Ali's brows lifted. "Cogently spoken! Was that an interrogative? What happened then, is Craig gave you something to sleep after you woke up from your faint. What's happening now is that your trade is going on-and this is one for the record books. Where, along the coast, and just outside. When, now. How you get there is on your own two feet to the flitter, but it had better be fast, because the scope shows a storm line that looks like the end of the world, approaching fast."

Dane started up, his heart hammering. "Is this it?" Confused, apocalyptic images swirled in his head.

Ali shrugged theatrically. "Floaters think so. Gas cloud was projected to hit the magnetosphere several hours back. Seismics show a lot of little sub-1 and -2 quakes, EM is up, and the aurora looks like a nuclear explosion. We're lifting off soon's we finish the Trade, but it's even money if we're out of the atmosphere at show time, the speed this storm is moving."

"Lifting."

"Off. Jets firing.,Zoom. Six hours." Ali thrust a hand skyward. "You have three minutes. I'll be out here, counting. If you're not ready, you go just as you are." He lounged the short steps to the cabin door, then turned to smile. "Coffee on your console there."

Dane realized that that was the aroma he'd been smelling, and he stopped mentally cursing the heartless-sounding engineer. Instead, he gently set the cat down and got to his feet, the threat of onrushing doom mixing oddly with the excitement of the trade-and of leaving Hesprid-to infuse him with energy.

When he stepped outside his cabin, tabbing the fasteners on his clean tunic with one hand and holding his mug with the other, Ali straightened up from wall-propping. "Two and a half minutes-not bad."

Dane laughed. The air felt cool on his wet head, and his stomach growled. But he ignored those things as he said, "Stotz came up with something, then?"

"Stotz and Tazcin and yours truly." Ali flourished a hand. "Also Jasper and Vrothin and Shoshu and whoever else was at hand. The Tath didn't have time to grow the whole things, so Stotz cobbled up some of the varitubing from Craig's medtech and figured out a way to interface it with the saltvines from the camp. What we have created, my friend, are spritzers."

"Spritzers?" Dane almost choked on a swallow of coffee.

"Yes." Ali led the way through the cargo hold to the outer lock, but to Dane's surprise, he walked around the waiting flitter, its fans already humming in neutral, its wings folded against its body. "Your coat is here." He pointed, shrugging into his own haz gear. "Sun came up an hour ago. And the Floaters are waiting." He poised a thumb over the lock control. "Suit up."

When Dane was ready, Ali motioned him forward and opened the lock. Dane stopped in the hatchway and looked out, confused. Around the ship towered the vast trees, their branches swaying in low gusts of wind, but the air was empty of presence.

"Look on the ground."

And there, like greenish red warts, on the rocks and on hastily laid plasweave tarps on the muddy ground, lay the Floaters, each almost empty of air, looking as helpless as a jellyfish on the beach. Crumpled in on themselves, they were far smaller than Dane would have expected.

"They don't even need sunlight to loft now," said Ali. "There's so much EM."

"I guess n.o.body needs to worry about psi-contact, then."

"Not now. But after you faded, Jasper and Rip and I did our best to try to show them what their touch did to us. We couldn't hold the bond long, but they seem to have picked it up. At any rate, at least they have eyes, and can see: they un-derstood that only the beings who thrust their arms in the air should be touched."

Dane leaned against the hatchway, sighing with relief. "I don't know if I can take any more of this psi-link work."

"You won't have to," Ali said with a strange smile. A triumphant smile. "We're out of here."

Dane eyed the engineer. "And? You can't be gloating about that."

Ali lifted one expressive brow as he turned away from the lock and sauntered back to the flitter. "I learned yesterday in the process of opening the door how it could be closed," he said as they strapped themselves in.

"Door." Then Dane got it: Ali had somehow learned how to mentally shut the others out. Could Dane do it as well? He realized he didn't want to try. Though physically he was as well as he could expect to be, he felt mentally fatigued. He did not want to experiment any more with psi powers, at least not now.

And in a way it didn't really matter. If the others could shut him out, then he didn't have to worry about whether or not his own thoughts disturbed them. Privacy was extremely important to Ali; now that he had gained it, he might even be willing to work further on the bond.

Someday.

If they managed to get off Hesprid IV.

And past the pirates.

Moments later the flitter leapt from the ship and bolted up at a steep angle. Dane gasped as the trees fell away beneath them, revealing the sky in its entirety. Eastward, above a distant line of darkness the sun lofted, and even with his unprotected eyes Dane could see the sunspots marring the glaring disk. Overhead small clouds in serried ranks marched toward the west; above and between them the sky flickered, pearles-cent, like lightning reflected in an oyster sh.e.l.l.

