He cocked an eyebrow at the exec, and, after a moment, Gruber nodded slowly.

“What I’m afraid of,” Bachfisch said then, “is that he’s headed there because he has friends waiting for him. Probably quite a lot of them.”

“Peep naval units in the middle of Silesia camped out in an uninhabited star system?” Gruber shook his head. “I’m not quite ready to call you crazy, Skipper, but I’m damned if I can think of any reason for them to be doing something like that.”

“I can think of one,” Bachfisch said, and his voice was suddenly grim. “Horus is the only star system in the Saginaw Sector which has an official Havenite diplomatic mission. It also happens to lie on an almost direct line from the Basilisk terminus of the Wormhole Junction to the Sachsen Sector. And if you extend our destroyer’s course from Horus to this star,” he tapped the icon on his display yet again, “you’ll see that it also forms a straight line… from Horus towards Marsh.”

Gruber dropped his eyes to the plot and stared at it for several seconds, then looked back up at his captain.

“With all due respect, Skipper, that’s crazy,” he said. “You’re suggesting that the Peeps have sent some sort of naval force clear from the Republic to the Confederacy and parked it in a star system in the middle of nowhere so they can attack Sidemore. Unless you’re suggesting that they’re out here to attack the Andies for some reason!”

“I can’t see any reason for them to be picking a fight with the Andies right now, no,” Bachfisch said. “And I admit that sending a big enough force out here to mount a credible attack on Duchess Harrington’s forces at Sidemore would be a fairly lunatic act under any normal set of circumstances. But you’ve heard just as many rumors about the tension between the Star Kingdom and the Republic as I have, Jinchu. It’s possible the new ships Theisman has been talking about really do exist. In fact, it’s possible that there are more of them than he’s chosen to tell us about.

“Now, if I were the Havenite Secretary of War, and I knew my government was getting sick and tired of being put continually on hold in its so-called peace negotiations with the Star Kingdom, I might be thinking very seriously about my war plans. And if the Admiralty had been kind enough to send one of the Star Kingdom’s better admirals out to a distant station, with only a handful of modern ships and a lot of obsolescent ones, then I might figure that it would be worth my while to send a much larger force of my own modern capital ships out here to pounce on her as part of a coordinated offensive against the Star Kingdom and the Manticoran Alliance.”

“Skipper, are you seriously suggesting that the Peeps are not only planning to restart the war but looking to kick it off with some sort of sneak attack?” Gruber asked very quietly.