But Javier Giscard, as both the lover who knew her better than anyone else in the galaxy and as the senior field commander of her Navy, suspected she was wrong. Not in what she wanted, but in how likely she was to get it. Even if the High Ridge Government fell, no Manticoran successor government was going to simply roll over and quit—not without additional proof of how Thunderbolt had crippled them. Nor were the Manties likely to believe that peace was truly all she wanted. Especially not if Thunderbolt secured the level of advantage Giscard expected it to. The Star Kingdom would have no choice but to expect the opportunities Thunderbolt would offer to tempt the Republic into exploiting them. Into imposing a peace on its own terms, not negotiating for one equitable to both sides. And just as Eloise had been unwilling to accept such an imposition for the Republic, so any new Manty government would be unwilling to accept one for the Star Kingdom. Which meant the war that Eloise hoped would be both begun and ended with a single campaign wouldn't be.
Giscard knew that. Thomas Theisman knew that, and both of them had explained it to Eloise. More operations would be required, more people would be killed—on both sides. And, intellectually, Eloise had admitted the possibility that they were correct. It was a possibility she was prepared to face as unflinchingly as she had been prepared to defy the Committee of Public Safety as Giscard's people's commissioner. But it wasn't one she'd truly accepted on an emotional level, and he was frightened for her. Not because he expected Thunderbolt to fail, because he didn't. And not because he expected defeat after Thunderbolt, because he didn't expect that, either. Theisman's plan was too good, its objectives too shrewdly chosen, for that. If additional operations became necessary, the Republican Navy would be well-positioned, with the strategic momentum on its side and an ever increasing stream of powerful new warships coming forward from Bolthole to replace any losses.
But even now he doubted that Eloise was truly prepared for the casualties. Not for loss of money, or loss of hardware—of lives. The deaths of men and women, Manticoran as well as Havenite, which would stem directly from her decision to go back to war. The deaths Javier Giscard firmly expected to continue for months, possibly even years, beyond the end of Operation Thunderbolt.
And if they did, he told himself grimly, then it was his job—his and Thomas Theisman's and Lester Tourville's and Shannon Foraker's—to see to it that in the end those people did not die for nothing.
He looked back at the date-time display, and as he did his com terminal beeped softly. He looked down at it and pressed the acceptance key, and Captain Gozzi's face appeared upon it. The chief of staff's expression combined tension and confidence, and he smiled at his admiral.
"Sir, you wanted me to remind you at X-minus three. The staff is assembling in your flag briefing room now."
"Thank you, Marius," Giscard said. "I'll be there in a moment. Go ahead and distribute the briefing packets so people can be looking over them. We don't have much time, so if anyone sees any last-minute detail we need to address, we'd better get on it quickly."
"Yes, Sir. I'll get right on it."
"Thank you," Giscard said again. "I'm on my way."
Chapter Fifty-Five
Lieutenant Commander Sarah Flanagan finished the current report, affixed her electronic signature, and dumped it back into the station's communications system. No doubt, she thought sourly, she'd be seeing it again soon. After all, there had to be some section she'd forgotten to initial, some signature block she'd forgotten to check, or—all else failing—some arcane routing number she'd somehow managed to delete from the header. Something. Right off the top of her head, she couldn't think of a single report which Captain Louis al-Salil hadn't bounced back to her for one obscure reason or another.
Now if he'd only spent half as much effort on keeping his LAC group's training up to standard . . . .
Unfortunately, al-Salil had better things to do with his time than to waste it on boring, "routine" training ops. And if the group absolutely had to train, it made so much more sense to him to rely on the simulators. The fact that no more than a quarter of the group could fit into the available simulators at any one time (which made exercises in things like full-group coordination impossible) was not, in his opinion, a particularly significant drawback.
