"I'll fill you in on all the details over breakfast, Captain," Jackson said. "There's a lot happening all at once, and I don't want any of it lost in translation."

"I'll call the officer's mess and have it sent up to the bridge briefing room, sir."

"Very good."

The officer's mess steward was quick about rolling up a cart into the small briefing room right off the Saber's bridge. The room was dominated by a single, oval table and a large display at one end and provided a convenient place for meetings like this while letting the command staff be one step away from the bridge during combat operations.

Jackson grabbed his usual breakfast of a slice of toasted bread and copious amounts of black coffee while Ellsworth, true to his New American heritage, loaded up with eggs, bacon, a biscuit, and a pile of fried potatoes. Jackson just looked at the mound of food and shook his head, which Ellsworth caught and gave him a rueful smile.

"This will be the only time I'll get to eat today if it was anything like yesterday," he said. "Gotta shovel it in when I get the chance."

"Fair enough," Jackson said. While Ellsworth wolfed down his food, Jackson relayed everything that had happened since he'd come on-watch. Since Ellsworth didn't waste a lot of time asking pointless questions or trying to impress his boss with his sharp insights, the brief only took ten minutes. Jackson could only be impressed so far with Ellsworth's performance, but they'd yet to take the Saber into battle. That tended to quickly separate the posers from the warriors.

"So these stealth ships…this doesn't seem suspicious to you, sir?" Ellsworth asked once Jackson wrapped up his brief. "They would have had to have been here with countermeasures engaged before we showed up. Possibly long before we showed up so the base sensors didn't observe them arriving."

"That's a good point," Jackson conceded. "As far as we know, the ESA hasn't solved the problem of visible transition flashes, and their RDS engines are still based on our old Gen 1 pods. The base's remote sensors would have easily detected them. Unless…"

"Unless?"

"We have no idea how long ago they infiltrated the base. They might have had plenty of time to sabotage the remote listening posts or upload a parameter change to mask the signatures of their incoming ships," Jackson said.

"Plausible," Ellsworth said. "But then that means the ESA has known about this base for some time and enacted a slow-crawl plan to take it while we used the advantage of Bluebird against them. A competent tactician would have hit this place hard once they knew what it was."

"Competent tacticians are something the Alliance is lacking," Jackson said. "They sat the last two wars on the sidelines and, for the most part, are still operating under outmoded pre-Phage War doctrine that was never worth a shit to begin with. Where they make up for that is with the sheer number of hulls they can field against us along with the willingness to use them."