“You got it. They—hold on.” The controller leaned forward and flipped a switch, shunting his com channels to Reynaud’s earbug.

“—ontrol, this is Navy flight Foxtrot-Able-One. Request final approach instructions.”

Arless started to reply, but Reynaud stopped him with a raised finger and keyed his own pickup.

“Navy Foxtrot-Able-One, this is Basilisk Control. Please state your intentions.”

“Basilisk Control, we are a naval liaison mission. I have on board my recorded orders and an explanatory dispatch for your station commander.”

Reynaud and Arless stared at one another, eyebrows raised. It was certainly unorthodox. Liaison mission? What kind of “liaison”? And why all the mystery? Why hadn’t they pre-filed a flight plan? The captain shrugged.

“Very well, Navy Foxtrot-Able-One. Make your approach to—” he craned his neck to check Arless’s display “—beacon Niner-Four. You’ll be met by a guide. Basilisk Control clear.”

He killed the circuit and gave Arless an eloquent glance.

“Now just what the hell do you think that was all about, Stu?”

“Beats me, boss,” the controller replied, “but look at that.”

He gestured at his display, and Reynaud frowned. Even as her pinnaces separated, the light cruiser had swung away from Basilisk Control to go slashing off on a vector for the system primary, and not at the eighty percent power RMN ships normally used. She was ripping along at a full five hundred gravities, and she was already fifty thousand kilometers away at a velocity of over seven hundred KPS.

The station commander scratched his bristly gray hair and sighed. Just when he’d gotten the last uniformed jackass to at least keep his ham-fisted fingers out of Control’s pie, this happened. It had taken months to convince Young that his condescending attempts to rearrange Control’s well-tried traffic lanes into more “efficient” routes—so poorly designed they could only increase the workloads of Reynaud’s already over-worked controllers while decreasing safety margins—were neither required nor desired. Managing wormhole junction traffic was a job for well-trained, highly experienced professionals, not twits who’d been exiled for how poorly they did their own jobs. There were lots of things the Navy could have done to facilitate ACS’s routine operations if the over-bred fart had been interested in doing anything that would have required any effort on his part. He hadn’t been, but the tin-god aspect of his personality had been pronounced. As far as Reynaud had been able to tell, Young was simply incapable of watching someone else get on with his job in an orderly fashion as long as he could interfere without exerting himself. He’d rubbed Reynaud wrong from the beginning, and the chief controller had found himself going out of his way to rub right back—with a predictable loss of efficiency he couldn’t quite regret, however hard he tried.

But it appeared Young’s replacement was cut from different cloth. The problem was that Reynaud didn’t know what sort of cloth. Judging by the speed with which he moved, the newcomer certainly seemed to have more energy than his predecessor, but that could be good or bad. If he actually intended to assist Control, it was probably good, yet long and bitter experience made it difficult for Reynaud to visualize a senior naval officer who did more good than harm.