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“What is this, Lisa?” Sar-Say asked as he halted at the guardrail of the observation platform.

“It’s your ship.”

“Why have you repaired it?” the alien asked. “I would have thought that your seekers for knowledge would have disassembled it further to learn its secrets.”

“They would have, except we have a more important need.”

“What need?” Vasloff asked as his stomach reacted with a sick twinge to the view below.

“Let’s get down to the ship,” Mark Rykand said hurriedly. “In case none of you have noticed, they are pumping the air out of this thing even as we speak!”

Vasloff opened his mouth to reply, and then noted the popping in his ears. Whatever was going on would wait until they got inside an airlock. A space dock being pumped empty of life-giving oxygen was no place to hold an argument.

The four of them made their way quickly to the spindly elevated walkway leading from their perch down to the starship’s airlock. The few workers they passed en route did not exactly stare at the alien, but they did not look away either. If Sar-Say noticed the interest, he paid it no attention. He moved quickly in the knuckle-walking gait that enhanced his resemblance to a monkey.

Mark and Vasloff followed the alien, with Lisa bringing up the rear. Despite the low gravity, Lisa found the half-walking/half-skating movement required for locomotion on Luna unnerving. Looking down, one eye tended to focus on the narrow catwalk, while the other focused on the dock floor some thirty meters below. The split view had triggered a throbbing behind her eyes by the time she passed through the
Ruptured Whale
’s airlock.

Once inside, they found the ship’s interior as transformed as its hull. The air stank of newly applied paint and other, less identifiable odors. White lights had replaced the yellow-orange lighting of the former owners, and the surrounding bulkheads lined with spacesuit storage lockers. A large woman wearing a pair of old-fashioned spectacles met them there. She was in the process of checking her wrist chronometer as they cleared the airlock hatch.

“Welcome aboard. My name is Laura Dresser, and I will be your chief engineer for this cruise. Stand clear of the hatch.” She did not wait for them to comply as she touched the control that would reseal the airlock. There was another general popping of ears as the ship's internal pressure returned to normal.

“What cruise?” Vasloff asked before the echoes had died away.

Laura frowned. “Surely you have been briefed.”

“Not all of us have been,” Mark Rykand answered smoothly. “We’ll take care of that once we are underway.”

“Underway for where?” Mikhail Vasloff demanded in a sudden burst of exasperation.

“Neptune, of course!” Laura Dresser replied. “That is where we rendezvous with the fleet. Now, let us get you to your compartments. The depressurization cycle should be complete in another fifteen minutes.

We launch as soon as they open the dome.”

#

“What’s going on here, Mark?” Vasloff demanded after the two of them were guided to one of the ship’s passenger compartments. Laura Dresser had insisted that they climb into their bunks and strap down before she guided Lisa and Sar-Say to the compartment across the passageway. Out of deference for the Russian’s age, Mark had given Vasloff the lower bunk. Once they were in space and weightless, the distinction between upper and lower would be academic.

“As Laura Dresser said, we are headed for Neptune.”

“Why Neptune?” Vasloff puzzled as he frowned upward at the bottom of Mark’s bunk. “Surely this can’t have anything to do with the Helium-3 strike --” He fell silent, and then let his mouth snap closed as he realized the truth. Long seconds later, he let out an audible sigh. “Of course, the strike is cover for something else, isn’t it?”

Vasloff was not in a position to see Mark’s nod. “Director Bartok arranged for the Helium-3 story as cover for our preparations.”

“Preparations for what?”

“We are sending a fleet to the Crab Nebula about seven thousand light-years from here.”

“Seven
thousand
light-years! Kind of far to go for an astronomy experiment, isn’t it?”

Mark chuckled at Vasloff’s unintended joke. “Depends on what kind of experiment. We are going to try and find the Zzumer sun.”

“The what?”

Mark quickly explained the program for locating one of the stars of the Broan Sovereignty. “Most of Sar-Say’s paintings were alien skyscapes, but one showed a night sky with a close-in planetary nebula that Sar-Say called ‘Sky Flower.’ We think Sky Flower might be the Crab Nebula.”

