And longer, if I can swing it, he thought, inwardly.  As XO, it was his duty to supervise the repair work, check the revised duty rosters and generally take as much of the burden of day-to-day administration as possible upon himself.  If he was lucky, that should take more than just one day ... and it was all urgent.  Some of it, he knew, could be reasonably put aside until they returned to friendly space, but the rest was quite important.  The reporters might have to wait several days for an interview.

He wondered, absently, what they’d thought of the battle.  Despite the battering the carrier’s weapons and sensors had taken, there hadn't been much actual evidence of combat apart from the view on the display.  If even hardened naval officers could become detached from the realities of space combat, what might happen to reporters who didn't really comprehend what they were seeing.  No doubt their reports, when they were finally filed, would consist of nothing more than poorly-written nonsense.  They’d probably been disappointed when their consoles had failed to explode.

The hours ticked past, one by one.  James watched the aliens warily, but they refused to move or do anything other than just wait by the tramline.  Were they more patient than humans, as a general rule, or simply too unimaginative to do anything other than follow orders?  But wouldn't that mean that their superiors had imaginations?  The Royal Navy taught its officers to use their best judgement, taking the initiative wherever possible, yet other space navies had different ideas.  James had watched a Russian exercise from a distance and he'd been struck by how little freedom the Russian junior officers had, compared to their British counterparts.

Puzzling over it, he brought up the recordings of the battle and went through them, piece by piece.  The analysts were already working on the records, but he wanted to see the raw data.  It was clear, he decided, that the aliens were preparing their next operation, although there was no way to deduce the target.  But Ark Royal had shocked them badly.  They’d be wiser to reconsider whatever attack plan they’d had in mind.

But what did they have in mind?

Human tactical doctrine called for pushing the attack as hard as possible, right into the teeth of enemy fortifications.  If the human race lost its industrial base, defeat was certain, all the more so as no one had any idea where the aliens were located.  A deep-strike mission couldn't be mounted without a target, unless they were prepared to spend months – if not years – exploring stars almost at random.  But the aliens ... they’d hit a handful of small colonies, then New Russia, then they’d launched a probing attack that had been smacked back ...

He shook his head.  Had Ark Royal shocked them so badly that they'd call a halt, long enough to reconsider their tactics?