“I’d have to say that fits my own observation of Ms. Tsakabikou,” Kotouč acknowledged.

  “I’m sure it does.”

  Vangelis stood between the two Manticorans—at 165 centimeters, he was shorter than either of them—looking out the window for several seconds. Then he drew a deep breath.

  “I’m more concerned about the non-Hypatians here in the system, Admiral,” he said, turning to look at Kotouč. “In particular, Rupert Chernikov—he’s the Managing Director for Alexandria Belt Extraction Industries—fought the referendum tooth and nail. I’ve always gotten along well with Rupert, on a personal basis, but that doesn’t mean as much as it used to, after what happened to Sandra Crandall and Massimo Filareta. And not just for people from outside the system, either. Makiko Allerton and I have been friends since we were kids, and she’s scarcely speaking to me these days.”

  Regret darkened his brown eyes, but he went on levelly.

  “I don’t want to think Rupert would try any kind of actual sabotage, and it’s not like we’re one of the Protectorates. Alexandria Extraction’s majority-owned right here in Hypatia, with less than a quarter of the voting stock held by out-system interests, and even if he was inclined to try something like that, ninety-five percent of ABEI’s employees are Hypatian. I can’t completely rule it out, though, and the fact that his employees are Hypatian, doesn’t mean all of them supported the referendum.

  “There are other assets and operations here in the system, however, that are owned primarily by one of the transstellars who’re likely to think secession doesn’t bode well for their long-term economic interests. My local law enforcement people are keeping an eye on all of the prospective problem children we’ve been able to identify, but it’s been my experience that it’s seldom the problems you see coming that do the damage. I assume it’s that way in military operations, as well?”

  “Oh, I think you could safely say that, yes, Mister President,” Kotouč agreed. “Naval officers hate surprises, for a lot of reasons.”

  “Well, I don’t really anticipate any armed resistance or major sabotage. What I’m more concerned about are people carrying tales to the League out of school, so to speak, and we’ve got a lot of privately owned hyper-capable ships here in Hypatia. There’s no way we could keep someone from running to Old Chicago with the outcome of the referendum, and I’m fairly sure someone already has. I know.” He waved one hand. “The results haven’t been officially announced yet, mainly because we’re still counting some of the absentee ballots from the belter habitats.” He shook his head. “That’s where our more anarchistic citizens hang out. The dinosaurs in some of those habitats still use paper ballots.”

  Both of Kotouč’s eyebrows arched this time, and Vangelis snorted.

  “The good news, from our perspective, is that they’re even more…irritated with Old Chicago than most, so the only question is how much they’ll inflate the margin of victory. But it’s been my administration’s policy from the beginning that we won’t certify the result of the referendum until every single voter’s been given ample opportunity to cast his or her ballot and have it counted.” The president’s expression sobered. “I very much doubt that early victory projections would actually have suppressed the vote against secession, but I didn’t intend to let that happen. Nothing is going to taint this referendum or its results, Admiral. This is the kind of decision where a decent respect for history requires that it be arrived at openly, honestly, and transparently.”

  “I agree entirely, Mister President,” Kotouč said, and Goode nodded. Her reports had prepared Kotouč for a system chief executive who took his responsibilities seriously, and everything he’d seen since arriving in Hypatia only confirmed that impression.

  “The bad news is that we’re still at least a day-half from actually certifying the count,” Vangelis continued, and Kotouč nodded. At just over forty hours, Hypatia’s planetary day was longer than the planetary days of most colonized planets, and its inhabitants had divided it into more manageable-sized “day-halves” and “full-days”—or, more commonly, simply “halves” and “fulls.”

  “I’d just as soon keep your arrival under wraps until those last ballots come in and get counted,” Vangelis continued. “My official position—and my personal promise to Senator Allerton and her supporters—has been that no foreign warship will enter Hypatia orbit until the final vote’s been certified by the Department of State and the Supreme Court.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that, Sir,” Kotouč said. “My orders were to proceed to Hypatia as quickly as possible to provide security here in the system after the referendum. And I’m afraid neither Mr. Lambrou nor Ms. Tsakabikou warned me about your ‘dinosaurs’ and any delays in the vote tally. I can understand why it might not have occurred to them to mention it, but I’d assumed the result would have been announced no later than yesterday.”

