At All Costs

Along the way, he'd found the time and patience to marry a serving naval officer, despite all of the dislocation a military career imposed on anyone's personal life... and the very real risk involved in marrying an officer while Oscar Saint-Just's State Security was shooting entire families under his infamous policy of "collective responsibility." And in the middle of all that, he'd somehow managed to raise two teenaged children, with only occasional visits from their mother, and done a damned good job.

"There's not much to tell... yet," she said. "Perimeter Tracking's detected what's probably a pair of hyper footprints well out from the system primary. It may be nothing."

"Or it may be Manty scout ships, like I saw on the boards about Gaston and Hera," Diana said tautly. At seventeen, she was the older of Bellefeuille's children, with her mother's dark hair coloring and gray-green eyes. She also had her mother's sharp-edged, adrenal personality, and at the moment Bellefeuille wished she'd inherited more of her father's equanimity.

"Yes, it may," Bellefeuille said as calmly as she could. "In fact, I think it probably is."

"Here?" Technically, Matthew wasn't quite a teenager yet. One reason for this trip to Chantilly had been to celebrate his thirteenth birthday, and at the moment, he looked and sounded very young-and frightened-indeed. "The Manties are coming here, Mom?"

"Probably," Bellefeuille repeated.

"But-"

"That's enough, Matt," Russell said quietly. The boy looked at him, as if he couldn't believe he could be so blas‚ about it. But then he saw his father's eyes, and his mouth shut with an almost audible click.

"Better," Russell said, reaching out to ruffle his hair gently, the way he had when Matthew had been much younger. Then he turned back to his wife.

"All I really know is what I've read in the 'faxes and on the boards," he told her. "Is this as bad as I think it is?"

"It's not good," she told him honestly. "Just how not-good, I don't know yet. We probably won't, for at least a couple of days."

"But you expect them to attack?"

"Yes." She sighed. "I wish now you hadn't come."

"I don't," he said softly, and her eyes pickled as he looked steadily at her across the table. Then he reached for his fork and glanced at their children. "I think we should go ahead and finish eating before we pester your mother with any more questions," he told them.

"There's another one, Sir," Chief Sullivan said flatly.

"Did we get a locus on it?" Lieutenant Commander Krenckel asked.

"I wish, Sir," Sullivan replied in disgusted tones. He looked up from his display, and his expression was a mixture of frustration and apology. "Whatever it is-and between you and me, Sir, it's got to be a stealthed Manty recon platform-it's moving like a bat out of hell. I wish to hell I knew how they got these kinds of acceleration levels and endurance numbers on their platforms!"

"NavInt says they've probably put micro fusion plants on them."

Sullivan blinked.

"Fusion plants? On something this small?"

"That's what they say." Krenckel shrugged. "I haven't seen any raw data on captured hardware or anything to support it, but it comes out of Bolthole. And if anyone knows what they're up to, it's got to be Admiral Foraker and her teams."

"Well, isn't that just peachy," Sullivan muttered, then grimaced. "Sorry, Sir."

"You're not saying anything I haven't thought, Chief," Krenckel said dryly. "Still, it'd make sense out of how small they've managed to make their MDMs. Not to mention the hellacious power levels their remote EW platforms pump."

"Yeah, it would," Sullivan agreed. Then he seemed to give himself a mental shake. "But what I was saying, Sir-all we're getting is the back scatter, and their directional transmission capability's better than ours. The best read we've gotten was an accident-one of our own platforms just happened to wander into their transmission path-and we haven't gotten what we need for a good crosscut bearing for any of them. Even if we did, by the time we could vector anything out there, the platform would be long gone. It'd have to see us coming, and it can pull a hell of a lot more accel than any LAC we might send after it."

"Then we're just going to have to hope we do get a cross bearing, I guess," Krenckel said.

"Yes, Sir."

Sullivan turned back to his display, bending once more to the wearisome task of listening for the tiny spies flitting about the Augusta System. Personally, he figured the effort was as pointless as it was exhausting. They knew the bastards were out there; they knew they weren't going to be able to run down any of the platforms, even if they spotted them; and they knew those platforms wouldn't be there if Hell itself wasn't coming to di

Still, he supposed he might as well waste his time doing this as anything else.

"Commander Estwicke's data is coming in now, Your Grace."

"Thank you, Andrea."

Honor nodded to her ops officer, then turned back to the com.

"You heard, Rafe?"

"Yes, Ma'am. Yolanda's already looking at the preliminaries. So far, it seems to be about what we expected."

"Then it probably is. But remember, surprise-"

"Is usually what happens when someone misinterprets something he's seen all along," Cardones finished for her. She closed her mouth, then chuckled.

"I think I may have spent too many years at the Island."

"No, Ma'am. You've always been a teacher."

Honor was a little surprised by the flicker of embarrassment she felt at the sincerity in Cardones' tone.

"Well, I had some pretty good teachers of my own," she said, after a moment. "Admiral Courvoisier, Captain Bachfisch, Mark Sarnow. I guess once you get stuck in the pattern, it's hard to break."

"If it's all the same to you, Ma'am, I think we'd all just as soon you didn't try."

"I'll... bear that in mind, Captain Cardones."

"Good. And now, if you don't mind, Your Grace, we've both got some tactical information to look over. So," he gri

"Tell the Admiral we've got a major hyper translation."

Commander Ivan deCastro, Rear Admiral Bellefeuille's chief of staff hoped he looked calmer than he felt as he gazed into the display at Commander Ericsson.

"How big is it, Leonardo?" he asked.

"At least thirteen footprints," Ericsson said grimly. "It may be fourteen. We're working to refine the numbers."

"Not good," deCastro said, and Ericsson snorted.

"I see you subscribe to the theory understatement can be its own form of emphasis."

"When it's all you've got, you might as well be witty, I suppose." DeCastro produced a wan smile. Then he squared his shoulders. "All right, I'll tell her. At least she's got her family dirt-side now, not on the flagship."

"I know." For just a moment, Ericsson's expression was haunted. "Christ, that's got to be hard. Knowing your kids are down there. That they know exactly what's happening."

"It's a bastard, all right," deCastro agreed. "Get me those refined numbers as soon as you can."

"How big a force did you say?"

Governor Joona Poykkonen's face was gray on Rear Admiral Baptiste Bressand's com. Not that Bressand blamed him a bit. The rear admiral intended to do his best to defend Augusta, but after he had-and after the wreckage had dissipated-Poykkonen was going to have to deal with what the frigging Manties were about to do to his star system.

"Perimeter Tracking makes it four superdreadnoughts, four battlecruisers, and seven heavy and light cruisers," Bressand repeated. "It's possible one or more of the superdreadnoughts could be a carrier, but so far the emissions signatures are consistent with Invictus and Medusa-class SD(P)s. If I had to guess, I guess we're up against the same force that hit Hera."