“I’ll bet you these things are designed to jettison,” she told Brigham. “Probably mounted on some sort of external hard point.”

“That’s what’s George and I think,” Brigham said with a nod. “For that matter, that was Ellis’ conclusion, as well.”

“Yes, Ellis.” Honor shook herself and turned off the holo display, then leaned back in her chair and frowned at the chief of staff. “You say he got this visual using his long-range drones?”

“Yes, Your Grace. And he doesn’t think the Andies spotted them, either. Which is a little reassuring. At least they haven’t broken all of Ghost Rider’s advantages!”

“Let’s not fret ourselves into assigning them superhuman powers, Mercedes,” Honor said with a small, crooked smile. “I’m sure they have some additional surprises for us, but by the same token, I’m sure we have some for them. And everything we’ve seen out of them so far is still effectively a case of their playing catch-up with where we already are. Which inclines me to think that whether they want us to realize it or not, they have to be at least as nervous about what we might be able to do to them as we are about what they might be able to do to us.”

“No doubt that’s true,” Brigham replied with a dry chuckle. “On the other hand, Your Grace, my sympathy for what they may be worrying about is decidedly limited just now.”

“Yours and mine both,” Honor assured her. “But getting back to Walther. What did Ellis do when he got the visual?”

“Well, it took him a few minutes to recognize what he was looking at,” Brigham told her. “When he did, he realized his two battlecruisers would be on the extremely short end of the stick if missiles started flying. By the same token, he was determined not to be driven out of the system. So he deployed close-in drones, and the mid-range EW platforms, and accelerated to meet one of the two Andie forces.”

“He took on four cruisers armed like this one—” Honor tapped the deactivated memo board “—with just two Reliants?”

“Well, according to his report, he figured he’d probably gotten a better look at them than they could have gotten at him,” Brigham said. “So in addition to the decoys he’d put out to duplicate his ships’ emissions signatures for the bad guys’ fire control, he also deployed an additional two dozen decoys behind each battlecruiser.”

She paused, and Honor looked at her suspiciously.

“What sort of decoys?” she asked.

“He had them set to look like missile pods, Your Grace,” Brigham told her, and chuckled at Honor’s expression. “And he was careful to hold his accel down to something he could have managed with that many pods on tow, too.”

“He was running a bluff on them?”

“Precisely, Your Grace. And it looks like he pulled it off, too. Apparently, however aggressive the Andies might be feeling, they didn’t want to take on a pair of battlecruisers, each of whom were prepared to put two hundred and fifty missiles into space in a single broadside.”