She lay for a moment on her side, dragging air into her lungs. She tried to curse, but couldn’t find the breath for it.
“Our visitor appears conscious,” said a man’s voice.
Brigid heard the words in a monotone, with faint fuzzy crackles of static following each s . She sat up again, but this time stayed put, hands on her knees. She guessed that some sort of electromagnetic screen surrounded the disk.
“Identify yourself,” the voice demanded. Though it had an electronic timbre, the voice was well modulated, with a sonorous tenor quality.
“Where am I?” Brigid asked. “Am I on the station? Where are my friends?”
“You will answer my inquiries first. What is your name?”
Seeing no reason to lie, she said, “Baptiste.”
“Baptiste, that’s it? No other name?”
“Brigid. Satisfied?”
“By no means. You arrived here via the gateway. From where?”
Repressing a smile, Brigid replied, “Where else? Earth.”
The unseen transmitter offered a deep sigh, heavy with annoyance. “Where else indeed. From where on Earth? I was not able to trace the matter-stream carrier wave to its point of origin. Was it a failure on the part of my instruments or a deliberate deception?”
“Your choice.”
There was a long pause in the questioning. Presently the voice stated, “I’ve just been informed that your companions have revived. They are unharmed, but a bit uncomfortable. What is the nature of your visit here?”
“A recce,” she answered.
“Recce?” The word was repeated, the pronunciation uncertain. “Explain.”
“It’s slang, derived from reconnaissance.'”
“Oh.” A chuckle floated into the room. “Local vernacular. Lingo. Patois. I’m hip.”
“What?”
“Pardon my ignorance, Miss Brigid. I we have been separated from the mainstream of common humanity for a very long time. We hope to change that.”
Getting to her feet again, but maintaining a discreet distance from the edge of the disk, Brigid winced as her lungs burned with the effort of breathing. A slow throb began pounding in her temples.
The voice instantly became solicitous. “I apologize for your discomfort, but we only recently restored marginal power to this section of the station. We’re still working out the bugs in the environmental systems. They’ve been neglected for many years.”
It took a moment for the statement to penetrate Bri-gid’s oxygen-deprived reasoning centers. “You only recently restored the power? You mean you don’t live here?”
“A small group of us does at present. This is not our home, only a way stop, a staging area.”
Brigid gazed around the room, trying to locate the comm unit from which the voice emanated. “A staging area for what?”
The reply was so long in coming, Brigid almost repeated the question. Then the voice spoke a single word, the tone of it touched with a bitter resolve. “Exodus.”
Brigid started to respond, but her throat muscles constricted. She coughed, shoulders shaking, diaphragm contracting. Her chest ached fiercely.
Through amoebalike floaters swimming over her eyes, she saw a dark line form a rectangle in the facing blue wall. The line expanded and became a door. The figure that walked through it was so startling, Brigid feared her air-starved brain was supplying hallucinations.
He was small but so perfectly proportioned her sense of perspective was confused for a moment. He was a three-foot-tall godling of a man. Unlike the trolls, his legs weren’t stumpy or his arms too long or his forehead too low.
If he had been three feet taller, a hundred or more pounds heavier, he would have been the most beautiful male Brigid had ever seen. Thick, dark blond hair was swept back from a high forehead and tied in a ponytail at the nape of his neck. Under level brows, big eyes of the clearest, cleanest blue, like the high sky on a cloudless summer’s day, regarded her sympathetically. Beneath his finely chiseled nose, a wide, beautifully shaped mouth stretched in an engaging grin, displaying white, even teeth.
He wore a perfectly tailored, fawn-colored bodysuit. A silk foulard of blue swirled at its open collar. A gold stickpin gleamed within its folds. The cuffs of the legs had stirrups that slipped between the arch and heel of polished, black patent leather boots. In his right hand, he carried a miniature black walking stick, with a hammered silver knob and ferrule.