On Basilisk Station

long-term basis, but I could certainly lend him to you for a few days. He's a good man and an old Medusa hand, and he's been involved in our own shuttle inspection efforts. How does that sound?'

'It sounds just fine, Commissioner,' Honor said with a smile. She rose, extending her hand once more while Nimitz flowed back up to her shoulder. 'Thank you. And thank you for the background, as well. I won't tie up any more of your time, but please feel free to screen me if there's anything I can do for you or if there's anything you feel should be called to my attention.'

'I certainly will, Commander.' Dame Estelle stood to grasp her hand once more, and her eyes were warm. 'And thank you.' She didn't specify exactly what she was thanking her for, and Honor suppressed a wry snort of amusement.

The commissioner walked around her desk to escort her to the door and paused for another handshake before she left. The door slid shut, and Dame Estelle returned to her chair with a bemused expression. She sat and pressed a button on her communications panel.

'George, get hold of Barney Isvarian, would you? I've got a new job for him.'

'Right,' her executive assistant said laconically, then paused. 'How'd it go, boss?' he asked after a moment.

'It went well, George. In fact, I think it went very well,' Dame Estelle said, and released the button with a smile.

CHAPTER TEN

'—no help at all. So since the Navy wasn't available, we've just done the best we could on our own, Commander.' Major Barney Isvarian, Medusan Native Protection Agency, was a short, sturdy man. He sat almost painfully erect in the comfortable chair, his Marine background showing in his discomfort at sitting in the presence of a warship's captain, but there was no apology in his face or voice.

'I understand, Major.' Honor gestured for steward MacGuiness to replenish Isvarian's coffee cup and sipped her own cocoa, using the mug to cover a sideways glance at Alistair McKeon. The executive officer had said very little while Isvarian listed all the things the Navy hadn't done for Medusa, but she sensed the discomfort lurking behind his stiffly formal facade and wondered if he felt as ashamed as she did.

'All right.' She set her mug aside and nodded. 'As I understand what you and Dame Estelle are saying, Major Isvarian, your greatest immediate need is for help with inspection of orbital transfers and space-to-ground traffic. Is that correct?'

'Yes, Ma'am.' Isvarian shrugged. 'As I say, we do our best, but most of us don't really know what to look for ... or where to find it, if it's hidden. A fair number of us have previous military experience, but it's not the right kind.'

Honor nodded again. The NPA's officers and troopers were mainly ex-Army, ex-Marine, or regular police. It wasn't the sort of job which would attract retired Navy personnel, and had the Fleet been doing its job, their skills would have been of little value to the NPA, anyway.

'We know damned well—pardon, Ma'am—that they're getting stuff past us, but we don't know enough about cargo shuttles to find it, and it's even worse aboard ship.'

'Understood. I think we'll be able to take care of that part of it, but we're shorthanded. If I can scare up inspection parties for you, do you think the NPA could help us out with flight crews for our cutters?'

'We can do better than that, Ma'am,' Isvarian said. 'Dame Estelle managed to, ah, find three Fleet pinnaces about a year back, and we've got two boarding shuttles on our official equipment list. I'm pretty sure we can put all five of them at your disposal, with enough NPA types to fill in any holes in their complements.'

'Now, that, Major, is good news,' Honor said warmly, wondering just how Dame Estelle's people had managed to 'find' Fleet small craft. Especially armed ones. But she wasn't about to question such unanticipated good fortune. She'd been afraid Fearless herself would be tied down ferrying her slow, shorter-legged cutters back and forth between parking orbits.

She rubbed the tip of her nose with a forefinger for a moment, thinking hard, then nodded to herself.

'I think we can come up with pilots, boarding officers, and inspection parties for all of them, Major. What we'll need from you will be com officers, flight engineers, and ground-side maintenance personnel. Can do?'

'Can do, Ma'am!' Isvarian grinned as he threw the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps' motto back at her.

'Good. Then I think that only leaves the matter of general traffic control. How have you been handling that?'

'Not very well, Ma'am. We've got a flight center down in the commissioner's compound, but it was really intended for atmospheric control only. Even there, the designers never anticipated the sheer number of off-worlders we've got wandering around these days. We're short on controllers and radar, and diverting what we've got to space control's left an awful lot of Outback airspace completely uncovered.'

'I see.' Honor glanced at McKeon. 'Exec? Suppose we reconfigure a dozen or so survey sats and tie their weather radar into the air traffic control net?'

'We could.' This time it was McKeon's turn to rub his nose and frown. 'We're making a mighty big dent in our equipment list, Ma'am,' he warned.

'I know, but I don't see an option ... and it's there to be used, Exec.'

McKeon nodded, eyes slitted in thought, and Honor wondered if he even realized he'd said 'we're' instead of 'you're.'

'Then I think we can do it, but their radar sets aren't going to get as good a paint off of an aircraft as standard ground radar would, and they're not set up for air traffic-quality doppler. They're intended more for radar mapping and weather observation, not real look-down capability, and air masses don't move that fast.' He frowned some more. 'If you'll give me a day or two with Santos and Cardones, I think between us we can come up with a fix to refine their target differentiation, and we should be able to work in a decent doppler and ranging capability, too, especially if we set them up in pairs. It'll be rough, but it should work.'

'Good,' Honor said. The survey satellites were standard issue and rarely used, since regular warships seldom pulled survey duty. They were also short-ranged and simple-minded, but they should suffice for this. Of course, McKeon was right about the carnage she was wreaking with her equipment list. Just her sensor network had cost the RMN somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred million dollars, even assuming most of the probe heads were recoverable, and she'd personally signed for every penny of it. But there was no other way to get the job done, and if the Admiralty objected to the cost, they should have assigned either more ships or narrower mission parameters. Besides, the survey sats would 'only' up the price tag by another half-million or so apiece.

'In that case,' she went on to Isvarian, 'I'd like to leave air-breathing traffic in NPA hands and set up a space traffic control center staffed by our people.' She toyed with her cocoa cup for a moment while she considered. 'Better make it a ground station, I think, in case something comes up out-system and we get called away. In fact, we might install it right next door to your air traffic people so they can coordinate better. What do you think, Exec?'

'I think we're going to be lucky if we're still at half-strength when the dust settles,' McKeon replied, using the calculator mode of his memo pad to check figures. 'By the time we crew those pinnaces and shuttles, we'll have another forty of our people on detached duty, Ma'am. We can probably use Marines to eke out the ratings in the inspection crews, but when you add enough Fleet people to man a control center on top of that—' He shrugged.

'Agreed, but I think it's necessary,' Honor said quietly. She kept her gaze on McKeon's face, but her eyes cut sideways at Isvarian for a moment, reminding the exec of their audience, and McKeon nodded. It wasn't a happy nod, nor a very graceful one, but it was a nod.

'We've still got that recon head we reserved to cover Medusa in our absence,' she continued after a moment. 'Limited endurance won't be much of a problem if we can get at it for regular service, so we can go ahead and deploy it in high orbit to cover the far side of the planet and use our onboard instrumentation to feed the ground center from this side. If we have to pull out, the air-search radar we save with the survey sats can revert to covering space traffic in our sector.'

'Who were you planning to put in command ground-side, Ma'am?' McKeon asked.