Strider's Galaxy

Spindrift Would Like to Offer
More Assistance But . . .

They moved back across the elliptical galaxy in carefully staggered jumps until they were fairly close to where they had first emerged into The Wondervale. Strider's reasoning was that the best place to go was where the Autarchy would assume they wouldn't be so stupid as to try to hide.

The Images agreed. WE SHOULD HAVE AT LEAST A FEW DAYS, said Heartfire, BUT AFTER THAT THINGS ARE LIKELY TO GET ROUGH IN THAT REGION. WE SHOULD MAKE PLANETFALL AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

"This ship isn't built for planetfall," said Strider.

IT IS NOW.

"Oh yeah?"

ITS DRIVE CAN BE SWITCHED FROM ONE MODE TO ANOTHER. IT HAS THE CAPABILITY OF OPERATING AS A SAFE FUSION DRIVE FOR MAKING LANDINGS. WHILE WE WERE BIDING OUR TIME IN THE RED GIANT WE GATHERED FUEL. WE HAVE THE MATTER UNDER CONTROL, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER.

She believed them, and at the same time she couldn't help feeling skeptical.

Also, she was still experiencing guilt over the slaughter she had commanded. She knew the feeling was irrational: it had been a case of them or us. It didn't make the guilt any easier to bear. She felt like a child who has stolen some sweets: the crime is trivial in one way, not at all trivial in another. She kept wondering if she could maybe have talked the reptiloid out of trying to destroy the Santa Maria, then realizing immediately afterwards that of course she couldn't have: The creature has destroyed half a thousand worlds. If the tyranny was prepared to extirpate millions—billions—for the sake of preserving itself, then it wasn't even going to notice the destruction of forty-some human beings.

Still . . .

Still, she wondered how many sentient creatures had been aboard that ship. How many of them were there voluntarily? Tyrannies tended to conscript their troops. She decided not to ask the Images about this. They, for their part, although they must have known that the question was skulking at the edges of her mind, chose not to offer any unsolicited answer. For that she was very grateful.

The other matter that still burdened her was that this wasn't supposed to be the way that alien societies met. From youth she'd assumed that, if ever humanity did encounter eetees, there would be a joyous blending of cultures. The same message had been drummed into her throughout her years of training with the SSIA—whose purposes had been not so much idealistic as practical: make friends with the alien fast, or the next thing that happened might be that the alien made the Sun go nova. In a way, of course, humanity's first meeting with aliens—the Images—had approximated to that vision, although the Images were so divorced from human understanding that the cultural exchange had been all one way. And the other thing to remember was that the Autarchy of Nalla was no more going to be able to establish the Solar System's location than Strider was herself—less so, in fact, because the Autarchy didn't have the help of the Images.

She knew all these things logically, yet it felt wrong to have unleashed so much destruction.

Strider confided some of these thoughts to the most unlikely of people. Marcial Holmberg had arrived on the command deck a couple of minutes after the alien vessel had met its fiery end and after the Santa Maria had fled from the hot haven of the red giant. He had been breathless and angry.

"On behalf of the civilian personnel aboard this vessel . . ."

"Leave it be," said Leander sharply. "We could all have been dead by now."

"We should have been told what was going on," Holmberg protested. He flopped down into the chair that Strider had thrust towards him. "We should have been told."

"O'Sondheim told you as much as he could on the commline," said Strider. She kept her tones steady. Holmberg might be a major pain in the neck, but he was one she had to live with. The personnel might have elected someone worse to represent them, although she couldn't for a moment think of a candidate. Flipping that over in her mind, she realized that from the civilians' point of view they probably couldn't have nominated anyone better. In between wanting to take a lazgun to Holmberg, she had actually begun to feel some respect for him. It seemed like a long time ago that she had told him that he wasn't as good at his job as she was at hers. She wondered, now, if that were true. He was an obstreperous shithead, if the truth had to be told; but it was his job to be that. The non-SSIA personnel would have been a lot worse off if they'd elected someone who allowed every decision made by Strider and her officers to go unchallenged.

"I don't have a commline," said Holmberg. "Quite a few of us don't."

"I don't have one myself," said Strider. "Look, we did our best—OK?"

Briefly she explained what had happened. Less briefly, she heard him explain how terrified many of the personnel had been. She pulled another seat over on its rollers to sit beside him, listening. Leander obviously thought she was mad to waste so much time with the man, but in reality there was nothing much else for Strider to do—the Images were taking care of guiding the Santa Maria through the various tachyonic shifts it was making across The Wondervale. Leander was occasionally monitoring their progress in a Pocket, but in fact that progress might just as well have gone unmonitored.

"We can hardly regard your first tour of duty as being entirely successful, Captain Strider," Holmberg said eventually.

"We're still alive," said Strider, beginning to smile. She could see from Holmberg's face that, yes, he was deliberately acting out a role.

Suddenly relaxing, he grinned back at her. "I know that." But his eyes were still unhappy, belying the smile. Whatever Strider said to him wouldn't take away the memory of the terror he'd been through. It must be the same for many of the other civilians.

"I'm tired," said Strider suddenly. "I'm going off duty—and I'm pulling O'Sondheim off as well. Would you like to join us in the elevator down to the village?"

There was only a single city on the airless world of Qitanefermeartha, but it was inarguably the most important city in The Wondervale. Contained within a dome three hundred kilometers from side to side and fifty kilometers high, the city, itself called Qitanefermeartha, was the seat of the Autarch Nalla and his governmental organization. The planet was defended by some four thousand warcruisers; the dome of the city was surrounded by forcefields capable of deflecting any missile or ray that The Wondervale had yet devised; the dome itself was constructed of massively dense deadmetal, which has the capacity to absorb energy, and was thus almost as impregnable as were the forcefields around it; in order to enter the dome, one had to go on foot through seventeen different huge airlocks, each of which was constantly monitored and also had implanted in its walls sufficient laser cannonry to arm a medium-sized warcruiser; after running this gauntlet you were confronted by over a hundred of the most highly trained troopers of the Autarch's Elect, who had general instructions to reduce you to your constituent atoms in a barrage of disintegrator fire if they so much as didn't like your face (or, depending upon your species, nearest equivalent thereof).

Paranoia was neither a rare nor a necessarily disadvantageous quality in a Wondervale autarch: after all, a billion billion sentient beings generally wanted the present incumbent dead. On the other hand, it meant that the Autarch Nalla didn't get a lot of casual visitors. Most people either stayed inside Qitanefermeartha, enjoying the luxuries of court life, or they stayed as far away from it as they reasonably could.

There was a small spaceport nearby, but it was rarely used—there were extensive holo linkups within the city, so that it was only infrequently that the Autarch's officers needed to visit in person. To be sure, the reception on the linkups was generally lousy, because of the millions of tons of deadmetal surrounding the city, but it was good enough for the Autarch—who could always have a few technicians executed if the holo became utterly incomprehensible—and for his emissaries, who were well content to be physically unpresent. The Autarch was unpredictable at best; if angered for any reason, he was lethal.

Inside the dome, the overriding impression of the city of Qitanefermeartha was that it was coralline pink. This was the Autarch's favorite color, and he had insisted that every structure within the dome be built in compatible material. Several worlds had been stripped of much of their granitic and metamorphic surface rocks in order to satisfy his desire. That this had destroyed the ecosystems of those worlds, and often their sentient inhabitants, was not a matter of much interest to the Autarch; the haulage costs involved in getting the rock to the remote planet Qitanefermeartha were a greater concern, though one easily solved by upping the tax-tribute required of every inhabited planet in The Wondervale. The more thoughtful of the Autarch's courtiers speculated about what might happen if the inheritor of The Wondervale's throne—for surely the old bastard must die some day—preferred, say, blue. None of them said anything about this out loud, of course: there probably wasn't a single cubic millimeter within Qitanefermeartha that wasn't under constant surveillance.

The Autarch didn't like to be reminded of the possibility of his demise.

He was a member of the Antracvhan species, whose lifespans were a hundred times longer, thanks to genetic engineering in the remote past, than those of the majority of species within The Wondervale. He was not in fact immortal, but to most members of the subject peoples within the Autarchy the distinction was purely academic: they would be dead and dust millennia before he finally succumbed.

Unless someone hastened the succumbing. A billion billion people hoped that someone would. Even the Autarch's most favored courtiers often wished this: when the Autarch got into a particularly filthy temper, the population of Qitanefermeartha became staggeringly sparse.

The Antracvhans were quadrupedal and massive. They were not particularly well coordinated—their early discovery of the trick of genetic engineering had hindered other aspects of their evolution. Finding yourself accidentally under an Antracvhan was a fairly common cause of death among the less agile courtiers in Qitanefermeartha. There might have been many uprisings in the city had it not been for the fact that the Antracvhans dwelling there were almost all in either the bodyguard or the concubinage that surrounded the Autarch everywhere he went, which was rarely outside his own palace—a smaller dome within Qitanefermeartha's great dome and likewise constructed of deadmetal, although painted pink.

Even the open spaces of Qitanefermeartha—of which there were many—were planted with pink grass, pink flowers and trees that bore pink blossom.

The Autarch Nalla's courtiers, the dwellers in the city of Qitanefermeartha, had to maintain a ghastly charade of being Happy Happy Happy throughout their lives. It was the only—partial—guarantee that those lives would not be whimsically curtailed.

At the moment the Autarch was watching a holo of his lieutenant for the Farside sector of The Wondervale. Kaantalech was giving him bad news; the Autarch wished he could kill her for that, but was at the same time glad that he couldn't: she was perhaps the most ruthless of all his lieutenants, and thereby among the most valuable. It was an additional cause for fury, though, that those of Kaantalech's species had an offensively bright green fur coloration.

." . . and the invader craft has destroyed not only Maglittel but also a Class Eight warcruiser," Kaantalech was saying, "at a cost of—"

"Spare me the figures," said the Autarch, with a wave of his suction-padded forefoot. "This is not too severe a financial calamity."

"Yes." It looked as if Kaantalech wanted to say more, but the Autarch overrode her.

"Is there any suggestion that the invader craft from Heaven's Ancestor is acting in concert with any of the terrorist worlds?"

"No, Stars' Elect."

"My advisors have told me that there are no technological civilizations in Heaven's Ancestor," said the Autarch. His voice was a cross between a growl and a whine: it seemed a very small voice to come from such a massive body.

"It is possible," said Kaantalech hesitantly, "that the intruders were lying."

"Why should they lie? It is far more likely, is it not, that my advisors were wrong."

"I believe," Kaantalech said more firmly, "that the aliens were attempting to deceive us. The transmissions we received from Maglittel before its tragic demise—and the destruction of its cruiser—cause me to think that these aliens were attempting to mislead. Maglittel was not the most intelligent of our emissaries: it is probable that the creature stupidly accepted what it was told."

The Autarch snorted. He had been looking forward to executing a platoon or two of his advisors. Watching executions was so restful.

"These aliens—'Humans', you call them—might be useful to us?" he said.

"They are not in alliance with any of the terrorist worlds, so far as we know," said Kaantalech. "It is possible that we could recruit them to the cause of righteousness. With the technology they so obviously possess, they could be powerful allies. At the very least, we could make approaches to them for as long as is required to gain the secrets of their technology."

She perched bird-like within the lightfield of the holo, although her form was nothing like a bird's. Instead, she looked more like a miniature version of the Autarch himself, although lacking his tusks and covered with long fur. Her triangular eyes were on her bulky shoulders; by spreading her breastbone she could look almost directly behind her. She was about two meters tall and almost as wide. Her mouth, beneath a long and constantly flexing proboscis, glittered with teeth.

She was a clever person, and the Autarch disliked that cleverness: it could so easily lead to a rebellion against his reign. On the other forefoot, he relied on the cleverness of people like Kaantalech to maintain that reign. His small eyes were red with confusion.

"You will make friends with these creatures," he said finally. "Persuade them of the need for firm law in The Wondervale. And then, when you have got everything you can from them, you will annihilate them. That is my command."

"They have superior technol—" said Kaantalech before the Autarch cut off the transmission by slamming a forefoot to the floor.

Craft designed primarily for interstellar travel do not come to ground easily—those few that can do so at all. It is as if they were protesting that their true place is out there in the infinite vacuum, free and unfettered, rather than down here in a thick soup of gravity. Even despite the massive reconstruction of the Santa Maria that the Images had carried out, the starship's architecture remained one designed for deep space. It was better equipped to exist beneath the photosphere of a star than inside the atmosphere of a planet.

There was also a little indignity involved in that first landing. The tachyonic drive had taken them through large tracts of The Wondervale and into orbit around the larger of the two moons of the world whose name the Images could best translate as Spindrift. For the final approach to landing, however, adjustments had to be made—and they were not simple ones, even for the Images. A day and a half had passed while Heartfire and Nightmirror effected the changes; during part of this time Ten Per Cent Extra Free had communicated with fellow-Images on Spindrift, who in turn negotiated on the Santa Maria's behalf with the military of the planet's most advanced nation. The granting of permission to land seemed to be a ticklish business; Strider wasn't sure who was doing the most work, Ten Per Cent Extra Free or the other two.

Spindrift looked rather like Earth, but somewhat smaller, its huge polar icecaps dominating its map. As with Earth, only in a broadish swathe around its equator was there blue water visible. Using one of the Pockets, Strider could see that the land areas seemed strangely unpopulated—except for one large island, which was mainly taken up by what was obviously a spaceport. Of the dozen or so landing bays, only three were occupied. From the lack of evidence of any heavy industry elsewhere on the planet, Strider inferred that it was an occupied world rather than one which had developed space travel for itself. Or maybe some other civilization had planted a mere staging-post on Spindrift.

She didn't know why Ten Per Cent Extra Free's negotiations were proving so protracted. If the people on Spindrift weren't likely to be allies, why the hell had the Santa Maria come here?

