"Aye, aye, Ma'am!" Commander Bradley Hampton said with a grateful smile. "I'll get right on it."
"Good," Grimm said quietly, and looked back at the plot. The first Ghost Rider platforms were already twenty-five thousand kilometers out, accelerating at just over five thousand gravities. She couldn't see them, though she knew they were there. But she could see the blossoming impeller signatures of Junction Defense Command's LACs. Over thirty-five hundred were already in space, and more were appearing with metronome precision as the LAC platforms launched.
You bastards just go right ahead and come in on us, she thought venomously at the impeller signatures of the battlecruisers trying to spy on her command area. Come right ahead. We've got something for you.
Sebastian D'Orville's thoughts about the boredom of his assignment ran through the back of his brain like a bitter, distant echo as he strode onto HMS Invictus' flag bridge. Despite all his training, all his preparation, all the simulations and wargames and contingency planning, he suddenly discovered that he'd never really believed it would happen. That the Peeps would have the sheer, unadulterated nerve to actually attack the Star Kingdom of Manticore's home star system.
And why the hell didn't you believe it? his brain demanded contemptuously. You were ready enough to think about invading their home system during Buttercup, weren't you? Pissed off because Saint-Just's "cease-fire" ploy stopped the operation, weren't you? Well it seems they can think big too, can't they?
"Talk to me, Maurice," he said harshly.
"They're coming straight down our throats, Sir," Captain Maurice Ayrault, his chief of staff, replied flatly. "The only finesse I can see is their approach vector. It looks like they think they're going to take out Home Fleet and Sphinx first, then roll on over Manticore, but they're trying to leave themselves an out just in case, and their astrogation was first rate. They came in right on the intersection of the resonance zone and the hyper limit and split the angle almost exactly. It's not a least-time approach, but it means they can break back across the zone boundary if it gets too deep instead of being committed to the inner-system. At the moment, they're eight light-minutes out, closing at fifteen hundred KPS, and they're pouring on the accel. They must be running their compensators at at least ninety percent of full military power, because current acceleration is right on four-point-eight KPS-squared."
"Well," D'Orville said, "that's why we deployed this way. What does it look like for a zero/zero intercept on the planet?"
"Just under three hours," Ayrault said. "Turnover in roughly eighty-six minutes. They'll be up to twenty-six thousand KPS at that point." The chief of staff grimaced. "I suppose we should be grateful for small favors, Sir. They could have cut their time by over thirty minutes if they'd come straight in across the zone boundary."
"Time to range on the planet if they decide to go for maximum-range shots?" D'Orville asked levelly, hoping his tone and expression hid the icy chill running down his spine at the thought of weapons as notoriously inaccurate as long-range MDMs screaming through the inner system.
"On a zero/zero profile, ninety-four minutes. If they go for a least-time approach, without turnover, they can shave roughly a minute off of that. Either way, it's about an hour and a half."
"I see."
D'Orville considered what Ayrault had said. Home Fleet was still rushing to Battle Stations, but at least it was standing policy to hold his ships' nodes permanently at standby readiness, despite the additional wear that put on the components. He'd be able to get underway in the next twelve to fifteen minutes. The question was what he did when he could.
No, he told himself. There really isn't any question at all, is there? You can't let those missile pods get any closer to Sphinx than you can help. But, Jesus-over three hundred ships?
"Does Tracking have a breakdown yet, Madelyn?" he asked, turning to his operations officer.
"It's just coming in now, Sir," Captain Madelyn Gwynett told him. She watched the information come up on her display, and he saw her shoulders tighten.
"Tracking makes it two hundred and forty superdreadnoughts, Sir. At this time, it looks like they're all pod-layers, but we're trying to get drones in closer to confirm that. They've also got what looks like sixteen CLACs and a screen of roughly ninety cruisers and lighter units, as well."
"Thank you, Madelyn."
D'Orville was pleased, in a distant sort of way, by how calm he sounded, but he understood why Gwynett's shoulders had stiffened. Home Fleet contained forty-two SD(P)s and forty-eight older superdreadnoughts. He was outnumbered by better than two and a half-to-one in capital ships, but the ratio was almost six-to-one in SD(P)s. He had twelve pod-laying battlecruisers, as well, but they'd be spit on a griddle against superdreadnoughts.
Still, he told himself as firmly as possible, the situation wasn't quite as bad as the sheer numbers suggested. The new tractor-equipped "flat-pack" missile pods would allow each of his older superdreadnoughts to "tow" almost six hundred pods inside their wedges, glued to their hulls like high-tech limpets. That was a hundred and twenty percent of a Medusa-class's internal pod loadout, and the ships were already loading up with them. Unfortunately, they didn't have the fire control to manage salvos as dense as a Medusa could throw. Worse, they'd have to flush the majority of their pods early in order to clear the sensor and firing arcs of their point defense and its fire control arrays. So he was going to have to use them at the longest range, where their accuracy was going to be lowest.
"Katenka," he said to Lieutenant Commander Lazarevna "get me Admiral Caparelli."
"Aye, aye, Sir."
Caparelli appeared on D'Orville's com display almost instantly.
"Sebastian," he said, his voice level but his expression taut.
"Tom." D'Orville nodded back, thinking about how many times they'd greeted one another exactly the same way before... and wondering if they'd ever do it again.
"I think I've got to go out to meet them," D'Orville continued.
"If you do, you lose the inner-system pods," Caparelli countered. "You'd have to take them on without any support, and they've got a huge edge in numbers. You'll lose everything you've got if you meet them head on."
"And if I don't take them head-to-head, I let them into range of the planet," D'Orville countered harshly.
"So far, they've stayed away from anything which might look like a violation of the Eridani Edict," Caparelli pointed out.
"And so far they haven't invaded our home system, either," D'Orville shot back. The Manticoran tradition was that the Admiralty did not second guess a fleet CO when battle threatened-not even Home Fleet's commander. What D'Orville did with his fleet was his decision. Admiralty House might advise, might provide additional intelligence or suggest tactics, but the decision was his, and it wasn't like Thomas Caparelli to try to change that.
But D'Orville wasn't really surprised by Caparelli's reluctance to admit what he knew as well as D'Orville did had to happen. The First Space Lord knew too many of the men and women aboard D'Orville's ships... and he couldn't join them. He would be safely back on Manticore when the hammer came down on Home Fleet, and Sebastian D'Orville knew Caparelli too well, knew exactly what the other admiral was feeling, the miracle he wanted to find. But there were no miracles, not today, and so D'Orville shook his head.
"No, Tom," he said almost gently. "I'd like to hang back-believe me, I would. But we can't count on continued restraint where their targeting's concerned. This one is for all the marbles. They've got thirty squadrons of SD(P)s-the equivalent of forty of our squadrons, with over a million people aboard them-coming at us, right into the heart of our defenses. That means they're ready for massive losses. I don't think we can expect them to take that kind of punishment without handing out whatever they can in return, and even if they never intentionally fire a single shot at the planet, think about how damned inaccurate end-of-run MDMs are. I can't let hundreds of those things go flying around this close to Sphinx."