by David Weber
His squadron’s only company was a single platform keeping station on the Prime Terminus of the Prime-Ajay hyper bridge. That platform, the home of Prime Traffic Control, was on the small side. Then again, the Prime-Ajay bridge wasn’t very impressive, compared to the massive Manticoran Wormhole Junction, and saw perhaps five percent of the Junction’s traffic. The Prime System, however, was also only 21.5 LY (and less than three days) from the Agueda System and the Agueda-Stine hyper-bridge. That made this unprepossessing, thoroughly depressing volume of nothingness far more valuable than first impressions—or simple economics—might have suggested, given Lacoön Two’s strategy of seizing control of as many wormholes as possible.
CruRon 912’s job was to see to it that the Prime Terminus stayed seized, particularly since Vice Admiral Correia had taken the rest of the task force off to Agueda en route to Stine. It would be…inconvenient if he returned to Prime and found he had to return to Manticore through hyper. That was a point worth keeping in mind, since eventually even the Solarian League Navy was bound to start trying to do something about Lacoön’s consequences.
Lessem grimaced at the thought and scolded himself for it. So far, the Sollies had stepped on their swords with almost unbelievable thoroughness, but they weren’t really all idiots. It was obvious the SLN’s peacetime ossification had gone deeper than anyone in ONI had been prepared to suggest in his wildest dreams, but there were plenty of perfectly good Solarian brains. The Darwinian consequences of the SLN’s obsolescent weapons and…less than ideal operational thinking were bound to push some of those good brains to the forefront far more rapidly than Lessem’s more optimistic—and, in his opinion, chauvinistic—colleagues thought possible. They damned well ought to know better than that, but it wasn’t really fair for him to fault them too severely for it. He found himself doing it too often for him to be casting any stones, witness the “even” of his own thoughts!
The good news, as his letter from Sara Kate reemphasized, was that those good brains had to start digging at the bottom of an awful deep hole. What had happened thirty-nine days ago made that painfully clear. He couldn’t imagine why Massimo Filareta had been stupid enough to open fire when Duchess Harrington had so conclusively demonstrated the hopelessness of Eleventh Fleet’s position, but what had happened to his ships was a clear example of that Darwinian process in action. And given her position at Bassingford, Sara Kate was better placed than most to see the human cost.
He sipped more coffee and touched the play button again.
“Another thing that’s pretty obvious,” she said, “is that an awful lot of them—even some of their senior officers—still outright refuse to acknowledge how outdated their hardware is. I know that’s got to be hard for them, but I don’t understand how they can stay in such deep denial after what happened to their fleet! Doctor Flint—I think I’ve told you about him before; he’s the new Head of Psychology here at Bassingford—tells me that’s exactly what’s happening, that they’re still in the ‘denial phase,’ and I suppose that makes sense. It’s not exactly what I’d call a survival trait, though!” She shook her head on the display, and her expression had turned grimmer. “If they can’t get past that pretty darn quickly, a lot more of their people are going to wind up under our care here at Bassingford…or dead. I’d like to think we’d be faster to ac—”
The display froze, Sara Kate’s voice sliced off in mid-word by the sudden, shrill, unmistakable stridency of the General Quarters alarm. Lessem was still jerking erect in his chair when a very different voice came over the speakers.
“Battle Stations! Battle Stations!” it barked. “All hands, man Battle Stations! This is no drill! Battle Stations! Battle Stations!”
* * *
“Talk to me, Lester,” Commodore Lessem said crisply, two minutes later, as he strode out of the lift car and onto the flag bridge of HMS Clas Fleming, the Saganami-C-class flagship of both Cruiser Squadron 912 and Task Group 47.3.
“They came out of hyper just over three minutes ago, Sir,” Commander Lester Thúri, CruRon 912’s chief of staff replied, straightening and turning from the display over which he’d been bent. “The good news is, they’re right on top of the outer platforms, so we had eyes on them as soon as they arrived. The bad news is, there’s a hell of a lot of them.”
Lessem made a “keep talking” motion with the fingers of his right hand, and Thúri gestured to the master display’s rash of crimson icons.
