"Tarnhelm, this is Mike X-ray Five Three Nine," Adele said with the formality of a scholar reading a script. "Over."

She was a scholar reading a script, Daniel knew, but he controlled his desire to wince. Adele might not sound like an officer tired after a long, boring mission, but she could put on a Bryce accent that wouldn't set off alarms the way Daniel might if it were him on the radio.

"Go ahead Mike X-ray Five Three Niner," the Alliance harbor control authority replied. He sounded bored, which was good.

If the military command had gotten concerned about why its commandoes hadn't reported back from dealing with the reported Cinnabar sailors, it might have careted the APC's number and identification transponder with harbor control. Daniel preferred to be one of the day's several hundred indistinguishable movements through the air about Kostroma City.

"Mike X-ray Five Three Nine requests permission to land at Dock Twenty-Five to pick up a passenger," Adele said. "Over."

She didn't sound worried. She probably wasn't worried, which put her one up on Daniel Leary right at this moment. But he suspected Adele couldn't be less than precise if life depended on it.

It did, but they'd make out one way or another. The Alliance military probably had its share of officers who always sounded like they had a broomstick up their ass.

Daniel doubted that sort very often found themselves commanding special operations troops—or survived very long when they did—but the technician in harbor control might not even know what MX539 was. Unless he had some reason to care, the APC was merely a number and a radar track to be routed away from other numbers and radar tracks.

It was dusk. On the horizon lights moved through the air above Kostroma City and across the water at its margins. Both the Floating Harbor and the surface harbor were much brighter than Daniel had seen them in the past. The Alliance forces had brought in additional lighting, as well as much else.

"Roger, Mike X-ray," the radio voice said. "You're cleared at altitude twenty meters, vector two-three-one, I repeat two-three-one, degrees. Tarnhelm Control out."

Daniel had made sure the commo helmets were shut off so they wouldn't accidentally be used. "Keep the speed down to thirty, Gambier," he shouted toward the driver's compartment.

Gambier flew with his seat high to raise his head through the open hatch, but Barnes was beside him watching the instrument panel. Barnes tugged the driver's leg and repeated the command.

Adele looked down at Daniel. There wasn't room for two people in the cupola ring, so he squatted beside her in the narrow passageway from the troop compartment to the driver's compartment. "Was I all right?" she asked.

She had been worried, she just didn't show it. "You were fine," Daniel said. That was true: they'd gotten clearance. This wasn't an acting class where performances were graded on a curve. "If everything else goes as well, we'll be back on Cinnabar before my birthday next month."

That was true too. If Daniel'd been asked if he thought that was a probable result, well, that would have been a different question.

"More ships have landed," Adele said. Unlike Gambier she preferred to view her surroundings through electronic imagery. The vehicle commander's position had a panoramic optical display as well as a combiner screen which echoed all the driver's gauges. "And Alliance forces seem to have taken over most of the government departments, not just traffic control."

Daniel nodded grimly. "Three destroyers and I count six big transports; that's a brigade at least, with full equipment. People who ask for help from Guarantor Porra don't realize what they're really going to get. Though by now they ought to."

"Are you thinking of the Three Circles Conspiracy?" Adele asked without emotion.

Daniel felt his stomach tighten. "No," he said. "I wasn't."

If he'd been thinking about what happened fifteen years ago on Cinnabar he'd have had better sense than to say anything out loud. The last thing he wanted to do was to offend the woman on whom the detachment's survival had depended, and still depended.

Adele sniffed. "I was thinking about it," she said. She appeared to be observing the ships in the Floating Harbor on her display.

Daniel cleared his throat. "Cinnabar and Kostroma are very different," he said, because he was afraid he had to say something.

"Yes," said Adele. "And Corder Leary isn't a complete fool like Walter III."

She shook her head and continued, "My parents were very passionate people. I'm sure passion is a useful characteristic or it wouldn't be so general in the human population, but I've always thought it must get in the way of accurate assessments."

She met Daniel's eyes and offered her pale excuse for a smile. "Of course, my parents had friends," she said. "As I do not."

Daniel tapped her shoulder with his clenched fist. "You've got friends," he said.

And Daniel Leary had one friend more than he'd had when he arrived on Kostroma.

The APC's landing skids grated minusculely as it settled to the Aglaia's concrete dock. Adele, wearing the commando lieutenant's uniform, reached for the hatch mechanism.

Behind her Daniel called into the closed-up troop compartment, "Remember, nobody says a word except Ms. Mundy. Not if there's a gun in your face!"

Adele opened the narrow hatch beside the cupola and stepped out, remembering the Alliance officer doing the same thing the day before. She wondered if she ought to display hectoring anger as the commando had done.

Adele smiled slightly. So long as the guards on the Aglaia's landing stage didn't make the correspondence perfect by throwing a grenade through the hatch.

The ports and panels that had been open when the Aglaia was in Cinnabar hands were now clamped shut, except for the main hatch where six soldiers armed with stocked impellers waited. The guards wore tan, not camouflaged, uniforms, so they were sailors rather than soldiers, Adele supposed.

The guards watched with interest just short of concern as Adele and the commando-uniformed Cinnabars exited one by one. Dropping the sides of the troop compartment might have looked provocative, and there was just a chance that a guard would notice that the five Cinnabars still aboard wore Kostroman naval garments.

Adele strode across the unrailed catwalk to the landing stage. Waves lifted the ship and the pontoon in differing rhythms; when the sailors tramped onto the light-metal ramp behind her Adele's balance problem got even worse.

Adele kept her eyes focused on the face of the bearded petty officer commanding the guards. Her own visage was grim, perhaps a more suitable expression than she'd have been able to arrange had she not been afraid of falling into the damned ocean.

"We're the relief for Lieutenant Wozzeck's platoon," Adele said coldly as she reached the landing stage. It too rose and fell, but without the twisting vibration. Did dignitaries never fall in the water?

"Wozzeck?" the Alliance sailor said. He'd been born on rural Leon from his dialect; Adele's statement puzzled him, but not her Bryce accent. "Sir, the navy took over here ten hours ago. This is the prize ship Aglaia."

"Of course it's the Aglaia," Adele snapped. "Vishnu and his Avatars! Where's Lieutenant Wozzeck?"

The guards looked at one another in worried puzzlement. One of them—speaking toward her petty officer, not Adele—said, "Wozzeck was watch commander on the duty sheet before Glanz took over, but that was last watch."

"All right, where's your damned command post?" Adele said with an angry grimace. She slapped her left thigh to add to the effect. "I'll try to raise somebody who can tell me what's going on."

She looked over her shoulder. Daniel had reached the landing stage. The rest of the Cinnabar sailors were strung out along the walkway or still on the pontoon because Adele hadn't left them room to go farther. They were nonchalant; probably more nonchalant than real soldiers would have been.

"Leary," Adele said, "you come with me. The rest of you stand easy until I get back with some information. And keep your mouths shut! This is supposed to be a nondisclosure mission."

"Nondisclosure mission" didn't mean anything that Adele knew of, but she'd been in and around bureaucracies most of her life. Nobody in a large organization knew everything that was going on, and this hint of mystery gave the sailors an excuse not to betray themselves by their accents.

The petty officer reached for the radio in a belt sheath, then quailed before Adele's stony glare. "Nawroos, take them to the bridge," he ordered abruptly.

An Alliance sailor handed his impeller to one of his fellows, then crooked a finger for Adele and Daniel to follow him into the Aglaia. He led them into one of the armored staircases off the entrance lobby.

Adele noticed that Daniel had started for the opposite set of stairs; he caught himself, she thought, before the sailor noticed. Familiarity with the Aglaia's regulations as a Cinnabar ship had almost caused a problem.

"The ship seems pretty big for a sixteen-strong guard detachment," she remarked to the guide ahead of her in the echoing stairwell. "Is that enough for the job?"

They wound past a door open to the next deck. The guide lifted his hands in unconcern. "All the Merks we captured are in Hold Two, sir," he said. He didn't bother to turn around, so dialect and reverberation blurred his words to the edge of understandability. "No light, no running water, and no fucking trouble for us."

Adele's submachine gun hung beneath her right arm on a short-looped sling. Her hand lay on the receiver to keep the gun from swinging, but she didn't really think of it as a weapon.

Her weapon rode, as usual, in the left side pocket of her tunic.

The guide stepped through the next door off the stairwell and turned left. They were in a hallway of some sort, lighted by surface-glow paneling. Daniel was a half step behind Adele, his head swiveling to observe points of distinction in what was to her a featureless landscape.

Offices to either side of the hall had been ransacked messily; drawers had been turned over on the floor. There'd been no attempt to clean up after the search, if it was anything as formal as a search. Looting was, perhaps, more likely.

"Hey, Lieutenant?" the guide called to the open door at the end of the hall. "Here's some soldiers that think they've got the duty here. Blaney sent 'em up to you."

The guide waved Adele and Daniel on and headed for the stairs by which they'd come. Obviously he felt no need to get into a discussion with his commanding officer. Adele strode through the door before any of the occupants decided to come out to meet her.

There were six tan-uniformed people inside a room with a great deal of built-in electronic equipment. None of the Alliance sailors looked particularly interested to have company. Two were playing a board game, not chess; another poured herself a cup of coffee from a carafe on a hotplate, and two watched an erotic recording on a holographic display.

The sixth, an overweight man, put on a cap decorated with gold braid and rose from the swivel chair where he'd been sitting. The console behind him was live. It was of a standard pattern, one that Adele could operate in her sleep.

"Yes?" the Alliance officer said. He wasn't impolite but he wasn't welcoming either. Adele didn't know how their two ranks compared.

"I need to check with my commander," Adele said. She walked past the naval officer as though he were a doorman and sat at the console. The seat was still warm.

"Who the hell do you think you are?" the Alliance officer asked indignantly. "You can't just come barging in here and taking over!"

Adele locked the console and all outgoing communications links, the matter of a few quick commands. There was no certainty of what would happen in the next minute or two, and the guards couldn't be permitted to summon help.

Adele swiveled the chair around. "All right," she said to Daniel.

Daniel looked down the corridor, then closed the door. It was a massive, armored panel and took all his weight to swing it home.

"Hey!" said a sailor.

The door banged against its countersunk jamb. Daniel unslung his submachine gun. "All of you against the port bulkhead," he ordered with a nod.

The nearest sailor flung her coffee and jumped at Daniel. He stiff-armed her away with his free hand. Adele shot the sailor in the shoulder.

The sailor's clavicle shattered as the pellet whacked into it. She screamed and spasmed into the wall. The Alliance officer turned as though to grab Adele, saw the pistol aimed at the bridge of his nose, and backed carefully against the wall.

The sailors followed their officer. Two of them helped their injured fellow. She whimpered with pain, but the wound was survivable unless a bone splinter had nicked a major blood vessel.

Adele unlocked the console while Daniel held his submachine gun on the bridge crew. When she'd finished, she stood up and said, "There. You'd better take over now."

"I will," Daniel said as he traded duties with her, "but don't sell yourself short." He grinned. "The RCN lost a great officer when you buried yourself in a library."

To the ship's public address system he went on, "Mistress Woetjans, complete the transfer of authority at the landing stage and report to the bridge with two ratings to take charge here. I'm coming to take over the remainder of the detachment."

Daniel looked at Adele. "Are you all right with these until Woetjans gets here?" he said, nodding toward the prisoners. "I want to release our people below right away."

"Oh, yes," said Adele. The captured sailors were looking at her. "There's only six of them, after all, and I've got nineteen more rounds in my pistol magazine."

She smiled without humor, wondering which of these faces might be staring at her in dreams for the rest of her life. Probably none of them, because they seemed to be very frightened of her.

That meant they understood.

As Daniel led ten "Alliance commandoes" down the passageway toward Hold 2, he felt the Aglaia quiver in a sequence of constantly changing harmonics. Since her capture, the Aglaia had been shut down except for the minimal systems required by the guard detachment. Woetjans was bringing the ship to life again.

Hold 2 held bulk consumables when the ship was fully loaded. The voyage from Cinnabar had run the stocks down, and the quantities remaining had been off-loaded on landing to be surveyed and replaced if they'd deteriorated. The RCN didn't feed its crews spoiled food, and if corners ever had to be cut it wouldn't be on a communications vessel like the Aglaia.

Four Alliance ratings were on guard at the inner hatch. The hold opened on the hull side also, but at the moment the exterior hatch was under twenty feet of salt water. Hold 2 made an excellent prison, if you didn't care about the conditions of the captives within.

The guards had gotten up from their card table when they heard Daniel's detachment approaching. They were chewing kift, a plant native to Pleasaunce with a mildly narcotic effect on humans. When the stalks were reduced to a tangle of soggy fibers, the guards spat them onto the deck and bulkheads to cling and dry.

"Yeah?" said one of the guards. Impellers leaned against the bulkhead nearby, but the guards didn't even glance toward their weapons.

Lamsoe pointed his submachine gun at the guards. "One move and you're all dead," he snarled. "I wouldn't half mind splashing your guts across the passage after the mess you've been making down here!"

"Too fucking right!" Sun agreed. The whole detachment had leveled their weapons. The Alliance ratings couldn't have been more surprised if an archangel had materialized before them.

"Let's nobody get excited, shall we?" said Hogg. Unlike the naval personnel, his master included, he wasn't horrified by the filthy sty into which the guards had transformed the Aglaia. "If people start shooting, the ricochets gotta go somewhere."

Hogg gestured the Alliance ratings toward the end of the corridor with the coil of cargo tape he'd brought to secure them. "Sit down and hold your hands out, you dumb bastards, and you'll live through the day, all right?"

As the guards obeyed, Daniel examined the hatch mechanism. The hold could be padlocked, but only a simple rod now blocked the system. Daniel tossed that to the deck and activated the power latch, then backed out of the way.

"All right, Cinnabars," he called to the fetid darkness within Hold 2. "You're free now. Come out without noise or jostling. I want the senior officer to report to me immediately."

"It's Mr. Leary!" a rating called in delighted wonder. Daniel permitted himself the shadow of a smile, despite the tension and his anger at the stench in which his shipmates had been confined.

Discipline held. The first person through the open hatch was Domenico, the bosun. He braced to attention and saluted—an admiral's inspection salute, not the forehead tap of a fighting ship on service. "Sir!" he said.

Ratings poured out of the hold. Some hugged friends among Daniel's detachment or even kissed the deck in delight to be freed, but the process was as orderly as a barracks emptying at a call of General Quarters.

"I don't mind saying I'm real glad to see you, Mr. Leary," Domenico added with a smile that involved every millimeter of his craggy face. "The best we were hoping for was passage to Pleasaunce and maybe exchange in a year or two."

"I think we can do better than that, Domenico," Daniel said. "What's our present strength?"

He glanced around to be sure everything was under control, but there was really nothing to control: these were veterans, every one of them. The most junior rating could rig, work ship, or handle the armament without a petty officer's attention.

"A hundred and thirty, including me and Chief Baylor," Domenico said. "The rest is ratings. The commissioned officers they took someplace else, and there's forty of the crew killed or sent to hospital when the bastards took us over. Chief of Ship Nantes, she choked on her tongue."

The bosun scowled like a thundercloud. "Talk about catching us with our pants down, sir, they did that for fair!"

"Yes, well, we'll see if we can't surprise our Alliance friends in turn," Daniel said mildly. "We'll ready the Aglaia for liftoff while a party frees Captain Le Golif and his officers, then reach orbit and head for home before anyone realizes what's going on."

His stomach twisted to think of the casualties to the Aglaia's crew, though he supposed he should have known. The Alliance had used nonlethal gas in their takeover, but even so there were bound to be people who got an overdose or were allergic to the compound.

"Sir, it won't work," Domenico said miserably. "They didn't want us getting ideas about crawling out through a cable trunk or some damned thing, so they dismantled the High Drive. Had a detail of our own people do it so we'd know for sure that even if we got loose there wasn't any place to go."

