Shadow of Freedom

Terekhov nodded in understanding. He’d listened to five or six minutes of the “news” transmissions from Mobius himself before he’d handed it off to Pope and Ødegaard. He’d felt guilty about doing that, but he’d also decided it would be far better to distance himself from it, at least for now. The last thing he needed was to be listening to that kind of crap when he might very well be making decisions about who lived and who died in the next few hours. He couldn’t afford to open himself to that sort of rage, however deserved it might be, so he turned to Commander Stillwell Lewis, instead.

“How much longer for the platforms to give us a good look at the planetary orbitals, Stilt?” he asked.

“Not long, Sir,” his operations officer replied. “They’re only about ninety-six light-seconds from Mobius Beta, now. In fact, if there’s anything in orbit with active impellers, it’s got to be on the far side of the planet from us at the moment, or we’d already have picked it up.”

“Good.”

Terekhov tipped back in his command chair, gazing at the master plot. Quentin Saint-James had reentered normal-space twenty-six minutes earlier. During that time, she’d increased her n-space velocity to just over ninety-four hundred kilometers per second and traveled just under 7.8 million kilometers towards the planet officially designated Mobius Beta. During that same interval, the Ghost Rider recon platforms they’d deployed as soon as they’d made their alpha translation had traveled ten and a half light-minutes—almost 200 million kilometers—at their vastly higher acceleration. In fact, they were already decelerating towards a zero/zero rendezvous with the planet.

He had a pretty good idea what those platforms were going to find. The “news” transmissions to the Delta Belt habitats which Quentin Saint-James had intercepted since translating back into normal-space made it abundantly clear that the Solarian intervention battalions the MLF had feared were underway had beaten his own force to the Mobius System. And that meant there had to be—

“We’ve got them, Sir,” Lewis said suddenly, and Terekhov’s eyes narrowed as a quartet of impeller signatures appeared on the plot, creeping around the icon of the planet. “The platforms are still ninety-two light-seconds out, but we should be getting good visual in another minute or so,” the ops officer continued. “CIC is calling them destroyers for now, but—”

He paused again for a moment, studying his displays carefully, then looked back at Terekhov.

“Correction, Sir. It looks like a Morrigan-class light cruiser and a trio of War Harvest-class destroyers. One of the tin cans could be a Rampart

, though. With all the refits Frontier Fleet’s destroyer fleet’s been through—”

He shrugged, and Terekhov nodded. At this range, even Ghost Rider platforms were doing well to have given them that much information.

“Nothing else with hot nodes?” he asked.

“No, Sir. But we’re picking up a good-sized merchant hull on visual. If I had to guess, I’d guess it was the transport OFS used to haul in its troops, but we can’t confirm that at this point. I don’t see anything else they could’ve used, though.”

“Makes sense,” Terekhov agreed. He gazed at the display for another minute or so, then sat back in his chair again and looked at his chief of staff.

“If their nodes are up, I’m guessing it’s because they’ve figured out we’re coming to call, Tom,” he said.

“Probably,” Commander Pope agreed. “I can’t think of any other reason they’d be sitting in orbit putting time on the nodes, and even Sollies should’ve picked up our footprints at this piddling little range. Of course,” he smiled thinly, “if they’ve got a good read on our tonnages, they’ve got to be feeling mighty unhappy right now. Especially if they figure Cloud’s a waller!”

Terekhov snorted in agreement. Just his cruisers would have been enough to make mincemeat out of those obsolescent vessels, even without Mark 16s. With Mark 16s, his flagship could have killed all of them all by herself. And a superdreadnought—any superdreadnought, far less an SD(P)—which was exactly what Captain Simone Weiss’ CLAC had to look like to the Sollies’ gravitic sensors, could have obliterated them with a single broadside.

Of course, if these…people had any idea what modern LACs were capable of, Cloud would probably scare them even worse than an SD

, he thought. And the acceleration numbers have to be giving them furiously to think, too.

“Now that we’ve found them, do you want to talk to them, Sir?” Pope asked after a moment, and Terekhov scratched his chin thoughtfully.

“An interesting question,” he decided after a moment. “In fact—”

He turned to look at his youthful flag lieutenant.

“Tutorial time, Helen,” he said with a slight smile.