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# Chapter Forty-Six

Honor stepped back and allowed Commander Denby to climb to his feet. The commanding officer of Werewolf's third LAC squadron was a little slower than he might have been under other conditions, and he shook his head like a man listening to a ringing sound no one else could hear.

He dropped back into a ready position, but Honor shook her own head and removed her mouth protector.

"Sorry about that, Commander," she said contritely. "Are you all right?"

Denby removed his own mouth protector and then rotated his right shoulder cautiously and gave her a lopsided grin.

"I think so, Your Grace," he replied. "I'll tell you for sure when that damned bird stops singing in my ear!"

Honor chuckled. She and the commander both wore traditional gis. Although Denby's belt showed only five rank knots, he was really very good . . . and like quite a few officers who followed the coup—perhaps somewhat disproportionately represented among the LAC portion of Werewolf's complement—he was always available for a sparring match with the station commander.

Unfortunately, he'd forgotten about Honor's artificial arm. The move he'd just attempted had depended upon its victim's reaction to leverage against her elbow joint. Which hadn't worked out quite the way his reflexes had assumed it would in this particular case. Honor's counter had caught him out of position and completely by surprise, and he'd hit the mat hard. In fact, he'd hit it rather harder than she'd intended, because her reflexes hadn't assumed that he'd be left quite as open as he had by her left arm's failure to flex properly.

"Well," she said now, "we've got enough time for you to finish listening. Take your time."

"Thank you, Your Grace, but I think he's coming to the end of his selection."

Denby gave her another grin and reinserted his mouth protector, and she smiled back before she did the same thing. The two of them stepped back towards the center of the mat and dropped back into the ready position. Honor watched him warily. They'd sparred enough over the course of this deployment for her to have a very good feel for his personality. Even without her ability to sense his emotions, she would have known that his recent misadventure had inspired him to dump her on her very senior posterior. On the other hand, inspiration and success weren't necessarily the same thing, and—"Excuse me, My Lady."

Andrew LaFollet's voice interrupted, and she stepped back from Denby and turned towards her senior armsman.

"I'm sorry to interrupt, My Lady," LaFollet said from where he'd stood watching her back, even here in Werewolf's gym, and she removed the mouth protector once again.

"What is it, Andrew?" she asked.

"I don't know," he replied. "Lieutenant Meares just commed. He says you're needed on Flag Bridge."

"On Flag Bridge?" Honor repeated. "He didn't say why?"

"No, My Lady." LaFollet half-raised his wrist-mounted com. "I can com him back and ask, if you'd like?"

"Please do. And ask him how urgent it is." She waved one gloved hand at her gi. "Unless it's earth shattering, I'd like to at least shower and change before I report for duty!"

"Yes, My Lady," LaFollet acknowledged with a small smile, and spoke into the wrist com. Then he looked up with the slightly absent expression of a man listening to a reply from her flag lieutenant over his unobtrusive earbug.

It was an expression which changed abruptly, and Honor's head snapped up as she tasted the surprise and apprehension in his emotions.

"What?" she asked sharply.

"Tim says Pirate's Bane just passed the perimeter patrols, My Lady," the armsman replied, using the flag lieutenant's first name instead of the more formal rank titles he was usually careful to employ out of deference to a young man's dignity. Now he met his Steadholder's eyes, and his expression was taut. "He says she's damaged—badly."

Honor stared at him for perhaps two breaths, her thoughts completely frozen. Then they jerked back into motion with an almost physical shock.

"How badly damaged?" The question came out crisply, but even as she asked it she was aware of how much a lie that calmness was. "And what about Captain Bachfisch?"

"Tim doesn't know exactly how bad it is, My Lady. But from what he said, it doesn't sound good." The armsman inhaled. "And it was her executive officer who answered the patrol's challenge. He says Captain Bachfisch has been wounded."

* * *

Honor held herself in her seat in the pinnace by sheer force of will. Nimitz was curled in her lap, and she felt the physical tension in his muscles as the pinnace cut its drive and Pirate's Bane's boat bay tractors reached out for it.

She looked out through the armorplast viewport, and her jaw muscles clenched as she saw the ugly holes blown in the Bane's skin. "Badly," she supposed was one way to describe what had happened to the armed merchantman. Personally, she considered it to be grossly inadequate.

