“Kern Loi?” said Dem Lia to the astronomer.

“Yes.” The young woman’s voice quavered slightly.

“Patek Georg Dem Mio?”

The red-band security specialist grinned. “Yes. As the ancient saying goes, no guts, no glory.”

Dem Lia was irritated. “You’re speaking for 684,288 sleeping people who might not be so devil-may-care.”

Patek Georg’s grin stayed in place. “My vote is yes.”

“Dr. Samel Ria Kem Ali?”

The medic looked as troubled as Patek had brazen. “I must say… there are so many unknowns…” He looked around. “Yes,” he said. “We must be sure.”

“Peter Delem Dem Tae?” Dem Lia asked the blue-banded psychologist.

The older man had been chewing on a pencil. He looked at it, smiled, and set it on the table. “Yes.”

“Res Sandre?”

For a second the other green-band woman’s eyes seemed to show defiance, almost anger. Dem Lia steeled herself for the veto and the lecture that would follow.

“Yes,” said Res Sandre. “I believe it’s a moral imperative.”

That left the youngest in the group.

“Den Soa?” said Dem Lia.

The young woman had to clear her throat before speaking. “Yes. Let’s go look.”

All eyes turned to the appointed commander.

“I vote yes,” said Dem Lia. “Saigyô, prepare for maximum acceleration toward the translation point to Hawking drive. Kem Loi, you and Res Sandre and Oam Rai work on the optimum inbound translation point for a systemwide search for life. Chief Branchman Redt, Far Rider, True Voice of the Tree Kasteen, if you would prefer to wait behind, we will prepare the airlock now. If you three wish to come, we must leave immediately.”

The Chief Branchman spoke without consulting the others. “We wish to accompany you, Citizen Dem Lia.”

She nodded. “Far Rider, tell your people to clear a wide wake. We’ll angle above the plane of the ecliptic outward bound, but our fusion tail is going to be fierce as a dragon’s breath.”

The fully space-adapted Ouster broadcast, “I have already done so. Many are looking forward to the spectacle.”

Dem Lia grunted softly. “Let’s hope it’s not more of a spectacle than we’ve all bargained for,” she said.

The Helix made the jump safely, with only minor upset to a few of the ship’s subsystems. At a distance of three AU’s from the surface of the red giant, they surveyed the system. They had estimated two days, but the survey was done in less than twenty-four hours.

There were no hidden planets, no planetoids, no hollowed-out asteroids, no converted comets, no artificial space habitats—no sign of life whatsoever. When the G2 star had finished its evolution into a red giant at least three million years earlier, its helium nuclei began burning its own ash in a high-temperature second round of fusion reactions at the star’s core while the original hydrogen fusion continued in a thin shell far from that core, the whole process creating carbon and oxygen atoms that added to the reaction and… presto… the short-lived rebirth of the star as a red giant. It was obvious that there had been no outer planets, no gas giants, no rocky worlds beyond the new red sun’s reach. Any inner planets had been swallowed whole by the expanding star. Outgassing of dust and heavy radiation had all but cleared the solar system of anything larger than nickel-iron meteorites.

“So,” said Patek Georg, “that’s that.”

“Shall I authorize the AI’s to begin full acceleration toward the return translation point?” said Res Sandre.

The Ouster diplomats had been moved to the command deck with their specialized couches. No one minded the one-tenth gravity on the bridge because each of the Amoiete Spectrum specialists—with the exception of Ces Ambre—was enmeshed in a control couch and in touch with the ship on a variety of levels. The Ouster diplomats had been silent during most of the search, and they remained silent now as they turned to look at Dem Lia at her center console.

The elected commander tapped her lower lip with her knuckle. “Not quite yet.” Their searches had brought them all around the red giant, and now they were less than one AU from its broiling surface. “Saigyô, have you looked inside the star?”

“Just enough to sample it,” came the AI’s affable voice. “Typical for a red giant at this stage. Solar luminosity is about two thousand times that of its G8 companion. We sampled the core—no surprises. The helium nuclei there are obviously engaged despite their mutual electrical repulsion.”

“What is its surface temperature?” asked Dem Lia.

“Approximately three thousand degrees Kelvin,” came Saigyô’s voice. “About half of what the surface temperature had been when it was a G2 sun.”

“Oh, my God,” whispered the violet-band Kem Loi from her couch in the astronomy station nexus. “Are you thinking…”

“Deep-radar the star, please,” said Dem Lia.

The graphics holos appeared less than twenty minutes later as the star turned and they orbited it. Saigyô said, “A single rocky world. Still in orbit. Approximately four-fifths Old Earth’s size. Radar evidence of ocean bottoms and former riverbeds.”

Dr. Samel said, “It was probably earthlike until its expanding sun boiled away its seas and evaporated its atmosphere. God help whoever or whatever lived there.”

“How deep in the sun’s troposphere is it?” asked Dem Lia.

“Less than a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers,” said Saigyô.

Dem Lia nodded. “Raise the containment fields to maximum,” she said softly. “Let’s go visit them.”

It’s like swimming under the surface of a red sea, Dem Lia thought as they approached the rocky world. Above them, the outer atmosphere of the star swirled and spiraled, tornadoes of magnetic fields rose from the depths and dissipated, and the containment field was already glowing despite the thirty micromonofilament cables they had trailed out a hundred and sixty thousand klicks behind them to act as radiators.

For an hour the Helix stood off less than twenty thousand kilometers from what was left of what could once have been Old Earth or Hyperion. Various sensors showed the rocky world through the swirling red murk.

“A cinder,” said Jon Mikail Dem Alem.

“A cinder filled with life,” said Kem Loi at the primary sensing nexus. She brought up the deep-radar holo. “Absolutely honeycombed. Internal oceans of water. At least three billion sentient entities. I have no idea if they’re humanoid, but they have machines, transport mechanisms, and citylike hives. You can even see the docking port where their harvester puts in every fifty-seven years.”

“But still no understandable contact?” asked Dem Lia. The Helix had been broadcasting basic mathematical overtures on every bandwidth, spectrum, and communications technology the ship had—from radio maser to modulated tachyons. There had been a return broadcast of sorts.

“Modulated gravity waves,” explained Ikkyû. “But not responding to our mathematical or geometrical overtures. They are picking up our electromagnetic signals but not understanding them, and we can’t decipher their gravitonic pulses.”

“How long to study the modulations until we can find a common alphabet?” demanded Dem Lia.

Ikkyû’s lined face looked pained. “Weeks, at least. Months more likely. Possibly years.” The AI returned the disappointed gaze of the humans, Ousters and Templar. “I am sorry,” he said, opening his hands. “Humankind has only contacted two sentient alien races before, and they both found ways to communicate with us. These… beings… are truly alien. There are too few common referents.”

“We can’t stay here much longer,” said Res Sandre at her engineering nexus. “Powerful magnetic storms are coming up from the core. And we just can’t dissipate the heat quickly enough. We have to leave.”

Suddenly Ces Ambre, who had a couch but no station or duties, stood, floated a meter above the deck in the one-tenth g, moaned, and slowly floated to the deck in a dead faint.