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from the Rock would put the shuttle at a distance similar to that between Earth and Sol's asteroid belt. Bluebird was right, that was way too far out for a shuttle. Unless it was an orbital body that wasn't on the Goin'on 's charts, which he seriously doubted. He asked the radar officer, Ensign Freelion, if he had picked up any such. He hadn't.
    "Sir," Freelion said, "the shuttle's moving on an intercept path toward the Rock."
    Captain Happiness thought a bit more, then asked, "Have either of you read up any on cloaking?" Neither had heard of cloaking.
    "The Confederation Navy's working on it," he told them. "It's supposed to make starships show up as something smaller."
    "Stealth technology?" asked Bluebird.
    "Similar," Happiness confirmed. "Stealth doesn't work on anything bigger than a Bomarc 36V. Cloaking is supposed to."
    "I've seen stealth," Freelion said. "This isn't stealth."
    "Hmm. Con, can you tuck us in behind that ship?"
    "I've got a read," Lieutenant Sunshine Stems'n'seeds chirped. "Can do, sir."
    Captain Happiness smiled tightly. If the Goin'on was directly behind that vessel, whoever she was, the Goin'on would be invisible to her and could follow wherever she was headed--unless she jumped into Beamspace. Which she wasn't likely to do unless her captain didn't realize she was on a collision course with a planet and needed to make an emergency jump in order to avoid catastrophe.
    He didn't believe for a second that the cloaked ship didn't know she was on an intercept course for a planet.
    Though she was a heavy cruiser in her current life, the Goin'on had been a Confederation Navy Omaha-class light cruiser before the Confederation Navy sold her to We're Here!
    shortly before the end of her scheduled service life. They'd included all of her existing systems, and to juice the sale a bit, thrown in a service-life extension. Which made the Goin'on one of the most sophisticated military starships owned by the local navy of any individual world in Human Space, and by far the most sophisticated in We're Here!'s navy.
    The craft with the shuttle drive signals, when the Goin'on got close enough to see her on visual, was a good deal bigger than a Bomarc 36V, which was the smallest ship capable of interstellar travel. She was an ore freighter, ten times the size of the Goin'on. The registration markings, which by Confederation statute were required to be clearly visible on the freighter's stern, had been painted over--the ship was unidentifiable. Except to someone who had the latest updates to Jane's Commercial Starfleets of the Confederation, which We're Here!'s navy made sure to keep updated on all its starships.
    The freighter appeared to be the Broken Missouri, registered in St. Helen's as part of United Express Freight's starfleet. The Broken Missouri had been reported lost to pirates three years earlier. A drone sent by the ship carried jerky, mostly out-of-focus 2-D vids of the pirate attack. No pirate band was ever identified as being behind the attack, and there had been no reports of the ship or any member of her crew being seen since. Neither had there been an acknowledged ransom demand. The Broken Missouri had been dead-heading when she was attacked, so there was no cargo to show up on either the black market or the gray.
    When it became clear that the Broken Missouri was indeed headed for rendezvous with the Rock, Captain Happiness backed off the Goin'on far enough that the possibility of detection from either the planetary surface or orbit was near enough to zero to make no difference, and he observed and considered the implications of the missing freighter approaching an uninhabited planet along the plane of the ecliptic.
    Starships coming out of Beamspace had two priorities: avoiding gravity wells, and allowing for margin of error in their exit to Space-3. That typically meant several days'
    transition travel above or below the plane of the ecliptic, as unanticipated gravity wells and small objects were more