"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 the trade, and that’s the only place you could be anonymous. That goes double for whoring. The first time you went out someone would be putting your picture and DNA through some scanner and next thing you know the Feds would be scouring the whole planet for us.”

Dayna looked torn between relief and disappointment. They could’ve used the mone--gods, could they have used the money--but Vila knew from bitter and repeated experience that Dayna was very particular about where she disposed her body. Try as she might, he didn’t believe she could hide her basic distaste for her customers, who might well try to “teach her a lesson.” At which point someone—probably the customer—would end up on a slab rather than a bed.

In fact, as far as he knew, no one had ever …. Well, no point in speculating about that. Except for a lewd suggestion that was mostly for show, he’d given up storming that particular citadel. But…a thought occurred to him. “How did you get rid of her?” They didn’t need any of the local criminal entrepreneurs following them back to their hideaway.

“Told her I’d let her know later. She told me, ‘I can find you whenever I want.’ But I doubt if she could…don’t you?” she asked, a bit doubtfully.

“No, we should be okay.” Hopefully, by the time the would-be madam found she’d been duped, they would be far from the university area. He doubted she’d pursue the matter, anyway, once she found she’d been duped….not unless she had a really nasty temper and plenty of time on her hands. Dayna was a beauty, true, but there were other pretty women on campus to try to bully into service. On the other hand, not all students were easy prey—once the woman took a serious look at the ID and realized she had a potential recruit without, say, powerful parents or close friends on the karate team she might become all the more serious.

No point in worrying Dayna about that just now, though. And probably it wasn’t all that likely.

Dayna’s fingers stopped their drumming against the tree bark and she looked more relaxed. Good. She needed to be able to concentrate, undistracted by worries, for the next part of their day’s activities. Once you let your mind wander, then you started to make the little mistakes that could add up to the big one that could get you caught. Concentration was the key to being a successful thief. Well, that and good hands.

Vila had very good hands. If Dayna would only let him show her how good his hands…

No, concentration. He mustn’t let himself get distracted.

“What next?” Dayna asked.

Vila had given some thought to that. Cold hard cash would be a nice addition to the Scorpio crew’s scant possessions, but after listening to Tarrant’s groans all last night, he could think of something that they needed even more. Besides, Dayna’s run-in meant they needed to get anything they wanted from the university today, before the fake ID got spotted. They could get cash anywhere. “Next you practice your sneezes. You’re about to come down with a cold.”

At Dayna’s questioning look, he added, “Most college campuses have an infirmary and most infirmaries have pain killers. I’m hoping we’ll find a distractible doctor who finds you as interesting as your shower madam.”

*

Tedium. Tedium. Val Kantqana swiped another ID through the reader, barely listening to the computer bleeping the student’s name. Nothing worthwhile there, unless her customers suddenly developed a taste for plainness verging on ugliness. More tedium.

Her whole day thus far had been similarly cursed, except for a few women who barely—very barely--met her criteria for looks and that stunning black woman. A lot of effort and boredom for very little return. It wasn’t fair, really. She shouldn’t even have to be doing the recruitment herself, shouldn’t need the pathetic pay she received for checking IDs at the athletic center.

Never mind. Soon she wouldn’t need to sully her hands with the day-to-day boredom of sifting through the students for suitable candidates. Not that this wasn’t a brilliant plan. Getting the job as doorkeeper allowed her to accost likely recruits by name after they’d gone into the showers, giving the impression she knew more about them than she in fact did. A few hints that she’d be sending a security guard to follow up gave her future employee the impression of a university-wide conspiracy that she had no hope of avoiding.

No, it was a good—even brilliant—plan and worth a bit of tedium to get the business launched. But she looked forward to the day when some flunkie would do the actual recruiting, while she sat back and took care of …. administration. Administration that would involve lying on the beach of some pleasure planet with a long, cool drink.

But for that to happen, she needed more talent. And that black woman would make an admirable addition to an unfortunately limited stable.

The steady stream of students thinned during the noon hour, giving Kantqana a chance to call up the records for the women she’d approached that morning. She’d take down a few numbers, make a few threatening midnight calls and …

Her fingers halted over the keypad. The photo called up was of a blonde of no particular beauty, not a stunning black woman.

The woman had used a stolen ID.

For a moment, she felt indignant at being tricked, but then the positives of the situation occurred to her. She tapped one painted nail against her teeth, pondering how this might change the situation. Definitely, it would alter her approach. Hopefully, it would make her more vulnerable. If the woman needed to steal an ID just to take a shower …. Yes, that seemed promising. A more promising prospect than she’d had for many days.

“Computer, let me know next time this—“ she entered the number of the woman’s ID “—number is used. Immediately.”

Immediately turned out to be no more than five minutes later. The monitor chimed, letting her know that her promising recruit was at the infirmary. Since she’d looked perfectly healthy when Kantqana had accosted her, that made it very likely she was seeking drugs. That might make her an even easier mark. Not only could she blackmail her for stealing controlled substances, but the drugs would undoubtedly make her less sharp, easier to confuse and confound. Yes, this was very promising.

Using her private com, she called a friend in security who occasionally helped her out with young women who needed extra “convincing” from an official-looking bullly-boy. Giving him a sketchy description—the woman was spectacular enough that she shouldn’t be hard to spot—she ordered him to follow her and report back when she’d gone. Once she knew where the women came from, she’d have a better idea of what approach would yield the most satisfactory reslts.

Smiling, she signed off and ran another student’s ID through the scanner. A woman with looks like that would bring in a lot of credits, maybe make all the difference in turning her business from the small-time operation it was into the kind of success that would put her on that pleasure planet beach.

Yes, she definitely had to find that woman’s hideaway and convince her to join the team.

*

In the end, bureaucracy yielded better results for Vila and Dayna than seduction, something Vila might have predicted if he’d thought about the matter a bit more in the light of his past experiences.

The triage nurse assigned to Dayna was sympathetic but clearly unaffected by her beauty, by which fact Vila figured he was gay or already bonded or both. On the other hand, there were clearly a number of cases more urgent than that of a woman who showed no temperature or outward signs of illness other than a persistent cough. So it made a certain amount of sense when they were led to a treatment room and left there with every sign that they’d be stranded there for some considerable period of time, possibly until the end of time.

This suited Vila admirably. And luckily, no one seemed to object to “Maya Cronby” taking her concerned friend into the treatment room with her. “Surely they’re not going to leave any serious painkillers just lying around a regular treatment room.”

