"And that they're enough tougher she doesn't have to worry about any slick little tricks mere battlecruisers might try against them?" Grantville finished the thought for him with a question.
"Pretty much," Caparelli agreed. "More than that, she may hope we haven't been able to reinforce. In that case, she's going to want to move quickly, before we do send in additional units."
"Do you agree with Mike's assessment about their probable targeting priorities, Sir Thomas?" Elizabeth asked, her fingers caressing Ariel's ears.
"Judging from we've seen of their contingency planning from the databases she captured at New Tuscany, I'd say yes, Your Majesty." The first space lord grimaced. "If it weren't for the wormhole, I'd be positive they were going to jump straight at Spindle. Given the importance of the Lynx Terminus, though, it's pretty much a coin toss. I don't see them splitting up and going after individual star systems in the Quadrant until after they've nailed Tenth Fleet. Not assuming Crandall knows what happened at New Tuscany, at any rate. But the idea of seizing the terminus, holding it to keep us from reinforcing while simultaneously forcing Admiral Gold Peak to come to them if she wants to reopen her line of communications, would have to appeal to a Solly strategist."
"I wish it would ," White Haven muttered, and Caparelli barked a laugh of harsh agreement.
"Hamish is right about that, Your Majesty," he said. "We've got all but one of the forts fully online now. And we've got Apollo system-defense birds deployed in depth to cover them. In fact, we were planning on recalling Jessup Blaine from Lynx to refit his pod-layers with Keyhole-Two and Apollo."
"So you and Hamish are both confident the Lynx Terminus could hold off seventy-one superdreadnoughts if it had to?"
"Your Majesty, at the risk of sounding immodest, the only real question would be how long it took us to blow all seventy-one of them out of space. Those forts were designed to hold that terminus without any outside support against the attack of two hundred and fifty of our own pre-Apollo podnoughts. Now that they have Apollo, their defensive capability's been multiplied many times. We still aren't sure by exactly how much, but it's got to be at least a factor of four."
"Then Admiral Blaine could—" Elizabeth began.
"Admiral Blaine already has, Your Majesty," Caparelli interrupted. "I sent his new orders before I started over to the Palace. If he hasn't already departed for Spindle, he'll be underway within the hour. And even though he doesn't have Apollo, his command would still eat those Solly superdreadnoughts for lunch. And there's one other bit of good news to go with that one—Admiral Gold Peak's Apollo ammunition ships are almost forty-eight hours ahead of the last schedule update she's received."
Elizabeth relaxed visibly, but Ariel raised his head and glanced at White Haven a moment before the earl cleared his throat. The quiet sound drew the queen's attention, too, and an eyebrow rose.
"What Tom just said is completely accurate, Your Majesty," he said, "and I unreservedly support both his analysis and his instructions to Admiral Blaine. The problem is that it's unlikely Blaine could arrive at Spindle before the Sollies do, assuming they come straight from Meyers. So, if they do decide to move against Mike, she's going to have to take them on with what she has, and even if the Apollo pods get there in time, she doesn't have Keyhole-Two or pod-layers."
"And if they hit Mike without Blaine and before the ammunition ships get there, what are her chances?" Elizabeth asked quietly.
"From what I've seen of the tech readouts from their battlecruisers' databases," Caparelli replied for the earl after a moment, "and assuming the count on Crandall's SDs is accurate and Admiral Gold Peak fights as smart as she's always fought before, I'd say her chances range from about even to fairly good. There's no way she could survive in energy range of that many superdreadnoughts—I don't care what class they are—but I very seriously doubt that any Solarian superdreadnought's going to survive to close to energy range. Their missile armaments are light, even by our pre-pod standards, and from our examination of the battlecruisers' counter-missiles and those 'Halo' decoy platforms of theirs, they still don't have a clue what the new missile threat environment really is. For that matter, assuming the stats we've pulled out of the computers are really accurate—which, to be honest, in some instances I find a little difficult to believe—at least two thirds of their reserve fleet's still equipped with autocannon point defense, not lasers."
"You're joking," Langtry said, his expression eloquent of disbelief.
"No, I'm not." Caparelli shook his head for added emphasis. "As I say, it's hard to believe, but that's what the data says. In fact, it looks to Pat's analysts as if they've only just recently really started to become aware of the increased missile threat. From the reports we've had from Second Congo, at least someone in the League's been experimenting with extended-range shipkillers, but whatever Mesa may've told Luft and his lunatics, there's no evidence the one doing the experimenting is the SLN . They're upgrading their current-generation anti-ship missiles, but only marginally, and according to our captured data from Byng, the improvements are to seekers and EW capabilities, not range.
"Defensively, there's some information in the data about something called 'Aegis,' which is supposed to be a major advance in missile defense. As nearly as we can tell, though, what it really amounts to is ripping out a couple of broadside energy mounts, replacing them with additional counter missile fire control and telemetry links, and then using main missile tubes to launch additional canisters of counter-missiles. It's going to thicken their counter-missile fire, but only at the expense of taking several shipkiller missiles out of an already light broadside. And to make things worse from their perspective, their counter-missiles themselves aren't as good as ours; the fire control software we've been looking at was several generations out of date, by our standards, at the start of the last war with Haven; and even on the ships where they've converted the autocannon to laser clusters, they don't appear to have increased the number of point defense stations appreciably."
He shook his head again, his eyes bleak with satisfaction.
"I don't doubt that they've increased their anti-missile capability from what it used to be, Tony," he said. "And it's going to take more missiles to kill their ships than it would have before they did it. But the end result's going to be the same, and if Admiral Gold Peak doesn't have Apollo, she's got at least four missile colliers stuffed full of Mark 23 flatpacks, her shipboard magazines are full of Mark 16s, mostly with the new laserheads, and every one of her Nikes has Keyhole One. Trust me. If this Solly admiral's stupid enough to ram her head into Spindle, Admiral Gold Peak will give her the mother of all migraines. She may not be able to keep Crandall from taking control of the planet's orbitals if she's willing to suck up the losses involved, but she'll be damned lucky if she has ten percent of her ships left when Tenth Fleet runs out of ammo."