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likely to be encountered along the plane. Contact with a sizable gravity well or an object much larger than a grain of sand could be catastrophic for a ship making the transition. Anyone watching for a ship to transit into Space-3 would, therefore, look above and below the plane of the ecliptic, not along it.
    Captain Happiness came to the only conclusion that made sense: someone didn't want the freighter's arrival to be noticed. Which meshed tightly with the fact that the Broken Missouri's kinetic drives were cloaked.
    The next question Happiness had was: Who? Followed immediately by: Why?
    Passive observation of the Broken Missouri in the visual, comm, and radar bands after she reached orbit made it clear that the freighter was loading cargo ferried up from the Rock. The only cargo Happiness could think of that might be worth uploading was minerals.
    The very minerals the Goin'on was there to investigate--the Goin'on carried a geological survey team that they'd planned to land on the surface. Obviously, they'd been beaten to it.
    Captain Happiness considered what to do about the unexpected situation and concluded he had three choices. One: he could close with, board, and commandeer the freighter, then quarantine the planet while he sent a drone back to We're Here! for further instructions. Two: he could wait until the freighter left orbit, then intercept and capture her. Three: he could wait until the freighter jumped into Beamspace, land a boarding force, and take the planetside mining operation, then send off a drone requesting further instructions.
    He didn't like any of those options.
    In the first, it wasn't likely that the Broken Missouri was still a pirate vessel--pirates didn't engage in trading for minerals and ores--and taking her could well cause a major interstellar incident. The same applied in the second, in addition to which he didn't know what defenses, if any, the ship had. Neither did he know what defenses the planet might have.
    He decided on a fourth choice. Send a drone to We're Here! and stay in place observing until further instructions arrived.
    A week later, when the freighter finally left orbit and headed out to where she could jump, he was glad he'd decided on his fourth choice. The Broken Missouri's hull had masked a military space station, to which she had been docked, from detection by his ship. Had he attacked, the space station might have caused severe damage to the Goin'on even if he'd been able to win a battle with it, which, while probable, wasn't certain.
    Like the Broken Missouri, the space station had no identifying marks.
    It took the Broken Missouri six days standard and a couple of hours to get far enough from gravity wells along the elliptic to make a jump into Beamspace. Only then did the Goin'on launch a drone. After little more than one day in Beamspace, it jumped back into Space-3 less than two days out from its destination and immediately began broadcasting its arrival. It was picked up the next day by a We're Here! coast guard cutter that downloaded its message and tight-beamed it to Navy HQ, where it was loaded into the Fleet Intelligence section comp and decoded.
    Lieutenant Stardust had the duty. When he saw the message was classified "Urgent Highest," he nearly panicked; he'd never before seen that classification on a live document and didn't immediately know what to do with it. Other than not read it; neither he nor anyone else in his duty section held the necessary security clearance. He punched up the board to see whether anybody with a sufficiently high clearance happened to be in HQ. Such a person was.
    Admiral of the Starry Heavens Sativa Orange, the We're Here! Chief of Naval Operations, was in his office. Lieutenant Stardust immediately routed the message to Admiral Orange and, to make sure it wasn't overlooked, placed a voice call to the admiral's office. Admiral Orange was alone, so there was nobody to take the call, but he dutifully noted a call had come in and