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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

_As soon as the main hatch tilted forward enough to break the
seal along the upper edge, smoke and ashes swirled into the Princess Cecile. The automatic impeller fixed to the wardroom hatch on the level above cut loose with a long burst, making the hull ring as it recoiled. An incoming projectile whanged off the corvette's bow.

"Boarders, spread out and form along the road on this side!" Daniel shouted. "Over!"

The hatch thumped down in soft soil, rolling up sparks from the weeds and brush ignited by the Princess Cecile's exhaust. A ridge of slightly higher ground supported a grove of trees, but the river a hundred yards north of the corvette flooded often enough to rot the roots of large vegetation on the flats. The road just beyond was built on a levee and made a good blocking position.

Daniel started for the grove, well behind the riggers in his fifty-strong party. They'd jumped while the end of the ramp was still ten feet in the air. The thrusters had baked the ground solid. The mud was more organic than mineral, so the stench was worse than that of a fire in a charnel house.

There was a bright white flash in the direction of the distant spaceport. Almost immediately the ground shuddered, but the crash of rending metal was many seconds delayed. The bow of a pirate cutter tilted up, then toppled again below the line of the causeway. There was no way to tell which side had been responsible for the destruction.

"Boarders, gunmen are taking position on the other side of the—" Tovera said. Her cold voice was little changed by the compression of the helmet radio link.

A stocked impeller began to fire behind Daniel, the slugs passing close overhead. He stumbled on a root that remained tough despite the charring. Righting himself he glanced backward. Hogg was seated cross-legged on the top of the ramp. His arms were braced on his knees and the impeller's sling, locking the weapon on target.

Every time Hogg fired, a head slipped out of sight behind the causeway. Sometimes there was a splash in the air behind where the head had been.

Midway between the road and the corvette, the ground was still soggy. Daniel's right boot sank ankle deep, throwing him forward. Spurts of mud and pulped foliage leaped high, drawing a diagonal across the line of advancing spacers. The man to Daniel's right crumpled, holding his belly and screaming. His equipment belt twisted away from him as he fell, severed by the slug.

The Princess Cecile's upper turret roared, raking the causeway with pulses of plasma. The bolts were hammerblows of pure heat on the back of Daniel's neck and bare hands. Several of the spacers fell—unharmed, or he hoped so, but thrown to the ground by the crashing discharges.

Daniel's visor blacked out the flashes that would otherwise have destroyed his retinas. What he saw as he continued to stagger forward was an invisible giant chewing hunks out of the roadway. Wet silt exploded in steam and the dark red flames of carbon; rock ballast blew to glassy shards or white, searing calcium flames.

The Falassan gunfire ceased. "Boarders, form along the roadway!" Daniel wheezed. "Over!"

Sun ceased fire after his twin cannon had devoured three hundred yards of roadway. Through the smoke of the new fires, Daniel saw people running back toward the town to the south or standing with their hands in the air.

Several of the spacers were shooting wildly as they advanced. They weren't going to hit anything—well, they weren't going to hit any Falassans, though their fellows were at risk—and the locals seemed to have stopped fighting anyway.

"Boarders, cease fire!" Daniel ordered. He thought again about his notion of small-arms training for the crew. There'd have been time for it during refit on Tanais. The Sissies would've been excited to have something real to be doing on a barren iceball. Instead—

Another explosion shook Homeland. An orange fireball lifted a metal roof and a human body. The figure was pinwheeling; the arms and legs had separated from the torso before it all dropped out of sight.

This causeway would make a good target backstop, but this probably isn't the time. 

Daniel reached the causeway and stepped carefully into a smoldering divot gouged by the plasma cannon before pausing to take stock. A figure in coveralls sprawled on the road to the right. The only thing moving was the row of ribbons sewn along his seams, fluttering in the breeze.

Adele sat beside Daniel on a chunk of rock fill. Thermal shock had crazed the surface, but either it had cooled or this was another example of Adele's unconcern for her physical comfort. She took out her personal data unit.

Daniel eyed the straggling mixture of woods, wire-fenced gardens, and stone houses to the south. The terrain was rolling, and the houses were generally built in clumps on the higher ground. Earthen mounds raised the two warehouses near the road ten feet above the surface.

Vehicles full of armed personnel moved on the paths between buildings. Even with his visor magnification at 160x Daniel couldn't see any current fighting. Two houses burned sullenly, and occasionally sparks gouted from the spaceport well to the south.

"I can get you imagery from Kelburney's command car if you like, Daniel," Adele said. Her voice broke in mid-sentence for a cough, but she didn't sound winded. "The turret has an electronic sight. Which I've tapped."

How in heaven's name . . . ? But the method didn't matter, and the information certainly did. "Yes, please!" Daniel said. "Ah, Quadrant One."

He didn't want somebody else's field of view covering his own completely. A compressed image on the upper left corner of his visor would give Daniel the information he required without preventing him from doing whatever might suddenly be required. Shooting an unexpected enemy, for example; though with Adele and Tovera both in the hole with him, that was of vanishingly low probability.

Several hundred people were coming toward the causeway on foot. Were they attacking, or—

"Boarders, don't shoot!" Daniel said in sudden horror. Much of the crowd was children, and many of the adults carried infants or toddlers as well. His first thought was that all of them were unarmed, but that wasn't technically true. A number of the figures wore holstered pistols, and one female carried a submachine gun slung across her back. She'd presumably forgotten about it; her arms were stretched out to hold the hands of a pair of three-year-old twins.

"Boarders, don't shoot," Daniel repeated. "They're surrendering to us instead of taking their chances with Kelburney's lot. On your honor, don't shoot!"

The Dalbriggan image echoed onto the corner of Daniel's visor provided a travelogue through the streets of Homeland. It was so smooth that he thought for a moment that Kelburney was in an aircar or at least an air cushion vehicle, but the forehull bobbled repeatedly into the bottom of the frame.

