A Rising Thunder-ARC (38 page)

“Not yet,” Lacharn replied, then shrugged. “Well, aside from the initial announcement that ‘unidentified starships’ are approaching the Manticore-A limit, at any rate. That’s what set off this entire cluster fuck!” He waved in the direction of the obviously overworked petty officer monitoring the communications net. “Now that everyone’s yammering away, I don’t have any idea how soon ACS is going to manage to restore some kind of order.”

“Great.”

Trudeau shook his head in disgust. When he and the rest of
DB 17025
’s crew had been designated for this operation, he’d thought it was a particularly…ill-advised notion. He’d even said so—tactfully, of course—although no one had paid him any attention. Which just went to show that brain power wasn’t necessarily a requirement for high rank. They were a miserable
dispatch
boat, for God’s sake! Even assuming Junction ACS would be willing to let
anyone
make transit through the Junction at a time like this, a dip-shit little courier boat wasn’t going to be very high in the queue. Which completely overlooked the fact that
DB 17025
was a Solarian vessel. Of course, the geniuses who’d come up with this had probably done it before they realized the Manties were closing every wormhole terminus they could reach against Solarian traffic, but still…

On the other hand, we’re not just
any
Solarian dispatch boat
, he reflected.

“Stay on it, Brynach,” he said. “Sooner or later, they’re going to start taking calls from
somebody
, so lean on them. Remind them about our INS credentials.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Lacharn nodded, although he had even more reservations about their orders’ basic assumptions than Trudeau. One of his sisters worked for the Ministry of Education and Information, which meant he knew exactly how the “independent reportage” of the Solarian media worked, and in his opinion, Sloarian newsies were the very last people the Manties ought to be allowing to use the Junction. For that matter, the Interstellar News Service Corporation had never been high on the Manties’ list of favorite people—something to do with INS’ “accommodations” with the People’s Republic of Haven’s Office of Public Information. Still, it
might
work, he supposed, since—unlike the League—the Manties actually gave at least a little more than pure lip service to the concept of a free and independent press.

And if it
didn’t
work, it was no skin off Ensign Brynach Lacharn’s nose.

* * *

“Fleet Admiral, we’ve got impeller signatures!” William Daniels reported sharply, and Filareta nodded as he saw the crimson codes of starship impeller wedges appearing in the plot. They weren’t moving, just sitting there.

“CIC’s identified two separate groups,” Daniels continued. “The larger group—designate Tango One—is about midway between Sphinx and Manticore, range approximately two-seven-zero-point-niner million kilometers. Call it fifteen light-minutes. The smaller group—designate Tango Two—is a lot closer. Range one-five-point-one million kilometers, about two million klicks this side of Sphinx. All we’ve got right now are the signatures themselves—they just lit off—but preliminary count makes Tango One approximately sixty sources. Tango Two’s only about forty and—”

The operations officer paused for a moment, listening to the earbug linked to
Oppenheimer
’s Combat Information Center, then nodded.

“Tango One’s begun to accelerate towards us, Fleet Admiral,” he said. “Acceleration’s just under four hundred and seventy gravities—call if four-point-six KPS-squared. Assuming constant acceleration, they could make a zero-zero with our current position in just under four-point-two hours. A least time approach would get them here in right on three hours, but they’ve have a final velocity of almost fifty thousand KPS.”

“Understood,” Filareta acknowledged, eyes narrow as he considered the new signatures and projected vectors in the master plot.

Eleventh Fleet had been accelerating towards Sphinx for almost twelve minutes now, and his task forces had traveled roughly 1.8 million kilometers, half way to the hyper limit. They were up to a closing velocity of 3,683 KPS, 17.1 million kilometers from the planet
.
But Daniels’ recon platforms, with their far higher acceleration, were only about 5.3 million kilometers from the nearer Manty formation, closing on it at 36,603 KPS. That meant they were 9.8 million kilometers ahead of Eleventh Fleet’s battle squadrons, however, which imposed a transmission delay of almost thirty-three seconds on their telemetry, so it was going to be a while before they got light-speed confirmation of the FTL-detectable impeller signatures.

“It may be smaller, but Tango Two’s also directly between us and the planet, Sir,” Burrows observed quietly in Filareta’s ear.

