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Chapter Sixteen

The aircar's central compartment had luxury seating for eight. Sun, Vesey, and the eight ordinary crewmen found it uncomfortably roomy: spacers liked close quarters or they'd have found some other line of work. The rear compartment had jumpseats for servants as well as cargo tie-downs; the expedition's food and luggage rode there now.

Daniel and Hogg were on either end of the bench seat in front, sandwiching their driver/guide Dorotige, the attendant Daniel had met guarding the Captal's gate. Today he wore a gray jacket over loose khaki trousers instead of the clown suit he'd been in for the party.

"I wish to God that you'd packed those guns away in the back," Dorotige said, shouting over the sound of wind and the fans' vibration. The central compartment was slung in elastic to isolate the passengers from the noise of operation, but the driver had no such luxury. "Or left them back in Spires, better yet. There's nothing bigger than your thumbnail on South Land."

"You've been here before," Daniel said, looking down at a plain broken by ravines where russet vegetation found enough moisture to grow. In the forward distance rose sandstone hills which the wind had weathered out of the surrounding clay. "My crewmen haven't, and this isn't the sort of business they're trained for anyway. They're more comfortable being armed."

In truth, Daniel's only real concern about the expedition was the same one the Captal's man had voiced. The spacers weren't for the most part any more familiar with hand weapons than they were with camping in the middle of a barren desert. Even though he'd ordered them to leave the guns' power switches off, there was a real chance that somebody'd put a bullet through himself, a fellow, or the car's drive fans.

"They'll be all right, buddy," Hogg said. "Most of this lot know which end the slug comes out of. And I told 'em that if anybody looses off a round, it'd better kill me straight out, because I'm sure as shit going to cut his throat if it don't."

Hogg was quite capable of exaggeration. He was also capable of cutting somebody's throat. Daniel hoped the comment was in the former category, but he even more hoped that he'd never have to learn.

An intercom connected the vehicle's three compartments, but Sun used his helmet's unit channel to ask, "Captain? What's the ETA now? We ought to be getting close, right?"

"Hold one," Daniel said, flipping down his visor and cueing the geographical overlay. It didn't show what he expected it to. Frowning, he used the thumb dial under his left ear to increase the scale until the destination pip showed on the same screen as the point where the helmet's inertial navigation system placed the aircar. They were to the north of the plotted ruins and well inland of them as well.

"Dorotige," Daniel said without raising his voice more than the noise level required. Hogg must have heard something in the tone, because he reached into his pocket.

"Yeah?" Dorotige muttered.

There was a snick from Hogg's side of the compartment. "Look at the master when he's talking to you, fishbait," Hogg said. He didn't speak loudly either, but with the point of a seven-inch knife blade resting against Dorotige's throat, he didn't have to.

"What the hell!" Dorotige screamed. The aircar lurched sideways. If Hogg hadn't been very fast, the jolt would have done exactly what the driver was afraid of; but while you could fault Hogg's judgment occasionally, Daniel was pretty sure his servant would never kill anybody that he didn't mean to. He had the knife back and closed before Dorotige managed to spit himself on it.

Daniel steadied the control yoke with his left hand, bringing the car straight and level again. He said, "We aren't heading for the ruins like we're supposed to be, Dorotige. Why is that?"

"What do you mean not the ruins?" the driver shouted, angry and terrified at the same time. He pointed through the windscreen toward the ground five hundred feet below. "What the hell do you think that is down there? Look, right at the bottom of the hill, there! We're here, you—"

The sound of Hogg's knife reopening punctuated the driver's bluster. He choked the next word off in his throat.

Daniel grimaced. He could see a pattern of lines in the stone, but until he dialed up the magnification on his visor they looked like mere weathering. That still might be what they were, but at 40x magnification and with the helmet's optical stabilizer engaged, Daniel could tell they were straight or at least seemed straight.

"There's two sites!" Dorotige said, now in a tone of injured innocence that Daniel had to admit his right to. "This is where the Captal told me bring you. The water you can get at the place down south has a lot of sulfur in it."

"All right," Daniel said. "Set us down, please."

He glanced into the passenger compartment. The helmet communicator was still engaged so the crewmen had heard everything that was going on. Dasi had his impeller pointed at the back of the driver's head. The heavy slug would punch through the clear plastic without difficulty, true enough, but it'd also send fragments of the panel across the compartment like a grenade blast.

Daniel frowned and waved the weapon away. He said, "All personnel prepare for landing. We've reached our destination."

He felt uncomfortable, but that might be simply because he seemed to have made a fool of himself. Still, the Captal should have mentioned that he'd directed them to a site that wasn't . . .

Ah. The Captal might not even know what the RCN Sailing Directions said about South Land. Anyway, there was no way of telling what the Captal had said to Gerson or Gerson to Commodore Pettin during their interview.

"I'm very sorry, Dorotige," Daniel said, sitting formally upright. "I jumped to conclusions. It won't happen again."

"And if you watch your tongue when you're talking to the master," Hogg said, "I won't have to prick you to better manners again neither."

Dorotige brought the aircar to a hover, raising a huge doughnut of red dust from the spiky vegetation. The cloud was inevitable, but he let the vehicle slip backward and landed expertly out of the worst of it.

Daniel opened his door; he'd studied the odd pull-lift motion of the latch before they left Spires. He'd learned as a child stuck in a narrowing cave that he didn't want to get into anything where he didn't know the way out.

Hogg stepped onto the deck on his side and surveyed the landscape: dark red rock with horizontal striations where the wind had dug deeper between layers; a sky so pale it was almost white; and cushions of reddish grass an inch or two high and about a foot in diameter. The vegetation vanished into the general rocky undersurface from any distance in the air, except in the ravines where greater moisture and protection from the wind let it grow higher.

Hogg spat. "Yessir," he said. "This is just where I was hoping to spend the next three days."

He turned to glare at Daniel over the cabin of the car. "And don't tell me I didn't have to come, young master," he added, "because you know damned good and well that I wasn't going to leave your ass swinging out here with nobody to look after you!"

"Yes, I did know that, Hogg," Daniel said, stepping to the ground. The contact jolted him all the way from his heel right up the spinal column. For some reason sandstone felt harder than other kinds of rock, even granite and basalt.

"Barnes and Keast, you're on guard till we know what we're dealing with," Sun ordered, lifting the gate of the cargo compartment. "The rest of you, stack arms and let's get the tarp up for shelter so we don't have to screw with it after the sunset. This wind's cold as ice up the ass already!"

