with the Soldiers." She was referring, he knew, to his bodyguards, rather than any military forces.

He also knew she was prompting him again, still trying to get him up to speed.

"I'll try again." He nodded at her. He didn't remember trying before, but her words told him he must have done so.

Bringing his left arm up as he moved across the room, he slid back the wide cuff of his dark gray jacket—now smeared with drying yellow mud—and looked at the control pad on his wrist. It was currently in a map-display mode; apparently he had been trying to determine their exact location. He did not remember doing that, either.

He reset the wristpad for communications, but found the usual channels jammed. He programmed the pad to run a continuous scan of the local channels, looking for an open one; and as he watched the rapidly shifting displays, he silently reviewed what he had learned about their situation.

Always, when he had emerged from a blackout, his memory of events leading up to it had been sharp and clear, right up to the point where he went blank—and while he had never recovered a memory of anything that occurred during a blackout, he had always awakened from them with his mind once more sharp and clear.

This time, his memory seemed sluggish, as if some part of his mind was unwilling to expend the energy required to drive the focal point of his consciousness through the murky haze that obscured events of—of how long? He could not even pin down where the hazy part of his memories began; he had a feeling it went back into a time before the actual blackout had begun.

Now, why did he think that? More accurately, why did he feel as if that was the case?

Willing his mind to focus on the problem, rather than give in to its apparent inclination to blend with the fog about it, he found there was a hidden part of himself that believed this particular blackout had begun very recently. But it seemed to have cast confusion over a longer stretch of his memory.

Kaj Menowsky, his personal medician, had told him that stress could not only retard his body's continuing efforts to heal itself from the effects of the Newtonians' attack on his DNA, but also trigger a blackout. And Kaj had warned him that any such retardation of his body's healing process would increase the period of time in which he would continue to be subject to such blackouts.

Kaj had also told him he could heal himself faster if he could find a way to harness his own creative powers, somehow—and in fact he had done so once, in the worst part of his bout with the DNA antagonist, working his way through a series of dreams that seemed to have somehow taught his body what needed to be done; at least, Kaj had been pleased with his progress after those dreams.

Could it be that his subconscious mind, unaffected by the blackouts, was trying to send messages to his conscious mind? Was this some new manifestation of those same creative powers Kaj had prompted him to work with? It occurred to him, for the first time, that the creative powers he had used might have been simply his subconscious mind at work.

It was clear he had been under a lot of stress, in the events— whatever they were—that had led to his current situation; he wondered now whether that same stress might have become so great that his subconscious mind could deal with it only by putting his consciousness back in charge. That might explain his unprecedented act of coming out of the blackout while awake, for instance. But if so, there was likely a price to be paid—Kaj would happily tell him so, if he were here—and possibly his current confusion was that price.

In that case, his subconscious mind had left him in a bad spot. It was going to be very hard for him to pull them all out of this when his memory was foggy about whatever had happened before his awakening. He needed information above all. So far he seemed unable to remember the recent past with any depth; he could only pull up particular memories when something triggered an association.

It seemed clear his party was under siege in something that appeared to be a primitive military fortification. The soldiers with them were certainly a military escort, so it was likely they had been on another visit to a unit of Friendly troops. But where were Henry and his Soldiers? Toni's words had suggested she thought they might be nearby—and with that thought, the memory of the events following their visit to Will's grave came back to him, suddenly and clearly.

Henry had realized, as soon as the local military officials had stepped in following the bombing, that military people were not likely to allow a group of armed civilians to convoy through their midst. So he had taken his Soldiers undercover, hoping to find some way to protect Bleys and his party from a distance, in the event the local military could not manage that.

The fact that the military had said Henry's people could not come along did not mean they weren't around somewhere.

Henry had never been one for obeying orders like some wide-eyed child; in fact, he had spent a portion of his earlier life fighting against the Militia on Association. He still had a low opinion of them, which he sometimes seemed to extend to all other formal military forces.

The question was how to make contact with Henry and his Soldiers. Bleys turned his attention back to his wristpad; Toni's had been damaged, and he guessed that Dahno's had been also; his appeared to be all right—

Abruptly, he noticed a small blue light on his pad's display face, one he had never seen there before. He queried the pad and—

"—me," a voice said.

