But even if it were a force from their Home Fleet, how bad could that be? They didn’t have enough SD(P)s in Home Fleet to significantly affect the odds here, and rushing in pre-pod SDs would be suicidal. But they’d know that, too. So where—?

“I wonder,” he murmured, and turned back to Gozzi. “We need to nail this down, Marius. Send the LACs in closer.”

“Sir, if they get any closer and this is what it looks like, they’re going to be awfully vulnerable,” the chief of staff reminded him quietly.

“I realize that,” Giscard acknowledged. “And I don’t like it a whole lot more than you do. But we have to know. This is the largest single task force of Operation Thunderbolt. If the Manties have somehow figured out what we’re up to, this would be the one place they’d try hardest to set a trap for us. Don’t forget what they did to Admiral Parnell at Yeltsin’s Star at the beginning of the war. And whether they deliberately set it up as a trap or not, we can’t afford to get ourselves enveloped by a superior force. If we take heavy losses here, we could be in serious trouble until Admiral Tourville gets back from Silesia. Or, at least, until Admiral Foraker and Bolthole can make up our losses. If we have to risk some LACs, or even deliberately sacrifice them, to ensure that doesn’t happen, then I’m afraid we’ll simply have to do it.”

“Yes, Sir.”

· · • · ·

“They know we’re here,” Commander Tatnall said positively, and MacDonnell nodded.

He’d hoped that the Peeps wouldn’t spot them until it was too late. Although it had become evident that there were actually at least a hundred capital ships in the Havenite task force, he remained confident that his task force and Third Fleet, with almost a hundred SD(P)s and fifty pre-pod SDs between them, could take them. The small, fast impeller signatures which proved that the Peeps did have CLACs, after all, had caused him to raise his estimate of the losses he and Kuzak would probably suffer, but that hadn’t affected his fundamental confidence. Not with the hundreds of planet-based LACs the Janacek Admiralty had deployed to back up Third Fleet as relations with the Republic worsened steadily. He knew they could take them… and that White Haven shared his confidence.

But in order to defeat them, he and Kuzak had to be able to get at them in the first place, and if they cut and ran for it, the chances of catching up to them would be poor at best.

He glowered at the display, where the steadily, if cautiously, advancing impeller signatures of scouting LACs crept ever closer to his own stealthed units. The question wasn’t whether or not they knew he was here—it was whether or not they knew what he had. If they did realize that he was coming in behind them with another forty SD(P)s, plus carriers, anyone but idiots would disengage in a moment, and those probing LACs were going to provide their commander with that information before very much longer. However good his own EW and however poor Peep sensor suites might be, he couldn’t hide from them if the range fell much further. Of course, it was always possible that they already had him. There was no way for anyone to be certain how much Shannon Foraker might have managed to improve their sensors in the last three or four years. But if they hadn’t managed to lock up his units yet they might not know just how powerful his force was.