III
“Admiral Gensonne?”
His eyes and attention still on Llyn's report, Gensonne reached over and keyed the com. “What is it, Imbar?”
“Hyper footprint, Sir,” Captain Sweeney Imbar, commander of Odin, reported. “Looks like Tyr has finally arrived.”
Gensonne grunted. About fraggy time. They'd been waiting on Blakely to get his butt here for four solid weeks, and the rest of the captains were getting antsy. Now, with the last of Gensonne's three battlecruisers on site, they were finally ready to get this operation underway. “Send Captain Blakely my compliments,” he instructed Imbar, “and tell him to haul his sorry carcass in pronto so he can start loading supplies and armaments. We head for Manticore in five days, and if he's not ready he'll be left behind.”
“Aye, Admiral,” Imbar said, and Gensonne could visualize the other's malicious grin. Imbar loved relaying that kind of order.
Gensonne keyed off the com, and with a scowl returned his attention to Llyn's report.
Seventeen warships. That was what the Volsung Mercenaries were bringing to the field: three battlecruisers, six cruisers, seven destroyers, and one troop carrier. The Manticorans, in contrast, had only thirteen warships with which to counter the attack.
Well, seventeen, really, if you wanted to be technical and add in the group guarding Gryphon. But they were way the hell over at Manticore-B. If the Volsungs did their job properly, that force could be left out of the equation. Llyn's spies hadn't been able to get a complete reading on the ship types in each of the two Manticore-A groups, but the earlier report had said the larger force had a single battlecruiser, and there was nothing in this latest intel to suggest that number had changed. The additional ships in the new intel had to be small, destroyers or corvettes.
Plus the fact that all the enthusiasm in the galaxy could mount impeller rings and graduate crewmen only so quickly. Even if Llyn's current count was off by a ship or two, the Volsungs should be facing no more than the same number of ships they themselves were bringing to the battle.
Still . . .
Gensonne murmured a ruminative curse. The wild card in this whole thing, and a wild card that Llyn either hadn't noticed or had deliberately downplayed, was this damn HMS Casey. The tables listed it as a standard light cruiser, but it was clear from the specs Llyn's spies had been able to dig out that there wasn't anything standard about it, certainly not for ships out here in the hinterlands. From the profile alone, he could see that the Manticorans had put in a modern grav plate habitation module, a high-efficiency radiator system, and had extended the length of their missile launchers. Possibly a railgun launch system; more likely just an absorption cylinder that would minimize the missiles' launch flares. Nothing really revolutionary, and nothing Gensonne couldn't handle.
Still, it was far more advanced than it should be, and better than most of the Volsungs' own mainly second-hand and surplused ships. The report didn't get into details about armament or defenses, but Gensonne had no doubt that Casey's designers hadn't neglected to pack some serious firepower aboard.
And if King Edward had had the authority, the confidence, and the cash to turn his designers loose on Casey, he might well have used that same combination to speed up the de-mothballing of those other ships.
The smart thing would be to put off the operation until Gensonne had time to send his own people to Manticore. Get a real military assessment instead of having to rely on Llyn's paper-pushing guesswork. But getting a civilian spy ship way out there and back again with anything useful would take over a year, and Llyn wanted this done now.
Gensonne scowled. The ongoing mystery underlying this whole thing was what in blazes the Manticorans could possibly have that was worth this much effort. Llyn was paying the Volsungs a huge sum of money to take over three lumps of real estate on the bloody back end of nowhere. Gensonne had tried on numerous occasions to wangle that secret out of the smug little man, and every time Llyn had calmly and artfully dodged the question.
But that was all right. The Volsung Mercenaries weren't without resources of their own . . .and if Gensonne still didn't know the why, he now at least knew the who.
Llyn's employer, the man quietly funding this whole operation, was one of the top people in the multi-trillion, transstellar business juggernaut known as the Axelrod Corporation.
So the question now became why Axelrod would be interested in Manticore. Was it the treecats? Something else hidden in the forests of Sphinx or the wastes of Gryphon?
“Admiral?” Imbar's voice came from the com speaker.
Gensonne keyed the transmitter. “Yes?”
“Captain Blakely's compliments, Sir,” Imbar said. “He confirms hauling carcass as ordered, and anticipates fourteen hours to zero-zero.”
Gensonne checked his chrono. “Tell him that if he doesn't make it in twelve he might as well not bother,” he warned.
“He anticipated that request,” Imbar said, his voice going a little brittle. “He said to tell you that fourteen should do just fine if you can get the loaders to haul carcass at even half the speed he's doing it. If you can't, he'll just have to do it himself.” The captain gave a little snort. “He added a ‘Sir' to that, but I don't think he really meant it.”
Gensonne smiled. Blakely was as arrogant and snarky an SOB as they came. But he was also a hell of a scrappy fighter, and Gensonne was willing to put up with the one if he could have the other. “Tell him he'll be losing one percent of his profit cut for every ten minutes after twelve hours he ties up.”
“Yes, Sir, that should do it,” Imbar said slyly. “I'll let him know.”
“Do that,” Gensonne said, his attention already back on the upcoming campaign. Standard military doctrine, of course, said that you went after the biggest ships first, taking them out as soon as you could clear away their screening vessels.
But in this case, it might well be smart to seek out Casey earlier rather than later and make sure it was out of the fight. If it was the Manticorans' modern showcase, its destruction might help convince them to sue for terms more promptly.
Which could be useful. Standard rules of war dictated that a planet was supposed to surrender once someone else controlled the space around it, a convention designed to avoid the wholesale slaughter of civilians in prolonged combat. Taking out Casey would give the Volsungs that control all the faster, and once Gensonne had King Edward's formal surrender document any forces that remained at large would be legally bound to stand down.
Gensonne liked quick surrenders. It saved on men and equipment, and it boosted profits.
And if Casey wasn't, in fact, anything special?
He shrugged. It wasn't like the ship wouldn't have to be destroyed eventually anyway.
“Admiral, I have a response from Captain Blakely,” Imbar once again interrupted. “He sends his compliments, and says he'll see you in hell.”
Gensonne smiled. “Tell him it's a date,” he said. “I'll be the one wearing white.”