Flammarion shivered. “I’ll tell you one man who’d have no trouble resisting. Those creepy Angels, and the Tinkers aren’t much better, crawling all over everything.” He turned his head. Dougal MacDougal was calling from outside the chamber. “Got to go.”
“Expect me tomorrow, Captain. I need tonight to wrap a few things up down here.”
“Good luck. I don’t expect I’ll see you again before the Assembly.”
* * *
When the Assembly convened in the Ceres Star Chamber, Kubo Flammarion wanted to be as far away as possible. A quick Link to the Dry Tortugas, maybe, out at the remote edge of the solar system and as distant from Sol as humans were allowed to go under the quarantine; that felt just about right.
So why, two days later, was he sitting here on Ceres, hidden away where he could see and hear whatever happened during the Stellar Group Assembly? Why had he cajoled and coaxed Milly, who handled the monitors that recorded for posterity every element of the meeting, into letting him sit next to her in the control booth?
Chan Dalton had put his finger on it: the same reason the monkey put his hand in the jar, the same reason the cat sniffed the high-voltage wire. It was curiosity, stupid curiosity. What did the aliens want? But now, with the Assembly just minutes away, Flammarion decided that he didn’t much care. He could feel his insides curdling within him — even though he was a hundred meters from the Star Chamber, even though the aliens themselves would be no more than three-dimensional images, linked in from their homeworlds lightyears away.