From the beginning, Odysseus had relied on deception, diversion, and the half-assed way the Royal Manticoran Navy policed Basilisk. Now it was all blowing up in their faces. What should have been a neat, clean sucker punch had turned into a fiasco which might yet become outright disaster, in large part because his ship had been used, and Coglin knew NavInt, the General Staff, and the War Cabinet were all going to fight like hell to pin it on someone else.

There was no doubt in his mind that Fearless’s captain had grasped the essentials of Odysseus, and even in his anger, his own professionalism had to admire Harrington’s instant, iron-nerved response. Blowing the consulate courier boat’s drive that way had been incredibly risky but brilliant, reducing the players to Sirius and Fearless instead of leaving her two potential targets to pursue, and his sensors had detected the separation of three pinnaces from Fearless. That had to be the cruiser’s entire Marine detachment, and the speed with which Harrington had dispatched them was clear proof Canning and Westerfeldt had grossly underestimated the contingency planning that must have gone on between her and the NPA. Given the numbers of rifles Westerfeldt had handed the Shaman, that planning might not have helped that much if the Stilties had surprised the enclaves, but a full company of Marines with Navy air support would slaughter the natives in an open field engagement.

Which meant that Coglin’s part of Odysseus was probably already pointless. With no massacre in the enclaves, Haven could hardly claim that their naval forces had responded only to save off-worlder lives.

Coglin ground his teeth together. That asshole idiot Canning was as stupid as he was blind. He’d jumped the gun by ordering Sirius out of orbit before the Stilties actually hit the enclaves. If he’d waited just twenty minutes—just twenty minutes!—they’d have known about the Marines and could still have aborted the entire spaceborne portion of the operation. But Canning had panicked, and Coglin hadn’t known enough about the situation dirt-side to argue, even if he’d had the authority to refuse the consul’s orders.

So here he was, running from Fearless, his very flight confirming Harrington’s every suspicion, while every hope for Odysseus went down the crapper behind him.

Yet he had no choice now. Canning had alerted the task force for an execution date only six days away. If the courier boat had still been hyper-capable, she could have been sent to quietly stand the task force down, but the courier couldn’t be sent now. Which meant that unless Coglin reached the rendezvous with Sirius, the entire force might well move in anyway. That had to be prevented, and even if it hadn’t, he couldn’t possibly permit Harrington to board Sirius, for that was the one thing which would absolutely prove that Haven had been behind the Stilty uprising. There was no way to hide what his ship truly was from a naval boarding party.

He queried NavInt’s files for the readout on Fearless’s armament. She was one of the last of the old Courageous-class ships, almost eighty T-years old and small for her rate, by modern standards. But that didn’t mean she was senile. The surviving units of her class had been thoroughly overhauled over the years, and they packed a nasty weight of metal for their age and size. They were light on defense, virtually unarmored and with relatively weak radiation shielding (for warships), but they mounted a pair of grasers, two thirty-centimeter lasers, and seven missile tubes in each broadside. They lacked the magazine capacity for a sustained missile engagement, but they could throw surprisingly heavy salvos for their size while their ammo lasted—more than enough to reduce any freighter to glowing vapor. Or it should have been, anyway.