“Any sign they’ve detected us?” he asked Granston-Henley.

“No, Sir,” she said firmly, and Commander Haggerston shook his head in support of her statement.

“I don’t think they’ll be able to see us much above three or four million klicks, Sir, and they’re still thirty-nine light-seconds out,” he said. “The forts’ EW isn’t as good on a ton-for-ton basis as our latest mobile refits, but they’ve got an awful lot of it aboard each of those platforms, and their decoys are a lot bigger—and better—than anything a warship could deploy. I figure those people are going to have to keep coming for another nine and a half minutes before they have a chance of picking us out of the clutter. Whereas we—”

He shrugged and nodded to the crimson display burning in one corner of his plot. It said Time to Launch 00:08:27, and as White Haven followed his nod, another second ticked inexorably away.

“Citizen Admiral, we seem to be picking up something new from the Manty decoys,” Darlington’s ops officer said.

“What sort of ‘something’?” the citizen rear admiral demanded testily. They were only a little more than a minute outside their own effective engagement range—which probably meant they were already inside the Manties’, if only barely—and they’d managed to lock up the two forts again. Or they thought they had, anyway. They couldn’t be sure, and anticipating a tidal wave of missiles while he sailed straight into the teeth of launch platforms he wasn’t even certain he’d found well enough to shoot back at was not making him feel any more tranquil.

“I’m not really certain, Citizen Admiral,” the ops officer said slowly, shaking his head. “We’ve had impeller ghosts coming and going inside the jamming all along, of course. Now more of them seem to be hardening up simultaneously, and there’s something else going on. It’s almost as if we were taking lidar and radar hits from a lot more units all of a sudden.”

“What?” Darlington spun to face the tactical section, but it was already too late.

“Sir, I’ve just picked up something I think you should hear,” Cynthia McTierney said.

“What?” White Haven looked at her irritably. “Cindy, this is hardly the time—”

“It was an all-ships transmission from Admiral Yanakov to all Grayson units, Sir,” McTierney said with stubborn diffidence, and then, before White Haven could respond, she pressed a stud and Judah Yanakov’s harsh recorded voice echoed in White Haven’s earbug.

“Admiral Yanakov to all Grayson units,” it said, and White Haven could almost hear the clangor of clashing swords in its depths. “The order is—Lady Harrington, and no mercy!”

“What?” White Haven spun towards his own com, but it was already too late.

· · • · ·

Sixteen hundred and ninety-five missile pods fired as one, and broadside launchers fired with them. The next best thing to nineteen thousand missiles went howling towards the Peeps at 95,000 gravities, and the range was only five million kilometers and the Peeps were headed straight to meet them at over fourteen thousand kilometers per second.