“Don’t be ridiculous!” I pointed a shaky finger at the degausing coil. “And put that thing down, will you? I kind of prefer my brain unscrambled.”

She continued to point it straight at my forehead. “Who are you, really?”

“I’m Lieutenant Zak Bowman, Grade 740. You want a retinal scan? A liter of my blood? Or maybe a cranial cross section?”

“All easily fabricated,” she said. “Except for the last.” She laughed then, and her laughter was the most beautiful sound I had heard since the zirconium waterfall on Taurus 4.

“I like that,” I said. “A girl with a sense of humor, even if she is about to short circuit my head. You know, I gave you my serial number during the approach.”

“Very easy to duplicate,” she replied, cool as ever, “especially if you neutralized the real Lieutenant Bowman.”

“Well, aren’t we paranoid.”

“Aren’t we though?”

“Look,” I insisted, “just put that coil down, will you? You’re really starting to make me nervous. Just give it to me and everything will be absolutely fine. Now, I’m going to take one step toward you….”

I had seen that little ploy work in reality theater, but it didn’t work now. Just the sound of a degausing coil is enough to turn your brain to pudding. When it hits, it’s like having a drill go through your head. I jumped up and grabbed at the console to keep from crashing to the deck.

“Ow! That hurt! I think I just forgot that tip on the Daulian panda races.  Still remember my name though. Zak something. Now will you please put that thing down? Oh, instant hangover. At least I still have all my teeth. Ah.”

Serena’s blinked her green eyes. “We seem to be at an impasse. Your move, Lieutenant, if that’s who you are.”

“Okay. Okay” I felt my tailbone, which I may have busted on the communicator knob during my fall. “We can stand here and wait to take a hit from one of those celestial hailstones or maybe get taken by the real Holloi, of which I am not one, or we can both take our chances, lower our weapons, and walk out that door now.”

Serena’s eyes narrowed. “I won’t be taken for what I’m not.”

Those meteors were starting to hit closer. This was not a time to talk philosophy. “You’re stubborn,” I told her. “That’s what you are!”

“To go out there and die, ” she said, “probably die, with the last being to see me thinking I’m some kind of knockoff is unacceptable.”

I braced myself as the next one came screaming in, but it landed pretty far away. “Well, you talk like a diplomat,” I conceded. “I’ll give you that much. If you’re an echo, you’re an unusually aggravating one.”

A flash of yellow in the green of her eyes. “You dare to speak to a Daulian ambassador that way?”

I laughed, couldn’t help it. “What are you going to do—prosecute me? ”

She came in closer with the coil. “I would look forward to that.”

“Lady, so would I! Now take your choice. Wait for the Holloi to pick you up or put that thing down and take your chances out there with me.”

The next one was close, rattled my teeth and my nerves.

When the noise died down, she asked me the strangest thing:

“Did he who made the lamb make thee?”

That threw me for a second and then I caught on and played along. “What? Oh, well, sure, with a little help from an itinerant cargo pilot named Zak Bowman, Senior, and Leena, a love-starved governess on Ganymede Seven.”

Again, that laugh, that life-giving laugh. “Less than poetic, but convincing.”

With a sweep of her hand, she started something humming.

I asked her what she was doing.

Her eyes had gone green again. Her chin came up. “Making a decision for both of us. In four minutes and forty-five seconds, there will be no PFK-480, not for you, not for me, not for the Holloi—not for anyone. It’s about to make a very loud noise. Shall we go, Lieutenant?”

I bowed. “Under the circumstances, I’d love to. Take my arm, ambassador?”

She dropped the degausing coil. The doors parted. “I’d be delighted.”

“You know,” I said, “We’ve got a long way to go, but I’ve got a hunch we’ll make it.”

She paused at the threshold.  “You know, Lieutenant, I have a hunch we will.”

A meteor screamed overhead just then, and in its light I saw her eyes, her green eyes, go from green to blue to the prettiest shade of indigo in the universe. I figured that violet could wait. 

Next time–as soon as you request it–a new serial!

I don’t mind telling you that the trip north was my dark night of the soul. Firth had been an echo, as convincing an imitation of a human being as I’d ever seen, and now my only companion—if you could call her that—was a voice in the cockpit of the field buggy. And I was letting her play me for the biggest sucker on the planet Citheron if she was nothing but a high tech gadget with a will to survive.

