Simeon picked out phrases from the uproar with directional sensors: » "... those goddamned assholes in tnat colony ship..." "... yeah, how many ways are, they going to try to get us killed,.." "... where's the damned Navy? That's what I want to know. They cripple us with taxes and..." "... this is crazy. TTiey don't even know this is what's gonna happen? Meanwhile, I'm sittin* here losin' money.,.. what do they expect us to do?"

"WHAT DO WE EXPECT YOU TO DO?" Simeon asked in a tone that overrode the babble. He added in a stew of subsonics intended to stun and intimidate. The noise dropped offabruptly, pleasing him.

"For starters, shut up and listen!" he suggested in a reasonable tone. "We expect you to take the emergency seriously, to listen to instructions and to carry them out" He paused for a moment to let that sink in. "This meeting will give you what you need to know on how to handle yourselves during the anticipated emergency. Remember, what you don't know, you can't reveal. From this point on, I remind you that rumor helps the enemy, not you or me, and not this station.

"If you hear something you think is a rumor, report it to your section leader, who's the same person who leads your ordinary emergency evacuation team. If it's true and it concerns your safety, he'll know about it If he hasn't heard it, he can check with me and I'll confirm or deny it. I wttl tell you the truth. Do not spread rumors. Remember that We fully expect shortly to be occupied by an enemy force which has a very bad reputation for space piracy."

Echel Mckie, station newscaster, waved both arms for attention. Simeon acknowledged him.

"Pirates?" he asked. "Look, is this another one of your damned games, Simeon?"

"Absolutely not. This is as real as death. They'll be here in less than three-days. We've notified Central and the Navy, who assure us that a rescue mission is already under way. But it woiA be here before the pirates are likely to arrive. Therefore this station and its personnel must initiate such delaying tactics as possible. To stay aliver That silenced the last bit of muttering.

"Why weren't we told this earlier? Every ship has left — we're stuck here!" Mckie's face was a study in outrage.

Channa moved forward to the front of the dais. "You weren't told because we used the available space to evacuate children and the sick," she said crisply. "Any objections to that, Mr. Mdde?"

"As I said," Simeon went on, "we are not only expecting to be occupied, we are hoping we will be." He paused again to see that they had absorbed that distinction. He was proud of his people! They got it in one! Shocked pale faces now accepted what he did not, after all, have to spell out.

"Listen up now. These are your station manager's orders. Don't offer direct resistance. Cooperate whenever necessary but don't volunteer anything. We expect that most of the enemy won't speak Standard, so misunderstand when you can. Make your answers as brief as possible, when you can't be silent. If you don't know, say so, but do not tell them who does know. Stay in your quarters as much as possible. Keep your emergency suits ready to use. Listen to information passed to you by your group leaders rather than anything you may hear over the vid. Remember, we're on your side. They won't be.

"Finally," he said, "this is Simeon-Amos." Amos stood up and bowed politely. "This is the only Simeon on the station. He is co-manager with Channa Hap, the term Simeon means co-manager. We have a longstanding tradition of having the male station managers carrying that name. It's in honor of one of the first station managers. There is no brain or brawn on this station, there never has been. Shellpersoas are only used on ships."

He paused to gauge their reaction, studying their grim faces. "If they don't know about me, I'll be able to continue running the station unimpaired — literally behind the scenes. If they disconnect me from the station — and they will, if they^find out about me—we're all in trouble. So, as of now and for the duration, I don't exist. This is Simeon-Amos, your station co-manager."

Amos smiled and nodded. The audience had that stillness of about-to-boil-over. Faces began to reflect expressions now; mild alarm, disbelief, skepticism.

"This . . . this backworldmttdfoot is supposed to manage us in an emergency?" somebody said, with all the hauteur of the space-born. Amos' head went back, and he stared down his classical Grecian nose with ten generations of aristocrats behind his eyes.

"To pretend to run things," Simeon said. "Furthermore, he volunteered to front for me! Not a role you'd get many to take under the circumstances," he added, and got a few snorts of agreement "So, before anyone frets over Simeon-Amos' leadership qualifications, I'd like to replay the man in action. The tape's authentic. I've checked it." Nobody could do that better than a brain.

What Simeon screened for them then were shots that he had accessed from Guiyon's files. Itbegan when a wall flashed with intolerable brightness, then diminished to show troops in black combat armor trotting down a burning street of brick-and-timber buildings. The sensor was pitched low, looking up from a half-basement window or a hole in the ground. Across the way, a human figure hung out of a window, long black braids trailing in a pool of blood on the sidewalk. A child's body lay there too: its crushed skull suggesting it had been thrown against the wall The screen wa*s abruptly blank. Then lit up again with a dimmer scene.

Amos' recorded *olq| cut through the blurr-roar of flames. "Now" he s*d.

The picture shook "as the ground heaved, and the burning walls cascaded across the street, drowning the black figures in a tide of brick and flaming timbers and glass. Other figures darted forward, Bethelites to judge by their rough, improvised uniforms. When the first powersuits began to claw their way out of the rubble, the defenders were ready. Amos was unmistakably leading them, an industrial jetcutter in his hands. He plunged it down on the massive sloped helmet that jerked itself free of the ruins, and helm and head exploded in steam.

The screen jerked, a different scene coming into abrupt focus: a manor-house among formal gardens, only a few scorch-marks on its walls. Invader infentry stood at their ease; the picture had the slightly glassy look of a flatpic extrapolated by a long-distance camera. Armored fighting vehicles rested in leagues on the lawns, their cannon pointing outward in a herringbone pattern, lighter weapons on their upper decks tracking restlessly across the sky. An aircraft slowed overhead. Bulky armored shapes disembarked, one in a suit marked with complex blazons in a script of angles and sharp curves.

The viewpoint zoomed in, as a group of young women in long robes were pushed out of the front door of the manor, many carrying bundles. They knelt under the alien guns; one opened the chest she carried, filled with miniature crystal vials. She smiled, gesturing to the bottles, opening one and smelling, extending it to the warrior in the decorated suit. From her looks she was about sixteen Standard years and very beautiful, with the classic features similiar to Amos'. The pirate raised both gauntlets to his helmet, lifted it free and tucked it under one arm, bending to sniff. The exposed face was scored with age, roughened skin pockmarked by radfttion damage, blossoming growths, thinning blond^hair startling against dark complexion. It smiled..."

Leered, Simeon thought, reviewing the scene, fve heard the word, but never really seen the corresponding expression till now.

The view of the pirate's face"was brief. Even as he bent, a red dot appeared between his brows. Less than a second later, his head exploded into mist.

The body stayed erect in the armored suit, blood pumping in a high arc from the stump of the neck. The girl with the perfume box stood, smiling truly this time as the blood bathed her. Until one of the other warriors stepped forward and, gripping her head in a powered gauntlet, squeezed. Her head burst in a spray of pink bone and gray matter. The other girlsjoined hands and were singing when the plasma gun scythed them into ash and steam.

Someone in the hall was retching; several sobbed.

"For the death of that Kolnar, I claim only the marksmanship," Amos said, his archaic accent adding gravity to his clear tone. "The bravery was my sister's. Sahrah led the maiden volunteers. I did not know what she had planned. I was trying to reach the manor before the enemy could. We think ... we think that dead dog was fourth or fifth in rank among the pirates."

All heads turned to him; his was slightly bowed. "Such was Bethel, when the Kolnari came to us," he said. "They have the souls of—" he spoke a nonstandard word.

"Rats," Simeon said. "— rats that walk like men. They kill for killing's sake, they rape and tenure and steal, and what they cannot steal, diey foul out of depravity."

Another holo came up. "Keriss," Amos said. There was total silence now. A city by a bay, astride a river, lower-built than the worlds influenced by Central's architectural styles, Brifrht-tolored buildings amid broad gardens. A scattering of taller buildings at its center, and one that led the eye up and up in a leap of towers and domes.

"The Temple," Amos said. "This was a remote pickup, a news-sendee shot, just before the end."

White light flashed. The city dissolved as the bulging donut shape of the shockwave billowed out. The slow scene gave it a terrible grace; trees exploding into flame under the heat-flash and scattering as less than splinters an instant later, the water of the bay beginning to flow and swell into a wave taller than the hills.

"So died Keriss," Amos whispered.

"I'm not calling wolf this time," Simeon said, matching that same tone. "If anyone doubts, speak now."

He let the ensuing silence echo. "Does anyone think they're better equipped to play me than Simeon-Amos is?" No one gainsaid him. "This emergency is all too real. Until help arrives, we're going to have to rely on each other. I believe we can do that," he said confidently. "If you weren't pretty brave and independent sorts of individuals, you wouldn't be on a station anyway. You'd be on a planet somewhere trying to figure out how to get the bugs offyour vegetables."

This got more of a chuckle than it deserved, he thought, but they needed the release from tension.

Channa rose, ubiquitous notescreen in hand.

"There will be a meeting for council members at two," she announced, "and there will be a meeting of evacuation group leaders at four. Subsequent to those meetings, evacuation groups themselves will meet at times appointed by the group leaders. We aren't going to take questions because we're now on a need- toknow basis. We thank you for your cooperation. Ladies and gentlemen, this meeting is adjourned."

"Right, listen up, you crap-headed rock hounds," Gus bellowed.

The noise level in the docking ^hamber fell fairly quickly. Stands to reason, he thought.'*These were working spacers, not data-pushers and entertainers. About fifty of them glared up at him as if he'd thought up this little crisis himself. The shages of the tugs and miners in the interior dock bulked at their backs, huge and shadowy with all but one of the overheads turned off. That cast a puddle of light over the assembled pilots and crew. He had staged the meeting this way at Simeon's suggestion, to make them feel like a group.

"You know what's coming down," he said, making his voice intense without making it loud. "All our shipping with interstellar capacity has been moved out"

"Not all," one of the miners said, running a hand over her luridly tattooed head.

"Can it, Shabla. You can do maybe ten lights, scouting for minerals. That won't get you to the next system."

She shrugged, grinning at those ranged about her.

"What we've got left is the tugs," said Gus, "and some mining scouts. It isn't much, against four frigate-class warships."

"It's fardling nothing," another said. "Unless you want us to ram 'em?" The man didn't think much of that idea even as he voiced it Ramming was not completely out of the question; if you cut something heading toward you at high speeds into smaller pieces, you were just multiplying your troubles. You had to blast it into gas, or deflect it, before you were safe. They all understood the principle, and the limitations.

"Ramming's not on," Gus said, shaking his head even as he gave them a sly grin. "Not when we lose to any beam-weapon they care to turn on us. But," and he waited until a schematic of a standard tug came up on the screen behind him, "what has a tug got? A^ normal-space engine'an^ a great big power plant, and a fardlin' humongous grapnel field. Mining scout's about the same, only with a sampling laser. So there isn't much sense in us getting into slugging matches with warships." He caught the universal sigh of relief that wafted about.the'bay. "But—" and he held up one gnarled finger "— there are things we can do."

Then he outlined the changes needed on the screen behind him. Gratified and slightly vulpine grins replaced frowns even when he explained the strategy to be effected by such alterations.

"Hey, wait," Shabla said. "I got a husband — two, actually — on this tin can. You want me to leave 'em here while the place is taken over?"

"Exactly," Gus said, giving her stare for stare. "What the crap could you do for 'em here? Get your head kicked in? Start a firefight in a corridor and blow the pressure hull? Out there, we've got a chance to do something worthwhile for all our skins. We've all got someone here, or nearly all of us. This is what we can do for 'em. Who's with me?"

The cheer was more nearly a howl.

He's realty much more attractive when he isn't trying to be, Channa thought dismally. And when he's really working. Which he was, now.

"And it's been so long," she murmured to herself.

Amos turned to look at her, his brow furrowed in concern. "Something troubles you, Channa?" He grinned. "Besides, that is, our possibly imminent demise?"

She gave him a jaundiced smile. He would mention that, she thought, just when I was getting involved enough not to think about it Well, since we might all die, why not take the plunge?

"This is beginning to get to me. I feel so... so alone."

His eyes kindled, and a lovely feathery warmth tickled her lower belly. Her smile spread to a grin, and he rose from his place and came to sit beside her, their thighs lightly touching. He took tfer hand in both of his.

Ooooo, she thought. If this one were on the holos, there wouldn't be a dry seat in the house.

"You're not alone! Fm here," he said, his voice rich with sympathy.

An hour later, things had progressed to the point where they had drifted into Channa's quarters arm in arm. And damn Simeon's opinion, Channa thought. Fm going to enjoy myself.

They were both three-<juarters undressed and a lot warmer when Simeon imitated the sound of a knock on the door and shouted from the lounge.

"Simeon-Amos, Rachel's here." The voice was flatly neutral, but Channa savagely thought she could detect a suppressed giggle.

"What!" Amos shrieked softly as they both sat bolt upright "Here?" Channa demanded. "What do you mean, here?"

"She's in the corridor outside," Simeon said cheerfully. "Should I let her in?"

*just a moment," Amos said desperately, leaping from the bed and frantically grabbing up clothes.

"That's mine," Channa said, rescuing her shirt from the pile.

Amos bolted from the room, opened the door to his quarters, flung his clothes in and ran to the door. Realizing he was in his underpants, he ran back to his room, grabbed his robe, and struggled to pull it over his head as he staggered back to the lounge. The arms seemed to knot and tangle so deliberately, he wondered if the robe had turned animate and was resisting. Amos made desperate, despairing little sounds.

Channa rolled her eye^ »ghed, and headed for the bathioom. "Cold waterf pulsed, shower," she told the fixtures. As if I need one with Rachel at the door, she thought Amos took a deep breath, finally pulling the robe down over hi$4»ddy.

"Why am I agitated?" he asked himself. "I do not have to account for my actions. There is no one in authority over me." On the other hand, Rachel could make an unfortunate scene. At least there would be no outraged father, brother, uncle, or cousin likely to break in with a hunting rifle and blow off the offending equipment He opened the door. He hopped backward just in time to avoid a blow from Rachel's fist, aimed at the lounge doors. "Rachel!" he snapped.

She stood glaring at him. She was breathing fast, her nostrils flaring, a sheen of sweat across the pale olive of her skin.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded.

He looked at her in astonishment "You know perfectly well what I am doing here," he said. He had himself sufficiently under control now to speak with his usual gentle authority, and he could see her purpose falter. "I am living in die manager's quarters because I am to be a co-manager of the station. I'm studying very hard and constantly to be worthy of this honor. I have told you this. 1 told everyone." He let his eyes widen sfighuy in unaffected innocence.

She narrowed her eyes. "It is true, Amos, that you told everyone. But, you did not tell me\"

"All right," he said soothingly, "all right, come in."

He placed his hands delicately on her shoulders and steered her to the couch. "Sit!"

She looked first at him, then at the couch as though she suspected some trap before she cautiously folded herself down to the cushioned jfcirface. Looking up at him, she patted the place beside her.

"You sit down, too," she insisted.

"You will have some refreshment?"

"No. I will have an explanation."

He drew over a straight-backed chair, placed it in front of her and sat down. Her eyes widened and she sat up straighter, looking, if possible, even more affronted than she had been.

"I am sorry," he said, "if I have offended you, but I have been very busy." Unspoken was the inference that she should be also, helping to brief the Bethelites and settle them into their temporary roles. "I told Joseph about our plans, and I assumed that he would explain everything to you."

"Oh!" she said sarcastically, "You told Joseph. Well, then of course there was no need to enlighten me! He could tell me whatever he pleased of your plans and that would have been sufficient. Then I could go to sleep this night, knowing that you had moved in with that blackhearted slut-bitch, with an untroubled heart."

"Rachel bint Damscusr he said sharply. "You forget yourself!"

She raised both fists above her head and shouted, "It is not I who disport with the daughters of the heathen, an act forbidden by every scripture! Nor is it Joseph's place to tell me of what we do. It is yours, yours alone! Are we not to be betrothed?"

He stared at her in shock. "No," he said in blank astonishment "Whatever gave you that idea?"

She blinked. "No?"

"No," he repeated, shaking his head in the negative.

All of the color drained from her race and he could see the white of her eyes all around the iris. She breathed in and out through her nose with a sound like tearing silk. She trembled. She tried to speak and only a garbled sound came out, then she said in a grating voice, "She has seduced^ou."

"No," he said and »hook his head again, waving both his hands in the same negative gesture, but his eyes slid away from hers.

"Always," she said harshly, "from the time we first met, I knew that you were mine. Mine!"

"No," he said. "You are meant for Joseph, who has always loved you. He will make you happy, and he wants you." He forced his voice to gendeness. She has became unbalanced, he thought desperately. Of all the times for such a thing to happen! He had thought her only a little more given to hysteria than most of her sex, but something had changed her; perhaps the trauma of the attack, perhaps the massive drug dosages they had been forced to use on the trip.

Her eyes widened still more, until the whites showed all around the iris. He had heard of such things, but never seen them, except once when an ancient hermit had gone into a trance and prophesied. / should have paid move attention to my first-aid training, he thought ruefully. Perhaps then he would know how to deal with her instability. Whatever her faults, she had sacrificed much to follow him. She had been invaluable in the chaotic scramble of the last days on Bethel. My dear friend, I have failed you.

"He wants me," she said in the same low growl "And you do not?" Her mouth twisted, and she bit her lip as she turned her head from side to side and nodded several times. Abruptly she rose and was out the door before he could rise from his chair.

He grabbed his hair in both of his hands and pulled. "Arrughh! Simeon," he asked, "what have I done?"

"Pissed off Rachel, I'd say."

Amos sighed, then groaned. "No," he said despairingly, "I have done worse than that I allowed myself to be talked out of doing what I knew was right. I knew in my heart that she should be-evacuated, but Joseph asked me to let her stay. Perhaps I gave you the wrong answer today, my friend. Perhaps I cannot play this role if I am so easily convince*} to go against my better judgement"

"You thought Joseph could keep her in fine?" "Yes. I hoped that, because he would be nearby and considerate of her, she would turn more to him and less toward me."

"Not a bad reasoning," Simeon replied truthfully. "Sending her away might break whatever hold she has on reality."

Amos looked unreassured and more miserable than ever. He might be a good-looking man, but he sure had cornered the supply of gloomy looks.

"Today, you have said quite correcdy that you are older than I, and also that in many ways you are wiser Today I should have been the wiser." He shook his head sorrowfully and shuffled into his room like an okl man.

Well, Simeon thought, what an interesting evening! Looks like the forecast for true lave is — not smooth. Such marvelous material for teasing Channa. So tempting to see how she'd react. No! He had to keep his mind on more important things. Like that Rachel. The girl had shot out of that interview with Amos as if she'd lost her rag. Better keep an eye on her, he told himself. And so should Doctor Chaundra, if he's got the time. Most acute mental illness was chemical, or could be adjusted with the judicious use of neutralizing chemicals.

With a weary woof, Doctor Chaundra sat at his desk and, setting his coffee cup in the most spill-proof area available in the surface clutter, he keyed up his mail It had been two days since he'd had an opportunity to look at it Twenty-five attempted suicides, four of them among the refugee Bethelites who chose gruesomely old-fashioned methods. One had actually hanged herself! Good in one respect: easier to revive, although there might be some memory loss from oxygen deprivation, and-he'd have to use a nerve-shunt The sight of that bloated, blue-tinged face with the protruding tongue lingered unpleasantly.

He slipped himself a calmer; just one, although the gods alone knew what it would do with all the caffeine he'd been absorbing. He had to get on with this accursed viral project even if he was a doctor, not a gene-sculptor! It disturbed him to deliberately make a virus more harmful: too much like making medicine into a weapon. Chaundra had grown up on a planet where personal violence was fairly common, and done his internship in a trauma ward. His own family came from a pacifist tradition, and the internship had confirmed him in it At least Seld is out of this, he thought with relief. The first message was yet another requisition for calmers. He signed it out; the organosynth machines were going to be running overtime. Would pirates take notice of supernatural calm? The doctor smiled ruefully at that and told the machine to show him the next message. It was flagged personal, which was odd. He began to read.