That was true beyond doubt. Maybe it was a whim of the weather rather than a variation in climate, but the air here was ten degrees cooler than it had been on Spires when they left this morning. This site was far from the coast, which probably made a difference also. And speaking of the site—

"Hogg, let's look at the ruins," Daniel said. There was high-definition imaging equipment in the kit Adele's servant, Tovera, had packed for the expedition, but for Daniel's initial survey his helmet's recording capacity would be sufficient. "Dorotige, come along with us. You've been here before, and none of our records mention the location at all."

"There's not a hell of a lot to see," Dorotige muttered as he slid across the seat. "God but it's cold!"

Patterns that Daniel had taken for mineral deposits on the rock were actually the stems of woody plants. They crawled across the surface because the wind would shear them if they rose any distance in the air. Their purplish leaves were as tiny as grains of rice.

"Some're up this way," Dorotige said, waving toward the hillside. "But they're all over the place, for what they're worth. It's just ditches in the rock."

He started up the slope. His foot slipped on bare stone; from then on he stepped on the flat mounds of grass that gave him some traction. He was wearing soft-soled sandals better suited for a drawing room than a wilderness.

Daniel thought about how long it must take plants to grow in this windswept aridity but didn't say anything to Dorotige. Besides, only the outer rim of the cushions was still alive; the centers were coarse gray stems.

"Here's one," said Dorotige, pointing to his feet. "Not much to come a thousand miles for, it seems to me."

"You got that right," Hogg said. He spat again, grimacing as the wind blew the gobbet back just short of his boot.

Daniel squatted beside the indentation in the rock, hoping to find some reason to disagree. He couldn't come up with one immediately.

So: there was a trough in the sandstone. It was straight, true enough, but it never got deeper than his index finger and its margins were rounded. Eight feet up it crossed another trough, shallower yet, at right angles. When Daniel held his head low to the ground he could make out a whole network of the markings, just as Dorotige had said.

"They could be footings for walls," Daniel offered. The patterns had been easier to see from the air, because the shadows thrown by the indentations were more obvious than the grooves themselves.

"Or they could be cracks that the wind routed out with sand," Hogg said. His education had been practical rather than scholarly, but there was very little new about the countryside an academic would be able to tell Hogg. "And anyhow, it didn't happen any time in the last couple thousand years."

His boot pointed to—but didn't touch—a shrub growing where troughs joined, its four stems writhing up the intersecting lines. "If this wasn't about as big back when they settled the planet, I'll never touch liquor again."

"I'm getting a jacket," Dorotige said. He stalked off, rubbing his hands together. Daniel ignored him, so Hogg merely shrugged.

Sun had the aircar emptied; Vesey was leading a section with buckets and shovels into the nearest ravine, searching for the water that was supposed to be there. They'd brought three days' supply in jerricans, but it'd be nice to have extra so they could wash.

Daniel stood, feeling momentarily dizzy. Squatting had cut off the circulation in his legs, robbing his brain of blood when he rose too quickly.

"This is fine-grained rock," he said. "I don't see any reason why it should crack at right angles the way it has. And granted that the sand has worn it—"

The aircar's drive fans whined, spinning up from idle; Dorotige hadn't shut the motors down when he landed. Daniel turned, frowning slightly. Sun and the other spacers were nearer to the vehicle, but they were upwind and probably didn't notice.

"Officer Sun?" Daniel said, the name cueing his direct channel to the warrant officer. "Did you order the local to move the—"

Dorotige slammed full power to his fans, sending the aircar downslope in a spray of grit. He kept it sliding only a handsbreadth above the ground so that surface effect supported the vehicle and as much power as possible went to accelerating its mass. The spacers shouted angrily, shielding their eyes as the car passed.

Hogg rolled his impeller's butt to his shoulder. His left hand gripped the fore-end while his arm stressed the sling to provide two more contact points locking the weapon on target.

"Don't shoot!" Daniel said. He knocked the impeller up with the edge of his hand.

The weapon's whack! punctured only the empty sky. The hairs on Daniel's arm stood out straight; the pellet's aluminum driving skirt, ionized by the flux through the barrel's coil windings, quivered like a blob of rainbow in front of the muzzle.

When Hogg's shot crashed out, Barnes and Keast opened up with their submachine guns. If they'd heard Daniel's shout (which wasn't certain against the wind), they ignored it in favor of the direct appeal of somebody else shooting.

Daniel saw two sparkles from the vehicle's quarter panel where ten-grain pellets disintegrated against the dense structural plastic. A swatch of hillside fifty meters from the car erupted in miniature dust devils. If the guard—no way to tell which one—had missed the same distance to the left instead of right, he'd have laced his burst into fellow spacers scrambling for their stacked weapons.

Hogg, his face as dark and stiff as an old boot, lowered the weapon across his chest in a carry position. He didn't look at Daniel.

"Cease fire!" Daniel bellowed on the unit push. He spread his feet and stood arms akimbo, hoping to dominate the situation by example since he was too far from the others to interfere the way he had with Hogg.

The aircar dipped behind a knoll too low to notice in the ordinary course of events. Daniel could still track the vehicle by the line of dust rising in a dull red haze.

"I could've taken the bastard's head off," Hogg said in a tight voice, still refusing to look at his master. "Easy as nailing a tree-hopper back in Bantry."

"I know you could have, Hogg," Daniel said quietly. "Let's go down to the others. They don't know what's happened and it probably worries them."

"I don't know what's happened," Hogg snarled. "And I don't know about worried, but this ain't exactly the place I'd figured to spend my declining years."

They started toward Sun and the others. Vesey and her team appeared at the lip of the ravine. The midshipman's pistol, the only weapon among the four of them, was in her hand.

A mile from the site he'd marooned the Cinnabar spacers, Dorotige lifted the aircar from the nap of the earth. It was a black dot against the pale sky. Hogg paused.

"Bastard's going straight away so I wouldn't need to lead him," he said. "I could still . . . ?"

"Yes," said Daniel. "And if you brought him down, how are we better off? I don't imagine he intended to kill us or he wouldn't have waited for us to unload all our equipment and provisions."

"I'd be better off knowing the bastard was dead," Hogg muttered, but he knew it wasn't an argument he'd win with his master. He didn't push beyond the bare comment.

Daniel could be as ruthless as was necessary to safeguard his mission and his crew. If he didn't care to kill for no better reason than anger, though . . . well, that was his business. There was nobody on South Land to overrule him.

Sun already had the satellite radio out when Daniel and Hogg reached the intended campsite. It was part of the gear the Captal had supplied with the aircar and driver. Adele could have adapted one of the corvette's own units, but it was simpler to borrow a radio keyed to the planetary frequencies.

"I swear I tested it before we packed it aboard, sir," Sun said miserably. "It's dead as Todd the Founder, now."