Suddenly those meteorite strikes were sounding a lot closer. But at least I would get to satisfy my curiosity because I had dodged all of them, and suddenly there it was—the PFK-480 sticking out of the crater wall like a silver plate.

I could tell that the ports were out of commission, so I made my presence known the old fashioned way, by knocking on the door. Well, there was one difference. I did my knocking with Firth’s signal gun.

     The door slid open, but I didn’t like what I was hearing.

Then Serena spoke. “Lieutenant Bowman. Have you come to rescue me or to kill me?”

So casual, as if I had walked over from a party next door. She had green eyes, those cool green eyes of a Citherian. She also had a degaussing coil capable of erasing my brainwaves at the source. She was tall and willowy, almost ethereal, and those green eyes of hers seemed to light up the dim bridge of the 480.

I looked into those green eyes. “Let’s just say I’m looking out for number one, Serena. Is there a Daulian courtesy title I should use?”

“Under more formal circumstances,” she said, “Ambassador would be correct, but we seem to find ourselves in an informal situation. Won’t you come in?”

She had quite a place. I’ve been in a 440 and a 460, but I’d say the 480 is quite a step up in comfort and convenience.

She followed me with the degauzssng gun. “Where’s Commander Firth?

“He couldn’t make it,” I said. “Got too far from his power base. Now he’s a little gray cloud floating across the sector.”

“An echo.”

I listened to the ceiling rattle under the impact of a meteor before asking why she was on the vessel.

“Lieutenant,” she said, “we have no contact beyond this meteor field, so I can be quite candid. I am the Daulian ambassador to the Gramlings.”

“I’ve never heard of a Daulian ambassador to the Gramlings.”

“That’s because I’m the first.”

“How did the Daulian parliament ever make up their minds to appoint one?”

I was watching her all the while for some little word or mannerism that would give her away, but every gesture, every look, every inflection of her voice, struck me as human—or Citherian at least. And those radiant green eyes, always green, gave away nothing. She looked amused. “They can set aside their differences and come to an agreement if the issue is important enough.”

     “But the parliament still deadlocked over supporting our search when you went down.”

“They didn’t know I was aboard and, after all, this is still Daulia.”

“So earth intel decided to do all the heavy lifting, largely because they don’t want their 480 to fall into the wrong hands.”

“Which, as you can see, is no longer an issue.”

I didn’t have to look hard at the screens on the console have gone into a total meltdown. The controls are fused together.

“You did this?”

“While the others were reconnoitering.”

“Well, you know your stuff.”

“The only thing remaining intact is the voice channel. Scrambled, of course, and so of no use to the Holloi.”

“But what about you? What would the Holloi or the Gramlings gain from capturing you?”

“It won’t be the Gramlings.”

I heard a long whistle, its pitch lowering to a growl. The strike was distant. I never heard the impact.

     “Why wouldn’t it be the Gramlings? They’ve been at war with Daulia for as long anyone can remember.”

She seemed to look down her nose at me. I thought I saw a glint of color change in her eyes, but it passed. “And that’s why I was up here on this secret mission,” she said. “It was a peace initiative between Daulia and the Gramlings. Our peoples are at peace for the first time in thirteen generations, or they will be as soon as I make my report to the parliament.”

“Leaving the Holloi out in the cold. Suddenly there’s a lot more than a 480 at stake. It’s the whole balance of power. That explains the echo. Earth intel wanted to be sure the deal went through, even if the real Serena Yuri didn’t go along with it for some reason. What really happened to that recon party?”

A small one broke up overhead. A shower of small stuff clattered onto the shell of the ship.

“I have no way of knowing,” Serena said. “I simply lost contact. Isn’t a meteor strike most likely?”

“But what if they were taken by the Holloi? If the Holloi are out there, we can’t just hunker down here and wait out the Sagitids. We’ll be sitting ducks, and I for one have no desire to spend the rest of my life—short as it will probably be—in the hands of the Holloi.”

Next: Episode 10–“A Decision for Both of Us”

I’d never used a signal gun, never thought about them, though there’s a whole paragraph about alternate uses for one in the pilot’s handbook. Now that Firth was pointing one at me, suddenly it was the most fascinating thing on the planet.

“You’re not that stupid,” he said. “I’m ordering you to turn this vehicle around—now!”

Take my word for it, wrestling that thing away from him was not an option. The guy was solid and he meant business.

