At All Costs

"What?" Tourville asked with a small smile. "No last minute delays? No liberty parties still adrift?"

"None, Sir," Houellebecq replied deadpan. "I informed the shore patrol that anyone who reported in late was to be shot beside the shuttle pad as an object lesson to others."

"There's the spirit I like to see!" Tourville said, although, truth be told, he found the joke just a bit too pointed, given the previous r‚gime's history. "Always find a positive way to motivate your perso

"That's what I thought, Sir."

"Well, in that case, Celestine, let's get them moving. We've got an appointment with the Manties."

"Aye, Sir."

Houellebecq disappeared from the display as he began issuing the orders necessary for Task Force 21 to break parking orbit, and Tourville turned his attention to his plot.

The slowly moving light codes wouldn't have meant much to a civilian, but they were an impressive sight to the trained eye. He picked out the ponderous might of his four battle squadrons, shaking down into cruising formation as they accelerated slowly. Ahead of them were the icons of a pair of battlecruiser squadrons, and six Aviary-class CLACs followed in their wake. A sprinkling of lighter units spread out in a necklace of jewels ahead of the main formation, watching alertly for any hint of an unidentified starship, and a trio of fast replenishment ships loaded with additional missile pods trailed along behind the carriers.

Not a capital ship on the display was more than three T-year old, and once again Tourville felt something suspiciously like awe. The Republican Navy might remain technologically inferior, in some ways, to the Royal Manticoran Navy, but unlike the Manties, it had risen from the ashes of defeat. Its officers, its senior perso

Well, he thought, if they don't realize it now, we'll give them a hint in about two weeks.

"Sir, we've just picked up a hyper footprint. It looks like at least two ships, probably destroyers or light cruisers."

"Where?" Captain Durand demanded, walking across the space station's command deck to Plotting.

"Forty-two light-minutes out from the primary, on our side and right on the ecliptic, Sir," Lieutenant Bibeau replied.

"So the foxes are scouting the hen house," Durand murmured.

The Plotting officer looked up at him a bit strangely; Charles Bibeau was from the slums of Nouveau Paris, whereas Durand came from the farming planet of Rochelle, and the Skipper kept coming up with oddball metaphors and similes. But the lieutenant caught his drift just fine, and nodded in agreement.

"All right, Lieutenant," Durand said after a moment, resting one hand lightly on Bibeau's shoulder as he watched the hyper footprints fade from the plot. "Keep an eye out. If we can pick up their platforms, so much the better, but the main thing I want to know is when anyone else hypers in."

"Aye, Sir."

Durand patted him on the shoulder once, then turned and walked slowly back to his own command chair.

Somewhere out there, he knew, Manty reco

Which was fine with Captain Alexis Durand. Just fine.

Chapter Thirty-Five

"We have Commander Estwicke's report, Your Grace," Andrea Jaruwalski said.

"Good."

Honor turned away from the visual display's gorgeous imagery. Task Force 82 forged through hyper-space, closing in on its objective steadily in close enough formation for the display to show the glowing disks of the nearest ships' Warshawski sails. Intolerant, Imperator's sister ship and the flagship of Rear Admiral Allen Morowitz, the division's CO, was the nearest vessel. Her sails-three hundred kilometers across-flickered with lambent fire, like a slice of heat lightning moving across the glowing depths of hyper-space in a visual spectacle Honor never tired of, but she turned her back upon it with what was almost a sense of relief at Jaruwalski's a

"Let's see it," she said, crossing to the secondary plot at Jaruwalski's bridge station. The ops officer touched the keyboard, shunting the download from HMS Ambuscade onto the display, and then she and her admiral stood back and watched the data assemble itself.

"Not as much firepower as we'd anticipated, Your Grace," Jaruwalski observed after a moment.

"No."

Honor frowned and rubbed the tip of her nose. All their pla

"I make it two superdreadnoughts," she continued after moment, "plus seven battlecruisers and roughly-" she consulted a display sidebar "-a hundred and ninety LACs."

"For mobile units, yes, Your Grace," Jaruwalski agreed. "But it looks like they've got a fairly dense shell of missile pods in close to the planetary industry around Arthur."

"And another little clutch here, around Merlin," Honor pointed out, and frowned some more. "That's a rather strange spot for them, wouldn't you say?"

"I certainly would."

Jaruwalski looked at the data and pursed her lips while she considered it.

"That's much too far out to cover the Nimue Belt's extraction centers," she said. "Is there something going on out among Merlin's moons that we don't know about?"

"I suppose there could be," Honor mused, gazing at the stupendous gas giant-only a bit smaller than Old Earth's Jupiter-in question. "According to the astro data, a couple of Merlin's moons are darned nearly the size of Manticore, and it's got a total of eleven. There could be something exploitable in among all of those. But whatever it is, it's on the far side of the primary from Arthur at the moment, anyway. So I think we'll just leave Merlin alone and concentrate on Arthur and the belter installations."

"That suits me just fine, Your Grace," Jaruwalski agreed.

"It looks like our best bet is probably Alpha Three," Honor continued. "I'd just as soon avoid any u

"Alpha Three works for me, Your Grace," Jaruwalski agreed again. "Shall I pass the word to Admiral Mikl¢s?"

"Go ahead." Honor nodded. "And tell him to doublecheck his alternate recovery points with his COLACs."

"Of course, Your Grace," Jaruwalski said, then paused, looking at her admiral thoughtfully. "Um, is there some particular reason you wanted to do that, Your Grace?"

"Nothing I can put a finger on," Honor said after a moment. "I guess I'm just a little antsy. As you say, we'd anticipated a significantly heavier defensive force for a system this important."

"Yes, Ma'am. You're thinking that whoever's in command here has tried to pull a Bellefeuille on us?"