"And they cleaned out the arms locker," said Chief Missileer Baylor, who'd joined them from the hold. He was a slight, sharp-featured man who looked as though he'd aged a decade since Daniel saw him a week and a half ago. "Primary and secondary armament's still in place, such as it is, because they didn't have time to offload it."

"Very well," said Daniel. "We'll have to do something else, then."

Learning that they couldn't escape in the Aglaia was a shock, but it passed in a few heartbeats. Shocks were always brief for Daniel Leary. His wasn't the sort of personality that thought it could plan for every eventuality. He did think, feel, that he could handle any crisis that arose, though. Thus far he'd been pretty successful at that.

The Aglaia's crew was sorting itself by watches and specialties in the corridor, each portion under the command of a petty officer or the senior rating if no petty officer was present. Daniel's detachment threw the four guards, bound with cargo tape, into the hold in place of the Cinnabars. The process was more violent than would have seemed necessary if the conditions for the former prisoners had been a little better.

"I think we'll take the Princess Cecile," Daniel said as calmly as though the idea had been at the top of his conscious mind for a week. "I don't imagine any of the Alliance vessels will be so poorly guarded as to give us the opportunity we need, but I've found you can generally count on the Kostromans to let things slide."

Daniel looked at what was his command, by God, until the Aglaia's proper officers came aboard. He gave the crew a pleased, professional smile and said, "Right. Warrant officers to the bridge with me, the rest of you to general quarters and await orders."

"Aye aye sir!" over a hundred ratings boomed as they scrambled to obey.

"Em Ex five three niner," said the controller's voice; a different person but as bored as the first one. "You're cleared to leave harbor. Maintain fifty meters altitude until you're three klicks out. Tarnhelm control out."

"Go ahead, Gambier," Daniel called from beside Adele. The APC slid off the pontoon and accelerated across the water's surface for several seconds in a trough of spray before rising to the prescribed altitude.

Daniel nodded approvingly. "Gambier's using surface effect till we build momentum," he said.

Adele started to climb out of the cupola; Daniel waved her back with a grin. "Stay there," he said. "We're more likely to need you on the radio than we are me on the cannon. I hope to God that's true, anyhow."

His grin broadened into his full-dress smile, an expression that made even Adele feel absurdly positive. "Besides," he added, "you could probably use the cannon too."

Adele sniffed. "About as well as you could handle the communications chores," she said. She permitted herself a tiny grin. "Which might be adequate. I've noticed that you have a very good ear."

Kostroma City had shrunk to a smudge on the horizon on Adele's panoramic screen. Gambier was following the programmed course, taking them well out to sea before curving southward toward the Navy Pool. The harbor and warehouse complex had Alliance detachments overseeing the Kostroman naval personnel on duty, but they weren't linked to Tarnhelm control.

Adele had listened to enough of their radio traffic to know that the standards at the Navy Pool were lax. Very nearly as lax as they'd been under Walter III, in fact.

"I'd like to use something less threatening than an APC," Daniel said as he scowled at the receiver of the submachine gun that was effectively part of his uniform. Adele had never seen Daniel fire a shot, now that she thought about it. "Our Alliance friends stripped airboats and anything else movable off the Aglaia as soon as they took over, it seems. The cutters too, though I wouldn't want to use a cutter."

"An Alliance APC will be an advantage," Adele said. "The Kostromans won't dare question us."

She didn't know whether she was being logical or merely soothing. She rather thought she was trying to be soothing, but that wasn't a familiar experience for her.

A dam crossed the jaws of a bayou to form the Navy Pool. It swelled in Adele's display, looking like a causeway supported by buttresses. The flap valves on the inner side formed a solid wall when the incoming tide no longer held them open.

The APC slowed mushily. Barnes stuck his head back between the drivers' seats to call, "Sir, there's a big aircar right slap in the center of the tender moored to the Princess Cecile. What do you want us to do?"

Adele glanced at the display before she remembered Daniel was the person who had to be able to see what was going on. She started to squeeze out of the way, then realized Daniel didn't need the display. He'd already echoed the image through his helmet's hologram projector.

She kept forgetting that though Daniel wasn't an information specialist, he was a professional trained to use state-of-the-art military hardware. Given a little time and experimentation she might be able to get more out of the equipment than Daniel could, but he handled it smoothly for its intended purposes.

The Princess Cecile was the cigar-shaped corvette Adele had seen in flight only a few days earlier during the Founder's Day celebrations. It was moored in the center of the bayou, at a distance from the rows of generally larger ships along the shore.

A flat barge was tied to the main hatch. Many of the corvette's other hatches and ports gaped also. The scene reminded Adele of the way the Aglaia had looked before she was captured.

The aircar parked in the middle of the barge's deck could carry at least a dozen passengers. The car's gray-enameled sides were marked with Alliance crests and stenciled government motorpool legends.

"Set us down on the tender's stern and pray we don't swamp her," Daniel ordered. "Keep the fan speed up in case it does."

He looked at Adele and shook his head. "If they'd landed on one end or the other, we could center our weight and there'd be no problem."

"If wishes hooked fish," Hogg put in tartly, "then you and I wouldn't have ate so much dried food when we'd go off camping."

Daniel's servant wore a commando uniform that couldn't be said to fit him even after he'd done some rough-and-ready tailoring to the sleeves, trouser legs, and waistband. Nobody'd suggested that the uniform should go to somebody who was more nearly the right size and age, however.

Adele was just as glad of that. At least some of the sailors were good shots, and their courage was beyond question. In the present business, however, she trusted Hogg's reflexes as she did those of no other member of the party.

Hogg carried a stocked impeller for choice. At Daniel's orders, so did Lamsoe, Sun, and Dasi. Adele hadn't understood why until Hogg explained to the sailors.

Submachine guns were lighter, handier and fine at short range. The light pellets were next to useless against vehicles or targets a hundred yards away, however. The group didn't know what they'd be facing in the next few minutes, and Daniel's desire for a range of alternatives was worth the extra weight.

Gambier dropped the APC to the surface of the water, then bounced up onto the tender. The inevitable gush of spray soaked the car already there. The driver jumped into her cab, shaking her fist at the APC.

Daniel smiled faintly. "Whoever's here ahead of us complicates things," he said, "but we'll handle it."

Adele nodded crisply. "I didn't do a cull and sort for messages referring to the Princess Cecile," she said. "It's my fault."

The APC settled. The tender rocked uncomfortably but finally stabilized with a slight list. When Gambier was sure it wouldn't turn turtle, he shut down the engines.

"It was your fault that time is finite and that I was in a hurry?" Daniel said. "No, I really don't think it was."

He turned to face the enclosed troop compartment. "Same drill as before: Ms. Mundy does all the talking until I give orders to the contrary."

Adele saw Daniel's jaw muscles twitch in a familiar smile. "Or the shooting starts, all right? But we don't start it."

Adele stepped onto the tender's quivering deck. The car's driver had gotten out again; she wore an Alliance naval uniform. "You there!" Adele snapped in upper-class scorn. "Who told you to land in the middle of this site? What are you doing here, anyway?"

She heard Hogg murmur in pleased appreciation.

The driver swallowed a lungful of protests in sudden fear. Greenish kift juice dribbled down her cheek.

"Look, I'm just driving Commander Strachan and the inspectors," she said as she backed toward the cab again. "Look, I'll move it, all right?"

She closed the hatch behind her before Adele could have replied if she wanted to. "They'll be examining the ship to take her into Alliance service," Daniel murmured into Adele's right ear. "Probably three officers and aides, but nobody looking for trouble."

The aircar's fans howled; it slid sideways clumsily. Adele strode toward the corvette's hatch, trying to ignore the way the deck hopped beneath her soles. She hoped the idiot driver wouldn't manage to fall off the tender and bring a rush of people out into the open.

The Princess Cecile was much more cramped than the Aglaia. Two Kostroman sailors were in the entrance lobby, standing beside mops and buckets of soapy water. They stopped talking when they saw the "commandoes."

"Where are the inspectors?" Adele demanded. She heard footsteps and a mixture of voices approaching.

The sailors looked at one another. A group of people wearing Kostroman and Alliance officers' uniforms walked into the entranceway from the hall to the left.

"What's this?" said an Alliance officer.

"Leary!" a Kostroman officer cried. Adele recognized him as one of the plump young peacocks she'd met at the Admiral's Ball. His name was Candace. "What are you—"

Adele had her pistol out butt-down at her side. It wasn't a magic wand; you didn't point it for threat the way sailors behind her were doing with their weapons. "Don't move or I'll kill you!" she said, her eyes holding those of the officer from Pleasaunce.

Paunchy, in his thirties . . . his light ginger hair would fluff out like a halo when the pellet penetrated his cranial vault through the light bones at the back of his eye socket. She could see it—  

Hogg stepped forward and made a quarter turn of his upper body. He planted the butt of his impeller in the pit of Candace's stomach. Candace fell to his knees, then spewed his dinner on the unscrubbed metal decking.

All around Adele Cinnabar sailors seized Kostroman and Alliance personnel alike, forcing them to their knees at gunpoint with shouted threats. Teams scrambled down the halls in both directions from the entrance alcove. A submachine gun fired, a needlessly long burst that sent bits of pellet and chips from the walls sparkling all the way back into the entrance. Someone screamed curses in a Cinnabar accent.

"Sir, they've locked the power room!" a voice cried.

"The bridge is secured!" another voice called.

The Alliance officer's nametag read Strachan in black letters on a gold field. He hadn't moved except to close his mouth since Adele spoke. Two sailors caught Strachan by the elbows, kicked his knees forward, and began strapping his wrists behind his back with cargo tape. He didn't resist, but his eyes never left Adele's.

The vessel shuddered as a heavy door slid to a stop. Daniel returned to the entrance alcove from the left; from the bridge, Adele supposed. "That was the power room containment bulkhead," he said with a scowl. "There's no override from the bridge."

He glanced around. A dozen captives lay on the deck, trussed like hens for market.

Hogg returned from the tender and gave Daniel a thumbs up. "We've got an aircar now too, sir," the servant announced. "We're coming up in the world."

Daniel's usual grin replaced the scowl. "Well," he said, "we can't burn through the containment bulkhead even with the plasma cannon, so I guess we'll have to talk some Kostroman sailors out of the power room."

"I guess we will," said Adele Mundy as she pocketed her pistol.

"Look, Leary . . ." Candace said. The gray sheen of his face made him look like a death mask of his normally handsome self. His seat was swiveled to face out from the Attack Console.

Candace rubbed his forehead and went on, "I'm sorry I ever met you! Are you trying to get me killed? First you come to my house, my house for God's sake! And now you think I'm going to help you and a gang of pirates steal a ship? You must be out of your mind!"

Daniel sighed. He'd thought he could bring Candace around if he took the Kostroman to the bridge. There were no open threats—though Hogg was nearby, trimming his fingernails with a knife as he pretended to watch Adele at one of the bridge consoles. The captured Alliance officers were in the wardroom, nearby but out of sight. All that was happening was that Leary and Candace, friends from different planets, were talking over a mutual problem.

Candace didn't see it that way. Well, Daniel hadn't really expected he would; but neither did Daniel see any other practical way of getting the Kostromans in the power room to surrender. Adele was sure that they couldn't get a message out, but Daniel and his Cinnabar crew couldn't lift the Princess Cecile with an unknown number of hostile sailors in charge of her power room.

At the moment the vessel was running on standby power from the auxiliary power unit in a bow compartment. The APU's output wasn't enough to operate the plasma motors, much less the antimatter conversion system of the High Drive.

"Leary," Candace said, speaking with the desperate earnestness of a man in fear of his life, "I'm neutral in this, just like I told you before. I don't wish you any harm, but the Alliance of Free Stars is in power now, there's no two ways about it."

Daniel sat on a fold-down jumpseat on one edge of the console. Candace tried to rotate his seat to face away from Daniel. Hogg held the chair where it was.

Candace acted like a kid hiding his head under the blanket to keep the bogeyman from finding him, Daniel thought. Cowardice like that in a man, let alone a fellow naval officer, turned Daniel's stomach.

"You've got to leave me out of whatever you're doing," Candace said. "They'll kill me!"

"Sir?" said Hogg as he looked down at the Kostroman in disgust equal to Daniel's own. "It sounds to me like the problem is he's more afraid of what the Alliance is going to do to him than he is of us. Let me have him for a couple minutes and he won't think that anymore."

Adele turned her head toward the three men without expression.

"No need for anybody else to watch," Hogg added in slight embarrassment. "I'll take him down to the forward magazine."

Candace hid his face in his hands. He was shaking. It suddenly struck Daniel that the Kostroman's fear wasn't really for his physical well-being but rather because he was being asked to make a decision. Candace was more afraid to act than he was to die.

Daniel stood. He smiled at Hogg and Adele. "No," he said. "Benno here's a friend of mine and I don't want anybody to hurt him."

He paused to let Candace relax slightly, then continued, "The Alliance officers he was squiring about the ship aren't friends of mine, though. Remember how we killed those first two commandoes to get the others to talk, Lt. Mundy? Go next door and do the same thing to Commander Strachan and his staff, one at a time."

He paused. "Until Benno decides to help us."

Adele rose from the commo officer's console, still without expression. "Take your submachine gun," Daniel said, nodding toward the weapon she'd left hanging from the back of her seat.

"Yes," Adele said. "That's the better choice for this purpose."

Candace stared at the three Cinnabars in horrified amazement. Daniel wasn't sure that the Kostroman was really taking in what was going on.

"Look, sir," said Hogg. He looked at least as concerned as Candace did. Hogg had been unconscious when Daniel and Adele put on their charade with the commandoes, so he thought this was real. "This is, you know, more up my alley. I'll take care of it."

"No," said Adele, "I will. I haven't killed anyone for a few days."

She looked critically at the Alliance submachine gun, then threw the lever on the back of the receiver to charge it. The mechanical clack within the weapon sounded like a dry chuckle.

She looked at Candace and said, "You'd best hope you don't fall into the hands of the Alliance after I've killed the six officers in your charge. The head of the operation is a man named Markos, from the Fifth Bureau. He's not a gentleman. The very best you can hope for is that you'll be quickly executed."

She smiled. Even Daniel felt his stomach clench to see the expression. Adele walked out of the bridge, holding the submachine gun in her right hand with the muzzle safely raised.

"Candace, I'm sorry as I can be," said Daniel, shaking his head, "but I need you to talk your people out of the power room. I've got nothing against you or them—I'll let you all go free before we lift ship. But if any of those Alliance officers die, God himself couldn't save you if you get into Markos's hands."

He wondered if Markos was a real person whose name Adele had gotten from signals intelligence or if she'd simply invented the name. When she was doing her sinister act, she was scarier than Hogg with a drawn knife—and Hogg wasn't acting.

"Leary—" Candace pleaded.

"Get out of the way," Adele's voice ordered from the wardroom. Her words clear and utterly calm. The bridge and wardroom hatches were both open. The noise of ratings inspecting and readying the vessel for space wasn't loud enough to dull Adele's perfect enunciation.

There was a mixed gabble of protest in Alliance accents. The examination team was a commander and two lieutenant commanders, with three midshipmen as aides. Daniel wondered if any of them had been present when Admiral Lasowski was murdered.

The submachine gun fired a short burst. Pellets disintegrated and spalled bits off the decking. A spark danced into the corridor to hiss on the lip of the bridge hatch. Alliance voices rose in screams.

There was a second burst.

The prisoners lay on the deck of the wardroom with their wrists and ankles taped. Daniel hadn't decided what to do with them; they were simply out of the way for the moment.

He'd expected Adele to shoot into the couch or one of the wardroom chairs, but from the terrified cries she must be putting each burst into the deck within an inch or two of a prisoner's ear. The carpet was glass fiber and nonflammable, but the stench of smoldering human hair indicated where some of the sparks were landing.

