"Um." Stone leaned back in the passenger seat of the air car, gazing out at the night sky, and frowned. "I wish we knew who Hughes had been working for."
"If it wasn't us, and it wasn't Mueller, then it almost has to have been Planetary Security," Baird said equably, "though I suppose it might be one of his fellow Keys. From all I've heard, Harrington would certainly be capable of taking direct action against him if she suspected the sort of action he was contemplating against her or Benjamin. It doesn't really matter in either case, though. The man's been dead for months. If whoever he was working for felt they had sufficient evidence to nail Mueller, they would certainly have acted by now. And if they don't have sufficient evidence to charge him, then they have no choice but to pretend nothing's happened at all."
"And do you really think this is going to work?" Stone asked much more quietly.
"Yes, I do," Shackleton replied, his own eyes on the instrument panel. "I wasn't especially confident to begin with. The whole thing seemed like such an outside shot that I was afraid to let myself hope for too much. But whatever anyone may suspect about Mueller, it would never cross Palace Security's mind that such a prominent member of the Keys would risk trying to plant electronic devices on the Protector's guests. If they do—" he shrugged "—all we lose is Mueller."
"And the opportunity to strike."
"And this opportunity to strike," Shackleton corrected. "And I don't think we will lose it. When Donizetti came through with the weapons, I began to think it might succeed. And when he came up with the molycircs for the memory stones as well—"
He shrugged once more.
"I only wish we weren't so reliant on Donizetti in the first place." Stone sighed.
"He's an infidel and a mercenary," Shackleton agreed, "and I'm sure he's taken a bigger `commission' off the top than he says he has. But he's also managed to come up with everything we needed. Not as quickly as I might have wished, especially on the memory stones, but he got it all in the end, and we couldn't have done it without him. And the bottom line, Anson, is that we have to remember we're about God's work. He won't let us fail Him as long as we trust in His guidance and protection."
"I know." Stone drew a deep breath and nodded. "This world is God's," he said softly, and Shackleton nodded back.
"This world is God's," he promised.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
"We've got a solid lock, Skipper," Audrey Pyne announced, and Scotty Tremain nodded. According to ONI, the MacGregor System lacked the enormous passive arrays which could pick up hyper transits light-days and even further out. That was why the CLACs had made their hyper translation one full light-day out... and why Bad Penny and the rest of her silent brood had been slicing in-system for over two days.
Their acceleration had been held down to a leisurely four hundred and fifty gravities to help the efficiency of their stealth systems. At that rate, it had taken them over sixteen hours just to accelerate to the eighty percent of light-speed their particle shielding could handle. Once they'd done that, they'd taken their wedges down entirely and simply coasted for twenty-one hours. They'd come swooping in out of the outer darkness at almost two hundred and forty thousand kilometers per second and blown right past the outer perimeter sensor platforms like hyper-velocity ghosts. The mid-system arrays had been a little trickier, and the destroyer screen had been trickiest of all, for they'd had to begin decelerating before they hit it, and even at a mere 4.127 KPS?, they'd had to be careful about their EW. Their active sensor suites were down for the same reason, but the Ghost Rider teams had provided the LACs with their own FTL recon drones. Their drives had a very short endurance compared to the all-up drones, but Tremaine had deployed them hours ago and let their base acceleration carry them inward without any drive power at all. They'd come ghosting in even more stealthily than the LACs themselves, and their very weak, directional gravitic transmissions had told Bad Penny's passive sensors exactly where to look.
"Have all our birds confirmed data receipt, Gene?" he asked now, and Lieutenant Eugene Nordbrandt, Bad Penny's com officer, nodded.
"Aye, Skip. All ships report locked and ready to fire."
"All right, then," Tremaine said, with a nod of his own. "Put Audrey on voice."
"Me, Skip?" Pyne sounded surprised, and Tremaine grinned.
"You're the tac officer who set this up, Ensign. The shot is yours to call."
"Uh... yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir!"
"Thank me if it works," Tremaine advised her, and looked back at Nordbrandt.
"Ready, Gene?"
"Live mike, Skipper," Nordbrandt confirmed, and Tremaine waved a hand at Pyne, who drew a deep breath.
"All Hydras,Hydra One," she announced crisply into the mike. "Tango. I say again, tango, tango, tango!"
Citizen Commodore Gianna Ryan sat in her tipped-back command chair on the flag deck of PNS Rene d'Aiguillon, legs crossed, and nursed a cup of coffee. The MacGregor System was fairly important to the PRH. It had long served as a sentinel for Barnett's northeastern flank, but it also boasted a robust economy. The system population was over two billion, and despite decades of bureaucratic management, it was one of the few systems in the Republic which continued to generate a positive revenue flow every year.
Despite that, MacGregor had never received a genuine deep-space sensor net (the financially-strapped PRH was parsimonious about emplacing those anywhere), and its picket force had been steadily reduced over the last several years. The lengthy stalemate on the Barnett front after the fall of Trevor's Star helped explain a lot of that, but so did Citizen Secretary McQueen's decision to reinforce Barnett so heavily. The strength Citizen Admiral Theisman had received had made a flexible, nodal defense practical, and Ryan's job was not to try to stave off the Allied Hordes all by herself. Her job was to fend off raiding squadrons and serve as a distant early warning post. If the Manties came after her in strength, she was supposed to avoid action but remain in-system, shadowing and harassing the intruders, if possible, but staying the hell away from a serious fight while she screamed for help from Barnett.
Unfortunately, she reflected as she sipped at her coffee, that had presupposed Theisman would be allowed to keep his reinforcements. A mere citizen commodore was not, of course, privy to the inner deliberations of the Octagon, but Ryan doubted Citizen Secretary McQueen could have been very happy about the need to take away so much of the strength she'd scraped up for Barnett. If the rumor mill was correct about Twelfth Fleet's successes down on the southern flank, it was unlikely the enemy was going to feel like showing any sudden activity on the Barnett front. Even so, depleting Theisman's strength was risky. MacGregor, along with the Owens, Mylar, and Slocum Systems, represented a valuable little cluster of prizes, and Barnett, at the center of the rough square they formed, was the lynchpin of their joint survival. Ryan was confident the PRH could survive even if it lost all four of them but as her staff intelligence officer had remarked the other day, "A system here, a system there... keep it up long enough, and pretty soon you're talking about some serious real estate, Citizen Commodore."
Still, there'd been no sign of any—
Alarms whooped, suddenly and savagely, and Gianna Ryan threw her coffee cup aside as she hurled herself out of her command chair. That was the proximity alarm!