Echoes Of Honor

delay. For that matter, he didn't really mind any of the military-style crap he had to put up with, because he remembered when he and his people had been left all on their own out here. Michel Reynaud was an old Basilisk hand— he had fourteen T-years on the station, longer than anyone else aboard the huge base—and there had been a time when he'd felt nothing but contempt for the Navy. Which had been understandable enough, he reminded himself, considering the useless screw-ups and idle layabouts who used to be exiled to Basilisk. But these days—

A bright red light began to blink on the master communications panel, and Vice Admiral Reynaud never remembered getting out of his command chair. He simply found himself suddenly standing behind the com officer, as if the blood-red flash that announced an emergency Priority One signal had teleported him there. And perhaps it had, a distant corner of his brain thought as he watched over the com officer's shoulder and the message began to appear on her display. But that thought was far away and unimportant compared to the content of the short, terse sentences, and his thoughts reeled as he read the estimate of what was headed for Medusa and all the orbital warehouses, freight transfer points, repair shops, and supply bases that served the commerce which poured through Basilisk daily.

He stared at it for one more moment, mouth dry, then wheeled to face the rest of his staff.

'Listen up, everybody!' he snapped, and heads turned throughout the control room, for they had never heard that particular harshness from him. 'There's an unidentified task force headed in-system. Vice Admiral Markham estimates it at a minimum of twenty super-dreadnoughts and fifteen to twenty light cruisers.'

Someone gasped in horror, and Reynaud nodded grimly.

'I'm sure the terminus picket will be getting underway shortly,' he went on, 'but even if they could get there in time, there aren't enough ships in the system to stop this kind of attack. Which means—' he inhaled deeply '—that I am declaring Case Zulu. Jessie—' he looked at his senior watchkeeper '—you're in charge of organizing the evac queue. You know the drill: neutrals and passenger ships first, bulk carriers last.'

'I'm on it, Mike.' The woman waved for two assistants to follow her and headed for the huge holo tank that plotted every ship movement within five light-minutes of the junction, and Reynaud laid a hand on the com officer's shoulder.

'Pass the word to the standby courier, Angela. Download Markham's dispatch and my own Case Zulu, and get it on its way. Jessie— ' he looked back over his shoulder '—clear a priority route for the courier as soon as Angela's finished.'

Jessie nodded, and Reynaud wheeled and beckoned to another controller.

'Al, you and Gus are in charge of short-range com traffic from here on out. I want Angela undisturbed on the Fleet com, just in case.' Al, the senior of the two nodded, and Reynaud went on in a voice which was both calm and urgent. 'There's going to be hell to pay when some of the merchant skippers figure out what's going on. We're ten light-hours from Medusa out here, but they're not going to be thinking about that, and they're going to demand priority to get their own precious asses out of here. Don't let them browbeat you! Jess will give you the movement schedule as soon as she's got it organized. Stick to it.'

'Yes, Sir,' the senior man said, almost as if he meant to salute—which simply wasn't done in the ACS. But Reynaud had already turned away, eyes searching for yet another officer. She had to be here somewhere, but he couldn't seem to spot her.

'Cynthia?' he called.

'Yes, Admiral?'

Reynaud almost levitated, for the reply came from directly behind him. He wheeled quickly—so quickly, in fact, that Lieutenant Carluchi stepped back to avoid him—and managed, somehow, not to glare at the speaker. It was his own fault, he told himself. Carluchi had commanded Basilisk ACS's Marine detachment for almost five months now, and he should have had plenty of time to get used to the silent, catlike way she moved.

'Oh, there you are,' he said with just enough emphasis to make her blush. At any other moment, he would have taken time to enjoy his minor triumph, for Lieutenant Carluchi was as perpetually self-controlled and composed as she was attractive and young. But he had other things on his mind today, and he looked grimly down into the slim, wiry Marine's huge aqua eyes.

