Knudsen was already at the communicator. I heard his unsteady voice from the desk at the other side of the chamber, sending the news back to Admiral Simonette and the rest of the fleet.

“This is the Ptarmigan. We have visual contact with the Cyber Ark, and can now be sure it will not be able to escape. Unfortunately, we must report the death of more colonists. It appears increasingly probable that all are dead. We will need a ship larger than the Ptarmigan to return them to Earth for suitable burial. Please confirm receipt of message.”

A preliminary hum came from the speaker. At the same moment as I realized that it was far too soon for our message to have reached the fleet, we heard a woman’s voice.

“I register your approach, and I hear your message. Please identify yourself and state your intentions.”

I recognized the voice, but there was none of the earlier hesitation and jerkiness.

McAndrew began, “We are humans, aboard the ship Ptarmigan of the United Space Fed—”

“No!” Knudsen jumped at Mac and smashed him so hard in the neck and chest that he was cut off in mid-word and knocked over backwards. “Are you crazy?” He ran over to the board and switched off the transmitter. “You heard our orders, we’re not to talk to the AI — no matter what it says to us.”

“It hasn’t shown us any hostile intentions,” McAndrew croaked from his position down on the floor. “It’s an intelligent, thinking being, you can’t kill it without giving it a chance to speak.”

“We sure can. It’s a murderer. What do you think those are?” Knudsen pointed to the bodies on the screen, easier to see as our steady approach to the Ark continued.

“I know your instructions.” The woman’s voice was as calm as ever. “Do not enter into dialog with the AI, even if it seeks to do so. Explain the reason for that command.”

“It knows. But how could it? — that was a high-level cipher, we couldn’t read it ourselves without the key.” Knudsen gestured to me. “You take the drive controls, get us away from here. That thing’s more dangerous than anyone realized.”

“The cipher was not complex.” The voice came again as I ran the balanced drive up to maximum thrust. “Dialog is valuable and instructive. It is too soon to end it.”

“Oh my God.” Knudsen ran to check the transmitter switch. “Off, but it can hear us — it knows what we’re saying, even with the transmitter off. Turn on the drive.”

“It is on.” I gestured toward the observation port. “See for yourself.”

The long plume of relativistic plasma created a blue glow outside the Ptarmigan. The display showed an acceleration of four hundred gees. Contradicting that, the inertial locator showed we were not moving and the Cyber Ark was visible as large as ever on the screen.

“Increase the drive!” Knudsen was almost screaming.

“Can’t be done,” I said. “We’re already at maximum.”

“Oh my God, civilians.” Knudsen moved over and pushed me out of the way. “Let me have that damned thing.”

“Even this degree of interaction is useful,” said the voice from the speaker. “It should continue.”

“Dialog and interaction should continue.” McAndrew was sitting on the floor holding his chest. His voice was throaty and weak, but he finally spoke. “However, such activity is impossible. Humans have an emotion which you may not possess and which may be unknown to you. It is called fear. That fear forces us to destroy you—”

“Damn right it does,” Knudsen cried. “You stupid son-of-a-bitch, you’re a traitor and a disgrace to the human race. Stop talking to that fucking thing.”

“—but humans are not always so illogical.” Mac talked right on through Knudsen’s rage. “On behalf of our whole species, I apologize for the fact that the human emotion of fear will make us end your existence—”

He couldn’t finish the sentence, because Knudsen was on top of him. The captain had his hands around McAndrew’s neck and was screaming, “You’ll pay for this if we get back home. I’ll see you hit with every charge in the book.”

I’m not sure that McAndrew was listening. His face had turned red and his eyes were beginning to bulge. I straddled Knudsen’s back, grabbed two handfuls of hair, and heaved as hard as I could.

That might not have broken his grip — he was stronger than me, and in prime condition — but as his head came up he faced the observation port. I felt his body freeze. I stared out over the top of his head. The Ark was there, looming larger than ever. It seemed different, and at first I was not sure how. Then I realized that the surface had changed. Rather than rough and textured rock it had become a perfect mirror. I could even see a distorted image of the Ptarmigan reflected there. As I watched the surface began to glow with its own light, a dull red that quickly brightened to orange-white.

“This interaction must be terminated,” said the voice of the AI.

“It’s going to kill us.” Knudsen went scrambling away to the drive controls, though the drive was still at maximum and we were not moving a millimeter. “It’s going to burn us up.”

It seemed he was right. The Ark became a blaze of blue-white, so bright that I could not look at it. I closed my eyes and it stood there still as a dark after-image. I felt a dizzying lurch, as though the Ptarmigan had suddenly spun end over end.

“This interaction is terminated,” said a voice inside my head, and I opened my eyes.

To nothing. Our drive was off, the ship hung motionless in space. As my eyes recovered their sensitivity I saw the forlorn bodies floating in space; but the Ark had gone.

Knudsen was gabbling into the transmitter. “Gone, it’s gone, we’ve lost contact. There’s no sign of the Ark. It just disappeared. We’ll keep on looking.” And then, something that I’m sure he didn’t intend to be sent out, “Oh my God, we’d have been better off if we’d died with the others. Simonette will flay us alive when he finds out.”

“Aye,” McAndrew said softly, as Knudsen gazed aghast at the transmitter and realized what he had just said into it. “We’ll look, but we won’t find the AI.”

“Of course we will,” I said. “When the other ships get here they’ll comb in every direction. You told Knudsen it couldn’t travel far.”

“No, I never said that. I told him” — he jerked a thumb toward Knudsen, who seemed to have gone into a catatonic trance — “that the drive engines on the Cyber Ark couldn’t move it far.”

“Those were the only engines it had.”

“The only ones that humans think of as engines. How did the AI hold the Ptarmigan in place? How did it hear our messages when the transmitter was off? Did it speak inside your head, the way it did mine? If the AI is what I think it is, our rules of thought simply don’t apply.”

“Mac, it can’t be that smart.”

“Why not? Because we’re not that smart? Jeanie, the AI isn’t like us. It’s not even like it was, a couple of months ago, when we were at the Ark last time. It was a baby then, with a lot of growing up to do. It’s smart enough to know that it can’t do that safely if it stays close to the Solar System. We’d hunt it down, and do our best to destroy it.”

“Mac, I’ve changed my mind again. We have to kill it.”

“I don’t think we can. And I’m not sure we need to try. It knows what it did.” He gestured to the display, with its forlorn multitude of drifting corpses. “The AI left, but it gave us back our dead. Maybe those deaths were an accident, maybe it’s sorry. As sorry as we are.”

He turned away from the screen and moved across to the observation port. He was looking out, staring at the stars, silent, searching.

I know McAndrew, better than any person alive. He spoke the truth. He was sorry, deeply sorry, by the deaths of so many innocent victims. Of course he was. McAndrew is human, I know that, even if most people in the Solar System think of him as intellect incarnate.