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“I’ve worked as hard as I can, Colonel, so I could have a chance. I spent every minute my check pilot could spare me flying. I spent every other minute I could training in the simulator. I’ll work just as hard here, if you don’t send me back.”

“Your check pilot, yes,” said Gavin, handing the ID disc back. “He seems to have run you through primary training in about a third of the usual time, even though he graded you not much better than passing. What’s the missing piece of this picture, Mallar?”

The question seemed to crush Mallar. “I suppose I should have let the admiral put it all in my file, like he wanted to,” he said dolefully. “He even wanted to give me a confirmed kill.”

“A kill? For what?”

“For the Yevethan fighter I shot down over Polneye, the day the Yevetha destroyed it—the day they killed my family,” Mallar said, and shook his head. “I didn’t want any special treatment—I wanted to be good enough on my own. Just good enough to do something to help. But I’m not—or you wouldn’t be trying to send me back. So all I can do now is beg you, Colonel—don’t send me back.”

“Offer me an alternative,” Gavin said quietly.

“It doesn’t matter,” Mallar said. “Find something I can do to help. Anything. Find some way that my being here makes it easier for you to hand the Yevetha the same kind of hurt they handed me. That’s all I ask. Because what they did to us was wrong. Just let me be a little part of teaching them that lesson. That’s the only thing that matters to me now. I’m the only one left—I have to speak for all of them.”

Gavin studied him as he spoke, and for a long time after. “Draw a flight suit,” he said finally. “Meet me at my gig in ten minutes. We’ll talk more on the way to Floren.”

“Yes, sir. But the shuttle’s supposed to leave within the hour—”

“I know,” said Gavin, patting Mallar on the shoulder as he moved past him. “I’m afraid you may miss it.”

Inbound to Utharis, Mud Sloth came out of hyperspace crippled by a data bus power surge that left the port navigation sensors and the navcom unable to talk to each other. The surge had come at the worst possible time, during the cascade in which the hyperdrive systems shut down and the realspace systems reinitialize.

“This is why you should never buy a bargain starship,” Luke grumbled as he climbed back out of the service access compartment belowdecks.

“What do you mean?” asked Akanah.

“Just that Verpine cut every corner they could building this thing,” Luke said, sliding the access panel back into place. “The power bus can’t handle all the systems, so the cascade processor has to juggle them, turning this one off before turning that one on. But for that to work right, the buffer circuits—” He saw her eyes glazing over and stopped. “Anyway, it means we’re going to be delayed at Utharis.”

“How long?”

“Until it’s fixed,” Luke said. He secured the last of the access panel hold-downs and looked up at her. “If there’s a wrench jockey at Taldaak Station who knows this model better than I do, maybe only a day or two.”

“Two days! You said we were going to stop only long enough to top off the consumables and reset the counters.”

Luke shrugged. “I’m not any happier about it than you are,” he said. “But better this happened now, inbound to a full-service port, than somewhere in the middle of Farlax.”

“I can’t bear the thought of any more delay, this close to the end—this close to the Circle.”

“I know,” Luke said. “But this ship won’t go into hyperspace again until she’s gone into a service bay.” He flashed a wry smile. “At least you’ll have plenty of time to pick out that souvenir hat I promised you.”

Utharis was in the grip of war fever. Even though Koornacht Cluster was more than two hundred light-years away, Utharis had a border world’s heightened sensitivity to matters of interplanetary politics. It was impossible to go anywhere in Taldaak without hearing about the clouds of war gathering over Farlax Sector, and the talk had prompted a quiet but noticeable exodus through Taldaak Station and the