The Shadow of Saganami

'They're dead meat,' he said flatly. The civilian stopped nodding and looked at him with undisguised anxiety, and the commodore barked a laugh. 'They don't have any of those damned pods left,' he said, 'and they never had anything bigger than a heavy cruiser to begin with, according to Admiral Hegedusic's tac analysis. At least a hundred of our missiles got into attack range before they detonated, too. They've been hammered- hammered hard— and they're going to be up against modern battlecruisers . Battlecruisers that can shoot back this time.'

The civilian still looked dubious, and Horster could almost hear the thoughts running through the other man's brain. Yes, he had modern battlecruisers to kill them with, but Horster's crews had been aboard their ships for less than three weeks. Their people were still learning how to use their systems, how to master the capabilities, but it wasn't quite as bad as it could have been. Their engineering and astrogation departments had been forced to wait until they could actually get aboard the new ships, but the tactical crews had managed to spend over two months in the simulators Levakonic had brought with him. That might not be the same as hands-on training, but it was one hell of a lot better than nothing.

And they were battlecruisers, with all the armor and sheer toughness that implied.

* * *

'They're definitely battlecruisers, Sir,' Helen said.

She was focused on her displays, trying not to think about how many people had just been killed and wounded aboard the Squadron's ships. Aboard Hexapuma . She knew Aikawa was still alive, but where was Paulo? Was he even-

She pushed the thought aside again. She had no time for it. Other people were depending on her.

'The arrays are close enough to see them now despite their EW,' she continued. 'They're definitely running with wedges at maintenance levels, but we're getting enough signature off them to be confident of their tonnage range.'

'Can we tell if they're more Indefatigables ?'

'No, Sir. We're not getting much besides the impeller signatures and some neutrino leakage.'

'Skipper,' Lieutenant Bagwell said from the electronic warfare station, 'until they go active with their sensor suites, we're not going to get any more off of them. From the quality of their stealth technology, though, they've got to be Solly designs.'

'Another thing, Sir,' Abigail said. 'Whoever these people are, they were obviously already on a ballistic course for Eroica Station when we turned up, or we'd have picked up their drives. I suppose it's possible they had their impellers up and their stealth system simply hid it from us, but I don't think so. I think they'd already cut their drives. Which suggests some sort of fleet maneuver.'

'And?' Terekhov prompted in an encouraging tone when she paused, although he was fairly certain he knew where she was headed.

'Well, Sir, I suppose it's possible an SLN commander might want to exercise his crews, but it doesn't seem likely he'd have pulled out all the stops that way against typical Verge sensor technology. I think it's more likely these are more of the same-additional ships being turned over to the Monicans, but already through the refit process and working up new crews.'

'That's speculative, Skipper,' Bagwell said, 'but I think it's good speculation.'

'So do I.' Terekhov smiled approvingly at his youthful tactical officer. And at her even more youthful assistant. Then his expression sobered.

If Abigail was right and those ships were still in the process of working up, there were likely to be weaknesses in their performance, chinks in their armor. But they were still battlecruisers. The three of them outmassed all six of his surviving ships by better than two-to-one, and they were undamaged.

He looked at the plot. Eleven minutes had elapsed from the moment the third battlecruiser was detected. Only eleven minutes, in which hundreds of his people had been killed and the Monicans' casualties had probably run well into the thousands. He was decelerating away from the oncoming battlecruisers at the highest rate the Squadron as a whole could sustain, but nothing he did was going to prevent those ships from engaging him.

The only advantage he still had was the reach of Hexapuma's internal launchers, and the geometry of the looming engagement did much to neutralize even that. The range was down to 30.9 million kilometers, and with the battlecruisers' overtake advantage of 38,985 KPS, Hexapuma's maximum powered envelope at launch was increased to almost thirty-seven million kilometers. Assuming the battlecruisers' shipboard missile performance approximated ONI's estimates, their range would be under fifteen million kilometers, despite their overtake, but at present velocities and accelerations, they would enter that range of him within another 6.3 minutes and enter energy range eleven minutes after that. Warlock would also have a slight range advantage over the Monican battlecruisers, but it wasn't great enough to change the tactical equation significantly. Her tubes were simply too small; she couldn't handle even the Mark 14 missiles the Saganami-B s had been designed to fire, much less a Saganami-C's Mark 16s, so her advantage would be little more than three million kilometers-barely seventy-five seconds at the Monicans' rate of closure.

The range was still very long, especially against current Solarian ECM and missile defenses... and he didn't have all that many missles with which to penetrate them. Each of his Mark 16 missiles came in at over ninety-four tons, and Hexapuma's total designed loadout of attack missiles was 1,200. Fortunately, they'd squeezed in an extra hundred and twenty birds... but Abigail had expended most of them in Fire Plan Omega, and fifteen more had been in the feed queues of the five destroyed launchers. Without the redundant manpower Hexapuma didn't have, there was no way to manually reclaim those missiles, so his ship was down to an effective total of only 1,155. The cycle time on his launchers at maximum-rate fire was one round every eighteen seconds, twice the time an older ship, like Warlock , would have required. Partly because the missiles were simply larger, but even more because of the need to light up the Mark 16's onboard reactor before launch. Still, in theory, each launcher could fire fifty-four times before anyone else on either side was in range to do the same... except for the fact that he had only thirty-three rounds per tube.

Yet he had very little time to think about it. Flight time was going to be over three and a half minutes.

'Guns,' he said to his youthful acting tactical officer, 'your target is the lead bogey. I want double broadsides at twenty-five-second intervals. You can have four tubes in each salvo for Dazzlers and Dragon's Teeth. Five salvos on Bogey One, then shift to Bogey Two.'

'Aye, aye, Sir.'

'Ms. Zilwicki, lock the Alpha-Seven array directly to Lieutenant Bagwell.' He turned his chair to face the EWO. 'These people's defenses are going to be good-very good. We need to hammer them, and to do that we need data on their EW capabilities-fast. The rest of the Squadron will have over ten minutes to engage after they enter their effective powered envelope, but for them to use that time, we need to feed them everything we can pry loose about these people's defensive systems, and our missile range advantage is the only crowbar we have. We need to make them show us their best, people.'

'Understood, Sir,' Bagwell said.

'Very well, Ms. Hearns-open fire!'

* * *

'Missile launch!'

'Wedge up!' Horster snapped instantly, and the division's impeller wedges sprang to full power. It didn't happen instantly, even from a maintenance power level, but there was plenty of time to get them up before the attacking missiles could arrive.

The commodore crossed quickly to the master plot, looking for the incoming fire, and his eyes narrowed as he found it.

The arrow-shaped icons of thirty-five missiles streaked towards his trio of ships, accelerating steadily at 46,000 gravities. Twenty-five seconds later, a second salvo followed. Then a third. A fourth.

'The target is Typhoon ,' CIC announced as the first counter-missiles went out to meet them, and Horster nodded. Typhoon was his lead ship. He'd expected her to draw the enemy's fire, assuming they weren't stupid enough to divide it among all of his units.

The Manties had begun firing much sooner than he'd anticipated. For just an instant, he wondered if that meant they were planning on sending them in ballistic. But that would have been a stupid waste of precious