He’s smarter than I was led to believe, Misrem noted. Given how he’d aggressively challenged both the senate and the analysts, she’d expected a foolish hothead who got lucky. Now she was wondering if he was perhaps considerably more dangerous than that. A man with patience who both knew when the situation called for taking a risk and had the guts to make his bets with everything on the line—that was someone to watch.

“I see no signs of your anomaly vessel, Captain,” she said coldly, casually tilting her head just enough so she could look at him without strain.

“They were never native to this system, I assure you, Navarch,” he told her in a neutral tone. “Our encounter was likely pure chance.”

That almost caused her to laugh at the man. He might be more than he seemed, she was willing to grant, but if he really believed that, he was still a child.

“Unlikely that, Captain Aymes,” Misrem told him. “They were either here to survey the damage done by the Drasin or, more likely, backtrack the path the Drasin took when the creatures invaded. They, my dear captain, were almost certainly looking for you, or us, I suppose. That would preclude the very idea that the meeting was in any way pure chance.”

Aymes considered her remarks, then tipped his head in acknowledgment. “Point conceded, Navarch.”

The question now became, where did they withdraw to? Or were they foolish enough to push on without repairs? Misrem had mixed feelings about that possibility.

If they had done that, well, it was a stupid move, and more importantly, it was the sort of stupidity that would make them easy to handle in the future. On the other hand, that would also mean that a fully armed cruiser capable of taking on the Piar Cohn and emerging with only minor damage was now quite possibly nearing the edges of Imperial space.

Not normally a big worry. Even if they weren’t Oathers, there was a limit to how much damage such a thing could do before the fleet came down on them. On the other hand, this wasn’t normal times. People who’d just been hit by the Drasin were unlikely to be in a pleasant mood. She could imagine many ways to turn even the weapons of a light cruiser to the destruction of entire star systems, and so the thought of a heavy cruiser flying around unchecked in Imperial territory was worrisome.

Still, by all the data she’d seen in the Cohn’s reports, these people didn’t appear either that aggressive or that stupid. The odds were very much in favor of them having withdrawn back to a repair station.

So, Misrem mused as she looked over the recon data they had on the Oather systems, where would I withdraw to if I needed minor repairs in a hurry and wanted to make a report?