Nigel oh Zak look can you find Nigel for me, sounds like, I said, this is Alex, sounds like a madhouse in Central can you

hold it, oh, okay here

send Reynolds those coordinates pronto I want

Nigel, glad I found you look I’ve been monitoring all the insuit Maydays and several of them are going spotty on me it’s not a relay problem I’m sure of that or pretty sure anyway and

nope there’s nothing from the satellite, no interference so that can’t be causing it

Alex Alex this is Nigel here I’ve cross-checked and there’s no other explanation how long until the rescue team

hour twenty-seven minutes more Central says

hell can’t they

I’m sorry, I, look we just lost one of the insuits, I thought you’d, I called cause it’s the 2.39 gigahertz one Nigel, it’s just clean gone.

The white caked skin was dead and dry, leached of color. Nigel reached out and rubbed it tentatively. He felt lightheaded and vague, the residue of many hours. Her right eyelid was closed. Her left had been burned away. The left side of her face was waxy and hardening. In the enameled impersonal phosphor light he traced a trembling finger across the familiar lines, the weathered fretworks and canyons, and marveled that the wrinkles flowed smoothly into the firming new flesh without a sign of the transition.

“They’ll have the … eyelid … back on in an hour … they said,” Nikka mumbled. The shiny skin was still tight and her lips were swollen, purple. She had trouble with pronunciation.

“Quiet.”

“I’m still not … taking orders … Nigel.”

He stared at her, unable to think of anything to say.

“You … were right.”

“No, I was simply cautious.”

The bright yellow medmon continued to nuzzle her left side, pausing to manufacture more skin and then nuzzling again, patient and doglike.

“When my suit intervened and … shut down circulation … on my left arm I thought …”

“I know.”

“I still don’t see … how …”

“It chilled you down by venting gases at the right ports. Tricky. That was the only way out.”

“I … didn’t think suits could …”

“They can’t, not without a processor linking into a good metabolic control program. When your suit stopped broadcasting, we calculated it was probably trying to conserve its power, use its reserves on insuit medical. So Alex focused the big dish for transmission, and I called up the needed programs. Alex stepped up his power level and managed to overrule your suit. He interrogated it, got it to relinquish control and patch through to us. The shipboard programs told your confused little suit-mind how to shut you down, put you on the back burner.”

“You make it sound … very … lighthearted.”

His patient-visiting facade vanished instantly.

“You always were a … terrible actor.”

“Yes, dreadful.” He should have known he could not keep the strain and fatigue out of his face.

“I was sure I was dying out there, Nigel.”

“So was I.”

“I wanted to call out to you …”

“I know.” There wasn’t anything to say, so he held her right hand. It had a soft and worn and kneaded texture. He watched her face as passing storms of emotion swept across it silently, revealed in slight shiftings of expression in the swollen, discolored, patchy flesh.

Through a small window nearby he could see the other survivors lying on white slabs, being operated on by teams of smocked figures. Three were being readied for Sleepslots; their damage was too extensive and deep for Lancer’s capability. They would he stored in a silent, dreamy nothingness until the return to Earth.

“Has … has anything more come out of that …”

“No. It looks dead as ever. The other satellite shows no signs of activity, either. Mysterious.”

She studied him. “Unconvincing.”

“Ummmm?”

“You’re piecing this together … aren’t you?”

“Having a go, yes.”

“You don’t think the EMs … put up those … things …”

“No. But I have only intuitions. I should never have let bloody cretinous Carlotta—”

“I … know.” She squeezed his hand and attempted a smile. “We both … Carlotta and I … reacted … to something … I don’t know, your way of putting it … so …”

“Undiplomatic.”

“Direct, at least.” Her dark eyes focused on the glowing ceiling. The medmon altered pitch in its constant labor and she moved uncomfortably. “You … you aren’t the same now. Nigel. Your … I always sensed an equilibrium … in you. Now …”

“Yes.” He looked at her and remembered the long nights together, when they had first met, lying in a cramped bunk buried beneath the Moon, Nikka patient and analytical, while he carried on, ragged and rusty-eyed, pressing against what appeared to be the problem and failing to see into it for what it was, to clutch it to him. The forward tilt in his life sent him down strange routes, kept shaping and reshaping him. In those distant days there had been no equilibrium, not even the dynamic equilibrium like walking, which was a process of falling forward and catching yourself just in time. Not even that was possible when the world showed itself as a riddle and twisted away, manifesting its greased-pig persona which was only another face, but one which had to be answered, that kneaded and molded him as part of the riddle itself, pressing—

“You’re going out again … aren’t you?”

So she sensed it. “Not to the satellites, no.”

“The surface.” She scowled. The pasty stuff they had used to secure her hair transplant crinkled and a small bubble popped in its surface, leaving a yawning gray crater that quicky filled in. “In person? Or in servo?”

“Servo for me, more’s the pity. I’m too much of a tedious tottering wreck to allow on the surface. I’m to be a flunky, really. Daffler gets to make the overtures—he’s a comm type. Cool-headed, as well.”

“At least they should … let you set foot …”

“Impossible, I’m afraid. But Ted is finally consenting to a direct contact, so we’ve won that. It’s the only good thing to come out of this satellite farce.” Nigel’s eyes danced with anticipation. “Plus, I’ve gotten consent for Daffler to do the overtures in person. Minimum suit.”

“Why?”

“So the EMs can see he’s a living creature. Not another damned machine.”

“I don’t understand. Why not send a carefully coded signal down to them?”

“That might be a bit of a dicey proposition, really. Ted and some of his theoreticians brought up an interesting argument against it. The surface team on Satellite A found a web of radiosensitive, metallic stuff all over the rock, woven into it in some fashion. The thing seems extraordinarily sensitive. It can quite easily resolve and monitor the EM transmissions.”

“And ours.”

“Quite. But it hasn’t bothered us, not until we did something out of the ordinary. Apparently our signals, coming from orbit farther out, don’t bother the thing. It’s—”

“A watcher. Transmissions of that slow chant from the EMs … they’re okay. So are ours, since they’re coming from far away?” She frowned.

“Yes, Watcher—not a bad name. Point is, what happens if we start returning the EM’s hailing signal—that old radio show? How will the Watchers react?”

“So Ted’s strategy group thinks … we should hail the EMs from the surface. Where it won’t look … unusual.”

“That’s the theory.”

“What do you think?”

Nigel shrugged “Those things are bloody dangerous. Best to be careful.”

“If we only … knew more about them …”

“Ah, but we do. A bit, anyway. The surface team transmitted a spectral analysis of the rock. It was fused in some high-temperature process, about 1.17 million years ago.”

“Ummm. Fits with the estimate of the lifetime of their orbits.”

“Yes. But about two hundred thousand years older than the maximum limit on their orbit lifetime.”

Her eyelids flickered; she was becoming drowsy, the knottings of strain in her face relaxing. Nigel felt a surge of elation himself, a conviction that the crisis was past for her. “I … see. Interesting … but …”