The Reena thing went out on reconnaissance and returned to report very little activity in this section of the hostform reef concentration.

They continued to wait, sitting in the dark interior of the ATV.

Rhem dozed.

He shuddered back to wakefulness hours later. His neck and shoulder ached from sleeping in a cramped position.

The Larshel thing spoke.

"You will accompany us into the library. You will speak for us."

It fitted.

"Yeah, I figured that was what you would want."

"We are on research project. We need access to star catalogues."

"Star catalogues, we're going on a trip, are we?"

"Star catalogues. If you try and escape we will kill you at once. You understand?"

It was a surreal experience. The things did not walk like human beings, they were too stiff or too loose, nothing was quite tight.

But Rhem moved just ahead of them, into the library. He established identities for them, explaining that they were members of a cult of Dervish, under a religious obligation not to speak for a year. He was their spokesperson. The libranan remarked that she thought she'd seen everything but this was new.

The Jaad Benuil fuel card served as credit card once more, and since there was no security clearance required for the star catalogues they were soon seated around a holo-vid table with a stellar projection passing through its inky simulation of space.

The Larshel creature had a specific set of catalogue entries that it wanted to view.

Rhem caught sight of the tagline, "Arntage Crystal Stellar-Regression Series."

These were a number of mobile star maps, showing a group of stars, mostly bright ones, in speeded-up motion. Most of them were heading in one direction-Rhem assumed that was the orbital drift around the galaxy-while a few contrary suns were moving in the other direction.

The stars moved in their enormous orbits. There were more than a hundred mobile maps in the Arntage Series. Rhem was soon bored to tears. The Larshel and Reena creatures, however, continued to study the moving microlights with total absorption.

Rhem dozed; the Arntage Series, painstakingly worked out two thousand years before, continued shuttling through the holovid projector.

CHAPTER THIRTY.

THE BATTLEMASTER HAD MADE CAREFUL PLANS. THE situation demanded nothing less than the utmost care. The Battlemaster's central nodes were an irreplaceable resource, at least in the short term. Given enough time the Secondary Form would grow replacements, but for the duration of the immediate operation the Battlemaster was alone.

Unfortunately the human central intelligence's were equipped with vast power. The humans were a constant puzzlement: they were grotesquely individual, but they were also capable of forming colony-organisms for decision making. What they were incapable of doing was obeying those decisions once made. There were no in built biochemical controls on human behavior. Their societies constantly verged on chaos and collapse. But from this disorganization came a dynamic, explosive society.

It was all very puzzling, and it necessitated the use of infiltration techniques to penetrate the human space-travel network.

Of course, everything in the Battlemaster's plan had been predicated on the initial success of the star search, using the painstakingly detailed Arntage Series of stellar regressions.

This enormous work had been done two thousand years previously, following a crisis event on a frontier planet. The Arntage series was nothing less than an attempt to map the progress of the galaxy's complement of stars through a billion years of history.

The Battlemaster had studied the history of the "Saskatch horror," on the encyclopedia memory module that it found in the house of Jaad Benuil.

The frontier planet had been overwhelmed by a small force of Imperial Military Form. The Battlemaster had no doubts of this. However, this Military Form had gravely underestimated the humans. The frontier planet had been invested by an enormous fleet and reduced from orbit to end the threat.

From what was known of the method of attack the Battlemaster was able to hazard a guess that it originated with a single Military Form, and that it had mistaken the cultural level of the humans that discovered it and provided it with its first hostforms.

It had cost the humans a habitable world, a precious resource, but it had been utterly annihilated in the end.

An Imperial Navigation Crystal had been recovered and analyzed, however. From it had been derived the core of the Arntage Series of star charts.

The Battlemaster had been impressed with the depth of the effort involved in the compilation of these charts. The object of the humans had been to discover the homeworld of the Empire of the Gods of Axone-Neurone.

The humans had discovered the purpose of the crystal quite quickly. They had then attempted to define each star by its spectral class. This was a much more difficult task since the crystal did not project true colors.

Once they believed they had achieved this, they projected each star's likely future, through its evolution along the main sequence and then off into the giant and dwarf phases.

It was believed that the events of the Starhammer War had occurred approximately one billion years before. At a time when there was no life beyond the single-celled upon the Earth.

