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eyebrow. "I don't blame you a bit for that," she said. The blue lozenge-shaped thing was a hellbomb, a self-destruct device that would destroy the ship so completely, vaporize it so thoroughly, that no trace of it would be left behind. "It'll put us a little on edge having it aboard."
    "Good," said Gunther. "I don't care how many safeguards and lockouts and system checks you have on something like this. You know, and I know, as a matter of logic, that you could pound on that casing all day with a hammer, then fire a clip of heavy-caliber ammo at it, and it wouldn't even muss up the paintwork. That thing is tough.
    "But if you're smart, you treat it like it was made of spun sugar. It won't go off. It can't go off without you doing about six very specific things first. But ma'am, sir--people make mistakes, and machines aren't perfect. It just might be that this thing was put together wrong, or got dropped in shipment in just the right way to bend a delicate part out of true. It might be that my bolting it to the equipment rack set up just the right stresses so that it's primed to go off the next time it gets jostled. It's not true, but it might be. It's a one-in-a-billion, one-in-a-trillion shot."
    "We know," said Hannah. "We know." She couldn't help noticing that Gunther hadn't called the thing by its proper name. He could barely bring himself to call it a self-destruct device, let alone "bomb." It clearly had him a lot more on edge than perhaps he realized.
    "And we know that there are ships that disappear for no known reason," said Jamie. "We'll be careful."
    Gunther looked at Jamie with wry amusement but spoke with a note of sadness in his voice. "You do that, sir. Please be sure you do that. Because this ship here, the Irene Adler , is one of those ships. Or was." He gestured up toward the Adler 's tiny flight deck. "I was part of the crew that boarded her when she came in. He was up there, in the pilot's seat. I think he wanted to die looking at the stars." Gunther was silent for a moment. "Whatever it was that killed him was something he wasn't expecting, something we've never seen before. You'd call it a one-in-a-trillion chance," he said, "until it happens to you. "
    Gunther Hendricks looked at them with a fierce, almost angry intensity. "I don't wish to pull anyone else out of this ship. I don't ever want to draw that duty again. I don't want any more ships that vanish for no good reason. I don't need more reasons to lie awake nights. Don't just be careful on this mission. Be careful, " he said, emphasizing the last word so hard that it was almost a shout.
    The tiny ship filled with a suffocating silence. Gunther looked almost as startled by his outburst as Hannah felt. He spoke again, in a quieter tone, after a moment's pause. "Sorry," he said. "But--I knew Trevor Wilcox. Not well, but I knew him. And being part of the team that took him out of here, seeing what they had turned him into...well, that got to me."
    "I believe it," Hannah said.
    "You said 'they' turned him into what you found," Jamie said. "Who is 'they,' exactly?"
    "The Metrannans, of course," Gunther said. "Who else would it be?"
    "That's what we're going to find out," Jamie said. "Why do you blame them?"
    Gunther frowned. "He went there young and healthy, and he died of old age on the way home. It must have been something there that did it to him, and it must have been the Metrannans that did it. Logic, that's all."
    Hannah could see that Jamie was about to ask something more, to press the point harder. But Gunther wasn't a forensic pathologist. His logic was nothing more than a jump, a leap to conclusions inspired by fear. His answers on the subject would be useless--worse than useless, if they served to distract Jamie, lead him in the wrong direction. "That's enough, Jamie," she said, before he could speak.
    And yet Jamie's instinctive urge to question Gunther was correct. Gunther was a first and unexpected witness. But better to talk to him about