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  “Appropriately rechristened, of course.”

  Harker’s gaze sharpened. “You have a problem with the Carlos Montero? Believe me, you would have never been allowed to keep your ship as The Patriotism of Fidel Castro.”

  “Not complaining at all.” Too late, Andromeda realized that she’d said the wrong thing. Ever since his death seventeen Earthyears ago, Carlos Montero—original Coyote colonist, hero of the Revolution, former Federation president—had become something of a martyr, his name held in reverence particularly among those like Theodore Harker, who’d personally known him. It had just been Andromeda’s misfortune that her ship, a Union Astronautica deep-space surveyor she’d brought to 47 Ursae Majoris following the collapse of the Western Hemisphere Union, had been the one picked to be rechristened in his honor. Andromeda may have fled the WHU and taken her ship and crew with her, but everyone in the merchant marine knew that she hadn’t completely given up a long-held belief in social collectivism. Yet no one had asked for her opinion; one leader was to be immortalized, the other consigned to history’s ashbin.

  “Good.” Another glance at her, more approving this time, then Harker went on. “You’ve got a good crew, a couple of whom have been with you from the beginning. And over the past few years, you’ve been to more places... a lot more... than you would’ve if you’d remained in the Union Astronautica.”

  Andromeda couldn’t argue with any of that. Before she’d decided to take her ship through Starbridge Earth in the waning days of the Union, as so many other UA captains had done once it was apparent that the Union was doomed, the Castro had been used to survey the Jovian system, including the establishment and support of a small science station on Ganymede. So, yes, she and her original crew had seen the outer planets of their native solar system, and for a long time this had been the high point of her life.

  All that paled, though, once the Castro was rechristened the Montero and refitted to serve as a merchantman. Since then, she’d seen worlds that made Jupiter and the Galilean satellites almost banal by comparison. The city-sized space colony of Talus qua’spah; the methane seas of Tau Boötis-C; the mountains of Sanja, in the HD 73256 system, which the native soranta had spent centuries carving into the likeness of a god.

  “I realize that,” she said. “And believe me, I’m grateful. You. . . the merchant marine, I mean... could have taken my ship, then mustered me and my people out and turned us into sidewalk beggars or something. Instead, you were good enough to let us keep . . .”

  “No.” Harker shook his head. “I appreciate your gratitude, Andi, but don’t think for a second we did it out of the goodness of our hearts. Taking a ship while discarding its crew would’ve been a waste of resources.”

  “Nice to know,” she murmured. You’re all heart, she silently added.

  “Think nothing of it,” Harker said dryly. “Maybe that sounds cold, but speaking as one CO to another, the last thing I ever intend to do is ground a captain who isn’t ready to stop flying. . . Unless you really are ready to retire, of course.”

  Andromeda was about to respond when, from the distance, her attention was drawn by an abrupt and distant roar. Turning about in her chair, she looked back to see, above the rooftop of her waterfront cottage, a slender finger of grey-white smoke rising into the deep blue sky, a tiny silver thimble at its tip. A spacecraft lifting off from the nearby New Brighton spaceport; judging from the character of the engine noise and the shape of the exhaust plume, she immediately knew that it was an Ares-class heavy lifter, probably belonging to one of the freighters parked in high orbit above Coyote. A few seconds later, the crackling roar of its engines reached them, causing a flock of sea-swoops to rise from the nearby river.

  Some women do a double take when a handsome man walks by; Andromeda Carson looked at spaceships. She used to look at men, too, but that had stopped shortly after she’d left Dean. A psychiatrist of the old school might have said that there was some symbolic connection between her fascination with spacecraft and her lack of interest in men, but Andromeda knew that there was a simpler explanation: a broken heart, not for her husband, but rather for their son.

  She watched the shuttle as it traced a long, hyperbolic curve that gradually faded from view, and once she’d heard its sonic boom, she turned back to her guest. “Sorry, Ted. You were saying something about retirement?”

