Probably, he thought. It wouldn’t have given anything away, either way, since the only way I could have avoided crossing the limit would have been to hyper out short of it, before they ever turned up. All of my sensors would have been on the other side of the alpha wall, where they couldn’t see a thing, when they dropped into normal-space. And did I think of detaching a couple of picket destroyers to watch and see what happened in a case like that? Of course not.

Humiliation glowed at the core of him as he realized how totally he’d been manipulated. No, not manipulated: anticipated. Anticipated the way a veteran—or an adult—might anticipate some inexperienced novice full of his own omnipotence. They hadn’t had to manipulate him because it had been so easy for them to predict him, and that made it almost worse.

“Sir,” Reuben Sedgewick said in a very careful voice, “I have a com request from Admiral Harrington.”

* * *

“So has it occurred to you that things may not be quite as simple as you thought they were, Admiral Filareta?”

Harrington sounded whimsical, almost amused, Filareta thought resentfully. He glowered into the com pickup, his face as expressionless as he could keep it, and “the Salamander” smiled thinly.

“I did point out to you,” she continued, “that your intelligence agencies’ estimate of how badly our defenses had been eroded by the Yawata Strike were in error.”

“Yes, you did,” he acknowledged, showing his own teeth briefly and settled back for the eighty-second two-way transmission lag. But—

“You should have listened, then,” Harrington said after little more than a single second. Despite his best efforts, Filareta’s eyes widened in surprise, and she smiled again. “It’s called a Hermes buoy, Admiral. We have quite a few of them seeded around the system to serve as FTL relays. Convenient, don’t you think?”

Flinty brown eyes bored into his, and icy fingernails scraped down his spine at the proof that Manticore truly did have faster than light communications capability.