Permanence

23

THE CALL CAME, as regular as clockwork, one month after the last one. This time, Michael was too busy to even politely decline to speak.

Slow bubbles trailed up from behind his breather. The way they popped up to the ceiling of these flooded tunnels, then skated along the translucent blue ice like quicksilver never ceased to fascinate him. He had swum on many different planets in the years of his service to Herat; swimming through the flooded tunnels of these abandoned Oculus settlements was an experience unlike any other. The ice that made up the walls, ceilings, and floors of the chambers ranged through thousands of shades from emerald green to deep azure. The quality of color changed as the lights on Michael's helmet and helper bots moved. It only took one person to turn their head and his surroundings could change from dark tunnel to jewel-lined hall.

The caller remained on the line for a few moments, her presence visible as a flashing triangle to Michael's upper left. He had instructed his answering service not to take messages from her, so after a minute the triangle faded out. He found himself sighing in relief, though he knew there was no way he would have answered. When the triangle vanished, though, it left a hollow feeling which was all too familiar lately.

"What's up?" Barendts had been forging ahead, as usual, and now he returned, kicking strongly through the icy water. His entourage of jet-driven bots spiralled around him, little lamps darting to and fro like the flashlights of inquisitive fairies.

"They've been here, I'm sure of it!" Barendts waved at the tunnel behind him. "Just a bit further."

"I'm with you." Michael couldn't read the marine's expression through his facemask. He knew Barendts was eager to prove that this abandoned sub-ice town held autotroph trash. He was as unhappy as Michael to be stranded on this halo world, so far from the action. He wanted to have something to show for their time here, if and when they succeeded in getting back to High Space.

The tunnel he was pointing to looked unstable, however. Large slabs of its wall bulged inward, become as malleable as wax from the pressure of all the ice above it. Long cracks ran up those swollen walls.

The bots seemed calm, though; Michael sighed again and swam after Barendts. "Just this last one," he said. "Then we go back, empty handed or no."

The autotrophs didn't exactly trade with their fanatical green skinned worshippers. They disposed of garbage by either dropping it into the deep ocean, or hiding it in any of thousands of abandoned tunnels that riddled the coast of the Northern Ocean. Humans had lived here for centuries, and boom towns had sprung up and vanished many times, some on the surface, some in the depths. The green men explored the caverns, and occasionally came out with treasures they could trade to the university for hard currency. Michael and Barendts had spied on them long enough to pick up their search habits, and then had begun looking themselves. Several times now, they had discovered lodes of autotroph technology, hidden deep in the collapsing grottoes where no sane human would normally venture.

A chain of madly swimming bots lit the ice tunnels ahead of Michael, so that even when Barendts went behind a wall, he could see the marine's moving green trail through the ice. He followed the bots around the corner, and found himself at the bottom of a shaft braced with corroded rails: the familiar shape of an old elevator shaft. This was a lucky find, it might give them access to levels of the settlement unreachable by other means.

Barendts's shout confirmed his hope. "It's the frickin' town hall!" His helmet lamp whipped back and forth at the top of the shaft, casting shadows and highlights down the walls. In moments Michael was beside him, gasping despite himself at the place they had come to.

Sometime in the distant past, settlers had carved out a large cavern here, maybe with a clean nuke. Michael's headlamps couldn't reach the end of it. Maybe it was a hundred meters across— maybe a thousand. All was darkness beyond the feeble fan of his light, but that glow was strong enough to pick out drowned buildings: He saw walls and the black maws of open doorways, windows.

"Supremely creepy," said Barendts. The marine sounded happy— as he always was when he had something to do.

They had been sharing an apartment now for four months. Ever since Rue Cassels stranded Michael here on Oculus, he had been trying to get back to the Rights Economy. (Well, she hadn't really stranded him, he knew; she was stuck here, too, at least for now.) Michael had been adrift for too long, and was almost grateful to her for forcing a decision upon him. He was no longer permitted to speak to her, or to Laurent Herat, and so he'd had to make some long-deferred decisions. He had decided to become a rebel again.

It was just a shame that there was no way he could act on that decision, trapped as he was in the halo worlds.

"Come on!" Barendts shot away into the submerged streets of the cavern settlement. Michael followed, trying to ignore the way this place reminded him of Dis.

Those dire kami seldom visited him these days. He felt he was, if not getting over that experience, at least slowly reaching an accommodation with it. Unfortunate, then, to have to swim past these empty facades and hear the kami whisper in the back of his mind, so strong, so sad.

"Heads up!" That was Barendts, his voice suddenly urgent. Suddenly, all the bots went dark, leaving Michael staring into the narrowed cone of light from his own headlamp— light that showed only grainy water, and the corner of a long-abandoned building.

Prudently, he tuned that light down to a vague glow, and switched on his goggles' light amplifiers. "What is it?" he radioed.

"Visitors," said Barendts curtly. It took Michael a few minutes to find the marine in the speckly gray shadowland of the now-dark town. Barendts was hovering behind a half-fallen wall that might once have defined someone's garden, back when the invisibly distant ceiling held sunlamps and there was air here instead of water. Barendts pointed over the wall as Michael slid next to him.

Lights wavered in the distance. Michael counted seven sources, about half a kilometer away. This cavern was indeed huge. From here, all he could see was diffuse greenish lozenges slowly moving around the abandoned buildings.

"I'll send a bot," said Barendts.

"No." Michael put a hand on the marine's shoulder. "I want to see this myself."

Barendts started to protest, but Michael ignored him, kicking strongly into the darkness beyond the wall. It made sense to send the bots ahead, but Michael had never been one to hide behind remotes— a trait he'd picked up from Herat, most likely. Better to do fieldwork yourself.

Anyway, he had not ceased to be a scientist by choice. Michael was still welcome at the university, but he couldn't work with Laurent Herat, because the professor had signed some kind of secrecy deal along with Rue Cassels. Whatever the secret was, it was paid for by turning their backs on the struggles of the people in the Rights Economy. Michael was surprised and hurt that Herat of all people should be willing to do that— the Cycler Compact might be a declining power, but its decline was slow and graceful. It didn't involve the deaths of millions.

Michael had petitioned the Compact to allow Barendts and himself to return to the R.E. It was absolutely critical that the rebels learn about the weapon Crisler hoped to find at Osiris and Apophis. Rue knew that, and she had the ear of the highest officials in the government.

The petition had been turned down, without explanation.

Every day that passed, Crisler drew closer to the Twins, and to escaping with the Chicxulub weapon. Frustration had drawn Michael back to the autotrophs as much as curiosity. Frustration drove him now as he closed in on the distant lights, for the university had refused to allow him to visit the green men again. Herat could; Michael was only partially mollified by the knowledge that even Herat had not been allowed to visit the autotrophs themselves.

He took a roundabout route, hiding behind the softening outlines of buildings, confident in his destination because the glow was constantly visible. Finally only one building separated him from whoever it was; he took a chance, and swam into the crumbling structure itself.

The walls were peeling, the floor covered in a layer of hazy mud. The feeling of desolation here was overwhelming, and he could feel his NeoShinto implant stirring, finding echoes of the kami of lost lives here. Michael ignored it, and made his way to a room at the front of the building.

The wall here had numerous holes in it. Light shone strongly through them, and he could hear a thrumming sound through the water now. Michael swam slowly over and put his goggles against one of the lower holes.

Not three meters away, a thing like a giant silver scarab was lowering boxes and canisters off its back, and arranging them carefully in the silt. There was no recognizable head to the thing, nor any sense organs he could see. But drifting around and above it were hundreds of tiny bright beads.

Michael recognized them: They were like the ones that had swarmed around him and Herat during their visit to the autotrophs four months ago. The swarm had spoken to them; it was an integral part of the autotrophs' artificial intelligence.

Michael had recovered some dead beads from other autotroph trash sites. He'd taken one apart, and figured he knew how they were powered. And the aliens didn't seem to keep good track of the things— which sparked an idea.

Some of the beads were hovering very close to the wall. Michael rose up on his haunches and peered through another crack. One hovered not twenty centimeters away. Its little black head was pointing down and away— watching the silver thing deposit its cargo, no doubt.

Months of anger at his betrayal by his companions made Michael unwilling to hesitate: He simply reached out and grabbed the bead, popping it into the metal mesh bag he carried at his waist. Then he put his eye to the crack and watched to see what would happen next.

Nothing happened. He heard a faint bzzt come over his radio, but the beads outside didn't move and the silver thing went on arranging its trash. The metal mesh probably blocked the thing's signal. And there were more of the beads hovering within reach.

In seconds he had a dozen of them in his sack. They circled lazily inside it, as if made lethargic by the cold water and high pressure. Maybe that was true. Michael eased back from the cracked wall and made his way to another building some distance away. There he found an interior room and turned up his headlight.

He opened the sack while tuning his radio across frequencies. The beads swirled lazily inside the mesh; after a minute he hit on the right frequency. A complex, sonorous hum came from the little things.

"Hello?" he said through the radio. "Do you guys speak Anglic?"

"Ph-ph-ph-phage," said a pipsqueek voice in his ears. "You eat us now."

"No," he said. "I just want to talk."

"No talk," said the tiny AIs. "We leave now."

"I'll let you go after we talk. How's that?"

"No. We leave planet. Ancient weapon in hands of phages. Must warn others of the Real."

"You're leaving Oculus? Leaving this planet?"

"Here to make preparations. Leave caches where phages not find."

Michael chewed his lip, thinking hard. "You know there's humans going after the Chicxulub weapon. You're going to pull up roots here— warn the autotroph empire?"

"We warn. Destroy phages before weapon built."

Michael raced back to where he'd left Barendts. The marine was startled when he ducked back over the wall; Michael had come from an unexpected direction.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"We're done here, at least for now," said Michael. "We've got to get these things back to Lux."

"But there's a veritable trove of stuff there—"

"Which we can come back for later."

"Are you crazy? The green guys might find it."

Michael swam determinedly toward the black maw of the elevator shaft. "Forget about the trash. Something more important's come up."

As he swam, he heard faint flashes of radio from the mesh bag. The little beads were clamoring to be let out.

Soon, he thought. When we have the right audience.

A CONSTANT WIND soared through the towers of Lux. It flooded in across the mountains and wound sinuously around the hills, coming from the dark hemisphere of Oculus. Sometimes, when Rue stepped out onto the balcony of her apartment high above the city, she had a momentary panic reaction: hull breach! This reaction was never more than a flash, but it always left her jammed with adrenaline. Lux held no outlet for the jagged energy of fear; not now that Crisler and Mallory were gone.

She didn't miss the bastards, of course; it was Max she longed for. And (though she tried not to admit this to herself) Mike.

So, at times like this she walked. Walking was a luxury she'd never known on Allemagne, but on Treya she had learned to associate walking with freedom. On this occasion, as commonly happened, her steps had taken her into the Night City.

Since Colossus never moved in the sky, day and night were conventions on Oculus. The day was defined by three eight-hour shifts, and social networks arose chiefly among people who shared shifts. Soon after their rescue from the ocean depths, Rue had taken care to move her «day» shift to correspond with Michael Bequith's "night." That way, she could minimize the chances of their meeting.

Sometimes, as she walked here, Rue would think about Dis. She had only visited Michael Bequith's nightmare one time, on board the submarine; but it had been enough. In its loneliness and isolation that frozen scrap of world had been akin to Allemagne and the Envy. Yet, of all Mike's kami, those of Dis were not spirits of a place, but echoes of an ancient species. Rue had felt them— present, yet fading, like a dying ember. They were merging back into the all-encompassing sky of stars— yet Rue had not felt that they were vanishing. Rather, they were expanding, like the sphere of light from a star, gradually becoming one with the vast and eternal stillness of space itself.

All her life Rue had thought of herself as small and singular, like a mote of dust battered to and fro by fate. In one moment of understanding the kami of Dis had shown her fragile individuality to be an illusion. The reality of who she— or anyone— was, was infinitely greater.

The Night City was a vast sprawling complex of arcades and sub-ice warrens, all windowless. There were huge caverns here, their ceilings studded with lights to simulate stars. The city held markets, restaurants, theaters, and the inevitable prostitute's quarter. The constant murmur of crowds was seductive, the press of bodies allowing a reassuring anonymity— but Rue often walked the darkest streets, because what was pitch-black to others was perfectly visible to her. She could easily avoid those who lurked in what they thought were shadows.

After two years of struggling to better herself and her people, Rue found herself alone again. The remnants of her crew were scattered, Rebecca, Blair, Evan, and Corinna back aboard the Envy, but as prisoners; Max forever dead; and Michael Bequith exiled into the streets of Lux. The only soul who knew even the slightest thing about Rue or her dreams was the academic Herat, and though she saw him during their regular sessions of militia training, she didn't feel close to him.

Few recognized the slim young woman who paced through the crowds, head down, hands jammed in the pockets of her tough workers' slacks. Anyone who thought they recognized the famous cycler captain from Erythrion probably decided they were mistaken. What would someone so wealthy and powerful be doing passing like a shabbily dressed ghost alone through the back alleys of the Night City?

She understood now that there were two states of being in the interstellar halo: in transit and stranded.

Rue was standing hipshot outside a dance club she sometimes came to, when she received a call. She hesitated before answering; it might be better tonight to lose herself in the crush of moving bodies and the pulse of the music inside. Sighing, she said, "Yes?"

"Rue, it's Laurent Herat. I know it's late, but I need to talk to you."

"Why? What's happened?" She stepped to one side of the club's door, allowing several other young people to enter. They were laughing carelessly and she watched them with envy.

"I received an extraordinary visitor earlier tonight," Herat went on. "One with an equally extraordinary message."

"Who?" Her thoughts flew to their various mutual acquaintances, but there was really only one person it could be. "Michael?"

"Apparently he's been making his own attempts to communicate with the autotrophs. Amazing! We've been unsuccessful, as you know, the green men won't let us visit them again, but… well, I believed Bequith when he said he had information about them. He says they know about what Crisler's intending, and they're leaving Colossus to warn their own people."

"Gods and kami." But it made sense— if Michael wasn't lying. Lying didn't seem to be in his nature.

"He brought some proof— several of the little remote AI bees that we spoke with once before. They're not very intelligent or knowledgeable, but they say the autotrophs are scared of the Chicxulub weapon, that they're pulling up their roots here."

Rue felt a terrible sense of helplessness. "That could mean war between humanity and the autotrophs."

"Yes," said Herat, his voice sounding old. "But Michael proposed a solution." He laughed humorlessly. "He's always been a good negotiator."

"What solution?"

"He's determined to warn the rebels about what Crisler's intending. He thinks he may have a way to communicate with the autotrophs, and he's willing to give it to us in return for passage to the nearest lit world for both him and Barendts."

"He's blackmailing us!" She was appalled, then infuriated. This was not the man she thought she knew.

As soon as she felt this, though, Rue reminded herself that Michael was, as far as he knew, abandoned in place here. What had she just been thinking about the halo herself? — that here, you were either in transit or stranded?

"He's desperate, and in no small part because of what we did to him," said Herat, as though reading her mind. "Anyway, I have no authority to give him what he wants."

"But I do," she said, her heart sinking. Yes, she could requisition two berths on the next cycler that came by. But if she did that, Rue would be letting Mike go without his ever finding out the reasons why she and Herat had become separated from him. The secret they were now party to was huge, as important in its own way as the existence of Jentry's Envy had become. She couldn't betray that secret, but was the price of her silence to be letting go of any chance of reconciling or explaining herself to Mike?

"In a way, I think this might be for the best," said Herat gently. "Bequith needs a calling, and maybe that calling was to be a rebel all along. Maybe his time with me was just a distraction."

Rue winced. Had she been a distraction as well? "If that's his price, we have to pay it," she heard herself say. "There's too much at stake. It would be… a shame to lose him, though. There's nowhere he'd be more useful than at the Twins, and I'm sure if he knew what we were planning, he'd drop this rebel foolishness in a second."

"If he knew, Rue. But there's no way to tell him. The law is very clear. Even if you and I know he would join us the instant he knew… we'd have committed treason to tell him."

"Treason…" Rue had a sudden idea. It wasn't pleasant, but she smiled grimly as she realized how perfect it was. "I think I know what to do, Professor. Let me handle it from here."

Michael was trying to meditate when his door announced a visitor. Concentration broken, he glared past the little telltale in his periphery, then remembered his visit with Herat yesterday. Maybe this was some messenger with a reply.

He unfolded himself from full lotus and stood. Barendts was out, probably at the gym exercising, as he did obsessively. The little flat was stark and bare, more a cell than an apartment, but Michael kept it neat. Just now as his mind had quieted toward a meditative state, he had been feeling, if not happy, at least as though he were doing something worthwhile for the first time in months.

Musing about this, he opened the door.

"Hello, Michael," said the woman on the other side.

He almost closed it on her, but after a moment's hesitation, Michael waved her in. Irina Case, NeoShintoist and general pain in the neck, stepped into his little room.

"I've been trying to contact you for months!" she said.

"And I've been avoiding you," he said. "Or hadn't you noticed?" But he waved her to a seat and said, "Would you like something to drink?"

She shook her head. Irina Case was about Michael's age, but blond and with pale, almost white eyes. She came from New Armstrong— had arrived, in fact, with that traitor Mallory. But she claimed not to have any involvement with the New Armstrong plotters.

"I know the Order sent you to try to bring me back into the fold," he said as he brought Case a cup of coffee. "I've dodged calls from the brothers here as well. But why they think you would be able to succeed where they failed is beyond me."

Irina quickly put down the cup. "Oh! I think there's been a misunderstanding." He stared at her; she looked uncomfortable. "I didn't come here to try to bring you back into the Order, Dr. Bequith, although we'd obviously prefer that."

He was puzzled. "Then why are you here? — to apologize for your countrymen?"

She took a sip of the coffee, unsuccessfully trying to disguise annoyance. "New Armstrong is a world, Dr. Bequith. Not a conspiracy. And not an evil empire.

"I suppose you haven't bothered to learn about us. Well. Our world orbits a gas giant only a little bigger than Jupiter. It's a halo world; if it didn't have a huge magnetic field for power, we wouldn't be able to live there at all. Our cities are built on the ice mares; I come from Mare Labrynthus."

Michael translated the name to himself: Sea of Mazes.

"New Armstrong is thriving," she said, "from an economic point of view. But in other ways…. For a long time we were staunch supporters of Permanence and the Compact. The Compact gives people direction, you know— many of our young people took the vows and became members of the Order. We built and launched our own cyclers. But since the fall of the lit worlds… well, people's faith has been shaken. A lot of the younger ones feel abandoned and alone and New A is such a hard place to live that… there's been violence. And suicide. People walking out onto the ice without a suit… and talk of joining the R.E."

He nodded. "And that talk reached the highest levels."

Case grimaced and nodded. "Of course. We would incur all the costs of such an association, and it would cripple us. Nonetheless, there's a powerful group aiming for just that. Mallory and his people are not the disease— just a symptom."

She took a deep breath and went on. "There must be an alternative. Recently, some of us have started a new church. We want to reverse the damage, give the people of New A their pride and sense of destiny back."

Michael suddenly realized where this was going. "Wait a second—"

"You can't have any idea how profoundly your kami affect people from New A," Case rushed on. "Particularly the Euler Night. I've seen a man who was in a deep depression visit those kami and come back laughing. Laughing!"

"I won't be your guru," said Michael. "I merely found the kami, I don't possess their… power."

"Oh, we know that. We just want your blessing to use the Euler Night in our initiatory ceremony. The religion's a mystery cult, adhering to the principles of Permanence Study 19-A. We're not exploitative economically or socially. People can come and participate in the mysteries and if they choose they can volunteer to run centers or learn to conduct initiations. There's no metaphysics or myth system, we're purely methodological. All clean," she said, holding her hands up.

Michael looked around at his tiny apartment. This was the last thing he'd expected. All his life people had asked him to serve, in one way or another. This woman Case was asking for something he didn't even believe he could give: a blessing. "But why?" he asked, trying to sort out how this made him feel. "Why do you need my blessing?"

