Recalling his training exercises, Hanif made the first jump, which was over almost before he realized it. His pneumatic crampons deployed flawlessly, retethering him to the rock before Vangar’s spin had an opportunity to fling him into space. Now he was only scant meters from the marauder ship.

Before continuing toward the alien vessel, Hanif took a few seconds to evaluate his condition, and that of his p-suit. He thought he might have sprained his right ankle during his landing, or perhaps even fractured it. The Genescience Heads need to build us better limbs,he thought wryly. Fortunately, his tail had taken the brunt of the impact, without compromising the integrity of his p-suit.

When he took stock of the rest of the team, however, he immediately saw that Gavin had not been so fortunate. His explosively decompressed corpse drifted from its tether like an obscene parody of one of the balloons the ’Neal technicians lofted through the high-grav exterior levels when tracking down slow atmospheric leaks.

Poor bastard,Hanif thought. Maybe someday the genengineers will make us Rock rats tough enough to survive even an accident like that. At least long enough to slap on a p-suit patch, or crawl into a Safety Hutch.

[228] With no small amount of difficulty, Hanif put all such thoughts out of his mind. There would be time to grieve later, once the threat posed by the aliens had been neutralized. Without ceremony, Hanif, Moira, and Safa each cut their tethers to their dead comrade, and Moira kicked the body loose. It quickly pinwheeled out of sight, slung away by Vangar’s relentless spin. Perhaps someday, Gavin would fall all the way back to the Milky Way and Auld Aerth.

The remainder of the team swarmed quickly across the marauder’s hull, holding themselves in place with magnetic grapnels. Hanif was sweating freely by the time they’d finished planting the shaped explosive charges into what appeared to be the vessel’s most prominent hatches and key structural points.

When Safa started to sabotage what appeared to be an external engine strut, Hanif pulled on the tether that connected them.

He shook his head when she looked toward him. He was well aware that Director al-Adnan had ordered the alien vessel “completely crippled and neutralized.” However, as leader of the boarding team, he also knew that it was up to him to interpret the director’s orders. Out on the Rock, where death could and often did strike without warning, Hanif was the one in charge. And demolishing what might turn out to be a completely functional Efti’el spacedrive—especially after the ’Neal People had failed to develop one of their own after more than a century of albeit intermittent attempts—struck Hanif as an utterly unconscionable waste.

Al-Adnan wouldn’t have put me in charge of this op if he didn’t trust my judgment. He can always order me and the marauder’s engines spaced if he’s really unhappy about this acquisition. But if he tries that, the Science Heads just might slice his throat from ear to ear and hand the little mullah’s job over to me.

Two tether-tugs from Moira told Hanif that all was in [229] readiness. Using his tail, he pulled on the line three times in response. Go!

The trio leapt clear of the hull again. After landing, Hanif was sure that his sprained ankle must now surely be broken. But there wasn’t any time to think of that. The pain was intense, but manageable. He relied on the suit’s servomotors to keep him walking as the final explosives were put into place and the remote-control keypad booted and ran through its initialization procedures.

The explosions were silent, though the ship’s hull transmitted their vibrations through the asteroid’s skin. Hanif felt the percussive rumbles in his hands and feet, as though Van-gar had suddenly begun shivering in the icy, neverending M’jallanish night.

Hanif looked at the ship, whose hull now showed deep rents and gashes. Clouds of atmosphere were venting, swiftly transforming into tumbling ice crystals that moved away, projectilelike, following the same course that Gavin’s corpse had taken.

He touched the sealed holster strapped to his thigh. The elfish energy weapon was still where he’d left it. With his other hand, he found his chest controls and keyed open the boarding team’s preselected radio channel.

“Let’s move, people,” he said, finally breaking radio silence. “I’m taking point. We kill whatever still moves in there.”

After entering the ship, Hanif was almost disappointed. They had found a total of thirteen of the squat, three-limbed creatures aboard the alien vessel, eleven of whom had already been finished off by the explosives-generated hull breaches before the team had even come aboard.

Stepping over the messily decompressed corpses, Hanif led Safa and Moira into a large aft chamber. Hanif surmised that this was the alien vessel’s engine room, judging by the glowing central structure, a four-mitr-tall semitransparent [230] cylinder which pulsated with mysterious, blue-tinted energies.

Here they also found the vessel’s two survivors. They were small, cowering things dressed in yellow pressure suits, creatures whose faces sported a pair of fist-sized, golden eyes, bordered by tufts of luxuriant white fur.

Hanif saw their complicated mouthparts moving repeatedly, but evidently wasn’t tuned to whatever comm frequency they were using. In the airless room, the creatures made no sound. They might have been trying to sue for peace, or beg for their lives, or even threaten the team.

Or they might have been trying to buy time, waiting for an opportunity to turn the tables on their victims-turned-captors. Hanif unholstered his weapon and shot one of the beings through the chest. Its thick orange blood flowed, sublimating immediately into vapor in the vacuum.

Safer to assume they’re all Tuskers,Hanif thought. Given half a chance, they’d do the same to us, and take everything we have. Including our lives.

The second creature looked terrified, and tried to flee. Safa knocked it down with her tail before it had moved a handful of mitrs away. But she hesitated after that, as though wavering in her purpose.

Then Moira stepped forward and shot the thing dead with three bursts from a lead-projectile pistol.

Hanif found that he couldn’t take his eyes off the blue-glowing cylinder at the room’s center. He wondered if it was the power plant or engine core that enabled these aliens to reach Vangar. They would have needed a truly potent energy source to cross the great gulf of interstellar space that separated the Rock from even the nearest star.

Then he noticed Safa, staring down at the motionless bodies of thé two aliens. Her tail lay limply across the floor, like a coil of discarded EV tether.

Hanif touched his radio controls. “What’s wrong, Safa?”

[231] “Did we ...” she hesitated. “Did we do the right thing here, Han?”

He sighed. “What on the Rock are you talking about?”

“These ... creatures,” she said, pointing down at the body nearest to her. “They’re not exactly Tuskers, are they?”

“No, Safa. But they could have turned out to be something far worse. Fortunately, that’s no longer a problem.”

“Unless their people start sending out rescue teams. Or war parties.”

Tucking her weapon back into its holster, Moira approached Safa. “If that happens, we’ll be ready for them.”

Hanif resumed watching the roiling energies contained within the tall blue cylinder. “Our dead visitors may have already given us the solution to that problem. But if that thing really is an Efti’el spacedrive, I wonder how they survived the acceleration.”

Moira shrugged. “Maybe they have some way to manipulate gravity and inertia locally.”

Hanif nodded, and an idea came to him. Pointing to his booted feet, he said, “We’re upside-down.”