"I don't know. We don't have any scope that can slew fast enough to track it overhead." He started back toward the stairs. "Maybe we could use the ten-inch."

"Yeah!" Shepry raced around him- "Button your breather! Watch the power cords!"

-and was out of sight, banging up the stairs.

But the little cobblie was right! There were fewer than two minutes until the object was directly overhead, then a couple more before it was gone again. Huh. Maybe not even time for the scope. Nethering paused, grabbed a widefield 4-ocular from his desk. Then he was running up the stairs after Tripper.

Topside, there was a faint breeze, a cold that bit like tarant fangs, even through his electric leggings. The sun would rise in about seventy minutes; dim though its light was, the best part of his observing time would be gone. For once it just didn't matter. Serendipity was up from the good cold earth this night.

There was at most a minute until the mystery came overhead. It should be well above the horizon now, gliding southward toward them. Nethering moved around the curved wall of the main dome, and stared into the north. From the equipment closet ahead of him, he heard Shepry struggling with the ten-inch, the little scope they showed the tourists. He should be helping the child, but there was really no time.

Familiar starfields extended crystal clear down to the horizon. That clarity was, for Obret Nethering, what made this little island truly paradise. There should be a fleck of reflected sunlight rising slowly across the sky. It would be very faint; the dead sun was such a pale thing. Nethering stared and stared, straining for the slightest motion-triggered gleam... Nothing. Maybe he should have stuck with the radar, maybe right now they were missing their one chance to get really good data. Shepry had the ten-inch out of the closet now. He was struggling to get it aligned. "Help me, sir!"

They both had guessed wrong. Serendipity might be an angel, but she was a fickle one. Obret turned back to Shepry, a little ashamed for ignoring him. Of course, he was still watching the sky, the swath just short of the zenith where there should be a tiny speck of light. A bite of blackness flickered across the glowing pile of the Robber's Cluster. A bite of blackness. Something...huge.

All dignity forgotten, Nethering fell on his side, brought the 4-ocular up to his lesser eyes. But tonight it was all he had... He turned slowly, tracking along his guess at a skypath, praying he could recapture his target.

"Sir? What is it?"

"Shepry, look up...just look up."

The cobblie was silent for a second. "Oh!"

Obret Nethering wasn't listening. He had the thing in the 4-ocs field and all his attention was on keeping up with it, on seeing and remembering. And what he saw was an absence of light, a silhouette that raced across the galactic swath of star clouds. It was almost a quarter of a degree across. In the gap between star clouds it was invisible again...and then he saw it for another second. Nethering almost had a sense of the shape of it: a squat cylinder, downward-pointing, with a hint of complexity sticking out amidships.

Amidships.

The rest of its track crossed lonely starfields down to the southern horizon. Nethering tried in vain to follow it all the way. If it hadn't been for its crossing the Robber's Cluster, he might not have latched on to it at all. Thank you, Serendipity!

He lowered the 4-ocs and stood. "We'll keep watch a few more minutes." What other junk might be flying along with the thing?

"Oh, please, let me go below and put this on the net!" said the cobblie. "More than ninety miles up, and so big I could see its shape. It must be half a mile long!"

"Okay. Go ahead."

Shepry disappeared down the stairs. Three minutes passed. Four. There was a glint sliding across the southern horizon, most likely a Low-Comm S satellite. Nethering pocketed his 4-ocs and climbed slowly down the stairs. This time, Air Defense would have to listen to him. A good part of Nethering's contract money came from Accord Intelligence; he knew about the floater satellites the Kindred had recently begun launching. This is not one of ours, and not one of the Kindred's. And all our warfare is reduced to petty squabbling by this arrival. The world had been so close to nuclear war. And now...what? He remembered how old Underhill had gone on about the "deepness in the sky." But angels should come from the good cold earth, never from the empty sky.

Shepry met him at the bottom of the stairs. "It's no good, sir. I can't-"

"The link to the mainland is down?"

