“Designate new force Tango Three.” Daniels’ staccato voice was crisp, harshly professional, yet Filareta heard his operations officer’s own shock, his awareness of how thoroughly they’d been duped, echoing in its depths. “Estimate Tango Three at one hundred and fifty—repeat, one-five-zero—superdreadnoughts and a minimum of eight hundred additional LACs.”

Filareta’s jaw muscles clenched as he abruptly found himself confronting five times the number of wallers he’d thought he was about to encounter.

But we’ve still got them by better than two-to-one, and Tango Two’s still over a million kilometers this side of Tango Three, he told himself. That’s going to limit how much Tango Three can bolster Two’s missile defenses. I can still gut the closer one, and then—

“Status change!” Daniels barked yet again, and Filareta could literally feel the color draining from his face as yet another huge cluster of impeller signatures appeared in the plot. These weren’t in front of him; they were behind him, ten million kilometers outside the limit, arriving in the biggest, most powerful hyper footprint he’d ever seen.

“Designate this Tango Four,” Daniels voice was flat now, that of a man face to face with total disaster, holding off despair by pure, dogged concentration on his duty. “Estimate Tango Four at minimum two hundred fifty additional superdreadnoughts. Minimal escorts, but—”

The ops officer paused, then he cleared his throat.

“Sir, we’re getting additional LAC signatures with Tango Four. They’re just appearing on the plot. They must have used some kind of carrier ships—some of those ‘superdreadnoughts’, maybe—to carry them across the wall.”

The silence on Oppenheimer’s flag bridge was absolute.

They mousetrapped me. Filareta felt something like admiration even through his shock. They keyed the entire thing to my own approach. They showed me Tango Two’s impellers to suck in the recon platforms and keep me coming, then they timed Tango Three’s wedges to come on line only after I crossed the limit. And they had Tango Four waiting in hyper the entire time. They must’ve sent a courier across the alpha wall to alert their backdoor force…and they timed their hyper translation to catch me on the wrong side of the limit, too.

It was all timing, he realized. Every bit of it tied to his own maneuvers. He wondered if Tango Four would ever have dropped out of hyper at all if he hadn’t crossed the limit?