Terney looked up at me. “Are they?” he whispered.

  “I hope so,” I said. But I couldn’t know for certain. Ever.

  I went back to the lab and worked on sequencing samples from the traps in the bay.

  * * *

  A pinnace had landed early and for most of the morning the Far Traveller echoed with the squeal of winches hauling the pinnace close to the ship and then hoisting it aboard. It was about midday when Rick entered the bio lab and called, “Hi, Harry, how has Elkin been treating you?”

  “It’s kept me supplied with marine microorganisms,” I said. “As a biologist, I’d have to say that I have a fulfilling life. How was sounding new routes?”

  I’d missed Rick while he was off being an RCN officer; he was the only person on the Far Traveller I could talk to. None of the other officers were unfriendly, but I was always aware that they were interacting with Lord Harper.

  Rick was aware of my family and respected it, but he didn’t really care. He was a space officer, focused on the details of his job—and outside of that on women, in a friendly, casual fashion. The way he’d treated Rachel bothered me—but by his own lights it had been a fair exchange. He’d never offered more than he was ready to deliver; and if she had put more weight than he did on his readiness to risk his life to save hers, well, she was an adult.

  It also bothered me that he talked—casually—about their relationship. That was my own problem. Rick was nowhere nearly as clinical as what was normal in a sporting club. I’d been raised according to the standard that a gentleman doesn’t use names, but my father was stiff-necked compared to members of the family who spent more of their time in Xenos.

  “We found some,” he said. “Why anyone will want to use them is beyond me, given how benighted the whole region is. Anyway, we’re off tomorrow for Mindoro where there’s supposed to be some nightlife worth the name.”

  “And different marine microorganisms, I’m sure,” I said. “Well, I won’t be sorry to see the last of Elkin.”

  Doctor Veil’s office door had been open. She stepped out into the lab proper and said, “Excuse me, Lieutenant Grenville. Did you say we’re leaving Elkin tomorrow?”

  “Bright and early in the morning, from what the captain says,” Rick agreed cheerfully. “Do you have any teams out in the field still?”

  “Kent is on the way back with Joss and her specimens,” Veil said. “But that means we’ll have to wind up our examination of the Room immediately.”

  Given that we had three cameras recording a block of moissanite as inert as the sand around it, “examination” struck me as an optimistic description. “Pick up our cameras, you mean?” I said.

  I wouldn’t be needed for that, and my distaste for the Room and its creators brought me to the verge of asking to be excused from the business, but Doctor Veil said, “No, we’re going to break it open and see what it’s holding.”

  I frowned and said, “Break how?”

  “Well,” said Veil. “I hate to do it but Captain Bolton informs me that we won’t be able to carry the Room on the ship, so I’m going to blow it open by placing an electrical shattering charge in the niche at the base of the door. Chief Engineer Hideko said that one of his techs is very experienced in this sort of thing—she transferred from the Land Forces. The charge will break apart the door. We’ll be there to record the whole event and take away the contents.”

  Destroying an Archaic artifact would have disturbed me a great deal a month ago. After my dream it…well, it didn’t bother me at all. I now believed in the Archaic Spacefarers, and I believed the cosmos was better off without them.

  I said, “What do you want me to do, ma’am?”

  * * *

  Doctor Veil, Rick—who’d asked to be present—and I were down in the open transport bay when Kent drove in with Joss beside him in the cab. Tech 3 Snedscott stood with us, though we hadn’t interacted beyond introductions. Her equipment was a powerpack eighteen by eighteen by twelve inches, and a soft-sided satchel. Veil and I had only our handhelds; the cameras were already on site and linked to the base unit in the lab.

  Kent pulled in and shouted over the idling fans, “There’s plenty of room in back without offloading, unless you want us to.”

  “No, that’s fine,” Veil said.

  I grabbed one end of the battery pack while Rick took the other; the forty-year-old tech grinned at us—and goodness knows, it was a lot heavier than I’d expected—but we got it up and into the back.

