The water was as cold as it looked. "Net's away, Captain!"

Leaning back in his command chair, Mackenzie Cho, scrapped a thumbnail over his stubble, the soft shup shup shup adding to the background noise, and listened to Huirre counting down the distance until contact.

"Twenty kilometers. Fifteen kilometers."

"Firebreather's Susumi engines have come on-line, Captain!" di'Berinango Dysun half turned from her station, eyes darkened to a burnt orange, hair flipping around her head in a tangerine aurora.

The three di'Taykan on the crew had been running from trouble on their home world before signing on, but given the differences in Human and Taykan aging, they were still little more than kids out looking for thrills. Dysun was a natural in the control room, though-followed orders like she'd been trained to it-and both her thytrins had skills he could use.

When Cho jerked a thumb toward Dysun's board, she whirled back around, adding, "They must've seen the net."

"Not your job to speculate," he growled.

"Five kilometers," Huirre announced.

It was possible, Cho allowed, that the civilian salvage operator at the controls of the Firebreather had been feeding data into their Susumi equations since leaving the debris field, cargo pen bulging with salvage. It was possible the Susumi engines coming on-line had nothing to do with the approaching net. And if the Susumi drive didn't kick in before the net covered the final three kilometers, it wouldn't matter.

"Two, one… we have contact! Anchor lines have caught the pen, net is spreading."

"Power up the buoys."

Huirre slapped his board. "Aye, aye, Captain!"

"Susumi engines are powering down." This time, Dysun kept her eyes on the data.

Of course the engines were powering down. Only a suicidal fool would fold into Susumi space when their equations had just been fukked beyond correction. Galaxy-class battle cruisers with a full complement of Susumi engineers had slammed out of Susumi space into unforgiving solid objects because of a missed decimal, so a seat-of-the-pants pilot and a cheap computer had no chance with the random pulsing from the buoys making an accurate equation the next thing to impossible.