Shadow of Freedom

“Sort of reminds you of cockroaches, doesn’t it, Ma’am?” Captain Armstrong remarked, and Michelle Henke chuckled. Cockroaches were one of the Old Terran species which had become as ubiquitous as mankind itself, and she had to admit Armstrong’s simile fitted.

Tenth Fleet—or most of it, at any rate—had made its alpha translation seventy-three minutes ago, a half-million kilometers outside the hyper limit and just over eleven light-minutes from the planet of Meyers. Since then, her command’s closing velocity relative to the planet had risen to 23,576 KPS, and she’d traveled over fifty-three million kilometers. In just over twenty-seven more minutes, her superdreadnoughts would be making turnover and beginning their deceleration towards the planet.

In the meantime, every hyper-capable ship that could get underway, had. She wasn’t especially surprised to see the Frontier Fleet detachment running hard for the hyper limit, and she didn’t blame Commodore Francis Thurgood one bit. In fact, she’d expected no less out of him. She and Cynthia Lecter had made it their business to study every scrap of information they could dig up on him, and it was obvious he was no Byng or Crandall. She’d been confident he’d recognize his responsibility to rescue whatever he could from the wreck for future service, and given that they’d obviously caught him with hot impeller nodes for some reason—an exercise, perhaps?—he was doing precisely what she would have anticipated.

Too bad,

she thought. Takes a certain degree of moral courage for an officer who knows her duty to cut and run in the face of the enemy. Lots easier for a coward to make that decision, really. He deserves better than what’s going to happen.

“I assume Captain Morgan’s staying in touch?” she asked now, glancing at Lieutenant Commander Edwards, her com officer.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Edwards acknowledged with an evil grin. Bill Edwards, who’d spent a lot of time at BuWeaps with Admiral Sonja Hemphill, wasn’t exactly a typical communications specialist. He was actually a lot more of a “shooter” than a technical weenie, and Michelle shook her head at him fondly.

“Bloodthirsty, aren’t you?” His grin only grew broader, and she shook her head, then glanced at Commander Adenauer.

The dark-haired operations officer had lost a lot of family in the Yawata Strike, and it had taken her a long time to regain her lively sense of humor. Indeed, there were shadows behind her eyes even now. It hadn’t affected her work, though, and she looked up and raised one eyebrow as she felt her admiral’s gaze.

“Yes, Ma’am?”

“What’s the latest on those merchies, Dominica?”

“I think just about everyone who’s going to get her impellers online before we hit orbit already has, Ma’am.” The ops officer twitched her head in the direction of the master plot. “The only one that’s really got a chance to make it across the limit is that first one, the one that bolted the instant they picked us up inbound. Well, I suppose I should say the only one that thinks

it’s really got a chance to make it across the limit is probably that one.”

Her lips twitched, and Michelle sighed.

“Bloodthirsty lunatics. I’m surrounded by bloodthirsty lunatics.”

“In all fairness, Ma’am, I don’t think ‘lunatics’ is exactly the right word,” Cynthia Lecter said respectfully.

“Oh, really? And what noun would you choose instead, Cindy?”

“I think enthusiasts would be the best way to describe them,” the trim, blonde chief of staff replied.

Michelle considered the suggestion for a second or two, then nodded.

“Point taken,” she acknowledged, and turned her attention back to the plot once more.

Thurgood’s battlecruisers had been accelerating away from Meyers for sixty-five minutes, and they hadn’t been wasting any time about it. In fact, they were accelerating at almost 4.8 KPS², their maximum military power, without the inertial compensator safety margin upon which SLN doctrine insisted. As a result, their velocity away from the planet was up to 18,712 KPS, and they’d traveled 36.5 million kilometers. Assuming constant velocities, Thurgood would reach the hyper limit on the far side of the primary twenty-six minutes before Michelle could, which meant his battlecruisers would be able to slip away into hyper before she brought him into her Mark 16s’ effective powered envelope. She would have been able to get inside her Mark 23s’s much longer powered envelope, however, and her SD(P)s would have made short work of his battlecruisers and lighter units under those circumstances. It would have required the units she committed to the attack to simply overfly the planet without decelerating, but she had far more firepower than she’d ever need to deal with Meyers.