Ravna swallowed hard and looked away from the display. "Well, they're still making big noises,
复件 (4) air max2," she tried for a light tone, but it didn't come out that way. Pham Nuwen touched her shoulder. "Quite true. And real killers generally don't advertise beforehand." But there was more sympathy than conviction in his voice. "We still don't know that this is more than a single loud-mouth. There's no definite word of ship movements. What can they do after all?" Ravna pushed herself up from the table. "Not much, I hope. There are hundreds of civilizations with small human settlements. Surely they've have taken precautions since this Death to Vermin stuff began.... By the Powers, I wish I knew Sjandra Kei was safe." It had been more than two years since she'd seen Lynne and her parents. Sometimes Sjandra Kei seemed something from another life, but just knowing it was there had been more comfort than she realized. Now.... On the other side of the command deck,
复件 (79) air max1, the Skroderiders had been working on the repair specs. Now Blueshell rolled toward them. "I do fear for the small settlements, but the humans at Sjandra Kei are the driving force of that civilization; even the name is a human one. Any attack on them would be an attack on the entire civilization. Greenstalk and I have traded there often enough,
复件 (97) air max1, and with their commercial security forces. Only fools or bluffers would announce an invasion beforehand." Ravna thought a moment,
Beats Kobe Bryant Limited Edition Headphones, brightened. The Dirokimes and Lophers would stand against any threat to humankind at Sjandra Kei. "Yeah. We're not a ghetto there." Things might be very bad for isolated humans, but Sjandra Kei would be okay. "Bluffers. Well it's not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing." She pulled her mind back from worries beyond her control. "But one thing is clear. Stopping at Harmonious Repose, we must be damn sure not to look like anything human." And of course, part of not looking human was that there be no sign of Ravna and Pham. The Riders would do all the "talking". Ravna and the Riders went through all the ship's exterior programs, weeding out human nuances that had crept in since they left Relay. And if they were actually boarded? Well, they would never survive a determined search, but they isolated things human in a ######## jovian hold. The two humans would slip in there if necessary. Pham Nuwen checked what they did -- and found more than one slip-up. For a barbarian programmer,
beats Studio (Blue) Special Edition High Definition Powered Isolation Headphones, he wasn't bad. But then they were rapidly reaching the depths where the best computer equipment wasn't that much more sophisticated than what he had known. Ironically, there was one thing they could not disguise: that the OOB was from the Top of the Beyond. True,
复件 (19) air max, the ship was a bottom lugger and based on a Mid Beyond design. But there was an elegance to the refit that screamed of nearly superhuman competence. "The damn thing has the feel of a hand axe built in a factory," was how Pham Nuwen put it. RIPer security was an encouraging thing: a perfunctory velocity check and no boarding. OOB hopped into the system and finished a rocket burn to match position/velocity vector with the heart of Harmonious Repose and "Saint(?) Rihndell's Repair Harbor". (Pham: "If you're a 'saint', you gotta be honest, right?") Out of Band was above the ecliptic and some eighty million kilometers from RIP's single star. Even knowing what to expect, the view was spectacular: The inner system was as dusty/gassy as a stellar nursery, even though the primary was a three-billion-year-old G star.