The Kagan was a Coast Guard cutter, commissioned in 1989 and currently based off the U.S. East Coast. It was a hundred and ten feet long, with a crew of eighteen and a top speed of more than thirty knots. Armament included two fifty-caliber machine guns and one twenty-five millimeter chain gun.

There was nothing about its current mission, nor could I find any public details about the commander or crew. The ship hadn’t been in the news recently. None of the articles or information gave any hint why Deb’s pet terrorists might have been interested in hitting the Kagan, or why they’d changed their minds.

I was still poring over what I could find of the ship’s history when the computer made the whooshing sound of the TARDIS engines from Doctor Who, letting me know I was about to be late for my own staff meeting. I grabbed a book from my pocket, performed a quick spell, and hurried off.

The Wheeler room was one of the smaller conference rooms, with a narrow table and a dozen chairs, along with a whiteboard that doubled as a projector screen. An old-fashioned crystal ball mounted to the center of the table served as the equivalent of both speakerphone and video monitor, though I always had trouble keeping it attuned to our world. I could never eliminate the static and random images from the book we’d used to produce the crystals, and every once in a while a green-skinned warlock would pop up to threaten us all with doom and destruction until we recalibrated him out of existence.

Vince was leaning back in his chair, his feet crossed on the edge of the table. Talulah sat on the opposite side, flipping through a gaming magazine.

‹Welcome back,› said Talulah. She’d given herself a limited form of mind-speech shortly after joining up with New Millennium. I could see the text of her telepathic magic when she spoke, like ink hidden between layers of onion paper.

‹Thanks,› I said. Talulah was one of four people at New Millennium with a criminal record. Hers was a minor vandalism charge from when she was a teenager. Although, given her skill with technology, she could have easily erased more serious crimes from her records and none of us would know.

Talulah had grown up on a Choctaw reservation in Oklahoma. Her family had steered her toward gaming as a way to keep her out of trouble. It had worked a bit too well. In addition to competing in statewide and national gaming tournaments, she had her own YouTube channel, and had developed a following as a video game guru in the years before she was outed as a libriomancer.