He leaned a bit closer to Zahn’s plot and frowned as he read the data codes beside the two incidents he’d been unaware of.

“A battlecruiser division here at Sandhill?” he asked, crooking one eyebrow in surprise as he indicated a star in the Confederacy’s Breslau Sector.

“Yes, Sir,” Zahn confirmed, and pointed to the second new incident, in the Tyler System, near the northeastern border of the Posnan Sector. “And this one was apparently an entire squadron of heavy cruisers,” she said.

“I didn’t know they had this many cruisers in their entire navy,” Ackenheil said ironically, waving at the widely scattered crimson icons. Three of them represented pirate interceptions by forces containing nothing heavier than a destroyer; all the rest marked operations which had involved cruisers or battlecruisers.

“They do seem to be turning up everywhere we look, Sir,” Zahn agreed, and pulled at the lobe of her left ear in an “I’m thinking” gesture Ackenheil was pretty sure she didn’t know she used.

“Which suggests what to you?” he pressed, returning to his original question.

“Which suggests, at an absolute minimum,” she said in a crisper voice, lowering her hand from her ear and forgetting her diffidence as she grappled with the problem, “a very substantial redeployment of their available assets. I think sometimes we forget that the only Andermani ships we’re hearing about are the ones which actually intercept someone, Sir. There are probably half a dozen ships, or even more, out there that we aren’t hearing about for every one someone does tell us about.”

“An excellent point,” Ackenheil murmured.

“As to why they should redeploy this way just to catch pirates, though,” Zahn went on with a tiny shrug, her dark eyes distant, “I can’t think of any compelling operational reason for it, Skipper. It’s not as if they’d suddenly started suffering particularly heavy losses among their merchies—or not that we’ve heard anything about, anyway. I checked the Intelligence reports to confirm that. And even if they have developed some sudden concern about pirates or privateers, why use battlecruisers?”

“Why not use them, if they’ve got them?” Ackenheil asked, slipping smoothly into the Devil’s advocate role. “After all, they have to blood and train their ships somehow, and it’s not as if they had any major wars to do it in. That’s one of the reasons the RMN deployed some of its best crews and skippers out here before the war—to use anti-pirate operations as a tactical finishing school.”

“That might make some sense, Sir,” Zahn agreed. “But it doesn’t fit their previous operational patterns. And I asked Tim to do some research for me.”

She looked a question at Ackenheil, and he nodded. Her husband was a civilian analyst employed in Fleet Operations’ Records Division in Marsh, and he was very highly thought of by Commodore Tharwan, who headed RecDiv. Which was one reason the captain was so interested in the lieutenant commander’s opinion, he admitted to himself.

“He says that as far as ONI’s database is aware, they’ve never committed anything as heavy as a battlecruiser division to routine anti-piracy ops,” Zahn went on. “Records says that the only times they’ve used forces that heavy were when someone had managed to put together a force of pirates or privateers capable of carrying out at least squadron-level strikes, like Warnecke did.” She shook her head and waved a hand at the red icons on her plot. “Nothing like that has been going on anywhere in the region they’re operating across now, Skipper.”