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  “We want all the information we can possibly get before reporting back. Authority is not designed for planetfall, nor does nest-honor let us risk her and our mission further in the possible hazards of closer exploration. You will make landing at one of those Forerunner installations, examine it as best you can, and keep us continually informed. We will take synchronous orbit, to observe and receive from above.”

  [265] Up in hyperjump escape range from this small planet, Lissa knew, though not too high for instruments with resolutions of less than a meter to follow what happened. Nor too high for hurling a missile. Transit time—Torben probably knew something about such weapons. He could figure out how long theirs would take to strike. A few minutes, at most. ...

  “Do you understand?” Ironbright demanded. “Repeat.”

  “We’re to land, look around, stay in touch, and try to stay alive,” Lissa said mechanically. Then: “But just where? How? What’ll we do down there?”

  “As for deciding on location, in our present state of ignorance that is a question of practicality,” replied the Susaian. “You may pool whatever information you have with ours, bearing in mind that your lives depend on accuracy. Since none of us know what the machines will do next, discussion will commence at once, decision be reached in minimal time, and maneuvers commence directly thereafter. I will turn you over to Navigation Officer Leafblue.” Again a brief span of silence. “If all seems to be going satisfactorily, you may thereafter converse with a human among us. He can further clarify the situation for you.”

  XLVIII

  HULDA curved slowly and cautiously toward a construction site in a low northern latitude not far east of the sunrise line. Lost to naked-eye visibility, the Susaian ship maneuvered to her station while always keeping the Asborgan in line of sight.

  The three sat in the control compartment under a slight weight of deceleration. The silence between them seemed to thrum. Finally Hebo cried, “Oh, Christ, Lissa, I’m so sorry!”

  The woman looked at him and raised her brows. “For what?” she asked.

  “Getting you into this mess.”

  “Don’t blither. You know damn well I got myself into it. And I’m not sorry. See what I’ve gained.”

  They leaned as closely together as harness allowed. Arms encircled, lips clung. To hell with the fact that they weren’t alone. This could be their last time.

  They let go when Dzesi said, “We are not foredone yet.”

  Hebo regained a measure of balance. “No, by God,” he agreed. His fist smote the arm of his chair.

  “Although if we are,” the anthropard murmured, “can the Ulas Trek somehow, someday know how we died, and that we died well?”

  It oddly touched Lissa. What other wistfulnesses lay behind that tigerish face?

  “Incoming communication,” Hulda announced.

  Lissa’s pulse fluttered. “Accept,” she directed.

  Romon Kaspersson Seafell’s image appeared on the screen. Hebo stiffened, Dzesi bared teeth. Lissa met the gaze. It was [267] surprising that the man was not triumphant, but white-lipped, unkempt, and a tic at the right corner of his mouth. “Yes,” she acknowledged icily, “Ironbright said you might call.”

  “What do your keepers allow you to tell?” Hebo jeered. “And is it the truth?”

  Lissa shook her head at him. “No sense in quarreling,” she whispered. He scowled but nodded.

  Although the pickup scanned all of them, Romon’s eyes were wholly for her. His voice stumbled. “I’m free to answer—most questions. ... Lissa, Lissa, I never expected this!”

  She caught the undertone of a trans rendering their Anglay into a Susaian tongue. “What did you expect, then?” she demanded.

  “I— My House— You know what loyalty to one’s House means.”

  “And status in it,” Hebo couldn’t help snorting, “power, personal profit.”

  It stung, maybe, but it also stiffened. “Yes,” Romon gave back, “I spied on you. Why not? I’d always suspected you had some ulterior motive, above and beyond the profit you claimed you craved. When the chance came to learn more, the situation suggested that there was in fact something to learn, something you’d kept hidden from your backers, your partners.”

  “My own business.”

  “Must you humans always make those smug noises?” Dzesi muttered.

  Romon spoke again to Lissa. “I should think you, at least, would understand. House Seafell needs an advantage. The big ones like Windholm have dominated our politics, our world, too long.” Hastily: “No offense to you, though, none, I swear.”

