MAIRI HANRAHAN THOUGHT it odd that Sallah had not rung at lunchtime to tell her she was delayed. With so many small ones to feed, every mother tried to be there at mealtimes. Mairi got one of her older children to feed Cara instead, thinking that something very important must have demanded Sallah’s attention.

None of the people at the met tower or admin building expected any contact from Ongola or Kenjo while the shuttle was moving through the ionized atmosphere. Ezra, seated at the desk of the voice-activated interface, could follow its course via the activated monitor screens on board the Yokohama. The Mariposa was closing fast and soon reached the docking port. “Safely there,” Ezra announced when he rang through to both tower and administration.

Half an hour later, children playing at the edge of the grid came screaming back to their teacher about the dead men. Actually, Ongola was still barely alive. Paul met the medic team at the infirmary.

“He’ll live, but he’s lost more blood than I like,” the doctor told the admiral. “What ’n hell happened to him and Kenjo?”

“How was Kenjo killed?” Paul asked.

“The old blunt instrument. The paras found a bloodied strut nearby. Probably that. Kenjo never knew what hit him.”

Paul was not sure he did either, for his legs suddenly would not support him. The doctor beckoned fiercely for one of the paras to help the admiral to a seat and poured a glass of quikal.

Paul tried to dismiss the eager hands. The implications of the two deaths greatly disturbed him. There was no antidote for Kenjo’s loss, though the wretched quikal eased the intense shock that had rocked him. In the back of his mind, as he knocked back the drink, he wondered where Kenjo had cached the rest of the fuel. Why, Paul seethed at himself, had he not asked the man before? He could have done so any time before or after the last few flights Kenjo had taken in the Mariposa. As admiral, he knew exactly how much fuel had been left in the gig on its last drop. Now it was too late! Unless Ongola knew. He had mentioned to Paul that there was not much left at the original site, but that Kenjo had been supplying the Mariposa. The figures Sallah had initially reported to Ongola indicated a lot more fuel than Paul had seen in that cave the other night. Well, the misappropriation—yes, that was the right term—had had a final appropriate usage. Maybe Kenjo’s wife knew where he had stored the remainder.

Paul consoled himself with that thought. Kenjo’s wife would certainly know if there were more fuel sacks at the Honshu stake. He forced himself to deal with present issues: a man had been murdered and another lay close to death on a planet that had, until that moment, witnessed no capital crime.

“Ongola will survive,” the doctor was saying, pouring Paul a second shot. “He’s got a splendid constitution, and we’ll work any miracle required. We would probably have saved Kenjo if we’d got there earlier. Brain-dead. Drink this—your color’s lousy.”

Paul finished the quikal and put the glass down with a decisive movement. He took a deep breath and rose to his feet. “I’m fine, thanks. Get on with saving Ongola. We’ll need to know what happened when he recovers consciousness. Keep the rumors down, people!” he added, addressing the others in the room.

He strode out of the emergency facility and turned immediately for the building that housed the interface chamber and Ezra. As he walked, he reviewed the puzzle that rattled his orderly mind. He had seen the Mariposa take off. Who had flown her? He stopped off to collect Emily from her office, briefing her on the calamity. Ezra was surprised by the arrival of both admiral and governor; the Mariposa’s current flight was being treated as routine.

“Kenjo’s dead and Ongola seriously injured, Ezra,” Paul said as soon as he had closed and locked the door behind them. “So, who’s flying the Mariposa?”

“Gods in the heavens!” Ezra leapt to his feet and pointed to the monitor, which clearly showed the safely docked Mariposa. “The flight was precalculated to hit the right window, but the docking process was left to the pilot. It was very smoothly done. Not everyone can do that.”

“I’ll run a check on the whereabouts of pilots, Paul,” Emily said, picking up a handset.

Paul glanced at the monitor. “I don’t think we need to do that. Call—” Paul had started to say “Ongola” and rubbed his hand across his face. “Who’s at the met tower?”

“Jake Chernoff and Dieter Clissman,” Emily reported.

