Starsong

Illustration by Vincent Di Fate

The woman was somewhere in her mid-fifties, I estimated, wearing a lower-middle-class blue-green jacket suit and a professional scarf of a style I didn’t recognize. In one hand she held a boarding ticket; with the other she balanced the inexpensive and slightly scuffed carry-bag slung over her shoulder. Her hair was dark, her features unreadable, and her stride, as she toiled up the steep gangplank toward me, stiffly no-nonsense with an edge of disdain.

In short, she looked like any of the thousands of business types I’d seen in hundreds of spaceports across the Expansion. She certainly didn’t look like trouble.

But that’s always the way with life, isn’t it? It’s right when everything’s going along nice and smooth and you’re all relaxed and bored that you suddenly discover that you’re in fact eighty degrees off course with a dead stick, straked engines, and a comatose musicmaster.

And everything right then was indeed going along nice and smooth. The flight deck had been showing flat green when I’d left three minutes earlier, Rhonda had the engines running at peak efficiency—or at least what passed for peak efficiency with those rusty superannuates—and Jimmy, while his usual annoying self, was very much awake.

And yet, if I’d been paying better attention, I might have wondered a little as I watched the woman approaching me. Might have seen that her completely ordinary exterior wasn’t quite matched by the way she walked.

The way she walked and, as I quickly found out, the way she talked. “I’m Andrula Kulasawa,” she announced to me in a no-nonsense voice that matched the stride. It was a voice that sounded very much like it was accustomed to being listened to. “I’m booked on your transport; here’s my ticket.”

“Yes, Angorki Tower just informed me,” I said, popping the plastic card into my reader and glancing at it. “I’m Jake Smith, Ms. Kulasawa, captain of the Sergei Rock. Welcome aboard.”

A flicker of something touched her face—amusement, perhaps, at the pilot of a humble Class 8 star transport calling himself a captain. “Captain,” she said, nodding her head microscopically as a hooked finger pulled the scarf away from her throat. “And it’s Scholar Kulasawa.”

“My apologies,” I said, hearing my voice suddenly go rigid as I stared at the neckpiece that had been concealed behind the nondescript scarf.

And if the walk and voice hadn’t made me wonder, that should have. Scholars were one of the most elite of the upper/professional classes, and I’d never seen one yet who wouldn’t freeze his or her throat in winter rather than wear something that would cover up that glittering professional badge. “The, uh, the Tower didn’t—”

“Apology accepted,” she said, her tone somehow managing to carry the message that it was her graciousness, not my worthiness, that was letting me off the hook for my unintended social gaffe. “Has my equipment been loaded aboard yet?”

“Equipment?” I asked, throwing a glance down the gangplank behind her. There was no other luggage there that I could see.

“It’s not back there,” she said, an edge of strained patience in her voice now. “I have two Size Triple-F Monshten crates back at the loading ramp. Research equipment for my work on Parex. It’s on the ticket.”

I looked at my reader again. It was there, all right. “I didn’t know, but I’ll see to it right away,” I promised, stepping back and gesturing her through the hatchway. “In the meantime, may I help you get settled?”

“I’ll manage,” she said, twitching the carrybag away as I reached for it. “Where is my seat?”

“The passenger cabin is aft—back that way,” I told her. “First hatchway on the left.”

“I do know what ‘aft’ means, thank you,” she said shortly, brushing past me and disappearing down the passageway.

I heard her carrybag scraping against the wall as she maneuvered her way down the narrow corridor. But she didn’t call for assistance, so I just sealed the outer hatchway and headed straight up to the flight deck.

The cramped room was empty when I arrived, but a glance at the status board showed the cargo hatch was still open. That would be where my copilot would be. Dropping into the pilot’s seat, I keyed the intercom for the cargo bay. “Yo, Bilko,” I called. “How’s it going?”

“Coming along nicely,” First Officer Will Hobson’s voice replied. “Got all the power lifters aboard, and it looks like we’ll have room for most of that gourmet food, too.”

“Well, don’t start figuring the profit per cubic meter yet,” I warned. “Our passenger has a couple of Triple-F Monshtens on the way.”

“She has what?” he demanded, and I could picture his jaw dropping. “What is she, a rock sculptor?”

“Close,” I said. “She’s a scholar.”

“So what, she’s shipping her lecture hall to Parex?”

“I haven’t the foggiest what she’s shipping,” I told him. “You’re welcome to ask her if you want.”

He snorted, a noise that sounded like a bad connection somewhere in the circuit. “No, thanks,” he said. “I had my fill of the scholar class on Bar-simeon.”

“Let me guess. Card tournament?”

“Dice, actually. And man, those scholars are real poor losers. Wait a minute—here come her Monshtens now. Triple-F’s, all right. Let’s see… code imprint says it’s Class-I electronics. Your basic off-the-shelf consumer stuff.”

That did seem odd. “Maybe she’s running a holotape business on the side,” I suggested.

Bilko snorted again. “Or else she’s bringing a podium sound system she could lecture in the Grand Canyon with,” he said.

Days afterward, I would remember that line. Right then, though, it just sounded like Bilko’s usual brand of smart-mouthing. “What she’s got in her luggage is none of our business,” I reminded him. “Just get it aboard and secured, all right?”

“If you insist,” he said with a theatrical sigh.

“I insist,” I said, keying off. Bilko, I had long ago concluded, was privately convinced he’d been switched at birth with some famous stage actor, and he seldom if ever passed up a chance to get in some practice in his might-have-been profession. Personally, I’d always considered those attempts to be a continual reminder of the great contribution the hypothetical baby-switcher’s action had made to live theater.

I keyed the intercom to the engine room. “Rhonda?”

“Right here,” Engineer Rhonda Blankenship’s voice came. “We in preflight yet?”

“Just started,” I told her. “Engines up and running?”

“Ticking like a fine Swiss clock,” she reported. “Or like a mad Bolshevik’s bomb. Take your pick.”

“You’re such a joy and comfort to have around,” I growled. She’d been after me for years to get new engines or at least have the old ones extensively overhauled. “You might be interested to know we have a professional passenger aboard. A scholar.”

“You’re kidding,” she said. “What in space is a scholar doing here?”

“Probably a study on the struggles of lower/working-class star transports,” I told her. “No, actually, it’s probably out of necessity. The Tower said she needed to get to Parex right away, and we were the only scheduled transport for the next nine days.”

“What, all the liners running full today?”

“The liners don’t take Monshten Triple-Fs as check-on luggage,” I said. “And don’t ask me what’s in them, because I don’t know.”

“I wasn’t going to,” she assured me. “If they look at all interesting, Bilko will figure out a way into them.”

“He’d better not even think it,” I warned. As far as I knew, Bilko had never actually stolen anything from any of our cargoes, but one of these days that insatiable curiosity of his was going to skate him over the edge.

“If he asks, I’ll tell him you said so,” Rhonda promised.

“If he asks, it’ll be a first,” I growled. “You just concentrate on getting us into space without popping any more preburn sparkles than you have to, OK? Sending a middle-aged scholar screaming to the lifepods wouldn’t be good for business.”

“At our end of the food chain, I doubt anyone would even notice,” she said dryly. “But if you insist, OK.”

I keyed off, and spent the next few minutes running various pre-flight checks. And finding ways to stall off the inevitable moment when I’d have to head back and talk to our music-master, Jimmy Chamala, about the details of our jump to Parex.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like the kid. Not really. It was just that he was a kid, barely past his nineteenth birthday, and as such was inevitably full of the half-brained ideas and underbaked worldly wisdom that had irritated me even when I was a teenager myself. Add to that the fact that the musicmaster was the single most indispensable person aboard the Sergei Rock—and we all knew it—and you had a recipe for cocky arrogance that would practically find its own way to the oven.

To be fair, Jimmy tried. And to be even more fair, I probably didn’t try hard enough. But even with him trying not to spout nonsense, and me trying not to point out what nonsense it was, we still had a knack for rubbing each other the wrong way.

Fortunately, by the time I finished the pre-flight—thereby running out of delaying tactics—Bilko called to say that the cargo was aboard and the hold secured. I called the Tower, found that our efficiency had gotten us bumped to three-down in the lift list, and gave the general strap-in order. Once we were in space, there would be plenty of time to go see Jimmy.

We lifted to orbit—without popping even a single preburn sparkle, amazingly enough—dropped the booster for the port tuggers to retrieve, and headed for deep space.

And now, unfortunately, it was time to go see Jimmy.

“Double-check that we’re on the Parex vector,” I told Bilko, maneuvering carefully past the banks of controls and status lights in the slightly disorienting effect of the false-grav. The fancier freighters with their variable-volume speakers and delimitation plates could handle some limited post-wrap steering, but we had to be already running in the direction we wanted to go. “I’ll see if Jimmy’s ready yet.”

“Right-o,” Bilko said, already busy at his board. “Be sure to remind him we’re running heavy today. Probably need at least a Green, maybe even a Blue.”

“Right.”

I headed down the corridor past the passenger cabin, noting the closed hatchway and wondering if our esteemed scholar might be having a touch of mal de faux-g. I could almost hope she was; in a Universe of oppressively strict class distinctions, nausea remained as one of the great social levelers.

Still, if she missed the bag, I was the one who’d have to clean it up. All things considered, I decided to hope she wasn’t sick. Passing her hatchway, I continued another five meters aft and turned into the musicmaster’s cabin.

I’ve already mentioned that Jimmy was a kid of nineteen. What I haven’t mentioned was all the irritating peripherals that went along with that. His hair, for one thing, which hadn’t been cut for at least five planets, and the mostly random tufts of scraggly facial fuzz he referred to, in all seriousness, as a beard. In a profession that seemed to take a perverse pride in its lack of a dress code, his wardrobe was probably still a standout of strange taste, consisting today of a flaming pais-plaid shirt that had been out of style for at least ten years and a pair of faded jeans that looked like they’d started their fade ten years before that. His official musicmaster scarf clashed violently with the shirt, and was sloppily knotted besides. His shoes, propped up on the corner of his desk, were indescribable.

As usual, he twitched sharply as I swung around the hatchway into view. Rhonda had mostly convinced me it was nothing more than the fact that he was always too preoccupied to hear me coming, but I couldn’t completely shake the feeling that the twitch was based on guilt. Though what specifically he might feel guilty about I didn’t know. “Captain,” he said, the word coming out halfway between a startled statement and a startled gasp. “I was just working up the program.”

“Yeah,” I said, throwing a look at the shoes propped up on the desk and then deliberately looking away. He knew I didn’t like him doing that, but since it was his desk and there were no specific regulations against it he’d long since decided to make it a point of defiance. I’d always suspected Bilko of egging him on in that, but had never uncovered any actual proof of it. “Did First Officer Hobson send you the mass numbers?”

“Yes, sir,” Jimmy said. “I was thinking we ought to go with a Blue, just to be on the safe side.”

“Sounds good,” I grunted, carefully not mentioning that a Blue meant Romantic Era or folk music, both of which I preferred to the Baroque or Classical Era that we would need to attract a Green. It wouldn’t do for Jimmy to think he was doing me a favor; he’d just want something in return somewhere down the line. “What have you got planned?”

“I thought we’d start with the Brahms Double Concerto,” he said, raising his reader from his lap and peering at his list. “That’s thirty-two point seven eight minutes. Dvorak’s Carnival Overture will add another nine point five two, the Saint-Saens Organ Symphony will clock in at thirty-two point six seven, and the Berlioz Requiem will add seventy-six minutes even. Then we’ll go to Grieg’s Peer Gynt at forty-eight point three, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto at twenty-four point two four, and Massenet’s Scenes Alsaciennes at twenty-two point eight two.”

He probably thought that throwing the numbers at me rapid-fire like that would have me completely lost. If so, he was in for a disappointment. “I read that as four hours six point three three minutes,” I said. “You’re six minutes overdue for a break.”

“Oh, come on,” he said scornfully. “I can handle an extra six minutes.”

“The rules say four hours, max, and then a half-hour break,” I countered. “You know that.”

“The rules were invented by senile old conservatory professors who could barely stay awake for four hours,” he shot back. “I did eight hours straight once back at OSU—I can sure do four hours six.”

“I’m sure you can,” I said. “But not on my transport. Change the program.”

“Look, Captain—”

“Change the program,” I cut him off. Spinning around, I strode out the hatchway and headed back down the corridor, seething silently to myself. Now he was going to have to find something else to fill in the last part of the program; and knowing Jimmy, he’d try to run it right up to the four-hour limit. Finding the right piece of music would take time; and in this business, time was most definitely money.

I was still seething when I reached the flight deck. “How’s the vector?” I demanded, squeezing past Bilko to my seat.

“Looks clean,” he said, throwing me a sideways look as I sat down. “Trouble with Jimmy?”

“No more than usual,” I growled, jabbing my main display for a status review. “How close to time margin are we running?”

He shrugged. “Not too bad—”

“Bilko?” Jimmy’s voice came over the intercom. “I’m ready to go.”

Bilko looked at me, raised his eyebrows. I waved disgustedly at the intercom—I sure didn’t want to talk to him. “OK, Jimmy,” Bilko told him. “Go ahead.”

“Right. Here we go.”

The intercom keyed off. “What was that about the time margin?” Bilko asked.

“Never mind,” I gritted. The damn kid must have had an alternative program figured out and ready to go before I even got there. Which meant the whole argument had been nothing more than him pushing me on the time rule, just to see if I’d bend. No absolutes; no rules; do whatever works or whatever you can get away with. Typical underbaked juvenile nonsense.

A deep C-sharp note sounded, and I felt my chair shaking slightly as the hull vibrated with the pre-music call. I shifted my attention to the forward viewport, staring unblinkingly out at the distant stars, and waited. Ten seconds later the C-sharp was replaced by the opening notes of the Brahms Double Concerto—

And with breathtaking suddenness the stars vanished.

I looked back down at my control board, disappointment mixing into my already irritated mood. Only once had I ever actually seen a flapblack as it came in, and I’d been trying ever since to repeat the experience. Not this time.

“We’ve got a good wrap,” Bilko reported, peering at his displays. “Inertial confirms four point six one light-years per hour.”

“Definitely a Blue, then.”

“Or a real slow Green,” Bilko said. “Computer’s still running the spectrum.”

I nodded, listening to the music and gazing out at the nothingness outside. And marveling as always at this strange symbiosis that humanity had found.

They were called flapblacks. Not a very imaginative name, and one which subsequent study had shown to be inaccurate anyway, but it had stuck now for five decades and there was no reason to assume it would ever get changed to something better. The first crew to run into one of the things had overscrubbed their meager sensor data until the creature had looked like a giant pancake shape wrapping itself around their ship and blocking off the starlight.

At which point, to their stunned amazement, it had picked up their ship and moved it.

As far as I knew, we still didn’t have the faintest idea how the flapblacks did what they did. The idea that an essentially insubstantial being that apparently lived its entire life in deep space could physically carry multiple tons of star transport across multiple light-years at rates of up to five light-years per hour, was utterly absurd. We didn’t know what they were made of, how they lived, what they ate, what else they did, how they reproduced, or how many of them per cubic light-year there were. In fact, when you boiled it down, there was virtually only one thing we did know about them.

And that was that they loved music. All kinds of music: modern, classical, folk melodies, Gregorian chants—you name it, some flapblack out there loved it. Play a clean musical tone through your hull and within seconds you’d have flapblacks crowding around like seagulls at a fish market. Start the music itself, and one of them would instantly wrap itself around the transport, and you’d be off for the stars.

“Spectrum’s coming up,” Bilko reported. “Yep—definitely a Blue.”

I nodded again in acknowledgment. The flapblacks themselves showed little internal structure, and of course no actual color at all. But it hadn’t taken long for someone to notice that, just as the transport was being wrapped, the incoming starlight experienced a brief moment of interference. Subsequent study had shown that the interference pattern looked and behaved like an absorption spectrum, with the lines from any given flapblack grouped together in a particular color of the spectrum.

That had been the key that had turned the original musical-shotgun approach into something more scientific. Flapblacks whose lines were in the red part of the spectrum were fairly slow, were apparently not strong enough to wrap transports above a certain mass, and came when you played musicals or opera. Orange flapblacks were faster and stronger and liked modern music—any kind—and Gregorian chants. I’d yet to figure that one out. Yellows were faster and stronger yet and liked jazz and classical rock/roll. Greens were still stronger, but now a little slower, and liked Baroque and Mozartian classical. Blues were the strongest of all, though slower than any of the others except Reds, and liked 19th-century romantic and any kind of folk melody.

It was the flapblacks and their love of our music that had finally freed humanity from Sol and allowed us to stretch out to the stars. More personally, of course, space travel was what provided me with my job, for which I was mostly grateful.

The catch was that it wasn’t just the music they needed. Or rather, it wasn’t the music alone. Which was, unfortunately, where musicmasters like Jimmy came in.

You see, you couldn’t just play the music straight for them. That would have been too easy. What you had to have was someone aboard the transport listening to the music as you pumped it out through the hull.

And not just listening; I mean listening. He had to sit there doing nothing the whole time, following every note and rest and crescendo, letting his emotions swell and ebb with the flow. Basically, just really getting into the music.

The experts called it psycho-stereo, which like most fancy words was probably created to cover up the fact that they didn’t know any more about this than they did anything else about the flapblacks. Best guess—heavy emphasis on guess—was that what the flapblacks actually liked was getting the music straight while at the same time hearing it filtered through a human mind. They almost certainly were getting the pre-music call tele-pathically—until they wrapped, there was no other way for them to pick up the sound in the vacuum of space.

However it worked, the bottom line was that I couldn’t handle the job. Neither could Bilko or Rhonda. Sure, we all liked music, but we also all had other duties and responsibilities to attend to during the flight. Even if we hadn’t, I doubt any of us had the kind of single-track mind that would let us do something that rigid for hours at a time. And you had to keep it up—one slip and your flap-black would be long gone and you’d have to stop and pull in another one.

That wasn’t a problem in itself, of course; there were always flapblacks hanging around waiting to be entertained. The problem came in not knowing to the microsecond exactly how long you’d been traveling. At flapblack speeds, a second’s worth of error translated into a lot of undershoot or overshoot on your target planet.

And even apart from all that, I personally still wouldn’t have wanted the job. I’ve always considered my emotions to be my own business, and the thought of letting some alien will-o’-the-wisp listen in was right next to chewing sand on my list of things I didn’t like to think about.

