The Law of Indirection

By David Welle

AN ORIGINAL STORY BASED
ON THE TELEVISION SERIES

SPACE: 1999

Many thanks
to
Terry Bowers
and
George Eichler
for
help making this
fanzine a reality

And to Rhonda, a friend who listened
to my occasionally "lunatic" ravings

This not-for-profit amateur/fan publication is designed for entertainment purposes only, and is not intended to infringe upon the rights of ITC, ATV, Gerry Anderson, Polygram, Carlton, Granada Ventures, or any other copyright holders of Space: 1999.

The Law of Indirection, story and artwork, Copyright ©1995-2007, by David M. Welle (MetaForms, Ltd.), and may not be reproduced or published without consent of author/artist.

All text and some pictures were created using MS-Write, MS-Works, MS-PaintBrush, Borland C++ 4.52 (text editing of the .HTML), and Borland Resource Workshop. Additional art was scanned using Logitech PageScan Color. All product names listed are trademarks of their respective companies (Microsoft, Borland, and Logitech). Originally published as a one-story, novel-length fanzine in 1995. First uploaded to the Web on May 15, 1997, with a slight revision on October 18, 1997. Restored to the Web on August 10, 2007, at the start of website repair. This introductory part of the page was revised on September 13, 2007 (happy Breakaway anniversary!).

Moonbase Alpha status report, 1040 days after leaving Earth orbit. Dr. Helena Russell recording. We continue to travel through a relatively star-poor area of space. It has been several weeks since the last planetary system, and months since the last living world, Luton. This has been the longest period of peace we have enjoyed since breaking from Earth--a badly-needed rest for everyone, and a grace period for repair and upgrade of systems, including those which have been neglected in favor of continually repairing the major systems. On the other hand, we have been unable to get at supplies of critical substances--such as tiranium--that are rare on the Moon. The situation is not yet critical, but will be in several weeks. We are, however, a couple of days from a star system. We can only hope for the best: it is entirely possible that we will not reach another planet until close to the critical point.

Typical, Helena mused with a smile. Watches everything like a hawk--or is it an Eagle?--during stellar approaches. She had often argued against his sixteen-hour days during encounters, due to the stress they induced; but she could understand his motivation. The unexpected had a way of popping up, and he wanted to be there when it happened. Nevertheless, the way he ignored the limits of his body often drove Helena crazy--both as medical officer, and as a woman who loved him deeply enough to feel the emotions he kept from everyone else. Here he was again, repeating his age-old pattern.

Maya, the science officer, was here as well. Her alien body could not keep the same time as the rest of Alpha. She worked by a thirty-three-hour clock, including eight hours of sleep plus a two-hour nap, forcing her to keep irregular hours by Alphan standards. She could trans form herself into other forms for short times; but when in her natural form, she had to work by its dictates. Here was another person Helena had urged to cut down on her hours. Where John hid behind claims of being needed in Alpha's nerve center, Maya sometimes hid behind claims of a more tolerant biology and psyche. Helena no more believed Maya than she did John on this issue, especially considering that Maya rarely mentioned her biology otherwise.

And finally, Tony Verdeschi, the security officer, was also present. Helena did not worry about him: he enjoyed his off-hours far too much to allow himself to over work except when absolutely needed. He just appeared to have arrived a little early, probably to talk with Maya.

Apparently, the "night" watch had already been dismissed by the commander. It figured.

When Helena walked further into Command Center, her distinct- sounding footsteps caught John's attention, and he turned his seat around to face her. "Good morning, Helena," he said warmly.

" 'Morning, John," she responded with equal warmth, resisting the urge to kiss him on the cheek. Despite the fact that the Tony and Maya were not looking their way, Command Center was just too public a place to be kissing in. "Anything happening yet?" she asked.

"No. Should there be?"

"Well, with you here, it looks as if you expect something. Maybe if you just stayed out of Command Center for once, nothing would happen."

He looked at her blankly for a moment, then smiled. "Yeah, I'll have to try that sometime, maybe when we approach a dead red dwarf star or something. Say, Jack Bartlett and his group are putting on an impromptu classical music recital tonight, open to the rest of the base. Interested?"

"Why are you so suddenly interested in the classics?" she asked coyly, trying to hide her smile of delight that he had asked.

"Well, you were probably about to say that I need a break--"

"Is that the only reason?" Helena interrupted.

"Are you saying I have ulterior motives?"

"Perhaps you do."

"Well... maybe I do."

"Hmm, that sounds a little better. I accept."

Out of the corner of his eye, Tony noticed Maya turn and look at him. His gaze was drawn to hers, and he instantly saw her expectant smile. He had not missed John and Helena's exchange, and realized the significance of Maya's stare. Oh God, he thought, she expects me, of all people, to take her to a classical music concert? Doesn't she know that I hate that boring, overly-romantic tripe? He couldn't resist wondering what her ulterior motives might be.

Tony heaved a sigh of relief when Maya's attention was drawn by alerts from her console.

"Hmm, that's interesting...."

"What is it, Maya?" Tony immediately asked.

"We seem to have prematurely emerged into normal space, at a space- normal boundary unusually far away from the star. We are no longer traveling faster-than-light."

Koenig frowned. "I thought you said it would be two days yet."

"It should have been."

"Any readings or explanation yet?"

"No, except that we are ten light-days out. I can't explain. We'll have to wait for further details."

Koenig nodded understanding, then turned to log this fact and send notification to everyone through computer mail. At the same time, Tony got up and approached Maya. "So, the super-smart Psychon scientist slips up." It sounded as if he had wished to deliver that line for some time, though it sounded more than a little silly to everyone else present.

Silly or not, Maya still fell for it, taking it seriously as she turned to him with a slightly annoyed look. "Given the complexities of our unusual form of hyperspatial travel and the variable space-normal boundaries around stars, prediction isn't easy."

"So she blames mysterious complexities."

"The mathematics of hyperdimensional folded topography are never precise."

"Next, she accuses the mathematics."

"And the computer can barely handle the simplest aspects."

"Then she insults our computer," he said, striving to maintain a poker- face.

"It doesn't understand probability vectors, transtates, slipstream tachyons, and hyperstrings."

"Ooohh, then she tries to knock us over with a bunch of fancy, pseudo- scientific-sounding statements that she probably made up on the spot."

John and Helena couldn't help smiling a little. Watching the antics of the younger couple could be quite amusing in some ways. On the other hand, it seemed their behavior continued to be almost exclusively along the lines of playful feints of various sorts, despite the fact they obviously loved each other. Apparently neither had a clear idea of how to express it. It was obviously tricky territory, as love always was. John knew the usually hot-shot Tony was deathly afraid of scaring the exotic Maya off, and Helena knew Maya was still innocent in many ways, despite her very playful nature. But they'd figure it out for themselves sooner or later, John and Helena figured.

"But there is still something unusual about this star system!"

"And when all else fails, she blames the poor, innocent star system for her mistake."

John almost visibly frowned at the sound of the word "innocent" being applied to any star system, even in jest.

By now, Alan and Sandra had shown up, and were watching the events with mild amusement.

"Well, I guess I'm washed up as a science officer," she said without skipping a beat or showing any expression. She got up from her seat, watching Tony's expression change from a smile to one of surprise. "I suppose we've got to find a new one," she continued as she walked around to Tony's back side. "And I think I found one," she said, pushing the surprised Tony into her vacated chair.

"Hey, wait a minute, Maya. I didn't mean anything--"

"Now," she continued, overriding his protests, "just to let you know where I left off, your first duty is to interpret these readings and give your report to Commander Koenig." She started walking away. His surprise held him in his seat, and her words caused him to look at the readouts flashing by at a dizzying speed. He could make no sense out of them.

Tony turned towards Maya, entirely missing John and Helena's amused looks, which they quickly tried to smother. Maya had nearly reached the rear doors. "Wait a minute! I can't understand these crazy readouts! Have you got them programmed in Psychon or something?"

She turned around. "No, Greek."

Her words triggered what she was looking for: Tony blurted, "Well, it's all Gr.... Heeyyy, now wait a second!" He pointed an accusing finger at her. "Oh, ha ha. 'All Greek to me.' You thought you could catch me."

"She did," Helena said, getting caught up in the fun despite herself--or perhaps because she felt a little nudge couldn't hurt, having suddenly realized what the other woman was up to. Tony looked at Helena in betrayal, and John was giving her a look that was both reproving and approving--not to mention the quiet amusement Helena saw in his eyes. She simply shrugged in return to both men.

"Call it a draw," Tony said.

"Sore loser," John added. Tony looked at John in surprise, having expected his support. Now Helena returned John's expression, the best she could. He likewise copied her shrug.

"A draw then, if you take me to the recital," Maya said with an pixie- like smile.

She had totally turned around his ill-conceived joke, and had him quite pinned. He could back out--but in front of everyone? His face flushed. "Ah, Maya... do you want to go the music recital?"

"Why thank you for the offer," she said smoothly, as if it were the first time she had heard of it. "Yes, I would be delighted to go with you."

Just a moment "too late" for Tony, Maya's console started clamoring for attention. Maya automatically tried to sit down, attempting to push Tony out of the seat. At the first moment of contact, Tony did not seem to want to move; but he finally got up. Maya settled in and took stock of the readings, then frowned, pulling her up-curved eyebrows tighter together. "Hmm..." she started hesitantly. "Seems to have been a moonquake somewhere."

"You don't sound so sure," Tony observed.

She ignored him. "I am calibrating readings from several detectors in order to determine its location and depth." Before the computer had even finished processing the raw data coming in, she had already used the same data to calculate the location in her mind, which she spoke aloud: "Roughly longitude 151 east, latitude 41 south, south of crater Jules Verne, approximately 4700 kilometers away by surface travel." The computer finally caught up with her and began printing some figures, but she ignored them. Her puzzled look prompted John to ask her what was bothering her. "It was an extremely shallow quake, practically at the surface," she said, then turned to the now completed read out to verify her calculations, while the others puzzled the meaning of her words.

Alan came up with the answer first. "An asteroid strike."

"That would account for these readings."

"We've never hit one before," Helena stated. "At least nothing big enough to detect this easily."

"They're thinly spaced and few compared to the huge volume of space-- even very near a star."

"And we are still far from the star," Sandra said.

"But we had to hit a somewhat larger one sooner or later," Koenig reasoned.

At 38 million square kilometers, the Moon was too large to have spread detectors thickly enough to detect anything smaller than about a thousand tons, given the most sensitive equipment they had been outfitted with by Earth. Those detectors had never been upgraded since instal lation a decade before. It simply wasn't a priority, given all of their ongoing problems.

After a pause, the commander turned to his chief pilot. "Alan, take an Eagle and check. Have Maya give you the exact coordinates." Alan nodded, took the printout Maya offered him, and left.

Four minutes later, at the stroke of eight--the usual start of "alpha" shift--Eagle One launched. Shortly after that, Maya had more raw data to calculate additional figures. "We entered the space-normal sphere at an unusual angle. Not only are we farther away, but we will only cut through the outer most part of the system before exiting in about a week." She put an image of the star on the main view screen. It looked like the other stars in the field of view, just brighter. "Assuming the sensors are showing an undistorted picture, we will not be getting much closer to the star."

"Too far out for the Eagles, then," Tony commented.

"And too distant to detect smaller, earth-size planets," Sandra added.

Maya typed some commands; a picture showed up on the big screen. The circle was a two-dimensional representation of the space-normal sphere, with an line--the Moon's path--cutting a small section far from the point at the center representing the star. "We will have full verification of exact distance and angle when we have traveled long enough to get meaningful parallax figures."

"It is rather unusual to be so far from the star, but it has happened several times," Sandra said.

"Not that it has made us any safer," Tony added. "We've encountered our share of ships out that far. Not to mention a few that travel faster- than-light and reach us during our extended jumps."

While the others continued talking, John could not help do some musing. Somehow, they always ended up reminding each other of their hardships. Yet morale tended to be quite high, most of them time. Hope had to be at the core of each and every Alphan. Hope and friendship were just as necessary as air and food to keep them alive, psychologically and physically, in deep space, far from others of their kind.

