“In the meantime, though, and while we’re here,” MacArtney continued, “what the hell are we going to do about Hypatia?” He looked around the table, his expression grim. “It’s bad enough we’re about to lose Beowulf, but at least where Beowulf’s concerned we’ve built the case that they must’ve decided years ago to throw in with the Manties’ imperialist ambitions. We haven’t done that in Hypatia’s case.”

  Personally, Kolokoltsov had distinct reservations about how well they’d “built the case” for Beowulf’s “long-planned treachery” against the League. God knew they’d given it their best shot, and the establishment newsies had embraced the narrative. But while the public opinion metrics (here in Sol, at least; trying to keep up with current public opinion in star systems hundreds of light-years distant was about as impossible as a task came) were favorable to the government’s actions so far, there was no guarantee they’d stay that way. Even here in Sol, a lot of that “favorable” attitude was probably as much lack of the interest that might have led to opposition, which meant it was subject to change without much notice. And Beowulf had a tremendous amount of well-earned prestige within the League. Given time, that prestige was only too likely to reassert itself in the public’s mind, and that could be…unfortunate. Despite which, MacArtney had a point about Hypatia.

  Hypatia hadn’t been on their radar when they first began looking at other star systems which might follow Beowulf’s lead. It should have been, but the Hypatians had adopted a calm wait-and-see attitude which—he admitted it—he and his colleagues had misread as fundamental acceptance of the League’s indissoluble nature. Unfortunately, that had changed when the Manties leaked news of Operation Raging Justice to the media long before Massimo Filareta ever reached Manticore. Hypatia’s relations with Beowulf were closer than its relations with Manticore, but Hypatians had been marrying both Beowulfers and Manticorans for centuries. In a lot of ways, technical Core World status or not, their population’s mindset was more closely attuned to the Fringers beyond the Manticoran Wormhole Junction than it was to Sol and Old Terra, and they hadn’t reacted well to the dispatch of hundreds of superdreadnoughts to attack Manticore—and several million of their relatives—without so much as a formal declaration of war. And once the possibility of secession had been mentioned, they’d moved forward far more quickly than anyone could have imagined, aided by a system constitution which made it easy to call snap referendums to approve—or disapprove—proposed government policies. Kolokoltsov doubted the Hypatian Constitution’s drafters had ever envisioned that provision being used for something like this, but their handiwork had let System President Adam Vangelis and his Attorney General, Thanos Boyagis, put the machinery into motion with astonishing speed.

  Hypatia would actually vote over a T-month before Beowulf, and there was little question that the outcome of the referendum would impact the Beowulf vote.

  It’s not going to change it, though, he reflected. There’s not a doubt in the universe which way Beowulf’s going to vote, and there hasn’t been from the beginning. What Hypatia will do, unfortunately, is to increase the margin in favor of secession, and probably by a lot. And it’ll also mean Hypatia will be the example all the hotheads in those Verge Systems cite when they start calling for their star systems to secede. Unless we can figure out a way to…defuse that particular threat, that is.

  He looked around the table again, thinking about the policy options Stephanos Nye had outlined in the conclusions section of his report. He’d provided half a dozen possible scenarios, but it was clear which one he favored, and Kolokoltsov wondered if the others would be as appalled by it as he was?

  And whether or not they’d find themselves endorsing it anyway.

  HMS Clas Fleming

  Prime Terminus

  Prime-Ajay Hyper Bridge

  “The really surprising difference is how much less…call it ‘cosmopolitan,’ I guess, than Manticorans they tend to be,” Sara Kate Lessem said from the display. “I have to say that’s not something I would’ve expected, and it took me a while to figure it out. But it finally came to me.” She shook her head. “They’re Solarians, and Solarians automatically know everything they need to know about the neobarbs inhabiting the outer dark beyond the League’s borders. So why bother to look for more data, far less open their minds to new opinions? And, to be fair, even some of them who’ve spent their entire careers in the Navy haven’t seen anywhere near as many foreign star systems as our Navy personnel, much less our merchant spacers! For that matter, we see a lot more visitors from other star systems right here in Manticore than most Solarians ever see. So I suppose I can understand—in a way—that they never get exposed to anyone from outside their ‘bubble.’ But that doesn’t make it one bit less scary. If the people in the Solarian Navy are…unsophisticated enough, let’s say, to never even question the nonsense the Mandarins are spewing, how’s the Solarian woman-in-the-street supposed to realize it’s all lies?”

