"I've seen the nations rise and fall,
I've heard their stories, heard them all
But love's the only engine of survival."

—Leonard Cohen

"Question Five-A: What is the prisoner's condition prior to interrogation?" Brett poised his light pen over the screen, his face carefully clear of expression.

"Fair." The older man licked his lips, as if to wipe away the taste of the lie. "The prisoner was slightly injured during the course of crashing his spaceship and then was lightly stunned during his capture, but as the chief interrogator on this case, I judge him fit to be questioned, with proper medical backup. Append medical report."

Brett dutifully wrote down the tissue of falsehoods. The prisoner had three cracked ribs and a concussion from the crash, worsened by the heavy stun administered by an overeager trooper. The prisoner had come to consciousness pale, sweating, in obvious distress and confusion, not only hardly knowing his own name, but not even seeming to know he was aboard a spaceship, which judging from the pilots he knew, was the worst of all signs. And the outmoded ship hastily summoned to take the prisoners from Gauda Prime to Sleer's headquarters had a medical unit barely adequate for simple first aid, much less for the reactions bound to result from a combination of his condition and the drugs Daggertt had spread out in front of him like a smorgasbord to be devoured.

Yes, so, Sleer's obvious eagerness for results made Major Daggertt nervous. So it would him, as well, but killing the prisoner might be literally fatal to the major's career and wouldn't do anything for his own, either.

"Sir, the medical report is..." Brett hesitated, searching for a more politic substitution for fabricated, "somewhat optimistic."

Daggertt waved the objection away. "The captain--the former captain--is not the target anyway, merely the pry bar."

Brett folded his lips over a "that doesn't mean he's expendable." But he'd seen those orders and seen that both of the Alpha males of the captured crew were of considerable interest to Sleer. In that case, why not use one of the women as an object lesson, if Sleer suspected their target to have a chivalrous streak? Or the Delta, for the quickest job. He was the type who'd break just from a tour of the interrogation room. True that Sleer's orders were clear and emphatic--use the younger man to get to the older one--but he didn't think that meant Sleer would welcome news that the man had been killed during questioning.

The senior interrogator turned to one of the guards standing on either side of the hatch--hardly necessary considering the state of the prisoner--and said, "Go get the other one."

So the show was to go on. Brett set the notepad aside, but close to hand, hoping it wouldn't end with him writing the obituary to a promising career.

The guard returned a few minutes later with the older Alpha, holding him up more than restraining him. Brett shook his head in disgust.

The man looked next door to catatonic, in no condition to pay attention to any horror but the vid that played behind his own eyes. Despite having the facilities for washing in the tiny brig, the man looked as if he'd not touched water or soap since they'd captured him, the aristocratic face streaked with dirt and blood that seemed to match that dried on the front of his black leather vest.

Daggertt had stepped around the interrogation table, half-hiding the young man restrained there. Playing for effect. "I understand you killed your friend. An unfortunate mistake. But still..he's dead."

The dead dark eyes flickered a bit, perhaps, and there might've been a hint of a flinch. But, after all, this was no news to him, who-- however he hid behind dirt and glassy numbness--surely knew the truth of his own action. But this was only the warm-up, a reminder of a past that could repeat in a slightly altered form.

"Of course, you still have a few friends who are alive...temporarily."

Daggertt moved aside, revealing the other man, tied to the table, naked, as Sleer had instructed, the light shining directly on him, bringing into sharp relief the greenish black contusions on the ribs, trailing down toward one bony hip. As if prompted, the half-conscious young man opened startlingly blue eyes and said faintly, "Avon."

The other man jerked infinitesimally in the guards' clasp, his expression flaring, as if his eyes were a flame being lit. Only for a second. Then just as quickly a mask of indifference settled over his face again. But that had given the game away completely--the pathological indifference before had been no pretense. This was.

Brett suddenly felt less pessimistic about the interrogation. Now they were getting someplace. Damned if Sleer hadn't been right.

He wondered where the woman got her information.

*

Two hours and thirty-seven minutes later, Standard Earth Time, Brett felt rather less optimistic.

Oh, the deserter Tarrant was in considerable pain. Brett had never had the opportunity to try the neural amplifier depenzinine before, but it certainly performed as advertised--even the lightest brush of Daggertt's laser, whether on cut or burn settings, obviously produced intense pain.

His face was pale and drenched with perspiration, with an even whiter line surrounding his firmly-folded lips.

But he wouldn't scream, and Avon wouldn't break. And it was well past time for either or both to have occurred.

In fact, the interrogation had gone so far beyond estimate that Brett hoped fervently that it wouldn't come to a show trial, since the numerous marks on the man's body wouldn't be fading anytime soon, and a few were outside the area generally covered by clothing.

Brett glanced at his superior, wanting to say: Call a break. Give the older one a chance to think about whether he wants to come back and watch this again. Using the subject's imagination against him was something emphasized repeatedly in his training and it seemed to him it would be particularly effective in this case, for both the one being interrogated and the one watching. Avon had begun coming back to life; let him finish the process and then decide if he wanted to watch his pilot being tortured.

But even if Daggertt wanted his ideas on interrogation strategies-- which from their prior exchanges didn't appear the case--they had no way to discuss the matter without the prisoners hearing. Damn, he was calling for another injection of depenzinine. Pointedly, Brett handed him the bottle with the label up, a label covered with warnings about using an increased dosage if the subject were in a poor condition.

No, it did no good. Brett hadn't thought it would...Sleer's orders had intimidated him past the point of reason. If questioned, Daggertt would simply reiterate that the medical report had shown Tarrant able to take this level of interrogation with no permanent damage. At least, that's what he'd tell the investigation board if this went as wrong as it had every chance of doing.

Unknown to Daggertt, however, Brett had kept a copy of the original and genuine report from the Gauda Prime medic, just in case he needed it to save his own career--and skin--and he thought it just might be. And I'll use it, major. But the threat, of necessity, had to be silent and thus useless.

Daggertt filled the hypodermic with a full dose of depenzinine, holding it up to the light so both prisoners could see clearly what he held in his hand. He spoke conversationally to the young pilot, but since Tarrant seemed only just barely conscious, it was perhaps just as well the words were really directed at Avon. "This next injection will increase your pain by about a factor of ten. It's too bad your friend doesn't want to stop me from giving it to you."

Avon stared stonily ahead. He didn't, Brett noticed, try to look away from the other man's battered body, which many did attempt until forcibly dissuaded, but neither did he say the words that would've ended the interrogation. Well, ended it for a time, at any rate. These sessions always tended to run in stages.

Daggertt shrugged one shoulder, as if depreciating the older man's cruelty, and held the hypo against the younger man's arm. This time, he injected it into a major vein, so that it shouldn't take long for it to start working.

It didn't.

Within the space of a few minutes, the subject started sweating copiously, and the intensely blue eyes widened, as if seeing some horrific vision swoop down upon him. The pain from both his crash injuries and the cuts and burns inflicted during the last few hours had just grown shockingly sharper and more focused, as if under a high-powered microscope...at least it did if the drug worked as advertised at this dosage, and it appeared that it did.

A cry escaped his lips that sounded like it could've been the other man's name. But whatever it was, he managed to cut it off almost stillborn.

Daggertt glanced at Avon. "I'm afraid you're causing him a lot of unnecessary pain." With a slight flourish, he reset his laser for a deep burn and brought it down in a jagged path down the younger man's left hip to his upper thigh, crossing the edge of the sensitive groin area.

Tarrant screamed.

Daggertt glanced up, nodded, then laid down a similar path with his laser down the right hip and thigh, and Tarrant screamed again, an agonized sound that even made one of the guards flinch for a moment.

Perhaps this would work, after all. The prisoner Avon had gone from pale to dead white and his arm tensed as if to pull away from the guards. A few more burns or maybe a medium-deep cut to bring up some blood, plus the continued screaming, might push the older man past his tenuous control.

Daggertt evidently thought so, too. He brought the laser up to eye-level again, switched another setting, applied it to an unblemished area of skin, and...

...And everything went to hell.

The young man jerked sharply in his shackles and his eyes rolled up, the lanky limbs spasming as if they'd lost all connection with the parent brain. His breathing went shallow and harsh, loud in the sudden silence.

Shit. Shit. Shit. Brett turned to the senior interrogator, who'd frozen in place as if he'd never had a subject gone critical on him before, and grabbed the vital signs indicator from his hands. Not good, not good at all.

"We're going to lose him," Daggertt whispered in horror.

"No, we're not." Not without a struggle. He had a shrewd idea of Sleer's reaction to that kind of carelessness. Damn, he should've protested, prisoners present or not, or at least written a formal objection for the record. Swiveling around to grab a resuscitation mask, he glimpsed the older prisoner's face, now fully alive--lips drawn back in a feral snarl, eyes dark pits of fury, his whole body pulling against the guards' grasp as if he could grab the pilot away from them. Yes, this was what they'd been aiming for, but little good that would do them, if they lost the subject.

He shoved the mask at Daggertt. "I suggest you work on him like your life depends on it. Because it does." He glanced back at the guards holding the struggling man. "And get him out of here."

They could bring him back later. If there was a later. For ex- Captain Tarrant and two about-to-be-court-marshaled Federation interrogators.

*

"Where do you suppose they've taken Avon?"

Soolin hadn't expected a useful reply--none of them knew the answer, after all--but the silence that greeted the rhetorical question unnerved her. Vila should at least be babbling with fear, with Dayna's mockery of his cowardice playing counterpoint, the familiar background music of Xenon and Scorpio, barely heard at the time, but now disconcerting to her by its absence.

"Vila?" she prompted. "You've been on Federation transports before. You should have an idea."

But he just shrugged, barely achieving the lift of one shoulder for the negation, and kept fiddling with the fork he'd lifted from the dinner tray, paying it the attention he would've given a challenging lock. He had his heels tucked up under him on the edge of the metal shelf that served as a bench, folding himself like a bit of much-creased origami, so that he looked even smaller than usual.

On the opposite bench, Dayna seemed much the same, though the long legs were folded under her more gracefully. She stared into space without seeming to have heard Soolin, lips moving silently as though counting out her losses. Too much, too soon, too young. Besides, Dayna had personal experience at Servalan's hands, of having her mind turned inside out; she knew what to expect better than any of them.

However, becoming a zombie wasn't a useful preparation for the future.

Soolin took a few steps into the tiny washroom at a stride and splashed tepid water from the tape onto her face. This shouldn't be her problem...she'd hired out her skill as a gunfighter, not signed on as a member of the group. She'd been extremely clear on that point. But there was little sense in standing on the formalities of her contract, when any future negotiations on the subject seemed destined to be cut short by both the employer's and the employee's sudden demise.

She'd ask Avon for a bonus later, if any of them lived that long.

Smoothing the blonde strands of tangled hair into a semblance of order, she returned to the cell and crouched in front of Vila. She took the restless hands in both her own, forcing him to stop fiddling with the fork.

"Vila, can you get us out of here? Out of the cell, I mean?"

"Why? We're on a ship. Nowhere to go, once we're out, unless we want to--" He winced slightly, as if at a scab being torn. "--Throw ourselves out an airlock."

"That's not what I had in mind, no," she said coolly. Clearly the reference meant something to Vila, but she didn't know what, and for the moment, didn't care. "But if we're out of this cell, we at least can try to find weapons, make a chance for ourselves. Stuck here, we're just waiting to die."

