4

"Destroy, Destroy," the Bellboy Said

F-14 didn't know what hit it until very much later. At one moment it was the most securely defended planet in The Wondervale with the exception of Qitanefermeartha itself and at the next a comparatively small warcruiser had somehow glided through the defenses and was raining down a torrent of fire on to the surface. The enhanced Santa Maria now contained as much weaponry as the Helgiolath fleet had been able to give it. Here within the planetary atmosphere it was running on jets. What it couldn't maintain within the atmosphere was the full gamut of defensive shields: that was a cause of continuing worry to her.

Strider tapped away at her Pocket's keyboard, knowing that she was dealing out death but trying not to think too hard about the individual deaths. Pinocchio was alongside her, manning the next Pocket and operating even more ruthlessly than she was. He seemed to be treating it all like some kind of holo game. She was grateful to him, but was also aware that, every time she pressed a key and one of those little factory-blips on the ground blew into pieces, hundreds or perhaps thousands of sentient beings were losing their lives. It didn't make any difference that those beings had been constructing crueller weapons than even humanity had been able to devise. She fed in another co-ordinate at Pinocchio's instruction, watched another factory explode. She just hoped that everyone there had died instantly. The thought that some of them might live on for a few hours, a limb or two blown away, waiting for medical help that would never come, was more than she could bear.

Nevertheless, she hit another factory and gave another cry of triumph.

Between the factories there were constructions that she could recognize as residential complexes. Kortland had told her that she ought to target these as well, but she'd refused. This might be a necessary massacre, but there was no need to make it worse than it had to be. The children of the technicians might indeed grow up to be creators of weapons of mass destruction, but at the moment they had to be given the benefit of the doubt.

Small fighter craft began to rise from the planet's tormented surface. O'Sondheim, whose designated job this was, picked them off easily with phasers. There were no missiles or beams from the ground as yet: the people on F-14 were restrained by the fact that the Santa Maria was operating in the world's stratosphere, well beneath the defensive shield. Any missile or beam that failed to hit the warship might do damage to the shield, making the planet yet more vulnerable to attack.

Another factory erupted. This one must have contained particularly sophisticated weaponry, because the entire massif on which it had been built began to melt and then flowed like lava, albeit much more swiftly, down a long valley to engulf a residential complex. The Santa Maria was moving fast enough that all that Strider could see was the start of the carnage. She shut her eyes momentarily, trying not to imagine what was going on down there.

The Santa Maria jerked. The techs on F-14 had at last found some way to hit it. Nelson fell away from his Pocket and collapsed heavily to the floor, his hands over his face. Strider retained her balance with difficulty.

"What the hell was that?" she snarled at Pinocchio.

"I don't know. We have suffered no structural damage." The bot was concentrating most of his attention on the destruction below.

"Yeah, but the next one could hurt us badly. Find out what it was."

Her lover caused his torso to open so that a small metallic spine emerged, reaching its way unsteadily towards the glowing Pocket. The entire command deck lit up as the wire entered the Pocket. Pinocchio himself seemed to be jolted by the contact. Through the Pocket he was interfacing with the Main Computer. The connection couldn't last long. If there was no response fairly soon . . .

Another shock ran the full length of the Santa Maria. This time the damage felt more serious. The Pocket in front of Strider began blinking away, every few seconds, from the scene on the ground to show the exterior of the ship. A big chunk had been taken out of one of its tail fins.

"The fighters are firing energy-seeking ballistics capable of—" the bot began.

"Forget the command, Pinocchio," Strider said. "We're getting out of here."

She leaned her head back into the Pocket and issued the necessary instructions.

The Pocket refused to respond. Instead, the 3D display vanished and she saw a graphic representation of a tract of landscape.

"What the—?"

"We're going down," said Pinocchio.

"Who says?"

"The laws of physics. We've lost one of the jets."

"Can't we just run on the other three?" She knew the question was stupid as soon as she asked it. With the latest redesign the Images had carried out, the Santa Maria was by no means an aerodynamic craft. It was supposed to be out in empty space, not dodging around in an atmosphere. The Helgiolath, when installing the weapons systems, had given the ship just enough jet propulsion to enable it to survive in such circumstances. As Kortland had made perfectly obvious, it wasn't particularly important to him whether or not the human beings aboard the Santa Maria survived this mission. There were thousands of spacefaring civilizations in The Wondervale: the disappearance of one, here or there, didn't make much difference.

"Are we going to be able to make a landing?" said Strider to both the bot and the Pocket. "Or are we just going to make a crater?"

"Assuming we're not hit by another ballistic, we ought to be able to land, if we can find somewhere big enough and flat enough," said Pinocchio.

Strider looked at the schematic display of landscape in her Pocket. There was a large expanse of desert right at its center.

"I think the Images have taken over control of this part of the mission from us," she said.

WE HAVE INDEED, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"But can you get us off again?" Strider asked.

Possibly. Unlikely. We will almost certainly require help.

"Time until impact?"

Forty-two point one three seconds.

"Everybody get down!" she screamed. "Pinocchio, intercom and commline the rest of the personnel! Move it!"

The whole craft seemed to be trying to pull itself to pieces. Strider threw herself to the floor. It seemed odd that the view-window was ahead of her rather than above—one of these days she must instruct the Images to finalize their revampings of the Santa Maria. Assuming there were going to be any more days, of course. She could see a grayish sky streaked with even greyer clouds. There was a wallop of deceleration as the retro-jets cut in, and she felt as if she were likely to shoot straight out of the view-window to arc downwards on to the snow-covered peaks of a mountain range that appeared momentarily, dizzyingly, and then was gone. She could hear Pinocchio talking urgently into the intercom, making a loop chip, and then he was on the floor beside her. His face looked entirely tranquil. It was at times like these that one remembered most piquantly that he was not a human being, not a living creature at all. But he was a sentient one—that was the important thing.

THREE POINT SIX ONE SECONDS, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free. The Images would certainly get out of this alive, and Pinocchio almost certainly would. Strider was not so sure about the human beings, herself included, but with luck at least a few of them might . . .

For a split second Strider's stomach was at least fifty meters above her prone body. The Santa Maria bounced and rocked away over towards the right. Leander swore loudly as the crew on the command deck began sliding across the floor. Then the Santa Maria righted itself again, bounced again. Strider wished she had something to hold on to. She felt as if she were a marionette under the control of some insane puppeteer who was taking sadistic pleasure in pulling all her strings at once. Her chin slapped the floor and she bit her tongue hard enough that she could taste the blood. The noise of the retro-jets was deafening, but at least the surface beneath her seemed to be more stable. She took a glance towards the view-window, but all she could see was the same grey, rain-heavy sky. There was a chance that the atmosphere of F-14 was poisonous to humans. What cocktail of chemicals would the rain in those distant clouds be composed of? At least the Santa Maria was headed for desert, where the rain wouldn't be an immediate problem. But what about the planet's micro-ecology? Ideally, she should keep everyone locked up in the Santa Maria until the Helgiolath or the Images or both engineered some way of getting the ship back up off this world, but she wasn't too certain that Kortland and his kind would make the effort and anyway the defense forces of F-14 were bound to get here first. No, the best thing to do was to get everyone out of the Santa Maria as quickly as possible and disperse them, hoping that there was nothing too lethal in the atmosphere. The Images could come along with Pinocchio; she would keep the bot beside her. Of course, a sand-desert wasn't going to offer too many hiding places, but . . .

Shit, that was the worst bounce yet, as if the Santa Maria were now beginning to think that it really would like to be shaken to bits, or, if not, would like to shake anyone inside it to bits. She chanced another look at the view-window and saw the desert vista wheeling at horrifying speed towards her. A sad thought occurred: presumably there were plants and animals which had somehow managed to eke out an existence in this waste, and now some shrieking behemoth from the skies had descended to shred them with the force of its impact or incinerate them with its retro-jets.

Hello, we're the human species. Don't you just like our funky sense of humor?

Pinocchio put a heavy hand on the back of her spine, pinning her to the floor. He was trying to say something to her but she couldn't hear it over the noise of the jets. There was nothing visible through the view-window now but a blizzard of orange-red sand. She wished the bot would take his damned hand off her, and wriggled her displeasure at him.

THOCK!

That was the worst bounce yet, but she sensed it might be the last. The racket of the jets was gradually declining, and there was the feeling that the Santa Maria was gradually slowing its erratic career across the desert surface. Once the people on F-14 got their fighters on to the job it wasn't going to take them very long to find the spaceship: the marks on the sand, observable out at least as far as geostationary orbit if some Autarchy minion wanted to be cutesy and shut off the defensive shield for a few moments, would tell them everything. Yeah, as soon as the boat stopped it was going to be a question of abandoning like there had never been an abandonment before. Everyone for herself or himself. With luck a few people could survive this disaster, so long as everyone went in different directions. Of course, everyone would be leaving tracks in the sand that would guide the searchers to their precise location. She wished, now, she'd countermanded the Images and told them to bring the Santa Maria down in water, but probably that would have vaporized an inland sea. With luck there might be a windstorm that erased their traces, but somehow she didn't think the possibilities were all that great.

The craft ceased shuddering. It had stopped its screaming skid.

Strider shook Pinocchio's hand away from between her shoulderblades.

"Right, everyone to the locks, quickest!" she yelled. "We're a sitting target here. Pinocchio—tell everyone."

HEARTFIRE AND ANGLER ARE TAKING ACTION TO SLOW DOWN THE SEARCH FOR US, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free. UNLESS THEY ARE UNSUCCESSFUL WE HAVE JUST OVER SEVENTY-ONE MINUTES BEFORE ANY OF THE F-14 FORCES WILL DISCOVER US.

