“Aye, aye, Ma’am.”

Llewellyn’s face disappeared from her screen as the exec cut the circuit, and Ferrero gestured to McKee to send word of his impending arrival to the boat bay personnel. Then she looked at Harris and McClelland.

“All right. When the Exec tells us he’s ready, I want the acceleration reduction we discussed, and a thirty or forty degree change of heading for the ‘pinnace exercises.’ And I want the drones dropped five minutes before that. Understood?”

Both of her subordinates nodded their understanding, and she leaned back in her command chair to smile at Hellbarde’s dot of light on her plot.

· · • · ·

“That’s it, Ma’am,” Lieutenant Commander Harris said finally. “Four of them.”

“Good work, Shawn,” Ferrero said sincerely as she stood looking over his shoulder at his detailed plot. There were, indeed, four of the Andy drones, placed so as to bracket Jessica Epps regardless of any course changes the Manticoran cruiser might make. They were within a few thousand kilometers of where Ferrero would have placed them herself, which only underscored how difficult it had been for Harris to nail them down. They’d started looking for them where they’d expected to find them, and despite that it had taken almost four and a half hours for the tac officer to positively confirm locations on all of them. Even then, he might not have managed it if the Andies hadn’t been forced to cycle in fresh drones to replace them as they exhausted their onboard power. He’d caught one of the replacement drones on its way in, and once he had its locus precisely defined, he’d managed to find the others by working his way out from there.

Which said some remarkably ominous things about the hellacious stealth technology the Andies had built into the damned things. At least their platforms’ endurance time seemed to be lower than the RMN’s, but that was rather cold comfort just at the moment.

Ferrero stood gazing at the icons of the elusive drones for several more moments. She was reasonably confident that they hadn’t noticed the even stealthier Ghost Rider drones creeping up behind them, but she wasn’t prepared to place any expensive bets on the proposition. Not after the way the Andies had managed to sneak their own platforms in on her. From everything Harris and Bob Llewellyn could detect or extrapolate, Ghost Rider’s technology was still superior to what they were seeing. But that assumed the Andy systems were working at full power without holding anything in reserve. Which seemed likely, but couldn’t really be confirmed.

On the other hand, whatever else they might be, those drones had to be equipped with extremely sensitive passive sensors. Which suggested the perfect way to deal with them to Erica Ferrero.

She glanced at the bulkhead time-date display, then rested one hand on Harris’s shoulder and smiled evilly.

“I’m afraid your day isn’t quite done yet, Shawn,” she told him. “We’re going to terminate our pinnace exercises at the end of the current evolution. When we do, I want you to track those things for another… seventy-nine minutes. I know it won’t be easy to hold them without the Andies catching on, but I want to put a little more time between our course changes for the exercises and the moment of truth.”