"People respect you— your accomplishments," she said. "With your stamp of approval on the ceremonies, we'll be able to bring in more people."

"And I should do this because…? Anybody can visit a NeoShinto chapter or buy the equipment to visit the kami privately. They hardly need us, do they?"

Irina Case shook her head. "It's Leary's principles of Set and Setting. We provide a social context for the experience. The ceremonies help visitors to the kami to bring their experiences back to their daily life." She drew herself up and said in a more formal voice, "I would be honored if you would attend one of our initiations here in Lux. If you approve of what we've done, I'd like you to endorse our statement of intent. That's all."

Mike's mind was a blank. He opened his mouth, thinking he would just reject her request out of hand. To his own astonishment, he just said, "Call me tomorrow," he said. "We'll set something up."

MICHAEL CLOSED THE door behind himself and let out a whoosh of breath. For some reason he felt good— very good. He knew he would never rejoin the NeoShintoist Order. But he hadn't known how deeply he'd needed to believe that the years he'd spent in their service had not been wasted.

Yes, he could bless this new mystery cult. Caught between a spiritual awakening and political adventurism, the people of New Armstrong needed to decide a new course for themselves. His kami could help with that, he was sure. And if New Armstrong could rebuild its soul, then he might have won without a shot a war that his people had long ago lost on Kimpurusha.

He had just stepped away from the door when a knock came on it. Irina must have forgotten something, he thought, swinging it open and saying, "What now?"

Three uniformed men stood there. "Michael Bequith," said the one in front. "I hereby place you under arrest for violating the terms of the injunction forbidding you from contacting your former companion, Laurent Herat."

TWO DAYS LATER, Michael was pacing the confines of his cell when an officer appeared outside. "Where's my council?" Michael demanded. He had tried the soft approach with these stone-faced men, and got nowhere.

They seemed to be military police, not like the ones he saw regularly in the streets of Lux. And this was no local police station: He had been flown for hours out over the ice, to finally land at a simple station in the middle of nowhere, and then to drop in an elevator until his ears hurt from the pressure change.

His guard merely grimaced at his question, and said, "You've got a visitor."

He stepped aside, revealing a diminutive woman in a cycler captain's uniform. It was Rue Cassels.

Michael backed away and sat down on the cell's bunk as she stepped in. Rue looked around herself appraisingly, then said, "I'm sorry I had to do this, Mike."

"Do what?" He clutched the edge of the bunk in sudden realization. "You! You had me arrested!"

"Yes," she admitted, looking of all things a bit embarrassed. "It was the only way to get you here."

"What did I do to you? First you strand me here, cut off all communication, steal the professor away, now you have me thrown in jail for trying to get out of this hole? What next? Am I going to be executed?"

She reddened, but her voice was calm as she said, "I only want what I've wanted ever since… since we came here. I want you to join my crew."

This answer was so unexpected that Michael laughed. "You let me stew in this place because you wanted me to join your crew? Are you crazy? And what crew are you talking about here, Rue? You lost the Envy, remember?"

He'd meant the words to sting, but she appeared unruffled. "Not for long," she said.

Her calm reminded him of how she'd been when he last saw her— shortly after she had inflicted the kami of Dis upon herself. The words he had been about to add died on Michael's lips.

Maybe, he thought, she was crazy. Maybe it wasn't the Rue he'd begun to fall for looking through those dark eyes— maybe it was the spirits of Dis.

Whatever. Either way, she couldn't get away with what she was doing. "Not for long? You and I both know that your ship is beyond reach." Maybe she had trumped up some reason for the local authorities to arrest him, he thought, but if so she couldn't have told them she intended to go chasing after her lost cycler. They would know she was mad, they would never agree to that. Michael sat back, crossing his arms. He would wait for her to leave, then he would tell them.

"I'd like you to listen to something," said Rue. She came and sat on the bunk next to him. He caught her scent, and it filled him with regret and anger. He leaned away from her, but she merely gestured, opening an inscape window in front of them.

The picture was hazy and runneled with lines of static. Even through the distortion, Michael instantly recognized the face of Rue's friend, Rebecca.

"This message is for the authorities at Colossus," she was saying. "My name is Rebecca France. I am the doctor on board the interstellar cycler Jentry's Envy. I have to report that the Envy has been boarded by hostile forces. Admiral Crisler of the Rights Economy, to be exact. I… huh, where do I start? After the assassination of Captain Cassels at Lux, I discovered that the admiral and some traitors from the halo were going back to the Envy. In the absence of Rue— my captain— the Compact was legally obligated to restore visiting passengers to their cycler. So they were going. I went with them, because I felt an obligation to the crew who are under my care.

"A man named Mallory has assumed command of the Envy. It is he who had Rue Cassels assassinated. He's not aware of this transmission, I'm sending it on the Compact's emergency frequency from the supply shuttle. Corinna Chandra instructed me in how to do this. She and Evan Laurel are under constant guard; apparently Crisler doesn't think Blair Genereaux or I are threats, 'cause we're not technical. So Mallory's ensconced himself with two of my people and some of Crisler's boys in the new habitat that Captain Cassels made.

"It is vital that the authorities know that Admiral Crisler and Mallory have plotted together. Crisler intends to take the Banshee and appropriate the Lasa's cycler technology at Apophis and Osiris. Mallory provided some special technology to speed up that operation. It seems Mallory's people on New Armstrong have been building a new kind of plow sail. They had built one at Colossus to try to convince the Compact to back their plan to merge with the R.E. It was small enough that they were able to bring it along with them.

"Mallory's given the plow sail to Crisler and he told Crisler something that made the admiral think the Compact might get to the Twins first. We don't know what that was— maybe there are already people at Apophis and Osiris, a new colony or something. Anyway, Crisler's going to use this new plow sail with the Banshee. He's not going to decelerate to a normal stop at the star Maenad, like he'd planned. With the new plow sail, he's going to pull some high-g slam into the corona of Maenad itself. He'll go FTL there, coast to the Twins and then emerge from FTL and decelerate in. He estimates it'll cut three months off his schedule.

"In return, Mallory gets the Envy. He's trying to turn it, he's going to take it onto a ring to serve his own world. This means it will never return to Erythrion— my home.

"Crisler wants to take us— I mean, myself, Blair Genereux, Corinna Chandra, and Evan Laurel to Apophis and Osiris. It's because we have experience with the Lasa cyclers. Mallory had argued that he needed us as crew, but the new habitat Rue made runs itself and… well, Crisler pointed out that Mallory can't trust us. We might try to mutiny— or rather, take back our ship. He's right, of course.

"So they're going to stick us in the Banshee's brig and use us as expendable explorers when we get to the Twins. Mallory will report us accidentally killed aboard the Envy and he'll arrive at New Armstrong a hero.

"It is vital that this information reach the leaders of the Compact, both at Colossus and at New Armstrong," Rebecca said. "Mallory is a traitor and must be punished. Crisler is engaged in an attack on our fundamental right to exist. If he escapes with the technology behind Jentry's Envy, the halo may have lost its last chance at survival. Please, if you get this message, forward it to the proper authorities at once." The window closed.

"This message arrived three weeks ago," said Rue. "As a result of it, we've had to push our timetable back. We need your help, Michael. We're going to beat Crisler to the Twins."

He stared at her. She seemed completely serious, and that self-assurance saddened her. "Rue," he said softly, "there is no way we can get to Apophis and Osiris before Crisler. He's got a head start, and we have no way to catch up…. If we had an FTL ship, maybe, but Colossus is too small to start an FTL drive near it."

Rue nodded. "You're right. We can't start an FTL drive anywhere near Colossus." She stood and briskly walked to the door of the cell. "Come with me." She gestured imperiously. Apprehensive, but curious, he stood to follow.

They walked, escorted by two soldiers, down long corridors empty of people and down stairway after stairway. He had the feeling they were somewhere deep in the ice. Finally Rue stopped before a great metal door that had warning signs, cameras, and autoguns around it. She turned to Michael. "Up until this moment, it's been possible for me to let you go. Once you step through that door, Mike, you're one of us— whether you want to be or not."

Now he was afraid. "What are you doing?"

"What I have to," she said. The door slowly ground open and Michael, prodded by his guards, stepped through.

He stood on a balcony high above a gigantic cavern hewn out of the ice. And on the floor of that cavern…

Bright lamps lit the blue ceiling and walls of the place and the cool light reflected from the gleaming hulls of dozens of sleek starships. Each stood twenty meters tall. They were built for gravity, judging by their strong, diamondite and fullerene construction. Michael had glimpsed shapes like these once before in the distance, the day they had been rescued from the deep ocean. Now, as he stared at them, a hitherto unsuspected possibility came to him.

He turned, and saw that Rue was grinning that mischievous grin he'd only seen once or twice before. "You were right that no FTL ship can start its drive close to a brown dwarf this size. Its mass is so small that a ship would have to be inside the dwarf's atmosphere to do it."

"These…" He turned to Rue. "They're built like reentry vehicles. You're not… you don't expect to—"

She nodded, still grinning. "We'll get to Apophis and Osiris first. And now that you've seen these ships, you can't be set free again. I'm afraid, Mike, you're coming with us."

24

MICHAEL WATCHED HIS interceptor's approach to Colossus through a nice safe inscape window; no real window was permitted in the design of these craft. The narrow cockpit he lay in was filled with cushioning liquid and crisscrossed with girders of diamond. Michael's body was strapped and enfolded by a variety of devices designed to soften the impact of a fall into the demonic gravity of a brown dwarf.

He still couldn't believe where he was, and what was about to happen. All these months, he'd believed Rue wanted him to abandon the chase, settle down on Oculus as she appeared to be doing. He'd thought she must not be the person he'd thought she was, since she had seemed to ask him to follow her, forgetting his obligations to his own people. Michael had been angry at her, and hurt that she never called after their rescue from the depths of Oculus's ocean.

And then to find out that she had been unable to call, prevented by her own obligations! To discover what secret she had been sworn to protect: a secret that dovetailed perfectly with Michael's own needs, had he only known. Every time he thought about the months of time he'd wasted in anger and solitary work on Oculus, he felt sick. He still blamed Rue for all of that, however he might know intellectually that it wasn't her fault.

He reached out to touch the solid hull of the interceptor. But he was really here! And, miraculously, they were on their way to the Twins to preempt Crisler. No matter how confused Michael's feelings, he couldn't suppress the excitement he felt at what was to come.

Rue was in another ship, which was something of a relief. Each of these interceptors could hold six people, no more. Michael and Dr. Herat were together again, ironically. It had not been by his or Rue's choice; Rue rode with Barendts as well as a master tactician from the Compact's military academy, a man whose weapons and systems were at her command. Michael and Professor Herat had to play escort to a member of the expedition that was Michael's proud addition: a thing from the autotrophs.

Michael's plan to communicate with the autotrophs had been simple: He talked with the bees he'd stolen from the abandoned settlement, repeating over and over the message he wanted them to take back. Then he'd returned to the subsurface caves, located some of the autotroph garbage-dropping things, and simply let his bees go. They had joined the existing swarm seamlessly, and after that all they had to do was wait.

The answer— delivered with reluctance by the green men— was too alien to communicate with directly, but Michael nonetheless thought of it as an ally.

Every now and then he turned to check the high-heat bubble at the back of the cabin. Inside, visible through a small square window, was a strange coiling thing and a swarm of autotroph bees. This little swarm, though dull in most respects, seemed able to translate Lasa and Chicxulub, and that was all he really cared about right now. It had come with a message, of sorts, from the autotrophs: Humanity threatened to unleash the Chicxulub weapon. Humanity must stop that weapon from being unleashed.

He couldn't see Herat through the cabin's liquid and impeding buttresses, but he could hear him in inscape, humming. The professor was delighted to be traveling again— and delighted to have Michael along as well. Although Herat had also kept silent about the secret of the interceptors all these months, Michael found it impossible to feel anger at his former employer. He wasn't sure why that was; but his loyalty to Herat had survived through everything that happened over the years.

"You're strangely silent, Bequith," the professor said.

"Can't you hear my teeth gritting?" he shot back. He had no illusions about the sanity of what they were about to do.

"These things are well tested, man," said the professor. "Besides, you know what they say, it's not the fall that kills you, it's the landing."

"Very funny." Brown dwarfs had no solid surface, Dr. Herat had reminded him earlier. Michael had not made the obvious reply then, but he thought it now: In twenty gravities, anything you hit was like a solid surface, even air.

They were plummeting like darts at the dwarf's atmosphere: sixteen sleek, aerodynamic interceptors. They couldn't hope to simply fall into the dense, incandescent atmosphere of Colossus and this fact had stymied earlier attempts to get faster-than-light ships deep enough into a dwarf's gravity well to activate. The first ships that tried had splatted like bugs against the dwarf's upper atmosphere.

The Compact's eventual solution was brutally simple, but they had proven it to work, at least most of the time. Each of the interceptors would begin firing a powerful antiproton beam ahead of itself as it fell into the atmosphere. The explosive shock would open a rarefied channel, through which the ship would fall. There would still be enough atmosphere to slow the ship, but not so quickly as to reduce its passengers to jelly.

"Relax, Bequith," continued Herat. "We've been in some pretty exotic places before. This one's just a bit more… extreme, than most."

He barked a laugh. "And are we going to get out and take a walk when we get down there?"

Herat sighed. "If I could, I would."

The curve of Colossus's horizon was becoming a flat line. Beyond that horizon, a giant plasma flare made an arch like a gateway to heaven. Herat was still speaking, but Michael was too mesmerized by the sight to listen.

Colossus was young, by the standards of brown dwarfs. Its heat was generated by its slow gravitational contraction, just like the planet Jupiter. But at eighty times Jupiter's mass and only twice its radius, Colossus was still flaming hot after a billion years of existence; and it would continue to glow like a fading ember for another billion. Its surface was banded, like a gas giant's, but under its gravity the clouds were flat, more like oil slicks or impurities in liquid metal. They glowed various shades of orange and red and gigantic lightning flashes shot through them randomly.

As the horizon flattened, Michael saw the world's edge fade slowly purple, then blue; the distant arch of fire lost its dimensionality, becoming like something painted onto the sky rather than in it. His interceptor was in free fall, but he felt no movement. Rather it seemed like the brown dwarf was uncoiling somehow, from a giant ball into a flat net spread to catch him. It began to seem as if the horizon were curving above, like a closing mouth: orange flame below, a crimson ocean of fire to all sides and in the unimaginable distance, where the incandescent thunderheads became small as specks, that royal purple began and climbed the sky and ate away the stars.

"Engaging beam," said the pilot crisply. Michael saw and felt nothing of that— but an instant later they struck the atmosphere.

The first jolt knocked the wind out of him. It felt like a giant mallet had struck the interceptor and was impelling it back into space. Michael struggled to breathe through his mask; his limbs were forced to his sides and he heard his neck crick. Something had gone wrong. Surely they were being shot upward at some ferocious acceleration. He blinked away spots and focused on the inscape window.

The blue was still rising and the clouds below were getting bigger. The window showed the interceptor to be standing on a pillar of solar fire that stretched down to puncture the cloud banks. That must be the particle beam, he thought in terrified amazement.

"Systems normal," said the calm voice of the ship's computer.

Normal? This was normal?

The pilot's voice came over. He was using a subvocal through inscape and so his voice sounded normal, though Michael had no doubt he was having as hard a time breathing. "We're trying to maintain as close to free fall as we can," said the pilot. "We're currently experiencing only eleven gees, which means we're still gaining speed as we fall. Well within tolerances."

An object dropped here would pass the speed of sound in the first second of its fall. This is insane, Michael thought again.

And that cloudscape… never, even on Dis, had he seen a more hostile, inhuman place. Maybe stars were worse, but you couldn't even imagine the surface of a star. He could more than imagine Colossus; he was here.

For a terrified moment he thought that his implants were going to kick in and expose him to the kami of Colossus. If the kami of Dis had whispered Michael's insignificance, those of this place would bellow it. They would snuff him out by sheer indifference.

But he didn't need the implants to feel time stretching out into a long, impossibly vivid moment. Michael felt balanced on the rim of eternity here, in the presence of vast forces it would have been presumptuous for him to capture and name as kami. The moment seemed overflowing with power and import, and he suddenly heard Rue's quiet voice saying, "How would you have to feel, to want it all again…?"

In seconds he might die, incinerated on Colossus— yet after infinite time maybe he would come round to exist again, and he would be here again, balanced on this moment. Even as he had in the fathomless past, an infinite number of times.

Everything— every instant— was infinitely significant. Even the most fleeting moment, he realized, was permanent.

And then a new voice spoke, calm as an angel.

"Prepare for transfer."

And an instant later the crushing pressure was gone and the swirling orange was replaced by the calm blackness of FTL travel. Michael floated freely in his straps.

Beside him Herat was laughing. Unsure of what he had just experienced, Michael started laughing too— and he was surprised to find as he laughed that a great weight had somehow lifted from his heart.

LEAVING FTL HAPPENED without drama. Suddenly the inscape window Rue had positioned by her g-bed showed stars. The pilot turned around in his seat, grinning, and gave a thumbs-up.

"Here come the others," he said. Rue looked, but could see nothing. She cloned the radar display he had in front of him and sure enough, one by one tiny needle shapes were popping into existence around them. One, two, five, eight, eleven… She held her breath while the call signs came in and let it out in a whoosh when Mike's ship signalled its presence.

Twelve, thirteen, fourteen… And no fifteenth. They waited tensely for almost half an hour, but the last ship didn't appear. Finally the pilot turned to her and said, "Ma'am, I don't think they made it."

She had been thinking this, but hearing him say it made Rue feel sick anyway. She let out a ragged sigh and said, "Bring everyone in. If we're secure, we'll inflate a balloon-hab and hold a ceremony honoring them."

Sola, the tactician, nodded. "Good idea."

"Meanwhile, unfurl the telescopes. We need to know where the hell we are. Passive sensors only— no radar yet, please."

She waited while the scopes came on line, then started them scanning. These instruments were infinitely better than the one Max had bought for their first trip to the Envy. Thinking this reminded her of him and his endearing fallibility. She felt a sharp pang of loss, which threatened to blossom into worry about what had happened to Rebecca and the others.

After meeting Mike's kami, Rue no longer believed she had to let her emotions lead her. She still loved her emotional life and had great sympathy for her own feelings; but it had become clear to her that she needed to be unsympathetic to the urges that came with many emotions.

Worrying meant that she cared about her people; but right now, worrying would not help bring them back. She returned her attention to the view.

Even though they gave no light, there was no missing Apophis and Osiris. Their convoluted magnetic fields swept the black sky like invisible hurricanes. Rue's ship felt those fields, though they were millions of kilometers from the Twins. Noise from the fields made the dwarfs the brightest radio emitters for light-years.

She soon had a visual fix. The dwarfs must be ancient, for they gave no visible light at all— not the gold of Colossus nor the coalred of Erythrion. These worlds were older than the Lasa; they appeared in her scope as round holes in the starscape. They orbited one another at a distance of fourteen million kilometers; unbelievably close, considering each had a diameter of a million and a half kilometers.

No— they did give light, she realized, as she turned up the gain. Both dwarfs sported crowns of flicking auroral light around their poles.

Rue had never thought of the halo worlds as lonely before, but the Twins were different. This was a forbidding place, like a frozen tomb. The feeling reminded her of the fractured plain of Dis.

"Ambient temperature is six kelvin," said the pilot. "The Twins register at about three hundred K. But… we're picking up pinpoint infrared sources. Lots of them!"

"Show me one." She waited while the telescope realigned.

What swam into view was a long thread of light. In infrared and speckled with dimness and distance as it was, it looked to Rue like a road, winding gently through space to infinity.

"A tether." She and the pilot had spoken simultaneously. Rue laughed. "It's a power tether." It was strange to see something so familiar and homey in this place— especially knowing that humans had not created it. Then again… "How many are there? Are they broadcasting standard position data?"

