But what Harris was telling Ferrero now added yet another dimension to whatever it was the other ship thought she was accomplishing.

Impeller signatures were the only normal-space phenomenon which propagated at what was effectively faster than light speed. That wasn’t exactly what really happened, of course. What really happened was that the intense gravity distortion associated with an impeller wedge created a “ripple” along the interface between the lowest alpha band of hyper-space and normal-space. It was that ripple, which was actually little more than a resonance from a hyper-space signature, which a starship’s Warshawskis picked up.

But the mechanics of what happened weren’t really important at the moment. What was important was the fact that impeller signatures could be detected and tracked in real-time across the effective range of shipboard sensors. Which was all well and good, except that as Harris had just reminded her, they were well beyond shipboard detection range from the Andy cruiser. Which meant that it didn’t matter that gravitic sensors were effectively FTL. For Hellbarde to be reacting that quickly to Jessica Epps’s heading changes, the communications links between her and her remote sensorplatforms had to be FTL, as well.

Which meant the Andermani Navy had not only managed to produce its own grav-pulse communicator, but also engineered it down to a size it could fit into something as small as a recon drone.

And a drone which is so stealthy, and has such a good shield against backscatter from its transmitter, that Shawn can’t find it even when he knows it has to be out there, she thought unhappily.

And Gortz is showing us that, too.

“You’ve been looking for drones only on passives, right?” she asked after a moment.

“Yes, Ma’am. Until I realized what was happening, I didn’t see any reason to go active. Do you want me to do it now?”

“No. Let’s not advertise the fact that we didn’t even realize she had drones on us. But I want to know where they are. So if we’re not spotting them with our shipboard passives, let’s put a few more drones of our own out there to hunt for them.”

“When they spot the drone launches they’ll have a pretty good idea of what we’re up to, Skipper,” Harris pointed out.

“Understood. But I think it’s time to put Ghost Rider to work.”

Harris looked up sharply, as if he were about to ask her if she was certain about that decision. But he wasn’t quite foolhardy enough to do that, despite his surprise, and she hid a lopsided mental grin at his expression.

“Don’t worry, Shawn,” she reassured him. “I haven’t lost my mind. But Ghost Rider’s mere existence isn’t on the Official Secrets List anymore. Everybody knows at least a little about its capabilities, and I’m sure Andy intelligence knows more than ‘a little.’ I don’t intend to flash the system’s full capabilities, but I want to know where those remotes are, and I want to find them without letting the Andies know how long it took us to realize they were out there.”