A Rising Thunder-ARC (42 page)

Their simulations had demonstrated that they couldn’t hope to usefully control more than 17,000 or so at a time, of course. But if he used only 4,200 pod-launched missiles to back his broadsides each time he launched, he could fire twelve salvos that size before he exhausted them. That would be better than four hundred missiles per launch for each and every one of Tango Two’s wallers, and his fire plan concentrated his entire first salvo on only half his potential targets. No superdreadnought ever built could fend off eight hundred and fifty capital ship missiles arriving in a single, cataclysmic salvo! So it was only a matter of them—

“Status change!” William Daniels snapped suddenly. “New impeller signatures.
Many
new impeller signatures!”

Massimo Filareta’s eyes flew wide as the plot abruptly changed.

Tango Two suddenly sprouted additional impeller signatures—
hundreds
of signatures! None of them were powerful enough to be starships. They had to be still more LACs, but there were so
many
of them! They glared like a solid, curved hemisphere between Eleventh Fleet and Tango Two’s superdreadnoughts, and still more of them appeared even as he watched.

That would have been surprise enough all by itself, but it wasn’t by itself. A brand new cluster of signatures, signatures so powerful they clearly
were
ships-of-the-wall, had burned to sudden life a million and a half kilometers
beyond
Tango Two.

That’s why they killed the recon platforms
, a preposterously calm corner of Filareta’s brain said.
They killed them before they could overfly Tango Two and possibly pick up the people hiding in stealth
behind
them. And what did
I
do? I let Harrington sucker me in like a goddamned
stage magician
, that’s what I did. I vectored all my surviving platforms in on Tango Two instead of spreading them further out to try and figure out what they might have been trying to hide!

“Designate new force Tango Three.” Daniels’ staccato voice was crisp, harshly professional, yet Filareta heard his operations officer’s own shock, his awareness of how thoroughly they’d been duped, echoing in its depths. “Estimate Tango Three at one hundred and fifty—repeat, one-five-zero—superdreadnoughts and a minimum of eight hundred additional LACs.”

Filareta’s jaw muscles clenched as he abruptly found himself confronting five times the number of wallers he’d thought he was about to encounter.

But we’ve still got them by better than two-to-one, and Tango Two’s still over a million kilometers this side of Tango Three
, he told himself.
That’s going to limit how much Tango Three can bolster Two’s missile defenses. I can still gut the closer one, and then
—

“Status change!” Daniels barked yet again, and Filareta could literally feel the color draining from his face as yet another huge cluster of impeller signatures appeared in the plot. These weren’t in front of him; they were
behind
him, ten million kilometers outside the limit, arriving in the biggest, most powerful hyper footprint he’d ever seen.

“Designate this Tango Four,” Daniels voice was flat now, that of a man face to face with total disaster, holding off despair by pure, dogged concentration on his duty. “Estimate Tango Four at minimum two hundred fifty additional superdreadnoughts. Minimal escorts, but—”

The ops officer paused, then he cleared his throat.

“Sir, we’re getting additional LAC signatures with Tango Four. They’re just
appearing
on the plot. They must have used some kind of carrier ships—some of those ‘superdreadnoughts’, maybe—to carry them across the wall.”

The silence on
Oppenheimer
’s flag bridge was absolute.

They mousetrapped me
. Filareta felt something like admiration even through his shock.
They keyed the entire thing to my own approach. They showed me Tango Two’s impellers to suck in the recon platforms and keep me coming, then they timed Tango Three’s wedges to come on line only after I crossed the limit. And they had Tango
Four
waiting in hyper the entire time. They must’ve sent a courier across the alpha wall to alert their backdoor force…and
they
timed their hyper translation to catch me on the wrong side of the limit, too
.

It was all timing, he realized. Every bit of it tied to his own maneuvers. He wondered if Tango Four would ever have dropped out of hyper at all if he
hadn’t
crossed the limit?