  “Mahaffy, you ride in the cab with Doctor Veil,” I said as he came around to join us.

  When the four of us had climbed into the back, Rick leaned over and said, “Is Terney coming along?”

  “No,” I said. “He doesn’t like the Room at all. Neither do I, but I’m sort of looking forward to blowing it up.”

  The fans grew loud and the truck shifted. We were wearing commo helmets—Snedscott had warned us we’d need them for the blast—but it still surprised me when it was through the helmet that Rick said, “What’s wrong with the Room?”

  The truck swept out of the transport bay and curved over the pools. I’d checked all of them on my way to and from Terney’s site on foot, but none of the others showed signs of habitation for at least a decade. That in itself could have made Terney—odd.

  I cleared my throat and said, “The place gave Terney dreams. It did the same to me though they weren’t the same dreams. If they mean anything, the Archaics changed the genetics of life forms on the planets they visited.”

  There hadn’t been time to speak to Rick about this since he got back from soundings, but I wasn’t sure I’d been ready to talk until now anyway. I didn’t know what to say.

  “So…?” Rick said. “They made chickens with bigger drumsticks?”

  I shook my head. “What I was seeing was a lot more complicated,” I said. “They were making animals different in ways that didn’t seem to help any way. Help the Archaics, I mean.”

  The fan note was changing again; Kent was preparing to land.

  “Rick,” I said, “they weren’t even malicious. It’s like boys throwing rocks through the windows of an abandoned house—they could break something, so they did.”

  “There’s people like that,” Rick said. “I don’t like them much, but there are.”

  We landed. Joss dropped the tailgate and we piled out. I reached for the powerpack but Rick put a hand on mine and said, “Where do you want this, Technician? I want you to stand in that place, because you’re going to be moving it yourself if it’s got to be moved.”

  Snedscott straightened. “Understood, Lieutenant,” she said. She walked to the back of the Room and marked a rough square with the toe of her boot. “I think it’s close enough for my leads to reach and we don’t have to dig the pack in then. The box itself will shield it.”

  Rick and I hefted the powerpack and shuffled to the spot with it. Rick obviously thought that the tech had been taking too much pleasure in watching a couple officers do physical labor. From Snedscott’s muted reaction, he’d been correct.

  With the powerpack placed, we backed away while the tech ran a pair of thick leads to the corner where the chip was missing from the Room. She knelt in the soil and pressed a wire into the divot with the leg of a pair of pliers, then squirted foam from a spray can into the opening to hold the wire. A tag of wire stuck out of either end.

  Snedscott attached a lead to each end, then walked back to the powerpack where the rest of us were standing. Doctor Veil had checked the camera set at the back of the Room.

  The tech connected one of the leads to the powerpack but then looked at her audience and said, “When the wire goes off, the cables may whip around to the back here. I think it’ll be safer in front but about twenty feet back. That’s where I’ll be standing.”

  We all scurried around while Snedscott made the final connection and walked around to join us. I stepped around the parked truck and squatted down beside Joss. My back was turned and I was watching the camera aimed at the front on my handheld. Doctor Veil and the others came and joined us, even Snedscott.

  She held up the controller so that we could all see what she was doing, then pressed the EXECUTE button. I’d opened my mouth and the helmet had sound cancelling, but my whole body felt the slap of sound.

  The image of the Room on my handheld suddenly glowed, then cleared. The crystalline roof and sides of the Room had powdered. The unsupported door—the floor had vanished also—fell back into what had been the interior. The moissanite powder fell out of the air, giving the ground around where the Room had been a sheen.

  The camera had jumped at the blast but it quickly stabilized: the mounting column was sunk several feet deep. I switched to the camera behind the Room. I scrolled forward at a crawl starting from the moment Snedscott raised her controller.

  When the blast occurred—the camera jumped to mark the instant—I saw a figure sitting on the floor of the Room. It flashed into powder the instant the air hit, seconds before the toppling door slammed onto the ground where the creature had been. I wondered if we’d be able to take DNA samples from the dust which the moissanite slab was protecting.