Sometimes, though, it was surprising they hadn't worn down after all these years, especially Maya, who in some ways had the least to hope for of any of them: it was possible she was the last survivor of the Psychon people; so how could she be so consistently cheerful and uplifting? John had never gotten the nerve to ask her how she went through everyday with such vitality and happiness, for he didn't want to remind her of her status. Maya often baffled him, but he realized it was probably more a matter of her individual personality than her alien nature--just as other humans, especially Helena, could regularly surprise him. On the other hand, Maya had once said Psychon was "a happy place," and given this remaining representative of that dead planet, he had little doubt it once was, before environmental catastrophe followed by Mentor's madness doomed it.

On top of everything else she had done for Alpha, Maya restored some small sense of trust in the universe. After so many hostile encounters with intelligent aliens, the humans had come to distrust almost anything alien. Maya's father Mentor had only furthered that impression with his bloody attacks on Alpha's personnel. At first, people had reacted poorly to his daughter's arrival, making her even more miserable for several weeks. Fortunately, it hadn't taken most of them too long to recognize Maya's innocent suffering and remorse, however, and accept her as a friend.

After acceptance came, and Maya's own grief faded somewhat, her innately cheerful nature had quickly reasserted itself. People found that they liked to be around her. Furthermore, her warm and cheerful nature, combined with her exotic beauty, had proven fascinating to the men of the base, which made Alpha's women--and some of the more conservative men--nervous at first, until they realized she really wasn't returning their interest. Now, however, Tony's special friendship with Maya, however slow it was in developing, was generally accepted as two people gradually falling in love; even if the two had trouble admitting it--though that was probably due more to their fiercely independent personalities than the fact they came from different planets.

John watched Sandra get up from her console to look at something on Maya's. Tony and Helena joined them. It was a picture of cooperation and friendship. Friendships with the humans undoubtedly helped sustain Maya, just as friendship sustained the other Alphans. Friendship and hope. They were indeed as necessary to their continued survival as any other factors.

The beeps emanating from Sandra's console broke John out of his reverie.

Sandra returned to her console, checked out the source of the beeps, then turned to John. "It is Alan. He is approaching the site of collision." It had been twenty minutes since Carter's launch.

"Okay, Alan, send us back a visual." The big screen lit up with a picture. Except for endless mountains of dull-gray moonrock, there was nothing to see yet. "Maya, tie your console into the detectors aboard Eagle One."

"Yes, Commander." She pressed several buttons. Almost instantly, she had something to report: "Sensors are picking up a magnetic disturbance."

"At that distance?" Tony asked.

"It is an object with high metallic content." Koenig noticed she did not say asteroid. Her eyebrows drew together as she pressed several buttons. "What is this?"

"What?" Tony and John asked in unison. They looked at each other, then turned back to Maya.

"There appears to be some sort of energy dis--" She didn't just trail off her sentence, she abruptly stopped. A worried expression appeared on her face, and she glanced around Command Center.

"What is it?" Tony asked, wondering what she was looking for.

"Something...." She reached for another button, but stopped as a soft glow started covering her form. It first seemed like she was transforming, but it was different. Instead of the soft fuzzing she usually went through, she was being covered with white light. "Maya!" Tony shouted. Her expression filled with fear as she vanished into the light. They tried to reach her, but the light was like a solid wall. "I can't move!" she cried out.

Two seconds later, the light turned from a uniform white into a chaotic swirl of color. Cries of pain instantly filled the air. Tony reached for the shield button, but Maya screamed not to activate any shield, so he pulled back, confused. They started pounding at the strangely solid colors, but the force did not yield. They heard her voice one last time, crying out for Tony, then near-silence. The light faded, to be replaced with what looked like a layer of highly reflective mercury covering her form. It also deflected all blows.

Tony, being Moonbase Alpha's security officer, was always armed. He pulled his laser gun, made sure it was set to a stun setting, then shot at the mercury-like layer. Like all other light, the laser was reflected, full strength, in a direction determined by the curve of the substance, itself determined by the curves of Maya's body. Sandra dropped to the floor, stunned. Tony looked at her, muttering "Sorry, Sahn" apologetically, even though she couldn't hear. He realized that a cutting setting would be reflected, as would a kill setting; and even if the substance covering her was shattered, the beam would kill Maya the moment the shield cracked, before he could turn the laser off.

They could not do a thing. They helplessly watched the shield for many long seconds, desperately trying to figure out a way to get at Maya. After several more seconds, the metallic silver turned back to a uniformly white light, which itself disappeared two seconds later. Maya did not reappear. Everyone looked aghast at the empty chair where the lovely woman had been sitting a mere forty seconds before.

"Oh, my God!" cried out Alan's voice from the speakers. His surprise had nothing to do with Maya's disappearance, which he had not witnessed. He had reached the collision site in an Eagle.

"That's no asteroid. It's the wreckage of a gigantic ship!"

---

Chapter Two
Viewpoints

Arlanka of Radial Transfer Station Tyrok-17 frowned at her console. "I'm having trouble with the transport," she offered to the seven men standing around the Transfer Alcove.

The target coordinates were being fed to her station real-time by hyperlink from a larger station with powerful sensors, located deep inside the star system. Someone there had picked out a specific target. Unfortunately, that target--which her computer identified as human--was on the small, traveling planet which had destroyed the Far Radial Station Tyrok-19 just thirty-two minutes before. It was well outside Tyrok-17's normal transport range, and barely within its theoretical range.

Sweat broke from her brow as she realized she was losing control of the disassembly, which was breaking down in a completely unexpected and chaotic way. She shivered, pitying the person on the opposite end: being chaotically disassembled was reportedly a painful process which often killed the recipient of such mistreatment. Her mind and hands raced as she ordered the computer to turn the failing disassembly field into a remote stasis field, in an attempt to restabilize the target's form.

Cocooning the person in a stasis field did not end the problems. For a moment, it returned the person to a stable form, as she expected; but then the readings started changing, far more than they should have been for something locked in such a field. To Arlanka's amazement, her computer claimed the person itself was doing it. That is impossible, she thought, dismissing the idea, instead concluding the great distance had weakened the initial disassembly attempt to the point where it had destabilized the person captured within. If so, why hadn't the victim simply disintegrated?

Her mind--working at a feverish speed--ignored blips indicating an energy attack at the stasis field from the outside. The target obviously had friends, but they could not break through.

Despite orders to capture the target, she would have released it by now, except she could not even restabilize it. Even the stasis field had failed to return it to human form. Arlanka called up some reassembly programs in an attempt to force a return to its original state, keeping the stasis field in place. Arlanka watched in delight as the energies, caught between the two forces, finally started returning to human form. That feeling vanished as she watched the restabilizing field being pushed back by the internal instability of the creature.

Arlanka was deeply disturbed to see such a visible demonstration of entropy fighting order. She had botched the transport so badly that she had turned a living creature--normally a highly-ordered construct constantly fighting to make order out of chaos surrounding it--into a source of disorder. Having been so utterly disrupted, the poor human had to be quite totally dead. Yet for some reason, the energies which had once been a living being remained surprisingly coherent. Not taking time to comprehend this, she continued manipulating the controls, trying to force a return to order, hoping against hope she could reform a living person. These strangely coherent energies seemed to resist the attempt, as if striving to create some new order, completely different than the human being that it had originally been.

"What have I turned this person into?" she cried aloud in frustration and confusion, drawing glances from her subordinates. She felt miserable, having unintentionally tortured a living human being into twisted ropes of energy. She was about to order the computer to deactivate the stasis field in order to release what was now an ugly mess, when by some miracle too huge to believe, the energy reverted to its initial human form. The computer automatically restarted the disassembly.

Too shocked by the sudden reappearance of the human form from dissolution, she did nothing to stop the disassembly. When it was complete, the computer gave her startling new data. With a calm voice which belied the sudden fear she felt, she relayed the information to her people, so they would be ready. "It's coming. Computer says it is not quite... human. It is unarmed, but wears a single metallic device near its waist. Please confiscate it. Be careful. This may be the first intelligent alien our culture meets. It could be dangerous."

On Moonbase Alpha, Maya felt energies form around her, immobilizing her to the point that she could barely move. She cried out for Tony as the image of Alpha and her friends was drowned out by a light so blinding she had to close her eyes against it. She suddenly realized that this was a transport system. She had gone through several transports--by Magus, by Taybor, and by the Vegans--but she had never before felt the actual process of dissolving her body. It was a terrifying sensation to a metamorph who was highly aware of physical coherence, so she resisted, trying to disrupt the field by transforming into another humanoid.

The field was disrupted all right--but not to the point that it released her. Its organized attempt to dissolve her immediately ceased, only to be instantly replaced by a completely chaotic attempt to do the same thing. Maya felt her body being ripped apart, and she screamed in pain. Her frantic mind suddenly realized it would be dangerous to have a shield raised during an unknown transference method, so she forced herself to scream out a warning. The sensation of being torn apart continued for several agonizing seconds. Suddenly, all attempts to dissolve her body ceased, and she found herself immobilized in what seemed to be a damping field.

It was an utter lack of outside sensation. No sound or light. No direction to space. No space even. Even time seemed distorted--the near nothingness continuing for an appalling length of time. She could feel nothing beyond her body, and even her physical form seemed distant, fading by the second. She was quickly approaching complete sensory deprivation.

Terror welled up in her. She attempted to move her body, but found she was losing all control over it. Despite the painful failure of her previous attempt, she again tried to regain control by ordering her body to transform. This was somewhat successful, until something clamped down and tried to force her back to humanoid form. Suddenly having a force to fight against, she pushed as hard as she could, trying for a radically different form that still had roughly the same size, instinctively feeling the damping field would not allow anything larger. Maya had already succeeded in disassembling her humanoid Psychon form, and was now reassembling the energies into that of a Mothan, but was unable to change it into matter.

The onslaught of outside force was preventing that, and causing her a great deal of pain in the process. Her body felt far from distant anymore, and it advertised that fact by screaming messages of agonizing pain to her mind. Utterly exhausted, Maya ceased all resistance, unable to fight anymore. She allowed the outside force to influence her body back to its normal humanoid state. After that was complete, she felt herself dissolve-- this time in an orderly and painless way. For a moment, she felt nothing, not even the rest of herself. Then she felt her body reforming around her.

In near-shock, her eyes still closed, it took a full five seconds to notice the sensations of Alpha had vanished. No computer noises. No human voices. New smells. Warmer. She slowly opened her eyes.

It was not Moonbase Alpha.

She was still too shocked to feel anything else. She slowly glanced about, taking in one thing at a time. Near silence. Enclosed. In a large cubicle. Green, with pink and purple dots. She wondered what was wrong with her eyes.

She looked out the window of the cube. There were seven men with drawn weapons, and a woman standing behind a console. Blinding blue walls prevailed, and streaks of wild purples and bright greens swirled sickeningly around. The people were likewise dressed in chaotically- colored clothing. Maya, used to the almost austerely muted colors of Alpha and preferring the low-wavelength oranges and reds of her destroyed homeworld, found the riotously clashing splashes of high- wavelength colors distressing. This, coupled with the vivid memories of the painful experience she had endured, nearly made the Psychon sick on the spot. She tried to resist the feeling, instead looking over her captors.

They were quite human, in the Alphan sense. Their heights varied little, from one to four centimeters shorter than Maya; and their faces were all medium-toned and relatively rounded--not quite fat--in shape, though the woman's face was slightly thinner. The men all wore their black hair uniformly short, and the woman's barely reached her neck. Where they failed to differ greatly in physical appearance, they made up with their wardrobe. Though all wore spacious, loose-fitting garments, each had clothing with differing patterns: stark vertical stripes on one, psychedelic swirls on another, random lines on a third, zig-zags on two others, as well as big dots, various animal-like figures, and some abstract shapes to round out the collection. Worse than their sense of style was their sense of color. Any one person's clothing had a variety of bright colors, often alternating such ugly combinations as blue and red, pink and purple. She briefly wondered if their home planet had such garishly-colored scenery, thinking that might account for their dreadful taste. They had to be the worst-dressed aliens Maya had ever seen.

She set aside such useless observations and turned her attention to the situation itself.

