Van Atta’s comconsole disgorged a couple of data disks, which he plucked off. “You put me on the fast track. I’ve always thought it must give you a sense of satisfaction, since you spend so much of your time training, to see one of your old students make good.”

Van Atta was no more than five years younger than Leo. Leo suppressed profound irritation—he wasn’t this paper-shuffler’s ninety-year-old retired Sunday school teacher, damn it. He was a working engineer, hands-on, and not afraid to get them dirty, either. His technical work was as close to perfection as his relentless conscientiousness could push it, his safety record spoke for itself… He let his anger go with a sigh. Wasn’t it always so? He’d seen dozens of subordinates forge ahead, often men he’d trained himself. Yeah, and trust Van Atta to make it seem a weakness and not a point of pride.

Van Atta spun the data disks across the room at him. “There’s your roster and your syllabus. Come on, and I’ll show you some of the equipment you’ll be working with. GalacTech’s got two projects in the wind they’re thinking of finally turning these Cay Project quaddies loose on.”

“Quaddies?”

“The official nickname.”

“It’s not, um… pejorative?”

Van Atta stared, then snorted. “No. What you do not call them out loud, however, is ‘mutants,’ genetic paranoia being what it is after that Nuovo Brasilian military cloning fiasco. This whole project could have been carried out much more conveniently in Earth orbit, but for the assorted legal hysterias about human gene manipulation. Anyway, the projects. One to assemble Jump ships in orbit around Orient IV, and another building a deep space transfer facility at some nexus away the hell-and-gone beyond Tau Ceti called Kline Station—cold work, no habitable planets in the system and its sun is a cinder, but the local space harbors no less than six wormhole exits.