Lakshmaniah replied with a wordless acknowledgment. The Combat Information Center portion of Valiant's computer net was probably correct, assuming that the faint sensor ghost Halberd might have picked up was actually there in the first place. Which didn't do her a damned bit of good.

She gnawed the inside of her lip fretfully while she suppressed the icy fear rippling through her as she contemplated the odds her eleven ships faced. The fear wasn't for her own survival—against such a weight of metal, living through this engagement would have been a low-probability event under any circumstances. No, it was the probability that she would not only die but fail to stop the Puppies short of the convoy that terrified her. Without the battlecruiser she would have accepted battle confident that she would emerge with enough of her ships to continue to screen the convoy; with the battlecruiser, she didn't need Valiant's AI to tell her that the chance of any of her ships surviving close combat was less than thirty percent.

And even that supposed that she took all of them out to meet the enemy as a concentrated, mutually supporting force.

There ought to be at least one more heavy cruiser, she fretted. At least one more; the battlecruisers usually operate solo in a squadron like this. And if I let myself be pulled out, then I open the door for it if it is out there. But if I don't go out to meet them, then the entire force gets into missile range, and if that happens ...

She drew a deep breath and made her decision.

"Communications," the Lakshmaniah portion of the neural net said, "connect me to Captain Trevor."

"So that's the size of it, Captain Trevor," Commodore Lakshmaniah said. "I don't like it, but we have to keep those big bastards as far away from the transports and industrial ships as we can. So I'm going to take the entire escort out to engage them. Which means it will be up to you and Lieutenant Chin to cover the transports in our absence."