Tremaine had opened his mouth, but Shaw had waved his hand before he could speak.
"I'm perfectly well aware that he's promised not to do that sort of thing anymore, Captain Tremaine. Even the best-intentioned can backslide, however, and we'd prefer not to expose him to too much temptation."
Tremaine's own lips twitched in remembered amusement, and he was astonished how much better the memory made him feel.
"All right, Adam," he said, turning to Lieutenant Commander Adam Golbatsi, his operations officer. "You heard Stilson."
"Yes, Sir. I'm on it," Golbatsi acknowledged.
"Good." Tremaine looked at Harkness. "Any change in their EW, Chief?"
"No, Sir. Not so's you'd notice." Harkness shrugged. "I know we didn't get complete stats on their wallers at New Tuscany, Skipper, but so far, these guys don't look to have anything better than Byng had. Or, if they do, they haven't bothered to bring it to the party yet."
"I have t' agree with Chief Harkness, Sir," Commander Francine Klusener, Tremaine's chief of staff said, looking up from her own console.
If there'd been anyone on his staff who might have had his or her nose put out of joint by finding a mere warrant officer in the staff electronic warfare officer's slot, Tremaine would have bet on Klusener. Not because the fair-haired, gray-eyed commander was anything but highly intelligent and competent in her own right. She was, however, by far the most nobly born of any of his staffers, with an accent that was almost as languid and drawling as Michael Oversteegen's. Fortunately, that was the only thing about her anyone could have accused of languor, and she and Harkness had actually hit it off very well from the beginning.
"I've been lookin' at th' take from th' platforms," she continued now. "Assumin' these people have th' brains God gave a gnat—not that th' evidence so far available would suggest they do , you understand—they ought t' be pullin' out all th' stops after what happened t' Byng. Better safe than sorry, after all." She shrugged. "If they are, then I don't think th' attack birds are going t' have much problem lockin' up th' real targets."
"Compared to Peep EW?" Harkness shook his head with an evil smile. "Not hardly, Ma'am! These people're toast , if that's the best they've got."
"Let's not get carried away with our own enthusiasm, Chief," Tremaine said mildly.
"No, Sir," Harkness agreed dutifully.
Chapter Twenty-One
"Coming up on turnover in two minutes, Ma'am."
Sandra Crandall looked up from a conversation with Pйpй Bautista as her astrogator, Captain Barend Haarhuis, made the announcement, one hundred and fourteen minutes after her task force had started in-system. Its velocity relative to the planet Flax had increased to just over twenty-three thousand kilometers per second, and the range was down to a bit over eighty-one million kilometers, and Crandall nodded in satisfaction. Then she looked at Ou-yang Zhing-wei.
"Any more movement out of them?".
"No, Ma'am," Ou-yang replied. "We're picking up more of those grav pulses, though. And I'm still a bit concerned about this volume here."
She indicated a large-scale display of the space immediately about Flax. A zone directly on the far side of the planet was highlighted in amber, and Crandall glanced at the indicated area, then grimaced.
"The pulses have to be from that damned FTL com of theirs," she said with an impatient shrug. Her tone was irritated, perhaps even a bit petulant, as if she still didn't much care for admitting the Manties really had developed a practical faster-than-light means of communication. Unfortunately, even she had been forced to admit that what had happened at New Tuscany demonstrated that they had.
"At the moment, though," she continued, "all it really means is that they may be getting recon information on us a little quicker than we're getting it on them. It's not going to change the odds any. And unless they've magically teleported in reinforcements directly from Manticore, I'm not especially worried about what they may be hiding in that uncertainty volume of yours, either, Zhing-wei. There wasn't anything particularly scary in there before we started in, after all."
"No, Ma'am," Ou-yang concurred. An outside observer might have detected a smidgeon less than total agreement in her tone, however, Hago Shavarshyan thought. "On the other hand," she continued a bit diffidently, "we never did get a resolution on those sensor ghosts. And we've got these other impeller sources over here."
She dropped a cursor onto the master display, indicating the sextet of impeller wedges their remotes had picked up thirty-six minutes earlier. They hadn't been able to get a solid read on whatever was generating those impeller signatures, but from the wedge strength, whatever they were, they were well up into the multimillion-ton range . . . despite the ridiculously high acceleration numbers they were putting out.
"Freighters," Bautista said dismissively. Ou-yang looked at the chief of staff, and he shrugged. "That's all they can be, Zhing-wei. Oh, I'll grant you they're fast. They must be fleet auxiliaries to pull that accel—probably supply ships; maybe repair ships—but they sure as hell aren't war ships! With their assumed masses, they'd have to be superdreadnoughts, and with us bearing down on them this way, why run with six of them and leave number seven behind with nothing but cruisers to support it?"
"What I'm worried about is why they waited this long to run in the first place," Ou-yang said rather more sharply than she normally spoke to Bautista.
"Waiting until they figured out we really weren't bluffing, probably," he replied with another, slightly more impatient shrug. "Or maybe just waiting until they were sure all our units were headed in-system, without leaving any light units outside the limit to micro jump around the hyper sphere and pounce when they come out the other side."
"Or maybe until they'd finished offloading their cargo," Ou-yang said pointedly. Bautista arched an eyebrow, and the ops officer inhaled deeply.
"We've all agreed the missiles they used on Jean Bart had to come from pods , Pйpй," she pointed out. "To get that kind of range, they have to be bigger than their battlecruisers' tubes can manage, right?" Bautista nodded, and it was her turn to shrug. "Well, I don't know about you, but I have to wonder how many pods six 'freighters' that size can transport. And I also have to wonder why it is that all of a sudden any recon drone we steer into a position to take a look at the planet's shadow is getting blown right out of space."
"You think they've stockpiled pods in that volume?" Crandall asked, intervening before Bautista could respond to Ou-yang's "God-give-me-strength" tone.
"I think there's some reason they don't want us seeing in there, Ma'am." The ops officer shook her head. "And I agree with Pйpй that they wouldn't be sending away six ships-of-the-wall when we'll be into missile range of the planet in another hour and a half—not unless they were going to pull all of their ships out, at least. On the other hand, whatever these things are, their stealth and EW are good enough we couldn't get firm resolution on them—not even confirmation they were really there—until they lit off their impellers. So I think we have to look very carefully at the possibility that our departing bogies hung around, using EW to play hide and seek with our platforms until we actually started in-system, then pulled out after unloading some cargo that didn't have the same kind of stealth capability. Something we might've picked up if they'd just dumped it into orbit earlier. And if they've left something on the far side of the planet that they don't want us getting a good look at, missile pods are certainly the first possibility that leaps to my mind when I start thinking about that."