"Shadowline - Starfishers Triology - Book 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cook Glen)

Book Two#8212;HANGMEN

Who springs the trap when the hangman dies?

Thirty-Five: 3052 AD

Some of the most unpleasant moments in life come when we have to face the fact that our parents are human and mortal. For me the revelations came in quick succession. They really rocked me, though I think I concealed my shock at the time.

I grew up believing my father a demigod. In an offhand way I knew he was mortal, but it simply never occurred to me that he could be killed. I suppose I should thank my uncle for removing those scales from my eyes.

I have only my father to thank, or blame, for making me realize that even the wise and noble Gneaus Julius Storm could be petty, arrogant, blind, unnecessarily cruel, and maybe even a little stupid. This latter revelation touched me far more deeply than did the other. After all, we all begin life under sentence of death. But nowhere is it written that our time on death row is to be spent compounding the idiocies and miseries of our fellow condemned.

Though I did not love him less afterward, I lost my awe of my father after witnessing his brush with my uncle. For a time just his presence made me suffer.

The loss of an illusion is a painful thing.

#8212;Masato Igarashi Storm

Thirty-Six: 3031 AD

Gneaus Storm gradually drifted up into a universe of gnawing pain.

Where was he? What had happened?

His dying hand had reached the switch in time. Or the automatics had asserted themselves. Somehow, he had been enveloped by the escape balloon before vacuum could take a fatal bite.

He knew that he had not died. There was very little pain in a resurrection. When you died the docs gave you a complete overhaul before they brought you around again. You came out with the vivacity, spirit, and lack of internal pain characteristic of youth. If you did not die, and you came back by more mundane medical processes, you had to play it by Nature's old rules. You took the pain along with the repairs.

More than once Storm wished they had let him go. Or that Cassius had had the decency to return him to the Fortress for proper medical care.

Storm once returned to consciousness to find a worry-faced, exhausted Mouse hovering over his medicare cradle. "Mouse," he croaked, "what are you doing here?"

"Cassius told me to stay," the boy replied. "It's part of my training." He forced a smile.

"He begged me." Cassius's voice, through the additional filter of the intercom speaker, sounded doubly mechanical and remote.

"Son, you've got to go back to Academy," Storm insisted, forgetting that he had lost this argument once before.

"It's arranged," Cassius said.

Perhaps it was, Storm reflected. He was not remembering clearly. The past month was all a jumble. Maybe Cassius had used his clout with the War College.

He tried to laugh. His reward was a shot of excruciating pain. Vacuum had done a job on his lungs.

"He needed somebody to watch you and Michael," Mouse told him, unaware that his father did not quite realize what was going on. "That's not a one-man job even with Michael sedated."

Storm remembered some of it. He smiled. Michael really impressed Cassius. Dee was only a man. He had been bested as often as not. His greatest talent was that of weaver of his own legend.

"He survived too, eh?" He remembered most of it now.

"He came through in better shape than you did," Cassius said. "He took some elementary precautions."

"It was his boat that was off tune," Mouse added. "He jiggered it on purpose. A trick he learned from Hawksblood. Hawksblood sets all his drives so they're off tune with everything but each other."

"His first intelligence coup," Cassius droned. "Though anybody with computer time and a little inspiration could have figured it out. Give him credit for the inspiration."

Mouse reddened slightly.

"We're headed for the asteroid?" Storm asked.

Mouse nodded. Cassius replied, "Yes. There're still questions we might put to Michael and Fearchild." Then, "We won't be able to reach Michael by the usual methods. He's been conditioned to resist drugs and polygraphs. Primitive methods may prove more efficacious."

"Uhm." Storm doubted that they would, though Michael, for all his bravado and daring, was a coward at heart.

How had Dee obtained an immunization course against the subtler forms of truth research? The process was complicated, expensive, and highly secret. Confederation restricted it to its most favored and highly ranked operatives and leaders in the most sensitive positions. Mouse, if he could stay alive for forty years and achieve flag grade, was the only man he knew who had a hope of attaining that signal honor. "Curious, that," he murmured.

"How curious you can't imagine."

Inflections in Cassius's speech were necessarily hard to grasp. This time Storm caught it. "You found something?"

"I think we learned most of it. It will be interesting watching the Dees while we discuss it."

"You can't tell me now?"

"We're fifty-one hours from the asteroid. Take time to recuperate. You're still disoriented. The discussion will be a strain."

"No doubt."

For two days Storm slept or endured his son's vague, intriguing hints about what he and Cassius had discovered on The Big Rock Candy Mountain. He tried to make the best of it by retreating to his clarinet and Bible. One of his sergeants had risked his life to salvage them from the phase-disrupted wreck of his singleship.

His eye was too weak for the book, his fingers insufficiently coordinated for the instrument. Mouse read some for him. Time did not drag. He slept a lot.

Mouse wakened him once, so he could watch while Cassius blurred their influential backtrail in the field around a star. Walters meant to make a complete orbit, take hyper briefly while masked by the star's own field, then drift for a day at a velocity slightly below that of light. The asteroid lay in the cometary belt of the chosen star.

The maneuver was intended to shed any unnoticed tail. Perforce, any such shadow would be operating at the limits of detection and would quickly lose contact.

Storm had Mouse move him to the control room for the stellar orbit.

"Cassius, roll her so the sun'll be topside during orbit," he said.

"You've got it." The star wobbled slightly as Cassius adjusted the ship's attitude. It swelled to the size of a sun. Cassius dove in, sliding around so close that the horizon curves vanished and they seemed to be drifting below an endless ceiling of fire. It was an Armageddon sky from which flames reached down with stately grace, as if to capture them and drag them into all that fury. Even smaller sunspots appeared as vast, dark continents surrounded by vaster oceans of flame. Cassius put all his filters up and let Storm stare, brooding, into that furnace that was the ultimate source of all other energies.

Storm said, "How like life itself a star is. It pulses. It struggles to maintain itself in a boundless ocean of cold despair. Every atom vibrates its little nucleus out, fighting the vampire night sucking its life. And the star fights knowing the struggle is hopeless, knowing that all it can do is die defiantly, going nova as its last grand gesture."

Mouse leaned forward, listening intently. His father seemed to be trying to create some order out of his own nebulous philosophy.

"Entropy and Chaos, death and evil, they can't be beaten by star or man, but in defeat there's always the victory of defiance. This sun is telling me, Gneaus, the mortal flesh can be destroyed, but the spirit, the courage within, is eternal. It need not yield. And that's all the victory you'll ever get."

Mouse watched with watery eyes as his father fell asleep, exhausted by the effort it had taken to put his feelings into words. The youth stared up at the fire, trying to see what Gneaus Storm had seen. He could not find it. He rose and took the old man back to his medicare cradle.

Being moved brought Storm back to a twilight awareness.

All his adult life Storm had been anticipating a fierce and final conflict from which he could win no mundane victory. With almost religious faith he believed that the manipulators would someday push him into a corner from which there would be no escape but death. He had always believed that Richard would be the instrument of his destruction, and that he and Richard, by destroying one another, would spell the doom of their kind.

The fires of the Ulantonid War had ignited a blaze of panhumanism of which Confederation was still taking full advantage. It was bulling its way into broad reaches of relatively ungovernmented space in apparent response to a set of laws similar to those defining the growth of organisms and species. Mercenary armies were among those institutions facing increasingly limited futures.

No government willingly tolerates private competition, and especially not competition which can challenge its decrees. The most benign government ever imagined has as its root assumption its right to apply force to the individual. From inception every government continuously strives to broaden the parameters of that right.

Storm believed he and Richard, if lured into a truly bloody Armageddon, would fight the last merc war tolerated by Confederation. The Services now had the strength and organization to disarm the freecorps. All they needed was an excuse.

Cassius's ship reached the chunk of celestial debris that Storm had long ago developed as a prison for Fearchild Dee. It was a living hell, Fearchild's reward for his perfidy on the world where Cassius had lost his hand.

That had not been a matter of the hazards of war.

Fearchild had been a dilettante merc captain commanding forces his father had hoped to turn into a Family army. The Legion had humiliated him in his field debut. He had tried using Dee tactics to recoup.

Merc wars were ritualized and ceremonial. Their ends were celebrated with a formalized signing of Articles of Surrender and the yielding up of banners by the defeated captain. Fearchild had smuggled in a bomb, hoping to obliterate the Legion staff prior to a surprise resumption of hostilities.

Appalled, his officers had turned on him and warned their opposites. Cassius had been the only Legionnaire injured. He had refused to have the hand replaced.

It reminded him that there were dishonorable men in the universe. He could consider its absence and remember just how much he hated the Dees.

It took Cassius and Mouse two hours to transfer Storm and Michael and their medicare cradles to the asteroid's single habitable room. They wakened the injured men only after completing the task.

Michael awoke with a whimper. The instant he discovered Storm's presence, he wailed, "Gneaus, that man is going to kill me."

Cassius chuckled. His prosthetic larynx made it a weird sound. "I will, yes. If I can."

"You promised, Gneaus. You gave me your word."

"You're right, Michael. But Cassius never promised you anything. Neither did Masato, and I've got the feeling he's mad about what you did to his brothers."

Mouse's attempt to look fierce fell flat. Dee did not notice. He was too involved with himself and Fearchild, whom he had just noticed.

"My God! My God!" he moaned. "What are you doing?"

"Thought he'd be up to his neck in houris, eh?" Cassius asked.

Michael stared, aghast. He was not inhuman. He loved his children. His parental concern overcame his trepidation. "Fear. Fear. What're they doing to you?"

"Plug him in, Cassius," Storm ordered. "It should make him more amenable."

Mouse and Cassius lifted a passive Michael onto an automated operating table.

Fearchild's situation did not seem cruel at first glance. He was chained to a wall. He wore a helmet that enveloped his head. A thick bundle of wires attached the helmet to a nearby machine.

That machine restricted Fearchild to limits that kept him barely among the living. Like Valerie in Festung Todesangst, he was permitted no lapses in self-awareness. Nor was he free to slide off into insanity. The machine enforced rationality with a battery of psychiatric drugs. At random intervals it stimulated his pain center with an equally random selection of unpleasant sensations.

They were all cruel men.

Mouse worked in a daze, not quite able to believe this place was real, not quite able to accept that his father had created it.

Cassius adjusted Fearchild's machine so the younger Dee could take an interest in what was being done to his father.

Mouse and Cassius strapped Michael to the table, rotated it till it stood upright. Storm watched impassively. Cassius positioned and adjusted surgical machinery which included a system similar to that which kept Fearchild sane. He added an anaesthesia system programmed to heighten rather than dampen pain.

"Do we have to do this?" Mouse whispered.

Cassius nodded. He was enjoying himself.

All cruel men.

"I keep my word, Michael," Storm said. His voice was soft, weak, and tired. "No matter what, I'll never kill you. I tried to make a point on The Mountain. You refused to understand it. I'm going to make it again here, a little more strongly. Maybe you'll get the message this time."

He paused for a minute, gathering strength. "Michael, I'm going to make you beg me to kill you. And I'm going to keep my promise and make sure you stay alive. You ready, Cassius?"

Cassius nodded.

"Give him a taste."

The machine whined. A tiny scalpel flayed a few square millimeters of skin off Dee's nose. A second waldo bathed the exposed flesh with iodine. A third applied a small dressing. The anaesthesia program intensified the fire of the antiseptic. Dee shrieked.

"Enough. You see, Michael? That rig is a little toy I put in when we slapped this place together. I had a feeling you'd make me use it someday. What it will do is skin you a few square millimeters at a time, here and there. You'll get plenty of time to heal so the skinning won't ever end. Think about that. Pain for the rest of your life."

Dee whimpered. His eyes seemed glazed.

Mouse turned his back. He kept jerking from the stomach upward as he fought to keep his breakfast down. Cassius laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. "Easy," he whispered.

Storm snarled, "Michael, Michael, you've just got to play your games. You can't claim you weren't warned. You can't say you didn't know the risks." He waved a weak hand at Cassius. "Do an eyelid now."

Dee flushed a pale shade of death. "My face... "

Cruel men. Cassius laughed. The sound was so malignant it seemed no artificial voice box could have produced it.

"There'll be scars," Storm promised. His voice was soft, musing. "Yes. That will hurt more than the skinning, won't it? Cassius, make sure there are plenty of scars in the program. Do something artistic."

Dee cried, "Damn it, Gneaus... "

"This isn't a pleasure spa, Michael. This is hell. Your own private hell. You brought it on yourself. Then you expect the rest of us to feel sorry for you. It doesn't work that way. We aren't kids now. You can't fool us the way you used to. We're on to all of your tricks."

"Gneaus, not my face."

"You want to tell us why Blackworld means so much to you?"

"It's my way out... " Dee shut up. He refused to speak again.

"Cassius, before we leave I want you to position them so they have to look at each other. Put a sound baffle between them so they can't talk. Now, before we tackle my questions again, tell me what you found on The Mountain."

Cassius sketched the story. Storm occasionally interrupted with a question or to make a point. When Cassius mentioned the elderly assassin, he asked, "Sangaree?"

Cassius nodded.

Storm turned to an attractive and frightened Michael Dee. "So that rumor is true. You have been dealing with them. That won't make you any friends, Michael." He shook an admonitory finger. "Go on, Cassius. This is getting interestinger and interestinger."

A minute later Storm muttered, "I've got a feeling I'll be eligible for Social Insurance after I pay your instel bill."

"Possibly. The man's name was Rhafu."

Storm sent a puzzled glance Michael's way. Dee seemed both disappointed and relieved. "It doesn't make sense, Cassius."

"It does. Keep listening." He explained what he had learned from his friend in Luna Command.

"Why would this mystery Sangaree wait till now to get even?"

"I take it he's really a low-key sort. Tries to get everything lined up perfect before he makes his move. He's probably been chipping away at us for a long time."

Storm looked at Dee. "That could explain a lot of things. But not too clearly."

"I've been doing some thinking. It was a long trip out, watch and watch. Not much chance to talk. Mainly, I tried to figure out why a man would want to destroy his brother so bad he would cut a deal with Sangaree. I didn't come up with anything. Each time I thought I had it, I came back to the same thing. The only things you've ever done were in reply to something a Dee did first. Our friend here is a son-of-a-bitch, but in the past he usually took his lumps when he deserved them. And until just lately he was always pretty impersonal about his crap.

"So I went back and thought it through from the beginning. There had to be a clue somewhere.

"I think it started because he wanted to get even with Richard Hawksblood. Including you was a sop for this Deeth creature. In others words, it's not really personal. It's an arrangement. Deeth helps him get Richard. He helps Deeth get you and the Legion."

Storm stared at his brother. Michael looked terribly uncomfortable. "Why the hell would he take up with this Deeth?"

"That's where I had to strain the old logic box. We have to go back to your father and mother to put it together. You know the family stories. He met her on Prefactlas. She was pregnant when they got married. Boris never found out who Michael's father was. Emily wouldn't say. Like that.

"Check my reasoning. Emily was born a Sangaree pleasure girl. Her genetic tagging was distinctly Norbon. We know she spent several years traveling and living with a boy who may have fathered Michael. He vanished completely once your mother moved in with Boris.

"There was a more notorious disappearance at the same time. The grand master of the Prefactlas underworld, a man we called the Serpent. My friend Beckhart tells me the Serpent and this Rhafu are the same guy. Starting to get a picture?"

"I've got one." Storm laid a finger alongside his nose. "And I don't like it. He's not just dealing with them, he is one of them. The son of this Deeth. Implausible on its face, but you found a few crossbreeds on Prefactlas, didn't you?"

"Too many. And from Michael's expression, I'd say we've hit it square."

"Ah, yes. So we have."

"Gneaus, I... " Dee shut up. It was too late for truth or lies.

The silence stretched out. Mouse began to move around nervously, glancing from man to man.

Storm murmured, "The thing takes shape. We know some whos and whys, and even a few hows. Enough to have upset them by recapturing Benjamin and Homer. But that doesn't really change anything. Probably too late to wriggle out."

"We can kill us a few Dees," Cassius suggested. "I grilled Beckhart on this Deeth. There's no way we can get to him. He's moved off Homeworld. His whole outfit is on his First Expansion planet. He's the only bastard in the universe who knows where it is. So how the hell do you bribe some fool Sangaree to go cut his throat? If we want him, we have to make him come to us."

"Michael stays alive. I gave him my word. He may not be as guilty as he looks, anyway."

"Stop making excuses for him, Gneaus."

Storm overlooked Cassius's remark. "He and Fearchild will be safe here. Remember Trojan Hearse? I'll order a go on it, and start hunting Seth-Infinite. If we nail him down too, this Deeth will have to come out if he wants to keep us running. He won't have any cat's-paws left."

"Helga," Mouse suggested.

"She doesn't get around so good anymore," Storm replied. "Warm your instel, Mouse. I've got to talk to Richard."

"We don't have one. We had our wave guides sheered off by friend Michael there," Cassius said. "And we've lost relay contact with your Seiner friend. It'll have to wait till we get back to the Fortress."

"Why are we fooling around here, then? Take me home."

Mouse turned his father's medicare cradle and pushed it into the passage to the ship dock. Michael started screaming behind him.

Cassius had energized the torture machinery.

Cruel men. All cruel men.

A small yacht drifted in normspace. Its pilot patiently watched her hyper scan. She had lost her quarry, but hoped to find it again.

Cassius went hyper. His vessel left a momentarily detectable ripple.

The yacht turned like a questing needle. In a moment it began to accelerate.

Thirty-Seven: 3028 AD

Moira was seventeen when she received the summons. It terrified her. She had heard stories... Not even Blake would force her. Would he?

She had no protector. She had had to do her own fighting since Frog's death. She was tough even for an Edgeward girl. But Blake? Fight a demigod?

Frog had, in his stubborn way.

She looked around the tiny room that had been the dwarf's home, that he had made home for a girl-child abandoned and unwanted by so many better able to provide. She turned an ear to listen for a ghost voice. "Frog, what should I do?"

"Go on, girl. And crank the bastard's nose up his butt if he tries anything."

She really had no choice. Blake was the great bull gorilla boss of Edgeward. They would come and get her if she did not go on her own.

As she prepared, making herself as unattractive as she could, she surveyed the room again. A cool tickle of irrational fear said it might be her last look around.

She had turned it into a museum. Almost a shrine, of and to the crazy dwarf called Frog, whose real name she had never known. There had been no way to show she cared while she lived. She had sensed that he would have been embarrassed by affection. Now, in her most romantic years, with her memories growing ever more vague and rose-lensed, she was, progressively, elevating him to godhead.

Moira did not fit. Edgeward was a black community. She was a curiosity and "old Frog's stray brat." The latter, with the ghost of the mad dwarf always peering over her shoulder, put people off more than did the former.

Old Frog had become a city legend. Edgewarders boasted about him to outsiders. The Man Who Ended the Shadowline. They had brought in his tractor and made a memorial of it. But he still made them nervous.

Dead and canonized was where madmen belonged. His mind had been diseased. They feared Moira might be a carrier.

They did not know what to say or do around her, so they did nothing. She was an outcast without justification, lonely, given far too much time to brood. The pressures of her fellow citizens' trepidations and expectations were creating the thing they feared.

Frog pictures on the walls. Frog things around the room. The ragged remnants of his hotsuit. A model of his crawler. Brightside charts which bore Frog's stamp, his openings of terra incognita. A diary in which Moira jotted what she felt were her most important thoughts, many of which orbited around her namesake, Edgeward's first woman tractor hog, The Girl Who Saw the Sun, a character saint of the same weird canon as Frog. Frog had claimed a relationship. Moira never had learned what it was. It was a mystery she was afraid to delve into. She had started in on the city records several times, and always stopped before she traced the link. She had a niggling little fear that she might find out her patron had had feet of clay.

She dithered. "At your earliest convenience," from Blake meant yesterday, and was that much more intimidating.

"Might as well get it over." She sighed, mussed her hair, and went.

Main offices for Blake Mining and Metals were in a huge old building at Edgeward's center, beneath the strongest part of the meteor screen shielding the dome. Years ago it had been City Hall and had housed city administrators' offices exclusively. Blake controlled that now. Edgeward was a company town. He might as well be in City Hall.

Moira arrived as the afternoon's programed rain began falling. A light breeze drove mist into her face. Scents on the air brought back vague images of herself running across a grassy, wild-flowered plain under a friendly yellow sun, playing with the other children on the breeding farm. It had been a gentle, realtime operation run by a paternalistic station master. The youngsters had not known they were property to be trained and sold. She would not have cared had she known. She had been happy.

She paused on the steps of City Hall and stared upward, trying to glimpse the star-speckled black enemy besieging the city. She saw nothing but sunlights and the piping from which the rain was falling. Edgeward worked hard to deny the night.

The rain fell harder. She hurried through an iris door that would become an airlock should the dome fall.

She entered a small, comfortable reception room. Its sole occupant was a thin, elderly gentleman who reminded her of a grown Frog. He had the leathery look of a lifelong tractor hog forced to retire from outservice. He made her nervous. Retired hogs sometimes became antsy and unpleasant.

This man had not. He glanced up and noticed her biting her lip in front of his desk. His whole face broke into smiles. He made it look as if he had been waiting years just for her.

"Miss Eight? Moira Eight? So glad you could come." He thrust a dark, wrinkled hand at her. She took it in a bit of a daze. It felt warm and soft. She relaxed a little. She judged people by the way they felt. Soft and warm meant nice and no harm planned. Cold, damp, hard, meant unpleasant intentions. She knew body temperatures were nearly the same in everyone, yet she depended on the difference in hands#8212;and later, lips#8212;and trusted that part of her unconscious which interpreted them.

It proved right most of the time.

"What... What's it about?" she asked.

"Don't know. I'm just the old man's legs. So you're Frog's little girl. All growed up. You should get out more. Pretty thing like you shouldn't hide herself." As he talked and she blushed, he guided her toward an elevator. "Mr. Blake is in the penthouse. We'll go straight up. He said to bring you right to him."

Moira bit her lip and tried for a brave face.

"Now then, no need to be scared. He's no ogre. We haven't let him devour a maiden in, oh, three or four years."

That's the way Frog used to baby me, she thought. There was something about Brightside that made tractor men more sensitive. Everybody thought Frog was a crusty old grouch#8212;maybe even Frog thought he was#8212;but that was just people who didn't know him.

Nobody bothered to get to know tractor hogs well. Their life expectancies were too short. It did not pay to get close to an enemy of the Demon Sun. Men like this one and Frog, who got old running the Thunder Mountains and Shadowline, were rare. Human beings simply could not indefinitely endure the rigid discipline and narrow attention/alertness it took to survive beyond the Edge of the World. Frog had broken down in the end, but he had been lucky. They had brought him out#8212;to be murdered. Maybe this man had had his failure and been lucky too.

