"Very good, Dominica," Honor murmured. She gazed at the imagery for a moment longer, then nodded. "Make me the best estimate you can of their actual acceleration capability—impeller and Warshawski mode—and write it up. Make sure you save all your data, too. We'll want to pass it on to BuShips for evaluation."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am." Santos cut the circuit, and Honor looked up to find McKeon standing beside her chair, his eyebrows raised.

"Commander Santos says we have a definite discrepancy here, Mr. McKeon," she said, and the exec nodded.

"Yes, Ma'am. I caught the last little bit of your conversation. And I've got something to add, too. Lieutenant Cardones and I have determined that Sirius's nodes are hot."

It was Honor's turn to feel her eyebrows rise. "Could it be a systems test?"

"I don't think so, Ma'am. We're reading a full standby load on all the alpha and beta nodes on this side of her hull, fore and aft both. A systems test would probably run up just the alphas or the betas, not both. And why should they test both the forward and after nodes simultaneously? Besides, the power level's held steady for over ten minutes now."

Honor leaned back to regard him pensively and saw her own thoughts flicker behind his gray eyes. There was no regulation against a ship's holding her impeller drive at standby in parking orbit, but it was almost unheard of. Power was relatively cheap aboard a starship, but even the best fusion plant needed reactor mass, and impeller energy demands were high, even at standby. Maintaining that sort of load when you didn't need to was a good way to run up your overhead. Nor was it good for the equipment. Your engineers couldn't carry out routine maintenance while the drive was hot, and the components themselves had limited design lives. Holding them at standby when you didn't need to would certainly reduce their life spans, and that, again, ran up overhead.

All of which meant no freighter captain would hold his drive at standby without a very compelling reason. But a warship's captain might. It took almost forty minutes to bring your impeller wedge up from a cold start; by starting with hot nodes, you could reduce that to little more than fifteen minutes.

"That's very interesting, Mr. McKeon," Honor murmured.

"Curiouser and curiouser, Ma'am," McKeon agreed. "Oversized impeller nodes and a full standby load. Sounds to me like you've got your discrepancy if you want to go aboard, Captain."

"Maybe, and maybe not." Honor nibbled her lower lip and felt Nimitz nip her earlobe as he detected her worry. She grinned and hoisted him down into her lap to protect her ears, then sobered once more as she looked back up at McKeon.

"The problem is that nothing requires them to give us the real specs on their drive," she pointed out, "and no law says they have to build a freighter whose drive makes economic sense. The fact that their nodes are live and don't show the sort of wear we ought to see if they've got tuner failure would certainly seem to argue that they lied to Warlock about the nature of their engineering problems, but that's all we've got. A good lawyer could probably argue that away, and we'd have to admit that they haven't even sent a shuttle down to the planet—or anywhere else, for that matter—in over two and a half months. Without their making physical contact with anyone else, we can hardly accuse them of smuggling. They've just sat here in orbit, minding their own business like good little law-abiding merchant spacers. That means our probable cause is still awfully weak, and I still have reservations about tipping our hand, as well."

She rubbed Nimitz's ears, wrestling with an unaccustomed indecisiveness. On the one hand, she could probably justify, however thinly, sending an examining party on the basis of her observational data. But if she did, and if the Havenites truly were up to something, they'd know she suspected that they were. And they'd be certain to lodge all sorts of diplomatic protests. What bothered her most was her inability to decide whether it was fear of revealing her suspicions or fear of the protests which most daunted her. She thought it was the former, but a nagging little voice wondered if it weren't the latter.

She closed her eyes, making herself stand back and consider the options with all the detachment she could muster. The real problem was that, under interstellar law, the freighter's master could still refuse her inspectors entry, whatever she cited as probable cause, unless she had evidence that they'd violated Manticoran law or posed a direct threat to Manticoran security, and nothing she had constituted an actual criminal violation. If Captain Coglin refused her the right to board his ship, her only options would be to accept the slap in the face or expel Sirius from Manticoran space. She had the authority to do that to any ship which refused to allow her examination, with or without probable cause, should she so choose, but it was an action she would have to justify to the Admiralty, and she could just see the headlines it would provoke. "RMN EXPELS MERCHANT SHIP WITH DEFECTIVE DRIVE." "FREIGHTER SENT TO DIE IN HYPER BY HEARTLESS MANTICORAN OFFICER." "HAVEN PROTESTS HARRINGTON'S INHUMAN EXPULSION OF DAMAGED FREIGHTER."

She shuddered at the thought, but she rather thought she could face the fallout if it came to that. Lord knew some of the news services back home had already had some fairly terrible things to say about her—especially the ones Hauptman and his cronies controlled! Yet the real cruncher was that while she might put a crimp into Haven's plans if she did expel Sirius, she would neither learn what those plans might have been nor insure that they couldn't be reactivated some other way. And it seemed likely that anything as involved as this appeared to be—whatever it was!—would have built-in backups, and that meant—

"Captain?"

She opened her eyes to find Webster standing beside McKeon.

"Yes, Mr. Webster?"

"Excuse me, Ma'am, but I thought you'd want to know this. There's a three-cornered secure com net between Sirius, the Haven consulate, and the consulate's courier boat, Ma'am." Honor cocked her head, and Webster gave a small shrug. "I can't tell you much more than that, Skipper. They're using mighty tight-focused lasers, not regular com beams, and there's not much traffic. I've deployed a couple of passive remotes, but they're just catching the edge of the carriers. I can't tap into them without getting a receptor into one of the lasers itself, and they'd be sure to notice that."

"Can you tell if it's scrambled?"

"No, Ma'am. But given how tight their beams are, I'd be surprised if it wasn't. They don't need whiskers this tight for any technical reasons at this piddling little range. It has to be a security measure."

"I see." Honor nodded, and her indecision vanished into tranquillity. "Mr. McKeon, as soon as Mr. Tremaine returns aboard, I want us returned to our original orbit, but put us back into it astern of the Havenite courier boat."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am." McKeon responded automatically, but Honor saw the puzzlement in his eyes.

"Keep a close eye on Sirius, but see if you can determine whether or not the courier's nodes are hot, too," she went on. "I think we've pretty definitely established that something strange is going on out here, and that Haven is at the bottom of it, but we still don't know what. I want to know that, Exec. I want to catch them with their hands dirty and nail them in front of God and everybody."

"Yes, Ma'am." McKeon's puzzlement had turned to understanding, and Honor nodded.

"In the meantime, I want Fearless held on standby for impeller, as well. If either of those two start going anywhere, I want to be able to go in pursuit. Clear?"

"Clear, Ma'am."