Mission of Honor-ARC (41 page)

"Yes, Sir," Vicotria Saunders replied, and he sat back in his chair. Much as it galled him to admit it,
Quentin Saint-James
' fire control was far better suited to manage modern missile fire than his aged flagship's antiquated systems. He'd actually considered shifting his flag in order to exercise tactical command himself, and a part of him wished he had, even now. But efficiency was more important than getting his own combat command ticket punched. And Augustus Khumalo was too self honest to pretend he was in Aivars Terekhov's league as a combat commander.

* * *

"Signal from
Hercules
, Ma'am," Lieutenant Wanda O'Reilly announced. "Execute Paul Revere."

"Acknowledged," Naomi Kaplan replied. O'Reilly was the closest thing HMS
Tristram
's officer complement had to a genuine problem child, but there was no trace of her occasional petulance in that crisp report. Kaplan gave her a nod of approval, then looked at Abigail Hearns.

"Is your sensor data fully updated, Guns?"

"We're just finishing an update from Commodore Terekhov now, Ma'am," Abigail replied, watching the waterfall graphic rising steadily on one of her side displays. "Estimate fifteen seconds to complete the upload."

"Very well." Kaplan turned to Lieutenant Hosea Simpkins, her astrogator and, like Abigail, one of her Grayson officers. "Astro, unless Tactical's update hits a glitch, execute Paul Revere in twenty-five seconds."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Execute Paul Revere in twenty-five seconds from . . . now."

* * *

Tristram
disappeared from normal-space forty light-minutes outside the Spindle hyper limit without fuss or bother. Unlike the translation from hyper-space into normal-space, a stationary
upward
translation left no betraying footprint behind, and she materialized almost exactly where she was supposed to be in the alpha bands.

"Fleet challenge, Ma'am!" O'Reilly announced.

"Reply," Kaplan ordered calmly.

"Replying, aye, Ma'am," the com officer acknowledged, and triggered
Tristram
's transponder code.

That transponder had been locked down, for fairly obvious reasons, while the destroyer hid outside Crandall's massive task force. And while Kaplan didn't really anticipate any itchy trigger fingers among the rest of Tenth Fleet's tactical officers, she still felt a profound sense of relief when HMS
Artemis
acknowledged her identity. Unlike Sandra Crandall, Naomi Kaplan had an excellent appreciation of just how much firepower was waiting for her.

"Very well, Guns," she said, once
Tristram
's right to be there had been confirmed. "Send the data."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Sending now."

* * *

"Lord, what an
arrogant
bitch," Michelle Henke said quietly, standing between Dominica Adenauer and Cynthia Lecter as the three of them studied the data
Tristram
had just transmitted to
Artemis
.

"And this is a surprise because—?" Lecter asked equally quietly, and Michelle snorted in bitter amusement.

"More a case of a confirmation I didn't really want," she acknowledged "I did think she might at least inform the Governor her time limit had officially expired, though."

"With all due respect, Ma'am, I don't see where it makes much difference." Lecter twitched her shoulders slightly. "It's obvious the same people who picked Byng also picked her, and whether she's here as a knowing cat's-paw or got selected because she's just as stupid as he was, we all knew what she was here
for
from the outset."

Michelle nodded. And Cindy was right. She
had
known why Crandall was here, and all of her own planning had been predicated on that knowledge. Yet that didn't diminish the undeniable flicker of fury she felt as she contemplated Crandall's dismissive arrogance.

No, that's not being quite fair to yourself, girl
, she thought.
Sure, part of you is pissed off because even though the overconfident idiot is doing exactly what you predicted when you made your own plans—exactly what you
want
her to do, if she's stupid enough to attack in the first place—you resent being taken so lightly. Because it's part and parcel of the kind of arrogance you've seen out of so many Sollies. But what
really
pisses you off is that she doesn't give a single solitary damn about all the people she's about to get killed. Of course
, her lips skinned back in a hexapuma's hunting snarl,
at the moment she's thoroughly convinced that none of the people in question are going to be
hers.
And she doesn't know she took long enough getting here for the Apollo pods to beat her, either
.