She began to grow angry. They had not done a thing about Frog's murder. Oh, they had exiled those people, but the murderer hadn't been caught. She planned to do it herself. She would be of age in less than a year. With Frog's bequest, and the credit from the sale of the salvageable parts of his rig after Blake had deducted recovery costs, she would buy passage offworld and find August Plainfield.

The obsession had been growing from the moment she had looked through that hospital door and realized what Plainfield had done. The practicalities did not intimidate her. She was still young enough to believe in magic and justice.

Her plan was her one rebellion against the dwarf's philosophy. Sour and grumbly as he had been, he would not have wanted her to hold a grudge so deeply it would shape her life.

"Here we are. Top of the tower. Be sure to ask if you can see the observation platform. Not many people get the chance. The view is worth it."

Moira's escort led her into an antechamber almost exactly reflecting her preconception of Blake's headquarters. It smelled of wealth. Such spendthrift use of space!

A domed city like Edgeward used every cubic centimeter to some critical purpose. Even open areas were part of a grand design intended to provide relief from the cramped limits of living quarters.

Here space existed without function beyond announcing the wealth and power of its occupant.

"He'll be in his private office, I believe," Moira's companion told her. "Follow me."

"There's so much room... "

"A big man with big responsibilities needs room to wrestle them."

"Thank you. Uh... I don't know your name."

"It's not important. Why?"

"Because you've been kind, I guess. And it is important. I like to know who's been nice so I can think nice things about them." She could not think of a better way to put it.

"Albin Korando, then."

"That's odd."

"For Blackworld, I suppose. My people didn't come here till after the war."

"No, I mean Frog used to talk about you. I was trying to remember your name just yesterday."

"I'll bet he told some stories," Korando said, and laughed softly. He wore a faraway look. Then he saddened. "Some stories, yes. We're here. And Miss?"

"Yes?"

"Don't be frightened. He's just a man. And a pretty good man at that. Very few of the street stories are true."

"All right." But as they paused before the door that would open on a man almost omnipotent, she became terrified of the sheer power she faced.

Korando pushed through. "Miss Eight is here, sir."

Timorously, Moira followed.

The man who swiveled a chair to greet her was not the fang-toothed cyclops she expected. Nor was he old. She guessed thirty-five. Maybe even younger. He had a slight frame which, nevertheless, had about it a suggestion of the restrained power of the professional fighter. His smile was broad and dazzling, revealing perfect teeth. For an instant she noticed nothing else.

"Forgive me for not rising," he said, offering a hand. With the other he gestured at legs that ended in stumps where he should have had knees. "An accident at the shade station in the Shadowline a few years ago. I haven't had time to grow new ones."

"Oh! I'm sorry."

"For what? I earned it. I should know better than to go crawling around under a rogue slave. I've got people who get paid for doing that sort of thing. Albin, bring the lady something. Something mixed, Moira? No, better not. Wouldn't do to have it get around that I'm getting young women drunk. Will coffee do?"

Korando departed when she nodded.

"Well, have a seat. Have a seat. And why this look of perplexity?"

"Uh... " Moira reddened. She had been staring. "I thought you were old."

Blake laughed. His laugh was a pleasant, almost feminine tinkle. She wished she had taken his briefly offered hand to see if it was warm. That hand gestured toward oil portraits hanging on a distant wall. "There they are. The real old ones. My father. His father. And the old pirate who started it all. Obadiah Blake." Three dark, hard faces fixed her with that look which is traditional in ancestral portraiture, a sort of angry calculation or cunning rapacity, as if each had been considering selling the artist into slavery. "They're old enough to suit anybody. I call them the Ancient Marinators. They took everything so serious. They soaked in their own juices." He smiled as if at an old joke. "Greedy grabbers, they were. Had to have it all."

"I guess when you've got it all you can point fingers and say shamey-shamey." Moira was astounded at her own temerity.

Blake laughed. "You're Frog's brat, all right. Hardly knew him myself, but Dad had a few things to say about him."

"None of them kind, I hope." She smiled at Korando as he arrived with a silver carafe and china teacup on a silver tray. Silver and gold were by-products of Blake's mining operations. Both were common around Edgeward. Korando wore one large gold loop earring.

"Not a one. Not a one. And none of them fit for your pretty ears, either. No, Albin, stay. I think my guest would feel more comfortable with a chaperon, though God alone knows how I'd run her down if the fancy hit me."

"As you wish, sir."

Moira smiled gratefully, including both men.

"Well, then," said Blake, "pretty as you are, and much as I'd like to chat and look and wishful think, it's business that made me ask you here, so to business we must. How do you feel about the man who killed Frog?"

She did not have to answer. Her feelings burned on her face.

"That strongly? Albin, rummage through that stuff on the table there and hand Miss Eight the solidos we were talking about last night." Blake's office was a vast clutter. He seemed to be a man without time to keep order.

"Plainfield," she said, handling two cubes about ten centimeters to a side. There were little differences in appearances, but she felt no doubt.

"Those came in yesterday, from Twilight Town. I've got a man up there who watches out for things. Made these of a fellow who's been hanging around their brass. Thought he recognized him from back when. He was one of the ones we exiled when Frog was killed. He was lucky. Got picked up by one of their crawlers. But he wants to come home. Has family here. He's trying to earn his way back in."

"What about Plainfield?" Her voice was hard, her throat tight. Her stomach felt as though she were about to throw up.

"He's using the name Diebold Amelung now, but that's not his real one either."

"What're you going to do?"

"For now, nothing." He raised a hand to silence her protest. "For now. In time, what needs doing. I could have him killed, but then I wouldn't find out what he's up to. I wouldn't find out why he killed Frog. I wouldn't find out if he's connected with some strange phenomena we've observed Brightside. Albin, is that projector ready? Good. Moira, the man's real name is Michael Dee. We've known that for some time."

"And you haven't done anything?" She began to get mad.

"My dear young lady, Blake has done everything possible, consistent with its own interests. Which isn't much, I'll grant. This man, whatever name he uses, is no Old Earth shooter, no crackdome cutthroat. He could buy and sell Edgeward City. He's a very old, rich, and powerful man. He's got a lot of connections."

"So?"

"For you it's simple. You could burn him. You've got nothing to lose. I've got an industrial empire and a hundred thousand people to consider."

"He can't be that important."

"No? He owns a planet. He almost controls the private instel trade. He has interests in all the shipping lines that carry our exports. His brother is Gneaus Julius Storm, the mercenary, who has a personal army of twenty thousand men and the ships to move it. He's associated with Richard Hawksblood, another mercenary. And he has friends in Luna Command who would put Blackworld under embargo simply on his say-so."

"I see. If he's such a big man, how come he's in Twilight?"

"Exactly. Now we're in tune, little lady. Let's watch some clips. Albin."

Korando lowered the lighting and started the holo projector.

"This is the shade cloud we send up from the outstation to cover the run from the Whitlandsund to the Shadowline," Blake said. The holo cube portrayed a tower of darkness, which, she realized after a moment, was dark only due to a lessening of an almost unbearable glare. "We've filtered it down to the limits of resolution."

The hologram changed. Another pillar of dust appeared, viewed from a slightly sunward angle, making a portion look like a tower of fiery motes. "A charter running fourteen hours north of the Shadowline caught this two years ago. We couldn't make anything of it then. Too far to investigate, and in Twilight territory. Somebody thought it might be dust blowing out of a volcano."

The third clip was a still of crawler tracks under artificial lighting. "This one's only about a month old. It was taken a little over two thousand kilometers out the Shadowline by another charter. He thought he'd stumbled across some side trip of Frog's. They didn't look right. Too wide. We checked against Frog's log. He didn't make them.

"Something was wrong. Obviously. It bothered me. Curiosities always do. I had Albin check the records. I had him talk to drivers. And he found out what I thought he'd find out. The only Edgeward man who ever went that far was Frog. So I had Albin make the rounds again. He found several charters who had gotten readings on, or sightings of, dust pillars in the north, especially way out west, where they could be seen from the Shadowline itself. Albin."

The holo changed to a small-scale chart of the northern hemisphere west of the Edge of the World. "Nobody thought they were worth reporting. Just another Brightside curiosity. Once we got interested, we plotted them. They all seem to have appeared along the black line there."

Moira understood. "A shade route to the Shadowline from Twilight territory. That would be expensive."

"She's quick, Albin. And the crawler track confirms it. It was made by a Meacham long-range charter. Twilight is in the Shadowline, at considerable expense in money and man-hours. More than they'd have available for a speculative venture. Putting a line of shadow generators across two thousand kilometers of Brightside is an awesome feat. The cost in equipment and lives must have been phenomenal. I checked with the engineers. They said it could be done, but somebody would have to be crazy to try it. So why did somebody?"

Korando changed clips twice while Blake was talking. The first showed an artist's concept of a peculiar tractor, the second an action sequence of the real thing, slightly different in its lines. The camera angle left no doubt that it had been shot in the Shadowline. Fine lines of intense light ran along the lip of towering cliffs in the background. "This was shot earlier in the week, not far from where we found the mysterious crawler track," Blake explained.

"This doesn't make sense," Moira told him. "There's no profit in it."

"Are you sure? There's got to be. Huge profits. Those Meachams are worse pirates than old Obadiah ever was. I was hoping you could shed some light."

"Me? All I know about the Shadowline is what Frog told me."

"Exactly. The only man who ever went all the way to the end."

"You mean he found something?"

"That's what I want to know. Did he?"

"He never said anything. But I only got to see him for a minute before he shooed me out. And then... Then... "

"Yes." Blake swept a hand around to include most of the room. "I've gone over every record we've got, trying to find something. Even those dreadful hours of broadcasts that went out before he made it back. I haven't found a thing. In fact, I've found too much nothing. It's like making a fly-by of a black hole. You know there's something there, but all you can tell is that it isn't. If you see what I mean. A lot of records were tampered with. You can't tell what Plainfield wanted to cover up. And more records seem to have been #8216;rectified' since. Like that black hole, there's so much nothing that you can tell it's something big and dangerous. And my only recourse is to some very fallible human memories of something that happened a long time ago."

"What about your spy?"

"I'd have to bring him home to question him properly. I'm trying, but I don't think I'll make it. The past few years the Meachams have gotten more paranoid than usual. Like maybe they've got something to hide. Getting the solidos of Dee was damned near impossible."

"You could put someone in, sir," Korando suggested. "Someone with a legitimate reason to come and go. Do the interview there."

"Easier than bringing someone out, I agree. But I'm afraid of how much trouble I might have getting my someone back out, legitimate business or not. My man there gives the impression that outsiders are watched pretty damned close."

"Then stage an ambush in the Shadowline," Moira said. "Use guns instead of cameras. Grab some of their people."

"I don't want them to know we know. That would bring on the war before we're ready."

"War?" Moira and Korando asked. The girl's voice squeaked.

"Of course. If there's something out there worth the trouble they've invested in stealing it, then it's worth our fighting for it to get it back."

Korando said, "Boss, you've got one hell of a subjective way of looking at things. On the map... "

"The Shadowline starts in Edgeward territory. As far as I'm concerned, the whole damned thing is ours. Doesn't matter that it wanders up above Twilight's south parallel."

So there's a little pirate in this Blake, too, Moira thought. She smiled. It took claim-jumper types to make money on Blackworld. "What's my part in this?" she asked. "You knew I couldn't help with what Frog found. So why drag me in?"

"You're right. You're right. Smart girl. I've got something in mind, something complicated. Do you think you could kill Dee?"

"Plainfield? Yes. I've thought about it. I could. I don't know how reliable I'd be afterward."

"Could you not kill him?"

"I don't understand."

"Could you be around him, exposed to him, and not do something to get even?"

"I don't know. Maybe. If there was a good reason. What are you driving at?"

"You think you could be friendly? Or more?"

Her breakfast slammed against her esophagus. She took a moment to force it down. Then it struck her that she could exact a much more satisfying revenge if she could get the man to love her before she killed him. The sheer cruelty of it felt good.

That was when she first realized how truly deep her hatred for Plainfield ran. It was an obsession. She would do anything.

She frightened herself. And did not like Moira very much. That was not the sort of person she wanted to be.

"What do you want me to do? I'll do it."

"Eh?"

"I'll do whatever you want me to do, as long as getting Plainfield is part of the deal."

Blake peered at her. "Don't let them turn you over to their women," he muttered. He seemed disappointed. "All right. Here's my thinking. It's still rough. We'll smooth it out as we go. First, we send you to Twilight Town. We're going to ticket you through to Old Earth. You can't get a through ship from any other port. We'll arrange a meet with our man there if we can. Then you'll take the first Earthbound ship out. You'll leave it at Weiderander's Station, cash in the rest of your ticket, and buy another for The Big Rock Candy Mountain under a different name. We're going to enroll you in the Modelmog. They've started taking rich kids in order to balance their books."

The Modelmog was the century's foremost study center for young artists, actors, and writers. As Blake suggested, the school had fallen on hard times. Rich no-talents were being admitted to carry the costs of subsidizing the talented but poor who made up the bulk of the student body. Substantial endowments were the price of the university's highly respected diplomas.

"What's this got to do with Plainfield?" Moira demanded. Her voice was plaintive. "It's awful complicated."

"Patience, child. Patience. I'm getting to it. At the Modelmog we want you to vamp a poet named Lucifer Storm. He's a talented young man, they say, and quite handsome. You shouldn't find him repulsive. Attach yourself. He'll be your passport into the Fortress of Iron. That's the headquarters of the mercenary Gneaus Storm. Dee is in and out of there all the time. You should have no trouble making contact. Become his consort."

"I see. Live with him and spy on him."

"Exactly."

"For how long?"

"There's more than Frog's paybacks to worry about, girl. There's Edgeward. I'm a big fish around here, but out there I'm just a minnow. I can't make enemies out of sharks."

Moira was intelligent. She recognized his problem, thought she found it emotionally unpalatable. "All right. Butyou're making it too complicated. I'll mess it up for sure."

Blake chuckled. "I've been studying Moira Eight, too, dear. She's no dummy. Her acquaintances say she's a very good actress, both on stage and in her personal life. Dramatist White thinks he's made a real find."

Moira shrugged. Secretly, she was pleased. Mr. White never said anything of the sort to her.

"My Dad, and my grandfather, they treated old Frog pretty bad. If I'd been in charge, I'd have done it different. Frog was important. He reminded us that we aren't gods. He reminded us that what was good for the Corporation wasn't always good for Edgeward's people. He didn't realize it, and my Dad only saw the edges of it, but your old man kept Edgeward from turning into something like Twilight. You'll see what I mean if we send you. Blake and Edgeward still have a human side#8212;despite my Board of Directors. I digress. I'm sorry. It's my hobbyhorse."

"May you never dismount, sir," Korando said.

"Albin is my conscience. He came from Twilight."

"I know. He was an exile. Frog brought him in. He's sort of my brother. That was a long time ago."

"A long time ago," Korando agreed. "Had a habit of collecting strays, didn't he?"

Grimly, Blake said, "I wish he were here today. I've got to present this to the Board pretty soon. He's the kind who could have bullied them into line. They were afraid of him. Still are, in a way. As if he might come back to haunt them."

"He has, hasn't he?" Moira asked. "When do we start? What do we have to do?"

Thirty-Eight: 3031 AD

Going home did nothing to brighten anything. The Fortress of Iron was gravid with bad news.

Wulf and Helmut had put a prize crewman aboard the singleship Dee had stolen. She and her escort had been attacked while returning home. The guilty warships had been of Sangaree configuration. Only one of them had survived. Wulf and Helmut had been forced to let it escape. Its crew had managed to recapture the medicare cradles containing Benjamin and Homer. The High Seiners had tracked the fleeing ship. They said it had made planetfall on Helga's World.

"We're right back where we started," Storm groaned from his own cradle.

"Oh, no," Helmut told him. He wore a sickly grin. "We're way worse off. The Fishers say Michael and Fearchild Dee arrived on Blackworld this morning."

"That's impossible." Storm's heart hammered so hard his cradle fed him a mild sedative.

"Not quite," Wulf said. "His wife got him out. She was on Helga's World. He instelled her during the chase. She spaced and followed you to the prison. That's the story they're telling on Blackworld."

"He's got a new wife?"

"All we know is what we get in the reports," Helmut growled. "It's the old wife. I thought she was dead, too. But our man got into their pockets while they were explaining to Seth-Infinite. He even found out how she followed Dee."

"How?"

"Limited range, general broadcast instel. A little node of a thing he swallowed before he was captured. It didn't last long, but it got her into the area of the asteroid."

"We get an ultimatum?"

"The minute that raidship grounded," Wulf replied. "No signature, of course. We take the Blackworld contract or we never see Benjamin or Homer again. I guess they'll try to frame Blake Mining with the snatch."

Storm lay back, stared at a pale ceiling. He needed no signature to know who had sent that message. Helga Dee. And she would not bother trying to cover her tracks. He was tempted to ignore it. Benjamin and Homer were his flesh, but he could balance their lives against those of all the Legionnaires who would die in combat. "What's our movement status?"

"Go. We can start any time."

"Activate Trojan Hearse," Storm ordered.

Nobody protested. Nobody acted surprised. He was amazed. That had done everything but laugh when, years ago, he had presented the contingency plan. They had seen no need to be ready to break into Festung Todesangst.

"The operation went active the day Michael left," Wulf said. "We've already located one of Helga's ravens. Ceislak took the ship yesterday. He's on his way to Helga's World now."

Storm smiled his first smile in a long time. Hakes Ceislak was a fine, bloodthirsty youngster with a flair for commando operations. If anybody could slip a shipload of Legionnaires into Festung Todesangst as pretended corpses, he could.

"How many? All volunteers, weren't they? I don't think she'd blow the scuttle bombs unless she thought she was dead anyway, but I don't like anybody taking risks if they don't want to."

"A full battalion. All volunteers. We turned another thousand away. They thought they might have to dig you out too. Ceislak picked the men he wanted."

"All right. We go to Blackworld. We stir it up there, and get their attention till Ceislak can do his job. He's going to need a lot of stall time. If he takes the raven in off schedule she'll smell us out."

"He needs almost five months." Helmut shrugged apologetically. "It was the only raven we could find."

"We'll miss Ceislak on Blackworld," Wulf said. "I've been studying the layout. Blake's position is so much better than what Richard has to work from that he's got to have a whole bag of tricks up his sleeve."

"Of course he does," Storm said. "He's Richard Hawksblood. He wouldn't have taken the commission if he didn't think he could win. If it gets hairy, we'll miss Ceislak bad."

Cassius said, "My friend Beckhart might be persuaded to take that job off our hands. If we can deliver proof of a link between Helga and the Sangaree."

Mouse had begun to feel lost. He asked, "Why would that matter?"

"He'd have to have an excuse to nose around in a private war," his father told him. "Then he'd jump on it so he can grab Helga's World for Luna Command. Sangaree would make him a great causus belli."

"I know they've done studies on the cost of taking her out," Cassius said. "Us, too, for that matter. The base plan was to saturate her defenses with missile fire. Go for overload and totalkill. They'd love to have us open the door and let them get their hands on all that sweet information."

"Arrange it," Storm ordered.

"You sure? He takes the place and the government gets a hammerlock on every corporation in this end of Confederation."

"I know," Storm said. "I know. No matter what way you go, it's no-win."

"What about Blake Mining?" Helmut asked. "They've been crying like babies for two weeks. I got a full-time guy in Communications giving them the stall."

"Keep him on the job. Meantime, start your preliminary movement. Surprise them. I'll be along as soon as Medical turns me loose."

"One more thing," Wulf said, as Mouse started to roll his father away.

"What?" Storm snapped. "What the hell other bad news can you hit me with?"

"Good, bad, who knows?" Wulf asked. "A message from Lucifer. He's a little embarrassed. Turns out his wife is an agent. For Blake, of all outfits."

"So? Does it matter anymore?"

"Maybe not. But answer me this, Colonel. Why was she planted on us? She hooked up with Lucifer before any of this broke. Which to me means she can't have anything to do with the Shadowline."

"Wheels within wheels," Cassius observed. He laid a gentle hand on Mouse's shoulder. "Some of us get born into the game. The wheels turn each other. Sometimes they never find out why."

"Ach!" Storm growled. "Take me down, Mouse."

The Fortress was a citadel of gloom. There wasn't a smile in the place. The Legion was a worm wriggling on a hook. A big fish was coming up to bite.

"It looks hopeless, doesn't it, Father?" Mouse asked.

"So it does, Mouse. So it does. But maybe we'll fool them all. It's always darkest before the Storm."

"Is that a pun?"

"Me? Make a joke of the family name? Horrors."

Thirty-Nine: 3028-3031 AD

Moira strained to get used to the name she was supposed to assume at Weideranders. She tried even harder to become a genuinely creative artist. She failed abysmally. She had absolutely no talent for anything but acting.

Blake grumbled, "I guess that'll have to do."

"Do? What's wrong with it? It's legitimate. And dramatist White says Janos Kasafirek... "

"I said all right." Blake smiled. "He's been at me harder than you have, pretty lady. He says it's your future."

She was thrilled. She would really get to do what she wanted... She began cramming classical drama, the Old Earth classics, especially the Elizabethans. She was mad for Shakespeare. Dramatist White actually broke down and told her she played an inspired Ophelia.

She was floating. Her mission was going to give her a chance to realize her wildest dreams. She would get to study with the great Kasafirek.

"Slight change in plans," Blake said one day not long before she was due to leave. "They've tightened security in Twilight. You're going to leave here as Pollyanna, instead of waiting till you get to Weideranders."

She was to be billed as the touring daughter of Amantea Eight, an under-minister in Confederation's Ministry of Commercial Affairs. The lady actually existed and was obscure enough to cause local officials some concern. The obscure career people were the real powers in Luna Command. The identity of surnames was serendipitous.

Moira thought the going would be easy once she left Blackworld. The character was more nearly the real her than the one she portrayed for Edgeward. Her daydreams often revolved around an acting career. She never had given that serious consideration before because Edgeward had such little use for actresses. She had not thought of leaving home except to go stalking after Plainfield.

It came time to leave. She went to the crawler locks reluctantly. This would be the end of one life and the beginning of another. The doubts had begun to hem her in. "Albin. What're you doing here?"

"Boss told me to go with you."

She spotted Blake, ran to his chair, gave him a quick little kiss. "Thank you. For Albin. I won't be nearly so scared."

"I thought not. And I thought we might learn something in Twilight. He knows the city. Be good, Moira. And be careful. You're going to be involved with some strange, dangerous men."

