"I don't know," Arzadel answered frankly. "That's why I prefer that we not all go running off to confront it; we might antagonize it." He paused, then added thoughtfully, "It occurs to me that I would greatly prefer to have something like this demon-ship on our side. Aside from the military possibilities—and we hardly need any more military power at this point—I think perhaps it's time that Dest resumed its contacts with other worlds. This ship from the stars could do that for us, if it weren't for the demon controlling it." He turned to Parrah. "Are you sure Sam didn't tell you anything more? He didn't say anything about what we should do? I don't want any of us to rush in blindly with so much at stake. Did he make any suggestions, or have you thought of what we could do to help?"

Parrah hesitated, then collapsed onto her cushion.

"No," she said. "I haven't thought of anything. You're right, we shouldn't rush in blindly, but I was panicking." She shook her head. "I just wanted to protect Sam, to hurry off to help him, and I haven't been thinking. 1 don't have any idea what to do." She smiled weakly. "I told Sam to talk to you before he left, Arzadel, but I'm the one who really needed to talk to you."

"I'm flattered," Arzadel answered, dipping his chin in acknowledgment of the compliment. "Just what did Sam tell you?"

"Well, as I told you, there's a demon that calls itself Flame that has just arrived from the stars, and it's landing its ship out near the wreckage of Sam's old ship. Sam said—let me see—he said that he didn't want them to see him flying. I don't know why he said 'them'; he seemed to think there were two demons, not just one, but he only mentioned the one by name. He said, 'They already think that something strange is going on,' and that he was afraid they would talk to the wrong person before he got there, and that that person might say the wrong thing. I don't know what he meant, but you must be right, rushing us all out there could be exactly the wrong thing." She sighed. "But I can't stay here and do nothing."

Shopaur and Arzadel smiled sympathetically; Wir-ozhess snorted, while the other councillors remained unexpressive.

"I think you're right," Arzadel said. "Sam knows more about demons than any of us, and he fought his own successfully, but that doesn't mean he can't use a little help. We helped him against his own, as much as we could." He paused, thinking, and then continued. "It sounds to me as if he's been trying to convince the demon that we're all its friends—after all, since he was once possessed by a demon himself, and still carries all that machinery inside him, this new demon may accept him as an ally. That could be a very good thing indeed, if he can convince this demon that we're all its friends. As I said, I would like to have the demon, or at least its ship, on our side. If we all barge in on his negotiat-ing—whatever it may be that he is, in fact, negotiat-ing—the demon may take that as a sign of bad faith. The rest of us simply don't know anything about what the demon might be looking for."

Several wizards nodded, and Parrah slumped dejec-tedly.

"On the other hand," Arzadel said, "something as potentially valuable as this should probably not be left in the hands of a single individual. We all have an in-terest in what happens to this ship; when Sam's own ship was wrecked, eleven years ago, a great opportu-nity was missed. At the time, public opinion might not have favored the capture and use of such a ship. The border wars were still being fought, and the possibility of bringing in the weapons of the Bad Times would have terrified everyone so much as to blind them to the possibilities of the old technologies. None of us wanted to risk the sort of trouble that could bring." He waved that aside. "Times have changed, now. The gov-ernment of Praunce is undisputed master of most of the continent, and at peace with the rest. Ideas have changed. I think that the rulers of Praunce would wel-come a chance to contact other worlds, to recover some of the knowledge our ancestors lost in the Bad Times. We've built a new civilization through wizardry, but we may have taken wizardry as far as it can go; I think it's time to take a look at other ways. This ship can give us that. I, for one, would prefer that we not miss this opportunity as we missed the one eleven years ago. I say we should do everything we can to capture this new ship intact."

The other councillors stared at him for a hushed moment.

"Are you serious?" Shopaur asked at last. "This is a demon's ship we're discussing!"

"Of course he's serious!" Wirozhess answered. "He's right, too. Sam disposed of his own demon, didn't he? The ship only crashed because it was flying when the demon died. If Sam had killed it while the ship was on the ground, we'd have it today! Think what we could have done with a ship like that in our war with Harthin!"

"No," Arzadel said. "That's a bad way to look at it. Using the demon's ship for war would be an incredible waste. It can take us to other stars! That's far more important than risking it in battle."

This was greeted with general approval, and Wiroz-hess reluctantly conceded the point. "Still," he said, "I think we can all agree that the demon's ship would be invaluable to the empire of Praunce."

The other councillors nodded, eagerly or reluctantly or with calm acceptance. No one spoke up to dispute Wirozhess's statement.

"In that case," Shopaur said, "the next question is, How do we capture this ship?"

Wirozhess shrugged and turned to Arzadel.

"I don't know," Arzadel admitted. "I know very lit-tle about demons. Sam has gone to ensure that the demon will not try to kill us all, and I'm sure that if anyone can do that, he can. I would suppose that he will either kill the demon, as he did his own, or will somehow convince it that we are its friends. The ques-tion then becomes, What will Sam do once the demon has been handled? Parrah?"

"I don't know," she said. "Sam can be unpredict-able."

"Perhaps, then," Arzadel said, "we should send a deputation to represent Praunce's interests in the mat-ter. A small one. Whatever the demon's beliefs and desires, a small party of friends come to make sure that nothing has gone amiss should not be too upset-ting, and Sam may need our aid. I think that a few of us should, indeed, follow him. These people, whoever they may be, will judge the situation carefully before they do anything, and must defer to Sam's judgment throughout, since he, and he alone, is knowledgeable about these demons, but insofar as circumstances allow, they must make every effort to see that the ship is captured intact, either with or without the demon. It could be a great asset to Praunce and to Dest, and I am not sure that Sam, personally involved as he is, will have properly considered this. Left to his own devices he might simply destroy the ship in order to save time and trouble."

