"Yes, Sir," Captain Gwynett said.

"We're in range, Admiral," Commander Adamson pointed out, and Lester Tourville nodded.

"I'm aware of that, Frazier, thank you."

"Yes, Sir."

Tourville tipped back in his command chair and glanced at Molly DeLaney.

"So Tom was right," he said quietly.

"It looks that way," DeLaney agreed, and Tourville wondered if the relief hidden behind her calm expression could possibly be as great as the one roaring through him.

He looked at the master plot, with its sprawl of light codes. Second Fleet had been accelerating towards Sphinx for the last hour. Given the system's geometry, Tourville's present vector cut a chord at an angle of almost exactly forty-five degrees to the outer wall of the hugely elongated, "skinny" resonance zone. His phalanx of superdreadnoughts, was up to 18,560 KPS, relative to the system primary, and they'd traveled over 35,600,000 kilometers. The Manties' Home Fleet had been under acceleration for only forty-seven minutes, on an almost exactly reciprocal course, but with its higher base acceleration, its velocity relative to the primary was already up to better than 17,000 KPS, and it had traveled just over 24,000,000 kilometers from its initial station.

Although Tourville's command was still almost half an hour from its turnover point for a zero/zero intercept of Sphinx, the range between the opposing forces had fallen to just a shade over 84,000,000 kilometers, and their closing speed was up to 45,569 KPS. That geometry gave Tourville's MDMs an effective range of better than 85,369,000 kilometers, which, as Frazier Adamson had just observed, meant they were in extreme missile range of Home Fleet.

But Manticoran MDMs' acceleration rate was just over thirty-four KPS2 higher than his birds could pull. That gave them a current effective range of better than 90,370,000 kilometers, which meant he'd been in their effective range for over two minutes.

"It doesn't just look like he was right," he told DeLaney after a moment. "He was. If they had those God awful missiles, they'd already be launching. They'd have spent the last ten minutes doing nothing but rolling pods, and they'd be punching them down our throats right this instant, not letting us close into our own effective range."

"You don't think they might just be letting the range fall a little more for their own fire control, Boss?"

"That's exactly what they're doing, which is why I know they don't have the new missiles. They've got less than a hundred wallers over there. Even assuming they've got heavy external pod loads-which they very well could, despite their accel, if NavInt's right about their new pod designs-they're outnumbered better than two-to-one. They wouldn't be closing straight into salvos the size they know we can throw if they had any choice at all. But they don't. They've got to get closer to improve their accuracy, just like we do."

"It's going to be ugly when we do open fire," Delaney said quietly, and Tourville nodded again.

"That it certainly is," he agreed grimly. "On the other hand, we planned for it, didn't we?"

"Yes, Sir."

Tourville studied the icons of the oncoming Home Fleet superdreadnoughts for another few moments, then looked at a secondary display and shook his head in admiration. He'd always known Shannon Foraker had a talent for thinking outside the box. Way back when she'd been his operations officer, he'd recognized her knack for coming up with solutions which simply didn't occur to other people-concepts so elegantly simple everyone wondered why they hadn't thought of them.

When NavInt reported that the new Manty pods incorporated onboard tractors as a way to allow their pre-pod ships to tow greater numbers of them, it had seemed impossible for the Republic to respond. Their pods were already too big, and they had too limited a power budget, to permit the designers to cram a tractor into them (and power the damned thing), as well. But Shannon had decided to turn the problem on its head. Instead of fitting additional tractors into the pods, she'd come up with the "donkey." That was what everyone was calling it, although it had a suitably esoteric alphabet-soup designation, and it was another of those elegantly simple Foraker specialties.

Instead of the typically Manty bells-and-whistles approach of putting the tractor inside the pod, Shannon had simply built a very stealthy pod-sized platform which consisted of nothing except a solid mass of tractor beams and a receiver for beamed power from the ships which deployed it. Each "donkey" had the capacity to tow ten pods, and a Sovereign of Space-class SD(P) had enough tractors to tow twenty of them. Better yet, they could actually be ganged together, as long as all the pods in the gang could be lined up for power transmission from the mother ship. In theory, they could have been stacked three tiers deep, with each donkey towing ten more donkeys, each towing ten more donkeys, each....

If Lester Tourville had so chosen, his two hundred and forty superdreadnoughts could-in theory-have towed 4.8 million pods. Except for the minor fact that the drag would have reduced them to negative acceleration numbers. Not to mention the fact that he didn't begin to have the power transmission capability to feed that many donkeys. Still, he could tow quite a lot of them, and the readiness numbers on the display gave him a sense of profound satisfaction. He studied them a moment longer, then looked at Lieutenant Anita Eisenberg, his absurdly youthful communications officer.

"What's the latest from Admiral Diamato, Ace?"

"No change, Sir. He still can't get a clear look. Their fortresses and the LACs deployed to cover the Junction are picking off his recon platforms before they get close enough for that. But he still hasn't seen any hyper-capable units headed his way, and he's positive they're still coming through from Trevor's Star. No one's started in-system yet, though."

"Thank you," Tourville said, and cocked an eyebrow at DeLaney.

The chief of staff clearly had been running through the same mental math he had, and she grimaced.

"They've been coming through for over forty-five minutes now, Boss. By my calculations, that means at least twenty-four wallers so far."

"And it means they're planning on bringing through a lot more than that," Tourville agreed. "They could have put twenty-seven through in a mass transit and been headed after us over half an hour ago. The only reason to delay this long is because they figure they can't afford to lock the Junction down... because they've got one hell of a lot more than twenty-seven wallers waiting to come up our backside."

"Still, Boss, if I were them, I might be thinking about sending some of the ships I've already got through the Junction after us."

"No way." Tourville shook his head. "I wish to hell they would, but the Manties picked their best people to command Home Fleet, Third Fleet, and Eighth Fleet. I've studied NavInt's files on all three of them, and they aren't going to cooperate with our plans worth a damn.

"D'Orville's probably the most conventional thinker of the three, but he's also got the simplest equation... and plenty of guts. He can't let us get any closer to Sphinx than he can possibly help, so he's going to hit us head on, as far out as he can. He's going to get clobbered. In fact, I'll be surprised if any of his superdreadnoughts survive. But like you just said, it's going to be ugly for both sides, and our own losses are going to be heavy. He knows that, and he probably figures he can score at least a one-for-one exchange rate, despite the tonnage ratios. I think he may be being a little optimistic, but not very much. So given the combat strength he thinks he's up against, he probably figures he'll hurt us so badly we won't be able to close through the fixed inner-system defenses and missile pods. And if his analysis of the balance of forces was correct, he'd be right."