"I'll be all right."

She enjoyed the ride to Twilight. She had never been outdome before. She saw her world from an entirely new perspective.

Bleak ghosts of midnight landscapes slid by the crawler. Crewmen made garrulous by her beauty and exotic skin color provided her with a running commentary. This had happened here, that had happened there. Over yonder was a fantastic landmark mountain that stuck straight up a thousand meters, but you couldn't see it on account of it was dark. The crewmen were from The City of Night. They did not know her. She rehearsed her cover for them, as Pollyanna, telling outrageous lies about life in Luna Command.

She reached Twilight in a bright and cheerful mood. It quickly soured.

At first glance Twilight Town appeared to be a clone of Edgeward City. She started to say so to Korando. The human factor intervened.

Two hard-faced policemen began checking papers as the passengers started shedding their hotsuits. They were especially nasty to Edgewarders, but only slightly more civil to the Nighter crew and the citizens of Darkside Landing. They were revelers in petty power, the sadists who gave police a bad image everywhere. Pollyanna lost her temper when they started in on Korando.

"You," she snapped, using words as gently as a torturer uses small knives. "You with the face like a pig's butt. Yes. You. The one with the nose like stepped-in dog shit. We know your mother made a mistake when she decided against the abortion. You don't have to prove it. Go beat your wife if you have to mistreat somebody in order to feel like a man."

Korando flashed a desperate "Shut up!" look. She just smiled.

The policemen were stunned. The other passengers made pained faces.

The man she had abused grinned malevolently. He had found himself a victim. "Papers, bitch!"

Malice turned to uncertainty. He looked at her, at her travel pass. White. Meant offworlder. Youth and sex might mean she was the brat of power.

"These better be good, bitch," he muttered to himself.

"Give them here, Humph," his partner said. "And calm down."

"Can you people read?" Pollyanna demanded. "You can? I'm amazed."

She expected more trouble than they gave her. The one officer became very solicitous once he saw the seals on her pass. "Be cool, Humph. This fluff's straight out of Luna Command."

Humph grabbed the pass, flipped through it. His eyes widened slightly. He thrust the booklet at Pollyanna. "I'll be watching you, smartass."

"I do believe you take after your father." She was a little frightened now. She had to concentrate to maintain her snottiness. "He never forgave your mother either."

And, before he could reply, in a gentler tone, she added, "A little courtesy doesn't hurt, officer. If you're nice to people, they'll usually be nice to you." She stalked away.

Korando came over while she was eating a snack at the station canteen. "That wasn't very smart, Polly. But I appreciate it. He forgot all about me."

For possible watching eyes they pretended to become acquainted. Korando told her he was going to stick a little tighter than he had planned. She needed keeping out of trouble.

And stick he did, like a limpet. So tight that he got no chance to interview Blake's agent. He stayed beside her until he had seen her enrolled in the Modelmog.

The trip thither was an adventure, Edgeward having been her whole universe and most of his. The space flies were like a visit to a dome devoted to happy times. The big Star Liners were space-going hotels.

Weideranders Station was different. That vast space-going roundhouse was too alien. Pollyanna and Korando spent most of their layover in their rooms.

Pollyanna remembered Weideranders. She had been there before, almost too long ago to recall anything but the fear she had known then. They had been running from men who had wanted to kill the people she was with. She could not face all those corridors and shops and eating places filled with outworlders, Toke, the Ulantonid, Starfishers, and other strange people. Not without coming apart, without anticipating something dreadful.

She could not have endured it without Korando's help.

She was easing him into the role Frog had vacated by dying. He seemed to accept it.

The Mountain was terrifying too. Though it was the gentlest of worlds, it lacked that without which a Blackworlder never felt secure. It had no dome. Neither she nor Korando ever learned to face the open sky.

Lucifer Storm was almost too easy. She was sleeping with him, loving him, and married to him almost before she herself knew what was happening.

Janos Kasafirek was impressed with her abilities. She was astounded and delighted. He had a reputation as a savage, unrestrained critic.

For a time she was thoroughly content. Life seemed perfect, except that she did not get to see Korando as often as she would have liked. Albin was her sole touchstone with her past and home.

Then, a year after their arrival on The Mountain, Albin announced that he was going home. She protested.

"There's been trouble," he told her. "A skirmish in the Shadowline."

"What can you do?"

"I don't know. Mr. Blake will need me, though. Be calm, Polly. You've got it under control. I'm nothing but excess baggage now."

She cried. She begged. But he went.

Looking back later, she chose that as the day when everything started going wrong.

During her tenure at the Modelmog, Lucifer's father and Richard Hawksblood fought a brief war on The Broken Wings. Lucifer followed the news uneasily. She tried to comfort him, and quickly became engrossed in the action herself, seizing every sketchy report from the Fortress of Iron, skipping from newscast to newscast to find out the latest. It was her first exposure to mercenary warfare. She was intrigued by the gamelike action and by the odd personalities involved. Once she did become enthralled, Lucifer lost interest. He expressed a virulent disapproval of her interest.

She was disappointed because the war ended so quickly.

A few months later Lucifer announced, "We have to go home. I got an instel from my brother Benjamin. Something bad is in the wind."

"To the Fortress?" She became excited. She would be a step closer to Plainfield. And closer to the mercenaries she found so interesting. Lucifer's father had come to their wedding. What a strange, intriguing old man he had been. Two hundred years old! He was a living slice of history. And that Cassius, who was even older, and Lucifer's brothers... They were like nothing Blackworld or The Mountain had ever seen.

What had begun as an ecstatic honeymoon was fading fast. She did not mind leaving a scene that promised to become unhappy#8212;except that she would miss Janos Kasafirek and her studies.

"I don't want to go," Lucifer told her. "But I have to. And it's cruel to take you away from your studies when you're doing so well."

"I don't mind that much. Really. Janos is getting a little overbearing. I can't take much more. We both need to cool down."

Lucifer looked at her oddly.

He changed after they reached the Fortress. His joy, youth, and poetic romance fled him. He became surly and distant, and ignored her more and more as he tried to fit into the Legion. The Legion tried to adjust to him. He could not meld in.

Inadequate to the mercenary role, he would be little help during the grim passage he had returned to help weather. Pollyanna could see it. Everyone else saw it. Lucifer could not. He was a fingerling among sharks, trying to believe he was one of the big boys.

Pollyanna became his outlet for frustration.

Knowing why he was hurting her did not ease her pain. Understanding had its limits.

Loneliness, self-doubt, her own frustration, and spite drove her into the arms of another man. Then another, and another. It became easier each time. Her self-image slipped with each one. Then came Lucifer's father. A challenge at first, he began to remind her of Frog. He gave her moments of real peace. He was gentle, considerate, and attentive, yet somehow remote. Sometimes she thought the body she clasped in their lovemaking was a projection from another plane, an avatar. The quality was even more pronounced in Storm's associates, spooky old Cassius and the Darkswords.

Plainfield, wearing the name Michael Dee, finally appeared. She met him with some trepidation, sure her hatred would shine through, or that he would remember her.

He did not remember, and did not sense her odium. Her scheme progressed with such ease that she lost herself in its pace. Before she knew it, she and Plainfield were aboard a ship bound for Old Earth and, eventually, Richard Hawksblood.

Her life seemed to become an ancient black and white movie. Jerky and depressing. Events followed Blake's script perfectly, yet she had a growing feeling that everything would fall apart.

She had lost a marriage that had meant a lot. She did not like the person she had become. Sometimes, lying beside Plainfield while he slept, she held discourse with Frog's ghost. Frog kept telling her nothing was worth the price she was paying.

It worsened. Storm forced her return to the Fortress. She would have killed Plainfield then had she not still felt an obligation to Blake, Korando, and her home city.

She became lonely in a way she had never known in Edgeward. She felt as if she had been dropped into the midst of an alien race. The men helped, for a few minutes each, but when a lover left her he took with him just a little more of her self-respect.

Then Plainfield was beyond her reach, running with the bodies of Storm's sons. She almost committed suicide.

Frog's ghost called her a little idiot. That stopped her.

She still had her duty to Edgeward. She had been living with soldiers long enough, now, to see herself as a soldier for her city. She could persevere.

Forty: 3052 AD

How important is a place? A place is just a place, you say. And I tell you: Not so! You are either of a place, or you are not. If you are, then it is in your heart and flesh and bones; you know it without thought, and it knows you. You are comfortable together. You are partners. You know all the quirks and bad habits and how to sidestep them. If you are an outsider...

It is the difference between new and old boots. You can wear both, but new boots can be trouble if you don't have time to break them in.

Blackworld was new boots for my father and the Iron Legion.

#8212;Masato Igarashi Storm

Forty-One: 3031 AD

The spaceport crawler crested the pass through the White Mountains. Storm saw Edgeward City for the first time. "Looks like a full moon coining up," he murmured. "Or a bubble of jewels rising where a stone fell into dark water." Only half the city dome could be seen above the ringwall surrounding it. It glowed with internal light.

His aide studied him, puzzled. Storm sensed but ignored the scrutiny. He reached for his clarinet case, decided he could not play in this lurching, shaking, rolling rust heap.

He had to do something to ease the tension. It had been ages since his nerves had been this frazzled.

He returned to the reports in his lap. Each was in Cassius's terse, cool style. The data and statistics summed an impossible assignment. Meacham Corporation had gotten a long jump on Blake. Though they had the more fragile logistics, they had used their lead time well. They had put military crawlers into production years ago. Twenty-four of the monsters were laagered in the Shadowline a thousand kilometers west of Blake's shade station. They would be hard to root out.

Richard's supply lines, which also supported the Meacham mohole project at the Shadowline's end, could not be reached from Blake shade. They were too far into sunlight for even the hardiest charter to hit and run.

Cassius said there was a tacit agreement to avoid conflict Darkside. Blake would not hear the suggestion of direct strikes. He insisted that fighting be confined to the Shadowline.

"Idiots," Storm muttered in a moment of bloodthirst. "Ought to run straight to Twilight, kick a hole in their dome, give them something to breathe when they surrender, and have done." Then he laughed. No doubt Richard felt the same way.

Mercenary conflicts were seldom simple. Corporations, while willing to fight, seldom wanted to risk anything already in hand, only what they might someday possess.

The only positive he could see was that the Seiners were still out there somewhere, eager to ease his communications problem. It had been a lucky day when he had let emotion convince him that Prudie's people deserved his help. Those Fishers never forgot.

Darling Prudie. What had become of that sweet thing? She probably wouldn't let him see her now even if he could find her. Fishers didn't believe in fighting Nature. She would be an old woman. Storm shuffled reports, forced his thoughts back to the Shadowline.

He tinkered with Cassius's suggestion for cracking Richard's laager till the crawler reached Edgeward's tractor depot. He was sure it was a workable solution, though they would have to run it past their employer's Brightside engineers to be sure. And past the Corporate Board. Those sons-of-bitches always had to have their say.

Blake met him personally. It was a small courtesy that impressed Storm because the man had to impose on his own handicap.

"Creighton Blake," the dark man said, offering a hand. "Glad you're here. You're recovered completely?"

"Like a new man. I've got good doctors." He glanced at the man behind Blake. He seemed vaguely familiar. "We've got the best facilities at the Fortress. You might want to try our regrowth lab."

"You know, I don't think so. I don't miss the legs anymore. And not having them gives me one hell of a psychological advantage over my Board of Directors. They get to feeling guilty, picking on a cripple." He grinned. "You have to use every angle on these pirates. Ah. My manners. I'm not used to dealing with outsiders. We all know each other here. The gentleman with me is Albin Korando. He's my legs. And my bodyguard, companion, conscience, and valet."

"Mr. Korando." Storm shook hands. "We met on The Big Rock Candy Mountain. At the wedding."

Korando looked startled. He glanced at Blake. Blake nodded slightly.

"Yes, sir."

Storm smiled. "I thought so. We walk from here? Which way?"

"You've got a good memory, Colonel," Blake said. "I believe you met Albin for just a few seconds."

"Why?"

"Excuse me?"

"Why did you plant Pollyanna on me?"

"Ah? You know?" Blake chuckled. "Actually, you weren't the target. I had no interest in you at the time. Ground-zero man was your brother Michael. We almost stuck her to him, too. But you tipped the cart over."

"Long as we're being frank, would you mind telling me why?"

Blake explained. Before he finished, Storm again found himself regretting his contract to protect his brother. Michael had outdone himself here on Blackworld.

"About the Shadowline," he said, trying to ignore the curious hundreds watching them pass, "how much interference am I going to have to put up with? Cassius tells me you've ruled out direct strikes at Twilight, as well as any other armed action this side of the Edge of the World."

"This is between Blake and Meacham, not Edgeward and Twilight. We feel it's important to maintain the distinction. And we don't want civilians getting hurt."

Storm cast Blake a cynical glance, realized that the man meant what he said. The idea startled him. How long since he had worked for someone with a conscience? It seemed like forever.

Blake's humanitarian impulses could spell unreasonable casualties. "You didn't answer me."

"You won't have much trouble from me. I'm no general and I'm willing to admit it. But my Board won't make the same confession, as your Colonel Walters has discovered. They didn't want to release tractors for nonproductive employment. Maybe they thought you were going to fight on foot."

"How much voting stock do you control?"

"Thirty-eight percent. Why?"

"Any of the Directors your men?"

"I usually get my way."

"Will you assign me your proxy for the duration?"

"Excuse me?"

"One of my terms was five percent of the voting stock and a seat on the Board."

"That was rejected. Unanimously, I might add."

"Where's my headquarters?"

"Back at the depot. We set it up in an obsolete repair shed. Where're you going?"

"I'm going to pick up my toys and go home. I'm wasting my time here. I don't have a contract."

"Go home? Colonel Storm... Are you serious? You'd dump us now?"

"Damned right I would. Things get done my way or they don't get done at all. I'm not Galahad or Robin Hood. I'm a businessman. My comptrollers will compute what you owe for transport and maintenance. I'll disregard penalty payments."

"But... "

"Would you like to test your meteor screens against a heavy cruiser's main battery?"

"We thought that was a giveaway clause, Colonel."

"There were no giveaway clauses, Mr. Blake. You were presented a contract and told it was a take it or leave it. In a seller's market prices get steep. You're hiring an army, not buying one crazy Old Earth shooter. Do you have any idea what it costs to maintain a division even on a peacetime footing? Win, loose, or draw, the Legion gets five percent, twenty-year deferred payments, expenses, equipment guarantees... "

"To be honest, Colonel Walters told us the same thing. We hoped... "

"Get somebody else. Van Breda Kolff is looking for something. But he won't be much cheaper."

"Colonel, you have us. We've got to have you. They'll cry a lot, but the Board will give in. Their fussing has put us so far behind now that it's criminal."

"I don't have time for games, Mr. Blake."

"They'll come around. They see the Shadowline slipping through their fingers like fine, dry sand. They want to get back what's been lost. You could hold us up for more and get it."

Storm saw that Blake was straining to control his temper. His Directors must have caused him a lot of grief.

He understood, once he was introduced to those select old armchair pirates. They were the sort who would buck a young whippersnapper like Blake simply because they resented his having come to power at such an early age.

Storm repeated his prima donna performance and stalked out. After what must have been a bitter hour of debate, Blake came to tell him they had acquiesced with the grace of virgins bowing to inevitable rape. Storm returned to the boardroom long enough to remind them of what happened to employers who defaulted contracts with the freecorps. Their bandit eyes became angry. He knew they had not surrendered completely.

He wondered why he bothered. The premonition could no longer be denied. Blackworld was the end. The last page of his story was going to be written on this hell of a world. What matter a contract?

The Fortress, that was what mattered. Even if the Legion entire encountered its death-without-resurrection, there were still the people of the Fortress. The dependents and retirees needed support. He hoped Mouse could handle the asteroid. Dumping the administration of the empire into the boy's lap as he had...

His aide finished preparing his quarters. With Geri and Freki pacing him and the ravenshrikes watching with hooded eyes, he walked the floor and nursed "Stranger on the Shore" from his clarinet. He played it again and again, each time more mournfully than the last. He was exhausted, yet too keyed up to rest. His mind kept darting here and there like a fish trying to find a way out of its bowl.

Poor pretty Pollyanna. So young to be so driven. That Frog must have been something. He would have Mouse send her home. There was no point to her going on with her game.

Poor Lucifer. Played for a pawn. Pray it did not blind his sensitive poet's eyes. Maybe the boy would have sense enough to go with his talent now.

Poor Homer. Poor Benjamin. Gone to do hard time in the hell of Helga's World. Could Ceislak get them out? Hakes was the most perfect of commando leaders, but his chances were grim. The Festung in Festung Todesangst was an understatement.

Poor Frieda. She was about to lose a husband she never really had. He had not been much good for her.

Storm could not think of his wife without guilt, though she was a soldier's daughter and had known, what she was getting into. Despite her peculiarities, she had been his best wife. In her way.

Poor everyone, Storm decided. There would be no winners this time. Not even the Sangaree Deeth. The shadow master was going to find the Shadowline a tool too hot to grasp. And poor Mouse was the dead-man's switch that would bring the Sangaree's folly home to him...

Storm finally relaxed enough to fall into a troubled sleep. His dreams gave him little peace. Only death itself promised that.

Forty-Two: 3031 AD

Storm stayed clear of the tractor driver and asked no distracting questions. The briefing had made it clear that operators needed their full attention all the time. Storm's head and eye remained in constant motion as he both familiarized himself with the instruments and displays and observed the economy of motion with which the professional operator managed his crawler.

Storm gasped in awe when the convoy began its run to the Shadowline. He had never seen anything like this. Brightside in description was nothing compared to the hellish reality. He could not begin to imagine what it must be like beyond the interface of instruments and filters. A kilometer-long lake of molten metals slid past. He glanced at a rear-view screen and saw high-melting-point trace metals form a scum in the convoy's shadows. This much heat was impossible to conceive. The convoy consisted of fifty crawlers jury-rigged to transport troops and cargo. Ideally, they would have deposited their cargoes at the foot of the Shadowline and allowed the Legionnaires to proceed from the shade station under their own power. However, Storm and Cassius did not trust the vacuum-proofing of their equipment to withstand the punishment of the journey out to the Shadowline. They had elected to transport it all the way.

It would take months to move the legion that way. Every crawler outbound since Cassius's arrival had been ferrying, yet only half the Legion was in the Shadowline. The force Storm was taking out to the point of confrontation consisted of a battalion each of engineers, artillery, armor, and infantry. Support troops would be distributed along the way. He had no intention of fighting immediately. The combat troops were along only to protect the engineers, who would prepare his move against Richard's roadblock.

Cassius had been laying logistical groundwork from the beginning. He had set up major depots each hundred kilometers, scattered secondary depots in between, had erected hospital domes, recreation domes, and had set out thousands of small inflatable emergency shelters so men working in spacesuits stood a chance if something went wrong. He had set out a galaxy of communications repeaters and transponders, had widened the extant road, and had charted the most defensible terrain.

The more constrained the battlefield, the more meticulous and extensive was the preliminary work. Cassius was a sound detail man. Given the help of the brothers Darksword, and time, he would prepare down to the last shell for the explosive-type artillery Storm had selected as his main heavy weaponry.

Already the Shadowline is cluttered, Storm thought as he studied the screens. Near its foot every square meter of shade was in use. And the work had scarcely begun. It would be a month before they were ready for even limited action.

How much more trouble was in it for Richard? His lines were tremendously more extensive.

Storm's scouts encountered hostile pickets twenty-five kilometers from Richard's laager. He stopped and dug in while the infantry went out as skirmishers. He distributed the artillery so it could hammer any enemy probe. The armor he tucked away well behind his front, as a reserve to be deployed against any breakthrough.

For the present only Richard would be doing the attacking. And Storm thought that unlikely. Hawksblood's mission was defensive. His task was to prevent interference with the Meacham project at Shadowline's end. All he needed to do was sit and let things happen.

After establishing his position, Storm concentrated on outflanking Hawksblood from the more difficult direction.

Hawksblood would anticipate a circling strike. He would have his heaviest weapons positioned to repulse anything coming out of the sun.

Fifty kilometers to his rear Storm's engineers exploded charges which demolished a hundred-meter-wide stretch of bluff, spilling megatons of rock into shadow. The engineers had estimated that it would take a month to clear the rubble, then five to ten days to grade a crawler road to the high side of the cliffline.

Storm was not sure taking the high ground would help.

It would be pure pissing into the wind if Richard figured out what was happening#8212;and it could turn into disaster if Hawksblood anticipated the maneuver and was waiting for it.

It was more promising than the alternatives. Attacking out of sunlight would be expensive and dangerous. Attacking straight up the Shadowline would be suicidal.

The positional and equipment advantages were Hawksblood's. Nevertheless, Storm believed he could win. One way would be to go all out, attacking with the Legion's full might. That would force a war of competitive consumption, of attrition. The sheer magnitude of Richard's logistics would betray and defeat him.

That way meant a bloodbath. Storm did not want one. Neither did his opponent. Theirs were wars of maneuver, not of slaughter. They were in the business for financial gain, not for blood and glory, not for some shadowy concept of honor or duty or patriotism, nor even for the latest in ideological fads. Their men were good soldiers. They knew how and when to keep their heads down. They knew how to stay alive and that was their primary bet in the battlefield sweepstakes. They would do their jobs with a cool professionalism and weigh each risk against the importance of the goal they were being asked to achieve.

They were the best and worst, according to one's viewpoint. A man could hire them and get a nice, clean, efficient job done quietly and quickly. A politician could rant and rave at them, exhort them, cajole them, inundate them with all the magic catch-phrases and righteous lies, and not get them to look up from their card games.

The characteristics of the Shadowline battleground left very little room for traditional mercenary finesse.

Hawksblood's detection equipment proved sensitive enough to isolate the explosion tremors from ambient thermal gradient noise in the planet's crust. He pushed a reconnaissance-in-force westward. Storm's artillery and mine fields stopped it. Hawksblood left a wrecked military crawler's slave sections behind. Storm studied them, comparing them with the handful Blake's crawler factory had produced.

He did not find much difference. Both manufacturers had stuck with a basic pumper design, modifying the slaves to carry armor and extrudable weapons turrets. The Meacham variety revealed somewhat less designer concern for the safety and comfort of the fighting crew.

"He may try flanking us now," Storm told Helmut Darksword, who was in charge east of the rockfall. "Watch for him coming out of sunlight. Keep him from spotting the fall."

"I think we'll get enough warning on the ground-noise sensors."

The command setup had been arranged so that Storm and Cassius would take turns controlling the schwerpunkt while the brothers Darksword would take turns directing operations in the support zone. The off-duty commanders would return to Edgeward City, to oversee the Legion's interests there. Storm's son Thurston directed the permanent communications and liaison team stationed in the city.

