the last war. But it's more than that for me.
'All right, Andrianna,' she said, turning her back to the plot and the icons of the Manty wallers whose crews were beginning to realize they'd walked straight into a trap, 'we don't have a lot of time before they run out of our envelope. Let's start rolling pods.'
'Aye, Ma'am!'
Andrianna's dark eyes gleamed, and Chin glanced at Captain NicodŠme Sabourin. Her chief of staff looked back, and then, unnoticed by the rest of Flag Bridge's personnel, he nodded, ever so slightly.
Chin nodded back. Sabourin was probably the only member of her staff who could fully savor her own sense of... completion. She'd come a long way to reach this point. She'd survived being scapegoated by the Legislaturalists for the disaster of Hancock Station at the very start of the last war. She'd survived long, dreary years in the service of the Committee of Public Safety-never quite trusted, too valuable to simply discard, always watched by her people's commissioner. She'd even survived Saint-Just's ascension to complete power... and the chaos following his overthrow.
She'd been 'rehabilitated' twice now. Once by Rob Pierre's lunatics, solely because she'd been scapegoated by the previous r‚gime. And once by the new Republic, because she'd damned well done a good job protecting her assigned sector despite the psychotic sadist they'd assigned as her people's commissioner.
This time, she actually believed it was going to stick. She'd still lost a lot of ground in the seniority game. Men and women who'd been junior officers, or even enlisted personnel, when she'd already been a flag officer, were senior to her now. Thomas Theisman, for one, who'd been a commander when she'd been a rear admiral. But she was one of only a handful of people who'd made admiral under the Legislaturalists who were still alive at all, so she supposed that was something of a wash.
And whether the universe was always a fair place or not, she couldn't complain about where she was today. The woman who'd been saddled with the blame for the Legislaturalists' disastrous opening campaign against the Star Kingdom of Manticore, was also the woman who'd been chosen to command the decisive jaw of the trap which would crush the Star Kingdom once and for all. She'd waited fifteen T-years for this moment, and it tasted sweet.
NicodŠme Sabourin understood that. She hadn't known it for quite some time, but he'd been a second- class petty officer aboard one of her dreadnoughts at Hancock Station. Like her, he was looking forward to getting some of his own back this afternoon.
'How are your target solutions, Andrianna?' she asked calmly.
'They look good, Ma'am, considering their EW.'
'In that case, Commander,' Genevieve Chin said formally, 'you may open fire.'
'We walked right into it,' Theodosia Kuzak said bitterly. 'I walked right into it.'
'It's not like we had much choice, Ma'am,' Captain Smithson said.
The two of them stood staring into the plot, watching the overwhelmingly superior force which had suddenly cut in astern of them as it rolled pods. Waiting. The orders were already given. Their own missiles were already launching. There was, quite literally, nothing at all Kuzak could do at this point except watch other people execute her orders.
She turned her head, looking at her chief of staff, and Smithson shrugged.
'We couldn't let them punch out Sphinx, and that meant coming in after them,' he said. 'You did.'
'I should have seen this coming,' she shot back, but quietly, quietly, keeping her voice down. 'After what Harrington did to them at Lovat, it was the logical response.'
'Oh?' Smithson cocked his head, smiling ironically despite the hurricane of missiles rushing towards them. 'And I suppose you were supposed to somehow use clairvoyance to realize they had another hundred wallers in reserve? That they were going to throw three hundred and fifty superdreadnoughts at us? Just you-not Admiral Caparelli, not ONI, not Admiral D'Orville, or Admiral Harrington. Just you. Because, obviously, this is all your fault.'
'I didn't mean-' she began angrily, then stopped. She looked at him for a moment, then reached out and squeezed his shoulder.
'I guess I did deserve that. Thanks.'
'Don't mention it.' Smithson smiled sadly. 'It's one of a chief of staff's jobs.'
'All right, Alekan,' Alistair McKeon told his ops officer harshly. 'We're the only squadron with Apollo. Admiral Kuzak has authorized us for independent targeting to make best use of the system. That means it's going to be up to you.'
'Understood, Sir.' Commander Slowacki nodded hard.
'I want to concentrate on this new bunch,' McKeon continued. 'They haven't been hit yet, their fire control and their tactical departments are going to be in better shape. We'll take them one ship at a time.'
'Understood, Admiral,' Slowacki said again, and McKeon pointed at the icons of Genevieve Chin's task force.
'Good. Now go kill as many of those bastards as you can.'
'Aye, aye, Sir!'
'I wish Her Grace were here, Sir,' Commander Roslee Orndorff said quietly beside McKeon as Slowacki and his assistants began updating their targeting solutions.
'I don't,' McKeon told Orndorff, his voice equally quiet, and shook his head. 'This is one not even she could get us out of, Roslee.'
'I guess not,' Orndorff agreed. 'And you're right. I shouldn't wish she was stuck in here with the rest of us. But-no offense, Sir-I... miss her.'
'So do I.' McKeon reached out and stroked the head of the treecat perched on Orndorff's shoulder. Banshee pressed back against his hand, but only for a moment. Then the 'cat pressed his cheek against the side of his person's head and crooned softly to her.
Orndorff reached up, caressing him tenderly, without ever taking her eyes from the plot.
Unlike Oliver Diamato's battlecruisers, Third Fleet couldn't dodge the pulser dart. Admiral Kuzak's command was too deep, pinned inside the RZ. Kuzak had intended to catch Second Fleet between her command and the Sphinx planetary defenses; now she was caught between the oncoming hammer of Genevieve Chin's MDMs and the battered anvil of Lester Tourville's surviving SD(P)s.
At least Third Fleet's base velocity was almost fourteen thousand kilometers per second higher than Fifth Fleet's, and almost directly away from it. Given that geometry, Chin's powered missile envelope was only fifty-one million kilometers. But the range was only 41,700,000 kilometers, and that meant Chin could keep Kuzak's ships under fire for eleven minutes before Third Fleet could run out of range.
Eleven minutes. It didn't sound like such a long time, but it was longer than Home Fleet had survived against Lester Tourville. And Home Fleet hadn't been running directly into the fire of one foe while the fire of a second came ripping into it from behind.
'Open fire!' Lester Tourville snapped.
'Aye, Sir!' Frazier Adamson acknowledged, and Tourville watched the icons of his missiles reaching out towards the Manties.
He'd almost left it too late, he thought. Chin's astrogation had been off by a good ten million kilometers, although it was hard to fault her for that. She'd had only a handful of minutes to adjust her position after MacArthur's arrival, thanks in no small part to how long Tourville had waited, and making that kind of delicate, short-ranged micro-translation was always infernally difficult.
Given that any error placing her alpha translation on the wrong side of the zone boundary would have resulted in the destruction of every ship under her command, it was inevitable-and proper-that she should err on the side of caution. Besides, it had never been part of the ops plan for her ships to move inside the resonance zone or hyper limit until she and Tourville were certain they'd dealt with the defenses. All the defenses.
Still, eleven minutes of concentrated fire from ninety-six SD(P)s should smash the hell out of the Manties' combat capability, even if it failed to destroy them outright. And in the meantime, he could do a little something to help Chin along.
The range for his missiles was only 32,955,000 kilometers, and unlike the range from Chin's ships, it was dropping by over a million kilometers per minute. Not to mention the fact that unlike Chin, his tactical officers had been tracking the Manties steadily, updating their firing solutions for the last thirty or forty minutes.
He checked the time display. Flight time for his missiles was just under six minutes, two minutes less than for