"That's about three months too short a time for me," said Strider breathlessly, hefting Leander on to her knees and then her feet. The woman's eyes were wild. Strider shoved her in the direction of where Pinocchio was at the intercom, indicating that he should take charge. O'Sondheim was all right, although like Strider he had bitten his tongue badly, but Nelson had at some stage dislocated his hip. Strider put her foot between his buttocks and yanked savagely. He gave a cry of agony, but she felt the joint jolt back into position.

"I love it when you treat me rough, babe," he said as he failed to get up on to his hands and knees. His second attempt was more successful.

"Get to the locks!" she shouted. "Suit up as you go."

Evacuating the Santa Maria took less time than she had anticipated, even though four people who had been working in the fields had been smashed to death as the ship landed. Someone wanted to give the corpses a "decent burial"; Strider ordered him to leave the bodies where they were, and backed up her argument with a wave of her lazgun.

The air of F-14 smelt like armpits—more accurately, Strider realized, it smelt like the armpits of the person who chooses to stand too close to you rather than one's own warm fust. It was presumably packed with organic chemicals of various possibly poisonous kinds, as she'd feared. She wondered how many of them she had breathed before she'd got the helmet of her suit on. Certainly enough to kill her if she was out of luck. The same was true for everyone except Pinocchio. She should have ordered that people suited up completely before they left the ship, but it had seemed like a better idea to get them out of it as soon as possible.

"Scatter," she said through the suit radio. "The further we are away from each other the more likely we all are to survive. Go in twos and threes." She grabbed Pinocchio's hand. "In five days' time I'll raise a commline conference if I can. If not, someone else can do it. It doesn't matter who. For now, what we have to do is get as far away from here as we can."

The prospects weren't good. She'd scanned the horizon, and all she could see were dunes—except for the parts where there weren't even dunes. The F-14 techs were going to be able to blast the grounded Santa Maria to pieces without any difficulty and then simply follow the foot-trails of her people through the sands to whatever pathetic hiding places they'd managed to discover for themselves. Strider reckoned that the future of the human species in The Wondervale had about an hour to run.

"Time to go," she said.

Strauss-Giolitto took Pinocchio's other hand.

"Lay off him," said Strider.

"We're going in twos and threes, and this is a three. I want to survive. Pinocchio is my best probability of staying alive."

Strider watched her personnel as they moved away across the desert. The surface offered at best a treacherous footing. A kid fell, making a fountain of sand. Two adults dragged it to its feet. The entire manoeuvre was so incompetent that Strider wouldn't have bet a penny on the family's chances of survival.

"How are we—how is anybody—going to find water or food?" she said as the three of them began to run. It was like wading through the shallows at the edge of the sea.

"Cut down your suit radio," said Pinocchio. "This is a question that is very soon going to occur to everyone else. They are less likely to survive if they worry about this than if they simply get as far away from the Santa Maria as they are possibly able."

"None of us have much chance at all," said Strauss-Giolitto.

"Things could be a whole lot worse," said Strider.

"Tell me another one," said Strauss-Giolitto as the three of them leapt cumbersomely over a . . .

"Stop," said Strider. "Have you just seen what I just saw?"

They hurried back to take a better look. The thing hovering centimeters above the surface of the sand was camouflaged, so that from even a few meters away it was hard to spot unless you knew it was there. About a meter square, it looked rather like a trapdoor—in fact, very like a trapdoor, with a hinged metal ring on it to aid opening. Strider nervously ran her glove just under its edge, making grooves in the sand there, to reassure herself that the artifact was indeed floating—that there was no mere optical illusion involved. Then, even more nervously, she hooked a finger of her glove through the metal ring, and pulled.

Pulled harder.

The trapdoor opened smoothly, although with some resistance, as if on hydraulics. Gazing down through the opening it revealed, the three of them could see what looked like nothing more exotic than a metal ladder, reaching far beneath them into darkness.

"Get working on the general suit-radio frequency, Pinocchio, and tell everyone to come over here. We're going down."

"Is this wise?"

"It's got to be a better chance than milling around in the desert just waiting to be picked off before we die of thirst. Do the message on the commline as well, in case people have their suit radios switched off, or have moved on to personal frequencies."

Strider looked at Strauss-Giolitto. Even through the slightly darkened glass of the tall woman's visor, Strider could see that she looked terrified. She reached out a gloved hand and Strauss-Giolitto clumsily took it, as if she were a young child needing reassurance from her mother.

Strider could see, in the distance, pairs and trios of suited figures turning towards them. A few, however, were still trudging resolutely in the other direction.

"Images," she subvocalized, "contact the rest. Then tell me what's actually at the bottom of that pit?"

A REASONABLE CHANCE OF ESCAPE, fluted the voice of Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"Can you be a bit more precise than that?"

The Preeae.

"I thought they were extinct."

Everybody does. That's why they're not. A few of them survived the torching of their planet, and they've built up an underground culture. We've already started speaking with them on your behalf, but for reasons that can be imagined they are virulently xenophobic. It is hard to persuade them that you are allies, but it seems likely that they will afford you safe passage through their tunnels.

"Where do the tunnels go to?"

The nearest other exit is in the foothills of a mountain range some four hundred and fifty kilometers from here. I should add that the Preeae are not best pleased by the fact that you have drawn attention to this ingress. As soon as you are all through it they will have to move it, so that the Autarch's people do not discover it. This will cause the Preeae logistical difficulties in the future, because it was placed precisely here for very good reasons.

"How much of this did you know before we crashlanded?" The first pair of personnel were just arriving. They had secondary retinal screens across both eyes, so it was impossible for Strider to recognize them through their visors.

Nothing. If you had not discovered this entrance we might never have known anything about the Preeae's presence. The neural camouflage they have erected is very sophisticated indeed. We had not been aware that any culture in The Wondervale was capable of creating this.

"Bit of a long shot that we discovered them, then, isn't it?" said Strider, her eyes roaming across the wastes of sand around them. The Santa Maria looked in a way like a grounded hawk. It was the first time she had really seen the outside of her redesigned vessel except through the Pockets, and it was also the moment when she was abandoning it to whatever fate the Autarchy's forces visited upon it. She did not consider herself a sentimentalist, but a twinge of remorse passed through her, as if she had just betrayed an old and trusted friend. A captain should go down with her ship, and all that. No: she mustn't let herself start thinking like that. The Santa Maria was a collection of advanced technology, of bits of metal and circuitry. It was just an object, not a personality.

WE EXPECT COINCIDENCES, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"Run that past me again."

OUR REALITY ONLY PARTIALLY OVERLAPS WITH YOURS. THE NATURE OF THAT OVERLAP IS SUCH THAT "LONG SHOTS," AS YOU CALL THEM, HAPPEN VERY FREQUENTLY TO US WHEN WE ARE IN THE WONDERVALE.

"Good thing we had you along, then."

The Image quite clearly failed to recognize the tone of irony in her subvocalization. YOU WOULD ALL HAVE BEEN DEAD WITHIN HOURS OF ENTERING THE WONDERVALE HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR OUR INTERVENTION. MAGLITTEL WOULD HAVE BLASTED YOUR VESSEL TO SMALL PIECES.

"Four hundred and fifty kilometers is a very long way to walk. Our suits have air enough for only a couple of dozen hours."

THE PREEAE HAVE A TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM, USING A NETWORK OF TUNNELS. BUT YES, SOONER OR LATER YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO ABANDON YOUR SUITS AND TAKE YOUR CHANCES. HEARTFIRE IS ALREADY DOING HIS BEST TO ANALYZE THE LOCAL MICRO-ECOLOGY TO TRY TO DETERMINE IF THERE ARE ANY MICROBES THAT MIGHT CAUSE YOU HARM. THIS WILL TAKE HIM SOME TIME, AND IT IS POSSIBLE THAT HIS RESULTS WILL NOT BE ENTIRELY ACCURATE. BUT HE WILL DO HIS BEST.

There was now a large cluster of suited personnel standing round the open trapdoor. Strider felt a pang as she saw the children among them. Children always looked so pathetic in spacesuits, as if the Universe should have been designed so that there was no need for such protections.

She explained the situation tersely.

"Pinocchio," she said, "tell me how many more people are still to get here."

"There are three others. I am finding it impossible to contact them either by commline or by radio."

"Is there any chance of your just physically going and getting them?" said Strider.

"Not in time."

"Then we leave them."

When the volume of the shouts of protest over her suit radio grew too oppressive she turned it off. She wasn't going to sacrifice forty-odd for the sake of three. Almost as important, she wasn't going to risk losing Pinocchio, whose abilities might quite possibly make the subtle difference between the survival and extinction of the rest of the party.

"Can you come with me inside my suit?" she said to Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

CERTAINLY. I ALREADY AM INSIDE YOUR SUIT.

"Good. I think I'm going to need you."

SO DO I.

Once she sensed that the argument had died down she tongued her suit radio back on again.

"There will be no further debate about this matter," she said curtly. "I'll be the first to descend into the pit. You can decide among yourselves who is the next to follow me, but whoever it is must wait at least five minutes before they do so—got that? I'm going to leave an open line to First Officer O'Sondheim, and report to him exactly what I'm doing every step of the way. I don't want anyone intruding on that line—it's to be just him and me. If I meet a fatal reception you must disperse once more, under his general instructions. Clear?"

Heads nodded. Enough heads to assure Strider she didn't have a revolution on her hands.

"He and Pinocchio will be the last to follow down."

She locked her radio on to O'Sondheim's.

"Got that, Danny?"

"Loud and clear."

She fumbled her hand free of Strauss-Giolitto's and, not allowing herself too much time to think, dropped to her knees and hoisted herself in through the dark opening. She fastened the end of her belt-rope to the uppermost rung, though she didn't think the precaution would do her much good if she fell. It felt to her as if there were a very long drop beneath. She could hear the pulse in her temple beating more swiftly than it should be. What Ten Per Cent Extra Free had told her had been less than entirely reassuring. This might be a long climb down to disaster.

"How are things going with the Preeae?" she subvocalized to him.

