The fireballs marched, hobnailed with fire, ripping the heart out of Grendelsbane Station. A tidal wave of flame and fury carrying disaster on its crest. And behind that wave were the personnel platforms and the yard personnel he hadn’t been able to withdraw. Over forty thousand of them—the entire workforce for a complex the size Grendelsbane once had been, just as lost to the Star Kingdom as the ships they had come here to work upon.

In one catastrophic act of self-inflicted devastation, Allen Higgins had just destroyed more tonnage and far more fighting power than the Royal Manticoran Navy had ever lost in the entire four T-centuries of its previous existence, and the fact that he’d had no choice was no consolation at all.

· · • · ·

“Sir,” Marius Gozzi said urgently, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but we’ve just picked up a second task force.”

Giscard turned quickly to his chief of staff, raising one hand to stop his ops officer in mid-conversation.

“Where?” he asked.

“It looks like its coming in from the terminus,” Gozzi said. “And we’re very lucky that we saw it at all.”

“Coming from the terminus?” Giscard shook his head. “It’s not ‘luck’ we saw it, Marius. You were the one who insisted that we needed to scout it to cover our backs while we dealt with the inner system.”

The chief of staff shrugged. Giscard’s statement was accurate enough, but Gozzi still suspected that the admiral had subtly prompted him to make the suggestion. Giscard had a tendency to build a staff’s internal confidence by drawing contributions out of each of them… and then seeing to it that whoever finally offered the contribution he’d wanted all along got full credit for it.

“Even with the drones and the LACs, we were still dead lucky to pick them up, Sir. They’re coming in heavily stealthed. But they’re also pushing hard. One or two impeller signatures burned through the stealth, and once the drones got a sniff, the recon LACs knew where to look. The numbers are still tentative, but CIC is estimating it as between twenty and fifty ships of the wall. Possibly with carrier support.”

“That many?”

“CIC stresses that the numbers are extremely tentative,” Gozzi replied. “And we’re not getting the take directly from the drones.”

Giscard nodded in understanding. The recon LACs were heavily modified Cimeterres, with greatly reduced magazine space in order to free up the volume for the most capable LAC-sized sensor suite Shannon Foraker and her techies had been able to build. Their main function, however, if the truth be known, was to serve as drone tenders. Foraker and her wizards still hadn’t figured out how to fit a grav pulse transmitter with any sort of bandwidth into something as small as a drone. But they could put a LAC in range for the drone to hit it with a whisker laser, and a LAC could carry an FTL com. They still couldn’t real-time the raw drone data to Sovereign of Space, but they could get enough summarized information through to give Giscard a far better picture of what was happening than any previous Havenite fleet commander could have hoped for.