International Police Starship Valiant (NX-06041)
Captain's Log, Tuesday, June 6, 2406
10:47 AM Avalon Standard Time

We're taking the long way around getting to Ishiyama from Babylon 5 -
sorry, 6 - to give Corwin, Zefram Cochrane, and his people time and
space to run the engines in and make sure everything's working like
it's supposed to be working.  They've already been tested, of course;
Gryphon did the initial drive trials last month.  Still, this is only
the ship's second long trip, and the first one, from Zeta Cygni to
Babylon 6, was done in metaspace, so this is the first real warp
endurance test.  So far everything's gone well.  We're cruising at
Warp 12 and Miki expects us to reach Ishiyama at about 2:30 tomorrow
afternoon.

Speaking of Miki, the crew is (no, Serge, no cheese) settling in well.
Nobody's had any trouble getting used to the automated systems.  Miki
is shaping up to be quite a navigator, though he's still getting
Klaang to check his figures for him.  Kozue's taken an interest in
piloting, which has taken her brother a little bit by surprise.
That's good, though, because right now we've only got four fully rated
pilots on board, three of whom have other jobs.  Corwin's been doing
most of the driving, and he's happy to have an apprentice.

Kate's been working her band like dogs getting ready for their first
show at Ohji Auditorium tomorrow night.  It's the first time they've
ever played anyplace on the Outer Rim and she's anxious to do a good
job.  They're all really looking forward to this tour, though Kate
does say she wishes Juri had given them -slightly- more than no
warning at all. :)

Both of the remaining two members of the crew - Mimi Shinguuji and our
AEGIS operative - will be waiting for us there; Agent Ardeen caught a
freight run from Jyurai to Ishiyama in order to make our rendezvous
schedule easier.  We'll eventually be going to Jyurai anyway - one of
the Art's tour dates is for the summer session of the IPO Psionics
Academy - but that's not until July, so she'd have a while to wait.

Morale is high throughout the ship; the band are happy to be on tour,
the rest of us are happy to be along for the trip, and the shipyard
people are thrilled that everything's working and we're all adapting
into our jobs as easily as (c'mon, I'm busy here - go bother Wakaba)
they'd hoped we would.  If things keeps working out like this for the
rest of the summer, the Irregular Projects... um, project... will be
as big a success as the DDNG program is turning out to be.

Also, this might be the only warship in the galaxy where the ship's
cook is the captain.  The galley's a bit smaller than the kitchen back
at the Castle, but I haven't heard any complaints yet about the food!
(No, I'm talking to the recorder.  No food.  Don't give me that look.)

Hmm... I think that's everything for the moment.  Except that there
are twenty days to go and I still don't know what to get Corwin for
his birthday.  I'm lousy at this stuff.  I'll probably have to ask
Anthy for suggestions...

- END RECORDING

                I have a message from another time...

                     Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
                               presents

                UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES FUTURE IMPERFECT
                      - SYMPHONY OF THE SWORD -

		      Second Movement: Per Ardua

                         Benjamin D. Hutchins
			 with Kris Overstreet

                (c) 2002 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited


			EIGHTEEN HOURS EARLIER
			NEW AVALON, ZETA CYGNI

	Leonard Hutchins could look back on his freshman year of high
school with a considerable measure of satisfaction.  He and his
friends had acquitted themselves well, surviving the transition from
Crescent Heights Middle School to Koopman Memorial High without a
casualty - well, unless you counted Corwin.  But Corwin's transfer out
wasn't really something he had a lot of control over; it was all part
of the burden of having become a full-fledged god over spring break,
and some kind of cosmic personage in an alternate realm to boot...
	Len got a strange feeling whenever something happened to
remind him that the person he thought of as "my brother, Corwin" was
also a Norse god.  Then it occurred to him that if -he- felt strange
considering it, how must their father feel?
	He was still smiling about that as he tightened the belt of
his practice garb and went out to the dojo his father had built behind
the house.  After his bedroom, this was Leonard's favorite place in
the 105 Morgan Lane compound - a wide, open, sunny expanse of polished
hardwood floor, with a number of the weapons used in his father's
samurai form, the Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu, hanging on the dark wood
walls.  The windows faced west, so that the setting sun would flood
the room with its reddish light over the mountains west of the city.
It was a room for the practice of violent arts, but yet it was one of
the most peaceful rooms Len knew.  He felt especially at ease there.
	He stepped through the sliding door to see that Achika Shannon
had arrived before him.  Like him, she wore hakama, although with a
monsuke instead of a gi over them.  She held a wooden practice sword,
and smiled as he entered the room.
	There would be time enough to worry about his future path
later.  Right now, Len intended to spend a pleasant Monday afternoon
practicing the sporting form (akin to kendo) of Katsujinkenryuu with
his favorite sparring partner.  He and Achika had been practice mates
for years, Len taking his interest in swordsmanship from his
samurai-master father, Achika from the similar traditional fighting
forms of the royal house of Jyurai.  In the early days she had
routinely and easily overpowered him, but over the years he had
developed an awareness and dexterity almost as uncanny as hers.  He
had tested flatscale when evaluated for innate psi power, but everyone
who knew him agreed that there was -something- special about Leonard
Hutchins.
	Achika Shannon would, with a smile and a twinkle in her eye,
certainly agree.  She had known Len all her life.  They both, along
with a few others, were all members of a group - detractors would say
a clique - of people born within a few days of each other, all the
children of remarkable people and all conceived in the aftermath of
nothing less than the Ragnarok itself.
	For Len's part, he'd been slightly alarmed to realize, over
the course of the last couple of years, that he was developing a -new-
awareness of Achika.  Somewhere in the middle of eighth grade, she'd
gradually ceased being his playmate and sparring partner from time
immemorial and become... something else, something -more-.  Len wasn't
sure he understood the phenomenon; for that matter, neither was
Achika.  It had crossed Len's mind to ask Corwin about it, but upon
further reflection the redheaded young man had decided that course of
action would be unwise; and so the two of them muddled through the
shift in their relationship unassisted, which had occasionally been an
adventure.
	Not that he was complaining.  Len might not be as inclined to
charge toward danger as Corwin, but he wasn't averse to a spot of
adventure now and again.
	He took down another bokuto from the wall, looked down its
length to make sure it was straight, and took up a position opposite
from Achika.  They said nothing, just bowed, straightened their
shoulders, and began.  Achika, as usual, made the first move, letting
out a yell that the Jyuraians supposed would startle and freeze an
unprepared opponent.  Len was ready for it and ignored it as he took a
half-step back and knocked her strike away from his head, then pivoted
into a counterattack to the body.  All contemplation of the past or
the future washed away as they settled into the old familiar rhythm.
	Experienced sparring partners and advanced students of their
arts, Len and Achika did not hold back in this or any other contest.
Their blades rang together with the solid smack of oak on oak, the
blows driven with full force.  They knew that there were dangers, but
they had long ago faced and accepted these dangers, and fear of injury
never entered their minds as they fenced back and forth.  Not much of
anything entered their minds during a sparring match on a good day,
and today was a very good day.
	At least it was until about twenty minutes into the session,
when it suddenly crossed Achika's mind that she had forgotten to call
Hiroshi Morisato and tell him where the evening's dinner gathering was
going to be.  For just that instant, her trance-like concentration
slipped, and with it, her right foot.  As she turned to flow into a
new pattern, she moved perhaps two inches out of position,
overextending her strike.
	Leonard saw what was about to happen an instant before it
happened - long enough for his soul to fill with horror, but far too
little time to do anything about it.  His blade swept past Achika's
instead of meeting it, and smashed into the left side of her head.
Had she been where they both expected her to be, she'd have blocked it
with her own bokuto and the match would have continued.  Another inch
out of position and she'd have been hit on the heavier bone just above
her left eyebrow, knocked down, stunned, but probably not seriously
injured.
	But she hadn't erred by that much, and with a sickening,
yielding SMACK, she took the blow halfway between eyebrow and ear,
then dropped to the floor without another sound save the clatter of
her bokuto falling from limp fingers.

        For Leonard, the next several hours were a horrible blur of
flashing lights, babbling voices, and disgust in himself.  Nothing
made any sense.  After a frantic call for paramedics, the confusion of
their arrival, and several hours under suspicion at Police
Headquarters, he found himself back home, the house now dark and
silent.  Only then did lucidity break through, and Len, alone in the
house, sat on his bed with his head in his hands and sobbed.
	Achika - his best friend, whom he loved on more levels than he
dared, at fourteen going on fifteen, to think about - was fighting for
her life at the WDF's Philip Boyce Memorial Medical Center.  She was a
tough girl; from her father she had inherited the regenerative powers
common to the WDF's literally-immortalized Detian old-timers, and from
her mother the robust good health of the Jyuraian royal family.  If
she hadn't had those qualities, she would have been DOA at Boyce.  Now
it was a race to see if the most advanced medical techniques in the
galaxy and her own regenerative powers, not yet as potent as they
would be in full adulthood, could repair the damage done by Len's
bokuto before some part of her just gave up.
	An hour or so after dawn, he was still sitting there, dry-eyed
and spent but still awake.  He was staring bleakly at the trophy on
his desk, the one with the stylized figure of a swordsman at the top.
He and Achika had won it for a kendo demonstration they'd staged a few
months before.  Nothing had gone wrong that day.  They had been able
to anticipate each other's moves as if telepathically linked.  It had
been an incredibly moving experience.
	He thought that she might now be gone, because of him, and his
eyes burned again.  He was saved from another deep black mood by the
ringing of the telephone.  When he answered, his voice rasped, hoarse
from a sleepless night and much sobbing.
	"Leonard, this is Aeka," came the voice of Achika's mother.
With her father and Len's parents out of the Sphere on business, only
Aeka could be found by the authorities to take charge of the crisis.
"Are you all right?"
	"I'm fine," said Len.  His brain seethed with shame.  If only
she would be angry with him, angry as he was with himself - if only
she would revile him for his clumsiness and stupidity!  Instead she
had been kind to him, as concerned for him as for her own daughter,
and the kindness deepened Len's own sense of shame.
	"I just came from a conference with Dr. Stone at Boyce," Aeka
went on.  "They've induced early onset of Regenerative Aging Freeze in
Achika, to put her into a healing coma so they wouldn't have to use a
biotank.  She'll be unconscious for at least a week, but she's
expected to make a complete recovery.  I thought you would want to
hear it from me."
	Half of the great weight resting on Len's shoulders lifted.
"Oh, thank the gods," he murmured.
	He staggered through the rest of the conversation, thanking
Aeka for telling him, assuring her again that he was all right.
	Then he went back to his room, packed a few essential things
into a small pack, wrote a couple of letters, put them on the kitchen
counter, and left the house without looking back.  Half an hour later
he was standing in the main concourse at Mathews Memorial Spaceport,
scanning the flight listings board to see what flight would take him
the furthest from New Avalon.
	"Leonard Hutchins, isn't it?" said a voice.
	Len turned to find himself facing a kindly-faced middle-aged
man in a brown robe.  It took Len a moment to place the man - he was a
traveler named Aldous Gajic, and had been a visitor to the Hutchins
home a few weeks before.  He and Len's mother knew each other from
somewhere.  During Gajic's visit, Len hadn't learned much about the
man - only that he was good-natured and calm, almost beatific, in the
manner of religious pilgrims of all times.  For that's what Aldous
Gajic was: a pilgrim, though he knew not to where.  Gajic was seeking
one of the great lost artifacts of Earth's civilization.
	"Oh!  Mr. Gajic," said Len.  "You startled me.  What are you
doing at the Spaceport?"
	"Waiting for my ship to be fueled," Gajic replied.  "I'm
leaving New Avalon.  The information that led me here proved
worthless."  He said this without disappointment or bitterness, as if
it were just part of the business of everyday life to chase bad tips
halfway across the galaxy.  "And you?" Gajic continued.  "Are you
taking a trip?"  Then a flicker of concern crossed his brows.  "My
boy, you look terrible.  Would you like to tell me what's wrong?"

	As she left the Deck 3 cargo bay which the Art of Noise had
staked out as their rehearsal room, Kaitlyn Hutchins was well-pleased.
A bit tired, but well-pleased.  She went up to Deck 1, to the area
which, in the ship's purely military configuration, would be officers'
country, bound for her own stateroom; then she paused in the corridor,
considering, and beeped the door of the one across the hall instead.
It opened immediately, and she entered Juri Arisugawa's cabin to find
the redhead watching F-SPAN, the Federation Senate network.
	"Hello," said Juri as Kate entered, trailed by her constant
companion, Sergei the tiger.  "This is rather interesting.  The Senate
is discussing Psi Corps enforcement excesses.  Our little encounter
with them last year came up a moment ago."
	Indeed, on the screen, the Honourable Eidun Palpatine, Senator
for the Outer Rim Territories, was declaiming pointedly that the Corps
could not be adequately controlled on the world of its origin, and now
it was asking for enforcement power -throughout the Federation?-  The
patrician face of the Senator from Naboo was dark with disapproval as
he made his opposition to this notion known in the strongest possible
terms decorum would permit.
	"Are they r-really asking for f-f-full Federation
j-jurisd-d-diction?"
	Juri nodded.  "The current proposal would attach them to the
Federation Bureau of Investigation."
	Kaitlyn snorted.  "M-more like the oth-ther w-way round."
	"Mm," Juri agreed.  "I don't think it will pass; Senator
Palpatine is not alone in his objections, and he's -human-, which, the
Federation government's protestations of diversity aside, counts for a
lot nowadays."
	"I d-didn't know you w-w-were so interested in p-politics,"
Kate mused.
	"Know thy enemy," Juri replied.  "It's a principle I ignored
at Ohtori Academy, to my detriment."  She smiled with faint sardony.
"I don't like making the same mistake more than once."
	Kate had to admit she had a point.
	"But enough for now," Juri said, switching off the display.
"How are thing shaping up for the show tomorrow?"
	"B-beautifully," said Kate, grinning.  "W-we're as r-ready as
we'll ever b-be."  Kate's grin became a more personal smile as she
went on, "D-did I th-thank you for arr-r-ranging the t-tour?"
	Juri smiled.  "Not yet."
	"W-well," said Kate with feigned detachment, "m-maybe I
w-w-will if w-we survive our f-f-first show."
	Juri smiled dryly.  "Fair enough."  She might have gone on in
the same mock-sarcastic vein, but just then the telephone rang.  Juri
pressed the answer key and the face of B'Elanna Torres appeared on the
monitor.  A bit of the Valiant's bridge was visible behind her; she
was apparently at the communications station.
	"Taking a break from engineering?" asked Juri.
	"I happened to be next to the panel when the phone rang,"
B'Elanna replied.  "Is Kaitlyn with you?"
	"I'm r-r-right here, B-B'Elanna," said Kate, moving into the
screen's field of view.  "W-what is it?"
	"Call from your father," said B'Elanna.  The half-Klingon
girl's face was more serious than usual, almost somber, and an alarm
bell rang in Kate's head.
	"I... I'll t-take it h-here," said Kate.
	B'Elanna nodded.  "Hold on, I have to figure out how this
panel works... "  Then she vanished, replaced by the IPO-SF seal and
the words "PLEASE WAIT".
	"What do you suppose it is?" Juri wondered.
	"I d-d-dunno," Kate replied, "b-but B'Elanna seemed ups-set."
	"Should I go?"
	Kate shook her head; a moment later, the face of her father,
IPO-SF Fleet Captain Benjamin Hutchins, appeared.  He wasn't wearing
his Space Force uniform; there was no greyish-blue yoke visible on his
shoulders, only the epaulets of a green civilian raincoat.  He was
calling from his office at IPO Headquarters in New Avalon.  Kate
recognized the bookshelves behind him.
	He looked harried and worried, which made the alarm ring
louder in Kate's head.
	"What is it, Dad?" she asked.  "What's the matter?"
	Ben "Gryphon" Hutchins was not a man accustomed to being at a
loss for words, but right now he seemed to be struggling to string
them together - a trait more often associated with his eldest
daughter, whose chronic stutter only disappeared when she spoke to
him or to childhood hero Martin Rose, when she sang, and at certain
other very personal moments.
	Finally he said, "It's... it's Leonard, Kate."
	Kate felt her face go cold.  "Len?  What's happened to him?"
	"Nothing's happened to him, as far as we know," Gryphon
replied, "but he's... I should start at the beginning," he said,
stopping himself from rambling with a visible effort.  He composed
himself, took a couple of breaths, and then said, "He was sparring
with Achika Shannon last night."
	Kate nodded; this was hardly an uncommon occurrance.  Leonard
and Achika were contemporaries, both products of the wave of, er,
celebration that followed their parents' participation in the Ragnarok
back in the fall of 2390.  They had been born, along with Achika's
twin brother Tenchi and Len and Kate's half-brother Corwin Ravenhair,
within twelve hours of each other on the twenty-sixth of June the
following year.  Since then they'd been almost inseparable companions,
and in the last year or so, over the course of their freshman year in
high school, that had slowly changed - as everyone who had known Len
and Achika had known it would all along - into something new.
	Len was a student of the family kenjutsu form, of which
Gryphon and Kate were both now masters.  Achika studied the fighting
discipline of her mother's line, the Jyuraian royal family, which bore
many stylistic resemblances to the Katsujinkenryuu thanks to the
common Jedi ancestry of both forms.  Len and Achika had been sparring
together since they were old enough to hold bokuto.
	Everyone who fought and trained in such a style knew this
activity held certain inherent dangers.  A bokuto was a dangerous
weapon for all that it had no edge and was made of wood, and a
miscalculation could lead to serious injury.  This was understood and
accepted as a possibility by all students of kenjutsu and its related
disciplines: If things went wrong, something very bad could happen,
and happen in a hurry.
	And now, according to Kate's father, it had.
	"Exactly what happened is a little sketchy right now," said
Gryphon, "because Achika's still unconscious, but it looks like one or
the other of them got a little out of position, either sparring or
doing combined kata, and Achika got hit in the head.  She has a
depressed skull fracture, there was some intracranial bleeding.  She'd
have died if the special trauma team at Boyce Memorial hadn't induced
early RAF in her, but they did.  She's stable now, out of danger, but
the regenerative coma will probably last something like a week... "
	"Oh my God," Kate murmured.  Her right hand sought Juri's,
caught it and laced with it.  "How's... how's Len taking it?"
	"We don't know," Gryphon said heavily, "that's the hard part.
As soon as he found out she was going to be OK, he wrote a couple of
letters - one to her and one to me and your mother - and disappeared."
	Kate stared.  "DISAPPEARED?!"
	Gryphon nodded.  "Packed some of his clothes into a duffel bag
and vanished.  It was last night, before Kei or I could get back.  The
Shannons were up at the hospital.  Once Aeka was satisfied that her
daughter wasn't going to die, around dawn, she called Len at the
house to make sure he knew; he thanked her, hung up, and that was the
last anybody's heard from him.  She went down around noon to see if
he'd managed to get to sleep and he was gone.  All she found was a
pair of envelopes on the kitchen counter, one addressed to Achika,
the other to me and Kei."
	"Did you read them?"
	"Not Achika's," Gryphon replied.  "But the one to me and Kei,
yes.  He says he's sorry, that the whole thing was his fault, that he
never meant to hurt her - as if there could be any doubt of THAT - and
that he's going away to... "  The man's face looked down out of the
frame, obviously consulting something on his desk.  "... 'learn to
better control myself, someplace where I won't be able to hurt anyone
else I love.'"
	Kate took her hand out of Juri's so that she wouldn't hurt the
redhead's fingers when she clenched her fists.  "That little -idiot-,"
she snarled.  "That's -just- the sort of stupid romantic thing he
would do... "
	Her father sighed sadly.  "I know.  Kei's down at Mathews
Memorial turning the place upside-down, but that won't come to
anything; with the head start he's got, he's parsecs away from Zeta
Cygni by now.  She knows it, too.  She's just doing it to keep herself
busy until the first flash of temper wears off and she can think
again."
	Kate nodded.  She knew her mother's moods nearly as well as
her father did.  "Do you want me to come home?"
	"I don't see what you could do here, really," said Gryphon
pragmatically.  "It's a safe bet he's not here.  Probably headed for
the Outer Rim or the Coreward Frontier."
	"Following after Rei's example," said Kate, still a bit angry
with her misguided sibling.  "Except he doesn't have her instincts."
	"That's just what I thought," said Gryphon glumly.  "Look -
your mother and Yuri are going to mobilize a detachment of Blue
Blazers and take them out to poke around the Frontier.  If we've got
any luck he went that way, where things are still relatively compact
and well-mapped.  If he headed for the Rim, like Rei... well, then we
won't find him unless he wants to be found.  There's not a hell of a
lot we can do about it."
	"We'll look for him.  We're practically on the Rim already."
	Gryphon looked uneasy.  "This wasn't how I envisioned you
spending your summer vacation, hon."
	"He's my brother," said Kate.  "Corwin's too.  He needs our
help, he'll get it.  Even if he -is- an idiot."
	Gryphon deliberated on this for a few moments, then sighed.
"I won't try to talk you out of it," he said, then cracked a wry
smile.  "I know how pointless that would be.  Besides, as soon as your
captain gets word of it, the point'll be moot anyway," he added, the
wry grin widening a little.
	Kate smiled very slightly as well and replied, "I'll let you
know if we find anything."
	Her father nodded.  "Same here.  Good luck, Kate.  Love you."
	"Love you too, Dad.  Luck to all of us."
	The screen went blank.
	Kate sighed again, then turned to Juri, her brown eyes sad.
	"S-sorry, l-l-love," she said.  "L-looks like the t-t-tour's
off... "
	Juri nodded and said philosophically, "Things happen."
	Kate thanked the redhead for her understanding with her eyes,
not trusting her voice at the moment; then she turned and dashed from
the room, Serge hot on her heels.
	Juri stood and looked at the open door for a few moments, then
sighed and went out into the corridor.  There she saw Wakaba
Shinohara, who was on her way from somewhere to somewhere, looking
with a puzzled expression in the direction of the bridge.
	"Trouble?" asked Wakaba as Juri emerged from the room.
	"So it seems," Juri replied, and began to explain.

