Flag In Exile

She glanced at Howard Brannigan. The sandy-haired com officer was as quietly busy as Mercedes, monitoring the communications nets, but he seemed to feel Honor's eyes upon him. He looked up and met her gaze for a moment, then nodded with a brief smile and bent back to his duties.

Gregory Paxton was at his own work station, and a steadily lengthening block of alphanumeric characters crawled up his display. He was actually jotting down notes, Honor thought, and wondered if he was recording his personal impressions or updating the official post-battle report he was so unlikely to survive to present.

Neither Stephen Matthews nor Abraham Jackson were present. Her logistics officer had taken over in Damage Central to free Terrible's surviving engineering officers to lead repair parties, and her chaplain was busy with his own grim duty to the dead and dying in Terrible's sickbay.

Her officers, Honor thought wearily. A microcosm of the entire squadron. People she'd come to know and care for directly, as individuals, and she was taking all of them to their deaths, and she couldn't think of a single other option. If only there were some way to bring just a little more pressure to bear on the Peeps. They had to be sweating it, as well, and, unlike her, they could break off and run away. But...

And then her exhausted eyes sharpened and she shoved herself upright in her command chair.

'Howard!'

'Yes, My Lady?' Brannigan turned from his com console, startled by the sharp energy of her voice.

'Warm up the pulse transmitter for an FTL Flash Priority transmission to Courvosier.'

'Courvosier, Milady?' Mercedes Brigham looked up with a frown. Mark Brentworth's Raoul Courvosier was way the hell and gone out-system, almost on the hyper limit, over a hundred million klicks behind Force Zulu. The enemy had accelerated right past her and the rest of her squadron on his way in while they hid under a total emissions shut down, out even if the eight of them had been powerful enough to threaten the Peeps, they were hopelessly out of range.

'Courvosier,' Honor repeated. 'I've got a little job for Captain Brentworth,' she said, and Mercedes blinked at the sudden, almost mischievous twinkle in her tired eyes.

'Status change!' Megan Hathaway snapped, and Theisman whipped around as a warning buzzer sounded. He stared back down into the plot, and, for just a moment, his heart seemed to stop.

Superdreadnoughts. Eight more Gryphon—class SDs of the Royal Manticoran Navy, the most powerful ships of the wall any navy had yet built, had just blinked into existence on the plot. They were a hundred and seven million kilometers astern of TG 14.2, but they were accelerating hard. Eight Grayson battlecruisers spread out to screen them as they closed, and an icy chill ran through his blood. That force changed everything. Even if he somehow managed to beat Harrington with no losses at all, that many fresh ships of the wall would make mincemeat of what was left of TF Fourteen, and...

His panicky thoughts stopped suddenly, and his brows knit. Yes, that many SDs could smash everything he had, but where had they been all this time? They were behind him, coming down his track, but his sensors would have detected their hyper footprint if they'd just translated into n-space. Of course, Manty stealth systems were good. They were 5.9 light-minutes back, and the Manties had proven in the fighting around Nightingale and Trevor's Star that they could hide low-powered impeller wedges from the PN’s sensors at as little as six light-minutes. That meant it was possible they'd been here all along, creeping in under cover of their EW in an effort to ambush him as he ran into their arms on his way out, away from Harrington after TG 14.1’s destruction. And the timing was about right for Harrington to have sent a light-speed message calling them in openly as soon as she realized he wasn't going to break off and let them ambush him after all.

All of that was possible... but he didn't believe it for a moment. If those were real SDs, Harrington would already have broken off. She wouldn't need to close with him, even as a bluff, for their mere presence would have been enough to force him to run for it. No, he thought coldly. The battlecruisers were probably real enough, but they were 'screening' EW drones set to mimic SDs, not real ships of the wall.

He started to say so, then stopped. The flag deck recorders had taken down everything he'd said to LePic, every word of his confident explanation of how he could defeat the surviving Grayson ships of the wall, and any board of inquiry which reviewed those recordings would know he'd been right. But he'd said those things before Harrington headed out to meet him. Before he was faced with the certainty that she was going to fight, and that even after he'd won, most of his battleships would still have been pounded to scrap. Now...

'What is it, Citizen Admiral?' LePic asked urgently.

'It would appear to be a squadron of Manty superdreadnoughts, Citizen Commissioner,' Theisman heard himself say calmly.

'Superdreadnoughts?' LePic stared at him in horror.

'What... Where... How can they be here?'

'Manty stealth systems are better than ours, Sir,' Theisman replied in that same calm, dispassionate tone while his own eyes dropped to the steadily narrowing green cone in Conquerant's master plot. 'It's possible they've been there all along. If they were too far out-system to rendezvous with Harrington before she came out to ambush Citizen Admiral Thurston, and, given their current positions, that would have to have been the case, they could have been coming in under stealth to catch us if we'd run straight back to the hyper limit on a reciprocal of our original entry vector.'

'But...' LePic clamped his jaws together and scrubbed sweat from his forehead, blinking furiously, and Theisman watched him dispassionately. 'This changes the situation, doesn't it, Citizen Admiral?' the commissioner said after a moment in the tone of a man fighting desperately for calm. 'I mean, even if you completely destroy this force...' he pointed to the light codes of Harrington's oncoming ships '...this one...' he pointed at the newcomers '...will still prevent us from carrying out the rest of Operation Dagger, won't they?'

'Eight Gryphon-class superdreadnoughts?' Theisman snorted. 'They certainly would, Citizen Commissioner!'

'But you still think you can destroy Harrington?'

'I'm certain of it,' Theisman said firmly.

'But you couldn't carry out Dagger afterwards?' LePic pressed.

'Not against a full squadron of Manty SDs,' Theisman admitted.

'I see.' LePic inhaled deeply, and then, suddenly, he seemed to calm. 'Well, Citizen Admiral, I can only say that I'm impressed by your determination and courage, especially after what's already happened here, but your ships are too valuable to throw away in a hopeless cause. If we can't carry through with Operation Dagger even if you defeat Harrington, then I see no way to justify the losses we'd take from her in reply. Speaking for the Committee of Public Safety, I instruct you to break off.'

Theisman glanced back into the plot. There were still a couple of minutes to go before the green cone disappeared, he noted, and let an edge of mulish obstinacy into his expression.

'Citizen Commissioner, even if we lose every battleship in the task group, the loss of four superdreadnoughts to the Alliance would...'

'I admire your determination,' LePic said even more firmly, 'but it's not just the battleships. There are also the transports and the freighters, not to mention the units of your screen.' The commissioner shook his head. 'No, Citizen Admiral. We've lost today, through no fault of yours, but we've lost, so let's not throw good money after bad. Break off, Citizen Admiral. That's an order.'

'As you wish, Citizen Commissioner.' Theisman sighed with manifest unwillingness, and looked at his ops officer. 'You heard the citizen commissioner, Megan. Bring us hard to port and go to maximum acceleration.'

'Aye, Citizen Admiral.' Hathaway managed to keep the relief out of her voice, but she shot her admiral a look of approving admiration when LePic couldn't see it, and Theisman turned away with a hidden smile of wry regret.