hiding an impeller signature even if it had been physically possible to fit nodes into them. They were intended for only relatively short movements under reaction drive or using the small, equally unmanned towing units normally paired with them. Yet even though they hadn’t been designed for concealment, their size and lack of emissions made them very hard to detect except on active sensors at very short ranges.
The sort of sensors mounted by the recon drones which hadn’t come within ten or twelve millions kilometers of them.
Which was why Raven and Parasol—which were among the stealthiest vessels ever built—had taken the two CW had dropped off under tow and tagged along behind Alistair McKeon and her consorts at a much lower acceleration. Combined with their onboard stealth systems, they’d been almost impossible to detect, and they’d coordinated their acceleration with McKeon’s. Now the UMVs lay less than eight thousand kilometers ahead of Tremaine’s flag ship with the range closing at less than fifty kilometers per second, although that was climbing at 6.41 KPS2. More to the point, the first of them had already used its pressors to eject one hundred and forty pods—each of which contained nine Mark 23 D multidrive missiles—into space.
It was unlikely that many would be required, but the other four hundred and sixty were always available if Tremaine needed them.
Not that I’m going to, he thought coldly. These people are so screwed, even without Barricade. Welcome to Reality 101, Admiral Tamaguchi. Pay attention—there’s going to be a quiz later, and you’d better come up with the right answer.
“Good solutions, Sir,” Adam Golbatsi announced.
“Then I suppose we shouldn’t keep them waiting. Execute William Tell.”
“Executing, Sir!”
* * *
Tamaguchi’s brain skittered like a ground car on ice, trying to grapple with the sudden appearance of those additional impeller wedges. From their formation, they were intended as some sort of screen—or possibly decoys, he thought—between him and Sierra One’s starships.
Maybe they aren’t really there at all, he thought. O’Cleary’s report from Spindle talked about how good the Manties’ decoys and ECM are. Maybe she had a frigging point! If she did, then it could be that—
“Missile launch!” Levine snapped. “Multiple launches! Estimate a minimum—repeat, minimum—of two hundred inbound at four-five-one KPS squared! Time of flight six minutes!”
Two hundred, Tamaguchi heard his own voice repeating in the back of his mind. They fired two hundred missiles that frigging big from only six ships, the biggest of them less than half my flagship’s size.
All sixteen of his ships combined could have put only two hundred and thirty-six into space from their internal tubes, even at normal missile ranges.
Either they had a hell of a lot more pods on their hulls than we could’ve fitted onto ships that size, or they must have God’s own number of internal tubes. But how could they have limpeted very many pods? Those frigging LACs—or whatever—of theirs had to’ve sucked up a lot of the volume inside their wedges that might’ve been available for pods. That’s the only way they could’ve hidden them from our RDs!
It seemed flatly impossible for anyone to cram two hundred missile tubes—or that many pods, for that matter—into less than two million tons of warships. But Tremaine had already demonstrated quite a few “impossibles” this afternoon, he reminded himself grimly. And if they could fire a second or even a third salvo this heavy, the consequences could be ugly.
They could be uglier, Winslet, he corrected himself. “Ugly” you’ve already got.
“Return fire,” he said out loud, eyes on the crimson icons howling towards his command with ever mounting speed. Then he looked up, meeting Levine’s strained gaze levelly. “Fire Plan Zulu. Flush the pods.”
* * *
Scotty Tremaine watched the missile icons race away from his starships. Well, not from his ships, precisely. He could have thickened that salvo considerably by using his ships’ tubes, but there was no point. He hadn’t even called upon the pods limpeted to his ships’ hulls…and William Tell had used only sixteen percent of the pods already deployed from Charles Ward’s UMVs.
Of course, he had other plans for some of those other pods.
“Good telemetry, Sir,” Golbatsi reported, and Tremaine nodded.
The range was over a light-minute and a half, but the Ghost Rider platforms keeping watch on Tamaguchi’s battlecruisers from as little as eighty thousand kilometers gave Golbatsi exquisitely accurate targeting data…in real time. He didn’t have the FTL command links Apollo made possible, but his command loop was only half as long as the Sollies,’ and that mattered in a missile engagement. It mattered a lot—especially when the one ship Tremaine most emphatically did not want to kill was the enemy flagship—and so did the quality of the defender’s electronic warfare systems.
