A Rising Thunder-ARC (39 page)

Tango Two wasn’t going to let that happen. Not when he’d be able to take control of Sphinx’s orbitals and legitimately demand the planet’s surrender. The Manties might move away from him, fall back
closer
to the planet, to hold the range open as much as possible. That would be the smart move on their part, anyway, although he doubted they’d let him get any closer to it than they had to before engaging him. But maintaining his own accel would tighten the time window on them, keep them from opening the range as
far
before they stood and fought, and that was no minor consideration, given how poor missile accuracy had to be at such extended ranges. Indications were that Manty accuracy was going to be significantly better—at least—at long range than his own, too, so keeping Tango Two from staying any further away from him than he could (and punching his lights out with its longer-ranged missiles) struck him as a very good idea. And so did the notion of finishing Tango Two off as quickly as possible, while he was still able to engage it completely isolated from Tango One’s support!

And I can still change my mind and translate out
before
we hit the limit if something new enters the picture
.

“Well, at least we know they know we’re here now,” he said out loud. “Get some additional recon platforms in there, Bill. In the meantime,” his nostrils flared slightly as he committed himself, “we’ll go with Approach Bravo.” He smiled thinly. “And I expect we’ll be hearing something from them shortly.”

Chapter Twenty-One

“Still no transmissions from our visitors, Harper?”

“No, Your Grace. Not yet, anyway,” Brantley replied.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, Your Grace,” Cardones, back on his own bridge, said from the dedicated display linked to
Imperator
’s command deck, “but aren’t these people here to demand our surrender?”

“That’s my understanding of their mission orders, yes, Captain Cardones,” she replied, almond eyes still gazing thoughtfully at the master plot.

“Then don’t you think they ought to be, well,
demanding
it?”

“I’m sure they’ll get around to it when they think the time is right, Rafe,” she said soothingly. “Don’t forget, as far as we’re aware, none of them have a clue we even knew they were coming.” She shrugged slightly. “They may figure on letting panic soften us up before they announce their surrender terms.”

“Maybe, but we just killed a bunch of recon platforms, Your Grace,” Cardones pointed out. “And not even a Solly could’ve missed seeing our wedges come up. I’d think that would be a pretty good indication we’re not feeling especially hospitable, and they’re only six minutes from the limit. If I were them and I intended to do any talking at all, I’d be thinking about opening the conversation sometime real soon now.”

“That’s because you’re a naturally talkative soul,” Honor replied with a chuckle she didn’t really feel. “Some people are the strong, silent type.”

Cardones snorted, and she smiled, but the smile faded as she contemplated the steadily developing situation. So far, everything was proceeding according to plan, yet that didn’t make her feel a lot better. As Cardones said, time was getting short, and she was always nervous when things appeared to be going this well. In her experience, Murphy always put in an appearance somewhere, and she’d anticipated from the outset that if he planned on showing up
this
time, he was most likely to do it in the next handful of minutes.

She’d spent a lot of time considering the timing for this entire operation, especially this part of it, and her thinking had been forced to allow for both Filareta’s probable acceleration and what he was most likely to do with his recon platforms.

Unlike the RMN, the SLN still adhered to the “maximum power” limit of eighty percent of power on its inertial compensators, and those compensators were a lot less efficient than her own. After considering what little she knew about Filareta, she’d decided he might well shave his impeller margin a bit closer than that and decided to assume he’d go with an eighty-
five
percent setting. That would have given him an accel of 3.5 KPS, but he’d come in at only 3.311, the old eighty-percent setting, and that bothered her. Not because it was going to make a lot of difference, but because he was apparently being more cautious than she’d allowed for. Under the original planning for his visit, that would have been a good thing from her perspective; given the revised objectives of Operation Cannae, she would vastly have preferred someone more reckless.

Well, up to the
last
little bit, at least
, she reminded herself wryly.

