He lifted the lid—then paused, frozen in mid-movement.

“Well, well, well, well,” he murmured, adding an absent-minded “Sir” as he remembered the ensign beside him. He shoved the lid fully up until it locked. “Mighty strange looking plowshares, I’d say, Mr. Tremaine.”

“So would I,” Tremaine said after a moment, leaning forward to stroke a hand over the lustrous, tawny-gold fur. The canister was two meters long by one wide and one deep, and it seemed to be completely full. “Is that what I think it is, PO?”

“If you think it’s Gryphon kodiak max pelts it is, Sir.” Harkness shook his head, and Tremaine could almost hear the credit terminal ringing behind his eyes. “Must be two, three hundred thousand dollars worth of them,” the PO mused. “In this one canister,” he added as an afterthought.

“And right off the controlled species list.” Tremaine’s voice was so grim the petty officer straightened and looked at him in surprise. The youngster beside him didn’t look young at all as he stared down into the canister and then turned to glare at the wilting crewmen. “You think they were going to transship them down on the surface, PO?”

“There or in the warehouse. Can’t rightly see anything else they might have done with ’em, Sir. Sure thing the Stilties wouldn’t need ’em.”

“My thought, exactly.” The ensign nodded to himself, then glanced around the dim cargo bay. “PO Harkness, I think you’d better check all the other customs seals.” The petty officer nodded, and Tremaine smiled thinly at the sweating shuttle crew. “In the meantime, these gentlemen and I will go pay a little visit on their captain. I want to arrange a visit to his main holds, as well, I think.”

“Aye, aye, Sir.” The burly petty officer braced to attention, a gesture of respect he rarely wasted on ensigns who didn’t yank him up short for omitting it, and jerked his head to summon the rest of his two-man team as Tremaine, Private Kohl, and two very unhappy crewmen left the bay.

Honor shook her head as she finished Ensign Tremaine’s recorded message. Then she flicked the terminal off, making a careful mental note of the way the ensign had credited PO Harkness, not himself, with the initial discovery. That was unusual in so junior an officer, but it confirmed her original impression of the youngster.

She’d expected that when she assigned him to the Medusa detachment. What she hadn’t expected was for him to confirm Dame Estelle’s smuggling hypothesis quite this soon. Nor, she admitted, had she expected to find a Manticoran vessel embroiled in it—and one on charter to the Hauptman Cartel, at that.

She turned her chair to glance across her desk at McKeon. The exec looked as if he’d just bitten into something sour, and Nimitz raised his chin from his cushioned rest to gaze thoughtfully at him.

“I don’t know if Tremaine is more pleased with himself or worried over what to do next,” she said, and McKeon twitched his taut shoulders. “I imagine there’ll be some interesting repercussions back on Manticore.”