Celesta killed the channel and stared at the screen for a long moment, noticing the details of CENTCOM’s new crest for the first time as it replaced the image of Admiral Marcum’s scowling face. She really didn’t think what she’d done had been so severe as to warrant the Chief of Staff’s reaction. In her mind, she’d taken bold, decisive action when everyone else seemed to flounder and had pulled their asses out of the fire by getting her ship to where it could do the most good. Instead, it looked like it had sunk her career. She also caught a whiff of an underlying anger directed towards her. Celesta had always thought Marcum was one of her more ardent supporters despite Wolfe’s warning not to trust him. How she went from being considered for the command of a battleship to being told her days in Starfleet were numbered was a mystery to her, but like her mentor had said over and over: Marcum’s rank of admiral became an honorific when he became CENTCOM Chief of Staff. Now he was a politician before he was an officer.

“Commander Barrett and Ensign Accari, please report to my office,” Celesta said conversationally and waited for the computer to beep softly to let her know it understood and had paged the two officers. When the knock came at the hatch a moment later, she let the two in and motioned for them to take a seat.

“Is there a problem, Captain?” Barrett asked, obviously concerned.

“More than one, but let’s get to them in order,” she said as she began pulling up the sensor feeds and putting them on the four large monitors that were arrayed along one bulkhead. “We’ve been tasked with prepping the local Black Fleet assets for redeployment to an as yet undisclosed staging point. We should have orders coming up momentarily that will give me the authority to order them onto new courses.”

“We’re leaving, ma’am?” Accari asked. “Right after this system was attacked?”

“We’re preparing for a counterattack,” Celesta corrected. “I’ll explain all that in due time. I think the faster we get out of this system the better, however, so let’s take a look at our orders and get to work.”

Her orders from CENTCOM ended up being as vague as she expected them to be, but they did empower her with enough command authority to get the other Seventh Fleet captains underway and steaming up to where she wanted them. Since most of the Black Fleet ships were orbiting DeLonges she sent an immediate transmission to Orbital Control to have them all moved up to a high holding orbit and ordered them up to escape velocity. It would take the better part of the day for them to untangle themselves from the random formations they had moved into to get up and away from the planet.