“A reasonable risk.” It looked around. “I would like to have a tour of your ship, if you don’t mind. Then you may tour ours.”

Paul nodded slowly. “We have nothing to hide.”

“I can speak consensus Martian,” it said, turning to Fly- in-Amber. “Would you guide me?”

Fly-in-Amber trilled a “yes” sound, and they headed off toward the Martian rooms. A logical starting place, but both Paul and Namir looked unhappy. “Wish it had chosen you,” Paul said to Snowbird.

“I wish that as well,” she said. “I’m curious.”

And more communicative, I didn’t bother to add. Fly-in-Amber might remember every detail, but we’d have to drag it out of him if he didn’t feel like talking.

“Well . . . come into the control room,” Paul said. “We’ll see what their ship looks like.”

I put on my gecko slippers and followed him. We waited at the door for the others.

“General,” he said as he walked in, and the control surfaces morphed to that configuration, a lot more dials and knobs and switches than the set he’d been using. He strapped himself into the swivel seat, and said, “Outside view.”

There was a flatscreen a meter square in front of him, and it darkened to a velvet blackness with a thousand sparks. He twiddled a joystick, and the angle veered around dizzyingly until it came to rest on a familiar view of the iceberg surface, with a decidedly unfamiliar visitor.

It didn’t look like a spaceship; it didn’t look like a machine at all. It looked kind of like a starfish with seven legs, pebbly skin that was mottled red and black, with filaments like cilia or antennae wiggling on ribs that ran down each leg. It would have looked right at home on the ocean floor if it were hand-sized. But it was easily half as big as the ad Astra landing craft.

“I wonder what makes it tick,” Namir said. “It can’t be carrying enough reaction mass for interstellar travel.”

“Well, if it’s the same thing that left Triton, it took off at twenty-five gees,” Paul said. “That argues for something more exotic than we’ve got. Spy says they’ve been following us, for who knows how long . . . so I guess it went out far enough to be undetectable, then just watched and waited. Then tailed us at its leisure.” He cranked up the magnification and slowly examined the thing. No obvious portholes or gunports or wheels or grommets. I suppose if you examined a starfish with a magnifying glass, you would see about the same thing.

“Maybe it’s alive, too,” Meryl said, “the way Martians are, and Spy claims to be. Grown for a specific purpose.”

“I would vote for that,” Snowbird said.

“Looks like a relative?” Dustin said.

“In a way. If the Others have an aesthetic, and our design reflects it, so does the vehicle’s design. Don’t you think?”