  “Enough self-justification on both sides,” she snapped. “What did you do?”

  He drew breath. “I took my information to the Seafell magnates. What else? It looked far-fetched to them. And yet, who knew? Our House couldn’t send an expedition. And if we did [268] have the means, how could we keep possession of whatever we found? Nor did we want to bring in some rival House. Besides, yes, Torben, you were right about how that would have meant endless delay and debate and publicity, giving the game away to anyone ready to take prompt, decisive action.”

  “Meaning the lizards,” said Lissa with scorn.

  He showed more pain than anger. “That sort of insult is unworthy of you.”

  “All right, the Dominators of the Great Confederacy. But I’m no friend of theirs,” as I am of those Susaians they have persecuted. “Nobody ought to be.”

  “Why? What threat have they ever been to us? What might be gained by cooperating with them instead of denouncing them and intriguing against them? Why not try to win their amity and trust?”

  “As the chickens wondered about the foxes,” said Hebo aside. His archaism went by.

  “It seemed reasonable,” Romon insisted. “Didn’t it? After all, as Ironbright explained, they have a legitimate grievance. This could make it good.”

  “Well, nobody’s judgment is perfect,” Lissa admitted, mainly to encourage him to go on. Ours, for instance, dashing off the way we did, she thought. But at least we can still live with ourselves. He sounds like being on the verge of breakdown.

  “Esker Harolsson strongly recommended the idea when I consulted him,” Romon said. “In fact, he was afire with it; he insisted he should go too.” The tone wavered. “He— In spite of everything, he’s been horribly lonely.”

  And here was possible new fame to win, Lissa thought. And glory attracts some women to even the most repulsive men. ... No, I’m being unfair, maybe downright cruel. I could never stand him personally, but he is brilliant in his field, he’d have much to give us if we let him.

  Romon continued in a rush, words he must have rehearsed: “Our message was carefully nonspecific. We just told that we had [269] certain interesting clues to the Forerunners, which the Susaians might like to discuss with us confidentially. We anticipated months of negotiation back and forth. Instead, they responded within two weeks. They offered to send a ship for our representatives.

  “Of course I volunteered. This was my doing, in a way, and—I am a man.” He was looking straight at Lissa. She saw the hunger and realized, faintly amazed: Why, he’s in love with me. How long has he been, and not dared speak because that would most likely bring his flickery hopes to naught?

  Romon’s voice steadied. “Esker came along. No one else. We supposed this would be only the first meeting, only a mutual feeling out. But—almost immediately, the Dominator committee proposed an equal partnership with House Seafell, provided that our news proved worth following up. We had to decide virtually on the spot; they said hyperwave consultation with Asborg posed too big a risk of the secret escaping. Esker and I thought this might well be so, and took it on ourselves to reveal what we knew. Again, it was stunning how fast they moved. In a few days they had outfitted Authority and dispatched her.”

  “I wouldn’t have been surprised,” Hebo said. “That government’s been wallowing deeper and deeper into trouble. The Old Truther emigration is a minor symptom. All their traffic and comm
unication restrictions, all the light-years around them, can’t quite hide economic breakdowns, provincial unrest, armed coups—” After a moment he remarked quietly, “Well, human or nonhuman, totalitarian regimes aren’t any more stable than democracies, often less. The Dominators must be near the point where they’ll try damn near anything.”

  This rough-hewn man has lived through a great deal of history, Lissa thought, and he’s studied a great deal more in his spare time. I’d like to learn how deep his thinking runs.

  “We came to this sun,” Romon stated flatly. “We cruised about as you did. Finally we made for this planet.”

  “And you were ordered off, and your hyperwave [270] decommissioned, same as with us,” Lissa said. “Why didn’t you head straight home?”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “We were about to. But whatever becomes of us, they know in my father’s council that we arrived and explored a little.”

  “As they know about us in the Dominance. However, Ironbright is determined to do everything possible before giving up. If we are destroyed, others will follow.”

  “A warrior soul,” Dzesi said. “My compliments to her.”

  “Pretty inconvenient for us, though,” Hebo added sardonically.

