by David Weber
"Unless she's coming in from the outer system," Hall pointed out, and tugged at the lobe of one ear, frowning down at her own plot. She didn't like the timing on this. The Manties coming out from the base had reversed course after all. At the moment, they were six-point-eight million kilometers directly ahead of TF 12.3, allowing the Republican ships to overtake them at a little over ninety-four hundred kilometers per second. That would let her into extreme missile range of them in another twelve minutes, and now this...
"They're up to something, Citizen Admiral," she said softly, but try though she might, she couldn't figure out what that something was. Yet that was hardly her fault, for Manticoran security had held. No one in the People's Navy had yet heard even a whisper about the Shrike-class or HMS Minotaur and their capabilities.
"Agreed," Kellet said flatly, and looked over her shoulder. "Pass the word to finish prepping the decoys, Olivia," she ordered. "I want them ready to go on-line in five minutes."
"Aye, Ma'am. Shall I initiate jamming?" Citizen Commander Morris asked.
"Not yet," Kellet said after a moment's thought. "They haven't begun jamming yet, either—or deployed their own decoys, for that matter. Given the difference in the number of birds we've each got, I don't want to push them into starting to screw with our tracking capability any sooner than necessary."
"Understood, Citizen Admiral," Morris said.
"And in the meantime, Citizen Captain," Kellet went on, glancing back at Hall, "I think I want to have a little talk with Citizen Rear Admiral Porter." The two women didn't—quite—grimace at one another. That would have been prejudicial to good discipline, after all, for Porter was Kellet's official second-in-command... even if he did need an instruction manual to pour piss out of a boot.
"If you'll excuse me?" Kellet said. Hall nodded, and TF 12.3's CO looked at her com officer. "Get me Citizen Rear Admiral Porter."
* * *
"By God, it's going to work!" Alice Truman whispered to herself. She hadn't really believed it would when she'd thought it up, but it had seemed the only possibility worth trying, and so she'd done it. And to her astonishment, Rear Admiral Truitt had accepted her recommendation. He must have, although he hadn't commed her to say so, for his ships were doing precisely what she'd suggested.
Passing that suggestion had worried her. Not the mechanics of the transmission; Minotaur had been within less than two light-seconds of one of the FTL com platforms, easily close enough to hit it with a whisker laser and let it transmit her message in-system. Nor had she worried about the Peeps detecting the grav-pulse message and realizing someone was behind them. By now they had to be able to recognize such transmissions—any decent gravitic sensor could detect them; the trick was learning how to generate them... or read them—but the entire FTL scanner net had been yammering away with enough data transmissions to hide a broadcast of the annual Address from the Throne in the background chatter.
No, what had worried her had been that she'd had to commit her ship and Jackie Harmon's LACs to her plan immediately if they were to get into position. And that meant that if Truitt had rejected her suggestion, the LACs could have found themselves pitted against the Peeps all alone. But that wasn't going to happen, and she smiled evilly as she watched the time display tick downward.
* * *
"Got 'em, Skipper!" Ensign Thomas announced.
"Well enough to guarantee lock-on?" Harmon asked sharply.
"I'll have to go active to guarantee that, Ma'am," Thomas said a little less exuberantly, and Harmon grunted. Her LACs were almost at their prebriefed attack points, coasting in ballistically with their wedges up but at minimum power. The range was a little under a light-second, and grasers were light-speed weapons. If everything worked perfectly, the Peeps would have no more than two seconds— certainly no more than four—to realize what was coming.
"All right," she said. "Stand by for energy weapons and missiles. Mike, I want the bow sidewall first, then full power to the rest of the wedge. Bring the wall up the instant Tommy gets his missiles away."
"Understood, Skipper," Gearman replied tautly.
* * *
A light began to blink on Citizen Commander Diamato's panel, and he frowned. He punched a query into the board, and his frown deepened as CIC responded.
"We're picking up something to port, Citizen Captain," he said.
"Something?" Citizen Captain Hall spun her command chair to face him. "What sort of 'something'?"
