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long as it carries the message that we're here—"
    "—And that we're not alone. Luce, I bet whatever you want that we're not the only CIs," Stana said.
    "She's right," Amoto said. "They've got a bureaucracy set up for it. I saw a form that said 'Office of Conscripted Immigration' on it. And one of the troopers posted on duty in my section told me it wasn't so bad—one of his grandparents was a CI."
    Everyone spoke at once. "My God. How long have they been grabbing ships?" "Why hasn't anyone ever caught them?' "Why do they want all these people?" "C'mon, Dwight, if that was true, why didn't the League find 'em years ago?"
    Amoto ignored everyone but the last speaker. "When a ship is lost in interstellar space, you never expect to see it again. And given the choice between believing ships blow up now and again, and saying pirates from beyond the stars have been kidnapping people—"
    "Yeah, I suppose," Schiller said.
    "You realize what that means," Wu said. "When we were back on the League worlds, we never heard a hint about hijacked ships. The League doesn't know such things happen, or that these people, these Guards, exist. The League thinks we're dead, and that Venera was lost with all hands. They won't come looking for us. We're on our own."
    "Not for long. Something's up," Lucy said. "That's why we're here. The immediate reason we were put on Ariadne was to allow them to transfer its crew elsewhere. And I've picked up a lot of traffic from the big ship, Leviathan, the one that arrived in orbit about twenty-five days ago. They're still having trouble filling billets even after 'recent transfers of comm personnel.' Which I figure means the men from here. And what does it suggest to you when a big ship rushes around to fill all billets? Plus, there's more-general radio traffic everyday. They call the ships orbiting

    Outpost the Main Strike Fleet. The Guards are going out on some sort of military mission."
    "You're saying they're going to attack someone," Schiller said.
    "And who is there to attack but the League worlds?" Lucy replied. "Unless there's another mystery planet, which I doubt. And if the Guards attack the League, the League will find out there are such things as Guards, and the League will come looking for 'em. Our job is to do our work, gather as much information as we can, be good little boys and girls, and watch for the chance to get the hell off this station and back to the League carrying a road map with Capital on it."
    Two weeks later, there was a sudden increase in radio traffic. Ship orbits were changed more and more. The CIs were kept busier than they had ever been, patching calls and tracking ships. Then, one after another, the ships left orbit altogether, heading away from Outpost to deep space, to a point far enough distant from Nova Sol B to allow a safe C 2 jump. As Lucy watched her board, the realization sunk in: Main Strike was leaving. Lucy wanted to jam the calls, send bad messages, whatever she could to stop them, but it was too late. Clear of the planet, whose bulk had served to block signals most effectively, the ships had perfect line-of-sight on each other: Their messages bypassed the relay station altogether.
    One ship was left behind. Leviathan. Lucy had never seen her, but the scuttlebutt from the Guards and the radio channels was that Leviathan was the biggest starship ever built, the first of her class.
    Why the hell would they leave the big ship behind? Curious, Lucy glanced over her shoulder to see if the Guards on duty was watching carefully. No, thank God, they were talking with each other about last night's poker game. She tapped into the signal traffic from Leviathan command channel directly and listened on her earphones. With luck they'd be using one of the codes she had broken.
    "—long, Carruthers. We'll see you in a few months."
    Lucy's eyebrows shot up. They were talking in clear! No encryption. But it wasn't the first time. The signals crew on Leviathan seemed to be out