Uncompromising honor, p.21
Uncompromising Honor, page 21
part #19 of Honor Harrington Series
“Acknowledged.” Menendez’s voice had turned crisp and coldly professional as quickly as Chi’s had; she glanced at Whitaker. The com officer had been waiting.
“Hot mic, Ma’am!” he confirmed, and Menendez’s finger stabbed the transmit key on her command chair armrest before he finished speaking.
“Typhon,” she announced over the suddenly live network of short-range whisker communications lasers in that same cold, hard voice. “Typhon, Typhon.” Then she released the key and looked around her command deck. “Here we go, boys and girls,” she said. “Make it count.”
As battle cries went, it lacked a little something in drama, she reflected, but that was all right. There’d be plenty of drama to go around without her adding to it.
“Hyper footprint,” Commander Patricia Richtmann, SLNS Voltigeur’s tactical officer, announced calmly. It wasn’t as if the arrival was a surprise. They’d been expecting it for at least the last three hours, but they were waiting for battlecruisers, after all. Every destroyer officer knew that the time required for any task expanded geometrically in proportion to the tonnage of the ship involved.
Be fair, Pat, she scolded herself. It wasn’t just the standard transit prep this time. And unless you really want to walk home the long way, you should be happy they took the time to lay those pods. Because guess who’d be sent through to check for any Manty visitors if Admiral Santini wasn’t watching the back door?
“Got the transponder code?” Captain Oglesby asked.
“Yes, Sir,” Richtmann replied. “It’s Hindu—”
“Firing…now!” Sarah Chi announced, and pressed the key.
HMS Echidna was a Hydra-class LAC carrier. The Hydras were 33,000 tons smaller than the Minotaurs which had preceded them, but they managed to pack in an additional dozen LAC bays. All one hundred and eleven of her serviceable LACs—one of the brood was downchecked by the group engineering officer because its stealth systems had a stubbornly persistent glitch—had been launched and left behind, hiding in the midnight depths of the Ajay Terminus when Echidna and the rest of the Ajay picket took themselves elsewhere in obedience to HMS So-po’s relayed order from Commodore Lessem. They’d sat there, waiting, watching the Solarian destroyers checking for defenders, and now it was their turn.
It wasn’t Patricia Richtmann’s fault no one had noticed them. She and her fellow tactical officers aboard Chamberlin and Timberlake, Voltigeur’s division mates, had searched diligently for any sign of warships. The problem was that no one in the Solarian League Navy who’d ever encountered the RMN’s Shrikes and Katanas had gotten home to tell anyone else about it. As a consequence, no one in Task Force 1027 had ever imagined that something that small—a Shrike massed only twenty-one thousand tons and was barely seventy meters long—could possibly pose a threat to any genuine ship of war. Voltigeur, at 112,500 tons, had no business in a fleet engagement, and her officers and crew knew it. The thought that anyone should worry about something less than a fifth their size would have been absurd. There was a reason—in fact, there were a lot of reasons—no serious navy had built LACs for the past century or so, and even those which were in service were purely sublight system-defense or patrol vessels. Without Warshawski sails and hyper generators of their own, which no one could possibly fit into a hull that size—or the LAC carriers no Solarian knew a thing about—they couldn’t have been here in Ajay space anyway.
And even if they’d known about CLACs and the new generation LACs, nothing else in the galaxy was as stealthy as a Shrike or Katana. Even active radar’s effectiveness against them was hugely degraded at anything above very short range. The only way to really spot one of them, with its impellers down and its stealth systems up was for it to occlude a star, and Commander Menendez, who was Echidna’s COLAC as well as Boomslang’s CO, had made sure her deadly little ships were motionless relative to the terminus. The chance that something their size and holding that still might occlude a star (or anything else, for that matter) were…slight.
Had the Solarian destroyers looked hard enough and long enough, they might still have spotted them. Not even Manticoran EW could make them invisible to active radar with enough power behind it. But they were very close to invisible. Their radar return was far too tiny to represent any threat the SLN or its computers had ever heard of. People look for the threats they know about, and none of the men and women aboard those ships knew one damned thing about Shrikes.
