Ted looked up at the holographic display, silently cursing the First Space Lord under his breath.  Being granted an international rank – a honour held by only a handful of officers, only one other of them British – came with an additional salary, but it also came with new and unpleasant responsibilities.  The twenty-seven starships currently assembled around Ark Royal represented eight different navies, only three of them solid British allies.  The remainder were deeply suspicious of the combined defence command’s decision to assign them to the deep-space raiding mission.

They had reason to be suspicious, Ted decided, as he surveyed the ships.  Most of them were younger than Ark Royal, but hadn't been updated as thoroughly as the massive carrier.  Their heavy armour would give them an advantage against alien starfighters – although probably not the giant plasma weapon the aliens had used in the previous battle – but their drives and weapons were heavily outdated.  Ark Royal was a lumbering brute of a ship, yet a handful of the smaller ships weren't even capable of keeping pace with her.  If it had been up to him, Ted knew, most of them would have been broken down into spare parts and replaced with more modern ships.

The only real advantage, he knew, was the older weapons they carried.  Unlike the newer designs, they had the fittings for mass drivers and adding them onto their hulls hadn't taken more than a few days.  Ted hadn't been too surprised to discover that several governments had stockpiled mass drivers, despite the unspoken agreement against deploying them.  The older ships also carried additional missile racks, all of which might come in handy when they faced the aliens for the second time.  But they were still critically low in starfighters.

Ted sighed, then looked down at the latest update from the Admiralty.  No one seemed disposed to cut loose a modern carrier, not even one of the freighters that had been hastily reconfigured into a makeshift starfighter platform.  Not that that was entirely unwelcome, he decided; the makeshift platforms had been constructed so rapidly, with so much improvising, that they could barely launch a single squadron of fighters and then only at a terrifyingly slow rate.  But with modern carriers suddenly very vulnerable, it was hard to blame the Admiralty – and its foreign counterparts – for clutching at straws.

He needed a drink.  Desperately.

The door chimed.  “Come.”

Commander Fitzwilliam strode into the cabin, looking like a man in desperate need of a drink.  Ted knew precisely how he felt.  Passing the reporters over to Commander Fitzwilliam had been a mean trick, but Ted was damned if he was wasting any of his own time on the reporters.  Besides, he had to speak with his new subordinates, reassure them as much as possible that he had no intention of wasting their lives, then plan their deployment to New Russia.  The direct route, he’d already decided, was out.