Voyage Across the Stars

CELANDINE




Île de Rameau on Celandine was the busiest spaceport in a trading cluster of twenty worlds. The sound of ships taking off and landing was a constant rumble through the roof and walls of the closed dock in which the Port Authority’s tugs had lodged the Swift.

The dock could easily have held a freighter of one hundred thousand tonnes or a score of smaller vessels. The Swift was alone; the two robot tugs had returned to orbit before the clamshell roof closed again.

The members of the Pancahte Expedition watched the main forward display tautly. Six Celandine officials drove an open vehicle through a small side door and across the dock’s scarred floor toward the Swift. The locals chatted to one another.

“They’ve got guns,” Josie Paetz said.

“Two of them are cops, an escort,” Ned answered loudly before anyone ratcheted the mercs’ nervousness up another notch. “The pair in back have enough braid between them to sell brass for a sideline. That kind of rank doesn’t show up if they’re expecting a firelight.”

“Wish I had a gun,” Deke Warson muttered in frustrated wistfulness.

“When I decide to declare war on a planet this size, Warson,” Lissea snapped, “you’ll be the first one I’ll tell.”

All the weapons aboard the Swift were in closed containers. Not concealed, not even locked away, most of them: there was no way the Swift could pretend here to be a peaceful freighter. Tadziki had insisted, however, that none of the crew be openly armed when they greeted the Celandine authorities.

The adjutant’s belief that they had to tread lightly was supported by the way the authorities sequestered the Swift in a closed dock and ordered the crew to stay buttoned up until further instructions. None of the mercenaries argued the point, but nobody was happy about it either.

Everyone but the driver, one of the policemen, got out of the vehicle. An official in civilian clothes put the end of a contact transducer against the airlock and spoke into it. “Inspection team coming aboard,” the Swift’s hull announced. “You may open your hatches now.”

Tadziki opened the main boarding ramp. As the hydraulics whined, Toll Warson said in a lilting voice, “We’ve come this far with no problems, boys. Let’s get the rest of the way back, all right?”

Ned couldn’t tell whether or not “with no problems” was meant to be ironic.

Echoes from other spacecraft made the huge hangar rumble like a seashore. The most richly decorated Celandine official raised his voice with familiar unconcern as he and his fellows walked up the ramp, roaring, “I’m Port Commander Flamond and I want you lot to understand two things right off!”

Flamond glared at Lissea and her crew, drawn up two abreast in the aisle on either side of the head of the ramp. Ned and Tadziki headed one rank. Ned hoped that none of the mercenaries behind him were going to catcall in response to Flamond’s bluster.

“First,” Flamond said. He seemed to have decided Tadziki rather than Lissea, who was on the other side of the aisle, was captain. “I’m in charge of Île de Rameau Spaceport. I don’t look kindly on anything or anybody who makes my life difficult.”

Tadziki nodded. His expression was open, solemn—that of a responsible man agreeing with another responsible man. The lower-ranking Celandine officials looked around the Swift with interest, surprise, and—in the case of the armed policeman—obvious concern.

“Second,” Flamond said, “there’s three warships from Pancahte docked here since two tennights.”

Carron stood beside Lissea. His mouth opened in horror. Ned’s stomach dropped through the deck plates, and his hands began to tremble.

“They’ve put in a claim for return of this vessel and crew to answer charges on Pancahte,” Flamond continued, “so you people are already causing me difficulties.”

“Commander Flamond,” Lissea said, “I’m Captain Doormann—”

The port commander turned to face her.

“—of the Swift. We’re registered on Telaria and I’m on the board of Doormann Trading there. The Pancahtans have no right to detain my ship. If they believe they have a claim, they can prosecute it in our courts.”

“Which,” Tadziki interjected, “are a great deal more fair than the mixture of piracy and imbecility to which we were subjected on Pancahte.”

Flamond looked from Lissea to the adjutant and back. He smiled, in a manner of speaking. “Are you telling me that I don’t have the authority to hand you over to the Pancahtans, Captain?” he asked softly.

“No sir,” Lissea said. “Celandine is a major commercial power, just as Telaria is. You have your law codes, and if they require you to . . . hand us over to murderous pirates, you most certainly have the authority. As well as the power. But I would be surprised to learn that Celandine’s codes contained such a provision.”

“What’s she saying?” Josie Paetz whispered loudly to his uncle. Yazov, standing directly behind Lissea, put a stiff index finger to Paetz’ lips. From his expression, he was willing for it to be a pistol.

Flamond guffawed. “Good, good, you understand the position, then,” he said. “Which that Del Vore from Pancahte doesn’t seem to. He keeps claiming that our laws don’t hold for a prince of Pancahte.”

He eyed the assembled mercenaries. “I told him that our guns held him, if it came to that. The same holds true for your lot, Doormann. Squashing you like a bug would solve my difficulties quite nicely. Give me half an excuse and that’s just what I’ll do. Do you understand?”

Somebody in a rank behind Ned started to speak. Somebody else had sense enough to elbow the troublemaker hard.

“Yes sir,” Lissea said quietly. “We were hoping to water and resupply here for the last leg of our journey back to Telaria. If circumstances make that impossible, we of course understand.”

She cleared her throat and lowered her eyes. “We only ask that you hold the Pancahtans here for a few days. To do otherwise would be to turn us over to pirates.”

The two civilian officials behind Flamond whispered to one another. The subordinate military officer joined the conversation after a moment.

“That’s what you request,” Flamond said harshly. “This is what you’ll get. First, your vessel can resupply here in normal fashion. I will add that although you’ll be charged for the use of a bonded hangar—”

He moved his head in a quick upward jerk, indicating the structure which enclosed the Swift.

“—you’re not being charged the additional costs you’ve imposed on my operations by the fact I can’t permit other vessels to share Hangar Thirty-nine with you. Under the circumstances.”

Lissea nodded contritely.

“Second,” Flamond continued, “you have five days from now to leave Celandine. If you don’t leave, you will be expelled. And I assure you, armed resistance would be most unwise.”

The other military officer nodded grimly.

“Third,” said Flamond, “no weapons will be taken out of or into this hangar. There will be a police detachment to enforce this prohibition at Entrance Five—”

He thumbed back toward the open doorway through which his vehicle had driven.

“—which will be the only entrance unsealed during the time you’re here.”

“We understand,” Lissea said, nodding again.

“Fourth and finally,” Flamond said, “all the same regulations apply to the Pancahtan contingent, who are also in a bonded hangar. The deadline for leaving Celandine is the same for both parties. And it will be enforced.”

“What the hell’s he expect us to do, then?” Coyne demanded. “Just shoot ourselves?”

Lissea turned her head. “Herne,” she called in a cold, deadly voice to Lordling, who stood at the end of the formation, directly behind Coyne. “The next time someone speaks out of turn, silence him.”

Flamond raised an eyebrow at the tone. “As a matter of fact,” he said to Lissea, “what I hope and expect you’ll do is to negotiate a mutually acceptable compromise with this Del Vore.”

Carron winced at the repeated name. Flamond ignored him to continue. “From discussions with the Pancahtans, I have reason to believe they might be satisfied with less than their stated demands. To that end—”

He beckoned forward one of the civilians, a squat man in his fifties who carried a briefcase of naturally striped leather.

“—since it will lessen my difficulties, I’m putting Master Nivelle at your mutual services. He’s head of the commercial mediation staff here at the Port Authority.”

Nivelle made a bow of middling depth. “Mistress Captain,” he said without a trace of irony, “I’m looking forward to working with you. If you have a few minutes after Commander Flamond finishes, I can suggest some neutral venues for meetings with the Pancahtan parties.”

The mediator stepped back. Flamond nodded crisply.

“Yes,” he said, “well, I’m almost finished.”

He looked hard at one half of the Swift’s complement, then the other. “I need hardly mention that in addition to regulations specific to the present situation, Celandine has normal civil and criminal codes, all provisions of which will be enforced by the proper authorities.”

Deke Warson grinned at Flamond from over Carron’s shoulder. Toll nudged his brother warily.

“Apart from that,” the port commander continued, “Île de Rameau Spaceport averages a hundred and thirty-one movements per day. We get all kinds here, even your kind. So long as you keep your public behavior within reason, I think you’ll find that our community can supply any kind of entertainment you’re able to pay for. That’s all.”

Nivelle said, “I’ll wait for you at the entrance, Mistress Doormann. I realize you may want to discuss matters among yourselves in private for a few minutes—but only a few minutes, I trust.”

Flamond nodded curtly. He turned on his heel and marched back to his car, followed by his entourage. Tadziki raised the ramp behind them.

The mercenary ranks dissolved into babble. Over the ruck of voices Westerbeke said, “Well, that lets us know where we stand!”

By chance, Ned’s eyes met those of Carron Del Vore as he looked away from Lissea. He realized from Carron’s blank tenseness that the Pancahtan noble didn’t know where he stood.



“No one leaves here until I release you or Tadziki does,” Lissea said to the mercenaries standing formally at ease in one of the Hotel Massenet’s three bars, rented for the afternoon. “Colonel Lordling is in charge.”

“The drinks are on the expedition account,” Tadziki interjected, “but I suggest you recall that we may be leaving very curst fast when we go.”

Eyes flicked from captain to adjutant. The bartender watched with his lips pursed and his hands spread on the bar’s polished granite surface.

“Lissea, I ought to be upstairs with you,” Herne Lordling said. There was more despair than bluster in his voice.

“This is where I need you, Herne,” Lissea said crisply. “I can handle a negotiation, and I’ve got Tadziki and Slade to help with the technical presentation.”

“And,” Deke Warson cooed, “she’s got the princey along for swank.”

Men laughed. Herne Lordling flushed, and Lissea trained eyes as hard and gray as the bar-top on Warson.

Deke looked away. “Sorry, ma’am,” Toll said.

Yazov and Paetz were on anchor watch. The rest of the complement had come with the negotiators to the Massenet. There wasn’t any reason to keep specialists from the navigation and powerplant side on duty, since the Swift couldn’t lift off until the authorities opened the hangar roof. Flamond was in charge, there were no two ways about it.

“I’ll give you men a full report after the meeting,” Lissea said. “I know you’re nervous, but there’s nothing here that I can’t work through if you’ll remain patient and keep the lid on. That’s all for now.”

She turned and strode from the closed bar. Tadziki was at her side, Ned behind them, and Carron Del Vore scrambled to join the movement that had caught him unawares.

“Why’s she think we’re nervous?” Ingried asked as the mercenaries surged toward the bar.

The Massenet was a dockside hotel, but it catered to ships’ officers and wealthy transients. The lobby staff included a discreet security presence to prohibit roistering crewmen, and the internal decor was expensively florid. The capitals of the square stone pillars supporting the double staircase were flanged outward to form bases for lions holding coats of arms; crystal electroliers glittered down on the lobby.

Though the Massenet was decorated in classic fashion, there was nothing antique in its operations. The molded ceilings themselves glowed to supplement the electroliers with soft, shadowless illumination. Movement between floors was by means of modern demand-actuated lift- and drop-shafts rather than elevators (or the staircases, which were kept for show).

There were about a dozen non-uniformed people in the lobby. The couple checking out were probably civilians, but the rest were divided between hotel security and plainclothed governmental types.

Nivelle had known what he was doing when he chose the venue for negotiations. Seeing the security presence made Ned feel calmer. The Swift’s personnel weren’t going to get into a bloody war with Pancahtans here in the hotel while the expedition’s cooler members negotiated in the roof garden.

Delegation of tasks among expedition personnel was ad hoc, but by now areas of specialization were pretty obvious. Ned’s job included worrying about possibilities that gunmen—better gunmen—would have laughed away.

Carron looked at the heavyset Celandine personnel with their good clothes and eyes like trip-hammers. He wrung his hands.

Lissea stepped to the liftshaft and reached for the call button. Ned blocked her hand and said, “Captain? Let me lead.”

“He’s correct,” Tadziki said. “I’ll bring up the rear.”

“This isn’t a combat patrol!” Lissea said, but she let Ned take her place on the lift disk.

“Not if we handle it right,” Tadziki murmured.

Ned held the attaché case close to his chest and poked the R button. The lift mechanism judged its moment, then rotated the meter-diameter disk on which Ned stood into the shaft and raised him in a single smooth motion.

At the top of the shaft, the disk rotated outward again and deposited Ned in a kiosk in the roof garden. He stepped out, meeting the professional smile of another security man whose briefcase certainly did not contain electronic files and a hologram projector as Ned’s did.

“They’re waiting in the gazebo, sir,” the Celandine said with a nod.

The gazebo was a substantial building, a heavy roof on tile-covered columns with couches to hold thirty-odd visitors in comfort. Several security men faced outward from beyond the low hedge encircling the structure. Nivelle and half a dozen brightly garbed Pancahtans led by Ayven Del Vore were seated at a round table in the center.

The liftshaft shunted Lissea onto the roof. Ned nodded acknowledgment and led the way toward the gazebo.

The walkways were tiled in a herringbone of green and white that clocked beneath their boots. Ned glanced at the flowering shrubs bordering the path and said, “A pretty blue, aren’t they?”

“Slade, don’t be an idiot!” Lissea replied.

He grinned toward a fountain. Fish of an unfamiliar breed, almost as clear as the plashing water, curvetted among lilies and snapped insects out of the air.

Ned felt loose and positive. For a moment he didn’t understand why. Then he realized that he knew he was physically safe in the midst of such tight security. It was the first time his unconscious had been sure of that since the Swift lifted from Telaria.

Of course, there wouldn’t be any safety at all in four and a half days if they blew this meeting.

The liftshaft sighed open again. Ayven stood up and very deliberately spat onto the tiles at the gazebo’s threshold. “Good afternoon, brother!” he called. “So glad to meet you on Celandine. For a time I thought perhaps I’d miscalculated.”

“Good afternoon, Ayven,” Carron answered calmly. “I would just as soon have left you to your interests on Pancahte while I live my own life in the wider universe.”

Ned had been doubtful about bringing Carron to the meeting—not that anybody’d asked his opinion. Even if Carron kept his temper (and so far, so good), his presence was likely to have a bad effect on his brother. He suspected the reason Lissea brought Carron was that she didn’t want to risk leaving him in the company of the mercenaries when she wasn’t there to protect him.

Ned put his case down on the table and opened it. From what he could tell, the Pancahtans accompanying Ayven were simply muscle, soldiers who were uncomfortable without their powered armor. Their suits would be aboard the vessels—and completely useless to them here under Celandine supervision or if the Pancahtan squadron ran down the Swift in space later.

The mediator rose and offered his hand to Lissea. “Glad to see you again, Captain Doormann,” he said. He was a cultured man, but in his way just as tough as any of the security personnel standing quietly in the background. “And this would be Carron Del Vore, one of the bones of contention?”

“Master Nivelle,” Lissea said, shaking hands. She nodded to Ayven. “Prince Ayven. But as for Carron here, he’s a free citizen—of Pancahte, as it chances—and not an object to be bargained.”

“He’s a traitor,” Ayven said flatly. “We want him, and we want the capsule you stole. When those two items have been turned over, we’ll permit the rest of you to go where you please, despite the damage you did to Astragal.”

“Succinctly put,” Nivelle said. “But may we all sit down, please? There’s less chance for actions being misunderstood if—”

“I’ll stand!” Ayven said.

Lissea pulled her chair out and seated herself. Ned, Tadziki, and—a half-beat later—Carron followed her lead.

“Master Del Vore,” the mediator replied, “I would be most appreciative if you would sit down as I requested you do.”

It occurred to Ned that Nivelle considered his position here to be as much arbitrator as mediator, and that the Celandine certainly had the force to back up his will. Ayven must have realized that too, because he suddenly dropped back into his seat beside Nivelle.

The prince was an extraordinarily handsome man. The flush on his cheeks complemented his blond hair.

“Master Slade,” Lissea said in the tense silence, “will you run the first set of clips, please?”

Ned switched on the hologram projector in his briefcase.

“This was assembled,” Lissea explained to Nivelle and the Pancahtans as the equipment warmed up, “from the helmet recorders we normally wear—and wore throughout our stay on Pancahte. The full texts from which the clips were taken are available, sir—”

She nodded to Nivelle—

“—Should there be any question about the authenticity of the excerpts.”

A view of the throne room in Astragal hung above the center of the table:

“The tanks—” Lon Del Vore’s image boomed from his throne, while the image of Ayven stood beside him and nodded agreement “—they’re an irritation. If you can destroy them, then I’ll let you have the capsule you claim.”

“Yes, I accept,” said an image of Lissea in profile, viewed from the recording lenses in Ned’s helmet.

The view cut quickly to a figure—Ned, though the view was from behind and the resolution wasn’t very good— running toward one of the Old Race tanks. The figure patted at the concealed latchplate and the hatch opened to him.

From the recording, it looked as though Ned had known what he was doing. His guts knotted as he watched the scene, recalling how utterly lost and alone he’d been at that moment.

The view shifted again: Ned, helmetless, staggered toward the viewpoint against a landscape of magma and hellfire. In the background was the tank he had abandoned in the last seconds of its existence. Armor slumped, and the gun’s long barrel hung askew because the mantlet could no longer support the weight.

The image panned too fast for good resolution. The recording viewpoint, Lissea, looked back over her shoulder. The tank she had crewed against the alien starship was dissolving in a pool of yellow-white rock.

The demonstration clip ended with a silent pop of light. Ned switched off the projector.

“Fulfillment of the agreement is the basis on which we removed the capsule,” Lissea said. “Although the capsule is itself Telarian property. As a matter of fact, it was the coffin of my great-granduncle. We carried out the Pancahtan terms to the letter. Despite the fact that the Treasurer and his son here concealed the existence of—”

“We concealed nothing!” Ayven shouted as he jumped halfway from his seat.

A burly Celandine put a hand on the prince’s shoulder and pushed him straight back down. Two soldiers started to rise and thought better of it when they noticed the guns pointed by other security men.

Nivelle’s mouth curved in a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

“Thank you for your forbearance, Master Del Vore,” he said softly. “Let me remind you all that my instructions from the port commander are to remove this problem by any means within the laws of Celandine. The force that will be used to suppress, for example, the felony of assault and battery would achieve Commander Flamond’s desires.”

He looked from the Pancahtans to Lissea. “Will be used,” he repeated. “And as for you, Mistress Doormann . . . I would appreciate it if you avoided the use of loaded terms yourself. They won’t advance the discussion.”

Lissea nodded. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, sounding like a good actress pretending to be contrite. “I might better have said that disabling the tanks as requested brought my crew and myself into dangers that we had no reason to expect.”

Ned’s fingers moved, cuing another chip while he continued to watch the eyes of the Pancahtan contingent.

