"Putting pods on tow, maybe," D'Orville replied.
"I suppose that could be it, Sir," Gwynett raid. "Their pods are almost as stealthy as ours are, and the recon platforms wouldn't be able to see them at this range. But those are superdreadnoughts. They'd have to have an awful lot of tractors to be able to tow so many pods they'd have to tow them outside their wedges."
D'Orville nodded. Pods towed inside a ship's wedge didn't degrade its acceleration. That, after all, was exactly what his own pre-pod designs were doing with the tractor-equipped pods glued to their hulls. But superdreadnought wedges were huge; for the Peeps to be towing so many pods they couldn't fit them all inside their wedges, they'd have to have hundreds of tractors per ship. So they had to be up to something else.
But what?
"Maybe they've got tech problems," Ayrault suggested. "Could be one of their SDs has lost a couple of beta nodes and had to reduce accel. The others might be reducing so she can stay in company."
"Possible," D'Orville conceded. "Or it could be even simpler than that. Maybe they've just decided to ease off on their compensator margins now that they know we're coming out to meet them."
Ayrault nodded, but D'Orville wasn't really satisfied with his own hypothesis. It made sense, but it just didn't feel right, somehow.
"How far do you want to close before opening fire, Sir?" Gwynett asked, after a moment, and he looked back down at her. Despite the fact that he and Ayrault were standing right beside her, she had to pitch her voice very low to keep it from being overheard, because it was very quiet on HMS Invictus' flag bridge. Everyone had had time to realize what was going to happen, and fear hung in the background. There was no panic, no hesitation, but they knew what they faced, and the people on that bridge wanted to live just as much as anyone else. The knowledge that they very probably wouldn't was a cold, invisible weight, pressing down upon them.
D'Orville knew it, and he wished there was something he could say or do. Not to make the fear go away, because no one could have done that. But to tell them how much they meant to him, how bitterly he regretted taking them on this death ride.
"We have to make them count," he told Gwynett, equally quietly. "We know our accuracy and penaids are better, but we've still got to get in close. They're going to bury us whenever we open fire, and according to the recon drones, every single one of their wallers is a pod design. They aren't going to face the same 'use them or lose them' constraints we are.
"So we're either going to wait until they open fire, or else until the range drops to sixty-five million klicks."
Gwynett looked at him for a moment, then nodded slowly.
"I know. I know," he said softly. "But we've got to get our hits through at all costs. We've got to, Madelyn. If we don't, all of this," a slight motion of his head, almost as much imagined as seen, indicated his flag bridge and the fleet beyond it, "is for nothing."
"Yes, Sir. I understand."
"Which fire plan do you want to use, Sir?" Ayrault asked.
"We'll go with Avalanche," D'Orville said grimly. "Madelyn, I want you to start shifting formation to Sierra Three. How many LACs have managed to overtake us?"
"Just over thirty-five hundred so far, Sir. Another five hundred will be here by the time we reach the range you've specified."
"How many are Katanas?"
"I'm not positive, Sir. Under half-I know that much."
"I wish we had more," D'Orville said, "but what we have is all we've got. Pull them forward and spread them vertically. I want their Vipers positioned for the best firing arcs we can build."
"Yes, Sir."
"And set up your firing sequences to have the older ships deploy their pods first. We'll try to hold the internal pods as long as we can. I want the Keyhole ships to manage as many of the other units' pods as possible in the opening salvos."
"Yes, Sir. I understand."
"Good, Madelyn. Good." D'Orville patted her gently on the shoulder. "I'll let you get on with it, then."
"Yes, Sir," Captain Gwynett said.
"We're in range, Admiral," Commander Adamson pointed out, and Lester Tourville nodded.
"I'm aware of that, Frazier, thank you."
"Yes, Sir."
Tourville tipped back in his command chair and glanced at Molly DeLaney.
"So Tom was right," he said quietly.
"It looks that way," DeLaney agreed, and Tourville wondered if the relief hidden behind her calm expression could possibly be as great as the one roaring through him.
He looked at the master plot, with its sprawl of light codes. Second Fleet had been accelerating towards Sphinx for the last hour. Given the system's geometry, Tourville's present vector cut a chord at an angle of almost exactly forty-five degrees to the outer wall of the hugely elongated, "skinny" resonance zone. His phalanx of superdreadnoughts, was up to 18,560 KPS, relative to the system primary, and they'd traveled over 35,600,000 kilometers. The Manties' Home Fleet had been under acceleration for only forty-seven minutes, on an almost exactly reciprocal course, but with its higher base acceleration, its velocity relative to the primary was already up to better than 17,000 KPS, and it had traveled just over 24,000,000 kilometers from its initial station.
Although Tourville's command was still almost half an hour from its turnover point for a zero/zero intercept of Sphinx, the range between the opposing forces had fallen to just a shade over 84,000,000 kilometers, and their closing speed was up to 45,569 KPS. That geometry gave Tourville's MDMs an effective range of better than 85,369,000 kilometers, which, as Frazier Adamson had just observed, meant they were in extreme missile range of Home Fleet.
But Manticoran MDMs' acceleration rate was just over thirty-four KPS2 higher than his birds could pull. That gave them a current effective range of better than 90,370,000 kilometers, which meant he'd been in their effective range for over two minutes.
"It doesn't just look like he was right," he told DeLaney after a moment. "He was. If they had those God awful missiles, they'd already be launching. They'd have spent the last ten minutes doing nothing but rolling pods, and they'd be punching them down our throats right this instant, not letting us close into our own effective range."
"You don't think they might just be letting the range fall a little more for their own fire control, Boss?"
"That's exactly what they're doing, which is why I know they don't have the new missiles. They've got less than a hundred wallers over there. Even assuming they've got heavy external pod loads-which they very well could, despite their accel, if NavInt's right about their new pod designs-they're outnumbered better than two-to-one. They wouldn't be closing straight into salvos the size they know we can throw if they had any choice at all. But they don't. They've got to get closer to improve their accuracy, just like we do."
"It's going to be ugly when we do open fire," Delaney said quietly, and Tourville nodded again.
"That it certainly is," he agreed grimly. "On the other hand, we planned for it, didn't we?"
"Yes, Sir."
Tourville studied the icons of the oncoming Home Fleet superdreadnoughts for another few moments, then looked at a secondary display and shook his head in admiration. He'd always known Shannon Foraker had a talent for thinking outside the box. Way back when she'd been his operations officer, he'd recognized her knack for coming up with solutions which simply didn't occur to other people-concepts so elegantly simple everyone wondered why they hadn't thought of them.
When NavInt reported that the new Manty pods incorporated onboard tractors as a way to allow their pre-pod ships to tow greater numbers of them, it had seemed impossible for the Republic to respond. Their pods were already too big, and they had too limited a power budget, to permit the designers to cram a tractor into them (and power the damned thing), as well. But Shannon had decided to turn the problem on its head. Instead of fitting additional tractors into the pods, she'd come up with the "donkey." That was what everyone was calling it, although it had a suitably esoteric alphabet-soup designation, and it was another of those elegantly simple Foraker specialties.