“My present estimate is that Carson sent these poor turkeys out to slow us down because his cupboard is bare of real warships. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re able to get our hands on the IFF codes for his minefields, as well. On the other hand, he might be smart enough to plant fake ones on us, so I’m not planning on having any sudden inspirations without clearance from you. I should have the situation here completely squared away within the next five to six hours. I’ll put prize crews aboard the merchies and send them back to Haven, and barring anything untoward, I should rendezvous with the rest of the fleet no later than seventeen hundred hours on the twenty-third. The locals seem pretty glad to see us, and I don’t think we’re going to need much in the way of a garrison to hang onto the planet, so I don’t expect anything to delay me.”

“Zrubek clear.”

The screen blanked, and Tourville nodded in approval. Zrubek was one of the new crop of junior flag officers he and Javier had been grooming for the past three years. The assignment to clear the Montague System of the ragtag remnants of Citizen General Adrian Carson’s forces had been the commodore’s first real solo operation, and it sounded as if he’d passed his graduation exercise with flying colors. Which was exactly what Tourville had anticipated when he sent the youngster off. In many ways, Montague had been something of a training operation with teeth, but if Zrubek had gotten cocky and strayed into range of the sort of missile firepower which seemed to have been aboard Carson’s freighters the outcome could have been very different. That was why Tourville had wanted to be certain Zrubek really was as ready for independent command as he’d thought he was.

Strange, he thought. All those years under StateSec’s thumb, and I thought the worst thing that could happen to me was to get myself shot. Now StateSec is in the crapper, and instead, I have to worry about whether or not the people I send out with task groups are going to bring them back to me in one piece. Funny how much less sleep I lost over the possibility of getting shot.

He snorted a chuckle at the reflection, then frowned thoughtfully.

With Montague out of the way, Carson was reduced to only two star systems still under his direct control. Citizen Admiral Agnelli, Carson’s theoretical ally currently controlled three more, but Agnelli and Carson had been strange bedfellows from the beginning. Both of them were ambitious, but Carson apparently retained at least some genuine loyalty to the New Order created by the Committee of Public Safety. That might have something to do with the high StateSec rank he’d attained under the previous management, and he was a thoroughly unpleasant individual, who remained addicted to brutality and terror as his preferred methods of crowd control. But for all that, there was at least some evidence he was motivated by something other than the possibility of personal gain.