Sarah Flanagan disagreed. Her last posting had been to HMS Mephisto, a CLAC assigned to Home Fleet. Even there, the LAC training tempo had slackened noticeably from the pace Eighth Fleet had maintained under Admiral Truman during Operation Buttercup, but it remained far more demanding than anything al-Salil seemed to feel was necessary. Flanagan had been only a lieutenant during Buttercup, working her way up to command her own LAC, but she'd had her eye on a squadron command slot even then. She'd absorbed everything she could under Truman's tutelage and applied it with an aggressive efficiency which had carried her to that goal in something close to record time. Although, she admitted to herself, if she'd known they were going to assign her to a bare-bones space station in a podunk frontier system when they gave it to her, she might have had second thoughts about her ambition.
She supposed it made at least some sense to economize on starships, especially given the way the Admiralty and Government had built down the Navy's strength. And certainly a LAC group could cover far more space, and do it more efficiently, than a like tonnage of light cruisers or destroyers could. But that wasn't a great deal of consolation to the unfortunate souls assigned to crew the LACs in question. Especially not when among the starships being economized upon was the carrier they ought to have been operating from.
Her Majesty's Space Station T-001 had never even attained the dignity of a formal name. Known to its denizens as "the Tamale" for reasons Flanagan had never been able to divine, T-001 offered absolutely no amenities. About the only good thing anyone could say about it was that an ex-Peep cargo transfer space station modified to play orbital mothership to a standard group of a hundred and eight LACs was big enough that at least there was ample personnel space. Of course, that personnel space had been carved out of the previous owners' temporary cargo stowage decks, and no one had bothered to do much to make it particularly pleasurable to inhabit. Still, Flanagan had to admit that her cabin gave her at least twice the cubage she'd enjoyed aboard Mephisto, and she didn't even have to share it with anyone.
It would have been nice if the increase in living space had been accompanied by an improvement in the quality of that space. On the other hand, perhaps the amenities they had were actually better suited to the quality of the LAC group living in it. Not that the problem was with the basic quality of the personnel assigned to the 1007th LAC Group (Temporary). One had to look a bit higher up the military feeding chain to find the reason for that.
Flanagan had been stunned and dismayed by the standard of readiness which appeared to satisfy al-Salil and Vice Admiral Schumacher, the system CO. She'd heard that Schumacher was considered one of the Navy's golden boys by the Admiralty, despite purely limited combat experience, but no one could have proved it by Flanagan. His operational standards would never have satisfied Admiral Truman, at any rate. They didn't particularly satisfy Sarah Flanagan, either. Unfortunately, as al-Salil's most junior squadron commander, there wasn't very much she could do about it.
She muttered a weary, heartfelt curse at the familiar thought, then punched up the next report in her queue and grimaced as she read the header. Lovely. Now The Powers That Were wanted her squadron's crews to run a complete inventory of all emergency survival stores. She wondered why that was. The group's maintenance personnel were fully capable of performing such inventories. In fact, it was part of their job description. So why exactly were the LAC flight crews supposed to do exactly the same job behind them? Had someone been pilfering e-rats? Was this somehow supposed to catch the arch thief at her work? It seemed unlikely that anyone so incredibly capable that she could actually make a profit selling emergency survival stores was likely to be trapped by any merely mortal agency.
But whether it made sense or no
t wasn't Flanagan's problem, so she drew a deep breath, settled down in her chair, and prepared to dive into yet another exhilarating adventure in creative paperwork.
That was the moment the entire universe changed.
The sudden, raucous, atonal howl took her utterly by surprise, but her instincts knew what they were doing. She was already out of her chair and halfway out of her small office before she even realized she'd moved. She was up to a full run within five meters, dashing through a bedlam of startled exclamations, other chairs skidding across decksoles, hatches cycling madly open, feet thundering down passages towards lift shafts, and over all of it that bone-crawling, brain-piercing alarm shrieking its warning.
As a squadron skipper, Flanagan's office cubicle was on the same deck as her squadron's LAC bays. She didn't need a lift shaft to reach her command ship, and only one member of her crew—Ensign Giuliani—had managed to beat her there. Of course, a corner of her brain reflected with something very like shell-shocked detachment, Giuliani practically lived aboard Switchblade. He was the command LAC's coxswain, and he'd discovered that he could seduce the flight computers into providing what amounted to his own, private simulator. As far as al-Salil was concerned, of course, Giuliani's solo excursions in training were completely unauthorized, but Flanagan had somehow failed to mention them to T-001's COLAC.
