"If it's headed for Samovar," Allworth went on, "the geometry of its vector is going to take it out of the drone’s reach without its ever coming close enough for us to get any sort of a mass estimate from its impeller signature."
"Hm." Luchner rubbed his chin for a moment. "Assume that it is a contact and that it's headed in-system. Who'd be in the best position to intercept?"
"Normally, I'd say Nuada, Citizen Exec, but the sensor snafu would make things tough for her. The contacts barely sixty-six million klicks from her, but its also smack in the middle of the area we're watching for her. Without her gravitic array, she probably hasn't picked up a thing, and if it's headed for Samovar, it's accelerating almost straight away from her. She could probably run down a merchant ship, but even if she cuts her pods loose, just about any kind of warship should have the accel to stay away from her with the kind of head start this one will have."
"Which means we probably can't intercept in the outer zone," Luchner observed. "Which leaves Dirk."
"Yes, Citizen Exec," Allworth confirmed, and Luchner frowned again as he digested the information.
Technically, what happened in Nuada's zone was her responsibility. Katana had her own sector to look after, and if she horned into someone else's interception problem and things went wrong, Luchner, or, rather, Citizen Captain Zachary, would make a convenient scapegoat. But Luchner possessed information Citizen Captain Turner didn't have, and that imposed a responsibility that cut across technical lines of authority. Or it did in Citizen Admiral Tourville’s command, anyway, and Luchner rubbed his chin gently as he made himself look at the situation through Tourville’s eyes.
The task group had too few ships to set up complete coverage, so Shannon Foraker had created a layered ambush to cover most likely arrival vectors. Anything that came in somewhere else would probably escape, but anything that translated back into n-space on a logical course would find evasion a much tougher proposition. So far the task group had managed to run down everyone who'd arrived in Adler since the system's change in management, though Nuada's hardware glitches threatened to throw a spanner into the works now. Luchner hoped that wouldn't come home to haunt Turner and his crew, but he made himself set that thought aside while he considered how the intercept effort was most likely to develop.
Like Katana, PNS Dirk, the ship responsible for the middle interception zone in Turner’s sector, was one of the older Sword-class ships. That was why the ops plan relegated her to the inner, less risky station and assigned the bigger Nuada to play the role of beater, closing in from three and a half light-minutes beyond the hyper limit to cut any target's retreat. The Mars class were expected to come as a nasty surprise to the Manties: almost as large as some of the PN's prewar battlecruisers, they took full advantage of the improved EW systems the Navy had acquired from its contacts in the Solarian League... and by reducing magazine space they'd also managed to pack in nearly twice the broadside of a Sword-class ship but gave up less than twenty gravities in maximum acceleration to do it.
But however powerful Nuada was, her hardware faults meant she didn't know what Katana had just discovered. Without that knowledge, she wouldn't leave her station to pursue the possible contact, which would leave Dirk to cope with whatever it was on her own, and that could be bad. Not only could she find herself outclassed in a single-ship action, if in fact the contact was a Manty warship, but unlike Katana, the ships in the inner zone relied on the outer pickets to pick up incoming traffic. That meant Dirk would have deployed neither RDs nor missile pods.
"What's the current com delay to Nuada?" he asked after a moment.
"Twenty-two minutes, Citizen Exec."
"And the range from the target to Dirk?"
"Approximately eighteen-point-three light-minutes." Luchner nodded again, then walked back to the command chair at the center of the bridge. He leaned over without seating himself, punched a com key, and waited until the small screen flicked alight with the image of Citizen Captain Helen Zachary. A moment later, the screen divided neatly in half down the center as Citizen Commissioner Kuttner dropped into the circuit. "Yes, Fred?" Zachary said.
"We've got a possible contact in Nuada's sector, Citizen Captain," the exec replied. He summarized Allworth's report, then went on, "With your permission, Citizen Captain, I'd like to alert Nuada and Dirk for an Alpha Intercept. We're only fifteen light-minutes from Dirk, so our transmission should reach her long before a ship accelerating after translation enters her sensor range, and if Nuada cuts her pods loose and goes to max accel as soon as she gets the word, she should have a pretty fair chance of intercepting the bogey if it tries to break back out across the limit. But since she will have to leave her pods behind to have a shot, I'd also like to alert Raiden and Claymore to support her and Dirk in case this is a battlecruiser or something even heavier."
"Hm." Zachary scratched the tip of her nose. "How much delay would we build in if we simply alerted Turner and let him handle it?' she asked. She and Luchner both already knew the answer to that; she was asking it only to be sure the answer was officially on record before they stuck their necks out.
"Nuada's about twenty-two light-minutes from us and eighteen from Dirk," Luchner replied. "It would take Turner at least forty minutes from the moment we send him the alert to pass it on to Dirk, and another two minutes to hit Raiden and Claymore. If we pass the word to the others at the same time we inform Nuada, we'll cut a minimum of thirteen minutes off the time for every one of the other ships, but our current geometry will let us take a full nineteen minutes off the time for Dirk."
"That sounds to me like ample justification for sticking our oar in," Zachary said, and shifted her eyes to meet Kuttner’s on her own com screen. "Citizen Commissioner?"
"I agree. And we should probably alert Count Tilly, as well."
"Yes, Sir," Luchner said respectfully, forbearing to mention that standing orders required any contact to be reported to the flagship. Kuttner ought to know that, he'd certainly been present often enough when it was discussed, but it could be unwise to remind people's commissioners of things they were supposed to know.
"Very well, Fred. See to it. And keep us informed of any further developments," Zachary said.
"Yes, Citizen Captain." Luchner killed the circuit and turned to the com officer of the watch. "Fire up your transmitter, Hannah," he said.
Chapter Fifteen
"Still nothing from Commodore Yeargin?" Alistair McKeon asked. Forty minutes had passed since Prince Adrian's translation back into normal-space. She'd moved almost two and a quarter light-minutes deeper into the Adler System, her velocity was up to 21,400 KPS, and the silence of her com section had become more than merely puzzling a half-hour ago.