Probably
, he thought.
It wouldn’t have given anything away, either way, since the only way I could have avoided crossing the limit would have been to hyper out short of it, before they ever turned up. All of my sensors would have been on the other side of the alpha wall, where they couldn’t see a thing, when they dropped into normal-space. And did I think of detaching a couple of picket destroyers to watch and see what happened in a case like that? Of course not
.

Humiliation glowed at the core of him as he realized how totally he’d been manipulated. No, not manipulated:
anticipated
. Anticipated the way a veteran—or an adult—might anticipate some inexperienced novice full of his own omnipotence. They hadn’t had to manipulate him because it had been so easy for them to
predict
him, and that made it almost worse.

“Sir,” Reuben Sedgewick said in a very careful voice, “I have a com request from Admiral Harrington.”

* * *

“So has it occurred to you that things may not be quite as simple as you thought they were, Admiral Filareta?”

Harrington sounded whimsical, almost amused, Filareta thought resentfully. He glowered into the com pickup, his face as expressionless as he could keep it, and “the Salamander” smiled thinly.

“I did point out to you,” she continued, “that your intelligence agencies’ estimate of how badly our defenses had been eroded by the Yawata Strike were in error.”

“Yes, you did,” he acknowledged, showing his own teeth briefly and settled back for the eighty-second two-way transmission lag. But—

“You should have listened, then,” Harrington said after little more than a
single
second. Despite his best efforts, Filareta’s eyes widened in surprise, and she smiled again. “It’s called a Hermes buoy, Admiral. We have quite a few of them seeded around the system to serve as FTL relays. Convenient, don’t you think?”

Flinty brown eyes bored into his, and icy fingernails scraped down his spine at the proof that Manticore truly did have faster than light communications capability.

“I’m aware,” she continued, “that up until a minute or so ago you believed you had the force advantage. You don’t. Nor, for that matter, do you face only the Royal Manticoran Navy. At the moment, a significant percentage of our own forces are…elsewhere, let’s say, on another mission. So we asked some friends to fill in for them. The ships you’ve been tracking between Sphinx and Manticore are, unfortunately, only freighters with military-grade impellers and inertial compensators. We wanted you looking at them so you wouldn’t notice the force I’m sure you’ve now detected just in-system from my own…which represents two task forces of the Grayson Space Navy, as well as the Protector’s Own. If it should happen your intelligence has failed to pick up on it, Grayson’s war-fighting technology is identical with our own. As for the ships which have just completed their alpha translation astern of you, they represent three task forces of the Republic of Haven Navy. And I think it should be apparent to you that the Republican Navy wouldn’t have survived this long if its war-fighting technology couldn’t match our own, as well.”

She paused, as if inviting a response, and the treecat on her shoulder cocked its head to one side, green eyes bright and whiskers twitching gently.

Filareta felt as if he’d just been punched in the belly. The
Havenite
Navy? ONI and BuPlan had always recognized that Grayson might be stupid enough to stand up beside its Manticoran allies. They were religious fanatics, after all, even more backward than most of their fellow neobarb monarchies. So there’d always been a possibility he’d encounter at least some of their units, as well…although no one had ever suggested that a single star system so recently removed from hopeless primitivism could have put
that
many superdreadnoughts into a wall of battle! But Haven? They’d been at the Manties’ throats for decades! What could possibly have induced
Haven
to range itself alongside its mortal enemy in defiance of the Solarian League’s juggernaut? It was preposterous! Of course, one answer might be…

“I trust you’ll forgive a certain skepticism, Admiral Harrington,” he managed to keep his tone almost normal, “but I find it just a bit difficult to believe Haven would come rushing to your rescue in a situation like this.” He twitched a smile. “Given the size of your star nation’s merchant marine, I find myself wondering if that force behind me isn’t just another batch of freighters.”

“It would have been an interesting ploy,” Harrington replied. “And it occurred to me that you might wonder that. So I’ve brought along someone who can vouch for my veracity.”

She nodded, and a stocky, brown haired man—a man in a Havenite admiral’s skinsuit—stepped into the display image with her.