“That ship was your doing!” Ayven snapped. “You used it to cover your escape with what you’d stolen—and with my brother who helped you steal it.”

Ned switched on the projector. The image began with the dumbbell-shaped starship, half-risen from the shaft in which it had laired for centuries or millennia. Tiny figures of men ran toward their vehicles. The gigantic ship continued to rise.

The notion that the starship was somehow a ruse of Lissea’s was so ludicrous that even the careful Nivelle smiled. Aloud he said, “I think we can dismiss that, Prince Ayven, since you’ve already stated that you’re willing to forego damages caused during the incident in question. And—”

His tone hardened, though the mediator hadn’t raised his voice at any point in the proceedings. Ned switched off the projected image.

“—it appears to me that Captain Doormann has made an unanswerably strong case for her continued possession of the capsule. That leaves the other point.”

Nivelle eyed Carron with the expression of an inspector viewing a quarter of beef. “The request for extradition of your brother here.”

“No doubt Celandine honors the principle of asylum?” Lissea said coolly.

“Celandine has enough problems of its own without our feeling the need to import troublemakers from outside the polity,” Nivelle replied. “We certainly do not grant asylum.”

He turned like a bullfighter between two animals to face Ayven again. “Nor, I might add, do we extradite to other states as a matter of right.”

Ayven’s face had remained set in anger during the exchange. The smiles of several of his subordinates wilted like frost-killed flowers.

“What Celandine will do,” Nivelle continued, “is to view evidence presented by the state desiring extradition, and to make a binding decision whether or not to extradite. What evidence can you provide, Prince Ayven?”

“He stole a thing, a device, from our father,” Ayven said, coldly precise. “I saw him give it to her.”

He glared at Lissea. “That was why the tanks didn’t kill her: that theft. Carron is a traitor and has been convicted as a traitor on Pancahte.” He nodded, terminating his statement.

The trial Lon gave his younger son had probably taken all of thirty seconds, Ned thought.

Carron stared at Lissea. He reached sideways to take her hand. She twitched it away without looking at him.

“Yes, that could constitute a serious charge,” Neville said. He tapped Ned’s briefcase with the tip of his index finger. “But what evidence do you have, Prince Ayven?”

Tadziki drew Carron close to him and whispered into the younger man’s ear. Lissea continued to watch Ayven and the mediator, as though no one else in the open room existed.

Ayven flushed again. “It didn’t occur to me,” he said, clipping his words in his cold rage, “that I would be treated with such disrespect by bureaucrats.”

Nivelle nodded calmly, protected from insult by consciousness of his absolute authority. From what Ned had seen of Celandine thus far, it was a place with common-sense rules and very good people enforcing them.

“However,” Ayven continued, “we have recordings just like they do.”

He flicked his chin in the direction of Ned and the hologram projector. “I watched Carron hand over the device, and my suit recorded it. The recording itself is on Pancahte, but you have my word of honor that it exists.”

Nivelle nodded again. “Mistress,” he said, “gentlemen, I’m going to propose a course of events. You’ll have time to consider it, the remainder of the five days. And while I can’t compel agreement—”

He smiled to underscore the patent lie.

“—if one party agrees and the other does not, it’s likely to affect Commander Flamond’s further actions. Is that understood?”

“Get on with it,” Carron Del Vore rasped. His fingertips were pressed tightly together, and his eyes were on the center of the large table.

“First,” Nivelle said, “the capsule in question remains the property of Captain Doormann.”

He looked at Ayven. “‘If you wish to press your claim for it, you may do so through the judicial system of Telaria.”

“Go on,” Ayven said, his voice a near echo of his brother’s.

“Second,” Nivelle continued, facing Lissea. “Carron Del Vore will remain on Celandine at his own expense for five tennights to permit the Pancahtan authorities to provide evidence substantiating their demand for extradition.”

“No!” said Carron. Tadziki dragged him back down into his seat before a Celandine security man did.

“If evidence isn’t forthcoming within that period,” Nivelle continued, “or I deem the evidence insufficient for the purpose offered, Master Del Vore will be free to go or stay as he desires. If, however, Pancahte meets its burden of proof—”

He smiled again. “—in my sole estimation . . . then Master Del Vore will be handed over to the Pancahtan authorities.”

“Lissea,” Carron cried, “you can’t let them do this to me! I—”

Lissea turned like a weasel striking. “Carron,” she said, “if you can inform me on how your situation would be improved if the Swift and everyone aboard her were blasted to plasma, then do so. Otherwise, please shut your mouth!”

Carron swallowed.

Lissea stood up slowly and easily. The mediator wagged a finger to warn off his security men before one of them reacted. “Master Nivelle,” she said, “I’ll take your suggested procedure under advisement. I’ll have a response for you shortly, certainly before the deadline.”

Nivelle nodded. “I understand that you’ll want to consider the matter privately, mistress,” he said. “But as you no doubt realize, the matter is absorbing Celandine state resources to very little state benefit, so a prompt response would be appreciated.”

Lissea walked out of the gazebo. The three men got up and followed. Tadziki gripped Carron’s shoulder in what could have been a comforting gesture.

The Pancahtans scraped back their chairs. “I’d appreciate it if you gentlemen stayed with me a few minutes,” Nivelle said with his normal bland insistence.

Tadziki put Carron into the dropshaft, then took the next disk himself. As Ned waited with Lissea, he heard Ayven Del Vore snarl, “I suppose you think you’ve got me over a barrel, don’t you?”

Lissea stepped off.

“Yes, Prince Ayven, I do,” the mediator agreed. “But it doesn’t affect my judgment on what would be a fair result.”

The mechanism swung Ned into the dropshaft. He didn’t know that he’d want to live on Celandine. But he respected the people who did.

Lissea and Tadziki, with Carron between them, were already striding to the temporarily private bar. Mercenaries cheered as Lissea opened the door. The sound was so viciously bloodthirsty that several of the security men in the lobby reached beneath their tunics.

Ned smiled with cold reassurance. “Not a problem,” he murmured to the nearest Celandine. “They’re just happy.” He closed the door behind him.

Lissea waved a hand for silence, but the men had already quieted. They weren’t tense, exactly, but none of them were so drunk that they didn’t realize the importance of the meeting that had just concluded.

“Gentlemen,” she said, “Tadziki has booked a corridor of rooms for you at the Sedan House a block west of here. Anybody who wants to stay at the Massenet is welcome to do so, but I believe the comfort range of the Sedan House is more in keeping with your requirements.”

“They’ll cater liquor and girls at the Sedan,” Tadziki amplified. “Or you can bring your own.”

“That’s my requirement!” Deke Warson shouted.

“We’ll continue with two-man anchor watches,” Lissea said. “Westerbeke and Slade, you’re on in an hour and a half. You’ll be relieved in another eight hours, but if you’ve got anything urgent I suggest you take care of it fast.”

Ned met her eyes without comment.

“I’ve got some decisions to make,” Lissea continued, “and I’m going to make them alone. I don’t want to be disturbed, and I won’t be disturbed. Do you all understand?”

“I understand I’m going to be too busy to worry about anything but where my prick is in about three seconds flat,” Westerbeke muttered, shaking his head with irritation at where his name appeared on the duty roster.

“Tadziki, do you have anything further?” Lissea asked.

“Toll and Deke, I need to speak with you,” the adjutant said. “Nothing beyond that.”

“Dismissed, then,” Lissea said. She turned. Ned opened the door for her.

Carron Del Vore caught up with her in the lobby as the mercenaries spilled out, heading for the street door. “Lissea—” he cried.

“Carron,” she said as Ned and, from within the bar, Tadziki and the Warsons watched, “if you lay a hand on me, I’ll turn you over to Nivelle right now. I doubt he’s left the building yet. Is that what you want?”

“But—”

“Is that what you want?”

Carron walked toward the street door. He hunched as if he’d recently had an abdominal operation.

Ned left the Hotel Massenet through the door at the far side of the lobby. He thought he’d have a drink, but not here.

Part of Ned didn’t like what he’d just seen done to Carron Del Vore. That same part didn’t like the other part of Edward Slade’s mind, grinning gleefully to have watched Carron’s humiliation.



Josie Paetz waited with Yazov just inside the entrance to Hangar 39. They wore their commo helmets and there was no access to the Swift except past them, but it seemed to Ned that the two men were jumping the gun on their liberty a little.

Paetz regretfully unfastened the pistol belt with twin right-hand holsters and handed it to Ned. “See you, then,” he said. He seemed keyed up—and happier than prospects for a drink and a woman would have made him. “Lay it on my bunk, okay?”

The heavy door was beginning to close. Paetz jumped out to avoid pushing the call button so that the police guards outside would open the hangar again. Yazov followed.

Ned opened his mouth to say that one of the pair ought to wait until Westerbeke arrived to fill the minimal anchor watch. He suppressed the words. There was no real risk and anyway, Paetz and Yazov weren’t going to pay the least attention.

Westerbeke and Carron Del Vore leaped into the dock an instant before the door slammed.

Westerbeke looked at the gunbelt Ned held. He raised an eyebrow. “Expecting trouble?” he asked.

Ned shrugged. “They’re Paetz’s,” he explained. “In his terms, he’s just thinking positively.”

He thought about the attitude of the men he’d just relieved and added, “They were acting . . . as if they expected to land hot. Does that mean anything to you?”

Westerbeke looked in the direction Paetz and his uncle had gone, though there was a massive door panel between them by now. He shrugged in turn and said, “Tadziki called them after he’d grabbed Deke and Toll. Maybe they’ve got something up, but they haven’t told me—”

He grinned brightly. “Which suits me just fine. I pilot spaceships. I always figured ‘When bullets fly, I don’t,’ was a curst good rule to live by.”

Ned didn’t comment, but he remembered Westerbeke’s flawless extraction from Buin and his landing at the same point an orbit later. Like many (though not all) other members of the Swift’s complement, the pilot chose to downplay his accomplishments rather than boasting.

“Westerbeke,” Carron said, intruding with the air of a man committing to a high dive. “I’ll take your watch. You can go back and . . . and—whatever you want to do. I need to talk to Slade.”

“I don’t think—” Ned began with a frown.

“You know, that suits me too,” Westerbeke said. He reached for the call button.

Ned caught the pilot’s hand. “I don’t—” he repeated.

“Slade,” Carron said, “I need to talk with you. It’s critically important. All of our lives are at stake.”

Westerbeke’s eyes bounced from one man to the other. The pilot looked more entertained than concerned.

Ned scowled, then came to terms with his own jumpiness. There was no way into Hangar 39 except at the will of Celandine spaceport police; and if he couldn’t handle Carron Del Vore by himself, then he deserved whatever happened to him.

“All right,” he said, pushing the call button for Westerbeke. It was mildly amusing to note that he’d assumed control, and that neither of the other men had attempted to argue with the assumption.

He looked Carron over without affection. “You’re here for the full eight hours, Prince,” he said. “You don’t get another chance to change your mind.”

The door rumbled open. Outside, artificial lights supplemented the rosy sunset. A policeman stood beside the weapons detector with his pistol drawn. Westerbeke gave Ned a three-fingered salute and sauntered out for renewed liberty.

An armored conduit snaked across the concrete between the Swift and a junction box near the door. The walls were thick enough to swallow radio and microwave signals. The vessel had to be patched into the planetary system in order to communicate beyond Hangar 39.

Ned waved the Pancahtan toward the Swift ahead of him. “What is it, then?” he demanded. “That you need to say to me?”

“You know that my brother can’t be trusted, don’t you?” Carron said.

“I think that a number of people in your family,” Ned said, “feel they have a right to do anything they bloody well please.” Until he heard the venom with which he spoke, he hadn’t realized how much he hated Carron.

Ned’s tone didn’t seem to concern or even affect the Pancahtan. “If you turn me over to Ayven,” Carron said as they walked up the boarding ramp together, “he’ll still hunt down your ship and destroy it. You made fools of him and my father. We made fools of them. They’ll never forgive us.”

“I don’t make those decisions,” Ned said, being deliberately obtuse.

The interior of the Swift looked even more like an animal’s lair now that Ned had spent the past eight hours in civilized surroundings. It was filthy, it stank, and the disorder was more akin to a heap of rotting vegetation than it was to living quarters. It would take days to clean and disinfect the ship when they returned to Telaria, if and when . . .

“I’ve come to you,” Carron said, “because you’re intelligent enough to understand what I’m saying.”

He stood in the central aisle, staring aft toward the capsule. Half the external panels had been removed, exposing circuitry.

Carron’s back was to Ned. “Also,” he continued, “because you will keep your word to me. The others, any of them—”

He turned to face Ned. His expression was cold and imperious, that of a king greeting his conqueror.

“—would promise but would betray me; though it will be all your lives unless you accept my plan.”

“Do you think I wouldn’t lie to you?” Ned wondered aloud.

“You will do what you think is necessary,” Carron said flatly. “I accept that. But I trust your honor as well as your capacity to see where necessity lies. Even Tadziki—”

He shook his head angrily, the sort of motion a man with his hands full makes to shoo a fly.

Josie Paetz slept in the top bunk, now vacant, forward on the port side. The cellular blanket was twisted in a heap, and the replaceable sheet which covered the acceleration cushion was gray with dirt. Ned put the gunbelt on the integral pillow and sat down at one of the navigational consoles.

“What about Lissea?” he said to the forward bulkhead.

“I’ve come to you, Slade,” Carron said.

In sudden anger, the Pancahtan continued, “Doesn’t it mean anything to you, all I’ve sacrificed? You’d have failed, died, on Pancahte a dozen different times if it weren’t for me! And what I’m doing now, it’s the only way for you to survive again! Do you want to die?”

Ned rotated the console, facing it aft toward Carron. “Not a lot, no,” he said. “Tell me your plan, then.”

Carron nodded. “Yes,” he said. “The only way the Swift will be able to reach your home—be able to leave Celandine’s space, even—is if my brother is aboard. My father’s ships won’t destroy us if Ayven is our hostage.”

“Go on,” Ned said, resisting the impulse to sneer. Carron had been consistently right in his assumptions, particularly those involving the behavior of his father and brother.

“He’ll come to you,” Carron said. “Here, to the ship, where you can capture him. If you offer him what he wants.”

Ned looked at Carron coldly. The Pancahtan stood in the aisle with his arms akimbo, smiling slightly.

“You,” Ned said. “You as his prisoner.”

Carron nodded. “That’s correct,” he said. “Me as his prisoner.”

There was fear in the young Pancahtan’s eyes, but the smile didn’t leave his lips.



Herne Lordling hadn’t been too drunk to function since a three-day family celebration when he turned twelve, but he was nonetheless carrying a load as he walked up to the sidewalk from a sub-level bar. He didn’t remember that there’d been steps when he entered, but he negotiated them in a satisfactory fashion anyway.

The bar faced the high berm surrounding Île de Rameau Spaceport. A starship rose on a plume of plasma, shaking the night sky with a familiar thunder. Lordling had been in a lot of ports, on a lot of planets. Now he wished he were on another one—and in a universe in which Lissea Doormann had never existed.

The sidewalk was busy. Vehicles ranging from monocycles to a forty-roller containerized-cargo flat snarled slowly along the circumferential road which girdled the port. Lordling swayed. He was considering the alternate possibilities of going upstairs in one of the buildings behind him to find a woman or throwing himself out in front of traffic.

A bright blue bus marked Spaceport Shuttle pulled in on its programmed circuit. The spiked barriers that kept ordinary traffic from parking in the shuttle stops withdrew before the nose of the bus. Sailors jostled past Lordling to board. The bus attendant watched from his cage in the center of the vehicle.

Lordling squeezed in with the others and presented his credit chip to the reader beside the attendant. One thing about a major port: your money was always good, though they might discount it forty percent from face value depending on how difficult they expected clearance to be.

Lordling didn’t care what things cost. All he really wanted was someone to kill. Several choice candidates shuttled back and forth through his mind. It took all the remains of his self-control to keep from grabbing the unknown sailor next to him and squeezing until the man’s eyeballs popped out.

He punched two-three-seven-one into the destination panel. It was only after he’d done so that he realized it wasn’t the location of the closed hangar which held the Swift.

He stepped to one of the benches. It barely had room for a child remaining. Lordling seated himself with a double thrust of his elbows. A fat sailor cursed and stood up. The attendant watched but didn’t interfere. Lordling stared at the sailor’s face, his puffy neck . . .

The sailor turned his back.

The bus pulled away from the stop. Because the vehicle was full, it left the curb lane and shunted across the circumferential to the next spaceport entrance. The whine of the turbine and the high-frequency clacking of the shuttle’s spun-metal tires buzzed Lordling into a haze of alcohol and bloody dreams.

The bus drove a route it chose for itself based on the desti nation codes loaded by its passengers. The attendant was aboard to summon emergency services if there was a problem among the human cargo, and to report if the vehicle was involved in an accident. Breakdown codes were, like the actual driving, the responsibility of the shuttle itself.

Ten passengers got off at the first stop, the hiring office in the port’s administrative complex. The shuttle moved down the line of docks on an elevated roadway, occasionally pulling into a kiosk to drop or to load passengers. There was little other traffic.

Beneath the roadway were huge conveyors shunting goods unloaded from starships into warehouses or vehicles for ground transportation. When the bus passed over an operating conveyor, the low-pitched rumble jarred Lordling temporarily alert again.

The lights of work crews dotted the landing field. At regular intervals a ship landed or lifted off in overwhelming glare and thunder.

“It’s yours, buddy,” the attendant said. “Hey! It’s yours!”

He reached through the cage and shook Lordling’s shoulder. Lordling came alert with a reflex that brought both hands toward the man’s throat. The attendant lunged against the back of his tubular cage to get clear.

“Hey!” the attendant shouted again, fumbling for the handset of his red emergency phone.

Lordling lurched to his feet. “You shouldn’t grab a guy like that,” he muttered as he stepped toward the door. It started to close at the end of its programmed cycle, then caught and reopened as the attendant pushed the override button.

Lordling stepped from the shuttle. He was the last of the passengers who’d boarded outside the spaceport, but the vehicle was half-full of sailors headed into the city.

The attendant watched, holding the handset to his mouth until the door closed behind Lordling.

The location sign in the kiosk had been defaced by names and numbers scratched on its surface, but the huge building the stop served had Bonded Hangar 17 in letters a meter high across the front wall. Lordling walked down the zigzag flight of steps to ground level and started toward the hangar entrance.

He hadn’t had a drink for half an hour. That didn’t make him sober, but he had enough judgment back to know what he was doing wasn’t a good idea. Not enough judgment to prevent him from doing it, though. Anyway, the sort of decisions a professional soldier regularly makes aren’t those a civilian would consider sane.

