"So," Stoorvol said, "now the question is whether there's a fourth one down there somewhere."

Some hours later they were satisfied there wasn't. The first one was the right one. Meanwhile they'd learned the number of surveillance buoys parked off the planet-four of them, located to provide coverage of the colonized continents.

Their next task was to scout Tagus's surface. Stoorvol was about to generate warpdrive when they learned there were indeed Wyzhnyny warships in the system. Their sensors picked up one of them a scant few hundred miles from where they watched in SRS 12/1. It was departing Tagus's single moon, and crossing to the planet in gravdrive. Why the Wyzhnyny had been on the moon, or very near it, and whether others still lurked there, neither Terran knew.

So instead of generating warpspace and crossing invisibly to Tagus, Stoorvol backed away in gravdrive, then returned to the Bering with a short warp jump, to let the captain know about the Wyzhnyny ship.

Captain Weygand promptly sent another two-man team out in SRS 12/2, to watch from the limb.

After listening to Stoorvol and Olavsdottir, he decided to skip the surface scouting. With four Wyzhnyny surveillance buoys, and possibly a space force on the moon's nearside, they might very well get only one chance before having to flee the system. So the first crossing would be for hornet collection-much the most feasible and least dangerous of their two missions.

The logic was inescapable, but it left Stoorvol ill at ease. In his heart of hearts, the most dangerous foray held priority, and at any rate, live Wyzhnyny prisoners seemed more valuable than hornets to the war effort.

Some hours later, the hornet collection team boarded the 46-foot collection boat, the Mei-Li, sometimes termed "the nursing whale" because she was carried outboard. The hornet collection team consisted of Alfhild Olavsdottir and two entomology techs, plus both squads of marine commandos for ground security. Paul Stoorvol would pilot the crossing, with PO1 Achmed Menges as copilot. Two weapons techs rode in the Mei-Li's gun bubbles.

Slipping the magnetic tie that held the Mei-Li to the gangway lock, Stoorvol separated from the Bering. At 200 feet from the surface, he activated the strange-space generator for warpdrive. Then departed the vicinity of the Bering much faster than he would have in gravdrive, though not remotely approaching full warpspeed. Not this close to planetary bodies. Invisible from F-space, they quickly cleared the limb, and saw Tagus again on their screens. Not as a blue and white sphere against deep, star-strewn black, but a computer artifact-a featureless silver globe against utterly starless indigo blue. Shipsmind could mock up something very similar to the planet's F-space appearance, even dubbing in star images. But the Admiralty specified silver on indigo for simulations in warpspace, to remind the watch it wasn't real.

At the Marine Academy, Captain Esteron had shown them a screen full of mathematics, telling them it best represented the warpspace view of a planet. He hadn't expected them to sort it out. He'd simply been making a point. He went on to discuss warpspace in non-mathematical terms. In a sense, you couldn't be in warpspace; warpspace has no material content. A ship "in warpspace" actually occupied an anomaly. Before generating warpspace, you're in F-space-familiar space-which is "permeated by the warpspace potentiality." The strange-space generator generates what can be thought of as a "bubble" of warpspace, which is free to move within the warpspace potentiality at "speeds" greater than light in F-space. And that "carrier bubble" of warpspace contains an inclusion-a bubble of F-space intimately surrounding the scout and its contents. A ship within a bubble within a bubble.

According to Captain Esteron, it could be understood only through the appropriate mathematics, and even that depended on what's meant by "understood." The bottom line was, you can leave Terra in warpdrive and arrive at Alpha Centauri in far less time than a photon could. And without inertia. In warpspace you're not only exempt from the light-speed limitation, your ship is stationary within its own little universe-its "carrier bubble."

Stoorvol had decided then not to worry about it. Accept it, yes. Get used to it, sure. Learn to control it, damn right! He'd quickly done all three, and become a competent warpspace pilot-not very difficult in routine circumstances.

Especially with the safekeeps built into shipsminds, to constrain warpspeeds in the vicinity of planetary bodies. For there, the "interfacing" of F-space and warpspace is more or less distorted, and pseudo-speeds must be moderate. Otherwise distortion could rupture your carrier bubble. Which could leave you abruptly in F-space, with momentum a function of your warpdrive pseudo-speed. If that happens at a pseudo-speed greater than c, ship and contents are converted instantly into energy. The resulting explosion is terrific.

Even at only a few-score miles per minute, a ruptured carrier bubble would convert a crew into strawberry jam.

Thus the crossing to Tagus took twenty-eight careful minutes. But they were also twenty-eight invisible minutes. The odds of a Wyzhnyny ship passing in warpspace near enough to detect your carrier bubble by chance were extremely low. While the prospect of being detected in warpspace by a ship in F-space was essentially nil.

The danger lay not in the crossing to Tagus. It lay in the fine maneuvering very close in. There, complex interface distortions made travel vectors tricky, and carelessness or clumsiness could easily be fatal.

So while the crossing took twenty-eight minutes, finding a suitable place to emerge required two hours of slow and careful sensor groping. Finally Stoorvol found what he wanted-a gorge. He recognized it by the nature of the grav-line distortions in the F-space potentiality, blurred though they were, and it was on the right part of the right continent. He groped his way almost to the bottom.

Emergence would cause a momentary surge of 80-kilocycle radio waves, a distinctive artifact that would hardly be misinterpreted. It was the primary reason he'd wanted to emerge deep in a gorge. A surge there would hardly be picked up by a ground installation, nor by any of the surveillance buoys, given their positions in space.

Once back in F-space, he keyed the gravitic matrix, and shipsmind gave him coordinates-0.65 degrees east of the Wyzhnyny settlement. The gorge was visible on the map the scout had generated during its surveillance from the lunar limb. It was one of the larger gorges leading down from a broad basaltic plateau to the ocean, and the Mei-Li had emerged only thirty feet from the bottom.

He turned the helm over to PO-1 Menges, who raised the craft almost to the rim. Then two of the Mei-Li's work scooters transferred the marines, plus Olavsdottir and the two entomology techs, to the plateau top. Stoorvol flew one of the scooters.

He left most of the marines on the rim with Gunnery Sergeant Gabaldon, to set up an inconspicuous defense point. Then, with Olavsdottir, two marines and a pair of hornet traps, Stoorvol left on one scooter. Three other marines and both entomology techs followed on the other, with four more traps. The scouts' gravdrives were designed to have a minimal EM signature, though even that might be picked up if they rose much above the rainforest canopy.

"Just tell me where to go," Stoorvol said. Olavsdottir scanned across the forest roof. "Take me higher," she said. "I can't see enough from here."

He glanced at the coordinate grid on his display, then raised the scooter straight up, while the planetologist looked around. At two hundred feet above the forest she spoke again, pointing. "There," she said. "There's a pretty good opening over there about half a mile."