"No... but I know I've seen that shape aboard," Ky said. She frowned; something was tugging her toward her cabin, a memory too vague to be recognizable. It couldn't hurt to follow the hunch... "I'll be back," she said.

In her cabin, she stood still, trying not to think, not to interfere with whatever memory was trying to find its way to the surface. Nothing showed on the surface but the stains from the cleanup after the... the death. No handy part lay in the middle of the floor, or her bunk, or her desk. The shelves to either side of her desk held only the cube reader and one rack of cubes. The desk drawer had her captain's log and its stylus. She pulled open the locker under her bunk, where the brightly wrapped fruitcakes had been stowed. One remained; she hoped they wouldn't have to cut into that one. So far no one had dared complain about the flavor, but Ky still preferred to donate her share to others. No way Paison could have accidentally dropped the part here, but what if he'd hidden it, or had someone hide it, for him? Wouldn't he have chosen the captain's cabin?

It still didn't make sense, the timing of it. He had not had time to disable the beacon and hide a part in her cabin; she knew that. She had been in her cabin when they discovered the beacon wasn't working; she had confronted him too soon after that.

But something was here... she knew it. She started with the lockers over her bunk, where she found that things were not quite as she remembered. Of course. The mercs would have searched the cabin and simply shoved things back in, and she'd been too busy since to come in and reorganize. Entertainment and study cubes, clothes folded not quite as neatly as she'd left them. Behind them was a box, somewhat bent. The model... the spaceship model. She remembered now having shoved it to the back herself. Ky pulled the box out-it rattled. When she opened it, a folded note was on top of broken parts.Sorry, the note said.Needle got it. This is most of the pieces. The needle-round had not reduced the model to its component parts, quite. Some of the assembly was still there. Ky laid the pieces on her bunk, wondering where the round had hit- obvious when she laid them in order-and there it was.

No purple stripe, but molded into the gray cylindrical shape which the assembly directions had told her was a missile was "I5 239684." The other "missiles" were beige.

Cold chills ran up and down her back. The meaning of MacRobert's cryptic little note suddenly seemed clear. He had, for whatever reason, given her parts to a beacon of some kind and she had been too stupid to recognize them...

She grabbed the whole box and raced back down the passage to where Corson and Sawvert were slumped against the bulkhead, contemplating the guts of the beacon.

"Is this one?" she asked, holding out the little cylinder. Sawvert looked up. "Looks like it-let me see-" She took it, turned it, peered at the inscription. "Yup, that's it. Where'd you find it?" "In a model kit," Ky said. She put the box down. "Either of you know what the rest of this stuff is?" "Model kit!" Sawvert leaned over the box. "That's nothing-nor that -but this-and this-and that bit there-all that's the makings of a small pin-beacon. A shouter." She pushed the parts around with her finger. "I don't know if you've got all of it-are there any more pieces?"

"There were, but it was in the way when the mercs shot up my cabin."

"I didn't know about that," Sawvert said."You weren't aboard then," Ky said. "Someone we'd picked up off the docks at Prime-someone from home-went crazy and tried to fight with the mercs. They shot him." The less said about that, the better. "So-anything more we can use to fix this beacon?"

"Let's just see what this piece does-if it works, the beacon should

work. If it doesn't, we have some more bits to try, at least."

Reassembling the beacon took another two hours, but even before they closed the case, Lee reported from the bridge that their passive scan showed the beacon on.

"Only problem is, it's not our ID," he said."What do you mean, not our ID?""It says we're the Mist Harbor, serial number XWT34693, out of Broadman's Station. I'd guess that scumsucker changed the ID so

when he put the part back in, no one would find us."

"And nobody will recognize us for who we are, unless we can change it back." Ky looked at Sawvert and Corson. "Can you change it back?"

"What he probably did," Corson said, "was change out the chip.

That's what he did on the other-" He stopped; Ky suspected that her own face had the same expression as Sawvert's, a mix of horror

and fury. "It's not my fault; I didn't want to do it," he said in a rush.

"It was Paison-he was the captain, I had to-"

"Did you know he'd changed out the chip on this one?" Ky asked.

"No-I swear I didn't. I didn't even know he had one with him; I wouldn't have thought he could, with the mercs just about pushing us out of our ship and into their shuttle." He swallowed. "Do you have a spare ship chip? I can change it back."

"I don't know," Ky said. She'd not ever thought about it. Beacons

came with ships, already sealed...

