Resurgence

“Do not play word games, Louis Nenda. Treachery toward me is a different matter. I am now convinced that you know exactly why we are here. In fact, I strongly suspect that you engineered this from the beginning. You arranged to have messages—”

The flow of pheromones abruptly halted. Nenda said, “At, I’m telling you for the last time—”

He was interrupted by a paw across his mouth and another on the nodules of the augment on his chest. A powerful burst of pheromones said, “SILENCE. We are not alone. If you must speak, do so softly and only through the augment.”

Nenda glanced around the darkened room and saw nothing. “What? Where?”

“Beyond the door. A human male.”

“You sure?”

“Of course I am sure. The odor cannot be mistaken.” Atvar H’sial’s proboscis quivered. The yellow horns turned, and the antennas above them unfurled to their fullest extent. “I can also provide an identity. It is Captain Hans Rebka—your old rival for the sexual favors of the female, Darya Lang.”

Nenda gritted his teeth, but he said only, “I didn’t know Rebka was here at Upside Miranda Port !”

“He was not, earlier in the day. To be more specific, if at Upside Miranda Port he was nowhere near us. Had he been present, even half a kilometer away, J’merlia or I would have smelled him. Wait a moment.”

Again the antennas quivered. Atvar H’sial said at last, “He does not know that we are here, yet somehow he is suspicious. His odor betrays uneasiness. Now—he is moving away along the corridor. I wonder how he knows?”

“Rebka’s a snooty bastard, but I’d never say he’s a fool. He can smell danger nearly as good as I can, and he knows how to look after himself. But At, you wanted proof that I’m not keeping information from you. Now you have it. Will you admit that I hate Rebka’s guts?”

“You have never been able to disguise that fact, at least from me. You and he, in your incessant bickering over the human female—”

“Forget the goddamned human female. Or better still, don’t forget her. Ask yourself this: If I had the hots for her the way that you claim, would I have brought Hans Rebka to Miranda Port ?”

“It seems unlikely.” The pheromones held an overtone of grudging admission.

“Unlikely? It’s preposterous.”

“So you are admitting your interest in the female.”

“No such thing. I don’t know why the Inter-clade Ethical Council called this meeting—I wish I did. And I had nothing to do with Hans Rebka being here, either. I wish he weren’t, but that has nothing to do with Darya Lang. He’s a troubleshooter. A good one, too, who’s dug himself out of some desperate fixes. But his being here means we’re lookin’ at trouble, with us likely to be in the middle of it.”

Louis Nenda had been crouching in the shadow of Atvar H’sial’s broad carapace, the location where he found pheromonal communication most easy. Now he stepped clear and went to slide the door wide open. He peered along the corridor.

“No sign of Rebka. But I can tell you one thing for certain. If he’s part of the meeting, we’re not being called in for a garden party. Better be ready, At. I don’t know what’s coming up tomorrow, but you can bet it’ll be a real doozy.”

* * *

Standing at the narrow opening in the doorway, Hans Rebka had sensed—or imagined—the faintest odor from within the chamber. It was sulfur-grass, with an overtone of something less familiar. Alien. Which alien, he neither knew nor cared. Without a sound, he retreated as fast as possible along the corridor.

Originally, his wanderings within the Upside Miranda Port administrative station had been more or less random. Now he had a destination. He sought the nearest of the external chambers, where an observer could settle in to stare at the stars.

Before he got there he experienced one more distraction. He passed one of the numerous chambers that housed the station’s distributed computer facilities. A row of windows permitted Hans to see everything inside the brightly lit room, including a solitary male human seated cross-legged before a gray instrument panel. The man had his back to the windows, so Hans had a view only of neatly trimmed black hair square-cut at the nape of the neck. Some kind of thin tube or cable led from the instrument panel toward the man’s hands or hidden chest. Hans guessed at a neural bundle, though what the man could possibly want with such a thing was anyone’s guess.

And none of Hans Rebka’s business. He watched for a few more seconds, then moved on.

The observation chamber sat at the end of a short tunnel that projected from the outer shell of the station. Hans could sit in a swivel chair, orient himself in any direction that he chose, and study every part of the heavens not obscured by the body of Upside Miranda Port station itself. Of course, in keeping with the natural cussedness of things, what most interested Hans was at the moment shielded from view.

That could never be more than a temporary problem, because the whole structure of the Upside Miranda Port station slowly rotated. Hans faced maybe a five-minute wait.