The Captain, he reflected, didn’t do things by halves—and she didn’t have much patience with anyone who did. Like a certain Lieutenant (Senior Grade) Maxwell Artois Stromboli who’d been dragging his ass and feeling sorry for himself ever since the Fleet exercise, he admitted. Max Stromboli didn’t consider himself the most brilliant officer the planet of Manticore had ever produced, but he knew he was better than he’d let himself become. He’d been slacking off like a sulky kid, and when Captain Harrington asked him for that course to Medusa he didn’t have—

He shuddered in memory. God, he’d expected her to bite off his head and shi—spit down his neck! And, he knew, he would have deserved it. But she hadn’t. She’d only sat there, waiting patiently, and he’d felt about a centimeter high while he figured the course, mostly because she wasn’t jumping his shit in front of the entire bridge watch.

And this job wasn’t the slap in the face he’d first thought, either. He admitted that, too. Medusa’s atmosphere might smell like the downwind side of a chemical refinery with buggered filtration, and the natives might look like some sort of circus freaks, but his assignment was more important than he’d thought. He’d realized that the moment he saw the jury-rigged lash-up with which the NPA had been trying to watch the high orbitals. They’d greeted him and his people with all the fervor of a relieved garrison, and they’d had only good things to say about the Captain, but the very way they said them made him uncomfortably aware of how badly—and for how long—the Fleet had let them down.

He sighed and swiveled his chair to check the first test printouts. They looked good, and he let the hardcopy spill into the printer tray and looked out the window.

Lord, what a piss-poor excuse for a planet! His newly installed control center was on the upper floor of one of the government compound’s corner towers, and he had an appallingly good view of klicks and klicks of gray-green, mottled moss. It stretched down to the bank of something the natives called a river. The greasy-looking, turgid flow, heavy with silt, was one of hundreds of channels cutting through the swampy delta, and the walls of a Stilty city rose beyond it.

He lifted a pair of electronic binoculars from a console and peered through them at the distant curtain wall fronting the river. The binocs brought it to arm’s length, and he marveled at the size of its stones. That rock had been quarried far upstream and ferried down, and the smallest single hunk of it must be a meter on a side. That was damned impressive engineering for a muscle-powered civilization, even in this gravity. And especially for something as stalky and ungainly looking as a Stilty.

He zeroed in on one of the natives, still unable to believe, deep down inside, that they could have built that massive wall. As on Sphinx, what passed for mammals on Medusa (there were no birds) were hexapedal, but the similarity ended there. Sphinxian beasties tended to the sturdy and blocky, aside from arboreals like the treecats, because of their native gravity. Medusans were tall and slender and trilaterally symmetrical, to boot. The natives were undeniably warm-blooded and bore living young, but they reminded Stromboli far more of a holo he’d seen of an Old Earth insect called a praying mantis than of anything he would have called a mammal. Except, of course, that no Solarian bug ever had its limbs arranged equidistantly about its body that way.