Vila stared down at their clasped hands, not answering. Trying to decide if he cared to live, she realized, and she wondered what moment had slipped her by when he'd lost that irritating, charming certainty that life was always worthwhile, or if it wasn't now, would be when the next pleasure-planet or bottle or good-looking female came along. No, that didn't matter now, she'd worry about it later. What did matter now was convincing him that they needed to stay alive and that he should help. "Vila, please, you are our only chance to get out of here."

"Yes, Vila, you are."

Soolin hadn't even heard the cell hatch open or close again, but she turned to find Avon standing just inside, as dirty and bloodied as before...but no longer among the undead. The formerly slack lines of Avon's face were again under his control, the intelligence back in business behind the watchful dark eyes. And not before time.

But Vila apparently felt none of Soolin's relief at Avon's return to humanity. His face, instead, reflected that combination of pain and anger, peppered with fear, that she'd seen a flash of a few moments before. "And you think I'd want to help you?" The twist of contempt in the final word startled Soolin.

Avon obviously knew precisely what it meant, though. "No, I do not. But you may want to help them." He nodded at Soolin and Dayna. "And Tarrant."

At the name, Dayna looked up sharply, her face animated for the first time since she'd recovered consciousness after their capture. "Is Tarrant alive?"

Avon hesitated fractionally. "Yes." He didn't elaborate and Soolin wondered if the statement consisted more of hope than fact. "But he might not be for long if we don't move quickly."

He glanced around as if taking in the cell for the first time, then walked quickly into the loo. Soolin heard water running and when he came back out again, a moment later, his face was clear of blood and dirt, droplets of water clinging to his hair. He stood looking at Vila as if they were the only two people present. "Well? Will you do it?"

"Not for you," Vila said softly. It sounded like a challenge.

"No," Avon agreed. "Not for me. For the others."

Vila looked at him a moment, then nodded. "All right, then. As long as you know." He walked over to the hatch, bending the flimsy fork as he went.

"Wait." Soolin felt foolish for not having thought of it before. "Is there surveillance in here? If so..." If so, guards would come running in any second, and that would be the end of their chances.

"Nah." Vila hunkered down in front of the hatch. "We're lucky. They don't usually transport anyone worth watching in this model, so it's not standard equipment." He probed the lock for a moment, then turned his head. "Avon?"

"Yes?" Avon stood square in the middle of the small space between the metal shelves, obviously trying to appear calm and unmoved, but with some strong emotion--anger? fear? impatience?--boiling just below the surface.

"Since you've killed Blake--" Vila seemed almost glad of Avon's involuntary flinch at the casual statement. "--the rebels aren't' going to feel any more friendly toward us than the Federation. So when do you intend taking us, assuming we do escape?"

Good question. Soolin glanced at Avon and saw the tail end of an idea flicker in Avon's eyes, then depart again, dismissed. After a moment of silence, he said, "We'll find somewhere. Just get us out of here, Vila."

*

"Well, it's scenic, I'll give it that." Kaeta Rowan clambered down from the flyer onto a patch of unplanted ground, and immediately began shivering. "Also cold."

The young man accompanying her swiftly whipped off his jacket and draped it across her shoulders. "I forgot to tell you it'd be late fall here. I'm sorry."

Kaeta repressed a smile. Wayl appeared to be apologizing not only for the lack of advance notice, but also for his inability to shift the season to suit the head of his family. Well, he was young, hardly two months out of his wardship, a charmingly shy stage he'd grow out of all too rapidly. Lieesb would've said, "You knew we were flying north--what did you expect, palm trees and tropical breezes?" Then he would've tried to steal her jacket.

She might as well enjoy Wayl's anxiety to please while it lasted.

"I'm fine," she assured him. But she kept the jacket, wrapping it over her thin tunic as she walked to the crest of the hill. From there, the bare earth turned into a series of lattices supporting vines of pale yellow grapes, tumbling one onto another until they reached the waters of the lake below, then rose once more from the opposite shore to the crest of the next hill.

She stopped by the first row of fruit, frowning down at it. "As I said, scenic, but will the grapes here make a decent wine? If not, we'll just turn it into a place for weekend getaways." She felt in desperate need of a holiday herself, but small chance of that.

"Oh, no, it's wonderful for grapes. I--" He stopped the headlong rush of words and blushed slightly, as if embarrassed by his own enthusiasm or perhaps displaying excessive and immodest knowledge in front of the matriarch. "That is, Kaell taught me about these grapes and he said..." He blushed again.

"Your birth family warded you to Kaell Voss so he could teach you viniculture. That being the case, I'm certainly not going to complain about your display of that knowledge, am I?" In point of fact, she had pushed the wardship against some grumbling in both families, from those who thought Kaell too old to take on another ward. Well, the tapes and the way the boy was fitting in with the Rowan family proved her right. And, yes, well, Lieesb had suggested the idea originally, though he claimed Wayl was all wrong about these grapes. They'd see.

Crouching down by one of the lattices, she examined the fruit with, yes, well, a bit of doubt herself. "So, in your opinion are these viable wine grapes?" She plucked a grape and turned it over between her fingers. Pale yellow and puny, it looked an unlikely candidate for the job.

He took it from her fingers and held it to her lips, instead. "Just taste it."

Biting down, she found her mouth full of a complex mixture of flavors, so shockingly intense as to seem alcoholic in its pure state. "Ah, I see what you mean. Do the Vosses grow this type of grape?" If she'd tasted a wine made from this, she thought she'd remember.

"A few. Not enough to bottle for sale, just for private use in the family." Wayl was grinning; the boy knew he was on his way to scoring a coup here. "Most of their land isn't acidic enough. But I had a feeling this bit would be." And had sent back word through channels for his family- to-be to buy cuttings.

"Very good, Wayl." She needed news like this, especially right now. Not that they'd be able to reap immediate benefits from this, but in a few years, they'd be exporting not only to other parts of Fargone, but to nearby worlds where wine from Earth was an overly-expensive luxury.

And, with the Pylene-50 scares, people were justifiably nervous of imports from the Federation these days.

Kaeta rose and started calculating how many barrels they could get from the present crop. "If we expanded over to that hill..." She gestured, and then took a second look. "Is that a flyer coming this way?"

Wayl shielded his eyes with one hand. "Two flyers, I think. The one in front is one of ours."

Ah, yes, she could see the burgundy and gold of Rowan now, and the paint on the left wing was a bit chipped, which meant it was either Lieesb or one of his assistants. She squinted into the sun, trying to make out the other--hmm, slate blue. Now what was an Enderor flyer doing so far from home? Unless...no, not that again, surely?

She returned to the crest of the hill, Wayl in her wake, as the two flyers landed. Lieesb emerged first, making what he no doubt considered significant grimaces at her. Kaeta's good mood of a moment before dissolved. If he'd brought Grav Enderor out here she'd have to smack him.

A prematurely gray head emerged from the second flyer.

Yes, she was going to smack him. Or at least present him with a lot more words than he wanted to listen to, damn him. Couldn't she get any peace, even in the middle of nowhere?

Lieesb's lips quirked when he saw her face and he came close enough that he could whisper, "there's a reason I brought him, this time."

"Oh, and it had better be an exquisitely good one." She spoke in an undertone to Lieesb, then raised her voice as Grav approached. "Grav- -" she abandoned good to see you or it's been too long as social falsehoods beyond her level of tact for the moment, and settled on, "What can I do for you? Is there something Sharah needs?"

The unsubtle hint that Grav should only call on the head of a family if directed by the matriarch of his own seemed to pass right over his head. "No, but there was some news I thought you should have."

Kaeta twitched a reproachful eyebrow at Lieesb and forbore to ask what was wrong with Enderor's comm systems. Really, there was nothing that wrong with Grav--he was certainly handsome in the lanky style that Sharah preferred and good at his work, directing the Enderor's sales force for those vistapes marketed off Fargone. But Grav was a bit...well, obvious in his ambitions. She preferred her men to be a bit more subtle, like...

She smiled suddenly at Lieesb, then settled back against the flyer, near as possible to the warmth of the engine, pulling Wayl's jacket around her. Better get this over with or they'd all freeze before Grav spit out his important news. "What is it, Grav? Something from your offworld sources?"

"Exactly." He looked so eager and happy to share news that Kaeta softened a bit, and could almost see what Sharah saw in him. "You remember the two rebels who crashed here last year?"

"Avon and his ward, you mean?" Oh, yes, she definitely remembered them. Now, Avon, there was a subtle man--so subtle he tied himself in knots and thus made himself more unhappy than any ten people could do, working at it full time with a research team at their beck and call. She wouldn't be his head of family for...well, he didn't have one. He'd had a bad upbringing, one had to make allowances. And the boy had been promising, very promising.

"They've been captured by the Federation."

"What?" Kaeta's eyes met Lieesb's over Grav's head, brows raised questioningly. Lieesb shrugged in a noncommittal fashion. "Are you sure?"

"Positive." Grav positively glowed with the satisfaction of being the conduit of such shocking and sensational news. "They were captured on a frontier world called Gauda Prime, and are being shipped to Sleer's headquarters for interrogation and execution. We won't be seeing them on Fargone again."

*

The lock clicked quietly but decisively and Vila stepped back from the hatch with the air of a master magician who'd just completed a minor sleight-of-hand. He cocked an eyebrow at Avon. "Guards?"

"Fortunately, they departed hastily and nosily even as they thrust me into the cell." Avon's grimace showed more than a hint of bared teeth.

"I suppose they didn't want to miss the excitement."

Excitement? Soolin wondered at the reference only a split second before dismissing it for more immediate concerns, like taking up the tool of her trade. "Do you know where they would have stowed our guns, Vila?"

He shook his head regretfully, then brightened a bit. "Would a weapons locker do?"

"I wouldn’t turn one down, if you could produce it for us." Her hand kept automatically returning to the spot where her holster customarily sat, reaching for a gun that wasn’t there. She wanted very badly to fill her hand with cool, hard metal.

Vila tilted his head as if calling up a mental schematic. "Two corridors toward the prow, turn right. The armory locker on this model should be about halfway down on the left."

Dayna looked surprised and a bit doubtful all at once, as if suspecting his certainty to be false, just like one of his idle boasts. Soolin judged it genuine enough--she worked with one or two professional thieves and had learned the use of an eye and a memory for detail. "Can you open the lock, too?"

He appeared slightly affronted, an expression that suited him far better than the hopelessness of a few minutes before. "Need you ask?"

Soolin exchanged a nod with Dayna, then turned to lead the way, only to find Avon had already pushed open the hatch, and was halfway down the companionway in the direction Vila had indicated.

She sprinted to catch up, leaving Vila and Dayna to hold the rear.

Generally speaking, she found Avon the most cautious and clear-sighted of her several employers, but she didn’t trust whatever fey mood gripped him at the moment. Emotion made for sloppy thinking, as she herself had proven on GP when she’d been too caught up with unpleasant memories to properly guard Avon and the others. If she’d gone for the woman with the gun while Avon questioned Blake that scenario could’ve gone very differently.

No, never mind that. Dwelling on past mistakes would only compound the problem.

She caught Avon up just as he reached the weapons locker, glaring at it as if he could tear it open with his bare hands. "You’ll have to wait for Vila unless you’ve developed new skills in the last five minutes."