“Maybe not lying around, but locked up somewhere near to hand. This is close enough to the athletic center that they probably have their sports injury cases brought in here—and they’ll need painkillers quickly.” Vila prowled around the small room, poking through drawers, running his gaze swiftly over the hodgepodge of vials, tubs, and bottles. “Ah-ha. Jackpot!”

Since every other drawer and cabinet had yielded without protest to being opened, it seemed likely that the single locked cabinet held the substances he sought.

“Can you open the lock?” Dayna asked, with a touch of anxiety.

Vila looked insulted, and felt even more so. The Scorpio crew had gone too long without using his talents, following Avon’s crazy schemes to bring together warlords and such. “I could open it at midnight, blindfolded and with both hands tied behind my back.” Well, maybe that last was a bit of an exaggeration. He did need at least one hand, plus the slender lockpicking tool he slid from its hiding place in the heel of his boot. “Just watch.”

“Well, hurry it up. If someone comes in while you—“

The cabinet door opened with a quiet swish almost before the words were out of her mouth.

“You were saying?”

“Just grab what we need before someone comes in, will you?”

“Relax. From the looks of the triage room when we came in, they have a full house. The doctor probably won’t be by for a half hour, at least.” Just the same, skimmed his gaze over the row of bottles at top speed, hoping to recognize at least one of the compounds.

Of course, he could just dump the lot into his pockets, but that would probably mean a speed discovery of the robbery, leading to a tumult and pursuit which he most definitely wished to discourage. Better to take one or two bottles of something not readily missed and hope that whoever eventually discovered that the bottle was gone blamed it on a colleague misplacing medicines rather than someone deliberately pilfering drugs.

His fingers paused on a slender bottle. Tagamac. Yes, he felt certain he remembered that one. It wouldn’t be his first choice, but any means. Rather than being an oral solution that worked all over the patient’s system, it was a topical mixture meant for an injury covering a relatively small area.

Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers, the old saying went, and sometimes neither could thieves. He kept looking, though, cursing his time out of the criminal loop. He no longer knew the names of the milder remedies … he knew plenty about all the latest torture drugs, but very little about the drugs normal people used these days. He shouldn’t have let himself get so rusty.

Not that he’d had much choice. Not with Avon at the helm.

No good. He had to take the Tagamac and hope it would do the trick for Tarrant. Skillfully, he rearranged the bottles to make it appear that none were missing, and slid the cabinet door closed.

Just in time. As Vila resumed his chair, a harried-looking young doctor arrived, looked puzzled at Dayna’s healthy state, though she coughed dutifully and heavily away during the whole examination. He prescribed rest and what Vila judged to be a harmless decongestant and sent them away.

The problem was, someone came away after them. For a few kilometers, at any rate.

Vila spotted him about a block from the infirmary, sticking to them like a particular obnoxious brand of glue. The madam Dayna had her run-in with occurred to him—but it didn’t matter, whoever it was, they needed to lose him before they returned to their not-so-sweet home.

It wasn’t as easy as he thought it’d be—they had to go several kilometers out of their way and were within three blocks of the battered hotel before Vila was certain the large, ugly specimen they’d picked up outside the infirmary was no longer on their back.

He thought. He hoped. No, he was certain.

He’d lost him.

*

Having completed her exercise for the day—she knew to the meter how many kilometers her circuits of the room made up and how many she needed to keep in condition—Soolin sat down on the bed and rummaged through her scanty possessions for the comb Vila had stolen for her a few days before.

She would’ve preferred to take her exercise outside rather than in, but she didn’t trust the fey mood she had noticed in Avon ever since the takeover of the prison transport. No, that wasn’t quite right—she didn’t distrust him, not like Vila apparently did these days, but she could no longer come close to predicting his actions, and she didn’t care for unpredictable employers.

Come to that, she didn’t care for employers who didn’t—couldn’t—pay. And yet she stayed. Odd that.

She drew the comb through a tangle of hair, contemplating a style that would take time and effort, but very little concentration. Not long after going into business for herself, Soolin had found herself suffering from insomnia and had found styling her hair a way of passing sleepless nights.

One of her employers had compared her to a cat grooming itself.

Very well, why was this cat working without even a saucerful of milk as pay? She worked a handful of strands into a loop, fastening it with a rusty pin. Charity cases were not her usual interest and this job not only promised no pay, but much more danger than her normal engagements. She made another loop on the opposite side of her head, regarding the effect in the reflection of the dirty window beside her bed.

She liked Dayna, true, and somewhere along the line had come to regard in the same light as her long-dead sister. A mistake, that. And she had come to like Tarrant enough to take that truly stupid risk to match him with Zeeona. … she didn’t blame Avon for being angry about that. He was as intelligent an employer as she’d ever run across.

Still, none of that accounted for her remaining on Rusthoven.

She was about to try the effect of a loop of hair on the top of her head when she heard a clatter of footsteps outside, and she instantly exchanged the comb for her gun. But it was, as she expected, Vila and Dayna, back from the day’s scavenging. “Any luck?”

“Some.” With a flourish, Vila took a small bottle from his jacket pocket, presenting it to Soolin as if he were a wine steward serving his finest vintage.

Soolin scanned the label and started to speak, but Vila forestalled her. “I know, I know, it’s only topical. But it’s the best I could do.”

“Better than nothing,” Soolin agreed, and turned to Tarrant. He’d awoken when Vila and Dayna arrived and now eyed the bottle in her hand nervously. “We’ll try it on a relatively small first,” she decided. “Tarrant, take off your shirt.”

“I’d rather not…”

Soolin had had enough of Tarrant’s reluctance to take analgesics. “And we’d rather not listen to you moan every time you move all night .” She had to admit he tried his best not to vocalize his pain, but his best wasn’t quite good enough and she was cranky from lack of sleep. “Take off the shirt.”

While Tarrant reluctantly followed orders, Soolin read the instructions over again, a bit more closely. “Do you know if you’re allergic to Segarey?” If so, they’d might as well throw the bottle away, since the bottle’s label warned about some fearsome side effects to those allergic to that medicine.

“No, not that I know of. I don’t think I’ve ever taken it, though.”

True, Tarrant was a normally healthy young man who’d had little occasions to sample various medications. It looked like a fairly uncommon allergy, though. The text also cautioned against using the medication on an area more than three square centimeters, but that would hardly touch the pain Tarrant was facing. These medications always allowed some leeway for people not following instructions exactly, so she thought she could safely double the area. “Did you have any problems while you were out?” She fished in her bag for a clean cloth to apply the medication.

