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"And what do you think she'll do when we pass along this little tidbit?"
"That depends on her, I suppose," Hongbo said. And on what herinstructions from Manpower might be, he very carefully did not say out loud. "It's remotely possible she might head off immediately for New Tuscany herself, although I don't really see it as at all likely. You want my best guess?"
"That's the reason I asked the question," Verrochio said just a bit sarcastically.
"Well, I think her most likely course of action would be to move her command from McIntosh to Meyers. We don't have the facilities to support her task force here, but we're no worse off in that regard than McIntosh is, and the whole reason for her deployment is supposed to be a test of the Navy's ability to sustain itself without local support. And this is our administrative hub for the area, so she could rely on the best communications here. This is where any fresh messages from Byng would be directed, and it's where Admiral Nelson is supposed to hold the rest of Byng's battlecruisers. Bearing all of that in mind, I can't really see any other logical location for her."
"Wonderful." Verrochio drank some more beer, then twitched his shoulders. "I'm begi
"Any last-minute thoughts, anyone?" Michelle Henke asked quietly, looking around the cool, quiet, dimly lit expanse of HMS Artemis' flag deck. "Any last-minute suggestions?"
Cynthia Lecter did her own once-over examination of the rest of the staff, one eyebrow raised, then turned back to Michelle and shook her head.
"No, Ma'am," she said for all of them, and Michelle nodded.
She hadn't really expected any, although that hadn't kept her from spending last night fretting and worrying on her own. She'd often wondered how Honor could appear so calm just before some enormously important operation kicked off. Michelle had done her own worrying before each of Eighth Fleet's rear-area attacks, but she'd always been one of the subordinate commanders. And that, she realized now, was another of the reasons she'd resisted playing the patronage game to reach flag rank sooner. Her hatred for that sort of nepotism really had been the major component of her resistance, but she knew now that there'd been another factor, as well. One that was almost—but not quite—its own form of cowardice.
Michelle Henke admired Honor Harrington enormously, but she wasn't Honor, and she knew it. She knew hers was in many ways a less complex personality, and she'd never been plagued by the soul-searching that was so much a part of Honor. When it came down to it, she'd always been more . . . direct. More black-and-white, less inclined to empathize with an enemy or agonize over the consequences to an enemy. She was comfortable with the notion of "us" and "them," and she didn't like ambiguities that could cloud and confuse her decisions.
As a captain, or even a junior flag officer, that had worked just fine for her. She'd been concerned only with the part her ship or her squadron was supposed to play in an operation pla
Be honest, girl, she told herself tartly. That's what's really scaring the crap out of you. You're not afraid of getting killed. Well, not terrified of it, at any rate. What you're really afraid of is that you personally—you, Michelle Henke, not just the Royal Navy—are going to screw this one up. That this isn't really the right job for a woman who'd rather kill them all and let God sort them out, no matter how much an asshole like Byng deserves it. That the Star Kingdom is going to find itself fighting for its life against the Solarian League because the wrong woman was in the wrong spot and you screwed the pooch.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm scared of, she replied to herself,and no wonder! I signed on to chase pirates, to fight battles, to defend my star nation. I never expected to have something like this dumped on my shoulders!
Well, you've got it now, the first voice told her, even more tartly. Last time I looked, it came with that black beret sitting on your head. So unless you want to admit this is all to much for itty-bitty you and give the nice hat back, I guess all you can really do is suck it up and get to it. And while you're at it, let's at least try to keep the body count within limits, shall we?
"Well, in that case, seeing as how no one seems to have spotted any t's we've left uncrossed or any i's we've left undotted," the Countess of Gold Peak said calmly, "I suppose we'd best be about it."
For the first time in his naval career, Josef Byng made his appearance on his flag bridge without his uniform tunic. He felt acutely out of place in just his shirt sleeves, but that thought was distant and unimportant as he came through the flag deck door at something just short of a run and slid to a halt, staring at the master plot.
Karlotte Thimár and Ingeborg Aberu were bent over the more detailed information CIC was cha
"What do we have on them?" he asked, eyes locked to the icons sweeping inward from the system's hyper limit.
"Not very much yet, Sir," Aberu acknowledged more than a bit unhappily, straightening and turning to face him. "All we really know is that we've got nineteen point sources. It looks like five of them are considerably smaller than the others—probably destroyers or light cruisers. We're tracking their impeller signatures now, Sir, and I'm assuming that the larger contacts are probably battlecruisers. Under the circumstances, I think we have to assume they're Manties."
Byng nodded almost absently, but Aberu wasn't quite through. She cleared her throat quietly to attract his attention.
"Their current velocity relative to the primary is approximately six thousand KPS, Sir," she said when she knew she had his attention. "But their acceleration is right on six KPS squared."
"What was that acceleration?" he asked sharply.
"Six KPS squared, Sir," Aberu said even more unhappily. "That's one-point-three KPS more than they showed us at Monica. Call it a twenty-eight percent difference."
"They must be ru
Byng only looked at her for several seconds, then he nodded. She had to be right. He couldn't think of any reason for the Manties to have gone to their maximum possible acceleration, with the attendant risk of someone's suffering compensator failure and the death of every man and woman aboard the ship involved. But a Solarian ship of that to