The gun was stabilized both in azimuth and deflection. It was mounted in the turret of a car armored so heavily that only a firm connection with the ground could support it. Daniel had briefly confused the smoothness of the sight picture with that of the vehicle itself.

The fighting was over; Daniel wanted to catch the Astrogator at the moment of triumph to have the best chance of succeeding with the next stage of his plan. "Lieutenant Mon," he ordered. "Have someone bring the jeep to me immediately. I need to speak to Astrogator Kelburney. Out."

"I can reach him, Daniel," Adele said, looking up with a frown of concern. She must wonder if he believed she was incompetent.

Daniel laughed at the absurdity of the unspoken thought. "I believe face-to-face would be the better choice, Adele," he said. "I'm going to have a hard sell, I'm afraid."

The ringing whine of the fans lifting the little vehicle out of the Princess Cecile's stern hold followed Daniel's request by only moments. Vesey's voice said, "Captain Leary, the jeep's on the way to your position, out," but the driver must have been not only prepared but cued into the command net.

Mon had cut corners to save time his commander might need. "A very good officer," Daniel said aloud. To Adele's raised eyebrow he added, "Lieutenant Mon, that is."

Kelburney's gunsight steadied on a low circular structure whose stone walls had a pronounced slope. Immediately slugs from an automatic impeller rang from the car's armor. The heavy-metal projectiles ricochetted with green, purple and magenta sparks, vivid even in full daylight. One round must have struck the turret because the sight picture jolted skyward even as the car backed to safety behind a residence.

Daniel switched away from the remote image and overlaid his visor with a sixty-percent mask showing Homeland's topography. The circular building was nearly in the center of town; it wasn't simply a building but a thick ring surrounding a central citadel.

"The Falassan chiefs depend more on physical protection than the Astrogator and his predecessors on Dalbriggan do," Daniel said with a grim smile. "That's a confession of weakness, of course. It appears that we've picked the right side."

Woetjans had come over to report. "Whichever we pick is the right side," she said. Her tone made the pronouncement sound rather like a comment on the weather. "We're securing the prisoners, sir. That all right?"

The corvette's small utility aircar landed at the back of Daniel's position. Gramercy, one of the power-room techs, was driving. He showed a gentler touch on the controls than Daniel had come to expect of RCN drivers; but then, perhaps he'd gotten lucky.

"Yes, carry on, bosun," Daniel said. "Signals and I are going to discuss the next stage with the Astrogator."

He walked toward the idling vehicle. Ash from the recent bath of plasma spiraled in the wash from the drive fans.

"Sir, I'll come with you!" Woetjans said. She knew she had to remain here to command the ground party, but her request was as certain as sunrise.

"There isn't room for you, mistress," Tovera said as she stepped between Woetjans and the aircar. "But if you like, I'll kill one of the locals for you?"

Daniel got into the front seat beside the driver. He'd never thought he'd see Woetjans with a shocked expression; but he knew exactly how she felt.

The Dalbriggans didn't have a command channel: they had seven separate frequencies on which subchiefs and their followers gabbled orders and nonsense in their excitement.

"Don't fire at the RCN aircar approaching from the north!" Adele said. She used her personal data unit to cue the corvette's powerful transmitters for a multiband rebroadcast, hoping—another person would have thought "praying"—the message would reach every one of Kelburney's gunmen.

She'd found seven frequencies. What if there was an eighth that she'd missed, that of a guntruck whose weapons were even now swinging on the jeep?

Adele's mouth quirked in slight humor as she repeated, "Don't fire at the RCN aircar approaching from the north!" In that case she was unlikely to live long enough to be tortured by failure. The universe had a kindly side after all.

Daniel switched on the jeep's klaxon as the driver took them low through the streets of Homeland. When the vehicle swooped up on edge to slice between a building and a car with an automatic impeller welded to each of its four corners, Adele wished angrily that they'd lift high enough to hold a steady course across the community.

The thought didn't reach her tongue, fortunately. It had scarcely formed when she realized that would mean a straight course down the throat of the Falassan holdouts. She had her duties and areas of competence; which were different, fortunately, from those of the spacer who was driving.

Adele could hear the sound of gunfire over the klaxon and the howl of the drive fans. A red spark shrieking like a banshee curved out of the sky and banged the car's bow, just ahead of the open cockpit. The driver shouted and jerked his control yoke. Daniel reached past and steadied the vehicle before they wobbled into the building to the left.

"A ricochet," he explained—to everyone in the car, but Adele was the only one who might not have known without being told. "Wars are dangerous places, aren't they? But of course, you can slip in the bath and break your neck."

Adele supposed he was only acting the part of a good commander in calming his troops, but on reflection she couldn't be sure. Nothing seemed to faze Daniel.

Adele didn't care about her own life to speak of, but she found the notion of being snuffed out at random was oddly disquieting. Logically it shouldn't matter whether she was killed by a sniper's deliberation or instead by a few ounces of impact-heated osmium plunging from the sky. She obviously wasn't as much a creature of logic as she preferred to believe.

The jeep rounded a knoll on which stood several houses, one of them afire. The swale beyond was a plaza of sorts with a triumphal arch and a number of plinths from which the statues had been recently shot away. Five armed vehicles parked on the pavement, with a group of heavily armed Dalbriggans hunched behind them.

One of the Dalbriggans saw the jeep out of the corner of his eye. He shouted and leveled a stocked impeller.

Tovera lifted slightly to aim: the light pellets of her submachine gun wouldn't penetrate the windscreen of the open car. Before she could fire, Daniel rose to his feet and raised his hands high.

"Quite all right!" Daniel shouted, keeping his balance even though the driver reacted to the threat by landing in what was virtually a controlled crash. "Captain Leary here to speak with the Astrogator!"

Kelburney stepped forward, holding a drawn pistol. The man with the impeller looked hesitant and didn't lower his weapon. Kelburney backhanded him with the pistol butt from behind, knocking him face-down to the ground.

