Echoes Of Honor

Chapter Twenty-Eight

"Citizen Saint-Just is here, Citizen Chairman," the secretary announced, and Rob Pierre looked up from behind his desk as his security chief was ushered in. It wasn't the desk in his official office, with all the proper HD props to make it look impressive. This was the one from which he actually ran the People's Republic, with the comfortably shabby furniture and working clutter only his closest allies were ever allowed to see.

And there were far fewer of those allies than there had been eight T-years before.

To the casual observer, Oscar Saint-Just would have looked just as bland, harmless, and unexcited as usual, but Pierre knew him too well. He recognized the acute unhappiness behind those outwardly dispassionate eyes, and he sighed at the sight of it. He'd been fairly certain of why Oscar had wanted to see him, but he'd also hoped that, just this once, he could be wrong.

Unfortunately, he wasn't.

He waved at one of the beat-up old chairs facing the desk and tipped his own chair back with a hidden grimace as Saint-Just sat. For just a moment, Pierre allowed himself to remember another office and another meeting with the man who had then been second-in-command of the Legislaturalists' Office of Internal Security. It provoked mixed emotions, that memory. On the one hand, it reminded him of all the things they had accomplished. On the other, it had been the first step which had landed Rob S. Pierre astride the hungry beast of the PRH, and had he known then what he knew now...

Had you known then, you still would have done it, his mind told him severely. Somebody had to. And be honest, Rob—you wanted to do it. You wouldn't be here if you hadn't decided to sit down at the table as a player, so quit whining about the cards you drew and get on with the job!

"What did you want to see me about, Oscar?" he asked, purely as a way to get things started.

"I just wanted to ask you one more time if you really want to do this," Saint-Just replied. He spoke as calmly as ever, but, then, he'd sounded calm even as LaBoeuf's maniacs fought their way towards the Committee floor by floor, too. Pierre sometimes wondered if some quirk of Evolution had simply omitted the standard connection between anxiety and voice pitch built into other people. Or if perhaps someone had foisted one of the mythical androids of prespace fiction writers off on him.

"I presume you mean the devaluation?"

"That's part of what I mean," Saint-Just said. "That part of it certainly worries me. But to be honest, Rob, it worries me a hell of a lot less than the free rein you're giving McQueen."

"We can squash McQueen any time we have to," Pierre retorted. "Hell, Oscar! You're the one who doctored her dossier to make it a slam-dunk in front of a People's Court!"

"I realize that," Saint-Just said calmly. "And I also realize that I'm the one who vetted her, and the one who countersigned Fontein's evaluation, and the one who's recording virtually every word she says. Under most circumstances, I'd feel perfectly confident about it. But these aren't 'most circumstances.' You know that as well as I do, and I don't like how... comfortable she and her senior officers are starting to sound with each other."

Pierre scowled and started to speak sharply, then made himself stop. Saint-Just's paranoia, both personal and institutional, was exactly what made him so valuable. He distrusted everybody, except— perhaps—Pierre. Actually, the Chairman wasn't too certain even about that. Yet paranoid or no, Saint-Just had given Pierre ample proof of the acuity of his perceptions... most of the time.

Unfortunately, Pierre had also had proof that the StateSec chief could occasionally go off on tangents all his own, and Oscar Saint-Just was not a great believer in moderation. He believed in playing safe... which, from his viewpoint, meant shooting anyone he suspected might even be contemplating treason. At least that way he could be sure he got any guilty parties, and if the occasional innocent got blotted out too, well, making an omelet was always hard on a few eggs.

Up to a point, that wasn't such a bad thing—except from the eggs' perspective, perhaps. A certain degree of unpredictability actually made a reign of terror more effective. But that was the point. If they were going to defeat the Manties, they had to begin moving away from outright terror tactics. Oscar himself had agreed with that when they first discussed McQueen's appointment as Secretary of War. The question was whether his present concerns were based in reality or were the result of another of his tangents.

"I don't have any military background myself, Oscar," the Chairman said after a moment. "You know that. But I do have some familiarity with how political figures work with their closest aides and subordinates, and I'd think a certain degree of 'comfort' in McQueen's relationships with her subordinates was actually a good sign. She's always been a leader, not a driver. I know!" He raised a hand before Saint-Just could interrupt. "That's one of the qualities which makes her dangerous to us. But it's the way her command style works, and her command style is what makes her dangerous to the Manties. I think we're just going to have to let her do things her way—as we told her we would—while you and your people go on keeping an eye on her. If she gets out of line, of course we'll have to remove her. But in the meantime, let's give her a chance to demonstrate that she can do what we brought her in to do for us."

"And if she can't?"

"In that case, the decision becomes simpler," Pierre said calmly. "If she doesn't produce in the field, then there's no reason to risk letting her build a personal support base in the officer corps."

In which case, he did not add aloud, she's yours, Oscar.

"All right," Saint-Just said after a long, thoughtful moment. "I won't pretend I'm happy about it, and Fontein and some of the other commissioners are even unhappier than I am. But I agreed with you about how badly we needed her in the first place, so I suppose bellyaching about it now is a bit childish of me."

"I wouldn't put it that way myself," Pierre told him, prepared to lavish a little stroking now that the decision was made. "You're my watchdog, Oscar. For the most part, I trust your instincts completely, and I know exactly how badly I need them. As for Fontein and the others, I'd be surprised if they weren't unhappy. McQueen's cut pretty deeply into their say-so in the operational sphere, and that's bound to have at least a little overlap into the political and policy sides, as well. They'd be more than human if they didn't resent a reduction in their authority."

"I know," Saint-Just agreed, "And in Fontein's case, I suspect a little of it may be overreaction to the way she blind-sided him before the Leveler business. But they're supposed to be suspicious of their military counterparts, and I don't want to undercut that. Or make them think I don't give their reports the attention they merit."

"And," Pierre said shrewdly, with just a hint of a twinkle, "you don't like who McQueen chose to head her Operation Icarus, either, now do you?"

"Well..." For once, Saint-Just seemed just a little hesitant. He even blushed slightly as he saw the gleam in his superior's eyes, and then he chuckled and shook his head.

"No, I don't like it," he admitted. " 'Rehabilitating' one flag officer is risky enough, but rehabilitating two of them just in time for the same operation seems to be rushing things just a little."

"Oh, come now!" Pierre chided. "You know what happened in Silesia wasn't really Giscard's fault! The only reason he had to be 'rehabilitated' at all was because Cordelia's handling of the situation meant we needed a scapegoat."

"Agreed. Agreed." Saint-Just waved both hands in the air. "And as a matter of fact, Eloise Pritchart is one of the few senior commissioners who isn't concerned that her charge is succumbing to McQueen's charm. Which, I have to admit, makes me feel a little better about the entire situation. Pritchart's always had a high opinion of his military ability, and she's commented favorably on his political reliability, but she really doesn't like him very much. It's like pulling teeth for her to say good things about him in her reports, so I take the fact that she's satisfied as a good sign."

"Well, then," Pierre said with a shrug, but Saint-Just shook his head.

"You're missing my point, Rob. I'm not saying Giscard deserved to be made a scapegoat. I'm just saying he was made one, and we still haven't invented a way to see inside somebody's head. Disaffection can begin in lots of ways, and being singled out for public blame and humiliation over something that wasn't your fault is certainly one of them. So however reliable he may have been in the past, I have to bear in mind that the possibility of future unreliability may have been planted in there to sprout later."

"But if he pulls this off, we'll slather him with all the praise and positive publicity a man could want. That should help repair any past damage."

"Maybe, and maybe not. But be that as it may, it's a chance I'm willing to take, especially with Pritchart keeping an eye on him. Actually, I'm more worried about Tourville than I am about Giscard."

"Tourville?" Pierre sat back in his chair and tried very hard not to sigh.

"Tourville," Saint-Just confirmed. "You and I both know Cordelia planned to have him purged when she got him back to Haven—probably for trying to protect Harrington from her."

"We know we think she wanted him purged," Pierre corrected, and Saint-Just snorted a laugh.

"Rob, let's be honest with each other here. I mean, Cordelia's gone—and a damned good thing, too—so we don't have to stroke her anymore. And you and I know better than anyone else that she took a personal pleasure out of eliminating anyone she thought was an enemy."

"Yes. Yes, she did." Pierre sighed. And, he reflected, that was the big difference between her and you, wasn't it, Oscar? You're ruthless as hell, and completely willing to eliminate anyone you think is even a potential threat. I imagine you sleep a hell of a lot better than I do, too... but you don't actually enjoy the killing, do you?

"Damn right she did," Saint-Just said, unaware of the Chairman's thoughts. "The only reason she would have dragged him all the way to Cerberus and then back here with her was to make a big, ugly, public show trial out of it, and you can bet your ass he knew it, too. That's the real reason I sat on him and his crew for so long."

"I know that," Pierre said with a trace of patience he couldn't quite hide.

"No, you don't." It was unusual for Saint-Just to correct him quite so flatly, and Pierre frowned. "I know I told you that I wanted him on ice until we publicly admitted Cordelia's death, but you thought my real reason was that I was being paranoid and trying to decide whether or not to have him eliminated, now didn't you?" the StateSec head asked.

"Well... yes, I suppose I did," Pierre admitted.

"Well, you were mostly right, but not entirely. Oh, it really was essential to keep his crew isolated until our version of Cordelia's glorious death hit the 'faxes, but neither of us anticipated initially how long that was going to take." He shook his head. "I never would have believed how useful she could be when we could use her reputation and status with the Mob but not have to put up with her tantrums!"

Saint-Just actually chuckled for a moment, then shook his head.

"But even though I know keeping him under virtual ship arrest has to have pissed him off even more than he was, I've never wanted to eliminate him, Rob; I've simply been afraid we had no choice. I realize what a tactical asset he is for the Navy, and I'd hate the thought of simply throwing that away when we need it so badly. But in a way, I regard him as a bigger danger than McQueen."

"You do?" Pierre's forehead furrowed in surprise.

"Yes. I've read his dossier and his commissioner's reports, and I've interviewed him myself at least a dozen times since Cerberus. There's a brain behind that cowboy exterior, Rob. He tries like hell to hide it, and he's been surprisingly successful with a lot of people, but he's sharp as a vibro blade. And Citizen Admiral Cowboy doesn't have a reputation for ambition like McQueen's. If he decides that his best long-term chance for survival lies in building some sort of cabal out of self-defense, his fellow officers are going to be a lot less wary of getting involved with him.

"So what do I see when I look at him? A man who, right this minute, is being grateful as hell that he dodged a pulser dart while deep inside he has to be wondering if he really did... or if he just thinks he did. He's been under a microscope for nine T-months, and he's got to know that we know that he knows Cordelia was going to have him killed. That means he also knows that we're going to be watching him very, very carefully, even if we have decided to release his flagship and staff for the moment. If he steps out of line again, we'll have no choice but to eliminate him, and he knows that, too. All of which means that he has to have at least considered the possibility of joining up with someone like a McQueen out of sheer self-defense. Or setting up a cabal of his own."

Pierre sat there for a moment, gazing at his security chief with a contemplative expression, then shook his head.

"I'm glad I have you to run StateSec, Oscar. I'd start foaming at the mouth if I had to spend much time concentrating on that kind of triple-think. Are you honestly telling me that you think Lester Tourville is going to take his task force over to the Manties or something like that?"

"Of course not," Saint-Just said with another of those unusual chuckles. "But it's my job, as you just pointed out, to think about the possibilities and then try to disaster-proof our position against them as much as possible. The odds are that Tourville is actually another Theisman. More extroverted and, um, colorful, but essentially nonpolitical and more concerned with getting the job done than he is with personal power. Mind you, I suspect he's even less fond of the Committee right now than I think Theisman is, and, frankly, with better reason. I'll want to keep a close eye on both of them, but we need them both against the Manties, and I know it."

"Well that's a relief!" Pierre said.

"I'm sure," Saint-Just agreed, but then he leaned back and gave the Chairman another sharp glance. "And now that I've aired my concerns about that, I want to ask you one more time if you're determined to carry through with the devaluation and the BLS cuts."

"I am," Pierre said flatly. Saint-Just started to open his mouth, but the Chairman went on before he could. "I realize it's a risk, but we've got to put our economic house into some kind of order. That's every bit as important as straightening out the purely military side of the war—and, damn it, it's the reason I went after this stinking job in the first place!"

Saint-Just blinked at the sudden passion in Pierre's voice. The SS chief knew, probably better than anyone else in the universe, how the inability to deal with the PRH's economic woes had eaten at Rob Pierre. And truth to tell, it was the probability of a Republic-wide financial collapse which had brought Saint-Just over to Pierre's side in the first place. As Oscar Saint-Just saw it, his real job was to preserve the power and stability of the state, as the source of authority which held the People's Republic together. In sober fact, he cared less about who exercised that authority than that it be exercised well, and the Legislaturalists had failed that critical test.

Yet Pierre's determination to tackle the economy now worried him. Too many things would be happening at once, creating too many potential flare-ups of the spontaneous combustion variety. And that was the hardest kind of trouble for a security officer to prepare against, because by the very nature of things, he seldom saw it coming before the flames actually burst out.

"I realize we have to deal with the fundamental problems eventually," he said now, his tone ever so slightly cautious. "I just have to wonder if this is the best time. We're already engaged in one experiment with McQueen and the War Office, after all."

"McQueen is what's made this the best time," Pierre replied sharply. "When she took out the Levelers for us, she eliminated by far the most radical element of the Mob." And, he added mentally, you and I used the coup attempt as our pretext to remove some of the more troublesome "moderates" just in case, didn't we, Oscar? "In the process, she taught the other potential radicals what happens to people who try to overthrow the Committee. And she made it quite clear in the public mind that the military supports us." He smiled thinly. "Even if she's actually trying to build her own power base, the Mob doesn't know that, so it has to assume that if we tell her to go out and kill another million or so of them, she will. Not only that, but the moderate elements of Nouveau Paris' population have had a lesson in what a real insurrection costs everyone in the vicinity, even the innocent bystanders. They don't want to see another one, and the radicals sure as hell don't want 'Admiral Cluster Bomb' dropping by to pay them another visit. So if we're going to introduce a policy which risks public repercussions, this is the best possible time for us to do it."

"I understand the reasoning, and I don't question the need to do something" Saint-Just said. "The timing does worry me, but that would probably be true whenever we decided to implement reforms. I guess part of it is the notion of deflating the currency and cutting the BLS simultaneously."

"Better to put all the medicine down them in one nasty-tasting dose than to string it out," Pierre disagreed. "Inflation was bad enough under the old regime; it's gotten even worse in the last few years, and it's hurting what foreign trade we've been able to maintain in Silesia and with the Sollies. As I see it, we have two options: we can go whole hog and completely nationalize the economy on the old prespace totalitarian model, or we can begin gradually phasing a true free market back in, but this half-assed socialism-by-regulation is killing us."

"No argument there," Saint-Just agreed when he paused.

"Well, I think we've pretty much demonstrated that the bureaucrats are almost as bad at running the economy under us as they were under the Legislaturalists," Pierre pointed out. "Given their dismal track record, I'm not particularly enamored of the idea of giving them still more control. Which only leaves the free market route, and for that to work we've got to have a stable currency—with at least a passing relationship to its real purchasing power—and a work force motivated to get out there and actually work. Most of the out-planets are in better shape for that than Haven is—they never had the percentage of Dolists we had here to begin with—and even the Nouveau Paris Mob has been reacquiring the habit of work since the war started. If we deflate the currency and reduce the BLS, we'll drag more of them into the non-military labor force, as well. And, as I say, this is probably the best time to make the attempt. I know it's risky. I simply don't see how we can avoid this particular risk."

"All right." Saint-Just sighed. "You're right. It's just that knowing how much of it is going to land on my plate if it goes sour makes me... anxious. We're playing with several different kinds of fire here, Rob. I only hope I've got enough firemen to deal with things if they get out of hand."

"I realize how much I'm dumping on you," Pierre acknowledged, "and I wish I saw a way to avoid it. Unfortunately, I don't. But the good news is that my analysts' projections suggest that if we get through the next twelve to eighteen T-months more or less intact, we'll actually have turned the corner on the reforms. So if McQueen can just generate some good news on the military front, on the one hand, while the threat of turning her pinnaces loose on the Mob again helps scare the remaining radicals into good behavior and you keep an eye on everyone else, we may actually pull this off."

"And if we don't?" Saint-Just asked very quietly.

"If we don't, then we'll lose the war in the end, anyway," Pierre said just as quietly, his eyes suddenly distant, as if he looked at something Saint-Just couldn't see, "and that will probably be the end of you, me, and the Committee. But you know, Oscar, that might not be such a tragedy. And it certainly wouldn't be undeserved, now would it? Because if we can't manage reform that's even this basic, then we'll have failed ourselves and the Republic. Everything we've done—and all the people we've killed—since the Coup will have been for nothing. And if it was all for nothing, Oscar, then we'll deserve whatever happens to us."

Saint-Just stared at the Chairman while an icy splash of shock went through him. He'd seen Pierre grow more and more brooding as the war dragged on, but this was the first time he'd ever heard him say something like that. Yet the shock wasn't as great as it should have been, he realized. Perhaps a part of him had seen this coming all along. And it wasn't as if he had a lot of choice, even if he hadn't seen it. For better or for worse, he had given his loyalty to Rob Pierre. Not the institutional loyalty he had sworn to the Legislaturalists and then betrayed, but his personal fealty. Pierre was his chieftain, because only Pierre had possessed the vision and the guts to try to save the Republic.

It was time to remember that, Saint-Just told himself. Time to remember how mad most people would have thought Pierre before the Coup, how impossible it had seemed that they could come this far. If anyone in the galaxy could pull the rest of it off, then Rob Pierre was that man. And if he couldn't...

Oscar Saint-Just decided not to think about that, and nodded to the man behind the desk.

"If it's all the same to you, Rob, I'll just try to keep anything like that from happening," he said dryly.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

"Signal from Salamis, Citizen Admiral," Citizen Lieutenant Frasier announced. "You and Citizen Commissioner Honeker are to report aboard her in twenty-five minutes. Citizen Admiral Giscard requests that you bring your chief of staff and operations officer, as well."

"Thank you, Harrison." Citizen Vice Admiral Lester Tourville glanced at Everard Honeker, then reached inside his tunic to pull a cigar from his breast pocket. The wrapper crackled as he stripped it away, and he looked back at Frasier. "Pass the word to Citizen Captain Hewitt that Citizen Commissioner Honeker and I will be leaving the ship, please. Then inform my coxswain that I'll need my pinnace."

"Aye, Citizen Admiral." Frasier began speaking into his hush mike, and Tourville moved his eyes to the chief of the watch.

"Citizen Chief Hunley, please be good enough to pass the word for Citizen Captain Bogdanovich and Citizen Commander Foraker to join Citizen Commissioner Honeker and myself in Boat Bay Two at their earliest possible convenience."

"Aye, Citizen Admiral."

Tourville nodded dismissal to the petty officer, then took a moment to insert the cigar into his mouth, light it, and be certain it was drawing properly. He removed it to blow a perfect smoke ring at a ventilator air return, gave his fierce mustache a rub, and glanced back at Honeker.

"Are you ready, Citizen Commissioner?" he asked politely.

"I suppose so," Honeker replied, and the two of them walked towards PNS Count Tilly's, bridge lift side by side, trailing a banner of fragrant smoke.

Tourville allowed Honeker to precede him into the lift, then punched the destination code and stood back against one bulkhead, drumming thoughtfully on his thigh with the fingers of his right hand.

"I really wish you'd waited to light that thing until I was somewhere else," Honeker remarked after a moment, and Tourville grinned. The people's commissioner had been on his case about the cigars from the moment he first came aboard Tourville's last flagship. It had become something of a joke between them, a sort of game they played, but only when no one was watching. It would hardly have done to let the rest of the galaxy suspect that an admiral and a commissioner had actually become friends of a sort, after all. And especially not at any point in the last nine T-months or so.

"I thought I'd just enjoy it on the way to the pinnace," Tourville told him cheerfully. In fact, he suspected Honeker had realized he rather regretted adopting the damned things as a part of his image. Modern medicine might have virtually stamped out the various ills to which tobacco had once contributed, but it hadn't made nicotine any less addictive, and the ash flecks on his uniform were more than mildly annoying.

"I'm sure," Honeker snorted, and Tourville's grin softened with an edge of genuine affection he would have been very careful not to let anyone else see. Particularly not now. People who'd survived the head-on collision of two air cars didn't light matches to discover whether or not their hydrogen tanks were leaking.

He snorted to himself at the thought. Actually, checking for hydrogen leaks with a match would probably have been considerably safer than what he'd actually done, and he still couldn't quite believe he'd tried it—much less survived the attempt! Defying a member of the Committee of Public Safety for any reason was unlikely to leave a man breathing. Unless, of course, the Committee member in question suffered a fatal accident before she could arrange for him to do the same.

Despite himself, Tourville felt tiny pinpricks of sweat along his hairline as he remembered the way Cordelia Ransom had provoked him. The crazy bitch had actually wanted him to challenge her authority. He hadn't realized, then, just how much she hated and feared the Navy, but he'd come to realize that she'd wanted him to do something—anything—she could use as a reason to have him eliminated. It wasn't so much because of who he was as because of what he was... and because his effort to treat his enemies as human beings rather than vermin to be exterminated had convinced her he could not be trusted.

Well, she'd succeeded in provoking him, but he was still around... and she wasn't. Her death hadn't been his doing, but he'd declined to shed any crocodile tears during his interminable "interviews" with StateSec. That would have been as stupid as it would have been insincere, and it would also have been dangerous. So far as he could tell, she'd never passed her specific plans for him on to anyone else, but people like Oscar Saint-Just had to have realized she hadn't ordered him to accompany her ship to Hades and then back to Haven just so she could give him a big, sloppy kiss. And since they had to know that, they would have recognized the falsity of any regret on his part. Worse, they might have wondered if he were displaying regret in an effort to keep them from wondering if perhaps he'd had a little something to do with her demise.

Fortunately, there was plenty of evidence to support his innocence. In fact, he had insisted—with Honeker's strong support—on having a senior member of Hades' SS garrison return to Haven with him as a witness. Citizen Warden Tresca hadn't been happy about that, but he'd known better than to argue, particularly when he himself had downplayed Tourville's initial warnings that something must have gone very wrong aboard PNS Tepes. Tresca was going to be in sufficient hot water of his own; SS brigadier or not, he didn't need to borrow trouble by refusing the orders of a senior people's commissioner or looking like he was trying to obstruct the investigation.

And so Tourville and Honeker had arrived at Haven with Citizen Major Garfield in tow. Garfield had brought along Camp Charon's scanner data on the entire episode, as well as a recording of the com traffic between Count Tilly and Charon that clearly demonstrated Tourville had been the first to sound the alarm and had done everything in his power to prevent the tragedy. In fact, Tourville and his people had come out looking considerably better than State Security had, and Everard Honeker's reports to Oscar Saint-Just had stressed their exemplary attention to duty.

I wonder if that was part of the reason they held us incommunicado for so long? Tourville mused now. StateSec belongs to Saint-Just, after all, and it was his personal fiefdom we made look like asshole idiots. He snorted. Great, Lester! Now you've come up with another reason for the head of State Security, personally, to loathe your ass. Good going.

Of course, Saint-Just didn't know the full story. Not even Honeker did, for only Tourville and Shannon Foraker had seen the recon drone data Tourville had erased. Camp Charon's sensors had been blinded by EMP at the time, which meant no one else could know what had happened, and Tourville had no intention of ever admitting what he'd seen. But that was one reason he'd insisted so adamantly on bringing along a StateSec witness to explain exactly what had happened... and why he'd started sweating bullets after the first five or six months of Count Tilly's confinement to her parking orbit.

Sooner or later they're going to realize Lady Harrington—or some of her people, at least—got out alive. That could have been decidedly dicey if it happened while they still had us all under ship arrest... and safely incommunicado. But now, it's going to be StateSec's problem when it dawns on them, not mine. And my people and I aren't going to be anywhere they can quietly disappear us, either, he thought with a certain complacency. In fact, he was rather looking forward to watching the SS punish one of its own for such gross negligence, although if the truth were known, he'd really rather that they never caught up with the Manties at all.

And if they do, they'll almost have to kill all of them this time, he thought much less cheerfully. After officially "executing" Lady Harrington just to avoid admitting what really happened, there's no way they'd let any witnesses that inconvenient live.

He regretted that, but he'd done all he could for them. His conscience was as clear as anyone's could be in today's PRH, and he tucked those thoughts and memories away in a safe place while he considered his present situation.

He supposed some people would consider his promotion to vice admiral a fitting reward for winning the PRH's most crushing victory of the war. Personally, Tourville suspected it was more of a bribe— a tacit payoff for having kept him on ice for so long—and he would much rather have remained a rear admiral. Vice admirals were too senior, too likely to catch the blame if things went wrong for the forces under their command, and for the last eight or nine years, officers who caught that sort of blame had also tended to catch firing squads. That was why he'd devoted so much effort to avoiding promotion, but it had caught up with him at last, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Still, he reflected as the lift reached the boat bay and its doors slid silently open, with Esther McQueen as Secretary of War, the Committee's promise to halt the practice of shooting losing admirals might actually be worth believing. That was the good news. The bad news was that it was Esther McQueen who had chosen Tourville for his current assignment and personally bitched loudly enough at Oscar Saint-Just to get Tourville and Count Tilly sprung for the operation. So if she turned out to be up to something ambitious, the fact that he hardly even knew the woman would mean absolutely nothing to StateSec. Whether he liked it or not, he had just been publicly identified as a member of "her" faction... which might just turn his release from ship arrest into a case of out of the frying pan.

Another set of lift doors opened, revealing his broad-shouldered chief of staff and his ops officer. Citizen Captain Bogdanovich nodded to Tourville and Honeker with something very like a normal smile, but Shannon Foraker's long, narrow face wore no expression whatsoever. Under normal circumstances, Foraker was rather attractive, in an understated sort of way, but now her features were an icily controlled mask, and Tourville felt a fresh stab of worry. Something inside Foraker had changed after Honor Harrington's capture, and especially during their long confinement, and he was no longer certain what was going on inside her head. She was the only other person who knew any of the Manties had escaped Tepes' destruction, and he was confident she would do nothing to jeopardize that secret, but her entire personality seemed to have shifted. She was no longer the cheerful, quintessential techno-nerd, all but oblivious to the interpersonal relationships about her or the political tides sweeping through the Navy. Now she watched everything that happened around her, choosing her words as carefully as she had ever laid out an operations plan and never, ever forgetting the proper modes of address.

For anyone who knew Foraker, that last was far worse than merely ominous. It meant the first-class brain which had made her so dangerous to the Manties was now considering other threats and options... other enemies.

It was unlikely a mere citizen commander could pose much threat to the Committee of Public Safety, but Shannon Foraker was no ordinary citizen commander. If she decided to do something about the way Cordelia Ransom and StateSec had treated Honor Harrington, the consequences were almost certain to be drastic. It was unlikely she herself would survive, but it was equally unlikely she would go down without inflicting some extreme damage of her own. Intellectually speaking, Lester Tourville no longer had any problem with any damage anyone managed to inflict on StateSec and the Committee. In fact, the more damage someone could do, the better. What he would object to would be the loss of Shannon Foraker, who was worth any hundred Committee members he could think of right off hand. And, of course, to the probability that other people in her vicinity—like one Lester Tourville, for example—would go down with her.

All things considered, he mused as he tossed his cigar down a waste disposal slot and led the way towards the pinnace personnel tube, this assignment looks like being a lot more... interesting than I'd really prefer. Ah, well. It beats the alternative, I suppose.

Tourville sat gazing out the armorplast port as the pinnace maneuvered towards rendezvous with Salamis. The view was certainly impressive, he admitted. He hadn't seen this much tonnage in one spot since before the war began. In fact, he wasn't certain he'd ever actually seen this heavy a weight of metal.

It was unusual for someone to actually be able to see more than a handful of warships simultaneously with the naked eye. Men-of-war were big, especially ships of the wall, with impeller wedges whose width was measured in hundreds of kilometers. That imposed a certain dispersal upon them underway, and they tended to stay far enough apart to clear their impeller perimeters even in parking orbit. If they didn't, then they had to maneuver clear of one another on reaction thrusters before they could bring their wedges up, and that was costly in terms of both reaction mass and time.

In point of fact, the ships he was seeing now were probably sufficiently dispersed to light off their drives; there were simply so many of them that it didn't look that way. The feeble light of the M2 star known as Secour-C reflected from their white hulls as the units of Twelfth Fleet drifted in orbit around a gas giant almost as massive as its star. A dark haze of upper atmosphere ice crystals provided a bleak, dim background for the assembled fleet, and it looked from here as if he could have walked around the planet by stepping from ship to ship.

Thirty-six super dreadnoughts, sixteen dreadnoughts, eighty-one battleships, twenty-four battlecruisers, and forty heavy cruisers, he thought wonderingly, and no one even knows they're here.

That was hard to wrap his mind around, even for a spacer as experienced as Tourville, for Secour was an inhabited system. Of course, everyone in it lived on or near Marienbad, the habitable planet which orbited Secour-A, the F9 star which was the trinary system's primary component. Secour-B was home to a small industrial presence, but Secour-C never approached to within less than thirty-six light-hours of Secour-A even at periastron, and there was nothing of sufficient value to bring anyone here. Which made it a logical place to assemble Javier Giscard's force without anyone's seeing a thing.

And McQueen's done Giscard proud, he mused. The screen's light— only twenty-three destroyers and light cruisers, all told—but that's still over eight hundred million tons, and that doesn't even count the supply ships and tenders. Pile it all up in one heap, and it's got to come to more than a billion tons. In sheer tonnage terms, this has got to be the Navy's biggest concentration in fifteen or twenty years.

He wondered—again—how McQueen had possibly talked her political masters into letting her assemble a force like this. It had needed doing for years, but she had to have stripped the majority of the PRH's rear area systems to the bone to scare up this much firepower. Even with the new construction beginning to come forward, she had concentrated ten percent of the PN's super-dreadnoughts, fifty percent of its new-build dreadnoughts, and over a third of its surviving battleships into a single fleet. And in doing so, she had created a potentially decisive offensive weapon for the first time since the Third Battle of Yeltsin.

And she'd damned well better produce something with it. If she doesn't—or if this ends up like another Fourth Yeltsin—after Pierre let her take the risk of reducing rear area security, her head is certain to roll. And ours, of course... although in our case the Manties will probably make that a moot point if we screw up.

He grinned at the thought, despite his tension. Perhaps there was a little more truth to his hard-charging public persona than he cared to admit, because damned if the challenge of helping to wield this much fighting power didn't appeal to him whatever the possible consequences.

Javier Giscard looked up as Citizen Vice Admiral Tourville, Everard Honeker, and Tourville's chief of staff and ops officer entered the briefing room. He saw Tourville's dark eyes narrow as he noted the ice water carafes, glasses, coffee cups, and other paraphernalia of a formal staff meeting and hid a mental smile.

"Please be seated," he invited his guests, and waited until they had taken the indicated chairs. Then he glanced at Pritchart, seated in the chair beside him, before he returned his attention to Tourville.

"As I'm sure you've just realized, Citizen Admiral, we will shortly be joined by the Fleet's other squadron and division commanders. At that time, Citizen Captain Joubert and Citizen Commander Macintosh will present our general ops plan to all concerned. However, Citizen Commissioner Pritchart and I wanted to speak to you and your senior officers first, since your role in the coming campaign will be particularly critical."

Giscard paused, head cocked slightly to one side, and Tourville fought an urge to squirm in his seat. He glanced at Pritchart, but her face was almost as expressionless as Foraker's, and he repressed a shudder. He'd heard stories about Pritchart. She was supposed to have ice water in her veins and a zealot's devotion to the Committee, and he was devoutly grateful that she wasn't his people's commissioner. Honeker had become even more human in the last endless months, but even at his worst he'd never radiated the sort of blank-faced menace which seemed to stream off of Pritchart like winter fog.

"I see," the citizen vice admiral said at last, before the silence could stretch out too far, and Giscard smiled thinly.

"I'm sure you do, Citizen Admiral," he said, with what might have been just an edge of gentle mockery, and then a star chart blinked into existence as he entered a command into his terminal.

"Twelfth Fleet's operational area," he said simply, and Tourville felt Bogdanovich stiffen at his side. Honeker wasn't sufficiently familiar with star charts to realize what he was seeing quite as quickly as the chief of staff, but Shannon Foraker sat upright in her chair, blue eyes narrowing with the first sign of interest she'd shown.

Tourville could understand that. Indeed, he felt his fingers twitch with the desire to reach for another cigar as his own eyes studied the glowing chips of light and read the names beside them. Seaforth Nine, Hancock, Zanzibar and Alizon, Suchien, Yalta, and Nuada. He knew them all... just as he recognized the bright scarlet icon of the Basilisk System.

