All in all, it seemed a feasible plan.

“Hey Ed, come ‘ere, will ya?”

M’wali tossed in his suspension cradle. There wasn’t another freighter loading or unloading due for another three hundred years yet. Well, three hours, anyway. They’d just completed an unloading about an hour ago. Therefore his shuttle partner, Myke Reinke, should not have been calling out to him. He should most definitely not have awakened Edward from his sound and beautiful sleep. Edward M’wali was upset as well as up.

“Friend Reinke, do I maliciously pull you from the soothing balm of Morpheus? Is your sleep so uneasy you must take from mine? Be your watch so dullish that you fracture courtesy to serve your simple brain some interest?”

A short shudder traveled the length of the ship. M’wali sensed a shift in position and forward motion. His partner’s sanity was abruptly suspect. Moving the ship required reaction mass, ergo credits. There was no reason to be moving the ship. The equation was simple but infuriating.

“Offspring of sand-hogs, what are you about!?”

“If you’ll move your pseudo-poetic ass out of that bunk, Ed, and take a look through the NV scope, you might see something.”

M’wali considered a last possibility, discarded it. Reinke did foolish things, but he did not, ever, drink while on duty. Still, there was a first time for . . . He floated out of the bunk and over to the control console. When he saw what the natural vision telescope was holding in automatic focus, all thoughts of sleep vanished.

“Oooeee! Munguenma na juaekundu! Great God and Red Sun, what is that?”

“Never seen anything like it, eh?” said Reinke evenly. His hands were playing lightly over the controls. “Me neither. Looks like the Yellow Giants’ jackstraws as arranged by the March Hare.”

“March Hare?” said M’wali, not taking his eyes off the fantastic object.

“Skip it,” replied Reinke.

“Just what are you thinking of doing, anyway, partner? We might get the shuttle inside that thing. We’d never get half of it inside the shuttle.”

“Look a little lower. Down where those three long spines just about intersect.”

M’wali took another look at the scope. The object now took up most of the field of vision, even though the tracker was automatically reducing magnification as they slipped closer. Yes, there was definitely a smaller, slightly saner looking bit of machinery floating slightly detached from the main body, near its south pole. It would fit—maybe—into the shuttle’s cargo bay.

They sat unspeaking for several minutes, staring at the approaching object—which was actually retreating from them.

Closer inspection did not breed familiarity. The impossible merely took on greater detail.

“We do have a loading job in three hours. Think it’s all right to shift station to fool with this thing?”

Reinke’s reply was muted. He was busy maneuvering the shuttle closer. “I can recognize a rhetorical question when I hear one. When the boss sees what we done gonna bring him, he’ll supply us with another ship—apiece.”