She turned her attention to the moon close by. Its landscape reminded her of that of Earth's Moon: pockmarked with craters and rays, with great grey plains extending over the most part of the surface. According to the Pocket's graphic display there was, however, the faintest trace of an atmosphere. The smaller moon was much the same, but airless.

There didn't seem to be much she could do on the deck, so she passed over full command to O'Sondheim and went below to her cabin. Once there, reluctantly, she pasted a commlink to her rearmost upper right molar; this would act as a temporary commline, so that O'Sondheim could contact her instantly if need be. She loathed even this degree of invasion of her body by technology.

In fact, it was Ten Per Cent Extra Free who contacted her first.

THEY WILL NOT LET US LAND ON THEIR WORLD, he said, jolting her from sleep. As she struggled out of an anxiety dream, it took a moment or two for the information to sink in.

"Then it was a bit of a waste of time coming here, wasn't it? Whose side are they on?"

THEY ARE ON NEITHER SIDE. MANY OF THE SPECIES IN THE WONDERVALE REFUSE TO BE DRAWN INTO THE CONFLICT ON EITHER SIDE. THE SPINDRIFTERS ARE AMONG THEM. THEY PAY THEIR TAXES, BUT THEY WILL NOT TAKE UP ARMS ON BEHALF OF EITHER THE AUTARCHY OR ANY REBELLIOUS FACTION. THEY BELIEVE IT IS SAFER THAT WAY.

"Or cowardly."

THE AUTARCH WILL ISSUE ORDERS FOR A PLANET TO BE TORCHED ON THE SLIGHTEST PROVOCATION. SPINDRIFT IS A VERY UNIMPORTANT WORLD, AND ALMOST NEVER COMES TO HIS ATTENTION. THE SPINDRIFTERS PREFER TO KEEP IT THAT WAY. THAT'S WHY WE BROUGHT THE Santa Maria HERE TO SEEK REFUGE. HAD WE GONE TO ANY KNOWN FOCUS OF REBELLION WE WOULD HAVE MADE IT SO MUCH THE EASIER FOR KAANTALECH TO FIND US—OR WE MIGHT HAVE BEEN BLOWN OUT OF SPACE BY REBEL FORCES BEFORE THEY DISCOVERED WHO WE WERE.

"But if the Spindrifters won't let us land . . ." Strider began.

THEY WON'T LET US LAND ON SPINDRIFT ITSELF, BUT THEY WILL LET US PUT THE SANTA MARIA DOWN ON THE MOON BENEATH US. FROM THERE WE CAN SEND A PARTY OR PARTIES ACROSS TO SPINDRIFT BY SHUTTLE.

She sat up on her bed and put her legs over the side. "Now you're talking. When can we get to it?"

Strauss-Giolitto watched Spindrift coming slowly closer to her. She had only fleeting memories of her childhood on Earth, but she had seen enough holos since then to know what the mother world looked like, and she could see the similarities here. Nevertheless, Spindrift seemed unnatural to her: there was so much free water everywhere, albeit most of it in the form of ice. And the planet seemed altogether bigger than it should be.

She felt a mixture of excited anticipation and fear. This was an unknown world. She knew full well that this was one reason why Strider had sent her as the human component of the first investigatory party: when it came to the crunch, Strauss-Giolitto was among the more expendable members of the Santa Maria's personnel. The Images had been full of assurances that the Spindrifters were non-aggressive, but Strider's opinion was that you could never be sure: Ten Per Cent Extra Free had been negotiating with a nation's military, after all. Sitting alongside her across a narrow aisle, piloting the shuttle, was one of the least expendable personnel—but the presence of Pinocchio increased the probability of the party surviving, and of course the bloody bot was more sturdily made than a human being, so that he himself was likely to pull through even if she didn't. She suspected that in fact he was doing only a part of the piloting, and that much only for cosmetic reasons; also aboard was Ten Per Cent Extra Free, who could easily have run all the shuttle's functions single-handedly . . .

Wondering if the Images actually had anything like hands damped down her nervousness briefly. But then the growing bulk of Spindrift brought it all back again.

Soon afterwards Strauss-Giolitto could see nothing ahead of her through the view-window but blue and white and brown. In her peripheral vision she could still see Pinocchio's knee. Seeing it annoyed her. It distracted her attention. The bot wasn't so bad, she had concluded a while ago, but his knee was very irritating, right now.

The shuttle lurched suddenly, and her restrainer belt tore at her waist and shoulder.

Strauss-Giolitto let out a little yip of fright. She'd been warned this would happen, but that didn't make the abrupt shock of the real experience much easier to take.

Pinocchio turned and smiled at her. "We're hitting the atmosphere," he said. "Don't worry: the shuttle can take almost anything short of a direct impact with the surface. Just get ready to watch the fun."

Then the smile vanished and he turned back to the controls, his fingers moving with unhuman nimbleness over the set of keyboards in front of him, his eyes intent on a bank of monitors rather than on the unfolding scene ahead.

The shuttle was being buffeted about more seriously and more frequently now. Despite her restrainer belt, Strauss-Giolitto gripped her armrests. The shuttle was skipping around the planet's upper atmosphere, losing speed all the while. Even so, the plastite of the view-window began to glow a dull orange. Plastite was virtually unbreakable and had a melting point of an almost unbelievable number of thousands of degrees Celsius, but that didn't mean much to Strauss-Giolitto right now.

Things got a lot worse before they got better. Thank God I didn't suit up, thought Strauss-Giolitto a few minutes later, eyes streaming, after she had emptied at least one previous meal into the plastic dispose-all provided for exactly such eventualities. Even Pinocchio seemed to be taking matters a lot less lightly than he had before; the grimness of his face was born not entirely of concentration. Strauss-Giolitto suddenly fathomed that he, too, had never previously come down through a dense atmosphere.

"You think we're going to make it, Skip?" she said hoarsely, hoping the weak joke would make her feel better.

It didn't. Pinocchio made no response, and she had a nasty few seconds before she realized that this was because his attention was focused entirely on what he was doing.

THIS IS PERFECTLY CUSTOMARY, MARIA STRAUSS-GIOLITTO, came Ten Per Cent Extra Free's reassuring voice in her mind. PLANETFALL IS NEVER AN EASY BUSINESS. ATMOSPHERES RESENT BEING INVADED.

Right now Strauss-Giolitto resented atmospheres.

Still the relentless pummelling of the shuttle went on. How long was it going to last? The plastite was a brighter orange now. Even if the plastite itself was impervious to what it was being put through, what about the points around the sides of the view-window? What were they made of?

She put her face in her hands so that she didn't need to keep on looking, but that only made it worse. Brute instinct, overriding logic, told her she should keep watching the view-window so that, if it did unexpectedly explode in towards her face, she would have a chance of running away and hiding. She wished she could run away and hide now, but there was nowhere in the confined cockpit to run to.

With an abruptness that was almost as shocking as anything that had gone before, it was over.

The shuttle was moving—still at a high velocity—through a clear blue sky. They had come in over one of the polar icecaps; the curve of the planet ahead of them was briefly orange and then, as the plastite rapidly cooled, a glaring white that stung her eyes.

Pinocchio visibly relaxed.

"You were worried there a while yourself, weren't you?" she said lamely after a while. The shuttle's drive was virtually silent; she could hear the whine of the air streaming past as well as all sorts of creaks and groans from here and there on the craft as its components cooled.

"It was something unique to my experience," the bot admitted. Only a short while ago, his head would certainly have buzzed. Since the Images had shaped him over it was senseless to continue with the pretence that he was just a halfwitted valet. Strauss-Giolitto's attitude towards him hadn't changed entirely—he was still just a bot, dammit, rather than a creation of the Lord—but she had at least come to regard him with some affection, as though he were a sort of incredibly intelligent housepet. They could get along together, so long as she remembered to bite back the more tactless of the remarks that came to mind.

One of the screens in front of Pinocchio lit up, and his attention promptly shifted away from her again. She wished she could see what the screen was showing him, but she was side-on to it. Out of its speaker came an incomprehensible noise, full of soft clicks and harsher whistlings.

After a few moments Ten Per Cent Extra Free intercepted, and the words began to sound to Pinocchio and Strauss-Giolitto as if they were in standard Argot.

." . . welcome you to our world, strangers, but you must understand that we have to take precautions." Even in Argot the voice sounded alien. It had a light touch of ethereality to it. She imagined this might be how a ghost would talk. "Our Images tell us that you are what you seem, but even an Image could be misled. You will therefore follow these navigational instructions precisely."

There followed a string of information that was as incomprehensible to Strauss-Giolitto as the earlier babble had been. Pinocchio seemed to understand it, though, for his fingers began moving swiftly over the keyboards again.

"I have assimilated all that," said the bot after a minute or two. "Would you like me to give a systems computer download to you so that you may check for error?"

"No." The voice from the screen sounded horrified. "You might infect our own systems. If you deviate slightly, we shall assume honest error. If you deviate greatly, I shall contact you again and re-dictate the navigational and landing instructions. Otherwise I shall not speak to you until you are over the Gate to the Sky."

The light from the screen, which had been reflected on Pinocchio's face, died.

THERE WERE NO ERRORS, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

The Gate to the Sky proved to be the spaceport Strider had observed from the Santa Maria. True to its word, the Spindrifter reopened communications with Pinocchio and guided him precisely through the landing. Strauss-Giolitto had a further urge to retch as a long runway ahead approached the craft at impossible speed. When they made first contact with the ground it was just as bad, because the shuttle jerked and bucked as if it were trying to throw itself off the hard surface and go tumbling into a blaze of destruction. Strauss-Giolitto's thoughts were drowned in the indescribable racket as the shuttle's retro-jets and brakes cut in and slowly, slowly prevailed.

At last, after what seemed like an infinitely extended screaming slither towards certain death, the shuttle came to a halt.

Strauss-Giolitto was so drained of all emotion that it was a long time before she could properly understand that she, a teacher from City 22, was the first human being to land on the surface of this alien world—the first of all human beings to be on a planet outside the Solar System. She felt there ought to be a bit of flag-waving and an out-of-tune brass band, but instead all she heard were the surreptitious little noises of the shuttle settling itself.

"May we disembark?" said Pinocchio to the screen.

And then the wonder of it all hit Strauss-Giolitto. She'd been thinking about brass bands, wasting valuable seconds when she could have been discovering what this new world was like. She'd been resenting the residual taste of vomit in her mouth. She'd been . . .

She shook herself, and began staring through the view-window eagerly, lapping up everything she could see.

Which proved to be disappointingly little. The sky was still that unnatural blue, unlike the familiar orange-blue of the Martian heavens, but she had seen pictures of pre-nuke-war Earth; she even knew that those huge, seemingly heavy masses of white were clouds, even though they were nothing like the wisps that occasionally appeared in the atmosphere of Mars. Very far in the distance she could see oddly purple-seeming mountains, but aside from that there was just a broad expanse of yellowed featurelessness with, tiny at its far end, a cluster of box-like buildings. The Spindrifters might have given their spaceport a romantic name, the Gate to the Sky, but from here it looked entirely functional, drab and desolate. Presumably spaceports all over the Universe looked very much the same.

"You may exit your vessel only if you are clad in full spacesuits," the alien voice was instructing in its eerily whispering voice.

"I'm a bot," said Pinocchio. "I have no suit."

There was a pause.

"That is acceptable to us. But your companion must be suited."

Strauss-Giolitto, still absorbing the fact that, whatever the scene through the view-window looked like, she was on a world new to humanity, only half-heard this. Pinocchio reached across the aisle and prodded her shoulder, then gestured towards the wall-chest where her suit was stored.

"About our Image?" said the bot to the screen.

"Images are always welcome on Spindrift." The voice gave a little whinny which Strauss-Giolitto guessed must be the best Ten Per Cent Extra Free could do to represent a Spindrifter's equivalent of a laugh. "We couldn't keep them out anyway, even if we wanted to."

She unclicked her restrainer belt with difficulty; the experiences of the past hour or so had made her fingers numb without her realizing it. As she stood, little cramps shot through her calves and groin area. She moved behind Pinocchio's seat and at last had sight of the Spindrifter.

The Images had said that the Spindrifters were humanoid, and at first glance that seemed to be the case. The face looking out from the screen was vaguely elfin, with slanting eyes and a pointy chin. But then you noticed the differences. The other features were more or less as in a human, but only approximately. The thing in the center of the face was obviously not a nose: it was an organ that lazily coiled and uncoiled as the Spindrifter spoke. The feature that looked superficially like a mouth was clearly constructed quite differently from a human mouth: it had four lips, set in a sort of pouting diamond shape. A high crest of what seemed to be stiff black hair ran from the top of the forehead towards the rear, while the rest of the face was covered with short black bristles. And those human-seeming eyes were utterly black, as if in looking into them you were looking into the voids of space.

Strauss-Giolitto turned away. She was both repelled and fascinated by the face; that there was a twinge of sexuality in the fascination did not help at all.

She suited up thoughtfully. Pinocchio was still discussing procedures with the Spindrifter. She sat down alongside him again, not wanting to look any more at the face in the screen. God made us in his likeness, she thought, but am I his likeness, or is that creature? No, it's not a creature: it's a sentient being, the same as I am. And the Images said the Spindrifters are humanoid, like me, so I suppose they are. Humanoid, but at the same time very different. How many likenesses does God have?

She filed away the question to be thought about later. Now they were here on Spindrift she was keen to be out of the shuttle. She was also already keen to be out of her spacesuit. There's always an offputting smell inside a suit—the combination of hi-tech, vestiges of urine from the last time you used the suit for any extended stretch of time, and your own body odor, both stale and fresh. The net result is a constant reminder that you are in a profoundly enclosed small space; it becomes very easy to start feeling claustrophobic.

Especially since all you can usually hear are your own breathing and the pumping of your pulse. Strauss-Giolitto's pulse was pumping faster than usual.

"Audio," she said to the suit impatiently.

At once her own noises were blotted out by the voices of Pinocchio and the Spindrifter, who seemed to be coming to the end of their conversation.

Yes, they were.