Chapter Thirty

The lift doors opened, and Citizen Captain Joanne Hall—known to friends and family as "Froggie" for reasons which remained a deep, dark secret from the officers and crew of PNS Schaumberg —strode briskly through them.

"The Citizen Captain is on the bridge!" a petty officer announced, and Citizen Commander Oliver Diamato, who had the watch, looked up, then rose quickly. Hall gave him a level look, and he swallowed a mental curse. He should have seen her coming, or at least heard the lift door, before the citizen petty officer announced her presence, and he felt quite certain she would find some way to make that point to him in the very near future. She had a habit of doing things like that.

"Good morning, Citizen Commander." Citizen Captain Hall's dark hair and dark complexion were the exact antithesis of Diamato's golden hair and fair complexion, and her dark eyes gazed levelly into his blue ones. Her coloration was perfectly suited to the severe persona she presented to the universe... and somehow the "citizen" hung on the front of Diamato's rank title seemed an afterthought the way she said it.

"Good morning, Citizen Captain!" he replied. "I apologize for not noticing your arrival," he went on, taking the bull firmly by the horns. "I was reviewing the chips of yesterday's sims, and I got more immersed in them than I should have."

"Um." She regarded him thoughtfully for several long seconds, then shrugged ever so slightly. "God hasn't gotten around to issuing eyes for the backs of our heads yet, Citizen Commander. Bearing that in mind, I suppose there's no harm done... this time."

"Thank you, Citizen Captain. I'll try not to let it happen again," Diamato replied, and wondered if he was the only person on the bridge who found the entire exchange rather antique and unnatural. Not that he expected to hear anyone else say so, even if they did.

Citizen Captain Hall sometimes seemed not to have heard that the old elitist officer corps and its traditions had been overtaken by events, and she was a stickler for what she referred to as "proper military discipline." Then-Citizen Lieutenant Commander Diamato had been less than delighted when he first discovered that fact upon his assignment to Schaumberg as the battleship's brand-new assistant tactical officer eleven T-months before. A product of the post-Coup promotions, he had risen from junior-grade lieutenant under the old regime to his present rank in barely eight T-years under the New Order. Much of that was the result of raw ability—he was one of the better tactical officers the PN had produced during the present war—but his political commitment had also been a major reason for his meteoric elevation. The Navy's insidious rot under the Legislaturalist officer corps' iron defense of privilege had inspired him with all the contempt for the old elitist order that any good people's commissioner could have desired, and he had been deeply suspicious of someone as old-fashioned (and probably reactionary) as Citizen Captain Hall.

He had expected Citizen Commissioner Addison to share his reservations about his CO. The slender, sandy-blond people's commissioner was absolutely committed to the New Order, after all. Diamato only had to attend a single one of Addison's regular political awareness sessions to realize that, and his fierce egalitarianism ought to have made him and Hall natural enemies. Yet the commissioner had actually supported her, and as Diamato had watched her in action, her sheer competence had overcome even his doubts.

Yes, she was old-fashioned, and he very much doubted she had the proper political opinions. But in large part, that seemed to stem from the fact that she didn't have any political opinions. She did her job exactly as she had under the old regime—far better than most—and let her political superiors worry about policy.

It still struck Diamato as unnatural, but seven months ago she had demonstrated just how well doing things her way worked. Old Citizen Commander Young had been Schaumberg's tactical officer at the time, and Young was the sort of officer who forced Diamato to admit that even the New Order had its weak points. Young's political fervor and patrons had gotten him assigned to a position his ability (or lack of it) could never have earned, and Hall and Addison hadn't managed to get rid of him. Which was why the Citizen Captain had taken personal command of the ship and proceeded to give Citizen Lieutenant Commander Diamato a rather humbling lesson in just how good he himself truly was.

Everyone knew battleships couldn't fight proper ships of the wall and that battlecruisers were even more outclassed by battleships than battleships were by superdreadnoughts. Fortunately, ships of the wall usually couldn't catch battleships, and battleships usually couldn't catch battlecruisers. Unfortunately for the Royal Manticoran Navy, that rule didn't always hold true. It especially didn't hold true when the battleship's captain had the nerve to take her own impellers off-line and just sit there like a hole in space until the Manties were actually in extreme missile range. Hall had that kind of nerve, and less than a month after Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville blew out the Adler System picket, she had neatly ambushed a trio of raiding Manty battlecruisers. They hadn't had the remotest suspicion she was even there until they'd built vectors which gave them no choice, even with their superior acceleration rates, but to come into her engagement range.

RMN battlecruisers were tough customers, especially given the superiority of the Star Kingdom's EW and missiles. Many Republican officers would have hesitated to engage three of them at once, even if she did out-mass them by almost two-to-one. That, in fact, had been Citizen Commander Young's earnest recommendation. Hall hadn't taken it, however... and she'd blown two of her enemies right out of space. The third had gotten away, but with enough damage to keep her out of action for months, whereas Schaumberg's repairs had required only five weeks of yard time. It had been a small-scale action, but it had also been a very difficult assignment, and Diamato had been on the bridge when it all went down. Despite the Manties' numerical advantage—not to mention the two destroyers screening them—Hall had made it seem almost routine. The only people who'd appeared more confident than her of her ability to handle it had been her bridge crew (aside from Young), and as Diamato watched their crisp efficiency, he had realized something he'd never quite grasped before.

A military organization was not the best laboratory for working out the proper forms of egalitarian social theory. The defense of a society which enshrined economic and political equality had to be undertaken by an authoritarian hierarchy with the clear, sharply defined sort of chain of command that put a single person ultimately in control, for combat operations were not a task which could be discharged by committee. The fact that, even after she won the battle by doing the exact opposite of what Young had recommended, it had still taken her and Addison another seven months to overcome the old tac officer's political influence in order to get rid of him had only made that even more obvious to Diamato.

That thought had caused him a few anxious moments when he reflected upon the existence of the Committee of Public Safety, but he'd soon realized that it was a false comparison. Military operations were a specialized and limited sphere of human activity. The larger macrocosm of the entire People's Republic required a different approach, and the combination of centralized power and multiple viewpoints represented by the Committee of Public Safety was undoubtedly the best possible compromise.

But Citizen Captain Hall's firm, demanding command style certainly had its place in the military. That, Diamato had come to realize, was the reason Addison supported her to the hilt. The people's commissioner didn't actually seem to like her very much, but he respected her, and the record of Schaumberg's accomplishments under her command was the reason Citizen Rear Admiral Kellet had chosen the battleship as Task Force 12.3's flagship.

"Don't beat your apology to death, Citizen Commander," Citizen Captain Hall said now, with a slight smile that took most of the sting from the words. "You are my tac officer. I suppose it's not totally unreasonable for you to spend some time reviewing tactical problems... even when you have the watch."

She stepped past him and seated herself in the command chair, and Diamato folded his hands behind his back while she ran her eyes over the readouts to catch herself up on the state of her command.

"Did Engineering find out what was causing that harmonic in Beta Thirty?"

"No, Citizen Captain." Diamato was glad he'd checked the status of the after impeller room with Citizen Lieutenant Commander Hopkins less than fifteen minutes ago. Letting the Citizen Captain catch one less than fully informed was a seriously unpleasant experience, and Citizen Commissioner Addison wouldn't do a thing to preserve one from the consequences. In fact, Diamato thought, he usually gets behind her and pushes when she comes down on someone.

"Um," she repeated. Then she leaned over and tapped a command code into the touchpad on her chair's arm. Her tactical repeater came on-line, and she frowned pensively at the data codes moving across the display. Diamato glanced inconspicuously over her shoulder and realized she was rerunning the same sim he'd been reviewing when she arrived. She let the one-on-one duel play through on a six-to-one time compression, then looked up so quickly she caught him watching her. He tensed for an explosion, but she only smiled.

"I see why you were so intent on this, Citizen Commander," she told him, and waved him over to stand beside her chair, then restarted the sim again.

"I hadn't realized at the time quite how neatly you pulled off this maneuver here," she went on, freezing the display, and Diamato nodded cautiously. He'd been rather proud of the shot himself. It wasn't one that was likely to prove practical in a fleet action, of course. Walls of battle didn't take kindly to units which suddenly pitched up perpendicular to their original vectors while simultaneously rotating on their long axes and turning through a radical skew turn. Doing that usually caused Bad Things to happen when impeller wedges collided, but the sim had been a single-ship duel, not a fleet action, and the unorthodox maneuver had given him an up-the-kilt shot at his simulated opponent that had inflicted extremely heavy damage.

"The question," Hall went on, leaning back and crossing her legs while she regarded him with an almost whimsical smile, "is whether you saw it coming or simply reacted on instinct." Diamato felt his expression try to congeal, but she shook her head. "Either possibility still puts you well ahead of the normal performance curve, Citizen Commander. I simply want to know which it was for future reference. So which was it?"

"I'm... not certain, Citizen Captain," he admitted after a moment. "It all came together without my consciously considering it, and I suppose you might call that instinct. But it wasn't all automatic. I... Well, I saw the pattern coming and recognized the possibility, so I had the whole thing sort of waiting in the back of my mind in case it actually happened, and—"

He shrugged helplessly, and she chuckled.

"So you do have the eye, Citizen Commander! I rather thought you might. Good. That's very good, Oliver." Diamato managed not to blink. He'd been her second officer for just under a T-month now and her tactical officer for over three, yet this was the first time she had ever used his first name. In fact, it was the first time she'd ever indicated she even knew what his first name was. Yet what truly astounded him was how good it felt to hear her use it with approval.

She cocked her head, watching him as if she were waiting for something, and his mind raced as he wondered what the hell he was supposed to say now.

"I'm glad you approve, Citizen Captain," he said finally.

"Ah, but you may not be for long, Oliver," she told him with something which looked unaccountably like an actual grin. "You see, now that you've demonstrated that you have it, you and Citizen Commander Hamer and I are going to be spending at least four extra hours a day developing it." Her grin grew broader at his expression, and she reached out and patted him on the elbow. "I'll have the Citizen Exec whip up half a dozen new problems for you in Simulator Seven," she promised. "I'll be interested to see your solutions to them by your next watch."

"Do you really think we can pull this off?" Everard Honeker asked very quietly. Lester Tourville almost gave a snort of laughter, but then he looked up with a much more serious expression as the people's commissioner's tone registered.

"That hardly sounds like the proper attitude for one of the New Order's forward-looking leaders of the People's vanguard," he said. His voice was more confident than the look in his eyes, and he watched Honeker closely, waiting for his reaction with an outward assurance he was far from feeling. He and his people's commissioner had been edging closer and closer to a true partnership for the better part of a T-year, yet this was the first time the citizen vice admiral had dared to expose his own contempt for his political masters quite so clearly.

It wasn't the best possible moment he could have picked, either, he reflected wryly. He'd retained Count Tilly as the flagship of Task Force 12.2 of the People's Navy, and Giscard's entire Twelfth Fleet had just departed the Secour System. In almost precisely twenty-four T-days, the various task forces would arrive simultaneously at their objectives and Operation Icarus would be on. Under the circumstances, this was scarcely a propitious moment to risk fracturing TF 12.2's command team. Then again, he'd been making a habit of doing things at less than optimum moments for quite some time now, and despite his apparent rehabilitation, he was hard pressed to think of a way he could dig his current hole much deeper. Besides, he was confident that Cordelia Ransom had disgusted Honeker just as much as she had disgusted Tourville himself.

The question, the citizen vice admiral thought, is whether or not his disgust with her is going to carry over to the rest of the Committee now that she's gone? It could be very... useful to me if it does. Maybe. Especially if Giscard and I are going to end up labeled as two of "McQueen's Men" whether we want to or not!

"Those of us in the vanguard of the People seem to spend a great deal of time looking over our shoulders to see who's following us," Honeker said after several silent seconds. Which, Tourville thought, could be taken several ways. The people's commissioner let him stew for a couple of more seconds, then produced a wintry smile. "Given the fact that some of those people tend to react just a little unreasonably where failure is concerned, my interest in the outcome of our assignment is more than simply academic, however. And, frankly, the thought of heading this deep into Manty space makes me nervous. Very nervous."

"Oh, well, if that's all that's worrying you, put your mind at ease, Citizen Commissioner," Tourville said with a broad grin, trying to hide his vast relief. "Unreasonably" wasn't a word people's commissioners were supposed to use—or not, at least, in connection with their political superiors—when speaking to the officers on whom they rode herd. Honeker's use of it constituted a major advance in the cautious dance they'd been dancing since Honor Harrington's capture, and hearing it made such things as the possibility of being blown to bits by the Manties seem almost minor.

"I'm sure I appreciate your display of confidence, Citizen Admiral," Honeker said dryly. "If it's all the same to you, however, I think I'd prefer something a little more detailed than 'put your mind at ease' when we're headed over two light-centuries into Alliance-held space to hit one of the Manties' allies' home systems with only thirty-six capital ships! If you'll pardon my saying so, this sounds entirely too much like what happened to Citizen Admiral Thurston at Yeltsin's Star, and I'd really rather not reprise his role there. As I recall, there were very few survivors from the first performance."

"There are some differences, Sir," Tourville said mildly, hiding raised mental eyebrows. Honeker's openness had just escalated his own probe by a few thousand percent, and he leaned back in his chair to consider how best to respond to it. The good news was that the two of them sat alone in Tourville's flag briefing room, and he had to assume Honeker would never have voiced his concerns unless he'd either disabled the bugs or else had complete confidence in his ability to control any access to the recordings.

Of course, the fact that he's confident wouldn't necessarily mean he has reason to be. And I suppose I still shouldn't overlook the possibility that he's trying to set me up, get me to say something he can use to nail my ass for StateSec. On the other hand, why wait this long or go to elaborate lengths when all he'd have had to do was remind someone back on Haven of just how splendidly Ransom and I had gotten along before her untimely departure? Besides, I've got to take some chances somewhere along the line.

The thoughts flicked through his brain in a heartbeat, and he smiled at Honeker.

"First of all, Sir, there are some substantial differences between Zanzibar and Yeltsin's Star. Zanzibar has a much larger population, but it's a largely agrarian world. The system's asteroid belts are richer than most, and it's developed a respectable extraction industry in the last thirty or so T-years, but it's primarily an exporter of raw materials—definitely still a third-tier economy. By this time, Yeltsin is at least second-tier, and I think an argument could be made for its rapidly approaching first-tier status. More to the point, the Zanzibar Navy is still essentially a sublight self-defense force which requires a substantial Manty picket for backup, whereas the Grayson Navy has turned Yeltsin into some kind of black hole for our ships."

He paused again, and Honeker nodded. But the people's commissioner still looked unconvinced, and Tourville couldn't really blame him.

"There are also differences between both the operational planning and the leadership of Dagger and Icarus," he went on, "and that's probably even more important than the inherent toughness of the objectives. I never served with Citizen Admiral Thurston, but I knew his reputation. He was a fairly good strategist on paper, but he was pretty much a headquarters type. A 'staff puke,' if you'll pardon the expression. Citizen Admiral Giscard is a shooter, not a chip-shuffler, and he and Citizen Secretary McQueen between them have avoided the weakest parts of Thurston's strategy for Yeltsin's Star."

"Which were?"

"Which were his elaborate maneuvers to draw the Manties and Graysons out of position prior to the attack," Tourville said without hesitation. "He got too clever and tried to manipulate them—to suck them out of his way so as to give himself a virtually unopposed shot at his objective. Worse, he seems to have fallen in love with his own plan. When he finally hit Yeltsin, he'd spent so much time convincing himself his preliminary operations had worked perfectly that he came in fat, dumb, and happy. Granted, he was up against an opponent with better electronic warfare capabilities, which contributed materially to his misappreciation of the enemy's forces when he finally saw them, but the mindset to be misled was implicit in his entire approach. So he walked right into the concentrated firepower of six superdreadnoughts at minimum range."

The Citizen Vice Admiral shrugged and moved his hands as if he were tossing something into the air above the briefing room table.

"If he'd come in more cautiously, kept the range open, he still had more than enough missile power to take the system. His battleships were no match for SDs on a one-for-one basis, but he had thirty-six of them, with two dozen battlecruisers to back them up. If he'd held the range open and pounded the Graysons with missiles, he would've had an excellent chance of annihilating the defenders anyway, but he didn't."

"That was a tactical failure on his part once all the pieces were in play, but, frankly, any strategist who depends on convincing his adversaries to do what he wants has made the kind of mistake even amateurs should know enough to avoid. Oh, it's always worth trying to mislead the other side, convince him you're going to hit him at Point A when you actually intend to blow hell out of Point B, but you should never—ever—set up a strategy under which the enemy has to do what you want if your own operations are going to succeed."

"But wasn't that what Thurston did? You just said he'd brought along enough firepower to win if he'd used it properly even when the enemy didn't do what he wanted."

"He did, but he lacked the will and preparedness to use it properly because his entire strategy had been built towards avoiding the need for a real fight. Frankly, he may have figured he had no option but to set it up that way if he was going to convince his superiors to let him try it. I once met Citizen Secretary Kline on a visit to the Octagon, and I hope you won't take this wrongly, Sir, but he was one of the worst arguments for civilian control of the military you could imagine."

He watched Honeker's eyes as he spoke, but the people's commissioner didn't even blink.

"Citizen Secretary Kline's biggest problem as a war minister," the citizen vice admiral went on after a moment, "was that he was too afraid of losing to let himself have a real shot at winning. To be fair, the Navy wasn't doing all that well in stand-up fights at the time—we were still reorganizing after the Harris Assassination, and we had a lot of people getting on-the-job training—but Kline's idea was to stand on the defensive and let the enemy come to us. I think he hoped that if we did that, the Manties would make the mistakes instead of us, but you may have noticed that they don't seem to make all that many mistakes. Besides, a primarily defensive strategy has to be a losing one when your operational area is two or three light-centuries across. You can't possibly picket every single star system in sufficient strength to defeat a determined attack, and trying to simply guarantees your opponent the right to pick his fights. Which, if he has a clue as to what he's doing, means he'll hit you in one of the places where you're too weak to stop him. If you hope to give yourself any kind of chance of actually winning a war, you simply have to take some chances in order to act offensively. I think some old wet-navy admiral from Old Earth said something along the lines of 'He who will not risk cannot win,' and it's still true today.

"So if I thought that what had actually happened was that Thurston had structured his proposals to understate the probability of a real fight in order to, um, entice the Octagon and the Committee into letting him try it despite the fact that he actually planned on fighting a serious battle, I'd have a lot more respect for him. Citizen Admiral Theisman or Citizen Admiral Giscard—or Citizen Secretary McQueen—might have done that. But if they had, they also would have carried through even if they knew their official diversionary strategy hadn't completely succeeded. Unfortunately, I think what happened was that Thurston really came up with a bad operational concept—or a weak one, at least—which simply happened to fit the profile of the 'low risk' counterattack for which his superiors were searching. He wasn't looking for a fight; he genuinely believed he could avoid one—have his cake and eat it too, if you will—and put his foot straight into it.

"The difference here is that Citizen Secretary McQueen isn't particularly interested in tricking the enemy into doing anything. Instead, she intends to take advantage of things the enemy's already done. And unlike Thurston or Citizen Secretary Kline, she's willing to take a few risks to win. So she expects us to actually do some serious fighting when we reach our objectives, but she's picked those objectives to give us the best shot of achieving our mission goals anyway."

"But Zanzibar has been a Manty ally for almost ten T-years now," Honeker pointed out. "That's why the Alliance put its new shipyard there, and they've picketed it since before Parks took Seaforth Nine away from us."

"They certainly have," Tourville agreed, "but at the moment, they're in very much the position we were in when Thurston launched Operation Dagger, if for rather different reasons. They've got an awful big chunk of their wall of battle in for overhaul at the very moment when they're strategically overextended by their successes. That means they can't possibly be strong everywhere—just as we couldn't—because they simply don't have the ships for it. And that means that someplace like Zanzibar, which is so far behind the front, and where there have been no active operations by either side for over eight years, is going to be lightly covered. They'll have enough firepower on call to deal with a raiding battlecruiser squadron or two... but that's why we have three battleship squadrons along for support."

Tourville paused once more, watching Honeker's eyes, then shrugged.

"Frankly," he said, "this is something we should have done years ago, Sir. We lost a lot of battleships trying to stop the Manties short of Trevor's Star, but we've still got over two hundred of them, and our superdreadnought strength has been rising again for the last T-year or so. That means we ought to be using the battleships as aggressively as possible. Since they aren't suitable for the wall of battle—and since our growing SD strength means we can finally stop putting them into it anyway—they should be committed to a strategy of deep raids. They've got the accel to run away from SDs and dreadnoughts and the firepower to squash battlecruisers. That makes them pretty damned close to the ideal tool to keep the Manties thinking about the security of their rear areas. And every ship of the wall we can force them to divert to guarding a star twenty or thirty light-years behind the front is just as much out of action as one we've blown apart. That's what Icarus is all about. What we'd prefer to do is to actually gain the initiative for the first time since the war began, but even if we don't, we should at least take the initiative away from the Manties. And that, Citizen Commissioner, is a damned sight better than anything we've managed yet!"

"So you actually have confidence in the ops plan?" Honeker sounded almost surprised, and Tourville gave a short, sharp bark of a laugh.

"I've got a hell of a lot of confidence in the plan, Sir," he said. "I think we'll probably lose some ships—the Manties may be out of position, but anyone who's ever fought them knows they won't go easy—but their forces are too light to stop us from getting in and doing one hell of a lot of damage. We'll take out more of their ships than they'll knock out of ours, and that doesn't even count the potential damage to their infrastructure... or their morale." He shook his head. "If this succeeds even half as well as Citizen Secretary McQueen hopes, it will have a tremendous effect on the future course of the war."

And, he added silently, McQueen is also avoiding the other two mistakes Thurston made. She's staying the hell away from Yeltsin's Star... and she's not sending us up against Honor Harrington.

"I hope you're right, Citizen Admiral," Honeker said quietly. He still looked anxious, but he seemed less so than he had, and Tourville decided not to broach the subject of whether or not the people's commissioner's superiors might decide to consider the two of them members of any "McQueen Faction" if it came to fresh purges.

Let the poor bastard worry about one thing at a time, the Citizen Vice Admiral thought.

"Well, Sir, we'll know one way or the other in about three T-weeks," he said instead, and he smiled.

Chapter Thirty-One

"Here we are... at last."

Earl White Haven knew the words sounded almost petulant, but he couldn't help himself. Admiral Caparelli's two-month delivery time for Eighth Fleet's Manticoran superdreadnoughts had turned into five, which meant White Haven was almost exactly fifteen months late assembling his assigned striking force. Or would be, when the last two RMN SDs actually arrived the day after tomorrow.

And I wouldn't be up to strength now if the GSN hadn't anted up three more of its SDs to replace Manticoran ships which won't be arriving at all, he thought, looking at the staffers assembled around the briefing room table. Well, I suppose I should be grateful for small favors. At least it means I got the Harrington and one of her sisters.

He glanced at the plot of his assembled fleet displayed on his terminal, eyes automatically seeking out the icons of the Grayson contingent. The GSN had worked like demons to get the Harrington ready to christen on schedule. There had been a delay in the fabrication of her beta nodes, and they'd had to divert half a dozen from one of her sisters to meet their deadline, but they'd met it... and a noticeably pregnant Allison Harrington had pressed the button that detonated the champagne bottle affixed to the ship's prow on the first anniversary, to the minute, of Grayson's receipt of INS's broadcast of Honor Harrington's execution.

I doubt the symbolism was lost on anyone, White Haven reflected with an edge of grimness. It certainly wasn't lost on me, at any rate, or on Judah Yanakov when he chose the Harrington as his flagship. But I'm delighted to have her. And I might as well admit I'm eager to see how the concept actually works out in action.

The corners of his mouth quirked wryly at the last thought, but he banished any hint of a smile instantly. Not that any of his staff would have noticed. They were all still busy looking down at the table rather than meet his eyes.

Hmm... maybe I let myself sound just a bit too petulant there. Or could it be that I've been acting just a little more like a hexapuma with a sore tooth than I thought I had? Possible. Entirely possible. Even probable.

"All right, ladies and gentlemen," he said in a much lighter tone. "They say late is better than never, so let's just see if we can't put some teeth into that old cliche. Jenny, what's the status of Barnett?"

"Our last scouting report is a week old, Sir, but the numbers hadn't changed since the probe before it."

Jennifer O'Brien, White Haven's intelligence officer, was a red-haired, blue-eyed native of Manticore. She was also only a senior-grade lieutenant and a third-generation prolong recipient. At thirty-one, the slender lieutenant looked like a pre-prolong seventeen-year-old, but despite her youth and junior rank, White Haven had specifically requested her for his staff. Just before the First Battle of Seabring, then Ensign O'Brien had strongly dissented from the enemy forces appreciation of the full commander who'd been White Haven's intelligence officer at the time. As it happened, she'd been right and the commander had been wrong... and Thomas Theisman had inflicted enough damage on the task force White Haven had sent to take Seabring to force its humiliating retreat. White Haven hadn't blamed his intelligence officer—he'd seen the same reports and drawn the same conclusions—but neither had he forgotten that O'Brien had been right when both of them had been wrong. And that she'd had the nerve to disagree with both her own immediate superior and the commander of an entire fleet.

"Run back over it for us again, please," he requested now, and O'Brien keyed her terminal.

"Our current strength estimate gives him twenty-six of the wall, twenty-eight battleships, twenty battlecruisers, thirty to forty heavy cruisers, thirty-five to forty light cruisers, and at least forty destroyers. We don't know how many LACs he may have, but Enki and DuQuesne Base were very heavily fortified prior to the war, and we have to assume they'll use missile pods to thicken their orbital launch capability. Call it a hundred and ninety hyper-capable units and six or seven times that amount of firepower in fixed defenses and/or LACs." She made a small face. "I'm sorry we can't be any closer to precise on that latter figure, Sir, but we simply don't know the present condition of their fortifications. We know they've had their own maintenance problems, and it's always possible a goodly percentage of their fixed weapons are down, but I wouldn't count on it. My own view is that if they were willing to reinforce him this heavily in mobile units, they would also have made every effort to put his permanent defenses on-line, and they've got the techs for that if they're willing to take them away from other, less important systems."

"Um." White Haven turned that over in his mind. He was inclined to agree with her, but he looked at his chief of staff. "Alyson?"

"I agree with Jenny," Captain (Junior Grade) Lady Alyson Granston-Henley said firmly. "All our sources confirm that McQueen has been sweeping with a new broom ever since she took over their war office, and she has to know Theisman is one of her best fleet commanders. Whatever Kline might have done, there's no way McQueen will stick him out at the end of a limb and saw it off behind him. She has to have made a major push to put his forts on-line. If she hadn't, she certainly would have sent him more mobile units—and heavier ones—to make up the difference. Either that, or reduced his strength still further to make it hurt less when we punch the system out."

White Haven nodded slowly and glanced around the table, seeing agreement on most of his other officers' faces. Commander Yerensky, his RMN astrogator, seemed a little doubtful, and Commander Yanakov, his Grayson logistics officer, appeared to share Yerensky's reservations.

"What's your feeling, Trev?" he asked his operations officer, Commander Trevor Haggerston of the Erewhon Navy. The heavyset commander scratched an eyebrow for a moment, then shrugged and grinned crookedly.

"I think Jenny and Captain G are both right," he said. "God knows we've taken long enough to assemble Eighth Fleet, and McQueen can't be certain we're not planning on diverting additional units to it from Third Fleet before we move on Barnett. And while Theisman has fifty-four capital ships to our forty-nine, twenty-eight of his are only battleships. We've got a fifteen-percent tonnage edge in capital ships—exclusive of battlecruisers—and a forty-seven-percent edge in genuine ships of the wall. We could just about double those numbers with diversions from Third Fleet, and he and McQueen must know it. Under the circumstances, someone as cagey as McQueen would have been pulling ships out of Barnett before we killed them—or at least replacing SDs and dreadnoughts with battleships she could better afford to lose—unless she figured his fixed defenses were good enough to even the odds."

"With all due respect, Admiral, that assumes McQueen is in a position to act on her judgment," Commander Yanakov put in. The sandy-haired Grayson officer was thirty-one, young enough that he'd received the first-generation prolong treatments shortly after Grayson joined the Alliance. He was a third cousin of Admiral Yanakov's, and he also had remarkably handsome features and intriguing, gold-flecked brown eyes which had cut a devastating swath through the female Allied officers who'd crossed his path.

"I think we have to assume she is, Commander," O'Brien said quietly. She, at least, seemed impervious to his looks and undeniable charm, although, to do the Grayson officer credit, he himself seemed unaware of his attractiveness.

"I realize all the analyses point that way," Yanakov said calmly, "and they may very well be accurate. In fact, I think they are. But we have to remain open to the possibility that they aren't. Giving her the authority to call the shots without civilian interference represents a major departure from the Peeps' established policies. I believe we ought to allow for the chance that they haven't changed directions as completely as we believe. At the very least, we have to be cautious about making operational assumptions based on an unquestioning belief that they have."

"Your point's well taken, Zack," White Haven agreed. "However, I believe ONI and SIS are correct about the extent of McQueen's authority."

"As I said, Sir, I'm inclined to think that myself," Yanakov said with deferential stubbornness. "But assuming she is in charge of their deployments, why hasn't she reinforced Theisman even more heavily? ONI's lost track of at least three squadrons of their SDs, not to mention all those other battleships. If I were McQueen and I was serious about holding Barnett, some of those missing ships would have turned up down here months ago. They haven't."

He shrugged and held out his hands, palm uppermost.

"The Commander has a point, Sir," Lieutenant O'Brien admitted. "I've asked myself that question. As you know, I've also asked Captain Leahy—" Leahy was Third Fleet's senior intelligence officer "—and both Grayson and Manticoran naval intelligence for their views. Unfortunately, the only answer they've been able to give me is that they don't know." It was her turn to shrug unhappily. "The only thing we know so far is that they haven't turned up anywhere else, either, and ONI's best estimate is that the SDs have probably been recalled for refit. Given the fact that Solarian League technology seems to be continuing to leak through the embargo to them, it would make sense for them to upgrade their ships of the wall in rotation to take advantage of whatever they've gotten. And, frankly, we've been so busy consolidating our own positions for the last eighteen months or so that we've given them the opportunity to do just that."

"I know, Jenny." White Haven rubbed his chin and glanced at the hologram floating above the briefing room table. It was a split image: a chart of the Trevor's Star System juxtaposed to an actual repeat of the flag bridge's main visual display, and the visual was even more impressive, in some ways, than the plot on his terminal.

Eighth Fleet floated before him—two hundred ships in all, headed by thirty-seven Manticoran and Grayson SDs and twelve Erewhonese dreadnoughts—maintaining station forty-five light-seconds off the Trevor's Star terminus of the Manticore Junction while White Haven awaited the arrival of the last of his superdreadnoughts via the Junction. The massed, massive firepower of the fleet gleamed in the display like tiny, fiery sparks of reflected sunlight, nuzzling relatively close (in deep-space terms) to the terminus, but the star chart showed what else they shared the system with. Third Fleet's fifty-five SDs hung in San Martin orbit, permanently on guard to protect the system and the thick clutch of half-complete deep-space fortresses being assembled under their watchful eye. Eventually, half those forts would be left to cover San Martin while the other half were towed out to cover the terminus directly. They could have been finished long ago if the Peeps had done even a tiny bit less effective job of destroying San Martin's orbital industry before they gave up the system. As it was, the Alliance had been forced to ship in the equipment to build the facilities needed to assemble the prefabricated components of the bases. It was taking far longer than it should have, but current projections called for the first group of forts to be finished within six or seven T-months—at which point everyone would no doubt heave a sigh of profound relief. But for now the solid ranks of capital units held their watchful orbit, proudly protecting what had been won at such terrible cost in lives and ships, and White Haven let his eyes rest upon their icons.

He hated the sight. Not that he didn't feel a deep sense of pride whenever he saw them and remembered the savage fighting which had finally taken the system. Nor did he have anything but respect for Theodosia Kuzak, who had replaced him as CO 3 FLT on the new Trevor's Star Station. No, what he hated was the way the terminus acted as an anchor on Third Fleet. The idea had been for the conquest of Trevor's Star to free up fighting power, not glue it in place, but until the forts were ready, the Admiralty refused to reduce Third Fleet in any way.

No, that's not fair, he reminded himself. In fact, Kuzak's command had already been reduced by over twenty ships of the wall, but those units had all been returned to the RMN's central dockyards for desperately needed maintenance. None had been released for operations elsewhere... and none of Theodosia's remaining units would be detached to Eighth Fleet, either. Trevor's Star was the prize for which the RMN had fought for over three years, and no risk of surrendering it back to the Peeps could even be contemplated.

