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# Chapter Fifty-Five

Lieutenant Commander Sarah Flanagan finished the current report, affixed her electronic signature, and dumped it back into the station's communications system. No doubt, she thought sourly, she'd be seeing it again soon. After all, there had to be some section she'd forgotten to initial, some signature block she'd forgotten to check, or—all else failing—some arcane routing number she'd somehow managed to delete from the header. Something. Right off the top of her head, she couldn't think of a single report which Captain Louis al-Salil hadn't bounced back to her for one obscure reason or another.

Now if he'd only spent half as much effort on keeping his LAC group's training up to standard . . . .

Unfortunately, al-Salil had better things to do with his time than to waste it on boring, "routine" training ops. And if the group absolutely had to train, it made so much more sense to him to rely on the simulators. The fact that no more than a quarter of the group could fit into the available simulators at any one time (which made exercises in things like full-group coordination impossible) was not, in his opinion, a particularly significant drawback.

Sarah Flanagan disagreed. Her last posting had been to HMS Mephisto, a CLAC assigned to Home Fleet. Even there, the LAC training tempo had slackened noticeably from the pace Eighth Fleet had maintained under Admiral Truman during Operation Buttercup, but it remained far more demanding than anything al-Salil seemed to feel was necessary. Flanagan had been only a lieutenant during Buttercup, working her way up to command her own LAC, but she'd had her eye on a squadron command slot even then. She'd absorbed everything she could under Truman's tutelage and applied it with an aggressive efficiency which had carried her to that goal in something close to record time. Although, she admitted to herself, if she'd known they were going to assign her to a bare-bones space station in a podunk frontier system when they gave it to her, she might have had second thoughts about her ambition.

She supposed it made at least some sense to economize on starships, especially given the way the Admiralty and Government had built down the Navy's strength. And certainly a LAC group could cover far more space, and do it more efficiently, than a like tonnage of light cruisers or destroyers could. But that wasn't a great deal of consolation to the unfortunate souls assigned to crew the LACs in question. Especially not when among the starships being economized upon was the carrier they ought to have been operating from.

Her Majesty's Space Station T-001 had never even attained the dignity of a formal name. Known to its denizens as "the Tamale" for reasons Flanagan had never been able to divine, T-001 offered absolutely no amenities. About the only good thing anyone could say about it was that an ex-Peep cargo transfer space station modified to play orbital mothership to a standard group of a hundred and eight LACs was big enough that at least there was ample personnel space. Of course, that personnel space had been carved out of the previous owners' temporary cargo stowage decks, and no one had bothered to do much to make it particularly pleasurable to inhabit. Still, Flanagan had to admit that her cabin gave her at least twice the cubage she'd enjoyed aboard Mephisto, and she didn't even have to share it with anyone.

It would have been nice if the increase in living space had been accompanied by an improvement in the quality of that space. On the other hand, perhaps the amenities they had were actually better suited to the quality of the LAC group living in it. Not that the problem was with the basic quality of the personnel assigned to the 1007th LAC Group (Temporary). One had to look a bit higher up the military feeding chain to find the reason for that.

Flanagan had been stunned and dismayed by the standard of readiness which appeared to satisfy al-Salil and Vice Admiral Schumacher, the system CO. She'd heard that Schumacher was considered one of the Navy's golden boys by the Admiralty, despite purely limited combat experience, but no one could have proved it by Flanagan. His operational standards would never have satisfied Admiral Truman, at any rate. They didn't particularly satisfy Sarah Flanagan, either. Unfortunately, as al-Salil's most junior squadron commander, there wasn't very much she could do about it.

She muttered a weary, heartfelt curse at the familiar thought, then punched up the next report in her queue and grimaced as she read the header. Lovely. Now The Powers That Were wanted her squadron's crews to run a complete inventory of all emergency survival stores. She wondered why that was. The group's maintenance personnel were fully capable of performing such inventories. In fact, it was part of their job description. So why exactly were the LAC flight crews supposed to do exactly the same job behind them? Had someone been pilfering e-rats? Was this somehow supposed to catch the arch thief at her work? It seemed unlikely that anyone so incredibly capable that she could actually make a profit selling emergency survival stores was likely to be trapped by any merely mortal agency.

