Flanagan had been stunned and dismayed by the standard of readiness which appeared to satisfy al-Salil and Vice Admiral Schumacher, the system CO. She’d heard that Schumacher was considered one of the Navy’s golden boys by the Admiralty, despite purely limited combat experience, but no one could have proved it by Flanagan. His operational standards would never have satisfied Admiral Truman, at any rate. They didn’t particularly satisfy Sarah Flanagan, either. Unfortunately, as al-Salil’s most junior squadron commander, there wasn’t very much she could do about it.

She muttered a weary, heartfelt curse at the familiar thought, then punched up the next report in her queue and grimaced as she read the header. Lovely. Now The Powers That Were wanted her squadron’s crews to run a complete inventory of all emergency survival stores. She wondered why that was. The group’s maintenance personnel were fully capable of performing such inventories. In fact, it was part of their job description. So why exactly were the LAC flight crews supposed to do exactly the same job behind them? Had someone been pilfering e-rats? Was this somehow supposed to catch the arch thief at her work? It seemed unlikely that anyone so incredibly capable that she could actually make a profit selling emergency survival stores was likely to be trapped by any merely mortal agency.

But whether it made sense or not wasn’t Flanagan’s problem, so she drew a deep breath, settled down in her chair, and prepared to dive into yet another exhilarating adventure in creative paperwork.

That was the moment the entire universe changed.

The sudden, raucous, atonal howl took her utterly by surprise, but her instincts knew what they were doing. She was already out of her chair and halfway out of her small office before she even realized she’d moved. She was up to a full run within five meters, dashing through a bedlam of startled exclamations, other chairs skidding across decksoles, hatches cycling madly open, feet thundering down passages towards lift shafts, and over all of it that bone-crawling, brain-piercing alarm shrieking its warning.

As a squadron skipper, Flanagan’s office cubicle was on the same deck as her squadron’s LAC bays. She didn’t need a lift shaft to reach her command ship, and only one member of her crew—Ensign Giuliani—had managed to beat her there. Of course, a corner of her brain reflected with something very like shell-shocked detachment, Giuliani practically lived aboard Switchblade. He was the command LAC’s coxswain, and he’d discovered that he could seduce the flight computers into providing what amounted to his own, private simulator. As far as al-Salil was concerned, of course, Giuliani’s solo excursions in training were completely unauthorized, but Flanagan had somehow failed to mention them to T-001’s COLAC.

“What’s happening, Cal?” she demanded pantingly as she skidded to a halt just inside Switchblade’s boarding tube.

“I’m not sure, Skipper,” Giuliani replied flatly, never looking up from the tactical plot he’d brought on-line as soon as the alarm began to sound. “But from the looks of things, we’re fucked.”