Sanderson System, aboard Admiral Thenuwara's flagship
Fleet Admiral Thenuwara had seen the news reports of the SIP's declaration three days ago. Theirs and fourteen other independence-minded parties in the deep core of the Solarian League. On one level, it was exactly what she wanted. The worlds represented by the signatories to Diaz' declaration were the homes of over ninety percent of the crew in her fleet. And a new government created under the principles of that declaration would be one she and her people would be proud to serve. But things were moving too fast. She wished she could move her fleet back to the Sol system and cut two weeks of message delays. She supposed she shouldn't complain; without access to the wormhole network, her news from Sol would be six weeks old instead of two, but she was worried things could fall apart on Sol and she would not be able to do anything. Trusting her father, who had only let her know he'd supported her efforts all along months ago, seemed a thin reed to hold on to.
She did not trust anyone else in the SLN with protecting the very secret R&D and construction happening at Sanderson. And while other Battle Fleet Admirals could eventually learn pod-based tactics given three and a half squadrons of SD(P)s to play with, it would take them quite a bit longer. They'd need to make all the mistakes the Manties and Havenites had made themselves, instead of learning from their experience. But if she could have her fleet in two places at once, she would have done it.
"And Raina's letter has me even more concerned." She told Admiral Richt, who was dining with her. Commander Raina Thenuwara was her grand-niece, and assigned to Battle Fleet's side of Operational Analysis. "A captain in her section apparently asked her if she could get a letter to me without alerting anyone higher up. She would have expected a trap, except that the captain has been embarrassingly paranoid about Haven sector military for years before we started shooting at them."
"I heard something similar from Stephanie." He said. That would be his cousin's daughter and a Frontier Fleet intelligence junior captain. "This sounds… very serious. With that kind of charges, against all of your senior staff, they could easily send a fleet out here to shoot first and ask questions later."
"If I had to order my people to fire on the SLN, I was really hoping to be out of it first."
"I didn't think we'd be in this kind of situation when I signed up for your crazy scheme either, Indira." Admiral Richt said. "Lately I've been thinking we sacrificed some things to it that we didn't need to."
"When we were twenty, we were just kids – kids with second-gen prolong who ought to live a long time since no one was fool enough to fight the SLN. When we were fifty and just seeing the edges of the problems that became 'my little scheme' I started getting worried about us being seen to be close. And we'd exchanged no vows, and even had other relationships from time to time. Agreeing to keep 'us' under the radar seemed like a good idea, and we'd gone years without seeing each other before. It took me a while to realize that by the time anyone got around to looking, things would be much too far gone for the lack of any formal relationship between us to stop anyone moving against me or you from following on."
"Unfortunately, we've realized this while you actually are my commanding officer. Still, if we survive long enough that we're not in the SLN and I'm not under your direct command, sixty-odd years is a long enough courtship, don't you think?"
"Yes, Jared, I do."
He didn't leave her cabin until the next morning.
[break]
Osgiliath orbit, Rivendell System, near the General Dynamics of Rivendell shipyard complex
"Release from the cradle." A tech said, and the drone was drifting in space. "It's your show now, Dr. Fey."
"Engage the spider drive, minimum acceleration." Or rather, their best guess at one right now. Two months ago, she'd shown Admiral Michaels a model. Today, they'd find out if the real universe's physics agreed with their simulation of it. But the drone crept forward.
"No gravitic signature on the standard recon drone." Another tech reported. "Visual and thermal are tracking." They had not, for this first trial run, built any stealth features into the spider drive drone.
"And the … special… one?" Dr. Fey asked.
"Nothing, nothing, and there's a blip." A third technician said. "The effective range is a lot shorter than standard graviitcs, and we're not trying to apply any other stealth tech to the spider drone yet, but we've definitely got something here. Unless the Mesan's drive is similar in abstract principles, but completely different in implementation."
"Step up the acceleration and try again." They cycled through the battery of tests ten times in all, going from .1g to the 20g that was the maximum the test drone had been designed for.
A few hours later, she looked up from the results of her test.
"What we have may not be exactly how the Mesans did it, but it certainly produces the same signature the Manties and Graysons are sure belonged to their 'mystery attackers'. And it least in the bounds of our test, our detector works. Excellent work, all of you."
[break]
Caemlyn, Princedom of Sanderson
"How long are we going to keep this up before we admit we're looking for a needle in a haystack, and the haystack is just too big?" Lt. Xing asked. They'd found some leads that Sanderson's intelligence services had not, but so far the anonymous tipster – and almost certain Mesan operative – had eluded them.
"As long as it takes. Do you want to give up and report failure to Victor Cachat?" Lt. Mendoza replied.
"Cachat is not in my chain of command. He's not in yours, either. And he's definitely not in Sharp Mind's."
"But you know where this mission came from." 'Special assignments' from 'Grand Alliance Intelligence'? Well, it was possible a certain noted Havenite agent wasn't behind them. Likely? Not so much.
