Boxmaster's Disgrace 
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Lyle gathered Ida close. "Relax. There'd be alarms if the dock was under attack by pirates."

She sighed. "Right."

"I'm sorry." He could feel her still quivering. "My journeyman tends to get carried away with new ideas." But he's not usually wrong. Just brash."

"It wasn't your fault," she said. "I thought I had that comm disarmed." She rolled to her feet. In two swift strides, she was at the bedroom console, fingers flashing over the lighted displays as she asked over her shoulder, "What did he mean, the pirates are back? You're the one who put Willie Spar out of the picture. He is gone, isn't he?"

"Absolutely." I think. He got to his feet and groped for his clothes. He'd learned to take Yran seriously, and there were still a lot of unanswered questions about Spar's operation.

At the console, Ida stiffened. Turning, she leaned against the console and folded her arms under her breasts. "I did have the visuals disengaged! They're still off. We shouldn't have been able to see him. He shouldn't have been able to see us. Lyle, that's never happened before."

Lyle tucked his uniform under one arm and went to her. "Check me if I'm wrong, but we shouldn't have been able to hear his environmental music either?"

She considered that. "That was some sort of Kethsemni music, then?" He nodded. "No, we shouldn't have heard it." She kneaded her hands. "This ship! It's as if someone loosed a swarm of gremlins in the circuits and they've hybridized and multiplied!"

"Perhaps the Kethsemni programming is at fault. They think private means only four consenting adults." Lyle took her by the shoulders, kissing her gently.

"You're leaving," she said.

His arms went around her waist and he nestled his cheek against her ear and nodded. He needed her to know how reluctant he was. "I've got to. I'll be back."

"Look, I'll get maintenance on it right away, and as soon as I can guarantee our privacy, I'll call you. Or - we could adjourn to your ship? Now?"

He stepped back. "I can't rest until I know what was on Yran's mind. He's not stupid, just - alien."

"And maybe curious about what humans do in the sack?"

"I think he had his mind on his message more than on us. I'd better go talk to him." He headed for the shower, then checked. "I'll be back in a couple of hours. All right?"

She looked him up and down as if considering if he was worth the wait. Then she nodded. "You know how to use the personnel locator to find him?"

"Yeah. They briefed us. I think they're expecting us to be back aboard - often." As he stepped into the luxuriant flow of water, he called, "At least I hope so! And I hope your calendar will have a lot of big gaping holes in it."

She stuck her head around the stall door. "It will!"

Seeing her face like that, cut off from her body, hair standing out in a cloud, eyes shadowed by the shower door, he caught a fleeting resemblance to Yran - just the sweep of the chin, and maybe the short, tilted nose, large eyes, or maybe just the proportions that suggested extreme youth. He blinked and it was gone. But it left him uncomfortable. He shouldn't be dreaming while wide awake.

Twenty minutes later he cornered Yran in the cabin assigned to the Kethsem. He thought his anger was under control until Yran opened the door, eyes wide and visible behind the relaxed shields. Then everything just overflowed and he pressed into the dim room, roaring, "What do you mean the pirates are back? Is the ship under attack? Have we been ordered to repel a boarding party? Have they stolen another of my boxes?"

"N-no!" Yran backed up before the stalking advance.

"Where was your head, Yran! You're not an innocent child, as Lii Wesdayne would gladly attest if he were here. How - why - Yran, it's the middle of the night!"

"I didn't think!"

The panicky squeak was back in the Kethsem's voice, and suddenly Lyle's outrage deflated. "It wasn't entirely your fault. Some sort of malfunction on the privacy circuits. You shouldn't have been able to get through, certainly not with full visual. The engineers are on it now."

"Then you're not angry?" He smelled angry, freshly showered and doused with odor killing chemicals, but angry.

"I'm angry. The point is you shouldn't have even tried to call me. Tracking me down . . . Yran, that shows lack of a certain quality - maturity, strength, judgement - I don't know what to call it, but you've got to have it to be a Boxmaster. Why didn't you just leave me a message?"

"But the pirates - "

"You were too excited by the news to think it through?"

"I've thought it through. I'm probably the only one who knows what's really happening. I wouldn't dare tell anyone before telling you, and I had to tell someone. Knowledge that resides in only one mind isn't safe."

