This one could. Kin's unease began to be tinted with excitement. The Line and the Matrix had chopped space into mere pauses between identical Line Top arrival lounges. This ship was something else.

There was a dumbwaiter, a big model programmed to produce anything from lobster thermidor to sawdust. It could even reproduce shand proteins.

There was a medical room that would not have disgraced a city. There was also a deep-freeze, a fact so unusual that Kin lifted the lid.

'Now here's a thing,' she murmured. Silver peered in, and rooted around among the frosted packages.

'Nothing remarkable,' she said. 'Meat, fish, fowl, leaves, swollen tubers -- human food.'

Kin pointed at the dumbwaiter, humming seductively to itself.

'Ever known one of those to fail?' she said.

'They don't,' said Silver. 'If they did, you humans would never have allowed us into space.'

'Then why waste space and weight hauling this junk? If he was nervous, he'd bring shandi food -- uh. Of course. I forget he's old.'

'Old?'

'Old enough to be fussy about machine-made food. This lot here must have cost him a fortune.'

'Please explain about "old",' said Silver insistently.

Kin told the shand about the Terminus probe. When she finished she was aware that the giant was looking at her oddly.

'You humans must have been mad for space,' she said.

They turned as Marco strode silently into the room, trembling with rage.

'What is this ship?' he bawled. 'There's enough weaponry in the hold to blow a hole through a planet.'

'And small-arms,' murmured Kin. Marco stared at her, while she felt her mind beginning to think very fast indeed.

'Precisely. But how did you guess?'

'No guess, I think I've seen enough. Silver, was there a message from Jalo when you got here?'

'The kung in the ferry said I was to wait. Why?'

Kin shook her head urgently. 'Marco, there must be spacesuits around. If we got into them, could you evacuate the ship?'

'Down here? It'd implode. I'd have to take her up, and that--'

'This is a .0003 Clipe automatic. If you all leapt at me the chances are I would not get you all, but who could I shoot first?'

Jalo was standing by the door, the pistol dangling nonchalantly from one hand. Kin thought about what a stream of Clipe needles could do, and decided to stand very still. She glanced at Silver.

The shand wasn't looking at Jalo. She was staring at Marco.

He had dropped into a curious bowlegged stance, arms held out from his body like an ancient gunfighter, and he was hissing softly.

'Tell it if it attacks, I will shoot,' said Jalo. 'Tell it!'

'You know he can understand you,' said Kin coldly. She heard Silver say in shandi: 'In a minute there's going to be an almighty fight, Kin. No-one threatens a kung and lives.'

'Marco is legally human,' said Kin in allspeak.

'Yes, that fooled me,' said Jalo. 'I should have known better. I told that agency computer on Real Earth to pick three people that fitted my specifications, and it gave me three names. The damn thing never bothered to say two of them were BEMs.'

Only Silver, student of history, understood the term. She growled.

'It surely mentioned planets of origin,' said Kin.

'The big frog was born on Earth, though, and the bear born in a ship orbiting Shand,' said Jalo. 'Doesn't anyone ever mention species these days? Legally human! Ye gods! Do not move.'

'I was wondering where you were,' said Kin. 'I should have been looking for a patch of fuzzy air -- looter.'

He grinned lopsidedly. 'The word is, uh, nasty but true. Just like the Company looted strata machines and the Line monomolecular technique.'

'Not true. The Company administers them for the general good.'

'Fine, so on this trip the profits will be for my general good. I figure I'm owed something. I knew LeVine and the rest. I trained with them. I'm taking my reward now. I've got the jackpot.'

Something small and black hopped around the curve of the corridor behind him. Kin recalled that Marco, determinedly human, had been trying to make a pet of the raven. It was feeding time.

'I shall need assistance,' Jalo said.

'You've got the self-filling purse,' said Kin. 'That sounds like a jackpot to me.'

'Nah. With what's here we can start our own Company where we're going.' He reached into a side-pocket and pulled out a navigation reel. 'It's all here.'

'I would prefer to talk further without the piftol threatening uf,' said Silver painfully. 'It if not kind.'

The raven flew up on to Jalo's shoulder and screamed in his ear--

--a stream of Clipe needles zonked into the ceiling--

--Marco moved so fast that his passage across the space separating him from Jalo could only be deduced from the fact that he was suddenly astride the fallen figure, the Clipe held in one hand and the other three raised to smash a skull--

--he blinked, and looked around as if waking from a dream.

He stared at Jalo, and then leaned forward.

'He's dead,' he said helplessly. 'I didn't even strike him.'

Kin knelt down by the man.

'He was dead before you got there.'

She had seen the face go snow-white after the bird's scream. Jalo had already been dropping when Marco reached him.

He was sufficiently recently dead for it to be worth slotting his body into the ship's medical sargo, which immediately flashed a row of red lights. Kin checked the readings on the panel below. Cell rupture, organ rupture, brain damage -- when they got back to a human world it would be six months in a resurrection vat for Jalo.

'A coronary?' suggested Silver.

'Massive; said Kin. 'He's lucky.'

There was silence, and when Kin turned the shand was looking at her in astonishment.

'Coronary is easy,' she explained. 'We can repair that. Simple job. If Marco had got to work on him there wouldn't have been anything left to put in a vat. He threatened Marco.'

Silver nodded. 'Kung are paranoid. But he also acts like a human.'

'You watch him enter a room. That walk of his is a fighting stance. Kung don't know the meaning of the word fear.'

'Fine,' said Silver pleasantly. 'Half kung, half human. Well, I know the meaning of the word fear, and right now I'm scared.'

'Yeah, I can see--'

(a few seconds of vertigo, an eternity of despair)

The first thing Kin registered when her sight came back was the cabin window and the view outside. The ship appeared to be surrounded by a fog full of icebergs.

She was dimly aware of an alarm, which cut off abruptly.

She was aware of hazy stars, and of drifting across the cabin because there was no gravity. Silver was floating near what had been the ceiling, out cold.

Let's see. The ship had been floating on a lake. Now it was floating in space. Outside was frozen air and quite a bit of the lake, so down on Kung storms must be raging since a few cubic hectares of air and water had suddenly been dragged into space inside the ship's Elsewhere field...

In free fall Kin's natural genius felt somewhat cramped. She swam and bounced her way to the control room, where Marco was hunched over the main consol like a spider, and screamed in his ear.

He grabbed her out of the air and turned her to face the big screen at the far side of the cabin.

She stared, open-mouthed.

After a while she fetched Silver, who was treating a slight headwound in the medical room and cursing in several languages, and made her watch.

When the film was finished they ran it through again.

'I put Jalo's reel in the navigator,' said Marco finally. 'It included this.'

'Run it again,' said Kin. 'I want to have another look at one or two bits.'

'The picture quality is exceptionally good,' said Marco.

'It had to be. They were meant to be transmitted over tens of parsecs--'