"Enemy carriers advancing, sir. They're launching. Plotting estimates two hundred plus fighters. Estimated time to our fighters is twelve minutes."
"Thank you, David. Commander Jorgensen?"
"Full decks, sir, or right next to them. They should have two-forty, plus or minus twenty."
"It sounds like they're biting, sir," Tomanaga observed cautiously.
"Perhaps. But don't underestimate Ian Trevayne, Bob." Han tapped her fingertips gently together, then glanced at Tsing Chang. "Admiral, prepare to move out. Bob, same message to the other battlegroups on whiskers."
"Aye, aye, sir."
The needle-thin com lasers woke, murmuring across the emptiness to the tightly grouped capital ships of the Terran Republic. Han looked back at her display, watching as Magda's fighters plunged into the oncoming Rim ships.
Running battle snarled viciously across the Zapata System, and space became leprous with the ugly pockmarks of nuclear warheads and dying humans. Trevayne felt Nelson tremble under full drive, but even at her maximum speed, the ponderous supermonitor fell further and further behind as Stoner's carriers raced ahead to cover Remko's cruisers. His pilots had moved in with the wary skill of professionals, but they'd been disconcerted to find that the rebel fighters mounted a new weapon-a kind of flechette missile, short-ranged and useless against starships but dismayingly effective against fighters. They faced a daunting exchange rate, yet they hurtled into action.
Trevayne sat motionless but for the slow drumming of his fingers. The whole unorthodox course of the battle disturbed him. Simple attrition made sense against the flanks of an extending corridor, but not in a set-piece battle to defend a vital system. And the presence of battleships this far from their retreat warp point did not offer advantages commensurate with the risk. To be sure, they were heavy metal for battlecruisers, but they weren't fast enough to crush Sean before he could fall back on the battle-line, however far ahead he got. Damn it, what were the rebels up to?
His battle-line had drawn almost level with Planet Three when Trevayne thought his questions had been answered.
"Admiral," Yoshinaka announced, "scanners report nine battlecruisers leaving Zapata III. Evidently they've been hiding behind the planet-now they're on course to intercept our screen from behind." Even as he spoke, the computers dispassionately added the newcomers to the display.
Things clicked in Trevayne's mind. Of course! The rebels had known he was as likely as themselves to deduce that Zapata was the logical place for them to make a stand-so they'd decided to make it elsewhere! Iphigena? Probably. It didn't matter. What mattered was that their objective for this battle was to strip him of his screen for the decisive clash . . . just as their false "fortresses" had already stripped him of most of his SBMHAWKs. And, he thought grimly, they were going about it in an all-too-rational fashion. Caught between these new battlecruisers and the force with which he was already engaged, Remko would be overwhelmed before he could disengage.
But . . . the rebel's timing, while excellent, wasn't perfect. The geometry of the engagement had forced them to jump as soon as Stoner's carriers came to them . . . while the onward-lumbering battle-line was still close enough, still had the range, to reach them with its heavy external ordnance load of SBMs. Yet there was no time to lose, or the battlecruisers would soon draw out of range. He gave the command, and the capital ships' external ordnance lashed outward, the salvos of SBMs thickened by the supermonitors' internally launched HBMs.
Trevayne sat back, awaiting further reports as the missiles speckled his display. Those battlecruisers were doomed. Nothing that size could stand up to that hurricane of missiles. Nothing. Yet there remained the unidentified worry nagging at the back of his mind, the sense of something overlooked. He was still scratching at the mental itch when Yoshinaka turned a carefully controlled face to him.
"Admiral, we've lost missile lock. Those 'battlecruisers' . . . it seems they were scout cruisers with their ECM in deception mode. They've dropped it and gone to evasive action."
Their eyes met, and neither needed to speak. The rebels had just stripped the battle-line of its external ordnance.
Somewhere in the back of Trevayne's mind a part of him reflected that perhaps he'd been too worried about his subordinate's cockiness to recognize it in himself. Or had he simply fallen into a belief in the infallibility of his own judgment? It was easy to do, when Miriam wasn't around. . . .
It only remained to learn why the rebels had mousetrapped him into firing off his missiles.
"They've taken the bait, sir!" Tomanaga's voice was exultant. "They just flushed their XO racks at the decoys!"
"Tracking reports at least ninety percent of their external ordnance fired, sir," David Reznick confirmed.
"Sir, their battle-line's flank scouts will clear the planet in eleven minutes," Stravos Kollentai reported.
"Very well." Han drew a deep, unobtrusive breath, remembering another battle aboard another ship. She glanced at Tsing Chang and saw what might have been a shadowy smile of memory on his imperturbable face.
"Commander Reznick, send to all commands: 'Execute Actium Alpha.' "
"Aye, aye, sir."
"Admiral Tsing."
"Yes, Admiral?" There was an edge of memory in that voice, Han decided. She felt a surge of warmth for the bulky admiral, and her face lit with one of her rare, serene smiles.
"Yours is the honor, Admiral," she said simply. "Prepare to move out."
"Aye, aye, sir. Immediately."
"Admiral Windrider is launching!" Reznick reported.
"Very well. Admiral Tsing, engage the enemy."
"Aye, aye, sir."
The superdreadnought TRNS Arrarat rumbled to life, drive field bellowing muted thunder through her iron bones as Battle Group Nine, Terran Republican Navy, moved out to battle.
"Sir! Admiral Trevayne! The scanners-!"
Trevayne's head snapped around, his eyes flashing angrily at the hapless scanner rating whose incoherent report had shattered the silence. But his scathing retort died aborning as his plot altered silently. The disinterested computers updated the data quietly, and the menace of the new data codes flashed starkly on the screen.
A chain of lights crept around the disk of Zapata III in a sullen, crimson line of hostile capital ships. He sat quietly, his brain racing to assimilate the new data, as eight monitors and twenty-four battleships and superdreadnoughts abandoned their hiding place in the planet's shadow. They were too close and fast for his battle-line to avoid.
And even as they emerged from the shadows there came more reports-reports of swarms of strikefighters spewing out of the asteroid belt behind Fourth Fleet. Of course, he thought coldly, filled with an ungrudging respect for his opponent's tactics. Escort carriers. They had one advantage over larger carriers-with their power down and a little luck, they could be mistaken for asteroids by even the best scanner teams.
Not that they'd needed much luck, he thought grimly, remembering the cloaking ECM on the escort carriers raiding his communications. He'd thought it a financially extravagant way to build such cheap carriers-now he understood why it had been done.
He was back on stride by the time the final report came in. He knew what was happening, understood the deadly ambush into which he and his ships had strayed. This was no mere attempt to stop Fourth Fleet; it was a full-blooded bid to destroy it. That was why they'd let him into the system unopposed-to catch his slower battle-line between warp points, unable to retreat, while they hit him from all sides. And with Fourth Fleet gone, the rebels could sweep into Zephrain at last. Oh, yes, he understood-and perhaps alone among all the personnel of the Rim's ships, he was unsurprised as the "battleships" Remko had been pursuing cut their ECM and appeared in their true guise: assault carriers, already launching the massive fighter groups they had held back from the original clash against Stoner's isolated ships.