'I—' Granston-Henley began, then stopped herself. 'Yes, Sir. Understood,' she said quietly, and White Haven nodded and turned back to his plot once more.
He understood Cranston-Henley's reaction, but he had no choice. His fleet was forty-five light-seconds from the Trevor's Star terminus. A destroyer with the latest compensator could accelerate at six hundred and twenty gravities with its safety margin cut to zero, but his superdreadnoughts could manage only four hundred and sixty-six with the same generation of compensator. That meant his destroyer screen could reach the local terminus on a least-time course in approximately thirty-five minutes while his SDs would need closer to forty-one. But a least-time course allowed no room for turnover and deceleration, and this large a force would have no choice but to decelerate to zero relative to the terminus before making transit, however urgent the crisis. And that meant those same destroyers would take fifty minutes while the SDs took just over fifty-seven. And once they'd gotten there, they still had to make transit—not once, but twice—just to get to the Basilisk terminus.
Nor could they go through together. Oh, it was tempting. There was an absolute ceiling on the amount of tonnage which could transit through any wormhole junction. In the case of the Manticore Junction, the maximum possible mass for a single transit was approximately two hundred million tons, which meant he could put that much of Eighth Fleet's wall—twenty-two SDs, for all practical purposes—through the junction in one, convulsive heave. Unfortunately, any wormhole transit destabilized the termini involved for a minimum of ten seconds, and vessels which massed more than about two and a half million tons destabilized it for a total interval proportional to the square of the transiting mass... which meant a maximum-mass transit would lock the route from Manticore to Basilisk solid for over seventeen hours.
If twenty-two superdreadnoughts were sufficient to deal with what White Haven feared the Peeps might be up to, that would pose no problem. But they might not be, and he had fifteen more of them, plus twelve dreadnoughts, under his command. They were the only ships which could possibly reach Basilisk in less than thirty hours, and he dared not leave any of them behind.
But that meant sending them through one by one. As long as there were no hostile units in range to engage them as they threaded the needle back into n-space, there was no tactical reason why he shouldn't do that, and he should know whether or not any bad guys were likely to be in range before he began sending them through. Yet each individual transit would also destabilize the junction route, even if for vastly shorter periods.
His screening units, up to and including his battlecruisers, would each produce a ten-second blockage of the route for whoever came next in line, but his dreadnoughts would close the route for almost seventy seconds and each superdreadnought would shut it down for a hundred and thirteen. Which meant that cramming his entire fleet through would require a minimum of a hundred and eight minutes. Add in the time required just to reach the Trevor's Star terminus, and it would be over a hundred and sixty-six minutes—over two and three-quarters hours— before his last ship could possibly reach Basilisk.
That was an immensely shorter response time than for anyone else, but it was still too long to save Medusa. And to achieve even that, he had to cut the transit windows to the bare minimum, which was going to give ACS fits. Under normal circumstances, the minimum allowable transit window was one minute. Usually the windows actually ran considerably longer than that, since the number of ships awaiting passage was seldom large enough to cause ACS to push the minimum. But that limitation had been adopted for a very simple reason: to give people time to get out of the way.
A ship made transit under Warshawski sail. Those sails provided no propulsion in n-space, but a wormhole junction was best thought of as a frozen funnel of hyper-space which happened to connect to n-space at either end. That meant sails not only could be used in a junction transit, but that the transiting vessel had no option but to use them. And that, in turn, meant each ship had to reconfigure its impeller nodes from sail to wedge as it emerged from the far side of the wormhole. Its sails would leave it with some momentum, but not very much, and if the lead ship in a transit was even a little tardy reconfiguring and the one astern of it ran up its backside—
White Haven shuddered at the thought, but he knew how he would have set up this attack, and knowing that, he had to get into Basilisk as quickly as he possibly could. And so he watched his plot, his face grim and set, as Eighth Fleet began to accelerate towards the local terminus at its best possible speed.
Admiral Leslie Yestremensky, Manticore ACS, stared at the message on her display in disbelief. Forty-nine ships of the wall? He was going to bring forty-nine ships of the wall through her wormhole at minimum intervals? He was insane!
But he was also the third-ranking serving officer of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and in wartime that gave him the right to be just as crazy as he wanted. Which wasn't going to make the disaster one bit less appalling if anyone's numbers were off by as little as one ten-thousandth of a percent.
She shook herself and checked the time. At least she still had over half an hour before the first of the lunatic's destroyers arrived. Maybe she could do a little something to reduce the scale of the catastrophe she felt coming.
'All right, people,' she announced in a clear, ringing voice which showed no sign of her own horror. 'We've got a Category One Alpha emergency. Manticore ACS is proclaiming Condition Delta. All outgoing merchant shipping will be cleared from the Junction immediately. Dispatch, tag a message to that courier boat before you let it go back to Basilisk. Inform Vice Admiral Reynaud that he will halt all outbound traffic from Basilisk thirty minutes from now. There will be no exceptions, and he may inform any merchant master who objects that he is acting under my authority as per Article Four, Section Three, of the Junction Transit Instructions.'
'Yes, Ma'am,' Dispatch said. Manticore ACS tended to be rather more formal than the crews who worked the Junction's secondary termini, but it was stunned shock, not discipline, that wrung that 'Ma'am' from Commander Adamon.
'Jeff, Sam, and Serena,' Yestremensky went on, her index finger jabbing like a targeting laser as she made her selections. 'The three of you turn your boards over to your reliefs. We've got a two-hundred-ship, minimum-window, double transit coming at us, and you're elected to supervise it. Get started planning now.'
'Two hundred ships?' Serena Ustinov repeated, as if she were positive she must have misunderstood somehow.
'Two hundred,' Yestremensky confirmed grimly. 'Now get cracking. You're down to... forty-three minutes before the first one comes in from Trevor's Star.'
Michel Reynaud listened to Admiral White Haven's clipped, gunshot voice and pursed his lips in a silent whistle. He'd never participated in a transit of such magnitude. For that matter, no one had, and relieved as he was by the thought of reinforcements, the potential for disaster twisted his stomach into an acid-oozing ball of lead. But no one had asked him, and he turned to his staff.
'Heavy metal coming through from Manticore in thirty-eight minutes,' he told them. 'All outbound transits are to cease twenty-five minutes from now. Anyone we can't get through in that time frame is to be diverted immediately. I want the holding area as well as both the inbound and outbound lanes cleared in precisely twenty-six minutes, 'cause we're sure as hell going to need the space to park warships. Now move it, people, and don't take any crap!'
The emergency had already stretched the voices that replied too wire-thin for them to register fresh shock, but he felt the disbelief under the surface and his mouth twitched in a wry grin. But then the grin faded as he glanced back into the master plot. Rear Admiral Hanaby had been underway for nineteen minutes now. She was over three million kilometers away... and message or no message, she showed no signs of slowing down.
Well, I suppose it makes sense, he thought. We've got the two forts to watch out for us till White Haven gets here, and with someone coming in behind to watch the back door, she must feel even more pressure to get into the inner system ASAP. She can't change what happens to Markham, but if she gets there quick enough, close enough on the Peeps' heels, they may not have enough time to wreck the orbital stations completely.
He snorted contemptuously at his own desperate need for optimism, and returned to his duties.
'Time to Medusa intercept, Franny?' Giscard asked quietly.
'Fifty-nine minutes, Citizen Admiral,' Tyler replied. 'Current closing velocity is thirty-point-niner-two thousand KPS; range one-fifty-point-two-five-five million klicks.' The Citizen Admiral nodded and looked at Macintosh.
'Are we ready, Andy?'