“Enemy launch,” Golbatsi announced a moment later. “Multiple launches. Acceleration rate is five-six-one KPS squared. That’s about thirty-five KPS better than Filareta’s Cataphracts could turn out, Sir.”
And, he did not add, twenty percent better than the Mark 23’s maximum acceleration. Of course, the Mark 23 could sustain that acceleration a lot longer.
“Assume the same endurance on the nodes,” Tremaine said, never looking away from the plot. “Range at burnout?”
“From rest, assuming a three-minute burn and no change in the final stage’s acceleration rate or endurance, about niner-point-one million klicks,” the ops officer replied. “Call it roughly a hundred thousand KPS terminal velocity. Assume they’ve got the same final stage, and we’re looking at about one-six-point-four million kilometers total powered envelope. How far they can actually reach depends on how big a ballistic phase they insert into the middle of that.”
He looked up from his display.
“Figure they’re still going to bring up the final stage around ten million kilometers out to give them the best combination of velocity and time on the clock when they actually come in on us and peg time-of-flight at this range at roughly four-point-niner minutes. Given those numbers, I recommend Barricade in—” He punched a macro, glanced down at a readout, and then looked back up at Tremaine. “—one-zero-zero seconds.”
“Approved.”
“Second launch, Sir,” one of Golbatsi’s ratings announced, and the ops officer returned his attention to his plot.
“Looks like they’re flushing all of the pods from their battlecruisers, Sir,” he said in satisfied tones. “They’re firing them in a very tight sequence. They probably want to get all of them off before our launch gets there.”
“Salvo density?”
“CIC makes it approximately five hundred per flight.”
“Third launch.”
The rating’s professional calm seemed to have…eroded just a bit, Tremaine reflected.
“Well, Horace,” he said almost whimsically, looking away from his own plot for a moment, “that should make Barricade even more effective. Of course, if it falls flat on its face, I suppose we’d better hope you’re your usual efficient self when it comes to dealing with this.”
“We try to please, Skipper,” Harkness replied.
He seemed remarkably unfazed by the possibility.
* * *
Winslet Tamaguchi watched the destruction of his command race towards him in an avalanche of blood-red icons and realized he’d never truly believed—not deep down inside—how deadly Manty missiles
had become.
“Implementing defensive measures,” Levine announced. “Halo active.”
“Very good,” Tamaguchi replied, playing his role to the bitter end.
Battlecruiser Squadron 720 turned sharply, pulling the vulnerable throats of its impeller wedges away from that oncoming torrent and opening its broadsides to clear its offensive telemetry links, counter-missile launchers, and tracking systems. Tamaguchi glanced at the maneuvering display as his ships settled on their new courses, but his attention was on the outgoing traces of each side’s missiles.
His own missiles’ higher acceleration gave them a shorter time to target, despite the minute and a half of ballistic flight in the middle of their profile. He told himself that was a good thing, but ten seconds had passed between the Manties’ launch and his own. That meant the total differential would be less than sixty seconds.
* * *
“Barricade in thirty seconds,” Golbatsi announced. Quite unnecessarily, Tremaine reflected, since his own eyes had been on the readout for the last ten seconds. He thought about mentioning that, then decided it would only indicate he was nervous over his own brilliant idea.
“Twenty…ten…five…now,” Golbatsi said, and a second salvo of Mark 23s launched. There were less than half as many of them this time…but their acceleration was twice as high.
* * *
“Second missile launch! Estimate seventy-two inbound!”
Tamaguchi pressed his lips firmly together. He’d flushed all his own birds in four waves, sequenced so tightly they were almost a single extended salvo. Normal doctrine would have called for spacing them out more, giving more time for his tactical sections to update the follow-on waves’ targeting profiles as the lead waves’s telemetry produced more data. But hopefully his tight sequencing would bring them in closely enough to overload his enemies’ point defense to at least some extent. An equally important consideration, however, had been the need to get them off before the Manties started killing the vulnerable, deployed pods…and there’d been no point holding any back for targeted follow-on salvos. Not only did BatCruRon 720 face a “use them or lose them” situation, but it was impossible to individually target missiles at such an enormous range. They’d be totally reliant on their internal seekers—trying to give any kind of precise updates or direction would actually be counterproductive, with a ninety-second-plus transmission lag—and so he’d been forced to accept what amounted to blind fire. Hopefully, with that many laserheads, at least some would find targets despite whatever the Manties’ EW could do to confuse them.