He powered up the flexipad and brought an encrypted compressed file to the front of the little desktop screen. It had taken him a long time to work out how to do this, and even longer to work up the courage to go through with it.

He opened the software that he was certain would provide a link into Fleetnet, if a valid connection could be made. He keyed in the code Moertopo had given him back in Hashirajima, when they'd had made their pact by the light of the burning Japanese ships.

The result was unimpressive, but momentous. The pad chimed, making him jump. He had forgotten to mute the sound, but that was all right. He worked with the device every day.

The file disappeared from the out-tray, and security software wiped every trace of it from the lattice memory.

He couldn't help but glance out of his window, taped to protect against bomb blasts. The sky was completely blocked by low, dark gray clouds. If he had done this correctly, somewhere up there on the edge of space, a surveillance drone was already decoding his microburst package and pulsing it back to the smart-skin arrays of the Trident.

It wasn't the first time the ship had played host to royalty. King William and his new wife had toured the stealth destroyer shortly after the ship was commissioned, but that had been an occasion of state, with pomp and circumstance as the order of the day.

The monarch's younger brother was much less disruptive, although word of his arrival still flew belowdecks with the speed of laser-linked gossip. He arrived with a Special Air Service squad and their Norwegian counterparts. Halabi, who knew the mood of her ship as well as she knew her own feelings, sensed that the excitement had more to do with having a Special Forces component on board again than it did with any celebrity aura that hung around Prince Harry.

The SAS and their commando guides pretty much kept to the Air Div hangars at the stern, where they laid out their equipment, checking and rechecking everything. Major Windsor appeared in Planning once, to request permission to load mission prep software into the Trident's Combat Intelligence. The CI could render the mock-up of the heavy water plant with much greater detail than the field server they'd brought with them.

He was most amused to discover that the voice of the ship was a synthetic facsimile of Lady Beckham.

"I met them at the investiture," he told Halabi, smiling broadly at the memory. "She still looked smashing, but I thought poor old David had gone to seed quite badly. He never got over it when supercoach Johnny Warde dropped him from West Brom, did he?"

Halabi was almost unique in twenty-first century Britain, having zero interest in pop music, soccer, or celebrity gossip, so it took her a moment to catch up. "I suppose not," she conceded, without knowing exactly what he was talking about.

Harry quickly returned to the hangar to boot up the V3D mission sim, sparing her any further embarrassment, although she could tell the junior ratings thought she was a bit of a knob for not wanting to talk Posh and Becks with Harry.

When she'd first taken command of the Trident, she would probably have retreated into stiff dignity, but three years of constant action had loosened her corset strings, and she let a wry smile play over her features instead. "I'm sure His Royal Highness would like nothing more than to spend the whole day with you lot, plonking on about gormless rejects from the Hello! magazine celebrity Deathstar. But he's busy, and so are you. So get your heads down and your arses up, where I can kick them a little more easily."

The sailors returned to their workstations with only pro forma grumbles. They were busily plotting a course that would take them to their insertion point in the Skagerrak, when Halabi's intel boss pinged her on shipnet.

"Better come up to the CIC, Captain. We've got all sorts of things going on here. The birds are picking up indications of massive troop movements on the continent, and comms has detected an encrypted burst. Unscheduled, unauthorized. Completely outside parameters for any of the deep-cover skin jobs we're tracking."

"Sounds like we're game-on, then, Mr. Howard. I'll be there right away. Better set up a laser link connecting us to the Admiralty."

She acknowledged the message and left her ops coordinator to carry on with the mission plot, although she suspected that circumstances might have just cut short their cruise to the Norwegian Sea.

It was a short walk to the CIC, which sat in the Trident's central hull. Sailors and officers bustled through the companionway, already alerted to the possibility of action. Footsteps padded along the composite decking at double time. The rude, northern brogue of her boat chief Dave Waddington could be heard all the way over in the portside hull as he rousted a couple of slackers. The ship herself thrummed as the engine room spooled up in readiness. Halabi listened with approval to the whirr of Metal Storm pods and laser packs deploying from their recessed silos.

Unfortunately the increased tempo also served to remind her of how naked the ship felt. Her offensive capabilities were almost played out. She reminded herself again that she had only six ship-killers and four antisub missiles left. Every station was occupied in the cool blue cavern of the CIC when she arrived. The huge battlespace monitors on the wall at the far side of the room told her that the waiting was over, even before her executive officer arrived to confirm it. Dozens of e-tags on the computer map of Europe were in motion now. Data notes affixed to each tag scrolled through unit designations, capabilities, and the presumed role that unit would play in the coming invasion.

"They're surging," said the XO. "There's a lot of activity on the coast, in the ports, but mostly it's still inland, at least for now, as they're moving into position for the jump-off."

"Thank you, Mr. McTeale. Are we feeding this back to Admiralty?"

"Live and in color, without commercial breaks, ma'am."

"Whom do we have there interpreting for them?"

"Lieutenant Williams, Captain. He just got into London this morning, but he's had a few sessions up there already. They'll listen to him."

"Of course they will," she said. "He took a blue in beer drinking at Eton. Speaking of which, best ping Major Windsor and get him up here. I suspect his little jaunt is about to go wobbly."

"Aye, ma'am," said McTeale. "About that, there's this business of the data burst. I suggest you have a shufti in your ready room, Captain. It might be hot."

Halabi knew better than to second-guess her exec. "Okay. I'll make it quick.

"Mr. Howard," she called out to her intel chief. "You're with me. McTeale, I'll leave you here to keep an eye on all this. Ping me if any more nasty surprises develop. Have Major Windsor join me in the ready room."

"Aye, ma'am."

She spun out of the CIC with Lieutenant Howard in tow. They found the SAS officer waiting at her door with Lieutenant Poulsson, the Norwegian commando.

"What is happening, Captain?" asked Poulsson. "Has the invasion begun?"

"Pretty much so, Lieutenant. You'd best join us, too, I suppose. Is that all right, Mr. Howard?"

"Actually, I think Lieutenant Poulsson needs to see this, ma'am. It partly concerns his mission."

They squeezed into the small space, where a flat screen was already displaying some of the data burst that had arrived without warning. Halabi closed the sliding door behind them.

"So what am I looking at, Marc?"

"A rare bounty or a giant con, Skipper. It's a file dump. A big one. There are hundreds of subpackets I still haven't decompressed and decoded. Mostly they're in German, but there was one attachment in English. Here."