"Better," Bruckheimer said a bit more conversationally. Then he cocked his head to one side, his eyes compassionate. "Commodore-Arakel-you just got dropped straight into the crapper through absolutely no fault of your own. If they'd waited another three weeks, we'd have had some significant reinforcements waiting for them. But they didn't, and you don't have a single capital ship under your command. There are exactly twenty-six Cimeterres in this entire star system; I know even better than you just how thin our missile pods are stretched; and you've got less than half your own squadron present for duty. There's no way you're going to stop this with three destroyers, and," Bruckheimer's voice hardened around the edges once more, "if you try-and survive the experience-I will personally see you court-martialed. Do I make myself clear?"
"Yes, Sir," Hovanian said after a long, still moment. "Yes, Sir. You do."
"Good." Bruckheimer ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair and grimaced. "We're going to have to come up with some sort of response to this strategy of theirs, but I'm damned if I know what the Octagon's going to do about it. In the meantime, get your people out of here before they all get killed."
"Aye, Sir," Hovanian said. He nodded to Stokely, who began issuing the necessary orders, then looked back at Bruckheimer. "And... thank you, Sir," he said to the man who had just saved his life.
"I wonder what other systems they're hitting today?" Admiral Bressand said.
"Maybe they aren't hitting any other systems, Sir," Commander Claudette Guyard, his chief of staff said.
"Oh, please, Claudette!" Bressand shook his head.
"I didn't say I thought they weren't, Sir. I just pointed out a possibility."
"Theoretically, anything is possible," Bressand said. "Some things, however, are more likely-or, conversely, less likely-than others."
"True, but-"
Guyard paused as Lieutenant Commander Krenckel appeared quietly at her elbow.
"Yes, Ludwig?" she said.
"We've confirmed it," Bressand's ops officer said. "Assuming they haven't decided to try to spoof our identification for some reason, two of those ships are definitely a pair of the Invictuses that hit Hera. I'm guessing one of them is the Manties' Eighth Fleet's flagship."
"Which means we probably are about to play host to 'the Salamander' herself," Guyard observed. "There's an honor-you should pardon the pun-I could have done without."
"You and me both," Bressand said, remembering his conversation with Poykkonen. "Not that it's going to take any tactical genius to kick the crap out of us with this kind of force imbalance."
"Maybe not, Sir," Krenckel said. "On the other hand, there's a sort of backhanded compliment in getting pounded by the other side's best."
"Did I ever mention that you're a very strange man, Ludwig?" Guyard asked.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
"It looks like we caught them with their pants down, doesn't it?" Vice Admiral Dame Alice Truman observed as her Task Force Eighty-One accelerated steadily in-system towards Vespasien, the inhabited planet of the Chantilly System.
"Yes, it does," Michelle Henke agreed from the vice admiral's com. "Of course, I have this sneaky suspicion that it's supposed to look that way."
"Why, Admiral Henke! I hadn't realized you had such a broad streak of paranoia."
"It comes from associating with people like you and Her Grace," Henke said dryly. Then she continued more seriously. "As Honor keeps pointing out, the Peeps aren't stupid. And this time around, they don't have political masters insisting they act as if they were. They haven't had time to reinforce heavily, but Chantilly is a jucier target than Gaston was. It should have been more heavily defended to begin with, and they sure as hell had more hyper-capable units in-system than the three destroyers our arrays have picked up. Which suggests to my naturally suspicious mind that as soon as they realized we'd inserted those arrays, they went to full-court stealth on their main combatants."
"It's what I'd do," Truman agreed. She drummed lightly on the arm of her command chair for a few moments, then shrugged. "Our arrays are good, but their stealth systems have gotten a lot better, and any star system represents a huge volume. If you were going to hide your defensive task force, where would you put it?"
"It's got to be close enough to protect the near-planet platforms," Henke replied. "Ninety percent of the system's industry's concentrated there, so there's no point deploying to defend any other area. Greyhound and Whippet swept the entire volume on this side of Vespasien very carefully, though. Even assuming they were stealthed, our arrays probably would have spotted them. But they have to base their deployment plans on the probability that we'll go for a least-time approach and figure they'll adjust if we do something else, instead. So, if I were looking for a good hiding place, I'd probably put my units on this side of the primary, but inside Vespasien's orbit. Far enough in-system the other side's remotes would have to do a fly-by on the planet, and all of the bunches and bunches of recon platforms of my own I'd have concentrated covering the inner system, before they could see me. But close enough so I could build an intercept vector headed out to meet an attack short of the planet."
"More or less what I was thinking," Truman murmured.
"To be perfectly honest, I'm less concerned about their warships than I am about their pre-deployed pods," Henke said. "They didn't have a huge number of them in Gaston, but that's the most cost-effective area-denial system they've got. And we found out in Gaston that they're a lot harder to spot than we thought they'd be. It's pretty obvious-assuming we're right about where their starships are-that whoever's in command here's a pretty cool customer. Sneaky, too. I don't like to think about what someone like that could do with a big enough stack of system defense pods if she put her mind to it."
"Do you think their scouts spotted us, Ivan?"
"It's too soon to say, Ma'am," Commander deCastro replied. "If they got close enough, if they looked in the right direction-if they got lucky-then, yes. They probably know exactly where we are. But nothing Leonardo's sensor crews have picked up suggests they did."
And we both know it's not going to make a lot of difference, either way, he thought, looking affectionately at his admiral.
"I guess it's just the principle of the thing," Admiral Bellefeuille said whimsically, as if she'd heard what he carefully hadn't said. "Whether it does any good or not, knowing we managed to at least surprise them would do wonders for my own morale."
"Well, in that case, let's assume they're surprised until and unless we know differently, Ma'am."
"So I want you to take point, Captain ," Michelle Henke said.
"I'm honored," the tall, gangly man at the other end of the com link drawled in a maddening aristocratic accent. "Be interestin' t' see how well she does in her first action, too."
"She's got a lot to live up to," Henke said.
"I know," Captain (senior grade) Michael Oversteegen agreed. "In fact, I believe someone may have mentioned t' me in passin' that the last Nike's first captain and XO had a little somethin' t' do with that."
"We tried, Captain. We tried."
Despite Oversteegen's sometimes infuriating mannerisms and sublime-one might reasonably say arrogant-self-confidence, Henke had always rather liked him. The differences between their families' political backgrounds only made that liking even more ironic, as had the fact that their fathers had loathed one another cordially. But not even the Earl of Gold Peak had ever questioned Michael Oversteegen's competence or nerve, and she was glad he was senior to Captain Franklin Hanover, Hector's CO. She liked Hanover, and he was a good, solid man. But he wasn't Michael Oversteegen, and Oversteegen's seniority gave him command of Henke's third division. If ever there'd been a case of the right man in the right place, this was it, and she watched Nike and Hector crack on a few more gravities of acceleration.