And it would be nice if there was some limit on their damned salvo densities, she added mentally.

  “Could be, Ma’am,” the rear admiral agreed. “On the other hand, they might just not want to piss away any more birds than they have to out here.” It was his turn to shrug.

  “And maybe it’s all they think they’re going to need, too,” she said more bitingly, then raised her voice and looked at Rosiak again. “Projected targeting?” she requested.

  “Hard to say this early, Ma’am. It looks like they’re coming in on Vice Admiral Bonrepaux, but that could be evasive routing.”

  “Probably is, actually.” Her tone was almost absent this time, and she looked back at the maneuvering plot. Thirty seconds since the Manties’ launch.

  “Execute Two-Step in seventy seconds from…mark,” she said. “All task groups will initiate translation, but if your projected targeting holds, Group Three will abort and hold position here in n-space.”

  “I hope you’re ready to punch that button, Randy,” Commodore Lessem said as the squadron’s missile launch slashed toward its target.

  If he’d chosen to dip into the missile pods tractored to the hulls of his ships, the older cruisers could have added more than six hundred additional missiles to his attack, and he’d been tempted to do just that, on the theory that fifteen hundred Mark 16s would turn any Solarian battlecruiser squadron ever built into wreckage. Unfortunately, there was no way in hell he was going to hit anything under the current circumstances, unless the Solly commander guessed very wrong about his target selection, and Picador was specifically designed to help the other fellow guess correctly. Under the circumstances, he wasn’t about to waste any of the pods limpeted to his ships, so he’d elected to rely solely on his cruisers’ internal launchers.

  The Saganami-C mounted twenty tubes in each broadside and its telemetry links were designed to “stack” forty-missile salvos of Mark 16s two deep, so ships like Clas Fleming routinely launched eighty missiles at a time. She’d also been designed with a sixty percent control link redundancy as a hedge against battle damage and to let her wring maximum utility out of the RMN’s missile pods.

  A Saganami-B-class cruiser actually mounted two more tubes than a Charlie, counting its chase armament, and had also been designed to stack salvos, which gave it stacked salvos eighty-four missiles “deep,” although it had only about half the Charlie’s control link redundancy. The Bravos weren’t equipped to fire the Mark 16, with its internal fusion plant, either, but they were armed with the Mark 14 Extended Range missile with its enhanced endurance impeller nodes. The Mark 14 had only fifty-six percent of the Mark 16’s powered range, and its onboard power budget was much lower, which impacted things like ECM capability. But even with those limitations, it had eighty percent more powered range than the Cataphracts the RMN had discovered in Massimo Filareta’s magazines. Inferior to the Mark 16 and the Mark 23 they might be, but they were superior to anything the Sollies had, and more than enough for his present purposes.

  And it would be really nice if those people were clumsy enough to let us actually hit them, too, he reflected. Not going to happen, though.

  “Bastards were trying to sneak one in on us, Ma’am,” Rear Admiral Ramaalas observed as the entire Manty salvo swerved at the last possible moment, shifting target from Vice Admiral Bonrepaux’s TG 1027.1 to Vice Admiral Tsukahara’s TG 1027.2.

  “And it’s going to bite them on the butt,” Isotalo agreed, studying the attack’s geometry with profound satisfaction. The Manty missiles’ course change had placed Helmut Santini’s TG 1027.3 well outside their envelope. Even at their acceleration, they couldn’t reorient to acquire his ships, given the separation she’d inserted between her task groups.

  “Com, confirm Two-Step abort to Admiral Santini,” she said.

  “Yes, Ma’am!” Commodore ad Kadidu, her communications officer acknowledged.

  “I’ll probably piss Helmut off by belaboring the obvious,” Isotalo said quietly to Ramaalas, “but it never hurts.”

  “True, Ma’am,” the chief of staff replied. The Manticoran missiles were barely fifteen seconds from detonation, but Ramaalas seemed unperturbed by the looming destruction of a third of TF 1027’s battlecruisers.

