Ceremony

Chapter Thirty-Four

I

"Marika!"

Grauel's tone startled Marika. She threw a hasty touch toward the huntress, fearing she had encountered something deadly. But it was not danger, just something she had found. Something that had her excited. Marika hastened to join her.

This was at least the hundredth habitable world and thousandth star they had visited since leaving home. The number of stars inside the radius Marika considered logically limiting, worth investigating, seemed infinite. She had lost track of time.

Time had little meaning when all worlds were different and each begged to be explored. She had thought the film Bagnel had given her, in rolls upon hundreds of rolls, was a ridiculous oversupply. But now most of it was gone, exposed, sealed, ready to be returned to those who would be avid to search it for the new, the weird, the terrible. The universe seemed capable of producing an infinitude of wonders.

More than three years had passed. None of Marika's original bath were with her anymore, having one by one proved out the value of her experiment or simply having grown homesick and opted to return on the Redoriad voidship High Night Rider, which resupplied Marika's base every few months.

Marika scrambled across a decomposed rock face where striations glistened unsettlingly alien blues, perched a hundred feet above a patch of tableland where Grauel crouched, studying something. "What have you got, Grauel?"

"A campfire site," the huntress called back. "Come down and see. Your talent might find something I cannot."

Marika's heartbeat picked up. Campfire site! There was no intelligent life on this world. And it had not been visited by any meth before, unless by the Serke. Maybe after all this time, chance had brought her to a warm trail.

She had discarded the world as a possible Serke hiding place only seconds after making orbit. The presence of silth would not have been hard to detect. These years among the stars, reaching out to find an enemy never there, had stretched her far-touching talent till it would have shamed the most talented of fartouchers back home. She did not believe anyone with the talent could hide from her long.

Aliens of the sort she sought should not have been hard to detect either, if only by the talent vacuum the brethren suspected should exist around them. She had grounded only because they all needed to rest, needed to feel a planet beneath their feet.

She was very strong now, able to make venture after venture without pause. She was not the least uncomfortable with the void or the Up-and-Over. It was as if she had been born to stalk the stars. But her bath reached their limits after six or seven passages and needed several days to recuperate. Grauel and Barlog never became comfortable with star-faring. She had taken them all to their limits this time. This site she had chosen only because it looked safe and comfortable.

Talus bounded around her boots as she slipped and slid down the slope, thanking Grauel's increased propensity for wandering while they were down, thanking the All for interesting the huntress in the oddities produced by the worlds they visited. It had paid a dividend.

Maybe.

Grauel remained crouched over a circle of stones blackened on one side. The circle lay away from the foot of the cliff, but was still sheltered from the prevailing winds. A glance told Marika it was an old site, barely recognizable for what it was.

Grauel glanced up. "It was not like this when I found it. I had to reconstruct it. I noticed some stones that looked smoked on one side scattered around. Then just a hint of a smell of smoke still in the ground here. Once I started looking around I found more stones. It all came together fairly easily."

Marika nodded. "What can you tell me about it?" Grauel was the huntress. This was her area of expertise.

"Very little, except that it's here. And it shouldn't be. But it did seem that this ledge would be a good place to ground a darkship."

"How far afield did you go?"

"Not far."

"Let's snoop around, see what we can find."

Careful visual search turned up nothing more.

"If they were here, they must have had a latrine and some place to dump their garbage," Grauel said.

"They may have had huntresses with them," Marika chided. Grauel and Barlog, treating the search as they would a hunt in their native Ponath, left every resting place pristine, naked of evidence that anyone had visited. Both huntresses believed the Serke were hunting for them in turn.

"One doubts it. No skilled huntress would have left a fire site so obvious to the eye. My thought was that you might use your talent to look where the eye cannot see."

"You are right, of course." Marika went down through her loophole and caught a suitable ghost, then searched the area again, using the altered perspective of the otherworld. She found what Grauel wanted in a crack to one side of the ledge. She returned to flesh. "You were right. Over here. Whoever they were, it looks like they used one natural hole for a garbage pit and a latrine both."

"Grab yourself a stick," Grauel said.

"A stick?"

"Do you want to stir through it with your paws?"

