“Not unless I want to short-circuit myself,” Deet said. “They say you’ll go blind if you do that too often.”

Rogers shrugged. “I’m not judging. What’s up with this report?”

“You can’t put a cannon on horseback!” the Viking shouted.

“One of the other ships in the fleet identified the rogue craft that was targeting the Flagship.” Deet handed him the datapad. “It was the MPS Rancor.”

Rogers gaped. “Zombie ghost-pirates,” he whispered.

“What?” Deet asked.

“Never mind. This ship was the one that started all of my trouble, but it was supposed to have crashed into an asteroid. What made you think it was important?”

“I saw several mentions of this ship in the closed network,” Deet said, “thought it was referred to by a different name. The Beta Test. And it wasn’t destroyed by an asteroid.”

Rogers looked at Deet, then looked back at the report. The report described basic flight pattern information, like the time it exited and reentered Un-Space, which Un-Space point it used, how much time it spent in the sector, and any other emissions that came from the ship. The targeting computer had been turned on and had locked onto the Flagship, certainly, but there were no other indications that the Rancor—the Beta Test—had been preparing to actually fire a warhead. Patrol ships didn’t have the kind of firepower to damage a capital ship, anyway.

Rogers skipped over some of the other metrics of little interest, but his eyes stopped when he came to one particular line of data.

Organic life detected on board: zero.

“What?” Rogers said aloud. “Nobody on board? That doesn’t make any sense. None of this makes any sense! This ship is supposed to be a splatter mark on the outside of an asteroid.”

Deet made a couple of strange beeping noises. “I’m not a brilliant intelligence analyst like Napoleon Junior over there,” he said, “but just because the life scanners didn’t show any organic material doesn’t mean there was nobody on board.”

Rogers froze. “That’s it. It was a test run. They’d already started taking over back when I was still a sergeant. They have the Rancor.”

Deet made a noise like Rogers had just won a prize on a slot machine in the Heshan casinos.

“Don’t patronize me,” Rogers said.

“Don’t be so slow.”

“But what does that mean?” Rogers said. “Why pull a feint attack on the Flagship ?”

“Given the previous pattern of behavior,” Deet said, “I would assess that it was an attempt to further support the claim that the Thelicosans were planning on invading.”

Rogers pulled at his beard. “Well, we’re going to have to act quickly. If they figure out that we know . . . ”

“Next strg, rffffs dk.”

“We’re finally here!” Tunger said as their argument deteriorated. McSchmidt was gingerly rubbing a hand-shaped imprint on his neck, and Mailn was blowing off her knuckles. Tunger looked cheery, but being guarded by a large baboon baring its fangs probably had something to do with it. “What are we doing on the refuse deck, anyway?”