“Keep them in the link for now.” Iceni gave her display an irate look. Instead of getting accurate updates from those other warships, she would now have to depend on the sensors on the cruisers to know what was really happening.
Accurate updates? “They were already falsifying their data feeds to us, weren’t they?” Iceni asked.
The operations line worker nodded. “The movements we’re seeing don’t match what their updates were telling us. It was…” His voice trailed off.
“Say it.” Iceni’s own voice wasn’t loud, but it carried very well to the line worker and everyone else on the bridge.
“Yes, Madam CEO. It was clumsy.” Now that he had voiced a criticism of superiors, even though they were on other units, the line worker seemed defiantly eager to keep talking. “They could have matched their false feeds to their actual maneuvers, knowing that we would see any discrepancy; instead, they just kept sending us data saying nothing had changed.”
Iceni watched the line worker, who had flushed as he returned her gaze with worried eyes. She wondered if any line workers on Kolani’s units had realized the need to tailor the false data feeds but hesitated to appear to question or contradict superiors. “That’s a good assessment,” she finally said, drawing a hastily concealed look of disbelief from the line worker. “We need to think of things like that before we give away any information to CEO Kolani. What is your rating?”
“Senior line worker class two, Madam CEO.”
“You’re now a senior line worker class one. Keep thinking, and tell me what I need to know.” Iceni turned back to face Akiri. “Make that promotion happen. I am pleased to see that your crew is well trained and knowledgeable.”
Akiri, who had been on the verge of scowling, perked up and bestowed an approving look on the line worker.
“I… I have a connection with CEO Drakon,” the comm line worker cried with relief.
The window that opened before Iceni showed Drakon in combat armor, smoking wreckage in the background. It took her a moment to realize that the wreckage had once been the ISS command center. She had toured that facility once, but only once, feeling half a prisoner already until safely outside the ISS headquarters again.
Drakon’s eyes seemed to hold more weariness than triumph, but he waved around in a casual gesture. “We’ve got it. There are individual snakes still running loose, but the heads are all dead, and we’ll catch the rest pretty quick.”
“Where’s Hardrad?”
“That’s sort of a metaphysical question now.”
Iceni had to pause to realize what that meant. “I didn’t know you had such a dark sense of humor, CEO Drakon.”
“It’s now General Drakon. Like you said, we need to cast off Syndicate ways of doing things.”
“I see.” A unilateral decision on Drakon’s part. Not a decision she could protest, but still a worrisome move. “Make sure you examine whatever remains of Hardrad carefully before disposing of it. There may be tiny data-storage devices hidden within him.”
“There were,” Drakon said. “But they were all dead-manned to his metabolism. When he died, they autowiped.”
“Pity. Since I now know that you have the planetary surface under control, I must focus on my own task. There’s a battle to fight up here.”
“Maybe Kolani will rethink that once she learns the snakes on the planet have been wiped out.”
“I’ll make sure that she knows,” Iceni said. “I will contact you again once the battle is over.”
But Drakon shook his head. “What’s to keep Kolani from dropping rocks on us during your fight?”
“She’ll want an intact planet to offer to her masters,” Iceni replied. “Restoring a battered ruin to their control will not impress them. If she did that, she would be blamed for the losses far more than she’d get credit for any success. I am certain of that.”
“I’m glad that you’re certain of it,” Drakon replied, “seeing as how you don’t have to worry about any of those rocks hitting you on the head. Have a nice battle.”
“Thank you.” The window closed, and Iceni gazed morosely at the place where Drakon’s image had been. Working with him was going to be challenging, but positioning herself to eliminate him would be a very long-term project.
Assuming that she wanted to eliminate him. She had noticed that CEOs who concentrated on getting rid of anyone who could be competition ended up getting rid of those who could do their jobs well, and that always produced long-term disaster.
Iceni’s eyes moved slightly to her display, where the representations of Kolani’s forces were steadying out on a direct intercept with the path of the units with Iceni. “She’s coming straight at us.”
Akiri nodded morosely. “CEO Kolani will focus her fire on this cruiser. She will want to kill you, thinking that will cause the other units to surrender.”
“Just as I need to kill her, so I won’t have to destroy all of the units following her.” Iceni scowled at the display, where automated calculations were summing up projections for an engagement. She had three heavy cruisers to Kolani’s two, but Kolani had more smaller warships. In a straight head-to-head exchange of blows, the firepower ratios would be very nearly equal. Victory or defeat would rest on chance, on how many hits went home on the primary targets, on where those hits struck, on which vital systems got knocked out.
She hated depending on chance. “How can we knock out the heavy cruiser carrying CEO Kolani without facing an equal chance of losing this one?” she asked Akiri and Marphissa.
Both looked back at her with puzzled expressions. “We go in hard and fast,” Marphissa finally said. “A clean, straight-on firing run. That will give us the best chance.”
“Black Jack never uses clean, straight-on firing runs,” Iceni said.
Akiri spoke cautiously. “The actions of Geary and the results of his engagements with Syndicate Worlds forces have been classified. We have not seen any official reports on those matters.”
Of course not. Stupid, mindless Syndicate Worlds security classification, keeping essential information from its own personnel rather than from the enemy. “To put it bluntly, Black Jack repeatedly inflicted horrendous losses on Syndicate Worlds flotillas, while suffering much smaller losses in exchange. He used tactics that we’re still trying to analyze but which seemed to me to vary by situation.”
“The rumors were true?” Marphissa asked, appalled.
“Yes. The mobile forces of the Syndicate Worlds have been decimated. There’s very little left. You’ve seen what the Alliance still has.”
“Can you also—?”
“No.” I’m not Black Jack. I’ve studied what we know about those engagements, and I still don’t understand why he did things the way he did, how he timed his movements, how…
Can I pretend to be Black Jack? What would he do? Not slam straight into the opposing force with the odds so even. He would… change the odds. “But I do have an idea.” She called up a maneuvering recommendation for intercepting Kolani’s force, a simple maneuver since Kolani was coming right at them, aiming to intercept the spot where they would be if Iceni’s force remained in orbit about this planet as it continued along its own track around the star. “All units, accelerate to point one light speed, alter course to port three two degrees at time one four.”
“CEO Kolani’s force has also steadied out at point one light speed,” Marphissa said. “Forty-seven minutes to contact if she adjusts vectors when she sees our own maneuver.”
“We are to concentrate fire on Cruiser 990?” Akiri asked, his hands already moving to set that priority in the targeting systems.