“What about protecting Ajay, though, Ma’am?” Rosiak asked. She raised an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged. “That has to be fairly high on their priority list, too, I’d think,” he pointed out.

  “I think we have two main possibilities,” Isotalo said. “Either what we’ve been looking at here on the Prime side of the terminus is all they’ve got—or their primary force, at any rate—or it’s not. Given how many missiles they threw at us in that one salvo, and given what we’ve heard so far about the kind of salvos Manty capital ships can throw, I’m inclined to think there can’t be any wallers on the Ajay side. I don’t care what some of our less brilliant colleagues might do if they’d brought a couple of those ‘podnoughts’ of theirs along, but all I’d have done would have been to run the hell away, and they’d have to assume any SLN admiral with a brain would be thinking exactly that. No way are we going to cross swords with something that can do what those damned things did to Filareta!”

  Both her subordinates nodded in agreement—and profound relief—at that.

  “From their perspective, maintaining control of this side of the terminus has to be more attractive than simply defending it from the other side, especially if they’re operating against Agueda. So, again, if they’d had that kind of firepower available, I’m pretty sure they’d have brought it through to chase us off or at least make us keep our distance from the terminus. Given all that, I’m inclined to assume—provisionally, at least—that what we’ve seen is pretty much all they’ve got. It looks to me like they’ve decided it’s more important to hold this terminus—and probably slam the door shut behind us, if we go through it—than it is to defend from the Ajay side.”

  “But that leaves everything in Ajay exposed, Ma’am,” Rosiak said.

  “It does, but think about it.” Isotalo’s expression had turned to stone. “What’s it exposed to, as far as they know? Any of their shipping—or anyone else’s in Ajay, for that matter—should have plenty of time to run for it before we turn up. Manties are damned good at commerce protection, everybody knows that, and that’s what’s going to be on their minds, because they don’t know about Buccaneer. They can’t.”

  Rosiak inhaled deeply, and Ramaalas’s expression turned almost as stonelike as Isotalo’s.

  Of course it did, the admiral thought. Kimmo doesn’t like Buccaneer one bit more than I do. We’ll do it, because those are our orders and because there’s no other way we can hurt the frigging Manties at the moment. But he doesn’t like it, and he and Bart both know as well as I do that no Manticoran naval officer would imagine for a moment that the Solarian League, of all star nations, would start systematically destroying entire star systems’ industrial and orbital infrastructures. Stopping that sort of thing was one of the main reasons the League was created in the first place!

  The very thought revolted her, but she’d had plenty of time to get over that. And the critical point was that the Manties didn’t know about—and would never expect—anything like Buccaneer. A commerce raid, yes. An attack on any Manty warships they encountered, the seizure of any merchant vessel they met—any and all of that, they would anticipate. And if anything in the galaxy was certain, it was that the Manty CO had sent one of her units back to Ajay to tell every single legitimate commerce-raiding target to get the hell out of the star system. That meant she’d cleared her responsibilities in Ajay, and that meant it would actually make strategic sense for her to let TF 1027 through the terminus into Ajay and then close it behind Isotalo, forcing her ships to take the long way home the way she’d anticipated forcing the Manties’ Agueda force to do.

  “Either way,” she said, “we still have Buccaneer to carry out.”

  She settled herself in her chair, contemplating the consolidating icons on the plot, then looked at Rosiak.

  “I want Quigley here on the terminus.”

  The operations officer looked startled, and she chuckled harshly.

  “Not to stay, Bart,” she reassured him. “Trust me, I want her task group in and out as quickly as possible. By the time she gets here, you’re going to have put together a pod deployment plan that will let me detach Santini with enough firepower to give even a division of Manty superdreadnoughts something to worry about. Ideally, I want him to be able to hold the terminus against anything they throw at it long enough for us to withdraw from Ajay, hopefully with Buccaneer’s mission objectives completed.”

  And, please, God, without Parthian on my conscience, she added silently.