  Doctor Veil had run to where the Room had been. Kent followed her. When I moved forward Rick came with me; I noticed that Joss stayed behind. Her face was expressionless, but her tattooed fingers were toying with the hilt of her bush knife.

  “Bloody hell!” Snedscott shouted. “I didn’t do anything wrong!”

  I didn’t speak the words that were on the tip of my tongue—Then the explosion you set didn’t destroy the Room and the object inside it?—but instead said, “Doctor Veil? We’ve got imagery that shows an animal inside the Room, but the touch of air destroyed it. It’s an animal I remember from a dream I had.”

  “A dream?” Veil repeated in puzzlement. She was obviously ready to flash out in anger, but I felt that it was my duty to speak anyway.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “It was a tree-climbing quadruped that seemed to be covered with fine down. Or hair, I guess.”

  Veil was checking the feeds from the cameras herself. She seemed to calm down a little; it was obvious that opening the Room had destroyed the specimen, not the way the Room was opened.

  “Look, I tamped the wire right!” Snedscott said. “I shock-foamed it and made sure it had time to set. You saw me!”

  “Mistress Snedscott,” I said. “You could have danced widdershins around it and none of us would’ve had any better notion of what was going on. We’re not demolitions experts. I suggest you keep silent while the rest of us figure out what to do with the situation we’re faced with.”

  She straightened to an attention posture.

  Rick said quietly to me, though I suppose the tech could have heard him, “The funny shape of the cavity may have made the blast reflect funny.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Actually, we probably have better imagery this way than we would have if only the door had shattered. We had cameras on both sides as well as the back and if the sides hadn’t been turned to dust, we’d have had only the front shot.”

  “Sir?” Joss said. “And ma’am? There’s a specimen you ought to look at. Here in the back.”

  “Now?” said Doctor Veil.

  I followed Joss without asking questions. I’d decided quite early after meeting her that she didn’t speak unless she thought it was necessary.

  Joss jumped into the back and said, “Just stay there and help me get it down for the boss, all right?”

  She lifted and slid a refrigerated container to the back of the bed. Between us we set it on the ground, though it wasn’t as heavy as the pack that had carried enough of a charge to vaporize a tungsten wire.

  Joss opened the case to its bottom compartment while Doctor Veil and I watched. Stored in that tray was a winged animal covered in gray down. Joss reached in and extended one of the wings. It was about half again the length of the body. There was no tail and the skull was narrow and low.

  “I had to use the carbine because it was too high up for a charge of shot,” Joss explained. “It reminded me of what was in the box.”

  “This is a smaller animal,” Veil said in puzzlement. “And the other didn’t have wings.”

  “I know,” Joss agreed. “But the jaws and teeth made me think of the image.”

  “I saw these,” I said. “In my dream. Yeah, they’re a lot like the climbers, only they’ve got wings. And they’ve got little brain, but because of the wings they out-competed the climbers. They’ll stay where they are till climate wipes out the trees; and they won’t be able to go down on the ground, so they’ll die out.”

  “I don’t understand?” Doctor Veil said.

  “There’s nothing to understand,” I said, feeling sick. “Why does a boy smash a window? He just likes to break things.”

  Rick was with us. I don’t know how much he’d understood of what was going on. He said, “Well, on to Mindoro in the morning. I wonder what you’ll find there?”

  MINDORO

  The Far Traveller had extracted 1.1 million miles from Mindoro. Captain Bolton had put Rick in charge of the approach. They weren’t short of reaction mass and they could have cruised to the planet on High Drive, but Rick figured he needed practice on short-range—in system—astrogation, so he calculated a path through sponge space and announced, “Bridge to ship. We will be inserting in one, repeat one, minute. Bridge out.”

  Rick knew that Captain Bolton was observing from the command console but he didn’t interfere in his junior lieutenant’s choices. Rick wasn’t surprised: He wasn’t making the most conservative decision, but neither was he taking any real risks.

