“Tango One’s begun to accelerate towards us, Fleet Admiral,” he said. “Acceleration’s just under four hundred and seventy gravities—call if four-point-six KPS-squared. Assuming constant acceleration, they could make a zero-zero with our current position in just under four-point-two hours. A least time approach would get them here in right on three hours, but they’ve have a final velocity of almost fifty thousand KPS.”

“Understood,” Filareta acknowledged, eyes narrow as he considered the new signatures and projected vectors in the master plot.

Eleventh Fleet had been accelerating towards Sphinx for almost twelve minutes now, and his task forces had traveled roughly 1.8 million kilometers, half way to the hyper limit. They were up to a closing velocity of 3,683 KPS, 17.1 million kilometers from the planet. But Daniels’ recon platforms, with their far higher acceleration, were only about 5.3 million kilometers from the nearer Manty formation, closing on it at 36,603 KPS. That meant they were 9.8 million kilometers ahead of Eleventh Fleet’s battle squadrons, however, which imposed a transmission delay of almost thirty-three seconds on their telemetry, so it was going to be a while before they got light-speed confirmation of the FTL-detectable impeller signatures.

“It may be smaller, but Tango Two’s also directly between us and the planet, Sir,” Burrows observed quietly in Filareta’s ear.

“Like I said, we didn’t exactly go for ‘subtle,’” Filareta replied equally quietly. “And how much of a mastermind would it take to figure this was any attack force’s most probable approach vector?” He shrugged. “It looks like they’re screwed anyway, though, given how far away Tango One is.” He jutted his chin in the direction of the larger cluster of crimson icons beginning to scramble towards the approaching sledgehammer of his fleet. “I don’t care if they do have a powered missile envelope of forty or fifty frigging million kilometers, there’s no way anybody this side of God could hit a missile target at the next best damned thing to three hundred million!” He shook his head. “No, they’ve let us catch them outside mutual support range. Tango Two’s on its own, and whoever’s in command over there, he’s got to be pissing himself about now.”

“You don’t think it’s Harrington?” Burrows asked with a slight smile, picking up on the pronoun in Filareta’s last sentence.

“If Harrington’s in space at all and not stuck dirt-side somewhere, she’s with Tango One,” Filareta said flatly. “She’d want the more powerful of her two task forces under her own personal control.”

“Makes sense, Sir.” Burrows agreed, then smiled thinly. “On the other hand, it looks like they may have been hit even harder than Intelligence estimated.”

“Maybe.”