THE NEGOTIATIONS ARE STILL . . . DELICATE.

"That bad, huh?"

THEY COULD BE VERY CONSIDERABLY WORSE.

"What do you think my chances are?" She was moving smoothly down the ladder now. After the first couple of dozen rungs it began to take on a helical form, which oddly enough she found less vertiginous than if it had continued straight downwards. However different the Preeae might be physically from human beings, there was obviously some psychological similarity.

She tried to stop her breathing sounding so loud. Although O'Sondheim seemed to have discovered his own inner strength since the terror to which he'd succumbed when the Santa Maria had fallen through the wormhole, she still wasn't sure quite how reliable he would be under pressure. He had refused her orders when she'd told him they had to flee from Spindrift's outer moon. If he picked up from her breathing quite how frightened she was, he might be infected and spread the fear on to others. She wished she could have asked Nelson or Leander or Pinocchio to take on the task of ushering the personnel into the pit, but that would probably, besides destroying his belief in himself, have created even more panic among the personnel than anything O'Sondheim could do. With luck, Pinocchio would cope with any problems.

She looked up. The square of skylight above her seemed very small and a very long way away. She tongued on her suit lights, and kept going downwards. In front of her, between the rungs, the lights reflected off a slightly damp-seeming stone surface. The rungs themselves were rusted with age; she told herself not to think much about how fragile some of them might be.

Strider looked upwards again. Perhaps there was a mote of daylight visible above, perhaps not.

"I'm still going down," she said. "Nothing to worry about so far, Danny. The ladder starts twisting after a while, which might faze some people."

"Message received and understood, Leonie," said O'Sondheim's voice inside her suit. "There aren't any signs yet of hostile forces. We're lucky. Keep your fingers crossed."

"Ever tried crossing your fingers when you're climbing down a ladder in a spacesuit?" It was all right to breathe more loudly now; O'Sondheim would simply assume it was because of the physical exertion.

"Well, you could try crossing your eyes instead." He was sounding perfectly confident. She hoped he stayed that way.

Strider became aware that there was a source of light beneath her. Pausing for a moment, she looked downwards and saw a yellow glow. It seemed improbably far away, as if she were crawling backwards down towards the core of the planet.

"Still there's been no contact," she reported to O'Sondheim. "The ladder has so far been in reasonably good repair, although the rungs are a bit rusty in places. Tell folk it might be wise not to try doing any acrobatics as they descend. Oh, yeah, and any kid big enough to climb down alone should do so rather than be carried. The less weight anyone puts on this ladder the better. But it seems OK to me."

She briefly tongued off her suit radio.

"How much further am I going?" she said.

YOU WILL REACH THE BOTTOM WITHIN ABOUT FIVE MINUTES, AT YOUR CURRENT RATE OF PROGRESS, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"I'm shit scared."

THIS IS EVIDENT TO US FROM THE INCREASED RATE OF MUCH OF YOUR METABOLISM.

"I haven't had any ziprite in years, but I sure as hell could do with a jolt of it right now."

She tongued the radio back on again. "Ten Per Cent Extra Free thinks I should get to the foot of the ladder in a few minutes, Danny. Stop anyone else coming down until I get there."

"Understood."

She tried to increase the pace of her descent as much as she could without doing anything dangerous. The sooner she met with the Preeae and they either killed her or didn't kill her the happier she'd be. She couldn't imagine the state of a technology that could construct something as advanced as the trapdoor and at the same time relied on a simple ladder for the rest of the ingress. And yet, she reflected again, there was something pleasingly human about it—a neat mixture of the simple and the complicated. Over the centuries, humanity had made considerable technological changes in some areas but had wisely left other things alone, or reverted to the earlier models. For example, a door on hinges could be relied upon to open almost all of the time; a photosensitive door that nictated as people approached it was a pretty neat gadget, but if something should go wrong with it . . .

She was letting her mind wander.

"I've lost track of the time," she said to O'Sondheim.

"It's three and a half minutes since last you spoke to me," he said. "We were beginning to get quite worried. At least we could hear you breathing."

"Sorry about that." She looked downwards. "There's a very brightly lit area beneath me. I should be there very soon. Still no problems at all, except a touch of muscular fatigue. Send the fittest people down first. Yeah—send Polyaggle down first of all. Kids and fatties can follow later. I want to get the most possible people down here as soon as we can."

"Present company excepted," remarked O'Sondheim drily.

Despite her terror of what she was about to encounter, she managed a chuckle. "Never been able to work out whether you're a kid or a fatty, Danny," she said.

"Both," he replied. "But don't tell my girlfriend."

"I didn't know you had a girlfriend. This should have been reported to me. You should have reported it."

There was silence from the other end. Strider realized that O'Sondheim's remark hadn't been as flip as it had sounded, and wished she'd kept her mouth shut. After the first year out from Mars her First Officer had stopped making doe eyes at her, but he hadn't formed any kind of relationship with any of the other women on board, either. She'd seen the way that he'd tried to woo Strauss-Giolitto, and smiled; then had smiled with a bit less conviction once she'd deduced the kind of personal misery Strauss-Giolitto had taken on herself in order to be a part of the expedition. They were both very lonely people—lonelier than even she herself was. At least Strauss-Giolitto had Lan Yi's shoulder to weep on. As far as Strider could tell, O'Sondheim's mental maturity had never evolved beyond the idea that if you wept on a woman's shoulder you ended up screwing her and that if you wept on a man's you were betraying some obscure macho code.

She wasn't sure that her own solution—weeping on a bot's—was perfect, but it was obviously better than anything O'Sondheim had come up with.

She tongued off her suit lights. The yellowness beneath her was very close now. Glancing down yet again, she caught her first sight of the Preeae.

She took a sharp breath. The aliens were somewhat less aesthetically pleasing than the Images had described—not as bad as the Helgiolath but . . . no, maybe they were worse, because they had a vaguely humanoid form. They looked as if they had somehow evolved to wear their more vulnerable bodily organs and their blood vessels on the outside, rather than sealed away carefully beneath decorous folds of flesh. They were bipedal, and had two arms, although from this lofty angle she couldn't work out their physical proportions.

Like the Spindrifters, they wore no clothing. All of the ones staring up at her as she descended, her hands and feet moving more uncertainly now, were, however, wearing things that looked suspiciously similar to lazguns slung around their necks.

"I'm about to make contact with the Preeae," she said to O'Sondheim. "Anyway, I hope I am."

At least they had eyes that from this distance were fairly like human ones. It made the aliens a bit easier to contemplate. The trouble was, reflected Strider, that one gets so used to gauging people's reactions by their eyes that she could all too well completely misread what one of these Preeae was actually thinking.

She flipped off her suit radio.

"I'm going to need a lot of help here, Ten Per Cent Extra Free," she said.

THEY ARE PREPARED TO TALK WITH YOU. THAT IS A GREAT ADVANCE ON THE SITUATION EARLIER. THE VERY WORST THEY WILL DO IS SEND YOU BACK UP TO THE SURFACE.

"Which is a long way away." She was sweating unpleasantly in her suit just from the descent. What would she be like if she had to climb all the way back up to the top? Like a stranded whale floundering on the sand of the desert until the Autarch's people came along to put an end to her misery, that was what.

WE WILL ASSIST YOU AS FAR AS WE ARE ABLE. WE HAVE ALREADY BEEN ARGUING VERY HARD ON YOUR BEHALF.

"I'm switching back to general frequency now," she said, tonguing the control as she did so. She wished her voice sounded less apprehensive.

IT SOUNDS FINE TO ME, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

Yes, thought Strider, but you're not a rather vulnerable human being called O'Sondheim standing Umbel knows how many hundreds of meters above me wondering how long he's got to live. My voice might sound a bit grim to him, huh?

The Image waited until her right boot was on the final rung of the ladder before it commented. WE WILL REMOVE ALL TRACE OF FEAR FROM YOUR VOICE AS WE INTERPRET BETWEEN YOURSELF AND THE PREEAE.

"Thanks," she said, reeling in her belt-rope.

"For what?" said O'Sondheim anxiously.

"I was speaking to Ten Per Cent Extra Free," she said. "Now, Danny, keep listening in, but leave me alone to do one of the things I do best: act like a diplomat."

He laughed.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," she said.

Several of the Preeae had drawn their weapons from their neck holsters—the aliens' arms were triple-jointed, Strider saw, so that it was as easy if not easier for them to reach to their necks as to their waists—and were directing them at her. She found the prospect of the weaponry less worrying than the physical appearance of the Preeae. She hoped that none of the personnel who with luck would be allowed down here to join her would do anything stupid—the children especially.

One of the Preeae took a step forwards. Presumably he was the leader of the contingent. Strider decided to address herself directly to him and leave the rest out of consideration.

"Look, dammit, let's get this straight: all we want to do is wipe out those bastards who very nearly fucking annihilated your entire species," she said, hoping that she was hitting the right diplomatic note. "That means we're on the same fucking side, so could you piss off with this super-defensiveness?"

The room around them was an empty box with various dark exits leading in various directions—some off to the side, a couple upwards, and quite a few downwards. Strider found it almost offensive that there were no technological artifacts on view—not even so much as a chair. This room was just a way-station into what she assumed was the system of tunnels Ten Per Cent Extra Free had told her about.

"We haven't got very long. There's going to be a few hundred Autarchy warships hitting the fucking desert above us pretty goddam soon."

"We are aware of that," said the Preeae. His voice sounded as though it tasted of metal. "But we did not bring this antagonism down upon ourselves: it was you things that lured the Interlopers to this place. If you had left them alone they would have continued in ignorance of our existence."

I SHOULD WARN YOU THAT WE ARE MAKING AMENDMENTS TO SOME OF YOUR REMARKS, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"So your species could spend the rest of eternity living in hiding?" she said to the Preeae spokesperson.

