Shadow of Victory - eARC (80 page)

He rubbed the tip of his nose some more, then turned to his astrogator.

“Tell me about our friend Tamaguchi, Elspeth.”

“He’s pulling a steady three hundred and ninety gravs, Sir, which is about right for a standard eighty percent margin on a Nevada’.” Lieutenant Dreyfus shrugged. “That means he’s got some in reserve, although how much depends on a lot of factors, like his compensators’ maintenance state. At the moment, he’s up to two-niner-point-two thousand KPS and he’s opened the range by just under fifteen million kilometers. We’re cutting into his acceleration advantage—we’re up to four-point-niner thousand KPS—but at present rates it’ll take us another three-point-six hours just to match velocities.”

“And he’ll clear the far hyper limit well before that.”

“Yes, Sir. About eleven minutes before we equalize.”

“And the range at that time?”

“We’ll be two-seven-seven-point-seven million kilometers behind him.”

“And if we went to maximum acceleration?”

“Our overtake accel—assuming he doesn’t change his—would almost double, Sir. We’d match velocities in an hour and three minutes, eighty-seven minutes before he hits the limit. At that point, we’d be roughly two-zero-niner million kilometers behind him and he’d still be the next best thing to three-five-zero million kilometers from the limit. We’d begin making up distance, but he’d still cross the limit about twenty-eight minutes before us, and the range when he did would be one-six-seven million kilometers.”

“About what I’d estimated.” Tremaine nodded. “So, we can’t catch him.”

None of his staffers, he noticed, commented that given the disparity in tonnage, his task group was rather like a treecat pursuing a hexapuma.

Except, of course, that in this case the ’cat’s packing a pulse rifle, he reminded himself. But if he can’t get the damned thing into range…

“Break back across the limit and micro-jump across to intercept him on the far side, Sir?” Lieutenant Commander Golbatsi suggested.

“Time to do that, Elspeth?”

“Just a second, Sir.” Dreyfus bent back over her panel and crunched numbers. Then she looked back up. “Eleven-point-five minutes to decelerate to zero relative to Włocławek, Sir, assuming we detached Charles Ward and took only the warships at McKeon’s maximum decel. We’d be roughly two-zero-seven million kilometers inside the limit at that point, so we’d need another forty minutes to get back across. Call it an hour and forty-three minutes.”

“At which point he’d still be better’n two hours short of the limit,” Horace Harkness pointed out.

“Yes, but he’d realize what we’re up to the minute we start decelerating,” Tremaine said. “What happens if he goes to, say, ninety percent of a Nevada’s max acceleration, Elspeth?”

“At ninety percent,” Dreyfus said, inputting numbers, “he clears the limit in…two hundred minutes. At a hundred percent, he’d do it roughly ten minutes earlier.”

“So we’d still have an hour to work with before he could translate out.”

“Yes, Sir,” Golbatsi agreed. “And pushing his margin to zero’s not something a Solly’s likely to do. Especially when he’s got that much tonnage advantage.”

“The fact that he’s not already decelerating indicates he’s not your typical Solly, Adam,” Tremaine pointed out. “If he realizes what we’re doing and he’s really determined not to fight, he splits his force and sends them on diverging courses for different spots on the limit, and he’s got more of them than we do. We’d play hell trying to intercept just his battlecruisers. Then there’s the problem that astrogation’s not exactly precise on such a short micro-jump. We’d almost certainly end up a couple of million kilometers off on our alpha translation, and it could be a lot worse than that. No offense, Elspeth.”

He smiled at the astrogator, and she smiled back.

“None taken, Sir,” she assured him.

“If we chase them hard, we could still get at least a couple just from compensator failures, Sir,” Harkness pointed out. “I could live with that all day long, Sir.”

“But I don’t want ‘a couple of them,’” Tremaine said grimly. “I want all of them.”

And without killing any more of them than I have to. After what happened in Saltash, we know how outclassed they are even if they haven’t figured it out, and however pissed I may be with Sollies in general, massacring them in job lots isn’t real high on my priority list.

Pulling back and micro-jumping across would almost certainly get us into position, despite what I just said, but my options would be limited. Given his closing velocity, I’d have to go for kill shots on all his units to keep them from sliding across the limit and translating out. Even if they went to maximum decel, they’d be well across the limit before they could stop, and no way do I have enough warm bodies to put prize crews on that many ships. Not to mention the fact that my pinnaces couldn’t even match accel with them to put people onboard short of the limit! But how do I…?

The hand rubbing his nose stopped suddenly. He stood gazing at the display for another dozen seconds or so. Then he began to smile and turned to Lieutenant Stilson MacDonald, his com officer.

