He’d been told years ago that flying into a major Empire station under power was a declaration of war. Eric had to take the ship’s boat halfway to (Chksh)-Wenshee Station, leaving Pair O’ Deuces in wide orbit, in Kimber’s care. The station would send a tug and tow him in.

The small boat, Jack of Eagles, was little more than a box with a clear front window, room for four seats (a bit cramped) the Pillbug docking system, and a light fusion engine. Eric had figured out how to add fuel tanks, losing two seats and some acceleration. The boat was all of human manufacture, though its belly–the docking system–was shaped to Pillbug specs.

Eric watched the unfamiliar star pattern Kimber had dubbed "the Joker Nebula." Red dwarf stars made mad misplaced slanted eyes; a twisted glowing line for a reddish orange grin, a wisp of green-lit gas above the eyes. He picked out details while he waited. That dark blotch off center might be taken for a bat–

The tug that drifted out of the Joker was a flat plate, windowless and featureless. It was marked with the interspecies "Don’t Touch" symbol, which looked like a proofreader’s takeout mark and glowed like a neon bar sign. Eric released Jack of Eagles’ controls and watched the tug disappear under Eagles’ belly. It mated to the underside with a barely sensed click.

Eagles surged.

(Chksh)-Wenshee Station grew from a naked-eye speck in the Joker to an irregular jumble of masses. A stalk sprouted from one side, like a ripe dandelion. That would be the Domain. It grew to a shimmering bubble big enough to engulf a moon.

His nose was almost touching the window. I must look like a kid, he thought. But this station was a legend.

Transparencies resolved inside the larger transparency. Thousands of tiny habitats clung to the basic spheroid, multicolored, some ringed with lights, some flashing, some opaque silver to benefit an agoraphobic species. The habitats brushed gently against and past each other, changing their shapes to accommodate. It looked like soapy foam.

They weren’t all small. One bubble held hundreds of individuals all the same shape, though he couldn’t identify the species. Nearer now, he watched two bubbles merge, saw figures inside them drift toward each other and touch. Tinier bubbles changed shape as they crawled through the mass.

Then (Chksh)-Wenshee Station rotated around and his view was blocked by cargo bays and spacecraft. Eric relaxed into his chair and watched. He passed between two huge ships–one as featureless as the hatbox shape he and Kimber had flown to Trine ten years ago, the other festooned with equipment and attitude jets . . . and what might be weapons. . . . More ships, tens of ships, and only three of them types he recognized.

Now he passed bulky cargo ships and containers. Many of them were marked with the "Don’t Touch," symbol. One of those containers was his to take. He lost a game of guess-which-one to himself.

It had been two years since he was in so populous a place; six years since he and Kimber had been home on Earth. He was in love with the view. It was like visiting the Emerald City.

Jack of Eagles settled among connector cables agile as snakes. Eric felt the click; he saw the tug drift away. (Chksh)-Wenshee Station had docked him.

A ribbon of gold sidewalk snaked up to Jack of Eagles’ airlock. He stepped onto it and found gravity, not much. Martian or less. The ribbon carried him away.

It looped and curved and joined other gold ribbons in a maze that twisted through three dimensions of cargo space. More ships: fascinating shapes. Where the paths forked the flow of the ribbon made his decisions for him. He’d never seen this exact system, but it wasn’t that different from other stations. And now he’d reached the base of a vertical pillar, turned a right angle, and was on it, riding upward.

There was precious little of free will in this place, he thought impatiently. He started walking, and the flow speeded up.

Life forms streamed past him, up and down the pillar. One multi-legged citizen was running but not moving, using the system for exercise. The sphere grew to a world, and then his path turned again, and he was standing on the surface.

He’d heard stories. He knew what to do next. He walked at the froth of habitats, ignored by their occupants. He pushed into a wall and his own habitat formed around him.

The Joker Nebula grinned down through the curve of ceiling. The walls were shallow curves at odd angles. Now what? He was in a bubble. The broker he’d come to meet was in another, somewhere out there.

He looked for controls. Nothing. He pushed around with his hands. Still nothing. How would they do this? What technology provided options? There was furniture in some of the other bubbles.

Verbal? He said, "(Chksh)-Wenshee Station Control, please. Language English."

It rose from the floor: a silver pillar, waist high. It asked, "Your desire?" in a voice the match of his own.

He had put it in an outer pocket of his travel suit, a card engraved with da Vinci’s sketch of a man. It was a meticulous description of the needs of human physiology, given pale UV-sensitive skin and allergies to penicillin, cat hair, and macadamia nuts. He showed it to the pillar. A laser winked at it.

Gravity and pressure changed. He opened his helmet, breathed. It worked. Magic. These moments always made him feel small, invoked awe.

This could be fun! He ran his fingers through his hair to get out the helmet-clumps. He’d shaved. Eh, what would an alien notice? Good thing he’d bathed, though. Kimber usually did the negotiations.