  “I realized that as soon as you turned up.” Vangelis nodded briskly. “And certainly no one’s faulting you or your people for how quickly you got here! For that matter, none of your ships are in Hypatia orbit, are they?”

  “No, Mister President, they aren’t,” Kotouč acknowledged. And now I understand why System Traffic Control sent us to the Alexandria Belt rather than to Hypatia, too.

  Fortunately, the Alexandria Belt was an inner-system belt, between Hypatia and its G4 primary but less than a full light-minute from the capital planet. The shuttle flight from Phantom’s current orbit to Vivliothḗkē Field had taken less than two hours.

  “I know it’s inconvenient,” Vangelis said, “but I think it’s important that I keep my promises. The real reason I asked you to come visit me today—and to come in what I believe you Navy people call ‘mufti’—was to explain why we’re keeping your arrival under wraps and won’t be having any formal dinners to welcome you to Hypatia for the next half-day or so.” He smiled. “I didn’t want you thinking it was because you were unwelcome!”

  SLNS Camperdown

  Task Force 1030

  Solarian League Navy

  “Do you think they’ve announced the outcome yet, Admiral?” The Honorable Madhura Yang-O’Grady asked as the lift car slowed.

  “I’m afraid your sources are probably better where that’s concerned than mine are, Ms. Yang-O’Grady,” Hajdu Győző replied. Which self-evident fact, he reflected, she should already have possessed.

  “I know.” Yang-O’Grady’s tone carried a hint of apology as the lift car doors opened on the passage outside SLNS Camperdown’s flag briefing room. She was almost eighteen centimeters shorter than Hajdu, with green eyes, a dark sandalwood complexion, and naturally crimson hair which was quite striking, and he suspected that under more usual circumstances, she had a lively sense of humor.

  “I believe that question comes under the heading of making inane conversation as a way to distract myself and keep my brain from wearing any more holes in itself,” she added, as if to confirm his suspicion.

  “I see.” Hajdu’s lips twitched. “In that case, Ms. Yang-O’Grady, I am enchanted to have been of service.”

  “Thank you.”

  Yang-O’Grady rewarded him with a smile, but there was a tautness—a darkness—behind her amusement. Given the nature of her assignment, a certain tension was not simply understandable but to be expected, Hajdu thought. In fact, only a moron—which Madhura Yang-O’Grady manifestly was not—wouldn’t have been worried as hell by the job she’d been handed. But this seemed to go farther, he thought, and wondered about its possible implications for their mission.

  They reached the briefing room hatch, and Hajdu courteously waved her through it. The command structure for their current operation was…complex. As Innokentiy Kolokoltsov’s personal representative, it was Yang-O’Grady’s job to convince the Hypatia System Unified Government to renounce the results of its referendum if, as all reports indicated was inevitable, the decision to secede had been sustained. It was Hajdu’s job to float ominously in the background, lending weight to Yang-O’Grady’s arguments. Unless and until Yang-O’Grady failed in her own mission, that was all he was supposed to do.

  At that point, however, Buccaneer came into play. From his staff’s analysis, there was no way that wasn’t going to happen in the end, and a part of the admiral wanted to simply get on with it. If Hypatia had chosen to betray its eight hundred T-years of loyalty and mutual obligations to its fellow League member systems, then it was time Hypatians were shown the error of their ways. Hopefully, their experience would make other potential traitors wise, and if he had to do it, he wanted it over and done as quickly as possible. The sooner Hypatia’s experience became general knowledge, the less likely other traitors were to arise.

  Besides, mixing politics and military policy was never a good idea. The result was usually an abortion, and the best one could normally hope for was that it wouldn’t be a total abortion. To this point, he was cautiously tempted to believe their current mission might prove an exception to the rule, but it was early days yet.

