“Before you go,” she said quietly, “I just want to say thank you.”

She didn’t specify for what. And as she looked into their faces, she knew she would never have to.

Chapter Twenty-Six

HMS Fearless spiraled gently outward and settled into her new orbit without fuss or bother, and a cutter departed her boat bay and scudded away towards a mammoth Manticoran-registry freighter with a formal, written invitation for the ship’s master to join Commander Harrington for supper. The merchant skipper would no doubt be astonished by—and possibly a little apprehensive over—that invitation, but none of the people on Fearless’s bridge gave him a thought or paid the cutter much heed. Their attention was bent upon their readouts as passive instrumentation probed cautiously at PMSS Sirius.

She was a big ship, Honor mused, watching her own visual display from her command chair. Fearless herself could have been stowed comfortably in one of the freighter’s main holds, and that sort of carrying capacity lent weight to Santos’s observation. Letting that much ship sit idle any longer than you had to was like pouring money straight out the airlock. No owner—not even a government bureaucracy like Haven’s Ministry of Trade—would do that without a very good reason.

She leaned back and glanced across at the tactical station. Cardones and McKeon had their heads together over the main sensor console, and Webster was equally intent on his communications panels. If any message traffic was going out from that ship, it was on a tight beam, and tight beams were hellishly hard to detect, but the com officer’s fingers moved like a surgeon’s as he gentled his computers through the search. If there was even a whisker beam out there, Webster would find it. Honor was certain of that.

An intercom signal beeped from her panel, and she depressed the stud on her chair arm.

“Bridge. Captain speaking,” she said.

“Skipper, we got a good relay from Tactical’s visual search down here—” Dominica Santos’s answering voice sounded excited “—and I’m replaying the scan of Sirius’s after nodes on my screen. I don’t see any pitting or scoring, and the date stamp isn’t visible, but I can tell you there’s something really strange about them.”

Nimitz bleeked softly in Honor’s ear, but she shushed him with a gentle stroke of her fingers.

“Can you relay your imagery to my display, Dominica?”

“Sure thing, Ma’am. Just a sec.” Honor’s display blanked as Sirius vanished from it, then relit almost at once with a frozen, hugely magnified view of the freighter’s after hull. One of her drive nodes, smaller than a pinhead against the ship’s stupendous size in the main visual display, filled the center of the screen, and Honor frowned. Something about that image looked subtly wrong, somehow, but she couldn’t quite put her mental finger on the discrepancy.

“What is it, Dominica?” she asked after a moment.

“It’s a lot bigger than it ought to be, that’s what it is, Ma’am, and the whole thing’s shaped wrong,” Santos replied. “Look.” A cursor blipped onto the display, indicating the point at which the node passed through Sirius’s outer plating, and Honor cocked her head as she noted the wide, soot-black band of shadow. “See that gap around the base of the node head? That shouldn’t be there. And look here.” The cursor vanished, and a bright green line arced up the side of the exposed node. It started out flush with the node’s base, but then it curved much more sharply inward. By the time it reached the node’s rounded apex, over a third of the node’s total mass lay beyond the line.