The voice was female and seemed very soft, and Bleys realized that the pad's HUSH mode had somehow come on.

He tried to use the SEND control, but it seemed inoperable. Even as he tried it the voice resumed: "Eleven minutes and thirty seconds." It paused; then: "Do you hear me?"

The voice sounded familiar, with some of the Friendly intonations most of his Soldiers had. His Soldiers came from a variety of worlds, but most were from the Friendlies; and while none of those used the archaic-sounding canting speech of the ultra-religious, they generally had the distinct Friendly accent he was used to. He himself had taken voice training that, among other things, rid him of the few tinges of that accent he had picked up while spending his teenage years on Henry's farm.

In a few seconds the voice spoke again:

"Eleven minutes and twenty seconds. Do you hear me?"

As the voice continued to count down, Bleys tried to locate the channel the message was coming in on; but all the remainder of his communications system seemed to be cut out of whatever circuit this message was coming in on . . . and even as he futilely clicked SEND for the third time, the voice stopped at the ten-minute mark. A new voice spoke—Henry's voice.

"Bleys," Henry said, "I don't know if you can hear this or not. Don't try to respond to this message. You can't; I'm using an emergency channel on a gravity band. Your pad can only receive, because a gravity transmitter is too bulky for any wristpad."

A gravity band would be unlikely to be cither blocked or monitored, Bleys thought as Henry's voice continued softly. Leave it to Henry to have one more backup behind the backups. For a brief moment he felt a lightening of his spirit.

Maybe that's where Dahno gets it.

"This message is going to repeat at every one-minute mark of the countdown, from here on," Henry was continuing, his tempo speeding up, "because I can't stay here to keep talking. We know where you are, and we're behind the people who have you surrounded. There're a lot of them, but if we can take them by surprise we've got a good chance of getting you out of there."

Bleys found himself nodding as he listened, following Henry's thought. He glanced up, and found that everyone in the bunker— everyone who was conscious—was watching him. They probably couldn't hear anything with the HUSH setting activated, but he had their full attention anyway.

Toni was smiling broadly—of course! Henry couldn't have added the gravity receiver to my pad without her knowledge.

Not only was she generally in charge of Bleys' communications, but she and Henry had a bond of their own, and would likely have worked together on something like this.

"I have to ask you," Henry was continuing, "to try to find a way to attract the enemy's attention on the zero mark. Getting their attention could make all the difference, by letting us get right in on them before they notice us. Any sort of demonstration would help, and the louder the better." He paused.

"Bleys, anything you in there can do might save more than one of our lives."

The words reminded Bleys of the Soldiers who had died helping him escape from Newton. Toni had counseled him to find a way to say something to Henry about those men and women, but he never had ... he just couldn't find the words.

The first voice he had heard resumed its countdown: "Nine minutes fifteen seconds," it said. Then: "Nine minutes ten seconds "

At the nine-minute mark Henry's words repeated themselves. Bleys, thinking furiously, listened through Henry's message again, and then set the pad to give him a visual countdown only. He looked about.

Everyone—except for the two wounded soldiers, who were unconscious—was still looking at him. He turned to face the soldiers grouped near the door, and then raised both arms, bringing his hands up to the level of his eyes, where they acted as a frame for his face. The soldiers seemed to cluster together about their sergeant, their eyes now all on his face.

Bleys faced them for a moment, silent and dramatic, with feet slightly apart; and then he paced—smoothly, with short, slow steps—toward them. Inside, he was wishing he had worn the black half-cape he used on public occasions, with its red, shiny lining intended to attract attention. Still, the situation had focused their attention on him in a way he had never experienced before—and certainly his need to be persuasive had never been stronger....

"Now is the moment," he said. And he put into those words all the training he had used to make his voice strong and comforting, sure and mellow. "Now is our moment!"

He focused on the eyes of the shortest of the soldiers, a dark-skinned youth who had picked up a cut on his left cheek that left a thin dried ribbon of blood down the side of his face. The youth's eyes widened slightly as Bleys tried to pour his certainty down the channel between them.