“Then ask Jake if there’s any unmodified sleds on the grid. Find out exactly where Stev Kimmer, Nabol Nahbi, and Bart Lemos are. And—” Paul held up a warning hand. “—if anyone’s seen Avril Bitra anywhere.”

“Avril?” Ezra echoed, and then clamped his mouth firmly shut.

Suddenly Paul swore in a torrent of abusive language that made even Ezra regard him with amazement, and slammed out of the room. Emily concentrated on finding the pilots and had completed her check before Paul returned. He leaned back against the closed door, catching his breath.

“Stev, Nabhi, and Lemos are accounted for. Where did you go?” Emily asked.

“To check Ongola’s space suit. Doc says he’ll recover from his injuries. The strut just missed severing the shoulder muscle and leaving him a cripple. But—” Paul held up a crystal packet between forefinger and thumb. “No one is going to get very far in the Mariposa.” He nodded grimly as Ezra realized what the admiral was holding. “One of the more essential parts of the guidance system! Ongola had not yet put it in place.”

“Then how did—Avril?” Emily asked, pausing for confirmation. Paul nodded slowly. “Yes, it has to be Avril, doesn’t it? But why would she want to get to the Yoko?”

“First step to leaving the system, Emily. We’ve been stupidly lax. Yes, I know we have this,” he acknowledged when Emily pointed to the chip panel. “But we shouldn’t have allowed her to get that far in the first place. And we all knew what she was like. Sallah warned us, and the years . . .”

“And recent unusual events,” Ezra put in, mildly hinting that Paul need not excoriate himself.

“We should have guarded the Mariposa as long as she’d an ounce of fuel in her.”

“We also ought to have had the sense to ask Kenjo where he was getting all that fuel,” Ezra added.

“We knew that,” Emily said with a wry grin.

“You did?” Ezra was amazed.

“At least Ongola took no chances,” Paul went on, wincing as he remembered the sight of the man’s battered shoulder and neck. “This—” He put the guidance chip very carefully down on the shelf above his worktop. “—was Ongola’s special precaution, done with Kenjo’s complete concurrence.”

Emily sat down heavily in the nearest chair. “So where does that leave us now?”

“The next move would appear to be Avril’s.” Ezra shook his head sadly. “She’s got more than enough fuel to get back down.”

“That is not her intention,” Paul said.

“Unfortunately,” Emily said, “she has a hostage, whether she knows it or not. Sallah Telgar-Andiyar is also missing.”

 

Sallah returned to consciousness aware of severe discomfort and a throbbing pain in her left foot. She was bound tightly and efficiently in an uncomfortable position, her hands behind her back and secured to her tied feet. She was floating with her side just brushing the floor of the spacecraft; the lack of gravity told her that she was no longer on Pern. There was a rhythmic but unpleasant background noise, along with the sounds of things clattering and slipping about.

Then she recognized the monotonous and vicious sounds to be the curses of Avril Bitra.

“What in hell did you do to the guidance systems, Telgar?” she asked, kicking at the bound woman’s ribs.

The kick lifted Sallah off the floor, and she found herself floating within inches of the face of an enraged Avril Bitra. Probably the only reason Sallah was still breathing was because the cabin of the Mariposa had its own oxygen supply. Kenjo would have charged the tanks up to full, wouldn’t he? Sallah asked herself in a moment of panic as she continued to float beyond Avril. The other woman was suited; the helmet sat on the rack above the pilot’s seat, ready for use.

Avril reached up and grabbed Sallah’s arm. “What do you know about this? Tell me and be quick about it, or I’ll evacuate you and save the air for me to breathe!”

Sallah had no doubt that the woman was capable of doing just that. “I know nothing about anything, Avril. I saw you stalking Ongola and Kenjo and knew you were up to something. So I followed you and got in the airlock just as you took off.”

“You followed me?” Avril lashed out with a fist. The impact caused both women to bounce apart. Avril steadied herself on a handhold. “How dare you?”

“Well, as I hadn’t seen you in months and longed to know how you were faring, it seemed a good idea at the time.” Hang for the fleece, hang for the sheep, Sallah thought. She could not shrug her shoulders. What had she done to her foot? It was an aching mess.

