“Andrew, would you please pass the word for Andrea to join us as soon as she finds it convenient?” she requested. Her personal armsman nodded in acknowledgment and reached for his com, and Honor turned back to her other guests and leaned forward in her own chair.

“I’m sure Andrea will be able to offer some extremely useful suggestions once we get her in on this,” she said. “But in the meantime, we should be about it, so why don’t all of you tell Mercedes and me exactly what it is you have in mind?”

· · • · ·

“All units, this is Cockatrice One-Alpha. We’ll go with Alpha Delta Niner-Six.” Captain Scotty Tremaine listened to the voice in his earbug. “Werewolf Four, take the lead battlecruiser. Werewolf Five and Six, you’re on Bandit Two. All Chimera squadrons, take your targets from Bandit Two along the targeting queue. Centaur and Cockatrice groups, decel to establish interval Baker Eight—you’re on cleanup. Execute now!”

Tremaine watched his plot in Werewolf’s Primary Flight Control carefully as the massed squadrons of TF 34’s four CLACs began to flow outward in response to Commander Arthur Baker’s orders. This was the third attack exercise of the day, and the first two had not been outstanding successes.

At least they were better than yesterday’s, he reminded himself wryly. And, after all, that’s what exercises are intended to do—find the problems so you can make things better.

He would have preferred to be leading the attack in person, for several reasons. One of the things he most treasured about his assignment as the task force’s senior COLAC was that despite his lofty position in its command hierarchy, he still got to go out in space with his personnel rather than staying back aboard a flagship somewhere. It gave him a better chance of getting himself killed than a battle squadron or task group commander might have enjoyed, but it also meant he didn’t have to send people out to do something he wasn’t doing himself.

Besides, there wasn’t much of an option about it. Even with grav-pulse FTL communications, LACs operated much too far away from their motherships to be controlled from there. As Jackie Harmon had established with the very first LAC group, any COLAC’s proper place was out with his attack birds and their crews.

But at the moment, Commander Baker, HMS Cockatrice’s COLAC, was subbing for him. After Werewolf herself, Cockatrice, Admiral Truman’s flagship, was the next senior of the task force’s CLACs, which meant that if anything happened to Tremaine, it would be up to Baker to take over. From what Tremaine had seen of him so far, the tall, black-haired commander had all the required skills and ability, but he was short on experience. He also still tended to think a bit too much like the destroyer skipper he’d been slated to become before he found himself transferred into the expanding LAC community. He was developing the proper “LAC jock” attitude, but he still had a few rough edges and he needed a bit more confidence.