“No problem,” said Marinetti. “For that matter, the females will be giving birth in a week or two and some of the whelps always die.”

  “Well, that’s very satisfactory,” Bolton said. “We’ll get on with it, I guess. Is there anything we can do for you, Commander?”

  “If you and your officers would eat dinner with me while you’re on Island One,” Marinetti said, “I would appreciate the company.”

  He made a rueful face and added, “I am paid very well and the duties are not arduous. But the personnel are not in sympathy with how I was raised. The factory workers are factory workers and the Guard Force are mercenaries—mostly from rural Buckroth.”

  “We can certainly do a visit,” Bolton said.

  I added, “I’ll be going off tomorrow, but I’d be delighted to come by tonight, if that’s all right?”

  Marinetti gripped my right hand in both of his. “Lord Harper,” he said, “your kindness melts my heart. At 1800 hours here, then?”

  Captain Bolton and I walked back to the Far Traveller. I for one was very satisfied with the way things were working out.

  * * *

  Pinnace Gamma floated in Zemlite Harbor at one of the slips. Rick had been in charge of warping her in, using the Far Traveller’s cables but the quay’s winches and bollards. The exercise gave the spacers, including Lieutenant Richard Grenville, good practice.

  “Testing thruster one,” Rick announced on the general push, which for this instance was copied to the ten spacers of the pinnace crew and also to the communications console of the Far Traveller and wherever beyond Captain Bolton decided to send it.

  Rick gave the forward thruster a two-second pulse at sixty percent output with the leaves flared. The pinnace bucked. Waves sloshed both sides of the slip, but not seriously. Even the small freighters which generally called at Zemlite Harbor were significantly larger than the pinnace. The Far Traveller, moored across the top of the slip, barely noticed the event.

  Bio Section’s aircar lifted from the stern boarding stage. Rick paused a little longer than he might otherwise have done before testing the other thruster. The plasma exhaust raised a cloud of steam sparkling with loose ions when it quenched in the cold water. That wasn’t a risk to the aircar, but it wouldn’t have been fun to fly through.

  The car curved over Island 1, rising as it did. When Kent slanted off over the sea to the southwest, Rick announced, “Testing Thruster Two,” and pushed EXECUTE. Again the pinnace rocked.

  Rick thought about Harry going to the mainland. He’d miss his friend’s companionship, but he sure didn’t envy him this expedition. The mainland was almost as cold as the Grinder Archipelago. At this latitude it was covered with stunted trees, much like those of the larger islands; and unlike Island 1, the only habitation would be inflatable tents. Even granting that Harry was more of an outdoor type than Rick had any desire to be, this didn’t sound a fun trip.

  * * *

  I’d plotted our course using imagery the Far Traveller had made herself from orbit. There were absolutely no charts of Zemlyn’s World anywhere I could find in the data we’d gotten from the Foreign Ministry. I wondered if there were something recorded in Guarantor Porra’s personal files. Probably not: Porra’s interest had been purely financial, though he had supported academic institutions throughout his reign.

  If there were charts we didn’t have them, but for Bio Section’s purposes the orbital images were fine. The Grinder Archipelago was a sharp hook. Island 1 was a good hundred and fifty miles from the mainland, but a number of the islands were considerably closer. We were flying to an estuary in the east coast of the mainland, but I hoped to visit one or more of the lesser islands on our return flight and take samples there to compare with those on Island 1.

  Kent and I were alone in the cab; Joss had chosen to travel in the unheated cargo compartment. She’d brought a one-piece weather suit along but she wasn’t wearing it when we boarded.

  I must’ve dozed off from the vibration of the drive fans, because Kent jolted me alert when he said, “I think that’s the notch you headed us for, sir. Right ahead. The guidance system thinks so anyhow.”

  My mind was buzzing from just having awakened. I said, “I guess it has to be,” as I squinted down at the body of land ahead.

  The windshield suddenly darkened. There was a terrible roar. “Kent, what in the hell is happening?”