Her smile turned even thinner and colder for a moment as she contemplated how the arrival of those pods had changed her initial defensive planning. But then she put that reflection aside and concentrated on the data in front of her. There hadn't been any changes she could see, although a few additional details had been added to the initial report HMS
Ivanhoe
had delivered three days ago. Mostly little stuff, like additional data on individual ships' electronic and gravitic emissions.

As she'd expected, the various destroyers' emissions signatures varied widely, which wasn't surprising given how much the
Rampart
and
War Harvest
classes had been refitted over their lifetimes. The heavier ships' emissions were much closer to their "book" profiles, though.
Hercules
' CIC had easily tagged the individual units of Rear Admiral Gordon Nelson's battlecruiser squadron, since they'd lifted his ships' electronic fingerprints out of the data they'd captured from Byng's task force. And although they didn't have hard individual IDs on the other battlecruiser squadron, it was obvious all of them were
Nevadas
.

There was an impressive uniformity among the superdreadnoughts, as well. All but seven of them were
Scientist
-class ships, and all seven of the others were members of the
Vega
class, which were basically only repeat
Scientists
with a couple of additional missile tubes in each broadside. By the standards of the prewar Royal Manticoran Navy, they weren't that bad a design, although the first of the
Scientists
had been built long enough ago that they'd still been equipped with projectile-firing point defense systems. At least all of these ships seemed to have been upgraded to laser clusters since, judging from the detailed passive scans Augustus Khumalo's Ghost Rider platforms had pulled in. And it was painfully obvious that even now the Sollies didn't begin to grasp just how capable—and stealthy—the Ghost Rider recon drones actually were. To be sure, the really close passes had been purely ballistic, with no active emissions to betray their presence, but even so they shouldn't have been able to get in close enough to literally read ships' names off their hulls without someone noticing
something
.

Don't complain
, she told herself firmly, and considered the armament readouts on Crandall's ships.

The
Scientists
were 6.8 million-ton units with thirty-two missile tubes, twenty-four lasers, and twenty-six grasers in each broadside. That was a heavier—or, at least, more numerous—energy broadside than any modern Manticoran or Grayson superdreadnought would have mounted. On the other hand, they had only
sixteen counter-missile tubes and thirty-two point defense stations in each broadside, whereas
Artemis
, although technically only a battlecruiser, had thirty-two CM tubes and thirty much heavier and much more capable point defense clusters. Even the
Saganami-Cs
had twenty tubes and twenty-four clusters in each broadside, and given the fact that Michelle Henke had absolutely no intention of straying into energy range of her opponents, that imbalance was just likely to prove fatal for Admiral Sandra Crandall.

Stay out of energy range, hell
, Michelle thought astringently.
I'm going to stay clear out of her
missile
envelope, too!

"I wonder if Crandall's superstitious?" she mused. Adenauer looked up from the plot and raised one eyebrow, and Michelle chuckled coldly.

"You didn't recognize her flagship's name, Dominica?"

The ops officer shook her head, and it was Lecter's turn to chuckle.

"This is the sixth
Joseph Buckley
they've built," she said, "and I've got to wonder why even Sollies haven't learned from that much history. It hasn't been exactly the luckiest name in the SLN's history."

"Well, fair's fair, Cindy," Michelle pointed out. "They didn't name any of them for the luckiest
scientist
in history, either."

"Is that your understatement for the day, Ma'am?" Lecter asked, and this time Adenauer chuckled, too, as the name finally clicked for her, as well.

Dr. Joseph Buckley had been a major figure in the development of the original impeller drive on Beowulf in the thirteenth century. Unhappily, he hadn't been one of the more fortunate figures. He'd been a critical part of the original developmental team in 1246, but he'd had a reputation among his peers even then for being as eratic as he was brilliant, and he'd been determined to prove it was accurate. Although Adrienne Warshawski was to develop the Warshawski sail only twenty-seven years later, Buckley had been too impatient to wait around. Instead, he'd insisted that with the proper adjustment, the impeller wedge itself could be safely inserted into a hyper-space gravity wave.

