And into hers.

Four hours later, she woke up, her body stiff and her mouth tasting like mud. She lifted her aching back from the bench and blinked in the tubelight. Her head ached abominably.

But she was on to something.

Discovering they had made it impossible to fulfill the Stone's original mission, in time all the Stoners had migrated down the corridor.

She stood and brushed down her jumpsuit. Now she had to go back and put foundations beneath all the hypothetical air castles she had built.

And find some aspirin.

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen

Lanier had kept the paper unread in his pocket on the shuttle and OTV, dreading that moment when he would have to know and have to act against a colleague, even a friend.

The OTV had docked with the Stone and he had disembarked, made a brief report to Roberta Pickney and the staging area communications team, and passed on his recommendation to Kirchner that Stone external security should be especially watchful.

As for internal security—

It wasn't really supposed to be his job. Had Gerhardt already received the same information awaiting him in the folded paper? How had Hoffman come across the name, and why had she given it to him?

He received reports from the various team leaders by way of a messenger bearing a slate. He floated in a small anteroom adjacent to the staging area, wrapped in one of the mesh cylindrical slings that served as bunks for axis-bound workers; he read, and absorbed, and realized he was only delaying the inevitable.

Boarding the zero elevator, accompanied by a taciturn marine guard, he removed the paper from his pocket and unfolded it.

"As soon as possible, I'd like to take a truck to the second well circuit," Patricia said. Takahashi held open the tent flap for her and she entered. Carrolson and Farley napped in one corner of the central room; Wu and Chang worked over slates and processors in another. Takahashi followed her inside.

"On a mental roll?" he asked. Carrolson and Farley grumbled awake simultaneously and blinked at the intrusion and noise.

"We have to make space-time spot checks," Patricia said. Her face was drawn and there were pastel purple smudges of fatigue under her eyes. "I've asked Mr. Heineman to help. There's a directional beacon on the airplane and we can pick up that signal with some security team equipment, feed it into a frequency analyzer, find out if we're moving faster or slower in time by comparing our readings as the plane passes overhead."

"You've reached some conclusions?" Carrolson asked, sitting up on her cot.

I think so," Patricia said. "But nothing's definite without evidence. I've made some predictions and if they're corroborated, then I might hypothesize."

"Want to tell us about the predictions?" Takahashi asked, sitting beside Carrolson on the cot.