“Moment of truth, Ma’am?” Harris repeated.

“Exactly,” she told him. “I don’t know whether it’s her idea or her superiors’, but this ‘Captain Gortz’ is obviously trying to make a statement about the Andies’ technical capabilities. That being the case, I think it’s time we made a statement about our capabilities, too. So at the end of your seventy-nine-minute tracking period, I want you to bring both of our tethered platforms around so that their active sensors bear on the Andie drones. And then I want you to go to maximum power. I don’t just want a radar hull map of those drones, Shawn. I want to be able to read the mag combinations on their service access ports. I want their frigging serial numbers and the fingerprints of the last tech to service them. And I especially want to reduce those things’ passive sensors to slag. Got it?”

“Oh, yes, Skip!” Harris agreed with a smile every bit as evil as her own had been. “Fried recon drones in hollandaise sauce coming right up!” he promised.

“Good.” She patted him on the shoulder again. “Very good,” she repeated, then turned and walked across to her own command chair.

She sat back down, and her smile faded slightly as she gazed once again at her own plot, and the steady crimson dots of Hellbarde’s shadowing drones. However satisfying it might be to repay the Andy cruiser’s rudeness with interest—and she was honest enough with herself to admit that it would be extremely satisfying—it wouldn’t change the fact that Hellbarde had managed to get them into position undetected in the first place.

Exactly why Gortz had chosen to reveal the ability to do that remained as much a mystery as ever, but there was clearly a pattern to the other captain’s actions. She (or he) was escalating slowly but steadily, revealing ever more capable layers of technology and, probably, using that same opportunity to probe at Jessica Epps’ capabilities. That was one reason Ferrero had gone to such lengths to conceal the fact that she was using Ghost Rider. The tractor-tethered electronic warfare remotes she’d had Llewellyn deploy as part of his “exercises,” were scarcely new. They’d been around for generations, and they’d undoubtedly be around for generations more, because unlike even the most capable drones, they could be powered directly from the ship which had deployed them, which gave them effectively unlimited endurance. It also allowed them to mount extremely powerful decoy, jammer, and sensor systems, since they could draw directly on their mother ships for the energy to power them. So when she used them to take out Hellbarde’s platforms, she would be using “old” technology.

But by the same token she would be showing Gortz that Jessica Epps had spotted Hellbarde’s spies, hopefully without revealing precisely when or how that had been accomplished. That should remind Gortz that however good Andie technology might have become, the RMN continued to have the best hardware in space. Which, Ferrero devoutly hoped, was still true.