"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."

"Could be over our level? Not these guys maybe but somebody who'd swoop in like whoever scries candle guy?"

"Yeah. They could be looking out for us."

She observes the boat to see if it'll do anything else in response to the Osirian vessel.

It ignores it and sails away. Eventually the rest of the crew comes back out. They don't bother changing the flags back for a while.

What are their usual flags?

When first encountered the ship had the flags of Absalom's merchant guild, and it now puts those back.