“I think I need to speak to Captain Lewis, Stilson,” he said.

Chapter Seventy-One

“Coming up on the mark, Ma’am,” Lieutenant Commander Nakhimov announced, and Ginger Lewis looked up from her smaller maneuvering plot, where she’d been reviewing Scotty Tremaine’s proposed movements, and turned her command chair back towards the main display.

“Run away. Run away!” she murmured under her breath.

It was one of her favorite lines from one of the incredibly ancient “movies” to which Duchess Harrington had introduced her (and much of the rest of HMS Wayfarer’s crew) on her very first cruise. Fortunately, however, none of her bridge crew heard her. Somehow she doubted it would have comported well with the gravitas of a proper CO.

Charles Ward was just over 136,580,000 kilometers inside the hyper limit, and her velocity relative to Włocławek had risen to 13,908 KPS. Like all the rest of TG 10.2.9, she continued to lose ground on the Sollies, although the rate at which they lost it was decreasing steadily. It was going to start increasing for CW in just another few seconds, however.

It felt…odd to be about to run away from the enemy, but Ginger Lewis had been aboard another armed fleet auxiliary which had taken on battlecruisers, and she hadn’t enjoyed the experience. True, there was a universe of difference between her present command and Wayfarer. There were a few similarities, too, however, and CW had a few disadvantages all her own.

The most noteworthy of which, she thought dryly, is just a teeny difference in the command experience of their COs.

She looked around her bridge. CW might be armed, but she’d dispensed with the separate backup command deck of a true warship. There was a secondary tactical station located down in the big ship’s CIC, which was currently manned by Lieutenant (JG) Burgulya Gödert, her assistant tactical officer, and Lieutenant Yolanda Cornelius, CW’s electronic warfare officer, while Lieutenant Commander Atkins manned the bridge tac station with Paulo d’Arezzo as his EWO. At the moment—and hopefully for the foreseeable future—none of them had much to do.

Also at the moment, however, Nakhimov had a point. So—

“Initiate separation, Oliver,” she said in a rather louder tone.

“Initiating separation, aye, Ma’am,” Lieutenant Primikynos replied from his cargo control panel, and she smiled. She might not be a proper tac officer herself, but she could appreciate deviousness when it came along.

Never saw this one coming, she thought wryly. I’m a frigging engineer, not a tac officer! But I really like it. Scotty and Harkness always were a sneaky pair, and the Duchess would be proud of them this time. It’s probably a damn good thing my job’s as simple as it is, though. And if it all drops into the pot anyway, Creswell can probably bail me out.

Actually, as she knew full well, if it all “dropped into the pot,” she’d do the best she could because she was senior to Commander Henry Creswell, HMS Feng Meng’s CO. That meant it would be her job, and she’d damned well do it. But she’d never expected to find herself in command, however temporary, of a combat formation, and—

“Clean separation,” Primikynos announced.

“Lieutenant Mallard confirms acquisition, Ma’am,” Lieutenant Sughavanam said a moment later.

“Very good,” she acknowledged both reports and smiled more broadly at Lieutenant Commander Nakhimov. “And now, Mitya, I think we should go elsewhere, so”—she smiled—“let’s be about it.”

* * *

“Excuse me, Sir,” Bradley Levine said, and Tamaguchi turned from the plot to face him.

“Sir, the freighter’s just reversed acceleration and five of the combatants are going with it. It looks like the Culverins and one of the light cruisers. We’re designating the remaining warships as Sierra One and the group that’s decelerating as Sierra Two. Looks like Sierra Two’s decel’s holding steady at five-point-seven KPS squared.”

“Getting the freighter out of harm’s way, do you think, Sir?” Yountz asked, crossing to Tamaguchi’s shoulder to contemplate the plot.

“It seems a trifle…excessive,” Tamaguchi replied after a moment. “Especially after this long. The freighter has to be well into its compensator margin to hold that accel; it’s already pulling twelve percent or so more than one of ours could even with military nodes and a zero margin. If they just wanted to park it safely somewhere, all they really had to do was have it reduce acceleration and fall astern. That would have to increase its compensator margin, and they could’ve done that any time after they went in pursuit in the first place.”

“And if they’re just letting it fall back, there’s no need to almost half their warships to keep an eye on it, either,” his chief of staff murmured with a nod of agreement, and Tamaguchi nodded back, his eyes thoughtful.

