"Well," Crandall didn't quite sneer, in response to Verrochio's protest, "you undoubtedly know the limits of your authority better than I do, Sir. However,Iknow the limits of my authority, and I also recognize my responsibilities. So, with all due respect for your need for Ministry approval, I have no intention of waiting for it."
"What do you mean?" Verrochio asked, his voice taut.
"I mean I'll be underway within forty-eight hours, Mr. Commissioner," Crandall said flatly, "and the Manties won't be happy to see me at all."
Chapter Fifty-One
"Well, Theresa?" Admiral Frederick Topolev said, looking at his chief of staff.
"Captain Walsh says we're ready to go, Sir," Commander Theresa Coleman replied. "And Felicidad's boards are all green."
Coleman nodded her head in the direction of Commander Felicidad Kolstad, Topolev's operations officer. It was odd, a corner of Topolev's thoughts reflected for far from the first time, that three of the four most important officers on his staff were not only all female, but all quite attractive, in their own very distinct ways. Although, perhaps, that attractiveness shouldn't have been such a surprise, since all of his officers were the products of alpha, beta, or gamma lines.
At the moment, Kolstad was concentrating all of her own attention on the readouts which showed the exact position of every unit of Topolev's task force, literally down to the last centimeter. All twenty of his ships were tractored together into two big, ungainly formations, nine hundred kilometers apart, as they floated with the closest thing possible to a zero velocity relative to one another and to the normal-space universe they'd left three months earlier.
"All right, people," Topolev said as calmly as he could, "let's do this."
"Yes, Sir," Coleman acknowledged, and passed the order to Captain Joshua Walsh, MANSMako's captain.
Absolutely nothing seemed to happen for the next two or three minutes, but appearances were deceiving, and Topolev waited patiently, watching his own displays, as Task Force One of the Mesan Alignment Navy translated ever so slowly and gradually back into normal-space.
This maneuver had been tested against the Mesa System's sensor arrays by crews using the early Ghost-class ships even before the first of theShark-class prototypes had ever been laid down, and Task Force One had practiced it over a hundred times once the mission had been okayed. Despite all that, Topolev still cherished a few reservations about the entire operation. Not about the abilities of his people, or the technical capabilities of his vessels, but about the timing.
And about the fact that we were never supposed to carry this out with the Sharks in the first place, Freddy, he reminded himself. Don't forget thatminor point! This was what the Leonard Detweilerclass was supposed to be for after the Sharks proved the basic concept. They weren't supposed to carry out the actual mission themselves; they were supposed to serve as training ships for the crews of the ships that would execute the mission.
He felt himself scowling down at his console as the familiar, worn-out thread of worry trickled through the back of his mind. He banished the expression quickly—it was hardly the confident, calm look his officers needed to see at this particular moment—and wished he could banish the worry with equal speed.
No one seemed to have noticed his momentary lapse, and his own concern smoothed into concentration as readouts began to slowly flicker and change. Both groups of his ships slid gradually, carefully towards the hyper wall, making the slowest possible translation back into normal-space.
It was physically impossible for any ship to cross the hyper wall without radiating a hyper footprint, but the strength of that footprint was—to a large extent, at least—a factor of the base velocity the ship in question wanted to carry across the wall. The alpha translation's bleed factor was roughly ninety-two percent, and all of that energy had to go somewhere. There was also an unavoidable gravitic spike or echo along the interface between the alpha bands of hyper-space and normal-space that was effectively independent of a ship's speed. Reducing velocity couldn't do anything about that, but a slow, "gentle" translation along a shallow gradient produced a much weaker spike, as well.
No translation, however slow and gentle, could render a hyper footprint too weak to be detected by the sort of arrays covering the Manticore Binary System. Yet arrays like that, because of their very sensitivity, were notorious for throwing up occasional "false positives," ghost translations that the filters were supposed to strain out before they ever reached a human operator's attention. And the most common ghosts of all normally appeared as a hyper footprint and an echo, which was precisely what Topolev's maneuver was supposed to counterfeit.
Under normal circumstances, there would have been very little point to deceiving the arrays where a simple hyper footprint was concerned, given the fact that those same arrays would almost certainly have picked up the impeller wedge of any ship headed towards the system. Even the best stealth systems were unreliable, at best, against a sensor array which could measure eight or nine thousand kilometers on a side, and Manticore's long-range sensors were even larger—and more sensitive—than that. Closer in, where the gradient of the stellar gravity well provided background interference and there were dozens of other gravity sources to clutter the landscape and turn the master arrays' very sensitivity against them, yes. The really big arrays were all but useless once you got within a light-hour or so of a system primary or a wormhole junction. That was where the shorter-ranged sensors aboard warships and recon platforms took over, and with good reason. But this far out was another matter entirely. Really good first-line stealth systems might manage to defeat the big arrays at this range, but no betting man would care to risk his money on the probability.
Fortunately, Frederick Topolev had no need to do anything of the sort.
It seemed to take much longer to complete the maneuver than it had in any of the training exercises, although the time displays insisted it really hadn't. Personally, Topolev suspected the damned clocks were broken.
"Translation completed, Sir," Lieutenant Commander Vivienne Henning, his staff astrogator, announced. "Preliminary checks indicate we're right on the money: one light-month out on almost exactly the right bearing."
"Good work," Topolev complemented her, and she smiled with pleasure at the sincerity in his voice. He smiled back, then cleared his throat. "And now that we're here, let's go someplace else."
"Yes, Sir."
The twenty Shark-class ships, each about midway between an old-fashioned battleship and a dreadnought for size, deactivated the tractors which had held them together. Reaction thrusters flared, pushing them apart, although they didn't seek the same amount of separation most starships their size would have. Then again, they didn't need that much separation.
A few moments later, they were underway at a steady seventy-five gravities. At that absurdly low acceleration rate it would take them a full ninety hours—almost four T-days—to reach the eighty percent of light-speed that represented the maximum safe normal-space velocity permitted by available particle shielding, and it would take them another three T-weeks, by the clocks of the rest of the universe, to reach their destination, although the subjective time would be only seventeen days for them. Another ship of their size could have attained the same velocity in a little more than thirteen hours, but that was all right with Admiral Topolev. The total difference in transit time would still be under six days—less than four, subjective—and unlike the units of his own command, that hypothetical other ship would have been radiating an impeller signature . . . which his ships weren't.