He considered nipping back into hyper and trying to micro-jump his way to the terminus, but he rejected the notion almost instantly. Superficially appealing though it might be, a hyper jump this short was actually more difficult for an astrogator to calculate, not less. That, no doubt, was the reason the Manty picket commander was headed for Medusa in n-space instead of hyper. Control had to be so fine at such low ranges that something as small as a tiny difference in the cycle time of the hyper generators of two different ships could throw their n-space emergences off by light-seconds and hopelessly scramble his formation. No, either he pulled out completely, or he went back the hard way. Dicking around with still more hyper jumps would simply invite the ancient curse of order, counter order, disorder, and he had enough crap to deal with already.

He glanced at Citizen Commissioner Leopold.

“With your permission, Sir, I believe we should reverse course immediately and come back at the terminus.”

“Can we still defeat the fortresses?” Leopold asked, not even glancing at Huff—which, Darlington reflected, boded ill for the citizen commander when Leopold turned in his report.

“I believe so, Sir. We’ll take heavier losses than the ops plan originally contemplated, but we should be able to secure control of the terminus. Whether we can carry through and maintain control until Citizen Admiral Giscard rejoins us is another matter, however. The terminus picket has almost as many dreadnoughts as we do. They can be here well before Citizen Admiral Giscard if they reverse course promptly, and if they do that and we’ve taken heavy damage from the forts, then I doubt we could stand them off and pick off anything making transit from the Manties’ Home Fleet. On the other hand, we’re well outside the hyper limit here. If we see a force we can’t fight coming at us, we can retreat into hyper immediately. That,” he added quietly, “was the reason Citizen Admiral Giscard was willing to contemplate this maneuver in the first place, Sir. Because we can always run away if the odds turn to crap on us.”

“I see.” Leopold considered for several seconds, then nodded. “Very well, Citizen Admiral. Make it so.”

“Citizen Commander,” Darlington said, turning to Huff, “we’ll go with the least-time course. We should have time to decelerate and come back again—” he managed, somehow, not to stress the adverb “—if their terminus picket wants a fight, and I want to cross their forts’ missile zone as quickly as possible.”

“Aye, Citizen Admiral,” Huff said, and began passing maneuvering orders to the rest of the task group.

Reynaud smothered a groan as the fresh Peep force began to decelerate. He knew exactly what they’d intended to do, and exactly how it had gone wrong, but the fact that it had didn’t make him feel much better. He could run the numbers just as well as they could, and his fingers flew as he punched them into his plot. But then he felt his spine slowly stiffen as the new vectors blinked in the plot before him.