"Ah! I hadn't realized the military stakes in today's exercises were quite that weighty. Now, of course, I fully understand."
"Good. And don't worry, I'll let you know as soon as-"
"Excuse me, Admiral."
Hegedusic turned his head at the interruption. A youthful-looking lieutenant stood in the open office hatch.
"Yes, what is it?" the admiral asked, with a trace of irritation at having someone break in on him in a private conversation.
"Admiral, I'm very sorry to disturb you. But we've just picked up a sizable hyper footprint."
"Hyper footprint? Where?"
For just a moment, Hegedusic wondered if it could be Horster. He was supposed to be "sneaking up" on Eroica Station, but Janko believed The Book had been written solely for him to personally ignore. That was why Hegedusic had chosen him as his first divisional commander. And it was possible he'd decided to try an open approach, pretending to be someone else and using his new EW to disguise his impeller signatures as merchants or something equally silly.
"Celestial azimuth zero-six-three, almost dead on the plane of the ecliptic, and about three-point-eight million klicks outside the hyper limit, Sir," the lieutenant replied.
Then it can't be Janko, was Hegedusic's first thought. His flight path originated at Monica; there's no way he could have gotten out across the hyper limit, circled around, and come in from the other side like this. Not this soon.
That was his first thought. His second was, But if it isn't Janko, who the hell is it?
"Sorry, Sir," Lieutenant Commander Wright said. "I undershot a bit."
"Stop fishing for compliments, Toby," Terekhov said, never looking away from the astrogation plot. "Five hundred k-klicks off on a thirty-eight light-year jump? Sounds like a bull's-eye to me."
He looked up in time to see Wright's grin. The astrogator remained probably the most private person aboard Hexapuma , and he continued to ration words as if someone were levying a surcharge on them. But he did have his own dry sense of humor, and that grin told Terekhov he'd caught the lieutenant commander exercising it.
"I suppose it's fairly close, Skipper," Ansten FitzGerald observed over the communications link to Auxiliary Control.
Terekhov had rethought things just a bit, and FitzGerald had Naomi Kaplan with him on the backup command deck. Terekhov had kept Guthrie Bagwell on the bridge, to run Hexapuma's electronic warfare systems for him, but he'd flipped Abigail Hearns and Kaplan. He planned on making his own tactical decisions, anyway, and if something happened to him, Ansten would have the best, most experienced tac officer in the ship to help him deal with it. Paulo d'Arezzo would run the EW console for her, and Aikawa Kagiyama would serve as her junior tac officer. Helen Zilwicki, who Terekhov privately believed was the best tactical specialist among the midshipmen, held the JTO's slot with Abigail, here on the bridge.
"Why, thank you, Sir," Wright said, and Bernardus Van Dort shook his head. The skinsuited Rembrandter-who, when it came right down to it, had no business at all on Hexapuma's bridge-sat to one side of Wright, in one of the jump seats the ship's midshipmen usually used when observing the astrogator. From his expression he was pretty sure there was still a shoe waiting to drop... and he was right.
"What I was going to say is five hundred thousand's fairly close... for someone who has trouble counting to eleven with his boots on," the XO said, and Terekhov chuckled.
It was a somewhat absent chuckle, and his attention was back on the plot, checking alignments. The Squadron had made its alpha transition in close formation and relatively gradually from a base velocity in hyper of 62,500 KPS. With the inevitable velocity bleed-off, that gave them an n-space velocity of almost exactly 5,000 KPS... headed directly for Eroica Station. At the moment, they were decelerating at 350 gravities in order to stay with the ammo ship, which was braking as hard as she could to stay clear of the hyper limit, and their formation looked close to perfect.
"Commander Badmachin reports Volcano is rolling pods, Sir," Amal Nagchaudhuri announced.
"I have them on lidar, Sir," Abigail Hearns confirmed from Tactical. " Warlock's picking up her allotment now."
"Very good," Terekhov acknowledged.
"Sir, we're being challenged by the Monicans," Nagchaudhuri said, and Terekhov snorted.
