He gave himself a mental shake. Grayson’s technology had been much cruder than Manticore’s, yes. But they’d made enormous progress in closing the gap in just the nine and a half years since joining the Alliance, and “crude” didn’t necessarily mean the same thing as “unsophisticated,” as the new generation of inertial compensators amply demonstrated.

And as these new fission plants are going to demonstrate all over again, he told himself firmly, and looked up as Captain Harmon turned her attention to Lieutenant Commander Stackowitz.

“I’ve talked Captain Truman into signing off on the expenditure of some real missiles for live-fire exercises tomorrow, Barb,” she told her staff operations officer.

“Really, Skipper?” Stackowitz brightened visibly. “Warshots, or training heads?”

“Both,” Harmon said with a shark-like grin. “Training heads for the shots at the Minnie, of course, but we get to use warshots for everything else. Including,” the grin grew even more shark-like, “an all-up EW exercise. Five squadrons worth.”

“We get to play with Ghost Rider?” Stackowitz’ eyes positively glowed at that, and Harmon nodded.

“Yep. The logistics pipeline just delivered an entire new set of decoy heads with brand-new signal amplifiers—the ones you were telling me about last month, in fact. We’ve got to share them with Hancock Base, but there’re more than enough of them to go around.”

“Oh boy,” Stackowitz murmured almost prayerfully, and then gave McGyver a grin that eclipsed the COLAC’s. “I told you they were going to make a difference, Bruce. Now I’ll show you. I’ll bet you five bucks they cut Minotaur’s tracking capability against us by thirty-five percent—and that’s with CIC knowing what we’re doing!”

“I’ll take five dollars of that,” McGyver agreed with a chuckle, and Harmon shook her head.

“Some people would bet on which direction to look for sunrise,” she observed. “But now that those important financial details have been settled, let’s get down to some specifics about said exercise. First of all, Barb—”

She leaned forward over the table, and her staffers listened intently, entering the occasional note into their memo pads while she laid out exactly what it was she wanted to do.

Chapter Nineteen

THE Earl of White Haven stood in the boat bay gallery and stared through the armorplast at the brilliantly lit, crystalline vacuum of the bay. It was odd, he thought. He was ninety-two T-years old, and he’d spent far more time in space than on a planet over the last seventy of those years, yet his perceptions of what was “normal” were still inextricably bound up in the impressions of his planetbound youth. The cliché “air as clear as crystal” had meaning only until someone had seen the reality of vacuum’s needle-sharp clarity, but that reality remained forever unnatural, with a surrealism no one could avoid feeling, yet which defied precise definition.

He snorted to himself at the direction of his thoughts while he listened with a minuscule fraction of his attention to the earbug in his left ear that brought him the chatter between the boat bay control officer and the pinnace maneuvering towards rendezvous with his flagship. His mind had always tended to drift through contemplative deeps whenever it had nothing specific with which to occupy itself, but it had been doing it even more frequently than usual of late.