A mere captain wasn't supposed to know about the inner deliberations of his supreme commanders, but Brentworth had connections few captains had. He knew Matthews and D'Orville would deliberately put together a force heavy enough to leave the Peeps no option but to run... but he also knew that if their approach vector made evasion impossible, the Alliance admirals intended to annihilate their entire force.
And that was why, after the murder of Convoy MG-19, Captain Mark Brentworth asked God each night to send the bastards in at too high a base velocity to hyper out before the superdreadnoughts caught them.
"—attle stations! Battle stations! All hands man battle stations! This is not a drill! Repeat, this is not a drill!"
The raucous, recorded voice and shrill, atonal alarm filled HMS Star Knight as her crew thundered to their stations. Captain Seamus O'Donnell sidestepped quickly to avoid a missile tech as the woman disappeared down the access tube to her station, then vaulted into the lift and punched the button. He was still sealing his skin suit when the doors opened on the bridge, and his exec looked up, then scrambled from the command chair with obvious relief.
O'Donnell dropped into the chair almost before Commander Rogers was clear. He racked his helmet by feel and familiarity alone, for his eyes were already busy absorbing the information on his tactical repeaters, and his mouth tightened.
Star Knight was the lead ship of the Manticoran Navy's most powerful heavy cruiser class. At three hundred thousand tons, she was fit to take on anything smaller than a battlecruiser, and, under the right conditions, she might even engage a battlecruiser with a chance of victory. It had been done, after all. Once.
But she wasn't the equal of the force coming at her today.
"IDs?" he snapped at his tac officer.
"None definite, Sir, but preliminary signature analysis says they're Peeps." The tac officer's reply was tight with anxiety, and O'Donnell grunted an acknowledgment.
"No response to our challenges, Com?"
"No, Sir."
O'Donnell grunted again, and his mind raced. The Poicters System was hardly crucial in military terms.
The powerful base built at Talbot had reduced Poicters to little more than a flank guard for the task force stationed there, but it was still an inhabited system, with a total population of almost a billion, and the Star Kingdom was committed to defend those people. That was why Star Knight and the other ships of her squadron were here, but none of her consorts were within light-minutes of her at the moment.
"Positive ID from CIC, Sir," his tac officer said suddenly. "They're Peeps, all right. Sultan—class."
"Damn," O'Donnell said softly. He tapped on a command chair arm for a moment, then looked across at the tac officer. "Enemy vector?"
"They're on an almost exact reciprocal, Sir—one-seven-three zero-one-eight relative. Their base velocity is point-zero-four-three cee, and their current acceleration is four-seven-zero gees. Range one-point-three-zero-eight light-minutes. They just popped out of hyper less than two minutes ago, Sir. We didn't have a clue they were coming."
O'Donnell nodded, silently cursing the luck which had put him in such a position. Or was it luck? The squadron had maintained the same patrol schedule for months now. Had the Peeps slipped a scout into range to analyze their movements? He hoped not, because if they had, this was a deliberate interception, and there was no way Star Knight could face four battlecruisers.
He laid maneuvering cursors on his display and looked for some way out. His ship was headed almost straight down their throats at a closing speed of over 33,000 KPS, and the powered missile envelope would be close to 19,000,000 kilometers under those conditions. That meant he'd enter it in less than two and a half minutes unless he found some way to avoid it. But the maneuvering computers told him what he'd already known: there was no way he could. He had little more than a 50 g acceleration advantage; even if he turned directly away, it would take him over seventeen hours to begin pulling away from them, and he'd overshoot their present position in less than thirteen minutes, even at max decel. If they were here to attack, their broadsides would rip his ship apart long before he did.
"Helm, roll ship and bring us to zero-niner-zero by zero-niner-zero at maximum acceleration," he ordered.
"Aye, aye, Sir. Coming to zero-niner-zero zero-niner-zero at five-two-three gravities acceleration," his coxswain responded, and O'Donnell watched his display for the Peeps' reaction as Star Knight rolled up on her side, presenting the impenetrable belly of her impeller wedge to them, and snapped through a skew turn down and away to starboard. It was a clear bid to avoid action, and it would work... unless the Peeps chose to split their formation and go in pursuit.
"Com, get a report off to Commodore Weaver," O'Donnell said, his eyes glued to his display. "Inform him we have positively identified four Havenite Sultan—class battlecruisers in violation of Poicters space. Include our position, tac analysis, and current vectors. Request assistance and inform him I am attempting to avoid action."
"Aye, aye, Sir."
O'Donnell nodded absently, still staring at his display, and then his hands clenched. The glaring dots of hostile impeller wedges were shifting their vectors—not simply relative to Star Knight, but to one another, as well. They were altering course to intercept... and splitting their formation to come at him from so many angles he could never interpose his wedge against all of them.
"Amend that signal, Com," he said quietly. "Inform Commodore Weaver I do not expect to be able to avoid action. Tell him we'll do our best."
Rear Admiral Edward Pierre leaned back in his command chair with a hungry smile as his four ships swept towards the hyper limit of the Talbot System. He'd heard for years how good the Manticorans were—how they had a tradition of victory, how hard they trained.
How good their tactics were, how their analysts and planners were up to every trick—and it had always irritated him immensely. He hadn't seen any of their graveyards, and if they were so damned good, why was the People's Republic of Haven gobbling up every choice bit of stellar real estate in sight, not them? And why were they so damned scared to pull the trigger themselves, if their superiority was so great?
Pierre wasn't like the majority of the People's Navy's senior flag officers, and he both resented the distinction and took immense pride in it. His father's political power helped explain Pierre's rapid rise, but Rob Pierre's fight to claw his way off the Dole as a young man had imbued him with a burning contempt for "his" government, and his son had inherited that contempt along with the benefits of his power. That was one of the several reasons Admiral Pierre belonged to the Navy's "war now" faction.
There was an invisible wall in the People's Navy. If you wanted rank above a rear admiral's, then you had to be born a Legislaturalist. That alone would have made Pierre hate most of his superiors—not that he didn't have other reasons. The Legislaturalist admirals, safe from competition behind their wall of privilege, had gotten fat and lazy. They'd had it too good for too long, and the guts had gone out of them, until they were afraid to risk their power and wealth and comfort even against a two-for-a-credit single-system threat like Manticore. Pierre despised them for that, and he'd been delighted when he was picked for this mission and the chance to show them how groundless their fears were.