Glancing down the corridor in either direction, she saw Dayna and Vila hurrying toward them, but fortunately no one else. As they’d been loaded aboard the ship, she’d had the vague impression of a skeleton crew, and the deserted air of this section of the ship seemed to confirm that. "How many crew are we looking at, do you know?"

Avon didn’t take his eyes off the locker, as if he believed the contents would disappear if he shifted his gaze away. "Eight that I know about. Two interrogators, four guards--probably two on-shift at once-- and a pilot and navigator. I’m guessing at the latter, but it would be standard, with automatics taking the off-shift." His gaze lifted from the locker as Vila approached, slightly out of breath. "Vila, now."

Vila gave him another of those odd, cold looks, but bent to the task and within seconds the locker door popped open. Soolin cursed silently at the contents: nothing but two outdated Federation rifles outfitted with trigger locks. Considering the sparse crew, a fully-stocked arsenal was perhaps too much to expect, but she’d hoped for better than this. She glanced at Dayna. "Can you...?"

Before she could get the sentence out Dayna had one of the trigger locks off and was working on the other. "Not a problem." She looked up sharply as Avon snatched the first gun practically from under her hand, but apparently decided a reproof was useless and merely handed the other gun to Soolin when she was finished removing the lock. "Where should we...Avon?"

Damn, there he went again.

Soolin caught him up a bit quicker this time, just before he’d made the turn toward the aft. "Wouldn’t a plan be a good idea at this point?"

He barely glanced at her and slowed not a whit. "I have a plan."

"Like to tell me about it?" No, judging from the silence that followed her question, apparently not. She glanced back...at least Vila and Dayna were following close behind. If she needed to stop to make sure of them, she’d probably lose Avon, at the pace he was setting.

Suddenly Avon paused mid-step, tilting his head to one side. A moment later Soolin registered the sound that had halted him--footsteps approaching a cross-corridor just ahead. Pressing flat against the bulkhead herself, she waved the Dayna and Vila back out of sight.

She needn't have bothered.

The man crossing in front of them--a middle-aged guard, distinguished only by the twenty-year pin on his collar and a sizable bald spot spreading south from the crown of his head--had no more notion of escaped prisoners than he had of an escaping horde of elephants thundering down the companionway toward him, but was intent solely on reaching his destination.

Nor did he have an opportunity to become alarmed. Before he'd gone more than four steps across their line of sight, Avon--who had not moved from his position in the middle of the companionway--lifted the Federation rifle and shot him squarely between the shoulder blades. The guard dropped to the deck with nothing more than a slight grunt, twitched once, then went still.

"Was that necessary?"

Soolin glanced back at Vila, startled. Reducing the number of enemies likely to threaten him with bodily harm had never bothered the man before. When had he gotten religion and why?

Seeming to ignore the question, Avon walked over to the corpse, turning it over with one booted foot and looking down into the still face for a long moment. Then he smiled, an expression that Soolin could have lived for many happy years without witnessing. "Oh, yes, it was. Quite necessary, Vila."

Some personal grudge there, as personal as one could get from a day of acquaintance. But Soolin had no interest in discovering its cause. As far as she was concerned, they could leave any time Avon had finished gloating and Vila finished sniping. They were a long ways from being out of danger.

But Vila hadn't quite finished. Darting in front of Avon, he snatched the guard's handgun from his side holster and a knife stuck in a sheath on the opposite side of his belt, weighing them, one in each hand, and giving Avon what Soolin supposed he considered a significant look.

"Don't you think I'd better take charge of that?" Dayna reached for the gun, reasonably enough, considering Vila's ease with firearms. But he drew it back protectively, offering the other weapon instead. "I'm not very good with knives," he said, as if apologizing.

Dayna looked a bit put out, as well she might. Neither of them had found Vila to be particularly good with any kind of arms at all. But it was true enough that Dayna had a talent for archaic weapons, and Vila's performance the last hour had been far above his normal standard.

Dayna's chain of thought seemed to travel along a parallel path to Soolin's, for after a moment she nodded, and slipped the knife into a thin sheath sewed into her trousers.

Paying no attention to the by-play, Avon gave the corpse one last glance, then continued down the companionway. He did seem to know precisely where he was going, even if he wasn't disposed to share that information with the rest of them, slowing his pace slightly as they apparently drew near to their destination and checking each cross- corridor for further human obstacles.

Finally, he halted altogether at the entry hatch to what appeared to be a sickbay of some sort, judging from the symbol painted on the metal.

He placed his hand almost gently on the latch release.

"Here?" Soolin asked quietly.

"Here." Though it was an affirmative, he seemed to hesitate.

Soolin glanced at his face again. He's afraid of what he'll find, she thought. And then, with a shock of realization. The Federation uses sickbays for interrogations.

As if pushed into action by her thought, Avon jerked at the release, shoving the hatch open with the heel of his hand.

...Revealing a disordered medical unit, with a clutter of medical instruments and interrogation tools surrounding a table, and a half- conscious form on the table, only his head and shoulders appearing above a blanket. But even that glimpse looked bad enough to be almost a corpse. Tarrant...what did they do ....?

And also revealing a young man about Tarrant's own age in Federation uniform, with the black crest of the Interrogation Division on his chest, bringing a handgun to nestle among Tarrant's curls as the hatch opened--its safety off, his forefinger on the trigger. He stared into Avon's eyes as if into the mouth of a laser cannon, flinching slightly at what he saw there. "Don't move. If I so much as twitch, he's dead."

The interrogator intended to use Tarrant as a hostage. Stalemate. Or so he apparently believed.

Not giving him time to shift his eyes from Avon, Soolin brought up her rifle, firing twice without pause as it came into position, and starting to fire once again before perceiving it to be unnecessary.

"Maybe," she told the dead man, "you won't even twitch."

*

"One more minute of Grav and there would've been murder done." Kaeta gave a cursory wave to Grav's and Wayl's departing backs, then shoved closed the door of the flyer and flipped the heat on high. "You might keep that in mind next time you so helpfully drag him home to fill me in on the news."

"Sharah might object." Lieesb stretched out on the passenger seat, propping his feet up on a bare section of the instrument panel and yawning. He'd been short on sleep recently, running between his own plantation and other Rowan holdings scattered around the countryside, and it showed. Not to mention that neither of them were getting any younger.

"She has other husbands," Kaeta pointed out. "And I hope at least several of them are a bit less annoying." She sat sideways on the pilot's seat, leaning against the door and propping her own feet against Lieesb's outstretched legs. It'd been a tiring few months for them both, with no end in sight. "So what about Grav's big news? True, false, or somewhere in-between?"

Lieesb shrugged. "It matches one of the rumors I've heard. But then I've heard dozens, most of the them contradictory."

"Such as?" Lieesb seldom went offplanet, himself, but instead assiduously gathered information from those Rowans who did. And their friends. And their friend's friends. If he hadn't yet passed on the news about Avon, it was because he didn't feel it solid enough to count on as anything but idle speculation. That and the fact that they'd had more immediate concerns lately.

Lieesb rubbed his hands over his eyes and yawned again. "Let's see. Most of the versions I've heard do involve Avon meeting his ex- colleague Blake and usually on that world Grav mentioned, Gauda Prime. I've heard he killed Blake and was captured, that he killed Blake and escaped with his crew, but then was captured and killed escaping GP. I've also heard that Blake killed him, that Blake was a bounty hunter who took him prisoner for the Federation, that Avon was secretly working for Commissioner Sleer and gave Blake to her...well, you get the gist."

"Dozens of wild rumors, with no way to distinguish which one is true?" The thought gave Kaeta a headache, and she already had enough of those.

"If any of them are," Lieesb agreed. "The whole lot of them could be planted to discredit Avon or Blake or both."

"Um." True enough. The troika had circulated false stories about Fargone, themselves, finding words a cheap and effective method of warfare. "So the question is this: Why does Grav think he has the truth?"

Lieesb closed his eyes, seeming to struggle between sleep and contemplation. "He could have an impeccable source he doesn't feel comfortable about revealing, even to the troika." Then his lips twitched, and he opened one clear blue eye. "Or he could be an idiot."

"There's that. And I wouldn't necessarily place that alternative second in the realm of possibilities." They both laughed. "No, Sharah doesn't have much more patience for fools than I do. But Grav's reach is outdistancing his grasp by quite a bit. He's beginning to fancy himself the future power behind the matriarch." She nudged Lieesb's leg with her foot. "He wants to be like you."

"Me?" Lieesb attempted to look innocent, a trick he'd very nearly mastered, or at least passably for those who didn't know him well.

"Um." She didn't feel energetic enough to be polishing his ego just at the moment. "And Grav was fishing, did you notice that? He wanted me to make--I don't know--some sort of foreign policy statement for his benefit."

"Such as: 'Oh, how terrible! We'd based our entire strategy on Avon's rebellion succeeding within five standard years." Lieesb indeed took on a horror-stricken expression and a fair imitation of her voice, but it sounded less like one of her political statements than the fit she'd thrown last time some nameless idiot had dragged a weed into the main house to which she'd proven violently allergic.

"Or conversely: 'Who cares? We didn't really intend to get involved with a hopeless cause, anyway.'" She stared through the windscreen thoughtfully. "I wish we did have an obvious policy, but the truth is that we have to feel our way carefully, stopping every step to test which way the wind blows. Avon's group could've been useful in keeping the Federation at arm's length--or he could've dragged us in right over our heads. But I hate losing the option, if Grav's news is accurate."

"Not only that," Lieesb added, "but I liked Avon."

That turned Kaeta's attention away from the scenery. From the tapes, she had to admit Avon had a few pleasing traits--and not just in the way of sexual talents--but few of them were likely to turn up in an ordinary social situation. "Why? He didn't seem particularly pleasant to me." Especially after he'd thrown her own uncertainties in her face. She bared her teeth slightly at the memory.

"Even though he didn't agree with our, um, ideas of civic duty, he worked within them to protect his ward, even from embarrassment, which he didn't need to do. And he protected Lewitt's ward, too."

Ah, that was it. As she'd suspected, he was still brooding about the Lewitt mess. A capable man with a healthy ego, Lieesb had an idea he should be able to protect those who came within his circle...wider than most men's because of her own position. He felt sorry for Lewitt and felt he should've advised him better, and she remembered vividly how appalled he'd been when the full extent of the boy's abuse had come to light. Lieesb disliked seeing people hurt, a trait Kaeta had no quarrel with at all, but... "The impetus for the latter came from his ward," she pointed out.

"I wondered about that," Lewitt admitted. "But Avon took it all relatively well from the first. In retrospect I feel a bit bad about laughing so hard after he left my study that first time."

At least that recollection had a bit of humor to it. "You played the ethnocentric prig marvelously." Lieesb had hurriedly set up surveillance for the occasion, allowing the troika to witness Lieesb's explanation of Fargonean ways to his visitor and gauge the visitor's reaction. "It made me wonder whether you shouldn't have been warded to an actor."

"I thought it would cut short a lot of argument if I appeared narrow-minded on the subject." He glanced curiously at Kaeta. "But I wondered why you wanted to do that at all--we could've just sent them both to one of the trade port areas for outsiders."

"Riessan suggested it," Kaeta said succinctly.

Lieesb made an oh, of course, Riessan thought of it gesture, and Kaeta grinned, adding, "I think she considered an elementary test of Avon's cultural flexibility, and I'll admit it turned out to be fairly interesting."

"To say the least," Lieesb said dryly. "There was a point there I thought I was to be liberated from the Lewitt problem altogether, if by rather violent means."