Enter Jimmy and the rest of the mu-sicmaster corps. They were the ones who actually made star travel possible. People like Bilko, Rhonda, and me were just here to keep them alive along the way, and to handle the paperwork at the end of the trip.

It was a train of thought I’d been running along quite a lot lately, more or less beginning with our previous musicmaster’s departure two months ago and Jimmy’s arrival. My digestion was definitely the worse for it.

“Looks like everything’s smooth here,” Bilko commented, pulling his lucky deck of cards from his shirt pocket. “Quick game?”

“No, thanks,” I said, looking at the cards with distaste. Considering that it purported to be a lucky deck, those cards had gotten Bilko into more trouble over the years. I’d lost track of how many times I’d had to pacify some pickup game partner who refused to believe that Bilko’s winnings were due solely to skill.

“OK,” he said equably, fanning the deck. “Want to draw cards for first turn in the dayroom, then?”

Mentally, I shook my head. For all his angling, Bilko could be so transparent sometimes. “No, you go ahead,” I told him, keying in the autosystem and giving the status lights a final check. The dayroom, situated across the main corridor from the passenger cabin, was our off-duty spot. On the bigger long-range transports dayroom facilities were pretty extensive; all ours offered was stale snacks, marginal holotape entertainment, and legroom.

“OK,” he said, unstrapping. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Just be sure you spend that hour in the dayroom,” I added. “Not poking around Scholar Kulasawa’s luggage.”

His face fell, just a bit. Just enough to show me I’d hit the target dead center. “What makes you think—?”

The intercom beeped. “Captain Smith?” a female voice asked.

I grimaced, tapping the key. “This is Smith, Scholar Kulasawa,” I said.

“I’d like to see you,” she said. “At your earliest convenience, of course.”

A nice, polite, upper-class phrase. Completely meaningless here, of course; what she meant was now. “Certainly,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”

I keyed off the intercom and looked at Bilko. “You see?” I told him. “She read your mind. The upper classes can do that.”

“I wouldn’t put it past them,” he grumbled, strapping himself back down. “I hope your bowing and cringing is up to par.”

“I guess I’ll find out,” I said, getting up. “If I’m not back in twenty minutes, dream up a crisis or something, will you?”

“I thought you said she could read minds.

“I’ll risk it.”

Scholar Kulasawa was waiting when I arrived in our nine-person passenger cabin, sitting in the center seat in a stiff posture that reminded me somehow of old portraits of European royalty. “Thank you for being so prompt, Captain,” she said as I stepped inside. “Please sit down.”

“Thank you,” I said automatically, as if being allowed to sit in my own transport was something I needed her permission to do. Swiveling one of the other seats around to face her, I sat down. “What can I do for you?”

“How much is your current cargo worth?” she asked.

I blinked. “What?”

“You heard me,” she said. “I want to know the full value of your cargo. And add in all the shipping fees and any nondelivery penalties.”

What I should have done—what my first impulse was to do—was find a properly respectful way to say it was none of her business and get back to the flight deck. But the sheer unexpectedness of the question froze me to my seat. “Can you tell me why that information should be any of your business?” I asked instead.

“I want to buy out this trip,” she said calmly. “I’ll pay all associated costs, including penalties, add in your standard fee for the side trip I want to make, and throw in a little something extra as a bonus.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Scholar, “I said, “but this run is already spoken for. If you want to charter a special trip at Parex, I’m sure you’ll be able to find a transport willing to take you.”

She favored me with a smile that didn’t have a single calorie of warmth anywhere in it. “Meaning you wouldn’t take me?”

“Meaning if you wish to discuss it after we’ve offloaded at Parex I’ll be willing to listen,” I said, standing up. I had it now: her scholarhood was in psychology, and this was all part of some stupid study on bribery and ethics. “But thank you for the offer—”

“I’ll pay you three hundred thousand neumarks,” she said, the smile gone now. “Cash.”

I stared at her. The power lifters and gourmet food we were carrying were worth maybe two hundred thousand, max, with everything else adding no more than another thirty. Which left the little bonus she’d mentioned at somewhere around seventy thousand neumarks.

Seventy thousand neumarks…

“You don’t think I’m serious,” she went on into my sudden silence, reaching into her jacket and pulling out what looked like a pre-paid money card. “Go on,” she invited, holding it out toward me. “Check it.”

Carefully, suspiciously, I reached out and took the card. Pulling out my reader, I slid it in.

As the owner of a transport plying some of the admittedly less-than-plum lanes, I had long ago decided that buying cut-rate document software would ultimately cost me more than it would save. Consequently, I’d made sure that the Sergei Rock’s legal and financial authenticators were the best that money could buy.

Scholar Kulasawa’s money card was completely legitimate. And it did indeed have three hundred thousand neumarks on it.

“You must be crazy to carry this around,” I told her, pulling the card out of my reader as if it was made of thousand-year-old crystal. “Where in the worlds did you get this kind of money, anyway?”

“From my university, of course. No—keep it,” she added, waving the card back as I held it out to her. “I prefer payment in advance.”

With a sigh, I stood up and set the card down on the seat next to her. Seventy thousand neumarks… “I already told you this trip’s been contracted for,” I said. “Talk to me when we reach Par ex.” I turned to go—

“Wait.”

I turned back. For a moment she studied my face, with something that might have been grudging admiration in her expression. “I misjudged you,” she said. “My apologies. Allow me to try a different approach.”

I shook my head. “I already said—”

“Would you accept my offer,” she cut me off, “if it would also mean helping people desperately in need of our assistance?”

I shook my head. “The Patrol’s got an office on Parex,” I said. “You want help, talk to them.”

“I can’t.” Her carefully jeweled lip twisted, just slightly. “For one thing, they have no one equipped to deal with the situation. For another, if I called them in they’d take it over and shut me out completely”

“Shut you out of what?”

“The credit, of course,” she said, her lip twisting again. “That’s what drives the academic world, Captain: the politely savage competition for credit and glory and peer recognition.” She eyed me again. “It would be so much easier if you would trust me. Safer, too, from my point of view. If this should get out...” She took a deep breath, still watching me, and let it out in a rush. “But if it’s the only way to get your cooperation, then I suppose that’s what I have to do. Tell me, have you ever heard of the Freedom’s Peace?”

“Sounds vaguely familiar,” I said, searching my memory. “Is it a star transport?”

She snorted gently. “You might say it was the ultimate star transport,” she said dryly. “The Freedom’s Peace was one of the five Giant Leap ark ships that headed out from the Jovian colonies 130 years ago.”

“Oh—right,” I said, feeling my face warming. Nothing like forgetting one of the biggest and most spectacular failures in the history of human exploration. The United Jovian Habitats, full of the arrogance of wealth and autonomy, had hollowed out five fairsized asteroids, stocked them with colonists, pre-assembled ecosystems, and heavy-duty ion-capture fusion drives, and sent them blazing out of the solar system as humanity’s gift to the stars.

The planetoids had stayed in contact with the home system for awhile, their transmissions growing steadily weaker as the distances increased and there was more and more interstellar dust for their transmission lasers to have to punch through. Eventually, they faded out, with the last of the five going silent barely six years after their departure. The telescopes had been able to follow them for another five years or so, but eventually their drives had faded into the general starscape background.

And then had come the War of Reclamation, ruthlessly bringing the Habitats back under Earth dominion and in the process wiping out virtually all records of the Giant Leap project. By the time humanity started riding flapblacks and were finally able to go out looking for them, they had completely vanished. “OK—the Freedom’s Peace. What about it?”

“I’ve found it,” she said simply.

I stared at her. “Where?”

“Out in space, of course,” she said tartly. “You don’t expect me to give you its exact location until you’ve agreed to take me there, do you?”

“But it’s somewhere near Parex?” I prompted.

She eyed me closely. “It’s accessible from Parex,” she said. “That’s all I’ll say.”

I pursed my lips, trying to think, listening with half an ear to the Brahms playing in the background. At least now I understood why there was so much money involved. Never mind the academic community; a historical find like this would rock the whole Expansion, from the Outer March colonies straight up to Earth and the Ten Families. Not to mention putting the discoverers permanently into the history books themselves.

Which did, however, bring up an entirely new question. “So why me?” I asked. “Your university could hire a much better transport than the Sergei Rock with the money you’re willing to spend.”

Her thin lips compressed momentarily. “There are—competitors, shall we say—who want to reach the Freedom’s Peace first. I know of at least one group that has been watching me.”

“You’re sure they don’t know the location themselves?”

“I’m sure this group doesn’t,” she retorted. “But there are others, and some of them may be getting close.” She waved a hand at the cabin around her. “I had to grab the first transport that was heading anywhere near it.”

“But you are authorized to use that money card?” I asked.

She smiled coldly. “Trust me, Captain: if I succeed here, the university will gladly authorize ten times what’s on that card. The historical significance of the furnishings alone will send shock waves through the Expansion. Let alone all the rest of it.”

“All the rest of what?” I asked, frowning. I’d have thought the historical artifacts they would find aboard would be all there was.

“I thought I mentioned that,” she said with a sort of malicious innocence. “When I asked about people needing assistance, remember? The Freedom’s Peace isn’t just drifting dead in space—it’s still underway.

“Obviously, someone is still aboard.”

The same rule book that said the musicmaster had to take a thirty-minute break every four hours also said that the crew was never to all be away from their posts at the same time, while in flight, except under extraordinary circumstances. I decided this qualified; and the minute Jimmy went on break, I hauled the three of them into the dayroom.

“I don’t know,” Bilko mused when I’d outlined Scholar Kulasawa’s proposition. “The whole thing smells a little fishy.”

“Which parts?” I asked.

“All parts,” he said. “For one thing, I find it hard to believe this race is so tight she had to settle for a transport like the Sergei Rock.”

“What’s wrong with the Sergei Rock?” I demanded, trying not to take it personally and not entirely succeeding. “We may not be fancy, but we’ve got a good clean record.”

“And don’t forget those boxes of hers,” Jimmy put in. I didn’t have to ask how he was leaning—he was practically bouncing in his seat with excitement over the whole thing. “She needed a transport that could carry them.”

“Yes—let’s not forget those boxes,” Bilko countered. “Did our esteemed scholar happen to tell you what was in them?”

“She said it was her research equipment,” I told him.

“That’s one hell of a lot of research equipment.”

“Historians and archaeologists don’t make do with a magnifying glass and tweezers anymore,” I said stiffly.

“Why are we all arguing here?” Jimmy put in earnestly. “I mean, if there are people out there who are lost, we need to help them.”

“I don’t think Scholar Kulasawa cares two sparkles about whoever’s aboard,” Bilko growled. “It’s Columbus Syndrome—she just wants the credit for discovering the New World.”

“Shouldn’t it be the Old World?” Jimmy suggested.

Bilko threw him a glare. “Fine. Whatever.”

I looked at Rhonda. “You’ve been pretty quiet,” I said. “What do you think?”

“I don’t think it matters what I think,” she said quietly. “You’re the owner and captain, and you’ve already made up your mind. Haven’t you?”

“I suppose I have, really,” I conceded. “But I don’t want to steamroll the rest of you, either. If anyone has a solid reason why we should turn her down, I want to hear it.”

“I’m with you,” Jimmy piped up.

“Thank you,” I said patiently. “But I was asking for dissenting opinions. Bilko?”

“Just the smell of it,” he said sourly. “I might have something solid if you’d let me look into those crates of hers.”

I grimaced. “Compromise,” I said. “You can do a materials scan and sonic deep-probe if you want. Just bear in mind that Angorki customs would have done all that and more, and apparently passed everything through without a whisper. Other thoughts?”

I looked at Rhonda, then at Bilko, then back at Rhonda. Neither looked particularly happy, but neither said anything either. Probably had decided that arguing further would be a waste of breath. “All right, then,” I said after a minute. “I’ll go tell Scholar Kulasawa that we’re in and get the coordinates from her. Bilko and I will figure out our vector and then you, Jimmy, will work out a program. Got it? Good. Everyone back to your posts.”

Kulasawa accepted the news with the air of someone who would have found it astonishing if we hadn’t fallen properly into line behind her. The location she gave me would have been a ten-hour trip from Parex, but as it happened was only about six hours from our current position. I couldn’t tell whether she was genuinely pleased by that or simply considered it another example of the Universe’s moral obligation to reconfigure itself in accordance to her plans and whims.

Regardless, the distance was reasonable and the course trivial to calculate. By the time Bilko and I had the vector worked out, Jimmy was ready with several alternative programs. I got him started on a four-hour program—he argued briefly for doing the entire six hours in one gulp, but I’d already stretched the rules enough for one trip—and had him get us underway.

And then, when everything was quiet again, I headed back to the engine room to see Rhonda.

Most of the engineer’s job involved the lift and landing procedures, leaving little if anything for her to do while we were in deep space. Despite that, we almost never saw Rhonda in the dayroom. She preferred to stay at her post, watching her engines, listening to Jimmy’s concert in solitude, and creating the little beadwork jewelry that was her hobby.

She was working on the latter as I came in. “Thought I’d check and see how you were doing back here,” I greeted her as I stepped in through the hatchway.

“Everything’s fine,” she assured me, looking up from her beads.

“Good,” I said, stepping behind her and peering over her shoulder. The piece was only half finished, but already it looked nice. “Interesting pattern,” I told her. “Good color scheme, too. What’s it going to be?”

“A decorated comb,” she said. “It holds your hair in place in back.” She twisted her head to look thoughtfully up at me. “For those of us who have enough hair to need holding, of course.”

“Funny.” I came around to the front of the board and pulled down a jumpseat. “I wanted to talk to you about this little side trip we’re making. You really don’t like it, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” she said. “I have no quarrel with locating the Freedom’s Peace or even going there, though reneging on a contract is going to damage that clean record you mentioned in the dayroom.”

“I know, but we’ll make it right,” I promised. “Kulasawa’s given us more than enough money to cover that.”

“I know,” Rhonda said sourly. “And that’s what’s really bothering me: your motivation for all of this. Altruistic noises aside, are you sure it’s not just the money?”

“If you’ll recall, I turned down the money when she first offered it,” I reminded her.

“But was it the money or the fact you didn’t know anything about the job?” she countered.

“Some of both,” I had to concede. “But now that we know what we’re doing—”

“Do we?” she cut me off. “Do we really? Has Scholar Kulasawa thought through—I mean really thought through—what she intends to do once we get there? Is she going to volunteer the Sergei Rock passenger cabin to take them all back to Earth? Make grandiose promises of land on Brunswick or Camaraderie or somewhere that she has no authority to make?”

She waved a hand in the general direction of the passenger cabin. “Or maybe she doesn’t intend to bring them home at all. She could be planning to leave them out there like some lost rain-forest culture for her academic friends to study. Or maybe she’ll organize weekly tour groups for the public and sell tickets.”

“Now you’re being silly,” I grumbled.

“Am I?” she countered. “Just because she’s a scholar and has money doesn’t mean she’s got any brains, you know.” She cocked her head slightly to the side. “Just how much above our expenses is she offering you?”

I shrugged as casually as I could. “Seventy thousand neumarks.”

Her eyes widened. “Seventy thousand? And you still don’t see anything wrong with this?”

“There’s prestige involved here, Rhonda,” I reminded her. “Prestige and academic glory. That’s worth a lot more to any scholar than mere money. Remember, we know next to nothing about the Great Leap colonies—all that stuff went up in dust when the Ganymede domes were hit late in the war. We don’t know what kind of astrogation system they had, how you create a stable ecosystem that compact, or even how you set about hollowing out eighteen kilometers’ worth of asteroid in the first place. Scholars go nuts over that sort of thing.”

“Yes, but three hundred thousand neumarks worth?”

I shrugged again. “It’s the bottom line of being the ones who go down in history,” I reminded her. “And remember, the Tower’s own records showed that we were the only transport headed for Parex for over a week. If her competitors have their own ship, then we’re her only chance to get there first.”

Rhonda shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I find that utterly incomprehensible.”

“Frankly, so do I,” I readily admitted. “That’s probably why we’re not scholars.”

She smiled lopsidedly. “Besides being from the wrong end of the social spectrum?”

I shrugged. “Besides that. So I guess we’ll just have to concentrate on the fact we’re going to be helping to rescue some people who’ve been marooned in space for the past century and a third.”

“And hope Kulasawa isn’t planning to renege on her deal if we lose the race,” Rhonda warned. “I don’t suppose that topic happened to come up in conversation, did it?”

“As a matter of fact, it didn’t,” I said slowly, feeling my forehead wrinkling. “Maybe I’d better introduce it.”

“You can do that when you ask about her cargo,” Rhonda suggested helpfully. “Incidentally, assuming we get it, I trust you’ll be spreading that seventy thousand bonus around equally?”

“Don’t worry,” I assured her, standing up and stepping to the hatchway. “What I’ve got in mind will benefit all of us.”

“New engines, maybe?” she asked hopefully, her eyebrows lifting.

I gave her an enigmatic smile and left.

Bilko’s materials scan on Kulasawa’s crates was quick and not terribly informative. It revealed the presence of electronics components, some pretty hefty internal power supplies, magnetic materials, and some stretches of rather esoteric synthetic membranes. The sonic deep-probe was more interesting; from two directions on each of the crates the probe signals got bounced straight back as if from solid plates of conditioned ceramic.

Kulasawa’s explanation, once I asked her, cleared up the confusion. The crates, she informed me, contained a set of industrial-quality sonic deep-probes. Though tradition said that each of the Great Leap Colonies had consisted mainly of a single large chamber hollowed out of the center of the asteroid, there was no solid evidence to back up that assumption; and if the Freedom’s Peace proved instead to be a vast honeycomb of rooms and passages, it wouldn’t be smart for us to start exploring it without first mapping out the entire network.

The first four-hour program ended, Jimmy chafed and groused his way through his regulation-stipulated break, and then we were off again. The transit time to the spot Bilko and I had calculated came out to be a shade over one hour forty-eight minutes, and Jimmy had worked up a program that nailed us there dead center on the nose.

The music stopped, the flapblack unwrapped itself, and Bilko and I gazed out the forward viewport.

At exactly nothing.

“Where is it?” Kulasawa demanded, leaning over our shoulders to look. “You said we were here.”

