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I are old friends and... well, the Pushkin won't be going anywhere for a while.  I was wondering if he could be seconded to the Cleopatra for this mission, sir."
    "Were you indeed.  I was not aware that the movement or otherwise of the cruiser Pushkin was a matter for your determination."
    "No sir.  I'm sorry, sir."
    "I'll think about it.  Now you've got the Pushkin's repair crews and you want her surgeon.  Is there anything else you'd like to strip from her?"
    "No sir.  Nothing else, sir.  Thank you very much, sir."
    Mikael saluted again and dashed from the office.  In the outer office the Captain and the shapely lieutenant were engaged in a deep conversation.  Heads close together, they did not even look up as Mikael hurried across the room and out into the passageway.
    "Lucky bastard," he thought to himself as he turned back towards the shaft.  At the intersection he looked for the communications screen that was installed in all such places.  He went over and punched the Cleopatra's code.  The screen cleared to show the face of his Executive Officer.
    "Everything under control, Frank?" he asked.
    "More or less, sir, but I think you'd better get back here.  There are more fitters than I've ever seen in my whole life crawling over the ship."
    "I'm on my way.  Keep an eye on them until I get there, Frank, and get the ship ready to hit space in 24 hours."
    He broke the connection and turned away.  Admiral Wei had been as good as his word.  This must be some priority mission.

CHAPTER 4
    It was not just on Runnymede that the naval action in the Rigel system was being closely monitored.  All through the civilised galaxy, Stellar Display Tanks were being tuned to the beacons around Rigel.  Not all of the tanks were capable of interpreting the coded naval signals from the Fleet Command Ship but the Rigellian navigational beacons were transmitting the movements of the ships involved in the action and these movements could be displayed by any commercial tank.
    The precursor to the Stellar Display Tank was originally developed on Old Earth as a spin off from war-gaming technology.  When the first interstellar expansion occurred, the commercial rights to the technology were acquired by the firm of Leahy and Marcus who installed the first models as navigational toys in the space yachts of the rich and famous.  At that stage the tanks had a very limited range and relied exclusively on their own monitoring equipment to collect the raw data for display.
    The breakthrough in commercial terms did not occur until Emperor Marcus I (the grandnephew of the eponymous Marcus) ordered that the whole of the known galaxy should have navigational beacons to mark the course of the main trade routes, sited at positions fixed relative to the movement of the galaxy, and that the information transmitted by these beacons should be available to all travellers.  Simultaneously with the installation of the first beacons, Leahy and Marcus announced the first model of the Stellar Display Tank capable of receiving and integrating information from any number of navigational beacons together with data from the ships own sensors.
    From that point Leahy and Marcus rapidly became one of the most powerful industrial conglomerates in the Empire with trading offices and service facilities in every colony large enough to have its own spaceport.  Leahy and Marcus now offered a range of models from a basic fixed scale navigational tank with a simple processor only capable of listening to the nearest beacon, to sophisticated, variable scale models with processors which could be programmed to accept coded feeds from any source.
    The naval model, which was in use at Star Base Runnymede, was a standard top of the range model with the addition of Top Secret Naval decrypt computers in the processing chain.  These naval models were manufactured under conditions of strictest security by a subsidiary of Leahy and Marcus and the senior officials of that company