But now the enemy had come out of hiding, and his timing was execrable. The largest units Thurston's sensors could see were battlecruisers, but the Allied forces acceleration was 458 g, which was stupid. It was higher than a Manty EC's "normal maximum" of four hundred gravities at eighty percent power, so they'd obviously redlined their drives. Yet that was still over forty gravities lower than the maximum they could have pulled, which indicated that they had some of their damnable missile pods on tow. The extra launchers those things provided in the opening salvos had worried Thurston when he first conceived Dagger, but the battlecruisers coming at him couldn't be towing more than one or at most two pods each, or their accel would have been still lower.
That was what made their movements so stupid. If Grayson's defenders were going to come out at less than max acceleration they should have started even sooner, with an even lower accel, which would have let them tow more pods. The small number their BCs could have available at this accel would make no difference against battleship point defense, so all they'd accomplished by bringing them along was to cost themselves about a half KPS� and give Thurston an earlier look at their numbers and formation than they had to.
If, he thought, you could call that a formation. The untidy gaggle of starships moved towards him in awkward clumps and knots, and he shook his head again. There were Manty ships in that mess, but its CO had to be a Grayson, because no Manty admiral would let himself fuck up this way. Thurston recognized the courage his enemy was displaying, but Lord was he dumb!
"Numbers?" he asked.
"Plotting makes it twenty-five battlecruisers, ten heavy cruisers, forty-odd light cruisers, and sixteen to twenty destroyers, Citizen Admiral," his ops officer responded. "We're not positive about the count on the light units because of their formation. They're not only getting in each other's way, but some of them are grouped so tight it's all but impossible to get a close look at their wedges."
"RDs?"
"Not much point at this range, Citizen Admiral," his senior tracking officer replied. "We can't send drones in ballistic the way their formation's all tangled up, we'd need to bring them in under power and steer them into location. If we do that, their point defense will have so much tracking and solution time they'll pick them off in droves. Given our vectors, the missile envelope should be about thirteen million klicks, though. We could probably bury the drones in our missile fire then and sneak 'em past, but..."
"But by that time, we'll have plenty of direct observation without them," Thurston agreed. He rocked on his heels for a moment, then shrugged. "Do your best to refine your data."
He walked back to his command chair, and Preznikov accompanied him.
"Does it really matter exactly how many light units they have, Citizen Admiral?"
Thurston wondered if the question reflected honest curiosity, an attempt to jab him into something more "energetic," or simply a probe to see how he'd react to what might be a jab. Best to treat it as the first possibility, he decided.
"Frankly, no, Citizen Commissioner. But we've got plenty of time before we come into range, and I'd just as soon get a hard count if I can before I detach the other two task groups."
"You are planning to detach them, then?"
"I'm certainly considering it, Sir. We know they've already sent a courier off to Endicott. The closer on its heels Theisman and Chernov arrive, the less time Endicott�ll have to set up any sort of defense, but I'm not turning them loose until I'm sure I won't need them here."
Honor sat back in her command chair, holding Nimitz in her lap, and stroked his ears while her ships accelerated towards the enemy. She'd have to resecure his safety harness before they got into range, but there was no need to worry about that yet, and she knew he could feel her anxiety.
The small plot on her console showed less detail than the holo sphere behind her, but her traitor legs had nearly collapsed the last time she'd started to stand. She thought she'd recovered quickly enough to hide it from her staff and bridge crew, yet there was no way she could fool them if she went staggering around like a drunk.
Now she gazed at the plot and wondered what the Peep CO made of her formation. It was certainly the sloppiest one she'd ever assembled, but there was a method to her madness. One she hoped wouldn't occur to him.
There were limits to even a Grayson-refitted SD's EW capabilities. Terrible could do a lot to make her impeller wedge look weaker, yet it was so powerful that the deception was unlikely to hold if someone got a good, hard look at it. Which was why she'd "disarranged" her formation and put at least three other ships in front of each SD. With their wedges directly between the superdreadnoughts and the Peeps' sensors, interference should mask the greater power of the SDs' drives. Coupled with the heavier ships' EW activity, that should keep the Peeps from realizing what they were truly up against... unless they got a recon drone close enough for a good look.
The trick, of course, was to dissuade them from trying to do just that. The chance of getting a big, relatively slow RD past her point defense was low, but it was possible, especially if the Peep commander should feel uneasy enough to expend the huge numbers of RDs needed to swamp her defenses.
So what she needed to do was to make the Peeps so confident of what they saw that they felt no need to confirm it, and she'd taken a risky step to do just that. She was running her superdreadnoughts flat out at full military power and zero safety margin, which gave the squadron about a three percent chance of someone suffering a compensator failure, with fatal consequences for whoever it happened to. But it also let them pull an acceleration of over 4.5 KPS�, far higher than any "normal" SD could manage, and she hoped Peep intelligence hadn't yet figured out that the new compensators had increased Alliance acceleration rates by over six percent virtually across the board. If they hadn't, her accel should look too high to be an SD's.
Her eyes moved across the plot to the ships racing towards her from other points in the system. They were decelerating to match vectors now, bringing the formation together well short of the Peeps, and, so far, things seemed to be working. She hoped.
She took her hand from Nimitz's ears long enough to pinch the bridge of her nose hard, but it didn't really help. Her exhaustion actually seemed to be making her mind work faster, not slower, yet it was an undisciplined speed, one that tried to race off in too many directions at once. Would her accel convince the Peeps she had no SDs? Or would it actually make the Peep CO more suspicious with its proof that her BCs couldn't be towing enough missile pods to make a practical difference? For that matter, what if his sensor crews had already seen past her EW and figured out exactly what she had? Or...
She lowered her hand and gritted her teeth, then leaned back in the support of her contoured chair while she prayed her fatigue hadn't already drawn her into a fatal mistake she was just too tired to recognize.
"Anything more?" Thurston asked his ops officer.
"Not really, Citizen Admiral. We've positively IDed one more light cruiser, but the mutual impeller interference is still too bad to say anything more certain than that."