"It's like… a whole galaxy of them in orbit. Around both Twins. Thousands. Tens of thousands. But no signals. I don't think they're ours."

"Well. Not a Cycler Compact colony, then… But that's probably their energy source for launching cyclers. Where are they beaming the power?"

But she could already see the answer. As the light-enhanced view pulled back, she saw the dwarfs as gray cutouts encircled by Saturnian rings composed of thousands of tiny scintillas of light. Both dwarfs were surrounded by such rings.

And right in between the dwarfs, at the fixed but empty point in space about which they both orbited, a brilliant flare of infrared shone.

Dr. Herat's voice came over the radio. "Of course! The only stable place in this system, other than low orbit around the dwarfs, is at their orbital center. It's like the axle of a wheel, gravitationally speaking. There might even be asteroids or a moon there. Let's take a look."

The telescope zoomed dizzyingly in to that bright spot. Things swam in and out of focus for a second. Then Rue saw everything she had hoped to find here— and everything she had feared to see.

THE INTERCEPTORS WERE clustered in a wall formation, pointing at the distant Lasa construction site. Behind them, a balloon habitat had been inflated and inside it Rue held a ceremony honoring the pilot and gunner whose ship had not made it through from Colossus.

As a cycler captain, she was the traditional choice to perform such a memorial. She had learned, on the Envy and in the depths of Oculus's ocean, that she was truly a captain when she forgot to doubt herself. Today, she could let the voice of tradition and centuries-long purpose speak through her. The authority was not originally hers, but it became hers through her acceptance of the role.

"We see before us the reason why sacrifice is necessary," she told the assembled fliers, who were clustered in a loose ball in the center of the habitat. "This is the origin of Jentry's Envy. It may be a Lasa colony or a machine intelligence, or something else entirely new. It appears that resources are being skimmed off the Twins and shunted to that central point— whether to build a new cycler or to feed an alien civilization, we don't know. But the starship Banshee is moored there. The men who have made themselves our enemies have come to steal from us the prize that Jentry's Envy hinted was here. If this is truly a construction shack for new cyclers, then this system is infinitely precious to us. Such new cyclers may be our last chance to restore our civilization to the greatness it once had. Our comrades, Julia Daly and Harald Siever, fell in the course of trying to guarantee a future for their children and ours. They exist now as part of the kami of this place. We will remember them, always."

In an ancient gesture, the assembled bowed their heads for a moment of silence. As the memorial broke up, Rue saw Mike hanging out at the edge of the crowd, uneasily glancing back at her. After the effort of speaking the eulogy, she felt strangely disconnected and so she felt it easy to go over to him. At the same time she was cringing inwardly at the thought that her need to save her crew had gotten two people killed and she was calculating whether the speech she had given would result in greater morale and respect for her. Her distraction allowed her to smile at him warmly, and say, "Thank you for being here."

"It's not like I had any choice," he said stiffly.

"Still. I need you with us, Mike. I… need you with me on this. We went through a lot to get to this point, and I'm sorry about the deception of the past months. But my people were— are— in danger. It was necessary."

"Yes, Captain."

Now Rue's carefully built mask crumbled. "Oh, Mike, I'm so sorry." She reached out tentatively. "Have the past months changed you so much?"

"No." He jammed his fists into the pockets of his jumpsuit. "It's you who's changed, Rue. You… don't need me. There was a time when I thought you might."

"Need you? Like Herat needs you? No, Dr. Bequith, I don't need you that way," she said hotly. "And I hope I never do. I'm not looking for a servant, I'm looking for an equal. Somebody who's with me not because of what they can do for me, but because of what we can do together." She turned away, shaking her head. "Once upon a time I imagined we could do great things together."

He flushed with anger. Rue regretted her sharp words, but damn it, none of this was her fault. She shook her head and floated over to Dr. Herat, who was floating nearby in a flock of inscape windows. "What are we faced with, Professor?"

"Crisler's here all right. And he's right at the source." Herat pointed to a window where a false-color image of the Lasa construction site glowed. "This place is pretty complex. From what I can tell, they get their raw materials from tethers that hang down into the dwarfs' upper atmospheres. They skim the elements they want off the top, which must take a long time. These tethers are powered by electrodynamic ones higher up. They bundle the scavenged materials and toss them at the orbital center of the system. There, the Lasa use something like a multilobed ramscoop to pull the packets in and feed it all into this." This was a cylinder, a kilometer long and almost half that in width, that radiated infrared at about 300 K. The Banshee was moored right next to this cylinder.

"So are they building a cycler there?" she asked, nervously twining her hands together.

"Actually, I don't think so. At any rate, I don't think they could launch a cycler using beam power. The total number of power tethers they've got in orbit around the Twins will produce trillions of watts of power, but that's not enough. It's kind of a puzzle, actually," he said happily. "The tethers produce far more power than they'd need to construct a starship or run a sizeable colony, but not enough to launch much more than a cycler cargo. There's no colony. If there's a starship, it's hidden inside that cylinder. So what are they doing with all that power? I don't know."

"What about the Banshee? Are you sure Crisler didn't detect our arrival?"

He nodded. "It's got a very low-level radar ping going. They're not expecting visitors— why should they? These ships," he nodded at a window showing their interceptors, "are not supposed to exist."

"The R.E. discounts the halo as a threat," said Sola, who'd come to hover nearby. "We're seen as bumpkins. It's our biggest advantage."

Rue nodded, contemplating the interceptors. Michael had come to examine the windows as well; secretly she was glad he was putting his anger aside, if only for the moment.

The interceptors certainly looked exotic, and Rue'd had the engineers emboss their diamond hulls with ruby lettering: Lasa script. They had copied fragments of writing found on a wrecked Lasa ship. Nobody knew what the words said; the point was not to fool the Lasa, but to convince Crisler that these interceptors were native to this place— part of the machinery.

Sola, the tactician, pointed to a top-down map of the Twins' system. "We can send teams A and B around the dwarfs, so that they ride in to the construction site in the pellet streams from the scavengers. Two ships at first, so as not to alarm Crisler. They'll dock opposite the Banshee at the construction site and we'll disembark as quickly as we can. If we can employ countermeasures to their inscape or sensors, we'll do that. The two squads will look for any control center, as well as looking for your crew, Captain." He shook his head. "That will be the tricky part."

"You don't have to remind me," she said coldly. "Then what?"

He shrugged. "Then the other interceptors approach. We'll see how close we can get to the Banshee before we have to open fire. But all we have to do is take out a critical system, like her engines and she'll have to surrender. If she's caught unprepared, it should be easy. Immobile, she has no options, because we can slide in behind the 'construction shack' to avoid her weaponry. We'll board her and secure your people."

Rue nodded. "Sounds good. Prepare everyone. It'll take a couple of days to orbit the dwarfs, so we'll head out right away. Communication is to be by laser only. We'll leave this outpost and one interceptor to act as observers."

"So who's on the in-teams?" asked Mike, his expression neutral.

She hesitated. Rue didn't want to send Mike into the fray, but if she left him here as an observer, he would be furious with her. "I'm going," she said. "With one squad, to bring my people out. Dr. Herat will go in the other ship, and… and since you control that autotroph thing, you'll go with him. We need to know what's valuable and what isn't, here. Do we need to secure the whole system to be safe? Or just the new cycler? Only you and Herat can make that assessment."

He nodded, his expression neutral.

The Klaxons sounded and everyone began to suit up to return to their ships. Rue watched Mike as he talked to Dr. Herat. His eyes often drifted back to her; he knew she was watching. But they were separated by meters and an impossible gulf of duty, for now. She tried to fix his features in her mind, in case she never saw him alive again.

HERAT WAS NOT one to let fear get in the way of his enthusiasms; so Michael was surprised at how subdued the professor seemed as they began their run around the back side of Apophis.

As soon as they were coasting on the aerobraking trajectory the pilot had chosen, Herat ordered the telescopes out and began silently studying the face of Apophis. Michael checked on his autotroph companion, and when he was certain the swarm's systems were all working, opened a connection to the ship's telescopes for it.

As he worked he brooded over what Rue had said. Was it true that he knew no other way to relate to those he cared for, other than service? — to place someone else's needs above his own, and ensure that those needs were met? Wasn't that what love was?

Or was it possible that love was sharing your own goals with someone else? In which case… just what were his goals? He didn't know anymore.

"Something's happening," muttered Herat. "I was right."

Michael climbed through the maze of pipes and struts that was the cabin of the interceptor and settled beside Herat. His shoulder brushed the hot carapace of the autotroph's capsule.

"What are you talking about?"

"It's been bothering me since we arrived. Why didn't the Lasa notice us? Acknowledge our presence?"

Michael shrugged. "Maybe they weren't looking. Or maybe we didn't send the right signal to wake them up. Or they haven't noticed us either, which is quite likely."

"Maybe they weren't looking. If they weren't, that would suggest that this installation is running on autopilot. Maybe it and its ancestors haven't encountered a sentient species in a billion years. It could have evolved away from its original purpose and then Jentry's Envy would be an accidental mutation— a throwback.

"But if it was expecting us to know how to signal it? That would imply that this place was not meant for us. But I believe Jentry's Envy and, by extension, this place, was a gift. Meant for anyone who wanted to take it."

Michael saw his point. "The lack of a greeting is ominous."

"I was hoping that the system had signaled Crisler when he first arrived. Now I don't think it did. Look." He gestured to a long-range infrared view across the horizon of Apophis. Michael could see the faint thread shapes of the orbiting tethers and a vague pink glow that the window legend said was a retreating cloud of small packets bound for the construction shack.

Herat read Michael's look of incomprehension and scowled. "Look at the packets, man! The closest ones are days away from their origin. The whole stream stretches from a million kilometers above Apophis all the way to the shack. It's a long continuous flow of building material— but it's been cut off."

He was right. The last packet of building material sent from the Twins had gone out days ago. Michael saw where Herat was going with this: "The system started to shut down as soon as Crisler arrived!"

"Yes." Herat scowled at the display. "The question is, why?"

"But that's great, Professor. It's a major clue. We'd better laser this back to the fleet."

Herat glanced up, shrugging. "I suppose."

This wasn't like the professor at all. "What's wrong?" Michael asked.

For a moment Herat looked exasperated. Then his shoulders slumped and he said, "I know that it was right for me to join the halo. The Compact, I mean. The R.E.'s rotting from within. My career was winding down anyway; the Panspermia Institute's a farce, always has been… I just miss my children. I don't know if I'll ever see them again, Bequith."

"After this," Michael nodded to the Twins, "you can still go home. You're not a wanted man in the R.E., Professor. Crisler thinks you're safely dead."

"It's not that. I… sometimes I just feel my age, Bequith… Michael. After this…" Herat gazed sadly at the displays. "What will there be after this? This place is a treasure world, for sure. And it's the climax of my career. The end of a long search. It's funny. After all these years, I'm sorry to see the search end, maybe because I'm old enough to know that it's all downhill from here."

He laughed. "Never mind. Look, maybe the Lasa machinery is supposed to run on its own until someone intervenes. Then it hands control over to the newcomer. It's an instinct of the machine, it's designed that way. So maybe the shutdown means this place is functioning the way it was originally designed to: It won't eat up the resources of new colonists. It will only turn back on when they allow it, which would be when they are not competing with it for resources.

"Or I could be wrong. Anyway, send our observations to the fleet."

Later, when they turned the lights red for a sleep period— their orbit of Apophis would take several days— Michael found his mind whirling on about Rue, about himself, and about Laurent Herat. The last time Herat had acted like this was on the shores of Kadesh. Hard to believe that was over a year ago. At that time, the professor had come face-to-face with his own version of the kami of Dis. His lifelong enthusiastic chase after the alien had turned up worse than nothing. It seemed he had pursued ultimate answers for himself in that search and those answers weren't there. For a while, Jentry's Envy had convinced him it could be otherwise, but he was now coming again to face the same reality.

Thinking this made Michael sad and yes, he heard that whisper of the kami, saying it doesn't matter, nothing matters. To hold an artifact millions of years old in your hands and realize that every being for whom it had held significance was long extinct— that would rattle anyone who thought about it too long. And Herat had thought about such things his whole life.

This whole place could be a vast machine running senselessly on after the deaths of its creators. The Lasa must be extinct and if Rue Cassels had not stumbled upon Jentry's Envy, perhaps no one would ever have found this place. It would have gone on about its ceaseless activity, a kind of guardian of the underworld, of the tomb of interstellar space.

Time swept all away and it would sweep Laurent Herat away soon enough. Also Michael Bequith and all his cares and loves. These thoughts jumbled together in his mind, bringing him a confused, unpleasant melancholy, as he drifted off to sleep.

So they traveled on in their circuit of the giant failed star. All around, as they passed, the Lasa machinery that surrounded Apophis was changing. Over the next days Michael spent hours staring at the cloudscapes of the brown dwarf. Ancient and incredibly cold, they flowed like oil, a spectrum of icy blues visible only under extreme light amplification.

Apophis had been stillborn. It had never attained enough mass to burn hydrogen and so like all brown dwarfs it had glowed in its brief glory by gravity and magnetic forces alone. After billions of years, it had almost exhausted the heat of its birth. Only very rarely did the dwarf's magnetic field pull a twist of energy up through the atmosphere; then, wan arches of light would shimmer above the cloudscapes, only to flicker and collapse, exhausted, after a few minutes.

Nonetheless, bright things moved down in that realm, where flat, viscous thunderheads moved like charging armies across dark plains of dense cloud. Fusion-powered aircraft wove in and out among the starlit thunderheads, like birds at play. And in some places, great dark balloon cities drifted, tethers unreeling for hundreds of kilometers below them to tap the cloud decks. In the telescope, these balloons looked more like ancient battleships than craft of the air; to withstand eighteen gees of gravity, they were buttressed with squat girders and plated with titanium.

Were there windows in those floating fortresses? And did some entity, part of the mechanical ecology of Apophis, pause sometimes to gaze out at the stars?

Every now and then, sun-bright engines would kick into life atop one of those balloon cities. Stark nuclear light brought the gunmetal-blue cloudscapes into sharp relief, somehow making Apophis seem even colder and more alien. The tanker carrying lithium, beryllium and other hard-won treasures would climb laboriously for hours until it rendezvoused with a passing orbital tether.

The orbiting tethers grazed on whatever rose from the depths. They passed cargo packets up and past their orbital centers and flung them off their outermost arms. Each became a little world on its own, negotiating its position with the Twins through the music of gravity. After flying a million kilometers, each and every packet of cargo would arrive at a spot a few meters on a side, there to be caught by another tether in a higher orbit. This one would fling the cargo on its ultimate course, to meet with the invisibly distant construction shack that was the ultimate reason for all this activity.

Now, though, these intricate systems were falling silent. The jets cruised aimlessly. The floating cities withdrew their arms and hung silent. A few last cargo rockets clambered to the top of the atmosphere, but as they fell again they disintegrated in seconds. Stillness spread slowly, but unstoppably across the dark continents of air.

Michael's interceptor brushed the upper atmosphere of Apophis, briefly becoming a meteor before bouncing back into space. They shot silently through a province of motionless tethers and after another day lined up right behind the final cloud of packets heading for the shack. The cloud would act like chaff to the Banshee's radar; they would be invisible until they were almost to the shack.

There was really no preparing for what they might find there. They could only contemplate the world they had come to and, when they slept, let its dark kami whisper in their dreams.

RUE WAS EXERCISING to counteract free-fall weakness when the call came. The message, encrypted and sent by laser, was from the remains of their fleet, which was now spiraling toward the construction shack as unobtrusively as possible.

"Captain, we've got new reconnaissance pictures of the Banshee," said the young woman in the inscape window. "We think you should look at them, stat."

Images popped up, familiar at first: the twin balloons of the Banshee were now in full bolo configuration, swinging at opposite ends of a long tether. They appeared as twin glowing beads standing out from the long dark cylindrical body of the construction shack. Other photos showed close-ups of the habitats, which had been rounded can-shapes when Rue had ridden in the ship. One was still shaped that way; the other was smaller, spherical now, with a number of gathered bunches of fabric knotted at one end.

They had a catastrophic hull breach, Rue realized as she flipped through the rest of the images. Finally she came to one that showed the ramjet section of the starship. It was lit by six arc-welding torches. The tiny stars shone on long black scars and hairlike bunches of fullerene jutting out of the hull.

The scars were in lines, such as lasers would make. But where between here and the Envy could Crisler have gotten into a battle? It didn't make sense— unless Rue's crew had done something?

For a moment her heart leapt at the thought— but she knew the resources they'd had to work with. Unless they attacked the gunnery stations and took over the Banshee's own lasers…

Anxiously, she forwarded the images to the other vanguard interceptor. This ship, which contained Mike and Laurent Herat, was now almost directly behind the construction shack relative to her. They were approaching from opposite sides, according to plan and so far the Banshee didn't seem to have noticed. Indeed, the Banshee wasn't really scanning, which implied that they felt there was no threat here.

It took several seconds for round-trip messages and she didn't want to risk an open laser link, lest the beam overlap one of the Banshee's sensors. So Rue waited for long minutes while, she presumed, the others pored over the images. Finally Dr. Herat's face popped up in a little window.

"It looks like laser fire. The ship's badly damaged— I don't know if she'd be able to start the ramjet with the condition it's in. If Crisler's not expecting reinforcements, I'd say he's in pretty dire straits at this point. We may not need to fire a shot to take the Banshee."

This news should have cheered her, but Rue didn't like not knowing who had crippled Crisler's ship.

Her answer came six hours later, as she was eating. They had just completed a braking maneuver and were lining up for the final deceleration to rendezvous with the construction shack. Rue had an inscape window open over her plate, the shack, now floodlit from the Banshee, visible in it.

Suddenly the window went gray and the words SIGNAL LOSS appeared in it. Rue blinked at it in puzzlement for a second. Then she heard a sound like snakes hissing and the interceptor seemed to shudder under her.

The pilot shot past her, cursing loudly. He yanked himself into his seat and now Sola was yelling orders like there'd been a hull breach.

Hull breach! She dove for her own g-bed, waiting for the confirming spike of pain in her ears as pressure dropped. It didn't come, but she felt the ship turning under her. She reached over and punched the tactician's arm. "What's happening?"

"We lost forward sensors. We're flipping over to use the aft set."

"Did we hit something?"

"Don't know… no, it wasn't like that." Sola looked a bit gray. "I think it was a laser. The Banshee must have spotted us."

"I'm setting up a dusty plasma shield," said the pilot. Rue's window came back on-line, showing a turning starfield. A glowing orange haze appeared and slowly thickened until the stars vanished.

"How am I supposed to see through this?" said Rue.

"Telescope's off-line," muttered the pilot. "Hull registered a two thousand degree temperature spike. Definitely a laser."

"What's the Banshee doing?"

Sola had a bunch of windows open. "…Nothing," he said, puzzled. "It hasn't varied its radar ping. No movement, no heat signature from weapons fire."

"Incoming transmission," said the pilot. "It's from IR 21." That was Mike's ship.

Doctor Herat appeared again, this time looking flustered. "Rue, we've been fired on! It's not coming from the Banshee. It might be an automated system, probably an asteroid defense. It's pretty persistent, we've taken three strong hits already."

She tapped the window to reply. "Find out why! Are we too big or something? I thought we were supposed to register as one of those cargo packets 'cause we're part of the cloud. Why didn't that work?"

The time-delay to Herat's nod was almost imperceptible; they must be close to the shack. "Maybe there's some characteristic of the packets that we—" The window went gray, as the shuddering hiss happened again.

"How much of this can we take?" she asked Sola. He shrugged.

"Probably a lot," he said. "These ships are designed for reentry into a brown dwarf's atmosphere, after all…" Another hiss and the lights flickered. "But that's different," he said less certainly.

