CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A quiet signal chirped through the eye-soothing dimness of the Central War Room, known to its inhabitants as "the Pit." Admiral Caparelli raised his head to check the master display at the far end of the Pit for the new incident's location, then punched up the details on his terminal, and his eyes flicked over the data.

"Bad?" Admiral Givens asked quietly across the smaller quadrant plot holo, and he shrugged.

"More irritating than serious—I think. Another in-and-out at Talbot. Of course—" he smiled without mirth "—the report is eleven days old. Tidings may have gotten a bit more than 'irritating' since."

"Mm." Givens pursed her lips and brooded down at the holo between them. Her eyes were focused on something only she could see, and Caparelli waited patiently for her to hunt down whatever it was. Several seconds passed, then a full minute, while he listened to the Pit's quiet background sounds before she shook herself and looked back across the tiny stars at him.

"A thought, I take it?"

"More of a general observation, really."

"Well, don't sit on it till it hatches, Pat."

"Yes, Sir." She gave him a fleeting smile, then turned serious. "The thing that just occurred to me—something that's been occurring to me for several days now—is that the Peeps are being too cute for their own good."

"Ah?" Caparelli tilted his chair back and raised an eyebrow. "How so?"

"I think they're trying for too fine a degree of coordination." Givens waved at the display. "They've been turning the pressure up for weeks now. At first it was just 'mystery' raiders we couldn't positively ID, and when we knew they were Peeps, there was no combat. Then they started actively harassing our patrols. Now they're pouncing on convoys and system pickets with hunt-and-kill tactics. But every time they do something to up the ante, it starts at one point, then ripples out north and south."

"Indicating what?"

"Indicating that each increase in pressure is the result of a specific authorization from some central command node. Look at the timing, Sir." She reached into the holo, running her fingers up and down the frontier. "If you assume each fresh escalation was authorized from someplace fifty or sixty light-years inside the Peep border—like Barnett, for example—the delay in the incidents to either side of the first incident in the new pattern is just about right for the difference in the flight times to those points from Barnett."

She withdrew her hand and frowned at the display, worrying her lower lip between her teeth.

"So they're coordinating from a central node," Caparelli agreed. "But we figured that all along, Pat. In fact, we're doing the same thing. So how does that constitute 'too cute for their own good'?"

"We're not doing the same thing, Sir. We're channeling information and authorizing general deployments, but we're trusting local COs to use their own judgments because of the com lag. It looks to me like the Peeps are authorizing each successive wave of activity from Barnett, which implies a two-way command and control link, not just information flow. They're waiting until they hear back, then sending out orders to begin the next stage, then waiting for fresh reports before authorizing the next step. They're playing brontosaurus—that's why this whole thing seems to be building up so ponderously."

"Mm," It was Caparelli's turn to stare into the holo. Givens' theory was certainly one explanation for the Peeps' increasing heavy-handedness. What had started out as a series of lightning pinpricks was becoming a chain of steadily heavier blows spaced out over longer periods of time. It felt undeniably clumsier, but then again, any strategist would try to build in cutouts: points at which he could abort the operation if he had to. It was quite possible Pat was right, that the coordination for this phase was emanating from Barnett, but it didn't follow that the same pattern would apply after they actually pulled the trigger. Once you were committed, there was no more point in cutouts; it was all or nothing, and if you had a clue as to what you were doing, you went for the most flexible possible command arrangements.

If you had a clue.

He turned his chair slowly from side to side, then raised his eyes once more to Givens.

"You're suggesting they may continue to operate this way once the shooting starts in earnest?"

"I don't know. Its possible, given their past operational patterns. Remember, Sir, we're the first multi-system opponent they've gone after. All their previous ops plans have involved closely controlled converging thrusts on relatively small targets, spatially speaking, and even the best staffs get into habits of thought. They may have overlooked some of the implications of the difference in scale.

"But my real point is that whatever they plan to do after the shooting starts, they're running under tight central control in the opening game. They have to have a detailed ops plan for when they finally move in strength, and after studying their previous campaigns, I'm willing to bet this one involves some careful—and cumbersome—timing constraints. Even if I'm wrong about that, at the moment they're going to react and respond to anything we do on the basis and within the limitations of that two-way traffic flow to Barnett."

"Assuming they haven't sent out orders for the next phase even as we sit here."

"Assuming that," Givens agreed. "But if they haven't reached that point yet, it could be useful to consider inserting information we'd like them to have into that command loop."

"Such as?"

"I don't know," Givens admitted. "I just hate the thought of losing any opportunity to throw them off stride. The worst thing we could do is let them steamroller us on their timetable. I'd like to shake them up, draw them off balance."

Caparelli nodded and joined her in pondering the holo afresh.

His eyes flitted automatically back to the three most worrisome points: Yeltsin, Hancock Station, and the Talbot-Poicters area. Although the pace and violence of Haven's war of nerves had increased steadily, Manticore had held its own in actual encounters to date. The loss of Star Knight with all hands was more than offset, albeit fortuitously, by Bellerophon's destruction of two entire Peep battlecruiser divisions in Talbot. By the same token, the tragic loss of Captain Zilwicki's entire squadron had not only earned her the Parliamentary Medal of Valor, the Kingdom's highest award for heroism, but saved every ship in the convoy under her protection... and cost the People's Navy almost twice her own ships' combined tonnage. Other Peep attacks had been more successful, of course, for they had the advantage of the initiative. And, he conceded unhappily, they also seemed to have fiendishly good intelligence on supposedly secure star systems. But by and large, their successes were outweighed, in the cold, brutal logic of war, by their less numerous but more spectacular failures.

Unfortunately, that didn't mean their operation as a whole was failing. Although his redeployments to face the threat had been much less drastic than he'd originally envisioned, there was still a general shift and flow of task forces and squadrons all throughout the volume of the Alliance. That left him feeling off balance and defensive-minded, driven into passive reaction, not initiation, and some of his local commanders seemed similarly afflicted. They were making decisions which looked more than a little questionable from his own vantage point, at any rate.

He tapped his fingertips on his console, and his frown deepened. Talbot-Poicters worried him because there'd been so much Peep activity in the area. Both star systems were exposed, and the incidents within them could simply be classic probing missions. Reconnaissances in force which happened to run into local pickets—or over them, he thought grimly—in the course of pre-attack scouting missions. Except that their timing argued that the Peeps already had detailed intelligence.