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back into the touch of his hand on her shoulder.
    “There's a bright side?”
    His laugh always struck her as incongruous, coming from such an immense man. It was bright and sharp-edged, crisp as a ruffled fan. “Yes. If the Benefactors—both sets, or either—had the technology to put ships on Mars a few million years ago, I'm sure that if they meant to wipe us out they wouldn't have waited this long to do it. And furthermore, don't forget that they showed up in force and departed in force, but they've left behind only one ship apiece. That's not a threatening gesture, by my standards.”
    “Hmmm,” Elspeth answered, unconvinced. “Or their time scale is different enough to ours that fourteen million years is a trip down to the corner store for pretzels, and they're still loading the torpedo tubes—”
    A discrete cough drew her attention. The team's xenobiologist, Charlie Forster, had wandered up. “Unlikely,” he said, plump hands balled in his pockets. “If their time sense were that far off scale with our own, the chances that they would be doing math at a rate we find comfortable would be slim.”
    Elspeth tipped her head, conceding. Gabe's hand still rested on her shoulder, thumb caressing the nape of her neck. She pretended she didn't notice, though that would amuse Gabe more.
    Charlie turned to face them and planted one hip on the table. He scrubbed both hands flat across his close-cropped hair. “I'm just so damned frustrated,” he said, and stopped short.
    She might have been particularly useless when it came to comprehending aliens, but Elspeth was a good enough psychiatrist to spot an invitation to pry when she was handed one. “What's eating you, Charlie?”
    He shrugged, but it was the kind of shrug that said
I'm gathering my courage
rather than the sort that said
leave me alone,
and Elspeth leaned forward in her chair to encourage him. She cocked her head on a light, wry smile.
Come on, Charlie
.
    He cupped his lower lip and blew across his face in the gesture of a man whose bangs had tended to fall into his eyes when he still had bangs. “I'm not much use as a biologist from seven or ten kilometers away. Although—”
    “Yes?” Gabe, a bit sharply, with a tension that had nothing to do with the current conversation. Elspeth leaned into his hand, pressing her shoulder to his thigh. Whatever comfort she could offer, though she knew neither she nor Jenny could touch this particular agony.
    “I wonder, frankly, if biology even relates.”
    “What do you mean?”
    Charlie waved one hand in fine dismissal of the
Montreal
and all space around her. “Okay, whatever's piloting the shiptree might be something we'd consider an animal. It seems to need a contained atmosphere, and we know from the ship on Mars that they bleed if you prick them, or at least they leak a fluid that contains things we normally associate with biology, such as amino acids and a DNA-analogue. But those globs in the birdcage? I've spent weeks observing them, and they . . . they're just plain weird. I'm not sure they
are
precisely . . . biological, by our standards. They could be drones, machines, for all I know.”
    “Then maybe we need to redefine biology.”
    Charlie gave her a startled look, and Elspeth leaned back against Gabe's fingers and lifted her chin to indicate the doorway to the corridor beyond. “In any case, there's the last of our guests,” she said, as the hatch swung open and Captain Wainwright stepped through it, Jenny two steps behind her, and the new arrivals Tjakamarra and Kirkpatrick just after. “We'll have to talk about this during the meeting. Do you have holos of the weird stuff?”
    “Is that a technical term, Dr. Dunsany?”
    She grinned. “It's as technical as I like to get. Come on. Let's break the new kids in.”
    Gabe offered her a hand as she stood up from her chair. She took it, returning his slight squeeze before moving away.
    The ethnolinguist Jeremy Kirkpatrick was a freckled,