“Ah?” Honor glanced at Brigham, and the commodore nodded.

“I don’t think they even suspected Captain Conagher had deployed the drones, Ma’am.” She smiled thinly. “Whatever else they’ve done, it doesn’t look like they’ve solved our EW capabilities just yet.”

“I’m glad… I think,” Honor said. “I almost wish I hadn’t let you and Alistair talk me into deploying them in the first place. If we’d been caught at it, it could have convinced Rabenstrange that my entire visit was only an intelligence ploy.”

Brigham started to reply, then decided not to. She still believed that even if the drones had been detected, a bunch as pragmatic as the Andermani Imperial Navy would have accepted it as no more than the way the game was played. In fact, she suspected, Honor probably believed the same thing, deep down inside. But if fretting about it represented her sole concession to the anxiety Brigham knew she must be feeling, then the chief of staff was perfectly willing to put up with it.

“At any rate,” she continued after a moment, “we got good visuals on several of their ships. Admiral Bachfisch was right about their new battlecruisers, too. They have at least one pod-based design in service; we got confirming visual imagery on three of them.”

“I wish I could say it was a surprise,” Honor observed.

“You and I both, Your Grace,” Brigham agreed. “But after seeing those strap-on pods of theirs, a surprise is one thing it isn’t. As a matter of fact, I’d have been delighted if that were the only thing the drones had confirmed.”

Honor crooked an eyebrow at her, and the chief of staff shrugged.

“They definitely have at least one SD(P) class in commission, Ma’am. We’re not positive how many of them they have in Sachsen. For that matter, neither Captain Conagher’s tac people nor George and I are prepared to give you any definitive estimate on their total ship strength in Sachsen. They’d clearly dispersed their units and gone to emissions control before we got far enough in-system to spot them all. But we picked up at least twenty superdreadnoughts, and the drones say that at least five of the twenty were SD(P)s.”

“Darn,” Honor said with a mildness which deceived neither Brigham nor herself.

“We didn’t pick up any sign of CLACs,” Brigham told her. “That doesn’t prove anything, of course. And we did see an awfully high number of LAC drive signatures scattered around the system.” She shrugged. “Call me paranoid, but to my suspicious mind, the existence of pod-based main combatants suggests that they have to have solved the problems of building something as simple as a LAC carrier.”

“You’re probably right,” Honor agreed. “And if you are, then they’re going to be a lot more dangerous. You know,” she went on slowly, “I wonder if they really failed to spot the drones at all.”

“You think they may have wanted us to know about their new hardware?” Brigham sounded skeptical, and it was Honor’s turn to shrug.