"Well, yeah," said a young chemist named Hutcheons. "Who's going into the tanks?"

"We want to maximize the science presence, obviously, but we can't completely eliminate the support team," said the admiral. "We can't ask Captain Cassels to spare any of her people, so a reasonable cut would be twenty of my people, mostly on the military side, except for a squad that will guard the tanks and other essential equipment from further sabotage. Twelve of the support staff leaves eight to be cut from the science team. Dr. Herat will have to decide on who he needs the most."

Hutcheons shook his head vigorously. "That's not fair. We all know Herat will keep the priest awake no matter what. Somebody's going to get put down in his place."

There was more muttering. The priest? Rue looked around at the crowd. Then she noticed Michael Bequith standing to one side, eyes still fixed on the ground. Other members of the science team were looking at him too.

"Oh, stop whining," Herat said. "You're only going to miss the initial exploratory phase— something Bequith has years of experience with. The real work comes later anyway, you know that."

Herat walked to the front and turned to fix his team with a determined look. "You all know I seriously object to tampering with alien archaeological treasures, but as Admiral Crisler keeps pointing out, this is a survival issue. We're going to have to search the Envy for usable supplies. One thing we can say is that oxygen is oxygen and we're not going to learn anything from the gas stored in the tanks we've seen attached to some of the Envy's habitats. We can harvest that gas if it's not being used by the habitats themselves. Now, we will learn from the tanks, damn it, so I don't want them busted, drilled, reamed out or painted! We need isotopic and engineering studies of them.

"Doubtless we could find a lot more supplies if we ransacked the place, but if we do that then we make a joke of the scientific expedition. So we will proceed slowly and systematically. Is everyone clear on that?"

There was no more grumbling. After a moment, Herat nodded sharply and said, "It's important to know what progress we've made in the little time we've been here. Dr. Katz, could you present our findings from the habitat Rue's people so colorfully call 'Lake Flaccid'?"

Katz was taken a bit by surprise. To cover himself, he began summoning inscape windows, until they surrounded his head like a cloud of playing cards. He glanced at these and cleared his throat.

"Well, the main finding is, of course, that Jentry's Envy really is a multispecies starship. This has profound implications; it could revive the project at Olympus and the political impact is going to be huge.

"Even so, this raises more questions than it answers. If there really are at least two species involved in creating Jentry's Envy, where are they? All the stars within twenty light-years are either inhabited by humans, or empty of useful planets.

"Secondly, we've completed isotopic analysis of Lake Flaccid and, by laser, on two other structures. The isotopic distribution matches several stars in the local stellar group. Most important, the hull of Lake Flaccid contains a record of its age: There's a steady rain of cosmic rays on the Envy and from the number of tracks in the hull metal you can directly calculate how long the ship's been travelling at this velocity.

"The answer is exactly forty-seven years." Katz waited while the now excited buzz of conversation died down. "If there is no FTL drive on this ship, then it's impossible for the Envy to have come from more than about forty light-years away. If it's a true cycler it's travelling in a rough circle and will eventually return to its starting point. We think that starting point is less than twelve light-years from here.

"If that truly is the case, then we have a paradox, since this whole volume of space is well known. At this point… I'd welcome any ideas," he ended weakly.

The scientists proceeded to get into a roaring debate. Crisler stood back, arms folded, and watched with satisfaction. Rue took the opportunity to edge in the direction of Mike Bequith, who was standing aloof; apparently no one would talk to him. Some kind of revelation had occurred concerning him, and Rue had to know what it was.

After letting the argument go on for a while, Katz raised a hand and said, "People, please! We can talk till we exhaust the stacks, but it won't get us anywhere. The evidence is there to be collected, if we just go look. I suggest that our next stop be the habitat that has the Lasa writing on it."

This touched off even more debate, but Rue had reached Mike now. "I wanted to thank you again for your discovery yesterday," she said. "I thought we'd lost you, and I apologize for getting you into that situation to begin with."

Mike appeared surprised. "It's… my job," he said, his voice a bit husky. "But thanks."

"I wanted you to know that you've served my ship and crew well," she said. "Now tell me, what was all that about?" She nodded in the direction of the arguing scientists.

Mike squinted at the wall for a few seconds. "I'm a suspect in the bombing," he said. "The only suspect, it seems."

"What? Why?" Then she remembered her first impression of Mike: He had been eavesdropping on her conversation with Evan in the gardens at Chandaka. She'd thought that impolite at the time, but not sinister. Now, though…

He grimaced. "I was briefly involved with the resistance, years ago. It was the kind of foolish thing you do when you're young. But it seems there's no outliving your mistakes."

"Hmm." She decided not to judge that, now— it might pay to be more cautious around Michael Bequith in the future; on the other hand, he had been nothing but charming and helpful during the expedition, so far. "Why are they calling you 'the priest'?"

"Because Crisler's told everyone that I practice a banned religion," he said.

Well, that at least was not a total surprise. "NeoShinto. You told me about it, so I looked it up. It's banned in the Rights Economy, but not in the halo. If you can't practice your religion in peace and quiet on the Banshee, all you need do is visit the Envy. Remember that."

He stammered his thanks. The meeting was breaking up, so Rue took her leave of Mike.

He might be the threat Crisler was searching for, or he might be innocent. Either way, by offering him a haven Rue had hopefully made him less of a threat to her own people.

Besides, he was kind of cute.

"STERLING ACCOMMODATIONS," SAID Dr. Katz. "But I'm sure we'll get used to them."

"Thanks for the support, Henry," said Laurent Herat. They were watching some of Crisler's marines unload boxes into one of the more capacious chambers of the Lake Flaccid warren. They had figured out how to unclip the sheets that were wadded into the rooms and here had packed them into a corner, leaving uprights standing like too-thin pillars everywhere. Two members of the scientific team sat in the corner, suits off, reading about partial pressures and trying to program their scrubber implants to handle the local air. There were public inscape windows everywhere, full of equations, photos, and journal articles and one or two hovering models of life-support equipment that the techs were using as schematics. You walked through them like clouds.

Michael Bequith was depressed. He had been struggling against admitting it to himself, but the strain of Crisler's accusations and the revelations about his past that had followed the explosion had mired him down. It didn't help, today, that Katz was in such a good mood.

"It'll be fun," said the habitat specialist. "We've gotten way too soft, let our machines do all the work for us. You know, when I was young I used to design habitats from scratch with big constraints on them— not enough air, or no free water supply. The more these halo-worlders tell me about their lives, the more I think I should have been born out here."