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"Understood. Do you have it, Astro?"
"Aye, aye, Sir—coming up on the computers now." Lieutenant Macomb studied his panel. "Course change to one-five-one two-four-seven true with impeller shutdown in one-niner minutes, Sir."
"Make it so," Alvarez replied, and Yountz punched buttons.
"That brings us across their projected track in one-one-two minutes," she reported. "Assuming their acceleration remains unchanged, the range will be four-point-one-one-six light-minutes at crossover, but if they maintain heading and acceleration, they'll reach the point of no return for their recovery vector in just over nine minutes from our shutdown, Sir."
Alvarez nodded, and Courvosier echoed his gesture with a mental nod of silent satisfaction. Yanakov might be cutting his drives a little sooner than he had to, but it was probably better to be conservative.
He made quick calculations on his own number pad, and his smile grew predatory as the solution blinked. If the task force coasted for just thirteen minutes, then went back to max accel on an intercept vector, the Masadans would have to accept action or cut and run for the hyper limit the instant they saw its impeller signatures. If they ran, Yanakov would never catch them, but if he was right about their having supply ships out here, that would be tantamount to abandoning them to his mercy. And that would spell the defeat of their current operations at least until Honor got back.
And, his smile grew even more predatory, it was unlikely the Masadan commander would break off. He might have lost a light cruiser, but he still had nine ships to Yanakov's seven, and Yanakov had left the Glory in Grayson orbit. She was his oldest, least capable cruiser, and she'd been completing a routine maintenance cycle when everything broke loose. She needed another twenty hours to get back on line, but her absence had left a hole in Yanakov's order of battle for Madrigal to fill. With any luck, the Masadans would accept battle with their outnumbered enemies without realizing Grayson's third "cruiser" was, in fact, a Manticoran destroyer, and wouldn't that just be too bad?
High Admiral Yanakov sat on his own bridge and yearned silently for the nest of repeaters which surrounded the captain's chair on a Manticoran warship. He had a clear view of all really critical readouts, but he didn't have anything like a Manticoran CO's ability to manipulate data.
Still, the situation was clear enough just now—thanks to Madrigal's keen eyes. He felt an odd, godlike sense of detachment, for he could see every move the Masadans made, but they couldn't even guess he was watching them. Their ships slid onward, driving ever deeper into the trap as his own vector angled towards theirs, and he smiled.
"Where are their LACs?" Sword of the Faithful Simonds fretted yet again as he stared into Thunder of God's holo sphere, and Captain Yu suppressed a desire to bite his head off.
Damn it, the man was supposed to be a naval officer! He ought to know no plan—especially one this complex—survived contact with the enemy. No one could cover all the variables, which was why Jericho had been pla
For that matter, the entire trap was u
The Masadans refused to admit that ... but they'd also insisted the Grayson Navy must be wiped out, or at least crippled, before Thunder's existence was revealed to the enemy. The possible intervention of a Manticoran warship had made them even more insistent, yet despite all Thunder of God could do for them, it was the Graysons and their primitive weapons that really worried them. Which was stupid, but telling them so wouldn't be the most diplomatic thing he could possibly do, now would it?
"They've clearly left them home, Sir," he said instead, as patiently as he could. "Given what they know, that was the best decision they could have made. LACs would have reduced their fleet acceleration by twenty-five percent, and the LACs themselves are much more fragile than proper starships."
"Yes, and they don't need them, do they?" Anxiety put a venomous edge in Simonds' question, and he pointed to a single light code. "So much for your assumption the Manticoran warship would sit this operation out, Captain!"
"Its intervention was always a possibility, Sir. As I said at the time." Yu smiled, carefully not saying that, contrary to what he'd told the Council of Elders, he'd assumed from the begi
"But they're not coming in on the vector we wanted," Simonds stewed.
One or two people turned to glance at the Sword, then whipped back around as they caught their captain's cold stare, yet Simonds hadn't even noticed. He was too busy glaring at Yu, as if challenging the captain to dispute his statement, but Yu said nothing. There really wasn't any point.
There'd never been any way to guarantee the exact course the enemy might follow once their own forces were spotted. In point of fact, Yu was quite pleased with how close his predictions had come. Thunder of God had enough tracking range to put the regular Masadan ships on the proper incursion vector even with light-speed communications, and the Grayson commander had selected very nearly the exact course change Yu had projected. Anyone but an idiot—or someone as badly rattled as Sword Simonds—would have allowed for how vast the field of maneuver was. Yu would have settled for getting one of his ships into attack range; as it was, both of them would have the reach, if only barely.
"They'll cross your range more than six hundred thousand kilometers out at almost point-five cee!" Simonds went on. "And look at that vector! There's no way we'll be able to fire down their wedges, and that makes Thunder's energy weapons useless"
"Sir," Yu said even more patiently, "no one can count on having an enemy voluntarily cross his own T. And if we have to take on their sidewalls, that's the reason our missiles have laser heads."
"But—"
"They may not be on the exact vector we wanted, Sir, but our flight time will be under forty seconds at their closest approach. Principality's will be somewhat longer, true, but they won't even know we're here until we launch, and there's no way they can localize us to shoot back."
Yu himself would have been happier if his targets had come straight at him, though he had no intention of telling Simonds that. Had they done so, he could have punched his missiles straight down the wide-open throats of their wedges. Even better, he could have used his shipboard lasers and grasers against those same unprotected targets.