For example, none of them were aware that in addition to the Shrike-B’s internal rotary missile launcher, it carried a single spinal-mounted graser as heavy as many a superdreadnought’s broadside armament.
“I have the destroyers’ impeller signatures, Sir,” Captain Absolon Badrani’s plotting officer announced as SLNS Hindustan reemerged into everyone else’s universe.
“Very good,” Badrani acknowledged absently. His attention was on his helmswoman as the Nevada-class battlecruiser glided out of the terminus. Hindustan’s sister ship Océan was on her heels, and Captain Hackenbroch had an acid personality backed up by a scalpel-sharp sarcasm. She was bound to say something rude if Hindustan was clumsy about getting out of her way.
Not that Océan would be coming through that quickly. Admiral Isotalo had ordered a twenty-five second interval between transits. That was far longer than anyone would ever need. True, it would be another—he checked the display—fifty-three seconds before he could reconfigure from Warshawski sail to impellers, but those sails provided all the acceleration he’d need to keep Hindustan out of Océan’s way.
Not that Hackenbroch’ll see it that way. If not for the fact that she’s just as competent as she is annoying, that mouth of hers would’ve—
Twenty-four grasers, each designed to rip straight through a superdreadnought’s armor, slammed into SLNS Hindustan like the curse of God.
It was like hitting a puppy with a ground lorry, only worse.
Far worse.
Not one shot missed. There were no sidewalls to stop the fire coming from Hindustan’s flanks, and her side armor was woefully inadequate against graser fire that heavy delivered from such brutally short range. Even worse, half the fire came in from above, where there wasn’t any armor, because designers didn’t armor areas of the hull normally protected by the wedge that ought to have been there.
“Jesus Christ!” Patricia Richtmann blurted as nine hundred thousand tons of battlecruiser—and twenty-three hundred men and women—disappeared in the titanic fireball of failed fusion bottles. She stared at her plot in stark disbelief, then sucked in a shocked breath.
“Impeller signatures!” Her professional voice was frayed and harrowed as the impeller wedges of Menendez’s LACs sprang to malevolent life on her display. “Many impeller signatures! Estimate ninety-plus. Bearings—”
She broke off, slamming her heel on the button that locked her bridge chair’s shock frame.
“Missiles incoming,” she said flatly. “Estimate seventy-five—no, eighty—inbound. Time-of-flight, twenty seconds.”
Aaloka Menendez’s eyes glittered with fierce satisfaction as the first Solly battlecruiser blew apart. Her Shrikes’ heavy grasers could have blown through battlecruiser sidewalls at this range with contemptuous ease, but they didn’t even have to do that. And while two of her squadrons dealt with Hindustan, three more of them launched against the Solarian destroyers who’d never seen them coming.
The Shrike-B carried fourteen shipkillers, and the attacking LACs’ rotary launchers spat them out in a deadly stream. The range was so short they could easily have taken the Sollies down with graser fire, but the Achilles’ heel of the Shrike’s massive energy armament was that its fission reactor couldn’t recharge its plasma capacitors in battle. The energy budget simply wasn’t there. That meant her units’ energy fire was at least as limited as their magazine capacity, and she wanted all the graser shots she could bank against future need.
“What the h—?” Captain Chayula Hackenbroch blurted, snapping upright in her command chair as Océan emerged on the Ajay side of the terminus. One moment the tactical display had shown only the calm, orderly line of battlecruisers queued up for transit. The next it was littered with missile traces, impeller signatures, and the homing beacons of a bare handful of life pods, speeding away from the fading fireball which must be all that remained of Hindustan.
“Impeller signatures! Many impeller signatures!” her tac officer screamed.
And then the holocaust which had hammered Hindustan came for Océan, as well.
SLNS Ohio, Neptune, and Minotaur followed into the furnace one by one, emerging at neat twenty-five-second intervals into the devastating fire of LAC Group 117, and the fire in Commander Menendez’s eyes grew cold and bleak.
They don’t have a chance—not a chance. My God! It’s not even shooting ducks; it’s clubbing kittens! These poor bastards don’t even know we’re here until they sail right into our sights and we blow them to hell!
