Mission of Honor-ARC (43 page)

"Freighters," Bautista said dismissively. Ou-yang looked at the chief of staff, and he shrugged. "That's all they
can
be, Zhing-wei. Oh, I'll grant you they're fast. They must be fleet auxiliaries to pull that accel—probably supply ships; maybe repair ships—but they sure as hell aren't
war
ships! With their assumed masses, they'd have to be superdreadnoughts, and with us bearing down on them this way, why run with six of them and leave number seven behind with nothing but cruisers to support it?"

"What I'm worried about is why they waited this long to run in the first place," Ou-yang said rather more sharply than she normally spoke to Bautista.

"Waiting until they figured out we really weren't bluffing, probably," he replied with another, slightly more impatient shrug. "Or maybe just waiting until they were sure all our units were headed in-system, without leaving any light units outside the limit to micro jump around the hyper sphere and pounce when they come out the other side."

"Or maybe until they'd finished offloading their cargo," Ou-yang said pointedly. Bautista arched an eyebrow, and the ops officer inhaled deeply.

"We've all agreed the missiles they used on
Jean Bart
had to come from
pods
, Pépé," she pointed out. "To get that kind of range, they have to be bigger than their battlecruisers' tubes can manage, right?" Bautista nodded, and it was her turn to shrug. "Well, I don't know about you, but
I
have to wonder how many pods six 'freighters' that size can transport. And I also have to wonder why it is that all of a sudden any recon drone we steer into a position to take a look at the planet's shadow is getting blown right out of space."

"You think they've stockpiled pods in that volume?" Crandall asked, intervening before Bautista could respond to Ou-yang's "God-give-me-strength" tone.

"I think there's
some
reason they don't want us seeing in there, Ma'am." The ops officer shook her head. "And I agree with Pépé that they wouldn't be sending away six ships-of-the-wall when we'll be into missile range of the planet in another hour and a half—not unless they were going to pull
all
of their ships out, at least. On the other hand, whatever these things are, their stealth and EW are good enough we couldn't get firm resolution on them—not even confirmation they were really there—until they lit off their impellers. So I think we have to look very carefully at the possibility that our departing bogies hung around, using EW to play hide and seek with our platforms until we actually started in-system, then pulled out after unloading some cargo that didn't have the same kind of stealth capability. Something we might've picked up if they'd just dumped it into orbit earlier. And if they've left something on the far side of the planet that they don't want us getting a good look at, missile pods are certainly the first possibility that leaps to my mind when I start thinking about that."

Bautista had flushed in obvious irritation, but Crandall nodded thoughtfully.

"Makes sense," she acknowledged. "Or as much sense as anything someone stupid enough not to surrender is likely to be doing, anyway. And you're right, six freighters that size could dump a hell of a lot of pods."

Bautista's expression smoothed quickly as Crandall took Ou-yang's suggestion seriously. It wasn't the first time something like that had happened, and Shavarshyan wished he could believe Crandall had deliberately chosen Ou-yang for her staff in hopes the ops officer's ability (for a Battle Fleet officer, at least) to think outside the box might offset Bautista's inclination towards sycophancy and his habit of automatically dismissing any opinion that didn't agree with his own. Much as the Frontier Fleet officer might have wanted to believe Crandall had done it on purpose, he wouldn't have wagered anything on the probability. Still, now that Crandall had endorsed at least the possibility that Ou-yang had a point, Bautista's expression, after a moment of blankness, had become intently—one might almost have said theatrically—thoughtful.

He may not do subtle very well
, Shavarshyan officer thought dryly,
but he does have an awesome ability to spot the glaringly obvious, especially when someone rubs his nose in it. No, siree! No one's going to hide any flare-lit Old Earth elephants from Pépé Bautista in any dark rooms, no matter
how
hard they try!

"All the same," Crandall continued, "whatever they've got stockpiled is still going to be bottlenecked by their available fire control."

"Agreed, Ma'am," Ou-yang acknowledged without even glancing in the chief of staff's direction. "On the other hand, as Commander Shavarshyan and I have both pointed out, we don't really know how good their fire control is." She shrugged. "There's no way a heavy cruiser, even one the size the Manties seem to be building these days, could match a waller where control links are concerned, but I think it's entirely possible they can throw bigger salvos than we'd anticipated."

