Drew Townsend had just returned to AdComm from a loud and angry discussion with the captain of a departing Earth ship, and he saw no point in keeping his frustration to himself. “Lydia,” he announced while striding from the tube car to his desk, “inform the crew that we need to give priority to figuring out that damned field generator before the next crisis descends upon us.”
She spun in her chair, wearing a pained expression. It stopped him in his tracks.
“Don’t tell me,” he begged her.
“I’m sorry, Drew. The tekl’hananni scoreboard just went up. House Trokerk took on House Drellith, and Drellith cleaned their clocks. They’re ahead by more than twenty points.”
Ouch! The final score in tekl’hananni was a body count. Each “point” was a warrior killed in action. This was how the Nandrians, embroiled in a millennia-long civil war, got around the Great Council’s requirement that each member race have a peaceful home world. They’d turned their planetary conflict into a sport played in space, complete with rules and officials. And, thanks to a previous station manager, there were also regular post-match victory parties held on Daisy Hub.
Townsend exhaled noisily and sat down behind his desk. “How many ships can we expect?”
“Drellith had three light cruisers in the last encounter. One is too badly damaged to go anywhere under its own power. The other two have evacuated its surviving crew and will be here in approximately forty-three hours. They’ve had heavy casualties, but there are still about thirty-five warriors on their feet, in total.” After a pause, she appeared, sober-faced, at the end of his improvised wall of filing cabinets. “That means more than half of their three original crews are dead or seriously injured. And they’re ahead on points.”
Meaning that Trokerk’s losses had been even worse.
“Okay. Send them a friendly reminder about the House rules. And find out the status of the Krronn and the Nannssi.” The Chief Officers of those two Trokerk vessels were personal friends of the Hub’s crew. With luck, neither ship had been involved in this match.
“Will do,” she told him.
As silence fell over AdComm, Townsend closed his eyes and pressed himself more deeply into his chair. The fun and games just never seemed to stop.
—— «» ——
Thirty hours to go.
“Drew? Gouryas and Singh are on their way up here.” Ruby’s voice floated across the deck and over top of his filing cabinets. “They said to tell you that they have good news and bad news.”
A moment later, the tube car door to the right of his desk hummed open and the two engineers stepped out. They were a study in opposites, Singh wearing a perpetual smirk and Gouryas’s swarthy face etched with a near-constant scowl. Good news and bad news personified.
“Gentlemen?” he said, inviting them with a gesture to sit. He waited until both their gazes were level with his own before continuing, “I understand you have something to report.”
Singh was the first to speak. “I’ve made a breakthrough with the paintbrush, and I think we now have a way to reverse the soft spots on the bulkheads resulting from the Midnight Muralist’s work.”
This was the good news.
Drew nodded approvingly, then added after a beat, “But…?”
Gouryas’s frown had deepened perceptibly. “In the process of finding it, he’s managed to ruin almost every spare wall panel in the parts locker, leaving us short if there’s an emergency,” he declared. “And I can’t think of a single reason to give for ordering more that won’t put us under scrutiny by the Space Installation Authority.”
“And that’s the bad news?”
“That’s just half of it. Tell him,” Gouryas commanded, looking daggers at his partner.
The smirk wilted slightly. “You remember what happened when we went to Zulu to investigate their field generator?”
“As I recall, and the Rangers may never let us forget,” said Townsend, “the molecular paintbrush turned their landing deck and several other enclosed spaces a lovely shade of purple.” Gripped by a sudden suspicion, he added, “What’s the color this time?”
Hesitantly, Singh replied, “A deep red.”
“You can’t simply overpaint it using a different setting on the same device?”
“I tried that,” said Singh. “It collapses the molecular latticework of the metal.”
“It does what?”
“Fatigues it,” the other man explained. “Makes it so brittle you can break it apart with your fingers. The air pressure we maintain inside the Hub would be beyond its tolerances.”
Intrigued, Drew leaned forward on his elbows on the desk. “Resulting in explosive decompression?”
“Theoretically, yes. The effect would be the same as if a bomb had detonated right beside the hull.”
