Instead, the five warglobes approached Crenna's star like bees clustering around a hive. They circled and swooped, scanning the spotted photosphere, flitting among the curling flares like children running through a sprinkler. Rlinda sat in cold silence for hours, her skin prickling and clammy from nervous sweat, as the five alien spheres lurked over the sun.

Then, for no apparent reason, the spiked hydrogue ships gathered into a single cluster and streaked out of the system.

"Good riddance," she said. Then, with trembling hands, she powered up her engines again and made her way toward Crenna. Even the prospect of a plague seemed preferable to staying out here.

26

ADAR KORI'NH

Adar Kori'nh knew it was a foolish risk to go on a direct mission to a gas giant, but he wanted to see the wreck of the Daym skymine for himself. The Mage-Imperator had instructed him to investigate the feasibility of reactivating the empty Ildiran facilities. No ekti harvesting had been done here since the Roamer disaster 183 Terran standard years ago. After its checkered past, the antique skymine had been ignored by humans and Ildirans alike.

Perhaps by the hydrogues as well-or so he hoped.

Originally, a trio of grand Ildiran skymines had crisscrossed the Daym skies, the first ekti skimmers to be turned over to refugees from the human generation shipKanaka . In a terrible accident, one of the three drifting cities had dropped into the depths. All crew members had been lost, except for a lone survivor, who was later rescued babbling about strange demons in the high-pressure depths. Since then, Daym was a shunned place of supernatural lights, mysterious noises, and creeping shadows where nothing should have lived.

Unfortunately, the strange creatures in the depths had not been the wild imaginings of a raving man, after all...

His command protege, Tal Zan'nh, piloted their patrol craft away from the main warliners to the cold, blue-gray giant. For an hour or two, there would be only the two of them, isolated, though close enough to sense the comforting presence of crews in the big ships overhead. No Ildiran liked to be so vulnerable.

Kori'nh fidgeted, impatient to see the creaking old facility, compile his report, and then return to the comfort of crowds. The hydrogues were volatile and unpredictable. So far, they had responded only when provoked, and the Adar hoped the aliens would pay little attention to a small ship carrying two passengers. But the strange enemy had proven that one could never make assumptions about their behavior.

"I have found the facility, Adar." Zan'nh called up a bright image on the patrol craft's scanners. Against the frozen atmospheric soup, the once-grand industrial city looked like nothing more than a tiny blip swallowed in a cold, swirling sea.