"Where is it?" he asked. "Gavon's reply should be on a shorter return loop as the ship nears us. The interval ought to have been no more than half an hour by this time. Isn't he speaking to us?"

"Perhaps Simeon's data is incomplete, and there is a dangerous anomaly in-system," Carialle said, her voice remote from the ceiling speakers. "I'm resending."

Nothing came. Keff cleaned up after dinner, and listlessly did his exercises on the Rotoflex with an interested audience of Cridi commenting on the swell and slide of his muscles.

Carialle found the rhythmic clang! bump! clang! bump! of the weighted pulleys a soothing, mindless pattern, then all at once it irritated her. She opened input to all her antennae. of the weighted pulleys a soothing, mindless pattern, then all at once it irritated her. She opened input to all her antennae.

She strained her "ears" for transmissions on the CW ship's frequency, putting the audio of her receivers onto speaker for the others to hear. Keff stopped his deltoid flex and eased the pulleys to a resting position. He looked up hopefully at the sound of static.

"Nothing," Carialle said. "Perhaps Gavon is coming all the way in without speaking to us again."

"Nasty," Keff said. He reached for a towel and wiped his face. "I thought this would be amicable. Maybe I won't won't give him all my files. Let him figure out the subtleties between this and give him all my files. Let him figure out the subtleties between this and this this." He made a couple of signs that Carialle, searching the IT database, found to be the symbols for hunger and a mild obscenity regarding mouths and filth. Long Hand looked shocked, Small Spot abashed. Tall Eyebrow and the two Cridi natives grinned widely.

"Wait!" Carialle exclaimed, getting a tickle from her long-distance receiver. "Here's something at last!"

The data-thread was weak and badly garbled. Carialle boosted it, and checked the frequency. It was the same Gavon had been sending on, but the audio portion was mostly static.

"...day...Intruders...May-"

Keff sat up. "Carialle, that sounds bad. Isn't there any more?"

"No."

"Play it again."

Now Carialle strained out a few more of the harmonics and static, and boosted the gain. The message welled up out of the speaker, then faded away again. "...ayDAY. INTRUDERS! MAYday...ip...." There was no more.

"Something's happened to them," she said. "In the sidebands I'm hearing the ID pulse from their black box, but no ship noise in the low registers, and no more audio messages."

"Intruders!" Keff exclaimed. "They were attacked! How many? Who? Who was it?"

He looked at the Cridi, who shook their heads, signing nervously between one another.

"We've got to help Gavon," Keff said. He shouldered back into his tunic, immediately all business. "Our fellow ship is in trouble. They might need life support assistance." He dared not think of the worst reason the DSC-902 had stopped sending, but concentrated on the possibility of saving the crew.

"I'm starting launch prep now," Carialle snapped out. She activated the control board, and quickly counted green lights. "Tall Eyebrow, Narrow Leg, you'll all have to go. Big Eyes, will you please tell Space Command we request permission to lift. We have an emergency on our hands."

"I will," the young councillor signed, then became still as she squeaked out vocal information through her finger-control transmitters. Carialle heard her voice repeated on first one, then a dozen personal frequencies as the message went out to the command center and members of the conclave via the Core of Cridi.

"I will come with you," Tall Eyebrow said, turning to look from Keff to Carialle's frog image.

Keff shook his head. "Stay here. We could get caught by whatever happened to them, too," he said. "I won't risk you getting hurt. We'll come back as soon as we can."

"I will go now," the Frog Prince insisted. "You may need me." He turned to sign at the local Cridi.

"How long?" Narrow Leg asked Keff. "How long until you go?"

Keff glanced at the board. "Minutes."

"Wait. Give me ten." The old Cridi levitated and flew out of the airlock. He began his high-pitched warbling, too. Big Eyes glanced up, surprised, then followed her father.

They were back within the promised ten minutes, but not alone. Behind them sailed a large crew of Cridi workers, bearing with them tools and a round device the size of a medicine ball, and an impressive tangle of flex, tubes, boxes, and clamps.

Keff peered at it. "It's a ship's Core. But we can't use it, sir." He waggled his fingers loosely.

