The full-power burn should have slammed him back in his couch and sent the survey ship hurtling forward, but the thundering engines had no more effect than his maneuvering thrusters, and he sagged in his seat. Then his jaw clenched as the Beagle finally started to move—not away from the stranger, but towards it! Whatever that thing on his radar was, it was no figment of his imagination.

His mind raced. The only possible explanation was that the blip had stuck him with some sort of … of tractor beam, and that represented more than any mere quantum leap in applied physics, which meant the blip did not come from any Terran technology. He did not indulge himself with any more dirty words like “impossible” or “incredible,” for it was all too evident that it was possible. By some unimaginable quirk of fate, Somebody Else had come calling just as Mankind was about to reach out to the stars.

But whoever They were, he couldn’t believe they’d just happened to turn up while he was Farside with blacked-out communications. They’d been waiting for him, or someone like him, so they must have been observing Earth for quite some time. But if they had, they’d had time to make their presence known—and to monitor Terrestrial communication systems. Presumably, then, they knew how to contact him but had chosen not to do so, and that suggested a lot of things, none particularly pleasant. The salient point, however, was that they obviously intended to collect him, Beagle and all, for purposes of their own, and Colin MacIntyre did not intend to be collected if he could help it.

The exhaustive Prometheus Mission briefings on first contact flowed through his mind, complete with all the injunctions to refrain from hostile acts, but it was one thing to consider yourself expendable in pursuit of communication with aliens you might have gone calling on. It was quite another when they dropped in on you and started hauling you in like a fish!

His face hardened, and he flipped up the plastic shield over the fire control panel. There’d been wrung hands at the notion of arming a “peaceful” interstellar probe, but the military, which provided so many of the pilots, had enjoyed the final word, and MacIntyre breathed a silent breath of thanks that this was a full-dress training mission as weapon systems came alive. He fed targeting data from his radar and reached for the firing keys, then paused. They hadn’t tried talking to him, but neither had he tried talking to them.

“Unknown spacecraft, this is NASA Papa-Mike One-X-Ray,” he said crisply into his radio. “Release my ship and stand off.”

There was no answer, and he glowered at the blip.

“Release my ship or I will fire on you!”

Still no reply, and his lips thinned. All right. If the miserable buggers didn’t even want to talk…

Three small, powerful missiles blasted away from the Beagle. They weren’t nukes, but each carried a three-hundred-kilo warhead, and they had a perfect targeting setup. He tracked them all the way in on radar.

And absolutely nothing happened.

Commander MacIntyre sagged in his couch. Those missiles hadn’t been spoofed by ECM or exploded short of the target. They’d just … vanished, and the implications were disturbing. Most disturbing.

He cut his engines. There was no point wasting propellant, and he and his captors would be clearing Heinlein’s transmission horizon shortly anyway.

He tried to remember if any of the other Beagles were up. Judging by his own total lack of success, they would be none too effective against Whoever-They-Were, but nothing else in this vicinity was armed at all. He rather thought Vlad Chernikov was at Tereshkova, but the flight schedules for the Prometheus crews had grown so hectic of late it was hard to keep track.

His Beagle continued to move towards the intruder, and now he was turning slowly nose-on to it. He leaned back as nonchalantly as possible, watching through his canopy. He ought to see them just about … now.

Yes, there they were. And mighty disappointing they were, too. He didn’t really know what he’d expected, but that flattened, featureless, round-tipped, double-ended cylinder certainly wasn’t it. They were barely a kilometer clear, now, but aside from the fact that the thing was obviously artificial, it seemed disappointingly undramatic. There was no sign of engines, hatches, ports, communication arrays … nothing at all but smooth, mirror-bright metal. Or, at least, he assumed it was metal.

He checked his chronometer. Communications should come back in any second now, and his lips stretched in a humorless smile at how Heinlein Base was going to react when the pair of them came over the radar horizon. It ought to be—

They stopped. Just like that, with no apparent sense of deceleration, no reaction exhaust from the cylinder, no … anything.

He gaped at the intruder in disbelief. Or, no, not disbelief, exactly. More like a desire to disbelieve. Especially when he realized they were motionless relative to the lunar surface, neither climbing away nor tumbling closer. The fact that the intruder could do that was somehow more terrifying than anything else that had happened—a terror made only worse by the total, prosaic familiarity of his own cockpit—and he clutched the arms of his couch, fighting an irrational conviction that he had to be falling.

But then they were moving again, zipping back the way they’d come at a velocity that beggared the imagination, all with absolutely no sense of acceleration. His attitude relative to the cylinder altered once more; it was behind him now, its rounded tip barely a hundred meters clear of his own engines, and he watched the lunar surface blur below him.

His Beagle and its captor swooped lower, arrowing straight for a minor crater, and his toes curled inside his flight boots while his hands tried to rip the arms off his couch. The things he’d already seen that cylinder do told his intellect they were not about to crash, but instinct was something else again. He fought his panic stubbornly, refusing to yield to it, yet his gasp of relief was explosive when the floor of the crater suddenly zipped open.

The cylinder slowed to a few hundred kilometers per hour, and MacIntyre felt the comfort of catatonia beckoning to him, but something made him fight it as obstinately as he had fought his panic. Whatever had him wasn’t going to find him curled up and drooling when they finally stopped, by God!

A mighty tunnel enveloped them, a good two hundred meters across and lit by brilliant strip lights. Stone walls glittered with an odd sheen, as if the rock had been fused glass-slick, but that didn’t last long. They slid through a multi-ply hatch big enough for a pair of carriers, and the tunnel walls were suddenly metallic. A bronze-like metal, gleaming in the light, stretching so far ahead of him even its mighty bore dwindled to a gleaming dot with distance.

Their speed dropped still further, and more hatches slid past. Dozens of hatches, most as large as the one that had admitted them to this impossible metal gullet. His mind reeled at the structure’s sheer size, but he retained enough mental balance to apologize silently to the proctoscope’s designers.

One huge hatch flicked open with the suddenness of a striking snake. Whoever was directing their flight curved away from the tunnel, slipping neatly through the open hatch, and his Beagle settled without a jar to a floor of the same bronze-like alloy.

They were in a dimly-lit metal cavern at least a kilometer across, its floor dotted with neatly parked duplicates of the cylinder that had captured him. He gawked through the canopy, wishing a Beagle’s equipment list ran to sidearms. After his missiles’ failure he supposed there was no reason to expect a handgun to work, either, but it would have been comforting to be able to try.