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  That was as far as she got when Nenda was hoisted suddenly into the air and whipped away to the left. The other figure next to Darya silently unfolded, to rear high above her. From its proportions it had to be a Cecropian. She heard a hissing sound and felt something else, thin and angular and with a hard and unyielding exoskeleton, push against her knees.

  “With respect,” said a voice from close to the floor, “We do not think that this is the best time for the renewal of old acquaintance.”

  “J’merlia?”

  “This is J’merlia’s person, but I am of course speaking on behalf of my dominatrix, Atvar H’sial, who is seated next to you.”

  More scuffling sounds from Darya’s left. A hiss, a series of clicks, a thump, and a guttural curse from Louis Nenda. The display in front of Darya vanished and bright lights filled the whole chamber.

  “I had intended,” said a deep, hollow voice, “that we would end today’s meeting in silent study of the Orion and Sagittarius Arms, since that knowledge will prove essential to all of us. I did not anticipate that some of us would choose to indulge in private discussion and personal squabbling.”

  Darya could see the speaker now. He stood at the front of the great chamber, a lanky man with a bald and bulging cranium. She should have expected him. Julian Graves was a native of Miranda, the only one on that world whom she in fact knew personally. The Ethical Councilor’s deep-set blue eyes were staring right at her and she nodded a greeting.

  “Ah.” Graves nodded. “Professor Darya Lang. Of course. I should have anticipated this difficulty. A vortex of emotional disturbance surrounds you still, as ever. Welcome to this assembly. Better late than never, though in truth you are not the last. I am expecting one more participant, who will, I am informed, be arriving within the next half-day. Given that, and the present state of disruption, I feel it will be to everyone’s advantage if I postpone further discussion and explanation until then.” Julian Graves glanced—glared?—around the chamber. “Study the displays. I will leave you now. For the remainder of the day you are free to resume old acquaintances in any way that you choose.”

  * * *

  Julian Graves spoke as though Darya was somehow responsible for ruining his meeting. All she had done was come in and quietly sit down, at a point when the meeting was in any case almost over.

  Darya stared around her. She had come here expecting to know almost no one, but to be surrounded mostly by humans. In fact, she thought she recognized every one of the half dozen beings in the room—and most of them were aliens.

  Still crouched at her feet in an eight-legged sprawl of limbs was the stick-figure form of J’merlia, the Lo’tfian who interpreted the pheromonal speech of his Cecropian mistress, Atvar H’sial. J’merlia stared up at Darya, and in greeting rolled his lemon-colored compound eyes on their short eyestalks. Darya liked J’merlia, although she objected strongly to his insistence on voluntary servitude to Atvar H’sial. And she had grave suspicions about the honesty and intentions of the latter.

  Which made her fondness for Louis Nenda even harder to explain. Nenda was Atvar H’sial’s business partner. He had told Darya, in so many words, that he was a man with an awful and criminal past. He was a native of Karelia , in the far-off reaches of the Zardalu Communion, and others had hinted to Darya of monstrous acts which meant he could never return there. He even possessed his own Hymenopt slave, Kallik, and unlike Atvar H’sial he could not offer the excuse that he needed an interpreter.

  Kallik sat at Louis Nenda’s feet, on the other side of Atvar H’sial. The Hymenopt was short and barrel-shaped, her meter-long body covered with short black fur. With her small round head, set with a ring of bright black eye pairs, she looked mild and defenseless.

  Darya knew better. Invisible was the yellow sting, retracted into the end of the rounded abdomen. That hollow needle could deliver squirts of neurotoxin with no known antidote. At will, Kallik could vary the composition from mild anesthetic to instant kill. Also invisible was the Hymenopt nervous system. It provided Kallik with a reaction speed ten times as fast as a human’s. The eight thin legs would carry her a hundred meters in two seconds, or let her leap fifteen meters into the air under a standard gravity.

