As the Europa matched vectors, the missile became visible to unaided eyes.  Sigrid Holmen looked from her pilot board and saw the shark form, still kilometres away but magnified by the screen, etched against blackness and thronged stars.  Her finger poised on the emergency thrust button.  Something would go wrong, she told herself wildly; it would, and no human muscles could close the engine circuit fast enough for the ship to escape.  To travel so far and then return to be killed!

But did that matter?  herself answered uprushing anguish.  When Earth was an ember, when hills and forests were vanished, when every trace of her folk from the time they entered the land to hunt elk as the glaciers melted to the hour when Father and Mother bade her good-bye in their old red-roofed house... when everything was gone?  One senseless kick of some cosmic boot, and the whole long story came to an end and had all been for nothing.

Hatred of the murderers crowded out fear and grief alike.  Hatred focused so sharply on the thing which pursued her ship that it seemed the steel must melt.

Steadily, then, her finger rested.  She watched the missile drift across her view as it checked acceleration to change course.  She watched it begin to overhaul again.  Still the Europa plodded away from dead Earth at a stolid five gravities; and still Chief Gunnery Officer Vukovic crouched immobile over her instruments, adjusting her controls.  Time stretched until Sigrid felt time must rip across.

"Bien," Alexandra Vukovic said, and punched a button of her own.  The slugs that hosed from No. One turret were not visible, but she leaned back and reached into her shapeless uniform tunic.  She even grinned a little.  The pack of cigarettes was not yet out of her pocket when the slugs struck.  From end to end they smote the missile.  Thermite plus oxidizer seamed it with white fire.  Sigrid watched the thin plates torn open, curling as if in agony.  Good! she exulted.  The missile dropped from view.  She cut paragrav thrust and asked the radar officer, Katrina Tenbroek, for a reading.  The Dutch girl forced herself out of a white-faced daze and reported the missile had ceased acceleration.