"I can," Tall Eyebrow said, holding up his hand, on which the new finger-stalls gleamed. "Let me help. You have done so much for me and my people. You may need more than you have."

"Let him come," Carialle said, interrupting her preparations. "Our tractors may not be equal to what we might find out there-and we're unarmed."

Keff's face blanked with shock. "Your salvagers? You think that's who's out there?"

"It's a possibility. There've been several other 'disappearances.' No space anomalies, Simeon said," Carialle pointed out. "We're in this sector. I feel there's a connection to my personal disaster. It's just a guess, Keff. I have no positive data. I couldn't sell it as a certainty."

"I trust your guesses more than other people's certainty," Keff said. "I've known you these sixteen years."

The miniature Core was installed by Narrow Leg's crew with remarkable speed and efficiency. Carialle felt its power signature, and set up a program so it wouldn't feed back on her own systems. It responded well to the technician who tested it, putting in his own frequency number, and to Tall Eyebrow, whose new circuitry was tied in as well.

"Its range is 18,000 kilometers," the shipbuilder said, with equal references to the X, Y, and Z axes. "Enough for a planet plus layers of atmosphere plus error factor."

"That means getting in right on top of the DSC-902," Carialle said. "We'd better not miss. I'm calculating their possible location based on the time signature for their last transmission. I must work from that assumption."

Keff felt stricken, but he nodded.

Big Eyes waved for attention. "You have permission to lift when you wish." She looked at Tall Eyebrow. "I go, too?"

"No," Keff and Tall Eyebrow signed at once. "You could be in danger."

"We don't know what's out there," Carialle snapped out. "No more arguments. Will you all clear the decks? Keff, TE, secure to station."

"Go in peace and safety," Narrow Leg said. "Return with honor." He turned to Carialle's pillar, as he had seen the others do. "We will assist your launch." The technicians backed away from the blank panel behind which they had secured the Core. They all flew out of the airlock as Carialle shut it on their heels.

"Come back," Big Eyes signed simply to Tall Eyebrow. Then, she was gone.

"Damn M-C," Carialle growled as she lit engines. Flames gathered under her exhaust cones, between the landing fins, wreathing her in light. All her indicators read green and on go. "This wouldn't have happened at all if he hadn't decided I was about to go rogue. He should have believed me! There's something out there, and it's hostile."

Outside, she observed shadows of Cridi behind the windows of the low buildings at the edge of the field. Farther back, in a great ring around the field, frogs stood, or levitated, or hovered in their saucer-craft, waiting and watching. The infinity of audio broadcast frequencies, both private and public, filled with chatter and speculation, hoping for the first successful launch from their planet in half a Standard century.

"Here goes." She applied thrusters. Carialle felt the invisible hands holding her down to the surface of the planet drop away, and gather at the foot of her ship.

"Ready," Keff said. Tall Eyebrow cheeped an affirmative.

"Brace yourselves," she told the human and the amphibioid as she applied thrust. "Watch your necks."

"Necks?" Keff asked. "Wh-yyyyyyyyy?!"

His question became a strained cry as the g-force pushed his head back. Within a half second of putting on her own engines, Carialle felt the envelope rising under her skirts. It felt like everyone on Cridi was helping to push her into space. The force shoved her hard into the sky like an extra booster rocket, bringing her to breakaway speed in record time. Flames from sheer friction danced down her sides as she cut through the atmosphere and emerged into space, yet her internal temperature remained stable. The Cores, both inside and outside the craft, were protecting her. She felt the exosphere seal behind her, planetary ozone readings returning to normal within milliseconds of her passage. The additional thrust cannoned her forward. She was moving 60% faster than she could have gone unassisted. The shields strained against the additional pressure but were fully capable of holding. She lit her own full engines, corrected course, and opened all her receivers, hoping for word from Gavon's ship. A quick slingshot around Cridi, and she was on her way.

Chapter Eight.

