“Alpha One, David,” he told his chief of staff calmly. Clairdon looked at him for just a moment, then nodded briskly.

“Alpha One. Aye, aye, Sir,” he said, and MacDonnell looked back at White Haven as Clairdon headed for the com section to pass the necessary movement orders.

“I think they’re doing exactly what you said you’d do, My Lord,” MacDonnell told the Manticoran. Then he smiled mirthlessly. “Of course, I suppose half of those ships could be EW drones and it could all be a huge ruse designed to draw the terminus picket force they didn’t know was here out of position.”

“It does seem unlikely,” White Haven agreed with a slightly warmer smile of his own. “And I doubt they’d be foolish enough to repeat their Basilisk pattern. They know this terminus’ forts are completely online. They could still have it—the force they seem to be sending towards San Martin could take all of the forts without too much trouble. But I find it difficult to believe that even Thomas Theisman and Shannon Foraker between them could have given them enough ships to let them hit Trevor’s Star with two task forces that size. Especially not if Duchess Harrington was right and they have sent an attack force all the way to Silesia. Or, at least, if they can attack Silesia and still hit Trevor’s Star with a hundred and sixty ships of the wall, we’d better start working on our surrender terms now!”

· · • · ·

Admiral Higgins stood like a statue of acid-etched iron on HMS Indomitable’s flag bridge, waiting, as his task force’s remaining units accelerated towards the Grendelsbane hyper limit. No one spoke to him. No one approached him. There was an invisible perimeter around him, a circle of pain and self-loathing none dared enter.

Intellectually, he knew as well as anyone else on that bridge that what had happened here wasn’t his fault. No one with his assigned order of battle could possibly have stopped the force the Peeps had thrown at him. That didn’t guarantee that he wouldn’t be scapegoated for it, of course—especially not by the Janacek Admiralty—but at least he’d had the sanity and moral courage to refuse to throw away any more of the lives and ships under his command.

None of which was any comfort to him at all at this moment.

His eyes were on the visual display, not the tactical display or the maneuvering plot. He was staring at the huge naval yard, its individual structures long invisible as they fell away astern, and his eyes were cold and empty as space itself.

And then his mouth tightened and pain flickered in those empty eyes as the first small, intolerably bright sun flashed behind his ships. Then another. Another, and another, and yet another as a tidal wave of flame marched through the huge, sprawling naval base Manticore had spent almost two decades building up from literally nothing.

Those silent pinpricks looked tiny and harmless from this range, but Higgins’ mind’s eyes saw them perfectly, knew their reality. It watched the forest fire of old-fashioned nukes—his own missiles’ warheads, not even the enemy’s—consuming fabrication centers, orbital smelters, reclamation yards, stores stations, orbital magazines, the huge hydrogen farm, sensor platforms and relays, and System Control’s ultra-modern command station. And the ships. The handful of ships in the repair yards. The ones who’d had the misfortune to choose this particular moment to be immobilized in yard hands because they required some minor repair, or to be undergoing refit. And worse—far worse—the magnificent new ships. Twenty-seven more Medusa-class SD(P)s, nineteen CLACs, and no less than forty-six of the new Invictus-class superdreadnoughts. Ninety-two capital ships—almost six hundred and seventy million tons of new construction. Not just a fleet, but an entire navy’s worth of the most modern designs in space, helpless as they lay beside fitting-out stations or half-finished, cocooned in their building slips and dispersed yards. The fifty-three additional lighter types being built alongside them hardly mattered, but Higgins could no more spare them from the fiery sword of fusion than he could the superdreadnoughts.