"You know this word?"

"Yeah, sure, but what am I supposed to be witnessing?"

"Everything that I have done. You have seen it. You will see more. You will remember it and inform your superiors. If you live. Let them know that they were defeated by the ultimate nervous system."

Rhem noticed absently that tentacles were surging out the doors and down the hallways, down every hole. There were tentacles surging away. Something big was taking shape.

Was that what they were, then? Just nerves, and things to feed and control nerves with?

But then wasn't that true of all animal life?

Rhem reached in his pocket for more of those little yellow triangles

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO.

LUISA CHANG WAS LOOKING THROUGH A REPORT ON THE investigations of the Arntage Series conducted by the suspected alien visitor to Cowdray University. She had a private minicabin to herself and the Strand, aboard a long-range shuttle that was closing in fast on the Empress Wu.

On the forward viewscreen selection the Wu could be seen already, in computer-enhanced mode: a moon of heavy metal, etched with the dark voids around each of the four huge modules that made up the ship's spherical body.

Chang was running through the star charts from the Arntage Series and examining the patterns of magnification and tracking that the customer at the university library using the identity of Jaad Benuil had followed.

The central stars on each projection were a small cluster, roughly spherical in shape and about twenty light-years across. There had once been a trio of blue-white giants, but these had long since disappeared.

All the biggest stars had become dwarfs or neutron stars since then, and only the yellow, orange, and red stars remained.

This cluster had held together for a long time, orbiting the galactic center for billions of years. It was a long way off, too, beyond the Orion arm, inward to the center.

The cluster had been examined in detail several times by the Benuil creditcard customer. The homeworld of the Directive 115 alien had to be located there.

Following her report to Scopus Central, Chang had been ordered to rendezvous with the Empress Wu immediately, with as much of the 624 OSF as was available. If necessary the Wu was to be seized in a military action. Admiral Heldheim was to be placed under arrest, and with him a certain Captain Cachester.

While she unshipped from the orbiter and began climbing the gravity well, Tohoto and his colleagues began the negotiations with Fleet High Command that would cover this emergency and the need to remove the obstreperous Heldheim.

Before Tohoto could finish that process there came the electrifying news. Something was attacking the Empress Wu, but what it was hard to understand.

The people on the bridge there were caught flat-footed, not expecting anything. The tentacles grabbed them before the first alarms even began blaring.

Beyond the Wu's control network chaos broke out. The ship's AI went down. All contact with the computer section was lost.

Somebody managed to scream something into the commo channels about "tentacles," but then all contact with the Empress Wu was lost.

A few minutes later there were mayday signals coming from personnel evac units drifting in the Wu's wake while the ominous silence from the ship itself continued.

Closest ship to the Wu was the long-range jumper Shaka. Shaka's armament included nuclear weapons, and these were ordered readied at once.

At the same time, Captain Ton was informed that a Captain Cachester was the nearest person in an evac bag.

Tracking pods were fired ahead. A rescue unit brought in Cachester and a woman who was floating not far from him.

Luisa Chang's shuttle altered course to avoid the Empress Wu.

Tohoto ordered Chang to get aboard the Shaka immediately.

Shaka was very close; the shuttle shifted orbit and closed on Chang joined the rest of the system, and Scopus Cluster command, in watching open-mouthed as the Empress Wu floated there, silent and inscrutable.

Chang had told Tohoto that she was convinced it was seeking its homeworld.

Tohoto agreed; so, more importantly, did Uni-Ten-One, the Cluster Command resident AI.

The cluster that Chang had noticed was targeted. Two sector battle fleets were mobilized and sent on to that cluster.

Meanwhile the nuclear torpedoes were sent hurtling in toward the Empress Wu.

A few seconds later they were detected by the Battlemaster, who knew the doom they represented.

The Battlemaster was now the central component of a vast tentacular assault form, a krakenoid thing the size of a blimp, filling more and more of the internal space of the Empress Wu as it consumed the humans aboard and their food stores.

The ship was under its control, but there were vital codes missing. Only the ship's commander could know the Baadadrive initiation codes and the weapons-initiation codes. This the Battlemaster knew from the ITAA Methods of Command manual, which it had read from cover to cover just recently.

Rhem Kerwillig was told to find the ship commander. After a look over the huddled crew persons taken from the bridge, Rhem decided that Heldheim had to be the top dog. He had on the white and gray uniform of the high brass, and he had three little sunbursts in gold on his lapel. Nobody else had gold on their uniforms.

Rhem pointed him out.

A tentacle flashed past him into the small room in which the crew were penned up. With a wail of terror Admiral Heldheim was plucked up and dangled by one leg in front of a wall of pink flesh that completely occupied the rest of the room.

Rhem meanwhile was digging a soda out of the ice chest that the Reena creature had brought back for him.

Since the soccer ball "head" had pronounced him to be the "witness," conditions had improved. The Reena thing had brought him whatever he asked for. Beer and bologna had been his latest request.

He found another cherriade and cracked it open.

"To the 'witness,' " he said in toasting himself.

Heldheim was gurgling.

Rhem knew what the Battlemaster wanted, despite the chemically induced haze he was floating in.

Heldheim was getting purple in the face. "Better put him down," Rhem said to the soccer ball.

Flower growths flexed.

