"Our little boss-man knows where we are, all right!" Cain said. Mason gave Cain's six-feet-two a quick glance, wondering as he always wondered why the big redhead's shoulders always seemed too broad for the Warrant Officer's stripes on them. "Sergeant Kent's right," he said. "Here's her comp-sheet. You can look for yourself. Fringe, Magellanic. And look at that while you can--" he jabbed a forefinger at the main scanner, its screen studded with unfamiliarly close constellations--"because we're on our way back. Set up a return on the comps, will you, Sergeant?" For all his tenseness his voice was low, and the words it formed were even and swift. "Hell, Lance, this is the sort of stuff the brain trust pays us bonuses for." "Not out here they don't. R-drive when you're ready, Sergeant!" Cain turned from the deep control bank and gave his full attention to the scanner as the slender, efficient girl started feeding a tape of reversal co-ordinates into the computers. Mason waited the few necessary seconds, pushed disarranged dark hair out of his eyes and felt the clammy dampness on his forehead, and wished silently to himself that opportunists like Cain were kept where they belonged--on the Slam-Bang Run out of Callisto. That's where the money was. That's where a Warrant like Cain ought to be. "Ready, sir," he heard Judith saying quietly. "Hey, skipper!" There was a sudden urgency in Cain's voice, and the equally sudden racket of an MPD alarm going off. Cain was gesturing at the scanner, stubby finger tracing a slewing pip of light. The alarm stopped, and Judith's cool voice was relaying information. "About a thousand miles," she was saying, "mass, approximately three hundred tons. Speed--" * * * * * But Mason wasn't listening. He was watching the pip of light as Cain got the scanner's directional going, tracked it. Suddenly there were others coming as though to meet it, and it swerved violently, obviously in flight. And now there were more yet, this time from the starboard quadrant of the screen. "Radiation reading, Sergeant!" Mason clipped out. While the two men watched, Judith read back the cryptic information interpolated by the ship's mass-proximity detector. "That's not all engine junk!" Cain exclaimed as she finished. "We don't know what drive they've got," Mason answered. "Could be anything--" "Nuts! You wouldn't get that much from an old-fashioned ion-blast, skipper! That's a shooting war, that's what it is!" There was a glitter in Cain's narrowed brown eyes; a new edge on his heavy voice. "Which side do we take, boss-man?" "No side at all," Mason said, hardly moving his lips. "We're getting the hell out of here."