He understood the cloudcats and their psionic survival aids perfectly now; he repaired a minor fault in one, though it wasn't yet necessary, for the sheer pleasure of using his new skills. He looked in on a young Irschchan student, graceful as her feline forebears, with no idea yet of the service she would soon do the Empire and her homeworld alike; he wished her well. He checked the condition of his friend, James Medart; if Kranath hadn't assured him Jim would live, Tarlac would have been sorely tempted to intervene. Knowing the older Ranger was in critical condition hadn't prepared him for the sight of Jim hooked up to a roomful of life-support machinery, not in even a low-grav bed but submerged in a tank of rapid-heal solution. That was further evidence of how seriously he'd been wounded; Tarlac had only heard of the technique a couple of months before leaving Terra, as an experimental treatment for massive injuries. It wasn't quite first-tenth at the clanhome, about 0730 Palace Standard Time, when Tarlac stopped amusing himself and went back to work. His new power made it simple for him to use his ID code alone to access the Imperial priority band, something he'd done before only with highly sophisticated equipment, and project an image of himself in open-shirted uniform to the Palace, to the Emperor's private comset. He made the comscreen's viewpoint his own, to avoid mistakes, so when the screen activated he found himself looking at the Emperor's head, bent over the inevitable stack of printout paper, from the familiar low right three-quarter view. "Just a minute, please," Davis said tiredly, without looking up. "Of course, sir." Tarlac sensed the Emperor was too fatigued, too distracted, to recognize his voice right away. His Majesty had changed in the three months since Tarlac had left Terra; his short-clipped hair was almost totally white, his shoulders were less erect, and his shirt more rumpled than he had tolerated then. When the Emperor did look over at the screen, Tarlac was shocked to see the strain etched into his face. Davis looked ten years older, and utterly worn out. Then fatigue gave way to a startled grin. "Steve! You did it! Will you be back soon?" "Yes, Your Majesty, to both. I'm on the Traiti Homeworld, and I'll be leaving, aboard one of their cruisers, in about five hours. Palace ETA is noon tomorrow, your time." He raised a hand to forestall the Emeror's beginning objection. "I know that's impossibly fast by Imperial technology, sir, but we'll be getting a one-time-only boost from a sort of super-computer the Others left here." "The Others." Davis frowned, then shrugged. "I won't look a gift horse in the mouth. Captain Willis reported what Fleet-Captain Arjen told you. Steve, can you end this damn war?" "I can't, sir, no. What I can do is arrange things so you and the Traiti rulers, their Supreme and First Speaker, can try to end it."