“Damn, that’s a big beast,” a voice intruded on Jessica’s concentration.
She looked up. Must have been Enej, from the way he blushed furiously. Jessica grinned at him in commiseration.
“Get all the Command Centurions on-line now,” she ordered. “If they’re alone, we have a golden opportunity. I want us closer.”
“Roger that,” he said.
Jessica turned to Marcelle and Willow, carefully seated off to one side, as always. Witnesses to history, they would probably still be forgotten by it.
“Marcelle, some fresh coffee for me, please?” she asked the woman. “And roust the wardroom, for something for everyone else. We’ll probably hop, listen, and then lunge. There will be time for food.”
Marcelle nodded, unbuckled herself, and rose from the chair. Jessica always wondered what went through Marcelle’s mind at times like this. She had nothing to do but run and fetch for Jessica, and whatever tasks probably shouldn’t even unofficially be handled by Enej or Casey.
Plausible deniability.
Marcelle grinned back at her from the hatch, as if she were reading Jessica’s thoughts.
Maybe.
Everyone had probably been listening to the data feed from CS-405. Even a tight laser was going to be something of a searchlight at this range. All her command centurions, including the four on Auberon, were on the link within a matter of seconds.
“We have possibly as good an opportunity as we’ll get,” Jessica addressed them all. “Battleship and four cruisers, with the ability to blink everywhere and attack from all sides. If we didn’t have forty-five fighters designed to engage Buran vessels, I probably wouldn’t try anything.”
The faces were attentive. Composed. They had spent a year or a lifetime, or both, preparing for this.
Jessica found the one face she wanted, quiet as always. Enfys El-Amin. RAN Wombat. The minesweeper she had brought along with her on several missions now.
She had almost left that ship behind with Arott Whughy and his base on this patrol round, but the temptation for delinquency and Mischief had been too great.
“El-Amin,” Jessica began. “How well will some of your beam-armed mines deploy if you dump them out the back at cruising speed, armed for Buran vessels?”
The scowl Jessica got back was worthy of the Vedas. Exactly the opposite of how you were supposed to utilize a minesweeper, who normally sat on defense like a black widow spider, weaving deadly webs for unsuspecting prey to stumble into.
“At your speeds?” Enfys asked. “Probably all of them will fail. If you let me do it my way? Maybe as many as fifty percent will work.”
“Good enough,” Jessica agreed. “Detach yourself when we hit our assault point and go to work. After this battle, we’ll probably have to return to an Imperial base for bigger repairs than Arott can handle, so don’t spare your ammunition stores. I’ll let you, Oz, and Moirrey sort that out.”
“Thank you, Fleet Centurion,” Enfys replied, switching to a private channel to talk to Auberon’s engineers, who had originally designed most of the mines as part of Moirrey’s Mischief.
“Team One,” Jessica continued, shifting to the three trouble-makers: Aeliaes, d’Maine, and Kigali. “I want you to make a high-speed, long-distance pass. Kigali, as you mentioned, Ballard, all over again, except you aren’t staying this time. The rest of us will be at point eleven, hopefully where Steadfast at Dawn’s Energiya module will be plopped when they chase you. That means beams only. Keep the bubble gun as a surprise for when they come out to play, and tune all the Type-3 beams for long-range. All the corvettes except CA-264 will be set for close work.”
Jessica selected a file and transmitted it to everyone after she updated a couple of decisions that could only be made on the verge of battle.
“We’ll start here,” she ordered. “You have four hours until we jump close enough to pick up CS-405. Then a hop to point four. At that point, we’ll be in a position to determine which options we’ll chase. Review everything. We’ll reconvene here in three hours and update intelligence from what Kosnett sends us.”
Heads nodded. Voices rumbled. They had had a year of training together, so even if this was the first battle as a team for some of them, the ones she was counting on were all old friends.
Hopefully, they would all survive the day.