Her jaw tightened, and her nostrils flared. Whatever their high command and political masters might have done, surely the men and women aboard those dying ships were not so different from the men and women aboard her ships.
“Targeting change,” she heard her voice say. “Go for the hammerheads, Sarah. Take out the impeller rings and the poor bastards are toast if they don’t surrender as soon as we get back around to them.” She grimaced. “Let’s not make any more orphans today than we have to.”
Prime Terminus
Prime-Ajay Hyper Bridge
Vice Admiral Helmut Santini accepted the cup of tea from his steward with a nod of thanks, but his expression was unhappy. He sipped the hot brew and gazed at the blandly uninformative tactical plot on SLNS Colossus’s flag bridge for a handful of seconds. The comforting green icons of his task group floated in place, barring the Prime Terminus to all comers, and that was good. But then he flipped his eyes to the master astrogation plot and glared at the handful of red icons floating tauntingly twenty-seven light-minutes from the Terminus. He treated them to fifteen seconds of silent, fulminating bile, then turned to the tall, broad-shouldered rear admiral at his side.
“I don’t like it, Jansen,” he said—unnecessarily, he was sure. “I don’t like it one damned bit.”
“I don’t like it either, Sir,” Jansen Vasiliou, Task Group 1027.3’s chief of staff, replied. “And I wish we had some kind of explanation for it.”
“You and me both.”
Santini sipped more tea, brooding at that damnable plot—both those damnable plots—and checked the time display…again.
Admiral Isotalo’s scheduled update on Buccaneer’s status was far overdue.
The Ajay Terminus was 342 LM from the system primary. A trip that long through normal-space would have required over twenty-three hours, allowing for a zero-zero arrival at the hyper-limit. But 5.7 light-hours didn’t qualify as a “micro-jump” in anyone’s book, and in hyper, going only as high as the Gamma bands, TF 1027’s other task groups should have made the trip in just under thirty-seven minutes. By that calculation, Isotalo had crossed into the inner system over nine hours ago. Even assuming there’d been some reason she couldn’t send a destroyer back to the terminus with dispatches, a light-speed message announcing her arrival in orbit around Elm, the system’s only inhabited planet, should have reached the damned picket destroyers three and a half damned hours ago. At which point, one of them should damned well have returned to the Prime Terminus to give him some damned idea what was going on.
He wished—more than he could possibly have said—he could blame it on Isotalo’s sloppiness, but the one thing Jane Isotalo wasn’t was “sloppy.” There was a reason—a compelling reason—she hadn’t sent him that update, and he was unhappily certain he wouldn’t have liked Vasiliou’s explanation if they’d had it.
Not that not having it was inspiring any cartwheels of joy.
“Send one of the tin cans through to check with the picket, Sir?” Vasiliou asked, quietly enough no one else on Flag Bridge was likely to hear him.
“Tempting,” Santini acknowledged. “But Admiral Isotalo took over fifty starships through that terminus. If there’s something on the other side nasty enough to keep her from sending us even an update, what do you think it’s going to do to a destroyer?”
“I thought about that, Sir.” Vasiliou’s voice was even softer, and although his expression remained merely calm and attentive, there was something very dark at the backs of his eyes. But they were unflinching, those eyes, and they met Santini’s levelly. “The thing is, Sir, that that would be a message of its own, wouldn’t it?”
Santini’s jaw tightened and he clamped down on an urge to rip off his chief of staff’s head for even suggesting the cold-blooded sacrifice of a destroyer and its crew. Unfortunately, it was an eminently sound suggestion. There was no way he could justify taking his entire task group through, even in a simultaneous transit, without some idea of what had happened to the rest of the task force. The one thing he did know was that there were—or had been, he amended grimly—three Solarian destroyers directly atop the far side of the terminus. If something had gotten close enough to prevent even one of them from escaping back to Prime, it was probably nasty enough to deal with sixteen battlecruisers, all but two of them the older Indefatigable-class, and fourteen destroyers if he was obliging enough to deliver them without impeller wedges or sidewalls.
