LITMIR.BIZ

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to the Blue named Yülhan-Nyulzen-Y'sch-Takan-Nyül. Either him or his brother, Trülhan. Alemaheyu could never tell them apart. The brothers were Blues, or "Dishheads," as they were still insultingly referred to on many Terran worlds, the only nonhumans in the Palenque crew aside from Gresko the Gurrad. "We are entering the planet's shadow in 20 seconds. Exit from shadow projected in 13 minutes and 34 seconds. Don't worry when you don't hear from us, Mama!"

      "You, I don't need to worry about. You're big enough to play by yourselves for a quarter of an hour. Have fun, but don't pull any crap!"

      In the beginning, Alemaheyu had resisted the nickname. Prospectors were a rough breed, and while the crews had long consisted of a mix of males and females—and occasionally beings whose gender could not be determined with any accuracy—the reference to presumed femininity was a favorite strategy for insulting your coworkers. So when the crawler teams began calling him "Mama Kossa" ...

      It was not until his watchfulness prevented, at the last moment, the total loss of a crawler that Alemaheyu understood the nickname was intended as a sincere indication of respect. For the men and women out there in their steel shells, he was the Palenque, the mother ship, proof that the prospectors, out among the cold and pitiless stars, had not been forgotten.

      "Everything all right with you, Alemaheyu?" called Sharita Coho, commander of the Palenque.

      "Of course. What else?"

      "Good."

      As always, the commander wore her uniform, an outfit that seemed to reflect an adolescent's idea of a spaceship captain's uniform rather than a practical, utilitarian design. And as always, she wore a beamer at her belt. Alemaheyu couldn't remember ever seeing her wear any other outfit, even away from the ship. Today, despite the uncomfortable warmth of the control center, she had fastened the front of her jacket all the way to the top. She must be sweating buckets—no, boiling alive—but apparently the extra psychological security she gained from the formality of the uniform was worth the unpleasantness.

      Today, her sweatiness had a specific name: Perry Rhodan.

      A low cheeping tone brought Alemaheyu back to tending his console. Since the unforgettable near-wreck of the crawler, Alemaheyu had formed the habit of checking the data stream at regular intervals. Usually, hourly checks were often enough, but here in the Ochent Nebula, with its five-dimensional anomalies, hyperstorms and unusually active stars, he was checking more frequently.

      He called up the data for each of the crawlers in quick succession. Seven of them were on the surface of various planets and moons, gathering rock samples and readings, while the other five were either on the way to a highly promising celestial body or already returning to the Palenque, their missions completed. Crawler Four was still in the communications shadow of a Jupiter-like planet five light-years from the prospecting ship.

      Concentrating, Alemaheyu reviewed the data streams. Everything looked normal, no anomalies, though Crawler Nine's data did show a tiny deviation—so tiny that he almost missed it.

      He zoomed in on the irregularity and directed the syntron to analyze the data status. It found that the crawler's g-force absorber currently would function at 99.93 percent capacity, which was insignificant as long as the vehicle operated on the airless surface of the moon it was surveying. This variance could possibly be deadly when the crawler lifted off and accelerated.

      Alemaheyu considered. A hardware failure? Improbable. G-force absorbers were the product of a proven, safety-critical technology in common use for thousands of years. And the crawlers' technology had been selected with especial care: in order to save precious space, the mini-labs carried no redundant components. Every system had to function at 100 percent.

      A software error? Alemaheyu went through the crawler's log data. After a few minutes of searching, he found an entry that struck him as unusual. He followed that lead, and finally found the problem. Part of a software update package installed a week earlier had somehow been skipped. This exact issue was a point of contention between him and the syntron specialists.

      Alemaheyu felt that since the crawlers operated flawlessly, they shouldn't be changing things. But nobody on board listened to him. To the control-center crew on the Palenque, he was just the comm officer, not Mama.

      Alemaheyu sent the update to Crawler Nine, then tested the absorber with a simulation routine. All the values showed 100 percent.

      A disturbance at the entrance to the control center distracted Alemaheyu. The men and women whispered to each other, then he heard a series of "Good mornings."

      Their passenger must have arrived on the bridge. The most effusive greeting even the commander herself could hope for from the control center crew was a nod and a murmur.

      "Good morning, Perry," Sharita Coho said a moment later, confirming Alemaheyu's conclusion. "Did you sleep well?"

      "Yes, thank you. Is there any news?"

      "No. No ores. And no Akonians."

      Alemaheyu wondered for the nth time if he should buy Rhodan's story. The Ochent Nebula was a no-man's-land, officially unclaimed by any of the galaxy's great powers. The region bounded the spheres of influence of various Blue races and the Akonians, but up to now had proven too uninviting to inspire any desire to possess it. The number of life-bearing worlds was small, the frequency of hyperstorms high, and the strategic value precisely zero. Anyone who occupied the Ochent Nebula would take on diplomatic complications and outrageous maintenance expenses for new bases on which expensively trained soldiers would die of boredom.

      But the sector was hardly deserted. In recent years it had attracted an increasing number of prospectors: Terrans, Blues, mixed crews without a common origin but united by the expectation of a big find and, most recently, Akonians. So far, the prospectors had invested considerable work and capital with nothing to show for it, but the probability of that suddenly changing grew with each day that passed.

      A vein of five-dimensionally radiant quartz ... the high-tech relics of an extinct race ... an ore deposit of high purity—any such find could trigger a race of the galactic powers and change the undeclared cold war that gripped the galaxy to an active conflict.

      Rhodan had come on board the Palenque to seek contact with the Akonians in order to preempt such a crisis. He wanted to draw the Forum Raglund, of which the Akonians were among the most important members, to Terra's side.

      Alemaheyu had laughed loudly when he heard that. Just how naive was the Immortal, anyway? The Ochent Nebula was one of the few remaining galactic frontiers. Did he expect that the Akonians—and even the Blues, who historically could not get along with themselves—would withdraw based on his suggestion, taking a pass on the opportunity to make the find of their lives? God only knew that Alemaheyu had no love for the Dishheads and the arrogant Akonians, but to dream that they would simply pull out on the basis of a request and an analysis of the galactic political situation? Even they weren't that crazy ... .

      "They'll show up yet," Rhodan said, facing the commander.

      "Yes, sooner or later," she replied. It was clear that Sharita was not exactly excited about the prospect of having the Immortal on board for weeks on end.

      Alemaheyu observed Perry Rhodan from the corner of his eye. He was a man of average height with dark blond hair. The simple uniform he wore revealed nothing of his rank. If Alemaheyu had encountered Rhodan on the street, he wouldn't have recognized the man who had led the human race to the stars nearly three thousand years ago. Rhodan seemed like an average man.

      Really.

      The Palenque's comm officer didn't have any words for it, but something changed on the ship's bridge every time Rhodan appeared. Of course, small, external things changed. The control-center crew attempted, with varying degrees of success, to suppress the curses; the conversational tone wasn't quite as rude; there was less talk in general. But all that was easy to explain. People were like that: they sought tight communities, and when they found them, they closed themselves to outsiders.

      But it was more than that. Alemaheyu caught himself sitting bolt upright at his console instead of lounging in his usual posture. And

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