	Kate arrived on the bridge at a run to find Utena Tenjou
sitting in the center seat, looking reasonably pleased with things for
a little before three in the afternoon.  As Kate entered, Utena turned 
with some smiling greeting on her lips, but it died when she saw the
look on her former roommate's face.
	"What's the matter?" she asked instead.
	Kate told her.
	"Dammit," Utena responded after a moment's thought.  She
thumbed one of the intercom switches on the panel to her command
chair's left, scowling.

	Corwin Ravenhair stood at the upper level rail and admired the
Valiant's engine room.  It was a marvelously compact example of the
Zeta Cygnan warp-drive type, with its vertical intermix chamber and
heavy power conduits running to the integral nacelles to either side.
Here and there, people in white jumpsuits, the shipyard personnel,
monitored readings or tinkered with various bits.  Such was the ship's
sophistication and automation that no actual engine room crew was
required, unless something broke; under normal operating conditions,
the ship could pretty much run herself.
	Zefram Cochrane was down there too, but he wasn't wearing a
white jumpsuit; the grizzled engineer was wearing what he always wore,
crumpled street clothes and his lucky (read: battered) New Avalon
Knights cap.  He had an unlit cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth
as he directed his engineering staff in their ongoing evaluation of
the power systems.  Corwin smiled as he remembered his arrival in the
engine room on the first day of the cruise.
	"Well, kid," Cochrane had said, "I guess you and me are gonna
have to decide who's in charge down here.  I invented warp drive.
Whatta you got?"
	"I'm the Norse god of Mecha," Corwin had replied without
batting an eye.
	Cochrane had blinked once, given the young god an impressed
look, taken his flat drinking flask from the inside pocket of his
vest, slugged back a little of whatever was in it, wiped his mouth on
his sleeve, put the flask back, and said unflappably, "OK then, I
guess you win."
	And that was all there was to it; Corwin's place as chief
engineer was secured, and Cochrane had said nothing more about it.
But then, that was Cochrane all over; brilliant and talented the man
might be, but he was almost completely devoid of ambition.  He just
liked to have big toys to play with, and since Corwin pretty much left
him alone when it came to the engines, their working relationship was
friction-free.
	Mind you, the chief engineer hadn't found himself with a hell
of a lot to -do- so far.  He felt more like the superintendent of a
flying apartment complex - all his jobs so far had been minor
maintenance tasks and the conversion of Cargo Bay 3 into a rehearsal
hall and recording studio for the Art of Noise.  Kate was pleased
enough with the room that she'd been talking about the possibility of
cutting a record during the trip - a real studio album, rather than a
live comp like their last two releases.
	Corwin smiled and went back into his little office on the
upper level, just in time for the telephone on his desk to ring.  Two
short rings, a pause, two short rings: an outside call.  Intrigued -
who would be calling him here? - Corwin picked up the phone.
	"IPS Valiant, Ravenhair speaking," he said, after a moment's
internal debate as to just what was the proper way of answering under
the circumstances.
	"Hello, Corwin," said a voice that was just familiar enough
for Corwin to have a hard time placing it.  "This is Clarissa
Broadbank."
	Corwin's mental warning system buzzed.  What the hell could
Clarissa want?
	"Uh... hi," he said cautiously.  His innate civility
prohibited him from asking the question quite that coarsely, so he
settled for, "Something you need?"
	"Not at all," Clarissa replied cheerfully (never a good
sign).  "I just wanted to call and offer my condolences, that's all.
Such a terrible thing to happen.  I know you're all very close."
	Corwin's first impulse was to take the telephone handset from
his ear and give it a puzzled look, but he restrained himself and
instead asked, "What's -that- supposed to mean?"
	"Oh dear!" said Clarissa with a fairly good imitation of
dismay.  "You mean no one's told you yet?  Oh, Corwin, I -am- sorry.
You shouldn't get news like this from outside the family.  I'm sure
your father's trying to reach you right now, so I won't take up your
line.  Goodbye!"
	"Wait a minute, what - "  But he was talking to dead air.
	Slowly, Corwin cradled the phone.  What the hell was that
supposed to be about?
	Whatever it was, he didn't like it.  He got up and was about
to leave the room when the phone signaled this time, buzzing instead
of ringing.  He picked it up.
	"Engine room."
	"Corwin, get up here.  -Now-."
	"On my way," said Corwin, not even bothering to ask for
clarification.  Not when Utena had -that- tone in her voice.  He
slammed the phone down, knowing ten would get him a hundred that the
two things, Clarissa's call and Utena's urgent mood, were related.  He
went out on to the upper-level walkway, leaned over it and bellowed to
Cochrane: "Zed!"
	"Yo!" Cochrane replied, whirling in place to look up.
	"I'm going to the bridge," Corwin informed him.  "You're in
charge down here.  I've got a feeling we're going to need everything
you can give us real soon."
	Cochrane looked at his clipboard, then back up at his
temporary boss.  They hadn't been working together long, but the elder
engineer had a good idea of how to read Corwin's moods - in crisis
they read a lot like his old man's, and that was a thing Zefram
Cochrane had great familiarity with.  He abandoned all semblance of
jocularity and nodded.
	"We'll be ready," he said, and then turned to direct his
engineering team to step up their work and batten down for action.

	Imra Ardeen wasn't really sure what to think about her first
assignment.  After all, she had joined the International Police
Organization in hopes of Making a Difference in the Galaxy and such,
with all the optimism and idealism that her youth could provide... and
now she was being sent on tour with a rock band?  Something about it
didn't seem to link up with her expectations.
	On the one hand, the Chief himself had assigned her to the
mission.  On the other hand, two of his kids were along for the ride,
and they'd had a run-in with the Psi Corps the year before.  Did that
mean the Chief was assigning her to babysit them in case they had
another, similar problem during their summer's lark?  If so, that
annoyed Imra a bit.  She hadn't worked so hard to get where she was
now in order to chaperone her boss's offspring.
	As she waited in the lobby of Kanzaki Heavy Industries'
orbital shipyard complex over Ishiyama, Imra chuckled wryly to
herself.
	The Chief's daughter is older than you are, Ardeen, she
reminded herself, and his son is only little more than a year younger.
And you read the report on that little set-to they had with the Corps;
they're both card-carrying heroes.  I'd hardly call it a babysitting
job, spending a summer with them.
	Still, it was all highly irregular.  At least the management
had the honesty to -acknowledge- that it was irregular, by putting the
word in the very name of the department that had been formed to
coordinate the operations of the ship.  
	The door from the shuttlebay opened and a girl emerged.  She
was perhaps two or three years younger than Imra, slim and athletic,
with a thick sheaf of black hair drawn back into a ponytail, a duffel
bag over one shoulder, and a sword on her back.  Imra, being the only
other person in the lobby, immediately got the newcomer's attention;
she trotted across the room to a conversational distance and said,
	"Hi!  Waiting for the Valiant too?"
	Imra nodded.  "Imra Ardeen, AEGIS.  You must be Sumire
Shinguuji."
	The girl grinned.  "You can call me Mimi if you like,
everybody does."
	Imra smiled and opened her mouth to respond, but before she
got a chance, her communicator chirped.  She blinked, gave Mimi a "one
moment please" sort of look, and then tapped the badge and answered.
	"Agent Ardeen, this is Captain Tenjou of the Valiant," came a
voice.  "Is Mimi Shinguuji with you?"
	"Yes, Captain, she's just arrived."
	"OK, good.  We've got kind of an emergency going on here, so
I'm afraid we won't have time to dock.  Can you be ready to beam over
in five minutes?"
	Imra glanced at Mimi, who shrugged and indicated her bag.
"We're ready now," Imra answered.  "May I ask - "
	"Tell you all about it once you're aboard," replied the
captain.  "I'm really sorry about this, but things are kind of
hectic."
	"No, I understand," said Imra.  "We're standing by.  Ardeen
out."

	They were met in the Valiant's small main transporter room by
Miki Kaoru, who welcomed them apologetically aboard and conducted them
forward to the bridge.  There, Agent Imra Ardeen got her first good
look at Captain Utena Tenjou, and vice versa.
	The captain wasn't what Imra had been expecting.  The AEGIS
operative had read the file, of course; she knew that Captain Tenjou
was sixteen, the same age as Imra herself, and that she was a student
at the Deedlit Satori Mandeville Memorial Institute on Jeraddo.  They
even had a mutual acquaintance, Devlin Carter, who was a cadet in the
class one year back from the one in which Imra had graduated.  The
captain was reputed to be a formidable fighter - one who had beaten
the Chief himself in close combat - and a fearless upholder of the
IPO's ideals of justice and fair play.
	As Imra stood and looked at her now, though, Utena Tenjou
didn't really give that impression.  She was just a teenage girl,
beautiful but normal-looking except for the vivid pink color of her
long, thick, slightly feathery hair.  Her dress was certainly not what
Imra, who had spent the last two years in uniform, would have expected
to see on the captain of an experimental warship.  The captain of the
Valiant was dressed in a Boston Red Sox baseball jersey, tight-fitting
denim shorts, and black and white saddle shoes with red socks and
laces.  She was sitting in the captain's chair with one heel drawn up
on the front of the seat, her chin resting on her upraised knee,
looking intently at the starfield shown on the forward display.
	Utena blinked her cobalt-blue eyes as she realized Miki had
just brought her two new crewmembers into her presence; this seemed to
bring her out of her reverie.  She stood up, brushed the wrinkles from
her jersey, and looked over the newcomers.  Mimi she'd seen before, of
course; it was mainly the AEGIS agent she was interested in.
	She'd read Imra Ardeen's personnel file and been impressed by
it.  A Solar telepath, Imra had had the remarkable good fortune to be
born in one of the two places in the Solar system not belonging to the
Earth Alliance: the Saturnian moon of Titan, which happened to be the
personal property of the Chief of the International Police Organization.  
As she grew up in Beltane, Titan's capital city, Imra's emerging
telepathic talent gave her good reason to be grateful for that luck,
since anywhere else in the Solar system except Free Mars, she would
have been automatically indentured by law to the Psi Corps.
	Instead, she was free to apply her considerable drive and
intellect to any pursuit she wanted.  When her telepathic talents
emerged and were classified by an operative of the IPO's Psionic
Services Division, Imra sought admission to that division's Psionics
Academy immediately - but was slightly hampered in the fact that, when
her talents emerged, she was only ten years old.  Undaunted, she
rocketed through Titan's excellent public school system and graduated
high school at fourteen, then renewed her application.
	She'd cut just as wide a swath through the Academy as she had
through Titan's schools, and was widely believed to be one of the
IPO's rising stars.  Upon graduation, she'd been offered her choice of
postings, and had unhesitatingly selected AEGIS.  She was commonly
accepted to be on the fast track to greatness.
	And, Utena acknowledged internally, she certainly looked the
part.  Imra Ardeen was blonde and beautiful, the sort of Nordic
supergirl who wouldn't have looked out of place on a poster extolling
the virtues of, say, Niogi's farm country.  She wore her heritage
proudly, in the form of a pair of golden earrings in the shape of
Saturn, the ringed mother planet of her home moon, and carried herself
with all the confidence of a fully trained and tested P12 telepath.
Even in this rather hectic, unexpected, unexplained situation, she
was calm, composed, and ready for anything.
	Utena smiled at her and said, "Welcome aboard - sorry about
the rush."  She put out her hand.  Now, for the first time, Imra
looked taken faintly aback; normals didn't usually offer to shake
hands with telepaths, and even though Imra was wearing gloves, she
hadn't expected the gesture.  She hesitated, then shook the offered
hand.  Utena nodded and repeated the gesture with Mimi, who grinned.
	"Good to see you again," said the young Ishiyamajin.  "You're
looking good.  What's going on?  Why the big hurry?"
	"Missing person," Utena replied.
	Mimi raised an eyebrow.  "The IPO Space Force's newest
experimental destroyer is going after a missing person?  Must be
somebody important."
	"In a manner of speaking," said Utena glumly, plopping back
into her captain's chair and resuming her pensive knee-up position.
Looking up at Mimi with a worried expression, she said, "It's
Leonard."
	