"Leary!" he shouted, advancing to give Daniel a bear hug. "Bloody good work with the guardship! There aren't six captains in my squadron who'd have been able to equal that!"

In the assembly, Kelburney had been a monarch; in the council meeting later he was the canny man of business. Here on this field of smoke and blood, Adele saw a much more primal figure that she suspected was the stuff from which the Astrogator had molded his other personas.

Automatic impellers opened fire from somewhere out of sight. Projectiles bounced skyward like a neon fountain. And where are they going to come down? Adele wondered, but with detached curiosity. The near miss had inoculated her against fear of death from that sort of randomness.

A white flash lit the sky to the west. There was a sharp explosion and the firing stopped.

"I gather Captain Aretine has gone to ground in the circular fortress just over the hill?" Daniel said, pointing in the direction of the shooting. The air stank of ozone and smoke from burning fuels, plastics, and flesh.

"We'll get'er out, never fear!" said a hulking gunman. The folk around Kelburney now were bodyguards, not the officers of his inner circle. Those folk would be directing their own contingents of fighters, here in town and back at the spaceport.

"No doubt you will," Daniel said in a cool tone and a glance that meant, "Don't interrupt when your betters are speaking, dog!" He cleared his throat and continued to Kelburney, "I think I might speed the process a good deal, Astrogator. That is, if you don't care what happens to the defenders with the exception of Captain Aretine herself?"

Several automatic impellers opened fire simultaneously. Orange flame mushroomed over the houses, lifting a gunshield from one of the makeshift fighting vehicles. The firing stopped.

"Care?" Kelburney said, his brow furrowing. "God rot my bones, boy, I don't care what happens to her either! You can burn her . . ."

His expression changed into a cat's smile. "Ah, I see," he said. "You mean, do I mind letting them live afterwards?"

"Yes, that's right," Daniel said. "I realize that they're pirates, but regardless, I wouldn't care to talk them out of their position and have them massacred as a result."

Ah! Adele understood now. She sat on a cracked marble paver and began setting up the link. She'd use the transmitter in the Astrogator's command vehicle rather than going through the Princess Cecile's communications suite. The personal data unit was close to the limit of its unboosted range for reaching the ship from here in the middle of Homeland.

Kelburney laughed. "I could say you were a soft bastard," he said, "but the truth is I don't see reason to kill a lot of good people if I don't have to. Go ahead. I've got a loudspeaker on the car. Or are you going to chance your uniform to keep them from blowing your head off?"

Daniel dusted the breast of his tunic with his fingertips. "Thank you, Astrogator," he said, "but I believe Officer Mundy has patched me—"

Adele nodded, her wands flickering. There were three separate nodes connecting displays in the Falassan strongpoint. She wanted to be sure Daniel's address would blanket all of them.

"—through to the communications network within the fortress. I think that will be the most effective way of proceeding."

"Inside?" Kelburney said. "There's no bloody way she can do that—it's all shielded."

"Officer Mundy doesn't give me advice on sailing a starship, Captain," Daniel said, every inch a Cinnabar aristocrat again. "And I allow her the same freedom in dealing with communications tasks. It works out quite well."

"Do you want the feed through your helmet, Daniel?" Adele asked. "Or would you prefer a larger display? There's quite a modern one in the command vehicle."

She nodded.

"The helmet will be fine, Adele," Daniel said. He squared his shoulders unconsciously and faced westward, although there was a hill and a building between him and the Falassan headquarters.

Adele made a final adjustment. She'd opened the circuit by aping the power management commands of the Falassans' standby batteries. That portion of the system had no safeguards whatever in place, but it was connected through the transmitter to every computer inside the stone walls.

"I've put you through," she said. Tovera was looking at Kelburney with much the same smile as if she watched him over a gunsight. "Go ahead."

Adele's display gave her the image of the operator seated at each of the seventeen separate units within the fortress. Six were gunnery displays controlling the weapon emplacements in wall turrets, and five consoles were unused at the moment.

At one of the six remaining sat a woman in her mid thirties. A scar ran from her chin into her scalp, skirting her left eye by very little. Her hair was a bright, artificial red except for where it grew over the scar; there the dye didn't take.

"Wartung!" she screamed to someone out of the image area. "Wartung, you bastard, they've entered the system!"

Even without the scar, no one would have called Aretine attractive. Her features were too sharp, and her eyes glinted like the points of icepicks.

"Siblings of the Selma Cluster!" Daniel said. "I'm Lieutenant Daniel Leary of the RCN with a proposition that will save your lives."

He'd instinctively raised his voice, though of course Adele was controlling the volume of the output speakers. She'd turned the command circuitry to her own purposes. Short of shooting the units to pieces, the Falassans couldn't affect their own equipment.

"My corvette, the RCS Princess Cecile, mounts four-inch plasma cannon," Daniel continued. "If I have to, I'll hover over Homeland and use them to burn your little fort into a pool of lava. I believe that will take about a minute and a half, but perhaps less."

Aretine and a muscular young male with a metal pincer in place of his left hand were trying to block the electronic intrusion from separate consoles. They had as little success as they'd have had gnawing through rock. The Falassans at the other consoles, including three which had been unused until Daniel began to speak, listened intently to the proposal.

"I've arranged for your lives to be spared," Daniel said. "On my honor as an RCN officer and a Leary of Bantry."

He turned his head toward the Astrogator. Daniel's expression left no doubt in Adele's mind that he meant his words in the most direct sense possible. If Kelburney went back on his word, there would be Hell to pay. A Cinnabar gentleman had promised as much.

Kelburney probably understood the terms being offered and the price that would be exacted for noncompliance on his part. Tovera certainly did. She smiled like a statue of ice as her eyes counted the Dalbriggans nearby; the targets, it might be, that she would kill in a few minutes. For the moment, her submachine gun slanted up at an angle that threatened no one.

