Unfortunately, his orders were to go directly for the Star Empire’s capital world, and that meant attacking Manticore-A.
Yeah, those are the orders. But the people who gave them aren’t here, and you are. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t…modify them in a heartbeat if you really thought it would make a difference.
He snorted mentally, wondering yet again if one reason he’d been chosen for this mission — chosen by his official superiors, not Manpower, that was — was precisely because those superiors realized he’d treat their orders as no more than suggestions if it came down to it. He hoped it was, at any rate, because he’d already decided that was precisely what he was going to do.
I’m sure Manpower does have its reasons for sending me out here, but I’ll be damned if I do a Crandall for them! If this brainstorm of Rajani’s looks like it’ll really work, all well and good. If it doesn’t…Well, sorry about that, Manpower, but we are out of here!
He didn’t much care to contemplate the repercussions of disappointing his “sponsors,” but he liked contemplating the deaths of a couple of million Solarians — including that of one Massimo Filareta — even less.
“All right,” he said finally, turning from the display tank, “does anybody have any last-minute thoughts, inspirations, or concerns we need to discuss before we all grab some sleep?” He smiled thinly and took one hand from a tunic pocket to wave in the direction of the time display which was counting steadily downward towards Eleventh Fleet’s scheduled alpha translation back into normal-space. “We’ve still got a whole ten hours to think about them!”
That evoked the smiles and smothered laughs he’d hoped for. There was an edge of nervousness in some of that laughter, but that was inevitable. More importantly, there was an even stronger edge of…not confidence, perhaps, but something close to it. Or a lot closer to that than to dread, at least. The simulations they’d carried out with their new missiles during the lengthy voyage had a lot to do with that. He still had more unhappy questions than answers about where those missiles had come from — and why — but he had to acknowledge their impact on Eleventh Fleet’s capabilities. He’d been as conservative as he could in evaluating their potential, but by his calculations the pods alone had tripled his wall of battle’s striking power at the very least. And if he was willing to accept a long enough ballistic phase between drive activations, the new missiles had enough endurance, even in the tube-launched version, to give him a powered engagement envelope far in excess of anything his fire control could hope to handle. That had to have gone a long way towards offsetting the range imbalance.
“Seriously,” he continued, allowing his own smile to lapse, “the initiative’s ours. If anybody has had a last-minute thought, we can still put a hold on the operation while we consider it.”
He looked around the faces of his seated staffers and their assistants. Their expressions were sober now, but they met his eyes steadily. Then he surveyed the faces of his task force and senior squadron commanders, looking back at him from the solid wall of com displays. One or two of them looked a bit more nervous, but they, too, returned his measuring gaze levelly, and he nodded.
“Good! In that case, John,” he turned to Admiral Burrows, “let’s just hit the high points one more time.”
“Of course, Sir.”
The portly chief of staff stood and walked around to the lectern at the head of the flag briefing room’s table. Normally he would have remained seated in his usual place, but today was scarcely “normal,” and every man and woman in that compartment or looking in from the display wall knew it.
“The key to our plan is the system’s astrography,” he began formally, entering the command that zoomed in the holo display on Manticore-A and its planets. “In particular, the location of the planet Sphinx.” He entered another command, and a 22-light-minute sphere around the G0-class star suddenly turned amber. “As you can see, Sphinx’s position means that—”
* * *
“Well, better late than never, I suppose.” Mercedes Brigham made a face. “Not that I’m not grateful for the extra prep time, but you’d think even Sollies could hit within, say, a couple of days of their ops schedule.”
“Now, now,” Honor said mildly, studying CIC’s preliminary analysis. “We’ve missed a few operational schedules ourselves, Mercedes.”
“True, Your Grace,” Raphael Cardones agreed. Her flag captain had been standing beside her, studying the flag bridge plot, but now he turned away from it to look at the chief of staff. “And far be it from me to point this out, Commodore, but this is amateurs’ night. This is Battle Fleet, you know. Frontier Fleet might at least have been able to find its backside if it got to use both hands, but these people?” He shook his head. “They sit on their asses while Frontier Fleet does all the work, and you’ve seen the kind of ‘gimme’ sims Lady Gold Peak pulled out of their computers! For somebody with exactly zero real operational experience and such miserable training doctrine, coming this close to meeting their schedule is downright miraculous, when you get down to it.” He smiled sourly. “As a matter of fact, I’m still trying to cope with the surprise that Solly SDs were really able to make it all the way out here in the first place. I didn’t think the engine room hamsters had it in them!”
Honor’s lips twitched unwillingly, but she gave him a moderately stern glower.
“It may be ‘amateurs’ night,’ Rafe, but these people may also be a lot closer to ready for the major leagues than we think. They’ve certainly been given plenty of incentive to…reconsider their training standards, at least. On the other hand, Mercedes,” she looked at the older woman, “Rafe’s got a point. For someone with zero real experience, they’ve done well to hit this close to their deadline.”
Brigham looked back at her for a moment, then nodded.
“You’re probably right, Your Grace — both of you. And either way, they’re here now.”
“And pretty much where we anticipated they’d arrive, Ma’am,” another voice said.
There was more than a hint of satisfaction in Captain Jaruwalski’s observation, and Honor nodded. Not that it had taken a tactical genius to recognize the Sollies’ most probable approach vector.
She wasn’t accustomed to knowing her adversary’s actual instructions before battle was ever joined, but she wasn’t about to complain when it finally happened. Nor was she about to rely blindly on that sort of advantage, which was why she’d copied Michelle Henke’s Spindle tactics and deployed system-defense pods and most of her heavy cruisers and battlecruisers to cover Gryphon, just in case Filareta had chosen to strike that way, instead. Still, despite any insurance policies against unlikely contingencies, she’d been confident in her own mind that he would head straight for Manticore-A, as both his orders and the Solarian Navy’s fundamental strategic doctrine required.
Even so, that had left the question of which of Manticore-A’s inhabited planets he’d choose to attack. In the eleven T-months since Lester Tourville executed Operation Beatrice, Sphinx had moved out of the resonance zone, the conical volume of space between the Junction and Manticore-A in which it was virtually impossible to translate between hyper-space and normal-space. That meant the planet was no longer shielded from a direct approach, which left Honor’s home world — barely 15.3 million kilometers inside the hyper limit — very little defensive depth.
Personally, Honor would have found that very exposure a temptation to attack Manticore rather than Sphinx, on the theory that her opponent would have been forced to deploy her forces to protect the more exposed target. Given the two planets’ current positions, a good astrogator could actually have dropped a fleet back into normal-space closer to Manticore than any mobile units deployed around Sphinx. It would have been riskier in some ways, since attacking the capital planet would require a deeper penetration of the hyper limit. That would make it more difficult to withdraw into hyper if the attacker ran into an unanticipated ambush, yet the potential payoff in catching the defense out of position might well prove decisive.