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  “Eril, look! Three o’clock! See it?”

  Eril caught a glimpse of something blue and orange, shaped like a giant butterfly, darting from one leafy shelter to the next. Kithri swung the ‘jet to follow but it vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

  Later they saw reflections of water running like silver veins along the forest floor, and once the infrared scanners picked up the distant, smoldering remains of a fire. Suddenly a huge meadow, frosted with yellow, crimson, and lavender, opened out below them.

  “Flowers!” Kithri cried out. “Fields of flowers! Look at them!”

  She sent Brushwacker in a ragged dive. Eril’s teeth rattled as she dropped the scrubjet on the field. She scrambled out in a time that would have earned her an Academy record and bolted through the waving knee-high meadow. She fell to her knees and stretched her arms wide, gathering sweeps of flowers to her breast.

  The field sizzled with midday heat and the insistent whine of insects. Eril took a few steps and was quickly inundated by color and head-spinning scent. He stopped to snap off one long-stemmed lavender blossom and run his fingertips over the wedge-shaped petals. They were surprisingly rigid and gave off a faint vanilla scent. The pollen grains that clung to his hand were deep blue. Scattering whirring creatures, he waded through the tall stalks to where Kithri knelt.

  She lifted her face to him as she accepted the flower. Her cheeks were flushed and wet. “I thought I’d never see fields like this again,” she said in a husky voice. “It’s just like when I was a kid.”

  “Oh. Where was that?”

  “Albion,” she murmured, dropping her eyes.

  Eril had heard of Albion’s flower fields and how the planet was so beautiful that no one emigrated. He wondered why Kithri had. “I’m sorry.”

  She glanced up again, and this time he had to look away. There was something behind her eyes, some shadow that threatened to rise up and engulf him. He hurried back to the scrubjet and lounged against the opened door.

  Albion. By all the powers of space, no wonder she’s so wary of anything remotely military.

  Eril had seen Albion only once, from space, a cloud-laced blue-and-green pearl, but he’d had no chance to appreciate it. He and Hank were in the team Weiram had dispatched behind the far moon, holding them in reserve against the impending stalemate. It was a sensible tactical move that took everything into account, everything except the desperation of the Alliance raiders. Eril had seethed with frustration at being ordered away from the center of the action.

  Battle-fever scoring his nerves, he’d watched on the scanners as the fight turned in favor of the Federation. Behind him, in the co-pilot’s seat, Hank wondered aloud how soon the surrender would come. Then, without a shred of warning, a blanket of electromagnetic noise paralyzed the stinger’s scanners. The static deafened his ears for a terrifying moment.

  As soon as he could move his hands on the controls, Eril sent his ship darting out from the moon’s protective shadow. The struggle was all but over, so what had happened? Where was the battle? Where were the Federation ships, poised for the kill?

  A snowstorm of tiny fragments glittered momentarily in the holocaust that had once been a planet. Eril slowed, unable to believe his eyes. Numbly he thought, That mote of fire was once the flagship, that one a stinger, that one a medic unit, that one a living human...

  Then he could see nothing at all.

  When Eril’s light-seared vision cleared, the sparkling cloud was gone. The fireball had already begun to dim. As he and Hank drifted and waited, their communications equipment damaged past repair, he heard someone weeping — dry, heart-shredding sobs.

  Now, three years later, leaning against a tenth-rate scrubjet on an unknown planet, Eril shied away from the memory.

  It must have been Hank sobbing in the darkness. It must have been. He was fine, just fine. The medics had cleared him of any radiation damage. He’d made it out of the war alive and with a bucket of medals, hadn’t he?

  In the middle of the field, Kithri jerked upright, and the movement caught his eye. The flowers in her arms had darkened, wilting. She brushed them from her, letting them drop as she got to her feet. The broken flowers lay in a little heap.

  As she came toward him, Eril saw she still held the one he’d given her. Its inky petals drooped like the tentacles of an octopus. When she reached the scrubjet, he could smell its rankness. She paused, her eyes flickering to the mangled blossom, and dropped it.