His heart stumbled; he could feel the pain in his chest quite distinctly, but it seemed distant and unimportant Vision grayed down to a tunnel; it was long minutes before he could speak. At last he managed to croak "Simeon? Simeon!"

"What is it, Chaundra?"

I don't like the way he looks. The sound of the doctor's voice had been sufficiently worrisome for Simeon to activate visuals. The doctor was visibly tired but, considering the work load he was pushing, fatigue would be normal. Nor unusual for Chaundra who tended to push himself. If Simeon had been capable of experiencing fatigue, he would be knackered right now. The slightly built dark man was gray-faced with sweat beading his forehead. Simeon ran a diagnostic program; not good. Extreme stress, to the point of endangering the man's health. Chaundra was not young anymore, and had endured some very hostile environments in his career. Not to mention the current problem.

"This message..." and Chaundra managed to point to his screen.

Dear Dad—Simeon read.

"Why on earth didn't this trip my watchman programs — I'll have ]oattsfade for this, by God!" — I couldn't go, Fmsorry. Ihopeyou can understand and forgiveme, but ^artythmg were to happen to you and I wasn't there, Td never forgive myself. I have to be here, because Mom can't be. Iloveyou.

Seld.

"Oh!" Simeon paused in full comprehension of Chaundra's state of mind. "But didn't you put him on...."

"No," Chaundra said, in a voice drained of affect. "He was in line, almost to the lock. Then I received a bleep message — the most urgent of codes. Seld said I must answer. He understood that. We embraced, said good-bye and I left him there."

Chaundra flopped one hand over weakly, unable for more effort than that. "He was practically on the ship. How the hell did this happen?"

"I'm sorry. I've too good an idea!" Simeon told him. "I'll try to find out where that wicked young rascal is right now." He didn't mean Seld, but did not qualify his term. After a moment's pause he came up blank. "I'm not finding him, so he's well hidden wherever he is. That should be some consolation, Chaundra," he said in a firmly reassuring tone. "If I can't find him, neither can our expected visitors. I'll keep looking. Count on me for that! I'm Looking with every eye I own, Simeon said grimly. How could the well-mannered, well-brought up Seld have fallen for one of Joat's schemes? And what part would the kid play in it? And Fm to blame for this situation and Chaundra's heartache, Joat had been so eager to learn, and he'd seen no reason to restrict her terminal's access to the schematics. She had been bad enough before this emergency sent her to cover; now, he didn't know what she was capable of doing.

Fve an idiot-savant running feral in my station, he thought bitterly. Ten years' precocity in advanced engineering technics and the morals of a five-year-old. The selfishness of small children can be charming, when they don't have the power to do much harm. In a nearadult, and a brilliant near-adult at that, the possibilities went out of bounds, "Well, Seld is here — somewhere!" Chaundra said, recovering himself enough to shout and to be livid with rage. "The clock says this message was entered ten hours after his ship left!"

"I know, I see it Don't worry, Chaundra. We'll find him."

HI know we'll find him. What worries me is that he should hide! That he is no longer as safe as I thought he would be by now. Do you understand? My son could die. My heart is pounding with the anxiety."

Simeon ran another quick scan of the station, this time including apartments left empty by the evacuation.

"Still searching. There are so many places he could hide and even I couldn't find him," he said by way of reassuring Chaundra. "He's a big strong kid who can handle himself" As well as any of us, he thought The odds for anyone on the station were not good, but there was no point in reminding Chaundra of that now.

"No," the doctor said between clenched teeth, "he isn't a "big strong kid,' and he can't handle himself. He's never going to be strong. Thej^lague that took his mother left him with nerve damage."

"Nerve damage?" Simeor^jsaid incredulously. Regeneration of nerve tissue was an old technology, and well understood. Without it, shellpeople would be impossible, for the same technique knitted their nervous systems into the machinery that supported them and that they commanded.

Chaundra shook his head. "I have done what I could to bypass the damage, but if he puts too much strain where the repair exists ..." His voice trailed off, and when he raised his face to Simeon's visual node, he had turned into an old man.

"It was a little clinic, you understand. Mary, she was the meditech, I the doctor. A new continent on a new colony world. Much to do, we were on research grants. Then people began to die. There was nothing I could do... They imposed quarantine — quarantine, in this day and age! When I found what had happened, already it was too late for Mary. The virus ... was a hybrid. A native virus-analogue combined with a mutant Terran encephalitis strain. The native virus wrapped around the Terran, you understand. So the immune system could not recognize it and had no defense. The Terran element enabled it to parasitize ourDNA.

"Seld was damaged, on the point of death. It took three years of therapy for him to be able to walk and talk and move as well as he does."

Chaundra turned, picking things up from his desk and putting them down.

"But he will never be strong. If they seize him, hell be as helpless as someone half his age. There could be convulsions: stress accelerates the damage. It is cumulative. Why do you think I took this position? He must be near a first-rate facility at all times. He must not suffer extreme stress or the effects could snowball As it is, he will probably r»t live much past adulthood."

Chaundra slumpefl in* his chair, anger, even anxiety draining out of him as he buried his head in his hands.

"Then we'll make sure they don't hurt him," Simeon said grimly." First, let's find him. He's probably withjoat"

"Seld's mentioned her." Chaundra's voice was muffled "He has many-friends, but she sounded... different"

"She is. Oh, she's different, all right. And she wouldn't leave, either. So in a way, you and I are in the same boat."

Chaundra rubbed his mouth and chin. Whiskers rasped; unusual, since he was normally a fastidious man. "Yes," he said and laughed sardonically, "and the boat is about to leak."

"Not necessarily." Simeon said firmly enough to make himself believe it "Seld has something else going for him."

"He has?"

"Yes. Seld has Joat, and she's got such a strong survival instinct that even if the rest of the station blew, she'd find a way to stay alive ... and keep Seld alive, too. He's actually far safer with her than anywhere else he could be. So I wouldn't worry about his infirmities, or stress. Though I hate like hell to admit it, I can't think of anyone better qualified to mind him than Joat!"

"Seld," Simeon called. "Seld Chaundra, come out where I can see you."

Joat popped into view rubbing her eyes, "What are you yeUin' about, Simeon?" she asked, yawning.

"Send him out, Joat This is the only place he can possibly be."

Joat crossed her arms and looked sleepily defiant. "Your father is worried, Seld," Simon went on. "He sent you away so that you'd be safe. So you know he's not really going to kill you for staying, even though you deserve it."

Seld appeared beside Joat, who*shoved him in the shoulder. "Tbldja to stay outta sight)"

He hung his head and said, "I know. But I can't let you take my rap. Mom wouldn't like that in me. At least that's what my dad says she'd say." He shrugged and gave her a feeble grin.

Joat rolled her eyes. "Do what'choo want," she said in a scathing tone, and disappeared.

"Actually," Simeon told them both, "I don't see any need to rough it just yet. Why not sleep comfortably while you can, eat what everyone else is enjoying, because we're certainly not going to leave it to the pirates to gobble up. I'd prefer that you hide out when the pirates arrive. Meanwhile, Seld, give your dad the benefit of your company: he needs it. Save your rations,Joat Eat with us. Food'sbetter. For now."

He picked up her disgusted sigh, and then she walked into view, arms still folded, expression still defiant Simeon warmed to her all over again. I don't think I was ever that young, he thought, but, y'ftnow, she makes me tvish I could swagger. "Okay guys, let's go."

* CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"Very large mass," Baila said, whispering. "Several score megatons, at least."

"You nee4 not lower your voice," Belazir said, amused and more so when several of the bridge crew jumped. "We are proceeding stealthed, but sound waves do not propagate in vacuum."

He turned to the schematic and long-range visual views. Impressive indeed, he thought. Far and away the largest free-floating construct he had ever seen. Twin globes, each at least a thousand meters in extent, linked by a broad tube. More tubes at the north and south axis, evidently for docking large ships, although none were there at the moment Around the station was an incredible clutter of material: loose ore, giant flexible balloons of various substances, radiating networks, fabricators, Large but soft, he decided. Like a huge lump of wellcooked meat, steaming in its own juices and touched with garlic, waiting to be carved into bite-sized pieces. It was a target so rich that he had trouble convincing himself of its reality. Mentally he accepted it, while his emotions could only kick in every minute or so, as jolts of near-orgasmic pleasure. He stretched like a cat, acutely conscious of the anticipatory tension beneath the quiet ordered activity of the bridge. Everyone in the flotilla would come out of this a hero. He couldn't believe this plum could be snatched away — not from the Kolnari and especially not when he commanded the Kolnari flotilla! And he, Belazir t'Marid Kolaren, would be more than a hero. He would be placed firmly in the logical line of succession to Chalku t'Marid.

"A pity it is so big," he mused. "A shame to have to waste any of the possible plunder." He sighed for, of course, they would have to destrqg what they could not take.

The flotilla were warships by sfjetialty, not cargo carriers. Even if they had time enough to bring in the heavy haulers from the Clan fleet, only the merest tithe of the goods to be found in this size station could be transported. On the othgrhand, the ecstasy of sheer destruction had its own euphoria — the knowledge that so much data and effort could be casually blown to dust.

"A message torpedo to the fleet?" Serig asked.

"You echo my thoughts, Serig," Belazir said. "Ready for instant transmission once we close our fist on our prey."

The message sent back with the captured merchantman would have the Clan fleet on alert. But the transports could not yet have arrived at Bethel, much less landed there. Rigged for deep-space running, sufficient ships could be diverted to assist him without hindering the effort at Bethel. Say, ten days' transit from the Saffron system, to be conservative; two or three days loading, depending on how many Father Chalku decided to send. Then set demolition charges, nice large ones to leave nothing larger than gravel. There might well be prisoners worth taking for skilled labor. The huge rectangular frame of a shipyard was now visible on one side of the station, and that meant that there would be rare and valuable slaves to sell.

With an effort, he restrained himself from rubbing his hands together. "Oh, what a surprise they have in store," he said.

"Indeed," Serig said. His eyes and teeth shone in the dim blue lights of the bridge and his voice was husky, a man in the grip of lust Which, Belazir reflected, was exactly what it was. Metaphorically and literally.

"Keep your eagerness in chains, my friend," he said genially "It is a good slave but a poor master." He 'aimed to Baila. "Whattraffic inbound?"

"None, Great Lor^l." * "None?" Belazir raised a brow.

Curious, he thought, a space station built in an area nearly devoid of traffic. Is it old and due to be abandoned? Or is it new and as yet rarely used ? A small chill diluted the perfection of his pleasure. There were alternatives here; he might be the hero who brought unimaginable wealth, or the immortal villain who revealed the existence of the Clan to an enemy more powerful than they.

He shook his head with a small, tssk of disgust. Impossible. The merchantman had been rich with treasure and it had just left the station. "Indications?"

"Great Lord, the background radiation is consistent with large-scale departures over the past five days." Baila paused, hesitant. "Lord, it is difficult to be certain, with the density of the interstellar medium here. Subspace distortion damps out very quickly..."

The small chill became fingers of ice stroking the base of his spine. His testicles drew up in reflex.

"I want information, not excuses!" he said in a harsh voice. "Ready the seeker missiles." If the accursed Bethelite cowards had warned the station—prompting the normal traffic to flee — they would destroy it and run immediately. He was nearly certain he had crippled the prey's communications apparatus in the pursuit, but "nearly" grilled no meat. But, if it had escaped, where was it? Or had the station done his work for him? A rich station would have cause to be wary of unexpected visitors. "Continue stealthed approach."

That meant running with the powerplants down, off accumulator energy, on a ballistic sublight approach.

Slow, they would take years to come near at this speed, but quite safe at a respectable distance. At any moment they could power up and close in swiftly at superluminal speeds. This was a modification of a tactic the Clan sometimes used against merchantmen on the outskirts of a solar system. And mey were dose enough that lightspeed was not much of a problem for detection purposes. Briefly, he considered running back on FTL for a few parsecs, to see if he could pick up traces of in or outbound traffic over the past week. Then he shook his head, rejecting that plan. Signal degraded too much over distance, arid his own trail would advertise his presence. While the station retained subspace communicator capacity, it presented the Clan with a deadly risk.

Taking time to consider a problem from all angles was no excuse for inaction. Strike the hardest blow you could, then see if another was needed; that was the Kolnari way.

"See if you can pick anything up from their perimeter relay beacons," he said. In dust this thick even local realspace beacons needed amplification. "Message, Great Lord," said Baila. "I would hear it" Immediately a woman's crisp voice filled the control center, "Warning all ships, warning all ships, SSS-90Q C is under Class Two quarantine: I repeat, Class Two quarantine. The following species are advised not to make port at these facilities under any circumstances." A list of alien species followed, most of them unknown to t'Marid.

"Human visitors are restricted to the dock facilities and the entertainment areas immediately adjacent to them. You are advised to continue on to your next port of call. Warning..."

The message began to repeat and Baila cut it off. "Further scan, lord: there are two debris fields. Both of them between us and the station. The one nearest the station is largely of natural ferrous compounds, probability ninety-seven percent-plus semi-processed asteroidal material. The other, nearest the Bride, is of metal and ship-hull compounds, finely divided. Computer assessment S that the mass represented by the metal debris is equivalent to the mass represented by the prey ship."

She touched several controls, and the multiple screens displayed a scene of tumbling scraps of halfmelted metal, no single piece larger than a meter wide or long. Most were a fog of metallic particles.

His eyes narrowed. The quarantine could explain the absence of shipping. Baila's analysis suggested that, either the prey ship, which he knew had been ancient, had disintegrated under the stress of redlining or the station had destroyed it. The former was more likely since no weaponry had been detected on the station. No doubt the truth of the end to the Bethelite refugee ship would be found in the station's records.

"Your appraisal?" Belazir asked his weapons officer.

"Great Lord," the man said, collating a probability run, "the bulk of the fragments are definitely the result of ultra-high temperature breakdown. The profile is completely compatible with sudden energy discharge from the main internal drive coil of a very large ship. Some of the other debris —" he called up relevant views "— show blast fragmentation. That could either have been the result of direct hits with chemical-energy warheads, or secondary propagation effects when the engine blew. The shockwave through the hull..."

"I'm aware of the phenomenon," Belazir said dryly. The weapons officer shrank back. Belazir t'Marid had fought his first space engagement before the younger noble was born. "Continue scan and analysis. Inform me of any anomalies."

They blew up," Serig said.

"Just as they arrived? How convenient," Belazir said. He gnawed a thumb. "Possibly too convenient?"

"Possibly. However, we were expecting their engines to foil catastrophically at any moment They were sublimating bits of their cooling vanes for the last thirty light-years." * "True. Itisstillacoincidence." •j» "Once is coincidence," Serig said in ritual tone, "twice is happenstance —" "— and the third time is enemy action, yes," Belazir finished irritably. "But for the station to be plagueridden at the same time?*'

"The scumvermin races are weak of body, lord," he noted.

Belazir signed confirmation. TTie seed of Rolnar was strong. It had to be, to have survived so long on a planet not suitable for human beings, and further devastated by so many centuries of reckless development and continual war with every nuclear, chemical and biological weapon ingenuity could produce. When the Clan fled a losing struggle, they had kept the tradition of culling any child who showed signs of vulnerability to infection. In feet, it was a stroke of fortune to have the enemy immobilized by a menace that was no menace to the Kolnari.

"Hold position. Call in the consorts." "Yes, Great Lord."

Belazir glanced at his communications officer. Her face was bright with excitement, too. He smiled. She was young; this was her first term of duty. He remembered well that sharp, eager feeling. He grinned. Ah, but he was feeling now, at the ripe age of thirty, that his life was half over.

"All captains confirming receipt of your orders, Great Lord. Moving into position."

"Excellent," he said, glancing back at the schematic Km have abvady given a cry of distress, oh rich and beauteous , he thought vindictively. The entire universe was in conspiracy against the Clan — against all of Kolnar and its children. Soon you mill scream.

Channa turned at her desk.

'Hi Joat, welcome « • « rome. I A relieved, shy smile greeted her. "Um ... gonna take a shower."

"You can use it," Channa said, sniffing. "When you're through, I want to introduce you to someone."

"Ah," Simeon said lighdy. "We're a family again."

"Shut up, you hunk of tin," Channa said goodnaturedly, throwing a wad of scrunched-up tissue in the general direction of the pillar. "How does this look?"

She punched a key to feed in the distribution of supply caches.

"Hmmm. Not bad. Okay, how about we seal off the following passageways?" A schematic of several decks sprang up." If you didn't know about modern fabrication methods, that would look right for structural members."

"Good, good — what does that give us?"

"About a thousand people we can stick away in corners — the V list" Those were the ones that they hadn't had space available to evacuate.

"Nobody essential, I'm afraid," Channa said. They had agreed that they had to let essential staff take the risks, as their absence would elicit questions.

"No, but it'll cut down the number of potential victims quite nicely. Also, it'll give us a chance to scatter around some stuff that'll come in useful later. Ah, Simeon-Amos."

Tlie Bethelite leader's eyes were red-rimmed, but his smile brought a warm lurch to Channa's diaphragm. "I think I have mastered the basic administrative structure," he said. "It is not too strange."

Channa raised a brow. A 900-series station isn't too strange to a backworlder? she thought. j The thought must have been obvious, but Amos only spread his hands and tossed his head, setting aswirl the coal-black curls of his shoulder-length mane. The blue eyes twinkled beneath the broad dear brow.

Oooooo, Channa thought, and fought to bring her attention back to his words.

"In any large organization* xhere will be certain constants," he said. "The central authority; officers in charge of various departments; a structure for meetings to coordinate activities; procedures for routine decisionmaking, and so forth. Tips is not too dissimilar to my family's holdings on Bethel. We, too, were essentially coordinators of the activities of many independent entrepreneurs. There are no ranchers or farmers here, of course, but both communities have mining, manufacturing, education, cultural facilities..."

"Culture?" Joat ducked back into the lobby, toweling her wet hair. For a wonder, she had on something more formal than the shapeless, patchwork-colorful overalls that were current fashion among SSS-900-C's youth. "Like holos and virtie games and stuff?"

"Ahhh ..." Amos hesitated. He had been thinking more of choral song and traditional dancing. "The general principle is the same."

The servos had been setting out the evening meal. Simeon had programmed them to meet the basic dietary superstitions of the Bethelite religion, although Amos had turned out to be flexible. Channa shuddered mentally at some of the things she'd screened in that Bethel text. How in God's name, for example, were they supposed to check that none of the materials had ever been touched by a menstruating woman?

They sat down, Amos murmured a prayer, and for another wonder Joat waited a second before grabbing the nearest bowl. She had turned out to be a monumentally unfussy eater, but in sheer capacity she belied the scrawny underdeveloped frame. Between— or sometimes during — mouthfuls, she grilled Amos about Bethel.

"Sounds dull," she said at last "I thought so, too," Amos said, pushing a bowl of steamed millet closer^aher. She shoveled several helpings onto her platband heaped them with sour cream and chives.

"Joat," Channa said gently. "That really doesn't go with pineapple slices, you know."

"Why not?" Joat asked, turning to her with a milk mustache on her upper lip. The girl licked it away with satisfaction as Channa searched for a reply, gave up, and turned her attention back to Amos.

"Hiding away all that stuff was smart of Channa," she said thoughtfully. "Always gotta have supplies in your bolt-hole unless you're fardlin* stupid."

"Sound strategy," Amos said seriously.

He certainly seems to be good with children, Channa thought, stirring her food around with her fork. Girls don't bother him. Not pre-pubescent ones, at least.

In her inner ear, Simeon began to croon an ancient song: 'Across a croooowded room..."

"Shut up," she subvocalized.

"This place has got more back-alleys than you'd believe," Joat was saying. "Not like a ship at all, really. You can get anywhere from anywhere and ain't nobody can stop you, if you know where you're goin'. Some of the places pinch grudly, but they're in-able if you're sveltsome."

"I would have thought it much like a ship of space," Amos replied courteously. Channa could see his lips move silently for an instant as he puzzled out Joat's slang. That was no wonder. Half of it was her own invention.