"I'm sure you did, Sun," Daniel said. "It was my mistake not to expect sabotage."

A wry smile lighted his face. "And of course, there was a satellite communicator as part of the aircar's commo suite if we needed a backup."

He glanced around the semicircle of his subordinates. They straightened and tried to look unconcerned as they met his eyes, all but Barnes. The big man had turned his back shamefacedly as he reloaded the submachine gun he'd emptied without—or against—orders.

"All right, spacers," Daniel said. He saw his subordinates through the mask of the terrain display projected onto the inner surface of his visor. "We've been left here without communication. I assume the intention is to keep us—"

To keep Daniel himself; though he couldn't imagine why. The rest of the party were top spacers, but the Princess Cecile could certainly operate without them.

"—out of the way for reasons that aren't clear at present. Our food is RCN issue, so we'll have no difficulty there for at least a week. The water we've brought should last as long if we're careful. According to the background Officer Mundy prepared for me, some of the vegetation here is edible."

Though Daniel for one would have to be damned hungry to get up an appetite for lichen soup.

"Vesey?" he said. "What's the situation for water locally?"

The midshipman looked down in horror at the pistol she still held. In squeaky embarrassment she said, "Sir! We found water a few inches below the pebble surface of the ravine's bottom and just started filling our containers with osmotic lifts. It, ah, tasted all right. Sir!"

"Very good, Vesey," Daniel said. He deliberately turned his head so that Vesey could holster her weapon out of his sight.

"Spacers," Daniel resumed, "we've been left some three hundred miles to the north of where Lieutenant Mon will expect us to be. That's my fault also. I think there's a fair likelihood that the people who marooned us here plan to pick us up again in the future."

Daniel felt a grin form at the corners of his mouth. That provided a good reason not to shoot down the Captal's aircar, though he knew his decision had nothing to do with reason.

"I don't know that's their plan," he continued, "and in any case, they aren't people we could trust."

He grinned more broadly. He didn't even know who they were with certainty.

"We could hike overland to where we were supposed to be," Daniel said, "but I believe there's a better option. A hundred and fifty miles to the north of us is a navigation beacon for orbiting starships. With a little luck, we can rig that to summon help from Spires."

"By God we can!" said Sun, looking cheerful for the first time since he'd found the radio was dead. His training to repair electromotive weapons as armorer gave him more hands-on skill with electronics than Daniel and Vesey had gotten at the Academy.

Daniel looked at the sky. The sun was midway to the western horizon. "Hogg," he said, "break up what we need for the march into loads we can carry. Food, water, tools. One tarp for shelter. We'll leave an arrow of rocks on the ground to indicate our direction of travel if anyone comes back for us."

"How about guns, sir?" Sun asked.

Daniel looked at Hogg and raised an eyebrow. Hogg rubbed his mouth with a knuckle, considering the spacers. "Two impellers," he said. "Sun, you carry one, I'll have the other. The officers . . . ?"

He looked at Daniel and raised an eyebrow in turn.

Daniel unsnapped his pistol, holster and all, and laid it on the rocks at his feet. "Quite right, Hogg," he said. "Our enemy now is weight, not anything we can shoot."

"For now it is," Hogg said in a musing, almost cheerful, tone. "But when we have got back, then I've got some ideas about the next thing we do."

From context, that had to be "camp," not "can't." Adele adjusted the character recognition parameters on her personal data unit, then used it to rescan the document's obverse. The machine whirred softly as it worked.

Adele stretched, wondering how long she'd been here in the attic of the Civil Government Building. The museum and library in the basement would have been a disappointment if she'd had any real expectations. She'd gotten a feeling she couldn't have explained when the museum's volunteer director, a retired ship chandler, mentioned the dead storage for items that weren't worth displaying, however.

Felt the thrill of the chase, Adele supposed. She visualized Hogg beside her in the dimness, waiting in perfect silence for prey to step into his sight picture. The thought made her smile, but there was truth in it nonetheless: every line of work has its tricks, and the people who know their craft very well always have an instinct that goes beyond the available evidence.

The data unit's display suddenly changed from opalescence to projected text. Moments before, about twenty percent of the document had been garbage; now less than half of that amount remained as a blur beyond analysis and reconstruction.

The day after the death of Captain Tyrfing, I left the camp and proceeded north as best I could judge by the sun. Any navigational materials for this godforsaken place had perished with the ship's computer during the crash. . . .
 

The attic was musty, which was actually a good thing from the standpoint of this document's survival. It was written on leather, and now that she'd read much of it Adele had begun to wonder about the source of that leather. The ink came from the berries of what the writer called the Finger Bush. Adele couldn't match the writer's cursory description . . . the height of my forearm, with branches like fingers and fruits of a sullen yellow on the tips thereof . . . with any plant in her database, but she knew she wasn't competent to direct the search for botanical answers.

The attic had a line of resistance lights in the ceiling, but the only two still working were on the far side of the big room. That didn't matter enough for Adele to get the bulbs replaced since she had a handlight and the data unit's display was self-illuminating. It did mean that when someone's body filled the square opening of the trapdoor, the dimming light attracted her attention as the squeaking of the ladder moments before had not.

Adele jerked suddenly alert, her left hand slipping down to the pistol in her pocket. That wasn't a reflex I used to have. . . . 

"Yes?" she said in a carrying voice.

"Ma'am?" Dorst called. "Officer Mundy, I don't mean to bother you but Lieutenant Mon was wondering . . . ?"

"Yes, come on up, Dorst!" Adele said, knowing that she was being snappish because of the way she'd reacted to the surprise. "Wondered what?"

The midshipman climbed the last three steps and squatted down to face her. His head would clear the ceiling if he kept it between the rafters, but then he couldn't look at Adele.

"Ah, Lieutenant Mon was wondering if you'd heard anything from the captain, ah, Adele," Dorst said. "He hasn't reported in to the ship, and the guy who loaned him the car, da Lund I mean, he says he hasn't heard anything either."

"I've been here all day," Adele said, wondering how she felt at the news. Her normal reaction was to shut down all emotion so that it didn't get in the way of accurate analysis. That was still the correct reaction, but this time it felt . . . odd. "I don't care to be disturbed while I'm working."

"Yes ma'am," Dorst said, straightening abruptly and thumping his head into a beam of reinforced concrete. He winced and stumbled forward, then knelt on one knee so he could keep his spine stiff while facing Adele.

"Yes, sir," he said. "Lieutenant Mon didn't want to interrupt you, but just on the off chance . . . And I said I knew where you might be even if you weren't answering calls, so he told me I could come. Ah, Midshipman Vesey's with the expedition and . . . but it's probably nothing, they were just too busy to report when they landed."

