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# Chapter Twenty-Nine

"Wayfarer, this is LaFroye. Our pinnace is closing from your six o'clock and low. ETA is now twelve minutes."

"Understood, LaFroye. Ah, may I ask just what it is you're concerned about?"

Jason Ackenheil sat back in his command chair, watching Lieutenant Gower, his com officer talking to one Captain Gabrijela Kanjcevic, mistress after God of the Solarian-flag merchant ship Wayfarer, and smiled thinly. It was safe enough, since he was far outside the range of Gower's visual pickup. Wayfarer wasn't that huge for a merchie—a fast freight hauler configured for relatively small cargos (by the standards of the leviathans which roamed the interstellar deeps) and limited passenger service—although she still dwarfed LaFroye to minnow-status. But the minnow had teeth and the whale didn't, so the whale had better be extremely polite to the minnow. On the other hand, some merchies were more equal than others, and Wayfarer undoubtedly felt reasonably secure in her League registry. After all, no Manticoran captain in his right mind wanted to provoke a career-ending incident with the League. Which explained why, so far at least, Kanjcevic sounded wary but not truly concerned.

But that was about to change . . . assuming, of course, that his information was accurate.

Which, all things being equal, it had damned well better be.

"It's only routine, Captain," Gower assured the face on his com screen. Then he glanced over his shoulder, as if checking to see if anyone were in proximity, and leaned turned back towards Kanjcevic's image.

"Just between you and me, Ma'am, it's pretty silly, actually. We've had reports of a rash of merchant losses in this sector over the last few months, and Intelligence has decided someone's using an armed merchant raider. So orders came down from Sidemore to make an eyeball check on every merchant ship we can." He shrugged. "So far, we've checked eleven without finding a thing." He did not quite, Ackenheil noticed, add "of course," but his tone made it superfluous, anyway. "Shouldn't take more than a few minutes for our pinnace to dock, come aboard, make sure you don't have any grasers hidden away, and let you go on about your business. But if we don't check it out, well . . ."

He shrugged again, and Kanjcevic smiled.

"Understood, Lieutenant," she said. "And I don't suppose I should complain about anything designed to make life harder on pirates. We'll give your people full cooperation."

"Thank you, Captain. We appreciate it. LaFroye, clear."

Gower cut the connection and turned to grin at his captain.

"How was that, Skip?"

"Perfect, Lou. Just perfect," Ackenheil assured him. Now let's just hope Reynolds knew what he was talking about in that intelligence brief, he added very quietly to himself.

* * *

Captain Denise Hammond, RMMC, stood and moved to the center of the pinnace troop compartment. Quarters were more than a little cramped, given that she had two entire platoons of battle armored troopers.

"All right, People," she told them. "We're docking in five mikes. You know the drill. No nonsense off anyone, but no bloodshed if we can help it either. Copy?"

A chorus of assents came back over her helmet com, and she nodded in satisfaction. Then she turned back to the hatch and waited with a hungry grin of anticipation. If the Skipper was right about what they were about to find, then this would be one of the best days she'd had in months, possibly years. And if he was wrong . . . Well, she was only a Marine. None of the crap was going to splash on her for following orders, and she'd never much liked Sollies, anyway.

* * *

The pinnace settled into the docking arms, the personnel tube mated with the lock, and the Solarian merchant marine lieutenant Kanjcevic had sent down to greet their visitors straightened into what might charitably have been called a posture of attention. He didn't much care for Manties—damned arrogant upstarts; that's what they were, crowding Solarian shipping lines all the time—but he'd been ordered to make nice this time. Given the circumstances, he thought that was an excellent idea, however much it might gripe him to do anything of the sort, and he pasted a smile on his face as the green light of a good seal showed above the tube hatch.

The smile disappeared into sickly shock as that same hatch slid open and he suddenly found himself looking down the business end of a stun rifle. One held in the powered gauntlets of a Royal Manticoran Marine in the menacing bulk of battle armor. A Marine, a corner of the lieutenant's stunned brain noted with something almost like detachment, who appeared to be followed by dozens of other Marines . . . most of whom appeared to be armed with things considerably more lethal than stunners.

