Except this one. This one had come in wide, and seen the trickery.

"The further from our bearing, the more obvious the discontinuity," Sarasti intoned. "Think it's clearly visible on any approach perpendicular to ours."

"So we're in a blind spot? We see it if we change course?"

Bates shook her head. "The blind spot's moving, Sascha. It's—"

"Tracking us." Sascha sucked breath between her teeth. "Motherfucker."

Szpindel twitched. "So what is it? Our skimmer factory?"

The freeze-frame's pixels began to crawl. Something emerged, granular and indistinct, from the turbulent swirls and curlicues of Ben's atmosphere. There were curves, and spikes, and no smooth edges; I couldn't tell how much of the shape was real, and how much a fractal intrusion of underlying cloudscape. But the overall outline was that of a torus, or perhaps a collection of smaller jagged things piled together in a rough ring; and it was big. Those nine klicks of displaced contrail had merely grazed the perimeter, cut across an arc of forty or fifty degrees. This thing hiding in the shadow of ten Jupiters was almost thirty kilometers from side to side.

Sometime during Sarasti's executive summary we'd stopped accellerating. Down was back where it belonged. We weren't, though. Our hesitant maybe-maybe-not approach was a thing of the past: we vectored straight in now, and damn the torpedoes.

"Er, that's thirty klicks across," Sascha pointed out. "And it's invisible. Shouldn't we maybe be a little more cautious now?"

Szpindel shrugged. "We could second-guess vampires, we wouldn't need vampires, eh?"

A new facet bloomed on the feed. Frequency histograms and harmonic spectra erupted from flatline into shifting mountainscapes, a chorus of visible light.

"Modulated laser," Bates reported.

Szpindel looked up. "From that?"

Bates nodded. "Right after we blow its cover. Interesting timing."

"Scary timing," Szpindel said. "How'd it know?"

"We changed course. We're heading right for it."

The lightscape played on, knocking at the window.

"Whatever it is," Bates said, "it's talking to us."

"Well then," remarked a welcome voice. "By all means let's say hello."

Susan James was back in the driver's seat.

I was the only pure spectator.

They all performed what duties they could. Szpindel ran Sarasti's sketchy silhouette through a series of filters, perchance to squeeze a bit of biology from engineering. Bates compared morphometrics between the cloaked artefact and the skimmers. Sarasti watched us all from overhead and thought vampire thoughts deeper than anything we could aspire to. But it was all just make-work. The Gang of Four was on center stage, under the capable direction of Susan James.

She grabbed the nearest chair, sat, raised her hands as if cueing an orchestra. Her fingers trembled in mid-air as she played virtual icons; her lips and jaw twitched with subvocal commands. I tapped her feed and saw text accreting around the alien signal:

Rorschach to vessel approaching 116°Az -23°dec rel. Hello Theseus. Rorschach to vessel approaching 116°Az -23°dec rel. Hello Theseus. Rorschach to vessel approachi

She'd decoded the damn thing. Already. She was even answering it:

Theseus to Rorschach. Hello Rorschach.

Hello Theseus. Welcome to the neighborhood.

She'd had less than three minutes. Or rather, they'd had less than three minutes: four fully-conscious hub personalities and a few dozen unconscious semiotic modules, all working in parallel, all exquisitely carved from the same lump of gray matter. I could almost see why someone would do such deliberate violence to their own minds, if it resulted in this kind of performance.

Up to now I had never fully convinced myself that even survival was sufficient cause.

Request permission to approach, the Gang sent. Simple and straightforward: just facts and data, thank you, with as little room as possible for ambiguity and misunderstanding. Fancy sentiments like we come in peace could wait. A handshake was not the time for cultural exchange.

You should stay away. Seriously. This place is dangerous.

That got some attention. Bates and Szpindel hesitated momentarily in their own headspaces and glanced into James'.

Request information on danger, the gang sent back. Still keeping it concrete.

Too close and dangerous to you. low orbit complications.

Request information on low orbit complications.

Lethal environment. Rocks and rads. You're welcome. I can take it but we're like that.

We are aware of the rocks in low orbit. We are equipped to deal with radiation. Request information on other hazards.

I dug under the transcript to the channel it fed from. Theseus had turned part of the incoming beam into a sound wave, according to the color code. Vocal communication, then. They spoke. Waiting behind that icon were the raw sounds of an alien language.

Of course I couldn't resist.

"Anytime between friends, right? Are you here for the celebration?"

English. The voice was human, male. Old.

"We are here to explore," replied the Gang, although their voice was pure Theseus. "Request dialog with agents who sent objects into near-solar space."

"First contact. Sounds like something to celebrate."

I double-checked the source. No, this wasn't a translation; this was the actual unprocessed signal coming from—Rorschach, it had called itself. Part of the signal, anyway; there were other elements, nonacoustic ones, encoded in the beam.

I browsed them while James said, "Request information about your celebration": standard ship-to-ship handshaking protocols.

"You're interested." The voice was stronger now, younger.

"Yes."

"You are?"

"Yes," the Gang repeated patiently.

"You are?"

The slightest hesitation. "This is Theseus."

"I know that, baseline." In Mandarin, now. "Who are you?"

No obvious change in the harmonics. Somehow, though, the voice seemed to have acquired an edge.

"This is Susan James. I am a—"

"You wouldn't be happy here, Susan. Fetishistic religious beliefs involved. There are dangerous observances."

James chewed her lip.

"Request clarification. Are we in danger from these observances?"

"You certainly could be."

"Request clarification. Is it the observances that are dangerous, or the low-orbit environment?"

"The environment of the disturbances. You should pay attention, Susan. Inattention connotes indifference," Rorschach said.

"Or disrespect," it added after a moment.

We had four hours before Ben got in the way. Four hours of uninterrupted nonstop communication made vastly easier than anyone had expected. It spoke our language, after all. Repeatedly it expressed polite concern for our welfare. And yet, for all its facility with Human speech it told us very little. For four hours it managed to avoid giving a straight answer on any subject beyond the extreme inadvisability of closer contact, and by the time it fell into eclipse we still didn't know why.

Sarasti dropped onto the deck halfway through the exchange, his feet never touching the stairs. He reached out and grabbed a railing to steady himself on landing, and staggered only briefly. If I'd tried that I'd have ended up bouncing along the deck like a pebble in a cement mixer.

He stood still as stone for the rest of the session, face motionless, eyes hidden behind his onyx visor. When Rorschach's signal faded in midsentence he assembled us around the Commons table with a gesture.