To either side of Hangar 17 were open docks, discharging the cargo of twenty-kiloton freighters along conveyor belts. The stereophonic racket dimmed only when a large vessel took off or landed. Cargo handlers wore helmet lamps to supplement the pole-mounted light banks along the rollerway.

Two men in the green-and-black uniform of Port Authority police watched from their air-cushion van as Lordling approached. One of them got up, yawned, and drew his bell-mouthed pistol. He gestured the mercenary to the detector frame set a meter in front of the closed doorway.

“Through here, buddy,” the policeman ordered. He didn’t look or sound concerned by the fact Lordling wore stone-pattern utilities rather than the orange-slashed yellow uniform of the Pancahtan naval personnel.

Lordling hesitated. He wasn’t stupid, and he’d survived decades in a business where often you get only one mistake.

“Look, pal,” the policeman still in the van said, “if you’re not going in, piss off! I don’t want you hanging around, you understand?”

Anger—at the cop, at life, at a woman who f*cked boys but wouldn’t give Colonel Herne Lordling the time of day—jolted the mercenary. He stepped through the frame and grasped the latch of the sliding door.

Neither the latch nor the door moved.

“Don’t get your bowels in an uproar,” the first policeman ordered. “This don’t open till we tell it to open.”

He turned to his partner. “Is he okay?”

“What the hell’s wrong with your back, buddy?” the man at the detector readout within the van demanded. “You got bits of metal all through it!”

Lordling stared through the van’s windshield. “Shell fragments,” he said. “If it’s any of your business.”

“Bloody well told it’s our business,” the policeman said, but he touched a switch anyway.

Servos slid the vehicle-width door slowly sideways against its inertia. The panel was fifteen centimeters thick and far too massive for an unaided man to move. Lordling walked inside.

Though the three Pancahtan vessels within Hangar 17 were individually much larger than the Swift in Hangar 39, they were still dwarfed by the vast cavity in which they rested. Inlaid letters on the bow of the nearest announced that it was the Courageous. The next over read Furious, and Lordling couldn’t be sure of the third.

Lordling walked along the side of the closed dock, staying at a considerable distance from the Courageous. The vessel had two flat turrets, offset forward to port and aft to starboard. They were faired into the hull and shuttered for the moment. Lordling judged that each could mount a pair of 20-cm power-guns, weapons as heavy as the main gun of the largest armored vehicles.

A team of Pancahtan sailors had removed access plates from the stern of the Furious. They were working on the attitude-control motors. There was a man at the foot of each open hatchway. Other yellow-and-orange personnel moved between vessels on their errands, but no one paid any attention to Lordling.

The complements were probably in the order of a hundred men per ship, counting crewmen and soldiers together. As with the Swift’s personnel, most of them would be billeted in portside hostelries while the ships were on Celandine.

A belt of linked plates circled the vessel’s midpoint. Alternate sections slid sideways so that missles could be launched from the openings. There was a variety of other hatches and blisters as well, some of which housed defensive batteries of rapid-fire powerguns to protect against hostile missiles.

The Swift mounted no external armament whatever. If the Pancahtans ran her down in space, as they surely would unless Ayven Del Vore was mollified, the Telarian vessel would provide only target practice—and that not for long. Lissea had to surrender her . . . her boy. There was no other survivable choice.

Perhaps Herne Lordling could himself arrange for Carron to wind up in the hands of his brother.

Lordling turned with decision toward the door in the enclosure wall. He was steady on his legs again, and his vision had sharpened through the earlier haze.

The door rumbled open while Lordling was still fifty meters away. He paused, standing close to the grease-speckled wall. A party of Pancahtan sailors entered the hangar, laughing and calling to one another. There were seven of them. When he was sure the last man was inside, Lordling broke into a run. He had to get to the doorway before the servos closed it.

A Pancahtan caught the motion out of the corner of his eye and turned around. “Hey?” he called. “Hey there! Who the hell is that?”

The last of the sailors shifted to put himself in Lordling’s path.

“Hey, it’s one of—” the Pancahtan shouted. Lordling kicked his knee out from under him and dived through the door an instant before it slammed against the jamb

“Freeze, you!” shouted a policeman as he leveled his gun at Lordling. “Freeze!”

An orange light winked within the van, the call signal indicating that someone within the hangar wanted to get out. The second policeman aimed a similar weapon from the van’s open window.

“Keep them in there!” Lordling cried as he got to his feet. “There’s six of them—they’ll kill me if you let them out!”

“Stand in the f*cking frame, you bastard!” the first policeman cried. “If you’re packing anything now, you’re cold meat!”

Lordling backed into the detector frame again. The plasma exhaust of a landing starship reflected from Hangar 17’s facade, throwing the mercenary’s tortured shadow toward the waiting policeman.

“He’s clean!” reported the man in the vehicle. “But you know, I figure if he’s one of them Telarians nosing around here, then anything he gets is what he’s got coming to him.”

He touched a switch. The servos whined, beginning to open the door again.

Lordling ran toward the conveyor serving Dock 18. Pallets supporting huge fusion bottles rumbled down the belt at intervals of five or six minutes. They moved very slowly because of the enormous momentum which would have to be braked before the cranes at the far end could lift the merchandise.

A few cargo handlers stood on catwalks along the conveyor, watching for signs of trouble. There was little they could do if a pallet began to drift. Stopping the belt abruptly would more probably precipitate a crisis than prevent one.

The trestles supporting the conveyor were enclosed in sheet metal to form a long shed. There were doors at fifty-meter intervals, but the first one Lordling came to was closed with a hasp and padlock.

He jogged on to the next. He was breathing through his open mouth. He’d never been a runner, and though adrenaline had burned the alcohol out of his system, it hadn’t given him a younger man’s wind. The second door was padlocked also.

Lordling glanced over his shoulder. Men in yellow-and-orange uniforms were grouped at the entrance to Hangar 17. Lordling was in the hard shadow cast by light banks on the conveyorway above, but one of the Celandine policemen pointed in the direction herun.

Bastard!

The Pancahtans started toward the conveyor. Lordling knew he couldn’t outrun them. He stepped back and brought his right foot around in a well-judged crescent kick. The edge of his boot sheared the hasp and sent it whizzing off into dark ness with the lock.

Lordling opened the sheet-metal door, slipped in, and tried to pull the panel closed behind him.

It swung ajar, and anyway he couldn’t expect to fool the Pancahtans as to where he’d gone.

The interior of the shed was echoing bedlam. Stark, flickering light leaked in through seams between the conveyor and the support structure as the belt material flexed. Flat loops of power cables feeding the rollers’ internal motors quivered in the vibration. The piers and trestles were fifty-centimeter I-beams, useless for concealment if any of the sailors pursuing carried lights.

Lordling ran across to the other side of the shed. He’d break out through one of the doors there, wedge it shut from the outside, and climb up to the catwalk while the Pancahtans searched the shed. From there he would go outward, to the ship that was unloading, rather than directly back to pick up the shuttle.

He ought to be able to find a weapon before he next saw a yellow—There were no doors on the other side of the shed. Access was from one side only.

The door by which Lordling had entered swung back. A handlight swept him and jiggled as the Pancahtan waved his comrades over. . . .

Lordling kicked at the metal siding, trying to find a seam he could break. The sheet belled and fluttered violently. It was too flexible to crack the way he needed it to do if he was going to get out.

All six Pancahtans entered the shed. They were illuminated from above and by side-scatter from the lights two of them held.

The sailors carried crowbars and spanners with shafts a meter long. They’d broken into a toolshed for the conveyor maintenance crews. Lordling wondered if the bastard cop had told them about the shed, also.

He shifted so that he stood a meter in front of one of the support pillars. That would cover his back but still give him room to maneuver.

When a bottle moved down the conveyor overhead the noise in the shed was palpable, and even when the rollers turned without load there was too much noise for voice com munication. The Pancahtans fanned out and advanced in the harshly broken light. They stayed in an arc, close enough for mutual support but not so tight that they’d foul one another when they struck. They knew their business.

Lordling braced himself mentally. He could take one down with a spearpoint of stiffened fingers, but the others would be on him before he broke through to the door. Even if he got to the door, he couldn’t outrun the sailors; he’d—

The door opened. The Pancahtans, three meters from their prey and preparing for the final rush, didn’t notice the men who entered the shed behind them.

Light as white and intense as a stellar corona blasted from the doorway. It threw shadows sharp enough to cut stencils against the metal of the wall behind Lordling. Pancahtans turned.

The shots were silent in the background thunder. Orange muzzle flashes and the bright blue glare of a powergun flickered from the fringes of the main light source. Pancahtans thrashed in their death throes. A fid of hot brains slapped Lordling in the face, hard enough to stagger him.

All the Pancahtans were down. The light switched off. Its absence was as shocking as silence would have been. Lordling was blind, and his ears were numb with thunder.

A shadowy figure stepped close and handed Lordling a commo helmet. He slipped it on. The positive-noise damping was a relief greater than he could have guessed before it occurred.

The unit was set to intercom. “Hey Paetz,” Deke Warson crowed. “You f*cked up. This guy’s tunic’s all over blood. We can’t use it.”

“F*ck you, Warson! I shot him in the f*cking head, didn’t I? How’m I supposed to keep him from bleeding?”

“We’ve got five, that’s enough,” said Tadziki. Lordling’s retinas had recovered enough for him to recognize his companions: Tadziki, carrying a 30-cm floodlight and its power-pack, Paetz and Yazov, and the Warson brothers. “Lordling, are you all right?”

Toll Warson stood in the open doorway with his pistol concealed as he watched for possible intruders. The other four were stripping the dead Pancahtan sailors. Paetz had set his powergun on the concrete beside him. The glowing barrel would have ignited his clothing had he dropped it back in his pocket.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Lordling said. “That was curst good timing, though. Where’d you get the guns?”

“I’ve never been in a port where you couldn’t find just about anything you were willing to pay for,” the adjutant said. He grunted and straightened his torso so that he could unstrap the heavy lightpack. “Île de Rameau is no different.”

“Hey, Cuh’nel?” Deke Warson said. He’d taken off his own tunic, mottled in shades of gray, and was pulling on the orange-and-yellow jacket of the headless corpse before him. “You did just fine. I was going to be the bait, but we saw you and thought we’d use the Big Cheese instead.”

One of the Pancahtans had taken ten or a dozen high-velocity projectiles through the face. The mercenary shooter hadn’t trusted an unfamiliar weapon—but it’d worked just fine, and there was a tight pattern of holes in the bloody sheet metal beyond. The Lord only knew where the bullets had wound up.

“You saw them come after me?” Lordling demanded. “You could’ve stopped them before?”

Tadziki was putting on a Pancahtan tunic that was too long for his torso but still tight across the shoulders. “We couldn’t have done anything without the police seeing it until we had some cover,” he said. “Herne, since you’re here, you can watch our gear. We shouldn’t be too long. Don’t do anything to attract attention and there shouldn’t be a problem.”

“What we did, Cuh’nel buddy—” said Deke Warson as he stepped to the doorway to take his brother’s place—“is watch you get off the bus and trot right into the hangar. So we thought we’d wait and see.”

He wore Pancahtan trousers and jacket. A very careful observer might notice that his boots were nonstandard for the uniform.

“You—” Lordling said. He didn’t know how to complete the sentence. Instead, he turned and kicked the sheet metal. This time a seam split, letting in a quiver of light from Dock 19’s rollerway.

“Look, you can’t get into the hangar with those guns!” Lordling said loudly. “Or do you plan to shoot the cops? Via, that’d send us all for the high jump!”

Tadziki’s trousers didn’t fit well either, but at least the jacket’s overlap covered the way he’d folded the waistband over his belt rather than cuff the pants’ legs. “Herne,” he said, “this one’s in the hands of the proper parties. When we’re done, you can get back to the Swift and sleep it off. Chances are we’ll be leaving Celandine very shortly.”

“But what are you going to do?” Lordling demanded.

Tadziki looked over the men he’d brought. All of them wore Pancahtan uniforms. Yazov had slung the jacket over his shoulder to conceal the blood that had speckled the front of it. He wouldn’t be the first sailor wearing an undershirt in public while on liberty.

The men laid their bootlegged guns beside the corpses. Tadziki took his helmet off and handed it to Lordling. Lordling took it blindly as the others followed suit.

More cargo rumbled its way cacophonously down the conveyor belt. Tadziki gestured and moved toward the door with three of his disguised men.

Deke Warson cupped his hands between his mouth and Lordling’s ear and snouted, “What we’re doing is our job, Cuh’nel. Now, you be a good boy while we’re gone.”

And then Deke too was gone.



The door stayed open as the five men in orange-slashed yellow uniforms entered Hangar 17 one by one, processed through the detector frame by the policemen outside. Deke Warson did a little dance, circling while his feet picked out a surprisingly complicated step. He tried to grab young Josie Paetz, who angrily pushed him away.

The party made for the Furious, the midmost of the three Pancahtan vessels, with more deliberation than speed. Deke linked arms with his brother Toll. They did a shuffling two-step across the concrete until they were hushed by Tadziki. The stocky man looked older and perhaps more nearly sober than his companions.

The boarding stairs of the Furious were wide enough for two men abreast, but both brothers tried to cram themselves in beside their leader. He turned and growled an order while the two sailors on access duty watched from the top of the stairs.

The Warsons subsided. Tadziki climbed the last two steps. He threw a salute that started crisply and broke off with him staggering against the rail.

“You got the wrong ship, Compeer,” one of the on-duty pair observed, reading the name tapes on Tadziki’s right breast and around his left sleeve. “The Glorious is the next berth over.”

He nodded toward the vessel farther from the hangar’s entrance.

“Good stuff, boys?” the other on-duty sailor asked with amusement.

“The best f*cking stuff I’ve drunk since the last f*cking stuff I’ve drunk!” Deke Warson said forcefully. He pulled a square-faced bottle of green liquor from a side pocket. The seal was broken, but only a few swigs were gone. He thrust the bottle toward the men on watch. “Here, try some.”

As he spoke, Yazov lifted a similar bottle, nearly empty, and raised it to his lips.

“Hey!” Josie Paetz bleated. “Save some for me!”

One of the sailors looked quickly over his shoulder to see if an officer was watching. The ship was almost empty, and the duty officer was probably drunk in his cabin. Ships’ crews on Pancahtan vessels were definitely inferior compared to the soldiers of Prince Ayven’s entourage. Morale among sailors suffered as a result.

“Naw, we don’t—” his partner said.

“The hell we don’t!” insisted the first sailor as he took the bottle and opened it. He drank deeply and passed it to his fellow. “Whoo! Where’d you get that stuff, boys?”

“We are here,” Tadziki said with a gravity that suggested drunkenness better than if he had staggered, “to pay a debt of honor. Honor! To Charl-charl . . . Charlie!”

“Who the hell is that?” the first sailor said. He reached for the bottle again. Yazov handed his bottle to Paetz and pulled a fresh one out of the opposite pocket.

“Charlie,” Toll Warson said. “Charlie is our dear friend. He told us that Dolores, the headliner at the Supper Club, made it onstage with a Kephnian Ichneumon.”

“We doubted him,” Deke said. “Our friend, our friend . . .”

There was a full bottle in the right-side pocket of his jacket. He fumbled at great and confused length in the empty left pocket instead.

“An Ichneumon?” the second sailor repeated. “They’re female, though. I mean, the ones that’re a meter long, they’re female. That’s not really a dong.”

Josie Paetz spluttered liquor out his nose. Yazov clapped him on the back. “She’s queer, then?” Josie giggled. “Dolores is queer?”

“Our good friend Charlie is on duty,” Tadziki said. “In our wicked doubt, we bet him that Dolores did not make it with a Kephman Ichneumon, and we were wrong. We are here to pay our debt of honor to Charlie.”

He lifted yet another bottle into the air.

The on-duty sailors looked at one another. “Look, you mean Spec One Charolois?” the first one asked. “About fifty, half-bald, and looks like a high wind’d blow him away?”

“That’s the very man!” Deke cried. “Our friend Charlie!”

Toll Warson watched the hangar entrance out of the corner of his eye as he waited with a glazed expression on his face. He and his brother were the only ones necessary to this operation, but the others had insisted on coming . . . and Toll was just as glad to have them along. Not that they’d be able to do any real good if it dropped in the pot.

“What would he know about the Supper Club?” the second sailor said, shaking his head. “Charolois’s as queer as a three-cornered wheel!”

“Just like Dolores!” Josie Paetz chortled. “Charlie and Dolores, my dearest, dearest . . .”

He looked up. “Hey! Gimme another drink, will you?”

Tadziki pointed to the bottle in the first sailor’s hands. “That’s yours,” he said, “if you let us go see Charlie. Right?”

The sailors exchanged glances again. The second one shrugged. “Yeah, well, keep it down, okay? If he’s on board, Charolois ought to be in his cabin forward.”

The five men wearing Glorious tallies slipped into the Furious. Despite the concerns of the men on watch, the strangers were amazingly quiet once they were aboard.



Ayven Del Vore wasn’t with the two Pancahtans who entered Hangar 39. The men rolled between them a portable sensor pack, similar to those the Swift carried, but even bulkier.

Before the door slammed, Ned glimpsed two more men waiting at the police outpost. They wore the lace and bright fabrics of Pancahte’s military nobility. Though the lighting was from behind and above, Ayven’s trim figure and ash-blond hair were identification enough.

The Pancahtans approaching with the sensor were tough as well as being big men. Ned waited for them at the top of the boarding ramp.

“I told Prince Ayven to bring only one companion!” he called. “I’m here alone with the prisoner.”

One of the soldiers mimed “F*ck you” with the index and little fingers of his right hand. “Four’s the minimum to drive and control a prisoner, dickhead,” he said, “If it’s you alone, then the prince and Toomey come aboard to collect the dirt. If you don’t like the terms, you can stick them up your ass.”

The sensor’s small wheels balked at the lip of the boarding ramp. The men lifted the unit by the side handles and carried it to the hatchway. From the way they grimaced, the pack must weigh closer to a hundred kilos than fifty, though Ned doubted it was as capable as the Telarian man-packs.

Still, it was as well that Ned had decided not to try concealing additional mercs aboard the Swift. The sensor would easily sniff them out.

Ned backed away to let the Pancahtans set up their unit. He wore a 1-cm powergun in a belt holster. “You know if you spend a lot of time dicking around, somebody’s going to come back aboard, don’t you?” he said harshly.

“Come here when there’s all Île de Rameau out there?” a soldier sneered. “Sure, buddy. I’m really worried.”

“Don’t matter if they do,” his partner said as he closed a chamber in the side of the sensor to get a baseline reading. “They don’t like the deal they’re offered, well, I’d just as soon fry the lot of you in orbit.”

