And yet for all of the order and serenity, the tension was palpable. Task Force Ten had yet to fire a shot, but the war had already begun. Or resumed. Or whatever future historians would agree it had done.

The exact verb didn’t matter all that much to the men and women who would do the killing and the dying, and as he sat in his command chair and listened to the quiet, efficient murmur of his staff, he felt the cold wind of all that mortality blowing through the chinks in his soul. He was about to do something he’d already done once before, in a star system named Basilisk. He’d had no choice then, and he had even less of one now, but that didn’t mean he looked forward to it.

He checked the time again.

Fifteen minutes.

· · • · ·

“Perimeter Security has bogeys, Admiral!”

Niall MacDonnell turned quickly from his conversation with Earl White Haven at his ops officer’s announcement.

“They just made their alpha translations,” Commander William Tatnall continued. “We’re still getting a preliminary count on their transit signatures, but there are a lot of them.”

MacDonnell felt White Haven standing behind him and sensed how difficult it was for the earl to keep his mouth shut. But White Haven had assured him before they ever departed from Yeltsin’s Star that despite any questions of relative seniority, he had no intention of backseat driving. This was MacDonnell’s command, not his, he’d said, and he was as good as his word now.

“Locus and vector?” MacDonnell asked.

“They made translation right on the hyper limit for a least-time course to San Martin,” Commander David Clairdon, his chief of staff, amplified quickly.

“Any sign of anything headed for the terminus?” the admiral pressed.

“Not at this time, Sir,” Clairdon replied carefully, and MacDonnell smiled thinly at the unspoken “yet” everyone on the flag bridge heard in Clairdon’s tone.

The admiral turned back to the main plot as the glittering light codes of the bogeys’ hyper footprints appeared upon it. Clairdon was certainly right about their position and course. And Tatnall was right, too—there were “a lot of them.”

“CIC makes it over eighty of the wall, Sir,” Tatnall announced a moment later, as if he couldn’t quite believe the numbers himself. “Uh, they say that’s a minimal estimate,” he added.

“Sweet Tester,” MacDonnell heard someone mutter. Which, he decided, reflected his own reaction quite well.

There was no way to tell how many of those ships were SD(P)s and how many were pre-pod designs. If he were Thomas Theisman, there’d be as many of the former and as few of the latter as he could possibly arrange. Either way, it sounded as if the Peeps had sent a force twice as powerful as the one they had expected to face. And it sounded very much as if they were doing what White Haven had said he would do in their place.

But MacDonnell couldn’t be certain of that, and his brain raced as he considered possibilities and options. It seemed to him as if he stood there, staring at the plot, for at least a decade, but when he looked at the date/time display again, less than ninety seconds had passed.