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talents.
    “Smith on deck,” John said as he paused at the door to the bridge. “Permission to enter, sir.”
    “Jeez, there you are,” said Steven, the OOD, signaling for John to enter. “You stop for a manicure?”
    “Seven twenty-three. Mark the time,” John said, walking to the navigation station next to Jerri.
    “Sure. Just find out where the hell we are,” Steven said pacing the bridge. Jerri noticed the hot coffee in John’s hand and shook her head.
    The nav-a station projected a star map with an overlay of what looked like an ice-cream cone with the point at the start of their last jump. The scoop of ice cream at the end of the cone represented where they might be now—their sphere of uncertainty .
    “Sphere’s too big to plot a jump,” Jerri said and switched the projection to the smaller nav-b station, where John sat. “We’d end up in a star.”
    “Did you try to triangulate the Doppler?” John asked.
    “Nope,” Jerri said with an impatient frown, “just waiting for you.”
    “What’s coming in, Socket?” he asked communications chief Suzanne Soquette, or just Socket—a nickname she rather enjoyed. She was beautiful, even for a spacer, and John always had to limit his gaze to avoid staring.
    “Some chatter for the buyers and lots of encrypted garbage,” Socket said with an extra flash of her eyes which increased his discomfort. “All EM , clear as a bell. Who’d think anybody’s listening out here?”
    “Pipe some of the chatter over to me,” John said. While he waited for the feed, John turned to Steven. “Say, I met the new cargo chief in the passageway just now,” he said. “What’s her story?”
    “Came over from Jeff’s boat, the Jolly Roger , saying she didn’t like the routes and had trouble sleeping,” Steven said. “Jeff said she’s the best cargo mate in the sector. Lifetime spacer who knows the boards. Said she could man any seat on the bridge if she wanted it, so Molly bought out her contract.” Molly was XO and rated exec-4 with laser-sharp instincts, so she would know. Steven’s link flashed, and he went back to his console.
    Jerri leaned over to John. “Is this academic or are you interested?” she asked with a timid smile and raised eyebrows.
    “Nothing’s academic.”
    Socket leaned over. “She’s too pretty for you.”
    Jerri dropped her smile. “If you ask me, I think she’s got a past. Something that won’t forget her, won’t let her go.”
    “So, what’s got the hooks in?”
    “Well, rumors say it was from a long time ago and bad,” she said, “something that needs drugs. Pirates, I heard, but that’s just a horror story. I really don’t know.”
    “Done,” Socket said, hit a button, and leaned back in her chair. She turned to look at John. “Say, sailor, why don’t you just ask her?” she added with a wink.
    “I’ll do that,” John said. His nav-b monitor lit up with comm chatter, and he pulled up a parser to extract the time stamps and origins from the packets. “Too many gravity well s to make this exact,” he said, “but let’s give it a go.” On Jerri’s star map, he added three rays from the center point that represented the vectors of the incoming signals. He rotated the projections until the sources aligned with the three well-known stations. A new sphere appeared around the locus of the rays—a sphere that was still much too large.
    “Not good enough,” Jerri said with a smug grin. She folded her arms across her chest again.
    John recalled the second law of navigation —everything is moving all the time; nothing stands still, ever. He adjusted the locations of the sources based on the time stamp on the EM and time dilation. This changed the position of the station from where it was currently to where it was when the EM originated, and the sphere contracted. He added some reliable EM from Earth and then added two more sources for fine-tuning. With each line, the sphere shrank until it was a point with a fuzzy