“Congratulations, Mister Singh,” said Townsend. “I mean that sincerely. You’ve turned the paintbrush into a short range defensive weapon. Now, if the two of you can just get a handle on the field generator, you might be able to extend and widen that range, giving us enough firepower to take out a ship or two if the Hub should come under attack.”
“Like monkeys with typewriters,” Gouryas remarked sadly, “using them to bash in the heads of other monkeys.”
Drew remembered that earlier conversation. It had taken place on L Deck shortly after his arrival on Daisy Hub. He’d postulated back then that the Nandrians might have given the Humans on the Hub a puzzling piece of technology in order to see what they would do with it. It was beginning to look as though he’d been right.
“Like it or not, Mister Gouryas, it’s the kind of monkey we are. The Nandrians are warriors and, given cause, so are we. We know that tekl’hananni is a war game, and that every Nandrian ship is equipped with one of these field generators. So, maybe the test of worthiness we’re undergoing is to see how long it takes us to recognize a weapon for what it is.”
“And to assemble it.” Ruby had been listening so quietly that Drew had forgotten she was there. Now, wearing a purposeful expression, she rounded the end of his wall of filing cabinets and settled herself onto one of the guest chairs. “I’ve been sifting my mind for all the places on Daisy Hub where the Nandrians might have left us a clue, and something occurred to me. The generator arrived in pieces, and we’ve been logically assuming that they were all delivered at the same time, to the same address. What if that assumption is only half right?”
“You’re talking about our missing part being on the Zoo,” Townsend remarked.
She tilted her head and arched a knowing brow. “Unless a third party that we’re not aware of received a package from the Nandrians at the same time as we did.”
As three pairs of eyes came to rest expectantly on his face, Drew blew out a breath and leaned back into his seat. That the answer might lie on the Rangers’ platform wasn’t a brand new idea for him. It had actually been meandering across his mental landscape for a while now, raising red flags everywhere it went. If Ruby was right — and he strongly suspected that she was — then a visit to Zulu was definitely in order. However…
“It can’t be a stealth mission,” he finally told them. “Rodrigues is sharp, nothing like Bonelli. He knows about the first con we ran and he’ll be watching for another. Hoping for it, I’m guessing. It will give him the excuse he needs to establish a permanent Ranger presence on Daisy Hub. Since that is the last thing we want, I’m going to be upfront with him and get official clearance for you to board the Zoo. But not for a treasure hunt. ‘I’ll know it when I see it’ won’t fly with Rodrigues. He’s career Security, and he’s familiar with search warrants. Unless you already have an idea of what you’re looking for and can tell him what it is, he won’t even open his landing deck doors for you.”
“Then we’re done before we start,” Gouryas complained. “The emitter resembles an overgrown crystal. The generator is a plain black metal cube. The paintbrush could be mistaken for a wall ornament. The missing component might be as small as a wristcomm or as large as one of your filing cabinets.”
“Maybe there’s something else we can do over there,” said Singh. He threw Gouryas a defiant glance, then straightened in his seat and continued, “Somewhere on each generator there must be the equivalent of a settings display, or a readout of some sort. We’ve lost the ability to see what the original settings were on our field generator, but no one’s been tinkering with the one on the Zoo. If we can find and record that display, then we’ll know where to look for it on our own generator. And if we can duplicate those settings, we may be able to return our sensor field to the way it was before.”
“Putting the genie back in the bottle,” said Drew.
“And making the invisibility field useless,” Gouryas pointed out. “We talked about this, Dev. It’s a big step backward. We’ll be effectively returning to square one.”
“Not true,” retorted Singh. “The next time we approached the problem, we’d have all the lessons learned from the mistakes that were made the first time around, plus the ability to press reset and start over.”
“I agree,” Townsend declared, repeating it more loudly to cut through their bickering. Once he had their full attention, he continued, “Mister Singh, conditional on Rodrigues’s going along with it, I’m green-lighting your proposal as a short-term measure. If you’re successful, it will buy us all some breathing time. Go and gather whatever you require for the mission. Pick a technician to accompany you in case two hands aren’t enough. Then sit tight and wait for further instructions. Ruby, you’re on standby to fly them to Zulu and back on Devil Bug. And don’t let them dawdle. I’ll need you all here and at your stations before the Nandrians arrive.”