The pinnace rolled on its internal gyros, aligning itself so the tractors could deposit it gently in the docking buffers. At least the bay gallery was still vacuum tight, she thought grimly as she watched the personnel tube run out to the pinnace's airlock. Bleak anger and anxiety roiled within her, and then she looked down as a hand-foot patted her on the knee.

<They said he'll be all right,> Nimitz's true-hands signed.

"No," she replied. "They told me that he said he'll be all right. There's a difference."

<He wouldn't lie. Not to you. Not about this.>

"Stinker," Honor sighed, "sometimes I think 'cats still have a lot to learn about humans. There may not be any point in empaths or telepaths trying to lie to each other, but we two-foots always think we get away with it. And when we don't want someone to worry . . ."

<I know. But still say wouldn't lie to you. Besides,> even through the 'cat's own anxiety, she tasted a sudden flicker of amusement, <he knows what you'd do to him when he got better if did.>

Honor looked down at him, and then, to her own amazement, she actually chuckled.

"You may have a point," she conceded. "On the other hand," she sobered again, "the fact that it was his exec who reported in doesn't sound good."

<Will know soon,> Nimitz signed back. <Green light.>

Honor flicked her eyes to the telltale above the airlock. Nimitz was right, and she scooped the 'cat into her arms and rose as the pinnace's flight engineer reached for the hatch button.

Others pushed up out of their seats behind her, and she glanced over her shoulder. LaFollet and Spencer Hawke sat in the row directly behind her, but there were enough others to make the pinnace's spacious passenger compartment seem almost crowded. Mercedes Brigham, George Reynolds, Andrea Jaruwalski, and Timothy Meares were all present . . . and so were Surgeon Captain Fritz Montoya and a full twenty-person medical team.

A second pinnace, this one loaded with two platoons of Werewolf's Marines, settled into the docking buffers beside Honor's pinnace, and her expression tightened once more. Then she moved forward as the inner hatch of the airlock opened.

* * *

It wasn't the first time Honor had seen Thomas Bachfisch wounded. But this time was worse. Much worse. She felt the physical pain radiating from him as she stood beside his bed in Pirate's Bane's spartan sick bay, and it took every ounce of self discipline she possessed to keep her own nonphysical pain out of her expression.

"Your Grace," Jinchu Gruber said, "will you please convince him to let Doctor Montoya get him out of here?"

Pirate's Bane's executive officer stood on the other side of Bachfisch's bed. Gruber wasn't exactly in pristine condition himself, Honor noted. His left arm was in a sling, he walked with a noticeable limp, and the left side of his face was badly bruised.

"Stop fussing, Jinchu." Bachfisch's voice was hoarse with pain, but he managed a tight smile. There was a different sort of pain in that smile, and something inside Honor winced as she tasted his emotions. "I'm better off than a lot of people."

"Yes, you are, Skipper." Gruber's voice was harsh, hard-edged with exasperation. "Now stop feeling guilty about it, damn it!"

"My fault," Bachfisch replied, shaking his head doggedly on the pillow.

"I didn't see you holding a pulser on anyone to make us sign on," the exec shot back.

"No, but—"

"Excuse me, Your Grace," Fritz Montoya put in, "but I'd appreciate it if the three of you could argue about this later." Honor turned to crook one eyebrow at the doctor, and Montoya shrugged. "I've already sent the worst half dozen cases across to Werewolf. Or, perhaps I should say, the worst half dozen other cases. I'd really like to get Captain Bachfisch over there sometime this week, too."

"I'm not leaving the Bane," Bachfisch said stubbornly.

"Oh yes you are, Captain," the blond-haired surgeon captain told him with an implacable calm Honor knew altogether too well from personal experience. "We can argue about it for a while first, if you really want to. But you are leaving."

Bachfisch opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Honor put one hand gently on his shoulder.

"Don't argue," she told him, resolutely not looking at the space where his legs ought to have tented the sheets. "You'll lose. For that matter, you'd lose even if Fritz was the only person who was going to be arguing with you. And he isn't."

Bachfisch looked back up at her for a moment, and then smiled crookedly.

"You always were a stubborn woman," he murmured. "All right, I'll go. But since you're here now . . ." He looked past her, indicating her staff officers with his eyes, and she nodded.

"I gathered from Commander Gruber's message that you were going to insist on a bedside debrief," she said serenely. "Now, if I were inclined to indulge in calling any kettles black, I might comment on the stubbornness involved in that. Since I'm far too broad-minded to do anything of the sort, however, why don't we just get started?"

