by David Weber
At least her assignment to Hephaestus meant she spent her time someplace big enough that there were actually personnel tubes, not just treadmills, set aside for the use of people who wanted to jog or run, but she clearly still had a lot of excess energy to burn off. Most other supervisors would simply have requested that McCormick shunt his data to their console, but not Epstein. She wanted any excuse to get out of her command chair and move around, which explained why he found her peering over his shoulder at his display in the big, cool, dimly lit compartment.
"Probably nothing, Ma'am," he told her now. "Looks like a ghost to me, but it popped through the filters. Right here."
He used a cursor to indicate the faint, almost invisible light splotch, then zoomed in. At maximum zoom, it was evident that there were actually two light splotches, each tagged with the time it had appeared, and Epstein grimaced at the telltale sign of a ghost footprint.
"I take it that this thing was strong enough the computers classified it as a genuine possible?" she said.
"That's what happened, all right, Ma'am," McCormick agreed.
"Well, better safe than sorry." Epstein sighed, then flicked her head in a sort of shorthand shrug. "I'll kick it upstairs, and they'll roust out some poor cruiser or destroyer division to go take a look."
"Hey, they ought to be grateful for us for finding them something to do instead of just sitting around in orbit," McCormick replied, and Epstein chuckled.
"If you think that's the way they're going to react, should I go ahead and tell them who spotted this in the first place?"
"Actually, now that I've thought about it, Ma'am, I think I'd prefer to remain anonymous," he said very seriously, and her chuckle turned into a laugh.
"That's what I thought," she said, then patted him on the shoulder and turned to walk back to her own command station.
Given the range on the possible footprint, the datum was over twelve hours old. Footprints, like gravitic pulses, were detectable by the fluctuations they imposed on the alpha wall interface with normal-space, which meant they propagated at roughly sixty-four times the speed of light. For most practical purposes, that equated to real-time, or very near to real-time, but when you started talking about the detection ranges possible to Perimeter Security Command's huge arrays, even that speed left room for considerable delays.
It seemed like an awfully long way to go for very little return. There'd been no sign of an impeller wedge, which meant no one was out there accelerating towards the star system. If there'd been an actual hyper footprint in the first place—which Epstein frankly doubted was the case—it had to have been some merchantship coming in with appallingly bad astrogation. Whoever it was had popped out of hyper a full light-month short of his intended destination, and then promptly (and sensibly) popped right back into hyper rather than spending the endless weeks which would have been required to reach anyplace worthwhile under impeller drive. And when she did arrive in the star system, or at the Junction, she wasn't going to tell a single solitary soul about her little misadventure. That kind of astrogation error went beyond simply embarrassing to downright humiliating. In fact, if Astro Control had hard evidence of a Manticoran astrogator who'd been that far off, they would undoubtedly call her back in for testing and recertification!
But, as she'd said to McCormick, better safe than sorry. That could have been the motto of Perimeter Security Command instead of the official "Always Vigilant," and Epstein, like virtually all of the officers assigned to PSC, took her responsibilities very seriously indeed. They were there, maintaining their endless watch, precisely to make sure everyone knew they were, which meant no one would even make the attempt to evade their all-seeing eyes. Checking out the occasional ghost was a trivial price to pay for that.
Commander Michael Carus, the commanding officer of HMS Javelin, and the senior officer of the second division of Destroyer Squadron 265, known as the "Silver Cepheids," sighed philosophically as he contemplated his orders.
At least it was something to do, he supposed. And he wasn't surprised they'd gotten the call. The squadron had earned its name from its demonstrated expertise in reconnaissance and scouting, although he'd always wondered if it was really all that appropriate. Cepheids were scarcely among the galaxy's less noticeable stars, after all, and recon missions were supposed to be unobtrusive.
"Here, Linda," he said, handing the message chip to Lieutenant Linda Petersen, Javelin's astrogator. "We're going ghost hunting. Work out a course, please."