	A few minutes later they were standing around the conference
table at the back of the bridge - Utena, Corwin, Kaitlyn, Miki, and
the two newcomers.  Sergei prowled restlessly around the bridge.  The
tiger's presence had taken Imra Ardeen slightly aback, but she'd
adapted quickly, and now paid him little mind.  Oddball situation or
not, she was receiving a briefing from her commanding officer, and her
training demanded that she give that her full attention.
	"Leonard left New Avalon sometime between seven AM and noon
Avalon time this morning," said Utena.  "Chances are he was headed for
the Outer Rim.  Miki, what's our best place to start looking?"
	The blue-haired young man (some unprofessional part of Imra's
mind noted what a cutie he was; the rest of her scowled at that part
until it piped down) punched a couple of keys on the briefing table
and caused its internal display to bring up a map of the Cygnus and
Lucas sectors.
	"The nearest major Outer Rim port to New Avalon is Mos Eisley
on Tatooine," he mused after a moment's study.  "It's fairly far from
here - but then -everywhere- is fairly far from Ishiyama.  I make
it... thirty hours at cruising speed."
	"What about top speed?"
	Miki glanced up at the captain, made as if to demur for a
moment, then thought better of it and did the recalculation in his
head.  After a moment he punched his stopwatch to a halt (Imra
wondered what use it was in calculating a warp-speed course-and-time
set) and said, "Seventeen hours, twenty-two minutes, plus or minus six
percent."
	Utena nodded and turned to Corwin.  "Can we do it?"
	Corwin thumbed a key on the briefing table's intercom panel.
A moment later Cochrane's voice came from the speaker: "Engine room."
	"Can we handle a sustained sprint?  Full power for eighteen
hours?"
	"Hell yes," Cochrane replied.  "That's what we built her for."
	Corwin smiled very slightly.  "I'll hold you to that," he
said.  "Stand by for maximum warp."
	"Ready when you are," Cochrane replied, and the connection
broke with a soft click.
	Utena looked around the table for a moment, then nodded.  The
meeting broke up; she returned to her captain's chair, Miki to the
navigation station forward on the left bulkhead.  Corwin went forward
to the pilot's console, where Kozue Kaoru had been sitting to monitor
things since they entered orbit.
	"Sorry, Kozue," he said, putting a hand on her shoulder and
giving her a wry, slightly strained grin.  "I think I better drive."
	She nodded and gave up the station without hesitation.  As he
slid behind the yoke, she saw his face take on that look of total
concentration that she had come to know so well over the last few
months in Cephiro.  She stood there at a loss for a moment, then went
to stand behind her brother while he plotted the course and locked it
into the computer.
	"Course set," he said after a few more seconds.
	Utena nodded and punched another of the controls on her
panel - the International Police all-band.  "Attention Ishiyama
Control, this is the International Police Starship Valiant with a
priority alert.  We are leaving the system on emergency IPO business."
	"Acknowledged, Valiant," came the voice of the Ishiyama
airspace controller.  "Your departure vector is clear.  Godspeed."
	Kozue noticed the corner of Corwin's mouth quirk ever so
slightly at that, but he had no other reaction as he plied the
controls and swung the ship out of orbit, aiming it for open space at
full impulse.  Once they were clear of Ishiyama's gravitational
influence, he switched in the warp propulsion systems.  The ship
hesitated for a fraction of a second, then jumped forward, the
starfield rainbowing and blurring.  For thirty tense seconds, he eased
the power control slowly and smoothly forward to its maximum stop;
then he punched the intercom channel to the engine room open.
	"How's she look, Zed?" he asked.
	"Smooth and quiet," Cochrane replied, though the pounding
throb of the matter-antimatter intermix chamber was clearly audible
behind him.  "We'll let you know if anything shows yellow."
	"OK."  Corwin closed the channel and turned.  "Warp 16.79.
I'm pretty sure she can go faster, but we haven't finished calibrating
the field dynamics yet; when I pushed her up closer to 17 she wobbled
a little.  It won't help Len any if we scatter ourselves from here to
Zanzigraal in a field implosion, so I backed off."
	Utena nodded.  "You're the driver," she said, managing a faint
smile.  "Miki, what does that do to our ETA?"
	"Sixteen hours, forty-nine minutes, plus or minus seven
percent," Miki replied after consulting his watch.  "I based my
original calculations on a top speed of Warp 16.5."
	Utena turned to Kaitlyn with a helpless little shrug.  "That's
the best we can do, Kate... "
	Kate nodded, doing her best to muster a smile for her friend.
"I'll... I'll b-b-be in my q-q-quarters," she said.  Utena nodded;
Kate put a hand briefly on her shoulder, then turned and left the
bridge with Sergei following glumly after.
	Utena watched her go, sighed, and then thumbed the intercom
all-call to announce to the ship's crew and passengers the change in
plans.

	Dinner that evening was a slightly subdued affair.  Most of
the ship's company knew Leonard at least slightly, being Kate's and
Corwin's friends.  Neither Utena nor Corwin left the bridge; many
others aboard the Valiant chose to keep to themselves, stopping into
the dining area forward on Deck 2 to pick up something to eat and
taking it back to their quarters.  As Imra sat alone at one of the
tables eating a Hungry Humanoid stewpack, no fewer than four people
came in, acquired something from one of the vending machines, and left
again.  All of them were polite and introduced themselves cordially to
their new shipmate, but all of them were visibly distracted - Imra
didn't need to be a telepath to tell that.
	She didn't take it personally - she hadn't been expecting a
ticker tape parade - but the fact that the sudden crisis overtaking
the ship had swept away any sort of formal introduction of the new
crewmembers did mean she was feeling a bit left out, starting to
wonder if she was going to be able to fit into this crew, by the time
the fifth person appeared.  This one was a tall, slim fellow with
long, wavy green hair, dressed in jeans and a blue checkered flannel
shirt.  He had a sword - Imra had noticed quite a few people involved
with this ship seemed to - and moved with the sort of quiet grace that
made it clear to her he was a trained fighter.
	He went to the wall unit, frowned at the selection list for a
few moments, then made his choice and waited for it to be delivered.
Imra sat idly and watched him, expecting him to take it and leave.
Instead, when it arrived, he collected it, turned, scanned the room,
noticed the only other person in it, and approached.  Now she expected
him to introduce himself and -then- leave, but he surprised her again;
when he reached the table he asked in a quiet voice,
	"May I join you?"
	Taken completely aback, Imra blinked, then said, "Oh,
uh... sure."
	He smiled slightly - he had a sardonic face, so that when he
smiled he tended to look like he was doing so at some private joke -
and sat down opposite her at the metal-slab table.  "You must be our
AEGIS agent."
	Imra nodded.  "Imra Ardeen."
	"Kyouichi Saionji," he replied.  "You'll have to excuse our
present disarray - Kaitlyn-sensei is quite fond of her brother, and
his disappearance is causing her great distress.  Hopefully we'll
catch up to him in short order and things will get back to normal
around here."  He cracked that sardonic little smile again as he
added, "Not that we've really been aboard long enough to know what
-is- normal."
	Imra arched an eyebrow.  "'Kaitlyn-sensei'?" she asked.
	Saionji nodded.  "I'm her student in the Asagiri
Katsujinkenryuu."
	"I'd have sworn you were older than she is."
	"I am," replied Saionji unconcernedly; then he tore the foil
panel off the top of his Chicken Surprise tray and started in on it.
"I wasted some time before I met Kaitlyn-sensei on a game I was
neither destined nor fitted to win.  It set me back a bit... "  That
dry smile once more, this time with just a hint of a raised eyebrow
and a twinkle in one violet eye.  "... But I'm feeling much better
now."
	"Well," mused Imra, "you've certainly got the cryptic-Zen-
sayings part of being a samurai down."
	"We all have our specialties," Saionji agreed calmly.
	The door opened then and another member of the ship's company
came in; this was a girl about Imra's age with auburn hair done up in
a style that looked rather like an onion, wearing cargo shorts and a
yellow tank top with a large black exclamation point on the front.
Imra wasn't sure what the statement was supposed to be, but it was
certainly emphatic.
	"Saionji, are you - ah, there you are.  Chatting up the new
girl, huh?" she said.
	Imra felt her cheeks color slightly, but then the girl draped
herself over Saionji's shoulders from behind for a moment before
slipping down beside him, grinning all the while, and Imra realized
that she was just giving her boyfriend a hard time.  "Agent Ardeen,
right?  Wakaba Shinohara," she said, thrusting a hand across the
table.
	On the wrist just behind that hand, a round green gemstone on
a silvery band gleamed at Imra; as she shook Wakaba's hand, she felt
obligated to state the obvious:
	"You're a Lensman."
	"Yep," Wakaba replied, admiring the gem for a moment.  "'Bout
six months now.  Haven't really done a lot with it, but then Skuld
said I was basically a reservist."
	Imra nodded.  "I've met a few before, at the Academy - we
cross-trained with Blue Lensmen, learning how to interoperate with
them on tactical operations - but never one my own age."
	"Were you briefed on this crew?" asked Wakaba with a grin.
	"Only the captain and Engineer Ravenhair," Imra admitted.
	"Well, you'll get used to us.  We're quite a package," Wakaba
said.  "The whole Mandeville Institute Duelists' Society is on this
ship, and a few other pretty special people.  So you'll probably be
thinking, 'I haven't seen one of those my own age' quite a bit the
first few days," she added with a grin.  "Kyouichi, love?"
	"Mm?" Saionji responded.
	"As your penance for chatting up the new girl behind my back,
you have to go get me a shrimp ramen and two rice balls."
	Saionji gave her a wry look, then got up and did as instructed.
	"It's been a tough year," said Wakaba confidentially to Imra,
"but I've just about got him fully trained."
	Imra laughed - it was hard not to, with Wakaba radiating good
cheer at her from across the table - and replied, "Well, from what
I've seen so far, you could've done worse."
	"Oh, believe me, I know -that-," Wakaba agreed, nodding.
"Saionji's a little crazy, but he's got a heart of gold now that Kate
and I have scraped most of the tar off.  You might call him a
fixer-upper, but he's been an interesting project."
	Most of that went right over Imra's head, but she didn't mind
much; Wakaba's waggled eyebrows made up for it and got her laughing
again.
	"Anyway - thank you, dahling," Wakaba interrupted herself as
Saionji returned with her food, "Anyway, I've been hearing about this
AEGIS thing for a little while now, ever since Devlin - d'you know
Devlin Carter?"
	Imra nodded.  "He was a year behind me at the Academy, but
there's a lot of mingling between classes.  All years do PT together
and so forth."
	"Ah, OK.  Anyway, ever since Devlin got picked for the program
I've been hearing about it off and on, but I don't have a real clear
idea of what it is.  So since you seem to -be- one, maybe you could
tell me?"
	"Sure," said Imra.  "Essentially, we're P12-level agents
specially trained to act as counter-telepaths.  You're familiar with
the Earth Alliance Psi Corps' top-level Enforcement Division
operatives,  the so-called Psi Cops?"
	"Only too," replied Saionji dryly.
	"Well, AEGIS operatives are basically trained as anti-Psi
Cops.  We're taught techniques for protecting normals and less
powerful telepaths, as well as ourselves, from the attack and
infiltration techniques employed by the Cops, as well as advanced
methods of penetrating the covers of sleeper agents and the like.
Anything a Psi Cop can do to a person, we can prevent or try to
repair.  We can seek out hidden Psi Corps influences, detect their
usual tricks, recognize and counteract their tactics.  There aren't
many of us right now - the program's only been operational for a year,
and the IPO Psionics Division has a smaller talent pool to draw from
than the Corps does -  but we're good at what we do, and in time,
we'll be what we're meant to be: the galaxy's shield against the
insidious evil of the worst of the Corps."
	Imra blinked, realized she was making a speech, and went a
little red.  "Uh, sorry.  Did I mention I topped my Political
Awareness class?"
	Wakaba laughed.  "Well, you're preaching to the choir here.
We've seen the Corps at their worst."
	"Oh, of course - the WPI incident.  Carter told me a little
about that, and it's required reading in the Know Your Enemy part of
the curriculum.  Especially the shabby little trick they tried to pull
with the anodyne, what was her name?"
	"Some hapless idiot named Liza," said a tall, curly-haired
blonde girl in rather flamboyantly colorful garb of silk and suede as
she entered the room.  "A real class-A bitch, by my understanding.
She'd earned all the shabby little tricks she could get.  But don't
you worry about her," she added, leaning over Saionji's shoulder with
a long-fingered hand splayed on his chest and giving Imra a hooded,
smoky look with her sky-blue eyes.  "She got more help than she ever
deserved."
	"LI-za... " said Wakaba with mock irritation.  "How many times
do I have to tell you, -don't- bother Saionji."
	"Who's bothering me?" Saionji inquired straight-faced as Liza
rubbed her cheek affectionately against his; Wakaba punched him on the
arm.
	"I told you, Wakaba, if you're jealous you can have exactly
the same treatment.  There's more than enough of me to go around,"
said Liza.
	Wakaba rolled her eyes.  "I -know- you're doing that on
purpose," she said.
	Liza laughed, disengaged herself from Saionji, came around and
sat down on the other side of Wakaba.  "There," she said.  "Happy?"
	"Ecstatic," Wakaba replied, sliding a little closer to her
boyfriend and putting a proprietary arm around him.  "You see what I
have to live with," she said plaintively to Imra.  "They circle like
vultures, waiting for my attention to wander, and he has no willpower
to resist them, the poor thing... "
	Saionji went on eating, his face completely composed, as
though nothing at all worth comment was happening around him.  Having
seen Devlin Carter do the very same thing while being tormented by
the two Gamilon girls who seemed to have staked claim to him, Imra
remarked smilingly to herself that he would have made a good
Englishman.  All he was missing was a newspaper.
	"All right, all right, I think we've scandalized the poor girl
enough now," said Liza, holding up a hand.  "Elizabeth R'tas Shustal,
Agent, formerly that poisonous chump who was played for a sucker by
the Psi Corps.  A pleasure to make your acquaintance."
	My gracious, there has to be a story here, thought Imra as she
shook Liza's hand.
	"You're thinking, 'There has to be a story here,'" said Liza
with a grin.
	"You're a telepath as well as an anodyne?" asked Imra.
	"Not much of one," replied Liza.  "It's just what everybody
thinks when they find out I used to be boring, bitchy old Liza-of-the-
oh-la-la-Aztechnology-Broadbanks.  They look at me now and they
wonder, 'What side of whose bed did -this- girl wake up on, the
morning that everything changed for her?'  And the answer is, the
left side of the Cardassian Obsidian Order's.  Do you like adventure
tales?  I do my own sound effects."
	"Sound effects?" said another voice from the doorway, and
everyone turned to see a small, slim girl with coppery dark skin and
wiry silver-grey hair entering.  She went to a wall panel, acquired
a vacutray of belgad shyam, reconstituted it, and brought it back with
a can of Hassy.  Seeing the unbalanced situation on one side of the
table, she went around to the other, plunking down right next to Imra.
	"Imra Ardeen, AEGIS," said Liza with a smile, "meet Azalynn
dv'Ir Natashkan, professional Dantrovian."
	"Are you really?  I've never met a Dantrovian before."
	"I've met a P12 before," Azalynn admitted, a little sadly;
then she perked up, her golden eyes gleaming mischievously, as she
added, "but he hasn't got a body like yours.  Was Liza about to tell
the story of how she turned from a boring corporate heiress into the
Scourge of Vestak Nor?"
	Imra, who wasn't quite sure she'd actually caught the middle
comment correctly, paused for a moment, then said, "... I think so,
yes."
	"Oh good," said Azalynn, wiggling a bit in her seat with
anticipatory delight.  "I love that story."
	"She hadn't actually said she wanted to hear it," Liza chided
Azalynn gently.  "It's possible she has better things to do with her
evening than hear my little story - although I must confess I can't
imagine what," she added with mock hauteur.
	Imra laughed.  "It sounds fascinating.  I wouldn't miss it.
Please, go on."
	"Saionji, go get us fresh drinks," said Wakaba, elbowing the
green-haired Duelist.
	Saionji gave her a slow look, then got up and reported to the
beverage machines as the girls called out their orders.
	Imra decided she might fit in around here after all.