So I called his bluff–if it was one. “Sorry, Firth. No can do. I’m going up there to finish this mission whether intel has the guts for it or not. Shoot or don’t shoot, but get out of my way.”

In close quarters a signal gun makes a hell of a racket. I hit my head on something. The headliner crackled with sparks and chromium dripped from a very ugly welt up there. I was starting to get a little steamed up myself.

“You’ll kill us both, you idiot.”

He didn’t budge. His eyes were like glass.

“It was just a warning. Next time—”

I cut him off. “Okay, I’m calling your bluff.” I goosed up the speed. The accelerator numbers were spinning too fast to read.

I didn’t know if it was the g’s or what, but something was starting to slow him down. Hie talked like he had just had a dram of Martian rum.

“Seven hundred and seventy-five kilometers, Bowman. Vehicle. turn, turn to. Around. Around.”

I was a little woozy myself. “Say again?”

He worked to get the words out. “Lieutenant Bowman, I’m ordering, ordering, ordering you to turn this, this vehicle a-round.”

I glanced away for a second when a chunk of something that glinted like gold smacked into the windshield. When I  looked back, things started to come seriously unglued. Firth started reciting the dictionary.

“A-round. Arp. Arpad, Arpeggio. Arrack. Arraign.”

I was too weirded out to catch on. I think I just stared as the space buggy bounced all over the place, taking a beating from the meteor shower.

Firth continued his little recitation. “Arrange. Arrangement. Arrant….”

Now I got it. I couldn’t quite believe it, but I got it. “You were good,” I said, “damn good. I had no idea.” 

His words were really messed up now. The harmonics were almost musical. “Thanks. Thank you. An expression of gratitude.”

“What are you,” I asked, “a four-point-five, four-point-six?

I could swear I heard pride in his answer. “Five-point-one!

“They could get the echo to match a human, down to the very breathing and touch, but—”

“It takes a lot of power, Bow-man, a lot of signal. Short range.”

“Seven hundred kilometers. That’s one heck of a power range. They wanted to test you to see if you could be convincing in close quarters on a mission. But they had no idea the crash site was so far from your power base.”

“They had reasons for their orders, Bow-man. Stand back, please.”

Now I heard a voice coming from the console. Serena.

“Hello? Are you there?”

“What about her?” I asked Firth, “What about Serena? What can you tell me?” 

The sound of an echo imploding is something that resounds in your nightmares. Imagine the cry of something human being sucked through a straw. I ducked beneath the yellow cloud that spread across the cockpit. Firth the echo, version five-point-one, imploded, leaving yours truly quite alone in the vast northern waste of the planet Citheron. Alone except for….

“Is everyone all right there?”

It was as if she was right there beside me.

“That depends upon your definition of “everyone” and “all right..” I told her. “Cross your fingers and I’ll be there shortly, Serena. In the meantime, how about some poetry?”

Next–Episode 9: “The Face of the Enemy”

“Only two? obstacles,” I said. “I hope a meteor shower counts as one of them.”

Firth was more intense than ever. “She’s more than a hundred kilometers beyond our authorized distance.”

I laughed. “Are you kidding? That’s not an obstacle, it’s a speed bump.”

He ignored a fist-sized rock that bounced off the windshield. “You can be sure that intel has a reason for it. The Gramlings or the Holloi may be up there already, and even if that 480 is scrubbed clean, they’d be delighted to snatch up a state-of-the-art field buggy and a couple of intel officers.”

“What about Serena?” I asked. “What’s she worth to them? What’s she worth to intel? What else does the database say about Serena Yuri?”

He eased up a little. ” I wish I knew. I can’t access it. That last hit took out the link to intel, took out all our comlinks, period, except for the seeker beam.”

“And the reply from the crash site.”

“Apparently it knocked down some topographical obstruction between us and the site.”

“And now we know where to find her.”

I gunned the accelerator.

“Don’t be a fool, Bowman. What’s the point of going up there if we don’t have the cell power to get back?”

The whine of the engine made me a little nervous. I tried not to think about how fast we were going. “One thing at a time,” I said. “We’ll figure something out, maybe.”

At the sound of Serena’s voice, we both turned toward the communication panel.

“I’d welcome some communication. It’s dark and cold up here. And the Sagitids are starting to hit closer.”