"Then you will send someone?" Parrah demanded. "I don't care about the ship, I care about Sam, but you're saying we'll send a party?"

"I think so. Sam did not actually tell you that we shouldn't, did he?"

"No," she said eagerly. "He said that he had to go immediately, and that I couldn't accompany him be-cause I was to inform you all of the situation and see that the children would be cared for, but he never said that I mustn't follow, or that other people shouldn't come as well."

"You're absolutely sure he didn't advise against it?" Shopaur asked uneasily.

"I'm sure," Parrah said firmly.

"In that case," Wirozhess said, "I think Arzadel is quite correct. The ship would be of incalculable value, and we can't afford not to do our best to acquire it. If there is no further disagreement on that point, it be-comes merely a matter of deciding who is to go in this little party."

No one voiced any disagreement. Instead, after only a moment's hesitation Parrah said, "Well, I'm going, of course."

Shopaur nodded, and no one else spoke for a mo-ment.

"I think that Arzadel should go as well," Shopaur said, breaking a growing silence. "He has had the ex-perience of helping Sam against demons once before, when Sam first came to us. He is perhaps Sam's best friend, if I am not mistaken, and has, in addition, just demonstrated once again that he is no fool, nor is he foolhardy."

"Not to mention," Dekert commented, "that it was his idea to capture the thing, and he's probably the most powerful wizard we have."

Shopaur nodded, acknowledging Dekert's rather tactless comment. Comparisons of wizardly talent were generally considered in poor taste, since the members of the Council were sworn to cooperation rather than competition, and as councillors were all theoretically equal.

"That's two," Wirozhess said. "Any more, or is that it?"

"I would prefer to have a third," Arzadel said. "For a variety of reasons."

"I wouldn't mind," Wirozhess said, assuming a falsely casual air.

"No," Parrah said emphatically. "Sam and I hardly know you."

Stung, Wirozhess shrugged and sat back, saying no more.

"What of Haiger, or Ahnao? Aren't they Sam's good friends?" Pleido asked, speaking for the first time.

Parrah shook her head. "They're our friends, yes," she said, "but they'll be taking care of the children, and besides, Sam has never really trusted either of them with anything important. That might not be fair, but he hasn't, and I won't ask him to now." She glanced around the table. "Dekert, what about you? You helped out against the first demon, didn't you?"

"Yes," Dekert said. "I did. If you want me, I'll be glad to come."

"That makes three of us," Arzadel said. "I think that should do. We'll need to pack a few things; I sug-gest we leave in the morning."

Parrah glanced out the window at the fading day-light and fought down an urge to demand that they leave immediately.

"All right," she said. "At dawn, then."

Arzadel smiled. "At dawn."

"Then I think that's everything," Shopaur said. "You will stay in touch, of course."

"Of course," Parrah said, rising.

Chapter Ten

TURNER STUDIED THE TWO STARSHIPS CAUTIOUSLY from the shelter of the surrounding forest, keeping forest,one hand on the strap of his rocket rifle. The ships presented a curious spectacle together. IRU 247 had of necessity landed directly in the wake of IRU 205, along the gash in the forest that Slant's fiery crash had made ten terrestrial years before. To either side towered mature, sturdy trees that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to clear com-pletely out of the way, trees very much like the ones that had ripped open the hull of Slant's ship and torn one wing entirely off. Along that one narrow path, however, nothing older than a decade stood, and the incoming ship had been able to cut itself a landing strip with its lasers.

That had meant coming in from the west, although its original approach had been from the east, and then stopping mere meters short of the wreckage of IRU 205. Turner was now approaching from the east—

slightly south of due east, since he had lost his way once or twice—so that Flame's vessel seemed to be rearing up from behind the mound of wreckage like a predator frozen in the act of bursting from hiding for its final deadly pounce.

The newly landed ship was clearly visible from a distance of several hundred meters, despite the sur-rounding forest. It stood up sleek and bright, gleaming silver in the cloud-filtered daylight. Flame and her computer had not bothered with any sort of camou-flage, which seemed odd.

Slant's ruined ship, by contrast, was almost invisible even close up, little more than a smooth hump in the dark undergrowth. The wreckage was green and brown with moss and creepers and dead leaves; the gray stalks of winter-killed weeds rattled against it in the faint breeze. The few spots where metal still showed were a dull gray from corrosion and weather-ing. Because of its tilt and the wing lost in the crash, the body of the shipwreck was asymmetrical, making it seem even more a part of the natural landscape.

Turner saw no sign of motion. He allowed the horse to slow to a walk, both to rest the beast and to avoid alarming either Flame or CCC-IRU 247, but he did not stop. He continued riding directly toward the grounded vessels.

He had called IRU 247 repeatedly over the past day and a half but had begun receiving answers only that morning, as he finished an unsatisfactory breakfast. Even then, the computer had not been willing to dis-cuss events since the landing but had only offered guid-ance in reaching the site of the wreck.

Of course, that guidance had been very welcome. The years that had intervened since his last visit had faded his memory of the route and allowed the forest to grow and change so completely as to eliminate any landmarks he might recall.

Flame had refused to speak to him at all at any time throughout his wild ride from Praunce to this place.

That worried him.

Now, though, after two nights and half a day more, he had reached the rendezvous, and Flame would have to speak to him so that they could settle the all-impor-tant questions of Dest's loyalties and future.

He had never really given Dest's future much thought until Flame had come along to threaten it.

"What's happening?" he called silently as he ap-proached.

"Restate question," the computer replied.

"What's the current situation?"

"Ship is functioning normally. Cyborg unit desig-nated 'Flame' is on extended reconnaissance on foot."