  Now that, Commodore Sir Martin Lessem reflected, pausing the letter for just a moment to refill his coffee cup, is an excellent summation of the problem, sweetheart. He smiled. I always knew you were a sharp one, despite the fact that you decided to marry me! Too bad I don’t have any better clue about the answer to your question than anyone else seems to have at the moment.

  He sipped coffee, gazing wistfully at his wife’s frozen image. At the moment, he and Cruiser Squadron 912 were 387.7 light-years (and forty-five days’ hyper-travel) from the Manticore System, and it was going to be a while before he got the chance to hold her again. Fortunately, letters were another matter—for the moment, at least. Despite the Prime System’s distance from Manticore, it was “only” twenty-nine days’ hyper-travel from Beowulf. As interstellar travel times went, that wasn’t especially bad. It wasn’t anything he’d call good, but he’d had to put up with far worse.

  Of course, that hadn’t been in the middle of a war against the largest star nation in human history. That put rather a different slant on things…and had quite a lot to do with how CruRon 912 came to be floating in interstellar dimness just over seven light-hours from the Prime System’s G0 primary.

  His squadron’s only company was a single platform keeping station on the Prime Terminus of the Prime-Ajay hyper bridge. That platform, the home of Prime Traffic Control, was on the small side. Then again, the Prime-Ajay bridge wasn’t very impressive, compared to the massive Manticoran Wormhole Junction, and saw perhaps five percent of the Junction’s traffic. The Prime System, however, was also only 21.5 LY (and less than three days) from the Agueda System and the Agueda-Stine hyper-bridge. That made this unprepossessing, thoroughly depressing volume of nothingness far more valuable than first impressions—or simple economics—might have suggested, given Lacoön Two’s strategy of seizing control of as many wormholes as possible.

  CruRon 912’s job was to see to it that the Prime Terminus stayed seized, particularly since Vice Admiral Correia had taken the rest of the task force off to Agueda en route to Stine. It would be…inconvenient if he returned to Prime and found he had to return to Manticore through hyper. That was a point worth keeping in mind, since eventually even the Solarian League Navy was bound to start trying to do something about Lacoön’s consequences.

  Lessem grimaced at the thought and scolded himself for it. So far, the Sollies had stepped on their swords with almost unbelievable thoroughness, but they weren’t really all idiots. It was obvious the SLN’s peacetime ossification had gone deeper than anyone in ONI had been prepared to suggest in his wildest dreams, but there were plenty of perfectly good Solarian brains. The Darwinian consequences of the SLN’s obsolescent weapons and…less than ideal operational thinking were bound to push some of those good brains to the forefront far more rapidly than Lessem’s more optimistic—and, in his opinion, chauvinistic—colleagues thought possible. They damned well ought to know better than that, but it wasn’t really fair for him to fault them too severely for it. He found himself doing it too often for him to be casting any stones, witness the “even” of his own thoughts!

  The good news, as his letter from Sara Kate reemphasized, was that those good brains had to start digging at the bottom of an awful deep hole. What had happened thirty-nine days ago made that painfully clear. He couldn’t imagine why Massimo Filareta had been stupid enough to open fire when Duchess Harrington had so conclusively demonstrated the hopelessness of Eleventh Fleet’s position, but what had happened to his ships was a clear example of that Darwinian process in action. And given her position at Bassingford, Sara Kate was better placed than most to see the human cost.

  He sipped more coffee and touched the play button again.