He grinned at Ned. “You see?”

The hatch through the bulkhead astern of the main bay was open. One of the soldiers stalked down the aisle, climbed around the capsule, and entered the engine compartment.

“It’s clear,” he announced to his partner. “No sealed containers, not unless they’re hiding in the expansion chambers.”

“I guess we can risk that,” the man at the sensor said. The radiation levels inside a well-used expansion chamber were in the fatal-within-minutes range.

He switched the sensor pack to area sweep, watching the readouts intently. The unit clicked to itself as it analyzed temperature, carbon dioxide levels, and vibrations down to and including pulse rates.

“Looks good,” he said as he straightened to his returning partner. “Nothing but the chump and the package.”

He looked at Ned. “Call the gate now, and I’ll tell the prince it’s clear.”

The navigation consoles were rotated to face aft. Carron Del Vore, bound and gagged in the portside acceleration couch, stared wide-eyed as Ned picked up the land-line telephone from between the consoles and handed it to the soldier.

“Boy, you high-class foreigners,” the other soldier said, looking around the vessel’s interior. “You really know how to live—like pigs!”

Ned sat at the open console. “Do your business and get out,” he said. “Then you won’t have to worry about how we live.”

His voice trembled slightly. That didn’t bother him. He was ready to go—good jumpy. His subconscious thought it would be very soon now, and his subconscious was right.

The entrance door opened. The walls of the enclosed hangar damped the spaceport racket, particularly at the higher frequencies. Though the door itself wasn’t particularly noisy, it slid open to the accompaniment of metallic cacophony from the wider world.

Ned got up and reached beneath Carron to lift him. “Give me a hand!” he ordered the nearer soldier. “The quicker this is done, the better I like it.”

“You’re doing fine, dickhead,” the soldier said. He squeezed back to let Ned and his burden pass in the aisle.

Ned set Carron down in a sitting posture on the lower bunk facing the hatchway. Ayven and a third Pancahtan soldier strode up the ramp. The outside door slammed closed behind them, returning Hangar 39 to relative silence again. The soldier who’d operated the sensor pack removed a panel on the back of the unit.

Ned nodded toward Carron. “You’ve got what you came for,” he said.

“So we shall,” Ayven said. He stepped to his brother and pulled off the gag.

“Ayven!” Carron cried. “They kidnapped me! Thank the Lord you’re here to rescue—”

Ayven reached a hand behind him. The soldier at the sensor pack pointed a projectile pistol of Celandine manufacture at Ned. He gave the prince a similar weapon, then held out a third pistol so that the partner who’d helped with the sensor could reach around Ned and take it.

The sensor’s necessary shielding provided concealment from the detector frame. The police had either missed one of the compartments in the large unit, or they had simply checked to be sure the sensor functioned—as, of course, it did, whether or not a baseline chamber contained three pistols as well as air.

“Ayven—”

Ayven smacked his brother across the forehead with the butt of his pistol. Carron went glassy-eyed, bounced off the bunk support, and fell backward. There was a bloody streak at the base of his scalp.

“You two,” Ayven said. “Get the capsule out. The curst fools have it all in pieces.”

“The capsule wasn’t part of the deal, Del Vore!” Ned said in a trembling voice.

The soldier behind Ned stepped up close behind and stuck the muzzle of his pistol in Ned’s ear. Toomey, who’d arrived with Ayven, leaned forward and drew the powergun from Ned’s holster.

“The deal,” said Ayven, “is whatever I—” He raised his arm to swing the pistol again, this time at Ned. He was smiling, but his face was white with rage.

“—say the—”

Ned ducked, kicked Ayven in the crotch, and slammed his left elbow into the stomach of the soldier behind him. The motions weren’t quite simultaneous, but they overlapped enough. The Celandine pistol’s whack! whack! whack! slapped the back of Ned’s neck, but the high-velocity bullets ripped trenches in the lining of the ceiling aft.

Ned grabbed the shooter’s wrist. Ayven tried to level his gun while his left hand gripped the numb ache in his lower belly. Ned yanked the soldier over his shoulder and knocked the prince down.

Toomey pulled the trigger of Ned’s pistol repeatedly. Nothing happened—the weapon wasn’t loaded. He thumbed the safety in the opposite direction and tried again. His body blocked the third soldier behind him.

Carron’s false bonds draped him loosely. He’d risen to one arm, but his eyes were unfocused. Blood dripped down his right cheek. When he raised his hand to dab at it, he slid off the bunk into the crowded aisle. A needle stunner dropped out of his sleeve.

Ned snatched the pistol he’d clipped beneath the bottom bunk facing the hatchway. Toomey smashed the butt of the unloaded powergun into the left side of Ned’s neck.

White pain blasted in concentric circles across Ned’s vision. He fired three times into the man who’d struck him, dazzling cyan spikes flaring across the waves of pain. The Pancahtan slumped sideways, gouting blood.

Ned’s trigger finger stabbed two bolts more into the man still standing. The soldier’s face exploded, ripped apart by flash-heated fluids. The unfired Celandine pistol flew out of his hand.

Ayven and the remaining soldier had gotten untangled. Ned aimed, squeezed, and nothing happened. Jets of liquid nitrogen cooled a powergun’s bore after every bolt. Ned had fired so quickly that the plastic matrix of the last round was still fluid when the gas tried to eject it from the chamber. Instead of flying free, the spent matrix formed a stinking goo that jammed the pistol.

Ned threw the powergun at Ayven. Ayven ducked sideways. The other Pancahtan rose to a kneeling position and aimed at Ned. The pistol’s smoking muzzle was a meter away as Ned scrabbled for another weapon.

A burst of cyan bolts hit the soldier between the shoulder blades. Exploding steam flung the body forward.

Ned found the needle stunner with which Carron was supposed to surprise his would-be captors. Ayven turned in a half-crouch, aiming back over his shoulder.

The front of the capsule was open. Lissea Doormann stood in it, aiming through the holographic sights of a submachine gun. Heat waves danced around the weapon. The muzzle glowed white from the first long burst.

Ned put needles into Ayven’s midback and right shoulder. Lissea fired simultaneously, ripping six or seven rounds all the way up the prince’s breastbone. Ayven’s chest blew open in a mush of ruptured internal organs.

Carron lay across his brother’s feet, pinning them. His eyes were open. What remained of Ayven slumped down on Carron like a scarlet blanket.

Ned tried to pull himself to his feet. His left arm wouldn’t obey him. It flopped loose, and that whole side of his torso pulsed with hammerblows of pain. He braced his right shoulder against a bunk support and used his legs to thrust himself upright.

The temperature of the vessel’s interior had shot up five degrees Celsius from the released energy. Matrix residues, ozone, and propellant smoke mixed with the stench of men disemboweled and cooked in their own juices.

Lissea put her boot against the side of a dead Pancahtan and tried to push him out of the hatch. The body was freshly dead, as limp as a blood sausage. She held the submachine gun out to her side. The barrel shimmered, cooling slowly in the heated air.

“Carron?” she croaked. She knelt down. “Carron, are you all right?”

He moaned and raised a hand to his head.

Lissea looked at Ned. “Sound recall,” she said. The gunshots had half-deafened Ned, giving the words a rasping, tinny sound. “Get everybody back on board soonest. We’ll lift in an hour if terminal control will clear us.”

“Yeah,” Ned said. “Yeah.”

He dropped the needle stunner and stuck a projectile pistol through his waistband. He and Carron had put the loose weapons aboard the Swift in lockers so that they wouldn’t be to hand for the Pancahtans they intended to take hostage. He should have known Ayven wouldn’t have come unless he’d figured out how to bring weapons with him.

“Oh, Lord,” Ned wheezed. He found the land-line phone and flipped open the protective case.

“The capsule was shielded,” Lissea said. She wasn’t talking to him, just reviewing the steps that had led to the unacceptable present moment. “I heard you and Carron talking as you came aboard. I didn’t trust any of . . . of—with the Swift and the capsule. So I waited.”

Ned keyed the outside line, keyed a separate code for a commercial paging system that would access the commo helmets of the Swift’s personnel, and then typed the recall code: six-six-six.

“I didn’t have any choice!” Lissea shouted. Her voice broke with the strain and foul air. She was gripping Carron’s left hand. “I had to turn him over, didn’t I?”

Carron groaned and tried to get up. He didn’t seem to be aware of his surroundings.

“There was a choice,” Ned said. “We took it, the three of us.”

He had a little feeling again in his left arm. He didn’t think the collarbone was broken—or his neck, but there’d be time enough for the medicomp to check him later, if there was any time at all.

“We’d better not dispose of the bodies until we’re in space,” Lissea thought aloud. She stood up abruptly. “It was probably a crime, wasn’t it?” She laughed, cackled. “That’s a joke! Shooting somebody, a crime.”

Ned fumbled the handset. “Lissea,” he said, “you’ll have to call terminal control. With one hand, I can’t manage the phone and access the necessary codes from the data bank.”

Carron moaned.

Noise hammered within the enclosed dock as the entrance opened again. Lissea turned, pointing the submachine gun. Ned stumbled to the hatchway over Pancahtan bodies.

The men of the Swift’s complement were pouring into the hangar. They couldn’t possibly have reacted to the summons so quickly.

The whole crew was present and accounted for, though a few of them were drunk enough to lean on the shoulders of their fellows. Moiseyev and Hatton, the two junior engine-room personnel, carried Petit, their senior.

There were two Pancahtan uniforms in the midst of the loose grouping. The Warson brothers wore them. They did a shuffling dance, arm in arm.

Josie Paetz was the first man up the ramp. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, not bad!”

Yazov gripped Ayven Del Vore’s short hair and tilted the undamaged face to the light. “And I thought we’d done something!” he said, shifting an appreciative glance from Lissea to Ned and back.

“Lissea, we’ve got to get out of here fast,” Tadziki said. Westerbeke, looking squeamish, hesitated at the top of the ramp. The adjutant tugged him forward and gave him a push toward the navigation consoles.

Lissea had returned to the phone when she saw the new arrivals were her men rather than Pancahtan reinforcements. She put it down again. “Yes,” she said. “They’re processing the clearance now. It’ll take—”

She shook her head as if to clear it of cobwebs. “I don’t know. Half an hour? An hour?”

Herne Lordling tried to put his arms around her. “No!” she screamed. “No!” She twisted away hard, her boots slipping in blood.

Ned looked at the Celandine pistol he’d drawn without being conscious of the movement. Tadziki stepped close to him with a concerned expression.

Ned tossed the gun on a bunk. He began to tremble. In a loud voice he said, “We need to get away fast, before the Pancahtans sort out a new leader. They won’t dare go home without catching us, but just for the moment they’ll be disorganized.”

“Everybody get in your couches,” Toll Warson boomed. “Don’t worry about the mess, we’ve all smelled worse, haven’t we?”

“’Specially Harlow has,” Coyne shouted. “Did you see what he was doing to that pig in the Double Star?” Harlow hurled his helmet at Coyne, but it was a good-natured gesture.

“And you’re right about the Pancahtans being disorganized,” Toll continued with a broad, beaming smile. “When the Furious engages the liftoff sequence in her navigational computer, there’s going to be a little software glitch.”

He waved his hand to the adjutant, as if presenting him to an audience.

“Her fusion bottle,” Tadziki said with a smile as cruel as a hyena’s, “is going to vent. I don’t think any of the three ships in Hangar 17 are going to be functional for a very long time.”





DELL




The ship landed on Dell as the last sunlight touched the tops of the tall evergreens surrounding Doormann Trading Company Post No. 103. The plasma exhaust threw iridescent highlights across the clearing. Livestock in the corral bellowed.

The factor waited a few moments for the ground to cool, then sauntered out to meet the strangers. The vessel wasn’t one of the familiar tramps that shuttled back and forth in the Telaria-Dell trade.

This one had radioed that it was the Homer, operating under a Celandine registry, a first for Post No. 103 in the thirty-seven years Jirtle had been factor here. He looked forward to seeing some new faces.

The vessel’s boarding ramp lowered smoothly. The Homer was quite small, which wasn’t unusual; in fact, a large vessel would have been hard put to land in the clearing in front of the post. There wasn’t a real spaceport at Post No. 103—or virtually anywhere else on Dell.

Lone entrepreneurs ranged the forests of Dell, culling the products that were worth transporting between stars and bringing them to the nearest Doormann Trading outpost. It was small-scale commerce, but it appealed to those who found cities and governmental restrictions too trammeling.

It appealed to Jirtle and his wife.

Four men stood at the head of the boarding ramp. They wore body armor and carried stocked powerguns. They looked as stark and terrible as demons.

Jirtle gasped and turned to run. There was no reason for pirates to come here, there was nothing worth the time of those engaged in criminal endeavors on an interstellar scale. But they were here. . . .

“Jirtle!” a woman’s voice called. “Jirtle, it’s me!”

The leaf mat slipped beneath the factor’s slippers and threw him down. He fell heavily. He was an old man anyway, gasping with terror and exertion after only a few steps. He couldn’t have outrun the pirates, and nobody could outrun a bolt from a powergun . . .

“Jirtle, it’s me! Lissea!”

The factor looked over his shoulder. “Lissea?” he said. “You’re back? Oh, thank the Lord! They’d said you were dead!”



Pots clanged from the summer kitchen behind the post, where Mistress Jirtle was cooking dinner for twenty with the somewhat bemused help of her husband.

Lissea glanced in the direction of the noise. “They were more parents to me than Grey and Duenya, you know,” she said affectionately. “I only saw my mother and father one month a year when they were allowed to come to Dell on vacation. The rest of the time, Karel kept my parents on the Doormann estate.”

The Swift’s personnel were gathered in the factory’s public room. There was plenty of space on the near side of the counter. In treacle-wax season, as many as a hundred forest scouts might crowd into the post demanding that the Jirtles weigh their gleanings “now, before these other bastards!”

“Yes, fine, it’s nice you’ve had this reunion,” Herne Lordling said curtly. “But we landed here for information before we made the last leg to Telaria, and I don’t like the information we got.”

Lissea sat on the factor’s counter with her legs dangling down. Carron stood beside her. The rest of the personnel spread in an arc around the walls, bales, and barrels in the public room.

“If the Doormanns believe the story of Lissea’s death,” Ned said, “then we’ve got the advantage of surprise. Of course, Karel may have spread the story himself.”

Tadziki shook his head and raised his hand to quiet the half dozen men who began talking at once. “I think we can take that as real,” he said when he’d gotten silence. “It’s too circumstantial to have been entirely invented—all of us dying on Alliance when the Dreadnought landed and the plague broke out there.”

He looked at Lissea and added grimly, “Besides, that was the point at which Grey and Duenna Doormann were taken into close custody.”

“And we can assume they’ll take me in charge also, just as soon as I reappear,” Lissea agreed calmly.

“They may try!” said Herne Lordling.

“Yes,” said Lissea. “Well, I don’t think fighting all Telaria is the way to proceed.”

“We could do that, you know, ma’am,” Toll Warson said quietly.

Everyone looked at him. Half the men present started to speak, mostly protests. Toll, sitting on a bale of lustrous gray furs, waited with a faint smile.

Ned frowned. The Warsons were jokers, but they weren’t stupid and they didn’t bluster in the least. Toll (and Deke even more so) had the trick of stating something so calmly that nobody would believe him—

And then ramming the statement home to the hilt.

“Wait!” Lissea ordered with her hand raised. “Toll, go on.”

“Everybody here’s worked in the business,” Toll said. “We know folks. Some of us have had rank, some haven’t. . .”

He grinned at Herne Lordling.

“But we’ve all got reputations that’ll get us listened to by the folks who’ve worked with us before.”

Toll glanced around the room, then back to Lissea. “We can raise you an army on tick, ma’am,” he said, his voice as thin and harsh as the song of a blade on a whetstone. “We can bring you twenty brigades on your promise to pay when the fighting’s over. I can, Herne can. If Slade can’t bring in the Slammers, then his uncle curst well can!”

He slid off the bale to stand up. The crash of his boots on the puncheon floor drove a period to his words.

“Blood and martyrs, he’s right!” Lordling said. “Doormann Trading’s enough of a prize to cover the cost, and it will cost, but—”

“No,” said Lissea, her voice lost in the general babble.

“—it’s worth it in the mid- and long-term,” Lordling continued enthusiastically.

“Hell, short-term is that we all get chopped when we land on Telaria,” Deke Warson said, “F*ck that for a lark if you ask me!”

“No,” repeated Lissea. “No!”

As the room quieted, she went on, “I didn’t come back to wreck Telaria forever. I’ll—I’ll deal with those who lied to me, who mistreated my parents. But all-out war on Telaria will leave . . .”

She grimaced and didn’t finish the sentence. Burr-Detlingen. Kazan. A hundred other worlds where men had settled.

“Look, Lissea,” Herne Lordling said in the tone of an adult addressing a child, “all of a broken dish is better than no plate at all. And Warson had a point about what’s going to happen to us if we land openly on Telaria—”

“I don’t think we need be concerned about our safety,” Tadziki interjected. “The professionals, that is. As Toll pointed out, we are individually, ah, men of some reputation and authority. I don’t believe Karel Doormann will go out of his way to antagonize the sort of persons—”

He smiled coldly

“—who might be offended by our needless murders.”

“What do we do then, ma’am?” Deke Warson demanded. As he’d listened to the discussion thus far, he stroked the barrel of his slung powergun. His fingertips had a rainbow sheen from iridium rubbed off onto his skin. “Do you want Karel dead? I can do that, any of us can do that. But that alone won’t give you what you want.”

He thumbed toward his brother. “Toll’s right. You’ve got to smash the whole system so there’s nothing left to argue with you. You need an army behind you if you’re going to force your kin to your way of thinking . . . and even then, it’d be better if they were dead. All of them.”

He spoke with the persuasive rationality of a specialist advising a professional client. That’s what he was. That’s what they all were.

“No,” Carron said, speaking for the first time since they entered the trading post. “There is a way.”

“All right,” Toll Warson said. “I’ll bite, kid.”

Carron stepped forward, so that he stood between Lissea and the men present. She frowned slightly from her perch above him.

“I have been studying Lendell Doormann’s device,” Carron said, “as you know. I think at this point I understand the principles on which it operates.”

Lordling guffawed.

“I can land us on Telaria, kid,” Westerbeke said huffily. “With or without tower guidance. That’s no problem.”

Carron shook his head fiercely. “No,” he said. “No, the device is necessary, but not as transport, of course.” He glared imperiously at the mercenaries, in control, and well aware of it. “We will land openly,” he said, “on Telaria . . .”