"A whole other order of magnitude," Simeon said. "No mass limits on a station — the SSS-900-C wasn't expected to go anywhere. The outer shell was fixed, as well as some of the major facilities, but the rest was intended to allow organic growth up to a couple of hundred thousand people, max. We've found natural expansion is the best way to stabilize a real community, as opposed to a transient community, like a passenger vessel."

"That is good sense," Amos said meditatively. "On my family's estate, planning towns was similar. If you set down every detail, the place has no life. When Uncle Habib decides to put his tobacco store next to Aunti Scala's pastry shoppr Brother Falken's saddlery, and that brings an ice-cream parlor, it then follows that the town becomes a living and efficient entity."

"Why do you talk so funny?" Joat asked.

"Why doyou talk so funny?" Amos parried, and they both laughed. "Because Bethel was cut off for so long. We did not even screen or broadcast data from other worlds, so our people's way of speech changed litde, and those changes differed from those in the Central Worlds, which had dealings with many other worlds and cultures."

"Central Worlds?" Joat asked. "Oh, you're fardlin' — 'cuse me — way off there. This is the hikstik, frontier, you know."

"To you, not me." He paused. "I think, Joat, that someone besides yourself should know of these hidden ways of yours."

"You should see it," she said enthusiastically. "You wouldn't believe what's back there!"

"I would very much like to see it,1* he told her gravely. "But, I have not much time left for my studies." Her face fell. "Still," he said," I think that it is important that trusted people, other than just you and Simeon, should know these back ways of yours. Would you be willing to show my friend, Joseph?"

"He's your head honcho, hey?"

"My brother and my right hand," Amos said seriously.

"Okay, if he's nanna grudly."

Amos gave up trying to interpret that remark and glanced over at Simeon's image in the screen.

"Grudly," the brain said in his most professorial. "An all purpose negative. In this context — 'not too grudly1 — stniight-laced, conventional, boring, unimaginative.** "No, no. To tel^the truth and shame the devil, Joseph was, in feet, a <Jockside desperado when I met him, "Amos said Joat lit up, her urchin smile taking a year or two off the extra time life had dealt her, so that she looked twelve. "Sure! I'll be glad to show Joseph around. Whenever you like."

"Thank you. And now I must return to my studies." He sighed theatrically and rose.

"I know how you feel," Joat said, shaking her head in resignation.

"He's made a conquest there," Channa subvocalized. "Wonder how he did it?"

"Joat is no longer a feral child," Simeon pointed out "We broke the ground for him. Being glamorous doesn 't hurt. And he listens to her. He's naturally interested in people, I think, under the iveird socvHvUgious stuffthey rammeddown his throat."

"You're right," Channa said aloud, looking dreamily at the now dosed door of Amos' quarters.

Well, Simeon-Amos, Simeon thought, you're a hit with both my girls. A petty observation, but couldn't he indulge in pettiness in the privacy of his own mind? '"Course I'm right," Joat said She was having more of the pineapple slices, fresh from the vats, lavishly doUoped with ice cream. "You flipping the sheets with him yet?"

*Joat!" Channa said warningly, reaching over to flick her on the ear with thumb and forefinger.

"Watch it!" Joat said, rubbing the offended lobe. "Ill report you to Gorgan the Organ." She grinned unrepentandy. "I know all about it, y'know."

"You may have observed — and I wouldn't put that past you for a nanosecond, but you don't understand what you've seen. You also have no manners." "Yeah, that's true," Joat said complacently, "\bu needn'tact so smug about the lack," Simeon cutin. "Why not?" Joat asked. "Lots d^ way-neat stuff you can't do if you've got manners." i< My God, Channa thought, looking up from her notescreen.

All of them were looking terrible, but Doctor Chaundra looked old. Antt haunted as well. Channa was a little surprised. She would have thought him one of the ones who could handle the fear.

"Here it is,1* he said bitterly, holding up a small synthetic container.

Channa automatically glanced down at the box, a capsule dispenser, standard model, but looked more closely at him.

"Are you all right, Doctor?" she said anxiously. There were other medicos on the station, but only one Chaundra. Personal factors aside, he was also the only specialist with experience in original viral research.

"Tired is all," he said. The non-Standard accent in his voice was stronger than usual, a trace of liquid singsong. He stood for a moment by her desk looking at the box he carried, then he placed it in front of her. "They're ready," he said, pointing to it.

Channa touched the dispenser slot and it dropped a gelatin capsule filled with clear liquid into her palm.

"The virus," she said.

"Yes," he murmured. "1, who am a healer, have created for you a weapon."

"A nonlethal weapon for self-defense" she said in gende correction.

"Hopefully nonlethal. How can I be sure, with a genetically nonstandard target population? I cannot even be certain nobody on the station will die of it!"

"The probability —" Simeon began in a firm tone.

*•_ js vanishingly small, yes, indeed," Chaundra said. Then he sighed. "There is no sense in complaining after the fact We have made enough so every man and woman on the«ta(&>n gets five. I can't imagine anyone being unlucty enough to need more than that. What you do, is bite down on it. Don't swallow and breathe it all over the Kolnari nearest you. It is contagious even if swallowed, you understand, but more so with direct contact. If the pirate wishes to kiss you, by all means let them."

"Ugh!" Channa said, making a face.

"I've alerted the group leaders to call in at the clink to collect dispensers for distribution to their people," Simeon said.

"Remind them, will you," Chaundra said, "that anyone who uses a capsule should report as soon as possible to the clinic for the protective shot. They'll get a light dose then, but their ... um... victim will get very sick indeed."

"Symptoms?" asked Channa.

"Headache, nausea, diarrhea, fever, possible delirium." He shivered. "I must get back to my lab. So much more needs to be done, and there is so little time to do it all in."

"You need to sleep," Channa said firmly. "Go to bed for a minimum of six hours."

"That's an order, Chaundra," Simeon told him, "as of now, you're off duty until tomorrow morning."

"Yes, of course." Chaundra nodded abstractedly. "And the volunteers," he continued, "have them in the hospital as soon as the pirates appear. We can accelerate the onset—"

"Go to bed!" Channa took him by the arms and gave him a little shake, finally getting his startled attention.

"Oh..." He smiled. "Good idea. Um..." He paused at the door and blinked. "Oh, yes. Joat — I have met young Joat She is a bit... more mature than I thought she was." He frowned, looking concerned. "Do you think it will be all right, their being together so much? Her and Seld, I mean."

Channa blinked. At least nobodyJias been unkind enough f^ Q to mention any grizzly tales of Joat's life story, she thought "Uh, I don't think it will matte#" Simeon said, slightly amused. "They'll be kept weil-occupied, you know, and they are neither of them physically adult."

"You are very off-handed for a proper father of a daughter," Chaundra saicl owlishly.

"Well, I am her father — or will be when the papers are completed. Truly, Chaundra, I think we can depend on Joat to be responsible. I trust her. She may operate on her own code of ethics, but she is more consistent about it than many adults I have encountered. I'm not worried."

Chaundra sighed. *'I wish I had a credit for every time someone has told me that they are not worried. They're at a volatile age and they can't even trust themselves. Hell," he said throwing his arms wide, "under all this pressure, the adults on this station can't trust themselves. How can we expect diese kids to?"

Channa felt her color rise. "We can only anticipate the problem and talk to them and hope for the best If they're so inclined," to her surprise, she couldn't force herself to be more specific, "they'll find a time and place where we can't interfere. So let's not wear ourselves down worrying about it."

A whole new set of problems, she thought. Correcting the damage done to Joat's psychosexual development was probably going to take many years. Right now the girl needed Seld to be her friend, not her bed partner. He was definitely her friend but... Channa remembered what boys were like at that age, too. There's more of a danger that she'd break his arm. But she needs a friend. Something else to lie sleepless and worry over. Or had anyone told Joat about Seld's medical problems? privacy, she thought Seld had the right to deal with that in his own time.

"Hey!" Simeon said. "Yoohoo! Channa! Chaundra. You're both tired. Eveiything looks manageable when you've had some slfep. So go sleep. We'll take care of the capsules and we'll organize the volunteers. Don't worry about a thing."

Chaundra sighed again and assumed a wry expression. "Amateurs," he mumbled. "What you're experiencing, Simeon, is denial. You can't avoid such problems by pretending they don't exist." His shoulders fell "I'll have Seld bring her home with him after they're through working today." He waved goodbye and left.

"Denial," Simeon said musingly. Strange, knowing what he did of her past, he knew that sex was the last thing Joat would think of as a recreational activity. That was the commonest symptom of the particular form of abuse she had suffered — and still the idea made him uneasy, fatherhood.

"I don't want to talk about it," Channa told him, and marched briskly back to her desk. She sat down and spun the box of capsules around with one finger. "I was thinking," she said, "wouldn't it be great if we could up the ante on these?" She looked at Simeon's column.

"Yeah, it would. But we're already putting our people at risk. I'm not willing to do the enemy's work for them. Y'know?"

"Mmm. True. What if we could make them believe it's worse than it really is?"

"Hard to say without knowing their physiology, tissue samples ... Oh. You're talking about a con game, aren't you, Happy?"

"It all depends on their psychology, of course. And I'm not happy."

"Well," Simeon said dubiously, "the Navy psych reports aren't too detailed. These splinter groups are usually aberrant Generally speaking, the reports say the Kolnari are extremely aggressive towards those they perceive as weak, treacherous but willing to bargain with their equals in power, and have a tight/submission reflex towards superiors — until the superiors let down their guard, which is a sign of weakness/ "Oh, what a love-feast their culture must be!" Channa said. "Hmmm. They'd be vulnerable to status and power anxieties, then. And lots of internal rivalries."

"You betcha. Accordingtb the reports, they're also as superstitious as horses. They know some science, but they're not scientific, if you know what I mean."

"I think I get the picture. So?"

"We could modify some of the holo-projectors beside the security cameras and flash 'hallucinations' for the benefit of those who've had the virus. Auditory hallucinations are no problem. I could project them and no one would be the wiser."

"Oh, really?"

"Yeah," he seemed to be whispering directly into her ear, "and without using your implant."

"Wow," she said, touching her ear, "that's spooky. How did you do that?"

*Just threw my voice — heterodyning waves from multiple sources. It takes practice, but as you saw, the effect is worth it"

She shook her head, wide-eyed. "If you can come up with something visual to go with that, they'll be running for their ships the first day."

"Can't overdo it. It'll be easiest if they're alone when they see these things, otherwise it could be considered suspicious. I'll sound Joat out. That girl's a fountain of ideas."

Channa winced and forbore to ask what kind. Chaundra's comments almost visibly flooded back into her conscious mind.

"Don't let it worry you, she's a good kid," Simeon said emphatically. "I don't want to think about it"

"You really are concerned about Rachel's sanity, aren't you?" ( Amos and Channa were settled comfortably on the settee. Simeon had tactfully withdrawn his image from the pillar screen, leaving a strikingly realistic crackling fire in its place. Somehow he had even manage to replicate the scent of burning cedarwood. Amos had had to tactilely reassure himself that the fire was an image.

"Yes, she is definitely unstable," he said, his shoulders sagging hopelessly. "Among all the other problems, I must worry about this! It is so... sopetty."

"Humans can be a remarkably petty species," Channa said philosophically. Partiddarly that hysterical bitch Rachel. "When you get down to cases, lots of'big issues' have been decided on personal matters. From Harmodias and Aristogetion on down." Amos looked blank. "Two ancient Greeks. Never mind. Briefly, a government was overthrown because of a lovetriangle."

Amos sighed again and reached for his snifter of brandy. "I care nothing about her and my best friend would give his life for her," he said, shaking his head. "Channa—* "Yes?"

"I know here—" he touched his head "—that this... delusion of hers, has nothing to do with me. But here —" he touched his heart "— I cannot help but feel that I must somehow be to blame. I was a... caller-of-spirit: you would say a preacher. Oh, yes, I knew that half the women in those crowds were in love with me. What of it? I would never touch any of them, for that would be dishonorable and destroy my cause more surely than any other oflense. The folk of Bethel are... inflexible about such matters. Yet if I knew and accepted love, if it flattered my vanity, am I not in some manner responsible? How desperate she must be, and how lonely. It is sad."

Channa patted his arm anjl smiled soothingly. "From your description, it was never this bad before. If you're to blame, then so is everyjcharismatic politician and holo star since time began. Her ... delusion .., may have been aggravated by those drugs, although she's not responding to medication. Simeon, has anyone talked to Chaund^a about this?"

"Not yet," he said, after a tactful pause to suggest he hadn't been listening.

"I have decided to keep her under my eye," Amos said, adding reluctandy, "Mental care, the cure of souls. It is part of our religion that only those consecrated can perform cures of the human soul."

"Mmm." Your religion sucks wind, she thought silently, No sense in offending Amos, of course. Humans shouldn't be forced to take religion. That should be free choice. "Maybe we'd better let Chaundra know that Rachel isn't responding to treatment. She may need stronger calmers. Let's face it, when the pirates arrive, you're going to have a surfeit of problems to keep under your eyes."

"I can keep my eye on more than one thing at a time, Channa," Simeon cut in abruptly. "Simeon-Amos?"

He nodded. **I agree with Channa. I will speak with the doctor of this. This is my burden, my obligation. I will do it." He rose and disappeared into his room, shoulders bowed.

Channa shook her head, "You'd think he was sending her off to be executed."

"Who knows how his people view psych treatment? Confession seems to be a major element in their religion. To him, treating this as a medical problem could be equivalent to blasphemy."

"Hmph." She turned to squint at his column. "By the way, don't try to tell me that you didn't enjoy that little interruption, Simeon. I know you too well by now."

"Okay." His voice was downright cheery.

She smiled rueful jy. "Just don't make a habit of it, okay?" i "There are no guarantees in life, Channa."

"Oh, no? If I ever get the idea that you're engineering any more little disruptions of my love life, / guarantee that you'll regret it."

"Hey, be reasonable, Channa! What could I possibly have to do with Rachel going bonkers? I didn't even let her into the lounge. I could have, y'know."

Channa shrugged and grunted.

"I thought about not telling you she was trying to beat the door down, I really did. But then I figured she'd go grab a laser and cut her way in. And, of course, if she had caught you two in flagrante delicto, she wouldn't have stopped at cutting up doors."

"Oh, thank you, Simeon, you are such a hero, saving me from a fete worse than death and death itself. Consider yourself hugged and slobbered over in an ecstasy of gratitude."

"That's short for 'my attitude's back,' isn't it?"

She got up and started for her room. "Yes, Simeon, my attitude's back."

"Well, why? What did I do?"

She spun on her heel and threw up her hands. "I'm horny, all right? I'm horny and I'm frustrated!" The door snapped shut behind her.

Simeon shut down his pickups in the lounge, escaping the charged atmosphere in the only way he could. Sheesh, he thought. Softshells -were strange.

"Nothing, Great Lord. Nothing but rebroadcasts of the same warning message."

Tsssk. You have had no success in monitoring internal communications?"

"No, Great Lord."

This time Baila's voice held a slight touch of resentment This was no backwater, no half-barbarian slum that used electro-magnetic signals for internal communication. This was a sophisticated Central Worlds installation they were planning to attack. It had internal optical circuitry. What did the Great Lord expect her to do? Fly over to the station and burn her way through to tap a line?

We are all impatient, Belazir thought. The Clan impulse was to leap upon the prey and take it Loot it bare, move on. They had been very successful following that course of action for a long time.

"Any other ships?"

"None since that freighter who acknowledged their warning beacon and sheered off," she said.

"Serig."

"Command me, lord." The verbal formula was more than routine in Serig's mouth; he fairly quivered with anticipation.

"We will move in exactly one-point-five hours from next day-cycle termination." This was about three hours Terran Standard time, since Kolnar rotated more slowly than Manhome. "All vessels to launch their seekers simultaneously and then begin subspace jamming pulses.

Cftwigter and Age of Darkness will remain on combat over watch, ready to provide fire support as necessary. Dreadful Bricte and Shark will move in to the upper and lower polar axis respectively and force-dock, then occupy the station. Here are the areas tabesjcured."

His hands keyedja sequence, and the schematic of the SSS-900-C was overlaid with color-coded plans for movement.

"Move swiftly! Crush any sign of resistance with utmost force. If resistance slows the infantry down, secure those decks and blow them open to space. I will be with the second wave at the north polar axis."

"Lord."

"Captain Lord Pol is not to disembark before the target is fully secured. Those are my orders. Repeat them to her in the message."

"I hear and obey, Great Lord," Serig said. He made a few notes to himself. "Tightbeam?"

"Of course."

"I may lead the assault party?"

Belazir and his henchman shared an identical wolf grin. "Of course."

Joseph ben Said nodded gravely. "I am glad that you have shown me these things, Joat."

Joat looked downshaft between her legs — it was the only way to see the Bethelite's face since they were both climbing up — and smiled cockily. They had paused at this intersection with two small feeder ducts so she could give him directions. He had hooked one thick arm around a rung so he could squint down the other shafts.

"You learn pretty quick," she said. "Hey, and you don't get fordled up in a tight spot, neither."

Joseph's square fece split in a raptor's smile. *Joatmy-friend, where I grew up one learned quickly, or one died. Also I spent much time in narrow places.

Sewers and tunnels, rather than ductwork, but the principle is the same."

"Yeah, I guess we got a lot in common," she said. You, poor bastard, she added to herself. -Not aloud. Evidently these oscos were sensitive about Iqiguage.

"But I am surprised that you can move with such freedom when any section can be closed off and airevacuated," Joseph went on. He cracked his thick-fingered hands reflexively, and took out a long curved knife to trim a callus. "And then there are the maintenance servos, also centrally controlled."

"Yeah, well, you gotta look at that sort of thing from the bottom up," Joat said. "Follow me."

They muscled upward, back and legs against opposite side of the passageway, then crawled out into a slightly wider connecting way.

"See? There's the seal," she said, running one finger along the edge of the octagonal opening where the two ducts crossed.

"Ah." Joseph peered more closely. "I see — a thin sheet?"

"Naw, interlocking pointed wedges, 's stronger or some fardling thing. Don't get in the way if it's gonna dose. They don't have no safety pressure stops here where people aren't supposta be, so they'll cut you right in half."

Joseph nodded, continuing his examination. "And this?" He touched a slight bulge.

"Access panel. Here."

Joat brought up a square piece of electronics from her harness and touched it The bulge withdrew into the wall. Inside were readouts, a keypad, and a datajack. She squirmed until her backpack was on the floor between her knees, then pulled out a jackline from her Spuglish and clipped it into the socket The machine lit. Hello, Joat, scrolled across it. Simeon's gone bye-bye wurfi

"What is that?" Joseph said, fascinated.

"I usta think it was Simeon in a grudly strange comedown," Joat said, her fingers flying in a rapid taptaptapt^tiptip. "Only it isn't. 'S just a really neato AI program running ©a the station main computers. Fools ya, y'know? ^eaTeasy to get to thinking it's a real person, but it isn't. Smart piece of junk, but I can get around it. When it thinks you're Simeon, it really comes down as an animal"

Hello, Simeon, the screen printed. What's up, boss? Huh? Huh?

Joat's fingers scrambled. Nothing much, she keyed. Updating Shame on Me, she added.

Don't rightly know that one, pardner, the machine replied. Uhyip. The tip of Joat's tongue was clenched between her teeth in a rictus of concentration. At last, she leaned back and sighed, cracking her fingers twohanded.

"Now it thinks I'm Simeon again," she said. " 'Shame on Me'?" Joseph enquired.

"Fool me once," Joat said, quoting, "shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

Joseph's laugh was quiet and appreciative. Joat felt the quiet glow of satisfaction you only got from another operator. Seld was neat, but he wasn't a ... Well, he wasn't grown up, in the special way Joseph was grown up. She'd known a lot of people who were grown-up that way, but Joseph was the first one she had ever liked or trusted.

"So you manipulate the system through the central computer?" he said.