"The condition is that you arrest Captain Aretine and hand her over to the authorities for trial on treason charges before Astrogator Kelburney," Daniel said. "The Republic of Cinnabar doesn't presume to dictate legal procedures and penalties to the governments of allies like the Selma Cluster, so I specifically except Mistress Aretine from my guarantee of safety."

Aretine had left her console. As Daniel spoke she reappeared at one of the gunnery displays, wrenching the man there aside and sitting down in his place. The unit was supposed to control three of the automatic impellers in unmanned barbettes on the outer wall. It was as dead as a pile of gravel now; the Falassan commander jerked at the joystick uselessly in frothing fury.

Adele frowned, realizing that she could have shut down the fort's active defenses much sooner than she did, thus saving lives among the Dalbriggan attackers. Though . . . looking at the thugs guarding Kelburney, that wasn't a prospect for which she could summon much enthusiasm.

"I realize you'll need to discuss this among yourselves," Daniel continued. He sounded utterly sincere, but he winked to those watching him from the interior of the fortress. They'd have thought he was simple-minded if he hadn't. "You have five minutes to accept or reject my offer; and if the latter, a trifle longer to make your peace with God. RCN out."

The Astrogator looked down at Adele. "You, Mundy?" he said. "Can you make all my people hear me the way you warned about you Cinnabars driving up in the car?"

"Yes, I can do that," Adele said, keeping her tone neutral. If another Cinnabar aristocrat had spoken to her in so brusk a fashion, she would have called him out; but Kelburney was clearly being polite in his own fashion. The custom of the country. . . . 

"Do it, then," Kelburney said, "and I'll warn 'em about the prisoners. We don't want any slipups."

He nodded toward Tovera with a grim smile. Truly, the Astrogator wasn't a man who missed much.

Adele pulled off her RCN helmet and tossed it underhanded to Kelburney. "Use this," she said.

"Would to God I had you on my ship," Kelburney muttered as he settled the helmet on his head. The lining adjusted automatically to his larger skull. He nodded toward Daniel, engrossed in the interplay visible through the fort's seventeen displays. "I thought he was blind to pick a girlfriend like you."

"I prefer not to be called a girl at all, Master Kelburney," Adele said. "You can address your personnel now."

On the range of miniature screens monitored through the personal data unit, the one-handed Falassan turned with a snarl and grabbed the bell-muzzled weapon beside him. Three splashing holes in his chest flung him back into the console. It went dead when a second burst ripped through the man's body and the box itself.

"This is the Astrogator!" Kelburney said. "Listen up! The bastards who holed up in the HQ are gonna surrender in a minute or two. We're gonna let 'em. Hear me! You're gonna treat 'em all like they was your long-lost sister, you hear? Anybody shoots a prisoner, he goes out an airlock without a suit, I don't care who you are!"

Aretine was no longer visible. The Falassans weren't looking at their displays; some of them remained at their consoles, but they'd rotated the seats outward and held weapons ready. Sparks crackled from the wall in front of an unused display, submachine gun projectiles disintegrating on concrete.

Kelburney gave Adele a lopsided grin. "Figure that'll do the job?" he said.

She shrugged. "You know your people better than I do," she said. "It seemed clear enough to me, certainly."

Kelburney squatted beside her, his eyes on Daniel who appeared oblivious. "Takes a lot on him for a young fellow, doesn't he?" Kelburney said.

Three Falassans carrying pistols ran through the image field of the console at which Aretine had sat when Daniel began his speech. One of them threw his hands in the air and toppled forward.

"He's acted as his father's envoy since he turned sixteen," Adele lied in a conversational tone. "This is a relatively minor matter compared to some he's undertaken."

"What?" Kelburney said in amazement.

Daniel walked a little apart as though he were completely lost in the events within the fort. He and Adele hadn't had a chance to plan this, but from their first meeting they'd shown an aptitude for counterpointing one another. Now, if only Aretine will hold out for a few minutes longer. 

"Why yes, Daniel is Speaker Leary's son," Adele said. "Your opposite number in the Republic, one might say; though we too have our factions."

She nodded in the direction of the fighting with what she hoped was a good-natured smile. Good nature wasn't a subject on which Adele Mundy had a great deal of experience.

"I hope that you didn't think that Daniel's come to you as a junior naval lieutenant?" she said. "The RCN is completely apolitical, I assure you. You'll be negotiating with a Leary of Bantry, sir."

A Falassan inside the fort began shouting into what had been Aretine's display. His bearded face was contorted with emotion. Adele had shut off the sound pickup along with all the unit's other functions.

"I see," said Kelburney without inflexion. "That's interesting, Officer Mundy. I'm glad you told me."

The Falassan gave up trying to speak into the console. He and a fellow reached down and together lifted Aretine by the hair into the image field. The rebel leader's eyes bulged and dribbles of blood ran from her ears. She'd probably been shot in the back of the head, but it was impossible to tell from this angle.

"Cue me," the Astrogator said with a curt nod to Adele. "All right, siblings, the fighting's over! Remember what I told you about the prisoners. Now it's time to party!"

He took off the RCN helmet and returned it to Adele as Daniel came sauntering back. Several of the bodyguards started shooting gleefully at the sky.

"Astrogator Kelburney," Daniel said, "now that the business here has been taken care of, I want to discuss a matter that will greatly increase the influence of your cluster in the Cinnabar Senate."

"They're coming out!" shouted a Dalbriggan who had a direct view of the fortress.

"Not just yet, Leary," the Astrogator said. "We'll talk tomorrow after you've got your ship rerigged, and you won't be sorry for the result. But not just now."

Adele sighed, gathering her strength to stand up again. She and Daniel had saved quite a number of lives by ending the battle in this fashion. She supposed she should feel cheerful.

But the air stank of blood and destruction, and Adele felt only disgust—at herself and at the species of which she was a part.