  For now, however, Yang-O’Grady was senior to him, which was why he’d waved her into the briefing room in front of him. It was her responsibility to determine the moment at which their mission transitioned from political to military. Until that moment, he was at her orders. After that moment, she became a passenger.

  “Attention on deck,” Commodore Fred Brigman, TF 1030’s chief of staff, said as Yang-O’Grady and his admiral arrived. Under more usual circumstances, the staff would simply have risen respectfully until Hajdu was seated. With “guests” present, Brigman was being a bit more formal, and Hajdu walked across to his chair, waited until Yang-O’Grady had seated herself, then sat down and nodded to the commodore.

  “Carry on,” he said.

  “Thank you, Sir.”

  The rest of the staff resumed their seats, but Brigman remained standing and keyed up the elevated display in front of him.

  “As the Admiral already knows, Ms. Yang-O’Grady,” he said courteously to the Foreign Ministry representative, “this is basically just a final readiness report. We completed our last scheduled exercise fifteen hours ago, and on the basis of that, Commodore Koopman”—he nodded to Daphne Koopman, TF 1030’s staff operations officer—“and I have added a few tiny tweaks. The main purpose of this briefing is to apprise both Admiral Hajdu and you of our readiness estimate, based on the exercises we’ve conducted, and to examine our mission orders one last time in light of that estimate. The Admiral’s made it clear to us that you need the most complete possible picture of our capabilities and the elements of Buccaneer and how they would play out in the unhappy eventuality of their becoming necessary. In addition, this briefing offers an opportunity for you—or the Admiral—to reconsider or more fully define any of those elements. From my own reading of the intelligence reports, unfortunately, I believe it’s likely the Hypatians will have voted in favor of secession by the time we get there. If that’s happened, the Task Force’s primary mission is to enable you to accomplish your mission without a shot being fired, and the Admiral feels that makes it essential that you be as hands-on as possible with our planning process and operational options.”

  “I see,” Yang-O’Grady said, when he paused. She glanced at the admiral sitting beside her. “And I appreciate it, Admiral.” She grimaced. “Before I joined the Foreign Ministry, I spent quite some time with Interior and cut my teeth in Frontier Security. During those years, I had ample opportunity to watch what should have been coordinated military and diplomatic operations turn into fiascoes. I doubt you can fully imagine just what a relief it is to know that whatever happens in Hypatia, it won’t be because your people and my people weren’t on the same page going in.”

  HMS Phantom

  Alexandria Belt

  Hypatia System

  “Talk to me, Jim!” Jan Kotouč said as he strode into flag bridge.

  “Yes, Sir!” Captain Clarke turned from an intense discussion with Commander Ilkova. “We’re still getting the details, but it doesn’t look good. So far, CIC is reporting a minimum of a hundred and fifty hyper footprints.”

  “And we don’t have a single Ghost Rider platform out there to keep an eye on them, do we?” Kotouč observed sourly.

  “No, Sir. Sorry, Sir,” Ilkova said, and Kotouč waved a hand at her.

  “That wasn’t a criticism, Markéta. Or, if it was, it was a self-criticism, not directed at you. I should have deployed a shell as soon as we made our hyper translation.”

  “My job to remind you, Sir,” she said loyally, and Kotouč shook his head.

  “If I recall my Academy classes correctly, the responsibility rests with the commanding officer.”

  His tone was almost whimsical, but his staff knew him well enough to recognize the intense self-anger buried within it. And Ilkova was correct; it was her job to “remind” her admiral about such things. But Hypatia was a friendly system with its own sensor net already in place. Kotouč had allowed himself to forget how unexpectedly things could change, and with him as an example, it was hardly surprising even a staff as good as his had done the same thing.

  You told Vangelis Navy officers hate surprises, he thought acidly. Maybe it would’ve been a good idea for you to do a little something to minimize this one?