"Naw, not most of the time. Too con-spick-cue-us. Finkin' obvious, in fact. There's a distributed node system, fambly thousands of little compus, all got backup authority, if you can cut in. And nobody cuts in like jack-of-all-trades, my man."

Joseph clapped a hand on her shoulder. She stiffened and stared at it. He took it away, not snatching or lingering, either.

"How did you pick this up?" he said in admiration, pointing at her Spuglish.

"Dad." Fdrdlmg swiney. "Learned more from the bastard who won me from my uncle," she said. "He was smart, really smart, when he wasnX drunk or... well, when he was sober. Knew his way around any system there was. Never got caught, except once."

"Who by?" Joseph asked.

Joat turned her face toward him, and for a moment it was not a child's face at all. "Me," she said softly. "He forgot me. And I cracked his system. They think he's still alive. He went thataway out the lock, peeing blood. His ship's computer said everything was fine."

"Well," Joseph said with a cold smile, "if it's good enough for the official records, it's good enough for me. Now, show me how you decouple the local subsystems again."

"Like, it's got to be physical," Joat went on, animated again. "You—"

"I am glad to see you two are friends," Amos said.

Joat and Joseph had walked in the door laughing uproariously, slapping each other on the shoulder.

Joseph smiled at his leader and bowed formally, hand on heart. "My brother, you have done me a great favor by introducing me to this young sorceress," he said. "And our cause."

"You guys are brothers?" Joat asked suddenly.

"No," was the spontaneous answer from Channa, Simeon, and Amos.

"Oh?" Joat looked from one to the other, frowning slightly, then she shook her head dismissing the problem. "Yeah, we had a great time!" she went on. *Joe here picks things up pretty good, for a grown-up."

"For a grown-up?" Amos said, raising a brow.

"You know," Joat explained kindly, "for somebody who's old"

Amos pursed his lips. He was a year older than Joseph. "I am glad to see you found him worthy," he said dryly. _ «,j "Yeah, I did. JojU frowned. "Can I ask you something?" she said.

"By all means, foster daughter of Channa," Amos said.

"Most grown-ups are funny about kids knowing things," she said. "You aren't. How come?"

Amos blinked. "You are... what, twelve?" he said. "'Bout. Gets hard to tell when you do a lot of FTL 'n some coldsleep."

"At your age, I was running my family's estates," Amos said. "Of course, 1 would not have been, had my father lived. Sons of poorer folk are apprenticed at twelve, doing a day's work and paying for their own food. Should I be surprised if you can do likewise?"

Joat glowed. "At last" she said, turning triumphantly to Channa. "Told you I'd learn more doing a real job!"

"What did I say?" Amos asked, flinching at the glare Channa leveled at him.

"Promised I'd go catch Seld," Joat said, wolfing down the last of her breakfast and sticking a few pieces of fruit in the pockets of her shapeless overall. "Ta-ta, all."

"Speaking of the Chaundras," Channa said meaningfully, glancing at Amos. "I have to run. More—ack! pftht! — meetings. Don't forget"

Joseph waited until silence had fallen again, then looked at Amos with concern. "Something is wrong with you, my brother?"

Amos looked at his plate. "No," he said. He gestured Joseph to a seat, but stood himself, his hands clasped behind his back. "There is nothing wrong with me. This concerns Rachel." He held up his hand to forestall Joseph's protest. "Let me finish. She came here the other night, furious, raving. She claimed we were betrothed. Her eyes, Joseph! They were wild, and she shook . .. her face was so white."-.He looked at his friend. "Our Rachel is shaking to njeces before our eyes. I am going to tell Chaundra what I have told you, and if he decides that she needs treatment, then she shall have it"

Joseph nodded jerkily, resting his face in one hand. His shoulders moved convulsively, then he steadied.

"I am grateful that you sbare your thoughts with me," he said. "Though you now stand as her father."

"We have no Healer of Souls here, Joseph," Amos said with deep remorse.

"So Rachel must lose her soul's privacy before an infidel, an outsider," Joseph replied.

"I had not thought you so pious."

Joseph sighed, shaking his head wearily. "It is strange how ingrained is the training of one's childhood. At the last, I find I, too, am a son of the Temple."

"If you truly are against such procedures, I will not force her," Amos said.

Joseph rose and gave Amos the embrace ofbrothers. "Thank you," he said, "but, if my heart rebels, my mind tells me you are right... damnably right That is an irritating habit you have, Amos ben Sierra Nueva."

Amos grinned. "So I have been told. To myself not least, brother. Do you wish to be with her?"

Joseph hesitated, then shook his head. "No," he said, after a moment "As she is... it would be no kindness. I will continue with my work." His mouth quirked. "Work is truly the mercy of God, as the Prophet said. No?"

"I find more truth in his words every time I return to them," Amos replied seriously, his hand on the other man's shoulder. "Truth too strong for the chains of dogma. Go in peace."

To make ready for war," Joseph observed.

Amos laughed ruefully. "Another truth the Prophet left us: 'Ifyou would have peace, then prepare for war/ "

"What a pity the Elders thought that meant the spiritual struggle alone," Joseph said.

"The Prophetwas a ftirprisingly practical man," Amos observed. "I strive to emulate him."

"You do so. You do so very well," Joseph replied and bowed formally: a rare gesture between them.

"Let's $o get Seld Chaundra," Joat suggested when Joseph caught up to her at the elevator. "We're supposed to go into hiding when the pirates show up, so he'll need to see this stuff, too."

"I have no objection," Joseph said mildly.

"You and Simeon-Amos fighting about something?" she asked blundy.

"No." Joseph shrugged. "We are angry together, at what is and cannot be changed."

"Yeah, life's like that," Joat observed.

They reached the main corridor and took two people movers down from the wall. Joseph looked a little dubious as he stepped onto the disk. As it silently lifted from the floor, he gripped the handhold tightly with one broad spatulate hand. Joat showed Joseph the address to tap to reach the Chaundras' home. The litde floatdisks took off, dodging agilely through traffic and summoning elevators when their route took to the upper decks.

Seld himself opened the door.

"Hi," he said somewhat nervously.

"Hi, this is Joseph ben Said," Joat said indicating the swarthy man beside her. "Simeon-Amos suggested that I take him round, and I thought you might like to come."

"Aw, I'd love to," he said, all eagerness which dissolved the next moment. "I can't I'm grounded."

"You're what?" Joat asked, puzzled.

Seld blushed to the roots of his auburn hair; the colors dashed horribly. "I'm being disciplined. I can't leave our quarters."

Joat's expression was amused andaghast. Glad I don't have parents, she thought. / won't get stigk someplace I don't want to be.

"Geeze, Seld, your dad can't seemj&o get it right First it's too much 'go,' now it's too mucn stay." She shook her head in awe. "You can't win playing that way. So come anyhow," she added, cocking her head at him.

"I can't," he repeated, glancing nervously at Joseph. The Bethelite crossed his arms and looked at the ceiling, humming an idle tune.

"He's okay," Joat assured him. "Why not?" "'Cause Dad's gonna call and check up on me."

Joat rolled her eyes. "So call in to the answering machine ev'ry so often. If he's called, you can call back and say he caught you in the head. He's so worried about your safety, Seld, he should worry more if you don't know this. You gotta know your way around the backside of the station. Hey! If it really bothers you we can ask Simeon to help, or Joseph ... ?" She turned appealing eyes up to his.

Joseph uncrossed his arms. "I believe it could be put to your father —" He broke off, his eyes focused on some one in the corridor beyond Joat. "Rachel?"

Rachel bint Damscus stopped, looking him coldly up and down. "Well, Joseph ben Said. I wonder, do you have any messages that you are withholding from me?"

He was nonplussed. "Whatever are you talking about, my lady?"

"No lady of yours, peasant," she said, spitting the last word at him, her eyes wide and flashing. "Amos told me that he had delegated you to inform me that he was moving in with that lanky, sallow-faced slut. But you, apparently, chose not to tell me. Why is that?"

"We are at war," he said shortly. "Time is short.

Rachel bint Damscus, be known to Joat," he said, gesturing courteously to her, "the foster daughter of Simeon. Be known also to Seld Chaundra."

Rachel looked at the two young people as though he had introduced her to a pair of rodents. "Simeon... ?" she said, picking up whit was important to her.

"Yes," he hissed In a whisper, moving closer to her. Nat now, his expression said. Spare these children.

"Who is this 'Simeon* that everyone addresses with such respect?"

"He and Channa run the station," Joat told her.

"Ah," Rachel said, looking at her with a false smile, "does that make you the whore's foster-daughter, too?* Joseph's hand moved very quickly, deflecting Joat's hand, which was halfway to delivering what it held.

"Drop it," he said. "Now, Joat."

Struggling against his grip, Joat drew her lips back from her teeth, but she had to comply. The grip on her wrist was not tight enough to hurt, but it had the implacable solidity of a mechanical grab. The Bethelite wrenched the small squarebox from her with his other hand.

"Weapon?" he said, turning it over briefly. "Do not strike without thinking, Joat. And rarely from anger. That causes problems, always." He handed her back the gadget "Wait."

Rachel's face had turned an ugly mottled color, partly from fright and partly from being humiliated. Her complexion went brick-red as Joseph grabbed her by the upper arm and began to pull her further down the corridor.

"Take your hands from my arm, peasant," she shouted. Joseph ignored her stolidly, as he did her attempts to halt their movement "Let goofme!" she shrieked.

Passersby turned at the sound of her voice. Joseph cast a look up and down the corridor. There was little privacy here and none within easy reach. He released her arm and spoke in a firm low voice.

"My lady, you are not yourself. The coldsleep medications have affected your ... balance. Please, accompany me to the sickbay and —"

"Yes! Back to the infidel doctor,.,so he can drug me, poison me, leave so-wonderful Amo&to wallow between the thighs of thats/w*, thata^wn?— He reached out a hand, a pleading gesture. Rachel •• i* " tj struck it away with the contempt she would have dealt a spider.

"Don't touch me, you peasant whore's-get! You make me sick. Don't touch me>"

She struck again, a hard ringing slap across his face, backhanding him again and again. Joseph's head moved only a little on his thick muscular neck, although a trickle ofblood started from his nose and the corner ofhis mouth. On the fourth slap, he caught her hand. She began to thrash, trying to free herself from that implacable grip. He turned her hand, exposing bleeding cuts where her knuckles had smashed against teeth and bone.

"My lady," he said, cutting through her shrill cries. "Strike me if you will, but you will hurt your hand using it so. Here, take this."

His free right hand made a small flip, and a knife appeared in it: a short leaf-bladed dagger with a plain leather-wrapped hilt, looking sharp enough to cut light. Rachel shrieked and pulled back again, but Joseph's hand made another movement, holding out the hilt. He waited, his eyes on hers. Silence fell broken only by Rachel's rapid, gasping breath. The bystanders were crowding away, their voices sunk to a murmur. Then Rachel pulled loose and ran, blundering into a corner as she scrambled out of sight down a side aisle.

Joseph clicked the knife into its wrist-sheath, his eyes thoughtful. Wiping his face on a kerchief, he returned to the two adolescents. "1 don't think I like her," Joat said laconically.

"I apologize," he said quietly. "Lady Rachel was gendy reared. She is suffering from stress and adverse reactions to medication."

"She's bughouse," Joat said bluntly. He's gone on her, she thought- Geh! What a fardlm' waste. People should reproduce the way bacteria did, splitting cells. That was cleaner. Even angrudies like Joe got strange when they had the hots. * Joseph frowned at her. "Negative reaction, as I said.*1 "Yeah, bughouse, like I said.... Okay, forget it How did you do that thing with the knife?"

"Spring-loaded sheath," Joseph said, obviously relieved to change the subject. He bent back his wrist and showed them.

Joat glanced at Seld, caught his eye. He shook his head in silent agreement. Adults! They're nuts.

Channa stumbled into the lounge and fell facefirst into the cushions of the couch. "I hate commuting," she said with a theatrical groan.

"Hah!" was Simeon's mocking comment. "Call that commuting? Why, in my grandfathers' day..."

"In your grandfathers' day," she said pulling herself into a sitting position, "they probably commuted by ox-cart through subspace and drifts of snow fourteen feet high, and that was in high summer, being dive bombed by stinging insects the size of ore-freighters, just to borrow a cup of sugar from their next-door neighbor three light years away. I," she said, indicating herself with a delicate hand and a raised eyebrow, "am not as hardy. And 1 hate to commute."

"Not a problem I'm likely to have," he commented.

"No!" she agreed.

"So I should just offer sympathy and understanding," he suggested.

"Absolutely, and I, of course, will accept this with gratitude as the very balm my bruised and battered spirit craves."

"Poor baby."

"Ah," she sighed. "Well! I feel better. What's new on the home front?"

"Apparently Joat's gotten Selchgrounded until he turns twenty-one." 3* "How'd she manage that?"

"Chaundra disciplined him foff itaying behind and she talked him into exploring the station with her and Joseph."

"Poor Seld. What's Joat's reaction?"

"Oh, it's all her fault, she's got the kiss of death or something...."

"Seld staying behind is her fault?"

"No, no. It's all her fault. The minute we decided to adopt her, Bethel was attacked, so that Amos escaped, the pirates chased him and the station is now endangered. You see the logical sequence of events. One of her depressed moods."

Those tended to be temporary but of unpredictable duration.

"I can't deny," she said, fighting a laugh, "that the logic's inescapable when the data is structured in that fashion."

They were still laughing when Amos came in.

"What causes such merriment?" he asked, grinning.

Channa looked at his handsome face, and it seemed to her that for a moment the station stood still.

"Oh," Simeon told him, "the horrors of being twelve."

Amos shuddered. "Indeed," he said, rolling his eyes. "Would that all horrors were both so transient and so amusing in retrospect. I fell in love with the cook. When that was over, I decided I was religiously inspired — and never recovered from that."

Channa gave an involuntary snort of laughter, glanced over at him to be sure, then dissolved in whooping gales of laughter.

"At least," she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, "you don't take yourself too seriously."

"I cannot afford to," Amos said, bowing with hand on breast "Far too many others do. If dieir prophet cannot laugh at himself now and then, they are lost as weH."

"My adolescence ^s^vorse," Simeon said. They turned and looked at tfce pillar. "Imagine my pure, unsullied, young self thrust among hardened asteroid miners."

"It certainly left its mark," Channa said dryly. "No one escapes without being marked," Amos said wisely.

"And no one gets out alive," they all said together.

"Are you talking about the station?" Joat asked in horror, emerging from her room.

"No, no," Channa said. "Life." Teenage life, actually, but let's not be specific right now.

Joat began to rearrange Channa's desk, banging down the implements.

"It's so stupid!" she said, clattering a note organizer screen down.

"What is?" Simeon said, soothingly. Sometimes that tone annoyed Joat so much she forgot what was troubling her. This time she was too focused.

"Seld," she said. "I mean, this could be the last week of our lives and Seld is locked in his room! What a great way to go! Y'know?"

No one answered her. Channa and Amos wouldn't meet her eyes. A look of mild exasperation crossed her features and she tried another tack.

"Look, I need him," she said earnestly. "He's really pretty good, in ajunior-grudly way, hey? I want to help. Y'know? So, I thought we, Seld and me, could ..." She stopped, tapped her fingertips together and stared upward, biting her lip. "I thought we could maybe make up some of those signal disrupters I use," she said in a rush.

"You mean the ones that keep me from seeing or hearing you?"

"Yeah," Joat appeared fascinated by her fingernails, "Those."

'Joat, you could do that in the engineering lab. Anyone there will be happy t5* help you. If we get enough people assembling thje elements, we could make quite a few in the time we h'ave left."

"No," Joat said and sat down, looking right at Simeon's column. "I mean, I like the idea of working in the engineering lab, don't getpae wrong on that But the signal disruptor is my idea, and I'm not going to just give it away. I know I'mjust a kid, but I know you don't dothat."

"I'm not going to let anybody steal the credit for your invention, Joat. I fully intend to watch out for your interests. I give you my word on that"

"Thank you," she said simply. A silence fell, oddly solemn. After a moment, Joat continued, "Y'know, it's probably not a good idea to have too many of them around. I mean, the more there are, the more likely some jerk will lose one and the pirates will find it and figure it out, then where'U we be?"

"A valid point," Channa said judiciously.

"So," Joat slapped her legs, then rubbed her palms up and down her thighs, "what I thought was, Seld and me could make up enough for you guys," she turned to point at Amos and then at Channa, "and as many of the councilreps or team leaders as we can." She looked at the adults' faces, checking their expressions, then turned to Simeon's column. "Whaddaya say?"

"I'd say you're a heartless hard-bargainer, a blackmailer, and a techno-witch. That said, I'D talk to Chaundra, and I think hell allow Seld to assist on an authorized project But use more sense next time, Joat. When I adopt you, you're going to have limits, too. Oh, and don't work him too hard. He's just not..." Simeon tried to finish the caution diplomatically "... the hardy type."

"I know," she said softly, nodding solemnly. "Ill take care of him, I promise." Then she smiled a tight, professional-looking little smile, and rose. "Well, goodnight, everybody."

"Goodnight," they wished her in return.

When-the door ha4 closed behind her, Amos looked warmly at Channi, then dropped his eyes. "I, too, am weary, and there is still so much to learn."

"Do what you can," Channa advised, "and play the rest by ear."

"And don't forget," Simeon told him, "all you have to do is ask and I'll try to help. Channa, why don't you give him that contact button now?"

"Yes." From a desk drawer, she took a small box, which she presented to Amos.

"We should probably give one to both Joat and Seld," Simeon suggested.

Channa nodded.

Amos took out the small button curiously.

"That gadget will let me see what you see, hear what you hear, and respond in relative privacy," Simeon told him.

"It is so small," Amos said, examining the tiny device.

"But so effective," Simeon answered through the button.

Startled, Amos dropped it.

"I can see that it could be very useful," he said, laughing as he retrieved it. "Thank you, Simeon."

Channa hesitated. "See you in the morning."

"Yes, altogether too briefly," he replied, giving her a rueful bow.

Channa yawned hugely and looked up at the time display. Evening again already! Almost time for dinner. Hopefully it would be more cheerful than breakfast, which had been subdued in the extreme. "Gods, another day gone? Where is everyone?"

Anne McQffiey &SM. Stirling "Amos is on his way back home and should be here any second," Simeon said. "Joat is committing illegalities in the engineering lab, chortling madly with Seld, when I can pick them up at all Siie'll be back here to eat, or so I believe her plan to be." ^ Channa stretched. "I need a break." She flopped into an easy chair and said, "Woul$ you put on the 'Hebrides Suite/ please?"

He listened to it for a moment and said, "This is nice.

*One of my favorites. My great-grandmother once told me that this music held the soul of Earth's oceans in its phrases. I've loved it ever since."

"Your great-grandmother was from Earth, Channa?" "No, but she'd been there. Oh, this is my favorite part—a litde louder, Sim."

She raised her hand, palm up to show that he should raise the volume again, and again. The door opened on Amos, who stepped backward as though the magnificent swell of sound had washed him out on a wave of music.

Channa laughed at his startled expression and signaled Simeon to lower the sound. "Sorry," she called.

Amos poked his head incautiously, "Whew!" he said. "Channa, it is dangerous to play music at such volume. Your hearing will be impaired."

She made a face at him. "Don't be a priss, Simeon Amos. No one ever lost their hearing on classical music."

"Beethoven?" Simeon suggested. "Hah!" she said. "You men all stick together," and stumbled to the galley for coffee. When she had doctored it with cream liqueur and whipped Jersey floating on the surface, she took an appreciative sip. "Ah! That's good!" Although when I learned where Jersey originally came from, Inearly lost -my lunch, she added to herself Simeon had picked up on her tastes quickly.

"Now, that is something I feel I've missed out on," Simeon said.

"Mmmh?"

"Coffee, food, everyone who sits down to dinner at •the Perimeter says, 'Wow! That smells good!' closely foDowed by 'MnimfThft is delicious!' and I haven't got an analogue for either of those sensations. Smell and taste — you'd think they could have given me one of 'em. Oh, 1 can taste when something's offin the chemosynthesis plants, and I can smell an ion-trail, but it's not the same'thing. Sometimes the people at Medic Central are downright inhumanly utilitarian."