So, yes, Jansen’s right, he thought, and he’s got the guts to say it. If we send a tin can through and it doesn’t come back, I’ll have no choice but to conclude that the Admiral’s been cut off from retreat through the terminus, at the very least. I can always assume that’s what’s happened without sacrificing a destroyer, but an assumption would be all it was. The truth is, I need some sort of confirmation, and paying the price of a destroyer would be a hell of a lot cheaper than losing the entire task group. But say I do send a tin can through and lose it, what do I do for my next trick?
On the one hand, with the thousands upon thousands of missile pods deployed around the Prime Terminus and with his own battlecruisers’ energy batteries poised to eliminate any hostile unit emerging from it, his position was a powerful one. Indeed, against any threat from the Ajay side, it was unassailable. So he could stay right where he was indefinitely, waiting to see if Isotalo could work her way around whatever was blockading her—and God, he hoped she was only blockaded!—in Ajay and return to Prime. For that matter, staying put would continue to keep the terminus corked against the Manty task force which had probably already been summoned back to Prime from Agueda.
At least until they turn up and deploy their damned pods to blow us all to dustbunnies, he reflected harshly, glaring once more at the heavy cruisers maintaining their prudent distance from his battlecruisers and the Cataphracts.
On the other hand, he was a vice admiral in the Solarian League Navy. Vice admirals weren’t supposed to sit around with their thumbs up their arses hoping something would come along to save them from making the hard decisions. No matter what he chose, somebody far, far away in a nice, safe office was going to second-guess him. He knew that, and he didn’t like it, but he cared one hell of a lot less about that than he did about the rest of the task force. The thought of leaving them unsupported turned his stomach into a vacuum flask. Yet there was nothing he could do to support them, not when the far side of the terminus was a hundred and three light-years away through Einsteinian space.
He sipped more tea, thinking about that distance. He could make the trip to Ajay through n-space in a bit over twelve and a half days, although he doubted there was much his single task group could do to reverse Isotalo’s fortunes, even assuming she was still in Ajay the next best thing to two weeks from now. No, that was a non-option, for a whole host of reasons. But at the very least, he had to inform Old Terra about the rest of TF 1027’s disquieting silence. Only he didn’t really have anything to tell Admiral Kingsford, did he? “They went into the terminus and they didn’t come out again” wasn’t a hell of a lot of information.
No, it’s not. But he does need to know about it, because if the Manties really did come up with some kind of mousetrap—a mousetrap so well hidden three destroyers posted specifically to watch for it never saw it coming—that could…prevent the Admiral from returning to Prime, this may not be the only place they’ve done it. And, his eyes grew grimmer, she may not be the only one they’ve done it to, either.
“We have to send a dispatch back to Wincote for the Admiralty,” he said quietly. “I know there’s damn-all we can tell them at this point, but if something has happened to Admiral Isotalo, they’ve got to know about it.”
“Agreed, Sir. But do we send dispatches now, or wait a while longer in hopes somebody does come back to tell us what’s going on?”
“I don’t know.” Santini sipped more tea, then grimaced. “No, I do know,” he said. “We’ll wait twenty-four hours. If we send anyone back to Wincote before that, some idiot somewhere along the chain of command’ll decide we jumped the gun because we’ve had the shit scared out of us.” He grimaced again, more deeply. “The fact that I think I have had the shit scared out of me doesn’t make me any more eager to give the idiot in question any ammunition I don’t have to. If we wait a T-day, that’s a nice, solid interval. Long enough to show we thought it over carefully before we did what we already know we damned well need to do. And it’s not like anything’s going to sneak up on us here on this side of the terminus, is it?”
“No, Sir,” Vasiliou agreed.
“Then have Sheila and Franziska put together a complete file for us, all the tac data from Sheila and the entire communications chain from Franziska.”
Vasiliou nodded. Commodore Sheila O’Reilly was TG 1027.3’s operations officer, and Captain Franziska Ridolfi was Santini’s staff communications officer.