  Eril took a deep breath and wished he hadn’t. The whole field reeked with decay. Even his saliva tasted bitter. Silently he climbed into the co-pilot’s seat and slid his hands over the controls. They felt familiar and solid.

  Kithri scrubbed her face with the back of her hand, slipped in front of him, and pulled the door shut. “So much for flower fields,” she said in a voice tight with secrets. “Let’s see what else this place has to offer.”

  Neither of them said anything about going back.

  Chapter 7

  As they continued across the massive forest, shipbrain sketched details of a variety of animals — insects, amphibians in the rivers and ponds, and reptiles, some of them the size of wolves. There seemed to be no recognizable primates or felines. Shipbrain continued to report nothing on the radio frequencies except natural background noise.

  So much for my woodmen.

  Without checking the scrubjet’s chronometer, Eril couldn’t be sure how long they’d been flying, watching and scanning. It felt like forever, suspended between forest below and equally endless sky above. Kithri said nothing about the flower field and very little about anything else.

  The novelty of the planet quickly wore thin on Eril. He found himself itching for something — anything — to happen. This couldn’t be all there was — a few tantalizing mysteries and then nothing but hours on end of unremitting pastoral peacefulness.

  He signalled shipbrain to pipe the radio scans to his headset. Maybe there was something out there after all and the dumb machine was too limited to recognize it. He listened, hearing nothing but uncommunicative noise.

  Eril’s thoughts turned to the unconscious man in the hold. Maybe they should find some place to set down and try to rouse him, find out who he was and where he’d come from. The stranger might even be from this world, peacefully exploring the tunnel when he and Kithri jolted out of nowhere. Eril instantly discarded the notion. For one thing, they’d been in their own Stayman — a normal jaydium tunnel of it anyway — when the spacer appeared. For another, the suit was clearly designed for work in space. Who in their right mind would go exploring a tunnel in extra-vehicular gear? Boredom must be corroding his brain, to even think of it.

  Squawk! — BURST — bzzz — BURST — Squawk! came shrieking over the headset. Eril nearly leapt out of his seat.

  “What the hell was that?” Kithri demanded.

  “I don’t know,” he said, quickly scanning the location functions. “It’s gone now. Damn!”

  “I’ll check shipbrain’s analysis.” After a brief pause, she said, “Inconclusive. Could have been some natural source — lightning, something like that.”

  “No damned lightning made that sound.”

  “You know something shipbrain doesn’t?”

  “I gotta hunch. I gotta hunch of a hunch. Where’s the source?”

  “Shipbrain pins it near Port Ludlow — or where it used to be. We could fly there in an hour, if you want to check it out.”

  “You bet I do!”

  o0o

  Brushwacker cleared the last ridge. Eril and Kithri looked down into the depression where Port Ludlow had lain baking in the sun. No low, flat-walled buildings of ash-brick greeted them, no spaceport with its battered insystem traders and field of garishly painted scrubjets. No distant fields of sallow, struggling green, no tendril roads spewing forth plumes of powdery dust. After the forest, Eril hadn’t expected any of that. But neither did he expect what he did see.

  Once, when he was a boy of four, the year before
his father disappeared on that Exploration mission, Eril’s mother had taken him and his sister to an antique crafts exhibition. There he watched a glassblower fashion a fairy castle, looping and twisting the liquid glass into filigree designs. It was his earliest childhood memory.

  Six-year-old Avery chose a winged horse for herself, but Eril had eyes only for the tower. It stood on his dresser, a touchstone for his imagination, until...he could not remember what happened to it. Now the memory of that childhood treasure rose up in front of his eyes, magnified a thousandfold and tinted like a watercolor rainbow, a crystal city set in a cup of living green.

  “Lo-o-ok at that,” Kithri said.

  Eril leaned forward across her shoulders, straining for more, hardly daring to breathe least the city shimmer and evaporate like a fever-born mirage. Even at this distance, he could distinguish individual structures. A ruby spindle shone in the late afternoon sun, dwarfing a flat rectangular block of pearlescent lace and a chain of smaller towers linked at every level by bridges of the same translucent material. A series of causeways, sapphire blue and turquoise, wound through the forest of towers.

