A Rising Thunder

Chapter Twenty

Massimo Filareta stood in one of his favorite “thinking” poses, feet spread, hands shoved deep into his tunic pockets, and brow knitted while he gazed down at the detailed star system schematic. At the moment, that schematic showed both components of the binary system which was his objective, but he wasn’t really interested in the secondary component. Not yet.

Although John did have a point, he reflected. They’re bound to be expecting anyone who comes calling to hit Sphinx or Manticore, especially after what happened to them in February. That’s where they’re going to have their fleet strength concentrated. And the bulk of any system-defense missiles they have left have to be deployed to cover Manticore-A, too. They can’t really afford to lose any of their home system planets, but they could afford to lose Gryphon a lot more than they could either of the other two. And they have to know that if they spread themselves too thin…

He grimaced. The notion of hitting Gryphon first, of starting by attacking their weakest point, had an undeniable appeal. Part of that was the “dipping a toe in” aspect of not getting any deeper than he had to before he’d tested the waters. That was scarcely the stuff of military derring do; then again, professional naval officers were supposed to avoid derring do whenever possible. “Derring do” was usually what happened only after someone had screwed up by the numbers and had to figure out how to save his ass from his own mistakes. And given that he’d been forced to accept that he really was facing the wrong end of a tech imbalance, seizing an objective the Manties would be forced to retake, compelling them to come to him on his terms, had a lot to recommend itself in terms of cold military logic. Especially if they really were depending on pod-launched system-defense missiles — which were effectively fixed defenses — to make up the combat differential against the League’s superior numbers.

Unfortunately, his orders were to go directly for the Star Empire’s capital world, and that meant attacking Manticore-A.

Yeah, those are the orders. But the people who gave them aren’t here, and you are. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t…modify them in a heartbeat if you really thought it would make a difference.

He snorted mentally, wondering yet again if one reason he’d been chosen for this mission — chosen by his official superiors, not Manpower, that was — was precisely because those superiors realized he’d treat their orders as no more than suggestions if it came down to it. He hoped it was, at any rate, because he’d already decided that was precisely what he was going to do.

I’m sure Manpower does have its reasons for sending me out here, but I’ll be damned if I do a Crandall for them! If this brainstorm of Rajani’s looks like it’ll really work, all well and good. If it doesn’t…Well, sorry about that, Manpower, but we are out of here!

He didn’t much care to contemplate the repercussions of disappointing his “sponsors,” but he liked contemplating the deaths of a couple of million Solarians — including that of one Massimo Filareta — even less.

“All right,” he said finally, turning from the display tank, “does anybody have any last-minute thoughts, inspirations, or concerns we need to discuss before we all grab some sleep?” He smiled thinly and took one hand from a tunic pocket to wave in the direction of the time display which was counting steadily downward towards Eleventh Fleet’s scheduled alpha translation back into normal-space. “We’ve still got a whole ten hours to think about them!”

That evoked the smiles and smothered laughs he’d hoped for. There was an edge of nervousness in some of that laughter, but that was inevitable. More importantly, there was an even stronger edge of…not confidence, perhaps, but something close to it. Or a lot closer to that than to dread, at least. The simulations they’d carried out with their new missiles during the lengthy voyage had a lot to do with that. He still had more unhappy questions than answers about where those missiles had come from — and why — but he had to acknowledge their impact on Eleventh Fleet’s capabilities. He’d been as conservative as he could in evaluating their potential, but by his calculations the pods alone had tripled his wall of battle’s striking power at the very least. And if he was willing to accept a long enough ballistic phase between drive activations, the new missiles had enough endurance, even in the tube-launched version, to give him a powered engagement envelope far in excess of anything his fire control could hope to handle. That had to have gone a long way towards offsetting the range imbalance.

“Seriously,” he continued, allowing his own smile to lapse, “the initiative’s ours. If anybody has had a last-minute thought, we can still put a hold on the operation while we consider it.”

He looked around the faces of his seated staffers and their assistants. Their expressions were sober now, but they met his eyes steadily. Then he surveyed the faces of his task force and senior squadron commanders, looking back at him from the solid wall of com displays. One or two of them looked a bit more nervous, but they, too, returned his measuring gaze levelly, and he nodded.

