Manticore Ascendant 3- A Call to Vengeance

by David Weber

  “Damn,” Marcello murmured, looking across at Lisa.

  Lisa nodded. She’d already pulled up the ship list Captain Katura had provided, but she didn’t really need it. Like her captain, she’d committed it to memory, and Mollwitz, Burkersdorf, and Rossbach were more properly known as Adder, Copperhead, and Mamba, Swenson’s three Thu’ban-class ships.

  “Well, that was unexpected,” Marcello continued. Lisa nodded again, wondering how Brigadier Massingill and her commandos were going to handle this one.

  Bergen 3 consisted of two active platforms and two more still in the process of construction. Massingill’s operations plan had divided her troops evenly between the operational platforms, under the assumption that she would face only two ships. Three of them would not only spread her available combat power thinner on at least one platform, but it also offered a greater opportunity for the timing to go awry.

  Still, as Commodore Charnay had pointed out, if anyone could handle that situation it would be Massingill and the 303rd. Heavy cruisers were also less likely than battlecruisers to have sizable ground combat components aboard, which should offset some of the brigadier’s dispersal problems.

  “I assume you heard that, Captain Marcello?” Charnay said from the captain’s com display.

  “Yes, Sir,” Marcello replied. “Has DTC responded yet?”

  “Unfortunately, there wasn’t time for them to run it past us before they did,” Charnay said out. “They couldn’t very well tell him no without a good reason. After all, on the face of it, it’s a completely logical suggestion.”

  “Wonderful,” Marcello murmured.

  “Agreed,” Charnay said. “This is going to make thing a lot trickier for the Brigadier. And unfortunately, she’s not the only one whose timing it’s likely to impact.”

  * * *

  “There they go,” Captain Imbar growled as the designated cruisers headed for Bergen 3. “Von Belling and Michelson behaving like hot dogs as usual. Should I com them to slow it down?”

  “No, let them have their fun,” Gensonne said, eyeing the plot. “Besides, everyone knows the Andermani do things better than anyone else in the galaxy. Let them show the Danakans how good they really are.”

  He didn’t bother to add that the main reason he’d chosen them for detachment was that nobody else could keep up with them anyway.

  The Thu’bans were the fastest ships in the Volsungs’ inventory, with a six-gravity maximum acceleration advantage over even Odin, and compensators that were equally robust. As a result, their captains routinely operated them at eighty-five percent power, rather than the more normal eighty percent, whenever they could cut loose from the rest of the fleet’s apron strings. Given their primary role of defending the battlecruisers from missiles, that didn’t happen very often, and they relished any opportunities that came their way.

  And so as Odin continued towards Bergen 2 at the formation’s stately 185 gravities, Adder, Copperhead, and Mamba accelerated steadily away from them at 223 gravities.

  “Just make sure von Belling and Schneider know they’re not supposed to let any of Danak’s techs on board until Michelson’s had a chance to see how competent they are,” Gensonne added. “I don’t want the locals getting near anything critical until we’re positive this isn’t an attempt to hit us up for extra fees before they dock.”

  “I doubt that’s really necessary, Admiral,” Llyn spoke up from the link to Banshee. “You may be a one-time customer, but Master Rowbtham is local and does a fair amount of business in Danak. You’re also rather forgetting that you’re units of the Andermani Navy, and no one wants to get blacklisted by Gustav Anderman. His personal disapproval aside, his word still carries a lot of weight with the Solarians.”

  “Maybe,” Gensonne said curtly. “But I’m not taking any chances. I’ll be keeping my eye on things at Bergen Two. Von Belling and the others had damn well better do likewise.”

  * * *

  “That much faster, Sir?” Marcello asked.

  “That much faster,” Charnay confirmed grimly.

  Lisa winced as she punched numbers into her console. When they’d come up with the plan to divert some of Swenson’s units they’d assumed that one of the battlecruisers would have been included. Ideally, Swenson would have taken his flagship into the trap, enabling Massingill to capture him and decapitate his entire force. The more likely scenario, though, had been that he would detach Boyen, otherwise known as Loki, whose maximum safe acceleration was only 185 G.