  With good reason, Isotalo thought with a glance at the digital time display. In just about—

  “Why am I not surprised?” Commodore Lessem observed as two thirds of the Solarian warships disappeared into hyper five seconds before CruRon 912’s missiles reached attack range. “George, send So-po and Obusier through to Ajay.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir,” Lieutenant Gordon acknowledged, and Lessem turned to Commander Kivlochan.

  “Start the clock, Randy.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir. Executing in…two-eight-zero seconds.”

  Astrogators hate micro-jumps, which are defined by most of the galaxy’s merchant spacers as any hyper-space trip which covers less than four or five light-minutes in normal-space. Actually, anything short of half a light-hour could be reasonably considered a micro-jump, but 72,000,000 kilometers is generally considered to be absolutely the shortest hyper “voyage” any reasonable person wants to make.

  A large part of that is due to the fact that although a ship’s maximum acceleration rate is identical in n-space and h-space—outside a grav wave, at least—its apparent acceleration rate to an observer in normal-space is much, much greater. In the Alpha bands, the differential is approximately 640 percent, which gives a Solarian Nevada-class battlecruiser an apparent maximum acceleration of 32,112 gravities—over 370 KPS2. That acceleration doesn’t make an astrogator’s calculations any more difficult, but it does mean any small errors have much larger consequences when the ship returns to normal-space. And some error is inevitable. The hyper log which keeps track of a starship’s location in hyper, much the way ancient inertial navigation systems kept track of pre-space submarines’ submerged positions, has to calibrate after any translation into hyper-space, and that calibration depends on a series of complex comparisons between the vessel’s actual energy readings and those projected by a “perfect” model run over a period of time. There’s not enough time for the hyper log to complete its comparisons in a micro-jump. Depending upon the jump’s duration, the hyper log may be able to refine its accuracy; it can never achieve anything like complete accuracy.

  And what creates problems for a single ship tends to create a lot more of them when multiple ships execute a micro-jump together. Even when a single ship runs the master clock for the jump and every ship initiates its downward translation simultaneously, there’s some variance when they actually hit the alpha wall between hyper- and normal-space. Crossing the wall is akin to encountering atmospheric turbulence in an aircraft, and the wall fluctuates as the result of a complex interaction with any local n-space gravity wells or wormholes. The degree to which that fluctuation can be adjusted for depends upon how well the astrogation computers have analyzed it, and that, too, is a factor of how long they’ve had for the analysis.

  Bearing all those factors in mind, merchant captains generally refuse to put wear on their alpha nodes and hyper generators for anything less than a half light-hour. Their schedules are seldom so time-critical as to make shorter micro-jumps worth the trouble, the effort, and the uncertainty. Naval astrogators, on the other hand, are specifically trained to make those shorter micro-jumps, although things can get tricky even for them if the total distance is much less than, say, three light-minutes.

  Task Force 1027’s micro-jump was only twenty-three light-seconds, however, and Isadore Hampton had the disruptive influence of the terminus itself to contend with, as well.

  Inevitably, there was going to be a certain…sloppiness about it.

  “Hyper footprints!” Thomas Wozniak announced 4.5 minutes after thirty Solarian battlecruisers, twelve light cruisers, and twenty destroyers had vanished from CruRon 912’s sensors. “Many footprints,” he continued, studying the data. “The nearest is…seven hundred thousand kilometers!”

  The terminus’s approaches were a storm of blue lightning, flashing against the Stygian dark as sixty-two starships returned to normal-space. Under the circumstances, it was a tight formation, Jane Isotalo thought as the hyper footprints flared upon SLNS Foudroyant’s master plot. “Tight,” however was a relative term, and her two task groups were still scattered over an enormous volume. One division of Nevadas from TG 1027.2’s BatCruRon 615 was over a million kilometers from the rest of its squadron. That was the worst dispersal, however, and she smiled fiercely as she saw how tight Isadore Hampton’s astrogation had actually been. He had, indeed, hit very close on the distance. If four of her battlecruisers were 1.6 million kilometers from the Manties, eight more were barely beyond energy weapon range. Flight time for a Javelin at 700,000 kilometers would be thirty-nine seconds, well within the cycle time on a heavy cruiser’s hyper generator, and the communications lag would be only 2.3 seconds. At that range, all the ECM in the universe wouldn’t save the Manties.

