When you have something to do, do it. When you have nothing to do, sleep.
Hans Rebka had learned that rule on Teufel before he was six years old. It had served him well through two decades as a troubleshooter in the Phemus Circle, and even better during the nerve-racking two years while he tried to overthrow the Phemus Circle's corrupt central government.
That effort had not been a success—he had come within twelve hours of his own execution—but once he was on the ship leaving Candela he put all such thoughts out of his mind. The trip to Miranda would require careful piloting through a number of Bose transitions points, but that was not his responsibility.
Hans ate until his skinny belly bulged, went to his cabin, and fell asleep within thirty seconds. The weeks in prison had pushed his body to its limits of endurance. For the next five days he intended to do nothing but gorge, snooze, and wonder occasionally why the inter-clade council might think it worthwhile to drag him out of gaol and all the way to Miranda.
A dozen close calls had given him a lot of respect for his own abilities. He had survived the fearsome Remouleur dawn wind on Teufel, saved a whole colony on Pelican's Wake, and flown an expedition on Quake to safety at the height of Summertide. But every one of those had been a marginal world, a place on the threshold for human existence. Miranda was rich, safe, and self-satisfied. It had been settled for millennia.
Hans yawned, turned over, and snuggled deeper under his blanket. So why Miranda? Well, when somebody told him why they wanted him there, he would know. Until then . . .
The final Bose transition and transfer to the Upside Miranda Port entry point took place in the middle of the local sleep period. He was told by the bleary-eyed woman who came to his quarters that since he was a late arrival, he might as well spend the rest of the night on board the ship. Meetings would continue the next morning, and nothing would happen until then. Hans nodded. As soon as the woman left he rose and dressed in his borrowed uniform. It was something learned through experience: in an unknown situation, any bit of extra knowledge might be the edge you would need. Examine your environment.
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?"
"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.
He occupied the inevitable delay doing what he had earlier declined to do, and examined the contents of the Shroud. The nets held ships of all sizes, shapes, origins, and ages, in dizzying variety and numbers for as far as the eye could follow. One nearby vessel caught his eye, from its strange yet familiar outline. He had seen that design, like a hammer with a head at both ends, only once before. On that occasion he had been far out in Zardalu Communion territory, where the outpost world of Bridle Gap orbited its neutron star primary, Cavesson. And Hans had at the time confirmed that the alien ship had been manufactured nowhere in the local arm: it was something built in a far off time and place, by the species known as the Chism Polyphemes.
What was such a ship doing here? Was it intended to provide proof of the boast made by the Miranda Port sales staff, that you could find in the Upside Shroud examples of every ship ever made?
The slow rotation of the station was bringing what he wanted to look at into view, and that pushed consideration of the alien ship to the back of his mind. Visual inspection of the glowing band of light that was now appearing would tell him nothing, and he stared at it for only a few moments. The Milky Way shone brighter without the diffusing effects of a planetary atmosphere, but the spiral arms beyond the local arm were still shrouded by interstellar dust and gas clouds. He had known that in advance, and already selected the observation wavelengths that he wanted. He switched to them. The chamber had been designed so that a viewer need not be aware that the "windows" now displayed the readings of radiation and particle monitors in spectral and energy regions far beyond what human senses could experience directly. Suddenly, Hans could "see" through the obscuring veils of dust and gas.
See to the edge of the local arm. See across the Gulf. See the Sag Arm, looking no different now from the way it had appeared at other times when he had done deep galactic viewing. And see, beyond the Sag Arm, the galactic center itself, with the million-star-mass black hole lurking at its hidden heart.
Hans brought his attention back to the Gulf. It appeared empty, as it had always been empty. It offered no sign of the pinpoints of light provided by the giant display he had walked through inside the station. So those bright points did not represent stars. They were a creation of the display itself, not something visible in nature.
But what were they? Hans had no idea. He lay back in the swivel chair and selected visible wavelengths, so that he was once more seeing by the natural light that came in through the chamber's transparent walls.
The view was familiar and relaxing. The chair was comfortable, more comfortable than most beds that he had slept in.
As the heavens turned slowly about him, Hans decided that although he had learned little, it was all that he was likely to get tonight.
There was always tomorrow. Which would take care of itself.
When you have nothing to do, sleep.
Within seconds he was drifting off. In his final moments of consciousness, he imagined he was walking out along the staggered line of lights that lay like stepping-stones across the Gulf.