Helmut's defenses were anchored upon a battery of heavy lasecannon unshipped from a Legion cruiser. They were the only weapons Storm had which could engage a vehicle in daylight. Explosive shells, so effective in the shade, exploded a few meters after entering sunlight. Lighter laser weapons did not have enough power to punch through a crawler's heat screens.

What would Richard do if he discovered the notch in the cliffs? Move his laager back? Storm did not think so. That would be an admission of defeat. The maneuver could be repeated indefinitely, forcing Hawksblood to withdraw again and again. It might take years, but Richard would eventually run out of room to back up.

Would he come from Brightside, in force, to isolate the force screening the rockfall? That might work if he moved before the debris was cleared, so that units not inside crawlers could not retreat. But it would mean a bloody fight.

He might do nothing, hoping Storm would make a self-defeating mistake before his scheme came to fruition.

Storm favored the latter possibility. That was Richard. Hawksblood was a master of the art of doing nothing. He liked to wait till an opponent became committed before making a move himself.

Storm called the officer commanding the engineers. "Dahlgren, I hear you've got a problem back there. What's wrong?"

"Sorry, Colonel. It's bad news. We're going to take a lot longer than we figured."

"Damn! Why?"

"We didn't get a good enough picture of what was up top. We breached a metals lake up there. It's draining into the fall and hardening when it gets out of sunlight. We can't do anything till it stops."

Storm controlled his temper. "Very well." I'm cursed, he thought.

To someone at his end the engineer said, "Throw a spot up there, Henry, so we can show the Colonel what we're up against." His face vanished, was replaced by darkness.

In a moment the darkness gave way to a palely illuminated tumble of rock. Camera elevation climbed, revealing first a long rockslide, then an area where greyish material lay between the boulders, in places looking like leaden gobbets of hardened candle wax. Finally, the camera view rose to capture the dramatic, fiery frenzy of the liquid metal splashing and tumbling over the broken lip of the cliff.

"Awesome, Dahlgren," Storm said. "Do what you can while you're waiting." Storm secured comm, leaned back, stared at the wall of his specially-equipped command crawler.

Richard waited, as Storm had anticipated. Otherwise, that malicious, chortling little devil-god called Fate ragged the Legion with a special vengeance.

An attempt to run a line of shadow generators out to intercept Twilight's line collapsed when Blake's crews encountered a vast sea of heat erosion.

Heat erosion, which usually took the form of extremely fine powder, was not dangerous in and of itself. It was a mask hiding the real dangers over which it lay. It could conceal sudden drop-offs or spikes of hard rock that could open the belly of a crawler like a fish knife.

On Helga's World Hakes Ceislak failed in his initial attempt to penetrate Festung Todesangst. He did establish a surface bridgehead and seize control of her missile defenses. Cassius's friend in Luna Command, Admiral Beckhart, appeared to be in no hurry to commit his people.

Delays and delays. Obtaining vacuum-adapted equipment proved almost impossible. Confederation had a push on against the McGraw pirates. The Services were devouring everything being manufactured. And Richard was bidding in the same market.

There was no solace in knowing that Hawksblood faced as much trouble as did he. Richard had been born to trouble as smoke to a flame. Storm wished him a ton from the clutch of Dees he was letting camp in his back yard.

Storm still found it odd that the war did not carry over Darkside. Over there it was peace as usual. Intercourse between Edgeward and Twilight continued almost normally. They did not play psy-war games with one another's citizens. There was no trip-trip of spy over assassin. Neither city tried to whip its people into a war fever. Business followed its usual routines. Corporations controlled both cities, but only a small percentage of the population in each was involved in mining, and even of those each corporation was willing to risk but a minority. The war in the Shadowline was a risk operation. Neither Blake nor Meacham wanted to hazard anything but money.

Well, Storm thought, that's why they buy soldiers. To avoid wasting their own people.

Forty-Three: 3031 AD

He returned to Edgeward after two grueling months Brightside. What had seemed a cramped, constricted city earlier now appeared so vast as to make him nervous. All a matter of viewpoint, he told himself as he tried to stretch and relax, free of the moment-to-moment survival worries of the Shadowline.

He discovered that he was a comparative unknown. Half the Edgewarders seemed unaware that the Legion was on Blackworld. The other half did not care. The war had not changed daily life.

Storm did not know whether to be pleased or dismayed. Blake had stirred up no hurrah at all. His employers usually went the reverse route.

He had a feeling Blake was a little ashamed of what he was doing.

His first day back he went through a rocky session with the Corporation's directors. They demanded action. Exasperated, Storm offered them weapons and transportation. "You know more about this business than I do," he told them. "I'm perfectly willing to run you out there and let you handle it yourselves."

After his initial aggravation, he enjoyed baiting them, delighting in their aghast expressions. He would love to have a chance to pull the same thing with the political pirates who ran Confederation. How many wars would there be if the warhawks themselves had to go put their fat asses on the firing line? The armchair warlord was one of the grotesqueries of post-feudal civilization. The Dark Ages were brutal, but then the ruling classes got out and whacked on one another...

There were no takers when he offered an inspection tour of his Shadowline operations, either. Blake, he discovered, was the only one of them ever to have crossed the Edge of the World.

Typical of the breed, he thought. Never been out of their plush chairs.

A week after his return Blake invited him to a City Hall party for Edgeward's elite. Pretty spy Pollyanna was on hand, looking more comfortable and vivacious than he had seen her since her wedding day. She was a different creature in her home milieu.

"Gneaus!" She greeted him with a kiss and an unselfconscious hug. "I hope you haven't been too miserable out there."

"Miserable isn't a word that will touch it. It's too good. I can't think of one that's low enough."

"Come on. I'll introduce you around."

"I hit Blake up pretty good on the contract, but I'm beginning to wonder if he isn't getting off cheap anyway. My men don't get to come in for these R-and-R breaks." Helmut, who had traded jobs with his brother, trailed Storm, looking like a grumbling thunderhead seeking a target for its spears of lightning. He was followed by the Sirian warhounds. Helmut scowled fiercely at those Board members who had a habit of sticking their long noses into the new Legion offices downstairs. Cassius had moved them there to take advantage of the Corporation's superior communications facilities.

The first person Pollyanna introduced was Albin Korando.

"We've met," Storm said. "How are you, Mr. Korando?"

"Still kicking, Colonel."

"Albin's sort of my brother," Pollyanna said.

"Must be a pretty thin genetic relationship."

"Oh, no. Not by blood. We were both adopted by Frog. Albin's an exile from Twilight. Frog brought him in. Got him into hogging. You should swap lies with Albin someday. He's got some stories to tell about the old days."

Korando grinned. "Anything before last week is the old days to these kids."

"Uhm. Maybe we should slip off and swap a few over a bottle. After the amenities."

"Oh, no you don't," Pollyanna told Storm. "I've got plans for you."

He began to fear that he had misread her, that she had not changed after all. "Lucifer... "

"The break is official. No hard feelings. It was good for a while, when we could both be ourselves. When we tried to be what we thought somebody else wanted, well... No. I don't want to bore you. Just say I don't regret it. Most of it."

Storm doubted that there were no hard feelings. This would mark Lucifer for years. The boy would throw himself into soldiering, trying even harder to become what he would never be. He did not disabuse Pollyanna. He could sense that she would hurt for Lucifer, knowing she had hurt him.

Next was Blake's wife, Grace, whom he hadn't known existed. She was a short, slim, retiring, elfin woman, who was socially ill at ease. She looked much younger than her probable age.

"Mrs. Blake." He put on his courtly manners, bowed to kiss her hand. A bit of ancient chivalry might put her at ease.

A part of his mind watched cynically. How we love to play at being paladins, he thought. Hired killers pretending to be knights of the Round Table. Dragons slain. Maidens rescued. Ogres dismantled. No, no, that's not really innocent blood taking the shine off the old armor. Just a spot of rust.

"Is it?... Is it dangerous?" Mrs. Blake said, staring at the ravenshrike on Storm's shoulder.

"Only if he decides you're edible." He tried a boyish smile. "Nothing to fear. He's not fond of sweets."

She became flustered. He moved on to Blake, who gave him a frosty, "Good evening, Colonel." He seemed painfully aware of Storm's philandering reputation. His gaze darted to the warhounds. "I hear you're quite skilled with an ancient instrument called a clarinet. Would you favor us by playing?"

Storm became quietly reserved. He could not be comfortable playing for strangers. He seldom played to an audience at all.

Blake sensed his discomfort. "Oh, not for the mob. For Grace and myself, after dinner. And Pollyanna, of course. Grace's request. She's a musician herself. Favors classical strings."

"An honor, then. Perhaps the lady will join me in a piece or two?"

Grace Blake stared at the floor and nibbled her delicate lower lip. She really was a timid creature. Pollyanna squeezed his arm. She whispered, "You're overdoing it."

People were watching. Several faces betrayed the thinking behind them. A few women were eyeing him speculatively. Men turned tip their noses at his menagerie or calculated their chances with Pollyanna. Both sexes envied his access to the throne.

He spotted a grim face behind the partiers. Thurston pushed through the crowd, trampling toes and egos alike. He was supposed to be on duty downstairs.

Storm murmured, "Dinner and music may have to wait."

Forty-Four: 3031 AD

"Father, Cassius needs you," Thurston boomed from ten meters away.

"What is it?"

Thurston shrugged. "Something's shaping up." Evidently, he did not want to talk in front of civilians.

"Mr. Blake. Mrs. Blake. If you'll excuse me?"

"Of course," Blake replied. "Wish I had an excuse to slip out myself."

"Creighton, Colonel Storm," Grace said, her tiny voice quavering, "could we go along?"

"Of course," Storm replied. "Your husband is the boss. I'd look silly keeping him away."

"Albin, make my apologies," Blake told Korando. "Then join us in Colonel Storm's war room."

The war room was lively when they arrived. The Legion had added a massive amount of specialized equipment to Blake Mining's Comm Center. The heartpiece was a gigantic display board on which was imposed a computer-mastered chart of the Shadowline. The long, dark river of the rift was alive with shoals of tiny moving lights. Each represented a particular unit. A susurrus of soft communications chatter filled the air as commtechs monitored Shadowline radio traffic. The theme of the moment was confusion on the firing line, questions racketing back and forth among "Foxbat," "Mirage I," and "Damocles." The chatter was clear, but couched in jargon that Storm's companions could not interpret.

Cassius' was on visual, and clearly impatient. "Command clear trunk, scrambled," the technician told Storm. Storm nodded.

"Gneaus," Cassius said the instant Storm moved in front of the pickup, "they're starting something. We don't know what yet, but it looks big."

"What have you got? I don't see anything on the big board."

"They started probing with infantry and armor two hours ago. Pushed our observers back. We've had to withdraw past the limit of reliable sonic discrimination, so nothing's sure. The computer enhancements make it look like there's a lot of heavy stuff moving."

Storm glanced at the pictures from the sky-eye orbitals. The damned satellites were next to useless. The demon sun burned them out in a few days' time, and what pictures they did send down were no good. Too much contrast between the sunlighted plains and the darkness of the Shadowline. "You get anything from Intelligence?"

"There hasn't been a crackle from an open carrier since this morning. Looks like they've shut down communications completely. Yesterday we did get confirmation of your notion that Richard went back to Twilight."

"Who'd he leave in charge?"

"Doskal Mennike. The younger."

"Richard wouldn't set up a push and then leave."

"That's why I called. He's been gone awhile, near as we can tell. He wasn't here for their spoiling raids last week, either. Something strange is happening."

"Where are they up top?" Storm's own forces had begun moving to break the laager that morning, after the engineers, a month behind schedule, had completed the incline to the upward side of the Shadowline cliffs. Any attack by Hawksblood would catch the Legion overextended.

"About ready. They were getting into position the last report I had."

"You have comm with Wulf?"

"A bad link. The sun is distorting the relay beam."

"Patch me in on Tac Two." While he waited, Storm asked, "Mr. Blake, is there any way we can find out what's going on in Twilight?"

"I have a man there, but I can't get in touch in a hurry. We have to wait till he finds some way to smuggle his microtapes out."

"That's no good. I need an idea of what's happening right now, today, not what was going on last month."

"Why?"

"I smell something rotten."

"Patched, Gneaus," Cassius said. "You won't get anything but snow on visual."

"I'll see if we can enhance. Switch it." He waited a few seconds. A 2 appeared momentarily. "Sky Writer, Sky Writer, this is Andiron, over." No response. "Sky Writer, Sky Writer, this is Andiron, do you read me, over."

"Andiron, Andiron, this is Blackwood. Sky Writer has lost lasecomm, over." The response was barely audible.

Storm whispered to a tech, "Who's Blackwood?"

The technician checked his charts. "Bill Allen, sir. In one of Colonel Darksword's crawlers."

"Blackwood, Blackwood, this is Andiron. Relay to Sky Writer. Query your position. Query can you relay visual of laager, over."

"Andiron, Andiron, this is Blackwood, relaying to Sky Writer. I read you loud. Am at point Romeo Tango X-Ray, engaged. Visual follows, over."

"Picture coming in," Storm said. "Enhance it."

A deep darkness, waxing and waning behind static snow, appeared before Storm. It wavered till the computer found how best to enhance it.

The darkness was broken occasionally by the fire-lances of lasecannon or the flash of explosives. The view was down from the rim of the Shadowline. Richard's laager was spread out like toys on a sand table. Here and there, jerkily in the flashes, movements suggested armor and mobile artillery scuttling for better cover. The visible crawlers began to glow.

"Why are they lighting up?" Storm asked. From behind him, Korando replied, "They're putting up their solar screens. That will stop the lighter lasecannon."

Storm leaned closer. "Those rigs look smaller than their military crawlers. Korando. What kind of units are they?"

"Pumpers and charters. Mostly old stuff. What I'd guess they'd be using for hauling supplies."

"Blackwood, Blackwood, this is Andiron. Query, Classes of defensive fire received, over."

"Andiron, Andiron, this is Blackwood. Receiving light projectile fire. Have silenced one lasecannon. Over."

"Wormdoom, Wormdoom, this is Andiron, do you read me? Over."

"Andiron, Andiron, this is Wormdoom," Cassius replied. "Switching to secure comm. Wormdoom out."

Shifting to the scrambled trunk, Storm said, "Cassius, they've replaced their heavy stuff with obsolete mining equipment. Watch for something coming out of sunlight. You might move up some artillery and armor. Go ahead with the blast. It's too late for Wulf to help you anyway. Try to get this lot to surrender. If you don't get hurt, and can push far enough past them, a sunlight sweep wouldn't be able to get back to friendly territory."

"I'm working along those lines already," Cassius replied. "Gneaus, if that's it, it's likely to be bloody. What's wrong over there? This isn't Richard's style. There's no need for an attack. And Mennike isn't any glory hound either."

Remembering what it had been like out there, penned in a suit most of the time and always surrounded by natural dangers as well as enemies, Storm posited, "Maybe he went around the bend."

"Maybe. But I can think of a more probable cause. There are enough Dees over there to wreck a galaxy. I've got to get back and stay on top of this. Keep watching. I'll check in later."

"Later." Storm rose, surveyed the room. He moved a chair to its center, seated himself. From there he could hear all the monitors and see the big board. He completely forgot his guests. Thurston received a curt nod when he brought a tankard of coffee.

The razor's edge of Now swept forward, turning future into past. Hours groaned away, creaking on rusty hinges. Wulf took the laager under heavy fire. One of his crawlers ran on out along the cliff top, planted charges that would drop a rockfall behind Hawksblood's men. Wulf's fire wrecked several Meacham crawlers. The laager broke. The big units, manned by flighty civilians, fled into sunlight, abandoning everyone not already aboard. Cassius immediately applied pressure with his armor. Hawksblood's people withdrew till Wulf's rockfall barred farther retreat.

The Twilight fighting crawlers swept in from sunlight on a well-organized front two hundred kilometers wide, far behind Cassius.

"No doubt about it," Storm muttered as he watched the situation develop.

"Father?" Thurston asked.

"There's a crazy man running things out there."

The thirty Meacham crawlers attacked everything man-made, including hospitals, refuge stations, and recreation domes, all of which had been clearly marked for what they were. The crawlers maintained a grim comm silence throughout the action.

Albin Korando observed, "It looks like they don't want each other to know what they're doing. It doesn't take any military genius to know that our comm nets would let us watch every one of them."

"Curious, isn't it?" Storm said.

The Legion bent. Forewarned, it broke nowhere. The attack was still on when Storm said, "We've got them. They're going to be sorry they tried this. This might mean the whole war."

Before long the others began to see what he meant. One by one, Hawksblood's military crawlers were being disabled or forced back into sunlight. The specially designed military units were Richard's most potent tool. He was losing them fast, and would lose more when the retreating units tried to get back into the Shadowline.

A Lt. Col. Gunter Havik commanded the forces opposite Cassius. He had been Walters's student in Academy and had served with Storm in Confederation's Marines. He was the archetypal mercenary officer. He surrendered the moment it became clear that his position was untenable.

The modern freecorps would fight no heroic, doomed Stalingrads. Not when there was no known tactical or strategic justification. Glory was an epitaph for fools.

Cassius immediately started ferrying troops round the rockfall and digging them in for the return of Hawksblood's fighting crawlers. He did not expect to have much difficulty forcing their surrender. Most would be running near their limits of solar endurance and would be short of munitions. They would be eager to get into shade, and unable to shoot their way in.

Wulf's force withdrew to the Shadowline to recuperate from its extended exposure to the demon sun.

Storm glanced at a clock and realized that he had been in the war room, awake and intensely attentive, for twenty-two hours. Even iron man Thurston had taken a few hours to nap. Thurston started to suggest that he do the same.

"I was just thinking that," Storm told his son. "I can't do anything here anyway. It's all on Cassius right now. Get me up if it begins to go sour."

In the Shadowline, of course, the only sleep for the men involved was the big one. No one would rest till the issue was decided.

Blake was on hand when Storm returned. He did not seem pleased.

"What's his problem?" Storm asked Thurston.

"Casualty figures been coming in."

"Bad?"

"Not good."

Battle's confusion had begun to resolve itself into a grim statistical portrait, Storm saw when he checked the unit reports.

The first big battle in the Shadowline, still under way, would be a resounding victory for Edgeward. The laager had been broken. All but a handful of the attacking battle crawlers had been taken out. Cassius, with every available man and machine, facing light resistance, was racing toward the point where Twilight's supply line intercepted the Shadowline. He would reach it in four days if Hawksblood could not stop him. The war could be over before the end of the week.

And a thousand Legionnaires had died the death-without-resurrection. More were missing. The survivors were sifting the rubble. There were as many more injured and resurrectable dead.

Storm was appalled. He was dazed. He could not accept the figures. He had not encountered this much killing since the Ulantonid War. "Richard didn't do this," he murmured several times. "This's the work of a madman." Michael's face seemed to laugh silently from nowhere and everywhere.

Only a Dee stratagem could have spilled so much blood.

He circulated around the war room, trying to find some positive spark amid all the negatives. He found no promise anywhere but in Cassius's headlong sprint.

Suddenly, he caught one strained thread from amid the constant babble being monitored. "... you read, Iron Legion? I've hit heat erosion fourteen kilometers off Point Nine Hundred. Main track in. Can't drop my slaves. I have thirty-two men aboard. Can you help? Mayday, Mayday, This is Twenty-ninth Brightside Main Battle Tractor, can you read, Iron Legion? I've hit heat erosion... "

"How's he sending?" Storm asked.

"Pulse-beam laser, sir. He's bouncing it off the cliff face."

Storm turned to the big display board. It portrayed incredible confusion. He wondered if even the computers were keeping track.

Point Nine Hundred would be nine hundred kilometers out the Shadowline, only about fifty kilometers east of the incline Wulf had used to scale the cliffs. "How long have we been getting this?"

The monitor checked the log for the previous watch. "Nearly four hours, Colonel. Colonel Darksword began rescue operations as soon as the message came in."

Storm turned to Blake. "What're the chances of bailing them out?"

Blake shook his head. "About zit. We haven't had a successful daylight rescue since Moira Jackson brought her father in. That was right after the Ulantonid War. And we get several chances a year. Finding them is the hard part. Point Nine Hundred and fourteen out don't mean that much. It's a dead-reckoning guess. DR gets pretty loose after a few hours in sunlight. If we ever develop the technology, we'll put out navigation beacons... Anyway, you have to be right on top of another crawler to spot it. The charters have the best instruments, and even they can't see far. But we always try, if only because we hope we'll learn something."

The drama unfolded with painful slowness. Wulf had committed all his units to a computer-mapped search spiral around the trapped crawler's estimated position.

The tractor's commander grew more and more desperate as his screens drew nearer overload.

Suddenly, "Hey! Got him! Hey, over here!"

Storm chuckled nervously.

Soberly, the same voice said, "Intrepid, Intrepid, this is White Wing One. We have a contact bearing three four seven at six one zero meters. Over."

"White Wing One, White Wing One, this is Intrepid. Hold your position, over." Intrepid was Wulf on his own tactical net. "Storm King, Storm King, this is Intrepid. Assemble on White Wing One, immediate execute, over." Wulf shifted to command net. "Wormdoom, Wormdoom, this is Sky Writer. We have a positive contact. Request instructions, over."

There was no response from Cassius. Walters had outrun his communications engineers.

Storm bent to a pickup. "Sky Writer, Sky Writer, this is Andiron. Proceed with caution. Let one of the miners direct the rescue. Andiron out."

Storm stared at the big board again. He had a sudden bad feeling about this. Something told him he should let it go. Yet he could not overcome his feeling of moral obligation to a brother soldier. He could not make himself call Wulf off.

"Andiron, Andiron, this is Sky Writer. Acknowledge proceed with discretion under native direction. Sky Writer out."

Storm told the tech, "Keep a close monitor. Let me know if you smell anything funny."

The communications technician frowned questioningly. Storm did not expand.

The rescue attempt followed procedures which were little more than paper theory. It went smoothly, according to Korando and Blake, one or the other of whom was always present.

Charters moved into position sunward of the stricken crawler. They set up portable shadow generators which were themselves protected by a series of disposable molybdenum-ceramic ablation sails. Pumpers, the leviathan crawlers which took liquid metals aboard and hauled them in for processing, ran their pump trunks to emergency locks designed to receive them. The inner diameter of the trunks was large enough to permit passage of a small man.

"Makes a hog more comfortable, knowing he has a theoretical chance," Korando observed. "Even if it's so slim it only pays off once a century. Knowing somebody will try means a lot when you're crawling Brightside."