"Oh God oh God oh God!" Candace said. He'd squeezed his palms over his ears, but he still couldn't shut out the screams from the wardroom. "Stop it! Stop it!"

"Cease fire!" Daniel cried. He returned his attention to Candace. Quietly he resumed, "Now, I hope that means you're ready to help us, Benno. Because if you're not . . ."

Adele walked back onto the bridge. Behind her a rating clanged shut the wardroom hatch, smothering the prisoners' voices. The muzzle of her submachine gun glowed; heat waves shimmered in the air above the barrel shroud.

"I'll talk to them," Candace said. He wiped tears from his eyes, then lowered his hands and faced Daniel with an unexpected degree of dignity. "I'll say anything you please. And I don't care what you do then. You're all animals!"

Adele draped the sling of her submachine gun over the seatback again. She looked at her right wrist. The skin was smudged with a black residue: metal from the pellets' driving skirts, vaporized by the flux and redeposited on the shooter's skin.

Candace turned his seat. He stabbed a button on the left wing of his console and said, "Bridge to power room. This is Lieutenant Candace. Whoever's in charge of the power room, report now."

Daniel shifted position slightly so that he could look over the Kostroman's shoulder at the communicator's holographic display. That wasn't much help because though the display came alive, somebody had flung a shirt over the power room's imaging pickup.

"Sir, what's going on?" a male voice said. The words were a plea, not a demand.

Daniel nodded toward the console's pickup and gave it a pleasant smile. The ratings in the power room could see him even if he couldn't see them, so it was important to project an aura of friendly calm.

"Gershon?" Candace said. "It's all right. We've been captured by the Cinnabar navy but I know the officer in charge. Everything will be all right so long as you open the power room with no trouble. They, they're . . . It's really very important that you surrender right away, Gershon."

He swallowed. "Really very important."

A last tear dropped from Candace's chin to the sill of the console. His hands were folded in his lap, but they were still shaking.

"Sir, what'll happen to us if we raise the containment bulkhead?" Gershon's voice asked. "Are they, you know . . . ?"

"You'll be confined aboard the Princess Cecile until just before we're ready to leave Kostroma, Gershon," Daniel said mildly. He rested his right forearm on top of the console in order to look even more relaxed than his voice projected. "Then we'll let you and all those with you go."

As a smiling afterthought he added, "Or you can join us, if you like. The Republic of Cinnabar Navy can always use brisk fellows who know how to act in a crisis."

"Christ help us," Gershon muttered miserably. The shirt slipped away from the pickup. The bald, gray-bearded Kostroman at the power room communicator looked as though he'd just volunteered to jump into vacuum.

"Open the bulkhead, Carney," he ordered. He pulled his shirt on to cover his scarred torso. A worm gear began to whine, hauling back the massive barrier intended to prevent a fusion bottle ruptured during combat from venting its contents through the entire vessel.

"We may as well give up," said Gershon. He was speaking toward Daniel, not Candace in the foreground. "We haven't got any rations or even water in here."

"You won't be sorry, I assure you," Daniel said. Commando-garbed Cinnabar ratings poured into the power room behind Gershon. They were securing the Kostromans without any serious roughness so far as Daniel could tell.

"Damn right," said Hogg, moving into the pickup's field for the first time. "And if you're smart, you'll sign up with Mr. Leary. You'll like serving under a real officer for a change."

Adele stood in the hatchway of the APC, waiting for Daniel to take his restraining hand off the coaming. She was so irritated that she'd have driven away while he was still talking, but Barnes was more respectful of his lieutenant.

The Alliance aircar approached the tender in a trough of spray, returning from the Aglaia with another load of sailors. Gambier was driving, but a Kostroman—Warrant Officer Gershon, the man who'd closed down the power room during the assault—sat beside him to provide an authentically non-Cinnabar voice for Tarnhelm Control.

"Look, Adele," Daniel said, raising his voice to be heard over the car's fans. "I think I'd better come along after all. It isn't proper for a civilian to be in charge of this. Freeing RCN officers is RCN business, and—"

"Mr. Leary," Adele said in a tone of very genuine cold anger, "in your company I have taken part in looting naval warehouses and in capturing not one but two naval vessels. There is no one in our mutual enterprise who knows the Elector's Palace as well as I do, nor whose accent can pass for that of an Alliance citizen. Your presence is necessary to ready the Princess Cecile for our escape. The twelve of us—"

She nodded toward Hogg and the ten sailors under Woetjans already within the vehicle. They and Adele wore commando uniforms.

"—can deal with the matter of the Aglaia's officers just as readily as we could if your presence made our number thirteen."

She wrinkled her nose dismissively. "I don't object to you coming on grounds of superstition," she said, "merely because it would be stupid."

The aircar landed, rocking the tender despite the APC's centered mass. Gambier idled the fans and the noise level dropped.

"Sir?" said Hogg. "Have this bitch of a wog ship ready to lift when we get back, all right? Because sure as shit, we're going to be ready."

"Too fucking true," agreed Woetjans.

"Yes," said Daniel. "All right."

The car was disgorging its load of sailors. "Hold for me, Gambier," Daniel called. "I need to prepare the Aglaia for when we lift."

He looked at Adele and smiled wistfully. "Odd that it's so much easier to do something dangerous than to ask friends to do so, isn't it? Good luck. And Hogg?"

"Yessir?" the servant called. Adele had already started to pull the hatch to.

"Ms. Mundy has all the skills desirable in an affair of this nature," Daniel said. "She does not have experience, however. Don't let anything happen to her."

"On my honor, sir!" Hogg shouted as Adele angrily clanged the hatch closed.

Barnes skidded the armored personnel carrier away from the tender. Adele's stomach churned as they dropped to the water, then rose.

She wondered how many officers really thought it was easier to take risks than to order others to do so. If Daniel was an example, perhaps all the good ones did.

The Aglaia's tactical operations center was an armored citadel at the opposite end of Deck E from the bridge. All the sensor inputs were routed here as well as to the bridge, through separate trunks.

Normally during battle the first lieutenant would be in charge of the TOC, while the captain commanded from the bridge and the Chief Missileer, a warrant officer, oversaw the missile launchers themselves. The weapons stations were entirely automated, but things go wrong with machinery even when nobody's shooting at you.

Daniel, in the TOC with the missileer, said, "To create a diversion when we lift to orbit, Chief Baylor, we're going to launch the Aglaia's missiles on radio command while she's here in harbor. I'll deal with the software prohibitions, but I want you and your crew to remove the mechanical interlocks. There can't be any slip-ups."

"Bloody hell!" said Chief Baylor. His small, foxy face tightened with wrinkles. "Launch in an atmosphere? It'll . . ."

Daniel hadn't had much to do with the missileer on the Aglaia's voyage out; Baylor kept to himself and his weapons, polishing the missiles' hulls and performing daily diagnostics on the launch and in-flight control systems. The other officers thought Baylor was strange, but he didn't cause trouble and he pulled his nonspecialist duties like anchor watch commander without objection.

A communications vessel was probably the perfect berth for a man like Chief Baylor. There was only a vanishingly low chance that the Aglaia would have to fire any of his beloved missiles—

But if she did, her crew could be certain the missiles would function perfectly.

"Yes," said Daniel harshly. "Launching in an atmosphere will certainly destroy the Aglaia. Depriving the Alliance of this valuable prize is a secondary reason for what we're about to do."

Missiles were miniature spaceships which had only High Drive for propulsion. High velocities were a requirement of interstellar travel, even when those velocities were multiplied by judicious use of bubble universes whose physical constants differed from those of the sidereal universe.

The High Drive was the most efficient way to boost a vessel to such velocities, but a certain amount of antimatter inevitably escaped the conversion process and was voided in the exhaust. When this happened in an atmosphere, antimatter and matter destroyed each other in a burst of pure energy just beyond the nozzle and wrecked everything in the vicinity.

Antiship missiles depended on kinetic energy and had no explosive warhead. Even a thermonuclear weapon would have been pointless in an object travelling at .6 c. Lack of atmospheric capability wasn't a handicap to the missiles because at those speeds, air was a solid barrier anyway.

Which didn't mean being hit by a just-launched thirty-ton missile was a love tap, however.

Baylor shook his head disconsolately. "Yessir," he said. "I've got my crew on alert, like you said, but I sure didn't figure you'd be asking us to do this."

The missileer's expression was similar to that Abraham must have worn when God ordered him to sacrifice his son. "I hate it, sir," he said simply. "I've served on a lot of ships in thirty-seven years, and this is the best of 'em. But we'll carry out orders."

Daniel nodded cold approval. "Make it so," he said. As Baylor turned to leave him alone in the TOC, Daniel said, "Chief?"

Baylor looked over his shoulder, expressionless.

"A ship is a tool," Daniel said. "It's all right to love a ship, but sometimes a tool has to be used, even if that means using it up."

He thought about the APC that was probably landing at the rear of the Elector's Palace about now. "Humans aren't tools," Daniel added. "But sometimes you have to use them up too. That's true for everybody who's taken the oath."

And for at least one librarian who hadn't.

The sides of the APC's troop compartment were lowered to give the big vehicle a less threatening appearance. Adele had examined the access restrictions for the palace. As she directed, Barnes idled them at surface level to the rear gate of the gardens instead of trying to overfly the wall and land close to the building.

The Alliance command had placed six posts of hypervelocity missiles on the palace roof and grounds to deal with vehicles which tried to evade the mandated entry checks. Properly designed layered armor could resist plasma weapons, perhaps for long enough to land a load of troops, but for defenders who didn't care about backblast, 500 grams of tungsten monocrystal moving at five kilometers per second was a good way to drill through anything short of a granite mountain.

The antivehicle batteries functioned automatically, irrespective of the target's Identification Friend or Foe signal. Adele had edited the control software to exempt their captured APC from the automatic defenses, but this wasn't the time to inform the Alliance forces of the fact.

Lamsoe was in the cupola. He and Barnes would stay with the vehicle while Adele led Hogg and nine sailors to the subbasement where the Aglaia's officers were held along with other important prisoners.

Woetjans eyed the guard post. A heavily laden surface truck was ahead of the APC. The guards had lifted the bed's canvas cover and were checking individual crates of bottled liquor.

"These guys are regular army, not commandoes," the petty officer whispered in Adele's ear. "We commandoes think we're hot shit compared to them, you see?"

She growled a chuckle. "None of 'em are worth a fuck compared to the RCN, of course," she added. "But it's going to be a lot trickier than it would be if the wogs was still in charge."

The truck moved on. Barnes pulled forward. The sailors tried to look relaxed, with more success than Adele would have expected.

Adele had no particular feeling. She'd found if she viewed her present activities as information searches—which in a manner of speaking they were, data in the form of five Cinnabar naval officers—she could maintain the detached skill which was the best hope for success. If she thought of herself as responsible for the lives of these sailors and the officers they came to rescue, she wouldn't know how to behave.

The gardens were brightly illuminated from ten-meter pylons among the trampled plantings. The prisoner pen had been dismantled, but the wire lay in untidy bales along the north wall.

"What're you guys doing here?" asked the head of the guard detail to Barnes in the cab.

Adele leaned forward from the troop compartment and said, "The password is Nike. Countersign?"

The Alliance guards carried stocked impellers. An air cushion vehicle squatted behind a stone planter, covering the entrance with an automatic impeller in a small turret. The soldier watching from the turret hatch looked bored, but his weapon tracked the APC as it slid forward.

The detail commander walked back to face Adele directly. The compartment's deck gave her a height advantage.

"I said what're you guys doing here?" the guard said in a rising voice. "This is our operation now."

Woetjans spit onto the ground. She missed the guard's foot by several inches.

"All you have to say to me, soldier . . ." Adele said. She looked at the guard as though she wanted to wipe him off the sole of her boot. "Is the countersign. And if you don't give it, you'll see just who's in charge."

The guard scowled. The other troops in the detail stood by the gatekeeper's kiosk. Two of them hitched up their equipment belts and walked closer to the APC. So far as Adele could see, there were no Kostromans present.

"Vinceremos!" the detail commander snapped. He stepped away from the vehicle. "Have you noticed," he called loudly in the direction of his personnel, "how commando pukes wear helmets smarter'n they are?"

"Drive on," Adele ordered.

Woetjans pumped her middle finger in the direction of the Alliance soldiers as the APC waddled forward. The vehicle was sluggish because Barnes was keeping the speed down. The gardens were full of parked vehicles, and the detachment couldn't afford a collision.

Though Barnes crawled up the drive, Adele had the uneasy feeling that she had stepped onto a patch of glare ice. The APC's bow swung very slowly toward the left. They continued forward but the vehicle's axis no longer aligned with its direction of movement.

"He's pretty good," Hogg muttered critically. "He's driven boats as big as this bitch before, so he knows where the back and sides are. But he's not allowing for how much the armor weighs. He needs to correct quicker and not use so much fucking yoke when he does."

Woetjans looked worriedly from Adele to the cab. Ahead, a luxurious aircar stuck out a foot from the line of parked vehicles. The APC's rear fender would rip the car's side off in the next moment.

Barnes dropped his right skid to the pavement. It shrieked in a shower of sparks, then lifted again. The contact had braked their drift and straightened the course.

"He'll do," Adele said. She hadn't been going to let Woetjans shout at the driver anyway. Trying to directly control the work of somebody who's already over his head couldn't possibly have a good result.

"Pull in here," Woetjans called to the driver. "Onto the hedge. We've got the weight and it won't scratch our finish."

The petty officer looked at Adele. "If that's all right, sir?"

"Yes," said Adele. She hadn't thought of herself as being in real command of the undertaking, but that was how the sailors viewed her. She had to keep reminding herself to make decisions with crisp authority.

The hedged squares where Adele had met Markos were battered, but civilian vehicles weren't massive enough to drive through the remains of the bushes. As Woetjans had noted, the APC was. Perhaps it was a good omen that the detachment was able to park close to where they'd be escaping from the subsurface levels.

But if you believed that, you could just as easily believe that Fate was giving with one hand in order to snatch the gift back with the other. Best trust to courage, discipline, and good marksmanship.

The APC shuddered as Barnes plowed the hedgerow with his side panel, then settled. When the driver cut the fans to idle, his own sigh of relief was audible over the sounds of the restive vehicle.

"Let's go," Woetjans said quietly. "Remember, company manners."

The detachment stepped down from the compartment in two ranks. Adele wiped her palms on her trouser legs. She'd thought she was perfectly calm.

Adele led the way up the ramp with Hogg at her side; Woetjans was one of the pair bringing up the rear. The Cinnabar sailors couldn't march in step and Adele didn't know what a military pace was, but Daniel assured her that they'd look out of place if they moved like parade-ground troops while wearing commando uniforms.

Despite the hour, lights were on all over the palace. The only time that was likely to have been true in the past was when the Elector was giving a party.

Adele saw the Kostromans for the first time since she'd entered the palace grounds: a group of low-ranking clerks, looking haggard and frightened as they left the building. She knew from her signals intelligence that the Alliance command was determined to take over every aspect of Kostroman life as soon as possible, but Kostroman bureaucrats were still necessary to the process. Their new masters were working them within an inch of their lives.

Or a step beyond. One of the messages Adele had skimmed was an order for the execution of a clerk who'd upset a glass of wine over a stack of account books while eating supper at his desk. The official charge was "treason against the Alliance of Free Stars." As the member of the Alliance military government had explained in her covering memo, the real purpose was to encourage other clerks to be more careful.

They entered the rear porch, covered by the overhang of the second and third stories. There was another guardpost, this time manned by troops whose rigid armor and opaque faceshields made them look like statues with only a rough resemblance to humans. Plasma cannon threatened from behind two semicircles of sandbags. Between the gun nests stood another soldier with an electronic reader.