"No, we would have stopped him," Kaeta said absently. Her train of thought had continued on to Avon's ward. "The boy seemed very promising, I thought, if a bit impulsive. But he'd grow out of that...well, perhaps. He'd be of age now, wouldn't he?"

Lieesb's face lost some of its expression of dry humor. "Yes, he'd be twenty-five now--if he's still alive."

*

Two seconds after she'd shot the interrogator, Soolin wondered whether she'd be forced to turn the gun against her own side, as Avon spun around with a murderous snarl. Whether his anger stemmed from the risk to Tarrant inherent in her shooting, because he wanted to do the job himself, or for some totally unrelated reason, she couldn't tell, and wasn't inclined to take the time to debate.

Fortunately, he came to himself before she had more than half raised her gun again, even sparing a half-nod of acknowledgment to her efforts in keeping Tarrant among the living. But she didn't particularly care for the way Avon seemed to be going in and out of focus.

He seemed alert enough now, though, sweeping a swift, appraising glance around the room." Dayna, watch the door." Going over to the table, he picked up the gun the interrogator had dropped as he died, tossing it across the cabin to Dayna. "With this."

Dayna caught the gun easily and checked the charge.. "What about Tarrant?" The sprawled form hadn't so much as stirred since the Federation officer's body fell upon it.

"I'll take care of Tarrant." Avon's hand fell to the sheet covering the younger man in what almost seemed a protective gesture.

"Oh, like you have up to now, you mean?" Vila slid down the bulkhead, coming to rest on the deck. For a change, he kept his gun at ready, but in a way only useful if he intended to use it on his fellow crew. Which he might need to if he kept this up with Avon.

But Avon simply nodded at Dayna, who slipped outside the hatch to take her position. Not so much ignoring Vila as saving it for later.

Pushing the uniformed body off the side of the table without ceremony, Avon laid his fingers on the pulse point of Tarrant's neck, his eyes steady on the battered face. "Soolin, take look at the readouts."

For her sins, Soolin happened to know more about medical equipment than anyone else in the crew, not that indicated any great range of expertise. "All right." She stepped around to the table, looking down at the interrogator's body. "Vila, make yourself useful and drag this body out--"

"No. Leave it."

Soolin shrugged and stepped over the dead officer. If Avon wanted to start a collection of corpses, far be it from her to get in his way. For the moment, at least, she had more pressing business that critiquing his hobbies.

Pulling the medical scan down from the overhead--it showed signs of recent use, she noticed, and hadn't been restowed properly--she ran the beam down the length of Tarrant's body, which looked more than ordinarily lanky under the thin covering of a sheet. She glanced at the readings, frowned, ran the instrument down its track again. "Do you know what drugs they gave him?"

"Yes."

Before Soolin could add, Good, and would you care to tell me what they were? Avon picked up a bottle from amidst the scattered instruments beside the table and placed it in front of her, the gesture almost too precise. "They might have used others, as well, but this is what they injected him with while I watched."

While he watched? The picture summoned up by the phrase certainly explained why he might've wanted to kill the interrogator himself. And the guard? Well, she held no brief for Avon's finer qualities, if he possessed any, but she couldn't see him standing docilely by while a Federation thug tortured one of his crew--someone would've had to hold him back.

Dismissing the speculation, she turned her attention to the label on the bottle. Exotic interrogation drugs fell quite a distance outside her expertise, but she gathered enough from its chemical makeup that, yes, it probably had caused the abnormal readings. Not that she found this insight particularly useful--she had no idea how long the effects might last, how to combat them, or how the drug cocktail might be expected to act next, whether to show worse manifestations or depart quietly from his body.

In the meanwhile, Avon sorted through the debris and found another bottle, handing it to her with the comment, "I believe they tried this to combat the first drug's effects when it started going wrong."

Soolin checked the ingredients. Yes, that might make sense, but again, she was working with a knowledge that hardly went beyond advanced first aid. "When what went wrong?"

He hesitated, then said in a voice devoid of emotion. "He seemed to go into convulsions. I couldn't tell very precisely. The guards took me out of the room a few moments after he began having the reaction."

"Wonder why they decided to have a go at Tarrant?" Vila tilted his head against the bulkhead, his eyes on Avon's face.

If anything, Avon's voice became even less emotional. "In order to convince me to talk, I believe."

Vila's laughed softly, the sound shocking in the confines of the small cabin. "Guess they didn't know you very well."

Avon didn't respond and, to Soolin's eye at least, it appeared he hardly heard Vila, except as a white noise to his own thoughts. He put out one hand, and then seemed almost to draw back again, before finally grasping the sheet covering Tarrant and pulling it back.

"Damn." Soolin's reflexive curse sounded inadequate even to her own ears. Since her family's murder, she'd led anything but a sheltered life, but most the criminals she'd consorted with tended toward simple killings or occasionally colorful, almost-ritual beatings and maimings designed to warn of the perils of certain prohibited behaviors. This criss-cross of burns and bruises seemed almost as if the lean body been used as a board for a child's game of noughts and crosses, with a laser rather than stylus or chalk. The colors Tarrant's flesh had turned--shades of red from dried blood, mottled green, and blue-black--reinforced the morbid illusion.

She glanced over at the bulkhead. Vila had scrambled up from his sitting position, looking angrier than she'd ever seen him. "Damn you, couldn't you have told them something?"

Avon's gaze never moved from Tarrant's battered form. "No." Not a hint of anger or even much emotion colored the voice. His thoughts were plainly elsewhere, leaving room for only the unadorned truth, a commodity one seldom received from Avon, who tended to decorate his facts with sarcasm and other distractions.

At the least, it silenced Vila. The anger slipped from his face like a badly-fitting mask, leaving him looking vaguely troubled.

"Av..on." Stripping off the sheet must have roused the younger man, for when Soolin looked around again, Tarrant had come to at least half-consciousness, flailing around as though trying to sit up. His gaze was unfocused, and the only person he seemed to recognize was Avon.

"Avon...I'm sorry...I didn't mean to... Didn't mean to...scream."

"Never mind that." He spoke steadily enough, but Soolin had seen Avon flinch, as a man might when a sharp and unexpected knife slices into his gut.

Gently, Avon tried to help Tarrant into an upright position, even though it swiftly became obvious that he couldn't be moved without at least some pain. Soolin wondered why he insisted on it--until Avon managed to pull Tarrant to where he could see the corpse on the floor.

Then it became clear enough.

"Tarrant, look." Avon spoke slowly, distinctly, clearly not trusting the other's comprehension. "This one, at the least, is quite dead. And the other one will be soon, I promise."

Unusual, Soolin thought, for Avon to show...well, something close to sentimentality. But, after all, they had nothing else to offer Tarrant at the moment but the sight of a corpse and the promise of another such treat, in the unlikely event they themselves weren't killed first, so perhaps it made sense. And she'd have welcomed such a assurance back... She shook her head, putting the memory aside as an enemy to her focus.

Tarrant gazed down at the interrogator for several seconds before sagging back against the support of Avon's grasp. "Yes, I see." He did seem comforted, though whether from the sight of the dead man or the proximity of his own people, she couldn't say. If the Scorpio crew were not his friends, they at least had the advantage of not being his enemies, either, an assurance of sorts.

Lowering Tarrant to a less painful position, Avon drew the sheet back up over his shoulders and motioned for Soolin to run the scan again with a silent gesture of his head.

"Can we leave him?" He spoke very quietly. "If I've calculated correctly, there are at least six crew members left alive, and I don't care to give them the opportunity to lay siege to us here. We need to take over this ship and quickly."

Soolin couldn't have agreed more, but... "I don't know. The readings look slightly better, but...I'd feel better if we left someone watching him." She glanced over at Vila. He wasn't the ideal choice as a medtech, but she was the best shot of the group, Dayna not far behind, and Avon presumably the one with the plan of action.

Avon nodded agreement. "You had better ask."

Picking up the second drug bottle and a hypo, she motioned Vila over. He stepped over the dead man without comment, holstering the gun in a loop of his belt, so that he could take the hypo into his fingers, his fingers deft as they never were with weapons.

She pointed to a line on the readout. "Run the scan over him every three minutes, and if the second line goes over that--" She tapped the danger point sharply with her fingernail. "--Inject him with 2 cc's of the drug. Better measure it out ahead of time."

Vila nodded, began to pour the liquid out of the bottle, then hesitated. "You're sure this will help?" He probably had some practical and personal experience with neural amplifiers, she realized, and wondered if she should've consulted him.

"No. But if the readout gets to that point..." Her voice trailed off.

Not a sensitive type, she still didn't want to say aloud, He'll probably be near dead anyway, and maybe the drug will shock his system back into life. Or not. And if Vila had any experience with these drugs, it was possible he knew a better alternative... "Just use your judgment." Those were four words, she thought ruefully, that she never expected to utter to Vila.

As she left, she noticed he looked more than a little surprised himself.

*

From out of the painful dark haze he'd been blanketed in for some indeterminate time, Tarrant began to hear voices, the sense of the conversation fading in and out intermittently, as if from a bad power source or a distant signal.

But he knew the timbre and pitch of both voices intimately, even through the fog and static produced by his brain, and lay listening just to that, soothed by the organic euphony despite the pain that echoed through his nerve-endings like the aftershocks of an quake. Yes, just an aftermath--nothing to be compared to the overwhelming agony that followed the injections and the burn of the laser, the pain that...no. That was over and these were just ...aftershocks, fading away.

He wished they'd fade faster, so he could ignore them and listen to the voices. Probably, he should at least try to move, try to see if he'd been too badly injured to move or whether it only felt that way. Later...in a minute...just a little while...

"So where are Soolin and Avon?" The male voice of the pair put a spin of disdain on the second name, as if it tasted sour or perhaps poisonous.

"Dumping the bodies." The female voice seemed laden with exhaustion, on the downward glide from an adrenaline high. "Then Avon wanted to search the cargo area--he thinks they might have loaded Orac on the ship as well as us, and maybe even some salvage from Scorpio."

Scorpio. Tarrant frowned, trying to remember, trying to concentrate, but the effort made him dizzy, even lying down. He'd crashed Scorpio and the memory of that burned like the pain in his ribs that had him fighting not to move or even to breathe more than he had to. He'd never crashed a ship before, except in simulations....and when they'd landed on Fargone.

But, no, he'd promised himself not to think about Fargone, as if it had not even happened. He'd put that memory away and closed the door with a double-lock.

And he'd crashed Scorpio less skillfully on Gauda Prime than on Fargone. No putting her together again with herculaneum-like plastics or anything else. Slave had di--shut down for good, he vaguely remembered. Then a man had appeared--Blake--and he'd-- No, he didn't want to think about Gauda Prime. Better to listen to the voices, whoever they were.

They at least distracted him from the pain, rather than focusing it.

"...Scuzzy little sparkle box," the male voice pronounced the insult half-heartedly, more as if it were expected of him than with intent, "I suppose it might come in useful. Doubt there's anything else in the whole ship that you could say that about...wretched bag of bolts that it is. We'll be lucky if it gets us to the nearest planet."

Ship. Yes, they were on a ship. As if prompted by the word, Tarrant suddenly registered the rise and fall of badly-tuned drive engines. Not Scorpio, at least not since he'd first gotten his hands on the drives and tuned them (and you crashed Scorpio, remember?), but definitely a spaceship in time distort and thus as familiar as the voices. One of his senses had started working again, apparently, even if the majority of his systems remained on strike.

