“Just keep at it, son,” Marcum growled before walking up beside Captain Everett and lowering his voice to just above a whisper. “You’re comfortable bringing her out here with all the damage?”

“As I said, Admiral, we’re the only ship that it makes sense to send out,” Everett said. “The New York would have likely taken nearly two days to get back underway. We’ll be okay, sir. She’s still got most of her teeth and an intrasystem skirmish won’t tax our remaining main engine.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.” Marcum shook his head. “What in the hell are they doing here?”

“If I were to guess, sir, I’d say that this could only have something to do with the attack during our initial negotiations, not to mention the ambush of our taskforce in the Xi’an System,” Everett said. “I noticed their translations are getting easier to understand.”

“That should help the ambassador,” Marcum muttered. “The most important diplomatic event in the last four centuries and they send an idiot I wouldn’t trust to negotiate my next divorce settlement.”

“I, uh—”

“Forget I said anything,” Marcum said.

“Of course, Admiral,” Everett said with a nod. One of the main reasons Marcum liked Captain Everett was that, in addition to proving to be an extremely capable captain, he was someone who knew how to keep his mouth shut. Marcum was often blowing off steam and saying things that should not be uttered by flag officers about elected politicians or the Commander in Chief while in the presence of a subordinate officer, but in all the time the Amsterdam had been flying his flag not a single one of those comments had been spit back out by the rumor mill. The fact Everett could be trusted to allow his boss to vent without fearing the shipboard gossip kicked him up quite a few notches in Marcum’s esteem.

Captain Wright, however, was another matter. Despite the fact he liked her personally, her tendency to follow in her former commander’s footsteps and buck the chain of command was something he would not tolerate. He had put up with Wolfe all those years because he had been red meat for the bleeding hearts in the Senate and had been put in a place he couldn’t really do any damage: the bridge of an obsolete starship that served as little more than a courier and was crewed by troublemakers and rejects. But, it had been one of the few successes of the Earth Commissioning Program the politicians could wave around and Wolfe himself had been largely ignored by CENTCOM and Fleet Operations until the damn Phage happened to show up in the middle of his patrol route.