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"I don't need to ask—it's shown right here. One hundred and thirty-two thousand. Damnation, I see what you mean. That's way too cheap."

  "Perhaps not, Louis. I would like the answer to one further question. How old is this ship?"

  "That's not shown on the listing." Nenda turned to Julian Graves. "Can you interrupt the display for a query? Atvar H'sial is asking about the age of the Erebus."

  "No problem." Graves had been leaning back in his chair, watching with huge satisfaction as the statistics rolled past. He entered Nenda's query, then turned to face the Karelian. "I hope that this gives you increased faith in my methods, Mr. Nenda. I sent J'merlia and Kallik to negotiate for purchase of a ship. They have bought a ship—and what a ship! And at a most reasonable price. I ask you, do you believe that you, or Atvar H'sial, or anyone, could have found a better bargain? The moral of this is—"

  He paused and goggled at the screen. "Is that the date it was put into service? It can't be. Let me check again."

  "Three thousand nine hundred years, At," Nenda said softly. "That's the listed age of the Erebus." He continued silently, using only pheromonal communication. "What's going on? You must know, or you'd never have asked the question."

  "I will tell you, though you may prefer to allow Councilor Graves to learn what I have to say for himself, rather than from you. The information is not likely to bring joy to his heart. Your description of the Erebus—especially of its weapons system—sounded familiar. It reminded me of the Larmeer ships used in the long-ago battles between the Fourth Alliance and the Zardalu Communion. Those ships were commissioned by the Alliance, but they were manufactured by my people, in the Cecropia Federation, in the free-space weapons shop of H'larmeer. J'merlia and Kallik have purchased something with the carrying capacity of a freighter, the firepower of a battleship, and the internal life-support systems and personnel accommodations of a colony ship. But it is none of these. It is a Tantalus orbital fort."

  "And it's four thousand years old. Will it still work?"

  "Assuredly. The orbital forts were created for multi-millennial working lifetimes, with negligible maintenance. There will be a problem recognizing the purpose of some of the onboard devices, since the common day-to-day knowledge of one generation lies unused and forgotten in a later one, to the point of incomprehensibility. To quote an old Cecropian proverb. Any sufficiently antique technology is indistinguishable from magic. However, I would expect little or no degradation in ship performance."

  "So Graves got a really good deal. He's going to be crowing over us for months."

  "I regard that as unlikely. Councilor Graves has already told us that it may be necessary to visit dozens of different worlds before he finds the Zardalu."

  "He can do it. The Erebus has ample power. And if the Zardalu get pesky, the ship has plenty of weapons."

  "It does indeed. But still I suspect that Councilor Graves will shortly become less satisfied with his purchase."

  "Huh?"

  "Less satisfied, indeed." Atvar H'sial paused for dramatic effect. "Much less satisfied, as soon as he realizes that what he has purchased is an orbital fort—a device which can never make a landing, ever, on any planet."

  Chapter Five: Sentinel Gate

  Darya Lang sat in the main control room of the Erebus, staring at the list of locations that she had generated and swiveling her chair impatiently from side to side.

  Stalemate.

  The way that Hans Rebka had described the plan, it sounded almost too easy: acquire the use of a ship and recruit a crew; seek out the refuge of the escaped Zardalu, with adequate firepower to assure their own safety; and return to Miranda with unarguable proof of Zardalu existence.

  They had the ship, they had the weapons, and they had the crew. But there was one gigantic snag. The Zardalu had not left a forwarding address. They could be anywhere in the spiral arm, on thousands of habitable planets scattered through thousands of light-years. Neither Hans Rebka nor Julian Graves had offered a persuasive method of narrowing that search, and no one else on board had been able to do any better. To examine all the possibilities, the Erebus would have to fly in a thousand directions at once.

  As soon as Darya and Hans Rebka arrived on board the whole group had met; and argued; and dispersed. And now the ship sat in lumbering orbit around Sentinel Gate, while the Zardalu—somewhere—were relentlessly breeding.

  Everything in the Erebus had been built in a multiply redundant and durable style. The control room was no exception. Fifteen separate consoles, each with its own weapons center, ran floor-to-ceiling around the circular room. General information centers were fitted into niches between them. Darya sat in one of those, and across from her on the other side of the chamber Atvar H'sial was crouched over another, manipulating controls with a delicate combination of four clawed limbs.

  The flat screens could not provide images "visible" to the Cecropian's sonic sight—so how could she be obtaining useful feedback of information? Darya wished that Louis Nenda or J'merlia were there to act as interpreter, but they had headed off with Hans Rebka to the auxiliary engine room of the ship, where Graves claimed to have found "a fascinating device."

  Kallik was sitting in the niche next to Atvar H'sial, deeply immersed in her own analysis of data. Without examining the outputs, Darya had a good idea what the Hymenopt was doing—she would be sifting the data banks for rumors, speculation, and old legends concerning the Zardalu, and pondering their most likely present location. Darya had been doing the same thing herself. She had reached definite conclusions that she wanted to share with the others—if only the rest would come back from their excursion to the engine room. What was keeping them so long?