Adele had already suspended the document analysis and was checking message traffic. Rather than looking at communications addressed to the Princess Cecile—the on-duty personnel were certainly capable of having done that—she coded her search for the time the comsats of Sexburga's low-orbit constellation were over South Land. It was just possible that a message had been received by a satellite which had failed to pass it on, or that—through some electronic hiccup between the local system and the corvette—the central communications node had swallowed the information.

The individual satellite logs showed no private messages coming out of South Land. The continuous broadcast from the navigation beacon on the northern headland was logged, providing Adele with proof that the satellites were working properly.

She paged Tovera through the transponder on the corvette—Meet me at the ship ASAP—then shut down her personal data unit and stood. The attic's contents were a shadowed jumble about her. Early on somebody had made an attempt to keep this overflow organized, but for the past several decades—judging by the dates of the documents Adele had unearthed—boxes had been piled on filing cabinets and into the aisles the initial planners had left.

She'd been working on a smooth-surfaced attaché case stacked on a packing crate of rubberized metal. She put away the data unit, then paused as she considered what to do with the document she'd found in a drawer of pre-Hiatus logbooks.

"What's that, ma'am?" Dorst asked, reaching forward as he spoke. "A piece of boot?"

"Don't touch that!" Adele said, then frowned at herself. Though he had to learn to ask before he put his hands on things . . .

"That is," she continued to the midshipman, ramrod straight though still on his knee, "that's a diary of sorts from the initial settlement of the planet some fifteen hundred years ago. The writer was the only survivor of a wrecked starship who lived for nine years with the natives of South Land."

Adele frowned again. "He says he did," she added, because you could scarcely consider this unimpeachable evidence.

"That's writing?" Dorst said, leaning far over to bring his eyes closer to the document. He clasped his hands behind his back to show that there was no danger of him touching the leather. "What language . . . ?"

Adele smiled. "It's in Universal," she said, "but the writer had a very crabbed hand and he wrote on both sides of the sheet. And—"

"These are holes in the paper!" Dorst said as his mind finally realized that he was seeing the attaché case, not pale gray ink against the dark brown leather. He looked up at Adele in amazement.

"Yes," she said dryly. "The ink he used was mildly acidic. It ate through the leather from both sides in the course of a millennium and a half. This makes transcription more difficult than it usually would be."

A document like this deserved care beyond anything available on Sexburga, but that couldn't be Adele's present priority. She opened the acetate folder she'd found it in and slipped one edge under the fragile wondrousness of the memoir. Closing the folder, she put the document back into the drawer where it had been.

It had survived there for decades or more. If matters worked out the way Adele hoped they would, she could return and preserve the account properly. If not, she didn't suppose it mattered very much.

She gestured Dorst to the opening. "Let's go," she said crisply.

"Ma'am," he said, rising to a stoop, "why don't you go down and I'll latch the trap behind us. It'll be easier for me, I think."

"Yes, all right," Adele said, squeezing past the midshipman. He'd spoken as though he'd been watching her sway as she worked the stiff bolt to open the attic. Well, you didn't have to be around Officer Mundy very long to imagine how clumsy she'd be on a ladder.

"Ma'am?" Dorst said, gripping her arm in a tactful but firm fashion. "If you turn so you face the ladder, you'll be, ah, more comfortable."

"Safer," Adele said, supplying the correct word as she obediently turned and started down. Though falling fifteen feet onto her face—the Council Chamber was on this floor and the ceiling was high—would certainly be uncomfortable.

Dorst waited till she'd reached the hallway to follow. He slammed the trapdoor with no trouble: the sudden weight had almost swept Adele off the ladder when the bolt released it.

"I didn't know there were natives on Sexburga, ma'am," he said, dropping lightly onto the balls of his feet instead of climbing down the rungs.

He smiled in a hopeful, puppyish way. Adele realized that he was trying to change the unstated subject from her physical ineptitude. That was the sort of handicap that bothered people who didn't trip over themselves more than it did Adele herself, but she found the impulse engaging.

"There aren't any natives according to the printed data I've found," Adele said, striding briskly down the hallway. "That's what made this account so interesting. The writer says that he lived alone for months before they showed themselves to him. After that they fed him, and if I've followed the text correctly . . ."

Dorst glanced back at the tall step ladder, but Adele waved him on. The janitor had dragged the ladder out for her with bad grace despite the generous tip she'd given him; he could put it away or leave it in the middle of the corridor as he chose.

"If I've read the text correctly," she resumed as she started down the end stairs, "he claims to have formed a romantic alliance within the tribe. And to have fathered a child."

A group of Sexburgans chattering in accented Universal were coming up in a cluster around a woman so pale that Adele would have guessed she was an albino, except that her eyes were an icy gray-blue. The Sexburgans all watched the pale woman, but her eyes followed Dorst until she disappeared through the door onto the second floor.

"That can't be, ma'am," Dorst said. The outside door was stiff; it resisted Adele until the midshipman hit it, high and low with his palm and bootsole. "Species aren't interfertile, and for sure animals on two different planets can't breed."

"That was my understanding also," Adele said. Insufficient data could cause mistakes. Certainty about matters where the data were insufficient was a mistake on its face. "On the other hand, I wasn't there and the writer very possibly was."

The streets of Spires weren't lighted, and the sky was dark except for the stars. They were unfamiliar constellations in a manner of speaking, but Adele didn't know anything about the stars above Cinnabar either. She was a city dweller, and if she'd ever been interested in the night sky she'd have called up a computer projection of it.

"Ma'am?" Dorst said, falling abreast as they started up the street. "Lieutenant Mon's going to send our jeep south to find the captain and, and the others. It can't bring them back all at once if there's a problem, but it'll take another radio and some medical supplies. Are you going along?"

A ship took off from the harbor. Adele lowered her eyes, shielding them further with her hand as she waited for the plasma's artificial thunder to subside.

Dorst slipped his goggles into place, watching the liftoff as he strode along. "It's the Achilles, that's the yacht that made the fast run from Cinnabar," he shouted. "Of course, that was nothing to what we did under Captain Leary."

"I'm sure Lieutenant Mon can find more suitable personnel for a search party on South Land," Adele said, going back to the previous question. "I intend to learn what I can here about the Captal da Lund and his friends."

Percussion bands were playing at the upper and lower ends of the street, the tunes syncopating one another. Because Adele was unfamiliar with the local instrumentation, it took her a moment to realize that the counterpoint wasn't intended. The Strymonian yacht had shrunk to an unusually bright star in the heavens.

"And I think," she added, "that I'm going to see where the Achilles is off to."

Dorst looked at her. She shrugged and grinned. "Just a feeling," Adele said. "An instinct, if you like."

