But if Filareta was as much smarter than Crandal as she believed, he wasn’t about to get any deeper than he had to. He’d want to stay shallow enough to break back across the limit and escape into hyper quickly if it turned out the reports about Manticoran missile ranges were accurate, after all. No, he’d go for Sphinx, not Manticore, specifically so he could cut and run if it all went south on him.

Which she had no intention of allowing him to do.

Her eyes hardened at the thought, and she felt Nimitz stiffen on her shoulder as he shared the bleak bolt of savage determination that went through her.

Her expression never even flickered, but she made herself draw a deep mental breath and step back from the brink of that fury.

Down, girl, she told herself firmly. The object is to make these people surrender, not just massacre them. Whatever else they may be guilty of, they aren’t the ones who carried out the Yawata Strike, and you know it.

“What’s their projected vector look like, Theo?”

Her soprano was calm, almost tranquil, unshadowed by hatred or anticipation, and Lieutenant Commander Theophile Kgari, her staff astrogator, doublechecked his readouts before he replied.

“They came in about twelve light-seconds shy of the limit, Your Grace,” he said. “Call it eighteen-point-niner million kilometers to Sphinx. Current velocity relative to the planet is thirteen hundred kilometers per second, and it looks like they’re taking their acceleration easy. At the moment, they’re building delta vee at just over three-point-three KPS-squared. With those numbers, they could make a zero-zero intercept of the planet in seventy-three-point-six minutes. Turnover at thirty-three-point-six minutes, range to planet niner-point-five-seven million klicks. Velocity at turnover would be just over seven-point-niner thousand kilometers per second.”

“Thank you.”

Honor never looked away from the plot as she considered the numbers, which confirmed her own initial rough estimate. As she thought about them, however, she was acutely conscious of the brown-haired officer who stood gazing into the plot beside her with another skinsuited treecat on his shoulder. Some people might have worried that an officer of Thomas Theisman’s towering seniority would be tempted to do a little backseat driving, or at least kibitz, no matter whose flagship he was on. Yet what Honor tasted from him most clearly was something very like serenity, and she wondered if she’d ever be able to stand on someone else’s flag bridge at a moment like this without simply itching to start giving orders.

That question was only a secondary thought, however, while the majority of her attention was on the coming engagement’s geometry.