The really tricky part of the timing, however, had focused on the recon drones, and she’d had better numbers to work with there. Without Ghost Rider’s onboard fusion plants, Solarian reconnaissance platforms had both lower acceleration rates and—compared to their Manticoran counterparts—pitiful endurance. Five thousand gravities was about the best they could turn out, and they couldn’t maintain even that power level for very long. On the other hand, Operation Raging Justice obviously contemplated a very…direct approach to its objectives. Filareta wasn’t going to need a lot of dwell time out of his reconnaissance shell, and he probably had more than enough platforms to replenish it if he really needed to, anyway.

On that basis, she’d assumed they’d come straight in at their maximum acceleration and timed her wedges’ activation accordingly. The trick had been to make sure Filareta got a really good look at what she wanted him to see before her outer LAC screen put out his advanced eyes, and she was pretty sure she’d accomplished that. Now he knew she really did have only forty superdreadnoughts under her immediate command, without any more of them hiding anywhere near at hand. Hopefully, he’d also seen the “superdreadnoughts” between Sphinx and Manticore, as well. There was no way he’d had time to get any of his platforms close enough to realize that
they
were only Navy supply ships with military-grade impellers and compensators, however, and she meant to keep it that way.

Her own heavily stealthed platforms were deployed to cover a sphere over ten light-minutes across, centered on HMS
Imperator
, and Ghost Rider’s sensors were far better than anything they’d seen examining Sandra Crandall’s surrendered hardware. She had detailed information on Filareta’s superdreadnoughts, and Ghost Rider was managing to keep pretty fair tabs on the Sollies’ platforms, as well. As a result, she knew Filareta had reacted to the destruction of his advanced drones much as she’d hoped he would. He was vectoring his more distant, surviving platforms in on Honor’s ships, trying to get them close enough to replace the ones he’d lost. In his place, she’d almost certainly have done exactly the same thing.

And, hopefully, it’s going to bite him on the butt just as hard as it would have bitten
me
when I did
, she thought with grim amusement.
Now if I can only convince him to keep
on accelerating
…

“Excuse me, Your Grace,” Andrea Jaruwalski said. “The forward recon platforms confirm their superdreadnoughts are deploying pods.”

“Deploying them? Or were they towing them all along and we just now noticed them?”

“Deploying, Your Grace,” Jaruwalski said firmly. “They must have had them tractored inside their wedges.”

“You were wondering if that accounted for their accel rate, Your Grace?” Brigham asked, and Honor nodded.

“It would have been one explanation. Any sign their acceleration’s dropping further now that they’ve deployed, Andrea?”

“Not so far, at least, Your Grace,” Jaruwalski responded, “and given the numbers they seem to have deployed, maintaining their current accel has to be pushing up their compensator loads by a good eight to ten percent. So I’d say the fact that they’re not reducing power is a sign they’re feeling pretty serious.”

“Point,” Brigham conceded. “The thing I’m wondering most about is what’s in the pods, though. Last time I looked, the Sollies didn’t
have
any missile pods.”

“You’re thinking about those Technodyne pods Terekhov ran into at Monica, Ma’am?” Jaruwalski said thoughtfully.

“Something like that. Or whatever the hell Mesa used against Rozsak at Congo.” Brigham shrugged. “Either way, I don’t think they’d bother with them unless they were stuffed with something they figure is superior to their standard tube-launched birds. I don’t like the thought that they might have a point about that, but if they
are
thinking that way, it’s going to have at least some impact on how willing—and eager—they are to bring it to us.”

“I think you’re exactly right,” Honor said. “And bearing that in mind, I also think it’s time we welcomed our visitors.” She looked at Brantley. “Ready, Harper?”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“And are
you
ready?” Honor asked, turning to Theisman with a crooked smile.

“Oh, I believe you could say that, Your Grace,” he replied. “And I’m sure Lester is, too.”

“Then just make sure you’re out of the pickup’s field of view until the appropriate moment.”

She made shooing motions, and Nimitz bleeked in laughter as the Havenite Secretary of Defense obeyed the gesture. The ’cat’s skinsuit’ kept him from flirting his tail the way he would have under other circumstances, but his amusement was obvious, and Springs From Above (who’d been fitted with his own skinsuit) laughed back from Theisman’s shoulder.

Honor waited another moment to make sure everyone was where he or she was supposed to be, then nodded to Jaruwalski.