  She would have preferred energy range, but she’d settle for what she had.

  “Fire Plan Delta!” she snapped.

  Delta relied solely on her ships’ internal launchers, because there wasn’t time to redeploy the extended chains of Huskies and missile pods which had been drawn in close enough for the battlecruisers’ hyper translation fields to extend around them. Still, the eight Nevadas—including Foudroyant—closest to the Manties belched 224 missiles two seconds after she’d given the order.

  “Not bad astrogation,” Commodore Lessem observed as the master plot stabilized. “Those bastards at zero-three-eight did especially well.”

  He twitched his head at the closely grouped clump of hyper footprints off Clas Fleming’s starboard quarter. The Solarians weren’t moving relative to his command—a ship translating out of hyper shed over ninety percent of its velocity in transit energy bleed-off, and they hadn’t been moving especially fast through hyper even before they translated back down—but those eight ships had maintained an extremely tight formation. In fact, he doubted very many Manticoran squadrons could have matched their performance.

  “Better than I expected, Sir,” Commander Thúri admitted.

  “Nobody ever said the Sollies weren’t competent spacers,” Lessem pointed out. “We tend to forget that because—”

  “Missile launch!” Wozniak said. “Two hundred-plus inbound from zero-three-eight, one-six-three at niner-three-five-point-three KPS squared. They look like Javelins, Sir. Time-of-flight…three-niner-point-two seconds.”

  “Acknowledged,” Lessem replied, never looking away from the plot. “As I was saying,” he resumed calmly, “we tend to forget that because of how one-sided the actual fighting’s been so far. But they’re not going to keep their heads inserted into their anal orifices on that front forever, Lester. And when they get them extracted, they’re still going to be competent in all those other areas.”

  “Point, Sir,” Thúri said.

  Lessem turned his head to smile at him, then glanced at Lieutenant Commander Kivlochan. The astrogator’s expression was intense as he watched his console, but there was remarkably little concern on Clas Fleming’s bridge as the missiles accelerated towards her. And then—

  “Damn,” Admiral Isotalo said as the entire Manticoran squadron disappeared into hyper fourteen seconds after her missiles had launched.

  “Aborting salvo,” Rear Admiral Rosiak said, and transmitted the destruct code to the Javelins which had been hurtling towards their foes. They self-destructed a second later, and Isotalo grimaced.

  “I hate it when the other side has a brain,” she said.

  “All due respect, Ma’am, it didn’t take a whole lot of brain to figure our options,” Ramaalas pointed out. “Like you said, Two-Step was really our only chance to get into effective range before they bugged out, anyway. And I believe you were also the one who said only ‘a drooling idiot’ would let us get away with it. It was worth trying, but they had to have had their generators ready to cycle the instant they saw us go into hyper.”

  “I know. I know!” Isotalo snorted. “I guess I’m mostly pissed off at myself for letting them suck me into firing those missiles. Like you say, they had to’ve known when we’d be turning up and they could have hypered out four damn minutes before we translated back down. The only reason they didn’t was because they wanted to sit here long enough to let me fire at them. It was a little…cheeky of them, but given the timing, we’d’ve had to hit n-space less than ninety thousand kilometers out to catch them with a missile launch. And at that range, we’d have been ripping them apart with energy fire, and damn the missiles! But what were the chances even Isadore could put us that close?” She shook her head. “No, the Manties did that on purpose. And they did it to make the point that they could do it.”

  “Beg your pardon, Ma’am?” Ramaalas’s eyebrows furrowed.

  “We could’ve fired ten times that many birds without making a hole in our internal magazines, much less what Quigley’s got in the support ships. I think we can assume they’re smart enough to figure that out, too. So they damned well didn’t expect that convincing us to waste missiles chasing them into hyper was going to affect our combat readiness in any way. No, those people only waited because they were thumbing their noses at us before they ran away.”

