Shadow of Victory - eARC (79 page)

“My ships should enter Włocławek orbit in approximately two hours and ten minutes,” he continued. “At that time, I believe it would probably be appropriate for you to join me in a com conference with Mister Szponder and his hooligans.” His smile was frosty. “I don’t want any misunderstandings from his end before I begin active operations to restore the legitimate government. At that time—”

“Excuse me, Admiral.”

Tamaguchi hit the pause button that brought up Triumphant’s wallpaper and looked away from the com pickup with a scowl.

“What?” he snapped.

“I apologize for interrupting you, Sir,” Vice Admiral Lorne Yountz said, and Tamaguchi’s scowl segued into a frown as his chief of staff’s expression registered.

“What is it, Lorne?” he asked in a rather calmer tone.

“Tracking’s just picked up a group hyper footprint. CIC makes it thirteen point sources. They’re almost directly astern of us at six-point-eight light-minutes and they brought about five hundred KPS over the wall with them.”

* * *

Well, Scotty Tremaine told himself as he studied CIC’s master plot,
at least Włocławek’s not going to be as
boring as Golem was.

His lips twitched as he remembered his earlier thought about the positive aspects of boredom.

Alistair McKeon and the rest of his task group had been in Włocławek space for just over three minutes, although he’d been in no hurry to move in-system the instant he arrived. Even now, he was pulling only eighty-three percent of his slowest unit’s maximum accel—there was no point showing the Sollies any speed advantages they didn’t already know about—and TG 10.2.9’s velocity was up to only 1,500 KPS while the Ghost Rider drones sped ahead of them at 10,000 gravities. He wanted those birds up forward to give him as close a look as possible at what CIC was calling eight battlecruisers and eight destroyers, 104,808,572 kilometers ahead of them, headed for the planet of Włocławek at 27,948 KPS and accelerating at 3.83 KPS². The Solarians had been decelerating, clearly headed for a zero-zero with the planet. They’d changed their minds, however, within less than ninety seconds of detecting his own arrival, and he allowed himself a moment of respect for the prompt decisiveness of that Solly commander.

That has to be a Frontier Fleet admiral, he thought. God knows nobody’s seen a Battle Fleet flag officer smart enough to run from a force so much lighter than his! That’s a major step up from Byng and Crandall, even if all he’s doing—for now—is taking out an insurance policy and buying a little more time to think. In fact, I’m surprised even a Frontier Fleet CO’s willing to do that.

Now, how do I convince him to stop being smart?

* * *

“Tracking’s confident of its IDs now, Admiral,” Captain Levine said. Tamaguchi only looked at him and curled the fingers of his right hand in a “tell me more” motion, and Levine glanced down at his memo board.

“We’ve got one of those big-assed heavy cruisers or cut-down battlecruisers of theirs, Sir. Five more look like light cruisers, from their tonnage. They might be destroyers—or what the Manties’re calling ‘destroyers,’ anyway, based on the scrubbed tac recordings of New Tuscany they sent with their ‘protest note’—but they’re all at least a hundred and forty k-tons. There are also four ships that’re definitely destroyers. Judging from Jayne’s, I’d estimate they’re Culverin-class ships.”

He grimaced, and Tamaguchi smiled sourly, well aware of how…frustrating Levine found it to be forced to depend on Jayne’s instead of the hard, reliable data ONI was supposed to provide to its tactical officers.

“In addition, there’s what looks like a freighter—fairly small, two or three million tons, max, but it must have a milspec compensator to pull that accel, so it’s probably a purpose-built collier—and like a pair of dispatch boats.”

“I see. And that acceleration rate’s confirmed?”

“Yes, Sir. They started in-system at a fairly low accel, but they kicked it up to five-point-seven KPS squared about four minutes ago.”

“Definitely Manties, then,” Vice-Admiral Yountz observed.

“Yes, Sir,” Levine said again. “And it indicates they aren’t pursuing us as hard as they could be if they dropped the freighter back.”

“Five hundred and eighty gravities sounds to me like they’re pushing it pretty hard,” the chief of staff said. “Dropping the freighter probably wouldn’t help much.”

“Probably not enough for them to overhaul us, no, Sir,” Levine agreed. “But if the wilder reports we’ve had are accurate, they should easily hit six hundred or even six-fifty. In fact, even that would be fairly low for Manties.”

