The Shadow of Saganami

Chapter Fifty-Seven

"Commodore, I just can't guarantee the hard numbers you're asking for," the Solarian technical representative said nervously on the bridge of MNS Cyclone . The man was sweating hard, and much as he wanted to, Janko Horster couldn't find it in himself to despise the fellow for it. He was a civilian, after all. He hadn't signed on for a combat mission against a technologically superior opponent.

"I'm not asking you to guarantee it," the commodore said. "I'm just asking for your best estimate."

The civilian fidgeted, pulling at his lower lip and blinking rapidly while he thought.

Horster wanted to shake the answer out of him, but hurrying the man wasn't the way to get a reliable response. So the commodore contented himself with a tight smile, folded his hands behind himself, and took a quick turn around his commodious flag deck.

Under the training mission scenario, the three ships of the First Division- Cyclone and her sisters Typhoon and Hurricane -had been tasked to penetrate Eroica Station's sensor perimeter and get to attack range before they were detected. Given the sensor upgrades the Station had received from the Technodyne people, Horster hadn't been ragingly optimistic about his chances, but he'd been determined to give it the best try he could. Which was why he'd arranged to embark a dozen tech reps aboard each ship for any "emergency adjustments" which might be required. After all, it was less than three weeks since the ships had completed their full-powered engine trials. There was no telling what sort of small things might go wrong. And if the tech reps who just happened to be aboard to deal with them also just happened to be qualified EW instructors who could just happen to actually take over the systems-purely in order to demonstrate their proper operation to his own people, of course-well, so much the better.

He'd used the marvelously effective stealth systems of his wonderful new toys to cover his relatively low-powered impeller signatures while he accelerated to a velocity of 37,800 KPS. Then he'd shut down to the absolute minimum impeller strength. He would have liked to shut down completely, but even with hot nodes at standby he would have been looking at a significant delay in bringing the wedge back up. So instead he'd held it at the barest possible maintenance level, which would let him bring it back to full power in less than eighty seconds if he needed to.

For the last two hours he'd been barreling through space on a ballistic course. Now he was 48.6 million kilometers short of the Station, which put him just under 58.7 million kilometers from the Manties… headed straight for them.

"Commodore," the civilian said finally, "I'm sorry. We just don't know enough about their sensor capabilities. Another Indefatigable couldn't see us until we got much closer, probably down to under five million kilometers, given how little emissions signature we're showing. Against Manties, who knows? I hate to say it, but if they've deployed remote arrays, they might be able to see us right this minute."

"No," Horster said. "If they could see us, they'd've already reacted."

"How, Sir?" the civilian asked, and Horster snorted.

"They're still decelerating, and they haven't fired on the Station or, apparently, demanded we break off. Given our closing velocity, they can't avoid us unless we break off. So if they're maintaining profile without even mentioning us to the Station, they don't know we're here."

The Solarian nodded slowly, and Horster shrugged.

"At this point, we're going to get to them," he said flatly. "The only way they could prevent that would be to spot us and destroy us first, and I don't think they're going to do that."

"I hope to hell you're right, Commodore," the tech rep said fervently. Which, Horster thought sardonically, wasn't exactly the most reassuring thing one of the people supposed to be teaching him how the ships worked could possibly have said.

He nodded courteously to the civilian and waved him back towards the EW section, then turned to the main plot and puffed out his cheeks as he considered the geometry.

If he'd only started the exercise sooner, he might have been able to intercept the Manties before they attacked the Station. Then again, if the Technodyne people were right about the maximum attack ranges of current-generation Manticoran missiles, they were already in range to attack Eroica. He'd just have to hope this Terekhov was running a bluff, that he wouldn't really inflict the massive casualties an all-out attack on the Station would produce. Surely the thought of how galactic public opinion-and especially Solarian public opinion-would react to something like that in time of peace, without even a formal declaration of hostilities, should give the lunatic pause!

"All right!" Hegedusic smacked his palms together and grinned at Levakonic. "The odds seem to be shifting," he observed.