"Of course. All right." Marika collected pieces of dead wood. Grauel used one to dig at soil that had been used to cover the wastes.

"Been a while for sure," the huntress said. "It has all decayed away to nothing. It must not rain or snow much here, for the black on the rocks to have remained noticeable. But we're wasting our time. There's nothing ... Hello!" Grauel dropped onto her belly and reached into the hole. She wriggled forward, bent at the waist, got hold of something, wriggled back and sat up. She held a lump to the light. Marika saw nothing special till Grauel spat upon it and cleaned it on her sleeve.

"A button." It was a tarnished metal button with a few fibers of thread still attached. It was embossed. Grauel passed it to her. Marika studied it, then compared it to the five upon the left wrist of her jacket. "That is a Serke witch sign on it, Grauel. We're on the trail. They've been here. I have a premonition. We are within a few passages through the Up-and-Over of catching up with them."

"That's what you've been saying since we established our first base."

"This time I am right. I can feel it. I am convinced."

"I hope you are." Grauel sounded sour.

"Grauel?"

"I do not want to die out here, Marika. How would the All find me?"

"What?" This was a surprise.

"In fact, if I had my choice, I would spend my final days in the upper Ponath, at the packstead that gave me life."

Marika was baffled. What had brought this on?

"I am getting old, Marika. In the Ponath I might already be one of the Wise. Likewise Barlog. The witchery and medicine of the silth have kept us young beyond our time, but time never stops gnawing. Lately I find I cannot help remembering that we are the last of the Degnan pack, and that our pack lies beneath the northern ice still unMourned."

"Yes. I know all that. You are indeed old for the Ponath, but not old by standards of the silth. There will be time, Grauel. We will see to the Mourning. But we can't go now. We're finally making some headway out here. We've finally found something besides a place where they aren't and haven't ever been. Maybe this world is a regular stop. Maybe if we just sat here and waited ... I know what I'll do. I'll make this world our new base. We'll continue the hunt from here."

"Which means a whole new globe of space to search," Grauel countered, showing no excitement. "It will be like starting from the beginning."

"Think positively, Grauel. Think lucky. Let's go tell the others."

"What I think is I wish I had not called you down here."

That evening Marika climbed a peak while the others rested. She stood staring at the stars. There were few to be seen, for the dust cloud spanned the heavens of that world. She selected the next half dozen stars that should be investigated. Into the cloud itself this time? Yes. What better place to hide?

For the most part she had avoided going into the cloud during her search. She was much less comfortable operating there because there were so few landmark stars. She had reasoned that the Serke explorers would have suffered the same reluctance. But perhaps one of their more daring Mistresses of the Ship, possibly a Bestrei, might have dared the darkness and have found the aliens.

What lay beyond the cloud? No one knew. No one had tried to reach its nether side. Maybe no one but the Serke had had any contact with the aliens because they were over there and they too were reluctant to enter the dust.

The dust cloud it would be, for a time.

II Marika's bath had again been rotated. Grauel and Barlog had begun to show gray and even lose a little fur. Marika herself had begun to feel age in her bones when she rose some mornings. And there were moments when the homeworld called so strongly that her resolve almost broke. There were moments when she was tempted to go home just to discover what had happened in her absence. Sometimes, during the on-planet resting pauses, she lay awake when she was supposed to be sleeping, wondering about Bagnel, longing for his company, and wondering about the progress of the mirrors she had imagined into reality, and even about the warlock, her littermate, Kublin.

She knew very little about what had happened since her departure. But for the regular visit of High Night Rider, and the occasional appearance of a Mistress of the Ship with an adventurous spirit, a desire to visit the strange worlds Marika had reported, and a knack for assembling bath of like temperament, she had no ties with home.

Grauel and Barlog had recognized the process at work and had ceased their importunities for abandoning the quest, fearing their petitions would harden her resolve.

She was finding it increasingly difficult to convince herself that the hunt was worthwhile. There was no end to the universe, even within the dust cloud. There was always another star. And, inevitably, always another disappointment.

It was time for High Night Rider to come again. She felt she had reached a time of decision. If the news from home were bad, she would return.

