"Well, I'm sure will be finding out shortly." Crandall smiled tightly. "And when we do, they're going to find out that—"
An alarm sounded, and Ou-yang stiffened in her chair.
"Status change!" she announced sharply. "We have hyper footprints directly astern of the task force, Ma'am!"
Crandall snapped around to the master plot as twenty-one fresh icons flared into existence four and a half light-minutes behind her own ships. Whatever they were, they'd popped out of hyper-space in an exhibition of pinpoint-precise astrogation. Their tightly groupedcrash translation put them right on the limit, approaching it at almost five thousand kilometers per second, and everyone on Joseph Buckley 's flag bridge seemed to hold his or her breath while they waited for the sensor platforms Ou-yang had left behind to identify the newcomers.
Or almost everyone, at least.
"Turnover in fifteen seconds, Ma'am," Haarhuis announced.
Crandall's eyes flicked to the astrogator, then back to the plot, and her expression was grim. Whatever else those new icons might be, they had to be Manticoran warships—warships which had been waiting in hyper until her own force was deeply mired inside the star's hyper limit. And if it should happen that they were superdreadnoughts, her potential losses had just climbed drastically . . . .
"The platforms make it fourteen of those big battlecruisers, what look like four light cruisers, and three ships in the four to five million-ton range," Ou-yang finally announced. The icons in the master plot blinked, changing color and shape to reflect the IDs CIC had assigned to each of them as lightspeed data on their emissions came in. "From their formation and emission s, it looks like the three biggies are probably freighters. Ammunition ships, I'd guess."
Her voice was taut, but it also carried an undeniable note of relief, and Hago Shavarshyan felt his own clenched stomach muscles relax. Crandall said nothing for a moment or two, but then she gave a sharp bark of a laugh.
"Well, I'll give them credit for audacity," she said as Bautista and Ou-yang looked at her. "This Gold Peak's obviously an ambitious bitch, isn't she?" The admiral jutted her chin at the icons beginning to accelerate in-system after her own forces. "And she must've used quite a bit of ingenuity arranging her ambush. But ingenious or not, she's no mental giant!"
Crandall gazed at the plot for a few more seconds, then glanced at Haarhuis.
"Go ahead and make turnover, Barend. Kick our decel to get us back on profile, then drop back to eighty percent."
"Yes, Ma'am," the astrogator acknowledged, and began passing orders as she turned back to Bautista and Ou-yang.
"Like I say, I'll give them marks for audacity," she said with a grim smile, "but falling in love with your own ingenuity can be painful sometimes." Her chuckle was harsh. "Bad enough for them to even think about 'ambushing' someone our size—reminds me of the story about the kid who tried to catch a house cat and wound up catching a tiger!—but they fucked up their timing, too. I don't care how much acceleration advantage they've got, they can't possibly overtake us until well after we've reached the planet and dealt with their friends in orbit."
"Did they screw up their timing, Ma'am?" Ou-yang asked. The admiral gave her a sharp look, and the ops officer shrugged. "I agree with what you just said about their ability to overtake us, but it strikes me as a bit of a coincidence that they should just happen to come in at almost exactly the same time we were scheduled to make turnover."
Crandall considered that for several moments, then grimaced.
"You may be right that the timing was deliberate. I can't imagine what kind of an advantage they'd think it would give them, though. And I don't think we should completely rule out the possibility that it really was a coincidence they hit so close to our turnover point. In fact, I'm still inclined to think that's exactly what it was. We know they've got a range advantage, at least as long as they stick to their missile pods, and we also know from what they did at New Tuscany that they can obviously tow at least a fair number of pods inside their wedges without compromising their acceleration. So what they probably wanted to do was to catch us in-system of them, stuck inside the hyper limit, with them outside us but close enough they could get into their range of us well before we reached the planet. There's no way we could match their acceleration rate, so as long as they were careful about it, they could probably get into their range of us while staying outside our missile range of them , and use their accel advantage to cut back out across the limit and escape into hyper if we reversed course to come after them. That's why I'm pretty sure they screwed the pooch with their timing, because even with the accel rates Gruner reported, they can't catch us with the geometry they've actually got. And they damn sure can't do it before we get to the planet, pound every warship in orbit around it out of space, and bring the entire system's infrastructure—such as it is and what there is of it—into our own range. At which point they've got three options: surrender to keep us from trashing all that infrastructure; go ahead and fight us on our terms, in which case we still wreck their infrastructure and they all get dead; or turn around and run away with their tails between their legs when they run out of missiles."
Ou-yang nodded slowly, although Shavarshyan wasn't at all sure the ops officer shared Crandall's conclusions. Or, at least, that she shared her admiral's confidence. It was fairly obvious to the Frontier Fleet officer that Ou-yang expected Task Force 496 to get hurt a lot worse than Crandall did, yet even the operations officer had to admit that two widely separated forces, each massively inferior to the single enemy force between them, were unlikely (to say the very least) to achieve victory.
* * *
"Well," Michelle Henke said, gazing into the master plot on HMS Artemis ' flag bridge, "at least we know what she's going to do now."
"Yes, Ma'am," Dominica Adenauer said. "Our arrival doesn't seem to have fazed her, does it?"
"Fair's fair." Michelle shrugged. "There's not a lot else she could do, really."
Adenauer nodded, although Michelle sensed her continuing disgruntlement. It wasn't so much that Adenauer disagreed with anything Michel had just said as that the ops officer was accustomed to dealing with Havenite opponents, and no Havenite admiral would ever have ambled this confidently towards a Manticoran foe. The fact that Sandra Crandall was doing just that did not give Dominica Adenauer a flattering estimate of the Solly's IQ.
Michelle shared that opinion, but she also stood by her observation about Crandall's alternatives. Her superdreadnoughts were holding their acceleration to just over three hundred and thirty-seven gravities, in strict accordance with the "eighty percent of maximum power" which was the galactic naval standard inertial compensator safety margin. At maximum military power, they could have managed almost four hundred and twenty-two gravities, but that was it. At eighty percent power, Michelle's trio of four million-ton milspec ammunition ships—HMS Mauna Loa, New Popocatйpetl , and Nova Kilimanjaro —could manage a hundred gravities more than the Solly SDs' maximum military acceleration; running flat out they could manage over six hundred and fifty gravities, while her Nikes could top six hundred and seventy.