“All right, Irene,” he said after a moment of furious thought. “I want you to pull a complete copy of all com traffic between you and Dirtside on this. I’m going to get dressed while you do that. When I’ve got my clothes on, I’ll buzz you to pipe the copies down here and let me view them. Then I’ll want you to connect me directly to this Citizen Colonel Therret. I’ll take it from there, and any further traffic from now on is to be routed directly to me as it comes in. Is all that understood?”

“Yes, Sir. It’s on the com log, Sir.” He heard the enormous relief in her voice, but her eyes were troubled. “Sir, I swear I didn’t do anything to their message files. You know that.”

“Of course I do, Irene. Hell, like you already told them, you couldn’t have done anything without their own authentication codes!”

“I just— I’m sorry, Sir,” she said in a small voice. “Whatever happened, it was my job, and—”

“Irene, we don’t have time to sit here and let you beat yourself up for something you didn’t do, couldn’t have helped, and aren’t responsible for,” he told her. “So hush and get started on those copies ASAP.”

“Yes, Sir.”

He killed the com, rolled out of his bunk, and reached for the uniform he’d discarded three hours earlier.

“—so I assure you, Citizen Colonel, that I’ve looked into the matter thoroughly. There are no additional messages for Danak in our banks, no messages for Danak have been erroneously transmitted at any of our earlier stops, and no messages have been tampered with in any way.”

“So your citizen ensign has already told me, Citizen Commander,” Citizen Colonel Brigham Therret said coldly. “I must say, I find this all extremely suspicious.”

“If I may be so bold, Sir, could you tell me anything at all to explain what, precisely, you’re looking for?” Heathrow asked as courteously as he possibly could. “At the moment, we’re shooting blind up here. We know you’re looking for something, but we’ve checked all the places that something ought to be without finding it. Maybe if we had a better idea of what we were trying to find, we could make some educated guesses as to where and how it might have been misdirected, mislabeled, or misfiled.”

“Um.” Therret frowned, but his expression actually lightened a tiny bit, as if he hadn’t considered that. He pondered for several moments, then made a face that might have indicated either indecision or annoyance. “Hold the circuit,” he said abruptly, and his face disappeared, replaced by a standard Com Link Engaged, Please Stand By image.

Heathrow looked up from it to smile encouragingly at Howard. After viewing her message logs, he’d decided to conduct this conversation from the bridge rather than his cabin terminal for several reasons, not the least of which was a desire to place himself in as official a setting as possible. Not that he expected an SS citizen colonel to be particularly impressed by a Navy citizen lieutenant commander, bridge environment or not, but it could hardly hurt. More to the point, he wanted immediate access to Howard and her console in case other questions came up… and, he admitted, exercising a soothing influence on the distracted citizen ensign seemed like a good idea, too.