"Living." The single word made the point.

"Can I tell my people it's safe for them to come down here?" Much longer standing around like this and it'd be too late to get everyone in through the trapdoor. "The Spindrifters thought it would be all right for them to carry on just living in quiet, but the Autarchy killed all of them except a friend of ours, who is here with us. You yourselves kept your heads down, but the Autarchy attempted to annihilate you. We human beings aren't any kind of saints, but we want to help stop these things happening."

"And the Helgiolath?" said the Preeae.

"I'm not sure what their agenda is, but at this moment I think they're the best chance this part of The Wondervale has."

"You will all need to be decontaminated," said the Preeae.

Strider's heart leapt as she heard the translated word "will."

"You mean you'll allow my personnel to escape down here?" she said.

"For a short time only. Your Images have been very persuasive."

"Start it off, Danny," said Strider. "We're provisionally welcome."

"I was listening," said the First Officer. "Polyaggle's already on her way down, followed by a bundle of others. Still no signs of enemy action."

"Good."

Strider didn't know if Ten Per Cent Extra Free had interpreted any or all of this for the benefit of the Preeae. It seemed not, because the individual was still speaking.

"We will escort you to our nearest escape-way and release you back to the surface of Preeat. More than that we will not do. After that you will be on your own. We will be glad to be rid of you as soon as is possible. You have already seriously risked our security."

"Nice to meet you as well."

BE CAREFUL, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER, urged Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"Aw, fu—"

DO BE CAREFUL. YOU ARE NOT A MEMBER OF A SPECIES THAT HAS BEEN ALMOST ENTIRELY EXPUNGED. IF YOU DO NOT CHANGE YOUR TUNE IT MIGHT BE BETTER TO LET POLYAGGLE DO THE REST OF THE TALKING. SHE AT LEAST WILL BE ABLE TO IDENTIFY WITH THE PREEAE.

Strider took the point.

"Thank you very much for the assistance," she said formally to the Preeae representative. "We'll get ourselves out from under your noses just as soon as we can."

"'Noses'?" said the Preeae.

#

After Kaantalech had finished eating one of her aides she wondered yet again if she should holo the Autarch to tell him the truth about the Humans having disappeared for the second time, and yet again she decided to procrastinate. All Nalla would do was get angry, then angrier. If he discovered that the Humans were in the middle of a Helgiolath fleet he would become incandescent—which would be fun to watch but would probably be personally dangerous to her. If she just left it alone he would assume that the Humans had been vaporized along with the entire ecology of Spindrift above viral level—damned few viruses would be left, come to think of it, except those that were able to live in total vacuum. Big deal. Perhaps in a few billion years a bunch of them might drift panspermically across a few hundred parsecs and seed life on a virgin planet, and some new technological species would come screaming up into The Wondervale with a view to getting revenge. Kaantalech wasn't going to waste too much time worrying about the possibility: she would have been dead herself for almost all of those billions of years—so why should she care?—and anyway she was pretty certain that viruses had lousy memories.

Not only had the aide been heinously inefficient, he had been made of meat that was so stringy that most of her teeth were now singing out in protest because of the bits of flesh still jammed between them. He hadn't even tasted anything more than passable. It was so difficult getting the right quality of staff these days.

Spitting out a ball-and-socket joint, she turned to look at her surviving aides. Most of them had continued to work away at the puters they were wired into, guiding the remnants of the fleet back across The Wondervale towards Qitanefermeartha orbit, but a few had watched the butchery of the aide. They didn't realize it as yet, but they had thereby volunteered themselves to be next. If there was anything that Kaantalech particularly disliked it was disloyalty.

"I want a position on the Humans," she said angrily. The aide really had tasted pretty poor: she hoped he hadn't been suffering from any infectious disease.

"We're doing our best, leader," said one of the aides, not looking up from his puter, "but they seem to have vanished from spacetime."

"Keep looking."

"Yes," said several voices.

She waded splodgily through the thick coating of faeces and other ordure that carpeted the floor of the Blunt Instrument's command deck. Hers was not a tidy species—never had been. It always amused Kaantalech and her kind to see the way that other species were so prim about the products of their bodies' metabolism. Every now and then the Blunt Instrument was cleared out and the valuable nitrates extracted.

"I want a fast result," she said, "but I don't want it broadcast. The first person to track them down is to contact me and me only, understood? Of course, the rest of you will know what's going on, but I don't want a word spoken." She snorted up what had once been a kneebone. "Do I make myself clear?"

There was not a word of dissent.

#

Lan Yi spent not one moment regretting that they had lost the Santa Maria: it had been a spaceship, nothing more and nothing less. What was really upsetting him was that he had had to leave his musibot behind. He himself played only half a dozen musical instruments, and as far as he could work out he was by far the most technically talented of the few musicians who had been aboard the Santa Maria. Human music was one of the comparatively few things that the species could profitably have brought to The Wondervale. Music was a peacemaker, unlike all the other things that people called "peacemakers." It was very difficult to get two people to start fighting each other while they were listening to the divine cantatas of Pastredii or the songs of L5 or the mating music of hump-backed whales. If there was any sign of aggression afterwards you could always just recycle the chip. He supposed it was all a primitive form of brainwashing, but it was not one to which he objected.

He looked upwards, and his lights illuminated Strauss-Giolitto's suited bottom descending towards him.

Once upon a time . . . he thought, before a stirring of interest told him that he was lying to himself. Yes, I'm being guilty of the most acute form of dishonesty: dishonesty of the self. He smiled wearily at the way fate had treated him. First a wife who had strangled herself rather than continue the existence she shared with him. Now a woman who he was virtually certain was not interested in him for the most fundamental reason of all. After Geena's death he had assumed there would be occasional—hell, after a while, frequent—sexual liaisons. The idea that bloody, nuisanceful, pestilential love might hit him was something that had never occurred to him. Now he found himself not only fonder of Strauss-Giolitto than he had been of anyone since Geena but also wanting to build a partnership with her. He had a couple of times lightly, as if joking, broached the notion to her, and each time she had taken it as the joke it wasn't.

He looked back at the slick stone surface behind the rungs. He was too old to be looking at women's rumps and thinking carnal thoughts.

No he wasn't. Never too old.

The thing he was was too old to go about falling in love with women who were a fraction of his age and who weren't remotely interested in him. Back in the Solar System, of course, he could have done something about it. He could have opted for the Artif way of life, taken up a female body, and then reintroduced himself—no, by that time herself—to Strauss-Giolitto, and waited to see what happened.

Except that the whole thing would have been a lie. Lan Yi loathed the notion of Artiffing. And he was a man, not some kind of sexless/sexed being. He wished the SSIA had chosen to board a load of sexbots, so that personnel like himself could at least try to fuck themselves into some kind of self-understanding; but the SSIA had been preoccupied with the notion of procreation. The idea of sharing a night with anyone other than Maria Strauss-Giolitto had become increasingly repugnant to him; although of course he would never say as much, the thought would be constantly in his head: Second best. You're not the one I really want. Thanks for the mutual masturbation, but . . .

With sexbots there was no need to pretend.

It was an odd time to be thinking about all this—or maybe it was the best time of all. Climbing downwards he was, for all he knew, likely to be dead within a few minutes. Perhaps there was nothing better to do in these putatively final few moments than to wonder why it was that the human species had since the very beginning of eternity managed to make a mess of things through confusing love, which was an emotion, with gender, which was a physiological fact.

He looked up once more—irritated to find himself feeling slightly guilty—at Strauss-Giolitto's buttocks. It wasn't particularly important to him whether or not he stuck a bit of himself into a bit of her for a while, although that could be a pleasurable conclusion to their lovemaking—if it would be pleasurable to her.

What he wanted to do was to make love with her, so that when they woke up together they could share a joke or give each other a massage or listen to some music or just lie there together, half asleep and half awake, enjoying the fact that they were in each other's arms.

It would take him an hour and a half to explain all this to Strauss-Giolitto, and even then she would probably either laugh it off or throw away his friendship, as if the latter had been polluted by the fact that he wanted to get that single stage closer to her. It was so much easier for most of the rest of the contingent that had come here on the Santa Maria: the normal conversation discussing such complexities consisted of "Wanna fuck?" followed by "Yes" or "No" or "If I can bring along a few friends."

The light was growing brighter beneath him.

He'd lived a long time and solved quite a number of the mysteries of the Universe. Now, sadly, he faced the fact that he'd failed to solve some of his own mysteries.

What the hell?

He was probably going to be dead soon.

#

Among the Preeae, it was very evident, things habitually happened very quickly. Polyaggle spoke a spurt of noise through her suit radio that Strider could not understand and which Ten Per Cent Extra Free chose not to translate. At once the boxlike room filled with more Preeae, all armed with weapons that looked as if they could do substantially more damage than even a lazgun. The aliens lined the walls, their weapons unwaveringly directed towards the humans. Strider made an instinctive move for her own lazgun, and then realized the stupidity of the action.

"What's happening?" she said to Polyaggle.

The Spindrifter looked at her in evident incomprehension. Then, a moment later, Ten Per Cent Extra Free performed the translation.

"They are escorting us to one of their underground shuttlecraft. This is not going to be a very pleasant journey, but most of us should survive. They want to get rid of us as soon as they can."

"I don't much like the sound of 'most of us'," said Strider. "How many people are likely to die?"

"Two or three. Acceptable losses."

"They're not acceptable to me."

"You left three people out on the desert," said Polyaggle.

"I had no option."

"You don't have any option now. These people will help us if we move fast, but if we stand here bickering they're going to start having second thoughts about helping us at all." Through the Spindrifter's visor Strider could see the tips of Polyaggle's wings briefly behind the tufted head as she touched her gloved claws together delicately. "The Preeae's sign of acceptance is a stroke of one hand over one eye. I think you would be wise to perform that action now."