“You got it, Chief.”
—— «» ——
House Drellith was no stranger to Daisy Hub. Drellith and Trokerk had been switching back and forth between first and second place on the tekl’hananni scoreboard for the past half-year. So, Drew was spared from having to recite a first contact speech — a small mercy. There would still be two ships full of warriors arriving simultaneously and two Chief Officers to be welcomed onto the station in accordance with Nandrian ritual. Two crews of large, evolved carnosaurs with venomous bites, fresh from battle and quick to respond with violence to any perceived insult. And if the past was any indication, they would probably lumber through the docking portals with the smell of citric acid already on their breath.
“I’m not getting paid enough,” Drew muttered as he perused the speeches Gavin Holchuk had written for him.
“Who among us is?” Sitting opposite him at the small round table in the caf, Holchuk grinned and took a swig from the mug of java that Fritz Jensen had just placed in front of him. “Cheer up, boss man. When you’ve finished describing your latest exploit, you’ll be a hero as well as a Hak’kor.”
“A hero who used guile and deception to pull the wool over a government agent’s eyes. I thought the Nandrians abhorred dishonorable conduct.”
Holchuk shrugged. “If Trokerk were coming, that would be an issue. With Drellith, it’s not.”
“Wait a minute. We’ve had at least four visits from House Drellith. Now you’re telling me they’re dishonorable?”
“Not really. At least, not in the sense that we should be locking up our valuables before they arrive. All I’m saying is that Drellith isn’t as averse as Trokerk is to using sneaky tactics to win a match. They never actually cross the line and cheat. That would get their entire First Shield slaughtered and the rest absorbed by the other Houses. But Nagor tells me that several of their victories have been questionable, sparking lively debates among the referees.”
“Sneaky tactics,” Drew repeated, not liking the sound of those words. “Is that how they won their latest battle against Trokerk?”
“I guess we’ll find out when they get toxed and start bragging about it. Will you be joining the party this time?”
“That depends. Will I have to threaten to call in the Rangers again to restore order?”
Before Holchuk could respond, Townsend’s wristcomm buzzed.
“Drew,” said Lydia’s voice, “Devil Bug is on its way back, ETA in about three hours. No problem there. But I’ve got Zulu on the comm screen. You need to come up to AdComm right away.”
“My cue,” he said to Holchuk, getting to his feet.
The Chief Cargo Inspector raised his mug in a farewell salute as Townsend headed for the corridor.
Drew took the tube car to C Deck and strode directly to Lydia’s station.
On the communications console’s light screen, Captain Rodrigues was visibly struggling to keep a straight face. “Are you expecting company, Townsend?”
“Yes, two shiploads of Nandrians in about twenty-four hours. Why?”
“I’ve been tracking an approaching small craft, the size of a short-hopper. It’s definitely alien. We’ve made voice and visual contact with the pilot. He calls himself Odysseus. Says he’s ready to claim his new home.”
“Paul, I have no idea what—”
“He also says that a Human ship’s captain gave him Daisy Hub’s coordinates and assured him that he would be welcome there.”
Lydia’s lips were pressed tightly together, holding back laughter. Abruptly, Drew understood.
“Does this Odysseus look like a large, clawless lobster?” he asked wearily.
Rodrigues was now grinning from ear to ear. “More like an overgrown prawn, actually, with a bullhorn voice. I’ve cleared him to enter the system. Good luck welcoming Odysseus home.” Chuckling, the Ranger captain broke off the commlink.
“Terrific,” Drew muttered. “Just what we need right now. Lydia, you’d better warn him about the—”
“I’m on it. Direct him to the landing deck?”
“Sure, why not. Tell Hagman to meet him there and bring him down to Med Services. That’s where I’ll be for the next few minutes, giving the Doc a heads-up.”
It appeared this was going to be another interesting day.
—— «» ——
Twenty hours until the Nandrians were due to arrive.
There was a reason Drew Townsend hated having to wait around for things to happen. It gave him time to think. Right now his mind was crowded with disturbing possibilities, and with memories that tumbled and spun. They spawned questions that he wasn’t sure he wanted answered.
