Cocooned in his command chair, Hadeishi could not feel the massive bulk of the Cornuelle begin to move, though the video feed on the Palenque picked up the spark of her maneuvering engines as they began a topwise spin. The threat-well and most of the displays remained constant – only the one pickup showing the arc of Ephesus shifted, the planet turning slowly upside down.

"Five second burn." Kosho's face remained porcelain, her eyes calmly tracking the movement of the ship. "Burn halted."

Hadeishi watched the comp on the Palenque adjust, seeing the image – and the identifier – flicker in and out, adapting, adapting…then the lock vanished and the civilian software declared the "foreign ship" to have vanished. "There you are… Reverse roll, Kosho-san."

The Cornuelle reappeared for a moment on the civilian display as momentum carried the cruiser back into a recognizable configuration. A second series of burns halted roll, then nudged her back, second by second, into an unidentifiable "hole" against the wall of night.

Hadeishi nodded. Kosho was already making a note in the log, while Hayes and Smith spoke softly into their throat mikes, adding their own commentary. The captain waited until they were done, then lifted his chin. "Admirably swift," he said. "Lieutenant Kosho, please make a note to schedule an exercise – at a later date – to determine the detection envelope of the civilian cameras. Then double-check with Fleet to see they have the same information. Mister Hayes, you may stand down your missile crews." He glanced over his display again. Everything remained quiet.

"Now there is the matter of this mysterious shuttle. I want a full report by end of watch, which we will discuss over dinner."

Kosho and the others nodded sharply and Hadeishi cancelled alert status himself. No need to disturb the cooks, he thought, though perhaps I should – an alert during dinner would certainly put everyone to the test… "We will remain underemissions control, Lieutenant. Move the ship to a different orbit. No sense in being too predictable."

Even though no one seems to be here to see us.…But Hadeishi knew exactly how easy it would be to hide in the interplanetary dark, unmoving, unnoticed, nearly invisible.

"Hrrmmm…" Magdalena was curled up again, both long arms lapped over her knees, snout resting on plush, close-napped black fur. One of her displays showed the faint traces of the Cornuelle shifting orbit – the flare of the big maneuvering drives were impossible to disguise, particularly at this short range – and the other presented an image of the "mysterious" shuttle the little bird had found.

The Hesht was not pleased with the man's efficiency or the power of his comps. She had watched with entirely open avarice as the Mйxica had unpacked three copper-colored blocks – each one no more than a forepaw wide – from his baggage and set them up in a cluster with the cabin display. She could smell something secret and powerful about them, and her tail lashed slowly from side to side, fur itching with the desire to take hold of them for just a moment.

At the same time, she was entirely convinced tweaking the tail of this human would be bad luck, for her, for her adoptive pack and for her hunt-sister Gretchen. So she watched impatiently, busying herself with a thorough search of the young skywatcher male's planetary scan archive. Magdalena had convinced herself there was a great deal of information hidden in the c-storage racks down at the observatory base. Many secrets, she mused. Waiting to be revealed to the light of day, like a heep burrow peeled back by a gentle claw.

She checked the progress of her image scan. The number was far, far too low to satisfy her desire, so a claw dragged an override and the Palenque main comp began to devote nearly thirty percent capacity to her search.

Hadeishi sat back, letting his steward remove the small dinner bowls from the table. The momentary burst of activity this afternoon had broken an almost imperceptible weight of boredom, though now – with nothing new to engage his attention – he felt the deadening effect of routine stealing up on him again. This pricked his mind to something like angry motion, and he'd spent the period between end of watch and dinner devising a series of sudden training alerts, each one timed to come at the most inappropriate or difficult time.

Standing on station like this – waiting, with nothing in the offing – was particularly trying. Hadeishi prided himself on being a calm man – particularly in the face of tumult or crisis – but amid this stultifying sameness he found himself reaching for something, anything, to enliven the day. Today, particularly after sensing Sho-sa Kosho's quiet pride in the crew's reaction time to the alert, he was tempted to press her until her imperturbable calm broke.

That is entirely unworthy, he reminded himself. Your boredom is not an excuse to torment a fellow officer. Still, the prospect intrigued – Hadeishi was beginning to wonder if the lieutenant had ever truly lost her temper.

The steward set down small pale green plates, each one containing a single orange wedge. Hadeishi speared his with a single hashi and popped the sweet fruit into his mouth. Around the low table, his officers did the same – each in their own way – and then the stewards finished clearing the last of the dishes. Mugs of tea appeared, each steaming, filling the air with the turned-earth aroma of a high-grade sencha.

"Very well, then," he said, after a decent interval. "What have you found?"

Kosho bowed politely. Like the others, she was officially off-duty, so she tied back the sleeves of her kimono with a deft motion and turned her head toward the captain with a very proper air. Beside her, Hayes moved aside, leaving a section of otherwise blank wall unobstructed.

"As Hummingbird-san reported, a Valkyrie-class mining shuttle was observed in the northern hemisphere of Ephesus Three. The aircraft was banking over an extensive lava field at north sixty, west ninety-eight degrees." Kosho indicated the blank wall with a control stylus and a rectangular image appeared – an enhanced version of the shuttle in flight. "Due to space limitations on the peapods, Smalls-tzin had set them to record one image every half hour at moderate visual density. As a result, this snapshot of the shuttle is only a very small section of a very large image area. We do not have enough data to extract a ship name or identification number from the visible surfaces of the shuttle."

The lieutenant commander motioned with the wand again. "We have scanned the snapshots for two-hour periods on either side of the sighting, and there is no evidence of the shuttle in flight. Given the altitude and location of the mining shuttle, we believe it was descending from orbit and then landed before the next set of pictures could be taken."

"And was hidden," Hadeishi commented. "Within thirty minutes."

"We believe so," Kosho said, inclining her head. "The Valkyrie-class is usually attached to a Tyr-class mobile refinery." Another image appeared, this of a huge, ungainly and entirely ugly collection of massive spheres, exposed girders and bulbous fuel tanks all arranged around an extended hexagonal core. "A Tyr can carry as many as fifteen shuttles, each with a nominal operating range of about eight hundred million k, with an operational duration of twenty days. They are designed for light exploration, survey and ore sample recovery."

"I see. Any pirate or wildcatter would be entirely pleased to have one under his control. Was the shuttle's descent within line-of-sight of the Palenque?"

"No, Hadeishi-san. At the time of descent, the civilian ship was on the opposite side of the planet."