Feeling that she was betraying something but not quite sure what that something was, Strider wiped a glove across her visor.

The gesture seemed to be enough. The Preeae gathered around the humans. Again Strider had to stop herself reaching for her lazgun. A triple-jointed arm, colored green and red and yellow and one or two complicated colors whose names she could never remember, coiled around her waist. She forced herself to relax into the quasi-embrace.

"We'll be safe?" she subvocalized to Ten Per Cent Extra Free. "Or should we start to fight it out right here and now?"

The Preeae will not harm you. Probably. Would you prefer to be back up on the desert, Captain Leonie Strider?

The question was unanswerable.

The Preeae herded the humans towards a gaping hole in the room's floor. Strider shoved herself to the front, trailing behind her a clutching Preeae. A captain should lead her troops into each new hazard. "Can you bring up the rear again, Pinocchio?" she asked the bot over her radio.

"I'll do my best," the bot replied. The Preeae beside him looked at him sharply. Pinocchio had clearly not intended to speak out loud.

The Preeae which had its arm around Strider suddenly picked her bodily from the floor, swivelled her over its shoulder, and peremptorily threw her face-first into the hole.

Oh, well, this is it, thought Strider as the darkness closed around her. She felt like a pacifist torpedo: it was much against her will that she had been launched. She wouldn't explode, of course, when she hit her destination. Actually, come to think of it, she almost certainly would explode, but in a different sense of the word. The images in her mind weren't appealing.

And then she wasn't in darkness any more but in a wash of silvery light, as if the air were made of mercury. The visor of her suit automatically dimmed the glare, but did not change the color. It seemed that she was floating down slowly, but she couldn't be sure because there wasn't any background against which she could measure her position. She floundered her limbs a few times and then realized the uselessness of the manoeuvre. Better just to watch the pretty light, Leonie, she thought, spreading her body into a star-shape, hoping she was right about which direction was down.

"Are any of you Images there?"

YES. YOU'RE PERFECTLY SAFE. Ten Per Cent Extra Free sounded more than usually supercilious.

"It might be a good idea if you told everyone else about this before they were flung down here."

The silvery light abruptly vanished. Hundreds of meters beneath her she saw a hard stone surface rushing to meet her.

"I thought you said I was perf—" she began.

But she was flying. So this was what it must be like to be Polyaggle, except that she didn't have to make any physical effort at all to move herself from place to place. If she wanted to drift to the right then to the right she drifted. If she wanted to hover she hovered. It was the greatest freedom of movement she had ever known—better, far better, than free fall, where you always had to bear in mind that a minor motion here or there might have a major consequence later on. All she had to do was to think her position from one place to the next, and her spreadeagled body would take her there.

She was in a cavern, carved out of the rock, of such vastness that it was impossible to appreciate its size. All around her she could see yellowy brown stone walls, but they were too far away from her for her to be able to make out any details. She lazily turned herself over on to her back and saw that what she had been falling through earlier was a brightly white cloud. Another suited figure was just emerging from it.

She continued the rotation so that once more she was looking downwards. A ring of about a dozen Preeae were gazing up at her as she made her languorous descent. The trouble was that she wasn't sure how much she wanted to make that descent. If she'd had total freedom of choice she'd have opted to stay here for the rest of her life. She wished she weren't wearing her spacesuit—she wished she weren't wearing anything at all, so that she could feel the air moving against her skin and her hair.

It was her duty to be down there among the Preeae. She was the captain of the Santa Maria and she had to take command of matters on behalf of her personnel. But the temptation to stay here, wafting to and fro in the air, was almost irresistible . . .

She came to ground smoothly beside the group of Preeae and was immediately shoved a few meters to one side. What she hadn't noticed from aloft was that three of the aliens were pointing those ugly-looking weapons skyward.

"Tell everyone else they mustn't think of flying around too long," she said urgently to Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

We've already done so.

"Thanks for telling me."

The next person to arrive was Holmberg, followed rapidly by Senskatachowan—a bacteriologist from whom Strider had over the years done her best to conceal her dislike—and Hilary. Even through the spacesuit one could detect the child's sense of exhilaration. Strider grinned. She still felt that same exhilaration. If the Preeae suddenly changed their minds and decided to massacre the humans, she would thank them in her dying breath for the experience they had just given her.

More and more of her personnel glided into the ring of Preeae and were manhandled across to join her. A couple of them had obviously been terrified by their brief encounter with flying, and had to be supported by others.

She keened her eyes and looked around her. The cavern's walls were still impossibly distant: she could see only enough of them to know that they were there. No, that wasn't quite true. Here and there, in whichever direction she looked, there were circular or semicircular patches of darkness that were presumably the mouths of yet more tunnels leading to yet other parts of the Preeae's domain.

Once the last of the Santa Maria's personnel had arrived—it was Pinocchio—the party was ushered unceremoniously across the floor of the huge cavern. The Preeae were not averse to using their weapons as goads with which to hurry the humans along. Some of the children began to shriek in fear, and most people switched off their suit radios and commlines.

Strider assumed that they were heading for one of those tunnel-openings, but suddenly the Preeae called a halt. One of the aliens moved ahead some fifty or sixty meters and made quick, complicated adjustments to the weapon he carried.

Oh, no, thought Strider. It's going to be the firing squad for us.

But instead the alien turned the modified weapon towards the ground. He did something to it, and then the floor just in front of him began to split open like the skin of an over-ripe fruit. The noise would have been deafening to the humans had it not been muffled by their suits. The vibrations underfoot were violent enough to make Strider stagger backwards and collide with Holmberg, who himself almost fell over from the impact. This is what it must be like when an earthquake hits, she thought. The jagged line of the split extended swiftly in either direction from them for almost a minute before the vibrations calmed down—for all Strider could tell, the opening ran the full width of the cavern. Then the noise started again, as the two puckered edges of the crack slowly pulled themselves apart.

The Preeae hustled the humans forwards.

As Strider looked down from the lip of the opening her first thought was that what she was seeing was a row of coffins.

"You're going to bury us alive," she spat at the nearest Preeae guard.

He gave no reaction.

YOU ARE PERFECTLY SAFE, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free again. I TOLD YOU THAT THE PREEAE HAD A TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM. THIS IS IT.

"Why didn't that bastard hear me?"

WE DECIDED THAT IT WOULD BE MOST POLITIC IF WE TEMPORARILY CEASED DIRECTLY INTERPRETING YOUR CONVERSATION, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER. FOR REASONS THAT MUST BE OBVIOUS.

"Whaddya mean, 'obvious'?"

"That bastard."

"If someone's jabbing you around with a lethal weapon, what other term would you ascribe?"

IF SOMEONE'S SAVING YOUR LIFE, BUT MIGHT VERY WELL CHANGE THEIR MIND, WHAT TERM WOULD YOU ASCRIBE?

She decided not to answer the question, instead tonguing her suit radio on to the general frequency.

"I have consulted with the Images," she said, hoping that her words could be heard over the din of wailing children—and a few adults, she was dismayed to realize. "There is no cause for panic. We are not going to be harmed in any way."

Strider realized that half her people probably still had their radios switched off. The others had probably heard her tell them not to panic just once too often.

"Can you give the same message directly to them?" she subvocalized to Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

I HAVE ALREADY DONE SO.

"Doesn't seem to have had much effect."

The Preeae who had split open the floor of the cavern was gesturing to her that she should jump down into the coffin directly beneath her. Hoping that she was doing the right thing, she obeyed. The drop was less than a meter, but it seemed very much further. She lay down in the oblong box and resisted the temptation to cross her arms over her chest: her duty was to give her personnel an encouraging example.

The Preeae straddling the split directly above her made urgent gesticulations. It took her a moment to realize what he was trying to tell her, and then, clumsily, she got up on her hands and knees and turned herself around the other way. It made sense. If this conveyance system accelerated quickly up to any speed, it was best to travel head-first. She guessed that deceleration at the far end would be a bit more gradual. She hoped so.

She could see others of her personnel being urged into the coffins ahead of her. She assumed the same was happening behind, because every now and then the coffin in which she was lying rocked slightly. Some of her people were having to be forced pretty damned hard, despite the Images' reassurance. She repeated again and again over the general frequency that there was nothing to be worried about, all the time wishing that, as they'd dashed from the Santa Maria, she'd thought to jam a commlink into her mouth. Maybe she should have hooked up to the commline long ago, but she still disliked the thought of being invaded by technology, however useful that technology might be.

Couldn't someone get those bloody kids to shut up?

The same grinding, wrenching noise that had marked the opening of the split started up again, and the strip of light above began to narrow as the rocky edges moved towards each other. Now she started to feel real fear. She turned on her suit lights, and quickly issued an instruction to everyone else to do the same. She assumed Ten Per Cent Extra Free would repeat her instruction.

The split closed. She was staring straight upwards at what looked like a rough-hewn granite surface, not fifty centimeters from her face. They say you can get used to anything, but Strider wasn't sure she was going to be able to get used to this. Again her pulse was pounding, and there wasn't anything she could do about it. How long was it going to take them to travel the four hundred and fifty kilometers? Would their suit air last out? The vision came into her mind of a string of what were now genuinely coffins arriving at the mountain terminus. She started doing some calculations before realizing that the Preeae's system would have to be exceptionally slow for that to be a concern. Besides, the Preeae must have aerated the whole system so that they, too, could survive it. What was more worrying was that, if she was as terrified as this, how would some of the others be reacting? Would any of the kids reach out an inquisitive hand to touch the moving surface as the coffins rattled along at a couple of hundred kilometers an hour, or whatever this apparatus was capable of?

Her last anxiety was removed when a metal lid suddenly appeared over the box in which she was lying. In a way, this was even worse.

With some difficulty she manoeuvred herself around until she was lying on her stomach, and tongued off her suit lights. Better to pretend that she was just lying on a bed.

