She turned her attention to the com screen and her flag captain.

“You heard, Rafe?”

“Yes, Ma’am. Bravo-Two, it is. Shall I pass the word to Admiral McKeon and Admiral Truman?”

“Yes, please. And tell them we’ll be setting up a four-way com conference in fifteen minutes, as well.”

“Aye, aye, Ma’am. I’ll see to it.”

“Thank you,” she said, and slid into her command chair, then rotated it to face her staff once more.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen,” she said calmly, “the Chair will entertain theories as to just what these people think they’re doing.”

· · • · ·

Ninety minutes trickled past without a single transmission from the incoming strangers. The transports—or whatever they were—had fallen back, trailing along behind the probable ships of the wall with what looked like three light cruisers or large destroyers riding herd on them. The rest of the unidentified formation simply continued to bore straight in, and tension had ratcheted steadily higher on Werewolf’s flag deck as the range continued to drop just as steadily.

“Scotty is about fifteen minutes from contact, Ma’am,” Jaruwalski reported.

“Has he gotten a visual yet?” Honor asked.

“No, Ma’am,” the ops officer admitted with an unmistakable edge of chagrin. “Whoever this is, they’re clearly familiar with our remote sensor platform doctrines. They haven’t tried to take any of them out, but the formation they’ve adopted makes that unnecessary… so far, at least.”

Honor nodded in understanding. The strangers’ formation was unorthodox, to say the least. Rather than a conventional wall formation, the capital ships had settled into a roughly spherical alignment, then rotated ever so slightly on their axes. The result was to turn the roofs and floors of their impeller wedges, which had just as powerful a warping effect on visible light as on anything else, outward in all directions. In effect, they had created a series of blind spots directed towards their flanks, which just happened to be where doctrine called for sensor drones to be deployed.

“Has Scotty considered vectoring his drones around behind them for a look up their kilts?” she asked.

There wasn’t that much to choose between looking down the throat or up the kilt of an impeller wedge, except that the throat was deeper than the kilt, which gave a sensor drone a better angle on its target. Unfortunately, the forward sensors and point defense armament of a warship were better than those guarding its stern precisely because the throat was more vulnerable than the kilt. Given these people’s apparent awareness of the defenders’ probable doctrine, it was a fairly safe bet that any drone, however stealthy, which wandered in front of them would be dead meat unless they chose not to kill it.

“Yes, Ma’am, he has,” Jaruwalski acknowledged. “But they should be going for turnover in another ten minutes or so.”

“Understood,” Honor said. When the bogeys flipped to begin decelerating towards Sidemore, they’d turn their own kilts directly towards Scotty’s shipboard sensors.

She leaned back in her command chair, with Nimitz curled comfortably in her lap, and let her gaze wander around her flag bridge. The tension was palpable, but her people were functioning smoothly and efficiently under it. None of them had been able to come up with an explanation for the intruders’ actions, but from the taste of their emotions, most of them had come to the conclusion that the bogeys were most probably Andermani.