“Aye, aye, Ma’am!” Benedict said sharply, and she nodded and reached for her own skinsuit.

She peeled out of her uniform and started climbing into the skinsuit with the lack of body modesty which was part and parcel of LAC operations here in Tequila. While she did, she heard Benedict working at his console, and she bared her teeth in an almost-smile.

Lima-Roger-Two—or “Standard Missile Load, Long-Ranged Intercept, Mod Two”—was hardly a tailor-made armament package, but it would give Flanagan’s LACs at least some chance of penetrating the envelope of a superdreadnought’s defensive fire. It was designed to help LACs which had to go out and meet heavy combatants from outside the supporting missile range of their own wall of battle. As such, it was EW-heavy, with emphasis on counter missiles, jammers, and decoys.

It wasn’t much, she thought harshly as she sealed the skinsuit. It was simply all she could offer her people under the circumstances.

“Missile reload complete in approximately nine minutes, Ma’am,” Benedict reported formally. “Time to launch now eleven-point-three minutes.” He looked up from his displays. “It’ll be tight, Skip,” he said much more informally, “but we’ll make it.”

“Good,” Flanagan said, picturing the high-speed missile pallets and robotic arms blurring and flashing as they rearranged Switchblade’s missile loads. “Any reaction from Captain al-Salil?” she asked after a moment.

“No, Ma’am,” Benedict replied in a painfully neutral tone, and Flanagan snorted mentally.

Of course there wasn’t anything from al-Salil. And there’d probably be precious little in the way of any sort of briefing on the battle plan he undoubtedly didn’t have. This was not only going to be an ugly battle, it was also going to the most fucked up one since Elvis Santino got his entire task group wiped out at Seaford.

And there was absolutely nothing Sarah Flanagan could do to change that.

· · • · ·

Vice Admiral Agnes de Groot studied the flag deck master plot in a mood of pronounced satisfaction.

De Groot had approached Operation Thunderbolt with less than total enthusiasm. Not because she didn’t want to get some of the Navy’s own back from the Manties. And not because she didn’t agree with President Pritchart that the Star Kingdom of Manticore damned well deserved to have its ass kicked up between its ears over its diplomatic doubledealing and chicanery. Not even because she disagreed with the ops plan’s underlying assumptions or strategy.

No, de Groot’s reservations had stemmed from the fact that the Staff had expressly ruled out any pre-attack reconnaissance of Tequila.

Agnes de Groot had risen to flag rank in a fleet which had experienced a seemingly unending series of drubbings—interrupted only occasionally by something like Operation Icarus—at the hands of the Manticoran Alliance. In light of that experience, she’d found it… difficult to accept NavInt’s estimates of the enormous decline in the efficiency of the Royal Manticoran Navy. She’d been certain that the spooks had to be overestimating the degree to which the Manties had lost their edge. Or thrown it away, if there was a difference. Which meant that she had also found it difficult to accept that they could have been stupid enough to reduce their picket in Tequila to the levels NavInt insisted they had.