Spinneret

"Right." They were into the next room now and approaching the second set of double doors. Sliding into the seat next to Carmen, Meredith took a minute to puzzle out the alien restraining straps. By the time he looked up again, they were slowing down in a machinery-packed room that seemed to have no ceiling.

"Under the volcano cone," he grunted, eyes probing the jungle of oddly shaped devices and cables surrounding them. "Um—up ahead, by the wall: isn't that a duplicate of the transport cradle we're riding on?"

"Looks like it," Carmen agreed. "Maybe the empty room we passed through originally held a second lifeboat."

"That might explain why this one was never used," Hafner put in quietly behind him. "By the time they left, there weren't enough of them still here to need two ships."

Meredith craned his neck to look at the other. Seated next to Loretta, his injured leg sticking awkwardly out from the ill-fitting Spi

But it was far too late to regret his decision. "You think there may have been a plague or something?" he asked Hafner.

"Or else they were ru

Meredith nodded and turned back. The lifeboat had stopped now, and a slight movement among the thi

The words were barely out of his mouth when the room seemed to tilt away in front of him and, simultaneously, the viewports blackened. "What—?"

"We must be starting up the shaft," Carmen said. "The windows opaque when the boat turns nose up, probably to protect them."

"Nose up?" The deck felt perfectly normal beneath him. "—Ah. So the Spi

"In a craft this size?" Amazement momentarily pulled Perez out of his tight-lipped silence. "Incredible."

"Yeah." Just one more item, Meredith thought grimly, to add to Astra's list of militarily useful hardware.

He hoped to hell the Spi

"It was pure luck we spotted them," the Trygve Lie's captain told Msuya, his tone indicating he still wasn't sure he should have awakened his superior. "As per instructions we had a telescope trained on Olympus—"

"Yes, yes," Msuya interrupted him, struggling into a robe as his feet searched the floor for his slippers. "Have they shifted yet?"

"No, sir," the other said. "Actually, they seem more like they're heading somewhere in Astra's outer system."

"Or else are trying to get far enough out that we won't be able to get their direction vector when they go," Msuya snarled. It was the sort of precaution he'd expect Meredith to take. "After them, Captain—I want to be right next to them when they shift."

"Yes, sir. We'll leave orbit in five minutes."

Nice try, Colonel, Msuya thought, smiling with grim satisfaction as the alarms sounded their warning of the upcoming activity. But you can't get that ship away from me. It'll be mine … or it'll be no one's.

Lurching a bit as the Trygve Lie's rotation slowed, he headed for the bridge.

Chapter 32

"So why haven't we shifted?" Perez demanded.

"Keep your RAM cool," Meredith shot back over his shoulder, trying to hold his own fears in check. "Well?" he added as Carmen blanked the screen and leaned back in her chair.

She waved her hands helplessly. "Every diagnostic I can find says nothing's wrong," she said. "The course we're on seems deliberate, as opposed to being random, so I can only conclude the boat knows what it's doing. Or at least thinks it does."

"Great." Meredith pondered. "You said the computer indicated four days to Spi

"Spi

"Does our course indicate anything that far ahead that could be our destination? A

larger preprogrammed ship, say, that has the necessary star drive?"

Carmen shook her head. "There's no way to tell at this range."

"This is ridiculous," Perez snorted. "Something's obviously gone wrong. Let's give up and go back to Astra."

"I don't think that would be a good idea," Meredith said.

"There's a repulser flare moving on what looks like an interception course off our starboard side."

"What?" Perez moved to the side viewport to look. "Who is it?"

"Does it matter? Whoever it is would probably be willing to risk even a Spi

"But how did they spot us? Carmen—you said we were using a gravity drive of some sort, right? So we're not putting out a flare of our own—"

"Msuya will have been watching from the UN ship," Loretta put in quietly. "He knew about the lifeboat."

Carmen twisted around. "He what? How could he?"

"Because she told him," Meredith said calmly. "Don't look so surprised; it's been obvious ever since Dunlop's coup attempt that Dr. Williams and her friends were spies planted on us."

"But the Ctencri … " Perez trailed off as cold anger replaced the shock on his face. "Damn them. They probably went straight to Saleh with my letters." He turned to Loretta. "So they hired you to come here and learn the Spi

"They pressured me into doing it," she corrected tiredly. "And now they have my two children. That's the pressure Msuya's been using on me lately."

Perez snorted, looking back at Meredith. "You seem remarkably phlegmatic about all this. If you knew she was a spy, why did you let her aboard?"

"What choice was there?" Meredith countered. There were other reasons, but if the UN ship had a chance of overtaking them, he'd best keep his hole card private.

"We needed her to decipher the controls, and we'll probably need her at Spi

"If it helps, I don't really want Msuya to win out here," Loretta said. She looked at Hafner."Especially after … what he tried to do through Major Dunlop. If I'd known he was going to use violence … "

"Well, he hasn't won anything yet," Meredith told her. "Why don't you come up here and double-check Carmen's translations, make sure we're not missing some warning light or something."

Loretta nodded and moved to the control board. Meredith took one last look at the distant repulser flare and walked over to Hafner."You're very quiet, Doctor," he said, sitting down next to him. "Still mad at me for shanghaiing you like this?"

Hafner smiled. "All you had to do was ask, you know—I wouldn't have missed seeing Spi

Meredith frowned. "Is that the scale Carmen's nav map shows?"

"I don't see it making sense any other way. What we've got here, it seems to me, is that old standby of science fiction, the instantaneous-jump drive."

"Um." Meredith chewed on his lower lip. "Then the five or six days between planets is just the insystem travel time between port and … what?"

"A safe distance from large masses, perhaps, or a low dust density," Hafner suggested. "Hard to tell what they came up with. The immediate question, then, is whether Msuya will see anything we don't want him to see when we go."

"Before that comes the question of his capturing us," Meredith said dryly.

"Won't he run out of fuel first? A couple-three days of constant acceleration—"