"At least in the direction of having a fighting chance," Levakonic agreed a bit more cautiously.

"But we could shift them even further if we could keep this Captain Terekhov coming in fat, dumb, and happy."

Hegedusic thought a moment longer, then turned back to the communications section.

"Send a message to the Manties. Tell them I've decided to evacuate the Station, but that it's going to take some time. Tell them I estimate a minimum of two and a half to three hours, even using every available vessel from the civilian platforms."

"Yes, Sir."

Hegedusic turned to another staffer.

"Get down to flight ops. Tell them I want a steady stream of lighters and shuttles moving between the Alpha platforms and the Beta platforms. I don't need anybody aboard them but the flight crews; I just need small craft in motion where the Manties can see it."

"Yes, Sir!"

"Well, thank God!" Bernardus Van Dort heaved a huge sigh of relief as the message came in. "Congratulations, Captain. It looks like you've managed it without killing anyone, after all."

"Maybe." Terekhov frowned at the master plot, then glanced at Abigail Hearns. "Any sign of confirming movement?"

"As a matter of fact, Sir, there may be," the Grayson lieutenant said after a moment. "I've got half a dozen-no, a total of nine-small craft impellers moving away from the military portions of the Station."

"You see?" Van Dort's grin grew even broader. "Hegedusic must've realized he didn't have a choice."

"I'd certainly like to think so," Terekhov agreed, his frown beginning to ease at last. "Amal, inform them that as long as they appear to be making a good-faith effort to evacuate the Station, I'll hold my fire. But warn them that restraint on our part is dependent on their continued compliance with our instructions."

"How obliging of him," Hegedusic said, and looked back at the tactical officer on his screen. "They're holding profile, correct?"

"Yes, Sir. They're about eighteen minutes from zeroing their velocity relative to the Station. And," the tac officer smiled thinly, "they're just over ten-point-one million kilometers out."

"Patience, patience, Commander," Hegedusic said. "If they're willing to come closer, I'm certainly willing to let them."

"Ms. Zilwicki?"

"Yes, Traynor?" Helen said, turning to the senior sensor rating assisting her with the remote arrays.

"The Alpha-Seven array's picking something up," Traynor said.

"What?" Helen asked. It was scarcely a proper contact report, she reflected. Assuming, of course, that it was an actual contact at all.

"It may be nothing at all, Ma'am. Maybe just a ghost. Look here, Ma'am."

He flicked keys, transferring the data he'd been examining to Helen's secondary plot. She gazed at it herself for several seconds before her eyes narrowed. She input a command sequence, playing with the data, trying to refine it, and frowned.

She considered briefly, then shrugged and sent a request to CIC for the master computers to take a close second look at the suspect datum. Seven seconds later, a scarlet icon flicked into existence on the master plot, strobing with the rapid flicker of an unconfirmed contact.

"Captain," Helen announced, astonished that her own voice sounded so calm, "we have a possible impeller signature, very weak, inbound at three-point-two light-minutes. Apparent closing velocity four-one-five-seven-two kilometers per second."

"Range now ten-point-zero-seven million kilometers," Hegedusic's tac officer said. "Velocity now three-seven-seven-three KPS."

"Range to enemy now five-seven-point-six million kilometers," Commodore Horster's tac officer reported. "Closing velocity four-one-five-seven-two KPS."

"CIC, I need confirmation, one way or the other." Terekhov kept his tone as level as possible.

"Yes, Sir. We know. We're doing our best to-"

"Captain, Alpha-Seven has a second possible contact in close company with Bogey-One," Helen announced. She hesitated a moment, then cleared her throat. "Sir, the array's at less than eleven light-seconds from whatever this is."

"Your point, Ms. Zilwicki?"

"Sir, these arrays don't pick up ghosts at that short a range. If they're seeing something that close to them, it's really there. And if they can't see it clearly, it's because whatever it is is doing its damnedest to imitate a hole in space."

