"Well," Khumalo said with more than a little regret, "I suppose it's time." He raised his voice slightly. "Communications, pass the word to Tristram . Instruct Commander Kaplan to execute Paul Revere. Then contact Commodore Terekhov and inform him that Code Yankee is now in effect. Captain Saunders," he looked down at the command chair com display tied into Hercules ' command deck, "tactical command is passing to Commodore Terekhov at this time."
"Yes, Sir," Vicotria Saunders replied, and he sat back in his chair. Much as it galled him to admit it, Quentin Saint-James ' fire control was far better suited to manage modern missile fire than his aged flagship's antiquated systems. He'd actually considered shifting his flag in order to exercise tactical command himself, and a part of him wished he had, even now. But efficiency was more important than getting his own combat command ticket punched. And Augustus Khumalo was too self honest to pretend he was in Aivars Terekhov's league as a combat commander.
* * *
"Signal from Hercules , Ma'am," Lieutenant Wanda O'Reilly announced. "Execute Paul Revere."
"Acknowledged," Naomi Kaplan replied. O'Reilly was the closest thing HMS Tristram 's officer complement had to a genuine problem child, but there was no trace of her occasional petulance in that crisp report. Kaplan gave her a nod of approval, then looked at Abigail Hearns.
"Is your sensor data fully updated, Guns?"
"We're just finishing an update from Commodore Terekhov now, Ma'am," Abigail replied, watching the waterfall graphic rising steadily on one of her side displays. "Estimate fifteen seconds to complete the upload."
"Very well." Kaplan turned to Lieutenant Hosea Simpkins, her astrogator and, like Abigail, one of her Grayson officers. "Astro, unless Tactical's update hits a glitch, execute Paul Revere in twenty-five seconds."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Execute Paul Revere in twenty-five seconds from . . . now."
* * *
Tristram disappeared from normal-space forty light-minutes outside the Spindle hyper limit without fuss or bother. Unlike the translation from hyper-space into normal-space, a stationary upward translation left no betraying footprint behind, and she materialized almost exactly where she was supposed to be in the alpha bands.
"Fleet challenge, Ma'am!" O'Reilly announced.
"Reply," Kaplan ordered calmly.
"Replying, aye, Ma'am," the com officer acknowledged, and triggered Tristram 's transponder code.
That transponder had been locked down, for fairly obvious reasons, while the destroyer hid outside Crandall's massive task force. And while Kaplan didn't really anticipate any itchy trigger fingers among the rest of Tenth Fleet's tactical officers, she still felt a profound sense of relief when HMS Artemis acknowledged her identity. Unlike Sandra Crandall, Naomi Kaplan had an excellent appreciation of just how much firepower was waiting for her.
"Very well, Guns," she said, once Tristram 's right to be there had been confirmed. "Send the data."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Sending now."
* * *
"Lord, what an arrogant bitch," Michelle Henke said quietly, standing between Dominica Adenauer and Cynthia Lecter as the three of them studied the data Tristram had just transmitted to Artemis .
"And this is a surprise because—?" Lecter asked equally quietly, and Michelle snorted in bitter amusement.
"More a case of a confirmation I didn't really want," she acknowledged "I did think she might at least inform the Governor her time limit had officially expired, though."
"With all due respect, Ma'am, I don't see where it makes much difference." Lecter twitched her shoulders slightly. "It's obvious the same people who picked Byng also picked her, and whether she's here as a knowing cat's-paw or got selected because she's just as stupid as he was, we all knew what she was here for from the outset."
Michelle nodded. And Cindy was right. She had known why Crandall was here, and all of her own planning had been predicated on that knowledge. Yet that didn't diminish the undeniable flicker of fury she felt as she contemplated Crandall's dismissive arrogance.
No, that's not being quite fair to yourself, girl , she thought. Sure, part of you is pissed off because even though the overconfident idiot is doing exactly what you predicted when you made your own plans—exactly what you wanther to do, if she's stupid enough to attack in the first place—you resent being taken so lightly. Because it's part and parcel of the kind of arrogance you've seen out of so many Sollies. But what really pisses you off is that she doesn't give a single solitary damn about all the people she's about to get killed. Of course , her lips skinned back in a hexapuma's hunting snarl, at the moment she's thoroughly convinced that none of the people in question are going to be hers. And she doesn't know she took long enough getting here for the Apollo pods to beat her, either .
Her smile turned even thinner and colder for a moment as she contemplated how the arrival of those pods had changed her initial defensive planning. But then she put that reflection aside and concentrated on the data in front of her. There hadn't been any changes she could see, although a few additional details had been added to the initial report HMS Ivanhoe had delivered three days ago. Mostly little stuff, like additional data on individual ships' electronic and gravitic emissions.
As she'd expected, the various destroyers' emissions signatures varied widely, which wasn't surprising given how much the Rampart and War Harvest classes had been refitted over their lifetimes. The heavier ships' emissions were much closer to their "book" profiles, though. Hercules ' CIC had easily tagged the individual units of Rear Admiral Gordon Nelson's battlecruiser squadron, since they'd lifted his ships' electronic fingerprints out of the data they'd captured from Byng's task force. And although they didn't have hard individual IDs on the other battlecruiser squadron, it was obvious all of them were Nevadas .
There was an impressive uniformity among the superdreadnoughts, as well. All but seven of them were Scientist -class ships, and all seven of the others were members of the Vega class, which were basically only repeat Scientists with a couple of additional missile tubes in each broadside. By the standards of the prewar Royal Manticoran Navy, they weren't that bad a design, although the first of the Scientists had been built long enough ago that they'd still been equipped with projectile-firing point defense systems. At least all of these ships seemed to have been upgraded to laser clusters since, judging from the detailed passive scans Augustus Khumalo's Ghost Rider platforms had pulled in. And it was painfully obvious that even now the Sollies didn't begin to grasp just how capable—and stealthy—the Ghost Rider recon drones actually were. To be sure, the really close passes had been purely ballistic, with no active emissions to betray their presence, but even so they shouldn't have been able to get in close enough to literally read ships' names off their hulls without someone noticing something .
Don't complain , she told herself firmly, and considered the armament readouts on Crandall's ships.
The Scientists were 6.8 million-ton units with thirty-two missile tubes, twenty-four lasers, and twenty-six grasers in each broadside. That was a heavier—or, at least, more numerous—energy broadside than any modern Manticoran or Grayson superdreadnought would have mounted. On the other hand, they had only sixteen counter-missile tubes and thirty-two point defense stations in each broadside, whereas Artemis , although technically only a battlecruiser, had thirty-two CM tubes and thirty much heavier and much more capable point defense clusters. Even the Saganami-Cs had twenty tubes and twenty-four clusters in each broadside, and given the fact that Michelle Henke had absolutely no intention of straying into energy range of her opponents, that imbalance was just likely to prove fatal for Admiral Sandra Crandall.