Vila and Dayna looked at one another questioningly.

“Tell me,” ordered Soolin. She swabbed painkiller on Tarrant while listening to the tale of the madam of the showers. “An amateur, it sounds like to me.” She’d dealt with more than one start-up criminal business in her career and they usual spelled trouble. Too much enthusiasm and too little hard business sense. Pros kept a sensible eye on the bottom line, while amateurs tended to get emotional, take dumb risks and misjudge what occasions called for force and which called for cutting their losses But that didn’t mean they couldn’t be dangerous. “You said you lost your tail. But could he have found out the general area we’re in?”

“Possibly,” Vila admitted unwillingly.

For a moment, she felt pleased that Vila acknowledged her expertise; he was most definitely a pro, one of the best thieves she’d worked with. “In that case, we’d better be ready for her goons to show up at our door. They might not, but it’s just as well to be prepared.”

She glanced at Avon, who nodded. That was more life than he generally showed these days, which might or might not be a good thing. She still remembered the slaying of the guard on the Federation ship—it hadn’t exactly been gratuitous, but the killing had seemed almost personal, not what she was used to with Avon. One more worry to pile on the stack she already had.

Sitting back, she wiped off her hands. She’d used the whole bottle of Tagamac and her patient was striped red with the medicine, giving the impression of a mis-colored zebra, at least from the waist up. Using the whole was a calculated risk—Vila might not be able to get more—but she judged that one night free from pain would do more for Tarrant’s healing than several nights with just a little relief. And it seemed to have started doing its job already—Tarrant had regained some of his color and didn’t seem to be repressing a moan with every breath.

She flipped forward the loop on the top of her head that had somehow half-unpinned itself and was falling into her eyes. Well, there was no question of her leaving the group now, not with the question of the madam and however many bully-boys she had to hand still open. Vila had experience with criminal organizations, but of a more professional type than this, and none of the others had experience at all. She’d stay at least until Dayna’s potential employer was taken care of.

One good thing. With the medicine Vila had stolen, at least all of them, including Tarrant, would have a good night’s sleep.

*

“I’m doing the best I can.”

Normally, Lieesb lounged in the chair in front of her desk, or even perched on the desk, swinging his leg as he delivered his reports in an equally-casual manner. Today he looked like a man facing a firing squad, which was perhaps the truth, if one looked at it in a metaphorical manner. “I’m doing the best job I can, just as I have ever since you became matriarch.”

Kaeta went cold inside. Lieesb had never before depended on past performances to impress her. Like her, he concentrated on what was happening now. Or he had in the past. “I wonder why it is, then, that your best is no longer good enough?” Her voice sounded unnaturally harsh to her own ears, but she couldn’t help that. With three-quarters of their wheat harvest endangered—some harvest festival next week’s celebration would be—she couldn’t afford to be sweetness and light. “What’s unique about this situation, precisely?”

“About the wheat blight itself, nothing. All the other families on planet have it to some extent or another … we just have the biggest problem because we’re the biggest wheat producers. So I don’t think it’s sabotage.”

“Not from anyone on Fargone, anyway.” Not that she’d ever believed a Fargonean would deliberately destroy another’s crops. A little industrial or agricultural espionage was part of the game and they all played that at one time or another, but actual destruction of crops … well, there was something deeply distasteful at the very idea. “The Federation, then?”

She hoped not. She and the rest of the troika were rather counting on Fargone being very low on the list of planets to take over at the moment. They kept prices to Federated worlds as reasonable as possible, wanting to make sure it was cheaper for the Federation to buy foodstuffs from Fargone than to take over. But still, there could always be some overly ambitious official….

Lieesb was already shaking his head. “If it were the Federation, it would show some sign of being a genetically-engineered blight. This is practically the same as what we had two harvests ago.”

But two harvests ago Lieesb had had no trouble handling the situation. Perhaps he’d just overreached himself with some scheme to save them money in curing the blight … it wouldn’t be the first time he’d gone too far in some plan or another and had to be slapped down. She almost—no, definitely—hoped this would be the case, “So why can’t we cure it with the fungicides we used that last time? Did you come up with some scheme to bypass our usual suppliers and it backfired?” Implied in the question was that confession would be good for Lieesb’s soul and if he told the truth she wouldn’t would blow up … well, not more than the occasion demanded.

If possible, Lieesb looked even more wretched. “No, our usual suppliers just aren’t coming through. For some reason, they haven’t been able to come up with the amounts we need to cover even half our own wheat fields, never mind those of the other families. And the price they’re demanding … well, we don’t want outsiders to know that we’re that desperate. It’s an outrageous amount. The suppliers would assume we’re next door to starvation and be passing the word along.”

And, as a matter of fact, this crisis wouldn’t cause starvation or anything like it … the Rowans had a healthy enough family budget to ride out this crisis, if necessary. It was manageable as a one-time emergency, but if it was the harbinger of things to come, a sample of how Lieesb was going to be handling family problems in the future …

“Haven’t you been stockpiling fungicide since the last outbreak of the blight?” It wasn’t like Lieesb not to be prepared. But, come to think of it, maybe that wasn’t the only slip-up Lieesb had made recently. Grav’s information about the Scorpio crew was apparently accurate, if their other sources of information were to be trusted, and he’d come up with the news before Lieesb, something she’d never known to happen before.

“We used those up within the first month of the blight’s outbreak. This outbreak is much more widespread than any we’d had before.” And he hadn’t been able to predict that, either. He didn’t say the words, but obviously he was thinking them right along with her.

None of this was Lieesb’s fault, which made it worse. Always before, ever since he was an eager youngster just out of wardship offering to help her become the Rowan matriarch in exchange for just this position, he’d been able to help her get them out of the stickiest situations, predicting the markets and politics in a way that helped keep Rowan as one of the richest families on Fargone. He’d helped her become one of the ruling troika, without a doubt.

But if he no longer had the gift of administration that had put them at the top, maybe it was time for him to retire. The idea made her sick, but Rowan couldn’t depend on a CEO who used to be able to do the job. They needed someone who could do the job right now, especially with a matriarch who had to devote much of her attention to planetary politics. “Lieesb, I—“

Lieesb’s fists were clenched around the arms of his chair, his fair skin flushed red, as if he’d read her thoughts. Which perhaps he could—they had been that close. Had been. She hated the past tense. But they had to solve the wheat blight problem, not only for the Rowans, but for the entire planet; she had bigger concerns than one family now.