“I want the best analysis Sheila can give us, and I want to see it before I write my cover dispatch for it.” He shook his head, staring into the plot again. “Actually, I’m hoping like hell the Admiral will come back in one piece before I have to send the thing.
“Hot mic, Ma’am!” he confirmed, and Menendez’s finger stabbed the transmit key on her command chair armrest before he finished speaking.
“Typhon,” she announced over the suddenly live network of short-range whisker communications lasers in that same cold, hard voice. “Typhon, Typhon.” Then she released the key and looked around her command deck. “Here we go, boys and girls,” she said. “Make it count.”
As battle cries went, it lacked a little something in drama, she reflected, but that was all right. There’d be plenty of drama to go around without her adding to it.
“Hyper footprint,” Commander Patricia Richtmann, SLNS Voltigeur’s tactical officer, announced calmly. It wasn’t as if the arrival was a surprise. They’d been expecting it for at least the last three hours, but they were waiting for battlecruisers, after all. Every destroyer officer knew that the time required for any task expanded geometrically in proportion to the tonnage of the ship involved.
Be fair, Pat, she scolded herself. It wasn’t just the standard transit prep this time. And unless you really want to walk home the long way, you should be happy they took the time to lay those pods. Because guess who’d be sent through to check for any Manty visitors if Admiral Santini wasn’t watching the back door?
“Got the transponder code?” Captain Oglesby asked.
“Yes, Sir,” Richtmann replied. “It’s Hindu—”
“Firing…now!” Sarah Chi announced, and pressed the key.
HMS Echidna was a Hydra-class LAC carrier. The Hydras were 33,000 tons smaller than the Minotaurs which had preceded them, but they managed to pack in an additional dozen LAC bays. All one hundred and eleven of her serviceable LACs—one of the brood was downchecked by the group engineering officer because its stealth systems had a stubbornly persistent glitch—had been launched and left behind, hiding in the midnight depths of the Ajay Terminus when Echidna and the rest of the Ajay picket took themselves elsewhere in obedience to HMS So-po’s relayed order from Commodore Lessem. They’d sat there, waiting, watching the Solarian destroyers checking for defenders, and now it was their turn.
It wasn’t Patricia Richtmann’s fault no one had noticed them. She and her fellow tactical officers aboard Chamberlin and Timberlake, Voltigeur’s division mates, had searched diligently for any sign of warships. The problem was that no one in the Solarian League Navy who’d ever encountered the RMN’s Shrikes and Katanas had gotten home to tell anyone else about it. As a consequence, no one in Task Force 1027 had ever imagined that something that small—a Shrike massed only twenty-one thousand tons and was barely seventy meters long—could possibly pose a threat to any genuine ship of war. Voltigeur, at 112,500 tons, had no business in a fleet engagement, and her officers and crew knew it. The thought that anyone should worry about something less than a fifth their size would have been absurd. There was a reason—in fact, there were a lot of reasons—no serious navy had built LACs for the past century or so, and even those which were in service were purely sublight system-defense or patrol vessels. Without Warshawski sails and hyper generators of their own, which no one could possibly fit into a hull that size—or the LAC carriers no Solarian knew a thing about—they couldn’t have been here in Ajay space anyway.
And even if they’d known about CLACs and the new generation LACs, nothing else in the galaxy was as stealthy as a Shrike or Katana. Even active radar’s effectiveness against them was hugely degraded at anything above very short range. The only way to really spot one of them, with its impellers down and its stealth systems up was for it to occlude a star, and Commander Menendez, who was Echidna’s COLAC as well as Boomslang’s CO, had made sure her deadly little ships were motionless relative to the terminus. The chance that something their size and holding that still might occlude a star (or anything else, for that matter) were…slight.
Had the Solarian destroyers looked hard enough and long enough, they might still have spotted them. Not even Manticoran EW could make them invisible to active radar with enough power behind it. But they were very close to invisible. Their radar return was far too tiny to represent any threat the SLN or its computers had ever heard of. People look for the threats they know about, and none of the men and women aboard those ships knew one damned thing about Shrikes.
For example, none of them were aware that in addition to the Shrike-B’s internal rotary missile launcher, it carried a single spinal-mounted graser as heavy as many a superdreadnought’s broadside armament.