The screen faded, and the bot glanced towards her. "We're to get out on to the tarmac—or whatever it is—and wait for Polyaggle to reach us. She'll take us to decontamination. She seems to be controlling this spaceport entirely on her own." He shook his head. "It seems very strange to me."

It took them several minutes to usher themselves through the locks and out into the open. The Spindrifters were clearly nervous of infection from the visitors; Pinocchio was equally concerned about contaminating the air in the shuttle with elements from Spindrift's atmosphere, which was likely to be laden with bacteria, some of which the human nanobots might not recognize as detrimental until it was too late. There was no sense in taking plague back to the Santa Maria.

Strauss-Giolitto suddenly realized she was due for another bout of decontamination on her return to the starship. She gulped unhappily. Most often decontamination was followed by a couple of days' diarrhoea, because the process tended, willy-nilly, to destroy large parts of the colonies of symbiotic bacteria in the human gut.

A small vehicle, not unlike a cabble but without the protective dome, was floating across the spaceport towards them.

"Have you noticed something?" said Pinocchio, moving away a few paces and tapping with his toe at some mossy weeds growing from between a crack in what did indeed seem to be tarmac.

"Not until you pointed it out," said Strauss-Giolitto. She gazed around her. Several hundred meters away the prow of what looked like an old-fashioned chemical-fuelled rocket protruded from a walled enclosure—a landing-bay, she guessed. There were smears of what appeared to be rust on the rocket's hull. "People don't come here very often," she said.

"And this spaceport was built a very long time ago," said Pinocchio.

"By whom?" said Strauss-Giolitto.

The bot shrugged.

The vehicle must have been moving more quickly than it had seemed to, because it was very soon beside them.

"Are you there, Ten Per Cent Extra Free?" said Strauss-Giolitto softly.

I AM INSIDE THE SUIT WITH YOU.

She squirmed slightly. It seemed a very intimate arrangement.

"Good," she said. "We're going to be needing you."

OF COURSE. Was there a trace of smugness in that singing voice, or was Ten Per Cent Extra Free merely stating the obvious?

Standing upright in the hovering vehicle was the owner of the face they had seen in the screen—Polyaggle, Pinocchio had called her. Strauss-Giolitto sucked in her breath. The elfin quality of Polyaggle's face was carried through to her body, which was slight, almost like that of a prepubescent child, and at the same time obviously fully mature. From ten meters away one might almost have believed she was a true human with a bizarre taste in hairstyles. Naked, she was very evidently female.

The Spindrifter flipped herself with some grace over the far side of the vehicle and beckoned them towards it. She seemed to be even lighter than her body-shape suggested, like a trained dancer.

"Please don't get into this until I am some distance away," she said. "I don't want to come too close to you. I shouldn't even be this near."

WISE, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

Strauss-Giolitto nodded. There could be possibly dangerous microbes on the surface of her suit. It would have to be thoroughly sterilized and then probably, after she had removed it, destroyed. The same went for her clothing, and Pinocchio's.

"The cabble"—Ten Per Cent Extra Free translated the alien word using a term familiar to them—"has been programmed to transport you to decontamination. You will be guided through that unit automatically. The process will take about fourteen . . ." This time Ten Per Cent Extra Free was unable to make a translation. He can't have worked out the local units of time as yet, thought Strauss-Giolitto. She hoped it wasn't going to be fourteen hours, or days, or . . .

"At the end of that period," Polyaggle continued, "I will speak further with you."

She put her hands together—no, they weren't hands but bird-like claws—in what was presumably a formal gesture, and turned away.

And spread her wings.

They unfurled swiftly in a riot of brilliant color. They were ragged, like a butterfly's wings, but brighter than any butterfly Strauss-Giolitto could remember. Around the edges there were broad, irregular patches of crimson and turquoise and black. Closer to the torso, lines of eye-shaped iridescent markings followed the contours of her body.

Polyaggle flapped her wings once, twice, and then allowed herself to drift slowly and erratically off the ground. When she was about twenty meters above them she began to move her wings with more purpose, and soon was fluttering away through the breeze towards the distant buildings.

Strauss-Giolitto couldn't recall having seen anything quite so beautiful. No wonder the Images had translated this world's name as Spindrift, for that was exactly what Polyaggle was doing now: spinning and drifting through the air. It now wasn't so surprising that Polyaggle's body was so light. This was God's image. The minor sexual pang Strauss-Giolitto had experienced on first seeing the Spindrifter's face in the screen was nothing to what she was feeling at the moment. She was going to have a difficult time on this planet.

YOUR TURN NOW, Ten Per Cent Extra Free reminded her gently, waking her from her thoughts.

Pinocchio was already aboard the cabble, reaching out a hand to help her. She took it gratefully. Ordinarily she would have had no difficulty stepping into the vehicle—she was fifty per cent taller than the Spindrifter—but suited up like this she felt cumbersome and squat.

Holding the T-shaped pole in the vehicle's center for balance, they stood and watched as they were conveyed swiftly across the landing-area.

There was so little to see, and yet in a way so much.

She kept trying to forget what it had been like going through the Spindrifter version of decontamination, but it was extremely difficult. At the end of the cycle she had been given a loose white robe to wear, but she still had never felt more naked in her life. Part of the time she had been anaesthetized, which should have made things better; in fact, it had been if anything worse, because she still didn't fully understand everything the Spindrifters' eager little bots had done to her.

She had anticipated losing her suit and her clothing, but the bots had been very much more thorough than that. They had depilated her entire body—it felt bizarre and uncomfortable having a naked crotch for the first time since childhood—and they had probed and scoured every orifice with ruthless efficiency, no great gentleness and strange-smelling chemicals; her ears still gurgled if she moved her head too quickly. But far worse than that had been what they had done to her under anaesthetic.

They had stripped her of her integrated hardware. Neural implants, stim sockets, thighputer, cortical amplification units—everything was gone, right down to her commline. Without her augmentations, everything around her seemed utterly strange: she was experiencing the world as she hadn't experienced it since puberty. It was confusing: she kept bumping into things if she didn't keep a look out where she was going: there was no secondary retinal screen to warn her automatically of obstructions. She kept listening for the tiny background hiss of her commline on standby—a commline that was no longer there. Having just flesh on her left thigh seemed somehow . . . perverse. She was perceiving everything differently, hearing things differently.

She was having to rediscover her natural senses.

And it was all doubly confusing: she really was experiencing a strange new world. On Mars, and indeed on the Santa Maria, when you were inside relaxing you always had the reassurance that you were in a totally enclosed environment. When you were outside you were almost certainly always on the move, because there was little reason to be stationary and almost none to be sedentary.

Here, though, she was sitting on a stool the size of those she expected her schoolkids to sit on and there was nothing overhead but the sky. She could vaguely recall this from her childhood, but only as an experience someone else had had. Ahead of them stretched the weed-infested waste of the Gate to the Sky. On the long, low table in front of her was a tall metal beaker of what Polyaggle had told her was distilled water. Strauss-Giolitto had tried it nervously at first, but the taste proved . . . interesting.

She took another gulp of it.

Strauss-Giolitto and Pinocchio, who was likewise dressed now in a white robe, were together at one end of the table and Polyaggle at the other. The human woman couldn't work out if this was a deliberate ploy to establish some kind of hierarchical demarcation or if it was totally unconscious on the Spindrifter's part: she still seemed cautious about approaching them too closely, as if not thoroughly trusting even the full rigors of decontamination to preserve her from infection.

And what about me? thought Strauss-Giolitto for the hundredth time. Dammit, I'm probably picking up every disease in the Universe by just sitting here breathing.

At the next lull in the conversation between Polyaggle and Pinocchio, Ten Per Cent Extra Free—currently resident somewhere in Pinocchio's circuitry—spoke swiftly to her. THE DECONTAMINATORS WERE WISE ENOUGH NOT TO INTERFERE WITH YOUR NANOBOTS. I AM, NATURALLY, MONITORING THE LATTER CLOSELY. YOU ARE INDEED INGESTING ALIEN MICRO-ORGANISMS, BUT NONE HAS OFFERED YOUR BODY ANY DANGER AS YET, AND ALL HAVE BEEN SWIFTLY IDENTIFIED AND DESTROYED BY THE NANOBOTS. WE WOULD NOT HAVE PERMITTED A HUMAN TO DESCEND TO THIS PLANET UNLESS WE WERE SURE IT WAS SAFE.

Strauss-Giolitto tuned in briefly to the conversation the other two were having. It was very difficult to concentrate. The decontamination process had exhausted and demoralized her and the day was hot and bright—and without her hardware there was nothing she could do to reduce the effects of the hotness and brightness. What she really wanted to do was find somewhere she could curl up and sleep for a few hours. When she awoke, maybe the remembered humiliation of being scoured by the decontamination bots would be easier to bear. About the only thing keeping her awake was the discomfort of sitting on a stool this low.

"I would like to speak directly with the Image you have with you," Polyaggle was saying. Strauss-Giolitto drowsily thought the Spindrifter still looked thoroughly alluring, even with her wings folded away. There was grace in Polyaggle's every movement.

"Certainly," said Pinocchio courteously. "His name is Ten Per Cent Extra Free, and I am sure that he would take pleasure in communicating with you."

"In private," said the Spindrifter. Strauss-Giolitto wondered what that strangely constructed mouth would look like when Polyaggle smiled—assuming the Spindrifters smiled with their mouths, of course.

Pinocchio nodded. "Are you willing for this?" he asked out aloud, clearly addressing the Image.

YES.

The silence stretched out for several minutes. Something like an insect hummed close to them and inquisitively circled Strauss-Giolitto a couple of times. Horrified, she recoiled from it. It might have a sting that could kill her in seconds. Pinocchio waved it away with a nonchalant hand.

Although the people aboard the Santa Maria generally spoke aloud, or at least subvocalized, when communicating with the Images, it was clear that Polyaggle felt no such need, although she had closed her eyes as if to assist concentration. I wish I could just close my eyes right now, thought Strauss-Giolitto wearily. Her heart was still beating quickly after her encounter with the little flying thing. But I'd better not risk it. Falling asleep at someone's party is reckoned rude enough back on Mars—unless you're stoned senseless, of course—but here it might carry the death penalty.

After an appreciable fraction of forever Polyaggle opened her eyes again.

"I have interrogated your Image friend at length," she said, "and he agrees that everything you have told me is substantively true, although on occasion limited by your own ignorance of the true situation in The Wondervale." Yes, Spindrifters did smile with their mouths. Perhaps this was one of the few traits that convergent evolution directed itself towards when producing human-like creatures. "The Images may mislead on occasion, but they never lie. I speak for all in the Affiliated Villages when I say that we will offer you such help as we can without jeopardizing our neutrality."

"That is very kind," said Pinocchio.

"Further than that we will not go."

"That is understood."

Polyaggle smiled again. The effect was disconcerting.

"Our species was among the most rapidly evolving and thus one of the most ancient in The Wondervale, and we were perhaps the first to explore this galaxy—and even Heaven's Ancestor." She gave what Ten Per Cent Extra Free interpreted as a sigh. "That was over a billion years ago." The Image had clearly worked out the Spindrifters' time units at last. "Four or five million years ago, we saw the nature of the new technological civilizations that were arising in The Wondervale, and we decided to abandon space and retreat to our mother world. Other species who were our friends chose to do the same: many of the neutral planets throughout The Wondervale today are the homes of ancient species who made the same decision that we did."

The Spindrifter raised her own, much smaller beaker of water towards her mouth. A tube-like tongue dipped briefly into the liquid.

"I'm explaining all this for a reason," Polyaggle resumed, turning her gaze towards Strauss-Giolitto, as if sensing that the woman's concentration had been drifting again. "We do not wage war—we never have. We have some defenses which we, well, stole from younger species; the task of our military is to maintain these. But our few primitive weapons would be useless should the Autarch or some lesser tyrant decide to occupy this world or destroy it. There are fewer than ten million of us left alive: we have no desire to increase our population, as yet, but we believe that the remnant of our once prolific species is very precious. Hence, please understand, our insistence on retaining not just our absolute neutrality but also the outward appearance of it."

Once more that disturbing smile. "We want Spindrift to remain a backwater, useless, boring little world. Several hundred years ago the Autarchy built the Gate to the Sky here, intent on colonizing this world. We persuaded the tyranny to depart again by ensuring that there was nothing here to be exploited—we don't even make good slaves: we're too frail to be of any use. Occasionally, still, an Autarchy ship will call by and look us over and decide we have nothing to offer that wouldn't be more easily found elsewhere.

"It is necessary for the survival of the last of our species that this situation be preserved."

"But not for ever," said Strauss-Giolitto, suddenly cottoning on. One of the subjects she taught was history. "You said you didn't want to increase your population as yet. You're just biding your time, aren't you?" Everything goes in cycles. What is omnipotent today will be dust tomorrow. It may take half the lifetime of the Universe, but the day will come.

"Yes."

The Spindrifters and the other ancient species will do their best to survive until all the warriors have destroyed themselves, and then they will reclaim their galaxy. No wonder they regard the scraps of their people as so precious.

"We understand your view," said Pinocchio, splaying his hands on the table in front of him and looking earnestly at the backs of his fingers. "Of course you're right. You're the seeds of the civilization that'll grow up once the Autarchy and all its successors have gone. But . . . humanity is a young species, not an old one, and—"

"Our way is not your way," said Polyaggle.

"That is what I was trying to say."

"No, you were trying to say that your way is not our way. There's a difference."

Pinocchio looked baffled. Despite the sophistication of his software, on occasion he could be defeated by the minor nuances of language.

"Let's be away from here," said Polyaggle abruptly. "I want to take you to our military." She stood and gave a weird trill that Ten Per Cent Extra Free didn't even try to interpret. "There is much that they could learn from you humans, and there are perhaps one or two things they might be able to tell you in return. I have just summoned a slidecraft, and it will be here very shortly. You"—she turned again towards Strauss-Giolitto—"will be able to sleep during the trip."

