“Another false registration.”
“Another stop at Nareth.”
Tess snatched the manifest out of her hand and scanned it.
“Three ships,” she said slowly.
“Three different registrations.”
“All false.”
“And all stopping at the same station within a few weeks.”
Tess was already reaching for the first manifest again. “Look at this.”
“What?”
“The authorization.”
At the bottom of each record was a block of official-looking text followed by a complicated symbol. Tess put the three pages side by side.
“Look at the station master’s signature,” she said.
She looked from one to another. They were identical. Not similar. Identical.
“Could it be an electronic signature?” she asked.
“Maybe.” Tess was already shaking her head. “But look at this.”
She pointed to a tiny mark beneath the signature, a notation Polly hadn’t paid any attention to. The same sequence appeared on all three forms. Tess sat back and looked at her.
“Someone’s running a network, and Nareth Station is part of it”
A chill shivered down her spine. “Maybe.”
“Not maybe.” For once there was no fear in Tess’s eyes. There was something harder. “Multiple ships. False papers. Coordinated movements. They move cargo through this station and change registrations somewhere along the way.”
Cargo.Neither of them said what kind.
She looked down at the records again.
“We don’t know these are the same people who took you.”
“No. But it’s the first thing we’ve found that looks like anything.”
She couldn’t argue.
Tess gathered the three manifests into a neat stack. “We need more records from Nareth.”
“We should send these to Baralt.”
“No,” Tess said immediately, frowning at her.
“Why not?”
“Because we found it.”
She frowned at the other woman. “I know that.”
