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“Park, there’s no proof the Dark
Ships have anything to do with the Premm,” Rebbert shook his head. “The Premm
have never said they had allies like that either publically or privately so far
as I know and the Dark Ships haven’t told us anything either.”

“They’ve told us to die a few
times,” Park pointed out. “They called us, Earthlings, that is, abominations.
Now who else refers to the people of Earth as abominations?”

“Strictly speaking, the Premm
only use that term to describe the Mer,” Rebbert argued.

“All right, then explain this one
away,” Park challenged. “The Dark Ships attacked Alliance ships at Owatino at
the same time a Premm suicide squad invades the Diet Chamber. I don’t think
coincidence stretches that far.”

Before Rebbert could reply a loud
set of sirens began to spin up to a raucous howl. “What’s that?” Park asked.

“Normally,” Rebbert shouted his
reply, looking around worriedly, “I would have thought it was a tornado
warning, but there’s not a cloud in the sky.”

“Father! Park!” Dannet shouted
from just inside the Manor. “Dennsee System has been invaded!”

There was no talking over the
alarm, so Dannet and Park brought Lord Rebbert back inside the Manor and then
took the suspensor lift down two floors below ground level. There, deep under
the Lord’s Manor was a sound-proofed conference room. Iris, Melise and Marisea
were already there as were another dozen men and women, advisors to the Lord of
Dennsee.

It was one of the advisors,
General Manfett, the presiding officer of the Dennseean Armed Forces, who
briefed the assembled. “Roughly an hour ago our sensors picked up a strange
signal approximately two astral units beyond the Stierdach limit. With the help
of the Pirate engineer, Sheetz, we were able to adjust our instruments and
determined that no less than twenty-four Dark Ships had entered our system and
are currently on course of Dennsee.” He went on to show them on various screens
just what had been detected,

“So are we at war now?” Park
whispered softly to Rebbert.

“We are,” Rebbert admitted.
Louder, he asked, “Can we drive these Dark Ships off?”

“That depends on your forces,”
Park admitted. “I have one small carrier and three ships with me.”

“Dennsee has forty-five ships,”
Manfett told him, “but we have heard that your ships are worth at least ten of
ours.”

“An exaggeration,” Park replied
with rare diplomacy. Privately he admitted it really was an exaggeration, but
not as much of one as he made it sound. “This is going to be a tough fight and
we’ll have to split our forces if I’m reading your charts correctly. The Dark
Ships seem to be arranged in three groups of eight each.”

“They are,” Manfett agreed. He
turned to Dannet, “Your Highness, my specialties are the coordination of ground
troops, but you have actual warship experience. Will you command our fleet?”

“By your leave, general,” Dannet
nodded, “It is my duty and honor to do so. Park, would you mind if I divide
your ships up and placed them within the Dennseean formations?”

“Probably not,” Park shrugged,
“What did you have in mind? But let’s not sit around talking about it too long,
we need to lift if we’re going to meet those Dark Ships in space and not
 
here on the ground.”

“Our fleet is already preparing,”
Manfett informed him. “All will be in orbit by the time we leave this council.”

“And I sent word to our ships as
well, Park.
Grantir’s Chance
and
Forward Thinking
should be launching
about now, assuming they managed to round up their crews.
Peg Leg
is waiting to ferry us up to
Tawatir
.”

“And probably any crewmen or
women from the first two who missed their ships,” Park commented. “Well, we
probably should not have allowed over half our force to take shore leave at once.”

“Twenty-twenty hindsight,” Iris
replied.

Park nodded, “Okay, Dannet,
what’s the battle plan?”

“I was going to ask you that,”
Dannet admitted. “I’ve commanded warships, but never a fleet.”

“At least you’ve had formal
training,” Park told him. “I’m a professional dilettante. All right, since
we’re going to form squadrons of Dennseean and Earth ships, I think
Tawatir
will go with one,
Peg Leg
and
Grantir’s Chance
with another and
Forward Thinking
with the third. And, before you ask, no I don’t
have any specific reasons for that, but if we’re splitting three ways, one
group is going to have fewer earth ships in it no matter how we arrange them.”