Herat reappeared. "Captain! The cargo packets are all broadcasting a weak transponder signal. We didn't notice it before because of the interference from the Twins. Each packet seems to be broadcasting a unique signature, but of course we don't speak Lasa so—" Hiss.

Now Rue's ears did pop. "Depressure!" shouted the pilot, even as the clamshells folded up over their g-beds and Rue found herself alone in the dark, flickering gray inscape windows her only company. She sat paralyzed for a second, then swept her hands out to open a series of diagnostics, as well as an intercom line to the others.

"…the hull's intact," the pilot was saying. "But we lost a seal around the airlock. We can grow a new one, but it'll take a few hours. The hull's acting like a lens, concentrating the laser light in a few spots."

"What about the shields? Aren't they working?" she demanded.

"Yeah, they are, or we'd have been vaporized by now."

This is the same battle the Banshee fought, she thought. Another hiss came and more indicators turned red.

"— the call signal." Herat had reappeared, his image distorted and full of static. "Our autotroph AI deciphered it. It's a—" the signal cut out for a second. " — manifest. You have to send the following string…"

"Are you getting that?" she shouted to the pilot.

"I think so." Silence— she pictured him retransmitting the signal Herat had provided. At least, she hoped that was what was happening.

"We've missed our scheduled burn," he said abruptly. "I'm going to have to expose our engines to the laser in order to decelerate. If I don't we'll overshoot or hit the shack—"

"Just do it," she said. "If this doesn't work, we'll be roasted anyway."

Crushing weight enveloped Rue. She pulled her hand up to close her fingers around the Ediacaran pendant. You've come this far, she thought at it. You can go a little further.

The burn ended. "Coasting in," said the pilot. "After all the fireworks, the Banshee sees us now. But we're coming in on the opposite side of the shack. It'll take them a while to get someone out to us."

"What about the others?"

"Other ships copying our maneuver. They're okay," said the pilot.

"Get ready to disembark," she said. She wanted to feel relieved that they had survived and were here, but she was out of time. Rue reached into the storage bins under the g-bed and pulled out the components of the army pressure suit they'd fitted for her.

She dressed quickly; as the helmet snapped in place with a satisfying click, Rue looked down at the weapons that dangled from the suit's belt. No time for relief now; no time for fear. Only time to take the most direct route to her crew and woe to anyone who got in her way.

25

RUE STEPPED INTO familiar darkness. The stars surrounded her and for a few moments they were all she saw. It wasn't until she turned around that she made out the black absence that was Apophis and, looking opposite that, saw the corresponding silhouette of Osiris. Her interceptor was gliding away, a ghostly knife-shape. It had dropped off her squad of six and would now take up station near the construction shack. That too became visible as she continued turning; it was much closer than she'd expected, a vast rectangle of darkness that must be only a few kilometers away.

Sola and the rest of the squad were feverishly setting up countermeasures to avoid detection. The interceptor had dropped them off in the middle of a cone-shaped zone of space where the cargo packets coming from the Twins were funneled inward. For a few moments, she and her soldiers would appear as part of the cloud. By the time they left the cone, they must be invisible.

While the soldiers unfurled stealth shields and started spraying a mist of liquid helium around to blot out infrared, Rue turned her attention to the shack. Behind it lay the Banshee. Crisler's starship would likely have strewn sensors all around the shack; their arrival on its other side was not so much a sneak as a way to shield the interceptors from attack.

Though not visible, she knew the other interceptor would be arriving as well. Mike and his team would be hanging in space just as she was, preparing to enter the alien structure.

Sola handed Rue a secure comm line and she plugged it into her suit's shoulder. "Good so far," he said. "Insertion as planned?"

"Yes." The squad grouped up, attaching lines to one another, then fired reaction guns to take them over the curve of the shack. Now they would find out if their countermeasures were working. Rue's mouth was dry, but she was surprised at how calm she was, now that they were finally here. She had thought about this moment for months, but in the end, her worries and nightmare scenarios were a distraction. She needed to focus on the moment and only that way would she get through it.

They'd spent a lot of time debating whether to go to the shack first, or the Banshee. Her people could be in either place, but were most likely to be aboard the starship. Even if they were somewhere in the shack, the Banshee was a better place to make a stand. Crisler could not destroy his own ship to get at them.

There was no sense of movement, of course; the stars were simply rising, slowly and gently, over the short horizon of the shack. After a few minutes something new began to rise: a bauble like a paper lantern. It was the larger of the Banshee's two balloon habitats, swinging on the end of its invisible tether. A kilometer away from it, below the shack's horizon, the smaller habitat would be swinging the other way.

She had only that one glimpse, then Sola raised one of the radar shields and blocked her view. That was okay; Rue didn't need to be reminded of the layout of the Banshee. The two six-story balloon habitats had similar internal plans and swung opposite one another from the central axis pod. The heaviest component of the starship in view was a pair of flowerlike assemblies of tungsten plates that petaled out from the cables halfway between the axis and the habitats. At the rotational axis of the system was a can-shaped weapons pod much smaller than the balloons. It held a fusion reactor and various supplies as well as missiles and lasers. Another tether trailed off at right angles from it, ending sixty kilometers away at the ramscoop and engines.

"EVA cart at Long-thirty, Lat-forty," said one of the soldiers. Rue oriented herself and looked in that direction. One of the Banshee's familiar raillike carts came into view; it must have just launched from the starship's axis.

For a tense few seconds nobody breathed as it approached. Rue was peripherally aware of one of her soldiers slowly bringing his laser rifle up to aim at the space-suited figures on the craft.

"No," she said. "They're headed for the shack."

"Agreed," said Sola. "Let them go; they're five less men for us to worry about at the Banshee."

They continued to watch as the cart lofted gently over the black surface of the shack and disappeared into the mist of stars beyond.

"They're checking out the interceptor," someone muttered.

"Good," said Rue. "It's supposed to distract them."

They had drifted far out from the shack now and were coming in line with the swiftly rotating habitats of the Banshee. Each swept past once per minute, which meant they were traveling at 180 kilometers per hour relative to Rue.

There had been spirited argument about their next maneuver. Like any spaceship, Banshee had micrometeor defenses, including automated lasers. Unlike other ships, though, its systems were of truly paranoid power and accuracy. Banshee was designed to be able to withstand deliberate attacks by missile and laser weapons. If Banshee had been at alert, they would have been spotted and targeted instantly. They could all be vaporized in a second by the ship's countermeasures.

Banshee was also designed to resist being boarded. According to Sola, such a rotating ship was usually designed to detect the sudden addition or subtraction of mass at either end of its tethers. It could literally feel the weight of an arriving man.

Normally one boarded a rotating spacecraft at the center and then moved down an elevator or drop-shaft to the rotating portion. But if Rue's squad were successful in approaching the weapons pod and began rapelling down a tether from there, they would be doing so in full view of the targeting and weapons systems and they would be felt and pinpointed instantly.

The alternative was a much more scary maneuver. For the next few minutes, their lives would depend entirely on the largely untested equipment they'd brought. Rue tried to breathe regularly, watching the tiny screen in her heads-up display. It showed them drifting directly into the path of the swinging habitats. She looked up in time to see the larger one flash past, disturbingly close. She could practically count the oxygen tanks hanging off it. It swept majestically away, arcing up gradually until it was rising vertically, then it was cut off behind Sola's shield. Invisibly behind that shield, the smaller habitat was racing down to meet them.

"Form up," ordered Sola. He took Rue's arm and that of one other man. They put their feet into the loops of a two-meter long cylindrical rocket and clipped their waist tethers to it as well. "Lean back," said Sola. The rocket twisted under them, little jets firing, as it figured out the distribution of their mass.

"Commit," said Sola tersely. The rocket was in control now; this would either work, or they would be dead in seconds.

Rue braced herself as she'd been coached to do. Suddenly the rocket lit and they were surging forward— it felt like upward. They'd left the countermeasures behind and here came the habitat. Rue had a strange perceptual moment when she felt as if she were standing on some high peak on Treya; someone had put glowing Erythrion on a chain and was swinging the whole halo world at her.

The habitat seemed to leap at them— then it faltered and stopped, barely meters away. Rue gaped at it. Suddenly the wall of translucent plastic began to rise, as if yanked up by some capricious child god. But by then Sola's man had leapt across the intervening space and slapped a sticky patch to it. Another man had performed the same maneuver from the other rocket.

A tether attached to the patch zipped up with the wall and yanked Rue and Sola and all the others off the rocket. The metal cylinder tumbled away while Rue swung wildly and in gravity now with nothing but stars below her.

A brilliant flash lit the wall, casting a long crazed shadow upward from the dangling soldiers. "They're on to us," said Sola tersely.

"What was that?"

"The rockets. They lasered them."

Rue clung to her thin rope, heart pounding. She was disoriented by the stars spinning past and the odd feeling of looking down at them. She could only watch as two soldiers glued a transparent emergency airlock to the hull. Once it was inflated, they entered it and began lasering a hole through the hull itself.

"Incoming defenders," somebody said. The others raised their weapons; Rue craned her neck up to see things that looked surprisingly like Jentry's mining spiders clambering down the side of the habitat. They were having trouble getting around the bunches and folds of material that had been tied together after the habitat was holed, days or weeks ago, by the construction shack's lasers. In surreal silence, the robots glowed and exploded as her men targeted them.

"We're in." Sola tugged Rue's tether. She looked down to see two of her men entering the Banshee through a ragged hole in the hull. Glowing flinders plummeted past her; red-hot droplets splattered on Rue's shoulder, hissed, and went out. A whole spider fell past, its legs scrambling and one flailing limb caught Rue's tether. Feeling oddly detached, she saw the tether part.

She was falling. Rue screamed and reached out, catching Sola's ankle. For a wild second she hung above the wheeling stars. Bright flashes pulsed below her as the lasers in the Banshee's weapons pod targeted the falling spiders. If she let go, she would share their fate.

Then strong hands pulled her up and she flopped over the resilient lip of the airlock. Sola fell onto her and the airlock gulped closed. In another moment she was being dragged into bright calm light and landed on all fours on the familiar decking of a corridor in the Banshee.

Rue needed a moment to compose herself. She sat up, watching her men fan out in either direction. They were in one of the ring-shaped corridors that ran around the outside of the habitat. About five meters to her right was a T-intersection; the hallway there would lead to the hub of the round habitat.

In the other direction the smoothly curving wall was interrupted after a few meters by a tightly wadded and stapled bundle of hull material. The decking and ceiling here had been cut away and sections of the inner wall removed. The habitat was basically just a big plastic balloon and here was a spot where the balloon had been gathered and twisted to make it smaller.

"Countermeasures," directed Sola. One of the men set a squat gray cylinder on the floor and flipped a switch on its side. The solid-looking can hopped, its sides bulging and smoking slightly. Rue heard a series of loud clicks, that seemed to originate inside her head.

"What was that?" asked Rue.

"We're using optical networks and coms exclusively," said Sola. "That was an EM bomb. It made a burst of microwaves that should have fried all the electronics in the vicinity. Hopefully it'll shut down their intercoms and sensors."

Somebody had dumped a satchel full of little buglike things onto the floor. They rose on buzzing wings now and swarmed off down the corridor. "Hunt bots," said Barendts.

Rue thought she recognized where she was. "They should look one deck up, northeast quadrant from our position," she said. "There's storage spaces there that could be used as a brig."

"Come on." Sola waved his men into motion. They trotted to the nearby intersection. Before they got there, Sola raised his hand. "Hostiles!" His men crouched back against the walls; a second later, Rue did likewise.

Pure crimson light flashed out of the intersection. She saw one of the little hunt bots twirl, flaming, out of the axial corridor.

Sola pitched a grenade around the corner; Rue was thinking no that can't possibly be one of the explosive variety— and then it went off and blue-black smoke poured back. She let out a whoosh of relief, though naturally Sola wouldn't have used an explosive in here; the blast could have torn the hull open.

The smoke made normal vision impossible, but her suit's HUD display showed a sketchy view of her surroundings, rendered from laser or sonar. It wasn't an inscape display; she and her men had their inscape temporarily disabled as a precaution against spoofing.

Sola's men were diving and rolling into the side corridor now and she heard taser fire. She hurried after them on wobbly legs. She had just rounded the corner when somebody swept her legs out from under her and she fell on her back. Bright flashes and the sound of gunfire surrounded her. Rue righted herself and looked ahead— catching confused sonar glimpses of man-shapes wrestling in the smoke. Somebody's discarded taser lay near her and she picked it up before thinking to unholster the one on her belt.

One of the fighting figures went down (others running away from her beyond it) and just at that moment a powerful gust of wind blew through the corridor. The smoke glided away in a single solid mass as though suddenly reminded that it should be somewhere else. Rue sat up.

Two spider robots and three space-suited men lay on the deck. The prone men's suits were all R.E.-issue. Rue's own men were already moving on toward the hub of the corridors.

Rue got to her feet unsteadily. She couldn't help looking down at the faceplate of the man nearest her.

She recognized the face behind the glass. This was a man who had sometimes joined her crew at lunch in the cafeteria. He was quite a joker. Now he was unconscious and turning blue as he tried to breathe.

"Captain!" Barendts was waving at her to hurry up. Rue knelt down and undogged the man's faceplate. Jared, that was his name. As soon as the glass was open he sucked in a deep breath.

"Come on!" She stood indecisively. There was no time to examine the other two. Rue ran after Barendts, feeling sick at what they were having to do.

The others were already going up the spiral staircase at the hub of the four spoke corridors. Rue caught up to them at the top of the stairs. There had originally been two more floors above this one, but now the staircase continued up in its cylinder past two sets of sealed doors. The ceiling visible through the opened doors on Rue's level was bunched and bundled. The walls had been partly dismantled, so that they only rose to head-height now, like partitions.

Rue nodded when she saw this. "If they're on board, they'll be here," she said. "Crisler wouldn't house any of his own people in such a dangerous spot." One pressure leak and the whole level would be in vacuum.

"We lost our hunters," pointed out one of the men. Sola shrugged.

"Search the old-fashioned way, then," he said. "Two men stay here; you two take that way and we'll go this way. Clockwise when you get to the ring corridor." This was Rue's chance to show she had learned her infantry-tactics lessons well; she covered Sola while he ducked through the doorway, then he knelt and waved her through. She ran past to the first door and flattened herself next to it.

The door was shut; Sola ducked past her and she hit the switch then dropped to a crouch. The door snicked open. Sola had it covered and nodded curtly to her. Rue poked her head around the corner.

The odd billowy ceiling made this wedge-shaped room look like it was half-filled by a solidified cloud. It must be cold up here: Icicles hung from the folds of hull fabric. Boxes were stacked around the room's periphery and the single table held two plates with halfeaten meals on them. There were no chairs; but another door beckoned on the far side of the room. Rue eased inside and Sola followed.

This time Rue took up position behind a stack of boxes and Sola went to the door. He was three steps from it when it flew open. A crimson flash caused her faceplate to polarize momentarily; then she saw Sola tumbling backward, his chest smoking. Another flash and the boxes in front of her exploded.

Rue rolled across the floor, firing her taser as she came back to a crouch. Sparks flew around the doorway, then someone leaped through it. The man was in a pressure suit and held an antipersonnel laser.

The laser looked just like the one she'd seen dangling from an arm of the submarine back on Oculus. This might even be the man who'd shot Max.

Rue jumped to one side just as he fired. She fired back, raising another cascade of sparks from the boxes where he now crouched. Even a near miss with the taser might short out his suit's systems, leaving him helpless— but she was having no luck.

Fire engulfed her hand. The taser exploded and the slap against her palm spun Rue around. She fell back against the smoking remains of the table.

He stepped out from behind the boxes, between her and the inner door now. The door opened and another figure dressed in an R.E. suit entered.

He glanced back, then casually took aim at Rue with the laser. She flinched and scarlet light blinded her.

There was no pain. As her faceplate depolarized she saw the man in front of her collapse to his knees and then fall on his face. The back of his suit was a blackened mess.

The soldier who had fired stepped over his body and knelt in front of Rue.

"Are you all right?" The voice was that of a woman. Rue shook her head in confusion.

The soldier reached up and undogged her own faceplate. "It's me, Mina!"

Mina. This was the woman Rebecca had begun seeing when they were aboard the Envy. She was one of Crisler's people, but obviously not on his side.

Suddenly Rue understood why Rebecca had left Oculus with Crisler. "She came back for you," she stammered.

"Come on," said Mina. She extended her hand to help Rue to her feet. "I've been managing to swing shifts so I could be with your people," she said. "It paid off, I guess."

Rue stooped to examine Sola. His eyes were open and lifeless.

She forced herself to turn away. With difficulty she made sense of what Mina had just said to her. "Are they here?" she asked.

"See for yourself." Mina pointed to the inner doorway. She could see two people standing on the other side. Rue ran to the door.

Rebecca and Blair both ran forward when they recognized her. They were alone in this small room. Both began talking at once and Rebecca grabbed onto Rue's gloved hand like a free-faller reaching for a safety line. A hot stab of pain in her hand made Rue pull back. She looked down and realized with a shock that her right glove was burned and fused. Waves of pain were radiating from her hand.

"I've been shot," she heard herself say. She had to keep her priorities, she reminded herself. "Where are Corinna and Evan?"

"They're aboard the cycler mother," said Mina. "Crisler's using them as explorers."

The room was spinning. "Rebecca, my people are outside," Rue said. "Get them…" She couldn't manage the rest, as everything blurred and roared together. For a few seconds she was sure she was going to pass out and she sat down heavily on the deck waiting for it. The tide slowly receded and she looked up to see the four remaining members of her squad crowding into the room.

This place had been set up as a prison cell. The walls were cut off near the top, as elsewhere on this level, but here they'd been stapled into the folds of hull material. There were four cots, a small table and a footlocker.

Blair was grimly rummaging through the locker. Rue's men clustered around Sola; he was obviously dead.

Rebecca was crying. "Rue, you're alive," she said. "They told me you'd drowned."

"How did you get here?" asked Blair. He was filling a satchel.

"It's a long story," she said, trying to smile. "Are those your records, Blair?"

He nodded to Rue, looking grimly relieved. "They were going to wipe it all. All my work." He had recorded everything, from the day they left Erythrion to Rue's discovery of the Lasa habitat builder at Jentry's Envy.

"What do we do about Sola?" asked Barendts sharply. "Leave him?"

They had discussed this before the mission. Casualties might have to be left behind; these men were here because they had accepted that risk. Now that they were in the situation, though, Rue found herself shaking her head.

"We take him as far as we can," she said. "If we have to abandon him to escape, then that's what we'll do. But I'm not leaving anyone behind if I don't have to."

"Have you taken over the ship?" asked Rebecca.

"Not yet," she said. "That's next on the agenda."

Mina nodded sagely. "So those are your ships out there."

"Yeah." Rue waved one of her men over. "I'm hurt, can you give me something?"

All four of them were suddenly looming over her, scrambling in their belt pouches for analgesic patches. "Your glove's been wrecked," Barendts pointed out. "We'll have to seal it."

"Go ahead."

He sprayed the glove with a plastic aerosol that hardened on contact. Meanwhile Rue fumbled her faceplate open with her other hand and let someone apply a patch to her forehead, which was the only exposed piece of skin large enough. She was sure she looked like a dolt now, with a military-black square on her brow like a little target. But there was nothing for it and anyway, the pain was receding now like a half-remembered dream.

"Crisler'll have to surrender now," said Mina. She took Rebecca's hand. "You're sure the halo'll have me?"

"Of course."

"I know you must have taken a cycler to Maenad," said Mina. "What I can't figure out, though, is how you managed to bring a big enough force with you to be able to take over Crisler's other ships. And you faked the transmissions perfectly— I mean, you even got the voices and faces right."

Rue and all her men turned to stare at Mina. "What?" said Rue.

"Admiral Crisler relayed the chatter through inscape," said Mina. "Half an hour ago— we watched the video feed from here, from the freighter and the other cruisers…" She stopped. "Why are you staring at me like that?"

Rue got to her feet. "What freighter? What cruisers? How many?"