"Guide me." He’d been given a number code: the broker’s address. He recited it. Ripples of light ran across the floor, and he followed the ripples.

He tried to watch in all directions at once; caught himself. He must look like what he was, a tourist. But some were watching him, if those were eyes, and the shy ones had opaqued their habitats. Kimber would have said it was the one thing all these life forms had in common. They’d come to see . . . perceive, she would have said . . . to perceive the universe.

So Eric looked back.

Six indescribable shapes dissected a shape different from their own, behind a wall like dark glass. Blood dripped like yellow paint and disappeared when it hit the floor. Banquet? Eric was nauseated.

Black wall, black wall. Rainbow wall, and a flow of shadows that hurt to look at. Then a wide floor-to-ceiling window, and two tremendous creatures wrestling in front of an audience. Wrestling, or mating? They didn’t look like the same species. A small individual brushed them with a yellow laser dot, and they broke the pose.

Wrestling.

He saw a dozen centaur-like citizens turn from a discussion, looking up. He followed their gaze.

A monstrous bulk pulled loose from the cargo bay, a ship the size of a city. The whole station quivered. A tiny arrowhead eased past it, surely a ship’s boat like his and Kimber’s Pair O’ Deuces. Everybody’s a tourist. . . .

The ripple in the floor changed its pattern. There, straight ahead of him, seen through a wall like wavy glass: a spidery creature and a smaller . . . hominid . . . human? The spider’s shoulders extended into a black clump–too small for a head–a sense cluster. It looked like the pictures: a Hyunpa.

The human beckoned. Eric waved back.

His habitat bumped against the other, clung, and then the invisible barrier popped. His ears popped too, pressure change, and they were all in one large bubble.

The Hyunpa bowed its head. Keep an open mind, but that extended sense cluster was still a head. No mouth. He couldn’t see its lower body. That was blocked by a brick shape with stuff on it: a desk. Long multi-jointed arms rested on the desk.

The woman sat in lotus position on a sage-green cushion, below her boss’s level. At least the Hyunpa thought this meeting important enough to have a same-species assist. But what should he do next?

The woman saw his problem. "Take something from the server, taste, then introduce yourself."

That was an unspeakable relief. He asked, "Server?"

The silver pillar had followed him, but now the desk lit in bright orange crawling with black graffiti. Eric saw what she meant. The desk was a server, was his host’s server, and to use his own would be seen as mistrust.

Eric showed it his da Vinci cardkey. The graffiti changed to English. Eric studied his choices.

Many races needed diet supplements. Supplements could be vital to trade, peace talks, settlements of succession in an empire or corporation. Some supplements increased intelligence or wariness, others suppressed a natural paranoia or a mindless coming-into-season. Drug laws would be impossible at an interspecies meetpoint, and alcohol was the least of what a server could make available to a human.

Most of Eric’s choices were for recreational substances. The coffee bean: no! Aliens wouldn’t brew decent coffee. He chose crossed hops leaves. A window opened with a drinking bulb, frothy and bitter smelling, like a micro-brew.

He tasted it. Perfect. Fermented? In the server? But the server knew what it had given him; its monitors would prevent even voluntary poisoning.

"Introduce yourself," the woman reminded him.

She had red hair down to her waist, eyes such a deep blue they had to be tinted, freckles that looked real on creamy skin. She was younger than he was, fresher. She was the first human woman he’d seen in nearly two years, barring Kimber, and she was stunning. Her scent reminded him of ocean froth and salty wind, and fresh cut grass . . . but that would be the Hyunpa. Eric tore his eyes away from her to bow to the broker.

"I’m Eric Keenan. I’m here for information and supplies for the Pyth project on Baent."

The woman turned toward the Hyunpa and spoke to it, high trilling sounds and a complex whistle. He only understood two words: his name. She cocked her head and listened carefully to the reply, then turned to Eric.

"You may call me Safe-Dealer-in-Goods. My use-name is"–a high trill, fast, it hurt his ears a little–"but even Martianne does not speak it properly. Your reputation precedes you, Eric Keenan."

How was he supposed to take that? He was relieved when the woman continued. "Allow me to introduce my translator, Martianne. She will assist you when we have completed our business. I submit a manifest listing all items we believe you will need to complete your survey." The desktop displayed a list in English of somewhat whimsical grammar. "There are also optional items, and Martianne will help you choose from among those. She has some knowledge of survey teams herself."

"I am much relieved," Eric said.

"Are you familiar with free floaters?"

"Only with the concept," Eric said. "We find massive planets not associated with any star, five to thirty times as large as our own Jupiter. We of Earth don’t know if chaos and gravity flung them–" He stopped. The alien was speaking.