"Andiron, Andiron, this is Sky Writer. We're getting no response from the crawler. We're sending a man from Main Battle One. Over."

Storm turned to Blake, frowning a question. "The battle crawlers are modified pumpers," Blake told him. "The first few have converted pump slaves."

That was not the question Storm wanted answered. But Wulf was waiting. "Sky Writer, Sky Writer, this is Andiron. I read you, over."

Wulf had the man carry a hand comm and patched him into the comm net. There was a lot of back and forth about how to open the escape hatch from outside. Wulf had a lot to say about hurrying it up because the shadow generators would not last forever.

"What I wanted to know," Storm told Blake, "was why you couldn't have used this method to rescue that man Frog."

"Because his tractor was built on the other side of the hill where Noah was building the Ark. His only escape hatch was under his cabin. The high-hatch modification came about because of the trouble we had getting to him. Meacham picked up the idea the same time we did."

"I see."

"I don't see anything but dead men, Colonel," Wulf's investigator reported once he had effected entry. "I'm starting forward to the control cabin."

There was a minute of silence. Storm waited tensely, something raising the hair at the back of his neck.

"Can't figure what happened here, Colonel. They're all bluish and puffy-faced. Their screens are still up and the oxy levels look good... "

"Wulf!" Storm thundered, ignoring the code rules. "Get the hell out of there! I mean now!" The bad feeling had bloomed into an intuition. "It's some kind of trap!"

His order came too late. It had been too late for an hour.

There was an instant of thunder on the net, then a silence punctuated only by static.

"Andiron, Andiron, this is Honeycomb," a tight voice said, breaking the silence. "We have a visual and lase-radar on a nuclear cloud at approximately Point Nine Twenty, fifteen kilometers out. Over."

And, "Andiron, Andiron, this is Charing Cross. I'm getting heavy richters epicentered at approximately point Nine Seventeen, fifteen kilometers out, accompanied by heavy gamma radiation. Over."

Similar and related reports came in from a dozen observers. Storm responded to none. The communications technician acknowledge in a dull voice.

Wulf. Dead. Along with hundreds of his men. Because of a humanitarian impulse. It had been a trap. Dee work for sure, predicated on a knowledge of mercenaries and miners.

Storm told Thurston, "That was Fearchild's doing."

Thurston nodded sadly. "It's his style. What are we going to do, Father?"

Storm paused a moment before answering. "You take over here." His stomach felt as though the great-grand-daddy of all ulcers were trying to gnaw its way out. "I've got to tell Helmut. Try to get through to Cassius. He has to know."

He was surprised at himself. He should have been in an insane rage. Instead, he was emotionally numb, still trying to convince himself that it really had happened. Part of him kept thinking Wulf would call in and say it was all a bad joke.

He scanned his people once before going to Helmut. Their faces were all reflections of his own, he suspected. Each portrayed shock and an inability to believe.

Nuclears had not been used on-planet, against people, even during the most critical days of the Ulantonid War. They had joined the list of banned-by-gentleman's-agreement weapons ages ago. One would expect chemical and biological weapons to see use first. Their effects were less long-lasting...

He had been right. The Shadowline war was the swan song of the freecorps. Confederation would move in and disarm them for sure, now. The public outcry would leave the government no choice.

He overlooked one small fact while thinking that. The media were completely indifferent to the Shadowline war. No one was covering it. Hardly anyone off Blackworld knew anything about it. He, the people in the war room, and perhaps a handful of men in Twilight, were the only folks Darkside who knew that proscribed weaponry had been employed.

Forty-Five: 2860-3023 AD

Only months after they had overcome the last Dharvon, Deeth growled, "I'm bored, Rhafu. I think I've figured out why my father was always so damned cranky. There's no real challenge in trying to boost a profit margin a tenth of a percent."

Rhafu looked at Deeth, perhaps thinking the young Head was fooling himself. "Your peers would argue the point."

"That's their lifestyle. The Haug and Gaab haven't ever done anything else. I might be happy if I'd had a normal childhood. But I didn't. The normal life makes me feel caged."

"We have a mission your father bequeathed us."

"We can't do anything about it. We're stuck with the tedious stuff here. By the time we clear it up, the animals will be warring with Ulant, and we'll have to wait them out. That could last twenty years. The Ulantonid are stubborn."

"I don't recall your father saying revenge had to be instantaneous. Even so, I have to admit to a certain restlessness myself."

"Any ideas?"

"Some."

"Let's hear them."

"I think we should divide ourselves into a greater and lesser House. One to go on being traditional Norbon, the other to exploit Osiris and pursue our vendetta with the animals. Creating a dual structure would isolate risks. If we fail, we wouldn't take the Family down with us."

Deeth eyed Rhafu uncertainly. They had built a very responsive, monolithic structure in order to destroy the Dharvon. He did not want to relinquish any of the power he had acquired.

"Your cousin Taake hasn't much imagination, but he's a competent administrator. Put him in charge of the Homeworld arm of the Family. Collect up our more venturesome people and move to Osiris. You'll find plenty of excitement there. And all the work you want, too. We can build puppet empires. We can develop broader markets. Raise sithlac domes. Construct breeding stations. Hell, we could even get into ordinary commerce and industry. It's a whole planet, and we don't have to share it with anyone."

A primitive, medieval world, Deeth thought. We can play God, if we want. What more could I ask? "I'll consider it. Any other suggestions?"

"We could exploit this war. We've collected a lot of new dependents since we came home. We have to employ them somehow."

"Build a raidfleet? Rhafu... When I was little, when I first went to Prefactlas, that was all I ever thought about. Growing up to be a raidmaster."

"Don't think it's all adventure and romance, Deeth. Even piracy is plain hard work if you're going to be any good at it. Ships have to be bought or built. Arms have to be acquired. All that takes financing. You have to assemble reliable intelligence sources. You have to find men who'll work together without letting too much pride get in their way. Men without Family loyalties who would become loyal to you and one another. That's not easy with our people."

"Yes, yes. I see. More of the same old administrative hoohaw. But at least with an interesting end in sight." Deeth began to recover some of that awe and excitement he had felt when, as a child, he had studied the adventures of the great raiders.

If the Sangaree race had one outstanding weakness, it was a cultural bias against tight, devoted administration, a cultural aversion to administrative detail. They pictured themselves as a people of action and behaved accordingly. The sprawling, suffocating, ever-growing bureaucracies characteristic of human enterprises were unknown to them. They strayed to the extreme in the opposite direction, sometimes so far that the lack was as crippling to them as was the excess to humankind. Critical records might amount to nothing more than a few handwritten notes on scraps of paper soon lost... What did not exist in the minds of the Heads and their immediate assistants could be extremely ephemeral, and setbacks frequently came about simply through failure of communication or absence of administrative precision or reliable records.

A Family's most prized retainers were those few Sangaree capable of being clerkish and detail-conscious. The Families scrambled for them aggressively and traded them carefully.

Deeth's raiding and Osirian operations prospered. In time the Norbon were accepted, grudgingly, as one of the Sangaree First Families. Deeth and Rhafu earned a reputation as a team with a golden touch. Their projects usually sprang from Rhafu's fertile mind. Deeth's carefully recruited employees and agents put them into effect. The old man did his best to remain obscure and play his own role.

In a sense Rhafu was the power behind the throne, the real genius of the Family. Deeth simply manipulated hands.

Deeth did not want to be the brains. He dared not be. Despite all the lessons of Prefactlas, he remained impulsive. Rhafu usually softened the impact of his impetuosity, but there were times when the Family welfare suffered because of some ill-considered scheme Deeth launched without consulting the old man.

Though one of the First Families now, the nouveau riche Norbon were never fully accepted as such. They were a little too crude, too rough, too much involved in the more barbarous ways of garnering wealth. And Deeth employed outsiders.

He did not use them in the traditional way, as cat's-paws among their own peoples. He found good men and brought them into the Family operations on Osiris and, occasionally, Homeworld. Accountants. Economists. Data-processors. And soldiers, hard men who became the fist of the Family, led by trusted Sangaree retainers.

The more traditional Families were appalled. And not a little jealous of the wealth-accumulating and fighting efficiencies of the Norbon.

Deeth received few social invitations, but even fewer slights that might be viewed as invitations to bad feelings. He did not miss the social life. He remained unregenerate in his distaste for parties and the people who frequented them.

During the war he saw occasions when he thought he could fulfill his father's charge on the cheap. He moved without consulting Rhafu, hoping, like a child eager to surprise a parent with an accomplishment. His enemies were cunning and slippery. They seemed to smell danger from light-years away. They evaded him every time, and so effectively that they remained unaware of the nature of the threat.

During the war, from a distance, he re-encountered his son, and could not shake the Sangaree sense of Family. He applied a few helpful nudges where the Norbon had the power, and helped create a rich man. And an instrument by which, Deeth hoped, Norbon influence might be intruded into the heart of human power structures.

Much later, long after he had revealed himself, Deeth began spiriting Michael off to Homeworld and Osiris for a belated Sangaree education.

There were grave deficiencies in Michael's character. Deeth was disappointed. He never let on. Michael was his only child.

Deeth did not marry. That he did not, and remained untempted by the prizes steered onto his path, caused quiet comment. There were ungrounded speculations about the nature of his relationship with Rhafu, and questions about Michael.

Only Rhafu suspected the truth, and even with his oldest friend Deeth refused to discuss the question.

Norbon w'Deeth was carrying a torch for an animal woman called Emily Storm.

For a bred pleasure slave.

That one dread secret could topple his empire. A physical relationship could be tolerated, could be winked at, but an emotional involvement could not. Not ever. Such weakness could not be accepted in a Head.

He dared not share his feelings for fear that it would, like a Frankenstein monster, get loose and destroy him. His own House would repudiate him.

He had won the loyalties of his relatives. They would go into hell for him if he ordered it, but for the sake of a perverted love they would not follow him to a new Wholar.

Yet he walked the edge. He dared bring Michael into Sangaree society. He formed an alliance with the Gaab by wedding his son to one of their daughters. He dodged all questions about Michael's mother by saying that she had perished on Prefactlas.

Rhafu, sensing the mild, unformed suspicion of the Heads, spread a tale of a companionship with a Sexon girl. He used the whole true story of Deeth's youth, merely changing Emily's name.

Time marched. Decades dwindled into the past. Deeth suffered severe and extended depressions whenever he withdrew from his work and realized that he had, again, become an administrator. Fulfillment of his great obligation to his father seemed to be ever more remote. There just was no time to plot against the Storms.

A sudden and unexpected opportunity arose on a world the humans called Amon-Ra.

Michael sent word that his brother, who had just assumed command of the Iron Legion, had agreed to help the underground human government oust the Sangaree Families controlling the world.

The Amon-Ra Families were all small and weak. They would stand no chance against the Legion.

Deeth decided to help them. Over Rhafu's protests, without adequate preparation, he threw in his raidships. Aboard them he sent the quasi-military forces he had developed on Osiris.

He lost everything. Every man, every ship, every weapon. It was a hard way to learn the truth about his officers. Landless, Houseless, Familyless Sangaree simply were not disciplined enough to make war in human terms.

Rhafu treated him to an extended lecture on those cultural biases which made it impossible to fight the Storms heads up...

"All right!" Deeth finally snarled. "I can see that for myself. And I'm going to correct it. We'll build a real fleet and real army. And if our own people won't do, we'll use animals. All animals." They had used humans and Ulantonid from the beginning, but never in command positions.

Amon-Ra slipped away. The years and decades rolled on. Deeth buckled down, subjected himself to an intense self-discipline, did not let up till the Norbon had recovered from the Amon-Ra disaster.

When he did pause to look around he found himself blessed with an excuse for ulcers. Michael and his children... They carried on as if they were alone and immune to anything. Time and again, one or another endangered his plans for the future of the Storms or threatened to scuttle one of his profitable intrusions into the human business sphere. The children were the despair of their mother, who was a stolid First-Family woman completely uninterested in bizarre adventures. She came to him, as the Norbon, again and again, pleading for his intercession.

What could he do? He dared not overcontrol them for fear of losing an invaluable bridgehead in human affairs.

With his financial backing they were pushing tentacles into every corner of Confederation, and those tentacles were channels along which Norbon influence flowed. And when the Norbon prospered, all Sangaree eventually profited.

Following Amon-Ra, Deeth became an avid follower of the human wars, especially the Storm-Hawksblood contests, which contained so much genuine animosity at the command level. "Rhafu, I think this is what we need. We bend their own wishes and guide them into a to-the-death struggle... "

"They're too intelligent to fall into that trap. They don't let personal feeling interfere with business."

"Nevertheless... " Deeth tried putting agents into both mercenary forces. He failed. He had to rely on his son for inside information. And Michael was both unstable and the possessor of a strong streak of Sangaree self-centeredness.

The creation of Festung Todesangst strengthened the Norbon immeasurably. It freed the Family of the old Sangaree administrative bugaboo, and allowed Deeth to pirate invaluable commercial information. In a very few years the Norbon had as much power and wealth over the First Families as the First Families had over the average Sangaree Family.

Deeth's secret monitoring facility inside Festung Todesangst, existing outside the knowledge of his son and granddaughter, apprised him of Michael's discovery on Blackworld. It screamed a priority instel when Michael first ran his numbers.

Forty-Six: 3032 AD

It was not much of a New Year. The Legion did not celebrate. Edgeward City tried, but events in the Shadowline had killed any spirit of optimism. The various parties fell flat.

Storm spent New Year's Day and the following week alone, or, when he craved company at all, with Helmut Darksword. Helmut was taking Wulf s death badly.

Cassius was ripping Twilight into bloody chunks in the Shadowline. Hawksblood's leaderless troops were falling apart. Storm could not refresh his interest in the Legion's advances nor in the enemy's mysterious vulnerability. He played his clarinet, read his Bible, and sat and stared at his old .45, twirling the dark steel cylinder as he did so.

Cassius had cut off the Meacham crews at Shadowline's end. He was having no trouble repelling relief forces attacking from the shade of the Twilight shadow generators. His men, despite orders to the contrary, frequently refused to play the old mercenary games of fire and maneuver. While Walters remained cool and professional, they went and slugged it out with the enemy, determined to teach lessons that would remain forever unforgotten.

Thurston had been making a career of trying to suppress the news of the nuclear blast. He was, like the Dutch boy, trying to save a dike with a finger. His luck was worse. The whole Legion knew how Wulf and his men had died. That was why they were out for blood.

Storm did not interfere. He believed that the whole thing had gotten beyond any chance of control. Like a cold, it had to run its course.

He had won another war. Resoundingly. And, probably, had stumbled right into a Michael Dee trap.

He thought a lot about his brother, and about the promise he had given so lightly, so long ago. Michael was on his mind whenever that old revolver rested in his hand... He often wished that, sometime, he had turned his head while Cassius or his sons had worked their will.

Keeping his word had cost too much. Far too much. And yet, even now, he knew he would shield Michael if Dee came begging for protection.

He returned to City Hall only when the first band of prisoners came in. He wanted to talk to Lt. Col. Havik.

Havik spotted him first. He rushed over, face drained and worn. "Colonel Storm. I want to offer my apologies. I know they're not worth a fart in a whirlwind, but I've got to say something. That thing is eating us up. I want you to know that if any of us had known, we would've refused our orders."

Storm standing cold and silent, watched Havik's face. He knew the man was telling the truth, yet it was hard to separate the action from the enemy...

"My men and I have had a lot of time to talk, Colonel. One of the corporals made a proposal. We've all agreed. The whole battalion wants to offer its services in bringing to justice whoever is responsible for the atrocity."

Storm inclined his head slightly in acknowledgment. Havik was professional to the core. Like so many Academy products, he was an attempt at a carbon of Cassius. "Thank you, Colonel. If there's any way you can help, believe me, I'll yet you know. And without trying to get you to compromise your commission. But if I can, I mean to handle this myself. It's become personal."

"Uhm." Havik nodded his head. Perhaps he had seen Dees floating around Twilight. Maybe he understood.

"What's happened to Colonel Hawksblood?" Storm asked. "I just don't understand how this could have happened in his organization."

Havik frowned, shrugged. "Colonel, nobody has heard from the Commandant since Colonel Mennike took over. We've started to wonder if he hasn't met with foul play. He'd been having a lot of trouble with the Twilighters. And now your men have found Colonel Mennike."

Storm sent a questioning glance Thurston's way.

"They found him the day before yesterday," his son told him. "In a one-man shelter near where the Twilight route enters the Shadowline. He'd been dead better than two weeks. Stabbed."

"Colonel Havik," Storm said, "I still won't ask you to compromise your commission, but if you'd volunteer a little information it might help."

"Sir?"

"What sort of communications did you have with your headquarters in Twilight?"

Havik did not think before replying. "We used microwave relay in the Shadowline, Colonel. Pulse-beam laser repeaters across Brightside. The system wasn't reliable. The laser's been down all month. The shadow generators are too far apart. The power you need to punch a beam through overloads the equipment. We've been using messengers between the down stations."

Storm eyed Havik. The Colonel's statement was a clear-cut betrayal of his employer. The nuclear must have touched him where he lived. "Then Commandant Hawksblood could be perfectly healthy, crossing Brightside somewhere, completely ignorant of what's happened?" Storm hoped so. He did not want Richard taken out of his life by one of Michael's stratagems.

"Possibly. We were set up to be as independent of Twilight as possible. There wouldn't be much traffic. He'll eat heads when he gets back and finds out."

"Thanks, Colonel. We'll make you comfortable. I hope this won't last much longer."

"It shouldn't. You've won. Before the blast. That's what makes it so senseless. You lost a lot of men, but it didn't change anything."

Storm went to the war room to check the daily reports from Mouse and Hakes Ceislak. The Fortress was quiet. There was good news from Helga's World. Ceislak's engineers had sapped a tunnel into Festung Todesangst. His men were occupying the upper levels.

Where was this Beckhart, this friend of Cassius who had promised to land Marines as soon as the Legion established a bridgehead? He seemed to have vanished from the universe. And Storm wanted Ceislak on Blackworld.

He went on to Blake's penthouse. "Mr. Blake, I want to make a direct strike at Twilight."

"I've told you that's impossible, Colonel."

"Hear me out. That blast out there was a setup. That bomb had to come from their mining inventory. That means there was collusion by somebody up high in Meacham Corporation. And it means that Hawksblood has lost control. He wouldn't try anything like this. If he makes it back from Brightside, he'll end up dead or in a cell. They're not playing by the rules anymore. I'm telling you we've got to quit before they eat us up. The scenario I see is this: Richard will be the scapegoat. He'll probably get killed trying to escape after he #8216;orders' somebody to put a bomb in on Edgeward itself."

Blake looked baffled. "Colonel, I absolutely refuse to allow you to endanger civilians."

"I don't think you understood me. The civilians are in danger now."

Korando cleared his throat. "Mr. Blake, pardon me for butting in. I think you'd better give the Colonel's suggestion more thought. That nuclear was a storm warning. We can't ignore it. We'd better be ready for anything. Logically, the next step would be a move against Edgeward. They have to get rid of witnesses. And it's the only way they have left to get control of the Shadowline. You can't bet they won't do it. They've already gone further than any of us would have believed possible a month ago."

"Right!" Storm growled. "You people are going to be up to your ears in Confie snoops when this gets offworld. Personally, I want to keep you around to answer their questions. Mr. Blake, believe me, I know the man responsible for this. We slept in the same room for ten years. If you give him time, he'll not only destroy you, he'll get away with it. You know that. When you get down to it, it's not that much of a jump from Frog to Edgeward."

"You think it's Dee?"

"Absolutely. And backing him is a Sangaree Head named Norbon w'Deeth. And the Norbon seem to be top dog among the Sangaree Families."

"Sangaree?" Blake was baffled. "What have they got to do with this?"

"It's too complicated to explain. Take my word. This confrontation was engineered from offworld. It started when Dee murdered your man Frog. If we don't scratch and claw, it'll end up with the Sangaree in complete control of Blackworld's mining industry. And they won't leave any witnesses to testify against them."

Blake slowly shook his head. "I'll consider what you've said, Colonel."

"Don't take too much time. They won't. By now they know their attack failed and they're being overrun. That bomb was probably meant to go off somewhere else, making the whole thing work. They'll do something, just to find out if it blew at all, then to cover it up. You'll find me in the war room."

Storm went back downstairs, settled into a chair facing the big board. The confusion of the previous week had begun to disappear. Unit lights had appeared throughout the territory Cassius had occupied. There was a big concentration a hundred kilometers west of the junction with the Twilight supply line. Cassius planned to sit there and wait for the Meacham people to come in and surrender.

Had this been a normal merc war it would have been all over but the prisoner exchange. Richard could do nothing to dislodge Cassius. His logistics were too precarious and there was no shade where he could assemble sufficient forces.

But if Michael had Meacham's ear, war would break out Darkside as soon as news of the Brightside defeat reached Twilight. Michael had cast the dice. He had no choice but to escalate his bets.

Storm issued orders. He wanted a new board set up to represent the Darkside territory between Edgeward and Twilight, and wanted all available personnel planting observation devices on likely approaches to the city.

How would Michael avoid the mutiny that was certain when Richard's men found out what had happened in the Shadowline?

Simple. He, or whichever of his sons it was who had taken Mennike's place, would destroy shadow generators while returning to Twilight, cutting communications with and abandoning Hawksblood's forces. It was a harsh move, but Dee-logical.

He had better warn Cassius to watch out for nuclear booby traps. The Dees would want to reduce the witness population fast.

"The Whitlandsund!" he growled. People turned to stare at him. "Of course!"

Edgeward's pass to Brightside was the key. Michael would want it bad. By capturing it, Dee could trap almost everyone who could damn him Brightside. In its tight, twisting confines he could play Thermopylae. If Edgeward were destroyed and he held the pass till everyone Brightside perished, who would be left to speak against him? Only his accomplices.

Storm had no one to send to defend the pass. How long to travel from Twilight to Edgeward? How long from Helga's World to Blackworld? He calculated quickly. Not long enough, and too long. There was no point to having Ceislak abandon his mission.

"Thurston. Go find Havik. Bring him here. Then get Blake." He retreated into his speculations. The nuclear blast had to be part of a greater Dee plan. It could not have been an end in itself because it had not altered the field situation in the Shadowline. Was it a diversion? Something to grab the attention while Michael snuck up on Edgeward and the Whitlandsund?

The idea deserved more thought. How had Michael arranged it? On timing? If so, then the southward movement toward Edgeward would be under way now...

The fox. The fool fox, Storm thought. I should have known he wouldn't be content to stay in the background while Richard and I tried to fake each other out with fancy footwork.