"Anything better and we'd never gotten out of the cell, never mind taking it over." A chair creaked as it was put into use.

The other sniffed, obviously offended. "Oh, I would've gotten us out. And Avon obviously isn't worried out how many people he has to wipe out. Did he leave anyone breathing or did he just try to keep it simple, as usual?" The twist of poison again.

"How could we leave anyone alive? We don't exactly have extra personnel to stand guard over prisoners." But she sounded more weary than angry. "But don't worry...they didn't complicate matters by trying to surrender." The chair creaked again, the weight shifting. "What's wrong, Vila? Is this about Blake? Tarrant said that he'd betrayed us."

The man made a sound that somehow came off like a shrug. "I dunno. I liked Blake. He would've never...but..."

"But you didn't try to stop Avon from shooting him."

"Tarrant usually tells the truth. It's one of his many faults. If he said Blake had sold us..." That almost audible shrug again. "Besides, maybe I just don't trust my own judgment of people, anymore. Maybe I don't know--" He broke off, tangled in a mire of words. "Maybe I just didn't much care one way or another, all right?"

"Vila, are you--?"

The man broke into the question, clearly trying to change the subject. "You said none of them even tried to surrender? Not a smart lot, were they, after you had them cornered like you did?"

"One of them tried to make a deal," she said reluctantly. "But he phrased it badly."

"What do you mean?"

The woman started to speak, hesitated, then began again. "He said Avon had to make a deal with him, that he was the ship's pilot and we couldn't do without him."

"So? Seems sensible enough. Sell your skill, right? Worth a try, anyway."

"Yes...but after what they did to Tarrant....Vila, you should have seen Avon's face. He just snarled, 'I already have a pilot' and shot him before he could say another word. Probably it was for the best, but who knows how long before Tarrant is in shape to fly a ship? None of the rest of us are more than passable."

Avon needed him to fly the ship. Tarrant tried to get up, or at least sit up, but found that all he could manage was to open his eyes and make a sound that even to his own ears sounded weak and incoherent.

"Vila, he's awake."

The profile view he had of a man's head turned full-face and came closer, filling his vision, his half-angry, half-worried expression smoothing away into a facade of professional optimism Tarrant usually connected with harried medics, rather than...Vila? What was Vila doing in an interrogation cell? He should be frightened half to death, not...or was that over now? Avon had said that... Avon. Avon needed him to fly the ship.

Tarrant tried to struggle up again, only to find himself easily held down by just the tips of Vila's fingers. And somehow none of the questions he wanted desperately to ask came out as anything but disconnected syllables.

"You've been drugged," Vila said matter-of-factly. "Don't worry, it should start wearing off in an hour or two, but we can't give you anything to kill the pain for awhile. Not until this drug's out of your system."

Desperately, Tarrant tried to turn his questions into some coherent verbal form. How badly am I hurt? How do you know it's going to wear off? Why does it hurt so much? But he couldn't come out with more than a few stumbling words, not enough. Not near enough.

But Vila seemed to know what he wanted to ask, as if he read the questions in Tarrant's face as readily as he might hear the combination of a lock from the sound of the mechanism turning. "No, don't worry. Sure, they beat you up pretty bad and did a lot of damage, but it's nothing that won't heal."

Tarrant tried to nod in response and did manage a few millimeters worth of movement. Yes, of course, it felt worse than it actually was. After all, Vila wasn't panicking, so surely the situation couldn't be considered remotely critical, since Vila generally did panic when the circumstances demanded or even when it might eventually demand it and he wanted to start practicing early. The woman beside him--oh, it's Dayna--looked concerned, but Vila seemed so perfectly calm. It must be all right.

His eyelids threatened to droop closed again, but Tarrant fought it, hoping that Vila might say something more.

"You just rest now. You're not needed just at the moment and Avon'll put us all back to work soon enough." Vila pushed gently, sending him fully back against the flat surface of the table. "You listen to what I tell you, there's no need to worry. You'll be just fine."

Tarrant closed his eyes obediently. He'd been worried for nothing. Vila must be right, and his body simply in shock from the beating it had taken. As soon as he got a bit more rest, he'd be back to normal. He'd be...fine.

*

Dayna watched Tarrant fall back toward unconsciousness with what she could only term a cowardly feeling of relief. Vila's casual delivery of the facts--or rather their most optimistic hopes--obviously soothed Tarrant's fears, but she couldn't bring herself to duplicate his performance. In fact, if she tried to so much as mouth a reassurance, she thought she'd gag on it.

Every time she looked at Tarrant's pale, battered features, she saw her sister's face superimposed like a ghost image over his, her head hanging limp after the Sarrans had finished with her. The last time she'd seen Lauren, ever, the final vision she'd had of her family before she'd left Sarran for good.

Why she should flash back to that now? The nightmares had nearly gone away this past year, she'd forced them to the back of her consciousness by sheer will, refusing to remember... how a fly with green wings had hovered around Lauren's half-opened mouth and Dayna knew the moment she turned her back it would land and begin to...

No, don't. Don't remember that. She pressed her hand to her mouth, trying not to be sick in front of Vila, of all people.

Feeling a touch at her elbow, she looked around to find a cup on the table beside her filled with dark liquid, a trail of steam rising from its surface.

"Just tea," Vila said apologetically. He nodded to a dispenser in the corner of the cabin, no doubt installed for the interrogators' breaks.

"Told you this ship had nothing much worthwhile in it. Not even any medicinal soma."

Embarrassed, but at the same time rather touched that Vila had noticed her distress and made the gesture, she managed a slight, half- wry smile. Somehow, she'd always imagined that Vila would make jokes of another's weakness, not sympathize with it. Especially hers.

"You don't see the results of a torture session every day," he said matter of factly, and went back to sorting through the contents of the drug cabinet, keeping an eye on Tarrant as he worked.

Maybe she hadn't seen the results of a torture session every day--not since Lauren--but Vila apparently was not unfamiliar with such sights. Somehow, it had never occurred to her before that Vila was older than Tarrant and more experienced with the rougher side of life than either of them.

. She found herself relaxing very slightly under the stimulus--or lack thereof--of Vila's undemanding company. If her present state of mind didn't make much sense, well, Vila would be the last person among them to demand sense from the universe in general or his crewmates in particular.

After several moments of silence interwoven only with the soft clink of the drug bottles sifted between Vila's nimble fingers and Tarrant's uneven breathing, the hatch slid open to admit Avon, a familiar clear rectangle in his hands. He staggered slightly once past the threshold, as if dragged back by his own heavy boots, then steadied himself even as Dayna rose to help him, walking with near-exaggerated care to deposit Orac on a shelf running across one bulkhead.

"Did you find anything else from Scorpio?"

For a moment, Dayna thought Avon hadn't heard her. He leaned over Orac's casing, fingers resting lightly on its handgrip, not moving.

Then he straightened slowly. "Yes. About three-fourths of the stardrive and rather more than that of Slave's circuitry. We may be able to put them together eventually, if we can find the proper replacement parts."

He half-turned toward Tarrant, but jerked his head back before completing the movement, his gaze going first to Orac, then the bulkhead, then to her face, then to a piece of empty air, where it stayed fixed. She noticed that a shadow of stubble had begun to edge his jaw and the skin underneath had an unhealthy gray tinge.

The sooner we get somewhere we can all rest, the better. She was the youngest and probably the fittest of any of them and she felt the strain--the others must be even closer to exhaustion. The state of shock they'd been in between waking up in detention and the getaway didn't precisely count as a holiday. But they'd have to find somewhere reasonably safe first and she had a feeling this ship didn't even remotely qualify. Especially if... "Did any of the crew get a distress signal off before we...?" She let the question trail off, remembering Vila's reaction to the deaths of the ship's crew.

Avon woke from his contemplation of empty air, at least enough to answer the question. "Apparently not, according to the logs.

I suspect they hoped they could salvage the situation themselves and thus avoid informing Sleer--" his teeth bared slightly at the name "--that they'd allowed us to escape in the first place."

Fleetingly, Dayna considered reminding Avon that if he'd allowed her to kill Servalan the numerous times she'd wanted to they wouldn't be facing that particular enemy now. But, no. They had enough problems and it was hardly relevant at the moment. "So we keep the ship?"

"No." Avon turned and leaned heavily against the edge of the shelf. Although he now faced toward Tarrant, he seemed to look at a point just aside from where the younger man lay. "The ship's too easily identifiable and, besides, it doesn't have sufficient fuel for any lengthy journey. Not a great loss, however--it's not precisely a sterling example of the shipwright's art."

"And I suppose you have another, better ship at your fingertips, do you?"

Dayna winced. Vila hadn't spoken since Avon's return and she'd have preferred to continue that state of affairs.

"Unfortunately, no." Avon didn't even bother to snap back at Vila, but continued to stare straight ahead, not-looking at Tarrant. "But we should be able to get this ship to a neutral port, where we can find other transportation while keeping out of the sight of the Federation."

"What about the rebels?" Vila again. "We'd better keep out of their sight, too, don't you think?"

This time Avon did react; he flinched. "Yes, we'd better stay away from Blake's people." His gaze fell to the front of his leather vest, still flaked with dried blood from the debacle on GP. Blake's blood, she supposed.

"You'd better put that through the crew's cleaner." Dayna spoke as gently as she could. "We might not find ourselves a change of clothing anytime soon."

Avon looked surprised, as if the idea hadn't occurred to him.

Perhaps it hadn't. He immediately took off the vest and seemed to sit a bit straighter to Dayna's eyes, as if a weight were eased, if only slightly.

"I'd better join Soolin on the flight deck; I want to duplicate the ship's computer records before we have to abandon it." He swiveled around to pick up Orac again, once more almost, but not quite, looking at Tarrant as he turned. "Signal the flight deck if there's any change."

With Tarrant, you mean? But she didn't ask and Avon didn't elaborate, simply walking quickly from the cabin without looking back, Orac in his hands and the blood-encrusted vest over one arm.

As the hatch closed behind him, Vila moved to Tarrant's side, checking over the readouts. "He didn't even look at Tarrant, the bas--" Vila swallowed the rest of the sentence as if it were a bitter dose, but one hand clenched where it lay on the table's edge.

"Vila, I can hardly look at Tarrant, either, in his condition. Are you blaming me, as well?"

He turned, the expression on his face one that Dayna couldn't interpret, except that any in it anger wasn't directed at her. "You're nothing like him."

She heard the odd emphasis in his voice without understanding it. "What do you mean, Vila?"

For a moment, he hesitated and she thought he might explain.

Then he shook his head and returned to the drug cabinet to continue cataloguing the contents. But he repeated, more quietly, "You're nothing like him."

Dayna stared at his back with a slight frown, simultaneously troubled--and slightly warmed--by his insistence.

*

"Tarrant." If Vila's tone suggested any remaining patience at all, it was the mere remnant of the attitude he'd begun with a few days ago and threatened to disappear altogether under the stimulation of his patient's continuing resistance. "Just cough for me. Four or five more times and I promise I'll leave you alone until morning."

"Leave me alone now. I've already coughed enough." Tarrant folded his arms protectively over his ribs and shrank back as if to hide himself under the dingy blanket that overlaid both him and even more doubtful sheets. But beggars couldn't be chosers and they were nearly down to the almshouse state, with himself as only another burden dragging them down further.