  “Everything we’ve heard about their operational stance suggests they’re seizing the wormholes primarily with battlecruisers and cruisers,” she continued serenely. “I think that’s most likely the case here and that we won’t be looking at superdreadnoughts whenever their Agueda force gets back. If we are, though, then Santini’s orders will be to punch as many missiles at them as he can from as short a range as possible, accepting that they’ll be blind fire, before he translates out and runs the hell back to Wincote. And before he does that, one of his tin cans will transit to Ajay and warn the rest of us what’s coming up our collective backside.

  “Frankly, given the combat differential, they probably wouldn’t really need wallers to kick our butts,” she said frankly. “A half-dozen of those big battlecruisers of theirs could do the job without breaking a sweat, especially since that logistics vessel of theirs is sitting out there somewhere with a load of additional pods for them. And, Kimmo, I want Santini’s orders to be clear. I don’t care whether it’s superdreadnoughts, battlecruisers, or a horde of outraged gerbils, if the Manties turn up and start firing shit pots of missiles at him, then he had better get his arse into hyper and out of here before any of them get a chance to hit anything.”

  “Understood, Ma’am.”

  “Well, so far, you seem to’ve read them pretty well, Sir,” Lester Thúri said quietly as he and Commodore Lessem stood watching the master plot and Lessem’s steward replenished their coffee mugs.

  They’d been watching the Solarians through the Ghost Rider platforms they’d left behind for almost nine hours now. The wormhole and its approaches formed a zone three-quarters of a light-second across, defining a sphere with circumference of 2.36 light-seconds and a volume of over 5.9 quadrillion cubic kilometers. The Solarian warships were a handful of minute specks in that enormity, and it was impossible for the plot to show the individual missile pods they’d been busily deploying ever since they’d taken possession of it. The hidden recon platforms and the computers were keeping track, though, and according to them, the Solarian CO had placed approximately seventy thousand pods. Judging from the earlier firing pattern, each of those pods contained only six missiles, considerably fewer than Eleventh Fleet’s pods at Manticore, but that still came to roughly 420,000 missiles, which would be enough to give just about anyone pause.

  They’d also sent a quartet of destroyers through to Ajay, clearly probing the terminus with light units before their battlecruisers made transit into the face of something unpleasant. One of those DDs had returned five hours ago, so it would appear So-po and Obusier had executed Lessem’s orders and kept right on accelerating away from the far side of the terminus. No doubt the other three Sollies were making sure the approaches to the Ajay Terminus stayed as clear as they were just then.

  “Maybe,” Lessem replied to the chief of staff’s comment, his voice as low as Thúri’s had been. “But I have to admit, there’s one thing—at least one thing—I can’t figure out, and that worries me.”

  “And what’s that, Sir?”

  “What the hell they’re after.” The commodore shook his head, eyes narrowed in thought. “I mean, there are only two reasons for them to be here. One is to take control of the terminus before we do, and they obviously didn’t manage that. I don’t care how many missile pods these people are deploying, they won’t have enough—not without Ghost Rider and Apollo—to keep Admiral Correia from kicking their asses all the way from here to Old Chicago when Pierrier catches him with our dispatch.”

  He paused, quirking an eyebrow at the commander as if to invite a response, but Thúri only nodded. It was a given that the Culverin-class destroyer would bring back a quick response from the rest of the task force as soon as she reached it.

  “Well, in that case, what we’re seeing is an exercise in futility. If they’d gotten here before we did—before the Admiral headed for Agueda—then all this activity of theirs might make sense as a way to fortify the terminus against anything coming through from Ajay. If they’re attacked from this side, though, not so much. So from that perspective, they should already have headed home. Or, if not that, I don’t see any reason for them to invest this many missile pods on this side of the terminus in an effort to prevent the inevitable. Transit to Ajay and fortify hell out of the Ajay Terminus, sure. Failing that, hang around, make us maneuver against them, make us use up missiles the way we made them use up missiles—all of that I could see…sort of. But any of that would come in a piss-poor second to forting up in Ajay, and even if they can churn the things out like cookies, seventy thousand of them—the next best thing to eighty thousand—is an awful lot of industrial effort to just toss out the airlock.”