“Stop. Do you think I don’t know that you’re depending on me not only as a member of the family but as one of the troika? Haven’t I always pulled rabbits out of my hat before? Just leave me alone and I’ll do it again this time.”

Kaeta felt her own anger flare up. With difficulty, she controlled the impulse to throw something while simultaneously reminding him of all the time she’d already given him. “Fine. You have a choice—you can find your rabbit or you can find a successor. But you’d better do one of the two soon, or I’ll find the successor myself.”

The color drained from Lieesb’s face, leaving him dead white. Without another word, he rose and left the room.

Kaeta leaned forward, resting her forehead against the desk, feeling utterly drained and empty. If this emptiness was a sample of life without Lieesb as her chief husband, she didn’t like it.

But she feared she’d have to get used to it. When he’d left, Lieesb had looked more like a man in despair than one with a mission.

*

The scream ripped Soolin out of the first sound sleep she’d enjoyed since before the debacle on GP.

At first, she almost thought she was on GP, hearing a gora, a legendary ghost who emitted unearthly shrieks as they haunted the more remote farms. But once she gained her feet, gun in hand and tattered nightgown tangled around her legs, she found the sound came from a more temporal source, the man in the next bed.

“What’s wrong?” Dayna was only a beat behind her, gun in one hand and a slender, well-honed knife in the other. She shook her head sharply, as if to banish the remnant of sleep from her eyes.

“I’m not sure.” Now Vila was up, too, disentangling himself from his cocoon of blankets on the floor, and Soolin seated herself on the opposite side of the bed from him, attempting to surround Tarrant with a comforting presence. “Tarrant, what is it?”

But Tarrant seemed to be in some altogether different universe. He huddled up against the rusty headboard of the bed, as if trying to escape some enemy or perhaps a horde of enemies. “Don’t let them near me,” he mumbled, then let out another unearthly shriek.

“Damn,” Soolin murmured. This could be just a bad dream, but somehow she didn’t think so. Still, she could try to snap him out of it. She slapped him lightly across the face. “Tarrant, wake up.”

No response, unless another scream could be termed that.

“I think,” a carefully level voice said from the other pile of blankets, “that he’s allergic to Segarey.” Avon had retrieved the bottle from the trash bin and was reading the instructions.

“So it appears.” The instructions said the allergy would cause hallucinations and what Tarrant was experiencing looked to be beyond a simple bad dream. She caught his arms as his hands came up toward his face in claws, as if intent to scratch furrows in the fair skin. He felt red-hot to the touch.

“You figured that out, genius?” Vila hadn’t given up the constant sniping at Avon, she noted, but he immediately returned his attention to Tarrant, making sure the writhing pilot didn’t roll off his end of the bed.

She addressed herself to Avon. “The bottle says the hallucinations are caused by a high fever. So the first thing we need to do is cool him down.”

“And quiet him down,” added Dayna. Her voice was not unsympathetic, just matter-of-fact. “If he keeps on screaming like that, even the patrons of this dump are going to start coming up to register their objections.” Unspoken was the fact that none of them wanted to draw unwanted attention—and any kind of attention would be unwanted—to their highly-sought little group.

“Right. Avon, you can handle him the best.” Why that should be true was a total mystery to her, but she took help as she could get it. “You try to get him quiet and keep him that way until we can get the temperature down.” Usually, giving orders to one’s employer was highly frowned upon, but somewhere along the line she seemed to taken up the reins of their day-to-day life. Avon hadn’t objected and no one else seemed to be ready to step in to keep the group the together and alive.

“Very well.” Avon rose from the tangle of blankets with obvious reluctance, taking Vila’s place beside Tarrant. Soolin transferred custody of Tarrant’s arms to Avon, and sat back think of the next step.

Dayna supplied it for her. “Ice. We could use ice to cool down the fever. I think there’s a machine down by the manager’s office. Do you want me to get some?”

Clearly, Dayna was uncomfortable with Tarrant’s condition and wanted to get out of there for a few minutes. Soolin could hardly blame her, and besides, she was correct …. Ice was the best of their available methods to get the fever down. Their only one, considering how difficult it was to get their hands on the simplest prescription medications—after their run-in yesterday, she could hardly send them back to the university infirmary. “Yes, go ahead and get as much as you can. This may take awhile.”

Dayna snatched up a couple of empty containers and scrambled from the room as if a hunting party of Sarrens were after her.

Soolin turned back to the tableau on the bed. Avon had his hands curled firmly around Tarrant’s wrists, and had hooked one leg over Tarrant’s lanky one in an attempt to keep him from scrambling further back on the bed, or escaping altogether. The last thing they needed was Tarrant aggravating his injuries.

“Tarrant.” Avon kept his voice quiet but firm, like a man soothing a wild animal. “Tarrant, you need to be quiet. Do you hear me? I know you’re in pain and I know you’re seeing some very frightening things, but none of those are real. Do you understand me? No matter what you see, what you feel, you need not to make any noise.”

Soolin would’ve sworn that nothing short of a gag would’ve quieted Tarrant’s screams, but the fever-bright blue eyes fastened on Avon’s immediately and he cut off a scream stillborn. He mumbled something that sounded like “warder”, but that made little sense, then started crying, with disjointed sentences punctuating each sob. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry for making noise, Avon, I didn’t mean to.”

Vila and Soolin exchanged a sickened glance. This was almost worse than the screaming, even if less dangerous to them all. The normally-sharp blue eyes were filled with tears, something Soolin had never seen in their year together, with streaks of the salty drops streaking down his cheeks and dripping from his chin. A sheen of sweat covered the collarbone that showed above his pajama top and caused the thin fabric to cling to his torso. He looked a wreck, almost worse than he had when they’d rescued him aboard the Federation ship.

“Avon, no more drugs,” he whispered. “I’ll keep quiet. I’m sorry, I’ll try to keep quiet, but promise me there’ll be no more drugs.”

“On my word,” Avon said softly. Soolin wondered if they’d all regret that promise, but it was made now. And they did need Tarrant to be silent. Avon eased Tarrant down from his position plastered against the headboard to a more normal position, propped against the pillow. Soolin thought he looked a little sickened, himself, paler than usual and with a sheen of sweat plastering dark hair to his forehead, but he kept his voice perfectly level.

He turned to Vila. “Get some water from the loo. We need to wash the Tagamac off … it’s probably done it’s worst already, but we might as well be sure.”

For a moment, it seemed like Vila might balk, like he did at any request Avon expressed these days, few enough as those were. But then he nodded, picked up an empty bottle and left the room as quietly as a ghost—or a very good thief.