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Framed

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Chapter Sixteen

The aircar's central compartment had luxury seating for eight. Sun, Vesey, and the eight ordinary crewmen found it uncomfortably roomy: spacers liked close quarters or they'd have found some other line of work. The rear compartment had jumpseats for servants as well as cargo tie-downs; the expedition's food and luggage rode there now.

Daniel and Hogg were on either end of the bench seat in front, sandwiching their driver/guide Dorotige, the attendant Daniel had met guarding the Captal's gate. Today he wore a gray jacket over loose khaki trousers instead of the clown suit he'd been in for the party.

"I wish to God that you'd packed those guns away in the back," Dorotige said, shouting over the sound of wind and the fans' vibration. The central compartment was slung in elastic to isolate the passengers from the noise of operation, but the driver had no such luxury. "Or left them back in Spires, better yet. There's nothing bigger than your thumbnail on South Land."

"You've been here before," Daniel said, looking down at a plain broken by ravines where russet vegetation found enough moisture to grow. In the forward distance rose sandstone hills which the wind had weathered out of the surrounding clay. "My crewmen haven't, and this isn't the sort of business they're trained for anyway. They're more comfortable being armed."

In truth, Daniel's only real concern about the expedition was the same one the Captal's man had voiced. The spacers weren't for the most part any more familiar with hand weapons than they were with camping in the middle of a barren desert. Even though he'd ordered them to leave the guns' power switches off, there was a real chance that somebody'd put a bullet through himself, a fellow, or the car's drive fans.

"They'll be all right, buddy," Hogg said. "Most of this lot know which end the slug comes out of. And I told 'em that if anybody looses off a round, it'd better kill me straight out, because I'm sure as shit going to cut his throat if it don't."

Hogg was quite capable of exaggeration. He was also capable of cutting somebody's throat. Daniel hoped the comment was in the former category, but he even more hoped that he'd never have to learn.

An intercom connected the vehicle's three compartments, but Sun used his helmet's unit channel to ask, "Captain? What's the ETA now? We ought to be getting close, right?"

"Hold one," Daniel said, flipping down his visor and cueing the geographical overlay. It didn't show what he expected it to. Frowning, he used the thumb dial under his left ear to increase the scale until the destination pip showed on the same screen as the point where the helmet's inertial navigation system placed the aircar. They were to the north of the plotted ruins and well inland of them as well.

"Dorotige," Daniel said without raising his voice more than the noise level required. Hogg must have heard something in the tone, because he reached into his pocket.

"Yeah?" Dorotige muttered.

There was a snick from Hogg's side of the compartment. "Look at the master when he's talking to you, fishbait," Hogg said. He didn't speak loudly either, but with the point of a seven-inch knife blade resting against Dorotige's throat, he didn't have to.

"What the hell!" Dorotige screamed. The aircar lurched sideways. If Hogg hadn't been very fast, the jolt would have done exactly what the driver was afraid of; but while you could fault Hogg's judgment occasionally, Daniel was pretty sure his servant would never kill anybody that he didn't mean to. He had the knife back and closed before Dorotige managed to spit himself on it.

Daniel steadied the control yoke with his left hand, bringing the car straight and level again. He said, "We aren't heading for the ruins like we're supposed to be, Dorotige. Why is that?"

"What do you mean not the ruins?" the driver shouted, angry and terrified at the same time. He pointed through the windscreen toward the ground five hundred feet below. "What the hell do you think that is down there? Look, right at the bottom of the hill, there! We're here, you—"

The sound of Hogg's knife reopening punctuated the driver's bluster. He choked the next word off in his throat.

Daniel grimaced. He could see a pattern of lines in the stone, but until he dialed up the magnification on his visor they looked like mere weathering. That still might be what they were, but at 40x magnification and with the helmet's optical stabilizer engaged, Daniel could tell they were straight or at least seemed straight.

"There's two sites!" Dorotige said, now in a tone of injured innocence that Daniel had to admit his right to. "This is where the Captal told me bring you. The water you can get at the place down south has a lot of sulfur in it."

"All right," Daniel said. "Set us down, please."

He glanced into the passenger compartment. The helmet communicator was still engaged so the crewmen had heard everything that was going on. Dasi had his impeller pointed at the back of the driver's head. The heavy slug would punch through the clear plastic without difficulty, true enough, but it'd also send fragments of the panel across the compartment like a grenade blast.

Daniel frowned and waved the weapon away. He said, "All personnel prepare for landing. We've reached our destination."

He felt uncomfortable, but that might be simply because he seemed to have made a fool of himself. Still, the Captal should have mentioned that he'd directed them to a site that wasn't . . .

Ah. The Captal might not even know what the RCN Sailing Directions said about South Land. Anyway, there was no way of telling what the Captal had said to Gerson or Gerson to Commodore Pettin during their interview.

"I'm very sorry, Dorotige," Daniel said, sitting formally upright. "I jumped to conclusions. It won't happen again."

"And if you watch your tongue when you're talking to the master," Hogg said, "I won't have to prick you to better manners again neither."

Dorotige brought the aircar to a hover, raising a huge doughnut of red dust from the spiky vegetation. The cloud was inevitable, but he let the vehicle slip backward and landed expertly out of the worst of it.

Daniel opened his door; he'd studied the odd pull-lift motion of the latch before they left Spires. He'd learned as a child stuck in a narrowing cave that he didn't want to get into anything where he didn't know the way out.

Hogg stepped onto the deck on his side and surveyed the landscape: dark red rock with horizontal striations where the wind had dug deeper between layers; a sky so pale it was almost white; and cushions of reddish grass an inch or two high and about a foot in diameter. The vegetation vanished into the general rocky undersurface from any distance in the air, except in the ravines where greater moisture and protection from the wind let it grow higher.

Hogg spat. "Yessir," he said. "This is just where I was hoping to spend the next three days."

He turned to glare at Daniel over the cabin of the car. "And don't tell me I didn't have to come, young master," he added, "because you know damned good and well that I wasn't going to leave your ass swinging out here with nobody to look after you!"

"Yes, I did know that, Hogg," Daniel said, stepping to the ground. The contact jolted him all the way from his heel right up the spinal column. For some reason sandstone felt harder than other kinds of rock, even granite and basalt.

"Barnes and Keast, you're on guard till we know what we're dealing with," Sun ordered, lifting the gate of the cargo compartment. "The rest of you, stack arms and let's get the tarp up for shelter so we don't have to screw with it after the sunset. This wind's cold as ice up the ass already!"