"Why don't you put Joat on it?" Channa suggested.

"Put me on what?" Joat asked, arriving at that point.

"I was just saying that I've missed out on tasting coffee, or smelling it even, everyone says it smells so good. I don't even know what that means. I just can't get my mind around the concept. I don't like the feeling that I'm being denied one of life's greatest pleasures. However, the thought of anyone poking about with my neural interfaces is enough to keep the thought merely wistful."

Channa and Amos locked eyes a moment, then flicked away. Not before Simeon had caught the look.

"That's terrible," Joat said sympathetically, "'though, maybe if you gave me your specs..."

"Now, sex... sex provides a lot of mental pleasure." Simeon continued with relish. "I'd be willing to bet that I get almost as much sexual pleasure out of my own imagination as anyone does actually having it."

Joat made a derisive grimace.

"I'd say in your dreams, Simeon, but that would be redundant," Channa said archly, making her way back to her desk. "What have you got there?" she asked, pointing to the box in Joat's hand.

"Oh, this is something for you guys." Joat opened it to display the two short, gleaming metal rods, perhaps three centimeters long, with crystals at either end. Joat looked at Channa expectantly.

Channa took one out of the box, turning it over. In the center of the rod was a small gap, bridged by a narrow tube which joined its two halves She touched the crystals experimentally, then lookeoqueringly at Joat "It's pretty?" she asked, puzzled at its use.

Joat laughed. "Seld said we should make 'em into jewelry, but I figured we didn't have time to experiment with the effect that might have. I wear mine in a sheath in my boot" She tugged up her^pant-leg and pulled down the cuffof her boot to show the top of an identical wand.

"How does this artifact of yours work?" Amos asked her, picking up the other.

"You push the two halves togedier to make a contact"

Amos did so. There was a click as the two halves came together to form a smooth even surface. He looked at Channa and Joat, then at himself "Is ... is it working?"

"Ask him,** Joat said, jerking her thumb at Simeon's column.

"Simeon?"

Simeon didn't answer because he hadn't heard the question. He had, however, seen Amos wink out of existence, and he was experiencing some very uncomfortable feelings about that disappearance. Suddenly, he was unsure that he wanted anyone besides Joat to have this ability. Such disappearances definitely gave him the willies.

"Apparently not," Channa said, pleased. She clicked her own rod together and vanished from Simeon's sight and hearing.

Amos leaned close to her. "I can already see much potential for his device." His smiling eyes were warm and full of meaning.

"Seld and me knocked seven of these off today," Joat explained to Simeon. "We'll contrapt more tomorrow, now that we've found the parts we need. What's the matter?" she asked in response to Simeon's groan.

"Sorry, Joat, seven is pretty good really, and there's nothing to say that we can't share these around. Right, Channa? Channa? OUie-ollie in-free!"

Channa grinned srmigly at Amos. "He really can't see us, can he?" Then she pulled gently at the rod.

"How nice of you to drop in," Simeon said in a sour tone. Damned if Til let you know how much that bothers me.

"Sorry," Channa said. "I know it bothers you," she subvocalized. Somehow Sim connected it with being cut off from his sensory input. Me, now Fm a sensory input? She turned to Joat. "Urn, do you actually have to have it on your person for it to work? Or would it work if, say I had it on the desk beside me?"

"It should keep you disappeared if you stay very dose to it. You're not really blanked out It's more like a local override command to the sensor not to record you, you know? I didn't really measure it very close." Joat gave a self-deprecating twitch of her hands. "I need more theory and stuff, I know."

"Well, I'm impressed, Joat" She clapped her hands together. "Let's celebrate, and send out for dinner." She took the rod out of Amos's hands and unsnapped it "You know," Simeon commented as Amos reappeared, "this invention of Joat's could be the biggest boon to burglars since hacking."

Channa froze, then looked over at Joat. The girl managed to look sweet, innocent and furtive at the same moment. It was true. AI-driven surveillance was universal in public places. So were attempts to counteract it Joat's seemed to work better than most Of course, once the device was publicized, countermeasures would be initiated. No wonder Joat wanted to keep her ace-in-the-hole secret.

Well, of course, she steals! Simeon whispered in her ear. How did you think she survived before you took a hand?

"Like many swords," Amos agreed, "it is two edged. But, they will be of help, and I shall enjoy testing mine." He smiled at Channa.

Channa looked at Simeon's column. *Just think, well be able to keep secrets from youjSim. How will you stand it?"

Amos tiptoed carefully out of Joat's room. "She never woke," he said ina hall-whisper. "I put a blanket over her."

Channa shook her head. Joat's subconscious seemed to know who to trust This evening was the first time she had noticed die girl sleeping with the limp, irresistible finality of the trusting child. She'd also had along, hard, if triumphant, day.

"I thought she'd never get enough of your stories about Bethel," she said. And neither would I. It didn't have the urban sophistication of Senalgal, but Amos could make his world and his way of life sound... beautiful, she decided. Of course, he was an eloquent man, and he was describing what he truly loved. He had described what she had always yearned for in a planet-side posting: the hugeness, the variousness, the alweness of a breathing world.

"It was as much for me as for her," Amos said, leaning back on the sofa and raising his face to the ceiling, eyes dosed. "I speak, and I see what can never be again."

She put a hand on his. "Bethel will be freed and made beautiful again. The Kolnar only stripped the surface, not the nature of the planet"

"Yes. Yes, I believe — must believe that." His fingers curled around hers; fine long-fingered hands, a little calloused. from riding horses, she thought A sport she had only read of before. Simeon had provided holos, and riding looked more dangerous and exciting than piloting mini-shuttles.

"Yet when the enemy are driven off, the wounds... and beyond that We need to change, we must change. More than I thought or wished, and I was a rebellious youngster, a radical, a breaker of images, or so they called me." He turned his head to her. "The enormity of the task ahead fhghcensme, overwhelms me. Yetwithhelp..."

Oh, great, shethougAt. To herself: "Lost prince of beautiful, exotic& planet, seeks helpmate/companion/lover to assist in rescue/reconstruction. Requires intelligent, forceful manager with strong sense of duty. Will furnish lifelong love and affection, plus palaces, estates, interesting experiences. Apply Amos ben Sierra Nueva." What was that quotation? Get thee behind me, Satan?

Amos sat quietly beside her and placed Joat's box in her lap. His glance was filled with meaning. Channa opened the box and they each took out a crystal-tipped rod. Then diey glanced at Simeon's column with identical scheming smiles and clicked the two parts together.

Amos leaned over. They kissed; she stroked his dark hair and gently cupped the back ofhis head in her hand.

"It is good to have privacy," he said huskily.

"Yes," she agreed, "it is good." And it adds spice, she thought Like sneaking out of bounds when you're in school.

Simeon watched Channa's door open and close, though no one appeared to be near it He suppressed a burst of resentment He had told them he'd turn off the sensors if they requested it. But no, they'd just gone and shut him out without a word...

What is the universe coming to ? he thought in irritation. Besides, there's a child present!

A child who had presented him with a techno-itch he could not scratch. On reflection, he decided the analogy was maddeningly accurate. Try as he might, his attention came looping back to the nagging gaps in his recordings. He was accustomed to knowing everything Atme MeQtfny fc? SM. Stirling that went on. Joat's earlier white-noise machines and attention-deflectors were minor irritations compared to this newest gadget Of course, she hadn't had access to the engineering labs before this.

"The child was probably bopo with a microtool in her hand," he muttered. Now, how did the wands function? Joat had, after all, given h*pi a hint She might be a genius, but Simeon was a shellperson, with all the computer power and experience that implied.

And I'm also constitutionally unable to resist picking tip the gauntlet, he thought happily. There were times when the only way to get nd of a temptation was to give in to it... / can't betieue this, he told himself, fifteen minutes later. Equipment made by the best minds in the Central Worlds flummoxed by a preteen! Which confirmed longheld thoughts about the quality of minds attracted to the Central Worlds bureaucracy. Simeon had long thought that it was a private miracle he hadn't come out prosthetized into a camel, since the design teams were committees. Now, he must meet this challenge.

Chaniia arched her back against Amos's weight, her hands caressed the slick, silken skin of his back. He kissed her throat and she sighed happily, ready for— "Oh, Chaaannaaa, Iseeeyooou."

HAck,ckgak!"

Amos raised his head from the crook of her neck to look at her. The mixture of puzzlement and sensuality on his face looked very silly, not to mention slightly nauseated. Simeon laughed.

Oh, this is terrible, Channa thought. Yet it was impossible not to see the moment from Simeon's point of view for a second. She laughed, caught between rage and helpless mirth. Amos bobbed up and down with her laughter. His expression assumed a martyred quality that caused her to lose control completely.

"Channa," he said desperately, rolling off and holding her in his arms. "Channa, my darling — are you all right?"

She struggled to speak, to reassure him that her sanity was intact "Sim... Sim... he... hehe... hehehe," she had to avoid the word he. "Sim..." she gasped, "my implant... he... he^ie,^nmrrmph... can see us."

She stopped, panting and watched his look of concern melt Suddenly she was slightly frightened. This was a man accustomed to redressing insult, and his ego had just received a terribly humiliating one.

"Simeonl" he roared. The door seemed to recoil before his headlong passage, and the cooler wind from the lounge brought goosebumps to her skin.

Amos picked up the first thing his hand encountered, a vase, and threw it against Simeon's column.

"You incest eater!" he bellowed. "You filthy pi dog! BanchatT Channa appeared in her doorway, wrapped in a sheet, fve never seen a naked, erect man in a/it of rage before, she thought dazedly. Oh, I really shouldn't have broken up. Mengetso focused at that particular moment!

"How could you do something so vile! Have you no decency?" Amos was demanding.

"What the hell is goin' on?" Joat asked, and stopped, poleaxed at the sight of a naked and raging Amos.

Amos dived for the sheet Channa was wearing and they tussled for it. He settled for dragging a small corner of it over his hips.

He drew himself up. "Go back to bed, Joat, this does not concern you." The pure mad anger had drained out of his voice. Bethel had a nudity taboo, and he was suddenly and acutely conscious of being naked before a twelve-year-old girl.

"Don't take it out on her, Simeon-Amos, I'm the one you're mad at," Simeon said.

Amos spun round, losing his grip on the sheet **I am unlikely to forget that!" he said between denched teeth.

"Nice buns," Joat murmured in abstract appreciation.

Channa and Amos turned to stare at her.

"Hey, you guys," she said blushing. "I'm young! I'm not dead." * "What kind of people are you? Amos murmured in shock. "Your children leer, yo#r sheUpeople are voyeurs ..." His gaze snapped to Channa. "And you, what sort of pervert are you?"

"Me? Oh, now wait just one minute, Simeon-Amos, I'm a victim here, too." s' "1 do not think so. You find this amusing, but I do not!" Turning his back on them all, he strode to his quarters in a fury, the door calmly swishing shut behind him.

"Whoa!" Joat said enthusiastically. "What's a voyeur?"

Channa's mouth firmed grimly. "A voyeur, Joat, is a nasty-minded son of a bitch who keeps poking his nose into private matters."

"Ah. Sorta like Dorgan the Organ from Child Welfere."

Ouch, Simeon winced.

Channa nodded, with crisp malice. "I promise I'll explain tomorrow, but right now I have to talk to Simeon."

"Oboyoboy," Joat said. "Are you ever in the deep pucky, Simeon." She slapped his column on the way back to her room. "Naughty, naughty!"

Channa hiked up the sheet and sat herself down in one of the lounge chairs. She clasped her hands in her lap, saying nothing, chewing her lower lip.

"Um," Simeon said. "He's still furious. He's throwing things around in there."

"Stop spying on him!" Channa said irritably.

"I don't have to spy. Just listen."

It was true, even through the door the sound of objects hitting walls could be heard. Then an ominous silence.

After a minute, a fully dressed Amos emerged and left the quarters without a backward glance or a further word. Channa rose quickly and took a step in his direction.

"Hey! You can't follow him like that! Besides, where'shegonnago?"

"Well... I suppose mis show of your vigilance was our own fault," Channa said grimly. "We would challenge you." She smiled, a wintry expression. "I guess you showed us."

Simeon gave a soft groan. "I'd rather end the evening on a positive note. I now know that I can contact you even when their sensors can't find you."

"Yes, there is that application of tonight's experiment," she said tiredly. Til be sure to point that out to Simeon-Amos when next I see him. If I see him."

"I'm sorry, Channa," Simeon said contritely after an awkward pause. "I was out of line."

"Yes, you were. For that particular activity, an invitation is required."

"And I know that it's difficult for you folks when coitus is interrupted."

She raised a brow. "Are you asking for information?"

"Um, nooo," he said hopefully.

"You are a swine, Simeon, an utter filthy pig! If you want to know, look it up, in a medical text, skip the pornography," And then she gave a despairing laugh. "Oh, God, hell never speak to me again. Where is he?"

"He's still on the move. At a guess, he's going to Joseph's. Best thing for him really, a litde male bonding. Maybe they'll get drunk together and complain about how badly the women in their lives treat them."

"This woman in his life was treating him just fine until you showed up!"

"Is it my fault he's so parochial?"

"Parochial!" Channa exclaimed. "Simeon, wrong use of that word. A man, any man who is one, will take offense at being spied on while making love. So now Anne McQffiey 6? 5JVf. Stirling you've called him a name, it's all his fault, and none of your own, is that it?"

"No," he said calmly, "I still accept responsibility for what I did. Let's not fight about Simeon-Amos, Channa."

She leaned her head against the back of the chair, "No, let's not fight about Simeon-Amos. We don't have time." She looked at his column from the corner of her eye. "It occurs to me that you were defending him not so long ago." "Maybe I was wrong."

"No, you weren't. You jpaow it, too. We are putting a lot of pressure on him when he'd arrived already under a crushing weight. He's lost everything, Sim, a whole world, family, friends. He blames himself for bringing the pirates to our door. Now he's working himself into the ground to save us from them. We should try very hard not to subject him to these little power games we play." "Ah... sure."

"Because, Simeon, if you can't, you're not the person I thought you were. And if you aren't, I don't want to have anything to do with you once this is over." "Channa!"

"Think about it, Simeon. You're sixty-eight years old. Grow up!"

Amos returned to the lounge for work the following morning, pale, distant, and polite. Simeon found an opportunity to apologize and convinced the Bethelite of his sincerity, vowing never to do such a thing again. Amos accepted the apology with the same detached courtesy that he received Channa's explanation, then dosed himself firmly in his room.

Dinner conversation that evening was so stilted that even Joat noticed. It was still early when Channa was left sitting alone next to the titanium pillar.

"Simeon, come talk to me?"

"Ah, she asks now instead of demanding."

"Your charm has humbled me," she said with a grin. "Besides, I'm bored and really crave your company."

"You sure if s my company you crave?"

"Heh. Last night I was horny! Tonight I'm bored. Different things, fella."

"I think that if I wei4 you, I'd rather be horny."

"Then you'd be an idiot," she said scornfully.

"But I wouldn't be bored."

She was silent a while. "Simeon, I'm scared. We may die."

"Yeah," he replied. "I'm scared, too, Happy. Real scared. We don't have much time left." Another pause, and he added more brightly, "That was a i • i" hint.

"Nah!" she said, shaking her head. "The moment came, was interrupted, and went. Amos needs someone kinder than a ball-buster like me."

"Channa!" Simeon exclaimed, laughing and appalled. "I wouldn't call you a ball-buster."

"You probably have."

"But that was before I knew you," he admitted. "Rachel is a ball-buster. You're just a bit prickly."

"Prickly?"

"Yeah."

"Maybe I am horny," she said thoughtfully. "Lordy, all the male generative organs that are creeping into this conversation. But you know I'm right We have to maintain a certain distance to carry this thing off... Simeon, say something to make me feel better."

"Um, how about...

"Stern daughter of the Voice of God! O Duty! ifthat name thou love... When empty terrors overawe; From vain temptations dost setjree..."

"Hey!"

"No huh? Wrong mood?"

"You might say that," she answered between clenched teeth. "Right now, the stern voice of duty is overrepresented in my thoughts."

"True. Hmm. Different mood Okay, how about j&t "Sound sleep by night; study and.ease Together mixed; sweet recreation;'' And innocence, which most does please With meditation."

"Sarcasmill becomes yon', Sim. Don'tyouwwnftohelp?" "Sorry, one more try, "lam ike lion, and his lair! I am the fear that frightens me! I am the desert of despair! And the night of agony! Night or day, whate'er befall, 1 must walk that desert land, Until I dare my fear and call The lion out to lick my hand."

She was silent for a long time. He could tell by her breathing that she was not angry, and he waited for her to think it through. At last she sighed.

"You know me pretty well on short acquaintance, Sim."

"Channa, he won't refuse you. He needs you as much as you need him right now. I screwed the pooch! I admit it My only excuse —" she gave him a tired smile "— is that it's an area of life I'm just not equipped to understand very well. Why should you both be miserable alone, when you could be much happier together?"

"After last night? And don't forget, I've already turned him down once, Simeon. He's got one free refusal coming to him."

"What is this? A competitive sport? There are scores and free throws and penalties?"

She laughed. "Sometimes. Depends on who you play with."

"Take up military history, Channa. It's a lot easier on the psyche."

She sighed again. "Not when you're about to become military history A "Oh for Christ'sake, Happy, get your butt off the couch and go knock on his door! You know you want to. C'mon, be honest."

"I'm going to get changed, first, at least," she said glumly, striding into her room. "And don't call me Happy," she called over her shoulder.

Why should I accommodate you on that, Channa, when Tve noticed that, whenever I call you "Happy," you do what I tell you. Vm not giving up an advantage tike that.

"Ready?" he called.

"What do you think?"

He opened a sensor inside her room. She now had on a simple black skinsuit, but he thought it showed her off to advantage.

"You'll do."

Channa walked glumly to the door. "Here I am, courting rejection. You'd think I learned about that back when I was Joat's age."

The door slid aside to reveal Amos on her threshold, his hand raised to knock. They exchanged looks. After a moment, they reached out to one another, and touched. Amos stepped into the room and the door slid firmly dosed.

They melted into an embrace that marked the first step m a dmb to the heights of passion.

Simeon echoed the thought off the computer. When it came back, it had a fruity announcer's voice. He keyed on Ravel's "Bolero," an insinuating thread of sound that swelled and grew in intensity and volume until its passionate, vibrant climax. On the council table, he projected scenes: palm trees crashed in the wind and waves rolled in to welcoming shores, trains roared into tunnels and out again, wild beasts roared in the forests and people worked wet clay into messy phallic symbols on spinning potters' wheels.

"Perfect," he decided, saving-rhe program to hard storage. It wouldn't be tactful to show it anytime soon, but someday they would be a lot older and more mellow. Providing, of course, they survived the next weeks. Shellpeople had a lot of time to fill in. He listened to the music as it^billowed and soared and swooned.

Bless you my children, he thought in the direction of Amos and Channa. And now I will check in again with the auxiliary bridge. Soon to be the fake/real command center for SSS-900-C's encounter with the Kolnari. eHAWERSIXTEEN "Hey, Simeon," the Traffic Control watch said.

"Yeahjuke?"

"I think I've got something here."

Simeon shunted much of his attention to the sensors. This was part of the reason no computer could ever replace a colloidal brain; apart from the inherent lack of self-consciousness, of course. Computers were wonderful at collecting and collating data, but they could never really interpret it the way a human could.

And there's no interface like that between a shettperson and his extensions, Simeon thought smugly.

"Yeah, that is something," he said aloud. "But what?"

"No powerplant neutrino signatures," Juke Cielpied said. He was a fresh-faced young man with a thatch of blond hair. "But the mass is there, that's for — Holy shithouse.r Suddenly the sleepy torpor of Communications and Navigation was a blur of activity. "Missile signatures, multiple, homing!"

Simeon made an incoherent prayer. This was it. They might have no more than thirty seconds to live.