Adele handed over the routing card she'd taken from the helmet of the commando lieutenant, a programmable chip in a rectangular polymer matrix. It had carried the commandoes' orders in electronic form that could be read on the helmet visors of every member of the unit so that complex operations could be executed without communications errors.

The faceless guard inserted the card in his reader. Adele had reprogrammed it so that it showed only a destination—the Elector's Palace—and reserved all other information under the highest security level of Blue Chrome operations.

The guard looked at the projected data, then returned the card to Adele and stepped out of the way. "Proceed," he said.

Or was it, "she said"? The voice was an electronic synthesis, just as were all sensory inputs the guard received. What sort of person could willingly live and function in a prison so strait that it touched their skin at every point?

But then, there were people who probably thought work in a library was a sentence to Hell. The universe had room for all sorts; though God knew, present events proved that many people weren't willing to leave it at that.

Adele turned left with the sailors sauntering behind her. Strip lights glued to the ceilings brightened the main corridor. People, two or three in a clot, stood talking in hushed voices outside the offices. Inside were Kostromans at tables made from shelving laid over furniture and stacked with paperwork, some of it from moldy boxes that must have come up from storage in the basement.

Each room had an Alliance overseer who looked tired but very much in command. The Alliance must have moved in a civilian administration as large as or larger than the invasion's military component.

Adele glanced to left and right in cold appraisal at those she passed. Bureaucrats, even Alliance personnel, avoided her gaze as she passed to the back stairs. No civilian wanted to know why a squad of commandoes had been summoned here.

Because of the bright illumination she noticed the corridor's murals for the first time. They showed scenes of Kostroman life during centuries past. The backgrounds were so varied that they must be of specific different islands. Fishermen cast hand lines from a sailing vessel; a farm family picked citrus fruit; a starship lifted from the water as a crowd cheered.

The artist had been skillful, but grime and the band rubbed by shoulders of those passing in the hall had reduced them to a shadow of what they must have been. Adele thought of her library. Was it perhaps enough out of the way that the palace's new masters had spared it, or had the books been treated with the same brutal unconcern that had tossed antique furniture from the windows of reception rooms to clear them for office space?

She should be worrying about humans, not books; but the books and their probable fate filled her mind anyway. She smiled at herself with wry humor.

The single soldier on guard at the narrow staircase down straightened when she saw a detachment of commandoes coming toward her. She carried a submachine gun and to Adele looked very young.

"Out of the way," Adele said with a curt nod. The Alliance soldier jumped sideways, knocking her weapon against the wall, pitting the ancient plaster.

Adele pulled open the door and led her detachment down the stairs in single file. Lighting had been improved even here: battery-powered lamps were stuck to the wall at each landing.

She hadn't expected the guard; there'd been no reference to a post at the stairhead in the electronic media Adele had examined. It would have been a mistake to try to explain what the detachment was doing, however. The guard must have been placed by someone of relatively low rank, so she was therefore best ignored by commandoes claiming to operate on the instructions of Blue Chrome Command.

Blue Chrome Command was Markos. Adele wondered if that would amuse him. He hadn't seemed a man with a sense of humor.

Adele smiled faintly. She was finding more humor in life herself since she became a Cinnabar pirate.

The door to the basement level was open. A guard stood there as well. He turned from watching workmen installing power cables to stare as the detachment trooped past down the stairs. Adele gave him a hard glance.

The subbasement was well lit also, but that was a doubtful virtue in a region so decayed. The brick flooring rippled like the face of the sea—a useful simile, because at least half of the surface was under water. The ceiling arches dripped condensate, and an apparent spring stirred one pool clear of the pale algae that scummed the others.

A pump rumbled disconsolately, and the generator at the far end of the building vibrated at a higher frequency. Workmen had drilled fresh holes through the ceiling to pass power lines to the upper stories. The air danced with brick dust.

Adele approved of the additional wiring in principle. The execution of the work was simple butchery, however. One might as well shear a book down on the upper and lower edges so that it fit your new shelving.

Her detachment had returned to double file; the only sound they made was the splash of boots in the foul water. The bays filled with the detritus of past generations looked like the wrack of a terrible storm. To Adele it was a sad reminder of the ephemeral nature of human civilization; but then, she saw most things that way. Hogg and the sailors probably had a different viewpoint.

The pumps were in four brick alcoves jutting from the lengthwise exterior walls, arranged in an X pattern with the outside entrance between the pair on the north side. The pumps were huge cylinders sunk beneath floor level and venting through ceramic pipes half a meter in diameter. They had more than sufficient capacity to keep the subbasement dry.

Only the southwestern pump still worked, and a grumble from it suggested not all was well with that one either. As Adele passed between the eastern pair of pumps, she glanced through the arch to her right. Workmen had recently removed the end cap of the big electric drive motor. The Alliance planned to put this portion of its house in order also.

The broad outside stairs were a continuation of the light well that provided natural illumination for the basement level. The sliding doors that could offer twenty feet of width for large objects—the pumps and the fusion generator were obvious examples—were closed and barred, but the pedestrian door set in one of the larger panels stood ajar.

The guard post covering this entrance was outside and up a level, at the basement landing. Through the door Adele heard a jig, distorted by reverberation in the stone-lined masonry pit of the light well. The soldiers were playing music that had been popular when Adele was on the staff of the Bryce Academy.

She'd never had a taste for music and she doubted that a connoisseur would have found the jig to have been of any particular merit, but it took her back to a time that was now forever past for her. She regretted its loss, as surely as she regretted the loss of her childhood.

The music shut off in mid-chord. Well, so had that stage of her life.

The fusion generator was in a masonry room on the western end of the subbasement. According to architectural files, the original plan had been to enclose the generator in all directions but one, a curtain wall to the west. That way if the Tokamak failed it would vent its plasma harmlessly into the open air.

Later Electors had added to the initial structure. The ionized plume would now envelop the west wing and everyone in it, but Adele had found no evidence in the records that this was viewed as a problem. Fusion bottles rarely failed; and if this one did, well, the west wing was given over entirely to servants' quarters and the offices of low-ranking clerks.

Alliance officials had used the three bays in the northwest corner of the subbasement as a high-security prison. The wall of the generator room formed the south side, and a mesh of barbed wire woven on a steel frame closed the open end.

Twenty Kostroman citizens—Walter III and members of his immediate family—shared two bays of the makeshift prison. The Aglaia's five officers were in the remaining one, brightly illuminated by floodlights in the vaulted ceiling outside the enclosure.

The prisoners had no privacy and no chance of escape, but Adele saw as she approached that the twelve Alliance soldiers on duty were a great deal less than alert. She and her detachment made no attempt to conceal themselves, but they were still within twenty yards of the post when a guard looked up, realized the splashing footsteps weren't condensate dripping after all, and shouted in surprise.

Guards jumped to their feet and zipped their uniform tunics closed. They'd appropriated furniture from the upper levels. The luxurious chairs, couches, and tables made a dissonant tableau among the utter squalor.

"Who's the officer in charge?" Adele demanded. She didn't raise her voice, but the tinge of scorn in her voice was proper either for the lieutenant she pretended to be or the craftsman she truly was.

A lanky soldier, the oldest in the squad by several years, stepped forward. Instead of identifying himself he said, "Sir, this is a restricted area."

He tried to sound forceful and threatening. His act wasn't nearly as good as Adele's.

"Yes," she said, "it is." She handed him the routing card. The codes Adele had implanted in the chip would direct the guards to turn over the five Cinnabar officers to the detachment of commandoes.

The chip wouldn't explain why: that was beyond the guards' need to know. The guards would have been sure something was wrong if Adele had included unnecessary information.

Some of the prisoners moved forward, drawn by hope of something to punctuate the boredom. The individuals weren't identifiable until they almost touched the wire mesh. Light glinting from the steel threw a haze over those beyond it.

Walter Hajas was in the middle bay. Captain Le Golif, whom Adele had seen during the Founder's Day Banquet, stood grim-faced with his four juniors. She didn't think either man would recognize her.

The sailors had bunched slightly when Adele and Hogg stopped. Woetjans suddenly pushed through her subordinates, put her lips to Adele's ear, and whispered tautly, "Sir! Two guys come down the side stairs and they're behind us!"

"You there!" someone called. The subbasement was so huge and multi-bayed that the words, though shouted, didn't seem loud. "What's going on here?"

Adele recognized the voice.

"Kill them!" she shouted, reaching for her pocket.

Hogg carried his impeller slung under his right arm with the muzzle forward. His right hand had ridden lightly on the grip from the moment he left the Princess Cecile on this mission. The guard commander's mouth gaped as Hogg's slug punched him mid-chest before Adele could complete the second word of her warning.

The soldiers were too startled to react. Hogg killed three of them standing before the rest of the survivors threw themselves toward cover. Brick shattered and a Kostroman prisoner doubled up with a cry: an impeller slug didn't stop when it hit its intended target.

The sailors had fast reflexes but they weren't trained killers. Only Dasi fired at the two figures who dived into the nearest pump alcove. He missed, though his impeller blasted a head-sized divot in the brick wall.

Adele didn't bother to shoot. The guards weren't worth her concern, and she couldn't get a clear shot past the members of her detachment before the real targets were under cover.

The voice had been that of Markos. He and his aide had decided to see the prisoners without giving electronic warning.

A volley of submachine gun pellets blew powder from the north wall and stuffing from the furniture. The sailors were trying to copy Hogg now that they understood what was required, but the surviving guards were mostly safe in a side bay.

A guard fired his submachine gun. Pellets slapped and scarred pillars on the other side of the vault, but the shooter couldn't hit the Cinnabars for the same reason they couldn't hit him and his fellows: at the present angle a three-foot-thick brick wall was in the way.

Hogg shouldered his impeller with more deliberation than he'd shown previously and fired one round through the seat of a red plush divan. The guard hiding there leaped up with a scream, then collapsed. The divan broke beneath her. The slug had smashed the frame on its way to her chest.

Civilian prisoners were screaming and throwing themselves into the back of their cells. Captain Le Golif pointed toward Adele and shouted, "Run for it! You'll be killed if you try to get us now!"

He was right in one sense: at least six of the guards were alive and armed. The open front of their bay was only twenty feet from the mesh barrier enclosing the Aglaia's officers.

The Alliance soldiers were shocked and frightened, but they were still capable of pulling a trigger. With a submachine gun, that's all it would take to chop to mincemeat anybody trying to break open the prisoner cage.

Adele had the pistol in her left hand. Her right elbow held the burdensome submachine gun to her side to keep it from flopping. For a moment, only her head and eyes moved.

Le Golif was half right. Adele and her sailors couldn't run, either, except past the pump alcove where Markos and his aide had taken refuge. Ruthless didn't necessarily mean skillful, but Adele didn't doubt that the pale sociopath could knock over human targets just as quickly as they appeared before her.

A submachine gun fired in the alcove. The burst wasn't directed toward the opening. Brick shattered and a few pellets rang on the steel pump housing.

"Sun, Polin, Hafard!" Woetjans roared. Like Adele, the petty officer had seen that there was no way out for the detachment except past Markos. "On the count of three, with me."

She pointed toward the front arch with her left index finger; the submachine gun was in her right hand, the stock extended to the crook of her elbow. The sailors she'd named were, like her, among the majority carrying submachine guns rather than impellers.

"One—"

A second burst within the alcove. The impacts sounded as though someone had thrown a case of glassware against the wall. A single bit of metal ricocheted through the arch, trailing a corkscrew of smoke.

"Stop!" Adele shouted. "Stop, she'll kill you all!"

Woetjans turned with an expression combining surprise and frustration. "Sir!" she pleaded. "There's no—"

Hogg pointed his impeller at the side of the alcove. "Dasi and Koop," he said. Those three—and Lamsoe, back in the cupola of the APC—carried stocked impellers. "It's just fucking brick after all. On the count, one, two, thr—"

The impellers fired a ragged volley. The slugs were aimed a few inches above the base course. Each impact blasted out thirty or more pounds of pulverized brick.

Adele turned away and coughed heavily. Blood gummed her right eyebrow. She threw an arm across her face, knowing she'd have been too late to save her eye if the thumbnail-sized chip had hit an inch lower.

Size was a great advantage in handling an impeller's powerful recoil. Dasi was a huge man and Koop was well above average. Hogg was the lightest by fifty pounds, but his impeller was back on target an instant before those of the two sailors.

As Adele turned, a guard stuck his head and the barrel of his submachine gun around the corner of the bay in which he'd taken refuge. Adele shot him, then shot him again in the ribs.

He'd leaped like a pithed frog when her first pellet blew a hole above his right eye. So long as the target was moving, she had to assume it was a danger to her and her detachment. She'd pay for what she did tonight in dreams or in Hell, but no one would ever say that Adele Mundy had skimped a task because of what it would have cost her.

The dead man thrashed in the pool of his own spreading blood. None of his fellows would follow his example in the next minute or two. Adele remembered the helmet visor. She pulled it down and returned to what Hogg and the sailors were doing.

Their impellers slapped. The sound of slugs smashing bricks was sharper yet, and echoes turned rapid fire into the rattle of automatic weapons. Adele guessed each man had fired about six rounds when a long section of wall fell into the alcove with a roar louder even than the gunfire.

The other sailors emptied the magazines of their submachine guns into the spreading dust cloud. Compared to the crash of the impellers, the lighter weapons sounded like the buzzing of insects.

"Cease fire!" Woetjans screamed. She charged with her empty weapon raised to use as a bludgeon. Adele, for reasons she couldn't possibly have articulated, was with the half-dozen sailors who followed the petty officer.

The commando helmet had nose filters Adele hadn't known about; the air she breathed was close but not chokingly full of peach-colored dust.

Bricks had collapsed into the drainage sump, burying Markos's aide there. Her right hand stuck out of the rubble. It held a pistol, not the submachine gun Adele knew the woman usually carried.

The output pipe was shattered just above the pump casing. The submachine gun lay on the floor beneath it. Markos's right foot, flailing wildly to find purchase to thrust him higher, stuck out of the hole he'd hammered through the ceramic pipe with submachine gun pellets.

"There!" Adele said. She aimed but didn't shoot because too many sailors were moving in the dust cloud.

Woetjans followed the line of Adele's pistol. She jumped to the motor housing and grabbed the spy's ankle. When Woetjans pulled, Markos slid out of the pipe. He was covered with ancient slime and his face bore a look of bestial rage. Woetjans hit him in the middle of the forehead with her gun butt.

"Bring him as a hostage!" Adele said, backing out of the ruined alcove. She lifted her visor because it made her feel trapped. Bricks continued to dribble from the top of the opening as gravity overcame the grip of old mortar.

"Mistress, we'll have to shoot our way out," Hogg said from beside her. "They may not have heard us upstairs, I'll hope they didn't, but they'll sure hell know something's going on when we turn up looking like we do."

"Oh," said Adele, considering a point she should have seen for herself. The brick dust had started to settle; a great deal of it had settled on the skin and uniforms of the Cinnabar detachment. Sailors who'd dived for the floor when the shooting started were blotched with muck and algae besides. As soon as they appeared in public, there'd be questions that would inevitably lead to shots.

Hogg was right. If there was going to be shooting, it was best for the Cinnabars to start it.

Woetjans tossed Markos to the floor beside Adele; a sailor quickly bound the spy's hands behind his back, using a belt stripped from a dead guard. Adele hadn't heard any order pass. The sailor simply understood and executed the task.

Adele felt her face quiver with the beginning of a hysterical laugh. Why couldn't Kostroma produce library assistants of that quality? She forced her cheeks into a frozen rictus until the fit passed.

"If it's all right to use the helmet commo now I can set things up with Barnes and Lamsoe," Woetjans said. "Unless you want to . . . ?"

A surviving guard fired a short burst from the bay where he and his fellows remained. A sailor fired back. Neither hit or could possibly hit anything but brick.