“The Stellar Survey is launching an expedition into the heart of the Broan Sovereignty? You can’t be serious!”

“Very serious, Mr. Vasloff.”

There followed a sputtering noise that segued into a stream of invective in Russian. After awhile, the invective stopped and there was nothing but silence from the lower bunk.

Mark considered explaining what the expedition planned, but decided not to. There would be plenty of time for that later. Instead, he turned his attention to the bulkhead-mounted viewscreen that displayed the view from a topside camera. Above them, the banks of lamps began going out one by one. Then, when the dock was in twilight, eight bright lines appeared to be radiating from the zenith. They grew wider, and suddenly, the
Ruptured Whale
was bathed in naked sunlight.

An unidentified voice issued from the annunciator. “Dome retracted. Ready for takeoff.”

“Very well,” the voice of the
Whale
’s captain answered. “Generators to power. Stand by for liftoff.”

Long seconds passed in which nothing seemed to happen. Then, the periphery of the landing dock disappeared at the edges of the screen. There was no sensation of motion as the
Ruptured Whale
rose slowly into the black sky.

Mark was jolted by Vasloff’s strained tones from beneath him. “Listen to me, Mark. The Broa killed your sister. They are evil beings and it is criminal for the Coordinator to take this risk. We have common cause here. You have to help me convince them to call off this expedition.”

“Don’t you want to know the truth?”

“But think of the risk, man!”

“The risk is minimal. They have it all planned. We will scout from afar, never getting within a light-year of any target system until we are ready. We rebuilt this ship in order to slip in and out without arousing suspicion.”

“Damn it, Mark, this is not the sort of decision that can be made by a few bureaucrats and scientists. This involves the whole of the human race. At the least, we should take the time to put it to a vote.”

“Sorry, Mikhail, but the fleet will be long gone when they make the announcement. They can vote when we get back.”

It had been a full minute since the ship had first risen from its landing cradle. Now the viewscreen changed to show the view below. They could see the open Lomonnosow Space Dock a kilometer beneath them, its interior partially bathed in sunlight. The rest was inky shadow. As Mark watched, a gentle hand pushed him into the bunk and the crater-strewn lunar landscape receded more swiftly. Soon the Moon was round again, and shrinking by the minute. Ahead lay the dim point of light that was Neptune.

#

Mark Rykand had been wrong. It did matter who was in the upper bunk. More than a week after leaving Luna, that gentle hand on his chest was still there. In its infancy, space travel had been a matter of extremes. One spent a few minutes blasting off on a thundering pillar of fire, and then weeks or months in freefall as the ship coasted towards is destination.

The advent of the reactionless drive had brought about a revolution in space travel for ships large enough to mount one. No longer did a ship need to throw expensive reaction mass overboard in order to maneuver. The space drive generator warped space asymmetrically around itself and slid down the artificial hill thus created. In the days of rockets, when fuel was at a premium, it would have taken a ship thirty-one years to reach Neptune in a minimum energy orbit. The
Ruptured Whale
would make the same voyage in two hundred hours, reaching a velocity of 1100 km/sec at turnover.

For most of that time, sharing a compartment with Mikhail Vasloff was like having a cabin all to himself.

Despite Mark’s attempts to engage the Russian in conversation, Vasloff remained withdrawn and uncommunicative. Whether he was sulking or planning something nefarious was difficult to tell.

Mark spent most of the voyage with Lisa in the ship’s communications center. She had been working feverishly to complete the software program that would train the fleet in the Broan lingua franca. She, too, was having roommate problems, but of a different sort. Far from being morose at the prospect of the voyage, Sar-Say’s joy seemed boundless.

“One would have thought that a race of traders would have learned to hide their emotions better,” Lisa remarked one morning at breakfast.

“You can’t blame him. He is just excited about going home.”

“I wish he would calm down enough to sleep at night.”

The language course they prepared was a typical multimedia education program. It had been culled from hundreds of hours of surveillance recordings of Sar-Say, as well as lessons Lisa had recorded back at PoleStar. Users listened first to Sar-Say, and then Lisa, as they enunciated a word in Broan. The students were then asked to repeat the word and a voice analysis was displayed to compare the results.

