Course Correction
They met in the ring ready room again at the eleventh hour, all six of them, and Kati with them. Anneli had gone down to deck eleven and brought her up. She had carried the girl's book and the girl's thermal sheet and had said, at the hatch, *you are not in trouble and you are coming with us*, and Kati had looked at her for a long moment and then had stood up and put on her too-big coverall and followed her through the service corridor without a word. The committee had agreed that the child would be in the room for what happened next. Tomas had insisted. He had said, *if we are deciding whether to wake a captain because of her, she is present for the decision, or she is not part of the ship*. Nobody had argued.
She sat on the bench next to Anneli with her feet not quite reaching the floor. She was watching Mihkel.
"We are not waking Aavik," Anneli said, when they were all there. "I am changing my mind. We agreed twelve hours. I am spending one of them telling you that twelve hours is not going to be enough, and I do not want to wake a captain onto a problem we cannot hand to her in one coherent piece."
Marta leaned forward. "Then what."
"I think we change course."
The silence in the room was considerable.
Anneli pulled up the mission plan on the wall screen. The Kaleva's track stretched out in its long simple arc, a line from Sol to the target system, with the slow