  “Don’t look at the exhaust!” Kent said. “It’ll blind you if you get the light unprotected and the side windows don’t darken!”

  The windshield slowly cleared. I could see the notch of an estuary which looked like the one we’d been headed for. “What was it?” I repeated in a normal voice, having gotten my startlement—well, panic—under control.

  “It’s just a ship landing,” Kent said. “Probably the guardship coming down to take on more reaction mass. They keep one gee on in orbit for the crew’s sake so they have to refuel.”

  “Who’s on guard right now?” I asked.

  “Well, I guess Guarantor Porra’s taking his chances,” Kent said. “It’s that or he has to stump up for another ship and crew. I guess he figures that nobody can steal very much if they sneak in during the pit stop.”

  He slowed the car and brought us to a hover. “I’m going to set us down here unless you want me to fly on,” he said.

  “Here is fine,” I said. “I’m looking forward to stretching my legs.”

  It looked like a nicer spot than Island 1, at any rate.

  * * *

  Kent landed on the border of stunted vegetation between the fast-flowing water and the thirty-foot trees nearest the estuary, rising to fifty or sixty feet tall farther back from the margin. The watercourse was only a few feet deep at the moment, but it must swell considerably with the spring melt from the hills visible to the north.

  Joss put up the tent while Kent unloaded the truck into it. I tried to help, but I was obviously in the way.

  Instead I decided to be a biologist and gathered local plants, taking images of each in place before setting a sprig of each in a collecting case under the same number as the image. The foliage of all species of vegetation was of soft spikes. The ground was covered by fallen leaves, and a few leaves of most plants were turning gray and preparing to join them. I suspected that the process was yearlong and that the site would look the same in six months.

  There were spore packets on many branch tips, but only on a percentage of any species. Reproduction was year round also.

  Having made an initial survey of the vegetation, I decided to look at the large birds flying about the estuary. They were eating fish that had washed up on the shore and on rocks out in the water. I used my goggles to view them closer. They had six limbs attached to the body segment. The final pair was modified into skin-covered wings and the top two were long with grasping claws. The middle pair seemed stunted, as best as I could tell from a distance.

  Joss joined me as I examined a cast-up fish. “I brought nets along that’ll take the little birds eating fruit in the forest,” she said. I’d almost gotten used to her mutilated face and tattoos, but seeing her unexpectedly when her left side was toward me was still a shock. “Those”—she nodded toward a bird on the shore ahead of us—“are going to need the gun.”

  I went back to the tent, where I put down the collecting case and donned the shooting vest over my weather suit. I loaded the shotgun with a charge of number two shot. I judged the largest of the birds to run less than twenty pounds apiece.

  I walked back to Joss and together we approached the bird. It watched us with increasing focus, then agitation. It hissed angrily.

  I said to Joss, “I don’t figure to shoot one unless I have to—” As I got the last word out, the bird launched itself at my face.

  I fired before the gun was firmly against my shoulder, so it gave me a hell of a whack. The bird’s middle limbs weren’t stunted after all and they gave the creature a powerful lift-off.

  “Bloody hell,” I said, reloading the gun reflexively. The shot had flung the creature backward, dead instantly. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

  “Your reactions are pretty good, though,” Joss said, picking the bird up by the neck. “Well, we were going to want a specimen before we left.”

  * * *

  The initial extraction had put Gamma five hundred thousand miles out from Zemlyn’s World. Rick had reentered sponge space briefly and extracted into orbit ninety-five thousand miles up from the planet’s surface.

  “They don’t get better than that,” Tech 4 Guadalupe said over the command channel. She was fully qualified and would be taking the pinnace for the next sounding voyage, but Rick had decided to run this one entirely himself.

  “Thank you, Guadalupe,” he said. “Now just to bring her in.”

  Rick was pleased with the work also. His astrogation had been spot on during this run.

  “Argus to RCS Gamma,” the communicator announced, “you are clear to land at Zemlite Harbor. Over.”