"This is the end of the ship's ion trail," Keff said, reading the telemetry monitors. The CK-963 zigzagged the empty space between the orbits of the last planet and the asteroid belt that marked the border of the Cridi system. They were within half a million klicks of the planet, a dusty, battered rock rimed with iron oxide red and nickel oxide blue. The sun was a faint flicker of yellow over Keff's right shoulder.

"And this corresponds to the last coordinates from which they transmitted to us," Carialle said. "But where's the ship?" She scanned space around her. There was a little debris, and a very small amount of residual radiation from the right kind of material, but not enough to tell what had happened. The DSC-902 appeared to have crossed the radiopause and disappeared into thin vacuum.

"If the ship was disabled, it couldn't have drifted far," Keff said, staring at the astrogation tank, searching it for artifacts. "If it was towed, where's the engine trail for the other ship?"

"What if Gavon was remotely pulled away?" Tall Eyebrow asked, showing the circuitry on his long fingers.

"The Cores," Carialle said. Keff let out a low whistle. "The pirates who killed them have Cores!"

"That's why somebody has bottled up the Cridi space program," he said. "The Cores have a limited range, but incredible power inside that radius. That technology alone is worth keeping a secret from the rest of the universe."

"I think you're right about the why," Carialle said. "We still don't know who. And at this moment, I am more concerned with where where."

She was silent for so long Keff wondered if she had suffered another memory flashback. He waited for a long time, then cleared his throat.

"Cari? Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," Carialle said, a little too emphatically. "Apart from being burning mad, I'm just on green. I may not like having another ship come in and usurp my mission, but damn it, I will fight my battles myself. Somebody captured or destroyed one of our vessels, and I am damned well going to know who. Nobody messes with a Central Worlds ship on my turf my turf."

"That's the spirit! Evil highway brigands who prey upon the helpless shall not prevail. We will sally forth and beard the miscreants in their den," Keff said, thumping his chest. He kept his voice light, hoping that her train of thought would not lead Carialle back to her memories of isolation. "We shall slay all who do not beg for mercy and swear allegiance to the CenCom."

Carialle was amused in spite of her worries. "Thank you, brave Sir Keff. But seriously, who are they? Not Cridi. They wouldn't be shooting at one another, at least not without giving a reason. And it certainly can't be other humans. There's never been any contact with humanity in this system before."

"That is what Narrow Leg and the others assure me," Tall Eyebrow said.

"And word would have gotten back to Central Worlds about the frogs if someone was ambushing their flights and stealing from them. We'd have begun to see artifacts that no one could explain-little spaceships," Carialle said. "Who could resist the Core technology? All three of the last Cridi missions had Cores on board."

"So what does that leave?" Keff asked, feeling the tingle of excitement. "Another race? Another spacegoing alien race?"

"It might be," Carialle said, cautiously. "It's a big universe. But first we must prove that the disappearance of this ship wasn't mere accident, and that it wasn't bad engineering that slew three Cridi vessels."

They explored the outer reaches of the heliopause. Space was pointedly, echoingly empty. Carialle picked up faint traces of engine trails, some ages old by the pattern of their decay. It seemed that most of the Cridi missions, at least as far back as they'd used an ion drive, had exited the system in this direction. It led, not incidentally, directly toward Ozran and away from the bulk of the Central Worlds. Her entry into the solar system was a quarter of the way anticlockwise around the sun, so the new wake she was forming behind her was clear and undisturbed. She used it to check the strength of the trail she was following.

"Aha," she said, as they arced out toward a group of jagged moonlets dancing along in the asteroid belt. "Now I am am picking up fresh indications from another kind of space drive. Not Cridi." picking up fresh indications from another kind of space drive. Not Cridi."

Keff stared at the astrogation tank. Tall Eyebrow wriggled up next to him to see. Carialle put the view on full light spectrum analysis. The brawn darted a finger toward the lines that sprang into relief, criss-crossing the holographic display like spider web.

"I see it. There are hundreds of them!" he exclaimed. "Someone else is in this system."

"Very strange," Tall Eyebrow signed. "They've been traveling through here for years, but no one has ever made contact with the second planet. They must have been able to tell someone was living there. The noisy airwaves alone would have told them that, even if they couldn't understand the transmissions."

