The Outsider offered only token counterfire. And that soon fell silent.

One salvo stilled the drives. But too late. The Outsider was in a groove that would take it into atmosphere in thirty-eight hours.

WarAvocat XXVIII Fretensis ordered the attackers to concentrate on shield generators. When permanent gaps appeared, he began recovering his secondaries.

XXVIII Fretensis began laying in all the fire it could, including 100cm axial clusters at 12,000mps capable of penetrating to the Outsider's Core—if it had one.

On the Outsider's far side, which had suffered little damage, attackers began opening a path for boarding parties already on the move.

The invaders found nothing alive. In the few hours they had they learned very little. They collected biological and technical samples and got out in time for XXVIII Fretensis to pound the hulk into fragments unlikely to be large enough to do damage when they reached the planet's surface.

As the Guardship turned toward the Web, M. Meddinia station broke communications silence with a laconic, "Thank you, Guardship."

The only Guardship casualties were two bruised and embarrassed pilots whose interceptors had collided during a race to be first through a gap in the Outsider's screen.

— 40 —

Jo slammed into the suite. She was in a grim mood. Vadja had the monitor. Degas and AnyKaat watched over his shoulders. Jo demanded, "Any sign of the krekelen?"

"Not a whiff," AnyKaat replied.

"What's going on?"

Vadja said, "We've maybe got a breakthrough, Sergeant. Course, I only hear the Commander's end. But it sounds like they're talking."

"Good. About damned time."

"Something eating you, Sergeant?"

"I just spent a watch poking around on the bridge. Making a pain of myself. It wasn't Timmerbach's turn to be on but he showed up ten minutes after I did. Looked like he dragged out of his rack in a panic. Worked his butt off trying to keep me from poking in the wrong places. But I still saw enough to know he stuck it to us when he skipped that strand. Him and Cholot are up to something. They think they're going to hand us the dirty end. Wish he'd hurry up."

"Want me to buzz him?"

"Don't bother. Time won't matter. I just want to break some bones."

Degas asked, "Did you get into the system deep enough to cull those biomass figures?" He was convinced that the krekelen had killed somebody and assumed his identity. Haget rejected the notion. Jo was drifting toward Degas's viewpoint.

Degas headed for the door. "I'm going to the galley. That thing has to eat."

Jo looked at AnyKaat, who said, "Instead of looking for the man, he looks for his footprints. Like checking with cooks and stewards on what meals went out when and where."

Vadja leaned back. "The Commander has had enough. He's working on his graceful exit."

Jo leaned past him. Haget was by-the-booking it out the door.

"Way to go, Commander!" Vadja enthused. "Look at there. He broke away clean."

Jo rested a hand on Vadja's shoulder. "How's your arm, Era?"

"Hurts bad enough. I don't think it's going to fall off."

Macho bastards were all alike, male or female. She had talked the same damned way. Was it just soldiers' territory? A defense mechanism that kicked in when you were vulnerable?

Haget shoved into the suite, flopped into a chair. "Jo. Can I impose on you?"

"That's what I'm here for."

"Ask a steward for an analgesic, some soda water, and whatever that liquor was you were swilling the other night."

"Headache?"

"Low grade. Nerves. It would have become a killer if I'd stayed down there."

"You got through?"

"Sort of. It's decided to cooperate. Sort of. Its thinking right into your head isn't as convenient as it sounds. It hurts."

AnyKaat called the stewards while Jo listened.

Haget said, "It's ground gained. Maybe we'll manage some back-and-forth now."

"Did you get anything?"

"Only that it's real anxious to get back to V. Rothica 4. It claims one of its own is marooned there, a child, that it overlooked when the Traveler was there."

"If it missed this kid when it was there, how come it knows now?"

"There's where communications break down. Maybe it couldn't explain. Maybe I just didn't understand. But it's positive and it can't figure out why we won't jigger the clockwork of the universe to help. Hell with it. I don't want to think about it. Answer the door."

The steward had come. He looked at them warily, the way Jo had come to expect. The STASIS people said law enforcement people faced that daily. Jo did not like it.

Haget asked, "Something bothering you?"

She told him about her visit to the bridge.

"Give me fifteen minutes. Then I'll choke Timmerbach till he tells us what's happening."

"Might do better with Cholot. Little sweater like the Chief, he isn't going to spit without orders."

"Uhm. Check the infocomm. See if you can access any Web data. See about this strand Timmerbach wants to pick up."

Jo did that. Timmerbach and Cholot, the twits, were slapstick comics at conspiracy. They had not locked inferential data out of the system.

"Commander, the second system down that strand is L. Caelovica 3, known locally as Karihn. Main city is Cholot Mogadore. Three stations. Only one handles Web traffic. Not much, but the only settled system on the strand. I'd guess only Cholot ships go there."

"That's enough. It ties the knot tight. We'll give them some slack and see how they hang themselves."

— 41 —

There were few occasions when the crews of Guardships came in contact. WarAvocat had come face to face with XII Fulminata crew only twice. He had not been impressed. They suffered from an excess of arrogance and presumption of superiority.

Still, there was a trap in that end space and there was no reason to suspect that it had not been put together with care. This might be the time the villains had what it would take. Wouldn't hurt to go in with more than one Guardship.

"You think too much, Strate," he muttered. "Don't think, act."

The tramp of many feet echoed through the corridors of Starbase. VII Gemina was warming every body and turning everyone loose, to have most of their expectations disappointed.

This was not the Starbase of old. This Starbase was a ghost artifact, empty corridors echoing only to phantom memories of the bustle that had been.

Today it was all automation, machines pursuing ancient programmes, overseen by the ghosts of ghosts, carrying on without human clutter.

There were six completed replacement Guardships in the construction channel and a dozen more being completed at a leisurely pace. They amounted to a macro-exemplar of the process by which slain soldiers were replaced. If a Guardship was lost, a replacement would be impressed with data left during its last visit to Starbase.

VII Gemina began updating its file when it broke off the Web. That would continue throughout its stay. All crew would register a current personal file.

VII Gemina might be destroyed, but there would always be a VII Gemina.

Those who created the fleet had faced a problem as old as idealism: how to keep the fire burning. Children reject the dreams of their parents, and grandchildren hold them in contempt.

Their answer was to preserve the founding generation.

A whisper from behind told Strate his time was no longer his own.

He did not hurry. They could not start without him. And they would be irked with him anyway, having to deal with a Dictat-WarAvocat who was one of the living.

He was less than a minute late. The stir had hardly settled.

Was there any real point to this formalization? A face-to-face only highlighted the ways in which Guardships had evolved independently.