"Sorry to wake you, Raoul." His soft Grayson accent was clipped. "Tracking just picked up a hyper footprint thirty light-minutes from Yeltsin. A big one."
Detection of hyper footprint at 38 light-minutes with Grayson hardware.
"What do you have on impeller signatures?"
"That's mighty far out for us." Yanakov sounded a bit embarrassed. "We're trying to refine our data, but—"
"Pass the locus to Commander Alvarez," Courvosier interrupted. "Madrigal's sensor suite is better than anything you've got. Maybe he can refine it for you."
Madrigal can make out more of the impeller signatures at this range than the entire Grayson navy and detection net.
Printers chattered madly as the admirals arrived at Command Central, and the two of them turned as one to the main display board. A dot of light crept across it with infinitesimal speed. That was a trick of scale—any display capable of showing a half light-hour radius had to compress things—but at least gravitic detectors were FTL so they could watch it in real time. For all the good it was likely to do them.
Madrigal had, indeed, gotten her CIC tied into the net. The board couldn't display individual impeller sources at such a long range, but the data codes beside the single blotch of light were far too detailed for Grayson instrumentation. That was Courvosier's first thought; his second was a stab of dismay, and he pursed his lips silently. There were ten ships out there, accelerating from the low velocity imposed by translation into normal space. Not even Madrigal could "see" them well enough to identify individual ships, but the impeller strengths allowed tentative IDs by class. And if Commander Alvarez's sensor crews were right, they were four light cruisers and six destroyers—more tonnage than the entire Grayson hyper-capable fleet.
Gravity sensors are FTL, real-time over a system's distance. This will be important later. The Masadan Navy in it's glory. For whatever reason, every scene in the GSN command center mentions the background noise of printers.
"Coming down on three million kilometers."
Jansen nodded. His missiles were slower than Thunder of God's. Their drives would burn out in less than a minute, and their maximum acceleration was barely thirty thousand gravities, but his fleet's closing speed was over 27,000 KPS. His missiles would take seventy-eight seconds to reach their targets from that initial velocity; Orbit Four's missiles would take a minute and a half to reach him. Only a twelve-second difference—but unlike asteroids, his ships could dodge.
Like I said once, launching from a stationary ship gets a missile a million klicks, launching from a ship doing half the speed of light gets you even further, 3 million for slow Masadan missiles on a relatively leisurely attack run, and they're apparently inside their optimal firing range. Of course, fixed positions don't get this range advantage.
One thing I remember a lot of fretting over in the second and third books is the 'c fractional strike' where a warship gets most of a system's running start to get to max accel, then launches missiles at light-speed (or rather, close enough as makes little practical difference) rendering them impossible to intercept.
The missile was an orphan from Captain Hill's third and final salvo. In fact, it should have been from his second salvo, but its launch crew had suffered a momentary loss of power. By the time the frantic techs got their weapon back on line, their bird launched almost five seconds after the third salvo, and all of them were dead by the time it entered attack range. The orphan neither knew nor cared about that. It drove forward, still under power while its sensors listened to the beacon of its chosen target. The Masadan defensive systems almost missed the single missile entirely, then assigned it a far lower threat value as it tagged along behind the others.
-snip-
The two counter-missiles targeted on it flashed past, clear misses without the better seeking heads of more modern navies, and its target's sensors, half-blinded by the artificial grav wave of its own belly stress band, lost lock. There was no last-minute laser fire, and the missile bobbed up, programmed for a frontal attack, and threw every erg of drive power it still had into crushing deceleration. There wasn't time to kill much velocity, even at 30,000 gees—but it was enough.
The unprotected, wide open throat of the light cruiser Abraham's impeller wedge engulfed the warhead like a vast scoop. Primary and backup proximity fuses flashed as one, and a fifty-megaton explosion erupted one hundred meters from the Masadan flagship.
The Little Missile that Could.
So missile defense computers automatically prioritize, for the Masadans at least this is done mainly by proximity, closest missile is first up. Also, it seems Grayson missiles have half again the accel of their Masadan counterparts, implying a significant tech-disparity. Still only about a third that of modern missiles.
