“Yes, Sir. Sorry ’bout that, Sir. Guess I’m just getting old, Sir,” Senior Chief Harkness replied so earnestly Honor had to turn a laugh into a smothered cough. “I’ll try not to let it happen again, Sir,” Harkness went on. “Maybe next time I can find you a younger, fitter flight engineer, Sir. And then—”

“And then you can tell me where you saw whatever you saw before I come back there and have Master Chief Ascher take care of you for me, Chief!” Tremaine interrupted.

“Ha! Threats now, is it?” Harkness sniffed over the com, but he was tapping keys back in the tac section even as he spoke. A heads-up holo display glowed suddenly, painting a rough map against the windscreen with a blinking icon to indicate the approximate location of whatever Harkness had seen. The icon was well astern and to port of them, and Tremaine brought the shuttle around in a wide curve.

“Is Two still on station?” he asked. Honor leaned to the side, peering through the armorplast on her side of the cockpit, but she couldn’t see anything. Senior Chief Harkness, however, had a better view from his location.

“Sticking to you like glue, Sir,” he said. “She’s dropped back a little on your starboard quarter, but she’s holding position nicely.”

“That, Chief Harkness, is because she is an officer and a lady. And unlike people who don’t tell me they’ve seen things until we’re past them, she’s also good at her job.”

“You just keep right on, Sir,” Harkness told him comfortably. “And the next time you need to find your posterior, you can use your own flashlight.”

“I’m shocked—shocked—that you could say such a thing to an officer and a gentleman,” Tremaine returned in a slightly distracted tone. He was leaning forward, eyes sweeping the night. “I’d think that after all these years, you’d at l—”

He broke off suddenly, and the shuttle’s speed dropped still further.

“I do believe I may owe you an apology, Chief,” he murmured. “A small one, at least.” He glanced at Honor. “Do you see it, Ma’am?”

“I do.” Honor raised an old-fashioned pair of binoculars, once more missing her cybernetic eye’s vision enhancement as she peered through them with her right eye. It wasn’t much—no more than what looked like a torch or two burning against the blackness of the jungle—and she felt a distant surprise that Harkness had seen it at all. Of course, he does have access to the tac sensors from back there, she reminded herself, but Peep passives are nothing to write home about.

“How do you want to handle it, Ma’am?” Tremaine asked, and tension burned under his deceptively calm tone.

“Warn Commander Metcalf, and then take us up another few hundred meters,” she replied. “Let’s see if we can’t find another break in this canopy.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” He thumbed a button on the stick to flash the running light atop the vertical stabilizer once, then eased the stick back and fed a little more power to the air-breathing turbines. The big shuttle angled smoothly upwards while its companion, warned by the flash of light, broke right and stayed low, tracking him visually against the moon-bright sky. He climbed another three hundred meters, then leveled out, sweeping around the dim lights Harkness had spotted.