But he hadn’t been able to argue. The Peeps hadn’t even sniffed around the perimeter of the Basilisk System for a standard decade. This was a routine, unthreatened sector, much too far behind the front for someone as defensive-minded as the post-Coup Peep Navy had proven itself to hit. And if that should change, the entire strength of Home Fleet was only a transit away. There would be plenty of time to adjust deployments to beef up his task force if the Peeps ever seemed to be headed this way.

Only now it looked as if no one had remembered to tell the Peeps they were too defensive-minded and timid to try a deep-strike raid like this, because as sure as Hell had a monopoly on brimstone, somebody was headed in to blow the holy howling bejesus out of Markham’s command area. And all the comfortable assurance—his, as well as the Admiralty’s, he admitted bitterly—about redeployments from Home Fleet were crap in the face of something like this. Even battlecruisers would require almost nineteen hours just to reach the Basilisk terminus from Manticore orbit; SDs would take almost twenty-two… and that was for ships with the latest-generation compensators. Ships could make the actual transit from Manticore to Basilisk in mere seconds, but to do that they first had to get to the central Junction terminus in Manticore. And even after they hit Basilisk space, they would be another twenty-two and twenty-six hours respectively from Medusa. Which meant that getting any reinforcements out here was going to take time. Virtually none by the standards of normal interstellar movement, but tactical combat within a star system operated on another scale entirely. And on that scale, forty-one hours was a very long time indeed… especially with the enemy barely two hours out from Medusa and coming hard.

The pinnace was running flat out, straining to catch up with HMS King William. The flagship, known affectionately to her crew as Billy Boy, was holding her accel down enough for the small craft to overhaul, and Markham watched out the port as the pinnace maneuvered to dock. He didn’t think of himself as a particularly brave man, and his belly knotted with tension as he thought of what King William and the rest of his understrength force was going out to face. But heroic or not, Silas Markham was a vice admiral of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and his place was aboard his flagship when she faced the foe, not in some damned office light-minutes behind the battle.

The superdreadnought’s tractors reached out to the pinnace, capturing it and easing it into the brilliantly lit cavern of a boat bay, and Markham stood. It was against Regs, of course. Passengers were supposed to remain seated and strapped in during any approach maneuver, but he was in a hurry… and he was also a vice admiral, which meant no one was going to tell him no.

He snorted at the thought, bending to keep peering out the view port as the pinnace settled towards the docking buffers. His eye caught the ship’s crest, painted on the outer face of the docking gallery below the armorplast viewing area, and his mouth twitched. The crest was built around the personal seal of King William I, for whom the ship was named, and Markham wondered once again how many of Billy Boy’s crew ever considered the fact that their namesake had been assassinated by a psychotic.