Mission of Honor

And now it was the turn of Sandra Crandall and all of the officers and enlisted perso

* * *

Gervais Archer watched his admiral and wondered what was going through her mind. As a rule, he felt generally confident of his ability to read her moods. She wasn't the most inscrutable person he'd ever met, after all. She could be as tactically sneaky and subtle as anyone he'd ever seen, but her personality was open and direct, not to mention stubborn, with a distinct tendency to come at things head on.

Yet at this moment, he couldn't read her body language. Not clearly. There was no sign of hesitance or uncertainty, no indication of second guessing herself, no sign any concern over future consequences would be permitted to erode present determination. But there was something. Something he wasn't accustomed to seeing from her, and he wondered why the word he kept thinking of was "sorrow."

* * *

Michelle Henke drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders, unaware of her flag lieutenant's thoughts as she ordered her own to attend to the business at hand.

Whatever's going to happen, it's going to happen. Too late to change that, and the decision wasn't really yours to begin with, girl. So instead of thinking about what Crandall's too damned stupid to see coming, think about what she is doing right this moment .

Actually, she rather suspected Crandall was doing exactly the same thing she was—staring at icons in a plot. Of course, her own data was far better than anything Crandall could have. Michelle had seeded the entire star system with FTL sensor platforms, and she'd paid special attention to the volume inside the hyper limit, particularly along the plane of the ecliptic. At the moment, her plot was being driven by a highly stealthy platform less than one light-second from Crandall's flagship, and the directional transmissions from the platform were less than five seconds old by the time she saw them on the display. Aside from the actual impeller signatures of Tenth Fleet's ships, any data Crandall had was almost five minutes old. At the moment, that meant little, but when the missiles started to fly, it was going to mean a great deal, indeed.

Thank you, Michael and Sir Aivars , she thought sardonically. And thank you, Admiral Hemphill .

She glanced at the time display. Five minutes had passed since her battlecruiser squadrons reentered normal-space. Crandall clearly had no idea she was already in Michelle's powered range, assuming Michelle was prepared to accept a two-and-a-half-minute ballistic phase between her second and third missile drives. Powered range wasn't necessarily the same thing as accurate range, though, and she wasn't about to waste birds from this far out unless she had to.

The range from Crandall to Khumalo and Terekhov was shrinking steadily, however. And when it fell to three light-minutes . . . .

About another seventeen minutes, Admiral Crandall , Vice Admiral Gloria Michelle Samantha Evelyn Henke thought grimly. Another seventeen minutes .

* * *

"I make it another seventeen minutes, Sir," Commander Pope said quietly, and Aivars Terekhov nodded, then looked at Commander Stillwell Lewis.

"Let's go ahead and spot the alpha launch, Stilt."

"Yes, Sir."

Commander Lewis began inputting commands, and as those commands reached the shoals of pods the withdrawing ammunition ships had left behind, onboard tractors began reaching out from clusters of them. They locked onto the ships designated to control them, moving out of the planetary shadow, settling into launch position. And as if that had been a signal—which it had—the LACs which had been left behind by the CLACs began jockeying into position. If everything went as pla

Of course, everything seldom went "as pla

He watched Lewis, then glanced over his shoulder at Ensign Zilwicki and his somber mood lightened suddenly. In fact, he found it difficult not to smile, despite the approaching Solarian juggernaut. His extraordinarily youthful flag lieutenant's eyes were bright with concentration, watching everything on Quentin Saint-James ' flag deck. If she'd been a cat, the lashing of her tail would have presented a serious safety hazard.

"Calmly, Helen," he said softly, barely loud enough for her to hear, and she looked at him quickly. Their eyes met, and then she gri

"That obvious, was I, Sir?"

"Let's just say it's reasonably apparent that what you'd really like to be doing just now is Commander Lewis' job."

"Sorry, Sir." She grimaced. "It's just—"

"Just that the last time, you and Abigail were sitting in the hot seats," he acknowledged. "And you will be again, someday. Promise."

"Yes, Sir."

He gave her another smile, then turned back to his own displays and his own thoughts.

Despite the best efforts of both BuWeaps and BuShips, the Royal Manticoran Navy's missile pods kept obstinately proliferating, spi

The reduction in throw weight hadn't been universally popular, particularly since the number of pods each ship carried hadn't magically increased, which left them with a sixteen percent overall reduction in magazine capacity. BuWeaps had argued, however, that the advantages of the new fusion-powered missiles—especially the advantages that kind of power supply made possible for the electronic warfare platforms—and of the new pods' vastly extended capacity for independent deployment more than compensated for the reduction in missiles per pod, especially coupled with the introduction of the Keyhole platforms. Although each pod might carry fewer missiles, Keyhole-based tactics were going to emphasize stacked patterns, anyway. The number of control links the new platforms made available would have required that even with the older style pods, if salvo density was going to be maximized.

But then Apollo had come along, and the Apollo control missile—the Mark 23-E. The Echo was the heart of the Apollo system . . . and big enough that a single Mark 23-E displaced two standard Mark 23s. That had pushed the maximum capacity of a same-dimension pod down to just nine missiles, only eight of which were attack birds. No one had objected to that, given the incredible increase in lethality Apollo made possible, but it had constituted yet another reduction in over all ammunition stowage, so BuWeaps had gone back to work and come up with yet another in the flatpack pod series—the Mark 19.