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A corner of her mind couldn't help thinking the Skipper was being a little paranoid. The Monicans couldn't possibly have known they were coming, and even the best Solarian missiles had a maximum powered attack envelope of no more than 6.5 million kilometers from rest, even at half-power settings. Not to mention the fact that while Manticoran electronics were the best any navy had ever deployed, the Monicans' basic surveillance systems were obsolescent League crap at least forty T-years out of date. There was no way any threat this system could mount could get through her sensor shell to attack range without plenty of warning.
But only a corner of her mind thought that. The rest of it recognized yet another example of the Skipper's infinite attention to detail. He would dot every "i" and cross every "t" ahead of time, when he had the leisure to be sure it was done right. Who was it, back on Old Earth, who'd said to ask him for anything but time? She rather thought it had been Napoleon. Of course, despite all his strategic genius on land, Napoleon hadn't known how to pour piss out of a boot where navies were concerned, but that particular bit of advice translated quite well across the centuries for any officer.
" Warlock has her full pod load, Sir," Nagchaudhuri reported. "Commander Diamond is moving up with Vigilant ."
"Thank you, Amal," Terekhov said. His tone was courteous and a bit abstracted, but Helen knew better than that. It was a reflection of how intensely he was concentrating, not of absentmindedness.
She thought about Lieutenant Commander Diamond. How did he feel right now? From all she could discover, he'd been with Commander Hope for at least two T-years. Now she'd been hustled off aboard the dispatch boat, returned to Spindle ignominiously with the Captain's dispatches, like so much unwanted freight. If this operation turned into the disaster she'd evidently predicted, she'd probably emerge as the only CO of the Squadron with an intact reputation. But if it succeeded, she'd be known throughout the Navy as the commander of a Queen's ship who'd refused, for whatever reason, to face the enemy when ordered to do so. And whichever way it came out, Diamond would have to live with the fact that he'd elected to succeed her in command rather than follow her into exile.
She watched her own plot as the highly stealthed pods clustered about Vigilant 's icon. The latest wrinkle BuWeaps had come up with was to incorporate a small tractor beam into each individual pod. Although their design was maximized for deployment from the new hollow-core SD(P)s and even newer BC(P)s, there were still plenty of old-style ships or smaller vessels-like the ones of Captain Terekhov's small squadron-which could only deploy pods on tow. One limiting factor for those ships had always been the way the number of tractor beams they mounted restricted the numbers of pods they could deploy. By mounting tractors on the pods themselves, that particular problem was overcome, and Captain Terekhov was using that advantage to the maximum. By the time he got done his ships would do well to manage 350 g , but they'd have a devastating long-range punch. Even the destroyers would have ten pods tagging along. Each of the three light cruisers would have fifteen, Warlock and Vigilant would have twenty-three each, and Hexapuma would have no less than forty. Altogether, it added up to a hundred and seventy-one pods for a total of 1,710 missiles. Capital missiles of the Royal Manticoran Navy-the longest ranged, most deadly missiles in space.
Somehow, she rather doubted anything Monica had was going to be able to stand up to that !
No, not Janko, Isidor Hegedusic thought. And whoever they are, I don't care for the way they're coming in. They sure as hell aren't merchies, they're completely ignoring our challenges, and approaching from this bearing, the shipyards are their only possible target.
His expression was grim. There was only one navy he could think of who'd have both an interest in depriving Monica of the Indefatigables and the sheer big brass balls to launch some sort of preemptive strike to accomplish that deprivation. And if the reports and rumors Levakonic had shared with him were accurate, those people had the range to turn his entire complex-and the irreplaceable battlecruisers lying helpless in its midst-into drifting debris from beyond the effective range of any weapon he possessed.
The "flag deck" hatch opened, and he glanced over his shoulder as Levakonic came hurrying in, skinsuited like the admiral himself. Technically, the civilian had no business here, but Hegedusic wasn't about to choke on any rules that required him to order a possible source of advice and information off of his command deck.
"No communication from them yet?" Levakonic asked tautly.
"No," Hegedusic replied, "and we've been hailing them for almost ten minutes now. I wonder if they're just going to close to attack range and blow us away without even identifying themselves." Levakonic looked sideways at him, and the admiral shrugged. "Think about it. If they blow the entire Station to bits and then just haul ass out of here without ever claiming responsibility, it'd be our word against theirs if we tried to convince anyone else of what happened."