"My name is Hammond, Lieutenant," the Marine behind the stun rifle said over her armor's external speakers in a soprano which would probably have been pleasantly melodious under other circumstances. "Captain Hammond, Royal Manticoran Marines. I suggest you take me to your captain."

"I—I—" The lieutenant swallowed hard. "Uh, what's the meaning of this?" he demanded. Or tried to demand, anyway; it came out sounding more like a bleat of terrified confusion.

"This vessel is suspected of violating the provisions of the Cherwell Convention," Hammond told him, and felt a profound sense of internal satisfaction at the way his face went suddenly bone-white. "So I suggest," she went on as the rest of her boarding party swiftly and competently secured the boat bay, "that you see about getting me to your captain. Now."

* * *

"It's confirmed, Skipper," Denise Hammond told Captain Ackenheil. There was no visual, because she was speaking to him over her helmet com, but he didn't need a visual from her. He'd already seen the imagery from the external cameras of the Marines who'd forced the hatches into Wayfarer's "passenger cabins." Even in Silesia and even aboard freighters with strictly limited personnel space, passengers were seldom packed in twelve to the cabin.

Of course, Wayfarer's crew had managed to save a little space for them in their quarters. After all, they didn't need much space to store their personal belongings when they didn't have any . . . including clothing of any sort.

The expressions of abject terror on the faces of those naked, hopeless "passengers" had been enough to turn a man's stomach. But the moment when they realized they were looking at Royal Marines, not the bully boy guards of the owners to whom they had been consigned, had been something else again. Indeed, seeing it had given him almost as much pleasure as the sick, stunned expression on Kanjcevic's face when she realized what had happened. And when she remembered that under the terms of solemn interstellar treaties, the Star Kingdom of Manticore equated violation of the Cherwell Convention's prohibitions on trafficking in human beings with piracy.

Which was punishable by death.

"Good work, Denise," he said sincerely. "Very good work. Keep an eye on things over there for another twenty minutes, and I'll have the prize crew across to you."

"Aye, aye, Sir. We'll be here."

* * *

"Do you know what I hate most about our political lords and masters?" Dr. Wix demanded.

Jordin Kare tipped back his chair and cocked his head with a quizzical expression as he regarded the astrophysicist who'd just burst unceremoniously through his office door. It was very early in the day—which was the only reason Wix had gotten past the secretary who would have intercepted him during regular working hours—and Kare's coffee cup sat steaming on the corner of his blotter beside a half-eaten croissant.

"No," he said mildly, picking up his napkin and brushing crumbs from his lips. "I don't know what you hate most about our political lords and masters, TJ. But I feel somehow certain that you can scarcely wait to enlighten me."

"Um?" Wix stopped just inside the door, alerted by his superior's tone of voice that he'd just committed a social faux pas. Then he had the grace to blush. "Oops. Sorry, Boss. I forgot it was breakfast time for you."

"For me? Most people eat breakfast even earlier than I do, TJ—between the time they get up and the time they begin work," Kare pointed out. Then he noticed Wix's somewhat scruffy appearance and sighed. "TJ, you did go home last night at some point, didn't you?"

"Well, actually . . . no," Wix admitted. Kare drew a deep breath, but before he could deliver yet another homily on the desirability of something resembling a normal sleep schedule, the younger scientist hurried on.

"I was going to, honest. But one thing led to another, and, well—" He twitched one shoulder in impatient dismissal. "Anyway," he went on more enthusiastically, "I was looking at that latest data run—you know, the one Argonaut pulled in last week?"

Kare recognized the futility of trying to introduce any other topic until Wix had run down about this one and resigned himself.

"Yes," he said. "I know the data you're talking about."

"Well," Wix went on, starting to bounce around the office in his excitement, "I went back and reran them, and damned if I don't think we've actually hit the proper approach vector. Oh," he waved one hand as Kare let his chair come suddenly back upright, "we still have a lot of refining to do, and I want to make at least two or three more runs to get a broader observational base to double-check my rough calculations. But unless I'm mistaken, the analysis is going to confirm that we've hit the target pretty much on the nose."

"I wish," Kare said after a moment, "that you'd stop doing this, TJ."

"Doing what?" Wix asked, obviously confused by his superior's tone of voice.