Of Orbital 4's desperate 3 salvos, only two missiles hit, doing minor damage to a destroyer, and killing the Masadan flagship cruiser. Not bad for a refinery/smelters.
Orbit Four had been joined by Orbit Five and Six, and neither of their commandants had gotten as lucky as Hill. Or, rather, the Masadans had gotten smarter. They were launching from six million kilometers or more, ranges so long the defensive missiles' drives burned out over five full minutes short of their targets. It gave the defenders longer tracking times and better point defense kill probabilities, yet sheer numbers more than made up for that by saturating the defenses. It might cost the Masadans a lot of missiles, but Grayson had already lost nine percent of its orbital resource processing capacity . . . not to mention twenty-six hundred uniformed defenders and sixteen thousand civilian workers.
The Masadan's switch to missile spam at 6 million klicks. It mentions the defender's missiles burning out, but not the attackers so I guess that's still within the bounds of their powered envelope while moving at speed.
Each orbital (well, belt) processing center represents 3% of the whole, so I'm guessing there's 33 or so.
"You know," the Manticoran admiral mused, looking out through the glass wall across the bustling battle staff, "there's something peculiar about this whole attack pattern." He turned to face Yanakov. "Why aren't they either pulling completely out of the system or continuing straight along the belt?"
So you'll engage them at the point they keep returning to and get ambushed by their modern Haven warships. Of course, they assume that there are fleet tenders/colliers out there which is logical enough. There really ought to be, with the rate they seem to be blowing through their magazines.
"All right. Your orbital sensor arrays give you real-time gravitic detection out to thirty-four light-minutes—eight light-minutes beyond the belt on their normal retirement vector. More than that, the Masadans know they do."
"Well, yes." Yanakov scrubbed at burning eyes, then rose and walked across to stand beside his friend and watch the display. "Of course, there's a lot of transmission lag from the more distant arrays—especially those on the far side of Yeltsin—but they're working our side of the primary, so Command Central's got real-time data where it really matters. That's why they pull back out beyond our detection range after each raid, pick a new attack vector, and come charging back in. As you say, our shipboard sensors have very limited range compared to yours. Even if we happened to guess right and place a force where it could intercept them, its commander couldn't see them soon enough to generate an intercept, and we probably couldn't pass him light-speed orders from Command Central in time for him to do it, either."
Grayson uses orbital sensor platforms to maintain a 34 light-minute blanket, large enough for signal delay to be a problem. Last time for a while we'll see system commanders struggling to deal with comm delays. Til the Sollies get in, in fact.
It was odd, Courvosier thought. Manticoran destroyers had excellent sensor suites for their displacement, but they were hardly superdreadnoughts. Yet at this moment, Madrigal was the closest thing around. She was a pygmy beside Honor's Fearless, much less a battlecruiser or ship-of-the-wall, but she massed barely twelve thousand tons less than Yanakov's flagship, and her command and control facilities, like her firepower, were light-seconds beyond the best the Graysons could boast.
Manticoran destroyers apparently have really good sensors for a ship their size. This is probably because of Manticore's emphasis on trade protection, they did mention wanting Madrigal to sniff out trouble for the convoy. Also, Grayson cruisers are pretty small.
Neither Endicott nor Yeltsin had been able to attract significant outside help until the Haven-Manticore confrontation spilled over on them. Both were crushingly impoverished; no one in his right mind voluntarily immigrated to an environment like Grayson's; and Masada's theocratic totalitarians didn't even want outsiders. Under the circumstances, the Graysons had made up a phenomenal amount of ground in the two centuries since their rediscovery by the galaxy at large, but there were still holes, and some of them were gaping ones.
Grayson fusion plants were four times as massive as modern reactors of similar output (which was why they still used so many fission plants), and their military hardware was equally out of date—they still used printed circuits, with enormous mass penalties and catastrophic consequences for designed lifetimes—though there were a few unexpected surprises in their mixed technological bag. For example, the Grayson Navy had quite literally invented its own inertial compensator thirty T-years ago because it hadn't been able to get anyone else to explain how it was done. It was a clumsy, bulky thing, thanks to the components they had to use, but from what he'd seen of its stats, it might just be marginally more efficient than Manticore's.
