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seven hardened
     military cameras. This was an unusual arrangement of eyes for him, as he preferred
     more sensitive scientific units. I thought about asking him why he was set up for
     a fight, but didn’t bother. There were only a few minutes left, and I figured it could
     wait.
    “All right,” I said. “We don’t need you right here. Choose your own ground, Marvin.”
    He reshaped himself into a cylindrical formation and snaked away into a circular conduit
     in the floor. Everyone glanced at him as he left. The crew was used to him, but he
     still elicited headshakes and rolled eyes wherever he went. Most of us in Star Force
     knew Marvin by now. He was bizarre, but in a familiar way, like the crazy uncle who
     lived the family attic.
    “There it is,” Welter said.
    My eyes flew to the holographic tank in the middle of the room. The Crustacean ship
     appeared at the ring without fanfare. There was no explosion of radiation upon its
     arrival on our side of the ring. It simply slipped from another part of the galaxy
     into the Eden system without so much as a whisper.
    We scanned it the moment it emerged, of course. I examined every reading, and everything
     showed green. The ship was armed, but it wasn’t a flying bomb stuffed with fusion
     warheads. There were radioactive elements aboard, but that was to be expected. The
     type and amount of dangerous components wasn’t out of the norm for a cruiser of this
     size. If it did fire a missile into our base at extremely close range, it would definitely
     damage us, but at the cost of having us destroy a nice ship. I was confident in the
     layered armor and layered systems in my battle station. We could withstand a hard
     blow if it came down to that. I didn’t think we had any choice, we had to let him
     come close to talk to us. The risk of an attack was small, and was worth the chance
     of normalizing relations with these prickly neutrals.
    The alien ship decelerated rapidly as it made its final approach. It had been slowing
     down for hours, as if it intended to dock when it reached our station. The design
     was new to me and oddly-shaped. Rather than a geometric configuration, or even a symmetrical
     one, the ship had humps here and there seemingly at random. It looked off-balance,
     but I supposed to the Crustaceans it was sleek and beautiful.
    “The ship is passing through the primary minefield,” Welter said, adjusting the tracking
     controls on the holographic tank.
    I looked around at my crew with a new thought. Most of them weren’t doing anything
     other than standing around watching. “Staff, I want everyone to scatter. Sandra and
     Welter, you stay here. Lester, head down to engineering. Pramrod, get yourself to
     maintenance. The rest of you, choose a weapons battery and set up camp. You can sip
     coffee and watch the secondary screens from there.”
    They stared at me for a second, then picked up their things and shuffled out of their
     seats. No one questioned me aloud, but there were a large number of baffled looks.
     I frowned. They were well-trained, but too slow for my taste.
     “ Move , people!” I roared suddenly, clapping my hands together. “In ten seconds, I don’t
     want to see so much as your suited butts walking away. I want you all gone .”
     This got their attention. Everyone rushed out of the bridge and jostled into the
     various corridors and elevators that led out to remote parts of the station. After
     they’d left, I noticed Sandra was watching me rather than the holotank. The Lobster
     ship was about half way between the ring and the station.
    “What was all that about, Kyle?” she asked.
    I shrugged. “I don’t know. But when I saw Marvin take himself out of here, it occurred
     to me that maybe he was smarter than the rest of us. What if you only had one ship,
     and could only make one suicidal attack? Where would you hit us?”
    She looked at me, her eyes widening. “The bridge?”
    “Why not?”
    “But they