“Bloody hell. You’ve flown this frigging crate. How do I override the preflight instructions? You must know that.”

“I might if you’d let me see the console.” She saw hope, and then manic doubt, in Avril’s eyes. Sallah was not lying. “How could I possibly tell from over here? I don’t know where we are. I’ve been just another Thread sledder.” Even to a woman slightly paranoid, the truth would be obvious. Sallah warned herself to be very careful. “Just let me look.”

She did not ask to be untied although that was what she desperately wanted—needed. Her right shoulder must have been bruised by her fall into the cabin, and all the muscles were spasming.

“Don’t think I’ll untie you,” Avril warned, and contemptuously she pushed Sallah across the cabin. Grabbing a handhold, she corrected Sallah’s spin to a painful halt against the command console. “Look!”

Sallah did, though hanging slightly upside down was not the best position for the job. She had to think carefully, for Avril had piloted shuttles and knew something of their systems. But the Mariposa, though small, was designed to traverse interplanetary distances, dock with a variety of stations or other craft, and had the sophisticated controls to perform a considerable variety of maneuvers in space and on a planetary surface. Sallah dared to hope that much of its instrumentation would be unfamiliar to Avril.

“To find out what this ship just did,” she instructed, “hit the return button on the bottom tier of the greens. No, the port side.”

Avril jerked at Sallah, tweaking strained arm and back muscles and jamming Sallah’s head against the viewscope. Sallah’s long hair was freed completely from its pins and flowed over her face.

“Don’t get cute!” Avril snapped, her finger hovering on the appropriate button. “This one?”

Sallah nodded, floating away again. Avril punched the button with one hand and hauled her back into position with the other. Then she caught the handhold to keep herself in place. Every action has a reaction, Sallah thought, trying to clear her head of pain and confusion.

The monitor came up with a preflight instruction plan.

“The Mariposa was programmed to dock here on the Yoko.” It was nice to know where she was, Sallah reflected. “Once you hit the power, you couldn’t alter its course.”

“Well,” Avril said, her tone altering considerably. “I wanted to come here first anyhow. I just wanted to come on my own.” Sallah, hair falling over her face, felt a lessening of the tension that emanated from the woman. Some of the beauty returned to a face no longer contorted with frustration. “I don’t need you hanging about, then.” Avril reached up and gave Sallah’s body a calculated shove that sent her to the opposite end of the cabin, to bump harmlessly against the other wall and then hover there. “Well, I’ll just get to work.”

How long Sallah was suspended in that fashion she did not know. She managed to tilt her head and get her hair to float away from her eyes, but she did not dare to move much—action produced reaction, and she did not wish to draw attention to herself. She ached all over, but the pain in her foot was almost unbearable.

A tirade of malevolent and resentful oaths spun from Avril’s lips. “None of the programs run, of all the frigging luck. Nothing runs!”

Sallah had just enough time to duck her head to avoid Avril’s projectile arrival against her. As it was, she went head over heels in a spin that Avril, laughing gleefully, assisted until the rotation made Sallah retch.

“You bitch woman!” Avril stopped Sallah before she could expel more vomit into the air. “Okay! If that’s the way of it, you know what I need to know. And you’re going to tell me, or I’ll kill you by inches.” A spaceman’s knife, with its many handlepacked implements, sliced across the top of Sallah’s nose.

Then she felt the blade none too gently cutting the bindings on her hands and feet. Blood rushed through starved arteries, and her strained muscles reacted painfully. If she had not been in free-fall, she would have collapsed. As it was, the agony of release made her sob and shake.

“Clean up your spew first,” Avril said, shoving a slop jar at her.

Sallah did as she was told, grateful for the lack of gravity, grateful for the release, and wondering what she could do to gain an upper hand. But she had little opportunity to enjoy her freedom, for Avril had other ways of securing her prisoner’s cooperation.