  Romon’s resoluteness cracked. “Lissa, if I’d known! If I could have warned you!”

  “What actually happened?” she asked sharply.

  Still shaken, he regathered himself. “We withdrew, but didn’t leave the system. We cruised at a distance, observing whatever we were able to. Nothing pursued us, nothing called to us, we detected nothing alien in space except the one guardian, keeping near-planet orbit. Esker, especially, got some more data. He has ideas. Ironbright’s reasoning was that if the machines were—mortally serious—about us, they’d probably let us know by less than lethal means. That’s when we’d depart. Otherwise our duty was to linger and look till we weren’t learning anything further.”

  “Like us, sort of,” Hebo put in, “except she’s willing to gamble an expensive ship and a whole crew.” He shrugged. “Well, the Dominators never did set much of a price on individual lives.”

  Romon gulped. “And then,” he continued harshly, “we detected you, and followed your progress.”

  Hebo nodded. “Naval-quality instruments. Naval doctrine. It didn’t occur to us. Damn!” he sighed. “Too late now.”

  “If, if I’d known you were aboard, Lissa,” Romon stammered, “I’d have—” He broke off in futility. What could he have done?

  “So friend Ironbright guessed that we’d get the same reception she did,” Hebo said. “Your ship kept watch from a few [271] light-minutes away and pre-matched velocities to ours before she jumped.”

  “To blast the guardian was daring indeed,” Dzesi said.

  “Ironbright—she’d concluded the Forerunners are, or were, probably very peaceful,” Romon tried to answer. “They wouldn’t have foreseen a,, a devotion like that.”

  “Besides, she’s got us to bear the risk,” Hebo said. “At gunpoint.”

  “A plan doubtless made as fast as everything else the lizards have done,” Lissa said. That word didn’t really taste bad. “Yes, Torben, I agree, desperate people are dangerous.”

  “Small consolation to us if the Dominance collapses in ten or twenty years,” Hebo replied. “Unless we’re alive to enjoy the circus.”

  “Lissa,” Romon pleaded, “believe me, believe me, I—

  “We are close to final approach,” Hulda interrupted.

  “Till later, then, Romon,” Lissa said. “Maybe.” She shut off the com and the sight of his anguish.

  IL

  FEW spacecraft of Hulda’s size or greater could land on a planet without docking facilities. Descending on an unprepared surface, the plasma jet would melt it. Ironbright must have recognized her type and known what she, meant to meet unpredictable hazards, was capable of. Lissa wished grimly that the Susaian weren’t such an able spacefarer. But the Dominance had known it when making the assignment. Ordinarily, at least in human services, a captain who lost a ship, whether culpable or not, never got another command.

  Having positioned herself and verified every vector, Hulda cut drive and fell. Dropping some two hundred klicks under this gravity, she would have struck ground at one kps. Her hull could readily have taken that impact, but her crew were less hardy. She extended the forcefields that had helped keep them alive when she collided with the asteroid. Other vessels, liners, freighters, warcraft, carried no such generators. For them the contingencies were too unlikely to justify taking up the mass and volume. As for landings, some models had boats. Hulda’s machine spread its invisible shields to distribute weight over square kilometers and decreased their strength at a measured rate. Touchdown was feather-soft.

  The silence that followed seemed to ring.

  The riders stared at the view. Extended landing jacks rested on a basaltic plain, scarred, drifted with reddish dust, but reasonably flat, about five kilometers north of the complex. Seen from their present height, it lay on the near horizon. Shadows reached long and irregular from a sun, shrunken but still too savage to [273] look near, not far up into a sky almost space-black but with stars hidden by glare. A few dust devils whirled on a wind more ghostly than themselves. Hills reached raw across the western distance, streaked with ice that glittered and gleamed and was not simply frozen water.

  It was the Forerunner works that captured Lissa’s gaze and would not let go. Seeing them there, close at hand, herself in ready reach of whatever they might send forth, was altogether different from a view in space. An upward helicoid, a spidery polygonal dome, shapes less easily nameable, and smaller shapes that moved upon them, busy with mysteries, a shimmer over all like mirage or heat-waves, but it was cold, cold out there—

  Hebo’s prosaic voice hauled her back. “Weird place. Seems peaceful enough, though.”