That was true beyond doubt. Maybe it was a whim of the weather rather than a variation in climate, but the air here was ten degrees cooler than it had been on Spires when they left this morning. This site was far from the coast, which probably made a difference also. And speaking of the site—

"Hogg, let's look at the ruins," Daniel said. There was high-definition imaging equipment in the kit Adele's servant, Tovera, had packed for the expedition, but for Daniel's initial survey his helmet's recording capacity would be sufficient. "Dorotige, come along with us. You've been here before, and none of our records mention the location at all."

"There's not a hell of a lot to see," Dorotige muttered as he slid across the seat. "God but it's cold!"

Patterns that Daniel had taken for mineral deposits on the rock were actually the stems of woody plants. They crawled across the surface because the wind would shear them if they rose any distance in the air. Their purplish leaves were as tiny as grains of rice.

"Some're up this way," Dorotige said, waving toward the hillside. "But they're all over the place, for what they're worth. It's just ditches in the rock."

He started up the slope. His foot slipped on bare stone; from then on he stepped on the flat mounds of grass that gave him some traction. He was wearing soft-soled sandals better suited for a drawing room than a wilderness.

Daniel thought about how long it must take plants to grow in this windswept aridity but didn't say anything to Dorotige. Besides, only the outer rim of the cushions was still alive; the centers were coarse gray stems.

"Here's one," said Dorotige, pointing to his feet. "Not much to come a thousand miles for, it seems to me."

"You got that right," Hogg said. He spat again, grimacing as the wind blew the gobbet back just short of his boot.

Daniel squatted beside the indentation in the rock, hoping to find some reason to disagree. He couldn't come up with one immediately.

So: there was a trough in the sandstone. It was straight, true enough, but it never got deeper than his index finger and its margins were rounded. Eight feet up it crossed another trough, shallower yet, at right angles. When Daniel held his head low to the ground he could make out a whole network of the markings, just as Dorotige had said.

"They could be footings for walls," Daniel offered. The patterns had been easier to see from the air, because the shadows thrown by the indentations were more obvious than the grooves themselves.

"Or they could be cracks that the wind routed out with sand," Hogg said. His education had been practical rather than scholarly, but there was very little new about the countryside an academic would be able to tell Hogg. "And anyhow, it didn't happen any time in the last couple thousand years."

His boot pointed to—but didn't touch—a shrub growing where troughs joined, its four stems writhing up the intersecting lines. "If this wasn't about as big back when they settled the planet, I'll never touch liquor again."

"I'm getting a jacket," Dorotige said. He stalked off, rubbing his hands together. Daniel ignored him, so Hogg merely shrugged.

Sun had the aircar emptied; Vesey was leading a section with buckets and shovels into the nearest ravine, searching for the water that was supposed to be there. They'd brought three days' supply in jerricans, but it'd be nice to have extra so they could wash.

Daniel stood, feeling momentarily dizzy. Squatting had cut off the circulation in his legs, robbing his brain of blood when he rose too quickly.

"This is fine-grained rock," he said. "I don't see any reason why it should crack at right angles the way it has. And granted that the sand has worn it—"

The aircar's drive fans whined, spinning up from idle; Dorotige hadn't shut the motors down when he landed. Daniel turned, frowning slightly. Sun and the other spacers were nearer to the vehicle, but they were upwind and probably didn't notice.

"Officer Sun?" Daniel said, the name cueing his direct channel to the warrant officer. "Did you order the local to move the—"

Dorotige slammed full power to his fans, sending the aircar downslope in a spray of grit. He kept it sliding only a handsbreadth above the ground so that surface effect supported the vehicle and as much power as possible went to accelerating its mass. The spacers shouted angrily, shielding their eyes as the car passed.

Hogg rolled his impeller's butt to his shoulder. His left hand gripped the fore-end while his arm stressed the sling to provide two more contact points locking the weapon on target.

"Don't shoot!" Daniel said. He knocked the impeller up with the edge of his hand.

The weapon's whack! punctured only the empty sky. The hairs on Daniel's arm stood out straight; the pellet's aluminum driving skirt, ionized by the flux through the barrel's coil windings, quivered like a blob of rainbow in front of the muzzle.

When Hogg's shot crashed out, Barnes and Keast opened up with their submachine guns. If they'd heard Daniel's shout (which wasn't certain against the wind), they ignored it in favor of the direct appeal of somebody else shooting.

Daniel saw two sparkles from the vehicle's quarter panel where ten-grain pellets disintegrated against the dense structural plastic. A swatch of hillside fifty meters from the car erupted in miniature dust devils. If the guard—no way to tell which one—had missed the same distance to the left instead of right, he'd have laced his burst into fellow spacers scrambling for their stacked weapons.

Hogg, his face as dark and stiff as an old boot, lowered the weapon across his chest in a carry position. He didn't look at Daniel.

"Cease fire!" Daniel bellowed on the unit push. He spread his feet and stood arms akimbo, hoping to dominate the situation by example since he was too far from the others to interfere the way he had with Hogg.

The aircar dipped behind a knoll too low to notice in the ordinary course of events. Daniel could still track the vehicle by the line of dust rising in a dull red haze.

"I could've taken the bastard's head off," Hogg said in a tight voice, still refusing to look at his master. "Easy as nailing a tree-hopper back in Bantry."

"I know you could have, Hogg," Daniel said quietly. "Let's go down to the others. They don't know what's happened and it probably worries them."

"I don't know what's happened," Hogg snarled. "And I don't know about worried, but this ain't exactly the place I'd figured to spend my declining years."

They started toward Sun and the others. Vesey and her team appeared at the lip of the ravine. The midshipman's pistol, the only weapon among the four of them, was in her hand.

A mile from the site he'd marooned the Cinnabar spacers, Dorotige lifted the aircar from the nap of the earth. It was a black dot against the pale sky. Hogg paused.

"Bastard's going straight away so I wouldn't need to lead him," he said. "I could still . . . ?"

"Yes," said Daniel. "And if you brought him down, how are we better off? I don't imagine he intended to kill us or he wouldn't have waited for us to unload all our equipment and provisions."

"I'd be better off knowing the bastard was dead," Hogg muttered, but he knew it wasn't an argument he'd win with his master. He didn't push beyond the bare comment.

Daniel could be as ruthless as was necessary to safeguard his mission and his crew. If he didn't care to kill for no better reason than anger, though . . . well, that was his business. There was nobody on South Land to overrule him.

Sun already had the satellite radio out when Daniel and Hogg reached the intended campsite. It was part of the gear the Captal had supplied with the aircar and driver. Adele could have adapted one of the corvette's own units, but it was simpler to borrow a radio keyed to the planetary frequencies.

"I swear I tested it before we packed it aboard, sir," Sun said miserably. "It's dead as Todd the Founder, now."