"No. It's up. But Air Defense brushed me off just like they did on the first pass."

"Maybe they already know."

Shepry jerked his hands in agitation. "Maybe. But something perved is happening on the gossips, too. The last few days, crank postings have pounded the ceiling. You know, end-of-the-world claims, snow-troll sightings. It's been kind of a laugh; I even did some counter-crapping of my own. But tonight the cranks have totally pounced." Shepry paused, seemed to run out of jargon. Suddenly he looked very young and uncertain. "It's...it's not natural, sir. I found two postings that described just what we saw. That's about what you'd expect for something that just happened over midocean. But they're lost in all crazy crap."

Hmm. Nethering walked across the room, settled down on his old perch beside the control bays. Shepry fidgeted back and forth, waiting for some judgment. When I first came to the observatory, the controls covered three walls, instruments and levers, almost all analog. Now most of the gear was tiny, digital, precise. Sometimes he joked with Shepry, asking him whether they should really trust anything they couldn't see the guts of. Shepry had never understood his lack of faith in computer automation. Until tonight.

"You know, Shepry, maybe we should make some phone calls."

FIFTY-ONE.

Hrunkner had been in a dry hurricane once before, during the Great War. But that had been on the ground-underground most of the time-and about all he remembered was the ceaseless wind and the fineness of the snow that swirled and piled, and penetrated every crevice and gap.

This time he was in the air, descending through forty thousand feet. In the dim sunlight, he could see the swirl of the hurricane spread across hundreds of miles, its sixty-mile-per-hour winds brought to stillness by distance. A dry hurricane could never equal the fury of a Bright Time water hurricane. Yet this kind of storm would last for years, its eye of cold widening and widening. The world's heat balance had paused on a kind of thermal plateau, water's energy of crystallization. Once past this plateau, temperatures would fall steadily toward the next, much colder level, where the air itself began to dew out.

Their jet slid down toward the walls of cloud, bucking and slewing on invisible turbulence. One of the pilots remarked that the air pressure was less now than it had been at fifty thousand feet back over the Straits. Hrunkner tilted his head up to a window, looked almost directly ahead. In the hurricane's eye, sunlight glinted off motley snow and ice. There were also lights, the hot reds of Southland industry just below the surface.

Far ahead, a ragged edge of mountains pierced the clouds and there were colors and textures he hadn't seen since he and Sherkaner took their long-ago walk in the Dark.

The Accord Embassy at Southmost had its own airport, a four-mile-by-two-mile property just outside the city core. Even this was just a fragment of the enclave that colonial interests had held in previous generations. The remnant of empire was alternately an obstacle to friendly relations and an economic boost for both nations. To Unnerby it was just an overly short, oil-smudged strip of ice. Their converted bomber made the most exciting landing of Hrunkner's career, a rolling skid past an unending blur of snow-covered warehouses.

The General's pilot was good, or very lucky. They came to a stop just a hundred feet short of snowdrifts that marked the no-more-excuses end of the runway. In minutes, beetle-shaped vehicles had driven up and were pulling them toward a hangar. Not a single person walked about in the open. Away from their path, the ground glittered with CO2 frost.

Inside the cavernous hangar, the lights were bright and-once the doors were shut-ground crews rushed out with stairs. There were a few fancy-looking cobbers down there, waiting by the base of the stairs. Very likely the Accord ambassador and the head of the embassy guards. Since they were still on Accord ground, it was unlikely that any Southlanders would be here... Then he saw the parliamentary ensign on the jackets of two of the VIPs. Someone was eager beyond the bounds of clever diplomacy.

The mid-hatch was opened; a bolus of frigid air spilled into the cabin. Smith had already gathered up her gear and was climbing back to the hatch. Hrunkner remained on his perch a moment longer. He waved at one of the Intelligence techs. "Have there been any more nukes?"

"No, sir, nothing. We've got confirmation up and down the net. It was an isolated, one-megaton burst."