"You've performed well," Bleys said, "all of you! No one would have expected you to hold off those people out there." Bleys' eyes moved to those of the tall man off to the side of the group; and that young man's eyes widened in turn, staring into Bleys' eyes. Bleys, his own vision focused tightly down, could see the pupils of the young soldier's eyes as they dilated slightly.

Bleys spoke on, capturing each soldier in turn with his eyes while he spoke of their bravery and worth, of the task that lay ahead, and of how their deeds would look to those who were coming to find them.

Their sergeant, he saw, had broken loose from the spell, and was now looking with a puzzled expression at the rapt faces of his men.

"Gather together," Bleys told the men, "and feel the trust of your companions. Each of them trusts you, as do I." He broke off, and gestured the sergeant forward with a short wave of his arm. As the man moved forward, Bleys extended the arm to drape it lightly on the man's shoulder, pulling him in toward Bleys' own body; and as he did so, Bleys himself pivoted, the action serving to pull the sergeant away from his men, who, oblivious, were gathering in a circle and speaking quietly and warmly to each other, joy on their faces.

"Sergeant," Bleys said, now stepping to the side, away from the man, "I know this seems strange to you." For the first time Bleys saw that the man was himself hurt, a red stain showing on his left side, just above hip level. The stain seemed large, but had been crudely-bandaged and was hidden from normal view by the man's battle jacket. Now that he was paying attention, he also saw that the man seemed to be holding his left shoulder slightly hunched, as if it, too, had been injured.

"It did," the man said, in reply to Bleys' question. "Not now. Now I recognize what you're doing. You're one of those New People who can go around persuading people to do whatever you want."

A Dorsai!

It seemed strange to see a soldier from that planet, so renowned for the military⁷ abilities of its people, working as a simple non-commissioned officer in some little brushfire war.

That shows how bad things have become for them—they have to take any little job they can get.

"Some people call us that," Bleys said. "Or Others. Whatever the name, I am that. But you seem hostile; do you feel as if I've persuaded you—as you put it—against your will?"

"You tried," the sergeant said. "But you did it to my men!"

"Your men are needed, Sergeant," Bleys said. "There's a mission they have to carry out—one that will save our lives. I'm only trying to get them ready for it."

"You're going to send them out there? They'll be slaughtered! The enemy can fire down the length of the trench and there's no cover at all!"

"But they'll grab the enemy's attention for a few moments," Bleys said. "Someone's coming up behind them who'll use that inattention to get in on those people and remove them."

"But my men! They'll be dead!"

Before Bleys could answer, the man started to move forward— and quickly checked himself as Toni, stepping up from the side, pointed a power pistol at his head from a couple of feet away.

Sadly, Bleys shook his head, glancing quickly at the display on his wristpad.

"Maybe," he said. "Maybe not. They'll have a chance. It has to be done."

"It's not right!" the sergeant said. "You're sending them out there like they were in some kind of dream! You're not even giving them a choice!"

"I don't have a choice, either, and we have less than three minutes," Bleys said, reaching out to remove the power pistol from the sergeant's weapons belt. Taking the pistol off its safety, he pointed it at the Dorsai's stomach. "Turn to your left and kneel facing that wall. If you try anything, you won't be alive to help your men."

As Toni watched the kneeling man, Bleys returned to the rest of the soldiers. They were enthusiastic about his rejoining them, and seemed, in their captured state, not to have noticed the confrontation with their sergeant. Bleys took a moment to greet each one individually, as if they were all comrades together, and gathered their attention to himself once more. He spoke again.

In a few moments he had given them their instructions, and they turned to checking their weapons and arraying themselves on either side of the doorway.

"Remember," Bleys said, "don't move until I give the signal. Then get out the doorway fast, spreading out as you go. Put out as much fire as you can. You can break those people, I know it."

Eyes now fastened on the cntranceway, they all nodded resolutely. Eighty seconds to go, Bleys saw.

At that point the sergeant, ignoring the gun Toni held on him, rose, pivoting—and moved toward him. Bleys raised the man's own pistol; but the sergeant slowed and splayed his arms to each side. One hand was bloody. He continued, however, moving toward his men, and Bleys understood suddenly.

