The cross-orbit journey was brief. The Juggernaut Goliath, three Manta cruisers, and a cluster of Thunderheads shepherded the ekti harvesters down into the Jovian atmosphere. Tasia was impressed with the beauty of Jupiter’s fingerpainted cloud bands, but she had seen many other planets, had stood on the observation deck of the Blue Sky Mine with Ross.

Now she was spoiling for a fight, for direct payback against the hydrogues. If the deep-core aliens dared to show up, Tasia hoped to get in the first shot.

A resounding cheer went through her crew as the ekti harvesters began to skim along the clouds, sucking up a huge volume of hydrogen and processing it through their ekti reactors.

The slow facilities would have to remain on-station at the gas giant for weeks before they produced enough of the rare allotrope to make a worthwhile cargo. But simply by putting the operations in place the EDF had scored a psychological victory for humanity. They had proved they would take the stardrive fuel, in spite of alien threats. They had called the hydrogues’ bluff. They had stood up to the enemy, thumbed their noses at them.

Tasia’s crew was joking, making bets, sounding even more enthusiastic than they had before the fleet’s launch. Manta cruisers flaunted their military maneuvers where other ships could see them. Robb Brindle stood beside her, though not too close, because he was on the bridge and she was the platcom. But he caught her gaze with his honey-brown eyes. “Far be it from me to request a reality check,” he said in a low voice, for her alone, “but I have a feeling that we’re mooning a mean junkyard dog, all brave and laughing—until the dog’s leash breaks.”

Tasia looked at him with a bemused expression. “Sometimes, Brindle, you speak a language completely foreign to me.”

But in truth, she understood exactly what he meant… understood it all too well. She just wondered how long they would have to wait.

108: MARGARET COLICOS

108MARGARET COLICOS

A function diagram inside the Klikiss machinery provided the clue Margaret had been looking for. Using her new intuition that the symbol tiles around the trapezoidal window represented coordinates of the lost race’s planets, Margaret hurried through nearby rooms. She stared at the clearest records—testaments or desperate messages hastily scribed on the wall surfaces.

While Louis tinkered with the machinery itself and DD rigged more lights around the writing, Margaret stood for hours, concentrating. She quickly documented her suspicions, translating one section at a time. Whenever she encountered stumbling blocks of undecipherable pictographs, she skipped to a different section. Each newly translated segment gave her insight into the more difficult parts, and she went back and forth.

Understanding each wall segment was like peeling back the layers of an onion, yielding some answers while revealing new mysteries, filling in Klikiss history yet demonstrating how much still remained to be learned. Finally, she pieced together a rough summary.