“Not very well, clearly. Genuine law enforcement is about balance. For all her reputation, Cancer was a small fish. Basically, your mirror image.”

“Go fuck yourself!”

The cabin became very still. A moment that stretched out—

“We’re almost there,” I said, as the images from the sensors on the front of the Trail Ranger splashed across my tarsus lenses. The last thing I wanted was a fight to break out, which would have soured the atmosphere beyond repair. My suspects were still being open with one another, and I needed that to continue. Somewhere in among all the paranoia that dominated both sides of the Universal–Utopial divide had to be a clue to where it came from. They remained my best hope of finding the origin, the alien.

Everybody perked up at hearing the trip was coming to an end and started to access the Trail Ranger’s sensors.

The crash site base had just appeared on the horizon—a cluster of six silver-white geodesic domes, locked together with stubby pressure tubes. Big as they were, they were dwarfed by the inflatable hangar that had been thrown over the alien ship—a rectangle of green-and-red silicone fabric large enough to cover a football field, looking so tight against the structural containment webbing it might burst at any second.

None of the domes had a garage; that would have been a waste of expensive habitation space. Up in the cab, Sutton Castro and Bee Jain carefully maneuvered the Trail Ranger to an airlock tube sticking out from the side of a dome.

We all waited while the seal clanked and hissed. Then the “pressure normal” icon splashed up.

—

Lankin Wharrier, the base commander, was waiting for us on the other side. One of Connexion’s finest troubleshooters, he had an engaging smile that backed up a dynamic air. When he spoke it was with smooth authority, leaving no one in any doubt he was in charge here, no matter what title any of us had stuck on our desks back home.

“I guess you all want to go straight to see the ship?” he asked.

“Of course,” Yuri said.

Lankin gestured down the tube. Like the first Eridanus base, this one gave the impression of being both a rugged pioneer outpost and incredibly expensive. The brief glimpses we got walking past labs and personnel quarters were of every facility and piece of equipment being top-of-the-range, but sitting in the starkest environment possible. I found that reassuring, after a fashion.

The clean chamber was divided into three sections, which was where corporate technobabble had claimed its fiefdom. We had the Alien Environment Suit (AES) egress room (changing room). Followed by the terra-bio sterilization section (eradicating terrestrial bugs from the surface of the AES before visiting the ship). And finally the xeno-bio decontamination suite, which resembled a bunch of cubicles in a country-club locker room, where you were showered and irradiated after leaving the ship, to make sure no alien pathogens got loose in the base.