  “Inserting,” Rick announced as he pressed EXECUTE. Hearing his voice over the PA system gave him a feeling of power which he wouldn’t have admitted in a million years.

  The Far Traveller shimmered out of sidereal space like cold water being poured into a bowl of oil. Insertion was generally painless, though extraction had various effects ranging from unpleasant to death-would-be-better. It depended on the individual, but it was never nice.

  The timer pulsed. “Extracting!” Rick announced and the Far Traveller was back in sidereal space. They’d come out within seventy thousand miles of the surface of Mindoro, a good piece—a bloody good piece—of astrogation. “Cleaning hull for landing,” Rick said and started the telescoping and folding of the rig.

  The outside crew remained on the hull to supervise the procedure: cables kinked or broke, gear trains stuck, and occasionally an antenna or spar had warped too badly to withdraw into the tube which was supposed to hold it. The riggers were there to correct mechanical faults, because a ship dropping through the atmosphere would be jouncing badly enough even if all the rigging was withdrawn and tightly clamped to the hull.

  There was already a ship in Mindoro orbit. Rick had ignored it except to plot its course and see that it was nowhere near anywhere the Far Traveller was going to be, but the stranger hailed on the twenty-meter frequency: “Unknown ship entering Mindoro orbit. Identify yourself and state your business. Mindoro control over.”

  Heimskring, the warrant officer on signals duty, replied. Rick focused on the ship. “Conn,” the captain said over a two-way link, “this is Bolton. That’s not a Mindoran ship on our database. Over.”

  “Sir, from the lines that’s a Shining Empire ship,” Rick said. “Do you want me to check the Bio Section files? Over.”

  “Look, you’re friends with Lord Harper, right?” Bolton said. “Have him come up and brief me as soon as we’re in harbor. Bolton out.”

  Heimskring reported on the command channel, “Sir, we’re clear to land in Keelung Harbor as requested, out.”

  Rick had already set up an automated landing approach in the assumption that the landing would be approved. The Far Traveller’s thrusters were very responsive and the automatic program would bring the ship in as smoothly as something the size of a cruiser ever landed. Rick didn’t think he could improve that response with manual control, and nor did he think the experience would be enough of a gain over what he could get from a training program to justify the risk in the event that he really screwed up.

  “Ship,” he announced on the general channel, “braking for landing on Mindoro.”

  He hit EXECUTE. There was a brief delay as some of the High Drive motors gimbaled. They had been driving the Far Traveller at 1 g toward planetary orbit; now they were preparing to fire at up to 3 g’s to slow the ship until it dropped into the atmosphere, at which point the less efficient plasma thruster would assume the burden.

  Rick had added a direct link to the intraship protocol. “Bio,” he said.

  A moment later his console replied, “Harper here,” in Harry’s voice.

  “Harry, the captain wants you to brief him on Mindoro in his cabin as soon as we’re on the surface,” Rick said. “Can you do that? Over.”

  Bolton could have made that an order, but he’d chosen to pass it through as a wish to Lord Harper through Lord Harper’s friend. Rick had therefore delivered it to Harry the same way.

  “Say…?” Harry said. “Can you ask him to come down here? I can find the material in our system but I sure don’t swear that on yours, though I know you copied it all in. And I’ll tell Doctor Veil so she can sit in.”

  Rick smiled. Harry might not know all there was about RCN protocol, but his natural courtesy was standing him in good stead. The captain might be willing to ignore Lieutenant Harper’s direct superior—but Lord Harper himself was not.

  The Far Traveller was beginning to get buffeted by the upper levels of the atmosphere. The buzzing High Drive was replaced by the lower roar of the thrusters.

  The High Drive motors combined matter and antimatter to give a very energetic impulse, but the process wasn’t perfect and any of the antimatter which didn’t recombine in the motor was spewed out in the exhaust where it met—and destroyed the first atom of normal matter that it contacted. If that happened while the motor was filled with air, the energy release would damage the motor itself.