Free Conquerors' Heritage by Timothy Zahn Page B

new treatment of more modern preservatives, sending an odd sort of double tingling sensation through him. Both sections had skinned over; the healers had announced the cutting a success; and as the disgust and pain had faded into disinterest and fatigue, Prr't-zevisti had wandered off.

The Humans had eventually lost interest in his cutting, too. And as darkness fell and the aliens settled down for the latearc, Prr't-zevisti had come up to the edge of the lightworld again and begun to poke around.

But he'd underestimated the enemy's cunning. The area where his cutting had been taken was absolutely crammed full of metal: metal weapons, metal tools, even what appeared to be metal packaging. Like every Elder, he knew that refined metal could not be breached; what he hadn't properly appreciated until then was that the effect went far beyond the actual physical space occupied by that metal. Each piece seemed to throw the grayworld equivalent of a shadow, a sharply defined area shaped exactly like the shadow that would have been created by a light source at hisfsss cutting. A shadow as impenetrable as the metal itself. Obviously having to do with his anchorline, though he was rather surprised he'd never heard of this effect before.

And as he was picking his way carefully through the area, his full attention on the metal and the shadows, the Humans had sprung their trap.

He was standing there in the darkness-he or she; Prr't-zevisti still didn't know which. Standing there waiting for him to make his appearance... and even as Prr't-zevisti had belatedly noticed him, the Human had let out a shriek of discovery and triumph that had echoed through his mind a half-dozen beats after he'd dropped frantically back into the grayworld.

For a while he'd stayed there in the haze, unwilling to come up and risk being seen again. Silly, of course-irrational, even; trying to hide himself in the grayworld while hisfsss cutting sat open and unprotected in Human hands. Presently, he'd heard voices and felt movement and, bracing himself, had come back up.

To find a Human carrying hisfsss cutting toward a room-sized box rising above the shorter stacks around it. A thick-walled box, with an equally thick door, furnished with lights and a long table and shelves stacked high with equipment.

A room made entirely of metal.

There'd been a room very much like it back on the Dhaa'rr homeworld of Dharanv, he remembered. Once the cutting had been pronounced viable, the healers and technics had offered to take hisfsss into that room and take a second cutting from it. The metal, they'd pointed out, would force him to anchor to the just-completed cutting, blocking all pain and discomfort from thefsss itself away from him. They'd been rather enthusiastic about the whole idea, a fact that had struck him as rather suspicious. He'd satisfied the requirements of pride and curiosity, and had no intention of being someone's experimental animal, and had politely declined.

But the Humans hadn't asked his permission to put him in their metal box. Nor were they likely to do so. And once his cutting was inside it, he'd be well and truly trapped there.

He'd been gone in an instant, stretching out and upward to the full length of his anchorline, sweeping across the foreshortened hemisphere that was all the surrounding piles of metal had left him, searching frantically for the anchorpoint-sense that would have shown he had a clear path back to safety at the Prr-family shrine. But nothing. He'd scanned the stars, wondering what the chances might be that Dorcas's rotation would bring the Dhaa'rr ancestral world of Dharanv into range in the handful of beats it would take the Humans to reach the box. But the stars were difficult to see from even the closest edge of the lightworld, and the constellations there were too different from those of home. He'd flicked back to the cutting-nearly to the metal box now-back to his anchorline limit; back to the cutting-just inside the door