"She's right, Skipper," Naomi Kaplan said from AuxCon. She'd been studying the frustratingly inconclusive data herself. "And if that's what we've got here, Sir," she continued grimly, "whoever it is has got much better EW than any Monican unit ever had."

"Guthrie?" Terekhov looked at his EWO. Bagwell didn't even hesitate.

"Concur, Sir. My guess is that we're looking at a maintenance level impeller wedge covered by some damned good stealth technology. Probably almost as good as our own."

"Understood."

Terekhov leaned back in his command chair, thinking furiously. All eleven of the Solarian battlecruisers Copenhagen had discovered were still at Eroica Station.

Which means these people weren't at the Station when the drone made its pass. Battlecruisers they'd already refitted? Possible. Probable, really. They could've been running trials or training missions out-system, where Copenhagen couldn't see them. Or these may be Solly units that never were intended to be refitted. Either way, I've got a pair of bogeys coming at me that I have to assume are at least battlecruisers… and there's no way Hegedusic didn't know about it when he sent me that "We're evacuating as quickly as we can" message. But-

"Captain, we've got a third possible contact."

He looked up as a third strobing icon appeared in formation with the other two. Helen, a corner of his brain noted, still sounded crisp and professional, but not quite as calm as she'd been with the first two.

And I can't blame her for that! That's three we know about; God only knows how many we haven't found yet . He studied projected vectors, and his mouth tightened. At their closing velocity, his squadron's vector intersected almost exactly head-on with the three bogeys' vector in less than twenty-four minutes. There's no way we can avoid them now, but there's still the units waiting to be refitted. So what do I do? I can hardly even see these probable Sollies. I certainly can't justify wasting missiles on them at this range, not with the miserable hit probabilities we'd have! But if I hold my fire until the range drops and then go for an engagement with them, I could lose everything I've got and leave eleven untouched battlecruisers behind me .

His jaw tightened.

"Ms. Hearns."

"Yes, Sir."

It was remarkable, he thought, how that soft Grayson accent actually got more musical as the stress mounted.

"We can't leave the battlecruisers in the yard behind us. I want to hold the pods-we may need them against these newcomers. Do you have a good firing solution on the Station?"

"Yes, Sir," she said steadily.

"Very well," he said. "Execute Fire Plan Sierra, broadside launchers only."

"Fire Plan Sierra, aye, aye, Sir," she said, and entered a command sequence.

"Missile launch! I have multiple hostile launches! Estimate thirty-plus inbound!"

"God damn it!"

Isidor Hegedusic smashed his fist down on his own knee. Missile Defense was tracking the incoming missiles-or trying to, at least-and there didn't seem to be many of them. No more than thirty or forty. But the Station's anti-missile defenses hadn't been upgraded. There hadn't been time to do everything, and he and Levakonic had concentrated on giving Eroica Station sharper eyes and longer teeth. Nor had they counted on the fiendishly effective EW platforms scattered among the attack missiles to assist them in penetrating Hegedusic's defenses.

He hesitated, but only for a single heartbeat.

If they take out the battlecruisers, there's no tomorrow, anyway, he thought grimly, and looked at the tactical officer on his screen.

"Engage the enemy, Commander!"

The missile pods provided by Technodyne were very stealthy platforms. In fact, they had even smaller sensor signatures than the RMN's pods did. In virtually every other respect, however, they were inferior to Manticore's weapons. Their single-drive missiles had lower accelerations, less sensitive seekers, poorer EW, and much, much shorter powered attack ranges. But inferior as they might have been in all of those categories, they were far better than anything the SLN had ever had before. They were better than ONI's worst-case estimates. And they were already inside the attack range their improved drives made possible.

To reach their targets with enough time left on their drives for the necessary terminal attack maneuvers, the missiles would have to restrict themselves to half-power, "only" 43,000 gravities and a terminal velocity of "only".32 c . They were big-larger even than a standard capital missile, more like something a ground-based system would have fired-and the designers had been able to squeeze only eight of them into each out-sized pod. But Hegedusic and Levakonic had deployed one hundred and twenty of those pods. Deployed them amid the concealing clutter of Eroica Station's platforms and in the protective radar shadows of handy asteroids.

