But whether it made sense or not wasn't Flanagan's problem, so she drew a deep breath, settled down in her chair, and prepared to dive into yet another exhilarating adventure in creative paperwork.
That was the moment the entire universe changed.
The sudden, raucous, atonal howl took her utterly by surprise, but her instincts knew what they were doing. She was already out of her chair and halfway out of her small office before she even realized she'd moved. She was up to a full run within five meters, dashing through a bedlam of startled exclamations, other chairs skidding across decksoles, hatches cycling madly open, feet thundering down passages towards lift shafts, and over all of it that bone-crawling, brain-piercing alarm shrieking its warning.
As a squadron skipper, Flanagan's office cubicle was on the same deck as her squadron's LAC bays. She didn't need a lift shaft to reach her command ship, and only one member of her crew—Ensign Giuliani—had managed to beat her there. Of course, a corner of her brain reflected with something very like shell-shocked detachment, Giuliani practically lived aboard Switchblade. He was the command LAC's coxswain, and he'd discovered that he could seduce the flight computers into providing what amounted to his own, private simulator. As far as al-Salil was concerned, of course, Giuliani's solo excursions in training were completely unauthorized, but Flanagan had somehow failed to mention them to T-001's COLAC.
"What's happening, Cal?" she demanded pantingly as she skidded to a halt just inside Switchblade's boarding tube.
"I'm not sure, Skipper," Giuliani replied flatly, never looking up from the tactical plot he'd brought on-line as soon as the alarm began to sound. "But from the looks of things, we're fucked."
Flanagan felt her eyebrows try to crawl up into her hairline. She'd never heard quite that note in the brash young ensign's voice. Nor, now that she thought about it, had she ever heard even the mildest profanity from him in her own august presence.
"Can you be more specific?" she asked tartly, and this time Giuliani raised his head and gave her a half-apologetic smile.
"Sorry, Skip," he said contritely. "I should've said that it looks like the system is under attack by unknown forces operating in overwhelming strength. Except that unless I'm completely wrong, they're not 'unknown' at all. I think they're Peeps."
"Peeps?" Flanagan wanted the word to come out as a question, or perhaps a protest, but it didn't. After all, who else would be attacking a Manticoran picket here in the Tequila System? Elves? Yet despite that, she felt an underlying sense of disbelief. Everyone had heard the rumors about the Peeps' new fleet, but no one had suggested to her that any sort of attack was imminent.
"Can't think of anyone else they'd be," Giuliani told her as the other members of Switchblade's crew began to arrive. Flanagan heard them opening equipment lockers and dragging out their skinsuits. Suits weren't usually stored aboard LACs, but "the Tamale's" conversion had been a bit on the crude side. It worked—most of it, usually—but no one had bothered with any frills. And since the flight crews' battle stations were aboard the LACs, the decision had been made to keep the skinsuits there, as well. It had led to a few problems with personnel with more extreme nudity taboos, but it worked better than a lot of T-001's arrangements, and, besides, Flanagan had other things on her mind just then. She stepped up beside Giuliani and leaned over the tactical plot with him.
Whoever it was, they'd come loaded for bear, she thought. T-001 and her sister station T-002 were all the defenders the Tequila System had. Which was pretty frigging stupid, she reflected grimly, given its status as the furthest advanced system Eighth Fleet had occupied during the final offensive of the war. Or maybe it wasn't. What they had was big enough to deter casual intrusions, and if it wasn't powerful enough to mount a defense against an all-out attack, at least it was sufficient to act as a credible tripwire. Anyone who wanted Tequila was going to have to pay cash for it. Unfortunately, it looked like the Peeps had brought plenty of spare change.
At least Vice Admiral Schumacher had decent in-system FTL sensor capability. The big passive arrays which had once been planned to cover the system perimeter and watch for hyper footprints far beyond it had never been emplaced . . . of course. Too expensive in this era of austere naval budgets. That probably didn't matter in this case, though. It didn't look as if the intruders were attempting anything particularly subtle. They'd simply sent in a squadron of superdreadnoughts with cruiser escorts. Given the power of the Shrike-Bs' graser armament, they were going to take damage even on superdreadnoughts, but nothing to compare to the damage the LACs were going to take. Even Peep SDs were going to tear unsupported light attack craft apart when they closed to energy range.
Which meant Cal was correct; "fucked" was exactly what they were.
"Launch instructions are coming up now, Skip," Lieutenant Benedict announced. Flanagan turned away from the plot and looked a question at her exec.
"It looks like we're going with Delta-Three, at least initially," Benedict told her.
"Time till launch?" she asked, and he checked the launch clock on his console.
"Thirty-one minutes," he said. "Station Engineering started bringing the nodes up on remote as soon as GQ sounded. They'll be optimal in another twenty-eight minutes."
"What about missile loadout?"
"Nothing on my screen, Skip," Benedict replied with a shrug. "Looks like we're going to launch with a standard package."
Flanagan managed not to stare at him in disbelief, which would undoubtedly have been terrible for morale, but it wasn't easy. The standard missile package consisted of a little bit of everything and not enough of anything. It was intended as a standby weapons load, one that gave at least limited capability under almost any circumstances. But it was effectively an emergency load. Standard tactical doctrine assumed that any COLAC would tailor his missile loads to the tactical mission—deleting the ordnance he wouldn't need to make room for the weapons he did—unless he found himself forced to launch under emergency conditions at minimal range. That wasn't the case here. Even if the Peeps had been able to match the extended range of the RMN's capital ship missiles, it would have taken them the better part of three hours to get into effective attack range of "the Tamale." That was plenty of time for the 1007th to strip the standby packages off of its LACs and replace them with a load that made sense, especially since the high-speed magazine tubes were the one part of T-001's conversion which had always worked perfectly.
But apparently al-Salil and Schumacher didn't see things that way.
Sera Flanagan hovered on the brink of comming the COLAC to suggest that it might be time for a little sanity. She had no doubt that most of the group's personnel were about to die, although that lingering sense of disbelief mingled with trained professionalism had managed to so far hold that realization at arm's length. Still, she knew, the odds were very good that she would be among the ones who did, and it offended that same professionalism deeply to think that al-Salil would just throw them away this way without even attempting to maximize the damage they might inflict before they were destroyed.
She almost did it. She ought to have done it, and she knew it. But she was the most junior squadron commander of the group, and she knew precisely how al-Salil would react. Given the circumstances, she had no particular desire to spend any of the time she had left in fruitless debate with a feckless incompetent. Or to be stripped of command and left behind when her people went off to die.