He paused to let her consider his words, then straightened his shoulders and looked straight into the pickup.
“I intend to complete my mission, Admiral Alexander-Harrington, and I will. To use your own words, if you persist in resisting, the consequences — including the thousands of your personnel who will die — will rest upon your head and the Star Empire of Manticore’s. I demand that you stand down your fleet immediately. If you refuse, I will engage you.
“Filareta, clear.”
* * *
“Well, that wasn’t exactly unexpected,” Honor observed fifty-odd seconds later. “Except for the bit about reopening the termini. I guess there was time for Old Chicago to tell him about that before he sailed, after all.”
“It’s certainly arrogant enough for me to believe it came from a Solly,” Mercedes Brigham half-muttered, her expression baleful.
Honor shook her head, smiling faintly, but she also checked the digital timer counting down in one corner of the main plot. She could have used the Hermes buoys planted along with the stealthed recon platforms to conduct her conversation with Filareta in what amounted to real-time. In this instance, though, the lag of light-speed communications worked in her favor, and she glanced at Lieutenant Commander Brantley.
“Time for round two, Harper.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” The communications officer nodded. “Live mike.”
“I see rationality still isn’t a hallmark of the Solarian officer corps, Admiral Filareta,” she said, looking straight into the pickup. “I can’t say that comes as a dreadful surprise, given the uniformly disastrous decisions Solarian flag officers — and especially Battle Fleet flag officers, now that I think of it — seem to have been making for some time now. Hasn’t anyone in Solarian uniform noted that you haven’t come out on top in a single one of the engagements you’ve provoked? Except, of course, when your courageous personnel choose to open fire without warning on ships which don’t even have their wedges up. Which, I point out to you, is not the case in this instance.”
Her lip curled, her brown eyes glittering with scorn, and the contempt in her expression and her voice was genuine.
“Obviously, I can’t prevent you from sailing your entire fleet into an even worse disaster than Sandra Crandall’s. I do warn you, however, that this entire exchange has been recorded and will be provided — at no charge — to the prosecution at the court-martial I’m sure you’ll be facing, should you happen to be one of the survivors of the fresh debacle the Solarian Navy is about to experience. I repeat my original warning. If the forces under your command cross the hyper limit of this star system, you will be engaged and destroyed and a state of war will exist between the Solarian League and the Star Empire of Manticore and its allies.
“Alexander-Harrington, clear.”
* * *
“Alexander-Harrington, clear.”
Massimo Filareta’s nostrils flared at the cold, biting disdain in that soprano voice, yet he made himself stop and think.
So far, the exchange had used up two and a half minutes, leaving him just over three minutes from the hyper limit. He’d bought himself a little extra cushion with his instructions to Daniels, but even so, he had to make the call within the next two minutes.
The woman had to be insane. She was outnumbered ten to one, with a base velocity of zero relative to the planet, while Eleventh Fleet came at her at over five thousand kilometers per second. She’d have to have one hell of a lot more of a compensator advantage than even the wildest tales suggested if she hoped to pull away from him under those circumstances! Unless she seriously believes she can pound us to pieces with those damned missiles of theirs before we get into our range of her, despite our velocity advantage, he thought. That might be it. But she’s already in our powered range, whether she knows it or not. Accuracy may suck, but we can reach her, and I’ve got ten times as many ships as she does! And I’m not going to get another chance like this one. Not another tactical situation where the frigging Manties can’t stay away from us, pick us apart from outside our effective range. This is a chance to take out what looks like it’s at least a third of their remaining wall of battle, and they can’t survive that kind of loss rate even if they take out my entire command in return.
But, damn it, she’s got to know that, too! So why is she goading me this way?
He glanced at the time display again, then drew a deep breath and made his choice. He waved one hand sharply at Sedgewick.
“Live mike, Sir,” the com officer told him, and he glared into the pickup.
“You obviously have a very high opinion of your capabilities, Admiral,” he said coldly. “Well, I have a high opinion of my fleet’s capabilities, as well. I think we’ll just have to see which one of us is correct. You have ten minutes to decide what you’re going to do. If you have not struck your wedges in preparation to surrender your vessels at that time, you will not be given another opportunity to do so.
“Filareta, clear.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Cantata’s made translation, Sir.”
“Thank you, Frazier.”
One thing Commander Frazier Adamson hadn’t done during their prolonged visit to Manticore, Lester Tourville reflected, was to grow an imagination. When it came to anything beyond the purview of his operational responsibilities, he was still the same unflappable, my-brain’s-busy-elsewhere-so-don’t-bother-me sort he’d always been, and that could still be irritating as hell. It did have its advantages upon occasion, however. In fact, there were times Tourville wondered if having a little less imagination wouldn’t have been a good thing for him, too.
Probably not, though. He’d needed a certain…mental flexibility to handle the rapid-fire sequence of events which had snatched him abruptly out of captivity and made him once again the commander of Second Fleet (although it wasn’t the Second Fleet he’d brought to the Manticore System) and assigned that fleet as the Havenite component of what had become known as Grand Fleet.
The designation had been suggested by Eloise Pritchart, and Tourville supposed it made sense. It had been one way to avoid submerging any of its constituent fleets into subunits of someone else’s fleet. He didn’t think that would have bothered him particularly, but he knew it would have bothered quite a few Havenite officers. And it for damned sure would have pissed off any number of politicians back in Nouveau Paris. Especially the ones who figured they could make some sort of political capital out of being pissed off over it. Hell, enough of them were going to be offended that Duchess Harrington had been named to command it without even worrying about what the damned thing was called!