"Without burning the insulation?" Hauptman asked. "Or was it burned?"

"There weren't any scorch marks that we could find," Swofford admitted. "That's what makes it shaky. The other possibility is even shakier: something called Jonquil tunneling, where RF electric fields twist in such a way that you get quantum tunneling of electrons between the power and control lines."

"That would eliminate the intact-insulation problem," Pampas added. "Problem is, we can't come up with any way for the fields to twist that way without it showing up elsewhere in the power system."

"What about Rafe's scenario?" Damana asked. "The saboteur-in-our-midst thing?"

"Possible," Pampas said. "But even trickier to pull off than we first thought. In order to take down all the forward nodes simultaneously, our saboteur would have had to open up the system somewhere downstream of the control box but upstream of where the control lines branch off to the different nodes. There aren't a lot of places you can do that, and all of them are either in sight of the command crew or out in the open where anyone might happen by. That means he'd have to either distract an entire watch crew or else come up with a logical reason to be poking around access panels."

"And he'd have to do it for both the fore and aft nodes," Jackson put in. "The lines go off in different directions."

"Right," Pampas said. "Once into the wiring, he'd have to splice in a power boost with just enough juice to kill the junction points but not enough to affect anything else."

"And, of course, he would have had to sync both boosts to get the fore and aft nodes to go down together?" Sandler suggested.

"Right," Pampas said. "Then, after the boosters had done their job, he'd have to go in and take them out again."

"Though he would have had other cleanup to do at that point, anyway," Hauptman reminded them. "Erasing his presence from the logs, for starters."

"And of course, the rest of the crew would probably have been dead by then," Damana said.

"You said these were our choices if it was done from the inside," Sandler said. "What about from the outside?"

Pampas shrugged uncomfortably. "Then we're talking Admiral Hemphill's magic grav lance," he said. "Presumably if you boost a lance's power high enough, you could overload the impeller wedge in such a way that it would back-feed and blow out the junction points. But to pack that kind of power into a ship is beyond any theory I've ever heard of."

"Especially when you're going to do it from a million klicks out," Swofford added.

"Right," Pampas agreed. "Either of those two pieces represents an enormous technological leap. Put them together . . ." He shook his head.

For a moment there was silence.

"All right," Sandler said at last. "What I'm hearing is that our options run from the ridiculously unlikely to the completely impossible, and that we're at a stalemate until and unless we can see this thing work for ourselves. That about sum it up?"

"I'd say so, yes, Ma'am," Pampas said.

"So let's make that happen." Sandler touched her board, and the wiring diagram floating over the table was replaced by a schematic of the Tyler's Star system. "The problem with catching raiders in the act is that they've always got so much space to work with," she said. "Usually, of course, they like to sit right at the hyper limit and catch their prey as they leave hyper-space; but our raider seems to prefer attacking them somewhere in mid-system."

"Which he'd never get away with anywhere except Silesia," Jackson muttered.

"No argument," Sandler agreed. "Everywhere else the in-system sensor nets would be right on top of him if he tried this too close to inhabited areas. So let's see if we can use that confidence against him."

A slightly curved green line appeared, coming in from the hyper limit and running inward to end at Hadrian, the fourth planet out from the sun. "Here's the vector our bait will most likely be coming in from," she said. "You can see by the configuration of the planets that unless our raider is waiting right at the hyper limit, he won't have any decent chance to attack before they're in range of either in-system forces or someone's sensor cluster."

"What's that blue marker?" Cardones asked, pointing at a flashing light by one of the outer planets.

"An experimental ring-mining scheme," Sandler said. "A joint Silesian/Andermani venture, and as such under the protection of the IAN. The Andies usually don't have more than a destroyer and a few LACs on station at any given time, but that's enough to keep most raiders clear of the outer system."

"Including our boy?" Hauptman asked.

"We hope so," Sandler said. "Because we certainly can't cover the inner and outer systems at the same time."

"Even the inner system's a lot of territory for one ship," Cardones pointed out. "Or are we expecting help?"

"No, we're on our own," Sandler said. "But it's not quite as bad as it looks."

She touched keys, and the schematic shifted to a close-up view of the inner system. "Here's the incoming vector again," she said. "And here's the outgoing."

Another green line appeared, running off at about a hundred forty degrees from the first. But instead of moving cleanly out toward the hyper limit, it split into three different paths a short distance out from the planet itself. "As you see, at this point our convoy suddenly loses its coherency," Sandler continued. "One of the merchantmen is slated to swing inward to a solar research station, two more are to head outward to a rendezvous with the fifth planet, Quarre, with the other four heading outsystem toward their next scheduled stop at Brinkman."

"I thought the whole purpose of a convoy was for the ships to stick together," Cardones said. "What are they splitting apart that way for?"

"Mainly because they haven't got much choice," Sandler said. "Three of the four ships in the latter group are carrying perishables, and they can't afford the extra time to divert either to the solar station or Quarre."

"So which group does the escort stay with?" Damana asked.

"Assuming there is an escort," Hauptman added.

"There is," Sandler assured her. "The heavy cruiser HMS Iberiana. The assumption is that no one's going to be interested in supplies being brought to a research station, so the plan is for the Iberiana to split the difference with the others. She'll run a course midway between them until the twosome reach Quarre orbit, then shift over, catch up with the main convoy, and take them out of the system."

"Pretty well coordinated plan," Cardones commented, frowning to himself. In point of fact, it was an amazingly well coordinated plan. Most convoys he'd ever known had been of the catch-as-catch-can variety, with merchies dribbling haphazardly into a system and the Navy then throwing them whatever escort they could scare up.

"Sometimes it works," Sandler said with a shrug. "Only when the merchantmen can stick with a real schedule, of course."

"So that's the two departing ships," Pampas said. "What happens with the others?"

"The two Quarre-bound ships—Dorado and Nightingale —will stay there for a few days, picking up cargo from the various asteroid mining operations and doing some maintenance," Sandler said. "At that point another convoy is scheduled to come through bound for Walther, and they'll link up with it. The Harlequin —that's the ship headed to the research station—will meanwhile join with a Silesian convoy going directly to Telmach."

"You seem to know a lot about their schedule," Cardones said.

Sandler smiled slightly. "Of course," she said. "We are ONI, you know."

"I meant all these specifics about the presumed attack," Cardones amplified. "From the way you were talking before, it sounded like all we knew was that there was a reasonable chance the raider would show up here looking for something to hit."