  If Harker noticed the ironic undercurrent of her question, he was careful not to let on. “Rumor around the spaceport pubs has it that you’re thinking about getting out. Announcing your retirement, then sticking around only long enough to train your successor. That true?”

  Andromeda hid her expression by picking up her glass again and taking another sip of wine. She tried to be ladylike about it, but she was tempted to chug the fine Midland merlot as if it were cheap ale. Oh, hell, she thought, who talked? Probably one of her crew; they were the only people with whom she confided anymore. Jason, her first officer, knew better than to reveal his captain’s secrets, but someone else might have had their lips loosened by drink. Rolf, perhaps, or maybe Zeus. . .

  “Only rumor,” she replied. “Is that why you asked how I’m feeling these days?”

  “Sort of.” Harker bent forward as if to get some more wine, then seemed to think better of it and withdrew his hand, shaking his head when Andromeda silently pointed to the bottle. “Y’know, no one would blame you if you decided to cash in. You’ve been at this for... what, twenty-five years now?”

  “Thirty-four, if you count the time I spent grounded after Black Anael.” Andromeda knew he wouldn’t. No one in the Federation Navy, its merchant marine, or Coyote’s few private space companies included in their logbooks the nine Earth-years—three by local reckoning—that most of their spacecraft had been grounded following the destruction of Starbridge Coyote. The hyperspace bridge was eventually rebuilt with the assistance of the hjadd, but until then, only a few ships had lifted off from New Brighton, and then only to other places in the 47 Ursae Majoris system. “But no one counts nine years of gardening as flight time.”

  “But such a lovely garden.” Harker glanced at the well-tended flower beds surrounding the deck. “I’m just surprised you’ve had time to look after it, considering how often you’ve been away. . .”

  “I don’t. My housekeeper takes care of it when I’m gone. My son, too, when he uses the house.” Which is the only time Sean visits anymore, she thought, although that was something Harker didn’t have to know.

  “But you could be spending so much more time with it. Are you. . .?”

  “What are you trying to get at, Ted?” Andromeda put away the rest of her wine in a single gulp, then firmly planted the glass on the table. “You call to ask if you can drop by for a chat, and when you show up, you ask me how I’m feeling lately and whether I’m thinking about retirement. Yes, I feel fine. No, I’m not planning to retire anytime soon.” The second was a lie, but she wasn’t about to tell him the truth, at least not here and now. “Any other questions, or would you like to trade gardening tips instead?”

  Theodore Harker didn’t respond at once but instead merely regarded her with expressionless eyes. Andromeda regretted her flash of impatience; she should have stopped drinking when he did, but instead, she’d let the wine get the better of her. But she and Harker had known each other for years, and if not for the fifty-six years he’d spent in an emergency biostasis cell—a legend in itself, the part of the Spindrift story that every spacer on Coyote knew by heart—they could have been approximately the same age. Not that anyone could easily tell, or at least not fairly recently. When Ted let his ponytailed hair go grey, Andromeda finally decided that she wasn’t fooling anyone and had let the fake auburn coloring fade from her platinum locks. Oddly, the effect had been the opposite of what she’d expected; men started to look at her again, even a few Sean’s age. But one person she’d never have to worry about making a pass at her was Ted. He was married to both a woman, Emily, and a ship, the Pride of Cucamonga, and whatever r
easons he had for visiting, seduction wasn’t one of them.

  “You said you’re bored with your job,” Harker said. “You still haven’t told me why.”

  Andromeda hesitated, then reached for the wine bottle. It was her house; she could get drunk if she wanted to. She’d just have to watch her mouth, that’s all. “I’m a starship captain. Before that, I was in command of a long-range survey vessel. I’m trained for deep-space exploration, with all the risks that go with it. That’s what I love, and if I’ve occasionally said something about retirement...”

  “Which you haven’t, as you say.” There was a sly twinkle in Harker’s eye.