The tentacle relaxed and lowered Heldheim to the floor and set him upright.

"Who are you?" Heldheim babbled.

"Doesn't matter who I am, friend. You were on the bridge and you have to be the commanding officer of this ship."

Heldheim shuddered; suddenly he knew what was coming.

"It wants to know the Baada-drive actuation codes."

"Oh, no, no, I can't give those up."

Rhem swigged cherriade and wished he had that beer.

"Look, if you don't tell it what it wants to know it will hurt you. Believe me when I tell you that it knows how to hurt someone. I've heard people scream at the top of the their lungs for as long as ten minutes at a time. Can you imagine that?"

The admiral sobbed, holding his face in his hands.

The tentacle slithered around his middle and gripped him tight.

Heldheim begged for his life.

Rhem waved at him and spoke to the Battlemaster. "He wants to live. "

The sphincter spoke suddenly, in shocking, wet sibilants.

"Give me codes, now."

Heldheim's eyes bugged out of his head. After he got his breath back he looked at Rhem.

"What the hell is it?" he whispered.

"It calls itself a Battlemaster, that's all I know. It's changed shape several times."

The tentacle gripped tight again.

With heavy heart and quavering voice Heldheim gave up the thirteen digit number.

A few moments later, seconds away from nuclear destruction, the Empress Wu went into Baada drive and spun out of the Wexel system and away through the mesh lines of space and time.

The nuclear torpedoes did not detonate.

Instead the Shaka's tracking pods framed the Wu's precise Baada "direction" and energy dump. Within a half minute Shaka jumped in pursuit. There was not a second to waste. It was imperative that Shaka get to wherever the Empress Wu had gone before Wu jumped again, because then they would lose the direction and have only the energy dump to measure, and they would never find Wu again with only one of those parameters.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE.

THE EMPRESS WU JUMPED FORTY LIGHT-YEARS, SIDEWAYS across the cluster. Shaka followed seconds later and emerged in a red-dwarf system with no planets.

Almost as soon as Shaka appeared close by, the Wu jumped again. Shaka was only just able to get coordinates before jumping. She squibbed out the message in high-speed blurt at jump time to Scopus Central and emerged again in a binary system. Two hot young giant stars blazed only a few hundred million klicks away.

Empress Wu was jumping again, with a spray of nuclear-tipped torpedoes moving away from her position.

Shaka neutralized the nearest missiles and hung on in pursuit. She dropped high-speed blurt behind with each jump, but as the chase moved farther away from the Scopus cluster she left behind all effective assistance from the ITAA military.

In the small, crowded bridge Chang felt her heart sink as she watched the schematic of their flight across the galaxy.

They were heading in the opposite direction from the cluster that had so interested the wielder of the Benuil credit card.

She realized with a sick feeling that she'd been taken, hooked once again on a deceptive lure. Always this opponent moved behind a feint, a diversionary attack or a false trail. So far she had fallen for it every time.

Meanwhile relations with Captain Ton were not the best. The Shaka was not a large ship; she had a crew of six and little spare accommodation. Her role in combat was high-speed system streaking. With two squads of the 624 OSF in full combat armor on board, the ship was stuffed. Add to that Chang and her entourage, which still included Darel Hopester, who continued filming everything, and the ship was jam-packed.

Captain Ton had his own prejudices, and dirtside colonels who were beating up on Fleet Officers were one of his pet hates. Cachester's tale of woe concerning Colonel Chang was enough to make Ton's hair stand on end.

Nor did he care for the sight and sound of heavyset space marines in combat gear clanking around his ship.

And yet he was a serious man and he understood that these were serious times. This was not the moment to carry on the good fight between Fleet and dirtsiders.

And yet there was something about this Chang that was very hard to take. She had a definite attitude.

He knew she came with a red-hot combat record and everything, but no Fleet captain could easily accept taking orders from a dirtside colonel, especially one who carried on as if she were ordained to command.

Chang made no allowances and gave orders like she expected them obeyed, unquestioningly.

On top of all this resentment, he was still swallowing his utter astonishment at finding that this whole Directive 115 thing was for real.

And now the Wu had been hijacked. Admiral Heldheim had either gone mad or had been taken over by some alien lifeform that had gotten his ship's drive codes directly from his brain.

Ton knew that no Fleet admiral would give up his codes before he gave up his life.

The absolutely worst moment had been shortly after Chang came aboard, when she took him aside and chewed him out for picking up the people in the evac bags. The fact that it turned out to be Cachester himself along with the prime suspect in the creation of the Directive 115 threat, Professor Reese, in those bags had made no difference at that point.

Chang was obsessed with infiltration just then. They could have lost the Shaka just as easily as the Wu.

Eventually she was mollified somewhat by the result of the interrogations of Reese and Cachester.

"A krakenoid form, " Chang said in wonder.

"A body dispersed around the interior of the whole ship. "

"Something like that infested the Starhammer once. It was very weak because it had been dormant for aeons, cut off from the outside world. "

Empress Wu jumped again and they only just caught her direction path before she was gone. Once more they jumped in pursuit, a vast distance this time, causing a huge energy dump.

They emerged in a small system; a dim red dwarf held a handful of planets around it. It was not a star that had ever been visited by either humans or laowon.