The mirrors, insofar as she knew, were coming along well. A brief note half a year earlier, written by Bagnel, had told her the mirror in the leading trojan was well ahead of schedule. So much for his doubts about his management skills.

But he had mentioned trouble down on the homeworld's surface. The old rogue male trouble had begun to reassert itself. The Communities seemed unable to stem it. This time the outlaws seemed to be working independent of the brethren, under the dominance of their wehrlen, but there were those, according to Bagnel, who did not believe the warlock was the true source of their witchcraft. Silth did not want to believe a male could be so strong, so felt the rogues had to be getting aid and encouragement from silth smuggled in by the Serke.

On its last visit High Night Rider had brought word that the rogues were sabotaging the brethren as well as silth, that assassination had become their primary weapon. They were using their talent-suppressing device again, and the sisterhoods could not cope.

Marika suspected they could not cope because they did not feel motivated enough. Even now, after all the disaster they had wrought, it was difficult to get silth to take males seriously as a threat.

Marika did not want to take up that task again, but it seemed she might have to, if the vague reports she received indicated the way things were actually moving. If the Communities themselves would not spend the effort and energy to defend themselves adequately.

A wave of undirected touch passed over her. She looked at the sky as one of her bath called out, "Mistress, High Night Rider has come."

A blob of light moved across the sky, visible even in daylight. It slowed, maneuvered, fell into orbit. Marika rose and stalked through the camp, which today housed nearly a score of meth. Two other darkships were operating from her base, not participating in the hunt, but examining more closely the most interesting of the worlds that Marika had discovered. Their Mistresses were young ones, filled with a desire to expand the frontiers, and they had found themselves teams of bath willing to join their ventures.

Marika's reports home had had one effect: They had somewhat revivified the old spirit of exploration. Once she had blazed a trail others were eager to devote closer attention to what she had found.

She suspected Bagnel was irked. That meant darkships scattered about the void contributing nothing to the mirror project. She suspected the tedium of construction work was what had encouraged these younger Mistresses and bath to come out to the edge of beyond.

The explorers could do little to truly expand meth knowledge. There were more curiosities among the starworlds than could have been cataloged by ten thousand darkship crews in ten thousand lifetimes.

Of late even Marika had been spending more time looking at those curiosities than she had been being driven by her need to overhaul the Serke.

"Darkships coming down, mistress," someone called. "At least three of them. Maybe four."

That was to be expected. There were supplies to be delivered, and always there was another group of explorers who had saved themselves effort by scavenging a ride aboard the giant voidship.

Though the darkships would not ground for a long time yet, Marika went to the landing area with the others. They all stood around waiting, joining in speculation about what news would come from home.

The first darkship down carried a passenger.

"By the All! Bagnel!" Marika swore as the tradermale stepped down. He was shaking, numb with awe. "What are you doing here?" He did not hear her. Whether he was amazed to have arrived healthy, or overawed by having traveled so far, he was completely turned inside himself. She rushed over and repeated her question as meth yelled about clearing the area so the next darkship could ground.

Silth stared. A male! Out here!

Bagnel shuddered as though shaking water off, and said, "Marika." He looked her over. "You have changed."

"So have you. Is that gray I see there? Time gnaws, does it not? It must be fate. I was just thinking about you-and here you are. What are you doing here? Come with me. Before that Mistress gets impatient and plops down on our heads."

"Are you all right? You look tired."

"I am tired, Bagnel. I have looked at more stars than you can imagine even exist. Though you must have seen how many there are when you spanned the reach outside the cloud. Come. Let's get something to eat. You must be starved."

"My stomach is too unsettled. That passage ... It was too much for me, I fear. The Up-and-Over ... I find myself dreading the return trip already."

"You still haven't told me what you're doing here. Has something happened?"

"No. Except that I have been stripped of my job and prerogatives. Whoa! It's only temporary. A cabal of senior factors and high silth ganged up on me and ordered me to take a vacation. They said I was pushing myself too hard, that I was on the edge of a breakdown because I was trying too hard to keep the project ahead of schedule. They stripped me of my powers so I would have no choice. Since they wouldn't let me do anything at all, and the Redoriad were willing when I approached them, I decided to come walk the stars while I had a chance. You invited me, you'll recall. I think I am sorry I did it."

