I came back to the bridge half an hour before we jumped to where Skippy thought we would find a Thuranin battlegroup. We jumped in, spent a tense ten minutes listening with passive sensors, with Desai ready to jump us safely away, until Skippy determined there were no Thuranin ships within range. He activated our active scanners, and quickly determined, based on thin clouds of atoms that did not naturally occur in deep interstellar space, that Thuranin ships had been in the area, recently. Skippy made a guess where they'd gone, and his first two guesses were wrong. His third guess was spot on, too spot on. We emerged from the jump in the middle of the battlegroup, less than two thousand miles from the nearest ship, that was way too close even for Skippy's bravado. After Desai initiated a microjump to a safe distance, we began hopping around the battlegroup, with a pair of Thuranin destroyers trying to chase us away. At first, it was alarming, then annoying for the pair of destroyers to pop up near us, firing missiles, railguns and particle beams. We had to jump away before the Dutchman got seriously hit, twice we took glancing particle beam hits that our shields easily deflected, and Skippy complained that we were jumping away too soon. After a few jumps, Skippy found a pattern in the tactics the Thuranin were using to pursue us, and once he adjusted to compensate, the two destroyers never came close again. Still, I thought Skippy was pushing it, or showing off, we kept popping up uncomfortably close to the command ship, close enough that a battleship and a pair of heavy cruisers joined the pursuit.

"Skippy, come on, do you have enough data yet?"

"Hold your horses, Colonel Joe, the fun is only getting started. We can, uh oh. Pilot! Emergency jump! Now!"

Desai didn't hesitate, the display flashed and the Thuranin battlegroup disappeared. "Jump successful, Colonel, we are-"

"Jump again, Pilot, jump! Option 4, initiate!" Skippy shouted.

The screen flashed again, and again we popped up somewhere in deep interstellar space. "Done." Desai reported, her eyes wide. "Colonel, we only have power for one microjump," she warned. The bottom of the main display showed a red bar for the jump engine charge. It read only eighteen percent.

"Skippy, what the hell is going on? Why the two jumps?"

"I think we're Ok now. I think."

"We'd better be," I said fearfully, willing the jump charge bar to slide above eight percent. It wasn't moving. "What happened? Did that battleship get too close?"