Station's chief engineer met her with startled admiration. 'You got guts, I'll grant you that.'

Ataine fussed with the seal of her suit. 'Why?'

    The engineer gestured toward the spidery framework of the Quest's launch cradle. 'No weaponry. Last shift, we lost an entire drilling team to a mine.'

    'What? Another?' Ataine paused, stunned, and thoughtfully snapped her collar stud. 'But no one's seen any anti-national hardware for months!'

The engineer shrugged. 'Want out?'

    'No.' Ataine quickened her step. She swung herself over the Quest's sleek vanes, into the cockpit, while the engineer launched into a companionable description of the Challenger series, which extended the Quest's capabilities to a crew of two, and a gun station.

    Ataine nodded vaguely. Anxious to get away, she dogged the hatch closed. Once under the headset, love, death, and emotional tumult would all cease to trouble her...

    Shortly, conjoined with electronic circuitry, she piloted the Quest through the asteroid field she had surveyed last shift. The area had been clean then, and anti-nationals would hardly trouble an unmanned claim.

    Sensors granted her vision in all directions. Entranced by the random dance of rocks whose motions would outlast the ages, Ataine killed the engines and switched off her running lights. Hours, she drifted, aimless as flotsam amid the dusty tumble of debris. Second Lieutenant Dorren Carlton ceased to matter. Attuned to radio frequencies through the Quest's systems, the soft, repetitive beep of a nearby claim buoy remained the only human intrusion upon her solitude, until the moment her sensors picked up a metallic flash of reflection.

    Anti-nationals, Ataine guessed. She was unafraid. Without lights, she was too small to be noticed. Ruled by the nerveless logic of the Quest's electronics, Ataine settled back in her darkened cockpit and stepped up magnification.

    The red and white checked sphere of the claim buoy jumped out of the darkness, spotlighted by a Prospector's search lamps. Odd, Ataine thought. Why would a team resurvey an area already covered? She frowned, and looked closer. Registration numbers marked the craft as one of Station's own, but the crewman who

IOI