Mark had learned quite a lot of what Sar-Say called “trade talk” already. He was surprised that the language was so logical and easy to learn.

“Of course it is easy to learn,” Lisa replied in response to his observation. “It has to be simple for a million sentient species to make themselves understood in it.”

“Why is that?”

“Because those million species have a million different ways of communicating with their own kind. Their brains all work differently. Actually, it is quite an accomplishment for the Broa to design such a simple language. In fact, I think most people have the wrong idea about the Broa.”

“What do you mean?”

“What is it about the Broa that make them capable of ruling a million other species?”

“That’s easy. They control access to the stargates.”

Lisa nodded. “That is right. So long as no one can travel from system to system without their tacit agreement, they do not have a need for a large presence on any individual planet. Sar-Say says that there are systems the Broa don’t visit for years at a time.”

“So they are not the evil imperialists we have been led to believe?” Mark asked.

“Actually, they are probably worse than we imagine. No, their domain is not ruled like a human empire because it can’t be.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Think about it. Would you try to control a race of civilized dolphins using the same techniques you would use with human beings? How could you? Human and dolphin brains and cultures are too different.”

“For one thing, dolphins don’t care anything about money.”

Lisa laughed. “And the females are in charge, a much more sensible system than the one we use. Think of the problems inherent in controlling a million-star interstellar empire, where every species is a different sort of ‘dolphin.’ What sort of government do you set up that works with humanoids, quadrupeds, octopoids, and God only knows what other forms there are to be found among the stars?”

“I guess you don’t,” Mark replied. “You have to find something that they all agree on.”

Lisa beamed as though gazing at a star pupil. “What the exo-biologists call an Objective Reality. In the case of the Broa, the objective reality is that if you do not do what you are told, a million starships suddenly materialize in your sky and proceed to kill every male, female, and pup of your race. That is the sort of thing anyone can understand, regardless of the shape and size of their brain case. Conversely, however, that is about the
only
level of control the Broa have over their subjects.”

“Interesting, but it isn’t getting this program debugged.”

“Sorry,” Lisa said. “I’ll leave you alone to work.”

Somehow, she did not sound sorry.

As the days passed, the need to finish the training course became ever more pressing. The software program would be distributed to the fleet before it departed Neptune and the human spacers would spend the next year learning the alien language. Those aboard the
Ruptured Whale
would have the added advantage of Lisa’s personal instruction and daily practice with Sar-Say.

Specialists aboard each starship would be fluent in the common language of the Sovereignty by the time they arrived. However, every member of each crew was to learn as much of the Broan language as his or her duties would allow. At the very least, the mission planners hoped any ship that stumbled into contact with aliens would be fluent enough to lie their way out of trouble.

Eventually, the blue star they had been tracking for a week grew into a visible disk. Then, over a period of hours, it filled the viewscreen. The
Ruptured Whale
had slowed to a few dozen kilometers per second when they caught the first laser beacons of the ships that had gathered at Neptune.

An hour later, they were among the gathered starships of the human race as they prepared to go out into the great unknown.

Neptune is an oversize marble thirty times more distant from Sol than Earth, a cold gas giant so far from the sun that it radiates twice as much heat to space as it receives. The internal heat is the engine that drives the planet’s 2000-kph winds, the fastest in the Solar System. The winds give the planet the characteristic banded appearance of a gas giant. In the case of Neptune, however, the bands are blue, the result of the red wavelengths being absorbed by methane in the upper atmosphere.

Like Saturn, Neptune possesses a full set of rings, although of much darker appearance than the orbiting ice shavings of its larger sibling. One of the rings has a twist in it, a phenomenon never adequately explained by astronomers. The largest of its moons, Triton, is in a retrograde orbit at about the same distance that Luna orbits Earth. The odd orbit, along with Triton’s physical similarity to Pluto, along with the fact that Pluto’s orbit actually cuts inside that of Neptune, had long fueled a dispute over whether the ninth planet was actually one of the blue giant’s lost moons.