“I think he is right,” White Haven said grimly. “Think about it. If they’d gone with a standard fire plan, they had the fire control channels to’ve fired at least three targeted salvos out of those missile pods. There’d have been time to feed actual target coordinates to their birds, and those salvos would have been in final acquisition by the time anything we fired could’ve reached their ships. Sure, we’d have stopped a lot of them—most of them—before they inflicted any damage, but their chances of actually getting through with at least some hits would have been a lot higher than they could do simply trying to saturate our defenses without even assigning targets!”

“And look at the delay between that first launch and the first follow-on salvo from their broadside tubes,” Lester Tourville said, eyes distant. “It was a good—what? Ten seconds? Something like that?”

“Thirteen,” Theisman said. “You’re right, Les.”

“Pat hasn’t had time for any prisoner interviews yet,” Sir Thomas Caparelli said thoughtfully, lips pursed. “I wonder if anyone’s going to be able to explain that delay to us? It does almost sound like there was a hole of some kind in the order queue, doesn’t it?”

“Possibly,” White Haven agreed. “But that doesn’t change the fact that Filareta could have used the time Honor gave him to set up a sequenced, targeted, controlled launch, and he didn’t. Why not?”

“Because that would have required a series of actions?” Yu murmured, then nodded slowly. “They’d have to select the pods to be enabled. Then they’d have to choose the targets, feed the coordinates, enable at least the first salvo’s telemetry links, update their electronic warfare plan. It would have taken more than one man, and it would have taken a complex series of commands and keystrokes. Whereas—”

“Whereas this way, if you’re right, all they needed was for some poor damned soul to punch one button and they could count on me to kill over a million people for them,” Honor grated harshly.

More than one of the humans present winced. Her husband reached out to lay one hand on her forearm, and she looked at him with bitter eyes.

“You didn’t have any choice,” he told her. “Not with fifty thousand missiles coming at your command.”

“I could have just taken the fire,” Honor replied flatly. “Look at how few people we lost anyway! I could’ve waited to be sure—”

“Oh, stop it!” Thomas Theisman snapped, and Honor’s head snapped around in surprise at the genuine anger in his voice.

“No, you could not have ‘just taken the fire’!” the Republic’s Secretary of War told her sharply. “And if you had done something that stupid, you’d deserve to be broken for it!”

“But—”