The nausea was passing, so she finally stood up. That action made her realize she had materialized on a chair--though certainly not the one she had been sitting on in Command Center less than a minute before. The one here had evidently been provided to prevent her falling to the floor after transfer: she had been sitting at her console on Alpha, and a transport computer could not make the attempt to change her body position, for fear of not reordering the molecules and cells correctly in a new configuration, thereby causing disphasing shock and death.

She looked back to the aliens on the other side of the transparent walls, demanding--first in Psychon and then in Alphan--the identity of her kidnappers.

They remained silent.

On Scan Station Nyka-2, near the heart of the Lykrontak system, a woman's frown finally faded, to be slowly replaced by a smile. Syranak had watched the inept handling of the transport with an anxiousness that almost made her lose control and cry out in front of the commander of the station.

She had the fortune of being on official inspection of N-2 when an emergency call came in from the Grand Council. A rogue planet had suddenly fallen out of faster-than-light travel at the far point of a hypertransport radial, destroying Far Station Tyrok-19 in the process. Syranak had considerable experience with scan systems and had commanded sibling station Nyka-1 some years before. In this case, she simply took over the scan equipment. From near the heart of the star system, she directed intense hyperscans at the object on the edge of the system. Within moments, she was listing the intruder's diameter and other key figures for the Council, which was meeting on Lykrontak itself. Syranak began concentrating the scans. She quickly found the remains of T-19 on the planet. It was partially intact--the stations being constructed of extremely tough alloys--but no survivors could be found. She shuddered. Almost one hundred people dead. She reported this tragic information. Scanning elsewhere, she almost found something that caused her heart to seemingly skip a beat.

"Incredible deposits of nuclear material near one edge of the intruder!" she said, her eyes widening at the sight. Her conscious mind refused to allow itself to jump to the obvious conclusion.

"A nuclear engine?" cried Potrak, commander of the Scan Station. Despite his own conclusion, he did not fully realize what it meant until Prime Councilor Garolak's impressively baritone voice provided the answer that shook them all up.

"Then the planet may be populated by intelligent alien life."

Silence reigned for a long moment before someone broke it. "That kills the conclusion that intelligent life elsewhere is highly improbable," grumbled Councilor Gastka, a man with the sharp eyes of a ieyask but the foul manner of a Ratakian salari.

"They are either brilliant or stupid to be using nuclear pile propulsion," Councilor Pylorka stated in the icy voice she reserved for seemingly every person and situation that existed in life.

"Verify the deposit isn't natural, first. Scan for life," Garolak commanded, providing a reassuringly authoritative voice which helped push aside the fear growing in them all: a fear of something new and dangerous which had already destroyed a station of nearly a hundred people.

Syranak altered the scans and probed the area around the nuclear deposits, and in a shaky voice, relayed the results. "A series of metallic structures house the material. Definitely artificial. No life forms present, however," she concluded, somewhat relieved. Her ease was short-lived, for she realized the incompleteness of her scans. Widening the beams again, she started playing them over the rest of the small, satellite-sized world. A blip caused her to concentrate the scans further.

"It is..."--she swallowed hard--"a large installation near the opposite limb of the rogue."

Without prompting, she narrowed the scans again. What she found shouldn't have surprised her or any of them. It still did. "Life indicated," she stated with simplicity. Not very grand words for what was the first discovery and verification of apparently intelligent life; but that is what would go down in Lykrontak history--assuming the aliens didn't have the power and desire to put an end to that history.

Stopping down her scans even further, she resolved the life readings. "Individuals. Estimate 270-310. Dozens of nuclear sources--probable energy generators."

"Or propulsion for ships," Pylorka stated dryly.

"I am unable to quickly distinguish metallic ships from the installation's metallic superstructure," Syranak said. She narrowed the hyperscanners to their ultimate--however incredible--limit, and probed a few of the individual life forms, interpreting the patterns in the false-color, wide-spectrum view, filtering and interpreting the confusing mass of computer-represented colors into something more meaningful. After a few seconds, she sighed in relief--though from what, she was not certain. "They are human," she said, not feeling--at least not consciously--the least bit surprised.

As if suddenly told everything was okay, they all relaxed. They had collectively waited for Syranak's pronouncement as if uncertain of the coming results; but in the end, it was nothing more than waiting for verification of the aliens' humanity.

As if it had merely been paused, their normal way of thinking resumed.

"So how much to satisfy the Law?" Gastka asked.

"One higher up in the command structure should do," Prime Councilor declared. "We can thus be assured the individual would have near- complete information."

Pylorka's eyes narrowed. "Only one?" she said icily. "For such a crime?"

"It's likely a commander's decision that set its course," Garolak said, "so one near him or her should do." At this, they all agreed, albeit with some hesitation on Pylorka's part. "Find an individual in a command location," Garolak relayed over the hyperlink to Syranak, over 100 million kilometers away. "Is there a Radial Station within transfer range?"

"Tyrok-18 is not properly aligned," Syranak said, looking at the situation 250 billion kilometers away from them all. "I am contacting Tyrok-17, which is nearly aligned and still within range."

In a matter of moments, she had a non-voice data relay set up with the commander of that station--Arlanka. Syranak scanned the overall layout of the alien base again, correcting for the angle of view. It was not symmetrical in exact design; but in general, it had strong radial and circular patterns which centered on a single tall structure. Concentrating her attention there, she found the upper levels were empty, but the lower ones contained increasing numbers of individuals. Finally, she found a close gathering of life forms in a single room off-center in the lowest level. Guessing this was the central control, she stared at the layout of the room and the positions and movements of the people, trying to determine who was the commander, so as to avoid transporting him or her.

Fine-tuning the readings, so the colored blips representing people resolved into fuzzy indications of limbs, she was able to see which direction they were facing from where their barely-resolved legs were pointing. She was then able to determine where the front and back of the room were, and realized one individual in the back was along the central axis of the room, while all the others were off to the sides. The one in the rear was almost certainly the commander.

A slight discoloration in the processed scans drew Syranak's attention to one of the blips nearest the probable commander. "What...?"

"Syranak?" Garolak prompted when she did not immediately follow up.

"Something is wrong with the scanner. It is giving odd readings. Wait--it is concentrated around one of the people. No, it is one of the people!"

"What are you saying?" Gastka demanded.

Ice materialized in Syranak's bowels. With effort, she calmly reported what she thought she was seeing, hoping she wasn't going crazy. "One of the individual life forms is not human."

"An animal? Ignore it," Pylorka said blithely, as if she were speaking to a functional idiot.

"No, no," Syranak said, a sharp edge in her voice. Not an animal." Her eyes kept growing wider. "Almost human--but not quite. Very much an... alien."

"Are you certain?" Garolak said with a surprisingly calm voice, sensing fear arising within himself and the Council around him; but trying to avoid further fanning it.

"Yes. It can't be a scan flaw--it would not distort only one individual in a consistent way." After a moment's pause, Syranak gave her opinion: "I say we take that one. The others are human; this one is not. That must be important in some way. It can be brought in, and you can... whatever." Syranak unconsciously avoided including herself among whoever would meet the alien.

After a few moments of chattering, the Grand Council became quiet. Then Garolak gave the order. "Have T-17 transfer the alien out."

The target was on a fast-traveling object which itself was rotating, so the coordinates were constantly changing. Precise real-time location had to be beamed along the hyperlink from Scan Station Nyka-2 to Radial Station Tyrok-17. This took up the entire bandwidth of the link, so Syranak could not warn Arlanka of the alienness of the target; and after the transfer, a warning would be superfluous. If Arlanka followed the usual precautions, no difficulties would occur. She did not even consider the possibility that the usual precautions could prove quite insufficient in handling an alien.

Tyrok-17 slowly rotated to the correct angle, then began transference. Syranak used the scanners to watch the transport process. As she saw disassembly fields and then stasis fields fail to work properly, Syranak grew angry at how badly T-17's commander was handling the transfer. Arlanka will be reported for this, she thought--though now with some nervousness as it became evident that the target was totally collapsing under Arlanka's inept ministrations.

Arlanka's lost the alien--and her command, I swear. If she-- Syranak's thoughts were abruptly halted as the situation suddenly-- miraculously--stabilized. The process reverted to normal, and was completed. The data link from T-17 had a moment to report success before the commlink to the Radial Station collapsed under the expected excess of tachyon emissions which followed completion of a transfer--the usual limitations of having "hyper"-everything. This had never been that annoying before; but now... everything had changed, and time was frustratingly crucial.

Syranak suddenly discovered how crucial. "Oh no...." Before the Council could demand clarification, she provided it: "Course of the rogue planet has been computed. It is aimed directly at the Far Station of another Radial--Utrax. Three-point-five days until collision."

Councilor Hajrar, an calm, older man with gray hair, shook his head sadly. "Remember that the shuttle linking Utrax-18 and 19 crashed against 19 and damaged the hyperspatial transfer system. Those aboard U- 19 cannot evacuate to Eighteen or to the Vaknor system. As with T-19, there are approximately one hundred people on U-19."

"Kaliskay," Gastka spat; a curse which made it unnecessary for others to add their own.

Pylorka gave a solution. "They cannot be transferred directly from T- 19, due to the nature of the radials, but if the people are evacuated far enough from the station by another ship, they can be transferred off that ship."

"What ship?" Syranak asked. We have none that can get there in time.

"The alien base might, when it gets close to collision point. We must secure their cooperation."

It was not the greatest idea, but no one could come up with any better.

Garolak sounded amazingly calm when he relayed what had been agreed on. "You, Syranak, will travel up the Tyrok Radial. Meet the alien. Find--"

Syranak interrupted, quailing, "I don't want to meet it!"

"We didn't say you had to touch it," Garolak stated impatiently. "You are already in space, which saves a great deal of time."

Syranak quickly recovered her emotions, horrified at her extremely atypical lapse. If Garolak and the others were analyzing her reaction, they made no hint of it. Syranak losing her control? No, she didn't want that to get out. "I will interrogate her. I need to take a team to the alien base to secure their cooperation." Now that was more the Syranak everyone knew. A woman of action.

After a moment's discussion, the others agreed, giving her the team she needed.

After the alien's arrival, the personnel of Tyrok-17 who were present in the transference room stared at her in shock. Despite the commander's warning, none of them--not even Arlanka herself--were psychologically prepared for the sight that greeted them in the transporter. It was indeed a humanoid, obviously a woman, and an oddly compelling one at that. She had an abundant amount of strangely reddish hair arrayed in an unusual configuration about her head. But it--she--was quite alien. The alienness seemed confined to four features: the strange color of her hair; her unusual eyebrows; streaks of dark skin angling across her cheeks; and hair that curved to a point on her forehead. Other than those details, her general facial structure was quite human: she had eyes, a mouth, a nose, and everything else--in the right places. She had also visibly paled since arriving.

She slowly, almost shakily, got up from the chair, and they found her body's outlines, evident in her nearly form-fitting clothing, were those of a normal woman--somewhat tall and slim, but certainly within human norm. She was dressed in a rather dull, beige-colored skirt that reached to her knees, a long-sleeved tunic which was the same color--except for one sleeve and some kind of collar around her neck, both of which were a striking red-orange--and long boots that were more gray than tan.

Her face was quite interesting, to say the least; but her clothing was utterly drab--at least color-wise, since the men's continued glances showed something was interesting.

Despite having been told by the computer, Arlanka was quite gratified to see for herself that the alien's human--human-like--form had been restored, though she was still at a loss to explain any of what had transpired during transport. She could only assume it had to do with the unusual distance, or perhaps the mass of the planet the target was on--the systems of Tyrok-17 had never been used to draw something from a deep gravity well.

When the alien vocalized two brief sets of gibberish, they found themselves wondering why she couldn't speak correctly, then were struck by the possibility she might not speak a language at all. They didn't even consider the possibility she simply spoke some other language.

Arlanka touched a control, and the door of the transport cubicle slid soundlessly into the wall. She looked at Marlkror, who then turned to the alien and waved his pistol, saying, "Out. Slowly."

Two utterances were not enough to allow Maya to identify the language, but she understood the gesture. They did not appear to have friendly intentions, but seemed in no hurry to harm her either. Evaluating her options, she realized transformation would not help at this moment. Inside the cube, they could transport her out--perhaps into empty space--or cocoon her in their hideous damping field.