That was a lesson Yran's whole career in the field thus far had driven home to him. Lyle couldn't blame him for having learned it. But he was aching inside, his nerves preparing to serve up pure misery as soon as the adrenalin was used up. He dropped onto a seating piece that adjusted to his frame. "All right, you've got my attention. What's this dire news?"

"That Laforn I was talking to - Bidridgin or something like that - works on the robots - showed me all the jobs the robots fill. You wouldn't believe the things they can do! I could teach Sam to - " Yran broke off when he caught the stony patience on the human's face. Sam had always been a sore subject with Odirin.

"Well, Bidridgin let me work with one of the news sorters. You'd think they'd do it like any other ship, using just the internal systems. But for security, they've got teams of robots to sort and file incoming reports. Most of it never gets into the system. Well, they had a malfunction and - " Yran's gaze drifted away, then snapped back and locked on Lyle with staunch courage. "I decided it would be a good chance to test my Ten's performance again. I - "

"You've been worried."

"Not exactly. Well. Yes. But I had no trouble getting the circuit glitches for them. My Ten's pulling in great resolution. Then, while I was helping them fix the problem, suddenly I found myself cleared to read reports on pirate incidents coded top secret.

"Boxmaster, the people who've been attacked say it's the Spar gang come back, but Forensics insists that's not true. I read all the files, lab reports - everything you never see on the news. I don't think it's the Spar gang, either. It's something much worse - and nobody, - I've searched every reference - nobody is considering my theory."

"Which is?"

Yran dropped cross-legged on the floor before the human and waved the data display curtain on, controlling it with voice commands. As the room lit with the display, Yran's eye shields shifted the spectrum so he could see it all clearly. Simultaneously, the walls began to shimmer with the dull steel blue that signified a security field cutting them off from any kind of snooping.

He'd prepared carefully for this moment and had cued up an incident that would capture the human's interest. But considering Odirin's current mood, he wasn't sure it would work. He wished for the thousandth time that he'd considered the Boxmaster's motive for staying over on Hytril. I keep forgetting he's human. That's the problem.

The screen lit up with a close view of a Filiksan male - a humanoid with a large, ridged head, oddly proportioned limbs and a lipless mouth. It wasn't a smoothly edited, professional news item, but a single, straight-on view of his full face, captioned with the date, place, time and identity codes for the Filiksan. Above the image, there was a security clearance demand, followed by Yran's code and then Odirin's, showing they'd accessed the recording and when. It was an official deposition.

The Filiksan told how three small space ships had swept down on a desert installation of the Bsordyan Pharmaceuticals firm growing tailored bacteria. The pirates were of several humanoid species, haphazardly uniformed but carrying matched weapons. They'd secured the plant with no problem, their weapons and sensors giving them complete superiority over the private guards. Within the day, they had taken over the main control systems that operated the plant and isolated it from the outside world.

All the employees were herded into an empty warehouse and left without food, water or sanitation. They knew they were as good as dead.

Up to then it was a very slick operation. "Then," the Filiksan reported, "as soon as they landed large numbers of their troops, things began to go wrong. They fell over each other as squads obeyed contradictory orders. They cut some of us out of the crowd in the warehouse to make us empty the warehouses and load their ships . Our plant manager told us to cooperate, but - I felt as if I'd have to do the stealing for them, they were so bad at it!

"After two days of this, I saw a chance and faded into the shadows, took a ground car, and headed north, toward the nearest city. About two hours outside the plant - at the farthest perimeter of the property - there was another cordon of pirates. I thought I was going to be shot. But I had nothing to lose. So I drove up to the blockade.

"These pirates had their faceplates up and their hoods thrown back." The Filiksan's expression flicked through a melange of emotions only another Filiksan could interpret. "They were just children. Human children - believe me, I've worked with human young long enough to know. They were boys, just barely post adolescent. Armed with lethal weapons. And left to stand a post in the desert - without water. Their lips were blistered. That's a serious symptom in human adults, more so in youths - and painful, I'm told. I gave them a case of chilled drinks someone had left in the car, and they were so grateful they let me through."

The Filiksan had brought out the first recordings of the pirates' attacking that the Union had seen. Analysis of the weapons fire puzzled the experts.

