A Rising Thunder

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Cantata’s made translation, Sir.”

“Thank you, Frazier.”

One thing Commander Frazier Adamson hadn’t done during their prolonged visit to Manticore, Lester Tourville reflected, was to grow an imagination. When it came to anything beyond the purview of his operational responsibilities, he was still the same unflappable, my-brain’s-busy-elsewhere-so-don’t-bother-me sort he’d always been, and that could still be irritating as hell. It did have its advantages upon occasion, however. In fact, there were times Tourville wondered if having a little less imagination wouldn’t have been a good thing for him, too.

Probably not, though. He’d needed a certain…mental flexibility to handle the rapid-fire sequence of events which had snatched him abruptly out of captivity and made him once again the commander of Second Fleet (although it wasn’t the Second Fleet he’d brought to the Manticore System) and assigned that fleet as the Havenite component of what had become known as Grand Fleet.

The designation had been suggested by Eloise Pritchart, and Tourville supposed it made sense. It had been one way to avoid submerging any of its constituent fleets into subunits of someone else’s fleet. He didn’t think that would have bothered him particularly, but he knew it would have bothered quite a few Havenite officers. And it for damned sure would have pissed off any number of politicians back in Nouveau Paris. Especially the ones who figured they could make some sort of political capital out of being pissed off over it. Hell, enough of them were going to be offended that Duchess Harrington had been named to command it without even worrying about what the damned thing was called!

Hitting the ground running with that sort of an assignment had been no picnic, but at least he’d been permitted to keep his staff together during their stay in Manty custody, and its members had been kept busy dealing with his many responsibilities as the senior officer of the original Second Fleet’s surrendered personnel. (For that matter, he’d been the most senior Republican POW taken during the entire war, which he considered a somewhat dubious distinction.) As a result, it had remained a functional, well integrated team when he needed it, although getting all of its members used to the notion of fighting with the Manties, rather than against the Manties, hadn’t been the easiest thing he’d ever done. Which was fair enough. Getting himself used to the notion after so many years had taken some doing. In many ways though, Tourville suspected, Adamson’s lack of imagination had actually made it easier in the operations officer’s case.

“Signal from Commander Pruitt, Sir.” Lieutenant Commander Anita Eisenberg remained far and away the most youthful staff officer Tourville had ever had, but her promotion from lieutenant during her stay as a POW had been amply merited. He hadn’t had all that much need for a communications officer per se, yet she’d made herself invaluable in dozens of other ways. “Cantata’s initiating download now.”

“Thank you, Ace.” Tourville gave her a brief smile, then looked back at Adamson. “Any changes, Frazier?”

“Don’t see any, Sir.” Adamson’s tone was a bit absent as he watched his side plot updating from HMS Cantata’s download. “Looks like Filareta’s maintaining acceleration. If he does, he’s going to cross the limit in about another four minutes. At which point”—the ops officer’s tone shifted from absent to intensely satisfied; he did have a lively imagination when it came to tactics, and he’d been looking forward to this ever since the ops plan had been explained to them—“he is going to be well and truly screwed.”

Tourville nodded. His expression was thoughtful, but his fingers were busy unwrapping one of his trademark cigars, and it was a bit hard to hide the smile which might have undermined his flag officer’s gravitas as he realized every officer and rating on RHNS Terror’s flag bridge was watching him. Those cigars were part of his image, and he felt ripples of anticipation radiating outward, as if those men and women — most of whom had known him only by reputation until he arrived to take command — had been waiting for the evidence that they truly were going to do this.

The treecat perched on the back of his command chair, on the other hand, made a soft sound of mingled resignation, amusement, and scolding. Lurks in Branches didn’t like the smell of burning tobacco. Or he claimed he didn’t, anyway; Tourville had caught him sniffing at it with what looked suspiciously like appreciation once or twice. Either way, he seemed willing to put up with it as part of the price of looking after his assigned two-leg, although he definitely wasn’t above making his public attitude clear. Tourville’s ability to read sign was still rudimentary, but he didn’t need to be able to read it fluently to understand Lurks in Branches’ message when the ’cat’s long-fingered true-hands sealed his skinsuit helmet as soon as the human started unwrapping the cigar.

“Then I suppose we should get ready to dance,” he said dryly, and smiled at the hermetically protected treecat as he stuck the cigar into his mouth. He made sure he had it at the proper, jaunty angle before he looked at the com displays which tied him to the flag bridges of the brand-new Second Fleet’s three constituent task forces.