“I have the destroyers’ impeller signatures, Sir,” Captain Absolon Badrani’s plotting officer announced as SLNS Hindustan reemerged into everyone else’s universe.
“Very good,” Badrani acknowledged absently. His attention was on his helmswoman as the Nevada-class battlecruiser glided out of the terminus. Hindustan’s sister ship Océan was on her heels, and Captain Hackenbroch had an acid personality backed up by a scalpel-sharp sarcasm. She was bound to say something rude if Hindustan was clumsy about getting out of her way.
Not that Océan would be coming through that quickly. Admiral Isotalo had ordered a twenty-five second interval between transits. That was far longer than anyone would ever need. True, it would be another—he checked the display—fifty-three seconds before he could reconfigure from Warshawski sail to impellers, but those sails provided all the acceleration he’d need to keep Hindustan out of Océan’s way.
Not that Hackenbroch’ll see it that way. If not for the fact that she’s just as competent as she is annoying, that mouth of hers would’ve—
Twenty-four grasers, each designed to rip straight through a superdreadnought’s armor, slammed into SLNS Hindustan like the curse of God.
It was like hitting a puppy with a ground lorry, only worse.
Far worse.
Not one shot missed. There were no sidewalls to stop the fire coming from Hindustan’s flanks, and her side armor was woefully inadequate against graser fire that heavy delivered from such brutally short range. Even worse, half the fire came in from above, where there wasn’t any armor, because designers didn’t armor areas of the hull normally protected by the wedge that ought to have been there.
“Jesus Christ!” Patricia Richtmann blurted as nine hundred thousand tons of battlecruiser—and twenty-three hundred men and women—disappeared in the titanic fireball of failed fusion bottles. She stared at her plot in stark disbelief, then sucked in a shocked breath.
“Impeller signatures!” Her professional voice was frayed and harrowed as the impeller wedges of Menendez’s LACs sprang to malevolent life on her display. “Many impeller signatures! Estimate ninety-plus. Bearings—”
She broke off, slamming her heel on the button that locked her bridge chair’s shock frame.
“Missiles incoming,” she said flatly. “Estimate seventy-five—no, eighty—inbound. Time-of-flight, twenty seconds.”
Aaloka Menendez’s eyes glittered with fierce satisfaction as the first Solly battlecruiser blew apart. Her Shrikes’ heavy grasers could have blown through battlecruiser sidewalls at this range with contemptuous ease, but they didn’t even have to do that. And while two of her squadrons dealt with Hindustan, three more of them launched against the Solarian destroyers who’d never seen them coming.
The Shrike-B carried fourteen shipkillers, and the attacking LACs’ rotary launchers spat them out in a deadly stream. The range was so short they could easily have taken the Sollies down with graser fire, but the Achilles’ heel of the Shrike’s massive energy armament was that its fission reactor couldn’t recharge its plasma capacitors in battle. The energy budget simply wasn’t there. That meant her units’ energy fire was at least as limited as their magazine capacity, and she wanted all the graser shots she could bank against future need.
“What the h—?” Captain Chayula Hackenbroch blurted, snapping upright in her command chair as Océan emerged on the Ajay side of the terminus. One moment the tactical display had shown only the calm, orderly line of battlecruisers queued up for transit. The next it was littered with missile traces, impeller signatures, and the homing beacons of a bare handful of life pods, speeding away from the fading fireball which must be all that remained of Hindustan.
“Impeller signatures! Many impeller signatures!” her tac officer screamed.
And then the holocaust which had hammered Hindustan came for Océan, as well.
SLNS Ohio, Neptune, and Minotaur followed into the furnace one by one, emerging at neat twenty-five-second intervals into the devastating fire of LAC Group 117, and the fire in Commander Menendez’s eyes grew cold and bleak.
They don’t have a chance—not a chance. My God! It’s not even shooting ducks; it’s clubbing kittens! These poor bastards don’t even know we’re here until they sail right into our sights and we blow them to hell!
