A soft sound circled the table, and something inside Giscard shivered. It had been a long time since he’d heard that hungry growl of agreement from anyone but his own staff, and a part of him wondered how McQueen had put so much iron into her senior subordinates’ spines so quickly. No wonder she’s been so effective in combat, if she can do this, he thought. Then: And no wonder just thinking about her political ambitions scares the shit out of the people’s commissioners!

“Our data on the enemy’s currently available fleet strength are not as definite as we’d like,” Bukato went on. “Our espionage operations in the Star Kingdom have taken a heavy hit since the war started. Indeed, we now suspect—” he glanced sidelong at Fontein and Pritchart “—that NavInt’s major prewar networks there had been compromised even before the start of hostilities. It looks like the Manties actually used our own spies to feed us fabricated information to draw us into false initial deployments.”

Again, Giscard kept his face expressionless, but it was hard. Most of the PN’s new crop of senior officers must have speculated about that. Giscard certainly had, though, like all the others, he’d dared not say so aloud. But it made sense. Certainly something had caused Amos Parnell to radically realign his force structure on the very eve of the war, and no one really believed it had been part of some obscure plot the Legislaturalist officer corps had hatched to betray the People for enigmatic reasons of their own. But the official line had been that the disastrous opening phases of the war had been entirely the fault of that officer corps, and that “crime” had been the pretext for which the new political management had ordered most of its senior members to be shot. So if Bukato was openly saying that it might not have been Parnell’s fault—that the disgraced CNO had been snookered by Manty counterintelligence…

My God, things really are changing! he thought wonderingly, and looked over at Fontein. The Citizen Commissioner hadn’t even blinked. He simply sat there impassively, without as much as a frown, and that impassivity told Giscard even more than Bukato’s statement had.

“Despite our lack of hard data from covert sources, however,” the Citizen Admiral continued, “we’ve been able to make some estimates based on known enemy deployments. One thing worth noting is that when Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville hit the Adler System, the Manties apparently had not deployed their usual FTL sensor network. From observation of their picket deployments and patrols around Trevor’s Star, we think they’re still short of a complete network even there, which suggests a production problem somewhere. Any such assumption has to be taken with a grain of salt, but it would appear to be consistent with the building rates we’ve observed. Their construction tempo has gone up steadily since the beginning of hostilities, but our best estimate is that their yard capacity is now saturated. What we seem to be seeing—not only with the FTL recon satellites around Adler and Trevor’s Star, but also in their reliance on Q-ships because of their apparent inability to free up battlecruiser and cruiser elements to police Silesia—is the end consequence of an all-out drive to maximize the production of new hulls. In other words, it looks as if they’ve overstrained their prewar industrial capacity. If so, then they’ll have to build additional yards before they can resume the upward curve in their fleet strength. And it would also help to explain their apparent passivity since taking Trevor’s Star.”