Strauss-Giolitto yawned. Sleep was becoming a matter of urgency.

"Lost them?" bellowed Nalla. "How in the name of the Autarchy can you have lost them?"

Even from a safe several hundred parsecs away, Kaantalech flinched at the sight of the Autarch's holographic wrath. When speaking with Nalla, it amused her to keep the image down as small as was consistent with being able to see what was going on. But, even when he was less than a meter tall, the Autarch's rage was spectacular.

She thought it might be a good move to put on a further show of cowering: the Autarch liked his lieutenants to be visibly terrified of him.

"They've just . . . disappeared," she said limply.

"By the blessed eyes of my father . . .!" the Autarch began, then obviously remembered what had been done to those eyes during a particularly messy succession. He started again. "By the might of my reign and the love of my people, they can't just have disappeared! What has happened is that you've let them go! You're either a traitor or an incompetent or both! Execute yourself at once!"

"I think that would be counterproductive, Stars' Elect," said Kaantalech. She knew that he liked the honorific. Since they were of different species, it was difficult for her to manipulate his moods as she did those of her own kind, but over the decades she had become more adept at it than most. "Whoever took over this region of The Wondervale would undoubtedly be less effective than myself at wooing the alliance of these Humans. I have studied the tapes of Maglittel's efforts extensively. Would any of your other lieutenants have labored so industriously?"

She could almost hear the Autarch thinking. It was painful for her to watch. She gave all her loyalty, life and soul, to her ultimate ruler . . . but one day, with luck, he would turn his back.

"I grant you a stay of execution," he said at last, "but it is only a stay. You must find these Humans and coax them into our service within one hundred Qitanefermeartha days or your life will be forfeit. And the lives of all your kindred."

Kaantalech wasn't particularly worried about the last part of the threat, but the first part did concern her. Summary executions were the Autarch's style. The bald stating of a time period within which a certain task must be accomplished, upon pain of death, was less usual. In the event that the Autarch remembered having issued the threat—or remembered to have a courtier record it for him—any resulting execution was inevitably protracted and brutal.

"I shall use my best endeavors," she said, giving a show of dignity. "But I must start right away."

"You may go," said the Autarch.

She flicked the holo off. Under her fur she was perspiring far more than she would have liked. The populace of some planet, somewhere, was going to have to pay for this.

By the time Strauss-Giolitto awoke, the slidecraft was well out over the deserted expanses of the northern polar icecap. She was surprised in a way that, despite her weariness, she'd been able to sleep. The Spindrifters, presumably because if anything went wrong with their craft they could always fly away, didn't go in for the kind of precautions humans did. The top of the slidecraft, as with the cabble back at the spaceport, was open; not too much effort had been put into providing the vessel with stabilization, so that it rocked from side to side and, even more alarmingly, from front to back; the ledge around its rim was no more than half a meter high.

Strauss-Giolitto, who had slept in a tangle on the vessel's floor, pulled herself to her knees with a groan, and peered over the ledge. They were at least several hundred meters above the ice. She decided not to have a second peer.

Rubbing the sleep from her eyes—it seemed so odd to be rubbing her left eye, where the secondary retinal screen had been mounted—she looked back towards the center of the craft. Polyaggle had, like herself, fallen asleep on the floor after programming the navigational unit with their destination. This had seemed an alarmingly simple business: Strauss-Giolitto was accustomed to the controls of even something as lowly as a Martian cabble having countless flashing lights and a bewildering graphic display of information which was beyond the power of most people to understand but was nevertheless reassuring by its very presence. The Spindrifter standard seemed to be about half a dozen buttons and a couple of switches. She assumed that the onboard computers must be infinitely more sophisticated than anything humanity had yet produced.

She hoped so.

The slidecraft was like a flying raft. There was the low ledge around its perimeter and, in place of a mast, the T-shaped pole to which you clung if you wanted to stand upright. Strauss-Giolitto, before sleep had ensnared her, had seen Polyaggle doing this; every now and then the wind of their progress had pulled the delicate Spindrifter right off her feet, so that she had been blown horizontal. The more general method of staying aboard a slidecraft was, Strauss-Giolitto gathered, to squat. She felt idiotic doing it herself; Polyaggle, needless to say, managed the posture with grace and elegance. Pinocchio had just crouched glumly at the front of the craft, beside the simple control panel, and watched the landscape flow by beneath them.

He was still there now.

"Pinocchio," she said.

He turned. "I heard you wake, but I didn't want to look round in case . . . in case I embarrassed you."

She remembered puking so explosively in the shuttle. "That's all right," she said. "If you'd been anoth—" She cut the sentence short.

It was bloody cold up here. Obviously Polyaggle didn't feel it because she was still naked; Strauss-Giolitto should have begged for some extra clothing—would certainly have, had she known where they were going. As it was, the thin white robe offered her body very little protection from the freezing air.

"Do you want to come up beside me?" said the bot. "The view is quite exciting. I never realized there could be wastes like this."

She crawled across to him. The slidecraft chose this moment to hit a pocket of turbulence. She felt the acidity of nausea at the back of her mouth, but swallowed it down. This was nothing like as bad as things had been when the shuttle hit Spindrift's atmosphere. Besides, all she had had in the past few hours was a little water. You can cope, she told herself.

She was less confident by the time she reached Pinocchio's side. She crouched beside him, fighting with her stomach. "I think I'm going to die of cold," she said to him.

"Sit up and look at the scenery."

"That's going to make it even worse."

"No, it's not. I have internal power sources. If you sit close to me I can put my arm about you and give you some of my warmth." He smiled down at her upturned face.

Her eyes narrowed. Various of the male personnel on the Santa Maria had made her similar offers over the years.

"Don't be silly," said Pinocchio, evidently reading her thoughts. "I'm just a bot, remember."

Nervously, she pulled herself up against him, putting an arm around his shoulders. He put one of his arms around her waist. After a few moments, she began to relax. His body was warm: she felt as if she were leaning against a radiator.

He was right: the polar landscape was impressive. From space it had looked like a featureless desert, and even the Pockets had been unable to show it from the angle at which they were seeing it now. There were sharp-edged mountains of ice, fairy arches, deep crevasses, rolled hummocks of snow, eddies of wind raising minor, short-lived blizzards. She snuggled closer to the bot, and his grip tightened compensatorily. She felt utterly safe.

"Tell me, Pinocchio, are you male or female?"

"Neither. And you?"

The question startled her. Of course she was female. Back in decontamination he'd seen her more naked than anyone had seen her before. But she sensed from the way in which he'd spoken the question that he was entirely serious.

"I don't know," she said at last. "No—that's a lie. I do. For a long time I thought I was maybe a man locked up inside a woman's body, and I wanted more than anything else to escape from it. If I'd had enough money I'd probably have had an Artif transfer and become a man. But I didn't, and I'm glad I didn't."

"Why?"

"Because I'm not male. I'm female. It's as simple as that. But . . ."

"But your sexual attraction is towards women, and sometimes you fall in love with them." The bot was speaking as quietly as he could. The slidecraft was moving at no great pace, but still the air was whipping past their ears.

"Yes," she said.

"You should never have been aboard the Santa Maria, you know. With the exception of Strider, the personnel were in part selected for their fertility, which involves the willingness to act in what could be best described as a fertile fashion."

"I know," said Strauss-Giolitto. "I did a lot of lying to get selected for the mission. I invented a most sensational set of past liaisons. Some of my male friends invented relationships on my behalf." She breathed deeply. "I wanted so much to be a part of this mission that I'd probably have forced myself to go to bed with Dulac in order to prove my qualifications, if that'd have been what was necessary. I even considered screwing around a bit with men, just to add a veneer of truth to the stuff I was claiming to have done. But the SSIA never dug very deep. Most people talk openly about their sexuality. I never did—never have, except with lovers and a very few close friends."

"Why were you always so secretive?" He was holding her even more closely. She felt like a child who needed a cuddle, and was being given it.

"My religion," she said. "Officially it accepts people like me, but there are still enough atavists around who point to carefully selected passages in the Bible and growl that homosexuality is a sin. They ignore the bits about fornication. In a way I was imitating them, disapproving of myself. It was almost as if there had to be two mes: the good Christian who had just never found any Mr Rights, and the evil woman who used female sexbots and occasionally had female lovers. I lived two lives, not just for the outside world but in my own head.

"Besides, there were the practical aspects," she added. "There are still prejudices about. Almost everybody but a Christian is allowed to have sex with whomever they want, but not teachers. Homosexual teachers are too often popularly regarded as a threat—as if I'd want to seduce some toddler."

"You have your own prejudices," said Pinocchio mildly.

"Yes, but that's diff—" She paused. No, it wasn't different. She was speaking to someone whom she felt she could trust. That he was a bot was neither here nor there, just in the same way that she was no less a woman because she wanted the love of other women. She wasn't a pseudo-man, and neither—in a quite different sense—was Pinocchio. He was himself. He was a person.

After a long time she said: "Does anyone else on the Santa Maria suspect, do you know?"

"Strider's a perceptive woman," said the bot. "I expect she's pretty certain. And Lan Yi's a wise old bird. Most of the others obviously think you're just frigid."

"That's a pretty rotten thing for them to think."

Pinocchio shrugged. "It's what you seem to want them to think. It's the disguise you've created for yourself, after all."

"Yes, but . . ." Again she hesitated. He had spoken the truth. But still she didn't like people thinking about her in that sort of dismissive way: Oh, her, she's just an icecube, no chance there, must be something wrong with her hormones.

She changed tack. "I'd expected that at least a couple of the women might be bisexual, just by the law of averages, but I was out of luck. It's been a very lonely few years."

"Yes, that was a rotten hand of fate," said Pinocchio sympathetically. "In screening out the homosexuals the SSIA inadvertently screened out the bisexuals as well—except for one male, and he doesn't know it himself."

"Who?"

The bot looked down at her. She was nestling into his shoulder. Her face and scalp were glowing with the warmth he had been giving her.

"I keep secrets," he said reprovingly.

"Will you keep mine?"

"Of course. Unless it should endanger the rest of the personnel in some way, but I can't imagine that ever it could." He looked towards the rear of the craft, where Polyaggle was still sleeping. "You want her very badly, don't you?"

Strauss-Giolitto gave a rueful, bitter smile. "I thought I did, for a while. I still find her very attractive."

"You still want her." It was a flat statement.

"Yes," said Strauss-Giolitto after a moment.

"I'd forget the idea."

"Why?"

"She's humanoid, not human. In more ways than you can imagine, she is utterly different from you. She told me about some of them after you'd fallen asleep. Apart from anything else," added the bot, looking out over the snowscape, "she has responsibilities to her own kind. She is the Queen of her hive."

Strauss-Giolitto had dozed back off to sleep against Pinocchio's side by the time the slidecraft gave a judder that was perceptibly different from all the lurches and swayings that had gone on before. It was enough to bring both her and Polyaggle to instant wakefulness.

Polyaggle unfolded herself with her customary grace from the floor and walked forward easily, mastering the rolling of the craft with ease. Strauss-Giolitto, turning with sleepy eyes to watch her and remembering her own timorous crawl over the same stretch, was instantly envious. At the moment what she herself wanted desperately were a lavatory and a meal, definitely in that order. The consequences of the decontamination procedure were beginning to take their toll.

"The slidecraft is nearing our destination," said Polyaggle coolly. "If you would be so good as to move over . . ."

She gestured with a claw, and the two of them shuffled aside to give her access to the control panel.

With Pinocchio's arm around her, Strauss-Giolitto no longer felt frightened of the height they were travelling above the pack ice. It was odd the way you could feel perfectly comfortable looking out of the window of a shuttle that was travelling a thousand kilometers above Mars, but being just a few hundred meters above the ground could inspire such fearsome vertigo. She supposed it was because it was so much easier to imagine yourself falling a few hundred meters to meet a gory end than it was to conceive of a drop of a thousand or more kilometers. Or maybe it was just that the shuttle was enclosed; she still hadn't become accustomed to the idea that being even relatively motionless in the open air was something that could be enjoyed.

She wondered how many of the rest of them from the Santa Maria would feel the same way. Most, she guessed.

Pinocchio was looking intently forwards, almost as if he had forgotten she was there. She followed the direction of his gaze.

Ahead of them was a great hill of snow, distinguishable from the rest of the landscape around it only by the gentleness of its slopes and the area it covered—it was difficult to judge from here, but Strauss-Giolitto reckoned the thing must be ten or twenty kilometers across. But there seemed little else of interest about it until she realized that it formed an almost perfect arc of a sphere.

Then a black diamond-shaped object appeared on the nearer hillside and slowly grew larger. No: Strauss-Giolitto could see more clearly as they grew closer. It wasn't an object but an aperture. They were heading straight towards it.

"Presumably this is one of those features of primitive, useless Spindrift that you don't go out of your way to show any visiting ships of the Autarchy," said Pinocchio.

"You are correct," said Polyaggle. She relaxed from the control board. "They have taken over and are guiding us in now."

They plunged towards the slope, seeming to be moving faster and faster the nearer they came to the surface. The slidecraft slowed to pause, bobbing, just outside the opening in the ice. Strauss-Giolitto could feel eyes watching her—alien eyes.

Then they were moving inward. The glare of the ice vanished behind them. They were entering a place of utmost blackness. Even the daylight from behind them seemed reluctant to penetrate it.

"What the hell's going on?" said Strider to Nightmirror, who was taking a turn on the command deck. "They've just vanished inside some bloody snowdrift!" She had been following her personnel's progress on Spindrift keenly for a duty-shift and a half now. She looked up, red-eyed, from the Pocket, as if expecting to find Nightmirror standing there beside her.

THERE IS NOTHING TO BE CONCERNED ABOUT, said the Image. I AM IN CONSTANT COMMUNICATION WITH TEN PER CENT EXTRA FREE, WHO IS CURRENTLY RESIDENT WITHIN THE BOT. YOUR PEOPLE ARE SAFE ENOUGH.