"I'm sure you did, Sun," Daniel said. "It was my mistake not to expect sabotage."

A wry smile lighted his face. "And of course, there was a satellite communicator as part of the aircar's commo suite if we needed a backup."

He glanced around the semicircle of his subordinates. They straightened and tried to look unconcerned as they met his eyes, all but Barnes. The big man had turned his back shamefacedly as he reloaded the submachine gun he'd emptied without—or against—orders.

"All right, spacers," Daniel said. He saw his subordinates through the mask of the terrain display projected onto the inner surface of his visor. "We've been left here without communication. I assume the intention is to keep us—"

To keep Daniel himself; though he couldn't imagine why. The rest of the party were top spacers, but the Princess Cecile could certainly operate without them.

"—out of the way for reasons that aren't clear at present. Our food is RCN issue, so we'll have no difficulty there for at least a week. The water we've brought should last as long if we're careful. According to the background Officer Mundy prepared for me, some of the vegetation here is edible."

Though Daniel for one would have to be damned hungry to get up an appetite for lichen soup.

"Vesey?" he said. "What's the situation for water locally?"

The midshipman looked down in horror at the pistol she still held. In squeaky embarrassment she said, "Sir! We found water a few inches below the pebble surface of the ravine's bottom and just started filling our containers with osmotic lifts. It, ah, tasted all right. Sir!"

"Very good, Vesey," Daniel said. He deliberately turned his head so that Vesey could holster her weapon out of his sight.

"Spacers," Daniel resumed, "we've been left some three hundred miles to the north of where Lieutenant Mon will expect us to be. That's my fault also. I think there's a fair likelihood that the people who marooned us here plan to pick us up again in the future."

Daniel felt a grin form at the corners of his mouth. That provided a good reason not to shoot down the Captal's aircar, though he knew his decision had nothing to do with reason.

"I don't know that's their plan," he continued, "and in any case, they aren't people we could trust."

He grinned more broadly. He didn't even know who they were with certainty.

"We could hike overland to where we were supposed to be," Daniel said, "but I believe there's a better option. A hundred and fifty miles to the north of us is a navigation beacon for orbiting starships. With a little luck, we can rig that to summon help from Spires."

"By God we can!" said Sun, looking cheerful for the first time since he'd found the radio was dead. His training to repair electromotive weapons as armorer gave him more hands-on skill with electronics than Daniel and Vesey had gotten at the Academy.

Daniel looked at the sky. The sun was midway to the western horizon. "Hogg," he said, "break up what we need for the march into loads we can carry. Food, water, tools. One tarp for shelter. We'll leave an arrow of rocks on the ground to indicate our direction of travel if anyone comes back for us."

"How about guns, sir?" Sun asked.

Daniel looked at Hogg and raised an eyebrow. Hogg rubbed his mouth with a knuckle, considering the spacers. "Two impellers," he said. "Sun, you carry one, I'll have the other. The officers . . . ?"

He looked at Daniel and raised an eyebrow in turn.

Daniel unsnapped his pistol, holster and all, and laid it on the rocks at his feet. "Quite right, Hogg," he said. "Our enemy now is weight, not anything we can shoot."

"For now it is," Hogg said in a musing, almost cheerful, tone. "But when we have got back, then I've got some ideas about the next thing we do."

From context, that had to be "camp," not "can't." Adele adjusted the character recognition parameters on her personal data unit, then used it to rescan the document's obverse. The machine whirred softly as it worked.

Adele stretched, wondering how long she'd been here in the attic of the Civil Government Building. The museum and library in the basement would have been a disappointment if she'd had any real expectations. She'd gotten a feeling she couldn't have explained when the museum's volunteer director, a retired ship chandler, mentioned the dead storage for items that weren't worth displaying, however.

Felt the thrill of the chase, Adele supposed. She visualized Hogg beside her in the dimness, waiting in perfect silence for prey to step into his sight picture. The thought made her smile, but there was truth in it nonetheless: every line of work has its tricks, and the people who know their craft very well always have an instinct that goes beyond the available evidence.

The data unit's display suddenly changed from opalescence to projected text. Moments before, about twenty percent of the document had been garbage; now less than half of that amount remained as a blur beyond analysis and reconstruction.

The day after the death of Captain Tyrfing, I left the camp and proceeded north as best I could judge by the sun. Any navigational materials for this godforsaken place had perished with the ship's computer during the crash. . . .
 

The attic was musty, which was actually a good thing from the standpoint of this document's survival. It was written on leather, and now that she'd read much of it Adele had begun to wonder about the source of that leather. The ink came from the berries of what the writer called the Finger Bush. Adele couldn't match the writer's cursory description . . . the height of my forearm, with branches like fingers and fruits of a sullen yellow on the tips thereof . . . with any plant in her database, but she knew she wasn't competent to direct the search for botanical answers.

The attic had a line of resistance lights in the ceiling, but the only two still working were on the far side of the big room. That didn't matter enough for Adele to get the bulbs replaced since she had a handlight and the data unit's display was self-illuminating. It did mean that when someone's body filled the square opening of the trapdoor, the dimming light attracted her attention as the squeaking of the ladder moments before had not.

Adele jerked suddenly alert, her left hand slipping down to the pistol in her pocket. That wasn't a reflex I used to have. . . . 

"Yes?" she said in a carrying voice.

"Ma'am?" Dorst called. "Officer Mundy, I don't mean to bother you but Lieutenant Mon was wondering . . . ?"

"Yes, come on up, Dorst!" Adele said, knowing that she was being snappish because of the way she'd reacted to the surprise. "Wondered what?"

The midshipman climbed the last three steps and squatted down to face her. His head would clear the ceiling if he kept it between the rafters, but then he couldn't look at Adele.

"Ah, Lieutenant Mon was wondering if you'd heard anything from the captain, ah, Adele," Dorst said. "He hasn't reported in to the ship, and the guy who loaned him the car, da Lund I mean, he says he hasn't heard anything either."

"I've been here all day," Adele said, wondering how she felt at the news. Her normal reaction was to shut down all emotion so that it didn't get in the way of accurate analysis. That was still the correct reaction, but this time it felt . . . odd. "I don't care to be disturbed while I'm working."

"Yes ma'am," Dorst said, straightening abruptly and thumping his head into a beam of reinforced concrete. He winced and stumbled forward, then knelt on one knee so he could keep his spine stiff while facing Adele.

"Yes, sir," he said. "Lieutenant Mon didn't want to interrupt you, but just on the off chance . . . And I said I knew where you might be even if you weren't answering calls, so he told me I could come. Ah, Midshipman Vesey's with the expedition and . . . but it's probably nothing, they were just too busy to report when they landed."