But whether it made sense or not wasn't Flanagan's problem, so she drew a deep breath, settled down in her chair, and prepared to dive into yet another exhilarating adventure in creative paperwork.

That was the moment the entire universe changed.

The sudden, raucous, atonal howl took her utterly by surprise, but her instincts knew what they were doing. She was already out of her chair and halfway out of her small office before she even realized she'd moved. She was up to a full run within five meters, dashing through a bedlam of startled exclamations, other chairs skidding across decksoles, hatches cycling madly open, feet thundering down passages towards lift shafts, and over all of it that bone-crawling, brain-piercing alarm shrieking its warning.

As a squadron skipper, Flanagan's office cubicle was on the same deck as her squadron's LAC bays. She didn't need a lift shaft to reach her command ship, and only one member of her crew—Ensign Giuliani—had managed to beat her there. Of course, a corner of her brain reflected with something very like shell-shocked detachment, Giuliani practically lived aboard Switchblade. He was the command LAC's coxswain, and he'd discovered that he could seduce the flight computers into providing what amounted to his own, private simulator. As far as al-Salil was concerned, of course, Giuliani's solo excursions in training were completely unauthorized, but Flanagan had somehow failed to mention them to T-001's COLAC.

"What's happening, Cal?" she demanded pantingly as she skidded to a halt just inside Switchblade's boarding tube.

"I'm not sure, Skipper," Giuliani replied flatly, never looking up from the tactical plot he'd brought on-line as soon as the alarm began to sound. "But from the looks of things, we're fucked."

Flanagan felt her eyebrows try to crawl up into her hairline. She'd never heard quite that note in the brash young ensign's voice. Nor, now that she thought about it, had she ever heard even the mildest profanity from him in her own august presence.

"Can you be more specific?" she asked tartly, and this time Giuliani raised his head and gave her a half-apologetic smile.

"Sorry, Skip," he said contritely. "I should've said that it looks like the system is under attack by unknown forces operating in overwhelming strength. Except that unless I'm completely wrong, they're not 'unknown' at all. I think they're Peeps."

"Peeps?" Flanagan wanted the word to come out as a question, or perhaps a protest, but it didn't. After all, who else would be attacking a Manticoran picket here in the Tequila System? Elves? Yet despite that, she felt an underlying sense of disbelief. Everyone had heard the rumors about the Peeps' new fleet, but no one had suggested to her that any sort of attack was imminent.

"Can't think of anyone else they'd be," Giuliani told her as the other members of Switchblade's crew began to arrive. Flanagan heard them opening equipment lockers and dragging out their skinsuits. Suits weren't usually stored aboard LACs, but "the Tamale's" conversion had been a bit on the crude side. It worked—most of it, usually—but no one had bothered with any frills. And since the flight crews' battle stations were aboard the LACs, the decision had been made to keep the skinsuits there, as well. It had led to a few problems with personnel with more extreme nudity taboos, but it worked better than a lot of T-001's arrangements, and, besides, Flanagan had other things on her mind just then. She stepped up beside Giuliani and leaned over the tactical plot with him.

Whoever it was, they'd come loaded for bear, she thought. T-001 and her sister station T-002 were all the defenders the Tequila System had. Which was pretty frigging stupid, she reflected grimly, given its status as the furthest advanced system Eighth Fleet had occupied during the final offensive of the war. Or maybe it wasn't. What they had was big enough to deter casual intrusions, and if it wasn't powerful enough to mount a defense against an all-out attack, at least it was sufficient to act as a credible tripwire. Anyone who wanted Tequila was going to have to pay cash for it. Unfortunately, it looked like the Peeps had brought plenty of spare change.

At least Vice Admiral Schumacher had decent in-system FTL sensor capability. The big passive arrays which had once been planned to cover the system perimeter and watch for hyper footprints far beyond it had never been emplaced . . . of course. Too expensive in this era of austere naval budgets. That probably didn't matter in this case, though. It didn't look as if the intruders were attempting anything particularly subtle. They'd simply sent in a squadron of superdreadnoughts with cruiser escorts. Given the power of the Shrike-Bs' graser armament, they were going to take damage even on superdreadnoughts, but nothing to compare to the damage the LACs were going to take. Even Peep SDs were going to tear unsupported light attack craft apart when they closed to energy range.

