“Lot of gunship activity; they’re doing the best they can to keep their numbers obfuscated, but it looks like we might have overestimated them,” the operations officer continued. “Chambers?”
“Sir?” Roslyn asked.
“Keep your eye on those gunships,” Kulkarni ordered. “You know their signatures as well as anyone, so work with Chief Jian and get me an accurate number.”
“Yes, sir,” she confirmed.
Pulling the data over to her screen and setting up a link with Chief Jian took her less than a second. She was still listening to Alexander as she dug into the data, though.
“They know we outrange them now,” the Admiral noted. “Their only chance to survive this is to bring their mobile units out to meet us.”
“They might want to test how many of the new missiles we’ve got,” Kulkarni observed.
Roslyn was tagging squadrons as they wove through each other. The RIN pilots were decent; at least some of these crews had to have been involved in the early offensives where the Republic had pushed the Protectorate back across the board, after all, but there was only so much they could do against the sensors of the dreadnoughts.
“We need a drone sweep to confirm,” she murmured to Jian. “But I make it thirty-four hundred and change.”
“Sweep is being set up,” Jian confirmed. “I think it’s closer to thirty-five, but I see your tags too. They’re doing their best.”
“Tactical?” Roslyn linked to Durendal’s bridge, intentionally contacting the assistant tactical officer—a young man who shared her own rank. “Do we have a timing on a probe sweep?”
“Salvos launching in sixty seconds,” the other junior officer replied. “We’re feeding everything we’ve got to the flag deck.”
“Oh, I know that,” she confirmed. “Those little buggers are being clever, though.”
“Time, Kulkarni?” Alexander asked.
“Ninety seconds,” the operations officer replied. “Locals are maneuvering but aren’t coming out to meet us.”
“Shame,” the Admiral said. “I didn’t really expect them to take the bait. If nothing else, they probably figure two dreadnoughts can take their entire fleet.”
Sensor probes flashed away from the two massive warships: dozens of missiles refitted to carry sensors instead of warheads. They’d have more answers once those drones entered Sucre orbit.
“Well, we’ll see how they react when we move in,” Alexander finally said. “That carrier might still have her gunships aboard, after all. That would bring the numbers closer to MISS’s estimate.”
“Or they moved gunships somewhere else in the system?” Kulkarni asked.
“Defending the cloudscoops would make sense,” she agreed. “If I thought that it would bring them out to play, I’d go for the fuel stations. As it is, though…they know what I know, which is that this battle will be decided here.
“And if cleverness doesn’t work, well, there’s a reason I brought a really big hammer.”
Kulkarni’s ninety seconds ran out—and the rest of Second Fleet flared into existence around the two dreadnoughts. Battleships, cruisers and destroyers dropped out of nothingness into a perfectly arranged formation.
It was a flashy parade-ground trick, synchronizing jumps like that…but it had a point, too, that Roslyn at least picked up.
Not only do we have more ships than you, we’re just plain better than you.
She wondered if the Republic ships in Sucre orbit interpreted it in the same way.
The warships hung in space silently for several moments as the command networks synchronized. Roslyn kept a careful eye on those networks as they linked up, with each additional sensor platform giving them one more angle to try and identify the individual gunships.
“Carrier is launching her gunships,” Jian said softly. “Two hundred fifty additional units. I make it thirty-seven hundred exactly, all told.”
“I have the same,” Roslyn confirmed. “Anyone want to guess where they hid fifteen million tons of gunships?”
The balance of power between the two forces wasn’t close enough to make those parasite warships a game-changer, but any surprise in a battle, however small, was generally bad in her experiences.
“First guess is the cloudscoops,” Jian replied.
Roslyn nodded and turned back to Kulkarni. The tall black operations officer was neck-deep in the network link-up, and she waited a few seconds for the immediate chaos to resolve.
“We’re looking at thirty-seven hundred gunships,” she told the older woman. “That’s with the two-fifty from the carrier. Intel said four thousand. The difference could be a resolution error from the distance that the scout ships came through, or they could have moved them out to the gas giants to protect the cloudscoops.”
Roslyn paused.
“We could send someone to check on the scoops,” she suggested. “The risk to the ship we send would be high, though, higher than the risk to the fleet from an unexpected thirty gunship squadrons.”
“Understood,” Kulkarni acknowledged. “Keep an eye out for them and see what you can resolve on those battle stations.”
“Do we have a command network, Mage-Captain?” Alexander asked, leaning past her ops officer. “This shouldn’t have taken this long.”
“The Cataphracts appear to have left the yards with a calibration issue, sir,” Kulkarni said crisply. “I failed to notice it in the previous exercises, but it did cause a small delay in syncing them to the overall network.”
“Teething problems, I suppose,” the Admiral said. “There were a few people who should have spotted that, Kulkarni. Including me. No need to throw yourself on your sword…if we have the network.”
A final set of lights for the two squadrons of brand-new Cataphract-class destroyers turned green on the screens around them.
“We have the network,” Kulkarni confirmed. “We had them in the missile defense net already; that was our primary focus.”
“Good call,” Alexander agreed.
The new Cataphracts were based on the realization that the Honor- and Lancer-class destroyers were built on designs a century old and intended to fight pirates. The ships had been upgraded and revised since, but they weren’t designed to be escorts for larger units.
The Cataphracts were. They carried lighter offensive armaments despite their larger size, trading in missiles and heavy lasers for over twice as many defensive Rapid-Fire Laser Anti-Missile turrets.
The Admiral glanced around the flag deck, her gaze meeting Roslyn’s for a silent second, then focused on the main display.
“Second Fleet will advance,” she ordered. “Course is for a zero-velocity halt at twelve point nine five million kilometers.”
Even if Roslyn hadn’t had the numbers memorized, the range spheres of the various ships were laid out on the displays around her. The Republic fleet had a range of twelve point seven five million kilometers from rest.
Second Fleet’s new Phoenix IXs had a range of thirteen million kilometers. They weren’t entirely effective at their full range, but they would be far more effective than enemy missiles without any fuel left.