“Low?” Yountz’ eyebrows rose, and Levine shrugged irritably.

“I did say they were ‘wilder reports,’ Sir. But according to the only Solarian report we have from New Tuscany, their battlecruisers were pulling over six-ten before they took out Jean Bart. And Admiral O’Cleary’s debrief after Spindle suggests the same sort of accelerations.”

“The report from New Tuscany’s hardly conclusive. And with all due respect,” Yountz didn’t sound particularly respectful, “there’s bound to be some CYA in Keeley O’Cleary’s debrief. I’d take anything coming out of Spindle with a grain of salt.”

“Which, unless the term ‘wilder reports’ means something different to you than it does to me, is precisely what Bradley just did,” Tamaguchi pointed out with an edge of frost. “He also brought it to our attention, however…which is precisely what he was supposed to do.”

“I know, Sir. And I didn’t mean to sound like I was biting your head off, Brad.” Yountz smiled crookedly at the ops officer. “I just find it a teeny bit hard to accept that a Manty battlecruiser can out-accelerate one of our destroyers. I’ll grant ONI’s badly underestimated their capabilities, but that’s still a mighty steep leap in compensator tech.”

“Agreed.” Tamaguchi nodded, then folded his hands behind himself and stood gazing at the main display while he considered his options.

If CIC’s analysis was accurate—and he was confident it was—there were no true capital ships, or even battlecruisers, in that pursuing force. The freighter didn’t count once the actual shooting started, and without it, any comparison of tonnage ratios came down in BatCruRon 720’s favor by a ludicrous margin. All the Manty warships, together, couldn’t mass more than a million and a half tons, whereas his battlecruisers, alone, massed over seven. But as the Manties had demonstrated to Admiral Crandall and Admiral Filareta, simple tonnage was no longer the best meterstick when it came to evaluating relative combat power. The admission left a bitter taste, but Winslet Tamaguchi had no desire to follow in the footsteps of such luminaries as Sandra Crandall or Josef Byng.

His mental jury was still out on Massimo Filareta—as a naval commander, at least. As a human being, Tamaguchi could only be grateful the Manties had eliminated him from the gene pool.

Still, Levine had a point about Manty acceleration rates.

He’d never really expected to be able to outrun Manties in a straight up race. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending upon one’s perspective—he didn’t have to. If the Manties wanted to bring his far larger force to action, they had to catch him before he raced across the inner system to the farther hyper limit and translated out. The thought of ignominiously fleeing from an opponent one out-massed better than five-to-one was hardly the stuff of derring-do and heroic news stories, and it might well have negative career repercussions when word got back to Old Terra. For that matter, it wasn’t a though Tamaguchi found appealing. Given his enormous velocity advantage, however, the Manties should find it impossible to overhaul him unless he chose to let them.

Should.

It was currently—he checked the astrogation display—687,191,428 kilometers to the limit. At his best acceleration, his force could reach it in roughly three hours and thirty minutes. At their current acceleration, it would take the Manties sixty-one minutes longer than that to reach the same destination. But if they had additional acceleration in reserve—especially if it was the ridiculous sort of acceleration some of Levine’s “wilder reports” ascribed to them—his ability to outrun them was far from assured, even if that was what he decided to do. Oh, he could always tweak his own accel, but the absolute best he could do, even cutting his compensator safety margin to zero, was only 4.78 KPS²…almost a full kilometer per second lower than the Manties were demonstrating even with the freighter to slow them. And three of his eight battlecruisers had been overdue for major overhauls well before Josef Byng blew up the League’s relations with Manticore and put maintenance schedules on indefinite hold. He frankly doubted their compensators were up to that sort of strain.

The problem, he thought grimly, is that they didn’t send me these up-rated missiles just to run away from the big, bad Manties. I’m sure someone’s going to point that out when I get home…and they damned well should. Sooner or later we have to take it to them and actually win a frigging battle! But after Saltash, I’ve got to think four times as many Manty launch platforms could rip the ass off any SLN battlecruiser squadron. All Dubroskaya’s survivors insist the Manties only had three of their light cruisers—and these people have at least eleven…not to mention that damned heavy cruiser. If I let them fight their kind of battle, I’m going to get a lot of people killed, but if I don’t fight some kind of battle when I’ve got this kind of tonnage advantage, when the hell will we be able to face these people?