"The… the three cruisers. You know, the old decommissioned ones Crisler had refitted and moved to Maenad."

Rue looked at her men. They looked back expectantly.

Sola was gone. It was up to Rue now; she would have to improvise. "Plans have changed. Everybody, get ready to abandon ship. Mina, tell me more about these ships."

Mina looked confused now. "They came out of hyperdrive an hour ago, just twenty thousand klicks away. Like I said, a freighter and three decommissioned cruisers. Crisler managed to get the rights to them after they were liberated from the rebels a couple years ago. They signaled us right away. I thought you must have been aboard them, I mean that you faked out Crisler… But if those aren't your ships, where did you come from?"

"Ma'am," said one of the soldiers, "we can't abandon ship. We'll be fried as soon as we leave the hull."

"Maybe not," said Rue. "I have an idea. Anyway, Crisler's got reinforcements coming. If we stay here…"

"But our boys will take them out," said the soldier.

Rue checked the time in her suit's HUD. "They appeared much closer to here than we did," she said. "Crisler's ships may reach us before our interceptors reach them. In which case, he's got both us and the construction shack as hostages. No, we've got to get back to our own ship and get out of here."

But we'll go through the shack if we can, she told herself. I won't leave Corinna and Evan behind if there's any way to get to them.

TEN MINUTES LATER they crowded into an airlock above the collapsed levels of the habitat. They had encountered no more resistance on their way here; it seemed that Crisler's people were spread out, perhaps mostly in the construction shack. If there was a way to get up past the hub and down to the other habitat without being lasered, they might well have been able to take over the Banshee. The hardened defenses of the starship were too strong, though.

Rue undogged the cover over a small quartz window and gawked up through it. "Yeah, there they are. See?" She stepped back and let Barendts look.

"Big black plates," he said. "Halfway up the cables. What the hell are those?"

"Antimatter generators," said Rue. She'd heard all about this stuff from a scientist who'd chatted her up shortly after they embarked for the Envy. "The Banshee can direct the particle stream coming in from the ramscoop through those tungsten plates. The radiation mostly just heats the plates on the way through, but a tiny fraction gets converted to antimatter and collected with magnets. That way, the Banshee can replenish her antimatter supply just by, say, orbiting close around a star and turning on the ramscoop."

"So?" said Barendts. "What's the point?"

"The point is those plates are designed to be put in the way of energy beams. The Banshee's lasers aren't going to get through one."

Barendts nodded. "So if we cut one loose…"

"Exactly. Do you think we can get there outside?"

Barendts shook his head. "We'll have to go up the elevator shaft." The shaft was an inflated tunnel that paralleled the cables, joining the habitat to the central hub of the ship.

"All right, let's do it."

They piled out of the airlock. A set of elevator doors faced the airlock in the attic of the habitat. Two of her men set to prying the doors open.

Blair was pacing up and down, trying to get comfortable in his suit. They'd taken suits from the tasered R.E. soldiers for both Blair and Rebecca. Blair's was too small.

Something behind the door broke and they slid open. Barendts jogged over and stuck a mirror on a pole out into the shaft. He examined it for a few seconds, then said, "There are autoguns in there. Antipersonnel tasers, I think."

"Can we take them out?" she asked. If not, they were stuck here.

"Simplicity itself," said Barendts. He laid the mirror pole down on the deck so that the mirror was inside the shaft, righted it so the mirror pointed upward and unslung his laser rifle. "Guys, come here. Sight off the mirror."

Rue was amazed at their ingenuity: they proceeded to shoot up the shaft by bouncing their shots off the mirror on the pole. The tasers inside the shaft had no way to shoot back, except at the pole itself. Several did just that, sending cascades of sparks back along it. Barendts and his men were standing well back and they ignored the jolts.

Sparks and bits of flaming metal fell down from above. After a minute, smoke drifted down as well. Then there came one of those rushes of air like a god inhaling and the smoke vanished. The pole twirled and would have fallen into the shaft if Barendts hadn't grabbed it. He peered into the mirror for a long while, then said, "That's all of them. Let's go."

Climbing the shaft was simplicity itself. There was a ladder inset into the wall. Barendts and two of his men went first, then Rue, with the others behind her.

The shaft towered up to a seemingly infinite height. It was almost half a kilometer to the hub from here. But as Rue climbed, her weight lessened and it became easier the farther she went. About halfway up, Barendts said, "Elevator coming."

The other men swore. "What is it?" asked Rebecca. "Reinforcements?"

"Probably," said Barendts. "Captain, may I have your permission to get ugly on this wall here?"

"I thought you were going to put up one of those inflatable airlocks and drill through inside it."

"The elevator would run over it. Yes or no? It's coming!"

"Yes!"

Barendts swung out from the ladder and slammed a disk-shaped charge against the wall of the elevator shaft. It stuck and he swung back. "Everybody hold on!"

The explosion was deafening, even through the suit. The ladder shook and tried to throw Rue off. She held on and looked up again to see smoke swirling and disappearing into a miraculous gale that had sprung up in the shaft.

Above, the elevator car had stopped moving. Rue could see the shapes of hatches in its floor. If those could be opened from the inside, then she and her people were about to be lasered.

"Come on!" shouted Barendts, his voice way too loud in Rue's headphones. He swung out and around again, but this time he was holding onto a line that he'd tied to the ladder. He disappeared into the gale. The man behind him followed an instant later.

There was no time to think. Rue grabbed the line and swung out. The wind caught her instantly and pushed her straight at a ragged black hole in the side of the shaft. She fell sideways out into night.

Barendts had calculated perfectly. As the wind vanished into vacuum around her, Rue fell against the outside of the shaft. Looming over her was one of the petallike tungsten plates. It hid any view of the hub above— so the lasers there could not touch her. One by one the others shot out of the bright tear in the side of the shaft and Barendts's men caught them. When they were all hanging from the lip of the tear— not so hard, since gravity was much reduced here— Barendts clambered up and began gluing handholds to the underside of the plate.

Rue could hear several persons' ragged breathing coming through the com lines. She said, "Everybody up now. We're going to have to use our suits' reaction jets to fly this thing. When Barendts cuts us loose we're going to fall, but coriolis effect will take us away from the habitat. Our main task is to keep the plate from spinning. If we cut loose at the right time we'll be aimed at the horizon of the shack and if we can get over that, we're safe." One after another, they climbed up. "No, don't grab with your hands," said Rue as Mina clutched at one of the new grips on the plate. "Put your feet through them. The plate is going to be our new 'down' when we cut loose. We'll fly it like those guys on Earth used to fly on ocean waves. What did they call it? — surfing."

She demonstrated. Soon they were all hanging feet-down off the plate, with the glowing habitat below and the stars streaming past under that. "Ready," she said to Barendts.

He had attached another charge to the gimbal joint that connected the plate to the shaft. Now he unslung his laser again and prepared to laser the charge.

"Ten, nine, eight, seven…" Barendts was counting down. As the Banshee slowly spun, he was lining up so that centripetal force would throw them at the shack. "…three, two, one—"

He fired the laser and a silent explosion silhouetted him. The plate shook over Rue's feet— but nothing else happened.

"Oh, shit," said Barendts. It hadn't worked.

"Everybody shoot the joint!" shouted Rue. The others unslung their lasers; she saw one rifle fall away; it arced out over the stars for a few seconds before vanishing in a flash of light. Destroyed by the hub lasers.

"Wait," said Barendts, "We have to line up another throw at the shack. We'll miss it if we drop now!"

"Too late!" Rue saw shadows moving inside the ragged hole in the side of the shaft. Whoever had been in the elevator car, they were out now and coming.

Bright spots appeared on the gimbal joint and in a few seconds metal was flaring intolerably bright. I hope the joint's not tungsten, too, she thought.

Without warning they were falling. Everybody seemed to be shouting or screaming, up turned down, the habitat whipped by and the stars were tumbling past—

"Jets forward!" shouted Rue as she brought up her own reaction pistol. She fired and several others did too. The plate wobbled under her feet, the Banshee's cables and shaft came into view and then the hub was peeking over the edge of the plate.

Light flashed and someone screamed. Rue was momentarily shrouded in smoke but she kept her feet braced in the straps and fired her pistol. After several agonizing seconds, the hub crept down over the plate's horizon again. Just as it did, the edge of the plate began glowing dull red, then orange.

"Who did we lose?" asked Barendts.

Silence for a few seconds. Rue looked around, but visibility was limited in her suit and in this dark.

"N-nobody," said Mina finally. "The laser caught my reaction pistol— blew it out of my hands. I've got a little leak in my glove, but nothing I can't seal."

Rue was watching the stars turn. "Jets back," she said. "Two second burst." They all fired and stabilized the plate again.

She could see the construction shack. It was above and to her left, but it was hard to know if they were headed in that direction. The plate they were riding was massive; she doubted if they could change its trajectory easily.

The metal under her feet glowed again, then faded. At least it looked like the plate would hold.

There was a long silence, as it sank in that they had, for now anyway, escaped. Then Blair's dry voice filled Rue's head.

"Well, Captain, this may not be the best ship I've crewed for you, but right now I wouldn't trade it for anything."

26

MICHAEL GRABBED THE autotroph canister by its handles, peering momentarily through its little window at the spiral-shaped thing inside. "You asked to be here, here you are," he said to it. Then he hauled it to the airlock and cycled through. The others were already outside, preparing to jump off the interceptor as they approached the construction shack.

The only light source outside was the stars, but the shack glowed in infrared and his suit helmet translated that into an image. The shack was huge and its quilted surface undulated slightly in places, like the fabric of a hotter-than-air balloon Michael had once seen on Kimpurusha.

"It's that ferrofluid again," said Herat. "These Lasa are nothing if not consistent." Likely there was no solid hull under that liquid, only a moveable matrix of powerful magnets. The shack's size and shape were a matter of convenience. Right now, it was a cylinder over a kilometer long and almost half that in thickness.

They slid behind the shack relative to the Banshee; as its glowing habitats vanished behind the horizon of the shack, their pilot said, "Fire," and the rail-shaped cart they hung onto pulled away from the interceptor. Michael had little sense of movement unless he turned to watch the interceptor depart.

Harp, their squad leader, pointed back along the surface of the shack. "I can see Captain Cassels's group. They're headed for the Banshee."

The cart drifted to a stop a meter from the shack. Michael switched off the infrared view and turned on his helmet light. The ferrofluid was a dull black, and until he reached to touch it, he wasn't sure he was seeing it. The surface indented slightly under his touch, but he couldn't penetrate it with his glove.

"No surprise we can't get through here," said Harp. "They'd want to control the placement of doors. Where's that photomosaic, Professor?"

Michael waited while they located an airlock. He was scared, in a completely different way than he was used to. This alien artifact was potentially more dangerous than any he and Herat had investigated— but the chief danger here was Man, not the alien.

Still, he told himself, this is what I've been waiting for. Ever since Kimpurusha, he had been wandering, waiting to come full circle. Now, finally, he had his chance to strike at the conquerors of his home. This time he would get it right.

Harp drew them over the curve of the shack to where one of the Lasa's distinctive airlocks sat nested in the spiky black skin of the shack. The soldier unclipped a hunt bot from his belt and pushed it through the resilient liquid. Michael tried to open an inscape window to it by habit; of course that didn't work in this military situation. He brought up his HUD and peered at the tiny image it projected ahead of him.

The inside of the shack was mostly one open space, lit by red laser light. For a moment Michael thought he was looking at some kind of computer-generated cartoon, however, because the interior of the place was overlaid with layers of ghostly image. Three dimensional ghosts shimmered as the hunt bot moved from its position by the airlock. It was as if some ectoplasm had been shaped into the cylinders and planes of giant machines, all faint and trembling. Through these vast ghosts moved tiny objects similar to the hunt bot.

"No hostiles visible," said the soldier who was piloting the bot. "Shall we go through, sir?"

"Standard penetration maneuver," said Harp. Two of the soldiers flipped through the lock, then Harp and the last soldier. Without comment, Herat followed. Michael grabbed the autotroph's canister and was the last through.

Now he saw with his own eyes what the bot had reported. He could see all the way across to the other side of the shack, but hazily, as though a giant hologram were projected inside the shack. The hologram of a colossal, intricate machine…

As he watched, one of those little Lasa bots swept by, not four meters away. As it passed, the contours of a half-visible girder swayed, and seemed to gain solidity.

"What…?" He appealed to Herat. The professor chuckled in delight.

"You've never seen the inside of a three-d printer before, have you, Bequith? I believe we're looking at a new cycler, or part of one. It isn't being built, so much as condensed atom by atom. The bots used a combination of magnets, laser holography and vapor deposition to create the entire thing as a single object. Incredible."

He couldn't tear his eyes away from the sight. Over the weeks or months, the elemental material harvested from the Twins would be breathed into this space and manipulated by subtle forces to come to rest here, there; to join with neighbors to become solid, or form the boundary of such a solid. The whole cycler was a single thing, so much more tightly integrated than humanity's modular machinery that its structure rivaled the organic.

Or exceeded it…

"There's air," said a soldier. "Not great, though, and low-pressure. A mix of helium, hydrogen, and oxygen."

"Keep helmets on," said Harp. "Which way, Professor?"

"Um?" Herat too had been staring. "Ah. To our left, I believe. I think there's another chamber there." Where he pointed, blackness shimmered beyond the phantom machinery. Another wall of ferromagnetic liquid? They drifted in that direction, hunt bots roving ahead.

"I still don't understand what they're building here," Herat muttered. Michael didn't take the verbal bait; he was too busy trying to keep his flight straight while hauling along the autotroph canister.

"I mean, the tethers around Osiris and Apophis won't produce enough power to launch a cycler," the professor went on. "So then, what is this?" He gestured at the slowly coalescing machinery in the center of the shack.

"A colony," somebody else said. Michael was startled at the thought— but maybe it was true.

"They might have spent most of their energy to launch the Envy, and then this is being provided as a home for whomever the Envy manages to find on its ring," Michael suggested.

"Halt," said Harp. They were approaching the wall that separated this half of the shack from the rest. Michael could see circular airlocks at regular intervals around the wall. The rest was ribbed and spiked ferrofluid, all conforming to the invisible shapes of the magnetic fields that held it in place.

He knew there were no living beings here, unless the other half of this structure held habitats. If it did, this would be the only settled spot in the Twins' system, which made no sense.

The hunt bots reported no human presence here, not even that of other bots. Crisler's people must have decided to leave this gestation chamber to do its work without interference. That was a lucky break.

They sailed up to one of the airlocks, and Harp repeated the procedure of sending a bot through it first. Michael was nervous— expecting at any moment that some trap of Crisler's would be sprung on them. Nothing happened, and the bot proceeded to beam back pictures of the new space.

The second half of the shack was a single large space, like the first. But while the first contained only the ghostly shadows of machines materializing, here the objects were fully made. The entire space was crammed with a giant, bulbous, and somehow insectile thing. It was vaguely egg-shaped, Michael thought, with circular holes in the end closest to the bot. Those could be weapons… or engines.

The entire white skin of the thing was covered in intricate, multicolored lines of text— but not, Michael realized with a shock, the spiky red writing of the Lasa.

"That's Chicxulub," said Herat. Michael could hear disbelief in the older man's voice, an echo to what Michael himself felt.

"It is a cycler," Michael said doubtfully.

"It can't be," insisted Herat. "Look at it, it must be incredibly massive— built with all kinds of unnecessary metal plating and girders…"

"It's a drop ship!" exclaimed Harp. "Like our interceptors."

"No… Too delicate for that. And way too big. I have no idea what it is," Herat concluded. Normally mysteries excited him, but he seemed more uneasy than pleased at this particular one. "But if not Lasa…"

Michael laboriously turned the autotroph canister until the little window pointed toward the cycler-or-whatever. "Translate that," he instructed the autotroph being.

The bulk of the giant machine obscured whatever else might be in the chamber. Harp took them through the airlock cautiously, but so far there was no sign of hostiles. But as the hunt bots shot away to explore, Michael spotted something far down along the curve of the ship. "White light," he said to Harp, pointing. "There."

Harp deployed countermeasures, and they began crawling slowly along the inside wall of the chamber, flat invisibility shields held overhead. Gradually, the source of the white illumination revealed itself.

Here was Crisler's base of operations. Two small balloon-habitats had been inflated inside the shack, one against its outside wall, and one half-encircling the nose of the giant machine— which Michael stubbornly decided must be a cycler, regardless of what Herat said. The habitats were a patchwork of white, made of the same stuff as the Banshee's habs. In several places each was transparent; Michael recognized the material the soldiers used for temporary bubble airlocks.

The habitat attached to the shack wall was small, probably subdivided into no more than two rooms. The one encircling the cycler's nose was much larger; it looked like it held as much volume as two floors of the Banshee's habs.

"Guards visible," said one of the hunt bots. "Cameras on habs."

"Seen." Harp gestured to two of his men. "Auto-aim on the bot's signal. Get ready to take out those cameras."

"Whatever you do, don't hit the artifact," said Herat.

Michael had to laugh. "Have you deciphered the writing yet?" he asked the autotroph.

"That which I have seen," it said. "There is much that is not visible from this point. I must be allowed to circle the vessel—"

"Not now—" Michael forgot whatever else he'd been about to say. He was looking in the direction of the habs, and had noticed a change in the white glow coming through the plastic.

"Sir," he said, "parts of the hab are pulsing. Pulsing red."

Harp cursed. "It's an alert! They've seen us. No more time for subtlety, boys. Fire."

"Wait!" shouted the professor. "Maybe it's not us they spotted, but Rue's party."

At that moment they lost the feed from the lead hunt bot. Michael looked around his shield, to behold a very strange sight. Where a moment ago the air within the cavernous space of the shack had been empty, now a long line of tiny glowing beads lay strung between the balloon-hab on the shack's wall, and the mangled smoking wreck of the bot a hundred meters closer. In the second or so Michael stared, he saw some of the little beads vanish, while others seemed to split in two, or begin to drift.

"Behind your shield, Bequith, that was a laser shot!" shouted Harp. A moment later the black hull material next to Michael exploded into vapor before splashing back to heal itself. "We're under fire! Infrared lasers! Target and fire, men!"

Around him, Harp's men popped up to shoot, then retreated behind their shields. The shields began to smoke and shake, but there was no sound, and nothing to see— except, when Michael looked down by his foot, where that second shot had hit the hull he saw a little constellation of glowing blue spheres, none bigger than his thumbnail. They drifted, serene and self-contained, like newborn stars.

Fire. He was seeing fire. The laser shots were igniting the hydrogen/oxygen mix that filled the shack. But what would have become a Hindenberg-class inferno under gravity behaved quite differently here.

His shield warped; he felt the heat through his gloves. Michael felt a surge of fear and adrenaline as it finally hit home the kinds of energies that were aimed at him. He drew his laser and cleared a window in his shield to shoot through. He had been dreaming for months of what his first combat against the R.E. would be like; now that it was here his mind was fixed only on the moment.

Behind him, the autotroph being was speaking, but he had no time to listen as glistening, mirror-clad men began flipping into the air from the balloon-habs, and more threads of flaming air converged on him.

"PREPARE TO ABANDON ship," said Rue. The tungsten plate under her feet was glowing hot in places, and its edges had become ragged from laser fire. The constant battering by the Banshee's laser defense system had knocked the plate past the construction shack, and Rue had gotten her people to focus their hand jets on firing tangentially to their course. The trick had worked; the construction shack was eclipsing the Banshee. After a last few agonizing seconds, the lasers of the Banshee vanished behind the black curve of the shack, and they were safe.

"Everybody kick off," she said. "Head for the shack." They dove for it: Rue, Rebecca, Mina, Blair, Barendts, and the three remaining soldiers. One of them was waving his sensors at the black hull.

"I read energy discharges," he said. "A firefight, looks like."

"Any way to tell who's who?" she asked.

"One group is small, appears to be pinned down by one wall. The other group is near the airlock where we saw a bunch of men headed earlier."

