We've advised them that there's a registered salvage company in this system; the captain sounds unhappy with that. Says he's had trouble before with salvage companies."

The first emergency since she'd come aboard. Esmay listened to the precis of the problem, and tried to remember which protocol this fell under.

"He wants Fleet assistance." Captain Solis looked at Esmay. "We have a responsibility in such cases, but we must also consider our responsibility to the whole area. So I want an estimate on the time it will take us to skip-jump over there, rig grapples, and put him in tow, then sling him back toward the orbit he wants. He's not an emergency."

"Sir." Esmay ran the numbers quickly. "Sixty hours, allowing a safety margin for rigging the grapples; he should have standard tug connections, but just in case."

"Well, then . . . let's go catch us a freighter."

Esmay watched the approach plots carefully on the bridge displays. External vid showed a bulbous, almost spherical ship with rings of colored light indicating tug grapple connections.

"Ugly, isn't it?" asked Lieutenant Briados. The Rescue One commander was on the bridge to watch the approach. "You'd think they could design big freighters with some character, but they all look pretty much alike."

"It would hold a lot of soldiers," Esmay said, the first thing that came into her mind.

Briados laughed. "I can tell you're off a warship. Yeah, it could, but it hasn't got insystem maneuverability worth spit. Even with the insystem drive working."

"How do they even know where to mount the drives? What's the drive axis?"

"Well, they want low-speed maneuverability near stations, so they mount two, usually, out near the hull and separated by sixty degrees; the drive axis is the chord perpendicular to the chord between the drives, in the same plane." It took Esmay a moment to work that one out, but she nodded finally.

Captain Solis turned to her. "All right, Suiza-let's see how you handle this. Just pretend you've been doing it for years."

Her stomach churned. She nodded to the com watch, and picked up the headset to talk to the freighter captain, explaining that a team would be boarding.

"We just wanted a tow," the captain said. "I don't see why you want to board."

"It's R.S.S. policy to board all vessels seeking assistance," Esmay said, repeating what Captain Solis had told her. "Just a routine, sir."

"Damned nuisance," the captain said.

"Think of it as practice," Esmay said. "If we didn't practice close-hauling and boarding, we might not be quick enough for someone with a serious emergency. After all, it might be your ship . . ."

"Oh, all right," he said. "Just as long as you're not planning to practice cutting holes in my hull."

Shrike deployed standard tug grapples, backed up by its military-grade tractor. In this instance, the grapples homed neatly on the freighter's signal, and locked on as Shrike maintained matching course and velocity. The tractor snugged the SAR ship closer still. Esmay gave the orders that sent Jig Arek and her team across a few hundred meters of vacuum to the other ship.

Rescue Two made its way in and out of all the holds, while Shrike boosted the freighter gently on

its way, then returned before Solis ordered the grapples retracted.

"Captain-what were they looking for?" Esmay asked.

"Just practicing," Solis said.

She looked at him; finally he grinned at her.

"All right. You might as well know. Sector's concerned about possible shortages in the munitions inventory. We think some stuff's being diverted from Fleet to civilian use. So the admiral says to check every ship that asks us for a boost. It is good practice, including the use of the warhead detection equipment."

"What's missing?" asked Esmay.

Solis spread his hands. "I've been told I don't need to know, but since they specified the equipment we were to use looking for it, I'd say someone's misplaced some of the more effective nukes."

"Ouch."

"Exactly. If our stuff's being transshipped on civilian freighters, it could be going anywhere. To anyone. Probably not the Benignity-they have their own munitions industry, and plenty in stock.

But any of the lesser hostile powers, or domestic malcontents . . ."

"Or simply pirates," Esmay said.

"Yes. Anyone who wants a big bang."

CHAPTER SIX.

Elias Madero, owned by the Boros Consortium, followed a five-angled route that had proved lucrative for decades. Olives and wine from Bezaire, jewels mined on Oddlink, livestock embryos from Gullam, commercial-grade organics from Podj, entertainment cubes from Corian, which had FTL traffic from deeper insystem, and the largest population in the area. She was a container hauler, picking up at each port the hold-shaped containers that had been filling since her last visit there. Her crew, most of them permanent, often had no idea what was in the containers. The captain did, presumably, and also the Boros agents at each port. But the containers had no accessible hatches-one advantage of container ships was supposed to be the impossibility of petty pilfering by crews-so they had no idea that the container in Hold 5 which was supposed to be filled with 5832 cube players was actually full of arms stolen from a Fleet stockpile. The other containers in Hold 5, which should have had entertainment cubes to be played in the cube players, contained more illicit weaponry, including thirty-four Whitsoc 43b11 warheads, their controlling electronics, and the arming keys.

Boros' agent at Bezaire would not have been happy to find the contents of that container, since she had a contract to supply the cube players and the entertainment cubes supposedly filling the rest of Hold 5.

Elias Madero came out of FTL flight, retranslating to normal space, to traverse the real-space distance between two jump points in the same system, colloquially known as Twobits. This shortcut had been marked "questionable" on standard charts for years, because the presence of two jump points in the same system was believed, on theoretical grounds, to lead to spatial instability of the jump points. If the insertion point shifted, an inbound ship might find itself emerging too close to a large mass, with no time to maneuver clear. But the nearest greenlined route meant three more jump point calculations, and added eleven days to the Corian-Bezaire passage. Since jump point temporal coordinates were fuzzy anyway, many commercial haulers used shortcuts to ensure that they met contractual delivery dates . . . while filing flight plans that were all greenlined.

This crew had made the traverse before, many times, without incident. The jump points had not

shifted in the past fifty years, while the possibility that they might kept the system uncrowded.

On this trip, system insertion went as smoothly as usual, and the Elias transferred to insystem drive without a hitch.

"That's done, then," Captain Lund said to his navigator, clapping a hand on the man's shoulder.

"Four days, and we'll be out of here again. I'm going to bed." Custom and regulation both required that a captain be on the bridge during jump point insertions; Lund had been up three shifts running because of a minor engineering problem.

His navigation officer, a transfer from Sorias Madero, a sister ship, nodded. "I have the course laid, sir. By my calculations, ninety-seven point two hours."

"Very good."

Captain Lund, balding and stocky, waited until he was in his cabin to take off his jacket and kick off his shoes. He hung the jacket up neatly, set his shoes side by side, laid his trousers, neatly folded, over the back of his chair, with his shirt over them. This was his last cycle . . . when he reached Corian again, he would retire at last. Helen . . . his grandchildren . . . the neat little house set high on a slope above the valley . . . he drifted into sleep, a smile on his face.

The sharp yelp of the emergency alarm woke him. He touched the comunit above his bunk.

"Captain here-what is it?"

"Raiders, sir."

He sat up, ducking automatically from the overhanging cabinets. "I'm on my way."

Raiders? What kind of raiders would hang around a route where almost no ships went? No ships, really-he'd never found any indication that others used this two-jump transit.

Had they been tailed through FTL? He'd heard rumors that Fleet was developing some kind of scan that worked in FTL. The Benignity? Certainly not Aethar's World, and they were across Familias space anyway.