“We’re still putting the numbers together, Sir, but it looks like at least a hundred Solly warships. We’ve got four really big-assed impeller wedges. They’re big enough to be superdreadnoughts, but they look commercial. CIC’s best guess is that we’re looking at somewhere around fifty battlecruisers, supported by another forty or fifty light cruisers and destroyers, and that the big signatures are transports or fleet support vessels.”
“Who was it back on Old Earth that said quantity has a quality all its own?” Lessem asked whimsically, and Thúri snorted harshly.
“Think they’re here because of us, Sir?”
“It’s possible.” Lessem rubbed his chin as he frowned at the master display. “It would be an awful fast reaction compared to anything we’ve seen out of them so far, but there’s been time for someone to reach Wincote. We didn’t see anyone leaving the system, but we all know how much that means. If that’s what happened, though, they must’ve had these people sitting there ready to translate out the instant they heard about us.”
Commander Thúri nodded, moving over to stand beside his tall, square-built commodore, and his expression was thoughtful. At the moment, Lessem had exactly ten heavy cruisers, only four of them Saganami-Cs, supported by six destroyers and HMS David K. Brown, one of the new David Taylor-class fast support vessels.
One might, the commander reflected, call that a slight force imbalance.
Lessem didn’t know what his chief of staff was thinking at that moment, but if he had known, he wouldn’t have disagreed. It was true that his Saganami-Cs and HMS Ajax and HMS Honda Tadakatsu, the pair of Roland-class destroyers attached to TG 47.3, had full loadouts of Mark 16 dual-drive missiles, but the Rolands’ Achilles’ heel was the class’s limited magazine space. Each of them carried only two hundred and forty of the big, powerful missiles, less than half the number a Saganami-C stowed. And none of the rest of his ships’ internal launchers could handle the Mark 16 at all.
Unfortunately, the Royal Manticoran Navy didn’t have an unlimited supply of Mark 16-capable warships, and a lot of those it did have had been retained for the Grand Fleet or dispatched to Admiral Gold Peak’s Tenth Fleet in the Talbott Sector. He did have six Saganami-Bs—Shelly Ann Jensen, Margaret Mallory, William S. Patterson, Oliver Savander, Rich Rucholka, and Jennifer Woodard—all of whom were armed with the extended range Mark 13, but that weapon’s powered envelope was far shorter than the Mark 16’s; it was a single-drive missile and couldn’t incorporate a ballistic phase into its flight profile; and its warhead was lighter, to boot.
Which may be something of a moot point, he reflected as the red icons of the Solarian task force began accelerating towards the wormhole at a sedate 375 G.
Battles outside the hyper-limit of a star system were virtually unheard of, for several very good reasons. The most salient was that there was seldom anything outside the hyper-limit worth fighting for. Wormholes like the one at TG 47.3’s back were the primary exception to that rule, and so was the occasional valuable resource or bit of system infrastructure, like a particularly rich asteroid belt, which lay closer to the primary but still beyond its hyper-limit.
But there was another excellent reason battles were seldom fought outside hyper-limits: any starship outside a limit could translate into hyper any time it chose to. And because no one ever willingly fought a battle he didn’t expect to win, the weaker side in any confrontation outside a hyper-limit always chose to translate into hyper before the stronger side could engage it.
Unless there was some reason it
couldn’t, that was.
That was the true reason for the massive fortifications covering the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. They were designed to annihilate anyone foolish enough to attempt an attack through one of the Junction’s secondary termini, of course, but in addition, they were intended to provide sufficient concentrated combat power to stand up against almost any conceivable attack through hyper-space.
None of those fortifications were present on the Prime Terminus, however. Prime’s five billion citizens had never found it necessary to build or maintain deep-space forts or anything resembling an actual navy. Although the Prime System was nominally independent, it was “closely affiliated” with the Solarian League, which meant it could rely upon the largest navy in the galaxy for its defense and required only a handful of lightly armed units to police the system’s internal volume. And since everyone knew the Prime Terminus was under League protection, there’d never been a need to fortify it. Anyone stupid enough to seize it would soon have found the SLN knocking on his home star system’s front door.
