“I see.” White Haven considered the First Lord in silence for several seconds, then shook his head. “Exactly how were his destroyers supposed to suggest all of this to us?”

“By being followed to an appropriate star somewhere—exactly as this Hecate was. Undoubtedly, they hoped to be picked up by one of our warships. If one of them had been, she would have ‘suddenly’ realized she was being trailed and broken away from the star she’d been to such trouble to bring to our attention. Our ship would have followed her until she either lost us or else returned to the Horus System ‘for new orders’. In either case, when the incident was reported to Sidemore, Admiral Harrington and her staff could be relied upon to draw the proper conclusions.

“As it turned out, they were spotted and shadowed by what they thought was a typical Silesian merchant ship, and they thought they saw an even better way to get their disinformation into our hands. Obviously, they intended to board Bachfisch’s ship, drop a few hints, and then turn her loose with stern orders not to go anywhere near the Marsh System. Of course any Silly merchant crew would immediately see the possibility of selling such information to us, which would have sent them straight off to Admiral Harrington!”

“And the data Admiral Bachfisch recovered from her computers?” White Haven asked.

“Strictly a fallback position,” Janacek said confidently. “Hecate was never intended to be captured or destroyed, but it must have been apparent to their planners that their ship might be unfortunate enough to attract the attention of a cruiser or even a battlecruiser. With our compensator efficiency advantages, Hecate’s ability to pull away would have been far from assured, so they briefed her crew with a cover story and planted a few ambiguous references to this ‘Second Fleet’ of theirs in her computers. They probably had it set up to look as if the crew had attempted to purge their database and failed to get everything dumped.” He shrugged. “When they screwed up and misidentified Bachfisch’s ship as a regular merchie, someone had time to go back to the fallback plan before he was killed.”

“Do you seriously believe any of that?” White Haven asked almost conversationally, and Janacek swelled with fury.

“Of course I do!” He shook his head angrily. “Oh, I’m sure we have some of the details wrong, but there’s no way—no way in the universe—Theisman would even contemplate genuinely sending a force as powerful as the one Harrington is postulating that far away from the decisive theater at a time like this! I don’t doubt that their ops plan came apart on them. Certainly I don’t believe they deliberately sacrificed an entire destroyer crew just to convince us their information was genuine! But the only thing that makes any sense is that this was intended as some elaborate diversionary effort.”

“And you don’t intend to be diverted by it, do you?”

“No, My Lord, I do not,” Janacek said flatly, staring unyieldingly into White Haven’s eyes.