"To hear is to obey," Petersen replied. She plugged the chip into her own console, then looked over her shoulder at Carus.
"How big a hurry are we in, Skipper?" she asked.
"The datum is already almost thirteen hours old," Carus pointed out. "I feel sure our lords and masters would like us to go check it out before it gets a bunch older. So I'd say a certain degree of haste is probably in order."
"Got it, Skip," Petersen said and began punching numbers. A couple of minutes later, she grunted in satisfaction.
"All right," she said, turning her chair around to face Carus. "This is going to be a really short jump, Skipper. Not quite a micro-jump, but close, so if we build up too much velocity—"
"Once upon a time, in the dim mists of my youth, all of, oh, three years ago, I was an astrogator myself, my daughter," Carus interrupted. "I seem to have a vague recollection of the undesirability of overrunning your translation point in a short hop rattling around somewhere in my aging memory."
"Yes, Sir," Petersen acknowledged with a grin. "Anyway, what I meant to say is that I'd just as soon not get much above forty-two thousand KPS as our base velocity. That gives us a total flight time of about three hours—a tad less than that, actually—if we hit the theta bands."
Carus nodded. As he'd just said, he'd been an astrogator himself, once, and his own mind ran through Petersen' decision tree. Translating steeply enough to hit the theta bands in a relatively short hop like this would probably take a couple of hours off the ships' hyper generators and alpha nodes, but it wouldn't be too bad.
"Figure about five hundred gravities?" he said.
"That was what I was thinking. Take us about two hours to hit our transit velocity at that rate. I don't see any point pushing it harder than that and risking overrunning the translation point at the other end."
"Sounds good to me," Carus said, and turned to his communications officer.
Three hours later, the destroyers Javelin, Dagger, Raven, and Lodestone arrived at the ghost footprint's locus and began to spread out.
"You and Bridget take the outer perimeter, John," Carus said, looking at the trio of faces on his divided com display. "Julie and I will take the inner sweep."
"Understood," Lieutenant Commander John Pershing of the Raven acknowledged, and Lieutenant Commander Bridget Landry, Dagger's CO nodded.
"Which of us plays anchor?" Lieutenant Commander Julie Chase asked from Lodestone's bridge, and Carus chuckled.
"Rank hath its privileges," he said just a bit smugly.
"That's what I thought," she huffed, then smiled. "Try to stay awake while the rest of us do all the work, all right?"
"I'll do my best," Carus assured her.
"Almost exactly on schedule, Sir," Commander Kolstad observed. "Nice to have punctual enemies, I suppose."
"Let's not get too overconfident, Felicidad," Admiral Topolev responded, giving her a mildly reproving look.
"No, Sir," Kolstad said quickly, and he allowed his slight frown to turn into an encouraging smile, instead.
If he were going to be honest, Topolev supposed, he wasn't immune to the ops officer's sense of euphoria. In the roughly seventeen hours since their arrival, their velocity had increased to better than forty-five thousand kilometers per second, and they were almost a hundred and thirty-eight million kilometers closer to their destination. Under most circumstances, 7.6 light-minutes wouldn't have seemed like very much of a cushion against military-grade sensors. Especially not against Manticoran
military-grade sensors. The Mesan Alignment had plowed quite a few decades—and several trillion credits—into the development of its own stealth technology, however, and the MAN was at least two generations ahead of the Solarian League in that capability. Their analysts' best estimate was that their stealth systems were equal to those of Manticore at a minimum, and probably at least marginally superior, although no one was prepared to assume anything of the sort. But as the Manties' own Harrington had demonstrated at a place called Cerberus, the key element in any passive detection of a moving starship was its impeller signature . . . and Task Force One didn't have an impeller signature.
