"We're going down in flames. You know that, right?" Katherine Leung said acidly to the present captain, Edward Teach, without taking her dark brown eyes off her work. Instead, she turned casually to her right in the command seat of WNS Pathfinder only after he approached her position. She was small in stature, but her personality tended to dominate any gathering where she found herself. Her long dark hair was pulled back into the traditional navy ponytail, but it was streaked with far more gray than it had contained only a few short years before. Her face radiated the frustrations and anger that had been building over the last several hours as the well-planned takeover had fallen apart in the face of application after application of Murphy's Law. Literally everything that could possibly have gone wrong, had. "Brighton and his meddling," she fumed as she pounded a fist into the arm of the command chair. "Everything would have gone smoothly if he hadn't had to stick his nose into everybody else's business." She finished with another curse under her breath.

"It is common courtesy to stand as a senior officer enters the bridge," Teach stated without a trace of emotion, as if he had not heard her tirade. "Because we are alone on the bridge, I will let it pass this time, but I will not stand for any laxity in my command." He stood ramrod straight and his near-ebony eyes radiated an almost palpable intensity.

Leung stared at him as if he were some interesting specimen that had crawled in under the door. He was short, barely 152 cm, but still taller than her own 145 cm. He also had an intensity that belied his small stature. He had cultivated that domineering attitude for many years to help overcome his insecurities. She began to protest. This was her ship now, she thought. She had created and executed the plan that had put them in charge of Pathfinder, which was the cutting edge of technological development. She had done the work. She had taken the risks. She was the one who had killed to make this possible. Why should she turn it all over to Teach, just because he had outranked her in their previous employment? She had foreseen more of a joint, relaxed command structure. She studied the bridge as she struggled to control herself. She still needed the temperamental commander. The four consoles in front of her were dead. They represented the communications, weapons, cartography and survey controls for the ship. All the other consoles were equally dead, a casualty of Brighton's hastily improvised destruction. Finally, she sighed and stood. Oh well, she thought. I'll let him have the headaches.

"Of course, you are right, sir. We must maintain the proper courtesies at all times." As long as you are useful to deflect the focus of the rest of the crew, she added to herself. She composed her features and continued her report quietly, as if there had been no interruption. "I'm locked out of the computer up here as well as the one in Engineering," she said as she stood and moved over to the astrogation computer that sat behind and to the left of the command chair she had just abandoned. "If you wouldn't mind trying your codes, Captain," she added the title deliberately, "we might be able to restore power and control. As things stand, we are drifting at our previous speed, which I cannot determine, on an unknown course that will most likely take us beyond the Antoc system if we are unable to gain control quickly. In essence, we are a 'Flying Dutchman'."

Teach moved past her and took a seat in the captain's chair she had just vacated. Her jaw clenched as she was casually shouldered aside, but she said nothing. Teach began to input his codes and became more and more frustrated as his codes obviously were not working, either.

"Blast him!" he yelled as he slammed his fists down on the arms of the chair, all semblance of calm evaporating in the furnace of his sudden rage. He shot up and flew to the astrogator's console, where Brighton had been seated less than two hours before. A quick series of keystrokes momentarily caused the screen to illuminate. His smile was immediately wiped away and he leapt backward as the console erupted in a shower of sparks. "What the--?" he spouted as he slammed the red emergency button on the top corner of the console and killed power to the circuits. The console continued to smoke, but no further eruptions were forthcoming. He turned back to Leung and the look on his face made her hand shift involuntarily to the pocket which held the gun she had taken from him earlier. He was clearly on the verge of losing control again. "Where is Lamont?" he screamed in rage.

"I don't know," she said quietly, trying to calm him down by example. "I searched the ship for him during the takeover, but I couldn't find any trace of him. You know how he is; he's probably off sulking somewhere."

"Search the ship again. He might be injured or tied up somewhere. We will need all of the command officers' codes to override whatever Brighton did here." He waved his hand to indicate the smoking ruin next to him. "We'll lock the bridge and gather a search party. We're not doing any good here," he said with perfect calm. He moved over to the communications console and tried to give the necessary orders. He found that console equally useless and stomped out the bridge hatch without another word.

