"Good to meet you all," Quinn said. "Let's get right down to business. If you'll look at the display there—"

"A question, first, if I may, sir," Jaeger spoke up. "I'd like to know what exactly our authorization is on this."

"You saw our orders, Jaeger," Clipper reminded him.

"Yes, sir, I did," Jaeger nodded, his eyes still on Quinn. "I don't recall any mention of a Commander Quinn in them. Watchdog also noticed something else unusual as we were bringing the fighter into dock. The Peacekeeper markings on the side of the fueler seemed to be a bit smeared."

"You're very observant, Watchdog," Quinn complimented him. "You're right, the markings are fresh. This ship has only recently been recommissioned into service."

"I see," Jaeger said, his voice studiously neutral. "Have you official orders confirming that, sir?"

Quinn glanced at Clipper. "Let's go ahead and cut through the noise here," he said to Jaeger. "This is not, in fact, a sanctioned Peacekeeper mission. I have no orders; I'm not even a reserve officer anymore. I needed an escort on an unofficial but important mission into unknown space. Bokamba offered to get me one. You're it."

Aric looked around the tiny room, his mouth dry. He'd known this moment would eventually come, but he'd hoped they would be too far along for anyone to turn back easily when they learned the truth. Here, barely minutes out, Quinn was not only inviting them to leave, but to arrest the two of them in the bargain and haul them straight back to Dorcas.

"Quinn," Wraith said suddenly. "Of course. Maestro."

A murmur of surprise rippled through the room. "Maestro?" Dazzler said. "The Maestro?"

"There was only one," Clipper said, his voice and face both a little pinched. Small wonder; with Bokamba's private message to him, he was effectively an accessory before the fact here. The team could haul him in, too.

"I see," Dazzler said, pushing himself gently away from the wall to drift toward Quinn. "You're the one who made all the noise that forced the Peacekeepers to reevaluate their screening procedure. Kept a lot of people out of the Copperheads. Including my brother."

"That's enough, Dazzler," Clipper said. "Get back to your position."

"No, that's all right," Quinn said, his voice sounding tired. "Let him have his say."

"Thank you, sir," Dazzler said, maneuvering to a stop directly in front of Quinn. "It was my older brother, sir. Charleston; four years older than me. He'd wanted to be a Copperhead since he was fifteen. The day after his eighteenth birthday he went down and enlisted. He went through the tests, the preliminary pilot training—the whole slate. He was two weeks from getting his Mindlink implant when the NorCoord hearings forced everyone to undergo new certification. He didn't make the new cut."

"I'm sorry," Quinn said.

Dazzler shook his head. "Don't be," he said. "It took him six months to get over it; but at that point he realized that going into the Copperheads would have been the worst mistake of his life. He wasn't anywhere near to having what it took to be a professional warrior."

And to Aric's surprise Dazzler held out his hand. "A long time ago he told me that if I ever ran into you, I was to thank you for saving him from the rashness of youth. His words."

For a pair of heartbeats Quinn didn't move. Then, looking as if he didn't quite believe it, he reached out and took the other's hand. "Thank you," he said quietly.

"No thanks needed," Dazzler said, releasing Quinn's hand and floating back toward his place in the group. "You helped take some of the glamour out of being a Copperhead. Speaking strictly for myself, I'd rather not fly with people who came in looking for glamour. I want the best. You helped make sure that's what we got."

For a long minute the room was silent. "You were going to tell us about the mission," Clipper said.

"Yes." Quinn took a deep breath, and Aric could see the effort in his face as he forced the ghosts of the past back down where they belonged. "You all know about the Conqueror attack on the Jutland task force," he said. "What you don't know is that the body count came up one short. Commander Pheylan Cavanagh, captain of the Kinshasa."

"Cavanagh?" Harlequin asked, looking at Aric.

"My younger brother," Aric said.

"Ah," Augur said knowingly. "So that's why we're going off half-cocked this way?"

"It's nothing of the sort," Aric said, keeping his voice level. "We tried to get the Peacekeepers to mount a proper rescue mission. Admiral Rudzinski turned us down."

"All the more reason we shouldn't be here," Jaeger said. "This is well past just being unsanctioned, Maestro. It's been effectively forbidden."

"Is there any evidence Cavanagh's still alive?" Delphi asked.

"Nothing positive," Quinn said. "Just the fact of no body and no debris from his escape pod. And the reasonable assumption that the Conquerors would want to take at least one live prisoner for examination."

"I watched those recordings very carefully," Shrike said, his finger fidgeting through his beard. "It was my understanding that all pod emergency beacons had been silenced before the watchships left the scene."

"That's true," Clipper put in. "But there's been some speculation that the Conquerors were using the beacons to locate and destroy the pods. It's possible Commander Cavanagh figured that out and shut his off before they got to him."

"And had his prudence rewarded by being taken prisoner," Crackajack said. "Some deal. You have any idea where to start looking?"

"We have the incoming vector that the Jutland and Dorcas garrison computed," Quinn said. "My plan was to look for likely systems that direction and check them out."

"That will take time," Jaeger pointed out. "And meanwhile the worlds of the Commonwealth are open to enemy attack."

Crackajack snorted. "After what happened to the Jutland, I hardly think six Corvines are going to make a lot of difference."

"That's irrelevant," Jaeger said sharply. "Our job is not to decide whether our presence is important or not. Nor is it to take our ships wherever we ourselves think proper. Our job is to go where ordered and to do there whatever needs to be done." He looked at Quinn, then at Clipper. "We have no legitimate reason to be here, Commander. I respectfully but strongly suggest we turn around and go back."

A muscle in Clipper's cheek twitched. "Maestro?"

"You're welcome to go back, Jaeger," Quinn said. "All of you are, in fact, if you don't want to continue. El Dorado and I are going on, whether you stay or not."

"I'm staying," Dazzler said. "You're going to need a tail, anyway."

"Sorry, Dazzler, but you can't lose me that easily," his partner Paladin said. "Looks like you've got yourself a wingman, Maestro."

"Delphi and I are in, too," Clipper said. "Call me old-fashioned, but I don't much care for the idea of Command simply abandoning Cavanagh to the Conquerors. Our people deserve better than that."

"So do all the people of the Commonwealth," Wraith said. "We're wasting time, Jaeger."

"Yes," Jaeger said, looking around. "Who else is coming back with us?"

"And if you want to leave, this is the time to do it," Clipper added. "If you don't go now, you're in for the duration."

Aric looked around the group. None of them looked especially comfortable, but none of them spoke up, either. "I guess it's you two, then," Clipper said at last to Jaeger and Wraith. "You'd better get going before you lose any more distance. Maestro, you want to go back to control and mesh us in?"

"That won't be necessary," Wraith said, pushing off a wall toward the wardroom doorway, his partner Augur following him. "We can disengage in mesh." His lip twitched in an almost reluctant half smile. "Besides, right now you need all the distance you can get. The farther you are from Dorcas when we blow the whistle, the less likely they'll send someone chasing after you."