"What d'you suppose they 're up to?" he asked.

"Damfino." Arless shrugged. He leaned back and cracked the knuckles of his long fingers.

"You mean they didn't file a flight plan?"

"You got it. They—hold on." The controller leaned forward and flipped a switch, shunting his com channels to Reynaud's earbug.

"—ontrol, this is Navy flight Foxtrot-Able-One. Request final approach instructions."

Arless started to reply, but Reynaud stopped him with a raised finger and keyed his own pickup.

"Navy Foxtrot-Able-One, this is Basilisk Control. Please state your intentions."

"Basilisk Control, we are a naval liaison mission. I have on board my recorded orders and an explanatory dispatch for your station commander."

Reynaud and Arless stared at one another, eyebrows raised. It was certainly unorthodox. Liaison mission? What kind of "liaison"? And why all the mystery? Why hadn't they pre-filed a flight plan? The captain shrugged.

"Very well, Navy Foxtrot-Able-One. Make your approach to—" he craned his neck to check Arless's display "—beacon Niner-Four. You'll be met by a guide. Basilisk Control clear."

He killed the circuit and gave Arless an eloquent glance.

"Now just what the hell do you think that was all about, Stu?"

"Beats me, boss," the controller replied, "but look at that."

He gestured at his display, and Reynaud frowned. Even as her pinnaces separated, the light cruiser had swung away from Basilisk Control to go slashing off on a vector for the system primary, and not at the eighty percent power RMN ships normally used. She was ripping along at a full five hundred gravities, and she was already fifty thousand kilometers away at a velocity of over seven hundred KPS.

The station commander scratched his bristly gray hair and sighed. Just when he'd gotten the last uniformed jackass to at least keep his ham-fisted fingers out of Control's pie, this happened. It had taken months to convince Young that his condescending attempts to rearrange Control's well-tried traffic lanes into more "efficient" routes—so poorly designed they could only increase the workloads of Reynaud's already over-worked controllers while decreasing safety margins—were neither required nor desired. Managing wormhole junction traffic was a job for well-trained, highly experienced professionals, not twits who'd been exiled for how poorly they did their own jobs. There were lots of things the Navy could have done to facilitate ACS's routine operations if the over-bred fart had been interested in doing anything that would have required any effort on his part. He hadn't been, but the tin-god aspect of his personality had been pronounced. As far as Reynaud had been able to tell, Young was simply incapable of watching someone else get on with his job in an orderly fashion as long as he could interfere without exerting himself. He'd rubbed Reynaud wrong from the beginning, and the chief controller had found himself going out of his way to rub right back—with a predictable loss of efficiency he couldn't quite regret, however hard he tried.

But it appeared Young's replacement was cut from different cloth. The problem was that Reynaud didn't know what sort of cloth. Judging by the speed with which he moved, the newcomer certainly seemed to have more energy than his predecessor, but that could be good or bad. If he actually intended to assist Control, it was probably good, yet long and bitter experience made it difficult for Reynaud to visualize a senior naval officer who did more good than harm.

He shrugged. Whatever Fearless's CO had in mind, the cruiser's rapid departure made it clear he intended to dump this "liaison mission" on Reynaud for the long haul, and his total lack of warning as to his intentions was peculiar, to say the very least.

He frowned again, but there was a speculative light in his eyes as he watched the light cruiser lope away. Whatever else that captain was, he clearly wasn't another Lord Pavel Young.

"Do you have our sweep pattern plotted, Astrogation?"

"Yes, Ma'am." Lieutenant Stromboli looked up at Honor's question. His fleshy face was drawn with weariness, for Santos and McKeon had kept revising their drone availability numbers on him. Every time they'd changed their figures, he'd had to recalculate almost from scratch, but tired or no, he never—ever—again meant to tell Captain Harrington he didn't have the course she needed. "We have a vector change in—" he double-checked his panel "—twenty-three minutes. We should deploy the first drone eight hours and forty-two minutes after that."

"Good. Pass the course change to Maneuvering." Nimitz "bleeked" softly in her ear, and she reached up to stroke his head. The treecat always seemed to know when it was time for him to be seen and not heard, even on the bridge, but he'd started sounding far more cheerful from the moment HMS Warlock disappeared. Honor knew why that was, and she allowed herself a small smile before she punched up Engineering.

She got one of Santos's assistants and waited patiently while the chief engineer was summoned to the com. Santos looked awful when she finally appeared. Her dark hair was gathered in a tight braid, her face was tired, and there was a smudge of grease down her right cheek.

"We'll be beginning drone deployment in approximately nine hours, Commander. What's our status?"

"The first pattern is almost ready to deploy now, Ma'am," Santos replied wearily, "and I think we'll have the second one by the time you need it, but I'm not sure about number three."

"Problems, Commander?" Honor asked mildly, and saw Santos's eyes flash with anger. Good. If her officers got mad enough, they might start thinking for a change instead of simply feeling sorry for themselves. But the lieutenant commander bit back what she wanted to say and exhaled sharply.

"I'm concerned about fatigue, Captain." Her voice was flat. "We're already running out of beacon kits, and the kits were never intended to deploy sensor heads of this size and sensitivity. Adapting them to fit requires modifications far outside the normal repair and maintenance parameters, and that limits the utility of our servomechs. We're doing a lot of hand-wiring and grunt work down here, we only have so many sets of hands, and it's going to get worse as the kits run out."

"Understood, Commander, but timing is critical to an orderly deployment. I advise you to expedite."

Honor cut the circuit and leaned back in her command chair with a tiny smile, and Nimitz rubbed his head against the side of her neck while he purred.

"You're what? " Captain Reynaud demanded, and Lieutenant Andreas Venizelos wrinkled his brow in puzzlement.

"I said I'm your customs and security officer, Captain. I'm sure Captain Harrington's dispatch will explain everything."

Reynaud accepted the message chip almost numbly, and Venizelos's puzzlement deepened. He couldn't understand why the ACS man looked so confused. It wasn't as if Venizelos were using any big words.

"Let me get this straight," Reynaud said after a moment. "Your Captain Harrington actually expects you and your people to be quartered here at Control? He means to leave you here to support our operations?"

"Yes, Sir, she does." The darkly handsome lieutenant stressed the pronoun's gender, and Reynaud nodded, but he still looked so dumbfounded Venizelos was moved to continue. "Why do you seem so surprised, Sir?"

"Surprised?" Reynaud shook himself, then smiled oddly. "Yes, I suppose `surprised' is a pretty good word, Lieutenant. Let me just put it this way. I've been chief controller in Basilisk for almost twenty months. Before that, I was senior assistant controller for damn near two years, and in all that time, you're the first—what did you call it? security and customs officer?—anyone's bothered to assign me. In fact, you may be the first one any station commander's ever bothered to assign to Control."