"The thought had crossed my mind," she admitted, and touched her com button. "Navigation," she told the computer, and Commander Tho appeared on her screen. Santander was normally a stickler for courtesy and proper military procedure, but this time she didn't even give Tho time to acknowledge her call.

"Assuming present power levels remain constant, Commander," she said without preamble, "where will our Kangas break the theta wall?"

"The theta wall?" Commander Tho sounded surprised. "Just a moment, Ma'am." He looked down at his terminal to make calculations, then looked back up. "Assuming they do break it, Ma'am, they'll be two-point-one light-months from Sol with a normal-space velocity just over four-fifty lights. But-"

"Thank you, Commander." Santander stopped him with a courteous nod, then switched off and looked around the briefing room. There was tension in every face, and she noted tiny beads of sweat at Onslow's temples as she nodded slowly.

"It would seem, Colonel, that you're onto something," she said. "And that, people, leaves us with a little problem."

Silence answered her, and she turned back to Onslow.

"You say we're closing the differential on them, Captain. How long before we can bring them into MDM range?"

"Normally, we'd have the range in about-" he glanced at his memo comp "-thirty-two hours, but their gradient's a bitch. Their translation curve is flattening, but so is ours. We've never seen a Kanga multi-dee run at this output, so I can't predict when their gradient will max out. It looks like we still have the edge, but we're into emergency over-boost now."

He did not add that no one ever used emergency over-boost, even on acceptance trials, and certainly not with drives in need of overhaul. Such demands on the multi-dee generators tremendously multiplied the chance of setting up a disastrous harmonic between them and the normal-space drive which actually moved the ship.

"Assuming we stay coherent," he went on, "I'd guesstimate that we should be able to range on them dimensionally in about two hundred hours."