“Allow me to introduce Admiral Thomas Theisman,” she said coldly. “You may have heard of him? If so, you know he’s the Republic of Haven’s Secretary of War
and
its Chief of Naval Operations. As such, I believe you can assume he’s in a position to speak officially for the Republic.”

“Yes, I am in that position, Admiral Filareta.” The brown-haired man’s voice was just as chill as Harrington’s. “And I’m addressing you from Duchess Harrington’s flagship so there can be no question of just where my star nation stands. If you should happen to doubt that I’m who I say I am, I invite your ONI representative, should you actually have one on board, to consult his records. He may not have the data available, but I’ve dealt personally and directly with the Solarian League Navy in the past. Admittedly, I wasn’t a flag officer at the time, but your intelligence people—such as they are and what there are of them—may have kept the recordings. For that matter, they may actually have been smart enough to provide them to you before sending you out into this region of space.”

His tone made it clear he very much doubted anyone had been smart enough to do anything of the sort, Filareta thought grimly. Which, given the monumental intelligence failure his current situation demonstrated, was hardly an unreasonable assumption.

“While they’re checking that,” Theisman continued, “simply allow me to say that every word Duchess Harrington’s just said is fully supported by both myself personally and my government. The Solarian League’s current lunacy is only the most recent and spectacular manifestation of its arrogant, corrupt foreign policy. The League’s blatant disregard for any interstellar law, treaty, or independent star nation which happens to get in the way of its own desires and the expansion of its OFS ‘protectorates’ has been tolerated by the rest of the galaxy for far too long. The fact that no one in the League seems bright enough to figure out how your star nation’s allowed itself to be played like a violin by an even more corrupt regime which isn’t even a League
member
only makes you even more dangerous to any other star nation. To
all
other star nations, in point of fact. As such, the Republic of Haven is fully prepared to stand with the Star Empire of Manticore and its allies against the Solarian League’s most recent
 
unprovoked aggression.”

Theisman stopped speaking, and Filareta looked over his shoulder. Commodore Sobolowski was working frantically at his console. Then the intelligence officer’s eyes widened and he looked up at Filareta and nodded once.

The fleet admiral’s stomach muscles clenched at the confirmation that it really was Theisman. Or a damned convincing facsimile
of him, anyway, although he couldn’t imagine what in the name of sanity the Havenite secretary of war was doing on a
Manticoran
flag bridge. And what the hell was
Theisman
doing with a treecat on his
shoulder?

Filareta shook the questions aside. However perplexing—or vital—they might be in the greater scheme of things, they had exactly zero relevance for his present position. He turned back around to the pickup and opened his mouth, but Harrington spoke before he could.

“Before we go any further, Admiral Filareta, let me summarize the tactical situation,” she said coldly. “Your fleet is between two hostile forces, which combined have effective parity with your superdreanought strength. Our recon platforms report that you have approximately fifty-one hundred pods on tow behind your ships. Each of those pods has ten missile cells, for a total of fifty-one thousand missiles. In addition, each of your superdreadnoughts has a broadside of thirty tubes, allowing for the two you’ve taken out and replaced with Aegis fire control stations. We’re assuming the missiles in question are at least equal in capability to the ones Mesa supplied to the mercenary fleet dispatched to carry out a genocidal attack on the planet of Torch not so very long ago. Under those circumstances, I estimate that my own forces are currently inside your powered envelope.”

She paused, as if inviting comments, and Filareta fought to keep his face from sagging at the accuracy with which she’d summarized his capabilities. It just got worse and worse, he thought. She must have had her platforms practically
inside
his wall to get that kind of information, and his sensors had never even
seen
the damned things!

“My own forces have rather more pods deployed,” she said, and Daniels sucked in sharply behind Filareta.

“Sir—!”

“
What?
” Filareta snapped, venting some of his own tension as he wheeled to face the operations officer.

“Sir, the plot…”

Filareta looked back at the master plot and felt his blood turn to ice. She hadn’t paused to invite comments, he realized distantly; she’d paused until the light-speed transmissions from the beacons which had suddenly turned the plot into an almost solid mass of point sources could reach
Philip Oppenheimer
.