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Ferocious Monolith . Feed three, if you want to take a look.”
    “Very good, Lieutenant,” called Downing, who pulled the screen into a position where both he and Caine could study it.
    Riordan wasn’t convinced he was looking at a shift-carrier at first. It did not have the distinctively freight-train modular appearance of all human and most Arat Kur shift-capable craft. It was shaped rather like a thickened Neolithic arrowhead: a wide, flat delta shape, with a notch separating the warhead from the after part that would be lashed to the shaft. There were no rotating habitats in evidence, and further surface details were hard to discern because, unlike any other spacecraft Riordan had ever seen, its surface was dead black. Truly dead black , Caine realized as he looked for reflections and found none. “I think that hull is designed to absorb light,” he muttered.
    Downing nodded. “The same sort of effect we’ve noticed with the Dornaani. But this is a damned odd jull design. How do they maintain gravity equivalent in crew quarters? And if that large section aft of the widest part of the delta-shape is the engineering section, then how the devil do they shield the crew?”
    Answers started presenting themselves. Caine pointed to a pair of transverse seams that had appeared close to the center of the arrowhead. “Something is separating from the hull; a whole band of it is lifting up.”
    “No,” corrected Downing after a moment, “that band of hull is splitting apart along the ship’s centerline, dividing into two equal halves that are moving out from its axis.”
    Caine squinted and then understood what he was looking at. “Those two halves, at the end of those extending pylons: those are the rotational habitats.”
    Downing nodded as the hull sections began spinning about the thick keel of the ship, at which point they underwent a further transformation. The two faces of each segment began to split apart and open like a jackknife. They ultimately unfolded into two hinged, mirror-image halves, the top and bottom faces joined at a one-hundred-twenty degree angle of incidence. They began to spin around the ship’s long axis.
    “That’s a pretty impressive piece of engineering,” Downing murmured.
    “I don’t think they’re done showing off, though,” commented Caine, who had noticed movement back along the notch that segmented the ship into its forward and aft sections. “Look.” From the section behind the notch, fins or sails were extending outward.
    Downing frowned. “What the devil—?”
    “Sirs!” exclaimed the co-pilot. “Intruder energy output is spiking, neutrinos increasing sharply. I think their engines are—”
    But Caine didn’t hear the rest. The fins or sails were becoming a kind of black parasol around the stern of the ship, separating the forward personnel and cargo section from the aft engineering decks.
    As the parasol continued to expand outward like a skirt, the co-pilot reported, “We are no longer in the line of the emissions, sir, but they continue to spike. We can detect the bloom around the edge of that…that stingray’s peacock tail.”
    Downing glanced at Caine. “A peacock-tailed stingray: seems as good a description as any.”
    Caine shrugged. “Better than anything I’d have come up with.”
    Downing grinned crookedly. “I thought you were a writer.”
    Caine tried to return the grin, but couldn’t get past the irony of who had whisked him out of that career, thereby destroying it.“Yes, well, two guys from IRIS put an end to that about fifteen years ago, now— Richard .”
    Downing looked like he had swallowed his tongue. Or wanted to. “Caine, I—”
    Caine shook his head. “Sorry, Richard. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to joke about that. But what’s done is done. I’m where I need to be, I guess, and we work well together. Let’s leave it at that, yeh?”
    Downing nodded, avoided Caine’s eyes by focusing intently on the screen. “Look at