"I don't know, and it doesn't matter," Michelle said grimly. "Our orders are clear enough, and so are the alternatives I spelled out to him. And I don't have any intention of waiting until he fires first."
"Excuse me, Ma'am," Dominica Adenauer said, and Michelle turned towards her, eyebrows raised.
"CIC's just picked up a status change," the operations officer said. "The Sollies have deployed some sort of passive defensive system."
"Such as?" Michelle asked, crossing to Adenauer's console and gazing down at the ops officer's displays.
"Hard to say, really, Ma'am. Whatever it is, Max and I don't think they've brought it fully on-line yet. What it looks like is a variation on the tethered decoy concept. From what the recon platforms can tell us, each of their ships has just deployed a half-dozen or so captive platforms on either flank. They have to have a defensive function, and I don't think they're big enough to carry the sort of on-board point defense stations our Keyhole platforms do. I don't want to get too overconfident, but it looks to me like they've got to be decoys, and we already know Solly stealth technology is pretty damned good. If their decoys are equally good, this is probably going to degrade our accuracy considerably, especially at extended ranges."
"Where is Apollo when you need it?" Michelle asked half-whimsically.
"When you say 'degrade our accuracy considerably,' do you have any sort of guesstimate for just how considerably we're talking about?" Lecter asked.
"Not really, Ma'am," Tersteeg replied for both of them. "Until we've seen it in action—and confirmed that it actually is a decoy system, for that matter—there's no way we could give you any real estimate."
Lecter grimaced, although the response was hardly a surprise, and looked at Michelle.
"Do you want to let the range drop a little lower than we'd originally planned, Ma'am?"
"I don't know." Michelle frowned and tugged at the lobe of her right ear as she considered Lecter's question.
ONI and BuWeaps had evaluated the weapons aboard the Solarian-built battlecruisers captured intact at Monica. The energy weapons, although individually smaller and lighter than was current Manticoran practice, had been quite good. The passive defensive systems had been good, as well, although not up to Manticoran standards, but the missiles—and counter-missiles—had been another story entirely, and the software support for the ships' sensors had been sadly out of date by those same standards. For that matter, the sensors themselves were little, if any, better than the hardware the RMN had deployed at the beginning of the First Havenite War, twenty-odd T-years before.
There was some division of opinion among the analysts as to whether or not the prize ships' electronics reflected the best the Sollies had. The standard Solarian policy for supplying military vessels to allies and dependencies had always been to provide them with downgraded, "export versions" of critical weapons technologies, which suggested the same thing had been done with the battlecruisers intended for Roberto Tyler. Except, of course, that those battlecruisers had come from recent service with Frontier Fleet, which should have meant they carried close to first-line, current-generation technology, and a bunch of outlaws like the ones at Technodyne probably wouldn't have gone to the expense of replacing that technology with less capable versions for what was already a thoroughly illegal transaction.
For the moment, BuWeaps had decided to split the difference and assume that everything they'd seen from Monica represented a minimum benchmark. The existence of the defensive system Adenauer and Tersteeg had just described—assuming their analysis was accurate—suggested that that decision had been wise, since none of the ships at Monica had been equipped with anything like it. But that also suggested it would probably be unwise to rely too heavily on the demonstrated range and acceleration rates of the anti-ship missiles those battlecruisers had carried, as well.
Those missiles' powered range envelope from rest generated a maximum range of just over 5,900,000 km, with a terminal velocity of 66,285 KPS. Given their current closing velocity, that equated to a range at launch of a shade better than 12,680,000 kilometers, whereas the Mark 23 had a range at launch of 85,930,000 given the same geometry. Even the Mark 16 had a range at launch of well over 42 million kilometers under current conditions. So even if she assumed Byng's battlecruisers carried missiles twice as capable as those captured at Monica, she still had better than three times his maximum powered range on her Mark 16s, much less her Mark 23s.
"What will our closing velocity be at forty million klicks?" she asked Adenauer, and the ops officer punched numbers.
"Approximately five-four-point-seven thousand KPS, Ma'am. We'll be there in roughly twenty-six minutes."
"Um."
Michelle pulled harder on her ear lobe while she did the math. At that velocity, the Sollies would cross through her Mark 16s' range to her ships in about thirteen minutes. At one launch every eighteen seconds her shipboard launchers could fire forty-three missiles each in that timeframe, and she had six hundred and twenty tubes aboard her Nikes and Saganami-Cs, alone. That worked out to better than twenty-six thousand missiles, which she suspected—decoys or no—would be a fairly significant case of overkill.
On the other hand, the Mark 23s from the pods limpeted to the exterior of her ships' hulls would have a powered envelope at launch of well over ninety-six million kilometers, assuming the target's acceleration held constant, which would let her she could open fire with almost fifty million kilometers sooner. Her accuracy would be lower, but . . .
"What will our closing velocity be at eighty million klicks?"
"Four-six-point-zero-five thousand KPS," Adenauer replied. "We'll reach that range in almost exactly thirteen minutes."
"Given that geometry, what do our Mark 23 envelopes look like?"
"Assuming constant target acceleration, a two-drive burn would give us . . ." Adenauer punched numbers ". . . just over four-six-point-one million klicks at launch. An all-up burn would make it about nine-one-four million."
"Thank you."
Michelle folded her hands behind her and walked slowly back across to the main plot to stand gazing into its depths. Lecter followed her, standing quietly at her right shoulder, waiting while she thought. After what seemed like hours but probably wasn't actually more than a handful of seconds, Michelle turned her head to look at Lecter.
"We'll send Byng one more message," she said. "That's it. If he doesn't stop this horse shit after that, we'll go with William Tell at forty-five million klicks."
For a moment, it looked as if Lecter were going to say something, but then she simply nodded and contented herself with a simple, "Yes, Ma'am," and Michelle smiled faintly.
It is sort of a balancing act, isn't it, Cindy? she thought dryly. Unless I'm prepared to go ahead and kill all of them, anyway—which, while tempting, would probably upset Beth just a smidgen, given the foreign policy implications and all—firing at that range is going to tell the Sollies a lot about our capabilities, and that could very well come under the heading of a Bad Thing. If this situation turns as nasty as I expect it to, given the fact that Byng is obviously even stupider than I thought, I'm sure the Admiralty would prefer to keep them ignorant of the Mark 23's real reach for as long as we can. But I'll still be holding over twenty million klicks of range in reserve, and the best way to keep this situation from going completely south on everyone is to finish up with the lowest possible casualties here in New Tuscany.