"Hecate is over two days overdue, Sir," Captain DeLaney pointed out quietly.
"I know, Molly. I know."
Lester Tourville frowned as he contemplated the unhappy implications of DeLaney's reminder. There could be any number of reasons for Hecate's failure to arrive as scheduled. Unfortunately, he couldn't think of one of them that he liked. And whatever it might have been, his orders were clear. It seemed extremely unlikely that anything could have given away Second Fleet's presence, but extremely unlikely wasn't the same thing as impossible. Nor was it impossible, however unlikely, that Hecate's nonarrival was the result of something besides the normal hazards of navigation.
"All right, Molly," he sighed. "Pass the movement instructions. I want to pull out for the alternate rendezvous within the hour."
Chapter Forty Seven
"Nothing, Ma'am."
"Nothing at all, Wraith?" Dame Alice Truman asked.
"No, Ma'am." Captain Goodrick shook his head. "We've swept the system pretty thoroughly. I suppose it's remotely possible that there could be one or two stealthed pickets hiding out there somewhere. After all, any star system is a mighty big haystack. But there's no way there's anything I'd call a fleet inside the system hyper limit."
"Damn," Truman said softly. She and her chief of staff stood on HMS Cockatrice's flag bridge looking at an astrographic display of a completely empty star system. Truman knew how badly Honor had wanted to either confirm or deny the presence of a Havenite fleet. And how badly she'd wanted for any Havenite admiral to know he'd been spotted. Unfortunately, an empty star system accomplished neither of those objectives. The mere fact that there was no one here now didn't indicate a thing about who might have been here when Hecate and Pirate's Bane fought their brief, bloody battle. Indeed, it was entirely possible that the destroyer's failure to arrive with their mail had inspired the people waiting for her to move to another address.
And the fact that there was no one here to note Truman's own arrival prevented her from delivering Honor's message.
"All right, Wraith," she said finally. "We've swept the system without finding anyone; now all we can do is get back to Sidemore ASAP. Her Grace needs to know what we found—or didn't, depending on how you want to look at it—and if there was a fleet here, it's not here now. Which suggests it's somewhere else. I'd just as soon not have it turn out that 'somewhere else' is launching an attack on Sidemore while we're out looking for it here!"
Honor regarded Truman's report with profound dissatisfaction. Not with Truman or her LAC crews, but with the elusiveness of the Republic's "Second Fleet."
George Reynolds had finished his systematic dissection of every fragment Captain Bachfisch's people had been able to extract from Hecate's mangled computers. It was unpleasantly evident from those fragments that Thomas Theisman's navy was extremely good at maintaining operational security. No one aboard Hecate had been in a position to initiate any sort of data purge—not while Pirate's Bane was blowing their ship apart around them. And Reynolds had confided to Honor that it was fairly evident that Lieutenant Ferguson, the "civilian" electronics specialist Gruber had sent across to Hecate's wreck to tackle her computers, was not merely military in background but extremely familiar with Peep naval hardware and software for some reason. Despite the catastrophic damage the destroyer had suffered, it seemed evident that Ferguson had gotten everything that was left in her computers, and there was actually a great deal of background information.
But there was very, very little about the organization and nature of this "Second Fleet" . . . and none at all about its purpose in Silesia.
That lack of information made Truman's failure to find the Havenites even more frustrating. No one on Sidemore Station doubted Second Fleet's existence, but without more information on it, her options for preparing against whatever it intended to do were limited, to say the very least.
She growled something under her breath that made Nimitz raise his head and look at her disapprovingly from his bulkhead perch. She felt him considering something a bit more demonstrative, but he decided to settle for sighing with exaggerated patience, instead.
She looked up from the report long enough to stick her tongue out at him, then returned to her contemplation of unpalatable reality.
At least there hadn't been any fresh shooting incidents with the Andermani while she tried to figure out what to do about this live grenade. Not that she expected that to last much longer. She'd hoped the arrival of Herzog von Rabenstrange might have brought about some easing of the tensions between their forces, but it hadn't happened. At least, unlike Sternhafen, he appeared to have no interest in actively fanning the fire, but he also hadn't renounced Sternhafen's obviously self-serving—and grossly inaccurate—official verdict on the Zoraster Incident.
Chien-lu Anderman was far too smart to believe Sternhafen's version. More than that, he was too good an officer not to have investigated what had happened on his own. So if he was signing off on Sternhafen's obstruction of the truth, it was a very bad sign. Worse still, she couldn't believe he would have been a party to any such action without very specific policy directives from the Emperor. And if his directives precluded the minimization of tensions, then the chances of avoiding a more direct and vastly more dangerous confrontation were slight. Indeed, her greatest fear was that this relative quiet represented the lull before the storm while the Andies finished deploying their assets.
However she looked at it, she was caught between two threats. She would have felt reasonably confident about dealing with either of them alone, at least long enough to be reinforced from home, with the backing of Alfredo and the rest of the Protector's Own. But even with that welcome reinforcement, she lacked the resources to protect her area of responsibility from two totally separate threats. And so far, the High Ridge Government had declined to provide her with any additional support.
But that wasn't the worst of it—not by a long chalk.
She sighed heavily, her face creased with a worry she was careful never to allow anyone else to see, and faced the most unpalatable conclusion of all. If the Republic of Haven was prepared to launch an attack clear out here, then they must be simultaneously prepared to do the same thing much closer to home. Committing an isolated act of war on the scale represented by an attack on Sidemore Station in a region so far away from the front line between them and the Manticoran Alliance would be an act of lunacy. This had to represent only a single aspect of a far larger operations plan . . . and the ships committed to it, however many of them there were, likewise had to represent a force Thomas Theisman felt he could afford to divert from the truly critical theatre of operations.
That was what worried her most. She knew Thomas Theisman personally, something only two other Manticoran admirals could say. Both of those flag officers were right here with her, and all three of them had the utmost respect for him. More, she knew that both Hamish Alexander, who'd also fought him, and Alfredo Yu, who'd been his one-time mentor, shared that respect. So if Thomas Theisman felt he had sufficient naval strength to open a war on what amounted to two totally separated fronts, then it was painfully obvious to Honor that ONI had catastrophically underestimated the new Republican Navy. Theisman might be wrong in his force estimate, but she found it very difficult to believe his calculations could be that far off . . . especially given that the strength of the Royal Manticoran Navy, unlike that of the Republic, was a matter of public record following the bitter budget debates. Unlike Jurgenson, Chakrabarti, and Janacek, he knew exactly what his opponents had.