Which meant Cal was correct; "fucked" was exactly what they were.

"Launch instructions are coming up now, Skip," Lieutenant Benedict announced. Flanagan turned away from the plot and looked a question at her exec.

"It looks like we're going with Delta-Three, at least initially," Benedict told her.

"Time till launch?" she asked, and he checked the launch clock on his console.

"Thirty-one minutes," he said. "Station Engineering started bringing the nodes up on remote as soon as GQ sounded. They'll be optimal in another twenty-eight minutes."

"What about missile loadout?"

"Nothing on my screen, Skip," Benedict replied with a shrug. "Looks like we're going to launch with a standard package."

Flanagan managed not to stare at him in disbelief, which would undoubtedly have been terrible for morale, but it wasn't easy. The standard missile package consisted of a little bit of everything and not enough of anything. It was intended as a standby weapons load, one that gave at least limited capability under almost any circumstances. But it was effectively an emergency load. Standard tactical doctrine assumed that any COLAC would tailor his missile loads to the tactical mission—deleting the ordnance he wouldn't need to make room for the weapons he did—unless he found himself forced to launch under emergency conditions at minimal range. That wasn't the case here. Even if the Peeps had been able to match the extended range of the RMN's capital ship missiles, it would have taken them the better part of three hours to get into effective attack range of "the Tamale." That was plenty of time for the 1007th to strip the standby packages off of its LACs and replace them with a load that made sense, especially since the high-speed magazine tubes were the one part of T-001's conversion which had always worked perfectly.

But apparently al-Salil and Schumacher didn't see things that way.

Sera Flanagan hovered on the brink of comming the COLAC to suggest that it might be time for a little sanity. She had no doubt that most of the group's personnel were about to die, although that lingering sense of disbelief mingled with trained professionalism had managed to so far hold that realization at arm's length. Still, she knew, the odds were very good that she would be among the ones who did, and it offended that same professionalism deeply to think that al-Salil would just throw them away this way without even attempting to maximize the damage they might inflict before they were destroyed.

She almost did it. She ought to have done it, and she knew it. But she was the most junior squadron commander of the group, and she knew precisely how al-Salil would react. Given the circumstances, she had no particular desire to spend any of the time she had left in fruitless debate with a feckless incompetent. Or to be stripped of command and left behind when her people went off to die.

"Override Group's ammunitioning instructions," she told Benedict flatly. The exec looked at her, and she shrugged. "We've got time if you get right on it," she said. "Use the squadron interlinks to the station magazine queue. I want a Lima-Roger-Two package loaded to all ships ASAP. Anybody in the station crew asks any questions, refer them to me."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am!" Benedict said sharply, and she nodded and reached for her own skinsuit.

She peeled out of her uniform and started climbing into the skinsuit with the lack of body modesty which was part and parcel of LAC operations here in Tequila. While she did, she heard Benedict working at his console, and she bared her teeth in an almost-smile.

Lima-Roger-Two—or "Standard Missile Load, Long-Ranged Intercept, Mod Two"—was hardly a tailor-made armament package, but it would give Flanagan's LACs at least some chance of penetrating the envelope of a superdreadnought's defensive fire. It was designed to help LACs which had to go out and meet heavy combatants from outside the supporting missile range of their own wall of battle. As such, it was EW-heavy, with emphasis on counter missiles, jammers, and decoys.

It wasn't much, she thought harshly as she sealed the skinsuit. It was simply all she could offer her people under the circumstances.

"Missile reload complete in approximately nine minutes, Ma'am," Benedict reported formally. "Time to launch now eleven-point-three minutes." He looked up from his displays. "It'll be tight, Skip," he said much more informally, "but we'll make it."

"Good," Flanagan said, picturing the high-speed missile pallets and robotic arms blurring and flashing as they rearranged Switchblade's missile loads. "Any reaction from Captain al-Salil?" she asked after a moment.

"No, Ma'am," Benedict replied in a painfully neutral tone, and Flanagan snorted mentally.