"Finding things ahead of schedule," Kare told him. "After the Director and I spent days hammering home the need for us to do all of the time-consuming detail work, you turn around and find the damned approach vector a good four months early! Do you have any idea how hard this is going to make it to convince the politicos that they should listen to us the next time we tell them we need more time to complete our research?"

"Of course I do," Wix told him in a moderately affronted tone. "That's what I hate most about our political lords and masters, if you'll remember the way I began this conversation. Besides, it really sours my day to start it off by literally stumbling across something which I ought to feel only pleased about finding and then realize how much it pisses me off to realize I'm going to do exactly what the idiots I work for wanted done all along. Well, that and the way the assholes are going to steal the credit for it."

"You do realize how paranoid—if not petty—this entire conversation makes two reasonably intelligent adults sound, don't you?" Kare asked with a wry grin, and Wix shrugged.

"I don't feel particularly paranoid, and I don't think we're the petty ones. In fact, that's why it pisses me off—I don't like working for a prime minister who's so damned petty. Besides, as soon as we tell them about it, that asshole Oglesby is going to be back over here for another news conference. At which you and Admiral Reynaud will be doing well to get a single word in edgewise."

"Oh, no, TJ! Not this time," Kare said with a seraphic smile. "You found it, so this time you're the one who's going to be doing well to get a single word in edgewise."

* * *

"That was delicious, Your Grace," Mercedes Brigham sighed, sitting back from the breakfast table with a comfortable sense of repletion. The plate before her bore the sticky remains of her eggs Benedict's hollandaise sauce and a few bacon crumbs, while the rind of a musk melon stood up like the keel of a stripped ark on a smaller plate, accompanied by two purple grapes which had somehow escaped the massacre of their fellows.

Honor's breakfast, as always, had been considerably more substantial, as a concession to her enhanced metabolism, and she smiled at Brigham's comment as she reached for the cocoa carafe and poured herself another mug.

"I'm glad you enjoyed it," she said, her smile broadening as James MacGuiness stepped in from his pantry with a fresh cup of the hot tea her chief of staff preferred. "Of course, I'm not the person you ought to be complimenting about it."

"No, and I wasn't complimenting you," Brigham told her. "I was simply commenting. The person I intended to compliment about it wasn't here at the moment. Now he is." She sniffed and looked up at MacGuiness. "That was delicious, Mac," she said with dignity.

"Thank you, Commodore," MacGuiness said gravely. "Would you like another egg?"

"Some of us, unfortunately, have to be a bit more careful than others about what we eat," Brigham said in regretful tones.

"Cheer up, Mercedes," Honor told her while Nimitz bleeked a laugh of his own around a stalk of celery. "There's always lunch."

"And I'll look forward to it," Brigham assured her with a chuckle while she smiled at the steward.

"I'll do my best not to disappoint," MacGuiness assured her. He was just about to say something more when the com attention signal chimed softly. He made a small face—the grimace of irritation he saved for moments when the outside universe intruded itself into his admiral's mealtimes—and then stepped over to the bulkhead-mounted terminal and pressed the accept key.

"Admiral's day cabin, MacGuiness speaking," he told the pickup in decidedly repressive accents.

"Bridge, Officer of the Watch, speaking," Lieutenant Ernest Talbot, Werewolf's communications officer, replied in a respectful voice. "Sorry to interrupt Her Grace's breakfast, Mr. MacGuiness. But the Captain asked me to inform her that Perimeter Security has just picked up an unidentified incoming hyper footprint. A big one, twenty-two light-minutes from the primary. According to CIC, there are over twenty major drive sources."

MacGuiness's eyebrows rose, and he started to turn towards Honor, but she was by his side before the movement was more than half completed. She laid one hand on his shoulder and leaned a bit closer to the pickup herself.

"This is the Admiral, Lieutenant Talbot," she said. "I assume that the grav-pulse challenge has already been sent?"

"Of course, Your Grace." Talbot sounded suddenly crisper. "It was transmitted as soon as they were picked up, exactly—" he paused, obviously checking the time "—seven minutes and forty-five seconds ago. There's been no response."