  He paused again, puffing his cheeks and frustration, then sipped coffee.

  “But that brings us to the second reason for them to be here, and that’s because they intended to raid Ajay. What it looks to me like they’re doing is fortifying the terminus against us—our task group, not Admiral Correia—before they poke their noses into Ajay. They want to keep us from sneaking back in and re-taking the Prime Terminus to ambush them when they come home again while they move on Ajay. But they’ve got to know we’ve had plenty of time to evacuate all of our ships and personnel from the system, if that’s what we’ve decided to do. So why raid an empty cookie jar? I mean, I suppose it would be an exercise in showing the flag, turning up in Ajay after they’ve ‘chased the nasty Manties out of town,’ but that’d be a purely cosmetic accomplishment. Again, stacking half a million missiles out where they’re likely to lose them for little or no return, strikes me as a pretty stiff price tag for a symbolic ‘victory’!”

  “That’s a valid point, Sir,” Thúri said after gazing down into his own coffee mug for several thoughtful seconds. “And I don’t have an answer.”

  “Neither do I, and that’s why it worries me.” Lessem waved his mug at the icons of the Solarian ships. “We’re missing something. There’s got to be a reason they’re doing this, and I can’t shake the suspicion that whatever it is, it represents a significant shift in their strategy.”

  “Well, maybe we can find out what it’s all about from the survivors, Sir,” Thúri said. “You’re right about what’s going to happen to them on this side when the Admiral comes back—assuming your own brainchild doesn’t send them on their way even sooner than that. But whatever they’ve got in mind for Ajay, I think they’re going to find it just a little more difficult to carry out than they think.”

  “Maybe.” Lessem smiled briefly. It was remarkably cold, that smile. “We put enough effort into the cheese, anyway.”

  “The Task Force is ready to proceed, Ma’am,” Rear Admiral Ramaalas said formally, and Jane Isotalo nodded.

  “I’m assuming that if we’d heard anything untoward from Captain Oglesby’s division, you’d have brought that minor fact to my attention.”

  “Yes, Ma’am. I believe you could safely assume that.”

  “Very good,” she said. “In that case, Admiral, proceed.”

  “Aye, aye, Ma’am.” Ramaalas looked at Rear Admiral Rosiak. “Execute,” he said.

  “Aye, aye, Sir. Executing now.”

  Rosiak touched a macro, and the carefully orchestrated movement plan unfolded with metronome precision.

  Isotalo sat back in her command chair, fingers of her right hand toying absently with the closure of her skinsuit while she did her primary job: radiating serene confidence as her subordinates executed her directives.

  She still didn’t like the idea of Buccaneer one bit, but she felt a deep sense of satisfaction as her task force rumbled toward its objective. After the seemingly unending tide of Manticoran triumphs and Solarian debacles, TF 1027 was about to execute its orders flawlessly. According to Captain Hieronymus Oglesby and his three destroyers, the far side of the terminus was just as naked as she’d hoped it would be. The destroyers’ recon drones had confirmed—as she’d expected—that any Manticoran or neutral shipping in Ajay had cleared the limit and disappeared across the alpha wall long since, and that was a pity. But Buccaneer’s true objective couldn’t escape into hyper, and there wasn’t a trace of a Manty warship to be found.

  She reminded herself of how astoundingly good Manticoran electronic warfare had proved both against Eleventh Fleet and against her own missile salvo right here on the terminus. It was possible there were still Manty warships hiding under stealth somewhere in Ajay, but it would have required direct divine intervention to hide anything bigger than a frigate from her destroyers and their reconnaissance platforms within ten or twenty light-seconds of the terminus. The terminus itself was enough to interfere with sensors—enough to make it more difficult to detect gravitic and electronic emissions signatures in the first place, although not seriously enough to significantly degrade fire control once the target had been picked up in the first place—but it was also, for all its size, a limited volume. Any ship large enough to pose a threat to her battlecruisers that couldn’t be picked up by Warshawskis or radar would have a hard time—a very hard time—hiding from visual and thermal detection.