Michael might be fated to win his game, but, damn it, there must be ways to make his winning expensive and painful.

Havik appeared. Storm said, "Colonel, I've got one hell of a problem." He retraced the path of his recent thoughts.

Havik suggested, "Put scouts out, of course. Fortify the pass. Hold a reserve to ambush them on their way down. Unless they've brought in someone from outside, there won't be many of them. We had almost everybody in the Shadowline. Meacham handled our logistics."

"The Legion is in the same position, Colonel," Storm said. "All I've got here are communications people and a liaison crew. And I expect Dee to use his own people. He won't want men who'll kick much about breaking the usual rules."

"I see." Havik remained thoughtful for more than a minute. Then, "The only help I could give you would be passive. I could go out and squat in the pass. If they attacked, I could consider that a move against my employer. I'd feel justified in resisting. But... What would I use for weapons? We turned ours over out there."

Blake had arrived and had been listening during Storm's speculations. He still did not want to believe, but had begun to recognize the potential for disaster. "Colonel Storm, do you really think Dee is such a demon?"

Storm snapped, "I grew up with him, remember? I think I know what he's capable of, and that's just about anything." He turned to Havik. "I don't know what we can do about arms. There're some personal weapons, but the only heavy stuff we have is what came back for maintenance work."

"We have our own weapons cache," Blake said. "It's obsolete stuff, though. It was used by the Devil's Guard during the war."

Storm made a face. He prided himself on keeping his men equipped better than Confederation's armed forces. "Any of it functional?"

"We've kept it up. We have a few men who play-act at being a militia."

"Colonel Havik?"

"I'll look it over." He did not sound excited. "But I want you to know, this is something I'll have to take to my men. I can't just order them to help the Iron Legion."

"I realize that, Colonel. Just ask them to hold the Whitlandsund till we can send someone to relieve them. They're your people caught out there, too. If you have doubters, send them to me. If I can't convince them, then I don't want them involved. It shouldn't be for more than a few days anyway. Mr. Blake. Do you have any people capable of managing the war room?"

"What're you planning now?"

"I'm going to do my job. I'm going to defend Edgeward City. I'm going to take my people out and ambush Michael Dee. I'll need somebody to keep track of things here."

"I have my communications people. You'd have to have somebody familiarize them with the equipment."

"I'll leave Helmut Darksword." Helmut was not yet ready for combat. "Thurston, how are your preparations coming?" His son had begun them immediately after contacting Blake and Havik.

"Half an hour, Father. They're loading the crawlers now."

Blake sighed, smiled a thin, worried smile. "I almost hope you've guessed right, Colonel."

Korando offered one of his rare observations. "Better a live fool than a dead skeptic, sir."

Storm smiled. He wished he had time to get to know Korando. The man interested him. "I'll keep in touch, Mr. Blake. I'm going to try to find Colonel Darksword."

It was a ragtag force he took out to meet the Dees. He had some three hundred men armed primarily with equipment that had been sent in for repairs. Their small arms were their only reliable weapons.

Still, if Michael did appear, the ambush should buy Havik a few more hours to get dug in in the Whitlandsund. Havik, in his turn, would stall Dee till the units Storm had recalled from the Shadowline arrived.

Forty-Seven: 3032 AD

Storm, wearing a standard infantry combat suit, stood on a hill overlooking the place where his men would fight. Silence and darkness surrounded him. To the west there was a hint of glow limning the Thunder Mountains, illuminated ions blowing on the solar wind. Before him, invisible to the eye, stretched a long, narrow plain flanked by the ringwalls of two immense meteor craters. The hill on which he stood was the wall of a third and smaller crater, which narrowed the nearer end of the plain to little more than road width. It was a nice tight place to defend.

The region had suffered intense meteoric bombardment over the ages. The plain, over which the customary Twilight-Edgeward route ran, was the only safe passage through the craters#8212;unless Michael swung hundreds of kilometers eastward to come in along the route from The City of Night. Storm was sure Michael would be too arrogantly self-certain to come in by the less obvious path.

And he would be too arrogantly sure of himself to charge south as fast as he should. While he was tootling along, smirking about having put one over on the best, his brother would have anticipated him and would have chosen their place of battle.

My brother, Storm thought. That's what it comes down to out here. A fight between me and my brother.

He now knew that Michael was coming. Dee's convoy had been detected by remotes an hour ago, ten kilometers to the north, rolling south at a steady eight kilometers per.

Storm smiled grimly when he saw the first running lights appear at the far end of the plain. The battle crawlers were leading. Michael had six of the monsters. If those could be wrecked...

Though it was pointless, he turned to survey his dispositions. He could see nothing, of course, though he could vaguely sense the presence of the gun crew in front of him and Thurston there beside him.

Here I stand, he thought. The Black Prince once stood like this on the hill at Poitiers. I know my soldiers are the best that ever were, but... He wondered how sure Edward had been. From the literature it seemed that he had known his Englishmen could handle ten times their weight in French, but those histories had been written after the fact, with the outcome no longer in doubt, and mainly by Englishmen. The Black Prince had stalled for days, trying to negotiate his way out of the mess.

There would be no negotiation today. And these enemies would be no gentlemen burdened by generations of chivalric tradition. If, as he had begun to suspect when he had learned the size of Michael's force, these were Sangaree troops spirited in through some city other than Twilight, he faced some rough fighters. They would not be familiar with the terrain or their equipment, but they would be as case-hardened as his own people.

The fifteen-minute wait seemed endless. Storm caressed his lasegun. It felt cold and hard through his suit gloves. He hummed "Stranger on the Shore," and wondered why he had never learned to loaf through these final minutes. He had had a long life in which to grow calloused, yet he was as nervous today as he had been while waiting for the opening shot of his first battle.

"A time for living and a time for dying," he murmured. The leading Meacham crawler had entered the narrows between ringwalls.

His one lasecannon flashed blindingly, drilling a neat hole through the face of the lead tractor. It was a point-blank shot. In the second flash Storm saw frozen air spewing from the wound.

His artillery opened up. His armor, using radar and the enemy lights as guides, began scratching deadly graffiti on the crawlers' flanks. Their tracks were favored targets. His infantrymen, bouncing in on their jump packs, concentrated completely on tracks. Their guns and roeket launchers scrawled a thousand bright lines on the face of a startled night.

A secondary explosion ripped the guts out of a slave in the third crawler in line.

"A complete surprise!" Storm growled happily. He descended the hill in hundred-meter bounds, the compressed gas of his jump-pack rockets rippling the back of his suit stingingly. To his right Thurston was bouncing mightily despite the heavy load of satchel charges he carried. Thurston veered across Storm's path, heading for the stalled lead crawler. Storm followed him. The lead vehicle was the most important target. Properly wrecked, it would block Michael's advance for a long time.

The Twilighters started shooting back. Their fire was wild. Storm chuckled. They must have been riding along like tourists, bored, sleeping, completely indifferent to the world outside.

One of his tanks took a bad hit. The crew scrambled out before the ammunition blew. They joined the infantry, going to skirmish with bewildered enemy troops disembarking from the transports up the line.

The lasecannon disabled another battle crawler before dying of its own illnesses. That put the lead three out. The others put their solar screens up. The energy of the small arms could do nothing against those.

Storm stayed close to Thurston. Almost fifty men converged on the lead crawler. Though stalled, the machine was far from dead. Its weapons spit shells and coherent light. Storm's rocket men concentrated on suppressing that fire.

He and Thurston reached the tractor. His son cut his jump pack, tossed him a charge, then ran along the monster's flank, below its fire, limpeting charges to each slave. Storm attached his own over the hole drilled by the lasecannon, dove for cover.

He felt the explosion in his hands and feet. There was no sound and almost no concussion. He leaped up, yanked himself through the hole he had blown. He used his weapon like a firehose.

The cabin was an undefended shambles. Storm sabotaged the power controls. The men who followed him in moved to the hatch connecting with the first trailer. Storm began moving from chair to chair, peering into the faces of dead crewmen.

He could not tell. They looked human enough. He would have to take a few back for dissection.

Would Michael really take that risk? he wondered. The provable presence of Sangaree would bring Navy and the Corps whooping in here as if they were a day late for Armageddon. It probably would not be worth the trouble of lugging the bodies around.

Then he found the blue man.

"What the hell?"

He had seen blue men before, a long time ago. A lot more of them than he had wanted during the Ulantonid War. There were no Ulantonid in Richard's forces, nor did any reside on Blackworld. Cassius had said that the Sangaree Deeth employed men of several races.

The crawler rocked as Thurston's charges exploded in series. His men burst through into the first slave. There was a brief bit of gunplay. Storm ignored it. He pitched a corpse out of the cabin, broke radio silence long enough to call a crawler in to pick it up. He returned for another.

What would be going on in Michael's head right now? Would he be raging against the fates, the way he always did when things went bad? Or would he be wondering why resistance was so light?

He chose a half-dozen corpses all told. His men loaded them aboard the same crawler that had done passenger duty on the Edgeward-to-Twilight run. The operator became increasingly nervous as Dee's infantry pushed closer and closer, but held on even after spears of light began stabbing all around.

Storm's force got mauled, as he expected. But even his clerks and commtechs were Legionnaires. They delivered far more damage than they took. When Storm had his corpse collection and was satisfied that the lead battle crawlers were thoroughly disabled, he withdrew in good order.

The mass of armor and infantry that poured around the lead crawler, pursuing Storm, suddenly ceased to be, as a garden of mine explosions devoured them. Dee's caution afterward allowed Storm to finish disengaging.

"Now we'll see what Michael's made of," he told Thurston.

"Father?"

"We'll find out if he can control his temper. If he can, he'll go after the Whitlandsund. If he can't, he'll come after Edgeward to get even."

"He wouldn't have much trouble taking the city."

"No. But he'd have to spend a week making sure it was pacified. And he doesn't have a day to waste. Go up and tell the driver to stop at the top of the crater wall. We'll sit up there and see what Michael decides."

Storm sat on that hill for a long, long time. He had done a superb job of blocking Dee's path.

Thurston wakened him. "He's coming, Father."

Storm went to the control cabin to watch the screens and displays. Crawler after crawler came from the north, lumbered past, and turned west. "Good. He had time to think it out."

"I feel sorry for Havik," Thurston said.

"So do I, Son. But he's got a better chance now than before. Driver, take us in to Edgeward."

An antsy Helmut awaited him at the depot. "Looks like trouble," Storm told Thurston.

"Gneaus, we've got trouble," Helmut said when Storm went to him.

"What now?"

"Ceislak has his ass in a bind. A Sangaree bind. They ran a big raidfleet in on him. Our ships had to haul out. He's holding them off with the captured batteries, but he says they can force a landing if they want to push it."

"Looks like Cassius got his wish, then. We've pulled the head spider into the game. Any word from Navy or Luna Command?"

"Not peep one. Cassius is on his way in."

"Eh? Why?"

"He said that if Dee means Richard's people to be trapped out there, he's cut the line to Twilight, so there's no need for us to hold on west of the shade station. They'll come to us. He's just leaving a few men to help them evacuate."

"I wonder... You think Michael figured Cassius would think that way? That this Darkside thrust is just a feint to pull him in?"

"No. The nuclear... "

"Of course. That changed everything. He's playing for all the marbles, not just the Shadowline."

They reached the war room in time to receive Ceislak's message that he was being attacked by Sangaree. Storm connected Cassius, brought him up to date on Helga's World, Havik, and his own recent action.

"Gneaus," Cassius burred, "I have a suggestion about those corpses. Send them over to Darkside Landing or The City of Night for the autopsy. The more you spread the proof around, the harder it'll be for Dee to eliminate all the witnesses. And they'll pressure Meacham to stop backing him."

"Good thinking. I'll do it. Got to go. Havik's in action now."

"Father," Thurston called across the room, "Instel from Helga's World. Ceislak has Sangaree on the ground now. Any special instructions?"

"Tell him to hold out as long as he can. Cassius's buddy will turn up one of these days. Helmut. Bring down the scale on the Whitlandsund there. Michael's dispositions look a little strange."

A half-hour later Thurston bellowed, "Yahoo! Hey, Father! Hakes says he's got ships in detection. They show Navy IFF, and there's a skillion of them."

Storm chuckled at his son's enthusiasm. "Calm down and keep an eye on it. Tell Ceislak to keep the comm open." He felt like whooping himself. "Helmut, this friend of Cassius's is as crafty as a Dee. He had me scared, but he knew what he was doing. Caught them with their pants down, making an assault. Bet none of them get away." Darksword's face lit with grim pleasure. Storm reveiwed the Whitlandsund situation again.

Michael's dispositions were not unusual after all, just unimaginative. Havik would not be in bad trouble for a while.

Thurston called, "Ceislak says he has contact with Navy. They brought in a full battle fleet. They've got them bastards nailed to the wall."

"Good. Good. Everything looks beautiful. I'm going to my quarters. Before I collapse."

He dreamed awful dreams. Something was nagging him. He had forgotten something. He had overlooked something, and one dared not do that when dealing with Sangaree and Dees.

Thurston shook his father. "Dad. Come on. Wake up."

Storm opened his eyes. "What is it? You look awful."

"They're attacking the Fortress. The Sangaree are. Another raidfleet. The Fishers just told me. They're watching and can't do anything to help. They've lost touch with Mouse."

Forty-Eight: 3032 AD

Mouse sat in his father's chair, behind his father's desk. His eyes were closed. He felt much as his father looked the day he had returned from Academy. How long ago? Just a few months... It seemed like half a lifetime.

So much had happened. So much had changed. The Fortress had slipped quietly over some unseen boundary into a foreign universe, a hateful, actively hostile universe.

He had changed with his home. He had seen things. He had helped do things. None of them left him proud. He had turned a sharp corner on the yellow-brick road and had caught a corner-of-the-eye glimpse of a side of his family he had not known existed when he had gone off to Academy.

"I was a child then," he murmured. "This is just growing-up pain. Just reaction to a head-on with reality."

With reality. With a special reality unique to the family and Legion, with their bizarre array of problems and enemies.

He opened his father's comm drawer, punched for Combat. "Anything new?" he asked.

"Ah, negative, sir. Situations appear static."

"Keep me informed."

"Will do, sir."

"You're very good," Mouse whispered after breaking the connection. "If I were you I would've lost patience with me last week." He rose and began prowling the study.

He could not shake a subtle conviction that something dreadful was about to happen. He was restless all day. He had been unable to sleep well the past several nights.

"If there was just something to do around here."

He began strolling from cabinet to cabinet, looking into each, re-examining his father's collections. He did the rounds at least once a day. The circuit had a curiously calming effect.

He wondered if his father used them for the same talismanic purpose.

The coins, the dolls, the china, the books#8212;they were all evidence of a past, of a connection with and a part in a vast, ongoing process. You could reach out and touch them and feel that you were touching part of something larger than yourself. You pulled in endless, invisible strands of humanity and spun yourself a chrysalis... It was all very subjective and emotional.

Still restless, he quit the study and went up to Cassius's office. He met no one along the way.

The tiny, empty world of the Iron Legion made him think of still, abandoned cities, deserted for no reason history bothered to remember. Take twenty thousand people out of the Fortress and it became a self-contained desolation almost timidly murmuring to itself.

These days he heard sounds he had never noticed before, all the background noises of supportive machines that had been drowned in the chatter and clatter of human presence. The sounds left him with an eerie, spooky feeling. Sometimes, as he strolled the empty hallways of the office levels, he would freeze suddenly, for a fraction of a second completely convinced that he was alone, trapped in an empty structure seven light-years from the nearest human being.

In those instants he staggered with the impact of a very vacant, very hollow feeling, inevitably followed by an instant of panic. Alienation was not the same as being alone. The alienated man moved in a bubble, but could see other human beings outside. The soul of him knew they were there, accessible if he could find the enchanted key. The separation was emotional, not physical. The truly alone man was barred from human intercourse by insuperable physical barriers...

Mouse would never forget the look on Fearchild's face when he had entered the torture chamber in that asteroid#8212;such pathetic joy at the appearance of another being, an almost eager anticipation of torment that would reaffirm his membership in a fundamentally gregarious species.

Mouse decided that he had had an insight into the human animal. The bad marriages that went on, the cruel relationships that persevered beyond all logic#8212;most people preferred pain to being alone. Even pain was an affirmation of belonging.

"The beast isn't really a solipsist," he muttered. Cassius's toy purchases from The Mountain were still in their shipping packs. He considered unwrapping them, setting them up, abandoned the idea. They were Cassius's private pleasure. He had no right to interfere.

He spent an hour playing with an ancient electric train, just running it around and around its track, making switches, stopping at stations, restacking the boxcars, wondering how the original owner had differed from people of his own age.

Beliefs and values made him think of his Academy classmates. Drawn from Confederation's farthest reaches, they had brought with them an incredible range of ideas and attitudes, some of which he had found wholly alien.

Tommy McClennon, with whom he had crewed and miraculously won in the Crab Nebula Sunjam Regatta two years ago... Tommy was Old Earther and more alien than most of the racial aliens attending Academy. Those aliens were of the same caste, the warrior, as the Storms. Tommy's ancestors had been nonproductive wards of the state for centuries. Tommy's different ideas went right to the bone.

A beep-beep-beep sounded from a silver button on the breast of his tunic. An elf's voice repeated a number three times. Mouse opened Cassius's desk and punched it on Walters's comm. "Masato Storm."

"Sir, word from Ceislak. He's just had a Sangaree raidfleet drop hyper... "

"I'll be right down." He ran to the nearest elevator, feeling foolish as he did. What could he do, really? Nothing but listen while this Helga's World disaster developed.

"I was right about something bad coming on," he told himself.

Frieda Storm stepped from another elevator as he left his. "You got the word?" she asked.

"The Sangaree? Yes."

"What the hell happened to that nitwit admiral who said he was going to help?"

Two big boards had been set up in Combat. One tried to follow operations on Blackworld, the other Ceislak's Helga's World action. They were not fully computerized, nor were they up-to-date. A mob of old folks and youngsters did their best with sketchy information.

"What's happened?" Mouse demanded.

"Donninger's trying to hold them off, but he's going to have to run. There's way too many of them."

Mouse glared at a newly activated display globe. At its heart lay a cue-ball-looking orb which represented Helga's World. Combat was receiving a data relay from Legion ships orbiting the planet. Mouse watched the blips a while.

"What's our real-time lag?"

"Five minutes and some seconds. Pretty good, considering. Your father's Fisher friends must be right in on top of it. Close enough to risk getting shot at."

Mouse considered the trend. "Tell Donninger to get the hell out. Ten more minutes and he won't be able to." A Legion ship winked out of existence while he spoke.

"They brought in some heavy stuff," someone said. "Bigger than anything on the ID lists."

Mouse tried to watch several screens at once as specs came through and the computers tried to build images of the enemy warships. "They are big," he told Frieda. "Something new in the way of raidships."

"I hear the Norbon are something new in the way of Sangaree."

"You think it's them?"

"Who else?"

"This's what Father and Cassius wanted, then. To draw that Deeth out of hiding."

Frieda sniffed. "He wasn't terribly cooperative about timing his appearance."

"Uhm." Mouse found himself a chair. He did not move, except to use the toilet, till the engagement reached its bloody conclusion.

"Astounding," he murmured, rising at last. "I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. I'm going to get some sleep."

He awoke to the insistent scream of the general alarm.

For a moment he could not understand what it was. He had heard it only twice before, long ago, during drills.

A booming voice echoed through the hallways: "Action stations. All personnel to action stations. We are about to be attacked. All personnel to action stations. We are about to be attacked."

"Holy Christ!" He grabbed clothing and ran.

He burst into Combat. "What the hell is going on?"

The senior watchstander indicated a display globe. His face was pallid. He gasped, "We got about two minutes' warning from the Fishers. They snuck past them somehow."

Red blips surrounded the Fortress in the tank. Tiny wires of fire lanced across the globe. Little stars sparkled. Diminutive sub-blips swarmed and danced like clouds of gnats on a still spring day.

"Eighty-two of them, sir," someone said. "There were eighty-five to start. Mostly light stuff. Sangaree."

"But... " He did not understand. It made no sense at all.

"They range from singleships to light battle, sir. Computer's still trying to project their assault plan."

Somewhere else, a computer voice murmured, "Kill. Bogey Forty-Six. Five thousand tons."

Frieda arrived. She had been asleep too. She was groggy and disheveled.

Mouse kept trying to make sense of the ship movements in the display globe. He could detect no pattern but an inexorable inward pressure.

"Just a raid?" he asked. "Or are they serious?"

The senior watchstander gave him a funny look. "Damned serious. Suicidally serious. They said so." He punched up something on his comm screen. A face appeared. The man said he was going to do to the Fortress what had been done to Prefactlas.

Mouse asked Frieda, "You think that's him?"

"Probably. Nobody's ever seen him, as far as I know."

"I've seen him before," Mouse said, suddenly remembering a moment on The Mountain. "He was there when that old man tried to kill us. In the crowd."

"Sir," the senior watchstander said, "the computer says they're running a randomed assault pattern. Some sort of command battle computer is controlling their ships. It looks like the ships' commanders have free manueuver any direction but backward. They've got to come after us whether they want to or not."

"Then it's a kamikaze attack."

"Sir?"

"A suicide thing."

"Definitely. Until whoever controls the battle computer turns them loose."

Mouse glanced at the display. An additional two enemy ships had been neutralized. "Are they going to break through?"

The watchstander sighed. "I think so. Unless we get a little more efficiency out of the automatic defenses."

"How long before they touch down?"

"Too early to predict."

"Tell the Fishers to contact Ceislak. Tell them to pass the word to Navy. Then have them get ahold of my father."

He could take only two hours of watching the claws of doom creep closer. The enemy kept coming and coming, despite one of the most sophisticated and deadly automatic defense systems ever devised. A third of their number had been destroyed, and still they came on with a dreadful, almost machinelike determination. Plainly, a madman was in charge out there.

He walked the silent halls of the office level, in some way making tentative good-byes to the Legion and everything he had known. He visited his father's study again, thinking it would be a crime against history to destroy the collections gathered there. So many beautiful things...

He returned to Combat. "What's it look like?"

"Still bad, sir."

"We going to hold till Hittite gets here?"

"Yes, sir. You think they'll commit her by herself?"

"I couldn't say. There's nothing out there that can stand up to her."

"Empire Class could take on any ten, sir. But there're fifty-some still."

"When you get signals from her, you give her everything we know. Especially about their combat lock. They'll have to break it to engage her, won't they? Maybe some of the individual ships' commanders will make a run for it."

"Will do, sir."

An elderly officer, retired from Legion service, said, "Some figures, sir."

