The distance to the Syndicate mobile forces had been down to eight light-minutes when Marphissa ordered her own warships into their new defensive formation. By the time her warships had reached their assigned positions relative to the freighters, the Syndicate flotilla was only three light-minutes away and coming on at a steady point one light speed, matching Marphissa’s warships.
Three light-minutes at a combined closing speed of point two light would be covered in fifteen minutes.
Marphissa tapped her controls again. “All units in the Recovery Flotilla, this is Kommodor Marphissa. Our primary goal is to protect the freighters. That means forcing the Syndicate mobile forces to break off any attack runs, or, if they maintain attack runs, to disable or destroy those warships before they can get within range of the freighters. Once a Syndicate warship has been forced to break off an attack run, you are not to pursue it. Remain in position where you can intercept other Syndicate attacks. Pursuit is only authorized if a Syndicate warship manages to get past our defensive screen and is actually on a firing run against the freighters. If that happens, that Syndicate warship must be stopped. We have rescued our comrades from imprisonment. Now we must ensure that the snakes do not stop us from getting those comrades home. For the people! Marphissa, out.”
The Syndicate flotilla, badly outnumbered as it was, continued heading straight for an intercept with the freighters, the smooth curve of its vector running straight through the center of the defensive shield set up by Marphissa. The Syndicate ships were in a simple, standard formation, a rectangle with the three light cruisers in the center and the HuKs ranged in front of them. On the display, it looked a bit like a battering ram aimed at the shield of Midway warships. “Is he going to try to blow right through us?” she wondered.
“It’s been tried,” Bradamont commented. “If he did, how much would make it through?”
“If I collapse my defensive shield around his vector and hit him with everything? Not much. But if all he cares about is hitting the freighters, I’m guessing one or two HuKs and one of the light cruisers would get past us unless we scored a lot of lucky hits on him.” Marphissa leaned forward, thinking. “He’s a snake. They don’t worry about how many citizens die. But they do worry about equipment. Ramming through our warships would mean losing a minimum of two-thirds of his force, assuming we didn’t manage to catch and wipe out the survivors after they had managed to hit the freighters. That’s the big question. How badly does he want to hurt those freighters?”
“We don’t know his orders,” Kapitan Diaz pointed out.
“But he’s a snake. He’s in command of the flotilla, meaning he is responding to orders from the senior snake in this star system. What would that senior snake want?”
Diaz made a derisory noise. “He’s a Syndicate CEO, right? So he wants optimum results at minimum or no cost.”
Marphissa nodded. “He’s not going to want to take losses doing this, or at least he’ll want to keep those losses to a minimum. This isn’t a war engagement to them. It’s an internal security action where our losses don’t matter, but they want to keep theirs down.”
“Why is he holding that course, then? We’ll shrink our defensive shield down to hit him with everything when he comes through it. He’ll take heavy losses and not manage to hit the freighters hard.”
“Ah!” Marphissa banged her own fist against her forehead. “That’s what he’s doing! His goal is to get through to the freighters!”
“I thought I said that,” Diaz complained.
“He wants me to concentrate my screening forces! And I’m going to make him think I’m doing that!” Her hands moved across her display, painting new tracks for her ships, fixing that as stage one of a maneuver, then altering the tracks dramatically for stage two. I have to time this right. He needs to think I’m falling for it. “All warships in the Recovery Flotilla, new maneuvering orders are attached. Execute orders at time one seven. Marphissa, out.”
Diaz nodded as he viewed the attachment, then frowned. But he had been trained in the Syndicate system, so he entered the commands into Manticore’s maneuvering systems without asking further questions.
At time one seven, thrusters fired on the cruisers and HuKs of the Midway force, pitching them onto converging courses that would dramatically shrink the size of the defensive shield and allow concentrated fire against the oncoming Syndicate flotilla. What if I’m wrong? Marphissa worried. If I guessed wrong, what happens next will let him get through with a lot more of his mobile forces intact. But I must be right. Sub-CEO Qui may or may not be worried about losses, but he is worried about fulfilling his orders, and he needs his ships intact to do that.
“Five minutes to contact,” the operations specialist announced.
“All units,” Marphissa sent, “engage any Syndicate warship that comes within range. Keep any of them from getting on vectors that intercept the freighters.”
“They’re already in those vectors,” Diaz pointed out.
“Not for long,” Marphissa replied with considerably more confidence than she felt inside.
At two minutes before contact, the second stage of her plan cut in. Thrusters fired again, pitching ships up and outward from the line the Syndicate flotilla would follow to reach the freighters. Even the two heavy cruisers swayed out from a direct intercept of the oncoming Syndicate forces.
Diaz, clearly nerving himself to question her orders, suddenly stared at his display. “What are they doing?”
“What I knew they would do!” Marphissa announced triumphantly.
The Syndicate formation had broken, the individual warships flowering outward in a spreading pattern that would pass above, below, and on all sides of the vector they had been following.
“If we had concentrated around the vector line—” Diaz began.
“They would have passed outward of us on every side! That was Sub-CEO Qui’s plan, to trick us into a compact formation that he would bypass by suddenly spreading out his ships. Now, Kapitan, get one of those light cruisers for me!”
Manticore’s new vector was swinging up and to port, toward the new vector from a Syndicate light cruiser that had bent his vector forty degrees upward to pass over the Midway forces.
Marphissa’s hands flew across her display, ensuring that every Syndicate warship had at least one Midway warship slewing outward to intercept it before it could get past the defensive shield.
Manticore was heading for a light cruiser, Kraken had targeted another, and three of Marphissa’s light cruisers, Harrier, Kite, and Eagle, were swooping down and to the right after the third Syndicate light cruiser. Light cruiser Falcon had a Syndicate HuK in its sights, while the six HuKs of Marphissa’s forces were accelerating onto vectors aimed at the remaining three Syndicate HuKs. The single, rapidly approaching time to contact had dissolved into a dozen different estimates of when different parts of the opposing forces would come within weapons range of each other.
But those estimates began shifting wildly as the Syndicate warships realized that their ploy had failed, and they were facing superior numbers of defenders at every point on the approach to the freighters. Syndicate light cruisers and HuKs bent their vectors even farther, spreading wider and fanning outward to all sides, as they tried to avoid contact with the Midway warships.