“Might I make a suggestion?” Iris
asked.

“Of course,” all the men replied
gallantly. The women in the room nodded as well.

Iris smiled. “First of all if
we’re going to put one Earth ship in a squad, make it
Peg Leg
.
She’s newer and
has the larger missile racks we’ve been installing. Also, we need to keep in
mind that
 
while our ships and crews have
trained for battle, they have not trained with Dennsee’s navy. Also our ships
all have stasis plating. So put us ahead of your formations, like the way you
might tip an arrow or a spear. We’ll go in and hopefully soften them up and
then you can come in and clean up what’s left.”

“You make it sound easy,” Dannet
shook his head.

“She is right about mixing our
fleets, however,” Manfett told him. “They have not been on maneuvers with us
nor we with them.”

“And while those blips might look
like three squadrons to us right now,” Park told them all, “There’s no saying
they won’t stay together. Twenty-four ships is a fairly large group of Dark
Ships, but nothing like what we encountered when we broke the siege at Owatino.
They may stay as one unit, in fact I hope they do. If not, the split as we’ve
arranged it will do to start the battle out with. Now, let’s get moving.
Dannet, you and I are going to have several days to work out details anyway.”

It was not the first time that
Park found the lag between spotting an enemy ship and the time they were within
firing range to be excruciatingly boring. Once everyone was on board their
ships and the combined fleet was underway, there was very little for him to do
aside from daily conferences with Dannet and the other captains. The pilots, navigators
and gunners all had simulations to run through in preparation, but as captain,
Park found he could serve best by staying out of the way. He could tell the
navigator where to point the ship, but it was the pilot who actually flew it
there once the course had been fed into the computer. As for the gunners, Park
knew by long experience that Iris handled that part of a battle far better than
he could.

So after the excitement of
spotting the enemy and planning how to deal with him, Park found the next few
days to be very boring indeed. “I wonder if the men on the Western Front of
World War I felt like this between the actual battles,” he commented aloud at
one point.

“What’s that, Park?” Marisea
asked from her communications station. Of all the people on board, she was
probably the busiest, constantly chatting with other comm. officers in the
fleet, setting up conferences between the engineers and captains. She also
spoke to Sartena, who had been left behind on Dennsee at Lord Rebbert’s insistence,
at least once a day. She afforded time for her devoted attention to Cousin,
whenever the small primate felt the need for company.

As always, Park wondered about
the wisdom of bringing a pet on board a warship. Cousin normally found an out
of the way corner to curl up and sleep in, but she did sometimes roam the ship
looking for people to play with. Most of the crew considered the furry little
critter to be a beloved ship’s mascot, but she did get in the way at times and
they were forced to shoo her away. But at least half the time, she found Park’s
lap to be perfectly suited to her desires and she spent
 
as much as twenty minutes at a time napping
there while he
 
continued to fidget from
lack of anything better to do save act as a pillow to the ship’s “cat.”

On the third, day, however, Park
had an idea. “Marisea put me through to Dannet, please.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral,” she replied
as she usually did when he gave her an actual command. “
Pride of Dennsee
, this is
Tawatir
.
My chief wants a powwow.”

“Where the heck did you ever hear
the word ‘powwow?’” Park asked her.

“I’ve been watching your old
movies and reading your books for years, Park,” she replied. “You have noticed
that I speak English without using my torc, right?”

“You sound like you grew up in
the Twenty-first Century,” Park told her.

“Thank you, Park,” she told him.
“I try.”

“Why?” Park wondered.

“It’s exotic,” she laughed, “and
a bit romantic, if you must know. Here’s Dannet on holo.”

Dannet’s image from the waist up
suddenly appeared in the middle of the bridge. “Sorry it took so long,
Admiral,” he apologized formally. “You caught me napping.”

“Nothing to worry about,
Admiral,” Park replied, in the same manner. “I’m bored too. Any reason we’re
not on a first name basis today?”

