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"I will, Sir."
"Thank you, Milady, And on that note, I'll wish you a speedy voyage and let you be on your way. Blaine, clear."
The display blanked, and Michelle looked back up at the tactical plot.
While she'd been talking to Blaine,Artemis' division mates in BCS 106's first division—Penelope, Romulus, and Horatius—had followed her through the terminus. As she watched, Filipa Alcoforado's Theseus, the flagship of Commodore Shulamit Onasis, who commanded the squadron's second division, erupted from the invisible flaw in space, radiating the blue glory of transit energy from her sails.
Not much longer, she thought, and glanced at Commander Sterling Casterlin. As she'd told Cortez, she'd met Casterlin before, although they'd never served together until now. They'd almost served on the old Bryan Knight together, but she'd just been leaving the ship when he came on board. She actually knew his cousin, Commodore Jake Casterlin, better, and from what she'd seen of Sterling already, she was willing to bet that Jake's Liberal Party sympathies drove the far more conservative Sterling bananas.
She might be wrong, though, since it looked to her as if it would probably take quite a bit to shake Commander Casterlin's equanimity. He'd been late arriving aboard, through no fault of his own, but he hadn't even turned a hair at the prospect of having less than forty hours to "settle in" with an entirely new department, aboard an entirely new ship, under an entirely new vice admiral, before departing for a possible combat deployment. Under the circumstances, he'd shown remarkable aplomb, she thought.
"It seems we'll be leaving soon," she observed.
"Yes, Ma'am," he replied without turning a hair. "I've just passed our heading and course to Commander Bouchard."
"Good," she said.
He looked over his shoulder at her, and she smiled. She'd known she wasn't going to catch him out without a course already figured, but he'd quietly one-upped her by going ahead and passing the course to Jerod Bouchard,Artemis' astrogator, before she asked.
"I believe he'd already worked out approximately the same course, Ma'am," Casterlin observed.
"No, really?" Michelle rounded her eyes in i
Daedalus and Jason had followedTheseus through the Junction, now. All they still needed was Captain Esmerelda Du
"Remind me to invite Captain Co
"Yes, Ma'am," Archer replied. "Should we invite Commander Houseman and Commander McIver, as well?"
"An excellent thought, Gwen," Michelle approved with a smile. "For that matter let's get Captain Armstrong, Cindy, Dominica, and Commander Dallas and Commander Diego on the guest list, as well. And you can drop them a little hint—unofficially, of course—that we'll be talking about training schedules."
"Yes, Ma'am." Archer made a note to himself, and Michelle smiled at him. The youngster was working out even better than she'd hoped he would, and it looked as if at least some of the ghosts of Solon were fading out of the backs of his eyes. She hoped so, anyway. It was obvious that nature had intended him to be a cheerful extrovert, and she was pleased to see him shedding the . . . somberness which had been so much a part of him at their first meeting.
He was quick, too. His suggestion that Co
Her nostrils flared at that thought. Those rough edges weren't her captains' fault, any more than they were hers. In fact, they weren't anyone's fault. Despite which, Michelle was uncomfortably aware of just how unprepared for battle her command truly was, and that was precisely why she, too, was looking forward to those ten days of exercises. Hard exercises, she thought—as demanding as she and her captains could make them. Given the situation she might well find herself facing in the very near future, it was time she and her officers started finding the problems, figuring out what to do about them, and doing it.
And the sooner the better, she reflected grimly. The sooner the better.
The range-to-target sidebar on the tactical display was preposterous.
The missile salvo was sixty-eight million kilometers fromArtemis, speeding steadily onward at 150,029 KPS. Its birds had been ballistic for four and a half minutes, ever since the second drive system had burned out, and they were still ninety-three seconds—almost fourteen million kilometers—from their target, even at half the speed of light.
And the attack missiles still hadn't been assigned targets.
Michelle Henke sat quietly to one side, playing the umpire's role as she watched Dominica Adenauer, Wilton Diego, and Victoria Armstrong work the simulation. It felt just plain wrong to have attack birds that far out at all, she reflected, far less have them swa
Admiral Hemphill, she'd decided, had been absolutely right about Bill Edwards. The "communications" officer's intimate knowledge of the entire Apollo project had proved invaluable when she and her staff started kicking around the new system's potentialities. In fact, Adenauer and he had spent hours off to one side, talking animatedly, scribbling on napkins (or any other unwary surface which made itself available), and tweaking the simulation software. Michelle had been relieved to see that. Some tactical specialists would undoubtedly have rebuffed a mere communications type's suggestions, wherever he might have spent his last tour. Adenauer, on the other hand, was sufficiently self-confident to welcome insight, regardless of its source, and over the last six days of ship's time, she and Edwards had established not simply a sound working relationship, but a warm friendship. And the fruits of their efforts were readily apparent. In fact, Michelle suspected that the two of them had come up with at least a few wrinkles which hadn't occurred to anyone at BuWeaps.
"Coming up on Point Alpha," Diego said quietly.
"Acknowledged," Adenauer replied.
The actual firing and management of the missiles was Diego's responsibility asArtemis' tactical officer, but the management and distribution of the squadron's massed firepower was a function of its operations officer. Normally, Adenauer would have given Diego Michelle's attack criteria and established general attack profiles before the first missile was launched. Diego would have taken things from there, assigning individual missiles to specific targets and—with Lieutenant Isaiah Maslov, Artemis' electronics warfare officer—slotting them into the attack, EW, and penetration profiles Adenaur had laid down.