"Not yet. Just cough four more times." Vila had lowered his demand, Tarrant noticed, but that didn't help. "I know it hurts, but you have to do it, Tarrant." Vila sat on the floor by the bed, looking around as if for some physical inspiration that would persuade Tarrant to follow his instructions. At least he hadn't reached for a gun yet, as Soolin had yesterday after listening to Vila's persuasions for too lengthy a time. "How about you have some food, then we'll try again? You haven't eaten a thing, after I took all the trouble to steal it, and it wasn't exactly easy, either."

Tarrant's stomach tried to turn itself over and he gagged, burying his head in the grime-encrusted pillowcase so Vila wouldn't notice his reaction. The unidentified meat Vila had brought back had a strong, smoky aroma that brought back a vivid memory of his own cooked flesh as the interrogator had seared him with the laser. Just the thought of eating it made him ill.

"Don't, Vila." Avon spoke quietly from the corner of the room where he'd camped out on the floor with a blanket and pillow, though Tarrant hadn't seen him do any more than nap restlessly. "I don't think the food agrees with him." Or with Avon, either. Only a moment after picking up his portion, he'd silently passed it on to Soolin, looking white around the lips. But then, Avon had been present when the interrogator had tried to roast him bit by bit, so he, too, knew the similarity between smell of cooked animal flesh and that of Tarrant's.

Vila glanced over at Avon with that half-angry, half-disdainful look he seemed to wear so much the past few days. "He needs to eat anyway, just as he needs to cough." His tone suggested he didn't suppose for a moment that Avon actually cared one way or another about whether Tarrant did either.

Avon glanced away, his face half-shadowed in the uncertain light of the one cracked lamp. "It's really necessary." The words weren't quite a question.

"You think I'm torturing Tarrant for fun?" Vila winced at his own phrasing, opened his mouth as if to apologize, then shrugged and answered the question. "The biggest danger for someone with cracked ribs is pneumonia because they don't want to breathe deeply or cough."

Because it hurts.

"Because it hurts." Vila went on, unconsciously echoing Tarrant's thought. "I saw it a lot when I was growing up, when someone got into a fight. The Federation didn't exactly give Deltas the best in health care, so we couldn't do anything but try to keep them from getting it. But, yes, he has to cough."

"I won't get pneumonia. I've had the vaccination." It was a weak excuse and he knew it, but he would've seized any excuse. He had thought himself no coward about pain, but there was something about the bone-deep weariness that seemed to intensify pain beyond his limit. He hurt because he was tired and was tired because he hurt.

"You had the vaccination when you went into the military, right? Well, that had to be at least five years ago, then, and the usual vaccination's only good for three. And if you get sick, we don't have drugs to treat it or the money to get drugs. Committing suicide with a gun will be faster, and probably a lot easier on all of us." Vila's voice held a mixture of irritation, fatigue, and frustration. "Tarrant, you have to cough."

"Go try to get some sleep, Vila." Avon rose from the floor, the blanket dropping from his shoulders. "I'll take care of it."

Vila looked first surprised, then uncertain, but finally nodded and retreated to his own pile of blankets and pillows, Soolin having claimed the other bed for herself and Dayna earlier.

As Avon moved over to the bed, Tarrant closed his eyes, willing him to stay away. The pain, Tarrant had found, weakened his will in other areas than the physical and just looking at Avon had begun to bring back vivid images of that week, six months before, when they'd been much more than crewmates. For so long he'd been able to shove that memory away every time it threatened to surface, but not now.

He didn't want Avon coming too close.

The other man hesitated, standing at the edge of the bed. Tarrant could feel the faint radiation of heat from his body, smell the cheap, harsh soap furnished in the loo down the hall, mixed with the sharply- remembered scent of Avon's skin.

"Tarrant." Avon spoke quietly, as if trying for near-silence, to allow the others to sleep. "You heard Vila. You have to cough."

"I can't." He felt like a child, a stupid, whining, annoying child, but he couldn't' force himself one more time. "I just...can't."

The bed shifted slightly, as Avon sat down, carefully, so as not to jostle the injured ribs. "You must."

"No. Please, Avon." Tarrant kept his eyes squeezed closed, afraid he might actually cry from the combination of weariness and pain.

"You must." Avon's hand closed around his shoulder and squeezed lightly. "Now, Tarrant. Cough."

Tarrant froze. It wasn't as if Avon hadn't touched him since Fargone, but it was seldom as they both could manage. He remembered, just before they left Xenon, when Avon had shoved him out of Zukan's presence and...

"Now, Tarrant." The hand wrapped itself firmly around Tarrant's shoulder, squeezing harder.

He coughed and a flash of agony went through his ribcage and up into his chest.

"Again." The quiet voice held the hint of a ragged edge.

Tarrant clutched at a handful of sheet and coughed again. The flash became a wildfire, sending tendrils of pain licking up each individual rib, as if they were outlined with heat. The other wounds inflicted by the interrogators began to ache in sympathy.

Avon placed his other hand on Tarrant's, where it crushed its handful of sheet. "And again." He paused, waiting, then said, "You can do this, Tarrant. Just twice more."

Just twice more. One. Tarrant found himself releasing the sheet and turning his hand so he clutched Avon's fingers instead. Two. He squeezed so hard at Avon's hand he could feel the joints protest.

But Avon himself didn't. "Good. That's over." He sounded relieved, as well. "Now try to get some sleep."

Tarrant wanted to laugh derisively. Or would have, if even the thought of laughing hadn't hurt so much.

"I know it's difficult. We'll try to get some painkillers as soon as possible." Though Vila and Dayna ransacked the sickbay before they'd abandoned the Federation ship on the edge of the city, they'd found little in the way of medicines that weren't either interrogation drugs or their antidotes. The few mild painkillers they'd found in one of the crew's pockets, and it wasn't of a strength capable of even denting Tarrant's pain.

But Tarrant had no complaints about that. "No, I don't want drugs." The interrogation had left him with a horror of chemicals that changed his perceptions of his body and all chemicals did that to some extent. He'd avoided taking even the mild analgesic Vila had offered on the grounds it wouldn't help, but that wasn't the real reason.

Avon made no reply, but didn't move to rise or disengage his hand, either. The dim circle of lamplight around them, the darkness beyond it, gave the moment a feeling of intimacy, as if they were completely alone together...an odd notion, seeing there were three other people sharing the room with them. But Vila's quiet snore and the even breathing of the two women on the next bed only intensified the impression.

For some reason, Tarrant found himself compelled to break the silence. And it was the first time since time since GP that he'd had the chance to... "Avon, I'm sorry. I was wrong about Blake. I thought..."

The fingers entangled with his stiffened, then withdrew from his clasp. "You didn't do anything wrong." The half-dead voice emphasized the word you.

Damn. Why had he spoken at all? If the pain hadn't thrown him off-balance, he'd have known better than to remind Avon of Blake, especially so soon.

"I know that," he answered at last. He'd done the absolute right thing on GP, but it had turned horribly wrong in his hands, like a prince turning to a frog in some reverse fairy tale. Because of him, Avon had killed a friend and a good man had lost his life, knowing in his last minutes only that someone he'd trusted thought he deserved killing. Somehow, it seemed worse knowing he'd done it all in innocence, that he'd betrayed Avon without intending it. "But if I had..." Not told Avon? Not sounded so certain? What could he have done?

He opened his eyes at last and Avon's expression looked every bit as bleak as he could've imagined. Good, Tarrant, you're not only useless to the others, but you're making life worse for Avon than it already was. What do you do for an encore? It's hard to top getting him to kill his friend, then torturing him with it afterward, but I'm sure you can if you try. And probably even if you don't try. It seems to come naturally to you.

"You didn't do anything wrong," Avon repeated tonelessly. Rising from the bed as carefully as he'd sat down, Avon returned to his patch of bedclothes on the floor, sitting down and wrapping the blanket back around his shoulders. But he didn't look as if he'd be sleeping anytime soon.

Feeling more wretched than he'd thought possible, Tarrant pulled his own blanket up around his shoulders and closed his eyes to give at least the impression of sleep. If he lay here very quietly, at least he'd avoid causing any other disasters before morning.

He hoped.

*

Soolin caught Dayna's eye and inclined her head fractionally toward the hallway. Time for a conference, the gesture said. The signal had become a familiar one over the last few days.

Dayna nodded, picking up a tattered blanket to wrap around her shoulders over the cheap jacket Vila had lifted from a shop in another section of town. The corridor felt a good ten degrees colder than their hotel room, probably due to the lack of body heat, and the two of them seemed to be spending a good half of their time there, since it was the only place they could talk with anything approaching privacy.

At one time the others, most particularly Avon, would've noticed every exit and made appropriately sardonic comments. The indifferent silence at their comings and goings now worried her more than she'd like to admit, even to herself.

Soolin checked the hall in both directions--not that this hotel suffered from an excess of patrons--then started to lean back against the wall, catching herself just in time. The management spent even less effort on the common areas than the rooms, and the walls were covered with irregular splotches of mildew, an environment appreciated only by a species of multi-legged insects which Dayna neither could nor wished to identify.

"What is it?" Dayna shivered and pulled the blanket around herself even tighter, hoping whatever the problem turned out to be, it could be resolved--or at least discussed--quickly.

"I want you to go out with Vila this morning."

Vila had been venturing into different sections of town each morning, trying to pick up the money they needed to get off planet by means of various petty thefts. They'd ransacked the pockets of the crew before dumping the bodies, of course, but had found little more than pocket change--enough to pay for these less-than-palatial accommodations, but little else.

As for other sources of cash, there were none. She suspected that Avon had kept a stash on Scorpio, but if so, that had disappeared into some lucky trooper's pocket back on GP and wouldn't be seen by them again. Nor could they use Orac as an embezzlement tool, as Avon had done on worlds with more sophisticated banking systems, sophisticated not being a word Dayna or anyone else would apply to the aptly named Rusthoven.

So whether they could get offworld ahead of a Federation team tracing their lost ship depended largely on Vila, the member of the crew Dayna had always thought the least of, when she thought of him at all.

Not to mention the member of the crew who now seemed most likely to bolt for parts unknown, with or without notice, for reasons she had not yet determined.

Tact was admittedly not Dayna's strong point, but cross- questioning Vila about a grudge against Avon with the object of said grudge in the same room seemed a bad idea to her. Besides, she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to know. Not now, not yet, when they had so many insoluble problems that one more such seemed a potentially intolerable burden.

So she said merely, "You mean you want me to keep him from sneaking off-planet without us? I'm not sure I can." Even if she could, the idea of doing had little appeal. Vila might generally figure in her mind as a useless coward, but he'd taken care of Tarrant when she couldn't, and sympathized with her unspoken revulsion to the effects of Tarrant's torture without probing deeper. She owed him for that. Even had she not, keeping a man she'd known so long as some sort of thieving slave...no, even if their survival depended upon it, that would sicken her.

Soolin grimaced, as if she wished Dayna hadn't put that particular idea into words. "Maybe not, but if he does leave, we need someone with his skills. That's why I want you to go with him, see what you can pick up. I don't expect you to become an accomplished thief in one day, but it seems to me that hunting down animals or Sarrans or whatever back on your home world isn't entirely unrelated to hunting down people whose money you want."