Martianne said, "Worlds form where space grows dense, usually in strings within clusters, where mass points in the local neighborhood guide the interstellar winds into a stream rather than a whorl. In the Orion Nebula, we find free-floating superjovians, twenty-six and counting, all a few million years old. We find also an intruder of mass five point six Jupiters, age three to four billion Earth years, formed elsewhere and gravitationally captured. We have made contact with tool users in its atmosphere."

"In–" Eric chopped it off. Their instructions had spoken of a free floater planet, but he’d been picturing Baent as a black moon, otherwise roughly Earthlike, circling a bigger version of Jupiter or Saturn. Baent was the floater itself?

No species he knew of lived inside a gas giant. In the face of Martianne’s amusement he considered what question would make him look least foolish . . . then discarded that notion. When he faced Kimber, he’d better have the data they needed.

He asked, "Are we to make contact? Why choose humans?"

"Of intelligent species, most cannot leave the locality they evolved in, cannot even claim most of their own world. Of space travelers, most have not evolved to speak to minds unlike their own. You seek out strangers. So does my own species, called–" The alien voice skirled like a bagpipe; Martianne said, "Hyunpa. It was I who was called to broker an agreement with the Pyth of Baent. I failed. You must try."

"Failed how?"

"They stopped talking. I could no more find a Pyth on Baent than a sun."

"Did they shy from your shape?"

"I thought it possible. I may seem too attenuated, too easily hurt. Pillbugs have an armored look they might appreciate, and Pillbugs make what the Pyth may buy, but Pillbugs can’t talk worth a bad smell. Thus we risk you."

"What’s the surface gravity on Pyth?"

"There is no surface."

No, of course not. Kimber would have laughed at him–and Martianne’s mouth was turned up with a slight quiver at the edge. He said nothing.

"The level at which Pyth live–" The spider-thing’s head retracted into its torso, then eased out again: a shudder. Martianne said, "Pull of gravity, fourteen point one times Earth. Pressure, two to three hundred atmospheres as measured at sea level Earth. Temperature, nine hundred degrees Absolute, your measure, varying by up to a hundred with every howling breeze. The ruinously expensive Deep Well Shield that was fabricated for me will mate to your small vehicle. You observe that I used it and survived." The Hyunpa skirled something Martianne didn’t translate. In response, the desk disgorged a blob of brown paste; the Hyunpa took it below desk level in two delicate fingers.

Eric always found living translators odd, the words they spoke about themselves in third person even odder. But he liked Martianne’s smile, even if it was amusement at his expense. Eric straightened his spine and tried to keep his eyes properly on the broker. They slid off regularly and locked with hers. This amused her too.

Throughout hours of slow conversation, they arranged price, spoke of safety using the Deep Well Shield, and Eric chose from the optional items list: a high end control board with translator integrated, three of the five available remote cameras (two of which were rated for over 14 G’s), and three boxes of tiny probes designed for gaseous atmospheres.

The Hyunpa shared some information in detail. The job specifications stayed murky. Contact the Pyth and obtain permission for a survey, with intent to terraform Baent. Do the survey. Share the information freely with both the Pyth and Eric and Kimber’s employer: the Overlord-run Interplanetary Mapping Service, which ran the survey schools and collected team data, regardless of who commissioned the work. About 25 percent of survey jobs came directly from the IMS, and all data from every job went straight to them.

He and Kimber were not terraformers. They were surveyors. Twice they had judged whether a world should be opened for terraforming. Those jobs had been done at the request of citizens looking for real estate.

Earlier, Martianne had advised him on manners, but now she didn’t speak a word that was not the Hyunpa broker’s. In the end, she even held out her hand for Eric’s cardkey. Heck, Eric thought, the Hyunpa has hands, or close enough.

But he placed the da Vinci card in Martianne’s hand. After all, he’d spent most of the exchange rudely looking at her rather than the broker. He did remember to turn and bow.

As he straightened, Martianne handed him back his card.

Safe-Dealer-in-Goods’ legs bent and straightened, then it spoke something that Martianne did not translate. The habitat budded: a new wall formed, closing off the Hyunpa and its desk. The Hyunpa walked away. Its desk sank into the floor.

And now Eric was alone with a beautiful woman, in a bar/hotel with a galactic reputation. It was a good reward for two years bouncing between the raw planets and rural outposts. Eric smiled at Martianne. This was negotiation he understood.

Martianne smiled back, and murmured something that attracted the server’s attention. She handed him a beer, and softly said, "I’ve heard about you. They use two of your adventures to teach new survey teams–the Trine and Julth 2 escapades." Her voice was lower and sweeter without the Hyunpa in the room. He felt his insides warming.

Eric called for a chair; a cushion rose under him and he sat. He sipped the second beer. "I didn’t know that–that they told anyone about Trine."

"They used it to teach us about small survey teams. Getting out of trouble. Trusting aliens–or not. I mean, wow, that was soooo close! Where were you this time–I mean, what was your last survey?" Martianne asked.