"What's happening, Cal?" she demanded pantingly as she skidded to a halt just inside Switchblade's boarding tube.
"I'm not sure, Skipper," Giuliani replied flatly, never looking up from the tactical plot he'd brought on-line as soon as the alarm began to sound. "But from the looks of things, we're fucked."
Flanagan felt her eyebrows try to crawl up into her hairline. She'd never heard quite that note in the brash young ensign's voice. Nor, now that she thought about it, had she ever heard even the mildest profanity from him in her own august presence.
"Can you be more specific?" she asked tartly, and this time Giuliani raised his head and gave her a half-apologetic smile.
"Sorry, Skip," he said contritely. "I should've said that it looks like the system is under attack by unknown forces operating in overwhelming strength. Except that unless I'm completely wrong, they're not 'unknown' at all. I think they're Peeps."
"Peeps?" Flanagan wanted the word to come out as a question, or perhaps a protest, but it didn't. After all, who else would be attacking a Manticoran picket here in the Tequila System? Elves? Yet despite that, she felt an underlying sense of disbelief. Everyone had heard the rumors about the Peeps' new fleet, but no one had suggested to her that any sort of attack was imminent.
"Can't think of anyone else they'd be," Giuliani told her as the other members of Switchblade's crew began to arrive. Flanagan heard them opening equipment lockers and dragging out their skinsuits. Suits weren't usually stored aboard LACs, but "the Tamale's" conversion had been a bit on the crude side. It worked—most of it, usually—but no one had bothered with any frills. And since the flight crews' battle stations were aboard the LACs, the decision had been made to keep the skinsuits there, as well. It had led to a few problems with personnel with more extreme nudity taboos, but it worked better than a lot of T-001's arrangements, and, besides, Flanagan had other things on her mind just then. She stepped up beside Giuliani and leaned over the tactical plot with him.
Whoever it was, they'd come loaded for bear, she thought. T-001 and her sister station T-002 were all the defenders the Tequila System had. Which was pretty frigging stupid, she reflected grimly, given its status as the furthest advanced system Eighth Fleet had occupied during the final offensive of the war. Or maybe it wasn't. What they had was big enough to deter casual intrusions, and if it wasn't powerful enough to mount a defense against an all-out attack, at least it was sufficient to act as a credible tripwire. Anyone who wanted Tequila was going to have to pay cash for it. Unfortunately, it looked like the Peeps had brought plenty of spare change.
At least Vice Admiral Schumacher had decent in-system FTL sensor capability. The big passive arrays which had once been planned to cover the system perimeter and watch for hyper footprints far beyond it had never been emplaced . . . of course. Too expensive in this era of austere naval budgets. That probably didn't matter in this case, though. It didn't look as if the intruders were attempting anything particularly subtle. They'd simply sent in a squadron of superdreadnoughts with cruiser escorts. Given the power of the Shrike-Bs' graser armament, they were going to take damage even on superdreadnoughts, but nothing to compare to the damage the LACs were going to take. Even Peep SDs were going to tear unsupported light attack craft apart when they closed to energy range.
Which meant Cal was correct; "fucked" was exactly what they were.
"Launch instructions are coming up now, Skip," Lieutenant Benedict announced. Flanagan turned away from the plot and looked a question at her exec.
"It looks like we're going with Delta-Three, at least initially," Benedict told her.
"Time till launch?" she asked, and he checked the launch clock on his console.
"Thirty-one minutes," he said. "Station Engineering started bringing the nodes up on remote as soon as GQ sounded. They'll be optimal in another twenty-eight minutes."
"What about missile loadout?"
"Nothing on my screen, Skip," Benedict replied with a shrug. "Looks like we're going to launch with a standard package."