The Royal Manticoran Navy was the enemy, and Frederick Topolev was prepared to do whatever it took to defeat that enemy, but neither he nor Collin Detweiler's intelligence services were prepared to underestimate that enemy or permit themselves to hold mere "normals" in contempt. Especially not given the RMN's combat record over the last twenty years. The MAN was almost certainly the galaxy's youngest real navy, and its founders—including one Frederick Topolev—had studied the Manties, and their officer corps, and their battle record with painstaking attention. They'd learned quite a few valuable lessons of their own in the process, and the admiral knew the crews of those destroyers were firmly convinced they'd been sent out here to investigate a genuine ghost. If anyone had thought anything else, they wouldn't have sent just four destroyers to check it out. But he also knew that, routine or not, the crews of those ships were doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing. He recognized the standard search pattern they were running, knew their sensor crews were monitoring their instruments and their displays intently. If there was anything out there to find, those destroyers would find it.
Except that no one in the entire galaxy knew how to find it. Knew even how to recognize that there was something out there to find. And so, despite the absurdly low range, and despite his own ships' ridiculously low top acceleration rate, Topolev felt just as confident as he looked.
Chapter Fifty-Two
"I wish I could say I was surprised," Elizabeth III said in tones of profound disgust as she flipped her hard copy of her cousin's report of the Second Battle of New Tuscany onto the same conference table in the same conference room. The initial report had arrived three days ago, with the news of Josef Byng's stupidity and the destruction of his flagship. That had been bad enough, but the rest of what Michelle had turned up after the battle was even worse, and the queen shook her head, her expression tight with anger.
"The Sollies have resented us for years," she continued harshly, "and we've walked on tiptoe around them for as long as anyone can remember. I guess something like this had to happen sooner or later, even if the timing could have been a lot better. In fact, I suppose the only thing I'm really surprised about is who seems to have arranged this entire—what's that charming military phrase? Oh, yes. This entire cluster fuck."
The treecat on the back of her chair shifted, his ears half-flattened, his needle-tipped claws extending far enough to sink into the chair's upholstery, and everyone in the room could hear his soft hiss as his rage mirrored his person's. Obviously, whether Elizabeth was surprised or not, the events at New Tuscany—and the fact that there truly had been no survivors from Commodore Chatterjee's murdered destroyers—had been enough to whip her fury to a white-hot heat even before the confirmation of outside manipulation had reached her.
The other two treecats present were less overtly infuriated than Ariel was, but neither of them was immune to the human anger—and anxiety—swirling about them. They were, however, somewhat farther away, and Prime Minister Grantville, sitting beside the Queen, kept a wary eye on Ariel as he shook his own head.
"I don't think there's any such thing as 'good timing' for a confrontation with the Solarian League, Your Majesty," he said, speaking rather more formally than was his wont. "On the other hand, as you've just said, it's not exactly as if there were any tremendous surprises here, is it?"
"I can always be surprised by Solly stupidity, Willie," Elizabeth said bitingly. "I shouldn't be, I suppose, but every time I think I've seen the stupidest thing they could possibly do, they find a way to surpass themselves! At least this particular idiot's taken himself out of the gene pool. It's a pity he had to take so many others with him!"
"I agree, Your Majesty," anger of his own rumbled around in Sir Anthony Langtry's voice, "and the fact that those flaming idiots in Chicago still haven't officially responded to our initial note only proves your point."
He shook his head in disgust. The note in question had reached Old Terra three weeks before this meeting, yet there'd still been no response at all from the League's Foreign Ministry.
"Of course it does, Tony," Grantville acknowledged. "Still, I stand by my original point. This is something we've all seen coming—or at least as a serious probability—ever since we found out Byng had fired on Chatterjee in the first place."
"Oh, I don't know, Willie," his brother said, reaching out to stroke Samantha's soft ears as the 'cat pressed against the back of his neck, "I think this minor matter of the sixty or so Battle Fleet superdreadnoughts Vézien and Cardot were so eager to tell Mike about could probably come under that heading. Surprises, I mean."
"Assuming they're really there, Hamish," Grantville pointed out.
