"They've got guts, Citizen Commissioner," he said "but they're not going to get that break. Not this time."
"Something funny going on here, Skip."
"'Funny'? What d'you mean 'funny'?" Citizen Commander Caslet demanded. TG 14.1 sped straight towards the enemy at a combined closing velocity of over forty-six thousand KPS, which meant maximum effective missile range would be just over thirteen million kilometers. They'd enter that range in less than five more minutes, and he was more anxious than he wanted to reveal. Vaubon was only a light cruiser, hardly a high-priority target with battleships to shoot at, but there were light units on the other side, as well, and they might well choose to engage Vaubon simply because she was small enough they might actually get through her defenses.
"It's just..." Citizen Lieutenant Foraker leaned back, rubbing the tip of her nose, then grimaced. "Let me show you, Skip," she said, and switched her own tactical readouts to Caslet's tertiary display. "Watch this motion," she said, and he gazed intently at the display as the raggedy-assed enemy formation bobbed and swirled. There'd been some movement in it all along, but it had become more pronounced as the range dropped, a fact he'd put down to nerves.
"I don't..." he began, but Foraker was tapping commands into her console, and Caslet's mouth closed with a snap as the same movement replayed itself. The only difference was that this time a half-dozen or so of the dots left little worms of light behind, charting their paths, and the "formation" they'd dropped into...
"What is that?" he asked slowly, and this time there was more than a trace of worry in his techno-nerd tactical officer's reply.
"Skip, if I didn't know better, and I don't know better, I'd say six of those battlecruisers just slid into a modified vertical wall of battle."
"That's crazy, Shannon," Caslet's astrogator said. "Battlecruisers don't form wall against battleships! That'd be suicide!"
"Yep," Foraker agreed. "That's exactly what it would be, for battlecruisers."
Caslet stared at the glowing light worms and felt his stomach drop clear out of the universe. It wasn't possible. And even if it were possible, surely one of the battlecruisers or battleships with their better sensors and more powerful computers would have seen it before a light cruiser did!
But those battlecruisers and battleships didn't have his resident tac witch a cold, clear voice said in his brain.
"Communications! Get me a priority link to the Flag, now!"
"He says what?"
Thurston wheeled his command chair around to face his ops officer with a glare. The enemy formation had begun to put out decoys and brought its jammers online, which was making it even harder to keep track of anything in that mishmash formation. His own ships were doing the same things, of course, but the Manties had obviously provided their Grayson allies with first-line EW equipment. First-line Manty EW equipment, he amended sourly. The range had fallen to just under thirteen million kilometers, well within theoretical missile range, but those decoys and jammers cut the effective range to seventy percent of theoretical, max. He had perhaps four-and-a-half minutes before both sides began to fire, and he didn't have time for last-minute nonsense.
"Citizen Commander Caslet says a half-dozen of their BCs have dropped into a modified wall of battle, Citizen Admiral," his com officer repeated. The ops officer was bent too intently over an auxiliary plot watching something play out to respond, and Thurston glowered at his back. Then the man straightened and met his CO's eyes.
"Caslet... may have something, Citizen Admiral. Watch your plot."
Thurston swung back to his own display and opened his mouth impatiently, then paused. Six Alliance Battle-cruisers were now highlighted in a darker red, and they formed, indisputably, they formed, what might just possibly be a formal wall of battle. It was an unorthodox one, like a huge "V" laid on its side in space, but the intervals were unmistakable. The confusion of the rest of their formation had hidden it from him, but now that those individual units had been highlighted, the spacing virtually leapt out of the display at him. Yet there was something wrong with it...
Citizen Vice Admiral Alexander Thurston punched a query into his console, and his face went pale as dispassionate computers answered it. No, that interval was all wrong for a wall of battlecruisers, but it was just right for one of superdreadnoughts...
"All right, people." All of Honor's divisional commanders looked out from her subdivided com screen as they neared the point in space she'd named "Point Luck," and she gave them a smile she hoped looked more confident than exhausted "I think we're about ready. Captain Yu," as in the RMN, so in the Grayson Navy, an admiral's flag captain was her tactical deputy, and Yu was far fresher than she, less likely to make a mistake through simple, molasses-minded fatigue, "the task force will rotate and engage on your signal."
"Aye, aye, My Lady," Alfredo Yu said quietly, then raised his voice to the other commanders. "The screen will scatter on my Alpha Mark; the squadron will rotate on my Beta Mark," he said crisply, and Honor sat back, waiting like every other officer in her task force, while her flag captain watched a digital timer tick downward.
"Twenty seconds," he said. "Ten. Five. Alpha Mark!"
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Alexander Thurston was still staring at his plot when the highlighted "battlecruisers" swung through ninety degrees, presenting their broadsides to his ships. And as they unmasked their batteries and the lighter units which had obscured them accelerated aside, his sensors showed him what they truly were at last.
He sat motionless, awareness of the trap into which he'd walked tolling through his mind, while TG 14.1 began its own preplanned deployment. There was no point trying to change the original plan at this late date, he thought almost calmly. There was no way to avoid action, and last-minute order changes would only confuse things and make bad worse. So he watched, saying nothing, as Meredith Chavez's battleships turned to open their own broadsides, exactly as he'd specified. But you expected to engage battlecruisers, didn't you? a voice said in his brain. He'd expected his ships to have a massive individual superiority: Every accepted convention said it was as suicidal for battleships to engage super-dreadnoughts as it was for battlecruisers to engage battleships... and he had no choice at all.
"Citizen Admiral?" It was Preznikov, staring at him, still trying to understand what had become so fatally obvious to Thurston, and then the SDs he'd allowed into missile range fired.
Honor's battlecruisers had only two missile pods apiece. That was all they could tow without massive degradation of their acceleration rates. But super-dreadnoughts were big enough they could actually tractor the pods inside their wedges, where they had no effect at all on acceleration, and now each of her ships of the wall deployed a lumpy, ungainly tail of no less than ten pods. They were ugly, clumsy, and fragile, those pods, but each of them also mounted ten box launchers loaded with missiles even larger and more powerful than a superdreadnought's missile tubes could fire.