"The aurora," Dane said, unable to keep momentary disbelief out of his voice. "In daylight."

Right," said Ali. "You don't even want to know what the instruments are saying about the amount of energy building up in the ionosphere. The whole planetary electrical field is beginning to ring like a bell."

"Don't tell me," said Dane, danger signals singing along his nerves. "We're at one of the nodes?"

Ali nodded grimly. "Rip says if the amplitude keeps growing on its present curve, this spot is going to be the center of a short circuit the likes of which we can't even imagine."

"The trees," Dane said, remembering. "They'll burn-"

"And reseed themselves," Ali finished, ramming the controls. "Frank Mura is calling them the Phoenix Trees, from some kind of dragon in his ancestors' mythology."

As he spoke he caused the flitter to dive down over the cliffs, and they skimmed along the coast, buffeted by gusts of wind. Peering again at the far horizon, Dane thought he saw vague flickers of light sheeting across the darkness, warning of vast thunderstorms hidden by the planet's curve.

Ali nodded over to the right. "Look at that."

Dane looked away from the coming storm-and then forgot all about it.

The long, rocky coast was flat and wet-looking as the tide went out. What drew his attention was the churning of the waves as thousands of strange, spiky crablike creatures emerged from the water, each carrying in its pincers something which they then dropped onto the sand.

Four crew-Mura, Tooe, Parkku, and her mate Irrba- were sweeping back and forth along the sh.o.r.eline with bags, picking up the rocks, then hurrying up the beach and dumping their contents into makeshift ore-carts. Not just rocks; as Ali swooped even lower, just above the waves, Dane realized that most of those rocks were ore eggs. Something bothered him-something was not quite right about the scene. He frowned, trying to identify the source of his reaction.

"This has to be the stuff swept into the ocean by the tides and storms," he said.

Ali nodded. "Retrieved by these critters. Oh, but you haven't seen the big stuff yet. When the sun came up, Vrothin called us on the comlink. He was sent to scavenge what he could from the mining-launch site, and found. this."

They lifted suddenly, veering round vast cliffs to which ancient trees clung. Ali jammed the speed forward, and the flitter vibrated in the heavy winds as it sped to the south. Then he abruptly pulled up, and Dane gazed in amazement at the sight below.

Huge loads of ore lay along the pebbly beach. As Dane watched, a mighty creature with black, rubbery hide and ma.s.sive webbed feet emerged from the water, waddling up onto the sh.o.r.e. Were these the singers-of-the-water the Floaters had hinted about?

Arms ending in tentacles dragged a load of muddy material on what looked like gigantic kelp leaves. The tentacles laced together in a kind of net around the leaf. As Ali circled around, Dane watched two creatures pull their tentacles away, shake off their leaves, depositing on the beach a huge mound of the ore eggs.

"That's got to be from quake-caused cracks in the ocean bottom," Ali said.

As they circled again, Dane saw Gleef and Shoshu zoom their flitter down next to the piles, and begin loading the eggs into the back pods'.

"Where are they taking that?" Dane asked.

"The Queen. Soon's you see the spritzers, your job is to supervise getting all this stowed for liftoff, cargo master."

Was that the nagging feeling that something was amiss? But that was just his job; already a part of his brain was totting up possible numbers and trying to calculate ma.s.s and storage. Then he realized the Traders would be bringing all their equipment-or as much as they could-and he whistled softly to.himself.

Ali's brows slanted. "Thinking of storm versus weight? I thank the lords of s.p.a.ce daily that I never chose piloting for my career," he commented breezily and pulled up with a sudden lurch. No one could call his piloting soft, Dane thought, smiling to himself as Ali added, "Time to see our people in action."

Dane looked up, realized they'd reached the Queen again. The craft settled near the ramp to the ship's cargo bay, and as the two emerged, one of the Traders ran down the ramp and waited.

"All yours," Ali said, and he and Dane took off at a swift walk north of the Queen, threading their way among the quiescent Floaters, vast mounds of wrinkled flesh festooned with lichen and even small flowering plants. Dane noticed movement in the floral pelt of a Floater as he pa.s.sed it, saw insects and even what looked like a furry worm-there was an entire ecology there!

And its continued existence depended on the Trade.

He looked up at Ali, a question forming in his mind. The engineer's lips quirked sardonically. "Tau says there's no way the Floaters can get away now without our help. And without the Floaters, sentience on Hesprid IV will die, and the planet will be just another hunk of rock and swarming mindless-ness."

Dane shook off the feeling of impending danger. Action- the need to take action gripped him with invisible claws.