  The miracle was that Kallik regarded Louis Nenda as her absolute master and allowed herself to be led around with a collar and leash. Nenda bullied and blustered. Sometimes he even carried a whip. However, Darya had direct proof that the master/slave relationship was more complex than it seemed. She had been on board Nenda’s ship, the Have-It-All. Nenda’s private quarters were opulent, even by the standards of a rich world like Sentinel Gate. But Kallik’s were just as large, and just as well-furnished. The little Hymenopt even had her own additional private area, equipped with powerful computers and scientific instruments.

  Kallik squeezed past Atvar H’sial, whose great body was blocking Louis Nenda, and came scuttling over to Darya. The Hymenopt and J’merlia exchanged a brief burst of clicks and whistles, then Kallik said, “Greetings. With your arrival we will perhaps begin to receive some explanation for our presence.”

  It was an embarrassment to Darya that J’merlia and Kallik, whom she had thought mindless pets when she first met them, could pick up languages with such ease. In the time that it had taken Darya to comprehend a few basic Hymenopt clicks, Kallik had achieved fluency in half a dozen human languages.

  Darya shook her head. “You won’t get explanations from me. I have no idea why I was summoned.”

  “Master Nenda says that it is a meeting which involves the Builders, and Builder artifacts.”

  “So I was told. But the Builders vanished from the spiral arm more than three million years ago, and now all their artifacts are gone, too.”

  “You sure of that?” Louis Nenda must have done an end run on Atvar H’sial, moving round the back of the row of seats. He had appeared now on Darya’s right-hand side.

  “Sure as anyone can be.” Darya quietly pushed his hand away from her shoulder. “The Artifact Research Institute is the clearinghouse for all activities or information concerning the Builders or Builder artifacts. I examine the data bases every day, personally. Absolutely nothing new has come in for the past few months—not for years, in fact.”

  “But they put the heat on you to come here?”

  “I suppose they did. I felt that I was given no choice.”

  “Same for me, same for At. Makes no sense at all. I mean, she’s an expert on the Builders, and so is Kallik. So are you. But me, if you bet on what I know about the Builders, you’d lose your ass and hat.”

  “You were involved in the disappearance of the artifacts, starting with Summertide on Dobelle and ending at Labyrinth, out by Jerome’s World.”

  “Sure I was, but that’s all history. I don’t remember more than half of what happened, even though I was right in the middle of it. I’m tellin’ you, something big has to be brewing.”

  “Based on a gut feeling, or do you have evidence?”

  “Mostly gut. But when your guts have rumbled with danger as often as mine have, you get to trust ’em. And yeah, I do have one bit of evidence. When the word came to us, me an’ At an’ Kallik an’ J’merlia an’ . . . another person, we were on Xerarchos, in what you might call the Lesser Armpit of Zardalu Communion territory. It’s a long way from there to here, so I called Miranda and said we’d need financial help to pay for the cost of the Bose transitions.”

  As usual, Louis Nenda’s clothes were crumpled and his eyes were bloodshot and his battered face needed a shave. And as usual, there was an intensity in the way he looked at Darya that both pleased and disturbed her.

  She glanced away from him and said, “It was reasonable to ask for help if you were short of funds. I assume that they gave some to you?”

  “Yeah. But that’s not the point. As it happens, me an’ Atvar have had a good year or two an’ we’re rolling in money. We sort of try to disguise that, of course, but you can’t hide everything. A simple credit check would have s
hown we didn’t need no help. And when I made my request, I deliberately sky-highed what I said we’d need. I do mean sky-highed, too, because I wanted to see if I could learn anything from their reply.”

  Darya found she was looking back at him in spite of herself. “And?”

  “Not a murmur. Instant approval of everything I asked for.”

  “What do you think it all means?”

  “Haven’t a clue. Except that somebody thinks this meeting is real super-important. But since we’re supposed to find out tomorrow from Julian Graves, I’m not goin’ to worry about it ’til then.” Nenda leaned closer to Darya, ignoring the angry hiss that came from the giant Cecropian on her other side. “Nothin’ else on the agenda for today. So how about you an’ me havin’ dinner an’ catchin’ up on things?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sleepless in MirandaPort

  When you have something to do, do it. When you have nothing to do, sleep.