“Good! In that case, John,” he turned to Admiral Burrows, “let’s just hit the high points one more time.”

“Of course, Sir.”

The portly chief of staff stood and walked around to the lectern at the head of the flag briefing room’s table. Normally he would have remained seated in his usual place, but today was scarcely “normal,” and every man and woman in that compartment or looking in from the display wall knew it.

“The key to our plan is the system’s astrography,” he began formally, entering the command that zoomed in the holo display on Manticore-A and its planets. “In particular, the location of the planet Sphinx.” He entered another command, and a 22-light-minute sphere around the G0-class star suddenly turned amber. “As you can see, Sphinx’s position means that—”

* * *

“Well, better late than never, I suppose.” Mercedes Brigham made a face. “Not that I’m not grateful for the extra prep time, but you’d think even Sollies could hit within, say, a couple of days of their ops schedule.”

“Now, now,” Honor said mildly, studying CIC’s preliminary analysis. “We’ve missed a few operational schedules ourselves, Mercedes.”

“True, Your Grace,” Raphael Cardones agreed. Her flag captain had been standing beside her, studying the flag bridge plot, but now he turned away from it to look at the chief of staff. “And far be it from me to point this out, Commodore, but this is amateurs’ night. This is Battle Fleet, you know. Frontier Fleet might at least have been able to find its backside if it got to use both hands, but these people?” He shook his head. “They sit on their asses while Frontier Fleet does all the work, and you’ve seen the kind of ‘gimme’ sims Lady Gold Peak pulled out of their computers! For somebody with exactly zero real operational experience and such miserable training doctrine, coming this close to meeting their schedule is downright miraculous, when you get down to it.” He smiled sourly. “As a matter of fact, I’m still trying to cope with the surprise that Solly SDs were really able to make it all the way out here in the first place. I didn’t think the engine room hamsters had it in them!”

Honor’s lips twitched unwillingly, but she gave him a moderately stern glower.

“It may be ‘amateurs’ night,’ Rafe, but these people may also be a lot closer to ready for the major leagues than we think. They’ve certainly been given plenty of incentive to…reconsider their training standards, at least. On the other hand, Mercedes,” she looked at the older woman, “Rafe’s got a point. For someone with zero real experience, they’ve done well to hit this close to their deadline.”

Brigham looked back at her for a moment, then nodded.

“You’re probably right, Your Grace — both of you. And either way, they’re here now.”

“And pretty much where we anticipated they’d arrive, Ma’am,” another voice said.

There was more than a hint of satisfaction in Captain Jaruwalski’s observation, and Honor nodded. Not that it had taken a tactical genius to recognize the Sollies’ most probable approach vector.

She wasn’t accustomed to knowing her adversary’s actual instructions before battle was ever joined, but she wasn’t about to complain when it finally happened. Nor was she about to rely blindly on that sort of advantage, which was why she’d copied Michelle Henke’s Spindle tactics and deployed system-defense pods and most of her heavy cruisers and battlecruisers to cover Gryphon, just in case Filareta had chosen to strike that way, instead. Still, despite any insurance policies against unlikely contingencies, she’d been confident in her own mind that he would head straight for Manticore-A, as both his orders and the Solarian Navy’s fundamental strategic doctrine required.

Even so, that had left the question of which of Manticore-A’s inhabited planets he’d choose to attack. In the eleven T-months since Lester Tourville executed Operation Beatrice, Sphinx had moved out of the resonance zone, the conical volume of space between the Junction and Manticore-A in which it was virtually impossible to translate between hyper-space and normal-space. That meant the planet was no longer shielded from a direct approach, which left Honor’s home world — barely 15.3 million kilometers inside the hyper limit — very little defensive depth.

Personally, Honor would have found that very exposure a temptation to attack Manticore rather than Sphinx, on the theory that her opponent would have been forced to deploy her forces to protect the more exposed target. Given the two planets’ current positions, a good astrogator could actually have dropped a fleet back into normal-space closer to Manticore than any mobile units deployed around Sphinx. It would have been riskier in some ways, since attacking the capital planet would require a deeper penetration of the hyper limit. That would make it more difficult to withdraw into hyper if the attacker ran into an unanticipated ambush, yet the potential payoff in catching the defense out of position might well prove decisive.