"On Grasseth. It’s a cave world, and we almost died. Long-legged lizards with an antlike life style. Kimber, my survey partner," he said carefully, "figured out that they’re not actually sapient. Our results are allowing Grasseth to be populated, but not significantly changed. There’s too much indigenous life to allow terraforming. The Ygr will use it as a park and hunting ground."

"Where’s Kimber now?"

"Still aboard our ship, Pair O’ Deuces. She’s got a cold. But hey, how did you end up here?"

"I like languages. Translating is temporary, good until I get a survey. I hope it’ll make me a hot item for a team. I graduated from the Institute for Planetary Ecological Surveys five years ago–five years after you did. So we’d have missed each other."

"That’s too bad. What made you decide on surveys?"

"Oh–I wanted to see the worlds." She laughed. "And I needed to get away. My folks were asked to leave Mars, and I needed someplace to go."

"Mars. Martianne. Asked to leave?" Mars advertised everywhere for settlers–they begged. He didn’t quite believe her.

"They’re eco-freaks. They destroyed some water pipes." Was she blushing? "They’ve never hurt people. Except, one day, they flooded out the Overlord ambassador’s habitat. Mom and Dad, they like attention."

Eric remembered– "The Graysons are your parents?"

She giggled again, no longer at all like the formal translator. He liked her even more.

"We had to go too, me and my brothers. And the damn newstapers were all over us . . . I thought I should put some distance between me and them."

"So, have you seen your family since then?"

"No. I heard they’re terrorizing the belt now. It’s about setting aside some asteroids as national treasures before we use them all up."

Eric raised his eyebrows. "Is there a shortage of asteroids?" he asked.

"Yes." She said it with a completely straight face. They laughed together.

He used his own server to buy her a drink. She leaned toward him, not close enough to touch, and asked, "Did you get everything you need from Safe-Dealer-in-Goods?"

"Let’s hope. But when I asked him what went wrong with his negotiations, he changed the subject."

"If he knew that, why would he offer you, or any other sapient, the credit for succeeding?"

"I’d be better off knowing of any blind alleys."

"I wasn’t on that mission. Or any other." She frowned into her tiny glass. "Maybe it’s because I don’t have a partner. The man I left Sol with, we just couldn’t get along."

"Kimber and I were like that. Or maybe I was like that. We got some practice. Now we’re okay."

"Mmm. But Wayne got a mission!"

"Maybe you’re too valuable as a translator."

"Maybe he didn’t like me enough to take me."

"What’s not to like?"

Martianne let that one pass. Finally, Eric said, "Well, sometimes personality is a big factor in survey team choices."

She stared at him.

"The Trine mission, the Thray picked us for our ignorance."

It didn’t help. Wrong tactic. He switched. "What am I supposed to do on Baent?"

Martianne looked past him, watching the tumult of habitats and movement. "Okay, first, you know from my translations that planets can form with no sun? Baent is a free floater. They’re usually too young to have life. But Baent seems to be an old one. It’s about fifteen times the mass of Jupiter, but it’s Jupiter’s size. Degenerate matter core. Fourteen G at the . . . not the surface . . . call it the sweet spot, where pressure and temperature and composition are all just right for the Pyth. The Pyth evolved in just this one stable streak of atmosphere."

Now she was talking down to him. Maybe he’d earned it. He interrupted her. "Stable for billions of years?"

She turned defensive. "It has to be. They’re there. They did evolve. We don’t know how stable the Red Spot on Jupiter is, and Baent is extreme even by that standard."

"What else do you know about them?"

"The Pyth are soft and low-mass, like–do you know what a jellyfish looks like? A Pyth looks like a foamy jellyfish, hydrogen foam. Long tentacles steering from behind. They absorb gasses and aerosols for sustenance. Eyes everywhere. They communicate with each other by changing color–blue for too hot, yellow for too cold, green for good. They glow bright in the sweet spot, dull near the edges or if it changes–something to do with the quality of the gasses and aerosols they need. They school in family groups." She reached for her wine glass. "The probes studied them for years before a mission was commissioned. I learned everything that was known about them. I was ready."

Time to change the subject. "Pyth behavior sounds almost like cetaceans. Did you ever see a whale?"

"In movies." Martianne raised her eyes to catch his squarely. "Eric, Pyth are . . . confused. Naïve. They talked with the Overlord machines, but we both know they didn’t see an Overlord. They avoided the Hyunpa, then sent them away."

"So it’s our goal to be accepted? This is–early contact. Every other race we’ve talked with has been in the Empire longer than we have." He took a long slow drink of beer. "The Pyth can’t have ever seen stars. Surely they can’t surface. Anything new must be scary. They will have had a lot of information given to them by the probe. But it won’t be the same as experience. And if we want to get near them, Kimber and I will have to go to them–" He caught himself. Of course Martianne knew that. She’d been translating while he bought the equipment.