  “Maybe so,” Ramaalas acknowledged after a moment, “but that could end up costing them. Especially if they really can’t fire salvos bigger than the one they already threw at us, Ma’am. We’re on top of the terminus now, not them, and if they don’t have the firepower to blow us back off of it, they’re stuck on this side of it. At best—from their perspective—that would mean they’d have to go home the long way.”

  “You could be right, but I’m not convinced someone as smart as this wouldn’t be a jump or two ahead of that logic. I’m thinking she probably chose to stay on the side of the terminus.”

  “Because he’s expecting friends, Ma’am?”

  “It’s certainly a possibility.” Isotalo turned and walked back to her command chair while the task groups’ scattered units began accelerating back toward Foudroyant. Given the separation, it would take at least fifteen minutes for them to coalesce around the flagship once more. The Manties would probably translate back out of hyper well before that.

  “They didn’t have time to put that many ships through the terminus after we went into hyper,” she pointed out, settling into her chair. A beckoning index finger summoned Rosiak to join her and Ramaalas and she leaned back. “Not in a sequenced transit, anyway. The minimum time for that would’ve been—what? A hundred and sixty seconds? And that would’ve been with all of them lined up in a tight transit queue. But if they’d intended to fall back on Ajay, they could’ve done that any time they wanted to before we translated out. For that matter, if they’d been planning on falling back, they could’ve been positioned for a simultaneous transit of their entire force. This terminus isn’t as big as some, but it’s more than big enough to handle that many cruisers simultaneously. And if they’d made transit to Ajay, we’d know they were sitting right on the other side of the terminus ready to rip our arses off with energy fire when we came through after them.”

  Her staffers nodded, expressions somber. A starship transited a wormhole under Warshawski sails, not impeller drive, and that meant it emerged with neither an impeller wedge nor sidewalls. It took several seconds—about eighty in the case of the Prime Terminus—to clear the wormhole sufficiently to reconfigure to wedge. During those eighty seconds, the ship in question was mother naked against defensive fire. That was one of the reasons Isotalo and her staff were quietly convinced that all the savage vituperation in the newsfaxes—and the Assembly—against Beowulf was completely unjustified in at least one respect. Colluding with the Manties or not, the Beowulfers had saved hundreds of thousands of SLN lives when they blocked the Beowulf Terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction against Fleet Admiral Tsang. If Tsang had made transit into the teeth of the unshaken Manticoran defenses, her entire fleet would have been massacred even more completely than Filareta’s had been. The politicians and the talking heads could say whatever they liked, but after what had happened to Eleventh Fleet, any naval officer with two brain cells to rub together knew what would have happened to Tsang would have been even worse. Far worse.

  “There has to be a reason they didn’t choose to do that,” Isotalo went on. “And the most likely one that springs to my mind is that they are, indeed, supposed to be picketing this terminus while another of their task forces takes out the Agueda-Stine bridge. If that’s the case, then they need to keep an eye on us to keep us from setting up an ambush to greet that other task force when it arrives.” She showed her teeth. “Wouldn’t it be sweet if we were the ones sitting on the terminus with a few thousand of our missile pods deployed in the area defense role when the Manties came back? They wouldn’t have any of those damned invisible recon platforms deployed, and even their shipboard sensors would be degraded until the transit energy bled fully away. By the time they picked us up through our stealth, they’d probably be in range for a mass launch, and I would cheerfully use up a half million or so missiles to kick the shit out of one of their point-of-the-spear task forces!”

  “That would be nice, Ma’am.” Ramaalas sounded a bit wistful.

  “And that’s what they’re primarily worried about, I think,” Isotalo continued. “They want to maintain a sufficient force on this side of the terminus to play watchdog for their friends. An incoming task force wouldn’t need recon platforms if there’s already an entire damned cruiser squadron sitting here to tell them about us.”