It'll be all right, he told himself. We're about to take the offensive again, and whatever McQueen and Theisman are thinking about, they've waited too long. Theisman doesn't have the mobile firepower to stop us—not with our advantages in EW and missiles, even if he does have their own version of the pods. Once we punch out Barnett, anything else they may be thinking about will have to be rethought in reaction to Eighth Fleet's operations. We've taken far too long about it, but it looks like we've preempted them after all.

"All right, people! Now that's the way an op is supposed to go!" Jacquelyn Harmon smiled hugely at her assembled staff and squadron commanders—including newly promoted Commander Stewart Ashford. The holo above the briefing room table was very different from the one which had shown the "dead" icons of Ashford's section six months earlier. Instead, it showed the spectacular (if simulated) wreckage of three battlecruisers, twelve destroyers, and all thirty-three of the merchantmen those warships had been escorting. A tabular sidebar showed the LAC wing's own losses: six ships destroyed, eight more damaged beyond Minotaur's on-board repair capability, and lighter damage to another thirteen. The tonnage ratio was appallingly in the LACs' favor: two hundred and eighty thousand tons of LACs lost or seriously damaged in return for the complete destruction of almost four million tons of warships and a staggering quarter of a billion tons of merchant shipping.

"The LAC concept certainly seems to have been proved... in sims, at least," Captain Truman observed. Minotaur's skipper had been invited to the wing debrief, and she, too, smiled at the exultant young LAC COs, but there was a note of warning in her voice.

"It certainly does, Ma'am," Commander McGyver replied. "I make it a tonnage ratio of just about eight hundred to one, and God only knows what the casualty ratio was!"

"Roughly a hundred-and-fifty-two-to-one," Barbara Stackowitz put in promptly. "We suffered one hundred and twelve casualties, ninety-three of them fatal, and they lost sixteen thousand nine hundred and fifty-one, but over eleven thousand of them were aboard the escorts."

"In a simulation," Rear Admiral of the Green George Holderman pointed out sourly. Unlike Truman, Holderman hadn't been invited to the debrief; he'd invited himself. That was something Manticoran flag officers simply didn't do, yet no one had possessed the seniority to tell him no, and his personality had done its best to put a damper on Minotaur's mood ever since his arrival. He was one of the officers who had fought the entire LAC-carrier concept from the beginning, and he continued to fight on with dogged persistence. His own battle record was good enough to give his opinions a solid weight, and he'd become one of the leading spokesmen for the "missile-deck admirals," as the traditionalist opponents of the LACs had been dubbed. He considered the idea a worthless diversion of desperately needed resources and everyone knew it. Yet despite Admiral Adcock's best efforts, he'd possessed sufficient seniority—and allies within the service—to get himself named to head the special board empaneled to evaluate Minotaur's effectiveness.

"With all due respect, Admiral," Truman said flatly, "until the Admiralty is willing to turn a LAC wing loose on a live target, the only way we can test the concept is in simulations. Where, I might add, the LACs have won every engagement to date."

Holderman's beefy face darkened as the golden-haired captain looked him straight in the eye. She hadn't cared for the fashion in which he'd bulled his way into the debrief, and she didn't particularly care for him as a human being, either. Nor did she like the way he'd begun tinkering with the simulations, convincing the umpires to incorporate "more realistic" assumptions... all of which just happened to pare away at the LACs' advantages in speed, nimbleness, and smaller target size.

The rear admiral knew exactly what she was implying, and he didn't care for her tone of voice. Nor had he ever liked uppity juniors who expressed disagreement even privately—far less publicly—with flag officers, and anger sparkled in his eyes. But the Honorable Alice Truman was no ordinary uppity junior. She was a captain of the list with a reputation—and allies (and patrons)—of her own, and he knew she was on the next short list for rear admiral. It was unusual to jump an officer straight past commodore to rear admiral, even in wartime, and Holderman gritted his teeth as he wondered if she knew it was going to happen to her. That would certainly be one possible explanation for the challenge in her tone and eyes.

But whatever she might become in the future, she was only a captain at the moment, and he let himself lean towards her, using his twenty-centimeter height advantage to loom pugnaciously over her.

"Yes, it's all been in simulations, Captain" he said even more flatly than she'd spoken. "And it will stay that way until this board and the Admiralty are convinced the concept merits testing in action. And, frankly, the unrealistic assumptions so far applied to the operational parameters of the exercises have done very little to convince me to recommend approval."

"Unrealistic, Sir?" Truman's blue eyes were hard, and several of her juniors glanced apprehensively at one another as they felt the thunderheads gathering. "Unrealistic in what way, if I may ask?"

"In every way!" Holderman snapped. "The exercise parameters assumed none of the escort captains assigned to it had ever encountered one of the new LACs before. They were forced to engage them in total ignorance of their actual capabilities!"

"I see, Sir." Truman cocked her head and bared her teeth in a tight almost-smile. "May I ask if any of the captains involved actually did have any knowledge of the Shrike's capabilities?"

"Of course they didn't! How could they have when it's still on the Official Secrets List?" Holderman demanded.

"An excellent point, Sir," Truman shot back. "But unless I misread my own briefing from the umpires, that was the objective of the exercise: to see how a force which had never encountered them would fare against them. Was I, perhaps, in error in that interpretation?"

Holderman turned a dangerous shade of red. Truman's words were respectful enough, but the tone in which she'd delivered them was cold as a frozen razor. Worse, she was completely right about the simulation's purpose.

"Whatever the object of the simulated exercise," he grated, "the true test of the concept will be how it works in real space, in real time, against people who do know what's coming, Captain. Eventually someone on the other side is going to figure out what they can do, after all, and begin taking steps to attack their weaknesses, now aren't they? So don't you think it might be a good idea to try and figure out those weaknesses for ourselves before we throw lives away against the Peeps? The Fleet would like to use these vessels—and their crews—more than once each, you know!"

"Certainly, Sir," Truman agreed. "I only point out that the object of this exercise was to determine how we can expect them to fare in their initial employments."

"'Initial employments'!" Holderman half-spat, and his lip curled. "Even granting that you're correct in this instance, Captain, no simulation is going to prove much until its assumptions bear at least some resemblance to reality. Obviously anyone can stack the odds in an exercise to favor one side or the other!"

"Indeed they can, Sir," Truman agreed in tones of deadly affability. "Of course, sometimes they fail to dictate the outcome they desire no matter how thoroughly they stack the odds, don't they, Sir?"

Holderman went puce, and someone sucked in air audibly, for everyone in the briefing room knew what she was referring to— they just couldn't quite believe she'd had the nerve to do it.

Rear Admiral Holderman had convinced the umpires to alter the immediately previous exercise's ground rules by giving the officers assigned to command the simulated superdreadnought division opposed to Minotaur a detailed briefing on the Shrike and its capabilities. The briefing had been a major change from the original exercise plan approved by BuShips, Admiral Adcock's BuWeaps, and the Bureau of Training, and everyone knew it had been intended to give the SDs a clear advantage. Despite that, however, both ships of the wall had been destroyed, although they had managed to take thirty of Minotaur's LACs with them and damaged another eleven. It had been the carrier's worst losses to date... and had still cost the defenders seventeen million tons of capital ship in return for only six hundred thousand tons of LACs. Not to mention twelve thousand crewmen as opposed to only three hundred and thirty-two from the LAC wing.

"You may think these... these toy boats are warships, Captain, but they'll be worth damn all against an alert wall with its sensor and fire control net intact!" he snapped.

"I'm sure loss rates will climb against a prepared opponent, Sir," Truman conceded. "No one has ever claimed they wouldn't. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, has anyone ever suggested that 'these toy boats' can substitute in close action for properly handled ships of the wall. But so far they've met every challenge thrown at them and performed even better than expected in almost every case. I submit to you, Sir, that Captain Harmon and her people have amply proved the first-stage practicality of Anzio."

"You can submit whatever you like, Captain!" Holderman spat, and his eyes blazed dangerously. "Fortunately, the decision is the board's, not yours, and we'll continue testing the concept until my colleagues and I are convinced these things have some real value."

"I see." Truman regarded him with calm, cold dispassion, then shrugged. "Very well, Sir. I cannot, of course, fault your determination to do a full, complete, and impartial job of evaluating the concept." Her voice might be cold, but the vitriol dripping from it could easily have stripped paint off a bulkhead. "In the meantime, however, Captain Harmon and her officers have a great deal to do to prepare for tomorrow's exercises. May I suggest that you and I leave them to it?"

Holderman glared at her, but there was little he could say in reply. More to the point, she was Minotaur's captain, and he, despite the difference in their ranks, was only a visitor aboard her ship. If she chose to, she had the legal authority to order him out of the compartment—or entirely off the ship. It would be a suicidal career move, regardless of whatever sponsors or patrons she might have attracted, but the look in her eyes suggested she might not care a great deal just at the moment. Nor would being the subject of such an order do very much for Holderman's career. At the very least, it would make him a laughingstock. At worst, it might even convince people Truman was right about the LACs and that he was the one who'd been out of line. Which was ridiculous, of course, but not something he could afford to ignore.

"No doubt you're correct, Captain," he said, and if her tone could have stripped paint, his was a flat declaration that she'd just made a mortal enemy. "If you'll have my pinnace called away, I'll return to the orbital base to consult with the umpires about tomorrow's exercise."

"Of course, Sir. It will be my pleasure." Again, the words were harmless... and the tone in which they were delivered was deadly. He glared at her, then turned and stamped out of the compartment.

Truman watched the hatch close behind him, then turned to give her breathless juniors a crooked smile.

"If I could have one more moment of your time, Jackie?" she asked politely, and twitched her head at the hatch.

"Certainly, Ma'am," Harmon replied, and the two of them stepped out into the passage beyond the briefing room. Holderman had already vanished, and Truman smiled again—more nearly naturally— at Minotaur's COLAC.

"I suppose I might have handled that just a bit more tactfully," she observed, "but the son of a bitch pissed me off."

"Me, too," Harmon agreed. "All the same—"

"All the same, nothing we could possibly do could make him any more determined to scrub the entire project," Truman interrupted. "Although," she added judiciously, "I did do my best to inspire him to greater efforts."

"You—?" Harmon blinked, then shook her head. "Would you care to explain that?"

"It's simple enough, Jackie," Truman said with a chuckle. "He and Commodore Paget are the board's senior officers, and they've been sitting on the sim results for months. You and your people have blown the other side out of space over and over again, but they're damned if they'll admit it. Surely you've noticed that?"

"Well, yes. Of course I have," Harmon admitted.

"Then what makes you think they'll stop sitting on the results?" Truman demanded. "Worse, the two of them will go right on tinkering with the sim parameters until they manage to come up with a way for the defenders to swat your people in droves. And they're not idiots. In fact, both of them are superior conventional tacticians, however stupidly they may be acting in this instance. They will find a way, and you and I know it, because they're right about how fragile your LACs are. Sooner or later, they'll devise a setup which will require you to accept catastrophic losses to accomplish your mission. It won't have to be a reasonable scenario, or a situation likely to recur in action. All it has to do is be theoretically plausible and inflict massive losses on the wing for minimal results. Because when they pull it off, that's the exercise they'll use as the baseline for their report to the Admiralty."

Harmon stared at her, and Truman sighed. The LAC wing's CO was a brilliant officer in her own iconoclastic way, but she came from a non-naval family. In many ways, she reminded Truman of Honor Harrington, for despite Alfred Harrington's career as a Navy surgeon, Honor had also come from a family with few or no naval ancestors and accomplished all she had on the basis of raw ability. Alice Truman, on the other hand, was the daughter of a vice admiral, the granddaughter of a captain and a rear admiral, and the great-granddaughter of a commodore, two rear admirals, and a first space lord. She understood the Byzantine feuds and machinations of the Royal Navy's great dynasties as Jacquelyn Harmon never would, and she knew exactly how Holderman and his fellows could—and would—go about killing or delaying Operation Anzio. She even understood that they'd do it because they honestly believed it to be their duty. The only problem was that she couldn't let them, for the Navy desperately needed the potential the Shrikes represented.

"Trust me on this, Jackie," she said as gently as she could. "I don't say they can kill the concept outright, because I don't think they can. It makes too much sense, we need it too badly, and it's got too many supporters. But they can delay it by another year or even two, and we can't afford that."

"But how will pissing them off stop them?"

"Because unless I miss my guess, Holderman is so hot right this minute that he can hardly wait to get back to Hancock Base, call in the umpires, and start twisting tomorrow's exercise like a pretzel," Truman said cheerfully. "By the time he's done, the sim's outcome will be the worst disaster for your LAC wing since Amos Parnell left a month early for the Third Battle of Yeltsin."

"And that's a good thing?" Harmon demanded, her expression aghast, and Truman chuckled.

"It's a wonderful thing, Jackie, because I've already drafted a dispatch to Admiral Adcock's attention at BuWeaps—with information copies to Admiral Caparelli, Vice Admiral Givens at BuPlan, Vice Admiral Danvers at BuShips, and Vice Admiral Tanith Hill at BuTrain—expressing my concern that the sims are being written unrealistically."

Harmon's eyes widened, for that was five of the Space Lords of the Board of Admiralty. In fact, it was all of them except for Admiral Cortez and Vice Admiral Mannock, the heads of BuPers and the Surgeon General, respectively. Truman saw her expression and smiled.

"Naturally I would never attribute intentional bias to anyone," she said piously, "but for whatever reason, I feel I've discerned a... failure to fully and fairly examine the capabilities of the LAC-carrier concept in the last few exercises. In fact, I'm afraid the problem is becoming more pronounced, and so I've brought it to the attention of all the relevant authorities, exactly as I'm supposed to. Unfortunately, Chief Mantooth somehow neglected to forward a copy to Admiral Holderman or any other member of the evaluation board here in Hancock. A terrible oversight, of course. Doubtless the board's copies simply got lost in transit someplace."

"You mean—?" Harmon stared at her in something very like awe.

"I mean the Powers That Be are going to have ample reason to look very, very carefully at the parameters of the sims and how they came to be written as they are. And what they're going to find is a steady procession of successes by the LACs followed—hopefully— by a single, crushing, overwhelming failure. Which will cause them to look even more carefully at that particular exercise, talk to the umpires... and discover just how the parameters were changed, and by whom." Truman smiled nastily. "I suspect Admiral Holderman and Commodore Paget will have just a little explaining to do after that."

"Jesus, Alice," Harmon said. She was silent for several seconds, then she shook her head. "I see what you're up to, but what if he doesn't bite? What if he just bides his time? And what if he decides to get even with you down the line? He's a rear admiral, after all."

"First, I think he's too pissed off—and too convinced he's right—to resist the bait," Truman replied. "Second, the seed is planted. Even if he waits another few days—or even longer—sooner or later he'll push a little too hard, and when he does, the trap will spring. And as for getting even with me—" She shrugged. "If he reacts the way I expect him to, he'll cut his own throat. His career may survive it, but any move he ever makes to hit back at me will be seen as a vengeful senior trying to use his position to punish a junior who was simply doing her job when he made himself look like an idiot. Oh, sure, some people will figure out what really happened—and a few will probably realize it from the very beginning—but I'm not worried about them. The ones who figure it out will also know why I did it. They may not be exactly delighted by the spectacle of a captain helping a rear admiral shoot his own... foot off, and I could find myself in trouble at some point if one of them ends up on a promotion board evaluating me for my own flag, but I'll cross that bridge when I reach it. Besides, I figure most of them will have realized how valuable the LACs are long before that happens."

"And if you're wrong?" Harmon asked quietly.

"If I'm wrong, my career is going to be very disappointing, by my family's standards," Truman said much more lightly than she felt. "I won't like that, and neither will my parents. But they'll know why I did it, and that's enough for me. Besides," she smiled, this time completely naturally, "at least this way I'll still be able to sleep with myself... and I'll still get that asshole Holderman, whatever happens. Believe me, Jackie—that by itself would be almost enough to make the whole thing worth it!"

Chapter Thirty-Two

The alarm buzzed very quietly. Lieutenant Gaines would always remember that—how quiet it had been, how civilized. As if the central computer were merely clearing its throat politely to get his attention.

It was only later, in the nightmares that lasted for so many years, that he realized how utterly inappropriate that peaceful sound had been.

He reached out and killed the alarm, then checked the master plot. The cool K2 primary of the Seaford Nine System floated at the holo tank's center, and he frowned as his eyes swept the sphere indicating the star's hyper limit, searching for the icon that had to be there. Then they found it, and he nodded and began punching commands into his console.

The computers considered his instructions and obediently lit a smaller holo directly in front of him. It didn't have much detail yet—just a single blur of light blinking the alternating red and amber of an unknown, possibly hostile contact. His gravitic sensors had picked up the FTL hyper footprint, but at anything over two or three light-minutes, even the best sensors couldn't tell much about the sizes or numbers of ships which had created any given footprint. He needed individual impeller signatures before he could make that sort of estimate, and he waited patiently for the newcomers to light off their drives.

It was most probably simply an unscheduled friendly arrival, he thought, although, failing that, it might be one of the increasingly infrequent Peep scout ships. Gaines almost hoped it was. The Peeps seemed to pick their hottest hotshots for the occasional, screaming sensor pass, and watching Admiral Hennesy maneuver to try to intercept them had always been entertaining and sometimes downright exciting. He hadn't seen Admiral Santino in action yet, either, and he was curious about how well he'd stack up against the officer he'd relieved.

Then again, he reflected, the duration figure on the footprint would almost have to indicate a multiship transit, now wouldn't it? Hmmm...

That made the unscheduled friendlies rather more likely, he judged. Still, he couldn't rule out the possibility of three or four scout ships intended to work in concert, and a multibogie intercept of that sort would be even more entertaining than most, but it was going to take a while to figure out which it was. He nodded to himself as symbols began to blink beside the fuzzy haze in his display. They were picking up impeller drives now, but the range was still long, and he waited as the system began painstakingly enhancing the faint emissions which had attracted the computer's attention.

There were reasons it took so long. Not good ones, in Gaines' humble opinion, but reasons nonetheless. There had once been plans to provide Seaford with an FTL sensor shell as good as any other Manticoran fleet base outside the home system, but somehow those plans had gone awry. Personally, Gaines suspected the paperwork was simply lost somewhere in the bowels of BuShips' Logistics Command. He'd always figured Logistics was the closest humankind was ever likely to come to producing a genuine black hole, because any work orders or parts requests that came within shouting distance of it were doomed to be sucked in, mangled, and forever vanish from the known universe.

Of course, he could be wrong in this instance. Despite the mammoth orbital facilities the Peeps had put in before Sir Yancey Parks took the system away from them, Seaford had never had all that high a priority for the Royal Manticoran Navy. BuShips and BuWeaps had spent a year or two going absolutely wild over the opportunity to get a detailed look inside the Peeps' tech establishment. But once they'd finished crawling through every nook and cranny of the repair bases and parts storage depots and asteroid smelters, and inspecting the contents of the magazines, and carting off samples of the latest Peep computer hardware, the Star Kingdom really hadn't had all that much use for the base.

Oh, it was bigger than Hancock. In theory, the RMN could have taken over the old Peep shipyards and used them for its own construction programs. And if the Star Kingdom didn't want to do that, even the limited portions of the repair facilities it had chosen to crew could have supported a considerably larger local defense force than Hancock Station did. Unfortunately, Seaford Nine's equipment was crap compared to Manticoran hardware, and the system had no local population or even habitable planets. Upgrading the yard to Alliance standards and shipping in a work force large enough to operate it would have cost almost as much as it would have cost to build new building slips from scratch, and the system itself was badly placed as a major defensive node. Hancock was in a much better position for that, and the only reason Parks had wanted Seaford in the first place was to eliminate its threat to the long-haul Manticore-Basilisk hyper route and deny the Peeps a springboard against Hancock, Zanzibar, Alizon, Yorik, or any of the other Allied systems in the area.

Plans had been drawn at one point to upgrade at least the repair portion of the system's infrastructure to Manticoran standards despite the cost, and those plans were taken out and dusted off periodically. But the Navy was stretched too tight to make the project worthwhile. The Admiralty had acknowledged that months ago when it began pulling out picket ships for refit at Hancock or the home system without bothering to replace them. If there was anyplace the Star Kingdom had decided it could do without, Seaford Nine was it. And so there wasn't really very much here: a fairly good-sized caretaker detachment of techs to keep the huge, mostly empty main repair base more-or-less operational, two squadrons of heavy cruisers, and a reinforced division of superdreadnoughts, supported by a half-squadron of battlecruisers and a couple of destroyers. And, of course, one Lieutenant Heinrich Gaines, Senior Officer Commanding Her Majesty's Sensor Station, Seaford Nine.

It sounded impressive as hell, he thought with a chuckle, but the same considerations which gave the system such a low priority for modernization and enlargement had also reduced its priority for first-line sensor equipment. He had an extremely limited FTL net, built mostly on first— and second-generation platforms only a very little better than those Lady Harrington had employed in the Second Battle of Yeltsin. They had a far slower data transmission rate than the new third-generation systems he'd heard rumors about, and—

His ruminations chopped off as the holo at his console sudden dissolved and reformed. He stared at it, feeling his eyebrows try to crawl up into his hairline, and his mouth was suddenly dry.

The information wasn't complete. Over half the identifying data codes continued to blink, indicating that the computers had been forced to assign tentative IDs pending better data resolution, and the emission sources were still right on the K2 primary's 16.72 LM hyper limit, which put them over ten light-minutes from Gaines' main sensor arrays. That meant everything he did know—aside from the impeller signatures, which were FTL themselves—was better than ten minutes old by the time he saw it. But even the limited data he had was enough to turn his belly to frozen lead.

He looked at the display a moment longer, then punched a priority code into his com. The delay seemed interminable, though it could not in fact have been more than five or ten seconds, and then a voice spoke in his earbug.

"Task Group Combat Information Center," it announced in professional tones that still managed to sound ineffably bored. "Commander Jaruwalski."

"CIC, this is Sensor One," Gaines said crisply. "I have unknown—repeat, unknown—vessels entering the star system, bearing one-seven-seven zero-niner-eight relative from the primary, range from base ten-point-seven-seven light-minutes. They have not transmitted an FTL arrival report."

"Unknown vessels?" The boredom had vanished from Jaruwalski's voice, and Gaines could picture the commander snapping upright in her chair. "Class IDs?" she demanded.

"I'm working with light-speed sensors here, Commander," Gaines reminded her. "My gravities make it—" he double-checked to be certain "—fifty-four point sources. At present—" He paused and cleared his throat. "At present, the computers are calling it fifteen to twenty of the wall and at least ten battleships. That's based solely on the strengths of their impeller signatures, but the data enhancement looks solid, Ma'am."

For just a moment, there was total silence from the other end of the com, but Gaines could almost hear the thoughts flashing through Jaruwalski's brain. Twenty-five capital ships—minimum—was hardly a typical raiding force. And the three superdreadnoughts and four battlecruisers of the Seaford Picket could never stand up to what was headed for them.

"Understood, Sensor One," Jaruwalski said after several seconds. "Patch your output straight through to me and do what you can to refine it."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am." Gaines felt immensely relieved to have passed the knowledge on to someone else—someone senior to him, who had become responsible for dealing with it. All he had to do now was keep the information flowing... and hope he could somehow survive what he knew was about to happen.

"Well, if they didn't have us on sensors before, it's clear they have us now," Citizen Vice Admiral Ellen Shalus remarked to her people's commissioner as the sparks of Manty impeller drives began to appear in the flag deck plot. She watched them carefully, then reached up and scratched an eyebrow while she frowned. Citizen Commissioner Randal saw the frown and cocked his head.

"Something is bothering you, Citizen Admiral?" he asked, and she shrugged.

"I don't see enough impeller signatures, Sir," she replied, and looked over her shoulder at her ops officer. "What did HQ say we were supposed to hit here, Oscar?"

"According to the analysts' best estimates, at least six or eight of the wall, plus a dozen battlecruisers, Citizen Admiral," Citizen Commander Levitt replied instantly. From his tone, he knew he was answering the question for the official record, not because his admiral hadn't already had the information filed away in her head, and Shalus looked back at Randal and pointed at the plot with her chin.

"Whatever that is—and we're still too far out for good reads—it sure as hell isn't a squadron of the wall, Citizen Commissioner. And I'll be very surprised if there are a dozen battlecruisers out there, either. It looks to me more like three or four of the wall with a screen of heavy cruisers."

"Could the other units be hiding in stealth?" Anxiety honed the edges of Randal's question, and Shalus smiled thinly. The same thought had already occurred to her, because it was just the sort of thing those sneaky Manty bastards liked to do.

"I don't know, Sir," she said honestly. "It's certainly possible. On the other hand, Citizen Admiral Giscard and Citizen Lieutenant Thaddeus did warn us that a lot of our data was out of date. We haven't exactly swamped this area with scout ships since the war began, after all. That's one of the reasons we figure the Manties are probably feeling smug and secure about it. And I suppose the answer could simply be that they've pulled the missing SDs home for refit. Intelligence said they have a lot of capital ships in the body and fender shop."

"Um." Randal moved to stand beside her and folded his arms, gazing down into the plot. "Can you make any estimate of what they're up to?" he asked after a moment.

"Right now, running around like headless chickens, I imagine," Shalus replied with a cold smile. "Even if they are hiding people in stealth, they can't have enough firepower to stop us—not this far from the front line. My gut feeling is that what we see is what they've got; they're just trying to get it all concentrated while they figure out what to do with it. As for what they can do—" She shrugged. "We've got the pods on tow, and we've got the advantage in numbers, and in tonnage, and in surprise, Sir. All I really see that they can do is run away... or die. And frankly," her smile turned even colder and a predator glow flickered in her eyes, "I don't really much care which."

"I want options, people!" Rear Admiral of the Red Elvis Santino snapped.

In that case, you should have gotten off your fat ass and spent at least a few hours thinking about this sort of situation ahead of time! Andrea Jaruwalski thought coldly.

Santino had succeeded Vice Admiral Hennesy two and a half months earlier when the picket was reduced to its present strength, and he had not impressed Jaruwalski. He'd made a big deal out of retaining Hennesy's staff when he took over Hennesy's flagship, treating their retention as a generous sign of his trust in them. After all, if he hadn't trusted them, he would have brought in his own command team, wouldn't he?

Unfortunately, Jaruwalski didn't believe for a moment that that was what had happened or why. Personally, she suspected Santino had been sent here because the system, however prestigious command of it might look on paper, was about as much use to the Star Kingdom as a screen door on an air lock. It was a supremely unimportant slot, suitable for shuffling off nonentities who might have been embarrassments in significant assignments. And Santino hadn't retained Hennesy's staff because he trusted them; he'd retained them because he didn't give a good godamn. He certainly hadn't bothered to set up anything remotely like an exercise schedule, after all. Or even arranged regular planning sessions, for that matter!

She let no sign of her contempt shadow her expression, despite her thoughts, but she knew she wasn't the only one who felt less than total confidence in the CO of Seaford Station.

"Sir," she said in her most reasonable tone, "assuming Sensor One's figures on enemy strength are accurate—and I feel confident that they are—we don't have a lot of options. There are at least twelve superdreadnoughts and eight dreadnoughts out there; we have three ships of the wall. They have twelve battleships and four battlecruisers; we have five battlecruisers." She gave a tiny shrug. "We don't have the firepower to stop them, Sir. In my opinion, our only real option is to order the immediate evac of the orbit base technicians and pull out."

"Not acceptable!" Santino snapped. "I'm not going to be another Frances Yeargin and let the goddamned Peeps take out my command area without a fight!"

"With all due respect, Sir," Jaruwalski said, "we cannot go toe-to-toe with these people, and they know it." She checked the tactical data CIC was relaying to her briefing room terminal as further updates became available from Sensor One. "They've been in-system for eleven a half minutes, and they're now nine light-minutes out, moving at over forty-five hundred KPS. Assuming they're headed for a zero-zero intercept with the main orbital facilities, they should hit turnover in another hundred and seventeen minutes and reach the base in two hundred and fifty-nine. That's only a little over four hours, Admiral, and it leaves the evac ships very little time to get moving."

"Goddamn it, you're supposed to be my frigging operations officer, not some gutless civilian! Or don't you care about showing cowardice in the face of the enemy?" Santino snarled, and Jaruwalski's eyes snapped up from her display. Anger smoked like liquid nitrogen at their cores as they locked with Santino's, and the staffer next to her shrank away from the sudden ferocity which filled the air about her.

"Nothing in the Articles of War requires me to listen to that, Admiral Santino," she said in a tone of chipped ice. "My duty is to give you my best assessment of the tactical situation, and my assessment is that we have a hundred and forty-seven million tons of ships of the wall coming at us and that we have just over twenty-five million tons with which to face them. That works out to an enemy tonnage advantage of just about six to one, Sir—and completely ignores the twelve battleships supporting them."

"You'll listen to whatever I goddamned tell you to listen to, Commander!" Santino bellowed, and pounded a meaty fist on the table. Jaruwalski half-rose and opened her mouth to say something career-ending as answering fury flashed through her, but then she stopped, frozen in mid-movement, as she recognized what lay behind Santino's belligerent choler.

Fear. And not just the totally rational personal fear any sane person would feel as that juggernaut roared down upon her, either, the commander realized. It was the fear—almost the terror—of responsibility. That, and the fear of what retreating without firing a single shot might do to his career.

She swallowed hard while tension roared and sang in the silence of the emotion-lashed briefing room. Nothing in her training told her how to deal with a commanding officer so consumed with moral panic his brain had ceased functioning, yet that was what she faced.

I suppose any CO could be excused for being afraid of her duty in this situation, she thought almost calmly, but it's worse for Santino after the way he shot his mouth off about Adler and Commodore Yeargin. And the way he just sat on his butt and vegetated out here. He's always been a sanctimonious pain in the ass, but all those lordly pronouncements about what he would have done if he'd been in her position—

Nor had Santino been alone in that. The total destruction of Yeargin's task force had shaken the Royal Manticoran Navy to the core, however little it cared to admit it, because Peeps weren't suppose to be able to do things like that. Not to them. The official Board of Inquiry had delivered its verdict six months ago, following its painfully emotionless analysis of Yeargin's (many) mistakes with a scathing condemnation of the mindset which had let her make them. The Board had pulled no punches, and that was good. The last thing the Fleet needed was some whitewash which would allow other station commanders to make the same mistakes. Yet the report had its downside, as well, for in its wake, some officers had become more terrified of being labeled "unprepared" or "insufficiently offensive-minded" or "lacking in the initiative properly expected from a flag officer" than they were of dying.

And Elvis Santino had just proved he was one of those terrified officers. Worse, he had been caught unprepared, and insufficiently offensive-minded, and lacking in initiative... and whatever he chose to admit to his staff, inside he knew he had. Which only made his terror worse... and his desperate determination to prove he hadn't been still stronger.

"Sir," Jaruwalski said after a moment, her voice as calm and unchallenging as she could possibly make it as she sought another way to get through to him, "whatever you or I may want can't change the facts of the tactical situation. And the facts of the situation are that our capital ships are outgunned by theirs by approximately five-to-one in grasers, five-and-a-half-to-one in lasers, and well over six-to-one in missile tubes... and that, of course, assumes they don't have still more units hiding under stealth out there somewhere. Under the circum—"

"I am not giving up this system without firing a shot, Commander," Santino said, and the sudden flat intensity of his voice was more frightening than his bellow had been. "I'll evacuate the noncombatants, but there is no way—no way in hell, Commander!— that I am giving them Seaford Nine without a fight. I know my duty, even if other officers may not know theirs!"

"Sir, we can't fight them broadside-to-broadside! If we try—"

"I'm not going to," Santino said in that same flat tone. "You're forgetting our missile pods and our edge in electronic warfare."

"Sir, they have pods, too!" Jaruwalski tried to keep the desperation out of her voice and knew she was failing. "And ONI believes they've been using Solly technology to upgra—"

"Their pods aren't as good as ours," Santino shot back obstinately. "And even if they were, their point defense and ECM suck. We can close with them, fire at extreme range, and break off, and all of our superdreadnoughts have the new compensators. They'll never catch us in a stern chase, and if they try to overhaul, it will only divert them from pursuing the evac ships."

Jaruwalski felt a chill of horror as his eyes brightened with the last sentence. Oh my God, she thought despairingly, now he's come up with a tactical justification for this insanity! He's going to get us all killed because he's too stupid—too afraid of showing lack of fighting spirit—to do the sensible thing, and now he's found a "logical reason" he thinks he can use in his after-action report to justify his stupidity!

"Sir, it doesn't matter if our pods have an edge if they have enough more of them than we do," she said as reasonably as she could. "And—"

"You're relieved, Commander," Santino grated. "I need advice and some offensive spirit here, not cowardice."