TELARIA




Two more truckloads of Doormann Trading security personnel pulled up before the Swift’s landing site. About half the guards wore body armor over their blue uniforms and carried submachine guns in addition to their sidearms. They looked wide-eyed, and the faces of their officers were set and white.

The scores of city police and Doormann personnel already present were swamped by the civilian crowd including newspeople which had gathered within minutes of the Swift’s arrival. Westerbeke had come in under automated control, letting the ship’s AI handshake with that of the terminal. No humans were involved in the process until the slim, scarred vessel dropped into view and spectators realized that “Movement Delta five-five-niner, Telarian registry,” was the returning Pancahte Expedition.

Ned, Tadziki, and Carron Del Vore stood at the base of the boarding ramp. They wore their “best” static-cleaned clothes; in Ned’s case, the uniform that had the fewest tears. Nothing available from clothing stocks on Dell would have been more suitable for present purposes.

Ned’s dress clothes were in storage in Landfall City, but he wasn’t about to send for them now. His feet were thirty centimeters apart and his arms crossed behind his back as he waited for someone with rank to arrive.

An official car pulled through the crowd, the driver hooting his two-note horn. A man Ned remembered was named Kardon, an assistant port director, got out. He was accompanied by a woman who was probably his superior. A police lieutenant tried to get instructions from the pair as they strode toward Ned. The woman waved him away without bothering to look.

“Everyone move back-k-k,” crackled a bullhorn. “This is a closed area. Everyone moo-urk!”

Toll Warson led the six-man team opening the Swift’s external storage bays and undoing the lashings within. More armed mercenaries stood or squatted in the hatchway, grinning out at the Telarians.

There were three meters of cracked concrete between Ned and the edge of the crowd. Media personnel shouted questions across it, but no one stepped closer. Harlow, at the spade grips of the tribarrel mounted on the upper plating, grinned through his sights as he traversed the weapon slowly across that invisible line on the ground.

“I’m Director Longley,” the woman said. “This vessel is quarantined. Take me to Captain Doormann at once.”

The director was in her thirties, younger than her male assistant. She radiated an inner intensity. Her voice and manner didn’t so much overpower the confusion as much as they rode over it.

“I’m in charge now,” Ned said harshly. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a squad of blue uniforms deploying on the terminal’s observation deck. “Captain Doormann’s dead, a lot of people are dead. But we brought back the capsule—”

Ned was rigidly focused on the step-by-step accomplishment of his mission. It was a series of hurdles, and it couldn’t matter that some of the obstacles might be blood and fire. Part of him wondered, though, what his expression must be to cause Kardon to flinch that way.

“—and we brought Lendell Doormann besides.”

“Got the f*cker!” Deke Warson cried. The crew gave a collective grunt and tipped the large sealed casket out. The plastic box was a clumsy piece of work, but it was as sturdy as befitted the skill of men whose training was in starship repairs rather than cabinetry.

The clear top the crew had added on Dell didn’t improve the casket’s appearance. Lendell Doormann grinned out at the crowd. He looked like the personification of Death by Plague.

Ned gestured. “As you see. Now, one of you take me at once to the board of Doormann Trading. I need to speak to the board immediately.”

There was movement inside the Swift as another team carefully walked the capsule up the aisle to the hatchway. Lendell Doormann’s device had been returned to its original status, with all the internal and external panels in place. The front of the capsule was open, displaying the empty interior.

“Keep your shirt on, Master . . . Slade,” Longley said, reading the faded name tape on Ned’s breast. “You’ve landed without proper authorization, and—”

“Excuse me, Director,” Tadziki said, “but we landed normally—as the navigation records will prove.”

“You’re Tadziki, aren’t you?” Longley said, turning her attention to the adjutant. “I’ve dealt with you before. Well, Master Tadziki, I can tell you right now I don’t appreciate you sneaking in on the regular landing pattern this way. Look at this chaos!”

She waved her hand at the crowd. “Somebody’s likely to be killed in a mess like this!”

As if that triggered a memory, Longley pointed up at Harlow. “And put that cursed cannon away or I’ll have you arrested right now! I’ll have you all arrested!”

Harlow grinned.

Kardon looked over his shoulder toward the mixture of police, security guards, and civilians. He thrust his way past Carron and started to climb the ladder extended from the Swift’s side to access the gun position.

Deke Warson muttered something. Raff slung his rocket gun and grabbed the assistant director by the wrists, plucking him easily from the ladder.

“Kardon, what are you playing at?!” Longley demanded.

The Racontid swung Kardon around, holding him well off the ground. Kardon bleated with rage. Several of the police and guards had drawn their weapons, but their officers were angrily ordering, “Don’t shoot! Don’t anybody shoot!”

“That’s enough!” said Tadziki.

Deke Warson slit Kardon’s waistband with a knife sharp enough for shaving, then pulled the man’s trousers down over his ankles.

“That,” Deke said, “is enough.”

He nodded to Raff. The Racontid let his victim down. Kardon bent over to grab his pants and tripped. There was laughter, but it was all from mercenaries and civilians.

“Director,” Ned said, “you’re not a fool, so stop acting like one. If you want real problems, for yourself and for Doormann Trading, then indeed go ahead and arrest these men who have risked their lives for Doormann Trading. We are not a rabble, mistress! I’m nephew to Slade of Tethys, and my companions are men of rank and power in their individual right!”

“We are here to report, mistress,” Tadziki said forcefully. “To report and to be paid under contract. We’ve suffered enough for Doormann Trading. We don’t choose to be chivied by bureaucrats who can’t control traffic in their own port!”

A pair of three-wheelers bulled through the crowd, carving a path for the limousine behind them. A video cameraman didn’t move out of the way. His bellow of anger turned to fear as an escort vehicle knocked him down from behind.

The trike drove over the man’s ankle and crushed part of the tracery of lenses which provided three-dimensionality for the holographic images. The cameraman’s producer managed to drag him out of the way of the limousine that was following.

Lucas Doormann opened the door of the limousine and got out. Time constraints and the crush of the crowd prevented the driver from waiting on his master in normal fashion.

“Where’s Lissea?” Lucas demanded. His gaze traveled over the Swift and those around it.

“Via!” he added with a moue of distaste. “Are all these guns necessary? Put them away, all of you.”

He gestured imperiously to a captain wearing a Doormann Trading uniform. “You! There’s no need for guns! Put your weapons up at once.”

“Captain Doormann is dead, Master Doormann,” Ned said as Lucas’ eyes returned to him.

“Dead?” Lucas repeated.

Kardon, holding his trousers up with one hand, looked as though he was about to interrupt. Longley shushed him with a curt chop of her hand.

“On Pancahte,” Ned said grimly. “We retrieved the capsule, though, and I must speak to your board immediately.”

“The capsule is an amazing advance over Transit,” Carron Del Vore said. “Your ancestor was right, but, for two-way traffic the device must—”

“Who is this?” Lucas demanded. Before anyone could answer, he spun on his heel. “Clear the crowd back, can’t you?” he shouted toward the red-faced officer who’d been bawling orders to the security personnel. “Blood and martyrs, what is this? A circus?”

Longley made a quick decision and stepped away from the discussion. She took a communications wand from her shoulder wallet and began speaking crisp orders. There were by now several hundred blue- and green-uniformed security personnel present. What was lacking was central direction, and Longley could supply that.

“Prince Carron,” Tadziki said, “is the heir and emissary of Treasurer Lon Del Vore of Pancahte. He is in addition a respected scientist, who believes it will now be possible to set up instantaneous communications between Telaria and Pancahte.”

Lucas’ eyes narrowed in surprise. “The lost colony really exists?” he said. He shook his head. “I suppose it must; I . . .”

“I must speak to the board of Doormann Trading,” Ned repeated again. “And the capsule should be returned to its original location in Lendell’s laboratory.”

Ned knew that Lucas was swamped by the situation. The Telarian noble’s mind was on a knife-edge, tilting one way and the next without real composure. If nudged successfully, Lucas had the rank and ability to do all the things necessary for the operation to succeed.

“Lendell?” Lucas said. He looked, perhaps for the first time, at the crude casket. “That’s Lendell. Good Lord, that is Lendell! What happened to him?”

“He never really left Telaria,” Carrion said, though “explained” would give too much effect to his words. “Though he couldn’t be seen here and he appeared to be present on Pancahte. That’s why the device must be returned to its original location, as precisely as possible, to permit two-way communication.”

“Good Lord,” Lucas repeated. “And Lissea . . . I didn’t think anything would really, would—”

He made a fist and broke off. He stared at his clenched fingers for a moment, then relaxed them and looked up at Ned again.

More police and guards were arriving, but the haste and panic of the early moments were over. The security personnel worked in unison, guided through their in-ear speakers by Longley and her assistant.

The crowd continued to grow as word of the Swift’s arrival spread beyond the spaceport boundaries, but nothing was happening to raise the emotional temperature. Harlow tilted the muzzles of the tribarrel skyward, though all the mercs kept watch from beneath easy smiles and gibes to one another.

“I very much regret all of this,” Lucas said. “The—Lissea.”

He looked at Ned. “Yes,” he continued. “An emergency board meeting was called as soon as my father heard of the Swift’s arrival. I will take you to the meeting, Master Slade. If you’re worried about your claims for payment, don’t be. I will personally guarantee them.”

“Thank you, sir,” Ned said, “but it’s necessary I report in person to . . . those who sent us to Pancahte.”

“And the device?” Carron put in. “This is an advance beyond conception!”

Lucas glanced at the Pancahtan, then back to Ned. “Should he be present at the board meeting?” he asked.

“No,” Ned said. “But Prince Carron should supervise the placement of the capsule back in the laboratory. That isn’t the first thing on your mind or on mine, sir, but I have no doubt that he’s correct in his valuation of the device.”

“All right, then,” Lucas muttered. He turned his head. “Director Longley? Director!”

Longley stepped quickly back to Lucas. “Yes sir?” she said. Kardon, still holding his trousers up, continued to oversee the security details.

“How quickly can you get two separate vans here?” Lucas demanded. “I want this object—”

He gestured to the capsule

“—taken to the laboratory in the basement of the Main Spire in the Doormann estate. And I want my . . . my great-granduncle’s body taken to the family chapel. That will require cargo handlers as well.”

Lucas looked at the mercenaries standing in falsely relaxed postures. “None of these gentlemen,” he added, “will be involved in the work.”

Longley spoke into her communications wand, then met the young noble’s eyes again. “The vehicles and crews will be here within ninety seconds, sir,” she said, “or I’ll remove a department head. They’ll need clearances to enter your family’s estate, of course.”

Lucas nodded brusquely. “Yes, of course; I’ll clear them through. Just get it done and done quickly. It’s not seemly to have—”

He looked at the casket and grimaced.” Was it really necessary to use a clear top?” he muttered, half under his breath.

“I’ll accompany the device,” Carron said to the port director. Longley glanced at Lucas.

“Yes, yes!” Lucas said with an irritated wave of his hand.

Doormann looked at Ned again, and his eyes hardened.

“You won’t be allowed in the meeting room armed, Master Slade,” he said.

“Of course,” Ned said with a sniff of surprise. He unlatched his pistol belt and handed the rig, powergun and all, to Tadziki. “On Tethys, it would be an insult to appear armed in public.”

The first of two spaceport service vehicles pulled through the gap the police had made in the spectators. Lucas turned and strode toward his limousine.

“Come along, then,” he muttered. “They’ll be expecting my report. Father didn’t want me to come.”

As he got into the big car, Lucas added, “I just can’t believe someone so alive as Lissea . . .”



“Hey, Tadziki,” Deke Warson called from the hatchway. “Master Customs-Agent here says he’s maybe going to quit hassling us so we can get our asses out of here.”

Tadziki spun his navigation console to face aft. He gestured toward Warson to indicate that he’d heard but continued talking earnestly to someone on the other end of the Swift’s external communications link.

The vessel’s bay looked more of a wreck than it had at any time since initial liftoff from Buin. Men had sorted their gear, but most of it remained on top of their bunks, and spilling into the aisle. In truth, most personal items had been reduced to trash during the voyage, but the bald willingness to walk away from objects that had been companions for so long was alien to civilian sensibilities.

The men of the Swift weren’t civilians.

Tadziki finished his conversation and stood up. “There,” he said as he picked his way down the aisle to the hatch. “I’ve got lodging arranged for all who want it at the Clarion House, admission on ID or an expedition patch. And I’ve got a mobile crane rented. Coordinates to both are downloaded. You say the rigmarole here’s taken care of?”

The gray-suited customs supervisor with Warson bridled. “Master Tadziki,” he said, “I realize you men have gone through a great deal, but Telaria is civilized and civilization requires rules. I assure you my people and I have made quite extraordinary efforts to clear you immediately.”

He looked around with unintended distaste.

“Are we ‘go,’ then, Tadziki?” Deke Warson asked in a voice that surprised the customs official for its gentleness.

“That’s right,” the adjutant said.

He stepped to the hatchway and looked out. The security presence had shrunk to about thirty green-uniformed police, but the media were gone and the tension had left the remaining crowd.

The Swift’s personnel were drawn up in two lines at the base of the ramp. Three vans rented from a spaceport delivery service waited nearby. The crates in the back of two of the vans were full of weapons and ammunition. Customs officers nearby eyed the vehicles and the mercenaries with disquiet.

“All right, boys,” Tadziki called. “Have fun, and if there’s a problem you’ll find me here.”

He gave the troops a palm-out salute. The men returned it in a dozen different styles. None of them were very good at the gesture. In the field, the only purpose of a salute was to target a hated officer for an enemy sniper . . . and these men were more likely to use self-help for even that purpose.

“Dismissed!” called Herne Lordling. The ranks broke up. Men scrambled to the vans. Dewey and Bonilla from navigation, and Petit and Moiseyev from the engine room, boarded the empty vehicle. The rest split among the vans carrying crated weapons.

Deke turned and shook the adjutant’s hand. “Hey, good luck,” he said. “Sure you wouldn’t like a little company?”

Tadziki smiled wanly. “We’ve gotten this far, haven’t we?” he said. “What can happen now?”

Motors revved. Deke ran down the ramp and jumped in through the open back of a van as his brother drove it away.

“I, ah . . .” the customs supervisor said. “Where are they going with all those weapons? I realize that it’s technically beyond my competence, but. . .”

Tadziki watched the vehicles until they disappeared around a maintenance building. The mobile crane he’d rented was in a lot on the north edge of the spaceport, convenient to their destination.

“They’re going to take them back to the warehouse,” Tadziki said at last. “They’re Doormann Trading Company property, you realize?”

“Yes, of course,” the supervisor said. “Most of them. I’m familiar with the manifest, of course. Some of the serial numbers weren’t—but that’s not a serious matter. As I said, we had no intention of delaying you gentlemen needlessly. And the individuals’data were in order from your initial entry to Telaria.”

He paused. The inspectors under his direction waited on the concrete, murmuring among themselves and glancing at the battered black hull of the Swift.

Tadziki stared northward, toward Landfall City and the Doormann family estate beyond it. He blinked and looked at the supervisor again. “Eh?” Tadziki said. “Sorry, did you say something?”

“I notice,” the supervisor said, “that your men are still wearing their uniforms?”

“Well, what else do you expect them to wear?” the adjutant snapped. “This wasn’t exactly a pleasure cruise, you know, with twelve trunks for every passenger.”

He waved toward the rumpled disaster area which the vessel’s interior had become.

“Anyway,” he continued in a milder voice, “they aren’t uniform. Not here. They’re battledress from as many different units as there were men aboard. And if you mean the commo helmets—”

Tadziki gave the supervisor a wry grin

“—we’re used to using them, you know. I’ve downloaded routes and locations into the helmet files.”

The supervisor nodded. It was all perfectly reasonable, but he felt uncomfortable. This wasn’t a standard task. The pilot who was in charge while Tadziki made calls said that one of the Doormann family had cleared through a number of passengers without even registering them. Well, what could you do when your superiors wouldn’t let you do your job?

He shook himself back to the present. “I’m sorry, Master Tadziki,” he said. “We both have business to attend, I’m sure. I shouldn’t be wasting your time.”

“All I have to do,” Tadziki said, staring out of the hatch, “is to wait. But I’m not in a mood for company right now, that’s a fact.”

The supervisor stepped down the ramp. “Come on, all of you,” he ordered as his subordinates stiffened at his notice. “The Puritan landed half an hour ago with seven hundred passengers on board!”

The Swift’s adjutant had gone back inside. The supervisor didn’t know how the man stood it. The vessel made him extremely nervous.



“Look, I don’t know if I ought to be doing this,” Platt whined at the door to the basement laboratory.

“Will somebody please make a f*cking decision?” grated the foreman of the cargo handlers carrying the capsule. The load wasn’t exceptionally heavy for the four-man team, but the seedy-looking attendant was obviously capable of dithering for hours.

Carron Del Vore snapped his fingers. “What do you mean you don’t know, dog?” he demanded. “You’ve got orders from the chamberlain, haven’t you?”

“All I got,” the attendant said, “is somebody called and said she was the chamberlain. Look, I think you better bring me something in hard copy. I don’t know you from Adam and these guys, they don’t belong in the spire at all.”

Platt straightened. He fumblingly tried to return the electronic key to the belt case from which he’d taken it a moment before.

Carron looked at the cargo handlers. “Set that down,” he ordered. “On its base, and carefully. Then beat this creature unconscious and open the door.”

“No!” Platt bleated.

“Suits me,” said the foreman. The crew tilted the empty capsule to set it down as Carron ordered.

Though Platt spilled most of the contents of his case onto the floor, he managed to hold on to the key. He pressed it against the lockplate. The cargo handlers started for him an instant before the heavy door began to open.

“No!” Platt said, squeezing himself against the doorjamb and raising thin arms against the threatened blows.

“That’s enough,” Carron said to the foreman. “Carry the device to the platform at the other end of the room. I’ll show you exactly where it goes.”

The men sighed and lifted the capsule again. One of them spat on the attendant as they passed him.

“We’re going to be on overtime before we get back,” the foreman muttered. “And won’t Kardon tear a strip off me? As if I could do anything about the estate staff getting its finger out of its bum every curst door we had to get through.”

“Hey, did you see Kardon having to hold his pants up?” another handler said. “Whoo-ee, I’d have liked to see when that happened!”

The carefully positioned lights flooded the lab and everyone in it with their radiance. Carron watched nervously as the crew wound its way between benches and free-standing equipment. For all their nonchalance, the men didn’t bang the capsule into anything. Platt peered from the doorway, scowl ing and rubbing his shoulder as if he’d been punched.

“What is this place, anyway?” a man asked querulously.