  Hans Rebka had learned that rule on Teufel before he was six years old. It had served him well through two decades as a troubleshooter in the Phemus Circle , and even better during the nerve-racking two years while he tried to overthrow the Phemus Circle’s corrupt central government.

  That effort had not been a success—he had come within twelve hours of his own execution—but once he was on the ship leaving Candela he put all such thoughts out of his mind. The trip to Miranda would require careful piloting through a number of Bose transitions points, but that was not his responsibility.

  Hans ate until his skinny belly bulged, went to his cabin, and fell asleep within thirty seconds. The weeks in prison had pushed his body to its limits of endurance. For the next five days he intended to do nothing but gorge, snooze, and wonder occasionally why the inter-clade council might think it worthwhile to drag him out of gaol and all the way to Miranda.

  A dozen close calls had given him a lot of respect for his own abilities. He had survived the fearsome Remouleur dawn wind on Teufel, saved a whole colony on Pelican’s Wake, and flown an expedition on Quake to safety at the height of Summertide. But every one of those had been a marginal world, a place on the threshold for human existence. Miranda was rich, safe, and self-satisfied. It had been settled for millennia.

  Hans yawned, turned over, and snuggled deeper under his blanket. So why Miranda? Well, when somebody told him why they wanted him there, he would know. Until then . . .

  The final Bose transition and transfer to the Upside Miranda Port entry point took place in the middle of the local sleep period. He was told by the bleary-eyed woman who came to his quarters that since he was a late arrival, he might as well spend the rest of the night on board the ship. Meetings would continue the next morning, and nothing would happen until then. Hans nodded. As soon as the woman left he rose and dressed in his borrowed uniform. It was something learned through experience: in an unknown situation, any bit of extra knowledge might be the edge you would need. Examine your environment.

  He left the ship and stared around him. Unlike Darya Lang, he wasted no time marvelling at the vast magnificence of the Shroud with its myriad netted ships. He had been to Upside Miranda Port before, and when he left the last time he had felt in no great hurry to return. On that occasion he and Julian Graves had been mocked when they tried to persuade the Council that the Zardalu, believed extinct for eleven thousand years, were once again at large in the spiral arm. Could this call involve the Zardalu again? If so, this time it would be the Council’s job to convince him that he should take them seriously.

  His previous visit had provided him with a vague layout of the docking center and station administrative quarters. He moved silently along corridors deserted except for cleaning and maintenance crew, low-level intelligences that froze in position until their motion sensors showed that he had passed. The meeting rooms were all empty. One of them contained a giant holographic display big enough to fill the whole chamber. He walked through the middle of it. The first part was the familiar territory of the local arm. He came to the nimbus of muddy brown that marked the Phemus Circle , and placed his index finger on the tiny bright spark of Candela. It winked out of existence. If only it were so easy to blot out the government there . . .

  The spark reappeared as soon as he removed his finger. Government corruption would be the same, returning to full strength throughout the Phemus Circle now that he was no longer there to wage war against it. Next time—if there could ever be a next time—he would seek allies from other clades before he took on an entrenched power structure.

  He continued through the chamber, wandering past Dobelle and into the beginnings of the galactic region dominated by the Cecropia Federation. The display here showed unfamiliar stars and the scattered sites of old artifacts, Zirkelloch and Tantalus and Cusp. At Cusp he halted. He had been heading in the display toward the galactic center, and he was at the edge of Cecropian influence. This marked the end of the local arm, the place where the Gulf began. Nothing lay beyond but thousands of lightyears of empty space, until finally a determined traveler who went on and on would reach the other side of the Gulf and find the stars and dust clouds of the Sag Arm.

  But something was here. In the display, the darkness of the Gulf was broken by a line of pinpoints of light. Stars? Rogue planets? Monstrous artificial free-space structures? The Builders could conjure such things from nothing. They had placed Serenity thirty-thousand lightyears out of the galactic plane. Hans had been carried to that great enigma—involuntarily—and after his return he still he had no idea of its purposes. Now, without some key, he could not guess what he might be seeing in the chain of lights that spanned the Gulf.

