He closed his eyes, letting his mind drift until he could almost hear the voice of the fighter speaking back to him. The voice told him what he wanted to hear.

“Chief.”

Chief Corrin glanced up, startled by the calm greeting. “Captain.”

Weston waved his free hand. “Don’t get up, Chief. You mind if I join you?”

She glanced at the food in front of her and nodded. “Please.”

“Thank you,” he said, taking a seat across from her. “I wanted to congratulate you on the repairs you pushed through earlier.”

“We’ve got some good people on this boat, sir,” she said. “They’re rough ’round the edges, but I’m knocking the corners off.”

The captain took a bite of his sandwich. “I’m sure you are, Chief.”

“I have to admit, I didn’t think it would work so well, what with all the different branches tossed together,” she admitted as she drank some of her soup. “But they pulled together tight in the pinch. Good swabs, all of ’em—even the air force pukes.”

Weston chuckled. “That’s how they got here, Chief. Best of the best across the board.”

“Now, I wouldn’t go that far.” Corrin grinned back. “They’re good swabs, yeah, but they’re not up to my old crew on the Tico. Not yet.”

“I have no doubt that you’ll find a way to get them there,” Weston said.

She glanced around the cafeteria. “They’re good kids, sir. But they’re nervous.”

“Yeah, I figured they would be.”

“You might want to have a talk with ’em, just a few words before we get started,” she suggested.

He cocked his head and shrugged. “Maybe I will, at that, Chief.”

“Might do you some good, too, Cap’n,” she said. “If you don’t mind my saying.”

“I learned a long time ago not to argue with a chief,” Weston smiled. “Saves time.”

Corrin grinned from ear to ear. “Sounds like you had a good teacher somewhere along the line, sir.”

“Doctor…What are you doing?”

Palin looked up, confused, into the wide eyes of one of the lab techs. “I’m refining the translation matrix. Why?”

“Doctor…We’re about to go into battle!” the lab-coated young man blurted out.

“So?”

“So…so? Dr. Palin, what good is that going to do us?”

Palin shrugged. “I’m not a soldier, Evan. I’m a scientist, who happens to be quite good with languages. My skills are unlikely to affect the outcome of this battle, but should we survive it, they might have an impact on our future relations with these people. So why shouldn’t I continue to work?”

The lab tech just stared wide-eyed.

Palin shoved a chair over to the young man. “Here, sit—unless you have something more pressing to do.”

The young man sat down numbly, and Palin passed him a PDA displaying a translation algorithm.

He stared at it. “What’s this?”

“That’s the sole transmission we’ve detected from the enemy ships,” Palin said. “Our best guess is that it’s a request for reinforcements. Why don’t you run it through the computer and see if we have any historical analogues for it?”