“I wish we could deploy drones like the Manties’,” Anders murmured beside her, and her mouth twitched in a small, wry grin at the confirmation that he’d been thinking exactly what she had. The power requirements and mass costs of the RHN’s current grav-pulse transmitters were far too high to permit it to employ the remote drones the RMN and its allies could deploy. The Manties were considerably ahead in super-dense fusion bottle technology and several other areas—including the newest generation of superconductor capacitor systems—and Haven was unable to match the onboard power levels of their remote platforms. But even without that, the sheer size of the early-generation RHN hardware would have made it impossible to squeeze it into such tight quarters. Indeed, it could be fitted into nothing smaller than a LAC. And, as Foraker strongly suspected had been the case for the Manties when they first developed the system themselves, any LAC or starship had to temporarily cut its acceleration to zero in order to transmit a message. Coupled with the slow pulse repetition frequency rate they’d so far managed to achieve, that limited them to very short and simple messages or to the use of preplanned ones which could be transmitted in shorthand code groups. Which was the reason Sovereign of Space’s CIC couldn’t receive the raw sensor data directly; there simply wasn’t enough bandwidth available.

Yet, she reminded herself once again.

“They’re coming in for a head-on engagement,” Commander Clapp reported. “Our lead LACs are reporting radar and lidar hits consistent with known Manty fire control systems.”

“Now that’s a surprise,” Commander Doug Lampert observed ironically. As Captain Reumann’s tactical officer, he really ought to have been on Sovereign’s command deck, but this battle was going to be fought beyond the reach of even her broadsides. Since that was the case, Lampert had opted for a ringside seat here in CIC, with its superb instrumentation and far more detailed master plot.

“Maybe not,” Anders replied. “But I’m still not sure this is their most logical response. They’ve got to realize we’re sending in a wave of LACs, and they must know we wouldn’t be doing it unless we figured our LACs can stand up to theirs.”

“I think it was reasonable to assume this was how they’d respond,” Foraker disagreed quietly, her eyes never leaving the plot as the crimson hostile icons swept closer and closer to the incoming green light codes of her own light attack craft. “Of course they realize we’re sending in LACs. But they’ve never seen the new birds in action. As far as we know, they’re not even aware the Cimeterre class exists. So the only way for them to find out what they’re up against is to come out and see. And when you couple that with the edge their hardware’s always enjoyed, this is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do.”

“I understand the logic, Ma’am,” her chief of staff replied in a tone of quiet stubbornness. “I’m just uncomfortable planning our entire doctrine around that assumption.”