Bachfisch's chuckle might have been tight with pain, but it was also genuine, and she tasted his gratitude for her manner.

"Commander Gruber," she waved at the exec, "already told us about your decision to shadow the Peep—Hecate, wasn't it?" She glanced up at Gruber, who nodded, and Honor looked back down at her old captain. "He told us you'd decided to, but what he couldn't tell us was what the hell you thought you were doing?"

Bachfisch's eyebrows flew up, and Honor tasted the surprise of all of her officers at hearing even that mild an oath out of her, but she never took her own eyes from Bachfisch's. She was willing to be calm and collected about his state, but she wanted him to cherish no illusions about her opinion of the sanity involved in getting himself and his ship mixed up in something like this.

"What I thought I was doing," he told her after a moment, "was trying to figure out what a Havenite fleet might be doing in your bailiwick, young lady. And I might point out that I've been old enough to make decisions for myself for quite some time. Why, just last week I picked out which shirt I wanted to wear without any help at all."

Their eyes held, and then, almost against her will, she smiled.

"Point taken," she told him. "On the other hand, I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't try quite so hard to get yourself killed next time. You think we could compromise on that?"

"I'm certainly willing to take it under advisement," he assured her.

"Thank you. Now, getting back to business. You followed Hecate until she left the grav wave."

"Yes." Bachfisch leaned back against his pillow. "We hit a bad patch. Particle densities went way up, and I had to close up on her if I wanted to hold her on sensors. From what her survivors say, that was probably what drew her attention to us. At any rate, she was waiting when we transitioned to wedge."

"And she ordered you to stand by for boarding?"

"Yes." Bachfisch grimaced. "I wouldn't have been too crazy about that under the best of conditions, but out in the middle of nowhere, dealing with a Havenite warship, I really didn't want an armed boarding party to discover that the 'merchie' who'd been shadowing them was armed to the teeth. Besides, there wouldn't have been much point in following her if we'd just let ourselves be hauled off and incarcerated."

"Assuming they'd been willing to simply incarcerate you, Captain," Lieutenant Commander Reynolds put in quietly.

"That thought did occur to me, Commander." Bachfisch grimaced again. "I know there's been a change of government in the People's Republic, but I'm inclined to take that with a grain of salt where the safety of my own people is concerned. Besides, if they're here covertly, it might be . . . inconvenient for them if witnesses to their presence ever turned up."

"I understand your concerns, Captain," Honor said. "And, in your place, I would have felt exactly the same way. But I strongly suspect that you and George are both doing whoever Thomas Theisman sent out here a disservice. Theisman isn't the sort of man to countenance atrocities or to send anyone who would countenance them off to an independent command. I speak from a certain degree of personal experience."

"You may be right," Bachfisch agreed. "But either way, I didn't want a Havenite boarding party aboard the Bane. If Hecate had been a pirate, it would have been easy enough. Just let them come in close to drop their pinnace, then run out the grasers and blow her to hell." He shrugged. "We've done that often enough.

"But this wasn't a pirate, and I didn't want to kill anyone I didn't have to. Maybe I was too squeamish. Or maybe I was just stupid. Anyway, I refused to be boarded."

"Was that when she opened fire?" Honor asked quietly when he paused.

"Yes and no," Bachfisch replied. Then he sighed. "She certainly did fire," he said. "The only problem is that I'm still not sure it wasn't intended solely as a warning shot to encourage us to cooperate. We were so close by that point that her captain may simply have chosen to use an energy mount instead of a missile, and the shot did miss. But it didn't miss by very much, and I didn't feel I could take a chance—not with a regular warship already in energy range. And besides," he admitted, "I was nervous as a cat." He shook his head. "At any rate, I jumped. I didn't pull the trigger, perhaps, but I did stop requesting him to stand clear and order him to. And I also ordered the plating over our weapons bays jettisoned."

"At which point," Gruber put in harshly, "they definitely opened the ball."

"Yes," Bachfisch agreed heavily. "Yes, they certainly did."

Honor gazed down at him and nodded slowly while her always excellent imagination showed her what must have happened in the instant that Pirate's Bane trained out her own grasers. There'd been no way the destroyer's captain could have guessed that he was accosting a ship which was actually more heavily armed than his own. He'd fired his warning shot—which, as Bachfisch had just suggested, was almost certainly what he'd done—in the belief that he was dealing with a typical, unarmed merchantman. The shock when he realized what he was actually facing, coupled with the way Bachfisch had followed him, must have been . . . profound.