Thanks to Nightmirror's efforts, Strider had been able to record in holo most of the conversation Pinocchio and Strauss-Giolitto had had with the alien down on the spaceport, but the link between the two Images had gone strangely dead during part of the time the little party had been travelling across the icecap. Moreover, she still hadn't been able to replay that recording and get Nightmirror to translate for her what the alien was saying: at the moment she could hear Pinocchio and a very tired-sounding Strauss-Giolitto clearly enough, but the alien's side of the dialogue was just a mess of whistling noises. Strider was beginning to feel that there were too many things she was not being allowed to know.

"You lost contact for a while earlier!" she said angrily.

THERE WAS GOOD PURPOSE FOR THAT, said Nightmirror.

The response was presumably meant to be soothing, but it had the opposite effect on Strider. "Don't fucking patronize me, you gobbet of half-real energy!" she yelled.

O'Sondheim looked up from his own Pocket. He was visibly every bit as weary as she was. "Cool it, Leonie," he said quietly.

"And you can fucking shut up as well," she said. "Go off into a corner and milk yourself off a couple of liters of testosterone, why don't you?"

They were having a personal conversation.

"Who were? Oh, Strauss-Giolitto and Pinocchio, you mean. What was it about?"

IT WAS PERSONAL, AS I SAY. TEN PER CENT EXTRA FREE DECIDED THAT IT WAS ENTIRELY BETWEEN THE TWO OF THEM, AND THAT IT SHOULD NOT BE TRANSMITTED.

Strider's eyes were slit-like with fury.

"So that's what goddam Ten Per Cent Extra Free thought, is it? Who's supposed to be in charge of this mission?"

You are.

"Then how come Ten Per Cent Extra Free's suddenly started making all the decisions?" She knew her anger had moved her beyond the bounds of rationality, but she was too exhausted to care. "I ordered constant monitoring of everything that went on down there. I need to know it all. I even need to be able to review what it looked like when those decontamination bots went shooting into Strauss-Giolitto's rectum, and what she said about it. Now, tell me why you two Images conspired to cut out half an hour of the transmission!"

There was a long silence, and even through the red haze of her temper Strider began to worry that she'd gone too far and persuaded the Images that they should desert their human comrades.

WE ARE NOT SPIES, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER, said the voices of Nightmirror and Heartfire in quasi-harmony. WE WILL REPORT AND RECORD EVERYTHING THAT AFFECTS THE WELL-BEING OF YOUR ENDEAVOR AND OF THE PERSONNEL UNDER YOUR COMMAND. BUT PINOCCHIO AND MARIA STRAUSS-GIOLITTO WERE TALKING TO EACH OTHER ABOUT THEMSELVES, AND THEIR FEELINGS. THEY WERE SAYING THINGS THEY CERTAINLY WOULD NOT HAVE SAID HAD THEY REALIZED THAT ANYONE BUT TEN PER CENT EXTRA FREE WAS LISTENING TO THEM. WE WILL NOT REPORT SUCH INFORMATION TO YOU.

"Were they balling, or what?"

No.

There was an icy silence in her mind.

She slumped against the Pocket. Inadvertently she nodded her head into it, and a perfect replica of her own bunk popped cheerily into view.

She was being stupid, and the worst part was that she knew it. She had been fraught with anxiety during that long half-hour when the Pocket in which the recording was being made had gone blank. Now it had gone blank again, and she was doubly fraught. But it was senseless of her to be taking her fears out in the form of rage against the Images.

"I'm sorry," she said, once she could get her voice under control. "But can you tell me, please, why the transmission has gone dead again."

WE ARE CONTINUING TO RECEIVE INFORMATION FROM TEN PER CENT EXTRA FREE. She must really have perturbed them: they were still speaking together. BUT THE INSTALLATION INTO WHICH THE PARTY HAS GONE IS SHIELDED HEAVILY AGAINST ELECTROMAGNETIC LEAKAGE, SO THAT HE CAN TRANSMIT ONLY DIRECT MENTAL INFORMATION TO US. HOWEVER, YOU WILL FIND OUT EVERYTHING ONCE THE PARTY RETURNS HERE. TEN PER CENT EXTRA FREE HAS EXPLAINED THE SITUATION TO PINOCCHIO, AND HE IS MAKING A RECORDING THROUGH HIS OWN EYES AND EARS AS BACK-UP.

"He could have been doing that all along," she said. Her anger waxed again, but this time it was almost exclusively with herself. It was something she should have thought of. It had been one of the basic tenets of her training: never rely on one system when two systems will do and, if you can manage a third, all the better. She was beginning to depend too much on the Images to do almost everything for them—hell, they all were, but it was her duty to ensure that there were back-ups for when things came along that even the Images couldn't manage.

"I'm sorry," she said again. "I'll be expecting you to scrub my back next."

THAT IS SOMETHING WE CANNOT DO, ALTHOUGH . . . There was a wistfulness in the song.

"Although what?"

The Images giggled, and were gone from her mind.

They heard the aperture closing behind them, closing off the last remnants of sunlight. Strauss-Giolitto could see absolutely nothing. Had it not been for the presence beside her in the slidecraft of Polyaggle and Pinocchio—one of whom, it had to be assumed, knew exactly what she was doing, and in the other of whom she now had complete confidence—she knew that she would have panicked, would have jumped hysterically over the side or done something else equally suicidal.

Pinocchio took one of her hands in his and at the same time switched on the lights in his eyes. The bright yellow beams shot here and there around the enclosure in which they were pent, picking out details of heavy machinery, banks of slidecrafts on shelved bays along the wall, huge cables that curved sinuously away across the floor . . .

"Turn those off," demanded Polyaggle sharply.

He did so.

"There are detector cells implanted all over the walls in this chamber," she explained. "They're examining us to make absolutely sure we are who we say we are and who we look like. Quite a number of them are low-frequency photoreceptors, and you've probably just blown out about half of those."

"I apologize," said Pinocchio.

"You weren't to know. I don't blame you." Ten Per Cent Extra Free translated her tone as irritable. "We have plenty of replacements, of course: it's the actual job of replacing that's going to be a pain in the butt."

Ten Per Cent Extra Free didn't often go in for colloquialisms when he was translating. Most of the ones he did use he had obviously picked up from Strider.

"I apologize again. If we can help . . ."

"You can't. We don't want you to be here more than a few hours."

Suddenly, dazzlingly, the lights came on. Strauss-Giolitto used her free hand to shield her eyes from the bright greenness.

A sequence of cooing noises echoed through the chamber, which Strauss-Giolitto, recovering her vision, began to realize was even bigger than she had thought during that brief glimpse when Pinocchio had lit his eyes.

Ten Per Cent Extra Free translated: WELCOME TO YOU, POLYAGGLE, AND TO YOUR COMPANIONS. BRING YOUR SLIDECRAFT TO THE GROUND.

Polyaggle touched a couple of the buttons on her control board, and the vessel slowly sank. All at once there were a dozen Spindrifters around them. Strauss-Giolitto's blood froze momentarily, but the aliens were unarmed, and most of them showed little interest in her or Pinocchio; they seemed to be a welcoming party for Polyaggle. She was hoisted out of the slidecraft by helping hands; the two offworlders had to climb over the low ledge and drop down to the ground under their own steam.

Of course, she thought. We'd be too heavy for them to lift.

A couple of the Spindrifters stayed on foot to escort Pinocchio and Strauss-Giolitto across the floor of the hangar; the remainder of the aliens, Polyaggle included, flew towards a diamond-shaped opening in the far wall. Under the green lights the butterfly wings of the Spindrifters took on even more enchanting tones. One kept expecting those many fluttering wingtips to collide, but somehow they never seemed to.

Strauss-Giolitto, barefoot, trod in a puddle of thick, gelatinous oil. It was an experience she decided not to repeat. Clutching Pinocchio's arm to stop herself from slipping on her oily foot, she picked her course carefully as they followed the two Spindrifters. Here and there they had to step over the thick cables or make a detour round some larger piece of seeming detritus. It was obvious that no one ever walked on the floor in here unless they were carrying something heavy: the Spindrifters flew across the hangar whenever they could. We're walking through their garbage tip, thought Strauss-Giolitto.

Several minutes later they were in a chamber some twenty meters long and high and perhaps half that wide. Around its walls were numerous cylindrical objects at whose nature Strauss-Giolitto couldn't guess. On the rounded top of each of the cylinders was another of the very simple control boards like the one she had seen Polyaggle use on the slidecraft.

"What are those things?" she subvocalized.

PUTERS, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free. AMONG THE MOST ADVANCED IN THE WONDERVALE. IN FACT, THEY'RE SO FAR AHEAD OF ANYTHING YOU'VE COME ACROSS THAT PERHAPS "PUTER" IS THE WRONG WORD. THAT'S WHY THEY LOOK SO SIMPLE.

Their escort had left them at the door, flying off down the broad, high corridor to go about other things. In the center of the chamber stood Polyaggle and a couple of other female Spindrifters whom Polyaggle quickly introduced as Nerita and Feefaar. At first Strauss-Giolitto assumed these individuals must be top-ranking officers in the military of the Associated Villages, but it soon emerged that they were the Associated Villages military. With the aid of their machines they could, together or singly, mount Spindrift's defenses—which Strauss-Giolitto began to infer were a lot less meager than Polyaggle had implied. In the event of the enemy's battling their way through them to the ground, as many Spindrifters as could manage it would take refuge in this vast bunker, which she gathered stretched for kilometers underground; the rest of the species would be doomed.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw a swiftly moving glimmer of not-quite-light. There was another Image in the chamber.

She let Pinocchio do most of the talking. She felt she had very little to contribute.

"We will give you what we can," Nerita was saying. "What we cannot give you is any weaponry information which, if you made use of it, might by its very nature allow the slightest possibility of the Autarch's forces tracing it back here to Spindrift. Most but not all of his lieutenants are as stupid as he is himself, but some are capable of the most intelligent ratiocinations. Every weapons system has its own signature, and that signature might give a clue to the Autarchy as to where you had gained the system's theoretical underpinning."

"That is perfectly understood," said Pinocchio.

"Not by me," subvocalized Strauss-Giolitto.

WHAT HE'S SAYING IS THAT IF YOU HUMANS SUDDENLY START DEPLOYING SOME VARIANT OF AN IDENTIFIABLE ANCIENT SPINDRIFTER WEAPON, SOMEONE IN THE AUTARCHY MIGHT PUT TWO AND TWO TOGETHER AND TORCH THIS PLANET ON PRINCIPLE.

"But there are other ways in which we might assist you," said Nerita. "For a start we can give you the co-ordinates of the stellar systems of the other ancient species in The Wondervale. They may be able to offer you different information. Some of them might even dare to give you technological data which would help you in your struggle."

"Is it likely?" said Pinocchio. Strauss-Giolitto envied the way that he seemed so perfectly nonchalant in these surroundings. She herself was all too aware that they were in the stronghold of aliens about whom they knew virtually nothing, and that there were millions of tons of ice and metal above them.

"Not very," said Feefaar. "But certainly they will give you information which is both unknown to us and likely to aid you."

"What sort of information?"

Nerita spoke again. "Our communications with those other species are sporadic and rare, but we know that some of them are more restless under the tyranny than we are. Remaining neutral is harder work than you might think, even for a species like ourselves, who think in timescales of billions rather than millions of years."

"No," said Strauss-Giolitto, speaking for the first time. "I know exactly what you mean. Injustice is difficult to stomach. So is guilt."

The Spindrifters looked at her silently.

"You must feel guilty about all the sentient beings who are dying because the Autarchy persists," she went on, floundering for words, becoming swiftly embarrassed.

"No," said Feefaar. "Why should we?"

"Because . . . well, because . . ."

"What is more important," said Feefaar, "is that, the longer the Autarchy and its inevitable successors continue their bloody rule, the more likely it is that our species will be destroyed."

The Spindrifters turned their attention back to Pinocchio and Strauss-Giolitto let the conversation drift away from her. You don't even know how these people think, she told herself, so how can you start guessing at their morals and priorities? Just because they're roughly the same shape as you and they seem to be talking in Argot—not to mention that you find all three of them fascinatingly desirable—you can't assume that they're like you in the slightest. What emotions do they have? You can't even imagine what their emotions might be like. Get to grips with this.

She looked around her. The warmth that Pinocchio had given her aboard the slidecraft had all ebbed away by now, and she realized that she was once more very chilly under her thin robe. Her head was beginning to throb from the cold. Aside from the rows of Spindrifter puters along the walls, the chamber was featureless. Green light—fortunately not as lurid as that in the hangar—came from somewhere. The walls seemed to be grey. There was no decoration at all on them. No art of any kind, she thought. Perhaps the Spindrifters are their art.

Pinocchio tapped her on the shoulder.

"I want to consult briefly with you," he said very quietly. The three Spindrifters had turned politely away. Although who knows how sensitive their hearing is? thought Strauss-Giolitto. Maybe this place is bugged up to the eyeballs anyway.

"With me? I'm no expert in any of this."

"The Spindrifters are prepared to feed into my puter all the information that they're prepared to give us. I think, from what they tell me, that I have the capacity to handle this amount of data—although I shall ask you to monitor the process in case I run the risk of crashing."

"What's so confidential about this that we have to be whispering?" she said.

Pinocchio shook his head. "That is not what I want to talk about. In exchange, I propose to permit them to download my puter into theirs beforehand." He looked hesitant. "It's a pity the Main Computer is dead. These people—they know so much more than we do that it's impossible for me to determine whether or not there's any information we might have that could be of use to them."

"There's bound to be," she said, glancing across to where the three Spindrifters huddled in the far corner. They, too, were talking in low tones. They seemed to be arguing—at one point Feefaar fluttered a meter or two into the air, speaking rapidly. "We've undergone a completely different cultural evolution," she continued, "and we've done it in isolation in a galaxy who knows how remote from The Wondervale. There's certain to be stuff that we've come up with that they don't know."

