‘There isn’t really anything,’ I said. ‘Nothing bad, anyway, and that’s a sort of good news, isn’t it? The skull’s peachy, and there ain’t any other ships within jumpin’ distance.’

‘Perhaps they know their targets better than we know ours,’ he said self-pityingly, as if he wanted me to lean over, pat him on the hand and say ‘there, there’. ‘We were given the intelligence on these baubles at a steep mark-up, you know. Our last Bauble Reader was confident these would shift things for us. All rests on the third, I suppose.’

‘If you had better intelligence,’ I ventured, ‘would that change your plan?’

He looked at me with only mild interest. ‘What intelligence?’

‘Well, supposin’ . . . what I mean is, if I got a squeak of something over the bones, and it seemed to point to a bauble that was worth the cost of cracking, and wasn’t too far away . . . would that make you reconsider?’

‘It might, in the unlikely event such a thing were to happen.’ Then his interest sharpened. ‘Wait. What have you picked up?’

‘I doubt that it’s anything, sir.’ I brushed a hair from my brow, trying to look winsome and innocent. ‘Oughtn’t to have brought it up, not when you’ve got so much on your plate, and everythi—’

‘Spit it out, Fura. I’ll be the judge of whether it’s useful or not.’

‘It wasn’t much,’ I said. ‘I just got this intercept, two ships whispering to each other down in the Sunwards. Combine ’jammers, I think. They were sharing gossip, the way we all do.’

‘Yes, yes.’ He waggled his pudgy fingers at me. ‘Of course. Go on.’

‘It was something about a bauble no one put much stock in. The auguries said it wasn’t due to pop, and the lore was that there wasn’t much worth the bother of going in it for anyways.’

He slumped. ‘If you’re going to throw me crumbs, Fura, at least make them tasty.’

‘There’s more, sir. Thing is, the coves on these ships was trading the idea that the auguries was all wrong, at least the common ones, and that the bauble was all set to pop. Like, soon. But that wasn’t all of it.’ I grimaced. ‘Really, sir, I’m sure it’s all chaff.’

‘When you say “wasn’t all of it” – what do you mean?’

I sighed. ‘These coves were saying there was dark rumours, sir. That there was some righteous loot stashed in the bauble, only no one’d had the spuds to get it out. No stairs, you see. Just a big plungey shaft, going all the way down, with rooms off it. Most crews see that and think it’s too much bother rigging up winches and buckets and so on.’ I swallowed, sensing I might have gone too far. ‘That’s what the coves were saying, is all.’