“Are there any other comments or suggestions?” she asked after a moment. There were none, and she nodded.

“I will announce our new orders and responsibilities to the ship’s company at fourteen hundred. Lieutenant Venizelos, I’ll want a list of the personnel you want for your party by thirteen hundred. Commander McKeon will vet them before you submit them to me, but I want final approval made before I address the crew.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Very well, ladies and gentlemen. You have your instructions. Let’s be about them.”

She nodded, and they rose and hurried from the compartment. They didn’t look very happy, but at least they were actively engaged with their duties for the first time in far too long. Perhaps it was a good sign.

The hatch closed behind the last of them, and she put her elbows on the table and buried her face in her palms, massaging her temples with her fingertips. God, she hoped it was a good sign! She’d done her best to radiate confidence, but a terrifying number of things could go wrong. Merchant skippers could be prickly about their right of passage, and Venizelos might well provoke an interstellar incident if he pressed the wrong captain too hard. Even with McKeon’s suggestion, the endurance of their cobbled-up sensor platforms would be frighteningly limited. They might last the three months until Warlock returned—with luck—if Young didn’t find some excuse to extend his “refit” even further. And, worst of all, all of her plans counted on nothing going seriously wrong anywhere. If something did break, she had an excellent chance of knowing about it, but she had an even better chance of being in entirely the wrong place to do anything to stop it.

She sighed and straightened, then lowered her hands to the table and stared long and hard at their backs.

In the final analysis, everything depended on her crew, and she hated to think about the strain she was about to impose upon them. Marines would be of limited utility to Venizelos, so the tactical officer would almost certainly ask solely for naval ratings. That meant he would be taking almost ten percent of Fearless’s ship’s company with him, and she would have a very hard time denying him the best ten percent, with the most small-craft experience. Her own customs parties for orbital traffic would have to come from what was left, and she’d already noted an appalling number of merchantmen in Medusa orbit. What they could be finding to trade with the aborigines was beyond her imagination, but they were clearly trading a lot of something, and it would be her duty to check every one of those ships.

It would be tempting, she knew, to settle for a simple examination of their manifests, but that wasn’t what the Fleet expected of her. Manifest checks would do for through traffic entering the system only to transit the Junction; in the case of vessels trading with Manticoran territory, however, or those transshipping cargo here, she was supposed to inspect the cargo shuttles and ships themselves for contraband. That meant long, grueling hours for her people, and each inspection party would require an officer or senior petty officer to command it.