“Don’t move the mirrors out of alignment!” Carron warned. The crew was edging its way to the dais. It wasn’t clear that it would be possible to put the capsule back without moving one of the pentagonal black mirrors that ringed the location.

“Don’t have kittens!” the foreman snapped. He paused, judging the relative shapes and sizes. “All right, Hoch, let go now.”

The man at the base of the capsule with the foreman obediently stepped away. The foreman eased forward, ducking his shoulder. By keeping the device low, he managed to dip it under the narrowest point and then raise it to clear the dais.

“There!” he announced with justifiable pride. He lowered the ring base, and his men lifted together to set the capsule upright.

“We’re not done yet,” Carron said sharply.

He switched on a measuring device from the kit he’d brought with him from Pancahte. It projected a hologram of the capsule taken at the moment Lendell Doormann vanished from Telaria for the next seventy years and compared the recording with present reality.

“There, you see?” Carron said. “The orange points are out of synchrony. Turn it clockwise ten degrees and move it a centimeter closer to the wall.”

Two of the cargo handlers moved to obey. The foreman waved them back. He viewed the image, then spread his arms around the capsule and himself began the minute adjustments.

Carron watched his measurement device tensely. The areas of orange slipped into the cooler end of the spectrum. “That’s far enough!” he cried as the foreman’s boot scraped the capsule the necessary distance toward the wall. “But keep turning, another degree.”

The foreman’s face was set. His mouth was open, and he watched the holographic display out of the corner of his eyes. The display wavered into the violet range then back toward indigo. He released the last pressure and stepped away, breathing hard. The main image was violet again.

“There!” he said.

The door of the capsule showed red to orange on the display. It had been closed when Lendell Doormann vanished. The foreman put his hand on the curved panel to swing it shut.

“No!” Carron cried, grabbing the man’s arm. “No, don’t do that! This is fine, this is perfect the way it is.”

The foreman shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. He stepped out between two mirrors. “You know,” he added, “this is a spooky place.”

“It is?” said Carron in puzzlement. “I wouldn’t have said so.”

The cargo handlers were sauntering back toward the door. “No, I don’t guess you would,” one of them muttered loud enough to be heard.

Carron walked out of the laboratory behind the crew. The lights cut off automatically. Platt shut the door, avoiding the eyes of the visitors.

Carron paused and looked at the attendant. “I have the phone number of your station,” he said. “You or someone else will be present at all times, is that not so?”

“Yeah, it’s f*cking so,” Platt muttered. “Unless somebody gets me up to dick around in the lab again, at least.”

“I may be calling soon,” Carron said. “You will regret it if you do not carry out to the letter any instructions I may give you.”

But the despicable little man would regret it even more if he did do as he was told. . . .



The boardroom of Doormann Trading Company was on the top level of the crystal spire in the center of the family estate. It was nearly an hour before the board readmitted Lucas to its presence. Ned had waited a further hour alone. He paced slowly around the broad walkway which served as an observation deck.

Two guards with submachine guns stood at the ornate bronze doors giving access to the boardroom. There were two more guards at the single elevator which opened onto the observation deck on the opposite side of the circuit. As a further security precaution, before entering the armored boardroom one had to walk all the way around it.

The two guards who’d come up with Lucas Doormann and Ned kept pace behind Ned now. They were bored, but not too bored to remain watchful.

The exterior of the spire was optically pure and had the same refractive index as Telaria’s atmosphere. Though the curved, fluted walls were at no point flat, they did not distort the view.

The view was breathtaking. The Doormann estate spread over hectares of rolling hills in every direction. Ned knew from his view out of the limousine that the surface in the frequent glades and bowers was as carefully manicured as that of the surrounding grassy areas.

Buildings in a mix of styles, mostly those of Terra’s classical and medieval eras, nestled in swales or sat on hillsides. None of the structures had more than two above-ground stories, though from the traffic in and out, some had extensive basements. The aggregate floorspace of the outbuildings probably totaled as much as that of the central spire, but the careful planners had succeeded in preserving the illusion of agrestic emptiness.

Machines and humans in drab uniforms worked like a stirred-up anthill to keep the grounds pristine. Ned noticed that when people in civilian clothes walked near or paused to view the formal gardens, maintenance personnel moved out of the area so as not to disturb them. Most of those who lived within the estate were the Doormanns’ servants and office staff, but even they had the status of minor nobility on Telaria.

One of the buildings on the grounds was the Doormann family chapel. Ned would learn where it was when he needed to; which would be very soon, unless his interview with Karel Doormann proceeded in an unexpectedly reasonable fashion.

The door to the boardroom opened with only the sigh of air and the faint trembling from the electromagnets which supported and moved the massive panel. Ned turned. Lucas Doormann walked out. “Master Slade,” he said, “the board is prepared to see you now.”

“Yes,” said Ned as he stepped forward. The entranceway was constructed on the model of an airlock. An iridium-sheathed panel closed the inner end whenever the main door was open. The designers had taken no chances with a guard going berserk and spraying the boardroom with his submachine gun.

The outer panel slid shut behind Ned and Lucas. Ned felt as if he were riding a monocycle at high speed across glare ice. At any moment he could lose his balance and go flying, and he had no control at all . . .

The inner door snicked upward with the speed of a microtome blade. It was time.

Eight men and three women faced Ned from around the oval central table. There was an empty place for Lucas, who remained at Ned’s side.

Karel Doormann was neither the oldest nor the most expensively dressed of the board members, but his dominance would have been obvious even had he not been seated at the head of the table. He watched Ned with the smile of a cat preparing to spring.

“Mesdames and sirs,” Ned said, taking off his commo helmet. His voice was clear and cool. He spoke as the peer of any of these folk. “I am here to tell you of a necessary deception. Lissea Doormann is alive on Dell, awaiting the outcome of this meeting.”

Karel Doormann’s smile broadened. His son made a startled sound. A heavyset man leaned close to the woman beside him to whisper, but both of them kept their eyes on Ned.

“I say ‘necessary,’” Ned continued, “because Lissea and yourselves have the same basic desire: to avoid trouble. Had she returned with the Swift, an underling might have taken actions that were not in the best interests of Doormann Trading, and which might have prejudiced chances of a beneficial outcome.”

“Go on, Master Slade,” Karel Doormann said. There was a catch in his voice between words, like the sound of a whisk on stone. “Explain what you consider a beneficial outcome.”

“Lissea,” Ned said, “Mistress Doormann. Has completed a task that we all know was thought to be impossible. The capsule which she has returned to Telaria has the potential of revolutionizing star travel—and with it the profits of Doormann Trading.”

The board members were silent, facing Ned like a pack of dogs about to move in. The table was black and shiny and slightly distorted on top. It had been made from a single slab of volcanic glass—useless as a working surface, but richly evocative of the power of the men and women who sat around it.

“I understand business, mesdames and sirs,” Ned said. “I understand politics. I don’t ask you to grant Lissea the place she demands out of justice or fairness or any of those other things which are quite properly excluded by the walls of this room.”

Lucas Doormann backed a step away. His father, still smiling, nodded to Ned. “Go on,” he said.

“What I put to you is this,” Ned continued. “Lissea Doormann has displayed the resourcefulness that will make her an invaluable member of this board, and at some future point a worthy leader of it.”

He waited, looking down the table at the board members.

“At some future point,” Karel Doormann repeated. “I believe our relative’s demand was for immediate chairmanship.”

He raised an eyebrow.

Ned nodded. “I said I understood politics,” he said. “I can’t sell what I wouldn’t buy, Master Doormann. In your place, I certainly wouldn’t buy that.”

Karel nodded approvingly. “You know, young man,” he said, “there could be a place for you in this organization if you cared to accept one. However.”

To this point, the president’s tone had been playful, cruelly humorous. Now it became as hard and dry as a windblown steppe.

“First,” he said, “this board has no confidence in the willingness of your principal to accept the terms you’re offering on her behalf. Your Lissea made it clear from the beginning that she wants everything. Her ability to control a band of murderous cutthroats does nothing to dispel our concerns about her future behavior.”

Some of the board members glanced at Karel in concern. The president was obviously no more interested in their opinions than he was in the opinions of the obsidian table.

“Second and, I’m afraid, finally, Master Slade,” Karel continued, “we expected some such trick as this. As soon as I learned the Swift had arrived via Dell, I sent—this board sent—a shipload of company security personnel to that planet. They will . . .”

He shrugged, then resumed, “I hate to say this, sir, but your public assertion that Lissea was dead was a bit of good fortune. It will help greatly to avoid future difficulties.”

“Father!” Lucas Doormann cried. He started around the table. “Father, you can’t think of this, of murder!”

Karel pointed a warning finger. “Lucas,” he said, “stop where you are. Otherwise I’ll face the embarrassment of seeing the automatic restraint system act on my offspring.”

Father and son glared at one another. Lucas turned and covered his face in his hands.

Karel looked at Ned and raised an eyebrow in prompting.

“Yes,” said Ned. “Master Doormann, I very much regret this.”

He reverted to at-ease posture with his hands behind him and went on. “Now, sir, what does the board intend for the rest of the crew and myself?”

“Your due,” Karel said calmly. “You’ve accomplished a difficult task for Doormann Trading. You’ll be paid according to your contracts, and there’ll be an added bonus for success.”

Karel pursed his lips as he chose his next words. “I can’t imagine that many of your fellows would care to remain on Telaria, nor will they be permitted to do so. Their passage will be paid to their planets of residence and, if they claim no residence, to their planets of origin. Deported, if you will, but certainly not wronged.”

He paused. “I will make an exception for you, Master Slade, if you choose.”

“No,” Ned replied curtly. Braced as he was, his eyes were focused on the wall above the president’s head. “I do not so choose.”

“I thought as much,” Karel said, “though you would have been welcome.”

The dry chill returned to his voice. “Let me make the matter very clear to you, Master Slade. This is a Telarian problem. We have no desire to offend you or the other members of your company, but you will not interfere in our affairs.”

He smiled again. “I know you’re intelligent enough to realize that without Lissea’s presence as a rallying point, there is no possibility of gathering a coalition to redress what—”

He paused

“—for the sake of argument we may describe as the ‘wrong’ done her. Some of your fellows may not be as sophisticated. I trust that you’ll be able to convince them not to . . . do themselves harm.”

Ned nodded. “I’ll do what I can,” he said tonelessly. He raised his commo helmet and settled it back on his head. “I believe we’ve said everything that needs to be said,” he went on. “With your leave, I’ll return to the Swift and gather my personal belongings.”

“As you choose,” said Karel, gesturing toward the doorway behind Ned.

“Lucas,” Ned said, “I would appreciate a few words with you outside.”

“Did you think I’d stay here?” Lucas snarled. He strode into the anteroom ahead of the mercenary. The stroke of the inner panel closing cut off sight of his father’s frown.

“I can’t believe this!” Lucas said as the main door opened.

“I can,” Ned said. For my sins, I can.

The commo helmet was set to the channel linking it with the Swift, and locked against all other parties. As Ned stepped out of the shielded boardroom, he faced south and broke squelch twice.



The alarm clanged through the Swift’s internal PA system.

Carron Del Vore was straightening the bunks on one side of the aisle. Unlike playing solitaire or staring at the ceiling, it gave him the illusion of accomplishment. He’d worked his way to the third pair, pulling the sheets tight and arranging the jumble of gear and tattered clothing in neat piles at the foot and head respectively. He jumped as if he’d been stabbed in the kidneys.

Tadziki sat at the backup navigational console, facing aft. He was as still as a leopard in ambush. Occasionally in the past twenty minutes he’d blinked his eyes; when the alarm sounded, he blinked them again.

“It’s time, then,” he said to Carron. “Make the call.”

“I think . . .” Carron said. He tried to lick his lips, but his tongue was dry also. “. . . that we ought to wait a, a few minutes.”

“No,” said Tadziki as he rose to his feet. “We shouldn’t. You can either use the console, or the handset—”

He indicated the unit flexed to his console. Its keypad permitted handier access to some planetary communications nets than the voice-driven AIs built into commo helmets did.

“—or a helmet, if you’d be comfortable with that. But it has to be done at once. Preset five.”

“Yes, I know it’s preset five,” Carron said. He flipped up the handset’s cover, held the unit to his ear to be sure of the connection, and pressed System/Five.

The Swift’s main hatch was open. Sounds of the spaceport rumbled through. At the graving dock nearby, polishing heads howled and paused, then howled again as they cleaned the hull of a freighter.

“I don’t like having to do this,” Carron said to Tadziki as circuits clicked in his ear. “I know it was my idea. But I don’t like it.”

“We aren’t required to like it,” the adjutant said, looking through the Pancahtan and into his own past life. “People depend on us, so we’ll do our jobs. Lissea depends on us.”

“I know . . .” Carron said.

The paired chimes of the ringing signal rattled silent. “Yeah?” a voice croaked. “Two-two-one, ah . . . F*ck. Two-two-one-four.”

“Platt,” Carron said imperiously, “this is Prince Carron Del Vore. You are to go into the laboratory at once and close the door of the device we brought in this afternoon.”

“What?” the attendant said. “What?”

“Close the door of the device so that it latches, but don’t slam it,” Carron said. “Otherwise the atmosphere will degrade the interior and cause irreparable harm. And don’t touch the mirrors surrounding the installation.”

“Look, this isn’t my job!” Platt cried. “I’m not even supposed to go into the lab—I’m just here to watch the door!”

“Platt,” Carron said, as implacable as a priest of the Inquisition, “I will arrive in a few minutes with mercenaries from the Pancahte Expedition. If you have not carried out my instructions to the letter, they will kill you. Hunt you down and kill you, if necessary. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, yeah, I understand,” the attendant whined. “Look, I’m doing it, I’m doing it right now. But I shouldn’t have to, you see?”

Platt broke the connection.

Carron sighed and closed the handset. “The man’s scum,” he said to Tadziki. “But there must be thousands of people in the building now. We don’t have anything so large on Pancahte. So tall, at least. Because of the earthquakes.”

Tadziki eased past the younger man and stood in the hatch, looking outward.

“What happens now?” Carron asked. He hadn’t been part of the tactical planning from this point on.

“We wait,” Tadziki said. “I wait, at least. You might want to get out of the way, hide somewhere in Landfall City. I can arrange credit for you if you don’t have any of your own.”

Carron stood beside the adjutant. An articulated three-section roadtrain clanked slowly by on steel treads, carrying heavy cargo. Tadziki was looking beyond it, and beyond anything visible.

“You think there’s going to be trouble here, then?” Carron asked.

“There’s going to be a great deal of confusion,” Tadziki said. “If the state organization is good enough, there will certainly be police sent to arrest everyone aboard the Swift. I don’t expect that. There’s a far greater chance of rioters attacking, however.”

He smiled wanly at Carron. “Some of the men—men from the ship’s crew—didn’t choose to be involved further. They’ll stay low in their hotel room until the business is done. The combat personnel are where they need to be also. And I’m here, because the potential need for a command post is greater than the risk.”

Tadziki’s hand gripped the hatch coaming so hard that the veins stood out. His skin blotched white and red because the tense muscles cut off their own blood supply.

“I wouldn’t be much good to Herne and the others,” he said harshly toward Landfall City. “I’m a fat old man, and I could never hit anybody far enough away that his blood didn’t splash me.”

Carron looked at Tadziki and swallowed. “Yes,” he said. “Well, I think I’ll stay here too.”

Dockyard machinery screamed like lost souls.



The limousine was parked in front of the building. It was unattended because both the security personnel from the vehicle were escorting Ned.

There were two similar cars whose driver/bodyguards were still present. Most of the board members would have come to the meeting via underground tramlines from their private residences within the estate rather than being driven.

The guards opened both doors of the limo’s passenger compartment deferentially. The Telarian noble paused and said to Ned, “Did you really want to speak to me, or . . .”

Ned nodded. “Could we drive slowly around the estate for a moment?” he asked. “Back trails?”

“Yes, of course,” Lucas said. He gestured to the man holding his door, the driver. “Go on, then.”

Lucas looked drawn. People on the stone-flagged patio fronting the spire watched the tableau sidelong. The armed, uniformed attendants in front of the building were the only ones who felt they could openly stare at the folk who rode in limousines; and that only while Lucas and Ned stepped through the weapons detector that covered the entranceway.

Ned and Lucas got into the car from opposite sides. As soon as the doors thunked closed, Ned retrieved the needle stunner he’d hidden between the seat cushions during the ride from the spaceport. His body concealed what he was doing from his companion.

“Master Lucas,” he said, “I don’t like what’s going to happen now—”

“You know this is none of my doing!” Lucas burst out. “I—I’ll leave home, I won’t stay on Telaria even, not after this. But it’s already done, Slade. There’s nothing I can do now!”

The guards closed themselves into the front with the same solid shocks as those the rear doors had made. Ned’s view forward ignored the guards. The limousine pulled away silently, heading down a curving drive.

“I know that, Lucas,” Ned said. “That’s why I wanted you out of the building. You’re not the only innocent person, I realize, but you’re the only one I know personally.”

“I don’t understand,” the Telarian said. He frowned as he tried to fit the mercenary’s statement into a knowledge base which had no category for it.

Secondary trails within the estate were only wide enough for one car at a time, so there were pull-overs every half kilometer or so. The limo approached one of them. A bank of red and white flowers grew on the left side, with a bower of trees with long flexible tendrils in place of leaves on the right. There were no other persons or vehicles in sight.

“Just a moment,” said Ned. He reached forward with his left index finger and touched the switch controlling the armored window between the front and rear compartments.

The driver started slightly at the sound. The guard broke off a comment about the soccer final and twisted to face the men in back. “Yes sir?” he said to Lucas.

“Would you please park here a moment?” Ned said.

Lucas nodded. “Yes, do that,” he said. He looked disconcerted. “There’s an intercom, you know,” he added as the limousine pulled beneath the trees.

Ned shot the guard, then the driver, in the back of the neck with his stunner. The weapon clicked as its barrel coil snapped tiny needles out by electromagnetic repulsion.

The guard went into spastic convulsions while the fluctuating current passed between the opposite poles of the needle in his spine. The driver arched his back and became comatose. His foot slipped off the brake, but the limousine’s mass held the vehicle steady against the idling motors.

Lucas screamed and slapped the door latch. Ned grabbed Lucas around the neck left-handed but didn’t squeeze.

“Wait!” Ned shouted. “They’ll be all right! Don’t make me hurt you.”

The door was ajar. Ned slid sideways, pushing Lucas ahead of him from the vehicle. He continued to hold the Telarian for fear the fool would try to run and he’d have to shoot him down. Needle stunners could do permanent nerve damage or even cause death through syncope. If Ned had wanted that, he’d have left the boy in the boardroom with his relatives.

