“Time of response to our sublight challenge, Harper?” Honor asked her com officer.

“If they respond to it immediately, we should be hearing something from them in another four or five minutes, Your Grace,” Lieutenant Brantley told her.

“Thank you.” Honor frowned thoughtfully for a moment, then returned her attention to Jaruwalski. “Any indications of CLACs?”

“No, Your Grace,” the ops officer replied. “Which doesn’t necessarily mean there aren’t any.”

“Your Grace, we’re getting IDs on at least some of their superdreadnoughts from the remote platforms,” Reynolds put in. “They’re confirmed Peeps. We’ve got nine of them so far. All pre-pod designs ONI has good recorded emissions signatures on.”

“That’s about twenty percent of their total SDs,” Brigham observed.

“True,” Jaruwalski agreed. “On the other hand, it still leaves over fifty which could be SD(P)s.”

Honor nodded once more, accepting Jaruwalski’s caveat, then gave the plot another glance and reached her decision.

“It doesn’t look like we’re going to get a better chance for Suriago,” she said, and looked at the com screen connecting her to Werewolf’s command deck. “Get us underway, Rafe.”

“Aye, aye, Your Grace,” Captain Rafe Cardones replied crisply, and began passing orders.

· · • · ·

“They’re not trying to be very stealthy about it, are they, Sir?” Molly DeLaney remarked.

“No, they’re not,” Tourville agreed. He sat in his command chair, legs crossed, expression calm, while his right hand’s fingers drummed very slowly and gently on its armrest. His eyes were equally calm but intent as he studied the repeater plot deployed from his chair.

The defending Manticoran task force was headed to meet him. The range remained too long for real-time reports from light-speed sensors, but impeller signatures were FTL, and they blazed clear and strong in the plot, confirming what the first wave of recon drones had already reported. Thirty-one Manty superdreadnoughts, eleven dreadnoughts, four LAC carriers, and sixteen battlecruisers, covered by two destroyer flotillas and at least three cruiser squadrons accelerated steadily on almost a direct reciprocal of his own course. A cloud of LACs spread out to cover the axis of their advance and its flanks. It was much more difficult to get a drive count on units that small, but NavInt had reported that somewhere around four hundred and fifty LACs had been permanently based on Sidemore. It looked like Harrington had brought all of them with her, since CIC estimated her main combatants were accompanied by somewhere around eight hundred of them. Taking NavInt’s highest figure and combining it with the six CLACs she was supposed to have gave her a maximum LAC strength of right on a thousand. She might have left a couple of hundred of them to cover the inner system against the possibility that the main attack was actually a feint to pull her out of position around Marsh, especially if she believed the Republican Navy still lacked any CLACs of its own.

And she was continuing to transmit her sublight challenges and demands that he identify himself as she came.