As Maya slowly walked out of the cubicle, the others, weapons still trained on her, backed away, staying out of her reach. They were taking no chances, which limited her possibilities. Even as a large animal, she could not hope to knock out seven men quickly enough, much less the woman further back, behind the console, where she likely had a weapon as well. Even if she could knock them out, then what? If she could understand the transport equipment and beam herself out, they could just pull her back again when they woke up, this time taking more precautions--or perhaps punitive action in the form of an attack against Alpha.

She refused to even consider killing these people to prevent further action. She couldn't imagine doing that. Even in animal form, she was still Maya; and even if the animal had a smaller brain that prevented rational thought, it would still carry out her pre-transformation directives, none of which would allow her to cold-bloodedly kill these people. Even if she were a lesser person, and did kill these people, others like them could probably carry out a revenge attack against Alpha anyway. No matter what, Maya would not allow harm to come to her friends in an attempt to save herself.

In any case, it would be senseless to reveal her abilities in a useless escape attempt when it would be more advantageous to surprise them at a later point. She would have to wait it out and try to extricate herself by some other means.

Abruptly, one of those "means" came to mind: her commlock. It was something they were likely to take from her. She was determined not to lose her means of communication, and started thinking frantically, trying to come up with a solution.

Chapter Three
Barriers

In the Command Center of Moonbase Alpha, Alan's voice continued issuing from the speakers, unaware of what had transpired in Command Center scant seconds before.

"Hey, Maya, wake up! You getting all this?" He received no response.

Commander Koenig quickly ordered Sandra to run a full scan to try to find an alien ship in space. Tony ordered attack crews to the Eagles and Weapons Section personnel to their stations. The laser was raised from its hidden platform; and though it was too late for Maya, the shields were activated.

"Maya?" Alan continued to call. "Hey, Alpha, would somebody get on the horn and talk to me!"

Koenig finally did so. "Stand by, Alan."

"Did you hear what I said?" Alan persisted. "There's some spaceship heaped out back."

"Understood. Scan for further spaceships."

"Affirmative," Alan said. "Is something wrong with Maya?"

"She's just disappeared," Tony growled. "Some sort of energy system transported her right out of Command Center. She was covered with light, and then disappeared."

Alan muttered an Australian curse, then turned his ship's detectors upward, but failed to locate anything. He reported that fact back to Command Center. He could hear Sandra's voice give a similar report, then Koenig's voice returned. "Alan, return to base immediately." Alan was about to protest, but something in the commander's tone said it would be pointless to argue.

In Command Center, Tony looked at Koenig, wondering how he had come to this order, rather than keeping Carter in the air. Koenig gave him one of his "we'll talk about it later" looks, and Tony held his tongue.

Maya searched for a way to prevent the aliens from taking her commlock--her best chance of calling for help. After a moment's frantic thought, she came up with a partial solution: with a slight transformation, she could hide her commlock in what Psychons referred to (and Maya translated to Alphan) as metaspace. She already was able to "take" a limited amount of inorganic mass--such as her clothes and equipment--"with her" as she transformed into another being. This would be a variation on that ability. Furthermore, since she was not really transforming her own body, she would be able to "hide" the commlock for many hours or even days, well beyond her normal limits.

It was only a partial solution, for Maya knew the others had seen a device on her belt, so couldn't just "hide" it. Her mind rushed for a solution, and found one. Because Maya had once met a semi-metallic creature Mentor had brought down--kidnapped really--to Psychon, she had since built up a store of metallic metamass. With difficulty, she could build a very simplified sort of "fake" commlock by adapting what she knew of that life form. The fabrication would satisfy their search and keep them occupied, hopefully sparing Maya the full intensity of their attentions. Creating such a thing would be difficult due to two more of the natural limitations of Psychon metamorphosis: the inability to create a life form never before seen; and the inability to transform into anything non- living.

Maya would be carefully avoiding both limits: one because she was simplifying the biology of one creature, and not making a truly new life form; and the other because the "fake commlock," even with its unusual concentration of metals, would still be organic and just barely alive-- though not in any truly meaningful sense: a cockroach or tree was far more vivacious.

Only the better metamorphs could so closely approach these limits (or "dance on the fence," as the Alphans would say); and only the best could apply one more trick besides: maintain the integrity of something separated from the body, as the commlock would be moments after its creation.

Maya desperately hoped she was among the best. She had been practicing these abilities for some months--but only one at a time. She had never tried applying all of them at once.

Setting her fears aside and concentrating with all her mind, Maya sifted through four-dimensional images, alien feelings, memories, and bizarre senses; reaching all of herself, through herself, and within yet beyond herself to her metabody, a hypodimensional construct buried in the tiniest of loops: twisted axes of space at levels far below the size of atoms, somehow found by Psychon mind and body, which influenced non-massed nano-loops to expand and snare the metallic commlock and then contract, pulling each molecule apart but holding it in an array, its mass nullified and hidden amongst and within the molecules of Maya's body; while other parts of metaspace were rearranged according to a strange mental picture, then expanded into something resembling both an object called a "commlock" and creature called a "Euthrak Metal-Hide."

It took all her concentration, except for one other thing she had the presence of mind to do: moving her hand, she covered the commlock, hiding the slight transformational fuzzing from prying eyes.

Though she made the motion almost casually, without even touching the commlock, several of the men gave her menacing looks as they tightened their fingers around the firing mechanisms of their weapons. The man who spoke to her earlier uttered some more words--still too few for Maya to identify the language. By then, she had successfully replaced the commlock; and she repressed a sigh of relief as she prepared for the final difficulty. She raised her hands in a gesture indicating compliance, at which they relaxed. The man who had twice spoken gave his weapon to his neighbor--to prevent any chance of Maya getting to it--and then approached her. She stared at him, letting some of her anger show, but otherwise did not move. He seemed to find her stare somewhat unnerving, but still pulled the "commlock" from her belt. He then stepped back and handed the device to yet another man.

Maya successfully fought the cry that threatened to escape her throat as what seemed like a part of her body was ripped away. With great difficulty, she managed to force her "metabody" to stretch and hold the "commlock" together.

Arlanka watched the alien female carefully. She saw the intense but distant expression on her face, then wondered about the little hand movement, and finally noticed how reluctantly the woman had given up the device, almost as if it were painful to do so. Obviously, it was of some importance. Seeing no further threatening action from the alien, she turned her attention to Sarlocron, telling him to "Take that down the electronics lab and try to see what you can discover. It's not a weapon, so ignore explosive procedures." Just then, her console beeped.

The sound made Maya nervous, given her bit of metamorphic subterfuge. Fortunately, the other woman merely smiled--an irritated smile at best--and spoke to the others. "The transport computer was destabilized by the transference, and has just now gone down. I can't see to it right now. Tyrlor, analyze the situation and restart the system." Tyrlor, a different man than the one who had spoken to Maya, nodded in response. "And while you're at it," the woman continued, "try to determine just what happened during the transfer. It was either the distance, or some interference from the alien base. An outside attack was recorded, but that was after the trouble had started."

Suddenly, Maya understood their words, the extended speech having finally allowed her to identify the language as Lykrontak. Unfortunately, she did not know the language very well, so she was going to have some difficulty with it. But she did recognize it well enough to realize they had not connected the transfer problems with her metamorphosis attempts, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

Sometime before their encounter with Psychon, the Alphans had apparently received some sort of "gift" of language comprehension, though it seemed to be limited to those languages known to the mysterious bestower, leaving conspicuous gaps: the language of the chlorine-breathers on the planet dubbed "Chrysalis" (for lack of the native designation); most other Earth languages, including the old Gaelic; and even Psychon. On Alpha, Maya was forced to use English, which she fortunately learned sometime before, based on mostly-complete information Psychon received in trade from an alien exploration probe in need of critical supplies, years before Psychon's environmental decay began. The same ship's crew had also provided some sketchy second-hand information on Lykrontak, but nothing about the people themselves, other than that they were of a human species remarkably similar to others scattered in space, and that they spoke only one language, which the traders had fairly complete information on, despite not having any direct contact with the Lykrontak.

Am I their first direct alien encounter? Maya wondered.

The woman behind the console walked over towards Maya. For just a moment, she looked as if she were going to approach very closely, but then backed up slightly and kept a safe distance, just in front of the men. At the same time, one of the men backed away. They always maintained at least one person at a distance greater than four or five meters.

"I am Commander Arlanka," she slowly stated in way of introduction. "Do you understand me?"

Maya paused for a moment, trying to translate, then dug up the correct words to respond.

"Yes. I am Maya."

Those four words startled the others, who after the alien's earlier gibberish had been considering the possibility she could not talk rationally- -or the even more radical idea that she spoke something... different. Now, she had spoken sensibly, if hesitantly. What was going on?

Sarlocron, who had not yet left with Maya's "commlock," was now fully convinced--despite Maya's speaking clearly this time--that the alien had grown up speaking a language as alien as the woman herself. It was an obvious idea (How could she know the language of our planet if she did not grow up here?), which made him feel all the more embarrassed for not having thought of it before.

Maya's "new" comprehension caused most of the others to assume complete understanding, however; and Arlanka and two men launched into a rapid fire of complex sentences. In a language Maya had little practice in, it was much too fast, especially with three people attempting to speak.

Without raising her hands, she said, "Stop... please. I do no... follow all voices... once."

The others, now baffled by a partial return to language difficulties, halted the barrage.

Just where did she learn our language from? Sarlocron wondered, continuing his own musings.

Maya clarified her last, badly botched sentence: "Speak one... per time, and more... slowly." The two men remained silent, while the woman repeated--very slowly, as a parent to a small child--a set of instructions that basically amounted to "don't try anything" and another command to follow her. Maya found herself surrounded by Arlanka and most of the men as they left the transport room.

Tyrlor, following Arlanka's previous orders, remained behind to determine what the transference computer's problems were; and Sarlocron, despite his intense curiosity about Maya and how she had learned their language, had been ordered to study the alien device, so he broke off towards his lab.

Arlanka led Maya and the five remaining men into a pair rooms connected by an open doorway. At the opening, the Lykrontak held back to form a semi-circle outside the second room, which was obviously a detention cell. Maya hesitated at the entrance, but decided not to make stepping into the cell an issue. When she was in, one of the men pressed some buttons, and the space within the doorway shimmered for an instant. A force field. Arlanka tossed some small object, and it bounced off the shield with a loud snapping spark. "Or," the commander added, "if you get some idea of jumping through despite the pain...." Arlanka found a larger object--an empty food tray--and threw it at the field. In an instant, it was surrounded and held in a mercury-like substance which hovered in the center of the doorway. Maya shuddered, realizing what it was: a version of the damping field which had virtually tortured her in transit.

Arlanka noticed the other woman's momentary sign of fear, and suddenly found it difficult to be taunting towards someone who had obviously suffered a great deal of pain during transfer--a transfer Arlanka had been controlling. Well, not totally, she thought. Someone had fed the coordinates from Nyka-2's hyperscanners, which were sensitive enough to pick out individuals at immense distances. Yet I was never informed of how different the inhabitants of that small planet are.

She broke off the momentary musing and signalled to Uytrar, who pressed a control. The silvery substance vanished, and the tray was thrown back towards Arlanka, who sidestepped it.

"We shall talk later," Arlanka stated. She left, signaling three of the five men to follow her. As she walked out of the detention ante-room, Arlanka continued wondering what other aspects of that scan had been kept secret. Who was sending the coordinates? Why is that small planet moving through our space? Where did it come from? Why did my station's sensors find no evidence of atmosphere around the planet, when something interfered? Just who are these strange aliens living on that planet? She began wondering if anyone had thought about what they were doing. Arlanka felt bewildered.

Her own culture was a monolithic entity which had changed so gradually over the millennia that few Lykrontak had even defined the concepts of cultural evolution and cultural variation. Language provided little hint: the earliest written versions were still readable, with only a little difficulty, sixteen thousand years later. Lykrontak had that many years of history, with the only changes being in the form of adjustments to new technologies, which occurred infrequently, as exemplified by the fact over thirteen hundred years had passed between the harnessing of electricity and the first space travel, and another two centuries before they had reached the nearest planet in their own system (unlike Earth with its Moon, Lykrontak lacked a natural satellite to strive for). That had been five-hundred years ago, and they had only recently reached beyond their own star system.

