“All right, Molly,” he sighed. “Pass the movement instructions. I want to pull out for the alternate rendezvous within the hour.”

Chapter Forty-Seven

“NOTHING, Ma’am.”

“Nothing at all, Wraith?” Dame Alice Truman asked.

“No, Ma’am.” Captain Goodrick shook his head. “We’ve swept the system pretty thoroughly. I suppose it’s remotely possible that there could be one or two stealthed pickets hiding out there somewhere. After all, any star system is a mighty big haystack. But there’s no way there’s anything I’d call a fleet inside the system hyper limit.”

“Damn,” Truman said softly. She and her chief of staff stood on HMS Cockatrice’s flag bridge looking at an astrographic display of a completely empty star system. Truman knew how badly Honor had wanted to either confirm or deny the presence of a Havenite fleet. And how badly she’d wanted for any Havenite admiral to know he’d been spotted. Unfortunately, an empty star system accomplished neither of those objectives. The mere fact that there was no one here now didn’t indicate a thing about who might have been here when Hecate and Pirate’s Bane fought their brief, bloody battle. Indeed, it was entirely possible that the destroyer’s failure to arrive with their mail had inspired the people waiting for her to move to another address.

And the fact that there was no one here to note Truman’s own arrival prevented her from delivering Honor’s message.

“All right, Wraith,” she said finally. “We’ve swept the system without finding anyone; now all we can do is get back to Sidemore ASAP. Her Grace needs to know what we found—or didn’t, depending on how you want to look at it—and if there was a fleet here, it’s not here now. Which suggests it’s somewhere else. I’d just as soon not have it turn out that ‘somewhere else’ is launching an attack on Sidemore while we’re out looking for it here!”

· · • · ·

Honor regarded Truman’s report with profound dissatisfaction. Not with Truman or her LAC crews, but with the elusiveness of the Republic’s “Second Fleet.”

George Reynolds had finished his systematic dissection of every fragment Captain Bachfisch’s people had been able to extract from Hecate’s mangled computers. It was unpleasantly evident from those fragments that Thomas Theisman’s navy was extremely good at maintaining operational security. No one aboard Hecate had been in a position to initiate any sort of data purge—not while Pirate’s Bane was blowing their ship apart around them. And Reynolds had confided to Honor that it was fairly evident that Lieutenant Ferguson, the “civilian” electronics specialist Gruber had sent across to Hecate’s wreck to tackle her computers, was not merely military in background but extremely familiar with Peep naval hardware and software for some reason. Despite the catastrophic damage the destroyer had suffered, it seemed evident that Ferguson had gotten everything that was left in her computers, and there was actually a great deal of background information.

But there was very, very little about the organization and nature of this “Second Fleet”… and none at all about its purpose in Silesia.