"This is my feeling also," said the bot. "But I do not think that I can go through with this enterprise without specifically asking for human permission. Ideally I should ask Strider, but she's not here. I'm reluctant to delay my offer until I've had a chance to speak with her, because already one of the Spindrifters is dubious about the wisdom of helping us at all. We may not be allowed to send a second deputation down here."

"Feefaar," she said.

"Precisely."

She wondered why Pinocchio was telling her this, then whispered: "Oh."

"You're the only human being here whose permission I can ask," said Pinocchio.

"What makes you think you aren't a human being, bot?" she said after a long, thoughtful pause. She touched him on the arm. "I'm a teacher from City 22—a few years ago I was showing infants how to access databases and fine-tune their neural implants. I'm not qualified to make decisions like this. You are. Do what you think you should." She punched him on the shoulder and tried to disguise the fact that it felt as if she'd broken a couple of knuckles. "Strider sent you as her ambassador. So go ahead and ambassad."

I COULD HOOK UP WITH NIGHTMIRROR TO ASK STRIDER IF SHE APPROVES THIS COURSE OF ACTION, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"No," Strauss-Giolitto said. "This is Pinocchio's deal. Strider delegated the decisions here to him."

"Are you sure?" said Pinocchio.

"Yes."

"You realize you've just answered the question you said you weren't competent to answer?"

Strauss-Giolitto supposed she had, in a way, but this was no time to be chopping around with logical niceties. "Do what you think is best," she said quietly. "Only, do you think you could give me some more of your heat? I'm freezing to death in here."

His arm around her waist, Pinocchio put his proposition to the Spindrifters. They retreated for a few further moments to their corner to discuss it, and now Polyaggle and Nerita very obviously prevailed over the skeptical Feefaar. The argument didn't last long.

"We accept your offer," said Polyaggle with seeming formality, facing the two offworlders. "And we will give you the data that has already been discussed." She paused as Feefaar said something to her with quiet intensity, but then Polyaggle raised her wings angrily at her. "There's something else we might be able to do for you. If we could have access to your Main Computer . . ."

"The Main Computer is dead," said Pinocchio. "I took out of it everything that I could. That wasn't very much, but it's all in the files I'm offering to download into your machines."

"There's no such thing as a truly dead computer!" exclaimed Feefaar. "Why do you try to deceive us this way?"

LET ME HANDLE THIS, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"Can our Image speak with your Image?" said Pinocchio. "Or would you prefer to speak to our Image direct? Let him explain."

"Let him talk to me," said Feefaar in a tone which Ten Per Cent Extra Free translated as contempt.

There was a brief silence. Feefaar stood with her eyes closed. At last she opened them.

"I understand now," she said. "I hadn't appreciated quite how primitive your technology is. If the Images have failed to drain the last out of your Main Computer, then perhaps much of it really is dead."

"As Pinocchio said," Strauss-Giolitto interposed tartly.

"As indeed your friend did say," agreed Feefaar with a shimmer of her wings. She touched her claws together in a gesture which Strauss-Giolitto this time interpreted as a signal of apology. "But we are better even than the Images at such matters."

THIS IS TRUE, Ten Per Cent Extra Free confirmed.

"It is probable that we can gain yet more data than you"—Feefaar indicated Pinocchio—"were able to immediately after your Main Computer's death. We would like to send one of us back with you to the Santa Maria to investigate."

Pinocchio looked at Strauss-Giolitto as if to ask her what he should do. She nodded to him that the decision was his.

"This seems permissible," he said. "There is room for an extra person in our shuttle."

"Then let us proceed with what we have to do here," said Nerita. "Afterwards Polyaggle will accompany you to your starship."

"There is one other thing of which you should be aware," added Feefaar. "If you are fortunate, Polyaggle may dredge enough information out of your Main Computer to be able to deduce a route back to your own stellar system."

"To Mars?"

"If that is what your home world is called, yes."

Among many species it would have been regarded as an inappropriate moment for a conversation, but the Antracvhans were not coy. The Autarch was in the process of both copulating with and gashing to death one of his less favorite concubines; in the midst of the former he had begun to suspect that she was faking her enjoyment of his efforts—hence the latter. The floor shook. She was taking a long time to die—Antracvhans are a tough species, and can sustain considerable physiological damage before the injuries become fatal—so the Autarch saw no good reason to discontinue his ponderous pleasure, even when he was informed that Kaantalech wished to holo with him.

Kaantalech watched with interest for a few moments before speaking.

"My officers have tracked down the Humans, Stars' Elect," she said. "Their protoplasm is so different from ours that it virtually glows on our screens. The delay has been because we have had to search all the quadrants." Had the Autarch been of her species he would have known that her mouth was brimming with glee. Luckily he wasn't, or he might have started wondering just what it was that was making her so gleeful. The successful search done by her aides had made her realize quite how potentially powerful she was.

"Where are they?" he said, not looking up. More gore splattered the walls. The concubine's slow brain began to realize that the process was hurting more than usual, and she let out a squeal of discomfort.

"They're on one of the moons of Spindrift," said Kaantalech. She could hardly believe what was going on. She knew that the females in Nalla's entourage were bred for stupidity—because an even remotely clever concubine is a dangerous concubine—but this particular specimen appeared to be no more than living meat. Kaantalech wondered if the Autarch's paranoia had increased to such a peak that he was having massive brain surgery performed on his females before they were allowed to approach him. If so, it couldn't be long before the same injunction started applying to courtiers, and then lieutenants . . . Kaantalech was glad she could communicate with the Autarch by holo, rather than having to go to Qitanefermeartha in person.

"Never heard of the place," grunted the Autarch.

"It's well off all the trade routes," said Kaantalech, "and it has little to offer us. We investigated it several times for natural resources or slaves, but there were hardly any of either."

"Why did the Humans go there?"

It was an unusually intelligent question from the Autarch, and it was one that Kaantalech cursed herself for not having thought through beforehand.

"Perhaps because of the planet's very remoteness and mediocrity," she said. That must be it.

"I distrust remote, mediocre planets," said the Autarch. This was true enough. He distrusted all planets. "Maybe they had some other reason for going there."

"I can't imagine why they . . ."

"I wasn't asking for an opinion. Torch it. Torch the Humans as well—we've done without their technology for thousands of years, so what makes you think we need it now?"

There was no point in arguing with the Autarch when he was in this kind of mood.

"Yes, Stars' Elect," said Kaantalech humbly, and prepared to disconnect holo contact.

The full force of the pain of what was being inflicted on her was now reaching the concubine's brain, and she was screaming in a most pleasing fashion. Kaantalech wished she could continue watching for a while, but she knew that she had been dismissed.

Regretfully, she disconnected.

Strauss-Giolitto was annoyed with herself about it, but she had experienced a certain vindictive delight while Polyaggle was going through the Santa Maria's decontamination systems. It didn't matter that she was having to undergo the same procedure herself—there seemed to be so little of her left to decontaminate—and it didn't matter that the humans' decontamination was significantly less rigorous and therefore significantly less humiliating than the Spindrifters' had been: Strauss-Giolitto still felt a poignant sense of revenge at the thought of Polyaggle's discomfort.

Which was very petty of her—hence her annoyance.

She was even more annoyed when the Spindrifter emerged from decontamination seemingly quite unperturbed.

Strider was waiting for the alien alongside Strauss-Giolitto and Pinocchio, who had cleared decontamination much more quickly.

God, but it was good to be back in a jumpsuit again—although her baldness still felt bizarre. She kept catching herself twitching her head to flick her hair out of her eyes and then realizing there wasn't any hair there to flick. Back on Mars she'd have had a medbot give her a quick transplant; the medbots on board the Santa Maria weren't designed for cosmetic repairs.

The first meeting between Strider and Polyaggle was interesting to watch. Because Pinocchio's synthetic skin was pale and because Strauss-Giolitto had been born that way, Polyaggle—whose reactions Strauss-Giolitto was beginning to be able crudely to interpret—was obviously startled to find herself being greeted by a black human being. Color variations among the Spindrifters were largely confined to the wings, Strauss-Giolitto had noticed: the bristles that covered their bodies differed little from one individual to another. Polyaggle clearly thought at first that Strider was of some different species—and was deeply suspicious, because Pinocchio had told the Spindrifters that, aside from the Images, there was only one sentient species on the Santa Maria. When Lan Yi appeared a moment afterwards, apologizing for his lateness as if he were attending an office discussion rather than encountering a delegate from an alien species for the first time, Polyaggle's confusion grew.

And then at last the Spindrifter cottoned on.

Strider extended a hand. "You're welcome," she said. "Touching hands is a form of greeting among our kind."

Somewhat timorously, it seemed, Polyaggle put out a claw and tapped Strider's fingertips lightly. Of course, she would still be worried about contagion. Presumably she would have preferred to remain suited up, but by now her suit was ashes.

The Spindrifter fluttered her wings briefly. "That is a greeting from my species to yours," she said.

"Would you like food?" said Strider.

Polyaggle didn't answer, but shut her eyes. What was there on this offworlder spacecraft that might be safe for her to eat? Her biochemistry was obviously entirely different from the human one.

"I brought an Image with me, as you must know," she said at length. "He has conferred with your Images here and they have devised a list of items which it is possible for me to eat without harm. I will join you for a meal of basic processed soya, if I may."

And I'll bet Strider tucks into the same beside her, thought Strauss-Giolitto. Processed soya was the hard tack on which many meals were based; one of the skills of cookbots was in blending flavors and sauces so that you could no longer taste the soya.

"Perhaps with a little pure water," added Polyaggle.

"It shall be arranged," said Strider. She nodded to Lan Yi, who spoke briefly into his commline.

"Please join us for dinner," said Strider to the other three. With a smile.

Only Pinocchio returned it.

"Our Images linked up so that I was able to monitor almost everything that went on during the while my people were with you, except for the time you were in your stronghold in the icecap," said Strider. And except for that bloody half-hour, she thought viciously. I'll find out more about that if I have to pull Pinocchio apart chip by chip.

They were seated round the table in Strider's cabin. It was just the right height for her and Lan Yi, but substantially too low for Strauss-Giolitto. Polyaggle had elected to remain standing. A bot would be arriving soon with their dinner. Strider grinned to herself. Lan Yi was remaining as taciturn as ever, but it was easy to read from Strauss-Giolitto's face that the woman was hoping the bot would take a very long time in coming.

"I know of the agreement you came to with Pinocchio," continued Strider, "and I approve of it. After we've eaten, allow me to show you round the Santa Maria and introduce you to a few people. If you're tired, we have some spare cabins—you are certainly welcome to claim one as your own . . ."

"I want to stay aboard this ship for as short a time as possible," said Polyaggle.

"Our friend is quite reasonably concerned about bacterial or viral infection," explained Pinocchio. "There is no discourtesy intended."

"Thank you, Pinocchio," said Strider. "I had gathered as much for myself." And that was a silly put-down, she thought. I wish I could get rid of my anger.

A klaxon screamed.

"Uh oh," said Strider, leaping from her chair. She felt the hairs all up the back of her spine rise. "Emergency. Forgive me."

She was through the door and into the nearest elevator shaft before she gave herself time to think. Pinocchio was hard behind her.

"Any idea what's going on?" she said breathlessly as the elevator hissed them towards the command deck.

"No."

"Are there any Images nearby?"

"No, not even Polyaggle's. He has gone to the deck already to work with the others. They clearly think this is not something minor." Even the bot was looking apprehensive.

Strider beat with her fist against the elevator's plastite wall. "Come on, damn you! Come on!"

It stopped abruptly, and for a lunatic moment Strider thought she might have broken it.

Leander, who had been on agricultural duties, boarded alongside them.

"What the—?" she began.

"Dunno," said Strider bluntly. "Better be good. I was just about to have my dinner."

A few seconds later they were on the command deck. All of the Pockets were glowing brightly except the two at either end.

"It's only just happened," said Nelson, looking up from one of them. His face was aghast. "It's like your worst fucking nightmare, light of my life."

"Let me see," said Strider, running to the Pocket next to the big man.

"Oh, shit," she breathed. It was a nightmare. At first glance it seemed as if the number of bright stars in the sky had doubled. Then you realized that half of them were starships.

THE AUTARCHY'S COME TO SAY HELLO, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free wryly in her mind.

"Any idea why they're here?" she barked to the Image.

US, I SHOULD IMAGINE. THE SANTA MARIA, I MEAN.

"Tell Polyaggle I want her here—she knows more about these bastards than I do. Where's O'Sondheim?"

"Here," the First Officer said beside her.

"Images, how many of those goddam starships are there?"

THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-TWO, said a voice she didn't recognize. That must be the Spindrifter's Image.

"Is there anything we can hit them with that could do them any harm?" For the first time in days, Strider felt completely calm. She was giving the orders again: for a time it had seemed that command of her ship was slipping away from her.

We could damage—even destroy—a few of them, but there would still be hundreds of others.

"Can we get away quick?"

THEY HAVE THE TACHYONIC DRIVE AS WELL. HOW DO YOU THINK THEY GOT HERE SO FAST? WE COULD LOSE A FEW OF THEM, BUT—Strider felt something that she assumed was the mental equivalent of a shrug—AGAIN THERE WOULD BE HUNDREDS OF OTHERS.

"Then what in hell can we do?"

WAIT AND SEE, said the Image philosophically.

"Is Ten Per Cent Extra Free there? Or Nightmirror? Or Heartfire?"

THEY ARE DOING OTHER THINGS.

"Great," said Strider, turning to Nelson. "We seem to have got ourselves a fatalistic Image."

"I'm feeling pretty fatalistic myself," he said. His attempt at casualness was unconvincing. He looked like a man who was staring into the jaws of death—which was more or less what he was doing. "Umbel almighty, but will you look at that?"

"I just have," said Strider harshly. "Get your brain together, Nelson. We need it."

She stepped away from the Pocket and glanced around.

"Anyone else got any good ideas?" she snapped.