  It occurred to her that there was something deeply significant in what was happening. She, Atvar H'sial, and Kallik—the females in the party—were working on the urgent problem of Zardalu location, analyzing and reanalyzing available data. Meanwhile all the males had gone off to play with a dumb gadget, a toy that had sat on the Erebus for millennia and could easily wait another few years before anyone played with it.

  Darya's peevish thoughts were interrupted by a startling sound from the middle of the control chamber. She turned, and the skin on her arms and the back of her neck tightened into goose bumps.

  A dozen hulking figures stood no more than a dozen paces from her. Towering four meters tall on splayed tentacles of pale aquamarine, the thick cylindrical bodies were topped by bulbous heads of midnight blue, a meter wide. At the base of the head, below the long slit of a mouth, the breeding pouches formed a ring of round-mouthed openings. While Darya looked on in horror, lidded eyes, each as big across as her stretched hand, surveyed the chamber then turned to look down on her. Cruel hooked beaks below the broad-spaced eyes opened wide, and a series of high-pitched chittering sounds emerged.

  Once seen, never forgotten. Zardalu.

  Darya jumped to her feet and backed up to the wall of the chamber. Then she realized that Kallik, across from her, had left her seat and was moving toward the looming figures. The little alien could understand Zardalu speech.

  "Kallik! What are they—" But at that moment the Hymenopt walked right through one of the standing Zardalu, then stood calmly inspecting it with her rear-facing eyes.

  "Remarkable," Kallik said. She moved to Darya's side. "More accurate than I would have believed possible. My sincere congratulations."

  She was talking not to Darya, but to someone who had been sitting tucked out of sight in a niche on the side of the control room. As that figure came into view, Darya saw that it was E.C. Tally. A neural connect cable ran from the base of the skull of the embodied computer, back into the booth.

  "Thank you," E.C. Tally said. "I must say, I like it myself. But it is not quite right." He inspected the Zardalu critically, and as Darya watched the aquamarine tentacles of the land-cephalopods darkened a shade and the ring of breeding pouches moved a fraction lower on the torso.

  "Though congratulations are due more to this ship's image re
storation and display facilities," the embodied computer went on. He circled the group of Zardalu, trailing shiny neural cable along the floor behind him. "All I did was feed it my memories. If something as good as this had been available on Miranda, perhaps I would have had more success in persuading the Council. Do you think that it is a plausible reconstruction, Professor Lang? Or is more work needed before it can mimic reality?"

  Darya was saved from answering by the sound of voices from the control-room entrance. Louis Nenda and Hans Rebka appeared between two of the massive support columns, talking animatedly. They glanced at the Zardalu standing in the middle of the room, then marched across to Darya and Kallik.

  "Nice job, E.C.," Nenda said casually. "Put it on video and audio when you're done." He turned from the embodied computer and the menacing Zardalu, and grinned at Darya. "Professor, we got it. We agree on everything. But me and Rebka gotta have your help persuading Graves and J'merlia."

  "You've got what?" Darya was still feeling like a fool, but she could not help returning Nenda's grin. Villainous or not, his presence was always so reassuring. She had been unreasonably delighted to see him at their first meeting on the Erebus, and she found herself smiling now.

  "We figured out how to track down the Zardalu." Hans Rebka flopped down into the chair where Darya had been sitting.

  "Damn right." But Nenda was turning to face the crouched figure of Atvar H'sial. "Hold on a minute, At's sending to me. She's been working the computer. I'll be back."

  If Nenda and Rebka agreed on anything, that was a first. It seemed to Darya that they had been snarling at each other since the moment when the Erebus picked up Darya and Hans Rebka and made its subluminal departure from Sentinel Gate. It did not help to be told by Julian Graves that Darya herself was the hidden reason for the argument.

  She watched as Nenda moved to crouch below the carapace of the Cecropian, where pheromonal messages were most easily sent and received, and remained there in silence for half a minute.

  "I don't see how Atvar H'sial can interface with the computer at all," Darya said. "The screen is blank, and even if it weren't, she couldn't get anything from it."

  "She does not employ the screen." Kallik pointed one wiry limb to where Atvar H'sial was now rising to her full height. "She obtains information feedback aurally. She has reprogrammed the oscillators to give audible responses at high frequencies. I hear only the lower end of the range. J'merlia would catch the whole thing, but all of it is too high for human ears."

  Nenda returned, followed by Atvar H'sial. He was frowning.

  "So now we got three ideas," he said. He stared at Darya and Kallik. "I hope that neither of you two think you know where the Zardalu are."

  "I do," Darya said.

  "Then we got problems. So does At."

  "And I also have suggestions." Kallik spoke softly and diffidently. Since they had been reunited, Darya had noticed a strange change in the relationship between Louis Nenda and Atvar H'sial, and their former—or was it current?—slaves. Kallik and J'merlia had greeted their sometime owners with huge and unconcealed joy, and those owners were clearly delighted to see them. But no one was sure how to behave. The Lo'tfian and the Hymenopt were ready and eager to take orders, but the Cecropian and the Karelian human were not giving them. Nenda in particular was on his absolute best behavior—which was not very good, in terms of social graces. If Darya had been forced to introduce him to the research staff of the Institute, Professor Merada would have had a fit. But Glenna Omar, with her appetite for anything rough and male, would more likely have been all over him.