When they reached the last of the Floaters at the edge of the forest, they found Stotz and Tazcin waiting at the head of a long line of what looked like small piles of translucent red spaghetti. Stotz's face, glimpsed through his helmet, was taut; it was impossible to discern what Tazcin thought of the nearness of the creatures that had, however inadvertently, killed some of her crewmates.

Then Stotz picked up the first pile of spaghetti and shook it out. Now it resembled a squid's sac, its surface warty and gourdlike, with many long tentacles made of surgical var-itubing trailing the ground.

"We figure that the Floaters live partly off the EMP sent out by the piezoelectric cielanite ore matrix," Stotz said. "They use this energy to help heat their internal air s.p.a.ce and generate lift-works nicely, since they get more energy just when they need it, to flee the End Times."

He and Tazcin walked over to the nearest Floater. Stotz tossed the sack onto the center of the deflated creature; the tentacles unrolled and then, eerily, began to stretch and quest, like snakes, toward the edges of the Floater.

"Their ability to modulate this energy makes it easy for them to control the varitubing, since the surgical tool that sizes it uses similar electrical fields."

Now Dane could hear a kind of muted belch coming from the creature as ripples coursed through its lichen-covered pelt. Its upper surface began to swell as it took in air. Stotz and Tazcin moved gingerly to opposite sides of the Floater, and Ali and Dane, following the big mechanic's directions, arrayed themselves along the other quarters of the Floater. They began pulling down the tubes all the way to the edge, where small pseudopods sprouted to hold the ends, which curled up and back, ending in small limpetlike sh.e.l.ls.

Stotz stepped back and motioned them away from the Floater, which now had swollen to a height of over a meter.

"The moisture is needed for the EM conversion, evidently, although we can't quite figure out all the reaction pathways, as well as protection against the heat of the fires that regenerate the trees." He paused dramatically. "Thus."

After a brief pause, the Floater's pelt twitched, and the squid-sack began pulsing visibly and emitting a droning hum. Dane smiled as Johan grinned broadly at him. The sound was very like one of the drones on Steen Wilc.o.x's bagpipe.

"What, couldn't you grow it in tartan?" said Dane.

To his surprise, Tazcin spoke. "Would not. Not esthetic." And suddenly Dane realized the Tath was making a joke; the first he'd ever heard from the taciturn Trader.

Slowly fog boiled up over the Floater, issuing out of minute holes in the sh.e.l.ls at the ends of the varitubing tentacles of the hybrid creature/machine Ali had called a spritzer. And the swelling of the Floater accelerated.

Dane stepped back; he could feel the heat as the creature radiated its internal s.p.a.ce with modulated EM from the approaching storm and the aurora blazing overhead. The ground shook suddenly, then again, more strongly, and the Traders leapt into action, carrying the spritzers to each of the quiescent Floaters and shaking them out, two people to each creature. As they worked, members of both crews joined them, and the work went more and more quickly. At first, some of the others flinched away from the Floaters as they drifted overhead, but soon urgency possessed them and they no longer noticed them.

For there were many more Floaters than Traders, and the eastern sky was rapidly filling with clouds as they worked, the sound of thunder a jaw-aching background to their every move. High lightning flared more and more often, picking out the shimmer of the Floaters cl.u.s.tered overhead and the glistening slickness of the Traders' haz suits and the water beading on the Tath fur from the spritzers.

Now the entire clearing was filling with fog; they waded through white mystery that swirled slowly about their waists, for the wind had fallen, and an eerie stillness possessed the air around them despite the growing electrical fury above. The only sound was the growing drone of the spritzers, like a hive of enormous bees. In the darkness between the trees, branches and leaves glowed with coronal light, eerie ghost flickers of the flames to come.

"I hope that's enough to see them through the fire," Stotz said as the last of the Floaters drifted up from the ground. He watched them; Dane suddenly noted the red light blinking on his helmet and realized the engineer had been recording their work with a vidcam.

For a moment the vast creatures hovered overhead, and Dane felt a pressure in his head. He was intensely aware of the other three Traders in the psi link, though no one spoke.

Then the sensation abated, and the Floaters drifted higher, letting the wind blocked by the trees take them away west-ward like scudding clouds, the lighting and auroral discharge lighting them with nacreous colors and highlighting the vapors trailing from them. Slowly the drone of the spritzers died away, leaving only the rustle and slap of leaves in the rising wind and the growl of distant thunder.

"We'd better get to work," said Dane. "Lots of stowage."

Rip merely nodded-Dane was in charge now. As cargo master, he had the responsibility of deciding what they could take on board, and what must be left behind, and how to stow the former to avoid disaster during the acceleration of liftoff.