“I’d like to offer calming words,” I told her, “but I’m afraid I don’t know many poems.”

Serena sounded so close now. “Not even Go and catch a falling star?”

I glanced at Firth. “If she’s an echo, she’s a mighty sophisticated one.”

“Maybe she is.”

I grabbed him by his silver lapels.”What? Why are you suddenly on fire to abort the mission? Come on, what are you holding back?”

“Let go of me, Lieutenant.”

I hung on. “What version is intel up to with echoes? Three-point-nine? Four-point-oh? You got something like her?”

He peeled my hands away. “Look, there were actually seven passengers on that 480.  Three of them were crew. Two of the others were from earth intel, the sixth one was the Daulian diplomat Serena Yuri, and the seventh was a cutting edge duplicate of her.”

“Her echo? What for?”

“The point is, the ship’s clean. Whoever or whatever she is, we can’t get to her. She’s out of our range. We turn back.”

“Just like that? Leave her up there?”

“The echo on that ship has a power base range like nothing you’ve ever heard of. And, given the impact, that’s probably who we’ve been talking to. We leave it because it’s no good to the Gramlings or the Holloi because as soon as they move it out of its power range, it implodes.”

“And what if it isn’t an echo? What if she’s for real?”

He took on this strangely fraternal tone. “You see those things out there, Bowman? Those are the Fabrini Arches. They’re seven hundred and fifty kilometers from the perimeter of the meteor field. Go through them and you’re in violation of a direct order from intel central. Gamble like that and lose and you get a one-way ticket to a penal colony.”

“Their orders were based on incomplete information,” I told him. “We know where the 480 is now and who’s on it. We’ve come this far. We can make it the rest of the way.”

“And at best, run out of cell two hundred kilometers short of the landing zone, with no communications and no life support.”

“Unless we can rig something from salvage.”

“Turn this vehicle around now, Lieutenant. That’s an order.”

“We’ve come this far. We can–” Suddenly I found myself looking in to the coil of a signal gun. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Putting down a mutiny. As your superior officer, I’m putting you under arrest.”

“With a signal gun?”

“Effective enough at this range.”

He was right about that, and I would not look good splattered all over the communication panel. . “Okay” I said, “then you can drive this thing! Just shoot me first so I don’t have to watch.”

Next Week: Episode 8–“I’m Calling Your Bluff”

A scream and a thundering thud  had me counting my teeth, but I put on a cheerful face. “See? Our luck’s starting to turn already. And only another 45 kilometers–”

Serena broke in, suddenly much clearer. “…down their spears and watered heaven….”

Another impact rattled me down to my tailbone, but Firth was concentrating on what she was saying. “…down their spears. That’s from the original message. When the stars threw down their spears.”

“Compare them,” I said. “If they’re identical, it’s just a loop.”

“Already done it. There’s a difference of half a second in the length of the phrase and the meteorite impacts in the background come at different times.”

“Yeah. And in the second one she sounds more desperate.”

“More desperate?”

“Yeah. And I don’t blame her. I’m getting a little desperate myself and she’s been up here a lot longer than I have.”

Then she was there again. “Is anyone listening?”

I jumped at the console “You bet we are!”

The gadgets in the cockpit were banging around like the percussion section in a Martian symphony, but I yelled over the clatter. “This is Beta-Alpha nine-zero-one-one, Zak Bowman, seven-four-three-eight, and Commander Abel Firth. Who are you? What’s your location?”

Serena answered.: “I’m seven-eight-four-one-four-nine-five-zero-zero. Position eighty-nine-point seven-three by ninety-four-point-eight-seven, the crash site of Aldebaran Sirius two-seven-four-five.”

I glanced at Firth. He was intent on the data bank. “She’s got the code right. It’s the 480. Who is she?”

He continued to scan the bank.  “According to her code, Serena Yuri. A Daulian civilian.”

“And she’s got the code for a 480? What’s going on here?” The racket died down enough for me to talk to her again. “‘What’s the status of your craft?”

She was clear now, crisp and clear. “One-eight-seven-four Alpha Centauri.”

“She’s got the supercode right, too,” I told Firth. “Scrubbed clean.” Now we were getting somewhere. “Four-nine-five-zero-zero, what’s the status of your crew?”

“Non-existent.”

That stopped me for a second–that and another impact.

“Say again?”