"Maybe." Bautista's tone, like his expression, was much more thoughtful than it had been, and he pursed his lips. "I still don't see any way they could throw salvos big enough to saturate our defenses, though."

"I'm not saying they can," Ou-yang said. "But they may not have to
saturate
our defenses to get at least a few leakers through. The fact that they won't get a lot of concentrated hits doesn't mean we're not going to get hurt, and one way they might degrade our defenses would be to simply fire off huge numbers of missiles. Most of them might be basically blind-fired, but if they buried their real fire in that kind of background hash, it would take at least a little while for missile defense to sort out which were the genuine threats and engage them. It'd be wasteful as hell, and I'm not saying that's what they're going to do. I'm only saying they
could
do it, and that's why I'd feel a lot more comfortable knowing what they're so busy hiding."

"Well, I'm sure will be finding out shortly." Crandall smiled tightly. "And when we do,
they're
going to find out that—"

An alarm sounded, and Ou-yang stiffened in her chair.

"Status change!" she announced sharply. "We have hyper footprints directly astern of the task force, Ma'am!"

Crandall snapped around to the master plot as twenty-one fresh icons flared into existence four and a half light-minutes behind her own ships. Whatever they were, they'd popped out of hyper-space in an exhibition of pinpoint-precise astrogation. Their tightly groupedcrash translation put them right on the limit, approaching it at almost five thousand kilometers per second, and everyone on
Joseph Buckley
's flag bridge seemed to hold his or her breath while they waited for the sensor platforms Ou-yang had left behind to identify the newcomers.

Or
almost
everyone, at least.

"Turnover in fifteen seconds, Ma'am," Haarhuis announced.

Crandall's eyes flicked to the astrogator, then back to the plot, and her expression was grim. Whatever else those new icons might be, they had to be Manticoran warships—warships which had been waiting in hyper until her own force was deeply mired inside the star's hyper limit. And if it should happen that they were superdreadnoughts, her potential losses had just climbed drastically . . . .

"The platforms make it fourteen of those big battlecruisers, what look like four light cruisers, and three ships in the four to five million-ton range," Ou-yang finally announced. The icons in the master plot blinked, changing color and shape to reflect the IDs CIC had assigned to each of them as lightspeed data on their emissions came in. "From their formation and emission s, it looks like the three biggies are probably freighters. Ammunition ships, I'd guess."

Her voice was taut, but it also carried an undeniable note of relief, and Hago Shavarshyan felt his own clenched stomach muscles relax. Crandall said nothing for a moment or two, but then she gave a sharp bark of a laugh.

"Well, I'll give them credit for audacity," she said as Bautista and Ou-yang looked at her. "This Gold Peak's obviously an
ambitious
bitch, isn't she?" The admiral jutted her chin at the icons beginning to accelerate in-system after her own forces. "And she must've used quite a bit of ingenuity arranging her ambush. But ingenious or not, she's no mental giant!"

Crandall gazed at the plot for a few more seconds, then glanced at Haarhuis.

"Go ahead and make turnover, Barend. Kick our decel to get us back on profile, then drop back to eighty percent."

"Yes, Ma'am," the astrogator acknowledged, and began passing orders as she turned back to Bautista and Ou-yang.

"Like I say, I'll give them marks for audacity," she said with a grim smile, "but falling in love with your own ingenuity can be painful sometimes." Her chuckle was harsh. "Bad enough for them to even think about 'ambushing' someone our size—reminds me of the story about the kid who tried to catch a house cat and wound up catching a tiger!—but they fucked up their timing, too. I don't care how much acceleration advantage they've got, they can't possibly overtake us until well after we've reached the planet and dealt with their friends in orbit."

"
Did
they screw up their timing, Ma'am?" Ou-yang asked. The admiral gave her a sharp look, and the ops officer shrugged. "I agree with what you just said about their ability to overtake us, but it strikes me as a bit of a coincidence that they should just happen to come in at almost
exactly
the same time we were scheduled to make turnover."

Crandall considered that for several moments, then grimaced.