"Incoming fire! Estimate nine hundred-plus!"

"Point defense free! Case Romeo!" Terekhov snapped.

"Case Romeo, aye, aye, Sir!" Helen Zilwicki responded instantly.

"Fire Plan Omega!"

"Fire Plan Omega!" Abigail responded.

She had assigned Helen responsibility for missile defense while she concentrated on Fire Plan Sierra, targeting her missiles as carefully as possible on the helpless battlecruisers. Now she made the snap decision to leave the midshipwoman in charge. Missile flight times were going to be under a hundred and sixty seconds. This was no time to confuse the situation by interfering. Besides, she had her own priorities.

She'd never really expected Fire Plan Omega to be required. It was the "use-them-or-lose-them" option common to any naval force employing towed pods. Their vulnerability to proximity "soft kills" meant they had to be gotten off before that hurricane of incoming fire arrived, but no one had really expected the Monicans would be able to range on them. Yet the Captain had insisted on planning for even that unlikely eventuality. There was a different, less precise targeting sequence to meet it, one which spared only the two battlecruisers in among the civilians, and Abigail Hearns ignored the missiles screaming in to kill her. She had less than three minutes to completely revise her firing plan and get her birds off before they were destroyed. And so she shut the incoming fire out of her mind, trusting her survival and her ship's to a midshipwoman on her snotty cruise while she called up Fire Plan Omega's targeting hierarchy, handed it to the computers, allocated her pods, and fired.

It never even occurred to Helen that Abigail might have shunted her aside. She was too locked into the job at hand to think about such things, and her fingers flew across her keypads. Her heart seemed to be hammering against the backs of her teeth, yet there was a sort of surrealistic calm to it. A sense almost of floating. If she'd had time to think about it, she would have realized it was almost like the Zen-like state Master Tye had trained into her back on Old Earth, but there was more to it than that. It combined that discipline with the endless hours of drills and simulations. Her hands seemed to know what to do without ever consulting her brain, and yet her brain was whirring with a flashing speed that made even her flying fingers seem slow.

Case Romeo activated the squadron-wide layered defense system Naomi Kaplan had set up on the voyage from Point Midway. Hexapuma and Aegis , with their superior sensor suites, faster-firing counter-missile tubes, and additional control links, were responsible for the outer counter-missile zone. Warlock, Valiant , and Gallant had the intermediate zone, and Audacious and the destroyers had the close-in counter-missile zone.

It was a good plan, and Terekhov's insistence on deploying his full EW assets helped. But there were nine hundred and sixty missiles in that incredible wave. Nine hundred and sixty missiles with penetration aids far superior to anything the Monicans were supposed to have in service, with better seekers and heavier warheads.

Hexapuma and Aegis , with their own counter-missiles and enough from the other ships to fill all their redundant control links, destroyed two hundred and nineteen missiles in the outer zone, ripping them apart with precisely directed counter-missile kamikazes.

Seven hundred and forty-one missiles, each fit to blast through a superdreadnought's sidewalls and armor, broke through the outer zone and screamed into the squadron's teeth. Hexapuma and Aegis continued firing, joined by Warlock , Valiant , and Gallant as the older ships' less acute sensors locked onto the incoming tide of death. Holes appeared, ripped through the solid-looking tide of incoming warheads, and another two hundred and forty-eight of them died.

But there were still almost four hundred left, and they came howling into the inner counter-missile zone. All the Manticoran ships could see them now, but there was no time for follow-up shots on missiles which evaded the first counter-missiles targeted upon them. The maelstrom of swarming targets and outgoing counter-missiles, the sensor-blinding interference of hundreds of missile impeller wedges, and the jamming, sensor-twisting strobes of the Solarian-built missiles' sophisticated ECM created a whirling confusion no human brain could have sorted out. It was all in the hands of the computers, and Hexapuma quivered with the saw-edged vibration of counter-missile tubes in constant, maximum-rate fire.

