of an uncaptured asteroid, the scout craft he piloted went dead to observation.

    'Nice work,' said Jensen. Awkwardly stiff in his command chair, he smiled. Their timing was perfect, a clean thirty minutes before the scheduled exchange between skip-runners and station. As the scopes resolved data, the lieutenant leaned anxiously forward. He expected the spider-armed sprawl of an orbital station, gravity powered, and glittering with the lights of habitation.

    What he saw was deep-space darkness, scattered with distant stars.

    His blank-faced dismay raised laughter from Harris. 'Well, what do you want for a security installation? Billboard lights and a docking beacon?'

    Jensen shut his eyes, opened them, and tried not to blush at his foolishness. Like the chaser he commanded, Cassix Station would be surfaced in camouflage. The complex would be dark except for lighted pinpricks that simulated stars. Her deep-space side would be painted in reflective, and unless a ship chanced to cross her orbital plane and catch her in occultation with her parent star, she would be invisible to passing traffic.

    Jensen bridled rising annoyance. He dared not use the Shearborn's fancy surveillance equipment. Without knowing how sophisticated his adversary's gear might be, he must assume that deflection beam interference would warn an already wary skip-runner that his activities had drawn Fleet notice. There were other ways to locate an orbiting body. The simplest involved time-sequence imaging, then a comparison of star fields to determine which objects were artificial by drift; except time was the one most glaring commodity this blitz operation lacked.

    'There,' Harris said suddenly, startlingly loud in the silence. 'I've got a fix on the target.'

    His experienced eyes had spotted the skip-runner craft. A fiat flash of reflection confirmed his sighting, as a shiny surface on her hull caught reflection from the dwarf star. Jensen turned up the resolution enhancer on the analog screen. Though his pilot patiently informed him that the hardware would not perform under $hearborn's erratically violent motion, the lieutenant continued searching until his eyes burned.

    Hope of coherent conversation seemed nonexistent; Harris shrugged and made a show of initiating a star-field comparison