Bolton walked calmly down the aisle reveling in the hum of efficiency about him. He knew he was dreaming. He had dreamed this dream a thousand times before, each time as real seeming as when he had first lived it. The officers were at their stations giving and taking endless status reports, systems checks and start-up procedures; running and re-running nav calc sims and a myriad of other routine tasks that were needed to man a warship through a hyperspatial jump.
There was an underlying electric tension in the air, for this ship was jumping into battle and they all might die. He looked at the big screen. The Dog Star hung there dimly, shrouded in its sickly radiations. It was not Sirius, old earth's famous dog star of the ancient mariners. This was a burnt up, shriveled dead thing
