“I see. Thank you, Citizen Lieutenant. And you, Citizen Commander.” Pritchart gazed down into the master plot for several seconds, then looked at Giscard. “Does this change your intentions in any way, Citizen Admiral?”

“I think not, Citizen Commissioner,” he replied with the exquisite courtesy he habitually used in public to depress her pretensions to interference in his tactical decisions. “There may be less opposition than we expected, but there’s still enough to hand us some nasty lumps. And their Home Fleet is still no more than forty to forty-eight hours from Medusa even if it has to come all the way from Manticore orbit.” He shook his head. “Hopefully their units will try to come through piecemeal and let Citizen Rear Admiral Darlington chop them up, but if anything goes wrong at that end, they can put a hell of a lot more firepower into this system than we have. I think we’ll just continue the profile and head straight for a fly-by firing run on Medusa. Unless, of course, you wish to proceed in some other fashion, Ma’am?”

“No, Citizen Admiral,” she said in chill tones.

“Excellent,” he replied, and folded his hands behind him and turned back to the plot.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

DESPITE the temperature setting, most of the people in Basilisk ACS’ central control room were sweating hard as they tried to cope. The initial reaction of the merchant traffic awaiting transit had been confusion, promptly followed by a panic that was as inevitable as it was irrational. They were ten light-hours from the Peeps’ obvious objective, and every hostile starship in the vicinity was headed for Medusa, which meant almost directly away from them. There was ample time to get every one of them through the Junction and safely out of harm’s way, and even if there hadn’t been, they were far outside the Basilisk hyper limit. The FTL sensor net would give plenty of warning if any of the Peeps turned around and headed this way, and it would be relatively simple to duck into hyper and vanish long before the enemy could possibly get here.

Those comforting reflections, however, did not appear to be foremost in the minds of the merchant skippers arguing vociferously with Michel Reynaud’s controllers. Lieutenant Carluchi and her pinnaces had already been required to physically intervene to keep a big Andermani ore ship and a Solarian freighter loaded with agricultural delicacies for the inner League worlds from jumping the queue.

Despite his fury with both skippers and a personal dislike for the Solarian League which had grown with each report of technology transfers to the Peeps, Reynaud could summon up rather more sympathy for the Solly than for the Andy. Asteroid ore was scarcely a perishable commodity, and the skipper’s flight plan indicated he was on a fairly leisurely routing anyway. But while the Solly was less than two hours out of Sigma Draconis on a direct transit via the Junction, she would add over two T-months to her voyage just to reach Manticore the long way if she was forced to run for it in hyper. And her cargo was about as perishible as they came. Understanding the reasons for the woman’s blustering anxiety hadn’t made him any more patient with her, however, and he’d watched with satisfaction as Carluchi’s pinnaces chivvied her ship back into line.