"He is?" That was not good. He had feared that the cyborg might to exploring, but he had not actually ex-pected it and had not prepared any plans for such a circumstance. He was out of practice at anticipating and countering the movements of an antagonist. He had not thought the situation through but had simply charged onward, and despite his worrying he had still somehow expected to find Flame quietly waiting for him. His only concerns had been reaching the ships, and that Flame's ship had stayed grounded and launched no missiles.

He had come prepared to accept whatever he found, and that had been a mistake.

"Affirmative," the computer said.

"Let me speak to Flame," Turner said. He hoped he might be able to convince the cyborg to return before he or she did any damage. Flame would probably not have gone far in unfamiliar territory like this forest—

though that "extended reconnaissance" did sound like something more than a stroll around the immediate area.

"Negative," the computer replied.

Startled, he demanded, "Why not?"

"Cyborg unit designated 'Flame' maintains that contact with cyborg unit designated 'Slant' may facili-tate deception by enemy insurgents of cyborg unit des-ignated 'Flame.' Insufficient evidence exists to allow complete analysis of this hypothesis; therefore, cyborg unit has full discretion."

"I thought I was supposed to meet him here and talk to him!"

"Affirmative. Discussion of situation is to take place upon return of cyborg unit designated 'Flame' from extended reconnaissance."

"Damn," he said aloud. Flame had gotten away from him, at least for the moment. A killer cyborg was loose somewhere on Dest, probably heavily armed and looking for the slightest excuse to cut loose with all available weapons.

But had he or she gotten away cleanly?

"Where is Flame, then?" he asked.

"That information may not be provided to cyborg unit designated 'Slant.'"

"Then how am I supposed to know when Flame will be back? Keeping me waiting here indefinitely is wasteful." Turner thought he was being clever, taking this approach; he allowed himself to relax slightly in the saddle.

There was a pause before the computer replied, and when the reply came, Turner's self-satisfaction evapo-rated.

"Cyborg unit designated 'Flame' maintains that no information regarding her location may be given to cy-borg unit designated 'Slant.' She will return shortly."

That was something, anyway. "What does she mean by 'shortly'?" he asked.

"Information insufficient."

"Damn!" he said again. Flame had eluded him. It seemed as if her computer was cooperating with her more closely than his own had ever cooperated with him in allowing her to cut herself off as she had. He wondered how she maintained so much control.

He realized he had learned one detail from the computer's phrasing. Flame was female. Not that that made any difference.

He was very close to both ships now; while he had conversed over the internal communications circuit he had covered most of the intervening distance. He stopped his horse and dismounted a few meters away from his own ruined ship, then wrapped the reins around a leafless bush and strode toward the over-grown heap, planning to go around it and board Flame's ship. His breath puffed out in a thin fog, and he could feel the warmth of the horse's body quickly fading from his thighs in the cold. Vague thoughts of sabotage were gathering in his mind. After all, Flame might be dangerous, but she was not carrying nuclear weapons about with her on her "extended reconnais-sance." If he could somehow cripple her ship, any threat to his adopted world would be reduced by sev-eral orders of magnitude.

"Request permission to come aboard," he called.

"Permission denied."

He halted, the hem of his coat brushing against a hump of moss-covered debris. "Why?" he demanded silently.

"Loyalty of cyborg unit designated 'Slant' has not been established sufficiently to allow cyborg unit desig-nated 'Slant' into high-security areas."

Another idea gone, then, he thought. The computer was stupid, but its programmers had not been. It could not think, but it could follow rules perfectly.

"All right," he said, resigned to the failure of an-other scheme. He stood silently for a moment, think-ing.

The intense chill of the winter air seeped through his coat. He had dropped his heat-field before ap-proaching the ship, lest CCC-IRU 247 take alarm upon detecting "antigravity" in use, and the moisture in his breath was turning to frost in his beard.

"I hope you don't mind if I take a look at my own ship," he said at last. He was grasping at straws now, looking for any advantage, however slight, that might enable him to defeat IRU 247 if it tried to destroy Dest. He hoped to find somewhere in the wreckage some weapon he could turn against Flame or her ship.

Perhaps he could somehow restore power to one of the lasers in the fusion chamber and turn it against the newcomer's hull.

Another, more desperate thought came to him un-invited. If worse came to worst and he could bring himself to do it, perhaps he could trigger one of his own nuclear warheads. That would almost certainly obliterate both ships and Flame as well, if she was any-where in the area, without doing much harm to Dest beyond possibly wiping out a few isolated villages and raising somewhat the already high level of background radiation.

The drawback, of course, was that he, too, would fry. He did not want to die and sincerely hoped that it would not be necessary, but if it came to a choice be-tween dying with IRU 247 or dying with the entire population of Dest, he preferred taking IRU 247 with him. At least it would be quick; if Dest were nuked, he might find himself dying of radiation poisoning, or from starvation during a nuclear winter, or in any number of other slow, unpleasant ways.

He wondered whether detonating one warhead would set off all of them. He had no idea, really, whether it would. He tried to remember how many nuclear warheads, and of what yield, he had had left when the ship crashed. The initial complement had been thirty-six, and, thinking back, he could re-member using only two, both long before he reached Dest.

The computer did not answer his statement; pre-sumably it did not consider an answer necessary.

He remembered that the hull had been breached on the southern side and that the air lock on that side had been jammed open. He headed around toward the area of the gray-green mound where the air lock should be, then stopped.

He sensed something wrong. He looked and saw tracks on the ground before him. The grass had been trampled down and ground into the mud. The mud was frozen hard now, but something had recently churned it up.

