Wes Marrone punched the wall of his cabin. Steve Carroll and his fleet had been lost over a week ago when the news reached Manticore.
"I should have gone back home on my own authority as soon as we heard about Thenuwara."
"It wasn't the SLN that destroyed Vice Admiral Carroll's squadron." Secretary Blanchet reminded him.
And Admiral Michaels would have ordered him elsewhere. She wouldn't have been happy leaving the defenses of Kalara and Osaka as light as she had, but she had been covering seven systems with forces intended to defend six and with a full squadron of the wall and screen detached.
"I've made a formal request for aid under the terms of our draft agreement. I believe our new allies will be receptive." She continued.
"But it's going to take time. Manticore doesn't have any magic way of attacking through a defended wormhole, and Steve may have gotten a dozen of Princess Harriet's SD(P)s, but she had to have brought along the mines to hold the bridge."
"Your people, and the Manticorans, seem convinced she can't have enough left to make a major attack on the home system soon."
"That's obvious. Princess Harriet has to hold that bridge if she doesn't want Manticore moving into our sector in force. And she needed to do it fast, before we put in our own fixed defenses. So she took everything she thought she could spare from defending her home world and her conquests. And Steve blew away two thirds of it."
"So if that's the case, and, contrary to her assumption, Manticore and its allies are willing to send a force the long way, then we can make things very unpleasant for the Princedom next month."
[break]
Admiral Marrone had not expected to be in command of the hashed-together task force the Grand Alliance had lent to Rivendell to reclaim the terminus system and prevail on Harriet II Sanderson's government to refrain from any further attacks on Rivendell and its allies. Between an 8-ship Havenite squadron of the wall, an SD-sized CLAC, and screen, the Republic of Haven was contributing the most weight of metal. The six Manticoran wallers and screen and the Grayson carrier accompanying them were the most powerful elements and Marrone had seen enough of Manticorans and Graysons to know that their navies trusted each other on a truly fundamental level; there might be a few officers on either side that would complain but they dropped into mixed formations with an ease that only allies who had spent two decades fighting side by side could manage. But Caparelli and Thiesman had insisted; they were sending out in defense of Rivendellian territory… and neither Manticore nor Haven really wanted to be in a mixed task force commanded by the other this early in their alliance.
"I hope you don't think I'm being ungrateful." Marrone had told Rear Admiral Starks after they finished reviewing the logs of the battle at the terminus system. "We really do appreciate that you think Vice Admiral Carroll and his squadron did extraordinarily well for their first fleet engagement, and in fact the first for our wall of battle in centuries. And that your technical people think highly of our hardware based on what they've seen of it and how it performed in that battle.
"But a lot of my oldest friends are dead or prisoners right now, and we haven't been fighting fleet engagements every few months for a decade. Being assured they fought well isn't doing much for me right now."
"I'm not going to tell you it gets easier. I was a cruiser skipper when Haven hit us with 'Operation Icarus' and Manticore suffered its first serious defeats in the first war. But I believe your people aren't going to give up after one defeat, and that means there will be others eventually." Starks said. He was older than most Manticoran junior flag officers, but he'd been a merchant spacer with a reserve commission for a decade when the first war had started, and had gone back to civilian service in the years between the wars despite earning a commodore's star due to Janacek's downsizing. He'd been dragged back in for the second war and found himself tapped for an SD(P) division command, and had that upgraded to a squadron after the exercises with Marrone in the Manticore-B system.