Otter ghosted forward at a bare twenty gravities, moving into the invisible flaw of the Agueda Terminus. Under normal circumstances, she would have been aligned for transit and cleared by Agueda Astro Control, which would have monitored her approach vector, double and triple checking her entry into the terminus. Under the circumstances which currently obtained, she and the rest of the Thirty First Cruiser Squadron were on their own, dependent on their own charts of the terminus and its tidal stresses. The good news was that they’d been provided with the very latest charts for the terminus before they ever set out; the bad news was that none of the squadron’s ships had ever transited this particular terminus before. And the potentially really bad news was that they had absolutely no idea what they’d be sailing into on the far side.

Oh, stop that! Magellan told himself irritably. You do know what’s on the far side…more or less, anyway. And it’s not like you’re about to poke your nose into the Junction Forts, now is it?

No, it wasn’t. On the other hand, if Lacoön Two was going according to plan and no one else had managed to jump the gun, he was about to become the first naval commander in history to seize a Solarian wormhole terminus by force.

And isn’t that going to make the Sollies happy? he thought dryly.

Magellan’s slightly understrength squadron of Saganami-C-class cruisers was a long way from home: four hundred and forty-five light-years from the Manticore Binary System through hyperspace, and three hundred and twenty-seven from Beowulf. Of course, he hadn’t had to make the trip the long way. Instead, he’d moved transited from the Manticoran Junction to Beowulf, then crossed sixty-three light-years from Beowulf to the Roulette System, then transited the Roulette-Limbo hyper bridge and crossed another forty-nine light-years of hyperspace from Limbo to Agueda.

Spreading sunshine and light the entire way, he reflected. Amazing how unpopular we are.

Amazing, perhaps, but scarcely surprising. Roulette, Limbo, and Agueda were all independent (or at least nominally so) star systems. Actually, Limbo was an OFS client state, with a particularly unpleasant fellow sitting in the system’s executive mansion. President for Life Ronald Stroheim had been most unhappy to see a Royal Manticoran Navy task group suddenly appear through the wormhole terminus which he regarded as his personal cash cow. As a good, loyal OFS henchman, he got to keep somewhere around three percent of the terminus’ total revenues for himself, which made him an incredibly wealthy man. Apparently he hadn’t heard that the Star Empire had decided to start collecting termini, however, and CruRon 31’s unannounced arrival had come as a distinct shock. He seemed to feel very ill used that his neighbors in Roulette hadn’t warned him his guests were en route.