Although several of his contemporaries had acknowledged the theoretical brilliance of his work, none had been prepared to endorse his conclusions. Unfazed by his peers' lack of confidence, Buckley—whose considerable store of patents had made him a wealthy man—had designed and built his own test vessel, the
Dahak
, named for a figure out of Babylonian mythology. With a volunteer crew embarked, he'd set out to demonstrate the validity of his work.

The attempt, while spectacular, had not been a success. In fact, the imagery which had been recorded by the
Dahak
's escorts still turned up in slow motion in HD compilations of the most awe-inspiring disaster footage in galactic history.

While Buckley undeniably deserved to be commemorated alongside such other greats as Warshawski and Radhakrishnan, and despite the huge body of other work he'd left behind, it was the dramatic nature of his demise for which he was best remembered. And his various namesakes in SLN service had fared little better than he himself had. Of the current ship's predecessors, only one had survived to be withdrawn from service and decommissioned.

"Actually, only three of them were lost on active service, Cindy," Michelle pointed out.

"Four, if you count the battlecruiser, Ma'am," Lecter argued respectfully.

"Well, all right. I'd forgotten about her." Michelle shrugged. "Still, I don't think it's exactly fair to blame the 'Buckley Curse' for a ship lost 'to causes unknown', though."

"Why? Because having witnesses makes it more final? Or because faulty fusion bottles and wedge-on-wedge collisions are more spectacular?"

"They're certainly more in keeping with the original's final voyage," Michelle pointed out.

"All right, I'll grant that much," Lecter agreed. "And, actually, I suppose losing only four of them—or three, if we go with your list—in the better part of seven hundred T-years probably isn't really
proof
the Curse exists. And I'm not an especially superstitious gal myself. But having said all that,
I
wouldn't care to serve aboard one of them! And especially not"—her smile disappeared and her eyes darkened—"if I was sailing into what promised to be ugliest war my navy'd ever fought."

"Neither would I," Michelle acknowledged. "On the other hand, she doesn't think that's what she's doing, now does she?"

* * *

Sir Aivars Terekhov sat in his command chair on HMS
Quentin Saint-James
' flag bridge and thought about the last time he he'd taken a
Saganami-C
-class heavy cruiser into combat. By most navies' standards, the odds he faced were even worse this time, but he wasn't really interested in most navies' standards. Unlike Ou-yang Zhing-wei and Hago Shavarshyan, he knew precisely what those ten "sensor ghosts" they'd been picking up actually were.

Four of them were the CLACs
Pegasus
,
Hippogriff
,
Troll
, and
Goblin
, with the next best thing to four hundred LACs embarked. As stealthy as the Manticoran Alliance's light attack craft were, four CLACs were much smaller sensor targets than all those LACs would have been if they'd been deployed, which meant they could be more readily concealed or, at least, that their natures could be readily disguised, while they remained in their shipboard bays.

Two more of the "ghosts" were ammunition ships, stuffed to the deckhead with Apollo missile pods crammed full of fusion-powered Mark 23 and Mark 23-E MDMs. And the other four were Scotty Tremaine's cruisers:
Alistair McKeon
,
Madelyn Hoffman
,
Canopus
, and
Trebuchet
.

You just keep right on coming, Admiral Crandall
, Terekhov thought coldly.
You don't even begin to realize just how much you've got us exactly where we want you . . . but you're about to find out
.

"Sir, Admiral Khumalo would like to speak to you," Lieutenant Atalante Montella, his communications officer, said quietly.

"Put him on my display, Atalante."

"Yes, Sir."

A moment later, Augustus Khumalo's face appeared on the tiny com screen deployed from Terekhov's command chair.

"Good afternoon, Sir," he said.

"Good afternoon, Aivars," Khumalo acknowledged. The admiral looked considerably calmer than Terekhov suspected he actually was, and there was little sign of tension in his deep voice.

"As you can see," Khumalo continued, "our friend Crandall at least has the virtue of punctuality."

"I suppose anyone has to have at least
some
positive qualities, Sir."

"You may have been disabused of that supposition by the time you're my age," Khumalo replied with a thin smile. "At any rate, assuming she maintains her current acceleration and heads for a zero/zero intercept with the planet, she probably expects to be joining us here in about four hours. Of course, she doesn't expect any of us to still be
alive
when she gets here."