It was just so nice to talk to another human, and Martianne’s small features and fall of hair tripped his tongue; he felt like a teenager. "Sorry. I’m babbling. And, really, this will be different from any survey we’ve done! We don’t have to wonder if they’re sapient. That’s enough to keep Baent free of outside claims. Our prelim instructions said we’re actually doing a geological–or what passes on Baent–and trading information to the Pyth and the IMS. The Pyth want to terraform their world. Terraform a gas giant! Call it ribbon forming? Ribboning? They live in a ribbon of atmosphere–they want to make more, or maybe a bigger one?"

She didn’t respond.

Better switch to tea, he thought. He continued. "Who found them? I heard it was the Overlords themselves? Something with real Overlord probes, anyway. What will the Pyth trade with, or for?"

Martianne shook her head and shrugged.

"It’s so . . . different. They must have something someone wants?"

Now she spoke, "Dealer told me once that he thinks the Overlords want the Pyth themselves. They’re risk-takers, and can navigate in gas giants. With Overlord technology, they won’t need perfect environments."

"But the Overlords won’t just give them the technology?"

"Have they just given us anything?"

"Not . . . exactly." The Overlords had decided they wanted to employ humans–humans had more flexibility and less arrogance than many other races. The payoff would be full citizenship, eventually. "We’re employees. Surveyors. Maybe the Overlords want us as ambassadors too?"

"If you can do what the Hyunpa couldn’t."

"Dealer survived and came back. Heck, Grasseth was dangerous. We expect that now." Too arrogant? Change the subject? "I’ve waited ten years to see (Chksh)-Wenshee Station! You live here?"

"Yes–"

"Are there any other humans here?"

"No." She smiled.

"Hey, how do these work for sleeping? Are some of these habitats hotel rooms?" He couldn’t sleep in the boat, after all. He wasn’t making a pass, yet.

"Want me to show you?"

"Yes."

Martianne ran her fingers through her hair. Eric’s hands itched to do that too–run his fingers through Martianne’s hair. Kimber’s hair was cut short for a pressure suit helmet, nothing to twist his fingers in, or to fall onto his face.

He pushed that thought away. Kimber was his partner, friend, and sometimes his lover. She’d almost left him a month ago. Martianne . . . Martianne was beautiful, and new, and they were the only humans in the Domain. Stars shone through fluorescent gasses behind and above her.

She stood, a waterfall of dress brushing her legs, and spoke. Eric’s pillow surged under his butt and was a circle of bed. It fissioned blankets. Martianne patted the bed and then turned toward him, perhaps savoring his flinch reaction. "Just tell it what you want. Bath, toilet, toothbrush . . . you’ll love the toothbrush," she said. "Goodnight."

What? In sudden haste, "Martianne, would you like to stay?"

"I have other business. Sleep well." And she walked through the wall and was gone. Her bubble turned opaque silver as soon as it was free of his.

Damn. He rolled onto the bed and suddenly felt exposed to every other being in the Domain. He should have asked about that opaque walls trick.

He tried a few requests. He got silver walls and a transparent roof. The bath was water supported in a force field. He spent some effort describing a "toothbrush," and what he got was disconcerting: the server gave him a horseshoe-shaped blob of gum, which he bit into. His mouth hadn’t been this clean in years.

And the view was wonderful.

Eric slept badly. The walls changed shape all night, and he was alone.

The tug attached itself to the Deep Well Shield that was now affixed to Jack of Eagles’ belly. When the tug let loose, Eric lit the fusion drive and took the controls. The Deep Well Shield doubled the dinghy’s mass. He flew carefully back toward Pair O’ Deuces, learning the new balance.

Deuces was a mansion compared to their first ship. That had been the hull section of a Space Shuttle II mated to the Wayfarer Basic that supported the aliens’ Shift Trick and Verification Link technology: a hatbox-shaped module marked with the "Don’t Touch" symbol.

He and Kimber were the only two-person survey team to make ten years without dying or quitting. They’d earned enough interstellar credit to design a better ship. A factory in the asteroid belt had built their cargo, tankage, attitude jets, and life support sections, and mated it all to a larger Wayfarer Basic leased from the interstellar trade. They’d set the Wayfarer motor section aft, where Eric believed a propulsion system belonged. It looked like part of the bullet-shaped hull. In Eric’s view, Pair O’ Deuces looked like a spacecraft.

Deuces even had a see-through hull at the bow. They’d had to fight for that. The Sol system spacecraft industry used interstellar designs, and most Empire species flew by instruments.

Behind the viewing station was enough cabin space for a workshop, two bedrooms, and a galley that could actually entertain more than two people. And between life support and the Wayfarer Basic, a roomy cargo bay configurable a dozen ways.

Jack of Eagles no longer fit.

Eric didn’t waste much time trying. There were attachments, but they were in the wrong place. They could be moved, but only from inside Deuces.

He called Kimber before he departed the dinghy. This was the age of space, but Extra-Vehicular Activity was never a casual matter.

