They were easier to see from the greater altitude, and the live side of Honor’s mouth frowned as she studied them through the binoculars. There were actually two double rows of light sources, set at right angles. Most of them were quite dim, but five or six of them flared brighter where the two lines crossed, and she thought she could make out faint reflections of what looked like flat roofs of some sort. She stared at them a moment longer, then laid the binocculars in her lap and rubbed her good eye with the heel of her hand in an effort to scrub away the ache of concentration.

Nimitz bleeked softly at her from where he lay beside her seat in a highly nonregulation nest of folded blankets, and she smiled down at him reassuringly. Then she lifted the glasses again, studying the jungle.

“What’s that line to the east?” she asked after a moment.

“How far from the camp, My Lady?” Jasper Mayhew’s voice came over the com.

“It looks like—what, Scotty? Twenty or twenty-five klicks?”

“Something like that, Ma’am,” Tremaine replied. “Chief?”

“I make it twenty-three from here, Ma’am,” Harkness said from the tac section after a moment, studying the frustratingly vague output of his passive sensors.

“In that case, I think it’s a river, My Lady,” Mayhew said, and she heard the rustle and crackle of plaspaper as he studied the hardcopy map he and Russell Sanko had put together. “The Tepes download didn’t give any terrain details, but that’s what it looked like from the weather sat maps we picked up. If it is a river, it’s not much of one, though.”

“Um.” Honor laid the binoculars back down and rubbed her nose in thought, then looked at Scotty. “Think you could take a shuttle through there without counter-grav?”

“Without—?” Tremaine looked at her for a moment, then inhaled sharply. “Sure,” he said, far more confidently than he could possibly feel, and Honor chuckled.

“Don’t get your testosterone in an uproar on me now, Scotty. I’m serious. Can you get us in there?”

“Probably, Ma’am,” he said after a moment, then added, grudgingly, “but I can’t guarantee it. With one of our own pinnaces, yes. But this is a big brute, Ma’am. She’s a lot heavier on the controls, and I haven’t really experimented with her vectored thrust yet.”

“But you think you could do it.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Honor thought for several more seconds, then sighed and shook her head.

“I’d like to take you up on that,” she said, “but I don’t think we can risk it. Chief Harkness?”

“Aye, Ma’am?”

“Go ahead and fire up the plant, Chief.”

“Aye, aye, Ma’am. I’m starting light-off now. We should be nominal in about four minutes.”

“Thank you, Chief. Signal Commander Metcalf please, Scotty.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” Tremaine banked the big shuttle to expose its full wingspan to Metcalf’s lower position and flashed both wingtip lights twice.

“Answering flash from Shuttle Two, Ma’am,” a Grayson voice reported.