For years, the Spar gang had prevented such recordings from reaching the Union. Their main weapon had been terror, the terror of the unknown - a kind of terror that worked on all the Union species alike. Their attacks left no survivors and no clues. Toward the end, when Odirin had forced the pirate's hand, the Union had garnered a number of views of their weaponry in action, including shard records. They had even collected bits and pieces of their hardware.

Analysis had shown that Spar had been using clever innovations on known technology. His organization had been vast and rich. It had been suspected that he had somehow united several of the far-flung criminal organizations behind him, but that had never been proven. Still, his attacks had had a distinctive style and purpose. Lyle and Yran had become the foremost experts in recognizing that style, and had later become privy to all the highly classified details of Spar's signature.

"Yran, that wasn't Spar's gang. Maybe they're some kind of self-appointed successors trying to capitalize on Spar's reputation. If there's anything left of Spar's organization, it's in fragments. Not something to worry about. Especially not in the middle of the night."

"You don't see it?" Yran had thought the expression on the boxmaster's face had been distaste, even revulsion, when the Filiksan had told of the human boy's thirst. "Watch this next one."

It was another eye witness account, a deposition accompanied by amateur recordings as well as uninspired official ones. As it was finishing, Yran called for the next and the next, and finally swiveled to look up at the human. "Do you see what I mean now?"

"They never choose a site with a box in place. Spar always did. He was after the Guild. The pirates are not back." Now he regretted not adjourning to his ship with Ida.

"But they are back! Look at the whole picture. The weapons. They're not just minor innovations on known designs, nor experimental models stolen and used. They're different. The pirates themselves are exceptionally inept. Spar's were always well trained paramilitary."

"You're disproving your point. The pirates aren't back. This is a new problem. And when the press finally gets hold of it, whoever's classified this story is going to lose - ."

"You don't see it. You really don't see it."

Odirin felt as if Yran had become the instructor and he the woefully deficient student. "No. I don't. Show - "

"Boxmaster, when we set our trap for him on Simmerflux, how did Spar know the experimental Wenshiss drive was going to blow up? How did he know exactly what sort of protective gear to give his men? And where did he get it? How did he equip his ship with a field that could protect it from the particle storm the explosion produced? And - who designed that field generator? Have you tried to get the reports on the analysis?"

"They're still incomplete." It had been bothering him.

"Or are they classified above Guild clearances?"

Yran pressed, "How did one man organize such a vast criminal network? How did one man infiltrate even the Guild? How did one man nearly destroy the Union? How could he seem to be in so many places at once?"

"He was an organizational genius."

"He was a tool of something much greater than pirates."

"What are you talking about?"

Yran searched the human's features for any sign of acceptance. There was none. "It may be my imagination."

"I'm listening."

Yran heard a hint of receptivity in the human's voice and hoped he was interpreting the alien correctly this time. "The Union is being invaded from outside - by experts. They backed Spar, who was genius enough to parlay their backing into a seriously threatening organization.

"Now they've lost Spar, they're recruiting our criminals to use against us, but not doing as well at recruiting, training and organizing as Spar did. To offset that, they have a better Wenshiss drive, and better weapons. They know where and how to hit us to disorganize our economies, to weaken our alliances. They understand us. They're destroying us because we don't even suspect they exist."

That's paranoid! Odirin unconsciously flinched away from the journeyman. Paranoia was one of the first symptoms of mental breakdown to manifest in a Boxmaster who had come to believe shard was sentient. The Kethsem's problems with his Number Ten edged him awfully close to the classic pattern. And now this. Odirin steadied his voice. "Yran, you're giving yourself nightmares."

"Maybe. I hope so. I can't believe no one else has seen this in the data. But I've dug at it all night, and if there's a report on it, I can't find it. I ought to file a report myself, but I'm only a journeyman, so I can't. I had to call you - I'd have waited for morning if I'd thought. But now you've seen it, you have to file the report."

Whoa!

Yran didn't sound paranoid when he talked about his hypothesis, but the notion itself was too far out of bounds. Odirin rose and paced the cabin, paused to stare down at the neatly made bed, paused to consider the door to the lavatory and the blank wall screens ready to display artwork. Very carefully, he said, "I'm not convinced. If someone asks my opinion, I might present the idea for discussion, but I'm not signing my name to a report like that."