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Framed

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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

_As soon as the main hatch tilted forward enough to break the
seal along the upper edge, smoke and ashes swirled into the Princess Cecile. The automatic impeller fixed to the wardroom hatch on the level above cut loose with a long burst, making the hull ring as it recoiled. An incoming projectile whanged off the corvette's bow.

"Boarders, spread out and form along the road on this side!" Daniel shouted. "Over!"

The hatch thumped down in soft soil, rolling up sparks from the weeds and brush ignited by the Princess Cecile's exhaust. A ridge of slightly higher ground supported a grove of trees, but the river a hundred yards north of the corvette flooded often enough to rot the roots of large vegetation on the flats. The road just beyond was built on a levee and made a good blocking position.

Daniel started for the grove, well behind the riggers in his fifty-strong party. They'd jumped while the end of the ramp was still ten feet in the air. The thrusters had baked the ground solid. The mud was more organic than mineral, so the stench was worse than that of a fire in a charnel house.

There was a bright white flash in the direction of the distant spaceport. Almost immediately the ground shuddered, but the crash of rending metal was many seconds delayed. The bow of a pirate cutter tilted up, then toppled again below the line of the causeway. There was no way to tell which side had been responsible for the destruction.

"Boarders, gunmen are taking position on the other side of the—" Tovera said. Her cold voice was little changed by the compression of the helmet radio link.

A stocked impeller began to fire behind Daniel, the slugs passing close overhead. He stumbled on a root that remained tough despite the charring. Righting himself he glanced backward. Hogg was seated cross-legged on the top of the ramp. His arms were braced on his knees and the impeller's sling, locking the weapon on target.

Every time Hogg fired, a head slipped out of sight behind the causeway. Sometimes there was a splash in the air behind where the head had been.

Midway between the road and the corvette, the ground was still soggy. Daniel's right boot sank ankle deep, throwing him forward. Spurts of mud and pulped foliage leaped high, drawing a diagonal across the line of advancing spacers. The man to Daniel's right crumpled, holding his belly and screaming. His equipment belt twisted away from him as he fell, severed by the slug.

The Princess Cecile's upper turret roared, raking the causeway with pulses of plasma. The bolts were hammerblows of pure heat on the back of Daniel's neck and bare hands. Several of the spacers fell—unharmed, or he hoped so, but thrown to the ground by the crashing discharges.

Daniel's visor blacked out the flashes that would otherwise have destroyed his retinas. What he saw as he continued to stagger forward was an invisible giant chewing hunks out of the roadway. Wet silt exploded in steam and the dark red flames of carbon; rock ballast blew to glassy shards or white, searing calcium flames.

The Falassan gunfire ceased. "Boarders, form along the roadway!" Daniel wheezed. "Over!"

Sun ceased fire after his twin cannon had devoured three hundred yards of roadway. Through the smoke of the new fires, Daniel saw people running back toward the town to the south or standing with their hands in the air.

Several of the spacers were shooting wildly as they advanced. They weren't going to hit anything—well, they weren't going to hit any Falassans, though their fellows were at risk—and the locals seemed to have stopped fighting anyway.

"Boarders, cease fire!" Daniel ordered. He thought again about his notion of small-arms training for the crew. There'd have been time for it during refit on Tanais. The Sissies would've been excited to have something real to be doing on a barren iceball. Instead—

Another explosion shook Homeland. An orange fireball lifted a metal roof and a human body. The figure was pinwheeling; the arms and legs had separated from the torso before it all dropped out of sight.

This causeway would make a good target backstop, but this probably isn't the time. 

Daniel reached the causeway and stepped carefully into a smoldering divot gouged by the plasma cannon before pausing to take stock. A figure in coveralls sprawled on the road to the right. The only thing moving was the row of ribbons sewn along his seams, fluttering in the breeze.

Adele sat beside Daniel on a chunk of rock fill. Thermal shock had crazed the surface, but either it had cooled or this was another example of Adele's unconcern for her physical comfort. She took out her personal data unit.

Daniel eyed the straggling mixture of woods, wire-fenced gardens, and stone houses to the south. The terrain was rolling, and the houses were generally built in clumps on the higher ground. Earthen mounds raised the two warehouses near the road ten feet above the surface.

Vehicles full of armed personnel moved on the paths between buildings. Even with his visor magnification at 160x Daniel couldn't see any current fighting. Two houses burned sullenly, and occasionally sparks gouted from the spaceport well to the south.

"I can get you imagery from Kelburney's command car if you like, Daniel," Adele said. Her voice broke in mid-sentence for a cough, but she didn't sound winded. "The turret has an electronic sight. Which I've tapped."

How in heaven's name . . . ? But the method didn't matter, and the information certainly did. "Yes, please!" Daniel said. "Ah, Quadrant One."

He didn't want somebody else's field of view covering his own completely. A compressed image on the upper left corner of his visor would give Daniel the information he required without preventing him from doing whatever might suddenly be required. Shooting an unexpected enemy, for example; though with Adele and Tovera both in the hole with him, that was of vanishingly low probability.

Several hundred people were coming toward the causeway on foot. Were they attacking, or—

"Boarders, don't shoot!" Daniel said in sudden horror. Much of the crowd was children, and many of the adults carried infants or toddlers as well. His first thought was that all of them were unarmed, but that wasn't technically true. A number of the figures wore holstered pistols, and one female carried a submachine gun slung across her back. She'd presumably forgotten about it; her arms were stretched out to hold the hands of a pair of three-year-old twins.

"Boarders, don't shoot," Daniel repeated. "They're surrendering to us instead of taking their chances with Kelburney's lot. On your honor, don't shoot!"

The Dalbriggan image echoed onto the corner of Daniel's visor provided a travelogue through the streets of Homeland. It was so smooth that he thought for a moment that Kelburney was in an aircar or at least an air cushion vehicle, but the forehull bobbled repeatedly into the bottom of the frame.

