Barendts grinned. "This is the part where we put our hands up," he said, demonstrating.

Three of the other divers were towing lines. They attached these to the sub and soon they were on the surface, being towed toward a set of docks where a number of other subs lay at berth.

"Let's get out of here," said Rue. She headed for the hatch. Herat laughed and shook his head.

"We never equalized pressure, at least not as far as I can tell from our busted instruments," he said. "The air out there will crush you like a grape if you open that hatch."

"Oh." She pointed at the divers now squatting atop their hull. "Do they know that?"

"Let's hope so." The divers hopped off, into the water, and their sub was hoisted out of the water. As it slowly turned, water rolling down the sides, Rue got a good look at the cavern they had come to.

Halfway up the blue wall of the cavern, a huge opening gave onto an even larger space, this one well above the waterline. The cavern they were in was just a lower dock area for what looked like an entire city carved out of the ice.

"What are those?" Tall shapes like smooth stalagmites stood in bright glimmering ranks under the lights of that other cavern. Rue pressed her nose against the diamond hull and peered at them. As the water stopped running past her eyes, she got a good look, but still couldn't figure out what she was seeing.

"They look big, but what are they?"

"Autotroph technology?" asked Mike. Barendts shook his head, pointing down at the docks below. Men in uniform were running about there; none were the conspicuous green of the fanatical humans who had seemed to worship the autotrophs.

"Hey, what are they doing?" protested Rue. The sub was being lowered into what looked like a giant trash compactor. It was a heavy cube with airlock hatches on the sides and top. It was attached to a larger, windowless cube. Their view of the cavern beyond was cut off as the cube's walls rose around them; then they were grounded with a thud. Fit-looking young men with buzzcut hair hopped into the cube and proceeded to roll the sub on its side. Stuff fell about the cabin and Rue found herself skidding over to sit on the wall.

Now their airlock was right next to a door that led into the larger cube. The fit young men clambered out of the cube and its walls started closing in, accompanied by a deep throbbing of motors somewhere. This is it, thought Rue incredulously, they're going to squash us.

The sides of the door to the large cube flattened and deformed around the sub's hatch, as though it were made of rubber. The sub settled a bit, creaked and then someone was undogging their hatch from the other side.

A little puff of air came in. A man-sized robot stood there, little laser lenses aiming at them from its hips. It stepped back with a clank and gestured in a very manlike way. "Come in," it said.

Rue and the others climbed out of the sub, finding themselves in a large cube-shaped room with bunks along the walls and a small partition behind which there was a toilet. There were no windows.

"Pressure equalization will commence now," said the robot. It slammed the inside door of the cube and stood in front of it, arms crossed.

Herat went over to it. "Please don't equalize the pressure," he said. "We need to get back to the surface as soon as possible!"

The robot said nothing. It seemed to have shut itself off.

HOURS PASSED. RUE'S sinuses hurt and her ears kept popping painfully. Her private inscape told her she was being subjected to mounting air pressure that her circulatory nano were having a tough time compensating for. They kept popping up windows in the corner of her vision, asking whether she could please eat some silicon and iron so that they could start building more units. They anticipated a need to protect her from the bends at a later time. There was nothing to eat in the cube, so she ignored them.

She and Herat continued to plead with the robot to let them talk to someone in authority, but it continued to ignore them. Mike sat on the sidelines, looking despondent; he was polite but not warm when she spoke to him. It was frustrating to face walls of silence on two sides.

Just when Rue was eyeing one of the cots in resigned exhaustion, the robot jerked and stepped forward. "Apologies," it said. "Our apologies."

Rue's ears popped and simultaneously an inscape window appeared. Her nano were telling her that the air pressure was dropping again.

"What the hell is going on here?" demanded Herat.

A new inscape window opened in the center of the room— a public one, obviously, from the way the others looked at it.

The abbot of the monastery of Permanence, Griffin, stood there. He held out his hands in a supplicatory gesture. "We are so sorry, gentlemen, captain. We just found out about your rescue. It seems the military police who fished you out of the ocean had some trouble ascertaining your identity, because the I.D. tags of your sub had been lasered off."

Barendts grinned sheepishly and shrugged.

"We've been talking ourselves hoarse for hours," said Herat. "Wasn't anybody listening?"

Griffin looked, if possible, even more embarrassed. "There's a local human rights policy that forbade the police from taking a deposition from you without a human physically present. It comes from an old case of long-distance interrogation, the ugly details of which I won't go into. And there were… further complications… due to where you chose to be rescued."

"What complications?" asked Rue. She was rapidly tiring of Oculus and all its political mazes.

"It appears you've stumbled on a military secret that no one, least of all citizens of the Rights Economy, is supposed to know about."

"What secret?" But even as she said this, Rue remembered the strange spikelike things they had seen in the cavern above.

"Please, this is a very sensitive matter. We're reversing your pressure equalization and will have you shipped topside immediately. These are matters that we cannot discuss through inscape, due to," the abbot coughed politely, "certain parties' uncomfortable skills with inscape hacking." His image looked directly at Barendts.

"Hey, don't look at me," said Barendts. "I'm just here for the food."

TWELVE HOURS LATER Rue stood in the lavish council chamber of the Permanence monastery. Once again she faced an array of faces around the oak table that dominated the room. The faces were different this time and Rue suspected that these men and women were the real powers of the Cycler Compact.

The politician Mallory was conspicuously missing.

Rue had been separated from the others early on their journey up here. She was assured that Mike, Herat, and Barendts were safe and were being taken care of. They were citizens of a foreign power, however, and it was time to discuss matters that they should not know about.

She resented the implication; as soon as Rue saw Mike and Herat again, she was going to fill them in on the situation, no matter what was said in this council chamher. She trusted them. Of course, there was no way she was going to tell that to the military police who had escorted her here.

Captain Li was present. He stood up as she entered; the others followed suit. "Captain Cassels," he began gravely, "let me express my deepest condolences on the loss of your cousin."

Rue had been all business, but this simple gesture stopped her. She felt her eyes filling with tears and wiped them angrily away.

"Yes, well," she said, as she dropped herself into an empty chair. "Thank you. But let's get on with things, shall we?"

Li nodded and sat, as did the others. Rue tried to still the quivering of her lip by biting it.

"You've been briefed on the overall situation," said a woman Rue did not recognize. "After the murder of your cousin and your disappearance, Admiral Crisler exercised diplomatic immunity and retreated to your magsail with his people. You had already secured beam time from the monastery and with the help of Mallory's people, Crisler got the schedule moved up. They left two days ago and are now nearing the outskirts of the Colossus system."