He and Olivia were almost certainly related by blood to Dennis Forrand, the late Supreme Adjudicator for Americas. By now, Olivia had to be aware of this as well. Had she known it when she’d sought out Forrand to be her mentor all those years ago? Had Forrand known it when he’d accepted her as his protégée while at the same time leaving her twelve-year-old brother to the not-so-tender mercies of a street gang? Had Olivia been aware of what was happening to Drew, as she’d claimed in her message? And if so, why hadn’t she done something about it? Or even just gotten word to him?
What kind of man would he be now if Olivia had kept her promise to protect him?
He guessed he would never know.
“It’s no use hiding, Mister Townsend.”
Dragged back to the moment, Drew looked up from the mug of java he’d been gazing into and found Doctor Ktumba standing across the table from him.
“Hiding? I’m not hiding,” he replied, and spread his arms to indicate the rest of the caf. “I’m in plain sight in an empty room.”
“Mm-hmm. Sitting hunched over, with your back to the door. Maybe that’s not hiding by your definition, but— Never mind. I’ve completed my examination of our newest arrival. I don’t know how you plan to explain this in your next report to the Space Installation Authority, but I’ve brought you a printout of mine.”
As he reached for the sheet of paper she was handing him, Townsend did a double take. A pair of eyes were perched on the edge of the table beside her. They were perfectly round, with deep orange irises, and with lids that moved sideways. They blinked lazily at him twice before he was able to find his voice. “Is this—?”
“Ja-va?” boomed a voice that seemed to come from under the table. Drew couldn’t help noticing that one of the eyes was now staring at his mug.
“Yes, it is,” he replied.
“Ja-va means wel-come,” declared the voice.
The Doc inhaled sharply. “Wait! Don’t let him—”
Too late. Something that looked like the end of a narrow black tube had whipped over the edge of the table and plunged itself into the mug. In two heartbeats all the liquid was gone.
“Ja-va!” the voice caroled. “Ja-va-ha-ha!” The alien reared up, startling Drew to his feet as well. The eyes were on stalks. As they extended, raising the alien’s height to about the level of Townsend’s waist, he caught a glimpse of something metallic jammed under the edge of the creature’s segmented carapace, and a kaleidoscopic display of bright colors dancing around on top of it.
“Mister Townsend, meet Odysseus,” said the Doc. “That was his third cup, by the way.”
Wonderful. The overgrown prawn was now over-caffeinated as well. His shell appeared to be doing everything but shoot off fireworks. Odysseus dropped down onto all eight of his legs and began scuttling rapidly around the caf, singing in a baritone voice, “Java-java-java-java!”
“He’s toxed,” Townsend declared. “Isn’t there a sedative or something you can give him?”
“I can’t calculate a safe dose without knowing more about his physiology. At least he’s not a danger to anyone. We’ll just have to keep him confined somewhere and wait until the caffeine is out of his system.”
“That’s easy to say, Doctor, but first we’ll have to catch him.”
A humming sound drew their attention to the front of the caf. Three crew members were strolling through the door, deep in conversation.
Together, Townsend and the Doc yelled, “Close the—!”
Too late again. Odysseus had already raced into the corridor. As he scuttled away, they could hear his singsong voice echoing off the bulkheads: “Java-java-java-hee-hee-heeee!”
One of the crewmen came over. “What the devil was that?”
Townsend and the Doc shared a look.
“It’s an alien,” Drew replied. “A java junkie. If he comes back here, seal the door and call AdComm, in that order. Stop and hold him if you can. But whatever you do, don’t let him near the urn behind the counter.”
Townsend’s wristcomm buzzed. “What?!” he snapped at it.
Silence. After a moment, Lydia’s tentative voice replied, “I just thought you’d want to know that Singh and Beale are back and they’re ready to give you a report.”
He took a calming breath. “Sorry, Lydia. I just— Never mind, I’ll fill you in later. Where are they? On L Deck?”
“Or they can meet you up here if you’d prefer.”
“L Deck is fine. Tell them I’m on my way.”
