They'd drilled the procedure back in the Sol System. The Bering had emerged off Luna's far side (and been snooped by a police craft from nearby Yerikalin Dome). The Tagus rainforest had been represented by the Maranon Ecological Benchmark Preserve, in Terra's Peruvian Autonomy. And to make the drill complete, the hornet team had returned (illegally) with a bunch of outraged Terran hornets. None had been the size of a man's thumb, but they were big-time mean.

There too it had been Captain Paul Stoorvol who'd piloted the short-range scout, SRS 12/1. And beside him, as here, had been Alfhild Olavsdottir, blond and perhaps forty years old, stocky and fit-looking. Now as then, Stoorvol guided the scout smoothly across the lunar gravitic field, veering around occasional topographic obstacles, then slowing as he approached the limb of the moon. He stopped when he'd cleared it, parking a bare hundred feet off the surface.

From there they got their first look at Tagus, a little less than 170,000 miles away. Alfhild Olavsdottir inhaled sharply. "Holy Gaea!" she said. "It's gorgeous!"

Her oath annoyed Stoorvol; he disliked Gaeans. But the annoyance was remote; his feelings were often somewhat remote. Besides, lots of non-Gaeans used that oath, and somehow Alfhild Olavsdottir didn't strike him as a Gaean. A deist maybe. Deism was supposed to be big among scientists.

At any rate she was right: Tagus was beautiful. Colonized worlds invariably were; it went with being Terra-like. At the moment, what dominated his view of Tagus was the world ocean-a vivid blue with white cyclonic swirls. The equatorial zone showed a modest continent whose predominant blue-green suggested heavy forest.

After perhaps ten seconds of planet gazing, Stoorvol called up his instrument display, checking for technical electronic activity. He found plenty, from a single south-coast locale. Two other sources appeared that the scout's shipsmind identified as surveillance buoys parked above the equator at an altitude of 4,600 miles. He marked their locations with icons, but just now his primary interest was the surface location. Centering it on his screen, he magnified the site. It was nearly rectangular, a six by eight-mile area cleared of forest-distinct enough to be measured by his scanner from 170,000 miles out. He marked it with another icon.

"That's probably the colony," he said. "Or one of them. We'll have to check the other hemisphere, but except for size, this one fits Morgan's site description. It's equatorial and on a south-coast headland-an open block with forest on two sides, the ocean on a third, and an inlet on the fourth."

Olavsdottir nodded. "It's hard to imagine a natural opening looking like that."

Stoorvol held the scout where it was, and they kept alternate, one-hour watches. Whoever wasn't on watch used the main cabin to nap, snack, exercise, or otherwise break the monotony. The scout's shipsmind didn't experience time in the same way humans do, and it also had external tasks. It assigned an arbitrary meridian to Tagus, bisecting the visible Wyzhnyny settlement. With that and the equator as references, it mapped the gravitic matrix and what could be seen of the surface-topographic and water features, broad vegetation types-along with much that didn't show on the surface, including gravitic and magnetic gradients and anomalies.

And recorded the frequency bands of Wyzhnyny radio traffic.

The humans, on the other hand, had no duties except to watch the sensor display and the planet itself. It was an invitation to drowse, so an alarm had been provided. The watch wore a communications earpiece, and when anything broke the slow and regular unfolding of the sensor pickups, an alarm ruptured any doze or inattention.

To ease the monotony, Alfhild Olavsdottir recited, in a quiet voice, extensively from the Icelandic sogur-the sagas. More than any other Europeans, even the Finns, the Icelanders had retained their old language as the primary domestic, social, and cultural idiom. Terran was their language of science, business, and the world at large. As for daydreaming-Olavsdottir could be an enthusiastic, even a formidable lover, but she seldom fantasized sex. Except occasionally to compose erotic poetry about some lover in her past. But she did not do that here.

On his watches, Stoorvol's thoughts included women, Alfhild Olavsdottir for one. She was a lot older than he-ten or so years-but interesting. According to the skipper, she was a Ph.D. planetologist with a bachelor's in invertebrate zoology. The academic degrees had made her eligible for this mission, but no more eligible than many others. What had made the difference, Weygand said, was her temperament, and her record as a field leader. "Those, and being smart as they get."

Smart, Stoorvol thought, meant different things to different people. But she'd made a good impression on him when they'd boarded the scout and she'd seen him stash his rucker in a locker. "Why the rucksack?" she'd asked. He'd always resented gratuitous requests to explain himself, certainly from people he didn't know well. So he'd simply said it held things he might need, and with a nod she'd let it go at that.

Besides thinking about women, he revisited old conflicts-fierce rivalries as a kid growing up; fistfights at boot camp and on pass; and later, one at the Academy, where fights were seriously frowned on. He'd almost always won, but the last had nearly gotten him expelled. He'd been young then, he told himself. He looked at things differently from the vantage of twenty-eight years.

And he thought about the collection missions-the collection of hornets and the collection of prisoners. (He was to protect the first mission and lead the second.) If everything went according to drill… Things seldom did, of course. It wasn't wise to rely on scripts. They were fine as a starting place, and even as a guide, but they weren't likely to survive a complete mission. Major Asahara had stressed that in Military Planning 202. Because others, notably the enemy, had their own scripts, and typically the physical universe added serious unforeseens. Things happened, and necessity often demanded snap decisions, with different people commonly responding differently. And in case his cadets didn't believe him, Asahara, as game master in their electronic war game labs, would throw in unforeseeables that required unexpected and often drastic improvisations: new tactics, new strategies, even new objectives.

Stoorvol could still quote the major, or nearly enough to make no difference: "Say you have a battle plan that will win this major battle for you. And a seriously chancy departure from it that, if successful, could win the war; but, if unsuccessful, would be a disaster. Discuss the factors in choosing, and create examples."

For days the class had gone round and round on that. It had been the most valuable discussion they'd had. And among the factors had been alien mentalities. Because if they ever fought a war-a real war, a serious war-it would be against alien invaders. None of them doubted it. It was the truism behind every plan War House made, everything it did. It had been for centuries.

In Stoorvol's ruminations, any verbalization was silent and in Terran. As with most Terrans, Terran was his only language. Olavsdottir had commented that his surname looked Norwegian with an Americanized spelling, probably from the late 19th or early 20th century. That had been news to him. The Americas had been Terra's great ethnic melting pot; the rest of the world was only now catching up. He'd never wondered about his ancestry, which besides various European roots, included Dakotah, Ibo, Samoan and Kachin.

Hour by hour, the Wyzhnyny settlement site crept across the face of Tagus, toward the terminator near the east limb of the visible hemisphere. Before the continent disappeared, a larger edged into sight. On the same watch, a settlement appeared on the new continent, and later a third, both marked by electronic activity. One was at a northern latitude, in what appeared to be a steppe. The other was in a large basin between two high, subtropical mountain ranges. Neither was at all like the tropical rainforest Morgan had described.