Lieutenant Whitley looked crestfallen. "Then perhaps old Brass-bottom Gorman means some other guy named Strykalski?" To Cob, eight Martinis made anything possible.
"Could there be two Strykalskis?" demanded the owner of the name under discussion.
"No." Whitley sighed unhappily. "And there's only one Tellurian Rocket Ship Cleopatra in the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!"
"Tethys isn't so bad," protested Strike.
Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that distant moonlet. "Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!"
Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. "You mean Captain Hendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of Project Warp?"
Cob made a sour face. "Project Warp, yet! Sounds like a dog barking!" He growled deep in his throat and barked once or twice experimentally. The officer's club was silent, and a silver-braided Commodore sitting nearby scowled at Whitley. The Lieutenant subsided with a final small, "Warp!"
An imported Venusian quartet began to play softly. Strike ordered another round of drinks from the red-skinned Martian tending bar and turned on his stool to survey the small dance floor. The music and the subdued lights made him think of Ivy Hendricks. He really wanted to see her again. It had been a long time since that memorable flight when they had worked together to pull Admiral Gorman's flagship Atropos out of a tight spot on a perihelion run. Ivy was good to work with ... good to be around.
But there was apparently more to this transfer than just Ivy pulling wires to see him again. Things were tense in the System since Probe Fleet skeeterboats had discovered a race of group-minded, non-human intelligences on the planets of 40 Eridani C. They lived in frozen worlds that were untenable for humans. And they were apparently all parts of a single entity that never left the home globe ... a thing no human had seen. The group-mind. They were rabidly isolationist and they had refused any commerce with the Solar Combine.
Only CSN Intelligence knew that the Eridans were warlike ... and that they were strongly suspected of having interstellar flight....