“We’re where your data took us,” I said, resisting the urge to lean away from her in the cramped space. Her breath was unpleasantly warm on my cheek, and her lip perfume had clearly been applied with a larger room in mind. “We’re running a check now, but—”

“My data was accurate,” she snapped. From the suddenly increased heat on my cheek, I guessed she had turned a glare my direction. Fortunately, I was too busy with my board to turn and look. “If we’re in the wrong place, you’re the ones to blame.”

“We’re working on it, Scholar,” Bilko soothed in the same tone of voice I’d heard him use on card partners suddenly suspicious by how deep in the hole they’d gotten themselves. “In any astrogate calculation there’s a certain margin of error—”

“I don’t want excuses,” Kulasawa cut him off, the temperature of her voice dropping into the single digits. “I want results.”

“We understand,” Bilko said, unfazed. “But those results may take time.” He threw her a sideways glance. “And we do need room to work.”

Kulasawa was still radiating frustration, but fortunately common sense prevailed. “I’ll be in the passenger cabin,” she said between clenched teeth, and stalked out.

The flight deck door slid shut behind her, and Bilko and I looked across at each other. “The lady’s deadly serious about this, isn’t she?” Bilko commented. “I’ll bet you could bargain us up a little on the deal.”

“I’d say she’s at least two stages past deadly,” I countered. “And I think trying to shake her down for more money would be an extremely poor idea right now. Rhonda, are you listening?”

“I’m right here,” Rhonda’s voice came over the intercom. “I presume you’ve both figured out the problem, too?”

“I think so,” Bilko said.

“It’s obvious in hindsight,” I agreed. “Her location was based on raw observational data from Zhavoronok and Meena, both of which are ten light-years away from here.”

“Right,” Bilko added. “Obviously, she fed us the location directly without realizing that she was looking at where the colony was ten years ago.”

“You got it,” I said. “Hard to believe a scholar would make such a simple error, though.”

“Unless she didn’t realize they were still moving,” Rhonda offered.

“No, she told me they were still underway,” I said. “That’s how she knew there was still someone aboard, remember?”

“She’s a historian,” Bilko said, waving a hand in dismissal. “Or maybe an archaeologist. Probably doesn’t even know what a light-year is—you know how rampant upper-class specialization is.”

“And someday all of us in the tech classes will take over,” Rhonda echoed the populist slogan. “Dream on. OK, we know the problem. What’s the solution?”

“Seems straightforward enough,”

Bilko said. “We know they were headed away from Sol system, so we figure out how much farther they could have gone in ten years and go that far along that vector.”

“And how do we figure out what speed they were making?” I asked him.

“From the redshift in their drive spectrum, of course,” he said. “Assuming, of course, that Kulasawa was smart enough to bring some of the actual telescopic photos with her.” He smiled at me. “You can be the one to go ask for them.”

I grimaced. “Thanks. Heaps.”

“Don’t go into grovel mode quite yet,” Rhonda warned. “Even if she has photos they won’t do us any good, because we don’t know what the at-rest spectrum for their drive was.”

“Why not?” Bilko asked, frowning at the intercom speaker. “I thought it was just a standard ion-capture drive.”

“There was nothing standard about it,” Rhonda told him. “You can’t just scale up an ion-capture drive that way—the magnetic field instabilities will tear it apart. Even now our biggest long-range freighters are running right up to the wire. God only knows what trick the Jovians pulled to make theirs work.”

“If you say so,” Bilko said. “Engines aren’t really my field of expertise.”

“Of course.” I cocked an eyebrow at him. “What was that again about rampant specialization?”

He smiled lopsidedly. “Touche,” he said. “So let’s hear your idea.”

I gazed out the viewport. “We start with a focused search along the vector from Sol system,” I said slowly. “Even if we don’t know what the spectrum looks like, we know they can’t have gotten too far away from here yet. That means the drive glow will be reasonably bright, and our astrogator ought to be able to pick up on a major star that’s not supposed to be there. Right?”

“Sorry,” Rhonda said. “Astrogation’s not my field of expertise.”

“Give it a rest, Blankenship,” Bilko growled. “Assuming it’s still firing hot enough to look like a major star, yes, it’ll work. Then what?”

“Then we head at right angles to that direction for a small but specified distance,” I said. “Say, a few A.U. Then we come back out, find the drive trail again, and get the location by straight triangulation.”

“Can we do a program that short?” Rhonda asked. “Even at Blue speeds an A.U. must go by pretty fast.”

“A shade under six-hundredths of a second, actually,” Bilko said. “And no, we can’t do that directly.”

“What we can do is run a few minutes out and almost the same number of minutes back,” I added. “Some of the bigger freighters do that all the time to fine-tune their arrival position. Jimmy should have what he needs to work up that kind of program.”

“We assume so, anyway,” Bilko added. “But of course musicmastery isn’t our field of expertise.”

“Look, Bilko—”

“Play nicely, children,” I said. “Bilko, get the sensors going, will you?”

The Sergei Rock’s sensors weren’t quite up to the same ultra-high standard of quality as our legal and financial software was. But they were certainly nothing to sneer at, either—the myriad of transport regulators that swarmed like locusts across the Expansion made sure of that. And so it came as something of a surprise when, thirty minutes later, the result of our search turned up negative.

“Great,” Bilko said, tapping his fingers restlessly on the edge of his board. “Just great. Now what?”

“They must have turned off their drive,” I said, looking over the astrogate computer’s report again. “That, or else it’s failed. Rhonda?”

“Seems odd that they would turn it off,” Rhonda said doubtfully. “Certainly not in the middle of nowhere like this. And for it to have run 130 years and just happened to fail now would be pretty ironic.”

“Yeah, but about par for the way my luck’s been going,” Bilko said sourly. “That last game I had on Angorki—”

“The Universe does not have it in for you personally, Bilko,” Rhonda interrupted him. “Much as you’d like to think so. Jake, I’d guess it’s more likely they simply changed course. If they shifted their vector even a few degrees their drive wouldn’t be pointed directly at us anymore.”

Abruptly, Bilko snapped his fingers. “No,” he said, turning a tight grin on me. “They didn’t change course. Not from here.”

“Of course not,” I said as it hit me as well. “All we need is to reprogram the searcher—”

“I’m on it,” Bilko said, hands already skating across the computer board.

“Any time you two want to let me in on this, go ahead,” Rhonda invited.

“We’ve assumed they hit this point on the way from Sol,” I explained, watching over Bilko’s shoulder. “But maybe they didn’t. Maybe they headed out on a slightly different vector, paused to take a look at some promising system along the way, then changed course and headed out again.”

“Passing through this point on an entirely different vector than the direct line from Sol,” Bilko added. “OK, here it comes… computer says the only real possibility is Lalande 21185. That would put the vector… right. OK, let’s try that focused search again. And keep your fingers crossed.”

We didn’t have to keep them crossed for very long. Three minutes later, the computer had found it.

“No doubt about it,” Bilko decided. “We are definitely genius-class material.”

“Don’t start making laurel-leaf soup too fast,” Rhonda warned. “Now, I take it, comes the tricky part?”

“You take it correctly,” I said, unstrapping. “I’ll go tell Kulasawa we’ve found her floating museum. And then go have a chat with Jimmy.”

Kulasawa was elated in a grim, upper-class sort of way, managing to simultaneously imply that I should keep her better informed and that I also shouldn’t waste time with useless mid-course reports. I escaped to Jimmy’s cabin, wondering if maybe Bilko’s suggestion of upping our price would really be unethical after all.

As Rhonda had suggested, the tricky part now began. Two successive performances of Schubert’s “Erlkünig,” the versions differing by exactly point five seven second gave us our triangulation point. Another reading on the Freedom’s Peace’s drive glow, and we had them nailed at just over fifty A.U. away.

“Not exactly hauling Yellows, are they?” Bilko commented. “I mean, fifty A.U.s in ten years?”

“The engines were probably scaled for low but constant acceleration,” Rhonda said. “They would have lost a lot of their velocity when they stopped to check out the Lalande system.”

“Just as well for us they did,” I pointed out. “If they’d been pulling a straight acceleration for the past 130 years we wouldn’t have a hope in hell of matching speeds with them.”

“Good point,” Rhonda agreed. “Any idea what speed they are making?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” I said smugly, keying for the calculation I’d requested. “I took a spectrum of their drive at both our triangulation points. Because we were seeing the red-shifted light from two different angles—well, I won’t bore you with the math. Suffice it to say the Freedom’s Peace is smoking along at just under thirty kilometers a second.”

“About three times Earth escape velocity,” Bilko murmured. “Can the engines handle that, Rhonda?”

“No problem,” she assured him. “We’ll probably pop a few preburn sparkles, though. So what’s the plan?”

“We’ll set up a program that’ll put us just a little ways ahead of them,” I told her. “That way, we’ll get to watch them go past us and can get exact numbers on their speed and vector.”

“Provided they don’t run us down,” Rhonda murmured.

“They’re hardly going fast enough for that,” Bilko scoffed. “Fifty A.U.s means another forward-back program, of course.”

“Right,” I said, nodding. “You work out the course while I go help Jimmy set it up.”

“Right,” he said, turning to his board. “You going to give our scholar the good news on the way to Jimmy’s?”

“Let’s let it be a surprise.”

Fifteen minutes later we were ready to go. “OK, Jimmy, this is it,” I called toward the intercom. “Let’s do it.”

“OK,” he said. “Here goes Operation Reverse Columbus.”

I flicked off the intercom. “Operation Reverse Columbus?” Bilko asked, cocking an eyebrow.

I shook my head as the pre-music C-sharp vibrated through the hull. “He thinks he’s being cute,” I said. “Just ignore him.” The pre-tone ended, and as the strains of Schumann’s Manfred Overture began the stars vanished, and I settled in for the short ride ahead.

A ride which turned out to be a lot shorter than I’d expected. Barely two notes into the piece, with the music still going, the stars abruptly reappeared.

“Jimmy!” I snarled his name like a curse as I grabbed for my restraints. Of all times to break his concentration and lose our flapblack—

And then my eyes flicked to the viewport… and my hands froze on the release.

Flashing past from just beneath us, no more than twenty kilometers away, was the Freedom’s Peace.

And it was definitely cooking along. Even as I caught my breath it shot away from us toward the stars, its circle of six drive nozzles blazing furiously from the stern and dimming with distance—

And then, without warning, it suddenly flared into a brilliant blaze of light.

My first, horrified thought was that the colony had exploded right in front of us. My second, confused thought was that an explosion normally didn’t have six neatly arranged nexus points… and as the six blazing circles receded in the direction the Freedom’s Peace’s had been going, I finally realized what had happened. Not the how or the why, but at least the what.

On that, at least, I was ahead of Bilko. “What the hell?” he gasped.

“The music’s still going,” I snapped, belatedly hitting my restraint release and scrambling to my feet. “As soon as it got far enough ahead of us, we got wrapped again and caught up with it.”

“We what? But—?”

“But why are we unwrapping when we get close?” I ducked my head and peered out the viewport, just in time to see us do our strange little microjump and catch up with the asteroid again. “Good question. Let me get Jimmy to shut down and we’ll try to figure it out.”

I sprinted back to his cabin, cursing the unknown bureaucrat or planning commission hotshot who’d come up with the idea of locking out the mu-sicmaster’s intercom whenever the music was playing. If these insane little wrap/unwraps were damaging my transport—

I reached the cabin and threw myself inside. Leaning back on his couch with his eyes closed and the massive headphones engulfing his head, Jimmy probably never realized anything was wrong until I slapped the cutoff switch.

At which point his reaction more than made up for it. He jolted upright like someone had applied electrodes to selected parts of his body, his eyes snapping wide open. “What—?” he gasped, ripping off his headphones.

“We’ve got trouble,” I told him briefly, jabbing the intercom switch. “Rhonda?”

“Here,” she said. “Why have we stopped?”

“It wasn’t our idea,” I said. “We lost our flapblack.”

“About six times in a row,” Bilko put in tensely from the flight deck. “As soon as we get close enough to the Freedom’s Peace, we lose them.”

“What’s going on?” a voice demanded from behind me.

I turned around. Kulasawa was standing in the open doorway, her gaze hard on me. “You heard everything we know so far,” I told her. “We’ve lost our flapblack wrap six times now trying to get close to the Freedom’s Peace.”

Her gaze shifted to Jimmy, hardening to the consistency of reinforced concrete. “It wasn’t me,” he protested quickly. “I didn’t do anything.”

“You’re the musicmaster, aren’t you?” she demanded.

“It’s not Jimmy’s fault,” I put in. “It’s something having to do with the Freedom’s Peace itself.”

The glare turned back to me. “Such as?”

“Maybe it’s the mass,” Jimmy spoke up, apparently still too young and inexperienced to know when to keep his mouth shut and pretend to be furniture. “That’s why flapblacks can’t get too close in to planets—”

“This is an asteroid, musicmaster,” Kulasawa cut him off icily. “Not a planet.”

“Yes, but—”

“It’s not the mass,” Kulasawa said, dismissing the suggestion with a curl of her lip. “What else?”

“It could be their drive,” Rhonda suggested over the intercom. “Maybe the radiation from an ion-capture drive that big is scaring them away.”

“Or else killing them,” Bilko said quietly.

It was a strange, even eerie thought, but one which I think had already occurred to all of us. We knew nothing about how flapblacks lived or died, or even whether they died at all. What we did know is that we traveled with them, and the thought that we might have been even indirectly responsible for killing a half dozen of them was an unpleasant one for all of us.

Or at least, most of us. “Regardless of the reason, we know the result,” Kulasawa said briskly. “How do we proceed, Captain?”

“Actually, the situation isn’t much different from what we were expecting anyway,” I said, trying to push the image of dying flapblacks from my mind. “Except that it’s going to be easier than we thought to get close to the Freedom’s Peace. We should have gotten a good reading on their vector while we were tailgating them that way, so all we have to do now is boost our speed to match them and then get a flapblack to wrap us and get us close again.”

“Even if it means killing another one of them?” Jimmy asked.

“What if it does?” Kulasawa said impatiently. “The Universe is full of the things.”

“Besides which, we don’t know it’s hurting them,” I added.

And immediately wished I hadn’t. The expression on Jimmy’s face was already somewhere between stricken and loathing; the look he now shot toward me was the sort you might give someone who’d just announced he enjoyed ripping the heads off small birds.

“Then let’s get to it,” Kulasawa said into the suddenly awkward silence. “We’ve wasted enough time out here already. You in the engine room: how long to bring us up to speed?”

“Depends on how much acceleration you want to put up with,” Rhonda said, her tone a little chilly. Apparently, she wasn’t happy with my comment, either. “At one g, we’re talking an hour or so.”

“You ran two gs lifting off Angorki,” Kulasawa said.

“That was for ten minutes,” I reminded her. “Not thirty.”

“You’re all young and healthy,” she countered. “If I can handle it, so can you. Two gs, Captain. Get us moving.”

It took Rhonda ten minutes to bring the engines up from standby, roughly the same amount of time it took Bilko and me to double-check the Freedom’s Peace’s vector and make sure the Sergei Rock was configured for high acceleration. After that came our half hour of two gs, unpleasant but certainly nothing any of us couldn’t take.

More unpleasant was the subtle but definite chill I could feel all around me. Orders were scrupulously obeyed and reports properly given, but all of it in crisp, formal tones and without the casual give-and-take that was the normal order of the day. I was used to frosty air between Jimmy and me, but for Rhonda and Bilko to have joined in struck me as totally unfair.

And yes, I blamed all of them. Maybe my comment had sounded insensitive; but damn it all, we didn’t have any evidence that were killing or even hurting the flapblacks by pushing them close to the Freedom’s Peace. My personal theory was that there was something about the asteroid that was simply distracting them enough to lose their wrap, and I tried to tell the others that.

But it didn’t seem to make any difference. In their minds, I’d sold out to Kulasawa, and I’d now shown that nothing was going to keep me from getting hold of that money. Not even if it meant slaughtering flapblacks right and left.

The acceleration process seemed to take forever, but at last we had the Sergei Rock up to speed and it was time to go.

Theoretically, we didn’t need to use the flapblacks at all, since the Freedom’s Peace was close enough that boosting our speed a little more would enable us to catch up with it. But that would have meant more acceleration, more delay, and pushing the engines more than we already had, so I told Jimmy to set us up with another program. He wasn’t at all happy about it, but I was long past caring about Jimmy’s happiness. If Bilko and Rhonda had opinions on the subject, they were smart enough to keep quiet about them.

The music started, sparking a wrap/unwrap that was again too fast for human eyes to see, and once again we were flying above and behind the Freedom’s Peace.

Even twenty kilometers away and only glimpsed for an instant, the colony had looked impressive. Now, with us steadily approaching it, the thing was flat-out awesome. It was one thing to read the numbers; it was something else entirely to actually see a huge asteroid driving its way through deep space.

It looked just like the handful of publicity shots that had survived the War of Reclamation: a craggy-surfaced, vaguely ovoid asteroid, roughly eighteen kilometers long and maybe twelve across at its widest point, lit only by the faint sheen of reflected starlight. The glare from the drive washed out any details of the engines themselves, but it was obvious that they were massive. Slightly brighter spots here and there across the surface indicated the presence of antenna or sensor arrays and a couple of rectangles that looked like access hatchways.

“It’s rotating,” Bilko breathed from beside me. Apparently, he was so dazzled by the view that he’d forgotten we weren’t on speaking terms. “Look—you can see that drive nozzle array turning around.”

“Using rotation to create artificial gravity,” I agreed. “They didn’t have false-grav back then.”

“I’m going to take a spectrum off the hull,” he decided, keying his board and swiveling around his viewer. “A Doppler will give us better numbers on the rotation than—yow!”

I jerked against my restraints. “What?” I snapped.

“Something just flicked across the stars,” he said tightly, punching keys on the spectrometer.

“Relax,” Rhonda’s voice came over the intercom. “It was probably a flapblack.”

“Yeah, but it didn’t wrap,” Bilko said. “I’ve never heard of a flapblack coming in but not wrapping.”

“Maybe they can’t wrap this close to the Freedom’s Peace,” I said. “Like I suggested earlier—”

I broke off at the look on Bilko’s face. “What is it?”

“It reads like a flapblack, all right,” he said, his voice low and rigidly under control. “Only it’s not a kind we’ve ever seen before. This one’s spectrum was in the infrared.”

I stared at him. “You’re joking.”