"There's a chip," Sawvert said, pointing to a little piece in the box.

"Where'd you get this, anyway?"

"I don't know if it's ours," Ky said, about the chip. But if it came from MacRobert, what would it be? Maybe a generic Vatta ID?

Maybe Slotter Key spaceforce? "In the meantime, Corson, since you seem to know so much about how Paison operated, what would he have done to our insystem drive?"

"I don't know anything about drives," Corson said. "I really don't."

"Even a fake ID ought to get someone's attention," Sawvert said.

"And if I can fix your transmitter-"

"That would certainly help," Ky said. "I'm not at all sure what this

chip is-it was in this box of model parts, as you can see-so I'm reluctant to put it in. At least this way someone can get us on scan.

Give us a way to talk to them, and we'll be a lot better off."

"Who is Mist Harbor?"The chief scan tech on ISC's bulbous command ship turned to look at the watch officer. "Dunno. Just showed up, but there's no

downjump signature."

"Anything running around with no beacon is probably part of the problem," the watch officer said. "We have a missing ship, and now we have an extra ship-let's get a distance, heading, and mass reading on that, and see if it answers us. And if we have one ship that's been running silent, there may be more. How's the system catalog coming?"

"We have the data from Prime's orbital station; we're using that as baseline and plotting against it. So far no anomalies, but we're only thirty-two percent complete. We wouldn't have found this ship for another two or three hours. At a rough guess, it's four to six light- minutes away, judging by signal strength."

"Commit another two units and speed it up. Do you want Ganges to site some additional spindles for it?"

"That would help," the scan chief said. "Real-time scans like that would cut it by half, anyway."

"I'll talk to 'em," the watch officer said.

The scan chief turned back to his board, allocated two more

computing units to the system catalog, and then increased the power on the active scan beam.Two hours later, he knew that the Mist Harbor was in the same mass range as the missing Glennys Jones, that she was 6.1 light-minutes away, not under power, and did not answer a hail. The ISC specialty ship Ganges, having dropped four spindle-ansibles in remote reaches of the system, was able to get real-time data from them.

"That's interesting," the scan chief said. "Not only is Mist Harborthe same general size as our missing Vatta ship, but there are two other ships out there lying doggo. One's here"-he pointed, as the watch officer came up beside him-"and one there. I do like that fine-resolution scan we added."

"A year ago we wouldn't have spotted them," the watch officer agreed. "Nice work. I'll pass the word up... wonder if that is the Glennys Jones and she was captured by the bad guys. Doesn't look good for Vatta if that's true."

"Sir!" One of the junior techs waved for the chief's attention. "Mist Harbor's beacon has gone-no, there it is-look at it-"The beacon icon blinked on and off, in a rhythm not quite regular.

"Power failure? Fuel expended?"

"No, sir. I'd bet my next raise it's a signal code of some kind. There are dozens of those blinker codes on various planets. This one's from-what did the registration say?"

"Assume it's the Vatta ship, from Slotter Key. Can we translate it?"

"Without translating it, it's got to mean that their transmission capability is gone, and they're trying to signal... which still doesn't tell us who's in control."

"At least whoever's looking knows a ship is here," Ky said. "They may not care about the Mist Harbor, but they're bound to care that a ship appeared out of nowhere with no downjump turbulence. Someone will come investigate."

"In time?" asked Corson. He looked pale.

"We may be very hungry, but we'll be alive, I'm sure," Ky said with more certainty than she felt. Her stomach growled.

"What if one of Paison's ships gets to us first?" he asked.

"Why would they? ISC is here in force; their best move is to lie low

or go away quickly."

"They think Paison's on this ship; he's their commander. He'd be

trying to rendezvous. When they don't hear from him, they will come looking."

"Honor among thieves, eh?" Ky shook her head. "I don't believe it;

I think they'll run off or stay hidden."

"You don't understand how they work," Corson said.

Ky cocked her head at him. "Are you going to explain, or just

complain? Either get busy helping Sawvert fix the transmitter, or

I'll have you escorted back to the others."

He looked scared, and bent to his work. But a half hour later, he shook his head. "Can't be done," he said.

"He's right," Sawvert said. "The problem here is mechanical as well

as parts missing. Things have been bent, ripped-"

"So he didn't plan on using our transmitter," Ky said. "He was more interested in preventing any of us from calling for help. He did plan on using the beacon. How was he going to signal his other ships?"