If they were lucky enough to come together once more, she wasn’t going to let them blow apart ever again.

 “I said byzero-one-seven !” Martinez said. “What’s thematter, there?”

 “Sorry, my lord!” Fingers punching the display. “That’s zero-one-seven, my lord.”

 “Pilot, rotate ship.”Corona was already a little late.

 “Ship rotated, my lord. New heading two-two-seven by zero-one-seven.”

 “Engines, prepare to fire engines.”

 “Missile flares!” called the two sensor operators in unison. “Enemy missiles fired!”

 “Power up point-defense lasers.”

 “Point-defense lasers powering, lord elcap.”

 Martinez realized he’d been sufficiently distracted by the announcement of the enemy missiles that’s he’d forgotten to order the engines to fire. He leaned forward in his couch to give emphasis to the order, and his command cage creaked as it swung on its gimbals.

 “Engines,” he said. “Fire engines.”

 And then he remembered he’d forgotten something else.

 “Weapons,” he added, “this is a drill.”

 After the drill was over, after the virtual displays faded from Martinez’s mind and the leaden sense of failure rose yet again in his thoughts, he looked out over Command and saw the crew as silent and miserable as he was.

 Too many of them were new. Two-thirds ofCorona ‘s crew had been on board for less than a month, and though they were taking to their new jobs reasonably well, they were far from proficient. Sometimes he wished he’d had only his old crew—the skeleton crew with which he’d savedCorona from capture during the first hours of the Naxid revolt. When he now looked back on that escape—the tension, the uncertainty, the hard accelerations, the terror induced by pursuing enemy missiles—all that now seemed painted in the warm, familiar tones of nostalgia. In the emergency he and the crew had reacted with a brilliance, a certainty that neither he nor they had matched since.