"Starting mayday call," he said, 'jammed! Engines pulsing."

"Oh, boy, I'm getting powerplant signatures now" Juke said. "They just kicked online and then steadied. Four. Big mothers. Way overpowered for the masses, even more than a tug."

"Warship engines," Simeon said grimly.

The missiles were streaking in from all sides. He deployed the anti-meteor laser. Seconds later it slagged and exploded in a spectacular burst of vaporized synthetic and metal.

"Neutral-particle beam," Simeon said. "Damage report follows." Thank The Bfcwers That Be that it hadn't hit an inhabited area, at least. "Red alert. All personnel to emergency station^."

This time there would be no fooling around. It was for real.

Ooops.

Simeon activated hi&afensors in the lounge and listened, hoping that things hadn't gotten too for in the very few moments that had passed since he'd politely turned them off. Unfortunately, judging by the soft sounds emerging from Channa's quarters, that was a vain hope.

She'll never believe I didn't plan this, he thought, and wavered. It's an hour before they'll be here. His sensors showed the ships boosting at a very respectable normal-space acceleration. But if I don't tell her, Tmgoing to be in the same bad odor, just a different situation. A more important situation. Okay, here goes everything. He knocked.

Channa froze and Amos slowed down. "I'm going to kill him," she said.

Amos chuckled and kissed her; his hips moved and she gasped. "Why don't you ask what he wants first," he advised.

"WHAT IS IT NOW?"

"Uh, the enemy's just come into sensor range, four heavily armed ships, E.T.A. forty-one minutes. Sorry, guys, you needed to know!"

Channa clasped Amos to her with arms and legs. "That's ... enough time," she gasped. "And if you... stop I'm going to fall you."

The hull of the station toned like a giant bell as the sprayshot slammed into the subspace antennae.

Automatic alarms made their banshee wail. Dutifully waiting with his sensors turned down, Simeon might have mistaken Channa's high shriek, under other circumstances, for a cry of alarm.

"Brief us," she called %few moments later.

Quite brief, Simeon thought, but did not say. He began, using a focused beam to cut through the noise of a very quick shower.

The corridors had been full of rushing people. Now their floatdisks were speeding down empty hallways, banking at the corners in emergency-override maneuvers as the population suited up and huddled in their shelter-sectors. The silence held no calm, only a tension so great that Channa expected sparks to pop from her hair. She gripped the handhold and looked aside at Amos. His face was set and remote, a carven image framed by the fluttering black curls of his hair.

"I'm sorry," Simeon said to Channa, whispering through her implants for the tenth time. "I wish this hadn't happened."

"Oh, give it a rest, Simeon. I'm hardly going to blame you because the rest of the universe won't organize itself for my convenience."

"Sure! Sorry!"

She grinned. "And for future reference, buddy, I much prefer 'Carmina Burana* to alarm klaxons as background music."

The enemy warships were in plain sight now. Simeon magnified, analyzed, and projected the results on the big screen in the secondary control chamber. The room was the usual shape, a C with a large virtualscreen at the flat section and a bank of positions and consoles. There had been a full crew here for the past few days, to eliminate the slightly fusty air of an unused facility. Now the circulators were working overtime to carry off the ketones of tension-sweat, and there were very convincing coffee-stains and rings by most of the recUner seats.

"That is the enemy," Amos said somberly.

The ships were very different tjpm the usual stubby egg shape: elongated darts, with triangular vanes swelling along most of their lengths, like flight-feathers on an arrow. Designs scrawled across their sides in the spike-and-curve script "Yup, Kolnari naval architecture," Simeon said. He set the computer on thejafcmes. "Phonetically: Shuk, Kelyug, Dhriga, Rumal." " Why the odd design?" Patsy said, leaning forward. "Not your most efficient layout"

"It is optimized for rapid atmosphere transit," Simeon said grimly. "Courier Service ships are much like that I think the Kolnari have different maneuvers in mind for their vessels. For example, swooping down to sack a town planet-side. Note the design's not uniform. They probably build, or rebuild captured hulls, as they get the chance. But it's still a class-type. Roughly equivalent to a Navy frigate, I'd say. Bigger hull, though; they must carry a humongous great crew. A hundred, at least." He studied the armament and whisded. "And, with all those weapons mountings, they must sleep in shifts."

"I'm glad you've finally gotten a chance to indulge your hobby," Channa said tighdy.

"I'm not," Simeon said. Odd, he thought That's true.

"Closing," Juke said, licking his lips. "Two of them are orbiting the station around our notional equator. The other two are closing at the poles. Closing fast. HeUT Exterior screens dampened to cut the energy fiux of sudden deceleration. Alarms cheeped and burbled as energetic particles sleeted into the exterior shielding fields.

A voice roared through the hull; an induction field, vibrating the substance of the station itself. The words were blurred by the coarseness of the medium and by a thick accent Itsounded like the shoutingofan angry god.

"SCUMVERMIN SUBMIT!" Then a feedback squeal tore at their eardrums as the broadcaster adjusted. "SLAVE TO THE SEED OF HIGH-CLAN KOLNAR ARE YOU, PERSON AND NONPERSON THING OUR POSSESSION. CEASE EXTERIOR SCANATONCE!"

"What —" somebody began.

Then the lights faded for a second. Everyone gasped as pressure fluctuated, and the temperature rose perceptibly. On the heels of the pressure wave came a rising wave of vibration through the hull. Banks of lights flashed from amber to red.

"Hit! We have been hit!" Patsy was shouting from her environmental systems console. "Loss of pressure, N-7 through 11!"

Simeon's hands itched, metaphorically. He had to step back and let the infuriatingly slow responses of softshells handle his station, his body. There was one thing he could do. He cut all the active exterior sensors immediately. Except, of course, for the one that had just been converted to vapor along with a section of hull.

"Passive scanners only," Juke said. "Th... that was a high-energy particle beam."

"Chaundra here." The doctor's voice had the slightly flat tone of a vacuum suit pickup. "Rescue squads in place. The people here were all suited up. No fatalities so for. There will be radiation problems." From secondary gamma sleeting, where the beam had struck matter.

Channa acknowledged his report. Injuries could have been much higher. Would have been if the warship had come on them with no notice whatever. A screen activated, showing suited forms moving down an interior corridor, but it had the depthless bright look of light in vacuum, no blur at the edges of the shadow.

The huge voice struck again. "OBEY. GENTLE WARNINGS NONE MORE WILL BE FOREVER. STAND BY TO BE TAKEN INTO THE FIST OF HIGH CLAN KOLNAR, SCUM VERMIN."

"Eat shit and die, you fardling maniacs," Channa muttered. Amos cast her a quick look, then nodded and gave a thumbs-up gesture.

"Still closing," Juke whispered. The infrared and other passive receptors were still working. "Closing on the docking tubes, but inboard of the docking rings."

"Quick," Simeon said to Channa, like thought in her inner ear. "Get anyone there away from the tubes."

"All personnel in north and south polar docking tubes, into the core! Move!" Channa barked. Then, to privately to Simeon: "Why?"

"They're going to force-dock. I've heard of it."

The Dreadful Bride floated dose to the docking tube. So dose, that of a sudden she seemed small to Belazir, waiting impatiendy in the off-corridor to the boarding tube, with his personal guard around him. He had an exterior feed, one of the multiple tiny screens around the lower rim of the helmet's interior. It took long training to assimilate the information without being distracted. His ship seemed like a tiny fleck of brightness next to the huge bulk of the target.

"Now," he said. But a knife is smaller than a man, too, he thought with hammering glee.

Serig stepped forward and slapped an armored palm on the bulkhead beside the combat lock. The assault party filled the antechamber. Decking shuddered beneath their feet. From his helmet's exterior view, Belazir could see the accordion-folds of the boarding tube extending their armored length. Grapnels and cutting-beams protruded from the forward edge, like the teeth of a hungry monster. A feint clung went through the ship as the tube struck. Then a savage roar of white noise as the weapons punched an oval hole through hull, conduits and inner surface, into the enemy vessel, fonx-sealing it with agudden crude weld.

Air whistled past them from the higher pressure of the Bride into the station.

"Go!" shouted Serig. The first team leapt forward, pushing a floating, armored powergun platform before them. "Go, go, go!"

Serig followed them. Belazir bit down on his tongue, suppressing the impulse to take immediate command. Instead, he froze the joints of his armor and commanded the faceplate to show Serig's inputs, seeing what he would see.

"Oh, smooth, very smooth," Simeon said in some dismay. Channa made an enquiring sound into the denched silence of the control room.

"To begin with, they're wearing heavy field armor," he replied, calling up interior shots.

The Kolnari were in powered hardsuits. At once more massive and sleeker than the Central Worlds naval equivalent, the suits were a soft matt black, and moved with the jerky quickness of servo-powered systems. In a dosed environment they looked more elephantine than they had in Amos' shots from Bethel, more unstoppable. The deck thundered under their weight, though the pirates moved with fluid precision and the snapping quickness of long practice. Teams of three or more secured corridor junctions; techs moved behind them, tying down control of one facility after another.

"And look at the way they're moving," Simeon went on dolefully. "Look." He brought up a schematic of the station. "Power, atmosphere, communications. They're coming here, too. They've done this before."

And those plasma guns they're carrying like rifles are crewserved weapons tn the Navy, he added to himself "Yes," Channa said, "that's how it looks to me. They've done this before. Only where?"Xnd did that station die? Do I remember ever hearing of a died station? She watched in a morbid fascination as the units moved inward, following the direction of the conduits. "Of course, they're heading here now.*1 "No resistance," Serig reported.

Either they are wise cowards^r simply wise, Belazir thought "Secure the control center! Pol?"

A miniature of the scarred face of the Shark's commander came up on one helmet screen.

"My people are meeting no resistance," she said. "All targets occupied on schedule. We have them in a nutcracker fist."

"Good, dan-kin Captain," he said. He trusted Pol more than most. She had no ambition to climb beyond her present position. Any equal of his own rank and age was a dangerous rival — rival by definition, and dangerous if they had survived to climb so high. "Now we will crush their stones. Serig! Watch and wait when you've secured their command center. ITljoinyou there."

"I hear and obey, lord," Serig said, slamming through another door with his assault team.

Serig*s pickups showed a roomful of suited figures. Plain vacuum suits, some small enough to hold children, and the chamber looked to be an emergency shelter, reinforced and near the core of the station. The people moved away from the armored violence of the Kolnari like grass rippling under wind. To Serig, their cringing was a profoundly satisfying sight "Faugh!" he said in sharp disgust "There are nonhumans here! Shall I open fire, lord?"

"No, Serig," Belazir said patiently. Of course, nonhuman sentients were worse than scumvermin.

They bore none of the Divine Seed that made Kolnar. "We're going to destroy this place and everything in it, Serig. Or had you forgotten? In the meantime, we need it functional."

"I abase myself before you, Great Lord," Serig said formally — another one-^ord expression in thentongue. "Proceeding with plan."

"Ooof," Channa said.

They were all lying with their faces in the fortunately soft decking with their hands tied behind their backs. The Kolnari had not moved or spoken since they ordered the others down on the floor, except when one of the stationers so much as twitched — in which case they prodded them with the muzzle of a plasma rifle, hard, as one had just done to Channa. None of them spoke Standard, she thought, except perhaps the leader with the gold slashes on his arm. He had the same thick accent as the amplified voice which had hailed the station.

The iron tramp of powered-armor boots sounded in the corridor outside. Another squad of Kolnari entered. AU she could see was feet and a glimpse of something heavy carried in by the last two. A voice spoke in the invader's incongruously musical, lilting tongue, and the feet with the load put something over the main communications console. There was a chung and then a minute ofhigh-pitched buzzing, followed by silence.

More clanks and clicking sounds. They're getting out of their armor, she thought, watching a pair of bare feet step to the deck.

"You may kneel," a voice said in Standard, much less accented than the first Either an interpreter, or the big boss; from the authority in the tones, the latter. "Let those who once led here, identify themselves."

"Obeyl" screamed the other voice, the first one, and a foot sank into her side.

Channa grunted and came to her knees, sinking back on her heels. Then she raised her eyes and gasped.

The pirate chieftain was the most beautiful human being she had ever seen. 190 centimeters, but so perfectly proportioned that he looked shorter. His skin was black — not the dark-brown usually miscalled as such, but an actual gunmetal black; tightly stretched over long, swelling muscles, and he stood and moved as lightly as a racehorse. Much of this was visible, because what the pirates wore under their armor turned out to be a pair of tight briefs the same color as their skins, and an equipment belt. The chieftain's race had the same inhuman exotic perfection as his body: high cheekbones, slightly aquiline nose, full lips, slanted yellow eyes, and the long mane of white-blond hair was caught at the back with a clip of silver and iridescent feathers.

Channa blinked, shook her head, and forced herself to look at the others. Apart from a pair still in power armor, the rest looked eerily similar. Two of those were women, with the same features and long lean bodies. Even their breasts looked as if they were carved out of ebony . . . and the expressions differed, of course. The pirate beside the chief was paring his nails with a small sharp knife. He looked at her and smiled. Channa glanced down again.

Ok, great, Simeon thought, noting the reaction from the others as well. We've been boarded by the Ultimately Intimidating Elves from, Hell. Owl That hurt. Something tugged at him, catling.

Behind Channa, one of the armored troopers touched his belt. The unoccupied suits turned and marched like a line of lockstep golems to stand themselves along the walls.

Ow! Pain-signals flooded in from the computer extensions of Simeon's mind. Emergency overrides. He turned his attention inwards.

***

Channa subvocalized. There was no reply.

"Simeon!"

"I am the Lord Captain Belazir t'Marid Kolaren," the pirate chiefsaid soMy. "Master here now, by right of conquest. I hold your lives in my fist, to spare or crush as I will. Who led here before we came?"

I H CHAPTER SEVENTEEN • 1* helpbosshelpbossowowow OW!

Simeon had never told anyone about the AI system. Well, nobody but Tell Ration. He was interfaced with the computers directly, of course; he could "remember" anything in the banks and use their capacities the way he could those of his own human brain. The AI program was something else again. It was as sophisticated as anything this side of Central. He and Tell had spent many a happy hour tweaking it further. Simeon needed the best. There were limits to how many tasks even a shellperson could do simultaneously, and many were far too routine for continual supervision. An ordinary human had the hindbrain for running heart, lungs, and other physical basics, a consciousness for thought, and a subconscious for monitoring and mental housecleaning. Simeon had the AI. help! boss!

Of course, it was impossible to actually visualize what was going on in the AI system, any more than you could visualize every neuron firing in your brain. Simeon had chosen to make it something of a playground, with something he had always wanted.

"Here, boy!" Simeon called.

He was standing—he had a softshell body in the virtual world of the AI — on a grassy plain, cut up into pathways by tall hedges with gaps. The sensations were full-tactile; only smell and taste were missing. This part of the landscape was memory-scan and basic accesscontrol programming, all analogued to the physical.

Both sense and response, automatically translated into algorithms by a subprogram.

"Here boy!" He whistled sharply. "I'm here, boy!"

A dog bounded into view around a corner. It was the dog of his dreams, big and shaggy-red, with floppy ears ;ind a cold wet nose* It was also the SSS-900-C's primary artificial intelligence program.

Now it was surrounded by a swarm of wasps, huge malevolent things with wingspans a meter across. Their beaks were hollow, and out of them wormed long pink tongues, lashing and rasping with serrated teeth set along their sides. A dozen bleeding wounds marked the dog's sides. One of the wasps clung to its head, with the tongue pulsing out and into the animal's ear. boss! help!

The dog's barking voice was weakening. Simeon stepped forward, and the ground shook with his anger. Beneath it was fear. The pirates had clamped something to the communications console and now he knew what it was. A specialized battle computer, stocked with worm and subversion programs. If it took over his hardware, he was doomed.

He turned the Jets cap backward on his head and gestured. A glowing green enchanted bat appeared in one hand, a hand that was suddenly gauntleted with steel, part of the armor that covered him. With the other steel glove he grasped the wasp on the dog's head and crushed it, pulling. The long tongue flailed as he pulled it out of the brain, jerking and cutting bone with a tooth-grating sound.

On my own, then, Channa thought. "I am Station Chief Channa Hap," she said. "This is my colleague, Simeon-Amos."

The Kolnari commander remained motionless, like a statue in oiled ebony. His companion reached down and jerked her to her feet by the front of her coverall. Fingers like steel rods slammed into shoulder, ribcage, hip. Pain flowered through her in a wave that snapped her teeth shut with a grinding clack and left her limply boneless when he released her to sarawl facedown on the decking.

For minutes she was too limp,to do more than sprawl. Amos had surged halfway to his feet The Kolnari who had struck Channa turned and gave him a casual buffet across the side of the head: the sound was like a wet board hitting conqyete. Amos flew backwards two meters and ploughed into the deck at an awkward angle. One of the others hooked him back to Channa's side with a foot. He lay with glazed eyes, breathing in a harsh rasp that sent bubbles of blood oozing from nose and mouth. She forced down an overwhelming impulse to rush to him, but their lives depended on her wits.

"Scumvermin address the Divine Seed of Kolnar as 'Great Lord,' " the second-in-command said. He put a foot on Channa's neck and ground her face into the coarse fabric that covered the floor. "When the Lord Captain Belazir addresses them, they respond with 'Master and God.'"

Eat shit and die, Master and God, Channa thought.

"Master and God," she managed to choke out, the words muffled by the synthetic fabric.

Belazir nodded benignly, a slight smile on his carven lips. "Let her rise to her knees once more. Ignorance pardons nothing but explains much. Do you understand?" he said to Channa.

"I understand perfectly, Master and God," she said to the Kolnari leader. "You're the Good Pirate and he's the Bad Pirate, eh?"

Belazir frowned a moment, then threw back his head and laughed in delight as he caught the reference.

"No no," he said, restraining his companion with a slight gesture. The feral aggression in the other man's face was unchecked, but he sank back obediently. "You do not understand my good Serig's role at all." He turned to the other prone figures. "Up on your knees, scum vermin. Announce yfcur functions."

The lights flickered? Belazir looked up sharply. One of the Kolnari spoke from beside the mechanism damped to the communications terminal.

Channa felt her stomach damp with a fear older and more visceral than the pirates. Something was interfering with basic station functions.

The dog lay panting, healing visibly but more slowly than it should. The wasps lay crushed or buzzing malevolently at a distance. Simeon's great bronze shield prevented their approach. On its surface were concentric rings of figures. Great heros: Armstrong, da Luis, Helva. At last the dog crawled over and licked Simeon's ankles, whimpering. good better make'emgoaway(!) boss Simeon checked the dog, who had sustained no permanent damage, although there was some memory loss.

"Get up," he said. "Run." runl "Change it as you go," Simeon said. "Game.** He added specifications. game!

The hedges melted and shifted as the dog ran, long ears flopping in the mild afternoon sun. A new sound came from around a long corridor in the memorymaze. A long raw raaaaaaaaaaaaaaa sound, like—what was that ancient holo? Like a chain saw! Then the beast that made the noise surged around the corner.

Wow, Simeon thought. Wormprogram, indeed.

The end of the creature stretched off into the distance, a grayish-pink tentacle covered in rough-edged scales. It was two meters thick, an endless segmented arm of tough fibrous muscle, dripping acid mucous. Where it passed, the bare ground smoked. Each drop of slime turned the dust into a pulsing globule the size of a fist, like a wet cyst. When jjiese popped, a longtongued wasp crawled out, flexed its wings, and took to the air to join the buzzing cloud around the worm. The head of the thing reared up suddenly, sprang open like a fleshy blossom. Twenty looping pseudopods whirled around it, each one tipped with a lidless eye. At their meeting was a series of qpcular mouths, one within the other, each ringed with pyramid-shaped teeth of urinecolored diamond. The teeth spun and clenched and gritted over each others' adamantine surfaces in a continuous blurred roar of hostile sound.