"I recall. I believe I invited you to come after I caught the Serke."

"But you haven't. You've been out here forever. It begins to seem unlikely, doesn't it?"

"I am narrowing it down, Bagnel. Narrowing it down. I have a very good idea where they're not."

"You are still able to be amused at yourself."

"Not often. But I don't think it will be too much longer."

"You sound like you're trying to convince yourself."

Marika noted Grauel and Barlog hovering. They were polite enough to remain out of earshot, but they were there, eager to discover the meaning of Bagnel's appearance. Marika asked, "You're sure this isn't business? That someone didn't send you out to get me to come home?"

He looked surprised. "No. Why do you ask that?"

"We get very little reliable news out here. What we have gotten are rumors about increasingly bad rogue trouble. Trouble nobody seems able-or maybe just willing-to solve. I thought maybe someone sent you to get me to come back and deal with it."

"Marika ... I might as well put it bluntly. The vast majority of silth are very happy that you are out here instead of at home. That's why you get the support you do. The farther away you are, the happier they are."

"Oh."

"The rogues have become a problem again, though, that's for sure. They're much better organized this time. They learned a lot."

"I believe I predicted that. I believe no one would listen to me."

"Right. It's no longer possible to use the tactics you developed. One cannot be taken and forced to betray scores more by subjecting him to a truthsaying. They have structured their organization so that few members know any of the others. And they are careful to keep the risks low whenever they choose to strike."

"That was predictable too."

"And even where the hunters know who they are looking for it has been hard to track a culprit down. Your Kublin, for example."

"Kublin?" Marika had done her best not to think of her littermate over the years. It had been her thought to destroy his hope by shattering the support lent by the Serke and their rogue companions. But the Serke remained unshattered.

"He is rumored to be the mastermind, the one they call the warlock. Not one hunter has been able to find a trace of him since his escape from you. Whenever someone does get a line on him he is found to be gone by the time the hunt closes in. There is still strong support for him and those who fled with the Serke among the bond meth and even our worker brethren."

"I can find Kublin."

"No doubt. You have always done whatever you set your mind to. I will mention that to anyone who is interested. My own opinion is, you should continue the search for the Serke. Step it up, even. It could be important."

"Ah? Is that it?"

"What?"

"The true reason you put yourself through what it takes for a meth unfamiliar with the Up-and-Over to come out here?"

"I came for a vacation, Marika. I came where I could see a friend who has been missing from my life for far too long. I'm just trying to tell you what is happening at home. If you care to interpret that as an attempt at manipulation ... "

"I'm sorry. Go ahead. Tell me the news."

"Last month we finally caught a courier from the rogues trying to sneak in. Two of them, actually. Both brethren who had gone into exile aboard Starstalker. I was brought in for their questioning because they had things to say about the project."

"And? Did you get any hints as to where they are hiding?"

"Just one. Inside the dust cloud. Which you suspect already. Naturally, they would not have been risked had they known more. I wish we could have taken the Mistress of the Ship who brought them in."

"Of course. What did they have to say otherwise?"

"We learned a lot about what they've been doing, which is mostly marking time and hoping the aliens find them before you do. They are no longer so confident of Bestrei."

"What?"

"It turns out that our estimates of the Serke situation were not quite right. They have no direct contact with the alien. What they have is a very large alien ship orbiting a planet. They have been studying it and appropriating from it, while they wait for its builders to come looking for it."

"But ... "

"Give me a chance, Marika. There is a story. I'd better tell it so you know what I'm talking about."

"I think you'd better. Starting from the beginning."

"All right. Here it is. Way back, a venturesome Serke Mistress of the Ship ... "

"Kher-Thar Prevallin?"

"Exactly. That most famous of the farwanderers. A legend of our own times. But if you keep interrupting you will never hear the story."

"Sorry."

"Way back, Kher-Thar decided she wanted to see what lay on the far side of the dust cloud. While she was passing through she decided to rest her bath at a particular world. An almost optimally friendly one, by all accounts. After several days down she had just reached orbital distance departing when the alien ship appeared, I take it out of the Up-and-Over. The way I was told, it was not there one moment, and there the next. It detected the darkship and gave chase. Out of curiosity, apparently."