Ajay, at the far end of the terminus, was not “closely affiliated” with the League. In fact, Ajay didn’t much care for the League. Although it maintained a civil relationship with Old Chicago, it had been an independent star nation for the better part of three hundred and fifty T-years. It had, in fact, been settled by colonists from other Verge systems who hadn’t cared for the way the League’s foreign policy was evolving, and their descendents had a not unreasonable suspicion that the Office of Frontier Security would really have liked control of the Ajay Terminus. As a counterweight to those OFS ambitions, the system had cultivated cordial relations and a long-standing, robust trade relationship with both the Star Kingdom of Manticore and Beowulf.
Despite that, System President Adelaide Tyson had protested in vociferous terms when Task Force 47 arrived on her doorstep and announced it was taking possession of her star system’s greatest natural resource as part of Lacoön Two. Lessem was pretty sure most of her protests had been in the nature of covering her star-nation’s posterior if things went badly for the Grand Alliance. They put her officially on record as strongly opposed to the Star Empire’s “patently illegal” seizure of every warp terminus in sight. Hopefully, that would be sufficient to protect Ajay from the League’s ire in the event of an eventual Solarian triumph. For that matter, win or lose, the League would still be there the day after the peace treaty was finally signed. Ajay would still have to live with it, and Sollies had long memories. Letting word get back to Old Chicago that she’d told the RMN she was delighted to see it in her star system was likely to put a certain strain on that future relationship.
Under the circumstances, Commodore Lessem found it difficult to fault President Tyson, especially since however strongly she might have protested, she and her modest Ajay System Navy had stayed out of Task Force 47’s way and the Ajay Astro Control services had cooperated smoothly—although only after protesting stingently—with the foreign navy which had illegally seized control of its wormhole.
System Director Gregor Cho had reacted rather differently here in Prime, however. He’d protested even more strongly than Tyson, and he’d ordered his Terminus Traffic Control Command to refuse any cooperation with the invaders. Vice Admiral Correia had expected that and brought along his own specialists, who now provided a skeleton crew for the Prime Traffic Control platform after the Primese crews had been evicted from it. The vice admiral had also taken it as a given that Cho would find a way to send word to the League as soon as possible, but neither he nor Lessem had anticipated this prompt a response.
Which brought Lessem back to the unpalatable odds headed his way.
“Should we call Captain Rice forward, Sir?” Commander Thomas Wozniak, his operations officer, asked quietly.
“No.” Lessem shook his head. Captain Jessica Rice commanded CruRon 912’s second division, the Saganami-Cs’ HMS Peregrine S. Faye and HMS Lisa Holtz, covering the Ajay Terminus…and the rest of TG 47.3’s back.
“She wouldn’t add that much to our firepower,” the commodore continued, “and we may need them—and Echidna—right where they are.” He rubbed his chin a moment longer, then inhaled sharply and turned from the display.
“George,” he said.
“Yes, Sir?” Lieutenant George Gordon, his com officer, replied.
“First, contact Commander Aamodt. I want So-po to stand by to transit the terminus with a complete tactical upload for Captain Rice on my command. The rest of his division is to lift our people off the Traffic Control platform and evacuate them to Ajay immediately.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Thúri made a sound of sour amusement, and Lessem cocked an eyebrow at him. The commander shrugged.
“Aamodt isn’t going to like that, Sir,” he said.
“Maybe not, but I doubt it’ll surprise him,” Lessem replied, and Thúri nodded.
Commander Tearlach Aamodt wore two hats as the CO of HMS Obusier and the commanding officer of Destroyer Division 94.2. Like HMS So-po—and all DesDiv 94.2’s other units—Obusier was a Culverin-class destroyer. The Culverins had been bleeding-edge technology when they were introduced in 1899 PD, but that had been twenty-three T-years ago, before anyone outside a few ultra-classified research programs had ever heard of anything called a multidrive missile. They remained capable platforms against anyone who didn’t have MDMs or DDMs of his own, but they were thoroughly obsolete against modern weapons. That meant Lessem could dispense with them more readily than with any of his newer units. They’d also been built for larger crews than the bigger, more modern Rolands, which gave them the redundant life-support to take the Manticoran traffic control specialists off the PTC platform.
