“Thank you, Karen,” he replied with a sort of absent-minded courtesy… which sounded much more absent than he felt. To be sure, his attention was distracted by his plot and the serried icons of Task Force 12.2, but under the surface his thoughts tried to whiplash out in all directions. He was glad Lowe could sound so composed and collected, yet a part of him fretted that her apparent composure might mask some error in her calculations until it was too late. And the fact that his was by far the smallest of Twelfth Fleet’s four task forces—in tonnage terms, at least; he had five more ships than Jane Kellet’s TF 12.3, but she had nine more battleships than he did—and also had the farthest to go to launch its initial attack wasn’t calculated to make him feel any calmer. Despite his earlier conversation with Everard Honeker, he couldn’t help feeling more than a little nervous at the thought of hitting the home system of an important Manty ally when he was this far from Republican-held territory, and—

Stop it, Lester, a corner of his mind scolded while his eyes and the rest of his brain sorted out the icons and checked vector notations. So they’re going to have at least some sort of picket there to support the Zanzibarans. They still aren’t going to have the least idea you’re coming, and if they turn out to have ships of the wall on station, you’ve sure as hell got the acceleration to pull away from them!

“Are the pods ready, Shannon?” he asked without looking up from the plot.

“Yes, Citizen Admiral,” Citizen Commander Foraker replied in the carefully correct voice she had acquired since the Battle of Adler. Tourville regretted the wariness in it, but she’d been her old self—sort of—when it came to planning the actual attack, and whatever was going on in her head hadn’t affected her flair for sneaky tactics. Or her willingness to make the case for her chosen approach with the sort of blunt succinctness which left no room for misunderstanding… although it sometimes left those who argued with her feeling as if they’d been run down by an out-of-control ground car.

For one thing, she’d argued for a high-speed run-in from the very start, despite some other officers’ fear that such an approach could leave them with a dangerously high velocity if there were, in fact, Manty ships of the wall in-system. Their concern had been that a high initial velocity would leave them with too much momentum to kill quickly if an evasive vector change were required, but Foraker had shown even less patience than usual with that argument. Even if there were ships of the wall present, she’d pointed out arctically, they would still have to generate an intercept vector, and the less time TF 12.2 took reaching its objective, the less time the Manties would have in which to intercept. In fact, the only way they could guarantee to intercept an attack on the planet Zanzibar would be for them to be in orbit around it and stay there… in which case, TF 12.2 should see them long before they entered engagement range and would have a much higher base velocity from which to evade the defenders and go after its secondary objective: the system’s asteroid extraction industry. Besides, a higher approach velocity would not only face the Manties with more difficult interception acceleration curves but force them to commit sooner and at higher power settings, which would degrade the efficiency of their stealth systems and make them far easier to detect early enough for it to do some good.