Jeffers tried not to let his own sense of shocked disbelief show. It was obvious that the Peeps still hadn’t quite equalized the gap between Manticoran hardware and their own. Their ECM was still nowhere near as good. Their missile pods seemed to carry fewer birds per pod, which suggested that they’d had to accept a more massive design. That meant lighter broadsides from the same tonnage of capital ships and a bigger squeeze on magazine space. And that might prove significant in the long run, for although their seeker systems seemed to have been improved almost as much as their missiles’ range had, they still weren’t quite up to Manticoran standards, either. Given the RMN’s remaining edge in electronic warfare, long-range missile accuracy was going to favor Manticore by a probably substantial edge, but it wasn’t going to be spectacular even for the RMN. So the number of missiles an SD(P) could carry was about to become extremely important. Which probably meant it was a damned good thing BuShips had pushed ahead with the new Invictus design.

Now if only that fucking idiot Janacek had let the Navy build some of them!

Jeffers felt his jaw muscle ache from how fiercely he was gritting his teeth and made himself turn away from the plot. He was a bit surprised that Starcrest had been able to make good her escape when Maitland ordered her to run for it. Probably it was simply a case of the Peeps having bigger fish to fry, he thought bitterly. But it could also have something to do with the amount of damage Maitland’s superdreadnoughts and LACs had managed to inflict, as well.

Alan Jeffers was too honest with himself to pretend that he wasn’t intensely grateful that Maitland’s orders meant he and his crew would live. But neither could he absolve himself from a crushing sense of guilt. It was a burden, he suspected, which would cling to him for a long, long time.

· · • · ·

“I wonder how Admiral Kirkegard did at Maastricht, Sir,” Commander Tibolt murmured. He and Admiral Chong stood side-by-side on RHNS New Republic’s flag bridge as TF 11 settled into orbit around the Thetis System’s sole habitable planet.

“No telling,” Chong replied. He watched the blue-and-white beauty of the planet on the visual display for several moments, then squared his shoulders and turned away. Another display attracted his eyes. The one that listed his task force’s losses.

Only a single ship’s name glowed in the blood-red color that indicated a total loss, and his lips curved in a smile of grim satisfaction. No one liked to lose any ship, or the people who crewed that ship. But after the savage losses the old People’s Navy had taken at the hands of the Manties again and again, a single heavy cruiser and seventy LACs actually destroyed was a paltry price to pay for an entire star system. Not to mention the fact that the Manties had lost over two hundred of their own LACs, four heavy cruisers, and a pair of superdreadnoughts, as well.