As ever, Pern is the property of AM and TM, but I do like to put a few twirls of icing on the cake.

I was musing on the two stories, Starship One and The Day Benden Went to War, and I wondered about the far future of Pern, when they can mine the asteroid belt and go out into their star system. And then I wondered if they would ever encounter any other Earth colonies...

Saska looked up from her lab bench as the sound came again. That strange susurration of sound she had been hearing intermittently all her life, but this time it was stronger, louder.

Glancing around at the other workers, it was obvious no one else had heard anything, and she shrugged and bent over the microscope again.

Making notes on the keyboard, she felt her way towards a solution, a method she had once tried to describe to a professor, been thoroughly humiliated by his disbelief, and never mentioned again. But it worked for her, and it meant she was beginning to see the way the virus reproduced, and what was needed to choke it off.

Raising her head and blinking around, she thought someone had called her name.

"What?" she asked in irritation, and her colleagues also looked around.

"Someone called me," she said. "What d'you want?"

Ron shook his head. "Not me, m'dear. Too involved in this little nasty. Jo?"

The other lab worker shook her head. "Not me. Hearing things again, Saska?"

She did not reply, shrugging her shoulders, reviewing her notes. Her parents had landed her with a name from memories of Old Earth, Saskatchewan, and she hated it almost as much as the various contractions and nicknames she had attracted throughout her life.

"This one seems to latch onto prey animals through ingestion," she said at random. "The last one was a parasitic flying form, this one might be in vegetation."

"Precious little of that around us, except on the eco-deck - are you saying - it might be in the eco-deck?"

Ron stood up and stared at her, came across the lab in a hurry and read her notes. Jo powered down her cutter and looked across as well.

"It's already in the eco-deck, you're saying?" Ron asked.

"There's something in there," she replied. "But I can't say it's a virus, nor if it would be deadly."

"Terrvert just spent umpty-billion credits building this base, to spread out into a colony," Ron said tensely. "And that eco-deck is state of the art, and you're saying it's contaminated? You'd better be sure of that!"

"I'm not sure of anything just yet," she replied, glancing at her notes. "But if there's a virus in there, it doesn't seem to want to do anything harmful."

"Can we request samples?" Jo asked. "I mean - if I ask for a bowl of salad, I can be sure it's gone through the zapper, can't I? No one eats raw leaves, do they?"

Ron and Saska looked at each other.

"I could request raw leaves," she said slowly. "I don't want to cause alarm, but a few leaves might be indicative."

"All right. A bowl of growing things, maybe?"

She nodded. "That would be good. It's all hydroponics in there, and the water is filtered and adjusted. Where does the water come from, Ron?"

"It's manufactured from the surface," he replied, gesturing to the metal walls surrounding the scientific bubble of life. "I doubt if anything could get through that process, Saska."

"Back on Old Earth, aeons ago, they thought they had life all sewn up," she replied absently, staring down the microscope again. "Then they discovered life could exist in places so weird it was beyond imagination. What if that poison out there is actually full of life?"

She moved the microscope into focus and out of it, not listening the silence in the room, but hearing once again someone call her name.

"Will you stop that?" she demanded irritably. "Who are you?"

- My name is Laroth

Saska reared upright so quickly she knocked the stool out from under her and in the process tangled her legs in it, and with a yelp fell to the ground with the high stool falling onto her. She heard the crack of a bone, and yelped in real pain, trying to fend off the things that had come down with her. Her head hit the floor and she blacked out briefly.

- I didn't mean to alarm you, please don't be frightened. Will you come and meet me?

Where are you?

- The big man wants to meet you also, he is excited about you.

"Saska? Are you all right? Are you awake? She hit her head pretty hard, doc."

She opened her eyes and stared up at Ron's inverted face, felt nauseated and sat up abruptly and vomited over the lab floor. Someone was holding her, and helping her, and she retched uselessly and gasped with pain as someone touched her wrist.

"Broken, undoubtedly. Yes, bring the trolley over here. No, don't try to sit up."

Robotic arms lifted her and placed her on a sickbay trolley,and Saska tried desperately to find that gentle voice in her mind, until someone put an anaesthetic in her and sent her down into sleep.

Saska woke in a sickbay bed with her arm tingling from the regrowth stimulant fed into the bone. The ache where she had struck her head had gone, and she felt no after-effects of the nausea.

Lying there, she looked around the sickbay. It was not somewhere she came often, although she had been here to be immunised against the last disease to strike the colony. Thinking about that, she wondered again if the atmosphere of this world was viable to some form of life. It seemed inconceivable, but over the years since its discovery, the colonists and scientists had had to battle with all kinds of diseases. In this far-flung corner of a forgotten star system, they were finding that erecting an eco-dome or two, mining the resources, feeding back into the system and receiving their credit rewards, was more problematic than usual.

"Hi there, Saska."

She looked up as Ron came around the screens. He looked at the monitors and nodded.

"You look OK. The doctors were furious you'd been put under, by the way."

"I react badly to anaesthetics, but that damned robot was too quick for me to stop it," she replied. "How long have I been out?"

"Two days," he said with relish. "And on life support for a while."

She stared at him in stupefied amazement.

"Two days? Two - whole - days? What about my work?"

"I closed down what I could, saved your notes." He hesitated, and she sighed in frustration.

"Jo's gone ahead with my idea and taken it on as her own?"

"Afraid so. I did point out it was your initial idea, but she's running with it."

"I hope she's being careful, is all I can say."

"Look on the bright side! You're going on R&R."

"I don't need R&R! I'm perfectly OK."

"It's either that, or they go probing into you to find out why you're allergic to anaesthetic," he said with a grin, and put a bowl onto the side table. "I fetched in some fruit. Zapped, not raw."

"Thanks."

He sobered. "Saska - you seemed to think someone was speaking to you. Do you often feel like that?"

She frowned at him. "Why d'you want to know?"

"Don't go defensive on me." He pulled up a chair and sat down, studying her. "D'you know where we came from? This colony specifically?"

"Yes, from A-Zed-One, the last space station before the vacuum," she replied sarcastically. "Which was a damned sight more civilised than this hole in space, I can tell you!"

"And before that?"

Saska hesitated, slowly pleating the bed cover, listening to the comforting sounds of the monitors telling her she was still alive.

"Benden is the name of the R&R planet," she said at last. "That's where my parents are, y'know."

"Yes, I do know. Doing sterling work at cataloguing and analysing the flora and fauna of Benden. And before that?"

"Oh Ron, get to the point!" Saska said angrily. "Why d'you need me to rehearse it?"

"Because I wondered if you knew where we came from, our first foray into space," he replied.

"Old Earth?"

"After that."

"Terrvert was a colony founded after the Nathi wars, on a planet congenial for humankind. From there, one space ship went out to find more worlds, and the rest is - history."

"What part of history were you taught?"

Saska stared at him.

"I do know the rest of it, Ron, so why the portentous frown?"

"So many of the scientists here, and the colonists, don't seem to know, or care. I don't know why that should be, but I make it a purpose in life to ask people, and prod them into looking it up. Our friend Jo, for instance, doesn't know, or doesn't care. Oh, we all get taught it, but so many seem to want to forget our partners in space, and what is, when you come down to it, a fairly spectacular way of getting from planet to planet, on dragon back."