—— «» ——
Gouryas and Beale stood together, poring over a printout that occupied most of a work table. They barely glanced up as Townsend stepped off the tube car and crossed the deck toward them. Meanwhile, Singh was pacing back and forth behind them, shaking his head and looking caught between tears and laughter. Drew’s first thought on seeing him was that the mission must have been either a spectacular success or a colossal failure.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Singh told him.
“Try me.”
“When the field generator was installed on Zulu, their main console was retrofitted with a dedicated control panel. They’ve had full command of their sensor field for the past two and a half standard years, but until now nobody realized it, because all the engineering talent was on Daisy Hub and none of the Rangers were curious enough—”
“—or brave enough,” Beale opined, her voice dripping disdain.
“—or something,” Singh continued, “to play with the alien technology. Those lazy bastards simply set everything on automatic and then forgot about it. Literally.”
“Meanwhile, we’ve been wracking our brains this whole time, trying to figure out how it works and getting ourselves deeper and deeper in trouble,” Gouryas cut in. He was a portrait of disgust. “And the most infuriating part of it is that we could have spared ourselves all that grief if either we’d asked them for help or they’d thought to offer it.”
“Neither of which was going to happen as long as Bonelli was in charge of the Zoo,” Singh pointed out. “Let’s be honest. After what happened to Lydia when she and O’Malley went over there to set up their SPA room, would any of us have trusted an offer of assistance from a Ranger?”
Gouryas swatted the question aside. “What I don’t understand is why the Nandrians would have provided a control panel for only one of the field generators. It makes no sense!”
Drew swallowed the answer that rose to his lips. To someone who had been both a convict and a cop, this situation made perfect sense. The generators had been ordered installed by Earth’s High Council. As far as Earth was concerned, Daisy Hub was an orbiting detention center and the Rangers were its guards. And it was the guards who got to control the prison boundaries, not the inmates.
Evidently, the Nandrians didn’t share Earth’s point of view, or the paintbrush and operating manual would never have found their way into the hands of the Hub’s crew. The aliens had also been dropping hints that the Humans and Nandrians would soon have to face a common enemy. Getting the field generator under control might be part of Daisy Hub’s test of worthiness, but it seemed clear to Townsend that it was also an important step in preparing for the coming conflict. That meant time was of the essence.
“Did the Rangers give you the information you went there for?” he asked.
“They gave us something better,” Singh replied, indicating with a flourish the diagrams on the work table. “On Captain Rodrigues’s orders, they gave us a copy of the schematics for their control panel, along with a wiring map, so that we could build and install one of our own.”
Townsend glanced over Beale’s shoulder and saw mazes of crisscrossing lines, sprinkled with alien symbols. She shuffled the pages, showing him one incomprehensible diagram after another. “Okay,” he said, trying to sound more intelligent than he felt at that moment. “This is for the control panel. What about the settings for the sensor field?”
Singh and Beale exchanged a long look. A mental coin toss? If so, Beale was the loser. She broke eye contact and replied, “It’s on automatic, and Rodrigues wouldn’t let us switch it over to manual to bring the settings up on their display. He’s so spooked by the problems we’ve been having with our generator that he won’t even let anyone touch the controls on theirs. So, it appears that we’re going to have to build the control panel and figure things out from there. Fortunately, we have plenty of engineering expertise on the Hub.”
“That’s nice, but there’s a problem,” Drew said.
“Just one?” growled Gouryas. “I can see half a dozen.”
Drew pressed on. “This control panel is made up of alien materials. How are you going to reproduce it using Earth-made parts?”
Beale broke out in a grin. “One of the Rangers slipped me this as we were leaving,” she said, reaching under the table and coming up with a fistful of colored wires. “Apparently, the Nandrians left a second panel behind, in pieces, just in case something needed to be replaced.”
“So Ruby was right. The missing clue was on Zulu all along,” Townsend remarked, and Singh nodded agreement.
“Anyway, these spare parts had been sitting in a locker, gathering dust, and the Ranger — whose name is Jacques — very kindly put them all into a couple of carry-cases and transferred them onto Devil Bug for me.”
Drew shot her a dubious look. “And he did this out of the goodness of his heart?”
