“The Stilties prefer it that way.”

“Damn the Stilties.” Summervale spoke almost mildly, but his eyes were hard. “You’re paying the freight, so the decision’s yours, but when one of these bucks gets hopped on a pipeful of our stuff, he turns into a nuke about to go critical.”

“No skin off our nose,” his employer said cynically.

“Maybe. But I’ll lay odds that’s what attracted the NPA’s attention. And the same elements that give it the kick will prove it wasn’t made by any Stilty alchemist. Which means it was either shipped in or made somewhere on-planet. Like here.” The man on the screen began to say something else, but Summervale raised a hand. Again, it was an oddly courteous gesture. “Never mind. Done is done, and it’s your operation. What do you want me to do at this end?”

“Watch your security, especially the air traffic. If they’re making overflights, we can’t afford to attract their attention.”

“I can hold down the cargo flights. I can even reduce foot traffic around the complex,” Summervale pointed out. “What I can’t do is hide from Fleet sensors. Our power relay will stick out like a sore thumb, and once it draws their attention, we’ll leak enough background energy for them to zero us despite the wall shields. You know that.”

He chose not to add that he’d argued against a beamed power relay from the beginning. The extra cost in time and labor to run a buried feeder cable would have been negligible beside the investment his employers had already made, and it would have made the entire operation vastly more secure. But he’d been overruled at the outset. And while he had no intention of allowing his caller to saddle him with full responsibility for concealment at this point, there was no point rubbing the man’s nose in it.

“We know that,” the man on the screen said. “We never expected to have to face Fleet sensors—” Summervale knew that was as close to an apology as he was likely to get “—but now that we do, we don’t expect you to work miracles. On the other hand, I doubt you’ll have to. Remember, we have people on the inside. Maybe not high enough to tap into Matsuko’s office or communications, but high enough to let us know if the NPA starts assembling anything big enough to come after you. We’ll try to get inside Harrington’s information channels and keep an eye on her recon reports, but even if we can’t, we should be able to give you a minimum of six or seven hours’ warning before anything local heads your way.”

Summervale nodded slowly, mind racing as he considered alternatives. Six hours would be more than enough to get his people away, but anything less than a full day would be too little to get even a tithe of the equipment out. And that didn’t even consider the meticulous records his employer had insisted he keep. He couldn’t fault the man for wanting to track every gram of mekoha the lab produced—nothing could be better calculated to arouse Estelle Matsuko’s fury than finding off-worlders peddling dream smoke to the Stilties, and if one of his people had set up as a dealer on his own time the odds of detection would have gone up astronomically—but maintaining complete hardcopy backups was stupid. The increase in vulnerability far outweighed the advantages, but there, again, he had been overruled.