"But - "

"If there's anything to your notion, someone else will come up with it - someone who isn't a Boxmaster, who isn't vulnerable to charges of mental instability - someone privy to the highest levels of information and has proof - someone who'll be listened to."

He won't risk his reputation. Yran knew he shouldn't have expected anything else. Lyle Odirin was just a person, not the paragon of idealism Yran often saw.

"You're disappointed in me." Odirin sighed.

"No! Well . . . Boxmaster, it's so obvious. No other explanation accounts so elegantly for everything that's happened. But it's such an absurd idea, it may be too late by the time someone who has the power to do anything about it will think of it." Or what if they have, and the report has been suppressed, the reporter silenced?

"You're right, it is absurd. Think, Yran. If another interstellar civilization had grown up in this galaxy, a civilization mighty enough to outstrip us in technology and big enough to take on the whole Union - wouldn't someone have noticed? Granted we don't occupy the entire galaxy, but we've had mapping probes out into just about every habitable region. Why would this hypothetical civilization want to destroy us if not to take our real estate? And if they want our planets, it must be that they're habitable to them - which means we'd have found some trace of them while we were looking over the useful planets still out there. Whole civilizations with highly advanced technologies don't just pop out of nothing in a century or two."

Yran wilted. He hadn't thought of that, and he should have. After all, wasn't galactic exploration what the Crissden Listening Post was all about? And he had a box stationed there. Of course, Crissden only scanned one small sector. But there must have been others in the past. The human's knowledge of galactic history was better than his own. His younger years had been spent learning the history of one continent on Kethsem. He'd taught himself galactic history after he'd escaped from a bad marriage and fled to the offworld enclave. There, he'd spent more time and effort learning to build and repair smart machines. History was boring. Except a Boxmaster had to know everything.

He got to his feet and waved the display curtain off. "Maybe there's some other explanation I haven't thought of yet." He embraced that warmly cheering thought and made it his own. "There must be another explanation."

Odirin studied the Kethsem, the way his sarone floated free, the way he carried his shoulders, even the line of the mouth. Everything he'd learned about Kethsem body language told him the journeyman was leveling with him. The paranoid don't give up their obsessions so eagerly, so he's not paranoid, just imaginative.

"Yran, see if you can port that data over to Pylant's system - legally that is, with authorization, and we'll start hunting for more pieces to the puzzle. Who knows, maybe we can find that alternate explanation." And teach him not to get so blinded by his own brilliance that he forgets to think things through. He'd spent a year teaching Yran to expect the unexpected and react without thinking. Now he had to balance that with the techniques of judicious consideration.

Yran's smile was worth whatever number of weeks of data jockeying it would cost. It was a Kethsem smile, a thin lipped grimace that Odirin had studied hard before he could see any joy in it. Yran rarely neglected to modify his expression for humans, and when he did it was a gift of trust that never failed to raise Odirin's spirits.

#

Oddly enough, Lyle wasn't able to dismiss Yran's hypothesis as easily as the Kethsem seemed to. He was relieved when they readily got permission to take the data dump from Hytril. The Guild's reputation for holding data sacrosanct was untarnished. But Guildmaster Adrun Rudy did get wind of the request and was on the screen with Odirin before the dump was completed.

"What's going on?" he asked without preamble.

Odirin described Yran's theory, finishing, "So I decided to let Yran sift the data for more similarities in our files on Spar. Adrun, he's got an insatiable, restless mind. He needs a project to keep him out of trouble."

"That's what you told me about his tinkering with Sam."

"This one could be useful. There might be a connection between these two outbreaks of piracy that no one's yet thought of. Who knows, maybe only a Kethsem Boxmaster could think of it!"

"Well. At least this time he asked permission before hand. That's progress."

Rudy was referring to Yran's having stolen the locking codes for the journalistic dossiers on the two of them. "I keep telling you, he's going to be a great Boxmaster."

"Hmmm. That's not all I called about. We have news from the labs on Inhet. Remember the blocks Spar used to blank out the recording ability of the shards?"

"You think I'm ever going to forget?" His head ached with the memory alone.