That made no sense. Certainly, Flame would have investigated the wreck, but she should have left no trail that would last more than a few hours, if that. Instead, he saw a beaten path, almost a road, leading from the break in the wall of his ship over to a belly hatch in her ship. An earthen ramp had been built up to the opening in the hull; an extruded metal ramp, now withdrawn, had presumably served at the other end.

Most of the tracks, he saw, had been left not by boots or by any other sort of human footwear but by caterpillar treads. That meant machines—probably service robots.

"What the hell have you been doing with my ship?" he demanded even as he reached out psionically to feel for himself.

"Equipment and ordnance have been salvaged."

" What equipment and ordnance? What weapons? Start with those." Even as he asked, he guessed what they must have been; a sick, empty feeling spread through him as he reached out with his wizard-sight to sense the ship's structure and energy fields.

His own vessel was completely inert, simply a mass of metal and plastic. Nowhere in it could he sense any radiation.

He turned his attention to Flame's ship even as the computer informed him, "Thirty-one missiles equipped with nuclear warheads were salvaged. Six missiles appear functional and tested positive. Propel-lant systems were removed from twenty-five missiles remaining and were disposed of, and warheads were inspected separately. Twenty-two warheads appear functional. Three are presently dysfunctional but may be reparable. Fissionable material from three de-stroyed warheads was also recovered for possible later use. Four missiles with high-explosive warheads were—"

"Never mind about the rest. What do you need with all those nukes? Haven't you got your own? And by what authority did you take those, anyway?" He tried to sound authoritative but failed; he was terrified by the ship's actions. Did it mean to wipe out not just Dest but other worlds as well? Dest's civilization could be effectively destroyed with a dozen high-yield mis-siles. Was the ship just providing a little overkill?

Or had its own missiles all been used up previously? Had the threats from orbit all been a bluff? If so, he had made a disastrous mistake in revealing his presence on Dest. If he had kept silent, Flame and her computer would probably never have bothered to ex-plore his wrecked ship and would never have found the warheads.

He was looking at Flame's ship with his every sense stretched to its utmost even as he asked his questions. Its hull was a graceful mass of shadows and gleaming metal by visible light, but now that he had tuned in psychically, he could sense the electrical networks within as webs of energy, webs he interpreted as violet and blue and gold even though he knew that he was not seeing actual colors at all. It was easier to think of them as colors than to try and develop an entire new vocabulary; most wizards spoke of the

"colors" of fields and auras, though the purists among them de-nounced such misleading terminology.

Yes, he could see the faint radiation of the war-heads. He struggled to count them. Maintaining the necessary concentration required a ferocious effort. The emptiness in his belly and the weight of the rocket rifle on his shoulder dragged on that effort.

"Salvage of materials from downed or abandoned military vessels, either friendly or enemy, is standard procedure, and fully covered by programming and mil-itary regulations. No further authority was required."

"But it was my ship!" Turner protested as he con-tinued his count.

"Negative," the computer replied. "IRU 205 was decommissioned. Vessel was abandoned."

He detected thirty-four warheads, plus the con-tainer holding the remains of three more. That made thirty-seven. Flame's armament had been low but not gone. She could have destroyed three fair-sized cities.

Her threats had not been mere bluffing.

That was, in a curious way, a relief. Although IRU 247 was now far more heavily armed, he had probably saved Praunce and two other cities from destruction, at least temporarily, by intervening.

Now, was there any way he could end the threat completely?

The wizards of Awlmei had drained the power of his own ship eleven local years earlier. They had shut down the fusion drive and bled the reserve energy cells down to uselessness by tapping the power flow to one of the drive lasers. They had missed the emergency backup batteries in the repair robots, true, but they had shut the ship down, temporarily at any rate. Could he do anything similar?

He reached out and tried to sense details of the in-terior of Flame's vessel but quickly gave up. A blaze of bright "yellow" just astern of the ship's center was surely the fusion drive, but he could "see" nothing of its structure—the fierce outpouring of energy hid all details. He could not sense anything in the starship but the parts that gave off energy—the various powered systems, the radiation of the nuclear weapons, and a faint

"greenishness" in the wings that he realized must be the algae that supplied air and food. He could make out nothing of the ship's frame or the shapes of the interior spaces. He could not tell one system from an-other.

Could he interfere with the computer or the ship's power supply? He shook his head reluctantly. He did not dare. !t had taken the seven best wizards on the Awlmeian Council to pull the stunt off on his own ship, and even that had been possible only because the com-puter had been devoting almost its entire capacity to a complex analysis at the time. CCC-IRU 247 was more or less idling; it would be running random system checks just to keep its circuits busy and would spot a power drain much too quickly for such a drain to do any good. The Awlmeian wizards had tapped a power feed to one of the lasers heating the fusion chamber; Turner could not even distinguish the lasers themselves from the surrounding glow, let alone locate a power feed.

If he could arrange a distraction and get some of his comrades over from Praunce, wizards more sensitive than himself, a power drain might be worth trying.

Could he, as a last resort, trigger one of the nuclear warheads?

No, he decided, he could not. He could sense the faint radiation from the fissionable material, but the triggering mechanisms were inert and invisible to him, and he could not muster sufficient telekinetic force to pry the fissionables from their mountings and slap them together in hopes of creating a critical mass.

Even if he could, he was not sure it would work. He had never studied exactly how nuclear weapons func-tioned, but he had an impression that the masses had to be brought together very precisely to create an ex-plosion.

Was there anything else he might do? He studied the intricate webs of energy.

No, he admitted reluctantly, he simply did not know enough. He had no way of knowing what he was see-ing. If he tampered blindly with the computer, he might disable the ship or convince it to side with him, but he might equally well throw it into an all-out at-tack. If he interfered with anything other than the computer, the computer would spot the malfunction and take action to repair it and prevent a recurrence.