"I don't really know, Citizen Captain," he admitted. "It's too weak to be a ship's impeller signature or an incoming missile, and we're picking up at least a dozen point sources... unless it's some sort of scatter?" He frowned, then shook his head. "No, Ma'am," he said, this time using the old style address without even thinking about it. "It's definitely separate sources; I'm confident of that. But there's nothing like it in our sensor or threat files."
"Could it be some sort of drone?" Hall asked intently.
"That's what CIC thinks, Ma'am," Diamato said. "But I don't think so. It doesn't... feel right, somehow. And faint as it is, it's too strong for a stealthed Manty recon drone."
"Bring the jammers and decoys up now!" Hall snapped, and Diamato's thumb jabbed at the button.
* * *
"What the—?" Citizen Captain Hector Griswold, CO of PNS Citizen Admiral Tascosa, frowned as Tascosa's sister ship Schaumberg suddenly brought her defensive electronic systems fully on-line. He looked at the readouts for a second or two, then switched his eyes to his com officer.
"Anything from the Flag?" he asked.
"No, Citizen Captain," the com officer replied, and he turned towards Tactical.
"Why did the flagship bring her EW on-line?" he demanded.
"I don't know, Citizen Captain," the tac officer replied.
* * *
"Damn!" Ensign Thomas swore as a single Peep battleship suddenly lit off every defensive electronics system she had. Those systems remained considerably inferior to the Manticoran equivalents, but they were an awful lot better than they'd been eighteen or twenty T-months earlier, and he swore again as the single ship vanished into a ball of electronic fuzz which made it impossible to see anything as small as a train of towed missile pods.
He started to report it, but Jacquelyn Harmon had already seen it.
"Engage now!" she barked.
* * *
"She did what?" Citizen Rear Admiral Kellet looked up from the com screen and blinked at Citizen Lieutenant Commander Morris.
"She brought up our EW without orders, Citizen Admiral," Morris repeated, and Kellet frowned.
"Excuse me, Ron," she said to Citizen Admiral Porter and reached for the interrupt switch. But the display blanked, banishing Porter's image before she could hit the button, and then it lit once more and Citizen Captain Hall's face looked out of it.
"Froggie, just what the h—" Kellet began.
"Ma'am, CIC has just—" Hall said simultaneously, but a third voice cut them both off before she could explain.
"We're being hit with lidar!" Olivia Morris shouted. "Multiple emitters—very close, Citizen Admiral!"
* * *
"Locked up!" Thomas snapped as the ranging and targeting pulses from his lidar came back to Harpy. "Firing—now!"
Ninety-six LACs fired ninety-six grasers within the space of barely two seconds. Their angle of closure was too broad for them to get shots up the open after aspects of the Peep ships' impeller wedges, but they weren't shooting at ships. They were firing at missile pods, and they killed ninety-three of them in the first salvo.
The pods were utterly defenseless, following docilely along behind their mother ships, and grasers which could blast through a ship of the wall's armor ripped them to splinters with dreadful ease. When a weapons-grade energy beam hit a target, it didn't melt that target. The energy transfer was too enormous, too sudden. Natural alloy or synthetics, ceramics or human flesh, it vaporized explosively, literally blowing itself apart with fearsome force, and some of
the first salvo's targets' sister pods succumbed to proximity damage as fragments blasted into them like old-fashioned prespace armor-piercing shot.
But the LACs weren't counting on that sort of fortuitous kills. Their fire control lashed the other pods viciously, despite the fact that the laser emissions were giving the Peeps' targeting beacons of their own, and a second fusillade of grasers ripped out even as the Shrikes' missiles tubes went to maximum rate fire.
* * *
"What's out there?" Jane Kellet demanded harshly. She felt the edge of panic trying to ooze into her own voice and throttled it savagely before anyone else heard it.
"I don't know, Citizen Admiral!" Morris replied, fingers flying over her console as she, CIC, and Oliver Diamato all tried to make sense of the preposterous readings. "There are—"
"LACs!" another voice came over the circuit, and Kellet's eyes snapped back to her com as a sidebar identified the speaker as Citizen Commander Diamato.
"Explain!" she snapped.
"It has to be LACs, Citizen Admiral," Diamato said urgently. "It'd take a dozen Manty battlecruisers to produce that much graser fire, but not even Manties could get something that big this close. And if they were battlecruisers, they'd be firing lasers, as well. And all the point sources, it—"
"Missiles incoming!" CIC reported.