  “Another thing that’s pretty obvious,” she said, “is that an awful lot of them—even some of their senior officers—still outright refuse to acknowledge how outdated their hardware is. I know that’s got to be hard for them, but I don’t understand how they can stay in such deep denial after what happened to their fleet! Dr. Flint—I think I’ve told you about him before; he’s the new Head of Psychology here at Bassingford—tells me that’s exactly what’s happening, that they’re still in the ‘denial phase,’ and I suppose that makes sense. It’s not exactly what I’d call a survival trait, though!” She shook her head on the display, and her expression had turned grimmer. “If they can’t get past that pretty darn quickly, a lot more of their people are going to wind up under our care here at Bassingford…or dead. I’d like to think we’d be faster to ac—”

  The display froze, Sara Kate’s voice sliced off in mid-word by the sudden, shrill, unmistakable stridency of the General Quarters alarm. Lessem was still jerking erect in his chair when a very different voice came over the speakers.

  “Battle Stations! Battle Stations!” it barked. “All hands, man Battle Stations! This is no drill! Battle Stations! Battle Stations!”

  “Talk to me, Lester,” Commodore Lessem said crisply, two minutes later, as he strode out of the lift car and onto the flag bridge of HMS Clas Fleming, the Saganami-C-class flagship of both Cruiser Squadron 912 and Task Group 47.3.

  “They came out of hyper just over three minutes ago, Sir,” Commander Lester Thúri, CruRon 912’s chief of staff replied, straightening and turning from the display over which he’d been bent. “The good news is, they’re right on top of the outer platforms, so we had eyes on them as soon as they arrived. The bad news is, there’s a hell of a lot of them.”

  Lessem made a “keep talking” motion with the fingers of his right hand, and Thúri gestured to the master display’s rash of crimson icons.

  “We’re still putting the numbers together, Sir, but it looks like at least a hundred Solly warships. We’ve got four really big-assed impeller wedges. They’re big enough to be superdreadnoughts, but they look commercial. CIC’s best guess is that we’re looking at somewhere around fifty battlecruisers, supported by another forty or fifty light cruisers and destroyers, and that the big signatures are transports or fleet support vessels.”

  “Who was it back on Old Earth that said quantity has a quality all its own?” Lessem asked whimsically, and Thúri snorted harshly.

  “Think they’re here because of us, Sir?”

  “It’s possible.” Lessem rubbed his chin as he frowned at the master display. “It would be an awful fast reaction compared to anything we’ve seen out of them so far, but there’s been time for someone to reach Wincote. We didn’t see anyone leaving the system, but we all know how much that means. If that’s what happened, though, they must’ve had these people sitting there ready to translate out the instant they heard about us.”

  Commander Thúri nodded, moving over to stand beside his tall, square-built commodore, and his expression was thoughtful. At the moment, Lessem had exactly ten heavy cruisers, only four of them Saganami-Cs, supported by six destroyers and HMS David K. Brown, one of the new David Taylor-class fast support vessels.

  One might, the commander reflected, call that a slight force imbalance.

  Lessem didn’t know what his chief of staff was thinking at that moment, but if he had known, he wouldn’t have disagreed. It was true that his Saganami-Cs and HMS Ajax and HMS Honda Tadakatsu, the pair of Roland-class destroyers attached to TG 47.3, had full loadouts of Mark 16 dual-drive missiles, but the Rolands’ Achilles’ heel was the class’s limited magazine space. Each of them carried only two hundred and forty of the big, powerful missiles, less than half the number a Saganami-C stowed. And none of the rest of his ships’ internal launchers could handle the Mark 16 at all.

  Unfortunately, the Royal Manticoran Navy didn’t have an unlimited supply of Mark 16-capable warships, and a lot of those it did have had been retained for the Grand Fleet or dispatched to Admiral Gold Peak’s Tenth Fleet in the Talbott Sector. He did have six Saganami-Bs—Shelly Ann Jensen, Margaret Mallory, William S. Patterson, Oliver Savander, Rich Rucholka, and Jennifer Woodard—all of whom were armed with the extended range Mark 13, but that weapon’s powered envelope was far shorter than the Mark 16’s; it was a single-drive missile and couldn’t incorporate a ballistic phase into its flight profile; and its warhead was lighter, to boot.

