the

is a very good reason to deny them the time to send those other units in. If nothing else, it will be that many fewer people for us to have to kill."
No one said a word, and he let his eyes move from quadrant to quadrant, meeting their gazes one by one, then nodded slowly.
"Commander Kaplan will now brief you on how I intend to do that, if it becomes necessary. Commander?"
He turned to Naomi Kaplan.
"Yes, Sir." She turned to face the com more squarely and tapped a command into the console in front of her, bringing up a holographic schematic of the Monica System.
"As you can see, Ladies and Gentleman, Eroica Station, the main shipyard nexus of the Monican Navy, is located in the Eroica asteroid belt, which has an average orbital radius of roughly nineteen and a half light-minutes. The Station is an extensive complex, larger than a Navy this size would normally require, because they took advantage of the proximity of the Eroica Belt to set up a basic heavy industry node for the entire system. All this section here," she superimposed a larger-scale schematic of Eroica Station itself and circled about a third of its total area with a green hairline, "is essentially a commercial civilian operation, servicing the belt's extractive industries."
She moved the superimposed image to the side to clear the schematic of the entire system.
"As you can also see, at this moment, Eroica Station is almost in direct opposition from the planet Monica. They're the next best thing to thirty light-minutes apart, with the primary directly between, so light-speed communications between Eroica Station and the Monican government are going to be slow and ponderous. The need to relay around the primary's going to increase their message lag to just over forty-five minutes. In addition, Eroica Station's less than one-point-two light-minutes inside the hyper limit, where we can get at it quickly."
She gave them a few moments to study the system display, then slid the Eroica Station schematic back to center stage.
"Here's what Copenhagen's recon drone was able to find for us. I've highlighted the Indefatigables in red. As you can see, most of them are clustered fairly tightly around the main naval space station, on the far side of the complex from