Resurgence

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?”