She was taking them home, and they were taking her home, and that was all in the universe that mattered.

Epilogue

ADMIRAL White Haven sat at his terminal, watching another of the endless, dreary ONI reports which had become all too familiar in the past eight T-months scroll up his terminal. Casualties and damages, ships lost, people killed, millions—billions—of dollars worth of industrial investment blown away…

There had been no more runaway Peep triumphs like the series of attacks with which Esther McQueen had announced the change in the military management of the PRH, for the Allies had not allowed themselves to become that overconfident a second time. But the momentum which had been with the Alliance for so long had disappeared. It hadn’t gone entirely to the Peep side of the board, but it was clearly McQueen and Bukato who were pushing the operational pace now. And unlike Citizen Secretary Kline, McQueen understood she had the ships to lose if spending them bought her victories.

He looked up from the terminal, running a weary hand through hair streaked with more white since the Battle of Basilisk, and grimaced as his eye lit on the star map frozen on the mural wall display in his quarters. The Barnett System still burned the spiteful red of the PRH, and Thomas Theisman had not sat still. When no attack had come from Eighth Fleet—which had been busy protecting what was left of Basilisk Station until a proper replacement could be scraped up from somewhere—Theisman had nipped out from Barnett to retake Seabring in an audacious raid. He’d hit that system and the Barnes System both, and then gotten his striking force back to Barnett before Theodosia Kuzak learned of its activities and reacted to its absence. It was unlikely she could have gotten permission to uncover Trevor’s Star to move on Barnett anyway, given the shock which had temporarily paralyzed the Alliance’s command structure and political leadership, but Theisman had been so quick that she couldn’t have hit him even if she’d had permission.

Which, White Haven thought with admiration-tinged bitterness, only reemphasized the danger of allowing an officer of Theisman’s caliber time to recover his balance and plan his own shots.

We should be moving on Barnett right now, the Earl thought. Hell, we should’ve concentrated Eighth Fleet two years ago, as originally planned, and damned well hit Theisman then! But even granted that we lost that chance a long time ago, we’re still back at Trevor’s Star and concentrated again, and why the hell did the Admiralty and the Joint Chiefs send us back out here if they didn’t mean for us to carry out our original orders?

But he hadn’t been given permission to reactivate his original attack plan, and despite his need to vent frustration, he knew why. The Alliance was afraid… and this time it had too much to lose.

He snorted savagely at the thought, yet it was true. He suspected that Queen Elizabeth and Protector Benjamin were as determined as he himself was that the initiative had to be regained, and he had complete faith in Sir Thomas Caparelli’s fighting spirit. Lack of courage had never been one of the things he’d held against the burly First Space Lord. But even though Elizabeth and Benjamin were, by any measure the two most important heads of state in the Alliance, they weren’t the only ones, and their smaller allies saw what had happened to Zanzibar and Alizon—and Basilisk—and were terrified that the same would happen to them. Nor had the Star Kingdom or the Protectorate of Grayson maintained as unified a front as their rulers must have desired.