But even as the thoughts tumbled through her brain, she knew the reason wasn’t really important. She had to deal with the consequences, regardless of the decision chain that had created them… and whatever happened now, the Peep authorities would know something was very, very wrong in Cerberus. Even if her orbital defenses and outgunned squadron should succeed in defeating these intruders and captured or destroyed every one of them, she and any of her ships which survived the battle would remain chained to Hell by the people still trapped on its surface. And when the incoming task group failed to report back, a still larger force would be sent. And a bigger one after that, if necessary. And then a bigger one yet…

“I see,” she heard her voice say to Thurman, with a calmness she didn’t recognize. “Do we have an emergence locus and vector on them, Amanda?”

“Yes, Ma’am.” Thurman tugged a memo board from her tunic pocket and keyed the display, but she didn’t need to look at it. “They made a relatively low-velocity alpha translation, right on the hyper limit. At the moment, they’re approximately fourteen-point-five light-minutes from Hades on an intercept course with a base velocity of just under twelve hundred KPS.” She paused for just a beat, drawing Honor’s eye to her face, and then added, “Their accel is only two hundred gravities, Admiral.”

“Two hundred?” Honor’s tone and gaze sharpened, and Truman nodded.

“Yes, Ma’am. CIC’s best estimate is that two of them are in the four- to five-million-ton range, with civilian grade impellers. The rest are obviously warships—probably heavy cruisers and battlecruisers. Given the size of the Mars-class ships, it’s even harder than usual to distinguish between them at any kind of range, so CIC is uncertain how the ratio breaks down.”

“I see,” Honor said. Thurman was right, of course. At six hundred k-tons, a Mars-class was as big as many an older battlecruiser, and their impellers had brute power to burn. “And their locus?” she asked after a moment.

“Right in the middle of the Alpha Zone, Admiral,” Thurman said, and this time there was a sense of something very like exultation under the completely understandable fear the odds had produced in her.

Honor understood exactly why that was, and Nimitz made a soft sound, midway between a growl and a snarl, as he shared her fierce surge of satisfaction.

That has to be a pair of transports—probably stuffed full of more SS intervention units, or even Marines—and a heavy escort, she thought. It’s the only thing that makes sense… and the fact that there are only two transports and nothing heavier than a battlecruiser means someone threw the entire force together in a hurry. Battlecruisers can do the job of blowing a hole in the orbital defenses if they have to, but if they had their druthers, they’d certainly have brought along at least a few battleships, and preferably a superdreadnought or two. And if they put it together too hastily, then maybe—