“Check it yourself,” he said, keying the analysis over to my display. “The spectrum’s definitely below the standard flapblack red—let’s call it an InRed.”

I looked at the numbers, and damned if he wasn’t right. “OK,” I said. “So we’ve found a new breed. So we get into the history books.”

“You’re missing the point,” he said grimly. “We have a new breed of flapblacks, all right: a breed that chases other flapblacks away.”

There was a soft whistle from the intercom. “I don’t like the sound of that,” Rhonda said.

“Me, neither,” Bilko said. “Maybe we ought to forget the whole thing and get out of here.”

I gazed out the viewport at the rapidly approaching asteroid below. “But it doesn’t make sense,” I told them. “For starters, if it’s a predator or whatever—”

“If they’re predators, plural,” Bilko interrupted me. “Another InRed just went past.”

“Fine; if they’re predators,” I amended, “then why haven’t we seen them before? More to the point, what are they doing hanging around the Freedom’s Peace in the middle of nowhere?”

If Bilko had an answer, he never got to give it. Without warning, there was the faint flicker of a laser from the asteroid and our comm speaker crackled. “Approaching transport, this is the Freedom’s Peace,” a female voice said. “Please identify yourself.”

Bilko and I exchanged startled glances. Then I dove for the comm switch. “This, uh, is Captain Jake Smith of the star transport Sergei Rock. We, uh… who is this?”

“My name is Suzenne Enderly,” the woman said. “Are you in need of assistance?”

“We were just about to ask you that question,” Kulasawa said, stepping through the hatchway behind me onto the flight deck. “This is Scholar Andrula Kulasawa, in charge of this mission.”

“And what mission would that be?”

“The mission to see you, of course,” Kulasawa said. “We would like permission to come aboard.”

“We appreciate your concern,” Enderly said. “But I can assure you that we’re doing fine and have no need of assistance.”

“I’m very glad to hear that,” Kulasawa said. “But I would still like to come aboard.”

“To study us, I presume?”

I looked up at Kulasawa in time to catch her cold smile. “And to allow you to study us, as well,” she said. “I’m sure each of us can learn a great deal from the other.”

There was a brief silence. “Perhaps,” Enderly said. “Very well.”

And on the dark mass below a grid of running lights suddenly appeared. “Follow the lights to the colony’s bow,” Enderly continued. “There’s a docking bay there. We’ll use our comm lasers to guide you in.”

“Thank you,” I said. “We’ll look forward to meeting you.”

The laser winked out, and I keyed off the comm. “Well?” I asked Kulasawa.

“Well, what?” she countered. “You have your docking instructions. Follow them.”

I had envisioned some kind of makeshift docking umbilical stuck perhaps to one of the hatchways we’d spotted on our approach. To my relieved surprise, the docking bay proved to be a real bay: a wide cylindrical opening leading back into the asteroid proper, fully equipped with guide lights and beacons. And, at the far end, a set of ancient but functional-looking capture claws that smoothly caught the Sergei Rock and eased it into one of the half dozen slots set around the inside of the open space.

“What now?” Kulasawa asked as we touched gently onto the bare rock floor and the overhead panel slid closed.

“We wait,” I said, switching off the false-grav and fighting against the momentary disorientation as the asteroid’s rotational pseudogravity took over.

“Wait for what?” Kulasawa demanded. This close to the asteroid’s axis the pseudogravity was pretty small, but if she was suffering from free-fall sickness she was hiding it well.

“For them,” Bilko told her, pointing out the viewport.

From a door in the far wall three people wearing milky-white isolation suits and gripping carrybag-sized metal cases had appeared and were making their slightly bouncing way toward us. “Offhand,” he added, “I’d say it’s a medical team.”

He was right. We opened the hatchway at their knock, and after some stiffly formal introductions we spent the next hour having our bodies and the transport itself run through the microbiological soup-strainer. Their borderline paranoia was hardly unreasonable; with 130 years of bacteriological divergence to contend with, something as harmless to us as a flu virus could rage through the colony like the Black Death through Europe.

In fact, it was something of a mild surprise to me when, after all the data had been collected and analyzed, we were pronounced safe to enter. The team gave each of us a broad-spectrum immunization shot to hopefully protect us from their own assortment of diseases, and a few minutes later we were all finally riding down an elevator toward the colony proper.

The ride was longer than I’d expected it to be, and it wasn’t until we were well into it that I realized the elevator had been made deliberately slow in order to minimize the slightly disconcerting mixture of increasing weight and Coriolis forces as we headed “down” toward the rim of the asteroid. Personally, I didn’t have any trouble with it, but it appeared this was finally the combination that had gotten to Kulasawa’s heretofore iron stomach. Her eyes gazed straight ahead as we descended, the expression on her face one of tight-lipped grimness. I watched her surreptitiously, trying not to enjoy it too much.

Considering the historic significance of our arrival, I would have expected a good-sized delegation to have been on hand. But apparently this wasn’t a society that went in heavily for brass bands. Only three people were waiting for us as the elevator doors opened: two stolid-look-ing uniformed men, and a slender woman about Kulasawa’s age standing between them.

“Welcome to the Freedom’s Peace,” the woman said, taking a step forward as we stepped out. “I’m Suzenne Enderly; call me Suzenne.”

“Thank you,” I said, glancing around. We were in a long room with an arched ceiling and no decoration to speak of. Set into the wall behind our hosts was a pair of heavy-looking doors. “I’m Captain Jake Smith,” I continued, returning my attention to the woman. “This is my first officer, Will Hobson; my engineer, Rhonda Blankenship; my musicmaster, Jimmy Chamala. That one’s a little hard to explain—”

“That’s all right,” the woman assured me, her eyes on Kulasawa. “And you must be Scholar Andrula Kulasawa.”

“Yes, I am,” Kulasawa said. “May I ask your tide?”

Suzenne tilted her head slightly to the side. “What makes you think I have one?”

“I recognize the presence of authority,” Kulasawa said. “Authority always implies a title.”

Suzenne smiled. “Titles aren’t nearly as important to us as they obviously are to you,” she said. “But if you insist, I’m a Special Assistant to King Peter.”

I felt a stir go through us over that one. The traditional concept of hereditary royalty had long since vanished from the Expansion’s political scene, though it was often argued that that same role was now being more unofficially filled by the Ten Families. Still, the idea of a real, working king sounded strange and anachronistic.

For some of us, though, it apparently went beyond merely strange. “A king, you say,” Kulasawa said, her voice heavy with disapproval.

Suzenne heard it, too. “You disapprove?”

For a moment the two women locked gazes, and I prayed silently that Kulasawa would have the sense not to launch into a political argument here and now. Suzenne’s two guards looked more than capable of taking exception if they chose, and getting thrown into the dungeon or whatever they had here was not the way I had hoped to end what had become a long and tiring day.

Fortunately, she did. “I’m just a scholar,” she told Suzenne, her voice going neutral again. “I observe and study. I don’t pass judgment.”

“Of course.” Suzenne smiled around at the rest of us. “But I’m forgetting my manners, and I’m sure you’re all anxious to see our world. This way, please.”

She turned and walked back toward the door, the two guards stepping courteously aside to let our group pass and then closing ranks behind us. “Incidentally, the study team tells me you have several large crates aboard,” Suzenne added over her shoulder. “May I ask what’s in them?”

“Two of them contain my personal research equipment,” Kulasawa said before I could answer. “The others contain food and some power lifters which we brought as gifts for you.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rhonda start. “Gifts?” she echoed. “But that’s our cargo.”

“Which if you’ll recall I purchased from you,” Kulasawa said, throwing a sharp look at her. “They’re mine to do with as I choose.”

Rhonda turned to me. “Jake?”

“That was part of the deal,” I reminded her.

“Yes, but—” She broke off, an oddly betrayed look on her face.

“You’re most generous,” Suzenne said, pulling out a plastic card and holding it up to a panel beside the doors. “But I’m afraid we can’t accept gifts. One of our techs will evaluate the items and issue you credit slips.” The doors slid open, and we stepped out onto a wide, railed balcony—

And I felt my mouth drop open. Stretching out before us, exactly as Enderly had said, was an entire world.

It was like looking at a giant diorama designed to show young schoolchildren all the various types of terrain and landscape one might come across. Far below us, extending for at least a few kilometers, was what seemed to be a mixture of farmland and forest, marked by gentle hills of various heights and dotted with occasional clusters of houses. Numerous ponds were scattered around, glistening in the sunlight, and there was at least one river wending its way across the ground. Farther away, I could see what looked like a small town, then more greenery—grassland or more farms, I couldn’t tell which—then more trees and buildings and finally the tall spires of an actual city.

“Look at that,” I heard Jimmy murmur. “The edges—they turn up.”

I looked to the side. In the distance, I could indeed see the edges of the landscape rising up toward the sky.

And in that moment, at least for me, the illusion abruptly collapsed. I was no longer gazing out over some nice planetside rural area. I was inside an asteroid, billions of kilometers from anywhere, driving hard through the blackness of space.

“I suppose it does take some getting used to,” Suzenne said quietly from beside me. “I grew up with it, of course, so to me it seems perfectly natural.”

“I guess it would,” I said, following the curve upward with my eyes. It was mostly more of the same, though the pattern of farm and forest had been varied and there was what looked like a large lake visible part way up. I tried to follow the curve all the way up, but began to lose it in the glare of the sun.

The sun? “I see you have the ultimate light fixture,” I commented, pointing. “I hope that’s not a real fusion generator.”

“It’s not,” Suzenne assured me. “We don’t have any problem with generating heat inside the colony—it’s dumping the excess we sometimes find troublesome, particularly during the winter season. No, our sun is just a very bright light source, running along inside a tunnel through the rotational axis. It fades in at this end of the chamber in the morning, crosses slowly to the other end throughout the day, and then is faded out to give us some twilight. Then it’s sent back across during the night and prepped for the new day. It’s not the same as living on a planet, I suppose, but it’s the closest arrangement the designers could come up with and it’s probably pretty accurate.”

I squinted up at it. The light was bright enough, but not the blinding intensity of a real G-type sun. “Looks like it’s getting toward evening.”

“About another hour to sunset,” she said. “And yes, we do call it sunset. I’m afraid that’s not going to leave you much time to look around tonight.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I assured her. “We’re not very far off your schedule ourselves, and I for one could do with an early night.”

“That will work best for us, too,” she said. “I’ll arrange for rooms for all of you, and you can look around and meet King Peter in the morning.”

“Sounds good.” I looked up again as another thought struck me. “You don’t have any stars, of course.”

“Not real ones,” she said. “But the various city lights look a little like them from the opposite side. And there are observation rooms at the bow for anyone who wants to see the stars for real.”

“The landscape looks pretty real, too,” I commented. “But you seem to have forgotten about mountains.”

She smiled. “Not really. You’re standing on one. If you’ll excuse me, I have to see to our transportation.”

She walked away. Grimacing slightly, I crossed to the far edge of the balcony. Making sure I had a solid grip on the railing, I looked down.

And found myself gazing down the slope of a rocky cliff at a pasture a kilometer or more below.

“Do you believe this?” Bilko commented, coming up beside me and glancing casually down. “Mountain climbing the easy way—you can start at the top if you want to.”

“You really think people climb this?” I asked, taking a long step back from the edge.

“Oh, sure,” Bilko said. “Probably designed that way on purpose. In feet, if you look around, you can see different-grade slopes all around this end of the chamber. I’ll bet they ice some of them up in the winter so that the really committed nutcases can ski, too.”

I grunted. “They’re welcome to it.”

“Personally, I’d rather have a good game of skill myself.” Leaning an elbow on the railing, he nodded casually off to the side. “Speaking of nutcases, did you happen to notice the crowd of cardsharps over there?”

Frowning, I turned to look. Cardsharps was the current cutesy slang term for cops among Bilko’s gambling buddies; but all I could see over there was Suzenne and a half dozen men in coveralls maneuvering a compact multi-passenger helicopter out of a hangar carved out of the rock. Between us and them, the two uniformed men she’d had up above were standing their stolid guard. “Since when do two men constitute a crowd?” I asked.

“Oh, come on, Jake, use your eyes,” Bilko chided. “Those aren’t techs rolling out that helicopter. They’re cops, every one of them.”

I threw him a look, turned back to the techs. “Sorry, but I still don’t see it.”

“It’s your innate honesty,” Bilko said. “Take my word for it, they’re cops.”

“Fine,” I said, stomach tightening briefly with old memories. “So they’re a little nervous and want to keep an eye on us. So what? Don’t forget, we’re the first outside contact they’ve had in 130 years.”

“I suppose,” Bilko said reluctantly. “It’s just that a mix of uniformed and non-uniformed always makes me nervous. Like they’re trying to con us.”

Suzenne turned and beckoned us toward her. “Which qualifies as working your side of the street, no doubt,” I commented as Bilko and I headed across the balcony toward her.

“Hey, I play a clean game,” he protested. “You know that.”

“Sure,” I said. “Just do me a favor and don’t try to draw cards with the pilot until we’ve actually landed, all right?”

Rhonda and Jimmy, who’d been admiring the view from a different part of the balcony, reached the helicopter the same time we did. Kulasawa, who’d wandered off on her own, arrived maybe ten seconds behind us. “We’re ready to go,” Suzenne said. “Rooms are being prepared for you in the guest house across from the Royal Palace. It’s not nearly as grand as the name might imply,” she added, looking at Kulasawa. “As I said, titles really aren’t that important here.”

“Of course,” Kulasawa said. “Should we have brought some food from the transport?”

“A meal will be awaiting you,” Suzenne promised. “Nothing fancy, I’m afraid, but it should tide you over until the more formal welcoming dinner tomorrow.”

“And my research equipment?”

“It will be brought to the guest house tonight,” Suzenne said. “Along with the rest of the cargo.” She looked around the group. “Are there any other questions before we go?”

“I have one,” Jimmy said hesitantly, looking warily at the twin helicopter blades hanging over our heads. “You’re sure it’s safe to fly in here?”

“We do it all the time,” Suzenne assured him with a smile. “Bear in mind that the chamber is over thirteen kilometers long and that it’s five kilometers from the ground to the sun tunnel. There really is plenty of room.”

“And now,” she continued, looking around again, “if there are no other questions, please go ahead and find a seat inside. It’s time for us to go.”

The Royal Palace was indeed not nearly as fancy as its name had implied. Situated near the center of the city I’d seen from the balcony, it much more resembled an extra-nice government building than it did a medieval castle or even your basic presidential mansion.

But it had a helipad on the roof, and the guest house Suzenne had mentioned was right across the street, and for me that was what counted. What with the long flight and strain of finding and getting to the Freedom’s Peace—plus the two short nights that had gone before—I discovered midway through the helicopter ride that I was unutterably tired.

The meal Suzenne had promised, consisting of a buffet of cold meats, cheeses, fish, bread, and fruit, had been laid out in the common area of the suite we’d been booked into. I wolfed down just enough to quiet the rumblings in my stomach and then went in search of my bed. My room was quiet and dark, the bed large and comfortably firm, and I was asleep almost before the blankets settled down around me.

I awoke to sunlight streaming in through a gap in the curtains and a smell of roast chicken in the air that reminded my stomach that the previous night’s meal hadn’t been much more than a gastronomic promissory note. Throwing on yesterday’s clothes, I made a quick trip to the attached bathroom and headed out into the common area.

The remains of another buffet were on the sideboard where the evening meal had been laid out, with a short stack of used plates on a tray near the door. Over at the window, sitting across from each other at the long dining table, were Rhonda and Suzenne. A sampling of Rhonda’s beadwork was spread out on the table between them.

“About time,” Rhonda commented as I stepped into the room. “The rest of us have been up for a couple of hours now.”

“I had more sleep to catch up on than the rest of you,” I reminded her as I snagged a clean plate and started stacking it with food. “I was the one who spent most of the past two nights sitting up with sick paperwork, remember?”

“Sick paperwork?” Suzenne asked, frowning.

“We had some strange problems at the Angorki spaceport,” Rhonda explained. “Lost or fouled-up permits and such. It took a couple of days to get it all straightened out.”

“Just as well it did, I suppose,” I commented, picking up a set of flat-ware and taking my breakfast over to the table. “If we hadn’t been delayed, Scholar Kulasawa would have had to find some other transport.” I gestured out the window. “And then we’d have missed seeing all this.”

“Yes,” Suzenne murmured, dropping her eyes to the beadwork.

I nodded toward the beads. “Working on a new customer, I see.”

“I beg your pardon,” Rhonda said, mock-annoyed. “I am not working a new customer; I’m participating in a cultural exchange.”

“We don’t have these here,” Suzenne said, fingering one of the earrings. “I’ve never even seen anything like it, even in our archives.”

“I’m sure it’s there,” Rhonda said. “It’s a pretty ancient art form, but its popularity does rise and fall.”

“Whatever its heritage, it’s beautiful,” Suzenne said. “I’m sure you’ll be able to sell a lot of these pieces here if you want to. You could probably teach classes, too.”

“I doubt we’ll be here long enough for that,” I warned. “Where’s everybody else, by the way?”

“They’re all outside looking around,” Rhonda said. “Jimmy went to find where the music was coming from—”

“Music?” I echoed, frowning.

She nodded. “You can’t hear it very well in here, but it’s quite audible if you step outside. Beautiful, but very alien.”

“We write most of our own music here,” Suzenne said. “We play it as a service to—” Her lips compressed briefly. “Well, we can talk about that later.”

“Bilko’s out, too,” Rhonda continued. “He said he was going to hunt down a card game.”

I made a face. “Well, good luck to him,” I said. “I’ll bet the Sergei Rock to his lucky deck he won’t find a game that’ll take Expansion neumarks.”

“No, we’re still using the First Citizens’ supply of Jovian dollars,” Suzenne said. “But he took one of the credit slips with him, and he’ll be able to exchange that for the coins.”

I felt my jaw drop a few millimeters. “One of the credit slips for our cargo?” I demanded, looking at Rhonda. “And you let him?”

She returned my glare evenly. “It was his share of the money,” she pointed out. “Besides, he usually makes a profit on these games of his.”

“Usually antagonizing the local populace in the process,” I pointed out darkly. “And this is one place you do not want to get run out of town.”

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Suzenne soothed me. “And just for the record, we don’t run troublemakers out of town. We have a proper prison, though it’s fortunately not used very much.”