Before Sallah realized what was happening, Avril had secured a tether to the injured foot and tweaked the line. Pain, piercing like a shard of glass, shot through Sallah’s leg and up to her groin. There was too little left in her stomach to throw up. Avril jerked Sallah over to the console, pushed her into the pilot’s chair, and tied her down, twiching her improvised lead line to remind Sallah of her helplessness.

“Now, check the fuel on board, check the quantity in the Yoko’s tanks—I’ve done that, I know the answers, so don’t try anything clever.” A jerk against Sallah’s injured foot reinforced the threat. “Then enter a program that gets me out of this wretched asshole of a midden system.”

Sallah did as she was told, though her head ached and her eyes blurred repeatedly. She could not suppress her surprise at the amount of fuel in the Mariposa’s tanks.

“Yes, someone was holding back on it. You?” There was a jerk on the line.

“Kenjo, I suspect,” Sallah replied coolly, managing to suppress a cry. She was determined not to give Avril any satisfaction.

“Fussy Fusi? Yes, that computes. I thought he’d given up all too tamely! Where did he hide it?” The line tightened. Sallah had to bite hard on her lip against a sob.

“Probably at his stake. It’s back of beyond. No one goes there. He could hide anything there.”

Avril snorted and remained silent. Sallah made herself breathe deeply, forcing more adrenaline into her system to combat pain, fatigue, and fear.

“All right, compute me a course to . . .” Avril consulted a notebook. “Here.”

Only because Sallah already knew the coordinates did she recognize the numbers. Avril wished to go to the system nearest them, a system that, though uninhabited, was closer to the populated sectors of space. The course would stretch the Mariposa to the end of available fuel, even if Avril also drained the Yoko’s tanks. It gave Sallah no consolation to think that the little ship might drift for centuries with Avril safe and composed in deep sleep. Unless, just maybe, Ongola had tampered with the sleep tanks, too. She liked that idea. But she knew Ongola too well to presume that kind of foresight.

Unfortunately, the Avrils of the galaxy could make themselves at home in any time and culture. So if Avril went into deep sleep, eventually someone, or something, would rescue her and the Mariposa. Sallah did not need to see them to know that Avril had several fortunes’ worth of gemstones and precious metals aboard the Mariposa. There had never been any doubt in anyone’s mind why Avril had chosen Big Island as her stake, but no one had cared. But then, no one would have imagined that she would be mad enough to attempt to leave Pern, even with Threadfall threatening the planet.

Wondering why Avril, who was an astrogator, after all, had not been able to complete laying in such a simple course, Sallah did as she was ordered. She had more experience than Avril did with the Mariposa’s drive board. But the program was not accepted.ERROR 259 AT LINE 57465534511 was the message.

Avril jerked hard on the line, and Sallah hissed against the burning, crippling pain in her foot.

“Try again. There’s more than one way of entering a course.”

Sallah obeyed. “I’ll have to go around the existing parameters.”

“Reset the entire effing thing but plot that course,” Avril told her.

As Sallah began the more laborious deviation into the command center of the gig’s course computer, she was aware that Avril had picked up a long narrow cylinder from the rack by her helmet. She fiddled with it, humming tunelessly under her breath, seemingly thoroughly delighted with herself.

When Sallah finally tapped the “return” tab, she became aware of Avril’s intense interest in the flickering console. She chanced a look at what the woman had been fondling. It was a homemade capsule. Not a homer—they were thicker and longer—but something more like the standard beacon. Suddenly she clearly saw Avril’s plan.

Avril would take the Mariposa as far away from the Rukbat system as possible and then direct the distress beacon toward shipping lanes. Every planetary system involved with the Federated Sentient Planets, and some life-forms who were not, traced distress beacons to origin. The devices, automatically released when a ship was destroyed, were often traced by those who wished to turn whatever profit they could on the flotsam.

Avril’s plan was not as insane as it seemed. Sallah felt certain that Stev Kimmer had intended to take the trip with her, to be rescued by the distress beacon he had made for her.

Words flashed on the screen. NO ACCESS WITHOUT STANDARD FCP/120/GM.