The gun was stabilized both in azimuth and deflection. It was mounted in the turret of a car armored so heavily that only a firm connection with the ground could support it. Daniel had briefly confused the smoothness of the sight picture with that of the vehicle itself.

The fighting was over; Daniel wanted to catch the Astrogator at the moment of triumph to have the best chance of succeeding with the next stage of his plan. "Lieutenant Mon," he ordered. "Have someone bring the jeep to me immediately. I need to speak to Astrogator Kelburney. Out."

"I can reach him, Daniel," Adele said, looking up with a frown of concern. She must wonder if he believed she was incompetent.

Daniel laughed at the absurdity of the unspoken thought. "I believe face-to-face would be the better choice, Adele," he said. "I'm going to have a hard sell, I'm afraid."

The ringing whine of the fans lifting the little vehicle out of the Princess Cecile's stern hold followed Daniel's request by only moments. Vesey's voice said, "Captain Leary, the jeep's on the way to your position, out," but the driver must have been not only prepared but cued into the command net.

Mon had cut corners to save time his commander might need. "A very good officer," Daniel said aloud. To Adele's raised eyebrow he added, "Lieutenant Mon, that is."

Kelburney's gunsight steadied on a low circular structure whose stone walls had a pronounced slope. Immediately slugs from an automatic impeller rang from the car's armor. The heavy-metal projectiles ricochetted with green, purple and magenta sparks, vivid even in full daylight. One round must have struck the turret because the sight picture jolted skyward even as the car backed to safety behind a residence.

Daniel switched away from the remote image and overlaid his visor with a sixty-percent mask showing Homeland's topography. The circular building was nearly in the center of town; it wasn't simply a building but a thick ring surrounding a central citadel.

"The Falassan chiefs depend more on physical protection than the Astrogator and his predecessors on Dalbriggan do," Daniel said with a grim smile. "That's a confession of weakness, of course. It appears that we've picked the right side."

Woetjans had come over to report. "Whichever we pick is the right side," she said. Her tone made the pronouncement sound rather like a comment on the weather. "We're securing the prisoners, sir. That all right?"

The corvette's small utility aircar landed at the back of Daniel's position. Gramercy, one of the power-room techs, was driving. He showed a gentler touch on the controls than Daniel had come to expect of RCN drivers; but then, perhaps he'd gotten lucky.

"Yes, carry on, bosun," Daniel said. "Signals and I are going to discuss the next stage with the Astrogator."

He walked toward the idling vehicle. Ash from the recent bath of plasma spiraled in the wash from the drive fans.

"Sir, I'll come with you!" Woetjans said. She knew she had to remain here to command the ground party, but her request was as certain as sunrise.

"There isn't room for you, mistress," Tovera said as she stepped between Woetjans and the aircar. "But if you like, I'll kill one of the locals for you?"

Daniel got into the front seat beside the driver. He'd never thought he'd see Woetjans with a shocked expression; but he knew exactly how she felt.

The Dalbriggans didn't have a command channel: they had seven separate frequencies on which subchiefs and their followers gabbled orders and nonsense in their excitement.

"Don't fire at the RCN aircar approaching from the north!" Adele said. She used her personal data unit to cue the corvette's powerful transmitters for a multiband rebroadcast, hoping—another person would have thought "praying"—the message would reach every one of Kelburney's gunmen.

She'd found seven frequencies. What if there was an eighth that she'd missed, that of a guntruck whose weapons were even now swinging on the jeep?

Adele's mouth quirked in slight humor as she repeated, "Don't fire at the RCN aircar approaching from the north!" In that case she was unlikely to live long enough to be tortured by failure. The universe had a kindly side after all.

Daniel switched on the jeep's klaxon as the driver took them low through the streets of Homeland. When the vehicle swooped up on edge to slice between a building and a car with an automatic impeller welded to each of its four corners, Adele wished angrily that they'd lift high enough to hold a steady course across the community.

The thought didn't reach her tongue, fortunately. It had scarcely formed when she realized that would mean a straight course down the throat of the Falassan holdouts. She had her duties and areas of competence; which were different, fortunately, from those of the spacer who was driving.

Adele could hear the sound of gunfire over the klaxon and the howl of the drive fans. A red spark shrieking like a banshee curved out of the sky and banged the car's bow, just ahead of the open cockpit. The driver shouted and jerked his control yoke. Daniel reached past and steadied the vehicle before they wobbled into the building to the left.

"A ricochet," he explained—to everyone in the car, but Adele was the only one who might not have known without being told. "Wars are dangerous places, aren't they? But of course, you can slip in the bath and break your neck."

Adele supposed he was only acting the part of a good commander in calming his troops, but on reflection she couldn't be sure. Nothing seemed to faze Daniel.

Adele didn't care about her own life to speak of, but she found the notion of being snuffed out at random was oddly disquieting. Logically it shouldn't matter whether she was killed by a sniper's deliberation or instead by a few ounces of impact-heated osmium plunging from the sky. She obviously wasn't as much a creature of logic as she preferred to believe.

The jeep rounded a knoll on which stood several houses, one of them afire. The swale beyond was a plaza of sorts with a triumphal arch and a number of plinths from which the statues had been recently shot away. Five armed vehicles parked on the pavement, with a group of heavily armed Dalbriggans hunched behind them.

One of the Dalbriggans saw the jeep out of the corner of his eye. He shouted and leveled a stocked impeller.

Tovera lifted slightly to aim: the light pellets of her submachine gun wouldn't penetrate the windscreen of the open car. Before she could fire, Daniel rose to his feet and raised his hands high.

"Quite all right!" Daniel shouted, keeping his balance even though the driver reacted to the threat by landing in what was virtually a controlled crash. "Captain Leary here to speak with the Astrogator!"

Kelburney stepped forward, holding a drawn pistol. The man with the impeller looked hesitant and didn't lower his weapon. Kelburney backhanded him with the pistol butt from behind, knocking him face-down to the ground.

