Brun had no way of telling time, except by her body's growth. When she felt the first vague movement that could not be ignored, she burst into tears. After a while, she felt someone patting her head gently, and looked through tear-stuck lashes to see one of the babies-the one the girl called Stassi. The child put her head near Brun's.

"Don' cry," she said very softly. "Don' cry."

"Stassi, no!" That was the older girl, pulling the child away. Brun felt as if she'd been stabbed in a new way. Did the girl think she would hurt the child? Was she to have no one to comfort her?

She struggled to hold back the sobs, but couldn't.

To get her mind off herself, she tried to pay more attention to the others, especially the older girl. The girl could not be one of them-not originally. She sewed clumsily, with no real knowledge of how to fit cloth to human shapes. When the men dropped off garments to be mended, Brun could see that they had been made originally with great skill . . . with hand sewing, like the most expensive "folk" imports, the stitches subtly imperfect. Surely a girl of their people would know, by that age, how to do it right. She glanced at the girl, whose brown hair hung down like a curtain to either side of her face. She didn't even know the girl's name . . . the men always called her Girlie, and the little ones Baby.

If the girl weren't one of theirs, where had she come from? No clues now . . . the pullover that formed the top of her dress might have come from anywhere, one of the millions sold in a midprice shop at any spaceport. Spaceport? Had she been snatched off a space station? Or a ship? By the color of her skin and hair-by her features-she could have come from any of a hundred planets, off any of a thousand ships. And yet-she was herself, an individual, just as Brun was. She had a past; she had hoped for a future. Ordinary . . . but very real. Brun found herself imagining a family for the girl, a home . . . wondering if the little ones were her sisters or just other captured children. How did the girl stand it?

Tears choked her again; she clenched her hands to her swelling belly. The girl flashed her a quick look, wary. Then, for the first time, she reached out a hand, and patted Brun's. That did it. Brun cried harder, rocking back and forth.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

Some days after boosting the trader on its way, Shrike nosed into the spindown military docking collar at Overhold, the larger of the two orbital stations serving Bezaire, as gently as a spider landing on a tree. Esmay carried out the docking sequence under Solis's watchful eye; it was her first docking. Everything went smoothly; Solis nodded as the status lights flicked to green, and then spoke to the Stationmaster. "R.S.S. Shrike docked; permission to unseal?"

"Permission to unseal. All personnel leaving ship must be ID'd at the security desk opposite the docking bay."

"Understood, Stationmaster. We anticipate a brief visit, and no station liberty. My quartermaster will be coming out to arrange for some supplies."

"Right, Shrike. You do have a hardcopy packet in the tank."

"Thank you, sir." Solis grimaced as he flicked off the screen. "Idiot civilians . . . says that right out on the station com, where anyone with a halfway decent datasuck could get it." He turned to Esmay. "Lieutenant, you'll take the bridge while I'm on station picking up our mail. I anticipate being gone less than an hour. If I'm delayed, I'll call you."

"Sir." Esmay toggled the internal com. "Security escort to the access for the captain, on the double."

"And . . . I think we'll do a practice scan, as well. Nobody's checked Overhold since Hearne was by, and there's no reason to trust her data. You can set that up while I'm gone."

Nothing showed up on the scan by the time Solis returned, and he sent Esmay off to other routine duties. Half a shift later, Chief Arbuthnot came back from the station in a state of annoyance and reported to the cook while Esmay was in the galley inspecting the sink traps.

"They don't have any Arpetan marmalade in, and we need it for the captain's birthday dinner. I always get it here; it's better quality than out of stores at HQ. They say they don't expect any

until the Boros circuit ship comes in. You know how fond he is of Arpetan marmalade, especially

the green gingered."

"Odd. Wasn't that ship supposed to be in already?" The cook glanced up at a schedule on the bulkhead. "We usually get here a week or so after her."

"Yes, but she's not. They don't sound very worried, though."

Esmay reported that conversation, minus the specifics of a treat for the captain's birthday, to Captain Solis.

"They don't seem concerned . . . interesting. I think perhaps we'll have a word with the Boros

shipping agent here."

The Boros agent, a flat-faced woman of middle age, shrugged off Captain Solis's concern.

"You know yourself, Captain, that ships are not always on time. Captain Lund is getting on a

bit-this was to be his last circuit-but we are confident in his honesty."

"It's not his honesty I'm questioning, but his luck. What was his percentage of late arrivals?"

"Lund? He's better than ninety-three percent on time, and in the last five years one hundred

percent on time."

"Which you define as . . ."

"Within twenty-four hours, dock to dock."

"On all segments?"

"Well . . . let me check." The woman called up a file and peered at it. "Yes, sir. In fact, on the

segment ending here, he's often twelve to twenty-four hours early."

"When would you have reported an overdue ship, if we hadn't asked?"

"Company policy is to wait three days . . . seventy-two hours . . . for any run, and add another

day for each scheduled ten days. For Elias Madero, on this segment, that would come to ten days

altogether. And from day before yesterday, when she was due, that's . . . seven days from now."

Captain Solis said nothing on the way back to the ship, but called Esmay into his office as soon as they arrived.

"You see the problem . . . scheduled transit time is seventy-two days, from Corian to Bezaire, dock to dock . . . most of that time spent on insystem drive. If you consider beacon-to-beacon time, she should have been off-scan only sixteen days."

"What's the scan data from Corian?"

"Normal exit from system. The approved course was like this-" Solis pointed it out on the charts.

"That makes the scheduled transit fairly tight . . . if the company really schedules things that tight, then it makes sense to allow some overage. But I'd expect someone on this route to be over

the alloted time at least thirty percent of the time. And the Elias Madero wasn't. Does that tell you anything?"

"They've been using a shortcut," Esmay said promptly. "They'd have to."

"Right. Now we have to figure out where."

"Someone at Boros should know," Esmay said.

"Yes-but if it's an illegal transit, unmapped or something, they may not want to tell us. Tell me,

Lieutenant, who would you recommend for a little quiet questioning?"

The crew list ran through Esmay's mind, unmarked by any helpful notes on deviousness; she hadn't been with them long enough to find out. She fell back on tradition. "I would ask Chief Arbuthnot,

sir."

"Good answer. Tell him we need someone who would be confused with a shady character, someone who can get answers out of a rock by persuasion."

Chief Arbuthnot knew exactly what Esmay wanted and promised to send "young Darin" out at once. The answer that finally came back several days later was expected, but not overly helpful.

"A double-jump system," Solis said, when he had taken the data and dismissed the pasty-faced Darin. "Hmm. Let's see if we can get confirmation out of someone at Boros. They probably ran into a shifting jump point."

"Why would someone retiring risk that?" Esmay wondered aloud.

"He probably thought it was stable. Some of those systems are stable for decades, but that doesn't mean they're safe."

Something tickled Esmay's mind. "If . . . they were carrying contraband . . . then the time gained in a shortcut would give them time to offload it. Or if someone knew they had contraband, it'd make a fine spot for an ambush."

"Well . . ." Solis raked a hand through his hair. "We'd better go take a look and see . . . I have to hope it's not a shifting jump point . . ."