	Ten hours after the initial leap to warp speed, all was quiet
on the Valiant.  The night-shift lighting was in place; most of the
ship's company was asleep.  Only the nightwatch in the engine room and
two people on the bridge were abroad; the others were all in their
quarters, sleeping or not as the whim took them.
	Up on the bridge, Corwin was at the engineering panel, not the
helm; there wasn't a hell of a lot to do up front right now, and he
was, overall, more concerned with the engine status than the locked-in
helm.  Everything looked good, though; the Valiant was running like a
champ, handling the indignity of a sustained maximum-warp sprint
without a bit of complaint.  In fact, she'd done everything they'd
asked of her so far without a hint of a problem.  The only teething
troubles he and his small engineering staff had had to deal with to
date had been a few defective glowstrips in people's quarters, a bad
heating element in the galley stove, and a sticking door down on what
had been immediately and ironically nicknamed the Lido Deck - Deck 3,
the Valiant's "basement", where the Art of Noise's studio was.
	He turned to say something to Utena, but whatever he was about
to say died in his throat when he saw that she was asleep, curled up
in the captain's chair with her arms folded across her chest and her
head down upon them.  He smiled at the sight, then turned back to his
displays.  He himself wasn't particularly tired; he'd had longer days
than this working on the World-Engine back in Cephiro.
	Just aft of the bridge, in the captain's cabin, Anthy Tenjou
was still awake as well.  She didn't know Kate's brother Leonard very
well, having only met him a couple of times over the course of her one
school term in this world, but she knew that the Kate felt his
disappearance keenly, and she was worried as much for that as for Len
himself.  Still, Kate had Juri to look after her, and when Anthy had
last seen them, shortly after Utena's announcement of the crisis, the
redhead had assured her that she'd see to it Kate got some sleep.  It
seemed the best thing to do for her under the circumstances.
	For Anthy's part, she found herself too fretted by the whole
situation to sleep, so she was sitting at the stateroom's small desk,
studying for the placement test she would have to take at summer's end
in order to enter the Deedlit Satori Mandeville Memorial Institute.
If she hoped to graduate with her beloved and her friends, Anthy would
have to place into the senior class at the exclusive institution, in
effect skipping three grade levels - a feat even Miki Kaoru, an
acknowledged boy genius, hadn't accomplished.  That this task would
require great effort on her part was not a thing that Anthy doubted,
but with Miki and the rest to help her when she needed it, Anthy was
confident that she could do it.
	Right now, though, she could feel a dull, gnawing pain
building behind her eyes.  She closed them and rubbed at the bridge of
her nose, then got up from the desk, leaving her science textbook
open, to go to the cabin's small bathroom to take something for her
headache.  She'd been getting a lot of these lately, mostly during
study sessions, and had attributed them to stress.  They weren't
particularly bad, but they were getting a bit tiresome.
	Meanwhile, on the bridge, Corwin had quietly returned to the
helm station and was checking over his controls.  This station was a
bit of a departure from the usual layout of Zeta Cygnan starships'
bridges, which had become the de facto standard for Wedge Defense
Force, Federation Starfleet, Earthforce and IPO Space Force starships,
among others, as well.  In the traditional design, there were two
stations at the "island" forward of the captain's center seat, one for
the helmsman, the other for the ship's navigator, with weapons control
at a separate station off to the side or at the back of the room.
	Here, helm and weapons control were combined into a single
station, with the navigator's place off to the side where tradition
placed the now-displaced gunnery officer.  This made handling the
Defiant class more like flying a very large fighter than helming a
warship, which was well in tune with the part of the class's heritage
that was Corellian.  Here, with a joystick, a throttle quadrant, and a
range of switches, displays and buttons, a single officer controlled
the vessel's flight and combat activities.  Like many things about the
DDNG project, it was an experimental arrangement; whether a destroyer
could function efficiently with a fighter's control interface had yet
to be seen, and there were many military theorists around who said it
would not be effective when push came to shove.
	Corwin was of the opinion that it would.  The ship so far had
been a joy to fly, responsive and powerful - despite her size, tiny
for a capital ship but huge in comparison to any fighter, the Valiant
-handled- like a fighter, with allowances for her comparatively great
length and mass.  He would be enjoying this hell-bent-for-leather dash
across the Lucas Sector, had they undertaken it under any other
circumstances.
	He was just in the process of checking their course for the
nth time when the comm panel bleeped for attention - the high-pitched
ululating wail of an incoming Priority 1 distress call.  Utena jerked
awake with a wordless exclamation, blinked, and looked at Corwin in
momentary post-awakening confusion; then it sank in what the sound was
and she keyed the secondary comm panel on her right, putting the
signal on the overhead.
	" - rial Klingon Cruiser Amar calling any vessel!  We have
suffered a serious drive casualty and are losing all power!  Reserve
power systems have been damaged and reserve energy is down to 11%.
Any vessel which can hear me, please respond!"
	The message began to repeat.  Utena looked at Corwin again, a
flicker of indecision in her eyes; but before he could offer an
opinion one way or another, her face took on that look of grim
determination he knew so well, and she thumbed the transmitter online.
	"Klingon vessel in distress, this is the International Police
destroyer Valiant.  We are receiving your distress call.  Can you read
us?  Please respond with your position."
	"Valiant," came the Klingon's voice through a sudden wash of
static.  "Reception is three by five but audible.  Repeat, three by
five but can read."  He went on to give their position; Corwin punched
it into the navicomputer and nodded.
	"Savruat system - uninhabited, some abandoned gas mines on one
of the outer planets, nothing of note.  We can be there in fifteen
minutes."
	Utena nodded and returned her thumb to the transmitter key.
"Amar, Valiant here.  We've received your position and will be there
in fifteen minutes."
	"Thank you, Valiant," said the voice of the Klingon comm
officer.  "We will assess our situation and report when you arrive.
Amar out."
	Utena made sure the connection was broken, then sat back in
her chair, looked at the rushing starfield on the forward viewer, and
sighed.
	"OK, Corwin," she said.  "Let's get over there."  Then she
punched the key on her command panel that sounded yellow alert, got on
the intercom, and rousted the rest of her crew from their beds.

	Fourteen minutes later, the Valiant dropped out of warp speed
on the outskirts of the Savruat system, fully staffed and ready for...
well, not -anything-, but a lot of things.
	"What've we got, Klaang?" Utena asked her Klingon science
officer, who was on loan from the Space Force flagship, Challenger.
	Klaang tai-Kalaan was one of the three personnel on the ship,
aside from Zefram Cochrane's team of shipyard-employed engineers there
to evaluate the ship's systems in shakedown, who didn't fit into the
primary reason behind most of the crew selections.  He wasn't here to
test the ease of adapting an untrained, untested crew into the
streamlined systems of the Next Generation Destroyer.  Fleet Captain
Hutchins had decided there were some roles that a trained and
qualified officer simply had to be placed in, and one of those was
that of the science officer.
	Now, though, Klaang mused ruefully to himself, it might as
well be one of these children at the science station, for the readings
he was getting back mystified him just as much as they would any of
them.
	"Very chaotic," he rumbled, peering into his isolation scope.
"You can see for yourself," he said, gesturing to the main viewer,
"that he's a Klingon, D-7K - k't'Inga class - a type you have some
command experience with yourself," added the burly Klingon with a
small grin.
	"Yeah, a whole afternoon's worth," replied Utena with a wry
smile.  "Condition?"
	"Hard to say," Klaang replied, shrugging.  "Lots of quartectic
radiation, consistent with a serious warp drive system casualty in a
Klingon vessel.  Power is low on all decks.  One hundred seventy-seven
life signs, all Klingon.  That's about sixty less than a ship of that
class should have."
	"Anything on the communications bands?"
	Half-Klingon B'Elanna Torres, the only member of the ship's
company other than Klaang who was fluent in the Klingon language
(though Utena had a good working knowledge), frowned at the comm
station's displays.  "Not yet.  I -think- I'm doing this right... "
Her eyebrows rose.  "Ah!  Got 'em."  She switched to her mother's
language and went on, >Amar, Amar, Valiant here.  Do you have us on
your display?  Over.<  A pause; then, >Very well, stand by.<  She
turned and said, "They're requesting permission to beam fourteen men,
the worst of their injured, aboard - they say the rest can hold out
aboard if we take them in tow."
	Utena nodded.  "OK."
	"Their captain wants to talk to you," B'Elanna went on.
	"Good, 'cause I want to talk to him, too.  Put him on."
	The viewer beeped and switched to the familiar view of a
Klingon starship's bridge, very like the one Utena had conned for an
afternoon under the watchful eye of Captain Krontep vathKesek.  She
knew enough about Klingon military markings to know that the haggard
man regarding her from the other side of the screen was dressed in the
uniform of a sub-commander in the Klingon Defense Forces.
	"I am Sub-Commander Kraal," he said.  "Senior surviving
officer aboard the Imperial Klingon Cruiser Amar."
	"Captain Utena Tenjou, IPO Space Force," Utena replied.
	Kraal's bushy eyebrows rose, but he said nothing, mastering
himself admirably to place a fist against his chest and bow slightly.
"My thanks to you, Captain, for your prompt response to our call.  Has
our request regarding our wounded been relayed?"
	"It has," Utena replied.  "We're seeing to it now."  She
turned to B'Elanna, moving out of her comm array's field of pickup,
and said, "Give them the transporter coordinates for Cargo Bay 1, then
go get Dr. Phlox and anybody else you can find and get down there.
You're the only one besides Klaang who speaks decent Klingon, and I
might need him up here."
	B'Elanna nodded, punched a few keys, then got up and ran from
the bridge.
	Utena turned back to the viewer, smiling in what she hoped was
a reassuring and confident manner.  "Our medical officer is excellent," 
she said.  "Your wounded will be well cared for.  I understand you'd
like to arrange a tow?"
	Kraal did not reply, merely looking calmly back at her.  After
several seconds of this, Utena tried again: "Sub-Commander Kraal?
Hello?  Are you receiving?"
	Again Kraal failed to reply; he merely gazed back, patiently.
Utena wondered if he'd lost his end of the signal.  Then, in the
background, she heard a faint voice, distorted as if through a comm
speaker, cry in Klingonese:
	>My lord, we have her!<
	Only then did Kraal respond.  Smiling coldly, he moved aside,
making room for another figure, this one alarmingly familiar, on the
command dais.
	"That," said Klayvor vestai-Klavaar, "will not be necessary,
thank you."  In the same breath the Klingon nobleman switched to his
own language and barked, >FORWARD WEAPONS - OPEN FIRE!<
	Things began to happen very fast.

	Doctor Phlox, no other name, was quite enjoying his tour of
duty on the Valiant so far.  Mind you, he hadn't had a lot to -do- so
far, just tend a couple of bruises and minor cuts for some of the
engineering types and see to a nasty rash the Barsaivian t'skrang
crewmember had developed after contact with a sheet of badly-secured
insulation matting in Cargo Bay 3.  But Phlox was as much a
sociologist and philosopher as he was a physician, and he was finding
the observation of this unlikely crew's first week in action, learning
their shipboard functions and settling into the life of a galactic
nomad, utterly fascinating.  Humans and their close cousins were
enrapturing creatures, and never more so than when they were grouped
convivially and introduced together to new and interesting
experiences.
	Still, it was nice to get a bit of action now and again,
medically speaking, and so Phlox found himself not displeased when
B'Elanna Torres breathlessly entered his sickbay and informed him that
they had wounded Klingons coming aboard in Cargo Bay 1.  He
accompanied the girl down the portside stairway - the turbolifts
really didn't seem all that necessary in such a small ship, and so
most of the crew just used the stairs - and into the cargo bay,
medical kit in hand, expecting to find casualties on whom to practice
his trauma-attenuation skills.
	Instead, the cargo bay door opened to reveal a dozen snarling,
standing, perfectly healthy Klingon space marines.  The instant the
bulkhead door opened, the one in the lead raised a pistol and leveled
it at the two who had come to help them.
	"Oh -my-," said Phlox.  B'Elanna, recognizing the non-military
crest on the marines' armor, turned and started to sprint for the
companionway, screaming for Phlox to follow her; a moment later she
heard the cough of a gas-projectile gun and felt something smack into
the middle of her back.  The last thing she heard on the Valiant was
the triumphant cry of the one who had shot her.
	Phlox, no fool, had done as instructed, but he stopped running
and blinked in surprise as the projectile flicked past him and struck
B'Elanna's back.  Rather than falling down stunned or slain as he had
expected, the running girl instead vanished in the orange-yellow
displacement of a transporter.  A beacon tag!  Very interesting -
though this was hardly the time to be musing in fascination on the
state of the art in Klingon outer-space abduction techniques.  The
Denobulan doctor shook himself out of his reverie and ran for the
intercom panel near the companionway door.
	Behind him, Phlox heard the Klingon leader bark what sounded
like a series of orders.  No doubt they were trying to burn him down
with the disruptors they carried, but no fiery death was forthcoming
as he ran.  He could hear them running after him, and they would
surely catch him - but if he could just get to the panel - 
	His hand slammed against the activator for the intruder alarm
a half-second before Klingon arms caught him around the waist and bore
him to the deck in a painful heap.  As the alarm howled throughout the
ship, Phlox disentangled himself from the Klingon who had felled him,
smiling benevolently up at the others in the boarding squad, who had
surrounded him.  Some glared down at him; others were looking in
quizzical anger at their disruptors.
	"Is there some problem with your weapons, gentlemen?" inquired
Phlox pleasantly.
	The Klingon squadleader spat something even angrier-sounding
than was usual for Klingonese and backhanded him unconscious.

	/*  Propellerheads  "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"
		   _Decksandrumsandrockandroll_  */

	One second before the intruder alarm screamed, Utena Tenjou
called Klayvor vestai-Klavaar a very rude name and cut off the comm
channel.
	The very moment at which that alarm began its cry, she slammed
her own hand down on the activator for another alarm, which joined its
warning tone to the intruder alarm and turned all the lights aboard
the Valiant blood-red.
	One second after that, as the Valiant's shield generators were
charging for action, the Amar's attack struck her, disruptors clawing
at her warp nacelles, one photon torpedo slamming home just aft of the
bridge, another just clipping the aft edge of the main hull, the third
in the salvo missing outright.  Caught with her shields still down,
the Valiant bucked, superstructure groaning under the forces.  The
lights went momentarily out.
	Well, that was anticlimactic, Utena mused to herself in the
dark, continuing to cry orders to ready for battle even though she
felt certain they were done for, crippled and at the Klingons' dubious
mercy.  So much for my first engagement.  Sorry to prove your theory
wrong so spectacularly, Chief...

	Klayvor grinned broadly, his sharpened teeth glittering in the
battle-amber lights of the Amar's bridge.  >Yes!< he snarled,
watching the mortally wounded little toy of a ship heel powerlessly,
lights out, engine grids dying.  He hadn't expected it to be -this-
easy.  He knew his opening salvo would cripple his enemy, but it
looked as if they might be put out of commission outright!  If they
lost hull integrity, he might lose his boarding party to the
decompression before he could lower his own shields and save them.
	But what did that matter?  He had his property back and he had
his revenge in hand.  Sergeant Va'Kath and his men could go to
Sto-Vo-Kor with Klayvor vestai-Klavaar's heartfelt gratitude to
recommend them to qeylIS.
	He would have enjoyed watching the death of the Earthman's toy
and his pet children with it, but he had other matters to attend to.
Leaving the bridge in Kraal's hands, he went below to deal with his
wayward niece.  It would be a good lesson to her, among the others he
planned to teach her, when Kraal announced the destruction of her
friends' little ship.

	But Gryphon, Nadia Davion, Zefram Cochrane, Montgomery Scott,
Rob Mandeville, and all the other lights of naval architecture who had
poured their centuries of combined experience and skill into the
creation of the Defiant class had done their job well.  Knocked
reeling by the Klingons' sucker punch, Valiant was nonetheless merely
stunned by the blow.  She heeled, she rolled, she flickered and went
dark - and two seconds later, emergency relays slammed into place and
restored power throughout the ship.  The warp engines were offline,
but with her twin impulse reactors running at 105% of rated power and
their output automatically redirected to combat systems, the little
destroyer had lost none of her fighting strength.
	The shields came online, wrapping the battered hull in their
invisible protective coating.  Underneath, her advanced ablative armor
was blackened, pitted and bent, but unbroken.  Her reaction control
system reasserted itself, stopping the roll and pitch anomalies and
steadying the vessel.  Environmental systems restored themselves,
flooding the interior with light.  External lighting, too, was
restored, and Kraal's eyebrows rose in outraged amazement as his
"dying" enemy righted herself.
	The glaring eyes and shark's mouth painted on the Valiant's
blunt nose snarled in defiance, as if to say, "Was that your best
shot?"

	"Corwin, talk to me," said Utena as the lights came back on.
	"Emergency power restoration came off flawlessly.  We're at
full power except for warp drive.  Shields are up and - "
	He was interrupted by the intercom's emergency broadcast
channel - Gudrun Truemace's voice speaking from somewhere on Deck 2 to
everywhere in the ship:
	"Attention!  Attention!  The Valiant has been boarded!  All
hands prepare to repel boarders!  If you see a Klingon and he isn't
Sub-Commander Klaang, let him have it first and ask your questions
later!"
	Corwin kicked the Valiant into motion as the Amar swung
herself for another salvo, putting them out of harm's way from that
quarter, at least for the moment.  Then he turned to Utena, worry
written all over his face.  "Zed Cochrane and his crew aren't
fighters," he told her.  "We have to reinforce the engine room.  If
the bastards get in there it's all over."
	Utena nodded.  "I know it," she said.
	Corwin then turned to the navigation station, where the Kaoru
twins, Miki and Kozue, were looking at the rapidly maneuvering outline
of the Amar with almost identical looks of mingled anxiety and
outrage.  "Miki," he said, "I'm sending fire control to your panel.
Kozue, take over the helm."
	Kozue blinked once, looked as if she might be about to object;
then a slow smile crawled across her face and she crossed to the
station in a single bound.
	Corwin finished transferring command of the targetable weapons
to Miki's station - though one person could run it all from here and
was intended to, that person was expected to have a bit more than a
week's intermittent familiarity with the station and a little more
than -no- practical weapons experience.  Then he got up, waited until
Kozue was seated, and said, "Listen to Miki - he'll tell you what he
needs to give his weapons good arcs.  These," he said, pointing to the
triggers under the index-finger curves of the steering yoke's arms,
"are for the fixed phasers.  Keep us out from under his torpedo tubes.
OK?"
	Kozue nodded.  "Gotcha.  Go to work, Corwin."
	Corwin grinned, then turned to Utena.  "Good enough?"
	"Good enough.  Get going!"  She didn't say the other thing she
was thinking, because she knew Corwin was thinking it too - where, in
the midst of this chaos, was Anthy?