  As they drew nearer, Eril realized that the city was not nearly as large as it first seemed. He was accustomed to the scale of artificial satellites or ancient mega-cities like New Paris or Terillium City, where ten thousand might live and work within the same self-contained scraper. These shining buildings before him could not be more than three or four stories high. It was their slenderness and composition that made them seem so elegantly tall. Judging by Fifth Fed standards, he put the city’s entire population at fifty thousand people, no more.

  Or perhaps they aren’t human. Perhaps we’ve discovered a new race of intelligent aliens! That had only happened twice before in humankind’s exploration of space and in neither case were the aliens this sophisticated. He’d met a few during the early years of the war, semi-telepathic anthropoids who quickly withdrew to their own planets at the first sign of interstellar warfare. The pseudofelines were even more reclusive and limited their own colonies to less than a dozen individuals.

  When he first went into space, Eril thought he wanted adventure, the biggest there was. Before him lay the wildest discovery he could ever hope to make, even in the far-flung Exploration Corps.

  A long-remembered quiver shot through him like an ember leaping into flame. At any moment, the city people would spot the scrubjet and send out an envoy.

  Wait until the Council gets my report — first the spaceman and now a whole new civilization! If only Weiram could see it...

  “Whatever made the radio signal, it wasn’t that city,” Kithri said in a puzzled voice. “There’s nothing alive down there.”

  Eril’s mind still roiled with images of a brilliant new interspecies alliance. “What are you talking about? It’s got to come from there. It couldn’t have been anything else. I’m betting we’ve just made First Contact with a new civilization!”

  “I’m betting you’ve got rocks in your skull,” she retorted. “I’ve been monitoring the infrared and motion scans, and there’s not a trace. And no radio, either. The burst must have been a natural fluke, just like shipbrain said. If anyone was there, their radar would have picked us up by now and they’d have sent someone to check us out.”

  Eril skin prickled. Logically she was correct, but it wasn’t logic that had kept him alive through one dog-fight after another at the end of the war. Maybe he was fooling himself, maybe he wanted the city to have inhabitants. Maybe he wanted an excuse not to go back — not yet, not empty-handed. Whatever his rationalizations, he couldn’t shake the bone-deep certainty that the noise burst had been from some advanced, power-using intelligence.

  But would such an intelligence necessarily be friendly? The two alien races known to the Federation were timid and anything but warlike, but he had no way of knowing if they were a fluke or the rule.

  Their radar would have picked us up, Kithri had reminded him. Were they even now being tracked by hidden weapons? Was the city’s silence an absence — or a lure?

  o0o

  Kithri brought ‘Wacker down into the shallow bowl of parkland that surrounded the city. With a sinking heart, Eril recognized the signs of deterioration — the splintered towers, the shredded supports beneath the causeways, the bridges whose lacy structures had crumbled in patches. The cores of the buildings still stood upright, lonely and proud as they slowly lost their battle with the elements. His fairytale city was nothing but a decaying ruin.

  “Eril, wait!” Kithri said suddenly. “On the infrared — I’m picking up something moving on the far perimeter, something small, or maybe there’s only one of them. I — you could be right...”

  An alien survivor, Eril wondered, or only a large animal, something we missed in the forest? Hope soared in him again.

  They came around to the far side of the city, following the location of the reading, to hover over a belt of velvety tree-dotted lawns. Eril had seen similar gardens on long-civilized worlds, intricate orchestrations of botanical species chosen for their nonproliferating nature. They required little maintenance to preserve the original landscaping.

  On the far side of the park lay a huge, flat field. Where it was not pock-marked by faded blast-sites, the surface was smooth, the color of cream instead of the charcoal ceramic asphalt used by the Federation in its spaceports. A chain of crumbling buildings, most likely control towers, ran down the center like the shattered fragments of a spinal column. Nothing else, not even the rusting framework of a abandoned ship, rose above the level surface.

  “You could berth twenty — no, thirty starcruisers out there without being crowded,” Eril said.

