Flag In Exile

war and the Cromarty Government, and that didn't even count the price in blood and suffering, Masadan as well as Manticoran, it would entail.

'I understand, Sir,' she said, and Matthews nodded.

'I thought you would.' He looked back and forth between the two older, and junior, admirals for a moment, then drew a deep breath and shoved himself to his feet. 'Very well, then. Let's...' he smiled at Honor as he used one of her favorite phrases '...be about it.'

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

'Ahhhhhhh! Here we go, Sir Citizen Commander. We've got customers.'

Citizen Commander Caslet grimaced and crossed quickly to the tactical section, hoping, without much hope, that Citizen Commissioner Jourdain hadn't heard Shannon's slip. PNS Vaubon, unlike most of the PN's ships, had survived the last year of purges with her crew essentially intact, and that had tended to shield the light cruiser's company from some of the Republic’s harsher realities. Caslet had reminded his people again and again that the Committee of Public Safety and its minions were serious about their egalitarianism, yet some of them, and especially Citizen Lieutenant Shannon Foraker, had a hard time remembering it. Shannon did fine when she took time to think before speaking, but she was a quintessential example of what was still called 'a techno nerd.' She was brilliant in her area of specialization, but her social skills were an afterthought. When the tactical situation hit the fan, or when she simply got particularly intent on a task, she dropped back into old habits of speech without even realizing she'd done it.

But at least Jourdain was a pretty decent sort for a citizen commissioner, and Caslet had explained to him (at length) why Foraker was especially valuable to him. Shannon's talent for extrapolating data amounted to witchcraft, and she was one of the few Havenite tac officers immune to the PN's collective sense of techno- inferiority. She knew her instrumentation wasn't as good as the Manties, but she took it as a challenge, not a cause for despair. Caslet only hoped Jourdain grasped how important that was and would remain willing to put up with a few lapses in Shannon’s revolutionary vocabulary.

He shook the thought aside and leaned over her shoulder to peer at her displays. Shannon was already bringing her computers fully on-line to enhance her passive sensors' data, and Vaubon’ s captain frowned as the distant light codes crept slowly across the plot.

'What do you make of it, Shannon?'

'Well, now, Skipper, that's hard to say just yet.' She tapped in a fresh enhancement command. 'Sure wish we were a little closer,' she grumbled. 'This passive shit's for the birds at this range, Sir.'

'Citizen Commander, Shannon!' Caslet whispered, and hid a sigh as the tac officer blinked, then shrugged the reminder aside. She had more important things on her mind, and Caslet darted an apologetic look at Jourdain. The commissioner didn't look nappy, but he only strolled across the bridge to examine the environmental readouts. That put him far enough away to pretend he wasn't hearing anything, and Caslet thought a very loud mental thank-you in his direction, then turned back to Foraker.

The tac officer was muttering to herself while her fingers caressed her keypad with surgical skill, and Caslet waited as patiently as he could for her to remember to report to the rest of the universe. Unfortunately, she seemed too intent on the marvelous toys the Peoples Navy had obviously provided for her sole entertainment, and he cleared his throat.

'Talk to me, Shannon!' he said sternly, and she straightened with a start. She looked at him blankly for a moment, then grinned.

'Sorry, Skip. What did you say?'

'I said tell me what we've got.' Caslet spoke with the patience one normally reserved for a small child, and Foraker had the grace to blush.

'Uh, yes, Sir Citizen Commander. The problem is, I'm not entirely sure what we've got. Is there any way we could maybe sneak in a little closer?' she asked in a wheedling tone.

'No, there isn't,' Caslet replied repressively. Shannon was familiar with their orders and knew better than to ask, which was the main reason he didn't add that he wished they could close on the contacts, too. Unfortunately, his instructions were clear: he was to keep Vaubon's presence completely covert, which meant no live impellers where the Manties might see them.

In Citizen Commander Warner Caslet's considered opinion, that was a pretty damned silly restriction. Vaubon was a hundred thousand klicks outside the Casca hyper limit; he could dart in for a closer look, make positive identification on his targets, then vanish into hyper before anyone could do anything about it, and he couldn't quite see why he shouldn't do so. It wasn't as if finding a Republican picket watching the system should surprise the Manties. They wouldn't be reinforcing unless they believed Haven might be interested in Casca, and confirmation that the People's Navy was keeping an eye on it should only encourage that belief. Which, as he understood it, had been the whole purpose of Operation Stalking Horse in the first place.

Orders, he thought. Something unfortunate must happen to a person's brain when he turns into a flag officer.

'Well, anything I tell you from this far out's gonna be a guess, Skipper,' Shannon warned.

'So guess.'

'Yes, Sir.' The tac officer tapped a function key, and two of the thirteen capital ship codes on her display were suddenly ringed in white. 'It looks like they must've refitted even more heavily than we figured they would,' she said, ''cause I'm getting Manty emissions off all of them. Looks like they've done the next best thing to a complete replacement on their active sensors, but I'm picking up emissions from an Alpha-Romeo-Seven-Baker off these two puppies here, Skip.'

'Are you, indeed?' Caslet murmured, and Foraker nodded happily. The AR-7(b) was the standard search radar mounted in PN dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts. It wasn't as good as the Manty equivalent, after all, he thought sourly, what Republican equipment was?, but that was mostly because the Manties' enhancement let them do more with the data they picked up. The AR-7 was about as powerful as its Manticoran equivalent and, all in all, a damned good installation, so it made sense that the Grayson Navy would have retained it if it had survived the ships' capture.

'Yep,' Foraker replied cheerfully, but then her smile faded. 'Problem is, Skip, that these're the only two I'm sure about. I've got the computers trying to run a correlation between impeller strength and acceleration, but we know the Manties are refitting across the board with the new inertial compensator. We're still guessing how much that improves their efficiency, and these birds are taking it mighty easy, so I don't have max power signatures to work with, but it may give us something on their masses.' She shrugged. 'Our SDs are smaller than theirs are. If I can get an idea...'

She broke off as an alarm chimed softly. Her fingers flickered across her panel again, and her face lit with a devilish smile.

'Well, now! I may just owe my 'puters an apology.' She touched another function key, and three more light codes suddenly grew white rims. 'Okay, what we've got here is speculative as hell, Skipper, but stay with me for a minute.' Caslet nodded, and the tac officer tapped one of the light codes which wasn't ringed in white. 'What I've done, Sir, oh, damn. I mean Citizen Commander.' She sighed, looking past Caslet at Jourdain with an expression that mingled repentance and impatience, then shrugged. 'At any rate, what I've done is make the best read I can from this range on their impeller strengths and correlate it with their observed acceleration rate. It's not going to tell us much about absolute masses, but it can indicate which ships are bigger than others, right?'

'Right.' Caslet tried very hard not to sigh. Shannon really didn't understand how irritating it was to have things you already knew explained to you. On the other hand, her lecture mode normally insured that she caught anything you might not know ... or that you'd simply forgotten to consider.

'All right,' the tac officer said. 'What I can tell you for certain, Skip, is that