Mission of Honor

'No, Ma'am,' Ou-yang concurred. An outside observer might have detected a smidgeon less than total agreement in her tone, however, Hago Shavarshyan thought. 'On the other hand,' she continued a bit diffidently, 'we never did get a resolution on those sensor ghosts. And we've got these other impeller sources over here.'

She dropped a cursor onto the master display, indicating the sextet of impeller wedges their remotes had picked up thirty-six minutes earlier. They hadn't been able to get a solid read on whatever was generating those impeller signatures, but from the wedge strength, whatever they were, they were well up into the multimillion-ton range . . . despite the ridiculously high acceleration numbers they were putting out.

'Freighters,' Bautista said dismissively. Ou-yang looked at the chief of staff, and he shrugged. 'That's all they can be, Zhing-wei. Oh, I'll grant you they're fast. They must be fleet auxiliaries to pull that accel—probably supply ships; maybe repair ships—but they sure as hell aren't war ships! With their assumed masses, they'd have to be superdreadnoughts, and with us bearing down on them this way, why run with six of them and leave number seven behind with nothing but cruisers to support it?'

'What I'm worried about is why they waited this long to run in the first place,' Ou-yang said rather more sharply than she normally spoke to Bautista.

'Waiting until they figured out we really weren't bluffing, probably,' he replied with another, slightly more impatient shrug. 'Or maybe just waiting until they were sure all our units were headed in-system, without leaving any light units outside the limit to micro jump around the hyper sphere and pounce when they come out the other side.'

'Or maybe until they'd finished offloading their cargo,' Ou-yang said pointedly. Bautista arched an eyebrow, and the ops officer inhaled deeply.

'We've all agreed the missiles they used on Jean Bart had to come from pods , Pйpй,' she pointed out. 'To get that kind of range, they have to be bigger than their battlecruisers' tubes can manage, right?' Bautista nodded, and it was her turn to shrug. 'Well, I don't know about you, but I have to wonder how many pods six 'freighters' that size can transport. And I also have to wonder why it is that all of a sudden any recon drone we steer into a position to take a look at the planet's shadow is getting blown right out of space.'

'You think they've stockpiled pods in that volume?' Crandall asked, intervening before Bautista could respond to Ou-yang's 'God-give-me-strength' tone.

'I think there's some reason they don't want us seeing in there, Ma'am.' The ops officer shook her head. 'And I agree with Pйpй that they wouldn't be sending away six ships-of-the-wall when we'll be into missile range of the planet in another hour and a half—not unless they were going to pull all of their ships out, at least. On the other hand, whatever these things are, their stealth and EW are good enough we couldn't get firm resolution on them—not even confirmation they were really there— until they lit off their impellers. So I think we have to look very carefully at the possibility that our departing bogies hung around, using EW to play hide and seek with our platforms until we actually started in-system, then pulled out after unloading some cargo that didn't have the same kind of stealth capability. Something we might've picked up if they'd just dumped it into orbit earlier. And if they've left something on the far side of the planet that they don't want us getting a good look at, missile pods are certainly the first possibility that leaps to my mind when I start thinking about that.'

Bautista had flushed in obvious irritation, but Crandall nodded thoughtfully.

'Makes sense,' she acknowledged. 'Or as much sense as anything someone stupid enough not to surrender is likely to be doing, anyway. And you're right, six freighters that size could dump a hell of a lot of pods.'

Bautista's expression smoothed quickly as Crandall took Ou-yang's suggestion seriously. It wasn't the first time something like that had happened, and Shavarshyan wished he could believe Crandall had deliberately chosen Ou-yang for her staff in hopes the ops officer's ability (for a Battle Fleet officer, at least) to think outside the box might offset Bautista's inclination towards sycophancy and his habit of automatically dismissing any opinion that didn't agree with his own. Much as the Frontier Fleet officer might have wanted to believe Crandall had done it on purpose, he wouldn't have wagered anything on the probability. Still, now that Crandall had endorsed at least the possibility that Ou-yang had a point, Bautista's expression, after a moment of blankness, had become intently—one might almost have said theatrically—thoughtful.