The NCO Club at Lands Command was a bit out of the ordinary. Lands Command was more than a day's drive from civilian entertainment, and the post had a fat budget compared to most out-of-the-way places. The average noncom at Lands Command was likely to be a tech with at least four years of academic training, and many of the troopers here worked at the deepmost Command and Control Center, several stories beneath the club. So, there were the usual game tables and gym sets and fizzbar, but there were also a good book collection and a number of net-connected arcade games that could also be used as study stations.

Victory Lighthill slouched in the dimness behind the fizzbar and watched the panorama of commercial video on the far wall. Maybe the most unusual thing about the club was that she was allowed in. Lighthill was a junior lieutenant, the natural bane and antagonist of many NCOs. Yet the tradition here was that if an officer covered her rank and was invited in by a noncom, then that officer's presence was tolerated.

Tolerated, but in Lighthill's case, not really welcomed. Her team's reputation for inspection raids and its special connection with the Director of Intelligence made the average cobber uneasy about her and the team. But hey, the rest of the team were noncoms. Right now they were scattered around the club, each with a bulging departure pannier. For once, the other NCOs were talking to them, if not actually socializing. Even the ones who weren't in Intelligence knew that things were teetering on the edge-and the ever-mysterious Lighthill team must surely have inside knowledge.

"It's Smith down there at Southmost," said a senior sergeant sitting at the bar. "Who else could it be?" He tipped his head in the direction of one of Lighthill's corporals and waited for some reaction. Corporal Suabisme just shrugged, looking very innocent and-by trad standards-indecently young. "I wouldn't be knowing, Sergeant. I truly wouldn't."

The senior sergeant waved his eating hands in a sneer. "Oh? So how come you Lighthill flunkies are all carrying departure bags? I'd say you're just waiting to hop on a plane for someplace."

It was the sort of probing that would normally bring Viki into action, either to withdraw Suabisme or-if necessary-to shut the senior sergeant down. But in the NCO club, Lighthill had zero authority. Besides, the point of being here was to keep the team out of official sight. But after a moment, the senior sergeant seemed to realize he wasn't going to provoke any slips from the young soldier; he turned back to his buddies at the bar.

Viki let out a quiet sigh. She hunkered down until just the tops of her eyes were above the level of the fizzbar. The place was getting busy, the ping of spit in cuspidors a kind of background music. There was little talk, and even less laughter. Off-duty NCOs should be a more lively lot, but these cobbers had plenty on their minds. The center of attention was the television. The NCO cooperative had bought the latest variable-format video. In the dimness behind the bar, Viki smiled in spite of herself. If the world could survive even a few more years, such gear would be as good as the videomancy gear Daddy used.

The TV was sucking from a commercial news site. One window was a crude image from some rent-a-camera at the embassy airport at Southmost: the aircraft coasting down the embassy runway was a type that Lighthill herself had seen only twice before. Like many things, it was secret and obsolete all at the same time. The press scarcely commented on it. On the main window, an editorialist was congratulating herself on this journalistic coup, and speculating just who was aboard the daggercraft.

"...It's not the King himself, despite what our competitors may claim. Our coverage around the palace and at the Princeton airfields would have detected any movement of the Royal Household. So who is this now arriving at Southmost?" The announcer paused and the cameras moved closer, surrounding her forebody. The picture expanded to spill over the nearby displays. The maneuver gave the impression suddenly of intimate conversation. "We now know that the emissary is the head of the King's Own Intelligence Service, Victory Smith." The cameras backed off a little. "So, to the King's Information Officers, we say: You can't hide from the press. Better to give us full access. Let the people see Smith's progress with the Southlanders."

Another camera, from inside a hangar: Mom's daggercraft had been towed all the way into the embassy hangar, and the clamshell doors were being pulled shut. The scene looked like a diorama built from children's toys: the futuristic aircraft, the closed-body tractors chugging around the hangar's wide floor. No people were visible. Surely they don't have to pressurize the hangar? Even at the eye of the dry hurricane, the pressure couldn't be that low. But after a moment, soldiers popped out of a van. They pushed a stairway up to the side of the dagger. Everyone in the NCO Club became suddenly very quiet.