"You don't have to go out there, you know," Bleys said. "Whatever you might think of me, I wouldn't make you do that." Over the sergeant's shoulder, Bleys could see Toni, still behind the man, with her gun on him. Dahno, off to the side, had pulled himself up onto an elbow and was now raising a pistol, his face ugly.

"No, Dahno!" Bleys said, raising a hand in a warding motion. Dahno, he was sure, was in the grip of emotion that wanted a violent outlet.

Bleys had no time to think about it; he was in the grip of his own emotional reaction—one he, too, could not control.

"I suppose I could take your word for that," the sergeant said. "It makes no difference." He paused; and while he did so, Bleys silently reversed the pistol and handed it back to him. The hand in which Dahno held his weapon seemed to jerk as he clenched his finger over the firing button—but nothing happened; the gun was empty.

The white-mind face Toni had been wearing—the inhumanly blank face that signaled a concentration state in someone who had attained a great mastery of the martial arts—changed, too, as her eyes narrowed and her lips curled in a grim half-smile. Bleys thought he caught a gleam from behind her lowered eyelids.

Bleys put his attention back on the sergeant.

"They're my men, you see," the man said, as if that explained it all. He holstered the pistol without looking at it; then turned and limped toward those same men, who had been chattering softly among themselves, as if blind and deaf to the drama behind them. The volume of their chatter rose for a moment as he joined them, but died out as he spoke softly among them. After a few sentences he took a moment to check each man individually, looking him in the eyes and asking a soft question or two. And in just a few more seconds, Bleys gave them an order as the countdown on his pad reached zero; and they burst through the doorway one at a time, the Dorsai leading.

Bleys felt himself frozen in place, listening to the eruption of sound from outside, the explosions of power weapons and the whistling of cones. Toni gripped his arm, pulling him toward Dahno.

"We've got to be ready to go," she said. "Help me with him. If Henry gets through to us, we may have only moments to get out before the opportunity passes."

As they got Dahno to his feet, silence fell outside. They waited tensely, eyes glued to the entrance; and in a few minutes Bleys heard Henry's voice call his name.

"We've got to go now," Toni said, quietly but intensely.

"Yes," Bleys said. He had to go. It would be too tragic a waste, otherwise....

CHAPTER 11

The local sun was lowering toward the horizon line formed by the ridge to the west of Henry MacLean's position, the dimming of its light darkening the opposite sky as he, along with some of his Soldiers, walked across the field, pausing to check out each body they came to. To all sides more of their number were fanning out, alert for any further threat, and he could see another thin line of his people holding the crest of the ridge ahead of him.

This land had never been very productive—Henry's eye could still be that of a farmer—and having a war fought on it had made it rough and uneven, pitted and scabbed. There were no trees of any size nearby, he noted, although his Soldiers, in their attack, had made effective use of the scrubby trees and underbrush lining the small creek that curved around two sides of this position. He himself had walked out of that underbrush to move up the gentle slope.

It was no surprise to him that there were few trees in sight; trees were always casualties when war visited in one place for very long.

That setting star, which seemed small to his eyes, was called Tau Ceti. It was a strange name, he thought; and the paleness of its yellow light seemed strange, too—but he knew he felt that way out of his lifelong familiarity with the more orange light cast by Epsilon Eridanus, the star that shone on his home planet.

He had seen bodies lying about on Association, long in his past; and on Newton, too, more recently. The look of them never seemed to change, no matter the color of the light.

And something else hadn't changed: once dead, it did not matter whose side the body had been on.

He had been moving forward as he thought, part of a skirmish line of the former Soldiers of God he led. Now he stopped, as the change in his perspective revealed the lips of the trench that had been their objective. The entrance-way to the bunker would be under the lip on the farther side, he knew; in a few more steps he would be able to see it.

Henry and his Soldiers had been approaching somewhat obliquely to the line of the trench, which now presented the appearance of a kind of scar cutting across the barren field. It didn't seem a very strong defensive position, he thought, but perhaps it hadn't needed to be. What little he had heard about the war that had been fought over this area suggested it hadn't been a serious contest.... He wondered if more people had not died here in this afternoon than in all of that war.

