aboard

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Commander Wright said. "I undershot a bit."
"Stop fishing for compliments, Toby," Terekhov said, never looking away from the astrogation plot. "Five hundred k-klicks off on a thirty-eight light-year jump? Sounds like a bull's-eye to me."
He looked up in time to see Wright's grin. The astrogator remained probably the most private person aboard Hexapuma, and he continued to ration words as if someone were levying a surcharge on them. But he did have his own dry sense of humor, and that grin told Terekhov he'd caught the lieutenant commander exercising it.
"I suppose it's fairly close, Skipper," Ansten FitzGerald observed over the communications link to Auxiliary Control.
Terekhov had rethought things just a bit, and FitzGerald had Naomi Kaplan with him on the backup command deck. Terekhov had kept Guthrie Bagwell on the bridge, to run Hexapuma's electronic warfare systems for him, but he'd flipped Abigail Hearns and Kaplan. He planned on making his own tactical decisions, anyway, and if something happened to him, Ansten would have the best, most experienced tac officer in the ship to help him deal with it. Paulo d'Arezzo would run the EW console for her, and Aikawa Kagiyama would serve as her junior tac officer. Helen Zilwicki, who Terekhov privately believed was the best tactical specialist among the midshipmen, held the JTO's slot with Abigail, here on the bridge.
"Why, thank you, Sir," Wright said, and Bernardus Van Dort shook his head. The skinsuited Rembrandter—who,

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