But it wasn't like that at all. There was a jolt and then, for a long—a very long—moment, it felt as if she were standing vertically but pressing herself with all her force against a wall.

Then there was oblivion.

#

It took a long while for Commander Segrill's people to work out how to get the alien spaceship open, and more than once he was tempted to tell them to go at it with lazcutters. He restrained himself. The spaceship that had destroyed half the planet's manufactories and then come gracelessly to the ground here in the desert could contain much that was of interest, and could possibly be of great use in itself. Where the aliens had gone to was no great mystery to him: from the marks they had left in the sand—milling around for a while and then converging on a single point—it was obvious that they had discovered one of the Preeae's access points, which had since been removed. If the technology aboard the spaceship proved advanced enough, he would liaise as best he could with one of his Preeae contacts—negotiations were always tricky because of the Preeae's powerful xenophobia—to see if he could track the aliens down.

This attack could be the best thing that had ever happened during his stint in charge of security on F-14. The defensive shielding of the spaceship had been pretty sophisticated, so it was likely that the rest of the technology aboard would be of a similar standard.

He was one of four of the Autarchy's occupiers of F-14 that knew about the continued existence of the Preeae. As head of security it was his duty to exterminate those survivors. As someone who wished to see the end of the Autarchy sooner rather than later, he had kept very quiet about his knowledge, as had his three co-confidants. The Preeae presented no nuisance, and might one day be helpful.

It was easy to rise to a position of minor power within the Autarchy. All you had to do was say the right things and keep very quiet about what was actually going on. Gambling for higher stakes was a much more risky business: the Autarch became aware of your existence, which meant that there was the ever-present possibility that he would decide you were a threat. Within the Autarchy, possible threats didn't last long. But a mere commander of security was beneath the Autarch's notice.

The technicians on F-14 hated the fact that they were there. Most of the people within the Autarchy hated what they were doing, but they had very little choice about it: on the average planet even an ill timed fart could lead to a painful death. The power of the Autarch's forces was almost absolute, because it was built from the top downwards. Only a comparative few were loyal to the Autarchy itself, but those few had the power of life and death over those below them. The same principle applied all the way down, until finally the pyramid's base was formed by the vast mass of ordinary people, who didn't give much of a curse about the Autarchy but just wanted to live from day to day without the threat of being butchered.

Where the Autarchy had made its mistake was in gathering a very large group of such people on F-14. The technicians did what they did because they were forced to, and almost without exception they loathed the war machines they were having to create. For all they knew, that particular item of weaponry was going to be used to annihilate their own species.

Segrill had slowly, cautiously worked his way up through the system until he had been posted to F-14. If there was a single planet that could threaten the Autarchy, this was it.

There was a yell of triumph as someone managed to open the spacecraft's outer lock.

Maybe the aliens had booby-trapped their abandoned vessel. He had to take the chance that they hadn't.

Segrill, who was about the size of Strider's thumb, flew across the desert so that he could be the first to investigate.

#

Strider opened her eyes and switched on her suit lights. Directly beneath her face was a rather dirty metal surface; she was glad she was in her spacesuit because the surface looked as if it stank. She felt as if she had had a claustrophobic dream, then remembered that it had been really happening.

There was very little room in the coffin, but she was able to shuffle over on to her back.

"How long have I been out?" she subvocalized.

ABOUT TWO HOURS, said a voice which she recognized as Heartfire's. YOU WILL BE RELEASED FROM CONFINEMENT VERY SOON NOW.

"Where's Ten Per Cent Extra Free?"

CLOSE BY.

"How much are we at risk from contamination?" said Strider, wriggling to try to make herself more comfortable. Her back was aching. Ideally she would have liked to stand up and flex herself.

AS FAR AS I CAN ESTABLISH, NOT AT ALL.

"How far are we from the mountain escape-way?"

WE ARE THERE ALREADY. THE PREEAE ARE PREPARING TO RELEASE YOU ALL FROM YOUR CONTAINERS.

"How many of us are still alive?"

TWO ARE DEAD. ONE TORE HIS EYES OUT AND BLED TO DEATH INSIDE HIS SUIT. ANOTHER DIED WHEN THE MAJOR PUMPING ORGAN OF HIS CIRCULATORY SYSTEM CEASED TO OPERATE. IN EACH INSTANCE WE DID OUR BEST TO ASSIST THEM, BUT IT WAS BEYOND OUR CAPABILITIES.

"Who are the dead?"

THEY ARE NOBODY ANY LONGER.

Strider kept her anger under control. Over time she'd built up a relationship with Ten Per Cent Extra Free, so that he generally understood what she was saying rather than just the literal meaning of the words she spoke. Heartfire and Angler were rather more of a problem. She wondered how many basic errors there were in the interpretations they offered when translating between herself and other species.

"What were those dead people called?" she said.

THE PERSON WHO DIED THROUGH CIRCULATORY MALFUNCTION WAS NAMED MARCIAL HOLMBERG.

Oh shit. A man whom she had begun to like.

THE PERSON WHO DIED BECAUSE HE RIPPED HIS EYES OUT WAS CALLED KHAN RAVI, AND WAS THREE YEARS OLD. ONLY A CHILD WOULD HAVE HAD ENOUGH ROOM IN HIS SPACESUIT TO REACH HIS EYES WITH HIS HANDS.

That was worse, a lot worse. Holmberg had led a reasonable adult life and then had experienced a few moments of agony before, boomf, he was gone. Young Ravi, by contrast, must have reached the outer extremities of terror and died in a loneliness that no one living could imagine.

She kept herself in check.

"How many of us are still sane?"

IT IS DIFFICULT FOR ME TO ASCERTAIN. WE IMAGES ARE NOT ENTIRELY CAPABLE OF TRACKING THE THOUGHT PROCESSES OF PEOPLE WITHIN THE WONDERVALE AND DECIDING WHETHER OR NOT THEY MAKE SENSE WITHIN YOUR OWN SPHERE OF REFERENCE.

"At a guess?"

MOST. PROBABLY ALL.

"You can't be more accurate than that?"

NO.

"What exactly did the Preeae do to us?"

THEY ACCELERATED YOU TO A VERY HIGH VELOCITY, AND THEN THEY SHUT DOWN ALL YOUR HIGHER NEURAL FUNCTIONS. THEY WERE TRYING TO MAKE YOUR TRANSIT AS EASY AS IT COULD POSSIBLY BE—IN THEIR TERMS.

"I'd rather have watched the rocks go by," said Strider.

BUT A PREEAE WOULD NOT HAVE. AND NEITHER WOULD MOST OF THE PERSONNEL YOU COMMAND. PLEASE DO NOT OBJECT TOO LOUDLY, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER. THE PREEAE ARE DOING EVERYTHING THAT THEY CAN TO HELP YOU WITHIN THE LIMITATIONS THEY EARLIER STATED.

"Yeah, I guess that's true," she said after a second or two.

GLADNESS, said the Image.

The lid of her coffin swiftly withdrew. A ribbon of light began to appear overhead.

She had spent almost all of the journey they had made in a state of enforced sleep. Nevertheless, what she wanted to do was to fall back into sleep. The option wasn't open to her.

A Preeae reached down, grabbed the front of her suit, lifted her, and chucked her on to a hard stone floor.

Wherever it was they'd arrived, they'd arrived.

#

Strider was the first to remove her helmet. She wasn't sure it was wise, and was slightly surprised—whatever Heartfire had said—when she didn't drop dead immediately. On the other hand, the alternative was that the small human party would plough on through the foothills until, sooner or later, they suffocated inside their spacesuits. With luck Kortland would have kept an eye out for them and would send a rescue party . . . but Strider reckoned there would have to be a hell of a lot of luck involved. Maybe, maybe, they'd be rescued: much more likely that they'd peter out, one by one, on the surface of F-14. But, just in case, she wanted to conserve what was left of her oxygen.

The air up here smelt good, unlike the fetid air of the desert: the first deep breath she took tasted like cold water, even though the surroundings were surprisingly hot. Above them the slopes of the mountain seemed to reach upwards so far that they punctured the sky. There was some kind of springy blue-green vegetation underfoot, so that Strider felt as if she were lighter than usual. With the strap of her helmet looped over her left wrist, she drew her lazgun from her waist. She and her personnel weren't far from a glacial snowline, so water wouldn't be a problem—assuming there weren't things in the snow that'd kill them—but food was going to be more difficult.

The Preeae had dumped the humans out on the surface with very little ceremony. Last to be ejected had been the suited corpses of Holmberg and Ravi. The trapdoor, the same bluish-green as the vegetation, had hovered for a few moments longer and then reared into the air—and then vanished with such speed that, had Strider not been watching it, she would never have seen it go. There was a small cave near to where the trapdoor had been: after removing the oxygen tanks from the backs of the dead people's spacesuits, Strider and Pinocchio had stuffed the corpses into it. It wasn't much of a burial—in fact, it wasn't a burial at all, although Strider had said a few pious words—but it was as much as she could give them. She'd told Pinocchio to handle the body of the child: one look at the red-specked visor of the infant was enough to convince her that this was a job someone else should do.

"We might as well go all together," she said blithely to the Images, feeling almost doped up by the air. "Tell the rest of them to get their helmets off. Please."

THIS WILL BE DONE, said Heartfire in his normal stilted fashion. She wished that Ten Per Cent Extra Free were back with her. BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SHOOT FOR FOOD. NOT EVERYTHING HERE IS WHAT IT LOOKS. LET US GUIDE YOU.

"If it looks like food I'm goddam going to eat it. Have you guys ever known what it's like to be hungry?"

But at the moment she didn't feel hungry. What she felt as she loped along on the springy vegetation was pretty good. Sooner or later, though, she and her people were going to have to find something to eat. Maybe she'd have been better off going downhill rather than up—she could see there was prolific foliage of some kind down there—but she sensed that she'd made the right decision. Certainly the Images hadn't disagreed with her, and presumably they'd have kicked up a fuss if she'd been doing something stupid. Yeah: Heartfire was implying that there'd be food animals somewhere up ahead.

