Kittredge looked up, too, but her smile had nothing but her normal cool friendliness in it. She was friendly because she felt professionals should always be polite to their inferiors; cool, because she knew all about my career and clearly had no intention of being too close to me when the lightning struck again. "Travis," she nodded. "You're a little early for your shift, aren't you?"

"A shave, maybe," I said, drifting to her side and steadying myself on her chair back. She wasn't much more than half my age, but then, that was true of nearly everyone aboard except Captain Garrett. Bright kids, all of them. Only a few with Kittredge's same hard-edged ambition, but all of them on the up side of their careers nonetheless. It made me feel old. "Was that thirty seconds to breakout?"

"Yes," she said, voice going distant as the bulk of her attention shifted from me to the bank of displays before her. I followed her example and turned to watch the screens and readouts. And continued my silent grousing.

We weren't supposed to be at Messenia. We weren't, in fact, supposed to be anywhere closer than a day's hyperdrive of the stupid damn mudball on this particular trip. We were on or a bit ahead of schedule for a change, we had all the cargo a medium-sized freighter like the Volga could reasonably carry, and all we had to do was deliver it to make the kind of medium-sized profit that keeps pleasant smiles on the faces of freighter contractors. It should have been a nice, simple trip, the kind where the crew's lives alternate between predictable chores and pleasant boredom.

Enter Waskin. Exit simplicity.

He had, Waskin informed us, an acquaintance who was supposed to be out here with the Messenia survey mission. We'd all heard the rumors that there were supposed to be outcroppings of firebrand opaline scattered across Messenia's surface—opaline whose current market value Waskin just happened to have on hand.