David Weber - At All Costs

"I think you were probably right all along, Mike," Truman said after a moment. "Certainly, if they did what Oversteegen thinks they did, having a couple of platforms-or even just one-keeping a close, permanent eye on near-planet space would probably've caught them at it."

"Maybe. The question, though, Ma'am, is what we do about it," Henke pointed out.

"Well, I see two possibilities. First, we send in the LACs. That means radically slowing your ships' approach while Scotty and his LAC jockeys get themselves organized and catch up with you. Second, we go right on doing what we're doing. Which do you vote for?"

"A variant of Option Two," Henke said without any appreciable hesitation. "I don't want to waste any more time than we have to, since we don't know where any response force they've sent for is coming from, or exactly how long it's going to take to get here. What I propose is that I send the Katanas ahead to catch up with Oversteegen. Hopefully, the bad guys won't have guessed we've taken a page from their own missile-defense doctrine, but whether they have or not, forty-eight Katanas should help out quite a bit."

"I don't know, Mike," Truman said dubiously. "Scotty would only need a couple of hours more than Oversteegan to get there, and Shrikes and Ferrets are a lot harder targets for their fire control than battlecruisers."

"And a lot easier to kill if they get hit," Henke pointed out. "Besides, we're already inside their powered missile envelope, if they're where we think they are. At the moment, they're not firing because we're still closing, and they're willing to wait until we give them better firing solutions. But if we suddenly break off, they're going to fire anyway, well before we could get a LAC strike in close enough to start killing platforms. Since we've already stepped into their parlor, I think our best chance is to just keep going, offer Oversteegen as the most attractive target, and back him up with the best missile-defense capability we can."

Truman thought some more. Then she nodded, once, sharply.

"All right, Mike. Do it."

"They've definitely figured out roughly what we're doing with our main combatants, Ma'am," Leonardo Erickson said. He tapped the projected vectors CIC was throwing into the master plot. "Look at this."

The four squadrons of LACs which had been glued tightly to the second Manty battlecruiser division were accelerating away from it, closing rapidly on the lead division. At the same time, some of the near-planet sensor platforms were beginning to pick up the shadowy ghosts of Manticoran recon drones. They weren't finding many of them, but that didn't mean they weren't there; the drones were hellishly difficult sensor targets at the best of times. The limited number they were actually seeing suggested there was probably a solid shell of them, spreading out in front of the oncoming Manty starships, and CIC was doing its best to project where that shell was in three-dimensional space. The tracking crews' hard data was limited, but Bellefeuille felt confident they'd gotten it effectively correct, and the shell they were projecting was aligned all too closely upon her own ships' positions.

"So," she said flatly, "the question is whether we fire now, when it's pretty clear they haven't quite locked in our positions, or wait a little longer in hopes of improving our firing solutions. Opinions, anyone?" She looked up from the plot. "Ivan?"

"Wait," Commander deCastro said, quickly and positively. She cocked an eyebrow, and he shrugged. "We're so outgunned that one good shot is all we're likely to get, Ma'am," he pointed out. "That being the case, I'd like it to be as effective as we can make it. That's what Smoke and Mirrors was all about to start with."

"I see. Leonardo?" she looked at her ops officer.

"Normally, I'd tend to agree with Ivan," Erickson said after a moment. "But I don't like this." He indicated the steadily accelerating icons of the enemy LACs once more. "They've been careful to keep them between our known LAC concentrations and the rest of their ships. To me, that suggests they're probably Katanas in the escort role. But now they're sending them in along with their probe, and I'm wondering if they've evolved something like our LAC fleet missile-defense doctrine. If they have, then the people we're going to have the improved firing solutions on are also going to've significantly improved their defenses by the time we finally fire."

"On the other hand, Ma'am," deCastro pointed out, "the closer they get to us, the further they are from their main body. And if they are a sizable chunk of the Manties' Katana force, mousetrapping them now might be the best thing we could do. Especially since they also seem to've completely missed Mirror Box."

Jennifer Bellefeuille nodded slowly, and her senior staffers waited. She always invited opinions, careful to avail herself of the best advice available, and she always made the final decision herself.

"We wait," she said. "Not as long as you'd probably like, Ivan, but long enough for our solutions to tighten up. I think we'll wait until their Katanas-and I think you're right about what they are, Leonardo-are about ten minutes from matching vectors with their battlecruisers. I'd actually have liked to catch them close enough to engage our missiles with their counter-missiles but still too far out to use their laser clusters, but that's not going to work, given the geometry. I think we'll go with a staggered launch, though."

"Staggered, Ma'am?" Erickson repeated.

"The first one to concentrate on their battlecruisers," she said, with a thin smile. "I'll want it heavy enough to get their attention pretty emphatically, too. Particularly, I'd like their Katanas to commit as many as possible of their counter-missiles to stopping the first wave."

Her thin smile grew vicious, and her staffers found themselves returning it slowly.

"Dagger One, Ramrod."

"Ramrod, Dagger One," Commander Dillinger replied. "Go."

Dillinger and his Katanas were over five million kilometers in front of Scotty Tremain's command LAC and the rest of the carrier division's strike, but there was no perceptible delay in their grav-pulse FTL conversation.

"I'm getting that uncomfortable feeling between my shoulder blades, Crispus," Tremain continued more informally. "I don't know why, but I've got the feeling there's something nasty waiting out here."

"Ah, Ramrod," Dillinger said with a smile, "I'm afraid I didn't quite copy that threat analysis. Could you repeat all after 'something.'"

"Dagger One, you're a smart ass," Tremain told him. Then his tone sobered. "Seriously, Crispus. Watch your six. I don't like how conspicuous these people's inactivity has been. I don't know exactly what they're up to, but they're up to something. That much I am confident of."

"Ramrod, I hear you," Dillinger responded, his smile fading. "So far, though, I haven't seen a thing you haven't."

"I know." Tremain frowned as he gazed at his own plot aboard Dacoit. "That's what worries me. Ramrod, clear."

"Another ten minutes, I think," Jennifer Bellefeuille said quietly.

She stood beside Commander Ericsson, gazing into the master plot of RHNS Cyrus, her battlecruiser flagship, at the icons of the oncoming warships. Even a few years before, she knew, the Manties would already have localized her own ships, opened fire, and almost certainly destroyed them by now. But one of the Manty drones had passed within less than ten light-seconds of her flaship and simply continued on its way, which made it obvious the improvements in the Republic's stealth systems were giving the enemy's sensors a hard time. The fact that none of her starships had their wedges up and that all of them had gone to total emissions control undoubtedly helped, but even so, she felt the tension prickling sharper in her palms. Cyrus and her consorts were barely one light-minute from Vespasien, and the Manties were clearly looking for them hard.