He finally reached what the humans had used as a command nucleus-they called it a "pilot deck." He stood alone, looking at darkened control stations, imagining the reports from crude instruments and sensors. Here, a succession of captains had lived and worked, making good and bad command decisions, growing old, passing on the long mission to their successors. Kori'nh wondered at their names. Were those commanders forgotten, their lives buried in the dust of history? The human race did not have an equivalent of theSaga of Seven Suns.

Sucking a long breath through the facefilm, the Adar gazed at the empty command chair, saw faint frostlines in some of the shadows between equipment stations. This giant ship had been achingly empty for so long. The silence hung like a thunderhead around him, occasionally broken by faint groans and shifting sounds as warming air and the presence of strangers stressed the long-dormant structure. It would take some time to shake the sleep and stiffness from its systems.

But Kori'nh would not give it a chance.

Though he had not been ordered to do so, the Adar instructed his soldiers to go through every chamber and remove any object of possible technical or cultural interest. He vowed that these details would not be lost forever. Some rememberer might still decipher them, use the clues to draw a deeper understanding of their Terran counterparts.

It was a crime to discard it all as if it had never existed... even though that was exactly what the Dobro Designate wanted.

When theBurton 's vital systems were functional and Kori'nh could find no further excuse to delay, he went to the pilot deck and personally guided the derelict. The enormous generation ship lurched out of the asteroid field, toward the hot center of the Dobro system. He felt the power inside the huge vessel, the lumbering shelter that had housed hundreds of people for so many decades.

He stood surrounded by the memories of humans who had staked their lives on the resourcefulness of their captains. The Adar had long been enamored with legendary heroes, but what he was doing now did not seem worth remembering. Few would ever know what he had done...

"The course is set, Adar," said an engineer. "Gravity will do the rest."

Kori'nh looked at the roaring ocean of Dobro's sun. Here, so close, the orange flames were like gaseous lava, a furnace in which nothing could survive.

"Prepare theBurton for departure. Inform the septa that we are on our way back."

The muscular kithmen looked oddly out of place as they carried colorful toys, dolls, and items of human clothing back to the docking bay. Kori'nh stayed behind, the last person on theBurton 's pilot deck, looking at the lonely control stations and the hot sun looming closer. Finally, he descended through the deck levels back to his shuttle.

Leaving the generation ship, Kori'nh stared out the shuttle's side ports, watching as the huge derelict fell inexorably into the sun's deep gravity well. The plasma surface lashed out with flares like the claws of a hungry predator.