Tall Eyebrow had succeeded in trapping all the dragonflies, and Keff was out of swordsmen to kill, so Carialle slowly shifted the holographic view forward, engulfing them in the darkness of "the great hall."
"Great suns, the lights are disappearing," Keff complained. Worried cheeps erupted from the two globe-frogs at the far side of the cabin, whose sole light source now was the hovering circuit diagram.
"Mulhavey," a tiny voice peeped.
Carialle smiled to herself. Tall Eyebrow had amazing powers of observation. On infrared, she watched his skinny form lope towards the spinning mask. He bent to look through it. It allowed you to see in the dark. He followed the floating hologram, grabbing Keff on the way, to three doors concealed behind a tapestry at the end of the room.
"Bend down," TE chirped in Standard, since his sign language was useless in the dark. He prodded Keff to look through the eyeholes at the three doors. They started a low discussion about which door to choose. Carialle left them to it, and made a crosscheck of her systems, and took a look at the long-range monitors. Hmm, number three engine was running a trifle too hot. She damped down the carburetion filter until all five engines were running in harmony.
Tall Eyebrow and his people had been out of touch with their homeworld, ever since the advent of the second alien race. Carialle reviewed the combination sign the Ozran globe-frogs had for these others, one hand with two fingers pointed downward like legs, but with the knees facing backward, and the other stretching the eyelids of one eye wide. No verbal name existed. The Crook-knees learned how the power system worked, commandeered all the power units in one single lightning grab, then moved their population base into the mountains, far out of reach of the Cridi. Without their devices, the globe-frogs were helpless. They couldn't range far from water, and had grown too dependent upon using the amulets to know how to survive without them. But a thousand years of subsistence living had taught them everything there was to know about making use of natural resources. Vulnerable to every hazard and large animal on the planet, sensitive to the atmosphere, and deprived of even basic luxuries they were forced to use the only resource left to them: their intellect. They lived virtually without waste, made use of all available resources, and appreciated every benefit that came their way. Carialle thought that such an admirable attitude would be a better import for the Central Worlds than the amulets.
The adventurers in her cabin passed through the correct doorway, and found themselves in a torchlit corridor, which in normal use was the passageway that led to Keff's quarters, the spare cabin, and the lift down to the storage bay. TE, letting the mask hologram float off, put his hand up flat to his face with the three middle fingers bunched together, and the long pinkie and almost equally long thumb slightly apart from the others so his round black eyes could peep through. It was his symbol for Carialle, "the One Who Watches From Behind the Wall."
"Yes?" Carialle asked at once.
"We have succeeded to the next stage. Food and water now?" the globe-frog asked, his small face plaintive.
"How thoughtless of me! Keff, you can go on for days without sustenance, and I have my own feeding systems, of course. Certainly, TE!" To keep within the context of the game, she had a floating globe appear that led the two adventurers toward the food synthesizer at the end of the cabin near the weight bench and the other two globe-frogs.
"I'd have just left the castle and gone to find a pub," Keff said apologetically. "Sorry, TE. You're not familiar with the conventions."
The hatch opened to disgorge in succession a bowl of succulent marsh greens, a glass of water, a glass of beer, some amorphous proteins shaped like Ozran grubs, and a plate containing one of Keff's favorite set lunches. Traveling with the globe-frogs was good not only for Keff, but for her as well. She had a chance to stretch her synthesizer's repertoire.
"There is not a strong enough resistor here," Small Spot said, pointing to the schematic. Carialle, distracted from her musings, noted his correction, tested it, found it good, and directed her internal mechanisms to make the adjustment.
"All right, try floating again," she instructed Small Spot. Obediently, the amphibioid put his fingertips into the niches on his amulet and took to the air.
But monitoring the game, meals, and the schematic took only a small portion of Carialle's attention. She had an oil painting in process, a globe-frog paddling its way across the dusty fields of Ozran, the way they were when she and Keff had first seen them, two years earlier. The canvas was meant to be a gift to the new joint government, to remind them of what they had left behind them. Her custom painting equipment took up as much space at one end of the cabin as Keff's exerciser did at the other. Critically, she examined each pixel she had done so far of the special microfiber-cell canvas, and with the greatest of care, flooded ten more cells of the thin, porous surface with medium green, and five with dark green, creating a minute stripe and highlight along a globe-frog's back. The result looked like a brush-stroke with a very fine sable brush, exactly as she wanted it to. She ought to be finished with the painting by the time they returned to Ozran. Carialle also gave her own hardware a good going over, to make certain the boffins in the repair bay at SSS-900-C, the last space station they had visited, hadn't left any screws untightened when they had examined her innards to install a ton of new memory. It appeared nothing had shaken loose since her last diagnostic. Their friend Simeon, the shellperson station manager, ran a tight ship. But Carialle liked to look after her own innards.
It was a wonder that the human race hadn't met the amphibioid race at least in passing. The coordinates that TE had given Carialle for his homeworld weren't far from P-sector, where Carialle herself had traveled many years before. Had no bored scientist with a radio-digital telescope ever swung it toward that system and picked up the traces of RF transmission? There could be a thousand explanations for failing to spot Cridi, but the result was, Carialle thought smugly, that she and Keff would be the first to meet the frogs, and the credit would be all theirs. Score two for the screwball crew, Carialle thought, her attention passing lightly over a cluster of unused memory cells. Alien Outreach didn't want a byte of possibly useful information about humankind's newest neighbor sacrificed for lack of space. They'd loaded her with new chips and controllers along every available circuit. Carialle felt that if she coughed she would rattle.
She scanned space around her. P-sector had only begun to be opened up in the last thirty years or so by exploration teams. It contained numerous spatial anomalies that frightened commercial shippers as much as it intrigued them as to what salable wonders might lie upon some of those as yet undiscovered planets circling the only just charted stars. When she herself had visited part of P-sector years ago, it was in the course of an investigation, with her first brawn, Fanine Takajima-Morrow, the mission had ended disastrously. A bomb planted by saboteurs in Carialle's fuel tank exploded, killing Fanine Takajima-Morrow, and leaving Carialle floating derelict, to wait weeks for rescue. She had survived, only narrowly avoiding the madness that haunts sensory deprivation.
It was right near here, in fact. Something long buried in her memory nudged her that she was passing within a few hundred thousand klicks of the exact spot. She did not even need to check the coordinates to know that that was true-how could she not have taken that into her calculations when she was planning the course to the Cridi system? Her thought processes must have been taken up with other things.
Still, her navigation program must have observed details about their route. Undoubtedly, her subconscious had told her she had old business to deal with, and steered her this way. Keff would have warned her to avoid the spot, if he had known. Bad luck, or some other softshell notion. But she wasn't superstitious-shellpeople weren't. Luck had little bearing on their situations. Considerable thought went into every facet of their lives, from pre-natal survival to the last hookup in their shells. Carialle's own disability had been diagnosed while she was still in her mother's womb, and she had been enshelled at once to save her life. So why did she feel, as they said in the old saw Keff had once dug up in his linguistical research, as if a goose had walked over her grave? Could there be leftover psychic vibration in a place where a trauma had occurred? That had to be a myth, and yet she began to experience the anxieties she had suffered when she was marooned here. These-yes, these were the last stars she had seen before the bomb in her fuel tank exploded, destroying her first ship and killing Fanine. Adrenaline surged through her system. Frozen, Carialle felt panic rise, not stopping it as it turned her nerves to barbed wire. It could happen again! Frantically, she ran a safety check on the fuel mix in her tanks, measuring carbon levels, looking for the telltales that might indicate the presence of foreign substances.