"lMENINEU O-OKARIN'TA NE?" ASKED the creature standing at my right hand, the tip of its horned crown nearly two cubits above the top of my own head.

"Trust them?" I asked, watching the darkness beyond the open hatch for the arriving shuttle.  "The Extras?"

"Your people," said Ramanthanu, eyes black as the space between the stars.

I did not answer it, but turned to examine my paltry retinue.

Agent Albé had remained on the bridge with the pilot, had sent me with two decades of HAPSIS men under the command of a man called Archil.  These were supported by as many Irchtani warriors under the command of Annaz's second, the black-and-green-feathered Inamax.  But it was Ramanthanu and its three remaining kindred that stood nearest me.  Egazimn, Otomno, and Bikashi were - with their captain - the last of my Cielcin, the last of that small number that had sworn fealty to me amidst the Battle of Sabratha.

Did I yet trust anyone?  Anyone other than Cassandra?

The door that led to the corridor at our backs opened, and a man in bright Jaddian silk shuffled in.  "Jitaten makanna."  He looked askance at the door he had entered through, located in the eye of a man's face carved in relief upon the wall, so that it seemed the skull of some giant lay half-sunken in the floor.  "I cannot abide this ship, Master Hadrian.  I cannot abide it at all."

"Neema!"  He was very nearly late.  "How is Cassandra?"

"Resting, poor girl," he said, smoothing the front of his open blue silk vest.  "Resting, yes.  The ghastly machine that calls itself a doctor says she will be fine, but she is unconscious.  It induced her to sleep while it treated her for possible infection."  He shivered.

"Very good," I said, and gripped my left hand with the right, squeezing the fingers to feel the bones beneath.  I had spent some time in the medica myself, recovering from my brush with death and the loss of my own arm following the battle against Aranata Otiolo all those centuries ago.  It had been the ship's iron surgeon that had rebuilt my own arm, printing the bones from adamant, growing new flesh.

That new flesh and printed bone were gone, replaced by the new flesh the Absolute had given me, but the memory remained - the memory and the impulse to feel the lattice ridges of the old false bones beneath the skin of my hand.

"Poor girl..."  Neema said again.  "She may be a holy terror, domi, but I shudder to see her in such circumstances.  Her poor arm."

A pilot light flared to life among the ramparts beyond the open hatch, heralding the arrival of the Vorgossene delegation.  Beside me, Ramanthanu straightened, four slit nostrils flaring as it and its kinsmen drew up about Neema and myself.

"Rakanyi ti-saem-gi," the lop-horned captain said.

They are here.

The air was filled at once with the noise of Archil and Annaz shouting their men to order.  An instant later, the night gave birth.

The Vorgossene shuttle was a perfect sphere, its gunmetal surface pitted and scratched by decades of micrometeor impacts.  Hypergolic attitudinal thrusters were fixed at intervals around its circumference, little holes like pockmarks blackening the surface.

It stank of brimstone, as all things brought in from the dark of space must.

Neema drew back at the sight of it, clutched a kerchief to his nose.

As we watched, the vessel orientated, relying on repulsors like wire inlay.  Then a half dozen slivers opened about the lower face of the craft, pushed outward, became legs like the legs of spiders, and settled on the floor of the hold.  The whole sphere was perhaps forty feet in diameter, larger than the average Imperial shuttle.  Still, the size of the hold dwarfed it, so that it seemed a lone pearl in the bottom of an otherwise empty jeweler's case.

The pilot had scanned their vessel on approach and found it safe, but still I readied myself for some trick, some trap.  Almost I expected the entire thing to erupt in white flame.  An AM bomb was nearly impossible to detect.  A bubble of antihydrogen in magnetic suspension would appear as little more than air to even X-ray spectrography, and yet contain enough destructive potential in a mass the size of a pea to blow the ship to pieces.

An instant later, a section of the spherical hull opened, and a ramp folded down.  Fleet Captain Acastus Kozar appeared at its top, his black hair neatly combed, his silver spacer's suit gleaming beneath his armor.  He had donned a black cape for the occasion, one that fastened at the right shoulder.  Behind him, there followed a collection of his fellow posthumans.  The man at his right - if man he was - appeared like a walking suit of armor, his limbs too narrow for human flesh to lay hid beneath.  A creature like a bloated infant floating in a bell jar followed on, its jar riding on four legs like the legs of dogs.