He snorted quietly at the thought, then gave himself a shake. Yes, there undoubtedly were a lot of exaggerations (and very few facts) in the news accounts, but one thing was clear—she truly did have a formidable record. Once upon a time, Filareta had been as inclined as the rest of his colleagues to write that off. After all, how good did some neobarb have to be if all she was going to do was beat up on other neobarbs? That had been before the Battle of Spindle, however. Since the Battle of Spindle, he’d revised his estimate of all Manticoran officers significantly upward.

Presumably, the Republic of Haven’s technological capabilities had to at least generally match the Manties’, since the war would have been over a long time ago if they hadn’t. That had been an unpleasant conclusion, as well, especially since Filareta remembered a time when the technologically backward People’s Navy had been desperate for any scrap of Solarian tech it could get. But the critical point at the moment was that if Harrington—clearly the cream of the Manty crop—had racked up an unbroken string of victories against an opponent who could come remotely close to matching Gold Peak’s performance at Spindle, she was obviously no one to take lightly, so—

“Update!” Daniels snapped suddenly.

Filareta wheeled back around just in time to see what looked like several hundred additional impeller signatures appear in the plot. They were much smaller and weaker than the earlier ones: far too small and weak to belong to starships. But they were also at least two million kilometers closer to Eleventh Fleet and—

“LACs, Sir,” Daniels said a moment later, his tone bitter. “They must have pretty damned good stealth, too. We never got a sniff of them until they brought their wedges up, and the bastards just killed every one of my advanced platforms.”

“I see.”

Filareta understood Daniels’ anger, but as he studied the sidebars on the weaker impeller signatures, he was more concerned about the timing. Daniels was right. They had to be light attack craft, but their signatures were more powerful than any LAC impeller wedge Filareta had ever seen. And they’d killed the advancing front of Daniels’ reconnaissance shell five million kilometers short of Tango Two. They’d done it with energy weapons, too, which suggested they had an awful lot of reach for such light units. Still, recon drones were fragile. They relied far more on stealth than evasive maneuvering for survival, too, and, as Daniels said, they hadn’t had a clue the Manties were out there. Assuming the other side had picked them up early enough, there’d been plenty of time to track them and establish hard locks while they came bumbling in all fat, dumb, and happy. And if the LACs had been able to generate firing angles that avoided the platforms’ impeller wedges…