He’d worked hard to fit into his new command assignment ever since he’d found out he was going to have it, and it helped that he knew all three of his task force commanders reasonably well. It still hadn’t been easy. After the next best thing to a solid T-year away from a command deck, he’d felt undeniably rusty, and he’d wondered how the three of them were going to feel about taking the orders of an admiral who’d rather decisively lost the last battle he’d fought in this very star system. For that matter, he still wondered how Admiral Pascaline L’anglais, the commanding officer of Capital Fleet, had felt when almost seventy percent of her wall of battle was suddenly stripped away and sent off to fight under someone else’s command. In her place, Lester Tourville would have been royally pissed, and he wouldn’t have cared who knew it.

Of course, at that point the plan had been for Thomas Theisman to command the reconstituted Second Fleet, and not even someone with L’anglais’ well-known temper would have cared to argue that point. That had changed along with the initial plan for dealing with Filareta, however. The suggestion that Theisman might actually contribute even more effectively from someone else’s flagship had come from Duchess Harrington, but somewhat to Tourville’s surprise, Theisman had embraced the idea enthusiastically, which had left Second Fleet with no flag officers who’d ever actually commanded a full-scale fleet in action.

Except for Lester Tourville, that was.

“All right, People,” he told his task force COs. “Commander Adamson is sending all of you the execute signal now. The timer’s ticking. Any last immortal words anyone wants to say?”

He raised his eyebrows, then produced an old-fashioned silver lighter, activated its tiny plasma bubble, and puffed the fragrant tobacco carefully alight.

“I don’t know about ‘immortal words,’ Admiral,” Vice Admiral Oliver Diamato said, with an off-center smile, “but I guess we’re about as ready as we’re going to get.” He shook his head. “I have to say, though, I’m still wondering when we’re going to wake up and find out this was all a really weird dream.”

“It may be a dream, Oliver,” Vice Admiral Jennifer Bellefeuille said from her quadrant of the display, “but, frankly, the thought of fighting Sollies instead of Manties makes it more pleasant than quite a few I’ve had!”

Vice Admiral Sampson Hermier, Tourville’s third task force commander, only shook his head with a rather bemused smile of his own. He was almost as young as Diamato, which was an accomplishment for an officer of his seniority, and he was one of the few survivors of what had once been a moderately prominent Legislaturalist family. Tourville knew him less well than he did Diamato or Bellefeuille, but his combat record was excellent. If it hadn’t been, Thomas Theisman would never have tapped him for task force command.

Especially not command of one of these task forces.

“Well,” Tourville said thoughtfully, squinting through a haze of smoke before the ventilators wisped it away, “with the exception of Sampson, here, we’ve all had our butts kicked at one time or another by the Manties. So I’ll grant you it feels a bit bizarre. But to be honest, Jennifer, I think you’ve got a point. And speaking only for myself, I have to admit part of me really wants to see these goddamned arrogant Sollies taken down a peg. Besides,” his smile disappeared, “we know who the real enemy is now.”

His eyes had hardened along with his tone, and his subordinates looked back at him in grim agreement. He held their gazes for a moment, then continued more briskly.

“Hopefully, this is going to work out without anyone else’s getting hurt. It may not, though, depending on how stupid Filareta’s feeling. And if it doesn’t, then we are going to hammer these people. Clear?”

All three vice admirals nodded, their expressions hard.

“Good.”

He glanced at the digital display counting steadily downward in one corner of the plot, then at Molly DeLaney, his chief of staff.

Captain DeLaney looked back at him, and something dark and hungry flickered in her eyes. She had more reservations than the staff’s younger members about the Republic’s allying itself with the Star Empire, if only because she’d lost so many more friends than they to the wars with Manticore. She’d kept those reservations to herself well enough that anyone who didn’t know her well could be excused for not realizing she felt them, but she’d also been with Tourville longer than any other member of his staff. He did know her well, yet as he looked into her eyes, he felt no doubt about her commitment to whatever was about to happen. Not, in her case, because she hated Sollies, although she was no fonder of them than any other naval officer who’d ever had to deal with their arrogance, but because she was impatient.

Filareta was only a distraction, as far as she was concerned. The entire Solarian League was only a distraction, when it came down to it, and one she wanted disposed of as promptly as possible. Molly DeLaney might not like Manticorans, and she might have a few qualms about finding herself allied to them, but those were secondary considerations whenever she remembered the nightmare slaughter of the Battle of Manticore. She didn’t really blame the Manties for the carnage. She might not like them, but she did respect them, and they’d only been doing exactly what she would have done if someone had attacked her home star system. Besides, she knew now that the Star Empire had been manipulated just as skillfully as the Republic by someone who intended to see both of them destroyed. And because she knew that, she wanted the people who’d sabotaged the Torch summit talks and sent Second Fleet into that holocaust. She wanted them with a pure and blazing passion, and she was willing to fight beside anyone who might help her get to them.

