Dane looked at him. “Is that so?”

“You’re damned right,” Matsura shot back. “No Earth Command captain would ever have taken a chance like that.”

Dane shrugged. “Then maybe they should consider it.”

“Are you out of your mind?” asked Matsura, turning dark with anger. “You’re going to defend that gambit–after it crippled my ship and injured seventeen of my crewmen?”

Dane smiled a thin smile. “Given a million chances, I’d do it a million times . . . hands down, no contest.”

Matsura was speechless.

“Of course,” Dane went on, “I’m not one of the noble black and gold, so none of my skill or experience means a flipping thing. But I’ll tell you what . . . I’ve met a few Romulans in my day too. In fact, I was blasting them out of space long before you ever warmed your butt in a center seat.”

Matsura’s eyes narrowed. “There’s a difference between experience and luck,” he pointed out.

“Men make their own luck,” Dane told him. “I make mine by pushing the envelope–by doing what they least expect. Come to think of it, you might want to think about pushing the envelope a little yourself.”

“Me . . .?” Matsura asked.

“That’s right. Dare to be different. Or do you want to spend the rest of your life living in your flyboy buddies’ shadow?”

Matsura’s jaw clenched. “I don’t live in anyone’s shadow–not Hagedorn’s or Stiles’s or anyone else’s. What I do is carry out my mission within the parameters of good sense.”

Dane grunted. “Right.”

“You think otherwise?”

Dane shrugged. “I think good sense is what people hide behind when they can’t do any better.”

“Says the man who hasn’t got any.”

“Says the man who accomplished his mission,” Dane noted.

Matsura flushed and got to his feet. “Obviously, I’m wasting my time talking to you. You know everything.”

“Funny,” said Dane, keeping his voice nice and even. “I was just about to tell you the same thing.”

Matsura’s mouth twisted.

“And just for the record,” said Dane, “I didn’t expect you to protect my flank. As I said, I’m not much of a team player.”

The other man didn’t respond to that one. He just turned his back on Dane, tapped the door control and left.

The captain shook his head. Matsura had potential–anyone with an eye in his head could see that. But the way things were going, it didn’t look like he was going to realize it.

Not that that’s any of myheadache, Dane told himself, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes.

Matsura was still boiling over Dane’s remarks as he left the Yellowjacket’stransporter room . . . and on an impulse, headed for a part of his vessel he hadn’t had occasion to visit lately.

Men make their own luck,Dane had told him.

But Matsura had done that, hadn’t he? During the war, he had been as effective a weapon as Earth Command could have asked for. He had risen to every challenge thrown his way.

But Dane wasn’t talking about efficiency or determination. He was talking about thinking outside the box. He was talking about a willingness to try something different.

You might want to think about pushing the envelope . . .

And, damn it, Matsura would do just that. He would show Dane that he could take the direction least expected of him–and do more with it than the butterfly catchers themselves.

Neither Shumar, Cobaryn, nor Dane had discovered anything of value with all their meticulous site scanning. But with the help of his research team, Matsura would turn up something. He would find a way to beat the aliens that his colleagues had overlooked.

Or do you want to spend the rest of your life living in your fly‑boy buddies’ shadow?

Matsura swore beneath his breath. Dane was wrong about him–dead wrong–and he was going to make the arrogant sonuvagun see that.

The captain had barely completed the thought when he realized that his destination was looming just ahead of him. Arriving at the appropriate set of doors, he tapped the control pad on the bulkhead and watched the titanium panels slide aside.

Once, this relatively large compartment on Deck Eight had been a supply bay. It had been converted by Starfleet into a research laboratory, equipped with three state‑of‑the‑art computer workstations and a stationary scanner that was three times as sensitive as the portable version.

It was all Clarisse Dumont’s doing. If the fleet was going to conduct research in space, she had argued, it might as well enjoy the finest instruments available.

Matsura hadn’t been especially inclined to make use of them before; he had left that to those members of his crew with a more scientific bent. But he would certainly make use of them now.

“Mr. Siefried,” he said, addressing one of the three crewmen who had beamed down to the colony to collect data.

Siefried, a lanky mineralogist with sharp features and close‑cropped hair, evinced surprise as he swiveled in his seat. After all, it wasn’t every day that Matsura made an appearance there.

“Sir?” said Siefried.

“What have we got?” asked the captain, trying his best to keep his anger at Dane under wraps.

The mineralogist shrugged his bony shoulders. “Not much more than we had before, I’m afraid. At least, nothing that would explain why the aliens attacked the colony.”

Matsura turned to Arquette, a compact man with startling blue eyes. “Anything to add to that?” he asked.

Arquette, an exobiologist, shook his head. “Nothing, sir. Just the same materials we saw before. But I’m still working on it.”

“Perhaps if we had a context,” said Smithson, a buxom physicist who specialized in energy emissions, “some kind of backdrop against which we could interpret the data.”

“That would be helpful, all right,” Matsura agreed. “Then again, if we knew something about these aliens, we probably wouldn’t have needed to do site research in the first place.”

The scan team looked disheartened by his remark. Realizing what he had done, the captain held his hand up in a plea for understanding. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it came out.”

“It’s all right, sir,” said Smithson, in an almost motherly tone of voice. “It’s been a frustrating time for all of us.”

Matsura nodded. “To say the least.”

But he wasn’t going to accept defeat so easily. Not when Dane’s smugness was still so vivid in his memory.

“Do you mind if I take a look?” he asked Smithson.

“Not at all,” said the physicist, getting up from her seat to give the captain access to her monitor.

Depositing himself behind the workstation, Matsura took a look at the screen, on which the Oreias Seven colony was mapped out in bright blue lines on a black field. He hadn’t actually seen the site in person, so he took a moment to study it.

Immediately, a question came to mind.

“Why does the perimeter of the colony follow these curves?” he asked, pointing to a couple of scalloped areas near the top of the plan.

“There are hills there,” said Siefried, who had come over to stand behind him. “Not steep ones, mind you, but steep enough to keep the colonists from erecting their domes.”

Makes sense,the captain thought. Why build on a slope when you can build on a flat?

Then again, why build near hills at all? Matsura presented the question to his mineralogist.

“Actually,” Siefried noted, “it would have been difficult to do otherwise. All the regions suitable for farming have hilly features. The area the colonists picked is the flattest on the planet.”

“I see,” said the captain.

He studied the layout of the colony some more, looking for any other detail that might trigger an insight. Nothing seemed to do that, however. Without anything else to attract Matsura’s eye, it was eventually drawn back to the two scalloped areas.

“What is it, sir?” asked Arquette, who had come to stand behind the captain as well.