"The entire 'engagement' lasted about twenty-seven seconds," Bachfisch said. "As nearly as I can determine, Hecate hadn't even cleared completely for action. Her people weren't even in skinsuits, and only four of their broadside laser mounts appear to have been manned. As soon as they saw our weapons, they opened fire with those four and blew the ever living hell out of two of our main cargo holds, three of our starboard graser mounts, and our backup enviro plant. They also killed eleven of my people and wounded eighteen more."

"Nineteen," Gruber corrected grimly. Honor glanced at him, and he jabbed a finger at Bachfisch.

"Nineteen," Bachfisch conceded. Honor looked back towards him, and he twitched his shoulders. "Compared to some of the rest of my crew, I got off easy."

"We're not going to have that particular conversation, Captain," Honor told him firmly. "You and I have both been there before, and I'm not going to help you beat yourself up over it. Even," she added with a wry smile, "if this does seem to happen to both of us quite a bit out here in Silesia!"

Bachfisch blinked at her, then laughed out loud, and she smiled more naturally as she felt the cold, bleak knot of his guilt ease . . . for the moment, at least.

"At any rate," he went on more briskly, "they blew the crap out of us. But a destroyer isn't much better armored than a merchie, and they were wide open. I didn't even suspect just how wide open they were, but it was like pushing baby chicks into a pond, Honor. We fired a single broadside and—"

He broke off, shaking his head, and Honor tasted a brief, intense layer of a completely different sort of guilt. This time she didn't try to do anything about it. No one could have, anyway.

"We took her survivors aboard afterward," he said heavily. "There were only forty-three of them, and we lost two of them to wounds despite everything we could do. Then we came here."

"We have all forty-one of the remaining survivors in custody, Admiral," Gruber put in. Honor looked back up at him, and the exec shrugged. "The Captain told me to get to Marsh as quickly as we could to report to you, but it occurred to me on the way here that with everything else you already have going on, you don't need to be officially involved in an attack on a Havenite warship."

"I'd hardly call what you and the Captain have described an 'attack' on a warship," Honor observed.

"No, Your Grace," Gruber agreed. "But you're not the government that warship belonged to. At any rate, we're prepared to present the evidence of our own sensor logs before any admiralty court and to stand by an impartial verdict on our actions. At the moment, however, any court would be considering the actions of a Silesian-flag vessel holding a warrant as a Silesian Navy auxiliary merchant cruiser. As such, we could argue that we had a legitimate Silesian security interest in investigating Hecate's actions and intentions. If we hand them over to the Manticoran authorities, however, we bring the Star Kingdom officially into all of this. From all we've heard out here about the current relations between the Star Kingdom and the Republic, I wasn't at all sure that would be a good idea."

"So he has them confined in the secure quarters I had fitted up for pirates," Bachfisch said, smiling approvingly at his executive officer. "They don't know where we are at the moment. In fact, they don't even know we're not still underway. So if you prefer, we can continue on to a Silly naval base and turn them over to 'proper authorities' there."

"I'm impressed, Commander Gruber," Honor said. "And I appreciate your forethought." She didn't add that she felt confident his forethought had been exercised more because of what he knew his captain would want than because he really cared all that much himself about relations between Manticore and Haven.

"All the same," she said thoughtfully, "I think handing them over to us would probably be the best course. We're the closest naval base to the point at which this action actually occurred. It would make sense for a ship as badly damaged as the Bane to head for the closest authorities, particularly since you have wounded from both ships' companies who need medical attention."

"But if we hand them over to you," Bachfisch pointed out, "then you have to take official cognizance of their presence, and you have enough hand grenades to juggle just now without that."

"Yes, I have to take 'official cognizance,' " she agreed. "On the other hand, the way I do that is up to me. I think I'll just hold these people here until my own medical people are willing to sign off on their release from hospital, then send them home by way of the Star Kingdom aboard one of our regularly scheduled supply runs." She smiled thinly. "Right off the cuff, I'd estimate that it will probably take at least a couple of months to get them as far as Manticore. By which time, hopefully, things will have settled down."

"And if they haven't?" Bachfisch asked.

