Okay, it's a little shorter than the last one, but here it is:
_____________________________________________________
HMS Arngrim
Hypatia System
“The Sollies have launched, Ma’am!” Lieutenant Bill Berden announced.
The tactical officer’s voice was crisp and professional, yet there was an odd softness to it, as well. Like everyone else aboard HMS Arngrim, he knew about his captain’s engagement. In fact, he’d been the assistant TO aboard Cinqueda when it was announced, and he’d attended their engagement party aboard the heavy cruiser. In the wake of the Yawata Strike, it had been a welcome reaffirmation that life went on.
And now Jayson and Cinqueda were 60,000,000 kilometers from Arngrim and a tidal wave of missiles had just erupted from the Solarian battlecruisers.
“Estimate one hundred twenty thousand inbound, and they’re turning out better acceleration than Filareta’s Cataphracts showed at Manticore,” Berden continued. “I’m reading eight-four-one-point-eight KPS squared. Time-of-flight,” he finished quietly, “one-five-two seconds.”
“Thank you, Guns.”
Megan Petersen made herself sound calm as she sat very still in her command chair, her eyes on the tactical plot. It wasn’t easy. She would far rather have been the target of those missiles herself, she realized. At least then the threat would have been to her, and not to the man she loved. And knowing that he would have felt exactly the same way, had the situation been reversed, only made her love him more.
She’d argued, when Admiral Kotouč gave her her orders. She didn’t know whether or not the admiral knew about her engagement to Jayson, and she hadn’t brought it up, either. She’d simply suggested, respectfully, that his logic was flawed.
Task Group 110.2 wasn’t going to survive. That was a given, something every man and woman aboard every one of Jan Kotouč’s ships knew as well as he did. This was their Saganami moment, the one every Manticoran officer knew might one day come to her, and as the Admiral had pointed out, it didn’t matter that Hypatia was someone else’s star system. It never had mattered, really. Ellen D’Orville had proved that in the Ingeborg System two centuries ago. Duchess Harrington had reaffirmed it in Grayson less than twenty T-years ago. And now it was their turn, here in Hypatia, to prove the tradition still lived.
Yet the fact that they were about to die didn’t mean they couldn’t accomplish their mission first. The odds were against it, but, like Edward Saganami himself, they might pull it off. Even if they didn’t, they could be certain a lot fewer Solarian battlecruisers would go home to brag about the atrocity they’d committed.
And we will by God show every other star system in this galaxy that the Star Empire of Manticore and its Allies stand by their friends, come hell or high water, she thought now. It’s just that I’ve seen so much aftermath. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of picking through the bodies and the rubble. I’m tired of being the survivor who has to tell other people the ones they loved didn’t make it. And, God, I don’t want to lose Jayson!
That, she knew, was the real reason she’d argued with Admiral Kotouč. She’d made the case that they were going to do need every launcher they had . . . and Arngrim had twenty-four of them, with twenty Mark 16s per tube. That made her a more effective platform than any of his three Saganami-Bs, with their Mark 14 tubes. That was the argument she’d made, when deep inside she’d known her real reason was her bleeding need to be there when the rest of the squadron — and Jayson — walked into the furnace at Kotouč’s side. She’d known that, deep inside, and a part of her hated herself for it. Her pain was no excuse for throwing away the lives of Arngrim’s people, even though her entire crew shared her sense of betrayal, of having abandoned their fellows in the ships standing to die with their admiral.
But Kotouč had been correct in at least one sense. In the final analysis, the weight Arngrim’s magazines and missile tubes might have added to the task group’s striking power would never change the final outcome. All she could really have accomplished would be to die beside her larger consorts, and there was no justification for sending another sixty-seven people to their deaths when that was true.
Especially not when he had another mission for her ship.
“The discussion is closed, Captain,” he’d said flatly, his expression stern on Megan’s com. “Someone has to bring Captain Acworth up to date when Vukodlak gets here. Acworth’s a good man, not the sort to take chances, but that doesn’t mean he can’t sail straight into an ambush if there’s not someone to keep him from doing that. Your ship is best equipped for that. You’ve got the speed, you’ve got the best ECM in the task group, after Phantom herself, and you do have Mark 16s to discourage anyone who gets too close to you, anyway. That makes it your job to be Acworth’s eyes and ears here in Hypatia. Now go do it.”
“Yes, Sir,” she’d replied. It was the only response she could make, and so she’d watched the rest of the squadron — Phantom and the three heavy cruisers — get underway for their rendezvous with Hajdu Gyôzô while Arngrim headed equally cautiously in the opposite direction.
And now she was doing her job. She was watching through the Ghost Rider platforms, downloading the Admiral’s complete tactical feed through the Hermes bouys he’d deployed. She was seeing all of it, getting every instant of it for the record and for later tactical analysis . . . and unshed tears burned her eyes as that stupendous missile salvo streaked towards the man she loved.
