Brigham nodded back, and the two of them watched the plot, waiting.
"Admiral, they're seventy minutes from turnover."
"Very good, Ewan. Send the execute to Tarantula."
"Hyper footprint! We have major hyper footprints directly astern and at system north and system south," Andrea Jaruwalski reported. "Designate these forces Bogey Two, Bogey Three, and Bogey Four! They're accelerating in-system at five-point-zero-eight KPS-squared."
"Very well," Honor said calmly.
She leaned back in her command chair and crossed her legs, stroking the plushy fur between Nimitz's ears.
"Admiral, Admiral Giovanni's platforms confirm that one of the superdreadnoughts matches the emissions signature of the ship that got away at Solon," Marius Gozzi said.
"So," Javier Giscard said softly, "'the Salamander' is back."
He shook his head with more than a trace of sadness. Eloise had tried to hide her despair in her last letter to him, but he knew her too well. When Elizabeth Winton had accepted her offer of the summit, it had been like watching the sun come out. And when whatever the hell had happened on Old Earth and Torch crushed any prospect of a negotiated settlement, it had been like watching a late blizzard bury the frozen blossoms of a murdered spring.
He supposed he couldn't really blame the Manties for leaping to the conclusion that the Republic was behind what had happened. It didn't make sense, in a lot of ways, yet people-and star nations-all too often did things that didn't make sense. But however well he might understand their reasoning, he still had to cope with the consequences of their actions.
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.