“I know that’s what they probably used at New Tuscany—and Spindle, assuming there’s any accuracy at all to what we’ve heard.” Diadoro added the qualifier conscientiously, although he was one of the squadron’s officers who was confident the rumors about Spindle were wildly inaccurate. “And they could have a few along,” he continued, “but they can’t have many. They’d have to be tractored to their hulls, or our lightspeed platforms would have picked them up, and you just couldn’t fit more than a handful of pods big enough to carry that kind of missiles onto the skin of a light cruiser. Besides, there’re still the limitations of their fire control. A light cruiser’s only got so many telemetry channels; there’s no way they could control pod salvos big enough to get through our defenses. I’m not saying they might not get two or three leakers through, land a couple of lucky punches, and it’s possible they could have enough range on internally-launched birds to engage us before we could engage them. But they’re not going to be able to saturate our defenses heavily enough to let them win, especially with Spatha-grade laser heads. Not when they’ve got nine hundred thousand tons of warship and we’ve got three-point-four million tons.”
“I can’t fault Kelvin’s analysis, Ma’am,” Captain Ham Seung Jee of the Inexorable said. “The only problem I have is that the Manties have to be able to figure that out just as well as we can…and they’re trying it anyway.”
“I’d say that’s because they’ve screwed the pooch,” another voice said. The others looked at the com image of Captain Borden McGillicuddy, SLNS Paladin’s CO, and he waved one hand in a throwing away gesture. “They’re committed to coming down our throats,” he pointed out. “Even if they went to max decel at this point, they’re still going to have to come all the way to Cinnamon orbit before they can kill their current velocity. Whatever their damned range advantage, they’re going to enter ours, whether they want to or not.”
“You’re suggesting this is some kind of bluff on their part?” Ham asked.
“All I’m suggesting at this point is that I don’t think they got their ‘invisible recon platforms’ close enough to pick us up quite as early as they’d like us to believe,” McGillicuddy replied. “Maybe this Zavala character didn’t realize what he was walking into until just before he contacted Governor Dueñas. God knows we’ve all seen how arrogant Manties can be! Maybe he just came bulling straight in without bothering on scouting the inner system. After all, how likely was it that he was going to run into an entire division of battlecruisers in an out-of-the-way system like Saltash? By the time he figured out what he was actually up against, it was too late for him to fall back across the limit and hyper out. So maybe he decided that rather than rolling over he’d try to run a bluff on the strength of what’s supposed to’ve happened at New Tuscany and Spindle.”
“And when it doesn’t work?” Dubroskaya asked.
“Then he goes ahead and rolls over anyway, probably, Ma’am,” McGillicuddy said, and shrugged. “This time limit of his is going to put him a good thirty million klicks outside our powered missile envelope when it expires. That leaves him plenty of time to change his mind and adopt a more conciliatory tone before we could blow him out of space. If I were in his place, I might figure I didn’t have anything to lose throwing my threats around ahead of time. If the other side blinks; I run the table. If the other side doesn’t blink; I’m no worse off than I was and I can still surrender before he engages me.”
Dubroskaya nodded slowly. McGillicuddy’s hypothesis made a certain degree of sense, and Diadoro was certainly right about the limited magazine capacity and small broadside of a light cruiser. She wasn’t quite as confident as McGillicuddy about the Manties’ fundamental rationality, given the fact that they’d been foolish enough to pick a fight with the Solarian League in the first place, but the captain’s analysis of the other side’s unpalatable tactical situation had a lot to recommend it.
In fact, that was Dueñas’ basic plan in the first place, she reminded herself. The whole object was to draw the Manties into an untenable position—and get them to commit themselves in a way that clearly demonstrated their belligerence—before they ever figured out we were here. Which is basically what Borden’s arguing happened, after all.
The governor might have hoped to have even more firepower available, but four battlecruisers against five light cruisers was an overwhelming mismatch by anyone’s standards. And if she and Dueñas pulled it off—if they forced an entire Manty light cruiser squadron to tamely roll over and surrender—Education and Information’s talking heads would turn it into an overwhelming triumph. The sort of thing the Solarian public wanted to hear about as an antidote for the rumors of devastation coming out of Spindle.
And let’s be honest here. Borden’s got a point—Dueñas was luckier than hell I had even four BCs that could get here in time! If we hadn’t, he’d be well and truly stuck in orbit in a leaky skinsuit right now.
The rest of Battlecruiser Squadron 491 was either dispersed to other star systems or in shipyard hands, but that was par for the course for Frontier Fleet. Its squadrons were always understrength, and there were always too many places they needed to be at the same time. But in this instance, at least, Dueñas truly had lucked out.
Always assuming Borden’s right about the Manties screwing up, of course, she reminded herself conscientiously. Yet even as she did, she knew she didn’t really think McGillicuddy was wrong.
Assume Kelvin’s estimate is off, or that they really do have more range than we do, and they get a couple of dozen missiles through our defensive basket before we get close enough to hammer them, she thought. No, make it fifty to be on the safe side. Against four Indefatigables? Hell, even Javelin-range laser heads would hardly scratch our paint!
No, even if Borden didn’t get everything right, there’s no way these bastards can hope to take me on and walk away from it. They’re truly and royally screwed, whatever happens, and I think I’ll be able to live with being the first Solarian admiral to smack them down the way they deserve.
“Well,” she said mildly, “since they know we’re here now, I suppose we might as well go ahead and get our wedges up so we can welcome them properly.”
* * *
“They’re coming out to meet us, Ma’am,” Abigail Hearns announced three minutes later, as the battlecruisers’ nodes went fully online and a quartet of impeller wedges appeared on the tactical display and began moving away from their original position between Shona Station and DesRon 301.
“I see them, Guns,” Naomi Kaplan replied almost absently, but Abigail knew that tone of voice. Tristram’s CO was putting on her warrior’s face, settling into predator mode while her brain whirred like another computer.
“We’ll just have to see how serious they are about this, I suppose,” Kaplan added a moment later, and her smile was hungry. For DesRon 301, and especially for HMS Tristram, the Star Empire of Manticore’s confrontation with the Solarian League was personal.
Very personal.
That was as true for Abigail as for anyone else in the ship’s company, and she found herself wondering if that was one of the reasons Lady Gold Peak had picked Captain Zavala’s squadron for this operation in the first place.