With a hand signal he started his Soldiers moving forward again, cautious as always. Those to his right had already reached the trench, and two of them stopped, covering down its length, while the other two leaped over it, to take up watch on the other side.

In a few steps more he, himself, could see down into the trench. There were more bodies here, these in uniform. From some distance back and at a different angle he had seen these young men burst out into the trench from the bunker, shouting and firing—and had seen them blasted down. Two had gotten a little distance down the trench, back the way he had just come, before falling into the greasy mud; and one had made it up over the edge of the trench, the move giving him enough time to put several bolts into the midst of the group of enemies that had been setting up a power cannon intended to blast Bleys and his party to pieces in their shelter.

It was that cannon that had forced Henry to decide on immediate action.

"Bleys? Are you here?" he called, directing his voice at the entrance across the trench. "Dahno? Toni?"

As he waited he shifted position, two strides taking him over to the body of the soldier who took out the cannon. The man was badly torn up, having taken a number of needles before bolts from power weapons had blasted him out of life. He had never dropped his pistol, though—his hand, curled in death, still held it firmly.

He appeared to be a little older than the others. But all of them, including this man's enemies, that Henry and his Soldiers had killed, and who now lay behind him—they were all too young.

He was reminded of Will, whose grave he had visited only two days ago. He thought someone must have looked down on his son in very much this same way... did that person feel then as he, Henry, did now?

"Bleys?" he called again. And he gave hand signals to his people to flank the position they were now watching.

Remembering Will, as usual, also made him remember Joshua, his other son, still living on the old farm on Association. In a very-true sense, he realized now, Will had died so that Joshua would live. Joshua, and all their people.

And some of these young people had died so that Bleys could live—if he lived. The others, so that Bleys would die. Did they cancel each other out?

Not in Gods arithmetic, he thought.

"Henry, we're here." It was Toni's voice, and he looked up to see her appear cautiously out of the bunker entrance, stepping down slightly into the mud while waving a white cloth of some sort; with her other arm she was trying to support Dahno, who was also being held up by Bleys, coming out behind him. Henry did not have to speak before several of his Soldiers leaped into the trench to help take Dahno's weight, as, refusing to sit down, he picked his way past a couple of bodies and trudged heavily toward a crude ramp that had been cut out of the side of the trench, farther down its length.

"Bleys, are you hurt?" Henry said. "Toni?"

"No, Uncle," Bleys said. "Dahno has two needles in him, but the rest of us are all right."

"Is there anyone else in the bunker?" "A body or two," Bleys said, "and—"

"Two more wounded soldiers," Toni added. "Please get them help."

"Where is—" Henry began to call; and checked himself upon seeing that Mary Holzer, their lead medician, was already at Dahno's side as he reached the bottom of the ramp.

"I'll look him over," Mary said in her soft voice to James Cella, her number two. "Check inside, Jamie."

She tried to make Dahno lie down so that she could examine him, but he refused, insisting on getting up the ramp and out of the mud-bottomed trench.

Rather than taking the ramp, Bleys had vaulted out of the trench with the aid of cupped hands provided by one of the Soldiers; and now reached Henry. Toni had remained with Dahno.

"Thank you, Uncle," Bleys said as he came to a halt, looking back past Henry at the scattered bodies that had been their attackers. "I believe they might have gotten in on us before long."

"Probably not," Henry said. "They would not have needed to do so. They were setting up a power cannon that likely would have blown that place down on all of you."

"Do you know who they were?" Bleys asked.

"I have no idea," Henry said. "They aren't wearing uniforms."

"Are there any left alive?"

"Not so far," Henry said. "We need to get you out of here—no, don't argue. These people may have comrades; or if not, the army will soon discover how they were deceived and come back; we don't want them to find us with their own dead people."

"But I need to try to find out—"

"We'll check all the bodies and their equipment for anything that might tell us what you want to know," Henry said, "before the rest of us leave. But you and Toni are going now—" he pointed at a wide, high-riding vehicle approaching from an angle behind them, "—and Dahno, if he can travel."

