“If I’m right, then they were able to make a pretty decent estimate on exactly when and where they’d drop off of our orbital platforms’ sensors using whatever improved stealth systems they were employing. I think that’s exactly what they did, and that as soon as they were confident they’d pulled it off, they went to a higher acceleration than we thought they could pull on an evasion heading. And when they figured we might be getting drones into position to spot their emissions despite their stealth, they shut down and went ballistic, exactly as you just suggested they might have. But because they were able to pull a higher accel, they were outside the zone where even Ghost Rider’s active systems could find them without an impeller signature.”

“And how do you think they were able to make that close a time estimate?” Honor asked. In the wrong tone, her question might have suggested that she thought Zahn was inclined to believe in the improvement in the Andermani’s capabilities she had just postulated as a way to excuse a less than stellar effort to find the elusive battlecruiser. The way it came out, it was clearly an honest information request, and she felt Zahn relax a bit more.

“I think there are two possibilities, Your Grace. We know from Captain Ferrero’s report that the Andies clearly have an FTL com capability of their own. It’s possible that they had stealthed platforms already in-system to observe us—or even a second stealthed starship doing the same thing—so that they knew when we deployed the drones. They’re not particularly stealthy during the initial deployment phase,” she pointed out.

“If they tracked the deployment, then they could have sent an FTL warning to the battlecruiser which would have given her at least a rough idea of when the drones might reach detection range of her. With that information, she would have had an equally rough idea of when she had to shut down her impellers to disappear from our passives.”

“I don’t much care for that scenario, Commander,” Honor observed. “That, unfortunately, doesn’t make it any less likely. But you said you saw two possibilities.”

“Yes, Your Grace. Personally, I find the second one even more disturbing: they may have actually detected the Ghost Rider drones before the drones detected them.”

“You’re right,” Honor said after a moment. “That is a more disturbing possibility.” She glanced at Jaruwalski. “What do you think, Andrea?”

“At this point, Your Grace, I’m not prepared to rule anything out,” Jaruwalski said frankly. “I realize it’s always dangerous to overestimate a potential opponent’s capabilities, but it’s even more dangerous to underestimate them. Be that as it may, however, I’m strongly inclined to think that Commander Zahn’s first hypothesis is the more likely. I know how hard it would be for us to detect an incoming Ghost Rider drone soon enough to shut down before it had us on passive, even if we were under stealth at the time. I don’t see any way that anyone else could do it at all. Even making every possible allowance for improvements in their tech, I find it very difficult to believe that our local intelligence estimates could be far enough off for them to have developed the sort of capabilities which would let them manage a trick like that.”