“Even if I happen to know more about a particular system than he does?”

“Especially if you happen to know more about it than he does,” she said drily. “But in this case, you don’t. Trust me.”

“Fine,” Car’das said with a sigh. “Such trust to be rescinded if and when we blow up, of course.”

“You’re learning,” she said approvingly. “Now run a systems check on the scanners and see if the instability’s bled over into them. Then do the same for the nav computer. Once we get through this, I want to make sure we can find our way home again.”

It took Qennto over four hours to find a way to shut down the runaway hyperdrive without slagging it. During that time Car’das offered his help three times, and Maris offered hers twice. All the offers were summarily refused.

Sometime during the first hour, as near as Car’das could figure from the readings tumbling across the displays, they left the relatively well-known territory of the Outer Rim, passing into a shallow section of the far less well-known territory known as Wild Space. Sometime early in the fourth hour, they left even that behind and crossed the hazy line into the Unknown Regions.

At which point, where they were or what exactly they were flying into was anyone’s guess.

But at last the wailing faded away, and a few minutes later the hyperspace sky collapsed into starlines and then into stars. “Maris?” Qennto’s voice called from the comm panel.

“We’re out,” she confirmed. “Running a location check now.”

“I’ll be right there,” Qennto said.

“Wherever we are, we’re a long way from home,”

Car’das murmured, gazing out at a small but brilliant globular star cluster in the distance. “I’ve never seen anything like that from any of the Outer Rim worlds I’ve been to.”

“Me, neither,” Maris agreed soberly. “Hopefully, the computer can sort it out.”

The computer was still sifting data when Qennto reappeared on the bridge. Car’das had made sure to be back at his own station by then. “Nice cluster,” the big man commented as he dropped into his seat. “Any systems nearby?”