“On the clock, Frazier,” Tourville said, looking away from DeLaney. “On the clock.”

* * *

Eleventh Fleet crossed the hyper limit, charging towards Sphinx with a closing velocity of just over five thousand kilometers per second. There was no actual physical sensation involved, yet in the instant the flagship’s icon crossed the perimeter of the amber sphere indicating Manticore-A’s hyper limit, something like a deep, silent sigh went through SLNS Philip Oppenheimer’s flag bridge.

Fleet Admiral Filareta stood silently, expression controlled but with grim eyes locked to the plot. Tango Two was still just sitting there, not even trying to evade him, and anticipation pulsed somewhere deep inside him, hot and eager. He felt the same emotion coming back at him from the staff assembled about him, yet he felt something else, as well. A sense that there was no turning back. Win or lose, they were committed, and despite all of their simulations with the new missiles, despite their huge margin of superiority over Tango Two, the reports of what had happened to Sandra Crandall echoed and reechoed in the depths of their minds.

Hell, they’d be more than human if they weren’t worried! he thought coldly. But whatever happens to us, Tango Two is screwed. There’s no way in this universe that forty superdreadnoughts can match the defensive firepower of four hundred and thirty of them!

A minute passed. Two minutes. Three.

Eleventh Fleet’s velocity rose to 5,647 KPS. The hyper limit lay 963,000 kilometers behind Oppenheimer, and the range to Tango Two had fallen to 12.3 million kilometers. The Manties were 3.2 million kilometers inside Cataphract’s powered envelope, even with no ballistic phase built into the attack run, although projected accuracy at forty-one light-seconds would be abysmal. On the other hand, he only had to worry about forty targets, and each of his superdreadnoughts had twelve missile pods towing astern. That gave him over five thousand pods, each containing ten missiles, which didn’t even count his tubes. Each of his superdreadnoughts had given up a pair of tubes in each broadside to squeeze in Aegis, but that left them thirty per side. If he flushed all of his pods and fired a full broadside from each of his superdreadnoughts, he could put over 64,000 missiles into space simultaneously.

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.

“Those are my missile pods, Admiral,” a soprano icicle told him. “Or some of them, to be more precise. I imagine you’re having a little difficulty getting a detailed count, so I’ll save you the effort. There are just over a quarter million of them…which represents less than ten percent of the total available to me. Moreover, every missile in those pods has a powered engagement range of better than forty million kilometers. And unlike you, we have the advantage of faster than light data transmission for fire control and electronic warfare management.”

“Which won’t do you personally a great deal of good if my admittedly inferior missiles blow you and every damned superdreadnought in company with you into plasma,” Filareta heard his own voice say harshly.

“No, it wouldn’t. But that’s not going to happen, Admiral. First of all, we’ve had the advantage of examining Sandra Crandall’s units in some detail. On the basis of that examination, we know your fire control is capable of managing salvos of no more than seventeen to eighteen thousand missiles. Each of my superdreadnoughts, on the other hand, can manage more than two hundred missiles apiece…in real-time, without transmission lags. I’ll let you do the math.”

She looked at him coolly.

“Bearing in mind that capability, do you really think we haven’t developed a defensive doctrine to deal with far heavier volumes of fire than your fleet can possibly lay down or control? I’m sure you’ve observed all of the LACs screening my forces, for example. I’m also sure you dismissed them as ‘only’ LACs. Before you do that, however, you might want to remember just how badly you’ve underestimated the rest of our hardware.”

She showed her teeth in another of those icy smiles as she let that sink in, then continued with the same, cold dispassion that was more terrifying than any rant could ever have been.

“Each of those LACs has more missile defense capability than one of your Rampart-class or War Harvest-class destroyers,” she told him. “In fact, they probably have more antimissile capability than one of your cruisers. And at this moment there are two thousand of them deployed with each of my forces. Which doesn’t even consider what our onboard defenses and EW will do to your birds.” She shook her head. “Your fire isn’t getting through my defenses, Admiral. Not enough of it to do you one bit of good.”