“I’m sorry,” Soolin said to Avon. “I should have thought of that, myself.” Getting the rest of the medication off was obvious, but her brain seemed to still be half-full of sleep. Not that she would allow herself that excuse …

“Never mind.” As though absently, Avon stroked some matted curls off Tarrant’s forehead. “I didn’t think of it until just now, either.”

Understanding? From Avon? For a moment, she felt like pouring out her anxieties and half-formed plans to him, hoping that he’d take up the reins again, at least partially. It would feel good, at least, to share her worries, get his opinions, have part of her old decisive employer back.

But then Vila slipped back in, full bottle in hand, and the moment was lost.

Soolin sighed, and found another clean cloth in her bag. “You keep holding him, Avon, while I clean this stuff off. Vila, you be ready to go back for a refill.”

Tarrant sobbed again, twisting in Avon’s grasp as Soolin took off the pajama top and laboriously removed the red stripes from his chest. “I’m sorry, Avon. Please forgive me. I’m trying my best…but please tell me you’re taking the drugs off. Tell me you’re not putting more on”

She remembered how badly just soap and water had hurt Tarrant before. If that were preferable to the drug right now indicated just how much pain the medication must be causing him.

“You have my word, Tarrant,” Avon said quietly. “We’re taking the drug off.”

No, the moment was definitely lost and she was left with the burden of her crewmates. At the moment, it felt like it weighed the same as a block of solid herculaneum and was slung firmly about her neck.

*

Well, damn. She should’ve guessed that, like everything else in this ramshackle hotel, the ice machine was out of order. In fact, the sign declaring it to be non-functional looked like it had been there before Dayna had been born.

But they needed ice. The water in the loo would never run cool enough to help lower Tarrant’s fever. It didn’t run hot either, but rather kept firmly to a lukewarm temperature that was just cold enough to make it a little uncomfortable for washing, but not enough to do the job for them now.

So what now? Dayna went to the door of the hotel and stood on the threshold, frowning in thought. She and Soolin had found a small store about a block away from the hotel where they’d bought some of the supplies that Vila couldn’t steal, and she rather thought she’d seen bags of ice for sale there.

Carefully, she felt in the slit in her trousers where she’d stashed the credit chit that Soolin had entrusted her with—they’d distributed their small hoard equally among the crew in case one of them was robbed—and found she probably had enough to buy perhaps two or three bags. It was worth trying for, anyway.

She found the leaking dome of Rusthoven’s slum sector rather creepier at night than it had been at day. The public lighting had apparently all been smashed long ago, leaving the only illumination the campfires of the homeless and the occasional lights from the windows of businesses that were open late or all night.

Luckily, the small store was one of the latter, though the clientele seemed even worse at night than it had when Soolin and she had made their daytime forays into the crumbling building. She hadn’t thought that would be possible, but at least during the daytime the aisles hadn’t been littered with men and women who had apparently had a full load of whatever recreational drug was popular locally. Not that she couldn’t have handled any—and possibly all of them—even without her weapons, but she didn’t want to attract attention. So she just stepped over the bodies when necessary and headed straight for the coolers at the back of the store.

She was happy to find she could afford two bags of ice, and hurry with them to the checkout.

But there was something she really didn’t like about the clerk. Not his looks—though those were far from pretty, from his missing teeth to his partially-dislocated jaw—but rather something in the way he looked at her after the first glance, as if she were the jackpot in a lottery he’d just entered. Dayna was used to being admired and leered at, from Vila at least, but this expression made Vila’s passes seem friendly and wholesome by comparison.

One good thing, though … he didn’t seem scared enough to have pegged her as a wanted terrorist. Not that the locals seemed to up-to-date on the galactic criminal scene. On their initial visit to the store Soolin had pointed out a tattered holo giving a reward for Bayban. They had both had to stifle giggles all the way out of the store, along with a certain amount of regret that there was no way they could collect the money.

Perching the bags of ice on the ledge that registered the prices of the items, she pushed her credit chit through the narrow slit in the reinforced plastiglass that protected the clerk from his customers. Not that she blamed the store managers, considering their clientele, but it would make things difficult if he refused to returned the chit with the remainder of her credit on it, like the daytime clerk had attempted to do before Soolin had promised to wait for the end of his shift to ‘discuss’ the short change.

This one gave her no trouble, pushing the properly-charged credit chit back through the slit to her and even attempting something that looked like it was supposed to be a smile. The damaged jaw made it look more like a grimace, but she dutifully smiled back, gathered her containers and ice and made for the exit.

She looked over her shoulder as she was leaving, and noticed he watched her all the way out. Well, no wonder. She had to make a comical sight, what with the miscellany of containers she’d brought to get ice from the broken machine and the two lumpy and uncomfortably clammy bags she clutched to her bosom. She didn’t like being watched here on Rusthoven, though, for any reason, humorous or not.

Never mind. Let me just get this back to Tarrant. Still, she felt a bit uneasy all the way back, and kept looking over her shoulder, finding no one, and feeling unsettled all the same.

*

The woman had hardly stepped out the door before the clerk was on the com to the university security barracks. Bruno had claimed that he’d know the woman Val was looking for with only a sketchy description and, stars, was he right. You didn’t see many women like that around this area of town. Too classy looking.

“Give me Bruno.” The man behind the counter shifted his somewhat emaciated form on the stool. “I don’t care if he’s asleep. He’s going to want to talk to me. Trust me on this. Yeah, yeah, I’ll hold.”

Visions of credits in Dak Tanneva’s head. True, according to his friend in security, Val hadn’t gotten her business started yet, but if that woman was an example of her wares … he wished he had enough money to be a customer. But he’d pick up some just for letting Bruno know where the woman was hanging out and with the lousy pay he got from this job, any little extra was welcome.

“Bruno. Yeah, this is Dak. You know that woman you called me about this afternoon…?”

*

Kaeta couldn’t identify the noise that issued from downstairs, but she was tolerably certain that if it didn’t cease and desist soon, she would be driven out of what was left of her mind.

Blam! Blam!

That was enough. Shutting down her terminal, she exited her study at a velocity that sent members of the family who happened to be in the hall scuttling for positions against the wall. Well, yes, she hadn’t been in the best of moods recently, but that didn’t mean everyone had to act like she was a tyrant who’d blast them in their tracks if they didn’t make way.

She had to admit it was somewhat satisfying, though.

Another chorus of blams accompanied her as she descended the stairs. “What in the hell are you doing down here? Building an addition to the hou--?”

