Spinneret by Timothy Zahn Page A

under Meredith for long, and aside from a brief interview when she’d been accepted for the colony, her personal knowledge of him was limited to the Ceres trip. Still, military bases had their fair share of gossip, and the stories she’d heard about the colonel had invariably painted him as honest and fair, which made his quick dismissal of Perez’s allegations seem out of character. True, he was under a lot of pressure—and, admittedly, she wasn’t convinced Perez had a case either—but it still seemed like an investigation was in order. As for Dunlop’s dismissal, she couldn’t make up her mind which way she hoped Meredith would decide.
    In one corner of the terminal screen a yellow light blinked on. Startled, Carmen looked at what she’d just typed, realized with mild annoyance that in her reverie she’d tried to shift a worker who was already on a higher priority job. She blanked the command, the yellow light disappearing as she did so. Keying for the next page, she resumed scanning the job assignments.
    One thing she was sure of, though, was that part of her responsibility to Astra was to do her bit to lower tensions and friction … and to that end she was determined to push her town council idea as hard as she could. Meredith’s scorn notwithstanding, it seemed to her the simplest way to make the civilians feel more at home. Besides which, if the colony survived it would eventually shift to civilian government anyway, and having such a setup already in place would undoubtedly ease the transition.
    Without warning, a red-bordered rectangle appeared in the middle of her screen, the words TOP PRIORITY MESSAGE flashing above it. Frowning, Carmen watched as words began filling the box … and felt her eyebrows climbing her forehead as she read them.
ATTENTION: ALL PERSONNEL: SATELLITE ARRAY HAS DETECTED ROOSHRIKE SPACECRAFT APPROACHING ASTRA, NO HOSTILITIES—REPEAT, NO HOSTILITIES—ARE EXPECTED, BUT ALL MILITARY PERSONNEL ARE TO REMAIN ALERT. LEGAL/ORGANIZATIONAL STAFF WILL IMMEDIATELY PREPARE LISTING OF KNOWN ROOSHRIKE CUSTOMS AND RITUALS FOR TRANSMISSION TO COLONEL MEREDITH’S OFFICE.
    Carmen read the message twice before blanking it from her screen. “Hell in a Stealth,” someone behind her muttered. The astonished chatter was just starting when Carmen’s superior cut it off.
    â€œAll right, all right; delete the noise,” she growled from her own terminal. “Smith, Hanson—start a Legal File search; Barratino, you check military records; Eldridge, start a general search for anything that’s gotten buried in odd corners. Olivero, you organize and format everything as it comes in.”
    The room fell silent, except for the steady sleet-on-a-window sound of computer keys. What rotten luck, Carmen thought as she waited for the data flow to begin. Stuck in a little room twenty kilometers from the landing field when I could be out there catching my first glimpse of a real live alien.
    Though come to think of it, perhaps it wasn’t such bad luck, after all. The Rooshrike had contacted humans once before … and that time they’d opened fire.
    The Rooshrike attack on the Celeritas was also on Meredith’s mind as he watched the shiny dot driving over the ocean toward Martello Base, the feeling of being a massive sitting duck adding stiffness to his back as he sat in the lead vehicle of the five-car welcoming committee. The chances that this was a sneak attack were small—after all, over half of Astra’s rental fee had yet to be paid—but business logic had only minimal effect on Meredith’s combat reflexes. Trying to pretend that the sweat collecting on his forehead was due solely to the warm day, he squinted into the bright blue of the sky and waited.
    Radar had already shown that the ship was considerably larger than the shuttles Martello’s landing strip had been designed for, but the Rooshrike pilot