"By their programs shall ye know them," Simeon intoned, suddenly wishing that he had not made the construct he inhabited in this virtual reality quite so vividly lifelike. He could definitely do without the dry mouth, pounding heart, and sinking stomach right now, for example. He could change the setting, but that would deprive him of one more slender advantage; his familiarity with it. So long as the matrix remained, the intruder had to fight on his terms.

"These people are not going to garner many SUM's," he said resolutely, and stepped forward, raising his shield. Central awarded Social Utility Marks to a number of unlikely people, but this would really be stretching the bounds of possible recipients.

"Come on, you bastard!" he shouted aggressively. "Nobody hurts my dog!"

The worm program struck. Simeon groaned, stamped his feet into the ground, and braced his shoulder against the shield. Data/fangs gnawed at it, recoiling with a sound like frying bacon amid choking clouds of green vapor. His bat flailed, knocking aside eye-tentacles and tongue-wasps. For a long subjective time there was only batter and strike, leap and wiggle and dodge. The oozing serrated mouth loomed in constant menace. It wants to swallow my pattern whole and assimilate it in one gulp.1 Tongue-worms flicked alarmingly around his head. They would subvert the Master Control Program with Ikeir probes. He continued to flail the wasps out of the air, stamped them underfoot, swung the bat, and an eye exploded in a shower of black syrup like a giant overripe fig. Finally, the worm recoiled for a moment, and Simeon whirled aside and fled, dodging and jinking through the maze.

Got to keep it off-balance, confused, he thought, listening to its triumphant screeching hard on his heels. Every muscle in his "body" already felt bruised. But it was more satisfying that way, too. Knowing you'd disorganized a section of code wasn't nearly as much fun as seeing blood —or ichor, in this case—fly and feeling flesh pulp under a blow. The howl sounded again, closer.

"Talk about your slash-and-burn data collection," he gasped in time with the pounding of his stride. What sort of maniacs would let something like this loose inside an information system? It had to be destroying as much as it gathered.

Got to make it think it's won, eventually. Isolate it in the outer subsystems of the computers, keeping the ultimate control-keys behind barriers the worm thought were the edge of the entire system. Otherwise, it would infest the whole system, like maggots in rotting meat. Including his own mind, unless he committed suicide by severing all connections between his organic brain and the data system.

That was an unfortunate image. He flashed back to the refugee ship and the dead Bethelites, their bodies moving with burrowing life. / will pull the plug first, he thought grimly. Theoretically, it was impossible to self-destruct the station. In practice, he probably could. Win or die.

"Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar the worm screeched.

"As Channa would say, eat shit and die." Simeon panted the words out as he turned a corner and took a stance again. Thorns and leaves Hew into the air as the data-worm tried to smash directly through to him. Then there was a huge splat sound and a watting cry of pain as it ploughed into the stone core of the hedge. That persuaded it to come around the corner. It seemed larger; frothy pink blood streamed around the working, palping mouths. Some of the teeth had shattered on stone, but they^generated as he watched. The worm's approach made the ground shake. Behind him, he could hear the wuffle and growl of the AI, setting new barriers and deceptions.

"Step right up, lay right down!" Simeon bellowed. Don't worry about the others. This is going to take attyour attention for a while.

"Raaaaaaaaaaaaa!"

This time the gravity bounced them about as the lights flickered. Belazir turned to the technicians with a well-controlled snarl of impatience.

"What now?"

"Great Lord, there is unexpected resistance. We thought the worm was successfully penetrating the Master Control programs, but they wiggled free. We are making progress, but the AI is exceptionally agile — the parallel—"

Belazir cut them off with a gesture. "I am interested in results, not jargon-laden excuses. Grasp the core in your fist, and quickly."

He turned back to his prisoners. What naked faces they have, he thought. In a new conquest, it was often so. Those who survived long learned better, but it could be entertaining.

Reports of the station's assets and supplies were flooding in. getter than I expected, he thought exultantly. Far fatter. Unimaginably rich! This facility could build dreadnoughts, given a little time and the plans which were available in the Clan's computers.

The High Clan's greatest weakness was the lack of ;arge purpose-buttt \rarships. They could turn out frigates, more or less, but for larger craft they could only modify captures. Nocobbled-togethermerchanter could rival the performance of real battlecraft. A warship was more than a ship with weapons and defense-systems: it was a single organism, almost living in itself. Must we abandon the shipyard"} The frustration was as agonizing as the satisfaction of taking the station was euphoric, with its destruction as a second orgasmic "hit." On the other hand, possession of such equipment would cut generations from the great plan, the spreading of the Divine Seed of Kolnar and the power of the Clan.

Even worse was the humiliation the Clan had suffered for too long. The human galaxy teemed with such prizes, yet the Clan fleet must skulk about the outworlds, gnawing discarded scraps: border worlds, miserable settlements of poverty-stricken exile, like Bethel. Skulk like jackals, even as they had been driven from their lands and possessions on their ancient homeworld. Gnawing poor bones, while feasts like this lay spread before them. Intolerable! Itwasnottobeborne!

His pleasure dissolved. "You have maintained physical separation?" he asked, his irritation at this check palpable.

The technician ducked his head. "Of course, Great Lord. No data enters our machines from this system save by hedron. All such hedrons are first analyzed to the last byte of information. Our duplicate backups are kept powered down and physically severed while any captured data is running."

Belazir nodded. "Continue," he said, satisfied that elementary precautions were being taken. You witt suffer, you will suffer, ahhhh, how you will suffer, he thought, barring mental teeth at the universe that stood between the Clan and its apotheosis. All of them would writhe in the fist, one day. "You have a preliminary report?"

"Affirmative, Great Lord," the technician said, Why can technicians never use ajDmple word where their accursed slang can be stretched toftf? Belazir wondered as he heard the technician out 5;

"We captured the message logs in the first penetration, before the AI reacted. No nonroutine messages to Central, except the arrival and spontaneous destruction of a large, mysterioutfship. Little evidence was left. Central said they would search their files."

With a white-toothed grin, Belazir condescended to give a nod in reply. "Excellent! Order: launch the message torpedo. Summon the transports, all that can be spared; also personnel for the disassembly."

He looked around at his fighters, smiling. "Well done. We will settle in, drinking the prey dry and eating it to the bone at our leisure. Staff, draw up a preliminary plan to strip as much as possible as quickly as possible and load efficiently when the transport arrives."

Smaller, high-value loot would go to the victorious flotilla, of course. He would have to arrange priorities: priorities that would give the Bride the first and best pick, and t'Vsrsk'sAge of Darkness the last and worst, of course.

Part of his attention had been on Serig's interrogation of the prisoners. He brought his head up, smiling at the executive officer's wit "He says," he translated for the benefit of the scumvermin Serig had been taunting, "that he will explore your internal environment, Environment Systems Officer Coburn."

No\ Channa thought hard at her. Don't resist, Patsy!

The older woman's broad fair fece was flushed, red spots on her cheeks showing her rage. The pirate reached a hand down her shirt and squeezed a breast casually. patsy spat in his face.

Channa started to rise. Belazir jabbed a precisely calculated toe into her bruised stomach. She collapsed to the deck again. The pirate grabbed her ear in strong, almost prehensile toes and forced her head around.

"Watch, scumverpiin," he said pleasantly. "And learn not to defy the High Clan."

Behind her there was a flurry as Amos tried to rise again. A Kolnari pounded her heel into the small of his back over the kidneys and he collapsed with a stifled shriek, thrashing. Nobody else moved.

Simeon, she thought desperately. Simeon!

Serig touched his face where the spittle ran and spoke in his own language. The other Kolnari laughed or grinned, watching with bright-eyed interest. Patsy took advantage of his inattention, lashing out in a kick at his groin. A fist snapped down and met the rising foot with a sound like a mallet hitting rock. Patsy gave a sharp gasp of pain. With bound hands, she was thrown off-balance and staggered back against the coffee table. The Kolnari laughed as she almost fell, stripping away his harness and tossing it aside. The briefs came away with it, memory-plastic rolling up into the belt. The stationer's clothes followed, torn away as if they were paper while one hand held her immobilized, clamped to her jaw. He stepped back and stood like a licentious Greek statue, gestured.

"Down," he said in Standard. "Spread."

Yes, Belazir thought, looking down at Channa. In the end, this one is mine. But not at once. With subtlety.

As a child, Belazir t'Marid had been the despair of his mothers and nurses. For all their whippings and shockrod treatments, for all the day-cycles spent locked in the hotbox, they could never break him of the nasty habit of toying with his "food."

Simeon dropped to the ground, panting. Atop the distant mountain, another wing of the castle crumbled and fell int^ the gulfs below with an earthquake rumble of rock. The worm screamed triumph and wound itself further around the central tower as flames billowed into the darkening sky. A tiny figure stood on the battlements above the monster, waving a bat that glowed iridescent green. Queasy, Simeon switched viewpoints, just in time to see the open maw engulf his pseudo-construct duplicate. The gnashing teeth ripped it into shreds. The illusion faded and his last sight from it was a rushing universe of light and onoffonoffonoffonoffonoff as the code was disassembled and "digested" by the intruder.

Phew, he thought, shakily turning his Jets cap rightside around again. That ought to hold km. For a while, at least. The worm would be here, always probing and testing, as long as the Kolnari battle-computer stayed clamped to the SSS-900-C's system. Even if he destroyed the program and purged his system, that would merely ring every alarm the enemy had. They'd only launch another worm immediately, with a different configuration. Despite its self-modifying abilities, he knew this one now!

Gently, stepping backward, brushing his footprints out of the sand, he faded from the blasted landscape of cinders, where pustules in the soil spewed line after line of questing wasps.

"The Knight came home from the quest; Muddied and sore he came. Battered of shield and crest, Bannerless, bruised and lame—"

Charma was weeping. "Jliat was his first thought, as his "other" awareness flared back. Everything was a little murky, but he could see dearly enough down into the lounge. She was sitting on the sofa next to Amos, head cradled against his shoulder, sobbing with slow misery. Both of them looked battered, as if they'd been thrown from a moving vehicle. Amos winced every time he moved.

"Channa!" Simeon said when a few microseconds' of a scan told him the room was safe. A little further adjustment put an innocuous scene on the security system the Kolnari and their computers were monitoring. "Channa, are you all right?"

"Where were you!" Channa shouted, springing erect. "Where were you, Simeon?"

"I was—"

Simeon noticed what was playing over the general channel, again and again, locked in from the command circuits. Nearing the end of one loop, Channa was kneeling by Patsy's side, trying to staunch the hemorrhage with the scraps of her clothing.

"Please, Master and God, may I summon the doctor?"

"Of course," the pirate chieftain said. "We are a reasonable people." Abroad smile. "As you see, you were wrong. / am the 'bad pirate.' Serig is the worse pirate."

Simeon blinked back to the present. He felt his automatic feeds cut in, damping down hormonal flows and adrenal glands, filtering his blood. Even so, he came as dose to feeling faint as he ever had.

"I ... oh, God, God" he whispered. "Shit." There were no words adequate in any lexicon.

S14 "Where were you, Simeon?"

"Fighting," he said. "Channa, they put a worm program into die station system. I had to fight it, it was—is — a monster. If I hadn't, it would have burrowed right into my brain and eaten me. I'd ako be under their control and telling them everything they wanted to know. I couldn't even self-destruct!" i * " I see," Channa said, "Not that there was anything you could have done for us. Excuse me." She walked quickly into her quarters: he could hear water splashing.

Amos stood, left hangVclenched around right fist. "Though they be thieves from their birth, for this, they shall pay," he said softly, almost to himself. "For Patsy, for Keriss, for my sister and my father's house and for all they have done, by the living soul of God, they shall pay in full, every jot and tittle."

Channa came back, her face set harder than Simeon had ever seen it. She waved Amos back and turned to the pillar.

"What damage did you sustain?" she asked in a professional tone.

"Nothing crucial — yet," Simeon said. "I've got to keep a fair share of my attention and the system's capacity involved in just watching and waiting. That worm program mutates like a retrovirus: the sort that never gives up. I could dean it out — if I dared. Apart from that, I've lost about a third of the memory and computational capacity. That's what could be termed 'occupied territory* at the moment. With luck, their computer will keep thinking that's all there is. It's powerful but specialized. They haven't hooked up their ship computers to the station, yet Probably afraid of us hacking in to them.

"But," he went on, "I've got to be really careful Any action I take in what they think is safe territory has to be elaborately screened. I can jimmy the records. However, even I can't make the impossible convincing."

THE CITY vmo FOUGHT S15 She narrowed her eyes. "Could you take back those functions in a hurry?"

"Somewhere from seconds to minutes. They'd know pretty quick, and that battle-computer they've got jacked in could ... hmm. Come to think of it, I could probably take that over* too. But they'd know."

"No problem.. .later. Can we conference?"

"Yeah, I've got all of their people under continuous surveillance."

"We'd better get moving as soon as we can," she said.

Simeon made an affirmative sound. "Our people are going to be pretty shook up," he said. I sure am. "We've got to get things in hand, before they start lashing out It'll take some time though, for a cycle when they're all available."

"Good. Let's get, hmmm, Chaundra, the section leaders, and —" Amos began.

"Everyone's gone," Seld Chaundra said in a low and careful voice. "You sure we oughta do this, Joat? Joseph said—** "Joe can wait a minute, 'n so can you, carrot-face," she whispered. "Now keep that thing running, hey?"

He nodded and bent again over the two modules and the jack clipped to the main conduit above them. This way was very narrow—an adult would have to be a dwarf to get through — but it came in conveniendy over the sickbay entrance.

"Look," he went on, without glancing up. He was still breathing hard from the effort of crawling up the axial ventway. "Look, maybe Ms. Coburn doesn't need someone else talking to her right now? It's been less than a day, and —"

"Yeah, I saw the broadcast, too," she said. She had. Seld had feinted. His meets weren't doing him as much good as they should. "You stay here."

She crawled forward, pushing the local sensor-override unit ahead of her. To the naked eye, the cover of the duct was a panel just like all the others. The only real difference was that it was selectively permeable and much thinner. It recessed obediently and Joat looked down into a darkened room. One float bed, the usual Jurnhure, and a figure under the sheet She curled herself into a bafl and somersaulted slowly through the opening, holding on with her fingertips and then dropping the final meter to the floor.

"You awake?" she said, moving to the bedside. "It's Joat"

Coburn's eyes were »pen. She lay motionless, but they tracked through the darkness. Joat shone a small light under her own chin. She had procured for herself a very expensive coverall, made of adjustable lightfibers. Simeon had gotten it for her because it was fashionable, but with a little creativity you could rig it to mimic the ambient background color, which was right now a mottled charcoal gray. Her face floated above it in the lightstick's feeble low-setting glow.

"Go 'way, Joat," the woman said in a dull voice. Her face looked old, under the sealant bandages. "I don't need any more sympathy. Leave me alone."

"Great, 'cause sympathy's not what I'm gonna give you," Joat said. She brought her face closer to Patsy's, and her own eyes held the same flat deadness. "Let me tell you something about me." She explained, in a flat, matter-of-fact tone all about her father, her uncle, the captain.

"So I know, Ms. Coburn," she went on. "Forget what anyone else's said. They don't know jack shit But Joat, she knows exactty how you feel. And like I said, you don't need sympathy right now. I know what you do need."

Slowly, Patsy raised herself on her elbow. "An* what would that be?"

Silently, Joat reached around and opened her haversack. Her gloved hand came out with Patsy Sue Coburn's gunbelt and arc pistol.

"Payback," Joat whispered steadily. "And here's how it's gonna be—"

The medical-storage room had its own surveillance subloop. That made i^a good place for the clandestine .-neeting. It was alsq chuly, bare, and crowded. The walls were gray metal bins outlined with fluorescent paint Appropriate, given the state of our morale, Channa thought "I have two hundred fifty-seven people down with the virus," Chaundra said. "The symptoms are spectacular but not life-threatening, as long as they stay hooked to the machinery. I have also treated sixty-four patients for traumas and wounds of various sorts. No fatalities, so far. One or two are in critical condition, but they should recover. This total includes several of my medical aids who have been assaulted by Kolnari coming to check up on our 'sick.' They seem to find the sight disgusting and ... exciting at one and the same time. Several of Outpatients have been assaulted."

So much for scaring them off with the virus, Channa thought "Patsy?" she asked aloud. She's my friend. Patsy hadn't wanted to talk to her or anyone else, which was understandable. Bid I want to know about her.

"She ... there were no broken bones, apart from the foot. I internally splinted that —" gluing the bones together in a synthetic sheath stronger than the original material, to give them a matrix to heal "— replaced the lost blood, and plas-sutured all the softtissue injuries. Ms. Coburn is mobile although in some .. . physical. .. discomfort. With the usual growth stimulators, full recovery should take no more than a week."

He licked his lips nervously." I cannot answer for her mental state. I fear catatoma. I have administered the usual psychotropics, but the mind is more than the brain and its chemistry."

Channa nodded jerkily. "Anything else?"

"Yes. I now have ... abundant tissue samples from the Kolnari. There are things we should discuss privately."

Amos looked at the faces in thejscreen. "Continue as planned," he said. "The enemy are pushing you to work. Be as stupid as you dare. Make mistakes as often as you dare. Above alt, keep as much material halfdisassembled as you can."

"When are we going to fight them?" somebody burst out. "You and Simeon, talked a good fight, about Cochise and the Viet Gong —" Gong, Simeon corrected silendy "— so far all we're doing is rolling over!"

"There is the virus," Simeon said. "That's working, they're catching it. I've begun psychological operations. Most important, I've deciphered their language." That brought a rusde. "It's not much like the ones in the survey files — both are pidgin Sinhala Tamil, but... anyway, I've got it. They've ordered sixty units here."

"Oh, great!" the man barked. "More of them!"

"Shut up," Channa remarked. "That means they're not just going to strip the station of everything they can carry in their warships and then blow it up. You can't kill a cow and milk it. It'll be at least a week before the transports arrive. There ought to be about sixty of them. You know how long it takes us to load sixty freighters with homogenous ore when we're trying to work fast. Imagine what it will take to remove and load fixed equipment, with everyone dragging their feet. And the more of them that are here, the more will be caught when the Fleet arrives."

"And," Amos said, with a feral smile, "that means we can be more direct in the interim. Do not worry, my friends. They, too, will suffer, know fear and pain."

That brought a chorus of satisfaction.

We think revenge is primitive, Simeon thought, until we need it to satisfy indignity and humiliation. He was feeling considerable desire in that direction himself Amos lifted a hand. "Wait We want to lure as many of them into the station as possible—as Insurance, and so we can wear them down. JBut we cannot risk key people who know a good dea^l about our plans and our station prisoners being dragged in for interrogation because they thought they could be clever. No action is to be taken save on my express orders. The personnel to effect those orders will be fitted with a suicide tooth and have psych profiles which assure its use. Wait until you receive orders. We have a fine general —" he nodded in Simeon's direction"—and wemust follow his words."

That brought silence.

"We'll try levering them to cut back on the atrocities," Channa said. "Say it's reducing working efficiency — that's true enough. Stay tight, endure! We'll see them all fried yet! Out."

One by one the faces vanished from the screen, except for Chaundra's.

"The bad news, Doctor," she said.

This meeting was a fleeting thing, time stolen as they were all supposedly on their way somewhere else. They could fool the sensors for a while, but nobody could explain being in two positions at once, one of them under the real-time eyes of the enemy. Only the fact that there were fifteen-thousand odd of the stationers and less than a tenth that number of Kolnari made it possible at all. That and the invaders' imperfect control of the surveillance computers.

Channa studied Chaundra's grim face. "What is it?" she asked him.

He scrubbed his face with both hands and shrugged, exhaustion in his voice. "It's not working."

"What is not working?" Amos asked impatiently.

"The virus," Chaundra said. "They are infected — somewhat—but it hardly bothers them at all."

"Shit!" Channa swore. She had hoped die illness would make the Kolnari shun civilians of their own volition. "Doesn'tit have any effect?"

