A lot of people think of fenspace as being full of plucky adventurers, haring off into the great unknown for the sheer love of the wilds of space.
Poppycock. Granted, many of us do get misty-eyed about the wonders of the solar system, but at the same time most of our day to day lives are concerned with much the same sort of rat race as planetside life. Those documentaries you've seen about the Jam Jump or the Explain Star exploring the outer planets... do you really think that the networks got those videos and high color glossy photos for free?
Mars isn't a dream, it's an investment, real estate development writ shockingly large, and already the cold-adapted crop strains that the dusters have introduced are starting to sell well enough to pay the terraforming project's day-to-day costs. Venus paid back its startup costs and has been earning a profit for years, shipping back hydrocarbons to Earth for use as fuel or plastics. Heavy metals mined from the asteroid belt are feeding much of Terra's industry these days, light ones from Luna likewise, while every day thousands more miles of hydrogen power lines are laid after being mined and processed from Jupiter's heart.
And, of course, there's always the usual human trades in murder, vice, and treason.
Oh, don't look at me like that. I'm a spy, admittedly, but not a murderer and hardly a dealer.
Besides a few lingering feelings for the country of my birth, my reasoning is that fenspace is unlikely to present a threat to, well, any Terran government at any point in the foreseeable future... but that, without the information to draw that conclusion for themselves, there'd be far too little chance of the Powers That Be believing that.
Since the fen are too diffuse and disorganized to be brought to heel in return, it seems wise to arrange the dissemination of such information and forestall any such rash and dangerous attempt. And so Moondance goes about her business just as she would anyway, while hidden and carefully stealthed sensors and listening arrays watch and hear the thoughts and heartbeats of fenspace and record them faithfully for processing and analysis by our self-styled masters on the homeworld.
Of course, the presence of that same state-of-the-art monitoring equipment, both wave and hardtech, would be extremely awkward to explain if it were discovered... which it definitely would be during any sort of refit.
If - when - the Star Patrol finally faced down the Reavers, we'd need fighting ships. As the largest hull among the first wave of volunteers, 'Dancer was a logical candidate for conversion.
Breaking cover would have inconvenient consequences for both me and my silent partners, which meant that we needed to sneak the secret sensor gear off the ship, posthaste.
Fortunately, the CIA had a station on Castle Magellan, and though it was rare for them to ship things to it via commercial carrier, it was hardly unheard of. Load empty crates on Earth, lift for Venus, work frantically 24-7 during the passage to get everything pulled out and stuffed in their boxes in time, land at Magellan and put the boxes of clearly marked Top Secret on a trolley for the station. Simple.
Let Stace - who's known to be the more hotheaded of the two of us - stage a large and public argument with those members of the crew whose expertise the Agency had judged us to no longer need, and we're about as home free as it's possible to get.
Pity to've lost the stuff just then, though. It would've been tremendously useful for the mission the Patrol had assigned us, no matter what course the investigation ended up taking.
Diamond as Castle M.'s shell and roof would be possible, but I'm concerned that it'd be too heavy.
So, what is thionite, anyway, and how does it work in this setting?
Ja, -n
===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"