“What are you doing?” Lucas gasped. “You can’t get out of here, you know that! Am I a hostage?”

Ned opened the driver’s door with the little finger of his right hand. The driver fell to the pavement in catatonic rigidity. His submachine gun and that of his fellow still stood muzzle-up in their boots on the central console.

“You’re not a hostage,” Ned said. At any moment, somebody might drive up and he’d have to kill them. “Look, this car has an autopilot, doesn’t it? Program it to drive to the family chapel.”

“But—”

“Now, curse you, now!” Ned said. He thrust Lucas’ head and torso within the driver’s compartment. He was bigger than the Telarian and stronger for his size, but it was the sheer violence of Ned’s will that dominated Lucas utterly. The presence of the submachine guns within millimeters of Lucas’ hands was no danger.

The Telarian called up a map on the dashboard screen. He touched a point on it without bothering to check the index of coordinates. The mechanism chimed obediently.

The guard thrashed again, then subsided. He’d lost control of his sphincter muscles, voiding his bladder and bowels. Lucas stared at the man in obvious terror.

Lucas withdrew from the car. “You can’t get off-planet in your ship,” he said to Ned. “The port defenses will destroy it before you’re a thousand meters high. And even if you got to Dell, it’s too late for Lissea—you heard my father!”

“Listen to me,” Ned said. “If you’re smart, you’ll just lie low here for the next while. I don’t care what you do, I don’t care if you raise an alarm—it won’t change anything now. But for your own sake, don’t go back to the spire.”

Ned got into the limo. He dropped the stunner into his pocket—waste not, want not—and charged one of the submachine guns. He looked again at Lucas, still standing frozen above the uniformed driver. “You’ve been as decent as you know how, Doormann,” Ned said. “I wish it didn’t have to happen this way.”

He engaged the autopilot. The dash beeped at him chidingly: the rear door was open.

Ned crushed his boot down on the throttle pedal. The limousine’s metal tires sang, chewing divots from the rubberized road material as they accelerated the heavy vehicle. Inertia slammed the door shut.

Ned lifted his foot and let the car drive itself as he checked the other submachine gun. Lucas stood in the center of the road, staring after the limousine until a curve took the vehicle out of sight.



Platt muttered to himself as he opened the laboratory door. He forgot to squint as he stepped inside, so the sudden harsh illumination slapped his eyes. The fog of fortified wine in his brain ignited in a fireball that made him curse desperately.

After a time, Platt regained enough composure to pick his way through the ranks of equipment with his eyes slitted. There was an unfamiliar humming in the big room, but he couldn’t identify the source. Anyway, it might have been the wine.

The capsule squatted on the platform at the end of the lab, as ugly as an egg after hatching. Pareto, the night man, claimed there was a corpse in the thing when they found it, but Platt didn’t watch the news himself much.

He didn’t trust that bastard Pareto, either. Pareto kept asking for the lousy ten thalers he’d loaned Platt last . . . last—whenever it was.

Platt lurched into one of the mirror stands. It was anchored to the floor. Instead of toppling over, the stand threw the attendant back with the start of a bad bruise. He cursed again, rubbing himself and thinking about the unfairness of life.

The black concave mirror whined shrilly, then slowly returned to synchrony with the others.

Platt touched the door of the capsule, then leaped away. He thought he’d received an electric shock. When he rubbed his fingertips together, he realized that the feeling was simply high-frequency vibration.

Gingerly, he gripped the edge of the door and slammed it with all his strength. Air compressing within the ovoid prevented the clang! from being as violent as Platt would have liked.

The humming was louder. It appeared to be coming from around the capsule, rather than from the capsule itself. The attendant turned away and started for the door.

Red light bathed the room. Platt glanced over his shoulder, suddenly afraid to face fully around.

The capsule was glowing. Atoms within its structure were coming into sequence with their selves of seventy years before. The meld was not absolute, but as more and more points achieved unity, they dragged neighboring atoms into self-alignment also. Closing the front of the ovoid started the mass down a one-way road to critical perfection.

The capsule was fire-orange, then yellow. As the blaze verged into white, all trace of physical structure was lost within the radiance.

Platt tried to run. His uniform seared brown and the hair on the back of his head burst into flame. The hum was a roar and the fires of Hell were loose.

All the lights in the laboratory shattered, but their absence was unnoticeable. Platt threw himself behind a massive computer console, unable to hear his own screams. The soundproofing cones in the walls and ceiling sublimed and drifted as black cobwebs in fierce air currents.

Matter attempting to fill the same space as its own earlier/later self became the energy that alone could escape from the catastrophic paradox. Laboratory equipment shattered. Metals and plastics began to burn in temperatures beyond those achieved in the carbon-iron cycle of a dying sun.

Devouring radiance ionized the whole contents of the laboratory into plasma. A spear of light sprang up the long axis of what had been the capsule, piercing the armored ceiling above like an oxygen lance through tissue.

The humans on the floor above didn’t have time to scream, nor did those on the floor above them; but the fire screamed like a god of destruction.



A switch on the dashboard could lock the tracks of the mobile crane into linked plates fifty centimeters long to lower the equipment’s ground pressure on yielding surfaces. For this concrete roadway Westerbeke, who was driving, left the tracks at maximum flexibility. They sang at high frequency, giving the impression that the 80-tonne crane was moving much faster than its actual forty kilometers per hour.

A car that had been trapped behind the crane for some time managed to get into the center lane. It passed with its horn hooting angrily. Josie Paetz leaned out of the crane operator’s cab and screamed, “F*ck you! Just f*ck you!” to the vehicle.

Yazov drew him back. The boy had kept his guns hidden, so there was no harm done. “Let him be, Jose,” Yazov said. “We’ll have something real to do soon enough.”

“Amen to that,” Deke Warson said. His fingertips caressed a submachine gun beneath the tarp beside him on the crane’s back deck. The big construction vehicle was taller than the other traffic, but guards on the wall surrounding the Doormann Estate could still look down on it. For the moment, the guards had nothing better to do.

Raff and Herne Lordling were in the driver’s cab with Westerbeke. The rest of the mercenary crew rode on the back of the vehicle. They wore ponchos to conceal their battledress, body armor, and slung weapons.

The team was in position: the crane had been driving along the innermost lane of the highway paralleling the walled estate for the past five kilometers. Until the signal, the merce naries could only gaze at the wall and the twenty-meter band of wired and mined wasteland protecting the Doormann family’s privacy. Occasionally a blue-uniformed guard watched idly from the wall.

Every half kilometer stood another tower mounting a huge anti-starship weapon.

“When are we—” Josie Paetz said.

Something within the estate flashed brightly enough to be seen in the full sunlight.

“Got it!” Josie Paetz screamed, ripping off his poncho. Yazov clutched him. A moment later, Lordling ordered through the commo helmets, “Don’t anybody move! We’ve got to get closer to the gun tower before we move!”

“Then get f*cking moving,” Deke Warson whispered through clenched teeth. Toll looked at him, but Deke was just letting off a touch of the pressure building in the instants before insertion.

When the column of light bloomed within the estate, the crane was nearly midway between a pair of the towers mounting 25-cm weapons. As the treads whined forward, the tower behind the mercenaries dropped out of sight because of the wall’s curvature.

A pair of company guards, visible from the waist up, stood on the firing step of the wall outside the approaching tower. They were four meters above the road surface and across the buffer strip. The light from within the estate had broadened into a ball of iridescent rose-petals. The guards, a man and a woman, must have heard a sound inaudible over the singing chatter of the crane’s treads, because they turned.

Westerbeke slipped the right-hand set of steering clutches but kept full power to the left track. The crane squealed and executed a right turn, heading directly toward the gun tower.

Westerbeke locked the track plates when he felt soil shift under the crane’s weight. A series of antipersonnel mines went off harmlessly beneath the treads, whacking like a string of firecrackers. Dirt and black smoke flew out.

The guards on the wall spun back at the sound of the mines and the clanging treads. At least six of the mercenaries fired simultaneously, blowing the guards’ heads and torsos apart in cyan fury.

An antivehicle mine containing at least ten kilos of high explosive went off under the left-hand tread. The track broke and the forward road wheel flew skyward. The men on the rear deck had to grab for handholds when the cab lifted, but Westerbeke kept the crane grinding onward.

The drive sprockets were at the rear. The vehicle held a nearly straight line, though one broken end of the track remained where it was on the ground. The wheels rode off it. Festoons of razor ribbon and vines streamed back from the running gear.

The huge powergun started to depress. The weapon couldn’t be aimed low enough to bear on a vehicle already at the base of the tower, and the next gun position in either direction was out of sight. A guard ran from the building, tugging at his holster. Both Warson and Josie Paetz shot the fellow before his hand was fully around the butt of his pistol. The body, headless and eviscerated by the bolts, spun off the firing step like the others.

The crane hit two more big mines, both on the right. The vehicle tilted sideways, then settled back upright on its shattered road-wheels. Westerbeke disengaged the drive train.

Yazov clutched in the crane itself. The vehicle had come close enough that the end of its boom already projected above the wall. Yazov lowered the boom until it—a massive square-section girder—rested on the masonry. He shouted after his nephew, but Paetz was already racing up the boom ahead of the rest of the mercenaries.

The armored hatch in the side of the gun tower was open. A woman in blue was trying to tug it closed. Paetz fired toward the gap as he ran along the girder. His submachine gun put two bolts of the three-round burst into her head.

Paetz jumped to the parapet, then caromed within the tower structure as part of the same motion. A man crouched at a console with a microphone in one hand and a pistol in the other. Paetz fired, and Toll Warson fired his 2-cm weapon from the boom. The Telarian guard’s right arm flew from his torso.

Warson’s shot singed the hair from the back of Paetz’ neck, but it probably saved the younger man’s life as well. Even head shots with the submachine gun’s lighter bolts might not have been instantly fatal.

A circular metal staircase with an open railing of tubes led up to the gunhouse. A guard hesitated on it, halfway through the opening to the upper chamber.

Paetz emptied the rest of the submachine gun’s magazine into the man, igniting his clothing and blowing chunks of the stairway into dazzling sparks. The Telarian slipped down the treads, howling mindlessly and dragging a pink trail of intestine.

The room stank of ozone and burned meat. Paetz ejected the empty magazine and slapped a fresh one home in the well. Toll Warson swept past, aiming his powergun upward but letting his brother lead. Deke carried a submachine gun, and the lighter weapon would be quicker to swing onto targets from uncertain directions. They leaped the dying guard and pounded up the stairs.

There was no one in the gun chamber. Identical chairs and consoles sat right and left of the gun’s breech and loading mechanism. They and the weapon rotated together with the floor of the chamber.

Screens above either console provided a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama from the gun tower. Fine orange crosshatching covered the portion of the display showing the estate proper. Lockouts within the control system prevented the gun crew from accidentally aiming their weapon toward the area they were defending.

“We’re clear here!” Toll Warson shouted down into the lower chamber. “We’ll take care of the rest!”

Deke’s miniature toolkit lay on the barbette floor beside him. He’d already removed the plate covering the front of one console.

The screen above Deke showed the spouting geyser of plasma which was devouring the estate’s central tower, but he ignored it. He had work to do.



“Look at that!” Westerbeke said as he—last of the mercenaries to leave the mobile crane—jumped down to the wall’s fir ing step. “Look at it!”

The clear exterior sheath of the office spire crumbled away, dropping in bits like snowflakes toward the mist of charged ions at the base of the building. The floors and the central sup port column containing the elevator and utility conduits looked like the remains of a fish after filleting.

The remnant was beginning to waver. Distance silenced the screams of humans who shook from the edges of the structure. Bits of furnishings and partition walls fell with them.

Cars on the six-lane highway slowed and pulled off on the median. Civilians were stopping to watch what they thought was a major accident. Harlow and Coyne eyed the scene. Together they raised their 2-cm weapons and opened fire, raking the soft-skinned vehicles.

Most Telarian cars used ion-transfer membranes to power hub-center electric motors. The fuel cells ruptured in balls of pale hydrogen flame which quickly involved upholstery and plastic body panels.

Survivors ran screaming, some into the path of oncoming vehicles. A tanker of petroleum-based sealant exploded into a huge orange mushroom, raining fire across the entire highway.

Coyne and Harlow crouched on the firing step to reload, then dropped to the mown sward within the estate to join their fellows.

“What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” Herne Lordling grumbled.

Harlow grinned. “Just giving the cops something to worry about besides us,” he said. “And having a little fun.”

A one-lane road ran parallel to the boundary wall, separated by a few meters of grass. At one end it dipped over a hill in a profusion of pink and blue flowers. The moan of a loud klaxon swelled from that direction.

Ten of the mercenaries poised. Lordling gave Paetz and Yazov a two-fingered gesture to watch the wall behind them: guards might approach along the firing step from the neighboring towers.

Westerbeke remained kneeling as he scrolled through the map display on the inner surface of his visor. The team had known neither its destination nor the point at which it would enter the estate, since the latter depended on when the spire’s destruction gave them the signal to come over the wall. Westerbeke carried a pistol and a submachine gun, but his prime value in this company wasn’t his marksmanship.

A three-wheeler carrying two guards and a tribarrel came over the rise at ninety kilometers per hour. Cyan bolts blew the Telarians out of their saddles before they had an inkling of the emergency they’d been summoned to deal with.

The trike lifted and was fully airborne when Raff put a rocket into the center of it. The little vehicle disintegrated in black smoke and bits of metal. Its klaxon cut off with a startled croak.

“Why’d you do that?!” Josie Paetz screamed at Raff. “D’ye want to f*cking walk?”

“Paetz, watch your—” Herne Lordling began.

A second trike, running silent twenty meters behind the first, squealed and fishtailed as its driver broke the single rear tire loose in trying to stop. The gunner was desperately swinging his tribarrel toward the wall, but he didn’t have a target when Paetz’ one-handed burst killed him and his partner.

The three-wheeler twisted broadside and flipped at least a dozen times before it came to rest a hundred and fifty meters down the road. The riders, two of the three wheels, and shards of the instrument console lay scattered at angles to the main track.

“Blood and martyrs!” Ingried said in amazement.

“Shall we ride yours, then?” Raff said to Josie Paetz. “But good shooting, very good.”

A half-tracked water tanker, marked Fire and painted red with white stripes, rumbled into sight behind the wrecked three-wheelers. The four-man crew wore fire-retardant suits and helmets with neck flares as protection from falling debris. The driver and one crewman bailed out on the far side of the vehicle.

The truck coasted to a halt. The other man in the cab crawled out the driver’s door, but one of the firefighters on the tailboard actually started paying out a hand-line toward the burning wreckage of a trike. When he saw eleven mercenaries in motley battledress running toward him, jingling with weapons, he froze.

None of the mercenaries fired. They jumped aboard the truck, clinging to the handholds above the tailboard and climbing on top of the four-kiloliter watertank.

Westerbeke got behind the wheel and drove the vehicle off. Paetz fired another one-hand burst at the pair of people he glimpsed at the edge of a grove two hundred meters away. They were grounds-maintenance personnel. He killed them both.

The firefighter standing by the road watched his hand-line jounce behind the disappearing truck like a thin white tail.



The limousine brought itself to a perfectly calibrated stop before a gray stone building, Gothic in styling but only seven meters high to its peak over the rose window. A black van, built on the body of a luxury car and polished to a soft gleam, was parked around to the side.

A number of civilians stood in front of the chapel, looking in the direction of what had been the central spire. They were all well dressed—not menials. One of them, a woman, wore clerical robes and collar. They stared in amazement as Ned, in tattered battledress and carrying a pair of submachine guns—one slung, the other in his hands—got out on the driver’s side.

Ned’s legs were shaky. “Where’s Lendell’s body?” he demanded in a high-pitched shout. “Where’s the coffin?”

Klaxons rose and fell from several places within the Doormann estate. The unsynchronized moans were further distorted by Doppler effect as emergency vehicles sped through the growing chaos.

“Sir?” said the woman in clerical dress. “Sir? Who are you?”

A terrible sound drew Ned’s head around despite his focus on the task at hand. The spire had begun to collapse. Because of the building’s size, the process went on for more than thirty seconds. It seemed to take minutes.

The release of energy in the sub-basement laboratory had finally dissolved the concrete spine from which the upper floors were cantilevered. A cloud of plasma enveloped the lower hundred meters of the building. Now the upper portion of the structure sank slightly and began to tilt like a top at the end of its rotary motion.

Figures jumped or fell from the visible floors. They disappeared in the boiling ions beneath.

The spine plunged downward at an angle. Stress broke the upper levels apart while the lower portion of the huge structure simply crumbled in a disintegrating bath. The building dropped out of sight a moment before it hit the ground.

Seconds after the impact, dust and smoke sprang skyward in a great, flat-topped pillar that hid and smothered the sea of ions. The crash took ten seconds to arrive at the chapel. It went on for at least that long.

A man in the quiet black garb of an undertaker stared at the destruction. His legs folded beneath him. He knelt and began to pray, moving his lips, as tears rolled down his cheeks.

“The coffin!” Ned snarled. No one looked at him. He ran into the chapel. The swinging butt of one weapon knocked a splinter from the dark wood of the door panel.

The chapel was quiet. There were three closed pews in front for members of the Doormann family and six open rows behind for their retainers. Light streamed through stained-glass windows illustrating Old Testament scenes. The building was bowered in trees. The light—equal to north, south, and through the east-facing rose window over the door—was artificial.

A pair of folding trestles waited before the altar, but the coffin wasn’t on them yet. The small door to the side behind the pulpit was open. Ned pushed through it.

He was in what would normally be a changing and storage room for the chapel staff. To the right was a staircase leading up to the choir loft. On the floor, Lendell Doormann grinned from the clear-topped casket the Swift’s crew had built on Wasatch 1029 and rebuilt on Dell. Beside the plastic box was a traditional coffin of dark, lustrously rubbed hardwood.

Ned stepped to the casket, looking around for a tool. The female cleric walked into the room. “Sir!” she cried. “You must leave at once!” Two of the undertaker’s assistants stood in the doorway behind her, looking doubtful.

The woman grabbed Ned’s arm. He pushed her away. A heavy screwdriver lay on the floor beside the coffin. He bent to pick it up.

“Sir!” the woman shouted. “I’m the Dean of Chapel! What are you doing?”

One of the assistants stepped forward with a set expression on his face. Ned dropped the screwdriver to point his submachine gun.

“Get out, you f*ckheads!” he screamed. “Do I have to kill you? Get out!”

The dean got to her feet. “Sir,” she said in a trembling voice, “this is sacrilege. You must leave here—”

She extended her hand. Ned took up the slack with his trigger-finger, then raised the muzzle and put a single bolt into the ceiling.