Most of the stars on the crystal star charts had long since raced through their lives and shifted to either dwarf or the grander exotica of the universe, neutron stars and black holes.

So they had searched for groups and patterns in the known black holes and neutron stars to find matchups with the ancient bright stars. Black holes, of course, were well known; as the essential loci of the original Deep Link system, all the holes in the ancient human region had been carefully observed and catalogued. This study had reached out to include a great many holes observed elsewhere in the galaxy, and thus there was a strong data base concerned with them.

When a hole was found to match closely with the predicted size and nature of one of the ancient stars in the Imperial Crystal chart, its motions around the galactic core were charted backward to see if it might fit into the projections from the crystal.

All this required enormous computational resources. The computations for tracking the vast multitude of dwarfs were even more onerous.

Worse, the location of many dwarfs was unknown; this catalogue was far from complete, even in the era of the ITAA star culture.

Disappointment ultimately overcame the project. A few matchups were established, but there was much that remained hazy, too fouled by unknowns to produce worthwhile data.

The searchers gave up at last, after the death of Rieben Arntage, the human that gave his name to the Series.

The Battlemaster wondered what had driven this particular human to make such a prodigious, long-term effort. It seemed unlike the general pattern of human behaviors.

In its own search through the Arntage Series the Battlemaster had a significant advantage: it knew the ancient location of the homestar on the imperial galactic grid.

After some work it had established a match between the Imperial grid and the human mapping system.

The star it sought still burned, fainter now, but still recognizable. Through the Arntage series of drift evolutions this star could be charted. It was small, an orange star. Insignificant, and never identified with anything important, at least not within the Arntage Series material.

It had been the distant partner of an F-class star that had long since become a white dwarf. The K star was now the major partner, and its galactic orbit bad changed slightly as a result.

The Arntage Series allowed the Battlemaster to find the homestar once again-a steady orange flame against the galactic dark.

That such information should be so freely available continued to astonish the Battlemaster. But it had been amazed from the beginning at the openness of the radio spectrum and the wealth of information webworks that laced the chaotic human culture.

The Battlemaster felt giddy whenever it contemplated this chaos. Billions of free-willed beings clashed along the planes of the matrix formed by their economic and social choices. Wild fractal patterns loomed out of this statistical mass.

Free choice of life habits, untrammeled freedom to reproduce, and freedom to travel, even between the stars, for those with sufficient value units.

It was as if the competitive struggle between the high forms should be spread to encompass all forms within the Empire of the Gods of Axone-Neurone. As if all levels were to be privy to First Level secrets and allowed to act upon them!

As if all forms should have reproductive rights!

The idea was bizarre, and actually frightening with its implication that such social chaos could even be culturally successful. These humans had spread across an enormous volume of the galaxy, a much greater volume than that attained by the Empire.

They must be doing something right.

The Battlemaster gave the equivalent of a mental shrug. These were gentler times, perhaps. They faced nothing equivalent to the great Batrachian enemy.

And so they were soft and the Empire might yet be reborn.

Their chaoticism would stand little chance against the blade of the Imperial will once it was reforged and armed with the new technologies of this incredible era.

And yet the humans were liable to surprise one.

Thus the Battlemaster faced an unexpected problem. Despite a constant drumroll of broadcast warnings to the population not to panic, they had panicked very thoroughly indeed. In exact opposition to their commands from above they had packed into their mobile vehicles and fled to the nearest spaceport at the news that an alien creature was running amok in the distant Ruinart Mountains and that Wexel was under the infamous Directive 115.

The nearest spaceport was entirely surrounded by stalled vehicles jammed solid on the access roads. It would be difficult to reach the base and it would be even more difficult to get off-planet.

The Battlemaster had considered lying low until the immediate panic died down. But eventually it returned to the original plan. It was vital to make the escape now. There was a trail of evidence behind it, from the farmhouses to the box canyon by the Klimatee.

Moreover, this panic showed that the humans were already widely aware of the threat posed to them by the existence of the Battlemaster on their planet. Their central organs would inevitably respond with all their terrific power. The chaotic frenzy would die down and the organs would move into the ascendancy and escape would be impossible.

To stay here, therefore, would invite eventual discovery and death, or worse, capture.