Some of the reasons even after reconnecting with the wider galaxy some time ago, both systems are still playing catch-up. Grayson uses printed circuits, as I believe we do in the present, as opposed to "molycircs" that cram a lot more capacity into negligible space. Their fusion reactors are 4x larger than everyone else's, hence why they still use so much fission. Also, first mention of Grayson's superior compensators.
For all that, their energy weapons were pitiful by modern standards, and their missiles were almost worse. Their point defense missiles used reaction drives, for God's sake! That had stunned Courvosier—until he discovered that their smallest impeller missile massed over a hundred and twenty tons. That was fifty percent more than a Manticoran ship-killer, much less a point defense missile, which explained why they had to accept shorter-ranged, less capable counter missiles. At least they were small enough to carry in worthwhile numbers, and it wasn't quite as bad as it might have been, if only because the missiles they had to stop were so limited. Grayson missiles were slow, short-legged, and myopic. Worse, they required direct hits, and their penaids might as well not exist. They weren't even in shouting range of Madrigal's systems, and the destroyer could take any three Grayson—or Masadan—light cruisers in a stand-up fight.
And then there's the pitiful state of local weaponry, and actually understating the mass thing. Manticore ship-killers vary by class but are in the neighborhood of 75 tons (at least this is how they're inevitably mentioned collectively) so 120 is a big difference. Add the lack of laser heads and penaids... Well, it's a good thing Honor wasn't actually unstable enough to declare war on Grayson, Fearless would finish them in an afternoon.
Which, he reflected grimly, might be just as well in the next several hours, for something still bothered him about the entire Masadan operational pattern. It was too predictable, too . . . stupid. Of course, closing to three million klicks before engaging Orbit Four hadn't exactly been a gem of genius, either, but the Graysons and Masadans had fought their last war with chem-fuel missiles and no inertial compensators at all. Their capabilities had leapt ahead by eight centuries or so in the last thirty-five years, so perhaps closing that way resulted from simple inexperience with their new weapons mix.
Much has changed, and both Grayson and Masadan are still reeling from the leap forward in technology, clinging to the traditions that are most important to them. Of course, this time Courvosier really is drastically underestimating the Masadans.
Left to his own devices, Yu would have preferred a direct, frontal assault, trusting Thunder's missile batteries to annihilate any defenders before they ever reached their own combat range of her. But for all their vocal faith in their own perfection as God's Chosen, what passed for Masada's General Staff held the Grayson military in almost superstitious dread. They seemed unaware of the true extent of the advantage Thunder gave them, but then, most of them had been very junior officers during Masada's last attempt to conquer Yeltsin's Star. That had been the sort of disaster even the most competent military people tended to remember with dread . . . and most of the senior officers who'd launched it and escaped death at Grayson hands had found it from the Church their failure had "betrayed." The consequences to fleet morale and training had been entirely predictable, and Yu had to concede that the present Grayson Navy was at least half again as efficient as his own allies.
Grayson Navy, though smaller, is worth more in absolute terms than the Masadan (excluding recent foreign purchases.) The fact that they always lose against Grayson, and failure is punished by death, doesn't exactly engender confidence in the men.
And, in a way, Yu was just as happy his energy weapons would be out of it. His jamming and other precautions should make it almost impossible for even the Manticorans to localize him if he used only missiles, but energy fire could be back-plotted far too precisely, and hiding his ships had required him to shut down his own drives, which deprived him of any sidewalls. Besides, Principality was one of the new city-class destroyers. She was short on energy weapons . . . but she packed a missile broadside most light cruisers might envy.
Haven city destroyer has enough missile tubes to throw a light-cruiser's missile broadside. Interesting contrast to the sensor-heavy search and destroy model of the Manticoran equivalent.
