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am afraid the Galactics have found us here sooner than we expected…”
    Creideiki ignored the little voice that tried to call him back to deeds and battles. He lingered in a waving forest of kelp fronds, listening to long night sounds. Finally, it was Nukapai herself who nudged him from his dream. Fading beside him, she gently reminded,
     
    # Duty, duty—honor is, is—
    Honor, Creideiki—alertly
    # Shared, is—Honor #
     
    Nukapai alone could speak Primal to Creideiki with impunity. He could no more ignore the dream-goddess than his own conscience. One eye at last focused on the hologram of the insistent human, and the words penetrated.
    “Thank you, Doctor Metz,” he sighed. “Tell Takkata-Jim I’ll be right-t there. And please page Tom Orley. I’d like to see him on the bridge. Creideiki out.”
    He inhaled deeply for a few moments, letting the room come back into shape around him. Then he twisted and dove to retrieve his harness.
     

----
::: Tom Orley
    « ^ »
    A tall, dark-haired man swung one-handed from the leg of a bed, a bed that was bolted to the floor in an upside-down room. The floor slanted over his head. His left foot rested precariously on the bottom of a drawer pulled from one of the inverted wall cabinets.
    At the sudden yellow flash of the alert light, Tom Orley whirled and grabbed at his holster with his free hand. His needler was half-drawn before he recognized the source of the disturbance. He cursed slowly and re-holstered the weapon. Now what was the emergency? He could think of a dozen possibilities, offhand, and here he was, hanging by one arm in the most awkward part of the ship!
    “I initiate contact, Thomas Orley.”
    The voice seemed to come from above his right ear. Tom changed his grip on the bed leg to turn around. An abstract three-dimensional pattern swirled a meter away from his face, like multicolored motes caught in a dust devil.
    “I suppose you would like to know of the cause of the alarm. Is this correct?”
    “You’re damned right I do!” he snapped. “Are we under attack?”
    “No.” The colored images shifted. “This ship is not yet assailed, but Vice-Captain Takkata-Jim has announced an alert. At least five intruder fleets are now in the neighborhood of Kithrup. These squadrons appear now to be in combat not far from the planet.”
    Orley sighed. “So much for quick repairs and a getaway.” He hadn’t thought it likely that their hunters would let them escape again. The damaged Streaker had left a noisy trail behind her when she slipped away from the confusion of the ambush at Morgran.
    Tom had been helping the crew in the engine room repair Streaker’s stasis generator. They had just finished the part calling for detailed hand-eye work, and the moment had come to steal away to the deserted section of the dry-wheel where the Niss computer had been hidden.
    The dry-wheel was a band of workrooms and cabins that spun freely when the ship was in space, providing pseudogravity for the humans aboard. Now it was still. This section of upside-down corridors and cabins was abandoned in the inconvenient gravity of the planet.
    The privacy suited Tom, though the topsy-turvy arrangement was irksome.
    “You weren’t to announce yourself unless I switched you on manually,” he said. “You were to wait for my thumbprint and voice i.d. before letting on you were anything but a standard comm.”
    The swirling patterns took on a cubist style. The machine’s voice sounded unperturbed. “Under the circumstances, I took the liberty. If I erred, I am prepared to accept discipline up to level three. Punishment of a higher order will be considered unjustified and be rejected with prejudice.”
    Tom allowed himself an ironic smile. The machine would run him in circles if he let it, and he would gain nothing by asserting his titular mastery over it. The Tymbrimi spy who had lent the Niss to him had made it clear that the machine’s usefulness was partly based upon its