"So what do you plan to do, Sir?" Chin asked.
"I don't know." Rollins sighed. "I suppose it comes down to which is more important—Hancock's facilities, or its task force."
He lowered himself into a chair and stretched his legs out before him while he frowned up at the deckhead and considered his options.
The original plan had given good promise of success against Hancock. Admiral Coatsworth's arrival from Barnett would increase his own "official" strength by over fifty percent, and the Manties wouldn't even know Coatsworth was coming until he hit Zanzibar in their rear. With Coatsworth behind them and the Seaford task force in front of them, they'd be caught in a vise.
But if Hancock was empty, the entire ops plan went straight out the lock. There was no telling where the Manties were, or in what strength—not, at least, until the other Argus collectors reported in. Still, Hancock was the only Manty repair facility in this sector. If he was going to have to hunt for them anyway, depriving them of anywhere to repair damages would be an invaluable first step.
He drew a deep breath and straightened, and Holcombe and Chin turned toward him at the movement
"We'll do it," Rollins said simply. Holcombe nodded in approval, and Chin looked relieved that someone else had had to make the call.
"Shall we wait until we hear from the other. Argus nets, Sir?" Holcombe asked. Chin said nothing, but she shook her head in instant, instinctive disagreement, and Rollins agreed with her.
"No." He thrust himself up out of the chair. "Waiting would burn another six or seven days, and if we're going to do this, we don't have the time to spare."
"Yes, Sir."
The admiral paced briefly back and forth, thinking hard, then nodded.
"I want the task force ready to move out within twenty-four hours, Ed. Send a courier to Barnett to advise Admiral Parnell of our intentions. It should still get there before Coatsworth pulls out, so instruct him to rendezvous with us at Hancock. We'll consolidate our forces and then move on Zanzibar together. After that, we can hook up to take out Yorik or Alizon. By that time, we'll probably have picked up enough additional intel to know where Parks went and how he's deployed."
"Yes, Sir."
"Admiral Chin, I'll want your squadron to probe Hancock as we go in." Chin nodded, but her surprise showed, for her dreadnoughts were less powerful than the other battle squadrons.
"I haven't lost my senses, Admiral," Rollins said dryly. "Your ships are lighter, but they should be more than adequate to deal with battlecruisers, and if we're not going to get anything bigger, I at least want to nail as many of them as possible before they run. Besides, if there is something nasty waiting for us, you can pull a higher acceleration than superdreadnoughts."
In short, he thought, they could get the hell out of it faster than anything else he had, and he saw understanding in Chin's eyes as she nodded.
"And Admiral West's battlecruisers, Sir?' she asked.
"We'll attach them to you, but don't let him get too far ahead of you. His squadron's understrength to start with—I don't want him tangling with Manties at three-to-two odds while you're too far astern to assist."
"Understood, Sir."
"Good." Rollins shoved his hands back into his pockets and rocked on his heels, staring down into the holo sphere, and his eyes were hard.
"Very well," he said at last, "let's get moving. We've got a lot of details to settle before we pull out."
The three officers turned and strode from the compartment, leaving the display alive behind them, and the empty, quiet image of the Hancock System glowed silently in its depths.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
"Still nothing."
Sir Yancey Parks took another quick turn about his flag bridge, and his staff busied themselves with routine tasks that happened to keep them out of his path. All but Commodore Capra, who watched his admiral with a painstaking lack of expression.
"I hate this kind of waiting for the other shoe," Parks fumed.
"Perhaps that's why they're doing it, Sir." Capra's voice was quiet, and Parks snorted.
"Of course it is! Unfortunately, that doesn't make it any less effective." Parks stopped pacing and turned to glare down at the holo sphere. CIC had switched to astrography mode, showing the sparse stars of his command area and the most recent data on friendly and enemy dispositions, and the admiral jabbed an angry chin at the bland light dot of Seaford Nine.
"That bastard over there knows exactly what he plans to do," he said, pitching his voice for Commodore Capra's ears alone. "He knows when he plans to make his move, what he plans to do, and how he plans to bring it off, and all I know is that I don't know any of those things."
He fell silent again, chewing his lip while acid churned in his stomach. War games and training exercises, he was discovering, were one thing, with nothing more at stake than one's reputation and career. Actual operations were something else again—life and death, not simply for you, but for your crews and, quite possibly, your kingdom, as well.
It was an unpleasant discovery... and one which made him doubt his own competence.
He sighed and made his muscles relax by a sheer act of will, then turned to look Capra squarely in the eye.
"Was Sarnow right?" He voiced his own thoughts, and the commodore shrugged uncomfortably.
"You know my view, Sir. I've never been comfortable about leaving Hancock so weak, but whether our posture should be aggressive or defensive—" He shrugged again, almost helplessly. "I just don't know, Sir. I suppose the waiting is getting to me, too."
"But you're starting to think he was right, aren't you?" Parks pressed. The commodore looked away, then drew a deep breath and nodded.
Parks' mouth twitched, and he turned his back on the sphere, folding his hands behind him.
"If anyone needs me, I'll be in my quarters, Vincent," he said quietly, and walked slowly from the flag bridge.
PNS Alexander coasted silently through the outer reaches of the Yorik system on another Argus run. It should have been routine, given the light forces the Manties normally maintained here, but Alexander's tactical display was a blaze of crimson impeller sources, and her captain stood peering down at it in consternation.
"What the hell is all this, Leo?" Commander Trent asked her tac officer.
"I don't have the least idea, Ma'am," the tac officer replied frankly. "It looks like a task force picket shell, but what it's doing here beats me. Its more like something I'd expect to see at Hancock."
"Me, too." Trent's tone was sour, and she looked across at Lieutenant Commander Raven. Her exec was officer of the watch, seated in the command chair at the center of the bridge, but his attention was on his captain rather than his displays.
"What do you think, Yasir?" she asked, and he twitched his shoulders at the question.
"I think I'd like to abort the pickup, Ma'am," he replied in the careful tone of someone who knew what could happen to both their careers if they did. "There's too much traffic out here, and they're operating mighty aggressively. All it takes is one of them in the wrong place, and—"
He grimaced, and Trent nodded. Raven had a point. But the presence of so many Manty ships argued that something unusual was happening in Yorik, which made the Argus data even more important. That, she knew, would be the verdict of any court of inquiry, anyway.
She propped one shoulder against the tac display's. hood and closed her eyes in thought. The risk to Alexander herself was minimal; they were still outside the hyper limit, and they could bring their wedge on-line in barely two minutes. The hyper generators would take a little longer—the trace signature from a standby translation field was simply too powerful to damp out—but Alexander could still be out of here long before anything got close enough to hurt her. No, the risk was to the Argus net itself. If they were picked up, the Manties were bound to wonder why a PN light cruiser would be skulking around way out here. And if something started them actively looking, not even the sensor arrays' Solarian-built stealth systems could hide them forever.