He couldn't even be sure which energy flows were parts of the computer and which were autonomous systems, let alone how to safely manipulate any of them.

He had once, in its final moments before crashing, piloted his own ship by wizardry, but he had done that through the direct-control cable, using wizardry only to bridge the gap between the plug and the broken socket in his neck. If he could locate the plug in this ship, he thought he might be able to do the same, de-spite the greater distance—but that would do no good, since the computer could simply override his input.

Besides, he could not even locate the plug.

He suddenly regretted rushing off alone, the lone hero on his way to save the world; Arzadel and the other wizards would have been a great help at this point.

They were not there, though, and he could not con-tact them over so great a distance. He was on his own unless and until someone came after him—alone against a starship.

A moment earlier, several kilometers away, Flame had been resting quietly, sitting huddled on the hard ground in her jumpsuit with her back to the bole of a fair-sized oak. She was intently watching a squirrel as, sluggish with the cold, it explored the ground nearby for anything edible. Her reverie was been interrupted by the computer's announcement. "Gravitational anomaly occurring in immediate vicinity of ship of in-tensity sufficient to register against planetary back-ground, centered on cyborg unit designated 'Slant.' Please advise."

Flame stirred very slightly and asked, "Slant's there?" She spoke silently so as not to disturb the squirrel.

"Affirmative."

"And there's antigravity activity around him?"

"Affirmative."

"Do you think he's causing it?"

"Information insufficient."

"Did you tell him you'd detected it?"

"Negative, in accordance with previous order of cy-borg unit designated 'Flame.'"

She tightened her lips rather than nodding. At least the idiot machine had gotten that much right. "Did he say anything about it?" she asked.

"Negative."

"He must be causing it somehow, I'm sure of it. There's no one else around?"

"Negative."

"Then it must be him. You see, I told you he was a traitor. I don't know what he's doing, or how he's doing it, but it's probably dangerous. You get the hell out of there before he can do anything to you. Get back into a synchronous orbit and wait there." She did not mention that what most worried her was the possi-bility that Slant would talk his way aboard and then remove the termite from the computer core, allowing the computer to side with him against her.

"Affirmative," the computer replied.

The ship stopped transmitting. Moodily, deliber-ately, Flame slipped a snark from her pocket and shot the squirrel.

Its left haunch disappeared in a swirl of dust, along with a small area of the surrounding ground and dead leaves. Blood sprayed briefly, and the little animal let out a single piercing squeal and thrashed once before it died.

"Serves you right, you little monster," she hissed hoarsely. "Living here peacefully all this time while I was out there rotting in space. This is my planet now, you understand that? It may be cold and uncomfort-able as hell, but it's mine, and I'm going to kill every-one on it to prove that, to pay them all back for what they did to me!" She spat at the little corpse, then sank back against the oak again. The bark scraped her back uncomfortably, even through her jumpsuit.

Leaving the ship had been a mistake, she decided. This planet was cold and harsh and hostile. The freez-ing air stung her skin, and the dampness of the ground where she sat, once the heat of her body had melted the frost, made her skin crawl. The surrounding trees were either dark and ugly, covered with sharp, menac-ing needles, or else bare and threatening, like great brittle hands reaching for her from every side.

The sky above the scratching branches was terrifying in its huge gray emptiness. The entire outside world was strange and frightening. She had become accustomed to her ship.

She would have preferred, however, not to have known that. She hated having her nose rubbed in the fact that she had been aboard the little vessel so long that she was no longer comfortable anywhere else.

What made it worse was that she was never really comfortable aboard the ship, either. She did not really trust the computer, despite its programming, despite her little timer gadget that would destroy the computer if she failed to reset it every hundred hours or so. She had its enforced loyalty, but she was not comfortable with it. She no longer fit in anywhere at all.

Maybe, she told herself, she would have been all right on Old Earth. Maybe it was just this planet that was wrong, with its dark sky and reddish sun.

All the more reason, then, to wipe it clean. In the interests of traveling light and not frightening away the natives she had not brought any large, obvious weapons, but she had three fully charged snarks—less the charge used to kill the squirrel—and her own su-perhuman speed and strength.

She would be able to do some damage, whatever happened. Even if Slant somehow destroyed her ship or caused her to destroy it, his planet would not be left unscathed.

She smiled at the thought.

Flame's conversations with her ship and with the squirrel and with herself took the same time as Turner's psionic study of the ship. As Turner decided that he was on his own in dealing with the starship, the vessel's forward lifters suddenly roared, breaking into his thoughts. His horse whinnied uneasily.

"Clear area for lift-off!" a toneless mechanical voice called loudly.

"Hligosh!" Turner said, backing away as a wave of heat reached him. "Computer, what do you think you're doing?"

"Cyborg unit designated 'Flame' has ordered imme-diate departure. Stand clear."

Turner needed no second warning; the heat of the ship's main drive could fry him instantly. He turned and ran at superhuman speed for the doubtful cover of the surrounding forest, forcing himself not to fly for still greater speed. He had no time to reach his mount, but he did reach out telekinetically to push at it, free-ing the reins from the bush he had tied them to. That done, he erected a psionic barrier behind him to pro-vide what protection he could, an instant before the ship's main drive fired.

The ground shook beneath him, and the roar blasted his ears; heat swept over him in a thick wave.

He sensed but could not hear that the horse was screaming in panic.

Then the ground was still, and the sound and heat were fading. He turned and looked back to see the ship already shrunk to a fiery spot of light rising into the sky, golden-white against the gray overcast, then gone as it pierced the clouds.