She was calm. I”ll say that for her. “Three perished upon impact and the other two went out to reconnoiter while I deleted the craft’s programs and codes. During a squall I lost contact with them and there’s no signal from their transponder. I have to assume the worst.”

“The message you’ve been sending, what’s its reference file?”

She laughed. Even coming through the static, it put me at ease. “It wasn’t code. It was a poem. All I have left is voice transmission. At first I filled it with the standard distress call, but after a while I needed something to keep my spirits up, so I started reciting poetry.”

“We’re one hundred fifty kilometers from your position and closing,” I said. “ETA, three universal hours, ten minutes.”

Silence again and then she said, “I’ll wait.”

“She’s got a flair for understatement,” I said. “I wonder if–“

Firth turned away from the console as if to cut her out of the conversation and looked at me with those stony eyes. “She’s a hundred and fifty kilometers away, Bowman. There are two obstacles.”

Next: Episode 7–“She May Not Be Who You Think She Is.”

“Only Fifty More Kilometers” 

It was as if I had awakened from a dream. Suddenly we were deep in the quadrant with rocks coming down all around us and we were still alive. I couldn’t tell how my cohort was taking it–calmly or with numb terror.

“You starting to feel lucky, Firth? Six hundred and fifty kilometers in this stuff and so far we’ve only gotten a dusting.”

He kept his eyes on the road ahead. Actually the road was behind us. We were making it as we dashed toward oblivion.

“Your considerable driving skills have played a part, Bowman, a considerable part.”

A compliment. I didn’t expect that. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll take my E for Effort—and for the rest you can thank your lucky stars. Get it? Your lucky stars.”

Our lovely rapprochement was at an end. His usual stony charm returned. “Only fifty more kilometers to go before we turn around.”

‘Let’s hope we find that thing,” I said. “This is a long way to come for nothing.  Anything at all on that receiver?”

“Something just now. Barely enough to mention. Once it gets through the scrambler, it barely peaks at ten on the meter. It could be ambient noise.”

“Well, let’s hear it anyway, Firth. I’m up for a little entertainment.”

It wasn’t much. A lot of white noise with a faint little filigree of syllables on top..

That’s it?” I said. “Sounds like Venusian minimalism. Not exactly my cup of—”

And then there was a complete phrase: …heaven with their tears, did he who…

Firth showed no excitement, but he was very attentive.

“Did you hear it?”

“Sure,” I said, coming closer to the console. “I heard it, but what was it?”

He raised his hand. “Wait….”

Another phrase came through the console: : …made the lamb….make thee….

I watched a dust shower sweep across the windshield. I really wanted out of there, but I was intrigued. “It sounds like the fragment intel picked up, just a different part of the message. Could be a loop.”

Firth gave up on the fine tuning. “That’s all there is. I’ve lost it completely now.”

“Well, can you get a fix on it?”

“I’d need to pull in more of it. We’ll have to get closer.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s pick a direction.”

Taking off like that was a little random, a wild guess since the signal was ricocheting through a meteor shower, but I’ve never been one to sit still, and so I revved us up and away we went.Even that state-of-the-art field buggy made quite a racket in the higher hover mode. Of course, we still had all kinds of stuff knocking into the envelope and occasionally a little something pinging into the hull.

I’ll give him credit, Firth remained calm through the craziness. In his polite, official way, he asked how the hell I knew which direction to go.

I was cheerful, frighteningly cheerful, “I don’t! Call it a guess or a hunch or intuition. And if I’m wrong, call it incompetence, but we’ve got to look somewhere and my gut is telling me that somewhere between two-seventy and three-oh-five we’ll start picking up that signal again.”

Now he started to get a little uneasy. “That’s too nebulous for me, Bowman. Why don’t we sit still long enough to re-position the antenna? We’re just burning precious cell power running around like this.”

I revved it up a little more. “Without a strong signal, all I’ve got to go on is my gut. We’re taking a heading of two-ninety-five. I’m not about to sit still and wait to get clobbered by one of those rocks. If we do get hit, you can have me court-marshaled.”

From his stony gaze I got the impression that he didn’t appreciate the irony.

Next: Episode 6: “Serena”

The Appeal

The message was pretty scratchy, but out of the scramble came a woman’s voice saying, “When the stars threw down their spears.”

“That’s pretty weird,” I told Firth. “And not much to go on.”

He was unmoved. “It’s enough for intel. They got a Citherian voice print from it.”

