David Weber - At All Costs

"Sir, we've just picked up a hyper footprint. It looks like at least two ships, probably destroyers or light cruisers."

"Where?" Captain Durand demanded, walking across the space station's command deck to Plotting.

"Forty-two light-minutes out from the primary, on our side and right on the ecliptic, Sir," Lieutenant Bibeau replied.

"So the foxes are scouting the hen house," Durand murmured.

The Plotting officer looked up at him a bit strangely; Charles Bibeau was from the slums of Nouveau Paris, whereas Durand came from the farming planet of Rochelle, and the Skipper kept coming up with oddball metaphors and similes. But the lieutenant caught his drift just fine, and nodded in agreement.

"All right, Lieutenant," Durand said after a moment, resting one hand lightly on Bibeau's shoulder as he watched the hyper footprints fade from the plot. "Keep an eye out. If we can pick up their platforms, so much the better, but the main thing I want to know is when anyone else hypers in."

"Aye, Sir."

Durand patted him on the shoulder once, then turned and walked slowly back to his own command chair.

Somewhere out there, he knew, Manty reconnaissance arrays were creeping stealthily inward, spying out the details of the Solon System's defenses. He knew what they were going to see, and it wasn't all that impressive: a single division of old-style superdreadnoughts, a slightly understrength battlecruiser squadron, and a couple of hundred LACs. Hardly enough to cause a Manty raiding force to break a sweat.

Which was fine with Captain Alexis Durand. Just fine.

"We have Commander Estwicke's report, Your Grace," Andrea Jaruwalski said.

"Good."

Honor turned away from the visual display's gorgeous imagery. Task Force 82 forged through hyper-space, closing in on its objective steadily in close enough formation for the display to show the glowing disks of the nearest ships' Warshawski sails. Intolerant, Imperator's sister ship and the flagship of Rear Admiral Allen Morowitz, the division's CO, was the nearest vessel. Her sails-three hundred kilometers across-flickered with lambent fire, like a slice of heat lightning moving across the glowing depths of hyper-space in a visual spectacle Honor never tired of, but she turned her back upon it with what was almost a sense of relief at Jaruwalski's announcement.

"Let's see it," she said, crossing to the secondary plot at Jaruwalski's bridge station. The ops officer touched the keyboard, shunting the download from HMS Ambuscade onto the display, and then she and her admiral stood back and watched the data assemble itself.

"Not as much firepower as we'd anticipated, Your Grace," Jaruwalski observed after a moment.

"No."

Honor frowned and rubbed the tip of her nose. All their planning had assumed Lorn would be the target more likely to be covered by mobile units, which was why she'd swapped Alice Truman two of Alistair McKeon's superdreadnought divisions and Matsuzawa Hirotaka's older battlecruisers in return for Michelle Henke's more modern but understrength squadron. She'd also given Alice Winston Bradshaw's Seventh Cruiser Squadron, with its four Edward Saganami-C-class cruisers, while she took Charise Fanaafi's CruRon 12, with its older Saganami and Star Knight-class cruisers. Still, they'd anticipated more defensive strength than this for a target as populous and economically important as Solon.

"I make it two superdreadnoughts," she continued after moment, "plus seven battlecruisers and roughly-" she consulted a display sidebar "-a hundred and ninety LACs."

"For mobile units, yes, Your Grace," Jaruwalski agreed. "But it looks like they've got a fairly dense shell of missile pods in close to the planetary industry around Arthur."

"And another little clutch here, around Merlin," Honor pointed out, and frowned some more. "That's a rather strange spot for them, wouldn't you say?"

"I certainly would."

Jaruwalski looked at the data and pursed her lips while she considered it.

"That's much too far out to cover the Nimue Belt's extraction centers," she said. "Is there something going on out among Merlin's moons that we don't know about?"

"I suppose there could be," Honor mused, gazing at the stupendous gas giant-only a bit smaller than Old Earth's Jupiter-in question. "According to the astro data, a couple of Merlin's moons are darned nearly the size of Manticore, and it's got a total of eleven. There could be something exploitable in among all of those. But whatever it is, it's on the far side of the primary from Arthur at the moment, anyway. So I think we'll just leave Merlin alone and concentrate on Arthur and the belter installations."

"That suits me just fine, Your Grace," Jaruwalski agreed.

"It looks like our best bet is probably Alpha Three," Honor continued. "I'd just as soon avoid any unnecessary bells and whistles."

"Alpha Three works for me, Your Grace," Jaruwalski agreed again. "Shall I pass the word to Admiral Mikl¢s?"

"Go ahead." Honor nodded. "And tell him to doublecheck his alternate recovery points with his COLACs."

"Of course, Your Grace," Jaruwalski said, then paused, looking at her admiral thoughtfully. "Um, is there some particular reason you wanted to do that, Your Grace?"

"Nothing I can put a finger on," Honor said after a moment. "I guess I'm just a little antsy. As you say, we'd anticipated a significantly heavier defensive force for a system this important."

"Yes, Ma'am. You're thinking that whoever's in command here has tried to pull a Bellefeuille on us?"

"Not really," Honor said almost unwillingly, then shook her head at her own formless misgivings. "Estwicke knows her job, and everybody was thoroughly briefed on what happened at Chantilly."

And, she reminded herself, that's one reason we gave her an extra eighteen hours to scout the system. If there'd been anything close enough to Arthur to pose a threat, Ambuscade and Intruder would have found it.

"I suppose part of it could just be the fact that Solon lies right in the middle of a gravity wave," she continued aloud. "I always get a sort of uncomfortable feeling between my shoulder blades in a case like this."

Jaruwalski nodded. No flag officer really liked attacking a star system which lay in the middle of a hyper-space gravity wave-not unless she was totally confident she'd brought along enough firepower to take the system outright-for a very simple reason. A starship could not enter a gravity wave and survive without functioning Warshawski sails, and no ship could produce a Warshawski sail if it had lost an alpha node out of one of its impeller rings. Which meant a single unlucky hit could leave a warship with otherwise trifling damage unable to withdraw into hyper if the rest of its task force or fleet had to run for it.

Frankly, Jaruwalski suspected that was one reason Honor had assigned herself to command the Solon attack. Well, that and the fact that they'd anticipated-erroneously, as it turned out-that Solon, with its heavily populated planet and relatively thriving economy would have considerably heavier fixed defenses than Lorn.

"As I say," Honor continued, "I don't have any real reason to feel uneasy, but have him doublecheck, anyhow." She smiled crookedly. "I'm not trying to develop a reputation for infallible intuition, so it won't hurt anything if I do a little excess worrying and people catch me at it."

"Captain Durand! Captain Durand to the command deck immediately!"

Alexis Durand punched the flush button, yanked up his trousers, and hit the lavatory door running. One of the space station's civilian maintenance techs grinned as the naval officer charged past him, still sealing his trousers. Well, Durand could stand a little civilian amusement at his expense.