Sir Aivars Terekhov sat in his command chair on HMSQuentin Saint-James ' flag bridge and thought about the last time he he'd taken a Saganami-C -class heavy cruiser into combat. By most navies' standards, the odds he faced were even worse this time, but he wasn't really interested in most navies' standards. Unlike Ou-yang Zhing-wei and Hago Shavarshyan, he knew precisely what those ten 'sensor ghosts' they'd been picking up actually were.
Four of them were the CLACs Pegasus, Hippogriff, Troll , and Goblin , with the next best thing to four hundred LACs embarked. As stealthy as the Manticoran Alliance's light attack craft were, four CLACs were much smaller sensor targets than all those LACs would have been if they'd been deployed, which meant they could be more readily concealed or, at least, that their natures could be readily disguised, while they remained in their shipboard bays.
Two more of the 'ghosts' were ammunition ships, stuffed to the deckhead with Apollo missile pods crammed full of fusion-powered Mark 23 and Mark 23-E MDMs. And the other four were Scotty Tremaine's cruisers: Alistair McKeon, Madelyn Hoffman, Canopus , and Trebuchet.
You just keep right on coming, Admiral Crandall , Terekhov thought coldly. You don't even begin to realize just how much you've got us exactly where we want you . . . but you're about to find out .
'Sir, Admiral Khumalo would like to speak to you,' Lieutenant Atalante Montella, his communications officer, said quietly.
'Put him on my display, Atalante.'
'Yes, Sir.'
A moment later, Augustus Khumalo's face appeared on the tiny com screen deployed from Terekhov's command chair.
'Good afternoon, Sir,' he said.
'Good afternoon, Aivars,' Khumalo acknowledged. The admiral looked considerably calmer than Terekhov suspected he actually was, and there was little sign of tension in his deep voice.
'As you can see,' Khumalo continued, 'our friend Crandall at least has the virtue of punctuality.'
'I suppose anyone has to have at least some positive qualities, Sir.'
'You may have been disabused of that supposition by the time you're my age,' Khumalo replied with a thin smile. 'At any rate, assuming she maintains her current acceleration and heads for a zero/zero intercept with the planet, she probably expects to be joining us here in about four hours. Of course, she doesn't expect any of us to still be alive when she gets here.'
'Life is full of disappointments, Sir.'
'My own thought exactly.' Khumalo's teeth showed briefly. Then he twitched his shoulders in a sort of abbreviated shrug. 'Admiral Enderby is launching his birds now. As soon as they're all clear of the bays, he'll pull the carriers further back in-system to keep them out from underfoot, and Commander Badmachin is rolling pods. Unless Admiral Gold Peak decides differently, it looks like we'll be going with Agincourt.'
'Understood, Sir.'
'In that case, I'll leave you to it,' Khumalo said with a nod. 'Khumalo, clear.'
He disappeared from Terekhov's com screen, and Terekhov returned his attention to Quentin Saint-James ' master plot. In many ways, he supposed, Oversteegen's Nikes might have been a better choice than his own heavy cruisers, given that the Nike was equipped with Keyhole, and the Saganami-C wasn't. In fact, before the ammunition ships Aetna and Vesuvius had arrived with their massive loads of Apollo pods, the Nikes would have been in orbit around Flax while the Saganami-Cs played the part of the beaters coming along behind the quarry. The cruisers still had a lot of control links, however. Almost certainly enough of them, coupled with Apollo, to show Crandall the error of her ways.
And if there isn't , he thought grimly, there's always Admiral Gold Peak, isn't there?
* * *
'Captain?'
'Yes, Nicolette?' Captain Jacomina van Heutz looked across Joseph Buckley 's command deck at Commander Nicolette Sambroth.
'Ma'am, I'm still picking up those grav pulses,' Sambroth said, and van Heutz frowned.
Sambroth was one of the better tac officers with whom she'd served, but the commander appeared to have been badly spooked by the implications of the Manties' apparent FTL com ability. Not that van Heutz really blamed her, assuming the report of the single dispatch boat to escape the New Tuscan debacle was accurate. Not only that, but she knew Vice Admiral Ou-yang shared Sambroth's concerns.
And I'm not too damned happy over them myself. Especially when I think about what's going to happen two or three engagements down the road, when we run into a real Manty wall of battle. But for right now . . . .
'You're passing your observations along to Admiral Ou-yang?' Her tone made the question a statement, and Sambroth nodded.
'Of course, Ma'am.'
'Then we're just going to have to assume Admiral Crandall has that information as well,' van Heutz pointed out rather gently.
Sambroth looked up from her displays. Their eyes met for a moment. Then the tactical officer nodded again, with a rather different emphasis.
Van Heutz nodded back, returned her own attention to her plot, and settled back in her command chair.
Josef Byng always was a frigging idiot , she thought. I'm not even going to pretend I miss him, either. But this —
She shook her head, eyes hardening on the plot, and wondered how many other members of the SLN officer corps secretly recognized that Byng's demise could only improve that officer corps' overall efficiency. Probably more than she was prepared to believe, actually. She certainly hoped so, at any rate, given what the ability to deny that reality implied. Yet as she contemplated what his removal was about to cost the Star Empire of Manticore—and ultimately cost the Solarian League Navy—the price tag seemed exorbitantly high.
And it's only going to get worse. No matter how bad I think it's going to be, it's only going to get worse .
* * *
Captain Alice Levinsky, commanding officer of LAC Group 711, watched the Shrikes and Katanas of Carrier Division 7.1 forming up around Her Majesty's Light Attack CraftTyphoon . She was aware of a certain queasiness as she contemplated the juggernaut of superdreadnoughts rumbling steadily towards Flax. Against a Havenite wall of battle, even the Manticoran Alliance's newest-generation LACs no longer possessed anywhere near the survivability they'd boasted when the Shrike-A was first introduced all of nine T-years ago. And even if they had, superdreadnoughts—even Solly superdreadnoughts—were normally too heavily armored for even a Shrike 's enormous graser to damage significantly. Of course, the Shrike- B , like her own Typhoon , had significantly improved its graser's grav lensing when the newest generation of bow wall came in. The Bravos really could blast their way through SD armor, assuming they could get close enough.
Despite that, two-thirds of her LACs were Katana -class space-superiority fighters with magazines packed with Viper dual-purpose missiles, because Manticoran LAC doctrine had changed—especially after the hideous losses of the Battle of Manticore—to emphasize the missile defense role rather than the strike role. LACs were smaller and much more elusive targets than any hyper-capable ship and, especially with Mark 33 counter-missiles (or the Vipers based on the same missile body and drive), one of them could provide very nearly as much screening capacity as an all up destroyer. Which meant a LAC group had become the most effective (and least costly) means of bolstering a wall of battle's missile defenses, which also freed up the perpetually insufficient
