No, if they wanted the Star Kingdom, they had to fight for it. And, as the very first step, they had to break its frontier defenses and annihilate a sizable chunk of its navy in the process.
The admiral climbed out of his seat as the landing gear engaged. He scooped up his briefcase, nodded to the security team which accompanied him everywhere, and made his way down the shuttle ramp with a smile that hid his inner apprehension.
DuQuesne Base's huge war room was even more lavishly appointed than Central Planning back home in the Octagon, and Parnell's staff stood in a silent arc behind him as he studied the status boards. It was a habit of his to absorb the raw data for himself. He knew it irked some of his staffers, but he didn't do it because he distrusted their competence. If he hadn't trusted them, they wouldn't be here in the first place, but even the best people made mistakes. He'd caught more than a few of them in his time, and while he knew he couldn't possibly assimilate that much detail, he'd trained himself over the decades to absorb a general overview.
The confirmed reports on Manty naval deployments were scantier than he'd hoped for, but what there were of them looked hopeful. There were signs of movement all along the frontier, and Operation Argus had done better than he'd ever expected when the notion was first proposed to him. Argus was hardly a speedy way to amass information, but the data it did bring in was surprisingly detailed, and that insight into normal Manty ops patterns was all that had made this entire operation workable. Besides, he admitted, Argus made him feel better. Manticore's persistently better hardware had begun to assume Sisyphean proportions for Parnell, and it pleased him to see the Manties' faith in their technological superiority boomeranging on them.
He noted with satisfaction the arrival of fresh Manticoran forces in Zuckerman, Dorcas, and Minette, and other reports indicated that the RMN had substantially reinforced its escort and frontier patrol forces. That was good. Every ship committed to any of those areas was one less he'd have to worry about when the war actually opened.
He was less pleased by the information from Seaford Nine. The sheer spatial volume of the cursed Alliance meant it was out of date, of course, but it was also unfortunately vague. Well, Rollins knew how critical the situation was; undoubtedly he was working to refine his data even now, assuming he hadn't already done so.
The CNO let his eyes run down ONI's latest estimates (guesstimates, he corrected himself wryly) of the current strength of Manticore's Home Fleet. There was no possible way to confirm the accuracy of that, but it wasn't really vital at this moment, anyway.
He turned to the tally boards listing the planned first and second phase incursions and the results so far reported, and, for the first time since entering the command center, he frowned and glanced over his shoulder.
"Commodore Perot."
"Sir?" His chief of staff replied.
"What went wrong in Talbot?" Parnell asked, and Perot grimaced.
"We don't know, Sir. The Manties haven't said a word about it, but Admiral Pierres ships must have run into some sort of trap."
"Something nasty enough to get all of them?' Parnell murmured, half to himself, and Perot nodded even less happily.
"Must have been, Sir."
"But how in hell could they have pulled it off?" Parnell rubbed his chin and frowned at the bland "UNKNOWN" glowing beside the names of four of the PN's best battlecruisers. "He should have been able to avoid anything he couldn't fight. Could they have known when and where he was coming in?"
"The possibility can't be completely ruled out, Sir, but even Admiral Pierre didn't know his objective until he opened his sealed orders. And the Poicters side of the operation went off without a hitch. Commodore Yuranovich nailed a Star Knight-class cruiser right where he expected to find her. As you can see," Perot pointed at the information displayed below the names of the ships committed to the Poicters raid, "he took more damage than we'd hoped—I'm afraid Barbarossa and Sinjar are going to be in yard hands for some time—but there was no sign they'd suspected anything. Since both halves of the mission were covered by exactly the same security, our best guess is that they didn't know Pierre was coming, either."
"You're putting it down to coincidence, then," Parnell said flatly, and Perot gave a tiny shrug.
"At the moment, there's nothing else we can put it down to, Sir. We're due for another Argus dump from Talbot late next week, and we should get at least some information then. The birds cover the area where the interception was supposed to take place, anyway."
"Um." Parnell rubbed his chin harder. "Any response from Manticore over the Star Knight?"
"Not in so many words, but they've closed the Junction to our shipping, ejected all our diplomatic courier boats from Alliance space without any formal explanation, and begun shadowing and harassing our convoys moving through Alliance territory. There was an incident in Casca, but we're not sure who started it. Casca may be officially nonaligned, but they've always leaned a bit towards Manticore, and some of my analysts think our Phase One operations may have pushed the Cascans themselves into pressing the panic button and asking for Manticoran protection. Our local CO exchanged long-range fire with a Manty cruiser squadron, then hauled ass." Perot shrugged again. "Hard to blame him, Sir. He didn't have anything heavier than a destroyer, and they would've eaten him for lunch if he'd stood and fought."
Parnell's nod was calmer than he felt. The situation was heating up, and Manticore was starting to push back, but they weren't lodging any formal diplomatic protests. That could be good or bad. It might mean they knew exactly what was happening and chose to keep silent in order to keep him in the dark about their response till they had it in position. But it could just as well indicate they didn't know what was going on... or just how much crap was about to fall on top of them. If they'd simply decided the incidents and provocations might be the start of some larger operation, they could be holding their protests until they figured out what that operation was.
In either case, they'd obviously decided protests would serve no purpose, and the way their forces were pushing back across the board, not just in a few local instances, certainly argued that new orders had gone out to their station commanders. And his fragmentary reports on their ship movements suggested they were also repositioning their units to support whatever those orders were. Now if they'd just do enough of that...
His eyes returned to the total lack of new data from Seaford Nine, and he grimaced.
"All right, ladies and gentlemen," he said finally, turning to regard his staff, "let's get down to it."
He led the way to the conference room, followed by his subordinates, and Commodore Perot began the detailed brief. Parnell listened closely, nodding occasionally, and deep inside he felt the moment of final decision rushing closer with every heartbeat.
On the face of it, the possibility of locating and attacking someone else's commerce in hyper shouldn't even exist. Maximum reliable scanner range is barely twenty light-minutes, hyper-space is vast, and even knowing a convoys planned arrival and departure times shouldn't help much.
But appearances can be deceiving. To be sure, hyper-space is vast, yet virtually all its traffic moves down the highways of its grav waves, drawing both its power and absurdly high acceleration from its Warshawski sails. There are only so many efficient grav wave connections from one star system to another, and the optimum points of interchange are known to most navies. So are the points which must be avoided because of high levels of grav turbulence. If a raider knows a given ship's schedule, he doesn't really need its route. He can work through the same astro tables as his target's skipper and project its probable course closely enough to intercept it.