'Admiral, Mr. Bellefeuille, I apologize for breaking in on your dinner, but I think this is urgent.'
Commander Ericsson, Bellefeuille's operations officer, held out a message board to his admiral. She managed to not-quite-snatch it out of his hand, and glared at the display. Then, abruptly, her angry expression smoothed into something very different.
'This is confirmed?' she asked crisply, looking back up at Ericsson.
'Yes, Ma'am. I had Perimeter Tracking doublecheck before I broke in on you.' He smiled apologetically. 'I know how much you and your family have been looking forward to this visit, Admiral. I really wish I hadn't had to disturb you on your very first evening.'
'I wish you hadn't had to, too,' Bellefeuille said, her own smile thin. 'For a lot of reasons.' She glanced at the message board again, then set it down on the table. 'Ivan's seen a copy of this, as well?'
'Yes, Ma'am. And I also routed a copy to Governor Sebastian's office.'
'Thank you.' This time Bellefeuille's smile was warmer, though it still seemed strained, a bit taut. 'I don't think there's much we can do about it right now. If they get clumsy and we get a solid read on them, I'd love to nail them. I'm not going to try holding my breath until we do, though, and I don't want to give away anything we don't have to. So tell Ivan to activate Smoke and Mirrors. I want everything we've got brought to immediate readiness, but no one moves, and we shut down the Mirror Box platforms right now. And I want all of our stealth-capable units except the destroyers into stealth now. They stay there until I tell them differently.'
'Yes, Ma'am. Anything else?'
'Not right now, Leonardo. Thank you.'
Commander Ericsson smiled, nodded once again to his admiral and her family, and withdrew.
'Jennifer?'
The Chantilly System commander looked up. She realized she'd been settling into what her mother used to call 'a brown study,' but the sound of her name pulled her back out of it abruptly. Her husband looked back at her, waiting patiently despite the concern in the back of his deep, brown eyes.
'I'm sorry, Russ,' she said quietly. 'I know you and the girls just got here, and I've really been looking forward to this visit. But it appears the Manties didn't get the memo about your trip.'
Russell Bellefeuille's lips quirked very slightly at her feeble attempt at humor, but their children, Diana and Matthew, didn't even try to conceal their worry.
'Can you tell us about it?' Russell asked. His tone said he'd understand if she couldn't, and she smiled at him, far more warmly, while she wondered how many other spouses could have honestly said the same in his position.
Russell Bellefeuille had spent thirty T-years fighting a hopeless struggle against the 'democratized' Legislaturalist educational system. Fortunately, he and his wife had been born and raised in the Suarez System, and Suarez had been added to the People's Republic only thirty-six years before the outbreak of the first war with Manticore, so at least he hadn't had to deal with the entrenched, massively intrusive bureaucracy of places like Nouveau Paris. He'd had enough slack to get away with actually teaching his students something, and although-like his wife-he'd hated and despised the People's Republic of Rob Pierre and State Security, he'd finally seen the idea that schools were supposed to teach students take root once more.
Along the way, he'd found the time and patience to marry a serving naval officer, despite all of the dislocation a military career imposed on anyone's personal life... and the very real risk involved in marrying an officer while Oscar Saint-Just's State Security was shooting entire families under his infamous policy of 'collective responsibility.' And in the middle of all that, he'd somehow managed to raise two teenaged children, with only occasional visits from their mother, and done a damned good job.
'There's not much to tell... yet,' she said. 'Perimeter Tracking's detected what's probably a pair of hyper footprints well out from the system primary. It may be nothing.'
'Or it may be Manty scout ships, like I saw on the boards about Gaston and Hera,' Diana said tautly. At seventeen, she was the older of Bellefeuille's children, with her mother's dark hair coloring and gray-green eyes. She also had her mother's sharp-edged, adrenal personality, and at the moment Bellefeuille wished she'd inherited more of her father's equanimity.
'Yes, it may,' Bellefeuille said as calmly as she could. 'In fact, I think it probably is.'
'Here?' Technically, Matthew wasn't quite a teenager yet. One reason for this trip to Chantilly had been to celebrate his thirteenth birthday, and at the moment, he looked and sounded very young-and frightened-indeed. 'The Manties are coming here, Mom?'
'Probably,' Bellefeuille repeated.
'But-'
'That's enough, Matt,' Russell said quietly. The boy looked at him, as if he couldn't believe he could be so blas‚ about it. But then he saw his father's eyes, and his mouth shut with an almost audible click.
'Better,' Russell said, reaching out to ruffle his hair gently, the way he had when Matthew had been much younger. Then he turned back to his wife.
'All I really know is what I've read in the 'faxes and on the boards,' he told her. 'Is this as bad as I think it is?'
'It's not good,' she told him honestly. 'Just how not-good, I don't know yet. We probably won't, for at least a couple of days.'
'But you expect them to attack?'
'Yes.' She sighed. 'I wish now you hadn't come.'
'I don't,' he said softly, and her eyes pickled as he looked steadily at her across the table. Then he reached for his fork and glanced at their children. 'I think we should go ahead and finish eating before we pester your mother with any more questions,' he told them.
'There's another one, Sir,' Chief Sullivan said flatly.
'Did we get a locus on it?' Lieutenant Commander Krenckel asked.
'I wish, Sir,' Sullivan replied in disgusted tones. He looked up from his display, and his expression was a mixture of frustration and apology. 'Whatever it is-and between you and me, Sir, it's got to be a stealthed Manty recon platform-it's moving like a bat out of hell. I wish to hell I knew how they got these kinds of acceleration levels and endurance numbers on their platforms!'
'NavInt says they've probably put micro fusion plants on them.'
Sullivan blinked.
'Fusion plants? On something this small?'
'That's what they say.' Krenckel shrugged. 'I haven't seen any raw data on captured hardware or anything to support it, but it comes out of Bolthole. And if anyone knows what they're up to, it's got to be Admiral Foraker and her teams.'
'Well, isn't that just peachy,' Sullivan muttered, then grimaced. 'Sorry, Sir.'
'You're not saying anything I haven't thought, Chief,' Krenckel said dryly. 'Still, it'd make sense out of how small they've managed to make their MDMs. Not to mention the hellacious power levels their remote EW platforms pump.'
'Yeah, it would,' Sullivan agreed. Then he seemed to give himself a mental shake. 'But what I was saying, Sir-all we're getting is the back scatter, and their directional transmission capability's better than ours. The best read we've gotten was an accident-one of our own platforms just happened to wander into their transmission path-and we haven't gotten what we need for a good crosscut bearing for any of them. Even if we did, by the time we could vector anything out there, the platform would be long gone. It'd have to see us coming, and it can pull a hell of a lot more accel than any LAC we might send after it.'
'Then we're just going to have to hope we do get a cross bearing, I guess,' Krenckel said.
'Yes, Sir.'
Sullivan turned back to his display, bending once more to the wearisome task of listening for the tiny spies flitting about the Augusta System. Personally, he figured the effort was as pointless as it was exhausting. They knew the bastards were out there; they knew they weren't going to be able to run down any of the platforms, even if they spotted them; and they knew those platforms wouldn't be there if Hell itself wasn't coming to dinner.
Still, he supposed he might as well waste his time doing this as anything else.
'Commander Estwicke's data is coming in now, Your Grace.'
'Thank you, Andrea.'
