''I want to get four, maybe six undisturbed hours of rest,'' he told Saris. ''Don't awaken me unless something very important comes up. Something that fills in some major blanks.''
''I will get some sleep, too, sir. No need to baby-sit a board that says nothing. Let the Duty Lieutenant do it.''
''He will wake you if necessary?''
''Yes, I trust him. I knew his father.''
''Good, then let us get some rest.'' The Admiral turned but carefully let Saris fall in step beside him. As he came close, he turned on his jammer and whispered to Saris good-naturedly, ''Do you have orders to replace me if Maskalyne says to?''
Saris's dark complexion turned almost ghostly for a moment, but he did not miss a step. ''Yes, sir. That was the condition of my being offered the position. If I did not agree to that, it was made known to me that they would offer it to someone else.''
The Admiral nodded. ''You were my first choice. In return for you, they required that I accept certain things as well. I expected they would require something like this of you. I am glad that we now have it out in the open.''
''Might I ask what things they required of you?''
''Let us hope that you never have to find out what they are,'' the Admiral said and switched off the jammer.
''Sir, we had a slight magnetic disturbance in the vicinity of flag plot,'' the Duty Lieutenant said, turning to them.
''What kind of disturbance?'' Saris demanded. They both knew that their recent conversation would not have occurred without someone jamming the observing cameras, listening posts.
''We could not locate it, sir. It was only there a second. It might have been a minor power fluctuation,'' the young man added, as if trying to give himself an out. Maybe his superiors. Senior officers were known to occasionally use jammers. If caught, it could be a career-ending mistake. Maybe life-ending.
''Well, what are you going to do about it?'' Saris demanded.
''Log it, sir,'' the young man said, giving the proper answer.
''Then do so. I will be in my underway cabin. Wake me only if something develops. Understood?''
''Yes, sir.''
Vice Admiral Ralf Baja left for his stateroom without looking back. He could only hope his fleet could spare enough time from looking over everyone's shoulder to keep an eye on its rapidly approaching target.
Contact: -11 hours
Honovi watched the large screen in the main parlor of Government House. It was hard to remember that this was not his home for the first time since he was thirteen.
''Can't you get the picture any clearer?'' Prime Minister Pro Tem Mojag Pandori snapped. ''Somebody walked off with the remote.'' A slur against the Longknifes' sudden packing job, no doubt. Honovi didn't mention all the stuff he couldn't find.
The screen was old, and someone had been messing with the brightness. Kusa looked at Honovi wordlessly. Yep, she was the kind of hands-on type who would have tried to make things better… and gotten them worse. An out-of-kilter vid screen perfectly illustrated the entire mess Wardhaven was in.
Honovi walked over to the wall, opened the control box, and pushed a couple of buttons. The screen snapped into proper clarity. Father and the acting Prime Minister focused on the picture and didn't notice Kusa mouthing Sorry, behind their backs. Honovi gave her a quick wink.
The scene was of the main space elevator station. People waited in long lines for cars. The voiceover explained that just hours ago, the stations had been deserted, with the evacuation of the space station complete and no one going up or down … a lie Honovi had made sure there were no pictures to disprove. Or at least none ready yet for the news.
Now it was different. The government had lifted its ban on near-Wardhaven space travel so long as the ships were only going from the High Wardhaven station to Jump Point Alpha. Now citizens of other worlds, stuck on Wardhaven, were fleeing.
The pictures were the kind that Honovi had hoped to never see in his lifetime. Fearful women clutching children that had that blank look of the young who didn't know enough to be frightened, except their mothers and their fathers were scared, so they took in that terror. Men hurried about, accomplishing nothing in their haste, and women hastened them on, wanting to know why the impossible wasn't done already.
Honovi had tried to keep this fear at bay for three days. Now it reached out, from children's wide eyes, from mothers' cracking voices, from men's frustration. Yes, that was fear. And now that it was on the screen, it would be out in the open for all to see everywhere.
''So, now are you satisfied?'' Pandori spat. ''I still say we should have kept the ships, the others, here. No one would dare bombard us with them here.''
''The message is very clear,'' Honovi said with the slow, dogged repetition that he hoped might finally get through Pandori's denial. ''They are using the old formal declarations from pre-Unity times. Ninety, a hundred years ago, a planet was supposed to surrender when it lost control of the space above it and pay ‘reparations.' That usually meant taking over the winning planet's debt to Earth. It was not a pretty time.''
''But they aren't demanding reparations. They want our total surrender,'' Kusa pointed out.
''Those are Peterwald battleships, and they're playing for bigger stakes,'' Father snapped. He was trying to stay quiet like he'd promised. It was not easy for him.
''So you say,'' Pandori snapped. ''With you Longknifes it's always a Peterwald under the bed. I say we ignore them, go about our business. They wouldn't dare fire on us. And, when the fleet is back, we settle anything that needs settling.''
There it was, out in the open. Bluff. Pandori was a great one for bluffing. Father brought his fist down on the visitor's easy chair. ''And just what do you think those six battleships will do while our fleet is boosting in from the jump point? Our battleships will arrive over a smoking ruin of a planet, with those ships running for the other jump point.''
''Father. Mr. Prime Minister. We've had this conversation,'' Honovi put in. They had. And might well have it many more times if there was time for it. Eighty years of peace had built ''civilized expectations,'' as Pandori put it. ''Faith in the system,'' as Father put it. ''A near impossibility to face the reality of change'' was the way Honovi put it privately to Kusa. She disagreed politely but not forcefully and tried to get her father to accept the need for change as much as Honovi worked on his.
''We need to work on the wording of our response to the surrender demand, and orders for the fleet,'' Honovi said, going straight at the next item on his to-do list. ''We need to issue it in two hours, maybe less.''
''Why so soon?'' Pandori grumbled. ''It only takes a bit more than an hour to boost past the moon. I've done it many times.''
''Yes, sir,'' Honovi said. ''But they aren't boosting past the moon. They'll boost at one g for an hour, then reverse and decelerate for an hour so they swing around the moon and come back at the hostile battleship's track as they're coming in. That's where they'll fight them.''
''We did a school trip in the first grade,'' Kusa said. ''It took the afternoon to swing around the moon and come back.''
''We did that trip, too,'' Honovi said.
''Do you remember much of first grade?'' Father quipped to Pandori. ''I sure don't.''
The acting Prime Minister shook his head. Finally, something the two old political warhorses could agree upon.
''Course, we didn't fight any battleships,'' Kusa said.
''I pretended we saw pirates,'' Honovi said.
''They were good days when children had to pretend they saw anything horrible,'' the Prime Minister said, eyes tearing.
''They will come again, Papa.''