All of which meant no freighter captain would hold his drive at standby without a very compelling reason. But a warship’s captain might. It took almost forty minutes to bring your impeller wedge up from a cold start; by starting with hot nodes, you could reduce that to little more than fifteen minutes.

“That’s very interesting, Mr. McKeon,” Honor murmured.

“Curiouser and curiouser, Ma’am,” McKeon agreed. “Oversized impeller nodes and a full standby load. Sounds to me like you’ve got your discrepancy if you want to go aboard, Captain.”

“Maybe, and maybe not.” Honor nibbled her lower lip and felt Nimitz nip her earlobe as he detected her worry. She grinned and hoisted him down into her lap to protect her ears, then sobered once more as she looked back up at McKeon.

“The problem is that nothing requires them to give us the real specs on their drive,” she pointed out, “and no law says they have to build a freighter whose drive makes economic sense. The fact that their nodes are live and don’t show the sort of wear we ought to see if they’ve got tuner failure would certainly seem to argue that they lied to Warlock about the nature of their engineering problems, but that’s all we’ve got. A good lawyer could probably argue that away, and we’d have to admit that they haven’t even sent a shuttle down to the planet—or anywhere else, for that matter—in over two and a half months. Without their making physical contact with anyone else, we can hardly accuse them of smuggling. They’ve just sat here in orbit, minding their own business like good little law-abiding merchant spacers. That means our probable cause is still awfully weak, and I still have reservations about tipping our hand, as well.”

She rubbed Nimitz’s ears, wrestling with an unaccustomed indecisiveness. On the one hand, she could probably justify, however thinly, sending an examining party on the basis of her observational data. But if she did, and if the Havenites truly were up to something, they’d know she suspected that they were. And they’d be certain to lodge all sorts of diplomatic protests. What bothered her most was her inability to decide whether it was fear of revealing her suspicions or fear of the protests which most daunted her. She thought it was the former, but a nagging little voice wondered if it weren’t the latter.

She closed her eyes, making herself stand back and consider the options with all the detachment she could muster. The real problem was that, under interstellar law, the freighter’s master could still refuse her inspectors entry, whatever she cited as probable cause, unless she had evidence that they’d violated Manticoran law or posed a direct threat to Manticoran security, and nothing she had constituted an actual criminal violation. If Captain Coglin refused her the right to board his ship, her only options would be to accept the slap in the face or expel Sirius from Manticoran space. She had the authority to do that to any ship which refused to allow her examination, with or without probable cause, should she so choose, but it was an action she would have to justify to the Admiralty, and she could just see the headlines it would provoke. “RMN expels merchant ship with defective drive.” “freighter sent to die in hyper by heartless manticoran officer.” “haven protests harrington’s inhuman expulsion of damaged freighter.”