"They might do that," Levakonic said, setting his helmet down on the seat of an unoccupied bridge chair. His skinsuit was a civilian model, but it was also much better and more capable than Hegedusic's.
"They might," the Solly repeated, "but if they were going to do that, they wouldn't have to come in on us at all. If our reports about how they're pulling off their range increases are correct, they've actually built multiple drive systems into a single missile body."
"What?" Hegedusic looked at him in astonishment, and Levakonic chuckled harshly.
"I know. They have to've developed an entire new generation of superdense fusion bottles, or something of the sort, to pull that off. We know they're fiendishly good at engineering components down, but there are practical limits. Their initial long-range missiles were apparently a lot bigger than their current-generation birds, so they probably went with improved capacitors on those. Hell, you've seen our latest-generation birds, and you know how big they are. Well, they still have single-drive systems that just happen to last a little longer before burnout; all the rest of the volume's for the juice they need to take advantage of their drive endurance.
"If our reports from Haven are right, the Peeps are still using stored energy for their birds. It's hurting them in areas like magazine capacity, compared to the Manties, and apparently they only managed that much because they were able to reverse engineer the Manties' late-generation capacitors.
"Of course," his smile was vinegar-tart, " all we have since Pierre and Saint-Just got bumped off are rumors and third-party reports. Their new management doesn't seem to like us very much. Which is partly our fault, of course." He grimaced. "They didn't have many samples of the Manties' current hardware after the cease-fire, and we weren't particularly interested in helping them out with their own development programs once the reports on Manty hardware started drying up. They, ah, seem to have long memories out there, and once Erewhon went over to their side with actual working examples of Manty technology, their R and D people pretty much told us to take a hike. So our latest first-hand reports are five T-years out of date, and it's possible all of this is inaccurate as hell.
"But if it isn't, then the Manties are building much smaller long-range missiles than they were. That means they have to've found a better solution than simply using bigger and better superconductor rings. If they're going to cram two-or even three, according to some rumors-complete drive packages into missiles the size of the ones they're supposed to be deploying, they can't have the internal volume to use straight superconductor storage to power the damned things."
"I imagine not," Hegedusic agreed. "But could anybody really build a fusion plant that small?"
"It's theoretically possible. With a powerful enough grav field to do the pinching, it could be done. But the initial power would have to come from a source external to the missile, which would probably mean some tricky modification of the launchers, as well. Anyway," he shook his head, brushing away the speculation, "the point I was going to make is that they have an effectively unlimited powered attack range. They could fire the damned things from five or six light-hours out, accelerate the bastards up to speed, and then program the second stage drive not to kick in until the birds entered attack range of their targets. If they didn't punch the max velocity too high, they wouldn't suffer significant -particle-erosion degradation of their onboard sensor systems during even a very long ballistic flight component."
"Jesus Christ," Hegedusic whispered, and Levakonic snorted.
"No, just damned good engineers," he said sardonically. "And before you get your knickers in as big a twist as I did the first time I heard about them, remember this. A missile's only as good as its fire control, and not even Manties can generate good targeting solutions and handle mid-course corrections from half a solar system away. At the moment, they've got a lot more effective range than they can use, and even if they've been able to squeeze their birds down the way some of our sources report they have, they're paying for it with missles which are significantly larger than ours are. That means lower total numbers of birds in the same magazine space, so it's unlikely they'd fire off the thousands of the things it would require to score a significant number of hits at that sort of range in a fleet action.
"But your shipyard here's another kettle of fish. It can't dodge, and it doesn't have sidewalls. So if all they wanted to do was wreck Eroica Station, they could just fire off a saturation salvo of old-fashioned contact nukes to come whipping in here at seventy-five or eighty percent of light-speed. There's no way you could stop enough of them, especially if they seeded the attack wave with their new penetration aids, and they wouldn't really even have to cross the hyper limit to do it."
"But we don't know they are crossing the limit," Hegedusic pointed out.
"I think they are," Levakonic said grimly. The Monican looked a question at him, and he shrugged. "I think that big bastard is a freighter, Isidor-probably an ammunition ship. They won't want to bring her in where anything nasty could happen to her, so they're decelerating to stay with her while they load up with towed pods. Once they have, she'll stay out beyond the limit, and they'll come on in."