What he saw pleased him. One or two of them were obviously a bit on the anxious side, but he didn’t blame them for that. Indeed, a certain edge of nervousness was probably a good thing, and there were enough others—like Zrubek and DeLaney—whose supreme confidence in the ops plan and, he supposed, in his own leadership, more than offset it. Yet however anxious or however confident any one of them might be, there was no hesitation. These people were as ready as anyone could possibly be for the task before them.

· · • · ·

“Talk to me, Andrea,” Honor said briskly but calmly as she arrived on Werewolf’s flag bridge. Nimitz rode in her arms, once more in his own, custom-designed skinsuit, and she paused to park him on the back of her command chair. She gave his tufted ears a caress, then turned back to face her operations officer while the ’cat’s nimble true-hands fastened the harness straps between his skinsuit and the chair.

“We still don’t have positive confirmation, Your Grace,” Captain Jaruwalski replied, “but I don’t think there’s much question. It’s the Peeps.”

“I tend to agree with Andrea, Your Grace,” Mercedes Brigham put in from her own console, “but at the same time, I don’t think we should positively rule out the possibility that this could be the Andies, instead.” Honor looked at her, and the chief of staff shrugged. “I’m not saying that I believe it’s the Andies, Ma’am. But until we know for certain, one way or the other, I think we’d better keep an open mind on the subject.”

“That’s a valid point,” Honor acknowledged. “But whoever it is,” she turned to consider the huge holo sphere of the master plot, “they look like they mean business.”

“They certainly do that,” Brigham agreed, and stood to join Honor beside the plot.

The unknown units were headed in-system on a course which would bring them to a zero-zero intercept with Marsh in just over six hours, assuming that they made turnover in three. And there were quite a few of them. In fact, it looked very much as if her “official” order of battle would have been outnumbered by at least fifty percent.

“We’re getting light-speed emissions signatures now, Your Grace,” George Reynolds reported. Honor turned towards them, and the intelligence officer looked up to meet her gaze. “They’re not Andies,” he said quietly. “We don’t recognize some of them, but we’ve positively IDed at least eight Havenite battlecruisers.”

Something like a not quite audible sigh seemed to run around the flag bridge, and Honor smiled thinly. She couldn’t say she was glad to have her worst fears confirmed, but at least the uncertainty was over. She closed her mind resolutely to speculation about what might have happened closer to home, and nodded as serenely as she could.

“Thank you, George,” she said, and glanced at Jaruwalski.

“CIC is trying to break them down by type, Your Grace,” the ops officer said. “It’s a bit difficult without better intelligence on whatever new types they’ve been building, especially since, as George just said, we don’t recognize some of them at all. At the moment though, it looks as though they’ve brought along fifty or sixty superdreadnoughts, with twenty or thirty battlecruisers in support.”