“Of course, Sir.” Venizelos clicked to attention, nodded pleasantly, and marched smartly back down the tube to his pinnace. The hatch slid shut, the tube disengaged, and his pilot hit the thrusters to carry them beyond their impeller wedge’s safety perimeter before lighting off the main drive.

Venizelos deposited his memo board on his pull-out desk, flopped back into his chair, and whistled a popular ditty as the pinnace turned towards the next ship on his list, a big, battered Silesian freighter. His second pinnace hovered respectfully off the Havenite ship’s flank like a pointed reminder until Merker lit off his own drive and headed back beyond the departure threshold.

“Jesus, Andreas!” Hayne Duvalier, Captain Reynaud’s liaison to Venizelos’s customs party, stared at him in patent disbelief. “You wouldn’t really have fired into him… would you?”

“Yep,” Venizelos said.

“But—”

“I’m only doing my job, Hayne.”

“I know, but for Chrissake, Andreas! We haven’t enforced the com regs out here in—Hell, I don’t think they’ve ever been enforced! ACS never had the manpower for it.”

“I know.” Venizelos turned his chair to face him. “In fact, since I got here, I’ve started to realize that a lot of things that should have been done never have. I’m not faulting Captain Reynaud and your people, either. It’s not your job—it’s ours, and we haven’t been doing it. Well, we’re doing it now.”

“Somehow I sort of doubt your captain’s going to thank you for all the ruckus it’s going to raise,” Duvalier said dubiously.

“Maybe not, but she gave me my orders, and one thing I can tell you about Commander Harrington, Hayne—when she gives an order, she expects it to be obeyed. Period.”

“Sounds like a real hardass to me,” Duvalier grumbled.

“Oh, she is,” Venizelos said with a smile. “In fact, I’m just starting to realize how hard a hardass she is. And you know something, Hayne? I like it.”

Chapter Eleven

LIEUTENANT Max Stromboli straightened with a bone-deep sigh and racked his tools neatly. Other members of his minute staff were busy elsewhere, mounting the transmission dishes on the tower roof, but there were too few of them for him to stand back and leave it all to the techs. Besides, he still installed a pretty mean circuit board himself, he thought, regarding the console with proprietary pride.

Not that pride was the first thing he’d felt on arriving on Medusa’s surface. He’d just started to feel himself slipping back into the groove aboard Fearless after the shock of being banished to Basilisk Station, when he’d found himself banished yet again. This time clear out of the ship!

He dropped into the cushioned bucket seat and brought his panel on line, punching into the new space control data net fed by Fearless’s sensors and the deployed recon probe, and smiled as the transplanted holo display came alive. It looked perfect, but he set up a complete systems test just in case and leaned back while the computers ran it.