“I see,” I said, peering past her out the window. The room faced east, toward the end we’d come in from; and blamed if it didn’t look like real mountains over there. “You know, this chamber looks pretty big, but if I remember the numbers you gave us there’s still a lot of the asteroid unaccounted for. What do you do with the rest of it?”

“All around the main chamber, beneath our feet, is the bulk of our recycling equipment,” Suzenne said. “Of course, that takes up only a fraction of the kilometer or so of stone between us and the outside, so there’s still plenty of structural strength and radiation protection. At the aft end of the asteroid are the fusion generators and ion-capture engines, along with the hydro-gen-scooping equipment to fuel them. The designers also left a fair amount of space completely untouched for our future needs. We’ve dug into some of that to get materials for new buildings and to replace the inevitable losses in the recycling system.”

She smiled. “And since we had to dig anyway, we went ahead and fashioned the resulting holes into a series of caves. It provides a little recreation for our resident spelunkers.”

“You think of everything, don’t you?” I said, shaking my head in admiration. “I wish the leaders of the Expansion were this competent.”

Suzenne shrugged. “We’re flattered, of course, but you have to realize it’s not a fair comparison. With a population still under half a million people, we’re more like a small city than we are a nation, let alone an entire world. Government on this scale is nearly always more efficient.”

“You haven’t asked about Kulasawa,” Rhonda spoke up.

I hadn’t asked about Kulasawa because I frankly didn’t care where she was. But there was something in Rhonda’s expression… “OK, I’ll bite,” I said. “What about Kulasawa?”

Rhonda gestured to Suzenne. “Why don’t you tell him?” she invited.

“It’s not all that mysterious,” Suzenne shrugged. “She was up early asking permission to set up her recorders around the colony, that’s all.”

I frowned. “Recorders?”

“Those large flat panels,” Suzenne amplified. “They were stacked together inside two of the crates we brought over from your transport.”

The equipment Kulasawa had told me was a set of sonic deep-probes. “Ah,” I said. “And what did you tell her?”

“Actually, we thought it was a good idea,” Suzenne said. “We have a lot of unified records from the first few years of the voyage, but nothing very organized after that. She agreed to give us copies we could edit into a true-time documentary, and so we let her go.”

“They also lent her a driver and a couple of helpers,” Rhonda put in. “She’s been gone—how long?”

“Not quite three hours,” Suzenne said, consulting her watch. “I’m hoping she’ll be done before your meeting with King Peter.”

“And when is that exactly?” I asked, suddenly aware of my grubby and unshowered state.

“I’ve set it up for two hours from now,” Suzenne said. “Will that give you enough time to prepare?”

“Oh, sure,” I said, digging an oddly shaped fork into a sculpted piece of melon. “I wonder if you could get my carrybag in from the Sergei Rock, though—this uniform is getting a little rank.”

“Our luggage has already been delivered,” Rhonda told me. That odd look, I noted uneasily, was still on her face. “They’re in the closet over there.”

“And I’d better get out of your way,” Suzenne added, pushing her chair back and standing up. “If there’s anything else you need, there’s a phone on the table over there. Just punch the call button and give my name—Suzenne Enderly—and they’ll connect us.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I’ll be back in a little under two hours to escort you to the Palace,” she said, walking toward the door. “Until then, if you get ready early, feel free to look around the city. Just be sure to take the phone with you.”

She left, closing the door behind her. “An audience with a real king,” I commented, stuffing a bite of chicken in my mouth. “Something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid. Too bad his name couldn’t have been Arthur.”

“Too bad,” Rhonda agreed, her voice neutral, her expression gone from odd to flat-out accusing as she stared hard at me. “All right, Jake, let’s hear it.”

“Let’s hear what?”

“The reason you didn’t tell her that Kulasawa’s gadgets aren’t recorders,” she said. “Or had you forgotten she told us they were sonic deep-probes?”

“Who says they’re not recorders, too?” I asked. “They could be both probes and recorders.”

“Or they could be something else entirely,” she countered. “The point is that she’s either lying to Suzenne or else she lied to us. And you didn’t blow the whistle on her.”

“Neither did you,” I shot back. “If you’re so worried about it, why didn’t you say something?”

“Because I was waiting for your lead,” she said. “And because I wanted to see just how strong a hold Kulasawa has on you.”

I jabbed my fork viciously into my fruit cup, splattering a few drops of juice onto the plate. “She hasn’t got any hold on me,” I insisted.

“My mistake,” Rhonda said. “It’s not her, it’s the seventy thousand neumarks.”

I glared at her, my hand squeezing the fork hard, wanting to tell her it was none of her damn business.

But I couldn’t. And she obviously could read that in my face. “This is me you’re talking to, Jake,” she said quietly. “We’ve been flying together for over three years now. If something’s wrong, isn’t it time you told me what it was?”

I closed my eyes, exhaling my anger with a chest-aching sigh. “I’m in something of an awkward situation,” I said, the words feeling like ground glass in my mouth. “Five years ago… well, let ’s just say it: I stole some money from the TransShipMint Corporation.”

Her eyes widened, just enough to make the admission hurt that much more. “You?” she asked disbelievingly.

“Yes, me,” I growled. “Why, is that so hard to believe?”

“Frankly, yes,” she said. “You’re the one who’s always so brass-butted about following the rules.” She waved a hand as if to erase that. “Sorry—I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Yes, you did,” I said. “I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you that there might be a reason why I was always so strict? Like a metric ton of guilt, maybe?”

She grimaced. “I guess that never occurred to me,” she conceded. “So what happened?”

I shrugged uncomfortably. “Like I said, I stole some money. Oh, I rationalized it—told myself I needed some new equipment for my transport, that if I invested it in this sure-fire deal I was being offered I could get what I wanted and still pay the company back out of my profits. But the bottom line is, I stole it.”

“How much?”

“A lot,” I told her. “Two hundred thousand neumarks.”

Her eyes went even wider this time. “Oh Jake.”

“Oh Jake and a half,” I agreed ruefully. “You can guess the rest: the surefire deal went sour and I lost the whole wad.”

She winced. “What did they do to you?”

“Strangely enough, they didn’t seem to notice the loss,” I said. “Or maybe they did but couldn’t figure out where it had gone. I thought maybe I’d gotten away with it, at least from a legal standpoint, though I knew I was going to have to pay them back.”

“All two hundred thousand?”

“Every last pfennig,” I said. “Why do you think you haven’t gotten me to spring for new engines yet? Every half-neumark of profit I’ve made for the past five years has gone into a special account I’ve got stashed away on Earth. I figured I’d wait until the statute of limitations was up, just in case, and then send them the money along with an explanation and confession. Anonymous, of course.”

“So what went wrong?”

I looked out the window at the distant pseudo-mountains. “About a month ago a TransShipMint agent contacted me,” I said. “He said they’d figured it out, and were going to press charges unless I could pay back all the money by the end of the month.”

“My God,” she breathed. “What did you do?”

“Begged and pleaded another month out of them.” I shook my head. “But everything else I’ve tried has come up dry.”

Rhonda sighed softly. “And then Scholar Kulasawa showed up on our gangplank and offered you seventy thousand neumarks.”

“I’ve got a hundred thirty already banked away,” I said. “Kulasawa’s seventy thousand would just cover it.”

“Yes, it would.” Rhonda paused. “You told me earlier you were going to use the money in a way that would benefit all of us. You were planning to sell the Sergei Rock, weren’t you?”

“There was no other way,” I said. “It would have cost all of you your jobs, but there was no other way. Until Kulasawa came along.”

I looked back at Rhonda. “But if you’re right, and she’s pulling some kind of scam on the people here—”

“Wait a minute—I didn’t say she was pulling any scams,” she said quickly, holding up a hand.

“But you implied it.”

“I implied she was stretching the truth,” she insisted. “That’s not the same.”

I folded my arms across my chest. “Look, Rhonda, I appreciate your attempts to salve my conscience. But I’m not going to trade one load of guilt for another.”

“And I’m not going to let you sacrifice your transport over my vague and unfounded suspicions,” she countered. “Not to mention all our jobs.”

“You and Bilko won’t have any problem finding new jobs,” I told her. “And Jimmy’ll be snapped up so quick it’ll make your head spin.”

“Then let me put it another way,” she said quietly. “I don’t want to see the team broken up.”

I forced a smile. “Got seventy thousand neumarks on you?”

Reaching across the table, she squeezed my hand reassuringly. “We’ll figure something out,” she said. “Thanks for telling me.”

She stood up. “I’d better get to the shower and then practice my curtsies. I’ll see you later.” Collecting her carrybag from the closet, she returned to her room.

I turned back to my breakfast. On one level, it was something of a relief to have the dark secret out in the open at last, to have someone whose opinions I cared about still accept me despite it all.

But neither the soul-cleansing nor Rhonda’s compassion in any way changed the basic situation. And the food, delicious barely five minutes ago, now tasted like sand.

The arched doorway facing us was far more impressive than the actual exterior of the Palace. And for a good reason: it was the entrance to King Peter’s royal reception room, the place where he held public audiences and from which he did his broadcasts to the entire colony when such was deemed necessary.

All this came from Suzenne, who had also assured us that the two uniformed guards flanking the archway would momentarily be getting the word from inside that the king was ready. At which point they would pull open the heavy wooden doors and admit us.

Us consisting of Rhonda, Suzenne, and me.

“Stop fidgeting,” Rhonda murmured in my ear.

“I am not fidgeting,” I insisted, rubbing my fingertips restlessly against my leg and throwing baleful glances at the door we’d entered the anteroom though. Kulasawa was supposedly on her way; but Jimmy and Bilko had both disappeared somewhere into the city and no one knew where to find them. When this was all over, assuming King Peter didn’t throw me in the dungeon for the impertinence of wasting his time with only half a crew, I was going to strangle both of them.

“Scholar Kulasawa’s just coming into the Palace,” Suzenne said softly, her phone to her ear. “Oh, and we’ve found Jimmy—he was with one of our musicians. They’re bringing him straight over.”

Which still left Bilko unaccounted for. Predictably. “Any chance Jimmy will actually be here before those doors open?”

“Probably not,” Suzenne said, smiling as she consulted her watch. “But don’t worry about it. This is just an informal introductory meeting—anything formal we decide to do will happen this evening or tomorrow. He isn’t going to be upset if you’re not all here.”

She drifted away, turning her back to us as she spoke quietly into the phone. “Then why are you trying so hard to find him?” I muttered under my breath. I turned to Rhonda to detail what I intended to do to Bilko when he finally surfaced—

And paused. Rhonda was staring at Suzenne’s back, a suddenly tight look on her face. “Relax,” I told her. “I’m the nervous one in this group, remember?”

“Something’s wrong here, Jake,” she said slowly, her voice barely audible. “Something having to do with Jimmy.”

I felt my heart seize up. Jimmy was our musicmaster, a vital ingredient for getting the Sergei Rock back home. “You think he’s in danger?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her eyes focused on infinity. “It’s something that’s been nagging at me ever since last night.”

I looked over at the guards flanking the doorway. The way their uniforms were cut, I couldn’t tell whether they were armed or not. “What time last night? After we got to the city?”

“No, before that,” Rhonda said, her forehead creasing a little harder. “It was on the flight over here; but it started before that...”

Abruptly, she looked up at me. “It was when we first met Suzenne,” she hissed. “When you introduced Jimmy as our musicmaster. She never asked what a musicmaster was.”

I played the whole scene back in my mind. Rhonda was right. “Could she have asked someone during the flight?”

“No,” Rhonda said, shaking her head microscopically. “I was sitting next to her, remember? Jake, they didn’t have musicmasters until fifty years ago.”

“I know,” I said, a sudden tightness in my stomach. “I think I even mentioned to Suzenne that it was hard to explain.”

“So why didn’t she ask about it?” Rhonda persisted. “Either she’s not very curious… or else she already knew.”

I looked over at Suzenne, still on the phone. “But that’s impossible,” I murmured. “If someone else had found the Freedom’s Peace, we’d have heard about it.”

Rhonda shivered. “Only,” she said, “if they made it home again.”

I swallowed hard. “That new species of flapblacks Bilko spotted hanging around the asteroid. The InReds.”

“I was just wondering that,” Rhonda murmured. “Suzenne and the others might not even realize the previous transport or transports hadn’t made it back alive.”

“Maybe it’s time for a few direct questions,” I suggested.

“You sure you want to hear the answers?”

“No,” I admitted. “But I’d better ask them anyway.” Squaring my shoulders, I took a step toward Suzenne—

And at that moment, the two guards suddenly came to life. Stepping to the center of the double doors, they each took one of the handles and pulled.

Suzenne was beside us before the doors even started to open. “All right, here we go,” she said. “Remember, don’t be nervous. All—Scholar. Good; you made it.”

I turned my head to see Kulasawa step into line between Suzenne and Rhonda. Her outfit was a surprise: a flowing-line jacket-blouse of a rich-looking brocade over a contrasting flare skirt. It made our transport-crew uniforms look positively shabby, I thought with vague resentment, and I wondered briefly why in the worlds a scholar would bring such an outfit on a trip between Angorki and Parex. But then, unlike the rest of us, she’d known what the Sergei Rock’s true destination was. “Where are the others?” she muttered to Suzenne.

“Not here,” Suzenne said. “Don’t worry about it. Everyone; here we go.”

We walked forward in unison, crossing the rest of the foyer and stepping between the open doors.

My first impression of the room was that its tone fit the outer building much more than it did the ornate doorway leading into it. More like an expansive office than the way I would have envisioned a throne room, it was dominated by a large desk near the back wall. A few meters to our right, a semicircular couch that could comfortably seat eight people was positioned around a low circular table on which was a carafe and several glasses. Scattered around the room were a few free-standing lamps and sculptures on pedestals; on the walls were some paintings and textureds, tastefully arranged and spaced. Off to the left, almost looking like an afterthought, was a high-backed throne that had apparently been carved out of a single block of pale, blue-green stone.

And seated there waiting for us was King Peter.

He was a bit older than I’d expected—somewhere in his eighties, I guessed—clean shaven instead of with the bushy beard I’d sort of expected every self-respecting monarch automatically came equipped with. His clothing was also something of a disappointment: no crown and royal robes, but merely a subdued white suit with gold buttons and trim. Kulasawa’s outfit, I thought uneasily, was going to make him look a little shabby, too.

“Welcome to the Freedom’s Peace” he said, rising to his feet as we turned to face him. “I’m King Peter, titular ruler of this world. I trust you’ve been properly looked after?”

“Yes, sir, we have,” I said, suddenly realizing to my chagrin that Suzenne hadn’t given us any pointers in protocol. “I mean, \our Highness—”

“ ‘Sir’ will suffice, Captain Smith,” he assured me, stepping up and offering me his hand. “I’m pleased to meet you.”

“Thank you, sir,” I managed, shaking his hand. “I’m pleased to meet you, too.”

He smiled. “Actually, a simple ‘Peter’ will do, if you’re so inclined,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. “The citizens here like the idea of having a monarch, but we all have too much common sense to take the idea too seriously.”

He took a step to the side and offered his hand to Rhonda. “Engineer Blankenship,” he nodded, shaking her hand. “Welcome.”

“Thank you sir,” she said. “You have a beautiful world.”

“We like it,” he said, moving to Kulasawa. “And Scholar Kulasawa. What do you think of the Freedom’s Peace, Scholar?”

“It’s more than merely beautiful,” she said. “I’m looking forward to examining it in much more detail.”

“You’ll be given that chance,” Peter promised gravely, waving toward the wraparound couch. “But please; let’s be comfortable.”

We crossed to the couch and sat down, Peter and Suzenne taking one end as the rest of us spread out around the curve, Kulasawa taking the far end. “I’m sure you have many questions about our world,” Peter said as Suzenne began pouring drinks from the carafe. “If there’s anything you’d like to know right now, I’ll do my best to answer.”

I took a deep breath. So he wanted questions. So OK, here it came. “I have one,” I said. “Are we the first visitors you’ve had in the past fifty years?”

Peter and Suzenne exchanged glances. “An interesting question,” Peter murmured. “A very interesting question, indeed.”

“I thought so,” I said, forcing my voice to stay steady. Whatever was going on here, that single glance had been all I needed to know I’d hit the target dead center. Whatever the hell the target was. “I’d like an answer, if I may.”

A muscle in Peter’s jaw tightened briefly. “As it happens, you’re the fourth Expansion transport to find us,” he said.

I felt Rhonda stir beside me. “And what happened to the other three?” I asked carefully.

“The crews are still here,” Peter said, his gaze steady on me. “Most of them. There were two… fatalities.”

“What kind of fatalities?” Kulasawa asked.

“They were killed trying to escape,” Suzenne said. “I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean, escape?” I asked.

“What she means is that you can’t leave, my friends,” Peter said quietly. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to stay with us for the rest of your lives.”

A lot of different thoughts go shooting through your mind when you hear something like that. My first thought was that this was some kind of strange joke Peter and Suzenne liked to play on visitors, that any second now they would smile and say, no, they were just kidding. My second thought was that the TransShipMint Corporation was going to be seriously unhappy if I disappeared without paying back their two hundred thousand. My third was that I wasn’t going to be very happy either if I wasn’t allowed to make that debt right.

And the fourth, which overrode them all, was that I was damned if I would walk meekly into this cage they were casually telling me to step into.

I kept my eyes on Peter, trying hard to think. Were the guards outside monitoring us? Probably not. Could Rhonda and I take out Peter and Suzenne? Probably. But that wouldn’t get us across the colony and back to the Sergei Rock.

And even if we got there, would it do any good? There were still those InReds hanging around out there. We knew they scared away normal flapblacks—were they waiting like ghostly sharks to grab us and haul us to oblivion?

Rhonda was the first to break the silence. “I don’t understand,” she said. “You can’t just order us to stay here.

“I’m afraid we have to,” Peter said. “You see, if you leave you’ll bring others back here. That’s something we can’t allow to happen. I’m sorry.”

“Why not?” Kulasawa asked.

Frowning, I turned to look at her. My ears hadn’t deceived me: her face was as calm and controlled as her voice.

Peter must have noticed it, too. “If you’re expecting to be rescued, Scholar, I can assure you that the chances of that are vanishingly small. None of the other transports who came here ever had anyone come looking for them.”

“And you think that means no one will come looking for us?” Kulasawa asked.

“Did you tell anyone else where you were going?” Suzenne countered. “Or where you would be looking for us?”

