"Admiral Kostmeyer will hit the hyper limit on her vector in another twenty minutes, Sir. We'll hit it seventy-three minutes after she does."

Parks glanced up at his chief of staff's report. Capra looked even more exhausted than the admiral felt after dealing with the tidal wave of last-minute details. His dark eyes were rimmed with red, but he was freshly shaved and his uniform looked as if he'd donned it ten minutes before.

"Tell me," Parks said softly. "Do you think I made the right call?"

"Frankly, Sir?"

"Always, Vincent."

"In that case, Sir, I have to say that... I don't know. I just don't know." The commodore's own weariness showed in his headshake. "If the Peeps do run forces in behind Hancock to take out Yeltsin, Zanzibar, and Alizon, we'd have a hell of a time kicking them back out with Seaford threatening our rear. But by the same token, we've surrendered the initiative. We're reacting, not pushing them." He shrugged. "Maybe if we knew more about what's going on elsewhere we'd be in a better position to judge, but I have to tell you, Sir, I'm not happy about stripping Hancock so clean."

"Neither am I." Parks turned away from the master display and sank into his command chair with a sigh. "But worst case, Rollins is still going to have to assume we're concentrated here until he scouts Hancock and learns positively that we're not, and he's been mighty slack about that for months. He can't move his main force out to support his scouting elements without our pickets picking up on it, and if he sends them out unsupported, Sarnow may just be able to pick them off before they get close enough to confirm that we aren't there. Even if he can't, they'll take at least three T-days each way to make the run and report back, then another three or four days for Rollins to move. We can be back from Yorik in just over three—seven from the minute one of our pickets hypers out of Seaford space to tell us his fleet is moving."

"Eight, Sir," Capra corrected quietly. "They'll have to shadow him long enough to confirm he isn't headed for Yorik before we can move."

"All right, eight." Parks shook his head wearily. "If Sarnow can just keep them occupied for four days..."

His voice trailed off, and he met his chief of staffs gaze almost pleadingly. Four days. It didn't sound like all that much—unless you were a squadron of battlecruisers up against four squadrons of ships of the wall.

"It's my decision," Parks said at last. "Maybe it is the wrong one. I hope not, but right or wrong, I've got to live with it. And at least the Peeps don't know what we're up to yet. If Danislav expedites his movement and gets here before they figure it out, he and Sarnow will have a fair chance."

"And at least they'll have the capacity to lift the construction workers out if they have to run," Capra said in that same quiet voice.

"And lift the workers out if they have to run," Parks agreed, and closed his eyes with a sigh.

The massive squadrons vanished into the trackless wastes of hyper-space, and in their wake, a frail handful of battlecruisers took up the task they'd just abandoned.

Admiral Parnell gazed out a view port as his shuttle touched down at DuQuesne Central, the main landing facility for the PRH's third largest naval base. The sprawling military facility named for the master architect of the Republic's march to empire was the primary—indeed, the only real—industry of Enki, the Barnett Systems single habitable planet. Well over a million Marines and navy personnel were permanently stationed on Enki, and the system seethed with warships of every size, all guarded by massive fixed fortifications.

Parnell had studied those warships from the bridge of the heavy cruiser which delivered him to Barnett, and he'd been impressed. Yet that wasn't all he'd been, for he recognized the risk he was committing his navy to accept, and he didn't like it.

As he'd told President Harris months ago, he didn't really want to take Manticore on at all. Unlike Havens other victims, the Star Kingdom had had both the time and the leadership to prepare. Despite the confused pacifism of some of its politicians, its people were generally united behind their stiff-necked, almost obsessively determined queen, its wealth had let it amass a frightening amount of firepower, and the sheer breadth of its alliance system faced the People's Navy with a whole new dimension of threat. Unlike Haven's past, single-system conquests, there was no quick, clean way to take the Alliance out, short of a direct thrust to its heart, and driving clear to Manticore without protecting the Fleets flanks and rear invited catastrophe.

No, if they wanted the Star Kingdom, they had to fight for it. And, as the very first step, they had to break its frontier defenses and annihilate a sizable chunk of its navy in the process.

The admiral climbed out of his seat as the landing gear engaged. He scooped up his briefcase, nodded to the security team which accompanied him everywhere, and made his way down the shuttle ramp with a smile that hid his inner apprehension.

DuQuesne Base's huge war room was even more lavishly appointed than Central Planning back home in the Octagon, and Parnell's staff stood in a silent arc behind him as he studied the status boards. It was a habit of his to absorb the raw data for himself. He knew it irked some of his staffers, but he didn't do it because he distrusted their competence. If he hadn't trusted them, they wouldn't be here in the first place, but even the best people made mistakes. He'd caught more than a few of them in his time, and while he knew he couldn't possibly assimilate that much detail, he'd trained himself over the decades to absorb a general overview.

The confirmed reports on Manty naval deployments were scantier than he'd hoped for, but what there were of them looked hopeful. There were signs of movement all along the frontier, and Operation Argus had done better than he'd ever expected when the notion was first proposed to him. Argus was hardly a speedy way to amass information, but the data it did bring in was surprisingly detailed, and that insight into normal Manty ops patterns was all that had made this entire operation workable. Besides, he admitted, Argus made him feel better. Manticore's persistently better hardware had begun to assume Sisyphean proportions for Parnell, and it pleased him to see the Manties' faith in their technological superiority boomeranging on them.

He noted with satisfaction the arrival of fresh Manticoran forces in Zuckerman, Dorcas, and Minette, and other reports indicated that the RMN had substantially reinforced its escort and frontier patrol forces. That was good. Every ship committed to any of those areas was one less he'd have to worry about when the war actually opened.

He was less pleased by the information from Seaford Nine. The sheer spatial volume of the cursed Alliance meant it was out of date, of course, but it was also unfortunately vague. Well, Rollins knew how critical the situation was; undoubtedly he was working to refine his data even now, assuming he hadn't already done so.

The CNO let his eyes run down ONI's latest estimates (guesstimates, he corrected himself wryly) of the current strength of Manticore's Home Fleet. There was no possible way to confirm the accuracy of that, but it wasn't really vital at this moment, anyway.

He turned to the tally boards listing the planned first and second phase incursions and the results so far reported, and, for the first time since entering the command center, he frowned and glanced over his shoulder.

"Commodore Perot."

"Sir?" His chief of staff replied.

"What went wrong in Talbot?" Parnell asked, and Perot grimaced.

"We don't know, Sir. The Manties haven't said a word about it, but Admiral Pierres ships must have run into some sort of trap."