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exasperation, Kaplin flipped back ash-brown hair. 'You're crazy. You'll get us
all court-martialed.'
'Or decorated,' Harris interjected. 'That's what happened last time.'
That moment Jensen noticed the gaudy, nonregulation nail lacquer. 'Ensign
Kaplin,' he rapped out. 'One more breach of protocol on this bridge, and I'll
have you confined to quarters.' His voice did not change inflection as he
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resumed with orders for his pilot. 'Harris, charge the coils and prepare for
FTL. I want our dispatches delivered as if they were hot, and Sail on flight
course for Chalice.'
In fact the logistics took days to work out. On fire with impatience lest they
miss their timing at Chalice, Jensen paced through $ail's tiny corridors. He
ran through his plan to trap Marity over and over again.
Since the scoutship's living quarters consisted of two bunkrooms, a galley
cubby, and the bridge, his crewmates grew sick of hearing it. Harris escaped
by closeting himself in astrogation to watch his library of porn tapes. Kaplin
got bugged enough to argue.
Her fingers tapped the mess counter as she voiced her list of objections.
'First, you took a helluva risk assuming those recon boys you brown-nosed
could wrangle us an assignment.'
'Irrelevant point,' Jensen snapped. 'We've got our papers and the assignment,
both on target.'
Kaplin shot a glance at the soup he would not eat because of nerves, and her
next nail snicked against the counter. 'Second, the explosive you had that
dock worker rig in case your plans went awry could misfire.'
Jensen gestured his exasperation. 'Not if you know, as the rest of Chalice
personnel does, that the box with the self-destruct is a dummy. The crystals
inside are fakes, a decoy for MacKenzie James.'
'Oh ?' Kaplin's eyebrows arched. 'You told everybody about your plot? Even the
janitors? Hell, man, if you left things that wide~open, your skip-runner's
deaf not to know it. His intelligence network's better than Fleet's, if he's
got connections with the Syndicate. So who's fooling who on this mission?'
'Mac's best style is recklessness,' Jensen countered. 'And he wants those
interface crystals very badly.'
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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
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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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Nobody spoke. None of the three in Sail's cockpit cared to contemplate what
might have been had their scout probe broken through FTS just half an instant
sooner. Jensen looked at his hands, found them clenched whitely on the arms of
his crew chair. Since he could not change the fuckup, he forced his brain to
work. And the obvious stared him in the face.
'Kappie,' he said sharply. 'Engage sensors, sweep the vicinity for the
presence of other warcraft.'
'What?' Overdue, the ensign's reproach was cutting. 'Have you gone nuts? You
set a live charge on
Chalice station, and now you're after the culprit who blew it?'
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