  Kithri’s voice sounded tinny in the cramped cockpit. “Even during the war, we always had something, if only some old insystem junker.”

  “Jaydium kept us coming back. Even with the Fed falling apart, that was too valuable to forget.”

  “But they didn’t come back here. Eril, could that mean — no Federation at all, no space travel, maybe the whole place left to rot like some sort of graveyard planet?”

  “If you’d built a spaceport that size, and a city like that, would you just leave?”

  “Not if I had any choice,” she answered bleakly. “But if they weren’t human, why should they even think like us?”

  “There’s got to be something left,” he said stubbornly. “Something. Where was that heat source?”

  “It’s gone out of range. Or maybe the damned detector malfunctioned and it never was there at all.”

  “No matter, we’ll be waiting for it when it sticks its pitouchee out again.”

  “Uhn!” came from behind them, a voice barely recognizable as human. The spaceman, as if following a carefully orchestrated script, had woken up.

  Chapter 8

  They dragged the spaceman from Brushwacker’s hold and laid him under a massive tree whose branches spread out like an umbrella from its knotted trunk. Although the spaceman was still unconscious, his breath came in hoarse grunts as he jerked his head from side to side. Eril knelt beside him. The shade felt cool and damp after the sun’s brassy heat and the crushed grass gave off a sweet, earthy smell.

  Kithri touched the side of the man’s neck. “His pulse is faster. Skin temperature feels okay. Shouldn’t we do something for him, like get him out of his suit?”

  “I don’t think so,” Eril said. If this suit was anything like the extravehicular gear he knew, it had its own life support function. It might be safer not to tamper with it.

  Kithri gave him an exasperated look. “We can’t just sit here like a pair of brainless sand-hens! We’ve got to do something! Look, I’ve got some more water in stores. How about if we bathe his face? That can’t hurt, can it?”

  The spaceman quieted as she wiped a damp cloth across his cheeks and brow. Slowly his breathing deepened, and the color of his skin changed from waxen to pink. His eyes moved behind his closed lids and suddenly jerked open.

  Before, the
face had been one of an ordinary, fairly young man, neither handsome nor ugly. When his eyes opened, so red-brown they looked auburn, they transformed his face into one of startling intensity. His pupils dilated and constricted as he shifted his gaze from Eril to Kithri.

  Eril put his hand on the spacer’s shoulder. “You’re all right now,” he said, with his friendliest smile. “We’re friends.”

  “Uh... Huh?”

  “Friends,” Eril repeated slowly. “Can you understand me?”

  The spaceman wet his lips. “Whuh hept? Whirrmy? Whirrs the shih?”

  Eril exchanged puzzled glances with Kithri, then tried again. The spacer seemed confused, although not frightened, as he answered. “Wirron — explorshon miss — Nited Therrin Spay Cummin — AlfaCentaw to Peers sunstar — we mit liestor — I win offboar — then I wek up here. Hoor yoo?”

  “I’m sorry, we can’t understand you,” said Eril.

  “No, wait,” Kithri said. “It’s like an archaic form of Pan-Anglish. Therrin, that’s like Terran, Old Terran! That almost-last bit was, ‘Then I woke up here.’ Can’t you hear it?”

  Now that she’d pointed it out, he could. Eril dredged his memory for the history lectures he’d sat through only because the Academy required them. He never thought there might be anything useful in them. “There was something about a Terran Space Cum-something — Command? United Terran Space Command?”

  After a fraction of a second, the spaceman nodded vigorously and gestured toward himself. The movement was hampered by the bulky suit. He repeated in a louder voice, even more heavily accented, “Nited Therrin Spay Cummin — Cummind Pascal, Lennart Pascal.”

  Commander Lennart Pascal.

  “Eril Trionan, Kithri Bloodyluck,” Eril said, pointing at himself and Kithri.

  “Whirrmy?”

  Where am I? Not a bad question to begin with. Before Eril could explain that they didn’t know where they were either, Lennart Pascal tugged at the catches across his chest with his heavily gloved hands. “I’m bow too suffcay. Yoofol could hell me owtta this thin?”