Dayna hadn't thought of that, and she had to admit that the idea attracted her. Weapons design was certainly a useless skill for them at the moment, and Dayna found the idea of being useless both unaccustomed and distasteful. Though she suspected Soolin also felt that Vila would be less likely to take off if Dayna accompanied him. Fine with her--she didn't mind contributing a little unspoken persuasion, as long as she didn't actually have to hunt down her crewmate and drag him back trussed like an animal.

"All right. I'll tag along with Vila." She cast a longing glance at the relative warmth of their room, but felt compelled to add, "But how about Tarrant? I was going to help you clean him up today." Without shower or bathtub in the hotel's inadequate common loo, and with only the harshest of soaps, keeping Tarrant's various injuries from getting infected constituted a major project necessitating two pairs of hands besides that of their reluctant patient.

"I'll get Avon to help. It's about time he made himself useful."

In Dayna's opinion, just getting Tarrant to cough three times a day without a surfeit of argument was a major contribution on Avon's part, but she sympathized with Soolin's irritation to a certain extent. Avon seemed as reluctant to interact with Tarrant as with Vila and for less reason, since Tarrant was equally hostile to everyone who participated in his treatment and Vila's hostility appeared focused on Avon. But she'd just about given up understanding any of the Scorpio's males, coming to Soolin when she needed advice or information.

Everything considered, it just seemed a lot easier.

"All right," she repeated, and went back into the room, where Vila still sat propped up against the far wall, picking at last night's dinner, which doubled as this morning's breakfast. "Vila," she said casually, "I thought I'd go with you today, keep you company."

Against her expectations, Vila brightened at the prospect. "Fine." The thought of companionship made him more cheerful than Dayna had seen him in...well, she couldn't remember the last time she had seen him truly cheerful. "I'll teach you some tricks of the trade."

"I'd like that." To her surprise, Dayna found herself looking forward to the outing, too.

*

“I can do it myself.” Tarrant tried to sound firm and mature, but feared that though he’d progressed—by sheer force of will—beyond toddler whining, he still hadn’t made it all the way to sounding like an adult. Maybe part way through adoles—

“Young males are violent, at the mercy of their hormones, dangerous to society.”

No. With an effort, Tarrant managed to cut off the memory of Lieesb Rowan’s voice. He didn’t want to follow where that echo led. Besides, he didn’t feel particularly dangerous. Except to those you care about.

Oh, yes, certainly to them. At odd moments, he kept seeing Zeeona (what remained of Zeeona) lying encased in her spacesuit and Avon shooting Blake (“Tarrant doesn’t understand”), as if the images were defective viscasts that wouldn’t stop repeating themselves.

At odd moments like now. No. He tried again. “Soolin, I can do it my—“

“You could,” she agreed wryly. “but the fact is that you don’t. So what you’re capable of is irrelevant, isn’t it?” She planted one slender hand, fortunately empty of weapons, between his shoulder blades and steered him toward the loo, usually deserted this time of day. “Coming, Avon?”

“Right behind you.” Avon sounded as cheerful as a man headed for Federation interrogat—

No. Bad simile. Every mental road seemed to hold pitfalls now. Better not to think…except that he couldn’t seem to turn that function off, any more than he could help flinching at the pain, or remembering how Scorpio came apart around him as it crash—

No. Don’t go there, either.

Soolin pushed open the flimsy door to the facilities with one hand and propelled her victim through with the other. “Close and lock it,” she said over her shoulder to Avon. It wasn’t unknown for hotel guests to get mugged while trying to use the loo, so they’d been told, and a few days as a guest made them believers in the wildest of stories.

With the door shut, the three square meters seemed overwhelmingly claustrophobic for the three of them. Usually, he could at least tell himself that the body heat cut the chill, but with Avon as one of his companions, it seemed worse, and not even a degree or two of warmth helped, if such a thing could be said to emanate from Avon at the moment. And with Avon here, he couldn’t possibility…couldn’t…

“Tarrant, you know the drill.” Soolin’s voice held equal parts sympathy and irritation. “Off with your clothes. Avon, help him. He shouldn’t be twisting around with his ribs still healing.”

Taking a deep breath, Tarrant nodded and let Avon strip off the faded blue jacket Vila had bought at a thrift shop, then the soft-weave shirt he’d lifted somewhere else. Vila had explained the logic of this one night while trying to distract him enough to eat, but the sense of Vila’s lecture had been drowned in nausea. Eating any kind of meat still made him ill, but he knew he needed the protein and usually managed to force it down.

As Avon hung the clothes on the room’s one rusty hook, Tarrant stepped a pace away, signaling the end to that part of the process, hoping that Soolin would not demand.

“All of your clothes, Tarrant.”

The protest that it wasn’t really necessary died on his lips. Some of the worst injuries were where the interrogator had burned across the hip, groin, and thigh, that area now covered by loose knit trousers, the only garment they’d found he could stand wearing below the waist. She had to get at that area, or the exercise would be pointless.

“I’ve seen everything you have to offer before, Tarrant. And I’m sure Avon has seen naked men, as well.”

Yes, in fact Avon has seen this naked man before. The thought had a half-hysteric tinge to it, and he clamped his teeth together hard lest the sentence somehow try to force itself past that barrier.

“Tarrant.” So often these days, Avon would be physically present yet obviously elsewhere…or nowhere at all. But, for once, now there was someone looking at him from behind those dark eyes, someone who wanted to get through to him. “Let’s just get this done.”

Yes. He could certainly agree with that. Anything to have this done. Nodding, he stepped back in front of Avon, letting him pull off the trousers and add them to the rest. Standing there naked in front of Avon. Trying not to think about that too much.

Soolin looked at Avon with more than a touch of surprise. “He listens to you better than he does to me.”

The half-hysterical commentary forced itself to the surface of his mind again: I have to listen to him—he’s my warder. And then, But, no, I’m over twenty-five now, aren’t I? It seemed more than half a year past when they’d been on Fargone; it seemed several lifetimes in the past. And, conversely, it seemed just a few weeks ago.

Avon shrugged off Soolin’s comment. “What do you need me to do?” He kept his gaze on Soolin, according Tarrant a kind of privacy, at least, by refusing to look.

“Hold him still,” Soolin said matter of factly. “He can’t help trying to jerk away when I’m cleaning these cuts and burns.” She picked up the sliver of soap from the edge of the rusty sink and turned on the water, rubbing the surface of the bar with one finger to remove the scum left by the last person to use it. “I especially want to get those cuts across his groin area clean. They don’t look like they’re healing right to me.”

Nor to him. The two long slashes were puffy and red, worse than any of the other marks. Not that any part of his body looked particularly attractive now, after the crash and after the two interrogators had gone over him. And he remembered when Avon had seemed to think his body looked…

Slowly, experimentally, Tarrant pulled the bodysuit off one shoulder, then the other, easing the fabric down to his waist in stages, feeling somewhat the fool, but wanting to know if he’d get a reaction. And Avon was amused, yes, but he was also…he was also…

No. No. No. Any memory but that one.

“Are you ready to start?” Avon moved into position behind him, not quite touching. But Tarrant could feel the faint radiation of Avon’s body heat, almost tangible in the chill room.

“Yes.” Soolin dropped to her knees on the none-too-hygienic floor, examining the area around his groin closely, the soap in one hand and the last of the clean scraps of cloth salvaged from the ship’s sickbay in the other. “Get a good hold on him.” She didn’t add this is going to hurt. Soolin wasn’t given to obvious statements.

Gently, Avon clasped his hands around Tarrant’s upper arms, and pulled him back against his chest. Avon still wore his leather and studs from GP and Tarrant could feel the coolness of the metal alternating with the body-warmed leather, animated by the steady rise and fall of the other man’s chest. “Ready,” he said quietly.

At least, Tarrant thought wryly, he had almost zero chance of a physical reaction to Avon, constant pain and weariness being an amazingly effective anti-aphrodisiac. Then Soolin started to work, and blessedly, he could no longer think at all. Pain had the one advantage that it could wipe out the most persistent of troublesome thoughts, the most haunting of memories.

But only for a short time.

And when they returned, the pain would make the thoughts and memories even harder to fight.

*

“Where to first?” Dayna dug her hands into the pockets of the shabby jacket, watching her breath form into tendrils of steam as she spoke.

The street in front of the hotel boasted little traffic this time of day, with only a solitary laborer hurrying down the opposite side of the pavement—once a slideway, but long since broken—as if late for work. A little further down, a group of vagrants even less fortunate than her and her crewmates huddled around a fire kindled in what looked like the boot of an abandoned flyer. The roof of what was once a sealed dome leaked just above the wrecked vehicle, sending up bits of steam as parts of the flame were extinguished by what appeared to be a downpour outside.

If the surroundings were depressing—and they were—Dayna also found them slightly exotic. The planetfalls since Avon had taken her off Sarran had not generally included slums or even many cities, Helotrix being her major experience of metropolitan areas and that one filled with Federation-made zombies.

A glance at her companion, though, informed her he didn’t regard this venue in anything like the same light. It suddenly struck her that he’d lived in places much like this for most of his life, that the squalor was as familiar to him as his own face in the mirror. What would it be like? she wondered. To her, childhood and adolescence had meant one tutor after another, books and hunting trips, learning from her father the puzzles of velocities and chemicals that went together to make weapons.

Vila, oblivious to her speculations, nudged her toward the street on the right-hand side of the hotel that lead to a somewhat less colorful part of the city, at the same time answering her question. “Somewhere we can grab a shower.” Seeing her inquiring look, he added, “We don’t want the marks to smell us coming.”

After more than a week of nothing but sketchy sponge baths, she had no objection to that whatsoever…some days she imagined battalions of vermin establishing new beachheads on her increasingly grubby body. “But how? We don’t have the money to rent a room with a shower, even for a day.”

She knew to the smallest coin how much cash they did have. She and Soolin counted it over several times a day, deciding how much they could spend on the necessities, like food and rent and keeping their few clothes reasonably clean, and how much must be put aside for their escape from Rusthoven. The amount in the latter fund wouldn’t even rent a room in a slightly more respectable hostelry than they presently patronized, much less a place with the luxury of showers.

“No problem.” Vila looked mischievous, an expression at once so usual with him and now so rare, that Dayna a stab of déjà vu, as if the conversation were merely a distant memory. “We’ll just steal a shower.”

Steal? A shower? For a moment she had a half-hysterical vision of the two of them lugging a shower cubicle down the street, bits of plumbing and a stream of water following in their wake. No, that couldn’t be what he meant. “How,” she queried cautiously, “do you steal a shower?”

Vila grinned. “Easy. Take a seat and watch this.”

They’d paused in what was indeed a more respectable part of town , almost park-like, in fact, with neatly trimmed grass unnecessarily shaded by large trees that must have been difficult to grow under a dome that was in rather better repair in this sector of the city. In between the green areas were stone buildings that looked too large to be private homes and not quite right for offices, around which loitered groups of mostly young people, some of them standing and talking, some of them seated on benches, intent on pocket bookviewers. Dayna realized, belatedly, that it must be some kind of university…her father had shown her pictures of the place he’d attended, of course, but she’d never seen one otherwise.

Taking a seat on the bench Vila indicated, Dayna watched his progress with a skepticism that within minutes changed to admiration. Vila clearly knew what he was doing. She didn’t know how he accomplished it, but there was a subtle change in his walk, how he held himself, his whole physical attitude, that caused him to blend in with the students, though he was rather older than most. Even the shabbiness of his clothes was more of an advantage than a detriment here, since worn or fraying clothing appeared to be something of a fashion statement amount the student population.