  She pushed away that last thought as unworthy as Nenda scratched thoughtfully at his backside, sniffed, and dropped into a chair next to Hans Rebka.

  "We gotta sort all this out quick," he said. "We sit here jerking ourselves off, while new little Zardalu must be poppin' out of the pouches every five minutes."

  "We must proceed," Rebka said. He and Nenda were having their usual silent tussle as to who was in charge, something they did whenever Julian Graves was not around. "We can't afford to wait for the other two to show up. It seems that we all have ideas, so who wants to go first?"

  Darya realized that Kallik was glancing deferentially in their direction.

  "I guess that I do," she said. "What I have to say won't take long. I'll start with two facts: First, when the Builder transportation system returned us from Serenity, it landed us in different parts of the spiral arm. But in every case, we came out on or next door to the location of a Builder artifact. Second, no one has reported the sighting of any live Zardalu—and you can bet that would make news everywhere. So I deduce two things. First, the Zardalu would almost certainly have arrived close to an artifact, too. And second, that artifact cannot be in Fourth Alliance territory, or in the Cecropia Federation, or even in the Phemus Circle. It has to be where you might expect Zardalu to be sent—to a location somewhere in the territories of the Zardalu Communion. That makes sense for two reasons: the Zardalu were originally picked up there; and the Communion still has a lot of unexplored territory. If you wanted to disappear, and remain hidden, that's the first place in the spiral arm that you'd pick."

  She stared around at five silent and expressionless faces. "Any comment?"

  "Go on," Rebka said. "No quarrels so far. Where do you go from here?"

  "I know the locations of all the Builder artifacts. Three hundred and seventy-seven of them lie within the Zardalu Communion territory. A hundred and forty-nine of those lie in fairly remote territory, where a Zardalu appearance might not be spotted at once. More than that, if you go along with my assumption that the Zardalu had to land someplace close to one of those artifacts, then I can narrow the field a lot further. You see, for many artifacts there's just no planet within many light-years where an air-breathing life-form can survive. Throw in that requirement, and you have my final list."

  She turned to the console and touched three keys. "And here it is, along with my calculations."

  "Sixty-one planets, around thirty-three different stars." Louis Nenda was frowning. "I can rule out a couple of those—I know 'em. Don't forget Kallik and me are from the Communion. But it's still too many. Hold on a minute, while I pass your list to At."

  The others waited impatiently during the transfer. Nenda was still in silent dialogue with the Cecropian when Julian Graves and J'merlia arrived in the control room. Rebka gestured to Darya's list, still on the screen. "Candidate places we might find Zardalu. Too many."

  "And while I have no wish to complicate matters"—Kallik was busy at the console—"here are the results of my analysis, quite independently evolved although with a similar guiding logic."

  Another substantial list was appearing on the screen, next to Darya's. "Seventy-two planets," Kallik said apologetically, "around forty-one different stars. And only twenty-three planets in common with Professor Lang."

  "And it's getting worse," Nenda said. "Atvar H'sial did her own analysis, with a logic similar to Darya's. But she didn't prepare it for visual output. She's doing that now."

  The Cecropian was back at her console. Within a few seconds, a third long list and a series of equations began to appear on the displays. Julian Graves groaned as it went on and on. "Worse and worse."

  "Eighty-four planets," E.C. Tally said. "Around forty-five stars." The embodied computer's internal processing unit, with a clock rate of eighteen attoseconds, could query the ship's data bank through the attached neural cable and perform a full statistical analysis while the humans were still trying to read the list. "Twenty-nine planets," he went on, "in common with Professor Lang, thirty in common with Kallik, and eleven planets common to all three. There is a sixty-two percent probability that the planet sought is one of the eleven, and a fifteen percent chance that it is not any one of the one hundred and forty-six in the combined list."

  "Which says you got too many places, and lousy odds." Nenda turned to Hans Rebka. "So I guess it's our turn in the barrel. You want to tell it? Peopl
e tend to get sort of excited when I say things."

  Rebka shrugged. He moved to sit closer to Darya. "Nenda and I did our own talking when we were in the engine room. What you three did was interesting, a nice, abstract analysis; but we think you're missing a basic point.

  "You said, hey, nobody reported Zardalu in the Fourth Alliance or the Cecropia Federation or the Phemus Circle, so that means they can't be there. But you know the Zardalu as well as we do. Don't you think it's more likely that they didn't get reported because there was nobody left to report them? If you want to find Zardalu, you look for evidence of violence. Better yet, you look for evidence of disappearances somewhere close to a Builder artifact. If the Zardalu arrived in the spiral arm and took a ship to get them back to their home planet, they'd have made sure there were no survivors to talk about it. Nenda and I took a look at recent shipping records for spiral arm travel, close to Builder artifacts, to see how many interstellar ships just vanished and never showed up again. We found two hundred and forty of them, all in the past year. Forty-three of them look like real mysteries—no unusual space conditions at time of disappearance, no debris, no distress messages. Here they are."