Archimedes, Andreas Vesalius, Hipparchus ,Leonardo da Vinci, Gregor Mendel, Marie Curie, Wilhelm Roлntgen, Alfred Wegener, Avicenna, al-Kawarizmi . . . every one of the Alpha launch's twenty-three targets—thirty-two percent of Crandall's total wall of battle—was reduced to splinters and wreckage in that single inconceivable, exquisitely synchronized explosion.
* * *
Sir Aivars Terekhov watched a third of the superdreadnought icons on his plot blink virtually simultaneously from the glaring crimson of hostile units into the purple crosses of dead ships . . . or into nothing at all. His arctic blue eyes didn't even flicker at the proof of how utterly outclassed the Solarian League Navy truly was, but his nostrils flared. He gazed at the display for almost a full minute, absorbing the results, watching the sudden disintegration of the Solarian wall's formation as individual captains tried to avoid the debris of slaughtered consorts or swerved in frantic, independent evasion patterns as the Bravo launch swept towards them. Then he turned to look at Stillwell Lewis.
"Execute Exclamation Point," he said.
"Executing Exclamation Point, aye, Sir!"
Lewis' finger stabbed a key at his console, and twenty seconds later, every one of the Bravo launch missiles detonated as one, millions of kilometers short of their targets.
"Spot the Charlie pods but hold launch," Terekhov said.
"Holding Charlie launch, aye, Sir," Lewis replied, and Terekhov sat back in his chair, waiting.
* * *
Forty-five more seconds ticked past. A minute. Ninety seconds. Then, abruptly, every surviving Solarian starship's wedge went down simultaneously.
Another two and a half minutes oozed into eternity while light-speed limited transmissions sped towards HMS Hercules and Quentin Saint-James . Then—
"Sir," Captain Loretta Shoupe told Augustus Khumalo quietly, "Communications is picking up an all-ships transmission from an Admiral Keeley O'Cleary. She wants to surrender, Sir."
Chapter Twenty-Three
And now , Michelle Henke thought dryly as she stood on Artemis ' flag bridge, hands clasped behind her, and watched the icons of Admiral Enderby's LACs move steadily towards their destinations, for the fun part. I know I shouldn't, but I can't help thinking everything would've been a bunch simpler if O'Cleary just hadn't surrendered for another salvo or two. As it is, we've got a hell of an interesting little problem here .
She snorted, grimacing at her own thoughts, but it was true. And, ironically, the direct consequence of one of the Royal Manticoran Navy's greater advantages.
The one huge problem with the RMN's decision to adopt increased automation in order to reduce its warships' manpower requirements was that it worked even better than anyone had expected. There were very few warm bodies aboard modern Manticoran or Grayson cruisers or destroyers, and even superdreadnoughts had crews smaller than prewar battlecruisers. That was an enormous advantage in Fifth Space Lord Cortez's Sisyphean task of manning the navy's ships, but it also meant the smaller companies of the ships in question found it much more difficult to generate detachments for little things like, oh, boarding parties, for example.
Solarian ships' companies, conversely, were even larger and more manpower-intensive than prewar Manticoran designs had been, and Sandra Crandall had entered the Spindle System with seventy-one superdreadnoughts, each with a ship's company of over six thousand. Even completely ignoring the rest of her task force, that had amounted to the next best thing to a half-million personnel. Tenth Fleet, on the other hand, had nowhere near that many people. A Roland -class destroyer like Naomi Kaplan's Tristram had a total company of less than seventy, and not a single one of them was a Marine. A Saganami-C , like Aivars Terekhov's Quentin Saint-James , was somewhat better off—at least each of them had a hundred and forty Marines available, but that was out of a total crew of only three hundred and fifty-five. For that matter, even one of the lordly Nikes , like her own Artemis , had a company of barely seven hundred and fifty. Which meant the total personnel of all Michelle's warships—including Khumalo's superdreadnought flagship and the four carriers of Stephen Enderby's CLAC squadron and their LAC groups—amounted to barely thirty-two thousand. Crandall's surviving forty-eight superdreadnoughts, alone, carried ten times that many men and women, and that didn't even consider the fifty thousand or so aboard her battlecruisers and destroyers.
Nor did it consider the need to provide search and rescue parties for the nine crippled superdreadnoughts which had not been totally destroyed.
All of which meant she was incredibly shorthanded for dealing with such a stupendous haul of POWs, and she frankly didn't know what she was going to do with all of them. She had nowhere near the hyper-capable personnel lift to transfer them back to the prison camps in the Star Empire currently populated by the personnel of Lester Tourville's Second Fleet. For that matter, she wasn't at all certain those camps, despite their frenetic expansion following the Battle of Manticore, would have had sufficient space for her current catch even if she'd been able to get them there!
Baroness Medusa was scrambling to find someplace to store them, at least temporarily. Unfortunately, no one on Flax had ever contemplated the absurd notion that the planet might suddenly have to absorb the better part of four hundred thousand "visitors" like these, and the governor's options were limited. At the moment, Michelle knew, Medusa was inclining towards the same solution Michelle herself had experienced during her brief stint as a prisoner of war on Haven. Flax possessed several large, uninhabited tropical islands, many with the sorts of climates that evoked Pavlovian salivation from vacation resort developers. There was no housing on them at the moment, but food and water could be transported in, emergency sanitation arrangements could be made, and more permanent housing could be built once the immediate crisis had been dealt with.
No matter what we do, the Sollies're going to scream we've "abused" their personnel by "refusing" to house them properly and deliberately leaving them "exposed to the elements," she thought glumly. But all we can do is the best we can do, and hope the Admiralty can find someplace back home to keep them . . . not to mention the shipping to get them "someplace back home!"
From the perspective of pure combat power, Crandall's task force wasn't even in the same league as Tenth Fleet. In fact, Michelle and her senior tacticians had been shocked by the totality of their own success. They'd deliberately adopted pessimistic assumptions about their ability to penetrate Solarian missile defenses, only to find their most optimistic estimations had fallen short of the reality. Despite everything, she'd been convinced it would take at least several salvos to inflict the sort of damage required to extort a surrender from someone as belligerent and obviously arrogant as Sandra Crandall. She'd certainly never anticipated that Terekhov's opening salvo would shatter its targets so completely.
She was fullyaware of the scale of her victory, andthat her firepower advantage was overwhelming. Yet from the perspective of securing its prizes, Tenth Fleet was in the position of someone who'd chartered a small boat to fish for near-tuna and landed a twelve-meter fluke-shark, instead. An impressive achievement, yes, but what did you do with the thing?