They followed him back to the Queen at a run, and for the next several hours Dane was busier than he'd ever been in his life.

The Traders couldn't help, for they were used to calculating storage for the Ariadne, whose design was completely different. Dane sat at his computer in the cargo bay, where Jan Van Ryke had reigned for so many years, and calculated ma.s.ses to several decimal places-a couple of orders of magnitude beyond what he thought might be safe. Ma.s.s storage had to be exact, with the center of gravity along the long axis of the Queen's needle shape.

First came the "ore, close to the axis, and when it was loaded, then the Traders' belongings farther out. Everyone worked like demons, even Tooe; her little blue body seemed to be everywhere at once, stowing, measuring, sealing, lifting far beyond her spindly strength.

As the Traders kept bringing their equipment aboard, he grimaced; and an hour later he reluctantly summoned Lossin and issued a ma.s.s cutoff.

"Ten kilograms more per person," he said.

The Traders did not argue. They had loaded the material in order of importance, except for personal belongings. Silently, they went out to the staging area and began sorting through their keepsakes, deciding what would have to be left behind, and what taken. This tacit acceptance of his decree made Dane feel all the worse, and he worked hard to com-pensate, helping to rearrange things as items were brought on board to gain an additional ma.s.s allowance.

Rip kept sending queries over the comlink. Dane had ignored the last couple of them, meaning to get back as soon as he finished this or that ch.o.r.e-which always led to another, and another. At length Rip came down in person. Dane realized the navigator had been standing there for half a minute before he comprehended his presence, and looked up.

Rip said tersely, "It's now."

"But-"

"Or never."

It was then that Dane realized the vibrating of the ship was not from the transfer of cargos, for they were down to smaller items now. Thunder roared, racketing seemingly endlessly across the sky behind a flare of purple-white light that glared through the lock and the silver rain now falling with increasing force.

He shook his head and closed down the computer with a swipe of his hand. The other hand activated the general com, and he said, "Everyone to stations and strap in for liftoff."

He and Rip made the rounds, seeing that everyone was secured, and then Dane went back down to the cargo bay. He checked on Tooe, who was unwontedly solemn as she strapped herself into the apprentice couch. He brought up the control deck on his vidscreen, strapped in, and waited.

On his screen he saw Rip strap down, run his hands once down his trousers, then look over at Lossin, who was running the com. They had all decided earlier that this liftoff required both engineers and their jet tech to be on hand for emergencies: Ali, Johan, and Jasper were in the engine compartment.

"Stand by to release cables," said Rip. They'd decided to sacrifice the guy-bots in the interest of both ma.s.s and a fast liftoff. "On my mark, in fifteen seconds." As he spoke his hands flashed across the console, and the ship trembled as the side thrusters came to life.

"Ten seconds." A puff of smoke came out from under the ship; Dane had his side screen tuned to the external vids. The jets muttered softly; Dane could visualize Johan hunched over his displays, alert for any sign of trouble as the pressure built.

"Five seconds."

Now a great gout of smoke and steam sprayed out from beneath the Queen. Dane could see good-sized rocks bouncing and shattering as they rolled away from the blast. Beyond, abandoned equipment began to smolder, flaps of plasweave blistering and fluttering away like flaming bats. Dane saw what he thought was a musical instrument among the abandoned personal effects flare up and crumble into embers fleeing ahead of the shock wave as the jets coughed again. The Queen trembled and creaked, the jets thundered and then screamed, the sound winding up, "Two. one. Mark!"

There was a triple-stutter explosive crack as the cables blew away from the ship and the Queen leaped into the air. Rip slammed the jet feeds forward; for an agonizing moment the ship seemed to hover, then slowly-Dane felt it through his body-continued lifting.

Vibrations shuddered violently through the ship, and Dane hunched unbreathing over the computer screen, watching his sensor readings lest anything shake loose, or shift, which could be disastrousnander acceleration.

The lights stayed gold, though the shuddering increased to a drumming, as the side screen showed Hesprid IV rapidly dwindling below, lightning flaring and lighting up the clouds from beneath. Air screamed past the hull like a mad organist's toccata-then the shuddering intensified for a moment, and abruptly stopped. They'd gone transsonic, outpacing the sound of their flight. Dane imagined the double boom of their shock wave slapping at the Floaters, now far below as the Queen clawed for s.p.a.ce.

Chapter Twenty-One.

Dane felt a little of his tension ebb, and he drew in a deep breath while twisting his aching neck from side to side- without removing his gaze from his console. Liftoff was usually when something broke Murphy's Law, especially when the loading had been done in haste.