Captain Stirling had been in somewhat deep thought when Alice approached him. She asked him if he was expecting trouble, and he nodded. "Intel says that with the exact time we left Orpheus IV's spacedock and entered hyperspace, we should arrive exactly in time for the first shots of the battle. And I'll be frank with you, Alice, I don't want this to be a repeat of the Gloval Catastrophe...." The 'Gloval Catastrophe' was the name used to describe the event in which the newly-anointed Captain James Gloval, a man regarded at the time as the greatest academy graduate in the last decade, lost control of both his cruiser the [i]Vindication[/i], and all of its crew to the rebel forces it was engaged with. This event being considered the most costly disaster of the war. With many people now praising Stirling as the the next great Academy man, he didn't want to follow in Gloval's footsteps anymore than he had to.