Jaruwalski jerked as if he'd slapped her, and her face went white— not with shame or fear, but with fury.

"Admiral, it's my duty to give you my best est—" she began, and his hand slapped the tabletop like a gunshot.

"I said you're relieved!" he shouted. "Now get the hell out of here! In fact, I want your gutless ass the hell off my flagship right now, Jaruwalski!" She stared at him, speechless, and his lip drew up in a snarl. "I'll pass the evac order to the base in five minutes—now get the hell out of here!"

"Sir, I—"

"Silence!" he bellowed, and even through her own anger and sense of despair, she knew she was simply the focus his panic-spawned rage had fastened upon. But the knowledge helped nothing, for he could not possibly have chosen a worse one. She was his ops officer, his staff tactician, the one officer he absolutely had to listen to in this situation, and he refused to. She stared at him, trying to think of some way—of any way at all—to reach him, and he punched a com stud savagely.

"Bridge, Captain speaking," a voice replied.

"Captain Tasco, I have just relieved Commander Jaruwalski of duty," Santino said spitefully, his burning eyes locked on the ops officer. "I want her off this ship—now. You will provide a pinnace to deliver her to one of the evac ships immediately. I don't care which. Just see to it. And, Captain—" He paused briefly and let his lips curl with contempt before he resumed. "If necessary," he said coldly, "you will have Colonel Wellerman remove her from Hadrian under guard."

The com was silent for at least ten seconds. Then—

"Sir," Tasco said in a voice which was just that little bit too unshaken, "are you certain about this? I—"

"Dead certain, Captain," Santino said icily, and took his thumb from the com stud.

"Get out," he said flatly to Jaruwalski, and then turned his back on her and turned to the rest of his white-faced staff.

The ops officer stared at him a moment longer, then let her gaze sweep the other officers in the compartment. Not one of them would meet her eyes. She had become a pariah, her career ended in that single instant. It wouldn't matter in the end if she'd been right or wrong; all that would matter was that she had been relieved of duty for cowardice, and her fellow staffers—her friends—refused to look up, as if they feared the same leprosy would infect them if their gazes should touch.

She wanted to scream at them, to demand that they support her, present a united front against Santino's insanity. But it was useless. Nothing she could say would move them, even though they had to know she was right, and she felt her own anger flood out of her as suddenly as water from a shattered pot. They would sooner risk their own deaths, and the deaths of thousands of others, than Santino's rage... and their careers.

She gazed at them for one more second, some corner of her mind already knowing she would never see them again, and then turned and walked silently from the compartment.

At least the evacuation plan seemed to be working, Lieutenant Gaines thought thankfully as he swam quickly down the pinnace's personnel tube to HMS Cantrip's boat bay. Unfortunately, that seemed to be the only thing that was.

He reached the end of the tube, caught the grab bar, and swung himself into the heavy cruiser's internal gravity.

"Gaines, Heinrich O., Lieutenant," he told the harassed ensign waiting by the tube. The young woman's fingers flew over her portable touchpad, feeding the name into the ship's computers to check against the current personnel list Orbital Base Three's computers had transmitted twenty-three minutes ago.

The touchpad beeped almost instantly, and she turned to look over her shoulder at the lieutenant serving as boat bay officer.

"Last man, Sir!" she announced. "Everyone's confirmed aboard."

The lieutenant nodded and bent over his com.

"The last evac ship is underway, Sir," Captain Justin Tasco told Admiral Santino. He knew his voice sounded flat and unnatural, yet he couldn't seem to do anything about it. He'd tried to argue with Santino only to be chopped off with a violence as extreme as it was sudden and unexpected. Now he was trapped by his own duty, his own responsibilities, and knowing it was stupid did absolutely nothing to change any of it.

"Good," Santino said, and his broad face smiled fiercely on the small com screen linking Tasco to Hadrian's flag bridge. Then the admiral's smile faded. "You got that bi—" He clamped his jaws and drew a deep breath. "Commander Jaruwalski is off the ship?" he demanded after a moment.

"Yes, Sir," Tasco said woodenly. He'd been Vice Admiral Hennesy's flag captain for two years and worked closely with Jaruwalski all that time, but he was only a captain and Santino was an admiral, and the Articles of War forbade "comments detrimental to the authority of superior officers," so he couldn't tell the fatheaded, pig-ignorant fool what he really thought of him. "Our pinnace put her aboard Cantrip eighteen minutes ago."

"Excellent, Justin! In that case, put us on course and let's get underway."

"Aye, aye, Sir," Tasco said flatly, and began giving orders.

Despite his relatively junior rank, Gaines was able to fast-talk his way into the heavy cruiser's CIC on the basis of his status as the senior sensor officer for Seaford Station. Or at least my recent status as SO, he thought with graveyard humor as the ship's assistant tactical officer nodded him into the compartment and then waved him back out of the way. Gaines found a position against a bulkhead from which he could see the master plot's holo sphere and took a moment to orient himself to the smaller display. Then he stiffened in shock.

"What the—?!" He shook his head and leaned forward, watching in horror as the main body of the system picket began to move at last. Not to escort the ships detailed for evacuation clear of the system, but to advance towards the Peeps!

"What the hell do they think they're doing?" he muttered.

"They think they're going to 'distract' the enemy," a drained-sounding soprano said from beside him, and he turned his head quickly. The dark-haired, hawk-faced woman wore a skinsuit with commander's insignia and the name Jaruwalski, Andrea on its breast, and her eyes were the weariest, most defeated-looking eyes Gaines had ever seen.

"What do you mean, 'distract'?" he asked her, and she turned her head to look at him with a considering air. Then she shrugged.

"Are you familiar with the term 'For the honor of the flag,' Lieutenant?"

"Of course I am," he replied.

"Do you know where it came from?"

"Well, no... no, I don't," he admitted.

"Back on Old Earth, one of the old wet navies had a tradition," Jaruwalski said distantly, returning her eyes to the display. "I can't remember which one it was, but it was way back before they even had steam ships. It doesn't matter." She shrugged. "The point is, that when one of their captains found himself up against an enemy he was afraid of engaging or figured he couldn't fight effectively, he'd fire a single broadside—frequently on the disengaged side, so as to avoid pissing the enemy off so badly they shot back—and then haul down his flag as quickly as he could."

"Why?" Gaines asked, fascinated somehow despite the disaster brewing in the display.

"Because hauling down his flag was the same as striking a wedge is today," Jaruwalski said in that same detached voice. "It was a signal of surrender. But by firing a broadside first—'for the honor of the flag'—he covered himself against the charge of cowardice or surrendering without a fight."

"He—? That's the stupidest thing I ever heard of!" Gaines exclaimed.

"Yes, it was," she agreed sadly. "And it hasn't gotten any less stupid today."

"What the devil do they think they're doing?" Citizen Commissioner Randal demanded.

"I'm not certain," Citizen Vice Admiral Shalus replied, her eyes fixed on her plot. Then she looked up with a bone-chilling smile. "But I'm not complaining, either, Citizen Commissioner." She looked at her ops officer. "Time to optimum launch range, Oscar?"

"Seven minutes, Citizen Admiral," Levitt responded instantly.

"Good," Shalus said softly.

"We're in range now, Sir," Captain Tasco told Admiral Santino. "Shall I give the order to fire?"

"Not yet, Justin. Let the range close a little more. We only get one shot here, so let's make it a good one."

"Sir, from their acceleration curve they have to be towing pods of their own," Tasco pointed out.

"I'm aware of that, Captain," Santino said frostily, "and I will pass the word to fire when I am prepared to do so. Is that understood?"

"Aye, aye, Sir," Tasco said bleakly.

"They must think they can hit us with one or two heavy salvos, then pull away with their compensator advantage," Citizen Commander Levitt said quietly, and Shalus nodded.

She could scarcely believe anyone—especially a Manty—could be that stupid even when she saw it happening, yet it was the only explanation for their antics. They'd come to meet her decelerating task force, then executed a turnover of their own. The range was coming down on six and a half million kilometers, and her overtake speed had reduced to only four hundred kilometers per second. She could never overtake them if they chose to go to a maximum safe acceleration, which meant they were deliberately allowing her to edge into range of them.

Are they that confident of the superiority of their systems? she wondered. Nothing in our intelligence briefings indicates that they ought to be... but, then, we don't know all there is to know about their R&D, now do we? But I simply can't believe they could possibly have a big enough tactical advantage to justify letting us into range! At max, they cant have more than forty-five or fifty pods on tow... and I've got three hundred and twenty-eight!

"Dead meat," she heard someone mutter behind her, and nodded.

"Let the range drop a little more," Santino said quietly. "I want the best lock-up fire control can give us. And when we launch, I want all our fire concentrated on their two lead SDs."

"Aye, aye, Sir," Captain Tasco said, and Santino smiled nastily. Even after detaching a full squadron of heavy cruisers for the evacuation, he had fifty-four pods. Adding his ships' internal launchers, he could put almost nine hundred missiles into space, and his lip curled as he contemplated what that would do to ships with Peep missile defense systems.

I'll blow those two fuckers right out of space, he told himself. And, really, everything else in the system combined is hardly worth two of the wall. Oh, it might be worth something to the Peeps, but this junk is hardly worth our time. Everyone will understand that. Nobody'll be able to say I didn't make the bastards pay cash to take over my command area, and—

"Enemy launch!" someone shouted. "Multiple enemy launches! Multi—My God!"

"Launch!" Citizen Vice Admiral Shalus snapped, and three hundred and twenty-eight missile pods belched fire. The People's Navy's missiles were less individually capable than the RMN's, with slightly shorter range, but to make up for it, each of their pods had sixteen launchers to the Manticorans' ten. Now all of them vomited their birds, and TF 12.1's internal launchers sent another fifteen hundred along with them. All together, over six thousand seven hundred missiles went screaming towards the outnumbered Manticoran task force.

Elvis Santino clung to his command chair arms with white knuckles, his eyes pits of horror as he saw the solid wall of missile icons streaking towards him. It wasn't possible. He knew it wasn't. But it was happening, and he heard orders crackling over the com link to Hadrian's command deck as Captain Tasco fought frantically to save his ship.

Lieutenant Commander Uller, Santino's acting ops officer after Jaruwalski's eviction, barked the command to flush their own pods without Santino's orders, but the Manticoran response seemed feeble in the face of the Peep tsunami, and Santino closed his eyes, as if he could somehow evade his hideous responsibility by shutting the sight away.

ONI had warned him, and so had Jaruwalski, but he hadn't believed it. Oh, he'd heard the reports, nodded at the warnings, but he hadn't believed. He'd seen the Manticoran missile storm loosed upon the Peeps, but he had never seen an answering storm front, and somewhere deep down inside him, he'd believed he never would. Now he knew he'd been wrong.

Yet he'd been almost right, after all; he would only see it once.

Heinrich Gaines and Andrea Jaruwalski huddled together as if for warmth, their sick eyes locked to the display. Cantrip was safely beyond the Peeps' reach, with a velocity advantage which would take her across the hyper limit and to safety long before any Havenite ship could even think about interfering with her. But none of the Peeps were thinking about anything as unimportant as a fleeing heavy cruiser. Their attention was on more important prey, and Gaines groaned as he read the data codes beside the icons.

ONI was wrong, Jaruwalski thought detachedly. They said the Solly systems had probably improved the Peeps' point defense by fifteen percent; it's got to be closer to twenty. And their penaids must be better than we thought, too. Of course, with that many incoming birds to swamp the systems—

Her detached thoughts froze as the Peep missiles reached attack range. Santino's desperate point defense had thinned them, but no force as small as his could possibly have killed enough of those missiles to make any difference. Almost four thousand of them survived to attack, and a holocaust of bomb-pumped X-ray lasers ripped and tore at impenetrable impeller bands, all-too-penetrable side walls... and the wide open bows and sterns of Santino's wedges.

It was over quickly, she thought numbly. That was the only mercy. One moment, three RMN superdreadnoughts led four battlecruisers and eight heavy cruisers on a firing run; nineteen seconds after the first Peep laser head detonated, there were two damaged heavy cruisers, one crippled hulk of a battlecruiser... and nothing else but wreckage and the eye-tearing fury of failing fusion bottles. She heard someone cursing in a harsh, flat monotone—heard the tears and rage and helplessness behind the profanity—but she never looked away from the display as the Peeps' internal launchers dealt with the cripples.

Santino's return fire hadn't been entirely futile, she saw. A single Peep SD blew apart as violently as his own flagship had, and a second reeled out of formation, her wedge down, shedding lifepods and wreckage. But the rest of the Peep armada didn't even hesitate. It just kept driving straight ahead, and she looked away at last as the missile batteries which had massacred men and women she had known and worked with for over two T-years came into range of the orbital facilities. Old-fashioned nuclear warheads bloomed intolerably bright as the enemy fleet methodically blew the abandoned, defenseless installations into half-vaporized wreckage, and Andrea Jaruwalski felt old and beaten and useless as she turned her back upon the hideous plot at last and made her way from Cantrip's CIC.

Chapter Thirty-Three

"Do you believe this crap, Maxie?" Scooter Smith demanded in a disgusted mutter. He and PO Maxwell sat in the rear of the briefing room, listening while Lieutenant Gearman explained the day's program to the wing's engineering staff. Commander Stackowitz and Captain Harmon would brief in the squadron and section leaders a bit later, but as always, everyone else's efforts ultimately depended on the engineers. Which meant they had to get the word first, and at the moment, Smith wanted to spit as he glanced at Maxwell.

"What's not to believe?" his hirsute friend replied, using the junior officers and senior noncoms seated between him and the briefing lectern for cover as he scratched his ribs industriously. Then he shrugged. "The brass has decided to screw the Minnie over. You gonna try to tell me you've never been part of that procedure before?"

"Is that all you have to say about it?" Smith regarded him with pronounced disfavor, and Maxwell shrugged again.

"Hey, what I say—or you say—don't matter squat, Scooter. What matters is that that asshole Holderman's decided we're gonna blow this exercise. I don't know why he's so hot to make us look bad, but there's damn all you or I can do about it, so how's about you vent with just a little less fervor? Or on someone else, at least."

"You never look outside your toolbox, do you?" Smith snorted.

"Nope," Maxwell agreed, then grinned crookedly. "Course, that could be because I've had a little more experience dodging official displeasure than you have, Scooter m'boy."

"Well, that's true enough, anyway!" Smith grunted with a laugh. "You've had more experience at that than just about anyone else in the Service, 'Silver Spanner.'"

"A low blow," Maxwell observed sadly, "but no lower than I'd expect from someone like yourself."

Smith grinned, left more cheerful by the exchange despite his disgust with the briefing. But Maxwell was obviously correct about what was happening here. Rear Admiral Holderman had leaned on the umpires hard, and the result had been an order for the LACs to make their approach on Hancock Base without utilizing their stealth systems at all. They could come in at whatever acceleration they liked, on whatever vector they wished, from a starting point that would be completely their own choice. But they could not take advantage of a single aspect of their powerful EW suites on the approach. Worse, the umpires had decided to reduce their active missile defenses' efficiency by forty percent in order to "reflect probable enemy upgrades in scan data enhancement and fire control," which was bullshit if Smith had ever heard it.

But at least they'd get to try it in real space, not the simulators, he reminded himself. If nothing else, that would prevent Holderman and his merry band from fudging the exercise's parameters still further once it was actually underway—and Scooter Smith wouldn't put even that past this bunch. Unlike Maxwell, he had at least a suspicion of what had punched Holderman's buttons, and he wondered what in heaven's name had possessed the Skipper to do something that dumb.

Well, I guess even captains can fuck up, he thought as philosophically as he could, and at least there won't be all that many "bad guys" looking for us. Aside from the base itself, there's only five SDs and the battlecruisers. That's a lot of sensor ability, but Captain Harmon's a sneaky one. I'll bet she and Commander Stackowitz will figure out a way to get a hell of a lot closer in before detection than old Holderman even dreams is possible!

"Time to translation?" Citizen Rear Admiral Kellet asked her staff astrogator quietly as she and Citizen Commissioner Ludmilla Penevski stepped onto PNS Schaumberg's flag deck.

"Approximately six hours, forty-three minutes, Citizen Admiral!" Citizen Commander Jackson announced crisply.

"Good." She acknowledged his report with a nod and looked at Penevski. The other woman looked back impassively, then produced a smile.

"Our people seem confident, Citizen Admiral," she remarked quietly as the two of them walked towards the master plot, and Kellet shrugged.

"They should be, Citizen Commissioner. I could wish for a little more tonnage and a few ships of the wall, but I'm confident we can hold our own against any picket we're likely to hit."

"Even if, unlike us, they do have superdreadnoughts?" Penevski asked still more quietly, and this time it was Kellet who bared even white teeth in a thin smile. It was hungry, that smile, and most unpleasant despite its whiteness, and her dark eyes gleamed.

"The gap between our onboard systems efficiency and the enemy's has fallen since the war began, Citizen Commissioner," she said. "Oh, they still have an edge, but our best estimate is that our technology transfers have reduced it by at least fifty percent. What's really made them so dangerous to us for the last several years has been the fact that they had missile pods and we didn't. The overwhelming advantage that gave them in the initial missile exchanges would be very difficult to exaggerate. Certainly the sheer volume of a pod salvo was enough to make any real difference between our missile defense capabilities largely irrelevant. But now we have pods of our own, with a sixty percent edge in the number of birds per pod, and that means the playing field just got leveled big time, Ma'am."

"So I understand," Penevski replied. "But there's no point pretending I'm as technically informed as you are, Citizen Admiral. I suppose it's just a little harder for me to accept the projections when I don't fully understand the basis upon which they were made... especially when you seem to be saying that we've reached a point at which the relative capability of our defenses does count once more."

"Understandable enough, Ma'am," Kellet said. Penevski had been assigned as her people's commissioner only three months earlier, and they were still learning to know one another. One thing she had already discovered, however, was that Penevski was at least willing to admit when she didn't know something. Jane Kellet was prepared to forgive any superior for a great many other failings when that was true, and she turned to face Penevski squarely.

"In the end, missile engagements come down to numbers, Citizen Commissioner," she said, "because probability theory plays no favorites. Differences in electronics warfare, jammers, and decoys can divert fire from a target, thus reducing the number of birds which become actual threats, but if a missile achieves lock, and if it retains maneuver time on its drive, only active defenses can stop it."

She paused for a moment, and Penevski nodded to show she was following her.

"Any ship, or squadron, or task force has only a finite active antimissile capability," Kellet resumed, "and that capability is defined by the interplay of scanner sensitivity, the sophistication of the defenders' fire control and supporting ECCM, and the effectiveness and numbers of the weapons systems the defender can bring to bear upon incoming fire.

"Since the war began, the Manties have held a considerable advantage in scanners, fire control, and ECCM. Their missiles' onboard seekers and penaids are also better than ours, but that's a separate issue and harder to quantify, anyway. Our countermissiles and laser clusters are roughly comparable to theirs, and it appears that we do a little better job with our main battery energy weapons when we use them in counter-missile mode, as well. But the Manties' electronics superiority, coupled with their previous monopoly on the missile pod, has given them a very substantial edge in missile engagements.

"But now our Solly... associates have helped us upgrade our electronics and reduce their superiority in that area from probably a thirty to thirty-five percent or so advantage to no more than fifteen or sixteen percent. Even more importantly, however, we can now swamp their fire control with massive salvos, just as they've been doing to us ever since the Battle of Hancock.

"What that means becomes apparent when we look at the probable numbers here. Intelligence estimates that the Manties have a maximum of a heavy battle squadron, with screen, waiting for us— call it twelve SDs, maybe the same number of battlecruisers, and twenty or thirty cruisers and destroyers. Assuming previous engagements are any meterstick, they'll choose a compromise between the maximum numbers of pods they can tow and their acceleration curves. They don't like to reduce their max accel, so their super-dreadnoughts will be good for ten to twelve pods each, but their battlecruisers will probably have a maximum of four on tow, with perhaps two more for each heavy cruiser. Taking the worst case estimate, then, they'll have a hundred forty-four behind the SDs, forty-eight behind the battlecruisers, and call it thirty-two behind heavy cruisers.

"That gives them two hundred twenty-four pods, with a total missile load of about twenty-two hundred. We on the other hand, have a lot more tractor capability than they do, and the new Mars-class heavy cruisers have more brute impeller strength than their compensators can handle anyway."

She chose not to complicate her little lecture by explaining that that was because the People's Navy had hoped that either they would have captured intact samples of the Manties' new inertial compensator technology or that their Solarian suppliers would have figured out how they worked by now. Neither had happened, which left the Mars-class ships ridiculously overpowered. But that had its good points, as well. For one thing, they could lose quite a few beta nodes before their maximum attainable acceleration dropped. For another, they could tow twice as many pods as a Manty Star Knight could for the same acceleration loss. And as far as the People's Navy knew, the Manties didn't yet have a clue that that was the case. Of course, if they'd had the compensator efficiency the Manties had, they could have towed three times as many pods, but who knew? The Republic might yet manage to acquire that efficiency somehow, and then...

"What all that means, Ma'am," she went on, shaking off the reflexive thoughts, "is that we'll be going in with twelve pods behind each battleship and six behind each heavy cruiser. It'll reduce our max acceleration substantially—by about twenty percent for the cruisers—but it will give us four hundred fifty-six pods and well over seven thousand missiles in our opening salvo. Which," she smiled again, with that same pearlescent ferocity, "is the reason I'm so looking forward to the Second Battle of Hancock."

"Coming up on translation in forty-five minutes, Citizen Admiral." The tone in which Citizen Commander Lowe made the announcement carried that unmistakable edge of professional calm—the sort pilots or surgeons always seemed to drop into when things threatened to fall into the crapper. Lester Tourville recognized it, but the rules of the game required him to pretend he hadn't, and so he simply nodded.

"Thank you, Karen," he replied with a sort of absent-minded courtesy... which sounded much more absent than he felt. To be sure, his attention was distracted by his plot and the serried icons of Task Force 12.2, but under the surface his thoughts tried to whiplash out in all directions. He was glad Lowe could sound so composed and collected, yet a part of him fretted that her apparent composure might mask some error in her calculations until it was too late. And the fact that his was by far the smallest of Twelfth Fleet's four task forces—in tonnage terms, at least; he had five more ships than Jane Kellet's TF 12.3, but she had nine more battleships than he did—and also had the farthest to go to launch its initial attack wasn't calculated to make him feel any calmer. Despite his earlier conversation with Everard Honeker, he couldn't help feeling more than a little nervous at the thought of hitting the home system of an important Manty ally when he was this far from Republican-held territory, and—

Stop it, Lester, a corner of his mind scolded while his eyes and the rest of his brain sorted out the icons and checked vector notations. So they're going to have at least some sort of picket there to support the Zanzibarans. They still aren't going to have the least idea you're coming, and if they turn out to have ships of the wall on station, you've sure as hell got the acceleration to pull away from them!

"Are the pods ready, Shannon?" he asked without looking up from the plot.

"Yes, Citizen Admiral," Citizen Commander Foraker replied in the carefully correct voice she had acquired since the Battle of Adler. Tourville regretted the wariness in it, but she'd been her old self—sort of—when it came to planning the actual attack, and whatever was going on in her head hadn't affected her flair for sneaky tactics. Or her willingness to make the case for her chosen approach with the sort of blunt succinctness which left no room for misunderstanding... although it sometimes left those who argued with her feeling as if they'd been run down by an out-of-control ground car.

For one thing, she'd argued for a high-speed run-in from the very start, despite some other officers' fear that such an approach could leave them with a dangerously high velocity if there were in fact, Manty ships of the wall in-system. Their concern had been that a high initial velocity would leave them with too much mometum to kill quickly if an evasive vector change were required, but Foraker had shown even less patience than usual with that argument. Even if there were ships of the wall present, she'd pointed out arctically, they would still have to generate an intercept vector, and the less time TF 12.2 took reaching its objective, the less time the Manties would have in which to intercept. In fact, the only way they could guarantee to intercept an attack on the planet Zanzibar would be for them to be in orbit around it and stay there... in which case, TF 12.2 should see them long before they entered engagement range and would have a much higher base velocity from which to evade the defenders and go after its secondary objective: the system's asteroid extraction industry. Besides, a higher approach velocity would not only face the Manties with more difficult interception acceleration curves but force them to commit sooner and at higher power settings, which would degrade the efficiency of their stealth systems and make them far easier to detect early enough for it to do some good.

In keeping with that recommendation, she'd also argued that the retention of their own ships' full acceleration capability was more important than putting the maximum possible number of pods in space. That liveliness in maneuver, after all, was the one advantage battleships held over ships of the wall, and she refused to throw it away. So rather than tow the pods astern, she'd suggested, they should take a page from the Manties' book in the Fourth Battle of Yeltsin and tractor the pods inside the wedges of their battleships, where they would have no effect on their acceleration curves. Their battlecruisers could tractor only two pods inside their wedges, and the heavy cruisers and destroyers lacked the tractors and wedge depth to tractor any inside at all, but that was fine with her.

Some of the squadron ops officers had hit the deckhead at the very suggestion, but she had simply waited them out with a cold, almost mechanical patience. And when the hubbub had settled, she'd pointed out that battleships had been designed as general purpose workhorses, which meant, among other things, that they had more tractors on a ton-for-ton basis than any other ship type in the Republican order of battle. Each of them could tractor eleven pods— more than most superdreadnoughts, actually—tight in against their hulls. That meant that when they actually deployed them, they could still put over forty-two hundred missiles into space at once, with another three hundred eighty from the battlecruisers. In the meantime, their entire task force's ability to maneuver at full acceleration would not only make them fleeter of foot but might actually convince the defenders that they hadn't brought along any pods until it was too late.

Most of the doubters had acquired suddenly thoughtful expressions at that, and those who hadn't had shut their mouths anyway when Tourville glared at them. This was the command team which had produced the Battle of Adler, after all. And even if it hadn't been, Lester Tourville was a citizen vice admiral who clearly enjoyed the full-bodied support of his people's commissioner.

Now Tourville grinned crookedly at the memory. Perhaps there were some advantages to promotion after all, he mused. But then his thoughts slipped back to the little matter of astrogation, and he leaned back in his chair with a quiet sigh which he hoped concealed the tension coiling tighter in his midsection from any of his juniors.

Karen Lowe was an excellent astrogator, but a hyper voyage this long provided a great deal of scope for minor astrogation errors to produce major results. Overshooting their intended n-space translation point wouldn't be all that terrible... unless, of course, they overshot it too badly. A ship which attempted to translate out of hyper inside a star's hyper limit couldn't. As long as it made the attempt within the outer twenty percent of the hyper limit, all that happened was that it couldn't get into n-space. If it made the attempt any further in than that, however, Bad Things happened. Someone had once described the result as using a pulse cannon to fire soft-boiled eggs at a stone wall to see if they would bounce. Lester Tourville rather doubted they would, and even if he was wrong, it was a proposition he had no desire at all to test firsthand.

And that was what made the nervous serpent shift and slither in his belly as the digital display counted down towards the translation, because after a voyage of over a light-century and a half, it would take an error of only one five-millionth of a percent to give them all an egg's-eye view of that stone wall. He trusted Citizen Commander Lowe implicitly... but he couldn't quite shut his mind off when it yammered about teeny-tiny errors and misplaced decimal points.

And, he thought dryly, your having supported Shannon's insistence on coming in fast and hot won't make things any easier for Karen, now will it?

It wouldn't, and he knew it. But he wasn't about to change his mind, either, because his tac witch was right. His task force was in the lowest alpha band, traveling at .6 c and headed for a crash translation. He knew what most of his crews were going to have to say about that, but they should have plenty of time to stop throwing up before the Manties could come into range. And by hitting the wall at roughly a hundred and eighty thousand kilometers per second, he would carry an n-space velocity of a bit more than fourteen thousand KPS across it with him.

The system's G4 primary had a hyper limit of just over twenty light-minutes, the planet Zanzibar orbited it at nine light-minutes, and their course had been chosen to drop them into n-space at the limit's closest approach to the planet. All of which meant that if Lowe hit her translation point exactly right, they should drop into n-space almost exactly eleven and a half light-minutes from their target. And with an initial velocity of 14,390 KPS and a maximum fleet acceleration of 450 gravities, they could reach Zanzibar's orbit in one hundred and sixteen minutes. They'd be moving at over forty-five thousand KPS when they crossed it, and decelerating and coming back to tidy up would be a time-consuming pain, but the advantages of a high-speed pass more than compensated. Even if the Manties and Zanzibarans were there in sufficient strength to stand and fight, his velocity would be such as to make their engagement window very brief. And whatever happened, his units would pass close enough to the planet to take out its orbital installations with missiles without hitting too many neutral merchantmen... or the planet itself.

He damned well hoped so, anyway. If he launched missiles that went wild and hit the surface of an inhabited planet in the middle of a civilian population somewhere, even by accident—

He shuddered. He would never forgive himself if he let something like that happen. But more important than any personal guilt he might feel, however traumatic, violation of the Eridani Edict's ban on indiscriminate planetary bombardment was the one thing guaranteed to bring the Solarian League Navy down on any star nation like a hammer. There wouldn't be any internal Solarian debate, no arguments or resolutions or declarations, for none would be needed. Enforcement of the Eridani Edict had been part of the League's fundamental law for five hundred and three years, and the League Navy's standing orders were clear: any government or star nation or rogue mercenary outfit which indiscriminately bombarded an inhabited planet or directed a bombardment of any sort against a planetary population which had not first been summoned to surrender would be destroyed.

It was probably the closest the Sollies would ever come to a clear-cut foreign policy decision, at least in his lifetime, Tourville reflected. But it was one they came by naturally... and one they had implemented five times since 1410 P.O.

The first two centuries after the Warshawski sail had rendered interstellar warfare practical had seen more than their share of atrocities, including ruthless attacks on defenseless planetary populations. It had been bad enough then; with the weapons available now, it would be far worse. A single superdreadnought—for that matter, even a single battlecruiser—could exterminate every city, town, and village on any planet once the target's defenses had been suppressed. These days, they could do it with kinetic missile strikes, duplicating on a far grander scale the so-called "Heinlein Maneuver" Old Earth's rebellious colonists had employed in the Lunar Revolt of 39 A.D. The Lunar rebels had settled for dropping cargo shuttles loaded with rock into Old Earth's gravity well; a missile capable of eighty or ninety thousand gravities of acceleration was incomparably more effective than such crude, improvised weapons. And a kinetic strike would do minimal damage to the rest of a planet and leave it suitably empty for the attacker's own colonists.

Except that the Solarian League, having experienced the bitter horrors of trying to clean up after such an atrocity on one of its member worlds, had not only unilaterally issued the Eridani Edict but incorporated it as Amendment Ninety-Seven of the League Constitution. Seven billion human beings had died in the Epsilon Eridani Massacre. The Solarians had not forgotten them, even today, and no one who was still in shouting distance of sanity wanted to remind them once again and bring the League Navy down on his head by violating the edict.

He pushed the thought to the back of his brain with an impatient flick of a mental hand. The Eridani Edict had no bearing on today's mission, and it was time he stopped fretting about the Sollies and started concentrating on the Manties.

"Well, you said you wanted to push him into cooking the exercise," Jackie Harmon observed to Alice Truman as the two captains rode the lift down to Harmon's wing briefing room.

"I did," Truman agreed calmly. "On the other hand, I'm a little disappointed in him if this is the best he can do."

"'Best he can do'?" Harmon echoed. The COLAC shook her head. "Let's see, he's increased our vulnerability to detection by about eighty-five percent, reduced our EW's ability to confuse his fire control by the same amount, and reduced the effectiveness of our active defenses by forty percent. Just what exactly did you expect him to do for an encore?"

"Oh, I admit it should do the job," Truman agreed with a chuckle. "He's going to wax most of our wing, though your people are enough better than he's willing to admit that I think he's still going to get hurt a lot worse than he expects. But it's a purely brute force approach... and one he's going to find extremely hard to justify when Admiral Adcock and Admiral Caparelli start asking pointed questions."

The lift came to a stop and the doors slid open, and she went on speaking—in a lowered voice—as she and Harmon stepped out into the passage.

"Reducing your EW is the most arbitrary change he could possibly have made—and it's also one which is totally unjustifiable on the basis of ONI's estimates of Peep capabilities, present or near-term future. He's being so ham-handed I almost feel guilty... as if I've just pushed a baby chick into a pond full of Sphinx near-pike."

"Oh?" Harmon cocked her head to regard Minotaur's captain sidelong, and her smile was wry. "Well, just at the moment, I feel more like the chick, knowing what's coming. So I hope you'll excuse me if I don't feel a great deal of sympathy for the good admiral?"

"I suppose I'll have to," Truman agreed with a theatrical sigh as they reached the briefing room hatch and it opened before them.