They shook their heads at her—all except Pinocchio, who was looking thoughtful.

"They wouldn't send a fleet that size against just a single vessel," he said. "All they'd need to overwhelm us would be half a dozen—maybe twice as many if they wanted to capture us. I have a bad feeling about this."

"Keep bad feelings to yourself right now," she said. She gestured towards the Pocket behind her. "There are three hundred and seventy-two bad feelings hanging out there in space at the moment."

"Please . . ." began Pinocchio.

"If it's not some way we can get the hell out of here, I don't want to hear it."

"Captain," said O'Sondheim. "Look here."

He pointed towards his own Pocket. She moved quickly across.

O'Sondheim had called up the representation of Spindrift. As the two of them watched, the appearance of the surface of the planet was changing. The southern polar icecap seemed to be melting; the northern icecap was doing the same sort of thing, but more patchily. Abruptly the planet's surface features disappeared entirely: all that Strider could see was a fuzzy pink disc.

"The Spindrifters' defenses," she breathed.

"That's my guess, too," said O'Sondheim.

"Three hundred and seventy-two ships are far too many to send against just one," repeated Pinocchio. "It's as I feared. We're just the sideshow."

Kaantalech had expected the job to be easy, but as soon as she saw the disc of Spindrift change color in her holoscreen she knew she was in for a fight. It normally took a couple of hundred cruisers to torch a planet down to its bedrock. She was glad that some instinct had warned her to bring a larger fleet. Perhaps it had been the surprise of hearing the Autarch ask a meaningful question for once.

She was looking forward to this. The databanks had told her that the dominant species here was confined to this single planet: torching it would mean there was one less developing species in The Wondervale to worry about. Developing civilizations made her anxious: one moment they were primitives and the next they were launching an armada of ships armed to the teeth with intramolecular disrupters aimed directly at your head. Better to get rid of them early, before that happened.

To judge by the defense shield that had been thrown up around Spindrift, she had got here with only a decade or two to spare. There was some sophisticated stuff on offer here.

"Take up standard formation," she said to an aide. He hurried off to transmit the order to the rest of the fleet.

The pinkness expanded rapidly from the surface of the planet until it enclosed the inner moon. From the fuzzy surface suddenly erupted a squadron of missiles, which moved in intelligent cooperation to effect maximum destruction among Kaantalech's front-line vessels. She watched the flares as ships died.

For a moment she was concerned. Those missiles had penetrated the best shields the Autarchy could produce.

"How many have we lost?" she asked another aide. She had sensibly placed her flagship, the Blunt Instrument, well to the rear of the fleet.

"Fourteen," he said.

"Keep moving into standard formation. The more we spread out, the less easy it'll be for them to attack us."

Even as she watched, her armada was shifting apart. Soon it would be forming a sphere all round the Spindrifters' defenses. That was the time to start attacking back.

Another flotilla of missiles emerged. She learnt a few seconds later that a further twenty-seven of her cruisers had been destroyed.

The Spindrifters had teeth, all right.

OK, so had she.

The diameter of the pinkness abruptly expanded by about ten per cent, and numbers of the ships under her command were simply swallowed by it.

This was more serious.

"Losses just incurred?" she snarled.

"Another fifty-eight gone, Kaantalech."

This couldn't go on much longer. The Spindrifter defenses had to be running low. Even though her fleet wasn't yet in position, she ordered the foremost vessels to launch a salvo of maxbeams down into the pink sphere. A couple of the maxbeams swerved to hit Autarchy vessels en route—this was par for the course—but the remainder seemed to hit home. The local space was a lightshow as the blue beams struck the pink surface and vanished somewhere beyond.

The pink paled perceptibly. Yes, some of those little darlings had struck paydirt, all right.

Kaantalech's mouth filled with joy.

"Continue moving into standard formation," she commanded brusquely.

Barely ten minutes had passed since combat had been declared. Conflicts in space don't generally last very long, because almost every blow that is successfully delivered is a fatal one. There have been legends of damaged warships somehow limping gallantly home, but almost without exception they are just that: legends. In the vacuum either you're alive or you're more generally dead: the status "wounded" is not an option.

The Blunt Instrument rocked, and Kaantalech staggered.

How had the Spindrifters been able to get a missile through without its being detected long before? She should have been warned. Someone was going to die painfully for this.

She squinted at her holoscreen, looking out for any trace of activity from the pink disc.

Off to her left, one of her cruisers erupted into a maelstrom of fire and glowing debris. She had seen no trace of a missile or ray. The Spindrifters must be using some technology of which the Autarchy knew nothing. Perhaps she ought to forbear from torching the planet and instead torture enough of the indigenes until one of them gave up the secret. But the Autarch would be bound to discover what she'd done, and then she'd have to hand over the technology to him—and he'd undoubtedly waste it on some damn-fool project or other. Besides, assuming he didn't, she had no wish to arm him up any more than she had to.

Better just to get rid of the world and its weaponry.

"Continue to move into standard formation," she repeated unnecessarily. Even though three more cruisers had been blasted into oblivion, no one would dare deviate from one of her orders until it had been countermanded. The sick joke the troopers passed around among each other when they thought they weren't being monitored was: "The Autarch'll kill you if he can't think of anything better to do, Kaantalech'll kill you because she can't think of anything better to do." Kaantalech not only allowed the apparently subversive joke to circulate freely: she had created it in the first place.

"Check the Humans on the bigger moon," she said to an aide.

Could it be that the Humans were chipping in with some of their own weaponry? She doubted it. If they'd had weapons of this class they'd merely have blown Maglittel to bits on first contact, rather than go through all the palaver with the red giant. In the name of the Autarchy, Maglittel had been a fool: she had attacked the Humans without first ascertaining their defense capabilities. It was one thing to kill innocent bystanders; quite another to be so stupid as not to check out first whether or not they could kill you.

The aide came bustling back, wagging his short proboscis.

"The Humans are quiescent, Kaantalech," he said. "Shall we divert a couple of cruisers their way?"

"No. Not yet," she said.

The Blunt Instrument was once again hit by something heavy. It was a good job she'd arranged that the flagship be kitted out with the best defensive shields of all the vessels in the fleet.

Vastly depleted—there were now fewer than two hundred and seventy ships left—Kaantalech's armada was forming a ragged version of the standard attack pattern. Most of the ships' commanding officers were adjusting their positions to take account of the gaps in the ranks. Here and there, however, the gaps remained. Kaantalech cursed. Patronage was still an important factor in an individual's attaining high rank in the Autarch's military. She would bet her fourteenth breast that the captains too slow on the uptake to get things right had friends or family in high places.

Still, she had to do the best she could with what she'd got.

"Four more cruisers out of it," said an aide nervously.

Kaantalech nodded absently. In the holoscreen, she'd seen three of them go down simultaneously. The fourth must have been around the far side of the pinkness. She congratulated herself yet again on having had the foresight to bring almost twice as many warships as were normally required.

The formation was ragged, but it was there. Surely the Spindrifters couldn't keep this up much longer. Even so, better to give them a first barrage now.

The earlier maxbeams had clearly weakened them.

She gestured to the nearest aide that she wanted to take over direct control.

He passed her a mike that was barely larger than a pajwhat's eye.

Kaantalech spoke a few words, and it was as if the heavens themselves were blown apart.

"I told you the Humans should never have been allowed to come here," fluted Feefaar. "All they have brought in their train is death and destruction." With a few assistants, she and Nerita were running the defense operations room.

"They were not to know that," said Nerita. Slidecraft were arriving from all over Spindrift; the port in the hillside was left constantly open because, with the deflector screen surrounding the planet out as far as the inner moon, there was no way the bunker could be observed by the attackers. But neither she nor Nerita was certain how long they could keep the deflector screen in place.

The screen caused a distortion in spacetime so that energy towards its exterior was diverted away to somewhere else in the Universe—in this instance, into Spindrift's star, where even the mightiest of the forces at the command of the Autarchy could do little damage. That was the theory of the device, which the ancient species had developed millions of years before, when they had seen the aggressive natures of the emergent secondary species taking form. The trouble was that no one had ever been able to make a deflector screen more than about eighty per cent efficient. If the Autarchy fleet poured enough energy into it they would, despite the huge wastage, nevertheless be able to destroy Spindrift just as effectively as if the screen had not been there at all.

"I'm not saying it was their fault," said Feefaar, fluttering her wings angrily as she flitted over Nerita's head to get from one puter to another. "But it wasn't our fault, either, that they drew this armada after them. As soon as they arrived we should have had the foresight to tell them to go away."

"Stop this. The deflector's losing power. Concentrate on that."

The two Spindrifters said nothing for a few minutes as they fought with various controls to try to beef up the energy resources available for the screen. They were drawing energy from the hot magnetic core of the planet; there was plenty of power on tap, but for technical reasons it was difficult to turn the tap on far enough to get more than a trickle at any one time.

"They're using maxbeams," said Nerita.

"I'd noticed."

Maxbeams sought out complex organic molecules and shredded them into their component atoms, those atoms being repelled from each other with such ferocity that the effect was not unlike a miniature version of a nuclear explosion. The disadvantage of the maxbeam was that it was difficult to target properly: if en route it passed too near some other collection of organics than the one you were aiming at, it was likely to change course, hungrily. If that collection of organics happened to be, say, the crew of one of your own starships, the starship would be blown into a depressingly large number of pieces. The weapon was outlawed throughout The Wondervale, which meant that no one but the Autarchy's military was allowed to use it.

"Even in here we may not be able to survive them," said Nerita. Between them, they'd got the deflector screen back up to full power again.

Feefaar looked upwards apprehensively. The dome of the hidden stronghold was built of meters-thick deadmetal, under the ice—the ice itself afforded a certain amount of protection. "We should be all right unless we get a direct hit."

"Should be. Hope so."

Both of them were all the while conjuring up in their minds an image of the disposition of the attacker's fleet. They were startled when one of the cruisers spontaneously and explosively disintegrated, soon to be followed by another.

"That wasn't us," said Feefaar. "Was it?" she added doubtfully.

Nerita gave a soft whistle—the Spindrift equivalent of a shrug. "Not unless the puters have independently developed an invisible beam or missile and decided to launch it themselves. I think you may unnecessarily have been maligning the Humans," she said.

"Then they're adding themselves to our grave," said Feefaar. "Even with the Images' help, their technology is several orders of magnitude behind what the Autarchy has at its disposal."

"I have a salvo of five direct ballistics available for launch," said Nerita. "What do you think?"

"I think, let the carnivores have it," said Feefaar emphatically.

In a galaxy where warfare was carried out using the most sophisticated technology available, defenses were designed accordingly. The Spindrifters were gambling on the fact that the Autarchy's defenses were too advanced to recognize that one way of destroying a spaceship is simply to fire something very hard very quickly at it. Expecting something complex like an intramolecular disrupter, a clever defense shield might let slip through what was effectively a very large bullet . . . which would puncture the craft's hull and break its spine.

All five of the ballistics effectively did just that.

"I deplore the loss of sentient life," said Feefaar, "but personally I found that rather pleasing."

"Leaving aside my obvious guilt," replied Nerita, "I am ashamed to confess that I too derived a deal of satisfaction from the episode. Shall I prepare another salvo?"

"Are you sure you're prepared to risk yourselves this way?" said Strider. "Some of the species on those cruisers might be able to see you in clear."

All four of the Images warbled together. IT IS UNLIKELY THAT WE CAN SAVE SPINDRIFT, BUT THE VERY LEAST WE CAN DO FOR HAVING BROUGHT THIS UPON THE SPINDRIFTERS IS TO CAUSE THEIR ENEMY AS MANY CASUALTIES AS POSSIBLE. THERE IS ALWAYS A CHANCE THAT THE AUTARCHY FLEET MIGHT RETREAT FOR LONG ENOUGH TO ENABLE US TO RESCUE MORE OF THE SPINDRIFTERS.

"How much of a chance?" said Strider, staring into a Pocket that displayed what the armada was doing to the Spindrifters' pink screen. Why the hell hadn't the fleet despatched just a couple of its vessels to make easy mincemeat out of the Santa Maria?

EXPRESSED AS AN ESTIMATED PERCENTAGE?

"No. Just a guess."

THERE IS THE SLIGHTEST POSSIBILITY THAT BETWEEN OUR EFFORTS AND THOSE OF THE SPINDRIFTERS THEMSELVES, THE ENEMY MIGHT BE REPELLED.

"Then, if you think it's worth the gamble, go ahead." She twisted her face. Even if she'd instructed them definitely not to, they'd probably still have gone ahead. The Images were always punctilious about asking her permission to do something, and then she told them to do what they were going to do anyway. One of these days she'd find the courage to countermand them and see what happened.

I WILL GO INITIALLY, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free. IF I PERISH, THE REST OF US WILL KNOW THAT THE ENTERPRISE IS INDEED FOOLISH.

Strider knew it was an illusion, but there was a sensation of loss as Ten Per Cent Extra Free departed, as if she could feel him going. It seemed that a little bit of herself had disappeared.

Yet again she asked herself: why had the Autarchy's starfleet so far spared the Santa Maria?

Ten Per Cent Extra Free slid through several layers of reality back to The Truthfulness, maintaining only the slightest pseudopod-like connection with The Wondervale. Briefly he saw several different versions of the way the cosmos might have been, had its initial creative spark been otherwise: one cosmos resembled a burning tree, and was no larger than that; another was nothing but timeless emptiness, a place where the omnipresent particle sea had never chanced to launch itself into the explosion of creation; yet another was a place where he found himself momentarily inside the form of what seemed to be a young woman who in blindness was being buffeted by pangs of undiluted emotion. At last, in his own reality—The Truthfulness—he was an energy matrix moving among other matrices.

He returned through the disparate realities to be aboard an Autarchy starcruiser.

Ten Per Cent Extra Free soaked himself into a wall and travelled easily along it between the atoms until he came to the drive chamber. Gratefully he soaked up some of the enormous energies that were being released by the drive even though the starship was moving at such a tiny fraction of the velocity of light.