Marika grumbled beneath her breath. He was stretching it.

"No. There was no evidence the creatures aboard were hostile. But Kher-Thar, you will recall, was not known for her cool head. She panicked. Thinking she was being attacked, she attacked first. The aliens were unable to deal with her, though she was not known for the strength of her talent for the dark side. The aliens abandoned the chase. Kher-Thar scrambled into the Up-and-Over and scurried home, nearly killing her bath."

"I always thought she was overrated. She was a total misfit, which is why the Serke put up with her wandering in the first place. They wanted her out of their fur."

"You would understand that better than I."

"Vicious, Bagnel. Tell your story."

"Let me."

"Well?"

"The aliens who survived Kher-Thar's attack managed to get their ship into a stable orbit around the planet, but could not save themselves. When Kher-Thar returned, accompanied by a horde of Serke investigators, they were all dead. The investigators knew the importance of their find, but could make no sense of it. After long and often savage debate their ruling council voted to ask the dark-faring brethren bonds for help. Ever since, for more than twenty years, they have been studying the alien ship, appropriating equipment and technology, and waiting for another ship to come looking for the first."

"Why do they think one will come? We seldom send anyone to look for a lost darkship."

"I am not certain. But they are convinced one will. Perhaps because of the investment such a vessel would represent. The prisoners said it is huge. That for us to build it would take an effort on the scale of the mirror project."

"Then everything they did to us in the Ponath was purely on speculation? They might have gotten nothing at all for their trouble?"

"Apparently. Even under truthsaying the prisoners insist that no meth has ever met one of the aliens alive."

"Idiots."

"Maybe. You don't know how you would have reacted in identical circumstances. One like your Gradwohl, obsessed with making the Reugge Community into a power, might have done the same. Or worse. You dare not fault the Serke without faulting all silth. They were being silth."

"I will not argue that. I will only say they behaved in the most stupid fashion possible in being silth. And they continue in their stupidity. All those years and no ship has come? And they have not given up?"

"How long have you been looking for them?"

"More years than some care to count. Grauel and Barlog are not happy with me."

"It is the only hope they have left, Marika. If the aliens do not come, sooner or later you will. And, as I said, they are afraid Bestrei is no longer what she was.

"Suppose that ship was an explorer, the same as Kher-Thar's? With no more fixed a routine than hers? Suppose she had been lost instead? How long have you looked, knowing the place existed?"

"Even so ... I suppose I understand."

"So I think you should go on looking, though I am sure the search is wearing. You have to be getting closer, if only by the process of elimination. But so must the aliens. I wouldn't like to guess what might happen if the Serke were to make common cause with them."

"The weapons that destroyed TelleRai."

"Not to mention those mounted on the ships the rogues used. We have studied those endlessly, from fragments we captured, and we can make no sense of them. I fear we are just too far away in knowledge and technology. They might as well be your witchcraft. Nevertheless, brethren in the sciences believe larger weapons of the same sort could be used against planetary targets."

"I will admit I have been tempted to give up the hunt."

"I thought so when I saw you, Marika. You look tired. As if you're ready to accept defeat. But enough of that. I really did not come here on business. I'm dedicated to carrying out my orders, which are to spend a few months without worrying."

"How is the project coming?"

"Seventy percent completion on the leading mirror. Forty on the trailing. The orbitals for making fine and local adjustments are in place. We're getting almost forty percent of peak output. I understand that they have begun to have an effect. There was no measurable advance of the permafrost line this past winter."

"How far did it get?"

"Almost to the tropics. Well past Ruhaack. But it should begin to fall back soon. If the dust gets no thicker. And the probes we have run in the direction the sun is moving show no increase in density along the path to be followed for the next five hundred years. I think we will win the battle against the long winter. And, though you have spent very little time on it since you got it going, you will be remembered as the dam of the project."

"I am not much concerned about how the future recalls me, so long as there is a future. And I am still battling for it out here. In a hunt that, I am sure, will not be in vain, and that will not last much longer."