	Corwin found the door to the captain's quarters sealed with a
blast shutter, just as the intruder protocols said it should be.  That
was good.  He activated the intercom, got no response, hoped that
meant Anthy was just as far from the door as possible, and ran aft.
The door to his office, which backed onto the engine room's upper
level, was similarly sealed.  That was also good, if inconvenient.  He
found a Jefferies tube, opened it with his chief engineer's access
code, sealed it behind him, and crawled to the engine room.
	Here he found Cochrane and his crew, not holed up in a
defensive formation waiting for the enemy to come, but struggling to
restore warp power, just as if it had been an ordinary day at the
yards and a testing overload had occurred.  Zefram Cochrane stood in
the middle of the room, before the darkened column of the intermix
chamber, his hands on his hips, barking orders.
	The reason the engineers could be so blase about their
situation was gleaming on the forward bulkhead, spanning both of the
room's twin entrances: a pair of hastily-drawn but, as far as his
quick glance told him, correct circles of warding, inscribed on the
bulkhead and over the locked doors and glowing softly.  Unless the
Klingons had a sorcerer of their own - very unlikely - they weren't
getting through those doors without a demolition charge.
	And here, too, was the answer to the question he and Utena
hadn't asked each other, for not far from Cochrane stood the two women
who had created those circles - Mia Ausa and Anthy Tenjou.  Slightly
breathless from his headlong scramble through the Jefferies tube,
Corwin trotted over to them.
	"Nice work," he said.  "That ought to keep them out.  No
Klingon in boarding armor is going to fit in a J-tube, but I've locked
them down with my personal code just in case."  He turned to Anthy.
"Captain's worried about you," he said with a little grin.
	Anthy shook her head, a smile of faint indulgence showing
through the troubled look on her face.  The ship shook as what sounded
to Corwin like disruptor fire struck her shields; a moment later the
spaceframe whined with the juddering discharge of the experimental
pulse phasers mounted in the roots of the Valiant's stubby wings, and
thrummed a second after that with the departure of a pair of photon
torpedoes.
	"How bad is it?" Anthy wondered.
	"Bad enough," Corwin replied.  "It's a Klingon battle
cruiser.  They got one free salvo before we realized they were
hostile, the bastards."
	Zefram Cochrane shoved his lucky cap back on his grizzled head
and grinned sardonically.  "Yeah, but this baby's tougher'n they gave
her credit for," he remarked.  "Sounds like Cap'n Utena's showin 'em
what for.  All we gotta do is keep the boarders outta here.  Well, and
get these damn engines working again - c'mon, Smitty, what's the
hold-up?!" he barked to one of the men working on the conduits in the
upper level.
	"What do they -want-?" Mia wanted to know.
	"Their leader's B'Elanna's Uncle Klayvor," said Corwin
grimly.  "You remember him, I'm sure."
	The scowl which marred Mia's pretty face at the sound of the
name made it clear that she did, in fact, remember the Klingon
nobleman who had tried to kill her after she'd won a fair duel with
him the previous summer.
	"The ship's probably part of House Klavaar's private army,"
Corwin went on.  "They pretended to be an Imperial ship to lure us in.
Our boarders are the 'wounded' they asked if they could beam over... "
He trailed off, horror spreading across his face.  "... and B'Elanna
went down with Phlox to meet them.  That's what - son of a BITCH,
that's what the MESSAGE meant!" he cried, looking like he wanted to
punch something.
	"What message?" asked Anthy.
	"Just before they took their free shot at us," Corwin told
her, "someone in the background said something in Klingon.  I didn't
understand it, but it must've been a message from the boarding party.
'We've got her' or something to that effect.  It was only a second
later the intruder alarm went off.  The bastards grabbed her and
beamed her back to their ship!  They had to send someone to tag her, I
bet, because their pattern-resolution sensors aren't up to picking a
single lifeform out of a starship without a station link."  Snarling,
he whirled, striding toward the ladder to the forward upper level.
	"Where are you going?" Anthy asked, trotting after him.
	"I'm going over there and get her back!" he snapped.
	"Not by yourself, you're not!" said Mia, following.
	Corwin climbed the ladder to the upper level with both girls
right behind him.  In front of the window that looked into his office,
he raised his hand, palm to the glass, and a bubble of power formed
between them.
	"I suppose it's a waste of time to try to talk either of you
out of coming along," he said.
	Both of them nodded.
	"Then I won't," he said; then, a wry grin breaking through the
look of enraged concentration on his face, he added, "Man, Anthy -
Utena's gonna have a whole -herd- of cows when she hears I let you do
this."

	Sergeant Va'Kath was surprised, and not in a good way.  He
wasn't a man who liked surprises in the first place, and every
surprise he'd had since this operation had started had been bad.
	It hadn't really surprised him that Klayvor had opened fire
without bothering to retrieve his boarding party.  That had been
accepted as a risk of the operation - if he fired before retrieving
the party, the humans might put their shields up before the marines
could be beamed out.  But the timing of the attack - that indicated to
Va'Kath's experienced instincts that Klayvor had never -intended- to
retrieve him and the others.
	Well, so be it; these were the risks involved in being a
soldier for a noble house.  The Defense Forces were a more secure job,
but joining them involved kowtowing to the present administration, and
there was no way Va'Kath, son of Kolkhor, was going to do -that-.  The
Amar might triumph and this ship might die, and he and his men with
it; in the meantime, their duty was to do all they could to ensure
that victory.  Who knew?  If they disabled the little vessel fast
enough, they might yet make contact with the Amar and survive.
	And how hard would that be?  Their disruptors would not work -
the humans apparently had some mechanism in their vessel with dampened
energy weapons - but what was that to Klingon warriors?  This ship was
crewed by humans, for the most part, and human -children- to boot!
Klayvor might make his dire warnings not to underestimate them, but it
was hard to believe that they could really pose a threat.
	Ten minutes of hard fighting later, he and his men were
scattered all over Decks 3 and 2, out of contact with each other, and
it was no longer looking quite so easy.
	All over the ship, the fighting was furious.  The human
children seemed fearless, and they knew this ship's corridors - they
seemed to have the ability to appear and disappear at will.  One of
his men had been brought down in a connecting corridor near the engine
room by a snarling bundle of dark skin and silvery hair that had come
out of one of the ventilation ducts and vanished down a side corridor
faster than a thrown d'k tagh could follow, leaving Corporal Krath in
a bloody heap on the deck.
	That was about when everything got so confusing, and now
Va'Kath was alone and looking for a companionway up.  If he could just
reach and breach the bridge, he could yet end this... 

	On that bridge, Utena Tenjou concluded a brief and rather
tense conversation with her fleet captain on the subject of Klingon
ambushes, then sat back, took in her situation, and was impressed.
	She'd heard from Miki Kaoru that, in their childhood together,
he and his twin sister Kozue had such a rapport that they could play
piano duets on the SAME PIANO, coordinating their efforts with such
easy synchronicity that they sounded like a single pianist with four
arms.  She wasn't sure she'd really believed it - Kozue hadn't wanted
to have anything to do with pianos or her brother by the time Utena
came on the scene, and Miki was a sentimental sort.  Utena had always
assumed that his fondness for the memory had embellished it a little
in his recollection.
	Watching them now, she didn't assume that any more.  Their
cooperation at the controls of the Valiant, operating systems intended
for the use of a single more experienced person, had been awkward at
first, miscoordinations costing them opportunities, but within a
minute all that had smoothed out.  Now Kozue was leading the Klingons
a merry chase, using every ounce of the Valiant's advantages
(maneuverability and speed) to cancel the Klingon ship's (firepower).
	Even the firepower advantage was dubious, though, with Miki
controlling the ship's targetable phaser arrays and torpedo tubes and
Kozue lacerating the Amar's shields with the pulse phasers at her
command whenever the opportunity presented itself.
	Utena told Kozue to indulge herself as to course and speed for
the next little bit while she checked some things below.  She glanced
over at Klaang and was not surprised to see that he was enjoying all
this immensely.  He kept his eyes on his readings, calling out a
steady stream of figures regarding the Klingons' degrading shield
condition and other such matters of importance.
	Satisfied that all this was under control for the moment, she
thumbed the intercom and asked the engine room how they were holding
up.
	"Emergency power's holding," Cochrane's voice replied.  "We're
still trying to get main power back online for you.  I'd watch the
expenditure on those phaser banks if I were you - we might not be able
to sustain that kind of outlay on emergency for much longer."
	"Where's Corwin?" Utena wondered.
	"He, uh... stepped out," Cochrane replied, his tone making it
clear that he didn't have time for lengthy explanations right now.
	Utena understood anyway - it was just the sort of thing Corwin
would do.  She sighed.  "OK, carry on," she said, switching the
channel closed.  Then she said to her abbreviated bridge crew, "Kids,
we've got a problem."
	"Besides the obvious?" Kozue inquired, wincing as she didn't
quite get them out of the way of a disruptor spread.  The green glow
of the weapons fire splashed across the Valiant's shields, but the
shields held and no real damage was done.
	"Yes," Utena replied.  "They -did- get B'Elanna - she's over
there right now - and Corwin's gone over to get her back.  So if you
don't mind, maybe -not- blowing the Amar out of the sky is the best
plan at the moment... "
	"Fine," Kozue grumbled, "if you can convince -them-... "
	"I'm working on it," Utena replied.  She got up from her seat
and went to the situation table, pulling up an assessment of the
intruder situation; perusing this, she kept one eye on the battle at
hand, calling out occasional instructions and advisements to Kozue as
she and her brother played their deadly game with the Klingon warship.

	Trooper Torolth thought he was somewhere near the forward
magazine; he could hear the automatic loading mechanisms for the
torpedo tubes working just after the weapons fired.  He worked his way
along the wall, mek'leth at the ready, searching for a doorway.  If he
could get into the torpedo room, he could disable the ship's hardest-
hitting weapons, maybe even destroy the vessel.  He would probably not
survive, but it would be a glorious ending, if anyone found out to
tell the tale.
	He found the doorway and started working on the lock panel.
After a few moments he heard a click behind him, and a voice said, "I
wouldn't do that if I were you."
	Turning, Torolth saw a human female, some way out of childhood
but not yet quite an adult, standing at the far end of the branch
corridor.  She was wearing what looked like light powered armor, which
brought her meager human physique up to only laughably puny.  There
was what looked like some kind of battle drone hovering just behind
her right shoulder.  The color of anything was impossible to tell in
the scarlet battle lighting, except for the soft green glow of the
muzzle of the pistol she had leveled at him.
	Torolth laughed.  Was this creature unaware that her own
vessel rendered energy weapons useless?  He turned, raising his blade
menacingly, and took a step toward her.
	"Not one more, pal," said the human, raising the blaster a
little more.  "Put down the pigsticker."
	>Idiot child!< Torolth snarled, and lunged.
	He died a very, very surprised Klingon.
	"Funny thing about Photon weapons," said Janice Barlow
conversationally to the corpse.  "They never quite work the way you
expect 'em to."  She holstered her Varista, regarded the body a bit
glumly for a moment, then shrugged and turned away.  "Mitra, you can
have his knife thingy if you want it."

	The 'rescue party' emerged from a window on the Amar's
recreation deck, which was deserted with the ship at battle stations.
With their weapons in hand, they determined that they were alone; then
Corwin turned to Mia.
	"Can you find her?" he asked.  "Divination's not my strong
suit."
	Mia nodded, concentrating, and spoke the words to a simple
spell.  B'Elanna's pattern was easy for her to find; they were
roommates, well known to each other, and Mia had performed a simple
transmogrification on her friend once in the past, which had required
her to read the half-Klingon's aura quite thoroughly.  It fell to
Corwin to relate what Mia told him of her impressions from the scrying
to the layout of a Klingon warship; of the three, only he had ever
been aboard one, aside from Mia's one attendance of Taco Night aboard
Krontep's command, the HoSghaj.
	They made their way through the corridors with relative ease.
The ship was, after all, in combat, and certainly not expecting to be
boarded.  From the shudderings of the deck, it felt and sounded like
the Valiant was giving them quite a chastising.  Corwin only hoped
that, though he wanted Utena to be victorious, she would take long
enough about it for them to finish their mission and get the hell off
the ship.
	B'Elanna's trail brought them from the main hull up the boom
to the control pod, where, one deck below the bridge, was the area
generally used for the captain's quarters.  There were no guards here,
no members of the crew at all in evidence; only the single door that
presumably led into the command stateroom, beyond which, Mia's locator
spell told her, was her missing friend.
	"Ready?" Corwin asked Mia and Anthy.  Both nodded, their faces
grim.  Corwin went to the door, stood off to one side, raised his hand
palm toward the control panel mounted next to it, and commanded in the
tongue of his mother's race,
	>OPEN!<
	Without hesitation, the armored bulkhead slammed back, laying
clear the path before them.
	Inside the large room beyond, which appeared to be fitted as
an opulent office, two people whirled at the sound of the door opening
and stared, one in outrage, the other in startled hope.  B'Elanna
Torres was standing with her hands manacled behind her, looking a bit
mussed and bruised but otherwise unharmed.  Her Uncle Klayvor stood
near her, towering over her, but Mia Ausa's heart glowed a little
inside her to see that B'Elanna wasn't shrinking away from him.
	"Mia!" said B'Elanna, recognizing the figure standing square
in the middle of the open door.
	"How did you get in here?!" Klayvor thundered.
	"Never mind that," said Corwin, rounding the edge of the door
and leveling his broomhandle Mauser.  "Call off your troops and get
them the hell off our ship, then go back where you came from."
	"Or?" Klayvor inquired.
	Corwin thumbed back the Mauser's hammer and replied coldly,
"You figure it out, smart guy."
	Klayvor seized his niece by the shoulder and slung her
protesting in front of him, blocking most of his body with hers, then
sneered at Corwin.  "How confident are you in your shooting abilities,
boy?" he asked mockingly.
	B'Elanna, thoroughly nonplussed by this, unleashed a stream of
Klingonese that Corwin, untrained in the language though he was, knew
could only be profanity of the bluest sort.  Klayvor snarled, looping
his arm around her throat and choking off the tirade with a painful
sound.  Corwin adjusted his grip on the Mauser slightly, preparing to
demonstrate for Klayvor the answer to his question.  Mia narrowed her
eyes and took a half-step forward, the words of a particularly nasty
attack spell coming to her mind -
	- but Anthy stepped past her, marching straight into the room,
straight into Corwin's line of fire, not paying attention to anything
around her but Klayvor and his hostage.  Her emerald eyes were icy and
hard, glinting coldly in the yellowish light of the Klingon environment, 
and she spoke only three words as she stopped before the angry nobleman:
	"Let.  Her.  Go."
	Klayvor scowled.  "Is it my destiny," he asked no one in
particular, "to forever have my business meddled in by children with
no manners?"

	Trooper Kaarg was moving down a corridor in what he thought
was the sickbay area, looking for the companionway up.  He had the
same idea as his squadleader - make it to the bridge and see what kind
of mischief he could get up to.  This area seemed to be deserted,
which was just as well; he didn't want to waste time dealing with
random crew when the prize awaited just above his head.  Ah!  There
was the emergency stairway, up ahead.  Stupid humans, marking them so
obviously for any boarder's convenience...
	There was a soft noise.  Kaarg froze, looking around, but saw
nothing.  Someone moving around in the room to his left?  He turned - 
	POW!
	Something burst -through the bulkhead- and slammed into his
face.  He had a dim sensation of slamming gently against the far wall,
but whether the impact affected his body or his consciousness had
simply been knocked clean out of it, he had no way of knowing.
	Moose MacEchearn carefully pulled his fist back through the
hole in the wall, avoiding the jagged edges of the thin metal, and
flexed his knuckles with a smile.  He didn't like violence, per se,
but there had been something deeply satisfying about that.  He turned
and flashed a thumbs-up to Imra Ardeen, who had coordinated his
timing.

	Liza Shustal met up with Gudrun Truemace in Corridor 2-C, and
between the two of them, agreed that the after half of Deck 2 was now
secure.
	"Bad?" Liza asked Gudrun, nodding to the bloody wound in the
Valkyrie's left shoulder.
	"It's nothing," Gudrun replied, though she didn't seem to be
doing much with that arm.  "Yours?" she added, indicating the
nasty-looking gash in Liza's right thigh.
	"Bah," Liza replied airily, "a mere bagatelle," though she
tried not to put much weight on that leg if she could help it.  "Shall
we get forward and see how the others are making out?"
	Just then, a screaming Klingon came flying out of Corridor
2-B, slamming against the bulkhead opposite the T-intersection with
enough force to dent it, then collapsing to the deck with a couple of
painful-looking broken limbs and a serious case of unconsciousness.
Gudrun and Liza both looked with curious surprise in the direction
from whence he'd come.
	Dorothy Wayneright came out of the corridor, hair mussed,
nightdress rumpled and torn.  She stopped in the T-intersection,
looking down at the crumpled Klingon with faint annoyance, then
glanced up at Gudrun and Liza.
	"I've just discovered," she informed them conversationally,
"that I -hate- to be awakened in the middle of a dream."