“I thought your call might be official,
Park,” Dannet shrugged.

“It is,” Park nodded. “I had an
idea about the upcoming battle and thought I would run it past you. Also if you
want to do it, we’ll have to start it soon. So far those Dark Ships are staying
in formation, aren’t they?”

“So far,” Dannet agreed. “Of
course they may not be planning to split up until they reach Dennsee.”

“I considered that,” Park
admitted, “that’s what got me thinking. Maybe we’re going to be meeting them as
a single fleet and maybe we don’t want to. Either way, I think meeting them
head-on as we discussed yesterday is a bad plan. For one thing, we could blow
right through them and then chase the remaining ships all the way to Dennsee if
they don’t scatter. Alternatively we could decelerate and see them come at us
from behind.”

“But once we do that, they’ll be
in front of us,” Dannet pointed out.

“Not if they decelerate too,”
Park argued.
 
“What I have in mind it to
split the fleet and come at them
 
from
three different directions in a sort of three-way pincer movement. If they
split up, we’ll each meet our target squadron and if they stay in formation,
we’ll squeeze them from every direction at once. And we won’t have them coming
up our tails for the second round.”

“I’ll need to see that in three
dimensions,” Dannet admitted. “Do you have a simulation of that?”

“I’m working on one now,” Iris
told them.

“When did you think of that?”
Park asked.

“I didn’t,” Iris admitted even as
she continued to program the simulation. “I heard you talking and started to
put something together for my gunners. I’ll shoot the first one over to you in
a few minutes.”

“First one?” Dannet asked.

“The battle can go any way,” Iris
explained. “I’m going to try to program in as many ways as possible. First of
all they might choose to stay more or less in formation and only chase us
within limited parameters. They might see our three pronged attack and split
into the three squads we see them traveling as. All hell might break lose as we
make contact and they may completely break formation and just chase us down.”

“Yeah,” Dannet nodded. “I see
that, but can’t you program your simulations to act as we’ve seen the Dark
Ships do in the past?”

“I can, and have,” Iris replied,
“but we only have the evidence of a few battles to go by and they’ve exhibited
all those behaviors and several in between. Also, it’s been three years since
we last handed them their heads on a silver platter. They’ve had time to
analyze how we fight too. Expect changes.”

“They would be foolish not to
turn and face us,” Dannet replied.

“Yes, but they can do so without
appreciably changing their course,” Iris told him. “Shoot at us as we go by and
then continue on toward Dennsee. From there it would only be a minor course
correction. On the other hand they could wipe us out and then it wouldn’t
matter if it took an extra few days to reach Dennsee. We don’t know how they
think or what the details of their mission are. So, we’ll try any scenarios we
can think of. Look for weaknesses in our own methods of attack.”

“What about their weaknesses?”
Dannet asked.

“These sims won’t tell us that,”
Iris replied. “Not with any degree of certainty. I can program them to react
like they have in the past, but that won’t tell us what they’ll do now.”

“A
valtotin
doesn’t change its spots, Iris,” Dannet replied.

“Neither does a leopard,” she
retorted. “These people aren’t leopards or voltotins and since we all agree
they are people, it is all too reasonable to assume that they will not
stubbornly stick to strategies and tactics that have proven ineffective.”

“All right,” Dannet nodded at
last. “Please let me know when we have a simulation to work with.”

“Done,” Iris announced.

Park and Dannet spent the next
three hours studying Iris’ simulation as well as several others she designed.
In the end, the decided that the three pronged attack was not going to be any
more or less effective no matter which directions each of their squadrons came
from so long as they were relatively evenly spaced.

“I think that’s the best we can
do for now,” Park decided finally. “Let’s go with the last plan we came up
with. It’s as good as any other and it’s still programmed in.”

“Hold on, Admiral,” Garro Tinns
cut in from the navigator’s station. “The Dark Ship Fleet is changing course.”

“They couldn’t have done that
three hours ago?” Park grumbled. “and where are they headed now?”