"I see." Honor refrained from pointing out that if there had been a response, the hyper footprint would scarcely have still been unidentified. Then she felt a tiny pang of guilt at the thought. Good officers learned never to assume that someone else was aware of all they were aware of, and subordinates who were willing to risk sounding foolish to be certain their superiors had all relevant information were to be cherished, not scorned.

"Well," she went on, "they could still be friendlies who're just a little slow responding, I suppose." Her tone was that of someone thinking out loud, and Talbot made no response. Nor was any required. Both of them knew that by now every Manticoran or Allied man-of-war was equipped with FTL grav-pulse transmitters . . . and that no Allied com officer was "slow" enough to not have responded by now.

"Still," Honor continued, "this isn't a good time to take chances. My compliments to Captain Cardones, Lieutenant, and ask him to bring the task force to Action Stations."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am!" Talbot said crisply, and the General Quarters alarm woke to clamorous, ear-hurting life less than four seconds later.

* * *

Admiral of the Green Francis Jurgensen felt his belly congeal into a single, massive lump of ice as he stared at the report on the display in front of him. For several seconds, his brain simply refused to work at all.

Then the real panic set in.

Sheer, shocked disbelief had held him paralyzed as he read through the brief, terse communique and the attached copy of the official news release. None of it could possibly have been true! Except that even as he'd told himself that, he'd known that it was. Now the shock had worn off enough to lose its anesthetic edge, and he jerked up out of his comfortable chair with an abruptness which would have startled anyone familiar with the eternally self-possessed exterior he was always so careful to present to the rest of the universe. For a moment, he stood poised, looking almost as if he wanted to physically flee the damning information contained in the report. But, of course, there was nowhere to run, and he licked his lips nervously.

He walked over to the window of his office, his strides jerky, and leaned against the towering panel of crystoplast as he gazed out over the early evening skyline of the City of Landing. The Star Kingdom's capital's air traffic moved steadily against the darkening cobalt vault of the planet Manticore's star-pricked heavens, and he closed his eyes as the serene, jewel-bright chips of light floated steadily about their business. Somehow, the tranquility of the everyday scene only made the report's contents and conclusions even worse.

His brain began to function again, after a fashion. It darted about, like a frightened fish in too small an aquarium, bumping its snout again and again against the unyielding crystal wall which kept it pent. But, like the fish, it found no escape.

There was no point even trying to suppress this information, he realized. It wasn't an agent report, or an analyst's respectfully-phrased disagreement with his own position which could be ignored or conveniently misfiled. In fact, it was little more than a verbatim transcript of Thomas Theisman's own news release. The high-speed courier the agent-in-charge in Nouveau Paris had chartered to get it to him as quickly as possible couldn't have beaten the normal news service dispatch boat by more than a few hours. Perhaps a standard day, at most. Which meant that if he didn't report it to Sir Edward Janacek—and thus to the rest of the High Ridge Government—they would read about it in their morning newsfaxes.

He shuddered at the thought. That prospect was enough to quash any temptation, even one as powerful as the auto-response defensive reaction which urged him to "lose" this particular report the way he'd lost others from time to time. But this one was different. It wasn't merely inconvenient; it was catastrophic.

No. He couldn't suppress it, or pretend it hadn't happened. But he did have a few hours before he would be forced to share it with his fellow space lords and their political masters. There was time for at least the start of a damage control effort, although it was unlikely to be anywhere near as effective as he needed it to be.

The worst part of it, he reflected, as his brain settled into more accustomed thought patterns and began considering alternative approaches to minimizing the consequences, was the fact that he'd assured Janacek so confidently that the Peeps had no modern warships. That was what was going to stick sideways in the First Lord's craw. Yet even though Jurgensen could confidently expect Janacek to fixate on that aspect of the intelligence debacle, he knew it was only the very tip of the iceberg of ONI's massive failure. Bad enough that the Peeps had managed to build so many ships of the wall without his even suspecting they were doing it, but he also had no hard information at all on what sort of hardware they'd come up with to put aboard them.

He thought still harder, pushing the unpalatable bits of information about, studying them from all angles as he sought the best way to present them.

However he did it, it was going to be . . . unpleasant.

* * *

The rest of Honor's staff was waiting on Werewolf's flag bridge when she and Mercedes, both now wearing their skinsuits, stepped out of the lift. She nodded to them all, but her attention was on Andrea Jaruwalski.