Some of her irritation faded at the sight of the buxom, curly-haired young woman at the foot of the stairs. Getting her together with Aurora was one of the things Lieesb had done right. When Kaeta had married into the Rowan family, Aurora had been an underage pest, and Kaeta might have continued to consider her nothing but an admittedly brilliant pest even once she came of age had Lieesb not arranged a ‘surprise’ weekend for the two of them.

Of course, the arrangement hadn’t done Lieesb any harm, either. He’d made her happy and he’d demonstrated to those who kept track of such things that he had an unusual amount of power for a under-fifty male but wasn’t showing any sign of jealousy. Some people—the people who’d resented Lieesb since he became her second-in-command—saw it as controlling access to the matriarch by surrounding her with his people, but neither of them had worried about that crowd.

Not until recently, at any rate. Not until Lieesb started failing at his job.

Aurora, typically, ignored Kaeta’s irritation. “We’re putting up some of the decorations for the Harvest Festival. It’s less than a week now, you know.”

“Isn’t Lieesb in charge of getting ready for the Festival?” He always had been before. How many tasks was he unloading on other members of the family? And how long had this been going on? She’d always trusted Lieesb to run large parts of the family business, more so since she had become one of the ruling troika, and had never bothered to check on his progress, as she might have with anyone else. Had that been a mistake?

“He’s busy trying to solve the wheat blight problem. My department is slow right now, so I told him I’d take over. Is there some reason that’s a problem?”

True enough, Aurora’s busy season tended to run from midwinter to late spring. Right now, she was pretty much at her leisure and could take on any project she wanted.

“No, I suppose not.” And asking Aurora’s assistants to hammer up the decorations more quietly wouldn’t be too reasonable, either. Unfortunately, Kaeta wasn’t feeling terribly reasonable.

“Aren’t you being a little hard on Lieesb?” Aurora tended to be the peacemaker in the family, and she’d often played that role between Kaeta and Lieesb, who both tended toward hot tempers and loud arguments.

But this time it wasn’t just a question of ruffled feathers. “He has to solve the problem, Aurora. That’s his job. If he can’t do it …” She let the obvious end of the sentence trail off to nothingness. She didn’t want to put that thought into words just yet.

Aurora hesitated a moment, waved the decorators back to the work they’d temporarily abandoned, and moved closer to Kaeta. “Someone in one of the smaller families called me yesterday with a possible solution to the problem.”

“Yes?” That Aurora didn’t name either the family or the person who had called gave Kaeta some idea of how much she would like the idea.

“An off-world company contacted them, and offered all the fungicide we would need—not only for their family, but any family on Fargone.”

“And the catch is—“

“They need proprietary information about our genetic engineering in order to construct the formula.”

“Never!” Kaeta spoke louder than she intended and everyone in the hall turned to look at her. She waved them back to their work impatiently. “Who was stupid enough to believe that?”

Aurora shrugged noncommittally. “The off-worlders presented themselves as a start-up business looking for fame and fortune in the agribusiness sector. That would be relatively innocent.”

“And relatively unbelievable.”

A wry grin slid over Aurora’s face. “That, too.”

“Not to mention how unlikely it is they’d come up with anything in time to save the current crop. Where do you think this offer is really coming from?”

Aurora tended to ignore politics, both familial and galactic, keeping her attention on her job of breeding people and her hobby of breeding flowers, but she had a good mind when she could be forced to use it on anything besides genetics. Besides Lieesb, there was no one she’d rather bounce ideas off of, and it seemed she didn’t have Lieesb right now. He seemed to be lying low rather than risk getting another taste of her temper.

And, besides, she wasn’t sure she trusted his opinion at the moment.

Aurora carefully removed a dried flower from arrangement she was working on and set it aside. “Lieesb has been trying to keep the extent of the problem quiet, hasn’t he?”

“Naturally. Though if he’s doing as good a job at that as everything else—“

For that she got a reproving look. “Some word could’ve gotten out, just the same. We can’t control the gossip every family on the planet indulges in with their off-world contact.”

Lieesb used to be able at least to steer the direction of the gossip, though, Kaeta thought, so it would be to Fargone’s advantage rather than bringing wild and unsuitable business propositions to her door. She hated the past tense she kept using when thinking on Lieesb these days, so kept her mouth shut, merely nodding her reluctant agreement.

“So,” continued Aurora, “who’s the most likely to take advantage of the situation?”

Kaeta nibbled at her fingernail; all her nails were down to their nubs by now. She be eating her fingers down to the knuckles next. “Could be anyone who wants to take advantage of the situation to get our technology at bargain-basement prices. Name someone.”

“The Destinians,” Aurora said promptly, clipping another flower.

“Possible,” Kaeta admitted. “Because of that research they did when they found that neutrotope would cure their fungus, they know more about agricultural funguses than most. And they wouldn’t mind getting into the hybrid seed business.”

“You don’t think it’s them, though.”

Kaeta shrugged uncomfortably. “It could be. But it’s my impression that they’re not up to an operation on this scale. And, if they were, I think they’d come straight to the troika with it, as a straight business proposition. They don’t seem the type for agricultural espionage to me.”

“So who?”

“I don’t have enough information yet to even guess, but I’ll tell you one thing. Whoever got that information could do more than corner the market on fungicide—they could engineer crop ailments which only they could fix. At high prices, of course. What your anonymous family suggested could cost all the families on the planet for a very long time.” And she hated to think of a family so stupid they couldn’t figure that out, though she could think of several without even trying very hard.

“So what shall I tell them?”

A very loud no came to mind, but Kaeta supposed the seriousness of the situation called for something less bald than that. Some of the smaller families could read this as the troika trying to hold on to control and keep the smaller families from making business arrangements to their own advantage, and they had to keep that idea from spreading. Or the next meeting of the legislature could be even more pure chaos than ever. “Try to stall them. The fungicide is out there—we know that, so there’s no real need to formulate a new strain. We just have to find out who’s hoarding it and why.”

Aurora nodded. “I think I can stall my source, what with the Harvest Festival coming up and everything.” This time of year people tended to have their minds on festivities rather than work, a yearly happening that could work to their advantage this time. She put the finishing touch on the arrangement and looked through a veil of curls at Kaeta. “Should I come up to your rooms later?”

Kaeta hesitated. She could desperately use having her mind taken off the problems that seemed to be constantly multiplying, and with someone she could trust.

Since Lieesb had been taken off that number, there seemed to be too few, and Aurora was one of them. “I’d like that. About seven o’clock would be good. And—“ This wasn’t reasonable, but sometimes a matriarch was entitled not to be reasonable, and if ever there was a time, this was it. “—Could you have the decorators hammer just a little more quietly?”

