“That’s another thing execs are there for, Skipper.” Lampert shrugged. “If the Master after God can relieve his tension, thereby improving his own efficiency, just by abusing his hapless executive officer, then said hapless executive officer is only too pleased to suffer for the good of the Service.”

“Yeah. Sure he is.” Captain and first officer grinned at one another, but then, as if by unspoken agreement, their eyes slid once more to the time display on the bulkhead, and their grins faded.

When it came down to it, Reumann reflected, Lampert was right. Maybe they couldn’t have changed the schedule, and no doubt they truly had been committed from the moment Admiral Giscard activated Operation Thunderbolt on the instructions of President Pritchart and the Congress. But there was something more than merely symbolic about Starlight’s departure from Trevor’s Star to Basilisk via Manticore. Battle divisions and squadrons had been departing First Fleet’s rendezvous for several days, each force heading off for its own individual objective. In fact, all of First Fleet had dispersed in accordance with Thunderbolt’s minutely organized timetable, and no one could possibly have called any of them back. So the Rubicon had actually been crossed well before Starlight reached Trevor’s Star. But there was still a special significance to the dispatch boat’s mission, even if Reumann couldn’t possibly have offered a logical explanation for why that was true.

Maybe it was simply the scale of the operations. Or perhaps it was knowing how many megatons of warships and how many thousands of Navy personnel were waiting with Second Fleet in Silesia for the arrival of that single, small vessel. Or perhaps it was even simpler than that. Perhaps it was just fear that something would still go wrong. That the Silesian Ambassador’s crew would screw up their mission, or let something slip… or even intentionally betray the Republic whose monumental bribe had convinced the Ambassador to make his ship available to it. So much coordination depended on such a tiny ship. Somehow, the universe hadn’t seemed quite so vast—or the dispatch boat quite so minute—when Thunderbolt had simply been an ops plan. Now it was reality, and Patrick Reumann had discovered that he was only too well aware of the fragility of their communication link to Second Fleet.

He gave himself a stern mental shake. What was really happening, he told himself firmly, was that he had opening night jitters. That, and the fact that despite all of the upgrades in the Republican Navy’s weapons and hardware, despite all of the doctrine and tactical development Shannon Foraker and her team had carried out at Bolthole, and despite all of the simulation runs, all of the training exercises, which Javier Giscard had put First Fleet through, there was still that edge of dread. That sense of challenging Fate itself by going up against the enemy fleet which had shattered the Republic’s Navy like so much glass in the final months before the cease-fire. Intellectually, Reumann knew that the Manties were far from superhuman. He only had to glance through the intelligence reports and the analyses of the incredibly stupid policies Janacek and High Ridge had instigated since assuming power to know that. But what his brain knew and his emotions expected weren’t necessarily the same thing, and he felt a familiar flutter somewhere deep inside as he, too, looked at the time display and realized that, in barely thirty-two hours, the Republic of Haven would once again be openly at war with the Star Kingdom of Manticore.