Kimber sounded awful, a raspy bass voice, but she sounded lucid.

He left the dinghy floating near Deuces, crossed into the cargo bay using a jet pack, and entered through the bay airlock.

He paused by a mirror before he sought Kimber.

He’d been avoiding the raw sunlight of space with too much fervor, maybe, and his skin was spacer-pale. There were white threads in his hair, and wrinkles around the eyes. He was thirty-three years old. Kimber had graduated with his class; she was the same age.

What had Martianne seen? She’d be five years younger than he was. She’d have to lose that wealth of hair to get into a pressure suit helmet, if she ever made a mission, and pressure changes would give her the same wrinkles he was wearing. Maybe she’d taken them for age.

Kimber looked awful: eyes and nose swollen and red, magic handkerchief clutched in her hand. "Chksh," she said. "Dab Wayne Hasselblad anyway for giving me this. Chksh."

"Great, now you can pronounce ‘(Chksh)-Wenshee Station.’ "

"Chksh. Blow it oud your ears."

"Don’t demonstrate."

"Dabbit, why don’t the Overlords come up with a cold cure?"

"Because nobody wants to be test subjects, and we don’t either. Kimber, I had to park Eagles–"

"You said. What have we got?"

"Most of what I bought is a mucking great plate the broker called a Deep Well Shield. I played with it a little. We’ll have to be careful. It’s supposed to shield us against fourteen gravities, and it might hold a lot more power than that, so we watch those dials or we get squashed like bugs. The plate locks onto the grooves we use to lock down Jack of Eagles, so Eagles is going to be riding loose in the cargo bay. We’ll have to work up padding."

"Ouch. Is (Chksh)-Wenshee Station fun?"

"Oh, yeah. You’ll love it."

"How were you with aliens? Bodder you any?"

"I keep telling you, aliens don’t bother me. Some really are prettier than others. The broker isn’t one of the pretty ones. His secretary-translator is."

"What species?"

He grinned. "Human. Martianne Grayson."

She looked.

"She’s the only human on the Station. Red hair, freckles, my height."

He tried to tell it funny. Kimber, sniffly and unsocial, was not amused. He gave up and wrapped up the story, "The robots mated the Deep Well Shield to Jack of Eagles. I found the other crates and got out of there to meet you. But you’ll have to see the Domain some day! Maybe when we get back. We can go together."

"You’ll see her again. Bet on it, she’s the only translator they’ve got when humans show up."

"It must be a lonely life."

"Did you make it less lonely?"

"Tried to."

"I dode see any bruises."

"No, she only . . . I told you, she showed me how to make a bed and bang, she’s gone."

Kimber just looked at him, shaking her head.

"Sorry. Martianne was cute. And we’re, well, I didn’t think you’d mind. You were almost ready to split us up to go off with Wayne Hasselblad. Kimber, I love you, but I’d have let you go."

"I know. I’m in no position to complain about a girl." She looked away. "It was just hard to stay here while you went. But you need practice negotiating, and oh boy, I am not a pretty sight. Chksh."

"Any better?"

"It’s just a code."

Kimber was still the nominal captain. They had run the roles in both configurations, and this worked best. He knew her moods–and now he sensed a minefield. "Martianne hasn’t been on any surveys yet. Funny. She graduated five years ago." He touched her short hair. "We’re lucky, you know?"

She nodded at him, looking uncomfortable with the conversation. "Whad else did dey send us?"

"I’ll park Jack of Eagles and we’ll see."

It took Eric seven hours to wrestle the crates already in the cargo bay to new spots. They’d lose easy access to some clothes and extra food and gear, so he had to guess what they’d need and repack completely. Then he had to EVA again to tow the crates from Jack into the bay. Two of them took up valuable living space until he managed to park the augmented boat and brace it.

They unpacked the bulky crates together, Eric showing off the small probes and cameras.

There was a "Don’t Touch" etched deeply onto one big box with fittings on the outside.

"Safe-Dealer-in-Goods, the broker, said the Overlords thought we might need this. He called it a ‘Pyth refuge bubble.’ "

They looked it over. It had equipment to attach it to standard ship’s hooks–the ones the tugs used. There was room for something else to bolt to it, on the opposite side. Something big. "I guess we’ll find out what it mates to after we get there. Martianne said she’ll send a "Read Me" file. That is, the broker did."

"You neber read dose."

She was kidding. Eric memorized instructions, directions, guidelines, and then distrusted it all until it could be proved. He said, "Maybe Martianne will know something too. She’s human. She can talk. Now, how about bed for you?"

"Leave tonighd?"

"We can afford a night’s rest. Maybe you’ll feel better, and you can negotiate with the Pyth. I recall the translator gets confused by colds."

"Whad was the broker like?" Kimber asked him.

