Mission of Honor

ambush. But ingenious or not, she's no mental giant!'

Crandall gazed at the plot for a few more seconds, then glanced at Haarhuis.

'Go ahead and make turnover, Barend. Kick our decel to get us back on profile, then drop back to eighty percent.'

'Yes, Ma'am,' the astrogator acknowledged, and began passing orders as she turned back to Bautista and Ou-yang.

'Like I say, I'll give them marks for audacity,' she said with a grim smile, 'but falling in love with your own ingenuity can be painful sometimes.' Her chuckle was harsh. 'Bad enough for them to even think about 'ambushing' someone our size—reminds me of the story about the kid who tried to catch a house cat and wound up catching a tiger!—but they fucked up their timing, too. I don't care how much acceleration advantage they've got, they can't possibly overtake us until well after we've reached the planet and dealt with their friends in orbit.'

'Did they screw up their timing, Ma'am?' Ou-yang asked. The admiral gave her a sharp look, and the ops officer shrugged. 'I agree with what you just said about their ability to overtake us, but it strikes me as a bit of a coincidence that they should just happen to come in at almost exactly the same time we were scheduled to make turnover.'

Crandall considered that for several moments, then grimaced.

'You may be right that the timing was deliberate. I can't imagine what kind of an advantage they'd think it would give them, though. And I don't think we should completely rule out the possibility that it really was a coincidence they hit so close to our turnover point. In fact, I'm still inclined to think that's exactly what it was. We know they've got a range advantage, at least as long as they stick to their missile pods, and we also know from what they did at New Tuscany that they can obviously tow at least a fair number of pods inside their wedges without compromising their acceleration. So what they probably wanted to do was to catch us in-system of them, stuck inside the hyper limit, with them outside us but close enough they could get into their range of us well before we reached the planet. There's no way we could match their acceleration rate, so as long as they were careful about it, they could probably get into their range of us while staying outside our missile range of them , and use their accel advantage to cut back out across the limit and escape into hyper if we reversed course to come after them. That's why I'm pretty sure they screwed the pooch with their timing, because even with the accel rates Gruner reported, they can't catch us with the geometry they've actually got. And they damn sure can't do it before we get to the planet, pound every warship in orbit around it out of space, and bring the entire system's infrastructure—such as it is and what there is of it—into our own range. At which point they've got three options: surrender to keep us from trashing all that infrastructure; go ahead and fight us on our terms, in which case we still wreck their infrastructure and they all get dead; or turn around and run away with their tails between their legs when they run out of missiles.'

Ou-yang nodded slowly, although Shavarshyan wasn't at all sure the ops officer shared Crandall's conclusions. Or, at least, that she shared her admiral's confidence. It was fairly obvious to the Frontier Fleet officer that Ou-yang expected Task Force 496 to get hurt a lot worse than Crandall did, yet even the operations officer had to admit that two widely separated forces, each massively inferior to the single enemy force between them, were unlikely (to say the very least) to achieve victory.

* * *

'Well,' Michelle Henke said, gazing into the master plot on HMS Artemis ' flag bridge, 'at least we know what she's going to do now.'

'Yes, Ma'am,' Dominica Adenauer said. 'Our arrival doesn't seem to have fazed her, does it?'

'Fair's fair.' Michelle shrugged. 'There's not a lot else she could do, really.'

Adenauer nodded, although Michelle sensed her continuing disgruntlement. It wasn't so much that Adenauer disagreed with anything Michel had just said as that the ops officer was accustomed to dealing with Havenite opponents, and no Havenite admiral would ever have ambled this confidently towards a Manticoran foe. The fact that Sandra Crandall was doing just that did not give Dominica Adenauer a flattering estimate of the Solly's IQ.

Michelle shared that opinion, but she also stood by her observation about Crandall's alternatives. Her superdreadnoughts were holding their acceleration to just over three hundred and thirty-seven gravities, in strict accordance with the 'eighty percent of maximum power' which was the galactic naval standard inertial compensator safety margin. At maximum military power, they could have managed almost four hundred and twenty-two gravities, but that was it. At eighty percent power, Michelle's trio of four million-ton milspec ammunition ships—HMS Mauna Loa, New Popocatйpetl , and Nova Kilimanjaro —could manage a hundred gravities more than the Solly SDs' maximum military acceleration; running flat out they could manage over six hundred and fifty gravities, while her Nikes could top six hundred and seventy.

What that meant was that Crandall's ships-of-the-wall could neither run away from her nor catch her if they tried to go in pursuit. And with Michelle outside Crandall's position, coming up her ships' wakes, there was really no way she could dodge, either. Nor could she possibly make it all the way across the hyper sphere to the opposite edge of the limit without being brought to action. And however confident Crandall might be of her task force's defensive capabilities, the Solarian admiral had to know her missiles were substantially out-ranged. In fact, just on the basis of what Michelle had done at New Tuscany before that first dispatch boat translated out, Crandall damned well ought to know her own anti-ship missiles' maximum powered envelope from rest was at best less than a quarter of that of the missiles which had killed Jean Bart . So, given her unpalatable menu of maneuver options, the one she was pursuing actually made the most sense. However nimble Michelle's ships might be, the planet couldn't dodge, and it was what Michelle had to defend. So if Crandall could get into her own range of Flax with what she no doubt believed to be her crushing superiority in missile tubes, she could compel Michelle to either come to her or concede strategic defeat regardless of any tactical advantages the RMN might possess.

And if we're wrong about our ability to penetrate their defenses, it could still work for her , Michelle conceded grimly.

She gazed into the plot for several more seconds, then turned and crossed to her command station. She settled into the chair, looking down at the com which was kept permanently tied in to Artemis ' command deck.

'Captain Armstrong, please,' she told the com rating monitoring the link.

'Yes, Ma'am!'

The rating disappeared. The crossed arrows of Artemis ' wallpaper replaced her image for a moment, then disappeared in turn as Captain Victoria Armstrong appeared on Michelle's display.

'You called, Admiral?' she inquired. Her dark green eyes were guileless, but Michelle had long since discovered the wicked sense of humor which was just as much a part of Armstrong as the chestnut-haired flag captain's confidence and rock-steady competence.

'I believe I did,' she replied. 'Now, let me see . . . There was something I wanted to discuss with you, but . . . .'

Her voice trailed off, and Armstrong grinned appreciatively at her.

'Could it have had something to do with that unpleasant person headed for Flax, Ma'am?' the captain suggested in a politely helpful tone, and Michelle snapped her fingers.

'That was what I wanted to talk about!' she said wonderingly, and heard someone behind her chuckling. Then own expression sobered. 'So far, it looks pretty much like the alpha plan right down the line, Vicki.'

'Yes, Ma'am,' Armstrong replied, equally seriously. 'Wilton and Ron and I were just discussing that. I have to wonder what's going through this Crandall's mind at the moment, though.'

'I'd guess we gave her a bad few minutes when we turned up, judging by the way she delayed her turnover, but I imagine she got over it once she figured out we don't have any superdreadnoughts. At any rate, I don't expect her to be screening us with any surrender offers anytime soon.'

'That would make it simpler, wouldn't it, Ma'am?'

'Probably. But it looks like it's going to take Admiral Khumalo and Commodore Terekhov to convince her of that, after all. In the meantime, go ahead with the Agincourt Alpha variant. We'll just quietly follow along behind