Bagnel bowed his head as if to mask his expression.

"Well, tradermale. Adventurer. Want to make it a working holiday? I can squeeze another body onto my darkship. You could be the first male ever to see new worlds."

III Bagnel stepped down off the darkship and surveyed the encampment with the look of one returning home. "I'll confess this, Marika. I never once worried about the project."

Marika lifted a lip in amusement. "It could not have been that bad. It wasn't the same as traveling in High Night Rider?"

"No. It was not the same. As you know perfectly well. It was more like falling forever. It was more unnerving than riding a darkship at home. There is something under your feet there, even if it is several thousand feet down. Still ... "

"What is that look in your eye?" Marika kept one eye on her bath and Grauel and Barlog, making sure they made sure the darkship was being readied for its next journey. She ruled the base strictly. She insisted all darkships be ready to lift at a moment's notice. The Serke could strike at any time. Would strike, she suspected, if they knew where to find her. She was stuck to their trail like the stubbornest hunting arft.

"Wonder, I suppose. I have to admit that, harrowing as it was, the experience touched something in me. I could develop a taste for exploration."

"Give up the mirrors, then. I am here. The darkship is here."

He looked at her narrowly, startled and tempted. "I think not, Marika. Your sisters would not understand."

"I suppose not. It was just a thought. Maybe someday. When the project is complete. When the Serke have been disposed of. When the aliens have been found and some sort of accommodation with them has been reached. Wouldn't it be in the grand tradition for us to fly away and never be seen again?"

He picked it up as a game. "Yes. We could just go on exploring, skipping from star to star, forever. We might be touched occasionally, in the far distance, and rumors would rise about a ghost darkship flitting out on the edge of the void. Young, fresh Mistresses would bring their darkships out to hunt the legend."

"But it couldn't be. We couldn't carry enough stores. And where would I find willing bath?"

"Oh, well."

"Tomorrow we will go out again. There is no end of stars in this sector-though those really worth investigating are running short."

But Marika returned to space much sooner.

The night was just hours old when a sudden, sharp, panicky touch smote Marika. Darkship! Starting down. Not from home.

Marika rushed from her hut. The base began coming to life around her. Darkship crews rushed to their ships. The touch came again. Serke! Oh. They have detected us. They are starting back up. They are fleeing. They are very frightened. The otherworld reeks of their fear. Hurry!

"Grauel! Barlog! Will you come on? We're going up!"

Sleepy-eyed, the untouched huntresses had come out to learn the cause of the commotion.

Marika's bath raced toward the wooden darkship, pre-flight rites forgotten. Marika tossed her rifle across her shoulder and dashed after them, shouting, "Come, you two. The Serke."

Grauel and Barlog raced for the darkship after snatching their weapons.

One voidship was off the ground already, rising swiftly. Marika's eyes were fiery as she glared at her senior bath, who was not hustling the silver bowl around fast enough to suit her.

"Wait!"

Bagnel wobbled toward them, trying to keep his trousers from tripping him by holding them up with one paw.

"No," Marika said. "This is the real thing, Bagnel. There are Serke up there."

Bagnel played deaf. He lined up for his turn at the silver bowl. The bath muttered something unappreciative, let him sip. Grauel extracted another flask of liquid from the locker under the axis platform and dumped it into the bowl. Then she dug out a spare rifle and forced it upon him. "One I owe you, male."

"I see you still carry the one I gave you at Akard."

"It has been a faithful tool. Like me, though, it is getting old and cranky."

Marika swore. The other darkship was aloft now. The first had dwindled to a speck, its Mistress driving it hard. And she had not yet gathered her ghosts. "You meth strap down good," she said. "Everyone strap down. This is going to be the ride of your lives."

Bagnel was strapped already. He began disassembling the weapon Grauel had given him. The huntress nodded with approval. Seated, she and Barlog did likewise with their own weapons.

Marika snatched the bowl from the senior bath, gulped its contents, then bounced to her place at the tip of the wooden dagger. She went down through her loophole and snagged ghosts, lifted off, and continued gathering ghosts as she rose, dropping smaller specimens as she snatched ever bigger, stronger denizens of the otherworld. She pressed mercilessly.