"I could look at it. Rather not." Eric acknowledged that Kimber knew his phobias. "There was . . . a lot of variety in the Domain. You would have been more comfortable than I was. But you’d have been proud of me. The broker looked like a cross between a spider and a dung beetle, and I don’t think he knew I had trouble looking at him."

"Weren’d you looking ad the girl?"

"Sure. Both."

"You like Pillbugs. You liked the Gry*nth too. Chksh."

"Pillbugs are . . . I like the design."

"Pillbugs are powerful." Kimber dropped her magic handkerchief, swollen now but still dry, into the top of the recycler and took a fresh one from the bottom.

"Yes. And good guys. They saved us. It seems, maybe," he was in dangerous territory, but still, "it seems like the best aliens are the most beautiful. The Thray were criminal, genocidal, and I couldn’t even look at them. I haven’t had that much trouble with any alien since. Maybe the best of us, the most advanced, the most evolved . . . are easier to look at, too." He gave up. He was stumbling.

"Maybe id would be arrogant do use your sense of beaudy, human senses, as a measure. Besides, we are not bery advanced, and you seem to dink human women are beaudiful." Kimber turned away and headed up the corridor to bed.

"That’s different, and you are!" Eric called after her retreating back. "Well designed. ’night."

She smiled over her shoulder. "Id’s wired in your brain. Nighd."

At least she wasn’t mad at him. Eric spent an hour making sure everything was locked down for the next day’s trip.

Kimber woke with better speech.

Eric woke exhausted from bucking crates, muscles on fire. But he stayed at the controls: this trip promised too much for him to miss anything. Aliens sometimes made him squeamish, but interstellar flight was breath itself. There was no way he’d ever sleep through a Shift Trick.

As they cruised through the "no wake" zone around the station, Eric and Kimber shared ship’s coffee and choked down something breadlike from the Domain. They took turns dozing at controls. Then they were clear of (Chksh)-Wenshee Station, and Eric pushed the button.

The view screen blacked. Last time, they kissed through the short moments when the stars were gone. Kimber didn’t offer. Was it the cold? They held hands, Kimber’s head tilted slightly onto Eric’s shoulder, but away. Then the Shift Trick terminated, and stars, new ones in new places, became a blanket the Pair O’ Deuces floated within.

There was light everywhere–young bright stars floating in Orion’s vast nursery, brilliant gaseous clouds of glowing matter, almost no place dark enough to rest his eyes even when looking through the tinted glass of Deuces’ front window.

Kimber pointed.

Eric’s eye followed her finger to an arc along one edge of the window, black moving on black, deep grays sometimes emerging, here and there a strand of dull white. Once a slice of brilliant yellow opened and closed, Hell glimpsed through layers of clouds.

Baent had its own internal light, and starlight, and no sun to shine a day alive. Moons: three black dots chased each other across the dark bands.

Eric nudged the drive. Deuces shifted, filling most of the view screen with planet. Baent’s edge was fuzzy, mesmerizing. A fog of gasses swirled where his eye expected defined edges. He watched Baent spit up a yellow flare in a broad arc, and followed the flare’s fall back inward as it softened into the filmy surface. There was movement everywhere, relentless. More black dots, not moon-shadows (no sunlight), but the moons themselves passing between Deuces and the planet. If there had been color, he would have thought he looked at a small sun.

Kimber turned off the cabin light.

Now they could see ribbons and whorls of gasses . . . the fractal turns of huge storms, curdles on the vaster bands.

He looked for civilization, but what would he see? No surface that could be built on, no satellites or space telescopes either. What could a tool-user build in here? He kept at it, used familiar and unfamiliar instruments to help him. On the display wall, he now had a row of real and false color mappings.

There. On a mapping in high infrared, on a band that ended in one of the larger storms, heat ran in straighter lines above the barely . . . differently . . . cool signature. Some kind of bridge? Highway? A canal rather than a river? It was all hot as a brick kiln, and reddish-brown whispered through black in visible light.

Time to announce their presence.

Kimber was ahead of him, already tuning communications and sending a signal directly toward Baent. Kimber as captain had the option. There was an Overlord probe in there. It would have a camera. Their contract implied they must contact the Pyth on arrival.

"So Pyth live in chemical soup, no ground, no structures, nothing we would think of as planetary features," Kimber said. "How big is the habitat band they’re supposed to be in?"

"Varies. It’s one to two kilometers deep and stretches almost around the planet at this latitude. Up to three thousand kilometers wide, sometimes contracts to half that . . . which would fit what we’re looking at. That storm . . ." The small whorl was moving across the face of the planet. More of the brown band followed it, and that too showed hot lines on the cooler background.

"Does it look like the storm is anchoring that band?"

"Uh huh. It’s not a big storm, though. Not like Jupiter’s Red Spot. Might not be as permanent."

"Has to be stable, if that’s the zone." Martianne had told him that. "Stable on the order of a billion years, even if it shifts around some. There has to be time for evolution."

