by David Weber
Thomas Theisman jerked awake, and his executive officer stepped back quickly as he sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the couch.
"What?" he asked thickly, rubbing at sleep-crusted eyes. "Is it the Captain?"
"No, Sir," Lieutenant Hillyard said unhappily, "but we're picking up an awful lot of impeller signatures headed this way."
"This way? Towards Uriel?"
"Slap bang towards Blackbird, Skipper." Hillyard met his eyes with an anxious grimace.
"Oh, fuck." Theisman shoved himself erect and wished he'd never left the People's Republic. "What kind of signatures? Harrington's?"
"No, Sir."
"I'm in no mood for bad jokes, Al!"
"I'm not kidding, Skipper. We don't see her anywhere."
"Damn it, there's no way the Graysons would come after us alone! Harrington has to be out there!"
"If she is, we haven't seen her yet, Sir."
"Goddamn it." Theisman massaged his face, trying to knead some life back into his brain. Captain Yu was forty hours overdue, the reports coming up from moon-side were enough to turn a man's stomach, and now this shit.
"All right." He straightened with a spine-cracking pop and picked up his cap. "Let's get to the bridge and see what's going on, Al."
"Yes, Sir." The exec followed him from the cabin. "We only picked them up about five minutes ago," he went on. "We've been getting some funny readings from in-system, some kind of discrete gravity pulses." Theisman looked at him, and Hillyard shrugged. "Can't make anything out of them, Skipper. They're scattered all over the place, and they don't seem to be doing anything, but trying to run them down had our sensors looking the wrong way. They may have been decelerating for as much as thirty minutes before we picked them up."
"Um." Theisman rubbed his chin, and Hillyard looked at his profile.
"Skipper," he said hesitantly, "tell me if I'm out of line, but have you heard anything about what's happening ground-side?"
"You are out of line!" The lieutenant recoiled, and Theisman grimaced. "Sorry, Al. And, yes, I've heard, but-" He slammed a fist explosively into the bulkhead beside him, then jerked to a stop and swung to face his exec.
"There's not a goddamned thing I can do, Al. If it was up to me, I'd shoot every one of the sons-of-bitches—but don't you breathe a word of that, even to our people!" He held Hillyard's eyes fiercely until the exec nodded choppily, then rubbed his face again.
"Jesus, I hate this stinking job! The Captain never figured on this, Al. I know how he'd feel about it, and I made my own position as clear to Franks as I can, but I can't queer the deal for the Captain when I don't know how he'd handle it. Besides," he smiled crookedly, "we don't have any Marines."
"Yes, Sir." Hillyard looked down at the deck, and his mouth worked. "It just makes me feel so . . . dirty."
"You and me both, Al. You and me both." Theisman sighed. He started back down the passage, and Hillyard had to half-trot to keep up with him. "When I get home-if I get home-" Theisman muttered savagely, "I'm gonna find whatever Staff puke thought this one up. I don't care who the bastard is, he's dog shit when I find him. I didn't sign up for this kind of garbage, and rank won't help the son-of-a-bitch in a dark alley!" He broke off and looked sidelong at Hillyard. "You didn't hear that, Lieutenant," he said crisply.
"Of course not, Sir." Hillyard took another few steps and looked back up at his commander. "Want a little help in that alley, Skipper?"
* * *
She missed Nimitz. The back of her command chair seemed empty and incomplete without him, but Nimitz was tucked away in his life-support module. He hadn't been any happier at being parted than she was, yet he'd been there before, and he'd settled down without demur when she sealed him in. Now she put the lonely feeling out of her mind and studied her plot.
A solid wedge of LACs led her ship, its corners anchored by Grayson's three surviving starships, while Troubadour and Apollo were tucked in tight on Fearless's port and starboard quarters. It was scarcely an orthodox formation, especially since it put the best sensor suites behind the less capable Grayson units, but if it worked the way it was supposed to . . .
She heard a soft sound and looked up to see Commander Brentworth playing with his helmet beside her chair. His bulky vac gear marked him as a stranger among her bridge crew's skin suits, and, unlike everyone else, he had nothing to do but stand there and worry.
