“Well,” she said aloud, “we’ll just have to find a way to get along without them, I suppose, won’t we?”

Chapter Twenty

THE brilliant white icon representing Trevor’s Star glared at the center of the enormous holographic plot in Sovereign of Space’s CIC, but Shannon Foraker had no attention to spare for unimportant distractions like suns and planets. Her eyes were riveted to the dense rash of crimson dots sweeping outward from the larger bloody icons of the defending fleet.

“Looks like they’ve got us on their sensors, Ma’am,” Captain Anders observed quietly beside her, and she nodded. Despite all the Republican Navy’s improvements in its stealth technology, its systems remained far inferior to those available to the Manticorans. It had been a given that they would be detected on their inbound vector; what remained uncertain was how much of an edge that would give the other side.

“We’re getting initial contact reports back from the lead LACs,” Commander Clapp announced, and Foraker turned to look at him. “Composition is about what we’d projected, Admiral,” the commander told her, cupping one hand over the earbug screwed into his right ear and listening intently. “It looks as if their missile LACs are taking the lead.” He listened a moment longer, then grimaced. “We can’t absolutely confirm that, Ma’am. Their EW is still too good to penetrate at this range, and CIC’s interpretation of the contact reports suggests that they may already be seeding their formation with decoys.”

“Understood,” Foraker acknowledged, and returned her attention to the plot. Like Clapp, she would have preferred for CIC to have been able to download the raw sensor data directly, rather than relying on the interpretive reports of the LACs’ tactical officers. Unfortunately, that wasn’t possible… yet. On the other hand, no one on the other side (we hope, she amended dutifully) had any reason to suspect that the Republican Navy had finally managed to crack the secret of the Royal Manticoran Navy’s faster than light communications capability. Actually, the RHN had known roughly what the Manties were doing for years; they just hadn’t known how to do it themselves. Until now.

To be honest, Foraker’s techs had needed a bit of a leg up from the Solarian League firms which had been trading military technology to Rob Pierre’s People’s Republic in return for combat reports and the largest payments the cash-starved Committee had been able to scrape up. But it had been a very small leg up, and Foraker felt a deep, uncomplicated sense of pride in the way her own R&D people had picked it up and run with it. She was far too self-honest to believe Haven’s researchers were in the same league as Manticore’s, yet they were much better than they had been. They were still playing catch-up, but they’d managed to considerably narrow the gap between themselves and their potential enemies.

And that’s another of the things we can “thank” Pierre and his butchers for, she thought. At least they blasted loose the old R&D hierarchies and actually found a few people who could think to take over instead!