Of course there wasn't anything from al-Salil. And there'd probably be precious little in the way of any sort of briefing on the battle plan he undoubtedly didn't have. This was not only going to be an ugly battle, it was also going to the most fucked up one since Elvis Santino got his entire task group wiped out at Seaford.

And there was absolutely nothing Sarah Flanagan could do to change that.

* * *

Vice Admiral Agnes de Groot studied the flag deck master plot in a mood of pronounced satisfaction.

De Groot had approached Operation Thunderbolt with less than total enthusiasm. Not because she didn't want to get some of the Navy's own back from the Manties. And not because she didn't agree with President Pritchart that the Star Kingdom of Manticore damned well deserved to have its ass kicked up between its ears over its diplomatic doubledealing and chicanery. Not even because she disagreed with the ops plan's underlying assumptions or strategy.

No, de Groot's reservations had stemmed from the fact that the Staff had expressly ruled out any pre-attack reconnaissance of Tequila.

Agnes de Groot had risen to flag rank in a fleet which had experienced a seemingly unending series of drubbings—interrupted only occasionally by something like Operation Icarus—at the hands of the Manticoran Alliance. In light of that experience, she'd found it . . . difficult to accept NavInt's estimates of the enormous decline in the efficiency of the Royal Manticoran Navy. She'd been certain that the spooks had to be overestimating the degree to which the Manties had lost their edge. Or thrown it away, if there was a difference. Which meant that she had also found it difficult to accept that they could have been stupid enough to reduce their picket in Tequila to the levels NavInt insisted they had.

She knew all about the reports the intelligence types had generated. But she also knew that the data on which those reports were based had come solely from the civilian-grade sensors of merchantmen passing through the system. It wouldn't have been hard for any navy, and especially not for one with the Manties' EW capabilities, to hide an entire fleet from a merchie's sensor suite, and de Groot had been privately certain that that must be what had happened.

It seemed she'd been wrong.

Her own recon drones were twelve million klicks—over forty light-seconds—ahead of her screen, with a secondary shell thrown out to cover her flanks and rear. While she was always prepared to recognize the Manticorans' supremacy in the field of electronic warfare, she found it difficult to believe that she wouldn't have gotten at least a sniff of any heavy units closing to missile range of her own command. Of course, there was missile range, and then there was missile range. Judging from their performance immediately before the cease-fire, Manty multi-drive missiles had a powered attack range of somewhere around sixty-five million klicks, which was at least eight million more than the RHN's new weapons could manage. But not even Manties were going to score many hits against alert targets at ranges of better than three and a half light-minutes. To be effective, they were going to have to come a lot closer than that, and her platforms should have started getting a sniff of them well before they got within five light-minutes of the outer shell, much less her actual starships.

A part of her still insisted that they had to be out there somewhere, but she told herself that was just the last gasp effort of her own paranoia. If they'd really had heavy ships, those vessels would be where her drones could see them. They'd have to be if they were going to offer any support at all to the two hundred and eleven LACs sweeping to meet her.

And if the Manties really hadn't shot themselves in both feet and one kneecap where their readiness states and training are concerned, she thought with grim satisfaction, those LACs would be doing something a hell of a lot smarter than what they're doing now.

She supposed whoever was in command over there was being brave enough, but Lord God was she stupid! What NavInt's estimates insisted was the entire LAC strength based on the system, allowing for four or five down for routine maintenance, was coming straight at the invaders with absolutely no attempt to maneuver for advantage. It looked like the Manty CO intended to charge straight down de Groot's throat, possibly in an effort to avoid the Republican broadsides and sidewalls. Of course, that would also expose her LACs to the fire of de Groot's entire squadron's chase armament as she closed, but maybe she figured she could survive that long enough to get into range. If so, she was an idiot . . . or even more unaware of the improvements in the Republic's naval hardware—including the new classes' bow walls—than de Groot would have believed was possible.

Of course, she probably thought she was facing only ships of the wall, too.

* * *

"Another message from the COLAC, Skipper," Chief Petty Officer Lawrence announced. Flanagan turned her command chair to face Switchblade's com officer and waved one hand in an unspoken "tell me" command. She tried very hard not to let the gesture radiate her disgust, but she knew she'd failed.