“Fuck it! That’s all I could get out of it. Try again, Telgar.” Avril pressed Sallah’s foot against the base of the console module, increasing the pain to the point where Sallah felt herself losing consciousness. Avril viciously pinched her left breast. “You don’t pass out on me, Telgar!”

“Look,” Sallah said, her voice rather more shaken than she liked, “I’ve tried twice, you’ve tried. I’ve tried the fail-safe I was taught. Someone anticipated you, Bitra. Open up this panel and I’ll tell you if we’ve been wasting effort.” She was trembling not only with pain but with the effort not to relieve her bladder. But she did not dare to ask even that favor.

Swearing, her face livid with frustration and rage, Avril deftly removed the panel, kicking the console in her frenzy. Sallah leaned as far away as her bonds permitted, hoping to escape any stray blows.

“How did they do it? What did they take, Telgar, or I’ll start carving you up.” Avril flattened Sallah’s left hand over the exposed chips, and her knife blade cut through the little finger to the bone. Pain and shock lanced through Sallah’s body. “You don’t need this one at all!”

“Blood hangs in the air just like vomit and urine, Bitra. And if you don’t stop, you’ll have both in free-fall.”

They locked eyes in a contest of wills.

“What . . . did . . . they . . . remove?” With each word Avril sawed against the little finger. Sallah screamed. It felt good to scream, and she knew that it would complete the picture of her in Avril’s mind: soft. Sallah had never felt harder in her life.

“Guidance. They removed the guidance chip. You can’t go anywhere.”

The blade left her finger, and Sallah stared in fascination at the drops of blood that formed and floated. The contemplation took her mind off Avril’s ranting until the woman snagged her shoulder.

“Are all the spare parts on the planet? Did they strip everything from the Yoko?”

Sallah forced her attention away from the blood and the pain, clamping down on all but the important consideration: how to thwart Avril without seeming to. “I’d say that there would be guidance chips left in the main board that could be substituted.”

“There’d better be.” Avril slipped the knife through the cord that bound Sallah to the pilot’s seat. “Okay. We suit up and head for the bridge.”

“Not before I go to the head, Avril,” Sallah replied. She nodded at her hand. “And attend to this. You don’t want blood on the chips, do you.” She let herself scream with the pain of the jerk to her foot. She felt she had handled her submission well. Avril would have suspected a more immediate capitulation. “And another boot.”

Finally Sallah could spare a dispassionate look at her foot. Half her heel was missing, and a puddle of blood rocked slowly back and forth, moved by the agitation of Avril’s kicks.

“Wait!” Avril had also noticed the blood. She spun away to the lockers by the hatch and came back with a space suit and a dirty cloth. “There! Strip!”

Sallah tied up her finger with the least soiled strip of cloth and used the rest to bind her foot. It hurt badly, and she could feel that fragments of her work boot had been jammed into the flesh. She was allowed the use of the head, while Avril watched and made snide cracks about maternal changes in a woman’s body. Sallah pretended to be more humiliated than she actually felt. It made Avril feel so superior. The higher the summit, the harder the fall, Sallah thought grimly. She struggled into the space suit.

 

“She’s left the gig, Admiral,” Ezra said suddenly into the tense silence in the crowded interface chamber. Tarvi had been called in. Silent tears streamed down his face. “She’s passed the sensors at the docking area. No,” he corrected himself, “two bodies have passed the sensors.” Tarvi let out a ragged sob but said nothing.

Bit by bit, the pieces had been put together to solve the puzzle of Sallah’s disappearance and Avril Bitra’s reappearance.

A technician, working on a remount job on the sled nearest Sallah’s, remembered seeing her leave her task and wander toward the scrap pile at the edge of the grid. He had also noticed Kenjo and Ongola walking to the Mariposa. He had not seen anyone else in that vicinity. Shortly afterward he had seen the Mariposa lift off.

Once someone thought to look for it, the sled Avril had used was easily spotted. It carried none of the modifications that all other Pernese sleds bore; it had been left at the edge of the grid, among others that had been called in for servicing. Stev Kimmer was called in to identify it. She had removed every trace of her occupancy, although Stev pointed to scrape marks that were new to him. He also kept his personal comments about his erstwhile partner to himself, though his expression had been sufficiently grim for Paul and Emily to suspect that he had been double-crossed. For one moment he had hesitated. Then, with a shrug, he had answered every question they asked him.

