For just an instant, Lester Tourville was five years in the past, when no admiral had been able to trust the intelligence appreciations produced by Oscar Saint-Just’s StateSec analysts. A dreadful sense of betrayal flashed through him at the thought that Thomas Theisman’s NavInt had just proven itself equally unreliable. But then he shook himself. Whatever had happened here, NavInt had proven its fundamental reliability too often over the last four T-years. There had to be an explanation, but what?

“We have hard IDs on the new bogeys’ types,” Marston said flatly. “CIC makes it twelve Medusa-class SD(P)s, six Covington-class CLACs, and six battlecruisers. CIC isn’t positive, but it thinks the battlecruisers are probably Courvoisier-class ships.”

“Covingtons? Courvoisiers?” DeLaney shook her head. “Those are Grayson types!” She turned to face Tourville. “What are Graysons doing out here in the middle of Silesia?” she demanded almost plaintively.

Tourville stared back at her for perhaps four seconds, then muttered a short, pungent obscenity.

“It’s the Protector’s Own,” he said flatly. “Damn! NavInt told us they were off on some long-ranged deployment training mission. Why didn’t it even occur to us that that sneaky bastard Benjamin might have sent them here?”

“But why here?” DeLaney protested.

“I don’t know,” Tourville replied, but his mind continued to race even as he spoke, and he grimaced. “Best guess? Benjamin and Harrington discussed it before she ever came out here. Damn! I’ll guarantee you that’s what happened. She knew High Ridge wasn’t going to give her what she needed to do her job, so she borrowed it from her other navy without even telling anyone she was doing it!”

He shook his head in brief, heartfelt admiration. Obviously, he thought, NavInt needed to update its estimate of Harrington as a brilliant military technician to include a degree of political sophistication no one had expected from her. But then he brushed the thought aside. There was no time for it—not when his entire fleet had just been mousetrapped with consummate professionalism.

He pushed himself up out of his chair and crossed to the main plot, staring into it as data sidebars updated and acceleration vectors established themselves. The numbers flashed and danced, then settled, and Admiral Lester Tourville felt a ball of ice congeal in his belly.

“The Graysons are launching LACs,” Marston reported. “Tracking reports over six hundred impeller signatures already.”

Tourville only grunted. Of course they were launching their LACs, but that wasn’t what was going to do most of their killing. Not today. Both Harrington and the Protector’s Own were well within MDM range of Second Fleet, and his own twelve SD(P)s, which had been supposed to give him a two-to-one advantage over Harrington’s Medusas were suddenly outnumbered by two-to-one, instead. And if NavInt was right about the Graysons new Courvoisier II battlecruisers, Harrington had an additional six pod-launcher types. Given the Manticoran and Grayson advantages in electronic warfare and missile defense, that gave them a devastating edge in the pounding match about to begin. And Harrington had timed things perfectly. Second Fleet was too far inside the hyper limit, sandwiched between two forces, both of which had higher fleet acceleration rates than it did.