“Sir, Sierra One’s just increased accel,” Levine announced. “Looks like they’re going to about six hundred gravities, maybe a little higher.” The ops officer studied his displays for a moment, then looked up. “Six hundred and five, Sir. Call it five-point-niner KPS squared.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Tamaguchi acknowledged. He frowned and turned back to the master plot, gazing into its depths. Sierra One’s increased acceleration seemed to confirm that the Manties had detached the freighter to free up the warships’ acceleration, and an additional twenty-five gravities was impressive. The maximum accel an SLN ship that heavy cruiser’s size could have pulled was only five hundred and one gravities, and that was with a zero safety margin on its inertial compensator. Somehow he doubted Captain Tremaine was willing to run his compensators flat out—if that acceleration number from New Tuscany was accurate, he definitely wasn’t—but he was clearly coming close, or the uptick would be higher than four percent. With that slight an increase…

“What does their new accel do to their approach to the hyper limit, Astro?” he asked Captain Shreeyash.

“It cuts their arrival time a little, Sir,” Shreeyash said so promptly he knew she’d already worked the figures. “They’ll shave off about four minutes, but they’ll still be five-one-point-four minutes behind us.”

“And at its current deceleration, where will the freighter be when we clear the limit?”

“Just a second, Sir.” The astrogator crunched some more numbers, then looked back up. “Assuming all accelerations remain constant, it’ll recross its entry hyper limit about eighteen-point seven minutes before we hit the exit limit, Sir.”

Tamaguchi nodded and frowned at the master plot some more.

“I wonder…” he said softly. Yountz looked at him, and he shrugged. “I’m wondering what’s in that freighter’s holds,” he expanded.

“Logistical support, I imagine, Sir,” Yountz said. “Unless it’s a transport. I suppose they could be hauling Marines to support what’s been going on down on the planet.”

“I can’t imagine they expected to need much ground combat capability.” Tamaguchi’s tone was desert dry. “The one thing there doesn’t seem to be any of dirtside is local opposition to Szponder’s coup. No, it’s a freighter. I think you’re probably right that it’s along to provide logistical support…and I’ll bet you most of that support is ammunition. Cruisers and destroyers can’t have huge magazines. Not for weapons the size any sort of multiple-drive missile has to be.” He snorted. “That’s probably the reason they’re building such big damned ships and calling them ‘heavy cruisers’!”

“Makes sense, Sir,” Yountz agreed.

“Well, it looks like this Tremaine’s been able to crank his compensator a bit higher, but even at this rate—” he twitched his head in Shreeyash’s direction “—he’s not going to catch us. So I’m wondering if he’s decided to kill two birds with one stone.”

Yountz raised a respectfully inquiring eyebrow, and Tamaguchi turned his back to the plot and clasped his hands behind him.

“Dropping the freighter obviously helps Sierra One’ acceleration curve, but not enough to catch us unless we let him. And the fact that it’s decelerating so hard—and that he’s sending so many combat units with it—seems…odd. I suppose it could have been to allow Sierra One’s other warships to increase their acceleration. Correct me if I’m wrong,” he smiled thinly, “but doesn’t Jayne’s say their Culverins entered service before the turn of the century? That makes some of them at least twenty-two T-years old, and it’s always possible they haven’t been refitted with these newer, more efficient compensators of theirs. I think it’s unlikely all of them wouldn’t have been, though. The tactical advantages are glaringly obvious, and they’d be even greater for such light units. So it may be possible that’s why he detached them, but I don’t think it is.”

“I agree it wouldn’t make much sense, Sir,” Yountz agreed. “But if that’s not why he did it, what is he up to?”

“At least one nasty possibility suggests itself to me, especially since he hasn’t cranked his own accel more. I mean, if a freighter can pull five-point-seven, a warship eighty percent less massive could sure as hell pull more than that with the same safety margin! But suppose he doesn’t have any intention of actually trying to catch us with Sierra One and that his freighter’s loaded with those god-awful system-defense missile pods they used on Crandall? It’d make sense to send some of them along to help secure the system once Szponder hands it over to them. And suppose he’s sent Sierra Two back across the hyper limit so it can micro-jump across the system to the farther hyper limit? Eighteen minutes would be enough for our freighter friend to translate into hyper, use the local grav wave to kill its velocity, and make the jump ahead of us. The astrogation might be tricky, but it’s doable. And suppose Tremaine intends for that freighter to run ahead of us and deploy a hundred or so of those same missile pods while Sierra One stays close enough on our tail to discourage us from breaking back to avoid them? Somehow I doubt even their military support ships have the fire control to do anything with pods like that, but what if the reason he’s splitting his warships. sending long the cruisers and destroyers, is to provide that fire control?”

“That’s an ugly thought, Sir,” Yountz observed after a moment.