  “Let me finish.” Andromeda poured the last of the bottle into her glass; fortunately, she had two more bottles of merlot in her liquor cabinet, so she shouldn’t have to return to the neighborhood vintner before tomorrow. “What I’m trying to say is, my job is supposed to be about visiting new worlds, breaking new trails, and so on. But ever since I got my ship back and signed up with the merchant marine, I’ve been doing little more than hauling freight.”

  “I’d say it’s more than that.” Harker folded his hands together in his lap. “It’s not like you were mapping the Jovian system for the first time... That was done long before you were born. The planets you’ve visited since then have been seen by very few people. And the races you’ve met... the soranta, the kua’tah, the hjadd...”

  “Most of the time, I only see those planets from orbit. And when my crew and I do get cleared to land, more often than not we’re confined to quarters at their spaceports. As for the aliens themselves...” She shrugged. “They’re less interested in who we are than in what we’ve got. As soon as we unload our cargo and take on whatever it is we’re bringing back, they’d just as soon that we leave. The hjadd are the closest friends we have in the Talus, and I think that even they don’t like us very much. You, of all people, should know that.”

  Of course he did. When he’d been an officer in the European Space Agency, Harker had been second-in-command of the illfated Galileo expedition that had made contact with the hjadd, the first intelligent extraterrestrial race encountered by humankind. A few years after he and the two other surviving members of the Galileo’s crew finally returned to human civilization, Harker had resigned from the ESA and was now the captain of the Janus Ltd. freighter that had made the Coyote Federation’s first trade mission to the Talus, the so-called galactic club to which most of the known starfaring races of the galaxy belonged. That mission had met unexpected obstacles, but its eventual success meant that humankind was admitted into the Talus, albeit on a provisional basis.

  The bombing of Starbridge Coyote by a religious fanatic had temporarily shut off Coyote from the rest of the galaxy, including Earth. While the starbridge was being rebuilt with the assistance of hjadd scientists marooned in the 47 Ursae Majoris system, the Federation Navy took the step of regulating its various competing private space companies by forming a merchant marine that would oversee all of them; it was hoped that, this way, disasters like Black Anael would be avoided. Not long afterward, Harker took on the job of the merchant marine’s operations chief. He was still conning a ship, but only part-time; perhaps he was becoming tired of it as well. Chronologically speaking, he was more than one hundred Earthyears old; Andromeda figured that he’d probably had enough of wormhole-jumping and wanted the quiet life of raising his own garden.

  “I don’t think it’s a matter of whether or not they like us,” Harker replied. “It’s their trust we’re having a hard time winning. Considering that an Earth ship made an unprovoked attack on the first alien vessel it saw, or that one of our kind blew up our own starbridge because he thought God wanted him to...” He shrugged. “Anyway, you can’t blame them for keeping us at arm’s length. We’re trouble.”

  “That’s what I’m getting at.” Andromeda picked up her glass, then stood up from her chair. The wine, along with the warmth of the afternoon, had made her a little light-headed; she leaned against the deck railing and gazed out at the river. “If I can’t visit worlds because the natives don’t trust me, then what good am I? I wasn’t meant to be a truck driver. If that’s all I’ve got to look forward to...”

  “It isn’t... and that’s why I asked to come see you.” Harker paused. “I’ve got a job for you and your crew. And, no, it doesn’t involve hauling cargo. It’s something else entirely.”

  Andromeda gave him a sharp look. “Exploration?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Yes, it is.”

  “Hazardous?”

  A shrug. “It could be, yes.”

  Andromeda smiled. “Tell me more.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  HARKER HAD MORE ABOUT THE MISSION IN HIS DATAPAD, BUT the bright afternoon sun made its holo imager hard to use.

  Andromeda was tired of the deck, anyway, so she led Ted into the living room. After making sure he was comfortable, she excused herself to the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee, then made a side trip to the bathroom to find a sober-up patch. By the time she returned to the living room, her head was a little more clear, and she was ready to listen to his pitch.

  Harker had linked his pad to the house comp. He accepted a mug of hot coffee from Andromeda, then settled into one of the bamboo swing-chairs suspended from the ceiling beams. “What do you know about the danui?” he asked, as Andromeda took a seat in an identical chair across the coffee table from him.