There was more oxygen in the atmosphere than she was accustomed to. On board the Santa Maria the oxygen level had been held somewhere between Mars-standard and Earth-standard, so that no one was too uncomfortable. Here the concentration was much higher than that, which was probably why she was feeling as if she'd just given herself a fix of ziprite.

The afternoon sun was very bright behind her as she climbed. She was not accustomed to seeing such a stark shadow ahead of herself. Far high in the sky small motes whirled: the planet had birds or bird-analogues.

The humans chattered as they went along, relieved to be released from the oppressiveness of the Preeae's underground realm. Strider realized that, for almost all of them, it was the first time they had been out in the open air for years—and that for the children it was the first time ever. Part of the reason for the incessant gossip might be that they were taking their minds off the fact that the open air might be killing them, even as they breathed it, but Strider thought not. This was the school outing.

A couple of hundred meters below the snowline there was a copse; Strider hadn't seen one since girlhood. They could hide in that for a while, leaving it only in ones and twos. Presumably the techs on F-14 had fairly sophisticated surveillance systems, so the less the cohort of humans was exposed on the hillside the better. If the copse was made up of anything remotely resembling trees, there would be food animals living within it. There might also be fruit—the Images would doubtless be able to analyze the vegetation to determine what was and what was not safe for the humans to eat. Berries. Nuts. Anything. She was beginning to come down off her oxygen high, and the prospect of eating something was becoming very appealing indeed.

They reached the copse and stumbled through the undergrowth into the green-grey shade of what looked not unlike trees. Strider stripped off her spacesuit: there might be predators or stinging creatures around, but she was prepared to take the risk. Most of the other personnel did likewise; she insisted they each put their suit somewhere distinctive, so that they could find it again in a hurry. Because they were high up on the hillside she reckoned that, come nightfall, the current pleasant coolness of the air would turn into extreme cold: the suits would offer protection against that. Some of the people had been naked when the order to abandon the Santa Maria had come, and she issued orders that these people—except Polyaggle—should keep their suits on: there were no longer any medbots on hand to treat minor cuts and abrasions.

There was a sudden commotion within the undergrowth. Some largish animal was running away from them in panic.

FOOD, said Heartfire.

"Are there a lot of them in here?" she subvocalized. She wished she'd been able to see what the animal looked like.

ENOUGH FOR TEN OR FIFTEEN DAYS. ALSO, THE BARK OF SOME OF THE TREES IS EDIBLE AND NUTRITIOUS. THE FRUITS ARE NOT, ALTHOUGH THEY LOOK SO.

Strider barked out an order that no one was to eat anything until it had been verified by one of the Images. One of the kids—the one called Hilary—looked momentarily rebellious. She faced him down.

They had food. They could make fire. Water, in the form of snow, was only a few hundred meters away, although she guessed that this copse wouldn't have been here if there weren't running water somewhere around. Ten or fifteen days, Heartfire had said: with luck the Helgiolath would discover them before that. If not, there must be other places to go.

For the first time in a long while Strider began fully to relax.

#

A week later Strider was the chieftain of a tribe of naked primitives. Or, at least, that's what anyone would have thought had it not been for the way they used lazguns to shoot food and climbed into spacesuits every night. At the height of the day it was impossible to move around in your standard-issue SSIA jumpsuit, because you sweated so much from the heat—and anyway, after a couple of days, the garment stank not just of sweat but of quite a lot more, because the copse had turned out not to have running water after all. The best way of keeping clean was to have a snow-bath, though Strider allowed only two people at a time to do this. The process was reasonably effective but freezing: quite a lot of ribaldry was directed by the women at the men. The big animals in the copse turned out to look like mammalian seven-legged spiders on whose upper surface someone had mounted a rabbit's head; once you forgot about the appearance of the creatures—"arachnibunnies," as someone had christened them—it was possible to enjoy their meat, which tasted like the very best textured soya protein you'd ever come across. Polyaggle—on the advice of the Images—stuck to the bark of the trees, which tasted like rotting maize if eaten raw and like barley if cooked. There seemed to be no bird-analogues dwelling among the trees, which puzzled Strider, because there were certainly bird-analogues flying high in the sky. Evolution, she reasoned, can play curious tricks.

One quarter of the copse was designated the latrine area, and by now people walked very cautiously there.

Strider was proud of her tribe. Whatever their living conditions might look like from the outside, they had accepted the rules she had imposed on them and were in fact a disciplined little community. The chores were shared around, and everybody did what they were supposed to do. Meals were eaten exclusively during daylight hours, because Strider reckoned that heat-seeking surveillance devices wouldn't spot the fires over which the meat was cooked when the rest of the landscape was so hot. If you got hungry at night . . . well, the taste of rotting maize went away after a while, or if you were very lucky there might be some cold arachnibunny left over from the afternoon.

She liked being a primitive. Her body was covered in scratches where she'd stumbled into thorny undergrowth, but once she'd learnt that the pain didn't hurt that much it didn't matter any more. The soles of her feet were quite another consideration: after some experimentation she and everyone else kept their boots on.

Strider would have been happy to stay here for the rest of her life except for three facts. Sooner or later they were going to be discovered. The food supply was, as they'd known from the start, not infinite. And, by the law of averages, someone was almost certainly already pregnant: although there was a chance Pinocchio could perform the delivery safely, it wasn't something Strider wanted to prove empirically.

She was levelling her lazgun at an arachnibunny when the fighter craft arrived. At first she didn't pay attention to the faint whine, assuming that someone had disturbed a swarm of the insect-analogues that plagued the copse and inflicted the occasional irritating bite. A single shot drilled through the arachnibunny's head and the creature slumped. She gave it another blast to be certain that it was dead, and was glad that she had done so because it gave a little reflexive kick of its legs.

The buzzing noise continued.

She moved forward to grab the arachnibunny by a leg, and then Ten Per Cent Extra Free spoke.

You are needed on the far side of the copse.

"Why?"

Your people have been discovered by the forces of F-14. They have brought a fleet of fighters.

"Oh. Great."

She looked at the dead animal. It could wait for a while.

Strider half-ran, half-tripped through the undergrowth. Now that haste was needed, being naked didn't seem to be such a good idea after all. Someone had had the sense to tell everyone else to shut up, because nobody—not even the kids—had started screaming. The whining sound decreased in volume. The Autarchy must have pretty goddam good technology if it could move heavy vehicles through the air with so little noise.

She tripped on a root and fell, knocking the wind out of herself. Some of the plants in this copse had stinging leaves, and one of them stung her just above the navel. It was exactly what she could have done without. She heaved herself to her feet and carried on, pushing away branches and tall, swaying plants with her hands.

This wasn't going to be the most elegant way to fight a battle, wearing boots and nothing else. With luck there wouldn't be too many war photographers around.

When she got to the end of the copse she threw herself down beside Pinocchio, who was lying flat on his stomach as he looked down the slope. His lazgun was in his hand, sweeping from side to side as if in search of something to shoot.

"The fighters are about a hundred meters downhill from us," he said. "There are approximately fourteen of them. I may have miscounted."

Strider had difficulty controlling her breathing enough to be able to form words.

"I can't see anything."

"They're small. The biggest of them is five meters across and about twenty-five centimeters high." Pinocchio for once was sounding uncertain of himself—almost afraid, if that were possible. "I think they must be remotes. What they likely want to do is blow away half the hillside and bury us in the rubble."

"You'll probably be able to dig yourself out," said Strider. The words were coming more easily now.

"Almost certainly," said the bot. "But only to find myself alone."

WE HAVE MADE CONTACT WITH THE F-14 FORCES, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"Good," said Strider. "Could you persuade a few of them to autodestruct?"

I THINK YOU MISPERCEIVE THE SITUATION.

#

The alien spaceship had been a fertile field. Segrill had expected that it would be fitted with the tachyonic drive, of course, but he had not expected the Pockets. He had wasted rather more time than he ought to have done playing with these, buzzing his head against each of them in turn and watching the wildest of his imaginings being brought into being. At last he had realized what the gadgets were for, and had called up a vision of the fleeing party of aliens. They were travelling on the Preeae's transportation system, something that Segrill had experienced once and had vowed never to do again. They looked as if they were rigid with fear, which Segrill could understand. They were certainly rigid with something.

The nearest Preeae access point was about four hundred and fifty kilometers away. That was probably where the Humans were being taken. Speaking quickly into his kreebolly, he issued orders that twenty of the fighters should go to that point at once. The officer who took the instructions was obviously confused as to why he was being sent to this particular set of co-ordinates. Segrill decided not to explain. The fighters were to stay as high as possible and do nothing more than observe, because the Humans—if the technology aboard this spaceship was anything to go by—were probably equipped with pretty impressive weaponry.

The next few days were spent probing through the rest of the spaceship's appurtenances. Segrill watched entertainment holos which made very little sense to him as of course he couldn't understand a word of what the Humans were saying although he began to have a shrewd notion of their mating habits; he was less certain why sometimes two of the Humans would remove their clothing and roll around together. He accidentally fired off one of the Santa Maria's missiles, and was thankful that they were in the middle of a desert: the resultant plume of sand was very impressive, and could probably have been seen five hundred kilometers away. Other items of technology were far more mysterious, having no apparent purpose that Segrill and his people could ascertain. There was a machine that emitted a roar of cacophonous noise when a button was pressed and then could only be turned off again with great ingenuity. Bots of various kinds crawled around the interior of the vessel, busily continuing to do whatever it was that they were supposed to do; some were clearly cultivating what Segrill recognized as tilled fields, but others had tasks that were quite inscrutable. There were also animals in forms that Segrill had never seen before, from small fluttering things not totally unlike himself to much larger quadrupedal creatures with nubby horns and the habit of excreting at unpredictable moments.

