"We're getting light-speed emissions signatures now, Your Grace," George Reynolds reported. Honor turned towards them, and the intelligence officer looked up to meet her gaze. "They're not Andies," he said quietly. "We don't recognize some of them, but we've positively IDed at least eight Havenite battlecruisers."
Something like a not quite audible sigh seemed to run around the flag bridge, and Honor smiled thinly. She couldn't say she was glad to have her worst fears confirmed, but at least the uncertainty was over. She closed her mind resolutely to speculation about what might have happened closer to home, and nodded as serenely as she could.
"Thank you, George," she said, and glanced at Jaruwalski.
"CIC is trying to break them down by type, Your Grace," the ops officer said. "It's a bit difficult without better intelligence on whatever new types they've been building, especially since, as George just said, we don't recognize some of them at all. At the moment though, it looks as though they've brought along fifty or sixty superdreadnoughts, with twenty or thirty battlecruisers in support."
"Time of response to our sublight challenge, Harper?" Honor asked her com officer.
"If they respond to it immediately, we should be hearing something from them in another four or five minutes, Your Grace," Lieutenant Brantley told her.
"Thank you." Honor frowned thoughtfully for a moment, then returned her attention to Jaruwalski. "Any indications of CLACs?"
"No, Your Grace," the ops officer replied. "Which doesn't necessarily mean there aren't any."
"Your Grace, we're getting IDs on at least some of their superdreadnoughts from the remote platforms," Reynolds put in. "They're confirmed Peeps. We've got nine of them so far. All pre-pod designs ONI has good recorded emissions signatures on."
"That's about twenty percent of their total SDs," Brigham observed.
"True," Jaruwalski agreed. "On the other hand, it still leaves over fifty which could be SD(P)s."
Honor nodded once more, accepting Jaruwalski's caveat, then gave the plot another glance and reached her decision.
"It doesn't look like we're going to get a better chance for Suriago," she said, and looked at the com screen connecting her to Werewolf's command deck. "Get us underway, Rafe."
"Aye, aye, Your Grace," Captain Rafe Cardones replied crisply, and began passing orders.
"They're not trying to be very stealthy about it, are they, Sir?" Molly DeLaney remarked.
"No, they're not," Tourville agreed. He sat in his command chair, legs crossed, expression calm, while his right hand's fingers drummed very slowly and gently on its armrest. His eyes were equally calm but intent as he studied the repeater plot deployed from his chair.
The defending Manticoran task force was headed to meet him. The range remained too long for real-time reports from light-speed sensors, but impeller signatures were FTL, and they blazed clear and strong in the plot, confirming what the first wave of recon drones had already reported. Thirty-one Manty superdreadnoughts, eleven dreadnoughts, four LAC carriers, and sixteen battlecruisers, covered by two destroyer flotillas and at least three cruiser squadrons accelerated steadily on almost a direct reciprocal of his own course. A cloud of LACs spread out to cover the axis of their advance and its flanks. It was much more difficult to get a drive count on units that small, but NavInt had reported that somewhere around four hundred and fifty LACs had been permanently based on Sidemore. It looked like Harrington had brought all of them with her, since CIC estimated her main combatants were accompanied by somewhere around eight hundred of them. Taking NavInt's highest figure and combining it with the six CLACs she was supposed to have gave her a maximum LAC strength of right on a thousand. She might have left a couple of hundred of them to cover the inner system against the possibility that the main attack was actually a feint to pull her out of position around Marsh, especially if she believed the Republican Navy still lacked any CLACs of its own.
And she was continuing to transmit her sublight challenges and demands that he identify himself as she came.
DeLaney's comment on Harrington's lack of stealth was a definite understatement, he reflected. And that made him a little nervous. One thing no one had ever accused Honor Harrington of was tactical obviousness. She had demonstrated repeatedly her willingness and ability to use the traditional Manticoran advantage in electronic warfare to deadly effect. Yet in the face of CIC's definite identification of her units, it seemed that this time, at least, she had disdained such tactics. She wasn't hiding or concealing a thing . . . which was the reason for his nervousness. "The Salamander" was at her most dangerous when an opponent was most certain he knew what she had in mind.
Let's not double-think ourselves into a panic, there, Lester, he told himself dryly. Yeah, she's sneaky. And smart. But she doesn't really have a lot of options here. And besides . . .
"It may just be that she's still hoping to get out of this without anyone shooting at anybody," he murmured aloud, and DeLaney's eyebrows rose.
"That seems . . . unlikely, Sir," she said, and Tourville grinned at her tone of massive restraint.
"I didn't say it was likely, Molly. I said it was possible. And it is, you know. She has to have IDed at least some of our emissions signatures by now, so she knows we're Republican. And she'd have to be a hell of a lot stupider than I know she is if she didn't suspect exactly why we're here. But at the same time, she can't know what's going on back home—not yet. So there's probably at least an edge of caution in her thinking right now. She's not going to shirk her responsibilities, but she's not going to want to start a war out here that could spill over on the Star Kingdom's own territory unless she absolutely has to, either. I'd guess that's why they're continuing to challenge us despite the fact that we haven't answered them."
"Do you think she'll actually let us into range because she doesn't want to fire the first shot, Sir?"
"I doubt very much that she's going to be that obliging," Tourville said dryly. "We are in violation of the territorial space of a Manticoran ally at the moment, you know. That means she's in a very strong position under interstellar law if she decides to shoot some dumb son-of-a-bitch who's too much of an idiot to even reply to her communications attempts!"
He flashed his teeth in a white smile under his bristling mustache, and DeLaney heard someone chuckle.
"On the other hand, if NavInt is right and the Manties still haven't confirmed that we have MDMs of our own, she may let us get in a lot closer before she gets around to opening fire. She knows we have SD(P)s, but she also knows by now that at least some of the SDs we brought with us are pre-pod designs. On top of that, she has to suspect from our acceleration rates that our older ships are towing heavy pod loads. She, on the other hand, isn't, even though NavInt says that she has only six SD(P)s of her own. She may have some pods tractored inside her other superdreadnoughts' wedges, but she can't have as many of them there as we're towing. Combined with how openly she's coming to meet us, that suggests to me that she still believes she has a decisive range advantage. That she can open fire at a range of her own choosing, from outside our effective reach, and hold it there."
"Do you think she knows about the new compensators, Sir?"
"I wouldn't be a bit surprised if she's figured out that we've improved our performance, whatever her ONI reports might be telling her," Tourville said. "She's certainly smart enough to realize that we must have made overcoming their acceleration advantage a very high priority. Unfortunately, for all their improvements, our compensators still aren't anywhere near as efficient as theirs are . . . and she's smart enough she's probably figured that out, too. So if she thinks she has the range advantage, she'll expect to be able to prevent us from closing with her."