It was an unhappy thought, and not just because of the potential criticism he’d face if he avoided action. Resuming his acceleration away from the Manties had been an instinct reaction to at least preserve his velocity advantage while he considered his options. And he knew avoiding action was almost certainly the smart tactical move, despite the apparent force imbalance. Yet if they were ever going to pin back a Manty naval force’s ears, dealing with this one would—

“Excuse me, Sir.” It was his com officer, Commander Phanindra Broadmoor.

“Yes, Commander?”

“We have a message from the Manty commander, Sir. It just came in.”

“Ah. I wondered when we’d hear from him.” Tamaguchi smiled thinly. “Put it up on the display, please.”

“Yes, Sir.”

The main display shifted to com mode and a remarkably young senior-grade captain in Manticore’s black and gold looked out of it with cold blue eyes.

“I’m Captain Prescott Tremaine, Royal Manticoran Navy.” His voice was even colder than those eyes. “In the name of my Empress and her allies, I call upon you to drop your wedges and surrender to avoid needless bloodshed. If you choose not to cut your acceleration and surrender, I will engage and destroy your force. Tremaine, clear.”

Well, that was certainly succinct and to the point, Bradley Levine thought, watching over his admiral’s shoulder. Arrogant as hell, and mighty bold talk from someone with so little tonnage, but definitely to the point.

Tamaguchi gazed expressionlessly at the display and Tremaine’s frozen image, for several seconds. Then he glanced at the com officer again.

“Record for transmission, please, Commander,” he told him, and turned his head to face the pickup.

“Live mic, Sir.”

“This is Admiral Winslet Tamaguchi, Solarian League Navy,” the admiral said in wintry tones. “You apparently have a very high opinion of both yourself and your capabilities, Captain Tremaine. Unfortunately, I don’t share it. If you believe you have the capability to engage and destroy my force, I cordially invite you to make the attempt. Tamaguchi, clear.”

“Good recording, Sir,” Broadmoor said after a moment.

“Then send it.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Tamaguchi nodded and returned his attention to the display, waiting out the ten-minute communication loop.

* * *

“For a fellow who’s eager to fight, he’s running awfully hard,” Commander Francine Klusener, Scotty Tremaine’s chief of staff, observed dryly.

“Probably, unfortunately, because he’s not an idiot,” Tremaine replied, his expression thoughtful. “Even assuming he’s got the missiles they gave Filareta before he moved on Manticore, anyone with a clue would realize we’ve still got every advantage in missile combat. And if he’s heard about what happened in Saltash, he can’t possibly want to take on four times as many Manticoran missile platforms with only twice as many battlecruisers.”

He frowned for a moment, then looked at his intelligence officer.

“What, if anything, do we know about this fellow, Adelita?”

“Not a lot, Sir,” Lieutenant Adelita Salazar y Menéndez replied, looking up from the data search she’d just completed. “There’s a bare-bones bio entry in the ONI files, but very little beyond a list of commands he’s held. There is a note that he’s considered by the Sollies to be a determined sort of man. Apparently he’s been handed several sticky jobs here in the Verge and accomplished all of them. There’s also a note from SIS, not ONI, that he’s viewed as not especially bloodthirsty but perfectly willing to kill however many ‘neobarbs’ he has to to complete a mission.”

“So even if he’s willing to run, he’s not the sort of fellow who’d like to run,” Tremaine murmured, rubbing the tip of his nose thoughtfully. None of the other members of his staff noticed Sir Horace Harkness’ slight smile as he recognized who that mannerism had been acquired from.

“Sir, excuse me for pointing this out,” Klusener said, “but he’s got a lot of missile defense over there. Not as good as ours, but a lot. And Filareta had a god-awful number of pods riding his hulls. Tamaguchi may, too.”

“Oh, trust me, I’m well aware of that.” Tremaine smiled coldly. “And once the RDs get close enough, I definitely want a look at what he might be carrying externally. On the other hand, we’ve got a bit of missile defense of our own…and a lot more accurate birds. I have no intention of trading hit-for-hit with these people, Frannie. But I don’t think we have to, given what Horace, Adam and I have been thinking about since we got the intel reports about their new missiles. If they want to use all that range to shoot at us, they’ll be very disappointed in the number of hits they manage to score. The problem’s convincing them to let us get close enough to shoot at them.”