  Andromeda thought it over a moment. “As much as anyone else, I suppose... not a lot.”

  “I thought so. Well, let’s review what we do know.” Harker raised his voice slightly. “Display danui emissary, please.”

  The holo projector in the ceiling responded by showing them a life-sized image of a danui. Andromeda had seen pictures of the aliens before, of course; nonetheless, she was glad that this was only a three-dimensional projection. If this one were actually in her house, she’d probably be reaching for the fléchette pistol she kept in a side-table drawer. A little more than seven feet tall, with a black, hairy body standing on six multijointed legs, two of which could also serve as hands, the danui would have borne a strong resemblance to a tarantula were it not for its elongated head, which had the mandibles and eyestalks of a lobster. Had it been naked, she might have mistaken it for some hideous animal, but the garments it wore—an outfit that looked like a cross between a vest and a six-legged pair of shorts, two bandolier-like belts with dozens of pockets, open-fingered gloves at the clawlike extremities of its limbs—clearly showed that it belonged to a sapient, toolusing race.

  “This is the danui trade emissary to the Talus,” Harker said. “Don’t ask me to tell you its name... I’ve heard it once, and it’s unpronounceable unless you can whistle and click your tongue at the same time. Even the word danui isn’t their own... It’s hjadd, meaning ‘strange genius.’ We can’t speak their own name for themselves. The emissary knows we have problems with their language, though, so it chose a human name for our convenience. It calls itself George Jones.”

  “George Jones. Right.”

  “Yes, well...” Harker paused to take a sip of coffee. “You’ll probably never meet him... it, I mean... anyway, so it hardly matters. What does matter is that our friend George has given us permission to make use of a piece of information that our people stumbled upon a short time ago.”

  “I take it you mean the merchant marine.”

  “Quite right... But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. As you yourself said, there isn’t much we know about the danui. They’re one of the oldest member races of the Talus, but they’re rather reclusive, seldom seen outside their home system. From what we’ve been told, they’re renowned as superb engineers... the best in the known galaxy, if the hjadd are to be trusted... but aside from the occasional ship at Talus qua’spah, we’ve never seen any evidence of that.”

  Andromeda nodded. She’d once caught a glimpse of a danui vessel, while the Montero was making a port-of-call visit to the immense space colony in orbit above the hjad
d homeworld that served as the central meeting place of the Talus. The ship looked like two spheres joined by a cylinder; one sphere was a fusion drive, the other was the crew module, and other than a few hatches and portholes, nothing else about it could be seen. The design was simple, efficient, and utterly enigmatic... just like the danui themselves.

  “They trade with the other Talus races,” Harker went on, “but only for raw materials. Apparently, they have no interest in the art and culture of other worlds... which, of course, is one of the reasons why we haven’t had much contact with them since our culture constitutes most of the goods we offer. They have a minimal number of representatives on Talus qua’spah . . . four, maybe five or six; it’s very hard to tell one from another... and no off-world colonies that we know of.”

  A last sip of coffee, then he put his mug on the table. “In short, they’re mysterious and tend to keep to themselves. All the same, the other Talus members appear to respect them. In fact, our friends among the hjadd tell us that the danui are considered to be one of the most powerful races in the galaxy, one that no other race dares to even think about attacking.”

  “Not that anyone in the Talus is likely to start any wars,” Andromeda said.

  Long ago, the Talus had arrived at an elegant solution to the threat of interstellar war. Since the member races used starbridges to journey from star to star, with ring-shaped portals at both the embarkation and destination points creating the wormholes necessary for such jaunts, they agreed to equip those portals with keys. These small cards, which fit into a starship’s navigation computer, contained frequencies for unique microwave codes that an outbound ship would transmit to the artificial intelligence controlling an embarkation starbridge. The AI would then relay the code via hyperlink channel to the destination starbridge, and if the AI at the other end recognized that code and authorized it, it would then allow a wormhole to be created and the incoming ship to pass through.