“I know about the protests, Mr. Canning. But while you’re no doubt correct about the pressure they’re placing on their admiralty, have you considered the fact they’ve no doubt also given her superiors ample confirmation that she’s doing something we don’t like?”

Canning flushed, and the first slow flickers of anger burned through his anxiety. All very well for the admiral to waltz in here after the fact and criticize, but what else did he expect Canning to do? Damn it, protests were the only offensive weapons he had! And, he thought resentfully, if he hadn’t lodged them, the admiral would be chopping his ears off for that!

“Well, so much for spilt milk.” The admiral sighed, setting his glass on a small table and rising. “Why don’t you tell me what’s gone right, instead?”

He crossed to Canning’s desk and bent over the unrolled map spread across the blotter. The paper chart was far less detailed and much more difficult to manipulate than a holo map would have been, but it had never entered the consulate’s electronic data base, either. And, unlike an individual holo map reader, it could be rolled up and shoved into a vault with a thermal-destruct security system. Those were considerations that made any incidental inconvenience unimportant.

Now the admiral frowned down at the map, tracing terrain features with a fingertip. Unlike the majority of his naval contemporaries, he was as comfortable with planetary maps as with star charts, for his particular nameless branch of NavInt was more concerned with Trojan Horses than open warfare. Now he tapped the map and looked up at Canning.

“The lab here on the plateau. It has a direct up-link to our orbital collector?”

“No, Sir.” Canning crossed to the desk and managed his first smile of the interview. “It relays through ground stations here and here—” he indicated two mountain peaks in the Outback “—and the initial ground station doesn’t link to our collector at all.” He met the admiral’s inquiring gaze, and his smile turned into something like a grin. “We’ve been tapping into Dame Estelle’s own backup collector.”

“You mean you’re drawing your power from the Manticoran grid?”

“No, Sir. It never enters the grid. This is their secondary collector, for use only if the main goes down for maintenance or repairs. Aside from their regular demand tests, we’re the only station on it. Even if they find our tap, it won’t tell them who set it up, and trying to figure out how it got there should point their attention in some very… interesting directions.”

“I see.” The admiral nodded with the first, faint signs of approval. “But, of course, if they do find it, they’ll also find the ground station it feeds, won’t they?”

“Yes, Sir, they will, but that’s where the cover plan I mentioned comes in. Colonel Westerfeldt has operational responsibility for the field activities, and he’s done an excellent job of hiding our tracks and planting red herrings. In fact, we want them to find the ground stations—and the lab—if they look hard enough.”