“Not exactly. We hit it off.” She turned her back on Townsend, leered over her shoulder at him, and batted her eyelashes extra hard.
He turned accusing eyes on Singh. “You let her flirt over there, knowing what had happened to Lydia?”
The engineer stared defiantly back at him. “My mother didn’t raise a fool, Mister Townsend, and neither did Vera’s,” he replied. “I didn’t ‘let her flirt’, as you put it. I instructed her to get one of the Rangers on our side in case we needed a favor in order to complete our mission successfully. And that’s what she did. It was a calculated risk, but I knew she could handle herself. Besides, you’d said more than once that Rodrigues was a different kind of leader, more like us than Bonelli was, and that implied that the Zoo itself would be a safer place than before.”
Drew wanted to be stern with them, but he couldn’t. They’d done exactly what he would have done — stretched their luck and gotten away with it — and the expressions on their faces showed that they knew it. “All right,” he said, letting out an exaggerated sigh. “Now, put this control panel together and let’s see how successful the mission was.”
—— «» ——
Seventeen hours to go.
Remembering how easily the Überrats, Yoko and Akiko, were able to hide out in the between-decks of the station, Townsend had consulted with Gouryas to find out whether Odysseus could do the same. Fortunately, the dimensions of his shell made it impossible for him to slip through the hatches covering the maintenance passageways. Unfortunately, he was clever as well as sentient, and tall enough to reach the keypad of a tube car.
In the past three hours, there had been Odysseus sightings all over the station, but no one had been able to corner or catch the little alien, even when they knew where to wait for him. He barreled through doorways like a miniature armored tank, knocking Humans aside with ease. Several crew members had required medical attention after trying to stop him in the corridor, including Security Chief Orvy Hagman.
Clearly, the “overgrown prawn” was a lot stronger than he looked, and he didn’t appear to be slowing down at all. So, Drew decided to put his best — in fact, his only — Stragori warrior on the assignment.
Swiveling his seat, he called across AdComm, “Lydia, where’s Karlov right now?”
A moment later her face appeared atop his bank of filing cabinets, reminding him unsettlingly of Odysseus’s eyes perched on the tabletop in the caf.
“He’s on Tannis Walker’s maintenance detail this shift,” she told him. “They’re cleaning and inspecting our solid waste processing system. Another hour or two and they’ll be done.”
He exhaled noisily, wondering how best to classify the current situation. Could one alien running all over the station be called an infestation? How much of an emergency did they actually have?
Picking up on his disappointment, Lydia added, “I can get him here right away, but he’s probably standing up to his hips in—”
“Never mind. Tell him to report to me as soon as he’s presentable.”
Two hours later, Max Karlov stepped off the tube car and approached Townsend’s desk, not bothering to conceal his amusement.
“Last year you were frantically hunting down rats. Now it’s some sort of alien bug? It sounds as though Daisy Hub needs an exterminator,” he remarked, pulling a chair over and sitting on it.
“First of all, Odysseus is not a bug. At least, I don’t think he is. Regardless, you mustn’t kill him. It’s not his fault that his race gets toxed on caffeine. We just need him captured and confined until the effects wear off.”
“Odysseus? That’s an Earth name, isn’t it?”
“He had contact with Humans before coming here, and that’s the name they gave him. I’ve just finished reading their file on him. He’s a Mitradean.”
Karlov sat up straighter in his seat. “Mitradean,” he echoed, a note of respect creeping into his voice. “Now I understand why your people haven’t been able to catch him.”
“You’re familiar with this race?”
“Oh, yes. The Mitrades have a perfect sense of direction. One look at a schematic and they know exactly where to hide and which spots to avoid. And they’re fast, even when they’re not revved up on caffeine. You’re lucky there’s only one of them aboard the station. They do telepathic data transfers. Put them close enough together and what one knows, they all know.”
Townsend leaned forward on his elbows. “The Nandrians will be here in fifteen hours. Can you catch him before they arrive?”
“I doubt it. But I wouldn’t worry too much. If these Nandrians are like all the others we’ve met, it’s a safe bet they won’t be able to catch him either.”