head, Abbot met Titus’s gaze and hardened his Influence around Mirelle.
Abbot was only exercising the elder’s right of choice in taking Mirelle. But the way he did it rankled.
Yet it was the Law of Blood. Titus relinquished his hold on the human. He could barely breathe against the outrage flooding through him. His lips curled in a snarl. Tourist! But he dared not spit an obscenity in his father’s face. Cloaking his words, he said, “Humans aren’t orl. They have the right of choice.” Orl were just animals evolved for luren to feed on, but Tourists often used the word for humans.
Abbot whispered to Mirelle, poisoning her subconscious against Titus. “I won’t let that physicist pry anything out of you. You can always depend on me to protect you.”
Offended, Titus choked, “What do you think I am?”
Abbot raised an eyebrow. “Luren, of course.” He turned Mirelle toward him and moved his left forefinger toward the point between her brows. His Influence focused to a barely discernible blue-white light emanating from the tip of his finger. If that finger should once touch her, Mirelle would be Marked with the complex pattern of Abbot’s personal sigil.
Until Abbot cared to remove the mark, no other luren would touch her. She would become Abbot’s puppet, his eyes and ears, his hands, doing his will.
Titus grabbed Abbot’s wrist and—surprised that he’d caught the older vampire off guard—yanked him off balance. Startled, Abbot forgot the light gravity and stumbled, drifting to the deck, Influence disrupted.
Security guards converged, moving with that sliding gait that marked experienced spacemen. Mirelle came out of her induced stupor. “Abbot! What were you doing?”
Appalled at himself, Titus spread his Influence, projecting boredom. It was just a clumsy grounder stumbling around. He waved the guards away and bent to help Abbot up.
The older vampire bemusedly added his power to Titus’s efforts to distract the guards, then soothed Mirelle. As the line shuffled forward, he grunted, “Titus, that was unprincipled. Undisciplined. Unlawful. And foolish. Didn’t I go to considerable pains to teach you the penalties for violating Blood Law?”
“Your people stole my supplies. Who violated Law first?”
“Supplies!” he scoffed. “Powdered ichor, cloned, freeze dried—lifeless! That stuff isn’t covered by Law. Mirelle is. There’re other passengers. I deny you nothing in exercising my priority. Defy me again on penalty of death!”
Surrounding Mirelle in a bubble of Influence, Abbot touched her forehead and set his stamp into her aura. She darted a hurt glance at Titus, then succumbed. Her eyes were dull as she gazed adoringly up at Abbot. With a triumphal swagger, he escorted her onto the ship.
Calm enough to think again, Titus realized Abbot hadn’t taken Mirelle just because Titus had won her over. He sensed, as Titus did, that she was involved in something clandestine within Project Hail. Abbot took her as Titus had taken the transmitter component, as part of his job.
And there was nothing Titus could do about it. Abbot, as his father, had both right and responsibility to destroy him if he turned unLawful and thus became a danger to luren security on Earth. Abbot never shirked a responsibility.
Once onboard the orbit-jumper, Titus went directly to his cabin and locked himself in. He spent the trip pacing the cubicle, on the floor when there was gravity, in the air when there wasn’t. Through his growing hunger, he told himself that Connie would see he was supplied. She was wily enough to get his supplies past the humans and Tourists. But until he got to Project Station and found his baggage empty of blood crystals, he wouldn’t think of taking a human. He just would not.
By the time they arrived at Luna Station, he was determined that within a month, two at the outside, he’d be on his way back to Earth, his part of the project completed. Meanwhile, he’d have to send a message to Connie demanding she get somebody else to deal with Abbot.
At Luna Station, they were loaded onto Toyota moonbusses for the twelve-hour trip out to the crash site around which Project Station had been built. Titus was in the lead bus, Abbot and Mirelle five cars behind that. With a heavy escort, they caravanned across the lunar landscape, following a well-worn track.
The scientists were all beyond misery and into dim-witted exhaustion by the time they first saw Project Station.
It was inside the new crater formed by the alien ship’s impact. Dust from that impact still orbited, interfering with the observatories’ work. The station consisted of a circle of interlocked domes clustered about the wreck. Trails worn by vehicle treads crisscrossed among the domes, some marked out by large boulders or cairns, leading off the station out over the jagged horizon.
Titus knew these were made by maintenance crews going out to work on the farflung solar collector installations that powered, via landlines, both Project Station and Luna Station. But some of them also led to the eight Arrays, the huge assemblies of antennas that would be tied into his own observatory computers, Arrays through which he’d map the sky.
The outer circle of Project Station’s domes housed power and environment plants, and, off to one side, Titus identified a motor pool park and maintenance shed. A tall, ridiculously slender antenna mast lofted high over the complex, and held reflectors and dishes for Earth or local communications.
Far off on the rim of the crater, Titus could see a field of solar collectors, most tilted toward the sun. For part of the month, the station had its own power. At “night” they were powered by landlines from the distant solar collectors, by battery, and by experimental generators.
Through the driver’s forward screen, they could all see the probe’s launch pad. The probe itself was still under cover in the huge hangar at the edge of the station, its gaping maw floodlit, dozens of suited figures around it. The probe was being designed and constructed here using every bit of knowledge that had been wrung out of the alien craft. It would be launched toward a point of Titus’s choosing, and programmed to beam a message where Titus designated.
The domes housed the labs and offices from which the scientists would continue to study the alien craft. Beneath those labs were the residences, connected by airtight underground corridors. Theoretically, only those working on the alien craft, the probe, or Maintenance had to go out into vacuum. But they had all been trained for it—just in case.
“It feels like a safe place to live,” remarked a man at the back of Titus’s transport.
“Safe, I don’t know,” responded a woman up front, “but live, yes. It’s bigger than any campus I’ve worked on, and I’ve lived happily without going off campus for months and months at a time. They say there’s even a shopping mall.”
The driver contributed a laugh. “Yes, but everything’s so overpriced you’ll only buy what you can’t live without.” She steered into the motor pool parking lot where a dozen suited spacemen swarmed over their bus.
In turn, each of the carriers was attached to a dome’s lock to discharge passengers. Titus suffered stoically through the brief ceremony of welcome. He was hungry. He told himself it was more a psychological than a real physical crisis. Since he’d first rebelled against Abbot, he’d never doubted the source of his next meal. But his patience was dangerously thin by the time they were escorted in groups of six—an airlock full—to their assigned quarters where, presumably, their luggage would be waiting.
The trip
