He shrugged, and Jeffers nodded unhappily. Maastricht had been at the back edge of nowhere as far as replacements and reinforcements were concerned for as long as Starcrest had been here. The rumor mill said the situation was tight everywhere, but Jeffers’ ship wasn’t “everywhere.” She was right here, and he didn’t much care what “everywhere” else had to put up with.

“Well,” he said with perhaps a bit more confidence than he actually felt, “Admiral Maitland’s good. And if Incubus is understrength, that’s still better than no LACs at all.”

“You’re right,” Stevens agreed, but his eyes drifted back to the display and the oncoming icons of eight superdreadnoughts. Assuming what the sensor platforms were seeing was what was really there, Rear Admiral Sir Ronald Maitland’s short superdreadnought division was outnumbered by almost three-to-one. “I just wish we had an SD(P) or two to even things up.”

“So do I,” Jeffers admitted. “But at least we’ve got the range advantage for the pods we have.”

“Which is a darned good thing,” Stevens acknowledged. His eyes were still on the display, where the diamond dust icons of Incubus’ LACs were fifteen minutes from contact with the Peeps. The LACs’ FTL reports accounted for the detailed accuracy of Starcrest’s tactical plot, and Stevens didn’t envy their crews a bit. It was bad enough for Starcrest, attached to the superdreadnoughts’ screen, but at least Starcrest was the better part of thirteen million kilometers from any enemy missile launchers. The LACs weren’t.

He looked at the light codes of Maitland’s superdreadnoughts and his single CLAC and visualized the long, ungainly trail of missile pods towing astern of them. As Jeffers had suggested, Sir Ronald had a reputation as a canny tactician—one which in the humble opinion of Lieutenant Henry Stevens was well deserved. Unlike all too many system picket commanders, Maitland believed in hard, frequent drills and battle maneuvers, and he had kept his “task group” at a far higher state of readiness than some of the other pickets could boast. His announced battle plan had made it obvious that he recognized the weight of metal the Peeps had sent his way, too, but he planned to fight smart to offset the discrepancy in tonnages.

According to ONI’s analysts, his missiles had an enormous range advantage over anything the Peeps could have produced. Stevens tended to take those reports with a grain of salt, and it was evident to him that Sir Ronald did, too. ONI had assured them that the maximum powered range the Peeps might have managed to get their missiles up to was on the order of seven or eight million kilometers. Sir Ronald had added a twenty-five percent “fudge factor” to the spooks’ estimate just to be on the safe side, which brought their theoretical max range up to somewhere around twelve million klicks. That was well within the effective range of the RMN’s multi-drive capital missiles which, in theory, had a maximum range at burnout more than five times that great. Of course, that could hardly be considered “effective” range, since not even Manticoran fire control was going to be able to hit a powered, evading target at that distance.