"Leary!" he shouted, advancing to give Daniel a bear hug. "Bloody good work with the guardship! There aren't six captains in my squadron who'd have been able to equal that!"

In the assembly, Kelburney had been a monarch; in the council meeting later he was the canny man of business. Here on this field of smoke and blood, Adele saw a much more primal figure that she suspected was the stuff from which the Astrogator had molded his other personas.

Automatic impellers opened fire from somewhere out of sight. Projectiles bounced skyward like a neon fountain. And where are they going to come down? Adele wondered, but with detached curiosity. The near miss had inoculated her against fear of death from that sort of randomness.

A white flash lit the sky to the west. There was a sharp explosion and the firing stopped.

"I gather Captain Aretine has gone to ground in the circular fortress just over the hill?" Daniel said, pointing in the direction of the shooting. The air stank of ozone and smoke from burning fuels, plastics, and flesh.

"We'll get'er out, never fear!" said a hulking gunman. The folk around Kelburney now were bodyguards, not the officers of his inner circle. Those folk would be directing their own contingents of fighters, here in town and back at the spaceport.

"No doubt you will," Daniel said in a cool tone and a glance that meant, "Don't interrupt when your betters are speaking, dog!" He cleared his throat and continued to Kelburney, "I think I might speed the process a good deal, Astrogator. That is, if you don't care what happens to the defenders with the exception of Captain Aretine herself?"

Several automatic impellers opened fire simultaneously. Orange flame mushroomed over the houses, lifting a gunshield from one of the makeshift fighting vehicles. The firing stopped.

"Care?" Kelburney said, his brow furrowing. "God rot my bones, boy, I don't care what happens to her either! You can burn her . . ."

His expression changed into a cat's smile. "Ah, I see," he said. "You mean, do I mind letting them live afterwards?"

"Yes, that's right," Daniel said. "I realize that they're pirates, but regardless, I wouldn't care to talk them out of their position and have them massacred as a result."

Ah! Adele understood now. She sat on a cracked marble paver and began setting up the link. She'd use the transmitter in the Astrogator's command vehicle rather than going through the Princess Cecile's communications suite. The personal data unit was close to the limit of its unboosted range for reaching the ship from here in the middle of Homeland.

Kelburney laughed. "I could say you were a soft bastard," he said, "but the truth is I don't see reason to kill a lot of good people if I don't have to. Go ahead. I've got a loudspeaker on the car. Or are you going to chance your uniform to keep them from blowing your head off?"

Daniel dusted the breast of his tunic with his fingertips. "Thank you, Astrogator," he said, "but I believe Officer Mundy has patched me—"

Adele nodded, her wands flickering. There were three separate nodes connecting displays in the Falassan strongpoint. She wanted to be sure Daniel's address would blanket all of them.

"—through to the communications network within the fortress. I think that will be the most effective way of proceeding."

"Inside?" Kelburney said. "There's no bloody way she can do that—it's all shielded."

"Officer Mundy doesn't give me advice on sailing a starship, Captain," Daniel said, every inch a Cinnabar aristocrat again. "And I allow her the same freedom in dealing with communications tasks. It works out quite well."

"Do you want the feed through your helmet, Daniel?" Adele asked. "Or would you prefer a larger display? There's quite a modern one in the command vehicle."

She nodded.

"The helmet will be fine, Adele," Daniel said. He squared his shoulders unconsciously and faced westward, although there was a hill and a building between him and the Falassan headquarters.

Adele made a final adjustment. She'd opened the circuit by aping the power management commands of the Falassans' standby batteries. That portion of the system had no safeguards whatever in place, but it was connected through the transmitter to every computer inside the stone walls.

"I've put you through," she said. Tovera was looking at Kelburney with much the same smile as if she watched him over a gunsight. "Go ahead."

Adele's display gave her the image of the operator seated at each of the seventeen separate units within the fortress. Six were gunnery displays controlling the weapon emplacements in wall turrets, and five consoles were unused at the moment.

At one of the six remaining sat a woman in her mid thirties. A scar ran from her chin into her scalp, skirting her left eye by very little. Her hair was a bright, artificial red except for where it grew over the scar; there the dye didn't take.

"Wartung!" she screamed to someone out of the image area. "Wartung, you bastard, they've entered the system!"

Even without the scar, no one would have called Aretine attractive. Her features were too sharp, and her eyes glinted like the points of icepicks.

"Siblings of the Selma Cluster!" Daniel said. "I'm Lieutenant Daniel Leary of the RCN with a proposition that will save your lives."

He'd instinctively raised his voice, though of course Adele was controlling the volume of the output speakers. She'd turned the command circuitry to her own purposes. Short of shooting the units to pieces, the Falassans couldn't affect their own equipment.

"My corvette, the RCS Princess Cecile, mounts four-inch plasma cannon," Daniel continued. "If I have to, I'll hover over Homeland and use them to burn your little fort into a pool of lava. I believe that will take about a minute and a half, but perhaps less."

Aretine and a muscular young male with a metal pincer in place of his left hand were trying to block the electronic intrusion from separate consoles. They had as little success as they'd have had gnawing through rock. The Falassans at the other consoles, including three which had been unused until Daniel began to speak, listened intently to the proposal.

"I've arranged for your lives to be spared," Daniel said. "On my honor as an RCN officer and a Leary of Bantry."

He turned his head toward the Astrogator. Daniel's expression left no doubt in Adele's mind that he meant his words in the most direct sense possible. If Kelburney went back on his word, there would be Hell to pay. A Cinnabar gentleman had promised as much.

Kelburney probably understood the terms being offered and the price that would be exacted for noncompliance on his part. Tovera certainly did. She smiled like a statue of ice as her eyes counted the Dalbriggans nearby; the targets, it might be, that she would kill in a few minutes. For the moment, her submachine gun slanted up at an angle that threatened no one.

