"Talk to me, Andrea," Honor said briskly but calmly as she arrived on Werewolf's flag bridge. Nimitz rode in her arms, once more in his own, custom-designed skinsuit, and she paused to park him on the back of her command chair. She gave his tufted ears a caress, then turned back to face her operations officer while the 'cat's nimble true-hands fastened the harness straps between his skinsuit and the chair.
"We still don't have positive confirmation, Your Grace," Captain Jaruwalski replied, "but I don't think there's much question. It's the Peeps."
"I tend to agree with Andrea, Your Grace," Mercedes Brigham put in from her own console, "but at the same time, I don't think we should positively rule out the possibility that this could be the Andies, instead." Honor looked at her, and the chief of staff shrugged. "I'm not saying that I believe it's the Andies, Ma'am. But until we know for certain, one way or the other, I think we'd better keep an open mind on the subject."
"That's a valid point," Honor acknowledged. "But whoever it is," she turned to consider the huge holo sphere of the master plot, "they look like they mean business."
"They certainly do that," Brigham agreed, and stood to join Honor beside the plot.
The unknown units were headed in-system on a course which would bring them to a zero-zero intercept with Marsh in just over six hours, assuming that they made turnover in three. And there were quite a few of them. In fact, it looked very much as if her "official" order of battle would have been outnumbered by at least fifty percent.
"We're getting light-speed emissions signatures now, Your Grace," George Reynolds reported. Honor turned towards them, and the intelligence officer looked up to meet her gaze. "They're not Andies," he said quietly. "We don't recognize some of them, but we've positively IDed at least eight Havenite battlecruisers."
Something like a not quite audible sigh seemed to run around the flag bridge, and Honor smiled thinly. She couldn't say she was glad to have her worst fears confirmed, but at least the uncertainty was over. She closed her mind resolutely to speculation about what might have happened closer to home, and nodded as serenely as she could.
"Thank you, George," she said, and glanced at Jaruwalski.
"CIC is trying to break them down by type, Your Grace," the ops officer said. "It's a bit difficult without better intelligence on whatever new types they've been building, especially since, as George just said, we don't recognize some of them at all. At the moment though, it looks as though they've brought along fifty or sixty superdreadnoughts, with twenty or thirty battlecruisers in support."
"Time of response to our sublight challenge, Harper?" Honor asked her com officer.
"If they respond to it immediately, we should be hearing something from them in another four or five minutes, Your Grace," Lieutenant Brantley told her.
"Thank you." Honor frowned thoughtfully for a moment, then returned her attention to Jaruwalski. "Any indications of CLACs?"
"No, Your Grace," the ops officer replied. "Which doesn't necessarily mean there aren't any."
"Your Grace, we're getting IDs on at least some of their superdreadnoughts from the remote platforms," Reynolds put in. "They're confirmed Peeps. We've got nine of them so far. All pre-pod designs ONI has good recorded emissions signatures on."
"That's about twenty percent of their total SDs," Brigham observed.
"True," Jaruwalski agreed. "On the other hand, it still leaves over fifty which could be SD(P)s."
Honor nodded once more, accepting Jaruwalski's caveat, then gave the plot another glance and reached her decision.
"It doesn't look like we're going to get a better chance for Suriago," she said, and looked at the com screen connecting her to Werewolf's command deck. "Get us underway, Rafe."
"Aye, aye, Your Grace," Captain Rafe Cardones replied crisply, and began passing orders.
"They're not trying to be very stealthy about it, are they, Sir?" Molly DeLaney remarked.
"No, they're not," Tourville agreed. He sat in his command chair, legs crossed, expression calm, while his right hand's fingers drummed very slowly and gently on its armrest. His eyes were equally calm but intent as he studied the repeater plot deployed from his chair.
The defending Manticoran task force was headed to meet him. The range remained too long for real-time reports from light-speed sensors, but impeller signatures were FTL, and they blazed clear and strong in the plot, confirming what the first wave of recon drones had already reported. Thirty-one Manty superdreadnoughts, eleven dreadnoughts, four LAC carriers, and sixteen battlecruisers, covered by two destroyer flotillas and at least three cruiser squadrons accelerated steadily on almost a direct reciprocal of his own course. A cloud of LACs spread out to cover the axis of their advance and its flanks. It was much more difficult to get a drive count on units that small, but NavInt had reported that somewhere around four hundred and fifty LACs had been permanently based on Sidemore. It looked like Harrington had brought all of them with her, since CIC estimated her main combatants were accompanied by somewhere around eight hundred of them. Taking NavInt's highest figure and combining it with the six CLACs she was supposed to have gave her a maximum LAC strength of right on a thousand. She might have left a couple of hundred of them to cover the inner system against the possibility that the main attack was actually a feint to pull her out of position around Marsh, especially if she believed the Republican Navy still lacked any CLACs of its own.
And she was continuing to transmit her sublight challenges and demands that he identify himself as she came.
DeLaney's comment on Harrington's lack of stealth was a definite understatement, he reflected. And that made him a little nervous. One thing no one had ever accused Honor Harrington of was tactical obviousness. She had demonstrated repeatedly her willingness and ability to use the traditional Manticoran advantage in electronic warfare to deadly effect. Yet in the face of CIC's definite identification of her units, it seemed that this time, at least, she had disdained such tactics. She wasn't hiding or concealing a thing...which was the reason for his nervousness. "The Salamander" was at her most dangerous when an opponent was most certain he knew what she had in mind.
Let's not double-think ourselves into a panic, there, Lester, he told himself dryly. Yeah, she's sneaky. And smart. But she doesn't really have a lot of options here. And besides...
"It may just be that she's still hoping to get out of this without anyone shooting at anybody," he murmured aloud, and DeLaney's eyebrows rose.
"That seems...unlikely, Sir," she said, and Tourville grinned at her tone of massive restraint.
"I didn't say it was likely, Molly. I said it was possible. And it is, you know. She has to have IDed at least some of our emissions signatures by now, so she knows we're Republican. And she'd have to be a hell of a lot stupider than I know she is if she didn't suspect exactly why we're here. But at the same time, she can't know what's going on back homenot yet. So there's probably at least an edge of caution in her thinking right now. She's not going to shirk her responsibilities, but she's not going to want to start a war out here that could spill over on the Star Kingdom's own territory unless she absolutely has to, either. I'd guess that's why they're continuing to challenge us despite the fact that we haven't answered them."
"Do you think she'll actually let us into range because she doesn't want to fire the first shot, Sir?"