"Captain al-Salil instructs all Shrike commanders to remember to close to minimum range before firing," Lawrence said as expressionlessly as possible.

"Acknowledge," Flanagan replied, and this time she didn't bother with concealing her emotions. It wasn't as if it was going to matter very much longer, and she knew her entire squadron must be as disgusted as she was. Both LAC groups had been accelerating steadily to meet the oncoming Peeps for over two hours. They were less than forty minutes from intercept, and the idiot was still sending fatuous, stupid "reminders" instead of anything approaching useful attack orders.

She supposed, in fairness (although she had very little interest in being fair to al-Salil under the circumstances), that he had specified an attack plan . . . of sorts. Unfortunately, like the missile loads his LACs were carrying, Attack Plan Delta-Three, was purely generic, little more than a vague set of objectives and procedures. It had been obvious to Flanagan for months that neither al-Salil nor Schumacher had believed, even as the diplomatic situation worsened, that the Peeps would dare to attack Tequila. So neither of them had spent much time or effort thinking about serious defensive plans. All of their thinking had been directed towards maintaining "system security" against any purely local disorder or some sort of scouting foray or harassment the Peeps might have attempted with light forces. Delta-Three would probably have worked fairly well against a destroyer sweep, or a few flotillas of light cruisers. Even a battlecruiser squadron or two. Against what they actually faced, it was about as useful as a screen door on an airlock.

At least it looked as if the Peep commander must have missed almost as many classes in tactics as Flanagan's superiors had, because her formation might have been purposely designed to actually let Delta-Three hurt her. Flanagan wasn't certain what the Peep was thinking of, but the attack commander wasn't making any effort to deploy her escorting units in the sort of anti-LAC defensive shell the RMN had devised in its own wargames. She was keeping all of her cruisers tucked in unreasonably tight. They'd be able to mass their energy fire effectively against the Shrikes as the LAC groups closed in for point blank energy attacks, but they were interfering with one another's long-range sensor envelopes, and they were going to offer extremely vulnerable targets to the massed missile fire the Ferrets would be pumping out any minute now.

She watched the Peep icons change color on her own tactical repeater as al-Salil's tactical officer designated missile targets. The escorting cruisers turned crimson, one by one, as the COLAC assigned a massive overkill to them. In some respects, it was an admission of despair, a concession that the cruisers were the only ships they had the firepower to kill, although Flanagan doubted that al-Salil would have admitted it. Delta-Three called for a converging attack, taking out the flank guards first, to clear a path for the graser-armed Shrikes to execute a minimum-range attack on the core of any enemy force. Which would have been all well and good if their targets had been battlecruisers, or even battleships. Against superdreadnoughts with their sidewalls up and their weapons on-line, the Shrikes would be impossibly lucky to inflict damage that was more than merely cosmetic.

Still, she told herself grimly, the Peeps would at least know they'd been nudged. And she owed it to her own people not to let her own crushing sense of despair affect her own effectiveness. If they were going to die anyway, then it was her job to keep her own head clear and make their deaths mean at least something by expending them as effectively as possible. And, who knew, maybe—The plot changed suddenly, and Sarah Flanagan's heart seemed to stop.

Apparently the Peep commander wasn't quite the idiot she'd thought.

* * *

Agnes de Groot smiled like a hungry wolf as the master plot changed.

The incoming Manty strike was a confusing mass of red light dots. That was their infernally effective onboard ECM, coupled with the capability of their decoys and jammers. Still, as far as de Groot could tell, there were fewer EW birds covering them than had been projected, and CIC seemed to be getting a better count on the hostiles than she'd hoped for. It was always possible, of course, that they were being allowed to get "a better count" by Manty electronics officers with their ECM in deception mode, but she didn't think so. It looked to her as if she had genuinely caught the Manties completely unprepared and with very little idea of how to respond to the unanticipated threat.

Which, she thought ferociously, had just become an even greater threat than they'd imagined.