Filareta’s jaw tightened. He wanted, more than he’d ever wanted anything in his entire life, to believe she was lying. That it was all still an elaborate bluff. But he knew better. There was too much certitude, too much confidence in those frozen brown eyes. And her body language — for that matter, the body language of every officer and rating in her pickup’s field of view — was just as confident as her eyes.

Silence lingered for several seconds, then he drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders.

“And your point in explaining all of this to me is—?”

“For the last eight T-months, the Solarian League government — or, rather, the corrupt bureaucratic clique which dictates the Solarian League’s policies — has ignored every effort on the Star Empire’s part to divert it from a catastrophic collision,” Harrington said in that same battle steel soprano. “We’ve repeatedly sought a diplomatic resolution of the crisis provoked and sustained by the League. The unelected bureaucrats ruling the League with complete disregard for the League’s own Constitution, however, have made it clear they prefer the path of military confrontation, regardless of how many human beings — including men and women in the uniform of the Solarian League Navy — might be killed along the way. We’ve recently discovered, and have shared with the League through our ambassador in Old Chicago, evidence that strongly supports our contention that the crisis between our star nations was deliberately engineered by certain parties in the Mesa System. We also invited Permanent Senior Undersecretary Kolokoltsov and his…associates to send someone through the Junction to Manticore with the authority to order you to stand down before anyone was killed. That invitation was declined, from which we can only conclude Kolokoltsov continues to prefer war to a peaceful resolution.”

She paused once again. Her eyes narrowed, and Filareta wondered if she’d seen something in his own eyes when she mentioned Mesa.

“Since war is clearly what he prefers, and since no one in the League seems to be prepared or in a position to dispute his policies, then war it will be.” Harrington’s voice was colder than the space beyond Oppenheimer’s hull. “Which leaves you with a decision, Admiral Filareta. The Star Empire and its allies are prepared to accept your surrender and the surrender of the vessels under your command. Should you so surrender, we will guarantee your personnel proper treatment under the Deneb Accords. We will further guarantee your personnel’s repatriation to the Solarian League as soon as a reasonable and mutually satisfactory resolution of all disputes between us and the League has been concluded. Should you choose not to surrender, we will engage you, and the consequences for your fleet will be disastrous. You have five minutes to consider our terms. At the end of that time, if you have not announced your surrender, struck your wedges, and scuttled your missile pods, we will open fire.

“The choice is yours. Alexander-Harrington, clear.”

The tall, implacable image disappeared from Filareta’s com, and he turned to face his staff.

Every one of them looked as stunned as he felt.

“Well, John?” He gave Burrows a smile he suspected looked as ghastly as it felt. “Do you think she’s bluffing?”

From his expression, Burrows wanted desperately to say exactly that. Instead, he shook his head.

“No, Sir,” he said flatly. “She set all of this up too well. She knows too much about our ops plan, and she’s showing us too much tactical detail. Worse, she’s showing us way too much about their capabilities — things like their platforms’ stealth and sensor reach, the number of pods she’s got deployed, those LAC carriers or whatever the hell they are the Havenites must have.” He shook his head again. “She wants us to know what she has, wants us to know exactly what she can do to us, and she wouldn’t be giving us that good a look if she wasn’t just as confident as she sounds. She may be exaggerating her antimissile capabilities, but I don’t think so. And even if she is, it won’t make any difference to us once the wreckage cools.”

“And I went charging straight over the limit so we can’t even try to run, instead.” Filareta heard the bitterness in his own voice.

“It’s what our orders specified, Sir,” Burrows replied with a shrug. “Whoever thought this operation up was obviously operating on the basis of a few…flawed assumptions. Now we’ve been handed the shit-end of the stick.”

Filareta nodded slowly, yet unlike Burrows, he very much doubted that “whoever” had truly come up with this operation had been operating on “flawed assumptions.” No. Harrington had it right; Mesa was ultimately behind it all. He couldn’t imagine why, or what Mesa hoped to accomplish, but it didn’t matter, either. There were over four hundred superdreadnoughts on his plot, and if they were even half as capable as Harrington had described, they were more than enough to cut through every active unit of Battle Fleet like a laser through ice cubes. Which didn’t even consider what would happen to him personally, or to the almost three million men and women aboard Eleventh Fleet’s starships, because they wouldn’t even work up a light sweat dealing with his command.

“Bill?” He looked at Daniels.

“Sir,” the operations officer’s expression was desperately unhappy, “I think she’s telling the truth — about her capabilities, anyway. And if she is, we’re…Well, John’s right, Sir. If she pulls the trigger, we’re toast. We may be able to hurt them more than she’s suggesting, but there’s no way we survive.”

