“That’s a normal node profile, Skipper,” Santos said, manipulating the green line to make it flash. “This thing’s way too broad for its length, and it’s not just a design peculiarity. You can’t build one with this profile—the physics won’t let you. Besides, look here.” The cursor reappeared, pointing to a thick, blunt cylinder protruding a slight distance from the end of the node. “That’s the main grav coil, and that thing is almost twice as big in diameter as it ought to be for a node this size. That cross section’s better suited to a superdreadnought than any freighter drive I’ve ever seen, and if they powered it up with no more governor housing than we see, it’d slag the entire after hull.”

“I see.” Honor stared down at the display, rubbing her nose. “On the other hand, they’ve obviously built what we’re looking at, and they got here under their own power.”

“I know,” Santos replied, “but I think that’s where the gap around the node base comes in. I think the damned thing’s on some kind of ram. When they power up, they run the rest of the node—the part we can’t see because of the plating—out to clear the hull. That’s why the opening’s so large; the node head’s greatest width is still inside the outer skin, and they have to get it outboard for safe operation. Skipper, that’s a pretty well camouflaged military-grade impeller node, or I’ll eat my main engineering console.”

“Very good, Dominica,” Honor murmured. She gazed at the imagery for a moment longer, then nodded. “Make me the best estimate you can of their actual acceleration capability—impeller and Warshawski mode—and write it up. Make sure you save all your data, too. We’ll want to pass it on to BuShips for evaluation.”

“Aye, aye, Ma’am.” Santos cut the circuit, and Honor looked up to find McKeon standing beside her chair, his eyebrows raised.

“Commander Santos says we have a definite discrepancy here, Mr. McKeon,” she said, and the exec nodded.

“Yes, Ma’am. I caught the last little bit of your conversation. And I’ve got something to add, too. Lieutenant Cardones and I have determined that Sirius’s nodes are hot.”

It was Honor’s turn to feel her eyebrows rise. “Could it be a systems test?”

“I don’t think so, Ma’am. We’re reading a full standby load on all the alpha and beta nodes on this side of her hull, fore and aft both. A systems test would probably run up just the alphas or the betas, not both. And why should they test both the forward and after nodes simultaneously? Besides, the power level’s held steady for over ten minutes now.”

Honor leaned back to regard him pensively and saw her own thoughts flicker behind his gray eyes. There was no regulation against a ship’s holding her impeller drive at standby in parking orbit, but it was almost unheard of. Power was relatively cheap aboard a starship, but even the best fusion plant needed reactor mass, and impeller energy demands were high, even at standby. Maintaining that sort of load when you didn’t need to was a good way to run up your overhead. Nor was it good for the equipment. Your engineers couldn’t carry out routine maintenance while the drive was hot, and the components themselves had limited design lives. Holding them at standby when you didn’t need to would certainly reduce their life spans, and that, again, ran up overhead.