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race.
    â€œThis is the danui trade emissary to the Talus,” Harker said. “Don’t ask me to tell you its name... I’ve heard it once, and it’s unpronounceable unless you can whistle and click your tongue at the same time. Even the word danui isn’t their own... It’s hjadd , meaning ‘strange genius.’ We can’t speak their own name for themselves. The emissary knows we have problems with their language, though, so it chose a human name for our convenience. It calls itself George Jones.”
    â€œGeorge Jones. Right.”
    â€œYes, well...” Harker paused to take a sip of coffee. “You’ll probably never meet him... it, I mean... anyway, so it hardly matters. What does matter is that our friend George has given us permission to make use of a piece of information that our people stumbled upon a short time ago.”
    â€œI take it you mean the merchant marine.”
    â€œQuite right... But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. As you yourself said, there isn’t much we know about the danui . They’re one of the oldest member races of the Talus, but they’re rather reclusive, seldom seen outside their home system. From what we’ve been told, they’re renowned as superb engineers... the best in the known galaxy, if the hjadd are to be trusted... but aside from the occasional ship at Talus qua’spah , we’ve never seen any evidence of that.”
    Andromeda nodded. She’d once caught a glimpse of a danui vessel, while the Montero was making a port-of-call visit to the immense space colony in orbit above the hjadd homeworld that served as the central meeting place of the Talus. The ship looked like two spheres joined by a cylinder; one sphere was a fusion drive, the other was the crew module, and other than a few hatches and portholes, nothing else about it could be seen. The design was simple, efficient, and utterly enigmatic... just like the danui themselves.
    â€œThey trade with the other Talus races,” Harker went on, “but only for raw materials. Apparently, they have no interest in the art and culture of other worlds... which, of course, is one of the reasons why we haven’t had much contact with them since our culture constitutes most of the goods we offer. They have a minimal number of representatives on Talus qua’spah . . . four, maybe five or six; it’s very hard to tell one from another... and no off-world colonies that we know of.”
    A last sip of coffee, then he put his mug on the table. “In short, they’re mysterious and tend to keep to themselves. All the same, the other Talus members appear to respect them. In fact, our friends among the hjadd tell us that the danui are considered to be one of the most powerful races in the galaxy, one that no other race dares to even think about attacking.”
    â€œNot that anyone in the Talus is likely to start any wars,” Andromeda said.
    Long ago, the Talus had arrived at an elegant solution to the threat of interstellar war. Since the member races used starbridges to journey from star to star, with ring-shaped portals at both the embarkation and destination points creating the wormholes necessary for such jaunts, they agreed to equip those portals with keys. These small cards, which fit into a starship’s navigation computer, contained frequencies for unique microwave codes that an outbound ship would transmit to the artificial intelligence controlling an embarkation starbridge. The AI would then relay the code via hyperlink channel to the destination starbridge, and if the AI at the other end recognized that code and authorized it, it would then allow a wormhole to be created and the incoming ship to pass through.
    Thus, a vessel couldn’t make the hyperspace jaunt unless it had an appropriate starbridge key for its destination, and the race who controlled the starbridge at that place could choose who received those keys and,