"Well, Forry Arunso's figured out how they work. The blocks and the directional detector both work on the same principle. I don't pretend to understand it, but it involves crushed shard. That's why Spar stole so many boxes before going specifically after yours. He needed certain kinds of shard to crush and mix. The powdered shard was deposited on a special composite base. Then, when it got near shard, it would give a directional reading. He didn't have to know where a Boxmaster had placed boxes, though his spy sometimes got that data for him. The detector would lead him directly to the box if he got near enough."

Odirin's flesh crawled with atavistic revulsion. "Dead boxmaster's crushed shard? I hope the labs aren't going to get any bright ideas - "

"No. I don't think so. Most of us on Inhet are Guildmasters. We don't need this kind of detector. We have the monitor shards to perform the same function."

Odirin wasn't convinced. Sometimes a monitor was lost when a boxmaster's ship was lost. Then its corresponding box had to be found without the boxmaster's help.

The design philosophy behind Spar's detector sounded so incredibly ghoulish that Odirin couldn't imagine how it had ever occurred to Spar. It lent a renewed credence to Yran's hypothesis of outsiders. "Thank you for letting us know. We'll be on our way to Crissden in a few hours."

"You're already two days behind schedule. The Guild Council has promised the Crissden Foundation that their observatory wouldn't be bottom priority again. For some mysterious reason, it's absolutely vital you be there on time. I got the impression my career depended on it. So far, I haven't told them you're behind schedule."

Adrun Rudy wasn't given to hyperbole. Odirin calculated quickly, then said, "I can't leave before the launch. If something disastrous was going to happen, it'd be then. Don't tell the Foundation we'll be late. We'll make up time in transit."

Rudy sighed. "Just be sure to stand Pylant well off."

"I know the drill, Adrun. I've been at this business for eight years."

"I worry. You know I'm your friend."

"I know." Odirin signed off and went in search of Ida Limms. If they could recreate the mood of five hours ago, they just had time before she had to go on duty for the launch.

He made a point of letting Yran know where he was going and why. You couldn't make assumptions about sexual knowledge across species lines. Some day, Lyle thought, that bit of folk wisdom might sink into his skull. For now though, he realized he was as much at fault as the Kethsem for last night's fiasco. From now on, when he wanted privacy, he'd tell Yran so, straight out.

#

Though Hytril launched without notable mishap, Pylant was very late getting to Crissden. He hadn't told Rudy.

Crissden was a large planet that had escaped from its orbit around a triple star system and ended up trapped in a gravitational saddle point far out between stellar systems. It was a useless hunk of ice, iron, and rock with just enough internal heat left to produce some seismic activity. Though it had hefty gravity, it had virtually no atmosphere.

The observatory where their boxes were placed was high on the peak of a huge mountain. From that vantage, the instruments could zero in on a precise region of the galaxy and search for hints of habitable planets or advanced civilizations.

The observatory had been established decades ago as the result of heated argument culminating in a bet between two astronomers, a Laforn and a Jholair, about the probability of a young civilization developing in a planet rich segment of an adjacent spiral arm, and subsequently sending out signals asking for contact with Others. Crissden had become known as the Listening Post, and had garnered more or less support at different times, depending on the political situation between the Laforn and the Jholair.

Currently, the Crissden Foundation was rich enough to afford box surveillance and even to pay for the Boxmasters to make instrument corrections immediately instead of just reporting to the foundation, leaving the maladjustments for months until the Foundation could send a ship.

The Boxmasters were to monitor the slightest ground movements or other randomizing events and re-aim the instruments to keep them steady on the relatively tiny arc of sky that was of interest. They were also to make certain that everything was functioning properly.

As Pylant's system was linking to the planet based system and bringing the ship down to the crudely leveled landing field, Odirin rocked back in his desk chair with his hands behind his head and stretched against the restraining fields protecting him regretting they hadn't been able to make up much time in transit. It wasn't so much that Adrun Rudy would be blamed as that Odirin himself had suddenly become interested in the Crissden project.

"Yran," he said toward the comm, "here's something I hadn't thought of. If there was another big civilization anywhere in this galaxy, it'd probably be right out there where these instruments are trained."

"But the signals are thousands of years old by the time they get here."

"Don't forget the probes. Some of this stuff here is receiving reports in real time. They've got state-of-the-art Laforn devices here, and you know what they're like."