"Still no reply to the challenge?" she asked. She reached up to rub Nimitz's ears where he sat on her shoulder in his custom-built skinsuit, and he pressed back against her hand. He held his miniature helmet tucked under one mid-limb, and she smiled as the taste of his emotions flowed through her.

"No, Ma'am," Jaruwalski replied. "They're accelerating in-system at a steady four hundred gravities, and they haven't said a word. CIC has managed to refine its data a little further, though. They make it twenty-two superdreadnoughts or dreadnoughts, eight battlecruisers or large heavy cruisers, fifteen or twenty or light cruisers, and what looks like four transports."

"Transports?" Honor raised an eyebrow at her operations officer, and Jaruwalski shrugged.

"That's CIC's best guess so far, Ma'am. Whatever they are, they're big, but their wedge strength looks low for warships of their apparent tonnage. So it looks like they're military auxiliaries of some sort, whether they're actually transports or not."

"I see." Honor continued across the flag deck to her command chair and racked her own helmet on its side. Her command station was no more than three long strides from the flag plot, and her small com screen blinked to life as she eased Nimitz down from her shoulder and set him on the back of her chair. Rafe Cardones' face looked out of it at her, and she smiled in welcome.

"Good morning, Rafe," she said.

"Good morning, Ma'am," he responded more formally, and his smile was a bit tighter than hers had been. "It looks like we've got visitors," he added.

"So I've heard," she agreed. "Give me a few minutes to get myself brought up to speed, and we'll decide what sort of welcome mat we want to put out."

"Yes, Ma'am," he said, and she turned her attention to the plot.

Werewolf was a new ship, and she and her sisters had been designed from the keel out to serve as task force or fleet flagships, so her flag plot's holo sphere was at least two-thirds the size of CIC's master plot. It was less cluttered than the master plot because the automatic filters removed distracting items—like the Marsh System's civilian spacegoing infrastructure—which were both unnecessary and possibly confusing. They could be put back if Honor really wanted to see them, but at the moment she had eyes only for the red icons of unknown starships sweeping steadily inward from the system hyper limit.

"What's their time to Sidemore orbit?" she asked.

"They came out on our side of the primary, Your Grace," Lieutenant Theophile Kgari, her staff astrogator, replied crisply. Kgari's grandparents had migrated to the Star Kingdom directly from Old Earth, and his skin was almost as dark as Michelle Henke's. "They made transit at a very low velocity—no more than a hundred KPS or so, almost directly in-system. But they've been piling on the accel ever since. They translated out of hyper just under—" it was his turn to consult a time readout "—nineteen minutes ago, so they're up to four-point-three-four thousand KPS. Assuming a zero/zero intercept with Sidemore, they'll hit turnover in almost exactly two hours, at which time they'll be up to approximately three-two-point-niner thousand KPS at seven-point-six-five light-minutes from the planet."

"Thank you, Theo," Honor said, turning to smile briefly at him before she returned her attention to the plot. She reached down to caress Nimitz's ears once more as he sat upright on the back of her command chair. She stood that way for several thoughtful seconds, gazing at the light dots in the plot silently, then drew a deep breath, shrugged, and turned to face her staff.

"Until they tell us differently, we'll consider them hostiles," she told them. "It would take a lot of chutzpah for anyone to come in on us with only twenty-two of the wall, but that's not to say someone might not be crazy enough to try it. So we won't take any chances. Andrea," she looked at the ops officer, "this looks like an excellent opportunity to dust off Buckler Bravo-Three, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes, Ma'am, I would," Jaruwalski agreed.

"Mercedes?" Honor asked, cocking her head at her chief of staff, and Brigham frowned ever so slightly.

"As you say, Your Grace, it would take someone with more guts than good sense to take us on with what we've seen so far. The only thing that bothers me about that supposition is that presumably whoever they are, they realize that too. Which leads me to reflect upon that axiom of Admiral Courvoisier's you're so fond of quoting."

"The same thought had occurred to me," Honor told her. "That's why I figure this is a good time to run Buckler Bravo-Three. If it turns out it's only an exercise, well and good. But if it should turn out we need it, I want those pods and those LACs in space and in position when it hits the fan."