* * *
Alice Truman watched the Peeps' jammers and decoys coming frantically on-line and bared her teeth at her plot. Minotaur was too far away to pick up any sort of accurate read on the Peeps' missile pods, but her sensors had reported the first tsunami of graser fire and hits on something astern of the enemy ships. And now the diamond-dust glitter of the LACs' outgoing missiles speckled her display against a background holocaust of independently firing grasers still ripping pods to pieces.
"All right, Alf," she said to Jessup. "Let's you and Commander Stackowitz just see what you can do to help out."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am! Firing now!"
Minotaur twitched ever so slightly as her bow missile tubes opened fire. She was nine million kilometers astern of her enemies and losing ground steadily. Her superior acceleration would change that shortly, but it hadn't yet, which should have made the launch a futile gesture. But she had the first fruits of Project Ghost Rider in her magazines, and the missiles she fired in salvos of nine were like none that had ever been fired in anger before.
* * *
"Bow wall up!" Michael Gearman barked as the last of twelve shipkillers erupted from Harpy's bow-mounted tubes.
"Wedge nominal!" PO Maxwell snapped almost simultaneously.
"Ready to answer the helm on reaction thrusters, Skipper!" Lieutenant Takahashi said.
"Very good," Harmon acknowledged, watching her small plot, and her lips curled back from her teeth. The wing had already gutted the Peeps' pods—they might have a dozen or so left, hiding amid the wreckage, but certainly not enough to have any great impact on the coming engagement—and now the Shrikes' missiles were howling in on their targets. The angle was still bad, but the range was down to only 220,000 kilometers, and the closure rate at launch was close to three hundred KPS. That would leave the birds plenty of time on their drives, and with an acceleration of 85,000 g, their flight time was barely twenty-two seconds.
* * *
Oliver Diamato watched in horror as the huge cloud of missiles flashed towards TF 12.3. He was right, he thought numbly. Those had to be LACs out there—the individual missile salvos were too small and coming from too many dispersed points to be from anything larger. But there were so many of them! Worse, they'd launched from such short range, and from so many places on so many vectors, that point defense was caught hopelessly flatfooted. CIC and the sensor crews did their best, but the target environment was too chaotic. They needed time for their plots to settle, only there was no time.
The Manticoran missiles came howling down on their targets, in final acquisition before more than a handful of counter-missiles could launch, and laser clusters and main energy mounts vomited beamed energy in a desperate effort to pick them off. PNS Alcazar, senior ship of the task force's understrength destroyer screen, took a direct main battery hit, squarely amidships, from Tascosa. The battleship was only trying to protect herself, but Alcazar was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the hapless ship blew up with all hands as the massive graser ripped contemptuously through her sidewall.
Schaumberg was firing as desperately as anyone else. Diamato's hands flew over his console, his entire universe focused on his responsibility to somehow break through the Manties' EW and find them for his own weapons, yet he felt the ship shudder and buck as the first bomb-pumped lasers tore at her. Citizen Captain Hall's orders to bring Diamato's ECM up on her own initiative made the flagship a much harder target than the other battleships, but with so many missiles flying some of them simply had to get through, and alarms wailed as she jerked again.
"Graser Three down! Direct hit on Lidar One, switching to backup! Citizen Captain, we're taking hits forward! Beta Thirteen and Fourteen are out of the ring! Heavy casualties in Point Defense Five!"
Diamato cringed as the litany of damage reports rolled through the bridge, yet even as he cringed, he knew it could have been far, far worse—would have been worse, if not for Citizen Captain Hall. But that was cold comfort as—
"Direct hit on Auxiliary Control!" someone shouted, and despite himself, Diamato looked up from his own displays at the damage schematic. Auxiliary Control turned bright, blazing crimson as he watched, and he darted a look at the citizen captain. Hall's face was a mask etched from stone, her presence an eye of calm as she forced her bridge crew to hold together by sheer willpower, yet he saw the pain—the loss—in her eyes as she realized Ira Hamer was dead.
"Find me those LACs, Oliver!" she commanded, her voice very nearly as even as it had been before the Manties launched, and he wheeled back to his display.