  “Acknowledged, Argus,” Rick said. They sure seem in a hurry to get rid of us. “We will land immediately. Gamma out.”

  Rick set up his approach into Zemlite Harbor but took his time about it. The Argus sent a tight-beam microwave transmission to the ground thirty seconds later. The pinnace’s commo suite registered the fact of the message but couldn’t read it, though it was possible that the Far Traveller’s own much more capable rig would be able to do so if Rick recorded it.

  He had no intention of doing so, but the direction of the guardship’s antenna allowed Gamma’s sensor suite to vector back to the intended recipient. As Rick expected, there was a small freighter on one of the islands of the Grinder Archipelago.

  “Braking in five seconds,” he announced to the crew. “Braking!” and pressed EXECUTE.

  Their two thrusters snarled and rattled in the small hull of the pinnace. They were headed back for Zemlite Harbor.

  And if somebody’d corrupted members of the guardship’s crew and was robbing Guarantor Porra—more power to them!

  * * *

  “Well, Kent,” I said as we cruised back from the mainland. “I’m pretty satisfied with the haul we made. It’s just a page out of a thick book, but it’s the only page anybody has opened on Zemlyn’s World. We can be proud of ourselves.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, sir,” Kent said. He was an extremely good driver, but it was a job to him. I was thrilled with the range of our specimens, and Kent was responsible for much of our success by hauling nets and buoys out to the mouth of the estuary. Joss had placed them, but the flying had been tricky.

  The result of the exercise meant nothing to Kent. He was pleased that he’d done a good job, but he always did a good job—often in more difficult circumstances than these had been.

  The advancement of human knowledge meant something to me—and I think to Joss as well. So far as Kent cared—he drove an aircar. Human knowledge wasn’t part of his job description.

  “I’ll be glad to be back,” Kent said. “The cafeteria at Zemlite Harbor probably wouldn’t make guidebooks rave, but the food’s better than the self-heating meals we packed along.”

  “As soon as I’ve got samples from Island Twenty-Three,” I said, “we head straight back. It’s not really out of our way.”

  “You’re the boss, Lord Harper.”

  Kent made it sound as though I were a brutal slave driver, but he was obeying. The stop would cost us at most an hour, and there was a chance that it would turn all our findings on their heads. It had always been assumed that the Grinders and the algae they cropped were identical on all twenty-seven islands of the archipelago, but there might be differences among the islands just as there might be between the Broadstairs population and that of Zemlyn’s World. It was worth an hour to me—and as Kent had said, I was the boss.

  I’d tried to tell Island 23 we were coming, but I hadn’t been able to raise them from the mainland. I tried again now, still without response. We were at fifty feet in the air as Kent normally flew. Maybe if we were higher we could raise somebody, but I didn’t know what frequency the base on 23 was monitoring or if they were monitoring any.

  “I think that’s it right ahead,” Kent said.

  Grinders were visible through the clear water, massive spindles with their edges quivering to keep them in place against the rocks of the shore. Occasionally the back of one broke the surface and caused surface ripples in the still water.

  The island ahead was wooded, and there wasn’t a beach on which the Grinder females could crawl out and give birth. Perhaps that was on the other side. There wasn’t even a place to land the aircar.

  “Hang on,” said Kent. “I’m going to take her up.”

  He adjusted the fans and swooped upward to a hundred feet. I saw our mistake: The island we’d approached was separated from the real Island 23 by a gap of several hundred feet on the left end and farther than that on the right, sheltering a shallow bay. The island behind—the real Island 23—had a broad beach of russet sand. A score of laborers in yellow fatigues were using winches to haul a dead Grinder onto a large skid plate. Several other figures in gray-green uniforms watched them, carrying carbines.

  I saw buildings on the opposite side of the narrow island, and also a small freighter at the end of a track worn in the coarse soil. The ship was dragging by a cable the laden skid plate into its hold where the Grinder would be processed.