Through his kreebolly he called up data on the known life-forms of The Wondervale, ruthlessly narrowing down the scope of his search as he progressed. There was nothing the kreebolly could tell him about any of these creatures, nor about the dominant species: double-armed bipeds were prolific throughout the galaxy, of course, but none approximated to these except the Lingk-kreatzai, a barely sentient species (although Segrill had his doubts) that lived in conditions of astonishing filth on a world that closely orbited a red dwarf at the opposite extreme of The Wondervale. That the Humans were not the Runtuata was readily apparent from the debris they had left behind them. They were from a high-tech species.

Through his kreebolly he also recited a series of carefully constructed, carefully boring reports back to his deputy in Hallaroi. He had found an alien spacecraft, he said. The aliens had all died when the ship had crashlanded. There was little of technological interest here—that was probably why the craft had been able to slip through F-14's defenses—but it was worth picking through what there was just in case something useful might be salvageable.

Segrill made sure that none of his people was within earshot whenever he made his reports, even though they were all utterly loyal to him . . . he was almost certain.

He had a sudden inspiration.

If the Pockets were capable of calling up anything he asked them for, presumably he could ask them to show him the surrounds of this ship as they had been a few days ago. That way he might be able to start guessing about where the aliens had come from.

Yes.

It worked.

He saw this ship in the middle of a sea of others. There were thousands of them there.

F-14 had several hundred warcruisers of its own, newly made and ready to be sent to various parts of the Autarchy. Segrill had, therefore, a personal space armada.

Joined to the vast fleet from which the Humans had come, it would be worth twice as much—no, far more than that, because on its own it would be next to useless against whatever the Autarch Nalla might think to put up, given time.

Segrill had never considered himself to be particularly philosophical or spiritual, but when he saw that fleet of alien starships he suddenly felt as if he were there at one of those infinitely rare moments when a corner of history was being turned.

Just as an experiment, he tried using the Pocket to look into the Santa Maria's future.

It didn't work.

#

Strider didn't see the alien at first. It came hopping across the blue-green vegetation, winged itself into the air for a few meters, and then started hopping towards her again. She saw it out of the corner of her eye, but assumed that the local bird-analogue life had chosen a singularly inappropriate moment to display itself. She kept the downslope covered with her lazgun, moving it steadily one way and the other. The lazgun wasn't going to be a lot of use if those things out there were just remotes, but neither was anything else.

The little creature almost jumped on to her hand before she gave it proper attention. It had bird-like wings, but its body was more like that of a tailless mouse. Its head was vaguely reminiscent of that of a mouse as well, except that there were no visible ears.

THIS PERSON WISHES TO SPEAK WITH YOU, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"Which person?"

THE ONE STANDING ALMOST DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF YOU. HIS NAME IS COMMANDER EBERRY SEGRILL. HE IS THE HEAD OF SECURITY ON THIS PLANET.

Strider focused on the small winged animal. She had been just about to bat it out of the way with the back of her hand.

"You mean he wants to kill us?"

I THINK YOU HAD BETTER SPEAK WITH HIM.

She looked more closely at the little creature, and then held out her hand. Without hesitation Segrill hopped on to her palm.

"We must talk to each other," he said. Strider could hear both the piping noise he made and the words interpreted by Ten Per Cent Extra Free. The proposition seemed ludicrous on the face of it. If she clenched her hand tightly she could crush this tiny animal to a pulp. Yet Segrill was chief of what was presumably an efficient strike force and she was the leader of a band of primitives . . .

"Please explain," she said.

"Not everyone who is in the thrall of the Autarchy wishes to see it persist," said Segrill.

"How do I know I can trust a single word you say?"

"I will permit you to read my mind in its entirety," said Segrill.

Strider didn't understand for a moment. Then realization struck her. The little alien assumed that the Images were an integral part of this particular small band of human beings. Why should he think anything different? Ten Per Cent Extra Free was currently operating out of Pinocchio, but of course Segrill couldn't see that. He must assume humans were telepathic. It might be wise to let him continue thinking that for a while.

"I've already done so," she said. Because the alien was so close to her she couldn't even subvocalize. Have you done a sweep of his mind? she thought at Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

HE IS SINCERE, said the Image. I SHALL LET YOU KNOW IF HE STARTS TO LIE.

"And how can I know that I can trust you?" said Segrill.

"Because you're standing in the palm of my hand. More to the point, I'm metaphorically in the palm of yours. Each of us could destroy the other very easily."

"That is true," said Segrill. "My people have lazcannon trained on you right at this minute."

Strider hesitated. That was something more than she had anticipated. She had better get her mind together. If she continued to find it difficult to take this alien seriously she might find herself and all the rest of her personnel dead very much more quickly than she expected.

"What can you offer us?" she said.

Segrill explained how the techs working on F-14 were, in effect, a legion of revolutionaries just waiting for the right moment to rise up. He had seen the huge fleet of Human warcruisers—it took Strider a further moment of thought to understand that what he had seen was the Helgiolath armada—and believed that he could add several hundred warcruisers to it, each crewed by dedicated warriors. The techs knew more about the Autarchy's weaponry—its strengths and weaknesses—than even the Autarch's military themselves, so that in effect he would be almost doubling the size of the "Human" fleet. Although the Autarch, with warning, could set up a force much larger than the combined fleets, they would have the advantage of surprise—they might even be able to strike at Qitanefermeartha itself before they were faced by any greater firepower.

Strider decided to put her cards on the table.

"Tell him what the true situation is," she said to Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"Are your friends the Helgiolath likely to accept us?" said Segrill after a short pause.

"If you're with us. If I'm able to talk to Kortland through a Pocket and persuade him that you're not snakes in the grass."

This last metaphor clearly didn't translate too clearly. Strider had to explain it in two or three different versions before finally Ten Per Cent Extra Free hit on one that Segrill could understand.

"We must get you back to your spaceship," said Segrill at length.

"How are you going to do that? I mean"—she waved with her free hand in the general direction of the hillside where the fighter craft lay squatly and small—"you couldn't fit even half of one of us into your ships. By the way, just how big are these warcruisers you're offering?"

"Some of them are forty times the size of your own."

"Um."

"The techs vary in size between species very much smaller than I am myself up to others that are nearly fifty meters tall. We all work together."

"Are any of the cruisers as small as those fighters?" she said.

"Those fighters could very simply be converted into warcruisers, but you must understand that their firepower would not be great."

"I think I just have the first glimmerings of an idea," said Strider. "I also think we have a partnership. I'd like to shake on it, except that probably you have some completely different method of signalling agreement and anyway I'm not sure I could do it without breaking your hand."

SEGRILL'S SPECIES NORMALLY CONFIRM AN AGREEMENT BY HAVING SEXUAL INTERCOURSE, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free. WE THINK THAT IN THIS INSTANCE . . .

She stroked the top of Segrill's head, making sure that her touch was as gentle as possible.

"We're an alliance," she said.

He leapt off her hand.

"Agreed."

Then he was flying away across the hillside. He wheeled up into the sky for a moment, performing a complicated wing-movement that undoubtedly meant something to his troops—something like "Don't shoot yet"—before she lost him from sight.

#

It was good to be back on board the Santa Maria again, and to be able to take a bath: that was just about the first thing most of the personnel had done.

Not Strider or her main officers, however: furtively hoping that they didn't smell as bad to other people as they did to themselves, they were trying to power the ship up, aided by the Images and by various of Segrill's techs. The difficulty was that, while the Santa Maria had been redesigned so that it could be operated in an atmosphere, it hadn't been adapted for landing or takeoff. It had jets that, with a little bit of cunning, could be used to lift it a few tens of meters off the ground, but thereafter its rocketry would be useful only for turning several thousand square kilometers of desert, and whoever happened to be there, into glass.

Segrill had transported them from their leafy hideaway back to the desert by calling up one of the fighters under his command: this ship, crewed by the Bredai, who were rather larger than the average nightmare and required a methane atmosphere, had been almost of the same size as the Santa Maria itself. A human behavioral therapist, interested in the way these aliens interacted, had gone too close to one of them and been rendered, on the floor, as something quite disturbingly like a Preeae except for the bits and pieces of spacesuit scattered around the splotch. Strider didn't allow herself to spend too much time thinking about what had happened to the guy: someone had shovelled him up and they'd all given him a burial—a ceremony that had clearly baffled the aliens.

It had been a quick way to go. One moment you're conducting a piece of scientific observation, the next moment splat. One had to assume that, far in the past of every sentient species, there had been individuals who had made similar scientific discoveries. Let's try this nice new brightly shining fruit we haven't come across before. Omnes: Aargh.

Segrill had gone back to Hallaroi in hopes that the techs there would be able to solve the problem of getting the Santa Maria off the ground. Strider was in constant touch with him through the Images.

"This hasn't been the easiest of missions," she said off-handedly to Nelson.

"I set off to Tau Ceti II and all I got was this lousy T-shirt," he replied.

There was a beep from one of the communications Pockets. Strider moved to it and saw a semblance of Segrill: reproduced in the Pocket he seemed to be the same size as she was herself. The Images had clearly decided that she should speak to him face to face.

"There is a way," he said, not concerned with any preliminaries.

"How?"

"We can lift you into space. A Bredai transport vessel is big enough and powerful enough to haul you up into orbit. We're going to have to tamper with the size of the bay doors of the one that is just being completed in order to accommodate you, but this is not beyond our means."

"Sounds good to me," said Strider, although the prospect sounded terrifying. The immensities of what could go wrong filled her mind. Segrill assumed that the Bredai were his allies, but if they were in fact loyal to the Autarchy they could simply hoist the Santa Maria a few thousand meters in the air and drop it. Or, even with the best of intentions, they could allow an accident to occur which caused methane to flood into the Santa Maria.

"Go ahead," she said.