  “All right,” he said. “We screwed up—I’ll grant you we both dropped the ball on this one, Markéta—so let’s do something about it. Get the recon shell deployed now. Complete stealth. That many footprints can only mean this is the Sollies, and I don’t want them to have even a sniff of our presence in-system.”

  “Yes, Sir.” Ilkova turned to begin giving orders, and Kotouč moved his attention to Commander Jason Kindrick, his staff astrogator.

  Kindrick was a bookish sort—his nose was usually buried in his reader or an old-fashioned hardcopy book whenever he was off duty—who rejoiced, for some reason Kotouč had never discovered, in the nickname of “Vulture.” It was hard for him to think of a name less suited to someone’s physical appearance, but Kindrick only smiled whenever he heard it. And wherever it had come from, or however fond of the printed page he might be, he was also one of the best astrogators Kotouč had ever served with.

  “While Markéta’s seeing to that, Jason,” he said now, “I think we need to move—very cautiously—to a point farther from Hypatia. We’ve got a lot of room to hide in where we are, but we’re also under a light-minute from the capital. If I were these people, I’d be looking that volume over very carefully, so I want to be somewhere outside it by the time they’re close enough to start looking. Pick us a good spot to hide at least fifty or sixty million klicks from here.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Kindrick replied, and Kotouč nodded and crossed to the master display, twitching his head to invite Clarke to join him there.

  “You think this is some kind of armed attempt to suppress the referendum, Sir?” the captain asked quietly.

  “Well, it’s not a convoy of ice cream tankers,” Kotouč replied tartly, then shook his head. “You know, the entire time we were rushing to get here, I never imagined anything this size coming over the hyper wall. This is a lot more escalation than I ever anticipated, especially in a Core System like Hypatia.”

  “I suppose it’s at least theoretically possible they’re only staging through Hypatia en route to somewhere else,” Clarke said.

  “No, you don’t suppose anything of the sort.” Kotouč shook his head. “You’re just trying to find a silver lining. Best case scenario, whatever genius in Old Chicago sent these people out here is hoping a force this size will overawe Hypatia into backing down on their referendum. In that case, they’re probably under orders just to be as visible and intimidating as possible, and I have to concede that a couple of hundred warships could do a pretty fair job of intimidating just about anybody. On the other hand, they’re only forty-four light-years from Beowulf, and they know what Admiral Truman has sitting on the Beowulf Terminus. So if they’re here to do any intimidating, they’re probably under orders to do it pretty damned fast.”

  “And if that isn’t why they’re here, Sir?”

  “About the only other reason they could be here is to…take steps if President Vangelis and his administration refuse to back down,” the admiral said, flat-voiced.

  Clarke started to ask another question, then visibly changed his mind, and Kotouč smiled grimly. His chief of staff was as capable of doing the math as he was, and neither of them liked the answers they were coming up with.

  Nobody ever expected us to stand off a full-scale invasion, damn it, he thought harshly. Nobody ever expected it, and we didn’t come prepared to do it, either. No pods, no CLACs, no Mycroft. Just Phantom, three Bravos, and Arngrim and only what we have in the magazines.

  “Have Markéta make sure we have a Hermes buoy on the approach vector from Beowulf,” he said. Clarke looked at him, and he showed his teeth. “Give us another seventy-two hours, maybe even only forty-eight, and the force balance in Hypatia will change rather significantly,” he pointed out.

  “Yes, Sir, it will,” Clarke agreed. He nodded respectfully to Kotouč and turned to speak to Ilkova. The admiral watched him go, then clasped his hands behind him, squared his shoulders, and looked down into the plot while he waited out the no-longer-accustomed-to light-speed delay from the Hypatian sensor net.

  Yes, the force balance will change, he thought. But unless Vukodlak and a couple of missile colliers turn up—at a minimum—it’s not going to change enough, and you and Jim both know it.

  He watched the plot, waiting, and prayed silently that whoever commanded those anonymous hyper footprints wasn’t one of the SLN’s hotheads.

  SLNS Camperdown

  and

  Proedrikḗ Katoikía com center

  Hypatia System