“And the Astra class?”

“As you know, we haven’t assigned them quite the same priority the superdreadnoughts have had, Sir. And Commander Clapp came up with a few LAC modifications we decided were worth retrofitting to the completed birds as well as incorporating in those still on the production line, which has slowed things still further. We have about thirty of the Astras either in commission or working up, but we don’t have complete LAC groups to put aboard them. And the same shortage of LACs is putting a crimp into our training schedule, as well. I don’t think we could deploy more than twenty, or possibly two dozen, by the end of the quarter.”

“I understand.” Theisman leaned back in his chair and gazed up at the deckhead, lips pursed in thought. He stayed that way for quite some time, then shrugged.

“You’re still enormously far ahead of where I expected you to be,” he told her. “What I’m hoping is that we can keep you and Bolthole under wraps for at least one additional quarter, possibly two, but I don’t think we can hope for much more than that. And, in a worst-case scenario, we may have to go public this quarter.”

He saw her slightly puzzled expression and waved one hand.

“If Secretary Giancola creates a situation in which he and the President and the rest of the Cabinet end up on opposite sides of a public debate, I don’t want him dropping any bombshells about our new and improved military posture. Not out of the blue, anyway. I can’t be positive, but I suspect that he’s at least considering the advantages of suddenly revealing the capabilities of the ships you’ve been building and working up out here.”

“The Manties clearly don’t have any serious interest in negotiating a treaty which would return any of our occupied planets. There’s some disagreement as to why that should be true. I personally tend to agree with General Usher over at FIA—that they could care less about hanging onto our territory except for the political advantages it secures the High Ridge crowd domestically—but other people have different theories. Including, I’m afraid, quite a few of the analysts at FIS… and at NavInt, for that matter.”

Foraker nodded. General Kevin Usher had been President Pritchart’s personal choice to head the new Federal Investigation Agency when Oscar Saint-Just’s repressive StateSec machine was demolished. The old organization had been split into two new ones—Usher’s FIA, and the Federal Intelligence Service, specifically charged with foreign intelligence at the federal level. The new agencies’ carefully chosen names had the advantage of a complete break with names like Internal Security and State Security, but they performed many of the same intelligence functions. With Usher in command, Pritchart could be confident that the FIA would not perform the old suppressive functions, and there were rumors that the President had wanted him in charge of the functions now assigned to both agencies. But many members of Congress had balked at the notion of creating yet another single intelligence/security umbrella organization. And, much as Foraker respected President Pritchart, she agreed with their disinclination. Not just because she, too, feared the potential for such an agency to become a new StateSec under a President other than Eloise Pritchart and a director other than Kevin Usher, either. She’d been less impressed with Wilhelm Trajan, the FIS’s new director, than she was with Usher, but she’d been delighted when Theisman resurrected Naval Intelligence as an independent agency within the Navy, as well. There were simply some questions civilian analysts wouldn’t think to ask, much less know how to answer.