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"I see." Sarnow rubbed his mustache again, then nodded. "All right, let's do it. Samuel, inform the minelayers' senior officer that I want his field laid ninety-eight million klicks out. And—" the admiral's green eyes slipped, almost against their will, toward Honor "—further inform him that he is to execute Carry Out as soon as he's done that."
"Aye, aye, Sir." This time Webster's response was audible over the com, and Honor caught Sarnow's gaze and nodded slightly, acknowledging the sense of his orders. Operation Carry Out would remove all the noncombatants the minelayers could cram aboard from the base. It would only be about fifty percent of the total base perso
"Very well, ladies and gentlemen. I believe that takes care of the preliminaries," Sarnow said, and bared his teeth at the pickup. "Now let's see just how much we can hurt these bastards."
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Admiral Yuri Rollins paced slowly up and down his flag bridge as PNS Barnett moved ponderously in-system. His hands were back in his tunic pockets in his favorite thinking posture, and he clamped an unlit pipe between his teeth. That pipe was one of his few real affectations—smoking had only recently become fashionable once more among Haven's Legislaturalists—but he found it comforting at the moment.
So far, things had gone exactly as pla
Their destruction had been a satisfying start to the operation, though Rollins didn't deceive himself about what the other Manticoran pickets had been doing. They'd hypered out in all directions almost the instant his own ships crossed the alpha wall. By now, they must be arriving wherever Parks had taken his ships, and that meant the Manty admiral would be in motion shortly. Parks might not have exact intelligence on his enemies' course, but an attack on his main forward base had to be high on his threat list. Under the circumstances, Rollins had to assume Parks was already en route, with a probable ETA of no more than seventy-two to eighty-four hours.
Which should still be more than adequate, for one thing was certain: the delay to query the Argus net's latest data had confirmed that Parks wasn't here now. The platforms didn't have the reach to see anything within ten light-minutes or so of the primary, but they would certainly have noted anything that came in far enough out to clear Hancock's hyper limit, and nothing heavier than a cruiser had.
He paused in his pacing to gaze into the master display. As pla
He nodded to himself and resumed his measured pacing.
Honor finished sealing her skin suit and looked down at Nimitz.
"Time to go, Stinker," she said softly, and the 'cat rose to pat her knee with a gentle true-hand. She thrust her gloves under her harness and scooped him up, hugging him for a long moment before she put him carefully into the life-support module. He made his own check of his surroundings, then curled down in the soft nest. Both of them hated being separated at times like this, but it was something they were getting used to.
Honor gave his ears a last caress, inhaled sharply, and closed the door behind him. She double-checked the seals and failsafes, then picked up her helmet and left the cabin without a backward glance.
The quiet efficiency of Nike's command deck enfolded her as she stepped out of the bridge lift. She crossed to her command chair and sat, racking her helmet, and pressed the button to deploy her displays from their storage positions. They surrounded her in a nest of information flow, and she reached back to double-check her waiting shock frame by feel while her eyes flicked over the silent screens of data.
Nike and her squadron mates accelerated at a steady .986 gees, screened by Van Slyke's heavy cruisers and the ten light cruisers Cartwright and Ernie Corell had exempted from their picket deployments. The task group seemed to crawl at such a low accel, yet there were limits to even the best electronic warfare capabilities. While the RMN's stealth systems were highly efficient against active sensors like radar, the only effective way to limit detection range against an impeller wedge was to reduce its power.
But slow or not, Sarnow's main striking force was exactly on Charlotte Oselli's course towards its massive foes, and the Peeps were, indeed, maintaining the separation Eve had noticed. That was good—as good, at least, as they had any right to hope for against such a tremendous weight of metal. Operation Sucker Punch wasn't predicated on any ridiculous assumption that battlecruisers could stop ships of the wall, nor was it without serious risks, but it offered a definite chance to bleed the enemy—especially when the enemy was obliging enough to come in split up this way. And it was remotely possible they could delay the Peeps long enough for Danislav to arrive.
Remotely.
She completed her scan of the displays and leaned back to cross her legs and radiate the calm it was her job to display. She looked around the bridge and noted with satisfaction that none of her people were watching her. They had their eyes where they belonged—on their own displays.
She touched a com stud.
"Auxiliary Control, Commander Henke," a furry contralto answered.
"This is the Captain. I'm on the bridge."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. You're on the bridge, and you have the con."
"Thank you, Mike. I'll see you later."
"Yes, Ma'am. You owe me a beer, anyway."
"I always owe you a beer," Honor complained. "I think there's something wrong with your bookkeeping." Henke chuckled, and Honor shook her head. "Clear," she said, and released the stud.
She would have preferred, in a way, to have Mike on the bridge with her, but unlike any of her earlier ships, Nike was big enough for a duplicate command deck at the far end of her core hull. Known informally as Coventry, Auxiliary Control was ma
She settled herself more comfortably in her own chair and checked the plot. The minelayers had already completed their part of the initial operation and started back for the base, and she wished with all her heart that Paul were among the people they were about to pick up. But he wasn't, and at least the base wasn't totally helpless. It mounted no offensive weapons, but it was fitted with generators for a spherical sidewall "bubble" almost as strong as Nike's own, and its active antimissile defenses were excellent. They'd been unable to adapt its defensive fire control to handle parasite pods, so it still had no offensive punch, but it could protect itself quite well—until, at least, some Peep capital ship got into beam range.