Admiral Courvosier checked the numbers once more and frowned, for the current Masadan maneuvers baffled him. They were obviously trying to avoid action, but on their current course the Grayson task force would overtake well before they reached the .8 C speed limit imposed by their particle shielding. That meant they couldn't run away from Yanakov in normal space, yet they were already up to something like .46 C, much too high for a survivable Alpha translation, and if they kept this nonsense up much longer, they'd put themselves in a position where he would overrun them in short order if they tried to decelerate to a safe translation speed.
Hint: it's a trap. This happens all the time in this series, the enemy does something that cannot reasonably be explained by your knowledge of their capabilities and goals. This seems like a good time to start worrying and re-examining your assumptions, yet only the intelligent characters so much as get confused, the rest seem to accept that the enemy is screwing up or panicking or something and move on. Now this isn't unrealistic. Quite the contrary, it's highly realistic in a depressing way.
The destroyers Ararat and Judah vanished in savage flashes. They were the flankers, closest to the incoming fire. It reached them thirteen seconds sooner than it did Madrigal, and they never had a chance. They'd barely begun to roll their wedges up to interdict when the incoming missiles detonated, and they carried laser heads—clusters of bomb-pumped X-ray lasers that didn't need the direct hits Grayson missiles required. They had a stand-off range of over twenty thousand kilometers, and every primitive point defense system aboard the destroyers had been trained in the wrong direction.
2 Grayson destroyer's down, 20,000 km range for laser-heads.
Courvosier nodded and his mind raced even as Madrigal's counter missiles went out once more. This time her human personnel knew what was happening as well as her computers did; that should have made her fire even more effective, but she was spread thinner, trying to protect her consorts as well as herself. There were almost as many missiles in this salvo—with fewer targets to spread themselves among—and whoever had planned their targeting clearly knew what Madrigal was. The missile pattern was obviously a classic double broadside from something fairly powerful—probably a light cruiser—and he'd allocated six of the birds in his second launch to Madrigal. Whether it was an all-out bid for a kill or only an effort to drive her anti-missile systems back into self-defense was immaterial.
The missile heavy destroyer, going purely by it;s missiles, is judged a light-cruiser. I guess it really does have a CLs broadside. At this point Madrigal is providing missile defense for the whole task force, so 6 missiles are a genuine threat.
Even as Courvosier replied, two missiles slashed in on the damaged David. The destroyer's outclassed defenses nailed one of them; the other popped up to cross her starboard quarter at less than five hundred kilometers. The sides of her impeller wedge were protected by the focused grav fields of her sidewalls—far more vulnerable than the wedge's "roof" and "floor," but powerful enough to blunt the heaviest energy weapon at anything above pointblank range. But this was pointblank for the laser head . . . and Grayson sidewalls were weak by modern standards.
A half-dozen beams ripped at David's sidewall. It bent and degraded them as it clawed at their photons, and the radiation shielding inside the wedge blunted them a bit more, but not enough.
Three of them got through, and the destroyer belched air. Her impeller wedge flashed—then died as the ship broke almost squarely in half. Her forward section vanished in an eye-tearing glare as her fusion plant's mag bottle went, and her frantically accelerating sisters left the madly spinning derelict of her after hull—and any survivors who might still cling to life within it—astern as they raced for salvation.
Modern missiles can simply one-shot Grayson destroyers. Then again, Grayson missiles can apparently one-shot Masadan cruisers, so perhaps they're really fragile agianst their own weapons too.
"I'm not sure what hit us, Sir, but assuming they both fired double broadsides, I'd guess one was a light cruiser. The other was bigger—maybe a heavy cruiser. They're both modern ships. We couldn't get a read on them, but they have to be Havenite. I wish we could tell you more, but—"
Again with Theisman's destroyer mistaken fro a cruiser.
The signal died. GNS Covington went back to full power, racing desperately for safety while her single remaining destroyer covered her wounded flank, and there was silence on her bridge.
Astern of her, HMS Madrigal turned alone to face the foe.
Last stand of Madrigal, to cover the retreat of the Grayson Navy's only non-LAC survivors, 1 cruiser and 1 destroyer.
