The stars, and a dull red sun barely visible to one side.

Carefully, he let out a quiet breath. That had been the final gamble of this phase of the operation, and now it too had come up clean. "Secure from battle stations," he ordered. "Location check, and scan for the cocoon."

"Location computed, Commodore," the navigator said briskly. "We're fifty-four point seven lightyears from the Lorelei system; running a hundred thirty million klicks out from the local sun. I'll have an orbit profile in a moment."

"No trace of the cocoon within inner scan limit," the scanner chief added. Shifting to midrange, but looks like a clean drop."

"Good. Get us some rotation, and have engineering start putting the kick pod catapult together."

The weight warning trilled through the command deck; and as the huge ship started almost imperceptibly to rotate, Lleshi turned to look at Telthorst. "You see now why we weren't all that worried about risking the Komitadji."

The Adjutor gazed back, his eyes hard. "Two hundred million kilometers further and you wouldn't be in a position to gloat," he said pointedly. "Our vector would have passed straight through that star out there and we'd all be very, very dead."

"Agreed," Lleshi nodded. "Which I imagine is why it took the Empyreals so long to get rid of us.

Laser-point precision on top of a fast field reconfiguration."

Telthorst looked at the dim star on the viewscreen. "I suppose they expect us to be impressed by that."

Lleshi shrugged. "I'm impressed. Aren't you?"

The Adjutor looked back at him, his lip twisted in contempt. "Impressed, Commodore? Impressed by a people who've become so sheep-like that they won't kill even in their own defense? You're too easy to please."

"Am I?" Lleshi countered, the slow unprofessional burn starting again. "Those Empyreals were risking their lives, Adjutor—make no mistake about that. If those Spearhawks had hit them they'd have died, with or without those fancy sandwich-metal hulls of theirs. In my experience, sheep seldom come equipped with that degree of courage."