Earth sociologists would have had difficulty understanding the slowness of cultural and technical progress, when individuals seemed lively and intelligent enough. Where is their curiosity, creativity, and drive? they would have asked after a few decades of study, baffled at why Arlanka's people moved forward with such tiny, shuffling baby steps. Not stagnant--never stagnant. Just slow--extremely slow. Perhaps it was due to the general biological richness of the planet. Maybe it was that most of the land area was on a single, gigantic, nearly mountain-free continent straddling the equator, lessening the number of barriers and variety of environments that necessitated different ways of coping, and thus different cultures on so many other worlds.

Beyond some degree of thievery, assault, and about one murder per day for the entire planet of over one-billion people, there were occasional short but strangely vicious wars fought between weakly-defined territories competing over the rarer resources--never over ideological, racial, or political differences, which were virtually non-existent. Even these rare battles had been declining in frequency, with the last having been fought three-hundred years before. The largest differences were between the sexes, but even those were minimized by the fact of their equality of power.

Perhaps the lack of diversity led to the slow pace of technology. Personal variation existed, but the overall range of viewpoints was comparatively small, stifling the range of creativity. On other worlds, diversity also tended to spark many long wars, which as destructive as they were, tended to spur almost desperate leaps in technology as well--a bloody, often two-edged "benefit" of war. Lykrontak lacked both the disadvantages and significant advantages of cultural variation.

On the other-hand, maybe that near-unity of culture and slow, careful change were what allowed them to invent the novel technology they had used to reach out to four new living worlds in other star systems. Those planets, however, were inhabited by little more than insect life, or in the case of Ratak, some warm-blooded--if brutally fierce--animals. They had but one culture, yet considered themselves ready for the challenge of space. Now Maya was their first example of a new culture, yet none of them recognized her as such, though Sarlocron had the most advanced inklings.

There were personal variations, however; and the idea was slowly creeping up on both he and Arlanka that all aliens could be completely different compared to the Lykrontak. It was only a partially-formed idea which had not come to consciousness; but the beginnings of it made Arlanka nervous: What if the aliens reacted in unexpected ways? was the question her mind was struggling to ask. A nameless fear slowly insinuated itself, making her question what little she knew of her government's orders. But when she reached her station, duties took over, and her mind stopped its "errant" wandering.

The two men watching Maya from the other side of the unusual force field appeared anxious, for they wandered aimlessly around, talking to each other in short bursts and frequently peeking in the cell. They were not leaving her any privacy, but she did not mind: watching and listening to them would provide vital cultural details. Maya caught parts of the discussion, which ranged over everything but the alien only meters away. Finding the language--what she knew of it anyway--was coming back, she quickly gained some information about the culture and this group in particular.

It seemed this was a small station, its personnel numbering only three women and seven men. Maya wondered about the fact Arlanka commanded, and that there were so many men to so few women. Did that mean this was a matriarchal society? Unfortunately, the guards' discussions did not really involve talk of women's positions in general, just about very particular positions. Maya did not allow herself to react too strongly about this fact, but she debated why they were talking so freely. It looked as if they were intentionally trying to "bait" her, so she kept silent.

Disappointed by the alien's lack of response to their words, they looked at each other and shrugged. She was kind of pretty, in a strange sort of way, but was singularly unflappable and humorless. Tired of oblique approaches, they began to question her directly.

"How many relatives do you have?" one asked her.

"None." The language was coming back well enough to respond almost immediately.

They looked at each other. "What happened?"

"A series of disasters," she replied vaguely. When they started asking more probing questions on the subject, she stated her unwillingness to discuss it. They got the hint--somewhat--dropping that line of questioning, but moving to other personal questions. Did she have a bond-mate? Children? No? Didn't she have anyone? "Yes," she stated with growing irritation, "I have plenty of friends." At this, they seemed to relax in mysterious satisfaction, one of them stating something to the effect that "it seems strange that it is a friend for a far point." The other nodded agreement. The statement baffled Maya, making her think she had mistranslated. When she asked what they meant, they seemed surprised by her confusion, then asked what the "weather was like" on her "planet." The radical change of subject to such a silly question left her behind for a second. What planet? Psychon? The Moon? Do they think the Moon has an atmosphere?

Apparently they didn't, for they abruptly turned away and began discussing minor details of some game called darcat which was "only played in the Kuska Region," acting as if it were the most important thing they could talk about. She was infuriated at the rude change of subject, and almost demanded an answer from their backs. She resisted the urge: they shut her out for some reason, and she wouldn't get anything out of them for a while.

A woman entered moments later, and immediately pointed a noisy device in Maya's direction, through the stasis field. Maya resisted the urge to back up or respond in some other way, instead asking what it was. Instantly, one of the men started talking to the woman about the latest results of the "Sal'iikor elections" until the woman left. Maya never did find out what the woman's name was.

She turned her thoughts back to the earlier conversation with the men. Why did she feel that saying she had friends was a bad idea? She had wanted to appear like the real person she was, and not some cold, friendless creature; but the answer had provoked an unexpected response.

Her captors, whose continued discussions revealed their names to be Uytrar and Nyakrayn, wandered to a pair of chairs, sitting down with their backs to Maya, allowing her some privacy to scrutinize the cell for escape possibilities. There was a bunk, sink, and toilet. The last was thankfully partitioned off. At four by five meters, the cell was actually rather large; if it had a table, chairs, and some decorations, it could have easily served as reasonably comfortable guest quarters. The walls, however, were painted in an eye-jarring combination of green, blue, and white.

There were several twenty-centimeter-wide air vents, but the air was passed through an dense bramble of wires--evidently a filter of some kind. The bolts were the kind Alphans called "butterfly," and she was able to remove them with ease. The guards turned back to her at the noise.

"You do not like clean air?" Nyakrayn joked.

"Throwing that against the shield will be useless," the more serious Uytrar said. "And if you try to use them as a weapon, we will immobilize you."

"I think you are too big to fit through there, unless you can change size," Nyakrayn said.

Maya nearly choked in surprise at his words before realizing it was in the same joking vein as his first statement. She said nothing, and they turned away again.

Looking into the vent, she saw no light. The other end was not in sight. She could transform into something small to crawl--or fly, in the likelihood of vertical ducts. What then? If there was a filter here, there would probably be filters everywhere. She could test the theory, but if it was true, she be forced back here. And one of them might get the brilliant idea of restoring the mesh, trapping me in there, where I would die. She shivered, dismissing the idea.

Turning back to the guards, she found they were still watching her. She tossed the filter under the bunk, as if frustrated, which, of course, she was. They shook their heads and made a strange hand movement she could not interpret, then turned away and resumed their discussion, which was now about some food which was the specialty of the Kolokwa Region.

Methodically, she checked all the vents, hoping for any sign of a clear passage, but found none. All she ended up with, once she gathered them, was a small pile of the wiry filters. She softly kicked them into the partitioned commode, which itself was very solidly bolted to the floor. The sink was similarly bolted, and also had a thin mesh covering both the tap and the drain. They are certainly fanatical about their filters, she thought with some amusement. If anything, her chances in crawling or swimming through plumbing were worse than with the vents, for it included the possibility of being ground to mush in some pump. Not very appealing. The only remaining piece of furniture in the room was the bunk, whose bolts were again too strong to remove.

Seeing nothing at eye level or below, she looked up, and found that the light streamed through what looked like a smooth, unbroken ceiling. There didn't appear to be any monitoring equipment, but the walls could have been opaque in one direction and transparent in another. Somehow, she doubted it. A one-way mirror was easy, but a one-way wall was a difficult alloy to make, and she had a "gut feeling" the Lykrontak didn't have one. At least she hoped they didn't.

In the end, she realized there were no other exits. She sighed softly in annoyance. The only escape option would be through the currently force- shielded door.

She then turned her attention back to her captors. Now comfortable--if not perfectly fluent--with their language, she tried to get some information from the two men. Now they completely ignored her. They would not even reveal the name of their planet, even though they talked incessantly of certain specific aspects of their culture, even naming regions on their planet. She finally said the planet's name--Lykrontak--herself. They merely paused for a moment.

"Have you been told not to talk to me?" she finally broke down and asked.

They continued talking about the burden of pollutants the Ostarkon Region bore from extensive use of chemical fertilizers some centuries before.

Obviously, they would only speak to her on their terms. Maya would have gotten even more annoyed at the thought, but something else caught her attention.

For a moment, she felt a strange, distant pain. It took her a few seconds to realize what it was: the fake, organic commlock. Part of her subconscious mind was still occupied in holding it together. One thing she had not immediately thought of was how long she could hold it together. Fortunately, the small amount of tertiary mass involved would allow her to maintain it almost indefinitely, as long as some part of her mind concentrated on it--and it was not too far removed from her person.

Now, there was a signal of pain. The somewhat-alive object was too simple to possess a nervous system, so it was her own mind's way of interpreting the fact someone had cut the device open. That meant they were going to very puzzled, very quickly. She had to do something soon, before they made things unpleasant.

Just before nine a.m., Alan returned to Command Center, and Koenig revealed his concern that alien ships were still hanging about the base, rendered invisible by some technology.

"Invisible? That's impossible!" Verdeschi declared, impatiently wanting to get ships back out to search for Maya. He gave no thought as to why he was almost desperately anxious to do so.

"Any more impossible than everything else we've seen?" Koenig demanded, trying to put Tony back on a path of logic. Though John had never heard of Tony admitting his love of Maya to anyone, and wondered whether Tony fully realized it himself, it was evident in the younger man's impatient reactions, unusual even for Tony.

"Okay, I concede that," Tony said. "But is sitting on our bums going to help find answers? We could drift until we leave the system, without ever seeing a ship."

"Assuming there was a ship," Sandra said.

"We crashed into one," Alan countered.

"We have never seen ships that could render themselves completely invisible," Koenig said. "But there is always a first time."

"There have been a lot of 'first times,' " Tony protested. "Has that stopped us from taking action?"

"I agree we should do something," Koenig said. "Let's just do it cautiously. Alan, send up two Eagles." John put up his hand against Tony's attempt to protest. "Just two for now. Since we have no idea where she went, make it a standard lunar-origin search. Scan for energy emissions, ion trails--anything that would indicate where a ship might be. Keep one in near orbit, and send the other back along our path since we entered this system."

"Armament?" Alan asked.

"We shouldn't rush out with weapons bristling--"

"Commander, they kidnapped Maya," Tony said impatiently. "That's hostile intent in my book."

"Something tells me there is more to the situation than we know. We haven't gotten the alien perspective yet."

Tony threw up his hands. "That's part of the problem! They aren't talking. That's not a sign of friendliness either."

"They may have more powerful weapons," Sandra said.

"Maybe. But that doesn't mean we should go out defenseless!" Tony countered.

"Okay. One armed ship, one unarmed." At sign of further protest from Tony, he added, "That is final." After a moment, he continued in a calmer voice. "Alan, you stay near the Moon in the armed Eagle, just in case Alpha is attacked. I think Fraser should be in the other one, traveling back on our path. Put four other armed Eagles on immediate standby." Alan affirmed the orders and left.

Seeing Tony twitch in his seat, he barked at the younger man, "You stay. With a possible alien ship lurking nearby, I need you here, in case they start harassing the base." Alan continued out the door.

Tony tightly nodded in agreement. "Sorry, Commander," he said, in a voice that was mixed embarrassment and annoyance.

Once, late in the first year, when Tony was still recovering from injuries sustained at Breakaway, he had a private conversation with John, and indicated his concern--"off the record" as a temporarily off-duty but still observant security officer--that John's relationship with Helena might interfere with the former's command decisions. "There's nothing wrong with your having feelings for Helena," Tony had added. "But--"

"I understand your concern," John had interrupted. "While I agree we should be careful about all our decisions, we've always done pretty well being concerned about each individual."