The vehicle was one of a type commonly called a vagen, a civilian adaptation of a high-riding, boxy carrier used on many worlds to ferry small military units. It drew up beside them, angling in at the last moment so that its driver could be next to Henry as his window opened. Its fans threw up very little dust from the still-damp soil.

"John, are you ready to go?" Henry directed his question at the now-open window.

"Yes, Henry," John Colville said. Bleys happened to know that John's father had fought beside Henry years ago, when they were both Soldiers of God.

"Rolf and Kamala have had their wounds treated and are in the rear compartment," John was continuing. "They can shoot."

"Bleys, you get in beside John," Henry said. He turned slightly and raised his voice.

"Mary, can he be moved?" he called.

"Yes, Henry," the medician replied.

"Move over there, John," Henry directed. "Bleys and I will walk over there in a moment. Leave the front seat open for Bleys, and put Dahno, Toni and Mary in the middle compartment. Who's driving your escort?"

"Richard Nelson," said John; "and, yes, I've made sure he knows where we're going. He has Ben and Eli with him, as well as our other wounded."

He moved off toward the ramp, and Bleys and Henry followed on foot.

"How many have we lost?" Bleys asked after a silent moment.

"I don't know that yet," Henry replied. "We had to scatter our people to all sides and try to coordinate our attacks, and there's been no time to get the details. That's another thing I'll have to tell you later." He paused to think for a moment, still walking.

"God willing, I believe we have done better than I feared," he went on. "Those people were not properly alert to the possibility of trouble coming upon them."

They had almost caught up with the vagen now.

"God gives us a lesson in these people," Henry said, "one we would do well to heed: be prepared for the possibility of trouble. Thus, you must go ahead of us, now."

As Bleys still hesitated, Henry spoke more sharply: "Go! Get in!"

Abandoning argument, Bleys moved around the vehicle to its passenger side. Henry began to give more signals to those of his Soldiers who had held their positions farther out from the bunker.

By the time Bleys opened the door, Dahno and the rest had been loaded into the vagen from its far side, a process facilitated by the fact that the vagen was riding higher on its idling fans than did more usual vehicles. Bleys climbed in, finding that a deep well under the dashboard provided plenty of room for his legs.

As soon as Bleys was in, John put the vagen into motion, heading back the way he had come. Another, similar vehicle appeared from somewhere, to fall in behind them.

Looking back as they went, Dahno fidgeting and complaining beside her, Toni saw Henry watching them go.

It must be tearing him up inside, she thought. I know he loves Bleys like another son—enough to risk his very soul to try to keep Bleys out of Satan s hands. But to do that he had to kill, which he believes—no, he knows, to the depths of his soul—is wrong.

As a curve in their path put Henry out of her sight, she faced forward, then leaned back in her seat.

She had never forgotten that Henry had once admitted to her that he was prepared to kill Bleys himself, rather than let him, as he put it, fall into Satan's hands. She herself had resolved that would never happen.

At the same time, she had grown fond of Henry herself; and she recognized that if Henry ever came to that point—regardless of whether he succeeded in killing Bleys, or not—it would come as the result of an almost inconceivable state of pain and despair.

Spare him, Lord!

As she heard her inner self say those words, she knew she meant her prayer to encompass both men.

By the time the local sun set, their vehicle had made a rendezvous with a long-haul cargo carrier. Hidden inside one of the containers inside its streamlined shell, they almost backtracked the way they had just come, now traveling along a paved trafficway that passed about twenty kilometers to the west of the bunker. While they did so, the vehicles from which they had parted, now functioning as decoys, crossed the Nightfish River on their fans—avoiding the bridges— and sped toward Abbeyville, a city large enough to host a Friendly consulate.

Feverish and achy in the aftermath of the action and the blackout, Bleys drowsed on an air mattress inside their container, Toni sitting quietly beside him as she worked over her wrist control pad. Dahno, sedated, lay quietly on another mattress while the medician monitored his condition. The wounded Soldiers—six in total—had stayed with John Colville and his vehicles, adding to the authenticity of the decoy operation while speeding them toward more advanced medical care.

