On Basilisk Station

campaign against illegal traffic. Medusa was no longer a good place to transship prohibited goods, and the word was getting around. She hadn't realized what a holy terror Tremaine was going to be—he seemed to be developing some sort of ESP where smugglers were concerned—and Stromboli's eagle eye on ship-to-ship traffic had guided the ensign to three mid-space pounces that had netted close to half a billion more dollars of contraband. She'd seen to it they both got 'well dones' for their success, and Lieutenant Venizelos had come in for quite a few of his own for his efforts at the terminus. Judging by the violence and volume of the protests they were generating, they and their people were putting an extremely painful crimp into someone's profits, and she'd made sure they knew she knew it.

And, as she'd hoped, the recognition Fearless's company was earning, not just from her but from Dame Estelle, the NPA, and the ACS, as well, was turning the corner. She no longer had to bully and harass her crew into doing their jobs. The notion that they, unlike anyone else who had ever been assigned to Basilisk Station, were making a difference was pulling them together. They were overworked, dog-tired, and only too well aware that they were scoring their successes in spite of the system rather than because of it, and that only made them prouder of themselves.

They deserved their pride. Indeed, she was proud of them, and their sense of accomplishment was starting to earn her their regard. The prize money they'd earned for their seizures didn't hurt any either, of course. The traditional award of a half percent of the value of all contraband seized might not sound like a lot, but they'd sent in over a billion and a half dollars worth of it. If all of it was finally condemned by the Admiralty Court, as Honor confidently anticipated it would be, that was more than seven and a half million dollars for the ship's company to split—and that assumed Mondragon's owners would simply be fined. If their ship was confiscated, as it well might be, its assessed value would be added to the pot. The captain's share was six percent of the total, which gave Honor herself a tidy little half million so far (she'd discovered that even she could do that math easily enough), which was almost eight years' salary for an RMN commander, but her noncoms and enlisted personnel got seventy percent to split among them. That meant even the least senior of them would receive almost twelve thousand dollars, and by long tradition and despite periodic assaults by the Exchequer, prize money was untaxable.

Needless to say, Ensign Tremaine and Lieutenant Venizelos had become very popular with their crewmates, but they'd all earned every penny of their bonus, and she knew they valued their self-pride even more highly. Indeed, the prize money was more valuable to them as a vindication of their efforts, a proof of their effectiveness, than for what it could buy, and it showed. Lieutenant Commander Santos had been the first to call her 'Skipper,' the possessive honorific none had been willing to extend after the disastrous Fleet exercises, but more and more of her officers were beginning to use it now.

More of them, yes, she thought with a sudden, inner frown, but not all. Lois Suchon still carried a palpable aura of resentment about with her, and Honor had come to the conclusion that she always would. The surgeon was simply one of those fortunately rare individuals who were naturally incapable of pulling their weight as a member of a team.

And then there was McKeon. He was doing his job. She couldn't fault the time he'd taken with Cardones, or the long hours he'd put in coaching and ass-kicking Panowski, or the skill with which he juggled their tight-stretched human resources to keep all bases covered. Yet for all that, the barriers remained. She could see what a tower of strength he might have been. Indeed, the fact that he was accomplishing so much without ever letting her close to him only underscored his abilities. But he couldn't seem to take that final step into partnership with her, and she suspected from his tight expression that it frustrated him almost as much as it did her. It was as if he needed to make the transition and couldn't, and she wished she understood what the problem was. One thing was certain, it went deeper than the malaise which had gripped the rest of her crew when they were first sent here, and—

A soft chime intruded into her thoughts, and she turned her head as Webster acknowledged the incoming signal. The lieutenant said something, then nodded and turned his chair to face her.

'I have a transmission for you from the surface, Ma'am. From the resident commissioner's office.'

'Transfer it to my screen,' Honor said, but the com officer shook his head.

'Dame Estelle asks to speak to you privately, Ma'am.'

Honor felt an eyebrow rise and smoothed it back down, then lifted Nimitz to the back of her chair and rose.

'I'll take it in my briefing room, Samuel.'

'Yes, Ma'am.'

Honor nodded and walked through the hatch, closing it behind her. She sank into the captain's chair at the head of the conference table and keyed an acceptance signal into the data terminal, then smiled as Dame Estelle appeared on the built-in com screen.

'Hello, Commander,' the Commissioner said.

'This is a pleasant surprise, Dame Estelle. What can I do for you?'

'I'm afraid I really called to cry on your shoulder, Honor,' Matsuko said wryly.

'That's what the Navy's here for, Ma'am,' Honor replied, and the commissioner snorted. Honor let it pass, but she hadn't missed the fact that Dame Estelle didn't seem to regard her as really belonging to the RMN. It was part and parcel of the way the commissioner addressed her by her first name, as if to distance her from the real Fleet officers (i.e., deadbeat incompetents) she'd had to deal with so often.

'Yes, well,' Matsuko said after a moment, 'the truth is, I'm beginning to think I may have a bigger problem down here than I thought I did.'

'How so?'

'Since you sent Lieutenant Stromboli and his people down to take over space control, my air traffic people have been freed up to deal with more local concerns. They've plugged a lot of the holes in our Outback aerial coverage with the extra manpower and your survey sats—not all; there are still a few left—and they've picked up a small number of unidentified flights in restricted areas.'

'Oh?' Honor sat straighter in her chair and frowned. 'What sorts of flights?'

'We can't tell.' The commissioner sounded disgusted. 'Their transponders don't respond when we query them, which, coupled with the fact that they certainly didn't file flight plans for their destinations, seems like pretty clear proof they're up to something we wouldn't like. We've tried interceptions, but the NPA's counter-grav is designed more for reliability and endurance than speed, and they run right away from us. If you hadn't made such a hole in our space-to-ground traffic, I'd guess they were rendezvousing smugglers.'

'I suppose they still could be,' Honor mused. 'We've only been working on them for a month now. They could still be handing off stuff they'd already gotten down.'

'I thought about that, but even if it was already down, they'd still have to get it back up past you to do them any good. Besides, they're too far out in the bush for that to seem very likely.'

'Um.' Honor rubbed the tip of her nose and frowned. The NPA's vehicles, for the most part, worked fairly close in to the enclaves, she reflected. 'Could they be meeting to transship that far out just to stay beyond your interception range?'

'I doubt it. Oh, it has that effect, but they seem to operate in singletons, as far as we can tell, and they'd have to be working with very low-mass consignments, unless they have a base with their own cargo-handling equipment tucked away somewhere. And even if their cargoes were small and light enough to hand load, they're losing our radar, outbound and inbound, in the Madcat Mountains or over in the Mossybacks. If all they were doing was meeting other air traffic, why come out of the mountains where we can see them at all? They could rendezvous in one of the valleys out there, and we'd never spot them without a direct overflight. Besides, I'm beginning to have some very unhappy suspicions about what they might be up to.'

'Such as, Ma'am?'

'You remember your first visit, when I mentioned mekoha to you?' Honor nodded, and Dame Estelle shrugged. 'Well, as I said then, mekoha's highly sophisticated for the Medusans' technology. They're surprisingly good bathtub alchemists, but this is a pretty complex—and potent—alkaloid analogue with a kicker something like an endorphin. It's not an endorphin, or at least, we don't think it is, but we're only beginning to really understand Medusan biochemistry, so we could be wrong. Anyway—' she made a moue and shook her head '—what matters is that manufacturing it is a lengthy, complicated, and dangerous process for the local alchemists, especially in the final drying and grinding