“She won’t get anywhere,” Emily said, firmly striving for optimism.

“No, she won’t.” Paul looked at the guidance cartridge, not daring to glance in Tarvi’s direction.

“Couldn’t she replace it from similar chips on the bridge?” Tarvi asked, his face an odd shade, his lips dry, and his liquid eyes tormented.

“Not the right size,” Ezra said, his expression infinitely sad. “The Mariposa was more modern, used smaller, more sophisticated crystals.”

“Besides,” Paul added heavily, “the chip she really needs is the one Ongola replaced with a blank. Oh, she can probably set a course and it will appear to be accepted. The ship will reverse out of the dock, but the moment she touches the firing pin, it’ll just go straight ahead.”

“But Sallah!” Tarvi demanded in an anguished voice. “What will happen to my wife?”

 

Sallah waited until Avril had reversed the Mariposa from the dock, let it drift away from the Yokohama’s bulk, and ignited the Mariposa’s tailflame before she operated the comm unit. Avril had done as much damage to the circuitry in the bridge console as she could, but she had forgotten the override at the admiral’s position. As soon as she left the bridge, Sallah accessed it.

“Yokohama to Landing. Come in, Ezra. You must be there!”

“Keroon here, Telgar! What’s your position?”

“Sitting,” Sallah said.

“Goddamn it, Telgar, don’t be facetious at a time like this,” Ezra cried.

“Sorry, sir,” Sallah said. “I don’t have visuals.” That was a lie, but she did not wish anyone to see her condition. “I’m accessing the probe garage. There is no damage report for that area. You’ve three probes left. How shall I program them?”

“Hellfire, girl, don’t talk about probes now! How’re we going to get you down?”

“I don’t think you are, sir,” she said cheerfully. “Tarvi?”

“Sal-lah!” The two syllables were said in a tone that brought her heart to her mouth and tears to her eyes. Why had he never spoken her name that way before? Did it mean the longawaited avowal of his love? The anguish in his voice evoked a spirit tortured and distressed.

“Tarvi, my love.” She kept her voice level though her throat kept closing. “Tarvi, who’s with you there?”

“Paul, Emily, Ezra,” he replied in broken tones. “Sallah! You must return!”

“On the wings of a prayer? No. Go to Cara! Get out of the room. I’ve got some business to do, Pern business. Paul, make him leave. I can’t think if I know he’s listening.”

“Sallah!” Her name echoed and reechoed in her ears.

“Okay, Ezra, tell me where you want them.”

There was a choking, throat-clearing noise. “I want one to go to the body of the cometary, the second to circumnavigate.” Ezra cleared his throat again. “I want the other to follow the spiral curve of that nebulosity. If the big scope is operable, I’d like bridge readings all along that damned thing. We can’t track it with the telescope we have here—not powerful enough for the definition we need. Never thought we’d need the big one, so we didn’t dismantle it.” He was maundering, Sallah thought affectionately, to get himself under control. Did she hear someone crying through that conversation? Surely Governor Boll or the admiral would have been kind enough to get Tarvi out of the room.

Then she needed to concentrate on the information Ezra was giving her to encode the duties and destinations of the individual probes.

“Probes away, sir,” she said, remembering the last time she had given that response. She saw Pern on the big screen; she had never thought that she would again see from space the world she had come to know as her home. “Now I’m sending some data for Dieter to decipher. Avril said she’d killed both Ongola and Kenjo. Has she?”

“Kenjo, yes. Ongola will pull through.”

“Old soldiers don’t die easy. Look, Ezra, what I’m sending for Dieter are some notations I made on available fuel. Ongola will know what I mean. And I’ve set down Avril’s course. She went off in the right direction, but I saw a very odd-looking crystal in that guidance system, one I never saw on the Mariposa when I was driving her. Am I right? She won’t go anywhere?”

