And so do they, he thought grimly, watching that outnumbered force go to military power. Not that it was going to do it a great deal of good. Its six superdreadnoughts were thoroughly outgunned by the sixteen SD(P)s and four CLACs in each of his three intercepting forces; the inner-system's missile pods were far more numerous than they'd been at Solon; and he'd been able to plot his own translations much more closely. Unlike Solon, these Manties would be unable to avoid entering the effective missile envelope of at least one of his intercepting forces.
"Open fire, Sir?" Selma Thackeray asked, but Giscard shook his head.
"Harrington showed us at Solon what she could do to long-range missile fire," he told the ops officer, "and she's got a lot more defensive platforms than she had then. No. We'll just follow along. We're the beaters; Moriarty is the hunter. Once Giovanni chews them up, we'll worry about cleaning up the remnants."
"Yes, Sir," Thackeray acknowledged, and Giscard returned his attention to the plot.
They shouldn't have sent you out with so few ships, Your Grace, he told the light code of HMS Imperator.
"All right, Andrea," Honor said, glancing at the time display once more. Twelve minutes had passed since the Havenite ambush force had translated in behind her. "Execute Ozawa."
"Aye, aye, Your Grace!" Jaruwalski said, her voice sparkling with excitement, and tapped a single command into her console.
"There's the execute signal, Ma'am!" Lieutenant Harcourt announced.
"Understood," Commander Estwicke replied, and looked at her astrogator. "Take us out, Jerome."
"Aye, aye, Skipper," Lieutenant Weismeuller acknowledged, and HMS Ambuscade popped back up into hyper-space.
Weissmuller had plotted his translation with care, and he'd had plenty of time to position his ship perfectly in normal-space before executing it. Ambuscade arrived precisely where she was supposed to be, and her plot suddenly blossomed with the light codes of capital ships.
"Communications, pass the word to Admiral Yanakov," Estwicke said.
"Hyper footprint!"
Javier Giscard's head snapped up at the unanticipated announcement. Commander Thackeray was bent over her console, fingers flying as she massaged the contact, and then she looked up, her face taut.
"Admiral, we've got eighteen superdreadnoughts or CLACs, well outside the hyper limit, directly astern of us. Range five-three-point-nine million kilometers. Velocity relative to Lovat two-point-five-zero-one thousand KPS. They-"
She broke off for just a moment, looking back down at her plot, then cleared her throat.
"Update, Sir. It's twelve SD(P)s and six carriers. The carriers just launched full LAC complements."
Giscard nodded, and hoped he looked calmer than he felt.
Mousetrapped, by God, he thought. And the same way we did it to her at Solon.
He shook his head in brief admiration, but well executed as Harrington's maneuver had been, it still wasn't perfect. The wallers coming up behind him were at almost three light-minutes' range. They had him deep enough inside the hyper limit that he couldn't avoid action, but their astrogation had been poor, and they'd made their own alpha translation 2.8 light-minutes outside the hyper limit. At that range, even Manty MDM accuracy was going to be significantly degraded, and he had sixteen pod-layers to their twelve. The LACs they were deploying outnumbered his, and they'd be more effective in the missile-defense role, but he was too far ahead of them, with too great an advantage in base velocity for them to overtake him.
And Harrington was still in front of him, driving steadily deeper into the waiting defensive missiles.
"Start rolling pods, Selma," he told his ops officer. "Fire Plan Gamma."
The outer-system FTL platforms reported the arrival of Admiral Yanakov's Task Force 82 to Alessandra Giovanni almost as quickly as Selma Thackeray reported it to Javier Giscard.
Despite a brief, instinctive panic reaction, Giovanni quickly reached the same conclusions Giscard had, and her smile was much more unpleasant than his expression had been.
So the great 'Salamander' can fuck up just like the rest of us mere mortals, she thought. Pity about that.
"Range from Forge?" she asked.
"Still one-one-point-two light-minutes, Ma'am," MacNaughton replied. "Roughly another thirty-six minutes to missile range for Moriarty."
"Thank you," she said, and turned back to the outer-system plot as the multi-drive missiles began to launch.
The range was almost fifty-four million kilometers, and Bogey Two was running away from TF 82 at a relative velocity of more than four thousand KPS. Missile flight time was over eight minutes, and as Giscard had demonstrated at Solon, even Manticoran accuracy at that range was going to be poor.
Except....
"Sir, there's something... odd about the Manties' launch," Thackeray said.
"What do you mean, 'odd'?" Giscard asked sharply.
"Their attack birds are coming in... well, 'clumped' is the only word I can think of for it, Sir. They aren't spreading out in a proper dispersion pattern."
"What?"
Giscard punched a command into his own repeater plot and frowned. Thackeray was right. His own outgoing missiles were spreading out, distancing themselves from one another to reduce wedge interference with their telemetry links to the ships which had launched them. Everyone's missiles did that.
But the Manties' missiles weren't.
"Query CIC," he told Thackeray. "I want an analysis of this pattern. There's got to be some reason for it."
"CIC's already on it, Sir,. So far, they don't have any explanation."
Giscard grunted in acknowledgment. Actually, he realized, the attack missiles were spreading out, just not the way they should have. They were coming in in discrete clusters, spread across an attack front which would bring them all in simultaneously in the end, but making the trip in relatively tight groups of about eight or ten missiles each.
No, he thought as a preliminary analysis from the Combat Information Center came up as a sidebar to his plot. They're coming in in clusters of exactly eight missiles each. Which is stupid, since they have twelve missiles in each pod!
It was called "Apollo," after the archer of the gods.
It hadn't been easy for the R&D types to perfect. Even for Manticoran technology, designing the components had required previously impossible levels of miniaturization, and BuWeaps had encountered more difficulties than anticipated in putting the system into production. This was its first test in actual combat, and the crews which had launched the MDMs watched with baited breath to see how well it performed.
Javier Giscard was wrong. There weren't twelve missiles in an Apollo pod; there were nine. Eight relatively standard attack missiles or EW platforms, and the Apollo missile-much larger than the others, and equipped with a down-sized, short-ranged two-way FTL communications link developed from the one deployed in the still larger Ghost Rider reconnaissance drones. It was a remote control node, following along behind the other eight missiles from the same pod, without any warhead or electronic warfare capability of its own.
The impeller wedges of the other missiles hid it and its pulsed transmissions from the sensors of Giscard's ships, and from his counter-missiles. But its position allowed it to monitor the standard telemetry links from the other missiles of its pod. And it also carried a far more capable AI than any standard attack missile-one capable of processing the data from all of the other missiles' tracking and homing systems and sending the result back to its mothership via grav-pulse.
The ships which had launched them had deployed the equally new Keyhole II platforms, equipped not with standard light-speed links for their offensive missiles, but with grav-pulse links. Virtually every Manticoran or Grayson ship which could currently deploy Keyhole II was in Eighth Fleet's order of battle, and Honor Alexander-Harrington had taken ruthless advantage of the capability when she formulated her attack plans.