which meant no one was going to tell him no.
He snorted at the thought, bending to keep peering out the view port as the pinnace settled towards the docking buffers. His eye caught the ship's crest, painted on the outer face of the docking gallery below the armorplast viewing area, and his mouth twitched. The crest was built around the personal seal of King William I, for whom the ship was named, and Markham wondered once again how many of Billy Boy's crew ever considered the fact that their namesake had been assassinated by a psychotic.
It was not a thought he particularly cared to contemplate at a moment like this.
'They're coming out, Citizen Admiral,' Citizen Commander Macintosh announced. Giscard held up his hand, interrupting a report from Julia Lapisch as he turned to face the ops officer.
'Strength estimates?' he asked.
'Still too far for any sort of positive count, Citizen Admiral, but it looks like they're present in considerably lower strength than predicted. We make it six to eight of the wall and an unknown number of battlecruisers. They seem to be headed our way at about three hundred gravities.'
'Thank you.' Giscard turned his chair towards Citizen Lieutenant Thaddeus. 'Reactions, Madison?' he asked the intelligence officer.
'Our estimates were the best we could give you from the data we had when Icarus was planned, Citizen Admiral,' Thaddeus said.
There was an edge of something almost like challenge in his voice, but Giscard was prepared to let that ride as long as Thaddeus kept it under control. He'd wondered why someone of the citizen lieutenant's obvious ability had not been promoted; now he knew, for the answer had been in the StateSec files Pritchart had received just before their departure from Secour. Thaddeus' older sister had been denounced to the People's Courts by a vengeful lover—falsely, as it turned out—as an enemy of the People. The lover had hanged himself when his anger cooled and he realized what he'd done, but his remorse had come too late to save Sabrina Thaddeus' life, and the SS feared that his sister's fate might turn the citizen lieutenant against the New Order. From what Giscard had seen of the man, they were right to be afraid of that. But it had never affected his work for the Citizen Admiral, and Giscard was hardly in a position to fault another over divided loyalties.
'I know the analysts' data was limited, Madison,' the citizen admiral said now, putting just enough patience into his tone to remind the intelligence officer to watch his manners in front of others. 'But this is a considerably lighter force than we anticipated, and I'd prefer not to find out the hard way that they actually have all those other ships we expected headed at us in stealth somewhere. So if there was any information, even questionable information, that could shed some light on this, I'd like to hear it.'
'Yes, Citizen Admiral. Sorry,' Thaddeus apologized, and leaned back in his chair, thinking hard. Finally he shook his head. 'I can't really think of anything concrete that could explain it, Citizen Admiral,' he said in a very different voice. 'But that doesn't mean as much as I'd like. We haven't made any scouting sweeps of Basilisk since the war started and the Manties blew out Seaford Nine. Instead, we've relied on covert intelligence gathered by merchant skippers on our payroll. For the most part, they're foreign nationals, not our own people, which means any report from them has to be taken with a grain of salt, but they're the best we've had.'
He paused, glancing at Giscard, and the Citizen Admiral nodded in combined understanding and an order to go on.
'Within those qualifications, they've been able to give us a pretty solid count on the forces deployed to watch over the terminus itself,' Thaddeus said. 'Those units are easily inside the sensor reach of any merchie using the Junction. But the numbers have always been a lot more... amorphous for the rest of the picket.'
'Why is that, Citizen Lieutenant?' Pritchart asked in neutral tones. 'My understanding was that over half the traffic passing through this system transships at least some cargo at the warehouses in Medusa orbit before continuing through the terminus.'
'That's correct, Ma'am,' Thaddeus said much more stiffly. Pritchart, after all, was the enemy as far as he was concerned, yet he seemed a little baffled by his own reaction to her. It appeared that he couldn't quite work up the hate for her that he felt for StateSec's other minions, and that seemed to puzzle him.
'In that case, wouldn't they have been able to observe the other portion of the picket in some detail, as well?'
'Yes and no, Ma'am,' Macintosh said, coming to Thaddeus' aid. 'They'd get a good look at anyone in close proximity to Medusa, but not at any units that were further out—on patrol, say, or conducting exercises. And the Manties are as sensitive to the possibility of espionage here as we would be in their place. They don't exactly encourage through traffic to use active sensors in areas like this, and there are limits to what merchant-grade passives can pick up. Unfortunately, part of the inspection the Manties have been insisting on since the war started includes a very close look at the sensor suites of visiting merchantmen, and if they find something more sophisticated than they feel is appropriate, the ship in question better have a very good justification for it. If she doesn't—pffft!' The Citizen Commander made a throwing away gesture with one hand. 'That ship and that merchant skipper are banned from any use of the Junction for the duration of hostilities, which leaves them no real legitimate reason to be anywhere in the Basilisk System, much less anyplace they could see something that would do us any good to know about. Sort of cavalier of them, I suppose, but effective, and I'd do the same thing in their position.'
'The Citizen Commander is correct, Ma'am,' Thaddeus added. 'We've had some reports that they've been drawing down the strength of the picket for the past several months, but no hard evidence to support them. Under the circumstances, NavInt—' it wasn't actually Naval Intelligence anymore, but Thaddeus, like a great many naval officers (and with more personal reason than most), still referred to the military intelligence section of State Security by the old pre-Coup name '—went with the last definite numbers we had. I suppose the theory was that it was better to make a worst-case assumption. And according to those figures, there ought to have been at least twelve of the wall assigned to the inner-system picket here.'
'I see. Thank you, Citizen Lieutenant. And you, Citizen Commander.' Pritchart gazed down into the master plot for several seconds, then looked at Giscard. 'Does this change your intentions in any way, Citizen Admiral?'
'I think not, Citizen Commissioner,' he replied with the exquisite courtesy he habitually used in public to depress her pretensions to interference in his tactical decisions. 'There may be less opposition than we expected, but there's still enough to hand us some nasty lumps. And their Home Fleet is still no more than forty to forty-eight hours from Medusa even if it has to come all the way from Manticore orbit.' He shook his head. 'Hopefully their units will try to come through piecemeal and let Citizen Rear Admiral Darlington chop them up, but if anything goes wrong at that end, they can put a hell of a lot more firepower into this system than we have. I think we'll just continue the profile and head straight for a flyby firing run on Medusa. Unless, of course, you wish to proceed in some other fashion, Ma'am?'
'No, Citizen Admiral,' she said in chill tones.
'Excellent,' he replied, and folded his hands behind him and turned back to the plot.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Despite the temperature setting, most of the people in Basilisk ACS' central control room were sweating hard as they tried to cope. The initial reaction of the merchant traffic awaiting transit had been confusion, promptly followed by a panic that was as inevitable as it was irrational. They were ten light-hours from the Peeps' obvious objective, and every hostile starship in the vicinity was headed for Medusa, which meant almost directly away from them. There was ample time to get every one of them through the Junction and safely out of harm's way, and even if there hadn't been, they were far outside the Basilisk hyper limit. The FTL sensor net would give plenty of warning if any of the Peeps turned around and headed this way, and it would be relatively simple to duck into hyper and vanish long before the enemy could possibly get here.
Those comforting reflections, however, did not appear to be foremost in the minds of the merchant skippers arguing vociferously with Michel Reynaud's controllers. Lieutenant Carluchi and her pinnaces had already been required to physically intervene to keep a big Andermani ore ship and a Solarian freighter loaded with