"Mild headache, some nausea, onex>r two cases of diarrhea for a day or so. All in all, much l|ss than our people have experienced even with the immunization. The afflicted individuals act embarrassed^jiot frightened, and their companions laugh at them." Chaundra shrugged in despair. "I move that we discontinue this plan. Our people are getting raped, beaten, humiliated and catching the flu while the Kolnari just have^fun. I tested their tissue samples — the Kolnari immune system is barely human. If some of the rape victims were not pregnant, I would doubt that the Kolnari are human. No, I correct that Of human origin. Their actions certainly are not," he added bitterly.

"Pregnant?" Channa asked, bewildered.

"I terminated," he said, "ectopic pregnancies, in the fallopian tubes. This despite slow-release implant contraceptives." Those made the body's own immune system treat sperm as foreign matter until counteracted.

"Channa, the pirates seem to have metallic-salt and other contaminant levels that should make every one of them stone sterile. Instead, their sperm are a whole order of magnitude more motile than the norm. The rest of their systems are built the same way. Their antibody response is... their bodies use the poisons to kill bacterial or viral invaders. Their DNA is locked into position with redundancy and self-repair mechanisms like nothing I have ever seen, resistant both to radiation and to viral contamination."

"I refuse to believe these animals are supermen," Amos said.

"Oh, they're not that," Chaundra said. "From their DNA, I'd say they have shorter lifespans than ours. I imagine the degeneration past early middle-age is ... spectacular and swift, as the whole system abruptly foils. Several other disadvantages; for example, they could not live without dioxin and arsenic compounds in their food. An equivalent of scurvy would strike them."

He fell silent' * "There's something else you're hiding, Doctor," Channa said quietly. Amos sat more erect, glancing narrowly from the woman to the screen, "Tell us!"

Bingo, Simeon thought, narrowing in on Chaundra's pupil dilation and breathing.

"There is a possibility," Chaundra said, looking aside from the pickup. "Another virus." A long pause. "The one that killed Mary. It is of unparalleled virulence. Possibly the worst natural... unnatural disease ever to be discovered."

Amos' head jutted forward. "Why did you not mention this before?" he asked harshly.

"Because it killed my wife!" Chaundra shouted suddenly; the more startling coming from so mild a man. "Because it is killing my son!" More softly, more rationally: "Because I swore that the filthy disease should never kill another human being. I no longer classify the Kolnari under that heading."

"Still," Channa said, "the virus is a good plan. The enemy don't have much medical capability at all And Chaundra has lucidly explained why they don't need it For our purposes they are medically ignorant Little expertise beyond treating wounds and broken bones, really. I get the impression they just sort of.. .junk anyone who's sicker than that"

Chaundra looked thoughtful, professional competence taking over despite himself. "I do not have the live virus, you understand. But I have the information on a rninihedron. The protein is nothing, the replicator can produce it immediately. But modifications... yes. What sort of disease did you have in mind?"

"Something scary," she said.

"Something fetal," Amos added.

"If possible," she agreed. "But at the least, spectacularly incapacitating, disgusting, horrifying. Something with mental deterioration? We want them terrified, and what's more terrifying than madness?"

"Whoa now, I dunno," Simeon .said. "Do you really want a stationload of crazy Kolnari? Crazier than they already are, I mean."

They looked thoughtful and slightly sick.

"No, no, wait a moment," Chaundra said, and paused. "As Channa suggested, we could target only those who've had the virus. They catch it. It's just not capable of getting much beyond the first few cells. Antibody response is very quick. That's a manageable part of the Kolnari force, enough to hurt and rattle them without driving them into a killing frenzy. It would be cumulative, spread among themselves. Close contact is needed, and I could increase that Immunize our people stealthily, under the guise of normal treatment. It can be done. I'm sure of it."

"Get on it, then," Channa said. When the doctor's image had faded: "That takes care of that!"

Simeon's image nodded. It was less mobile than usual, with so much capacity tied up. "This is a war of morale. Guerilla war always is. We have to demoralize them, and much more important, maintain our own morale."

Or our people will crack and someone will go to the Kolnan, went unspoken among them.

"Speaking of which," Amos said, rising. "Must you?" Channa said quietly. "Yes, I must," he replied, walking over to her and lifting a hand to his lips. The gesture seemed far more natural than it had at first, less.staged.

"This isn't going to work for long," Channa said to the air, after he had left.

"It doesn't have to," Simeon replied. "Only long enough."

"Get ready, Seld," Joat breathed.

"I'm ready" he whispered back. He was pale and 5weating heavily. --"A Her hand rested dh the diaphragm that separated the vent from the corridor. Her other hand gripped the spring-loaded device, adjusting it so the red dot on the notescreen image beside her lay precisely over a spot in the corridor. Below, Patsy waited at the junction of the passageways, one hand behind the concealing wall. That hand held the arc pistol, but if all went well they would not need it.

If all did not go well, they were probably going to die in the next twenty seconds or so. Die quickly if they were lucky.

"One of them," Seld said. "Still only one." He was peering into the miniscreen jacked into the security cameras from their local lead. "Still coming."

Bare feet scuffed lightly below. The Kolnari came swiftly, not running: they seemed to walk on the balls of their feet in a light half-trot most of the time. He checked slightly at the sight of Patsy.

"Who goes?" he called.

Stationers not on essential duties were supposed to be in their cabins. Then he recognized her and smiled. One taken by the na Marid was a prestigious victim and here she was, walking alone. He started towards her, speeding up as she dodged around the corner.

The warrior was stopping and turning even as Joat keyed the diaphragm open. His speed was awesome, but she had triggered the hand-cobbled device at the same instant the panel came down. Behind her there was a click that meant Seld had cut in the damper. For the next few minutes, security records would show an empty corridor. Safe, unless a human observer were looking. Even checking the files would show recording errors, normal enough considering the havoc the Kolnari had caused the station computers.

The darts struck the Kolnari as his finger was tightening on the trigger of his own* weapon. A hundred thousand volts flowed through the thread-thin superconductor wires behind them. He convulsed.

K-tash. Hot air blossomed away from the plasma rifle aroundarod ofsun-hot violence, literally sun-hot; it was an ultra-miniaturized, laser-triggered deuterium fusion pellet focused by magnetic fields. Normally the pirate's muscle and reflex would have been enough to hold it steady on his aiming point. Now the superheated gas slewed his lifeless body around and the substance of the walls sublimed away, the beam chopping through synthetics and conduits and the empty chambers beyond. There was a hiss and cherp-cherp-dierp of pressure alarms as theouter hull was punctured.

Joat winced. That was -not part of the plan. "Quick," she said in soft urgency. Dropping down into the corridor and grasping the pirate's weapon, she heaved it up.

"Here," she gasped, wobbling under the burden of the clumsy thing. Between them, Seld and Joat got it up into the duct. Then she bent and grabbed one of the Kolnari's arms. She heaved and her heels skidded. The juddering, twitching body was heavy, far heavier than a man dressed only in a belt and briefs ought to be. Patsy darted back.

"It's not hm? she said.

"It'll do for starters," Joat said with a grunt. "C'monr Together they dragged the body to the airlock around the corner and cycled it through.

"Meet you at N-7a x L," Joat panted, trotting back to the open diaphragm. "Need that stuff on the list."

"I'll be there," Patsy said.

"H will work," Joseph said reassuringly. "At least once," he amended. "Joat is an odd child, but any contraption she claims will function, will function."

Amos nodded dubiously. / have never found reason to doubt you in matters of violence, he thought. That was fomforting. On the otnbr hand, no man was infallible, and even Joseph was an amateur at war.

They were in the lower-equatorial park, near the central core of the station's upper globe. For a wonder, there were no surveillance cameras here. By Central World law, there had to be such places in any substantial habitat Most of the inhabitants being law-abiding types, SSS-900-C's was in the park. It was fairly large, several hundred hectares, with part of the station water-reserves deployed as lakes and ponds. Currently it was in nightcycle, and the Kolnari seemed to find that fascinating. Amos could understand that. He had found it heartbreakingly like, and yet unlike, Bethel. The scents were strange, greener, and fresher than the arid hills of the Sierra Nueva estates, milder than the irrigated lowlands. Strange birds — or was it small animals? — chirred and rustled in the undergrowth. He was an outdoors man, but these were not the fields he knew.

"They come," Joseph said. "To stay," he added.

He moved off into the shadows of the bushes, bent low, moving with a skill he had learned in the alleys of his childhood and the hunting grounds of his leader's properties in later years.

God was not entirely unfair. The Kolnari hearing was not quite as good as human norm; it need not be in the thicker air of their homeworld. Amos crouched with hunter's patience, waiting as if for sicatooth.

God of our fathers, be with me now, he prayed with utter sin "Hai, dog-turds, what brings you out this fair night?" Joseph's voice rang clear. "Tired of banging your mothers or looking for sheep?"

Amos felt a lurch of fear. They were counting on the enemy's inexperience with guerilla tactics, their arrogance. That was perilously close to counting on the Kolnari being stupid, and that was dangerous.

Pounding feet came closer: Jgseph's heavier tread, and the lighter, fester sound of ffie folk the hell-planet bred. Joseph flashed between the trees with his head down, arms and legs pumping. The pursuers seemed to float by contrast, loping effortlessly like men on a low-gravity moon. Their eyes and trailing manes glowed lambent in the sjmulated starlight, and their movements had the aching gracefulness of swans taking flight. They were beautiful, and horrible beyond belief, and he feared them in a way that had nothing to do with the long knives in their hands.

He stepped out. They stopped with a plunging abruptness. Their heads turned to scan him with the smooth accuracy of gun-turrets tracking under computer control. Joat had counted on that in designing her gadget A scanner detected the alignment of their eyes.

The thing he carried strapped to his chest yawped. Then it was red-hot, and he was scrabbling to rip it loose and toss it away. The pirates stumbled as if they had run into a wall of iron. They screamed as if that iron were white hot and dropped their knives to tear at their feces in a frenzy of pain.

Scream, dogs, Amos thought, gratified. Scream as Bethel screamed, as Bstsy screamed, scumvermin/i&A.

Cries of pain were not going to attract attention on the SSS-900-C: not while it was held in the Fist of High Clan Kolnar.

A dozen men and women edged out of the shadows. Cutting bars and lengths of dull-gleaming synth tubing were in their hands. Amos reached over his back and drew a long curved sword from its sheath with the slender sound of steel on steel: the motion so long practiced from blade-dance training that it was as unconscious as breathjng. The heads of the Kolnari turned toward the sounds he made; their ruined eyes were circles ofblood-red now, and tears of blood dribbled down their cheeks. They moaned in their agony, but they moved toward him, teeth hared in a rictus of pain a&d savagery.

"Quickly, but carefully," Amos said to the others dosing in on their victims.

Afterwards they must throw their clothes into disposal and go through full decontamination cleansing.

Joseph was behind the blinded pirates, a half-dozen stationers at his back. Two knives glinted in his hands.

"Now!" Amos said. « CHAPTER N&ETEEN "Shall I perform an autopsy, Great Lord?" the eunuch medico asked in its shrill whine.

Belazir t'Marid lookejtt down at the bodies in their separate bags. Separate bags, but who knew what went where? One bag might be a few parts short or extra, for all he could tell.

"Creature," he said to the eunuchs, cuffing one aside, "when men have their skulls crushed by heavy blows — as these have — and their eyes gouged out— as these have — and their throats cut to the neckbone — as these have — and their bodies cut to pieces, as these have, then generally speaking, as a rule, they die. An autopsy seems somewhat superfluous."

The noble's voice was even and pleasant, as it usually was, but the slave medico sank deeper and deeper into a crouch of abasement with every word, as if they were blows from the powered whip normally used on such. At the last, all the eunuch could do was whimper.

"Cease," Belazir said. "Now, this other; in that, I have interest"

The medico sealed the bags containing the bodyparts of the two dead Kolnari and hastened to the intact casualty. Relatively intact. He stroked a hand down the opaque material, and the stuff turned utterly transparent.

"Whatever killed him, he was not pleased with it," Belazir remarked to Serig, looking at the dead man's bulging, staring eyes. Shifting to the interrogative tense: "Creature?"

"It is uncertain, Great Lord. Either the electrocution or the explosive decompression would be fatal, of course. Here, the dart struck. See, a burned patch, high on the shoulder, towards the angle of the jaw. As he was turning to confront that which killed him, it struck from the reqr."

"Blindingly obvious," Belazir said facetiously. "Go. Preserve the bodies."

"And what do you propose to do, t'Marid?" the third Kolnari noble present said.

"Do, lord Captain t'Varak?" Belazir said, turning with an expression of perfect courtesy.

TVarak's presence provided a welcome distraction. A kin-enemy was always more entertaining than outsiders, if more predictable. He waved a languid hand about them, at the dew-cool grass, at the holos for overhead that mimicked the blue cloud-scattered sky of Earth. The temperature was far below what Kolnari preferred, but they could endure anything down to and below freezing without undue discomfort. None of them needed to wear more than briefs and shipbelt for utility. For status, the nobles wore long open-necked robes of watered silk, jewelry of fretted silver, and homeworld fire opals. Their hair was brushed to shining shoulder-length waterfalls, pinned back with combs of sea-ivory and precious metal, and the knife-sharp feathers of Kolnari birds.

Belazir stretched. His robe was severely plain, dazzling white with gold and indigo trim.

"I shall enjoy the beauty of this place. So fair, and so tragic because soon it will perish as if it had never been." He added a classical quotation on transience and death in the three-tonal scale.

Anger glowed from the other man, lambent as hot metal. He might have been Belazu-*s twin, except for a hair-dip of gold rather than silver and the petulance of his expression. Belazir t'Marid never showed an enemy his frustrations. sso "Three of my men are dead, t'Marid," he said.

"Dead!" agreed Belazir in a mild tone. "One slain from ambush, another two destroyed hand-to-hantl, by scumuermm. Of course, to be caught so carelessly, they became litde better than scumvermin themselves. Far better for the Clan that they were cut off before they could breed." Or breed much; Kolnari became fertile early. "Culling by the universe, not so? They will leave no sons of disgrace to propagate lines of weakness amid the Divine Seed."

For a moment, he thought Aragiz would attack him here, while Belazir was in^ctear command, with Serig at his side and armored crewfolk from the Dreadful Bride at his back. If he did, he was better culled out of the Divine Seed. That was the point of the delicate insult, of course. Back on Bethel, old Azlek t'Varak had taken off his helmet a moment too soon and lost his head by such precipitousness. That had been a scandal of some note, shadowing the prestige and honor of all his sons — Aragiz t'Varak not least. The t'Varak were always hotheads, Belazir thought, amused at his own pun. Azlek had been all of fifty, though; time enough to be slow and senile. Aragiz should know better.

He did, though barely. "You should bring the scumvermin here under better control," Aragiz said in a bland tone which matched Belazir's. "Kill a few hundred. A hundred for one."

"TVarak, t'Varak," Belazir murmured. He bent and plucked a flower, sniffed deeply of it "There are fifteen thousand or so scumvermin on this great fat-dripping morsel that the Clan — and Father Chalku, by the latest message — yearns to pop into its ever-hungry mouth. And, if the scumvermin suspect that almost all of them will die when we are done, some one of them will sabotage this station and rob the Clan of that feasting, for all that we can do. Despair makes even scumvermin brave. Hope brings forth their cowardice, each one hoping for himself."

A songbird swooped by. Belazir's hand snapped out like a trout rising to a fly and caught the tiny creature within the cave of his hand. He brought it up under Aragiz's nose as the soft feathers brushed his skin, in rhythm with its heartbeat.

"I have them in my mt, cousin," he went on. "Shall I open it —" he suited words to action "— and let them go?" The bird flew away.

"Blood calls for blood," Aragiz said. "Avenge our blood, or you are no Clan leader."

"Blood-call can wait a few days," Belazir said, his voice flint-hard as the two men stared face-to-face. "Until the transports arrive," he added negligently. "Eight days to load and leave, and watch this station vanish in a spark of fire as we go. Because Father Chalku's message giving me mandate over all the High Clan in this action has already come, has it not** "It has," Aragiz said. "Be glad, O cousin, be very glad of that!"

"Be assured I am," Belazir said ambiguously. "And now, Lord Captain, load your ship with choice loot. Let you and your fighters enjoy themselves as they will among the scumvermin, so long as they do not reduce the slave work-output." He dropped his voice to a whisper. "Do not obstruct me, t'Varak. Not until you can bring the Clan a prize like this."

"No. Not yet."

Belazir watched him go. "Serig," he said, "behold. Never underestimate an enemy."

"Aragiz, lord?" Serig said incredulously.

Belazir threw back his head and laughed merrily. "No, no. 1 should have specified; never underestimate even a scumuermm enemy. As that dolt does. This station's two leaders, they have between them a three hundred percent increment upon poor Aragiz's sum total of wits. He has the technique of a tungfor."

That was a metaphor for the younger Kolnari, who had never seen homeworld. In Kolnar's seas, there was an animal — more or less an animal — that concentrated the abundant transuranics from seawater in a specialized section of its gut. It sucked in water and sprayed it on the heated chamber that resulted, expelling it behind as steam for proptUsion. Tunglor massed in at about the same as the Dreadful Bride, and they attacked by rising from depth at fifty or sixty knots and ramming with their metal-sapphire-fiber prows, never deviating from the shortest course. Belazir's ancestors had made themselves nobles by hunting tunglor, hunting them to gain plutonium for weapons and powerplants.

"As you do when you take your pleasure," Belazir went on, slapping his companion on the back of the neck in mock reproof.

Serig grinned slyly. "It's not as if they were women" He omitted the "lord" in this brief instance, speaking man to man. "And how will you take this Channa creature?"

"With slow care, fool, as all true pleasures should be savored: wine, a woman, revenge. And on the Dreadful Bride, when we have left," Belazir said.

Serig raised brows in surprise. "You think her worthy of bearing slaves, lord?" he said.

"Many." The male offspring would be castrated — that was how such as the medico were made—and the females bred back to the Divine Seed. In four or five generations, with careful testing, they could become Kolnari of the lowest caste.

"I will need some pleasure to relax me after our labors," Belazir added.

Serig nodded, needing no further explanation. They would have to destroy and leave for Bethel immediately. The Central Worlds Navy would be all over these stars as soon as they learned of the destruction of SSS-900-C. The Clan would run a long, long way, to wait among unpeopled, unsurveyed systems while they assimilated this treasure and bred the strength to use it. Empty systems held raw materials and energy in plenty, if you had the I0ols, and the uni^gerse was unimaginably vast. That voyage would be a giant step nearer the good day when it was the Central Worlds' scumvermin who were the scattering of fugitives, and the Divine Seed the power that bred and covered world upon world upon world. A long, if necessary, flight would be tedious.

"So, leave me," Belazir said. "See to the preparations for the transports. Now I will speak with the two scumvermin."

Their Kolnari guards seemed incapable of letting them just walk through a doorway. The prisoners were always propelled over the threshold with a hearty shove. Thus far Channa and Amos had managed to keep their feet, which seemed to inspire ever more energetic pushing. Channa wondered if the two guards bet money on which of them would stumble first Such treatment irritated her and it must infuriate Amos beyond endurance, since he was born noble among a ceremonious people.

The last door gave onto the nature deck, one of the jewels of the SSS-900-C. Amos straightened then, almost smiling. The deck covered several hundred hectares; lakes, several small wooded areas, and meadows. A stream wandered from savannah to a miniature rain forest, through prairie and into the softly informal confines of a classic country-house garden, here by the entrance. Herons stalked through the reeds by the river, alert for the fish that leaped after dragonflies. The smell was overwhelmingly green. Off in the middle distance, a herd of small deer browsed.

Amu McCoffrey 6? SM. Stirling The air was full of birdsong. Normally there were parties of picnickers and the shouts of children. Now a plasma gun swung down before them.

"Wait the Great Lord's pleasure, scumvermin," the amplified voice of the Kolnar said^, Ok-oh, Channa thought, with a sinking stomach. That sounds bad. She and Amos had discussed what to do under interrogation, but she had doubts about his ability to keep control of his temper.

As for me, FU live through what I have to. And Ptt dance on their graves, she thought grimly. She had been one of the first to take the new virus.