"They wouldn't exactly come visiting if their only motive was robbery," Keff said. "Wait, these are all cold. They're years old."

"Not these," Carialle said, illuminating three traces that converged on an asteroid cluster. "Those are new."

Keff peered closely at the faint image in the tank, then pounded a hand flat on the console. He had spotted movement.

"Cari, reverse course! Quick!"

Almost before the words were out of his mouth, Carialle had looped the ship around. She was heading for cover behind a pocked moonlet before they could sense her. Three strange ships flew out of crevices and holes in one of the asteroids, and were making straight for them. She kept video cameras aimed aft as she looked for a hiding place. Keff studied their pursuers.

The ships' design looked familiar: long, tapered cones bracketed with emplacements for landing gear, communications, and weaponry, but all were old and in poor repair. Flying junkheaps, he thought, with a sniff. His monitors still didn't show a sensor lock from their pursuers. Their sensors showed radiation leak from two of their engines. One was nearing critical point as it poured on power to catch up with them. They were almost ridiculously undermaintained, but Keff felt no urge to laugh.

"Hurry, Cari!"

By comparison, the CK-963 was an angel on the wing. Carialle cornered wide around two halves of a broken rock ten times her size, then hugged in close behind a flattened sphere, searching for a ravine or a cave she could duck into. The sphere's sides were solid. She tried slipping past it unseen, to another huge rock shaped like a flatiron. One of the intruders was waiting just beyond the great wedge's lip. Carialle grimly turned as sharp an angle as she could in the opposite direction.

A red light, infinitesimally small, bloomed on the pursuer's hull.

"Brace!" Carialle cried out as the energy bolt struck her amidships.

The blast tore straight through her shields as though through cellophane. Painful heat ran along her sensors, which then mercifully shut down. Damage control monitors showed her an elongated oval tear in her dorsal hull. Whoops sounded as the alarm went off in the cabin. Emergency systems kicked into operation at once.

Keff kept himself from being thrown across the control console by gripping the crash couch's armrests and hanging on with all his great strength. Tall Eyebrow, hovering, had nothing to grab onto, but pivoted deliberately in the air and somersaulted into the padding of the other couch. The straps rose up and surrounded him like an octopus seizing prey.

"Wish I could do that," Keff said, between gritted teeth. Tall Eyebrow whistled an apology. The pilot's couch engulfed Keff in safety harness. He expelled his breath in a long sigh and let go his grasp on the armrests.

"Thanks. How bad is it?" Keff asked the air.

"Hull breach, minor. Already being fixed," Carialle said shortly.

The automatic repair system quickly pressurized the sector and filled it with self-hardening polymer/metal compound. Nothing vital had been damaged, but Carialle wondered how many of those hits they could take before being destroyed. Her nerve endings still stung. She fed somatotropins to the injured part, and increased her sugar levels slightly.

Keff shook his hands to help the blood flow to the white and pinched palms, then slammed his fist down on the record button to send a message to CW.

"Mayday. This is the CK-963. We are under attack by three vessels, origin unknown. I am uplinking video of these vessels, plus other data we have gathered regarding the disappearance of a Central Worlds ship in this sector. If we are unable to escape, send fleet ships to the Cridi system at once. We have already taken damage. I repeat, we are under attack-uh-oh!"

The screen caught his attention as the red light on the enemy ship appeared again. "Cari, they're shooting again!"

"I'm moving, I'm moving!" Carialle exclaimed. The ship zigzagged as well as it could to avoid the coming barrage, but she couldn't move far to any side. There was no way to dodge another blast. "Our shields aren't meant to take this."

The Frog Prince once again put his newfound power into operation. His hands whisked back and forth in silent commands. Carialle felt the Core within her walls hum. Suddenly, her hull felt as if it had been dipped in transparent padding. The next bolt of energy, invisible to the naked eye, exploded in a burst of white light against her side. Keff and Tall Eyebrow were jolted around in their couches, but the ship sustained no damage.

"Thanks, TE," Carialle said. "You just earned your keep." The globe-frog signalled a shaky "You're welcome."