"I've missed something," Bleys said, lifting the arm he had draped across his brow; the lightstrips glued to the walls of their container seemed to be able to glare right through his eyelids. He rolled onto his side and propped himself up on one elbow, watching Toni as she monitored the displays on her wristpad.

"I deliberately set out to stir the pot on this planet," he went on, "thinking that if our Others were galvanized into action, they might unearth some clue to whoever these people are who've been working in secret here. Or perhaps those people would become aware of the increased activity, and react in some way that might lead us to them. But this! Two major attacks in two days, thousands of kilometers apart... ?"

He stopped himself from shaking his head, for fear that the lurking sense of discomfort in the center of his skull might blossom into a full-blown headache ... he had come to be leery of headaches.

"I wanted to elicit some reaction," he said. "But if these attacks are that reaction, it's so far out of proportion to the situation as to be insane. So I must have missed something."

"We talked about this after the bombing," she said, "and you and Dahno agreed it must have been the work of that—that secret group you came here to look for."

"Only because we couldn't think of anyone else," he said. "But that conclusion only dodged the question of why they, or anyone on this planet, would want to attack us."

He held up a hand, stopping her reply while he thought.

"But maybe they don't have to be from Ceta at all," he went on after another moment. "We've made a lot of enemies elsewhere, certainly."

"Who out there could have reached down onto Ceta and set up not one, but two, attacks in such quick succession?" she asked. He nodded at her objection.

"Generally, you're right," he said. "The only group really capable of being efficient enough to follow us to Ceta on short notice and then set up these attacks—only the Dorsai could do it."

"It's not the Dorsai," she said.

"I know you have Dorsai ancestry," he said. "Is there another reason to believe they couldn't do this?"

"It's not that they couldn't," she said. "It's that they wouldn't." He was impressed by the firmness of her assertion. "You're that sure?"

"Absolutely," she said. "I have Dorsai ancestry, yes, but that doesn't make me one of them. It does, however, make me sure that such an attack is something no true Dorsai would ever do."

"I'll admit it feels like a false idea," he said. "But who else could have done it?"

"Besides," she said, not ready to let go of her thought just yet, "no Dorsai-led group would have let itself be caught so off-guard by Henry and his Soldiers—no disrespect to Henry and his people "

"That's true, too." He grimaced and raised a hand to massage his forehead. "Who else is there? Who have I overlooked?"

"You're working now from the premise that the attack must have come from off-Ceta," she said. "But the logic only works if the premise is correct."

"You're right," he said. "I did start out by assuming there isn't anyone already on this planet who would have wanted to attack us—and who also could have done it. But I gather you're saying that I'm making a shaky assumption, there."

"Yes," she nodded. "If you think about it for a moment, what you really mean is that there's no one on this planet who would have done it, and could have done it, that you know of"

"And where are you going with this?"

"You've already deduced the existence of an unknown—a hidden—group on this planet. But you know next to nothing about them, so how can you conclude that they couldn't have attacked us?"

"But that group, whoever they are, should not have had any reason to attack us," he said. "Yet."

"Go at this from the other side of the problem," she said. "Ask how they knew—not only that we were on the planet, but that we presented a threat of some sort to them. And then, ask how anyone could have known where we were going to be—not once, but twice."

He nodded. "I guess they've done us a favor."

She looked at him, interest in her face.

"You know perfectly well what I mean," he said. "We still don't know who those people are—but we definitely know there's someone out there!"

"More than that," she said. "We now know they have some sort of access to our plans."

"And that narrows the range we have to search quite a lot, doesn't it?"

"Yes," she said, looking more somber. "Our own people." "Yes."

They talked on quietly for a time, as the night passed outside their container. Bleys slipped into an intermittent and unrestful nap, awakening each time the medician's CALL roused her for another check on Dahno's condition ... and sometimes he woke for no reason that he could tell, as if he were seeking to escape some dream his waking mind could not remember.

Toni stayed awake, keeping her attention focused on the satellite news channel that beamed down steadily as they moved across the face of a continent.

"Are you all right?" she asked, finally, softly, a few hours later, when he had come uncomfortably awake once more.

He looked at her, wondering what she was referring to.

