"But that would be pretty risky, wouldn't it?" said Trigger. "With just
the equipment he could pack on a League transport."

"Not very much risk," said the Commissioner, "if he had an agreement to
have an Independent Fleet meet him."

"Oh." She nodded.

"And by what is, at all events, an interesting coincidence," the
Commissioner went on, "we've had word that an outfit called Vishni's
Fleet hasn't been heard from for some months. Their I-Fleet area is a
long way out beyond Manon, but Fayle could have made it there, at League
ship speeds, in about twenty days. Less, if Vishni sent a few pilots to
meet him and guide him out of subspace. If he's bought Vishni's, he's
had his pick of a few hundred uncharted habitable planets and a few
thousand very expert outworlders to see nothing happens to him
planetside. And Vishni's boys are exactly the kind of crumbs you could
buy for a deal like that.

"Now, what's been done is to hire a few of the other I-Fleets around
there and set them and as many Space Scout squadrons as could be kicked
loose from duty elsewhere to surveying the Vishni territory. Our outfit
is in charge of that operation. And Manon, of course, is a lot better
point from which to conduct it than the Hub. If something is discovered
that looks interesting enough to investigate in detail, we'll only be a
week's run away.

"So we've been ready to move for the past two weeks now, which was when
the first reports started coming in from the Vishni area--negative
reports so far, by the way. I've kept stalling from day to day, because
there were also indications that your grabber friends might be getting
set to swing at you finally. It seemed tidier to get that matter cleared
up first. Now they've swung, and we'll go."

He rubbed his chin. "The nice thing about it all," he remarked, "is that
we're going there with the two items the opposition has revealed it
wants. We're letting them know those items will be available in the
Manon System henceforward. They might get discouraged and just drop the
whole project. If they do, that's fine. We'll go ahead with cleaning up
the Vishni phase of the operation.

"But," he continued, "the indications are they can't drop their project
any more than we can drop looking for that key unit. So we'll expect
them to show up in Manon. When they do, they'll be working in unfamiliar
territory and in a system where they have only something like fifty
thousand people to hide out in, ins