»Un- fortunate?» Wai challenged.

«Keep trying, Karl,» Marcus told him. «OK, Antonio, what do you want to do about it?»

«We have to know who they are,» Victoria said. «As Antonio has just explained so eloquently, we can't have other people seeing what we're doing here.»

«It's what they're doing here that worries me,» Marcus said; although, curiously, his intuition wasn't causing him any grief on the subject.

«I see no alternative but a rendezvous,» Antonio said.

«We're in a retrograde orbit, thirty-two million kilometres away and receding. That's going to use up an awful lot of fuel.»

«Which I believe I have already paid for.»

«OK, your call. I'll start plotting a vector.»

«What if they don't want us there?» Schutz asked.

«If we detect any combat-wasp launch, then we jump outsystem immediately,» Marcus said. «The disc's gravity field isn't strong enough to affect Lady Mac 's patterning-node symmetry. We can leave any time we want.»

• • •

For the last quarter of a million kilometres of the approach, Marcus put the ship on combat status. The nodes were fully charged, ready to jump. Thermo-dump panels were retracted. Sensors maintained a vigilant watch for approaching combat wasps.

«They must know we're here,» Wai said when they were eight thousand kilometres away. «Why don't they acknowledge us?»

«Ask them,» Marcus said sourly. Lady Mac was decelerating at a nominal one gee, which he was varying at random. It made their exact approach vector impossible to predict, which meant their course couldn't be seeded with proximity mines. The manoeuvre took a lot of concentration.

«Still no electromagnetic emission in any spectrum,» Karl reported. «They're certainly not scanning us with active sensors.»

«Sensors are picking up their thermal signature,» Schutz said. «The structure is being maintained at thirty-six degrees Celsius.»

«That's on the warm side,» Katherine observed. «Perhaps their environmental system is malfunctioning.»

«Shouldn't affect the transponder,» Karl said.

«Captain, I think you'd better access the radar return,» Schutz said.

Marcus boosted the fusion drives up to one and a half gees, and ordered the flight computer to datavise him the radar feed. The image which rose into his mind was of a fine scarlet mesh suspended in the darkness, its gentle ocean-swell pattern outlining the surface of the station and the disc particle it was attached to. Except Marcus had never seen any station like this before. It was a gently curved wedge-shaped structure, four hundred metres long, three hundred wide, and a hundred and fifty metres at its blunt end. The accompanying disc particle was a flattened ellipsoid of stony iron rock measuring eight kilometres along its axis. The tip had been sheered off, leaving a flat cliff half a kilometre in diameter, to which the structure was clinging. That was the smallest of the particle's modifications. A crater four kilometres across, with perfectly smooth walls, had been cut into one side of the rock. An elaborate unicorn-horn tower rose nine hundred metres from its centre, ending in a clump of jagged spikes.