"Attention on deck!" Commander McGyver barked as the two captains appeared. He and Barbara Stackowitz had been conducting the preliminary brief, and Harmon smiled again, more wryly even than before, as she sensed her officers' reaction to what they had already heard.

"At ease," Truman told them, and they settled back in their chairs, regarding their superiors warily. Truman took her own seat without another word—she was still the senior officer present, but this was Harmon's domain—and the COLAC folded her arms as she faced her people.

"All right," she said, "the XO and Commander Stackowitz have already given you the bad news. Yes, we're going in with our electronics artificially degraded, and, yes, we're going to get our butts kicked. But along the way, we're going to do a little—"

A sharp, shrill sound interrupted her, and she turned her head quickly. Stackowitz was already reaching for the acceptance key, and she cut the priority com signal off with a sort of dying wheep! The screen lit, and the commander's eyebrows arched in surprise as she recognized Minotaur's executive officer on the display.

"Briefing Four," she told him. "Commander Stackowitz. How can I help you, Sir?"

"I need the Captain, Commander," Commander Haughton replied crisply, and his Gryphon accent was much more pronounced than usual. Truman frowned as she heard it, then crossed to stand beside Stackowitz' chair and lean into the com pickup's field.

"Yes, John? What is it?"

"Captain, we need you on the bridge," Haughton told her flatly. "The FTL net's just reported a bogey, Ma'am—a big bogey, that hasn't pulsed us an arrival notification—and it's headed straight in system at ten thousand KPS, accelerating at four-point-zero KPS squared." He paused and cleared his throat. "I don't know who they are, Ma'am, but they sure aren't ours."

Chapter Thirty-Four

"Captain is on the br—" the quartermaster began, but Alice Truman's curt wave cut him off as she stormed out of the lift onto HMS Minotaur's command deck.

"Talk to me, Tactical!" she snapped, continuing in a straight line for her command chair.

"They came out of hyper five minutes ago, Ma'am," Commander Jessup replied quickly. "They made translation just above the ecliptic and just outside the hyper limit and headed straight in. Present range to the primary is six-five-six-point-six light-seconds. Bearing from Hancock Base is zero-zero-three zero-niner-two relative, range to orbit shell intercept three-five-one-point-eight-five light-seconds, closing at one-one-two-zero-one KPS and accelerating at four-point-zero KPS squared."

"Um." Truman had continued across the deck as Jessup spoke. Now she threw herself into the command chair McGyver had vacated at her approach. Her eyes darted down to the plot, and she frowned at the vector projections. Then she punched for a readout on the probable enemy types, and her frown deepened.

Thirty-plus battleships, ten or twelve heavy cruisers, and a half-dozen destroyers, she thought, fingers drumming nervously on the arm of her command chair. Individually, nothing in that force could stand up to Rear Admiral Truitt's superdreadnoughts; collectively, they could demolish everything Truitt had in twenty minutes of close action. They'd get hurt in the process, but they could do it. And their low acceleration made her wonder if they'd need even twenty minutes... or get hurt all that badly. They had to be towing heavy loads of pods to account for that acceleration, and Adler had proved Peep missile pods were not to be taken lightly. Which meant Hancock was going to fall, and that was more than just a disaster because there wasn't enough shipping with enough life support in the entire system to take off the personnel assigned to the steadily expanding fleet base. And—

Her fingers stopped drumming suddenly, and her eyes narrowed as a thought struck her. It was preposterous, of course. Or was it? She turned it over in her mind, examining it from all angles with feverish haste while the Peeps' vector built steadily towards Hancock Base. Could it really be—?

She began punching rapid-fire numbers into her plot.

"Could they have seen Minnie yet?" she demanded of the tac officer, using the nickname she'd done her level best to stamp out in her distraction.

"No way, Ma'am," Jessup replied confidently, and she nodded at the confirmation. Not that she'd expected anything else. Minotaur had been running silent under stealth for the point from which she and Harmon had decided to launch their "attack" on Hancock Base's defenders—which wasn't all that far, on the scale of deep space, from where the Peeps had actually appeared—and anything that could hide from the Hancock sensor net wouldn't be picked up by Peep sensors even if the damned Sollies had doubled their efficiency. And that meant...

She stopped, looking at the results on her plot, and swore silently. She couldn't quite pull off what she'd hoped for, but the fallback looked good.

"Check me on this, Alf," she said, turning to face the tactical section. "I make it that they're on course for a speed-zero/range-zero intercept with the orbit base. Do you concur?"

"Yes, Ma'am," Jessup replied. "Assuming accelerations remain constant at four KPS squared, they'll hit turnover in approximately forty-five minutes at just under six-zero-point-six million klicks from the base. Time to zero/zero intercept from now is one-three-six-point-seven-niner minutes."

Truman nodded again as he confirmed her figures. Of course, if the Peeps decided to, they could simply maintain a constant acceleration, in which case they would cross the base's orbital shell in only eighty-three minutes. They'd be well "ahead" of the base at the time if they stuck with their current heading, but they'd have plenty of time to adjust their course for a missile pass.

But whichever option they pursued, they would certainly remain on their current heading at their current acceleration at least to the turnover for the zero/zero approach, and that gave her forty-five minutes with which to work. She turned to look down at her plot again, then looked at her helmsman.

"Bring us to zero-one-zero zero-seven-eight at three-zero-zero gravities," she said.

"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Zero-one-zero zero-seven-eight at three hundred gravities," the helmsman replied, and Truman punched a comstud.

"LAC Control, COLAC speaking," Harmon's voice responded instantly.

"We're going to get a live-fire test of your birds after all, Jackie," Truman said with a tight smile. "Are they prepping?"

"Yes, Ma'am! We're loading the mags with war shots now. We'll be ready to launch in four minutes."

"Um." Truman punched a fresh set of assumptions into her plot and scowled. It would stretch the range envelope still further and require a higher acceleration from the LACs than she really liked, EW or no EW, but it would be possible. Probably.

"All right," she said. "Here's what we're going to do..."

"Here come the Manties, Citizen Admiral," Citizen Commander Morris called out, and Jane Kellet looked up quickly. She'd known the defenders would have the precious advantage of near real-time data on her command thanks to their FTL sensor net, but her own gravitics were quite capable of picking up impeller signatures at this range. Now she saw them on her plot, coming at her, and her eyebrows rose at the data codes beside their icons.

"Are you certain about those class IDs, Olivia?" she asked her tac officer.

"CIC's confidence is high, Citizen Admiral," Citizen Commander Morris replied. "We see no evidence that they're trying to spoof us, nor are they running under stealth. Of course, with that much power to their wedges, even Manty stealth systems would be pushed to the max. Our best count makes it five superdreadnoughts and eleven battlecruisers with eight light cruisers or destroyers screening them."

"And they're accelerating at four hundred and thirty-five gravities?"

"Aye, Ma'am. CIC makes it... four-point-two-six KPS squared. That's why their signatures are so clear."

"I see." Kellet leaned back in her command chair, stroking her chin, and Citizen Commissioner Penevski looked a question at her.

"I'm a bit surprised by their tactics, Citizen Commissioner," Kellet admitted. "Given their acceleration, they must have cut their pod strength to the bone. Everything they've got has to be inside their wedges, and that means we can't be looking at more than a hundred pods or so."

"Why would they do that?" Penevski asked.

"That's what I don't quite understand," Kellet said. "Unless..." She tapped some numbers into her plot and frowned at the vectors the display obediently generated. "Well, I suppose that could be it," she said finally.

"What could?" Pevenski's tone was that of a woman who was reining in her own frustration to be polite... and wanted the Citizen Rear Admiral to know it. Kellet's mouth quirked wryly at the thought, and she looked up at the people's commissioner.

"Their current course and acceleration will intercept our projected vector well before the point at which we'd make turnover for a zero-speed intercept of their base," she said. "They probably figure we have to maintain our profile that far whatever we intend to do—and they're right," she admitted. "I suppose what they could be hoping to do is to blow past us with the maximum velocity differential they can generate and rake hell out of us in a passing engagement, but I wouldn't have thought they'd try something like that."

"Why not?"

"Because it buys them the worst of all worlds, Ma'am. Their current acceleration indicates that they're light on pods, so they've sacrificed a lot of firepower to achieve it. At the same time, our accel curve almost has to have told them we're coming in heavy with pods—on the battleships, at least; they probably figure the heavy cruisers are light, since they can't know how much reserve impeller strength the Mars-class has. Our closing speeds won't really matter very much to the kind of missile exchange they're inviting, and we'll hurt them badly at the very least. And after we do, they'll be behind us, headed out-system and unable to kill enough velocity to stay with us while we go sailing merrily inward and blow their fleet base to dust."

"Could they be intending to reverse acceleration before we actually intercept them?" Penevski asked.

"Certainly they could, and it's what I would have expected them to do, assuming they intended to fight us at all," Kellet agreed. "But in their place, I'd want to do that at some point after we've made turnover... especially since that would've let them pull a lower acceleration. Which, in turn, would have meant they could have brought along a maximum pod load—and used their EW to hide their signatures longer to keep us guessing—instead of stripping down and coming in wide open this way."

"Could it be that they just want to engage as far from their base as possible?" Penevski wondered.

"It could," Kellet conceded, "but, again, I can't see a reason they should. Their accel will let them come further out to meet us and match vectors sooner—and further from their base—than they could have otherwise if that's what they want to do, Ma'am. What it won't do, however, is give them any particular advantage. Even with maximum pod loads, they'd have been able to match vectors far beyond our missile range of the base. Meeting us further out of range of it doesn't offer any advantage commensurate with the sacrifice in firepower they've accepted."

"Maybe surprise just panicked them into making a mistake, then," Penevski suggested.

"I suppose it's possible..."

"What do you make of it, Ira?" Citizen Captain Hall asked calmly.

"Beats me, Citizen Captain," Citizen Commander Hamer replied from her com screen. The XO was in Auxiliary Control, as far away from the bridge as he could get, ready to take over in the event that something unfortunate happened to Schaumberg's command deck, but he had the same displays Hall did, and his expression was puzzled on the small com screen.

"Do you have any suggestions, Oliver?" the Citizen Captain asked next, glancing at her tactical officer, and Citizen Commander Diamato shrugged to indicate his matching bafflement.

As promised, Citizen Captain Hall and Citizen Commander Hamer had kept Diamato thoroughly busy with tactical problems in his putatively free time. Along the way, he had come to admire both of them—and especially the citizen captain—intensely. He still had some qualms about their possible political opinions, but they made a brilliant command team. And in another five or six years, Diamato calculated, he might be as good a tactician as the Citizen Captain, assuming she and Hamer kept hammering away at him hard enough. For the moment, however, he was devoutly grateful he was only third in Schaumberg's chain of command, for working so closely with Hall had shown him the weak spots in his own experience. He'd come up too quickly, been driven up the rank ladder too rapidly, to acquire the sort of foundation he truly needed, and he was grateful to the Citizen Captain for showing him that.

"I think someone over there's screwed up, Ma'am," he said, and felt his face stiffen, his eyes darting towards Citizen Commissioner Addison as he realized how he'd addressed her. Addison gave him a dagger-sharp glance, but then the Citizen Commissioner looked away without saying anything, and Diamato sighed in relief.

"You may be right," Citizen Captain Hall said, her voice as calm as if she hadn't heard anything at all out of the ordinary. "But while I have no objection at all to seeing the Manties screw up—and God knows Adler proved they can screw up just as badly as anyone else—I don't think I'm quite ready to leap to any conclusions here. Stay on your sensors, Oliver. I've got a feeling something nasty is headed our way. We just haven't seen it yet."

"So far, so good," Alice Truman murmured to herself. Minotaur had swept in from the side, angling to cross the Peeps' course well behind them. Her EW was the best in the RMN, which (presumably) meant the best in space, at least for the moment, and she was using it for all she was worth. Not that the Peeps would worry too much if they did see her. She would cross directly astern of them in a little over twelve minutes, but she would also be something like eight million kilometers from them, well beyond effective missile range, especially for missiles trying to overtake them from astern.

Of course, there were a few other things the Peeps didn't know about. Like the ninety-six LACs which had launched from the big carrier over half an hour ago and darted away on a radically divergent course. Their impellers were far more powerful than any previous LAC's, but they were still much weaker than any conventional warship's. Coupled with their EW, that let them move at almost five hundred gravities and remain undetected at a range as low as thirty light-seconds. They could probably get even closer than that under ideal circumstances—like against Peep-quality sensors manned by people who had no idea they existed. Their acceleration rates were rather lower than that by now, however, for this was no time to take unnecessary chances, and they were slicing in toward the Peeps on a sharply converging angle. In fact, they ought to be cutting their acceleration back to zero any moment now.

"Any sign they've spotted us?" Captain Harmon asked quietly.

"Negative, Skipper," Ensign Thomas, Gold One's tactical officer said. "They're sticking with their original flight profile. They'll cross our course starboard to port at a range of two-eight-four thousand klicks in—" he tapped on his key pad "—nine minutes. The angle won't be all that good, but our closing velocity at course intersection will be right on two hundred KPS."

"And their decoys and jammers are still down?"

"That's affirmative," Thomas replied. Then he grinned tautly. "Makes sense, doesn't it, Skipper? They've still got their share of maintenance problems, and they probably don't want to put any more time on their decoys' clocks than they have to. But we're well inside our own missile envelope, so the fact that they figure they don't have to bring their systems up yet has to indicate they don't have a clue we're here."

"Good." Harmon glanced across at her engineer. Lieutenant Gearman sat at his console, hands resting lightly on its edge. He looked almost calm, but a trickle of sweat down his right temple gave lie to that impression. "I'll want full power on the wedge and the forward sidewall the instant I give the word, Mike," she reminded him.

"Aye, Skipper. You'll get it."

"Good," she repeated, then glanced further aft to the second engineer's station and directed a ferocious mock glower at the hairy-armed first-class petty officer who manned it. "And as for you, PO," she said tartly, "I don't want any dropped spanners on my bridge!"

"No, Ma'am," PO Maxwell replied quickly, and rolled his eyes at his own console. He'd always suspected his nickname had made it to the officers' ears, but this was the first time the Skipper had ever used it. He had absolutely no doubt who'd passed her the word, and he resolved to do something to thank PO Smith properly for seeing to that little detail when he got back to the ship. Something humorous, he thought, with boiling oil or molten lead...

"I'm picking up something a little odd, Citizen Cap—" Diamato began, then interrupted himself. "Unknown ship astern of us!" he announced sharply. "She's running under stealth, Citizen Captain!"

"What is she?" Citizen Captain Hall's deliberate tone was pitched to remind him to calm himself, and he drew a deep breath.

"I can't say for certain, Citizen Captain," he told her in a more nearly normal voice. "She's extremely hard to hold even now. I don't think we've encountered ECM this good before. She's about to cross our course about eight million klicks back, but it looks like she's altering heading to follow us in. CIC's calling her a dreadnought, but that's tentative."

"And she's all alone back there?" Hall's eyebrows rose in surprise, and Diamato nodded.

"She's all we see, Citizen Captain."

"Well, she's too far back to engage us even if she wasn't alone," the Citizen Exec murmured from the com screen. Hall had it in split-screen mode, with Hamer on the left side and Citizen Rear Admiral Kellet on the right.

"I agree with Citizen Commander Hamer," Kellet said now, "but what the hell is she doing swanning around all by herself? Why not shape a course to join the rest of them ahead of us? If her ECM's this good, she should have been able to do that."

"Unless she's coming in from the outer system," Hall pointed out, and tugged at the lobe of one ear, frowning down at her own plot. She didn't like the timing on this. The Manties coming out from the base had reversed course after all. At the moment, they were six-point-eight million kilometers directly ahead of TF 12.3, allowing the Republican ships to overtake them at a little over ninety-four hundred kilometers per second. That would let her into extreme missile range of them in another twelve minutes, and now this...

"They're up to something, Citizen Admiral," she said softly, but try though she might, she couldn't figure out what that something was. Yet that was hardly her fault, for Manticoran security had held. No one in the People's Navy had yet heard even a whisper about the Shrike-class or HMS Minotaur and their capabilities.

"Agreed," Kellet said flatly, and looked over her shoulder. "Pass the word to finish prepping the decoys, Olivia," she ordered. "I want them ready to go on-line in five minutes."

"Aye, Ma'am. Shall I initiate jamming?" Citizen Commander Morris asked.

"Not yet," Kellet said after a moment's thought. "They haven't begun jamming yet, either—or deployed their own decoys, for that matter. Given the difference in the number of birds we've each got, I don't want to push them into starting to screw with our tracking capability any sooner than necessary."

"Understood, Citizen Admiral," Morris said.

"And in the meantime, Citizen Captain," Kellet went on, glancing back at Hall, "I think I want to have a little talk with Citizen Rear Admiral Porter." The two women didn't—quite—grimace at one another. That would have been prejudicial to good discipline, after all, for Porter was Kellet's official second-in-command... even if he did need an instruction manual to pour piss out of a boot.

"If you'll excuse me?" Kellet said. Hall nodded, and TF 12.3's CO looked at her com officer. "Get me Citizen Rear Admiral Porter."

"By God, it's going to work!" Alice Truman whispered to herself. She hadn't really believed it would when she'd thought it up, but it had seemed the only possibility worth trying, and so she'd done it. And to her astonishment, Rear Admiral Truitt had accepted her recommendation. He must have, although he hadn't commed her to say so, for his ships were doing precisely what she'd suggested.

Passing that suggestion had worried her. Not the mechanics of the transmission; Minotaur had been within less than two light-seconds of one of the FTL com platforms, easily close enough to hit it with a whisker laser and let it transmit her message in-system. Nor had she worried about the Peeps detecting the grav-pulse message and realizing someone was behind them. By now they had to be able to recognize such transmissions—any decent gravitic sensor could detect them; the trick was learning how to generate them... or read them—but the entire FTL scanner net had been yammering away with enough data transmissions to hide a broadcast of the annual Address from the Throne in the background chatter.

No, what had worried her had been that she'd had to commit her ship and Jackie Harmon's LACs to her plan immediately if they were to get into position. And that meant that if Truitt had rejected her suggestion, the LACs could have found themselves pitted against the Peeps all alone. But that wasn't going to happen, and she smiled evilly as she watched the time display tick downward.

"Got 'em, Skipper!" Ensign Thomas announced.

"Well enough to guarantee lock-on?" Harmon asked sharply.

"I'll have to go active to guarantee that, Ma'am," Thomas said a little less exuberantly, and Harmon grunted. Her LACs were almost at their prebriefed attack points, coasting in ballistically with their wedges up but at minimum power. The range was a little under a light-second, and grasers were light-speed weapons. If everything worked perfectly, the Peeps would have no more than two seconds— certainly no more than four—to realize what was coming.

"All right," she said. "Stand by for energy weapons and missiles. Mike, I want the bow sidewall first, then full power to the rest of the wedge. Bring the wall up the instant Tommy gets his missiles away."

"Understood, Skipper," Gearman replied tautly.

A light began to blink on Citizen Commander Diamato's panel, and he frowned. He punched a query into the board, and his frown deepened as CIC responded.

"We're picking up something to port, Citizen Captain," he said.

"Something?" Citizen Captain Hall spun her command chair to face him. "What sort of 'something'?"

"I don't really know, Citizen Captain," he admitted. "It's too weak to be a ship's impeller signature or an incoming missile, and we're picking up at least a dozen point sources... unless it's some sort of scatter?" He frowned, then shook his head. "No, Ma'am," he said, this time using the old style address without even thinking about it. "It's definitely separate sources; I'm confident of that. But there's nothing like it in our sensor or threat files."

"Could it be some sort of drone?" Hall asked intently.

"That's what CIC thinks, Ma'am," Diamato said. "But I don't think so. It doesn't... feel right, somehow. And faint as it is, it's too strong for a stealthed Manty recon drone."

"Bring the jammers and decoys up now!" Hall snapped, and Diamato's thumb jabbed at the button.

"What the—?" Citizen Captain Hector Griswold, CO of PNS Citizen Admiral Tascosa, frowned as Tascosa's sister ship Schaumberg suddenly brought her defensive electronic systems fully on-line. He looked at the readouts for a second or two, then switched his eyes to his com officer.

"Anything from the Flag?" he asked.

"No, Citizen Captain," the com officer replied, and he turned towards Tactical.

"Why did the flagship bring her EW on-line?" he demanded.

"I don't know, Citizen Captain," the tac officer replied.

"Damn!" Ensign Thomas swore as a single Peep battleship suddenly lit off every defensive electronics system she had. Those systems remained considerably inferior to the Manticoran equivalents, but they were an awful lot better than they'd been eighteen or twenty T-months earlier, and he swore again as the single ship vanished into a ball of electronic fuzz which made it impossible to see anything as small as a train of towed missile pods.

He started to report it, but Jacquelyn Harmon had already seen it.

"Engage now!" she barked.

"She did what?" Citizen Rear Admiral Kellet looked up from the com screen and blinked at Citizen Lieutenant Commander Morris.

"She brought up our EW without orders, Citizen Admiral," Morris repeated, and Kellet frowned.

"Excuse me, Ron," she said to Citizen Admiral Porter and reached for the interrupt switch. But the display blanked, banishing Porter's image before she could hit the button, and then it lit once more and Citizen Captain Hall's face looked out of it.

"Froggie, just what the h—" Kellet began.

"Ma'am, CIC has just—" Hall said simultaneously, but a third voice cut them both off before she could explain.

"We're being hit with lidar!" Olivia Morris shouted. "Multiple emitters—very close, Citizen Admiral!"

"Locked up!" Thomas snapped as the ranging and targeting pulses from his lidar came back to Harpy. "Firing—now!"

Ninety-six LACs fired ninety-six grasers within the space of barely two seconds. Their angle of closure was too broad for them to get shots up the open after aspects of the Peep ships' impeller wedges, but they weren't shooting at ships. They were firing at missile pods, and they killed ninety-three of them in the first salvo.

The pods were utterly defenseless, following docilely along behind their mother ships, and grasers which could blast through a ship of the wall's armor ripped them to splinters with dreadful ease. When a weapons-grade energy beam hit a target, it didn't melt that target. The energy transfer was too enormous, too sudden. Natural alloy or synthetics, ceramics or human flesh, it vaporized explosively, literally blowing itself apart with fearsome force, and some of the first salvo's targets' sister pods succumbed to proximity damage as fragments blasted into them like old-fashioned prespace armor-piercing shot.

But the LACs weren't counting on that sort of fortuitous kills. Their fire control lashed the other pods viciously, despite the fact that the laser emissions were giving the Peeps' targeting beacons of their own, and a second fusillade of grasers ripped out even as the Shrikes' missiles tubes went to maximum rate fire.

"What's out there?" Jane Kellet demanded harshly. She felt the edge of panic trying to ooze into her own voice and throttled it savagely before anyone else heard it.

"I don't know, Citizen Admiral!" Morris replied, fingers flying over her console as she, CIC, and Oliver Diamato all tried to make sense of the preposterous readings. "There are—"

"LACs!" another voice came over the circuit, and Kellet's eyes snapped back to her com as a sidebar identified the speaker as Citizen Commander Diamato.

"Explain!" she snapped.

"It has to be LACs, Citizen Admiral," Diamato said urgently. "It'd take a dozen Manty battlecruisers to produce that much graser fire, but not even Manties could get something that big this close. And if they were battlecruisers, they'd be firing lasers, as well. And all the point sources, it—"

"Missiles incoming!" CIC reported.

Alice Truman watched the Peeps' jammers and decoys coming frantically on-line and bared her teeth at her plot. Minotaur was too far away to pick up any sort of accurate read on the Peeps' missile pods, but her sensors had reported the first tsunami of graser fire and hits on something astern of the enemy ships. And now the diamond-dust glitter of the LACs' outgoing missiles speckled her display against a background holocaust of independently firing grasers still ripping pods to pieces.

"All right, Alf," she said to Jessup. "Let's you and Commander Stackowitz just see what you can do to help out."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am! Firing now!"

Minotaur twitched ever so slightly as her bow missile tubes opened fire. She was nine million kilometers astern of her enemies and losing ground steadily. Her superior acceleration would change that shortly, but it hadn't yet, which should have made the launch a futile gesture. But she had the first fruits of Project Ghost Rider in her magazines, and the missiles she fired in salvos of nine were like none that had ever been fired in anger before.

"Bow wall up!" Michael Gearman barked as the last of twelve shipkillers erupted from Harpy's bow-mounted tubes.

"Wedge nominal!" PO Maxwell snapped almost simultaneously.

"Ready to answer the helm on reaction thrusters, Skipper!" Lieutenant Takahashi said.

"Very good," Harmon acknowledged, watching her small plot, and her lips curled back from her teeth. The wing had already gutted the Peeps' pods—they might have a dozen or so left, hiding amid the wreckage, but certainly not enough to have any great impact on the coming engagement—and now the Shrikes' missiles were howling in on their targets. The angle was still bad, but the range was down to only 220,000 kilometers, and the closure rate at launch was close to three hundred KPS. That would leave the birds plenty of time on their drives, and with an acceleration of 85,000 g, their flight time was barely twenty-two seconds.

Oliver Diamato watched in horror as the huge cloud of missiles flashed towards TF 12.3. He was right, he thought numbly. Those had to be LACs out there—the individual missile salvos were too small and coming from too many dispersed points to be from anything larger. But there were so many of them! Worse, they'd launched from such short range, and from so many places on so many vectors, that point defense was caught hopelessly flatfooted. CIC and the sensor crews did their best, but the target environment was too chaotic. They needed time for their plots to settle, only there was no time.

The Manticoran missiles came howling down on their targets, in final acquisition before more than a handful of counter-missiles could launch, and laser clusters and main energy mounts vomited beamed energy in a desperate effort to pick them off. PNS Alcazar, senior ship of the task force's understrength destroyer screen, took a direct main battery hit, squarely amidships, from Tascosa. The battleship was only trying to protect herself, but Alcazar was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the hapless ship blew up with all hands as the massive graser ripped contemptuously through her sidewall.

Schaumberg was firing as desperately as anyone else. Diamato's hands flew over his console, his entire universe focused on his responsibility to somehow break through the Manties' EW and find them for his own weapons, yet he felt the ship shudder and buck as the first bomb-pumped lasers tore at her. Citizen Captain Hall's orders to bring Diamato's ECM up on her own initiative made the flagship a much harder target than the other battleships, but with so many missiles flying some of them simply had to get through, and alarms wailed as she jerked again.

"Graser Three down! Direct hit on Lidar One, switching to backup! Citizen Captain, we're taking hits forward! Beta Thirteen and Fourteen are out of the ring! Heavy casualties in Point Defense Five!"

Diamato cringed as the litany of damage reports rolled through the bridge, yet even as he cringed, he knew it could have been far, far worse—would have been worse, if not for Citizen Captain Hall. But that was cold comfort as—

"Direct hit on Auxiliary Control!" someone shouted, and despite himself, Diamato looked up from his own displays at the damage schematic. Auxiliary Control turned bright, blazing crimson as he watched, and he darted a look at the citizen captain. Hall's face was a mask etched from stone, her presence an eye of calm as she forced her bridge crew to hold together by sheer willpower, yet he saw the pain—the loss—in her eyes as she realized Ira Hamer was dead.

"Find me those LACs, Oliver!" she commanded, her voice very nearly as even as it had been before the Manties launched, and he wheeled back to his display.

Reaction thrusters flared, pushing LAC Wing One's bows sideways with old-fashioned brute power. It was slow and ponderous compared to maneuvering on impellers, but it let them maintain their powerful bow sidewalls as they simultaneously turned and rolled to present the bellies of their wedges to the enemy.

Jacquelyn Harmon watched the maneuver with fierce elation. That asshole Holderman might have hung them up out here for months while he tried to sabotage Operation Anzio, but at least his machinations had given her people plenty of time to train. They were reacting like veterans, bringing themselves far enough around to deny the Peeps down-the-throat shots so they could go in pursuit, and she felt herself leaning forward against her shock frame as if to physically urge Harpy on.

But then something caught her eye, and she blinked, lips pursing in surprise, as HMS Minotaur's first nine missiles came shrieking in from astern. They'd taken one hundred and forty-three seconds to overhaul their targets, and their overtake velocity was over a hundred and twenty-six thousand kilometers per second. No other missile in space could have done that; simply to get the burn time would have required a thirty-five-percent reduction in maximum acceleration, which would have put it three million kilometers behind these birds with a velocity almost twenty thousand KPS lower. More to the point, any other missiles would have been ballistic and unable to maneuver by the time they overhauled their prey, whereas these birds would still have close to forty seconds on their drives.

No one in TF 12.3 saw them coming—not even Oliver Diamato. The PN tactical crews could be excused for that. There was so much other confusion on their displays, so many other known threats scorching in on so many different vectors, that none of them had any attention to spare for the single dreadnought so far behind them that it couldn't possibly represent a danger.

And because none of them did, Minotaur's first salvo came slashing in completely unopposed.

All nine missiles were locked onto a single target, and they had not only plenty of power for terminal attack maneuvers but a straight shot directly up the after aspect of its wedge. Two of them actually detonated inside the wedge, and the other seven all detonated at less than eight thousand kilometers. The hedgehog pattern of their X-ray lasers enveloped the stern of PNS Mohawk in a deadly weave of energy, and the battleship's after impeller room blew apart, and her wedge faltered. Unfortunately, however, it didn't fail... and every man and woman aboard her died almost instantly as one laser scored a direct hit on her inertial compensator and two hundred gravities smashed the life from them like an enraged deity's mace.

That caught the attention of the tactical officers aboard Mohawk's sisters, and a fresh surge of consternation washed through them as they realized the Manties had just hit them with yet another new weapon. Their counter-missiles and laser clusters trained around onto the threat bearing, firing furiously at the followup salvos, and at least they had plenty of tracking and engagement time against this threat.

"Admiral Truitt is coming back at them, Skipper!" Evans reported, and Harmon nodded. Truitt's task group had reversed acceleration, charging to meet the Peeps now that their pods had been mostly destroyed, and his own pods launched as he entered attack range. They flew straight into the Peeps' faces, and ships slewed wildly as they tried to turn the vulnerable throats of their wedges away from the incoming fire. But that turned them almost directly away from Harmon's LACs, exposing their vulnerable after aspects, and her people had turned far enough away that they were no longer crossing their own "T"s for the enemy. That meant they'd been able to take down their bow walls, unmasking their missile tubes once more

"Reengage with missiles! Flush the reserves now!" she ordered over the wing command channel, and the missiles she'd held back from the initial attack for just this moment went roaring out.

It was a nightmare for Jane Kellet—or would have been, if she'd had even a single microsecond to dwell upon it. But she didn't have that microsecond. Her task force writhed at the heart of a deadly ambush, with missiles flying at her seemingly from every possible direction, and the Manty SDs were closing on her battleships. They couldn't fight those leviathans—not in energy range—and win... and that didn't even count the damned LACs. Her tac people could find them now that they'd made their presence felt and brought their wedges up, but their decoys and jammers were hellishly effective for such small vessels. Locking them up for fire control should have been easy at this short range, but it wasn't. Worse, they were splitting into two forces which angled away from one another, obviously intending to race out on either flank before they turned and scissored back towards one another with her in the middle. She could see it coming, but the maneuver had turned the bellies of their wedges towards her, which meant she could engage only with missiles.

"All ships, stand by to come to course oh-niner-oh by two-seven-oh!" she barked. It wasn't much, but it would turn her sterns at least a little further away from the LACs and twist her vector violently away from the Manty SDs. Even with their new compensators, those SDs had a lower max accel than her battleships, and if she could just draw out of their range—

"Flush remaining pods at the LACs!" she snapped, her brain whirring like a computer as she considered options and alternatives. She didn't know how many missiles she had left, but she had a decent chance of keeping the ships of the wall from getting into energy range. That meant it was the damned LACs which were the real threat. They, and they alone, had the acceleration and, more importantly, the position from which to overtake her fleeing units. Which meant that every one of them she killed would be—

The incoming missile from Rear Admiral Truitt's superdreadnoughts detonated nineteen thousand kilometers in front of Schaumberg, and the battleship writhed like a tortured animal as two massive X-ray lasers, vastly more powerful than anything the LACs could have fired, slashed into her. One destroyed three missile tubes, breached a magazine, demolished a graser mount and two of the ship's bow lasers, and killed eighty-seven people. The other smashed straight through armor and blast doors and bulkheads with demonic fury, and Citizen Rear Admiral Jane Kellet and her entire staff died as it blew her flag deck apart.

Joanne Hall felt her ship lurch, heard the alarms, saw the flag bridge com screen go blank, and knew instantly what had happened. Disbelief and horror foamed up inside her, but she had no time for those things. She knew what Kellet had been thinking and planning, and as the crimson bands of battle damage flashed in her plot, ringing the icons of the task force's ships, she had no idea who was the surviving senior officer. Nor was there time to find out.

