A Rising Thunder

Trudeau shook his head in disgust. When he and the rest of DB 17025’s crew had been designated for this operation, he’d thought it was a particularly…ill-advised notion. He’d even said so — tactfully, of course — although no one had paid him any attention. Which just went to show that brain power wasn’t necessarily a requirement for high rank. They were a miserable dispatch boat, for God’s sake! Even assuming Junction ACS would be willing to let anyone make transit through the Junction at a time like this, a dip-shit little courier boat wasn’t going to be very high in the queue. Which completely overlooked the fact that DB 17025 was a Solarian vessel. Of course, the geniuses who’d come up with this had probably done it before they realized the Manties were closing every wormhole terminus they could reach against Solarian traffic, but still…

On the other hand, we’re not just any Solarian dispatch boat, he reflected.

“Stay on it, Brynach,” he said. “Sooner or later, they’re going to start taking calls from somebody, so lean on them. Remind them about our INS credentials.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Lacharn nodded, although he had even more reservations about their orders’ basic assumptions than Trudeau. One of his sisters worked for the Ministry of Education and Information, which meant he knew exactly how the “independent reportage” of the Solarian media worked, and in his opinion, Sloarian newsies were the very last people the Manties ought to be allowing to use the Junction. For that matter, the Interstellar News Service Corporation had never been high on the Manties’ list of favorite people — something to do with INS’ “accommodations” with the People’s Republic of Haven’s Office of Public Information. Still, it might work, he supposed, since — unlike the League — the Manties actually gave at least a little more than pure lip service to the concept of a free and independent press.

And if it didn’t work, it was no skin off Ensign Brynach Lacharn’s nose.

* * *

“Fleet Admiral, we’ve got impeller signatures!” William Daniels reported sharply, and Filareta nodded as he saw the crimson codes of starship impeller wedges appearing in the plot. They weren’t moving, just sitting there.

“CIC’s identified two separate groups,” Daniels continued. “The larger group — designate Tango One — is about midway between Sphinx and Manticore, range approximately two-seven-zero-point-niner million kilometers. Call it fifteen light-minutes. The smaller group — designate Tango Two — is a lot closer. Range one-five-point-one million kilometers, about two million klicks this side of Sphinx. All we’ve got right now are the signatures themselves — they just lit off — but preliminary count makes Tango One approximately sixty sources. Tango Two’s only about forty and—”

The operations officer paused for a moment, listening to the earbug linked to Oppenheimer’s Combat Information Center, then nodded.

“Tango One’s begun to accelerate towards us, Fleet Admiral,” he said. “Acceleration’s just under four hundred and seventy gravities — call if four-point-six KPS-squared. Assuming constant acceleration, they could make a zero-zero with our current position in just under four-point-two hours. A least time approach would get them here in right on three hours, but they’ve have a final velocity of almost fifty thousand KPS.”

“Understood,” Filareta acknowledged, eyes narrow as he considered the new signatures and projected vectors in the master plot.

Eleventh Fleet had been accelerating towards Sphinx for almost twelve minutes now, and his task forces had traveled roughly 1.8 million kilometers, half way to the hyper limit. They were up to a closing velocity of 3,683 KPS, 17.1 million kilometers from the planet. But Daniels’ recon platforms, with their far higher acceleration, were only about 5.3 million kilometers from the nearer Manty formation, closing on it at 36,603 KPS. That meant they were 9.8 million kilometers ahead of Eleventh Fleet’s battle squadrons, however, which imposed a transmission delay of almost thirty-three seconds on their telemetry, so it was going to be a while before they got light-speed confirmation of the FTL-detectable impeller signatures.

“It may be smaller, but Tango Two’s also directly between us and the planet, Sir,” Burrows observed quietly in Filareta’s ear.

“Like I said, we didn’t exactly go for ‘subtle,’” Filareta replied equally quietly. “And how much of a mastermind would it take to figure this was any attack force’s most probable approach vector?” He shrugged. “It looks like they’re screwed anyway, though, given how far away Tango One is.” He jutted his chin in the direction of the larger cluster of crimson icons beginning to scramble towards the approaching sledgehammer of his fleet. “I don’t care if they do have a powered missile envelope of forty or fifty frigging million kilometers, there’s no way anybody this side of God could hit a missile target at the next best damned thing to three hundred million!” He shook his head. “No, they’ve let us catch them outside mutual support range. Tango Two’s on its own, and whoever’s in command over there, he’s got to be pissing himself about now.”

“You don’t think it’s Harrington?” Burrows asked with a slight smile, picking up on the pronoun in Filareta’s last sentence.

“If Harrington’s in space at all and not stuck dirt-side somewhere, she’s with Tango One,” Filareta said flatly. “She’d want the more powerful of her two task forces under her own personal control.”

“Makes sense, Sir.” Burrows agreed, then smiled thinly. “On the other hand, it looks like they may have been hit even harder than Intelligence estimated.”

“Maybe.”

Filareta kept his tone noncommittal, but Burrows might have a point. ONI’s best estimate of the Manty’s wall of battle before the last attack on the star system had given the RMN around two hundred SDs, twice the number they’d detected. Of course, ONI could have been wrong about that, and he wasn’t going to pretend he wasn’t going to be delighted if the Manties were a lot weaker than their pre-battle analyses had suggested. But the division of their forces… That puzzled him, and he didn’t like things that puzzled him at a moment like this.

I said it wouldn’t take a mastermind to predict our approach, but if that is Harrington in command over there — and given how everybody out here worships the deck she walks on, that’s who it’s got to be — I wouldn’t have expected her to split her forces this way. Still, I suppose anybody can screw up. For that matter, she might have wanted to maintain concentration and been overruled by the civilians. This is their capital star system, and I shudder to think how Kolokoltsov and the rest of the ‘Mandarins’ would be standing over the shoulder of any poor SOB responsible for defending the Sol System!

Not for the first time, he found himself fervently wishing he had better intel on the other side’s senior officers. Burrows and Commodore Ulysses Sobolowski, his staff intelligence officer, had done their best, but what Filareta was most aware of was his frustrating ignorance.

There’d been no time to send back to Old Terra for updated data dumps, given the operation’s time constraints. Of course, any competent planner should have considered the desirability of sending updated appreciations of the most probable enemy fleet commander along with orders for the operation, but he supposed that would have been asking too much. Or expecting too much, at any rate.

Without any updates, Sobolowski (whose relatively junior rank for the staff of a Solarian force Eleventh Fleet’s size was, unfortunately, an all too accurate reflection of the secondary — or even tertiary — importance the SLN in general attached to the intelligence function) had gone through his own files with a microscope. He’d pulled out every scrap of data Eleventh Fleet had on Harrington…and come up with very little. Worse, most of what they did have on her were simply clippings from the standard news services, almost all of which had clearly been written by newsies who knew exactly zero about naval operations. They were basically fluff pieces about ‘the Salamander’ (who always had made good copy on a slow news day), with almost no hard data on her tactics or operational concepts but plenty of hyperbole. Hell, based on those sources, the woman had to be at least five meters tall, and she probably picked her teeth with a light cruiser!

He snorted quietly at the thought, then gave himself a shake. Yes, there undoubtedly were a lot of exaggerations (and very few facts) in the news accounts, but one thing was clear — she truly did have a formidable record. Once upon a time, Filareta had been as inclined as the rest of his colleagues to write that off.