Another ship approaches on the horizon. The pirates change their colors to those of an Osirian merchant vessel; the few non-Osirian crew go belowdeck.

"Interesting they have enough Osirians to crew the whole place if they want. Not very properly international pirates."

"The whole gang is mostly local. I don't know why."

"Shouldn't you have an especially low rate of piracy? But they're at least not outright hostile to foreigners, there's a handful."

"Maybe we have a higher rate of piracy because we have a lower rate of on-shore crime? So all the people who are irretrievably criminally inclined leave? But I wouldn't have predicted it'd work that way."

"Yeah, me either."

"And some countries actively fund pirates, cheaper than a navy, but one assumes we're not doing that."

"Because we're the good guys?"

"Well, because we're the lawful guys."

"But what about the virtues of thrift and making an enterprise profitable? A navy that never gets into wars doesn't see much revenue."

"Piracy is really bad for international commerce.  I guess paying pirates to do less piracy and more weapons smuggling would be defensible under some circumstances."

"We could be looking at that..."

"Helping Cheliax? I - would need a lot more reason to consider it plausible. The circumstances where it's the right thing to do would have to be kind of absurd."

"Maybe they're not helping Cheliax, maybe they stole from Cheliax?"

"More plausible."

"What do we check to rule it out?"

"Well, if we're paying them, then at some point one assumes we'll pay them."

Hagan fixes an arrow that has nothing wrong with it.

"I was hoping for something more actively checkable."

"I don't really know."

"We could drag someone off the ship and ask. We could go back to the girl in Saint Hadassah's and ask her. We could go to Cheliax and try to figure out what they're gearing up for and who they're selling to. We could report in to Fazil's contact that we have the proof our Taldane contacts need to exonerate us and we're going to bring the ship in, and see if they stop us -"

"I won't do that."

"You could ask them what they'd want us to do if it came up, though."

"They said observe and don't interfere."

"Kind of a weird thing to say if this is a bad thing that's going to start a war."