Shattered plaster exploded across the room. The undertaker’s assistant grabbed the dean from behind. He dragged her back into the nave as the other assistant jumped out of the way. The three of them were gabbling unintelligibly.

Ned tried to sling the weapon he’d just fired. It clanked against the other submachine gun. He swore and dropped the gun beside him on the floor.

The plastic casket was welded smoothly all around the top. Ned set the screwdriver blade against the seam and slammed the butt of the tool with the heel of his right hand. The blade scrunched in, but only a few centimeters of the weld on either side broke.

A klaxon howled to a halt in front of the chapel. Voices shouted to one another. Ned stretched out his foot and kicked the door shut as he levered the lid upward. More of the weld broke, but the transparent sheet Tadziki had used for the lid was too flexible either to lift away or shatter the way Ned wanted it to do.

He stepped back and brought his boot up hard, smashing his heel into the juncture just beyond where he’d managed to crack the bead. The gray sidepanel broke apart, tags of it still clinging to the clear top.

Ned grabbed the slung submachine gun and aimed toward the doorway. The door flew open. Two security guards burst in, one of them rolling in some desperate vision of how to enter a room safely against an armed man.

Their pistols were drawn. The rolling man fired into the wooden coffin as his partner shot a robe hanging on a peg in the far corner.

Ned hit the standing man twice in the upper chest. The guard’s pistol flew out of his hand. His body fell, its legs tangled with those of the man on the floor. Ned fired a long burst into both guards.

Somebody in the nave screamed.

The guards’ uniforms only smoldered, but the hanging robe managed to sustain a low, acrid flame. Smoke and ozone made Ned’s eyes water. He stepped over the casket and laid the gun he’d just fired across its top.

The broken sidepanel permitted a two-hand grip on the lid. Ned pulled upward and back with all his strength, ripping the seam apart and flinging the submachine gun against the wall behind him.

Lendell Doormann lay now on his side, disturbed by the violence with which Ned had opened the casket. Ned rolled the body out. It was as light as a foam mannequin. He pulled up the layer of red baize from the stock of trade goods on Dell.

Lissea lay beneath the baize. Her eyes were closed, and her chest did not move.

Ned fumbled an injector out of his belt wallet. Klaxons outside the building were suddenly much louder: the chapel’s outer door had opened. He reached over the casket for the gun with which he’d fired the shot into the ceiling. The limo’s driver and guard had carried only four spare magazines between them, so he had to watch his ammo expenditure.

Ned aimed the submachine gun at the door with his right hand. Holding the injector against his left palm, he let his fingertips trail along Lissea’s shoulder to the skin at the base of her throat. He squeezed down with his thumb, breaking the seal and triggering the injector.

Three Doormann security personnel rushed the door. They wore back-and-breast armor and helmets with faceshields.

Ned knelt behind the casket and blazed the twenty-nine rounds remaining in his magazine into the trio. The tightly grouped bolts chopped the guards apart in thunder and blue glare despite their armor. The Telarians were firing their submachine guns also, but wildly. The third guard shot the woman in front of him several times in the back before Ned killed him.

Ned groped behind him for the other gun he’d brought from the limo. The air was gray and his lungs burned. He supposed that was because of the flames and powergun residues, but maybe the security people had thrown tear gas at him.

Perhaps they hadn’t used frag grenades because the body of a Doormann was in the room, but it was equally likely that such equipment wasn’t an item of issue for security personnel. They were guards, after all, not combat troops.

Lissea groped at the edge of the casket.

Ned reached beneath Lissea’s shoulders with his left arm and lifted her upright. Like her great-granduncle, she seemed almost weightless to Ned’s adrenaline-fueled muscles.

“Oh Lord!” Ned gasped. “You’re all right! Are you all right?”

Lissea clutched him. “I think you’re supposed to kiss me, aren’t you, prince?” she murmured.

Effects of the drug and its antidote suddenly washed her face saffron. She leaned out of the coffin and vomited the bile which was the sole content of her stomach.

Pews scraped in the nave. The door between the rooms was ajar. Ned took a chance. He got to his feet and stepped to the hinge side of the inward-opening door.

A whistle blew. Ned reached around the door left-handed and fired a short burst into the nave. Then he put his shoulder and full strength against the panel to slam it shut. A dead guard’s foot was in the way. Ned kicked it free, then banged the panel against the jamb.

Bolts from the nave hit the panel, but the wood was heavy and the chapel’s architect had added metal straps for the look of it. The security forces carried 1-cm pistols and submachine guns. If a few of them had been issued projectile weapons or even 2-cm powerguns, they’d have blasted through the door and the man behind it; but they weren’t expected to fight a full-scale war.

They shouldn’t have f*cked with Lissea Doormann, then. . . .

“Ned!” Lissea screamed.

Smoke and haze swirled as security personnel outside the building jerked open a door that Ned hadn’t noticed because the burning clerical robe hung beside it. The man lunging in hosed the room with his submachine gun, firing blind because his eyes werenadapted to the smudgy atmosphere.

Ned tried to swing his weapon, but the target was on his left and the submachine gun was still in his left hand. The guard’s line of bolts snapped toward him across the partition wall, chest-high.

Two cyan flashes lit the Telarian’s faceshield, spraying a mist of vaporized plastic into the man’s eyes. His hands flew upward.

Ned shot the guard in the throat and, as the Telarian toppled backward, sprayed the doorway and the further guards clus tered there. They fell or scattered. He knelt and replaced his magazine, though there were still a few rounds in the one he dropped into his pocket.

Lissea climbed out of the casket, holding the pistol she’d scooped from the floor where a dying guard flung it. “Stairs!” she cried. “There’s stairs behind you!”

“Go!” said Ned. He saw movement through the open doorway and shot, aiming crotch-high in case the guard was in body armor. Return fire chewed the door panel and jamb, but none of the security people outside were willing to rush the scene of sudden carnage again.

Lissea ran to the stairs, bending over as if she were in driving rain. She hesitated once, to tug a submachine gun out of the hands of a fallen guard. His fingers twitched mindlessly for the missing weapon.

Ned backed after her. The hisscrack! of bolts wove fiery nets across the changing room. Bits of stone exploded from the walls like shrapnel, stinging and even drawing blood. The door to the nave exploded in a welter of splinters and cyan as a dozen Telarians opened fire on it together.

More klaxons sounded outside the chapel. Many more klaxons.



The firetruck slowed. “Hold your fire,” Herne Lordling ordered. “I’m not going to commit till I know what we’re getting into.”

“Who died and made him God?” Josie Paetz muttered, but the three tense veterans on the tailboard with him were nodding grim agreement to Lordling’s words.

There was heavy firing to the front of them, small arms and at least one tribarrel; no high explosive. Rushing into a doubtful situation was a good way to get killed. It wasn’t a good way to accomplish anything useful, either, and staying alive was a higher priority of most of the Swift’s complement than a grand gesture was. They’d lived to become veterans, after all.

The truck plowed through a bed of white-flowering bushes. The bluff cab crushed the shrubs down, and the tracks supporting the rear of the vehicle chewed up foliage and spat it out behind.

The firetruck hadn’t attracted dangerous attention in the midst of so much violence and confusion. Westerbeke was driving a straight vector to the rendezvous point. He didn’t want to take chances with a road net designed for scenic vistas rather than high-speed communication.

As a sensible security precaution, there were no openly available maps of the Doormann estate. The team didn’t have time or the proper equipment to break into the estate’s data base now.

Besides, the data base had probably been housed in the central spire.

In the cab, Lordling called up a chart of recent powergun discharges onto his visor display. The weapons’ bursts of ionized copper atoms threw high spikes into the radio-frequency bands. The energy of each discharge was closely uniform within classes of weapon, permitting easy correlation between signal strength and range. Though the sensors built into a commo helmet were rudimentary in comparison to those of dedicated packs, they gave Lordling a fair schematic of the fighting half a klick ahead of the firetruck.

Shots had been fired from thirty-one points during the past five minutes, though some of the locations might have been alternate firing positions for a single weapon. Most of the points formed a pair of inwardly concave arcs a hundred meters apart. A gun or guns were also being fired frequently from the point squarely at the center of the common radii.

“Set your helmets to receive,” Lordling ordered. “Now!”

Copies of the display Lordling had summoned echoed on the visors of his team, then vanished. The men could recall it from their helmets’ data storage if needed.

“Yazov,” Lordling continued, “take four men and jump off in thirty seconds. Leg it into position. Don’t start shooting until I give the signal from the other side. And don’t forget, they may be getting reinforcements so you need to watch your back. Clear?”

“Worry about your end, Herne,” Yazov said. “I’ll take care of mine. Harlow, Coyne . . . Hatton, I suppose.” He didn’t bother naming his nephew to the team he would lead. “Execute—now!”

The five men stepped off the truck’s tailboard at the edge of a glade. The trees were forty meters high and waved brilliant streamers into the air to attract winged pollinators. The team quickly melted into the manicured shadows among the trunks.

The firetruck made a sharp turn in order to curve around the firefight. It growled out of sight.

Using hand signals, Yazov sent Harlow and Coyne out on the flanks. He didn’t especially trust Hatton, an engine-room crewman, but he supposed the fellow would be all right if they kept an eye on him.

The fire team moved through the glade in line abreast, with a five-meter interval between troopers. Birds twittered invisibly, but the only sign of human beings was a woman’s shoe caught in a branch high overhead. It looked badly weathered.

The estate was enormous, and the people working in it were concentrated in a relatively few nodes. With all that was going on, there shouldn’t be many strollers out, either.

On the far side of the glade was a narrow path. It appeared to be made of brick laid in a herringbone pattern, but it had a rubbery resilience underfoot. They trotted across it.

The path was bordered by waist-high clumps of pink and magenta flowers, interspersed with saw-edged grasses that shot tufts up six or seven meters tall. Yazov had fought in vegetation like that before. He couldn’t imagine anybody having the stuff around if he employed gardeners—or owned a flamethrower.

“Yase, the shooting’s died down,” Josie called. “What do you think that’s because?”

Yazov signaled his nephew angrily to shut up. The kid was good, no question; but he hadn’t lived long enough to have good sense. Well, that was why Josh Paetz had sent his bastard brother Yazov along with Josie.

They’d come to a two-meter hedge growing along a low stone curb. Yazov signaled Josie to watch their backs: they didn’t need a squad of locals jumping them from behind. The rest of the team flattened behind the curb and peered through the scaly lower branches of the hedge.

They were looking into a rectangular garden, fifty meters by one hundred. Walkways from corner to corner and down the long axis met at a stone fountain of four stacked bowls in the middle. Each quadrant had at its center a tree sculpted into a slim green spindle. The trees and stone benches scattered among artistically ragged plantings made it impossible to see everything within the garden from one point, and perhaps even from four points.

Yazov’s team was arrayed on a long side of the garden. Within the rectangle and facing in the same direction along the parallel hedge on the far side were eighteen or twenty Doormann security personnel.

The guards had a three-wheeler. They’d parked the vehicle so that a large marble urn gave it a modicum of protection, but no one was crewing the pintle-mounted tribarrel at the moment. Instead, several Telarians crouched behind the trike, muttering over a casualty sprawled in a bed of variegated flowers.

The hedge had sere yellow scars where powergun bolts had pocked it. Portions of the foliage still smoldered. The large scallop which outgoing bolts from the tribarrel had cut was twenty meters from the trike’s present position.

Other guards lay tensely prone, well back from the hedge so as not to draw fire. The fighting certainly wasn’t over, but no one was shooting at the moment.

The hedge was thorny and impenetrable, at least to anything short of a bulldozer or some minutes’ work with a cutting bar. There were arched bowers at each corner, however, giving access to the garden. The terrain on Yazov’s side of the barrier was flat, with regular beds of knee-high flowers. They didn’t provide any cover, but they were decent concealment.

Yazov keyed his commo helmet. “Harlow and Coyne, opposite corners,” he ordered. “Wait for it. Paetz and I’ll drive them to you. Hatton, watch our back. Paetz, take the crew around the tribarrel when you get the signal. Nobody get early or we’ll get somebody killed. Move out.”

The end men scuttled into position. Both of them carried 2-cm weapons. At this range and these conditions, Yazov would as soon they had submachine guns, but they were pros. They’d manage.

Hatton faced around with an obvious air of relief. Josie thrust his left hand into the hedge to broaden his viewpoint. Yazov was ready to snap an order, but the younger man was merely eager, not rabid.

Nothing to do now but wait for the signal.

“Yase, why aren’t they shooting?” Josie said over the spread-band radio net. “Why’re they just sitting there?”

“They’re waiting for something,” Yazov explained. “And don’t ask me what it is because I don’t know.”

What Yazov did know was that “it,” whatever it was, was nothing he wanted to be around to see. He took four fresh magazines out of their pouches and set them by his left hand, behind the stone curb.

“It would be nice if you got your thumbs out of your ass, Herne,” he mouthed, but the thought wasn’t even a whisper.

“Go,” said the command channel, and Yazov’s trigger finger had blasted the head off a Telarian security man before his ears caught the whop! whop! whop! of powerguns firing from Lordling’s side of the double ambush.

Yazov swung to the next target, a guard lying prone who lifted her head to look at the comrade who’d died a few meters from her. Yazov’s bolt converted her startled expression into a cyan flash.

One of the Telarians ministering to the casualty leaped to his feet; his two fellows tried to flatten when the shooting started. All three of them were down now, their limbs thrashing in their death throes. Josie had taken them out in three aimed bursts, though the separation between trigger-pulls was scarcely more than the normal cyclic delay of his submachine gun.

Coyne and Harlow both fired, but Yazov couldn’t see their targets through his narrow niche in the hedge. A guard scrambled toward the tribarrel. Josie shot him in the cheek, ear, and temple. The victim’s cap flew off and he plowed a furrow through ankle-high flowers with his face.

Yazov dropped his weapon, braced his left hand on the curb, and tugged a fragmentation cluster from its belt carrier. Simultaneous pressure from thumb and fingertips released and armed the weapon. Yazov gave the thumb-switch another poke to change the setting from Time to Air Burst, then lofted the bomb high over the hedge. A third squeeze on the thumb toggle would have set the fuse to Contact.

A guard, either wild with terror or trusting in his body armor, jumped up in a crouch behind the fountain. He held his submachine gun at waist height.

Harlow and Coyne shot him simultaneously in the torso. The ceramic breastplate shattered like a bomb under the paired 2-cm bolts. The guard’s body did a back-flip, flinging his unfired weapon through the spray of the fountain.

The fragmentation cluster popped into three separate bomblets. They burst in red flashes two or three meters above the soil of the garden. Guards leaped up like a covey of birds rising. Five of them died in instantaneous gunfire from the waiting mercenaries.

A surviving guard waved his pistol from a clump of low-growing evergreens. Yazov shot the arm off and, as the screaming Telarian lurched upright, finished the job and the 2-cm weapon’s five-round magazine.

Yazov stripped in a fresh clip. Coyne and Harlow stood in plain sight in the archways, raking the guards who cowered among the low plantings. Most of the Telarians were dead already, but the muscle spasms of a beheaded corpse were enough to draw a bolt for insurance.

Josie Paetz got to his feet, wild-eyed with enthusiasm. His submachine gun’s iridium barrel glowed white.

“Wait!” Yazov ordered. He was still kneeling. He aimed his powergun at the gnarled base of the hedge plant. Six or eight stems twisted from the sprawling roots.

Yazov fired twice. The plant lifted on a blast of cyan plasma. The soil was moist enough to erupt into a cavity also. Splinters and microshards of terra cotta sprayed out in a circle.

The shrub’s fragments fell into the garden, still tangled by thorns and interwoven branches. Josie Paetz leaped through the gap without hesitation, dragging branches with him further into the killing zone.

Yazov reloaded and followed more circumspectly, brushing grit off his faceshield. His mouth smiled, but the expression had nothing to do with what was going on in his mind. “Hatton, you can come on through,” he said, “but keep your eyes on the back-trail.”

The whole team was in the garden. Coyne stood at the tri-barrel; Harlow checked the mechanism of the Telarian submachine gun in his left hand while he held the shimmering barrel of his 2-cm weapon safely off to the side.

Insects buzzed among the flowers. The firefight had done surprisingly little damage to the plantings, though the stench of the shooting and its results weighted the air worse than the miasma of any swamp.

A guard with no obvious injuries lay spread-eagled near the line Yazov followed across the garden. Blue flowers lapped her cheeks and neck.

Yazov swung his weapon one-handed, like a huge pistol. He fired into her back as he passed. Vaporized fluids turned bit of rib bone into shrapnel. The guard’s head and heels lifted waist-high, then flopped again. The point-blank charge had virtually severed the body at its thickest point.

Better safe than sorry.

Yazov knelt at the far hedge. “Coming through!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs. There hadn’t been any radio communication with Slade. “Coming through! Coming through!”

His own team was in position. Yazov held the powergun out at arm’s length and fired into the root-stem juncture of a plant beyond the one he crouched behind. Powergun bolts had little penetration; the twisted branches and foliage of the hedge provided almost as much protection as a steel wall could have done.

The shrubbery blew apart as before. Splinters blazed, but the raggedly severed ends of the stems themselves were too green to do more than smolder.

There were still occasional shots in the near distance. With luck, that meant Lordling’s team was policing up its area too.

“Coming through!” Yazov shouted again. Coyne seemed to think the tribarrel was operable, because he now crouched in the sidecar saddle with his hands on the weapon’s double grips.

“Come on then, curse you!” cried a voice too cracked for Yazov to identify the speaker. “And we’re bloody glad to see you!”

Yazov risked a glance outward. This side of the garden faced a gray stone building. The facade was shattered by powergun bolts. A limousine and half a dozen emergency vehicles burned in front of the structure, a van of some sort burned around to the right side, and the lower floor of the building itself burned like the box of a wood stove.

The flames had driven Doormann security personnel out of the building. The bodies of at least a dozen guards lay in a straggling windrow where submachine-gun fire had laid them.

Ned Slade dangled Lissea Doormann from the cavity that had been a window on the second floor. She pushed off from the wall so that she landed in the drive, well clear of the black smoke gushing from the doorway. Slade jumped after her. It took him a moment to rise again to a crouch.

Yazov led his men through the hedge. Lordling’s team appeared from the woods behind the shattered structure. The firetruck snorted along behind them as Westerbeke steered it between the well-spaced boles.

Lissea helped Slade stand. His commo helmet was skewed sideways. A powergun bolt had grazed it, melting the outer sheathing and shattering the ceramic core. Slade reached down to grab the ammo pouch of a fallen guard. Lissea pulled him upright again. As the rescue team closed in on the couple from both directions, she kissed Slade full on the lips.