"You fell out of the damned sky a hundred yards from my boat," he said bluntly, "and I fished you out." His face and voice softened. "I'm sorry there wasn't anything I could do for your friend."

"I guessed as much." She sighed sadly. "Poor Anwar. He came so far."

There was a moment of silence which he was loathe to break, but his curiosity was much too strong to be denied.

"Just how far did you come?" he asked. "Where are you from-and, please, don't hand me any more crap about the 'Terran Marines'!"

"It's not 'crap,' " she said. "Oh, I'm not from Terra myself. I'm from Midgard." She saw the mounting frustration in his eyes and explained kindly, "That's Sigma Draconis IV."

"Oh, great!" he snorted. "Parallel evolution's even better than the Terran Marines! Does everybody on Sigma Draconis look like you, or did they do plastic surgery before they dropped you on us?"

"'Plastic sur-?' Oh! Biosculpt!" She chuckled. "No, we're all like this, more or less ... though some of us are men," she added innocently.

"Listen-!" he started wrathfully, but she raised a placating hand as if to apologize for her flippancy.

"Sorry," she said contritely. "I couldn't resist." She smiled, but it was a more serious smile, and she leaned slightly forward. "I know it sounds confusing," she repeated, "but my people are as human as you are."

"Oh, sure! Blow a hole clear through me and I'll heal up overnight, too!"

"I said we're human, and we are," she said, and he blinked at her suddenly chill tone. She shook her head, as if angry with herself, and pressed her lips firmly together for a moment. Then she sighed.

"Please," she said. "Give me a tick, and I'll try to explain. All right?"

He nodded, not quite trusting himself to speak.

"Thank you. First of all, I am from Midgard, but Midgard was colonized from Earth." He started to protest the absurdity of her statement, then shut his mouth. It was hard, but he managed to keep it shut.

"Midgard," she continued with careful precision, "will be settled by humans in 2184." She met his eyes levelly. "That was about three hundred years ago ... for me."

He was trapped by her eyes. Her statement was patently insane, but so was what he'd seen the night he plucked her from the sea. So was her survival and the way she'd slept and eaten for the past four days. And her eyes were neither mad nor those of a liar, he thought slowly. Indeed, there was an edge of desperation under their calmness-and he sensed, somehow, that desperation was foreign to this girl.

"Are you telling me you're from the future?" he asked very carefully.

"Yes," she said simply.

"But ..." He shook his head again, more confused than ever, yet feeling as if understanding lurked just half a thought beyond his grasp. He drew a deep breath and fastened on an inconsequential as if for diversion.

"How does it happen you speak twenty-first-century English, then?"

"I don't," she said, and grinned faintly at his expression. "Not normally, I mean. Oh, mass literacy, printing, and audio recordings pretty much iced the language after the twentieth century, but it's actually a bit diff for me to match into your dialect. I'm a histortech by hobby, and that helps, but historical holodrama helps more." She laughed softly. "Not that they got it nickety, but they came close."

"'Nickety'?" he asked blankly.

"Sorry. It means, um, exactly correct. I'll have to be careful about my idioms." She smiled disarmingly. "I couldn't resist twisting you with that 'Take me to your leader' larkey, though. Some of the tainment dramas from your period are manic."

He felt suspicion sagging into acceptance. She was speaking English, all right, but the more she said, the more he realized that it wasn't quite his English. And as she relaxed, the differences became more pronounced. He was astonished to realize he actually believed her ... sort of.

"All right," he said. "But why are you here? What the hell is going on? Those were nukes you were throwing around up there, honey!"

"Yes," she said softly, her face suddenly serious once more. "Yes, they were." Her fingers pleated the edge of her sheet unhappily. "You see, Ster Aston, I'm not here for pleasure. I came-" she drew a deep breath and met his eyes again "-to prevent the destruction of the human race ... and I'm afraid I haven't quite done that yet."

Aston leaned back and closed his eyes, counting slowly to fifty behind his lowered lids. It was all preposterous of course, he thought almost distantly, and yet ... and yet... .

His mind went back to that night of terrible explosions, and he felt his doubt crumble. Not his confusion-that became worse, if anything-but the memory of those searing flashes and their thunder could not be rejected. Yet it was another memory which suggested just how desperate she was to accomplish whatever task had brought her here. He'd rerun his mental records of that fight again and again, and one point had become glaringly clear; she'd been terribly outnumbered, but she'd been the attacker. And, he reminded himself, she'd gotten all but one of her enemies.

His face showed no sign of his thoughts, but he felt a surge of admiration for the naked youngster sitting on his bunk. He was no pilot, but he'd seen a great deal of combat in his time. He had a very clear notion of what it took to face that sort of odds-and of the skill needed to achieve what she had. He wasn't so foolish as to think courage and skill guaranteed honesty, but he felt oddly certain she wasn't lying to him.

He sighed and opened his eyes slowly, standing without a word, and rummaged in a locker for a black, silk-screened tee-shirt decorated with a dramatic head-on view of an old US Air Force A-10 attack plane. He tossed it to her, and she tugged it over her head. It covered her like a tent, he thought as he wiggled past her in the narrow confines of the cabin.

Amanda chose that specific moment to surprise him with an unexpected motion, and he lost his balance. He leaned away from the bunk, falling towards the table to avoid landing on his guest, but a hand flashed out, moving faster than any hand he'd ever seen. He was more than a foot taller than she, but she pulled him back up one-handed ... and with very little apparent effort.

Aston stood very still, then continued to the stove and put his battered old coffee pot on to heat. He turned a chair around and straddled it, leaning his chest against its back and reaching for his pipe.

"Pretty well-muscled, aren't you?" he said, watching her run curious fingers over the raised, slightly pebbled texture of the shirt's silk-screening. She seemed fascinated by it.

"What?" She looked up with a furrowed brow, then smiled. "Oh. I suppose I am, but I came by it naturally, Ster Aston. I told you I'm from Midgard." He raised his eyebrows, and she explained. "Our gravity runs about twenty percent higher."

"I see." He filled his pipe slowly, then found his butane lighter and took his time lighting the tobacco. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of his smoke, but she seemed more curious about it than irritated by it.

"Okay," he said finally. "Tell me about this war."

"I'll try, but it's a long story."

"That's all right." He grinned around his pipe and reached for a cup and the coffee pot. "We've got plenty of time, I'm afraid. We're over a week out of Portsmouth, and your nukes fried my radio, or I'd've had proper medical people out here to take you off my hands long ago."

"I see," she said, watching him pour and licking her lips. "Excuse me, but is that Terran coffee?"

"It sure isn't Martian," he said dryly.

"Sorry. It's just that back home Terran coffee's as rare as ... a hen's tooth?" she finished on a questioning note and raised an eyebrow.

"Scarce as hen's teeth," he corrected, and she nodded, filing it away. He had the very strong impression she wouldn't need the same correction twice. "Want some?"