Flag In Exile

should position him nicely to begin the other campaign, but first he had to win the battle. And while the citizen vice admiral was confident his firepower could crush the Grayson Navy, he also knew that navy was going to fight. It had to, for this was its home star system, and he refused to make the mistake of underestimating the Graysons' courage or skill.

And that meant that, preponderance of firepower or no, Task Force Fourteen would take losses, possibly even among the battleships. Possibly even aboard a battleship named Conquistador.

It was odd how difficult it was actually to believe that. Oh, he accepted it intellectually, but to actually believe he himself might be among the thousands of dead his battle plan was about to create? No, that was more than he could truthfully do. Dying, he thought with a wry mental smile, would be so inconvenient, after all. But if it was hard for him to accept the possibility when he knew what could happen, then how much harder must it be for civilians like Preznikov or LePic or DuPres?

The seconds ticked past while Preznikov gazed at him, and it suddenly occurred to Thurston that perhaps the citizen commissioner was looking for something in his eyes even as he looked for the same thing in Preznikov's. Now there was an amusing thought, but if his civilian watchdog searched for signs of weakness, he failed to find them, and he shook his head.

'No, Citizen Vice Admiral. I'm satisfied.'

'Thank you, Sir,' Thurston said, and looked at his ops officer. 'Citizen Captain Jordan,' he said formally, 'have Communications pass the word to bring all units to battle stations at nineteen hundred hours.'

An alert bell rang, and the rear admiral who had the duty in Command Central looked up. His eyes found the blinking yellow light of a hyper footprint on the master plot, then moved automatically to the scheduled arrivals on System Control's status boards, and he grimaced as he found none listed. Great. Just great. Like himself, every other man in the vast command center had been glued to his HD before coming on duty. They'd all seen the traumatic events in the Conclave Chamber, and they'd been half-distracted by them, and now he had a whole damned unscheduled convoy to...

The yellow light code turned abruptly blood red as the FTL sensor net began to report, and the admiral's irritation was suddenly a thing of the past.

The two-toned priority buzz of Honors bedside com yanked her awake with all the gentleness of a garrote. She hissed in pain as broken ribs and bruised muscles protested their abuse, but the spinal-reflex reactions of thirty years of naval service were ruthless, and she shoved the pain aside and swung her feet to the deck even as she rubbed at sleep-gummy eyes. She didn't need the querulous sound Nimitz made from his nest in the blankets to tell her they'd gotten barely an hour's sack time. Her thoughts felt slow and logy, floating on a drift of fatigue, and she made herself take another few seconds to fight herself awake before she pressed the audio-only acceptance key.

'Yes?' She heard the husky weariness of her voice and cleared her throat.

'Sorry to disturb you, Milady,' Mercedes Brigham said tensely, 'but Command Central just sent out a Flash One.'

Honor's nostrils flared as a jolt of adrenaline punched at her foggy brain. She touched the vision key, and the terminal flashed alight in the darkened sleeping cabin. Mercedes looked out of it at her, and she saw the flag bridge, already coming fully on-line, behind her chief of staff.

'Numbers and locus?'

'Numbers are still rough, Milady. It looks like...' Mercedes paused and looked up as Fred Bagwell appeared at her shoulder. The ops officer handed her a message board, and she glanced at it, then looked back at Honor with a grim expression. 'Update from Central, Milady. They make it one-sixty-plus point sources approximately two- four-point-four-seven light-minutes from the primary at zero-eight-five, right on the ecliptic. The sensor net's still reporting in, but it looks like a standard Peep task force formation.'

Honor tried to keep her face from reacting, but her mind raced, despite the streamers of fatigue which clogged it. Although the sensor platform's grav-pulse transmitters were FTL capable, each pulse took time to generate, which meant their data transmission rate was slow. At the moment, all Mercedes' information was based on the intruders' hyper footprint and impeller signatures, both of which were also FTL and could be directly observed from Grayson, but which told very little, other than raw numbers, about the ships who'd made them. It would be several minutes yet before the closest sensor platforms could send Central anything definite on the Peeps' light-speed emissions, but if it was a standard Peep formation, that high a unit count argued for at least twenty-five ships of the wall... and she had six.

'All right, Mercedes,' she heard her own voice say calmly. 'Send the squadron to quarters, then tell Central I'm activating Sierra-Delta-One.' Brigham nodded. System Defense One was the emergency contingency plan which put every unit in Yeltsin under Honors direct command in support of BatRon One ... for whatever good it was going to do. 'After you've done that, set up the Sierra-One net; I want every squadron and division commander tied into our command net, and be sure we include every SD's skipper, as well as the flag officers.'

'Aye, aye, Milady.'

'After that...' Honor looked up as MacGuiness appeared in her quarters, carrying her skinsuit '...get with Fred and CIC. I need strength estimates and course projections soonest.'

'You'll have them, Milady.'

'Good. I'll see you on the flag bridge in ten minutes.'

'Well, Citizen Commissioner,' Thomas Theisman murmured to Dennis LePic, 'they know we're here.'

'How soon do you expect a response?' LePic asked a bit nervously, and Theisman looked up from his plot with a wry smile.

'Soon enough, Citizen Commissioner. Soon enough. It's not like they can just ignore us and we'll go away, now is it?'

'Message from Conquistador, Citizen Admiral,' Theisman turned his head and cocked an eyebrow, and his com officer cleared his throat. ''From CO TF Fourteen to all units. Stand by to execute Bravo-One on my signal.''

'Very well.' Theisman looked at his ops officer. 'Bravo-One, Megan. Execute on the Flag's signal, but be sure our own net is tied in with Citizen Admiral Chernov's, and have Astro run a continuous course update in case we get an alpha revision.'

'Aye, Citizen Admiral.'

Terrible's flag bridge was a scene of orderly fury when Honor stepped onto it with Simon Mattingly at her heels. Mercedes Brigham and Fred Bagwell had their heads together and looked up simultaneously at her entry, but she held up her right hand to fend them off long enough to cross to the master plot and take a quick glance. For the first time in all their years together, she'd brought Nimitz to action stations rather than closing him in the life support module in her cabin. She cradled the cat against her side with a crooked left arm, the helmet of the skinsuit Paul Tankersley had designed for him hanging down his back, and rubbed his ears while she gazed down into the holo tank.

It did look like a standard Peep task force, but there was something... odd, about it. She tried to put her finger on that oddness, but it eluded her, and she gave herself an angry mental shake at her inability to pin it down. She knew she was exhausted. She couldn't have been anything else, under the circumstances, and Terrible's doctor had flatly refused to allow her more stims. She knew he was right, but she also knew the energy lift of adrenaline rushing through her system was a false friend. There was a limit to how long it could sustain her, and when it ran out...

She closed her eyes and braced her right hand on the frame of the tank as traitor knees tried to betray her. Her ribs spasmed as her arm took her weight, and she felt a matching spasm of terrible, futile rage at the universe. Why, she thought bitterly. Why now? Why does it have to be right this minute?

The universe returned no answer, and she felt a deep, cowardly temptation to pass responsibility to Command Central. She'd been through too much, lost too much, built up too vast a debt of physical and emotional