Vila strolled casually behind a group dressed in some sort of exercise clothing, all of them too caught up in their discussion to notice the abduction of two of their athletic bags. Then, just as smoothly, he retraced his steps to join her, tossing one of the bags onto the bench beside her.

“That’s a shower?”

“So to speak.” He pointed to the plastic chip dangling from the handle of her bag. “It’s a pass to the university athletic club, where there’ll be showers. You should find a towel inside the bag.”

“But won’t there be a photo of the actual student in their computer records?” As she understood the process, whoever checked memberships would scan the chip and the photograph would come up.

“They’ll scan the chip, but they won’t look at the photo, unless we’re unlucky enough to get a new employee who’s still feeling conscientious. Then you say you grabbed a friend’s bag by mistake and can’t you just dash in and have a shower, because you have a class coming up. Just look confident that you belong there, and you’ll do fine. Chances are you won’t get questioned at all.”

“Aren’t you coming in, too?” For the first time she could remember, Dayna felt nervous at the prospect of being on her own. If it were a hunting expedition in a wilderness or a fight against a squad of Federation thugs, she’d face it with confidence, but this was outside her usual areas of expertise.

“They’ll have separate shower rooms for men and women. Too bad—sharing a shower with you would be my pleasure.” The leer accompanying this might’ve been the same as in the old days when it irritated her to the point of violence, but this time it somehow felt more reassuring than obtrusive. “You go in first, then I’ll come right behind in case something goes wrong. But it won’t, trust me.”

She stood, still a bit uncertain, and Vila handed her the bag. “You’ll be fine.” He gave her a slight push. “The athletic center is the one to your right, with the double entrance. Just sort of stroll in…remember, the trick is to look like you belong there, and then no one will question you.”

Taking a few steps, she glanced back involuntarily. Vila nodded encouragingly. “You’ll be fine,” he repeated. “Remember, I’ll be right behind you.”

Another first, for her to be reassured by Vila being at her back. Slinging the bag over her shoulder in what she hoped was a casual attitude, she nodded and walked across campus toward the athletic building.

*

Of all the evils of their present situation, Avon was inclined to place the lack of personal privacy, if not at the top, at least very close to that prime position.

The constant hunt of funds had at least cleared the room of Vila and Dayna. And Tarrant had at last achieved a sort of fitful sleep. He'd hoped that Soolin would avail herself of the opportunity to take a long walk, but she had apparently decided to do that indoors rather than out, pacing out a neat quadrangle around the room, only changing her course for furniture or baggage. Only halting to shoot Avon sharp, inquiring looks every time he asked Orac for another piece of information.

He could've done without the audience. He'd prefer for there to be no witness to this exercise at grasping--or attempting to grasp at--straws. "Orac, can you access information about the Auron colony on Kaarn?"

"The Aurons abandoned Kaarn eight standard months ago when the Federation began annexing worlds two systems away. I have no information on their current location."

Not that the Aurons would welcome him with open arms, at any rate, considering that he'd caused Cally's death. But his list of possible refuges had become desperately short--Orac had already ruled out Destiny, on the basis of too-close Federation surveillance, and the Teal-Vandor Confederacy because Tarrant had not accepted the Championship.

"What about Albion?"

"Albion is still independent. However, I would point out that the widespread tales about your role in Blake's death makes your reception there doubtful."

Avon caught his breath at a sudden pain, as if a dagger had slipped between his ribs unaware. True. It made his reception on a majority of non-Federated worlds doubtful. And perhaps that was just, if only it didn't put his companions in the same impossible position as himself. That his responsibility for Blake's death was widely known left them with a narrow selection of choices, especially if he put aside--

"What about that planet you and Tarrant crashed Scorpio on?" Soolin halted her pacing again, a slight frown creasing her forehead as she searched her memory.

Even without looking, Avon would've known that Tarrant had awoken at Soolin's words, but he couldn't help but look, nonetheless. The startlingly blue eyes opened and locked with his steadily, but the voice was soft, weary with illness and an emotion that Avon preferred not to acknowledge. "Fargone."

Avon turned his head, looking at the stained wall, saying nothing and keeping his mind on the straight and narrow of their present situation. It helped no one to wallow in emotion--Tarrant should know that as well as Avon did.

Soolin's frown cleared. "Right, Fargone. As I understand, they have no connection to the organized resistance, except for us. I don't see why they'd turn us away because of Blake's death."

"You need not be so tactful," Avon said coldly. "Say it. Because I killed Blake."

"And you don't need to continue the self-flagellation." Soolin didn't quite snap back the reply, but it was close. "You believed he was about to turn us over to the Federation. I would have killed him twice as quickly and a lot more efficiently. "She paused a moment for her words to sink in, but not long enough to allow him a reply. "So can we return to the subject of Fargone?"

If we must. "The Fargoneans are determined to maintain their neutral status. Even if at some future date they decide to support an anti-Federation group, it will be with materials rather than active participation. That being the case, they'd hardly welcome us showing up on their doorstep at this point."

However, if we could get there secretly… He couldn't deny in that case there might be a chance he could manage a deal with the troika. In a worst-case scenario, even if the Fargoneans tossed the rest of the crew, he might just be able to find a place there for Tarrant, recalling the redheaded Matriarch's remark about Tarrant's desirability as a marriage prospect. True, she'd meant it mainly to irritate him, but Avon thought it might be a possibility, and surely Tarrant would have no desire to stay with Avon after what had happened on the Federation ship.

"Avon's right, Soolin." Tarrant voice cut across Avon's bleak meditations. "The troika as much as said to contact them only after we're had a few wins and the odds of us successfully opposing the Federation are better. That being the case, they're not going to welcome us with open arms just now."

Why should it hurt so much, Avon wondered wryly, to be correct? Tarrant obviously didn't want to return to the scene of their brief relationship, where his ex-warder's record would hardly be a matter for pride. Quite the reverse. What could Tarrant say if they did go back? Avon's misjudgment had led to disaster for both the active anti-Federation factions, destroying Blake's base of operations and causing Avon's own people to be hunted by Federation and dissidents alike. And Tarrant, the person Avon was particularly responsible for in Fargonean eyes, had suffered the most under his leadership, returning to Fargone as an object of charity and pity.

No, he could hardly blame Tarrant for not wishing to return.

Soolin didn't appear entirely convinced by their arguments, but seemed willing to set the question aside, which was all that Avon asked for at this moment. He wanted to concentrate on practicalities for now and put the vexed subject of Fargone out of his mind.

"All right." Soolin sat on the edge of Tarrant's bed. "The immediate goal is to get off planet before the Federation tracks their hijacked ship here. Where do we go, if not to Kaarn or Destiny or Teal-Vandor or Albion or Fargone?"

"We find somewhere to go to ground, preferably somewhere we can eventually find a ship or the capital to buy one. There's next to no chance we can stay ahead of the Federation, so our strategy should be to lie low and hope the search loses momentum. There are bound to be rumors and false sightings that diffuse the search effort--then we can move on, find another ship and perhaps even another base. In other words, once we get off Rusthoven we play it by ear."

Soolin sat silent for a long moment, just looking at him. "You're right. It's probably the most reasonable course, but there's one thing that bothers me."

"And that is?" Not that he cared, as long as she agreed. He wasn't altogether sure why she'd stayed with them after landing on Rusthoven--she wasn't so identified with the Scorpio crew that she couldn't do better on her own--but he had no doubt of her value to the group, and not only because of her skill with weapons.

One edge of her mouth turned up in a wry smile. "Avon, I doubt that you've voluntarily played a situation by ear in your entire life and I can't help wondering what's making you willing to do so now."

He bared his teeth in a humorless smile. "Perhaps because I have no other recourse?"

Actually, he did have another possible course of action, though he saw no need to make it a subject for discussion. Once they were safely off Rusthoven and possessed of some sort of independent transport, he could get the others to run and let himself be captured by the Federation. Or rather, let his clearly-identifiable corpse be captured--he had no wish to be the plaything of another Shrinker. Once he was removed from the equation, the others would have more and better options, including finding asylum on worlds where Blake's killer would not be welcome.

But it wasn't time for that yet. The fact that he could recognize that convinced him he could still think logically about the alternatives.

"Perhaps," Soolin agreed at last. Then she added, half under her breath, so he could pretend to ignore her: "Or perhaps not."

Soolin might well guess his purpose, but he didn't believe she would try to interfere. Of the others, Dayna was too naïve, Vila's opinion of Avon too low, and Tarrant…well, Tarrant was in no shape to think about it just now.

And it would be well, Avon acknowledged to himself, if he did decide on that plan to carry it through before Tarrant was well enough for any lengthy analysis.

Tarrant possibly--very well, almost certainly--would not consent to what he'd term Avon's sacrifice. But he was far from sure whether this would stem merely from Tarrant's well-known ideals about crew loyalty--a well-meant hypocrisy that would be painful enough for them both--or an actual desire that Avon should live. And the latter, like Blake's dying attempt at an embrace, would be much, much worse.

Therefore, he would avoid talking with Tarrant about it. Therefore he must act--if he decided to act--before Tarrant began to recover.

*

Vila felt like pacing a path through the artificial turf surrounding the somewhat anemic-looking imported oak that gave him a reasonable, but not too obvious, view of the athletic center. But that would be sure to give away the game. Instead, he lounged at the foot of the tree, an open—and pilfered--book by one outstretched hand and his eyelids drooping as if half-asleep.

Far from drowsing, every nerve was a-twitch, telling him that sending an inexperienced girl---no matter how dangerous in weaponry and hunting on a frontier world—alone into an alien urban environment was just plain stupid. It had seemed a simple enough task, but once a half hour passed and Vila himself had emerged, clean but with no sign of a crewmate in the area, he started enumerating in his mind everything that could go wrong.

At the end of forty-five minutes, he began to try to devise ways to sneak into the women’s section of the center.

Without much success. So it was fortunate that before the tower clock chimed the hour, Dayna emerged from the center, bag in hand, looking nervous but unharmed.

“Trouble?” he asked quietly as soon as she came within earshot.

“I’m not sure.” Vila approved of the casual way she flung down the bag and slid down the tree to sprawl to the spot where two roots spread to make a natural seat. He could detect her uneasiness, but it was unlikely that any casual passerby would. Dayna might be inexperienced, but she was far from stupid. “When I was in the showers, the woman who checked the Ids came back and … approached me.”

One of Vila’s eyebrows flew upwards. True, there had been little chance for Dayna to receive passes, from either the opposite sex or her own during their travels, but the offhand way she had handled his own efforts in that direction convinced him that she could handle herself in most situations.

“Not for sex … well, not for herself. She told me she was setting up a business, strictly women for women and very high-class, that I could make a lot of money for both of us, and that if I turned her down she had friends that would make me very sorry.” She leaned back against the rough bark in a movement that looked casual, but her long fingers drummed a telltale tatoo against one protruding root. “I wasn’t sure what to do—if she could really cause us trouble, I should have killed her, but there were so many people around I wasn’t sure I could be inconspicuous. And then there’s the money … we really could use that. I thought, maybe I should go along with her.”

Vila shook his head decidedly. “Not unless we want the Federation down on our heads in no time flat. Remember what we decided when Soolin wanted to wait tables to get some credits—you and Soolin are both too classy-looking and inexperienced to be working the low-end of