Kulasawa shrugged fractionally. “That’s irrelevant.”

“Not really,” Suzenne said. “You see, we’ve learned from the other fortune-hunters that a prize like the Freedom’s Peace tends to inspire great secrecy on the part of the searchers. All any of you want is to make sure you get all the profit or glory—”

“That’s enough, Suzenne,” Peter murmured. “Let me hasten to assure you that you’ll all be treated well, with homes and jobs found for you—”

“Suppose we don’t choose to roll over and show our throats,” Kulasawa interrupted. “Suppose we decide we’re not going to feed your megalomania.”

Peter’s eyebrows lifted, just a bit. “This has nothing to do with megalomania,” he said. “Or with me.”

“Then what does it have to do with?” Rhonda asked quietly.

“The fact that if the Expansion learns where we are, they’ll want to bring us back,” Peter said. “We don’t want that.”

Kulasawa frowned. “You must be joking,” she said. “You’d kidnap us for that? Do you seriously think anyone in the Expansion cares a pfennig’s worth for any of you?”

“If you think that, why are you here?” Peter asked, regarding her thoughtfully. “And please don’t try to tell me it was in the pure pursuit of knowledge,” he added as she began to speak. “The more I study you, the more I’m convinced you’re not actually a scholar at all.”

Kulasawa favored him with a thin smile. “One for two, Your Highness,” she said. “You’re right, I’m not a scholar.”

I looked at Rhonda, saw my own surprise mirrored in her face. “Then who are you?” I demanded.

“But on the other point, you’re dead wrong,” Kulasawa continued, ignoring my question. “Pure knowledge is exactly the reason I’m here.”

“I see,” Peter said. “Any bit of knowledge in particular you’re interested in?”

“Of course,” Kulasawa said. “You don’t really think I care about your little world and your quaint little backwater duck-pond monarchy, do you?”

“Yet you were willing to pay three hundred thousand neumarks to come here,” Rhonda pointed out.

“Don’t worry, I intend to get full value for my money,” Kulasawa assured her coldly. “By the time I’m finished here, I’ll have completely changed the shape of Expansion space travel.”

There was a sort of strangled-off gasp from the other end of the couch. I turned that direction just in time to see Peter put a restraining hand on Suzenne’s arm. “What do you mean by that?” the king asked, his voice steady.

“It should be obvious, even to you,” Kulasawa said, regarding both of them with narrowed eyes. Clearly, she’d caught the reaction, too. “I want those ion-capture engines of yours.”

“Of course,” I murmured under my breath. It was obvious, at least in retrospect. The current limit on spaceship size was due solely to the limits in the power and size of their drives; and those limits were there solely because the Jovians’s unique engineering genius had died with their bid for independence from Earth. Examination of the Freedom’s Peace’s drive would indeed revolutionize Expansion space travel.

As I said, obvious. And yet, at the same time I felt obscurely disappointed. After all of Kulasawa’s lies and manipulation, it seemed like such a petty thing to have invaded an entire world for.

But if Peter was feeling similarly, he wasn’t showing it. In fact, I could swear that some of the tension had actually left his face. “I presume you weren’t planning to disassemble them for shipment aboard your transport,” he said. “Or did you think we would have the plans lying conveniently around for you to steal?”

“Actually, I was hoping to persuade you to come back with me,” Kulasawa said. “Though the engines are my primary interest, I’m sure there are other bits of technological magic the Jovian engineers incorporated into the design of this place that would be worth digging out.”

“I’m sure there are,” Peter agreed. “But you already have our answer to that.”

“But why don’t you want to come back with us?” Rhonda asked. “We have true interstellar travel now—there’s no need or reason for you to stay out here this way.”

“She’s right,” I put in. “If you want your own world, I’m sure the Expansion could provide you with something.”

“We already have our own world,” Suzenne pointed out.

“I meant a real world,” I said.

“So did I,” Suzenne said. “You think of a world as a physical planet orbiting a physical sun; no more, no less. I think of a world as a group of people living together. I think of the society and culture and quality of life.”

“Our ancestors left Sol for reasons involving all of those,” Peter added. “Don’t forget, we’ve had three other visitors from the Expansion, from which we’ve learned a great deal about your current society. Frankly, there are things happening there we’d just as soon not involve ourselves with.”

“Typical provincial thinking,” Kulasawa said contemptuously. “Fear of the unknown, and a ruthless suppression of anything that might rock the boat of the people in power. And I presume that if I wanted to put my proposal to the whole colony you’d refuse to let me?”

“There would be no need for that,” Peter said. “The decision has already been made.”

“Of course,” Kulasawa sniffed. “The glories of absolute monarchy. Dieu et mon droit, ex cathedra, and all that. The king speaks, and the people submit.”

“The Citizens’ Council agreed with the decision,” Suzenne told her. “All the citizens understand our reasoning.”

Kulasawa shrugged. “Fine,” she said. “As I said, I’d hoped to persuade you. But if you won’t come willingly, you’ll just have to do so unwillingly.”

Peter’s forehead furrowed slightly. “An interesting threat. May I ask how you intend to carry it out?”

“As I said, I could start by addressing the people,” Kulasawa said. “Give them a taste of real democracy for a change.”

Peter shook his head. “I already said you wouldn’t persuade them.”

“Then why are you afraid to let me try?” Kulasawa countered. “Still, there’s no reason to upset your well-trained sheep out there. All I really need to do is explain to you why you can’t make me disappear as conveniently as you have all the others. Why there will be people who’ll come looking for me.”

I frowned at her, a sudden hope stirring within me. Up until that moment, it hadn’t really sunk in on an emotional level that what we were discussing here was a permanent—and I mean permanent—exile to this place. If Kulasawa had som£ kind of trick up her sleeve that could get us home...

“By all means,” Suzenne invited. “Tell us what sort of clues or hints you left behind.”

“No clues or hints,” Kulasawa said loftily. “Merely a simple matter of who I am.”

“And who are you?” Suzenne asked.

And at that moment, the double doors behind Peter swung open again. I looked that direction to see Jimmy come into the room, his hair looking even more unkempt than usual. He must have missed seeing Peter and Suzenne, with their backs mostly to him; but he spotted me instantly. “Captain!” he said, bounding toward us as the doors closed again behind him.

I hissed under my breath, trying to gesture his attention to Peter without being obvious about it. Talk about your oblivious bull in a china shop—

But he was bubbling too hard to even notice. “Guess what?” he called, a huge grin plastered across his face as he came around the end of the couch. “These people can talk to the flapblacks!”

I froze, my gesturing hand still in midair. “What?”

“Yeah, they can talk to—” He broke step, suddenly flustered as he abruptly seemed to focus on the rest of the people seated in front of him on the couch. “Oh. Uh… I’m sorry…”

“No, that’s all right,” I said, throwing a hard glance at Peter. But his face was unreadable. “Tell us more.”

Jimmy’s eyes darted around, his throat working uncertainly. “Uh… well, I was talking to one of their musicians,” he said hesitantly. “And he said...”

His voice trailed away. “He said we can communicate mentally with the beings you call flapblacks,” Peter said. His voice was calm again, and with a flash of insight I realized that this was the secret he’d thought Kulasawa had stumbled on earlier when she’d spoken of revolutionizing space travel. “We would have told you about it eventually.”

“Of course,” I said. “How about telling us about it now?”

He held his hands out, palm upward. “There’s not much to tell,” he said. “Our first hint was a few years out, when we began to realize that the supposedly imaginary friends our first-born children were telling their parents about were not, in fact, imaginary at all. It took awhile longer to realize who and what the beings were they were in contact with.”

“And Jimmy said you talked to them?”

“A figure of speech,” Peter said. “It’s actually a direct mental contact, a wordless communication.”

“Why didn’t you tell the Habitats?” Kulasawa put it. “You must have still been in contact with Jupiter at that point.”

“We were already beginning to fade,” Suzenne said. “By the time we’d figured it all out, it would have been problematic whether we could have gotten enough of the message through.”

“And besides, you thought it might be a useful secret to keep to yourselves?” Kulasawa suggested, smiling thinly.

Peter shook his head. “You don’t understand,” he said. “In the first place, it’s hardly a marketable secret—any child who’s conceived and brought to term away from large planetary masses will have the ability. Everyone aboard has it now, except of course for the handful of recent visitors like yourselves.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that it’s an enormously useful talent,” Kulasawa said. “You people don’t need a musicmaster to get where you’re going, do you? You just order the flap-black to take you where you want to go, and that’s it.”

“It’s not like that at all,” Suzenne protested. “They’re not servants or slaves we can order to do anything. It’s more like...” She floundered.

“I sometimes think of it as similar to those dolphin and whale shows they have on Earth,” Peter said. “You train them by giving them a reward when they do something you want, but you aren’t really communicating with them. In this case, you provide the reward—the music—concurrently with the action, but you have no real understanding as to who and what you’re dealing with—”

“Let’s put the philosophy aside for a minute,” Kulasawa cut in brusquely. “Bottom line: you can tell them where to go and they take you there. Yes or no?”

Peter pursed his lips. “For the most part, yes.”

He looked back at me. “You see now why we can’t let even a hint of this get back to the rest of the Expansion. If they knew we could move their transports between the stars without the uncertainties and complications of the music technique, they would carry every one of us away into slavery.”

Kulasawa snorted. “Give the melodramatics a rest, Your Highness. What you mean is that you’ve got a platinum opportunity here and you’re just afraid to grab it.”

“Believe whatever you wish,” Peter said. “For you, perhaps, it would be an opportunity. For us, it would be slavery.”

“You really think they would just take you away like that?” Rhonda asked. “I can’t believe our leaders would allow that.”

“Of course they would,” Peter said, gesturing toward Jimmy. “Just look at your own musicmaster. The music-master on the first transport to find us was a forty-six-year-old former professor of composition. How old is Mr. Chamala?”

“Nineteen,” I said, looking at Jimmy. “He has the right kind of mind, and they hustled him straight through school.”

“Did he have a choice?”

I grimaced. “As I understand it, there’s a great deal of subtle pressure brought to bear on potential music-masters.”

“Do you think it would be any different with us?” Peter asked quietly. “There’s a virtual explosion in the volume of interstellar travel and colonization—just comparing the Sergei Rock’s planetary charts with those of our earlier visitors makes that abundantly clear. If they knew we could feed that appetite, do you really think they would hesitate to press us into service?”

“And do you have any idea what prices you could command for such service?” Kulasawa demanded. “That’s what Smith’s ‘subtle pressure’ mostiy consists of: huge piles of neumarks. Play your cards right and your world could be one of the richest in the Expansion.”

“And who would be left to live there?” Suzenne countered. “Children under five and elders over ninety? They’d take everyone else.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous,” Kulasawa growled.

“I don’t think so,” Suzenne said. “But whether I am or not is irrelevant. The decision has been made, and we’re not going to change it.”

“Fine,” Kulasawa said. “If you won’t bring freedom to your people, Jimmy and I will have to do it for you.” Jimmy, who’d been largely frozen in place ever since planting himself near Peter’s end of the couch, came unstuck in a rush. “Who—me?” he gulped, his eyes turning into dinner plates.

“You’re the only one who can help them, Jimmy,” Kulasawa said, her voice abruptly soft and earnest. “The only one who can free them from the prison King Peter and his power elite have locked them into.”

“Wait just a second,” I protested. “If the people have decided—”

“The people haven’t decided, Smith,” Kulasawa cut me off scornfully. “Or haven’t you been paying attention? What proportion of the people here, do you think, would jump at the chance to get out of this flying coffin and see the Universe?”

“We can’t let even one of our people leave here,” Suzenne said. “If there was so much as a single slip on anyone’s part, the entire colony would be doomed to slavery.”

“There’s that slavery buzz-word again,” Kulasawa scoffed. “Do you feel like a slave, Jimmy? Well, do you?”

Beneath that mop of hair Jimmy’s face looked like that of a cornered animal, his eyes darting around as if seeking help or a way to escape. “But if they don’t want to do it—”

“Do you feel like a slave?” Kulasawa repeated sharply. “Yes or no?”

“Well... no…”

“In feet, you’re extremely well paid for what you do, aren’t you?” Kulasawa persisted. “And with opportunities and privileges most teens your age would give their left arm to have.” She stabbed an accusing finger at Peter and Suzenne. “And that’s what these people are afraid of. They’ve been the big ducks in the small pond all their lives. And they know the only way to hold onto that power is to keep their people ignorant.”

Her lip twisted. “Slavery, you said, King Peter? You’re the real slavemaster here.”

“But what can I do?” Jimmy asked plaintively, his expression still looking hunted. “If they won’t let us leave—”

“You can save them, that’s what,” Kulasawa told him. “You see, those plates I had aboard the Sergei Rock aren’t deep-probe sonics. They’re actually highly sophisticated monodirectional resonance self-tuning loudspeakers. Loudspeakers which are at this moment scattered at strategic points all around this asteroid.”

She reached her left hand beneath her brocaded jacket-blouse and pulled out a small flat box. “And this is a wireless player interface to them.”

“You can’t be serious,” Rhonda said, a sandbagged look on her face. “You want to take the whole colony back?”

“Can you think of a simpler way to solve the problem?” Kulasawa asked. “The choices will be presented to the citizens, and they’ll be allowed to decide for themselves what they want to do. Those who want to enter the musicmaster profession—I suppose we’ll have to come up with a new name for them—can do so. Those who don’t can go on to new homes or the world of their choice.”

Rhonda glanced at Peter and Suzenne, looked back at Kulasawa. “And the Freedom’s Peace?”

“As I said, there are technological secrets here that will benefit the whole Expansion,” she said. “The colonists will be properly compensated, of course.”

“And what makes you think our people will just sit by and let you do this?” Peter asked.

“The fact that we can do it without leaving this room,” Kulasawa said, her right hand dipping beneath her jack-et-blouse. “And the fact that I have this.”

I looked at the tiny gun in Kulasawa’s hand, a sudden hollow sensation in the pit of my stomach. “It’s called a Karka nerve pistol,” Kulasawa continued, her tone almost off-handed. “It fires needles that dissolve instantly in blood, disrupting neural chemistry and totally incapacitating the target. Usually nonfatal, though an allergic reaction to the drug will kill you pretty quick.”

There was a soft click as she moved her thumb against the side of the gun. “There’s also a three-needle burst setting,” she added. “That one is fatal.”

She clicked back to the one-needle setting. “We can all hope that won’t be necessary. All right, Jimmy, come over here and take the interface. Be sure to stay out of my line of fire.”

Jimmy didn’t move. His eyes darted around the couch one last time—

And stopped on me. “Captain?” he whispered.

“You don’t need to ask him,” Kulasawa said. “You’re the one who holds the key to these people’s freedom, not him.”

“It’s not our decision to make, Jimmy,” I said quietly, knowing even as I said it how futile my words were. If there was one button guaranteed to start Jimmy’s juices running it was the whole question of personal freedom versus authority. Stupid rules, restrictive rules, unnecessary impositions of power—I seemed to go around that track with him at least once per trip. Kulasawa couldn’t have come up with a better way to trip him to her side if she’d tried.

And then, to my eternal amazement, Jimmy squared his shoulders, turned to face her, and shook his head. “No,” he said. “I can’t do it.”

From the look on her face, Kulasawa was as stunned by his answer as I was. “What did you say?” she demanded.

“I said no,” Jimmy said. His voice quavered slightly under the blazing heat of her glare, but his words were as solid as a sealant weld. “Captain Smith says it’s wrong.”

“And I say it’s right,” Kulasawa snapped. “Why listen to him instead of me?”

“Because he’s my boss.” Jimmy looked at me. “And because I trust him.”

He turned back to Kulasawa. “And because he’s never needed a gun to tell me what to do.”

Kulasawa’s face darkened like an approaching storm. “Why, you stupid little—”

“Leave him alone,” Rhonda cut her off. “Face it: you’ve lost.”

“Sit down, Chamala,” Kulasawa growled, gesturing Jimmy toward the couch. “And if I were you, Blankenship, I’d keep my mouth shut,” she added to Rhonda, all her heat turned to crushed ice now. “Of all the people in this room, you’re the one I need the least.”

She looked back at Peter, her face under control again. “Fine; so our lap-dog of a musicmaster is afraid to make decisions like a man. I’m sure one of your musicians out there will see things differently. Where’s the room’s public-address system?”

Peter shook his head. “No,” he said.

Kulasawa shifted her gun slightly to point at Suzenne. “I don’t need her, either,” she said.

Peter’s lips compressed briefly. “In the throne. Controls are along the side of the left armrest.”

“Thank you.” Standing up, Kulasawa started to circle around the table.

I cleared my throat. “Excuse me, but there’s just one little thing you seem to have forgotten.”

Kulasawa stopped, her gun settling in to point at my chest. “And that is?”

“One of their musicians might be able to whistle up some flapblacks for you,” I said. “But none of them can tell you how to get back to the Expansion.”

The gun lifted a little. “I’m disappointed, Smith—I would have thought you could come up with something better. I’ve got the Freedom’s Peace’s coordinates, remember? All I have to do is work backward from those and we’ll wind up back at Angorki.”

“We would,” I agreed, “if we were anywhere near your coordinates. But we’re not.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Explain.”

“Your coordinates didn’t take into account the time-delay for the light,” I explained. “Or the fact that the Freedom’s Peace is no longer on a Sol-direct vector. You try a straight backtrack and you’ll miss Angorki by about sixty A.U. That’s about twice the distance from Earth to Neptune, in case you need help with the numbers.”

For a long moment she studied my face. Then, her lips tilted in a slight smile. “And of course you’re the only one who knows how to plot a course back, right?”

“Right,” I said, folding my arms across my chest. “And I’m not going to.”

“I suggest you reconsider,” she said. “There’s a little matter of two hundred thousand neumarks you owe the TransShipMint corporation.”

The bottom seemed to fall out of my stomach. “How do you know about that?”

She snorted. “Oh, come now—you didn’t really think I pulled your name out of a lotto ball, did you? You were one of a dozen transports I knew I could bring enough pressure on to get what I wanted. You just happened to be in the right place and the right time when the data finally came through.”

I shrugged as casually as I could. “So fine. Renege on the seventy thousand if you want. What do I care—Peter says we’re staying here anyway.”