The shack was just a big blot to Rue. "Which is closer?" she asked.

"We're equidistant. But we need to get to an airlock anyway, Captain."

"No, we don't." Rue sighted along the quilted surface of the shack. The material's bubblelike surface clearly showed the patterns of magnets that underlaid it. "Target your lasers on the exact center of the dome of hull material directly ahead of us. We'll make ourselves an airlock there."

"Ma'am?"

"Just do it!"

She couldn't see the beams, but four glowing spots appeared on the hull, quickly converging into one. Then suddenly the hull wasn't there anymore. In its place a blast of black droplets was spewing into space, revealing a three-meter hole in the shack's hull.

"Quick! Before it heals itself!" She jetted through the black rain and found herself in a vast space lit by red light and galaxies of little blue stars. Air was rushing around her, trying to push Rue back through the gap, and spiraling with it came thousands of those little stars. She and Jentry had played with flames like this when she was young and she knew what was about to happen: As the beads were sucked into the moving air they merged and became tongues of fire. For a few moments Rue was licked by a passing inferno.

Her people were through, and just in time as the array of magnets supporting the hull shifted and the ferrofluid reached out to close the wound they'd made. The long tongue of flame halted, became a large irregular ball shape, then died from the inside out. Its outermost skin fractured into hundreds of tiny beads, which began drifting away as if nothing had happened.

New lines of stars appeared— one, two, four, all lancing through the space around her. Rue and her people were floating, vulnerable, in the crossfire of a battle.

"Where?" shouted Barendts. "What the hell is all this?"

The swirling clouds of firebeads made it hard to see, which was probably good just now, she thought. One thing Rue did make out was a standard balloon-hab, attached to some kind of very large machine dead ahead. "Make for that!" She jetted toward it.

One of the marines screamed as his suit jetted white fire. Barendts whirled and fired back along the telltale line of firebeads joining the dying man to a blurry figure near a balloon-hab attached to the shack's hull. He was rewarded with a jet of fire at that end. "We're dead unless we get inside now!" he shouted.

Rue reached for the white surface of the balloon-hab. No time for niceties this time: She shot the material with her laser, burning a long ragged tear in it. Despite the pain in her hand, she used her gloves to force the tear in. Pushing against the air that was coming out, she climbed through.

Big flapping white sheets were flying at her. She dove to the side, cursing, and dragged at the things to keep them from covering the breach. Balloon-habs were a bit too efficient at sealing leaks, sometimes. The others clambered through her hole one after the other, then rolled out of the way while the white panels slammed against it and glued themselves into an uneven patchwork.

"This— this is the new ship," panted Mina. "They've attached this hab to the nose of the new cycler as a place for the crew during takeoff. The theory is that once the cycler's at speed it'll calve off a bunch of its own habs, the way Jentry's Envy did. At that point they'll have it make up a human-friendly one, like you did. Then they can move out of the habs."

They hung in a small pie-slice of a larger doughnut-shaped structure. This chamber was crammed with crates of supplies. "Who's they?" asked Rue, eyeing the lack of space. "Crisler can't be moving the whole Banshee crew in here."

"Some of the science team, and marines loyal to Crisler," Mina said. "He'd be returning on the Banshee with the real prize."

"Real prize?" Rue gestured around to indicate the whole vessel they had come to. "This isn't it?"

"No. There's something else— but I don't know what it is. Only that it's small enough to be carried by one person."

"We'll worry about that later," Rue said. "If Corinna and Evan are here, we have to find them." She pointed to a pressure door that separated this tiny room from the rest of the hab. "We go through that. Now."

THERE WERE A good ten of Crisler's marines hunkered down next to their balloon airlock on the far side of the shack. Even with the nose of the cycler between them, there was little cover here. Michael was wreathed in a gas of bubbling black ferrofluid; laser shots had half destroyed his shield and he had several burns on his suit. Both sides were laying down a covering fire to prevent the other from getting out of sight behind the cycler.

"The ancient pact is turned on its head," said the autotroph. It had been silent until now; it must have completed translating the Chicxulub script that covered the outside of the ship.

"What have you learned?" Herat asked it.

"Professor, this is hardly the time," said Michael incredulously. Their little squad was outmanned and outgunned, and Crisler's men might get reinforcements through the airlock at any moment.

"No better time," said the professor. "Now, tell us what those inscriptions say."

"The ancient pact is turned on its head

The hermit who carries the lamp now hands it on

The god who devours his children comes now for those who sought to defy him."

"Ancient pact? Hrm, don't know about that," said Herat. "But the hermit who carries the lamp? Lamp Bearers? It's talking about the Lasa!"

"Fascinating, professor, but—"

"Whoa, what's that?" shouted one of the soldiers. Michael peeked out from behind his shield, in time to see several space-suited figures explode through the shack's wall, to the accompaniment of gouts of fire.

"It's our boys, back from the Banshee!" One of the newcomers took a direct hit from a laser, flailed, and went still. "Give 'em cover, men!" shouted Harp. They all began shooting.

Michael didn't fire. He was too busy puzzling out what had just happened. Somehow, they'd targeted one of the magnets holding up the ferrofluid. As he watched, the lattice of magnets rearranged itself, and the whip of fire that had been exiting into space choked as the wall reappeared.

"That's it!" He leaned out, and aimed carefully— not at the mirrored shields of the marines that the others were targeting, but at a square black block several meters above them. Though his heart was pounding and he was sure he would be hit at any second, he waited until he was sure he had the shot, then pulled the trigger.

The magnet unit flared and exploded. Instantly, the ferrofluid wall behind Crisler's marines bubbled out and exploded. With a visible whoosh of firebeads and flame, they all went spiralling out into space.

"Good work, Bequith," shouted Harp. "But they'll just come right back through the airlock."

"Not if we mine it," he said. Without a word, one of the soldiers took a smart grenade from his belt, programmed it, and threw it in a perfect free-fall straight-throw. Moments later it reached the purple airlock disk, and stuck.

"They can still come through the wall like Captain Cassels did," said Harp. "So move it! We need to secure the habs on that cycler!"

They dove through constellations of firebeads, and now Michael allowed himself an instant to appreciate what he was seeing. It was as if he had become a giant, flying through the stars, batting suns out of the way with the back of his glove. The blue sparks seemed to have become more intense in the past few moments, indeed they were floating alone in a new velvet darkness…

"Hey," he said. "Anybody else notice that the lights have gone out?"

He flew on through a vision of stars, as in his ear, the words of the Chicxulub whispered:

"The sword we forged has turned upon us

Only now, at the end of all things do we see

The lamp-bearer dies, only the lamp burns on."

Rather than go through the door, Barendts had gone around it, tearing a long rip in the flexible wall material. He'd tossed a bot through that, and a moment later signalled all clear. Rue stepped through after him.

This room was larger than the last, but equally crowded. Floor, walls, and ceiling had coffin-shaped hibernation chambers clamped to them, the only open space a kind of tunnel through them. Even here, pieces of equipment floated, tethered by cables to the walls.

A face popped up from behind one of the coffins. It was the senior member of the science team, Katz. He looked wan and nervous. It would only take a few laser shots through the hull to evacuate the place, and kill him.

"Who the hell are you?" he demanded. He'd have a hard time seeing Rue's own face through her helmet, and probably wouldn't have recognized Barendts. She decided to take a chance: Clumsily with her one usable hand, Rue undogged her faceplate and levered herself past Barendts.

"It's me, Professor. Rue Cassels."

The flight of emotions across Katz's face was amazing and gratifying. "Captain," he managed to stutter after a moment, "how did you get here?"

"Rue?" Two more faces emerged from behind the hibernation tanks, and this time Rue's own face must have betrayed her; Evan Laurel and Corinna Chandra bounded over, laughing with amazement.

"Is this a rescue?" Corinna asked incredulously. Rue could only nod. Corinna hugged her tightly, tears starting in her eyes.

"But how?" muttered Katz, as he drifted to the side. Now other people were emerging from hiding: It looked as though the whole Banshee science team was here, and they all looked as stunned as Katz at Rue's arrival.

"So much for the halo-worlders being backward," said Evan proudly. "But really, Captain, how did—"

"Later," she said. "We need to get out of here. Where are your suits?"

"The marines in the next section have them," said Katz, nodding through the tunnel of coffins. "They stuffed us in here a few minutes ago, no explanations. We didn't have a window to look out, but we saw a couple of flashes—"

"Okay," said Rue. "We need those suits, so we need to get into that chamber. That means all of you get back into the storage room behind us, now! We don't want you caught here if the pressure goes."

They crowded past her, and Rue led her men forward. There was another stout pressure door at the end of the hibernation chamber.

"So," said Barendts, "how do we handle this one? Straight through, or stealthy?"

"I think we…" She forgot what she was going to say, as the pressure door slid open. Rue found herself diving behind one of the hibernation chambers, like everybody else.

Three of Crisler's marines emerged, one by one, into the chamber. They all had their hands up, gloves pressed against the sides of their helmets. There were no weapons in their belt loops.

Rue relaxed and straightened up from her hiding place. "Good work, Lieutenant… Harp, is it?"

The men from Michael Bequith's team filed in after their prisoners. Mike himself was there, and safe, though his shield and the autotroph canister he towed were a bit laser-scarred. Rue couldn't help but grin at the sight.

"All safe and accounted for, I see," she said. "We were… not so lucky. We lost two."

"There's still a squad of Crisler's boys out there," said Harp. "They'll be closing in on us right now."

"But we have hostages," she pointed out.

"With respect, ma'am, we had no trouble breaking in here and capturing these men. Why should it be harder for them?"

"Because these fellows weren't expecting us," she said. "They had no idea who was attacking, or what we were after."

She turned to wave at Katz, who was peering through the slit in the far wall. "Everybody come and get your suits! Then we're getting out of here."

"May I be so bold as to ask who is getting out of here?" asked Katz as he pulled himself through the maze of coffin-shapes. "Have you come to rescue all of us, Captain, or just your crew members?"

Rue frowned at him. "I wasn't aware that you needed rescuing, Professor. You joined this expedition of your own free will."

Katz shook his head angrily. "None of us are here by choice, Captain— not any longer. Once we learned what happened on Oculus, there was a general revolt. Crisler had us all put into cold storage, and we were only awakened a few days ago, then put to work building this." He waved around at the balloon-hab.

Now that she had her people, Rue's plan had been to call the interceptors. They would be able to pierce the shack's ferrofluid hull easily, and come alongside the hab. Each could hold two or three extra people during normal flight— but Katz's staff numbered fourteen. There was no way they could pack them all into the two interceptors that were here.

"Pardon, Captain, but we've fulfilled our mission," said Harp. "These people are under no threat from the admiral. We can negotiate for their release later."

Rue looked around at the faces of the science team. She saw a lot of apprehension there. "I disagree," she said. "I think these people are pawns now that Crisler has what he wants. I think," she said to Harp, "that now might be the best time to negotiate— while we have everything he wants."

Harp scowled, and seemed to be about to say something; Mike Bequith moved forward and said, "There's a defensible point in here that looks as though it was set up as a command post; maybe it's time to make a call?"

She found herself smiling at him. "Show me this spot."

The next chamber had an airlock, and numerous lockers that the science team now proceeded to plunder for their suits. The inner wall of the chamber was not made of the ubiquitous white plastic of the other surfaces, though. It was white metal, glistening like it had been oiled. Scrawled across it in eye-hurting colors were the odd loops and dots of Chicxulub writing. And in the center of the wall was a purple disk-airlock.

"Chicxulub," said Rue. "Not Lasa writing?"

Mike shook his head grimly. "We may have been mistaken about the origin of the Envy," he said. "This writing covers the entire outside of the ship."

"What does it say?"

"It doesn't make much—" Mike started to say— but the autotroph interrupted him.

"Only the Phoenix persists," it said.

There was a momentary silence; even the members of the science team who had been cramming themselves into their suits stopped to look over.

"Well," said Rue. "…where does this lead?" She pointed to the airlock.

"Come," said Harp. He entered, and she followed. She noticed that Mike was right behind her.

The airlock led to a large spherical chamber, reminiscent to Rue of the interior of the Lasa habitat on the Envy— or, she thought now, what she had taken to be Lasa at the time. An inscape unit had been set up here, and Rue was about to activate her inscape link when she saw something else. Near one side of the white metal space floated a very familiar object: a round, diaphanous chamber similar to the one she had crafted to control the Envy. The chamber was pulsing blue right now, and various holographic vectors were interpenetrating it, like the petals of a ghostly flower.

"You guys built an interface," she said as Katz and the others crowded in behind her. "I'm impressed."

"Well," smirked Katz as he moved beside her, "you bragged about how you did it enough times that we knew what to… do…" He was staring at the glowing sphere in shock.

"It's come alive," he muttered. "What…" He reached out to touch the wall of the sphere; Rue did likewise, and felt a faint vibration through her glove.

"What's happening?" asked Rue.

"I don't know, but if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that all the fighting outside has woken this lady up."

"Then we'd better get out of here." Rue popped up her private inscape and keyed in the command sequence that would summon the interceptors. Before she could execute the order, though, Barendts came flying through the airlock and tumbled through space, trying to maintain his aim on the purple disk. Others of the science team were leaping and scrambling through after him; there was pandemonium in Rue's earphones.

"What's going on!"

"— Attacking!" Barendts stabilized himself against a large egg-shaped object that jutted out of the chamber's wall. He kept his laser aimed at the airlock. "There were too many— and the civilians were in the way…"

Rue took quick stock of her people: They were all here, plus most of the science team. She looked back at the airlock, in time to see a bare hand thrust through the surface. The hand was waving frantically, as if in warning.

Slowly, the rest of a female member of the science team emerged through the lock. As her head broke the surface of the ferrofluid, it became clear that there was a laser rifle butted up against her jaw. Her eyes were wide with fear.

Several other human shields appeared, and behind them, marines from the Banshee. "Lay down your weapons!" commanded one. "We have more hostages in the other room, and we'll kill them one by one unless you surrender."

Barendts and Harp looked to Rue. She made her face into a neutral mask to hide her outrage, and nodded to them. Reluctantly, they and the other soldiers let go of their weapons.

The marines holding the hostages moved aside to let another figure through the airlock. This man steadied himself against the edge of the lock, faced in Rue's direction, and depolarized his helmet to show his face.

"Hello, Captain Cassels," said Admiral Crisler. He was smiling. "I don't know how you managed to get here, but now that you are I'm sure you'll have plenty of time to explain it all to me." More marines entered the chamber, and he gestured to them to take the weapons from Rue's men.

"Plenty of time."

27

RUE STEELED HERSELF. She would not flinch away from this man; he was not Jentry and she was not a helpless child anymore. "Admiral Crisler, I was just about to call you."

He smiled ironically. "Considering your situation, I believe you." He shook his head. "I honestly admit, I'm amazed to see you. How did you manage to follow us here?"

Rue had been ready for that question. "Living in the halo worlds, we've had to spend a lot more time and resource building slower-than-light ships than you. It was easy to fix up a couple of rendezvous ships with antimatter rockets; after the beams launched you back to the cycler, we had them launch us. We used the antimatter rockets to decelerate down here, and we have another set ready to boost us out."

"A desperate gamble," Crisler said, his eyebrows raised.

"Not really. Because of why we're here… it's simply that I came to get my people," she said. "As you see I have found them." She gestured around at her crew. "Looking at the state of the Banshee, and the number of berths on this new cycler, it doesn't look like you've got enough room for them anyway. Why not let me take them off your hands?"

Crisler looked surprised, then laughed. "A tempting offer— if I believed you about why you're here, which I don't. Or rather, I know you came for your crew, but what about them?" He pointed at Mike and the professor. "You've arrived with soldiers and scientists, just like I did. I doubt your little expedition's as small as you make it out to be. Regardless of what you want, I'm sure these people want the cycler mother."

"The what?" asked Herat.

Katz hung his head. "Self-reproducing starship technology. It's what we suspected we'd find here. When we got here and saw this place, we knew: Jentry's Envy was not made by the Lasa. It's a Chicxulub ship."

Crisler nodded. "Renegade Chicxulub— who would have thought? Katz here tells me that the Chicxulub were wiped out by their own planet-killers. But apparently not all the Chicxulub were loyal to the extermination program to begin with. There was some kind of splinter group toward the end, and they adopted the goals of the Lasa. They made the cycler mothers, and so here we are." He frowned suddenly at the glowing control sphere. "Katz, why is that thing on?"

"Sir, it seems to have come on by itself. The gunfire, maybe…"

"Well, shut it down." Katz obediently slipped into the control sphere, and began gesturing at the holographic spires and disks inside it. After a few moments he emerged, shaking his head. "Some kind of sequence has started. I can't shut it down."

"Get inscape going," snapped Crisler. "I want to see what's happening here."

Rue switched her inscape implants to receive, and watched as windows blossomed throughout the sphere. As this was happening, she noted Herat moving over next to Katz, and Mike going the opposite way, towing the autotroph canister. Crisler's men had examined it then given it back to him after deciding it wasn't a weapon.

"So what's a cycler mother?" asked Herat casually.

"This place," Katz said. Seeing that Rue was listening, he said, "All human societies have outlawed self-reproducing machines. You know the disasters that happened the few times the things were made— ecological catastrophes, nanotech-based diseases… Most other sentient species also ban them. But not the Chicxulub. They raised their creation to a fine art. All the machinery around Osiris and Apophis is part of a full-grown cycler mother— a machine that gives birth to cyclers."

"This is all very well," said Rue to Crisler, "but it doesn't get you very much, does it? Your cycler mother is stuck around a pair of brown dwarfs. How are you going to adapt it to launch FTL starships? I take it that's your plan."

Katz looked mournful. "He doesn't have to adapt it. He can just take—"

"That will be enough, Professor," said Crisler. He turned to look at an inscape window that showed stars. He frowned, and waved a hand to adjust the picture. "I thought this camera was mounted on the outside of the cycler?"

Katz glanced over. "It is." He did a double take. "Oh, that must be the fires you see…" No, those tiny pinpricks were not the luminous blue dots of the ongoing fire, but the real firmament.

"Get a bot out there!" shouted Crisler. "What's happening?" Meanwhile, he gestured to swivel the view in the window he did have open. Not surprisingly, after a moment the Banshee came into view.

Crisler popped open another window. "Banshee, answer! What's happening to the shack?"

"S-Sir… We were watching the other ships coming in, it must have just happened—"

A new window appeared, either from the bot's perspective, or the Banshee's. Rue could see the long black cylindrical shape of the shack. It appeared normal except at one end, which was flattened, belling outward a bit even. And extruding through the ferrofluid was the nose of the cycler. As she watched, the balloon-habs emerged.

"It looks like we're launching," said Herat with a smirk. "Unplanned, I take it?"

"Shut up," said Crisler. "You, and you! Take one of the seeds back to the Banshee. We can't afford to risk keeping them all in one place."

Some marines began levering one of the two large egg-shaped objects out of its socket in the wall of the chamber. As they did Herat turned to Katz, eyes wide. "Did he just call those…"

Katz nodded unhappily. "Cycler mother seeds. We think so, anyway. Each one can regrow a complete construction system like this. These are the real treasure here."

"Well, it seems that we're out of time," said Crisler briskly. "I don't understand what you hoped to achieve here, Rue, with this little band of pirates. But as you can see, our cycler's launching, and so we've got to get her crew secure, and get ready to follow in the Banshee. The newly arrived ships will remain to study the cycler mother.

"But as to you…" He scowled at Rue. "You're quite right that we don't have the resources to support you. Nor can we let you escape with word of what we found here." He nodded to two more marines. "Escort Rue and her people outside, and kill them."

"Admiral, this is insane!" Katz pushed forward, his face red. "It's murder!"

"Dr. Katz, you still have some limited usefulness," said Crisler coldly. "Unless you'd like to join your friends outside, you'll keep silent and do your job."

