Several heads nodded unconsciously in agreement around the conference table, but she tasted disagreement from several of her subordinates, as well. And, in all fairness, she couldn’t really blame them for it. For all of her effort to remain analytical and detached, she felt a bright, searing flicker of rage whenever she thought of what had happened to Erica Ferrero’s ship and all of her crew. Alice was undoubtedly correct that there’d been lapses on both sides, but if the Andermani hadn’t been deliberately provoking incidents for so long, those lapses probably wouldn’t have occurred… and would never have had such fatal consequences if they had.

She wanted vengeance. She wanted to avenge her dead and simultaneously pay back all of the premeditated slights the Andermani had given the Royal Manticoran Navy. And she wanted, God help her, an enemy she could face openly, across the broadsides of her warships, without all of this endless hiding in shadows and groping with uncertainty even as she looked over her shoulder at a Government she neither agreed with nor trusted. She wanted that so badly she could taste it, like fire on her tongue.

Which was precisely the reason she dared not leap to any conclusions or foreclose any options. However much she wanted to.

“In addition to the messages I’ll be sending to Sachsen,” she went on, “I will, of course, dispatch a complete report to the Admiralty.”

Who probably won’t bother to read even this one, she thought bitterly.

“Unfortunately,” she went on in that same calm, even tone, “even our fastest dispatch boat will take over two weeks to reach the Star Kingdom. And, of course, any reply will take equally long to get back to us. That means we’re going to have to respond without fresh instructions for a minimum of more than a full standard month.”

She didn’t really need her ability to taste emotions directly to sense her subordinates’ response to her use of the plural pronoun. As good as these people were, they would have been superhuman not to feel a flash of intense relief at the realization that someone other than they was ultimately responsible for deciding just how “we” were going to respond.

Her lips quirked ever so briefly at the thought, then she shook it aside and continued.

“Until—and if—we receive instructions to the contrary, I have no choice but to continue to enforce existing policy and directives in our operational area. Accordingly, we’ll continue to patrol the star systems to which we’ve regularly assigned priority. I’m willing to pull in a bit from the periphery of our ops area, but we’re going to maintain a definite presence in the core systems. In fact, I want our patrols beefed up even further. We can’t afford to disperse our screening elements too broadly, and I have no desire to dilute our combat power. Nonetheless, I want our present plans to assign our vessels to operate at least in tandem to be expedited. In fact, where at all possible, I want ships operating in at least divisional strength, and pulling in a bit should free up the strength for that.