I stared at the file name as if it would give me more info. “”What is it? Code?”

“Not that we know of,” Firth said. “It’s part of a poem.” In a flat voice, he began reading. “When the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears, did he smile his work to see and so on.”

I shrugged. “Sounds like somebody has a sense of humor at least. The stars are certainly throwing down their spears.”

Firth was uninterested. “If you say so.”

I gave up. “All right. So what’s the drill?”

Now he came to life “We fly to a landing zone at the edge of the Sagitid field, one that’s never been hit.”

“That’s nice.”

“From there we take an intel field buggy with the best rabbit ears in the fleet and make a sweep around the sector with a seeker beam.”

“In the meteor shower? For how long?”

“For how long?”

“Yeah. How long are we supposed to look?”

He talked as if I was supposed to know the answer. ”The cells in the buggy will last only so long, Bowman. Seven hundred kilometers tops.”

I thought he was crazy. “Three hundred and fifty kilometers each way—in a meteor shower?”

“Oh, no.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear—”

“Seven hundred each way.”

“What! That’s all the way to the Fabrini Arches There’s not a field buggy ever built that can go fourteen hundred kilometers on a cell.”

“That’s what intel wants—”

“Everybody to think.”

“You’re starting to catch on, Lieutenant Bowman”

Next: Episode 5–”Only Fifty More Kilometers”

“Enter Commander Abel Firth”

Enter Commander Abel Firth. I’d never met the guy, never heard of him. But he had security badges like you wouldn’t believe. He had an Omega Orange. And he was all business.

He said: “You’ve heard about the PFK-480 by now.”

I didn’t want him to get too full of himself.: “Sure,” I said. “I’ve got intel clearance. I’m in the loop. What about it?”

“It’s up there waiting for somebody to grab it. Could be us, or it could be the Gramlings.”

What was that to me? “Yeah, I know.” I said. “Or the Holloi. But with the Sagitid meteor shower just starting to rev up, even the Gramlings and the Holloi won’t go up there. Nobody’s that dumb.”

Says Firth: “Yeah, well, somebody is. Us.”

“What do you mean us?”

He was not cutting me any slack. Whatever this was, it was going to happen–at least as far as he was concerned. “Slice it however you want,” he said. “Earth intel, A-7 himself, or little old you and me. When the order comes down, it’s all the same. Except that somebody has to do the dirty work.”

“Are they crazy?”

“Dumb, crazy, that’s all the same, too. They want their PFK-480. Or at least they want it scrubbed clean before anybody else can get to it. And they’re not going to get any help from the Daulians, not even charts, not in our lifetime. That’s why I’m on it.”

“Well, I hope you have a very nice time, Firth. Bon voyage.”

“And they want a pilot—”

Now things were starting to get a little weird, even for Citheron. “Look,” I said, “even a crack pilot—which I am not, being about a five-point-six on a scale of ten according to my last—”

“—who’s good at handling a field buggy, and they want—”

“Even a field buggy master charioteer cannot drive through a meteor shower. Have you heard about the meteor showers up there at this time of year? It would be like trying to run through a hailstorm without getting hit—once. And one hit–”

He pushed right over me.”They want somebody who’s had experience with Daulians.”

That stopped me. “The Daulians? What for?”

Now that he had my attention, he took his time. “They think there’s one up there. They think there’s one that survived the crash.”

“I thought the thing was unmanned.”

“That’s what they want everybody to think. But there were five humans aboard—and one Daulian.”

Omega orange. The guy seemed to know everything.

“A Daulian on a PFK-480? Those ships are way too sensitive. They’d never let a Daulian or any other Citherian so much as set foot on one.”

“That’s something else they want everybody to think. So now consider, what if the Gramlings or the Holloi did get a hold of that ship and the Daulian on it? You want to talk about intelligence coups?”

“And they expect us—you and me—to find that thing and clean up their mess for them. If they’re lucky, a big old hunk of the Sagitid belt will take care of everything for them.”

He was smooth. “Get a hold of yourself, Bowman. When was the last time your read your commission? This is a matter of earth security.”

“Look,” I said, “if this is earth security, it’s a long way from home. Can they at least give us a fix on the thing? They can do that, can’t they?”

“Kappa Bravo 2799.”

“That’s it? For real? The whole blasted sector? No triangulation on the 480’s transponders?”