“Wrong,” Kulasawa bit out. “One way or another, we’re getting back.” She arched her eyebrows. “And when we do, you’re going to prison… because you don’t owe just seventy thousand any more. You owe the full two hundred.”

I stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the hundred thirty thousand you thought you had stashed away in the Star Meridian Bank,” she said, openly gloating now. “The hundred thirty thousand that isn’t there any more.

“You’re bluffing,” Rhonda said sharply. “How could you possibly get that kind of access to Jake’s account?”

“For the same reason these people can’t keep me here for long.” Kulasawa straightened up slightly and looked around—

And as she did so, her face and posture and entire demeanor abruptly changed. Suddenly the upper-class scholar was gone; and in its place was someone or something that seemed far more regal even than the king seated at the end of the couch. “My name isn’t Andrula Kulasawa,” she said her voice rich and commanding. “It’s Andrula Chen.”

She turned hard, arrogant eyes on me. “Second cousin of the Chen-Mel-lis family.”

I stared at her, my blood seeming to freeze in my heart. “Oh, my God,” I whispered.

“Captain Smith?” Peter asked, his voice low. “What does she mean?” With an effort, I turned away from her gaze. “Chen-Mellis is one of the Ten Families,” I said, the words coming out with difficulty. “The people who effectively rule Earth and most of the Expansion.”

“I prefer to think of it as one of the Six Families, actually,” Kulasawa—Chen, rather—put in. “The other four survive solely at our pleasure.”

“You told us there were other groups looking for the Freedom’s Peace,” Rhonda said, her voice low. “The other families?”

“You don’t think I would have picked the Sergei Rock to hide from some bumbling academics, do you?” Chen retorted. “Members of the Hauptmann and Gates-Verazzano families have been sniffing along my trail for the past two months.”

She gave Peter a brittle smile. “They want your engines, too,” she added. “And I can assure you that Chen-Mellis will cut you a better deal than they will.”

Peter shook his head. “We will deal with none of you.”

“I’d love to see you try to persuade the Hauptmann family of that.” Chen looked back at me. “Well, Smith? Cooperation and a share of the profits, or lofty ideals and a few years of your life in prison?”

“So now it’s a share of the profits, too?” Suzenne murmured.

“Shut up, or I’ll add your lives on the downside of the ledger,” Chen snarled. “Well, Smith, what’s it to be? Shall we say your freedom and, say, five million neumarks?”

I should have been tempted. After five years of scrimping every pfennig I got to put toward my debt, I should really have been tempted. But to my own amazement, I discovered that I wasn’t. Maybe it was the condescension inherent in the offer, the casual assumption that I had my price just like everyone else she’d ever met. Or maybe it was the presence of Jimmy, sitting on Rhonda’s other side now, who’d already resisted the pressure and made the right decision.

Or maybe it was the fact that I’d suddenly had an idea of how we might be able to get out of this. If I played my cards right…

I looked Chen straight in the eye. “Forget it,” I told her. “And if you’re thinking about pipping the ante, save your breath. You’re on your own here, lady. None of us are going to help you.”

Her face had frosted over again at my refusal. Now, though., the ice cracked into a small but malicious smile. “Perhaps none of you three will,” she said. “But you’re not the only one who knows how to get us back to civilization. And I suspect First Officer Hobson will be more easily convinced of the realities of this situation.”

Keeping her eyes on us, she began backing toward the throne and King Peter’s public address system. Mentally, I crossed my fingers…

And then, abruptly, she stopped. “No,” she said. “No, I see your game, Smith. You’re hoping that anyone using the PA system except His Royal Highness will make the local secret police suspicious.” She waved the gun toward the throne. “On the other hand, you’re his captain, aren’t you? What could be more natural than for you to call him to the Palace?”

I didn’t move. “And how much were you planning to offer me for this service?”

“I wouldn’t dream of insulting you that way again,” she assured me, her voice not quite covering up the soft click as she shifted her gun to its three-needle setting. “So let’s make it simple. You call Hobson, and Blankenship gets to live.”

I felt my throat tighten. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“I’ve already said I don’t need either her or Ms. Enderly,” Chen reminded me. “In a pinch, I could probably do without the king, too.”

I took a deep breath, exhaled it noisily, and got to my feet. “Don’t do it, Jake,” Rhonda pleaded. “She’s bluffing—even the Chen-Mellis family couldn’t get her off a murder charge.”

“The Chen-Mellis family can do anything when the rewards are big enough,” Chen said shortly.

“It’s not worth the risk,” I told Rhonda, reaching down to briefly squeeze her hand. “Besides, even if I don’t, Bilko will be here eventually anyway.”

The throne was more comfortable than it looked, with silky-soft cushions fitted to the stone. The controls on the left armrest were simple and straightforward: one basic on/off switch, one that determined whether or not the audio was accompanied by a visual, and five switches determining which section or sections of the colony would receive the broadcast. I set the latter group for full coverage, set the mode for audio only—this at Chen’s insistence—and we were ready. “No tricks,” she warned, stepping back well out of range of any desperate flying leaps I might have been contemplating. “Bear in mind this gun has a clip of just over two hundred fifty needles, and that I don’t mind spending a few of them if I have to.”

I cleared my throat and touched the “on” switch. “Attention; attention,” I called. “First Officer Will Hobson of the Sergei Rock, this is your captain speaking. We’re having a little party over here at the Palace you seem to have forgotten about. Greet the other cardsharps for me and hustle it over here, all right? Thank you; that is all.”

I switched off the PA and stepped down from the throne. “Happy?” I asked Chen sourly.

“What was that nonsense about a party and cardsharps?” she demanded, her face dark with suspicion.

“It’s a private joke,” I said briefly, striding past her and dropping onto the couch next to Rhonda.

“Make it a public joke,” Chen ordered.

I could feel Rhonda’s eyes on me, and could only hope she wasn’t frowning too hard at this private joke she’d never heard of. “It goes back to a time on Bandolera when I got him into some trouble,” I said. “I called him while he was in the middle of a game and told him to get back to the transport. He was winning big, and said he wouldn’t be back until he’d finished the round. He turned off his phone; so I tracked down the numbers of the other players and started calling them and telling them to please send Bilko home.”

“I imagine he was immensely pleased by that,” Chen said.

“I don’t think he ever lived it down,” I said. “At least, not with that bunch. The point is the reference means he’s to get his rear over here now, and not just whenever he finishes the current round or has won enough money or whenever.”

Chen lifted the gun warningly. “He’d better.”

“He will,” I sighed, mentally crossing my fingers a little harder.

Peter cleared his throat. “I’m curious, Miss Chen,” he said. “When you spoke earlier of changing the shape of Expansion space travel with our engine design, I naturally assumed a certain degree of exaggeration. Now that we know your true affiliation, do I now assume you were speaking literally?”

“Quite literally, Your Highness,” Chen told him. “In ten years, the Chen-Mellis family is going to completely dominate intrasystem space travel. We’re going to create super tankers, mining ships like no one’s seen since the Jovian Habitats went down, passenger liners ten times bigger than the Swan of Tuonela—”

“And warships?” Rhonda asked quietly.

Chen didn’t even flinch. “Of course we’re going to need to defend our interests,” she said. “I don’t anticipate any actual warfare, though.”

“Of course not,” I said sarcastically. “Subtle threats and economic pressure bring the same results without making so much of a mess, don’t they?”

Chen shrugged. “You learn slow, Smith. But you do learn.”

“Possibly faster than you do,” I said. “Has it occurred to you that there may be a limit to how big a ship the flapblacks are going to be able to carry?”

“Of course it has,” she said. “That’s another reason why I want to try to bring the colony back with me. If they can carry the Freedom’s Peace, then the sky is very literally the limit.”

From across the room came the whisper of air that signaled the opening of the double doors. Chen spun around to face that direction, dropping her arm to her side to conceal the gun against the back of her right thigh. I felt my muscles tense, reflexively estimating the distance to her gun and the chances I could get there before she could aim and fire...

Obviously not as subtly as I’d thought. “Don’t, Jake,” Rhonda hissed into my ear, gripping my arm. “It’s still set on three-needle.”

“Hello, everyone,” Bilko said, wandering almost casually into the room. Wandering in alone; and even as I tried to catch a glimpse of anyone else who might be out in the foyer, the doors swung shut again. “Sorry to be late, Jake—my game went a little longer than I’d expecte—”

He broke off as his eyes landed on the gun Chen had brought back into view again. “Relax, Hobson, it’s not what it seems,” she assured him. “My name is Andrula Chen, second cousin of the Chen-Mellis family, with the mission of bringing this colony back to the Expansion. Unfortunately, the power structure here is resisting me, and I’m going to need your assistance.”

“Well... sure,” he said, throwing a puzzled look at the rest of us on the couch. “Jake?”

“Captain Smith wanted more than his assistance was worth,” Chen said. “He demanded ten million neumarks; I could only offer five.”

She looked at me as if daring me to contradict her. But though her eyes were on me, her gun was pointed at Rhonda. I held her gaze, and kept my mouth shut.

Bilko snorted derisively. “Five million neumarks not good enough, huh? Well, that’s management for you. OK, Ms. Chen, you’ve got yourself a deal. What do you need me to do?”

“I need you to plot us a course from here back to Angorki,” she said. “Can you do it?”

“Sure—no sweat,” he said, glancing around and starting toward the desk. “I just need a computer—there must be one back here somewhere.”

And across at Peter’s end of the couch, Suzenne suddenly inhaled sharply.

Chen heard her, too. “Just a minute,” she snapped, throwing a suspicious glare at Suzenne. “What was that all about?”

Suzenne seemed to shrink back into the cushions. “What was what?”

“What’s over there at the desk?” Chen demanded.

“Nothing,” Suzenne said guardedly. “What could be there?”

“Yeah, what could be there?” Bilko agreed, taking another step toward the desk. “Computer’s probably in one of these drawers, right?”

“Get away from there,” Chen said sharply, spinning back to face him. “I said getaway.”

“Sure, OK,” Bilko said, taking a hasty step back and holding up both hands. “What’s the problem?”

“Maybe you’re a little too cooperative.” Chen threw me a hard look. “And maybe there was more to Smith’s private joke than he let on. Move away—I’ll find the computer.”

“Whatever you say,” Bilko shrugged, taking another step back. Chen circled around behind the desk, clearly trying to watch all of us at once. She pulled the desk chair out and half stooped to pull open one of the drawers—

The thick glass panels were so perfectly transparent and moved so fast that they were almost impossible to see. But there was no missing the sudden thundercrack as they slammed out of disguised cracks in the floor and thudded solidly against the ceiling, sealing the desk and the area around it into its own isolated space.

Chen’s curse—I assume she cursed—was lost in the echo of that boom, as was the sound of her shot. She ducked reflexively back as the needles ricocheted from the barrier; and then the guard who’d come through the doorway that had magically appeared in the wall behind the desk was on her, the momentum of his diving tackle slamming her hard against the glass. By the time the second and third guards made it through the door, she had run out of fight.

“Don’t hurt her,” Peter called. We were all on our feet now, though I personally couldn’t recall having stood up. “Take her to a holding cell.”

“Make sure you search her first,” Suzenne added. “Thoroughly.”

They hustled her out through the hidden door, and Peter turned back to me. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “However you did it, we’re in your debt.”

“No problem,” Bilko assured him, coming up to join us. “When Jake says to whistle up the cops, I whistle up the cops.” He looked back toward the desk, watching as the glass panels receded back into the floor. “Now that it’s over, can someone tell me what I just blew five million neumarks over?”

“The biggest attempted hijacking in history,” I said, looking at Peter. “And unfortunately, it’s not over yet.”

“You really think her people will be coming to look for her?” Suzenne asked.

“It’s worse than that,” I said grimly. “The implication she’s out here alone is nonsense—no Chen-Mellis second cousin would be stupid or reckless enough to come out here without backup already on its way. My guess is we’ve got maybe two or three days before they get here. Maybe less.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Bilko cut in. “If they’re that close, why didn’t she just wait for them in the first place? Why bother coming in with us?”

“Because there are other people looking for the Freedom’s Peace” I told him. “And the first one to get here is going to be the one with salvage rights claim. Odds are that those loudspeakers she scattered around the colony really are also recorders, just like she said, so that she’ll have a record of her presence here.”

“But then why didn’t she wait for her people to arrive before revealing herself to us?” Peter asked, clearly confused. “Why risk tipping us off the way she did?”

“Pure arrogance,” Rhonda suggested. “She wanted to deliver you personally to the backup team.”

“Or else she wanted to be the one who got the flapblacks to get you moving,” Bilko put in. “Maybe there’s even some rivalry between her and the backup team—the Ten Families are supposed to be riddled with upper-level infighting. If she got the Freedom’s Peace back to Angorki on her own, she’d look that much better.”

“The reasons and motivations don’t matter,” I interrupted the budding debate. “The bottom line is that we’ve got trouble on the way.”

“I can’t allow my people to be forced into servitude, Captain,” Peter said softly, the lines in his face deepening. “If it comes to that choice, we will fight.”

“Let’s see if we can’t find a third choice,” I said. “Tell me about those flapblacks that surround the colony, the ones who chase away the others. What are they, predators of some kind?”

Peter smiled sadly. “Hardly. They’re merely the eldest of the Star Spirits. The ones marking their last few weeks as they wait for death.”

An unpleasant shiver ran up my back. I knew all creatures died, of course, and in fact we’d had that argument on the way in over whether our wrapping flapblacks were getting eaten. But somehow the thought of a group of aging flapblacks hovering together waiting quietly to die was more disturbing than I would have expected it to be. Perhaps it took some of the magic away, or perhaps it felt too much like the death of a favorite pet.

“Like all Star Spirits, they enjoy music,” Peter continued quietly. “But of a particular kind, the kind only we apparently know how to write for them. That’s what the music in the colony is for.”

Abruptly, Suzenne looked at me and smiled. “One of them remembers you, Captain. He says he carried you once a long time ago.”

A second chill ran through me. “They get into our minds?” I asked carefully. “Not just the musicmaster’s, I mean, but all the rest of us, too?”

“No, they can’t read minds, Captain,” Peter assured me. “Not even ours, and we’re as attuned to them as any humans have ever been. No, they simply recognize you by the shape of your minds, just as you recognize them by the spectra of their passing.”

“I see,” I murmured. Like a favorite pet, I’d just thought. Only which of us was the pet? “So why do they drive the other flapblacks away?”

“They don’t,” Suzenne said. “The others stay away out of respect for the dying.”

I scratched my cheek. Bits and pieces of a nebulous plan were starting to swirl together in my brain. “Does that mean that if you asked them to move aside for awhile and let the younger ones in, they would do it?”

Peter shook his head. “I know what you’re thinking, my friend. But it won’t work.”

“Well, I don’t know what he’s thinking,” Jimmy spoke up.

“It’s simple, Jimmy,” I told him. “Cousin Chen went to a lot of trouble to scatter all those loudspeakers around the colony. I think it would be a shame to waste all that effort.”

“But it won’t work,” Peter repeated. “We’ve talked with the Star Spirits about this. They simply aren’t strong enough to carry the Freedom’s Peace.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. You say you’ve talked to them, but you didn’t say you’ve played music for them.”

“Are you suggesting we force them to carry us?” Suzenne demanded, an ominous glint in her eye.

“It’s not a matter of forcing,” I said. “They enjoy the music—you know that as well as we do. I think it acts like a stimulant to them.”

“So now you’re suggesting we effectively drug them—”

“Excuse me,” Rhonda put in gently. “Your Highness, how long have you been providing music for the dying flapblacks to listen to?”

“Quite a few years,” Peter said, frowning. “All of my lifetime, certainly.”

“And how often during those years have you had a younger flapblack carry any of you anywhere?”

He shrugged. “Three or four times, perhaps. But those were only our small scout ships. Not nearly as big even as your transport.”

“Then perhaps that’s the real problem,” Rhonda said. “You can talk to the flapblacks, but your perception of them has been skewed by the fact that most of the time you’re talking to the old and dying, not the young and healthy.”

“You talked about whale and dolphins earlier,” I put in. “I suggest a better analogy might be dogs.”

“Dogs?” Peter asked.

“Yes.” I waved a hand around. “You’ve been surrounded for decades by aging, crippled Chihuahuas. That’s not what most of the flapblacks are like.”

“And what are they like?”

“Big, exuberant malamutes,” I told him. “And with all due respect, your people may understand them, but we know how to make them run.”

For a moment there was silence. Then, with a sigh, Peter nodded. “I’m still not convinced,” he said. “But you’re right, it has to be tried.”

“Thank you.” I turned to Jimmy. “Go take a look at that player interface of Chen’s and see what kind of music she’s got programmed onto it. Then get in touch with that musician you were visiting this morning and have him whistle up the colony’s whole music contingent.

“We’re going to have ourselves a concert.”

The Grand Center of the Arts was considerably smaller than I would have expected for a place with such an impressive title, though considering the colony’s limited populace I suppose its size made sense. The main auditorium was compact but with a feeling of spaciousness to it and a main floor that would supposedly seat two thousand people.

We were only going to need a fraction of that capacity tonight. Gathered together by the front of the stage were Jimmy and the sixty-eight colonists he’d been able to sift through his impromptu musicmaster screening test in the past six hours. Above them in the balcony, I waited with Peter and eighty hand-picked colonists who were considered especially in tune with the flapblacks. Star Spirits. Whatever.

A motion down at the stage caught my eye: Jimmy, his final instructions completed, was giving me the high sign. I waved acknowledgment and keyed the radio link Suzenne had set up to the Sergei Rock in its hangar slot. “Bilko? Looks like we’re about ready here. You all set?”

“Roger that,” he confirmed. “Inertial’s all calibrated and warmed up. If you get this chunk of rock moving, we’ll know it.”

“OK,” I said. “Stand ready.”

I stepped over to Peter, standing alone at the balcony rail gazing down at the musicians gathered below. “We’re all ready, sir,” I said. “You can give the order any time.”

He smiled faintly, a smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “You give the order, Captain. It’s your show.”

I shook my head. “It may be my show. But it’s your world.”

His smile became something almost sad as he turned to face the others on the balcony. “Your attention, please,” he said. “We’re ready. Tell the Ancients it’s time, and ask them to move away from the colony.”

For a long moment there was silence. Then Peter turned back to me and nodded. “It’s all clear,” he said. “They may begin.”