Mouse scanned them. They predicted that the Sangaree would overwhelm the outer defenses and land at least fifteen vessels on the planetoid's surface. "Not good. This makes Hittite our only hope."

"Yes, sir."

"Sir," said the senior watchstander. "We've just picked up another group of them moving in."

"What?"

"Easy, sir. They aren't fighting ships. Here. Five of them. Four big ones that scan out as transports of some kind, and one medium one that might be the command ship."

"Transports. Of course. So they can send troops inside."

Frieda eased up on the senior watchstander's far side. She studied the data momentarily, then stalked out of Combat. It was the first she had moved in hours.

"Pass the word to the Armory to stand by to issue small arms," Mouse said. "And tell them to run a check on all internal defense systems. You computation people. I want some kind of parameters on best and worst times we can expect them to reach the surface." More to himself than anyone, he added, "Father thought the Fortress could stand up to anything. I guess he never considered being attacked by a madman."

"Uhm. Sir, there never has been a perfect defense against someone who doesn't care what happens to himself."

Next evening Mouse mustered the entire population of the Fortress in the gymnasium. He explained the situation. He asked for suggestions and received none. There was little that could be suggested. They could but try to hang on till Navy arrived. He bid them do what they could, and before he finished decided he had screwed up by bringing them together. It only rubbed everyone's nose in the fact that there were hundreds of children who would share the Fortress's fate.

Mouse's comm roused him from a troubled sleep. "Storm here."

"Contact with Hittite, sir. She's coming in."

"I'll be right down."

When he reached Combat, the senior watchstander told him, "We've fed them our data, sir. We've established a continuous instel link. She's got a couple of Provincials with her, for what they're worth. They're going to go for the command ship and transports first."

"How soon?"

The man checked the time. "They drop hyper in two hours and eight minutes, sir. They'll be coming in with a big inherent and only a couple degrees out of the slot to target."

"How much warning will our Sangaree friends have?" Mouse nodded at the red blips on the display.

"Depends on how good their detection gear is. Anywhere from five minutes to an hour."

It came up closer to an hour. "Damn!" Mouse spat. "Look. They're pulling back."

Within a half-hour it was obvious the raidships were being moved to protect the command ship and transports, and that they were still under that relentless outside control.

"I guess we'll see just how mean one of those big-assed Empire babies is," Mouse said.

"I suppose we will, sir."

Hittite dropped hyper and went into action in an awesome blaze of weaponry. She and her escort settled into a quiet, deadly routine of systematic destruction. The Sangaree seemed unable to touch her. But invincibility proved an illusion.

"Hello, Iron Legion. Hittite here. Boys, I don't want to tell you this, but I have to. We've taken some drive damage. We'll have to pull out or lose our screens. Sorry."

"Sorry?" Mouse snarled. "Sorry don't help nothing."

"At least we softened them up a little for you." Hittite's Communications Officer had not heard Mouse. "We make it eleven solid scratches and a whole lot of bloody noses. Good luck, guys. Hittite out."

"Run the numbers," Mouse snapped.

"They're still going to get through, sir. Unless those bloody noses are worse than they look."

"Bloody hell! I didn't want to hear that."

Frieda made her first appearance of the new day. "What's going on?"

Mouse explained.

"Damn it all, anyway!" She flew out of Combat.

Mouse was returning to his quarters when he saw the body lying on the stretcher in the corridor. A girl of about fifteen. He did not recognize her. She had to be a daughter of one of the enlisted men.

"What the hell?" He knelt, felt her pulse. She was alive. Just unconscious. Or sleeping.

A sound startled him. He glanced up, saw two old men go into a cross corridor carrying a youngster on a stretcher. The one to the rear gave him a furtive look.

He started to run after them, became distracted when he passed an open dormitory door. The lights were on. A half-dozen retirees were lifting children onto stretchers.

"What the hell is going on here?" he demanded.

They stared at him. Nobody said anything. Nobody smiled or frowned. Two hunkered down, lifted a stretcher, came toward him.

He grabbed an arm. "I asked a question, soldier."

"Mouse."

He turned. Frieda stood framed in the doorway, not a meter away. She held a weapon and it was aimed at him.

"What the hell are you up to, Mother?"

She half smiled. "We're loading you youngsters aboard the Ehrhardt. We're sending you to your father. The Fishers will give you covering fire."

His thoughts zigged and zagged. That was a good idea. It should have occurred to him. Gets the children out. It would be risky, but Ehrhardt was one of the fastest ships ever built... But Frieda seemed to be including him in this Noah's Ark venture. He would not have any of that.

"I've got a job here."

She smiled weakly. "I relieve you of command, Mouse. Bring a stretcher, men."

"Don't try to pull anything on me... "

"Take your father a kiss for me, Mouse." Her finger tightened on the trigger.

Mouse tried to jump aside. He was not quick enough. The stun bolt scrambled his thoughts. He was falling, falling, falling... He never reached the floor.

Forty-Nine: 3032 AD

Storm flung himself out of bed. A real nightmare had closed in on him. An attack on his home... That was it. That was what he had overlooked. This was a war against his Family. He had left a flank unguarded.

"Is that true?" he asked, able to think of nothing else.

Thurston looked baffled. "Why would I lie about that?"

"Don't mind me. I'm just confused. Let's go."

Mouse had reestablished a continuous instel relay by the time Storm reached the war room. "Mouse, what's it look like?" he demanded.

The burst went out. The response came back, it seemed, no swifter than the speed of light. "It doesn't look good, Father. They're coming at us like they've gone crazy. No maneuver or anything. And it looks like they know our weak spots. We're holding, but we're losing outstations faster than the program allows. I think we need outside help."

Helmut whispered in Storm's ear while Mouse was talking.

"Okay, Mouse. Just do what you can. Helmut says we've instelled Ceislak and asked the Fishers to pass the word to Beckhart." He listened to Helmut a moment more. "Oh. You've done that, too. Good. Look. The arrangements are made. You've got a heavy battle group on its way from Canaan, two squadrons headed there from Helga's World, and Hittite somewhere in your vicinity on shakedown cruise. The whole damned Navy is headed your way."

Navy would, anytime, anywhere, drop everything else for a dustup with Sangaree.

"Hang in there, Son. The Fortress will see you through. I designed it myself."

Mouse laughed. "Thanks, Father. Mother sends her love. I've got to get back to work now."

Mother? Storm thought. Who?... Ah. He meant Frieda. How was Frieda handling the crisis? He shrugged. She would cope. She was a soldier's daughter and a soldier's wife.

Time would tell the tale. If the Fortress cracked before Navy arrived, he would be a poor man again, in several senses. All his treasures would be gone, with most of the people he held dear. He would be left with nothing but the financial wealth of the Legion... He forced his attention back to what was happening in the Whitlandsund.

Havik was taking a beating, but he was holding. An infantry battalion was assembling at the shade station. If Havik held till they crossed back to Darkside, Storm was sure he would win again.

He could do nothing but work up an ulcer here, he decided. "Thurston. Take over. I'm going for a walk."

"It's raining out, Father."

"I know."

After a while he realized he was no longer walking alone. Pollyanna, without intruding, was slouching along beside him. He had not seen her since the day Wulf died.

"Hello."

"Hi," she replied. "Is it bad?"

"They're attacking the Fortress."

"And nobody's there."

"Mouse is. And the families."

"But no one to fight."

"They'll fight. As well as any Legionnaire. It's mostly automated anyway."

"Couldn't you ask for help from Navy?"

"It's on its way. But it might take a week to get there. That's a long time to hold out if the raid-master is determined."

"And it's all because of Plainfield. Michael Dee."

"My brother is a pawn too. The shadow-master is a Sangaree named Deeth."

They walked a block in silence. Pollyanna said, "I like the rain. I missed that at the Fortress."

"Uhm."

"I couldn't go walking on The Mountain. The skies were too big."

"Uhm." Storm was not listening. His thoughts kept turning to the Fortress. "He must've gotten upset with the way things were going here. Or maybe because of Helga's World. I don't know. It doesn't make any tactical sense to move against the Fortress right now." He talked on, using a soft voice to describe how Helga's World had become a deathtrap for a major Sangaree raidfleet and how the Shadowline War might still go the Legion's way.

Pollyanna was not listening to him any more than he was listening to her. "Down here," she said, pausing at the head of a descending stairway. "I want to show you where my father lived. Where my heart still lives, I guess."

He followed her down to the tiny apartment she had shared with Frog. The dwarf's ghost was its only occupant now. Pollyanna now lived in quarters provided by Blake.

Storm felt right away that the place was a shrine. It made him uncomfortable. He remained carefully, neutrally attentive while Pollyanna told the story of each of her museum pieces. He felt like a voyeur peeping through the keyhole of her soul. The slightly dotty, obsessive monologue helped him understand Pollyanna Eight just a bit better.

From there they went to his rooms and made love, then lay curled together in the twilight afterglow and murmured of nightmares that had come true and dreams that had turned into smoke.

"I want to go back to the Modelmog, Gneaus," she said in her tiny, weary voice. "I was really happy there. Lucifer... I think we could have made it if it hadn't been for the rest of this."

"That's life, pretty thing. It won't leave you alone. It keeps hammering away till it finds the weak places, then it starts yanking everything apart."

"Does it have to be that way?"

"I don't know. Some people slide right through. They never have any bad times, never hit that tough piece of road. Or so it seems."

"Can you play something on that funny black thing? Whenever you do, you know, I get this image of this lonely old man way up on a mountain... A hermit, I guess. He sits there looking down at this city wondering if maybe he missed something. But he can't figure out what it is because he used to live in the city and he did everything there was to do... Aw, you're laughing at me."

"No. I'm just a little surprised."

"Anyway, hearing it always makes me sad. I guess I want to be sad now. Because I guess I'm feeling like that guy on the mountain. I was there but I missed something."

"You've still got a lot of years to find it."

"It wouldn't be the same. I'm not the same Pollyanna anymore. I've done a lot of things I don't like me very much for. I hurt people. Frog taught me never to hurt people."

Storm moistened the reed of his clarinet, startled Pollyanna with a couple of rollicking Hoagie Carmichael pieces.

She smiled when he finished. "I didn't know that thing could be happy. You never... "

"It could be happier. I didn't have my heart in it."

"That was really strange music. Kind of wild and primitive."

"It's very old. More than a thousand years."

"Thanks. I feel better. Come here."

They made love once more, and fell asleep lying side by side, reading Ecclesiastes.

His comm's shriek wakened him. An almost incoherent Helmut blurted, "They took the Fortress! It just came in, Gneaus. From Frieda. She sent a personal message... You'd better come here... "

Grimly, Storm began dressing.

"What is it?" Pollyanna asked, frightened by the sudden hardness of him.

"We lost the Fortress."

"Oh no! Not... Your wife! And your children... "

"Be quiet. Please." Feeling numb, he finished dressing. He did not remember the walk to the war room. Suddenly, he was there. Something within him would not allow him to react completely to the news. It felt like another in a parade of disasters that had happened to somebody else.

"Bring me Frieda's tape, Helmut," he said when he realized where he was.

"Gneaus?"

He looked up. Helmut was standing beside his chair, holding the microtape. Time had stolen away on him again.

He loaded the cartridge with the exaggeratedly careful motions of a drunk. It began with a continuous status report from Fortress Combat. He advanced it till Frieda's pale face formed on screen. Her thin, severe, colorless mouth writhed, but he did not hear anything.

What's happened to Mouse? he wondered. He had not been visible in the Combat views.

Don't take him, too, Storm prayed. He's our only tomorrow.

Frieda was saying something about there being fighting on Dock Level. He upped the sound.

"... penetrate Residential. They're tough, Gneaus. Primitives, I think. Definitely human. I've put the kids into the Ehrhardt. She's set to boost whenever the computer decides she has her best shot at breaking through.

The Seiners say they'll try to cover her. We'll lose contact with them soon. The raiders are getting close to our wave guides. There it goes. The cruiser. Wish them luck getting through.

"Gneaus, I'm going to cut this short. I want you to remember me as a good soldier, but I'm so damned scared I might make a fool of myself. Forgive me now for whatever hurt I may have done you over the years. Remember my love, such as it was. And remember me to Father.

"We'll hold them as long as we can. Tell Navy to come get them."

She smiled weakly, pursed her lips in a last long-range kiss, then secured her screen. The instel relay continued. An old man calmly chanted ordnance data from the Fortress's Combat Information Center.

Storm sighed and closed his eyes. Getting the youngsters out was something, anyway. He shuffled around the dark places of his mind, collecting the old scraps of rage and hatred and hiding them in an out-of-the-way dust bin for nonproductive emotions. More than ever, now, he needed to keep a tight rein on his feelings.

"Helmut, give me an update on the situation here."

The news from the Whitlandsund was little better than that from home. Havik faced virtual human wave assaults. Michael appeared to be growing desperate.

The shade station was sending reinforcements, but only in driblets. Most of the functional crawlers were still far out the Shadowline.

Helga's World was the bright spot. The Fishers said the Sangaree raiders had been obliterated. Marines were taking over for Ceislak's commandos. The latter were taking ship for Blackworld. Already.

Storm sent Thurston to find Blake.

"Mr. Blake," he said when the man arrived, "I'm down to my last gasp. The one option I have left is to scratch Dee's base of operations."

"Colonel... "

"It's not open to debate this time. We're not going to argue about it. It's past that stage. I'm going to do it. I'm telling you so we can observe the proprieties. I'm going to do it even if you insist on a vote. Remember, I control the proxies. One of my ships will be here soon. When it shows, I'll use it to jump to Twilight."

"Colonel... "

"Blake, it looks like we're going to lose the Whitlandsund. If Cassius is going to have any chance to break through and save your ass, I'm going to have to destroy Dee's logistics. Can't you understand that?"

"Won't he just grab Edgeward?"

"He might try. I can't guarantee that he won't. He'll have a lot of trouble doing it now. You're ready for him. And he's been outside a long time, without much coming down from Twilight to support him. Yet. He didn't count on heavy resistance."

"So?"

"So he's going to run low on munitions before he gets new stocks. I think he's going to take the Whitlandsund no matter what we do. But if we do hit Twilight, then we have him in the same position he has Cassius. In order to survive, he'll have to take Twilight or Edgeward. Either way, he'll have to pull me out of the pass. Enough, hopefully, so Cassius can break through. If we manage that, Dee is done for. Unless he uses nuclears again. Which I doubt he has with him, but which he'll have on tap up north. So from our viewpoint, taking Twilight has become an imperative."

Storm did not admit just how much he was guessing and hoping. Michael, even in predictable circumstances, could be unpredictable. There was a good chance he would go the easy way and spread nuclears around, if he had them. Or he might take a cue from Hawksblood and sit tight till his ammo was gone, hoping he could outlast Cassius. Walters's supply situation was just as iffy as Dee's.

Days groaned past. Men and arms trickled over from the Shadowline, but never enough to halt Dee's gradual conquest of the Whitlandsund.

There was a tremendous inertia in the westward flow of men and materiel in the Shadowline. It had to be overcome and turned around before a large and effective force could be mustered against Michael...

"Father, Havik wants to talk to you," Thurston said one morning.

"Bring him up over here." Storm faced a screen. "Yes, Colonel?"

"Colonel Storm, I can't do the job. I'm sorry. I'm too bad shot up and this obsolete equipment... Crying won't change it. Sorry, sir. What I'd like is permission to stop trying to be everywhere so I can concentrate on holding a bridgehead. We'll need some place to assemble a counterattack once you've brought enough equipment back."

Storm nodded. "I've been expecting it, Colonel. Go ahead and pull in your lines. And so you won't feel too bad, I want you to know I think you've done all you could. I'm sorry I couldn't give you more support."

"Thank you, Colonel."

"Thurston, where's Cassius now?" Storm asked.

"Still a long way to go, Father." Thurston indicated a light on the big board. "He's rolling around the clock, but those damned machines just don't move very fast. Do you want me to link you through?"

"Not now. It's too early in the morning for a squabble."

He and Cassius had been conferring regularly. Every conference degenerated into an argument. The loss of the Fortress had hit Walters harder than had anything else in the whole time Storm had known him. Finally, after ages, warfare had become a personal thing for Cassius. Storm anticipated a classic bloodletting when he came to grips with Dee.

He checked Ceislak's progress. It was a long fly from Helga's World. The Blackworld business might be over before Hakes arrived.

Storm spent much of his time alone, writing. He had a lot of thoughts he wanted committed to writing. He hoped Mouse would understand what he was trying to convey.

The Ehrhardt rumbled into Edgeward's crude little space port. Storm went out to greet her.

The pilot was one of his granddaughters. No one else aboard was conscious. He walked along the passenger aisles, looking down at Mouse, Lucifer, and others of his children and grandchildren, as well as the progeny of his men. He took a while, strolling along. This would be the last he saw them all.

Silly, lovely Frieda had surrendered her tomorrows on behalf of theirs. She was a soldier's daughter indeed.

"She tricked us, Grandpapa," his granddaughter told him. "We wanted to stay. Even the little ones. Grandmama drugged the water supply. I guess she cooked it up with the other old folks. They put us on the ship while we were out and sent us off on auto, with the Starfishers to cover us. It just isn't fair!"

"Did you want to die, Goldilocks?"

"No. But they needed us there. We should be there right now... "

"You'd be dead if you were. We haven't been able to raise the Fortress for days. Even the automatic signals are out." He did not entertain the slightest illusion. The Fortress had been taken, all the way down to the computers at its heart. And Deeth would have taken no more prisoners than had Boris and Cassius on Prefactlas.

"Oh." His granddaughter started crying.

"Hey. Hey, Honey. No tears now. They chose... We're the Iron Legion, remember?" He ground his teeth, afraid the tears would be infectious.

"I don't care!"

"Now, now, there're outsiders waiting out there."

She tried to stifle the flood.

"What about you, Goldilocks? Why were you awake?"

"They fixed me to wake up after it was too late to turn back. Somebody had to bring her in. I'm the best pilot. Mouse isn't rated on anything this big. What're we going to do, Grandpapa?"

Storm strained at being cheerful. "We won one, we lost one, Honey. Now we're going for best two out of three. We're going to settle with them here." His optimism fell flat. He could not force it through a very real despair. "They won't get away with it cheap, Honeycakes. We'll make them sorry they didn't leave us alone."

As with so many promises he had made lately, he did not see how he could make this one bear fruit.

The old shuttle crawler had to make three trips to carry all the youngsters into the city. Edgeward's people welcomed them warmly, not understanding that the city and its problems were not the real reason they found themselves orphaned and homeless.

The fourth trip out the crawler carried Storm's raiding party. Thurston. Lucifer. Helmut. Mouse. The best of the men who had survived the ambush of Michael's convoy. Pollyanna, whom no argument had been able to dissuade from going along in pursuit of a rapprochement with her ex-husband. And then there was Albin Korando, who wanted to go home, to help impose order and reason on the city that had sent him into exile.

Storm examined Korando before he started the liftoff checkdown. The man was a lean black eagle, grimly trying to familiarize himself with his weapons. He looked, Storm thought, much as Cassius might if ever Walters found himself a mission with special personal relevance. Much as Cassius must look right now, in fact.

They made a silent, grim band of commandos. There was no small talk, no nervous joking, no murmured rehearsals. On the edge of this action each preferred to be isolated with his or her thoughts.

Storm hit the go.

Fifty: 3032 AD

Storm took the cruiser in low and fast and put her down a hundred meters from Twilight's south lock. His weapons started talking while he was still aloft. Shafts of coherent light stabbed at everything outside the dome. Shellguns bit at the stressglass of the dome itself, chewing a hole through it two hundred meters west of the lock. Freezing atmosphere roared out, mixed with dust in violent clouds. His searchlights probed for enemies who never appeared.

The decompression was not explosive. The Twilighters would have time to get off the streets, into buildings that could be sealed. But time to insure personal survival was all Storm meant to allow them.

Helmut captured the lock before Storm finished cycling down. Darksword was moving the last of the raiders through it when Storm hit dirt himself. Accompanied by Korando, Pollyanna, Thurston, Lucifer, and Mouse, Gneaus set out for Twilight's equivalent of City Hall.

He had given orders to shoot anything that moved. He wanted these Twilighters cowed fast. The tininess of his force compelled him to hit hard and keep on hitting. He dared allow his enemies no time to regain their balance.

The only resistance he encountered was a lone sniper who surrendered the moment he received counterfire.

The entry to Twilight's City Hall, like Edgeward's, was a massive airlock. The outer door was sealed. "Blow it," Storm told Thurston.

His son placed the charges. "Stand back, people," he shouted just before the Boom!

Storm clambered through the wreckage, checked the inner door. It was not secured. "Rig something over that outer doorway," he ordered.

Mouse and Lucifer scrounged plastic panels and pounded them into place. "They'll still leak, Father," Mouse said.

"They'll prevent complete decompression. That's all I'm worried about now."

He did not want to hurt civilians. The ordinary people of Twilight, like those of nations at war at any time, were simply victims of their leadership.

He was in a generous mood. In other times and places he had been heard to say that people were guilty of their leadership.

Storm and Thurston poised themselves, ready for the inner door. "Go!" Thurston growled. Storm kicked. Thurston went through on his jump pack, rocketing at an angle across a chamber twenty meters by thirty. Laseguns probed for him. Their beams went wide.

Thurston let go an antitank rocket. Before the debris settled, Storm, Lucifer, and Mouse moved in, firing, and spread out behind furniture. Pollyanna and Korando had enough sense to stay out of action for which they had no training. They indulged only in a little supportive sniping.

Thurston's second rocket, accompanied by grenades from the others, convinced the opposition. They surrendered. They wore no combat suits. Only four of fifteen had survived the exchange.

Korando sealed the inner door before more atmosphere escaped.

"Where're the big people?" Storm demanded of the prisoners, after folding his faceplate back. "Where's Meacham?"

He received surly looks in reply.

"All right. Be that way. Lucifer. Shoot them one at a time till somebody answers me."

They looked into his one grim eye and believed him. He was not bluffing. He no longer cared, especially about Michael's men. The lives he valued most had been wasted already.

"Upstairs. Fourth level. Communications center. Yelling for help."

"Thank you. You're true gentlemen. Lead the way."

They balked.

A twitch of his trigger finger got them moving.

The elevators were dead. Storm shrugged, unsurprised. His guides led him to an emergency stairwell. Thurston blew the locked fire door. The big man could have achieved his end with a lasegun bolt, but he enjoyed the bangs.

A bolt poked through the smoke, stabbing a small, neat hole through Lucifer's right calf. The ambusher died before he could take a second shot.

"Pollyanna, take care of him," Storm ordered. "You four. Up the stairs. Smartly now."

