Flag In Exile

'I'm sure they do,' the intelligence officer replied, but his eyes were on Honor, not Bagwell, and they were very intent.

'But they don't think they're in Yeltsin.' Honor saw only confusion on her staffs faces, except, perhaps, on Paxton's, then dropped her eyes to her com link to Terrible's command deck. Alfredo Yu looked back at her from its screen, and she smiled, with absolutely no idea how heartbreakingly exhausted that smile looked. 'Candor and Minette, Alfredo,' she said simply, and saw the sudden understanding in his eyes.

'Of course, My Lady. This was their objective the whole time, wasn't it?'

'I think so. I hope so, at any rate, because it may just give us a chance. Not a good one, but a chance.'

'My Lady, I still don't understand,' Bagwell protested.

'They hit Candor and Minette to draw our SDs out of Yeltsin, Fred,' Honor said, 'and they think they've succeeded. That's the only reason for them to head in for a normal engagement with the forts. They think they can take them out, and those 'freighters' are probably transports with an occupation force to take over the shipyards after they knock out the defenses. They can't hope to hold onto them, but they can certainly destroy them, and if they've brought along the right tech teams, they could learn an awful lot about our latest systems for their own use.'

'It makes sense, My Lady,' Paxton said with a sharp nod. 'We've been Manticore's most visible ally since the war started. If they can take us out, wreck our infrastructure, then they've proved they can raid any of the Kingdom's other allies. What that could do to the Alliances long-term stability would be well worth the risk of a few battleships to them, even without the possibility of raiding our tech base.'

Honor saw the same thoughts racing through the rest of her staff. One by one, they began to nod, but then, predictably, Bagwell stopped.

'You may be right, My Lady. But how does it give us a chance?'

'They don't expect anything heavier than a battle-cruiser, Commander,' Yu said from his com screen. 'When they realize they haven't drawn all the SDs out of the system, it's going to be a nasty surprise for them.'

'More to the point,' Honor said more briskly, 'the fact that they're not expecting to see any ships of the wall may just let us get close enough to do some real damage before they break off.'

There was a moment of silence, and then Bagwell cleared his throat.

'You're going out to meet them, My Lady?' he asked very carefully. 'Without the support of the forts?'

'We don't have a choice, Fred. They'll probably spot us in time to stay outside the forts' engagement envelope even if we don't go to meet them, and in that case they can use cee-fractional missile strikes to take us all out. No, we have to get close—clear into energy range, if we can—and kick their guts out before they know we're here.'

'But, My Lady, while we 'kick their guts out,' that many battleships will destroy us, as well,' Bagwell pointed out quietly.

'Maybe they will, and maybe they won't,' Honor made herself sound far more confident than she felt, 'but it's still our best chance. Especially if we can sneak in close enough.' Bagwell looked frightened, less, Honor knew, by the prospect of dying than of losing so much of the Grayson Navy, but she held his eyes until, almost against his will, he nodded.

'All right, then, people,' she said, leaning forward in her command chair, 'here's what I want to do.'

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

'Well, there they are, Citizen Commissioner.' Thurston sounded disgusted, Preznikov noted, and looked a question at him. 'Oh, I'm not complaining,' the citizen vice admiral said. 'But remember what I said about how when they decided to come out would indicate how good they were? Well, it looks like the answer is not too good.'

He shook his head and gazed thoughtfully into the plot. Almost exactly seventy minutes had passed since the task force's arrival, and its units were up to 20,403 KPS. So far they'd covered over forty-six and a half million kilometers, and for a while he'd thought the Graysons were going to fight smart. Destroyers and dispatch boats had shot out in all directions, no doubt carrying word of his attack to nearby systems and screaming for help, but whatever they'd had in Grayson orbit had sat tight. The fact that one of those courier vessels had headed out on a least-time course to Endicott was irritating, since it meant the forces covering that system would be alerted to make whatever preparations they could before he detached Theisman and Chernov, but he'd known from the outset that that was likely to happen. He couldn't divide his own forces until he'd confirmed that there were no ships of the wall in Yeltsin, and every minute the Grayson commander had sat tight, denying him that confirmation, was one more minute he'd had to hold onto Theisman and TG 14.2's battleships and battlecruisers.

But now the enemy had come out of hiding, and his timing was execrable. The largest units Thurston's sensors could see were battlecruisers, but the Allied forces acceleration was 458 g, which was stupid. It was higher than a Manty EC's 'normal maximum' of four hundred gravities at eighty percent power, so they'd obviously redlined their drives. Yet that was still over forty gravities lower than the maximum they could have pulled, which indicated that they had some of their damnable missile pods on tow. The extra launchers those things provided in the opening salvos had worried Thurston when he first conceived Dagger, but the battlecruisers coming at him couldn't be towing more than one or at most two pods each, or their accel would have been still lower.

That was what made their movements so stupid. If Grayson's defenders were going to come out at less than max acceleration they should have started even sooner, with an even lower accel, which would have let them tow more pods. The small number their BCs could have available at this accel would make no difference against battleship point defense, so all they'd accomplished by bringing them along was to cost themselves about a half KPS? and give Thurston an earlier look at their numbers and formation than they had to.

If, he thought, you could call that a formation. The untidy gaggle of starships moved towards him in awkward clumps and knots, and he shook his head again. There were Manty ships in that mess, but its CO had to be a Grayson, because no Manty admiral would let himself fuck up this way. Thurston recognized the courage his enemy was displaying, but Lord was he dumb!

'Numbers?' he asked.

'Plotting makes it twenty-five battlecruisers, ten heavy cruisers, forty-odd light cruisers, and sixteen to twenty destroyers, Citizen Admiral,' his ops officer responded. 'We're not positive about the count on the light units because of their formation. They're not only getting in each other's way, but some of them are grouped so tight it's all but impossible to get a close look at their wedges.'

'RDs?'

'Not much point at this range, Citizen Admiral,' his senior tracking officer replied. 'We can't send drones in ballistic the way their formation's all tangled up, we'd need to bring them in under power and steer them into location. If we do that, their point defense will have so much tracking and solution time they'll pick them off in droves. Given our vectors, the missile envelope should be about thirteen million klicks, though. We could probably bury the drones in our missile fire then and sneak 'em past, but...'

'But by that time, we'll have plenty of direct observation without them,' Thurston agreed. He rocked on his heels for a moment, then shrugged. 'Do your best to refine your data.'

He walked back to his command chair, and Preznikov accompanied him.

'Does it really matter exactly how many light units they have, Citizen Admiral?'

Thurston wondered if the question reflected honest curiosity, an attempt to jab him into something more 'energetic,' or simply a probe to see how he'd react to what might be a jab. Best to treat it as the first possibility, he decided.

'Frankly, no, Citizen Commissioner. But we've got plenty of time before we come into range, and I'd just as