“Once Bitra hits the engine button, she goes in a straight line.”

“Very good,” Sallah said with a feeling of immense satisfaction. “The straight and narrow for our dear departed friend. Now, I’m activating the big scope. I’ll program it to report through the interface to you. All right?”

“Give me the readings yourself, Miss Telgar,” Ezra ordered gruffly.

“I don’t think so, Captain,” she said, glad to rely on the impersonal address. She visualized Ezra Keroon’s thin frame hunched over the interface. “I don’t have that much time. Only the oxygen in my tanks. They were full when Avril let me put them on, but she told me she was switching off the bridge’s independent system. I have no reason to doubt her. That’s another reason why I’m switching the scope’s readings to you. Space gloves are good, but they don’t allow for fine tunings. I just about managed some repairs to the mess Avril made on the console. Jury rig at least, so . . . when someone gets a chance to get up here, most everything will work.”

“How much time do you have, Sallah?”

“I don’t know.” She could feel the blood reaching to her calf in the big boot, and her left glove was full. How much blood did a person have? She felt weak, too, and she was aware that it was getting harder to breathe. It was all of a piece. She would miss knowing Cara better.

“Sallah?” Ezra’s voice was very kind. “Sallah, talk to Tarvi. We can’t keep him out of here. He’s like a madman. He just wants to talk to you.”

“Oh, sure, fine. I want to talk to him,” she said, her voice sounding funny even to herself.

“Sallah!” Tarvi had managed to get his voice under control. “Get out of here, all of you! She’s mine now. Sallah, jewel in my night, my golden girl, my emerald-eyed ranee, why did I never tell you before how much you mean to me? I was too proud. I was too vain. But you taught me to love, taught me by your sacrifice when I was too engrossed in my other love—my worklove—to see the inestimable gift of your affection and kindness. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have failed to see that you were more than just a body to receive my seed, more than an ear to hear my ambitions, more than hands to—Sallah? Sallah! Answer me, Sallah!”

“You—loved—me?”

“I do love you, Sallah. I do! Sallah? Sallah! Salllllaaaaah!”

 

“What do you think, Dieter?” Paul asked the programmer as he consulted the figures Ezra had given them.

“Well, this first lot of figures gives us over two thousand liters of fuel. The second is a guesstimate of how much Kenjo used on the four missions he flew and what was used by the Mariposa today. There’s a substantial quantity unused somewhere down here on the surface. The third set is evidently what was left in the Yoko’s tanks and is now in the Mariposa’s. But, I do point out, as Sallah does, that there’s enough in the Yoko’s sumptank for centuries of minor orbital corrections.”

Paul nodded brusquely. “Go on.”

“Now this section is the course Bitra tried to set. The first course correction should have been initiated about now.” Dieter frowned at the equations on his monitor. “In fact, she should be plunging straight toward our eccentric planet. Maybe we’ll find out sooner than we know what the surface is like.”

“Not that Avril is likely to stand by and give us any useful information as—as Sallah did.” Dieter looked up at the savage tone of the admiral’s voice. “Sorry. C’mon. You’ve the right. And if something goes wrong . . .” Paul left the sentence dangling as he led Dieter down the corridor to the interface room.

Emily had gone with Tarvi to give him what comfort she could, so Ezra was manning the room alone. He looked as old as Paul felt after the wringing emotions of the day.

“Any word?”

“None of it for polite company,” Ezra said with a snort. “She’s just discovered that the first course correction hasn’t occurred.” He turned the dial so that the low snarl of vindictive curses was plainly audible.

Paul grinned maliciously at Dieter. “So you said.” He turned on the speakers.

“Avril, can you hear me?”

“Benden! What the hell did that bitch of yours do? How did she do it? The override is locked. I can’t even maneuver. I knew I should have sawn her foot off.”

Ezra blanched and Dieter looked ill, but Paul’s smile was vindictive. So Avril had underestimated Sallah. He took a deep breath of pride in the valiant woman.

“You’re going to explore the plutonic planet, Avril darling. Why don’t you be a decent thing and give us a running account?”