"Get out!" Captain Le Golif repeated.

He stood behind the wire, feet slightly spread. His arms were behind his back as though he were reviewing a parade. Pride in Cinnabar made Adele flush, despite the cold awareness that the men who cut her little sister's throat might have been personally brave as well.

Adele hadn't seen an armored personnel carrier until a week before. Among other things she had no idea of what might be the rate and duration of fire of the heavy weapons involved.

"No, you have a much better appreciation of the factors," she said.

The petty officer glanced down at Markos. "And you want him along?" she said without emphasis.

"Yes," Adele said. "I do."

Markos was useless as a hostage: trying to negotiate their exit from Kostroma would simply alert the Alliance command to their presence. The detachment might escape in a rush; if the Alliance had time to set up, every Cinnabar on the planet would die or be captured.

Adele had called Markos a hostage because the only other alternatives were to kill him in cold blood, or to let him live. She'd meant it when she said she wouldn't be party to a cold-blooded execution.

But she'd pull the trigger herself if it was that or setting free the monster she knew Markos was.

"Message received," Daniel said, speaking into the integral microphone at his console in the Aglaia's tactical operations center. Domenico was in charge at the Princess Cecile. He'd used his initiative—against Daniel's orders for communications silence—to relay the warning from the detachment in the Elector's Palace. "We're on the way. Leary out."

Chief Baylor looked at Daniel with concern. The missileer had just arrived to report his team was done with the starboard installations, Missile Tubes One and Three, but that there'd been damage to the port-side handling controls when the Aglaia was captured. It'd take an hour to clear, and the Cinnabars hadn't had an hour even before the wheels came off for the palace detachment.

Daniel keyed the general communicator. "All personnel to the main hatch and begin loading," he said calmly. "Bridge out."

He'd hoped to make the final transfer from the Aglaia to the Princess Cecile in two stages, but the car could carry the nineteen Cinnabars so long as Gambier stayed low and used surface effect. That was an easy problem. If Daniel'd thought it would have helped the palace detachment, he'd have swum to the Navy Pool pulling the missile crew on a raft.

Chief Baylor didn't leave the TOC. Daniel felt a surge of rage—did the man think orders weren't meant for him?—but suppressed it instantly. Baylor didn't need to guide his people to the main hatch. Daniel was jumpy because he held himself responsible for allowing the palace detachment to take a vain risk.

He touched the switch opening the hatch of Hold Two, then keyed the general communicator, audio only. Video required more bandwidth than might be available during combat. Trained naval personnel ought to have their eyes on their tasks anyway.

"You're free to go," Daniel announced to the former Alliance guard detachment. They'd be jumping up in their prison as light entered through the opening hatch. "We've left an inflatable liferaft tied to the mooring pontoon for you. I strongly recommend that you use it to get away from the Aglaia as fast as you can. Bridge out."

Daniel swung out of his seat and headed for the door. Baylor followed in his wake, frowning again. It was a familiar expression on the little man's face.

"We might've left them where they are," Baylor said over the clash of his boots and Daniel's on the metal stair treads. "Though I don't guess a bunch of groundhogs're going to reprogram the targeting computer in the time they'll have to try."

"I don't guess they are," Daniel agreed, feeling his irritation rise again.

As Baylor said, the Alliance personnel were from the ground forces rather than the navy. If they even knew where the TOC was, the chance they could reset the programmed sequence was less than the possibility of them flapping their arms and flying to the Princess Cecile ahead of the aircar.

Besides, leaving the prisoners locked in the Aglaia was a sentence of death by fire or suffocation. Daniel didn't hate anybody that much. He hoped he'd never hate anybody that much.

He hit the Deck C landing and sprinted down the corridor toward the hatch. The Chief Missileer ran at his side.

"It sounds like Woetjans is really in the middle of it," Baylor said. He talked out of nervousness. Also, he was displacing his fear rather than acknowledging that his real concern was the certain doom of the Aglaia and his beloved missiles with it.

A rating stood in the main hatch with a submachine gun. When the officers reached the concourse he shouted, "Here they come!" over his shoulder to the aircar quivering in dynamic balance on the pontoon.

"They're professionals," Daniel said to Baylor. He was out of the Aglaia's hatch for the last time, into warm salt air and a sky not far short of dawn. He crossed the catwalk and paused, gesturing Baylor and the rating into the vehicle ahead of him.

They were professionals, Adele and Hogg as surely as the Aglaia's crewmen. They would do the best they could under the circumstances.

And by God! so would Daniel Leary and the contingent directly under him.

"Remember," said Woetjans to the detachment, "shoot anything you please but don't shoot the fucking APC, right? And keep moving but help your buddies. We don't leave nobody behind even if their head's blown off. Ready?"

The general murmur of assent sounded to Adele like feeding time in a bear garden. She smiled faintly. Everyone in the immediate area would shortly prefer that a pack of bears had rushed up from the depths of the Elector's Palace.

Woetjans keyed her helmet. "Barnes, get moving," she said.

Two clicks on Adele's helmet intercom signaled wordless agreement. The APC was going into action two high levels above the poised detachment.

"Remember," Woetjans said. She sounded peevish, like an adult trying to control unruly children. "I fire the first shot."

She nodded to Dasi and Koop; the big sailors put their whole strength into sliding the equipment door sideways so that the detachment could exit as a group rather than dribbling one at a time through the pedestrian doorway.

The door's rattle drew the attention of the entire detachment on the landing twenty feet above. The Alliance troops stared in amazement at the squad of commandoes starting up the broad stairs toward them.

Woetjans was on the left end; Adele was beside the bosun's mate, holding only her pistol, and Hogg was to Adele's right with her submachine gun in his hands and the impeller slung across his back. Three more sailors completed the first rank; Dasi and Koop fell in behind with the two men supporting Markos by the elbows.

"Buddha!" cried an Alliance soldier. He pointed toward Markos, pinioned and groggy. "They've got—"

Faces—angry, surprised; none of them frightened, not yet, because they didn't have time. They were lighted from above by a glaring fixture the Alliance had bolted to the wall. Ten soldiers, perhaps a dozen.  

Woetjans may have squeezed her trigger first, but Adele doubted there'd been a heartbeat between any of the five weapons firing. Only Hogg of the five shooters failed to empty the 300-round magazine of his submachine gun. The guard detachment melted like frost in a torrent.

Adele ran up the stairs. A mist of dust and blood pulsed in the floodlight. She didn't know why she was shouting. Her foot slipped and she did know why, but she didn't look down to make sure.

Gunfire and screams echoed in her mind. A soldier lay on the landing, pounding the bricks with his remaining hand. Hogg finished him as he passed; probably a waste of ammunition, but because it was Hogg only three or four rounds.

An Alliance official looked over the carved stone coping of the light well. Adele shot him. His peaked hat flew off and his face jerked back with a red smear where his forehead had been.

Adele was winded already, gasping to breathe brick dust but wishing that dry smell could mask the stench of bodies sawn inside out by hypervelocity pellets. She thrust her hand against the wall where the stairs switched back. The surface was cratered and sticky.

Powerful drive fans howled. A bolt of plasma ripped overhead, dimming the banks of light and setting off a bloom of ionized fire that must have been one of the Alliance gun nests in the entryway.

Barnes and Lamsoe were doing their part, all of them were doing their part. Nothing else mattered now.

Adele tripped. A sailor caught her. They were at the top of the staircase. The APC turned on its axis in front of them, bunting civilian vehicles into crumpled ruin. The right side panel was raised but the left one was still locked down so that the detachment could leap aboard.

Adele stopped. She fired, aiming at white blurs that were faces. Plasma lit the sky. This time the plume carried with it the skirt of the gun vehicle at the garden entrance, devouring the flexible fabric in orange flames that were a shadow in the iridescence.

Any blur, any face, any soul within them if men have souls.  

Woetjans caught Adele around the waist and leaped into the troop compartment. The APC lifted on the full screaming thrust of its fans.

Adele twisted on the hard deck. Hands gripped her to keep her from sliding out of the vehicle. She slid a fresh magazine into the butt of her glowing pistol, and the victims in her mind shrieked louder than the fans.

Daniel fiddled at the Princess Cecile's command console, trying to get the adjustable seat positioned properly for him. The controls were reversed from those on similar Cinnabar equipment; he kept getting a hump in the upholstery where he wanted a dip and vice versa.

The ship's systems were live: the telltales were green or amber, with the only red warnings those for the open main hatch and the enabled armament switches. The Princess Cecile was fully crewed with some of the most experienced ratings in the RCN. There was only one commissioned officer, but that wasn't unheard of for a vessel as small as a corvette.

The single officer shouldn't have been a junior lieutenant on his first cruise, but that wasn't a problem that Daniel could find it in his heart to really regret.

Lt. Daniel Leary, Officer Commanding the RCS Princess Cecile. That was a fact forever now, even if he died in the next ten minutes or the RCN cashiered him after he reached Cinnabar.

Dying in the next ten minutes was actually quite probable, because the Bremse, an Alliance cruiser/minelayer, was in orbit over Kostroma.

Daniel's main display was a Plot-Position Indicator for the region above the planet to an altitude of 100,000 miles: near space by interstellar standards, but if the Princess Cecile could get through it alive she'd have a very good chance of making it the rest of the way home. The Commonwealth of Kostroma's automatic defense system hadn't been a joke, not quite, but the Alliance had come prepared to update the defensive constellation to a level of protection comparable to that over Pleasaunce.

Alliance cruiser/minelayers were built on the hulls of large light cruisers, but their large magazines were configured to accept either missiles or thermonuclear mines like the ones the Bremse was deploying now above Kostroma. The ships were fast because their mines could interdict hostile planets as well as defend friendly ones; and even though the Bremse would be heavily loaded with mines, Daniel was sure she could out-slug a Kostroman corvette by a considerable margin.

The options available to the Princess Cecile were guile or incredibly good luck. And disaster, of course. Disaster was far the most probable option.

"The Mundy section is beginning extraction," said Domenico from the console to Daniel's right. That was normally the navigator's position, but Daniel had put the bosun there for now because he needed someone trustworthy handling communications.

Navigation and attack were Daniel's own responsibilities until he handed the Princess Cecile over to somebody better qualified. He switched the main display to an attack screen which echoed data from the Aglaia's sensors. The PPI shrank to a holographic fifty-millimeter cube, one of a series of similar displays at the upper edge of the projection volume.

"Understood," Daniel said. He tried to keep the gleeful excitement out of his voice. He didn't want the crew to think he was insane. . . . "Alert the ship."

Domenico passed the report over the general communicator in a rasping tone with as little emotion as he'd have put into a drinks order. These were good people, and they were depending on Daniel Leary.

"Holy shit!" said Dorfman. She'd been gunner's mate aboard the Aglaia—a communications vessel didn't rate a warrant gunner—and was seated at the remaining bridge console with responsibility for the corvette's defenses. "All the missile batteries at the palace just fired!"

"Yes," said Daniel as he transmitted preprogrammed commands to the Aglaia. "We're fortunate to have a communications officer of Ms. Mundy's skill. She said she'd trip the automatic defenses to create a diversion as they departed the target area."

Daniel pressed the red Execute switch with the full weight of his thumb. "And now," he added with satisfaction, "we're going to create a diversion of our own."

Fifty feet below the APC, a line rippled through three blocks of housing in the center of the city. Buildings crumbled. A pall of dust spread up and outward. Where the hypervelocity rockets hit something harder than brick an occasional spark flew into the night, but the flames growing slowly in the projectiles' wake were for the moment unimpressive.

Adele stared in horrified amazement. She'd had no idea that the rockets would penetrate so far. All she'd intended was to add to the confusion by destroying vehicles parked in the palace gardens.

"It is very important that you preserve my life," said Markos. "Your superiors will punish you severely if anything happens to the information I bring them about my nation's intelligence operations."

Adele turned. Sailors stared in disbelief at the hostage, still bound, who sat upright in the middle of the compartment.

"That woman is a spy," Markos said, nodding toward Adele with a malevolent expression. "Her real name is Adele Mundy. She was recruited on Bryce."

"Why you lying bastard," Woetjans said. She punched Markos in the face. He fell against Dasi. The sailor knocked him upright again with an elbow.

"I do not lie," Markos said, dripping blood from a cut lip. "There's proof of what I say in the data unit that looks like a communicator on my belt. I'll give your superiors the key to the information inside as soon as they guarantee my safety."

He turned his gaze on Adele again. "She's a spy," he repeated. "She provided the information that permitted us to capture the palace and your ship so easily."

Adele was detached. It was as though she were listening to the history of an alternate reality in which events transpired in a fashion slightly skewed from those in which she had participated.

But only slightly skewed: the reality would be enough to hang her. She thought of the Three Circles Conspiracy and the Cinnabar traitors betrayed in turn by their Alliance paymaster.

Adele Mundy didn't belong in this world; or any, she supposed. She'd briefly thought otherwise, but she'd been wrong.

She smiled. A sailor swore under his breath.

"That's a lie, right, sir?" Dasi said. He was pleading. "It's all bullshit that he's talking!"

The APC was over water now. To the north behind them, fires burned in Kostroma City and weapons fired at nothing.

Adele continued to smile. There was no way out. She could lie, but the sailors wouldn't forget Markos's words. She was quite certain evidence would be found to implicate her. Markos would have arranged that, so that if she balked at some demand he could threaten her with exposure to the Cinnabar authorities.

As he was exposing her now, to save himself and punish her with the same stroke.

The sailors stared at Adele in stricken horror. They'd seen her shoot. But she couldn't fly an armored personnel carrier, and she couldn't kill the sailors who'd risked their lives for her and with her in the past. The only family she'd known since the proscriptions; and in a real sense, the only family she'd ever known.

"I'll handle this," said Hogg. He raised the flap of Markos's jacket and unclipped the belt communicator.

"Be careful," the spy warned. "If you try to retrieve the data without the codes you'll destroy it instead. But I will tell all to the proper authorities."

He sneered at Adele in bloodthirsty triumph. His lips and left cheek were swollen from Woetjans's blow.

Hogg weighed the false communicator in the hand that didn't hold a submachine gun. "You know," he said conversationally, "the master wouldn't believe a word of this. He's a honest sort himself, my master Daniel, and he thinks the whole world's like him. But there's a lot of people back on Cinnabar who would believe it."

He grinned at Adele. "Right, mistress?" he said.

"Yes," said Adele.

Hogg shot Markos in the temple. The spy's head jerked sideways, losing definition as hydrostatic shock violently expanded his brain tissue.

Hogg thrust his right leg straight, shoving the corpse out the open side of the APC. He tossed the communicator after Markos. He fired a burst from his submachine gun as the little object spun off in the vehicle's wake.

"Missed," Hogg said. "When my eyes was better I'd have blown it to shit in the air, but I guess we'll have to trust salt water to do the job."

He looked around the troop compartment. Everyone was staring at him. "What the fuck's going on?" Barnes demanded plaintively from the front cab.

"It's like this," Hogg said to the sailors. "The master told me to take care of Ms. Mundy, there."

He nodded to Adele. The submachine gun was still in his right hand, pointed toward empty night sky through the open side of the vehicle.

"Giving her to this guy and his sort—and they're all the same sort, I don't give a fuck what color uniform they wear," Hogg continued. "That wouldn't be doing my job. Besides, you can't trust them even if they do happen to tell the truth."

"Too fucking right," said Woetjans. To Adele in a respectful voice she went on, "You got a bad burn on your hand there, sir. Better be sure to get it looked at the next time you get a chance."

Adele looked at the throbbing blisters on the thumb, web, and index finger of her left hand, her gun hand. She held her hand out to Woetjans.

"Yes," she said. "Perhaps you'd do it now. I believe we have a few minutes before we reach Lieutenant Leary and our new vessel."