"That was fast," he said dryly. Of course the fact that Eroica Station was so close to the hyper limit meant the transmission lag was only a little over ninety seconds. "No response yet," he continued to the com officer. "We'll let them sweat a little longer."
"Yes, sir."
"Lieutenant Bagwell," Terekhov said, still never looking away from the plot, "let's get the EW platforms deployed."
"Aye, aye, Sir. Deploying now."
"Very good. Ms. Zilwicki."
"Sir?"
"Deploy the recon shell."
"Deploy the recon shell, aye, aye, Sir," Helen acknowledged, and began tapping commands into her console.
Her pulse, she knew, was quicker than usual, yet in almost too many ways, this felt like just another training sim. Which, she supposed, was the point of spending so much time in simulators in the first place.
The first remote sensor arrays launched, spreading out in a vast, hollow sphere around the Squadron. At the same time, she saw the electronic warfare platforms spreading out around the individual ships and settling into a closer, tighter defensive formation than the arrays.
A corner of her mind couldn't help thinking the Skipper was being a little paranoid. The Monicans couldn't possibly have known they were coming, and even the best Solarian missiles had a maximum powered attack envelope of no more than 6.5 million kilometers from rest, even at half-power settings. Not to mention the fact that while Manticoran electronics were the best any navy had ever deployed, the Monicans' basic surveillance systems were obsolescent League crap at least forty T-years out of date. There was no way any threat this system could mount could get through her sensor shell to attack range without plenty of warning.
But only a corner of her mind thought that. The rest of it recognized yet another example of the Skipper's infinite attention to detail. He would dot every "i" and cross every "t" ahead of time, when he had the leisure to be sure it was done right. Who was it, back on Old Earth, who'd said to ask him for anything but time? She rather thought it had been Napoleon. Of course, despite all his strategic genius on land, Napoleon hadn't known how to pour piss out of a boot where navies were concerned, but that particular bit of advice translated quite well across the centuries for any officer.
" Warlock has her full pod load, Sir," Nagchaudhuri reported. "Commander Diamond is moving up with Vigilant ."
"Thank you, Amal," Terekhov said. His tone was courteous and a bit abstracted, but Helen knew better than that. It was a reflection of how intensely he was concentrating, not of absentmindedness.
She thought about Lieutenant Commander Diamond. How did he feel right now? From all she could discover, he'd been with Commander Hope for at least two T-years. Now she'd been hustled off aboard the dispatch boat, returned to Spindle ignominiously with the Captain's dispatches, like so much unwanted freight. If this operation turned into the disaster she'd evidently predicted, she'd probably emerge as the only CO of the Squadron with an intact reputation. But if it succeeded, she'd be known throughout the Navy as the commander of a Queen's ship who'd refused, for whatever reason, to face the enemy when ordered to do so. And whichever way it came out, Diamond would have to live with the fact that he'd elected to succeed her in command rather than follow her into exile.
She watched her own plot as the highly stealthed pods clustered about Vigilant's icon. The latest wrinkle BuWeaps had come up with was to incorporate a small tractor beam into each individual pod. Although their design was maximized for deployment from the new hollow-core SD(P)s and even newer BC(P)s, there were still plenty of old-style ships or smaller vessels-like the ones of Captain Terekhov's small squadron-which could only deploy pods on tow. One limiting factor for those ships had always been the way the number of tractor beams they mounted restricted the numbers of pods they could deploy. By mounting tractors on the pods themselves, that particular problem was overcome, and Captain Terekhov was using that advantage to the maximum. By the time he got done his ships would do well to manage 350 g , but they'd have a devastating long-range punch. Even the destroyers would have ten pods tagging along. Each of the three light cruisers would have fifteen, Warlock and Vigilant would have twenty-three each, and Hexapuma would have no less than forty. Altogether, it added up to a hundred and seventy-one pods for a total of 1,710 missiles. Capital missiles of the Royal Manticoran Navy-the longest ranged, most deadly missiles in space.