dome down there, the first undamaged one we've found. Figure it out for yourselves."

They digested the statement in silence. Stryker paled slowly, as if it needed time for apprehension to work its way through his fat bulk. Farrell's uneasiness, sourceless until now, grew to chill certainty.

"I think I've expected this, without realizing it, since my first flight," he said. "It stood to reason that the Hymenops would quit running somewhere, that we'd bump into them eventually out here on the fringes. Twenty thousand light-years back to 70 Ophiuchi is a long way to retreat.... Gib, do you think they're still here?"

Gibson did not shrug, but his voice seemed to. "It won't matter one way or the other unless we can clear the Marco's generator."

From another man it might have been irony. Knowing Gibson, Farrell and Stryker accepted it as a bald statement of fact.

"Then we're up against a Hymenop hive-mind," Stryker said. "And we can't run away from it. Any suggestions?"

"We'll have to find the interfering generator and stop it," Farrell offered, knowing that was the only obvious solution.

"One alternative," Gibson corrected. "If we can determine what phase-level the interfering warp uses, we may be able to adjust the Marco's generator to match it. Once they're in resonance, they won't interfere." He caught Stryker's unspoken question and answered it. "It would take a week. Maybe longer."

Stryker vetoed the alternative. "Too long. If there are Hymenops here, they won't give us that much time."

Farrell switched on the chart room scanning screen and centered it on the village downslope. Scattered cottages with dark tiled roofs and lamp-bright windows showed up clearly. Out of their undisciplined grouping swept the great hemispherical curve of the dome, glinting dully metallic in the starshine.

"Maybe we're jumping to conclusions," he said. "We've been here for five weeks without seeing a trace of Hymenops, and from what I've read of them, they'd have jumped us the minute we landed. Chances are that they left Sadr III in too great a hurry to wreck the dome, and their Ringwave power plant is still running."

"You may be right," Stryker said, brightening. "They carried the fight to us from the first skirmish, two hundred years ago, and they damned near beat us before we learned 

 Prev. P 7/14 next