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In short, he thought, they could get the hell out of it faster than anything else he had, and he saw understanding in Chin's eyes as she nodded.
"And Admiral West's battlecruisers, Sir?' she asked.
"We'll attach them to you, but don't let him get too far ahead of you. His squadron's understrength to start with—I don't want him tangling with Manties at three-to-two odds while you're too far astern to assist."
"Understood, Sir."
"Good." Rollins shoved his hands back into his pockets and rocked on his heels, staring down into the holo sphere, and his eyes were hard.
"Very well," he said at last, "let's get moving. We've got a lot of details to settle before we pull out."
The three officers turned and strode from the compartment, leaving the display alive behind them, and the empty, quiet image of the Hancock System glowed silently in its depths.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
"Still nothing."
Sir Yancey Parks took another quick turn about his flag bridge, and his staff busied themselves with routine tasks that happened to keep them out of his path. All but Commodore Capra, who watched his admiral with a painstaking lack of expression.
"I hate this kind of waiting for the other shoe," Parks fumed.
"Perhaps that's why they're doing it, Sir." Capra's voice was quiet, and Parks snorted.
"Of course it is! Unfortunately, that doesn't make it any less effective." Parks stopped pacing and turned to glare down at the holo sphere. CIC had switched to astrography mode, showing the sparse stars of his command area and the most recent data on friendly and enemy dispositions, and the admiral jabbed an angry chin at the bland light dot of Seaford Nine.
"That bastard over there knows exactly what he plans to do," he said, pitching his voice for Commodore Capra's ears alone. "He knows when he plans to make his move, what he plans to do, and how he plans to bring it off, and all I know is that I don't know any of those things."
He fell silent again, chewing his lip while acid churned in his stomach. War games and training exercises, he was discovering, were one thing, with nothing more at stake than one's reputation and career. Actual operations were something else again—life and death, not simply for you, but for your crews and, quite possibly, your kingdom, as well.
It was an unpleasant discovery... and one which made him doubt his own competence.
He sighed and made his muscles relax by a sheer act of will, then turned to look Capra squarely in the eye.
"Was Sarnow right?" He voiced his own thoughts, and the commodore shrugged uncomfortably.
"You know my view, Sir. I've never been comfortable about leaving Hancock so weak, but whether our posture should be aggressive or defensive—" He shrugged again, almost helplessly. "I just don't know, Sir. I suppose the waiting is getting to me, too."
"But you're starting to think he was right, aren't you?" Parks pressed. The commodore looked away, then drew a deep breath and nodded.
Parks' mouth twitched, and he turned his back on the sphere, folding his hands behind him.
"If anyone needs me, I'll be in my quarters, Vincent," he said quietly, and walked slowly from the flag bridge.
PNS Alexander coasted silently through the outer reaches of the Yorik system on another Argus run. It should have been routine, given the light forces the Manties normally maintained here, but Alexander's tactical display was a blaze of crimson impeller sources, and her captain stood peering down at it in consternation.
"What the hell is all this, Leo?" Commander Trent asked her tac officer.
"I don't have the least idea, Ma'am," the tac officer replied frankly. "It looks like a task force picket shell, but what it's doing here beats me. Its more like something I'd expect to see at Hancock."
"Me, too." Trent's tone was sour, and she looked across at Lieutenant Commander Raven. Her exec was officer of the watch, seated in the command chair at the center of the bridge, but his attention was on his captain rather than his displays.
"What do you think, Yasir?" she asked, and he twitched his shoulders at the question.
"I think I'd like to abort the pickup, Ma'am," he replied in the careful tone of someone who knew what could happen to both their careers if they did. "There's too much traffic out here, and they're operating mighty aggressively. All it takes is one of them in the wrong place, and—"
He grimaced, and Trent nodded. Raven had a point. But the presence of so many Manty ships argued that something unusual was happening in Yorik, which made the Argus data even more important. That, she knew, would be the verdict of any court of inquiry, anyway.
She propped one shoulder against the tac display's. hood and closed her eyes in thought. The risk to Alexander herself was minimal; they were still outside the hyper limit, and they could bring their wedge on-line in barely two minutes. The hyper generators would take a little longer—the trace signature from a standby translation field was simply too powerful to damp out—but Alexander could still be out of here long before anything got close enough to hurt her. No, the risk was to the Argus net itself. If they were picked up, the Manties were bound to wonder why a PN light cruiser would be skulking around way out here. And if something started them actively looking, not even the sensor arrays' Solarian-built stealth systems could hide them forever.
"We'll continue the operation," she said finally. "We can't bring the wedge up without risking detection, anyway, so we're committed to the run in. But I want our sensor people on their toes. If there's even a hint of anyone in the area when we reach the transmission point, we'll pass up the data dump."
Commander Tribeca lounged comfortably in his command chair and chortled mentally while he watched the displays and thumbed his nose at Captain Sir Roland T Edwards.
HMS Arrowhead and the two other destroyers from her division were cast in the role of aggressors for this particular exercise, and, at the moment, Arrowhead and Attack were busy pretending to be holes in space and watching the rest of the flotilla look for them. Every system was powered down to a bare trickle while his passive sensors tracked the other nine destroyers and the light cruiser bumbling along astern of them in the role of a "merchantman." Another couple of hours should bring the whole "convoy" within missile range, and, at the moment, every one of those destroyers was looking in exactly the wrong direction. There were going to be some red faces at the exercise debrief, he thought complacently.
Of course, it was always possible one of the other cans would double back and look in his direction, but even if they did, they were unlikely to spot him. If he was picked up, he was going to have to go for a high-accel run in and hope he got lucky, yet that was a worst-case scenario, and it didn't look like happening. Captain Edwards had obviously decided Tribeca was outside him—not without a little help from Tribeca. Ambush, the third destroyer of Tribeca's division, was somewhere out there, where she'd deliberately leaked a carefully designed scrap of divisional com chatter, and Edwards thought he had a fix on the division's general location.
Tribeca gave a silent snicker at the thought. Edwards was such a pompous ass. It would never occur to him that anyone could out-sneak him, and—
"Excuse me, Skipper, but I just picked up something odd. It— There it is again."
"What?" Tribeca spun his chair toward his tactical officer and frowned. "There what is, Becky?"
"I don't know, Sir. It's like..." Her voice trailed off and she shook her head, then looked at the com officer. "Hal, sweep zero-eight-zero to one-two-zero. I think it's a com laser."