"Message to all ships!" she told her com officer without even looking away from her plot. "'LACs are primary targets. Repeat, LACs are primary targets. All ships will roll starboard and execute previously specified course change.'" She looked over her shoulder at last, meeting the white-faced Citizen Lieutenant's eye. "End it Kellet, Citizen Rear Admiral," she said flatly.

The Citizen Lieutenant's eyes darted to Calvin Addison. The citizen commissioner looked at Hall for one brief instant, then back at the com officer and nodded sharply.

"They're turning away from us, Skipper," Ensign Thomas reported. "Looks like they're trying to evade Admiral Truitt."

"I see it," Harmon replied. She gazed at her plot with narrow eyes, her mind racing. The Peeps were clearly trying to run for it, and after the hammering they'd already taken, they wouldn't be back any time soon. All she and her LACs really had to do was chase them; catching them was no longer necessary to save Hancock, because those ships weren't going to stop running as long as a single Manticoran starship or LAC appeared on their sensors.

But her plot showed their projected vector, and she swore silently. It was going to take them out of Truitt's envelope—not without giving him the chance to batter them with missiles, but staying well out of his energy range—and that meant a lot of them were going to get away. Only three battleships, two destroyers, and six heavy cruisers had actually been destroyed so far, and she gritted her teeth at the thought of letting all those cripples get away. But the only Manticoran ships which could possibly overtake them and keep them from escaping were her LACs, and they were out of missiles. Which meant graser-range attacks on targets which were individually enormously more powerful than her ships were. And which also meant turning the wing's bows dangerously close to its enemies as it pursued.

And they're learning, she thought grimly as two LAC icons flashed crimson on her plot. One broke off, limping away from the battle while the data codes of severe damage blinked beside it; the other simply vanished. They know we're out here, and they're not running scared or shocked anymore, so if we do follow them up, it's going to get ugly. Uglier, that is, she corrected herself grimly, for she'd already lost four ships—five with the latest casualty.

She didn't have to do it. Not to save the system. And what had already happened was a brilliant vindication of Operation Anzio. But that wasn't the point, was it?

"The LACs are pursuing, Citizen Captain," Diamato reported.

"The superdreadnoughts?"

"They're turning to cut the angle on us as well as they can, but they're not going to be able to overtake, Ma'am. I make their closest approach something over a million and a half klicks—well outside effective energy range, anyway. Whoever that is out-system of us could, but she's not trying to." He actually managed a death's head grin. "I don't think I would, either, if I had her missile range," he added.

"Understood," Hall grunted. She glanced at the damage report sidebar scrolling down her plot and winced. A third of the surviving battleships had been hammered into wrecks. And despite what Diamato had said, two of them, at least, weren't going to make it clear after all. They'd taken too much impeller damage to stay away from the Manty capital ships, yet the task force had no choice but to leave them behind and save as many other units as it could.

I hope to hell the other attacks are doing better than we are, she thought bitterly.

"Citizen Captain, I have a com request from Citizen Rear Admiral Porter. He wants to speak to the Citizen Admiral," the com officer said quietly.

He would, Hall thought, watching the missiles fly. And I have to give him command... which I wouldn't mind at all—at least I could also let him have the responsibility!—except that he doesn't have a clue what to do with it.

She darted a look at Addison.

"Citizen Commissioner?" She couldn't ask him for what she really wanted, not in so many words. But he recognized her expression and drew a deep breath. He looked back at her for several seconds, then spoke to the com officer without even glancing in the young woman's direction.

"Inform the Citizen Rear Admiral that Citizen Admiral Kellet is... unavailable, Citizen Lieutenant," he said flatly. "Tell him—" He paused, thinking hard, then nodded once. "Tell him our com systems are badly damaged and we need to keep our remaining channels clear."

"Aye, Sir," the Citizen Lieutenant said in a tiny voice, and Hall turned back to her plot.

"All right!"

Michael Gearman heard Ensign Thomas' cry of delight as Harpy and the rest of Gold Section concentrated the fire of their grasers on one of the Peep cripples. The battlecruiser-weight weapons blasted through armor and structural members like battleaxes, and their target heaved, belching atmosphere and debris and bodies. Gearman shared Thomas' exultation, but he remembered another battle, another ship—this one a superdreadnought—heaving as she was battered to wreckage and her people were slaughtered... or maimed. His hand went to the thigh of his regenerated leg, and even in the heart of his own battle fury, his lips murmured a silent prayer for their victims.

"We've drawn out of range of their superdreadnoughts, Ma'am," Diamato reported hoarsely.

"Understood." Hall nodded. Yes, they'd left the ships of the wall behind, but not before their fire, coupled with those incredible missiles coming in from the lone dreadnought so far astern of her— and, of course, the LACs—had killed another four battleships. That made nine gone out of thirty-three, with all of the survivors damaged. All the tin cans were gone, as well, and only two heavy cruisers remained to her, both badly damaged.

Which means I have no screen at all, she thought coldly as the LACs raced back up on her flanks like shoals of sharks. She had a count on them now, and her people had managed to destroy sixteen of them outright and drive another five off with damage. But that left seventy-five, and their acceleration was incredible. The bastards were hitting her with what was obviously a well-thought-out maneuver; charging up on TF 12.3's flanks, taking their licks from her missiles—which were far less effective than they ought to be— until they reached their attack points, and then slashing in in coordinated runs from both sides. They were scissoring through her formation, firing as they came, and the damage they were doing was immense.

But they lost ground and velocity on her each time they crossed her base course. For some reason, they appeared to completely stop accelerating each time they turned in for a firing pass, but they were turning out over six hundred and thirty gravities of acceleration before they turned in, and they snapped right back up to it as they turned back to parallel her course once more at the end of each pass. Which meant they had more than enough maneuvering advantage to continue battering away at her remaining twenty-six ships all the way to the hyper limit.

Which meant the only way out was going to be through them.

"All right," Jackie Harmon told her squadron and section commanders. Her voice was still relaxed, almost drawling, but her face was taut. She'd lost three more LACs, two of them on cowboy solo attacks they should never have attempted, on the last firing run.

She was down to seventy-two effectives now, and she tried not to think of all the people who had died aboard the LACs she no longer had. "Admiral Truitt's lost the range, so it's all up to us, now. I want full squadron attacks—no more individual horse shit, here, people, or I will provide some unfortunate souls with new anal orifices!" She paused a moment to be sure it had sunk in, then nodded. "Good! Ensign Thomas will designate targets for the next attack run."

"They're turning in on us again, Ma'am!" Diamato snapped.

"I see them, Oliver," Hall said calmly. "Citizen Admiral Kellet's" orders had already gone out, and she bared her teeth at her plot. She knew what was going through the mind of whoever was in command over there. The LACs were enormously outmassed and outgunned, despite TF 12.3's damage. But her opponent simply couldn't stand to see her getting away, and the Manties were clearly out of missiles. They had to come into knife range and engage with energy weapons, where they should have been easy meat for battleships, but she and Diamato had already deduced that there was something very peculiar about these particular LACs. Not only did their acceleration fall to zero whenever they fired their grasers, but even the accel for their lateral maneuvers dropped enormously, almost to what she would have expected out of old-fashioned reaction thrusters. She didn't know precisely what it meant, but they were incredibly resistant targets—extremely difficult just to lock up on fire control and almost as hard to actually kill even when Tracking had them firmly. Could they be generating some sort of shield forward? Something like a sidewall? But how was that possible?

A vague suspicion glimmered at the corner of her adrenaline-exhausted brain, but there was no time to follow it up now. She'd have to be sure she mentioned it to NavInt later, though, and—

"Here they come!"

LAC Wing One altered course and came slashing in, firing savagely. Another Peep battleship blew up, and one of the surviving cruisers, but the enemy had been waiting for this, and their own energy batteries replied savagely. Even more dangerously, the Peeps were firing missiles past them now, as if someone on the other side had figured out about their bow walls. A passing shot was always a harder targeting solution, but the laserheads exploding astern of the LACs probed viciously at their wedges' open after aspects. One of them died, then two more, then a fourth, but the others held their courses, unable to accelerate as they locked their bow walls and poured fire into the enemy.

Too many! Jacquelyn Harmon thought. I'm losing too many! They're running now, and their fire's too heavy for us to take them alone.

"Last pass, boys and girls," she announced over the com. "Make it count, then break off and head back for the Minnie."

Another battleship blew up, then yet another, and she stared into her plot as Harpy reached her own turn-in point and began to pivot.

PNS Schaumberg staggered drunkenly as three grasers burned through her port sidewall like red-hot pokers. The sidewall flickered and died, then came back up at half strength, and four of her energy mounts and two missile tubes were torn to wreckage by the same hits.

But then a fourth graser struck home, and Oscar Diamato slammed his helmet shut as the port bulkhead shattered and air screamed out of the breached compartment. Fragments of battle steel blasted across the bridge, killing and wounding, but Diamato hardly noticed. His eyes were on the lurid damage codes for the port sidewall, and he darted a desperate look at the plot. There! If he rolled ship just right—

"Roll ship twelve—no, fourteen degrees to port!" he shouted.

"Rolling fourteen degrees port, aye!" the helmsman's voice replied over his suit com, and Diamato gasped in relief as the ship turned. But then a sudden, icy shock washed through him as he realized he hadn't heard the Citizen Captain confirm his order.

He turned his head, and his face twisted with horror as he saw thick, viscous blood bubbling from Citizen Captain Hall's skinsuit as the last of the bridge's air fell away into vacuum.

"Damn, I didn't think she could do that," Jackie Harmon muttered as she watched her target roll. Whoever was in charge over there must have ice water in her veins. She'd managed to roll at exactly the right angle to turn her weakened port sidewall away from the LACs following Lieutenant Commander Gillespie in from port for a followup shot. Unfortunately for the Peep, however, it had forced her to give Harmon's group an almost perpendicular shot at her other sidewall, and that was about as good as it was going to get this side of a hot tub, a good-looking man, and a chocolate milkshake.

"Stand by to take us in, Ernest," she told Lieutenant Takahashi.

"Aye, Ma'am." Takahashi checked his own plot, then looked up at Harpy's engineers. "Watch the power to the forward nodes when I call for the wall, PO," he reminded Maxwell.

"I'll watch it, Sir," Maxwell promised him.

"Yeah, I've heard about you and forward nodes, 'Silver Hammer,'" Takahashi said with a grin, and the hirsute petty officer chuckled.

"Take us in—now!" Harmon snapped as the numbers matched on her plot.

"Captain! Captain Hall!"

Diamato knelt beside the command chair while fat, blue-white sparks leapt and spat silently in the vacuum. Citizen Captain Hall sat upright on the decksole, but only because he held her there, bracing her shoulders against his body while he tried desperately to get her to respond. By some miracle, his tactical section was untouched, and so was the com and the helm. Everything else was gutted, and he fought nausea as he tried to ignore the slaughterhouse which had engulfed his fellow officers and friends.

Citizen Commissioner Addison had been torn almost in half, and most of the rest of the bridge personnel were just as dead. But Citizen Captain Hall was still alive... for the moment.

He'd slapped patches over the worst holes in her skinsuit, but her life-sign readouts flickered on the med panel. Diamato was no doctor, but he didn't need to be one to know she was dying. There was too much internal bleeding, and no one could do anything about it without taking her out of her suit... which would kill her instantly.

"Captain!" he tried again, and then froze as the dark eyes inside the blood-daubed helmet opened.

"O-Oliver." It was a faint, thready sound over his suit com, with the bubbling sound of aspirated blood behind it, and his hands tightened on her shoulders.

"Yes, Skipper!" He felt his eyes burn and blur and realized vaguely that he was crying. She must have heard it in his voice, for she reached out and patted his skinsuited thigh feebly.

"Up... to you," she whispered, her eyes burning into his with the fiery power of a soul consuming itself in the face of approaching death. "Get—" She paused, fighting for breath. "Get my people... out. Trust... you, Oli—"

Her breathing stopped, and Oliver Diamato stared helplessly into the eyes which had suddenly ceased to burn. But something had happened to him, as if in the moment of Joanne Hall's death, the spark had leapt from her soul into his, and his nostrils flared as he drew a deep breath and laid her gently down.

Then he rose and crossed almost calmly to his panel. Half his starboard energy weapons were gone, he noted, and most of the other half were in local control. But that meant half of them remained, with on-mount crews to fire them, and he bared his teeth as his gloved fingers flew. There was no time to set it up with proper double-checks, and his internal data transmission links had taken too much damage for him to rely on computer target designation. He was going to have to do this the hard way—the deep-space equivalent of shooting from the hip—but his eyes were cold and very still.

There, he thought. Those two.

He laid the sighting circles by eye, hit the override button that stripped the targeting lidar away from the central computer's command, and painted his chosen targets for his energy battery crews' on-mount sensors. Green lights blinked — he couldn't tell exactly how many—as at least some of his crews picked up the designator codes and locked onto them. However many it was, it would have to do.

See you in hell, Manty! he thought viciously, and pressed the fire key.

A fraction of a second later, LAC 01-001, call-sign Harpy, exploded in an eye-wrenching flash as Oliver Diamato's crews sent two capital ship grasers cleanly through her bow wall.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Admiral Kellet should be hitting Hancock about now, and Citizen Admiral Shalus should already have hit Seaford Nine," Citizen Commissioner Honeker observed. Tourville nodded but said nothing. Of course, Honeker hadn't really expected him to reply. The people's commissioner was just making conversation while he tried to ignore the worm of tension which had to be eating at his own belly.

"Twelve minutes to translation, Citizen Admiral." Citizen Commander Lowe sounded as professional as ever, but there was a certain undeniable edge even in her voice.

"Thank you, Karen." Tourville made his tone as calm and confident as possible. It wasn't much, but when it came right down to it, that was about all any admiral could really do at a time like this.

Rear Admiral of the Green Michael Tennard bounded out of the flag deck lift still sealing his skinsuit. Alarms blared throughout the eight-and-a-half-million-ton hull of his flagship, and he swore vilely as he saw the master plot.

Fifty-plus bogies were scorching in towards Zanzibar. Their velocity was already close to fifteen thousand KPS, and it was climbing at a steady four hundred and fifty gravities. That acceleration meant the intruders couldn't have anything heavier than a battleship, but he had only his own six ships of the wall, six RMN battlecruisers, and a handful of cruisers, destroyers, and obsolete LACs of the Zanzibar Navy to stop them.

"At least they can't be towing pods," his chief of staff observed beside him. "Not with that accel."

"Thank the Lord for small favors," Tennard grunted, and the chief of staff nodded soberly, for the unhappy fact was that Tennard didn't have anything like a full load of pods for his own ships, either. He could put a total of only seventy-three on tow, and that wasn't going to give him anywhere near the salvo density he wanted for his first strike. On the other hand, the Peeps wouldn't have anything at all to respond with, and his SDs had immeasurably better point defense. If he could take out a half dozen battleships in the first strike, then match courses and maintain separation for a classic missile duel, his people would have a fairly good chance of shooting the survivors up badly enough to make them think very hard about breaking off. Of course, the Peeps would be shooting up his ships in the meantime, and those damned missile-heavy battleships of theirs were just the thing to do it with. But—

He chopped his thoughts off and began issuing a steady stream of orders, and even as he gave them, he tried to pretend he didn't know what was going to happen. Not that it would have made any difference if he had chosen to admit it to himself. There was no way he could withdraw without at least attempting to defend Zanzibar. Even if the honor of the Royal Navy hadn't made that unthinkable, the act would devastate the faith of the Star Kingdom's other allies in the worth of a Manticoran guarantee of protection. But the truth was that if the Peeps were willing to take their losses and keep coming, they had the numbers to weather his understrength pod salvo, cripple or destroy his ships of the wall, and still carry through to take out every ship and structure in Zanzibar orbit.

All Rear Admiral Tennard could really hope to do was make it expensive for them, and he set grimly out to do just that.

"Coming up on translation in thirty-one minutes, Citizen Admiral," the voice over the com said, and Javier Giscard reached out to press the stud.

"Understood, Andy," he told Citizen Commander Macintosh. "Citizen Commissioner Pritchart and I will be up to the flag deck shortly."

"Aye, Sir," Macintosh said, and Giscard smiled crookedly at Pritchart as he released the stud.

"I do believe Andy has his suspicions about us," he remarked.

"You do?" Pritchart looked at him sharply, and he nodded.

The two of them sat in his day cabin, already skinsuited while they waited for the alarms which would summon Salamis crew to action stations. No doubt most of their subordinates thought they were deeply immersed in some last-minute planning session—and so they were, in a sense. But none of their subordinates would have expected to see People's Commissioner Pritchart sitting in Citizen Admiral Giscard's lap, nor guessed exactly what sort of plans they were laying. Or so Pritchart had thought, and Giscard's remark touched her topaz eyes with alarm.

"Why do you say that?" she demanded.

"Because he's gone out of his way to tell a few stories about incidents between us, love," Giscard said with a slow smile. "Incidents which never happened—or not, at least, quite the way he describes them—and all of which emphasize the 'tension' between us."

"You mean—?"

"I mean I think he's covering for us," Giscard told her. She gazed into his eyes for several seconds, chewing her lower lip with even white teeth, then sighed and twitched her shoulders in a shrug.

"I'm grateful to him if he is," she said unhappily, "but I'd be even more grateful if he'd never guessed. And he'd better be careful about his stories, too. If he gets too creative and StateSec starts comparing his versions with those of some other informer..."

She let her voice trail off, and Giscard nodded again, this time soberly.

"You're right, of course. But I don't think he'll let himself get carried away. And don't forget—you and I are exhibiting a lot of 'tension' in our official relationship. What he's doing is mostly a matter of... emphasizing that tension, and I suspect most of his embroidery is the sort that could be put down to someone exaggerating for effect. Or possibly an amateur angling for a job as an official informer."

"Um." Pritchart considered that, then sighed in resignation and leaned back against his shoulder. "Well," she said in a determinedly brighter tone, "at least you came up with a brilliant way to get rid of Joubert, Javier!"

"I did, didn't I?" Giscard said rather complacently. He had no doubt that StateSec would figure out that getting rid of Joubert was exactly what he'd done, but, then, he'd made it plain from the beginning that he'd accepted the chief of staff only under protest. And although Pritchart had argued strenuously against his decision to reassign Joubert to command PNS Shaldon, not even a commissioner as vigilant in the People's service as she could argue that it had been a demotion. No one had expected Citizen Captain Herndon to drop dead of a heart attack en route to the target, but his exec had been far too inexperienced to command a dreadnought in action, whereas Citizen Captain Joubert had both the experience and the seniority for the spot. And so Citizen Admiral Giscard had regretfully deprived himself of his services by transferring him to Citizen Rear Admiral Darlington's Task Group 12.4.2 and tapped Citizen Commander Macintosh to fill both the chief of staff's slot and the ops officer's, and everyone—except, of course, for Citizen Commissioner Pritchart's official persona—was delighted with the change.

He chuckled quietly at the thought, and Pritchart smiled, following the direction of his mind with her usual uncanny acuity. His arms tightened about her for a moment, and his mood darkened. At least I can say one thing for worrying about StateSec's reaction if they find out they've got an unregenerate Aprilist watching over a rogue admiral, he thought. It puts the thought of such minor things as being killed in action into their proper, unimportant perspective!

"We'd better go," he said quietly, and she turned to kiss him with fierce, quiet desperation before they stood and donned their masks once more.

"They're going for a straight-up duel," Citizen Captain Bogdanovich said, and shook his head.

"Why not?" Tourville replied quietly. The two of them stood gazing down into the master plot, hands clasped behind them, and the citizen vice admiral shrugged. "Thanks to Shannon, they may figure we forgot to bring any pods along, and their missiles—and point defense—have always been better than ours. In their place, I think I'd want to get to energy range as quickly as possible, but then, I do know about our pods. Even if I try to forget it, I can't, which may be affecting my opinion."

"No it's not," the chief of staff said with a wry smile. "You'd want to charge in and get it done anyway."

"I'm not that bad," Tourville protested. He turned to frown quellingly at Bogdanovich, but the chief of staff only grinned. "Am I?" the citizen vice admiral asked rather more plaintively, and Bogdanovich nodded.

"Oh, well. Maybe you're right," Tourville conceded. But maybe you aren't, too, my friend, he added silently. I may believe in getting in and getting it done, but I'm not prepared to be stupid about it. And I didn't just happen to decide to keep Count Tilly as my flagship, either. She's more fragile than a battleship, but battlecruisers are going to draw a hell of a lot less fire than the battleships are, too!

He smiled at the thought, then turned and walked back to his command chair.

Rear Admiral Tennard waited tautly as the range continued to drop. He'd gone out to meet the Peeps, then turned to decelerate back the way he'd come. The range was down to only a little more than six-point-seven million kilometers now, and he was letting it drop by a steady eight hundred KPS. They'd be in long missile range in a little over four minutes, at which point he would attack and then increase his accel to hold the range open as long as possible.

"Stand by to launch," he said in a firm, quiet voice.

"Recommend we deploy the pods, Citizen Admiral," Shannon Foraker said. The tension everyone else felt burned in her voice, as well, but on her it had a curious effect. It was almost as if this tension were a familiar one—even a welcome one—which displaced that other tension which had gripped her for so long. In that moment, she sounded more like Lester Tourville's old tac witch than she had since Honor Harrington's capture, and he turned his head to look at her. She glanced up, as if she felt his eyes upon her, and then, to his astonishment, she actually smiled and winked at him!

"Recommendation approved, Citizen Commander," he told her, and Citizen Lieutenant Frasier passed the order over the intership net.

"Sir! Admiral Tennard, they're—"

"I see it," Tennard said, and the sound of his own voice surprised him. It was even, almost relaxed, when every cell of his brain screamed his fatal mistake at him. It hadn't even occurred to him that they might have held their pods inside their wedges, and it should have. Such a simple thing to do... and he'd never seen it coming, never even considered it.

But it was always the simple things, wasn't it? And he knew now. The long, lumpy trails of pods deployed astern of the battleships and battlecruisers in ungainly tails, revealing themselves to his sensors, and there were far more of them than he had.

"Course change," he said. "Let's close the range."

"Close the range, Sir?" his chief of staff asked as Tennard's flag captain acknowledged the order.

"Close it," the rear admiral confirmed grimly. "Those people are going to blow the ever living hell out of us when they launch. And then, if they have a clue at all, they'll be the ones holding the range open. They'll stay outside our energy envelope and pound us with more missiles until we're scrap metal."

"But—"

"I know," Tennard said softly. "But our best shot is going to be to get in close enough to land a few good licks with our energy weapons before they take us out." He managed a tight, bitter smile. "I screwed up, and I'm going to lose this system, but nothing I can do will get our people out of the trap I walked them right into," he said almost calmly. "That being the case, all we can do is try to take some of them with us."

"They're altering course, Citizen Admiral," Foraker reported, and studied her plot carefully. "They're coming to meet us again," she announced after a moment.

"Trying to get into energy range," Tourville grunted. He rubbed his luxuriant mustache for a moment, then shrugged. "Bring us about as well, Karen," he told Citizen Commander Lowe. "They must have figured out how Shannon suckered them, but there's an old, old saying about suckers and even breaks."

The two forces continued to close, but at a much lower rate, and as the range fell below six and a half million kilometers, both opened fire almost simultaneously. Rear Admiral Tennard's missiles slashed out, driving for the solid core of Tourville's battleships. But unlike Alice Truman, he had none of Ghost Rider's experimental missiles. Those he possessed had marginally greater range and marginally greater acceleration than the People's Navy's, coupled with superior penaids and seekers, but not enough to make up the difference in numbers. Even with his internal tubes to thicken the launch, he could put only twelve hundred missiles into space; Lester Tourville and Shannon Foraker replied with almost six thousand.

The two salvos interpenetrated and passed one another, and both admirals turned their walls of battle broadside-on to one another, swinging the most vulnerable aspects of their wedges away from the incoming fire... and also clearing their broadside tubes to pour maximum-rate fire into one another.

The displays in CIC showed the holocaust reaching out for both of them, showed the fury hurtling through space, and yet there was something unreal, almost dreamy about it. There were only the light dots of hostile missiles, not the reality—not yet. For now, for a few seconds still, there was only the professional tension, the slivered edges of what they had thought was fear only to feel the reality of that emotion trying to break loose within them, and wrapped about it all the quiet hum of ventilators, the beep and murmur of background chatter, and the flat half-chants of tracking officers.

They seemed to last forever, those last few seconds, and then the illusion shattered with the silence as counter-missiles began to launch and the reality of megatons of death howling towards rendezvous burst in upon them.

Incoming fire began to vanish from the plot as counter-missiles blotted it away, tearing great holes in the shoals of destruction. And then laser clusters began to fire, and broadside energy mounts, and both sides ripped great swathes through the other side's fire. But it was not the sort of battle the Royal Manticoran Navy had become accustomed to fighting. TF 12.2's point defense was far better than the People's Navy's had been, its Solarian enhanced ECM was more effective... and there were far fewer missiles coming at it. The counter-missiles killed almost half of them, and the laser clusters killed a third of those that remained. Scarcely four hundred broke through to actually attack, and half of those were spoofed and confused by decoys and false targets far superior to anything the people who'd launched them had expected.

Two hundred missiles plummeted inward, targeted on thirty-three battleships, but those battleships turned as one, in the exquisitely choreographed maneuver Shannon Foraker had conceived and Lester Tourville had ruthlessly drilled them upon all the way here. The maneuver which turned the entire wall up on its side, showing only the bellies of its wedges to the missiles.

There were chinks in that wall of wedges—huge ones, for battleships required wide safety perimeters for their wedges—but it was far tighter than anything a Havenite fleet had assembled in over eight T-years. It was a Manticoran-style defense, one only a superbly drilled formation could attain, and the chinks in it were fewer, and smaller, and further apart than they ought to have been. Missile after missile wasted its fury on the unyielding defenses of the wedges of which it was built, and Lester Tourville smiled savagely as he watched it.

He lost ships anyway, of course. He'd known he would. Manticoran missiles were too good, their warheads too powerful, for it to have been any other way. But as he had told Everard Honeker three T-weeks before, Esther McQueen and Javier Giscard—and Lester Tourville, for that matter—had allowed for that. They had expected to lose ships... and to keep coming anyway.

Two battleships were destroyed outright, with two more driven out of the wall in a debris-shedding slither, but that left twenty, and they rolled back down to pour fire into what remained of their opponents.

Not that there was much left to shoot at. TF 12.2's fire had been five times as heavy as Rear Admiral Tennard's, and every missile had been concentrated solely upon his superdreadnoughts. Nine hundred and sixty missiles roared in upon each of them, and Tennard's ships were too far apart to duplicate Tourville's maneuver and build a wall in space with their wedges. The Manticoran admiral had never anticipated such a weight of fire. Against what he'd thought he faced, it had made sense to maintain unit separation, give each ship room to maneuver independently within the envelope of the task group's combined point defense. There had been no time to close up his formation when he realized what he actually confronted... and even if there had been, the galling truth was that his force was insufficiently drilled for it. This time, at least, it was the despised Peeps who possessed the superior training, the superior weight of fire... and the superior command team.

Michael Tennard knew that. He admitted it to himself, draining the bitter cup of his own assumptions as he watched a corona of fire envelop his lead superdreadnought. It flashed back along his formation, reaching for his flagship like some monstrous dragon from Old Earth's legends, and then there was only the terrible, unending, world-shattering succession of blows as laser after laser blasted into his flagship. He clung to the master plot, fighting to stay on his feet, watching the lights flicker, the dust filter from the overhead, and then there was a final, smashing concussion and a brilliant flash of light... and darkness.

"My God," Yuri Bogdanovich muttered. "It's like Adler all over again!"

"Not quite, Yuri," Tourville said grimly, looking at the icons of his dead and wounded ships. Three of the twenty battleships he'd taken into the final exchange had suffered severe damage. All told, the enemy had put twenty-nine percent of his wall out of action... but they'd completely ignored his battlecruisers to do it. Now those ships joined their fire with that of the remaining seventeen battleships, battering the Manty battlecruisers into wreckage one by one with merciless concentration. Here and there a Manticoran missile still got through to wreak more damage, but there weren't enough of them... and there were still fewer in each successive salvo as Shannon Foraker's precise fire demolished the enemy launch platforms in ruthless succession.

Nausea stirred in Tourville's belly as he looked out at the spreading patterns of wreckage, the life pods and unidentifiable debris which had once been megaton ships of the wall, each with a crew of over five thousand, and wondered how many of them had survived.

Not many, he thought. No, not many at all. And what the hell am I thinking of? Would I rather it was my people who'd died out there in such numbers? Hell, I have lost eight or nine thousand of my own! I should be glad the bastards who killed them are dead.

But he wasn't. Proud of his own people, yes, and grimly determined to carry through with the job for which so many had paid so much. But no one could look at that display and count all those dead and be glad. Or not anyone Lester Tourville ever wanted to know, at any rate.

He shook himself as the last Manticoran battlecruiser blew apart. The surviving cruisers and destroyers and LACs kept boring in, trying to get to energy range with utter gallantry and total despair, and he turned away, unable to watch their dying.

"Put us on course for Zanzibar again, Karen," he told his astrogator quietly, and looked at Shannon Foraker.

"Start calculating your fire patterns, Shannon," he said. "I hope to God they're smart enough to surrender, and if they are, I'll give them up to twelve hours to evacuate their orbital installations before we take them out. But I don't intend to spend much time discussing it with them." He produced a wintry smile. "If this can't convince them to accept sanity, then nothing I can say will, now will it?"

He sat down in his command chair, tipped it back, crossed his legs, and felt in his breast pocket for a cigar, and all the time he wanted to weep.

Chapter Thirty-Six

"Stand by for translation on my mark," Citizen Commander Tyler said. "Coming up on translation in five... four... three... two... one... mark!"

Task Group 12.4.1, composed of Task Force 12.4's superdreadnoughts and their screening light cruisers, exploded out of hyper into n-space in brilliant, multipeaked flashes of azure transit energy barely a hundred and eighty thousand kilometers outside the twenty-two-light-minute hyper limit of the G0 star known as Basilisk-A. It was a phenomenally precise piece of astrogation, but Javier Giscard was unable to appreciate it properly as he fought the mind-wrenching, stomach-lashing dizziness the crash translation sent smashing through him. He heard others on Salamis' flag bridge retching and knew thousands of other people throughout his flagship's huge hull were doing the same, and even through his own nausea, he reflected on how vulnerable his task group was in that moment. His ships' crews were as completely incapacitated as he himself for anywhere from ten seconds to two full minutes, depending on the individual. During those seconds and minutes, only the ships' automated missile defenses were available to stave off attack, and had any hostile vessel been in position to take advantage of that brief helplessness, the price could have been catastrophic.

But no hostile ship was. Nor was one likely to be, for a star system was an immense target, and he had deliberately avoided a least-time course to the planet Medusa. Not that he was far off one. He intended to waste no time carrying out his mission, but even a slight diversion vastly increased the n-space volume into which his units might make translation. He preferred to have some room to work with... and it wasn't as if he was going to manage to evade the sort of sensor net the Manties must have assembled here. The PN had no hard data on the Basilisk net, but Giscard knew what the Republic's Navy had assembled to watch over its own core systems. The huge, sensitive, deep-system passive sensor arrays standing sentry over the Haven System for the Capital Fleet, for example, measured something on the order of a thousand kilometers in diameter and could detect the footprint of even a normal hyper translation at a range of up to a hundred light-hours. He had to assume the Manties' arrays were even better—after all, every other sensor they had was—which meant there was no point trying to sneak up on them with a slow, furtive approach.

Besides, the Manties were supposed to see him. If the timing worked properly, they would have almost an hour to react to his presence before Citizen Rear Admiral Darlington arrived. Which should give the defenders time to let themselves be well and truly caught between stools when they realized what was actually happening.

Of course, trying to achieve that sort of coordination comes awfully close to asking for the impossible, he acknowledged as his body's protests began to subside and his vision cleared enough for him to see his plot once more. But the beauty of it here is that we don't really have to achieve it. It'll be nice if we pull it off, sort of like frosting on the cake, but we should be all right either way. Should.

"Talk to me, Franny," he said.

"Uh, yes, S— Citizen Admiral." The astrogator shook herself and looked down at her readouts. "On profile, Citizen Admiral," she reported in a brisker, more normal-sounding voice. "Present position is three hundred ninety-five-point-niner million klicks from Basilisk-A, bearing oh-oh-five by oh-oh-three relative. Velocity is... fourteen-point-one KPS, and task force acceleration is three-point-seven-five KPS squared. Range to Medusa orbit is two hundred twenty-nine-point-niner-five million klicks. On current heading and acceleration, we should reach a zero-range intercept with the planet in one hundred thirty-two minutes, with a crossing velocity of forty-three-point-eight-two thousand KPS at the moment we cut its orbit."