	Corwin, Anthy, Mia and B'Elanna would all have sworn that the
Amar's inter-hull boom segment was increasing in length at a rate
directly proportionate to their efforts to run across it.  Of course,
that might have had more to do with the group of Klingon security
types chasing them than the actual length of the boom.  Just their
luck to stumble across a security patrol group headed for the messhall
on their way out of Klayvor's office...
	To tell the truth, Mia wasn't really paying attention to the
actual circustances of the chase; she was too busy being impressed by
what Anthy had done to B'Elanna's uncle.  She'd seen a lot of magic
spells from a lot of different sources during her years of
self-directed sorcerous studies, but never anything like that - a
tornado of black rose petals, summoned from apparently nowhere, that
engulfed the Klingon and... well, Mia wasn't really sure what had
happened to him in there.  She'd caught a glimpse, astrally, of
something very, very nasty, but some instinct had told her not to look
too closely.  She wanted very much to ask about it, but now was not
the time.
	Corwin was too preoccupied with the logistics of getting them
all the hell out of this mess to think about it too much.  In order to
Gate back to the Valiant, he had to find a window, and they weren't
goin to find any of those in the boom of a Klingon battlecruiser.
They'd have to get back to the main hull, to one of the observation
areas or perhaps a door in the engineering spaces with a look-through
panel.  He could try to transit the lot of them to Cephiro directly -
with Anthy's help he would almost certainly accomplish that - but he
couldn't come back to the Valiant from there.  To return to Midgard
from Cephiro, he had to be coming back to someplace big and fairly
stable, like a planet.
	It'd do for an emergency exit, but he'd rather not complicate
everything that much if he could help it.
	Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that he might not be able
to - not when the security party was gaining on them at such a rate.
All it would take is for them to get close enough to start shooting
and things would get much too exciting much too fast.  He ran through
a mental list of things he could do about them, and didn't come up
with much that was encouraging.
	At his side, he saw that Anthy was taking the same assessment
of their situation; from the look on her face, she must have drawn a
similar conclusion, except that she looked as if she knew how to
handle it.  Suddenly she stopped running, turned, and set herself, her
face taking on that same look of angry determination it had had in
Klayvor's office.  She faced the charging security team, raised her
hands, and cried,

>Drinker of blood, tearer of flesh:
Born out of love, span this passage with my strength:
WALL OF THORNS!<

	Impossibly, vines and branches grew from the steel walls of
the corridor, whipping from one side to the other, from ceiling to
floor and back again, meeting and recrossing in the middle.  In a
matter of seconds, the boom passageway was choked for at least thirty
feet of its length, between Anthy and the pursuing security officers,
by a thick tangle of plant matter.  Tough, intertwined vines studded
with white roses and wicked thorns blocked the entire corridor.
	A couple of the frontmost men in the security detachment
either couldn't stop in time or greatly underestimated the strength of
the vines.  They plowed headlong into the mass, snarling angrily - and
then cried out in a most un-Klingon fashion as the thorns tore through
their tough, armored uniforms and into their flesh.  The more they
struggled to extricate themselves, the harder the vines seemed to
bite, as if taking delight in having ensnared their mistress's
pursuers.  The others crowded behind, trying to hack their fellows
free with their knives or burn them free with disruptor fire and
finding the vines much more resistant to their attacks than they would
have thought possible.
	Finally, the leader of the security squad gave up the idea of
catching the intruders - they were already vanishing into the
distance, having nearly reached the main hull.  Had he sounded the
alarm earlier, another team could have blocked the other end of the
boom and boxed the intruders in; but that other team might then have
made the capture, denying Sub-Lieutenant Voralt the credit, and so
Voralt had waited.  Now, at last, he resigned himself to that loss,
keyed his communicator and reported the intrusion to the bridge - too
late for another team to trap the intruders in the boom.
	They were away into the main hull's maze of corridors and
decks, down there amid the engines and main weapons, where they could
wreak all manner of havoc.  If it got back to Lord Klayvor that
Voralt's hesitation in sounding the alert had cost them the prisoners,
especially his lordship's niece...
	... well, Voralt wondered if he might not be better off
throwing himself into the tangle of vines now and saving Lord Klayvor
the trouble of flaying him.

	Kozue Kaoru was understandably proud of the flying she was
doing.  With only a few hours of fairly casual instruction under her
belt, she was handling the Valiant deftly, playing her controls with a
sure touch that reminded her of the infrequent-but-becoming-more-common
days when everything went right and she felt as comfortable at the
piano as her brother.  She was keeping the little ship out of the
enemy's main arcs of fire and giving Miki good opportunities to use
the Valiant's weapons for effect.
	The trouble was, both of their jobs carried a complication:
the knowledge that there were at least two of their own complement,
Corwin and B'Elanna, aboard the vessel that was nominally their
target.  This made both their tasks harder.  Miki had to find ways to
target the enemy to minimize the possibility of a catastrophic failure
while still being effective, and Kozue had to get him into firing
positions that were that much more elusive because of the precision of
fire that was required.
	The trouble was, Valiant hadn't really been built for precise
applications of her weapons.  She wasn't a commerce raider or a picket
ship, built to disable her opponents; she was a -destroyer-, plain and
simple.  It suddenly occurred to Utena, as she watched the Kaorus
struggle with the problem, that that quality made using the Valiant in
a battle not to the death very similar to dueling in the Cephirean
style, for the ship was much like a sword: an instrument designed
solely to kill the enemy, unwilling to be put to any other use and
inherently awkward under such conditions.  Rose Dueling was actually
-more challenging- than fighting to the death, which was a truth Utena
realized Miki and Kozue didn't have her first-hand experience of.
	"Klaang," she said abruptly, "what effect would severing the
Amar's bridge module from the rest of her have?"
	"It would put her primary command crew out of the fight,"
Klaang replied promptly.  "There would be a delay - how much of one
depends on how well-trained her crew is - before the rest of her took
up the fight again, if she did.  Whoever took command of the main hull
would have to contend with the loss of the forward torpedo room and
primary sensor arrays, as well as potential problems in the power
distribution network.  Shield efficiency would suffer significantly."
	"Casualties?"
	"Anyone unlucky enough to be caught in the boom at the time
would be killed," said Klaang.  "Aside from that, though, the
automatic sealing systems should prevent serious injuries or deaths in
either module.  Still, I should warn you: that tactic has been
theorized before - it's fairly obvious - but in practice it's much
harder than it seems to pull off.  The ship's main shields are
configured against it; the boom itself is composed largely of armor,
it's much stiffer and more durable than it looks; and it's a very
elusive target in a battle of open maneuver like this one.  Were it
the vulnerability it seems to be, it would have been eliminated long
ago," the Klingon added didactically.  "It would require a direct and
concerted assault; you'd be better off just trying to cripple her
engines."
	Valiant shook again as one of Amar's point defense disruptors
hit her starboard shields.  The early jockeying for position had
degenerated into slow, graceful and nervewracking pas de deux, Valiant
orbiting half a dozen kilometers away from Amar as Amar held a tight
starboard turn, attempting to bring his forward guns and torpedo
launcher to bear.  Now and again Amar would fire whichever point
defense disruptor bore on Valiant, and Valiant would respond by
rocking to starboard and firing the dorsal phaser array, then rocking
back to port and unloading with the ventral array. In this slugging
match, Amar had the advantage.
	Utena rubbed her palms against the handrests of her command
chair, watching the shields degrade still further.  Auxiliary power on
Valiant was enough to arm weapons and run the shields, and sublight
engines, but none were as powerful as with the main reactor on-line.
So long as Valiant could hold relative position to Amar - practically
forever, barring a breakdown, which, it had to be admitted, their
current maneuver profile was inviting - she had a safety margin in her
shields, but that margin was being whittled away, little by little.
	"Dammit," said Utena, thumping a fist gently against her
thigh.  "C'mon, Corwin, get out of there so I can take the -gloves-
off... "

	Once the rescue party reached the main hull of the Amar, their
rescuee took charge; the cruiser was the same class (though a
different mark) as Krontep's HoSghaj, aboard which B'Elanna Torres had
spent most of the previous school year's breaks as an unofficial
intern to Sub-Commander Azrodel, chief engineering officer.  With her
small size, B'Elanna had been the natural choice for sending into the
cramped crawlspaces of the vessel's maintenance ductways.
	"No -way- a security team's fitting through -these- things,"
she remarked as she led the group through one of the Klingon ship's
J-tubes.
	"What about intruder countermeasures?" Mia wondered.
	"On Klingon warships," B'Elanna replied, "the security staff
is the only intruder suppression system.  It's a standard Klingon
macho bullshit rule."
	"... Oh," said Mia.
	"Anyway, we take a left up here, then down two decks, take the
second right, and we'll be in the dilithium recrystallization lab.
There are observation windows into the recrys bays there."
	"Perfect," said Corwin.

	On the bridge of the Valiant, Utena watched the sector-secure
reports come in on the situation monitor and breathed a little easier.
Gudrun and Liza reported Deck 2 secure; Imra Ardeen, Moose MacEchearn,
Wakaba Shinohara and Mimi Shinguuji had just completed a sweep of Deck
3, revived the bruised but intact Dr. Phlox, and were proceeding to
Deck 4.  (This area gloried in a full deck designation despite the fact
that it was really just the ship's basement, a cramped horseshoe-shaped 
crawlspace containing the landing gear, the lowest level of the 
centrally located shuttlebay, and some consumables tankage.)  Dorothy
and a few of the others had the engine room completely secure, with
teams in place on both levels; this accounted for the rest of Deck 2
and the aft quarter or so of Deck 1.  A simple visual inspection
confirmed that the bridge was secure.
	That left only the forward sections of Deck 1, from which no
one could get a report.  Gudrun and Liza were marshaling a couple of
the others, preparing to charge up Companionway A and see what was
brewing up there.
	Before they got the chance, though, something came flying
-down- that companionway, crashing into the deck at their feet with a
sound like a collection of pots and a side of beef being thrown into a
dry well.  Drawing back instinctively, they took a moment to realize
what it was: a senior Klingon noncom, looking very much the worse for
wear.  His armored uniform was ravaged by hundreds of cuts and tears,
the armor plates themselves scarred and in some cases slashed clean
through.  His bat'leth, still clutched in one hand, was nicked all
along its edge and backcurve.  His face was the only part of him that
wasn't a patchwork of cuts; as he lay sprawled on the deck in a slowly
growing pool of blood, it bore an expression of great surprise.
	Gudrun Truemace made a surprised little sound and knelt down
next to him.  She'd seen her share of battle injuries, being a
Valkyrie, but this guy looked like he'd just fallen down all the
Tindalos, the Razor Peaks of Jotunheim, in alphabetical order,
starting at Aachenspijk and ending with the Zistjian Spire.
Amazingly, though, he was still alive.
	At the top of the companionway, something snarled.  Gudrun
looked up, not startled - she was too well-trained for that - but
certainly put on her guard by the sound.  With one hand on the grip of
her mace, she peered up into the darkness of Deck 1.  Whatever it was,
it was moving - coming closer - but slowly... 
	Sergei the tiger moved out of the shadows at the top of the
stairs, coming partway down, and stood looking down at the Klingon;
then he snarled again, baring fangs tinged with blood.
	"Easy, Serge," said a soft voice behind him, and Kaitlyn
appeared.  The bandleader's pajamas were wrinkled and stained and
there was a bleeding cut on her upper arm, but all things considered,
she was in better shape than her erstwhile opponent.  She put a hand
on Serge's head and nodded to Gudrun.
	"W-we think that's a-all of th-them," she said.  "J-Juri and
Saionj-ji are s-s-sweeping the r-rest of the deck n-now."
	Gudrun looked from Kate to the unconscious Klingon and back
again a couple of times.
	"You... -and- Saionji... -and- Juri... and -Serge-?"
	Kate nodded.  "B-bit off a l-little m-m-more than he could
ch-chew," she said humorlessly.
	"Apparently so," said Gudrun.  What else was there to say,
really?

	Sub-Commander Kraal knew that his boss wasn't the galaxy's
stablest individual.  Klayvor vestai-Klavaar was the head of a noble
house that was out of favor with the High Council, out of step with
the times, and that always entailed a certain amount of desperation.
Some men could handle desperation and some could not; Klayvor
generally could, but he had his moments.  Kraal ignored them because
loyalty and duty to one's lord was life, and because Klayvor paid
well, not necessarily in that order.
	Still, even Kraal was surprised at the vestai-Klavaar's
condition when Klavyor suddenly burst onto the bridge.  He looked up
from his situation monitor, where he'd been trying to make sense of
the intruder alert down in Engineering, keep an eye on the IPO ship's
feeble attempts to disable his engines, and get some idea of the
boarding party's progress at the same time, to see Lord Klayvor charge
through the control deck's main entrance with his uniform disarrayed,
his eyes wild and burning, and his hair - great Kahless, what in the
Twelve Suns of the Ancient Empire had happened to his hair?  It was
out of its warrior's queue, flying wild around his head, and it had
gone from black shot through with the stately steel-grey which befit
its owner's status to the snow white of an old man's mane.
	"WHY HAVEN'T YOU DESTROYED THEM YET?!" Klayvor demanded at the
top of his lungs.
	"My Lord, our initial assault failed to cripple them," said
Kraal, trying to remain calm and deferential.  Klayvor -knew- that
part; it had happened before he'd left the bridge to deal with his
niece.  Kraal was diplomatic enough not to point that part out,
though, as he went on, "They are an agile opponent, and their helmsman
is -mad-!  Look at the evolutions he's putting that vessel through!
The strain on their hull and engines must be tremendous.  Rest you
assured, My Lord, we'll get them.  We outgun them five to one, and
under that kind of maneuvering strain they will surely suffer a
crippling failure soon.  Once that happens, Kahless Himself couldn't
save them!"
	Klavyor snarled.  "You underestimated that ship's robustness
once before, Kraal, when your opening salvo failed to see to them.
Now you think your estimation is more accurate?"
	"My Lord, -no- vessel can long withstand the sort of
punishment that madman is inflicting.  He can keep himself from under
our main guns as long as his motive power holds, but - "
	Klayvor's wild eyes widened further; suddenly he drew his d'k
tagh and thumbed out its wing blades.  "Not good enough," he growled
in a soft, deadly tone.  "You're relieved.  I'll deal with this
situation myself.  Go below and see to the intruders.  They have my
niece with them, but they cannot escape - the transporter rooms are
shut down, the shuttlebay and escape pods locked off by the security
computer.  Find them and kill them."
	"How did they get aboard?" Kraal wondered.
	"DO I KNOW?!" Klayvor roared, driving his fighting knife
angrily into the arm of the captain's chair.  "Am I expected to be a
CLAIRVOYANT now, as well as the only one aboard with any grasp of
tactics or strategy?!  GO AND ASK THEM BEFORE YOU END THEIR LIVES!"
	Kraal decided there was no percentage in asking for any more
information, under the circumstances.  He turned to go, then paused
and turned back.  "One question, my Lord... "
	"What is it, Kraal?" Klayvor hissed, his eyes venomous.
	"What of your niece?"
	Klayvor paused, a considering light creeping into the madness
in his eyes; then he shook his head and turned to the main viewer as
if banishing the whole notion from his mind.
	"Kill her too," he snapped dismissively.  "She knows too much
now."
	Kraal hesitated for a fraction of an instant, then turned to
obey.  Loyalty and duty were life, after all.
	And he did pay -very- well indeed.