  At the moment the three cruisers—now designated Swenson Two—had separated from the main formation, Swenson One had been 9.84 LM from her original destination at Bergen 1. That had put it 23.27 LM from Bergen 2 and 16.2 LM from Bergen 3. From that starting point, Loki would have been seven hours and two minutes from a zero-zero with Bergen 3.

  But at the Thu’bans’ higher acceleration, they were only six hours and twenty-three minutes away. That meant Swenson Two would arrive thirty-nine minutes earlier than Loki could.

  Which meant Massingill’s attack might well have to begin over a half hour earlier than the plan had assumed.

  Even worse, the rest of the pirate fleet would be thirty-nine minutes—and a solid 4.9 million kilometers—farther away, and traveling 4,254 KPS faster than Commodore Charnay’s battle plan had allowed for.

  Lisa punched more numbers, studying them closely. Swenson One would still be too deep into the inner-system to kill its velocity and accelerate back out short of engagement range. But if the balloon went up early at Bergen 3 and the rest of the bad guys were smart enough to cut and run the instant it did, it would probably make intercepting them more difficult. Depending on how much too soon it went up, it could make things very difficult indeed.

  On the other hand, the timing here had always been problematic. Even Loki would have reached Bergen 3 eighty-four minutes before the rest of the fleet reached Bergen 2. The transmission lag between Bergen 3 and Bergen 2 was 15.8 minutes, which would have bought some of that time back, but that had still left an interval of well over an hour in which Loki might have warned her consorts they were headed into a trap.

  No one had been willing to assume that Massengill’s people could take out two ships before at least one of them got a message off. Accordingly, they’d designed a carefully choreographed set of procedures intended to burn at least forty to fifty minutes between Loki’s arrival and her actual docking. That would have kicked off the boarding attempt only about ten minutes before the rest of the pirates were at Commodore Charnay’s desired range from Bergen 2, at which point any warning messages from either section of their forces would have crossed one another in transmission.

  That thirty-nine-minute difference was going to make the timing a lot trickier. But that was the reality, Lisa knew as she watched CIC project the pirates’ newly diverging vectors onto Damocles’ main plot. They would all just have to deal with it,

  * * *

  And of course, right in the middle of Gensonne’s work on rethinking and reworking his schedule, Llyn’s face popped up on his com display. “What do you want?” Gensonne growled. “I’m busy. Thanks to your helpful friends.”

  “I understand,” Llyn said in one of those soothing tones he used when he wanted something or didn’t think Gensonne would understand some complicated plan he was going to pitch. “And I don’t want to add any extra complications to your life. I just wanted you to know that I’ve received a coded burst transmission.”

  Gensonne sat up straighter. “What kind of transmission?”

  “It’s not a problem,” Llyn assured him hastily. “Quite the contrary. It’s merely confirmation that Secretary Charnay is, indeed, the one waiting for our credit chip.”

  “Good.” That particular concern had been pushed into the back of Gensonne’s mind by everything else, but it had never entirely left. “So we’re good to go?”

  “Mostly,” Llyn said. “It appears we’ll also have deal with a couple of yard foremen. Again, not a problem, but
I’ll need figure out how much extra this is going to cost.”

  “And why are you bothering me with this?”

  “Because you need to be aware that there could be a brief delay when we reach the yard platforms while the arrangements are being made.”

  “Really,” Gensonne said, turning up the voltage in his stare. “Have I ever mentioned how much I dislike delays?”

  “I’m not particularly fond of them either,” Llyn said with a scowl. “Especially when my original instructions were crystal-clear. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to have been anything Katura could have done about it. We’re going to need to discuss the foremen’s demands, then authorize their payments, then find a way to slip the money their accounts without Jerriais’ bookkeepers noticing.”

  “You’re not making me any happier,” Gensonne warned.

  “Don’t worry, it’s nothing I haven’t done dozens of time before,” Llyn assured him. “But it’s likely to keep me busy for the next few hours, and I wanted you to know why I’ll be on the com a lot and therefore why I might not be instantly available if you need my help with something.”

