That lack of information made Truman’s failure to find the Havenites even more frustrating. No one on Sidemore Station doubted Second Fleet’s existence, but without more information on it, her options for preparing against whatever it intended to do were limited, to say the very least.

She growled something under her breath that made Nimitz raise his head and look at her disapprovingly from his bulkhead perch. She felt him considering something a bit more demonstrative, but he decided to settle for sighing with exaggerated patience, instead.

She looked up from the report long enough to stick her tongue out at him, then returned to her contemplation of unpalatable reality.

At least there hadn’t been any fresh shooting incidents with the Andermani while she tried to figure out what to do about this live grenade. Not that she expected that to last much longer. She’d hoped the arrival of Herzog von Rabenstrange might have brought about some easing of the tensions between their forces, but it hadn’t happened. At least, unlike Sternhafen, he appeared to have no interest in actively fanning the fire, but he also hadn’t renounced Sternhafen’s obviously self-serving—and grossly inaccurate—official verdict on the Zoraster Incident.

Chien-lu Anderman was far too smart to believe Sternhafen’s version. More than that, he was too good an officer not to have investigated what had happened on his own. So if he was signing off on Sternhafen’s obstruction of the truth, it was a very bad sign. Worse still, she couldn’t believe he would have been a party to any such action without very specific policy directives from the Emperor. And if his directives precluded the minimization of tensions, then the chances of avoiding a more direct and vastly more dangerous confrontation were slight. Indeed, her greatest fear was that this relative quiet represented the lull before the storm while the Andies finished deploying their assets.

However she looked at it, she was caught between two threats. She would have felt reasonably confident about dealing with either of them alone, at least long enough to be reinforced from home, with the backing of Alfredo and the rest of the Protector’s Own. But even with that welcome reinforcement, she lacked the resources to protect her area of responsibility from two totally separate threats. And so far, the High Ridge Government had declined to provide her with any additional support.

But that wasn’t the worst of it—not by a long chalk.

She sighed heavily, her face creased with a worry she was careful never to allow anyone else to see, and faced the most unpalatable conclusion of all. If the Republic of Haven was prepared to launch an attack clear out here, then they must be simultaneously prepared to do the same thing much closer to home. Committing an isolated act of war on the scale represented by an attack on Sidemore Station in a region so far away from the front line between them and the Manticoran Alliance would be an act of lunacy. This had to represent only a single aspect of a far larger operations plan… and the ships committed to it, however many of them there were, likewise had to represent a force Thomas Theisman felt he could afford to divert from the truly critical theatre of operations.