“Those are excellent points,” Honor agreed.

“With all due respect, Your Grace,” Alistair McKeon pointed out, “as important as the question of intent obviously is, it may also, unfortunately, be completely beside the point. Shots have been fired, casualties have been suffered, and we’ve lost a Queen’s ship with all hands. Whatever these clever-assed bastards may have been planning on doing, what they’ve actually accomplished is to present us with an act of war.”

The sudden, brief silence which greeted his blunt observation was profound.

“Yes, they have,” Honor said into that silence after a moment. “But the reason they did may still be of critical importance. My own initial read is that this entire incident represents a mistake.”

“Mistake?” Alice Truman shook her head. Unlike many of the other flag officers in the briefing room, Truman had had the opportunity to look over the sensor data from Chantilly before joining the rest of them. “Your Grace, Hellbarde was clearly not threatened in any way when she opened fire on Captain Ferrero’s vessel. Given how long and how assiduously Hellbarde had been harassing Jessica Epps for months prior to this, there’s not very much chance Hellbarde didn’t know exactly who she was dealing with, either. Which means that whatever else may have happened, an Andermani warship, deliberately, without provocation, and knowingly attacked a Queen’s ship.”

“I don’t disagree with your analysis of what happened, Alice,” Honor said. “I’m not at all certain, however, that ‘deliberately and without provocation’ is the best way to describe it.”

She felt more than a little incredulity from her subordinate officers, astonishment at both the thrust of her argument and that “the Salamander” should be the one to voice it.

“As Captain Gonsalves has already pointed out,” she continued calmly, “this represents an enormous break with the level of harassment we’ve seen out of the Andermani in the past. Moreover, we know Herzog von Rabenstrange is expected at Sachsen to relieve Sternhafen within the next few weeks. I find it very difficult to believe that the Andermani Navy would deliberately kick off an offensive against the Star Kingdom before their new station commander—widely regarded as perhaps the best flag officer in the IAN—even arrived.”

“There is that,” Truman agreed.

“True,” Alfredo Yu said. “But it’s also remotely possible that the timing represents a form of disinformation. By timing it to occur shortly before Rabenstrange’s arrival in Sachsen, they may have intended to give him a degree of plausible deniability. He can always lay the blame for the attack on Sternhafen.”

Honor felt a strain of bitter amusement under his words and had to suppress an ironic snort of her own as she remembered how Yu himself had been disavowed by his government during the operations which had first brought him to Yeltsin’s Star all those years ago.

“Why would he want to blame Sternhafen?” Hewitt asked.

“I don’t say I agree that it’s what they were trying to do,” Harriet Benson-Dessouix replied. “But it’s possible that they might see this as a way to hit us with a really painful provocation, a demonstration of the fact that people can get hurt out here if they don’t get out of the Andies’ way, while leaving themselves room to retreat from actually starting a war. They may think that if they blame it on Sternhafen, or even on Hellbarde’s captain and simply officially fault Sternhafen for not having reined in Hellbarde’s previous aggressiveness—which certainly wouldn’t have been the result of any official Andermani policy, under this interpretation—and possibly offer some form of reparations, we’d choose to absorb the attack without retaliating. Especially if they’ve interpreted the position of the Star Kingdom’s present government as indicating an… unwillingness to embrace a confrontational policy here in Silesia.