"Well, yes, sure," Tony hastily agreed. "We shouldn't stop taking action on behalf of each person, but you should be careful not to react too... excessively when Helena is in trouble."

"Tony, you know I'd never throw away the whole of Alpha just for Helena, no matter how much I may care about her."

Tony looked insulted. "I know that, John. You know what I mean."

John had of course known. Now, he began wondering if he should point out the same thing soon, back at Tony, in regards to Maya. John quickly decided he was satisfied with the security officer's response--for now. He'd have to keep an eye on the already emotional Tony.

Filing the subject away, the commander turned to Sandra. "Organize intensive scans of all surrounding space, including uplinks with the Eagles' detectors. Also give attention to the main commlock frequencies, especially the emergency channel in case she can still communicate."

"If they take her commlock, she may be forced to find alternate means of communications," Sandra said.

"Yes, of course. Do what you can to cover everything."

"Even on alien equipment, she'd still try to find some way to find an Alphan frequency," Tony said.

Sandra gave a slight, patient smile. "If she doesn't know Alpha's speed relative to herself, she will not be able to account for the Doppler effect, which shifts the frequency. I will try to balance the possibilities."

Tony nodded, realizing Sandra's job was nothing to envy; it was no easier than anyone else's.

On an alien space station, Maya paced in her force-shielded cell. The guards had their backs turned to her, and had not looked in her direction for some time. Satisfied they were not overly concerned about her movements anymore, Maya moved to the bunk, which she was surprised to find semi-comfortable. The blankets covering it turned out to be an unexpected bonus. She drew them back and climbed in. The rustling of bedcoverings prompted the guards to turn around. One smiled. Maya wasn't sure what the smile meant, feeling it could have had any of several hidden meanings, especially given their previous conversation. Unfortunately, as was often the case with the Alphans, the hidden meanings stayed hidden. It had taken her some time to understand the complexity of the subtler Alphan expressions--facial, verbal, and written. With the Lykrontak, she was starting over.

Now fully in bed, she drew the covers over her and lay on her side, back to the guards and face towards the wall. She wondered about non-visual detectors; but not having seen much in the way of sophisticated visual or even auditory communicators, she decided to take a risk. Through a subtle transformation, she brought the real commlock back into "real" space.

Instantly, the sound of computer buzzers filled the air.

Maya froze. Damn, she thought, using a Terran curse in her Psychon thoughts. Why are their computers so sensitive to my transformations? Although a whole zoo of subatomic particles was emitted during transformation, she had never seen a system sensitive to the rather weak and exotic particles produced. She hoped that it was merely a fluke of construction, rather than intentional design. Fortunately, the men did not seem to be too concerned about it. One casually hit a button to turn off the alarm, then looked at the other. "Crazy computer is getting more nervous than we are," Nyakrayn, the more light-hearted one, said.

"Didn't the transport computer do the same thing earlier?" Uytrar asked.

"You're right. I better report it," Nyakrayn said, leaving the room.

Maya was relieved they did not consider the possibility she had something to do with computer alarm; but she was concerned that attention might come back to her in a very unpleasant manner. It was too late to simply hide the commlock and ignore the fact that buzzers had sounded. She might as well use it.

When she started feeling for the keys to initiate a signal, she realized something: Alpha may be out of commlock range. She suppressed a cry of frustration at the possibility this alien station had plucked her from billions of kilometers away. She could not try calling Alpha just to see if it was in range. If it wasn't, and the Lykrontak picked up the commlock signal, they could take action to prevent any further attempts to communicate. She had to reach Alpha on the first try. She chewed her lip, trying to come up with a solution. Obviously, she had to boost the commlock's weak signal enormously, but how?

Turning over to look around the cell, her eyes locked on the deceptively open doorway, where the invisible barrier resided: an energy field which could suddenly change into an incredible damping field. The latter would be of little use, but the former was a ready source of what she needed: raw electrical power. Watched again by the guards, she got off the bunk-- leaving the commlock behind--and put her hand near the shield, feeling the electrical energy, painful even from a few centimeters. Perfect! She thought. At a distance, it gives off electrical energy without making obvious sparks or noise. She drew her hand back, seeing the openly amused stares of the Lykrontak.

When she opened her mouth to try to talk, they simply turned away and started discussing one Arvanarm of Kuska'rasko, who was apparently a social analyst or news chronicler. She resisted the urge to override their conversation, realizing it would be futile. They still would not talk to her.

She turned away and paced, thinking instead about the commlock. The idea became fully formed in her mind: boost the signal with more power. But she would have to alter the commlock to accept a strong outside--and alien--power source without burning out. She returned to the bunk and closed her eyes, starting to picture the circuitry in her mind, trying to determine how to reconfigure it.

Several hours later, at thirteen-hundred lunar time, Bill Fraser reached the area in space where the Moon had collided with the alien ship.

Even as he decelerated, he brought all sensors to bear on the point in now-empty space where the collision had occurred. The sensors detected faint energy signs, but the computers could make no conclusions. It could have been a ship's trail, so he approached more closely.

The Eagle's lights flickered for an instant, but he happened to blinking his eyes at that moment.

If anything, the readings were less conclusive, more chaotic--and much more energetic. He slowed further, nervous that something was wrong but unable to come up with a good reason to abandon the area. He wouldn't be scared off information for no real reason.

Space took the opportunity to provide a terrifying reason.

The Eagle lights dimmed and flickered as sensors indicated massive energy shifts. Suddenly, the ship was wrenched about, then tossed around like an old sailing vessel on a stormy sea, shaking the single living being within. Superfluous alarms rang everywhere, unheard by Fraser as he fought to regain at least a semblance of control. Sparing the viewport a momentary glance, he could see stars flashing by in continually varying angles--indicating an three-axis spin--as well as splotchy, multi-colored, shifting patches of light.

For brief seconds, he stabilized the Eagle, and found the seemingly motionless stars were trying to form trails--like meteor paths originating from a point--only to revert to points sitting in the same places as before, like being thrown at a blurring, light-year-gobbling speed, only to snapped back as if attached to a rubber band. Bill's panicked mind connected to an answer. Space warp, he thought, instantly redoubling his efforts to pull away before he could be sucked permanently through space.

The Eagle suddenly reeled again, as if struck by an angry hand, and he felt enormous forces of acceleration overcoming the artificial gravity.

After four hours of confinement within the cell, Maya had fully thought through a method of reconfiguring the commlock. It would involve wholesale cannibalism of most of its circuitry and wiring. Oddly, the wiry mesh filters she had methodically removed from the walls would help-- except in opening the commlock. Stymied by the lack of usable tools in the room, she had to resort to what she was wearing. Still lying under the covers of the bed to shield any possible noise, Maya used the short edge of the zipper of her skirt to pop the screws on one side of the commlock, thankful the unit had been designed with easy repair in mind--though this would hardly count as repair.

She turned around in the bed to look out at her two most immediate captors--the other had returned earlier--who were sitting with their backs to her, apparently having lost all interest in her. She found that puzzling-- not that she wanted badly-timed attention. It was just that people tended to be more curious about aliens than these Lykrontak were. Had they become jaded from numerous encounters? The scanty information she possessed indicated the Lykrontak were fairly new to space, but the Moon's peculiar form of hyperspace travel occasionally created pronounced time-dilation effects, so the Lykrontak could have already met numerous alien cultures since the time of her second-hand data.

Maya did not debate the question long, knowing their mostly ignoring her was one of the few factors in her favor. Carefully, she slipped out of bed and into the partitioned-off lavatory with her commlock. Neither man turned to look. She set to work, first removing the unsealed panel to expose the inner workings of a device which no longer seemed alien to her after two years on Alpha.

She couldn't create a screwdriver the way she had formed the fake commlock. The former was a solid metal mass with precise edges, something she could not possibly make. The latter was based on an organic creature which happened to have outer layers consisting of matrix of organic molecules and metallic compounds. The fake was an amorphous, semi-biological construct with non-sharp edges--an object which had been very difficult to construct and even more difficult to remotely maintain, even after months of practice. Making a tool was completely impossible.

That did not preclude her securing a tool, however.

Her hair was elaborately coiffured, as usual. Some of it was simply through elaborate twisting and tying of the hair itself, but this arrangement still needed a few strategically-placed pins. Arlanka had either not noticed the pins during transport, or not deemed them threatening, so they were still available to Maya. She pulled all seven out, releasing her hair to cascade down her shoulders and upper back. Hopefully, the Lykrontak would simply assume she had simply "let her hair down" and not think about where the metal pins had gone. She used the pins to alter settings and pull electronic chips out, following the picture she had earlier formed in her mind.

The alien air filters were incredibly shabby. Using one bent pin as a tool, she was able to pull out quite a few wires with surprisingly little noise, which was masked by the electronic yet smoothly flowing alien music coming from undetermined sources in both the cell and apparently the guard-room, as evidenced by their occasional comments about specific segments of the soothing songs.

The commlock's transmitter, internal clock, antenna lead, and their interconnections were left intact; while the all other components were sacrificed, their chips reconfigured to modulate an alien power source with the help of all the other free wires she had removed and reconnected to the bent arrangement of capacitors, inducers, air filter wires, and some of the hair pins. The interconnected mass formed a primitive "pseudo-neural bramble" which she hoped would analyze and collimate the alien power source into something the few remaining components could handle, using the signal from the commlock's power pack--which she also left intact--as the "teacher." The clock would give the time to the antenna, to which the neural heap would add the rest of its power to create an extremely powerful signal--hopefully. She partially replaced the panel--even though most of the almost-fluffy mass of wires remained outside--since the system needed all six panels as power-handling planes. From the bramble emerged three main wires, leading to another arrangement of the remaining hair pins: this would be used to tap the shield's energy. She hoped pin-tips would be too small for the shield to react to--an assumption she had no choice but to make, not having any other idea how to get power. It was almost unbelievable that she had been able to put such a system together, and she sighed thankfully and in relief, suddenly discovering how sweaty she had become working on so many tiny components with only a few primitive tools.

She had spent forty minutes sitting on the flat cover of the toilet. She stepped from behind the partition with the commlock hidden under a towel, which she put to her face to wipe away the sweat. Maya hoped they thought she might still be sickened by the torturous transfer. Is there any suspicion on their faces? Their mostly-puzzled glances seemed to be directed at her now free-flowing hair.

"It looks better," Nyakrayn commented to Uytrar, as if Maya weren't within hearing distance.

Uytrar disagreed. "The other way was more interesting."

They launched on a protracted discussion of women's hair styles, while continuing to watch her. They did not seem the least concerned over her having spent so much time behind a partition.

Suddenly, however, the two men turned to Maya, Nyakrayn asking her how she felt.

The question took her completely off guard, and after a moment's pause to find the words, she whipped out a angrily sarcastic response: "How would you feel being taken from your home, put through a... blender, and then... jailed without explanation?"

Curiously, they proceeded to give answers--some of the most baffling she had ever heard.

"I'd know that it was deserved by someone," Nyakrayn said.

"And it would be a chance for stable analysis, if I asked," Uytrar said.

"New opportunities, but it would introduce need for further probes."

"Mental shifts could be intrinsically abducted by transducing the escape instincts."

"I'd probably do some of that too, but a reorganization of unfulfillable inter-gender attraction would seem more prudent."

Maya wondered if she had lost her grip on the Lykrontak language. When she tried to interrupt to get an meaningful translation, they ignored her, proceeding further into a morass of something that Tony would have called "psychobabble"--intense but seemingly pointless discussion of various hypothetical mental "forces."

After several more insistent demands for answers, they turned their full attention back to her. "Unfocused hostility and full-feed impatience. A little too Ratakian...."

They proceeded to analyze her, and every attempt to disagree or demand an explanation merely triggered more crazed analysis, all spoken in a third-person tense, deliberately ignoring her obvious presence. The whole conversation made her nervous. She was still holding the towel with the commlock hidden within; and their line of analysis suddenly seemed to be a sophisticated way of interrogating her. She could feel herself sweating, and she turned away, giving up any attempt to talk, afraid they would trip her up with their words, and unintentionally reveal something vital. Immediately, their voices decreased, and looking back, she saw they had turned away from her. They continued to discuss her, however, using copious volumes of nearly-meaningless expressions.