“Like I said, we didn’t exactly go for ‘subtle,’” Filareta replied equally quietly. “And how much of a mastermind would it take to figure this was any attack force’s most probable approach vector?” He shrugged. “It looks like they’re screwed anyway, though, given how far away Tango One is.” He jutted his chin in the direction of the larger cluster of crimson icons beginning to scramble towards the approaching sledgehammer of his fleet. “I don’t care if they
do
have a powered missile envelope of forty or fifty frigging million kilometers, there’s no way anybody this side of God could hit a missile target at the next best damned thing to
three hundred
million!” He shook his head. “No, they’ve let us catch them outside mutual support range. Tango Two’s on its own, and whoever’s in command over there, he’s got to be pissing himself about now.”

“You don’t think it’s Harrington?” Burrows asked with a slight smile, picking up on the pronoun in Filareta’s last sentence.

“If Harrington’s in space at all and not stuck dirt-side somewhere, she’s with Tango One,” Filareta said flatly. “She’d want the more powerful of her two task forces under her own personal control.”

“Makes sense, Sir.” Burrows agreed, then smiled thinly. “On the other hand, it looks like they may have been hit even harder than Intelligence estimated.”

“Maybe.”

Filareta kept his tone noncommittal, but Burrows might have a point. ONI’s best estimate of the Manty’s wall of battle before the last attack on the star system had given the RMN around two hundred SDs, twice the number they’d detected. Of course, ONI could have been wrong about that, and he wasn’t going to pretend he wasn’t going to be
delighted
if the Manties were a lot weaker than their pre-battle analyses had suggested. But the division of their forces… That puzzled him, and he didn’t like things that puzzled him at a moment like this.

I said it wouldn’t take a mastermind to predict our approach, but if that
is
Harrington in command over there—and given how everybody out here worships the deck she walks on, that’s who it’s got to be—I wouldn’t have expected her to split her forces this way. Still, I suppose anybody can screw up. For that matter, she might have wanted to maintain concentration and been overruled by the civilians. This
is
their capital star system, and I shudder to think how Kolokoltsov and the rest of the ‘Mandarins’ would be standing over the shoulder of any poor SOB responsible for defending the
Sol System!

Not for the first time, he found himself fervently wishing he had better intel on the other side’s senior officers. Burrows and Commodore Ulysses Sobolowski, his staff intelligence officer, had done their best, but what Filareta was most aware of was his frustrating ignorance.

There’d been no time to send back to Old Terra for updated data dumps, given the operation’s time constraints. Of course, any
competent
planner should have considered the desirability of sending updated appreciations of the most probable enemy fleet commander along with orders for the operation, but he supposed that would have been asking too much. Or
expecting
too much, at any rate.

Without any updates, Sobolowski (whose relatively junior rank for the staff of a Solarian force Eleventh Fleet’s size was, unfortunately, an all too accurate reflection of the secondary—or even tertiary—importance the SLN in general attached to the intelligence function) had gone through his own files with a microscope. He’d pulled out every scrap of data Eleventh Fleet had on Harrington…and come up with very little. Worse, most of what they did have on her were simply clippings from the standard news services, almost all of which had clearly been written by newsies who knew exactly zero about naval operations. They were basically fluff pieces about ‘the Salamander’ (who always had made good copy on a slow news day), with almost no hard data on her tactics or operational concepts but plenty of hyperbole. Hell, based on
those
sources, the woman had to be at least five meters tall, and she probably picked her teeth with a light cruiser!

He snorted quietly at the thought, then gave himself a shake. Yes, there undoubtedly were a lot of exaggerations (and very few facts) in the news accounts, but one thing was clear—she truly did have a formidable record. Once upon a time, Filareta had been as inclined as the rest of his colleagues to write that off. After all, how good did some neobarb have to be if all she was going to do was beat up on other neobarbs? That had been before the Battle of Spindle, however.
Since
the Battle of Spindle, he’d revised his estimate of
all
Manticoran officers significantly upward.

