The question, he reflected wryly, was whether that was a good thing, or a bad one. There was such a thing as knowing too much and allowing yourself to double-think your way into ineffectualness.

He walked across to a smaller repeater plot and punched in a command. Moments later, CIC had displayed its best guess of the new force’s composition and numbers. He frowned slightly. Apparently, CIC had managed to firm up its estimate at least a little while Marius was reporting to him. They were showing a minimum of thirty of the wall now, although some of the impeller signatures were still a bit tentative.

He folded his hands behind him and squared his shoulders while he considered the display.

It was always possible, perhaps even probable, that what looked like Third Fleet in the inner system was something else entirely. Or, for that matter, that it was actually only a portion of Third Fleet. In fact, that was the more likely probability. If Kuzak had been as completely surprised as Thunderbolt’s planners had hoped, then she might very well have been caught with her fleet divided between the inner system and the wormhole terminus. In that case, she might be employing ECM to convince his sensors that she was actually fully concentrated near San Martin in an effort to keep them from noticing the second half of her force sneaking in to join her.

The only real problem with that neat little theory was that there seemed to be too many ships in that second force. Giscard had studied Kuzak’s record, and he had a lively respect for her strategic judgment. If she’d split her forces to cover two objectives in the first place, she would have placed the larger force to cover the more important one. And in this instance, there was no comparison between the value—politically and morally, as well as economically—of defending San Martin’s citizens as opposed to a wormhole terminus. So if one force was going to be more powerful than the other, then the one in front of him ought to be substantially more numerous than the one behind him, yet CIC’s estimate suggested that the trailer was damned nearly the size of Kuzak’s entire fleet.

But if it wasn’t the second half of Third Fleet, then what was it, and what was it doing here? Could it be a detachment from their Home Fleet that had simply happened to be in range for a crash Junction transit? That was certainly possible, although a part of him rejected the possibility. It would have been too much like history repeating itself. That was exactly how White Haven had reached Basilisk in time to keep Giscard from taking out the terminus there when he’d raided that system. But the possibility of a coincidence like that happening a second time was remote, to say the least.

No. If there really was a second force out there, then it had been deliberately placed there ahead of time. Only that didn’t make a lot of sense, either… unless he assumed that they’d somehow guessed what was coming. Which should have been impossible. On the other hand, he couldn’t even begin to count the number of “top secret” plans which had somehow been compromised in the long history of military operations.