	Corwin raised his hand, palm outward, to the little window in
the recrystallization bay, then closed his eyes in concentration.
Just as the window began to glow, though, so did the door leading from
the bay into the outer engineering space.
	"Slag it, they're burning down the door!" B'Elanna cried.
	"Just a few more seconds," Corwin replied.  "I've never done
this with four people before - have to make sure it's stable... "
	"I'm not sure we -have- a few more seconds!"
	"We have all the time Corwin needs," Anthy replied, her voice
and expression perfectly calm.  She turned to Mia, catching her eye,
and for just a moment, the two sorceresses smiled at each other.
	Then Anthy closed her eyes, folded her hands as if in prayer,
and bowed her head over them.  A breeze seemed to come from somewhere,
ruffling her violet hair - and then a glowing semicircle of light
sprang up from the floor, a bright arc encompassing the four of them,
beginning and ending at the wall which held the window on which Corwin
was concentrating.
	A moment later, the bulkhead gave way under the security
team's persistent torching.  The torchman backed out of the way and
five armed Klingon security guards burst through the jagged opening,
weapons ready.  They barked out commands for the four to give
themselves up and come away from the recrystallizer, hands raised -
but Anthy and Corwin both ignored them, remaining intent on what they
were doing.  The leader of the security team raised his disruptor
pistol, rapped out the command to raise hands once more, and when he
was not obeyed, fired straight at Anthy.
	The bolt of energy struck empty air in front of her, just
where it would have crossed the circle on the floor, and rebounded,
exploding the disruptor that had fired it and flinging its erstwhile
wielder clear back out into the engineering corridor.
	The others drew back slightly in consternation, then regrouped
and started bellowing more commands.  Mia Ausa ignored these, instead
focusing her own attention inward for a moment.  She drew her Minbari
battle staff from under her coat, extended it, and turned it in her
hands as she chanted,

>Elemental upheaveal,
Power to shift the Earth itself,
Heed the voice of She Who Calls and come forth
To lay my enemies low!<

	She swept the staff suddenly upward, spinning it vertically,
and then dropped down to one knee and drove its end into the deck in
front of her, completing the incantation with a ringing,

>SHOCKWAVE!<

	A barely-visible something rippled outward from the point of
the staff's impact, surging across the glow of Anthy's warding circle
like surf rising up a shore before exploding outward with a thunderous
BOOM to scatter the Klingon security officers before it.  Two of them
went back through the hole into the corridor, as their leader had
done; the others were too far to the sides and found themselves
smashed painfully against the bulkhead to either side instead.  The
wave proceeded up the corridor to the turbolift, flattening
Sub-Commander Kraal before spending the last of its strength denting
the lift doors and rendering the shaft unusable.
	By the time Kraal got to his feet and made his way to the
wrecked recrys-bay door, all he found were five semiconscious security
troopers and an empty room.

	Utena was making a very concerted effort not to chew on the
edge of her thumbnail as she watched the tactical plot on the main
viewer, knowing that they couldn't keep this dance up forever.  What
was -keeping- Corwin, anyway?  They couldn't have caught him, could
they?  No, she decided, Klayvor would have come on the comm to brag if
they had.  So where the hell was he?
	The intercom chirped just then, and what followed that was the
enormously welcome sound of Corwin's voice:
	"Bridge, Engineering.  Rescue operation complete.  Mission
accomplished.  All hands aboard."
	"Well, it's about time!" Utena shouted, banging a fist down on
her chair arm.  "All hands, brace for heavy maneuvers!  Helm, all
ahead flank, make your course oh-seven-five by zero-zero-zero.  Full
power to the weapons array - now we're going to show that bastard what
we can -really- do!"
	Kozue Kaoru grinned, hunching a little bit over her controls
like a motorcyclist trying to get a little extra speed, and moved to
obey her captain's instructions.

     /*  Bad Religion  "Supersonic"  _The Process of Belief_  */

	Just when Amar's weapons officer thought he finally had a
torpedo solution on the damn IPO ship, Valiant lurched hard to port,
pulling away from Amar on an angle to deprive him of that decisive
forward shot.  Once at a range of a dozen kilometers, the little ship
flipped over on itself and snap-rolled, executing a perfect Immelmann
that redlined the inertial dampers.  Valiant dove screaming onto Amar,
all guns charged and ready.  In eerily silent cooperation, the Kaoru
twins unloaded with all phasers and torpedoes at precisely one
kilometer's range.  Amar's starboard shields flared under the assault,
the ship visibly rocked by the salvo, and Valiant skimmed just above
Amar's dorsal shield without any return fire.

	"Damage report!" Klayvor shouted, picking himself up from the
bridge deck.  A small line of lilac ran across his brow where he'd cut
himself against the deckplates.
	"Starboard shield is down to thirty percent!" the weapons
officer shouted.  "Microfractures in boom armor sections seven and
eight.  Power overload on primary disruptors."
	"Minor injuries being reported on all decks," the Amar's comm
officer added.
	"Fah!" Klayvor spun in his chair, wishing momentarily that the
comm officer was close enough to strike.  "Minor injuries are not my
concern!  Bring forward guns to bear on that ship and DESTROY it!"
	The bridge doors opened and Kraal staggered in.  "What hit
us?" he asked, humility and obedience to his lord forgotten in the
hammer-blow he'd just felt.
	"Here he comes again," the helmsman groaned.
	"Bring us AROUND!" Klayvor shouted, rising slowly from his
chair as the little splotch of white on the viewscreen began to grow
again.
	"Their helmsman's too good," Amar's own helmsman answered.
"He's coming in on an angle, he won't come around - "
	Light and thunder erupted once more from the Valiant, this
time slamming into the Klingon's port shields.  The bridge lights
flared and died, replaced by the dim reds of emergency illumination.
Several displays shorted out, further darkening the bridge.
	"Portside shields down to forty percent!" the weapons officer
replied.  "Firing secondary disruptors now!"
	Twin waves of green light slapped Valiant's aft section as she
flew past, causing her no apparent difficulty.
	Kraal watched the International Police ship soar away at high
speed, much higher than Amar could ever manage, and came to a
decision.  "Sensors!"
	"Yes, Sub-Commander?" the science officer replied.
	"Is the enemy's main reactor still offline?"
	"Affirmative!"
	"Helm, come about to three-one-eight by zero-two-four," Kraal
replied.  "Warp factor six.  Navigation, set course for home."
	"NO!" Klayvor jumped up from the deck where he'd fallen again
and lunged at Kraal.  Kraal gave no resistance as Klayvor backhanded
him against the bulkhead.  With hysterical strength, Klayvor pinned
Kraal to the wall and shouted, "We fight ON!"
	"Only a fool fights in a burning house, my Lord," Kraal said
softly.  "Consider: with our main battery out, they have a weapons
load equal to our own.  They can stay out of our heavy weapons' firing
arcs indefinitely.  They can outrun us and outmaneuver us in
realspace.  We have lost our advantage; we -must- withdraw."
	The madness in Klayvor's eyes diminished for a few moments,
leaving only anger and frustration.  "You will pay for your cowardice
with your life," he said at last.
	"Yes," Kraal answered unflinchingly, "but my Lord and my crew
will survive.  Helm, engage warp speed."  As he noted Valiant turning
in for a third attack run, he added, "Get us -out- of here."
	The Amar lurched forward into warp, narrowly evading the blow
that would have crippled it fatally.

	"Ha-HAAAA!" cried Zefram Cochrane as the throbbing blue-white
light of the warp core filled the engine room again.  He, Corwin and
B'Elanna put down their tools and shared a round of grubby-handed high
fives.

	Kozue's heart had only just begun to tighten in frustration
when the little red indicator on the left side of her panel suddenly
turned green and shot to the top of the bar.  The bridge lights
brightened perceptibly as the main power systems came back online,
making a verbal report to the captain unnecessary; instead the budding
helmswoman looked back over her shoulder and asked simply,
	"Chase 'em?"
	"Damn straight!" Utena snapped back.
	Kozue grinned nastily, waited a half-second for Miki to feed
her a pursuit course, and flung the Valiant after the fleeing
Klingons.  The shark-mouthed destroyer gathered herself for an
instant, then streaked forward in a rainbow leap after her quarry.

	"Enemy has effected warp drive repairs!" called out the Amar's
sensor officer.  "Pursuit course, warp factor seven and still
accelerating."
	"Flank speed!" Kraal ordered.
	The helmsman plied his controls, pushing the protesting vessel
up to warp 12.5, some way beyond the D-7K class's rated flank speed
and into groan-and-shudder territory.
	"Not enough," the sensor officer confirmed.  "I make the
enemy's speed warp factor 15.  He'll overhaul us easily.  Twenty
seconds to firing range."

	Utena leaned forward in her seat, watching the Amar grow
larger in the middle of the main viewer.
	"Klaang," she said, "see if you can get me a channel."
	Klaang nodded and worked one of his subpanels for a few
moments; then he said, "I can't guarantee that they'll listen, but
they can hear you."
	"Klayvor, don't be an idiot," said Utena.  "There's nowhere
you can run.  Command knows you attacked us.  Even if you somehow gave
us the slip, your own fleet will be after you.  Heave to now and you
might get out of Rura Penthe sometime before the 2500s."
	The Klingon's response was a spread of three photon torpedoes
from the Amar's aft tube - a desperation play, but at the speed
Valiant was charging after her, one that might have a chance of
working.
	"SON of a - !" Kozue snarled.  Without really thinking, she
wrenched at the yoke, taking manual control of the ship's flight path.
This was a thing that was almost never done at warp; flying the ship
was generally left to the computer at supralight speeds.  There
weren't many pilots in the galaxy who had ever handled a vessel,
especially one as thoroughbred as Valiant, under manual control at
warp speed, and fewer still who had come out of it with their ships
and their hides intact.
	Kozue didn't know any of that, though, and so it never crossed
her mind that what she was about to do was difficult, or that it would
make her something of a legend in the spaceflight community.  She just
-did- it, without conscious thought, slamming the Valiant into a tight
corkscrew spiral at warp 15.  The maneuver confounded two of Amar's
torpedoes, leaving them to flash past at a relative speed of upward of
warp factor 30 and vanish far astern, to exhaust their sustainer fuel
and explode harmlessly at the ends of their runs.
	The third plowed into Valiant's forward shields, burst through
them, and clawed at her hull, carving a furrow of ruin at an oblique
angle across her starboard winglet and severing four of her warp
coils.  Sparks cascaded from the main starboard EPS tap as the
disabled nacelle backflashed for a nanosecond before being diked
automatically out of the power systems.  Alarms howled within the
hull as the warp drive cut out.  This time the engineers and the power
distribution computer were ready; the intermix core stayed online.
	When the Amar's torpedo hit, Miki Kaoru had already fired his
own torpedo banks, having calculated a compensation for his sister's
radical maneuver and flung it into the Torpedo Data Computer on the
fly.  Valiant's twin launchers fired in assault salvo mode, flinging a
dozen packets of antimatter after the destroyer's prey in four groups
of three, two port, two starboard.  Most of them missed outright,
which was to be expected; weapons fire at supralight speeds was always
a dicey proposition.  (The calculations for relative speeds and
verteron compensation and so forth get pretty mind-boggling in cases
like this, which is why so many cadets wash out of the Supralight
Combat section of Starfleet Academy's weapons-officer-candidate
school.  As one failed candidate put it, "If I wanted to know that
much about warp-drive physics, I'd have become an engineer.")
	Two of them, however, struck home, smashing into Amar's aft
shields to port of the Klingon's impulse thrusters.  One failed to
penetrate; the other, following it immediately in, punched through the
weak spot created by its predecessor and blew off most of the the
Amar's portside warp nacelle.
	Utena pulled herself up off the deck, teeth gritted, and
surveyed her opponent's situation on the viewer.  "Us: 1, Klingons:
1," she muttered, dropping back into her seat.  "What've we got left?"
	"Warp drive is out, but main power's still online," replied
Kozue, looking over her panel.  "Forward shields at 20% and
recharging."
	"Phasers fully charged and ready," Miki reported.  "Torpedo
bays reloading from salvo fire."
	"And the bad guys?" asked Utena, turning to Klaang.
	The Klingon peered into his viewer, brows arched
thoughtfully.

	"REPORT!" bellowed Klayvor through the smoke of his bridge.
	"Warp drive destroyed!" replied his engineer officer.  "Main
power offline, weapons disabled."
	"He's not answering the helm!" cried Helm Officer Kh'dir.  "We
are drifting!"
	Klayvor turned to Kraal, his face a mask of blood and fury.
"'We must withdraw,'" he spat acidly.  Then he whirled to the engineer
officer's panel.  "Stand ready on the self-destruct.  He will be eager
to complete his first kill.  When he swoops in to finish us off, we
will take him with us to Sto-Vo-Kor."
	Engineer Korrdek swallowed visibly, but his voice was steady
as he replied, "As you command, my Lord."
	"Of course," added Klayvor with a hint of humor in his voice,
"if you could get me working weapons before he comes, we might be able
to postpone that plan for a time."
	The engineer turned to his damage control coordination panel
with increased industry.

	"Should we finish him off?" asked Kozue, her hands ready on
the yoke and impulse throttles.
	Utena's first impulse was to agree, send her ship diving in
for the kill, but some instinct whispered to her to wait.  It was the
same sort of feeling that had guided her during the Tournament, and it
had served her well then, so she heeded it.
	"No... not just yet.  Bring us... "  She stood up.  "Bring us
to transporter range and hold."
	Klaang's eyebrows rose.  "You can't mean to board him," he
remarked.  "There are over a hundred Klingons on that ship - on a
K-model, closer to two hundred - and they've already had uninvited
guests once today.  They aren't likely to be very accommodating."
	"Neither am I," Utena snapped, "by God, I've had -enough- of
this.  Look, if we just sit here, he'll restore power and either
counterattack or get away.  If we finish him off right now - well, I'm
not going to fire on a crippled ship with no working weapons.  The
only way we can finish this thing is if we take the ship."
	Klaang nodded, acknowledging the logic, but asked, "How do you
intend to overcome the crew?"
	"I don't," Utena replied flatly.  "Get everybody together in
the messhall, and make it quick."

	"What are they doing?" wondered Klayvor as he stood and
watched the Valiant's image on his viewer.  The little ship was in a
patrol orbit around the crippled Amar, outside weapons range; she had
her shields up (and by now almost fully recharged) and weapons armed,
but was making no move to attack.
	"Human sentimentality," said Kraal.  "They are reluctant to
finish us because we have no weapons."
	"Mmm," said Klayvor, nodding thoughtfully.  "For once, Kraal,
you and I agree."  He turned to Korrdek.  "Your task becomes more
important, Engineer."
	"I'm working as fast as I can, my Lord."

	Liza Shustal had a similar thoughtful look as Utena finished
outlining her plan.
	"Hmm," she said.  "Interesting."
	"Think it'll work?" asked Utena.
	"Probably," Liza replied.  "I just wish I didn't have to miss
it."
	"Well, you -do-," said Phlox pleasantly, "if you want this leg
to heal."
	"I know, I know," said Liza with mock petulance.  "You're
letting -Gudrun- go, though."
	"Miss Truemace's wound is less severe," Phlox replied, adding,
"And in any case, I believe she is fully capable of following through
on her threat to shatter my skull if I try to keep her behind, whereas
you, my dear, are all bluff."
	Azalynn giggled and put her arms around Liza's neck from
behind.  "Don't worry," she said, smiling.  "I'll take care of you."
	Liza smacked herself in the forehead with the palm of a hand.
"What am I, an -idiot-?"
	"... Is this a trick question?" asked Phlox.
	"No.  I'm an -anodyne-," said Liza.  "Go and see to the
Klingons if you feel like it, Doctor - I can take care of my -own-
leg.  Shivoam'alaa, I'll lose track of where I put my -brain-
next... "
	"How about it, Edward?" Utena went on.  "Workable?"
	Edward Tivrusky nodded, rubbing pensively at her chin.
"Mmm... shouldn't be a problem," she said.  "The newer Klingon ships
have pretty tough logic cores, buuuut... "  She nodded.  "We can
handle it."
	Ein the corgi barked concurrence.
	Utena looked around at her little band.  Liza, who had
finished dealing with her leg wound, was now using her remarkable
power of psionic healing to see to Gudrun Truemace's shoulder wound.
Imra Ardeen, who had never seen an anodyne in action before - they
were very rare - was looking on with awed eyes.  Dr. Phlox was also
paying rapt attention, though he looked less awed than mightily
intrigued.
	"You might well put me out of business, Miss Shustal," he
mused.
	Liza shook her head, chuckling slightly.  "I save it for
emergencies," she replied, wiping a light film of sweat from her
forehead with one sleeve.  "Obviously," she added, "since sometimes I
forget I can -do- it...  Good enough, Gudrun?"
	Gudrun nodded.  "Great, thanks."
	"OK," said Utena.  "Everybody else clear on what we have to
do?"
	Nods and affirmative murmurs all around.
	"Then let's get it done."
	The boarding party filed out of the room; Utena, leaving last,
paused at the doorway as Anthy stepped forward as if to join her.
	"Where're you going?" she asked.
	"With you, of course," Anthy replied.
	Utena blinked.  "Uh... I don't think that's a good idea."
	"Of course you don't," said Anthy equably, "but I'm going
anyway.  Haven't we always done our best when we worked as a team?"
	Utena considered that for a moment, then smiled.  "OK," she
said.  "Let's go."
	"Edward wishes the Major were here," Edward mused, "but Janice
will have to do."
	"Oh, gee, thanks," said Janice Barlow as she charged her
Varista.