He felt her eye and looked down, and she smiled her lopsided smile.
"Feeling out of place, Mark?" she asked quietly, and he gave her a sheepish nod. "Don't worry about it. We're glad you're aboard."
"Thanks, Ma'am. I just feel sort of useless with nothing to do, I guess." He nodded at her plot. "In fact, the whole Fleet probably feels that way right now."
"Well, we certainly can't have that, Commander!" a cheerful voice said, and Honor's good eye twinkled, as Venizelos appeared on the other side of her chair. "Tell you what," the exec went on, "leave us the Peeps, and we'll let you have all the Masadans. How's that?"
"It sounds fair to me, Commander." Brentworth grinned.
"Good enough." Venizelos looked down at his captain. "Steve makes it another hour and fifty-eight minutes, Skipper. Think they know we're here?"
* * *
"They're down to two-six-oh-five-four KPS, Sir," Theisman's plotting officer reported as Principality's captain stepped onto his bridge. "Range niner-two-point-two million klicks. They should come to rest right on top of us in another one-one-eight minutes."
Theisman crossed to the main tactical display and glowered at it. A tight-packed triangle of impeller signatures came towards him across it, decelerating at the maximum three hundred seventy-five gravities of a Grayson LAC. Three brighter, more powerful signatures glowed at its corners, but they weren't Harrington. Principality had good mass readings on them, and they had to be what was left of the Graysons.
"Anybody in position to see around that wall?"
"No, Sir. Aside from Virtue, everybody's right here."
"Um." Theisman rubbed an eyebrow and cursed himself for not convincing Franks to send one of the Masadan destroyers to Endicott as soon as Harrington returned. The admiral had refused on the grounds that Thunder of God was already two hours overdue and so must be back momentarily, and the most Theisman had been able to get him to do was send Virtue out to Thunder's planned translation point to warn the Captain the instant he did return.
He thrust that thought aside and concentrated on the plot. It certainly looked as if Grayson had launched this little expedition without Harrington, but that would have required an awful lot of guts—not to say stupidity—if they knew what they were getting into.
But did they? Obviously they knew something, or they wouldn't be here at all. Theisman didn't know how they'd tumbled to the Masadan presence on Blackbird, yet it seemed unlikely Harrington had recovered any usable data from Danville's LACs. No other Masadan ships had been in range to assist Danville (luckily for them), but the destroyer Power had been close enough for long-range grav readings, and Harrington hadn't even slowed down. That suggested there hadn't been any wreckage large enough to search, which was precisely what Theisman would have expected.
But if Harrington hadn't learned about Blackbird, then something must've slipped on the Grayson end. The original base predated Haven's involvement, and the Masadans had always been mighty cagey about how they'd put it in. Yet they almost had to have recruited local assistance to build it, so whoever their assistant had been might have spilled the beans.
And if that were the case, the Graysons still might not realize who was waiting for them here. Or, he amended sourly, who ought to be waiting for them if the Captain weren't so long overdue. Damn, damn, damn! He could feel the wheels coming off, and there was no way to find out what the Captain would want him to do about it!
He drew a deep breath. Assume a worst-case scenario. The Graysons had discovered Blackbird, learned about Principality and Thunder of God, and told Harrington all about it. What w
ould he do if he were she?
Well, he damned straight wouldn't come after them—not if he knew about Thunder! What he'd probably do was send his destroyer for help, hold his cruisers in the inner system to cover Grayson, and hope like hell the cavalry arrived in time.
On the other hand, Harrington was good. The People's Navy had studied her carefully since Basilisk, and she might just figure she could take Thunder if the Graysons kept the Masadans off her ass while she did it. Theisman couldn't imagine how she'd do it, but he wasn't prepared to say categorically that she couldn't. Only, in that case, where was she?
He looked at the Grayson formation again. If she was out there at all, she was behind that triangle, following it closely enough for its massed impellers to screen her from any gravity sensors in front of it.
The only thing was, her record said she was sneaky enough to send in the Graysons like this to make him think just that while she was someplace else entirely . . . like waiting for any Haven-built ships to abandon their Masadan allies and make a run for it.