Stretched out on his couch, immobilized by the landing restraints, Yran realized one more weary time that there was just too much he didn't know about the galaxy. There was no point in blaming Kethsem for his shoddy education. He had to make up for those lost years of youth. "I'll read up on the survey probes as soon as we get done here." All he knew about Laforn was that they were fanatically private people with a knack for running financial institutions. But then there had been that roboticist on Hytril.

As he felt the touchdown, Odirin added, "One word of caution. We're here to work, not play with the robots."

Offended, Yran sat up. "I understand, Boxmaster." Ever since Odirin had found he'd ported over an entire reference library on robotics along with the data on the new pirates, the human had been tiptoeing around Sam and favoring the machine with exaggerated looks of distrust and horror.

Not sure what to make of that at first, Yran had finally decided Odirin was using humor to make a point he felt he'd failed to make with facts and figures. Only he hadn't failed. After his long session with Bidridgin over Hytril's robots, Yran at long last understood why a cross-programmed robot was so treacherous, especially one that carried domestic judgement programs as well as combat routines.

The boxmaster's nearly hysterical rejection of Sam when the robot had first come aboard had not been irrational or even inappropriate. It had been an expert opinion.

They met in the forward cargo elevator's air lock to suit up. Odirin got there first and opened the compartments with the vacuum suits. His own suit was still out for repair, so he was using a civilian one in florescent yellow and orange. It was better than trying to cope with a Guild issue that didn't fit. He was sitting down to get the boots on when Yran arrived looking horrified that he was late.

"Slow down," said Odirin softly. "Haste makes dead Boxmasters. Recite the checklist!"

Yran straightened before the open compartment and recited the checklist from memory. The words ran together in his breathless haste to prove his competence.

"Close your eyes, calm down, and give me that one more time, slowly." He stomped his right foot into the ill designed civilian boot.

When Yran had finished the apprentice's exercise, Odirin said, "I don't doubt that you've memorized the words, Yran, but I'm not convinced the import of them has really penetrated yet. Take your suit down."

Yran reached into the compartment and brought out the pure black, Guild issue vacuum suit he was to use. It had been made for a diminutive young woman, a Boxmaster who had been killed in one of Spar's raids. She'd never worn it.

Yran had inherited it when his apprentice's white suit, made to his measure, had proved defective. Then, within the month, he'd cut shard and become a journeyman, entitled to the black and white, and his pure white had been returned to the factory. It hadn't caught up with them yet. So Yran was wearing a boxmaster's suit that didn't quite fit and Odirin a badly designed civilian's suit. Such was a boxmaster's life in the field.

He watched carefully as Yran executed each move as if doing a text book demonstration. He was stiff and awkward at it. There would have to be some drills, soon.

"Wait, wait! Hold it! What did you just do?"

"I checked to make sure the field projector nodes had been properly serviced."

"Did you?"

Yran displayed the tag the Guild maintenance people had left attached to the helmet. The suit material itself could protect from vacuum for a number of hours, but the real value of a suit was in the fields that protected the material. With them functional, you could be buried alive under tons of rock and emerge unscathed.

"Yran, you checked the tag, not the nodes."

He looked at the tag in his hands.

"Yes, I know," said Odirin, "the book says check the tag. Boxmasters who expect to live to become Guildmasters check the nodes with their own eyes. Don't ever trust your life to some weary, bored, routine-sick tech making his fifteenth useless double-check of the day. It's your life. You check. When you're out here alone, there's no one to pull you out of a tight spot."

But the suit's practically new, Yran's thoughts protested. He'd only worn it a few times, and he'd checked it after taking it off so he could tag anything the techs needed to attend to. But there hadn't been any damage. And no Guild tech would shirk a check or attach a tag without having done the check. Aloud he said, "Yes, Boxmaster."

"Yran. Do you know how to recognize a damaged node?"

"I - I'm not sure, Boxmaster."

"Bring the suit over here. Sit down on the bench. I'll show you." Most people learned to spot field projection node damage as kids learning to maintain their own sports equipment. He had to keep reminding himself that Yran's childhood had been very different, so different that the Kethsem didn't even know what he didn't know.

As he demonstrated, Odirin made a mental note to tell Rudy to have the Academy curriculum modified to take nonhuman childhoods into account. Of course, all the nodes on Yran's suit were perfect, so Odirin had to dig out some old junk to show him what corroded nodes looked like and what happened when you tried to use them: basically nothing. Which could be fatal.