A soldier climbed to the aircraft's mid-hatch. It cracked open, and...the embassy rent-a-camera feed went dead, replaced by the King's seal.

There was startled laughter, then applause and hooting. "Good for the General!" someone shouted. As much as anyone, these cobbers wanted to know what was happening at Southmost, but they also had a long-standing dislike for the news companies. They regarded these latest, very open discussions as a personal affront.

She looked at her team members. Most had been watching the television, but without great interest. They already knew what was going on, and-as Senior Sergeant Loudmouth had speculated-they expected to see action themselves very soon. Unfortunately, the television couldn't help them with that. At the back of the room, far from the fizzbar and the television, a few hard-core gamers hung around their arcade boxes. That included three of Lighthill's people. Brent had been there since they began to loiter. Her brother was hunched down under a custom game display, the helmet covering most of his head. To look at him, you'd never guess that the world was teetering on the edge of destruction.

Viki slipped off her perch and walked quietly back toward the arcade machines.

In all its thirty-five-year existence, this was the booze parlor's finest moment. But, who knows, maybe after this we'll carry on, turn into a real business. Stranger things had happened. Benny's parlor had been the social center of their strange community at L1. Very soon that community would include another race, the first high-tech alien race Humankind had ever met. The parlor might well be the centerpiece of the marvelous combination.

Benny Wen floated from table to table, directing his helpers, greeting customers. Yet still occasionally his attention was off in a fabulous future, trying to imagine what it would be like to cater to Spiders.

"The bottom wing is out of brew, Benny." Hunte's voice came in his ear.

"Ask Gonle, Papa. She promised she'd cover whatever is needed." He looked around, caught a glimpse of Fong down a tunnel of flowers and vines, over in the east wing of the parlor.

Benny didn't hear his father's reply. He was already talking to the party of Emergents and Qeng Ho that floated down around the just-prepped table. "Welcome, welcome. Lara! I haven't seen you in so many Watches." Pride at showing off the parlor and pleasure at meeting old friends mixed all together, warming him.

After a moment's chat he drifted away from the table, to the next, and the next, all the time keeping track of the overall service situation. Even with Gonle and Papa both on duty, they were just barely keeping their helpers coordinated.

"She's here, Benny." Gonle's voice sounded in his ear.

"She came!" he replied. "I'll meet her at the front table!" He drifted in from the tables, toward the central cavity. All six cardinal points had customer wings. The Podmaster had allowed, encouraged, them to knock out walls and consume the volume that had been meeting rooms. The parlor was now the biggest single space on the temp. Except for the Lake Park, it was the biggest single living space at L1. Today, almost three-quarters of all the Emergents and Qeng Ho were on-Watch simultaneously, the climax of the rushed preparations for the Spider Rescue. And for a short time before the final push, virtually everyone was here at Benny's. The affair was as much a reunion as it was a rescue and a new beginning.

The central core of the parlor was an icosahedron of display devices, a tent of their best remaining video wallpaper. It was primitive and warmly communal at the same time. From all directions, his customers would look inward at the shared views. Benny glided quickly across the empty space, his feet just missing a corner of the displays. In the directions outward from here, he could see the hundreds of his customers, dozens of tables nestled among the vines and flowers. He grabbled a vine and brought himself to a graceful stop at a table on the up wing, at the edge of the empty core. "The table of honor" was how Tomas Nau had put it.

"Qiwi! Please, sit and be welcome!" He flipped over the table to float beside her.

Qiwi Lisolet smiled hesitantly back at Benny. By now she was five or six years older than he, but suddenly she seemed very young, uncertain. Qiwi was holding something close at her shoulder; it was one of the North Paw kittens, the first that Benny had ever seen outside of the Lake Park. Qiwi looked around the parlor, as if surprised to see the crowds. "So almost everyone is here."

