"I do n't believe this shit."

"What?" Duan Binyan looked up, startled by the sheer venom in Zeno Egervary's voice. The Marianne was thirty days out of Split, decelerating towards the last planet on her delivery schedule, and Egervary sat glaring at his tactical display.

"That bastard Manticoran," Egervary snarled, and Duan frowned, wondering why Egervary sounded so upset.

"What about them?" he asked. "We knew they had a couple of support ships stationed here."

"Not them," Egervary grated. "That frigging cruiser from Split!"

"What about her?" Duan demanded. He was getting past surprise at the security officer's obviously frightened fury to alarm, and his tone was considerably sharper.

"She's here, too," Egervary spat. "Right here in Montana orbit!"

"What?"

Duan bounced out of his command chair and across to Egervary's station almost before he realized he was moving. Not for the first time, he made a mental note to insist that if Marianne was going to be sent out on this sort of mission he really wanted a proper tactical repeater where he could get at it without leaving his own chair. It was only an absentminded flicker at the bottom of his brain, however. His attention was too firmly fixed on Egervary's plot to spare it any more than that.

"Are you sure?" he demanded as he gazed down at the icons of the ships in orbit around the planet. There weren't many. The icon representing the warship floated in a parking orbit all its own, and there were only two merchantmen-one a Rembrandter, and the other a Solarian, from their transponder codes, the two service ships they'd known about, and half a dozen Montanan LACs to keep it company.

"Unless you know some reason for two Manty cruisers to both be squawking the same transponder code, then, yeah, I'm pretty goddamned positive."

Egervary's tone was scarcely what anyone would have called respectfully disciplined, but Duan paid that little attention. If Egervary's identification was accurate, he had every reason to be worried as hell.

"I don't like this, Binyan." Annette De Chabrol's voice was sharper than usual, if not quite as taut as Egervary's.

"I'm not particularly crazy about it myself, Annette," he replied acidly, still staring down at the plot while his mind whirred.

"They must've spotted the goddamned drop after all," Egervary said. "The bastards nailed the fucking terrorists, then ran on ahead to grab our asses when we showed up here! We're fucked , people!"

Duan glanced sideways at him. Zeno Egervary's language wasn't exactly what you'd care for your sweet old grandmother to hear at the best of times, but he was obviously under more stress than usual. Which could be bad. Egervary was good at his job-both his jobs-but he was also the least stable of Marianne 's officers.

"Calm down, Zeno," the captain said as soothingly as he could. Egervary gave him an incredulous look, and Duan shrugged.

"They did not spot the drop, Zeno. If they'd spotted that, they would have nailed us at the same time. We didn't break orbit for over four hours after we made the delivery and recovered the shuttle. You think they would've let us just sit there that long, then actually leave the system, if they'd known what we'd been doing?"

He held Egervary's eyes with his own, and the security head seemed to settle down a bit.

A very tiny bit.

"Then they must've picked up one of the locals with some of the new guns right after we left," he said. "They busted him, and he sang like a bird. That's how they knew to come on ahead and wait for us."

"And just how do you figure that? I didn't tell anybody where we were going next-did you?"

Egervary was still glaring at him, but he gave his head a choppy shake, and Duan shrugged.

"Well, if you didn't, and if I didn't, I'm damned sure Annette didn't. So how do you think they could have figured it out."

"What about the port agent?" Egervary demanded. " He knew what we were doing. If they picked someone up and whoever it was turned him in, he could've told them."

"He couldn't tell them what he didn't know," Duan riposted. "This operation was tightly compartmentalized, Zeno. Our Kornati agent knew we were coming and made the arrangements for us, including assembling our cover cargo, and he could have spilled that part of it. But he didn't know where we were going next. The flight plan we filed with him had us heading for Tillerman as our next port of call, and that's also the destination for the cargo we took on there. We didn't say a word about stopping off at Montana. So the only place he could have sent them is straight ahead to Tillerman."

Egervary frowned, obviously trying to find a hole in Duan's logic. The captain folded his arms, leaning one hip against the tactical console and waited.

One advantage of Marianne 's military-grade hyper generator and particle screening was that her speed would let her stop off at Montana long enough to contact the locals waiting for their special cargo and still make it to Tillerman on time. A regular merchantman would have been too slow for that, and not even the Jessyk agent on Kornati had known about Marianne 's superior speed.

"Then what do you think she's doing here?" Egervary challenged.

"I don't have the least idea. The only thing I'm pretty damned confident of is that there's no way they could have predicted that we'd be coming here."