Her jaw tightened, and her nostrils flared. Whatever their high command and political masters might have done, surely the men and women aboard those dying ships were not so different from the men and women aboard her ships.
“Targeting change,” she heard her voice say. “Go for the hammerheads, Sarah. Take out the impeller rings and the poor bastards are toast if they don’t surrender as soon as we get back around to them.” She grimaced. “Let’s not make any more orphans today than we have to.”
Prime Terminus
Prime-Ajay Hyper Bridge
Vice Admiral Helmut Santini accepted the cup of tea from his steward with a nod of thanks, but his expression was unhappy. He sipped the hot brew and gazed at the blandly uninformative tactical plot on SLNS Colossus’s flag bridge for a handful of seconds. The comforting green icons of his task group floated in place, barring the Prime Terminus to all comers, and that was good. But then he flipped his eyes to the master astrogation plot and glared at the handful of red icons floating tauntingly twenty-seven light-minutes from the Terminus. He treated them to fifteen seconds of silent, fulminating bile, then turned to the tall, broad-shouldered rear admiral at his side.
“I don’t like it, Jansen,” he said—unnecessarily, he was sure. “I don’t like it one damned bit.”
“I don’t like it either, Sir,” Jansen Vasiliou, Task Group 1027.3’s chief of staff, replied. “And I wish we had some kind of explanation for it.”
“You and me both.”
Santini sipped more tea, brooding at that damnable plot—both those damnable plots—and checked the time display…again.
Admiral Isotalo’s scheduled update on Buccaneer’s status was far overdue.
The Ajay Terminus was 342 LM from the system primary. A trip that long through normal-space would have required over twenty-three hours, allowing for a zero-zero arrival at the hyper-limit. But 5.7 light-hours didn’t qualify as a “micro-jump” in anyone’s book, and in hyper, going only as high as the Gamma bands, TF 1027’s other task groups should have made the trip in just under thirty-seven minutes. By that calculation, Isotalo had crossed into the inner system over nine hours ago. Even assuming there’d been some reason she couldn’t send a destroyer back to the terminus with dispatches, a light-speed message announcing her arrival in orbit around Elm, the system’s only inhabited planet, should have reached the damned picket destroyers three and a half damned hours ago. At which point, one of them should damned well have returned to the Prime Terminus to give him some damned idea what was going on.
He wished—more than he could possibly have said—he could blame it on Isotalo’s sloppiness, but the one thing Jane Isotalo wasn’t was “sloppy.” There was a reason—a compelling reason—she hadn’t sent him that update, and he was unhappily certain he wouldn’t have liked Vasiliou’s explanation if they’d had it.
Not that not having it was inspiring any cartwheels of joy.
“Send one of the tin cans through to check with the picket, Sir?” Vasiliou asked, quietly enough no one else on Flag Bridge was likely to hear him.
“Tempting,” Santini acknowledged. “But Admiral Isotalo took over fifty starships through that terminus. If there’s something on the other side nasty enough to keep her from sending us even an update, what do you think it’s going to do to a destroyer?”
“I thought about that, Sir.” Vasiliou’s voice was even softer, and although his expression remained merely calm and attentive, there was something very dark at the backs of his eyes. But they were unflinching, those eyes, and they met Santini’s levelly. “The thing is, Sir, that that would be a message of its own, wouldn’t it?”
Santini’s jaw tightened and he clamped down on an urge to rip off his chief of staff’s head for even suggesting the cold-blooded sacrifice of a destroyer and its crew. Unfortunately, it was an eminently sound suggestion. There was no way he could justify taking his entire task group through, even in a simultaneous transit, without some idea of what had happened to the rest of the task force. The one thing he did know was that there were—or had been, he amended grimly—three Solarian destroyers directly atop the far side of the terminus. If something had gotten close enough to prevent even one of them from escaping back to Prime, it was probably nasty enough to deal with sixteen battlecruisers, all but two of them the older Indefatigable-class, and fourteen destroyers if he was obliging enough to deliver them without impeller wedges or sidewalls.