"The APC's approaching at speed!" Domenico said. The bosun's console displayed the region centered on the Navy Pool at a scale small enough to include Kostroma City miles to the north.

"Direct the crew to their stations, Mr. Domenico," Daniel ordered without looking around. "Ms. Mundy takes over the commo desk, and you head up the emergency team until we're out of the system and in one piece."

A computer-generated model of the Aglaia was at the center of Daniel's display; the remainder of the imagery was that gathered by the Aglaia's sensors and transmitted to the Princess Cecile.

The Aglaia launched missiles across the Floating Harbor.

The first round lifted at a flat angle from a bath of steam and plasma. The harbor surged as though it'd been bombed. Nearby pontoons rocked violently, breaking their tethers and grinding against one another like blunt concrete teeth.

The second missile exited with less immediate disruption because its predecessor had blown a hard vacuum in the sea about the Aglaia's flank; water pressure hadn't had time to fill the man-made event. The missile trailed a corkscrewed line of fire as bright as the sun's corona, matter and antimatter annihilating one another in its wake.

Antiship missiles were intended for use over stellar distances. Even accelerating at twelve gravities, the first round was only travelling at 800 feet per second when it nosed over toward the Alliance destroyer moored a dozen berths away in the Floating Harbor. The ball from a flintlock musket moved faster than that.

But the missile weighed thirty tons.

It hit the destroyer on the upper curve of the hull, a third of the way back from the bow. Heavy plating crumpled. The warship rolled ninety degrees on its axis, then rolled back and gulped water through its open hatches. Steam and smoke from electrical fires swelled about the injured vessel.

The missile ricocheted skyward as a point of light. It swelled as it mounted toward orbit because its drive devoured ever more of the missile's own fabric as it rose. A rainbow bubble marked the final dissolution.

The second missile was intended for another destroyer, but the guidance system was marginal at such short range and might have been damaged by the previous round. It hit the harbor's surface short of its target and bounced out of the spray at an angle flattened by friction with the water. It cleared the destroyer by what looked to Daniel like less thickness than you'd use to shim a bearing.

The missile was beginning to tumble when it collided three berths distant with a big transport that had arrived with a battalion of Alliance troops. For a fraction of a second the two merged like a log and a giant buzzsaw; then antimatter from one or the other turned the immediate area, tens of thousands of tons of metal and sea water and flesh, into a plume of light.

Daniel split his main display between the PPI and an attack screen. The remote targeting screen shrank to a cube of vivid light in a corner. At its center, the Aglaia was sinking, gutted by her own missiles.

The Bremse orbited twenty-nine thousand miles above Kostroma's surface. She was in the sky above Kostroma City now; on the PPI a point moved away from the blue icon that was the Alliance cruiser—another mine, making the present total 131 according to the sidebar at the edge of the display.

Daniel keyed the guard frequency, the universal emergency channel, and cried, "Commonwealth ship Princess Cecile to all vessels, emergency, emergency! Ships are blowing up in the Floating Harbor! Do not land in the Floating Harbor! All vessels on the planetary surface, lift at once to escape the explosions!"

The Aglaia had managed to launch a second pair of missiles. If ships had souls . . .

But humans do have souls, and humans who depended on Daniel Leary would die unless he focused on the next step of the road to safety. He opened his mouth to blurt another dollop of simulated panic to justify the Princess Cecile lifting. Before he could speak, a voice from the console demanded in a guttural accent, "AFS Bremse to Princess Cecile. What is going on down there? Over."

"Emergency!" Daniel repeated. He heard a bustle beside him, figures moving at the right-hand console. "Ships are blowing up, Bremse! We must lift to save ourselves. All ships on the surface must lift!"

"Bremse to Princess," the harsh voice spat back. "Negative on lifting, Princess Cecile. Stay where you are and provide a full imagery link on commo channel twelve, no encryption. Over."

"Emer—" Daniel said. An amber bar slashed across the green telltale on his display, indicating that the channel was locked to him. He turned his head in surprise.

Adele sat at the console to his right. Her uniform was splotched with blood, brick dust, and substances Daniel couldn't even hazard a guess at.

He'd thought his own was the master unit and couldn't be overridden. That wasn't true, at least with Adele working in the same system.

"Princess Cecile to Bremse," Adele said. Her voice was perfectly calm. Anyone who'd had experience with people reacting to crises would assume she was in shock. "We are transmitting data now as we lift off. I repeat—"

She pointed a bandaged left hand to Daniel. He nodded; he was already initiating take-off sequence. Domenico had sealed the Princess Cecile as soon as the palace detachment boarded, so it was just a matter of bringing up pressure to the plasma motor feeds and unlocking the outriggers so they could be brought in as soon as the vessel left the water.

"—we are lifting off for safety. Princess Cecile out."

The motors rumbled beneath them. The Princess Cecile shuddered on a bubble of steam and plasma, then began to rise. She was shorter than the Aglaia and therefore wobbled at a higher frequency as she found her balance, but she was a lot steadier than Daniel had expected.

He grinned at Adele, then settled into his seat. His fingers moved across the console's keyboard as he set up the next step on the corvette's targeting display.

One step at a time, until they got home or went off the end of the final cliff.

Adele coughed wrackingly, doubling over in her seat to bring up orange phlegm. Her first thought was that she'd had a lung hemorrhage, but the color came from the brick dust she'd breathed as they shot their way out of the palace. It and the ozone generated by electromotive weapons were irritants, but she didn't think either of them would kill her.

She wiped the sputum on her sleeve and went back to work. The fabric couldn't be much filthier than before anyway.

Starships weren't stressed for high acceleration. The Princess Cecile lifted at less than two gravities, making flesh a burden but nothing worse. Sailors moved about, albeit a little slower than they had in Adele's library; and as for Adele, she noted with a cold smirk that many of her plumper contemporaries carried as much weight every day of their lives.

Daniel, instead of using the ship's communication system, turned his head to say, "Adele? The Bremse up there's laying a defensive array. Can you find the command node so we can destroy it?"

Adele put down her wands. "The constellation hasn't yet been activated, but I'm changing our identification codes to mimic those of the Goetz von Berlichingen. That way we'll be safe if they switch it on."

"Yes, but can you spot the command node?" Daniel said. "We can destroy it with cannon or even a missile if you can just locate it."

Adele heard in his tone the ingrained irritation of a male trying to get information from a female too dense to understand a simple question. She didn't say: "Yes, if you're stupid enough to want to commit suicide that way I can help you do it."

Instead Adele said, "If the command node is destroyed each unit of the constellation will react to any ship within range except the Bremse. The command node is—"

She twitched a control wand without taking her eyes away from Daniel. An object on Daniel's visual display changed from an icon distinguished only by number to a pulsing ball as red as murder.

"—here."

"Ah," said Daniel. His face was blank as he assimilated what he'd been told: all the things he'd just been told, including the fact that he'd acted like a fool. "Adele—Ms. Mundy. My concern isn't so much for our own safety from the defenses, as for the safety of the Cinnabar force that retakes Kostroma."

His expression was momentarily that of an older man and a very hard one. "As one most certainly will."

He swallowed, settling into a calmer state. "Is there a way we can disable the constellation before we leave the system? Even if it means risk for us. Though not suicide, if you please, not at this point."

Adele's subconscious responded with a surge of pleasure to Daniel's engaging grin. She'd frequently called people fools to their faces. She didn't recall ever before meeting someone who analyzed the criticism, then accepted it because it was valid. Certainly no men had done so in the past.

"If you can put me aboard the node," Adele said, "I can disable it. I can make it change sides, if I've the time."

"Bremse to Kostroman vessel Princess Cecile," growled the communicator. "Orbit at thirty thousand kilometers. Do not leave that assigned level or we'll destroy you. Over."

A different officer was handling the Bremse's communications now. This one was female and had an upper-class Pleasaunce accent. Senior personnel had been recalled to duty when chaos broke out in Kostroma City.

Daniel bobbed his head as he considered. "Tell them we acknowledge but we're having trouble with our reaction mass shutoffs," he said.

He waggled a finger toward his console. The four quadrants of the main display were now split into separate screens which he kept in the corner of his eye. "Actually, the fuel feed's about the only part of the drive system that seems to be working to spec. Three of the plasma nozzles should have been replaced a couple maintenance cycles ago."

"Princess Cecile to Bremse," Adele said. "We acknowledge your orders. We'll orbit at thirty thousand kilometers as soon as we've repaired the reaction mass shutoffs. Princess Cecile over."

The Bremse was laying a defensive array at 44K kilometers above Kostroma's surface, geosynchronous level. Adele didn't doubt that the cruiser was willing to destroy a Kostroman vessel that disobeyed its orders, but there were other things going on that might well seem more pressing to the Alliance officers.

Killing a ship was a complicated business. Very different from squeezing a trigger and seeing a face swell, eyes bulging and the first spray of blood from the nostrils . . .

"Bremse to Princess Cecile!" the communicator said. "You'd better stabilize where we tell you, you wog morons, or you'll be lucky if enough of you gets home that your families can breathe you! Bremse out."

Daniel's expression was one that Adele wouldn't have liked to see had she thought it was directed at her. "The node is big enough to board?" he asked. His left hand on the keyboard was making corrections to the targeting display.

"Big enough for a dozen technicians at once," Adele said. "I've checked the design drawings. There'll be a programming crew aboard it at least until the whole array is deployed. A boat can take me there using the codes that the shuttles for the work crews use."

"How big a party do you want?" Daniel asked. "We don't have combat suits, though."

Adele sniffed. "There'll be three or four Alliance programmers," she said. "Give me somebody to drive the boat and another sailor or two to keep the programmers out of my way."

Daniel nodded. His finger touched the general call button. "Woetjans, Barnes, Dasi, and Lamsoe to the bridge," he said, his voice syncopating itself through speakers in every compartment.

Adele noticed distortion. The Princess Cecile, though clean and fit-looking, wasn't as tight a collection of systems as it might have been if its present crew—communications officer included—had longer to work on the vessel.

"And the Bremse?" Daniel asked. "Can you . . . ?"

"I doubt it," Adele said. "As a safety feature there's a lockout chip common to the Bremse and every mine of the constellation. It's an infinite nonrepeating sequence, not a code I can break. The system won't even permit me in the node to command a mine to attack the Bremse so long as the lockout's in place."

The four sailors came at a shambling run. The weight of continued acceleration showed in the taut lines of their faces, but not in the speed of their arrival. Woetjans didn't even look strained.

"You're to take Ms. Mundy in the cutter to track Kay-Kay One-Four-Three-Oh," Daniel said with perfect enunciation and economy. "That's the command node of the defensive constellation under construction. There'll be Alliance personnel aboard, but they shouldn't expect trouble. In any case, you'll protect Ms. Mundy and provide her with any assistance she requires. Do you understand?"

Woetjans grinned broadly. "Yes sir," she said.

"You'll launch when we're opposite the planet from the Bremse," Daniel said to the bosun's mate. "That's about seven minutes, so don't waste time."

Adele raised herself from her seat, trying not to stagger under the strain of her added mass. Without comment Barnes and Dasi stuck hands under her elbows and lifted her with easy grace.

Lamsoe murmured, "Proud to be chosen, mistress. There's always something happening where you are."

"It's an occupational hazard for librarians," Adele said with a feeling of amusement that surprised her.

They started down the corridor to one of the circular stair towers. The sailors continued to carry Adele though she dabbed her feet to the deck in stubborn determination not to seem completely helpless.

"Baylor to the bridge," the general call ordered in Daniel's voice.

"I've never worn an atmosphere suit," Adele warned. "I'll need help putting it on."

She'd need help with more than that, and she'd need luck as well. Thus far she'd had both.

And the greatest luck in Adele Mundy's life was that now for the first time she did have help.

Chief Baylor entered the bridge. He'd barked his left knuckles; his right arm to the elbow was a black smear of congealed lubricant; and his expression was furious enough to face down a fox terrier.

"Sir," he said, "I've got fucking work to do so I'd really appreciate you getting to the fucking point!"

"You've become Attack Officer," Daniel said calmly. "That's your console."

He pointed to the navigator's console, empty since Adele's departure. "I've programmed the first two missiles but you'll launch any others. There are others, I hope?"

"Oh," said the warrant officer. "I—"

Baylor seated himself. He typed with the power of somebody driving nails expertly: far harder than necessary for the job but absolutely precise. The PPI switched to a targeting screen, similar in gross essentials but vastly different in detail and the keyboard functions associated with it.

"Well, not so very different from ours," he said with something short of approval.

Baylor looked back at Daniel. "Sir," he said, "we've got ten missiles aboard, all of them in the ready magazines now and I think they'll at least launch. Those wog cretins just let them sit in the grease they got them in from the factory. I swear! They're Pleasaunce built, though, and they seem to power up all right."

He shook his head. "They're low-acceleration models. Seven gee max. I wish to God we could've transferred some of my babies from the Aglaia before, before . . ."

The Princess Cecile was over Kostroma City at this point in its orbit. A quadrant of Daniel's display showed an enlarged view of the scene below. Dawn had broken over the capital, but fires blazed beneath trails of smoke. Explosions flashed in the Floating Harbor.

A warship on the surface fired plasma cannon in quick, nervous flickers. So far as Daniel knew there was no real enemy for the bolts to engage.

"Yes," Daniel said. "I regret that too."

If he'd been wishing for things, he'd have started some distance beyond a chance to transfer missiles between ships. That was an all-day job and they didn't have the heavy equipment to carry it out besides. He knew, though, that Baylor was mourning the loss of what were "his babies" in every sense but the biological.

Baylor gave him a faint, thankful smile. "I guess worse things happen in wartime, sir," he said. He reached for the commo key as he added, "I'll put Massimo in charge at the tubes. She's a good man. I got a good team."

Message traffic was passing from the Bremse to the ground at an increasing level of frustration, and from the ground to the Bremse with frequent contradictions caused by a complete collapse of the civilian communications net. Since the Alliance forces hadn't yet built an alternative net, commo was unit to unit rather than through a multilateral system which could analyze the data from all points simultaneously.

Locking bolts withdrew with a clang. The cutter spurted clear of the hold. The Princess Cecile shuddered in reaction. Bolts rang again to reseal the corvette.

Daniel wondered if the confusion in Kostroma City was a result of something Adele had done but hadn't bothered to mention, or if it was a chance result of the burgeoning disaster. People talked about the fog of war, but the truth was a much harsher thing. In war a fire swept across all sources of information. Equipment failed and humans, trying to balance dozens of competing crises, lost them all in crashing shards.

"I thought you'd be handling the Attack Board, sir," Baylor said. His hands were spread across the virtual keyboard. He faced the display with an expression as solidly determined as the nose of one of his beloved torpedoes.

Daniel looked at him. The missileer was setting up course data based on possible locations of target and tube. The courses would have to be refined when it came time to actually launch, but having a setup in the computer made that simpler by a matter of seconds or even minutes.

"If shooting starts, chief," Daniel said, "I'm going to have my hands full with the ship. If things go better than I expect, we'll just wait here for the cutter to return."

A particularly bright flash lit Daniel's display. When he turned to view the image directly the Floating Harbor was completely shrouded by steam. The fusion bottle of one of the moored vessels had failed catastrophically.

"They didn't do so bad, did they, sir?" Baylor said with a wistful smile, looking at the display over Daniel's shoulder. "My b— Our missiles from the Aglaia, I mean."

"No, chief," Daniel said. "They taught some wogs what it means to go up against Cinnabar."

He said the words to console the missileer, but as they came out Daniel felt his own pulse surge. It was childish and for that matter uncivilized to feel this sort of murderous patriotism. That didn't make the reaction any the less real.

The Aglaia's missiles were of the twin thruster design with dual antimatter conversion systems. They were the only type in first-line use in either of the major navies.

