"You're right. I am useless here."

"That's hardly what I meant, sir. I think you know—"

"That's not self-pity, Wolfe," Marcum said. "It's an admission of fact. I have no official status, and no matter how much I try to force it, I don't belong here anymore. I'd just be in the way on the Nemesis, and there's still much I need to do at my real job instead of pretending I'm a younger man, saddling up for another fight. I'm sorry I put you in the position to call me out on it, and I'm sorry for the times I let you down when you were under my command."

"That may have come out a bit more harshly than I intended, sir," Jackson said.

"Perhaps, but you're right all the same. So what do you need from me? As a VIP, I'm still just technically a passenger."

"Barton!" Jackson shouted. "Send them in." Marcum looked at him questioningly but said nothing.

"Sir?" Michael Barrett said as he walked in, followed closely by Idris Accari.

"New assignments for you two. One of you will be happy, the other won't," Jackson said. "Barrett, the Nemesis will be given the equipment to be added to the taskforce's Bluebird datalink network. You'll be tied in with every other ship, and we'll share Link and com data over it in real-time. The Nemesis is also getting the intra-system warp hop capability programmed back into your drive field controllers."

"Which makes me the one who won't like what's coming. Right, sir?" Accari asked.

"Right you are, Commander. You will be taking PM Marcum aboard the Coyote and will be responsible for his safety," Jackson said. "In the meantime, I also have another job you can do. It's something the PM will be able to help you with."

"This should be good," Marcum muttered.

"We need the Mickey fleet repositioned."

"That's over two hundred ships!" Accari said. "Sir."

"It's actually almost five hundred at this point. The rest of the modules have been delivered and assembled into as many completed vessels as the yard could do," Jackson said. "The problem is that we don't know everyone who might have knowledge of where they are, and they're sitting targets. We lost the crew training center at Brabus, but protecting the ships is still vital. Better we hide them and have the chance to scuttle them later ourselves than have the Alliance get a hold of them."

"I'm assuming there's some way to do this other than ferrying pilot crews back and forth five hundred times?" Marcum asked.

"Under your authority, the yard master will be able to give you a master control console," Jackson said. "It's something built into the Mickeys to make them easy to move around, but then gets removed once the ship gets a crew and enters service. It's essentially a way for you to remotely pilot the ships from aboard the Coyote. It's all automated and pretty much foolproof. You'll be able to command the entire formation to a new location of your choosing with it."