That left only Danny Casement and the Bun, and Chan had been more sure of them than anyone. Danny had enormous persuasive power, but he probably wouldn’t even need it. In the old days the Bun had been keenest of all to go to the stars. Now they would fly out from the Vulcan Nexus and complete the old team.

And then reality intruded. Danny’s message, chasing Chan around the solar system, finally caught up with him. It told of the Bun’s disappearance and his almost certain death. The Hero’s Return was looming up ahead but Chan didn’t see it. He was turned inward, looking at the collapse of his plans. Deb Bisson had promised to go along only if he had the full team. With the Bun gone, Deb would back out. Without Deb, Tully would not make it. The dominoes would fall. No Bun, no Deb, no Tully …

No team.

The transit vessel docked. The hatch opened. Chan didn’t have the energy to stand up and go through it. He sat, hands gripping the padded arms of his chair, until the robots came along and began to service the cabin around him. The gentle probing touch of one on his leg, as though asking Do I clean this? , roused him.

He stood up and passed through the first connection chamber, through the outer hatch, through the lock and through the inner hatch. He was finally in the true interior of the Hero’s Return , but he had sat so long after docking that anyone waiting for a passenger on the transit vessel would surely be gone. He glanced over to the couch at the side of the chamber, expecting to see no one. General Dag Korin lay there at full length. His eyes were closed and his mouth was open. Somehow he gave the impression of a man sleeping at attention.

Chan hesitated to wake him. On the other hand, what was Korin doing here if not waiting to see Chan? And when you had bad news to present, one time was as good as another.

Chan leaned down and shook the General’s shoulder. Korin came awake so smoothly and quickly that it was hard to believe he had been sleeping.

Frosty blue eyes fixed on Chan as the General slowly sat upright. “You’re running damn close to the deadline, Dalton. Are you sure you’ll have all your team on board by midnight?”

“I’m sure I won’t. One of them is dead.”

“You tell me that now , with just a few hours to go to departure?”

“I only found out myself a few minutes before we docked.”

“Can you operate without him?”

“If we have to. But it’s not that simple.” Chan outlined Deb Bisson’s position, and how the death of the Bun would affect her presence on the team.

“So you’ve got problems to solve.” Korin stood up. “And so do I. The two of us have to talk.”

“I don’t know that I have much to say. Not until I’ve had a chance to think about all this.”

“Understood. But if you can’t talk, you can listen. Come on. This is important.”

Korin led the way into the cavernous interior of the Hero’s Return . In the old days the cruiser had carried a military crew of nine hundred men and women. The ship’s exterior with its massive armor and reinforced hull was little changed from those glory days, but once inside you wandered through a ghost ship. Your voice echoed through bare-walled compartments, your footsteps rang along empty corridors. Chan found himself reluctant to speak, while Dag Korin apparently did not want any discussion until they had privacy. The two men drifted along in silence, past dark chambers that had once housed weapons able to turn whole asteroids to slag; past engines that could drive the eighty-thousand-ton mass at anything up to seven gees; past the chamber housing a computer as sophisticated as any ever built, able to control the vessel’s sensors, make autonomous decisions, and do whatever was needed to assure the safety of ship and crew; past the deserted quarters of that crew, where almost a thousand men and women had once exercised, eaten, and slept.

Dag Korin, with the pick of the whole ship available to him, apparently preferred simplicity. He continued on, beyond the section that had once housed the captain and the senior officers, until they came to a set of smaller rooms tucked away beside the ship’s main control room. And there, at the very end of a corridor, Chan saw a tall form in a powder-blue work suit, lounging against a door painted a bilious green.

He heard Dag Korin’s surprised grunt, in the same moment as Chan recognized the blond hair and anorexic face of Elke Siry.

“I believe you already met my ward,” Korin said to Chan. And then, to the woman, “What are you doing here, Elke? I thought you were getting us ready for Link transition.”

My ward? Dag Korin had said nothing about that at their first meeting. But the woman was speaking. “I was.” There was no mistaking the high-pitched, nervous voice, with its trace of a lisp. “But I have disturbing information, matters that I must discuss with you.”

“You, too? Looks like it’s bad news all round.” Korin opened the door. “We’d better go inside.”

The room they entered was simply furnished even by the standards of Earth’s Gallimaufries. Console, disk-case, small couch, writing desk, bureau, and chair, all without decoration or added niceties. Chan squeezed onto the couch next to Elke Siry, and noticed how she jerked urgently away when his hip accidentally came into contact with hers. Dag Korin went across to the metal bureau in one corner and returned with a box housing a dozen plastic bottles, each the size and shape of a small pear.

“Calvados?” He sat down on a hard chair opposite them. “I can personally recommend it.”

Chan hesitated, then shook his head. Elke took one of the bottles, opened the cap with her thumbnail, and sucked down the contents in one long gulp. She was reaching for another when Korin pulled the box away.

“Talk first. If it’s as bad as you say, maybe we’ll sit here and drink the lot together. Now, Elke, what’s the problem?” Korin caught Elke Siry’s rapid sideways glance at Chan. “Don’t worry, my dear, he’s in this as deep as we are. If I can hear it, so can he.”

“All right.” But Elke Siry’s face suggested to Chan that she thought it was far from all right. She bit her lip, shook her head from side to side so that her long blond tresses swung about her thin face, and burst out, “It’s the Link point. The one in the Geyser Swirl.”

“What about it?”

“I’ve wondered about it ever since I heard it existed. I mean, how could there be a Link in the network that no one knew about before? A Link is a spacetime anomaly. It pops out at you on any connectivity survey in a way you can’t miss.”

“We missed this one.”

“No. I don’t think we did. I believe that it wasn’t there to be observed on any previous survey.”

“Hm.” Korin raised grizzled eyebrows at Chan. “Did you ever hear of anything like that? A Link entry and exit point that comes and goes?”

“I didn’t know such a thing was possible. Link points are permanent features. Aren’t they?”

Chan thought that he had offered a mild and reasonable response. He was not ready for the way that Elke blushed bright red, or for her breathless outburst: “Then that just proves how much you don’t know. Links can be created — and destroyed. How much scientific training have you had?”

“Very little.”

“How much?”

“Well, none.” Chan held up his hands defensively. “Dr. Siry, I wasn’t arguing with you. I’m just telling you what I’ve been told.”

It didn’t seem to help. She was as nervous and intense as ever, the absolute opposite of Dag Korin, who gave the impression he had seen it all before and found it no more shocking this time around.

“But there’s worse,” Elke said abruptly. “We had word today from the Angels. They have some way of monitoring the existence of the Link point in the Geyser Swirl. That Link wasn’t there a year ago, and it wasn’t there yesterday. But it was there two months ago, and now it’s there again. It comes and goes in a totally unpredictable way.”