* * *
Reaction thrusters flared, pushing LAC Wing One's bows sideways with old-fashioned brute power. It was slow and ponderous compared to maneuvering on impellers, but it let them maintain their powerful bow sidewalls as they simultaneously turned and rolled to present the bellies of their wedges to the enemy.
Jacquelyn Harmon watched the maneuver with fierce elation. That asshole Holderman might have hung them up out here for months while he tried to sabotage Operation Anzio, but at least his machinations had given her people plenty of time to train. They were reacting like veterans, bringing themselves far enough around to deny the Peeps down-the-throat shots so they could go in pursuit, and she felt herself leaning forward against her shock frame as if to physically urge Harpy on.
But then something caught her eye, and she blinked, lips pursing in surprise, as HMS Minotaur's first nine missiles came shrieking in from astern. They'd taken one hundred and forty-three seconds to overhaul their targets, and their overtake velocity was over a hundred and twenty-six thousand kilometers per second. No other missile in space could have done that; simply to get the burn time would have required a thirty-five-percent reduction in maximum acceleration, which would have put it three million kilometers behind these birds with a velocity almost twenty thousand KPS lower. More to the point, any other missiles would have been ballistic and unable to maneuver by the time they overhauled their prey, whereas these birds would still have close to forty seconds on their drives.
No one in TF 12.3 saw them coming—not even Oliver Diamato. The PN tactical crews could be excused for that. There was so much other confusion on their displays, so many other known threats scorching in on so many different vectors, that none of them had any attention to spare for the single dreadnought so far behind them that it couldn't possibly represent a danger.
And because none of them did, Minotaur's first salvo came slashing in completely unopposed.
All nine missiles were locked onto a single target, and they had not only plenty of power for terminal attack maneuvers but a straight shot directly up the after aspect of its wedge.
Two of them actually detonated inside the wedge, and the other seven all detonated at less than eight thousand kilometers. The hedgehog pattern of their X-ray lasers enveloped the stern of PNS Mohawk in a deadly weave of energy, and the battleship's after impeller room blew apart, and her wedge faltered. Unfortunately, however, it didn't fail... and every man and woman aboard her died almost instantly as one laser scored a direct hit on her inertial compensator and two hundred gravities smashed the life from them like an enraged deity's mace.
That caught the attention of the tactical officers aboard Mohawk's sisters, and a fresh surge of consternation washed through them as they realized the Manties had just hit them with yet another new weapon. Their counter-missiles and laser clusters trained around onto the threat bearing, firing furiously at the followup salvos, and at least they had plenty of tracking and engagement time against this threat.
* * *
"Admiral Truitt is coming back at them, Skipper!" Evans reported, and Harmon nodded. Truitt's task group had reversed acceleration, charging to meet the Peeps now that their pods had been mostly destroyed, and his own pods launched as he entered attack range. They flew straight into the Peeps' faces, and ships slewed wildly as they tried to turn the vulnerable throats of their wedges away from the incoming fire. But that turned them almost directly away from Harmon's LACs, exposing their vulnerable after aspects, and her people had turned far enough away that they were no longer crossing their own "T"s for the enemy. That meant they'd been able to take down their bow walls, unmasking their missile tubes once more
"Reengage with missiles! Flush the reserves now!" she ordered over the wing command channel, and the missiles she'd held back from the initial attack for just this moment went roaring out.
* * *
It was a nightmare for Jane Kellet—or would have been, if she'd had even a single microsecond to dwell upon it. But she didn't have that microsecond. Her task force writhed at the heart of a deadly ambush, with missiles flying at her seemingly from every possible direction, and the Manty SDs were closing on her battleships. They couldn't fight those leviathans—not in energy range—and win... and that didn't even count the damned LACs. Her tac people could find them now that they'd made their presence felt and brought their wedges up, but their decoys and jammers were hellishly effective for such small vessels. Locking them up for fire control should have been easy at this short range, but it wasn't. Worse, they were splitting into two forces which angled away from one another, obviously intending to race out on either flank before they turned and scissored back towards one another with her in the middle. She could see it coming, but the maneuver had turned the bellies of their wedges towards her, which meant she could engage only with missiles.
