Stay out of energy range, hell , Michelle thought astringently. I'm going to stay clear out of her missileenvelope, too!
"I wonder if Crandall's superstitious?" she mused. Adenauer looked up from the plot and raised one eyebrow, and Michelle chuckled coldly.
"You didn't recognize her flagship's name, Dominica?"
The ops officer shook her head, and it was Lecter's turn to chuckle.
"This is the sixth Joseph Buckley they've built," she said, "and I've got to wonder why even Sollies haven't learned from that much history. It hasn't been exactly the luckiest name in the SLN's history."
"Well, fair's fair, Cindy," Michelle pointed out. "They didn't name any of them for the luckiest scientist in history, either."
"Is that your understatement for the day, Ma'am?" Lecter asked, and this time Adenauer chuckled, too, as the name finally clicked for her, as well.
Dr. Joseph Buckley had been a major figure in the development of the original impeller drive on Beowulf in the thirteenth century. Unhappily, he hadn't been one of the more fortunate figures. He'd been a critical part of the original developmental team in 1246, but he'd had a reputation among his peers even then for being as eratic as he was brilliant, and he'd been determined to prove it was accurate. Although Adrienne Warshawski was to develop the Warshawski sail only twenty-seven years later, Buckley had been too impatient to wait around. Instead, he'd insisted that with the proper adjustment, the impeller wedge itself could be safely inserted into a hyper-space gravity wave.
Although several of his contemporaries had acknowledged the theoretical brilliance of his work, none had been prepared to endorse his conclusions. Unfazed by his peers' lack of confidence, Buckley—whose considerable store of patents had made him a wealthy man—had designed and built his own test vessel, the Dahak , named for a figure out of Babylonian mythology. With a volunteer crew embarked, he'd set out to demonstrate the validity of his work.
The attempt, while spectacular, had not been a success. In fact, the imagery which had been recorded by the Dahak 's escorts still turned up in slow motion in HD compilations of the most awe-inspiring disaster footage in galactic history.
While Buckley undeniably deserved to be commemorated alongside such other greats as Warshawski and Radhakrishnan, and despite the huge body of other work he'd left behind, it was the dramatic nature of his demise for which he was best remembered. And his various namesakes in SLN service had fared little better than he himself had. Of the current ship's predecessors, only one had survived to be withdrawn from service and decommissioned.
"Actually, only three of them were lost on active service, Cindy," Michelle pointed out.
"Four, if you count the battlecruiser, Ma'am," Lecter argued respectfully.
"Well, all right. I'd forgotten about her." Michelle shrugged. "Still, I don't think it's exactly fair to blame the 'Buckley Curse' for a ship lost 'to causes unknown', though."
"Why? Because having witnesses makes it more final? Or because faulty fusion bottles and wedge-on-wedge collisions are more spectacular?"
"They're certainly more in keeping with the original's final voyage," Michelle pointed out.
"All right, I'll grant that much," Lecter agreed. "And, actually, I suppose losing only four of them—or three, if we go with your list—in the better part of seven hundred T-years probably isn't really proof the Curse exists. And I'm not an especially superstitious gal myself. But having said all that, I wouldn't care to serve aboard one of them! And especially not"—her smile disappeared and her eyes darkened—"if I was sailing into what promised to be ugliest war my navy'd ever fought."
"Neither would I," Michelle acknowledged. "On the other hand, she doesn't think that's what she's doing, now does she?"
* * *
Sir Aivars Terekhov sat in his command chair on HMSQuentin Saint-James ' flag bridge and thought about the last time he he'd taken a Saganami-C -class heavy cruiser into combat. By most navies' standards, the odds he faced were even worse this time, but he wasn't really interested in most navies' standards. Unlike Ou-yang Zhing-wei and Hago Shavarshyan, he knew precisely what those ten "sensor ghosts" they'd been picking up actually were.
Four of them were the CLACs Pegasus, Hippogriff, Troll , and Goblin , with the next best thing to four hundred LACs embarked. As stealthy as the Manticoran Alliance's light attack craft were, four CLACs were much smaller sensor targets than all those LACs would have been if they'd been deployed, which meant they could be more readily concealed or, at least, that their natures could be readily disguised, while they remained in their shipboard bays.
Two more of the "ghosts" were ammunition ships, stuffed to the deckhead with Apollo missile pods crammed full of fusion-powered Mark 23 and Mark 23-E MDMs. And the other four were Scotty Tremaine's cruisers: Alistair McKeon, Madelyn Hoffman, Canopus , and Trebuchet.
You just keep right on coming, Admiral Crandall , Terekhov thought coldly. You don't even begin to realize just how much you've got us exactly where we want you . . . but you're about to find out .
"Sir, Admiral Khumalo would like to speak to you," Lieutenant Atalante Montella, his communications officer, said quietly.
"Put him on my display, Atalante."
"Yes, Sir."
A moment later, Augustus Khumalo's face appeared on the tiny com screen deployed from Terekhov's command chair.
"Good afternoon, Sir," he said.
"Good afternoon, Aivars," Khumalo acknowledged. The admiral looked considerably calmer than Terekhov suspected he actually was, and there was little sign of tension in his deep voice.
"As you can see," Khumalo continued, "our friend Crandall at least has the virtue of punctuality."
"I suppose anyone has to have at least some positive qualities, Sir."
"You may have been disabused of that supposition by the time you're my age," Khumalo replied with a thin smile. "At any rate, assuming she maintains her current acceleration and heads for a zero/zero intercept with the planet, she probably expects to be joining us here in about four hours. Of course, she doesn't expect any of us to still be alive when she gets here."
"Life is full of disappointments, Sir."
"My own thought exactly." Khumalo's teeth showed briefly. Then he twitched his shoulders in a sort of abbreviated shrug. "Admiral Enderby is launching his birds now. As soon as they're all clear of the bays, he'll pull the carriers further back in-system to keep them out from underfoot, and Commander Badmachin is rolling pods. Unless Admiral Gold Peak decides differently, it looks like we'll be going with Agincourt."
"Understood, Sir."
"In that case, I'll leave you to it," Khumalo said with a nod. "Khumalo, clear."
He disappeared from Terekhov's com screen, and Terekhov returned his attention to Quentin Saint-James ' master plot. In many ways, he supposed, Oversteegen's Nikes might have been a better choice than his own heavy cruisers, given that the Nike was equipped with Keyhole, and the Saganami-C wasn't. In fact, before the ammunition ships Aetna and Vesuvius had arrived with their massive loads of Apollo pods, the Nikes would have been in orbit around Flax while the Saganami-Cs played the part of the beaters coming along behind the quarry. The cruisers still had a lot of control links, however. Almost certainly enough of them, coupled with Apollo, to show Crandall the error of her ways.