“I’m sure they’ll get around to it when they think the time is right, Rafe,” she said soothingly. “Don’t forget, as far as we’re aware, none of them have a clue we even knew they were coming.” She shrugged slightly. “They may figure on letting panic soften us up before they announce their surrender terms.”

“Maybe, but we just killed a bunch of recon platforms, Your Grace,” Cardones pointed out. “And not even a Solly could’ve missed seeing our wedges come up. I’d think that would be a pretty good indication we’re not feeling especially hospitable, and they’re only six minutes from the limit. If I were them and I intended to do any talking at all, I’d be thinking about opening the conversation sometime real soon now.”

“That’s because you’re a naturally talkative soul,” Honor replied with a chuckle she didn’t really feel. “Some people are the strong, silent type.”

Cardones snorted, and she smiled, but the smile faded as she contemplated the steadily developing situation. So far, everything was proceeding according to plan, yet that didn’t make her feel a lot better. As Cardones said, time was getting short, and she was always nervous when things appeared to be going this well. In her experience, Murphy always put in an appearance somewhere, and she’d anticipated from the outset that if he planned on showing up this time, he was most likely to do it in the next handful of minutes.

She’d spent a lot of time considering the timing for this entire operation, especially this part of it, and her thinking had been forced to allow for both Filareta’s probable acceleration and what he was most likely to do with his recon platforms.

Unlike the RMN, the SLN still adhered to the “maximum power” limit of eighty percent of power on its inertial compensators, and those compensators were a lot less efficient than her own. After considering what little she knew about Filareta, she’d decided he might well shave his impeller margin a bit closer than that and decided to assume he’d go with an eighty-five percent setting. That would have given him an accel of 3.5 KPS, but he’d come in at only 3.311, the old eighty-percent setting, and that bothered her. Not because it was going to make a lot of difference, but because he was apparently being more cautious than she’d allowed for. Under the original planning for his visit, that would have been a good thing from her perspective; given the revised objectives of Operation Cannae, she would vastly have preferred someone more reckless.

Well, up to the last little bit, at least, she reminded herself wryly.