"Seems strange for something sapient to have developed in that. Life, yes, but sapience? What would drive a civilization?"

"Hmmmm . . . danger? Lightning and wind and the risk of poisonous atmosphere leaking into the home band? Rapidly changing place and size the Pyth are safe in? Breed other life forms as tools–"

"So they want to move the storm?"

"That would be screwy." Eric said. "The storm probably anchors them. Stabilize it or make it bigger, maybe, make the habitable band broader or just more predictable."

"How do we look around in that?" Kimber pointed at the planet rolling beneath them, much closer now. Eric was shying wide around a sulfur-yellow ellipsoidal moon. When he failed to respond, she said, "We don’t know much, do we?"

She was right, and it disturbed him.

He heard a soft whirr, and his stomach searched for his backbone.

The row of screens, the views of Baent, all became black silence. Then light levels adjusted and they were looking at dark greens and brighter reds streaming through rivers of clear air. There was no sense of perspective or size. The fog shifted oddly and a filmy green mushroom shape resolved, partially obscured by murky chemicals. Thick translucent tentacles trailed behind the Pyth, lost to view long before the ends passed the camera’s ability to resolve image from fog. A bouquet of marbles popped out of the main body, splayed in all directions, then tightened to focus on Kimber and Eric. Eyes.

How big is that? Eric didn’t ask. Kimber wouldn’t know.

The translator coughed to life, even though they couldn’t find a mouth amid the multiple eyes on the transparent alien in front of them. Wind filled the cabin: the Pyth’s natural voice. The translator coughed again, was silent a moment, then spit out English.

"Whistle-whistle-click-whisper greets Ambassadors."

That had to be a name. Kimber sent the standard greeting: names and species, and (it wouldn’t help, but it was polite) da Vinci cards. Kimber’s was a smiley-face.

"Welcome Eric Keenan and Kimber Walker," came a measured reply.

Eric said, "Thank you. Shall we meet?"

"We wait." The translator stopped, the Pyth’s image cut off into black.

Eric looked puzzled. "That was short."

"At least–it–seemed friendly enough." Kimber poked him in the ribs. "This time, we agreed, two for planet fall."

"Hmmmm . . . okay Captain." He ran his hand along her cheekbone, kissed her. His other hand roamed her backside. Graceful surrender. If Jack of Eagles needed rescue, they couldn’t do it with Deuces anyway.

She leaned into him, but didn’t return the caress. "There’s no room to lie down, and I don’t want to spread cold germs in there. We did it right the first time." Her voice went campy. "Besides, alien beings await us! Away!"

It must be the cold, he thought.

***

What miracles lived behind the Takeout Signs? Eric often feared death would come from something he should have been told about the Overlords’ closed boxes.

The claims made for the Deep Well Shield read like fantasy. When Eric was half-sure that he understood the specs–you could never be sure–he dropped Jack of Eagles into Baent.

They fell a long way.

Baent was vast. It was hard to see the acceleration. Eric slowed them early, taking his time, playing with thrust and cabin gravity, eye on the meters . . . thirty gravities decelerating, twenty-nine compensating, velocity in thousands of kps and slowing.

Angle lateral, aiming for the habitable band. If they hit anything, they’d be plasma. Eric was leaving nail marks in his hands. Better boost the thrust to forty decelerating. The cabin gravity compensated automatically, set to point seven G now. If the system wobbled a bit, Eric didn’t want to be flattened helpless, nor knocked against the roof. A big wobble was death.

Atmosphere set up a whine though the sky was still black. Below, a deep saffron curdle, a minor storm. Stars dimmed and went out. Murk rose up around them, and heat . . . but the hull was holding out the heat, at least for a while. Eric dropped them through what should have been the Pyth habitable zone at half a kilometer per second–hope no Pyth got caught in the sonic boom!–and brought Jack of Eagles back up, slowly.

Velocity: zero. G force: fourteen point one. Temperature: 930 K. Lots of sulfur and carbon compounds. This should be the middle of the habitable zone.

Kimber asked, "Hunt around?"

"Wait a bit. We should be conspicuous enough. The hull’s almost red hot. We’re a rigid object, there can’t be too many of those, and maybe the Pyth are four inches long."

"Okay, rigid, but they have to be tool users, don’t they? They could build floating structures–"

"And we could hit them if I just tootle around. And I’m twitching. That was a ride and a half." They weren’t quite at rest; winds were blowing them around. "I grant it’s hard to wait."

"Eric."

It was only a shadow in the murk, but– "It’s big."

"Yow. Big as Jack of Eagles, and maybe a juvenile at that, because the one behind it looks bigger."

"That could be an illusion. Lensed by the thick atmosphere." They were both talking for the record now. The hull thumped as a tentacle patted them gently. "Want to try to talk?"

Kimber reached for the communicator and it spoke: a howling wind, and the word: "Follow."