  No, she thought. The henhouse door really is wide open…damn it.

  SLNS Hindustan, leading Lamont Bonrepaux’s TG 1027.1 headed into the terminus and flickered into nonexistence on her way to join the destroyers in Ajay.

  Ajay Terminus

  Prime-Ajay Hyper Bridge

  “So, you still liking the odds Giselle gave you, Andy?” Commander Aaloka Menendez inquired, turning her command chair to face Andreas Bazignos, her executive officer.

  Lieutenant Bazignos looked back without saying a word, and Sarah Chi, HMS Boomslang’s tactical officer, chuckled without taking her attention from her own displays.

  “Should’ve known better, Andy,” she told him. “First, because the Commodore…well, he’s the Commodore. When was the last time you saw him get it wrong? Whenever it was, I’m pretty sure it was the first time, too. But even leaving that aside, nobody in his right mind bets against Giselle. And even if they did, nobody’d be—I hate to say it, but ‘dumb’ is the only word that comes to mind—to do it when she offers odds. What were you thinking?”

  Bazignos maintained his dignified silence, but his lips twitched. Chi had a point. At forty T-years, Lieutenant Giselle Parkkinen, Fire Snake’s executive officer, was the “old woman” of the group, seven T-months older than Commander Menendez. Her relatively ancient age for her rank had nothing to do with lack of competence; she’d just been busy doing other things until the People’s Republic of Haven’s Operation Thunderbolt brought her a direct commission from the merchant service. If she didn’t end up with an admiral’s stars, it would only be because somebody managed to kill her along the way.

  And, as his good friend Chi had just so kindly pointed out, Parkkinen never had the wrong end of the odds in a friendly wager. She also had a nasty—and expensive—knack for filling inside straights. For that matter, she was one of the best TOs he’d ever met, and her analysis of Plan Estocada—and what the hell was an “estocada,” anyway?—had been spot-on so far. He didn’t see much chance that was going to change anytime soon, and he wondered what he’d been sniffing when he took her bet.

  “Well, I’d have to say it’s not looking too good from your side,” Menendez said now, twitching her head at the red icons of the three Solarian destroyers on Boomslang’s smallish master plot. “Those three seem to be doing exactly what she—and the Commodore; let’s not forget him—predicted.”

  “I know,” Bazignos admitted finally. “And I knew it’d probably work out exactly that way from the beginning. But the odds were so good!”

  “I only hope you’re luckier in love than you are at cards and betting,” Menendez told him.

  “Oh, I am—I am!” he assured her with a broad smile.

  “Funny,” Chi offered, still watching the quiescent destroyers. “That’s not what Sally Parkins down in Engineering said.”

  “You don’t want to believe everything you hear from snipes,” Bazignos warned her. “Besides, I think she was uncomfortable in my presence because of my godlike good looks.” He shook his head sadly. “One of the crosses I bear. The women in my life realize they just can’t compete with my superhuman physical beauty.”

  Both women guffawed, and Lieutenant (JG) Josh Whitaker, Boomslang’s communications officer, looked across the cramped command deck at him with round, admiring eyes.

  “Is that what you call it, Sir?” he asked in awed tones. “And here I thought your last name derived from the…lordly dimensions of your proboscis.”

  Bazignos lifted the proboscis in question—which was indeed of “lordly dimensions”—with an equally lordly sniff.

  “Alas, it’s ever my fate to be maligned by the little people,” he said. “But that’s okay! I’m used to it.” He heaved a deep sigh. “I’ve been dealing with it since high school, after all.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Chi said. “Not the way I remember it,” she added, and it was Bazignos’s turn to chuckle. He and Chi had known each other since childhood, and she was probably his closest friend in the galaxy.

  “That’s because your mind is starting to go and—”

  “Hyper footprint!” Chi snapped, cutting him off in midsentence. “Somebody transiting the terminus, Ma’am!”