“Recorded, Sir.”

“Very well. I want information copies repeated to the Admiralty, special attention Admiral Caparelli and Admiral Givens, to Vice Admiral Reynaud, and to Vice Admiral Markham,” White Haven went on with staccato clarity. “Standard encryption and code, Priority One. As soon as you’ve got them coded up, transmit them to Admiral Reynaud’s courier boat.”

“Aye, aye, Sir.”

White Haven gave her a curt nod, then turned to his chief of staff and his ops officer.

“Alyson,” he told Captain Granston-Henley, “I want you to grab that courier boat and send it straight back to Manticore as soon as Cindy’s transmitted my message. Then I want you and Trevor to build me a transit plan: Trevor’s Star to Manticore to Basilisk.”

“Yes, Sir.” Granston-Henley shook herself, as if to clear the last echoes of stupefaction from her brain and glanced at Commander Haggerston, then looked back at White Haven. “Standard translation order, Sir?” she asked.

“No.” The earl shook his head curtly. “There’s no time for a nice, neat, orderly transit; we’ll send them through as fast as we can, in whatever order they reach the terminus. If it’s a choice between a capital ship and a screening unit, the capital ship goes first; otherwise, it’s strictly on an ’on arrival’ basis. And, Alyson—” he looked straight into her eyes “—I want this set up to go quickly. Ships will move to the terminus at maximum military power, and transit windows are to be cut to the minimum possible, not the minimum allowed. Use the courier boat to inform Manticore ACS of that intention, as well.”

“I—” Granston-Henley began, then stopped herself. “Yes, Sir. Understood,” she said quietly, and White Haven nodded and turned back to his plot once more.

He understood Granston-Henley’s reaction, but he had no choice. His fleet was forty-five light-seconds from the Trevor’s Star terminus. A destroyer with the latest compensator could accelerate at six hundred and twenty gravities with its safety margin cut to zero, but his superdreadnoughts could manage only four hundred and sixty-six with the same generation of compensator. That meant his destroyer screen could reach the local terminus on a least-time course in approximately thirty-five minutes while his SDs would need closer to forty-one. But a least-time course allowed no room for turnover and deceleration, and this large a force would have no choice but to decelerate to zero relative to the terminus before making transit, however urgent the crisis. And that meant those same destroyers would take fifty minutes while the SDs took just over fifty-seven. And once they’d gotten there, they still had to make transit—not once, but twice—just to get to the Basilisk terminus.

Nor could they go through together. Oh, it was tempting. There was an absolute ceiling on the amount of tonnage which could transit through any wormhole junction. In the case of the Manticore Junction, the maximum possible mass for a single transit was approximately two hundred million tons, which meant he could put that much of Eighth Fleet’s wall—twenty-two SDs, for all practical purposes—through the junction in one, convulsive heave. Unfortunately, any wormhole transit destabilized the termini involved for a minimum of ten seconds, and vessels which massed more than about two and a half million tons destabilized it for a total interval proportional to the square of the transiting mass… which meant a maximum-mass transit would lock the route from Manticore to Basilisk solid for over seventeen hours.