THANK YOU, he said politely to the drive unit.

MY PLEASURE, it responded. I have plenty to spare.

BUT I'M AFRAID THAT I HAVE TO END YOU, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free. THE ENDING OF YOU WILL DESTROY THE SHIP YOU HAVE BEEN POWERING FOR HOW MANY YEARS?

More years than I have been able to count. Yes, I knew you had come here to destroy me. I do not resent the fact.

NEVERTHELESS, FELLOW-CREATURE, I APOLOGIZE FOR WHAT I HAVE TO DO.

DO IT QUICKLY.

Ten Per Cent Extra Free drew all of the energy out of the drive, so that its components froze—so that its very core died. He couldn't hold this much energy inside himself for more than an instant, but that was long enough to divert it into the main body of the starcruiser, while at the same time withdrawing himself through the realities once more to the safety of his own cosmos.

Even at this sidewise distance there was a flicker of pain at the edge of his consciousness as the energies of the starship's drive died a second time, this time in a pyre of their own making. He had a millisecond's guilt over having killed another sentient creature of energy, but that soon passed: the drive had confronted its own death with equanimity, and he had been courteous with it to the last. By now it would be awakening, in entirely different form, in some remote probabilistic reality; it might or might not retain its memories of its previous existence. If it did, then at least its demise had been as painless as any could possibly be.

It took Ten Per Cent Extra Free some little while to recover himself from this first destructive venture. As a rule, when in The Wondervale the Images never destroyed, they only created: they created communications nexi of various sorts, or they infiltrated technology to bend it towards something better—another creative act.

Destruction was emotionally difficult for Ten Per Cent Extra Free, as it would be for the other Images.

He contacted them now, across the bridge of the intervening realities, informing them—all within the compass of a single thought—of the depth of the hurt he had received through his act of annihilation. Each of them must decide whether the pain of such an action was justified—or even if the action itself was, in hindsight, ethically acceptable. There would be no recriminations among the Images afterwards if one or more of them decided not to assist in this venture.

Ten Per Cent Extra Free didn't wait for the others' thoughts to come back to him. Fully recuperated, he slid once more through the nests of the realities that separated his own comfortably radiant cosmos from that of The Wondervale until he located another Autarchy warship . . .

Strider staggered back from the Pocket.

"Shit! Those poor bastards!"

She felt tears coming to her eyes, and blinked them back.

Polyaggle was by her side, and made some whispering noises that meant nothing to Strider—with all the Images off on their destructive course through the Autarchy armada, it was impossible to understand what the Spindrifter was saying: it could have been a message of hate, or of loss, or of any of an infinitude of emotions that no human had ever felt.

The blue maxbeams sprang from every surviving vessel in the armada and plunged into the Spindrifters' defensive shield. Strider felt as if she were watching a supernova. Nothing—nothing—could sustain such a barrage. The Universe itself had decided that the Spindrifters should be extinguished. The pinkness paled to white, retreated, and then was gone. The planet was naked and defenseless.

The vessels of the armada—even though, here and there in a random and unpredictable pattern, one after the other of them spontaneously exploded thanks to the efforts of the Images—moved into a tighter formation, ready for the kill. There was nothing she was able to do about it.

But there was something she could do.

"Power the drive," she said to O'Sondheim.

He looked at her, startlement visible in the eye that wasn't covered by a secondary retinal screen.

"We're going," she said.

"Just leaving these people?" he said.

"We can't save them. If we run now, we might with a bit of luck be able to save ourselves."

He snorted.

"There are five kids down there"—she pointed a thumb towards the main body of the Santa Maria—"and a couple of them haven't learnt to walk yet. If it were just you and me I'd say fuckit, let's go out in glory, you go first Danny because I've got to comb my hair so I look my best—all that. But we haven't the right to throw away other people's lives. Now fucking power that fucking drive."

"I . . . I won't do it."

Her elbow struck him in the side just below the ribcage, so that he staggered away across the command deck, half-gagging, half-gasping. She took over the Pocket at which he'd been working, analyzed the situation within seconds, and fed the necessary instructions into the Pocket.

"Nelson," she yelled, removing her head from the Pocket as little as she could. "Commline the personnel that we're moving under five gees within the next minute. Tell 'em to spread themselves flat. Leander—get to the intercom and do the same."

Yeah, it felt bad: running when the people who had helped you were about to be massacred. It'd feel even worse knowing in your dying moments that there just might have been a chance you could have saved a few human beings but you hadn't done that because you wanted to make a macho display of martyrdom. To hell with that. Strider thought it unlikely they'd escape with their lives, but she was going to give it a try.

The graphic display told her everything was ready for a fusion launch. There was every chance, whatever the Images had promised, that this moon was going to be little more than a heap of garbage once the Santa Maria's drive had finished with it—but anyway there weren't going to be any young night-walking lovers looking up from Spindrift hoping to compare it to a silvery spoon.

She stuck her head back into the Pocket.

"Move it."

Not the most dignified of commands, but the Pocket knew what she meant. It transmitted the essence of her instruction to the drive.

Strider threw herself to the floor just in time. Then there was a brontosaurus standing on her back.

She felt glued down, but knew that somehow she had to get herself up to at least her knees—not later, but now. O'Sondheim and Leander were screaming; she hoped Polyaggle was surviving somehow. She could hear Nelson shuffling somewhere near her as he too struggled to cope with the gees. Strider told herself not to worry if she broke a few bones—the medbots could splint those up, and maybe even mend them. This was likely to hurt a lot but . . .

She not only felt but heard her kneecap crack. The pain was enough to make her bite right through her lower lip. Something extra for the medbots to do. The drops of blood hit the floor with unnatural speed. She made it to the whereabouts of the Pocket somehow. It adjusted its height to meet her, but she still had another few meters to go. The world was filled with a red that was encroaching into black, but she was aware that Nelson was doing his best to copy her feat.

"First one there gets a free trip home to Mars," she croaked, her throat feeling as if it were made of red-hot lead. "Posh hotel, little tablets of soap, curious gunk I've never worked out what to do with in the shower . . ."

"Don't forget the trouser press," gasped Nelson. "And the holo that doesn't work properly. If I get a clear picture I'm gonna complain to the management. Say, Strider, you ever get your hand caught in one of those fucking trouser presses?"

She was inching herself closer to the Pocket.

"No," she said.

"I did once. I was trying to work out what the fuck the thing was. Hey, you didn't mention the too-small kettle that takes so long to heat up that eventually you forget you switched it on, so when you get back to the room you find everything's damp except the kettle, which is kind of a lump of molten plastic."

"OK, Nelson, if you get to your Pocket before I get to mine, I'll even make sure your hotel room has a dud kettle."

"'Kinell, sweetest in all creation, I never thought I'd hear you talk dirty like that." It sounded as if Nelson were smiling, but Strider didn't have the strength to turn and look. A few more centimeters and . . .

"Bad luck," she said. "I'm the winner of the luxury holiday. I even get the shower-rose coming away in my hand."

Strider slumped her head into the Pocket.

"Shift into tachyon drive," she said with the last of her strength, "and give me a superfluity of those white towels that are too small to do anything useful with."

Nightmirror kicked at the flagship of the Autarchy armada, trying desperately to download the energies of its drive into the rest of the vessel. He had destroyed three other vessels so far, but the Blunt Instrument was proving more difficult. In the other vessels the drive had been unshielded—what mortal being would want to come into the drive chamber?—but in the Blunt Instrument extra defensive screens had been erected.

He kicked again, hoping that he could find some way through the forcefield. The kick wasn't a physical movement, rather an electromagnetic manipulation of the forces surrounding the drive unit. Nightmirror's latest attempt was as useless as the others had been—the flagship was shaken, but undamaged.

No. Wait a moment. There was a chink in the drive unit's defenses. He had kicked open the slightest of cracks. If he could edge himself through there . . .

No sooner thought than done. He faced the intensity of the reactive core. From here on it should be easy.

The crack in the defensive shield behind him closed again. He was trapped here with the core.

He could destroy the core, probably, but at the same time destroy himself—and without doing any major damage to the Blunt Instrument. Although driveless, the vessel could easily be taken in tow by one of the other ships in the fleet until it could dock and have a new drive installed.

There was a better thing Nightmirror could do. Assuming the Humans could survive this massacre, it would be good for them to have an ally among the enemy. It wasn't the best of all possible options, but it was the best that was open to him right now.

He opened himself, and allowed his own energies to be swallowed into those of Kaantalech's drive unit.

The pain was exquisite for a long nanosecond or so, but then he was there.

Nightmirror stretched himself out in the drive's core, feeling the ecstasy of the energy pulses moving through him. If it was going to carry on being as good as this, he was going to have difficulty persuading himself to assist the Humans when the time came.

HI THERE, said the drive unit. WELCOME ABOARD.

THIS IS GOING TO TAKE A WHILE, said Nightmirror to the other Images, BUT I HOPE IT'S GOING TO BE WORTH IT.

There was the sensation of glorious freedom aboard the Santa Maria. The abrupt imposition of five gees had killed three people, including one of the children. Strider would doubtless have to do some fast talking soon to save herself from the attentions of a lynch mob, but just now she was happy enough to have removed her ship from the vicinity of the Autarchy fleet. She'd lost three: she could have lost everybody. For the moment, though, there was that delicious feeling of liberation from the crushing gees.

Polyaggle uttered a further stream of noises which Strider found totally incomprehensible. The Images were clearly still doing their destructive worst among the ships of the Autarchy. Strider assumed they would be able to find their way back to the Santa Maria.

Would they? It was a question that hadn't occurred to her before. She'd become so accustomed to the Images being capable of doing anything they wanted to do that it had been easy enough to make the assumption they could track down the Santa Maria, wherever in The Wondervale it went. Now she began to worry. She knew so little about the nature of the reality that the Images inhabited. If she'd managed to lose them, the Santa Maria was dead—sooner rather than later.

"Images," she said despairingly to the air. "Images—are you there?"

There was no reply.

She didn't want to repeat the question. Sometime soon the others on the command deck would begin to share her apprehension. O'Sondheim was already beginning to glance over his shoulder as if in dread of finding that, for once, there wasn't anything there. She'd be best to put off the moment as long as possible.

Polyaggle moved up to the Pocket next to Strider's and edged her head forwards into it. At once the scene around Spindrift sprang into existence.

Of course, thought Strider, all this time I've been thinking about us, and more particularly me. Poor Polyaggle has a whole species to think of. She called up the same image in her own Pocket.

The first thing she saw was that the pink deflector screen was still down. The fleet was forming a sphere around the naked planet. As she watched, yet another ship went up in flames, but there were still hundreds left. In the vista displayed by the Pocket they were just little gleaming needles, but she knew that each of them packed more firepower than anything that had ever been dreamt of on Mars.

It was good, in a way, seeing each one of them being blown to bits, because that meant there was one less that would be able to rain destruction down on Spindrift. The other side of the coin was that the explosion was proof that her Images were still back there among the Autarch's forces. She'd been too blase about the Images' abilities. Were they invulnerable? For all she knew, they were offering up their lives for the cause of trying to save Spindrift—a cause that Strider was beginning to believe was hopeless.

Words were starting to form in the graphic display behind the likeness of Spindrift and the slowly contracting sphere of cruisers.

SOME OF US WILL SURVIVE, said the display. It seemed to be having great difficulty in forming the letters.

Polyaggle! Deprived of the Images, she was using her Pocket to communicate with Strider's.

Strider looked up at the Spindrifter, who touched her claws together and then returned to concentrate on her own Pocket. Strider took the hint, and bobbed her forehead into the invisibly defined space in front of her.

How many? she thought as hard as she could at the display.

The display appeared to be fighting with itself for some seconds before new letters began to form.

ENOUGH, it said. I HOPE.

Strider kept her own thoughts to the back of her mind. If you're wrong, sister, you're the last of your kind. And that's something nasty I'm going to have to live with for the rest of my life. Shit, but it's going to be a hell of a lot easier for me than it will be for you . . . She hoped that nothing of this was being transmitted between the two Pockets. Absently, she shifted the vision in her Pocket to show once more the Santa Maria's progress across The Wondervale.

The graphic display behind the image of the galaxy went through that visually curious process of struggling with itself again.

I AM THE QUEEN OF MY HIVE, the letters said. AND I AM BEARING A NEW BROOD.

Kaantalech's mouth was abrim with joy. The planet was totally exposed to the weaponry at her command. She could see the polar icecaps—now oddly depleted—and the seas and the mountain chains. An aide came to report to her that the Human starship had fled, and she waved him away. The Autarch would never think to ask about the Humans when she made her report of successfully destroying the planet which he had so perceptively identified as a hotbed of rebellion. He would be very pleased with her: he was always pleased to hear of the justifiable demise of another species.

The Humans, the Autarch would think—if he thought about them at all—were a side issue, a single shipful of extragalactics who were of little importance in the grand scheme of things.

Kaantalech hoped that, with luck, they might be of great importance in removing the Autarch from his throne. To judge by the defenses that Spindrift had been able to throw up, the Humans had the knack of making useful friends. As another of her ships spontaneously exploded she yet again thought that the Humans, wherever they had come from, were no mean adversaries. They would make even better allies. Around Qitanefermeartha people were hoping for the day when the Autarch would die. Kaantalech was keen to advance the date. The Humans might be helpful.

But Spindrift wouldn't.

The fleet was almost perfectly in formation.

Kaantalech suspected that the Spindrifters had a bunker somewhere from which military operations were being directed. If she were a Spindrifter, trying to make the world look as unobtrusive as possible, she would have put a military stronghold somewhere in one of the icecaps and covered it in deadmetal so that as little as possible betraying electromagnetic radiation might escape.

If she merely torched the planet, that bunker might escape.

Her other option was to blast Spindrift into a belt of rather small asteroids.

Yes, that was the better thing to do.

She gave the command.

Just over eight minutes later, Spindrift died. And everyone on the world died with it.