	Klayvor was still pacing, trying to divine his opponent's
plan, when an alarm suddenly wailed on the security panel.  Kraal, in
the absence of the security officer, jumped to examine it himself,
then turned to Klayvor, his face blank with astonishment.
	"My Lord, they've boarded us!"
	Klayvor blinked, and for a few seconds that was his only
response.  Then the corner of his mouth twitched; he chuckled, then
laughed, then roared with mirth.  This struck Kraal as somewhat
inappropriate, but he held his peace and waited for Klayvor to come
down and tell him what was so damn funny.
	"-They- have boarded -us-?!" Klayvor demanded when he could
speak again.  "A dozen children, give or take a few, rampaging through
the halls of a Klingon warship?  They'll be exterminated in minutes."
	"Their last boarding party fared not too poorly," Kraal
replied; his life was already forfeit, so he felt free to say whatever
he felt.  Klayvor looked on the verge of flying into another rage, but
then he seemed to realize the same thing; his ire subsided and he
replied,
	"They were lucky, and they had that Minbari bastard girl with
them, the one who claims to be Anla'shok.  She's a tricky one, but she
can't outwit the whole crew of this ship."
	"She doesn't have to," cut in Korrdek, a note of panic edging
into his voice.  "My Lord, they're taking the engine room!"
	"What?!"
	"They must mean to seize control of the ship from there," said
Kraal thoughtfully.  "A clever plan, but flawed; they would need a way
to compromise the master computer, and that would take - "
	"Activate the self-destruct!" Klayvor snarled.  Korrdek
blinked at him, frozen into immobility by the surprise and horror that
unexpected order generated in him.  The warlord, enraged, strode
across the bridge and backhanded the engineer out of his seat, and
then, before anyone could stop him, slammed a hand down on the
destruct control.
	Nothing happened.
	A moment later, the main display screen on Korrdek's panel
blinked and fuzzed to static before resolving into a black and white
image of the Klingon characters spelling out, "GOOD MORNING CAPTAIN."
	Then it fuzzed out and resolved again, this time into a
jittery black-and-white image of the face of Captain Utena Tenjou.
She was a bit tousled and there was a smear of something - soot or
blood, it was impossible to tell in monochrome - on one cheek, but she
was smiling a rather hard smile as her voice came tinnily from the
speaker in surprisingly well-pronounced Klingonese:
	>I am Tenjou of the Valiant, and this ship is my prize.<
	Klayvor roared with rage, drove his fist into the screen, then
whirled and made for the exit.  Kraal didn't try to stop him; he
merely watched the warlord go, then turned with a weary sigh and sat
down in the captain's seat.
	"This," he mused darkly, "is not going to look good on my
resume."

	When Challenger arrived an hour and a half later, they found
one battered but unbowed DDNG riding herd on one crippled Klingon
battlecruiser, most of whose crew weren't particularly interested in
continuing hostilities now that their warlord seemed to have
disappeared.
	"We don't know -where- he went," Gudrun Truemace was saying to
Utena on the main viewer as Fleet Captain Hutchins and his security
chief T'Vek arrived on the bridge of the Valiant.  "We've been up and
down this ship from one end to the other and he's just plain not
here."
	"Escape pods?"
	"All accounted for.  Same for the shuttles.  It's like he
just... disappeared."
	"Klingon warlords don't just disappear," said Utena.  "He must
be hiding someplace."
	"Someplace where -Imra- can't find him?" Gudrun replied.
	"Hmm," said Utena.  "Well, Gryphon's here now.  He can have
his blue-suiters take the thing -apart- if they have to.  Klayvor'll
turn up.  For now, keep the lid on."
	"Aye aye, Cap'n," replied Gudrun, and the screen switched back
to a view of the Amar.
	"Seems like you've had a busy afternoon," Gryphon observed
dryly.
	"You might say that," replied Utena.  "I think everything's
under control now, though.  Except for the incredible disappearing
Klingon, anyway."
	"Like you say, he'll turn up," Gryphon replied, unconcerned.
"And when he does, there are a number of people who are going to want
a word with him.  The High Council have already issued a statement
denouncing the Amar's attack as the action of a rogue ship belonging
to a private House, in no way connected to the Defense Forces.  Before
I left Babylon 6, Ambassador Thalekh asked me to convey his government's 
best wishes.  Just between us," Gryphon added, leaning over with a
confidential grin, "he was -furious-.  Klayvor'd better hope the High
Council's guards get him before Zargh does."
	Utena chuckled.  "Yeah, I bet."  She looked around the bridge
of her ship, finally settling on the master situation monitor with its
flashing red damage indicators, and sighed.  "Sorry, Chief... looks
like I got your nice new ship kind of banged up."
	Gryphon shrugged.  "It happens.  Are you and the rest OK,
that's the important question.  The ship can be repaired, but... "
Now it was his turn to sigh.  "If I didn't want your summer to start
out by chasing Len across the galaxy, I -really- didn't picture it
starting with a fight with a rogue Klingon warship."
	"I'm fine," Utena assured him.  "Tired, but I'm OK.  The
others all said the same at the after-action debriefing.  Before I
sent most of 'em to bed, nobody said they wanted to quit.  They're
just bummed that the drive damage is going to put us out of the Len
hunt for a week or so."
	"Mm.  Actually, I have some news about that.  Kate's in bed?"
	"Yeah... but she'd want you to wake her up if it's news about
Len."
	Gryphon nodded.  "I was just thinking that."

	If Fleet Captain Hutchins was at all uncomfortable standing in
his daughter's stateroom with his daughter and her girlfriend sitting
up together (dressed, mind you, but still) in bed listening to him
talk, it didn't show.  That might have been because he had more
pressing issues on his mind, but Utena, watching him and hiding the
smile she felt at the thought, suspected he'd have been just the same
had he just popped in to say hello.  (-Kate- would have been a bit
more reticent about it all, but that was a different issue.)
	"A few minutes before we got your call that the Amar had
attacked you, I got a transmission from the Outer Rim.  You guys were
on the right track - Len was on Tatooine.  If the Amar hadn't
intercepted you, you might've made it there before he left."
	Kaitlyn didn't reply, but her face darkened and her fists
bunched in the covers over her lap.  Gryphon pulled over the room's
desk chair, sat down next to her, and patted one of her fists, saying,
	"It wouldn't have made any difference, Kate.  The message we
got... well... it's probably best if I just let you see it."
	He tapped a couple of commands on his vambrace computer,
interfacing it with the Valiant's datasystems, and the display screen
on the far wall rezzed into life.
	There was Leonard, looking a bit subdued but healthy enough,
standing in what looked like a commercial comm kiosk with a man in a
brown traveling cloak.  He looked familiar, but it took Kate a moment
to place him - until he spoke, when his rich, cultured voice with its
Earth-English accent brought it all back to her.  She inhaled sharply
in surprise.
	"Hello.  My name is Aldous Gajic.  This message is for Captain
Benjamin Hutchins and Agent Kei Morgan of New Avalon.  It concerns
their son, Leonard.  Anyone else would find it of dubious utility, and
so I ask that, if it should go astray, whoever does receive it will
see that it reaches them."
	The impersonal preliminaries out of the way, Gajic smiled,
which lit his middle-aged, patrician face subtly and made it much
warmer.  "Gryphon, Kei - no doubt you have been very worried about
Leonard since his rather rash departure from New Avalon.  Well, as you
can see, he's quite all right.  He and I are on Tatooine, preparing to
depart for parts unknown.  I say this not to obscure our destination,
but because I truly do not know where we are going next.
	"My original plan, when I found Len at Mathews Memorial
Spaceport preparing to flee Zeta Cygni for any distant point he could
afford passage to, was to bring him along with me on my supply run to
Tatooine, try to get him to talk about his troubles en route, and
hopefully restore him to you here - but during our conversations,
we've made a rather remarkable determination which makes that
impossible."
	Gajic paused for a moment, smiled again, and said, "Leonard
has agreed to become my student."
	Kate gasped again, louder this time, but, as Utena glanced at
her, not with dismay.  Her face, which had been drawn with worry all
this time (except during the attack on the Amar, when it had been a
cold, almost malevolent mask which had scared Utena a little),
actually relaxed into something almost like a smile.  Admittedly, it
was overlaid by such a blank sheet of disbelief that the underlying
expression was hard to discern, but there it was.
	Serge, reading the gasp as a sign of more distress, grumbled
in concern and jumped up onto the bed; Kate somewhat absently took him
into a hug, looking over his head at the screen as Gajic went on
speaking.
	"Naturally, this means he won't be coming home for some time,
and I know that this wasn't the outcome you had in mind - but you know
me, and so you know what this all means.  I won't lie and say that he
will be -safe-, exactly - you know what sort of life I lead, and he
will be leading it with me - but he will be well cared for and he will
learn to care for -himself-.  I can't say how long it will take or
when he will return, but when he does... well - I'll let him tell you
that part himself."
	With that, the elder man stepped back, gesturing Len to the
fore.  The redheaded youth took his place in front of the projector,
looking a bit nervous but also excited, and gathered his thoughts for
a moment before saying,
	"Mom, Dad... I know leaving New Avalon the way I did was dumb,
and probably scared you all half to death, but... Master Aldous and I
have been over all that, and... he really thinks I have the gift.  I'm
going to work hard... and when I come back, you're all going to be
proud of me.  I love you, and please don't worry about me.  I'll send
you a card when I can.  Please let Kate, Corwin, the twins and Sylvie
know that I love them too, and I'll be thinking of them.  And if you
get the chance... tell Achika... I'm sorry."
	Looking like he might be about to cry, Len stepped back; Gajic
put a hand on his shoulder, smiling benevolently at him, then turned
back to the camera.
	"Now.  As to why this call isn't live - well," he said with a
knowing smile, "I think it likely that Len -gets- this tendency to
charge rashly off in all directions from his mother, and just to
discourage her from barging out here to Tatooine and discommoding the
good people of Mos Eisley - assuming any can be found - we're
recording this message and forwarding it to arrive when we are no
longer here."
	Gryphon chuckled softly and murmured to Kate, "(Your mother
couldn't decide whether to laugh or punch the wall.)"
	"(So she did both?)"
	"(Of course.  And now she's putting a patch in the living room
wall.)"
	"(I told you you should've gone with paneling.)"
	"It would be futile and fatuous to tell you not to worry,"
said Gajic with that same quiet smile, "so I won't bother - but try
not to worry over-much.  That Leonard left New Avalon the way he did
was foolish, but it served a purpose.  The Force has guided him to me,
and I take my responsibilities to the Force very seriously.  He will
have the best training I can give him.  When you see him again he will
be different - but at his core he will always be your Leonard.
Believe in him, believe in the Force, and all will be well.
	"That's all for now, then.  Be well, my friends, and may the
Force be with you."
	The screen switched to a time-and-transmission-route stamp
screen, then went blank and powered off.  Kate turned to her father,
tears tracking her face, the look of mingled disbelief, sadness and
joy still on it, and he patted her hand again with an only-slightly-
sad smile.
	"Um... " said Utena diffidently.  "I don't want to be a pain,
but... can someone tell me what that meant?"
	Gryphon chuckled.  "Oh - sure.  I expect you're wondering the
same, Juri?"
	Juri inclined her head slightly.  "If you don't mind
explaining," she said, in a tone that made it clear she hadn't
intended to bother him otherwise.
	"Sure.  The man in the brown robe is a friend of mine, name of
Aldous Gajic.  He's an Earthman originally, but he's been traveling
the galaxy for years, looking for an artifact that was lost in one of
the twenty-first-century wars."
	"Which one?" Utena wondered.
	Gryphon grinned.  "The Stanley Cup, as a matter of fact."
	Utena blinked.  "Get outta town," she said.
	"No, it's true.  One of his ancestors was part of the group
that lost it in the first place, and he feels a moral obligation to
get it back.  But anyway, that's not really the important part.  The
important part is that he's also a Jedi Knight, one of the last ones
left in the galaxy.  If he's seen something in Len that made him offer
to take him as his student, well... that's something very special.
Mia told me once your Castle on Jeraddo is an old Jedi Temple, so I'm
guessing she told you a little bit about the Order."
	Juri nodded.  "Ancient defenders of justice," she said.  "A
philosophy that, in the broad strokes, sounds similar to the IPO
Charter."
	Gryphon nodded.  "The Charter is based in part on a
translation of the Jedi Code," he said.  "So is the creed of the
Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu, for that matter - one of the style's two
founders was a Jedi Knight."  He sighed.  "Anyway, knowing that,
there's not much point in looking for Len now; he could be anyplace
out there, hunting the Cup with Gajic, and if we found him we'd just
be disrupting his studies now anyway.  The early stages of Jedi
training are a very delicate time.  Unlike Katsujinkenryuu, the Jedi
way is as much a religion as a martial art.  It's customary for
students to break off all ties with their former lives, and not resume
them until their novitiate ends."
	"How long does that take?" asked Utena.
	"Depends on the student," Gryphon replied.  "Could be
years... maybe even decades, but knowing Len I doubt that.  I had
wondered, a few times, if the Jedi path might not be right for him -
but not being one myself, I couldn't tell for certain.  Anyway... it
looks like we won't be seeing him for quite a while... but he's doing
something great, and we should take what comfort we can from that."
	Kate nodded.  "I was just thinking that," she murmured.  "The
others must be beside themselves... has... has anyone told Achika
yet?"
	"She's not awake yet," Gryphon replied sadly.  "Her mother is
of the opinion that she won't take it very well."
	"Her mother is right," Kate said glumly.  "Corwin should be
there with the rest of them.  He's going to be -furious-.  -I'm-
furious.  But... I'm also so relieved... "
	Juri discreetly put an arm around her, squeezing her just to
let her know she was there; Kate smiled and gave a laughing little
sigh.  "My brother the padawan," she said.
	Utena got up from her catcher's crouch beside the bed, brushed
at her jersey (only now did it occur to her that she might well be the
first person in history to command a fully qualified warship into
battle wearing a Boston Red Sox jersey and jean shorts), and said
quietly, "I'll go roust Corwin.  He should hear about this now rather
than later."
	"All right," said Gryphon.  "Will you be OK here, Kate?  I
should go up to the bridge and get us into metaspace - the faster we
get to New Avalon, the faster you can be back on tour."
	"Oh, God, the tour... " said Kate in an I-hadn't-thought-of-that 
tone of voice.  She looked at Juri with an expression of mingled
desperation, amusement and hope, but Juri bore up stoutly and said
only,
	"I'll have to work on that a bit."

	Utena and Gryphon went their separate ways in the corridor,
Gryphon up to become Officer of the Deck for the first leg of their
jaunt home for repairs in metaspace, Utena aft to the engineer's
quarters to wake Corwin and give him the news about Len.
	That task done and the simultaneously relieved, annoyed and
very sleepy engineer returned to his bed, she headed forward again,
reflecting that a) she was very tired as well and b) he really had no
business being that cute when first rousted out of bed.
	But then, that could also be said of Anthy, who, roused from
the peaceful slumber of the just by the sound of the turbodoor, also
looked entirely adorable and faintly comical with her slightly bleary,
childlike sleepy face on.
	"Sorry," said Utena softly as she keyed the door shut behind
her, then bent to remove her shoes.
	"It's all right," Anthy murmured.  "What time is it?  You must
be tired."
	"Almost ten-thirty, and yes, very," Utena replied.  She
changed for bed, went into the bathroom to throw some water on her
face, then climbed into bed.  "Hopefully," she said wryly as Anthy
nestled comfortably into her arms, "not every day will be as eventful
as this."
	"Hopefully," Anthy replied equably.  "But if they are...
we'll manage."
	Utena smiled and kissed the crown of her wife's head.  "You're
a wonder, Anthy."
	"I try," Anthy murmured, already falling back into sleep.  "I
try... "
	As she settled into slumber herself, Utena felt the gentle
rippling sensation of the Valiant transitioning into metaspace and
knew that they were on their way back to the barn.
	Had she known how hectic their first day back was going to be,
she'd have savored that long-delayed sleep all the more.

		 /*  Santo & Johnny  "Sleepwalk"  */

		     Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
			      presented
			UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES
			   FUTURE IMPERFECT
		   - Symphony of the Sword No. 3 -
		      Second Movement: Per Ardua

			       The Cast
		       (in order of appearance)
		       Leonard W. Hutchins III
			    Achika Shannon
			 Aeka Jyurai Shannon
			     Aldous Gajic
			   Kaitlyn Hutchins
			    Juri Arisugawa
				Sergei
			   B'Elanna Torres
			 Benjamin D. Hutchins
			   Wakaba Shinohara
			     Utena Tenjou
			   Corwin Ravenhair
			   Zefram Cochrane
			  Clarissa Broadbank
			     Imra Ardeen
			   Sumire Shinguuji
			      Miki Kaoru
			     Kozue Kaoru
			   Kyouichi Saionji
		       Elizabeth R'tas Shustal
		       Azalynn dv'Ir Natashkan
			     Anthy Tenjou
			  Klaang tai-Kalaan
			 Kraal, son of Korrg
			Klayvor vestai-Klavaar
			    Dr. Phlox, MD
		       Va'Kath, son of Kolkhor
			   Gudrun Truemace
			       Mia Ausa
			   Krath tai-Volpak
			  Torolth vathNasek
			    Janice Barlow
			 Kaarg, son of Kraal
		  The Hon. J. Maurice MacEchearn IV
			R. Dorothy Wayneright
			  Voralt tai-Valtor
			Kh'dir, son of Romarr
			   Kamor vathTeltek
			  Ch'tok tai-Kototlh
			 Korrdek entai-Zotek
		  Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV
				T'Vek

			      Scribbler
			 Benjamin D. Hutchins

			Space Warfare Advisor
			   Kris Overstreet

			  Title suggested by
			    Kelly St.Clair

		     With the usual assistance of
			  The Usual Suspects

	     The Symphony will return with "Valiant Rose"