All the while, Odirin was feeling guilty he hadn't done this with Yran the first time he'd taken him into vacuum. He'd made another unfounded assumption across species lines. Finally, they were suited up and doing the comm check.

"Are you angry with me, Boxmaster?"

"No, Yran, I'm not angry!" snapped Odirin. To his shame, he stalked into the lift cage and almost closed the lock on the journeyman in his haste to be gone. "Come on. There's work to do."

As they exited the ship, the site's spot lights came on full, bank after bank of them, striving against the vacuum which refused to disperse the light, leaving it too bright and sharp edged. The effect made Yran's eye shields flicker when he looked around quickly.

In spots, the ground was covered with sharp, glittering unweathered white sand, elsewhere, fine black grit which had been spewed out by the equipment that had leveled the site.

Odirin carried the data pallet with the checklist of items to be cared for while Yran had the equipment pack and a smaller data pallet. After they'd seen to the equipment, they would pick up the boxes and take them back to the shop for re-casing.

They split up to go about their separate tasks, and Yran watched the stiff back of the human recede into the cluster of buildings. He is angry. He watched Odirin identifying himself to the robots who swarmed out of the closest dome. Most of them bent immediately to assist the Boxmaster, but curiously enough, one seemed to hesitate.

Probably the suit color, thought Yran. Most of these servos didn't have color perception because they didn't need it. He noted the number twenty-three painted on the gleaming hide of the hesitater, who was now following behind Odirin obediently.

Then he dismissed it from his mind and concentrated on the instrument readings he had to check to make sure every sensor was properly targeted. He gathered the filled recording media and popped in fresh datacases, collecting the filled ones from the depository where the robots filed them. He checked the resolution and clarity of the recordings, double checking all the work the robots had done.

If they should find anything amiss, they'd have to spend another two days here doing a more meticulous diagnostic and maintenance on the robots than the routine called for. Even in training, in a nice safe monitored chamber, Yran had never felt comfortable in vacuum gear.

But now, he hardly noticed it, except for the gloves. Knowing that this was fresh, present time data, data that might reveal the presence of the distant civilization he'd postulated, the work was so absorbing that nothing else registered, including the passage of time.

"Yran, what are you up to?"

"Item thirty-one," he replied. "Calibration." Straightening, he looked around. Odirin was standing atop one of the skeletal sensor arrays among a group of robots. The array was a dome shaped scaffolding fully two stories high. It supported nine large bowl style receptors.

The boxmaster's garish colored suit was outlined by the dim glow of its own fields and by the searingly bright spotlights that forced Yran's eye shields to shift the spectrum. That blacked out the background so that Odirin seemed to be standing on nothing surrounded by black space, looking like an icon on black velvet.

In his ears, the Boxmaster's voice said quietly, "It's time to knock off. We'll finish this tomorrow. Get your box and go start dinner. I'll be there in a few minutes."

Yran realized that if they hadn't lost so much time while he learned what every Union kid knew, they'd be done by now and ready to lift off. Obediently, he collected his box and hurried in, wanting to have a hot meal ready for the Boxmaster by the time he arrived.

But once in the shop, he opened his helmet, put his own Number Four box on the work bench, and set Sam to arranging the re-casing tools just the way Odirin liked.

Then he remembered robot number twenty-three. Calling up the record, he learned that it was a site-custodian, charged with keeping the place clean. But since there was no atmosphere, no storms or growth, the robot was of no use except when a ship landed and people littered.

Someone had had the bright idea to double program that custodian, giving it color perception, a wider spectrum perception, and superimposing a Security program. It wasn't a combat program, but it could detain or immobilize a sentient that seemed bent on harming the equipment. It had probably been nervous because they were off schedule. He'd better tell the Boxmaster.

More than a few minutes had passed, and Odirin had not yet summoned the lift. Yran thought of using the ship's comm, but then remembered the last time he'd surprised Odirin with an unscheduled call. If he startled him while he was climbing around on those tiny struts, the human could take a nasty fall. Odirin had been angry enough about mere frustration and embarrassment even though there'd been a good reason. Yran wasn't anxious to face anything worse from his instructor when there was no good reason.

Fastening his helmet, he climbed back into the cargo lift, sealed the lock door, and sent it back outside.

