Her crew were awake now, though not entirely up to speed; despite their loginess, today would be their first EVA.

Rue's stateroom had a window, another contrast to her first time out. She turned the lights off to watch the stars wheel by. They looked no different than they had from Allemagne; she even recognized some constellations. In Rights Economy terms, she was still next door to Erythrion— and only two dozen light-years from Earth.

She turned away from the window with reluctance. There had been a couple of times when she'd had panic attacks standing here; looking out at the stars had been the only thing that had calmed her. Now, looking out had become a ritual.

After taking a couple of deep breaths, she fixed a confident smile on her face and stepped out into the curving hall of B Dormitory. A few of Crisler's people nodded to her in passing; the soldiers had a habit of checking her out, pushing the envelope of propriety, but they were always faultlessly polite when she spoke to them. Everybody radiated confidence; they were at the Envy and ready to start investigating its secrets.

They weren't like her— they were graduates of the finest universities, disciplined military minds. She was just a woman from the middle of nowhere, yet they treated her like an equal. It made her want to scream.

She entered the galley and immediately Corinna waved at her from an otherwise empty table. Blair had a tray and was headed that way too and she saw Max talking to the chef. Good. She nodded at Corinna, but before heading over there she took a detour.

Crisler sat with Dr. Herat, the lead scientist, at a table in the back of the room. Rue clenched her fists, loosened them and walked up to the two men. "How are you gentlemen this morning?"

They both nodded and greeted her courteously. Max had a term for guys like these: alpha males. Both men were instinctively dominant. They reminded her a lot of Jentry and having that frame of reference helped her. Alphas couldn't be coerced, but they could always be tricked; before Max had revealed that she owned Jentry's Envy, she had let him serve as foil with Crisler while she nosed around on her own. Now that he knew about her, Crisler was wary. She had been trying to appear young and naive around him, but lately was regretting that strategy. You become what you pretend.

Dr. Herat was a lot harder to figure out than Crisler. He seemed utterly relaxed, as usual. Being at the cycler seemed to have no effect on him, except maybe to increase his already considerable enthusiasm.

She remembered how she had been before her first EVA to Lake Flaccid. She'd thrown up. It wasn't the environment that had wrought her nerves that time— from the outside, Lake Flaccid bore a remarkable resemblance to Allemagne. It was no colder here than where she had grown up. No, it was a fear that hied her back to old stories about robbing graves. The cycler was cold and silent, after all: It was likely that it was in fact a tomb. She still felt uneasy whenever she thought about all the places here that they had yet to visit.

Still, she needed to be present on this first sortie. Herat was on the EVA team, at his own insistence. So were Corinna and Evan. Three other scientists and two soldiers rounded out the team.

"We're all set," Herat said sunnily. "The fellows on the EVA team are pacing like caged tigers."

"Remember, anything you find that might be a way of controlling the Envy's course, you hand over to us. I invited your people on this trip to help me uphold my salvage claim."

"Yes, I know. But may I point out, Ms. Cassels, that we may not be able to identify the controls when we see them. How can you tell an alien inscape crown from a toilet? It could take us months. Then to understand how it works—"

She had learned to just interrupt him if she needed to get a point in. "I expect you to approve anything— but I also expect to understand everything you investigate. Look at it as a challenge; the fun part will be explaining it all to me in layman's terms."

He laughed. "I usually get paid to do that."

"You don't think having free rein on the Envy to be payment enough? When all your colleagues are sitting on their hands back at the Institute?" She smiled sweetly at him.

He stammered something.

"I'll see you gentlemen in the control room at ten o'clock," she said, then hurried on while she still had the momentum.

"Oh, I'm sorry!" Michael Bequith had nearly run her down. He had a tray with two tiny bacon strips and a piece of toast on it.

"How do you survive on that?" she asked.

He blushed. He did that a lot, she'd found; she couldn't decide whether it was endearing or annoying. He was good looking, though, tall and lean, with dusky skin like Corinna and eyes so dark you usually couldn't see the pupils. He generally dressed severely and today was no exception: He was in a black jumpsuit with an equally black utility vest on it. A small, but not virtual, book lay on the tray next to his meager breakfast.

"I never eat much before a space walk," he said. "It's a sensible precaution."

"Oh, so you're on the team?" She already knew this, but wanted to keep the conversation going. Rue had a connection with him; they had both been there at the discovery of Linda Ophir's body, after all. She wasn't sure yet whether she liked Bequith, but she wanted to find out, and he seemed hard to get close to.

He grimaced at her question. "I'll be in charge of enforcing the quarantine precautions," he said. "Dr. Herat gets the fun work; I do the digging, he picks up the treasure." He grinned almost imperceptibly.

Interesting; she hadn't known he had a sense of humor at all.

"So space walks make you nervous?" she asked.

"Space Walks into alien spaceships do." He shrugged. "Shouldn't they?"

"No, no, you're quite right. It's funny… nobody else is admitting to being nervous."

He registered a faint smile. "That's because most of them haven't got the faintest idea where we are."

"Oh? And you do?"

He peered off into the middle distance for a moment. "One thing I've learned in this job is, we never get used to the alien. Looking at something that's of alien manufacture is like catching a glimpse of God— no, don't laugh. What I mean is— well, ask yourself this question: What's the difference between holding an object, say a cup, made by alien hands and a cup created out of nothing by the universe— by the ineffable?"

Rue might indeed have laughed at this strange analogy, were it not that she remembered quite vividly how her scalp had prickled when she first looked through the telescope, saw one of the Envy's habitats, and knew it was not man-made.

"An alien speaks, or a stone speaks— what's the difference?" said Mike. "The experience is similar."

"Rocks speak to you?" she said in a mock-indulgent tone.

"Not as such. Ask me about NeoShintoism sometime," he said.

"Uh… okay." Bequith was religious! She should have realized it before; he was very much the priest type, now that she thought about it.

"Don't worry," he said. "I don't bite."

"So you're from, what, the Vatican?" she asked.

"No, actually, I'm from Kimpurusha. It's not far from here—"

Rue's stomach did a flip. "Oh. If you'll excuse me, my crew's expecting me."

Even as she walked away, Rue was thinking, Go back— keep talking to him! She'd wanted to have some polite chitchat with the man and here she was running away instead. But if he really was from Kimpurusha, he was from one of the lit worlds that had betrayed the halo. In the years before she was born, there had been hundreds of embassies and trade centers around Erythrion, each representing one or another cycler ring. The jewels in the vast Cycler Compact were the lit worlds, places like Kimpurusha that had nearly Earthlike planets basking in the glow of G-, K-, or even M-class stars.