He did not want to go all the way to the surface, though it was nice to know that he could. Bony carefully adjusted the power setting until the Mood Indigo was hovering at a constant depth. He knew the direction that Liddy, Friday Indigo and the group of Limbics had taken, but the imaging sensors showed nothing but the continuous blue-green of sea water.

Bony activated a pair of lateral thrustors at their lowest level, so that the ship began to crab slowly sideways through the water in the direction taken by the group of Limbics. If they had changed their minds before reaching the ridge, Bony would be out of luck.

He was a little lower in the water than he had realized, and became aware of the approaching ridge by the reappearance of the cloud of blown silt. He raised the ship another ten meters, waited until he reached the brow of the ridge, then hovered stationary while he inspected the displays provided by the imaging sensors.

He stared desperately at the seabed, seeking a group of figures. He had a problem. If he went too high, the amount of scattered sunlight filtering down around the ship made it hard to see detail below him. But if he went lower, silt raised by the exhaust of the thrustors obscured everything.

If he could not find them he had to return the Mood Indigo to its original position, so that Friday Indigo and Liddy could get back to it. As he reached that conclusion, he realized that although he saw no moving figures, either bubble people or humans, the view below was not totally featureless. He could make out a faint trail of suspended mud, a haziness where something appeared to have recently disturbed the bed of the sea.

It must mark the way that they had travelled. Just beyond the ridge it angled wide to the left. Continue on his original course, and he would have missed them completely.

Bony rose, to a height where he could still just see the ghostly arrow of blown silt, and directed the ship along the trail. He went slowly. He wanted to know what was going on with Friday Indigo and Liddy, without the captain being aware of it. Indigo’s instruction had been explicit: stay in one place and look after the ship. He had already violated that, and if he got in the way of what Friday Indigo was trying to do it would make things worse.

No danger of getting in the way at the moment. On the seabed the trail went on and on, but no matter what he did with the image intensifiers he could detect no sign of figures, human or otherwise.

Was he following an illusion, a path made by some other creature that lived on Limbo’s tranquil seabed? In fact, wasn’t there a hint, at the very limit of visibility, of a quite different shape out there? He fancied he could discern a long, low form, with some kind of conical shell on top. The sort of thing you would see if the ocean of Limbo was home to a gigantic sea-snail.

He allowed the Mood Indigo to drift forward, slower and slower. Now he could discern a bright line along the upper edge, as though the body of the great snail was edged with gold.

Nearer. And just a little nearer yet, though he remained ready at any moment to cut in an alternate set of thrustors and shoot away at maximum power. The snail lay silent and motionless on the bed of the ocean.

And then, in a moment, the image changed — not on the seabed, but inside Bony’s mind. It was like one of those optical illusions, where a figure suddenly transforms as you look at it into a quite different one. The sea-snail was even bigger than he had thought, and it was no longer a snail. It was a ship, lying on its side.

And not just any ship. The outer hull was misshapen, all bulges and wens. Although he had never encountered a vessel like the one before him, Bony recognized those lines.

The object on the sea bed was a Pipe-Rilla ship, built by — and unique to — that alien member of the Stellar Group.

14: THE CREW OF THE HERO’S RETURN

The Hero’s Return was close to three hundred meters long and massed in excess of eighty thousand tons. It had been designed for “peacekeeping,” which meant that it had been fitted out from stem to stern with the most hideous weapons of war that the human mind could conceive. Nothing ought to warm better the heart of one of the solar system’s most experienced military men. Yet General Dag Korin stood in the main docking area and shook his white-haired head in disgust.

“You see how it goes,” he said. “You form some sort of halfassed union with a load of goggle-eyed sapsucker pipestem-legged aliens, and they dump their jackass craphead lily-livered ideas on you, and before you know it you’ve come to this .”

He waved his arm to take in the whole of the loading bay, forty meters across and twenty high. Flammarion, standing at the General’s side, stared around at the ribbed walls, the array of displays, and the warren of pipes and cables. Everything looked fine to him. Not only that, the Angels to his certain knowledge didn’t have eyes to goggle, and he very much doubted that they, the Tinkers, or the Pipe-Rillas had livers.

“Filthy!” General Korin ran a gloved hand along a rail, and it came away smudged with dust and grease. “Filthy, and neglected, and stinking. A typical civilian vessel. Swallow all the soft-headed pacifist nonsense that the aliens preach, and in just a few years here’s what you have. What I’d like to know is, where did good old-fashioned military discipline go, the thing that made humans great?”

Flammarion couldn’t answer. But since the Hero’s Return had been for at least ten years a civilian ship, it didn’t seem reasonable to look for it here. The weapons, except for strictly defensive shields, had been stripped out, and the human crew replaced by robots low-level to the point of imbecility. On the other hand, the ship’s computer had been upgraded to the very best that humanity could produce. This was an area where humans led the rest of the Stellar Group by a wide margin. If you’ve got it, flaunt it.

Dag Korin was glaring at Flammarion, who knew better than to offer answers or comments. He had a lot of respect for the aged general, and he realized that he was more of a convenient audience than anything else.

“And the crew that we’re getting!” Korin regarded Flammarion with something close to approval. “Now you, you’re a military man yourself. You know the value of organization and training. Did you see the description of what’s going to be arriving on board in the next few hours?”

“Yes, sir.” It would be more like the next few minutes. According to the status display, a transit vehicle to the Hero’s Return had docked three minutes ago and Flammarion could hear the locks in operation.

“The scum of the solar system,” Korin went on. He waved the manifest that he was holding. “The two arriving on this ship are a fine example. Coming from the Oort Cloud, and so far as I can tell they’ve never done one useful thing in their whole lives. See this one. ` Tarboosh Hanson. Areas of expertise: talks to animals; strongman and stuntman.’ A fat lot of use he’s going to be when we’re fighting armed aliens in the Geyser Swirl. And here’s the other one. ` Chrissie Winger. Areas of expertise: magic and deception.’ What’s that mean? They may buy this sort of nonsense out in the Oort Cloud, but not here. Now this other man coming in later today looks a bit better. He’s not military but at least he has a career. ` Daniel Casement. Areas of expertise: financial investment advice, precious stones.’ Hmm. Maybe I should deal with him myself.”

“Sir, the first two will be here any second. That’s the outer hatch cycling. What should we do?”

“Hold your water, and take your signals from me. These people have to know who they’re dealing with. First impressions are important.”