«And unlike you two-legs, I think we're making progress. » Sharp Mind signed. The Princedom's former intelligence service's attempts to trace the tip had run to ground at the store where the disposable comm the call had been placed from came from. The person who bought it had seemed very sincere when he claimed it had been stolen shortly after he purchased it. He'd even reported the theft to the police, and claimed he didn't get a good look at the thief. Sharp Mind, though, could tell he was hiding something. A bit of well-directed interrogation (Sharp Mind didn't even need to show his claws) had revealed that the man who'd purchased the comm had been paid several times the cost by a stranger, who had then never showed up to claim his merchandise. But following security camera footage, someone who could have been the thief also 'bumped' a man who had spoken to the comm purchaser before he entered the store.
The actual thief hadn't been hard to locate; a fairly skilled pickpocket who had been suspected a few times but never with enough evidence for a conviction. Unfortunately, they'd found a corpse rather than someone they could ask more questions of. The person who had been the ultimate recipient of the comm had proved harder to trace.
"In a lot of ways I wish we could show he'd gone off-planet, as long as he didn't sneak on to a private yacht." Xing said.
«They never say so, but these people do not seem to like us much. » Sharp Mind signed.
"Technically the Sollies forced a new government on them, not us, but they couldn't have done it over our objections. And while Harriet II Sanderson might not have been popular on some of the worlds she or her father conquered, here on Sanderson was another story. Forcing them to sell a Solarian contractor a shipyard set up to build ships of the wall a good two generations more advanced than SLN standard issue had to rub a lot of them the wrong way, too. It's not hard to see why elves and Manticorans and Sollies are not so popular in Caemlyn." Mendoza said.
"And that passing through a public, well-monitored spaceport – which describes every spaceport on this planet – would give us a much smaller set of targets than an entire planet, too." Xing finished.
"We've got programs in place to catch him if he shows up on any public security camera, assuming he hasn't changed his appearance enough to fool them. Since Ruth and Anton gave them a once-over after NavInt's boys did the development, there's at least a chance things that our Alignment agent would expect to work will not." Mendoza said.
«We're making progress. » Sharp Mind signed. «But I hate waiting. »
[break]
New Capetown system, aboard Admiral Wesley Marrone's flagship
The operation to seize the New Capetown-New Beijing Bridge had been a bit of test for Wes Marrone's task force. They had been training for nearly a year with mixed task forces from all the Grand Alliance partners who could spare ships for it. Even in the defense of the Manticoran home system, the Havenite forces had only coordinated with the RMN at the highest level. What Marrone was trying to do was make a division of Rivendell dreadnoughts, a division of Havenite SDs, a division of Manticoran SDs, an 'Erewhonese' light cruiser squadron and a Grayson carrier group act as one squadron. The process had more than a few bumps – some of which had been smoothed out as hardware closer to Manticore/Grayson levels had become available to other alliance partners, and others just by experience – but Marrone thought he could even match an all-Manticoran task force ton for ton at this point. His hardware might not be quite as good, but the Alliance had sent him very good people; Starks might have been a touch overconfident the first time he'd exercised against Marrone back in the Manticore binary system, but Marrone had absolutely no worries about him commanding the squadron on the other side of the bridge. And he was similarly impressed by the other senior officers of his task force.
It was true that he'd hit both ends of the bridge with heavier forces than Manticore had used for most of the Case Lacoön raids, which had discouraged futile attempts to hold them. But he'd had reason for that. This particular bridge had a much higher chance than most of an attempt to retake it. The SLN almost certainly had no illusions it could force its way through the Manticoran Wormhole Junction and on to the Spindle-Rivendell bridge, but shaving three weeks off of the trip from Sanderson – where the most advanced ships and missiles the SLN was building were being constructed – might well seem important to Solarian officials less clear-headed than Indira Thenuwara. So presenting actual ships of the wall at both ends of the bridge seemed like a good idea for now.
"Admiral, the picket's reporting four Solarian light cruisers hypered in and fired off recon drones, but stayed beyond the hyper limit and immediately started cycling up their hyper generators again. Given that our mission was to have a noticeable presence, we didn't shoot them down." And even with FTL comm, it was too late to overrule the picket captains, but he had no desire to. If the SLN had something they thought could take a Grand Alliance squadron of wallers and screen heading this way, he wanted to know it.
"Let it go by, just like we planned things." He said.
[break]
Mandela system, aboard the SLNS Currie
Fleet Admiral Koh was disappointed, but not surprised when his scouts reported two each of Rivendell DNs, Havenite SDs, Manticoran SDs, and unknown waller-sized ships at New Capetown. Along with a squadron each of BCs and light cruisers. At least the BCs weren't those 2 Megaton Manticoran monstrosities that had been reported from Talbot. He supposed declining to face six to eight of the wall with over one hundred would normally be seen as cowardice. But he had a mission to accomplish.
"Send a dispatch boat to HQ and tell them we're taking the long way to Canton and awaiting further orders there."
He knew what orders to expect, and did not see any choice but to plan on obeying them. It was far, far too late for him to back out now.