*

She had to get out of here, if only for a few minutes.

Dayna glanced around at her crewmates. None of them had moved appreciably for the last few hours. Vila sat huddled against the wall, tossing a credit chit in the air and catching it, watching its lazy circuits as if it were the only point of interest in the universe. Soolin sat cross-legged on the bed she shared with Dayna, weaving her hair into a complicated style Dayna had never seen on her before.

And, like the centerpiece of a grisly banquet, Tarrant lay limply against his pillows, bracketed by the bags of nearly-melted ice, with Avon sitting by his side and occasionally feeding him sips of water from a battered metal cup. Tarrant’s quiet sobs had lessened as the ice brought down his fever, though she guessed he was still in considerable pain.

No one said anything. The only sounds in the room for hours were Tarrant’s soft cries and the metal chit hitting Vila’s hand before being sent skyward again.

She couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Soolin, if you’ll give me your credit chit, I’ll go get something better for Tarrant to drink. He could use a drink with electrolytes and such in it.” It wasn’t altogether a bogus errand. The fever had caused Tarrant to sweat what seemed quarts of liquid and he needed something better than tepid water to replace what he’d lost.

The other woman started, as if she’d been sunk deep within herself. Wondering what they’d do next probably, as they all were. Except Avon, who seemed to Dayna not to be thinking at all. Soolin untangled herself from her cross-legged position and got up to lay one slim hand on Tarrant’s sweaty forehead, at the same time taking in a glance his equally sweat-soaked torso. “You’re right. He needs to replace those fluids.” Taking the chit out of her hip pocket, she tossed it over.

Dayna escaped the room with a mixture of gratitude and guilt, scarcely looking around her as she crossed the garbage-stewn street. Maybe it would be better if someone did turn them in, she thought morosely as she shouldered open the store’s defective sliding door. This way, they were just dying by inches, sitting in a moldering hotel room watching one another weaken day by day. And watching Tarrant just try to survive pain that was worse, she thought, than any of them could guess.

After a lengthy search, she found a reinforced juice behind some containers of aging cereal. That gave her plenty of time to think of the consequences of being captured by the Federation. It would put them out of their misery, all right, but it wouldn’t be a clean death … look at what they had done to Tarrant. They’d all be screaming in the same agony before the Federation let them die.

Look at what they did to her father. She paid for her purchase, and headed back to the hotel. He faced these same kind of choices … what was he thinking when he was on the run from Federation goons? Of course, he’d finally found a hideaway and survived longer than it seemed they would. Someone could grab them any moment …

And did as Dayna stepped into the hallway of the hotel.

The plasteen juice container bounced to the floor as the thug attacked her from the rear, bending her right arm behind her back in a painful grip. He wrapped his other hand around her neck, squeezing just enough to let her know he was in control.

“Now, you just come along with me,” he said in a thick, barely understandable provincial accent. “Val sent me to come get you to work for her. And what Val wants, I makes sure she gets, ya see?”

Val, hmm? She thought Val must be the madam who’d accosted her in the university showers earlier in the day. But she didn’t really care.

This thug promised to give her a fight, and she’d been spoiling for one for weeks.

She bent forward and twisted to her left, straightening out her captured arm and relieving most of the pressure. So far, so good. She looked back over her shoulder, noting that the thug mostly seemed surprised that she could defend herself to that extent.

Before he could recover, she swung her left leg back to kick at his groin, at the same time using her captured right hand to grab his arm, and pull him closer into the kick, intensifying the effect. Almost too easy. But it was fun and she hadn’t had this kind of fun for far too long.

The thug howled and tried to pull away, but Dayna had a good hold on his arm by now, and was able to keep him from escaping her hold while she kicked back again and again and …

“Stop right there.”

Damn. Dayna had been so engrossed in the fight that she’d failed to keep an eye out for a backup, and here one was, complete with gun. A recognizable backup, too … it was Val the madam herself, sans university uniform, but complete with a serviceable-looking gun that Dayna didn’t care to argue with.

“Step away from Bruno now and apologize nicely.”

Dayna stepped away, but didn’t apologize. Enough was enough, after all. She kept a wary eye on Val. If there was only some way to get the drop on her … But even though supposedly Val wanted her alive, Dayna didn’t trust her to be intelligent enough not to injure her, at the least, and the last thing the crew needed was another casualty.

Unfortunately, Val had obviously thought of the possibility of Dayna attacking her , as well, and kept more than an arm’s length from Dayna. “How delightfully athletic you are, my dear. That should come in handy in the jobs you’ll doing for me. And I can guarantee you’ll make enough money that you’ll be able to move out of this dump. Just think, a career that will be lucrative for both of us.”

“I think not.” A welcome voice came from the end of the hall, and Dayna turned to see an even more welcome form: Soolin with her gun drawn. She must have heard Bruno’s howling and come out to investigate. “We personally prefer careers that are lucrative only for ourselves. But never mind that now. First, I suggest you hand your gun over to my friend.”

Looking flustered, Val did as she was told.

“Now I think we should move this party inside our room. We don’t want anyone coming along and interrupting an extremely interesting conversation, do we?” Soolin waved her gun toward their room to indicate direction. “This way, please.”

*

“Amateurs.”

Nearly everyone had shifted position since Val and Bruno had appeared on the scene, and they made, Soolin thought, quite a strange little grouping.

She had the two sorry representatives of Rusthoven’s criminal element backed against one wall, where the entire crew could keep a watch on them. The madam stood, but thanks to Dayna’s handiwork, Bruno could only manage a painful kind of crouch, using the wall as a support. They’d had to drag him into the room, since he couldn’t manage walking on his own.

When Dayna did a job, she did it thoroughly.

Tarrant remained on the bed, of course, and Avon poured out a cup of the juice they’d retrieved from the hall, his gun lying beside him on the bed within easy reach. Vila hovered uncertainly behind Avon, as if he expected the other man to burst into a homicidal fury any moment.

Of course, none of them had much of an idea of what Avon might do. Not since GP. But Soolin didn’t think he was operating with his normal ruthlessness. It was more like … she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

So instead she cocked an eyebrow at Dayna. “Amateurs?” she echoed questioningly.

“This gun is totally inoperable.” Dayna tossed the gun, top over handgrip, and caught it again. “She came after me with a gun that doesn’t work.”

“Told you,” Soolin said to Vila with a touch of complacency.

