Shadow of Freedom

“So we have to make do with what we have, and while neither Admiral Khumalo nor I like that situation, it’s one Queen’s officers have had to deal with more often than we’d like to remember.

“After careful consideration, we’ve concluded that the best use of our current forces will be to cover each system of the Quadrant with four or five LAC squadrons for local defense, backed up by a couple of dispatch boats. The LACs should be more than adequate to deal with any ‘pirate’ stupid enough to come this way, and given what we’ve seen of SLN technology, they also ought to be able to deal with any Solly raiding force that doesn’t include a core of capital ships. Given Crandall’s losses, it’s unlikely there are enough Solarian capital ships anywhere near the Quadrant to provide that kind of force. Obviously, that’s subject to change—possibly without much warning—but even in a worst-case scenario, the local-defense LACs should be able to at least delay and harass any attackers while one of the dispatch boats goes for help.

“I realize there’s been some thought of splitting up our own capital ships in order to give our star systems greater protection.”

She carefully didn’t look in the direction of the two men sitting on either side of Samiha Lababibi. Antonio Clark, from the Mainwaring System, was the Quadrant’s Minister of Industry, while Clint Westman, a Montanan cousin of the famous (or infamous) Stephen Westman, headed the Ministry of the Interior. On the face of it, they should have been almost as unlikely allies of an oligarch like Lababibi as Krietzmann once had been, but the nature of their responsibilities gave them a certain commonality of viewpoint. Inevitably, all three were worried—deeply—about what would happen if the Quadrant’s star systems were hit by anything like the Yawata Strike. Westman and Clark, especially, had argued in favor of dispersing Tenth Fleet to give every star system at least some protection. After all, they’d pointed out, the decisive superiority of the Manticoran Navy had been conclusively demonstrated, so the traditional risks of defeat in detail for dispersed units must be less applicable than usual.

Lababibi had found herself in the same camp, although she’d been a rather less fervent spokeswoman for their position.

“There are several reasons we’re not proposing to do that,” Michelle continued. “The two most important ones, though, are that dispersing our capital ships wouldn’t provide any appreciable increase in system security against the sort of attack which hit the home system, but it would disperse the powerful, concentrated striking forces it’s vital to maintain to respond to any fresh Solarian activity in our area.

“At the moment, the Admiralty and ONI are still working on how the Yawata Strike was launched. From the information available so far, Admiral Hemphill is more convinced than ever the attack relied on a new, previously unknown drive technology. In effect, we believe the attackers were ‘invisible’ to our normal tracking systems. So far, at least, no one’s been able to suggest how whatever drive they used might work or how we might go about figuring out how to detect it in the future. In the meantime, however, analysis also suggests the attackers were probably operating in relatively small forces, relying on their cloak of invisibility rather than raw combat power. I realize that may sound absurd, given the damage inflicted, but I assure you that if a single podnought—or even a couple of Nike-class battlecruisers—had been able to get into range of the inner system totally undetected, that would have been ample to have inflicted all of that damage.

“My point is that the problem in Manticore wasn’t lack of combat power or lack of defenses; it was the inability to see the enemy coming. Scattering wallers around the Quadrant’s star systems isn’t going to appreciably increase our ability to detect these people. We can deploy enough remote sensor platforms—in fact, we’re already in the process of deploying them—to give each of our systems more detection capability than an entire squadron of SDs could provide. The LACs will give us large numbers of manned combat platforms to chase down and prosecute possible contacts; the dispatch boats will be available to send for help in the case of an attack in strength; and we’ll be deploying enough missile pods in planetary orbit to provide the long-range missile firepower of at least a pair of SD(P)s in each system. We won’t have the sort of sustained firepower superdreadnoughts could provide, or the area missile defense they could offer, but we’ll have enough to deal with anything short of a Solly battle squadron, assuming we see it coming.”

She paused, and this time she did look across the table at Lababibi, Clark, and Westman.