“Our job, citizens, is to get Citizen General Gisborne and his people safely down to secure control of Styx Island. To this end, I intend to advance with the entire escort, less Citizen Captain Harken’s Rapier.” He nodded to the dark-haired Navy officer. “Citizen Captain Harken will employ her ship as an escort and control vessel for the transports, which will remain at least one million kilometers astern of the main body at all times.”

“Is that really necessary, Citizen Admiral?” It was Citizen Captain Fuhrman, CO of the battlecruiser Yavuz and one of the regulars, Chernock observed. Yearman raised an eyebrow at him, and Fuhrman shrugged. “Nothing in my download suggested the need for an n-space, in-system escort, Citizen Admiral.”

“No, it didn’t,” Yearman agreed, “and I may be paranoid. Nonetheless, I want someone watching over the transports—and our backs—if we’re going to be pegging missiles at defenses as dense as the ones around Hades. I have no desire to see anyone, even a hijacked destroyer, creeping up behind me while I concentrate on the job in hand, and I think we can spare a single heavy cruiser to keep an eye on the back door. Do you disagree?”

“No, Citizen Admiral,” Fuhrman said after a moment. “You’re certainly right that we can spare a Sword-class’s firepower—no offense, Helen—” he grinned at Harken “—and it can’t possibly hurt anything to watch our rear. I only wondered if there was something in the download that I’d missed.”

“I don’t believe there was,” Yearman replied. “The problem, of course, is that downloads sometimes don’t contain all relevant data, no matter how hard the people who prepared them worked at it. So let’s spend a little extra effort to make me feel comfortable, shall we?”

One or two people chuckled. Several more smiled, and Yearman smiled back at them. Then he cleared his throat.

“After detaching Rapier, I intend to form all of our other units into a single striking force. Citizen Captain Isler, you will be my second-in-command, and Modred will take over if something happens to Tammerlane. Citizen Captain Rutgers will back you up in turn in Pappenheim.”

Yearman paused once more, looking at Isler. The SS officer seemed surprised by the announcement, and he glanced at Chernock, as if wondering if the citizen general was behind the decision. But Chernock hadn’t had a thing to do with it, and he was as surprised as anyone else. At least two of Yearman’s regulars were senior to Isler, and Chernock hadn’t anticipated that the citizen rear admiral might be sensitive enough to the rivalries to formally name his most resentful subordinate as his executive officer.

“I understand, Citizen Admiral,” Isler said after a moment, and Yearman nodded, then looked back around the table once more.

“If we have to shoot our way in, I anticipate that the heavy cruisers will sit more or less on the sidelines, at least initially, aside from thickening our anti-missile defenses. We’ll be going in without pods, which I regret, but we can’t always have everything we’d like to have.”