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"You mean it reduces power somewhere, which means it has to do something else somewhere else."

"Which makes it have to go back to the first place and maybe increase power again. Then it reduces more, then it increases more, and soon enough circuit breakers start popping. When a metal head starts over-reacting at the speed of light problems develop real fast. Human brains can spot the patterns developing somehow and even things out. But it's a real pain in the neck to deal with, especially in a critical power situation like combat. It'll be nice to have a metal head capable of handling that part of the job."

Paul grinned. "Maybe we won't need engineers, anymore."

"Suits me. I can change over to one of those easy jobs in Operations Department."

"Now you sound like Jen."

"We just both happen to know what we're talking about. Speaking of female officers, how'd Val Isakov do on watch just now?"

"She seemed okay. Confident. Why?"

Kilgary shrugged. "New officer. I'm just curious."

"Well, she's got the whole ball of wax on the mid-watch. Along with me."

"Lucky guy," Kilgary murmured, then left before Paul could ask what she meant.

The bad part about being on watch on the bridge from midnight to four in the morning was that you weren't sleeping. The good part, the only good part in Paul's opinion, was that just about everybody else was sleeping. The watches tended to be quiet. No senior officers bulling in to raise hell, no scheduled events to add stress, just you and the other watch standers. The bridge, itself darkened not from necessity but to keep human body rhythms happy, sometimes felt to Paul like a cocoon of life traveling independently through the nothingness, the glowing display screens and instrument panels providing nearby artificial counterparts to the cold, distant light of innumerable stars shown on the visual displays.

Paul yawned, then grimaced and grabbed a quick gulp of coffee from the container clipped to his belt. Quiet and dark could be too nice. Too conducive to falling asleep, anyway, and the last thing anybody wanted to do was fall asleep on watch. Or, as Carl Meadows used to advise him, "Falling asleep on watch is like falling off a cliff. It feels fine for a while, until you hit the bottom. Or in the case of sleeping on watch, until somebody finds you sleeping. Then you'll wish you had fallen off a cliff instead."

"Paul."

He looked over at Lieutenant Isakov. "Yes, ma'am?"

She laughed. "Ma'am?"

"You didn't tell me I could call you anything else."

"Oh. Right. So, I'm Val. I've got a question for you."

Paul couldn't be certain of her expression in the dim lighting. "What's that?"

Isakov tapped her control console with two fingers for a moment before speaking again. "I wonder… it looks like war, don't you think?"

"Maybe. I hope not."

"I've never been in combat."

"Neither have I."

"But you did lead that damage control team. I've heard about it. Pretty nasty fire, right?"

Paul took a deep breath as the memory flooded back. "Yeah. Forward Engineering was an inferno. We couldn't see a thing because of the smoke." He felt his heart speeding up and tried to calm himself. That happened six months ago. But Chief Asher died in it and Scott Silver got court-martialed because of it. Because I helped chase down the evidence that Silver had been doing a lousy job and might've ordered Chief Asher to do something that started the fire. I wonder if anybody's told Isakov about all that? "It was pretty intense."

Isakov leaned toward Paul slightly, pitching her voice lower even though the enlisted watchstanders were deep in their own quiet conversation. "Then you know. What it's like to face that kind of danger."

"I… guess so."

"It must have been very exciting."

Paul shook his head. "No. I was too scared to be excited."

"Scared?" Isakov laughed again, in way which bothered Paul. "Scared?"

"Yes. I had a lot of things to worry about." He wondered if he sounded defensive, and wondered why he cared.

She leaned closer. "So you don't believe in taking risks?"

"When I need to."

A little closer. He thought he could feel her breath on his face. "Some risks are worth choosing. Just for fun. Don't you think?"

Paul shook his head. "No."

Isakov grinned and leaned away again. "That's not very heroic of you," she noted with another laugh.

Not sure what Isakov was up to, he decided he should blow it off. "I'm not a hero."

She called up the Captain's Standing Orders on her display and made a show of reading them. Paul spent a few more moments wondering what it had all been about, then mentally shrugged and concentrated again on staying awake.

A week later, after standing a lot more watches with Isakov, he still hadn't figured her out. She knew her job, and sometimes talked about her time on the Isherwood, or the Ish-fish as the ship was nicknamed in the fleet, in a friendly fashion. Other times she treated Paul like they'd just met, and she hadn't been impressed by the experience.

But he had plenty of other things to worry about on this particular watch besides whatever ticked inside Isakov's head.

The Maury had left Franklin nearly a full day after the Michaelson, cutting a slightly tighter and faster course toward their rendezvous point. Thanks to the moon-bounce updates on Maury 's course and speed they'd been able to localize her much better than if they'd just been depending on passive detection of what signs of the other ship's presence leaked past her various means of hiding in space. Paul checked the datum outlined on the Michaelson 's maneuvering displays again.

Commander Garcia swung onto the bridge and scowled equally at Paul and the displays. "Damn stupid idea," he grumbled, then pointed at the estimated position and vector for the Maury. "If we were just going to do a firing run, fine. That's great. It'd let us get close enough to precisely fix her and rip her guts out. But we're supposed to be on matching vectors and close to each other. Stupid."

Paul watched Garcia, trying to hide his curiosity. Garcia had a lot of experience, but rarely shared it with the officers in his division, and if he did, usually managed to put them down in the process. Now he was actually explaining something. I guess that shows how nervous he is. That doesn't exactly calm me down.

"If we don't hit each other, this'll look really good," Garcia finished, turning to go. Then he glared at Paul. "No collisions, Sinclair."

Isakov stared after Garcia after he'd left the bridge. "Was he kidding? Telling you not to run into any other ships like it was some kind of special instruction?"

"He wasn't kidding."

"I'm glad he's your department head."

Paul sweated through the watch, scanning his displays as the Maury and Michaelson converged on the point where they'd join up. No big deal, except both would be as invisible as modern technology could make them, and both would be traveling through space at velocities measured in kilometers per second and both were large enough that their masses carried plenty of momentum which wouldn't turn on any figurative dimes. As each ship drew closer to each other, the small signs of their presence became easier for the other to detect. A final moon-bounce update on Maury 's course and speed vector arrived, but it had taken so long to travel to the moon and back that it didn't provide much reassurance.

The estimated position of the Maury kept wavering on the Michaelson 's displays as probabilities shifted. Instead of the single, bright point Paul wanted to see, the estimate resembled a big, fuzzy ball. The Maury should be closer to the center of the ball, but it might be somewhere on the outer edge.

An hour before Paul's watch ended, the collision alarm sounded, jolting already frayed nerves and generating a volley of curses. "Shut that thing down," Captain Hayes snapped.