A soft chime intruded into her thoughts, and she turned her head as Webster acknowledged the incoming signal. The lieutenant said something, then nodded and turned his chair to face her.

“I have a transmission for you from the surface, Ma’am. From the resident commissioner’s office.”

“Transfer it to my screen,” Honor said, but the com officer shook his head.

“Dame Estelle asks to speak to you privately, Ma’am.”

Honor felt an eyebrow rise and smoothed it back down, then lifted Nimitz to the back of her chair and rose.

“I’ll take it in my briefing room, Samuel.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Honor nodded and walked through the hatch, closing it behind her. She sank into the captain’s chair at the head of the conference table and keyed an acceptance signal into the data terminal, then smiled as Dame Estelle appeared on the built-in com screen.

“Hello, Commander,” the Commissioner said.

“This is a pleasant surprise, Dame Estelle. What can I do for you?”

“I’m afraid I really called to cry on your shoulder, Honor,” Matsuko said wryly.

“That’s what the Navy’s here for, Ma’am,” Honor replied, and the commissioner snorted. Honor let it pass, but she hadn’t missed the fact that Dame Estelle didn’t seem to regard her as really belonging to the RMN. It was part and parcel of the way the commissioner addressed her by her first name, as if to distance her from the real Fleet officers (i.e., deadbeat incompetents) she’d had to deal with so often.

“Yes, well,” Matsuko said after a moment, “the truth is, I’m beginning to think I may have a bigger problem down here than I thought I did.”

“How so?”

“Since you sent Lieutenant Stromboli and his people down to take over space control, my air traffic people have been freed up to deal with more local concerns. They’ve plugged a lot of the holes in our Outback aerial coverage with the extra manpower and your survey sats—not all; there are still a few left—and they’ve picked up a small number of unidentified flights in restricted areas.”

“Oh?” Honor sat straighter in her chair and frowned. “What sorts of flights?”

“We can’t tell.” The commissioner sounded disgusted. “Their transponders don’t respond when we query them, which, coupled with the fact that they certainly didn’t file flight plans for their destinations, seems like pretty clear proof they’re up to something we wouldn’t like. We’ve tried interceptions, but the NPA’s counter-grav is designed more for reliability and endurance than speed, and they run right away from us. If you hadn’t made such a hole in our space-to-ground traffic, I’d guess they were rendezvousing smugglers.”

“I suppose they still could be,” Honor mused. “We’ve only been working on them for a month now. They could still be handing off stuff they’d already gotten down.”

“I thought about that, but even if it was already down, they’d still have to get it back up past you to do them any good. Besides, they’re too far out in the bush for that to seem very likely.”