"That's more or less what I was thinking, Ma'am," Brigham said. "My only problem is that Bravo-Three takes us out of Sidemore orbit towards them. If it's all the same to you, I'd really prefer Bravo-Two." She shrugged. "I may be being paranoid, but if these really are hostiles and not just terminally stupid friendlies who think it's humorous not to respond to our challenges, then I'd just as soon not be drawn any further from the planet than we have to be."

"Um." Honor rubbed the tip of her nose thoughtfully, considering what the chief of staff had said.

Buckler Bravo-Three called for the task force to advance to meet any potential enemy, closing into extreme Ghost Rider missile range with the ships of the wall behind an advanced screen of LACs. Bravo-Two, on the other hand, kept the ships of the wall in close proximity to Sidemore while LAC scouting forces fanned out to make a more precise ID and, if appropriate, launch the initial attacks independently of the wall. It was the more cautious approach, and the LACs, unlike the capital ships, would have to enter any adversaries' range to engage them. That meant exposing them to potential losses the ships of the wall could avoid, thanks to the range advantage Ghost Rider gave their missile pods. On the other hand, the LACs could go out, make positive identification, and then report back rather than sweeping in to attack automatically, and there ought to be time to bring the wall into range instead if that seemed appropriate.

She considered a moment longer, then nodded.

"I can't think of any good reason for them to be trying to suck us away from the planet—not on the basis of anything we've seen up to this point, anyway. But that doesn't mean there isn't one, and you're right. Bravo-Two will do the job just as well as Three."

She turned her attention to the com screen and her flag captain.

"You heard, Rafe?"

"Yes, Ma'am. Bravo-Two, it is. Shall I pass the word to Admiral McKeon and Admiral Truman?"

"Yes, please. And tell them we'll be setting up a four-way com conference in fifteen minutes, as well."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am. I'll see to it."

"Thank you," she said, and slid into her command chair, then rotated it to face her staff once more.

"And now, ladies and gentlemen," she said calmly, "the Chair will entertain theories as to just what these people think they're doing."

* * *

Ninety minutes trickled past without a single transmission from the incoming strangers. The transports—or whatever they were—had fallen back, trailing along behind the probable ships of the wall with what looked like three light cruisers or large destroyers riding herd on them. The rest of the unidentified formation simply continued to bore straight in, and tension had ratcheted steadily higher on Werewolf's flag deck as the range continued to drop just as steadily.

"Scotty is about fifteen minutes from contact, Ma'am," Jaruwalski reported.

"Has he gotten a visual yet?" Honor asked.

"No, Ma'am," the ops officer admitted with an unmistakable edge of chagrin. "Whoever this is, they're clearly familiar with our remote sensor platform doctrines. They haven't tried to take any of them out, but the formation they've adopted makes that unnecessary . . . so far, at least."

Honor nodded in understanding. The strangers' formation was unorthodox, to say the least. Rather than a conventional wall formation, the capital ships had settled into a roughly spherical alignment, then rotated ever so slightly on their axes. The result was to turn the roofs and floors of their impeller wedges, which had just as powerful a warping effect on visible light as on anything else, outward in all directions. In effect, they had created a series of blind spots directed towards their flanks, which just happened to be where doctrine called for sensor drones to be deployed.

"Has Scotty considered vectoring his drones around behind them for a look up their kilts?" she asked.

There wasn't that much to choose between looking down the throat or up the kilt of an impeller wedge, except that the throat was deeper than the kilt, which gave a sensor drone a better angle on its target. Unfortunately, the forward sensors and point defense armament of a warship were better than those guarding its stern precisely because the throat was more vulnerable than the kilt. Given these people's apparent awareness of the defenders' probable doctrine, it was a fairly safe bet that any drone, however stealthy, which wandered in front of them would be dead meat unless they chose not to kill it.

"Yes, Ma'am, he has," Jaruwalski acknowledged. "But they should be going for turnover in another ten minutes or so."

"Understood," Honor said. When the bogeys flipped to begin decelerating towards Sidemore, they'd turn their own kilts directly towards Scotty's shipboard sensors.