His eyes switched to a direct vision display filled with Uriel's bloated sphere. The planet was so enormous it created a hyper limit of almost five light-minutes—half as deep as an M9's. That meant Principality would have to accelerate at max for ninety-seven minutes before she could translate the hell out of here, and Harrington might have her cruisers smoking in on a ballistic course to pick off anyone who tried to run. With her drives down, he'd never see her coming till she hit radar range, but she'd see him the instant he lit off his impellers. That would give her time to adjust her own vector. Probably not by enough for a classic broadside duel, but certainly by enough for two cruisers to reduce a destroyer to glowing gas.
Assuming, of course, that she didn't know about Thunder—and that she expected him to run.
He swore to himself again and rechecked the Grayson ETA. A hundred seven minutes. If he was going to run, he'd better start doing it soon . . . and if he had his druthers, running was exactly what he'd do. Thomas Theisman was no coward, but he knew what was going to happen if Harrington hit this force with Thunder absent. And, in the longer run, if she'd sent for help, it was going to arrive long before anything got here from Haven. Besides, the idea had been to pull this thing off without a war with Manticore! Everyone knew that was coming, but this wasn't the time or place for it to begin.
Then again, wars often started somewhere other than when and where "the plan" called for. He squared his shoulders and turned from the display.
"Get me a link to Admiral Franks, Al."
* * *
"Don't be ridiculous, Commander!" Admiral Ernst Franks snorted.
"Admiral, I'm telling you Harrington and her ships are right behind those people."
"Even if you're correct—and I'm not at all certain you are—our weapons on Blackbird will more than even the odds. We'll annihilate her allies, then close in and finish her off, as well."
"Admiral," Theisman clung to his temper with both hands, "they wouldn't be here if they didn't have some idea what they were heading into. That means-"
"That means nothing, Commander." Franks' eyes narrowed. He'd heard rumors about this infidel's opinion of his battle with Madrigal. "Your own people supplied our missiles. You know their effective powered range—and that nothing the Apostate have could possibly stop them."
"Sir, you won't be engaging Grayson defenses," Theisman said almost desperately, "and if you think Madrigal's point defense was bad, you don't even want to think about what a Star Knight-class cruiser's will do to us!"
"I don't believe she's back there!" Franks snapped. "Unlike you, I know precisely what data could have fallen into Apostate hands, and I'm not running from ghosts! This is a probe to examine little more than wild tales someone heard from someone who heard it from someone else, and they wouldn't dare pull the infidel bitch's ships off Grayson to chase down rumors when they can't know Thunder won't pounce on the planet in her absence."
"And if you're wrong, Sir?" Theisman asked in a tight voice.
"I'm not. But even if I were, she'd be coming to us on our own terms. We'll shoot the Apostate out of our way, then overwhelm her with close-range fire, just as we did Madrigal."
Theisman locked his teeth on a curse. If Harrington was out there, this was suicide. Franks had gotten his ass kicked up between his ears by a frigging destroyer—what did he think two cruisers were going to do to him?!
But there was no point arguing. Franks had heard too much criticism of his previous tactics, insisted too doggedly that only the superior range of Madrigal's missiles and the way they'd reduced his force before he ever engaged had caused his heavy losses. This time he had the range advantage from Blackbird Base, and he was determined to prove he'd been right the first time.
"What are your orders, then, Sir?" Theisman demanded in a curt voice.
"The task force will form up behind Blackbird as planned. Our base launchers will engage when the Apostate enter their range. Should any of the Apostate—or your Manticorans—survive that, we will be able to engage them with equivalent base velocities at close range."
"I see." That was probably the stupidest battle plan Theisman had ever heard, given the quality of the two forces, but short of running on his own, there was nothing he could do about it. And, from Franks' expression, he suspected the Masadans had their energy weapons dialed in on Principality. If they thought she was pulling out, they'd blow her out of space themselves.
"Very well, Sir." He cut the circuit without further ado and cursed for two minutes straight.
* * *
"Coming down on forty minutes, Ma'am," Stephen DuMorne reported. "Range is approximately ten-point-six million kilometers."
