Kaplin threw up her hands, almost banging the dish locker in her irritation. 'You're telling me nothing but insanity! Our success depends on MacKenzie James being quantum leaps dumber than you are.'

    Now Jensen grew heated in turn. 'If you can devise a better plan, I'd sure be interested to hear it!'

    The lilac-colored nails drummed an agitated solo on the countertop. 'I can't,' Kaplin said finally. 'But God, we'll be lucky if our asses stay whole through this one.'

The queer, intangible stagger that human time sense underwent through the shift from FTL came to an end, but confusion lingered. On re-entry to analog space, Sail seemed to hesitate and bounce, as if she were a plane engaged in a turbulent landing. Then something moving and metallic impacted her high-density hull with an awful, ear-stinging clang.

    'Jesus!' screamed Harris from the pilot's seat. 'We've dumped slap into a war zone!' He spun the spacecraft, tossing Kaplin and Jensen hard into their couch stations.

    The lieutenant strained against the pull of vertigo and managed to punch up an image on the screens. Instantly his eyes were seared by the glare of an expanding plasma explosion. Sail had not entered a war zone; instead, the station logged as her destination had been detonated to a cloud of gases and debris. Harris responded, reflexively kicked Sail's grav drives into reverse with a scream of attitude thrusters. Small fragments rattled against the hull. The gravity drives accelerated into the red, and buzzers sounded warning.

    Jensen stared at the blowing burst of destruction that Harris labored feverishly to evade. What could possibly have gone wrong? he wondered, and his shoulders tensed in anticipation of Kaplin's acerbic, 'I told you so, you arrogant, stupid fool.'

    But Kaplin said nothing, only sat with her face in her hands, caution lights from the recon unit a glare of yellow against her knuckles.

    'Je-sus,' Harris repeated, the Eirish accent of his childhood breaking through the more cultured tones he had acquired in air-tactics academy. A gifted sixth sense and instinct enabled him to quiet the drive engines; Sail described a smooth course just beyond the event horizon left by the explosion. 'What now?'

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