So, yes, Jansen’s right, he thought, and he’s got the guts to say it. If we send a tin can through and it doesn’t come back, I’ll have no choice but to conclude that the Admiral’s been cut off from retreat through the terminus, at the very least. I can always assume that’s what’s happened without sacrificing a destroyer, but an assumption would be all it was. The truth is, I need some sort of confirmation, and paying the price of a destroyer would be a hell of a lot cheaper than losing the entire task group. But say I do send a tin can through and lose it, what do I do for my next trick?
On the one hand, with the thousands upon thousands of missile pods deployed around the Prime Terminus and with his own battlecruisers’ energy batteries poised to eliminate any hostile unit emerging from it, his position was a powerful one. Indeed, against any threat from the Ajay side, it was unassailable. So he could stay right where he was indefinitely, waiting to see if Isotalo could work her way around whatever was blockading her—and God, he hoped she was only blockaded!—in Ajay and return to Prime. For that matter, staying put would continue to keep the terminus corked against the Manty task force which had probably already been summoned back to Prime from Agueda.
At least until they turn up and deploy their damned pods to blow us all to dustbunnies, he reflected harshly, glaring once more at the heavy cruisers maintaining their prudent distance from his battlecruisers and the Cataphracts.
On the other hand, he was a vice admiral in the Solarian League Navy. Vice admirals weren’t supposed to sit around with their thumbs up their arses hoping something would come along to save them from making the hard decisions. No matter what he chose, somebody far, far away in a nice, safe office was going to second-guess him. He knew that, and he didn’t like it, but he cared one hell of a lot less about that than he did about the rest of the task force. The thought of leaving them unsupported turned his stomach into a vacuum flask. Yet there was nothing he could do to support them, not when the far side of the terminus was a hundred and three light-years away through Einsteinian space.
He sipped more tea, thinking about that distance. He could make the trip to Ajay through n-space in a bit over twelve and a half days, although he doubted there was much his single task group could do to reverse Isotalo’s fortunes, even assuming she was still in Ajay the next best thing to two weeks from now. No, that was a non-option, for a whole host of reasons. But at the very least, he had to inform Old Terra about the rest of TF 1027’s disquieting silence. Only he didn’t really have anything to tell Admiral Kingsford, did he? “They went into the terminus and they didn’t come out again” wasn’t a hell of a lot of information.
No, it’s not. But he does need to know about it, because if the Manties really did come up with some kind of mousetrap—a mousetrap so well hidden three destroyers posted specifically to watch for it never saw it coming—that could…prevent the Admiral from returning to Prime, this may not be the only place they’ve done it. And, his eyes grew grimmer, she may not be the only one they’ve done it to, either.
“We have to send a dispatch back to Wincote for the Admiralty,” he said quietly. “I know there’s damn-all we can tell them at this point, but if something has happened to Admiral Isotalo, they’ve got to know about it.”
“Agreed, Sir. But do we send dispatches now, or wait a while longer in hopes somebody does come back to tell us what’s going on?”
“I don’t know.” Santini sipped more tea, then grimaced. “No, I do know,” he said. “We’ll wait twenty-four hours. If we send anyone back to Wincote before that, some idiot somewhere along the chain of command’ll decide we jumped the gun because we’ve had the shit scared out of us.” He grimaced again, more deeply. “The fact that I think I have had the shit scared out of me doesn’t make me any more eager to give the idiot in question any ammunition I don’t have to. If we wait a T-day, that’s a nice, solid interval. Long enough to show we thought it over carefully before we did what we already know we damned well need to do. And it’s not like anything’s going to sneak up on us here on this side of the terminus, is it?”
“No, Sir,” Vasiliou agreed.
“Then have Sheila and Franziska put together a complete file for us, all the tac data from Sheila and the entire communications chain from Franziska.”
Vasiliou nodded. Commodore Sheila O’Reilly was TG 1027.3’s operations officer, and Captain Franziska Ridolfi was Santini’s staff communications officer.
“I want the best analysis Sheila can give us, and I want to see it before I write my cover dispatch for it.” He shook his head, staring into the plot again. “Actually, I’m hoping like hell the Admiral will come back in one piece before I have to send the thing.
