We hoon elect our captains, then obey without question while any sort of emergency is going on — and this whole voyage qualified in my mind as a screaming emergency — so I tucked away any resentment for later, when I pictured getting even with Pincer in many colorful ways. Maybe the gang’s next project should be a hot-air balloon. Make him the first qheuen to fly since they gave up starships. It’d serve him right.

By the time Huck finally yelled “Eureka!” my poor muscles and pivots felt as if we’d covered the entire width of the Rift, and then some. My first relieved thought was — No wonder Uriel provided so much hawser and hose!

Only after that did I wonder — How did she know where to tell us to look for this jeekee thing?

It stood half buried in the mud, about twelve cables south of where we first touched down. Judging from the portion that was visible from my “vantage point” way in back, it consisted of long spikes, each pointed outward in a different direction, as if aimed toward the six faces of a cube. Each spike had a big knob at the end, hollow I guessed, to prevent sinking in the muck. It was obviously meant to be found, being colored a garish swirl of reds and blues. Red to really stand out at short range, since the color’s almost totally absent underwater, and blue to be visible from farther away, if your beam happened to sweep across it in the deep darkness. Even so, you had to be within less than a cable to see the thing, so we’d never have come across it without Uriel’s instructions. Still, it took two search spirals before we stumbled on the jack.

It was the strangest thing any of us had ever encountered. And don’t forget, I’ve heard a g’Kek umble and witnessed a traeki vlen.

“Is it Buyur-uyur?” Pincer asked, superstitious awe invading his voice vents, along with a returned stammer.

“I bet a pile of donkey mulch that’s not Buyur-made,” Huck said. “What do you think, Ur-ronn?”

Our urs pal stretched her neck past Pincer, her muzzle drying a patch of the bubble window. “No way the Vuyur would’ve vuilt anything so frightful-ghastly,” she agreed. “It’s not their style.”

“Of course it’s not their style,” Huck continued. “But I know whose it is.”

We all stared at her. Naturally, she milked the moment, pausing till we were on the verge of pummeling her.

“It’s urrish,” she concluded with a tone of smug conviction.

“Urrish!” Pincer hissed. “How can you be so—”

“Exflain,” Ur-ronn demanded, snaking her head to peer at Huck. “This ovject is sophisticated. Uriel could forge nothing like it. Not even Earthlings have such craft.”

“Exactly! It’s not Buyur, and no one currently living on the Slope could make it. That leaves just one possibility. It must have been left here by an original sooner star-ship, when one of the Six Races — seven if you include glavers — first arrived on Jijo, before the settlers scuttled their craft and joined the rest of us as primitives. But which one left it? I’d eliminate us g’Keks on account of we’ve been here so long that I’ll bet the jack would’ve moved a lot farther into the Rift by now. The same probably holds for glavers, qheuens, and traeki.

“Anyway, the clincher is that Uriel knew exactly where to find it!”

Fur riffled around the rim of Ur-ronn’s nostril. Her voice turned colder than the surrounding ocean. “You suggest a conspiracy.”

g’Kek stalks twined, a shrug.

“Not a horribly vile one,” Huck assured. “Maybe just a sensible precaution.

“Think about it, mates. Say you’ve come to plant a sooner colony on a forbidden world. You must get rid of anything that’d show on a casual scan by some Institute surveyor, so your ship and complex gear have to go. Nearby space is no good. That’s the first place cops’d check. So you sink it amid all the stuff the Buyur dumped when they left Jijo. Sounds good so far.

“But then you ask yourself — what if an unforeseen emergency crops up? What if someday your descendants need something high-tech to help ’em survive?”

Ur-ronn lowered her conical head. In the dimness I could not tell if it denoted worry or rising anger. I hurried to cut in.

“Hr-rm. You imply a long view of things. A secret kept for generations.”

“For centuries,” Huck agreed. “Uriel no doubt was told by her master, and so on back to the first urrish ancestors. And before Ur-ronn snaps one of my heads off, let me rush to add that the urs sages showed great restraint over the years, never seeking to use this cache during their wars with qheuens, then humans, even when they were getting their tails whipped.”

That was meant to calm Ur-ronn? I rushed to save Huck from mutilation. “Perhaps — hrm — humans and qheuens had their own caches, so there was a standoff.” Then my own words sank in. “Maybe those caches are being sought now, while we serve as Uriel’s dipping claw, in search of this one.”

There was a long silence.

Then Pincer spoke.

“Sheesh-eesh-eesh. Those aliens up at the Glade must really have the grown-ups spooked.”

Another pause, then Huck resumed. “That’s what I’m hoping all of this is about. The aliens. A mutual effort of the Six, pooling resources, and not something else.”

Ur-ronn’s neck twisted nervously. “What do you nean?”

“I mean, I’d have liked Uriel’s word of honor that we’re down here seeking powers for the defense of all the Commons.”

Not simply to arm urrish militia, in some of the grudge fights we’ve heard rumors about, I thought, finishing Huck’s implication. There was a tense moment when I could not predict what would happen next. Had tension, worry, and Tyug’s drugs strung our urrish friend to the point where Huck’s baiting would make her snap?

Ur-ronn’s neck slowly untwisted. An effort of will, I saw by the dim light of the phosphors. “You have…” she began, breathing heavily. “You have the oath of this urs, that it will ve so.”

And she repeated the vow in Galactic Two, following it with a laborious effort to spit on the floor, not an easy act for one of her kind. A sign of sincerity.

“Hr-rm, well, that’s great,” I said, umbling for peace. “Not that any of us ever thought any different. Right, Huck? Pincer?”

Both of them hurried to agree, and some of the tension passed. Underneath, however, seeds of worry had been laid. Huck, I thought, you’d bring a jar full of scorpions in a lifeboat, then drop it just to see who swims the best.

We got under way again and soon were near enough to see how big the jack really was. Each of the bulbous balloonlike things at its spiky tips was larger than Wuphon’s Dream. “There’s one of the cables Uriel talked about,” Pincer announced, waving a claw toward one spike, from which a glossy black strand made a relatively straight line, though buried in places, aimed north, in the direction we had come.

“I bet anything that line’s broken somewhere tween here and the cliffs,” Huck ventured. “Prob’ly used to go all the way to some secret cleft or cave near Terminus Rock. From there the cache might’ve been hauled in without an urs ever having to get her hooves wet. That end point may’ve gotten cut in an avalanche or quake, like the one that killed my folks. This jack thing is a backup, so the cord can be picked up again, even if the first end point is lost.”

“Good thinking. It does explain one thing that had me puzzled — why Uriel had so much equipment on hand. Stuff that proved so useful for diving. In fact, it makes me wonder why she needed us at all. Why didn’t she have a hidden bathy of her own in the first place?”

Ur-ronn was getting over her funk. “A g’Kek accountant inventories the forge warehouse regularly. He’d notice anything as un-urrish as a suvnarine, just lying around, ready to ve used.”

Her voice was sarcastic. Yet Huck agreed.