Vila grinned back with a touch of the carefree manner she remembered from early days on Xenon Base, and Soolin realized how much she’d missed the give and take of wit. Not all their exchanges had been hurtful. Not before GP, at any rate, though she fancied the change in Vila had come before.

“Even so.” Soolin found herself starting at Avon’s voice—he’d spoken so seldom recently—and losing all trace of the humor the exchange with Vila had engendered. The low voice reminded her of a recording of a tiger’s growl she’d once heard … quiet but deadly. Deadly but with no emotion. “Dayna should have been more careful about allowing this, ah, gentleman to tail her back here. Still, it should be fairly easy to dispose of the bodies in this part of town.”

Soolin exchanged a quick glance with Dayna at the open use of her name. True, just her first name, but … Dayna shrugged, seeming as much of a loss as to Avon’s motives as Soolin.

The lightness left Vila’s expression, as well, leaving only the bitterness he constantly showed around Avon now. “And you’ll enjoy it, won’t you? Killing them, I mean.”

“Oh, yes.” Even Soolin felt a bit disturbed at Avon’s silky tone. “I rather think that I will.”

With the last word, he seemed to transfer his attention completely from the two captives, focusing on Tarrant. He eased Tarrant up further against the pillows so that he could drink more easily from the cup Avon still held. “Try to drink a little more, Tarrant. You’ve lost a lot of fluid tonight.”

Val and Bruno both looked terrified. Nor could Soolin blame them. There was something particularly disturbing about his gentle manner with Tarrant when contrasted with his homicidal promises to other two. In fact, Soolin suddenly realized, they could very well believe Tarrant to be a victim of Avon who was being coddled to make him ready for another round of torture.

The woman’s face certainly looked like someone facing a stone killer. Not that that was an altogether bad thing.

“Listen,” Val said desperately. “We can make a deal here. You have two beautiful women who could making you a lot of money.”

Avon stared at them with fanthomless dark eyes. She’d seen ruthlessness in Avon before and this wasn’t it. She’d seen people kill for sport before and that wasn’t in this gaze, either. This was more like … a death wish turned inside out.

He could kill Val and Bruno and it wouldn’t make her weep, but she didn’t want Avon indulging any death wishes, extroverted or not. They needed him too much and it occurred to her that an extroverted death wish could turn introverted without much notice.

“Actually—“ She interrupted Val’s plea in voice that gave no indication that Avon’s performance had disturbed her at all. “I think they could make us some money, if not in the way they have in mind. Vila, why don’t you search them, keeping a special eye out for bank cards, university identification, and, of course, credit chits. I’ll wager they have something useful on them.”

Vila’s smile returned, if not quite as fully as before. “My pleasure.”

Soolin appreciated working with a professional like Vila, who carried out the search nimbly, never putting himself between her gun and their victims, and finding several hidden pockets as well as the wallets they carried openly. Within a few minutes a neat stack of chits and cards lay on the ragged bedspread beside Avon.

He poked through it with one finger. “Not a great deal of cash … it might buy us a few more nights in this fine hostelry, but nothing much more. No reason to keep them alive.”

Soolin wasn’t sure whether he was trying to further terrify the duo or was just being difficult. That he’d openly used Dayna’s name suggested that he expected Val’s and Bruno’s obituaries to hit the local criminal circuit shortly, but Soolin thought she might be able to convince him otherwise. And that it would be best for all of them if she did.

“Look a bit closer,” she suggested. “I expect Val, at least, has an account with the university credit union and very possibly a pension plan that she could borrow from. Of course, she’d have to give us the access codes … maybe she’d like to negotiate.”

Avon went through the cards again, this time looking at them more carefully, though from his expression one would deduce he had little interest in the question of making a deal with the madam. “Ah, yes, you appear to be correct. One credit union card which seems to have more than one account attached to it. Perhaps she’d care to trade the access number for a swift death.”

Val went white. Well, at least there would be little trouble convincing them that Avon meant business with his threats. Avon in this mood made her nervous, never mind two small-time thugs who’d never seen him in a murderous mood before. Though she had to admit this was beyond what even she’d seen in Avon before.

“Not necessary,” Soolin said coolly. “I think we can trust Val to give us the correct numbers, then keep her mouth shut about ever having seen us. Isn’t that right, Val?” Not that she cared particularly about the latter … even if the criminals wanted to have contact with Federation officials, she expected the combined accounts of Val and Bruno would get them away from this area of Rusthoven, if not off planet altogether.

“Yes, I’ll give you the number. I won’t say a word.” Val was nearly incoherent in her reassurances.

Avon shrugged, as if the matter wasn’t worth discussing. “Very well, but you will take me to an access terminal and stay with me while I clean out the accounts, in case there are any … problems.” He scooped the gun off the bed and ostentatiously tucked it in a pocket just inside his jacket, where it would be close to hand.

“There won’t be any problems,” Val promised, almost feverishly.

Vila moved closer to the bed and to Avon’s gun hand, Soolin noticed. “I’ll come along, too, help you find the terminals on campus. After yesterday, I have a pretty good idea of the layout of the university. And I’ve worked with credit machines before.”

Soolin wondered just what Vila had in mind in accompanying Avon. If he thought he could stop Avon in a murderous mood, good luck to him. More likely, considering Vila’s attitude toward Avon recently, he expected Avon to take the money and run. But Soolin found herself more worried that he might do something that would get himself killed. At any rate … She nodded. “Just as well if he has some backup.” Whether he wants it or not.

Dayna glanced out the window. “It’s just about dawn. Maybe this would be a good time to start out. I think the public terminals at the university open pretty early, but there shouldn’t be many students around yet. If you hurry, you can get both Val’s and Bruno’s accounts cleared out before the first classes start.” She glanced disdainfully at Val’s muscle, who’d recovered enough to lean against the wall rather than lay against it. “Bruno probably doesn’t have much in his account, but every little bit counts. Right?”

“Right,” said Vila in a heartfelt tone. All of them had had their fill of being short of credits.

Avon stood slowly, his right hand inside his jacket, obviously resting on his gun, the other hand holding a neat pile of plasteen cards. Soolin would generally have grave doubts about herding two captives through a public area with a hidden weapon … it would be too easy to break away and call for help.

Except that anyone looking at Avon’s face would have no doubt that he’d shoot and shoot to kill, no matter where they were and no matter who might catch him two seconds later. Looking at Val and Bruno, she thought they’d definitely gotten the message.

“So,” said Avon, with the air of someone proposing a pleasant stroll through the park, “shall we go?”