  Gensonne snorted. Like he would need the little man’s help at this point.

  “Fine,” he said. “You’re the one signing the slips. Go see how many credits you have to fork over this time.”

  “How many credits my employer has to fork over, you mean,” Lynn replied, and Gensonne suppressed a smile at the irritation in the other’s tone. Apparently, Llyn didn’t like being gouged any more than he did, even when it wasn’t his own personal money.

  “Whatever,” he said. “Just make sure the details are settled before we’re ready to dock. I want to get this show on the road.”

  “Of course, Admiral,” Llyn assured him. “As do I.”

  * * *

  “Damn,” Brigadier Jean Massingill muttered under her breath as she punched numbers and flung names back and forth across her tablet. “Damn, damn, damn, and damn again.”

  The schedule had called for her to delay the pirates’ incoming battlecruiser forty to fifty minutes before getting her commandos aboard and launching their attack. Now they needed to drag that out another thirty to forty minutes. The plan had called for two teams, one each for a battlecruiser and heavy cruiser. Now, it was going to be three teams for three Thu’ban heavy cruisers.

  So not only did she need to find a way to tapdance for a full hour and a half, she also needed to split two teams into three. And those three teams needed to take a crash course in Thu’bans architecture.

  “Brigadier?”

  Massingill looked up to see Major Elsie Dorrman striding up to her, another tablet in her hand. “Yes?”

  “I’ve pulled up specs for the Thu’bans,” Dorrman said. “Everyone’s looking them over, and Bastonge and Danzer are mapping out the routes and procedures.”

  “Good,” Massingill said. Major Bastonge and Captain Danzer had been the leaders of the two thirty-man teams who would have taken on the pirates.

  Only now each of their teams would be reduced to twenty. That was not a hell of a lot against a shipful of pirates.

  “At least they won’t have to cut their way out of cargo containers this time,” Dorrman reminded her.

  “True,” Massingill said, feeling a ghost of a smile at the memory of the Solway operation. That one had gone off without a hitch.

  But that one had had extensive planning ahead of time, and no last-minute surprises.

  “What about the teams?” she asked. “Have you and the others figured out how to split them up?”

  “We’ve come up with two options,” Dorrman said, handing over her tablet. “The first would leave Bastonge’s and Danzer’s core groups intact. The downside is that would make the third team mostly made up of less experienced fighters.”

  Massingill scowled. With the bulk of the 303rd off on training exercises elsewhere in the Republic, these sixty men and women were all she’d been able to scrape together on the short notice she’d been given. They’d had a few days in transit to train together, but they were far from being fully coherent units.

  “The second would strip five commandos from each of the core groups to form the core of the third,” Dorrman continued. “That would lower the experience level of Groups One and Two, but give Three a more solid center.”

  “Understood,” Massingill said, studying the options. “Do you have a recommendation on Three’s commander?”

  Dorrman shrugged slightly. “The only logical choice is me.”

  Massingill suppressed a sigh. Yes, she’d pretty well seen that one coming.

  Only she didn’t want it. Dorrman was experienced, but she was older than the average 303rd and therefore somewhat lower on the strength and stamina scales. Ironically, perhaps, that same age detriment—along with her gender—tended to make opponents underestimate her. That gave her a huge advantage in the ambush and subterfuge categories, which was why Massingill had set her up as one of the lower-level techs with Danzer’s team. Getting close to the people in charge of critical systems was one of Dorrman’s specialties, and Massingill had hoped to take advantage of those skills.

  But she was right. Experience and leadership, not to mention her rank, argued for Dorrman commanding Group Three.

  “And your recommendation on the split?”

  “Leave the other two groups their cores and give me the newbies,” Dorrman said without hesitation. “As long as I have Rushkoff, I can make it work.”

  Massingill nodded. Rushkoff was one of their best-trained ship techs, and would probably be the first to get the Thu’ban details under his belt. On top of that, he had a gift of gab that enabled him to convince the most hardened skeptic that he knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “All right,” she said, handing the tablet back. “Get on it. I’ll go corral the yard dogs and figure out how we’re going to vamp for an extra half hour.”