She shook her head in bewilderment. Two men acting as guards, but talking in terminology that hinted at years of psychological training. It had to be a method of interrogation (it could certainly make for a good method of torture, she thought), but Maya felt there was something more to it, something important. Unfortunately, the full meaning escaped her.

Maybe they're all simply crazy, she mused as she started wandering around the cell, sometimes leaning on the wall, sometimes walking again, as if loath to lay down. They paid her no further attention, so decided to make her move. Maya approached the wall by the shielded doorway, then set the commlock on the floor next to the wall--just out of the guards' sight, but near the edge of the shield. From there, she could feel static prickling at her skin. Though the array was not in contact with the core of the field, it could still gather a lot of power.

If the idea works, the signal is being broadcast now. Having sacrificed all readouts, she had no idea what was actually happening. Unfelt by their owner, her slim hands clenched and unclenched. Then, teased by the excessive power flowing within the commlock, the tiny video screen started glowing. To forestall any concern the guards might start feeling at her hiding behind the wall, she took to wandering again. The commlock remained silent, but the video screen's feverish glow slowly increased to the point where it was lighting up almost a square meter of the wall.

When a faint whining started up, she realized the commlock was overloading, and had probably quit transmitting. She returned to the commlock and pulled it away from the shield, before the sound could become audible to the guards. She almost cried out in pain when the object's heat seared her skin slightly before she "hide" the now-heavier mass in metaspace. Once again, computers buzzed. Nyakrayn and Uytrar looked into the cell suspiciously.

"She couldn't be doing anything in there, could she?" Uytrar asked.

Nyakrayn laughed. "How? She's locked in there with no mechanical device. There's no circuitry she could get at, and she isn't the first frustrated prisoner to play with those stupid filters."

The last words made Maya momentarily wonder how often they got prisoners here.

Despite his own words, Nyakrayn got up and took a closer look at the whole cell as Maya climbed back into bed. He shrugged, but his joking demeanor had been subdued by the thought that maybe an alien could do... alien things. He had no idea what, and didn't even really think about it in such clear terms; but the feeling nonetheless bothered him. He resolved to have a discussion with Sarlocron, or if the chief scientist was too busy, perhaps Marlkror, the sub-commander.

Maya relaxed--having done all she could do for the moment--and wondered whether a strong-enough signal had been transmitted. If Alpha heard, they would come. Of that, she had no doubt; having come to feel a great deal of faith in her friends. Though she hoped other options for escape would present themselves, Maya silently took comfort in the image of Tony flying an Eagle with all haste to save her, like a knight in white armor.

Or is it supposed to be a knight in shining armor? Only at this moment did she partially understand the strange attraction some Terrans felt for the concept of chivalry and some of the related and ancient imagery. She saw Tony, astride his trusty white steed as it snorted its hot breath and galloped at half the speed of light--well, fifteen percent anyway--towards her. She almost giggled, but her heart beat faster at the sight of him battling her captors with a sword of laser light until they finally surrendered and released her. Then she yielded to his embrace, his kiss, his....

Whoa, not so fast. Simply yield to Tony, the toad who constantly teased her? Who tried to ply her with that foul Terran concoction called "beer?" No, she was no weak-kneed woman, ready to swoon and fall at a man's feet. Taybor was right: I am a wild, untamed beast. Then why did she like Tony so much, and all the little things he did to her? Why did she enjoy the teasing? And why did she feel so warm at the thought of Tony racing to her rescue? Because it's rescue, she thought. Then why did she feel even warmer at the image of Tony kissing her...? Must have been that mind-warping transport system. It certainly was worse than Tony's beer, making me want to imagine something that hasn't even happened yet.

Maya didn't even give a second thought to the last word through her mind; a word pregnant with hidden anticipation and desire: "...yet...."

In Science Lab Four, Jim Haines meticulously combed the sensor readings during Maya's disappearance, both from Alpha and from Alan Carter's Eagle.

He sighed in frustration at how little they told him.

After the death of his mentor, Ernst Linden, previously known as Ernst Quellar, the creator of the infamous Quellar Drive some two decades before, Haines had started analyzing the enormous body of data contained in the Voyager records. Brushes with space phenomena and high technology, strange forces and strange languages; cold space, numerous star systems, alien worlds. He had disseminated many volumes of information from that deceptively small box, collecting theories in return, while creating his own hypotheses in attempts to integrate explanations. It was an enormous task Koenig had assigned to him that first year--a task which could have been the work of ten experts. The commander couldn't spare the people; so it was up to Haines to analyze the data, calling on experts as needed, which was frequently--though perhaps not as often as in the past. Physicists, sociologists, chemists, linguists, geologists, biologists, and more--the whole host of "ist"s, with engineers and others thrown in for good measure--had all been called upon. With his earlier training, the help of others, and an ability to learn quickly, he had become an excellent data analyst--now almost on par with Sandra Benes.

Two years ago, Maya had become science officer, inheriting one of the largest groups of people on Alpha. As with several previous supervisors, the hot-headed Haines experienced some friction with Maya. He had been surprised that an alien was immediately made science officer, especially an alien whose father nearly destroyed Alpha with his mind-draining biological computer. The cruel violence reminded him all too vividly of other hostile entities, including those which touched closest to his soul--the Sidons, who like Mentor, had condemned Alpha to death. Jim wasn't too quick to welcome Maya; but he had learned a lesson from the Sidons' narrow-minded and eventually self-destructive attempt at revenge, or perhaps he had grown up with more moral fiber than he realized, for Haines soon felt his distrust subsiding. She was friendly, and obviously felt remorse over her father's malevolent acts.

Jim's duties had soon taken him out of the "pure" sciences, however, and into data analysis, a still semi-vague and growing field whose main purpose was to integrate multi-departmental information. It was something Professor Bergman had once done; but he had been one man, and when he disappeared, Sandra started expanding her role as analyst-- even though she did not have the breadth in the sciences that Victor had-- while drawing on Alibe and others for relief in the communications duties, which quickly made Benes a supervisor.

Maya came aboard only a month after Victor's disappearance, and since the Psychon had an even more extensive repertoire of scientific and technological knowledge and skills than Bergman, she was soon under terribly high demand from all departments. Maya was the obvious choice for science officer, since her knowledge and skills could help choose the best directions for scientific study, and though this seemed to include the obvious offshoot of "data analysis," Maya made no attempt to control Benes and the people she oversaw, including Haines. Perhaps it was Maya's respect for her obviously-capable fellow officer. Or perhaps it was because Benes worked with all the sections--as Maya obviously did--but with a radically different approach. Diversity of all forms had long been proven a strong point.

Sandra had been the one most actively carving out this niche, and with Maya, Haines, and parts of other people's time, this small but growing inter-departmental team of people was gathering all the disciplines together to work on problems common to their survival, subduing the state of occasional internecine war between the various sciences and engineering disciplines, making cooperation--along with the more friendly and useful forms of competition--the constant pattern of activity. It was obvious that Sandra felt no science was any less important to their survival than any other. Maybe archaeology and history, for example, seemed arcane to the selenites while in Earth orbit; but Arkadia, amongst other places, proved that view wrong. Sandra, more than any other person, was the first to emphasize the "leveling" of the sciences--not necessarily in their already near-equal importance, rather in their perceived importance.

Privately, Jim felt larger strides in technology would start coming out of the fuller and more intimate interaction being fostered by these people, and felt proud to be part of the effort--for "data analysis" was fast becoming a center point of that integration.

Though no longer under Maya's supervision, Jim frequently needed to get her view on various alien phenomena; and though she was spread thin as a resource, he managed to work with her on numerous occasions. He found her to be consistently calm and patient, even when dealing with what to her was frustratingly primitive science and certain frustrating people-- like Jim, who sometimes got combative and angry when he didn't understand something. But he always learned, and over time, he even mellowed, the enormity of the task and his own characteristic dedication both converging to draw his energies in more fruitful pursuits, creating a more mature man in the process. In the past, he had sometimes felt like a kid on Alpha. Now, he felt as confident as the people who had originally helped to get him the posting on Alpha, which had seemed nothing less than a miracle at the time.

In spite of the obvious stress involved, she had always been a charming and friendly woman, to the point where Jim would forget she was an alien. Though he scarcely admitted it to himself, Jim found her quite attractive. He was angered at her apparently senseless kidnapping.

Behind him, the doors parted. Commander Koenig and Security Officer Verdeschi strode through. Despite being used to the fact that people were quite within their right to walk in--this was a laboratory after all--it nonetheless unnerved Jim to see them when he still had no real results to report.

"Well? Have you found anything?" Verdeschi immediately demanded. Koenig looked at Tony, askance. Oddly enough, the rudeness of the question did not bother Jim. There had been many rumors about Tony and Maya falling in love with each other, and this was one of the most obvious signs of the attraction Jim had directly seen beyond the fact they spent a lot of time near each other. Without trying to make excuses, he told them there was nothing conclusive. Tony looked as if he wanted to shout at Jim, but Koenig held his hand out in front of Tony and spoke in a quiet tone. "Have you found anything at all? Any clue, or even guess, might help."

"Well, it was a transporter...."

"Obviously," Verdeschi interjected. Jim shifted in his seat, and Koenig glared at Verdeschi. Jim relaxed a little when Tony subsided, and he continued, relieved by the commander's support.

"Actually, it isn't entirely obvious what kind of transporter."

"I didn't think there were different kinds," Verdeschi said crossly.

"Well, there are quite a few," Jim said, somewhat defensively. Koenig's pause indicated that Jim should continue. "We've combed all the earlier Alphan and Voyager logs, and she identified the type for most of them, based on 'the primitive instrumentation,' as I finally got her to call it."

Tony smiled slightly, his respect for Haines growing. That was Maya all right, and she must have trusted him, for few people had actually gotten her to say that. He relaxed, realizing he had been too hard on Jim Haines, who was obviously doing the best he could.

Encouraged by the security officer's smile, Jim continued. "There are the light-speed variety, as the Guardian of Piri, the Taybor, and Magus employed. Then there was the neutrino transfer used by Texas City. The Vegans used tachyon transformance...." At Tony's odd look, indicating that he thought Jim was making this up, Jim added, "That was her phrase for it, anyway." Tony started looking impatient at his recital of scientific facts, prompting Jim to wonder what Maya saw in him. It certainly isn't his overwhelming interest in science, he thought. Koenig, however, still looked interested, so Jim finished his list. "Beyond the apparent mental origin, we could make no determination about what the Judges of Luton or the living rock on Milgonore used. "Nor could we figure out what the Exiles did, despite their apparently altering the computers...."

Despite his show of interest, Koenig had heard much of this before, from Maya herself. On each occasion, she had given an explanation, followed by the understandable but always disappointing statement that it would be years, decades, or even centuries before they could achieve similar technologies, even if jump-started by Maya's skills and Terran ingenuity.

"What about this case? Do you have any ideas?" Koenig asked.

"Unfortunately, I couldn't fit it in any of those categories. The best possibility seems to be a technology only Maya has seen, and even this system was a very poor application of her equations, as I understand them."

"Well, what is it?" the security officer said.

"Like I said, I'm not really sure, but my best guess is that it is a hyperspatial transporter."

 "But we've seen hyperspatial transport!" Verdeschi protested. "Taybor's ship, remember?"

"No, that's hyperspace propulsion--a ship throwing itself into and through hyperspace, rather than the case where Maya was disassembled"-- Tony grimaced slightly at Jim's use of the word--"and pulled through hyperspace from a remote location. Maya said she never read of a culture that used that form of transport."

"So why aren't you sure that's it? Are there enough readings?" Koenig asked.

"Well, I'm not sure that it's a lack of scan records. What I have just doesn't fit well."

"Could they have been some exotic variety?" Verdeschi asked.

"Lacking any other ideas, that's just what I'm guessing."

They all paused for a moment. Then Koenig continued. "Just after she was initially covered with light, she shouted not to activate the shields. Why would she say that? Would the transport have been disrupted in a way that could have killed her? If so, do our shields constitute a defense?"

"I've been debating that, and thought of another possibility. Perhaps the combination of transfer beam and our shields would have caused some sort of explosion."