Far away, Flame glimpsed a flicker of light in the sky. A long moment later she heard a faint rumble.

"You made it, then," she said.

"Affirmative. Query: Advisability of landing to re-cover cyborg unit."

"No, don't do that—at least, not yet. I'm fine." Ugly and uncomfortable as the forest was, she was not yet ready to leave it. It was different, at any rate, and that was something she valued.

"Warning: Cyborg must allow for acceptable margin of error on timed destructive device."

"Don't worry about that. We still have time. You know that; you watched me reset it just before I left the ship."

"Affirmative. Eighty-three hours, forty-six minutes, ten seconds remaining."

"You see? We have plenty of time, and I want to scout around some more," she said. "We still don't know what's going on on this planet, or what that anti-gravity stuff really is. Whatever it is, it must be porta-ble if Slant had it there with him."

"Affirmative."

"Did you see any equipment on him?"

"Cyborg unit designated 'Slant' carried standard-issue rifle-barrel fully automatic rocket launcher, model ARR-eleven."

"Anything else?"

"Negative."

"Maybe it really is some kind of mutation, then— but I doubt it. That was probably just another lie.

Be-sides, if Slant was using it, it couldn't be a local mutation, could it? He wasn't born here." She snorted quietly. "Oh, well, we'll figure it out."

She knew what she wanted to do before she called her ship down and got back on board. It wasn't neces-sary, since the ship now had enough nukes to obliterate all human life here, but she wanted to kill someone face to face. She had never done that before. It might be better than watching the mushroom clouds. Killing the squirrel had not been much of a relief for her tense need for vengeance, but people might be better.

She might even be able to kill the one she really wanted, the man on this planet who had actually be-trayed her. She had told him that she might kill him with her own hands, and she might.

She liked that idea.

She stood, stretched in the peculiar way they had taught her back on Mars, and then kicked at the dead squirrel with a booted foot. Dark blood smeared the toe.

"I'll get you, Slant," she muttered. "I'll get you somehow."

Chapter Eleven

cautiously, turner emerged from the forest and stepped forward to stand by the wreckage of his ship.

The blast of the other ship's main drive had left a long teardrop of bare, blackened ground in the clear-ing behind the shattered tail section. A broad line of white ash lay around the cleared ground, and around that was a band of black cinder that faded gradually into the surrounding undergrowth. Half the wreck lay exposed amid drifting ash, eleven years of accumu-lated plant life burned away in seconds, leaving bare, pitted metal.

Turner peered up at the sky for a moment but could see nothing but clouds. He could no longer make out any trace of Flame's ship or its trail.

He wondered why Flame had ordered the ship to leave. Had she been afraid he would find a way to destroy it?

If so, she had certainly found the right defense. Ob-viously, he was not going to be able to hurt it, either single-handedly or with the help of every wizard on Dest, unless it landed again. Magic simply could not reach it in orbit, nor could any other weapon he had available.

If he could not stop the ship, then he had to stop Flame. Loose on the ground, she was for the moment the more immediate menace.

He turned around, studying the surrounding forest.

Flame would surely have stayed with her ship long enough to oversee the salvage of the missiles and war-heads, and that would have taken some time. She had probably not left the clearing until that very morning. How far could she have gone since dawn?

Not very far, he was certain. She was on foot, and despite her training she was not really familiar with this forest. He would have a horse as soon as he could retrieve and calm the animal; he might be able to catch up to Flame if he could pick up her trail.

Of course, a cyborg could move much faster on foot than an ordinary person, but Flame would have had no reason to hurry. Even if she had expected pursuit, she could not have known that he would have a way of locating her.

He was not sure he actually could locate her, but as a wizard he had a possible method, and he intended to try. He reached out, seeking for some psychic trace of her passage.

His horse whinnied from somewhere amid the trees, and he felt the pale mist of energy that was its nervous system. He called for it, both vocally and psychically, and was gratified when it obeyed.

He stepped forward, turned to his left, and found a direction that somehow felt right. He took a step, then stopped.

There was no sense in walking off and leaving the horse; he crossed the clearing to meet it halfway, found the reins, and then swung himself into the saddle.

Once astride, he again located the faint trace he had sensed and guided the animal to the southwest, hoping but by no means certain that he was following Flame's trail.

He rode on through the afternoon, eating in the saddle. The psychic trace he was following came and went so that at times he had to wander around aim-lessly until he could pick it up again, but he never lost it completely.

He hoped that the trace was actually Flame, but he was still not certain, and on two or three occasions, before he could regain sufficient concentration to con-tinue the pursuit, he had to stop and convince himself that he was not following a stray goat or dog.

Whenever he could sense it at all, the psychic resi-due seemed to grow very gradually stronger, but he could not be sure he was reading that correctly. He had attempted no magical tracking since his apprenticeship and had never taken the time even then to become good at it. He found it much easier than telepathy or several other wizardly arts but had never expected to need it.

At nightfall he had found no physical trace of Flame, though his psionic tracking sense still led him on.

The orbiting computer, although perfectly willing to talk to him, would say nothing of her whereabouts or actions.

He dared not rest for fear he might lose her com-pletely or, worse, that she might double back, find him sleeping, and kill him.

When he first glimpsed the orange glow on the hori-zon, an hour after sunset, he was unsure whether it was visible light or something impinging on his wizard-sight. As it grew brighter, however, he realized that it was definitely visible. He smelled smoke as well.

Something was burning, something big. He hoped it was only forest that was afire.

Worried, he urged his tired horse forward; the beast obeyed reluctantly and moved no faster than Turner could have moved on foot.