"Yes we are! We're so glad you could come. You can give us the inside view of what's going on." A goodwill ambassador from the Podmaster. And Qiwi looked the part. No pressure-coveralls for Qiwi today. She wore a lacey dress that floated in soft swirls as she moved. Even at the Lake Park open house she hadn't looked so beautiful.

Qiwi sat hesitantly at the table. Benny sat down for a moment too, a courtesy. He handed her a control wand. "This is what Gonle gave me; sorry we don't have better." He pointed out the display and link options. "And this gives you voice access to all the parlor. Please use it. More than anyone here, you know what's going on."

After a moment, Qiwi took the wand. Her other hand held tight to the kitten. The creature wriggled its wings into a more comfortable position, but didn't otherwise complain. For years Qiwi had been the most popular of the Podmaster's inner circle. She wasn't really an ambassador; she was more like a princess. That was how Benny had once described her to Gonle Fong. Gonle had smirked cynically at the word, and then agreed with him. Qiwi was trusted by all, a gentle restraint on tyranny... And yet there were times when she seemed to be lost. Today was one of those times. Benny sat back in his seat. Let the others do some hustling for a bit. Somehow he knew that Qiwi needed his time more.

She looked up after a moment, a little of the old smile on her face. "Yes, I can run the show. Tomas showed me how." She loosened her grip on the kitten and patted his hand. "Don't worry, Benny. This rescue is a tricky thing, but we'll bring it off."

She played with the wand, and the display core of the parlor flared into announcement colors, the light splashing back onto the flowered vines. When she spoke, her voice came from a thousand microspeakers, phased so that she seemed at everyone's side. "Hello, everybody. Welcome to the show." Her voice was happy and confident, the Qiwi they all knew.

The display core was sorting itself into multiple views: Qiwi's face, Arachna as seen from the Invisible Hand, Podmaster Nau working at his lodge at North Paw, schematics of the Hand's orbit and the military configuration of the various Spider nations.

"As you know, our old friend Victory Smith has just arrived in Southland. In a few moments she'll be at their parliament, and we'll have a treat none of us have experienced before-a direct human-camera view from the ground. Finally, after all these years, we'll be seeing firsthand." On the big center display, Qiwi's face opened into a smile. "Think of it as a taste of things to come, the beginning of our life with the people of Arachna.

"But before we get to that point, you know we have a war to prevent, and our presence finally to reveal." She looked down at the displays, and her voiced hesitated, as if she were suddenly struck by the enormity of what they were attempting. "We have planned to announce ourselves in just over forty Ksec, when our low-orbit network manipulations are in place, and the Hand's orbit takes it over the capitals of both Kindred and Accord. I think you know how tricky it will be. The Spiders, our hoped-for friends, are poised on more dangerous ground than most human civilizations can survive. But I know you have prepared for this day well. When the time for announcement and contact comes, I know we will succeed.

"So, watch for now. Soon we will be very busy."

FIFTY-TWO.

Oddly enough, Rachner Thract retained his rank of colonel, not that former colleagues would trust him to scrape out their latrines. General Smith had treated him gently. They couldn't prove he was a traitor, and apparently she was unwilling to use extreme interrogation on him. So Colonel Rachner Thract, formerly of the unnamed service, found himself with a salary and per diem worthy of full duty...and nothing whatsoever to do.

It had been four days since that terrible meeting at Lands Command, but Thract had seen his disgrace building for almost a year. When it finally overcame him...it had been such a relief, except for the unhappy detail that he survived it, a living ghost.

Old-time officers, especially Tiefers, would decapitate themselves after such ignominy. Rachner Thract was one-half Tiefer, but he hadn't cut off his head with a weighted blade. Instead, he'd numbed his brain with five straight days of fizz, chewing his way round and round the Calorica Strip. An idiot right to the end. Calorica was the only place in the world where it was too warm to lapse into fizz coma.

