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behind a curving counter festooned with built-in instrumentation. There were no chairs, no seats. The Vssey had no use for seats, their bodies boasting nothing to put in them. They could stand in one place for hours, even for days, at a time, doing nothing but contemplating their surroundings. In contrast, a sane AAnnforced to remain motionless in one place for any length of time would quickly go crazy, Qerrudd knew.
    There was no question that the arrival was a human. To her additional surprise, it was conversing with the Vssey not in symbospeech but in extraordinarily fluid AAnn. That immediately roused the captain's suspicions. While many of the softskins could speak the language of the Empire, few did so with any fluency. This tall young male's enunciation was superb. Idly she noted that his pet, some sort of colorful but otherwise unimpressive limbless, winged creature, was sheathed in scales not unlike her own, albeit far smaller and different in shape. Whoever the strange visitor was, he at least showed some taste in his choice of companionship.
    She was startled when he glanced unexpectedly in her direction. Since she and the soldier who was accompanying her were standing behind a privacy screen and could not be seen from the immigration room, the glance had to be coincidental. Still, she found it hard to escape the feeling that he had been looking directly at her.
    “I am going insside,” she informed her subordinate, adding a third-degree gesture of insistence.
    “Do you wissh me to firsst clear your arrival with the authoritiess?” the soldier inquired.
    She brushed him off with a simple gesture. “I have no time to wasste on the ussual interminable Vsseyan procedure. They sshould have no objection. I intend only to obsserve, not to interfere.”
    The human barely took notice of her when she entered. It was as if he had already seen and appraised her. Nor did the presence of the large sidearm prominently displayed on her belt appear to unsettle him. The Vssey officials, of course, were not armed.
    Without moving its body, the nearest swiveled one eyeballto regard her. “We welcome the presence of Captain Qerru'.'' You have come to greet our visitor?”
    Double eyelids half closed over slitted pupils as she studied the imperturbable human. He smiled back at her.
    “I have come to ponder him. Greetingss I leave to you. Thiss iss your world. It would be impolite of me to contemplate ussurping any of your official functionss.”
    “That's very gracious of you,” the human responded. His command of her language really was impressive, the captain decided—exactly what would be expected of someone sent to spy on Imperial operations. What operations? The Commonwealth had expressed no special, distinctive interest in or plans for Jast. Why do so now? And if that was the case, why send only a single observer? Could the human be nothing more than a casual visitor? A lone casual visitor? Or were, even now, as they chatted coolly but amiably in the pleasantly warm room, dozens of skilled, heavily armed fighters listening and waiting in his vessel high in orbit, waiting for the right moment to descend and wreak havoc with the limited AAnn operations on Jast?
    What operations? she had to ask herself again. Jast was not an Imperial colony, or even an outpost. It was a developed, technologically sophisticated world whose inhabitants had shown an interest in ongoing AAnn overtures. She was being paranoid.
    Lone representatives of hostile species who dropped from nowhere tended to do that to one, she reminded herself.
    Maintaining her vow to remain aloof from the actual questioning, she positioned herself off to one side and tried to still the steady back-and-forth switching of her long tail. Occasionally reaching up to stroke the head of his quiescent pet, the human proceeded to answer withquiet aplomb every question the Vssey immigration officers put to him.
    “Very few of your kin have visited Jast,” the nearest one