He cursed, then swung down out of the saddle and, although weary himself, drew on his reserves and levi-tated, rising quickly to treetop level. It meant leaving the horse behind for the moment, but he thought speed might be essential, and he could fly a good deal faster than he could walk. He refused to worry about what Flame's computer might think about his flight.

The computer said nothing about it, and he flew on toward the spreading glow.

Moments later he was sailing over a blazing village, fending off the billowing smoke as he tried to see what was happening on the ground. Even at his altitude of twenty meters or so, the heat of the flames drove away the winter's chill, and he could feel himself sweating inside his heavy sheepskin coat.

He could see about two dozen homes and a handful of assorted other buildings and outbuildings. In a town of such a size, in the event of fire, he expected to see several people running about, either aimlessly panick-ing or making desperate attempts to rescue their friends, their families, or their more precious posses-sions. The rest of the townspeople, he thought, should be watching from the relative safety of the nearby woods.

So far as he could see, only darkness filled the spaces between the trees, and the streets were empty.

He dropped to the ground to one side of the village, landing on a sparsely wooded piney hillside upwind from the burning buildings. He could still feel the heat, though, and the firelight painted the trees in stark orange glare and black shadow. The roar of the flames was like a strong gale.

"IRU 247," he called. "There's a village burning here, probably endangering friendly civilians. Do you know anything about it?"

"Affirmative. Cyborg unit designated 'Flame' set fire to destroy rebel outpost."

That was exactly what Turner had feared. " What rebel outpost?" he demanded. "There are no rebels on Dest anymore!"

"Cyborg unit designated 'Flame' maintains outpost was rebel-held."

Infuriated by the computer's mechanical calm, he said, "First off, that's no outpost, it's a village—or it was, anyway. Second, what grounds does she have for calling its inhabitants rebels? Those people were loyal to Old Earth! And where are the villagers, anyway?"

"Cyborg unit reports all rebels terminated."

Turner felt the shock like a blow to his belly. The village could well have held a hundred people.

"She killed all of them?" he asked, horrified. "Al-ready?"

"Affirmative."

"How? I know they probably weren't armed, but they must have tried to escape."

"Initial assault was made with snark, allowing for surprise. Survivors of initial assault surrendered and were ordered into large central structure, which was then burned. Persons attempting escape were killed."

Turner's stomach wrenched, and acid filled his throat. In his own years in the military he and his ship had killed hundreds or thousands of people, but even at the worst he had never carried out a pointless, vi-cious massacre like this. He looked out across the patchwork of burning thatch roofs and the billowing black smoke. "How could she do that? Why did you let her? These people were loyal!"

The computer seemed to hesitate, as if uncertain, before replying. "Insufficient evidence exists to allow complete analysis of this situation; therefore, due to ongoing situation, cyborg unit has full discretion.

Probability of inappropriate action not sufficient to justify risking loss of ship and mission in the event of cyborg-computer disagreement."

"So you didn't want to argue about it, and maybe have to blow Flame's head off? You let her kill inno-cent villagers instead. Aren't you supposed to make sure that your cyborg only kills the enemy?" Turner knew that the anger and bitterness in his tone would mean nothing to the computer, but he spoke aloud anyway.

The pause this time was so long that Turner won-dered whether he had lost contact with the ship some-how. "Affirmative," it said at last. "Computer dysfunction remains within acceptable parameters."

"Oh, my God," Turner said, his anger suddenly washed out by fear and dismay. His own computer had used that very phrase, "computer dysfunction remains within acceptable parameters," when it began behav-ing irrationally. That had been bad enough for him as a cyborg dealing with a demented computer, and this time it would surely be worse. This time both the com-puter and the cyborg appeared to be insane.

The missiles could be launched at any time if the computer's insanity ever happened to coincide with the cyborg's.

"What dysfunction are you talking about, exactly?" he asked cautiously.

"Computer is marginally dysfunctional as a result of damage inflicted by enemy action, and as a result of long-standing internal programming conflicts caused by present situation, and as a result of general wear.

Damage is suspected or known in programming and memory relevant to linguistics, cultural information, and procedures for dealing with civilian populations. Other damage may also exist."

Turner shuddered, took a deep breath, and then coughed as he took in a wayward puff of smoke.

When he could breathe freely again, he said angrily, "Well, listen, I've lived on this planet for ten years, and there's nothing wrong with my programming or my knowledge of this planet. I'm an expert on the local culture and fluent in the local language, and I'm telling you, the people here are loyal to Old Earth. Don't let Flame kill any more without good evidence to the contrary. Understand?"

"Acknowledged."

That did nothing for the dead in this village, of course, but it was the most Turner could do. Hoping for further clues to how the two halves of IRU 247 thought, clues that might help him prevent further dis-aster, he asked, "What evidence did Flame have that these people were rebels? What did she ask them?"

The computer hesitated again—more evidence, if Turner had needed any, that it really was damaged.

Military computers were not supposed to hesitate over simple questions of fact. He wondered what the inter-nal programming conflicts were and guessed that they resulted from the computer's knowledge that the war was over, combined with its inability to surrender. His own computer had never acknowledged such a con-flict, but Turner suspected that it had existed.

He had no idea that Flame had booby-trapped her own ship.

"Information insufficient," the computer said at last. "Request cyborg unit designated 'Slant' discuss situation directly with cyborg unit designated 'Flame.'"

"Fine! I'd be glad to!" he said, genuinely pleased that the computer was finally going to break through the barrier it had placed between the two cyborgs.

He wondered how she could possibly justify her ac-tions. The villagers had been human beings, just as deserving of life as she was; how could she think she had the right to kill them?