HMS Phantom
and
SLNS Camperdown
Hypatia System
“CIC confirms it, Sir,” Captain Clarke said quietly, standing beside Jan Kotouč’s command chair as they watched the master plot. “They’re coming in almost eighty percent hotter than they should have. Must be a new bird, which makes our missile defense projections a lot more problematical. And they’ve flushed at least three quarters of their deployed pods at us. Looks more like eighty or ninety percent, actually.” He smiled ever so slightly. “I suppose we should take that as a compliment.”
“One way to look at it,” Kotouč acknowledged.
“Might as well look on the bright side, Sir. While we can, anyway.”
Kotouč only grunted in acknowledgment, his eyes on Commander Ilkova as she and her assistants bent over their consoles.
“Range at launch twelve-point-zero-two million kilometers. Time-of-flight one-five-two seconds,” she announced, updating her initial projections. Her voice seemed preposterously calm, but it was the calm of concentration, not lack of understanding or imagination. The tension in her eyes showed that clearly enough. “At current acceleration, they’ll enter the outer defense zone in . . . one-one-five seconds. First wave counter-missile launch in forty seconds.”
Only twelve million kilometers, Kotouč thought. Judging by the timing, it must have taken the Sollies longer than he’d dared hope to localize his ships. Each of his four ships had put ten double broadsides into space — and closed well over two million kilometers at their base velocity of 15,125 KPS — while the Sollies looked for him, and he had time for another nine launches before that massive wavefront of Cataphracts could reach him.
Of course, when it did reach him . . . .
True, that hundred and twenty thousand-strong salvo had to be blind-fired. All the Solarian battlecruisers combined — they’d identified ninety-eight, all Nevadas and Indefatigables — could bring less than four thousand telemetry links to bear, only three percent of what they’d need to control that many birds. But the numbers worked out to roughly 30,000 missiles for each of his ships. The five Lorelei decoys he'd deployed would thin that quite a lot — all the way down to a "mere" 13,300 or so. Assuming a mere three percent hit rate, that was almost four hundred per ship. Not even a Nike could shake off that kind of hammering, and the sheer volume of fire was guaranteed to swamp even Manticoran missile defense.
I believe this is what the analysts call “overkill,” Kotouč thought wryly. I’m actually surprised he didn’t try to take us with just his internal tubes, given the numerical balance. Too bad he didn’t. Missile defense probably could’ve handled a mere five or six hundred missiles per ship!
He surprised himself with a faint but genuine smile, yet the truth was he hadn’t wanted Hajdu to rely on his broadside tubes. Indeed, that was one reason he'd deployed only five Loreleis. Their ability to counterfeit the sensor signatures of all up warships was all but impossible to penetrate above very short ranges, even for Manticoran sensors which knew what to look for, but the one thing they couldn't do was actually launch missiles of their own. That was why he'd been unable to tempt the Solly admiral into wasting any significant number of missiles by simply showing him Loreleis to draw his fire. If the Loreleis weren't firing at him, then he'd have no reason to fire at them, and unless the actual firing platforms were close enough to the Loreleis to fool him, he probably wouldn't bite. At most, he'd probably toss a relatively limited salvo at them to see how they responded, and when that salvo of Solly missiles took out every target without any return fire, he'd know he'd been had.
That same inability to fire also limited the total number he could deploy to cover his approach without someone on the other side running the math and realizing that at least some of those targets had to be decoys. He didn't want that, but he did want to convince Hajdu that he faced an even more dangerous threat than he actually did. TG 100.2 could sequence its launches closely enough that the fact that they were double salvos might well not be noticed, and at missile ranges, it was impossible to tell which ship had launched which specific missiles . . . as long as there weren't too many platforms to produce them all. So he'd had to choose between offering as many targets as possible or offering as many as the Solly tac officers might find plausible, and the last thing he'd wanted was for the Sollies to think things through.
The truth was that he'd just succeeded in one of his two primary goals. It looked as if the Solly had thrown everything he could at TG 110.2 in his initial salvo . . . which meant he’d emptied all or almost all of the missile pods he’d deployed for the execution of Buccaneer. And when Ilkova killed his freighters, she’d also killed his ability to replenish those pods. No doubt the magazines aboard his battlecruisers and their escorts carried more than sufficient missiles to do the job anyway, but they’d be shorter ranged and less efficient. It would take them longer, and every extra hour of delay was another hundred thousand lives saved.
And if TG 110.2 succeeded in its second goal, there’d be one hell of a lot fewer of those magazines to go around, too. For that matter, if Hypatia wasn’t the only star system on Hajdu’s Buccaneer list . . . .
“Penetration EW coming up in three seconds,” Commander Ilkova said.
* * * * * * * * * *
Did I just let the son-of-a-bitch sucker me? Hajdu Gyôzô wondered coldly.
