At All Costs

"Yes, Sir."

Tourville terminated the co

The thought made him chuckle, and he was glad he was alone as he detected the edge of nervousness in the sound.

Let's just get that out of our system right here, Lester. No butterflies in front of the troops. They deserve a hell of a lot better than that out of you.

He glanced at himself in a bulkhead mirror. It was probably just as well none of his perso

He ran one hand over the hair in question, and chuckled again, much more naturally... just as the music began to play.

One of Thomas Theisman's reforms had been to allow the captains of capital units the right to substitute more personalized selections for the stridency of the standard fleet alarms. Captain Houellebecq had a fondness for really old opera, much of it actually dating from pre-space Old Earth. Tourville had cherished private doubts when she decided to use some of it aboard Guerriere, but he had to admit she'd come up with a suitable selection for this particular signal. In fact, he'd thought it was an appropriate one even before she told him what it was called.

"Now here this! Now here this! All hands, man Battle Stations! Repeat, all hands man Battle Stations!" Captain Celestine Houellebecq's calm, crisp voice said through the ancient, surging strains of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries.

"Ma'am, the Alpha Arrays are reporting-sweet Jesus!"

Lieutenant Commander Angelina Turner turned quickly, eyes flashing angrily.

"Just what the hell kind of report do you call that, Hellerstein?" she demanded harshly, even angrier because Chief Petty Officer Bryant Hellerstein was one of her best, steadiest people.

"Commander-Ma'am-this can't be right!" Hellerstein blurted, and Turner strode quickly towards his station. She'd opened her mouth in another, still sharper reprimand, but Hellerstein's shocked expression when he turned to look at her stopped it unspoken. She'd never seen the tough, competent noncom look... terrified before.

"What can't be right, Bryant?" she asked, much more gently than she'd intended to speak.

"Ma'am," Hellerstein said hoarsely, "according to the Alpha Arrays, three hundred-plus unidentified ships just made their alpha translations right on the limit."

Chapter Sixty-Four

"All right, Robert. Let's get those drones deployed."

"Aye, Sir!" Commander Zucker began punching in commands at his console, and Rear Admiral Oliver Diamato turned to his chief of staff.

"It's not going to take them long to figure out we're out here, Serena," he said, one hand gesturing at the master plot which showed the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. Just getting this close to the Junction made Diamato's skin crawl, because if there was one point-besides their home system's inhabited worlds-guaranteed to make the Manties respond like a wounded swamp tiger, it was the Junction.

"As a matter of fact, Sir," Commander Taverner replied with a mirthless smile, "I sort of suspect they already know, don't you?"

"I'm an admiral. That means I can put the best face on things if I want to." Diamato countered with a taut, answering smile.

In fact, as both he and Tucker knew perfectly well, the Mantie's system platforms had detected and pinpointed their hyper footprints the instant they arrived. There was no point trying to fool those stupendous arrays. With dimensions measured in thousands of kilometers on a side, they could pick up even the most gradual translation into normal-space at a range of literally light-weeks, much less the signatures of two battlecruiser squadrons only six light-hours from the primary.

"I suppose so, Sir," Taverner agreed. "Maybe that's why I'm just a commander."

"And don't you forget it." Diamato could almost feel his flag bridge crew relaxing at the banter between him and the chief of staff, and that was good. But there were more serious things to consider, as well.

"What I meant," he continued, "is that I'd like to put as much distance-very stealthily-as we can between us and our arrival points. I doubt we'll be able to drop off their systems, but it's worth a try."

"Yes, Sir," Taverner said more seriously. She gazed at the plot along with him. Their recon drones were out, racing for the Junction to keep a close eye on things, and already the faint sensor ghosts which were all they ever seemed to see of the Manties' all-too-aptly named "Ghost Rider" drones were appearing, headed (as nearly as they could tell) in their direction.

"What about going to Shell Game, Sir?" she asked after a moment.

"That's what I was thinking," Diamato agreed.

His ships' job was to keep as close an eye as possible on the Junction. At least the Manty defenses hade made it easy for the pla

At the same time, there was no point pretending his command could fight off what the Manties could send its direction if they so chose. So instead of any deluded notions of martial glory and stand-up battle, it was time-as Tavrerner had just suggested-to rely on speed and dispersal. This far out from the system primary (and well to the side of the resonance zone), Diamato's sixteen battlecruisers were free to bob and weave. And if things looked like getting too hot anyway, they could always disappear into hyper. The trick was to avoid letting anything with MDMs get within four or five light-minutes of them.

"Should I pass the orders, then, Sir?" Taverner asked, and he nodded.

"Do it," he said.

"Oh, shit," Admiral Stephania Grimm, Royal Astrogation Control Service, said to herself very, very quietly as a soft but urgent audio alarm sounded. The napkin she'd been using to brush cake crumbs from her tunic was suddenly a crushed ball in her hand, and the people who'd just been wishing her happy birthday turned as one to look at the plot.

Figures, a corner of her brain thought. They would decide to come calling on my birthday!

She looked around at the suddenly taut faces of her co-workers. ACS was a civil service organization, despite its military ranks, and most of her subordinates and staff had never imagined in their darkest nightmares that they might ever actually see combat. But Grimm's position as the commanding officer of the Manticoran Junction's traffic control service required her to cooperate closely with its military hierarchy. Not all ACS commanders had been comfortable fits for that side of their duties, but it helped that Grimm was herself ex-Navy. In fact, she'd reached the rank of captain of the list before transferring to ACS, and she'd quickly acquired a reputation among her military colleagues for efficiency and brains. That was especially welcome in the wake of her immediate predecessor, Admiral Allen Stokes, whose sole claim to his position had been his brother-in-law's close ties to Baron High Ridge and First Lord Janacek.