There wasn’t any reason to bring it up, he told himself defensively. It’s the Peeps we have to worry about; not the Andies. If we had to, we could survive letting them have the entire Confederacy, in the short term, at least. Besides, Francis hadn’t said a word to me about it then.

“In the meantime,” he continued, turning back to Chakrabarti, “I need firm proposals from you on the exact strength we need to transfer to Sidemore.”

“Do you want me to use worst-case assumptions?” the First Space Lord asked, and Janacek shook his head.

“Not worse-case. We don’t need to frighten ourselves into overreacting when none of this has even been confirmed by Intelligence. Assume some improvements in their capabilities, but let’s not get carried away.”

“That still leaves a lot of uncertainty, Ed,” Chakrabarti pointed out, and Janacek frowned. “I just want to be certain I base my proposals on what you want them based on,” the admiral said.

“All right,” Janacek said, “assume their present capabilities are approximately equal to what ours were, say, six T-years ago. No SD(P)s, no Ghost Rider, and no CLACs, but otherwise assume that they have everything we had, including the new compensators.”

“Fine,” Chakrabarti agreed with a satisfied nod. Then he cocked his head. “On the basis of those assumptions, though, I can already tell you that ‘a couple of battle squadrons’ isn’t going to be enough. Not playing so close to the Andies’ backyard.”

“There are limits to our resources,” Janacek told him.

“I understand. But we may be looking at a situation where we have no choice but to rob Peter if we’re going to pay Paul.”

“It’s highly probable that the Government will be able to control the situation through diplomatic measures,” Janacek said. “If it turns out that we’re going to require a more concrete proof of our commitment, we’ll just have to do whatever is necessary to come up with it.”

“Yes, Sir. But if we’re going to reinforce Sidemore on the scale I think the threat levels we’ll be assuming are going to require, then we’ll also have to pick somebody to command those reinforcements. Rear Admiral Hewitt, the station’s present commander, is actually on the junior side for what’s already assigned to it. He’s much too junior to command what’s about to become one of our three largest fleet commands, whether we call it a ‘fleet’ formally or not.”

“Um,” Janacek said again, frowning down at his desk in thought. Chakrabarti had a point, but picking a new station CO wasn’t going to be easy. Sidemore had proved fairly useful, but scarcely essential or vital even during the war. Now that the war had been effectively won, Sidemore would become increasingly less relevant to the Star Kingdom’s strategic needs, which meant no ambitious officer was going to appreciate being shuffled off to command it. And that didn’t even consider the potential mousetraps built into the assignment.

Despite his words to Jurgensen and Chakrabarti, Janacek was privately certain the Government would much prefer to avoid any distracting confrontation with the Andermani, and rightly so. The First Lord had never been in favor of the expansionist pressures he’d often sensed in both the Navy and Parliament, anyway. That was why he’d done his best to disengage from Basilisk during his first tenure at the Admiralty, before that maniac Harrington almost got them into a shooting war with the Peeps five T-years early.