The really tricky part of the timing, however, had focused on the recon drones, and she’d had better numbers to work with there. Without Ghost Rider’s onboard fusion plants, Solarian reconnaissance platforms had both lower acceleration rates and—compared to their Manticoran counterparts—pitiful endurance. Five thousand gravities was about the best they could turn out, and they couldn’t maintain even that power level for very long. On the other hand, Operation Raging Justice obviously contemplated a very…direct approach to its objectives. Filareta wasn’t going to need a lot of dwell time out of his reconnaissance shell, and he probably had more than enough platforms to replenish it if he really needed to, anyway.

On that basis, she’d assumed they’d come straight in at their maximum acceleration and timed her wedges’ activation accordingly. The trick had been to make sure Filareta got a really good look at what she wanted him to see before her outer LAC screen put out his advanced eyes, and she was pretty sure she’d accomplished that. Now he knew she really did have only forty superdreadnoughts under her immediate command, without any more of them hiding anywhere near at hand. Hopefully, he’d also seen the “superdreadnoughts” between Sphinx and Manticore, as well. There was no way he’d had time to get any of his platforms close enough to realize that they were only Navy supply ships with military-grade impellers and compensators, however, and she meant to keep it that way.

Her own heavily stealthed platforms were deployed to cover a sphere over ten light-minutes across, centered on HMS Imperator, and Ghost Rider’s sensors were far better than anything they’d seen examining Sandra Crandall’s surrendered hardware. She had detailed information on Filareta’s superdreadnoughts, and Ghost Rider was managing to keep pretty fair tabs on the Sollies’ platforms, as well. As a result, she knew Filareta had reacted to the destruction of his advanced drones much as she’d hoped he would. He was vectoring his more distant, surviving platforms in on Honor’s ships, trying to get them close enough to replace the ones he’d lost. In his place, she’d almost certainly have done exactly the same thing.

And, hopefully, it’s going to bite him on the butt just as hard as it would have bitten me when I did, she thought with grim amusement. Now if I can only convince him to keep on accelerating…

“Excuse me, Your Grace,” Andrea Jaruwalski said. “The forward recon platforms confirm their superdreadnoughts are deploying pods.”

“Deploying them? Or were they towing them all along and we just now noticed them?”

“Deploying, Your Grace,” Jaruwalski said firmly. “They must have had them tractored inside their wedges.”

“You were wondering if that accounted for their accel rate, Your Grace?” Brigham asked, and Honor nodded.

“It would have been one explanation. Any sign their acceleration’s dropping further now that they’ve deployed, Andrea?”