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"Understood. Keep an eye on her, Eve."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am."
A cruiser, hmmm? Honor leaned back in her chair once more. One cruiser wouldn't make much difference, but Van Slyke would be happy to see her. She would bring his squadron up to full strength at last, and the rest of the task group would probably see her as a harbinger of the far more powerful reinforcements they'd been promised. Besides, she'd probably have dispatches on board, and even the tiniest scrap of fresh information would be a vast relief.
She reached up and drew Nimitz down into her lap, rubbing his ears and considering the com conference the Admiral had scheduled for tomorrow morning. There were several points she wanted to make—not least how lucky she'd been to get away with that EW drone trick—and she slid further down in the chair as she considered the best (and most tactful) way to express them.
Several minutes ticked away, and the quiet, orderly routine of her bridge murmured to her like some soothing mantra. Her mind toyed with phrases and sentences, maneuvering them with a sort of languid, catlike pleasure. Yet her dreamy eyes were deceptive. The soft chime of an incoming signal from the com section brought her instantly back to full awareness, and her gaze moved to Lieutenant Commander Monet's narrow back.
The com officer depressed a button and listened to his earbug for a moment, and Honor's eyes narrowed when his shoulders twitched. If she hadn't known what an utterly reliable, totally humorless sort he was, she might actually have thought he was chuckling.
He pressed another sequence of buttons, then swiveled his chair to face her. His face was admirably grave, but his brown eyes twinkled slightly as he cleared his throat.
"Burst transmission for you, Captain." He paused just a moment. "It's from Captain Tankersley, Ma'am."
Faint, pink heat tingled along Honors cheekbones. Did every member of her crew know about her... relationship with Paul?! It was none of their business, even if they did, darn it! It wasn't as if there were anything shady or underhanded about it—Paul was a yard dog, so even the prohibition against affairs with officers in the same chain of command didn't come into it!
But even as she prepared to glower at the com officer, her own sense of the ridiculous came to her rescue. Of course they knew—even Admiral Sarnow knew! She'd never realized her nonexistent love life was so widely noticed, but if she'd wanted to keep a low profile she should have thought of it sooner. And the twinkle in Monet's eyes wasn't the smutty thing it could have been. In fact, she realized as she sensed the same gentle amusement from the rest of her silent bridge crew, he actually seemed pleased for her.
"Ah, switch it to my screen," she said, suddenly realizing she'd been silent just a bit too long.
"It's a private signal, Ma'am." Monet's voice was so bland Honors mouth twitched in response. She shoved herself up out of her chair, cradling Nimitz in her arms and fighting her rebellious dimple.
"In that case, I'll take it on my briefing room terminal."
"Of course, Ma'am. I'll switch it over."
"Thank you," Honor said with all the dignity she could muster, and crossed to the briefing room hatch.
It slid open for her, and as she stepped through it, she suddenly wondered why Paul was screening her at all. Nike would reach the base in another thirty minutes or so, but the transmission lag at this range was still something like seventeen seconds. That ruled out any practical real-time conversation, so why hadn't he waited another fifteen minutes to avoid it?
An eyebrow arched in speculation, and she deposited Nimitz on the briefing room table as she sat in the captains chair at its head and keyed the terminal. The screen flashed a ready signal, and then Paul's face appeared.
"Hi, Honor. Sorry to disturb you, but I thought you'd better know." Her eyebrows knitted in a frown as his grim expression registered. "We just got an arrival signal from a heavy cruiser," his recorded voice continued, then paused. "It's Warlock, Honor," he said, and she went rigid in her chair.
Paul looked out of the screen as if he could see her reaction, and there was compassion in his eyes—and warning—as his image nodded.
"Young's still in command," he said softly, "and he's still senior to you. Watch yourself, okay?"
PNS Napoleon drifted through blackness, far from the dim beacon of the system's red dwarf primary. The light cruiser's drive was down, her active sensors dead, and her captain sat tensely on her bridge as she coasted along her silent course, well inside the orbit of Hancock's frozen outermost planet. He could see two different Manty destroyers' impeller signatures in his display, but the nearest was over twelve light-minutes from Napoleon, and he had absolutely no intention of attracting its attention.
Commander Ogilve hadn't thought much of Operation Argus when he was first briefed for it. The whole idea had struck him as an excellent way to start a war and get his ship fried in the process, yet it had worked out far better than he'd expected. It was horribly time-consuming, and the fact that none of the ships involved had been caught yet didn't mean none of them ever would be, but it only had to go on working for a little longer. Just long enough for Admiral Rollins to receive the data he needed... and for PNS Napoleon to get the hell out of Hancock in one piece.
"Coming up on the first relay, Sir." His com officer sounded as unhappy as Ogilve felt, and the commander took pains to exude calm as he withdrew his gaze from the display and nodded in response. Wouldn't do to let the troops know their captain was as scared as they were, he thought dryly.
"Prepare to initiate data dump," he said.
"Yes, Sir."
The bridge was silent as the com officer brought his communication lasers up from standby. Any sort of emission was extremely dangerous under the circumstances, but the relay's position had been plotted with painstaking care. The people who'd pla
Ogilve snorted at his own choice of cliche, for Argus had cost billions. The heavily stealthed sensor platforms had been inserted from over two light-months out, coasting in out of the silence of interstellar space with all power locked down to absolute minimum. They'd slid through the Manties' sensors like any other bits of space debris, and the tiny trickle of power which had braked them and aligned them in their final, carefully chosen positions had been so small as to be utterly indetectable at anything over a few thousand kilometers.
In point of fact, getting the platforms in had been the easy part. Laymen tended to forget just how huge—and empty—any given star system was. Even the largest star-ship was less than a mote on such a scale; as long as it radiated no betraying energy signature to attract attention it might as well be invisible, and the sensor arrays were tinier still and equipped with the best stealth systems Haven could produce. Or, Ogilve amended, in this case buy clandestinely from the Solarian League. The biggest risk came from the low-powered, hair-thin lasers that tied them to the central storage relays, but even there the risk had been reduced to absolute minimum.
The platforms communicated only via ultra high-speed burst transmissions. Even if someone strayed into their path, it would require an enormous stroke of bad luck for him to realize he'd heard something, and the platforms' programming restricted them from sending if their sensors picked up anything in a position to intercept their messages.