The large green beads of three of her "superdreadnoughts" were suddenly surrounded by clouds of smaller green fireflies, dashing away from them, as they launched full groups of Cimeterre-class LACs. NavInt's sources all confirmed that the Manties had stuck with their original, basically dreadnought-sized CLACs. Given the compensator advantages which the Manticoran Alliance had enjoyed for years, it gave them the best combination of LAC capacity and acceleration. But the Republican Navy had adopted a different philosophy. Its CLACs were visualized as primarily defensive platforms, mobile bases for the LACs intended to protect the wall of battle from long-range Manty LAC strikes. As such, there was no reason to make them any faster than the superdreadnoughts they would be protecting, and all of that lovely tonnage advantage could be put into additional LAC bays.

Which meant that whereas a Manty CLAC could pack approximately one hundred and twelve LACs into its bays, a Republican Aviary-class carried well over two hundred.

Now seven hundred-plus Cimeterres went charging outward to meet less than a third that many Manty LACs which were far too close at far too high a closing speed to even hope to evade them.

* * *

They were all dead . . . and for nothing.

The thought stabbed through Sarah Flanagan's mind with cold, unspeakable bitterness as she realized how utterly the Royal Navy had failed in its most basic responsibilities to its Queen and to its own people. It wasn't just al-Salil and Schumacher after all. It was the entire Navy, from ONI to Flanagan herself, and something deep inside her—the something which had sent her into her Queen's uniform in the first place—shriveled in shame.

The Peeps had CLACs . . . and no one had even suspected it. Or, even worse, if anyone had, they'd kept their suspicions to themselves. And this was the result. Disaster unmitigated.

Even as the huge cloud of LACs flashed towards her, some detached observer in her brain was visualizing all of the other system pickets. Most of them, unlike Tequila, had at least a division of capital ships, or a battlecruiser squadron, or a dozen cruisers or so, to back up the LACs expected to bear the brunt of system defense. But it wasn't going to matter. If the Peeps had committed three CLACs to Tequila, where they had to know the picket was so understrength, then they'd committed more to the systems where they expected something approaching respectable resistance. And no one in any of those systems knew what was headed for them any more than al-Salil and Schumacher had.

It would be like an avalanche. Not one of snow and tumbling boulders, but of laser heads and grasers. Waves of LACs and thundering broadsides. Of broken Manticoran starships and shattered light attack craft. And there was nothing at all that anyone could do to stop it. Not now.

She heard her own voice issuing orders, overriding the COLAC's targeting designations. Her own Shrikes' tac officers responded quickly, almost as if they didn't realize how complete the catastrophe was. She heard al-Salil frantically issuing commands of his own, but she paid them little heed. They were half incoherent to begin with, and even if they hadn't been, it was too late.

Her squadron launched even while al-Salil was still gibbering away. She launched on her own authority, with no orders, and at the oncoming enemy LACs rather than the starships whose defenses her Shrikes' light missile loads could never have penetrated.

Then she hunkered down in her command chair, braced her forearms on the armrests, and watched the holocaust come.

* * *

De Groot grimaced as a single Manty LAC squadron launched every bird it had. The rotary launchers which were the central feature of modern LAC design couldn't be "flushed" in a single salvo the way the old-style box launchers could be. But they could come close, and that single squadron got every offensive missile away before her own squadrons reached launch range.

That fire reached deep into her LACs' formation. Eighteen of them were destroyed outright. Seven more were crippled, five so badly that there wouldn't be any point in repairing them. Another eight took lighter damage.

But then it was the turn of the remaining seven hundred and sixty Cimeterres.

Commander Clapp's "triple ripple" roared outward. The magazines of two hundred of the Republican vessels fed that onrushing wave of missiles. The other five hundred and sixty held their fire, waiting.

Agnes de Groot watched the first wave of ferocious detonations sweeping away Manty EW drones like a broom of brimstone. Even from here, she could almost feel the despair enveloping the enemy as they realized what was happening, but it was far too late for them to do anything about it.

The second wave of explosions lashed at the Manties, hashing their sensors, crippling their onboard electronics ever so briefly. And then, exactly as Clapp had predicted, the third wave of missiles swept through the hopelessly disorganized Manticoran defensive envelope.

Thirty-three Manticoran LACs survived the triple ripple.

None of them survived the single massive salvo which followed it up.

De Groot's total losses were less than forty.

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