Flanagan managed not to stare at him in disbelief, which would undoubtedly have been terrible for morale, but it wasn't easy. The standard missile package consisted of a little bit of everything and not enough of anything. It was intended as a standby weapons load, one that gave at least limited capability under almost any circumstances. But it was effectively an emergency load. Standard tactical doctrine assumed that any COLAC would tailor his missile loads to the tactical mission—deleting the ordnance he wouldn't need to make room for the weapons he did—unless he found himself forced to launch under emergency conditions at minimal range. That wasn't the case here. Even if the Peeps had been able to match the extended range of the RMN's capital ship missiles, it would have taken them the better part of three hours to get into effective attack range of "the Tamale." That was plenty of time for the 1007th to strip the standby packages off of its LACs and replace them with a load that made sense, especially since the high-speed magazine tubes were the one part of T-001's conversion which had always worked perfectly.
But apparently al-Salil and Schumacher didn't see things that way.
Sera Flanagan hovered on the brink of comming the COLAC to suggest that it might be time for a little sanity. She had no doubt that most of the group's personnel were about to die, although that lingering sense of disbelief mingled with trained professionalism had managed to so far hold that realization at arm's length. Still, she knew, the odds were very good that she would be among the ones who did, and it offended that same professionalism deeply to think that al-Salil would just throw them away this way without even attempting to maximize the damage they might inflict before they were destroyed.
She almost did it. She ought to have done it, and she knew it. But she was the most junior squadron commander of the group, and she knew precisely how al-Salil would react. Given the circumstances, she had no particular desire to spend any of the time she had left in fruitless debate with a feckless incompetent. Or to be stripped of command and left behind when her people went off to die.
"Override Group's ammunitioning instructions," she told Benedict flatly. The exec looked at her, and she shrugged. "We've got time if you get right on it," she said. "Use the squadron interlinks to the station magazine queue. I want a Lima-Roger-Two package loaded to all ships ASAP. Anybody in the station crew asks any questions, refer them to me."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am!" Benedict said sharply, and she nodded and reached for her own skinsuit.
She peeled out of her uniform and started climbing into the skinsuit with the lack of body modesty which was part and parcel of LAC operations here in Tequila. While she did, she hear
d Benedict working at his console, and she bared her teeth in an almost-smile.
Lima-Roger-Two—or "Standard Missile Load, Long-Ranged Intercept, Mod Two"—was hardly a tailor-made armament package, but it would give Flanagan's LACs at least some chance of penetrating the envelope of a superdreadnought's defensive fire. It was designed to help LACs which had to go out and meet heavy combatants from outside the supporting missile range of their own wall of battle. As such, it was EW-heavy, with emphasis on counter missiles, jammers, and decoys.
It wasn't much, she thought harshly as she sealed the skinsuit. It was simply all she could offer her people under the circumstances.
"Missile reload complete in approximately nine minutes, Ma'am," Benedict reported formally. "Time to launch now eleven-point-three minutes." He looked up from his displays. "It'll be tight, Skip," he said much more informally, "but we'll make it."
"Good," Flanagan said, picturing the high-speed missile pallets and robotic arms blurring and flashing as they rearranged Switchblade's missile loads. "Any reaction from Captain al-Salil?" she asked after a moment.
"No, Ma'am," Benedict replied in a painfully neutral tone, and Flanagan snorted mentally.
Of course there wasn't anything from al-Salil. And there'd probably be precious little in the way of any sort of briefing on the battle plan he undoubtedly didn't have. This was not only going to be an ugly battle, it was also going to the most fucked up one since Elvis Santino got his entire task group wiped out at Seaford.
And there was absolutely nothing Sarah Flanagan could do to change that.
* * *
Vice Admiral Agnes de Groot studied the flag deck master plot in a mood of pronounced satisfaction.
De Groot had approached Operation Thunderbolt with less than total enthusiasm. Not because she didn't want to get some of the Navy's own back from the Manties. And not because she didn't agree with President Pritchart that the Star Kingdom of Manticore damned well deserved to have its ass kicked up between its ears over its diplomatic doubledealing and chicanery. Not even because she disagreed with the ops plan's underlying assumptions or strategy.