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it’s big. We’ve sealed off this local area and repressurized it but we just didn’t have the gear to do a full job. But now we’ve got the supplies, we’ll be able to do it properly.’
    Oomoing had already worked out that the plan had been for Stormer’s men to sneak up on the base in small, lightly armed spacecraft, and for a much larger ship – her ship – to bring supplies after the base was taken. No-one seemed to have expected that the supply ship would stop off at Habitat 1 and wait for her to wake. It seemed a bit of an oversight.
    ‘But you have troops exploring the rest of the place?’
    ‘Of course. I can show you a map of what we’ve found, if you like. Those outlanders dug in deep.’
    That word again. Oomoing remembered her own reaction upon learning of the extraterrestrials’ existence. Stormer, a military male not given to scientific lines of thought, would have felt it all the more strongly. She felt the dislike, the loathing behind the word: to him,
outlander
was barely removed from Not Us, and it was probably only politeness in front of a female that kept him from using the ultimate term of contempt.
    ‘Thank you, I will want to see it,’ Oomoing said. ‘My brief is to assess the entire situation.’
    ‘Well, you can start here.’
    They had stopped outside a doorway, and hanging by the doorway were two empty space suits. She could immediately tell which suit belonged to which extraterrestrial – a basic eye for shape told her that the wearer of one would have stood on two limbs and have two limbs free, while the other would have used all four for standing. Seeing the clothes that the creatures wore, but without the creatures inside them, somehow emphasized the sheer alienness of their species. She reached out a feeding arm and caressed the alien material, which wasn’t unlike her own suit.
    ‘Are you getting anything, Learned Mother?’ Stormer said.
    ‘You’re the expert spacer, Worthy Son,’ Oomoing said. ‘They probably tell you more than they tell me.’
    Stormer shrugged, as if to say,
whatever
. ‘The tall one had this,’ he added. From a box he produced a narrow circle of plastic. ‘It was worn on one wrist.’
    Oomoing took it in a feeding hand, turned it over and over. White, tough plastic; embedded in it was what looked like a headshot of its owner and a series of black and white parallel lines, probably some kind of computer code.
    ‘An identity tag?’ she said. Stormer’s people all carried something similar. It occurred to her that if they could only read that code . . .
    ‘Probably,’ Stormer agreed, sounding surprised that he and the Learned Mother could agree on something. ‘But press that red plastic square, there.’
    Oomoing did, and a holo appeared next to the bracelet. It was a shapeless mass of colour that hung in mid air, the size of one feeding fist. It was a picture of something; but unlike a still photograph, which anyone could look at, it was attuned to the frequency of vision of an alien race. Eyes other than hers were meant to understand it.
    ‘And that’s all it does?’ she said. ‘No hidden keys, no access to computers, anything like that?’
    ‘As far as we can tell.’
    ‘I see.’ She put it in her pocket. ‘Well, looking at their discarded equipment is all very interesting but . . .’
    ‘Through here,’ Stormer said. He pulled himself through the door next to the suits. After a moment to collect her thoughts and control her excitement, Oomoing followed.
    And she finally saw what she had crossed millions of miles of space to see.
    ‘They’re doing it again,’ Stormer said without a lot of interest. The two extraterrestrials were kept in a large, circular room; Stormer had chosen it simply as a secure place to put his captives, with no idea what the room was for. There was only the one entrance and two armed sentries waited by it. The two creatures lay still and motionless against the far wall in what Oomoing recognized as