Leung watched him with growing apprehension. These sudden switches between rage and reason were unnerving. She shuddered involuntarily as she followed Teach off the bridge. She realized she was squeezing the gun in her pocket and made herself stop as they gathered the first six crewmen they encountered. After collecting weapons at an arms locker, they split into three groups. Teach took Danis and Bezates and followed the central corridor. Leung sent Martin Terry and Lenore Chandler down the port corridor with instructions to secure everything and do a thorough search for any injured or missing crewmen. She never mentioned Lamont by name, but Terry would understand. This was the same assignment she had given him immediately after everything hit the fan at the end of last shift. She then took the two remaining crewmen, Eric Goesch and Simon Chin, and followed the starboard corridor down the right side of the ship.

There were surprisingly few people out and about. From the state of her thoughts and emotions she had somehow expected chaos everywhere, but she found that was not the case. Most crewmen seemed to be doing their jobs, taking refuge in the familiar routines of their normal duties, but there were still many worried, furtive glances at the armed group moving down the corridor. There were small items lying on the deck where people had evidently dropped them or let them slip from their grasp in their haste to exit the ship. With those few exceptions, however, the ship looked the same as she always had, but there was an inexplicable coldness to the corridors that had not existed before.

Most of the rooms off the starboard corridor were offices and storerooms and the group found nothing out of the ordinary in any of them until they reached the medbay, which was the last series of cubicles on the interior side of the corridor. As they entered, it was obvious that this was not a routine day here.

Meghan Johnson, the senior medical officer on Pathfinder, was just emerging from the operating room. Dr. Johnson was a tall, striking woman, despite the fact that she was nearing her seventieth year. Her hair was still dark brown and cut short, without any trace of gray. She was dressed in her surgical garb and her round, kind face was haggard and worn. She was clearly exhausted and struggling to function. Leung found this to be confusing. How could she have gotten that tired in just a couple of hours? As Leung looked past her into the operating room through the observation glass, the answer became obvious. Jill Burton, one of the Marines assigned to Pathfinder as security, lay unconscious or dead on the operating table. From the plethora of bandages on her right side, she guessed the former.

"How is your patient?" she asked quietly.

"She will live. She may retain the use of her arm, we'll have to wait and see on that." Johnson replied with an overtone of formality despite her obvious exhaustion as she began to remove the bloody apron-like outer coverings she had been wearing over her working clothes. "Frankly, I'm surprised she made it through. She lost a lot of blood and will be weak for quite some time."

"It would serve her right if she died," Goesch said quietly from behind the engineer. "She and that witch, Chowdhury, killed Morales and Brandon. If you ask me, we should put her out an airlock."

Johnson started to bristle at the tone and thought that had been expressed, but Leung was much quicker.

"It's a good thing that you don't have anything to do with it, then. We are not murderers or brigands. She defended herself and did her duty as she saw it. No one will ever be punished on this ship for doing their duty. AM I CLEAR?"

"Yes, ma'am," Goesch said as both he and Chin unconsciously straightened to a posture of attention. "I'm sorry, ma'am, but Brandon was a good friend."

Leung said nothing but appeared to be weighing alternatives. Turning back to Doctor Johnson she said, "That being said, Doctor, I cannot allow her to 'do her duty' at our expense." She moved to the pile of discarded clothes on the floor near the operating room door and, rummaging through them, came up with a set of handcuffs and a key. "She will be secured to her bed at all times and only released under your direct supervision and only for medical necessities. Is that clear?"

"Yes, ma'am," the doctor replied with distaste. "I don't like it, though."

"Noted. Have you seen Lieutenant Lamont in the last two hours, by chance?"

"No, no one has been in since Dr. Ward left."

"Very well, we'll leave you to your work." Leung then moved into the operating room and snapped the handcuffs on Burton's left, undamaged, hand and onto the metal side rail of the moveable bed. She handed the key to the doctor and continued out the door.

After completing their search of the last storeroom in that corridor, they moved into the boat bay, which had access to most of the cargo holds. Staying along the starboard side of the cavernous bay, she entered the first hold. There she found a crate labeled "Computer Spares," so she ordered it moved to the doorway.

They had just finished their search of that hold when Teach, with his two cohorts and several others, entered the boat bay with the same goal of searching the holds. On seeing her and her group, he ordered her to take the computer parts and begin building a new astrocomp. To that end, she grabbed several of her engineering techs and began moving supplies to the bridge. She knew that even if she was successful in rebuilding the computer, however, they were still missing vital data from the main astrogation data files. They would still need access to that data or the ship couldn't be successfully jumped out of the system to their planned rendezvous.

Teach took all the remaining crewmen and continued aft into Engineering in a vain search for the lost lieutenant as Pathfinder continued at 81,879,337 m/s past the orbit of the outermost planet in the Antoc system with no one at the controls.