"I'm tired, and my head aches," he said warily. He kept his voice low, as she had. "But I'm not hurt."

He stopped, and flicked his eyes in the direction of their companions in the container.

"It's all right to talk," Toni said, still keeping her voice down. "Dahno is heavily sedated, and Mary's sound asleep."

"I've been waiting to see if I'm going to go into another blackout," he said, almost whispering. "But I'm not sure I'll know I'm doing so, until after I come out of it."

"You've certainly had enough stress to bring on two or three blackouts," she said, almost cheerfully. "We'll deal with that if it happens. But that wasn't what I was getting at."

"Then what were you asking about?"

"How are you doing, emotionally?" she said.

"Emotionally? What makes you ask that? Are you wondering if nearly being killed is going to make me break down?"

"Break down, no," she said. "But it's not unusual for people to have an emotional reaction of some kind after they get out of a bad situation. When we had to fight our way off Newton you were sick from the DNA poisoning, so I couldn't tell how you were doing otherwise. But it's occurred to me that, if you aren't already having some reaction, maybe you should be warned to expect one."

"I guess I know the kind of thing you mean," he said, remembering how he had felt the first time he killed a man—Dahno's old associate—back on Association. "So far there's no sign of anything like that."

"It may sneak up on you," she said. "Don't be surprised by it, and don't let it make you do something you'd regret." "Are you having a reaction?"

"A little," she said. "But one as trained as I've been keeps her ki centered as a matter of habit; and that helps prevent her—me— from being thrown off balance."

"I don't know if that means you don't have a reaction to all those deaths, or if it means you have a way to cope with that kind of reaction."

"The latter," she said. "Being as trained as I am doesn't mean I don't feel."

"I didn't think otherwise," he said. "It's different with me, a little. I began to train myself, long ago, to prepare for the deaths that would be necessary ... it doesn't mean I'm blind to them. But they can't throw me off stride."

Silence followed.

Finally, about seven hours after they had left the bunker, it came.

"It's Henry," Toni said. Bleys sat up, looking over at her control pad.

Determined to avoid being traced through their communications, Henry had instructed them to send out no messages, but to watch for his instructions to come in piggybacked on the signal from the broadcast satellite.

"My pad is still decoding—there!" she said. She took a moment to read the text message on her small screen.

"It's actually not for us," she said. "Our drivers are being given orders for a rendezvous in—let's see—just over three hours." She looked up as Bleys made a movement.

"Do we need to let the drivers know?" he asked.

"No." She shook her head. "They have their own pads—" she was interrupted by a soft double tone that seemed to emanate from the lightstrips inside their container.

"That would be them letting us know they've gotten instructions," she said. "Leave it in their hands."

"All right," he said. He settled back on the mattress. In a moment he spoke again from beneath the arm draped across his face.

"This is the hardest part."

"Delegation was never a strong suit for either you or Dahno," she said, smiling a little. "But you, at least, are learning. Now get some sleep."

"And you?"

"I may be a basket case tomorrow," she admitted. "All the more reason for you to be in top form."

Part of him was uneasy about doing as she instructed, but he could not come up with an objection that would not sound lame even in his own ears. He settled for closing his eyes again. He still wondered if he'd fall into a blackout now, or soon—or if not, whether he might wake up later without any memory of what had occurred today.

After a while, he fell into an uneasy sleep.

Unimaginably distant, the stars—maybe they were entire galaxies—were so faint that they would not be noticeable to any senses not sharpened by lifetimes spent in interstellar space. But as he watched, in his comfortable floating, those lights were a dazzling panoply of infinitely varying shades of red—the red of light so old it had gotten tired on the way to him.

He had been out here for so long that any time before was—not forgotten, but forgettable in its insignificance.

The black was cold but not unfriendly. It held him in its calm, strong embrace as comfortably as any warm ocean, rocking him gently as it drew him, in accordance with the immutable laws, to the end it had been ordained he would share with all the Universe, as it all came together in that final, gentle, terrible place that was the totality of the infinitely far future.

But there was a blur intruding on his solitary blackness, a barely sensed perturbation in his long, slow orbit, that incensed him with its wrongness... some intruder, out of place, or maybe just out of time....