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"Which means," Marshal Tsien said thoughtfully, "that your own ships may be able to ambush their formations as they emerge from hyper."
"Exactly, Marshal. What we hope to do is mousetrap the vanguard and wipe it out; I think we'll get away with that, but we don't know where the rendezvous point before this one is. That means we can't stop the vanguard's couriers from telling Lord Tharno about our trap, meaning that the main body will be alerted and ready when it comes out.
"So we probably will have to fight the main body. That pits seventy-eight of us against one-point-two million of them: about fifteen thousand to one."
Someone swallowed audibly, and Colin smiled that grim smile again.
"I think we can take them. We may lose a lot of ships, but we ought to be able to swing it if they pop into n-space where we expect them."
A long silence dragged out. Marshal Tsien broke it at length.
"Forgive me, but I do not see how you can do it."
"I'm not certain we can, Marshal," Colin said frankly. "I am certain that we have a chance, and that we can destroy at least half and more probably two-thirds of their force. If that's all we accomplish, we may not save Earth, but we will save Birhat and the refugees headed there. That, Marshal Tsien—" he met the huge man's eyes "—is why I'm so relieved to know we're sending one of our best people to take over Bia's defenses."
"I am honored by your confidence, Your Majesty, yet I fear you have set yourself an impossible task. You have only fifteen partially-ma
"But Dahak is our ace in the hole. Unlike the rest of us, he can fight all of our unma
"And if something happens to him, Your Majesty?" Tsien asked quietly.
"Then, Marshal Tsien," Colin said just as quietly, "I hope to hell you have Bia in shape by the time the incursion gets there."
CHAPTER TWENTY
"Hyper wake coming in from Sol, ma'am."
Adrie
Adrie
"Captain, we've got a very faint wake coming in from the east, too," her plotting officer said, and Lady Adrie
"Emergence times?"
"Bogey One will emerge into n-space in approximately seven hours twelve minutes, ma'am; make it oh-two-twenty zulu," Fleet Commander Oliver Weinstein said. "Bogey Two's a real monster to show up at this range at all. We've got a good hundred hours before they emerge, maybe as much as five days. I'll be able to refine that in a couple of hours."
"Do that, Ollie," she said, relaxing again. The vanguard wasn't as far ahead of schedule as she'd feared, just a bigger, more visible target than anticipated.
Adrie
"Herdan," she said aloud.
"Yes, Captain?" a soft soprano replied, and Adrie
"Assume Bogey Two has sca
"Computing." There was a brief pause. "Probability approaches zero."
"How closely?"
"Probability is one times ten to the minus thirty-second," Herdan responded. "Plus or minus two percent."
"Well, that's pretty close to zero at that, I guess," Adrie
"Comment not understood."
"Ignore last comment," Adrie
"Acknowledged," Herdan said, and Lady Adrie
"Scout emergence into n-space in fourteen minutes, sir."
"Thank you, Janet," Senior Fleet Captain Tamman said, wishing he could share his tension with Amanda, and wasn't that a silly thought when he'd taken such pains to insure that he couldn't? Well, he admitted, "pains" was the wrong word, but he'd only gotten away with it because he'd found out about Colin's compulsory perso
He thought she would forgive him someday, but he'd almost lost her once in La Paz, and then a rifle slug went right through her visor aboard Vindicator. It was only the Maker's own grace it hadn't shattered, and she'd used up most of her helmet sealant and all of her luck. He was taking no chances this time.
"Emergence in five minutes," Janet Santino said politely, and Tamman shook his head. Woolgathering, by the Maker!
"Come to Red One," he said, and his command staff settled into even more intimate communion with their consoles. His own eyes focused dreamily on the red circle delineating their target's locus of emergence, barely twenty light-seconds from their present position, while his brain concentrated on his neural feed, "seeing" directly through Birhat's superb sca
That courier had done a bang-up job of timing its jump, given the crudity of its computers, to hit this close to an exact rendezvous with the vanguard.
"Emergence in one minute," Santini said.
"Alpha Battery," Tamman said gently, "you are authorized to fire the moment you have a firm track."
"Emergence in thirty seconds. Fifteen. Ten. Five. Now!"
The red circle suddenly held a tiny red dot. There was a brief, eternal heartbeat of tension, and then the missiles fired.
They were sublight in order to home, but only barely so. They flashed across the display, and the dot vanished without fuss or bother, twenty kilometers of starship ripped apart by gravitonic warheads it had probably never even seen coming.
"Target," Birhat's velvety contralto purred, "destroyed."
"Thank you, Darling," someone murmured. "I hope it was good for you, too."
"Well, that's the first hurdle," Colin said as he digested Tamman's brief hypercom transmission.
"As thou sayst," Jiltanith agreed.
Colin nodded and looked around, admiring Dahak Two's spacious command deck and awesome instrumentation, and knew he would trade it all in a heartbeat for Dahak's outmoded bridge. Not that Two wasn't a fantastic fighting machine; she just wasn't Dahak. But Dahak couldn't fly this mission, and Colin refused to send his people to fight without him. Assuming anyone survived the next few months, that might be something he'd have to get used to. For now, it wasn't.