Which meant Cal was correct; “fucked” was exactly what they were.

“Launch instructions are coming up now, Skip,” Lieutenant Benedict announced. Flanagan turned away from the plot and looked a question at her exec.

“It looks like we’re going with Delta-Three, at least initially,” Benedict told her.

“Time till launch?” she asked, and he checked the launch clock on his console.

“Thirty-one minutes,” he said. “Station Engineering started bringing the nodes up on remote as soon as GQ sounded. They’ll be optimal in another twenty-eight minutes.”

“What about missile loadout?”

“Nothing on my screen, Skip,” Benedict replied with a shrug. “Looks like we’re going to launch with a standard package.”

Flanagan managed not to stare at him in disbelief, which would undoubtedly have been terrible for morale, but it wasn’t easy. The standard missile package consisted of a little bit of everything and not enough of anything. It was intended as a standby weapons load, one that gave at least limited capability under almost any circumstances. But it was effectively an emergency load. Standard tactical doctrine assumed that any COLAC would tailor his missile loads to the tactical mission—deleting the ordnance he wouldn’t need to make room for the weapons he did—unless he found himself forced to launch under emergency conditions at minimal range. That wasn’t the case here. Even if the Peeps had been able to match the extended range of the RMN’s capital ship missiles, it would have taken them the better part of three hours to get into effective attack range of “the Tamale.” That was plenty of time for the 1007^th to strip the standby packages off of its LACs and replace them with a load that made sense, especially since the high-speed magazine tubes were the one part of T-001’s conversion which had always worked perfectly.

But apparently al-Salil and Schumacher didn’t see things that way.

Sera Flanagan hovered on the brink of comming the COLAC to suggest that it might be time for a little sanity. She had no doubt that most of the group’s personnel were about to die, although that lingering sense of disbelief mingled with trained professionalism had managed to so far hold that realization at arm’s length. Still, she knew, the odds were very good that she would be among the ones who did, and it offended that same professionalism deeply to think that al-Salil would just throw them away this way without even attempting to maximize the damage they might inflict before they were destroyed.

She almost did it. She ought to have done it, and she knew it. But she was the most junior squadron commander of the group, and she knew precisely how al-Salil would react. Given the circumstances, she had no particular desire to spend any of the time she had left in fruitless debate with a feckless incompetent. Or to be stripped of command and left behind when her people went off to die.

“Override Group’s ammunitioning instructions,” she told Benedict flatly. The exec looked at her, and she shrugged. “We’ve got time if you get right on it,” she said. “Use the squadron interlinks to the station magazine queue. I want a Lima-Roger-Two package loaded to all ships ASAP. Anybody in the station crew asks any questions, refer them to me.”