“Send
Cantata
through to Admiral Tourville, Andrea.”

* * *

“We’ve got clearance, Skipper!” Brynach Lacharn said suddenly. “Number seven in the queue!”

Hamilton Trudeau looked up in surprise at the announcement. He hadn’t really expected the Manties to let DB-17025 make transit at all, and certainly not this early in the queue. Maybe the people who’d picked the INS cover weren’t as dim as he’d thought they were.

“All right, Tommy,” he said briskly, turning to Ensign Thomasina Tsiang, the dispatch boat’s astrogator and third in command, “get us in line! The last thing we need is to miss our slot now that they’ve given us one.”

“Aye, Skipper.”

The dispatch boat was small enough for Tsiang, who enjoyed being hands-on whenever possible, to take the helm herself instead of simply passing orders to someone else, and
DB-17025
accelerated smoothly, sliding out of the mass of waiting freighters and passenger liners. Trudeau suspected there were some alarmingly high blood pressures on the bridges of the ships they were leaving behind, but that was fine with him. He only wished he had some better intelligence—like
any
intelligence—on how the rest of Operation Raging Justice was making out.

Somehow, he felt sure, Admiral Tsang would probably wish the same thing.

* * *

“Are we sure this is a good idea, Ma’am?”

Christopher Dumbrowski tone sounded more than a bit doubtful as he watched the dispatch boat’s icon moving towards the terminus to Beowulf.

“Define ‘good idea,’” Admiral Stephania Grimm replied with a wry smile.

“Well, it just seems to me it would have been simpler all around to sit on them,” Captain Dumbrowski said. “I mean, they wouldn’t be going anywhere without our permission. We could’ve just kept them cooling their heels right here until it was all over one way or the other, without ever bringing the Beowulf end into it at all. Seems to me that keeping Beowulf up our sleeve as a holdout card in case we need to play it even worse later on might have a lot to recommend itself.”

“In some ways, I’m inclined to agree with you,” Grimm acknowledged. Given their positions and the role they had to play, she and Dumbrowski knew quite a lot about the thinking behind this part of the plan. And in Grimm’s opinion, the captain had a very valid point. But…

“It’d be a hard call for me, either way,” she said finally. “I’m sure it was for everyone else involved, too. In fact, even though no one’s told me this in so many words, I think it was ultimately the Beowulfers who made the decision, not anyone at our end. And I think the deciding factor was probably that they’re really and truly
royally
pissed off at this Mesan Alignment. There’s no way in this universe they’re going to sit on the sidelines when we go after them, and they’re about as disgusted as anyone could possibly get with the way Kolokoltsov and the Mandarins have botched the entire situation. For that matter, they’re disgusted as hell with all the rest of the League for letting itself get turned into such a bitched up
mess
instead of a star nation in the first place. So this is their way of punctuating all the reasons they’re doing what they’re doing—jumping ship to sign up with us, I mean. And I think they want to draw Admiral Tsang in, get her to openly commit to her part of ‘Operation Raging Justice,’ so they’ll have that additional evidence of just how fast and loose with the League Constitution Kolokoltsov’s apparatchiks are really willing to play.”

She paused, lips pursed in thought, then shrugged.

“Anyway, senior and better-paid heads made the decision, not us, so that’s the way it’s going to be. And,” she smiled slightly, “I have to admit I’m going to be interested as
hell
to see how it all works out in the end.

* * *

“All right, Harper,” Honor said as she watched HMS
Cantata
’s icon disappear from her plot. “Why don’t you go ahead and put me through to Admiral Filareta now?”

* * *

“Fleet Admiral, we have an incoming communications request.”

Filareta glanced at Admiral Burrows and arched one eyebrow at the announcement. At 14,875,000 kilometers, the grossly outnumbered Manty wall of battle remained motionless, holding position relative to the planet, fifty light-seconds from his own far larger formation. He was astonished that they hadn’t even begun accelerating away from him, but he wasn’t going to complain about it.

“I wondered how much longer it would take them,” he said.

“Frankly, I’m surprised they managed to wait this long, Sir!” Burrows replied with a harsh chuckle.