Stars in the Sand by Richard Tongue

ferry Lieutenant Caine over there. She’s doing some sort of inspection, looking for hidden compartments or something like that.”
     He sat bolt upright, “Why didn’t you say that before? I bet the Captain’s having her check the ship out. She sat in on my meeting with him.”
     “ Those two are tight,” she said. “If he was going to send anyone over quietly, I bet it would be her.”
     “ Which means we might be getting to go after all, without doing anything desperate.”
     Cooper’s communicator bleeped, and he reached for it with his stump. He cursed under his breath, reached around and raised it to his ear, “Cooper here, Captain.”
     “ Captain?” Duquesne said. “Are you promoting me, Corporal? I wish you’d reconsider, if so. I don’t want the damn job.”
     “ Sorry, Doctor. I was expecting a call from the Captain.”
     “ Well, I’m sorry to interfere with your social arrangements, but I want to see you at 0700 tomorrow morning. Quinn’s delivering your new hand around then, and we need to get it tuned.”
     “ I thought I wasn’t getting it for a fortnight?”
     “ Someone bumped you up the priority schedule. Obviously you have friends in high places now. Put in a word for me, will you; I could use a pay rise.”
     “ Thanks, Doctor. I’ll be there on time.”
     “ Bring coffee. Lots of coffee. I don’t do mornings well. Duquesne out.”
     “ Did I hear that right?” Barbara asked. “They’ve bumped you up ahead of the critical ship repair components.”
    “ Let’s not get our hopes up,” he said. “This could be the Captain’s idea of a consolation prize.”
    Shaking her head, she replied, “He doesn’t strike me as that sort. I think if he said no, he’d just say no, he wouldn’t try and pacify you.”
    “ When we lost them, he told me that he would do anything it took to get them back. I understand that he can’t commit Alamo to this. Most of the crew just want to get home, and I don’t blame them. That’s why I tried to give him the alternative, so that he didn’t have to commit the whole crew to this. Hell, I know that the ship would never get through. We’ll have to sneak in, and the freighter is perfect for the job.”
    “ It won’t be as easy as that,” Barbara replied. “There are a lot of hoops to jump through. The Captain has to think of all of them.”
    “ We can do it, though. Between Alamo, the freighter and the station, we’ve got everything we would need to pull this mission off.”
    Pausing for a second, she looked around the empty room, “Even if all of that is so, you’ve got to remember the odds. This isn’t exactly going to be a low-risk operation. There’s a good chance that we could end up captured like the rest.”
     “ I know. I’m willing to take the risk.”
      Another figure appeared in the door, and uninvited, Cantrell walked in, carrying a pair of ration packs. She looked at the two of them with a smile and walked over to sit opposite them, dropping her cargo onto the table.
     “ What’s up?” she asked.
     “ We were just having a conversation,” Barbara said.
     “ I think I can add something to it. Besides dinner.”
     “ What?” Cooper asked.
     “ Petty Officer Fox just got back from the station. He was grousing in the mess about being on double duty; he’s been ferrying prisoners back and forth all evening.”
     “ Did he say why?”
     “ Something about an urgent series of interrogations. Top priority stuff. Hey, and I took a look around the freighter with Caine, and she was installing some new stuff in the computer systems. You know what that means.”
     “ Don’t jump to conclusions,” Barbara said. “We could just be planning to take the freighter home with us. I could think of a hundred reasons for a software upgrade.”
     “ Only one of them makes sense, though,” she said, snatching a piece of nearly-cheese from the food pack. “They’re going ahead