What I’d like to do is squash him like a pimple, she thought. But then she gave a mental snort. Not like he’s the first arrogant civilian you’ve had to take orders from, Oxana! And at least the Manties only sent along light cruisers. However…questionable his strategy may be, you’ve got more than enough force advantage to keep a lid on the situation.
“Thank you for getting this information to me so promptly,” Dueñas continued after a moment. “I need to confer with my people here in Kernuish. Please keep us apprised of any additional information that comes your way.”
“Of course, Governor.”
* * *
“What do you think, Cicely?” Damián Dueñas asked two minutes later.
“Probably the same thing you do,” Lieutenant Governor Cicely Tiilikainen replied from his com, and shrugged. “Dubroskaya’s right—they have to be Manties, with that acceleration rate.”
“But why haven’t they said anything yet?” Dueñas wondered out loud.
“Who knows?” Tiilikainen shrugged again. She’d never shown any particular enthusiasm for Dueñas’ plan, and he felt a flicker of anger at her obvious intention to stand back and make it abundantly clear it was his plan. “Maybe it’s some kind of psychological warfare ploy. They have to’ve thrown this together pretty quickly to get here this soon, so maybe they figure we don’t have any Navy detachment of our own. If that’s the way they’re thinking, they may figure that letting you worry about them for a while will soften you up for their demands.”
“Maybe.” Dueñas rubbed his chin, eyes narrowed in thought, carefully taking no note of the second-person pronoun in her last sentence. Then he gave himself a shake and straightened up.
“I’d better get dressed. Meet me in my office as soon as you can.”
“On my way now,” she said, panning her visual pickup to let him look out the side window of her air car as it sped through the sparse late-night aerial traffic of the city of Kernuish. “I’ll be waiting by the time you can get there.”
Chapter Eleven
“We’re getting back good data on the forward platforms, Skipper,” Abigail Hearns said, and Naomi Kaplan turned her command chair to face the tac section and cocked her head in response to Abigail’s tone.
“I’m seeing three merchies in parking orbit with the platform, Ma’am,” Abigail said, replying to the unspoken question. “They’re not squawking transponders, but we’re close enough for good visuals, and at least two of them look Manticoran-built to me. That’s not the interesting thing, though.”
“No?” Kaplan smiled thinly. “That sounds interesting enough to be going on with to me, Abigail.”
“Oh, I agree, Ma’am. But what I thought was really interesting were the four battlecruisers lying doggo in the inner system.”
A frisson of tension ran around Tristram’s bridge.
“You’re right, that is interesting,” Kaplan conceded after a moment. “I’m assuming Commodore Zavala has that information, as well?”
“Yes, Ma’am. It’s on the distributed feed.”
“Good.” Kaplan’s hexapuma smile was even thinner—and much colder—than before. “I think this little spider may have underestimated the fly.”
* * *
“It’s confirmed, Sir,” Lieutenant Commander Gabrowski said a half-hour later. “All four of the battlecruisers are Indefatigables—older units, from their emissions signatures—and the recon platforms say they have hot nodes. Our platforms’ve gotten a good look at the entire inner system now, though, and aside from the trio of tincans on the far side of Cinnamon’s moon, that seems to be all they’ve got.”
“And still not a peep out of any of them, correct, Abhijat?” Jacob Zavala asked Lieutenant Abhijat Wilson, his com officer.
“Not one, Sir,” Wilson confirmed.
“And they have to know we’re here…and that we sure as hell aren’t merchies,” Lieutenant Commander Auerbach added. “So I have to wonder why they haven’t said a word to us.”
“Well, at least it makes a pleasant change from the usual Solarian bluster, don’t you think?” Jacob Zavala’s tone was whimsical; his expression was not.
“What it suggests to me is that there’s a reason we’re not hearing the usual Solarian bluster, Sir,” Auerbach replied. The chief of staff liked and respected Zavala, and they usually got along well, but George Auerbach had never been noted for his spontaneity or sparkling sense of humor.
“Fair’s fair, George,” Zavala pointed out in a more serious tone. “We haven’t talked to them yet, either.”
Zavala’s truncated squadron had been inbound for eighty-five minutes. His destroyers’ velocity relative to the system primary was up to 29,400 KPS, and they were barely three minutes from their turnover for a zero/zero intercept with the planet of Cinnamon, still over 88,000,000 kilometers ahead of them. They were also well inside the twelve-light-hour limit where they were supposed to have announced their identities. There was a little leeway in that requirement, especially for ships emerging from hyper—as most ships did—well inside it, but they were still supposed to get around to it in a “timely fashion,” and he supposed it could be argued that he hadn’t done that.
Pity about that.
“I know we haven’t talked to them yet, Sir,” Commander Rochelle Goulard said from the com display which tied Zavala and his staff into HMS Kay’s command deck. “On the other hand, I can’t see them trying to hide from our sensors if they didn’t have something nasty in mind.”
“I can think of at least a couple of legitimate—from their perspective, at least—reasons for ‘hiding,’ Roxy,” Zavala told his flag captain. “For one thing, they might’ve come up with a Frontier Fleet officer bright enough to seal his own shoes. They may not have details on Spindle here in Saltash yet, but it’s been five T-months since Byng got himself blown away in New Tuscany. There’s been time enough for them to’ve heard all about that encounter, and if they’ve paid some attention to the reports of our weapons’ range from New Tuscany, they may just want to make sure we’re inside their range basket before they make their presence known. Especially if they buy into the notion that we’re the ones who’re actually picking this fight, which is exactly how the Sollies spun New Tuscany.”
“Agreed, Sir,” Lieutenant Commander Gabrowski said. “But there are some other possibilities here, too.” Zavala looked at her, and the ops officer shrugged. “We’ve wondered all along why a system governor might do something as daft as seizing Manticoran merchantmen. What if they were intended from the beginning as bait and these battlecruisers are the trap?”
“I think that’s an entirely plausible scenario,” Zavala acknowledged. “Mind you, I’m not going to rush in assuming it’s what’s happening, but I’m damned well not going to assume it isn’t, either!”
“That’s a relief, Sir,” Gabrowski said earnestly. “Given how gullible and easily taken in you usually are, I mean.”
Unlike Auerbach, Gabrowski did have a sense of humor, and Zavala grinned at her, then rubbed the tip of his nose thoughtfully.
The Sollies had undoubtedly figured out who—and what—his command was by now. Or they’d at least figured out his ships had to be Manticoran, at any rate, even if they didn’t realize something as large as a Roland-class destroyer wasn’t a light cruiser. On the other hand, it was unlikely anyone in Saltash had detected the highly stealthy Ghost Rider recon platforms fanning out in front of his squadron. Which probably meant that—so far, at least—he knew about their battlecruisers and they didn’t know that he knew about them.