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Did you have a nice nap, Mr. Korie?”
    â€œYes, Captain, I did,” he replied stiffly.
    She gave him a questioning look. Was he still smarting at having been ordered to rest?
    â€œIt was an interesting experience, sleep,” he said blandly. “I’ll have to try it more often. Thank you for the opportunity.”
    Parsons allowed herself a hint of a grin, a wry expression. Korie was clearly not without a sense of humor—he could even allow the joke to be on himself. That was good to know. She nodded and turned forward, all business again. “Let’s get a close look at the Norway . Commander Brik—?”
    The Morthan Security Officer and chief of strategic operations straightened up and turned to face the captain. When he stood on the Ops Deck, he could turn toward the Command Deck and be eye-to-eye with his superior officers, so he had made his post a work station directly ahead and to the left of the captain’s command chair. “Aye, Captain?”
    â€œLaunch a spread of three probes. Monitor them all the way in.”
    â€œAye, Captain. Launch bays armed and ready. Stand by.” He turned back to his console and began reading calmly off his display. “Probes are hot and green. Launching on my mark ...” He snapped open a plastic protective cover, and flipped a red toggle. “We are armed. Three ... two ... one—” There was a row of buttons next to the toggle; three of them were lit. He pressed the first one, paused, pressed the second, paused again, then pressed the third. With each touch, the hard thump of a torpedo launch thudded through the ship.
    Captain Parsons’ coffee rippled in her mug; she replaced the cap and put the mug back in the holder in her chair arm.
    At his station, Brik continued to watch his displays. “Probes accelerating. On course. Probe one has acquisition of target ... Probe two has
acquisition of target ... Probe three has acquisition of target. Flyby in seventeen minutes. Deceleration begins in thirteen. Confidence is high, and all three units are in the groove, five by five.” He punched up the next program in the series and reported, “We have acquisition of all three signals. We’ll have a half-second delay at maximum range.”
    â€œThank you, Mr. Brik.” Parsons retrieved her coffee and turned her attention to the holographic display in the center of the Ops Deck. It showed the bloated red spheroid with the orbit of the Norway tracking around it and a separate line showing the interception course of the Star Wolf . Although they were now decelerating at full power to the plasma drives, they were still more than half a light second away from the other ship. In six hours, their respective trajectories would be almost matching. Less than two hours after that, they should be close enough for final approach and docking.
    The physics of the problem were trivial. HARLIE could have the answer on the screen before a person finished asking the question. But the logistics of the problem were complicated by IKE-34’s primary, the bloated red star. Once per orbit—once per artificial “year”—the Norway would have to pass through the streamer of flame being pulled out of the red star by the blue. This was clearly a “fail-safe” orbit. If something went wrong on the Norway , if she were disabled and couldn’t break orbit or if there was no one left alive to give the order, she would be destroyed by her passage through the fire.
    The Norway ’s large orbit gave her a long “year”—more than fortyeight months—so she had clearly been on station for some time; she was just now approaching her time of passage. Within a few days at most, she would be gone. The Star Wolf ’s timing was fortunate—or maybe not. They still didn’t know what they would find aboard her.
    This was the troubling factor in Captain Parsons’ calculations. How badly was