And I’ll give you the best command team I can to pull it off, she thought, including Tourville, if I can finally pry him loose from Saint-Just! “Investigation”—ha! I suppose I should be grateful he’s been willing to settle for keeping Tilly’s crew sequestered so they can’t tell anyone what really happened to the bitch, but I need Tourville, damn it! And ten months is frigging well long enough for him to sit in orbit and rot!

“Yes, Ma’am,” Giscard said. “And my objective?”

“We’ll get to the territorial objectives in a minute,” she told him, neither voice nor expression showing a hint of her frustration with Saint-Just’s foot-dragging. “But what matters far more than any star system you may raid or capture is your moral objective. So far in this war, we’ve danced to the Manties’ piping. I know that’s not the official line, but here in this briefing room, we simply cannot afford to ignore objective realities.”

This time she did glance at Fontein, but her people’s commissioner only looked back at her without a word, and she returned her own gaze to Giscard.

“That stops now, Javier,” she told him softly, using his first name for the very first time. “We must assert at least some control over our own strategic fate by forcing them to dance to our tune for a change, and you’re the man we’ve picked to play the music. Are you up for it?”

Damn, but she’s good, a small voice mused in the back of Giscard’s brain. He felt the siren call of her personality, the enthusiasm and hope she’d fanned by the apparently simple yet ultimately profound fact of speaking the truth openly… and inviting him to follow her. And I want to, he marveled. Even with all I’ve ever heard about her, even knowing the dangers of even looking like I’ve committed to “her faction,” I want to follow her.

“Yes, Ma’am,” he heard his voice say. “I’m up for it.”

“Good,” she said, and her smile was fiercer… and welcoming. “In that case, Citizen Admiral Giscard, welcome to command of Operation Icarus.”

Chapter Sixteen

CITIZEN Admiral Giscard, CO Twelfth Fleet, stepped through the briefing room hatch aboard his new flagship and looked around the compartment at the equally new staff charged with helping him plan and execute Operation Icarus. Personally, he would have preferred to call it Operation Daedalus, since at least Daedalus had survived mankind’s first flight, but no one had asked him.

Besides, I probably wouldn’t worry about the “portents” of naming operations myself if the Manties hadn’t kicked our asses so often.

He brushed that aside and crossed to the empty chair at the head of the briefing room table, trailed by Eloise Pritchart. She followed him like the silent, drifting eye of the Committee of Public Safety, her public, on-duty face as cold and emotionless as it always was, and slipped into her own seat at his right hand without a word.

By and large, he reflected, he was satisfied with both his flagship and his staff. PNS Salamis wasn’t the youngest superdreadnought in the People’s Navy’s inventory, and she’d taken severe damage at the Third Battle of Nightingale. But she’d just completed repairs and a total overhaul, and she was all shiny and new inside at the moment. Even better, Citizen Captain Short, her CO, reported that her upgraded systems’ reliability was at virtually a hundred percent. How long that would remain true remained to be seen, but Short seemed pleased with the quality of her Engineering Department, so perhaps they could anticipate better maintenance than usual.