Should I tell them about the Protector's Own? she wondered. There was no real reason she shouldn't . . . except that she and Benjamin had agreed that no one would be told—except Alfredo Yu himself—until the Grayson ships actually reached Silesia. The Protector had decided upon more mature consideration that the simplest way to avoid potential domestic arguments over his decision was simply not to tell anyone about it. As far as the rest of the Navy and the Grayson population at large were concerned, the Protector's Own was merely being dispatched on an extended deep-space training cruise, accompanied by its organic support ships. The primary purpose was to demonstrate its ability to sustain itself out of its own logistic resources in long-distance, independent operations. The fact that its training cruise would just happen to take the entire Protector's Own to the star system where its official commander just happened to have been stationed by the RMN would just happen to be one of those happy coincidences which just happened to happen from time to time.

Besides, as Wesley Matthews had pointed out when his opinion was sought, if someone like Sir Edward Janacek or Simon Chakrabarti knew Grayson was planning to make up the difference in the force levels Honor would require, their response almost certainly would be to see it as an opportunity to reduce the purely Manticoran forces available to her even further. Which analysis took on an additional point in the wake of Jaruwalski's news.

No, she decided. It's not really fair for me to tell them when Benjamin won't even be telling his own people about it. And even though it may not be very nice of me, if I don't tell them about it, it'll probably encourage them to try even harder to make what we do officially have adequate. Besides, she hid a sudden mental grin, think what a pleasant surprise it will be for them when Alfredo turns up in Marsh. Assuming, of course, that they don't decide to lynch the admiral who didn't warn them he was coming!

"Well," she said aloud, "we'll just have to find a way to get along without them, I suppose, won't we?"

The brilliant white icon representing Trevor's Star glared at the center of the enormous holographic plot in Sovereign of Space's CIC, but Shannon Foraker had no attention to spare for unimportant distractions like suns and planets. Her eyes were riveted to the dense rash of crimson dots sweeping outward from the larger bloody icons of the defending fleet.

"Looks like they've got us on their sensors, Ma'am," Captain Anders observed quietly beside her, and she nodded. Despite all the Republican Navy's improvements in its stealth technology, its systems remained far inferior to those available to the Manticorans. It had been a given that they would be detected on their inbound vector; what remained uncertain was how much of an edge that would give the other side.

"We're getting initial contact reports back from the lead LACs," Commander Clapp announced, and Foraker turned to look at him. "Composition is about what we'd projected, Admiral," the commander told her, cupping one hand over the earbug screwed into his right ear and listening intently. "It looks as if their missile LACs are taking the lead." He listened a moment longer, then grimaced. "We can't absolutely confirm that, Ma'am. Their EW is still too good to penetrate at this range, and CIC's interpretation of the contact reports suggests that they may already be seeding their formation with decoys."

"Understood," Foraker acknowledged, and returned her attention to the plot. Like Clapp, she would have preferred for CIC to have been able to download the raw sensor data directly, rather than relying on the interpretive reports of the LACs' tactical officers. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible . . . yet. On the other hand, no one on the other side (we hope, she amended dutifully) had any reason to suspect that the Republican Navy had finally managed to crack the secret of the Royal Manticoran Navy's faster than light communications capability. Actually, the RHN had known roughly what the Manties were doing for years; they just hadn't known how to do it themselves. Until now.

To be honest, Foraker's techs had needed a bit of a leg up from the Solarian League firms which had been trading military technology to Rob Pierre's People's Republic in return for combat reports and the largest payments the cash-starved Committee had been able to scrape up. But it had been a very small leg up, and Foraker felt a deep, uncomplicated sense of pride in the way her own R&D people had picked it up and run with it. She was far too self-honest to believe Haven's researchers were in the same league as Manticore's, yet they were much better than they had been. They were still playing catch-up, but they'd managed to considerably narrow the gap between themselves and their potential enemies.

And that's another of the things we can "thank" Pierre and his butchers for, she thought. At least they blasted loose the old R&D hierarchies and actually found a few people who could think to take over instead!

"I wish we could deploy drones like the Manties'," Anders murmured beside her, and her mouth twitched in a small, wry grin at the confirmation that he'd been thinking exactly what she had. The power requirements and mass costs of the RHN's current grav-pulse transmitters were far too high to permit it to employ the remote drones the RMN and its allies could deploy. The Manties were considerably ahead in super-dense fusion bottle technology and several other areas—including the newest generation of superconductor capacitor systems—and Haven was unable to match the onboard power levels of their remote platforms. But even without that, the sheer size of the early-generation RHN hardware would have made it impossible to squeeze it into such tight quarters. Indeed, it could be fitted into nothing smaller than a LAC. And, as Foraker strongly suspected had been the case for the Manties when they first developed the system themselves, any LAC or starship had to temporarily cut its acceleration to zero in order to transmit a message. Coupled with the slow pulse repetition frequency rate they'd so far managed to achieve, that limited them to very short and simple messages or to the use of preplanned ones which could be transmitted in shorthand code groups. Which was the reason Sovereign of Space's CIC couldn't receive the raw sensor data directly; there simply wasn't enough bandwidth available.

Yet, she reminded herself once again.

"They're coming in for a head-on engagement," Commander Clapp reported. "Our lead LACs are reporting radar and lidar hits consistent with known Manty fire control systems."

"Now that's a surprise," Commander Doug Lampert observed ironically. As Captain Reumann's tactical officer, he really ought to have been on Sovereign's command deck, but this battle was going to be fought beyond the reach of even her broadsides. Since that was the case, Lampert had opted for a ringside seat here in CIC, with its superb instrumentation and far more detailed master plot.

"Maybe not," Anders replied. "But I'm still not sure this is their most logical response. They've got to realize we're sending in a wave of LACs, and they must know we wouldn't be doing it unless we figured our LACs can stand up to theirs."

"I think it was reasonable to assume this was how they'd respond," Foraker disagreed quietly, her eyes never leaving the plot as the crimson hostile icons swept closer and closer to the incoming green light codes of her own light attack craft. "Of course they realize we're sending in LACs. But they've never seen the new birds in action. As far as we know, they're not even aware the Cimeterre class exists. So the only way for them to find out what they're up against is to come out and see. And when you couple that with the edge their hardware's always enjoyed, this is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do."