"All right," she said. Her calm soprano gave no sign of the thoughts which had flowed through her mind, and she nodded crisply. "Alistair is right, Thomas. We'll put Prince Adrian on point." Greentree nodded, and she switched her gaze back to Venizelos. "From Marcia’s original comments, I gather that we've received hard numbers on the convoy. Do we have an actual ship list yet?"
"There are still a couple of blanks, Ma'am," the chief of staff replied. "We should have them filled by fifteen-thirty, though. My understanding is that they're all present in Yeltsin but that Logistics Command is still deciding exactly which ships to load the last of the Samovar garrison's supplies aboard."
"Good. Howard..." she turned to her com officer "...once we have a complete list, I want you to contact the master of each ship on it. Invite him and his exec to a meeting here aboard Alvarez at, oh, call it nineteen hundred hours."
"Yes, My Lady."
"Marcia, between now and then I want you and Andy to rough out a Sarnow deployment for the squadron. Assume Prince Adrian will take point and assign Magician to watch the back door."
"Yes, Ma'am."
Honor sat for a long moment, rubbing her nose once more as she tried to decide if that was everything that needed saying. Then she looked at Mayhew.
"That was a good job of pointing out an alternate interpretation of ONIs analyses, Jasper. Sometimes we forget to think about the person behind the rank on the other side." Greentree and McKeon nodded firmly, echoing her approval, and she felt the lieutenants pleasure. Perhaps even more importantly, she also sensed the lack of resentment in Marcia McGinley’s emotions. A lot of staff officers would have been angry with a junior who dared not only to disagree with her but actually to convince their commodore that he was right and she was wrong. It was good to know McGinley wasn't one of them.
Honor started to rise, officially bringing the meeting to a close, but then she stopped. There was one other point that needed to be dealt with, and she drew a deep breath and steeled her nerve. "Carson?"
"Yes, My Lady?" The flag lieutenant seemed to quiver in his chair, as if it required a physical effort not to spring to his feet and snap to attention.
"I'll be inviting the convoy's skippers to join me for supper when they come aboard," she said. "Please get hold of my steward and see to the arrangements."
"Yes, My Lady!" the ensign said sharply, and the burst of determined enthusiasm which flooded from him over Honors link to Nimitz was almost frightening.
But not, she reflected silently, as frightening as the potential for disaster in letting Carson anywhere near a table covered with food. If he can make that much mess with a single pitcher of water, what couldn't he do with an entire formal dinner? But at least, she told herself hopefully, he'll have Mac to ride herd on him. So how bad can it be?
The answer to her last question suggested itself to her, and she shuddered at the very thought.
Chapter Ten
"Will you look at that" Yuri Bogdanovich murmured almost reverently. "Its actually working!"
"Your surprise is hardly becoming, Yuri," Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville chided from within a cloud of cigar smoke. "And now that I think about it, it displays an appalling lack of confidence in our operations officer."
"You're right, Citizen Rear Admiral." Bogdanovich turned from his contemplation of the main holo sphere to bow in Shannon Foraker's direction. "Im still surprised, you understand," he went on, "but that's just because the Manties keep sneaking up on us. And may I say, Shannon, that it's a pleasure to be the ones doing the sneaking for a change!"
"Here, here!" Karen Lowe muttered, and a chorus of laughter, muted, and mostly a bit more nervous than its authors would care to have admitted, ran around the bridge.
People's Commissioner Honeker listened appreciatively. He heard the anxiety within it, but he also knew how rare any sign of levity at a time like this had become for the People’s Navy. He wasn't immune to ambition of his own, and once the domestic situation had stabilized enough, he intended to pursue a civilian political career, where having a stint as commissioner to a successful officer like Tourville on his record was going to look very good. Yet in fairness to him, he was more impressed with the citizen rear admiral's ability to motivate people to fight than he was by his own career prospects.
"How much longer, Citizen Commander Foraker?" he asked quietly. Foraker tapped numbers into a keypad, then studied the results for a moment.
"Assuming I've estimated their sensor platform availability correctly and that they really put the ones they had where I'm predicting, Sir, and assuming NavInt's estimate of their passive sensor capability is close to accurate, they should be in a position to begin picking us up within the next seven and a half hours," she said. "Of course, we're not emitting a thing, which will make their job a lot harder. As far as active sensors are concerned, the only ones I'm picking up at the moment are a long, long way outside detection ranges, and they look like standard navigation radars, civilian radars, from local intrasystem traffic."
"No active military sensors at all?" Honeker couldn't quite keep the skepticism out of his voice, and Foraker shrugged.
"Sir, any star system's a mighty big fishpond, and our approach course was designed to stay well clear of the ecliptic to avoid blundering into any of the local traffic’s sensor envelopes. Unless a starship already has a pretty good idea about where another ship is hiding, its active sensor reach is simply too short for any realistically useful sweeps. That's one of the things that makes the Manties' remotes such pains. Their sensor arrays, signal amplification, and dedicated software are better than any of our shipboard systems can come close to matching, and just to be on the safe side, they like to seed the things so densely and generate so much overlap that active sensors can pick up anyone who tries to sneak through. Which doesn't even mention the fact that an intact sensor net lets them shut down their mobile systems completely and rely on relayed data without revealing their own positions. But everything we've seen so far supports the theory that they're short on platforms, and we'll pick up any active sensor emissions long before they can get a useful return off of us."
Honeker's grunt was as much an apology for doubting her as an acceptance of her explanation, for she'd been very careful not to add, "I already told you that, dummy!" And the fact was that she had explained the entire plan in detail after she, Bogdanovich, and Lowe had worked out the final points.
Tourville’s squadron was doing something which was virtually unheard of: moving deeper and deeper into an enemy-held system without a single scout deployed to probe its line of advance. Instead, all four battlecruisers and all of their attached units were gathered into the tightest possible formation and coasting ballistically towards an interception with Samovar... and so far, it seemed clear that no one had seen them at all.
It was always possible Bogdanovich and Foraker were wrong about that, Honeker mused. Manty stealth systems were better than those of the People’s Navy, and it was at least possible that the entire Allied picket force was headed straight for Count Tilly and her consorts at this very moment. It seemed unlikely, however, for as Foraker had just pointed out, so far the squadron had yet to take a single active sensor hit, and only active sensors stood any realistic chance of picking them up.