'You heard what I told Al and Gus?' he asked, and she nodded without the usual trace of discomfort she felt at ACS' casual, highly unmilitary modes of address. 'Good,' he said even more grimly, 'because it's going to be up to you to put some teeth into their orders if some of those skippers out there actually panic. Can do?'

'Can do, Admiral,' Carluchi said flatly.

Unlike the others, she snapped him a sharp salute, and Reynaud actually found himself returning it, albeit with much less precision. Then she turned and left at a trot he knew was going to turn into a run the instant she was out of his sight. Well, that was all right with Michel Reynaud. Lady Harrington had begun a tradition when she detached two of her pinnaces to support ACS' antismuggling inspections twelve years ago. But these days there were twelve pinnaces, not two, and the personnel to man them were assigned directly to Basilisk ACS by the Royal Marine Corps. A pinnace's twin pulse cannon and single light laser weren't even popguns compared to the weapons carried by real warships, but they were more than powerful enough to deal with unarmed, unarmored merchantmen who got out of hand. More than that, Reynaud knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Cynthia Carluchi and her Marine crews would use those weapons in a heartbeat if the situation required it.

He just hoped the merchies knew it, too.

* * *

Vice Admiral of the Red Silas Markham managed to keep himself in his seat aboard the pinnace only by main force of will. Eleven minutes ago, he had been ensconced in his comfortable office aboard Medusa Gold One, the Navy's relatively new orbital HQ for the Basilisk Station. He'd been buried to the elbows in boring, frustrating paperwork and feeling ticked off—as usual—by the way the picket had been reduced over the last seven T-months. He'd understood the logic. Hell, he'd even agreed with it! But that hadn't make it any more pleasant to hold what was supposed to be a vice admiral's billet and see the forces assigned to him reduced to something a rear admiral would probably have been too senior to command had it been located anywhere other than a single junction transit from the Manticore System.

But he hadn't been able to argue. The Peeps hadn't even sniffed around the perimeter of the Basilisk System for a standard decade. This was a routine, unthreatened sector, much too far behind the front for someone as defensive-minded as the post-Coup Peep Navy had proven itself to hit. And if that should change, the entire strength of Home Fleet was only a transit away. There would be plenty of time to adjust deployments to beef up his task force if the Peeps ever seemed to be headed this way.

Only now it looked as if no one had remembered to tell the Peeps they were too defensive-minded and timid to try a deep-strike raid like this, because as sure as Hell had a monopoly on brimstone, somebody was headed in to blow the holy howling bejesus out of Markham's command area. And all the comfortable assurance— his, as well as the Admiralty's, he admitted bitterly—about redeployments from Home Fleet were crap in the face of something like this. Even battlecruisers would require almost nineteen hours just to reach the Basilisk terminus from Manticore orbit; SDs would take almost twenty-two... and that was for ships with the latest-generation compensators. Ships could make the actual transit from Manticore to Basilisk in mere seconds, but to do that they first had to get to the central Junction terminus in Manticore. And even after they hit Basilisk space, they would be another twenty-two and twenty-six hours respectively from Medusa. Which meant that getting any reinforcements out here was going to take time. Virtually none by the standards of normal interstellar movement, but tactical combat within a star system operated on another scale entirely. And on that scale, forty-one hours was a very long time indeed... especially with the enemy barely two hours out from Medusa and coming hard.

The pinnace was running flat out, straining to catch up with HMS King William. The flagship, known affectionately to her crew as Billy Boy, was holding her accel down enough for the small craft to overhaul, and Markham watched out the port as the pinnace maneuvered to dock. He didn't think of himself as a particularly brave man, and his belly knotted with tension as he thought of what King William and the rest of his understrength force was going out to face. But heroic or not, Silas Markham was a vice admiral of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and his place was aboard his flagship when she faced the foe, not in some damned office light-minutes behind the battle.

The superdreadnought's tractors reached out to the pinnace, capturing it and easing it into the brilliantly lit cavern of a boat bay, and Markham stood. It was against Regs, of course. Passengers were supposed to remain seated and strapped in during any approach maneuver, but he was in a hurry... and he was also a vice admiral,