Rue's heart was pounding, but somehow she didn't feel fear— just fury. She looked around at the people in the sphere. The scientific team were cowed, all pressed back against the walls as Rue's crew reluctantly drifted forward.

Then Mike Bequith caught her eye. He jerked his head almost imperceptibly toward the inscape screen that showed the shack. Then he winked and reached behind him.

Behind him was the canister containing the autotroph life-forms.

She had no idea what he was planning; anything they did now was just likely to get them killed. But Rue looked Mike in the eye, and he looked right back. That mysterious smile he sometimes got was hovering around his mouth. Rue looked at the inscape window, and her heart leapt as she saw what he'd been indicating: two smudged absences of stars hung there. They would be easy to miss unless you knew they were there.

Rue caught Mike's eye and shook her head very slightly; then, using her link, Rue issued a command to the interceptors. Mike looked incredulous. He frowned and nodded back at the autotroph canister. She shook her head again.

The two marines carrying the seed were blocking the exit to the chamber. People's eyes were momentarily on them, so no one but Rue noticed as two sleek gray shapes shot out of the black smoke in which they'd been hiding, like Earth squids leaving clouds of ink. Here they came, looming closer and larger, she could see the Lasa writing on them—

"Admiral!" It was the Banshee calling. "What the hell— are those part of the cycler?"

"Admiral," cried Rue confidently, "I think you should look to your ship."

Crisler whirled to look at the inscape window. He was just in time to see two spindle-shapes, glowing brightly from the Banshee's lasers, smack into the axis assembly of the starship. Amazingly, the interceptors bounced, tumbling unhurt away from the wreckage before each regained its poise. Then as one they turned their antimatter beams on the damaged core of Crisler's ship, and the flash of light overwhelmed the camera. The inscape window went black.

"Perhaps it's time to talk terms," said Rue in the most self-assured voice she could muster. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mike Bequith's eyebrows shoot up, then he smiled dazzlingly at her.

"Captain Cassels," Crisler said in a tired voice, "were those your ships?"

"Indeed they were, Admiral," she replied. "But not all of my ships. If you or one of your men could find an external camera and aim it at your own newly arrived allies, you might see something more."

Crisler gestured impatiently to one of the marines. The man narrowed his eyes, and another inscape window opened.

Moments later a new inscape window bloomed. This was probably transmitting from one of the cameras on the outside of the cycler because the picture was grainy and ill-focused; the camera was at the limit of its zoom. Still, it showed enough to make Rue feel a rush of relief.

There were the rest of Crisler's ships. Three were mirrored spheres, each twice as large as the Lasa habitat of the Envy. The last was little more than a girder framework with dozens of cargo balloons attached to it.

And closing fast on the ships were all thirteen of Rue's remaining interceptors.

"My men have just taken out the Banshee," she said. "Unless you and your men surrender immediately, the rest of my ships are going to cut yours to pieces."

Crisler looked terribly weary. "Just how did you get here? Those aren't like any ships I've seen before. And is that Lasa writing on them?"

"I'm afraid I can't tell you anything, Admiral. But as you can see, I'm not just here with a little band of… what did you call us? Pirates? As you saw, we've got some short-range interceptors. Obviously, they had to come from somewhere…"

The admiral glowered. "No deal," he said finally. "I've accomplished my mission here already. This ship appears to be leaving, and so we'll be leaving with it. Once the cycler is underway, we'll have it create a habitat large enough to house all of us comfortably. Then we'll steer her back to Chandaka. Those little interceptors of yours can't stop us— this entire system is full of laser defenses. They hit anything that threatens the construction cylinder— and what do you bet they protect this cycler as well?"

He shook his head. "Regrettable that I have to lose my other ships. But it's an acceptable loss."

To Rue's surprise, Professor Herat raised his hand. "Admiral, this might be the time to mention that there isn't enough power in this system to actually launch a cycler."

"Of course there is," snapped Crisler. "They launched the Envy from here. And this ship, as you can see, is on its way."

One of the inscape windows showed the glowing wreckage of the Banshee dwindling behind them. Rue noticed that everyone had begun to drift toward one wall of the sphere: They were starting to accelerate.

"Sir," said the marine who had been controlling the inscape windows. "I've located a signal originating from Captain Cassels."

"Disable her suit radio," said Crisler. "That's it then," he said when the marine had finished. "Cassels, I am going to bring home the means to end the rebellion. I'll have the Chicxulub weapon adapted to hunt the rebels anywhere they go. After we let the ships loose, we grow, they whither. It's as simple as that."

"But the rebels use alien technology," said Katz. His voice was strained. "How can you target the rebels without also hitting the aliens?"

The admiral shrugged. "Collateral damage. The professor here should know," he said to Herat, "that all our overtures to them failed anyway. Humanity has no friends in this universe. If they won't be our allies, then they're vermin."

"But once the genie's out of the bottle, how do you stop it? The ships will continue to breed, they'll always be out there…"

Crisler shook his head. "That's where R.E. technology comes into it. We intend to adapt the ships so that they and all their systems are reliant on microtransactions with a Rights Owner. In order to breed, they'll have to contact us for permission."

Mike laughed humorlessly. "And you'll be the Rights Owner… of an entire fleet of warships."

The admiral nodded. "Any good plan has room in it for both altruism and self-interest, Dr. Bequith. This is a good plan."

He waved to the marines by the door. "Take the prisoners outside. You can use them for target practice."

Rue caught Mike's eye, and nodded. He reached behind him.

"No!" shouted Katz. He jumped at Crisler and for just a second he had the admiral by the throat. Then his own momentum carried him past. There was a bright flash and he screamed. When he hit the far wall and bounced away, he was limp.

"If anyone else tries—" Crisler started to say, but at that moment a swarm of hissing, buzzing things rose from behind Mike Bequith and flew straight at the marines.

"Bots!" shouted one marine, as he tried to bring his laser to bear. Four flying beads landed on the laser itself, and began vibrating madly. He shouted and let go of the smoking rifle.

Then Michael Bequith was struggling with him, trying to get the taser at his belt. Rue saw Barendts leap forward too, and the small chamber erupted into combat. Rue dove out of the way of a laser shot, only to collide with one of the researchers.

"Tasers only!" shrieked Crisler as a stray beam burned a line down the leg of his suit.

People were boiling everywhere, kicking each other in their haste to escape the chamber. Rue found herself propelled in the direction of the control sphere. She grabbed its crystalline edge, and pulled herself inside.

Instantly stars bloomed around her. Since crafting the controls systems of the Envy, Rue had spent many hours in her own cycler's cockpit, so she was instantly familiar with this one. Quickly, with one eye on the mayhem outside, she zoomed the view out.

Osiris and Apophis made twin walls on either side of her. At her navel was the cycler, and a meter away the construction shack had returned to its normal cylindrical shape. Next to it a tiny version of the Banshee was drifting, gutted and dark. The two interceptors waited near it.

She moved her hands within the hologram to call up the cycler's flight plan. The Twins zoomed out, becoming small spheres, and now a curved line showed the cycler's course. It was going to whip closely around Osiris, and then accelerate outward…

In exactly the opposite direction to Chandaka. If somehow the machinery here were able to accelerate this ship up to the same velocity as the Envy— eighty-five percent light-speed— it would take it a decade or more to cycle back to Chandaka. No, Crisler would choose another destination. There must be another lit world closer on this course… In a moment, she had it. She knew where Crisler would abandon the cycler and return to High Space.

An arm reached into the sphere and dragged her out. She started to fight, then saw that it was Mike. "Come on!" he shouted. "We've got to get out now!"

Smoke had filled the chamber, which was still full of struggling forms. She followed Mike to the exit and out, to find herself with the rest of her crew, and most of the science team, in the balloon-hab. Herat, of all people, was standing over the entrance, firing into the smoke with a laser rifle.

"This way!" It was Harp, gesturing from an airlock opposite to the one that led to the hibernation cocoons.

Rue grabbed Herat's arm. "Professor. Laurent! We have to go!"

Herat whirled. His face was a mask of anger. " — Shot Henry. Just shot him down!"

"I know. Come!" She hauled him through the door after Harp.

"Status," she said to Harp as the door closed behind her. Rue found that as soon as she stopped moving she drifted to one wall of this new chamber; might as well call that direction down, she decided. This new room was packed with supplies like the one on the other side of the hibernation chamber.

"They seem to have wrapped hab chambers like this around the nose of the cycler," said Harp. "That'd mean there's about ten of them—"

"Twelve," interrupted Corinna Chandra. She was actually smiling, a rarity for her. "We're continuing to accelerate, Captain, and not all of these people were able to bring their helmets." About half the science staff had made it out.

"Anyone want to stay and take their chances with Crisler?" shouted Rue. No one moved. "All right. These balloon-habs are anchored to the cycler somehow. We're going to detach this one and float away. Got it? Get moving!" She clapped her gloves together, and was rewarded by a wave of pain from her injured hand.

She could see shadows of movement on the other side of the door: Crisler's marines. They could have cut through the wall separating the two habs in a second, but doubtless they or Crisler had realized that this little ring of balloons was their only chance of survival if they were to ride the cycler out of here. They couldn't afford to damage it.

Rue's crew were swarming over the floor and staring out the hab's one small window, looking for the points where the balloon-hab was attached to straps glued onto the cycler's skin. Harp turned his laser on the lowest setting and at Evan's command, made several quick cuts through the floor. Rue's ear's popped as air hissed out of the hab for a few tense seconds before the hab's skin repaired itself.

"Now we're only held by the doors," said Evan. They set to work on those.

Mike Bequith had been huddled with Herat in one corner. Now he floated over to Rue. "I count twelve. We should be able to get everyone safely into the interceptors…" He trailed off, looking around in obvious puzzlement. "Rue… where's Barendts?"

"Your little rebel friend? I don't know," she snapped.

"But he was one of the first ones out," said Mike.

She sighed. "So?"

Mike took her by the shoulders— she was about to protest, when he said, "Rue. Where is the cycler mother seed?"

"Look, I think we have more important things to think about right now."

"No, Rue, I don't think we do," said Professor Herat, who had come up behind Mike.

"The seeds are the key— they're the real treasure of this world, Rue. With them, Crisler might learn how to make his self-reproducing warships. And with them, you could make any number of Jentry's Envys…"

Corinna and Evan had detached their side of the door through which Rue had entered this hab. The whole hab shifted a bit; it was now hanging from the cycler only by the other door.

"Barendts took the seed," said Mike.

"Took it?" Rue laughed wildly. "Took it where?"

Mike looked at her. A look of shocked comprehension dawned on his face. "Of course!"

He dove for the hab's other door, elbowing Corinna aside as he closed his faceplate. Before Rue could react, he had opened the door and swung through.

The door hissed shut. Rue turned, gaping, to Professor Herat. Herat had put a hand over his mouth, fingers trembling.

"Laurent? What is it?"

"Crisler's not the only one who might be able to resurrect the Chicxulub weapon," said Herat. "The rebels could do it… if they too had a seed…"

Suddenly the hab let loose and began to tumble. Rue barely felt the motion. Barendts was making for one of the interceptors with the seed in tow. And Michael Bequith had gone to join him.

MICHAEL FOUND ANOTHER airlock and cycled through it. He was too busy inventorying his supplies to think about what would happen next. He had a laser rifle, reaction pistol, and those autotroph bees that had survived their diversionary attack. Those huddled in one of his belt pouches now as he opened the outer airlock door to hard vacuum.

Osiris loomed above him. Below he saw nothing but stars— no, that wasn't quite true. One bead of the necklace of habs had fallen from the cycler. He watched it tumble, intact so far, away into the dark.

Between them, he knew Rue's crew and the science team would be able to find a way to signal her interceptors. They would be all right, he told himself as he braced himself, preparing to leap into the void.

Funny— not too long ago, he had stood on Dis, facing just such an empty sunless sky. Then, Michael had made sure he was tethered at all times; the prospect of drifting off into endless space had terrified him.

There was not a whisper of that old terror now as he stepped off the cycler into the void.

The cycler shot up past him, a moving graffiti-scrawled wall visible only by faint starlight. Michael got the light-enhancers in his helmet working, and turned away from the now-bright starship.

The stars were sharp points; as the cycler passed, the exhaust from its engines was blinding. He jetted away from twin columns of light that speared into the night. As he turned again he saw the oval glow of an aurora crowning Apophis.

He knew in general where he was going, so began jetting toward the ruins of the Banshee. Barendts wasn't visible yet; he might never be unless Michael got a lucky glimpse of his reaction pistol firing. Uncomfortably, that suggested that Michael might miss him and go to the wrong interceptor.

He couldn't afford to think about that. Michael recited a mantra to calm himself as he flew through the darkness. All was silent, and he had no sense of motion at all. Only the faint whirring of his suit's systems, and his own breathing, told Michael that he was still real, a physical man and not a spirit drifting in the void.

Part of him was bracing for an onslaught of despair from the kami of Dis. Surely they were still there? But no, they had gone silent. Michael realized this with a kind of shock— when had that happened? When had his constant companions, who had dragged him down all these months, evaporated?

It must have been his decision to rejoin the rebels— to take back Kimpurusha, or die trying. Was that it? He tried to remember his days on Oculus… but no, they had been there then.

Perhaps it was the battle that had just passed. The immediacy of it, the adrenaline. Wasn't this his natural environment now? The battlefield?

Michael frowned, and shook his head. He was no soldier. He might make a credible spy, but he'd had no stomach for hurting anyone, even the marines who had tried to kill him today. Barendts, a trained fighter, had carried most of the attack that got them out of Crisler's clutches.

Far ahead of him a tiny star flared to life, then died. That must be Barendts. Michael lined himself up and made the difficult course correction that would take him that way.

They were approaching the construction shack now. In enhanced light, he could see the white spindle-shapes of the interceptors. Barendts was making for the one on the right. Good.

If both Crisler and the rebels had the secret of the Chicxulub ships, at least there would be a level playing field. Maybe the ships would clash among themselves, ignoring the humans until there was a victor in space. Maybe they could spare lives, not take them that way.

Sadly, though, the halo worlds would lose either way. Without more Jentry's Envys, they were doomed to increasing isolation and irrelevance. Rue's civilization, which he had been born into and still loved, would come to an end.

Barendts was a faintly visible star-shape struggling with a cylindrical white seed at the airlock of the interceptor. The marine hadn't spotted Michael yet.

He knew he shouldn't have left Rue and the others helpless in the balloon-hab. He cast about for something to take his mind off of that in these last minutes of free fall. Fear… Yes! He still couldn't remember when the kami of Dis had left him. He tried to focus on that. It hadn't been in battle, he knew that now. Before that, then… and he had it.

When Irina Case told him that his kami might be the means for reviving the spiritual life of New Armstrong, something had changed in Michael. He'd had no time to think about it then; he'd been arrested immediately afterward, but his kami were powerful and despite what he'd said to Irina, he now believed that he had not simply found them, but had created them; they were not real entities with lives of their own, they were his Art. With them, he had somehow strengthened Rue through her grief. Maybe his kami really could heal a whole world.

And then, as the interceptor fell into the fiery maw of Colossus, he'd had a momentary flash when he thought he understood Rue's Supreme Meme. Somehow, in that moment of insight, the dark whispering voices of Dis had departed for good.

This realization was so astonishing that he almost missed the interceptor. He made a frantic last blast with the pistol, and was actually able to touch the magnetic soles of his boots to the hull of the interceptor and grab the back end of the seed, before Barendts noticed him.

The marine whirled, laser raised.

"It's just me," said Michael. "Brilliant move, skiving off with this thing."

"Bequith!" Barendts laughed shakily. "Quick, let's get it inside. I think I know enough to pilot one of these through the drop; say, how'd you like a holiday on Kimpurusha?" He holstered the laser again.

Michael felt his heart leap at the name of his homeworld. "Kimpurusha? Is that where you're taking it?"

Barendts laughed again. "You never knew, did you? — That's where I was trained. Years after your people tried their insurrection— but they still knew you. I knew who you were when you first came on board the Spirit of Luna!"

"How?" Had rebel cells continued to exist on Kimpurusha after Michael's own uprising failed? No, that wasn't possible; they would have tried to contact him, surely.

"We had the same mentor," said Barendts. "You remember Errend, don't you?"

Michael's stomach turned over.

"He sure remembered you. You were… how did he put it? One of the pawns he had to sacrifice to convince the R.E. that Kimpurusha had gone quiet. But he always hoped you'd kept your allegiance and that we might activate you again. A farsighted man, Errend."

"Indeed." Michael looked over the seed to where Barendts was trying to wedge his end into the airlock. "Need a hand there?"

"Sure, buddy." Michael went around the seed and crouched by the open airlock next to Barendts.

"Why don't you just grab it there, and—"

In one motion Michael unholstered Barendts' laser, and kicked the marine off the interceptor.

"What the hell are you doing!" Barendts tumbled over twice before he got his reaction pistol in hand and steadied himself. "This is our only chance now, don't you get it? If Crisler gets away with the other seed, he'll be able to build a weapon we can't stop! Hell, one that even he can't stop! He'll win the war, Mike. Kimpurusha will have fallen for all time, and it'll be your fault!"

Michael regarded him calmly over the edge of the airlock. "What war is it that you're talking about?" He had to laugh at his own thick-headedness during the past months. "I know all about that war, I just spent the last five years of my life uncovering its victims with Professor Herat.

"Out there in High Space, the war is of all against all, and it goes on forever. No one needs anyone else if they can simply pull up roots and move a few light-years to get away— which works great until you run up against someone who's there already. That's the great lesson of the Chicxulub, isn't it? No matter how big the galaxy, its resources are finite— but with FTL, mobility isn't. Barendts, the result is always— always— the disintegration of the species into thousands of subspecies that war among themselves and with their neighbors. Permanent war. In all the lifetime of the galaxy there's only been two exceptions: the Lasa and the Chicxulub. The Lasa opted out of FTL travel completely; they discovered an environment that encouraged cooperation rather than competition: the halo worlds. No halo world can stand on its own. They need one another, and war between them isn't possible because of the barrier of light-speed."

"You're crazy," said Barendts. "Put down the laser. Can't you see what's happening here?"

"More clearly than ever. The Chicxulub are the only other solution, Barendts. The only other solution is to keep yourself pure, and wipe out every competitor. That's what the R.E.'s all about, isn't it? It was created to force humanity to stay together.

"The lit worlds are lost no matter who wins, can't you see? Whether you and I bring this seed back or not, the R.E. either wins, and goes the way of the Chicxulub, or it loses, and we end up with every world for itself. A thousand wars where before there was only one."

"You want the R.E. to win!" accused Barendts.

Michael shook his head. "Actually, I want the Lasa to win. Now you'd better find something to hold onto out there, because I'm shutting this hatch and then we're going after the rest of our people."

From inside the hatch it was easy to pull the cycler mother seed inside. Michael could see Barendts waiting just outside, but he had no weapon. He continued to rail impotently at Michael until the hatch was shut.

"DON'T MIND THE cold, guys," said Rue. It was only about — 5 °Celcius in here so far, which brought back memories of her escape from Allemagne. "Just breathe through your noses." At least everybody had their suits on; it was just the scientists who were missing their helmets that were having trouble. So far everyone had been calm, sitting along the walls silently while the techs worked.

The lights of the hab flickered. Now this they didn't need. "What's going on?" She moved to where two technicians were trying to rig up a transmitter.

"Looks like the emergency supply was just a superconducting loop. It's bleeding out pretty fast, ma'am. I'd say we've got about ten minutes of power left."

When the power went the cold would really start. Those without helmets would develop severe frostbite around the face and ears, then their lungs would start to burn.

She would have to fix things before then. "Okay, how about reserve oxygen?" The techs pointed to a set of panels under the floor. Rue opened one and examined the tanks there.

"Listen up, people! We're going to do something hazardous. I'm going to fetch one of our interceptors." If Mike Bequith hasn't stolen both, she thought bitterly. "I'm going to have to cut a hole in the wall and exit through it. There'll be a huge pressure drop, but it'll be temporary. Once the patches are on, you'll be able to breathe again. Is everybody clear on that?"

