"Mphm."  Grimes made a major production of filling and lighting his foul pipe.  "How long before your odd friends get here, Commander Mayhew?"

"My friends, sir?"

"Yes.  Your friends.  Metzenther and his ever-loving.  You telepaths always seem to stick together."  Grimes grinned.  "Frankly, I regarded that ex-Empress woman and her bunch of Imperial Navy throwouts as a pain in the arse...."

Mayhew grinned back.  "They thought about you and Commander Verrill in rather the same way."

"Good.  But when do they get here?"

The psionic communications officer shut his eyes, concentrated.  He said slowly, "In about three hours fifteen minutes Standard."

"That gives us time...  Commander Williams, I think you'll find one or two Confederate ensigns in the flag locker.  You'll want one with wire stiffening, and a pole with a magnetic base.  We'll plant our colors on the...  The Outsider.  I doubt if the legality of the claim will be recognized in a court of interstellar law, but it will give us some sort of talking point.

"Meanwhile, probably quite a few of you are wondering what this is all about.  You know, Commander Williams, and Mayhew knows, but none of the rest of you will have heard the full story.  It'll be as well if I put you in the picture."  He turned to Williams.  "You'd better get your flag planting under way, Commander, just in case Mayhew's ETA is out.  And could you lend Commander Williams a couple or three hands for the job, Major Dalzell?  And Mr. Daniels, I shall want everything I say put through on the intercom.  Thank you."

Williams and Dalzell left the control room.  Grimes cleared his throat.  He said into the microphone that Daniels handed him, "Attention, all hands.  Attention, all hands.  This is important.  You will all have seen, in the Public information screens, our objective, the Outsiders' Ship.  Most of you will have realized that we are now in orbit about it.  Shortly you will see a landing party jetting off from this vessel toward The Outsider.  They will be planting a flag on it.  The reason for this is that we shall soon be company.  This will not be the Waldegren warship that we have been expecting - although she, probably, will be along before very long.

"A few years ago," Grimes continued, "I was instructed to take Faraway Quest out to investigate some strange, drifting wreckage - wreckage that, obviously, had not originated in this universe.  It was the remains of a lifeboat that had belonged to a ship called Star Scout, and this Star Scout had been a unit of the Imperial Navy.  The only empire that we know is the Empire of Waverley, and its navy is officially called the Imperial Jacobean Navy.  So...

"So we were stooging around, trying to find a few further clues, when this ship, quite literally, appeared from nowhere.  Her name was Wanderer.  She was quite heavily armed, the equivalent to one of our destroyers, but she was privately owned.  She had been the yacht of the Empress Irene.  She was still owned by the ex-Empress Irene, who was married to her Captain.  She carried only a small crew - this Irene woman was mate, as well as owner; a Mr. Tallentire, who had been a gunnery officer in the Imperial Navy was second mate, and his wife, Susanna, had been lady-in-waiting to the Empress, and was now radio-officer-cum-purser.  The psionic communications officer was - and still is - a Mr. Metzenther, almost the double of our Commander Mayhew.  This Metzenther had - has - an  Iralian wife called Trialanne.  We don't have any Iralians on this time track.  They were all wiped out by a plague.  Bronheim was the engineer.  He, too, had an Iralian wife - Denelleen...."