"The condition is that you arrest Captain Aretine and hand her over to the authorities for trial on treason charges before Astrogator Kelburney," Daniel said. "The Republic of Cinnabar doesn't presume to dictate legal procedures and penalties to the governments of allies like the Selma Cluster, so I specifically except Mistress Aretine from my guarantee of safety."

Aretine had left her console. As Daniel spoke she reappeared at one of the gunnery displays, wrenching the man there aside and sitting down in his place. The unit was supposed to control three of the automatic impellers in unmanned barbettes on the outer wall. It was as dead as a pile of gravel now; the Falassan commander jerked at the joystick uselessly in frothing fury.

Adele frowned, realizing that she could have shut down the fort's active defenses much sooner than she did, thus saving lives among the Dalbriggan attackers. Though . . . looking at the thugs guarding Kelburney, that wasn't a prospect for which she could summon much enthusiasm.

"I realize you'll need to discuss this among yourselves," Daniel continued. He sounded utterly sincere, but he winked to those watching him from the interior of the fortress. They'd have thought he was simple-minded if he hadn't. "You have five minutes to accept or reject my offer; and if the latter, a trifle longer to make your peace with God. RCN out."

The Astrogator looked down at Adele. "You, Mundy?" he said. "Can you make all my people hear me the way you warned about you Cinnabars driving up in the car?"

"Yes, I can do that," Adele said, keeping her tone neutral. If another Cinnabar aristocrat had spoken to her in so brusk a fashion, she would have called him out; but Kelburney was clearly being polite in his own fashion. The custom of the country. . . . 

"Do it, then," Kelburney said, "and I'll warn 'em about the prisoners. We don't want any slipups."

He nodded toward Tovera with a grim smile. Truly, the Astrogator wasn't a man who missed much.

Adele pulled off her RCN helmet and tossed it underhanded to Kelburney. "Use this," she said.

"Would to God I had you on my ship," Kelburney muttered as he settled the helmet on his head. The lining adjusted automatically to his larger skull. He nodded toward Daniel, engrossed in the interplay visible through the fort's seventeen displays. "I thought he was blind to pick a girlfriend like you."

"I prefer not to be called a girl at all, Master Kelburney," Adele said. "You can address your personnel now."

On the range of miniature screens monitored through the personal data unit, the one-handed Falassan turned with a snarl and grabbed the bell-muzzled weapon beside him. Three splashing holes in his chest flung him back into the console. It went dead when a second burst ripped through the man's body and the box itself.

"This is the Astrogator!" Kelburney said. "Listen up! The bastards who holed up in the HQ are gonna surrender in a minute or two. We're gonna let 'em. Hear me! You're gonna treat 'em all like they was your long-lost sister, you hear? Anybody shoots a prisoner, he goes out an airlock without a suit, I don't care who you are!"

Aretine was no longer visible. The Falassans weren't looking at their displays; some of them remained at their consoles, but they'd rotated the seats outward and held weapons ready. Sparks crackled from the wall in front of an unused display, submachine gun projectiles disintegrating on concrete.

Kelburney gave Adele a lopsided grin. "Figure that'll do the job?" he said.

She shrugged. "You know your people better than I do," she said. "It seemed clear enough to me, certainly."

Kelburney squatted beside her, his eyes on Daniel who appeared oblivious. "Takes a lot on him for a young fellow, doesn't he?" Kelburney said.

Three Falassans carrying pistols ran through the image field of the console at which Aretine had sat when Daniel began his speech. One of them threw his hands in the air and toppled forward.

"He's acted as his father's envoy since he turned sixteen," Adele lied in a conversational tone. "This is a relatively minor matter compared to some he's undertaken."

"What?" Kelburney said in amazement.

Daniel walked a little apart as though he were completely lost in the events within the fort. He and Adele hadn't had a chance to plan this, but from their first meeting they'd shown an aptitude for counterpointing one another. Now, if only Aretine will hold out for a few minutes longer. 

"Why yes, Daniel is Speaker Leary's son," Adele said. "Your opposite number in the Republic, one might say; though we too have our factions."

She nodded in the direction of the fighting with what she hoped was a good-natured smile. Good nature wasn't a subject on which Adele Mundy had a great deal of experience.

"I hope that you didn't think that Daniel's come to you as a junior naval lieutenant?" she said. "The RCN is completely apolitical, I assure you. You'll be negotiating with a Leary of Bantry, sir."

A Falassan inside the fort began shouting into what had been Aretine's display. His bearded face was contorted with emotion. Adele had shut off the sound pickup along with all the unit's other functions.

"I see," said Kelburney without inflexion. "That's interesting, Officer Mundy. I'm glad you told me."

The Falassan gave up trying to speak into the console. He and a fellow reached down and together lifted Aretine by the hair into the image field. The rebel leader's eyes bulged and dribbles of blood ran from her ears. She'd probably been shot in the back of the head, but it was impossible to tell from this angle.

"Cue me," the Astrogator said with a curt nod to Adele. "All right, siblings, the fighting's over! Remember what I told you about the prisoners. Now it's time to party!"

He took off the RCN helmet and returned it to Adele as Daniel came sauntering back. Several of the bodyguards started shooting gleefully at the sky.

"Astrogator Kelburney," Daniel said, "now that the business here has been taken care of, I want to discuss a matter that will greatly increase the influence of your cluster in the Cinnabar Senate."

"They're coming out!" shouted a Dalbriggan who had a direct view of the fortress.

"Not just yet, Leary," the Astrogator said. "We'll talk tomorrow after you've got your ship rerigged, and you won't be sorry for the result. But not just now."

Adele sighed, gathering her strength to stand up again. She and Daniel had saved quite a number of lives by ending the battle in this fashion. She supposed she should feel cheerful.

But the air stank of blood and destruction, and Adele felt only disgust—at herself and at the species of which she was a part.

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