But if Filareta was as much smarter than Crandal as she believed, he wasn’t about to get any deeper than he had to. He’d want to stay shallow enough to break back across the limit and escape into hyper quickly if it turned out the reports about Manticoran missile ranges were accurate, after all. No, he’d go for Sphinx, not Manticore, specifically so he could cut and run if it all went south on him.

Which she had no intention of allowing him to do.

Her eyes hardened at the thought, and she felt Nimitz stiffen on her shoulder as he shared the bleak bolt of savage determination that went through her.

Her expression never even flickered, but she made herself draw a deep mental breath and step back from the brink of that fury.

Down, girl, she told herself firmly. The object is to make these people surrender, not just massacre them. Whatever else they may be guilty of, they aren’t the ones who carried out the Yawata Strike, and you know it.

“What’s their projected vector look like, Theo?”

Her soprano was calm, almost tranquil, unshadowed by hatred or anticipation, and Lieutenant Commander Theophile Kgari, her staff astrogator, doublechecked his readouts before he replied.

“They came in about twelve light-seconds shy of the limit, Your Grace,” he said. “Call it eighteen-point-niner million kilometers to Sphinx. Current velocity relative to the planet is thirteen hundred kilometers per second, and it looks like they’re taking their acceleration easy. At the moment, they’re building delta vee at just over three-point-three KPS-squared. With those numbers, they could make a zero-zero intercept of the planet in seventy-three-point-six minutes. Turnover at thirty-three-point-six minutes, range to planet niner-point-five-seven million klicks. Velocity at turnover would be just over seven-point-niner thousand kilometers per second.”

“Thank you.”

Honor never looked away from the plot as she considered the numbers, which confirmed her own initial rough estimate. As she thought about them, however, she was acutely conscious of the brown-haired officer who stood gazing into the plot beside her with another skinsuited treecat on his shoulder. Some people might have worried that an officer of Thomas Theisman’s towering seniority would be tempted to do a little backseat driving, or at least kibitz, no matter whose flagship he was on. Yet what Honor tasted from him most clearly was something very like serenity, and she wondered if she’d ever be able to stand on someone else’s flag bridge at a moment like this without simply itching to start giving orders.

That question was only a secondary thought, however, while the majority of her attention was on the coming engagement’s geometry.

The maximum powered range from rest of the SLN’s standard shipkillers was just under 7,576,000 kilometers. From a launch speed of 7,900 KPS, that powered range would be as close to 9 million kilometers as made no difference, however. So within the next thirty-five minutes or so, Filareta would have brought anything in orbit around Sphinx into his powered missile envelope…assuming, of course, that nothing changed.

And assuming”standard shipkillers” are what he has in his tubes, she reminded herself. We still don’t know exactly what Mesa used on Rozsak at Congo, Honor. Of course, we also don’t know that this ‘Alignment’ is prepared to hand the same weapons to the Sollies, either.

Under their initial defensive planning, they would have concentrated on stopping Filareta short of the limit (and convincing him to withdraw), long before he ever got that close to the planet. She still intended to stop him before he got that close to her home world, but as for the rest of it…

“I don’t see any reason to change our minds at this stage,” she said out loud, her soprano as cold as it was calm. “We’ll go with Cannae.” She looked up from the plot at Lieutenant Commander Brantley. “Pass the preparatory signal to High Admiral Yanakov and Timberlake, Harper.”

* * *

“Signal from Flag, Ma’am.”

“And that signal would be exactly what, Vitorino?” Lieutenant Commander Jacqueline Summergate, HMS Timberlake’s commanding officer, inquired, looking up from the small tactical repeater deployed from the base of her chair.

“Sorry, Ma’am.” Ensign Vitorino Magalhães was on the young side for the senior communications officer in any starship’s company, even that of a somewhat elderly destroyer like Timberlake, and he colored slightly. But if he was flustered, there was no sign of it in his tone, at least. “‘Execute Cannae Alpha,’ Ma’am.”