"Personally," Elizabeth said, "I'm less worried about sixty obsolete Solarian superdreadnoughts than I am about the several hundred modern, pod-laying superdreadnoughts the Peeps still have. You're right, Willie. We've discussed the Sollies almost to death. I'm not saying we've figured out what to do with them yet, even if I do feel a little bit better in that regard than I did a month or so ago, but I think we may have let ourselves get overly focused on them. I mean, whatever kind of threat the Solarian League may pose in the long term, it's the Peeps we have to worry about now. So while I'm perfectly willing to admit that the League may be the greater danger in absolute terms, I think we need to focus on removing the threat we can remove as quickly as possible."
She looked at White Haven, her eyes sharp.
"When we received our first report about Commodore Chatterjee, Willie asked you and Sir Thomas about our ability to hit Haven now, hard and fast, hurt them enough to make them realize they had no choice but to surrender outright. You seemed to think it would be feasible within a couple of months' time. I realize that was less than one month ago, but could we do it now? And could we hold off the Sollies in Talbott while we do it?"
For the first time in his naval career, Hamish Alexander-Harrington felt an almost overwhelming temptation to temporize and dodge a fundamental question. But however great the temptation, he was still Elizabeth Winton's First Lord of Admiralty, and he met her eyes squarely.
"I've deliberately kept my hands off of a lot of the operational details," he said. "The last thing Tom Caparelli needs is to think he's got a backseat driver—and one who's a civilian, now—trying to grab the controls away from him, so he and I have both tried very hard to respect one another's spheres of authority. Having said that, though, I think the answer is probably that, yes, we could punch out the Haven System with what we have available right now. If we want to do it before we find ourselves up against the Sollies, though, and considering transit times and everything else, we'd have to use Eighth Fleet, which would mean uncovering the Home System at least temporarily. I don't much care for that thought, but I think enough of the new construction would be available at or almost at combat readiness to cover the gap, and we've made better progress than I really anticipated in getting the system-defense variant of Apollo into service.
"In addition, however, there's another timing issue involved. If there really are Solly SDs in Talbott, we can't afford to have our main striking force weeks away from the home system when they finally make their presence felt. That means that if we decide firmly in favor of taking the military option against Haven first, we'd have to launch the op now—immediately, without any effort to talk to the Peeps first—and that it wou
ld have to be militarily decisive, in the shortest possible period of time. If we present any ultimatums, they'd have to be delivered from the flag bridge of a fleet actually in position to attack, with no time for the other side to think about them or digest the implications ahead of time. Which, frankly, makes it much less likely, in my opinion, that they'd be willing to stand down without a fight. Faced with the same situation, we'd certainly be more likely to fight than just roll over, so I suspect we'd have to pretty much wipe out Capital Fleet before they were ready to give in. And we might well have to actually go ahead and really take out most or all of their infrastructure, as well."
The fourth and final human being present for the conference stirred slightly in her chair beside him, but he kept his eyes resolutely focused on the Queen. He already knew exactly how his wife felt about the notion of turning the Haven System into a scrapyard.
"As I say," he continued, "we could punch out Haven. But you asked me a two-part question, and my answer to the second half of it—whether or not we can hold off the Sollies in Talbott while we do it—is that I simply don't know. That's why I say we can't afford to take the time to send diplomatic notes back and forth first, if we're going to set up to attack the Haven System at all.
"Having said that, however, I also have to say that, judging from my preliminary read of the technical appendices of this report, I think all our estimates about how outclassed the Sollies' deployed equipment is may actually have been overly pessimistic. But they've got a lot of ships, Elizabeth. And whatever our long-term prospects might be, if they've actually got that many superdreadnoughts deployed in proximity to the Talbott Quadrant, then Mike's and Khumalo's ability to fend them off with nothing heavier than battlecruisers is . . . doubtful, to say the least. If the Sollies have that many wallers available, and if they decide to respond the way it sounds very much like this Admiral Crandall would be likely to, we could find the new systems in the Quadrant burning to the ground at the same time we're off hammering Nouveau Paris."