“While George is talking to Aamodt, Tom,” Lessem continued, turning back to Wozniak, “tell Captain Amberline to begin deploying and enabling pods as per Pattern Able.”
“Yes, Sir.” The operations officer didn’t sound very surprised by the order.
Harriet Amberline commanded David K. Brown, most of whose capacious cargo pods were stuffed with Mark 16s. One of the FSV’s cargo modules was loaded with Mark 23 MDMs, which offered twice the Mark 16’s powered envelope, but Mark 23s were in short supply, not to be wasted where the smaller Mark 16 would do the job. More to the point, the Mark 23’s greater range would offer no real advantage in the sort of engagement Lessem saw coming. Pattern Able deployed only Mark 16 pods, and he considered sending David K. Brown (known as “Brownie” by her crew, despite the fact that that name officially belonged to a Hydra-class CLAC) back to Ajay after the Culverins as soon as Amberline completed the Able deployment. She was a valuable unit, although the Service Train units with Rice in Ajay carried many times the number of pods she did. Despite her size, however, she could easily out-accelerate anything in the Solarian inventory and she represented his missile pod piggy bank.
And I may need to dip into that “piggy bank” pretty damned soon, he thought grimly. A lot’s going to depend on what these people decide to do.
* * *
“CIC makes it ten or twelve cruisers, four destroyers, and what could be a dreadnought, Ma’am,” Rear Admiral Barthilu Rosiak reported.
“A dreadnought?” Admiral Jane Isotalo, CO, Task Force 1027, Solarian League Navy, repeated with a raised eyebrow. No first-line navy had used dreadnoughts in twenty T-years. ONI said both the Manties and the Havenites had used them early in their wars, but they’d all been retired long since.
“Yes, Ma’am,” Rear Admiral Lamizana, TF 1027’s intelligence officer, said before Rosiak could reply.
Isotalo transferred her raised eyebrow to Lamizana, and the intel officer shrugged.
“CIC isn’t saying that’s necessarily what it is, Ma’am,” she said. “But they’re calling its mass around three million tons, which is too big for even one of the Manties’ battlecruisers. It’s too big even for a battleship, for that matter, but way too small for an SD. It could be some kind of collier or supply vessel—in fact, it pro
bably is—but it’s showing military-grade impellers. Until we know more, I think we have to assume it’s a warship.”
Isotalo considered that for a moment, then nodded. Unlike her, Lamizana was Frontier Fleet. Under normal conditions, that might have left Isotalo less impressed by her caveat. Little though the admiral cared to admit it, though, Frontier Fleet had demonstrated a better track record than Battle Fleet when it came to acknowledging the threat of Manticore’s technological advantages.
Not that any of us have precisely covered ourselves with glory, she thought.
Still, Lamizana was smart and she’d invested a lot of effort in acquiring the best insight into Manty capabilities she could even before TF 1027 had been tapped for Operation Buccaneer and sent off to burn Ajay’s orbital infrastructure to the ground.
“What to do you think they’re doing here, Maleen?” Isotalo asked now. “More of this wormhole seizure strategy of theirs?”
“Most likely, Ma’am.” Lamizana nodded. “I can’t think of another reason for them to be swanning around three or four hundred light-years from Manticore or Beowulf. They haven’t had time yet to learn about Buccaneer and start deploying interception forces, and if that’s what these people were doing, I’d expect them to be in greater strength than this.”
“Just our luck to run into them here,” Rear Admiral Kimmo Ramaalas, Isotalo’s chief of staff observed with a sour expression.
Like Lamizana, Ramaalas was Frontier Fleet, not Battle Fleet, and he’d been with Isotalo for less than three T-months. In fact, he’d been assigned over her protest when they took Rear Admiral Tirso Frederick away from her. Frederick had been her chief of staff for the better part of three T-years, but Winston Kingsford had made a point of breaking up established command relationships—and of cross-assigning Frontier Fleet and Battle Fleet officers—ever since he’d replaced Rajampet Rajani as Chief of Naval Operations. The new policy had infuriated Isotalo when it was initiated, and she’d scarcely been alone in that.
