“How do I know what happened to them?” Harriman growled at his critic. “If I knew where the damned grunt list had gone, then it wouldn’t be lost, now would it?”

“Oh, fer cryin’ out loud!” Base muttered. “It’s in your computers, dipshit—not scribbled down on a scrap of paper somewhere!”

“Oh, yeah?” Harriman sounded even more belligerent. “Well I happen to be looking at the directory right this minute, Shrevner, and it ain’t here! So suppose you get off your lazy ass and get it to me? I’m coming up on the drop for Alpha-Seven-Eight in about twelve minutes, and I got lots of other stops still to make.”

“Jeezus!” the other voice snarled. “You stupid goddamned pilots are so— Oh.” It cut off abruptly, and then a throat cleared itself. “Here it is,” Base said in a much crisper (and less contemptuous) voice. “Uploading now.”

No one spoke for a few seconds, and then a sharp snort came down the link from Harriman.

“Interesting time stamp on that data, Base,” he said almost genially. “Looks to me like those numbers were compiled—what? Seventy minutes after I left?”

“Oh, screw you, Harriman!” Base snapped.

“In your dreams, sweetheart,” Harriman said with cloying sweetness, and Base cut the channel with a click.

“Did you get it?” Mayhew demanded.

“I think so.” Sanko punched more commands, calling up a review of the data he’d been too busy downloading to evaluate and felt his face stretch into an exultant grin. “Looking good over here, Jasper! How about your side?”

“Speculative, but interesting,” Mayhew replied. He tapped a few queries of his own into the system, then nodded. “I think it’s time we got Lady Harrington and Commodore McKeon in here, and then—”

“Base, this is Carson. I’m at Gamma-One-Seven, and I’ve got a problem. According to my numbers—”

The fresh voice rattled from the speakers, and Sanko and Mayhew dived back into their consoles.

· · • · ·

“So that’s it, My Lady,” Mayhew said. “We’ve picked up six more complete or partial conversations during the last ninety odd minutes. Of course, we’re only working the comsats that are line-of-sight to our own location, so I suspect we’ve missed others.”

“Makes sense,” Alistair McKeon rumbled from where he sat beside Honor. He rubbed his jaw, the tip of his tongue probing at the gaps a Peep pulse rifle’s butt had left in his teeth. It was a nervous gesture he’d developed aboard Tepes, and it seemed to help him think. “You send out that many shuttles, you’re going to get com chatter. Especially when half your flight crews don’t seem to know their asses from their elbows!”

“Now, now, Alistair. Be nice,” Honor murmured with a small smile, and Nimitz bleeked a laugh from her lap. He’d finished shedding last week, and the sauna bath of the local climate was no longer the crushing burden it had been, but he was delighted whenever he and his person entered the shuttle’s air-conditioning. Now he showed McKeon his needle-sharp fangs in a lazy smile, and Honor chuckled. She gave the ’cat’s head a gentle caress, then leaned forward and peered at the map Mayhew had spread out over the shelf-like fold-down desk. The Peep shuttle’s only decent holo imaging capability was in the cockpit, but its tactical section was capable of using the same data that drove that display to print out an old-fashioned plaspaper map that was good enough for her current purposes. Now she bent a little closer, trying to read Mayhew’s small, neat handwritten notations, and suppressed another stab of regret for the loss of her cybernetic eye’s enhanced vision modes.