The Shark-class strike ships were much larger than Commodore Østby's and Commodore Sung's scouts. Any pod-layer had to be, although these were still essentially prototype units in many ways, and they had only twenty-eight of them, divided between Admiral Topolev's Task Force One and Admiral Colenso's much smaller Task Force Two. Substantially larger units with far more magazine space were on the drawing board, designs based in no small part on the experience Benjamin and his crews had acquired working with the ships currently under Topolev's and Colenso's command. Some of those larger units were already entering the first phases of construction, for that matter. And, again, Albrecht wished they'd been able to wait until those larger ships were available in greater numbers. But the key to everything was timing, and the two admirals had enough combat power for their assigned mission.
Albrecht wasn't the military specialist Benjamin was, but even he could tell the Sharks looked subtly wrong. They were too far away for the naked eye to see, but the view screen's magnification brought them to what seemed like arm's-length and made it obvious that all of them lacked the traditional "hammerhead" design of a military starship. Indeed, the lines of their hulls were all wrong, in one way or another, as if their designers had been working to a completely different set of constraints from anyone else in the galaxy.
Which was precisely what they had been doing.
The strike ships turned slowly, and then, as one unit, they went loping away into the trackless depths of space. And that, too, was wrong. The light-warping power of a starship's impeller drive made the ship within it impossible to see, except from exactly the right angle. But there was no gravitic distortion around these ships, nothing to bend and blur light waves, because they didn't use impeller wedges.
And isn't that going to come as a nasty surprise for the Manties and their friends? Albrecht thought fiercely.
He watched for several more moments, then shook himself and inhaled deeply.
"Well," he said, "that's that. I'm proud of you, Ben." He reached out to squeeze his son's shoulder. "I sometimes think I forget to tell you—and the other boys, for that matter—that as often as I ought to, but it's true. I know how much pressure I put on you when I decided to move Oyster Bay up this way. But I also knew that if anyone could get it organized and moving in that time frame, you were the one."
"Flattery will get you everywhere, Father," Benjamin said with a grin, but Albrecht could tell that his son recognized the sincerity behind his words. He gave the shoulder under his hand another squeeze, then shook his head.
"And now, I'd better get back to the house. I'm sure something else has crawled out of my in-basket while I was away, and your mom has something special planned for dinner tonight. She didn't tell me what, and I didn't ask. Sometimes I am a little afraid to ask her, actually. I'd hate to think she was getting her cookbooks mixed up with her lab notebooks!"
This time, Benjamin laughed out loud. Evelina Detweiler was one of the Mesan Alignment's top biosciences researchers, with a special expertise in bioweapons, working closely with Benjamin's brother Everett and Renzo Kyprianou. And unlike her husband, who was always sharply focused on the task in hand, Evelina was all too often the epitome of the "absent minded professor."
"Whatever it is she's planning on feeding me, though, you'd better be there too," Albrecht said now, glaring at the laughing Benjamin. "It's a special dinner to celebrate launching Oyster Bay, and I understand it's going to include seafood, somehow or other. So be there. Nineteen-thirty sharp—and no excuses, young man!"
"Yes, Sir," Benjamin said meekly.
"Well," Augustus Khumalo said gloomily, "I could wish we'd been wrong at least this once."
"If it makes you feel better to be wrong, Augustus," Baroness Medusa said with a crooked smile, "don't get too worried. I'm sure we'll be able to make enough mistakes to satisfy you while we try to figure out what to do about it!"
"I know what I'd like to do about it," Henri Krietzmann muttered just loud enough to be heard, and Joachim Alquezar gave him a reproving glance.
"While direct action has a certain primitive appeal, especially at moments like this, it isn't always the best course of action, Henri. Besides, there's a little thing called the Eridani Edict to worry about, so a nice saturation kinetic bombardment of New Tuscany is probably out of the question."
"Spoken like a true effete aristocrat," Krietzmann shot back with a twinkle, despite the tension of the moment, and Alquezar chuckled. But his momentary humor disappeared quickly, and he shook his head and looked at Medusa.
"I have to admit that I'm at a loss to even suggest what it is this was supposed to accomplish," he said, running one fingertip across the hardcopy printout of the diplomatic note lying on the conference table in front of him beside his copy of Commander Denton's report.
"I think at least part of it is fairly obvious, Mr. Prime Minister," Gregor O'Shaughnessy said. "I realize New Tuscany is actually five days closer to Spindle than Pequod is, but the fact that Vézien's nastygram got here less than twenty-four hours after Commander Denton's report still says quite a lot. Even if this Captain Séguin let the merchies make the trip on their own and went ahead of them in her light cruiser, she still burned the better part of five and a half days just getting home to New Tuscany. Which means they conducted this entire 'investigation' of Vézien's, discussed how to respond, and got his damned note off to us in less than one T-day. How many governments do you know of that could have done that from a standing start?"
"None," Alquezar said grimly. "Or not at least if there really was any sort of an investigation involved."
"I think we can take it as a given that there was no need for any investigations," Michelle Henke put in from her place to Khumalo's right, and her husky contralto was far grimmer than usual.
Medusa glanced at her, and the baroness didn't exactly like what she saw. Michelle had been back in Spindle for less than a T-month, and it was obvious to Medusa that the horrendous casualties the Navy had suffered in the Battle of Manticore had hit her especially hard.
Well, of course they did! Medusa scolded herself. How many of those people did she know personally? How many close friends were killed? And even leaving all of that out of the equation, she's an officer in the Queen's Navy. The Navy that was supposed to keep anyone from ever doing something like that to the home system.
And even if none of the rest of that had been true, the baroness reflected, Michelle Henke was Tenth Fleet's commanding officer. That organization had been officially activated following the arrival of Aivars Terekhov—Sir Aivars Terekhov, she reminded herself—and his cruiser squadron at Spindle, and as Tenth Fleet's CO, Vice Admiral Gold Peak was only too well aware of how the savage losses the Royal Manticoran Navy had suffered were going to affect force availability here in Talbott, as well. It was entirely possible—indeed, almost inevitable—that many of the ships she'd been scheduled to receive were going to be delayed or even permanently diverted to other duties as the Admiralty tried frantically to fill all the holes the Battle of Manticore had blasted into its order of battle.
All of which made the timing on the New Tuscans' little operation, whatever it was, even more . . . inconvenient.
"It's almost like they already knew about what happened in Manticore, isn't it?" Terekhov mused out loud, like an eerie echo of Medusa's thoughts. He sat in a comfortable armchair at one corner of her desk, the new, blue-and-white ribbon of the POV heading the "fruit salad" on the breast of his tunic.