Two hundred more missiles perished, and "only" two hundred and ninety-three kept coming.

They hit the the perimeter of the final defensive zone, too close for counter-missiles to acquire and intercept in time. Tethered decoys called to them, seducing them away from their assigned targets. Huge bursts of jamming tried to blind them. Laser clusters swiveled and spat, cycling bolts of coherent light in lethal streams, their prediction programs pitted against the best evasion patterns the Solarian League's premier naval shipbuilder could provide. The inner zone was a holocaust of shattering missiles and wreckage, and a hundred and ninety-six more were torn apart in the second and a half it took them to cross it.

It was a phenomenal performance. Ninety percent of that lethal tide was stopped short of attack range. Ninety percent, by only ten warships, none heavier than a heavy cruiser.

But ninety-seven got through.

The Squadron twisted and danced, each captain maneuvering individually, desperately seeking to interpose the shield of his impeller wedge between his crew and the incoming laser heads. But their base velocity was low, and the missiles had plenty of time on their drives. Less than a third of them could be evaded that way. Last-ditch decoys sucked a few of the rest off, and four more strayed too close together and destroyed one other in fratricidal bursts of impeller interference. Two more simply failed to detonate; the rest of them did not.

Hexapuma heaved madly as bomb-pumped lasers designed to shatter the armor of superdreadnoughts slammed into her. Sidewalls did their best, clawing at the beams, bending them. Armor resisted briefly, but the savage bars of X-ray lasers smashed through it. Impeller nodes blew, superconductor capacitors exploded, hull plating shattered. Graser One, Three, and Seven were wiped away as if they had never existed, and despite Hexapuma's manpower-reducing automation, nineteen men and women died with their weapons. Missile tubes were wrecked, ripped and twisted. Frame members shattered. Three sidewall generators went down, and a quarter of her starboard counter-missile tubes and almost half her point defense clusters went with them. Gravitic Array One and Lidar One disintegrated, and a power surge blew into the superconductor ring for Spinal Five, the starboard graser in her after chase armament, like a tornado. The ring exploded, deep inside the ship, like a bomb, and the blast blew back into Auxiliary Control.

Ansten FitzGerald, Naomi Kaplan, and eleven other men and women were caught in the path of the explosion. FitzGerald and Kaplan both survived; most of the others were less fortunate.

Isidor Hegedusic felt a moment of incredible triumph as the missile pods fired.

That tsunami of destruction surpassed anything he'd ever dreamed of commanding, and only ten cruisers and destroyers stood in its path. Whatever happened to Eroica Station, those ships were doomed.

Yet even as he thought that, before the first counter-missile had intercepted the first missile, the Manticoran pods fired. He'd sent nine hundred and sixty missiles to crush the Manties; Abigail Hearns sent seventeen hundred back into his teeth, and his defenses were nowhere near as good.

Damage reports flooded into the bridge, and Helen cringed.

Javelin, Rondeau , and Gallant were gone . Audacious was -savagely damaged and lamed, with less than a quarter of her weapons left. Vigilant was little more than a hulk, and Warlock was severely damaged. Hexapuma's more modern point defense-and an inordinate share of pure luck-had let her escape with far less damage than her older sisters, but all things were relative. Her maximum acceleration, even without pods, was no better than four hundred gravities. She was down to thirty-five tubes, and a quarter of her broadside grasers-sixty percent of her starboard energy broadside-and one of her after chasers were gone. Thirty-seven of her people were confirmed dead, with at least another seventeen wounded… including Surgeon Commander Orban. His sick berth attendants were doing their best, but none of them were fully trained physicians.

It was her fault. She knew that was insane, yet a small, cruel voice deep down inside whispered that she'd been in charge of the missile defenses. She was the one who was supposed to stop this from happening.

She stared at the com screen still connected to the badly damaged AuxCon and saw Aikawa working frantically with two uninjured ratings as they applied first-aid to the wounded. But no matter how hard she stared, there was no sign of Paulo.