Presumably, the Republic of Haven’s technological capabilities had to at least generally match the Manties’, since the war would have been over a long time ago if they hadn’t. That had been an unpleasant conclusion, as well, especially since Filareta remembered a time when the technologically backward
People’s
Navy had been desperate for any scrap of Solarian tech it could get. But the critical point at the moment was that if Harrington—clearly the cream of the Manty crop—had racked up an unbroken string of victories against an opponent who could come remotely close to matching Gold Peak’s performance at Spindle, she was obviously no one to take lightly, so—

“Update!” Daniels snapped suddenly.

Filareta wheeled back around just in time to see what looked like several hundred additional impeller signatures appear in the plot. They were much smaller and weaker than the earlier ones: far too small and weak to belong to starships. But they were also at least two million kilometers closer to Eleventh Fleet and—

“LACs, Sir,” Daniels said a moment later, his tone bitter. “They must have pretty damned good stealth, too. We never got a sniff of them until they brought their wedges up, and the bastards just killed every one of my advanced platforms.”

“I see.”

Filareta understood Daniels’ anger, but as he studied the sidebars on the weaker impeller signatures, he was more concerned about the timing. Daniels was right. They had to be light attack craft, but their signatures were more powerful than any LAC impeller wedge Filareta had ever seen. And they’d killed the advancing front of Daniels’ reconnaissance shell five million kilometers short of Tango Two. They’d done it with energy weapons, too, which suggested they had an awful lot of reach for such light units. Still, recon drones were fragile. They relied far more on stealth than evasive maneuvering for survival, too, and, as Daniels said, they hadn’t had a clue the Manties were out there. Assuming the other side had picked them up early enough, there’d been plenty of time to track them and establish hard locks while they came bumbling in all fat, dumb, and happy. And if the LACs had been able to generate firing angles that avoided the platforms’ impeller wedges…

He frowned unhappily at the thought of what that said about Manty sensors and their ability to track elusive targets, but LACs were still LACs. No matter how accurate they were, they couldn’t pack in the firepower to seriously threaten a waller! And the Manties had let the platforms get close enough to do a hard count on the SDs in Tango Two before they killed them, too. Which meant he knew there weren’t any more wallers hiding out there. No admiral this side of Sandra Crandall or Josef Byng would leave his ships sitting with cold impellers if there was even a
chance
missiles might be flying around shortly. And no matter how good Manty stealth might be, an SD’s impellers would have burned through it at
that
piddling a little range.

They’re close enough I can get to them and too far from Tango One for anyone to support them
.

Anticipation glowed within him, even hotter because he’d never dared to hope Harrington would present him with an opportunity like this one, and he made himself stand back and think.

Alpha or Bravo, Massimo?
he asked himself.
Take it slow, or run right in?

He glanced at the chrono. His original ops plan had called for him to make the decision about his final approach to the hyper limit at about this point anyway, but the Manties’ faulty dispositions lent added urgency to the choice. Under Approach Alpha, Eleventh Fleet would begin decelerating, reducing its velocity to a relative crawl by the time it hit the limit in order to minimize how long it would take to get back
across
the limit, if that became necessary. Under Approach Bravo, the fleet would maintain acceleration all the way in, which would get it into effective range of the planet (and any defenders) as quickly as possible but also meant he’d have to go far deeper into the system before he could kill his approach velocity and get back to the hyper limit.

The truth was that he’d seen Bravo as a desperation move, the rush of a boxer trying to get close, inside a larger opponent’s longer, heavier reach where he might be able to get in a few punches of his own. And, he admitted, given the Manties’ reported higher acceleration rates, he hadn’t really expected it to work.

But he’d caught Tango Two just
sitting
there. The acceleration numbers Tango One was putting up now that it had its impellers on line were fairly shocking, of course, despite earlier reports. In fact, they indicated the Manties had an advantage of almost forty percent over his own current acceleration. But Tango One was a minimum of three hours away, even so, whereas Eleventh Fleet could reach
Tango Two
’s current position in thirty-five minutes—and Sphinx orbit in thirty-eight. And it would take Tango Two
forty-seven
minutes just to match velocity with him, even assuming it began accelerating directly away from him this instant. He’d close the range to less than ten million kilometers before that happened, though…and he’d be 6.9 million kilometers
inside
Sphinx’s orbit when it happened.