“Indeed. But our Manty may’ve outsmarted himself, too. He’s clearly reacting to the fact that he can’t overhaul us before we cross the limit, despite his higher acceleration rates. But he’s also—as you just observed, Lorne—sending forty-five percent of his warships off to ambush us six hundred million kilometers from where we are right now. And, if that freighter is his ammunition ship, he’s also just sent away a bunch of additional pods he might have deployed against us in the inner system.”

Yountz was nodding, and Tamaguchi pursed his lips. Then he shrugged.

“He’s split his forces, and we’ve got Flight Two Cataphracts. His birds may still be faster than ours, but we’ve got just as much range as he does. In fact, we may have more; no one’s reported any ballistic segments in any of their missile flight profiles, so it’s possible they don’t have that capability. And along with the freighter’s ‘escorts,’ he’s sending away forty-five percent of his missile defense.”

The admiral smiled coldly at his chief of staff.

“We don’t know how big an edge their missiles actually have, but it’s not as big as they probably think it is, especially against the Flight Twos. So if they’re confident enough—arrogant enough—to let us engage half their force in detail, they’re giving us the best chance anyone’s had yet to collect hard reads on how good their hardware really is. And if they aren’t confident enough to let us into range, that will tell us a lot about how good they think their birds are.”

* * *

“Looks like they bought it, Sir,” Harkness observed, and Tremaine nodded.

Forty-one minutes had passed since his task group had gone in pursuit of the Solarians, and HMS Charles Ward, the light cruiser Feng Meng, and all four of Commander Jemima Toulouse’s Culverin-class destroyers had reversed course five minutes earlier.

At ninety percent of military power, Charles Ward’s compensator and impeller nodes, she could have managed six hundred and thirty-five gravities with no cargo pods riding the racks to slow her, but she hadn’t revealed that fact to the Sollies. Alistair McKeon, Lieutenant Commander Jansen Slagle’s light cruiser Rama, and Commodore Priscilla Tanager’s four Rolands, on the other hand, had increased t to eighty-three percent of McKeon’s maximum…which Tremaine devoutly hoped the Sollies would conclude was the best he could do—or was willing to do, at any rate—now that he’d detached the auxiliary which had been “slowing” them. At that rate, the range from McKeon to Tamaguchi’s squadron had increased by 58,644,475 kilometers, but the Sollies’ velocity advantage had fallen from the 26,448 KPS it had been immediately following the start of his pursuit to only 21,297 KPS.

And Tamaguchi had just reversed acceleration. Not only that, he’d increased it considerably—to ninety percent of a Nevada’s maximum military power—which seemed a pretty clear declaration of his resolve to seek battle. He was decelerating back towards Tremaine at four hundred and thirty-nine gravities now, for a closing acceleration of over 10.2 KPS². Assuming they maintained current headings and accelerations, they’d overfly one another in just over two hours at a closing velocity of 61,668 KPS.

Now, what I ought to do, thinking conventionally and assuming I wanted to be smart about this, would be to turn Ginger back around. But the whole object is to convince Tamaguchi I’m not smart. Tremaine smiled mirthlessly. Now if he just doesn’t figure out the real reason our accel’s been so low…

* * *

Winslet Tamaguchi sat in his command chair, gazing at the master plot and the bands of overlaid color which showed engagement ranges. At the moment, his ships were enormously far outside the Manties’ estimated range envelope, but the crimson sphere representing that envelope expanded steadily as the velocity differential between BatCruRon 720 and Sierra One shrank. Paring his compensators’ safety margins so low represented a substantial risk, but if he was going to do this, he wanted the highest closing velocity Tremaine would allow.

The latest estimates from ONI gave the Manties’ missiles a sprint acceleration of 92,000 gravities and a sustained acceleration 46,000 gravities. That was for a reported six-minute burn, which was twice the endurance of any SLN missile drive, even the Cataphract’s. Assuming those numbers were accurate, the 30,000,000-kilometer range ascribed to them was probably equally accurate. On the other hand, no one had yet seen—or no one’s reported seeing, at any rate, he reminded himself—a Manty missile which accelerated, stopped accelerating, and then resumed accelerating. No one had ever managed to build a missile drive that did that, either, and once a missile’s drive burned out and it could no longer maneuver, it had virtually no chance of penetrating alert, active defenses. It didn’t matter what its velocity might be; what mattered was that it was an easy, non-evading target for counter-missiles and point defense…and that its target could maneuver at several hundred gravities to generate a miss. So it was at least possible Manticoran missiles used a single drive whose endurance had somehow been hugely increased rather than separate drives, like the Cataphract. And if that was the case, it meant they weren’t capable of integrating a ballistic phase into their attack profiles…and couldn’t reach beyond that admittedly impressive 30,000,000-kilometer range and still attack effectively.