“No triangulation, no biangulation, no vectors, nothing. They think that a rogue Sagitid squall took it down and that it ended up in a crater with the transponders either knocked out or buried too deep to function. But the number crunchers say we can run the perimeter of the sector with a wide-band seeker beam and hone in on whatever signal it’s sending out.”

I was starting to feel a little itchy under the collar. “So what makes them think there’s still somebody alive up there?”

He dialed up a file on the communication console.”This. A fragmentary voice transmission. Take a listen. It’s unscrambled.”

Next: Episode 4: “The Appeal”

“The First Thing You Need to Know”

Report filed by Zak Bowman, Grade 740, earth intel, to whom it may concern, position somewhere in sector Kappa Bravo 2799: The first thing you need to know about the Daulians is that they’re just like us, human to the nth degree, except for one little detail. They show their emotions in the color or their eyes. And they run through the whole spectrum, with red irises indicating extreme agitation.

I’ve seen orange in the eyes of a Daulian working on his taxes. Daulia has the worst bureaucracy on the planet Citheron, and that’s saying something. A Daulian can’t even get out of bed in the morning without filling out a form. And don’t get me started on the Daulian parliament. The paperwork and the grandstanding in there make for a lot of yellow eyes.

The default color of Daulian eyes is green. A beautiful pellucid green to be sure, but it tells you absolutely nothing about a Daulian’s state of mind. The best Daulian gamblers can keep their eyes locked in the green mode for days at a time as they bluff their way into staggering fortunes in iridium futures.

Blue eyes—well, that means a pretty good day, one in which nobody gets hit by some kind of projectile. Lobbing incendiary devices at each other has been a way of life among the Daulians and their neighbors for centuries.

Even during such events, some Daulian monks can achieve indigo irises just by thinking serene and pleasant thoughts.

As for the ultimate–violet—ah, that’s the color of undying love and friendship, or so I hear.

The color change is the one thing that the creators haven’t been able to duplicate. They can produce an interactive three-dimensional solid holograph, euphemistically called an echo, with basic emotions, just a little short on humor and imagination. But they haven’t been able to mimic the emotional spectrum shift of Citherian eyes—not yet at least.

As for the recent incident in the fourth polar quadrant of Citheron, you can imagine that there were a lot of yellow and orange eyes in the Daulian parliament, which deadlocked at once over how to handle the crisis, neither party wanting to buckle down to do the paperwork to authorize a recovery mission. To be fair, they didn’t have all of the facts, but listen, if the Daulian prime minister’s head caught fire, the parliament would argue for a month over how to put it out.

So when earth intel got word that one of our PFK-480s had gone down in a meteor shower in sector Kappa Bravo 2799, they were fit to be tied because they knew the Daulians weren’t going to do anything about it, not until it was so late that the Gramlings or, worse still, the Holloi had swooped down and grabbed the thing, sucked all the codes out of it, and reverse engineered it, putting us right back on square one when it comes to defending this sector of the galaxy.

Episode 1 “Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make”

The galaxy of lights would dazzle the man on the bed if he woke up. Each had its purpose, of course, an urgent purpose, some monitoring his vital signs, others reassuring all who came into the room that technology was doing its best to keep him alive. Blue, green, and red stars reflected in the surgeon’s glasses as he and the nurse discussed the latest numbers.

“I thought you’d want to see this,” the nurse said. She was nervous, twisted her fingers as she looked at the man on the bed. The doctor was notorious for reprimanding staff who interrupted his rounds for insufficient cause.

“Pulse seventy-five,” the doctor said. “Wonder what accounts for that after a week in a coma.”

The nurse was encouraged. “And his EEG is showing increased activity. What do you suppose it means?”

The doctor was studying the man’s face, which remained impassive. “Maybe he’s dreaming.”

“In a coma?”

“There’s a lot we don’t know about sleep and sensory deprivation. The mind has to get out of the box, though. We know that. Ever heard Lord Byron?”

The nurse flashed through her memory of medical texts and came up empty.

“He was a poet,” the doctor said at last, “had some medical issues of his own. He wrote that stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage. Our boy may be out for a spin.” He turned on his heel. “Keep me posted.”

The nurse’s feeling of relief gave way to curiosity. Was it a trick of those dazzling lights or had the man’s lips moved? She watched for a while, wondering what the man on the bed might have said.