“Not to my knowledge.”
“Then you will execute that maneuver at what you feel is the best moment,” Iceni ordered. “Without announcing that fact, I will pass maneuvering control of this cruiser to you when we are one minute from contact. I will handle weapons targeting for all mobile—all warships with us.”
“Yes, Madam CEO. I understand and will obey.”
Marphissa returned to her station, while Akiri tracked her progress with worried eyes. When promotions and demotions could come at the whim of a CEO, private meetings between a subordinate and a CEO would worry any supervisor.
“Five minutes to contact.”
All weapons systems were ready on the heavy cruisers, light cruisers, and HuKs under her control. Iceni itched to prioritize their target now, but waited. If Kolani somehow still had a tap into the comm net tying together those units, she might still have time to learn Iceni’s plan.
Akiri and the line workers on the bridge were all pretending not to be watching her, but Akiri’s nervousness was once again becoming visible. “Madam CEO,” he finally said, “we still require your prioritization orders for the mobile units’ combat-system targeting.”
“You will get it.” Iceni marveled at how calm her voice sounded.
“Three minutes to contact.”
Roughly five and a half million kilometers separated the two forces as they rushed together at a combined velocity of sixty thousand kilometers per second. Iceni shook her head, trying to grasp such distances and such speeds. She couldn’t really do it. Maybe even Black Jack couldn’t. All any human could do was set the scale on their display so that the distances and speeds had the illusion of being something a human mind could accept and work with.
“Two minutes to contact.”
Iceni carefully entered her targeting priorities, pausing to triple-check they were what she wanted, then sent them to the combat systems on not just her cruiser but all of the other mobile forces under her control.
Akiri seemed relieved for an instant as the orders popped up on his own display, then jerked with surprise. “What—?”
But Iceni was already entering the commands to shift maneuvering control to Marphissa. Looking back, she saw Marphissa nod to indicate she was ready.
“One minute to contact.”
Iceni took a breath, then keyed her comm circuit. “For the people,” she sent out to every listener. Perhaps the old phrase, which seemed to have lost any real meaning long ago, would now hearten her supporters.
Marphissa was rigid before her own display, concentrating, one hand poised over her controls.
Akiri gave Iceni a worried look. “Madam CEO, CEO Kolani’s force will be concentrating their fire on this cruiser.”
“This cruiser may not be where CEO Kolani’s force expects it to be,” Iceni replied.
“CEO Kolani’s force is firing missiles,” the operations line worker said.
Another nervous glance from Akiri, but Iceni shook her head. “We will hold fire except for defensive systems.”
The final seconds to contact dwindled with astounding speed. Hell-lance particle beams speared out from the warships under Iceni’s command, aiming to hit the oncoming missiles. Most of the missiles blew up as the hell lances went home, and a few more detonated when last-ditch barrages of grapeshot, metal ball bearings depending on their kinetic energy and mass to do damage, slammed into the missiles short of their targets. Iceni’s cruiser jolted as a couple of missiles detonated against her shields, creating dangerous weak spots.
Iceni felt sudden forces jerk at her as Marphissa activated last-moment maneuvering commands. The drone of the inertial nullifiers, normally too low to notice, rose in pitch as they protested the demands being made upon them.
The cruiser bolted upward, fighting momentum to curve away from the track it had held for more than half an hour.
Just beneath the cruiser, the rest of the two forces tore past each other so quickly that the moment of closest approach came and went far too quickly for human senses to register. The cruiser Iceni rode had already pumped out some last-moment missiles, and the rest of her warships did as well.
But none of those weapons aimed for the cruiser being ridden by Kolani. Instead, every missile, every hell lance, went for the stern of the other cruiser in Kolani’s force. C-818 staggered as multiple hits knocked down her stern shields and impacted on her main propulsion units.
Meanwhile, the barrage of hell lances and grapeshot aimed at the spot where Iceni’s cruiser should have been tore harmlessly past just beneath, only a few grazing the shields of the heavy cruiser as it steadied out again.
“C-818 has lost all main propulsion,” the operations line worker cried. “C-818 can no longer maneuver!”
Iceni smiled. “With CEO Kolani down to one heavy cruiser in her force, the odds are now much in our favor on the next firing pass.”
“But—” Akiri was shaking his head, trying to grasp what had happened. “CEO Kolani might just run now. Avoid action.”
“That would be the prudent thing to do, in the short run,” Iceni agreed. “But you know CEO Kolani’s temperament. She isn’t thinking prudently right now. She is angry. She wants to kill me even more now than she did five minutes ago. And in the long run, arriving at Prime with only one heavy cruiser would simply guarantee a swift firing squad for incompetence. No, she’s going to attack.”
On her display, the crippled C-818 had kept onto the same vector, heading helplessly away from the other warships. But Kolani’s other ships were bending into as tight a turn as they could manage. That turn covered a lot of space at the velocity they were traveling, but it was plain that Kolani intended to reengage as soon as possible.
“All units, come up one one zero degrees.” Iceni brought the rest of her own force curving upward to join with her cruiser, then continued the upward turn, not trying to match the hull-straining tightness of Kolani’s maneuver. “She’ll come to us,” Iceni said, steadying out her force.
Using the standard human conventions for maneuvering in a star system, up was the direction arbitrarily designated above the plane of the planets orbiting the star while down would be below that. Port meant a turn away from the star while starboard meant a turn toward the star. The conventions were the only way of ensuring that one spacecraft understood directions issued by another spacecraft when they were operating in an environment without any real ups or downs. To an observer on a planet, Iceni’s warships would have turned so far “up” that they had passed the vertical and were upside down, angling farther above the plane of the star system. Kolani’s force had done the same, so that the tracks of the two forces were coming together at an angle as if aiming to complete two sides of a triangle whose base was the original tracks of the warships before their first encounter.
“This time,” Iceni said, “we will target everything on CEO Kolani’s cruiser.” There was a chance that would destroy cruiser C-990, but there was also a chance that Kolani, if she was desperate enough and convinced that victory was impossible, would still launch a bombardment of the planet. That had to be prevented even if the price was a heavy cruiser that Iceni didn’t want to lose.
“Madam CEO,” the comm line worker said, “we’re getting broadcasts from the planet that you might want to review.”
“Is General Drakon still in control?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll deal with that after we’ve finished with CEO Kolani.”
The wait wasn’t nearly as long as before as the two forces rushed back together. Akiri seemed resigned to the damage that might still be inflicted on his unit. Marphissa appeared enormously pleased with herself but was keeping it mostly under wraps.