Two went down before they reached the fourth floor. Three snipers joined them.

While Thurston prepared to blow the comm center door, Korando told Storm, "These men aren't Twilighters. They're not even Blackworlders."

"I didn't think they were. Blackworlders would be a little more careful about gunfighting in tight places. You spend your life worrying about vacuum, you don't go shooting where you might put holes in the walls."

"Exactly."

"Stand back. When that door goes we're going to get a lot of fire."

Thurston set off his charges. The counterfire came. Storm and his sons hurled grenades around the door frame, frags first, then tear gas, then smoke. After a brief pause they moved in.

Through the haze, using his infrared filters, Storm could see men trying to get out other exits. "Mouse. Stop those men over there. Korando, over there." He and Thurston bulled straight ahead, charging a group that looked like they could be troublesome. They were a tough-looking crew, and among them Storm saw his brother's son Seth-Infinite.

Thurston announced his approach with a rocket. Hands flew up. In all the smoke and tear gas the Twilighters could not determine the number of their attackers.

Seth-Infinite managed to slide away in the confusion.

Storm herded the gagging prisoners to the center of the room. He posted Mouse, Thurston, and Korando at doors. When Pollyanna, supporting Lucifer, arrived, he left the main door to her. He sat down and waited for the air to clear, for Helmut to report how it was going elsewhere.

The comm boards around him chattered wildly as people all across the city demanded instructions.

The air cleared enough. Storm opened his face plate. "Which one's Meacham?" he demanded.

A very sick old man, who fit Storm's notion of an elderly brigand, timorously raised a hand. The gases and smoke had left him puked out and aguey. From the corner of his eye Storm caught Korando's slight affirmative nod.

"Would you mind awfully, sir, explaining what the hell you've been trying to do? Would you kindly tell me why you broke your contract with Richard Hawksblood in favor of a deal with that bandit Michael Dee? Or Diebold Amelung, if you prefer? And, for the sake of heaven, why you've been using nuclears on my people in the Shadowline?"

Meacham's jaw dropped. He peered up at Storm in unadulterated disbelief. Gradually, an air of cynicism crept over his tired old body.

"Ah. I see," Storm said. "He's done it to you, too. Believe it or not, old man. It's true. I wouldn't be here otherwise."

Briefly, he sketched what had happened to Wulf.

"I didn't know... " Meacham mumbled. Then, "We lost communications with the Shadowline weeks ago. Equipment failure is what they told me. Amelung's son came back and said everything was going fine. He said our troops were holding you and work on the mohole was ahead of schedule."

"It isn't going fine at all. Not from your viewpoint. The fighting is over in the Shadowline. You lost. Because Hawksblood wasn't in charge. Because some nitwit Dee set it up that way. Now, tell me why the force that hit us Darkside? I thought that was outside the rules."

Meacham frowned. He was old, but obviously rugged. He was making a fast physical comeback. "What are you talking about?"

"About the convoy that's besieging Edgeward and the Whitlandsund. Somebody sent six armed crawlers with twenty-one mining units in support. Half of which are no longer with us, by the way."

Meacham stiffened. "Colonel Storm... I assume you're Storm? Yes? I don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about. I specifically forbade any action Darkside." The old man's spirits were rising fast. "Establishing a tradition of Darkside warfare would be insane, Colonel. It would be bad for business."

"And what's become of Hawksblood, Meacham? Why is Dee fighting me, leading Sangaree troops?"

The old man glared. "That's not possible." Then his spirits collapsed again. He dropped into a chair so suddenly Storm was afraid that he had had a stroke.

"Sangaree?" he whispered. "Sangaree? No. That's just not possible."

There was a stir among the prisoners. The offworlders were getting nervous. They knew, whether or not they were Sangaree themselves.

"You don't have to take my word, Meacham. Call Walter Carrington at The City of Night. We sent him some of the corpses we took in after fighting near Edgeward. He had his people perform the autopsies. The word's out to all the domes now. Twilight is using Sangaree troops."

"My nephew," Meacham said in a barely audible voice. "Talk to him. He was in charge of military affairs. A little too anxious for the old man to die, I thought. Responsibility would settle him down, I thought. That's why I put him in charge. He was too weak, I suppose. The devils. The bloody devils."

How pleased Dee must have been, finding such an ideally usable man, Storm reflected. "Divide and conquer. The Dee way, Meacham. Get them by the greed. No doubt there was a plan to wrestle stock away from your directors. But their plans went sour. We attacked when they were overextended. Their bomb crawler got caught in heat erosion. Where is your nephew now?"

No one there would admit to being Charles Meacham. Storm glanced at Korando. Korando shrugged. The elder Meacham surveyed his fellow prisoners, shook his head. Then he rose and slowly walked to the tumble of bodies near the door'Thurston guarded.

"Yes. Here he is. Caught up by his own sins." He shook his head wearily. "Children. They never quite turn out the way you want."

Storm sighed. It figured. The one prisoner who knew anything had been killed. Probably by Seth-Infinite's hand. He did not check to see if the nephew's wounds were in front or back. It was too late to matter.

What now? "Mr. Meacham, I'm going to draw up surrender terms. They'll be simple. You'll abandon your claim to the Shadowline. You'll agree to cooperate fully in bringing to justice members of the conspiracy to use nuclear weapons. You'll agree to help ferret out any Sangaree on Blackworld. You'll aid in the rescue and evacuation of personnel now trapped in the Shadowline. You'll free Richard Hawksblood and any of his men who might be imprisoned here. I expect Richard will have terms of his own to discuss... "

"Gneaus?"

Storm turned. Someone was at the door guarded by Pollyanna and Lucifer. "Helmut?"

The old warrior came to him slowly, wearily, his helmet open, his face as pale and strained as it had become when he had learned of his brother's death.

"What is it, Helmut? You look awful."

"Won't be any more wars with Richard Hawksblood," Darksword muttered. He laughed. It was a soft cackle of madness. "We didn't get to him in time. They had him down in the service levels. Gneaus, it was the work of the Beast. It was like something from the Second Dark Age. Like the camps at Wladimir-Wolynsk."

"He's dead?"

"Yes. And all his staff. Beyond-the-resurrection. And death was a gift for them."

Storm stared into eternity, lost among disjointed memories of what Richard had been to him, of what Richard had meant. All their conflicts and hatreds... which had had their own formality and inflexible honor... "We'll take care of them," Storm said. "An honorable funeral. Send them home for burial. I owe Richard that much."

One of the foundation stones of his universe had vanished. What would he do without his enemy? Who, or what, could replace a Richard Hawksblood?

He shook it off. Richard did not matter anymore. He had his own plans... He drew his ancient .45, slowly turned its cylinder.

"Father?" Mouse said softly. "Are you all right?"

"In a minute. I'll be okay, Mouse." Storm looked into his son's eyes. Today and tomorrow... What seemed to be a depthless sadness stole into his soul. "I'll be okay."

"I evened scores a little," Helmut said. "Dee's wife. One shot. Through the brain. May the Lord have mercy on her soul."

"Gallant, chivalrous Helmut," Storm mused. "What happened to you?" The Helmut he had always known could not have slain a woman.

"I learned to hate, Gneaus."

There was no way of resurrecting a brain-destroyed corpse.

"Seth-Infinite's here in the city," Storm said. "We saw him."

"Fearchild, too. He did Richard in. He was there when we arrived. We're hunting him now. The citizens aren't giving us any trouble, by the bye."

"Good. Be kind to them. And watch all the exits from town. Dees always have a bolthole."

"We've accounted for most of their hired guns. We get an estimate of fifty on hand. What I didn't see anywhere else seem to be here, except for maybe five or ten and the Dees."

"Helmut, be careful. They'll be worse than any cornered rats if they think the game is completely up."

Worse than cornered rats. The Dees were intelligent, terrified, conscienceless rats who went straight for the throats of those who threatened them.

They attacked through the door where Thurston stood guard, coming hard behind a barrage of rockets that slaughtered the prisoners without harming Storm's people. They came in screened by a handful of Sangaree gunmen.

Thurston killed one attacker by smashing his skull with a rocket launcher. Seth-Infinite shot Thurston point-blank, through the faceplate.

Beams stabbed around the room. People scrambled for cover. A rocket killed Albin Korando. Frog's orphan had returned home only to die.

Storm's old .45 spoke. A Sangaree died. Beside Gneaus, Helmut gasped and collapsed. Storm fired again, dropped another Sangaree. He got down and tried to drag Helmut to cover.

He was too late. Beams had punched fatal holes through Darksword's helmet and chest.

Storm crouched and, unable to do anything, watched Pollyanna try to pull Lucifer out her door. Beams found them both. Hers was a minor wound. She got off a killing shot herself before fainting from pain.

Me and Mouse, Storm thought. So it's finally here. The last battle. It's almost laughable. It's so much smaller than I thought it would be. Two of us against... How many?

He peeped cautiously around the end of the console that concealed him. Seth-Infinite, casually, was killing the last of Storm's prisoners. Getting rid of witnesses, Storm supposed. Leaving no one who could repeat the name Dee. Startled, he realized they might nuke the city if they escaped.

"Mouse... " he moaned softly. His favorite son lay on the floor before his door, his suit badly discolored along one side. He looked dead.

"Uhn... " Storm gasped. Mouse's head was turning slowly, toward Seth-Infinite. Mouse's suit had withstood the bolt. He was playing possum.

"I should've left him behind," Storm muttered. He smiled grimly.

Where was Fearchild? Storm assumed the men who had come in with the Dees were dead, killed by their employers if not during the attack. None were in evidence, and no Sangaree would have stood by while Seth-Infinite slaughtered his captured comrades.

An explosion slammed the console against him, tumbled him backward.

He had seen the grenade arcing through the air, could judge whence it had come. He seized Helmut's fallen weapon, rolled, bounced up, fired with both hands. He narrowly missed ending Fearchild's tale. Dee scrambled for better cover.

Storm's .45 roared at Seth-Infinite. He plunged back behind the console. The cabinet crackled as a lasebolt spent its energy inside.

Storm moved to his left, to get near a wall that would make flanking him difficult, and to make them turn their backs on Mouse. He fired as he went, to hold their attention.

The .45 stopped thundering, cylinder spent.

Storm reached the last cover available. He paused to catch, his breath.

Now what? They would be crafty-aggressive. They would be sure they had him. He would have to do more than stall... Was this the time for it?

He had decided there was a thing that had to be done before Michael's game could be beaten. The act would ruin all Michael's calculations, and blacken his heart with terror.

Now was the time to do it.

He was afraid.

Faceplate open, laughing at Michael's spawn, he rose and hosed lasegun fire over the area where they were hidden.

A bolt pierced his lung two centimeters from his heart. It did not hurt as much as he had anticipated. His weapon tumbled from his hand.

Fearchild and Seth-Infinite rose slowly, their faces alive with malicious pleasure.

Storm smiled at them. He croaked, "You lose, you fools!"

Mouse shot with preternatural accuracy, a single bolt stabbing through the back of each Dee skull. They did not have time to look surprised.

Storm smiled as they fell. And smiled. And smiled.

"Father?" Mouse had come to his side. The boy's hands were on his arm, urging him to sit.

"A time for reaping and a time for sowing," Storm whispered. "My season had fled, Mouse. The season of the Legion is gone. But the rivers still run to the seas... "

He coughed. Funny. It still did not hurt. "It's time for the young." He forced a broader smile.

"I'll take you to the ship, Father. I'll get you into a cradle." Mouse's cheeks were wet.

"No. Don't. This is something I have to do, Son. In my quarters in Edgeward. A letter. You'll understand. Go on now. Take command. You're the last Storm. I give you Cassius and the Legion. Complete the cycle. Close the circle."

"But... "

"Don't argue with orders, Mouse. You know better. Go help Pollyanna." Storm leaned against the console, turned his back on his son. "Don't rob me of this victory. Go on." Then, to himself, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What does a man profit?... "

Death descended on quiet, silken wings and enfolded him in gentle, peaceful arms.

Fifty-One: 3023-3032 AD

One of the Osirian commtechs called out, "Lord Rhafu, I've got a red light on something from Todesangst."

The old man limped across the huge communcfations center whence the Norbon empire was directed. "Get me a printout."

A machine whirled and rattled. Paper spewed forth. Rhafu caught the end and read as it appeared. "Uhm!" he grunted. He balled the whole thing up and carried it into a seldom-used office where he studied and researched it for several hours. He came to a decision. He picked up a phone. "Number One." A moment later, "Deeth, I've got a critical here from Todesangst. I'm bringing it up."

Deeth looked up from the printout. Rhafu was old. Probably older than any Sangaree alive, and near the time when rejuvenation would no longer take. The shakiness of massive nerve degeneration had set in.

Deeth frowned. He would not have Rhafu much longer. How would he manage without the man?

He scanned the report again. "I must be missing the point. I'don't see anything remarkable here."

"It came red-tagged. I wondered what Michael is up to, that's all."

"Send someone to check."

"I already have. Deeth, if I may?"

Deeth smiled a soft smile. That was Rhafu's bad news tone. "Yes?"

"It looks to me like he's trying to bail out on us."

"What makes you say that?"

"The figures. What they add up to. A hell of a lot of wealth if this thing can be tamed. That and the risks he took."

"I don't see... "

"Sir, your son is Sangaree by your will only. If the truth were known, I expect, he wishes you weren't his father. He grew up a Storm. Inside he still wants to be a Storm. Or, second-best, some anonymous human. We're a closet skeleton he'd rather forget. He could disappear if he wanted, but he's hooked on money and power. If he could be somebody else and still have those... "

"He's got all the money and power anybody could want, Rhafu."

"Sangaree money. Sangaree power. Tainted. And shared. We can control him. We can destroy him by exposing him. With the wealth of this Blackworld thing he could assume any one of several identities we don't yet know and leave us standing around with our fingers in our noses wondering what happened. Except that he was stupid enough to use his own computation capacity to run this feasibility study."

Deeth leaned back, closed his eyes, tried to banish the pain. Rhafu was probably right...

"Deeth, there are indications he tried this once before. Nothing concrete, but he apparently went after a Starfisher harvestfleet years ago. He's never told us about it."

"And he might have achieved the ends you're arguing?"

"Yes. I hear it was an eight-ship harvestfleet. That's a lot of wealth, and a damned good place to hide."

How could Michael prefer anything else to being heir of the leading Sangaree house? That was not logical. What more could a man want? He put the question to Rhafu.

"Respectability. Acceptability in Luna Command. Rehabilitation from the sin of youth that got him rusticated in the first place. You can smell on him how badly he wants to get into the humans' elite club. He'll do anything, including selling us down the proverbial river if the payoff is big enough."

"Rhafu... I can't accept that. I refuse to accept that."

"I have the same emotional responses you do. Intellectually, I see how his emotions are driving him, but I don't understand." Rhafu stared over Deeth's shoulder, out a vast window, at Osiris. Deeth turned, also considering that slice of world.

"He wants to be loved. By the species which rejected him. Is that what it boils down to, Rhafu?"

"Perhaps. And does anybody love Michael Dee? Not really. Not unless it's Gneaus Storm. To everyone else he's a tool. Even us. And he knows it."

Deeth nibbled his lower lip. Put that way, he could feel some empathy... "Let me see that printout again." After a glance he said, "He won't evade his Family responsibilities."

Rhafu stared out the window while Deeth examined the numbers for the third time. After a time, he said, "Deeth, this Blackworld thing may be what we've been looking for. I checked it out before I came here." He dropped a chart onto Deeth's desk.

"It has some peculiar physical characteristics. Look how it lays out. A pot of gold here. In this Twilight Town's territory, but it's accessible only from this Edgeward City's territory. The pot's big enough to fight over. I would if I were in their shoes. And engineered right, we might end up controlling it. Here's my thinking. We engineer a war. We manipulate it so these cities hire Storm and Hawksblood. If the fighting is confined here on the dayside, we might trap both gangs. Suddenly, no Storms, no Thaddeus Immanuel Walters. And no Hawksblood, which would be Michael's payoff for running the show. That's just rough thinking, of course. It would take a long time and a lot of money and research to set it up right."

Deeth smiled. "I see it. I think you're right." He scrawled his name across a piece of paper, wrote a few words. "Take this to Finance and get whatever you need to do your own feasibility study. I'll cut loose whichever people you want. But don't get carried away. Just map it out and see how it looks. If it'll go, then we'll set up a special organization."

"All right."

"Rhafu? Go as carefully with this as you did with the Dharvon. For the same reasons. If there's that much power metal there, let's come out on the far end not only finished with the Storms but controlling that mine."

Rhafu smiled, apparently considering the Homeworld impact of yet another quantum jump in Norbon wealth. "Don't overreach, Deeth."

Deeth was not listening. The possibilities had revivified his childhood dream of restructuring Sangaree society to suit himself. "Call Michael in before you do anything. It's tune for face-to-face. And you'll want his first-hand impressions."

If there had been any doubt that Dee was up to something, it vanished when Rhafu tried to summon him to Osiris. Michael dodged messengers the way lesser men dodged process servers. Rhafu had to collect him in person.

Deeth was appalled by the sullen creature Rhafu brought in. Michael snarled, "I've had enough. I didn't want to get involved with you in the first place."

"You're part of the Family."

"I don't give a damn about your Family. All I want is for it to stay out of my life."

"Michael... Look at all we've done. We've made you one of the richest men alive."

"Yes. Look what you've done to me. My children... belong in asylums. My people hate me. They think I'm a monster. And they're probably right... "

Deeth snapped, "We're you're people."

The usually evasive, cowardly Michael looked him straight in the eye. He did not speak.

He did not have to. Deeth recognized his failure. He did not have a son. He had an unwilling accomplice. "All right, Michael. What do you want?"

"I want out. OUT. Nothing to do with you, and you nothing to do with me or mine, now or ever."

"It's not that simple. I still haven't settled with the Storms. That's why I brought you here. This thing on Blackworld... "

"Not that simple. Forget it. They're not that simple. Your buttboy here explained on the way. The scheme won't work. You're not dealing with some First Expansion primitives or tenth-generation pleasure slaves. You're talking about people even tougher and nastier than you. And smarter."

Deeth bolted up from behind his desk, face puffing with anger. He swung hard. Dee leaned out of the way. "You see? You can't control your temper."

"Rhafu!"

"Sir?"

"Explain it to him again. I'll come back when I calm down."

When Deeth returned he found Dee no more receptive. "Michael, I've considered everything. Here's my offer. Help us put this thing through and we're quits. We'll divvy up the organizations and go our own ways."

"Sure," Michael replied, voice dripping sarcasm. "Till the next time I'm a handy tool."

"Quits, I said. My word. The word of the Norbon, Michael. I even keep it with animals."

Dee gave him an odd look. Deeth realized that by tone or expression he had betrayed his secret pain. He massaged his face and forehead. Michael wanted to break all ties. He wanted a son. They could not both have their way.

"That's the deal, Michael. You're either with me or against me. No in between. Help me destroy the people who destroyed Prefactlas, or be destroyed with them."

Michael stared at him with that defiant, fearless look once more. Very, very slowly, he nodded. Then he turned and started toward the door.

He paused, took a priceless piece of Homeworld carved jade off a shelf, examined it. It was better than two thousand years old, and so finely carved that in places it was paper thin. He held it at arm's length and let it fall. Fragments scattered across the tile floor. "Damn. Am I clumsy."

Deeth sealed his eyes, fought his anger.

"That's going to be a very difficult tool to control," Rhafu observed.

"Very. Answer this. Was that bit of vandalism a message, or just the spite of the moment?"

"I don't think we'll know till the dust settles. And that's probably why he did it."

"Watch him. Every minute. Every damned minute."

"As you will."

Rhafu put the operation together with his usual genius. It rolled along with such perfection, for so many years, piling and building like the growing crescendo of a great orchestra, that Deeth became convinced of the inevitability of a Norbon success. The little setbacks were there, but carefully accounted for in a program put together with all the information and computation capacity of Helga's World. An absolute and unavoidable doom loomed darker and darker above the murderers of Prefactlas.

Then word came to the hidden headquarters chalet on The Big Rock Candy Mountain. A puzzled Rhafu announced, "The man called Cassius is here. Asking questions about Michael."

"I don't understand. How could they have gotten wind of us?"

"I don't know. Unless... "

"Michael?"

"Does anyone else know we're directing it from here?"

"Not a soul." Deeth considered. He had monitored Dee's dealings with Storm. Michael had kept his mouth shut. "Maybe we left tracks without knowing it."

"Possibly."

"Cut off his sources of information. We'll tend to friend Cassius ourselves."

"Deeth... Never mind."

Deeth studied the old man. Rhafu's nervous degeneration was so advanced he had trouble managing a drinking glass.

"I want this one, Rhafu. We'll hit them and move somewhere else."

"As you wish."

They entered the hotel by separate doors. Unfortunately Rhafu had the only clear shot.

The old man's nerves betrayed him. He missed.

Cassius did not.

Deeth's nerve betrayed him. He froze. He never touched his weapon.

Deeth found himself aboard his escape vessel without remembering how he had gotten there. Just one image remained clear in his mind. Meeting the eyes of Cassius's companion in the street, over Rhafu's body.

It went sour after that. He did not have Rhafu's enchanted touch.

Storm stunned Deeth by attacking Helga's World. He gathered the Norbon forces. His raidships blundered into a trap more disasterous than that at Amon-Ra.

Blackworld was becoming a debacle. Michael just could not handle his half of the chore.

Deeth remembered a shattered piece of jade and wondered.

He lost his temper. He ordered the attack on the Fortress of Iron, "I may not get them all," he told himself, "but they'll know they paid the price of Prefactlas."

He had abandoned hope of profiting from Blackworld. And he had abandoned Michael Dee.

"My son, if you've done your best, you deserve an apology. But I suspect you've subtly sabotaged the whole thing. Enjoy the trap you've built yourself."

His last few fighting ships reached the Fortress's surface. His troopships went in. His men forced the entry locks.

The fighting continued for days, cubicle to cubicle, corridor to corridor, level to level. His soldiers encountered only women and old people, but they too were Legionnaires.

Near the end one of his people told him. "Lord Deeth, enemy scoutships have been detected... "

"Damn!" The Fortress was almost clear. Only a handful of defenders remained, holding out in the old Combat Information Center. "Very well." He could not run now. He had to finish. For Rhafu. For his father. For his mother and the Prefactlas dead.

"All right. I want everyone out but the crew of Lota's raidship. Take space like you're in a panic. Let them intercept messages that will convince them that there's no one left alive here."

"Yes sir."

Deeth joined the one raidship crew in the final attack. His participation brought him face to face with Storm's wife, Frieda.