Cookie blinked, then blinked again. “Hiram?” His name came out funny. She tried again. “Baby?” Then his arms were around her and they were laughing and hugging and then they were both crying and that made them laugh some more and he pulled her bodily into his room and kissed her and she took his face in her greasy and stained hands and kissed him back.
“I thought you were-” but he choked with tears and couldn’t say it and she hugged him and kept saying “I’m here, I’m here” over and over and when they next came to anything resembling conscious thought they were in his bedroom and their clothes were strewn about in joyous disarray. And just as things were about to tip over and become unstoppable, Cookie suddenly whooped with laughter. “That goddamned Emily!”
“What?” Hiram asked breathlessly, still in shock of finding Cookie alive and well and in his bed.
“She sent me a message that I had to report here for debriefing. Priority 1, ‘Action Immediate.’”
Hiram looked up from something amazing he was doing to her breasts. “We can talk about Emily later,” he gasped.
Cookie was more than inclined to agree, but then remembered the attachment. “Hold on,” she whispered hoarsely, her concentration tattered from what his mouth was doing to her breast and his fingers were doing elsewhere. She pulled the comm off the side table and clumsily opened the attachment to her earlier Order, read it, then collapsed again in a gale of laughter.
“What? What is it?” Hiram demanded.
“These are my orders once I reach your cabin.” She turned the screen to show him.
To Corporal Sanchez:
Upon reaching Cabin 714B, immediately undress and get into bed. Vigorously debrief the interviewing officer.
Cookie tossed the comm on the floor and wrapped her legs around Hiram’s waist. She looked at the man in her arms, taking in the black fatigue smudges under his eyes, the gentle eyes that she had dreamed about so fervently and never expected to see again. She pulled his face down and kissed him fiercely.
I’m home, she thought. I will never leave him again.
But even as she thought it, she knew it wasn’t true.
Chapter 63
Approaching the Refuge Wormhole
The conference room was filled with the remaining senior officers of the Black Watch, the Queen’s Own and the Coldstream Guards. Peter Murphy, the leader of the tug boat captains, and Max Opinsky, the operations manager, sat next to each other looking tired and out of place.
At the end of the table, Admiral Douthat sat beside Queen Anne. Sir Henry sat on the other side of the Queen. Douthat shot an impatient glance at the wall clock as Hiram Brill entered the room and took a chair just a minute before the meeting was to begin.
Admiral Douthat scowled, more out of habit than anything else. Queen Anne, who had learned of Emily’s scheming from her guards, smiled at Hiram and arched one eyebrow. His eyes widened and his face flushed. She let him squirm for a moment, then nodded at Admiral Douthat to open the meeting.
Admiral Douthat’s eyes darted from the Queen to Hiram and back again. She was sure that something just happened, but she had no idea what it could be. She rapped her knuckles on the table.
“We have approximately five hours before we need to scramble all ships, and a lot of ground to cover. First, we think the Dominion have approximately one hundred and twenty ships still fit to fight. By contrast, we have fifty one war ships, including one battleship, fourteen cruisers, twenty seven destroyers and nine frigates. We also have three arks, which carry a mix of corvettes and gun boats. Most of our ships are damaged to one extent or another, including at least two which can only function in a defensive role. Our ship count includes the recently arrived Coldstream Guard ships, which are all in the ship yard being repaired and refurbished.”
She paused, letting that information sink in. “The odds are against us, ladies and gentlemen, but they are a lot better now than when we started our retreat toward Refuge. And not to forget, we also have the munitions output of the Atlas, which has been turning out large numbers of missile platforms and mines.”
Admiral Douthat stood up and began to pace back and forth in front of the conference table. “There are two critical developments you need to be aware of.
“First, the enemy has split its forces. Of their one hundred twenty ships, they’ve moved some sixty seven ships between us and the entrance to the Refuge worm hole. Captain Tuttle spotted them on passive sensors and estimates that they include fifteen destroyers, thirty cruiser-size ships, twenty smaller ships similar to our frigates, and one large ship with unknown capabilities, but I will make an educated guess that it is the D.U.C. Vengeance, serving as their flag ship. The Vengeance is big, very big, about half again the size of our remaining battleship, the Lionheart. Remember,” she cautioned, “this is only an estimate. We won’t really know until we have them on our sensors.
“That leaves some fifty three ships behind us, including their three surviving Hedgehogs and their two carriers, which we now know employ small attack craft. We are not sure of their size or throw weight, but we think that the ships behind us are mostly made up of ships from ‘Bogey Two,’ and we presume that most of them are undamaged.”
There was muttering around the table as the facts sunk in. Now the Atlas and the surviving Home Fleet were caught in a classic hammer and anvil position. The best way to get out of it was to turn either up or down from their plane of advance and run like hell, but they couldn’t turn and they couldn’t run. The enemy knew exactly where they were going. The only option was to fight their way through to the worm hole against two to one odds.
“You said two things we need to be aware of,” one of the captains voiced.
Douthat pursed her lips and nodded. “Yes. The second thing is that the worm hole is moving.”
The murmur of disquiet grew louder. Peter Murphy leapt to his feet, red faced and furious. “Admiral! You should have told me as soon as you learned. I need to start turning Atlas or we’ll lose the worm hole!”
Douthat made a ‘take it easy’ gesture with her hands. “Normally, you’d be right, Mr. Murphy, but we first learned of the movement not from our sensors, but from a communication from an unknown ship. It came via whisper laser, addressed to the Queen and to Commander Brill.”
Hiram sat bolt upright in his chair. What? He looked at Admiral Douthat, only to find that she was looking straight back at him.
“The message tells us that the worm hole has started to move west on our plane of advance. It will move west for seven hours, but then it will reverse course and move back east past its original position and stop at a specified set of coordinates exactly at — ” she consulted her tablet — “seventeen hours and twenty minutes from now. When it stops it will actually be closer to us than it is now, shortening our time to reach it.”
For a moment there was stunned silence, then the room dissolved into an uproar. “How can we trust the message?” demanded Captain Wicklow.
“We can’t,” snapped Sir Henry, speaking for the first time. “We cannot verify the source, so we cannot verify the accuracy of what they told us.”
“This could be a trap,” Wicklow continued. “The Dominion may want us to believe the worm hole will reverse course so we’ll plot our course accordingly, when all along it will be moving west, further and further out of reach.”
Douthat motioned for silence, then gestured to Peter Murphy. “Mr. Murphy, if we turn west with the worm hole, and it does reverse course, can we turn back and still catch it?”
Murphy shot a morose glance at Opinsky, who shook his head. “Don’t see how, Admiral,” Opinsky said. “Hard to turn the Atlas, real hard. If your data is right, the worm hole will move west about twenty degrees off our plane of advance, so we’d need to turn twenty degrees left to try to hit it. To do that we’d need to start turning now, right now, and even then it would be close. But you’re sayin’ that it is gonna turn back east again, to our right and end up fifteen degrees off our current plane of advance. Well, Ma’am, we can go left and maybe make it, or go right and probably make it, but we can’t start left and then change our minds with any hope of hitting the worm hole if it really ends up going to our right. If you follow me,” he concluded glumly.