  Which may be something of a moot point, he reflected as the red icons of the Solarian task force began accelerating towards the wormhole at a sedate 375 G.

  Battles outside the hyper-limit of a star system were virtually unheard of, for several very good reasons. The most salient was that there was seldom anything outside the hyper-limit worth fighting for. Wormholes like the one at TG 47.3’s back were the primary exception to that rule, and so was the occasional valuable resource or bit of system infrastructure, like a particularly rich asteroid belt, which lay closer to the primary but still beyond its hyper-limit.

  But there was another excellent reason battles were seldom fought outside hyper-limits: any starship outside a limit could translate into hyper any time it chose to. And because no one ever willingly fought a battle he didn’t expect to win, the weaker side in any confrontation outside a hyper-limit always chose to translate into hyper before the stronger side could engage it.

  Unless there was some reason it couldn’t, that was.

  That was the true reason for the massive fortifications covering the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. They were designed to annihilate anyone foolish enough to attempt an attack through one of the Junction’s secondary termini, of course, but in addition, they were intended to provide sufficient concentrated combat power to stand up against almost any conceivable attack through hyper-space.

  None of those fortifications were present on the Prime Terminus, however. Prime’s five billion citizens had never found it necessary to build or maintain deep-space forts or anything resembling an actual navy. Although the Prime System was nominally independent, it was “closely affiliated” with the Solarian League, which meant it could rely upon the largest navy in the galaxy for its defense and required only a handful of lightly armed units to police the system’s internal volume. And since everyone knew the Prime Terminus was under League protection, there’d never been a need to fortify it. Anyone stupid enough to seize it would soon have found the SLN knocking on his home star system’s front door.

  Ajay, at the far end of the terminus, was not “closely affiliated” with the League. In fact, Ajay didn’t much care for the League. Although it maintained a civil relationship with Old Chicago, it had been an independent star nation for the better part of three hundred and fifty T-years. It had, in fact, been settled by colonists from other Verge systems who hadn’t cared for the way the League’s foreign policy was evolving, and their descendants had a not unreasonable suspicion that the Office of Frontier Security would really have liked control of the Ajay Terminus. As a counterweight to those OFS ambitions, the system had cultivated cordial relations and a long-standing, robust trade relationship with both the Star Kingdom of Manticore and Beowulf.

  Despite that, System President Adelaide Tyson had protested in vociferous terms when Task Force 47 arrived on her doorstep and announced it was taking possession of her star system’s greatest natural resource as part of Lacoön Two. Lessem was pretty sure most of her protests had been in the nature of covering her star-nation’s posterior if things went badly for the Grand Alliance. They put her officially on record as strongly opposed to the Star Empire’s “patently illegal” seizure of every warp terminus in sight. Hopefully, that would be sufficient to protect Ajay from the League’s ire in the event of an eventual Solarian triumph. For that matter, win or lose, the League would still be there the day after the peace treaty was finally signed. Ajay would still have to live with it, and Sollies had long memories. Letting word get back to Old Chicago that she’d told the RMN she was delighted to see it in her star system was likely to put a certain strain on that future relationship.

  Under the circumstances, Commodore Lessem found it difficult to fault President Tyson, especially since however strongly she might have protested, she and her modest Ajay System Navy had stayed out of Task Force 47’s way and the Ajay Astro Control services had cooperated smoothly—although only after protesting stringently—with the foreign navy which had illegally seized control of its wormhole.

  System Director Gregor Cho had reacted rather differently here in Prime, however. He’d protested even more strongly than Tyson, and he’d ordered his Terminus Traffic Control Command to refuse any cooperation with the invaders. Vice Admiral Correia had expected that and brought along his own specialists, who now provided a skeleton crew for the Prime Traffic Control platform after the Primese crews had been evicted from it. The vice admiral had also taken it as a given that Cho would find a way to send word to the League as soon as possible, but neither he nor Lessem had anticipated this prompt a response.

  Which brought Lessem back to the unpalatable odds headed his way.

  “Should we call Captain Rice forward, Sir?” Commander Thomas Wozniak, his operations officer, asked quietly.