“Shove it, Benden. You know where! You’ll get nothing out of me. Oh, shit! Oh, shit! it’s not the—oh, shiiiitt.”

The sound of her final expletive was drowned by a sizzling roar that made Ezra grab for the volume dial.

“Shit!” Paul echoed very softly. “It’s not the . . . ’—the what? Damn you, Avril, to eternity! It’s not the what?”

 

Emily and Pierre, along with Chio-Chio Yoritomo, who had been Kenjo’s wife’s cabinmates on the Buenos Aires and her housemate on Irish Square, took the fast sled to Kenjo’s Honshu Stake. While most of Landing knew about Kenjo’s death and Ongola’s serious illness, there had been no public announcement. Rumor had been busy discussing the “unknown” assailant.

When Emily returned that night, she brought a sealed message to the admiral.

“She told us,” Emily said dryly, “that she would prefer to stay on at Honshu to work the stake herself for her four children. She has few needs and would not trouble us.”

“She is very traditional,” Chio-Chio told the admiral breathlessly. “She would not show grief, for that belittles the dead.” She shrugged, eyes down, her hands clenching and unclenching. Then she looked up, almost defiant in her anger. “She was like that. Kenjo married her because she would not question what he did. He asked me first, but I had more sense, even if he was a war ace. Oh!” She brought her arm up to hide her face. “But to die like that! Struck from behind. An ignominious death for one who had cheated it so often!” Then she turned and fled from the room, her sobbing audible as she ran out into the night.

Emily gestured for Paul to open the small note, which was well sealed by wax and stamped with some kind of marking. He broke it open and unfolded the thick, beautiful, handmade paper. Then, mystified, he handed it to Emily and Pierre.

“There were two caves cut, to judge by the amount of fuel used and rubble spilled. One cave housed the plane. I do not know where the other was,” Emily read. “So he did manage to remove some of the fuel? How much?”

“We’ll see if Ezra can figure it out—or Ongola, when he recovers. Pierre?” Paul asked the chef for a pledge of silence.

“Of course. Discretion was bred in my family for generations, Admiral.”

“Paul,” the admiral corrected him.

“For something like this, old friend, you are the admiral!” Pierre clicked his heels together and inclined his body slightly from the waist, smiling with a brief reassurance. “Emily, you are tired. You should rest now. Paul, tell her!”

Paul laid one hand on Pierre’ de Courci’s shoulder and took Emily’s arm with the other. “There is one more duty for the day, Pierre, and you’d best be with us.”

“The bonfire!” Emily pulled back against Paul’s arm. “I’m not sure I—”

“Who can?” Paul broke in when she faltered. “Tarvi has asked it.”

All three walked with reluctant steps, joining the trickle of others going in the same direction, down to the dark Bonfire Square. Each house had left one light burning. The thinly scattered stars were brilliant, and the first moon, Timor, was barely a crescent on the eastern skyline.

By the pyramid of thicket and fern, Tarvi stood, his head down, a man as gaunt as some of the branches that had been cast into the pile. Suddenly, as if he knew that all were there who would come, he lit the brand. It flared up to light a face haggard with grief, with hair that straggled across tear-wet cheeks.

Tarvi raised the brand high, turning slowly as if to place firmly in his memory the faces of all those in attendance.

“From now on,” he shouted hoarsely, “I am not Tarvi, nor Andiyar. I am Telgar, so that her name is spoken every day, so that her name is remembered by everyone for giving us her life today. Our children will now bear that name, too. Ram Telgar, Ben Telgar, Dena Telgar, and Cara Telgar, who will never know her mother.” He took a deep breath, filling his chest. “What is my name?”

“Telgar!” Paul replied as loud as he could.

“Telgar!” cried Emily beside him, Pierre’s baritone repeating it a breath behind her. “Telgar!”

“Telgar! Telgar! Telgar! Telgar! Telgar!” Nearly three thousand voices took up the shout in a chant, pumping their arms until Telgar thrust the burning torch into the bonfire. As the flame roared up through the dry wood and fern, the name crescendoed. “Telgar! Telgar! Telgar!”