Odirin was still on top of the scaffolding intent on the instruments, the custodian robot right behind him, apparently unperturbed. As Yran walked out into view, Odirin must have caught the motion from the side of his eye, for he turned, rose with his box tucked under one arm and waved. "Get back inside! Get ready to take off!"

Take off?! They weren't anywhere near finished. Though his mind lagged, his feet started to obey, a trained reflex.

The spotlights went out. Odirin began to scramble down the network of struts in a frantic hurry. Yran paused for his eye shields to adjust. There was a movement among the bright stars behind Odirin, a tiny spark of light growing in size as it swooped across his field of vision. A spaceship? In a landing orbit?

Almost simultaneously, the array of struts and signal collectors around Odirin exploded in a silent shower of sparks and tumbling fragments. The boxmaster's body rose high in an arc, then tumbled through space, end over end with the ungainliness of the unconscious - or dead.

Ignoring the deadly rain of hot, heavy material, not even thinking about what had caused the explosion, Yran ran toward the point where Odirin's body would land.

Something slammed into the back of his neck.

He stumbled, then tucked into a forward roll. The fields of his suit had kicked in, but still he fetched up against a boulder, stunned, dazed, dizzy. Debris rained down, pummeling his suit's fields, making sheets of blindingly brilliant light in a hundred colors humans called infrared, light his eye shields weren't set to deflect.

Groggily, he gathered his knees and tried to stand. The ground shook, sand and black grit billowed upwards in a cloud. A space ship was landing on the rough space cleared of the sensor array. Pylant already occupied the only open flat ground.

The violence of the ship's landing picked up broken remnants of the struts and risers and hurled them outward with explosive force. Through the maelstrom, Yran couldn't see the boxmaster's suit, but he did spot Odirin's box. He inched toward it, sliding on the belly fields of his suit. He wrapped one arm around the box and humped to his knees. He had to get Odirin and the box back to Pylant, take off, report this.

It was all he could do to hold that in mind as he stumbled toward where he thought Odirin's body had landed. Unable to see through the flying dirt and debris, he slammed into a mound of machinery, felt the shape of the housing and oriented himself. He tried one of his suit lights, but its beam was thrown back by the glittering mineral grit.

It would only lead the attackers to him, anyway. Extinguishing it, he stumbled on, heaving fallen struts and fused lumps of composite aside in his frantic search for Odirin. "Boxmaster?" His voice was a hoarse whisper, surprising since he was not breathing the grit. Whispering wouldn't keep them from monitoring the suit comm. Louder, he called, "Boxmaster? Answer me! Let me get a fix on you!"

The grit was settling fast without air to impede the work of gravity. And there, emerging from the murk, was the bright outline of a suit, the garish colors making it visible despite everything. The fields around it were bright and hard, triggered to maximum.

"Pylant, prepare for liftoff," Yran ordered, glad that Odirin had given him piloting clearance with the ship's system. "Hold for my order. Acknowledge."

"Acknowledged."

Good. At least Pylant wasn't running any of Odirin's special defense programs.

Three steps closer, Yran could see why the suit fields were still triggered. The limp body was half buried in a twisted mass of rubble. The form was prone. A massive strut lay across the back of the neck. A piece of half molten slag pinned the legs. He's dead! No. No, he can't be.

Yran teased a relatively straight beam out of a pile of debris and, using the box as a fulcrum, set it as a lever against the strut pinning Odirin's head. He slipped and fell, reset, pried, and fell again. Setting the bar once more, he climbed onto it at the fulcrum and crawled up the lever, cursing the stiff suit boots, balancing carefully. Slowly, very slowly, the bar began to sink, the strut pinning Odirin's neck began to rise. He saw Odirin's lips move. The eyelids fluttered. He's alive!

"All right! Hold it right there!"

The Filiksan voice in his helmet startled Yran. He jerked around on his perch to find three suited figures gathered behind him. The lever under his feet twisted. Yran lost his balance.

The Filiksan raised a weapon. "Don't try it, Odirin!"

Arms reaching for balance, Yran fell toward the trio.

The weapon discharged.

The fields of Yran's suit flared into searing brilliance and he fell into blackness, every nerve on fire but curiously beyond pain.

End Chapter Two