Kostroma had purchased single-thruster missiles to equip its warships. These were much cheaper, since the High Drive was the system's only expensive component. Guidance was loaded before launch. Complex sensors and terminal guidance equipment would have been a waste of money due to the high velocities involved and the fact that missiles were ballistic at normal engagement ranges.

The Princess Cecile's missiles were the same size and would reach the same velocities as those of the Aglaia—or the Bremse—but they did so at a leisurely rate by comparison. This was a particular handicap at short ranges; and if it came to a fight with the Alliance cruiser, it would be very short ranges indeed by the standards of interstellar warships.

"What do you think our Alliance friend has to send us, chief?" Daniel asked. "If it comes to that."

Baylor wrinkled his nose. "Four tubes only," he said. "The fire director's the same type they fit in the Krestovik class with twice the tubes, though, so they can keep rounds coming at ten-second intervals as long as there's anything in the magazines."

He spread his small, muscular right hand above his keyboard without touching it. "The magazines, though, that's a guess, but carrying a full defensive constellation I'd guess thirty-six missiles. Maybe thirty-eight if their missileer knows his business, and maybe only twenty if some dickhead with a lot of braid thinks, 'They're not coming to fight, so let's use the stowage for something useful like fancy rations.' "

Baylor cleared his throat in embarrassment. "Not meaning to insult you, sir," he added.

"I wouldn't feel insulted even if I had a lot of braid, chief," Daniel said. "Which I most certainly do not."

"Thing is, sir," Baylor said, "they'll be high-acceleration types and ours aren't. There's no getting around that."

"Bremse to unidentified vessel at thirty-nine thousand kilometers!" the communicator snarled. The Alliance cruiser had noticed the cutter at last. Too bad, but Daniel had expected it. "Cut power and identify yourself immediately or we'll destroy you. I repeat, identify yourself immediately! Bremse out!"

Daniel touched a console button whose protective cage he'd flipped back even before the Princess Cecile reached orbit. The vessel's general alarm, sets of three treble pulses, sounded in all compartments.

He lifted his finger from the button and said over the communicator, "General quarters. Prepare for action."

To Baylor Daniel added, "Well, chief, let's see what we can do with the present equipment, shall we?"

Covering a mind full of doubt with a tight smirk, Daniel stroked the firing toggle to launch the corvette's first pair of missiles.

"—repeat, identify yourself immediately or we'll destroy you!" said the voice from the communicator. "Bremse out!"

"You'll do wonders," Woetjans muttered reflectively, glaring at the cutter's minimal display. "Put us in the shadow of one of the mines they been dropping, Lamsoe. If you can, anyhow. I'd say put the command node between us, but we're too fucking far."

Here aboard the cutter, Adele had no feeling whatever for distances or even directions. Because of space restrictions the Plot-Position Indicator was projected on a concave combiner lens in front of Lamsoe, the pilot, rather than as three real dimensions in the air above the console. Adele wasn't even sure whether the cutter was one of the points on the curved display or if they were instead the center of the display's lower horizon.

She turned to Dasi, strapped into the fold-down seat beside her, and said, "Will they fire at us?" It didn't occur to her until after she spoke that the sailor might think she was frightened.

Dasi shrugged, though the loose-fitting atmosphere suit barely quivered. "They can try, but I don't guess they're going to do much across forty thousand miles. You know how plasma spreads."

The cutter had a single thruster. The deck quivered as the nozzle gimbaled around. When the thruster fired at its new heading Adele found herself hanging from the strap as the bulkhead tried to accelerate away from her. The plasma flow's high-frequency vibration made dust shimmer in the air.

Adele tried to settle herself. That was impossible while wearing an atmosphere suit. The suits were meant for transfer in vacuum, not work. They were awkward, uncomfortable constructions of rubberized fabric with stiffening hoops. One size fit all—in Adele's case, fit very badly. The gauntlets separately clamped to the cuffs came in three sizes, though for Adele a pair marked small wasn't.

The helmets were plastic castings shaped like the bottoms of test tubes, clear on the front and with round lenses like miniature portholes on either side. Aboard the cutter the Cinnabars wore the helmets open on the hinge at the back of the neck. They had no communication equipment, nor was the plastic clear enough for piloting a spacecraft.

"Think we're worth a missile?" Barnes wondered aloud. Neither of the men seemed concerned, either by the situation or by Adele's state of mind.

"A little tub like this?" Dasi scoffed. "No! Though she handles pretty good, don't she?"

"The captain's launching," Woetjans said. Adele couldn't place the emotion she heard in the petty officer's voice. "He's taking the cruiser away from us, I guess."

"God have mercy!" Lamsoe muttered over the plasma whine. "That big bastard'll eat them alive."

His fingers moved on his control keys. The flow cut abruptly. The thruster pivoted again, then resumed firing. In a tone of professional detachment Lamsoe went on, "One minute thirty to docking."

All four sailors stared at the display. Woetjans stood beside the control console, gripping attachments because she wasn't strapped in. Barnes and Dasi, facing one another in jump seats, leaned forward for a better view.

Adele could see the display past the pilot's shoulder, but it meant absolutely nothing to her. The full-sized console aboard the Princess Cecile had been simple to understand. When three dimensions were flattened to two, they became an alien world. It horrified her to realize that Barnes and Dasi, who (not to be unkind) between them might approximately equal her intelligence, watched with full appreciation the data which passed before her in a cascade of gibberish.

"Missed!" Dasi said. "Shit, they weren't even close!"

Barnes shook his close-cropped head in dismay. "Well, the captain's young," he said. "Not everybody's born to be an attack officer."

Woetjans turned toward them in fury. "How about shutting the fuck up, will you?" she said. "Did you ever think he just spit a couple missiles out in a hurry because our asses was in a sling?"

"That Alliance bastard didn't even maneuver," Dasi said in disappointment. "Missed 'em clean, and there's only ten missiles aboard."

"Eight now," Barnes agreed sadly.

Adele felt cold. If Woetjans was correct, it was an even more damning indictment of Lt. Daniel Leary that he hadn't used the available time to set up his initial attack on the cruiser/minelayer. She couldn't believe that: she'd watched Daniel updating his launch sequence throughout the time they were on the bridge together.

No, Daniel wasn't slack. He just wasn't very good at that part of his job. He'd told her that his Uncle Stacey hadn't been a fighting officer for all his courage and skill in other aspects of spacefaring. Apparently Daniel had that part of the Bergen heritage as well.

It was unfortunate that they were all learning this in the middle of a battle. Though perhaps that didn't matter. The sailors obviously thought the battle was unwinnable to begin with.

"Docking!" Lamsoe warned. He lifted his hands from the controls and swung his helmet into place.

Automatic systems took control of this final portion of the journey. Adele felt the cutter rotate minusculely under the impulse of the maneuvering jets, steam rather than plasma. Even for the experts she assumed this Cinnabar crew were, the process of manual docking would be a maddening, time-consuming task.

She reached for her own helmet. The hinge was at the back of her neck so she couldn't see what she was doing. Dasi's big hand gently brushed hers away.

"Hunch a bit, mistress," the sailor said. Adele tried to obey but the edge of the helmet still grazed her forehead as it pivoted down over her head.

There was a click and a cool pressure as the helmet sealed. The oxygen bottle switched on. Simultaneously Adele felt the rasp of the cutter's docking mechanism interlocking with its mate on the command node's surface.

The sailors drifted in the weightless cabin. Heavy wrenches dangled from their belts. They couldn't carry real weapons because the programmers wouldn't open the airlock's inner hatch to an obvious threat, but burly sailors with wrenches should take command of the situation without difficulty.

Woetjans was opening the cutter's hatch. Adele tried to get up. She couldn't. Dasi—or was it Barnes?—reached down and released her safety strap.

The hatch released and pivoted inward. The gush of cabin air into vacuum would have carried Adele with it if Dasi—she was almost certain it was Dasi despite two distorting layers of faceshield—hadn't gripped her.

The node's airlock was three feet away, hard to see because of the flat lighting. Woetjans spun the wheel and pulled the lock open, using the cutter's hatch for purchase. She entered; the sailors launched themselves after her. Dasi and Barnes each held one of Adele's hands in the process, and Lamsoe clamped the outer lock shut behind them.

The chamber's interior was illuminated. Adele could tell that atmospheric pressure was building by the way the figures of her fellows filled out as air molecules began to scatter the light.

The sailors unlatched their helmets. Adele struggled with hers for a moment before Dasi did the job for her. The air was thin, frighteningly thin for a moment, but the sailors didn't seem to mind.

The hatch to the node's interior had a small window with a speaker plate directly beneath it. An eye showed through the window and the plate demanded, "What the hell are you doing here?" in a tinny voice.

"We're from the Katlinburg," Adele said in her Bryce accent. "She exploded in the harbor. Let us in."

"You don't belong here," the voice said in a mixture of anger and puzzlement.

"For God's sake, let us in!" Adele said. The Katlinburg was one of the Alliance transports; very possibly she had exploded by now. "We can discuss what we're doing here then!"

The eye vanished. For a long moment Adele was afraid that this was the end: the frightened programmers simply weren't going to let strangers into the command node.

The inner lock rang as bolts withdrew. The hatch pivoted into the station.

Four worried-looking technicians were in the node's central concourse. They were unarmed. From their dark complexions and hazel eyes they were natives of Willoughby, a world the Alliance had conquered less than five years earlier.

The technicians were probably political prisoners. At any rate the Alliance authorities obviously didn't trust them because there was also a detail of four uniformed soldiers with them on the command node.

The soldiers had submachine guns. They were pointed at the Cinnabars.

Daniel Leary sat at the command console of the Princess Cecile, as integral a part of the corvette as the sensor suite or the High Drive that responded to his touch.

He was braking at 1.8 gravities, the most strain he was willing to put on the corvette's structure. Even that was harder than he'd initially intended, since he knew the hull was modular and had been maintained by personnel with lower standards than the RCN would accept.

Daniel had been unjust to the Princess Cecile. Liftoff had proved the craft was as tight as a unit-built Cinnabar hull. Whatever else you said about Kostroma, they knew how to build starships here. The Princess Cecile would be a prized command in Cinnabar service, a handy little vessel whose crews would love her. All she needed was a once-over to make right a decade of neglect.

And of course she needed to survive to reach Cinnabar. Daniel wasn't concerned about that ultimate result now, because every thread of his being was focused on the actions that would make it possible.

Personnel shouted on the bridge and over the commo net. The crew wasn't worked up on this vessel, and because of the missing officers there was a degree of confusion that wouldn't normally have occurred with veterans like these.

A part of Daniel's mind was aware of what was going on around him, but the chaos touched only the surface. The core of him was the Princess Cecile, feeling her skin grow hotter as the Bremse lashed her with plasma cannon.

It was almost unheard of for a starship to use its secondary batteries as offensive weapons in space. Even now, though the Bremse and Princess Cecile were too close and slow for missiles to be really effective, the distance between vessels orbiting at different heights and orientations was beyond the range at which plasma cannon were a serious threat.

A sensor suite amidships degraded thirteen percent at the stroke of the Bremse's directed ions. For the moment Daniel ignored the problem. The Princess Cecile's processors could compensate for the loss. If he needed greater precision, he'd rotate a replacement suite into place.

Conformal sensors in a ship's outer hull always suffered mechanical wear when a ship was in service. Alliance cannon had done nothing that a week cruising in the solar wind from Kostroma's Type O sun wouldn't have equaled.

Daniel's braking thrust meant the Princess Cecile in effect dived toward the planet, spiraling around Kostroma in an increasingly tight orbit. As the corvette approached the surface, Kostroma and the extended volume of the Kostroman atmosphere subtended a greater portion of the Bremse's orbit.

The Princess Cecile passed into Kostroma's shadow. The Bremse's cannonfire ceased; a better commander would have ended the vain process long before. Shooting at the Princess Cecile degraded the cruiser/minelayer's own sensors and eroded the bores of weapons meant for the Bremse's defense.

Of course the Bremse's captain probably didn't think he had much to fear from the Princess Cecile's low-acceleration missiles. He might well be correct.

Chief Baylor launched a single round. Daniel's control inputs went to the Attack Board and were automatically figured into the launch commands. What the Attack Officer had to do was to calculate, with the help of his sensors and AI, where the target would be when his missile arrived.

This was a relatively simple—"relatively" being the key word—process when the vessels were at normal engagement speeds and ranges. A ship moving at a significant fraction of light speed, attacked by a missile at its terminal velocity of .6 c, had no time to maneuver.

Since the missile's course was based on sensor data that was several minutes old, the chances were very high that the target had done something in the interim that would cause the attack to fail. You didn't have to worry about the target reacting to your missile, however, except with point-blank slugs of ions in an attempt to decelerate the projectile by converting its substance to gas and forward thrust.

At these cislunar ranges, the target could see a missile in realtime from the instant of launch. The Princess Cecile's low-acceleration weapons weren't a serious threat to the Bremse unless the cruiser/minelayer's entire bridge crew was asleep; even then the automatic avoidance system, meant for maneuvering in the constricted space over a major harbor, would probably get them out of the way.

The Bremse's missiles, though . . .

"Blue vessel is launching!" Dorfman said. Daniel was already aware of the dot separating from the icon highlighted blue, the traditional hostile designator in Cinnabar service. "Defensive batteries are live!"

Daniel released a control key, reducing the Princess Cecile's thrust by a fraction. Three more dots appeared at ten-second intervals, the shortest period at which missiles could be launched without the exhaust of preceding weapons damaging those that followed.

The missiles accelerated at a full twelve gees, but the corvette would be a thousand miles away when they reached the calculated impact point. The Princess Cecile handled beautifully, and with Daniel Leary at her controls she was safe until she was too close to Kostroma to continue maneuvering.

The trick wasn't merely to stay alive till then, however. Daniel was trying to pilot two vessels, his own and the Bremse. He was dragging the cruiser/minelayer behind him like a dog on a leash. If the corvette was here, the Alliance captain would strive to put his vessel there.

The process would continue in infinite sequence until there was a point Daniel had calculated before the Princess Cecile lifted from Kostroma; or until the Princess Cecile and her Cinnabar crew disintegrated in a gush of molten metal because her young captain had cut things a little too close.

"You're not authorized to be here," said the older female soldier who seemed to be in charge of the guard detail. "This place is top security!"

"We were just lifting off to launch a message cell," Adele said. "The ship blew up and damaged us, so we had to dock here. We need to contact the Bremse so they can send down aid to the surface."

She picked at the cuffs of her gauntlets. She couldn't see them clearly because of the way the sleeve ballooned, and she hadn't paid any attention to the method of closure when Woetjans sealed them for her.

"Somebody help me off with these damned gloves," Adele said peevishly. She held her hands out to Dasi, ignoring the guns pointed at her and her fellows. The node was weightless, but everyone aboard it was floating within thirty degrees of the hatch's alignment.

"How did you get here?" asked a technician; a man in his sixties, at least twice the age of the other Willoughbies. "Only the supply vessels are supposed to be able to dock without being destroyed by the defenses."

Willoughby was a center of electronic manufacturing and had provided a haven for disaffected Alliance citizens. The latter had been both a thorn in the side of Guarantor Porra and the key to the recent Alliance capture of the planet: feigned refugees had subverted Willoughby's automatic defense array when the Alliance fleet arrived.

"Of course we weren't destroyed!" Adele snapped as Dasi drew her gloves off. The sailors were keeping silent, waiting for her to tell them what to do. "We're the Katlinburg's cutter, I told you."

Another Willoughby opened her mouth to speak. The senior technician shushed her with a quick gesture.

The technicians understood that friendly or not, the cutter shouldn't have been able to approach the command node without setting off the close-in defenses mounted on wands projecting from the node's hull. These would blast a hail of faceted tungsten pellets in the direction of any object that tried to approach without the proper codes. Only the cutters bringing supplies from the Bremse should have had those codes.

