Brinna nodded briefly toward the window. "Look out there." Her brows were drawn down into a black angry bar and she seemed to be thinking hard. Wyatt looked out the small window.
A second disc-shaped craft had joined them. It was about four hundred feet away, keeping pace. Even while he looked at it the craft tilted, showing a glowing pink center surrounded by the black outer ring, and appeared to shoot away into the starry void.
Brinna followed it.
Wyatt said, "Hey. You said you were going to put me off on the mesa—"
She shook her head. "Not now. That's Makvern out there, the good gray Makvern who would be suspicious of his own father. He knows you're aboard. There is only one place I can take you." She pointed expressively. "Out. If I tried to drop back down to Earth now I'd be in front of a court-martial before breakfast."
She turned to face him. It seemed that she had done her thinking, compensating for the sudden change in direction that Makvern's appearance had necessitated.
"Listen," she said. "I'm the only hope you have of getting back to Earth before the attack. If you tell anyone that I tried to pass on a warning, that one hope will be gone. Do you understand me?"
"Perfectly," Wyatt said. He had been doing some thinking too. "I am also your only hope of getting a warning to Earth before the invasion, which you badly want to do not because you give a tinker's damn what happens to Earth, but because of the effect you think it will have on some deal of your own. So I guess in a sense we're partners, then?"
"You could say that." Her eyes were as bright and hard as two chips of blue stone. She was as handsome a girl as Wyatt had ever seen, and she scared the devil out of him. "Partners. Yes. But whatever my motives may be they do not concern you, or Earth. And if I do not succeed with my plan this time—" She shrugged. "There will be other worlds."