“Evelyn,” Carson said, getting red in the face, “and I still say Wulfmeier’s surveying that sector. You just don’t like loaners.”

“You’re right about that,” I said. “They’re more trouble than they’re worth.” I’ve never met a loaner yet that was worth taking along, and the females are the worst.

They come in one variety: whiners. They spend every minute of the expedition complaining—about the outdoor plumbing and the dust and Bult and having to ride ponies and everything else they can think of. The last one spent the whole expedition yowling about “terrocentric enslaving imperialists,” meaning Carson and me, and how we’d corrupted the “simple, noble indigenous sentients,” meaning Bult, which was bad enough, but then she latched onto Bult and told him our presence “defiled the very atmosphere of the planet,” and Bult started trying to fine us for breathing.

“I laid the binocs right next to your bedroll, Fin,” Carson said, reaching behind him to rummage in his pack.

“Well, I never saw ’em.”

“That’s because you’re half-blind,” he said. “You can’t even see a cloud of dust when it’s coming right at you.”

Well, as a matter of fact, we’d been arguing long enough that now I could, a kicked-up line of pinkish cloud close to the ridge.

“What do you think it is? A dust tantrum?” I said, even though a tantrum would’ve been meandering all over the place, not keeping to a line.

“I don’t know,” he said, putting his hand up to shade his eyes. “A stampede maybe.”

The only fauna around here were luggage, and they didn’t stampede in dry weather like this, and anyway the cloud wasn’t wide enough for a stampede. It looked like the dust churned up by a rover, or a gate opening.

I kicked my terminal on and asked for whereabouts on the gatecrashers. I’d shown Wulfmeier on Dazil yesterday when Carson’d been so set on going after him, and now the whereabouts showed him on Starting Gate, which meant he probably wasn’t either place. But he’d have to be crazy to open a gate this close to King’s X, even if there was anything underneath here—which there wasn’t, I’d already run terrains and subsurfaces—especially knowing we were on our way home.