She waited as the two went through their suit checks, then cycled them through the airlock into a yawning abyss of stars.

"Gods and kami," said Blair. He backed up. "Gods and kami."

Rue was a bit surprised by his reaction. "Here, I'll clip a line to you," she said. Evan was a bit bolder, but he kept one hand on the edge of the airlock. Rue simply turned and stepped into the darkness.

It was just like the night at Allemagne, the billion angelic stars in their wreaths and coils. As soon as she was out here, in fact, Rue calmed right down. What had she been so worried about? This was just like home— only moving ten thousand times faster, a fact that the eye could not discern.

"It's beautiful," she said. "Look at it."

"Great Rue, now can I go back in?" said Blair.

"Okay, I want you guys to each pick a part of the sky and watch it," she said. "You don't have to leave the airlock— just look around."

"What are we looking for?" asked Blair. His breathing was shallow, but he seemed to have gotten control of himself. These guys were from planets, she reminded herself. They weren't used to being out in the real world.

"Just rest your eyes and watch," she said. "You're looking for a star to wink at you."

This was just basic prospecting technique, though usually done by automated full-sky telescopes. Rue hadn't realized when she let Max upgrade the scope that he would replace it with an instrument more suited to delving deeply in one narrow field of view. No wonder they couldn't see where they were.

Hanging in space and watching the stars was very calming. Soon, both Blair and Evan were into it; they began chatting in a more friendly way than they had to date. Rue looked for familiar constellations— they weren't that far from Erythrion yet— and then just let her eyes rest on the scene. Waiting for one of those billion stars to blink. The problem was, the eye played tricks. Things on her peripheral vision were constantly shifting. There were lots of false alarms over the next hour.

At last Evan said, "I think… I think I see it."

"Where?"

He pointed. "Four or five stars have disappeared over there."

"What's the constellation?"

"The Horologium."

"Okay. Corinna? Did you hear that? Aim the scope at the Pendulum Clock."

Ten minutes later, they had a confirmation: something was occluding the stars of the Horologium, in a line that paralleled their own course. When Corinna broke the news, they all cheered and Rue allowed herself a little grin of satisfaction. She had not let them down.

"N OW THAT WE know where to look, it should get easier," said Evan. "We can aim spotlights at the Horologium and see how many habitats we're dealing with."

"What do you mean?" asked Blair. "We found the ship, didn't we?"

"Yes and no." Evan summoned the telescope window and began adjusting controls. "Most cyclers are built as constellations; you never keep all your life support in one basket, so to speak. If a cycler habitat hits a rock going at point-eight light-speed, the whole thing'll vaporize. The plow sail takes care of gas and small particles, but there's no way to avoid anything big. So we distribute the living quarters and cargo among several independent habitats and separate them by up to thousands of kilometers. We use jumpers to travel between them. So if I'm right," he said as he made a final adjustment, "the spot should find at least one more object out there."

Everyone gathered around and watched. The spotlight was programmed to track lines across the sky like an old-style cathode-ray tube. It had only been on for a few seconds before there was a pinprick flash of light in the window. "Got one!" shouted Evan. He reversed the spot and increased the magnification. And there it was.

Rue had studied cycler designs in the days leading up to their departure. What she saw looked a bit like Allemagne and didn't surprise her; a sphere was the best shape for retaining heat, an important consideration in interstellar space. Still, she felt her heart leap as she saw a silvery ball swim into focus, framed in stars.

"It's real," she whispered. All this time, she had been afraid to believe it.

"I'm fixing the distance," said Evan. "Then we'll move on to the next one…. Sixty thousand kilometers. We're practically on top of it!"

The sphere disappeared as the spotlight moved on. Another sphere appeared, then a rusty cylindrical shape. "There's no lettering," said Corinna. "Or painting. Cyclers are often covered in murals," she explained. "These habitats are plain."

"It's new?" speculated Evan. "Look, there's another! How many habitats are there?"

They counted eight more. Then, the spotlight found something odd— a dim red glow. "Magnify that," said Corinna. Evan fiddled with the controls. Some blurry red lines filled the window, faded in and out and resolved into…

"Words. There's something written on that one."

The sphere itself was black, but scrawled across it was spikey lettering utterly unfamiliar to Rue. There were about a hundred words, she guessed, in a discrete paragraph. No way to tell how big the letters were, although the scope indicated the object they were written on was thirty thousand kilometers away.

"Do a capture and run it through the computer," said Corinna. "I don't recognize the language."

They waited while Evan did as she'd suggested. After a while he looked up. His face had gone pale.

"The computer doesn't recognize it either," he said.

"Strange," said Max.

"More than strange." Evan took a shaky breath. "The computer knows every human script in the halo or High Space. This isn't any of them; it's not even derived from any of them."

"What are you saying?"

"All I'm saying," said Evan, "is that this isn't a known human language."

That wasn't all Evan was saying and they all knew it.

"Gods and Kami," breathed Corinna. "It's an alien ship."

THEY'D ARGUED BACK and forth all day, while Evan exercised the scope and mapped out the dozen visible habitats of Jentry's Envy. Now, exhausted, they retreated to their staterooms. Rue and Max were in his; he was drinking, as usual.

"We should have guessed," she said. "It came from an area of space we haven't colonized."

He shrugged angrily. "I still don't believe it. All the aliens we've heard about use the FTL drive. There's no such thing as an alien cycler."

"But it's there, Max. You saw it."

"I saw something. I don't know what."

"So what are we going to do? We can't go home," she said. "We'll have to try to make contact."

Max put the heel of his hand to his forehead. "No. We're just not in a position to do that. We've got no defenses, no recourse—"

"Max, we have no choice!"

He glared at her. "Do you know anything at all about how to do a first contact? I know I don't. No, Rue, we're totally out of our depth here. I still say we lay low, don't approach and just ride until we get to Chandaka. If they come to us, well then, there's nothing we can do about that. But we can't go out to them. It'd be suicide."

She turned away. There was no discussing this any further today. She would have to wear Max down— or else finally act like a cycler captain and just command it to be done. Rue wasn't ready for that yet.

"What have we gotten ourselves into," she murmured. Rue's gaze fell on the public inscape images Max had arranged on his wall. These were the same photos he'd had at home— family and friends, mostly, plus a few landscapes of Treya.

They all looked so homey and sensible; how could they be light-months behind, inaccessible now for years? Rue rubbed her eyes, fighting weariness and fear.

She looked up— and her grandmother looked back at her from one of the photos.