"Even if he can't be bothered to tell us," Victor said. It came out with more feeling than he intended, and Julia registered a flicker of pain. Julia's choice had always baffled him, although he and Royan had always been careful never to show any animosity towards each other. If anything, they'd always been scrupulously polite, to the point of excess, it became a ritual. Perhaps the mistrust he felt was just a security man's instinct. But he always considered Royan a flaw in Julia's otherwise meticulous life; it was always her devotion, her money. All Royan had brought with him were his hotrod programs. Love was never reasonable.

"Something I'd like to ask," Victor said, evading Julia's critical eye. "Seeing as how I don't believe in coincidence: Royan builds a Jupiter probe to investigate alien life, then he turns up warning us about alien life. Would it make sense for our aliens to use Jupiter as a base?"

"You mean, could their ship be in orbit around Jupiter?" Julia asked.

"Just an idea," Victor said. It was one he'd had on the flight back to Wilholm. He had wanted to pursue it with Rick, but then Greg had called and he wound up getting sidetracked with safeguarding Andria Landon.

"A good one," said Rick. "However advanced their technology, a starflight would deplete on-board resources, certainly on a slower-than-light ship. Jupiter would be an excellent resupply point. Minerals and metal in its ring, ice on Europa, He3 in its atmosphere."

"Can you at least run a search of Jupiter for us?" Victor asked.

"I keep telling you," Rick said irritably. "SETI is not a hardware-orientated department. All we have is an office, and access to the Institute's lightware cruncher. That's it, the total, what we are."

"Not any more," Julia said. "As of now, I am placing every deep-space sensor facility Event Horizon owns under the control of the SETI department." Her eyes went distant. "Your role will mainly be co-ordination, but then that's what you're used to. Tell the visible- and radio-astronomy departments what you require, I'll see you have the clearance by the time you get back to the Institute. You can also get the visible-astronomy staff to interpret any recent visual records of Jupiter. There's our own Galileo telescope, as well as the IAP's Aldrin. Victor, you handle any image purchases from the Aldrin. Go through some fronts, I don't want anyone to know Event Horizon is the end user, not at this stage."

"This is all very sudden," Rick said slowly. He kept glancing at Victor for confirmation of what was actually happening. "Funny, nothing like the contact scenarios we were prepared for. We always assumed it would be non-material contact, almost archaeological, digging through the electronic remains of a culture, signals broadcast before the human race had even learnt how to knap flints. Now this, a starship finally arrives, then it hides from us. Crazy."

"I'm sure you can cope," Julia said, there was a line of steel in her voice.

Rick jerked back out of his daydream. "Yes, of course, absolutely no problem."

"Good. You're searching for two things. Firstly, any sign of an alien starship. Secondly, this Kiley probe of Royan's. I want to know if it's still in Jupiter orbit, or if it's en route back to Earth. Got that?"

"Yes." Rick bobbed his head.

"There's a third option on Kiley," Victor reminded her. "The most likely, that it's already returned."

"How would we know?" Julia asked. "Royan's wiped or guarded any reference in the company memory cores. Even I can't find any traces," she added significantly.

"We do it the old-fashioned way. Ask people instead of machines," he said with a slow smile. Investigative techniques, cross-indexing and correlating data, had been a part of his original training. Unused for well over a decade, ever since security simply became a question of correct data retrieval. It would be good to actually use his brain on a problem again, satisfying, that and being out in the field for a change. "We can start with Rick here?"

"Me?" the startled SETI director asked.

"Yes."

"But I've told you everything I know about Kiley, every byte."

"Not quite. For a start, which bay the Kiley was assembled in?"

"F37, I think."

"Right, Julia would you ask your team to access the records for that bay, see if they can work out how Royan glitched the cores to hide what he's been doing?"

"Good idea," she said.

"In the mean time, Rick and I will get back to the Institute, start talking to the team that assembled Kiley, and more important, see if we can locate the spaceplane crew that launched it."

"What for?" Rick asked.

"Because if it has returned, their familiarity with the system would make them the logical choice to perform the recovery flight."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Julia watched the study door close behind the two men. Rick Parnell had been more or less what she'd expected, except for his physical size; an intellectual, socially out of his depth. Wasn't royalty supposed to be able to put anyone at their ease? That was one trick she had never mastered. It always took three or four meetings with people before they started to relax around her. Apart from Victor, of course, she couldn't think of a time when Victor had been reticent around her. Always honest, that was Victor's big attraction. And loyal, which went far beyond professional integrity. Julia quickly put a brake on that stray thought.

You shouldn't be so dishonest with yourself, Juliet, her grandfather said gently.

She hadn't realized the NN cores were still plugged in.

I wasn't being dishonest, just practical.

Poor Juliet, so many problems, so many unknowns.

You're getting quite dismally sentimental in your old age.

Listen, my girl. I know this is immortality, but it's tasteless, odourless, and numb; and it isn't going to get any better. Maybe I should have gone for the angels and demons deal after all.

You don't have glands, Grandpa, you don't need the outside world.

No, but I like it.

Oh, all right, anything for peace and quiet.

Load OtherEyes. She felt the package squirt into one of her processor nodes, it was a fragment of her grandfather, a sub-personality, formatting her sensory impulses and relaying them back to his NN core. In effect, he was riding her nervous system, a tactual tourist.

Happy now? Julia asked. She gave him access to her sensorium about once a week; he always claimed he needed to receive the physical sensations to stop himself going insane. Julia doubted it, her two NN cores never made the same request, and her grandfather had skipped the last four months of both her pregnancies.

"Too bloody weird, Juliet," he had told her. "Remember this is a lad who grew up in the sixties—the Beatles, Apollo moonshots, and black and white telly—that's my stomping ground, simple times. Looking round this brain-wrecked world half of me thinks I'm in hell already."

That's better, thank you, Juliet.

His silent voice always sounded closer when OtherEyes was loaded, which was impossible. She stretched her arms, wriggling her fingers, then breathed in deeply.

Oh, terrific, that grand old smell of chilly conditioned air. Can't beat it. You live in a bloody spaceship, you do, girl.

She laughed. I'll take a walk out in the gardens for you later. Daniella and Matthew are in the pool, I could join them.

An eerie wisp of pride slithered through her brain at the mention of her children. Not hers, not the usual background of paternal pride.

They're good kids, they are, Juliet. My great-grandchildren. Even if they do keep taking Brutus into the pool.

Oh, not again! I've told Qoi not to let them.

There was a mental chuckle. Brutus doesn't harm anybody, it's not as if he's got fleas. Besides, I remember a little girl who would have stabled her horse in her bedroom if I'd let her.