Whatever's going to happen, it's going to happen. Too late to change that, and the decision wasn't really yours to begin with, girl. So instead of thinking about what Crandall's too damned stupid to see coming, think about what she is doing right this moment .
Actually, she rather suspected Crandall was doing exactly the same thing she was—staring at icons in a plot. Of course, her own data was far better than anything Crandall could have. Michelle had seeded the entire star system with FTL sensor platforms, and she'd paid special attention to the volume inside the hyper limit, particularly along the plane of the ecliptic. At the moment, her plot was being driven by a highly stealthy platform less than one light-second from Crandall's flagship, and the directional transmissions from the platform were less than five seconds old by the time she saw them on the display. Aside from the actual impeller signatures of Tenth Fleet's ships, any data Crandall had was almost five minutes old. At the moment, that meant little, but when the missiles started to fly, it was going to mean a great deal, indeed.
Thank you, Michael and Sir Aivars , she thought sardonically. And thank you, Admiral Hemphill .
She glanced at the time display. Five minutes had passed since her battlecruiser squadrons reentered normal-space. Crandall clearly had no idea she was already in Michelle's powered range, assuming Michelle was prepared to accept a two-and-a-half-minute ballistic phase between her second and third missile drives. Powered range wasn't necessarily the same thing as accurate range, though, and she wasn't about to waste birds from this far out unless she had to.
The range from Crandall to Khumalo and Terekhov was shrinking steadily, however. And when it fell to three light-minutes . . . .
About another seventeen minutes, Admiral Crandall , Vice Admiral Gloria Michelle Samantha Evelyn Henke thought grimly. Another seventeen minutes .
* * *
"I make it another seventeen minutes, Sir," Commander Pope said quietly, and Aivars Terekhov nodded, then looked at Commander Stillwell Lewis.
"Let's go ahead and spot the alpha launch, Stilt."
"Yes, Sir."
Commander Lewis began inputting commands, and as those commands reached the shoals of pods the withdrawing ammunition ships had left behind, onboard tractors began reaching out from clusters of them. They locked onto the ships designated to control them, moving out of the planetary shadow, settling into launch position. And as if that had been a signal—which it had—the LACs which had been left behind by the CLACs began jockeying into position. If everything went as planned, those LACs wouldn't be needed, except to sweep up the pieces. Neither would Gold Peak's battlecruisers, for that matter. In fact, if everything went as planned, those battlecruisers would represent no more than an insurance policy which hadn't been needed after all. And, possibly, an additional threat to shape the thinking of the Solly CO.
Of course, everything seldom went "as planned," Terekhov thought, remembering his battle plans at Monica and a star called Hyacinth.
He watched Lewis, then glanced over his shoulder at Ensign Zilwicki and his somber mood lightened suddenly. In fact, he found it difficult not to smile, despite the approaching Solarian juggernaut. His extraordinarily youthful flag lieutenant's eyes were bright with concentration, watching everything on Quentin Saint-James ' flag deck. If she'd been a cat, the lashing of her tail would have presented a serious safety hazard.
"Calmly, Helen," he said softly, barely loud enough for her to hear, and she looked at him quickly. Their eyes met, and then she grinned crookedly.
"That obvious, was I, Sir?"
"Let's just say it's reasonably apparent that what you'd really like to be doing just now is Commander Lewis' job."
"Sorry, Sir." She grimaced. "It's just—"
"Just that the last time, you and Abigail were sitting in the hot seats," he acknowledged. "And you will be again, someday. Promise."
"Yes, Sir."
He gave her another smile, then turned back to his own displays and his own thoughts.
Despite the best efforts of both BuWeaps and BuShips, the Royal Manticoran Navy's missile pods kept obstinately proliferating, spinning off one new variant after another, and of late, pod capacity had trended steadily downward. The original "flatpack" pods, which had come in with the final generation of superconductor capacitors, had carried twelve MDMs each. Then along had come the next-generation flatpacks, with internal tractor systems. They'd still managed to keep capacity up to a dozen birds, but only until they'd shifted to the fusion-powered Mark 23. At that point, the designers had been forced to figure out how to cram in the pod's own fusion plant, since its new power budget had to be able to spin up the Mark 23s' plants at launch. The Bureau of Weapons had opted to hold the pod's dimensions constant in order to simplify handling and manufacturing constraints, despite the fact that it had dropped its capacity to only ten Mark 23s.
The reduction in throw weight hadn't been universally popular, particularly since the number of pods each ship carried hadn't magically increased, which left them with a sixteen percent overall reduction in magazine capacity. BuWeaps had argued, however, that the advantages of the new fusion-powered missiles—especially the advantages that kind of power supply made possible for the electronic warfare platforms—and of the new pods' vastly extended capacity for independent deployment more than compensated for the reduction in missiles per pod, especially coupled with the introduction of the Keyhole platforms. Although each pod might carry fewer missiles, Keyhole-based tactics were going to emphasize stacked patterns, anyway. The number of control links the new platforms made available would have required that even with the older style pods, if salvo density was going to be maximized.
But then Apollo had come along, and the Apollo control missile—the Mark 23-E. The Echo was the heart of the Apollo system . . . and big enough that a single Mark 23-E displaced two standard Mark 23s. That had pushed the maximum capacity of a same-dimension pod down to just nine missiles, only eight of which were attack birds. No one had objected to that, given the incredible increase in lethality Apollo made possible, but it had constituted yet another reduction in over all ammunition stowage, so BuWeaps had gone back to work and come up with yet another in the flatpack pod series—the Mark 19.
The Mark 19 was the same size as the Mark 15 and Mark 17 pods, and it contained no more missiles, but its surface contours had been changed significantly. Whereas earlier marks of pods had been symmetrical, the Mark 19 was asymmetrical . Its surface contours had been deliberately designed so that flipping alternate layers of pods allowed them to pack even more flatly into the available volume of the RMN's SD(P)s' missile cores. As a consequence, although the total number of missiles which could be deployed using a single pattern of pods was no greater, the total missile stowage of the existing SD(P) classes had been restored to pre-fusion levels. In fact, it had actually increased by just under four percent.
None of which had any particular relevance to Tenth Fleet at this particular moment, since it had no SD(P)s currently on its order of battle. But the fact that the reserve missile pods for the podnoughts Tenth Fleet was supposed to receive had already arrived had quite a bit of relevance. And despite the fact that not a single one of Michelle Henke's ships mounted Keyhole, and certainly none of them had Keyhole-Two capability, Aivars Terekhov was very happy to settle for only nine missiles per pod.