Celesta had no doubt her Fourth Fleet counterpart had received similar orders and she wanted to get her ships moving first. After she’d sent Accari up to the bridge to handle getting her orders to the fourteen ships in orbit around DeLonges, she messaged Lieutenant Ellison directly to have him order the two Black Fleet assault cruisers in orbit over New Sierra to form up on the Icarus.

“I think the sixth planet will make the most sense to form up around,” Celesta said, having changed one of the monitors to a real-time depiction of the DeLonges System with a top-down view. “We’ll still be far enough down the well to give the older ships plenty of room to accelerate to transition velocity, but we’ll be out of the mess down here.”

“So we’re really doing this,” Barrett said. “We’re going to war over the attack in the Xi’an System.”

“It would appear so,” Celesta said slowly. “You feel we shouldn’t?”

“I feel like I would like to know more about the Darshik, and from a source independent from the Ushin,” Barrett said. “While most people have no idea what the Phage actually was, we do. The Vruahn could have been straight with us the moment they knew Xi’an had been attacked the first time, but they withheld support and information until after millions were dead.”

“And you think the Ushin are similarly duplicitous?”

“Maybe.” Barrett shrugged. “I do think we’re being spoon fed information in order to reach the conclusion they want us to. I’m also not so certain I believe that a race of beings with advanced starships and colonies on other planets somehow can’t build an effective weapon and deploy it. The Vruahn were also pacifists but were able to build powerful warships, the Phage itself, and even cloned humans to do their fighting.”

“Unfortunately, Commander, we’re all drawing our conclusions based on the limited information we each have,” Celesta said, ignoring the last part of his comments as they raised an unpleasant reality. “And that isn’t much, given that CENTCOM and the civilian oversight is being very tight-lipped.”

“How do you reconcile with that, Captain?” Barrett pressed her.

“I simplify it for myself,” she said, turning to him. “I took an oath when I joined Starfleet and accepted my commission. If I’m told that to protect humanity we need to fly back in harm’s way, then that’s what we’ll do. I may question the wisdom of it, but if the time comes when I find I can no longer perform my duty in good faith I’ll resign my commission and return home. But what I won’t do is openly defy the orders of those who are appointed over me.”