"Painting—now!" she snapped, and squeezed the stud.
An alarm shrieked, and Palmer-Levy's pilot twitched in his seat. One eye dropped to the lurid light on his EW panel, and his face paled.
"We're being lased!" he barked.
The launching charge lit the tower roof like lightning as it spat the Viper missile from the tube. Its tiny impeller drive kicked in almost instantly, accelerating it at over two thousand gravities even as its sensors picked up the glare of reflected laser light from the air car below and in front of it, and its nose dipped.
The pilot twisted the controls in a frantic evasion maneuver, but the Viper had an optical lock now, and his speed was too low to generate a miss. He did his best, but it was too late for his best to be enough.
Constance Palmer-Levy had one fleeting instant to realize what was happening, and then the edge of the Viper's impeller wedge struck.
The air car tore apart in a hurricane of splintered composites. Its hydrogen reservoirs exploded in balls of brilliant blue flame, and the commander of Internal Security and her bodyguards cascaded down across Nouveau Paris in a grisly rain.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
"Thank God."
Commander Ogilve relaxed at last as PNS Napoleon dropped out of hyper and the primary of the Seaford Nine System blazed ahead of her. Realistically, they'd been away and free from the instant they went into hyper, but his sleep had been haunted by nightmares of some disaster that would prevent him from delivering his data.
He glanced at his com officer.
"Record a most immediate to Admiral Rollins' personal attention, Jamie. Message begins: Sir, my latest Argus dump confirms total—repeat, total—withdrawal of Manticoran wall of battle from Hancock. Analysis of data suggests maximum remaining force in Hancock consists of one battlecruiser squadron and screening elements. Napoleon is en route to rendezvous with your flagship, ETA—" he glanced at his display "—two-point-two hours, with complete data dump. Ogilve clear. Message ends, Jamie."
"Aye, Sir."
Ogilve nodded and leaned back, letting himself feel his weariness at last even as he envisioned the hive of activity his signal was about to kick off aboard Admiral Rollins' flagship. A footstep sounded beside his chair, and he looked up at his exec.
"Somehow I don't think this is going to hurt our careers, Sir," the exec murmured.
"No, I don't imagine it will," Ogilve agreed unsmilingly. His exec came of prominent Legislaturalist stock, and the commander didn't like him a bit. Worse, he didn't trust his competence. But it sometimes seemed the political game was the only one that counted in the Peoples Navy, and if that meant Commander Ogilve had to carry his exec on his back, then Commander Ogilve had better just have strong back muscles.
And, he thought sourly as the exec moved back to his own station, if he did get promotion out of this, maybe it would mean a new assignment that got him away from at least one incompetent asshole.
Admiral Yuri Rollins shook his head, still suffering the lingering aftereffects of numb disbelief, as the Argus dump's images played themselves out in his flagships main holo sphere for the third time.
"I can't believe it," he muttered. "Why in hell would Parks do something this stupid? It's got to be a trap."
"With all due respect, Sir, I don't see how it can be," Captain Holcombe disagreed. "For it to be a trap, they'd have to know about Argus, and there's no way they can."
"Nothing is impossible, Captain," Rear Admiral Chin said frostily, and Rollins' chief of staff flushed at her tone.
"I didn't mean to say that they couldn't possibly have detected the birds, Ma'am," he replied a bit stiffly. "What I meant was that if they knew about them, they would certainly have taken them out by now."
"Indeed? Suppose they know about them and choose subtlety over brute force? Why destroy them if they can use them to lie to us?'
"Unlikely," Rollins said, almost against his will. "Whatever tactical advantage deceiving us in Hancock might offer would be more than outweighed by the strategic damage they're suffering in other systems. No," he shook his head, "they'd never let the net stay up if they knew it was there."
"And if Admiral Parks is the only one to have noticed the platforms?" Chin asked. "If he's only just become aware of them, he might have chosen to use them in his own case while dispatching couriers to the commanders of other stations to alert them to the danger."
"Possible, but again, unlikely." Rollins turned away from the display and thrust his hands into his tunic pockets. "If he knows about them at all, then presumably he also knows they cover the entire system periphery. That means he can't sneak back in to set any sort of ambush without being picked up. Somehow I don't think he'd deliberately risk letting us in unopposed on the off chance that he could intercept us from some distant position."
"I suppose not." Chin folded her arms and looked accusingly into the sphere. "In that case, though, I have to wonder what he thinks he's up to."
"I think it's another indication he doesn't know about Argus, Ma'am," Captain Holcombe offered. She raised an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged. "If he's not in Hancock, he almost has to be picketing the Alliance systems in the area. Assuming that to be the case, I believe he uncovered Hancock precisely because he feels we can't know he's done it. After all, one of Argus' primary objectives was to cut down normal scouting ops to make Manty commanders overconfident in hopes they'd make mistakes just like this."
"True." Chin pursed her lips a moment, then nodded. "I suppose it just seems too convenient for him to suddenly do exactly what we want him to."
"But do we want him to?" Rollins said, and both his subordinates turned to him in surprise. "Certainly this offers us a perfect opportunity to smash Hancock, but it also means any attack would close on so much empty space, as far as warships are concerned. Battlecruisers? Piffle!" He took a hand from a pocket to wave it dismissively, then stuffed it back in place. "We wanted battle squadrons, and they're somewhere else now. Besides, how long do you think Parks is going to stay wherever he is? Their Admiralty won't let him leave Hancock uncovered for long, whatever he wants to do, so if we're going to take advantage of his absence, we have to move now."
"Without confirming with Admiral Parnell?" Chin's question was a statement, and Rollins nodded.
"Exactly. We're eighteen days' message time from Barnett, even by courier boat. That's thirty-six days for a two-way message. If we wait that long, they're bound to reinforce Hancock."
"Can we wait until the scheduled deadline, Sir?" Chin asked, and Rollins frowned. Officially, only he and his staff were supposed to know the timetable, but he'd invited Chin here, despite her status as his most junior battle squadron commander, because he respected her judgment And if he wanted her input, she had to know the extent of his problems.
"I don't think so," he said finally. "Assuming Admiral Parnell doesn't postpone, we're supposed to move in another thirty-one days."
Chin nodded, her face showing no sign of triumph at finally learning the date the war was supposed to begin.
"In that case, of course, you're right, Sir. We can't wait that long if we want to hit them before they come to their senses."
"I said from the beginning this whole thing was over-centralized," Holcombe muttered, "tanking ops schedules that tightly with this much distance between operating areas is—"
"Is what we're stuck with," Rollins said a bit sharply. His chief of staff closed his mouth with a snap, and Rollins shrugged. "As a matter of fact, I tend to agree with you, Ed, but we're stuck with the way things are."