"Any idea at all what it could be?"
"CIC says it looks like a couple of ships of the wall, Citizen Admiral."
"I see."
Groenewold frowned into his plot as the icons of the new contact — assuming it was a real contact and not just a case of sensor ghosts — appeared. He sensed someone beside him and glanced up to find Citizen Commissioner O'Faolain at his side.
"What to do you think it is, Citizen Admiral?" she asked quietly.
"Could be a lot of things, Citizen Commissioner, but I don't think it's Diamato's LACs. If Fugimori's vectors are right, whatever it is obviously doesn't want to get any closer than extreme missile range, and that doesn't sound like LACs with big, nasty energy weapons. They'd want to close, get into knife range and hit us hard."
"Could the capital ships be planning to support a close-in LAC attack with long-range missile strikes?" O'Faolain asked, and Groenewold looked at her with respect.
"It's certainly possible, Ma'am. But, again, I don't think it's what's happening. If they were going to commit to a LAC strike, it would probably indicate they meant to mount a serious defense of the system. In that case, their SD element shouldn't be on a vector that would make it all but impossible for them to stay in range if we break off sharply. They'd want to bring it in closer to their LACs and keep it in engagement range to cover the close-in strike." He shook his head. "No, I think those are SDs with missile pods out there. If NavInt was right about Manty forces in this area, there can't be more than six to eight of them, though, and their pods aren't good enough to even the odds against the greater number we have on tow. If these people want to close into missile range of us, they're dead meat.".
"All right, Adam. Let's start rolling pods," Rear Admiral Trikoupis said, and Commander Towson nodded.
"You heard the Admiral," he said, his Grayson accent just a bit crisper than usual as he turned to his assistants. "Plan Bravo Three. Execute now."
Responses came back, and Trikoupis watched his repeater. A sparkle of diamond dust began to decorate it, each small cluster of gems a clutch of missile pods. They weren't launching yet. Instead, each cluster of pods went spilling out astern of one of the missile superdreadnoughts' wedges to be grabbed by the tractors of one or more of her consorts. With a Harrington along, a task force commander could accelerate at his maximum rate, without worrying about towed pods' drag on his compensators, because he could deploy any pods he needed from the missile ships just before the action opened.
As Trikoupis watched, HMS Belisarius replenished the EW drones. There were only four of them, each pretending to be a superdreadnought trying unsuccessfully to hide under stealth, and Trikoupis smiled as he looked at them. Some might have assumed those four false SDs were there in an effort to bluff the Peeps into breaking off, but they were there for a very different purpose, and he wished he could have deployed even more of them. Unfortunately, four were all they could fit into their intended deception.
Trikoupis watched the sprays of light a moment longer, reassuring himself that each pod's intended recipient was spearing her charges with her tractors as planned, and then looked back at the Peep formation. The enemy clearly had a hard fix on at least some of the picket force, and he was altering course to close with it. But Admiral Malone was also altering course, holding the range open, and it would be some minutes yet before anyone was in range for a normal missile exchange. Of course, the Peeps were in range of Trikoupis' missiles now, but he was under strict orders not to demonstrate the enormous reach advantage of the Ghost Rider birds.
But that was all right. The goodies from Ghost Rider he was allowed to play with today would make the missile exchange far less profitable for the Peeps than they could possibly anticipate... assuming they worked as well in action as they had in the exercises. And given what he'd surmised about the strategy Admiral Caparelli and High Admiral Matthews had put together, losing control of Elric would probably be a good thing, in the long run... and as long as the Peeps didn't take it too cheaply. Which they wouldn't, he thought grimly. He didn't know how many of Malone's ships the Peeps might have spotted, but his own tactical people had iron locks on the Peep SDs. The ones their onboard sensors couldn't see had been plucked from concealment by the improved recon drones which were also part of the Ghost Rider cornucopia. Those people were naked to his fire control solutions, and that changed them from warships into targets.
Hmmmm... The more he studied that formation, the more it looked downright Manticoran. That was unpleasant. Closing up on one another that way gave each unit a much more restricted maneuver envelope when it came to rolling ship against incoming missile fire. There was simply less room — a lot less room — for the edges of their impeller wedges to clear one another. But it also brought them in closer under one another's point defense umbrellas, and the formation was tight enough that if the enemy managed to roll it simultaneously, its wedges would form a huge picket fence. Some missiles would penetrate the gaps between pickets, but not very many. Even a missile's wedge would be too wide to fit through the openings between the ships's wedges unless it hit at precisely the correct angle, which could only be the result of pure good luck. And any wedge that didn't clear the vastly stronger wedges of its targets would blow immediately, vaporizing the missile which had generated it in the process.
Still, there was something a little odd about the intervals. No, not the intervals. About the relative attitudes of the superdreadnoughts at the center of the formation.
"Have you taken a close look at the intervals in their wall, Adam?" he asked Towson, and the Grayson commander looked at him with raised eyebrows.
"What about them, Sir?"
"Look at the way they've got their units staggered," Trikoupis suggested, tapping keys to highlight selected units. "See the center of the wall? It actually extends out to starboard, almost like a cone with the closed end pointed straight at right angles to us. The vertical separation is the same for the ships in the cone as for any of the rest of their formation, but they're definitely extended perpendicular to our approach vector."
"I see what you mean, Sir," Towson replied, but his voice was puzzled. "I don't think I understand it, though. It may help their sensor efficiency a little bit by clearing the interference of the ships between them and us, but it won't give them any advantage once they turn away to open their broadsides. In fact, it actually hurts their tactical flexibility, now that I think about it. With those ships pushed out to their port and our starboard that way, they don't have any choice but to turn to their starboard to bring their broadsides to bear. Swinging the other way would mask the fire of several of the units in the cone."
"I'd think so," Trikoupis agreed, his tone thoughtful. "But that formation is far too tight for it to be an accident or something they just strayed into. That means whoever's in command over there has a reason for it."
"But what kind of reason, Sir?"
"I don't know," Trikoupis said slowly, but then his tone firmed up. "Unless—" He pondered for another few seconds, then nodded. "I think that may be the first effort to develop a new anti-LAC doctrine."
"Anti-LAC?" Towson looked back at his own plot. "I suppose that could be it, Sir."
"Frankly, I've been a bit surprised we haven't seen something like it before this," Trikoupis said. "Given what happened at Hancock, I'd be terrified of the new LAC classes in their place. I'd assumed the absence of any apparent precautions against them in engagements since Hancock meant they'd taken such heavy losses there that they genuinely didn't know what happened to them. But now..."