  “Thus far,” hissed Dzesi.

  “We’ll sit tight for a while and see if anything happens, okay?”

  “Then what shall we do?”

  Lissa’s heart rallied. “Go and start investigating,” she said. “Do we have a choice?”

  “I do not need a choice, now,” answered the Rikhan, and quivered with the eagerness of a hunter.

  Hebo unharnessed, stood up, and stretched, muscle by muscle. “Well, let’s brew some coffee—hell, a shot of brandy in it—and try to relax, try to think,” he suggested.

  Lissa had to smile, forlorn though it probably was. “If those aren’t mutually exclusive.” She and Dzesi rose too. Having steadiness underfoot, but weighing only about twenty-five kilos, felt oddly refreshing. “First chance we’ve had, really.” Might it not be the last.

  She suppressed that thought and helped with the small mundane tasks, making equally small talk with Hebo. That, and the companionable silences in between, while look met look, also brought back hope, even a bit of cheer. Underneath, she sensed reaction to what they had just been through, but it lapped down near the bottom of consciousness, a black tide rising very slowly. [274] Dzesi didn’t act as if she had been affected at all.

  The coffee tasted astoundingly good when they sat down again, like a promise that she would at last come home to the dear everyday. Her mind was thrummingly taut.

  “Nothing has attacked us yet,” Dzesi said. “Are the things unaware of us?”

  “They could be,” answered Hebo. His tone had gone slow and reflective. “Specialized for their one job of observation. Sure, that’s a complicated set of operations, starting with constructing the apparatus, including robots, computers, and programs. Plenty of unforeseeables to deal with, decisions to make, things to modify or invent as need arises. But nothing that calls for what we’d call sentience. Nothing like us was ever ... expected. I think the guardian was supposed to handle anything that came out of left field.”

  Once more Lissa must infer what an expression of his meant. “And it may well have been a, an afterthought,” she said. “From Earth.”

>   Dzesi pricked up her ears. “What say you?”

  “Can you think of any plausible way a purely Forerunner— artifact—could acquire the principal languages of the modern space-going races, and knowledge of their capabilities, right down to the details of circuits?”

  “How can we say what they have or have not mastered? It’s as bad a mistake to overreckon as to underreckon another. It can well be deadly.”

  Hebo lifted a hand. “No, wait, Lissa’s right. Or, anyhow, she’s working along the same lines as me.” He sipped deeply from his cup. “Let’s lay our notions out, share ’em, tinker with ’em.”

  “You first,” Lissa murmured in a rush of warmth. Practicality: “You’ve lately been on Earth.”

  Hebo grimaced. “And the more I look back on it, the stranger a place it seems,” he said, as if with a slight inward shiver. “Oh, they put on a pretty good show for outsiders, but I’ve gotten pretty sure that a show is what it is. They’re—cooperative, [275] unanimous—in a way impossible on any of our worlds. ... Linked, in some fashion, through and to a giant, central artificial intelligence.” He paused. “Don’t get me wrong. I believe they still have individual minds, personalities, as human as you and me.” A smile barely flitted across his mouth. She wondered who and what he was remembering. Maybe best not to ask. Starkness returned. “But they’re also in a sort of mental collective.”

  The idea was not entirely new or daunting. “Yes, weren’t things tending that way for a long time?” Lissa asked. “Though we on the new planets grew too occupied with our own new lives, societies, troubles, adventures, to keep track; and of course nonhumans never did.”

  “I’ve seen how a few people here and there guessed this was developing. However, what they suggested was fairly well ignored, for the reasons you gave. There were no strong clues to the truth. It was easy to cover up.”

  “Easy for—for what they were becoming.” Lissa summoned fresh courage. “That doesn’t mean they’re hostile to us, or, or evil. Why should they be? They may wish to spare us bewilderment and envy, or unnecessary fear. After all, the guardian didn’t hurt us. I think it was only there to keep—amateurs—from bumbling around and interfering with the work.”