"Look at this moonscape." Hassan's dark face was all but invisible behind his gold-tinted visor. "Doesn't your heart expand in this ancient grandeur, Susan Chen? What person would not wish to spend time alone here, in contemplation of the infinite?"

All loners are trouble, Chen thought. No one came out to a place as remote as this was -- or had been anyway, before the wormhole was dragged out here -- unless he or she had a damn good reason.

Chen knew she was going to have to find out Marsden's reason. She just prayed it was something harmless, academic, remote from the concerns of humanity; otherwise she really, really didn't want to know.

Hassan was grinning at her discomfiture, his teeth white through the gold of his face plate. Let him. She tilted her head back and tried to make out patterns in Neptune's clouds.

There were a couple of subsidiary structures: lower domes, nestling against the parent as if for warmth; Chen could see bulk stores piled up inside the domes. There was a small flitter, out-moded but obviously functional; it sat on the surface surrounded by a broad, shallow crater of jet-disturbed dust, telltales blinking complacently. Chen knew that Marsden's GUTship, which had brought him here from the inner System, had been found intact in a wide orbit around the moon.

It was all bleak, unadorned; but it seemed in order. But if so, why hadn't Marsden answered his calls?

Hassan was an intraSystem government functionary. When Marsden had failed to respond to warnings about the coming of the Interface colony, Hassan had been sent out here -- through the new wormhole -- to find out what had happened. He had coopted Bayliss, who had once worked with Marsden -- and Chen, who was now working with the Interface crew, but had some experience of walking into unknown, unevaluated situations...

Hassan stepped towards the dome's doorway. Chen ran her hands without conscious volition over the weapons at her belt. The door dilated smoothly, revealing an empty airlock.

The three of them crowded into the small, upright lock. They avoided each other's visored eyes while the lock went through its cycle. Chen studied the walls, trying to prepare herself for what she was going to find inside the dome. Just like outside, like Marsden's flitter, everything was functional, drab, characterless.

Bayliss was watching her curiously. "You're trying to pick up clues about Marsden, aren't you? But this is so -- bare. It says nothing about him."

"On the contrary." Hassan's voice was subdued, his big frame cramped in the lock. "I think Chen already has learned a great deal."

The inner door dilated, liquid, silent.

Hassan led them through into the dome. Chen stood just inside the doorway, her back against the plastic wall, hands resting lightly on her weapons.

Silence.

Low light trays, suspended from the ribbed dome, cast blocks of colorless illumination onto the bare floor. One quarter of the dome was fenced off by low partitions; gleaming data desks occupied the rest of the floor area.