“Very well.” Summergate nodded, she’d been anticipating exactly that since the first Solarian superdreadnought made its alpha translation.

Now, now, Jackie, she reminded herself. You mean the first unidentified superdreadnought. After all, there’s no proof these are Sollies invading your home star system without benefit of any formal declaration of war. Why, they could be from Andromeda, instead!

She smiled very slightly at the thought, then glanced at Lieutenant Selena Kupperman, Timberlake’s tactical officer.

“Is your tac data updated yet, Guns?”

“Just about, Ma’am,” Kupperman replied. “The last of its coming in now.”

“Very good.” Summergate nodded. “Astro, take us out of here. We have some mail to deliver.”

* * *

So far, so good. Filareta felt his lips twitch, but he restrained the smile as he sat motionless in his command chair, watching the plot.I wonder what’s going through their minds?

“Nice job, Yvonne,” he said out loud.

“Thank you, Sir,” Admiral Yvonne Uruguay replied.

Eleventh Fleet’s alpha translation had been as neat as any Filareta had ever seen, with minimal scatter of its units and on almost the exact heading he’d wanted. Oh, Uruguay had been off slightly — he’d wanted to shave the margin on the hyper limit even tighter — but that was inevitable after such a long hyper trip. The hyper log gave an astrogator a reasonably accurate running position, but “reasonably accurate” over interstellar distances could leave just a bit to be desired, and allowing for the difference in intrinsic velocities between departure point and the arrival star system could be tricky, too. Getting an entire fleet to the right place at the right time, in the right formation, and keeping it that way through an alpha translation while simultaneously carrying the desired relative velocity across the hyper wall was an art, as well as science, in a lot of ways.

On the other hand, skilled at her job or not, Uruguay would have been much too senior for a staff astrogator, in most navies, even on the staff of a fleet the size of Filareta’s current command. He knew that, and ever since this business with the Manties had blown up, he’d been thinking about the rank inflation that was such an integral, ancient, and time-honored part of the Solarian League Navy.

Assuming we don’t end up finishing this whole business this afternoon, he reflected, we’re going to have to do something about that. Our entire rank structure’s so frigging bloated it’s no wonder we’ve all got hardening of the professional arteries! But I have to say, Yvonne did do a damned good job.

“How long do you think it’s going to take them to get around to challenging us, Sir?” Admiral Burrows asked.

“Well, they have to have noticed we’re here,” Filareta replied dryly. “We didn’t exactly go for subtle, after all.”

He pursed his lips thoughtfully, considering Burrows’ question. His orders had left how he presented the League’s demands to the Manties to his own discretion, and he and Burrows had considered the matter at some length. One thing Filareta had been determined to avoid was any repeat of Sandra Crandall’s asinine antics at Spindle. He wasn’t going to hold any two-way conversations with minutes-long delays built into the middle of them. And he wasn’t going to hang around for a couple of days before getting down to business, either.

On the other hand, there was something to be said for letting the other side sweat. The ancient term “swinging in the wind” came forcibly to mind, as well, and he’d decided to let the Manties worry about opening communication. Four hundred-plus superdreadnoughts ought to be enough to get their attention…especially when the superdreadnoughts in question were headed straight for their capital star system’s hyper limit. The psychological advantage in forcing the other side to initiate contact might seem like a small thing, but at this point Massimo Filareta was prepared to go for any edge he could beg, borrow, or steal.

“We’re over a light-minute from Sphinx,” he continued out loud, “and whether or not this FTL communicator they’re supposed to have actually exists, we sure as hell don’t have it. Give them four or five minutes to kick the original sighting report upstairs and their superior officers to stop crapping their drawers, then another couple of minutes for them to kick it over to the civilians. Three or four minutes for the civilians to get back to the uniforms, and then a minute of light-speed lag to get the challenge to us.” He shrugged. “To be honest, I’ll be surprised if we actually hear anything from them in less than ten minutes or so.”

Burrows nodded slowly, his own expression thoughtful, and Filareta climbed out of his chair and strolled across to Admiral Daniels’ station. The operations officer was monitoring CIC’s data and seemed unaware of Filareta’s approach for a moment. Then he looked up quickly with an apologetic smile.