"Andy? Anything headed our way yet?" Giscard asked.

"Not yet, Citizen Admiral," Macintosh replied promptly. "We've got a lot of impeller signatures running around in-system, and some of them are almost certainly warships, but nothing seems to be heading our way yet. Of course, we are being just a bit visible, Citizen Admiral. Their sensor net has to have us, and I expect we'll be seeing a reaction soon."

"Thank you." Giscard glanced at Pritchart, then plucked his lip while he considered the two reports. Tyler's only reconfirmed the superb job of astrogation that she'd done to hit her intended n-space locus so closely. The acceleration numbers made Giscard a little nervous, however, even though he'd ordered them himself, for they were higher than was truly safe. Not that the PN found itself with a great deal of choice about cutting safety margins. Like the Royal Manticoran Navy, the prewar People's Navy had restricted its ships' top drive settings to a maximum of eighty percent of their full officially rated inertial compensator capacity. That was because the only warning a compensator usually gave that it was thinking about failing was the abrupt cessation of function... which instantly turned a ship's crew into goo. Since higher power settings were more likely to result in failure, most navies (and all merchant shipping lines) made a habit of limiting their ships to a comfortable safety margin of around twenty percent.

Unfortunately, the new Manty compensators made that unacceptable to the People's Republic. Unable to match the new compensators' power levels, they had opted both to begin building dreadnoughts for the first time in eighteen T-years and to cut their prewar compensator safety margins in half. The new dreadnoughts were considerably less powerful than superdreadnoughts would have been, but their lower tonnage gave them something approaching the acceleration curves a Manty superdreadnought could pull with the RMN's new compensators. By the same token, cutting the safety margins let the People's Navy steal back most of the Manties' advantage across the board. Which didn't help a whole lot when the Manties decided to go to full military power and toss their safety margins out the airlock, but at least it reduced the differential a little.

But Macintosh's report was the really interesting one. Giscard hadn't expected to hear anything just yet, for any defensive picket would need at least ten or fifteen minutes just to get organized... and as much as forty if its CO had been so overconfident he'd let his units sit in orbit with cold impellers. For that matter, Giscard probably wouldn't know for some time even once the Manties began responding, given the quality of their stealth systems. Still, he'd be happier when Macintosh's sensor crews finally detected some reaction to their arrival. In no small part, that was simply because he always hated waiting for the other shoe to drop, but there was more to it this time. Until he had some sign of what the Manties intended to do, he would have no idea whether or not the diversionary effort had worked... or just what sort of hornet's nest he might be sailing into.

Vice Admiral Michel Reynaud, Manticore Astro-Control Service, looked up and quirked an eyebrow as a distinctive three-note alarm chimed. It wasn't a particularly loud alarm, but it didn't have to be, for the master control room buried deep at the heart of the multimegaton space station that housed Basilisk ACS was a calm, quiet place. Not that it wasn't busy. Basilisk ACS oversaw all the traffic passing through the Basilisk terminus of the Manticore Wormhole Junction. A single mistake by one of its controllers could result in the complete loss of several million tons of shipping, not to mention the human cost to the crews of the ships involved, and that was the very reason the main control room was kept calm and quiet and efficient.

It was also the reason the lighting was intentionally adjusted to be on the dim side, the better to make the various displays visible, and why, in a practice dating back to the earliest days of electronic watch standing on Old Earth, the temperature was kept decidedly cool. (Except, Reynaud reminded himself wryly, for the handful of Sphinxians on staff; they insist it's like a balmy spring day... the showoffs!) The deliberate chill was carefully designed to prevent people from becoming so comfortable they dozed off on duty. Not that anyone on Reynaud's staff was likely to have enough idle time to doze off. He snorted at the familiar thought, but his eyebrow didn't come down, for he didn't recall any scheduled exercises with the picket force or Basilisk Station Command, and those were the only people who ever used that particular com circuit.

He turned his well-padded command chair to watch the com officer of the watch kill the alarm and begin inputting the primary authorization code. It always took a fair amount of propitiating with codes and responses to various challenges to convince the FTL com systems to disgorge their contents. Of course, that was to be expected. In Reynaud's humble opinion, most people who went into the Navy tended to be on the anal retentive side (ACS personnel were civil servants, not military—and proud of it—despite their uniforms and rank insignia), and they were especially retentive about toys like their FTL com. Except under very special and carefully defined conditions, ACS was absolutely forbidden the use of its own FTL transmitter, and the fact that only Manticore knew how to read the grav pulses hadn't prevented the RMN from insisting on all sorts of internal security fences.

But despite his private conviction that it was unnecessary, Reynaud was perfectly content to wait out the delay. For that matter, he didn't really mind any of the military-style crap he had to put up with, because he remembered when he and his people had been left all on their own out here. Michel Reynaud was an old Basilisk hand— he had fourteen T-years on the station, longer than anyone else aboard the huge base—and there had been a time when he'd felt nothing but contempt for the Navy. Which had been understandable enough, he reminded himself, considering the useless screw-ups and idle layabouts who used to be exiled to Basilisk. But these days—

A bright red light began to blink on the master communications panel, and Vice Admiral Reynaud never remembered getting out of his command chair. He simply found himself suddenly standing behind the com officer, as if the blood-red flash that announced an emergency Priority One signal had teleported him there. And perhaps it had, a distant corner of his brain thought as he watched over the com officer's shoulder and the message began to appear on her display. But that thought was far away and unimportant compared to the content of the short, terse sentences, and his thoughts reeled as he read the estimate of what was headed for Medusa and all the orbital warehouses, freight transfer points, repair shops, and supply bases that served the commerce which poured through Basilisk daily.

He stared at it for one more moment, mouth dry, then wheeled to face the rest of his staff.

"Listen up, everybody!" he snapped, and heads turned throughout the control room, for they had never heard that particular harshness from him. "There's an unidentified task force headed in-system. Vice Admiral Markham estimates it at a minimum of twenty super-dreadnoughts and fifteen to twenty light cruisers."

Someone gasped in horror, and Reynaud nodded grimly.

"I'm sure the terminus picket will be getting underway shortly," he went on, "but even if they could get there in time, there aren't enough ships in the system to stop this kind of attack. Which means—" he inhaled deeply "—that I am declaring Case Zulu. Jessie—" he looked at his senior watchkeeper "—you're in charge of organizing the evac queue. You know the drill: neutrals and passenger ships first, bulk carriers last."

"I'm on it, Mike." The woman waved for two assistants to follow her and headed for the huge holo tank that plotted every ship movement within five light-minutes of the junction, and Reynaud laid a hand on the com officer's shoulder.

"Pass the word to the standby courier, Angela. Download Markham's dispatch and my own Case Zulu, and get it on its way. Jessie— " he looked back over his shoulder "—clear a priority route for the courier as soon as Angela's finished."

Jessie nodded, and Reynaud wheeled and beckoned to another controller.

"Al, you and Gus are in charge of short-range com traffic from here on out. I want Angela undisturbed on the Fleet com, just in case." Al, the senior of the two nodded, and Reynaud went on in a voice which was both calm and urgent. "There's going to be hell to pay when some of the merchant skippers figure out what's going on. We're ten light-hours from Medusa out here, but they're not going to be thinking about that, and they're going to demand priority to get their own precious asses out of here. Don't let them browbeat you! Jess will give you the movement schedule as soon as she's got it organized. Stick to it."

"Yes, Sir," the senior man said, almost as if he meant to salute—which simply wasn't done in the ACS. But Reynaud had already turned away, eyes searching for yet another officer. She had to be here somewhere, but he couldn't seem to spot her.

"Cynthia?" he called.

"Yes, Admiral?"

Reynaud almost levitated, for the reply came from directly behind him. He wheeled quickly—so quickly, in fact, that Lieutenant Carluchi stepped back to avoid him—and managed, somehow, not to glare at the speaker. It was his own fault, he told himself. Carluchi had commanded Basilisk ACS's Marine detachment for almost five months now, and he should have had plenty of time to get used to the silent, catlike way she moved.

"Oh, there you are," he said with just enough emphasis to make her blush. At any other moment, he would have taken time to enjoy his minor triumph, for Lieutenant Carluchi was as perpetually self-controlled and composed as she was attractive and young. But he had other things on his mind today, and he looked grimly down into the slim, wiry Marine's huge aqua eyes.

"You heard what I told Al and Gus?" he asked, and she nodded without the usual trace of discomfort she felt at ACS' casual, highly unmilitary modes of address. "Good," he said even more grimly, "because it's going to be up to you to put some teeth into their orders if some of those skippers out there actually panic. Can do?"

"Can do, Admiral," Carluchi said flatly.

Unlike the others, she snapped him a sharp salute, and Reynaud actually found himself returning it, albeit with much less precision. Then she turned and left at a trot he knew was going to turn into a run the instant she was out of his sight. Well, that was all right with Michel Reynaud. Lady Harrington had begun a tradition when she detached two of her pinnaces to support ACS' antismuggling inspections twelve years ago. But these days there were twelve pinnaces, not two, and the personnel to man them were assigned directly to Basilisk ACS by the Royal Marine Corps. A pinnace's twin pulse cannon and single light laser weren't even popguns compared to the weapons carried by real warships, but they were more than powerful enough to deal with unarmed, unarmored merchantmen who got out of hand. More than that, Reynaud knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Cynthia Carluchi and her Marine crews would use those weapons in a heartbeat if the situation required it.

He just hoped the merchies knew it, too.

Vice Admiral of the Red Silas Markham managed to keep himself in his seat aboard the pinnace only by main force of will. Eleven minutes ago, he had been ensconced in his comfortable office aboard Medusa Gold One, the Navy's relatively new orbital HQ for the Basilisk Station. He'd been buried to the elbows in boring, frustrating paperwork and feeling ticked off—as usual—by the way the picket had been reduced over the last seven T-months. He'd understood the logic. Hell, he'd even agreed with it! But that hadn't make it any more pleasant to hold what was supposed to be a vice admiral's billet and see the forces assigned to him reduced to something a rear admiral would probably have been too senior to command had it been located anywhere other than a single junction transit from the Manticore System.

But he hadn't been able to argue. The Peeps hadn't even sniffed around the perimeter of the Basilisk System for a standard decade. This was a routine, unthreatened sector, much too far behind the front for someone as defensive-minded as the post-Coup Peep Navy had proven itself to hit. And if that should change, the entire strength of Home Fleet was only a transit away. There would be plenty of time to adjust deployments to beef up his task force if the Peeps ever seemed to be headed this way.

Only now it looked as if no one had remembered to tell the Peeps they were too defensive-minded and timid to try a deep-strike raid like this, because as sure as Hell had a monopoly on brimstone, somebody was headed in to blow the holy howling bejesus out of Markham's command area. And all the comfortable assurance—his, as well as the Admiralty's, he admitted bitterly—about redeployments from Home Fleet were crap in the face of something like this. Even battlecruisers would require almost nineteen hours just to reach the Basilisk terminus from Manticore orbit; SDs would take almost twenty-two... and that was for ships with the latest-generation compensators. Ships could make the actual transit from Manticore to Basilisk in mere seconds, but to do that they first had to get to the central Junction terminus in Manticore. And even after they hit Basilisk space, they would be another twenty-two and twenty-six hours respectively from Medusa. Which meant that getting any reinforcements out here was going to take time. Virtually none by the standards of normal interstellar movement, but tactical combat within a star system operated on another scale entirely. And on that scale, forty-one hours was a very long time indeed... especially with the enemy barely two hours out from Medusa and coming hard.

The pinnace was running flat out, straining to catch up with HMS King William. The flagship, known affectionately to her crew as Billy Boy, was holding her accel down enough for the small craft to overhaul, and Markham watched out the port as the pinnace maneuvered to dock. He didn't think of himself as a particularly brave man, and his belly knotted with tension as he thought of what King William and the rest of his understrength force was going out to face. But heroic or not, Silas Markham was a vice admiral of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and his place was aboard his flagship when she faced the foe, not in some damned office light-minutes behind the battle.

The superdreadnought's tractors reached out to the pinnace, capturing it and easing it into the brilliantly lit cavern of a boat bay, and Markham stood. It was against Regs, of course. Passengers were supposed to remain seated and strapped in during any approach maneuver, but he was in a hurry... and he was also a vice admiral, which meant no one was going to tell him no.

He snorted at the thought, bending to keep peering out the view port as the pinnace settled towards the docking buffers. His eye caught the ship's crest, painted on the outer face of the docking gallery below the armorplast viewing area, and his mouth twitched. The crest was built around the personal seal of King William I, for whom the ship was named, and Markham wondered once again how many of Billy Boy's crew ever considered the fact that their namesake had been assassinated by a psychotic.

It was not a thought he particularly cared to contemplate at a moment like this.

"They're coming out, Citizen Admiral," Citizen Commander Macintosh announced. Giscard held up his hand, interrupting a report from Julia Lapisch as he turned to face the ops officer.

"Strength estimates?" he asked.

"Still too far for any sort of positive count, Citizen Admiral, but it looks like they're present in considerably lower strength than predicted. We make it six to eight of the wall and an unknown number of battlecruisers. They seem to be headed our way at about three hundred gravities."

"Thank you." Giscard turned his chair towards Citizen Lieutenant Thaddeus. "Reactions, Madison?" he asked the intelligence officer.

"Our estimates were the best we could give you from the data we had when Icarus was planned, Citizen Admiral," Thaddeus said.

There was an edge of something almost like challenge in his voice, but Giscard was prepared to let that ride as long as Thaddeus kept it under control. He'd wondered why someone of the citizen lieutenant's obvious ability had not been promoted; now he knew, for the answer had been in the StateSec files Pritchart had received just before their departure from Secour. Thaddeus' older sister had been denounced to the People's Courts by a vengeful lover—falsely, as it turned out—as an enemy of the People. The lover had hanged himself when his anger cooled and he realized what he'd done, but his remorse had come too late to save Sabrina Thaddeus' life, and the SS feared that his sister's fate might turn the citizen lieutenant against the New Order. From what Giscard had seen of the man, they were right to be afraid of that. But it had never affected his work for the Citizen Admiral, and Giscard was hardly in a position to fault another over divided loyalties.

"I know the analysts' data was limited, Madison," the citizen admiral said now, putting just enough patience into his tone to remind the intelligence officer to watch his manners in front of others. "But this is a considerably lighter force than we anticipated, and I'd prefer not to find out the hard way that they actually have all those other ships we expected headed at us in stealth somewhere. So if there was any information, even questionable information, that could shed some light on this, I'd like to hear it."

"Yes, Citizen Admiral. Sorry," Thaddeus apologized, and leaned back in his chair, thinking hard. Finally he shook his head. "I can't really think of anything concrete that could explain it, Citizen Admiral," he said in a very different voice. "But that doesn't mean as much as I'd like. We haven't made any scouting sweeps of Basilisk since the war started and the Manties blew out Seaford Nine. Instead, we've relied on covert intelligence gathered by merchant skippers on our payroll. For the most part, they're foreign nationals, not our own people, which means any report from them has to be taken with a grain of salt, but they're the best we've had."

He paused, glancing at Giscard, and the Citizen Admiral nodded in combined understanding and an order to go on.

"Within those qualifications, they've been able to give us a pretty solid count on the forces deployed to watch over the terminus itself," Thaddeus said. "Those units are easily inside the sensor reach of any merchie using the Junction. But the numbers have always been a lot more... amorphous for the rest of the picket."

"Why is that, Citizen Lieutenant?" Pritchart asked in neutral tones. "My understanding was that over half the traffic passing through this system transships at least some cargo at the warehouses in Medusa orbit before continuing through the terminus."

"That's correct, Ma'am," Thaddeus said much more stiffly. Pritchart, after all, was the enemy as far as he was concerned, yet he seemed a little baffled by his own reaction to her. It appeared that he couldn't quite work up the hate for her that he felt for StateSec's other minions, and that seemed to puzzle him.

"In that case, wouldn't they have been able to observe the other portion of the picket in some detail, as well?"

"Yes and no, Ma'am," Macintosh said, coming to Thaddeus' aid. "They'd get a good look at anyone in close proximity to Medusa, but not at any units that were further out—on patrol, say, or conducting exercises. And the Manties are as sensitive to the possibility of espionage here as we would be in their place. They don't exactly encourage through traffic to use active sensors in areas like this, and there are limits to what merchant-grade passives can pick up. Unfortunately, part of the inspection the Manties have been insisting on since the war started includes a very close look at the sensor suites of visiting merchantmen, and if they find something more sophisticated than they feel is appropriate, the ship in question better have a very good justification for it. If she doesn't—pffft!" The Citizen Commander made a throwing away gesture with one hand. "That ship and that merchant skipper are banned from any use of the Junction for the duration of hostilities, which leaves them no real legitimate reason to be anywhere in the Basilisk System, much less anyplace they could see something that would do us any good to know about. Sort of cavalier of them, I suppose, but effective, and I'd do the same thing in their position."

"The Citizen Commander is correct, Ma'am," Thaddeus added. "We've had some reports that they've been drawing down the strength of the picket for the past several months, but no hard evidence to support them. Under the circumstances, NavInt—" it wasn't actually Naval Intelligence anymore, but Thaddeus, like a great many naval officers (and with more personal reason than most), still referred to the military intelligence section of State Security by the old pre-Coup name "—went with the last definite numbers we had. I suppose the theory was that it was better to make a worst-case assumption. And according to those figures, there ought to have been at least twelve of the wall assigned to the inner-system picket here."

"I see. Thank you, Citizen Lieutenant. And you, Citizen Commander." Pritchart gazed down into the master plot for several seconds, then looked at Giscard. "Does this change your intentions in any way, Citizen Admiral?"

"I think not, Citizen Commissioner," he replied with the exquisite courtesy he habitually used in public to depress her pretensions to interference in his tactical decisions. "There may be less opposition than we expected, but there's still enough to hand us some nasty lumps. And their Home Fleet is still no more than forty to forty-eight hours from Medusa even if it has to come all the way from Manticore orbit." He shook his head. "Hopefully their units will try to come through piecemeal and let Citizen Rear Admiral Darlington chop them up, but if anything goes wrong at that end, they can put a hell of a lot more firepower into this system than we have. I think we'll just continue the profile and head straight for a flyby firing run on Medusa. Unless, of course, you wish to proceed in some other fashion, Ma'am?"

"No, Citizen Admiral," she said in chill tones.

"Excellent," he replied, and folded his hands behind him and turned back to the plot.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Despite the temperature setting, most of the people in Basilisk ACS' central control room were sweating hard as they tried to cope. The initial reaction of the merchant traffic awaiting transit had been confusion, promptly followed by a panic that was as inevitable as it was irrational. They were ten light-hours from the Peeps' obvious objective, and every hostile starship in the vicinity was headed for Medusa, which meant almost directly away from them. There was ample time to get every one of them through the Junction and safely out of harm's way, and even if there hadn't been, they were far outside the Basilisk hyper limit. The FTL sensor net would give plenty of warning if any of the Peeps turned around and headed this way, and it would be relatively simple to duck into hyper and vanish long before the enemy could possibly get here.

Those comforting reflections, however, did not appear to be foremost in the minds of the merchant skippers arguing vociferously with Michel Reynaud's controllers. Lieutenant Carluchi and her pinnaces had already been required to physically intervene to keep a big Andermani ore ship and a Solarian freighter loaded with agricultural delicacies for the inner League worlds from jumping the queue.

Despite his fury with both skippers and a personal dislike for the Solarian League which had grown with each report of technology transfers to the Peeps, Reynaud could summon up rather more sympathy for the Solly than for the Andy. Asteroid ore was scarcely a perishable commodity, and the skipper's flight plan indicated he was on a fairly leisurely routing anyway. But while the Solly was less than two hours out of Sigma Draconis on a direct transit via the Junction, she would add over two T-months to her voyage just to reach Manticore the long way if she was forced to run for it in hyper. And her cargo was about as perishible as they came. Understanding the reasons for the woman's blustering anxiety hadn't made him any more patient with her, however, and he'd watched with satisfaction as Carluchi's pinnaces chivvied her ship back into line.

That was the only satisfaction he was feeling at the moment, however, and he darted a look at the main plot. The six dreadnoughts and eight battlecruisers composing the terminus picket had headed in-system at maximum acceleration the instant the first report came in. They couldn't possibly arrive in time to intercept the Peeps before they hit Medusa, but their CO could hardly just sit here and watch the system fall. The dreadnoughts had all received new compensators, but they were only second-generation upgrades with no more than a six percent efficiency boost over the old style. Nonetheless, Rear Admiral Hanaby was running them at full military power—right on four hundred and eighty gravities—and she'd been underway for ten minutes now. She was over eight hundred thousand kilometers from the terminus, up to a velocity of twenty-eight hundred kilometers per second and still accelerating at 4.706 KPS², and as he watched the icons of her ships moving further and further from his command area, Michel Reynaud felt a chill of loneliness.

Hanaby's departure didn't leave the terminus completely unprotected. But the outbreak of hostilities and the more immediate needs of the Fleet had cut deeply into the funding originally appropriated to pay for the deep-space fortresses that had been supposed to protect the Basilisk terminus... and into the priority assigned to their construction, as well. What had been planned as a shell of eighteen sixteen-million-ton forts had been downgraded to ten... and only two of those had actually been completed. The other eight were anywhere from six T-months to a T-year from readiness—which put the most advanced of them something like five T-years behind the prewar schedule—and Reynaud gritted his teeth at the thought. Two fortresses should be ample to stand off any Peep battlecruisers which might be hiding out there to come running in and jump on the terminus from which Hanaby had withdrawn, but if there was something bigger and nastier in the offing...

He turned his mind away from that thought once again and concentrated on his own job.

"What?" The Earl of White Haven jerked around to face Commander McTierney. His com officer's face was pale, and her right hand pressed against her earbug as if she thought screwing it physically inside her head could force what it had just told her to make sense.

"The Peeps are attacking Basilisk, Sir," she repeated in shock-flattened tones still echoing with disbelief, and for once her Sphinxian accent did not remind White Haven painfully of Honor. "ACS has declared Case Zulu and began clearing the terminus of shipping six— No," she glanced at the time display, "seven minutes ago. Enemy strength estimate when Vice Admiral Reynaud dispatched his courier was a minimum of twenty superdreadnoughts with a light cruiser screen."

"My God" someone whispered behind White Haven, and he felt all expression vanish from his own face as the implications hammered over him. Basilisk. They were hitting Basilisk, and not with any raid-and-run force of battlecruisers, either. Twenty superdreadnoughts were more than enough to take out the entire Basilisk picket, given the way its strength had been drawn down—in no small part to build up your wall of battle, Hamish! a corner of his brain whispered—even if it hadn't been spread between Medusa and the terminus itself.

And after they punch out Markham's task force, they'll destroy every single installation in Medusa orbit, he thought with a dull sense of horror. Will they give the orbit bases' personnel time to evacuate? Of course they will... unless their CO is one of the new regime's fanatics. But even if they do allow an evac, that's still sixty T-years' worth of infrastructure. My God! Who knows how many trillions of dollars of investment it represents? How in hell will we manage to replace it in the middle of a damned war?

The ringing silence about him returned no answers to his questions, but then another, even uglier thought suggested itself to him.

"Did Reynaud say anything about Admiral Hanaby's intentions?" he demanded.

"No, Sir." McTierny shook her head, and White Haven scowled. Reynaud should have passed that information along, but the earl reminded himself to cut the ACS man some slack. For what was basically a uniformed civilian, he'd already done more than White Haven had a right to expect. Which didn't make the lack of information any more palatable.

Still, he thought, you already know what Hanaby is doing, don't you? Exactly what any admiral worth her gold braid would do: steering for the sound of the guns.

Which may be exactly what the enemy wants her to do.

He frowned down at the plot that showed his own command still holding station forty-five light-seconds from the Trevor's Star terminus of the Junction, and his thought stream flashed too rapidly for him to split it down into its component parts. His staff stood behind him on Benjamin the Great's flag deck, staring at his back, with no idea what thoughts were pouring through his head. Their own brains were still too shocked to think coherently, but they could see the weight of his conclusions pressing down on him, see his broad shoulders slowly hunching to take the weight. And then he turned back to them once more, his face set and hard, and began to snap orders.

"Cindy, record the following message to Admiral Webster. Message begins: 'Jim, keep your ships where they are. This could be a trick to draw Home Fleet into Basilisk to clear the way for an attack on the capital. Eighth Fleet will move immediately to Basilisk.' Message ends."

Someone hissed audibly behind him, and his mouth twitched without humor at the reaction. They should have thought of that possibility for themselves, he thought distantly, but his eyes never moved from McTierney.

"Recorded, Sir," she replied. Her voice was still shaken, but her eyes were coming back to life and she nodded sharply.

"Good. Second message, this one to CO Manticore ACS Central. Message begins: 'Admiral Yestremensky, upon my authority, you will clear all traffic—I repeat, all traffic—from the Manticore-Basilisk queue immediately and stand by for a Fleet priority transit.' Message ends."

"Recorded," McTierney confirmed again.

"New message," White Haven rapped, "this one to Rear Admiral Hanaby via Basilisk ACS. Message begins: 'Admiral Hanaby, I am headed to relieve Basilisk at my best speed from Trevor's Star via the Junction with forty-nine of the wall, forty battlecruisers, and screen.'"

"Recorded, Sir."

"Very well. I want information copies repeated to the Admiralty, special attention Admiral Caparelli and Admiral Givens, to Vice Admiral Reynaud, and to Vice Admiral Markham," White Haven went on with staccato clarity. "Standard encryption and code, Priority One. As soon as you've got them coded up, transmit them to Admiral Reynaud's courier boat."

"Aye, aye, Sir."

White Haven gave her a curt nod, then turned to his chief of staff and his ops officer.

"Alyson," he told Captain Granston-Henley, "I want you to grab that courier boat and send it straight back to Manticore as soon as Cindy's transmitted my message. Then I want you and Trevor to build me a transit plan: Trevor's Star to Manticore to Basilisk."

"Yes, Sir." Granston-Henley shook herself, as if to clear the last echoes of stupification from her brain and glanced at Commander Haggerston, then looked back at White Haven. "Standard translation order, Sir?" she asked.

"No." The earl shook his head curtly. "There's no time for a nice, neat, orderly transit; we'll send them through as fast as we can, in whatever order they reach the terminus. If it's a choice between a capital ship and a screening unit, the capital ship goes first; otherwise, it's strictly on an 'on arrival' basis. And, Alyson—" he looked straight into her eyes "—I want this set up to go quickly. Ships will move to the terminus at maximum military power, and transit windows are to be cut to the minimum possible, not the minimum allowed. Use the courier boat to inform Manticore ACS of that intention, as well."

"I—" Granston-Henley began, then stopped herself. "Yes, Sir. Understood," she said quietly, and White Haven nodded and turned back to his plot once more.

He understood Cranston-Henley's reaction, but he had no choice. His fleet was forty-five light-seconds from the Trevor's Star terminus. A destroyer with the latest compensator could accelerate at six hundred and twenty gravities with its safety margin cut to zero, but his superdreadnoughts could manage only four hundred and sixty-six with the same generation of compensator. That meant his destroyer screen could reach the local terminus on a least-time course in approximately thirty-five minutes while his SDs would need closer to forty-one. But a least-time course allowed no room for turnover and deceleration, and this large a force would have no choice but to decelerate to zero relative to the terminus before making transit, however urgent the crisis. And that meant those same destroyers would take fifty minutes while the SDs took just over fifty-seven. And once they'd gotten there, they still had to make transit—not once, but twice—just to get to the Basilisk terminus.

Nor could they go through together. Oh, it was tempting. There was an absolute ceiling on the amount of tonnage which could transit through any wormhole junction. In the case of the Manticore Junction, the maximum possible mass for a single transit was approximately two hundred million tons, which meant he could put that much of Eighth Fleet's wall—twenty-two SDs, for all practical purposes—through the junction in one, convulsive heave. Unfortunately, any wormhole transit destabilized the termini involved for a minimum of ten seconds, and vessels which massed more than about two and a half million tons destabilized it for a total interval proportional to the square of the transiting mass... which meant a maximum-mass transit would lock the route from Manticore to Basilisk solid for over seventeen hours.

If twenty-two superdreadnoughts were sufficient to deal with what White Haven feared the Peeps might be up to, that would pose no problem. But they might not be, and he had fifteen more of them, plus twelve dreadnoughts, under his command. They were the only ships which could possibly reach Basilisk in less than thirty hours, and he dared not leave any of them behind.

But that meant sending them through one by one. As long as there were no hostile units in range to engage them as they threaded the needle back into n-space, there was no tactical reason why he shouldn't do that, and he should know whether or not any bad guys were likely to be in range before he began sending them through. Yet each individual transit would also destabilize the junction route, even if for vastly shorter periods.

His screening units, up to and including his battlecruisers, would each produce a ten-second blockage of the route for whoever came next in line, but his dreadnoughts would close the route for almost seventy seconds and each superdreadnought would shut it down for a hundred and thirteen. Which meant that cramming his entire fleet through would require a minimum of a hundred and eight minutes. Add in the time required just to reach the Trevor's Star terminus, and it would be over a hundred and sixty-six minutes—over two and three-quarters hours—before his last ship could possibly reach Basilisk.

That was an immensely shorter response time than for anyone else, but it was still too long to save Medusa. And to achieve even that, he had to cut the transit windows to the bare minimum, which was going to give ACS fits. Under normal circumstances, the minimum allowable transit window was one minute. Usually the windows actually ran considerably longer than that, since the number of ships awaiting passage was seldom large enough to cause ACS to push the minimum. But that limitation had been adopted for a very simple reason: to give people time to get out of the way.

A ship made transit under Warshawski sail. Those sails provided no propulsion in n-space, but a wormhole junction was best thought of as a frozen funnel of hyper-space which happened to connect to n-space at either end. That meant sails not only could be used in a junction transit, but that the transiting vessel had no option but to use them. And that, in turn, meant each ship had to reconfigure its impeller nodes from sail to wedge as it emerged from the far side of the wormhole. Its sails would leave it with some momentum, but not very much, and if the lead ship in a transit was even a little tardy reconfiguring and the one astern of it ran up its backside—

White Haven shuddered at the thought, but he knew how he would have set up this attack, and knowing that, he had to get into Basilisk as quickly as he possibly could. And so he watched his plot, his face grim and set, as Eighth Fleet began to accelerate towards the local terminus at its best possible speed.

Admiral Leslie Yestremensky, Manticore ACS, stared at the message on her display in disbelief. Forty-nine ships of the wall? He was going to bring forty-nine ships of the wall through her wormhole at minimum intervals? He was insane!

But he was also the third-ranking serving officer of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and in wartime that gave him the right to be just as crazy as he wanted. Which wasn't going to make the disaster one bit less appalling if anyone's numbers were off by as little as one ten-thousandth of a percent.

She shook herself and checked the time. At least she still had over half an hour before the first of the lunatic's destroyers arrived. Maybe she could do a little something to reduce the scale of the catastrophe she felt coming.

"All right, people," she announced in a clear, ringing voice which showed no sign of her own horror. "We've got a Category One Alpha emergency. Manticore ACS is proclaiming Condition Delta. All outgoing merchant shipping will be cleared from the Junction immediately. Dispatch, tag a message to that courier boat before you let it go back to Basilisk. Inform Vice Admiral Reynaud that he will halt all outbound traffic from Basilisk thirty minutes from now. There will be no exceptions, and he may inform any merchant master who objects that he is acting under my authority as per Article Four, Section Three, of the Junction Transit Instructions."

"Yes, Ma'am," Dispatch said. Manticore ACS tended to be rather more formal than the crews who worked the Junction's secondary termini, but it was stunned shock, not discipline, that wrung that "Ma'am" from Commander Adamon.

"Jeff, Sam, and Serena," Yestremensky went on, her index finger jabbing like a targeting laser as she made her selections. "The three of you turn your boards over to your reliefs. We've got a two-hundred-ship, minimum-window, double transit coming at us, and you're elected to supervise it. Get started planning now."

"Two hundred ships?" Serena Ustinov repeated, as if she were positive she must have misunderstood somehow.

"Two hundred," Yestremensky confirmed grimly. "Now get cracking. You're down to... forty-three minutes before the first one comes in from Trevor's Star."

Michel Reynaud listened to Admiral White Haven's clipped, gunshot voice and pursed his lips in a silent whistle. He'd never participated in a transit of such magnitude. For that matter, no one had, and relieved as he was by the thought of reinforcements, the potential for disaster twisted his stomach into an acid-oozing ball of lead. But no one had asked him, and he turned to his staff.

"Heavy metal coming through from Manticore in thirty-eight minutes," he told them. "All outbound transits are to cease twenty-five minutes from now. Anyone we can't get through in that time frame is to be diverted immediately. I want the holding area as well as both the inbound and outbound lanes cleared in precisely twenty-six minutes, 'cause we're sure as hell going to need the space to park warships. Now move it, people, and don't take any crap!"

