Janacek frowned at him for several seconds, then shrugged.

“Either way, there wouldn’t have been much we could have done until you did confirm it,” he conceded, and Jurgensen nodded calmly. “But I can’t say I’m happy to hear about it, whether it’s confirmed or not,” the First Lord continued. “The Andies’ hardware was almost as good as ours before the war; if they’ve improved theirs since, we may have to seriously reconsider force levels in Silesia. The Prime Minister isn’t going to like hearing about that less than four months after we finished telling Parliament we’re making further reductions in our wall.”

Jurgensen and Chakrabarti nodded solemnly, secure in the knowledge that they had proposed nothing of the sort, whatever the civilian lords of Admiralty might have had to say about it. Of course, neither of them had protested the reductions, but that was entirely different from bearing responsibility for them.

“What sort of details do you have?” Chakrabarti asked after a moment.

“Almost none, actually,” Jurgensen admitted. “A Sidemorian analyst claims that visual imagery of one of the IAN’s new Thor-class battlecruisers shows fewer missile ports than the class is supposed to have. Exactly what that might mean, we currently have no idea, and we haven’t yet confirmed his claim with an independent analysis of the imagery. The raw visual take is on its way here, but we won’t see it for another week or two.”

“In addition, we have two reports from merchant skippers suggesting that the Andies may have managed at least some improvement in their inertial compensators. The evidence is extremely sketchy, but both of the captains involved report observing Andermani ships pulling accelerations considerably higher than they should have been.”

“Merchant skippers!” Chakrabarti snorted, but Jurgensen shook his head.

“That was my own initial reaction, Simon, which is one reason I wanted to get confirmation before reporting it. But one of the merchant captains involved is a half-pay admiral.”

“What?” Janacek eyes sharpened. “Which half-pay admiral?”

“An Admiral Bachfisch,” Jurgensen replied.

“Oh, him!” Janacek snorted. “I remember now. A fuck-up who almost got his ship blown out of space!”

“Not, perhaps, the best possible reference for someone’s resume,” Jurgensen agreed. “But he is an experienced man, with over thirty T-years on active duty before he, um, left active naval service.”

Janacek snorted again, although with a bit less panache this time. Chakrabarti, on the other hand, suddenly looked more thoughtful, and Jurgensen twitched one shoulder.

“There are a half dozen other reports, most of them from independent stringers run by our naval attaches in the Empire, that indicate the Andies have at least been experimenting with longer ranged missiles, and we’ve known for years now that they’ve been developing their own pods. What we don’t know, and what I haven’t found a way to confirm one way or the other yet, is whether or not they’ve begun laying down SD(P)s of their own.”

“Find a way to confirm it, one way or the other.” There was an edge in Janacek’s voice. His estimates of necessary force levels had been predicated upon maintaining the RMN’s monopoly on the new superdreadnought types. His reports to the Cabinet hadn’t even considered the possibility that the Andermani might already be beginning construction of their own SD(P)s.