He may not do subtle very well , Shavarshyan officer thought dryly, but he does have an awesome ability to spot the glaringly obvious, especially when someone rubs his nose in it. No, siree! No one's going to hide any flare-lit Old Earth elephants from Pйpй Bautista in any dark rooms, no matter how hard they try!

'All the same,' Crandall continued, 'whatever they've got stockpiled is still going to be bottlenecked by their available fire control.'

'Agreed, Ma'am,' Ou-yang acknowledged without even glancing in the chief of staff's direction. 'On the other hand, as Commander Shavarshyan and I have both pointed out, we don't really know how good their fire control is.' She shrugged. 'There's no way a heavy cruiser, even one the size the Manties seem to be building these days, could match a waller where control links are concerned, but I think it's entirely possible they can throw bigger salvos than we'd anticipated.'

'Maybe.' Bautista's tone, like his expression, was much more thoughtful than it had been, and he pursed his lips. 'I still don't see any way they could throw salvos big enough to saturate our defenses, though.'

'I'm not saying they can,' Ou-yang said. 'But they may not have to saturate our defenses to get at least a few leakers through. The fact that they won't get a lot of concentrated hits doesn't mean we're not going to get hurt, and one way they might degrade our defenses would be to simply fire off huge numbers of missiles. Most of them might be basically blind-fired, but if they buried their real fire in that kind of background hash, it would take at least a little while for missile defense to sort out which were the genuine threats and engage them. It'd be wasteful as hell, and I'm not saying that's what they're going to do. I'm only saying they could do it, and that's why I'd feel a lot more comfortable knowing what they're so busy hiding.'

'Well, I'm sure will be finding out shortly.' Crandall smiled tightly. 'And when we do, they're going to find out that—'

An alarm sounded, and Ou-yang stiffened in her chair.

'Status change!' she announced sharply. 'We have hyper footprints directly astern of the task force, Ma'am!'

Crandall snapped around to the master plot as twenty-one fresh icons flared into existence four and a half light-minutes behind her own ships. Whatever they were, they'd popped out of hyper-space in an exhibition of pinpoint-precise astrogation. Their tightly groupedcrash translation put them right on the limit, approaching it at almost five thousand kilometers per second, and everyone on Joseph Buckley 's flag bridge seemed to hold his or her breath while they waited for the sensor platforms Ou-yang had left behind to identify the newcomers.

Or almost everyone, at least.

'Turnover in fifteen seconds, Ma'am,' Haarhuis announced.

Crandall's eyes flicked to the astrogator, then back to the plot, and her expression was grim. Whatever else those new icons might be, they had to be Manticoran warships—warships which had been waiting in hyper until her own force was deeply mired inside the star's hyper limit. And if it should happen that they were superdreadnoughts, her potential losses had just climbed drastically . . . .

'The platforms make it fourteen of those big battlecruisers, what look like four light cruisers, and three ships in the four to five million-ton range,' Ou-yang finally announced. The icons in the master plot blinked, changing color and shape to reflect the IDs CIC had assigned to each of them as lightspeed data on their emissions came in. 'From their formation and emission s, it looks like the three biggies are probably freighters. Ammunition ships, I'd guess.'

Her voice was taut, but it also carried an undeniable note of relief, and Hago Shavarshyan felt his own clenched stomach muscles relax. Crandall said nothing for a moment or two, but then she gave a sharp bark of a laugh.

'Well, I'll give them credit for audacity,' she said as Bautista and Ou-yang looked at her. 'This Gold Peak's obviously an ambitious bitch, isn't she?' The admiral jutted her chin at the icons beginning to accelerate in-system after her own forces. 'And she must've used quite a bit of ingenuity arranging her