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zone covered by the Cruiser’s most sensitive passive sensors which had an accumulate and refresh cycle of just over two seconds.  When it dropped off their sensors, it never occurred to the Krag in the low Cruiser that the monkey-blasphemer Humans were doing anything but continuing on the same course to fly from their better-armed attackers. 
    “Are we committing suicide?  I see that we are headed directly for the surface of that moon.”  There was discernable alarm in the doctor’s voice.
    “No, doctor, we are not going to hit the surface.  We are just going to get very, very close to it.”
    “How close?”
    “The highest surface feature on that moon is right at seven thousand meters, so we will be at seven thousand two hundred.”
    “Isn’t that, according to the old American idiom, ‘cutting it a little close’?”
    “Yes.  It is.”
     “As long as you are aware of it.”  It took a very acute ear to detect the sarcasm in the statement.  Max had a very acute ear.  “In addition to cutting it a little close, aren’t we going a little fast for a ship that is going to be that close to the surface.”
    “Not really.  We’ll not be going much more than one thousand kilometers per second.”
    “Oh, a snail’s pace.  You so ease my mind.”  This time the sarcasm was not so subtle.
    Max was keeping a close eye on a display on his console that he had configured to show distance to the surface of the moon.  Chief LeBlanc had a similar display.  Both men were watching the numbers as they fell rapidly.  Watching them very closely.  By Max’s orders, this next maneuver would be executed at the Chief’s command as he had the better “feel for the ship.”  Nevertheless, more for his own reassurance than to communicate anything new, Max said to LeBlanc, “Second maneuver at your discretion, Chief.”
    “Second maneuver at my discretion,” the older Cajun acknowledged.  On various displays around CIC tied into the forward video feed, Mengis VI’s moon was growing nearer at terrifying speed.  It seemed either that the ship would slam into it at any second, or that it still had so much forward velocity that it could not pull up in time and would plow into the surface, inscribing a new canyon that some wit would probably name the Cumberland Valley.  People had to remind themselves to ungrit their teeth, to unclench their hands, to breathe.
    “All right, men,” LeBlanc told the three men at their stations in front of him, “just like we talked about.  In five seconds.  Four.  Three.  Two.  One.  Now.”
    At Chief LeBlanc’s signal the man controlling pitch and roll pitched the bow of the ship up so that it was precisely following the contour of the moon’s surface and rolled the ship so that its missile tubes, one of which was mounted in the bow exactly between the one and the two o’clock position and the other mounted between the seven and the eight were level with one another.  The braking drive disengaged and the main sublight drive went to Flank to push the ship through this maneuver, and then to one tenth power to hold the ship to the trajectory Max had ordered for it, which was anything but an orthodox Keplerian orbit.  The craters and mountains of the desolate world below them whizzed past so rapidly that they could hardly be discerned on the optical feeds.  The smallest errant twitch on the pitch controller would have slammed the Cumberland into the surface so hard that the only evidence she had ever existed would be the kilometer wide crater, the rapidly expanding ball of incandescent gas, and the “we regret to inform you” commgrams to the parents, orphans, and widows. 
    Doctor Sahin looked at his tactical display.  The icon for the Cumberland and the icon for the Krag cruiser were approaching one another so fast that they would meet in only a few seconds.  He noted from the “data source slot” at the top of the display that the information on the positions of