The aspect beneath was no more real. Spots of black appeared on it and vanished as rhythmically as a heartbeat. Jo sensed sorrow radiating from it.

"I don't think it's really belligerent, Commander. I think it just doesn't know how to make us understand."

He knelt opposite her. "Ready, AnyKaat?"

AnyKaat eased around so she would be behind them. "Ready." Very professional, Jo thought.

Her communicator squawked. "Vadja, Sergeant. We got us a snake circus back here. This methane sniffer has gone berserk."

Haget said, "Tell him to stand fast. We'll be there as soon as we stuff this thing into its den."

Jo relayed the message. Before she finished, Degas checked in. "Nobody home back here, Sergeant. Our protean friend has gone AWOL."

"Can it do that?" Jo asked. "I thought WarAvocat had it programmed."

"Evidently not well enough. It has. AnyKaat, help Degas find it after we put this thing away."

"Yes, sir." She sounded worried.

Jo felt some feather touch from Seeker. She could make no sense of it. "It's trying to tell me something, Commander."

"It can talk us blue in the face after we get the bees back in the hive. But first things first."

Bees? How did he know about bees? From a former life?

Seeker was light. Jo had guessed a hundred kilos beforehand but now she was thinking fifty. Fifty creepy kilos. She grew increasingly repelled....

"Vadja, Sergeant. You people better get here. The damned thing is trying to get out."

"Shee-it!"

"Out?" Haget asked. "But..."

"No shit. Bang!" Jo said. "Shoot it if you have to, Era."

"Where?"

"Good question. Hell, just smoke away." She looked at Haget. "That all right?"

He nodded.

They reached Seeker's quarters. "In you go, buddy," Haget said. They dumped it and closed the door. AnyKaat set her weapon to Kill and welded the door shut. Then she ran.

"We'd better collect our own arsenal, Sergeant."

That took only a moment. Then, hip to hip, they raced for the methane breather's deck. Startled passengers dodged them and stared. Vadja kept Jo's communicator squealing. "Shooting doesn't do much good. It's spread out all over in there and just getting madder. Damn it! It is trying to get out."

Haget grabbed the communicator. "If you can't stop it, get the hell away from it. Now!"

They burst into the passageway. Forty meters away Vadja started running toward them. Behind him a compartment door popped open.

"Down!" Jo yelled, and tripped Haget. They landed in a sprawl as oxygen and methane met.

Thunder, flame, and the indignant wail of alarms filled the passage for the few seconds that Jo retained consciousness. The last thing she saw was Era Vadja flying toward her, spread-eagled on the knuckles of the blast.

— 28 —

Simon Tregesser's bell drifted out of shadow, onto the dock, as Noah secured the pay comm. The artifact left the booth, headed for a sanctuary whose location had been given him.

Valerena thought there was a chance he might be suspect, that he ought to run.

His pace slowed as the wrongness penetrated his self-involvement.

The silence screamed.

It had been a typical dock when he had gone into the booth. Dense. Loud. Hectic. Now it was as empty as if all life had been obliterated.

He froze.

In so short a time?

Short of cosmic intervention, there was only one power capable of clearing a dock so fast.

The crew of the Voyager appeared ahead and to either hand. Each carried a naked hairsplitter. They closed in.

Mad laughter rolled behind him. This time, he knew, he would not dodge the lightning.

But he tried, knowing he could not bluff his way through.

— 29 —

The thing hidden at the heart of Simon Tregesser's end space citadel sensed a quivering on the Web. The vibration beat upon it from every direction, like the subtle neutrino flux of the universe itself.

For a minute the message drove it totally sane.

By means provided it called, "Simon Tregesser!"

Simon Tregesser did not respond.

It called again. The news had to be related! A juggernaut of disaster was rolling down the Web, and only inspired improvisation would keep it from bursting into the end space long before it was due.

Fate had carved itself a big slice. Fate and the machinations of enemies the Outsider had not known it had.

Tregesser would not answer. The madman must be off amusing himself. If enough alarms sounded, he would have to respond.

The Outsider's period of sanity ended as it began stressing the limits of its habitat. It twitched, spasmed. Its components turned upon one another. A convulsion cracked a gap in a seal supposedly proof against violence. High-pressure methane squirted through.

There was no explosion. A three meter sword of flame stabbed a control panel. Heat interrupted circuits. Smoke boiled. Plastics began to burn. Alarms whooped. Fire-suppressant systems reacted too late or not at all. Temperatures went up and up and up. More systems failed.

Fire reached a storage compartment for chemicals used inside the closed environments of Tregesser and the Outsider.

The Lupo who first reached the cavity witnessed the blow, which sent shrapnel rocketing unpredictably off the walls. But the Outsider knew nothing of that. Its components were dead already, some of asphyxiation, some of oxygen poisoning, some of decompression, or, failing all of those, of being broiled medium well.

The Lupo watched the violence subside, shook his head, went back topside to see if instruments had recorded anything that would explain what had happened. He doubted he would learn anything.

He did not.

He did get to wondering.

— 30 —

In a place no Canon human knew or would go by choice, in a murk of methane and ammonia, a dozen colonial intelligences harkened as another thrumming blast of agony echoed across the Web. Their components rearranged themselves in some expression of shared emotion. It may have been sorrow, or anger, or despair, or something no human could conceive. Certainly there was a period of inactivity that might have been memorial or mourning.

Then that council joined its multiple brains to consider new machinations.

— 31 —

Turtle had been given quarters reserved for visiting dignitaries, the best living arrangements he had known since the Dire Radiant. A prison cell without bars. Only prisoners mad enough to attack their jailers would need restraint aboard VII Gemina. The Guardship was aware of every sentient corpuscle moving through its metal and plastic veins.

He had the freedom of the ship, with the exception of the Core. What harm could he do?

He was caught more surely than any fly in a spider's snare.

Amber Soul had been installed in the cabin next to his, where her pain was monitored remorselessly. Initially Turtle went nowhere else. He refused to pretend to be anything but a prisoner of the ancient enemy.

Midnight had quarters beyond Amber Soul's but seldom saw them. She spent her time with Hanaver Strate. Turtle felt no rancor. She had to be what she had been created to be.

He was sad, pitying Midnight her pain and Amber Soul her needless agony.

Maybe one of Amber Soul's own kind could penetrate her barriers. To Turtle it was as proof as a Guardship's screens.

Frustration at his helplessness translated into a restlessness he assuaged, eventually, by wandering. But he did so far from the habitats of living crew, out in remote reaches near the rider bays, the nests of pursuit and interceptor fighters, and the Hellspinner pits. There were places out there that offered direct views of naked starspace.

He suspected thousands of Guardship crew never saw space except as a telerelay. A screen had boundaries. A screen never portrayed more than a small, flat section of reality. These humans did not like to admit that they were of no consequence in the eye of the universe.