Bill looked pleased. “Within range. If he’s on schedule, the Condor could be here tonight. If he makes a good jump, he could be in by early morning.”

“He has room?”

“Only a handful of passengers. Plenty of space. But we should contact him without delay. There is no one else close enough to help.”

Star travel was as much art as science. Ships did not return to sublight space with precision. One could materialize quite far from a projected destination, and the degree of uncertainty tended to increase with the range of the jump. The risk normally lay in the possibility of materializing inside a target body. In this case, even materializing inside the cloud constituted a major hazard. Thin as it was, it nevertheless possessed enough density to explode an arriving ship. That meant Preach would have to follow her own procedure, make his jump well outside the envelope, then make a run for the station. On the way back out, he’d be racing the flare until he got enough acceleration to jump back into hyperspace.

He had reckless red hair and blue eyes that seemed lit from within. He was not extraordinarily handsome, in the classic sense, but there was an easygoing sails-to-the-wind attitude about the man and a willingness to laugh at himself that utterly charmed her. A year or so earlier, when they’d found themselves together at Serenity, he’d made her feel that she was the center of the world. Hutch wasn’t inclined to give herself to men on short acquaintance, but she’d have been willing to make an exception for Brawley. Somehow, though, the evening had gotten diverted, and she’d thought better of casting a lure. Next time, she’d decided.

There had been no next time.

Bill was still talking about the Condor. The ship was engaged in biological research. Brawley has been collecting samples on Goldwood, and was returning them to Bioscan’s central laboratory at Serenity. Goldwood was one of the worlds on which life had not progressed past the single-cell stage.