  Kent started to land on the sandy shore. He must have seen what was happening, but the significance had escaped him.

  “Lift!” I shouted. “Out to sea! Fast!”

  One of the guards in gray-green presented her carbine. The aircar’s windscreen starred and the slug sprayed me with powdered thermoplastic.

  Kent hadn’t reacted to my shouted orders, but now he whipped the car in a circle to port, heeling us over. At least three or four of the guards had started shooting when the first one did. I heard a dozen distinct whacks! as slugs hit the underside of the car, though only one of them came through the cab—between me and Kent, then punched its way out through the roof.

  We straightened out, heading away from Island 23. There was a loud bang! and the car’s rear fan blazed with blue fire. We vibrated fiercely for an instant before Kent slapped something on his control panel and with the other hand tilted the left handgrip while twisting it to maximum output.

  The motor behind us stopped burning though I saw ghostly sparks dance along the frame of the windscreen. We were dropping at a steep angle, but Kent managed to keep the aircar balanced and upright on lift from the forward fan alone.

  We came down into the six-foot trees of the islet that we’d overflown a moment before, crunching through the foliage and the stems themselves. The front fan tore itself to pieces but without the violent asymmetry of the rear fan when slugs unbalanced only one of the four blades. Trees had stripped the front rotor completely. The stems sagging under our weight set us down to the ground, though the impact slammed me against my safety harness.

  * * *

  I fumbled to open the harness release. When I finally looked down, I realized that it was twisted so that I was pushing on the back of the catch. When it finally popped open, I stumbled out of the cab and shouted, “Joss! Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. She was standing at the back of the cargo compartment, holding my shotgun which she’d removed from its case. “Do you want me to take care of this, because they’re probably going to come over to finish the job.”

  “I’ll take it,” I said. A lot of me wanted to give the gun to Joss, who hadn’t brought one for herself. That was passing off responsibility, though. I couldn’t depend on others to save me. I was in charge.

  She handed over the gun and my shooting jacket. I put on the jacket and loaded a solid. I’d brought two solids in case I had occasion to shoot a Grinder. I didn’t plan to do that, but I hadn’t planned to shoot that bird back on the mainland. I was damned glad that I’d had a charge of heavy shot ready.

  Holding my gun by the balance, I returned to the cab to see that Kent was all right. He was still in the driver’s seat, staring at the hole in the windscreen. He turned to me and said, “What the hell happened? They were shooting at us!”

  “Yes,” I said. “They’re selling Zemlite to outsiders, probably the Shinings, and they were afraid we’d come to arrest them. Maybe if they’d had time to think about it, they wouldn’t have shot. They’re too deep now to back off, so I guess Joss is right.”

  Joss came over and joined us. The scrub forest we’d landed in hid us from the shore of Island 23 and them from us. By worming our way to the shoreline but staying within the brush I figured we could see the bare shore opposite, at least with our RCN goggles.

  “Sir, what do we do?” Kent said. He was still in the cab, but as he spoke he opened his door.

  “We wait for the next pickup from Island One,” I said, walking back to the cargo compartment to take out a case of the rations we had left. “They must make a circuit of the collecting islands regularly and haul the catch back for processing. We contact the boat when that happens and go home with them.”

  “But the radio doesn’t work!” Kent said.

  “I think it’ll work fine at line of sight,” I said, separating out an armload of meal packs. “If it doesn’t, I’ll fire a shot across the boat’s bow—or some bloody thing. For now, let’s get what we need out of the truck since it’s a target for them if they turn out to have an aircar, which I doubt. I’m not sure they’ve even got boats, but they can certainly make rafts out of something so we’ll have to watch out for them crossing. And they may have some good swimmers, the water’s not rough.”

  Joss laughed. “They’re welcome to swim,” she said. “They won’t be able to trust guns that they’ve submerged, and I promise you I’ll be ready to greet them as they should be.”

  She tapped the hilt of her bush knife.