  He left the chamber and prowled another dark corridor. Everyone should be in sleeping quarters, but by instinct he moved silently. That same caution made him pause at the entrance to another room. The sliding door was open a fraction.

  Hans froze, all his senses alert. He peered through the one-centimeter crack, but saw and heard nothing. The room beyond was totally dark. He told himself that his imagination was working overtime. Still he did not move. Something—what?—convinced him that the room beyond was occupied.

  * * *

  The argument was no less fierce because it was conducted wholly through pheromonal communication. The chemical messengers passing between Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial reeked with overtones of suspicion, anger, and denial beyond anything that mere words could offer.

  “I am betrayed.” The pair of fernlike antennas on top of the Cecropian’s head were tightly furled in indignation. “You insisted that the Council’s call for our presence indicated their desperate need.”

  “Hey, I think it does.”

  “Also, you spoke on the journey here of the possible commercial advantages that accrue to us on such a rich world. And I, in my innocence, agreed.”

  “Innocence! You lost your innocence before you left the egg.”

  “I was innocent of particular knowledge. I had no idea that the human female, Darya Lang, would be here. You knew.”

  “I sure as hell didn’t. I was as surprised to see her as you were.”

  “Say what you will, the warmth of her pheromonal greeting to you was unmistakable. And you sought her company later.”

  “I suggested dinner. What’s wrong with dinner, for Croesus’ sake? Hell, I gotta eat. And she said no.”

  “To your obvious disappointment. It is clear now why you insisted that your faithful companion and my valuable human-language teacher, Glenna Omar, be abandoned and left to her fate on Sentinel Gate.”

  “Nuts. I’ve told you a dozen times, Sentinel Gate was Glenna’s idea, not mine. She thought we might be heading for something dangerous. Danger isn’t Glenna’s style.”

  “But treachery is your style.”

  “Sure. Why else would you accept me as a business partner?”

  “Do not play word games, Louis Nenda. Treachery toward me is a different matter. I am now convinced that you know exactly why we are here. In fact, I strongly s
uspect that you engineered this from the beginning. You arranged to have messages—”

  The flow of pheromones abruptly halted. Nenda said, “At, I’m telling you for the last time—”

  He was interrupted by a paw across his mouth and another on the nodules of the augment on his chest. A powerful burst of pheromones said, “SILENCE. We are not alone. If you must speak, do so softly and only through the augment.”

  Nenda glanced around the darkened room and saw nothing. “What? Where?”

  “Beyond the door. A human male.”

  “You sure?”

  “Of course I am sure. The odor cannot be mistaken.” Atvar H’sial’s proboscis quivered. The yellow horns turned, and the antennas above them unfurled to their fullest extent. “I can also provide an identity. It is Captain Hans Rebka—your old rival for the sexual favors of the female, Darya Lang.”

  Nenda gritted his teeth, but he said only, “I didn’t know Rebka was here at Upside Miranda Port !”

  “He was not, earlier in the day. To be more specific, if at Upside Miranda Port he was nowhere near us. Had he been present, even half a kilometer away, J’merlia or I would have smelled him. Wait a moment.”

  Again the antennas quivered. Atvar H’sial said at last, “He does not know that we are here, yet somehow he is suspicious. His odor betrays uneasiness. Now—he is moving away along the corridor. I wonder how he knows?”

  “Rebka’s a snooty bastard, but I’d never say he’s a fool. He can smell danger nearly as good as I can, and he knows how to look after himself. But At, you wanted proof that I’m not keeping information from you. Now you have it. Will you admit that I hate Rebka’s guts?”

  “You have never been able to disguise that fact, at least from me. You and he, in your incessant bickering over the human female—”

  “Forget the goddamned human female. Or better still, don’t forget her. Ask yourself this: If I had the hots for her the way that you claim, would I have brought Hans Rebka to Miranda Port ?”