The emergency had already stretched the voices that replied too wire-thin for them to register fresh shock, but he felt the disbelief under the surface and his mouth twitched in a wry grin. But then the grin faded as he glanced back into the master plot. Rear Admiral Hanaby had been underway for nineteen minutes now. She was over three million kilometers away... and message or no message, she showed no signs of slowing down.

Well, I suppose it makes sense, he thought. We've got the two forts to watch out for us till White Haven gets here, and with someone coming in behind to watch the back door, she must feel even more pressure to get into the inner system ASAP. She can't change what happens to Markham, but if she gets there quick enough, close enough on the Peeps' heels, they may not have enough time to wreck the orbital stations completely.

He snorted contemptuously at his own desperate need for optimism, and returned to his duties.

"Time to Medusa intercept, Franny?" Giscard asked quietly.

"Fifty-nine minutes, Citizen Admiral," Tyler replied. "Current closing velocity is thirty-point-niner-two thousand KPS; range one-fifty-point-two-five-five million klicks." The Citizen Admiral nodded and looked at Macintosh.

"Are we ready, Andy?"

"Yes, Citizen Admiral," the ops officer said. "The enemy's velocity is up to just over nine thousand KPS—closure rate is... twenty-three-point-one-five-two KPS, and range is just under a hundred thirty-nine million klicks. Assuming all headings and accelerations remain constant, we'll hit a zero-range intercept in almost exactly forty-six minutes."

"Very good." Giscard nodded and glanced at Pritchart from the corner of one eye. At moments like this, he almost wished he had one of the other people's commissioners—the sort he wouldn't miss if Salamis happened to take a hit on Flag Bridge. And also at moments like this he bitterly resented the game they had to play, the way it kept him from looking at her, holding her while they waited for the missile storm. But wishing and resenting changed nothing, and he locked his eyes resolutely on his plot.

The Manties were coming hell for leather, and he didn't blame them. Even with their present high accel, his task group would be only thirteen minutes' flight from Medusa when their vectors converged. It was hardly likely that the Manties would break off at this late date, but they had to survive clear across his missile zone to get to energy range... and even with a closure rate of over sixty thousand KPS, he doubted very much that any of them would.

He grimaced at the thought, already feeling the weight of all the deaths about to occur. Yet what made him grimace was the fact that even knowing the nightmares he would face in years to come, he was eager for it. His Navy had been humiliated too many times. Too many men and women he'd known and liked—even loved—had been killed, and he was sick unto death of the handicaps under which he had taken other men and women into battle so many times. Now it was his turn, and if his execution of Esther McQueen's plan was working even half as well as the two of them had hoped, he was about to hurt the Royal Manticoran Navy as it had never been hurt. Hand it not one but an entire series of simultaneous defeats such as it had not known in its entire four-hundred-year history.

Yes, he thought coldly. Let's see how your damned morale holds up after this, you bastards.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Michel Reynaud heaved a sigh of relief as the last protesting merchant skipper moved aside before the implacable approach of Cynthia Carluchi's pinnaces. A good quarter of the waiting merchantmen had already taken themselves off into hyper, where they were undoubtedly putting as many light-seconds as possible between themselves and Basilisk. The others—less than twenty ships all told, now—remained, hovering just beyond the half light-second volume of the terminus in hopes that normalcy would be restored and they would still be able to make transit to Manticore.

Personally, Reynaud didn't think there was a chance in hell "normalcy" would be restored to Basilisk any time soon.

He grunted at the thought and checked his plot once more. Almost exactly one hour had passed since the Peeps first turned up, and they were considerably less than nine light-minutes out from Medusa. Admiral Markham's horribly outnumbered task group was headed to intercept them, and Reynaud's stomach churned every time he thought of what would happen when they met.

Admiral Hanaby had been underway for forty-four minutes now, which put her over sixteen million klicks from the terminus, with her velocity up to 12,424 KPS. Which sounded impressive as hell, he thought bitterly, until he reflected that it meant she'd covered almost exactly one-and-a-half percent of the distance between the terminus and Basilisk. But at least the first of White Haven's destroyers should be arriving within another thirteen minutes, and—

An alarm shrilled. Michel Reynaud jerked bolt upright in his chair, and his face went paper white as the blood-bright icons of unidentified hyper footprints blossomed suddenly on his plot.

Citizen Rear Admiral Gregor Darlington swore with silent savagery as the plot stabilized. He felt his astrogator cringing behind him, and he wanted to turn around and rip the unfortunate citizen commander a brand-new rectum. It would have done the citizen admiral an enormous amount of good to vent his fury, but he couldn't. It wasn't really Citizen Commander Huff's fault, and even if it had been, Darlington would never have raked him down in front of a people's commissioner. The People's Navy had given up enough martyrs as scapegoats.

"I see we seem to have misplaced a decimal point, Gorg," he said instead, unable to keep an edge of harshness out of his voice, however hard he tried. Then he cleared his throat. "How bad is it?"

"We... overshot by one-point-three light-minutes, Citizen Admiral," Citizen Commander Huff replied. "Call it twenty-three-point-seven million klicks."

"I see." Darlington folded his hands behind him and rocked on his toes, digesting the information. Of course, it wasn't quite as simple as "overshot" might be taken to imply, he thought grimly. Task Group 12.4.2 had been supposed to emerge from hyper four million klicks from the Basilisk terminus, headed directly towards it with a velocity of five thousand kilometers per second. That would have put them in missile range and firing by the time the defenders could realize they were coming. And with any luck at all, the picket force normally stationed on the terminus would have been headed in-system at max for a full hour, which would have put those ships safely out of the way and left only the two operational forts to deal with. Thirty-two million tons of fort would still have been a handful, but he had eight dreadnoughts, twelve battleships, and four battlecruisers— a better than three-to-one edge in tonnage—and he should have had the invaluable advantage of complete and total surprise, as well.

But Citizen Commander Huff had blown it. In fairness, it was expecting a great deal to ask anyone to cut a hyper translation that close, but that was exactly what he'd been trained for years to do... and the reason TG 12.4.2 had dropped back into n-space less than two light-months out to allow him to recalibrate and recalculate. And he hadn't actually missed it by all that much, had he? His error was—what? Less than two-thousandths of a percent of the total jump? But it was enough.

"Time to decelerate and return to the terminus?" the citizen rear admiral demanded after a moment.

"We'll need about twenty-one minutes at four KPS squared to decelerate to relative zero," Huff said, watching the back of the citizen admiral's neck carefully. He saw its muscles tighten, and though there was no explosion, he decided not to mention that the battleship component could have decelerated considerably faster than that if they left the dreadnoughts behind. Citizen Admiral Darlington knew that as well as he did; if he wanted the numbers for just the battleships, he'd ask.

"After that," the citizen commander went on, working furiously at his console as he spoke, "we'll be just over thirty million kilometers out. A zero/zero intercept with the terminus would take us a hundred and eleven minutes from now, with turnover for the original braking maneuver at twenty-one minutes and for the intercept at sixty-six minutes from now. A least-time course would get us to range zero in... eighty-four-point-three minutes from now, but our relative velocity at intercept would be almost sixteen thousand KPS."

"Um." Darlington grunted and bounced on his toes once more. The Manties had seen him now; their forts were bringing up every jammer they had, including some remote platforms that seemed to be doing things the PN had never heard of before, and decoys were lighting off all over the place, as well. The entire area of the terminus was disappearing into a huge ball of electronic and gravitic fuzz that his sensors would be unable to penetrate at ranges much above four million kilometers. That was bad. On the other hand, he had a fix on the Manty dreadnoughts and battlecruisers normally assigned to watch the terminus, and they were a hell of a lot further from it than he was.

"Time for the Manty picket force to return to the terminus?" he demanded of his ops officer.

"Forty-five-point-two minutes just to kill their present in-system vector, Citizen Admiral," the ops officer said instantly. Clearly he'd been anticipating his CO's thoughts... and had no intention of being caught out like the unfortunate Huff. "At that point, they'll be almost two light-minutes in-system, and they'll need ninety more minutes to get back here. Assuming they begin decelerating immediately, call it a hundred and thirty-five minutes.

"Thank you." Darlington pondered a moment longer. He didn't like closing into all that jamming. Even with his Solarian-upgraded ECM and sensors, he'd have to cross something just under a million kilometers in which they'd be able to shoot at him, but he couldn't pick out a clear target to shoot back at. At the relatively low closing velocity he could generate between now and then, it would take him almost a minute to cross that fire zone. Which wouldn't have been all that bad if he hadn't been confident those forts were going to have missile pods—lots of missile pods—deployed and waiting for him.

He considered nipping back into hyper and trying to micro-jump his way to the terminus, but he rejected the notion almost instantly. Superficially appealing though it might be, a hyper jump this short was actually more difficult for an astrogator to calculate, not less. That, no doubt, was the reason the Manty picket commander was headed for Medusa in n-space instead of hyper. Control had to be so fine at such low ranges that something as small as a tiny difference in the cycle time of the hyper generators of two different ships could throw their n-space emergences off by light-seconds and hopelessly scramble his formation. No, either he pulled out completely, or he went back the hard way. Dicking around with still more hyper jumps would simply invite the ancient curse of order, counter order, disorder, and he had enough crap to deal with already.

He glanced at Citizen Commissioner Leopold.

"With your permission, Sir, I believe we should reverse course immediately and come back at the terminus."

"Can we still defeat the fortresses?" Leopold asked, not even glancing at Huff—which, Darlington reflected, boded ill for the citizen commander when Leopold turned in his report.

"I believe so, Sir. We'll take heavier losses than the ops plan originally contemplated, but we should be able to secure control of the terminus. Whether we can carry through and maintain control until Citizen Admiral Giscard rejoins us is another matter, however. The terminus picket has almost as many dreadnoughts as we do. They can be here well before Citizen Admiral Giscard if they reverse course promptly, and if they do that and we've taken heavy damage from the forts, then I doubt we could stand them off and pick off anything making transit from the Manties' Home Fleet. On the other hand, we're well outside the hyper limit here. If we see a force we can't fight coming at us, we can retreat into hyper immediately. That," he added quietly, "was the reason Citizen Admiral Giscard was willing to contemplate this maneuver in the first place, Sir. Because we can always run away if the odds turn to crap on us."

"I see." Leopold considered for several seconds, then nodded. "Very well, Citizen Admiral. Make it so."

"Citizen Commander," Darlington said, turning to Huff, "we'll go with the least-time course. We should have time to decelerate and come back again—" he managed, somehow, not to stress the adverb " —if their terminus picket wants a fight, and I want to cross their forts' missile zone as quickly as possible."

"Aye, Citizen Admiral," Huff said, and began passing maneuvering orders to the rest of the task group.

Reynaud smothered a groan as the fresh Peep force began to decelerate. He knew exactly what they'd intended to do, and exactly how it had gone wrong, but the fact that it had didn't make him feel much better. He could run the numbers just as well as they could, and his fingers flew as he punched them into his plot. But then he felt his spine slowly stiffen as the new vectors blinked in the plot before him.

The Peeps could be here in roughly eighty-five minutes — into missile range, even with the jamming, in about eighty-four—and unlike the Peeps, Reynaud knew that the operational forts' supply of missile pods was dangerously low. The two of them together probably couldn't put more than a hundred and fifty into space. But Eighth Fleet's first destroyer would arrive in eleven minutes... and its first super-dreadnought would be here in twenty-six. And assuming White Haven could actually pull it off without turning his capital ships into billiard balls (or expanding plasma), another SD would arrive every one hundred and thirteen seconds after that. So he could have...

The Astro Control vice admiral's fingers flashed, and a most unpleasant smile appeared on his face.

Vice Admiral Markham felt his heart spasm as the FTL net reported the arrival of still more enemies. He realized as quickly as Reynaud what the original Peep intent had been, and the bitterness and despair he fought to keep out of his expression deepened at the fresh proof of how utterly the RMN had underestimated the "defensive minded" People's Navy.

But he also knew, thanks to the FTL com relays between the terminus and Medusa, that Eighth Fleet was on its way, and he bared his teeth in a death's head grin as he, too, worked the numbers on its arrival time. It didn't change what was going to happen to his own task group, of course. Nothing short of a direct act of God could have changed that. But it did change what was going to happen to the Peep bastards who thought they were going to kill the terminus forts and then wait to ambush Home Fleet if it tried to respond.

"Missile range in thirty-nine minutes, Sir," his ops officer said quietly, and he nodded.

"I wonder how Citizen Admiral Giscard is making out," Citizen Commissioner Leopold said quietly, and Darlington turned his head to meet his eyes. The people's commissioner had spoken softly enough no one else could have heard, and the citizen admiral replied equally quietly.

"Probably just fine, so far, Sir," he said. "I doubt he's made contact with their main force yet."

"I wish we could know what was happening to him," Leopold said, and Darlington shrugged.

"If we had the FTL relays the Manties have, we could, Sir. Without them, we can only guess. But it doesn't really matter. Nothing that happens that far in-system can have any immediate effect on us, and even if the Medusa picket turned out to be a hell of a lot heavier than we thought and it killed every one of the Citizen Admiral's ships and then came after us, we'd have plenty of warning to hyper out before it got here."

He glanced back up, and his mouth twitched as he saw the stricken look on Leopold's face.

"I didn't mean that I think anything of the sort is going to happen, Citizen Commissioner," he said with a barely suppressed chuckle. "I only meant to present a worst-possible-case scenario."

"Oh." Leopold swallowed, then smiled wanly. "I see. But in future, Citizen Admiral, please tell me ahead of time that that's what you're doing."

"I'll remember, Sir," Darlington promised.

The air-conditioned chill of Basilisk ACS' control room was a thing of the past. Vice Admiral Reynaud felt the sweat dripping down his face as his controllers hovered over their consoles, and even though he saw it with his own eyes, he could scarcely believe what was happening.

Thirty-nine destroyers hovered just beyond the terminus threshold. They'd come through in a steady stream, as rapidly and remorselessly as an old, prespace freight train, and Reynaud had felt like some small, terrified animal frozen on the rails as the train's headlamp thundered down upon him. But he'd handed each warship off to its own controller, cycling through the available list with feverish speed, and somehow—he still wasn't sure how—they'd managed to avoid outright collisions.

But not all damage. HMS Glorioso had been just a fraction of a second too slow reconfiguring from sails to wedge, and HMS Vixen had run right up her backside. Fortunately, perhaps, the second destroyer had gotten her wedge up quickly, for it had come on-line one bare instant before Glorioso's had, but without building to full power. Which meant that only Glorioso's after nodes had blown. The resultant explosion had vaporized two-thirds of her after impeller room, and Reynaud had no desire at all to think about how many people it must have killed when it went, but it hadn't destroyed her hull or her compensator, and the fail-safes had blown in time to save her forward impellers. Momentum, coupled with instantaneous and brilliant evasive action on Vixen's part, had been just sufficient to carry her clear of an outright collision, and two of her sisters had speared her with tractors and dragged her bodily out of the way of Vixen's next astern. But for all that, it had been impossibly close. A thousandth of a second's difference in when either wedge came on-line, a dozen meters difference in their relative locations, a single split-second of distraction on the part of Vixen's watch officer or helmsman, and not only would they have collided, but the next ship in line would have plowed straight into their molten wreckage in the beginning of a chain-reaction collision that could have killed thousands.

But they'd avoided it, and now the first superdreadnoughts were coming through. The huge ships were much slower on the helm, but they were almost as quick to reconfigure from sails to wedge, and their longer transit windows gave them precious additional seconds to maneuver. They were actually easier to handle than the destroyers had been, and Reynaud leaned back in his chair and mopped the skim of sweat from his forehead.

"Did it, by God," someone whispered, and he looked over his shoulder. All four watches had assembled, which meant he had more controllers than he did consoles, and the off-duty people with nothing to do were probably in the least enviable position of all. They knew how insanely dangerous this entire maneuver was, but there was nothing they could do about it except hold their breaths and pray whenever things looked dicey. But now Neville Underwood, the number-three man on the fourth watch, stepped up beside his own command chair and shook his head as he gazed down into the plot.

"Maybe yes, and maybe no," Reynaud replied. "We've got three— no, four—SDs through with no collisions so far. But if two of those babies bump—" He shuddered, and Underwood nodded soberly. "And even if we don't have any collisions, there's always the chance the Peeps'll detect them and stay the hell out of range."

"Maybe," Underwood conceded. "But they'll need damned good sensors to pick up their arrivals through all the jamming the forts are putting out. And once our people maneuver clear and take their wedges down to station-keeping levels, they should be downright invisible at anything above a few light-seconds. Besides," he summoned up a ragged smile, "at this point I'll be delighted to settle for the Peeps staying the hell away. It beats the crap out of what I thought was going to happen to us, Mike!"

"Yeah," Reynaud grunted, turning back to his console. "Yeah, I guess it does, at that. But I want these bastards, Nev. I want them bad."

Underwood eyed him sidelong. Michel Reynaud was one of the easiest going—and least military—people he knew. In fact, Underwood had always suspected that the reason Reynaud had gone ACS instead of Navy in the first place was his deep-seated, fundamental horror at the thought of deliberately taking another human being's life. But he didn't feel that way now, and when Underwood glanced at the display tied into the FTL sensors, he understood exactly why that was.

Vice Admiral Markham's gallant charge was less than twenty minutes from contact with the main Peep force, and Reynaud and Underwood both knew what would happen then.

"Their EW is getting even better, Citizen Admiral," Darlington's ops officer reported. The citizen rear admiral walked over to stand beside him, looking down at the hazy sphere that had enveloped the terminus, and frowned.

"Are their jammers hitting us harder?" he asked.

"No, Citizen Admiral. Or I don't think so, at least. But look here and here." The ops officer keyed a command, and the plot blinked as it replayed what had happened over the last several minutes at a compressed time rate. "See?" He pointed at the flickering shift of questionable icons in the display. "It looks to me like their decoys must be considerably more advanced and flexible than we'd thought, Citizen Admiral. We've still got probable fixes on the forts themselves, but our confidence in them is degrading steadily because they're throwing so damned many false impeller signatures at us."

"Well, we knew it was going to happen." Darlington sighed after a moment. "Do your best, Citizen Commander."

"Yes, Citizen Admiral."

White Haven stood stock still on Benjamin the Great's flag bridge and stared at the order slowly gelling in the depths of the master plot. He'd brought his Grayson SDs through first, because even if it might hurt the Royal Navy's pride to admit it, they were newer, more powerful units than most of his Manticoran ships. Eight of them were through the Junction now, with three more to go and the first Manticoran units following on behind them. He'd gotten here in time to defend the terminus against the second prong of the Peep attack, but his pride at his achievement tasted of ashes and gall.

It wasn't because of the damage to Glorioso, or even the loss of life entailed. The destroyer's list of known dead already stood at thirty-five, and dozens of people remained unaccounted for, dead or trapped in the tangled wreckage of her after half. He felt the weight of those deaths, knew they were his responsibility and his alone. But in eight bloody years of war he had learned that there were always deaths. The best a wartime commander could hope for was to minimize the toll, to lose no more than he could possibly avoid... and to make certain the lives he could not save were not bartered away too cheaply.

Nor did this leaden fist crush down upon his heart because Rear Admiral Hanaby hadn't even tried to reverse course. That was her smartest move, he conceded—for all the good it would accomplish. The only thing she could realistically hope to do now was to put some sense of time pressure on the main Peep force, and she could never have gotten back to the terminus in time to affect the outcome there, anyway.

But she wasn't going to save Vice Admiral Markham... and neither was White Haven's brilliant transfer from Trevor's Star.

He drew a deep breath and made himself turn away from the main plot to look at the smaller display tied into the in-system FTL net. He didn't want to. There was a peculiarly detached, mesmerizing horror about seeing something like this in real-time and yet not being close enough to somehow forbid it or alter the outcome. But he could no more not have looked than he could have stopped it from happening.

Diamond dust icons speckled the plot as both sides flushed their pods and the missiles went out. Markham launched first, and his fire control was better, but the Peeps had many more birds than he did. There was a mechanistic inevitability to it, a sense that he was watching not the clash of human adversaries, but some dreadful, insensate disaster produced by the unthinking forces of nature.

A distant corner of his mind noted the huge numbers of incoming missiles Markham's ships picked off or fooled with their ECM and decoys, but it wasn't enough. It couldn't have been, and he bit his lip until he tasted blood as the first Manticoran superdreadnought vanished from the plot. Then another died—a second. A third. A fourth. A fifth. Three of them survived the opening exchange, led by King William, but the flickering sidebars of damage codes told how savagely wounded they were as they closed to energy range of the Peeps behind their flagship. The butchery grew suddenly even worse, yet no one flinched, no one surrendered—not on either side.

Two Peep superdreadnoughts had died with King William's consorts, and others had been damaged, if none had been hurt so dreadfully as the Manticoran ships of the wall. Now the two forces slammed together and interpenetrated, short-range weapons ripping and tearing with brief, titanic fury.

It took only seconds, and when it was over, two more Peep SDs had been destroyed. At least three more were severely damaged... and every single ship of Vice Admiral Silas Markham's task group had been obliterated.

A spreading lacework of life pods beaded the display, Manticoran and Havenite alike. The pattern they made was less dense than the missile storms had been, and here and there one winked out as battle-damaged life-support systems or transponders failed. White Haven's lips worked as if to spit, but then he wrenched his eyes away from the secondary plot as the first Manticoran superdreadnought of Eighth Fleet came out of the Junction behind him. He darted a bitter, hating look at the dreadnoughts and battleships accelerating steadily towards him, and his face was hard.

"Our turn now, you bastards," he murmured to himself, so softly no one else ever heard at all, and beckoned Commander Haggerston over beside him.

Javier Giscard handed the memo board back to the skinsuited yeoman. The hammering Salamis had taken in the last few seconds of the engagement made him wonder if the Manties had somehow deduced that she was the task group flagship, but it turned out that Citizen Captain Short had had good reason to feel confident about the quality of her techs back in Secour. Giscard intended to have a little talk with her, find out just how she'd managed to pull the strings to get her hands on a fully qualified engineering department in the present day People's Navy, but for now it didn't really matter. What mattered was that, according to the report he'd just been handed, Salamis would have all of her alpha nodes back within twenty-five minutes. That was good. In fact, it was outstanding, for it meant his flagship—unlike her consort Guichen —would be able to withdraw if that became necessary.

He sighed and lowered himself into his command chair, then raised a hand at Julia Lapisch. The com officer looked up, then trotted over to him.

"Yes, Citizen Admiral?" she asked. That withdrawn, disconnected edge remained somewhere inside her, but her gray-green eyes glowed with a sort of dark fire. Giscard wasn't certain what that meant. It was almost as if in the last few minutes she had seen something more terrifying than even StateSec could be, a threat which had put the relative threat of the SS into a different perspective in her mind. Or it could simply be that she had just discovered that, as someone on Old Earth had once put it, "Nothing in the world is so exhilarating as to be shot at... and missed."

"Are you ready to transmit?" he asked her now, and she nodded.

"Yes, Citizen Admiral."

"Then do so," he instructed, and she nodded again and headed back towards her console, right hand above her head while she whirled her index finger in a "crank it up" signal to her assistants.

Giscard leaned back in his chair and rubbed his closed eyes. His ships had been decelerating from the moment they opened fire on the Manties, and they were still decelerating hard. But their base velocity was too high to kill. He was going to slide right past Medusa, and all he could do was slow it down, stretch the pass out a bit... and give the Manties a little longer to evacuate their orbital installations.

He sighed. This was what he had come for, the part he had most looked forward to and, conversely, dreaded. The destruction of eight Manticoran SDs had been worth accomplishing, even if he had lost four—five, probably, as he would have to leave Guichen behind if he was forced to pull out—of his own to accomplish it. But it was the devastation of Basilisk Station, the utter destruction of Medusa's orbital bases and Gregor Darlington's destruction of their incomplete fortresses and Basilisk Astro Control, which would strike the true blow. It would be a shot not to the body of the Star Kingdom, but to its soul, for this was no frontier fleet base or allied system. Medusa was Manticoran territory, as much an integral part of the Star Kingdom as Sphinx, or Gryphon, or Manticore. For eight years, the Manticoran Alliance had taken the war to the Republic, fought its battles on Republican territory, smashed and conquered Republican planets. But not this time. This time it was their turn, and Javier Giscard was too good a strategist—and too hungry for vengeance—not to long to drive that lesson home with all the brutal power Esther McQueen or Rob Pierre could have desired.

Yet the waste of it appalled him. The lives he had squandered, Havenite and Manticoran alike, and the untold trillions of dollars of material he was about to destroy. He knew many of his fellow officers saw it only as material, and the true believers among them undoubtedly saw it as the best, most fitting way possible to punish their "plutocratic" enemies. But it wasn't as simple as "hitting them in the pocketbook" for Giscard. He couldn't help seeing his target in terms of all the time and effort, the labor and sweat and hopes and dreams, as well as the monetary investment, which had gone into building it. He would be smashing livelihoods, even if he took no more lives at all, and deep inside, he knew there would be more deaths. The message Julia Lapisch was broadcasting ordered the immediate evacuation of every orbital structure. It warned the people who crewed them to abandon ship and gave them the precise timetable on which his missiles would launch, and he knew anyone but an idiot would have begun evacuating to the planetary surface an hour before, when it became obvious the defending task group couldn't stop him.

But he also knew some of them hadn't left. That some of them would not... and that others could not. They had their own duties, their own responsibilities, and despite all the planning that might be done, and all the exercises which might be held, it would be physically impossible to get everyone off of some of those bases. They would do their best, and he would hold his fire until the very last moment, until the instant before he lost lock and range to hit them. He would do all that the Deneb Accords and the Epsilon Eridani Edict required of him and more, and still some of them would not get out... and he would kill them.

He longed not to, yet he had no choice. If Darlington had won against the forts and the terminus picket, if the Manty Home Fleet would be unable to come charging through the Junction after him, then he could afford to take the time. To decelerate and come back at a lower rate of speed, to wait and be sure there were no civilians still aboard his targets. But he couldn't know what was happening out there for at least another six hours, and he dared not squander that time if it turned out that Darlington had lost, or that they had been wrong about the strength of the terminus picket, or that Home Fleet had already made transit into the system to come rushing up behind him.

And so he sat back in his chair, watching the time display tick downward while elation and shame and triumph and grief warred within him.

"They're fourteen minutes out from the terminus, Sir," Captain Granston-Henley said quietly, and White Haven nodded.

He clasped his hands behind him and turned his back on the main plot. He no longer needed to see it to know what was happening, anyway. He had twenty-three superdreadnoughts in the system now, and they were as ready as they were going to get.

The Peep commander obviously intended to make a maximum-velocity pass, flushing his pods as he came and hoping to saturate the forts' defenses. He must have what he considered to be damned reliable intelligence about the status of the other forts, or he would never have risked it. Unfortunately, he was risking it, and White Haven was relieved that the work crews had managed to abandon the incomplete fortresses. Those unfinished hulls were sitting ducks, with neither active nor passive defenses. Their only protection would be the decoys and jamming of their active sisters—and Eighth Fleet—and any missile which acquired them was virtually guaranteed to hit.

More losses, he thought, gritting his teeth. I'll be amazed if even one of them comes through this intact enough to make it worthwhile bothering to finish the damned thing. And that, of course, will make a continuing—and heavily reinforced—Fleet picket here absolutely unavoidable.

He shuddered at the thought, already hearing the strident demands that the Fleet provide sufficient protection to stop this sort of thing. If the Peeps were smart and audacious enough to try similar raids against another system or two, they could throw a monumental spanner into the works for the RMN. It had been hard enough to scrape up the forces for offensive action before; now it would get astronomically harder. Yet if they didn't resume the offensive, they only gave the Peeps time to pick their spots with even more care, land their punches with even more weight behind them, and that—

He jerked his mind back from useless speculation and inhaled deeply. The active forts had strictly limited numbers of pods—another point to take up with Logistics Command, he thought grimly; when a fort is declared operational, then it should damned well receive its full ammunition allocation immediately, not "as soon as practical!"— but, fortunately, the Harrington and her two sisters were another story. Built to the radical new design proposed by the Weapons Development Board, they'd been constructed around huge, hollow cores packed full of missile pods and ejection racks to deploy them. Between the three of them, they carried no less than fifteen hundred pods, and they'd been busy launching them into space ever since their arrival. Unlike older ships of the wall, they also had the fire control to handle a couple of hundred pods each, and they'd been handing the other eleven hundred off to the two forts and to their fellow SDs. But it was the Honor Harrington and Admiral Judah Yanakov who would call the shot for them. Not only did he have the best fire control equipment, but they were his navy's pods... and the Grayson Navy had earned the right.

"Any sign they've detected us?" he asked Granston-Henley.

"No, Sir," she said firmly, and Commander Haggerston shook his head in support of her statement.

"I don't think they'll be able to see us much above three or four million klicks, Sir, and they're still thirty-nine light-seconds out," he said. "The forts' EW isn't as good on a ton-for-ton basis as our latest mobile refits, but they've got an awful lot of it aboard each of those platforms, and their decoys are a lot bigger—and better—than anything a warship could deploy. I figure those people are going to have to keep coming for another nine and a half minutes before they have a chance of picking us out of the clutter. Whereas we—"

He shrugged and nodded to the crimson display burning in one corner of his plot. It said time to launch 00:08:27, and as White Haven followed his nod, another second ticked inexorably away.

"Citizen Admiral, we seem to be picking up something new from the Manty decoys," Darlington's ops officer said.

"What sort of 'something'?" the citizen rear admiral demanded testily. They were only a little more than a minute outside their own effective engagement range—which probably meant they were already inside the Manties', if only barely—and they'd managed to lock up the two forts again. Or they thought they had, anyway. They couldn't be sure, and anticipating a tidal wave of missiles while he sailed straight into the teeth of launch platforms he wasn't even certain he'd found well enough to shoot back at was not making him feel any more tranquil.

"I'm not really certain, Citizen Admiral," the ops officer said slowly, shaking his head. "We've had impeller ghosts coming and going inside the jamming all along, of course. Now more of them seem to be hardening up simultaneously, and there's something else going on. It's almost as if we were taking lidar and radar hits from a lot more units all of a sudden."

"What?" Darlington spun to face the tactical section, but it was already too late.

"Sir, I've just picked up something I think you should hear," Cynthia McTierney said.

"What?" White Haven looked at her irritably. "Cindy, this is hardly the time—"

"It was an all-ships transmission from Admiral Yanakov to all Grayson units, Sir," McTierney said with stubborn diffidence, and then, before White Haven could respond, she pressed a stud and Judah Yanakov's harsh recorded voice echoed in White Haven's earbug.

"Admiral Yanakov to all Grayson units," it said, and White Haven could almost hear the clangor of clashing swords in its depths. "The order is—Lady Harrington, and no mercy!"

"What?" White Haven spun towards his own com, but it was already too late.

Sixteen hundred and ninety-five missile pods fired as one, and broadside launchers fired with them. The next best thing to nineteen thousand missiles went howling towards the Peeps at 95,000 gravities, and the range was only five million kilometers and the Peeps were headed straight to meet them at over fourteen thousand kilometers per second.

"Take us into hyper!" Darlington shouted, but flight time was under ninety seconds, and he'd wasted four responding.

Counter-missiles launched desperately, and laser clusters trained onto the incoming fire, but there simply wasn't time. His engineers needed at least sixty seconds to bring their generators on-line, and by the time Darlington snapped the order to Citizen Commander Huff, and Huff relayed it to the captains of the other ships, and they relayed it to their engineers, time had run out.

Space itself seemed to vanish in the titanic violence as thousands upon thousands of laserheads exploded in a solid wall of fury. At least a thousand of the Allies' own warheads killed one another in old-fashioned nuclear fratricide, but it scarcely mattered. There were more than enough of them to deal with eight dreadnoughts, twelve battleships, and four battlecruisers. Amazingly, and against all apparent reason, two of Darlington's six destroyers actually escaped into hyper. Because no one was intentionally wasting missiles on such small fry, no doubt.

Alexander Hamish grabbed for his own com with frantic haste with Judah Yanakov's order still ringing in his ears. He was horrified by the implications, and his horror grew as the Graysons' fire control continued to sweep the tumbling wreckage and the handful of life pods which had escaped. But none of them fired, and as he slowly relaxed in his chair once more, his memory replayed the words once more. "No mercy," Yanakov had said, not "No quarter," and a long, quavering breath sighed out of him as he realized he was not about to see a vengeful atrocity by units under his command.

He inhaled slowly, then looked at Granston-Henley.

"Remind me to have a little discussion with Admiral Yanakov about communications discipline," he said, and his mouth quirked in a wry, exhausted grin that might actually hold true humor again someday.