“Sorry, Sir. Didn’t notice you.”

“If it’s a choice between noticing me and keeping your eye on the Manties, I’d just as soon you kept your eye on the Manties,” Filareta replied dryly, and Daniels’ smile broadened for a moment. “I know it’s early, Bill,” the fleet admiral went on, “but is there anything you can tell us yet?”

“Not really, Sir.” Daniels shrugged. “The recon platforms are headed in-system, but we haven’t been here long enough to pick up anything from our light-speed systems. We’ve got quite a few impeller signatures on the gravitics, but they’re scattered around the inner system — or moving back and forth between the inner system and the Junction, it looks like, which takes them well clear of our approach vector — and all of them appear to be civilian traffic. We are picking up a scattering of gravitic pulses, though.”

He met Filareta’s eyes, and the fleet admiral nodded, thinking about his earlier comments to Burrows about FTL coms. The Manties’ apparent ability to transmit data at faster-than-light speeds had given all of them more concern than they really wanted to admit. The advantages of real-time or near real-time communication of tactical data were enough to make anyone who didn’t have them nervous about facing anyone who did. And all the fragmentary information available to Eleventh Fleet when it pulled out of Tasmania had insisted the Manties were doing it using grav pulses, possibly to somehow manufacture modulated ripples along the alpha wall’s boundary with normal-space. Theoretical gravitics were scarcely Filareta’s area of expertise, and he had no idea how the Manties might be pulling it off. For that matter, it didn’t sound to him like any of the gravitic theorists — even among the handful who would admit it might be possible — had a clue about how to actually do it. Given the penalties the SLN had already paid for its institutional arrogance, however, he and his staff had decided to accept the probability that the Manties could do it.

Funny how the apparent confirmation that we were right doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better, he thought.

“Any pattern to the sources?”

“Not really, Sir. Or not one we can identify yet, at any rate. It looks like they’re directional as hell, so the only ones we’re actually getting a good look at are coming from directly out-system of us. They might be scattered all around the system periphery without my being able to pick them up yet.” He grimaced apologetically. “We’re still spreading the platforms, Sir. And, to be honest, I’m not sure how good they’ll be picking up this sort of datum in the first place. Their gravitic arrays just aren’t set up or calibrated to detect or differentiate signals like this.”

“The best you can do is all you can do,” Filareta said, much more philosophically than he actually felt.

Daniels nodded and returned his attention to his displays.

Filareta walked back across to the master plot and unobtrusively checked the waterfall display on one of the secondary plots which showed the status of Eleventh Fleet’s hyper generators. A hyper generator built to the scale of a superdreadnought like Philip Oppenheimer was a substantial piece of equipment, and it took time to cycle. In fact, it would have taken Oppenheimer thirty-two minutes — over half an hour — to go from powered-down status to translation into hyper. Recovering from a translation took time, as well, although nowhere near that long. In fact, Oppenheimer’s generator could return to stand-by readiness in only twelve minutes, but it would take another four to cycle all the way up to an actual translation, for a total of sixteen minutes. Unfortunately, they’d been only about nineteen minutes flight time from Manticore-A’s hyper limit when they made their alpha translation. That was why his operations plan had specified bringing those generators back to full readiness as quickly as possible, and he gave a mental nod of satisfaction as he observed their progress and then glanced at the time display.

Five minutes since they’d crossed the alpha wall, he noticed.

* * *

“Looks like this is it, Sir,” Ensign Brynach Lacharn said quietly (and redundantly, in Lieutenant Hamilton Trudeau’s opinion).

The Junction traffic control net had just gone berserk as the bulk carriers and passenger vessels queued up for transit got their first intimation that something untoward was occurring a few light-hours away in the direction of Manticore-A. Given what had happened to the star system a few months ago — and the possibility that the people who’d done that might choose to hit the Junction after all, if they went for a repeat visit — Trudeau could hardly fault the merchies’ evident consternation. Not that he was particularly pleased by how quickly that consternation had manifested itself. It only confirmed what he and the rest of the ship’s company of SLNS DB 17025 had already decided had to be the case: the Manties really did have FTL communications.

“Anything from Junction Astro Control?” he asked.

“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.

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.”