"How imminent?" Jackson asked. Trapp let out an exasperated grunt before opening her tile and running the real-time telemetry numbers through her model.

"Twelve hours," she said. "Twenty, tops. I think we're looking at the newest versions of their shrouded stealth ships, sir. They've been positioning them up into a higher orbit, and now the freighter convoy is heading right where I think they may have parked, leading Captain Risher into a trap."

"How many individual signatures have you managed to isolate?"

"Eight."

"Any idea of displacement?

"Smaller than a frigate, bigger than those gunboats we saw in the Odmena System," she said. "Impossible to tell for certain with such limited data."

"Indeed," Jackson said, rubbing his chin as he thought. A moment later, Colonel Beck practically sprinted onto the bridge, skidding to a halt in front of the com station when she saw Jackson.

"I came as quickly as I could, Admiral."

"Plug in," Jackson motioned to the com station. "You'll be talking to Colonel Serra, the battalion CO on Exeter Base who is trying to repel an attack from what looks like a mercenary or covert force that came in with the work crews."

Beck slipped on the proffered headset, identified herself to Serra, and then got straight to work. She moved over to one of the auxiliary terminals and brought up an overlay of the base so she could visualize the intel Serra fed her. She marked up the schematic with both his forces and the suspected enemy positions and strengths. After that, she filled in the movements and areas of heavy resistance to try and get a handle on what the force could be after.

Jackson listed in for a few minutes before signing off and leaving the jarheads to their work. He was as useless at strategizing a ground campaign as he suspected they would be at handling a battle between starships. He reached out and took the tile from Lieutenant Trapp and dug into the details to see where the analysts thought the ambush might happen.

The thing about setting a trap for a moving starship is that space, even space within a star system, is unfathomably large. So, the area to cover in order to ambush another ship had to also be expansive or you had to know for certain your target was taking a specific course. Risher looked to be angling in on the convoy and, if his people were right, would almost certainly fly right into a nasty crossfire situation.

But he didn't have to take that route.

They were assuming the Broadsword would continue sweeping up from their original orbit and opt for a pursuing intercept where all the tactical advantages would be on their side. There were a lot of critical systems in the aft end of a ship, and the sensors were degraded in that quadrant thanks to the RDS engines being mounted there on the newer ships. If Risher decided to accelerate and turn into the slower formation, he'd still likely do it at such close range that one side of the ambush would have a clear shot.