She overhauled one darkship at fifty thousand feet and the other before it made orbital altitude. All the while she caressed the void with the touch, tracking the Serke darkship as it fled toward where it could clamber into the Up-and-Over. She soon had its line of retreat clearly defined in her mind.

It pointed toward a section of cloud she had not yet explored. She sketched an imaginary circle around that line, finding only four stars within it. She discarded the one farthest off center.

She reached with the touch and told the other two Mistressess of the Ship, We will pursue. There are three stars close to their line of flight. I will take this one. She sent a picture of the stars and indicated which she had chosen for herself, then assigned each of them one of the two remaining. Push yourselves. Try to arrive before they do.

That was unlikely, she thought. Even for her, with her advantages. Though time lapses in the Up-and-Over depended on the strength and talent of the individual Mistress of the Ship, the Serke Mistress had a long start and death raving behind her to motivate her.

Marika began pushing down her chosen course before she reached orbital altitude and began gathering ghosts for the Up-and-Over long before she reached the traditional jumping distance. She grabbed at the Up-and-Over only minutes behind the Serke-long before she should have. Echoes of silent terror came from her bath, whom she had pushed near hysteria already with her demands.

Blackness, twisting. A sensation of infinite nothing. A hint of a deep space ghost, a great black ghost, startled by the voidship's passage.

Then light again. The target star lay nearby. Marika struggled to gain her bearings, groggy from the violence of her plunge through the Up-and-Over.

The bath recovered more slowly than she. While she waited on them Marika reached into the surrounding void, searching for the Serke darkship.

Mentally righted, the senior bath left her station to prepare another silver bowl.

Marika's probe revealed that the star had no planets. It might have had at one time, but something had happened. Perhaps too close a brush with another star. The surrounding void teemed with rocky fragments, some of them bigger than the moon Biter back home. None were big enough to retain an atmosphere, and nowhere could Marika sense the betraying glow of life.

There were no Serke bases here.

And no Serke darkship.

She stalked up the blade of the wooden dagger to see how Grauel, Barlog, and Bagnel had fared. She had drawn upon them as well as upon the bath, though the strength they had to lend was feeble.

Bagnel looked sick, like he might vomit any second. He was down, clutching the framework with his eyes sealed. Grauel and Barlog looked strained and a little stunned by the savagery of the passage, but they had been with her long enough and had been through enough to be accustomed to the occasional violent passage. Though this had outdone everything that had gone before.

Marika touched Bagnel briefly, gently, encouragingly. The one silth ability for which she had very little talent was healing, but she tried to let well-being flow from her to him. He nodded. He was all right. He was just shaken.

She suspected, in her more dark moments, that she was a poor healer because she was not sufficiently whole and at peace within herself.

She started back toward her station.

Plop!

It had the feel of the sound of a pebble falling into water as heard from beneath the surface, only it fell upon the silth part of her mind.

The Serke darkship.

Where?

She searched, found a line, drove toward the enemy darkship. If she could strike before they recovered ...

They sensed her coming, turned, gained velocity rapidly. Marika swept into their wake, skidding like an aircraft in a tight turn, began gaining, began snapping up stellar landmarks as she went. Those were few indeed. This deep in the cloud only a dozen stars were visible in any direction.

The Serke ship vanished. Marika fixed its line of flight and a target star and grabbed for the Up-and-Over herself.

She did not press as hard this time. She guessed she need not strain so to arrive first.

Correct.

From that second system, in the dense heartstream of the dust, only three stars were visible. One was that from which Marika had come.

There was no life in that system. Nor had there ever been any, for the star was a dwarf of a type never associated with planets. Marika scanned star and system only casually. Then she concentrated upon those two farther stars.

One was a red giant.

The other was a yellow, like the meth home sun.

Elation filled her.

She had sniffed out a hot trail at last.

She gathered everyone at the axis and had the senior bath pass the silver bowl again. Once everyone had sipped and taken a few moments to relax, she pulled the darkship into the Up-and-Over again and returned the way she had come. Back to the base world.

Let the Serke think they had eluded her.