"We’re jamming it," the other one added. "This entire house is insulated from the datasphere."

That shouldn’t have been a great surprise. Anyone who’d studied the Vigil would know to take precautions. "Well then," I said, "what do you want?"

A light sprang up in the middle of the darkened room. It began as a pinprick but fast expanded to a life-size hologram of two androids, a Peacock’s Tail, and a fear-eyed yours truly… a first-rate mock-up that had to be based on the download from my brain. The holo images were projected across my body, across the cot beside me, across the two men who’d come through the door; I happened to be standing half-in/half-out of the female robot. Stubbornly, I stayed where I was — flinching would have made me look like a nelly.

One of the men stepped forward…

Hold on a second. I need some breezy way of distinguishing my two captors — calling one Tall and one Short, something along those lines. But they were both of identical height, both wearing identical uniforms, both sporting identical haircuts: as close to twins as people can get when they don’t actually look the same. All I can think to call them is the Mouth and the Muscle… because one couldn’t stop yapping while the other mostly loomed quiet as a hoar falcon biding its time.

So the Mouth stepped forward. He made a point of walking straight through the hologram of me, briefly disrupting my laser-projected image into a random scramble of pixels. Then he aimed his finger straight at the peacock tube. "Do you know what that is, Ms. Smallwood?"

"No."

The Mouth sneered in disbelief. Not many men can actually manage a sneer — they might glower or grimace, but they don’t have the degree of self-involvement required for an out-and-out sneer. The Mouth looked as if he’d practiced sneering in a mirror till he got something he really liked. "This," he said, pointing to the peacock tube, "is a miniature Worm field. Colloquially called a Sperm-field, or Sperm-tail. Do you know what that is?"

"We use Sperm-tails as transport sleeves to our local orbitals," I answered. "They’re also used in starship drives."

I stared at the peacock again. "But the Bonaventure sleeve is white."

"Sperm-fields look white when they’re stabilized," the Mouth said, "like planetary transport tubes, or a starship envelope after it’s properly aligned. But with an unanchored Sperm, you get flutter around the edges. Makes a characteristic diffraction pattern." He pointed again to the peacock tube.

"Okay," I shrugged, "it’s a Sperm-field. So what?"

"So what?" the Mouth repeated, as if I’d only asked the question to antagonize him. "So where did it come from? There’s no Sperm-field generator in the picture!"

"None that we can see," the Muscle put in. "It could be miniaturized."

The Mouth glared at him. This was obviously a point of contention between the two men… and a precious petulant contention at that. Mouth took a slow and deliberate breath, the picture of a man exercising colossal restraint in the face of grievous tests to his patience. I bet he practiced that look in the mirror too. "The point is," Mouth told me, "current Technocracy science could not create a Sperm-field in the situation you see here. It came out of nowhere…"

"Nowhere big enough to see," the Muscle muttered.

"It came from no discernible field generator," the Mouth said testily, "it immediately shaped itself into a smooth arc without any apparent control magnets, and it ended in a well-defined aperture that held its position for 1.6 seconds without any equipment to anchor it in place!"

He stared at me triumphantly, as if he’d just scored some telling knockout in a political debate.

Ooo. Posturing. As a Vigil member, I’d never seen that before.

I spoke mildly. "I take it those things you listed are unusual for Sperm-fields."

"Unusual? They’re impossible!" the Mouth snapped.

"At least we don’t know how to do them," the Muscle said under his breath.

The Mouth gave Muscle another hissy glare, then slapped his hand through the hologram peacock. His skin fuzzed with green-and-purple streaks. "Ms. Smallwood," the Mouth said, "this is a matter of great concern to the Admiralty. When Outward Fleet personnel saw the news broadcasts of what happened to you…"

"This was never broadcast," I interrupted.

The Mouth looked at the Muscle. The Muscle shrugged.

"When the Outward Fleet obtained this hologram from the police," the Mouth said loftily, not looking me in the eye, "there was immediate concern. The base commander on Demoth contacted the High Council of Admirals, and the council dispatched us to investigate this matter strenuously."

"Strenuously?" I repeated. If I were an admiral, I wouldn’t trust these two with that kind of adverb.

"It’s a matter of security," the Muscle said with a straight face. "The security of the entire human species."

"Because someone pulled a trick you can’t imitate?"

"Ms. Smallwood," the Mouth said, pushing to regain his place as the center of attention, "if this hologram is accurate, someone is employing inhumanly advanced science on a Technocracy world. Your world, Ms. Smallwood. Doesn’t that worry you?"

"Why should it? The Sperm-field saved my life."

"She’s got a point," the Muscle murmured.

"Do you mind?" Mouth tried to give his partner a withering glare. He hadn’t spent enough time practicing the "wither" part — probably too busy working on his sneer. Mouth’s prissy little stare bounced off the Muscle like a wad of soggy tissue.

"Look," I said in my most reasonable voice, "we all know the League of Peoples includes races that are millions of years beyond human technology. Millions of years smarter, millions of years more evolved. I thought it was conventional wisdom that someone was always keeping an eye on humanity. ‘Invisibly walking among us’… even the Admiralty uses that phrase."

"League members may walk among us," the Mouth sniffed, "but they never do anything. If there are invisible aliens wandering through the Technocracy, Ms. Smallwood, they don’t stop children from drowning. They don’t call local police to tell who’s behind a string of serial murders, and they don’t show up in court to explain who’s innocent or guilty. So why should they work a miracle to help you?"

Good question, that. I’d asked it now and then myself in the past few days. "I don’t know," I said.

"We can’t accept that answer," Mouth told me. "The High Council gets extremely agitated at the thought of unknown aliens taking action on Technocracy planets. Especially when it involves political figures like you."

I snorted. "I’m not a political figure."

"You’re part of Demoth’s political system, Ms. Smallwood. And the Technocracy’s charter from the League of Peoples prohibits the League from trying to influence our internal governments."

Hogwash. I’d studied the charter during my Vigil training. The League could and would put the boot to human governments at every level if they thought our race was turning non-sentient. On the other hand, why waste breath giving these dickweeds a lecture on law? "What am I here for?" I asked as calmly as I could. "The way you’ve created this hologram, you must have hacked the full VR recording from the police databanks. That means you know everything I saw and heard. What else do you expect to get out of me?"

The Mouth smiled nastily. Close to a sneer but more smugness. "How about a confession this was all a hoax?"

"It wasn’t," I snapped. "If you want to see the acid burns on Chappalar’s body, let’s you and me take a trip to the cemetery."

"Ms. Smallwood," the Muscle said in a voice that had the decency to sound abashed, "there’s no question Proctor Chappalar died from third-degree burns. But we have to worry about…" He jabbed his thumb in the direction of the Peacock. "We need to know if that’s real or if someone is trying to trick us."