"You may be right that the timing was deliberate. I can't imagine what kind of an advantage they'd think it would give them, though. And I don't think we should completely rule out the possibility that it really was a coincidence they hit so close to our turnover point. In fact, I'm still inclined to think that's exactly what it was. We know they've got a range advantage, at least as long as they stick to their missile pods, and we also know from what they did at New Tuscany that they can obviously tow at least a fair number of pods inside their wedges without compromising their acceleration. So what they probably wanted to do was to catch us in-system of them, stuck inside the hyper limit, with them outside us but close enough they could get into their range of us well before we reached the planet. There's no way we could match their acceleration rate, so as long as they were careful about it, they could probably get into their range of us while staying outside
our
missile range of
them
, and use their accel advantage to cut back out across the limit and escape into hyper if we reversed course to come after them. That's why I'm pretty sure they screwed the pooch with their timing, because even with the accel rates Gruner reported, they
can't
catch us with the geometry they've actually got. And they damn sure can't do it before we get to the planet, pound every warship in orbit around it out of space, and bring the entire system's infrastructure—such as it is and what there is of it—into our own range. At which point they've got three options: surrender to keep us from trashing all that infrastructure; go ahead and fight us on our terms, in which case we still wreck their infrastructure and they all get dead; or turn around and run away with their tails between their legs when they run out of missiles."

Ou-yang nodded slowly, although Shavarshyan wasn't at all sure the ops officer shared Crandall's conclusions. Or, at least, that she shared her admiral's confidence. It was fairly obvious to the Frontier Fleet officer that Ou-yang expected Task Force 496 to get hurt a lot worse than Crandall did, yet even the operations officer had to admit that two widely separated forces, each massively inferior to the single enemy force between them, were unlikely (to say the very least) to achieve victory.

* * *

"Well," Michelle Henke said, gazing into the master plot on HMS
Artemis
' flag bridge, "at least we know what she's going to do now."

"Yes, Ma'am," Dominica Adenauer said. "Our arrival doesn't seem to have fazed her, does it?"

"Fair's fair." Michelle shrugged. "There's not a lot else she could do, really."

Adenauer nodded, although Michelle sensed her continuing disgruntlement. It wasn't so much that Adenauer disagreed with anything Michel had just said as that the ops officer was accustomed to dealing with Havenite opponents, and no Havenite admiral would ever have ambled this confidently towards a Manticoran foe. The fact that Sandra Crandall was doing just that did not give Dominica Adenauer a flattering estimate of the Solly's IQ.

Michelle shared that opinion, but she also stood by her observation about Crandall's alternatives. Her superdreadnoughts were holding their acceleration to just over three hundred and thirty-seven gravities, in strict accordance with the "eighty percent of maximum power" which was the galactic naval standard inertial compensator safety margin. At maximum military power, they could have managed almost four hundred and twenty-two gravities, but that was it. At eighty percent power, Michelle's trio of four million-ton milspec ammunition ships—HMS
Mauna Loa
,
New Popocatépetl
, and
Nova Kilimanjaro
—could manage a hundred gravities more than the Solly SDs' maximum
military
acceleration; running flat out they could manage over six hundred and fifty gravities, while her
Nikes
could top six hundred and seventy.

What that meant was that Crandall's ships-of-the-wall could neither run away from her nor catch her if they tried to go in pursuit. And with Michelle outside Crandall's position, coming up her ships' wakes, there was really no way she could dodge, either. Nor could she possibly make it all the way across the hyper sphere to the opposite edge of the limit without being brought to action. And however confident Crandall might be of her task force's
defensive
capabilities, the Solarian admiral had to know her missiles were substantially out-ranged. In fact, just on the basis of what Michelle had done at New Tuscany before that first dispatch boat translated out, Crandall damned well ought to know her own anti-ship missiles' maximum powered envelope from rest was
at best
less than a quarter of that of the missiles which had killed
Jean Bart
. So, given her unpalatable menu of maneuver options, the one she was pursuing actually made the most sense. However nimble Michelle's
ships
might be, the planet couldn't dodge, and it was what Michelle had to defend. So if Crandall could get into her own range of Flax with what she no doubt believed to be her crushing superiority in missile tubes, she could compel Michelle to either come to her or concede
strategic
defeat regardless of any
tactical
advantages the RMN might possess.