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“I agree with his tactics,” said Lobot.

“You would,” Lando said wryly.

“Is it not prudent to take all pains to avoid alarming one’s prey?”

“We’ve gone far beyond prudent,” Lando grumbled. “I’m beginning to suspect the Hortek hunt by boring their prey to death.”

But finally the hour came when all ten ships were in position, and IX-44F and its three-man crew were relieved from their seventy-nine-day deployment.

“Captain, you are free to return to base, with our thanks,” Pakkpekatt signaled the ferret. “I’m afraid you will have to make a stealth withdrawal from the target zone, however.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” came the response. “A couple of days more or less in this closet don’t mean much to us at this point. Good luck and good hunting.”

As IX-44F veered slowly off the intercept heading and fell behind, the cruiser Glorious took up its position.

“What do you think is inside, General Calrissian?” asked Pakkpekatt as they stood together at the main bridge viewport. “Why is it here? Where is it going? Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“Wherever it’s going, Colonel, it’s not in a hurry,” Lando said easily. “Just like us, eh? Have you made a final decision on when to send in your ferret?”

“I intend to establish an observation baseline before making any approach,” Pakkpekatt said. “Have you and your staff made any progress on the signal fragment from the Hrasskis contact?”

“Colonel, you know our hands have been tied by your blackout orders. We’ve had hardly any bandwidth available to us on the HoloNet. Lady Luck doesn’t have the kind of data capacity you have here on Glorious. We depend more heavily than you do on access to records located elsewhere.”

“I will take that as a report of ‘No progress,’ ” Pakkpekatt said. With a light touch on the main viewport’s controls, he increased the gain on the photoamplifiers until the outline of the vagabond sharpened and the body of the vessel brightened enough to show the gross detail.

“Look at it, General,” he went on. “For all we know, it may be five hundred years old, or fifty thousand. It may have been roaming space since both our species were too young to raise our eyes to the stars. Perhaps the only reason we can get this close is that the work of some ancient engineer has at long last begun to decay and fail.”

“The odds favor a shorter history,” Lando said, surprised at the Hortek’s sentimentality. “There are many dangers in space.”

“Yes,” said Pakkpekatt, “and to the vagabond, we are one of them. Do you know, General, that no ship like this, no plan or design, appears in any registry of any New Republic world? No shipwright we’ve found will claim it as his handiwork, though all seem to admire the craft evident in it. If the vagabond was built by any species we know, no other like it was ever made.”

“Our catalog of everything that ever was is a long way from being complete,” said Lando. “The odds favor a less exotic history.”

“How can a gambler post the odds without knowing the game?” scoffed Pakkpekatt. “Perhaps this ship before us is home to a species which has no other home. Perhaps it’s a new and curious visitor to this part of the universe, from places for which we have no names. Or perhaps it comes here from deep in the Core, where we have vanishingly few friends. All are possible—as are a universe of possibilities beyond our present imagining.”

“Yes, possible,” Lando admitted. “Not likely.”

“But reason enough to be cautious, wouldn’t you agree?” Pakkpekatt said pointedly. “Reason enough for patience, even to the point of pain. Even to the point of boredom. We will watch them for a while, General. We’ll let them watch us for a while as well. And I’ll tell you when we’re ready to do more. Can you live with that, General?”

Lando’s skin prickled to hear echoes of his private conversations in Pakkpekatt’s words. It seemed more than a coincidence, and yet he had, on many occasions, seen charlatans perform even more convincing feats of mind reading through