Unfortunately, his orders were to go directly for the Star Empire’s capital world, and that meant attacking Manticore-A.

Yeah, those are the orders. But the people who gave them aren’t here, and you are. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t…modify them in a heartbeat if you really thought it would make a difference.

He snorted mentally, wondering yet again if one reason he’d been chosen for this mission—chosen by his official superiors, not Manpower, that was—was precisely because those superiors realized he’d treat their orders as no more than suggestions if it came down to it. He hoped it was, at any rate, because he’d already decided that was precisely what he was going to do.

I’m sure Manpower does have its reasons for sending me out here, but I’ll be damned if I do a Crandall for them! If this brainstorm of Rajani’s looks like it’ll really work, all well and good. If it doesn’t…Well, sorry about that, Manpower, but we are out of here!

He didn’t much care to contemplate the repercussions of disappointing his “sponsors,” but he liked contemplating the deaths of a couple of million Solarians—including that of one Massimo Filareta—even less.

“All right,” he said finally, turning from the display tank, “does anybody have any last-minute thoughts, inspirations, or concerns we need to discuss before we all grab some sleep?” He smiled thinly and took one hand from a tunic pocket to wave in the direction of the time display which was counting steadily downward towards Eleventh Fleet’s scheduled alpha translation back into normal-space. “We’ve still got a whole ten hours to think about them!”

That evoked the smiles and smothered laughs he’d hoped for. There was an edge of nervousness in some of that laughter, but that was inevitable. More importantly, there was an even stronger edge of…not confidence, perhaps, but something close to it. Or a lot closer to that than to dread, at least. The simulations they’d carried out with their new missiles during the lengthy voyage had a lot to do with that. He still had more unhappy questions than answers about where those missiles had come from—and why—but he had to acknowledge their impact on Eleventh Fleet’s capabilities. He’d been as conservative as he could in evaluating their potential, but by his calculations the pods alone had tripled his wall of battle’s striking power at the very least. And if he was willing to accept a long enough ballistic phase between drive activations, the new missiles had enough endurance, even in the tube-launched version, to give him a powered engagement envelope far in excess of anything his fire control could hope to handle. That had to have gone a long way towards offsetting the range imbalance.