Chapter 27

Dealing with "the difficult Captain Cromartie," however, proved to be considerably more troublesome than she'd anticipated.

"Sure, you can assert your authority over me, " he told her. "You're absolutely right, you hired me and I'm under your orders. Your granddaughter-in-law or whatever has been making that pretty clear right along, making me violate one regulation after the other. I've got two shuttles running at once, I've got an orbit a lot closer in than I like, and it goes on and on. But this time you're going to have to order the computer around, and I don't think your authority extends that far."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Look, Ms. Heisinger hasn't left me alone since she put me here," he said. "She's been push, push, push all along. She sat me down and made me tell her exactly what was the maximum, and I mean maximum, time we could spend, made me run it through the system with all safety margins removed, and when I gave her the answer she still pushed me even more, down to almost the minute. And she's used up every last bit of it."

"Go on."

"Chen's nova hits this system in exactly ten weeks, give or take. Ask the computer if you want the exact numbers. But at dead maximum acceleration it takes us precisely the same amount of time to reach worm speed, and that's the bare minimum specification. We have got to be out of here through the wormhole by then or we'll wind up cooked along with the planet and everything else in this system. And how it works out, we leave here a couple hours after sunset down there under full power or we don't make it. We're still here, the nova clobbers us along with everything else, and pfizz, we're dead, so's all the stuff we have on board, and we never get home."

"There must be some sort of margin we can shave," she said.

"Sure there is," he agreed. "There was. We had all kinds of safety margins built into the original plan, we were going to be out of here worst case a couple of weeks before the nova hit. She made me kill every damned one of them. It's literally down to a few minutes of margin now. And a few minutes damned well doesn't cover a couple more days hanging around where we are. We simply can't wait."

"We came for the Edenites, Captain," she reminded him. "That's our whole purpose. They need those two days to prepare. So we have to wait."

He threw up his hands. "Ma'am, it's not up to me. I'm happy to stay as long as you like. But you can't get around the numbers. I'm not responsible for the Edenites waiting until the last bloody second to make up their minds. I'm not the one who delayed your last visit down there, the one that changed their thinking, until there was no time left." He looked abashed for a second. "Not that I'm blaming you, ma'am, but, well ... And I'm also not the one who made us so late getting here in the first place." He directed a look at MacPherson, who returned it without expression. "None of this is my fault."

"No-one's blaming you, Captain," she said soothingly. "That's not the point."