Captain's Cabin, Aboard the Eagle

Captain Robinson poured himself another cup of coffee and shoved his untouched-and-now-cold breakfast away. Hot, black, strong coffee—his morning repast was down to that. He was losing weight, he knew that without getting on a scale. He always stopped eating properly when he was nervous, on edge. Tension made his appetite vanish. Robinson had never been more tense and on edge than he was now.

He thought of his wife, Mildred, back home on Kennedy, and knew how she would worry if she saw him now. She knew the danger signs, the tiny twitches and microscopically small nervous gestures that warned things were not good.

And they weren't. For the first time, Robinson was seriously entertaining the thought that he might not get home to Mildred. He raised the cup to his mouth, sipped at the coffee, and burned his tongue. Too hot.

Prigot. Prigot was the last damn straw. They had mustered the ship's complement the moment Covert Lander Two turned up missing, of course. Prigot was the only person unaccounted for. The bloody twice-told traitor. He was competent enough to crack into any data file aboard and make a copy. It had to be assumed the Guards knew exactly where every ship had been—and so all of them had to be moved, or else be sitting ducks. Every plan, every disposition of forces had to be thrown out and reworked, and that was a crippling blow; the League forced into its second-best plans. Time, energy, and fuel chewed up.

Well, maybe not time lost due to Prigot. They had been wasting that right along, without any help from traitors. The League forces had simply been sitting astride the barycenter for weeks now, not attacking, not being attacked. Admiral Thomas seemed quite content to wait the Guards out. He did nothing all day, every day, but putter around the bridge, watching this report, talking to that ship's captain. The only thing Thomas really seemed interested in was the exploratory team going over the lump of rock called the baryworld. Robinson couldn't see any great value to a roughly spherical lump of skyrock barely one hundred kilometers across. Certainly nothing to merit such close attention from the Commander-in-Chief. He vanished into his stateroom each night, and early each morning the mess steward brought out an empty bottle of port. Hours later the admiral himself would emerge, looking very bright and chipper, his skin flushed, a twinkle in his eye. He had to be constantly drunk, putting away that much booze day after day. But it never showed. He was always sharp, always alert, always in control. But Robinson knew about drinkers and false fronts. Sooner or later the facade would crack, unless something was done.

His great-niece, Joslyn Larson, she seemed to have some effect on him, some ability to keep him from drinking. But she was on Outpost, chatting with the natives. There wasn't even any real way to know that the League's tiny, improvised First Contact crew was still alive. With Guard stations and spacecraft orbiting Outpost, reporting via radio would have been suicide. No, dealing with the company of the Sick Moose would have to wait upon the outcome of battle.

There might be some way to contact Ariadne Station and Johnson Gustav, but to what point? What could they say to each other that would be worth the risk of communicating?

Robinson's coffee had gotten cold as he sat there, worrying. He drank it down anyway, throwing his head back and downing it in one swallow. He winced at the taste and his stomach kicked up a fuss, but it was time to go to work. In ten minutes the long-range scanning team would be ready with the morning report on the disposition of the Guard fleet.

Robinson didn't know it yet, but that report was going to be badly in need of updating by the time he got it. Outpost and Capital were both many light hours away from the barycenter. The information gathered by the telescopes and other sensors watching from the barycenter was hours old by the time the photons carrying the news were collected by League technicians. The telescopes were limited by the speed of light, but the Guard ships weren't.

Guardian Orbital Command Station Nike

George Prigot wasn't sure about why he had been brought into the Intelligence section again, but he didn't like being there. He was brought from his cell straight to Phillip's office.

"Prigot," Captain Phillips said. "I thought you'd like to know. Thanks to your arrival, our attack on the barycenter was brought forward by fifty hours. The first craft are already launching. If we move quickly, we should catch the League while it's still repositioning its forces, while their ships are at their most vulnerable. The change in plans should allow us to do a great deal of damage."

"But why are they repositioning their forces? What's that got to do with me?"

"Didn't you work that out when you risked this trip of yours? The League will be forced to assume you betrayed every bit of information you had access to. Every battle plan. Any other assumption on their part would be risking suicide."

"But I didn't betray any League battle plans. I never knew them!"

"But they are forced to assume otherwise. Didn't you realize that? Tell me, Prigot, having betrayed both of them, which side do you want to win?'

But George Prigot was too stunned to answer.