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were even willing to speak while I was in the room, let alone speak to me . Everything in that personnel file is true--but I was writing to make myself look good on a job application. It doesn't make me an expert on the Pavlats."
    "Frankly, that's about what I figured," Kelly said. "But you're as close to an expert on the Pavlats as we have in the Bullpen at the moment." She nodded, making it clear the subject was closed. "So: a nice, simple job. Collect the prisoner, get the locals to sign on the dotted line, bring the prisoner back here, and hand him over to the Star Marshals--sometime when the StarMars aren't on a doughnut break. A milk run. Any questions?"
    Jamie had something like an infinite supply, but he focused on what struck him as the central problem. "Ah, ma'am--as you say, the message is ambiguous. Suppose it means something else, and it's not just a prisoner pickup?"
    "Then we find that out when we get there and deal with the situation as we find it," said Hannah.
    Kelly gestured toward Hannah. "What she said." She glanced up at the wall clock, then stood up--plainly a cue for the others to do so as well, and they did. "Consider yourselves briefed. You have one hour before you boost," she said. She looked at Jamie, then at Hannah. "So what are you waiting around here for?"

FOUR DEPARTURE
    Fifty-nine minutes after the clock started, Hannah Wolfson was strapping herself into the left-hand pilot's seat on the bubble-domed command deck of the Captain Arthur Hastings while Jamie Mendez strapped himself into the right-hand seat.
    The Hastings was a short, fat cylinder with three decks. The lower deck held the propulsion, the environmental control, cargo, and aux gear. The main deck had living quarters and work areas. The command deck was a smaller cylinder, barely large enough to hold the pilot's and copilot's stations, centered on the topside hull of the ship and capped by a transparent hemispherical forward view dome.
    The ship carried two small ballistic landers, the Lotus and the Orient Express . BSI tradition had it that certain classes of ships in the BSI were named for famous characters, events, places, and vehicles in detective fiction. Captain Hastings had assisted Hercule Poirot on several cases. The steamship Lotus figured in Death on the Nile , and the train of the same name in Murder on the Orient Express. There was a complete set of the works of Agatha Christie aboard the Hastings --another part of the tradition--but there wouldn't be much time for pleasure reading.
    The two landers were strapped down on the topside hull, one on either side of the command deck bubble. A portable habitat module was also strapped down topside, collapsed and stowed, to serve as accommodation for the prisoner they were expecting to transport home.
    The ship's designers had played a few games with gravitic orientation. On the main and lower decks, and on the topside hull of the ship, down was toward the lower base of the cylindrical ship, toward the engines, opposite the direction of normal travel. However, the command deck's gravity field was rotated ninety degrees, so that down was out , toward one section of the cylinder rim, so the two landers were to the "left" and "right," and the portable habitat module was "overhead." That put "down" below the feet of the pilot and copilot in their command chairs. The arrangement led to a disconcerting transition as one moved from deck to deck, but allowed the craft to be flown from a normal seated position rather than with the pilot flat on his or her back.
    But more things than not knowing which way was up or down could disorient a person. Hannah glanced over at her partner as the ship left the docking pad. He was looking a bit worried--and Hannah was pretty sure she knew why. Lots of people still found the idea of a completely automated starship disconcerting. Enter the destination planet's coordinates, hit the START button, and the ship would take it from there. It just didn't