Once it was sure of the homestar's likely location, the Battlemaster moved on to the next phase of the plan, entering a spaceport and getting a shuttle offplanet.

But to get to the spaceport in this panic meant bypassing the surface.

The Battlemaster scanned the skies. Aircraft of many shapes and sizes were in motion.

Once more it was Rhem Kerwillig's turn to tremble as the Battlemaster turned its attention upon him.

"How can we obtain possession of an aircraft?"

Rhem gulped. "I dunno, I'll have to think about it."

They had left the library before noon and set out on the approach highway to CK Air&Space. They'd soon bogged down in terrible traffic. An hour or more had taken them barely five miles.

Rhem turned it over in his mind. How was he going to walk these two inhuman-behaving critters on board an aircraft that would get them to the spaceport?

"Downtown," he said after a while. "fly to get aboard a corporate chopper. Most of the big towers have chopper parks on top."

The Battlemaster nodded. Downtown was opposite to the panic flow of traffic.

The ATV wheeled about and crossed the meridian on its big wheels and headed north once more, back into the city center.

In less than an hour a suitable corporate building had been selected. Small helicopters were coming to and from the roof almost constantly. A crowd was gathered in the street outside the building; these were the employees of the corporation, for the most part.

"You will assist us in getting aboard aircraft," the Battlemaster informed Rhem. "If you try to escape you will be killed."

Rhem was then pressed to help them plan their way into the building. There were armed guards at every entrance. Rhem suggested they seek out an executive elevator bank. Perhaps one connected the roof and the underground car park beneath the building.

They drove through a barrier and down a ramp.

Astonished guards opened fire and set out in pursuit.

The ATV was swung around the ramps at top speed until it was three levels down. Then the Battlemaster abandoned it.

With Rhem Kerwillig in tow the Battlemaster ripped open a locked fire door, displaying an inhuman strength that made Rhem gasp, and then set off up the emergency stairs.

Rhem was also left gasping by the speed of their ascent on these stairs. When he started to fall behind the Reena thing seized him by the arm and dragged him up the stairs at her own swift pace.

From the emergency stairs they emerged into an exit corridor at ground level. Here they turned inward, into the building, breaking open a door at one point to gain access to an elevator lobby.

The lobby was occupied by a small group of people who stood there, horrified, when they broke the door in. They were frozen while these intruders waited with them for the elevator.

Everyone simply wanted to get to the roof and to the line for the choppers to the suburban car park.

Everyone just wanted to get home safely to their families.

Rhem, on the other hand, just wanted to get his lungs filled with air. The sweat was pouring off his brow and puddling in his shoes. He thought his heart might burst.

They stood there, the three of them, sides heaving, breath sobbing into tortured lungs while the executives tried to ignore them and the elevator rose smoothly to the roof.

They exited to a wide vista of the city in late afternoon. The tower had few peers in the Cowdray-Kara tower park, and the views were spectacular.

The roof was a rectangle divided by a rooftop lounge. On one side was an executive lunch garden. On the other was the chopper park. The elevator banks opened in a separate structure adjacent to the lounge blister.

The garden was crowded with executives waiting for their chopper out to the suburbs. Everyone had found some excuse to leave early that day. The Battlemaster pushed forward, elbowing through the crowd. A line of humans was moving along from the glass-walled lounge to the entry gates to the chopper park.

Another helicopter took off with a whoosh and thrum and whirled away from the tower top.

The lounge interior was also jammed with humans. The Battlemaster grew concerned. How were they going to get to the choppers?

It studied the lounge structure, a blister with a green metallic roof that jutted up from the deck of the tower roof. On the far side of that blister were the aircraft. There were dorsally positioned skylights running the length of the blister. If one could break through one of those skylights one might climb down on the other side.

It seemed the only feasible solution, other than trying to infiltrate through the gates. Kerwillig cautioned against that; they lacked identification cards.

The Battlemaster briefly conversed with the Secondary Form and then told the human to follow and not to try anything if it wished to live.

They pushed through into the lounge and headed for the central region. There were kitchens and storage rooms there; the kitchens were deserted, most doors were locked. The Battlemaster pushed the hostform that had once been Larshel Deveaux into a superhuman effort once again and broke the lock on a door into an empty kitchen area behind the rooftop restaurant.