  “If all else fails, Ma’am,” Dorrman offered, “you could always start reminiscing about the good old days.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, Major,” Massingill said. “Go prep your team.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  “Commander?” Lieutenant Wolfgang Moeller, ATO of the Volsung battlecruiser Tarantel, called back across the bridge. “Something odd, sir.”

  Lieutenant Commander Marco Feyman, Tarantel’s tactical officer, looked up from his novel, a trickle of hopeful interest rising in him. Duty at Walther Prime’s Schmiede space station was about as cripplingly boring as anything the Volsung Mercenaries had to offer, and anything that could lighten that uniformly gray lifescape would be welcome.

  Though probably it was nothing more than a twitchy reading on one of Tarantel’s systems. Still, anything was better than nothing. “What is it, Moeller?” he asked.

  “We’ve just picked up an incoming impeller wedge, Sir,” Moeller replied, turning his head to look over his shoulder at Feyman. “I checked the schedule update from Schmiede, and we’re not expecting anyone for at least two months.”

  “I see.”

  Feyman bookmarked his page, unstrapped, and swam leisurely across the bridge to Tactical. He grabbed one of the handholds on the back of Moeller’s chair and frowned past the younger man’s shoulder at the icon gleaming on the tactical plot.

  There was a wedge there, all right. And it was heading inward.

  Straight toward the Volsung station.

  Moeller had already pulled up Captain Hauser’s last two schedule updates on a different display. Feyman ran an eye over them, confirmed that there were no visitors expected, and looked back at the icon.

  Odd, certainly. Still, hardly a cause for panic. The mercenary business didn’t run on a public transport system’s schedule, after all. There could be any number of reasons a single ship—from the impeller signature, he tentatively identified it as either a destroyer or a cruiser—could be incoming to Walther.

  At the moment, though, he couldn’t think of any reason that made sense. If eve
rything had gone according to schedule, Admiral Gensonne had only just now arrived at Danak. He couldn’t possibly have gotten there, learned anything important enough to justify sending a courier back to Walther, and gotten the courier here by now. And it was highly unlikely that anyone else would be sending them couriers.

  So the odds were that whoever this was, it wasn’t a Volsung.

  Which raised all sorts of interesting questions of its own.

  “Com?” he called over his shoulder. “Raise Schmiede. Inform Captain Hauser that we’ve detected an incoming impeller wedge, inbound at just over four thousand KPS, and accelerating at one-niner-zero gravities. She’s about—what do you make the range, Wolfgang?”

  “Call it fourteen-point-niner light-minutes, Sir,” Moeller replied. “She’s just over four million kilometers inside the limit.”

  “Append that information to your message, Com.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Feyman shifted his eyes to the status board. At the moment, Leuchtfeuer was down for long overdue maintenance on her alpha nodes, but her sisters Heliograph and Semaphor, the designated ready-duty ships, were properly on station. Whoever this intruder was, they could at least give it a proper Volsung welcome.

  “Think they’ve seen us yet, Sir?” Moeller asked quietly, looking up at Feyman.

  “You tell me,” Feyman countered. Moeller had promise, but he was also young and inexperienced. This would be a good exercise for him.

  “Yes, Sir,” Moeller considered. “Probably not.

  “Why?”

  “Only four ships have hot nodes at the moment: Heliograph, Semaphor, and two of the freighters,” Moeller said. “It would be very difficult for them to pick up anything other than an impeller wedge at that range.”

  “Anything else?” Feyman asked.

  “Well…it’s not exactly scientific,” Moeller hedged, “but if that’s not one of our ships, they‘d be crazy to head in-system if they had any clue what was waiting for them here.”

  “Good,” Feyman complimented him. The kid definitely had promise. “All right. If they’re headed for a zero-zero with the planet—which looks likely from their projected vector—they’ll hit turnover in another hundred and sixty minutes. By that time, they may be able to see more. If they don’t turn around before then, they’re pretty much committed to coming all the way into our parlor.”