The others' disappointment was visible. "So we may not be able use the shields as a defense," the commander said.

"Maybe. I don't know yet. The second reason I have my doubts about the hyperspace theory is they shouldn't be able to transport within the space-normal boundary. Maya said only simple hyperspatial communication waves can be used within a system."

"And you disbelieve Maya?" Verdeschi said, almost as if he had been insulted.

"In this case, I think I might," Haines said tightly, holding his anger. "She stated that she was only just learning 'this esoteric branch of folded topography,' as I think she called it. But the data I have seem to be an unexpected fit--however poor it is--to the approximations we developed."

"Approximations?" Koenig queried.

"She said hyperspace cannot be represented well by our 'Terran' mathematics."

No wonder Maya rarely gave her honest opinion of Alphan science and technology. It was rather depressing. On the other hand, she often said Terrans were ingenious at making incredibly complex machines with what they did have, and using them for even more inventive purposes. Now if only Psychon experience could be fused with Earthly cleverness....

Koenig's commlock beeped. Responding, he found Sandra's face filling the tiny screen.

"Commander, we are picking up a Alphan-style locator signal."

Tony's glum face broke into a smile. "It's Maya!"

"We'll see," Koenig said. "Come with me, Tony." The order was unnecessary: Tony was already halfway to the door. Jim stayed behind, turning back to the equations, trying to find a solution.

Arlanka appeared outside of Maya's cell and ordered the guards away, though at their insistence, she took one of their weapons--in case the shield would fail for some reason. Maya couldn't blame them too much for being singularly paranoid. No, that isn't quite right, Maya thought. They are simply highly protective of each other. From what little she had seen of them, they seemed a highly cohesive group, at least as much as the Alphans. As soon as the two men were out of sight, the alien commander set the weapon down on the table and approached the force field, unarmed. That surprised Maya a bit. Even if there was a force field between them, it was a pretty bold action for one of the semi-skittish Lykrontak.

What Arlanka proceeded to say surprised her even more. "Look... ah... Maya.... I'm sorry about what happened during the transport. I didn't mean to hurt you." When Maya said nothing, she continued. "I almost killed you. This has never happened to me before. Something strange happened during the transport."

It was not an apology for the original act of kidnapping, but it was an apology nonetheless. Though Maya did not really want to give any quarter for the crime, she couldn't just ignore the apology she had just received. It was a peace offering, and she didn't have the heart to reject it, no matter what else went unapologized for.

It soothed Arlanka's guilt a bit to hear Maya say "I accept that apology." It wasn't a full absolution, and Arlanka knew it.

"What is the name of this place?" Maya asked.

"Radial Transfer Station Tyrok-17."

"Transfer? What do you mean exactly?" She had a feeling about what it meant, but she continued probing, hoping for some information that would allow her to formulate an escape plan.

"Remote mass transmission through hyperspace."

The Lykrontak word for "hyperspace" did not translate for Maya, so she asked for a definition.

"Faster-than-light transportation, through some sort of higher-level but compacted dimension or space. It's not easy to explain."

It was enough explanation to allow Maya to translate the word. A controlled hyperspatial transfer system. It was impressive and rare, though not unheard of. Transportation with light-speed waves was more common, mainly because hyperspace equations were slow in yielding practical solutions. Even the best scientists of Psychon and other planets had difficulty in this particularly esoteric branch of hyperdimensional folded topography mathematics, and Maya was a mere beginner in the field. These people appeared to at least partially fluent with the equations.

"I'm impressed," Maya offered.

Of course, transference was different than propulsion: disassembling and "transmitting" an object along hyperspatial wave/particles versus propelling starships through hyperspace. Both, however, could only work safely outside of solar systems, beyond what the Alphans called the "space- normal boundary." Massive objects such as stars defined these boundaries. Intermediate-mass objects such as the Moon, when outside a star system, seemed to cause a large hyperspace field to collapse in the form of a shell about a large volume of normal space, causing the whole combination, Moon and all, to spurt through space at high speed, as well as allowing certain spacecraft originating from such a body to travel within the large bubble of normal space surrounding the mass, including smaller objects that temporarily fell into and were slowed down by such a bubble.

It was nearly impossible for low-mass objects such as starships to form stable hyperspace shells about them, which had led Maya to disbelieve Taybor's claim of owning a hyperspatial jump drive at first, much to her regret. But his people and a handful of other cultures had developed such propulsion. One more, the Eeskoi, tried, but activation of the drive in orbit of their home planet had created a shell too deep within the system. It promptly collapsed into a short-lived singularity whose subsequent explosion devastated the planet. The peaceful, highly artistic and mathematical culture now only survived in others' recordings, and in a famous lament penned by their nearest neighbors, the reptilian Yarzysst, in their so-called "semi-pictorial binary" style:

                                                                                 Eeskoi
                     You danced to faint star songs;                      In a moment,
              Only you could hear the beauty.
       You strived to soar to their song--                                        swift dreams
To join  them in  their  infinite  flight.
       Then you encountered a star,                                                      collapsed
              But did not glory in its rays:
                     for you had never wished                                         in a mass
                            to create an furious one
                                   on your own home soil.                      of light.
                                                                                 Lament
Maya shivered, realizing something similar could have happened to her, either here or on Alpha, due to her metamorphic meddling: even though hyperspatial transfer was different than hyperspatial propulsion, both displayed certain horrific instabilities within the "space-normal boundaries." And she had been transferred from when the Moon was just barely within the star system.

Maya had remained so deep in thought, for so long, that Arlanka finally asked if she was well.

"Just think," Maya responded clumsily, botching the tense of the alien verb.

Arlanka smirked, both at the linguistic mis-step and the alien's apparent inability to understand the fact they could travel faster-than- light.

Maya, for her part, understood it well enough to realize that the Lykrontak were not only intelligent, but quite clever as well. But she had also noticed many aspects of this station indicating that their brilliance lay mainly in this one direction, implying more of a dogged dedication to understanding one branch--admittedly fascinating--of mathematics and physics. Their computers, for example, seemed as hopelessly primitive as the computers on Moonbase Alpha, despite their hypersensitivity to her transformations.

Despite being plucked from the Moon when it was just within the star system, this station and others of its kind had to operate outside the star system, so she started querying Arlanka from this point: "How far outside the system are we?"

"How far outside?" Arlanka said, sounding puzzled.

That surprised Maya in turn. She could only guess she had used the wrong word in an unfamiliar language. She tried another phrasing: "Well... beyond the... boundary of this star system."

The alien quirked her head to one side. "It's inside the system boundary."

How could a hyperspatial culture not be aware of the star system's space-normal boundary? Further attempts to clarify Arlanka's meaning finally netted the statement that "We are between our Sun and your Moon: seven percent closer and at an angle of fourteen percent of a circle towards the retrograde direction, and a off-plane tilt angle of forty-four percent."

Maya frowned, confused that this "transfer" station could be within the space-normal boundary. But that was what Arlanka was insisting. Was the alien commander lying to confuse her? No, it didn't seem to be the case. Somehow, if Arlanka was telling the truth, the Lykrontak could make hyper-transfers inside their star system. But what was the limit of this station? If she was not freed, could she escape using the transfer system, or would the Moon be too distant? Would eventually be forced to steal a ship instead? Would they even have a ship with enough speed and range?

Attempts to gain further information from Arlanka floundered, however; for the Lykrontak woman seemed to be a little wary, as if realizing she had given away too much information. Maya tried to shift the subject to other areas; but Arlanka gave no useful responses.

Maya finally asked the question that most concerned her: "Why am I here?"

Arlanka immediately gave a flippant, "It should be obvious," then ignored any more questions Maya asked, as if not understanding why Maya could not comprehend something so basic.

Arlanka's response was useless, except as indication there was some uniquely Lykrontak reason why it was supposed to be so obvious. Maya had been thinking they were they going to use her as a hostage in an extortion plan against Alpha, but Arlanka's response made her think something more sinister was involved.

Silence came down between them, another barrier not unlike the physical barrier separating them. There was too much distrust on both sides to have even the simplest of conversations anymore. Maya did not want to reveal anything important about herself, and Arlanka was now wary of the same thing. Both were relieved to have the silence interrupted by an intercom message paging Arlanka, who promptly left.

Maya sighed in frustration, then perked up at the realization that she had gained some incredible information: a claim of intra-system hyperspatial transporters, and, far more importantly, directional data that could pinpoint the Moon to within a few light-seconds. Maya walked back to her bunk, closed her eyes against the irritating blue walls, and began considering options.

By the time John and Tony reached Command Center, Sandra had already determined the distance, as indicated by a circle thrown over Maya's original diagram. At the sound of opening doors, Sandra turned back to face them. "The beacon transmits its current time, and given the difference between that and our present time, it is nearly a light-hour away. I'm trying to determine direction right now."

"A light-hour?" Tony exclaimed. "That's over a billion kilometers from here--many times the range of the commlock. Could the timer be wrong?"

"It is possible," Sandra said. After an ever-lasting minute, Sandra pinned down the direction of the exceedingly faint signal. Her expression became grim as she graphically displayed the results. "It is behind us, almost straight back on our course, only a bit further inside the system." She stared at the diagram for a moment more, adding, "Like a link in some chain, pointing towards the center of the star system."

Tony again stated the main problem: "But it can't be a commlock transmitting at that distance--it's too far away."

"The carrier wave is distorted, and the frequency is much lower than we use--even when adjusting for the doppler effect--but the signal itself is recognizably Alphan," Sandra said.

Tony noticed John's eyes narrow. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" the security officer asked.

"That it may be a baited trap?" the commander responded. "Sure."

"But we still have to check it out."

John said nothing, weighing the risks.

"We're getting farther away by the second," Tony added pointedly.

No one brought up the ironic fact Eagle Nine had been a few million kilometers away from the signal, just hours before; but an emergency transmission--delayed ninety minutes by the huge and growing distance between the base and the ship--had been received twenty minutes before, in which Bill Fraser stated he had sacrificed most of the spare fuel in escaping a mysterious maelstrom at the site of the collision, and had to return to Alpha, which would force someone else to make a billion- kilometer trek. The communication had been cut off by static--presumably from the space storm.

"We have no other lead," John finally said, not quite agreeing with Tony's impulsiveness, but lacking any option beyond their so-far futile search attempts. "Sahn, connect me with Eagle One."

Before she could do so, Eagle Nine broke through the static again, and Benes put him on the speakers. Fraser's voice was weak and slurred. Eagle Nine was too far away to talk real time, but Fraser was already describing a problem he hadn't been able to convey earlier, apparently hoping it could reach Alpha now. "Autopilot cannot engorge... engage I mean. Eagle mossstly... okay... otterwisss. I am worse than thought. Losing concuss... con... science... consequence.... Have started in general direcsssion of Alpha, but..."--a long, static-filled pause ensued--"... I request real... refeel... refueling... relief plot... pilot."

Bill's slurred voice started repeating some of the message, then died out. Sandra sent a message on its way to Eagle Nine, stating relief was on the way. Koenig ordered Verdeschi to send rescue personnel and a spare pilot to the fastest Eagle on Alpha, then ordered Benes to establish contact with Eagle One. When she nodded in affirmation, he continued. "Alan, Bill is in trouble; and we now have coordinates for Maya's commlock. We're sending a refueling Eagle to you, and Tony will take Eagle Four, which will also carry medical personnel and a replacement pilot for Fraser. Rendezvous with Eagle Nine and drop rescue personnel off. They will bring back Nine and Bill. Eagle Four is already outfitted with boosters, so even with the small detour, you will both reach Maya's signal before any other Eagle could." After Carter confirmed, Koenig signalled to Benes to break the connection, then nodded to Verdeschi, who promptly left.

Yet again, he wondered exactly what the motivation for kidnapping Maya was. To get information? Weaknesses of Alpha for an attack? Or perhaps it was simple, cruel revenge. He shuddered, fearing for what they might be doing to her right now, hoping they only wanted to ask her some questions. But he doubted the "asking" would be that benign, considering.

He hated any of his personnel being mistreated, and kidnapping alone was mistreatment--much less the terrible cries of pain they