"And if they haven't," Honor said much more bleakly, "then things are probably going to be so bad that throwing this into the mix won't matter at all."

* * *

"Fritz says Captain Bachfisch will recover fully," Honor told her assembled staff and senior flag officers two hours later in the briefing room aboard Werewolf. "Unlike some of us," she added wryly, "the captain responds quite well to regeneration. It will take him a while to grow new legs, but he should be fine. And under the circumstances, I believe he and all the rest of his wounded personnel are definitely entitled to have the Navy pick up the tab on their medical bills."

"You can say that again," Alistair McKeon agreed.

His expression was grim, and he shook his head. The handful of survivors from Hecate were still in a state of semi-shock, but they'd been remarkably and uniformly reticent about precisely what their ship had been doing. Some of that was probably inevitable, given the history between the RMN and the Havenite navy, but this went beyond traditional dislike or antipathy. These people were clearly maintaining operational security, and like everyone else in the briefing room, McKeon could think of only one star nation against which any Havenite operation in Silesia could possibly be directed.

"We certainly owe Pirate's Bane and her crew an enormous debt for alerting us to the Peeps' presence," Mercedes Brigham added.

"Agreed." Honor nodded. "Which is why I instructed the Fleet repair base here in Sidemore to see to all of her damages gratis. If anyone back at Admiralty House has a problem with that, they can take it up with me."

Her tone and expression alike suggested that anyone who did fault her decision probably would not enjoy her response.

"In the meantime, however," she went on briskly, "the question is how we respond to this information."

"I agree fully," Alfredo Yu said. "The problem is that we're still not entirely sure what information we have."

"Captain Bachfisch's people did get a few more facts out of Hecate's database," Lieutenant Commander Reynolds pointed out.

"But not very many," Alice Truman objected. Reynolds looked at her, and she shrugged. "We know she was assigned to their 'Second Fleet,' " she said. "But nothing in our intelligence files even shows that fleet's existence. We have no idea how powerful it is, who's in command of it, or precisely what its mission out here may be!"

"With all due respect, Dame Alice," Reynolds replied, "we do know at least a little. For one thing, there's a fragment of a report which refers to the fact that Hecate was assigned to this Second Fleet's third task group. If it's organized into at least three task groups, then it's obviously a fairly good-sized force. And since Hecate's survivors are being so intensely uncooperative with us, I think we have to assume that whatever reason it was sent out here for has something directly to do with us. And I'm very much afraid that I can think of only one scenario which would send a large Havenite fleet to an uninhabited star system this close to Marsh in complete secrecy."

"You're suggesting that they're planning to attack us," Anson Hewitt said flatly.

"I'm suggesting that they may be planning to attack us, Sir," Reynolds corrected. Then he sighed. "No," he admitted. "That's being wishy-washy." He faced Hewitt squarely. "The truth is, Sir, that I can't really believe they'd send a heavy force out here under these conditions if they weren't planning to jump us."

Silence hovered in the conference room, bleak and bitter as the implications of the intelligence officer's analysis sank into the brains of officers already confronting the early stages of a shooting war with the Andermani Empire.

"You may well be right, George," Honor said after several seconds. "On the other hand, there's one point that confuses me."

"Only one?" McKeon laughed harshly. "There are dozens of them confusing me right now!"

"Only one main point of confusion," Honor told him, then let her gaze sweep over the other officers in the compartment. "If all they wanted to do was to attack us, then the logical way for them to proceed would have been to move straight into the attack as soon as they reached Silesia, before some freak accident—like this one—betrayed their presence. But they didn't do that. Instead, we've got this Second Fleet of theirs hiding out in an out of the way star system close enough to use as a jump-off point while one or two of their destroyers play postman back and forth between them and their closest diplomatic mission."

"You think they're waiting for orders to attack?" Truman mused aloud.

"Or for orders to turn around and go home and pretend they were never here," Honor replied.

"There may something to that," Yu said slowly. Of all the officers in the compartment, he was probably the least happy. "On the other hand," he continued with stubborn integrity, "much as I would prefer for my old homeland not to be the heavy of the piece, there's no way they would sent a force as heavy as the one Commander Reynolds is postulating this far if they didn't seriously intend to use it. They may be waiting for orders from home to kick off the attack, and they may actually be hoping they'll get recall orders, instead. But the mere fact that they've sent an attack force into a region where they know the Star Kingdom is already confronting a possible war scenario indicates all sorts of things I'd really rather not think about."

