“Aye, aye, Sir!” Hoffner acknowledged with a grin.

“And just to give Ruihuan’s suggestion a little added point, Shilan,” Glockauer continued, “why don’t you go ahead and bring up your targeting systems? A few long-range radar and lidar hits should help to convince him we’re serious.”

“Aye, aye, Sir.” Weiss’ smile was at least as unpleasant as Engelmann’s had been, and she turned back to her console and her tracking party as the heavy cruiser altered course.

Glockauer returned her smile and waved Engelmann towards his own station, then settled back in his command chair to await Karawane’s reply to Hoffner’s demand that she heave to. His eyes returned to the icon burning in his plot, and his smile faded.

Piracy was always a problem here in the Silesian Confederacy. Silesia had never been anything but a sort of ongoing political meltdown at the best of times, and in this one thousand nine hundred and eighteenth year of mankind’s diaspora to the stars, the times were anything but the best. In fact, things had been going steadily downhill even from Silesia’s ramshackle norm for the last fifteen T-years.

Little though Glockauer or any other Andermani officer might care to admit it, the Royal Manticoran Navy had been the true mainstay of piracy suppression in the Confederacy for over two centuries. It was only in the last hundred or so T-years that the Andermani Empire’s fleet had begun to acquire the size and the numbers to pretend to exercise any meaningful, long-term police power in the area. Glockauer knew that was true, just as he understood that until the last fifty years—seventy-five, at the most—the Andermani merchant fleet had been too insignificant to justify the expense required to build up the Navy’s light forces to a point which would have permitted it to make any real inroad into the bloody forays of the Confederacy’s pirates and privateers.

Of course, even though piracy suppression was a natural part of the responsibilities of any naval officer, the Empire’s interest in Silesia had never been limited to, or even primarily focused on, the losses of its merchant lines. The true Andermani interest in the Confederacy had been unwaveringly focused upon frontier security concerns and the possibility of expansion. It would have been impolitic (to say the least) to admit that aloud, but no one in the Empire, the Confederacy, or the Star Kingdom of Manticore with an IQ above that of a rock could have had any illusions in that regard. Certainly, the Manties had been quick to depress any Andermani pretensions to sovereignty in the Confederacy, which they regarded with depressing arrogance as their own private fishing pond.

The grueling demands of the Manticoran war against the People’s Republic of Haven had distracted the RMN from its traditional role as the policeman of Silesia, though. That distraction had grown increasingly pronounced over the last fifty or sixty T-years, during the RMN’s build up to face the Peeps, and especially in the last fourteen or fifteen, after the actual shooting started. Glockauer wasn’t supposed to know about the high-level internal debates in both the Navy and the Foreign Ministry over how the Empire ought to have responded to the combination of steadily worsening local conditions and the opportunity the Manties’ distraction offered. Again, however, only an idiot could have been unaware of them. On the one hand, the Manticoran preoccupation with the Peeps had been an almost irresistible temptation to satisfy the Empire’s long-standing territorial ambitions while the RMN had too much on its plate to respond effectively. On the other hand, the Star Kingdom had been the Empire’s buffer against the People’s Republic’s insatiable expansionism.