* * *

“What do you think he’s going to decide, Tom?” Honor asked quietly.

“Given the options, he’s going to strike his wedges and blow those pods, unless he’s a complete and total idiot,” Theisman replied succinctly. “Of course, he may be a complete and total idiot, but I think you made our position eloquently clear. For that matter,” he smiled slightly, “I doubt my own modest contribution hurt.”

“No, I don’t think it did,” she agreed, right cheek dimpling with a sudden, much broader smile of her own.

“You do realize you weren’t exactly truthful with the poor shmuck, Your Grace,” Rafe Cardones pointed out from his com screen, and she cocked an eyebrow at him. “You didn’t fall all over yourself giving him accurate info on our capabilities,” her flag captain expanded, and she shrugged.

“I disagree with your assessment, Rafe. I didn’t tell him we could do a single thing we can’t do, I just…understated the numbers a bit. Sooner or later, at least some of these people will be going home again — at least I darned well hope they will! — and I don’t see any reason to give away all our little secrets before they do. Hopefully, we’re finally going to put the brakes on this thing today. If we don’t, though, I want to keep the Sollies guessing about the actual ceiling on our abilities for as long as I can.”

“I agree completely.” Theisman nodded firmly. “Keeping at least some of your capabilities in reserve as long as possible is always a good idea. Besides,” he snorted dryly, “they might not have believed you if you’d told them how good your tech—our tech — really is! He might’ve decided you were lying and running a bluff after all.”

“I’m with Admiral Theisman, Your Grace,” Mercedes Brigham offered. “Besides, you didn’t need to tell the bastards everything. What you did tell them was plenty bad enough from their perspective, and while I’ll agree you were both pretty eloquent, I think the tactical situation’s even more persuasive.” She shook her head. “I’ve never seen a fleet in a worse hole than this one, even in a simulation, and”—she glanced at Theisman for a moment—“that’s saying something, after some of the scrapes we’ve been in.” She shook her head again. “Surrender’s the only option you’ve left him.”

“That was the general idea, Mercedes,” Honor said softly, her eyes on the crimson icons of Eleventh Fleet.

* * *

Massimo Filareta took one last look at the horrific array of firepower which had closed its battle steel jaws on his command. He remembered the shock with which the SLN had responded to the surrender of Josef Byng’s task force. The even greater shock — and disbelief — of what had happened to Sandra Crandall. The impact of this was going to dwarf all of those other shocks, all of that other disbelief.

And there wasn’t one damned thing he could do about it.

Well, actually, there is, he told himself. I can at least put one right in those Mesan bastards’ eye and refuse to be an even more disastrous Crandall for them.

“Very well.” His voice sounded flat, defeated and broken, even to him. “Strike our wedges and send the pod self-destruct command, Bill.”

“Yes, Sir,” Daniels said.

“I suppose you should go ahead and get Harrington back, Reuben,” Filareta continued, turning to the communications officer. “She’ll want—”

Admiral William Daniels reached for his console to transmit the orders Admiral Filareta had given him. He was still in a state of shock, of disbelief, yet what he felt most strongly was relief. Relief that Filareta had been willing to recognize reality. Relief that Eleventh Fleet wasn’t going to be destroyed after all.

Relief that abruptly vanished as he saw his own hand flip up a plastic shield and hit the button under it.

Filareta stiffened in horrified disbelief as fifty-one hundred pods launched fifty-one thousand missiles in a single enormous salvo.

“What the fuck d’you think you’re do—?!”

The fleet admiral never completed the question. Before he could, William Daniels’ hand, still under someone — or something—else’s command kept right on moving. The operations officer fought desperately to stop it, but it moved smoothly, efficiently, punching in a numerical command code he’d never learned or even seen before.

The command that detonated the bomb a petty officer named Harder had installed in his console and killed every man and woman on SLNS Philip Oppenheimer’s flag bridge.

* * *

“Missile launch!” Andrea Jaruwalski barked. “Multiple missile launches! Fifty thousand-plus, incoming!”

Honor Alexander-Harrington’s breath stopped. For just an instant, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Couldn’t believe anyone, even a Solly, could be that insane. That arrogant. That willing to see his men and women slaughtered.

But someone obviously could.

She looked at that incoming tide of destruction for perhaps another two seconds. Then she drew a deep breath.

“Engage the enemy,” her soprano voice said evenly. “Fire Plan Thermopylae.”