She leaned back in her command chair, with Nimitz curled comfortably in her lap, and let her gaze wander around her flag bridge. The tension was palpable, but her people were functioning smoothly and efficiently under it. None of them had been able to come up with an explanation for the intruders' actions, but from the taste of their emotions, most of them had come to the conclusion that the bogeys were most probably Andermani.

Mercedes and George Reynolds, Honor knew, both suspected that this was one more provocation, this time on a grand scale. A sort of interstellar game of chicken between task forces. Jaruwalski disagreed. She didn't know who these people were, but she was firmly convinced they weren't Andies. There was entirely too much potential for someone to panic and start shooting if those were Andermani warships out there, and nothing anyone had reported, including Thomas Bachfisch, suggested that the Andermani could possibly be able to overcome such unfavorable numerical odds. If Honor's staff was aware of that, then surely the Andermani were, as well, and risking that much tonnage and the personnel required to crew those ships just to "send a message" was a far cry from risking a single cruiser here or there. And whatever else the Andies might be, it struck her as extremely unlikely that any senior Andermani officer could be crazy enough to take such a chance. She'd been polite about it, but she'd also made her disagreement with both the chief of staff and the staff spook clear, and Honor smiled ever so slightly at the thought. Then she glanced at the time and date display on the bulkhead, and beckoned to Timothy Meares.

"Yes, Your Grace?" the youthful flag lieutenant said quietly as he stopped beside her command chair.

"I think it's about time, Tim," she told him, equally quietly.

"Yes, Ma'am," he said, and walked casually across the bridge towards Lieutenant Harper Brantley, Honor's staff communications officer.

She watched him go, then turned her head as she tasted a sudden spike in Mercedes Brigham's emotions. Her chief of staff was gazing at her in intent speculation. Speculation that became something else when Honor grinned cheerfully at her. Brigham's eyes narrowed, then snapped from Honor to Meares and Brantley, and Honor felt Nimitz's delighted amusement. Which was only to be expected from someone whose treecat name was "Laughs Brightly," she reflected.

Brigham looked back at Honor and opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it again and shook her head severely at her admiral, instead.

None of the other staffers had noticed the silent exchange. They were all far too intent on their own duties to pay any attention to Meares' movements or the chief of staff's expression. Nor did they notice when the flag lieutenant bent over Brantley's shoulder to whisper quietly in his ear.

The com officer's head popped up, and he looked incredulously at Meares for just a moment, then darted a half-accusing, half-amused looked at his admiral before he bent back over his console. He murmured something into his hush mike, then leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms.

Nothing at all happened for perhaps ninety seconds, and then quite a lot of things happened in rapid succession.

The incoming bogeys suddenly and simultaneously made turnover over ten minutes early, and as they did their icons began to multiply in the plot. Dozens—scores—of additional light codes appeared, spreading outward like captive constellations, and Honor tasted her staffers' consternation as they recognized what they were seeing. It was a sight they'd seen scores of times over the past three or four T-years; it was just that they'd never seen anyone else lunching full deckloads of LACs.

For a few, brief moments consternation (and something just a bit more akin to panic than any of them would ever have admitted) was all they felt as they grappled with the sudden awareness of how far the bogeys' unexpected possession of LACs would go towards evening the tactical imbalance they had assumed favored Task Force Thirty-Four so heavily. But before they could react, the flood of LAC icons began to blink from the crimson of unknown, assumed hostiles to the steady green of friendly units. The color change flowed through the formation in a cascade, one LAC squadron at a time as each of them brought its transponders online. And as each LAC group completed its transition, its mothership's icon blinked to green, in turn.

"Your Grace," Jaruwalski began, "we know those ships! They're—"

She chopped herself off abruptly and turned to favor Honor with a much more old-fashioned glance than the one Brigham and turned upon her as she realized how superfluous her report actually was. Honor returned her look—it would never have done to call it a glare, of course—with her best innocent smile.

"Yes, Andrea?" she said.

"Never mind, Your Grace." For a moment, the ops officer sounded remarkably like a Grayson nanny who had surprised her charges in the act of painting the nursery purple. But then, almost against her will, she began to grin and shook her head at her Admiral.

"Never mind, Your Grace," she repeated, in quite a different tone. "I suppose by now we should all be accustomed to what passes for your sense of humor."

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