For a few, brief moments consternation (and something just a bit more akin to panic than any of them would ever have admitted) was all they felt as they grappled with the sudden awareness of how far the bogeys’ unexpected possession of LACs would go towards evening the tactical imbalance they had assumed favored Task Force Thirty-Four so heavily. But before they could react, the flood of LAC icons began to blink from the crimson of unknown, assumed hostiles to the steady green of friendly units. The color change flowed through the formation in a cascade, one LAC squadron at a time as each of them brought its transponders online. And as each LAC group completed its transition, its mothership’s icon blinked to green, in turn.

“Your Grace,” Jaruwalski began, “we know those ships! They’re—”

She chopped herself off abruptly and turned to favor Honor with a much more old-fashioned glance than the one Brigham and turned upon her as she realized how superfluous her report actually was. Honor returned her look—it would never have done to call it a glare, of course—with her best innocent smile.

“Yes, Andrea?” she said.

“Never mind, Your Grace.” For a moment, the ops officer sounded remarkably like a Grayson nanny who had surprised her charges in the act of painting the nursery purple. But then, almost against her will, she began to grin and shook her head at her Admiral.

“Never mind, Your Grace,” she repeated, in quite a different tone. “I suppose by now we should all be accustomed to what passes for your sense of humor.”

Chapter Thirty

“I EXPECTED better than this from you, Edward.”

Michael Janvier, Baron High Ridge and Prime Minister of Manticore, looked down his aristocratic nose at his First Lord of Admiralty, and his tone was rich with disapproval. The conference room’s smart wall had been reprogrammed to create a moonlit forest glade behind him, but he appeared totally oblivious to the bizarre contrast between its calm tranquility and his own almost petulant expression.

“Not seven months ago,” he went on in precisely metered words, “you assured us that the Republic of Haven had no pod-superdreadnoughts. Now you’re reporting that they have a minimum of at least sixty in commission… which is only four less than we have. And, I might add, that they’ve managed to assemble this force without our so much as suspecting they might be doing so.”

He paused, gazing at his First Lord with his best, patented look of disappointment, and Sir Edward Janacek resisted a powerful urge to glare back at him. It was just like High Ridge to try to make this all his fault, he reflected. But of course he couldn’t say that. And however typical of the Prime Minister the automatic search for a scapegoat might be, his own position at the Admiralty made him the natural choice for the role in this case, which meant this conference had to be handled very carefully, indeed.

“What I’d like to know,” Lady Elaine Descroix put in as the Prime Minister’s pause lingered, “is exactly how bad the situation really is.”