Dasi removed the right gauntlet and started on the other. The Bremse sent not only supplies but changes of guard: Adele could see that by the relatively good health of the soldiers compared to the sallow puffiness of the technicians.

The cruiser/minelayer maintained gravity by constant acceleration. Its High Drive used water molecules for conversion. A ship in station above Kostroma could replenish its tanks by dipping down to the surface for an hour every few days.

The command node was a satellite with only maneuvering jets. Those aboard her would feel the effects of weightlessness within days; the technicians had been in this high-technology prison for the full two weeks since the Alliance invasion.

"Paltes, call the ship and see what the fuck we're supposed to do about this," the Alliance noncom said. "You lot—"

She waggled her submachine gun toward the Cinnabars and drifted slightly back in reaction. Unlike the sailors, the Alliance guards weren't used to weightlessness.

"—get into the airlock again till they tell us what to do. I shouldn't have let you in."

Dasi removed the other gauntlet. He was between Adele and the guards. She reached into the pouch on her equipment belt with her left hand. "All right," she said calmly to the noncom, "but you're going to be in trouble—"

As Adele's hand came clear of the pouch, she shot the noncom through the bridge of the nose. Recoil—even the pistol's slight recoil—spun Adele sideways. She fired twice more as she rotated.

The guard whose right forearm Adele had shattered with a pellet meant for his upper chest jerked the trigger. His gun pointed toward the far wall. Pellets raked a programming alcove. Faint gray smoke drifted from holes punched in the structural plastic.

Adele bounced off the airlock. She turned desperately to see what was happening. Barnes and Dasi had the uninjured guard between them; Dasi was bending the man's gun arm over his knee to break it. Woetjans held the guard who'd fired by the throat with one hand as she hit him an unnecessary second time with the wrench in the other hand.

There was no need to worry about the noncom, nor for the soldier whose blood spurted one final time before his heart stopped for lack of fluid to pump. When a pellet hit the soft tissue of a human throat, the wound it tore looked more like a bomb crater.

Adele returned the pistol to her tool pouch. She pushed herself carefully toward a programming station. She reached a different alcove than the one she'd intended but that didn't matter, they were all the same.

Her leg, red with the globe of body fluids she'd brushed on the way, couldn't be allowed to matter either.

The Princess Cecile's quartet of plasma cannon roared like a swarm of bees. They were four-inch high-output weapons with a hundred times the flux density of a thruster nozzle. The corvette's maneuvering jets fought to keep the vessel in alignment. Dorfman had his finger on the armament override, keeping the weapons on continuous fire even though he was burning their throats out.

There wasn't any point in saving the cannon for further use if the ship itself was a shower of meteors hitting the Kostroman atmosphere.

A space battle at these short ranges was a dance in which either party moved in conscious relation to her opponent. Computers determined the maneuvers; two battle computers given the same data would come to the same "best" result.

Daniel was poised over the controls. Before the battle started he'd directed the Princess Cecile's AI to follow an extremely complex set of parameters. The corvette continued on a ballistic course for three long seconds despite the oncoming missiles. She had to hold the setting in order to lead the Bremse to where Daniel wanted the cruiser to be.

The parameters were beyond computation to a greater than fifteen percent probability of success, but that was a much greater chance of survival than Daniel saw in any other course. Next time perhaps Fate would hand him a cruiser to hunt down some poor bastards in a second-class corvette.

He laughed, to the amazement of the other bridge personnel. An Alliance missile grazed the Princess Cecile.

The impact may not have been the missile itself but rather the ball of vaporized metal surrounding its ion-pitted head. It slapped the corvette, flexing the hull and shutting down all the vessel's electronics for a momentary self-check. The hull whipped three times more before it came to stasis, and even then nerves as trained as Daniel's could feel the tingle of harmonics which took longer to damp.

Emergency lighting went on; at least part of it did. That seemed to be an area where the Kostromans had skimped maintenance. Daniel's console came up again. A ship status display filled the main screen; the PPI had shrunk to a sidebar.

The Princess Cecile was tumbling faster than the maneuvering jets could handle. Daniel fed in thruster input more by feel than in response to his readouts.

They'd lost atmosphere and were losing more, but the leak wasn't serious and the rate was decreasing. There was severe damage to the port quarter between frames 79 and 92, but the inner hull wasn't penetrated and Daniel suspected, felt, that the outer hull might not be either. Plating had crumpled and the whipping had opened hull seams. That was where the air loss was occurring.

Domenico's emergency team had already started rerouting a severed data trunk amidships. Two ratings lugged a cannister of sealant up the bridge corridor and thrust the nozzle against a deck joint. The High Drive was running hot, but that was because the Princess Cecile was getting into the fringes of the Kostroman atmosphere. Have to make a decision soon, but first—

Daniel switched his display to the Attack Screen. The two missiles he'd launched at the start of the action were on it, heading back at terminal velocity.

Daniel had programmed the missiles to rotate three minutes into their flight, brake to stasis, and return to a target above Kostroma. The course reversal wasted fuel, but single-thruster missiles had the same conversion mass as their high-acceleration cousins and only half the rate of usage. Because of the additional distance this pair of projectiles had travelled, they were at .6 c when they crossed the point where the Bremse might have been and almost was.

Almost.

The missiles were a streak on the Bremse's sensors. They passed within a mile of the cruiser/minelayer; one of them might have been closer yet.

The missiles hit the Kostroman atmosphere and mushroomed into fireballs that ignited the sky above an entire hemisphere. The same conversion of mass and velocity into thermal energy would have turned the Bremse into a ball of gas.

If.

Baylor's console was still out. The missileer had an access plate off and was shouting into a communicator he'd laid on the floor to free his hands as he worked. There was only one missile left in the corvette's magazines, so the temporary lack of an Attack Officer wasn't serious.

Dorfman still had his electronics, but the gunner's mate had already burned out his guntubes. That section of Daniel's status display was red and pulsing, warning of catastrophic failure if the weapons were used again.

Dorfman stabbed his keyboard with blunt fingers, removing the software interlocks that would prevent the guns from firing. A plasma cannon exploding when its barrel split would do damage to the ship, but not as much damage as a hit by an Alliance missile.

In their present condition the four guns would provide very little protection, but you do what you can. Everyone aboard the Princess Cecile was pulling his weight in the best tradition of the RCN.

Daniel replaced his Attack Screen with the Plot Position Indicator. The near misses had rattled the Bremse's captain: the Alliance vessel was accelerating at over two gravities on a course skewed from any she'd been following to that point.

In a minute or two the Alliance commander would realize those missiles had been a one-off chance which the Princess Cecile couldn't repeat. The cruiser/minelayer would turn onto a following course and run down a quarry which could no longer use the planet as a shield.

Daniel rotated the corvette and increased thrust, climbing up from Kostroma's gravity well. They'd head out of the system for as long as they could. He felt his cheeks sag under acceleration. A fifteen percent chance of success had really been pretty good, given the odds he and his crew were facing.

They had no chance at all now.

Adele ran the system architecture a third time, searching for the lockout that protected the Bremse from its own mines. She was sure that the safety device was a separate chip, not software within the main command and control unit.

She was sure of that, but she couldn't find any place within the design for the chip to reside. And the lockout wasn't in the software either!

The living guards were bound with wire and floating in the middle of the concourse. One had bandages on his arm and forehead; the other's broken limb was taped to his chest. The technicians from Willoughby were unharmed but as silent as the two drifting corpses.

The four Cinnabar sailors clustered around a programming alcove which they'd set to display the planetary environs. Adele glanced toward them out of frustration. She was doing something wrong. She hadn't been sure she could remove the lockout, but she hadn't expected any difficulty in locating it.

Woetjans looked grim in stark contrast to her ready cheerfulness as the cutter approached the control node. All the sailors looked grim.

"Mistress?" the petty officer said as she caught Adele's eye. "Is there anything we can do to help Mr. Leary? They're going for the high jump if we don't."

"If you can find the damned lockout chip that prevents the mines from engaging the ship that laid them, then we can do something," Adele said in a voice so savage that she wouldn't have recognized it herself.

"Mistress?" said the eldest of the programmers. "That's part of the sensor receiver, not the control system. It's in the third chassis slot and has a blue band across it."

"Where?" said Woetjans.

Another programmer turned to the console beside him. "This one!" he said.

The cover panel had quick-release fittings. The programmer was fumbling with them when Lamsoe, Barnes and Dasi arrived together. The sailors brushed him out of the way with as little concern as Woetjans showed for the floating corpse with which she collided on her way to the unit.

Lamsoe stuck his prybar beneath the edge of the cover. He twisted. The plate lifted enough for Barnes and Dasi to reach under it. The plate flew up, accompanied by fragments of broken fasteners.

Adele checked her own work. If the lockout was eliminated, she shouldn't have to do anything more. But because she was who she was, Adele entered the main database for a schematic of the sensor control system.

Woetjans reached over the shoulders of her subordinates. Her hand came up with a component from which the locking screws dangled, along with bits of chassis.

A relay clicked somewhere within Adele's console. Two icons vanished—one minusculely before the second—on the display the sailors had been watching.

Adele wouldn't have been sure what had happened if Woetjans and the others hadn't begun to cheer.

Daniel's first thought was that a fault in the system caused the change in the Plot Position Indicator. It was too good to be true.

He still switched to a direct imagery of the cruiser/minelayer and scrolled back five seconds before the event. There wasn't a great deal he could do that was more useful, after all.

The Bremse was a blunt-nosed cylinder of eighteen thousand tons or so loaded. Her present attitude toward the Princess Cecile was three-quarters on, so foreshortening made her look tubby. Had he wished Daniel could have rotated the image on his display to show the Alliance vessel's full 780-foot length, but he didn't need a schematic.

At the five-second mark the cruiser/minelayer expanded on a line intersecting the vessel's long axis. A sleet of atomic nuclei had just ripped through her at light speed.

Plasma weapons weren't effective against starships because the bolts lost definition in the vastness of astronomical distance. A charge that could be safely generated on one vessel was unlikely to harm a similar ship across tens of thousands of miles.

A mine was under no such restriction as to the size of the charge. Its external structure only had to survive the first microsecond of the thermonuclear explosion in its heart so that its magnetic lens could direct the force of the blast toward the target.

In practice, lens efficiency was on the order of sixty percent. Sixty percent of a thee-kiloton explosion, even attenuated somewhat by distance, was enough to gut a dreadnought.

It opened the Bremse like a bullet through a melon. The forty or so mines still undeployed in the cruiser/minelayer's hold went off in a series of low-order explosions that turned the wreck into a gas cloud, but that was an unnecessary refinement.

Daniel cut thrust to one gravity, then hit the alert button. "All hands!" he said. "All hands! The Bremse has blown up! I repeat, the cruiser chasing us is gone!"

He thought for a moment about the five hundred human lives lost with the starship. There was no triumph in the thought, but there was no pity either. They'd died in the service of their state as Daniel Leary expected someday to die in the service of Cinnabar. So be it.

Dorfman had stood to hug the rating who held the sealant cannister. Baylor's console was live again, but the missileer gaped instead at Daniel's display. By now the image was only a haze that would soon be indistinguishable from any other volume of cislunar space. Voices elsewhere cheered, but some shouted doubtful questions. Not everybody aboard the Princess Cecile could believe they were alive and likely to remain that way for the immediate future.

Come to think, if there was a heaven it would be a lot like this. At least for Daniel Leary . . .

Daniel switched back to the PPI. For what seemed forever he'd been focused on the relative location of three points: Kostroma, the Princess Cecile, and the Bremse pursuing her. The intricate dance had ended and Daniel's mind was suddenly as clean as that of a baby starting a new life. Now he had to bring the corvette into orbit, ideally in close alignment with the command node so that the personnel who'd saved his life could return to the Princess Cecile.

Domenico entered the bridge. He looked wary and exceptionally calm. He threw Daniel a salute that proved not all combat sailors were slack about ceremony and said, "Chief of Rig reporting for orders, sir!"

It was his way of asking, very professionally, if the emergency was over.

"Yes, it's real, Domenico," Daniel said. "Mind, let's not have a bulkhead blow out now that we think we're safe. We'll pick up Ms. Mundy's detachment, then see what shape the ship's in and—"

Domenico's face went stiff. "Sir, check your display!" he said.

Daniel turned. There were three new dots just within the present fifteen-light-second boundary of the PPI. As he watched, two more dots appeared. They were starships dropping out of sponge space and proceeding the remainder of the way toward Kostroma at maximum braking effort.

Daniel touched the attention signal and called, "General quarters!"

Four more dots joined the five recently added to the display. The nine ships couldn't be said to be in tight formation, but for vessels which had just left sponge space they were in remarkably good order. The admiral in charge must be pleased with her subordinates.

Because there was no question at all that this was a naval squadron, not some sort of merchant argosy returning to Kostroma.

The repair crews were back at work; apart from them, there was a hush over the Princess Cecile. Domenico leaned over Daniel's shoulder to peer more closely at the display. "Does that read Tee-Ay-En One-Four-One-Eight?" he asked.

The Princess Cecile's PPI would assign an all-numerical designator to an icon if the object didn't provide one. Starships normally broadcast an alpha-numerical identification signal, however, the pennant number for naval vessels and a similar designator for merchantmen.

Daniel nodded. "Yes," he said. TAN1418 didn't mean anything to him.

"That's the Rene Descartes!" the bosun cried. "By Vishnu's dong, sir, I served on the old bitch for three years, I did! She was guardship over Harbor Three when we left Cinnabar, I swear to God!"

Daniel started to say, "Are you sure?" but caught the words just before they made him sound like a fool. He didn't know what else to say. Except—

He chimed for attention and announced, "All hands. I believe the vessels inbound are an RCN squadron, which will be very welcome. Continue repair work until further notice, but don't forget where your action stations are."

Daniel almost rang off, but a further thought struck him. "And fellow citizens?" he said. "Thank you. Your performance has been to the highest standards of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy."

There were cheers all over the ship. Daniel was choking. He knew he'd be replaced on the Princess Cecile as soon as the regular navy arrived, and he might never command another ship. But no captain, ever, would have a better crew than he did!

The icons on the PPI continued to reform as the newcomers approached Kostroma. The last four were probably transports: they remained two light-seconds behind the leaders. The five warships were arrayed flower-fashion with the battleship in the center.

They'd noticed the Princess Cecile as well. Because Dorfman still had a gunnery display on his console, the interrogatory was routed to Daniel: "RCS Vessel Rene Descartes, Captain Lairden commanding, carrying the flag of Rear Admiral Ingreit. Vessel signaling Are-Em Six-Nine-Three, please identify yourself. Over."

It took Daniel an instant to realize that he was RM693. He'd never had occasion to check the Princess Cecile's pennant number.

He took a deep breath, then hit the general communicator switch as well as the intership hailing channel. What he was about to do was worthless braggadocio that was bound to irritate the senior officers on the other end of the line.

But he was going to do it anyway. He was a Leary of Bantry; and the crew, still for the moment his crew, would appreciate it.

"This is RCS Princess Cecile," he said, "Lieutenant Daniel Leary commanding. You are authorized to orbit within our automatic defense array."

He cleared his throat and went on, "Allow me to say that your squadron is a welcome addition to the RCN forces on station here. You'll be very useful in helping mop up the remaining unpleasantness on the ground. Princess Cecile out."

There was as much laughter as cheering in the corvette's compartments this time. "By Vishnu!" the bosun said in delight. "By Vishnu, sir!"

Daniel smiled faintly. He could imagine what Admiral Ingreit would say when he heard the message. On the other hand, he could imagine what Speaker Corder Leary might have said in similar circumstances. In that, at least, father and son were more alike than different.

Daniel switched to the channel dedicated to communication between the Princess Cecile and Adele's detachment. He'd better inform the command node promptly, or Admiral Ingreit was going to find his squadron in range of a hostile and demonstrably lethal defensive constellation.