I looked down at Jimmy and raised my hand. He nodded and fiddled with something on Chen’s player interface; and faintly from the tiles beneath my feet I heard the drone of the C-sharp pre-music call. A few seconds later the tone was replaced by the opening brass fanfare of the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.

I waited a few bars, then keyed my radio link. “Bilko?”

“Yeah, I can hear the music,” he said. “I had a flapblack shoot past, I think, but so far—wait a second. I thought the inertial... yeah. Yeah, we’re off. Moving in fits and starts, but we are moving.”

“What do you mean, fits and starts?” I asked frowning. “Aren’t they getting a good wrap?”

“When they’ve got the wrap, they seem to have it pretty solid,” Bilko said. “They just keep losing it, that’s all. Either they keep unwrapping because Jimmy’s people aren’t very good at this, or else we’re just too big to lug very far at a time.”

“I can understand that,” I said. “I’ve done my share of helping friends move across town.”

“Yeah, me too,” Bilko said. “And you have to admit this place is the ultimate five-section couch.”

“True,” I said. “But we’re putting some distance between us and Chen’s coordinates, and that’s the important thing.”

“Right,” Bilko agreed. “We can sort out the details later. How long are you planning to run?”

I looked down at Jimmy’s people, hunkered down and visibly concentrating on the music. “Just the first movement, I think,” I told him. “Eighteen and a half minutes should be plenty for this first test.”

“Sounds good. Let me know when to shut down the recorders.”

“Sure.”

I keyed off and looked around for Peter. He had moved off to an unoccupied part of the balcony while I was talking to Bilko and was again standing alone gazing down at Jimmy’s people. Avoiding the small clumps of quietly conversing colonists that had formed around us, I crossed to his side. “It seems to be working, Your Highness,” I told him. “A little slow, but we’re making progress.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” he murmured, his eyes still on the musicians. “I wish I could say I was grateful for your help, Captain. Unfortunately, I can’t.”

I nodded. “I understand.”

He gave me an odd look. “Do you? Do you really?”

“I think so,” I said. “Up until a few minutes ago you had no decisions to make about the life of your people. You were sealed inside the Freedom’s Peace, stuck in the empty space between stars, with nowhere else to go even if you’d wanted to.”

I turned away from his eyes to look down at Jimmy. “But all that’s changed now. Suddenly the whole galaxy is open to you… and you’re going to have to decide whether you’re willing to take the risks and challenges of finding and colonizing a new world for yourselves as your designers intended, or stay all nice and comfortable in here.”

“We’ve always known that decision would eventually have to be made,” Peter said quietly. “But until that first transport arrived it was something we expected the people ten generations down the line to have to deal with. I’m not at all sure my people are ready for this. Not sure I’m ready for it.”

“I doubt King Peter the Tenth would have felt any more ready than you do,” I said. “For whatever that’s worth.”

“To be honest, not very much,” Peter conceded. “I’m very much afraid the colony is going to split, and split violently, over the decision.”

He straightened up. “Still, humanity has been dealing with violent disagreements for a very long time now, and we’ve certainly had our fair share of lesser controversies aboard the Freedom’s Peace. Hopefully, we’ll find our way through this one, too.”

“And remember that it’ll be you who makes the decision, not someone from the Chen-Mellis family,” I reminded him. “That’s worth something right there.”

“Yes.” He eyed me. “Which brings up the question of what we are to do with her.”

“You can’t keep her here,” I said. “Not unless you keep us here with her. She’s sure to have left a complete data trail for her backup and the rest of the family to follow, including her plan to come aboard the Sergei Rock. If we show up anywhere in the Expansion without her, our necks will be for the high wire.”

“The problem is that you’re not going to do much better if you do show up with her,” Peter pointed out darkly. “She’s a highly vindictive person, my friend, and you’ve not only robbed her of a great prize but humiliated her in front of other people. At the very least, she’ll make sure you go to prison; at the worst, she might conceivably have you murdered.”

I shook my head. “She won’t have any of us murdered,” I told him. “If she’d brought back the Freedom’s Peace I have no doubt the Chen-Mellis family would have given her cover for any illegal act she’d done along the way. But she has no prize now, and none of the Ten Families support unnecessary and unprofitable violence by one of its members. Aside from the bad publicity involved, it leaves them wide open to blackmail from the other families.”

“Perhaps,” Peter said, not sounding convinced. “You know Expansion politics better than I do. Might she still do something against you on her own, though, without family support or knowledge?”

“That’s possible,” I said. “The trick is going to be to persuade her that she personally will suffer greatly if she tries anything.”

Peter shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve met people like Miss Chen, and I suspect her pride would outweigh even threats against her life.”

“Probably,” I said. “But I think there are things a person like Chen would value more even than her life.”

Peter regarded me thoughtfully. “That sounds like you have an idea.”

I shrugged. “An idea, yes. But the execution of it is going to depend solely on you and your powers of persuasion.”

Peter lifted his eyebrows. “I doubt seriously my powers are strong enough to persuade Miss Chen of anything.”

“Actually, that’s not who you have to persuade,” I told him. “Here’s what I have in mind…”

We convened in Peter’s office in front of the throne—a more impressive locale, Peter had decided, from which to deliver his pronouncements than anywhere else in the colony.

If either of us was expecting Chen to have been subdued by her two days of confinement, we were disappointed. She stood stiff and erect in the drab prison clothing they’d given her, her head held high and her eyes smoldering with hidden fire. Proud, confident, and defiant; and if this didn’t work, I was definitely going to be in for some big trouble down the line.

“So you’ve come to your senses after all,” she said to Peter. “A wise move. My people will be coming back here regardless, of course; but if they’d had to come for the purpose of rescuing a kidnapped family member there would have been far less of this place left afterward for you to bargain with.”

“I’m afraid you misunderstand, Miss Chen,” Peter said. “You’re not being released because I’m worried about reprisals from your family. You’re being released because you and your family are no longer a threat to us.”

Chen smiled cynically. “No, of course not. That’s all right—you go ahead and tell your people whatever you have to.”

“You’re no longer a threat,” Peter went on, “because we are no longer where you can find us.”

The smile remained, but Chen’s eyes narrowed. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that your idea of using speakers and music to call the Star Spirits worked quite well,” he told her. “We’ve had four sessions in the past two days, and are now a considerable distance from the spot you first directed Captain Smith to.”

Chen threw me a dagger-edged glance. “And you think that’s all it takes to hide from the Chen-Mellis family?” she bit out. “You have no concept whatsoever of the scope of our resources.”

“None of your resources will do you any good,” Peter said. “Not only do you not know where to look for us, you also don’t have anything to look for. Those wonderful ion-capture engines you covet so much have been shut down.”

A muscle in Chen’s cheek twitched. “You can’t keep them off forever,” she pointed out. “Not if you ever want to get anywhere. You’ll have to decelerate sometime.”

“True,” Peter said with a shrug. “But we’re in no particular hurry. Besides, by the time we begin our deceleration, you won’t have even the faintest idea where to look for us.”

“Perhaps,” Chen said, her voice calmer than I would have expected under the circumstances. “But I’d warn you against the mistake of underestimating us.”

“You’re welcome to try,” Peter said. “Still, I’d warn you against making any promises to your cousins just yet. Captain Smith tells me the Chen-Mellis family has a reputation for vindictiveness when they don’t get what they’ve been promised.”

Chen looked at me again. “Captain Smith will soon be a position to find out about that first hand.”

“I don’t think so,” Peter said, shaking his head. “There is one final condition for your release: that you leave Captain Smith, his transport, and his crew strictly alone. No reprisals, no revenge, nothing.”

Chen cocked her head. “An interesting demand. And if I decide to ignore it, what do you intend to do? Smother me with moral outrage?”

“Actually, we have a somewhat more effective demonstration prepared,” Peter told her. “I’m told you were on your way to Parex when you diverted the Sergei Rock to come here. Do you know anything about that world?”

“It’s the dregs of the backwater,” Chen said, not bothering to conceal her contempt. “One city, a few small towns, and the rest just farms and useless alien wilderness.”

“I doubt that it’s quite that bad,” Peter said. “It surely must have its own unique charms. Regardless, you’ll have plenty of time to find out.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that once you reach Parex, you won’t be allowed to leave for a few weeks,” Peter said quietly. “Or had you forgotten we’re able to talk to the Star Spirits?”

Chen had her expression under good control, but there was no way for her to stop the blood from draining from her face. “You’re bluffing,” she said.

“It’s already done,” Peter told her gravely. “Once you reach Parex, the Star Spirits will refuse to wrap any transport that you’re aboard.”

Her eyes darted to me, as if seeking evidence that this was some elaborate trick. “I don’t believe you,” she snarled defiantly. “You can’t have talked to that many flapblacks. Besides, they’re aliens—they can’t possibly recognize individual human beings.”

“I don’t expect you to take my word for it,” Peter said. “By all means, try it for yourself.”

His forehead darkened. “And as you do, I suggest you consider all of the implications of this demonstration. The Star Spirits see everything that happens in deep space, and we of the Freedom’s Peace are in continual contact with them. Just because we’re multiple light-years away doesn’t mean we’re out of touch, or that we can’t call further retribution down on you. On you, or on the entire Chen-Mellis family.”

For a long moment, Chen held that gaze unflinchingly. Then, almost reluctantly, she dropped her eyes. “Fine,” she growled. “I’ll play your game.” She turned a glare on me. “Besides, I don’t have to lift a finger to drop Smith down the sewer. The TransShipMint Corporation will be handing out all the revenge I could ever want.”

I swallowed hard, trying not to let it show. I still had the money card she’d given me; but after paying off all the cargo and penalty clauses from this trip, I’d be lucky to clear the seventy thousand neumarks she’d originally promised me. Unless I could track down that hundred thirty thousand she’d ghosted out of my account—

“And if I were you I wouldn’t count on digging up your bankroll in time,” Chen said, reading my face despite my best efforts. “I’m the only one who can retrieve it... and according to His Highness here, I’m going to be stuck on Parex for a few weeks.”

She looked at Peter. “Unless, of course, you want to call off your little demonstration. If not, he’s going to prison.”

Peter looked at me. “Captain?”

I shook my head. It was, we all knew, her one last chance to manipulate me, and I wasn’t in any mood to be manipulated. “I appreciate the offer, Ms. Chen,” I said. “But I think you need King Peter’s object lesson. I’ll take my chances with TransShipMint.”

The cheek muscle twitched again. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll do my few weeks on Parex; you can do your ten years in prison. We’ll see which of us gets the last laugh.”

She waved a hand impatiently. “If you’re finished with your threats, I’d like to get going. I have a life back in the Expansion, Smith here has charges of embezzlement to face; and you of course have some serious cowering to do.”

“We are indeed finished,” Peter confirmed with a nod. “Farewell, Miss Chen.”

The ten-hour trip back to Parex was very quiet. Chen stayed in the passenger cabin with the hatchway sealed the whole time, while Jimmy, Rhonda, and I spent most of our time at our respective stations. Only Bilko took any advantage at all of the dayroom. He reported it as being pretty lonely in there.

The intended recipients of the cargo we’d left behind on the Freedom’s Peace were not at all happy with the Sergei Rock’s empty cargo hold. I think Chen was hoping they would press charges, but application of the assets on her cash card—along with a little smooth talking on Bilko’s part—got them sufficiently calmed down. It did, however, leave us with only sixty thousand neumarks, a far cry from the two hundred thousand TransShipMint was going to want in the next couple of weeks.

We were on Parex for about twenty hours, catching up on sleep, getting our next cargo aboard, and wading through the heavier-than-usual stack of paperwork. During that time, Chen tried twice to sneak off the planet. Both times, the transports were forced to return after an hour’s worth of trying failed to get them a flapblack wrap.

By the time we buttoned up the rumors about her were just beginning to be heard, and as we headed for deep space I found myself wondering if she would be able to find passage on a transport even after her internal exile was over.

To my lack of surprise, I discovered I didn’t really much care.

“Hi,” Rhonda’s voice came from the dayroom door. “Got a minute?”

I looked up in mild surprise, deciding to pass on the obvious retort that when TransShipMint got done with me I would have all the time in the world. “Sure,” I said instead, waving her toward one of the other chairs at the table. “You come here often?”

“Hardly ever,” she said, sidling over to the indicated chair and sitting down. Her left hand, I noticed, had stayed out of sight behind her the whole way, as if she was hiding something behind her back. “But I wanted to talk, and this seemed a good time to do it.”

“Sure,” I nodded. “What about?”

She nodded down at the reader on the table in front of me. ‘Working out how to pay off the TransShipMint Corporation?”

“Trying to work it out,” I said, sighing. “Really just going through the motions. There’s just no way I can raise that kind of money that fast.”

“There was one,” she reminded me. “I hear Chen offered to unbury your other account if you’d get Peter to let her off the hook with the flapblacks.” She cocked her head slightly. “I wanted you to know I was very impressed that you turned her down. So was Jimmy, by the way.”

I snorted. “Thanks, but impressing the two of you was pretty far down on my reasons list. We needed to scare her, and scare her good, or we’d have had her and the whole Chen-Mellis family hanging over our heads for the rest of what would have probably been depressingly brief lives. This way... well, at least we all have a chance of living through it.”

“Assuming self-preservation outweighs her sense of vengeance,” Rhonda pointed out soberly. “And assuming she doesn’t figure out what’s actually happening.”

“I don’t think there’s any chance of her doing that,” I said. “She doesn’t even know about the InReds, let alone how they interact with younger flapblacks.”

Rhonda shivered. “I guess it just feels too much like a magician’s trick,” she said. “Peter creates the illusion that a whole Galaxy’s worth of the flapblacks are deliberately and actively snubbing her; when really all it is is a single Ancient InRed who’s been persuaded to hang around her whenever she leaves the planet. It just seems so fragile, somehow.”

“Only because you know how the trick’s being performed,” I pointed out. “And because you know that it would only work on a world like Parex where there’s a single spaceport and no more than one ship leaving at any given time.” I shrugged. “Frankly, if there’s any magic in this it’s that Peter was able to persuade one of the InReds to cooperate this way in the first place.”

“Yes,” Rhonda murmured. “It’s rather sad, really, having to spend its last few weeks of life sitting on Chen instead of getting to listen to the Freedom’s Peace’s music.”

I smiled. “Oh, I don’t know. You didn’t see what they did to Chen during her last day in prison. Where were you, by the way?”

“I was working out a deal with Suzenne,” Rhonda said, frowning. “What did they do to her?”

“Nothing much,” I said, frowning at her in turn. This was the first I’d heard of any deal. “They just played one of the InRed’s favorite melodies over and over again on her cell’s speaker system. Knowing how my mind does things, I figure that tune will be spinning around her mind for at least the next month. What deal?”

“Oh, that’s nasty,” Rhonda said. “Brilliantly nasty. Gives the Ancient something to listen to, and probably helps him identify her, too. Your idea?”

“Peter’s,” I said. “What deal?”

“Oh, it wasn’t anything much,” she said casually. “You remember how much Suzenne liked my beadwork? Well, I sold her my entire stock. Beads, hoops, pattern lists, fasteners, needles, thread, looms, finished items—the works.”

“Congratulations,” I said, feeling obscurely disappointed. After all of that buildup, I had expected more of a payoff. “She’ll be a big hit at their next formal concert.”

“I think so,” Rhonda agreed. “She was already talking about getting one of the fabricators retasked to making a fresh supply of beads.”

“Sounds great,” I said, frowning. Rhonda, I suddenly noticed, still had a twinkle in her eye and seemed to be fighting hard to keep from grinning. “So OK, let’s have it.”

“Have what?” she asked, clearly determined to drag it out a little more.

“The big punch line,” I said. “What did she do, offer you a 50 percent commission or something?”

“No, of course not,” she said. “How in the worlds would I collect on something like that, anyway? No, I insisted on cash.”

Her hand finally came around from behind her back, and I saw now that she was holding a small wooden box like the kind Bilko kept his poker chips in. “And that’s exactly how she paid,” she concluded. “With cash.”

I frowned down at the box. It was one of Bilko’s poker containers, all right. Clearly, there was something significant here I was missing. “OK,” I said. “Cash. So?”

Rhonda rolled her eyes. “Cash, Jake. The only kind of cash they use on the Freedom’s Peace... ?”

And with a sudden jolt I had it. Cash.

Reaching over, I unlatched the lid and flipped it up. And there they were, neatly stacked in the velvet padding: a triple row of shiny golden coins. United Jovian Habitat dollars, one hundred thirty years old each. A currency that hadn’t been minted since the Habitats were reabsorbed by Earth over a century ago.

I looked up again at Rhonda. “How many do you have?” I asked, my voice quavering slightly.

“Enough,” she said quietly. “I checked a couple of numismatic files on Parex, and it looks like they’ll pull in somewhere between a hundred fifty and three hundred thousand neumarks.” Reaching across the table, she pushed the box a few centimeters toward me. “They’re yours.”

There are times in every man’s life when pride demands he argue. Far past the end of my financial rope, I knew this wasn’t one of them. “Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “For all our faults, we’re a pretty good crew. It would be a shame to break a team like this up.”

I smiled wryly. “Even Jimmy and his youthful impertinences?”

“Listen, buddy, those youthful impertinences stood up with you against a member of the Chen-Mellis family,” she reminded me tartly. “And whether he’s willing to admit it or not, I think your moral stand back on the Freedom’s Peace impressed him a lot.”

“I suppose,” I said noncommittally. Still, I had to admit in turn that Jimmy’s willingness to accept my judgment had impressed me, as well.

Not that I was willing to admit it out loud, of course. Not yet, anyway. “Still, it’s sort of a pain. The problem with moral leadership is that you have to keep being moral for it to do any good. I liked it better when I could get what I wanted by yelling at him.”

“Yeah, right,” she said, patting my hand in a distinctly sarcastic fashion. “Don’t worry, though—I’m sure you’ll be able to handle it.”

She smiled slyly. “I, on the other hand, being a lowly engineer, have no need of leadership of any sort, moral or otherwise.” She tapped a fingernail against the box of coins. “And I’ll tell you right now I intend to take utterly shameless advantage of you over this.”

“Ah,” I said, scooting my chair over to the cooler. “So, what, you want me to serve you a drink?”

“That’s a start,” she purred. “And then we’re going to sit here together, all nice and cozy, and I’m going to tell you all about the wonderful new engines you’re going to buy for me.”