At All Costs

But not even that faith was going to get Hawke's sidearm back into its holster until he knew positively what was happening.

At the moment, however, that was a completely secondary concern for Honor beside the consternation and turmoil boiling inside the Marine.

"Yes, Corporal... Thackston?" she said, reading the Marine's name off of his nameplate and deliberately pitching her voice into the most soothing register she could. "What is it?"

"Your Grace-" Thackston stopped and shook himself. "Beg pardon, Your Grace," he said after a moment, his voice under tight control. "Captain Cardones' compliments," he touched the communicator at his belt as if to physically indicate where Cardones' message had come from, "and we've just received a Case Zulu from the Admiralty."

Honor jerked fully upright. She couldn't have heard him correctly! But even as she told herself that, her memory flashed back to another day, aboard another ship. The last time someone had transmitted the code phrase "Case Zulu." In the Royal Manticoran Navy, those two words had only one meaning: "invasion imminent."

"Thank you, Corporal," she said, her voice crisp yet calm enough the Marine looked at her in something very like disbelief. She nodded to him, then wheeled to Hawke and Atkins while Nimitz came bounding across the gym towards her.

"Spencer, get on the com. Find Commodore Brigham. Tell her we're in the gymnasium, and that I'll see the staff on Flag Bridge in five minutes."

"Yes, My Lady!" Hawke reholstered his pulser with one hand and reached for his communicator with the other, and Honor opened her arms as Nimitz leapt into them, then turned to Atkins.

"Joshua, com Mac. Tell him I'll need my skinsuit and Nimitz's on Flag Bridge as soon as possible."

"Yes, My Lady!"

"Clifford," she said over her shoulder to her third armsman as she started for the hatch, "just grab your gunbelt. You can worry about the rest of your uniform later."

"Yes, My Lady!"

Sergeant McGraw snatched up his weapons belt and buckled it over his own gi.

Fifteen seconds after Corporal Barnaby Thackston, RMMC, had delivered Rafe Cardones' message, Admiral Lady Dame Honor Alexander-Harrington was headed purposefully for the lifts with her armsmen jog trotting to match her long-legged strides.

"It seems they've made up their minds, Sir," Commander Frazier Adamson observed, watching the icons of the Manticoran Home Fleet.

"It's not as if we've left them a lot of options," Lester Tourville said without looking at his operations officer.

Adamson was a competent tactician, an efficient organizer, and a loyal subordinate. He was also a pretty fair pinochle player, and Tourville liked him quite a lot, under normal circumstances. But outside his area of professional interest, the commander had about as much imagination as a wooden post. It wasn't that he was a shallow person, or insensitive in his personal relationships. It was simply that it would never have occurred to him to put himself inside the minds and emotions of the people aboard the ships accelerating away from Sphinx to meet Second Fleet.

At the moment, Lester Tourville, who was cursed with entirely too much imagination, bitterly envied that i

"They can't feel confident we won't bombard the planetary orbitals-or even the planet itself-from long range," he continued. "So they're going to come to meet us, at least try to thin us down to something the fixed defenses can handle before we hit them."

"Yes, Sir," Adamson said. "That's what I meant."

He seemed surprised by his admiral's restatement of the obvious, and Tourville made himself smile.

"I know it was, Frazier. I know it was."

He patted the ops officer on the shoulder and walked a couple of paces closer to the main tactical display. He stood gazing into it until he sensed a human presence at his side and looked down to see Captain DeLaney standing there.

"Frazier means well, Boss," his shorter chief of staff said quietly.

"I know he does." Tourville smiled again, more naturally, but it was a sad smile, all the same. One only those he knew and trusted were ever allowed to see, since it accorded so poorly with his "cowboy" persona.

"It's just that he only sees them as targets," Tourville continued, equally quietly. "Right now, I wish I did, too. But I don't. I know exactly what they're thinking over there, but they're going to come out to meet us, anyway."

"Like you said, Boss," DeLaney's smile was a mirror of his own, "we didn't leave them much choice, did we?"

"Forget the screen!" Admiral Theodosia Kuzak snapped. "We can cut fifteen minutes off our total transit time if we leave them behind, and it's not like cruisers and destroyers are going to make any difference, is it?"

"No, Ma'am," Captain Gerald Smithson, her chief of staff replied. He was a tall, spare-looking man, his dark hair and complexion a stark contrast to Kuzak's red-hair and fair skin, and he seemed to be coming back on balance after the shock of the Admiralty's Case Zulu.

"Has Astro Control responded?" Kuzak demanded, wheeling around to Lieutenant Franklin Bradshaw, her communications officer.

"Yes, Ma'am," Bradshaw said. "As a matter of fact, Admiral Grimm's courier boat just came back though from the Manticore end. She'd already started clearing the Junction even before she sent it through the first time. Now she's working out the best dispositions for our units to help screen the arrival terminus from Peep drones. And she's also moving tugs to the inbound nexus in case any of our units require assistance."

"A nice thought," Kuzak said with a mirthless smile, "but if any of our wallers bump, tugs aren't going to be much help."

"Take what we can get, Ma'am," Smithson said with graveyard humor, and Kuzak snorted a harsh chuckle.

"Actually, Ma'am," Smithson continued in a low-pitched voice, "I've just had a rather nasty thought. What if this isn't their only fleet? What if they've got another one waiting to hit Trevor's Star as soon as we pull out for Manticore?"

"The same thought occurred to me," Kuzak replied, equally quietly. "Unfortunately, there's not a lot we can do about it, if they do. We've got to hold the home system. If they punch out Hephaestus and Vulcan, take out the dispersed yards, it'll be a thousand times worse than what happened at Grendelsbane. I hate to say it, but if it's a choice between San Martin and Sphinx or Manticore, San Martin loses."

"At least the system defenses are better than they were when the shooting started," Smithson said.

"They are. But that's another reason we can't afford to lock down the Junction with a mass transit. If they do have something like that in mind, we've got to be able to get back as quickly as we left."

"What about Duchess Harrington?" Smithson asked. "She's too far out to rendezvous with us before we make transit. Should we ask her to stay behind and mind the store while were gone?"

"I wish we could, but I we'll have to see what happens with Home Fleet. And of course, I can't give her direct orders, since-"

"Excuse me, Ma'am. You have a com request from Duchess Harrington," Bradshaw interrupted suddenly.

"Throw it to Jerry's display," Kuzak said, bending over the chief of staff's console rather than waste time walking back to her own. An instant later, Smithson's flatscreen lit with the image of Eighth Fleet's commander.

Harrington had obviously been as surprised as everyone else, Kuzak thought, noting the gi she hadn't burned up time changing out of.

"Admiral Harrington," she said with a choppy nod, and Honor nodded back.

"Admiral Kuzak," she replied, then continued, getting straight to business. "I assume you're already pla