"Whether they could predict it or not, they're here now," De Chabrol pointed out tartly, and Duan nodded.

"Yes, they are. "

"So what do we do?" his executive officer demanded, and he frowned.

If Egervary had spotted the Manty sooner, his options might have been a lot better. Unfortunately, even Marianne 's sensor suite had a strictly limited range, especially against targets not obliging enough to have an impeller wedge up. From the look of Egervary's plot, the Manty's parking orbit must have brought her around from the far side of the planet within the last six or seven minutes. Unfortunately, by the time the cruiser was on the right side of the planet and the range was down to something which let Egervary spot her and check her transponder code, Marianne had already made turnover and begun decelerating towards the planet. Now she was twelve minutes past turnover, down to a velocity of 14,769 KPS and about 56.8 million kilometers from the planet, still decelerating at her dignified, tramp freighter's rate of two hundred gravities.

Part of the Jessyk Combine officer wanted to avoid the planet altogether. Despite his soothing words to Egervary, he, too, felt his hackles rising as he looked at that silent icon. What had brought the Manty here? Duan had seen enough bizarre coincidences to know they happened, but this one was more bizarre than most... assuming it was, in fact, a coincidence at all. Under the circumstances, and especially given the nature of the ship under his command and his cargo, he felt no burning desire to find out if it was.

Unfortunately he didn't have much choice. His ship was two hours and three minutes out of Montana orbit. If she suddenly changed course away from the planet, she'd make System Flight Control mildly curious, to say the least. Nor could she magically stop where she was and escape back across the hyper limit. Unless she altered acceleration radically, it was still going to take her two hours to decelerate to rest relative to the system primary, whatever she did. That meant she was committed to at least a flyby of the planet, and not stopping as she went by was certain to arouse the Manty skipper's suspicions.

And if the Manty got suspicious, there was no way Marianne could hope to stay away from her long enough to escape into hyper.

"We'll have to continue on profile," he said finally. Egervary looked as if he wanted to protest, and De Chabrol and Iakovos Sandkaran, the communications officer, didn't look much happier. "We're already committed to making planetfall," he pointed out. "If we try anything else, they're bound to figure we're up to something shady."

"But we're not supposed to be here," De Chabrol pointed out.

"And nobody in the system knows we're not," Duan countered. "Unless you want to suggest the Manty pulled our flight plan from the Split traffic control people?" He snorted. "That wouldn't make any more sense than the notion that they'd somehow run on ahead of us to lurk in ambush, now would it?"

"Maybe not, but what if they recognize us?" Egervary asked.

He looked more than a little pinched around the nostrils, and Duan remembered that Egervary-only his name hadn't been "Egervary" then-had been a "guest" of the Royal Manticoran Navy once before. Fortunately, he'd been acting as the tactical officer aboard a pirate cruiser in Silesia at the time, rather than serving aboard a slaver. Since he hadn't been in the database of the battlecruiser which had taken his ship and he'd been "only" a pirate, he'd been turned over to the local Silesian system governor rather than simply executed by the Manties. Getting him back from a Silly system governor had been trivially easy for Jessyk, but it seemed to have permanently affected Egervary's nerve where Manticoran warships were concerned.

Probably because he figures he is in their database now , Duan thought sarcastically. But his sarcastic amusement faded quickly. Finding yourself in the Manty Navy's database under the heading of previously arrested pirate or slaver was a virtual guarantee of the death sentence the second time they apprehended you.

"There's not any reason they should recognize us," he said, looking Egervary in the eye. "If they didn't spot us doing anything we shouldn't have been doing in Split, there's no reason for them to have done anything except check our transponder code. Why waste time taking a close look at one more rusty tramp-especially one that heads out of the system within less than nine hours of your own arrival? Right?"

Egervary looked at him for a moment, then gave a jerky nod.

"All right, then." Duan turned to Sandkaran. "Have we contacted Flight Control yet, Iakovos?"

"No," Sandkaran said, shaking his head.

"And we haven't started squawking our transponder code yet, right?" Another headshake. "Good. Let's crank up a new -transponder-the Golden Butterfly , I think. Get it ready, then contact Flight Control and request a parking orbit as Butterfly . Don't put the transponder on-line until they call you back up and whack you on the wrist for not having it up. Be a little crabby when they do, like a typical lazy merchant spacer. Then put the Butterfly code up. By the time we actually make orbit, the Manty should already have been informed by Flight Control that we're coming under our new name."