At All Costs

"Ah, India-Papa-One-One, Imperator Flight Ops." The controller aboard the flagship sounded suddenly much brisker. "Come to approach vector Able-Charlie. You are cleared for immediate approach to Boat Bay Alpha."

"Thank you, Flight Ops. India-Papa-One-One copies approach vector Able-Charlie for immediate approach to Bay Alpha," the pi

"How was your visit to the Admiralty, Ma'am?"

"Good, Rafe." Honor looked at her flag captain as the two of them, accompanied by Nimitz, Mercedes Brigham, her three armsmen, and Timothy Mears rode the lift car from the boat bay towards Flag Bridge. "That's not to say everything Sir Thomas had to tell me was something I wanted to hear, but at least we're all on the same page. And," her mouth tightened slightly, "it's more important than ever that we get Cutworm launched successfully."

"Everything's ready, Ma'am," Cardones told her soberly.

"I expected it would be." Honor brought up the time display in her artificial eye, then looked over her shoulder at her flag lieutenant.

"Tim, general signal to all flag officers. They're all invited to supper. We should just about have time for that before we all pull out."

Chapter Nineteen

"Alpha translation in seventeen minutes, Ma'am," Lieutenant Weismeuller said.

"Understood," Lieutenant Commander Estwicke acknowledged, and turned to her com officer. "Pass the final readiness signal to Skirmisher."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Lieutenant Wilson acknowledged, and Estwicke nodded to her executive officer.

"Bring the ship to general quarters, Jethro."

"Yes, Ma'am." Lieutenant Jethro Stanton replied, and pressed the GQ button on his console. Alarms blared throughout the ship, although they were scarcely needed. HMS Ambuscade's crew had closed up to their action stations over half an hour ago, taking their time, making certain they'd done it right.

Readiness reports flowed back to the bridge steadily, and Stanton listened carefully, watching the icons in his display's sidebar blink from amber to a steady, burning red.

"All battle stations report ma

"Very good." Estwicke swiveled her chair to face Lieutenant Emily Harcourt, her tactical officer. "Stand by to deploy the remotes."

"Unidentified hyper footprint! Correction-two hyper footprints! Range four-six-point-five light-minutes! Bearing one-seven-three by oh-niner-two!"

Captain Heinrich Beauchamp looked up sharply, swiveling his chair to face the petty officer. The twin, rapidly strobing blood-red icons of unknown hyper translations glared in the depths of the master plot, and the chief of the watch was leaning forward over the shoulder of one of the other sensor techs, watching her display as she worked to refine the data.

"What do we have so far, Lowell?" Beauchamp asked the petty officer who'd made the initial report.

"Not a lot, Sir," the noncom said unhappily. "That far out, we don't have any of the FTL platforms close enough for a good look, and the sub-light-"

He broke off as the crimson icons vanished as abruptly as they had appeared.

"Did they translate out?" Beauchamp demanded.

"Don't think so, Sir," Petty Officer Lowell replied.

"Definitely not, Sir," Chief Torricelli said, looking up from where he'd been watching the sensor tech work the contacts. "Whatever they are, they've gone into stealth."

"Damn," Beauchamp muttered. He let his chair swing back and forth in a tight arc for a few seconds, then shook his head. "All right, Chief. How much did we get?"

"Not much, Sir," Torricelli admitted. "We only had them on sensors for about eight minutes, and like Lowell says, that's an awful long way out for any kind of detail. Best I can tell you is they weren't anything really big. Might've been a pair of light cruisers, but it looked more like destroyers, from the little we got."

"If that's all we've got, it's all we've got," Beauchamp said, more philosophically than he really felt, and punched the com stud on the arm of his bridge chair.

"System HQ, Commander Tucker," a voice responded in his earbug.

"George, it's Heinrich," Beauchamp said. "I know the Commodore just turned in, but you might want to wake him."

"This better be good," Tucker replied. "He was dead tired before I managed to chase him off to bed."

"I know. But we just picked up two unidentified hyper footprints-destroyer or light cruiser range. We had them on sensors for a bit less than eight minutes, then lost them. Our best estimate is that they're still out there, just in stealth."

"Shit." There was silence for several seconds, then Beauchamp heard Tucker inhale deeply. "Not good, Heinrich. I guess I really will have to wake him back up."

"Good light-speed telemetry on the arrays, Skipper," Lieutenant Harcourt reported, studying the readings coming back over the whisker lasers. "Deployment profiles look optimal."

"Skirmisher reports good deployment as well, Ma'am," Wilson added from Communications.

"Good," Estwicke replied to both officers simultaneously. "Any sign they got a hard read on us, Emily?"

"Impossible to say, Ma'am," Harcourt replied in the respectfully formal tone she kept for those rare special occasions when her commanding officer asked a silly question. "We didn't pick up any active sensors, of course. But there's no way of knowing whether or not we came out close enough to one of their platforms for it to get a good read on passives."

"Understood." Estwicke's wry smile acknowledged the ever so proper smack on the wrist the tac officer had just given her.

"I haven't picked up any grav-pulse transmissions," Harcourt added. "Anything they did get on us, aside from our footprint itself, has to be coming in light-speed. So whatever it might be, they won't have it for another twenty-five minutes or so."

"By which time we'll have cut even the laser links and be very tiny needles in a very large haystack," Estwicke said with a nod of satisfaction.

"Exactly, Skip," Harcourt agreed. Then she cocked her head. "By the way, Skipper, there's something I've always meant to ask."

"And what might that be?"

"What the hell is a 'haystack,' anyway?"

"I don't like this, George," Commodore Tom Milligan said. "I don't like it a bit."

The Commanding Officer, Hera System Command, and his chief of staff were hunched over the latest report from the Hera System's sensor arrays.

"I don't either, Sir," Commander Tucker agreed. The chief of staff's face was tight with worry, but far less exhausted looking than Milligan's. Then again, he was sleeping better than Milligan was.

Probably, he thought, because the ultimate responsibility is his, not mine.

"Those damned ships have been hanging around for two frigging days," Milligan continued harshly.

"We think they have, Sir," Tucker amended conscientiously.

"Oh, of course." Milligan's irony was withering, although Tucker knew it wasn't actually directed at him. He was simply unfortunate enough to be in range. "Well, I think they're hanging around for a reason," the commodore continued in slightly less sarcastic tones. "And I don't like these readings, either."

He tapped another paragraph of the report, and Tucker nodded silently.

"They aren't very strong, Sir," he pointed out after a moment. Milligan looked at him, and the commander shrugged slightly. "I wish they were a little stronger. Maybe then we could at least have gotten a directional bearing for the LAC sweeps."