"Com, ask Admiral Matthews to open the wall. Let's take a look," Honor said. If the Peeps had given the Masadans what she was afraid they had, she and Matthews would be finding out about it in approximately one hundred and forty seconds.
* * *
"I frigging well knew it!" Commander Theisman spat.
His own sensors were blind from back here, but the base's systems were now feeding Principality's displays . . . for what it was worth. The tight wall of LACs had just spread, revealing the far stronger—and larger—impeller signatures behind it. It was Harrington . . . and she was just as good as ONI said she was, damn it! Even as he watched, her ships were sliding forward through the Grayson wall, spreading out into a classic anti-missile pattern and deploying decoys while the Graysons vanished behind them.
* * *
Admiral Matthews watched his display and waited. Covington was still short five missile tubes, but her energy weapons and sidewall generators had been repaired in record time. For all that, he knew just how helpless she would have been before the attack Captain Harrington was deliberately inviting. He'd been horrified when she first told him about the endurance their larger, more robust drives gave Haven's ground-based missiles, but she'd seemed confident.
Now it was time to see if that confidence had been justified. If those missiles had the endurance she estimated, they would accelerate to an incredible 117,000 KPS and reach eight-million-plus kilometers before burnout. Given their ships' closing velocity, that equated to an effective powered engagement range of well over nine million kilometers, and that meant the base should be launching right . . . about . . . now.
* * *
"Missile launch!" Rafael Cardones snapped. "Birds closing at eight-three-three KPS squared. Impact in one-three-five seconds—mark!"
"Implement point defense Plan Able."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Initiating Plan Able."
* * *
Commander Theisman managed to stop swearing and raised his eyes from his plot to glare at Lieutenant Trotter as the first Manticoran counter missiles scorched out. It wasn't Trotter's fault he was one of the very few Masadan officers aboard Principality. In fact, Trotter was a pretty decent sort, and he seemed to have become even more so by a sort of process of spiritual contamination during his time a
board Theisman's ship. Unfortunately, he was Masadan and he was handy.
Trotter felt his captain's eyes, and his face reddened with a curious blend of humiliation, apology, and answering resentment. He opened his mouth, then closed it, and Theisman made himself stop glaring. He gave the Masadan an apologetic half-shrug, then looked back at his plot.
* * *
There were thirty missiles in the salvo, more than Honor had expected, and they were big, nasty, and dangerous. Each of them massed a hundred and sixty tons, more than twice as much as her own missiles, and they put all that extra mass into tougher drives, better seekers, and penaids no shipboard Havenite missile could match.
But she'd suspected what was coming, and Rafe Cardones and Lieutenant Commander Amberson, Apollo's tac officer, had the squadron in a classic three-tiered defense plan. Fearless's counter missiles were responsible for long-range interceptions, with Apollo's and Troubadour's taking the leakers. Any that got through both missile layers would be engaged by the massed laser clusters of all three ships under Fearless's control.
Now Honor punched a plotting overlay into her tactical display, tracking the vectors of the incoming fire back to Blackbird to pinpoint their launchers.
"Engage the launchers, Captain?" Cardones asked tensely as his counter missiles began to launch.
"Not yet, Mr. Cardones."
If she could get it, Honor wanted that base intact, for she still had no positive identification of what she faced in the way of modern warships. She might find that out the hard way very shortly; if she didn't, somewhere in that base were the records—or the people—who could tell her.
A second missile salvo launched. It contained exactly the same number of birds, and she nodded as she checked the time. Thirty-four seconds. ONI estimated three-round ready magazines and a firing cycle of thirty to forty seconds for the newest Peep ground-based systems, so the launch times suggested thirty tubes were all there were. Now the question was how many missiles each tube really had.
She looked back to the first salvo. Their ECM was better than ONI had predicted. Fifteen of its birds had broken through Cardones' outer intercept zone, but his computers were already updating their original solutions and feeding them to Apollo and Troubadour. The attacking missiles' powerful drives gave them an incredible velocity—they were already moving fifty percent faster than anything of Fearless's could have managed from rest—but simple speed was no magic wand, and the range gave lots of time to plot intercepts.