Adele had already suspended the document analysis and was checking message traffic. Rather than looking at communications addressed to the Princess Cecile—the on-duty personnel were certainly capable of having done that—she coded her search for the time the comsats of Sexburga's low-orbit constellation were over South Land. It was just possible that a message had been received by a satellite which had failed to pass it on, or that—through some electronic hiccup between the local system and the corvette—the central communications node had swallowed the information.

The individual satellite logs showed no private messages coming out of South Land. The continuous broadcast from the navigation beacon on the northern headland was logged, providing Adele with proof that the satellites were working properly.

She paged Tovera through the transponder on the corvette—Meet me at the ship ASAP—then shut down her personal data unit and stood. The attic's contents were a shadowed jumble about her. Early on somebody had made an attempt to keep this overflow organized, but for the past several decades—judging by the dates of the documents Adele had unearthed—boxes had been piled on filing cabinets and into the aisles the initial planners had left.

She'd been working on a smooth-surfaced attaché case stacked on a packing crate of rubberized metal. She put away the data unit, then paused as she considered what to do with the document she'd found in a drawer of pre-Hiatus logbooks.

"What's that, ma'am?" Dorst asked, reaching forward as he spoke. "A piece of boot?"

"Don't touch that!" Adele said, then frowned at herself. Though he had to learn to ask before he put his hands on things . . .

"That is," she continued to the midshipman, ramrod straight though still on his knee, "that's a diary of sorts from the initial settlement of the planet some fifteen hundred years ago. The writer was the only survivor of a wrecked starship who lived for nine years with the natives of South Land."

Adele frowned again. "He says he did," she added, because you could scarcely consider this unimpeachable evidence.

"That's writing?" Dorst said, leaning far over to bring his eyes closer to the document. He clasped his hands behind his back to show that there was no danger of him touching the leather. "What language . . . ?"

Adele smiled. "It's in Universal," she said, "but the writer had a very crabbed hand and he wrote on both sides of the sheet. And—"

"These are holes in the paper!" Dorst said as his mind finally realized that he was seeing the attaché case, not pale gray ink against the dark brown leather. He looked up at Adele in amazement.

"Yes," she said dryly. "The ink he used was mildly acidic. It ate through the leather from both sides in the course of a millennium and a half. This makes transcription more difficult than it usually would be."

A document like this deserved care beyond anything available on Sexburga, but that couldn't be Adele's present priority. She opened the acetate folder she'd found it in and slipped one edge under the fragile wondrousness of the memoir. Closing the folder, she put the document back into the drawer where it had been.

It had survived there for decades or more. If matters worked out the way Adele hoped they would, she could return and preserve the account properly. If not, she didn't suppose it mattered very much.

She gestured Dorst to the opening. "Let's go," she said crisply.

"Ma'am," he said, rising to a stoop, "why don't you go down and I'll latch the trap behind us. It'll be easier for me, I think."

"Yes, all right," Adele said, squeezing past the midshipman. He'd spoken as though he'd been watching her sway as she worked the stiff bolt to open the attic. Well, you didn't have to be around Officer Mundy very long to imagine how clumsy she'd be on a ladder.

"Ma'am?" Dorst said, gripping her arm in a tactful but firm fashion. "If you turn so you face the ladder, you'll be, ah, more comfortable."

"Safer," Adele said, supplying the correct word as she obediently turned and started down. Though falling fifteen feet onto her face—the Council Chamber was on this floor and the ceiling was high—would certainly be uncomfortable.

Dorst waited till she'd reached the hallway to follow. He slammed the trapdoor with no trouble: the sudden weight had almost swept Adele off the ladder when the bolt released it.

"I didn't know there were natives on Sexburga, ma'am," he said, dropping lightly onto the balls of his feet instead of climbing down the rungs.

He smiled in a hopeful, puppyish way. Adele realized that he was trying to change the unstated subject from her physical ineptitude. That was the sort of handicap that bothered people who didn't trip over themselves more than it did Adele herself, but she found the impulse engaging.

"There aren't any natives according to the printed data I've found," Adele said, striding briskly down the hallway. "That's what made this account so interesting. The writer says that he lived alone for months before they showed themselves to him. After that they fed him, and if I've followed the text correctly . . ."

Dorst glanced back at the tall step ladder, but Adele waved him on. The janitor had dragged the ladder out for her with bad grace despite the generous tip she'd given him; he could put it away or leave it in the middle of the corridor as he chose.

"If I've read the text correctly," she resumed as she started down the end stairs, "he claims to have formed a romantic alliance within the tribe. And to have fathered a child."

A group of Sexburgans chattering in accented Universal were coming up in a cluster around a woman so pale that Adele would have guessed she was an albino, except that her eyes were an icy gray-blue. The Sexburgans all watched the pale woman, but her eyes followed Dorst until she disappeared through the door onto the second floor.

"That can't be, ma'am," Dorst said. The outside door was stiff; it resisted Adele until the midshipman hit it, high and low with his palm and bootsole. "Species aren't interfertile, and for sure animals on two different planets can't breed."

"That was my understanding also," Adele said. Insufficient data could cause mistakes. Certainty about matters where the data were insufficient was a mistake on its face. "On the other hand, I wasn't there and the writer very possibly was."

The streets of Spires weren't lighted, and the sky was dark except for the stars. They were unfamiliar constellations in a manner of speaking, but Adele didn't know anything about the stars above Cinnabar either. She was a city dweller, and if she'd ever been interested in the night sky she'd have called up a computer projection of it.

"Ma'am?" Dorst said, falling abreast as they started up the street. "Lieutenant Mon's going to send our jeep south to find the captain and, and the others. It can't bring them back all at once if there's a problem, but it'll take another radio and some medical supplies. Are you going along?"

A ship took off from the harbor. Adele lowered her eyes, shielding them further with her hand as she waited for the plasma's artificial thunder to subside.

Dorst slipped his goggles into place, watching the liftoff as he strode along. "It's the Achilles, that's the yacht that made the fast run from Cinnabar," he shouted. "Of course, that was nothing to what we did under Captain Leary."

"I'm sure Lieutenant Mon can find more suitable personnel for a search party on South Land," Adele said, going back to the previous question. "I intend to learn what I can here about the Captal da Lund and his friends."

Percussion bands were playing at the upper and lower ends of the street, the tunes syncopating one another. Because Adele was unfamiliar with the local instrumentation, it took her a moment to realize that the counterpoint wasn't intended. The Strymonian yacht had shrunk to an unusually bright star in the heavens.

"And I think," she added, "that I'm going to see where the Achilles is off to."

Dorst looked at her. She shrugged and grinned. "Just a feeling," Adele said. "An instinct, if you like."

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