“I think you may be right,” said Bill, cautiously.

She folded her arms and squeezed down as if to make herself a smaller target.

The technician was looking at her with crinkled eyebrows. “Yes. We have twenty-three dependents. Fifty-six people in all. Monte has fifteen students.”

“Thank you,” said Hutch. “Wildside out.”

Bill’s innocuously content features hardened. “So if an evacuation does become necessary—”

“We’d have to leave almost half of them behind.” Hutch shook her head. “That’s good planning.”

“Hutch, what do we do?”

Damned if she knew. “Bill, get me a channel to Serenity.”

THE ERUPTIONS COMING from Proteus were growing more intense. Hutch watched one that appeared to stretch millions of kilometers, boiling out beyond the edge of the star cloud before running out of steam.

“All set to Serenity,” said Bill.

She checked the operations roster and saw that Sara Smith would be on duty when the transmission arrived, in two and a half hours. Sara was an aggressive, ambitious type, on her way up to management. Not easy to get along with, but Sara would understand the problem and take it seriously. It was Sara’s boss, Clay Barber, who’d assigned Hutch to the mission and instructed her to take the suddenly inadequate Wildside.

She composed herself. Blowing up would be unprofessional.

The green lamp over the console imager blinked on. “Sara,” she said, gazing steadily into the lens but keeping her voice level, “I’m supposed to be able to evacuate Renaissance if there’s a problem. But apparently somebody forgot they have dependents. Wildside doesn’t have space for everybody. Not close.

“Please advise Clay. We need a bigger ship here tout de suite. I don’t know whether this place is going to blow or not, but if it does, as things now stand, we are going to have to leave twenty or so people.”

“That was good, Hutch,” said Bill. “I thought you struck exactly the right note.”