Aivars Terekhov surveyed the damage, and his jaw clenched painfully.

He'd walked straight into it, and a third of the Squadron's ships had been destroyed because he had. It was all very well to remind himself no battle plan ever survived contact with the enemy. He even knew it was true. But it didn't make him feel one bit better about the dead and maimed who'd counted on him to get it right.

He drew a deep breath and turned his attention to Eroica Station and felt a stab of vengeful satisfaction. Those damned missile pods had savaged his squadron, killed his people, but their own fire had shattered the military components of the Station. The close-in drones made it obvious that at least eight of the nine battlecruisers in the military yard had been wrecked beyond any hope of repair even by a Solarian shipyard, far less Monica's facilities. The other one might be repairable, but it would take a fully equipped shipyard months, possibly T-years, to do the job. The two on the civilian side of the installation were still intact, but there wasn't much he could do about that, even using laser heads instead of conventional nukes, without killing hundreds of civilians. He didn't want to do that, and he wouldn't… if he had any choice at all. And at least Eroica Station itself had been thoroughly neutralized as a threat.

Which, unfortunately, wasn't true of the oncoming battlecruisers.

Janko Horster's face was white with mingled shock and fury. His sensors couldn't give him as clear a picture of what had happened to Eroica Station as Terekhov's could, but he didn't need details to know the Monican Navy had just been mangled. Most-probably all-of the other battlecruisers were gone, and the same was almost certainly true of the older units which had been laid up at Eroica to provide personnel for his own ships. First Division, by itself, probably had ten times the firepower of the entire Monican Navy before Levakonic had delivered the new ships, but it would be impossible to carry out the operational plan with what was left.

And that didn't include the casualties. The men he'd known and served and trained with for decades. The friends.

Yet the Manties had been hurt, too. Badly. And they must have fired every pod they had to inflict such damage on Eroica Station.

Their long-range missile advantage was gone, and the bastards who'd raped his Navy couldn't get away from him now.

"Get me Vigilant ," Terekhov grated.

"Aye, aye, Sir," Nagchaudhuri acknowledged, and fifteen seconds later, he found himself facing a lieutenant he'd never seen before.

"Commander Diamond?" he asked.

"Dead, Sir," the lieutenant said hoarsely. "We took a direct hit on the bridge. No survivors, I'm afraid." He coughed on the thin haze of smoke swirling about him, and Terekhov realized he was connected to Damage Control Central.

"Who's in command, Lieutenant?" he asked as gently as he could.

"I guess I am, Sir. Gainsworthy, third engineer. I think I'm the senior officer left."

Dear God, Terekhov thought. Their casualties must be almost as bad as Defiant's were.

"What's your maximum acceleration, Lieutenant Gainsworthy?"

"I don't know for sure, Sir. It can't be much over a hundred gravs. We've lost the entire after ring, and the forward ring's badly damaged."

"That's what I was afraid of." Terekhov drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders. "You're going to have to abandon, Lieutenant."

"No!" Gainsworthy protested instantly. "We can save her! We can get her home!"

"No, you can't, Lieutenant," Terekhov said, gently but implacably. "Even if she could be repaired, which is doubtful, she can't stay with the rest of the Squadron. Those bogeys will run right over her. So get your people off and set the scuttling charges, Lieutenant Gainsworthy. That's an order."

"But, Sir, we-!" A tear carved a white streak down one dirty cheek, and Terekhov shook his head.

"I'm sorry, son," he said, cutting the lieutenant off quietly. "I know it hurts to lose her-I've done it. But however much you love her, she's only a ship, Lieutenant." A lie , his brain shouted. You know that's a lie! "She's only alloy and electronics. It's her people that matter. Now get them off."

The final sentence came slowly, measured, and Gainsworthy nodded.

"Yes, Sir."

"Good, Lieutenant. God bless."

Terekhov cut the circuit and turned back to the ships he might still be able to save.