Several of the exposed faces went white, but no one protested.

"Better for two of us to go," said Harp. "I'll come."

"All right." Rue pointed a laser at a section of wall well away from the vulnerable scientists. "Rapid, deep breaths, people. Get ready to plug your noses." She aimed.

Clunk. Something big had struck the hab a glancing blow; Rue found herself and Harp tumbling like dice in a cup. Moments later the hab stabilized, but not its inhabitants: Everyone was shouting at once.

"Wait, wait! Shut up everybody!" They gradually quieted. Then Rue heard it: a tapping on the door. She flew over to it and looked through its tiny window.

Michael Bequith grinned back at her. He was holding a large and cumbersome inflatable airlock, trying to attach it to the door. After a minute he gave her the thumbs up, then she heard hissing.

The door opened. Mike filled the doorway, his suit covered in smoking frost.

She grabbed him and hugged him tightly, despite the cold that seared through her cheek as she laid it against the breastplate of his suit. "You came back."

"Of course." He seemed a bit offended that she had doubted him.

"But the seed… the rebels… don't you want to fight the R.E.?"

Mike sighed, and reached up to smooth back her hair with one icy glove.

"I don't want to destroy, not even destroy the R.E." he said. "I… want to build."

A DAY LATER, Rue joined a large crowd that had gathered around a big inscape window in the larger of the cruisers they had captured from Crisler. The scientific team was here, all talking excitedly about the spectacle unfolding in the window. Someone had found material to make black arm bands in honor of Henry Katz.

"I knew there wasn't enough power in those tethers to launch a cycler!" laughed Herat. "But never in a million years would I have imagined they'd do that!"

That was bright enough to illuminate both Apophis and Osiris like a minor sun. The thousands of conductive tethers that orbited around Osiris normally just drew power out of the brown dwarf's magnetic field. Somehow, they had orchestrated a vast current flow back into the dwarf— and the result was the biggest flare Rue had ever seen burst off a dwarf. It stood out of Osiris's equator like an incandescent spear, and though they weren't visible from here, she knew that a vortex of tethers was amplifying and aiming that flare. The full power of Osiris's magnetosphere was pouring power into an energy beam of astonishing power.

Crisler's cycler rode the crest of that wave of energy like a leaf in a hurricane. The acceleration was enormous; Crisler and his men were either in their hibernation tanks now, or dead from the pressure. The cycler was thriving, though, soaring on wings of magnetized plasma faster and faster, trying its best to catch up to light.

Rue made her way over to the professor, and Mike who was as always next to his mentor. Rue reached out and touched Mike's arm. He turned with a wide smile.

"And so," Rue said very softly, "the halo worlds become able to launch our own cyclers at last." Mike took her hand in his, and squeezed it.

She'd barely had a chance to talk to Mike in the whirlwind of activity that had followed Crisler's escape. When he arrived to rescue her team and she realized he had abandoned the rebels, Rue had felt a rush of happiness that had carried her through the whirlwind. Now, with Crisler's ships secure and dispatches ready for sending to Colossus, New Armstrong, and Crisler's probable destination, she could finally relax for a moment.

The scientists cheered the cycler launch like they were watching a sporting match. Herat turned away, smiling fondly, and said, "Hello, Rue. Are you getting ready to leave?"

She nodded. "There's much to do. Are you staying here, Laurent, or are you going back to High Space? Now that we know they exist, I'm sure you'll be able to find the Lasa themselves."

He shook his head. "No— or rather, we already found them. They are that." He gestured to the vast machinery of the Twins visible through the window. "That and no more. The original Lasa— the species that gave us the name— realized that no species is permanent. Only the ecological niches, the environments friendly to one or another kind of life, have any kind of permanence. They saw that they would rise and fall like every living form. So, instead of trying to extend their existence, like so many other species before and since," he sighed, "they looked to ways of preserving and nourishing an environment that would encourage the birth and growth of species similar to themselves. Cooperative, farsighted peoples."

He turned back to contemplate the view. "I'm going to stay here, and make it my life to study this place. The Lasa, you see, aren't a species. They're an environment— an ecological niche. Bequith, here, explained that to me. And I'm coming to agree with him that humanity would do well to expand into and nurture this niche."

As usual, Rue didn't completely understand Herat. But he smiled at her, and turned back to watch the cycler launch. That smile was enough to tell her he was content.

She turned to Mike, and now her throat was tight again. "And what about you? You came back for us, when you could have gone with Barendts and become the greatest hero of the rebels."

He shrugged. "I just realized it would never stop. We might get Kimpurusha back, but what then? It would never return to what it was when it was part of the Compact. And… and I realized that freeing Kimpurusha wouldn't satisfy me. There was something better I could do."

Rue bit her lip, avoiding his eyes. "So where will you go now?"

He had that mysterious smile again. "I want to help revive the Cycler Compact. Right now, there's nowhere I'd rather be than wherever you're taking the cycler mother seed."

"Why, Mr. Bequith," she said, grinning back at him. "Where else would I take it? It's coming with me to Erythrion."

He hesitated. "And your crew will go with you. That's six, including Rebecca's girlfriend; there's no room in the interceptor for one more…"

Now she laughed. "Evan is staying here. He wants to return to High Space."

"And that means…"

She took his hand and smiled into his eyes. "There is a berth on my ship, Mr. Bequith, if you would like to have it."

28

RUE STOOD AT a window, and the view from it was real, neither holographic nor inscape. Treya shone close by, a sphere of pearly auroral light transfixed by one circle of purest white radiance where the artificial sun was shining today on clouds. The orbital colony where Rue stood had once been the property of the Cycler Compact; it had seemed a fitting place for her to stay, for now.

"You see?" she said to Michael, who stood at her side. "Sunlight, of a sort. Too bright for me, but you'll like it."

Michael rested his hand on hers. The cuffs of their shirts were an identical black; she wore her captain's uniform, and Michael had accepted the high-collared clerical counterpart. He looked good in uniform, especially now that he seemed to have overcome his demons. He radiated authority.

Sounds of debate came from behind them. A long oak table filled the other end of the room. A group of men and women, mostly elderly, were going over a complex set of plans and edicts. They all looked slightly shell-shocked. A week ago none had suspected that their lives would be overturned by the arrival of Rue.

There were fourteen people here; fourteen in all Erythrion who had once held positions of power in the Cycler Compact and who might still be trusted by the people. On Oculus, the Compact had been a living thing, a vast and ancient order that encompassed both government and religion. Oculus had been vibrant, forward looking. Well, Rue was determined that Erythrion would become so too.

Only the monks of Permanence and a few holdouts from the old days had responded immediately to Rue's summons. On her arrival she had exercised the prerogative of a cycler captain in ordering a special session of the Compact executive. The first replies had been angry accusations that she was playing some trick; she had been called disrespectful to the glorious past that the proud few still revered.

Her response to that was to transmit substantial excerpts from Blair's records. The discovery of Jentry's Envy and the proof that Rue had learned to control it was enough to yield a second round of responses. These were respectful and curious. She claimed to come bearing great news, and yet she had not arrived by magsail. Had she come from High Space? And what was this news?

Her first meeting here, a week ago, had begun inauspiciously. The men and women who filed into this office were just civilians— albeit rich and powerful, some of them. They had long ago retired their uniforms and rented out the offices of the Compact to local businesses. Ten people who might have been here had refused to come, citing more important business of one kind or another. Rue suspected that they simply believed the Compact was dead or not worth reviving.

She had not minced words during that first meeting. "The Cycler Compact has been reborn," she told them. "Erythrion is requested to restore its institutions to the standards of the Compact. In the months and years ahead, you will have the opportunity to return to your traditional roles in the administration of the Compact. In fact, Erythrion is critical to the rebirth of our great civilization. For we will be the first halo world in decades to begin launching new cyclers."

They had begun to come around, gradually. Then, as the news of the cycler mothers sank in, skepticism had changed to enthusiasm, then almost feverish excitement. The scattered worlds of the halo could be reunited. The shared experience of living in the interstellar fastness could reach everyone, no matter how remote. From being isolated colonies with no belief in a future, they could become explorers and settlers again. The offer was almost unbelievable; in a kind of desperation to prove it real, they were working day and night now to lay the groundwork for the return of the cyclers.

The argument behind Rue and Mike now reached a fever pitch, then broke in laughter. She turned. Corinna Chandra stood at the head of the table, waving to the text in a holo window. "That's it, then," she said. "The monks of Permanence will take charge of the cycler mother seed. We will see to its nurturing and growth."

There were nods around the table, some reluctant, some enthusiastic. Rue smiled at Corinna, who seemed to be beaming all the time, these days. Corinna had adopted the seed as if it were her own child, and she was fiercely protective of it. This new agreement was a good one; people still respected the monks, and they alone still controlled the myriad launch beams and power tethers that orbited Erythrion. The launch beams could double as weapons in a pinch, everyone knew that, so the monks' possession of the seed would not be threatened.

Everyone sat back, relaxing and talking excitedly. The cyclers could come again, and the psychological isolation of Erythrion would be ended. Even now Blair was in an editing suite preparing his records for broadcast. Rue had no doubt that they would be the most highly watched documentaries on the net for the next six months. By the time they had finished airing, the impact of what was now possible would have begun to sink in; Erythrion would begin to thaw from the long winter of the soul that had gripped it.

"Ten minute break," said the abbot of Treya's Permanence monastery. "Then we need to discuss Brother Bequith's dangerous new theology."

"Dangerous?" murmured Rue to Mike, who grinned. They headed for the door with the rest of the crowd, but the abbot stopped Mike.

"You have seen more of the universe than any of us, Brother," said the abbot seriously. "We know the grave discoveries you made about the life and death of civilizations. I just don't understand why such proof of the fragility of life hasn't convinced you that Permanence is our only hope. I mean… what can we possibly offer the people of our worlds that would be better than an eternal civilization?"

Mike looked the abbot in the eye and said, "Children. We can offer them children." Then he politely stepped around the abbot and into the hall.

Rue grabbed his arm as he walked, and laughed. "You're learning fast," she said.

"Learning? What?"

"How to be a prophet. Cryptic utterances are an essential part of the role, aren't they?"

He blushed slightly. "I just didn't want to get into it all right then."

Michael now believed that the theology of NeoShinto was incomplete. "It tries to make us one with the universe— and it succeeds. But I got lost in that oneness, and I suspect many people do. Your Supreme Meme taught me that the little inconsequential details of my everyday life are as real and valuable as everything else put together. In science they have a principle called complementarity: mass and energy are the same thing, but you can only have one at a time; a particle has momentum and position, but you can only see one of those at a time. So it is with our lives. We need to honor our sense of unity with the world, but we also need to honor our individuality. Both are true. Both are absolutes, and we have to nurture both if we're to survive on these worlds."

He had tried to explain the theology of it to her, but Rue wasn't really interested, and he knew that. "It's just…" he had said after a half hour's discussion, "just a new way to both accept mortality and throw yourself into life. Nothing's permanent. But everything can hand what's unique, what's best about itself, to what comes after."

"Like the Lasa?" she'd asked.

He nodded. "And like the Chicxulub."

They walked upstairs and into the gloriously hot artificial sunlight of the colony cylinder. This tiny world was a cylinder twenty kilometers long and four across. The land wrapped itself above to become sky, with an intolerably bright fusion lamp at the axis providing daylight for the parks and forests that dotted the inside of the cylinder. Rue and Mike went to sit on a bench under a shady tree, and after fumbling out her sunglasses she draped herself over the back of the seat and drank in the air. It was nearly as natural smelling as that of Chandaka. Things were peaceful here; among the distant clouds, people glided and swooped on diaphanous wings.

"One more meeting," said Rue. "Think they're ready to go it on their own for a while?"

"They'll have Corinna and Blair to keep them inspired," said Mike. "And we should be back in a few days, if all goes well."

"Excuse me."

Rue looked around. A rather officious looking woman in a gray suit stood on the path. "Are you, um, Meadow-Rue Rosebud Cassels?"

Rue stood up. "Yes, I am."

"My name is Alita Strong. I represent… your family."

"Represent?"

"I'm their lawyer." Rue continued to stare blankly at the woman, who finally said, "Surely you know that there are lawsuits outstanding against you, and… financial matters to be settled…"

"Financial…?"

"It took us a while to find you," continued Strong. "But I told my clients that a face-to-face talk with you would probably be the best way to resolve things. Have you got a few minutes?"

"What? Now?" Rue felt a strange flutter of nervousness. Politicians and generalissimos didn't scare her anymore, so why was her heart pounding at this development?

Strong was walking toward one of the campus buildings near the one Rue had rented. Rue turned to Mike, appealing to him for something, any sort of guidance.

He took her hand and said, "Let's go see, shall we?"

They followed Strong inside the building and down into a lounge below the surface. Two people were sitting on low couches there. Both stood as Rue came down the steps.

"Good morning, dear!" gushed Aunt Leda as she minced forward.

"Hi, Sis," said Jentry, who slouched with his hands in his pockets, not moving from his spot near the back of the lounge.

Time seemed to stop for Rue. There he was, and damned if he didn't look older. Shorter. Skinnier. Jentry was dressed in his usual station gear, rather gauche in the plush environment of the lounge.

There was no way to look him in the eye and not remember all the times he'd beat her. Rue remembered now, though, that there had never been any occasion when she hadn't fought back. And it was with a cool tingle of pleasure that she realized that after her military training on Oculus, she could beat him in a fair fight any day.

"Brother," she said in a sweet voice; she felt Mike's grip on her arm tighten. She extricated herself from that hold and went to embrace Aunt Leda. "Aunt Leda. How are you? I'm so sorry about Max."

"Yes, we only just heard the news." Leda contrived to look weepy. "That is— it was a few days ago. We didn't know you were here, the news came from our dear friend Colonel Jackman…"

Rue nodded. Jackman had been one of those who had refused to come to her meetings here. He must have called Leda with the news— Leda and who else? Ah, now the intrigues would start!

Rue turned from Leda to Jentry. "How are you, Jentry?"

"I'm okay." He hesitated, then stepped forward, hand out. To her own surprise, Rue shook it. Then it came to her how she must look to these two: imperious and proud in her uniform, with a sharp-eyed monk standing, arms folded, at her shoulder.

She laughed, and plunked herself down on one of the couches. "Well, who of us would ever have expected this!" She patted the seat next to her; after a moment Jentry sat cautiously next to her. "How's the station, Jen? Still racing those mining bots?"

He looked shifty, and said, "It's okay. Yeah, I, we… We got a bit of a debt problem right now, so—"

The lawyer cleared her throat. Jentry looked at the floor.

Rue appraised her, with a raised eyebrow.

"There's two little matters we need to get behind us," said Strong, coming to sit opposite Rue. Leda remained standing, a rather fixed smile on her face. "There's the matter of the inheritance from Max of course, and then the—"

"Inheritance? What inheritance?"

Leda and Jentry looked at one another. The lawyer sighed.

"I gather you haven't been informed. Max Cassels made you his heir."

Rue sat there with her mouth open for a bit too long, because suddenly Mike was sitting next to her holding her shoulders. "Are you okay?" he whispered.

"Okay? Okay?" She tilted her head back and laughed. "I'm great! Oh, Max, why'd you—" Then she realized something. "But— he must have done that before we left…"

Strong nodded. "Yes, the night before your departure from Treya, he registered a new will. You were to receive his entire estate. Of course, what with taxes, litigation fees, and monies owing to certain plaintiffs…" and here Leda turned pink and tried to look smaller, "all that's left is the house. And contents. And this." She held out a data card. "Keyed to be unlocked only by you."

Rue took the card numbly. She had tears in her eyes, she realized. It was simply that by this one gesture Max had brought her into the Cassels family. Since her parents died, Jentry had done everything in his power to make her feel like she didn't belong. And Leda had been no help. It was only now that Rue realized how deeply the wounds had reached. Bereft of family, she had run from world to world, across years and through adventures that had made her into something quite new. A cycler captain. A woman of power and influence.

And now, Max's gift to her was to affirm that she had been a Cassels all along. That she had a home.

There was a respectful silence while she pulled herself together. "Well," she said at last, "I will open this in good time and," she glanced sharply at Leda, "in private. Thank you."

"There is one other thing," said the lawyer.

Rue stood. The inheritance had been quite enough, she was thinking. "We need to be getting back," she said to Mike.

"It concerns a certain family heirloom, entrusted to Jentry Cassels and stolen by you."

Rue whirled. "What?"

"The ediacaran pendant your grandmother had," said Leda. "It was never rightfully hers. But Jentry has been so kind as to reveal its existence to us, and as provenance was never certain on it… well, it's legally his now."

"Come on, Sis," said Jentry. "I need that thing to pay off our debt. You wouldn't want us to lose the station, would you?"

She stared at him. Possibly a million things came to mind that she might say right now, but none seemed adequate.

Finally, in a kind of daze, she said, "I traded it on Oculus for supplies. Sorry."

Strong cleared her throat. "Then you are liable for the—"

"Take it up with the Compact," snapped Rue. "Bill the Cycler Order. I assure you we're good for it."

Then she turned on her heel and stalked out of the room.

A FAMILIAR COUNTDOWN was ticking away in the background. Rue floated once again in oxygenated liquid, watching Mike adjusting his G-bed through the wavery liquid that filled the interceptor.

"I hope this is the last time we have to trust our lives to one of these things," he was muttering.

She smiled fondly at him, and lay back. In just a few minutes they would fall into the brooding red cloudscape of Erythrion, and if the gods and kami were kind, they would survive the transition to FTL flight. In a few hours, they would be at New Armstrong.

Michael was going there to teach Irina Case's people his new alternative to Permanence. And she… she came to take back what was hers. She would see Jentry's Envy in her control again, and the men who had taken it would find justice, or die.

They would arrive at New Armstrong well in advance of the Envy. Rue would make her case, buttressed with plenty of evidence from Oculus. New Armstrong would be threatened with sanctions by the Compact if necessary, should they not comply. But they would. They would take Mallory and his people into custody once they rode down the beam, and a new crew, handpicked by Rue, would replace them. Then, finally, the Envy could be brought back onto her original ring and, in a few years, she would return to Erythrion.

Maybe by then Rue would be ready to captain her again.

She had been putting something off, she knew. A little holo window showed Erythrion approaching, like some baleful god. With a sigh, Rue took out the card Max had left for her, and pressed her thumb against it.

The card darkened, then a tiny holo of Max appeared in it.

"Don't ask," he said with a shrug. "I couldn't very well leave it all to the old bat, could I? You deserve it, Rue, you do."

But why? She mouthed the words.

As if he'd heard her, Max paused. "You came along at a time when I'd started to lose hope, Rue. I didn't believe there were good people in the world anymore. But you came stomping into my life, all oblivious to the little jealousies and intrigues of the family, as though you'd somehow been kept in a crystal jar somewhere, pure and unsullied by the rest of the stinking clan. At first I couldn't believe it. But I believe it now. So I'm going with you to Chandaka, and maybe we can make this family stand for something again— or maybe for the first time. Because I wasn't able to do it on my own.

"But if you read this, then I didn't make it back. And maybe it will have been my own doing; I hope not."

"I hope you thrive, Rue. I know you will. And take my stuff and use it well… and keep it out of her clutches." He grimaced.

"Thrive, cousin. Thrive."

Rue raised heavy fingers and thumbed open a pouch on her suit. She brought out the little ediacaran medallion, and held it up for a moment, arm shaking with the effort. She could see the delicate galaxy-shaped spiral of it on the siltstone.

"Brace yourselves," said the pilot. "We're starting the dive."

Rue could feel the hand of Erythrion begin to press down upon her. The interceptor swayed from side to side, and her heart began to hammer.

Across from her, Mike grinned a stoic grin and said, "We'll make it. We have a house to come back to now."

"And so much more," she replied with a smile.

We have time.