“Can I trust you to go inside with me?”

This he pondered, hanging beside the circular lock entrance. Mouth working. Eyes slitted. “I… carry no further weaponry,” he said at last.

By that time Rachel was there. Instead of slowing, she glided directly into the lock. Fraq barked some surprised epithet and hastily followed her. Intuitively she sensed it was better to confront him inside, isolated; make it personal. She passed through an iris that opened at her approach. No air, but she was in a large space that slowly… awakened.

Phosphorescent glows stretched across long walls. Transparent cases lit, showing strange bodies suspended in clear liquid. Intricate tiny slabs showed pale colors, light fluttering as if rousing from a slumber. DNA inventories? She prowled the space, surrounded by an enormous bio database. Slowly, it came to life.

Suddenly zero-grav flowers floated by, big blooms growing from spheres of water. She recalled her joy as a girl watching soap bubbles shimmering in sunlight. These somehow sprang to life in vacuum.

Behind thin windows, gnarled trees like bonsai curled out from moistening soil. Odd angular plants burgeoned before her eyes.

In all directions of the cylindrical space, plants grew, looking to her like lavender brushstrokes in the air. In a spinning liquid vessel, orange snakes with butterfly wings danced in bubbling air. Displays.

She heard her own gasps echoed, turned. Fraq hung nearby, eyes wide. “Is exhibition,” he said. “A welcome, could be.”

“Welcome, yes. It’s a bio inventory,” she said. “Displayed as an explanation. As advertising.”

In his own suit bubble he waved a wing at images playing along the walls.

Purple-skinned animals loping on octopus-like tendrils across a sandy plain. Flying carpets with big yellow eyes, massive ruddy creatures moving like mountains on tracks of slime, trees that walked, fish in stony undersea palaces. A library of alien life.

She turned full-on to him, pressed against his bubble, glowered. “What was that you said? The Ark was a ‘Prime Need for life itself,’ eh?”

“We came for ancient vengeance,” Fraq said stonily over comm, tan feathers ruffling with unease.

“For what? They sent you an Ark? But—”

“And we brought their life from the Ark in orbit, down to our world.” His eyes flared. “We could not control it. Did not know. Their strange creatures festered, escaped from us, attacked our life at every level. Diseases, blight, desolation, death. They nearly killed and colonized our biosphere.” Sudden deep anger boiled in his tight voice.

She sighed. “You… you just did it wrong.”

“They sent it as a weapon, our history says. Our foremothers laid down for all generations, as bloodpride, the call—to destroy all Arks.”

“It was too late to kill the Furians?”

“Alas, yes. No bloodpride justice can we have. Their star had eaten them.” Suddenly, from the troubled shifting of his eyes, she saw why Fraq had insisted that she fly with them.

First, to test whether humans could be better than the mere dirt-huggers of the Ythri world.