"Yes, sir," Hill said, pulling out his phone. "May I ask what's wrong?"

Aric leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. "It's my brother," he said. "He's dead."

"Dr. Cavanagh?"

Melinda Cavanagh looked up from the large high-detail plate and her final run-through of the upcoming operation. "Yes?"

"Dr. Billingsgate is in prep," the nurse said. "Room three."

"Thank you," Melinda said, mentally shaking her head. He could just as easily have paged her or called her on her phone, but instead he'd sent someone else scurrying off to find her. She'd never worked with Billingsgate before, but the Commonwealth's surgical community was by necessity a small and tight-knit group, and she'd heard enough stories to know that this was typical of the man. Opinion was split as to whether it was arrogance, stinginess with his own time, or just a simple preference for human interaction over the more impersonal electronic sort. "Tell him I'll be there in a minute."

She finished tracking through the plan and pulled her card from the plate. Prep Three was just down the corridor, and she entered to find Billingsgate poring over the high-detail plate there. "Ah—Cavanagh," he said distractedly, waving her over. "Ready to suit up?"

"Almost," she said, sitting down in the chair next to him. "There are a couple of minor points I'd like to discuss with you first."

He frowned at her from under bushy eyebrows. "I thought we'd settled everything," he said, his tone dropping half an octave.

"I thought we had, too," she said, sliding her card into his plate and keying for the marked sections. "Number one: I think we should reduce the use of markinine in the third phase. We certainly want to lower blood pressure at that point, but with the shorozine drip only four centimeters away, I think we should consider lowering the dosage by at least ten percent."

The eyebrows frowned a little harder. "A ten percent cut is rather drastic."

"But necessary," Melinda said. "Number two: in phase four you have two separate neurobinders being applied at each of four sites. This one"—she pointed to it on the plate—"strikes me as being just a shade too close to the optic chiasma. Particularly given your revised dosage numbers."

"You think that, do you?" Billingsgate said, his voice starting to shade from annoyed to intimidating. "Tell me, Doctor, have you ever performed this operation yourself?"

"You know I haven't," Melinda said. "But I've consulted on five similar operations."

Billingsgate's eyebrows lifted slightly. "For five different surgeons, no doubt?"

Melinda looked him straight in the eye. "That's unfair," she said. "And you know it. The two operations weren't identical—no two operations are. Trying to bypass me that way and just blindly following the first plan was totally irresponsible. And it could have been fatal."

"It most likely wouldn't have been," Billingsgate pointed out.

"Would you have wanted me to take that chance?" Melinda countered.

Billingsgate's lips pursed tightly together. "You didn't have to humiliate Mueller publicly."

"I tried talking to him privately. He wouldn't listen."

Billingsgate turned back to his plate, and for a minute the room was silent. "So you think we should cut the markinine by ten percent, do you?" he asked.

"Yes," Melinda said. "The lower dosage should do the job perfectly well. Particularly given the patient's metabolic baseline."

"I was going to ask if you'd checked on that," Billingsgate said. "All right; but if the blood pressure doesn't respond properly, we're going to jack the dosage back up. Fair enough?"

"Fair enough," Melinda agreed. "Now, what about the neurobinders?"

The discussion was short and civilized, and in the end he acquiesced with reasonably good grace. Like most surgeons Melinda had dealt with, Billingsgate had strong proprietary feelings toward his operation designs, but he was also experienced enough not to simply ignore the recommendations of a good consultant. With more and more routine operations being handled by semisentient computerized systems, the only ones that still required human surgeons were those that were as much art as they were science. Writing required editors; sculpture required texturers; surgery required design consultants. Or so the theory went.

"All right, then," Billingsgate said at last. "We cut the markinine by ten percent and shift the gamma-site neurobinder three millimeters right-lateral. Is that it?"

"That's it." Melinda closed down the plate. "Is everything else ready?"

"Just about. We just have to—"

He broke off as the door slid open and a nurse stepped in. "I'm sorry, Dr. Cavanagh, but this just came for you," she said, holding out a card. "It's marked urgent."

"Thank you," Melinda said, taking it and pulling out her own plate.

"Make it fast," Billingsgate said.

"I will," Melinda promised, frowning at the scrambled symbols. She'd expected it to be a job assignment or something equally official; but this was in one of her father's private codes. Keying for decoding, she watched as the lines reformed themselves....

And felt her heart seize up. "No," she whispered.

Halfway to the door, Billingsgate turned back around. "What is it?"

Wordlessly, she swiveled the plate around to face him. He stooped to read it. "Oh, my God," he murmured. "Who's Pheylan?"

"My brother," Melinda told him, her voice sounding distant in her ears. She'd had a chance to see Pheylan three weeks ago, when they'd both been on Nadezhda. But she'd been too busy....

Billingsgate was saying something. "I'm sorry," she said, forcing herself to focus on him. "What did you say?"

"I said you don't need to stay," he repeated. "The team can handle things without you. Get yourself a flight over to the spaceport and get out of here."

She looked back at the plate, the words dissolving into blurs before her. "No," she said, wiping at her eyes. "I'm the design consultant. I'm supposed to see the operation through."

"That's a recommendation," Billingsgate said. "Not a requirement."

"It's my requirement," Melinda said, standing up. Her mind was starting to function again, spreading out the possibilities and necessities in her usual surgically neat lines. "Give me a minute to get in touch with the CavTronics plant in Kai Ho and I'll be right there."

"All right," Billingsgate said, not sounding convinced. "If you're sure."

"I'm sure," she told him. "I can't bring Pheylan back. Maybe I can help prevent someone else from dying."

4

"All right!" he shouted, slapping the pod wall. "Enough, already!"

The light flared one last time and went out. Pheylan swore under his breath, wincing at the rancid taste in his mouth as he checked his chrono. He felt as if he'd just barely closed his eyes, but he'd actually been asleep for four hours. That made it twenty-two hours since the alien ship had come up behind his pod and swallowed it like a big fish snaring its lunch. Roughly sixty-six light-years, assuming the aliens hadn't discovered a stardrive that ran on a different theory from the Commonwealth's. A long way from home.

The blue light flashed again, twice this time. Reflexively, Pheylan reached for the shutter control, stopped with another curse as his sleep-fogged mind remembered that none of the pod's equipment was functional. They'd done that to him early on, scuffling furtively around the base of the pod where he couldn't see them and knocking out his power supply. He'd been in silent darkness ever since except for the dim light and muffled sounds filtering in from the shuttle-bay-sized room around him.

Without power, of course, his dioxide/oxygen converter was also useless, and there'd been a couple of tense hours when he was debating with himself how close to suffocation he should get before he risked popping the hatch. But while the air inside the pod had slowly grown stale, it hadn't gotten any worse than that. Clearly, the aliens had arranged a supplementary air supply to him, probably funneling it in through the valve he'd weakened earlier when he dumped the pod's reserve oxygen.