On Basilisk Station

already called several items to Hauptman's attention, haven't we?'

'Yes, Sir, we have,' Canning agreed. He furrowed his brow as he considered ways and means. 'My regularly scheduled courier to Ambassador Gowan leaves tomorrow morning,' he said thoughtfully.

'An excellent suggestion, Mr. Canning.' The admiral nodded and raised his glass in a toast. 'To Commander Harrington, may she have other things to concern herself with very shortly,' he murmured.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Scotty Tremaine hit the powered adjustment button and stretched hugely as the purring motor moved the copilot's seat back from the pinnace's console. He rotated his shoulder joints, grimacing as he worked the stiffness from them, then rose.

'I'll be back in a few minutes, Ruth,' he told his pilot.

'No sweat, Mr. Tremaine.' Coxswain Third Class Ruth Kleinmeuller grinned. 'I don't guess the planet's going anywhere till you get back, Sir.'

'Probably not,' he agreed, and opened the cockpit hatch. He made his way down the cramped passage (pinnaces were little larger than pre-space jumbo jets) to the flight engineer's cubicle and poked his head in.

'How's it going?'

'Nothing, Sir.' The rating manning the sensor equipment wrinkled her nose at him. 'As far as this outfit's concerned, we're flying over lots and lots of nothing.'

'I see.' Tremaine smothered a smile at her tone. Her reply was respectful and reasonably cheerful, but he heard the disgust under its surface. His people had been less than pleased to be detached to customs work at the outset, but that had changed over the past few hectic weeks. They'd learned to take a positive glee in making a major bust, and what it was doing to their bank accounts back home didn't hurt. Now they actively resented any diversion from the steadily thinner pickings of the orbital traffic.

'Y'know, Sir,' a voice said from behind him, 'without more pinnaces, this is going to take a long time.'

Tremaine turned to face PO Harkness.

'Yes, PO, I do know,' he said mildly. 'But unless you happen to have a half-dozen more of them tucked away in your locker, I don't see anyone else we can assign to it. Do you?'

'No, Sir,' Harkness said. The ensign, he reflected, had come a long way since that first contraband discovery. Harkness liked Tremaine—he was neither an arrogant snot, like too many ensigns who were afraid of betraying their inexperience, nor the sort to avoid responsibility—but he'd been testing the youngster. There were many ways to find out just what an officer had inside, and there were depths to young Mr. Tremaine the casual observer might not suspect.

'I was just thinking, Sir,' the petty officer went on after a moment.

'About what, PO?'

'Well, Sir, it occurred to me that we're diverting one pinnace full-time from customs work, right?' Tremaine nodded. 'With the close passes we have to make, this is going to take days then,' Harkness went on, 'but what about all the other boats?' Tremaine cocked his head and made a little 'go on' gesture with his fingers. 'The thing I was thinking, Sir, is that each of those other boats is making at least six space-to-ground passes every day—down and back every time they change off crews—and that got me started wondering. Couldn't we maybe reroute their landings and liftoffs? I mean, they've got the same sensors we've got, don't they?'

'Hmmmm.' Tremaine rubbed his chin. 'That's true enough. We could lay off flight paths to cover this entire hemisphere, couldn't we? And that would free us up to cover the other side of the planet.' He nodded slowly, eyes narrowing in thought, and Harkness nodded back.

'This, PO,' the ensign said judiciously, 'bears thinking on. Thanks.'

'You're welcome, Sir,' Harkness said, and Tremaine headed back to the cockpit and the pinnace's com.

Lieutenant Commander Santos stepped into the briefing room and paused behind the captain's chair. Honor was busy perusing the latest data on planetary power usage and didn't hear her come in, but she looked up at the sound of a sudden, juicy crunch.

Nimitz's buzzing purr confirmed her suspicions, and she shot a humorous glare at Santos as she saw the celery stalk clutched in the treecat's right hand-paw. Nimitz's carnivore fangs weren't designed for vegetable matter, despite his tree-dweller origins. Treecats were the top of Sphinx's arboreal food chain, preying on the smaller vegetarians and omnivores who inhabited their domain, and his needle-sharp teeth shredded the celery into stringy green strands—wet, stringy green strands—as he chewed.

Santos gave her a half-apologetic glance as she watched the 'cat make a blissful mess, and Honor shook her head.

'You know that stuff's bad for him, Dominica,' she chided.

'But he likes it so much, Skipper,' Santos excused herself.

'I know he does, but he can't metabolize it—not fully, anyway. He's got the wrong enzymes for terrestrial cellulose. It just fills him up, and then he picks at his supper.'

Nimitz paused in his chewing. His vocal apparatus might be utterly unsuited to anything resembling human speech, but he understood a surprisingly large vocabulary, and he'd heard this particular speech from his person too often over the years. Now he gave her a disdainful glance, flirted his tail, and rose on his rear feet to rub his head against Santos's arm, making his views on the subject abundantly clear. The engineer was his favorite among Fearless's officers—probably, Honor reflected darkly, because she always had a stash of celery somewhere about her person these days—and Santos grinned down at him.

'Well,' Honor sighed finally, 'I guess I should be used to it. The little devil always finds someone to pander to his vices.'

'He is kind of cute, isn't he?' Santos agreed. She gave the 'cat an affectionate chin rub, then sank into an empty chair at the table, and Honor smiled. She was, she reflected, a terrible sucker where people with a kindness for treecats were concerned.

'You wanted to see me about something?' Santos asked after a moment.

'Yes.' Honor tapped her data display with a stylus. 'I've been looking at Barney's figures on probable power usage. They seem awfully vague to me.'

'Well, it's not an easy thing to quantify, Skipper.' Santos ran her fingers through her hair and frowned thoughtfully. 'He doesn't have very solid data on what they've got to use their power on, so his people have had to make a lot of WAGs.' Honor raised an eyebrow, and Santos grinned. 'That's a technical term we engineers use. It means `Wild-Assed Guess,'' she explained. 'They can feed in some hard figures from outside observation—things like exterior lighting, com traffic, and heat exchangers—but without complete specs on an enclave's interior hardware, they're shooting in the dark. Just knowing whether or not a given set of people remember to turn the lights off when they leave the room could throw any estimate off by a pretty wide margin.'

'Um.' Honor rubbed the tip of her nose and leaned back in her chair, listening to Nimitz crunch and slurp away at his celery. 'How are we coming on the collector taps?' she asked suddenly.

'We've got three—no, four—to go,' Santos replied. 'Sorry it's taking so long, but with just the cutters —'

Honor waved a hand, cutting her off, and smiled.

'Don't apologize. You're doing well, especially since we're trying to keep anyone from noticing what we're up to.' She rocked her chair slightly, still gazing at the data on her terminal, then shrugged.

'All right, let's see if we can come at this a different way, Dominica,' she murmured, and pressed her intercom key.

'Officer of the watch,' Lieutenant Webster's voice replied.

'Com, this is the Captain. Is the exec on the bridge?'

'No, Ma'am. I think he's down in Missile Two. Tactical's been having some problems with the magazine