On Basilisk Station

home? They've already been here for three months, but unless they're way up into critical failure levels, they could pop through the terminus to Manticore. That's a short hop, with minimal tuner stress and demand, and one of the big yards there could put in a whole new sail, much less tuners, in less than two months. But even if they were afraid to transit the Junction, why not order the replacements from Manticore? It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper and faster than shipping them out from home, and we've got scads of privately-owned repair ships. If they send new tuners from Haven, they're either going to have to send their own repair ship to install them or else charter one of ours, anyway, and the time they're spending in orbit has to be costing them a lot more in lost profit than paying us for the parts would.' She shook her head. 'No. They've got to be up to something, Skipper. There's just no logical economic or engineering reason for the way they're going about this.'

'What do we know about the ship's cargo, Captain?' Lieutenant Brigham asked. 'Do we know what she's carrying or where she was supposed to be bound from here, for instance?'

'Commander McKeon just told you everything we know,' Honor said wryly. 'She's been on station since before we arrived. That means Captain Young cleared her.'

People sat back around the table with careful nonexpressions of disgust, and despite her worries, Honor had to raise a hand to hide a smile.

'In that case, Ma'am,' Ensign Tremaine said, 'maybe we should make a customs check on her? I could take PO Harkness and a cutter, and—'

'No, Scotty.' Honor spoke almost absently and missed his flush of pleasure as she used his nickname. 'We can't do that. Sirius has already been checked by Warlock —' Someone snorted, and Honor paused to bite her tongue. Then she gave them all the closest she could come to a severe look and turned back to Tremaine.

'The point is, she's been officially cleared. We can't go back to re-inspect without some sort of hard evidence that her master lied to Lord Young. And while I think Commander Santos is right and their excuse for being here probably is bogus, we really don't have any evidence, do we?'

Tremaine shook his head unhappily, and she gave a slight shrug.

'More importantly, perhaps, if we did go back to give her a second look, we'd tip our hand. They'd know we figured something was fishy about their ship. If we are being `paranoid'—' she flashed McKeon a tight smile '—over an innocent coincidence, that might not hurt anything. But if they're really up to something, we could scare them into backing off or finding another way to do whatever they're trying to do. A way we don't know anything about.'

'There's another point, too, Skipper.' McKeon sighed. 'As you say, she's been cleared once. Her skipper might just refuse to let us back aboard, and without evidence that they're involved in what's happening dirt-side or that they lied to Lord Young, we wouldn't have any probable cause to justify forcing him to. We'd kick off all kinds of interstellar protests.'

'That I could live with.' Honor's voice was cold. 'I just don't see any way to do it without giving too much away.'

'You know, Skipper,' Santos mused, 'we might not be able to get aboard her, but it's possible a good, close external scan could tell us something.' Honor looked at her, and the engineer shrugged. 'I don't know what, but there could be something.' She paused for a moment, and then her eyes narrowed. 'For one thing, I'd really like to see how their drive compares to the specs they gave Warlock. If this Coglin cobbled up a report on a phony engineering casualty, it's possible he slipped up and built in an inconsistency.'

'Such as?'

'Depends.' Santos scooted down to sit on the end of her spine and plucked at her lower lip. 'There might not be anything—in fact, if they're smart, there probably won't be—but if they have a genuine flutter problem, then there damned well ought to be a lot of wear on their alpha nodes. We should see at least some pitting, maybe a little outright scoring, and the main coil should certainly have a fairly old replacement stamp.'

Honor nodded thoughtfully. The main gravity coils in a starship's alpha nodes were always replaced whenever the tuners were. In a sense, the coils were part of the tuner, sharing in its wear, and each of them carried a date stamp when it was installed. More to the point, the grav coil was open to space. There was an excellent chance the date stamp would be visible to a close external examination.

'If we get close enough for that, Ma'am,' Webster offered, 'I should be able to get a good read on her com activity, too. Maybe even tap into it.' He blushed as Honor looked at him, for what he suggested was illegal under half a dozen solemn interstellar conventions. He could be severely disciplined just for making the offer.

'I like it,' McKeon said suddenly. 'If we turn up a discrepancy like Dominica's talking about, it might just constitute the sort of evidence you need, Skipper.'

'It's not impossible for a tuner to go bad early,' Santos agreed, 'but it's certainly unusual. If we've got a discrepancy between observable wear on the alpha nodes and normal tuner wear, I can give you a written declaration of my own suspicions, Skipper. That's expert testimony, and expert testimony constitutes probable cause for any admiralty court.'

'Any Manticoran admiralty court,' Honor corrected gently, trying to hide the lump in her throat. The officers who had once been so hostile were now sticking their professional necks far out for her, and she looked down at her hands for a moment.

'Very well, ladies and gentlemen. I'll screen Dame Estelle with your comments and suggestions. In the meantime, I want our orbit shifted.' She looked at Panowski. 'I want us placed within two hundred kilometers of Sirius. Once we get there—' she turned her eyes to Tremaine '—I want you to take a cutter to the closest Manticoran ship. I'll give you a hardcopy dispatch for her master.'

'A dispatch, Ma'am? What sort of dispatch?'

'I won't know that until we know which ship it is,' she said dryly. 'But I'll come up with something once we do. The point is, your trip will be our pretext for changing orbit—that's why I want you in a cutter instead of a pinnace—and also why I want you to be obvious about your trip.'

'Oh.' Tremaine sat back for a moment, then nodded. 'Yes, Ma'am. I see.'

'I'm sure you do.' She turned back to McKeon. 'While Lieutenant Panowski and Lieutenant Brigham plot our move, Mr. McKeon, I want you to sit down with Lieutenant Cardones. I want this all done with passive sensors. I know we won't get as much, but an active probe would be as big a tip-off as actually boarding her. We're going to need the most intensive passive scan we can come up with, though, and I want you to help Rafe set it up in advance.'

'Yes, Ma'am.' McKeon met her eye confidently. 'We'll take care of it.'

'Very good.' Honor drew a breath and rose, sweeping her officers with her eyes once more. 'Then we know what we're going to do, people, so let's be about it.' They rose in turn, only to stop as she raised a hand.

'Before you go,' she said quietly, 'I just want to say thank you.'

She didn't specify for what. And as she looked into their faces, she knew she would never have to.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

HMS Fearless spiraled gently outward and settled into her new orbit without fuss or bother, and a cutter departed her boat bay and scudded away towards a mammoth Manticoran-registry freighter with a formal, written invitation for the ship's master to join Commander Harrington for supper. The merchant skipper would no doubt be astonished by—and possibly a little apprehensive over—that invitation, but none of the people on Fearless's bridge gave him a thought or paid the cutter much heed. Their attention was bent upon their readouts as passive instrumentation probed cautiously at PMSS Sirius.

She was a big ship, Honor mused, watching her own visual display from her command chair. Fearless herself could have been stowed comfortably in one of the freighter's main holds, and that sort of carrying capacity lent weight to Santos's observation. Letting that much ship sit idle any longer than you had to was like pouring money straight out the airlock. No owner—not even a government bureaucracy like Haven's Ministry of Trade—would do that without a very good reason.