"Things none of us would like to think about, Alfredo," Honor agreed grimly. "Nonetheless, I think we do have to consider them. And whatever may be going on closer to home, we still have to respond to our own situation out here."

"What did you have in mind, Your Grace?" Jaruwalski asked, regarding her intensely. Honor glanced at her, and the ops officer shrugged. "I've known you for a while now, Your Grace," she said, "and I've heard that tone of voice before. So since you've already made up your mind about what it is you're planning to do, perhaps you'd care to share it with the rest of us?"

A rumble of laughter rolled around the compartment as Jaruwalski's wry tone punctured the tension, and Honor smiled at her. Any number of flag officers would have stamped on an operations officer who semi-twitted them that way in front of the rest of the staff, but no one thought twice about it on this staff.

"Actually," she said, "I have made up my mind. Alice," she turned to Truman, "I'm going to pull Werewolf out of your task group to hold her here. I'll swap you the Glory from the Protector's Own to replace her; she's a little bigger, but her emissions signature is close enough that I doubt anyone who sees her will realize she's Grayson and not Manticoran. Then I want you to take your entire group and run a LAC sweep through the star system Hecate was headed for. And I want you to be obvious about it."

There was a moment of silence, then Truman cleared her throat.

"May I ask why you want me to be obvious, Your Grace?" she asked quietly and a bit more formally than usual.

"First," Honor told her with a tight smile, "I don't want any more accidents. If we seem to be sneaking LACs into the middle of their fleet under stealth, then there's entirely too much chance that they might mistake it for a serious attack. We don't need that when things are already this tense with the Andies." Several heads nodded, and she went on. "Second, I want them to know that we know they're here."

"What if they have orders to attack if they're discovered, My Lady?" Yu asked.

"I doubt very much that they do. I could be wrong, of course, but we can't afford to paralyze ourselves trying to second-guess what they may or may not be planning to do. My feeling is that this entire operation was set up to be as covert as possible. Under the circumstances, I think it's more likely they have orders to withdraw if their presence becomes known. If nothing else, I'd think that they'd have to be unhappy about how the Andies may react to their having sent a major fleet presence this close to their borders. At any rate, I think it's worth the gamble. We'll drop in on them, let them know we've realized they're here, and see how they respond."

She looked back at Truman.

"So, as I say, I want you to be obvious, Alice. But I also want you to emphasize the need to be cautious when you brief your COLACs. I don't want anyone crowding the Peeps—I mean, Havenites—closely enough to provoke them into defensive fire. Clear?"

"Clear," Truman agreed, and Honor was pleased to taste her intense satisfaction at having been handed the assignment. Some task group commanders would have been wondering if they were being sent out as a way for the station commander to put a convenient scapegoat into the line of fire in case something went wrong. Other station commanders would have been completely unable to delegate the authority, which might have suggested a certain distrust of their subordinate's capabilities. There was no need, she thought, for Alice to know just how hard she really did find it to delegate in this instance. Not because she had any qualms whatsoever about Alice's abilities, but because the responsibility for what she'd just ordered done was hers, not Alice's.

Unfortunately, with everything else that was going on, she needed to be right here, just in case it all hit the fan while Alice was away. Speaking of which . . .

"In the meantime, Alfredo," she continued, turning back to Yu, "we'll keep your other people here with Alistair's at Sidemore to cover it during Alice's absence. I think it's at least possible that no one in Nouveau Paris knew Benjamin had sent you out here when they dispatched this Second Fleet. I'd just as soon keep it that way in case things go south on us."

"Understood," Yu agreed.

"In that case, people, let's be about it."

* * *

"Hecate is over two days overdue, Sir," Captain DeLaney pointed out quietly.

"I know, Molly. I know."

Lester Tourville frowned as he contemplated the unhappy implications of DeLaney's reminder. There could be any number of reasons for Hecate's failure to arrive as scheduled. Unfortunately, he couldn't think of one of them that he liked. And whatever it might have been, his orders were clear. It seemed extremely unlikely that anything could have given away Second Fleet's presence, but extremely unlikely wasn't the same thing as impossible. Nor was it impossible, however unlikely, that Hecate's nonarrival was the result of something besides the normal hazards of navigation.

"All right, Molly," he sighed. "Pass the movement instructions. I want to pull out for the alternate rendezvous within the hour."

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