"It got worse. Not only did the jock ignore my warnings; he lined up alongside my bridge and danced on his thrusters. He flipped from relative vertical to horizontal, then corkscrewed us lengthwise fore to aft and back. To add insult, he whirled his buggy on its tail like a damn dervish, right alongside where I stood on my bridge and then cut across my bow. That hotshot was one good pilot, I'll grant him that. "After a minute or so of that, the buggy circled my ship, close. The pilot probably liked what he saw, because he surface-snaked us again bow to stern. That must have been boring; he peeled away, tore ahead a quarter-million kay, skewed around, and came straight at my bow, curdling space. When collision was just about unavoidable, he did an up and over. In doing that, he cut us much too close, snapped off a dozen masts, sensors and nav guides. "The jock must have gone berserk; he took us on for full 'chicken'. He shot ahead about a million kay, flip-flopped, and came at us head-to-head, taunting us with his collision signals. Our computer showed him as boosting all the way." Another long pause. Brad looked directly at Xindral. "We collided, head on," he said. "That brightly colored, beautiful little flitter buried itself deep in our forward cargo bay. My rescue team went in, but we knew ahead of time what we'd find. It was there: chunks of metal, shards of bone, and scraps of flesh splattered on mining gear, rock-crushers, and other odd pieces of equipment. "The Space Guard hearings were followed by a quick trial. The jock was the son of a politician, so here I am." Brad looked away, then back at Ram. "Your turn," he said. "What's the story on how we became the 'chosen'?" "The selection was certainly not random," Ram stood and stretched to his full height as he spoke. "Despite the billions of citizens in the UIPS, we're all tagged and catalogued. It's a simple job for the computers to correlate any unique manpower requirements the government might have to the UIPS index, cross-check phys-psy profiles, professions and technical skills plus experience, competence, reliability and anything else that we crank in as rating factors. You mentioned 'three men and three women'; your mission can not exclude gender compatibility consistent with the prevailing psychosocial construct -- this is what we are. "In my line of work, our data bank produces an optimal selection of personalities, skills and identities for the best possible teams we might need to support our contingency plans. Old stuff; we've been doing that throughout history. Why you folks? The computer selected you, showed where each of you was located and why, and that you were all, shall we say, relatively unknown and available. None of you will be missed."