“What do we know about the ship’s cargo, Captain?” Lieutenant Brigham asked. “Do we know what she’s carrying or where she was supposed to be bound from here, for instance?”

“Commander McKeon just told you everything we know,” Honor said wryly. “She’s been on station since before we arrived. That means Captain Young cleared her.”

People sat back around the table with careful nonexpressions of disgust, and despite her worries, Honor had to raise a hand to hide a smile.

“In that case, Ma’am,” Ensign Tremaine said, “maybe we should make a customs check on her? I could take PO Harkness and a cutter, and—”

“No, Scotty.” Honor spoke almost absently and missed his flush of pleasure as she used his nickname. “We can’t do that. Sirius has already been checked by Warlock—” Someone snorted, and Honor paused to bite her tongue. Then she gave them all the closest she could come to a severe look and turned back to Tremaine.

“The point is, she’s been officially cleared. We can’t go back to re-inspect without some sort of hard evidence that her master lied to Lord Young. And while I think Commander Santos is right and their excuse for being here probably is bogus, we really don’t have any evidence, do we?”

Tremaine shook his head unhappily, and she gave a slight shrug.

“More importantly, perhaps, if we did go back to give her a second look, we’d tip our hand. They’d know we figured something was fishy about their ship. If we are being ‘paranoid’—” she flashed McKeon a tight smile “—over an innocent coincidence, that might not hurt anything. But if they’re really up to something, we could scare them into backing off or finding another way to do whatever they’re trying to do. A way we don’t know anything about.”

“There’s another point, too, Skipper.” McKeon sighed. “As you say, she’s been cleared once. Her skipper might just refuse to let us back aboard, and without evidence that they’re involved in what’s happening dirt-side or that they lied to Lord Young, we wouldn’t have any probable cause to justify forcing him to. We’d kick off all kinds of interstellar protests.”

“That I could live with.” Honor’s voice was cold. “I just don’t see any way to do it without giving too much away.”

“You know, Skipper,” Santos mused, “we might not be able to get aboard her, but it’s possible a good, close external scan could tell us something.” Honor looked at her, and the engineer shrugged. “I don’t know what, but there could be something.” She paused for a moment, and then her eyes narrowed. “For one thing, I’d really like to see how their drive compares to the specs they gave Warlock. If this Coglin cobbled up a report on a phony engineering casualty, it’s possible he slipped up and built in an inconsistency.”

“Such as?”

“Depends.” Santos scooted down to sit on the end of her spine and plucked at her lower lip. “There might not be anything—in fact, if they’re smart, there probably won’t be—but if they have a genuine flutter problem, then there damned well ought to be a lot of wear on their alpha nodes. We should see at least some pitting, maybe a little outright scoring, and the main coil should certainly have a fairly old replacement stamp.”