So he'd heard the reports that someone-Smith, it had to be Smith-was flying to Southmost, was trying to recover something of what Thract had lost. As the hours counted down toward Smith's arrival at Southmost, Rachner had eased off on the fizz. He sat staring at the news feeds in the public houses. Sat and prayed that somehow Victory Smith could succeed where Thract's life effort had failed. But he knew that she would fail. No one believed him, and even Rachner Thract didn't know the how and why. But he was sure: There was something backing up the Kindred. Even the Kindred didn't know about it, but it was there, twisting every one of the Accord's technical advantages back on itself.

On the multiple screens, live from Southmost, Smith passed through the Great Doors of Parliament Hall. Even here, the rowdiest public house on the Strip, the clientele was suddenly very silent. Thract settled his head upon the bar, and felt his stare become glazed.

And then his telephone began ringing. Rachner hauled it out of his jacket. He held it by his head, stared at it with uninterested disbelief. It must be broken. Or someone was sending him an advertisement. Nothing important could ever come over this unsecured piece of junk.

He was about to throw it to the floor when the cobber on the next perch whacked him across the back. "Damn military bum! Get out!" she shouted.

Thract came off his perch, not sure if he was about to follow the other's demand, or defend the honor of Smith and all the others who tried to keep the peace.

In the end, house management decided the issue; Thract found himself out on the street, cut off from the television that might have shown him what his General was attempting. And his telephone was still ringing. He stabbed ACCEPT and snarled something incoherent into the microphone.

"Colonel Thract, is that you?" The words were jerky and garbled, but the voice was vaguely familiar. "Colonel? Is your end a secure comm?"

Thract swore loudly. "The bleeding hell no!"

"Oh thank goodness!" came the almost-familiar voice. "There's a chance then. Surely even they can't meddle with all the world's idle talk."

They. The emphasis cut through Thract's fizz hangover. He brought the microphone close his maw, and his next words came out almost casually curious. "Who is this?"

"Sorry. Obret Nethering here. Please don't hang up. You probably don't remember me. Fifteen years ago, I taught a short course on remote sensing. At Princeton. You sat in."

"I, ah, remember." In fact, it had been a rather good course.

"You do? Oh good, good! So you'll know I'm not a crank. Sir, I know how busy you must be right now, but I pray you'll give me just a minute of your time. Please."

Thract was suddenly aware of the street and the buildings around him. Calorica Strip stretched around the bottom of the volcanic bowl, perhaps the warmest place left on the surface of the world. But the Strip was just a faded memory of the time when Calorica had been a playground for the super-rich. The bars and hotels were dying. Even the snowfalls were long ended. The snow piled up in the alley behind him was two years old, littered with fizz barf and streaked with urine. My high-tech command center.

Thract hunkered down, out of the wind. "I suppose I can give you a moment."

"Oh, thank you! You're my last hope. All my calls to Professor Underhill come up blocked. Not surprising, now that I understand..." Thract could almost hear the cobber collecting his wits, trying not to blather. "I'm an astronomer out on Paradise Island, Colonel. Last night I saw"-a spaceship as big as a city, its drives lighting the sky...and ignored by Air Defense and all the networks. Nethering's descriptions were short and blunt, and took just under a minute. The astronomer continued. "I'm no crank, I tell you. This is what we saw! Surely there are hundreds of eyewitnesses, but somehow it's invisible to Air Defense. Colonel, you've got to believe me." His tone segued into uncomfortable self-realization, an understanding that no one in his right mind could buy such a story.

"Oh, I believe you," Rachner said softly. It was a floridly paranoid vision...and it explained everything.

"What did you say, Colonel? Sorry, I can't send you much hard evidence. They cut our landline about half an hour ago; I'm using a hobbyist's packet radio to reach rout-" Several syllables were jumbled into incoherence. "So that's really all I had to tell you. Maybe this is some Deepest Secret plot on the part of Air Defense. If you can't say anything, I'll understand. But I had to try to get through. That ship was so large, and-"