The Short Victorious War

but his brown eyes twinkled slightly as he cleared his throat.

'Burst transmission for you, Captain.' He paused just a moment. 'It's from Captain Tankersley, Ma'am.'

Faint, pink heat tingled along Honors cheekbones. Did every member of her crew know about her... relationship with Paul?! It was none of their business, even if they did, darn it! It wasn't as if there were anything shady or underhanded about it—Paul was a yard dog, so even the prohibition against affairs with officers in the same chain of command didn't come into it!

But even as she prepared to glower at the com officer, her own sense of the ridiculous came to her rescue. Of course they knew—even Admiral Sarnow knew! She'd never realized her nonexistent love life was so widely noticed, but if she'd wanted to keep a low profile she should have thought of it sooner. And the twinkle in Monet's eyes wasn't the smutty thing it could have been. In fact, she realized as she sensed the same gentle amusement from the rest of her silent bridge crew, he actually seemed pleased for her.

'Ah, switch it to my screen,' she said, suddenly realizing she'd been silent just a bit too long.

'It's a private signal, Ma'am.' Monet's voice was so bland Honors mouth twitched in response. She shoved herself up out of her chair, cradling Nimitz in her arms and fighting her rebellious dimple.

'In that case, I'll take it on my briefing room terminal.'

'Of course, Ma'am. I'll switch it over.'

'Thank you,' Honor said with all the dignity she could muster, and crossed to the briefing room hatch.

It slid open for her, and as she stepped through it, she suddenly wondered why Paul was screening her at all. Nike would reach the base in another thirty minutes or so, but the transmission lag at this range was still something like seventeen seconds. That ruled out any practical real-time conversation, so why hadn't he waited another fifteen minutes to avoid it?

An eyebrow arched in speculation, and she deposited Nimitz on the briefing room table as she sat in the captains chair at its head and keyed the terminal. The screen flashed a ready signal, and then Paul's face appeared.

'Hi, Honor. Sorry to disturb you, but I thought you'd better know.' Her eyebrows knitted in a frown as his grim expression registered. 'We just got an arrival signal from a heavy cruiser,' his recorded voice continued, then paused. 'It's Warlock, Honor,' he said, and she went rigid in her chair.

Paul looked out of the screen as if he could see her reaction, and there was compassion in his eyes—and warning—as his image nodded.

'Young's still in command,' he said softly, 'and he's still senior to you. Watch yourself, okay?'

PNS Napoleon drifted through blackness, far from the dim beacon of the system's red dwarf primary. The light cruiser's drive was down, her active sensors dead, and her captain sat tensely on her bridge as she coasted along her silent course, well inside the orbit of Hancock's frozen outermost planet. He could see two different Manty destroyers' impeller signatures in his display, but the nearest was over twelve light-minutes from Napoleon, and he had absolutely no intention of attracting its attention.

Commander Ogilve hadn't thought much of Operation Argus when he was first briefed for it. The whole idea had struck him as an excellent way to start a war and get his ship fried in the process, yet it had worked out far better than he'd expected. It was horribly time-consuming, and the fact that none of the ships involved had been caught yet didn't mean none of them ever would be, but it only had to go on working for a little longer. Just long enough for Admiral Rollins to receive the data he needed... and for PNS Napoleon to get the hell out of Hancock in one piece.

'Coming up on the first relay, Sir.' His com officer sounded as unhappy as Ogilve felt, and the commander took pains to exude calm as he withdrew his gaze from the display and nodded in response. Wouldn't do to let the troops know their captain was as scared as they were, he thought dryly.

'Prepare to initiate data dump,' he said.

'Yes, Sir.'

The bridge was silent as the com officer brought his communication lasers up from standby. Any sort of emission was extremely dangerous under the circumstances, but the relay's position had been plotted with painstaking care. The people who'd planned Operation Argus had known the perimeters of all Manticoran star systems were guarded by sensor platforms whose reach and sensitivity the People's Republic couldn't match, but no surveillance net could cover everything. Their deployment patterns and plans had taken that into consideration, and—so far, at least—they'd been right on the money.

Ogilve snorted at his own choice of cliche, for Argus had cost billions. The heavily stealthed sensor platforms had been inserted from over two light-months out, coasting in out of the silence of interstellar space with all power locked down to absolute minimum. They'd slid through the Manties' sensors like any other bits of space debris, and the tiny trickle of power which had braked them and aligned them in their final, carefully chosen positions had been so small as to be utterly indetectable at anything over a few thousand kilometers.

In point of fact, getting the platforms in had been the easy part. Laymen tended to forget just how huge— and empty—any given star system was. Even the largest star-ship was less than a mote on such a scale; as long as it radiated no betraying energy signature to attract attention it might as well be invisible, and the sensor arrays were tinier still and equipped with the best stealth systems Haven could produce. Or, Ogilve amended, in this case buy clandestinely from the Solarian League. The biggest risk came from the low-powered, hair-thin lasers that tied them to the central storage relays, but even there the risk had been reduced to absolute minimum.

The platforms communicated only via ultra high-speed burst transmissions. Even if someone strayed into their path, it would require an enormous stroke of bad luck for him to realize he'd heard something, and the platforms' programming restricted them from sending if their sensors picked up anything in a position to intercept their messages.

No, there was very little chance of the Manties tumbling to the tiny robotic spies—it was the mailmen who collected their data who had to sweat. Because small as it might be, a starship was larger than any sensor array, and harvesting that information meant a ship had to radiate, however stealthily.

'Light beam standing by, Sir. Coming up on transmission point in... nineteen seconds.'

'Initiate when we reach the bearing.'

'Aye, Sir. Standing by.' The seconds ticked past, and then the com officer licked his lips. 'Initiating now. Sir.'

Ogilve tensed, and his eyes returned to his display with unseemly haste. He watched the Manty destroyers with painful intensity, but they continued along their blissfully unobservant way, and then—

'Dump completed, Sir!' The com officer didn't quite wipe his brow as he killed the laser, and Ogilve smiled despite his own tension.

'Well done, Jamie.' He rubbed his hands and grinned at his tac officer. 'Well, Ms. Austell, shall we see what we've caught?'

'An excellent idea, Sir.' The tac officer returned his grin, then began querying the data dump. Several minutes passed in silence, for the last Argus collection had been a month and a half earlier. That left a great deal of information to sort through, but then she stiffened and looked up sharply.

'I've got something very interesting here, Sir.'

The suppressed excitement in her voice drew Ogilve out of his chair without conscious thought. He crossed the bridge in a few, quick strides and leaned over her shoulder as she tapped keys. Her display flickered for a moment, then settled, and a date and time readout glowed in one corner.

Ogirve sucked in sharply as the data before him registered. A score of heavy capital ships—no, more than that. By God, there were over thirty of the bastards! Jesus, it was the Manties' entire wall of battle!

He stared at the display, holding his breath, unable to believe what he was seeing as the massive fleet movement played itself out. The time scale was enormously compressed, and the incredible mass of impeller signatures slid across the star system at breakneck speed.

It had to be some sort of maneuver. That was the only thing it could be. Ogilve told himself that over and over, like some sort of mental incantation against the disappointment that had to come.

But it didn't come. The stupendous dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts went right on moving, sweeping out from Hancock until they hit the hyper limit.

And then they vanished. Every goddamned one of them simply vanished, and Ogilve straightened with slow,