“Yes, Ma’am.” McKeon tapped a note to himself into his liberated Peep memo pad. “I’ll snag Gerry as soon as the meeting breaks up. Harry,” he looked at Captain Benson, “can you free up Commander Phillips and… Lieutenant Commander Dumfries, I think, to help Gerry and me with the initial planning?”

“I’ll have to rework the watch schedules a little, but I don’t see a problem,” Benson said after a moment.

“Be sure you’re comfortable with that before you give them up, Harry,” Honor warned her. “Because once Alistair’s got that running, you and Jesus and I are going to have to put our heads together and start thinking seriously about genuine tactics. I’ve got a few thoughts, but to make this work, we may well be going to have to get a lot more performance out of the orbital defenses than I’d initially planned on. If you give up Phillips and Dumfries, do you have someone else who can replace them?”

“I do,” Benson replied firmly.

“All right, in that case—”

Honor turned to Cynthia Gonsalves, her expression calm and focused, and her brain ticked smoothly and efficiently. There were no more doubts. She was committed now, her mind and thoughts reaching out to the challenge without a shadow of uncertainty, and her concentration was so complete she never even noticed Alistair McKeon and Jesus Ramirez grin broadly at one another across the table.

Chapter Forty-Three

CITIZEN Lieutenant Commander Heathrow hadn’t been at all happy when he received his latest orders, but he hadn’t been sufficiently unhappy to let it show. That was a bad enough idea for a Republican officer when it was merely Navy orders he objected to.

Still, it did seem unfair to pick on him for this. State Security had skimmed off large enough numbers of badly needed warships for its own private use, and the SS was notoriously secretive about its affairs. Those were two good reasons they should have been able to send one of their own courier boats right there!

But they hadn’t, for whatever reason. Officially (and it might even be true) the problem was shortage of time and resources in the wake of the Navy’s achievements at the front. Heathrow was too junior an officer to have access to any of the classified briefings, but even peasants like him knew Citizen Secretary McQueen’s enormously successful offensives had thrown the Republic’s naval forces into utter confusion. In some ways, following up success had wreaked more havoc with their deployments than years of slow, steady retreat had, and Heathrow supposed StateSec might be experiencing echoes of that same mad scramble to reorganize on the fly.

But whatever the reason, the StateSec CO in Shilo had needed a courier—fast—and he hadn’t had any courier boats of his own immediately available. What he had had, however, was the standing SS authority to requisition the “support” of any Navy or Marine units which he might happen to decide he needed, and so Heathrow and his crew had ended up stuck with the job. Which explained why he was sitting very nervously in his command chair and watching Citizen Lieutenant Bouret follow Camp Charon’s extremely specific helm instructions. Given the number of targeting systems currently illuminating his command and StateSec’s obsessive suspicion of the regular Navy, neither Heathrow nor Bouret had the least intention of straying so much as a meter from their cleared flight path. Besides, the damned mines out there looked thick enough to walk on.