“I think it’s possible,” she said. “Think about it. If they’re still hoping to convince us to pull out without a fight, letting us know that they’re going to be tougher opponents than we might have assumed would make sense. And they could kill two birds with one stone, in a way, if they deliberately failed to respond to our drones. First, they let us ‘steal’ the data they wanted us to have anyway. And second, by ‘not noticing us’ when we did, they lead us to assume that they can’t crack our electronic warfare capabilities. Which could come as a very nasty surprise down the road if we didn’t take the hint and withdraw from Silesia completely.”

“You know, Your Grace, I’d just hate double- and triple-think situations like this.”

“And you think I don’t?” Honor smiled crookedly, then gave her head a little toss. “But at least we know a bit more than we did, whether the Andies wanted us to know it or not. And they know a bit more about what’s going on than they did before we went to call on them. I’m sure that someone back at Admiralty House is going to be upset with me for ‘consorting with the enemy,’ but I can’t help thinking that this is the first positive contact between us and the Andermani since the entire escalation in tensions began.”

“I’d have to agree with that,” Brigham said. “But even so, that just brings me back to my original question, I’m afraid. Do you think it did any good?”

Chapter Fifty-Three

“STARLIGHT, you are Alpha-One for transit at the inner beacon.”

“Astro Control, Starlight copies Alpha-One for transit. Beginning final approach to insertion now.”

“Starlight, Astro Control shows you on nominal approach. Enjoy your trip. Astro Control, clear.”

“Thank you, Astro Control. Starlight, clear.”

Lieutenant Commander Sybil Dalipagic watched the data code of the Silesian Confederacy diplomatic courier blink out of existence as it disappeared into the Junction’s central terminus on its way to Basilisk. As she’d informed Starlight’s astrogator, the dispatch boat’s flight path had been nominal, but that hadn’t kept her from sweating the transit, anyway. Diplomatic couriers were the one type of vessel with which Astro Control could not establish direct telemetry links. Dalipagic shuddered to think what would have happened if she’d even suggested to Starlight that she could have handled the entire transit much more safely and efficiently from her own console. The very idea would have violated at least half a dozen solemn interstellar accords, although in Dalipagic’s professional opinion, those solemn accords were pretty damned stupid. It wasn’t as if establishing an interface and an override with the ship’s maneuvering computers would have in any way compromised the sacred integrity of its diplomatic files. Or, not at least if the people the dispatch boat belonged to had an IQ recorded in double digits.

She snorted in familiar amusement at the thought. Her brother-in-law had served for almost forty T-years aboard the ships of the Royal Manticoran Mail Service. The RMMS was never used for secure diplomatic dispatches, but there were plenty of other people who wanted to be sure their mail was transmitted in complete security. Which was why the mail ships’ secure data banks were completely separated—physically, not just by electronic firewalls—from any other computer they carried. Somehow, Dalipagic thought, it was… unlikely that a diplomatic courier wouldn’t have built in security measures at least that good. Which would just happen to have obviated any possibility that she could have hacked into Starlight’s dispatches simply by interfacing with the dispatch boat’s astrogation systems. Hell, not even a hacker as celebrated as the Navy’s Sir Horace Harkness could have managed that!