As he waited for Flame's words, it suddenly oc-curred to Turner that Flame must be somewhere close to him, somewhere in the vicinity of the burning vil-lage. She could possibly have gone a few kilometers away, but not more than that, as the destruction of the village would have required a good bit of time. She might even have stayed to observe the results of her handiwork. She could be anywhere in the area, was perhaps watching him even now. The computer would not tell him where she was, but it would probably be glad to tell her his own location. He looked around but could sense nothing over the heat and glare and roar of the flames; he stepped back, away from the village into the shelter of the trees, just in case. She had threat-ened to kill him, after all.

"You wanted to talk to me?" Flame asked abruptly, the voice in his head startling him.

Before he could reply, she continued. "I don't know how you convinced my computer to overrule me, you bastard, when it knows better than to argue with me, but however you did it, it won't do you any good. If you won't let me kill these people one way, I'll do it another—I'll burn every village on the stinking planet. It might even be better—slower, but more fun."

"But damn it, they're friendly!" he said, exasperated. "Didn't you ask them? Didn't they tell you which side they were on?"

"You're kidding, right?" Her strange cackling laughter came over the communications circuit, and he thought he heard it with his ears as well, faint but au-dible. "I couldn't understand a word these damn rebels said!" she continued. "I yelled at them in every lan-guage I know, just in case, but they never answered me with anything but babble."

"Probably all they speak—all they spoke —was their own dialect. It's descended from Anglo-Spanish, but it's got added dipthongs and dropped conson-ants—"

"I don't care what it is, Slant—it's not anything I know and it's not anything the computer could inter-pret, and if these people were loyal they'd speak some-thing we could understand."

"That's ridiculous!" A thought struck him. "If you couldn't speak to them," he asked, "how did you get them to surrender so you could herd them into the building you burned?"

"Oh, that was easy," Flame said. "I used sign lan-guage. A snark isn't very impressive, since it doesn't make any noise or flash, so to get their attention I shouted at them until they all came out into the streets to see what the fuss was, and then I cut someone in half." She laughed again. "That scared the crap out of the little bastards; all I had to do after that was wave and point, and they went where I told them."

Turner choked back vomit. He knew what a snark could do, and his imagination conjured up the scene all too clearly. "Oh, God," he said.

He found himself unable to stop thinking of the old schoolyard joke that he had heard as a boy: What's worse than finding a worm in an apple you just bit? Finding half a worm in an apple you just bit.

He forced down an urge to laugh hysterically, like Flame, and told himself that he was being foolish. He had seen plenty of gruesome things in his time and had no excuse for letting a mere description upset him.

His stay on Dest had weakened him, softened him up.

But then, he had never expected to need to be strong and hard again. He was a husband and father, a wizard, not a warrior.

And now, whether he liked it or not, he was Dest's protector. He did not yet know whether he would be called upon to be a warrior once again, but his role certainly called upon him to face reality and to make what decisions had to be made. He could not afford any illusions about Flame. He was facing an utterly ruthless opponent.

He might have to be equally ruthless to save the planet.

As he was recovering his composure, Flame de-manded, "Where are you, anyway? How did you know about the village?"

Turner didn't bother answering. It seemed point-less. Talking to Flame at present was useless, he saw that plainly. She was simply beyond reason.

At least, this personality was. She presumably had seventeen others.

If they were similar to the ones he had had, several of them would appear only in specialized circum-stances and would be incapable of reasoning about anything outside their own specialties. Others, though, would be more complete, and somewhere in the frag-ments of Flame's original mind a sane personality might still linger. If it ever came out, Turner might be able to settle things peacefully—but that seemed unlikely. This personality did not seem inclined to give way, and Dest, with its relatively primitive technology and social structure, was not likely to provide a situa-tion where a cover personality was called for. Most of the nontechnical personalities were intended to be used as deceptions in dealing with complex societies; at least one existed only in order to be ignorant under torture. Flame's attitude toward Dest's society made such subtleties unnecessary.

Besides, even if a friendly personality did come to the fore, Turner would have no way to keep her from switching identities again, and sooner or later this paranoid killer would almost certainly reemerge, par-ticularly if, as he believed, it was the default persona.

He had no idea what to do. It was easy to tell him-self that he had to be ruthless, but what could he do? If he found Flame and killed her, her ship would retaliate by nuking cities.

"Hey, computer, I want to talk to you privately," Flame said, breaking into his thoughts. "I've got—" The rest was cut off as the computer stopped relaying to Turner, leaving him listening to dead air.

He cursed, and unslung the rocket rifle and held it ready, the barrel gleaming dully in the glow of the burning village. Cutting off their communications channel was clearly a threatening move. Flame was somewhere nearby, he knew, and she might well be coming after him, intending to kill him. Her private business with the computer might have been to ask it to tell her exactly where he was.

If she came after him in her combat persona, only fantastic luck would keep him alive, and that luck would need all the help he could provide, such as hav-ing his weapon out and ready. He was faster and stronger than any normal human, the equal of any of Flame's other selves in a fight, but even so, an IRU

combat personality would completely outclass him. The combat persona was more efficient than any of the nonspecialized selves. Since its decisions were limited to such basic choices as whether to fight or flee and what weapon was closest at hand, it was able to oper-ate much more quickly than a fully conscious person, even a person with spliced neurons. It was also able to completely ignore pain and automatically kept adrena-line pumping at full force whenever it moved, so that it did not tire. An IRU cyborg with the combat personal-ity dominant was really more a machine than a person, with a machine's unthinking efficiency.

Convincing the combat persona to take over with-out a direct and obvious threat, however, was not always easy, and it might not agree with the default personality about which target to attack, so that she would probably have to come looking for him as her-self—if that mad killer could be considered anybody's true self. The two cyborgs would then be on roughly even terms until Turner did something that threatened Flame sufficiently to bring out her combat self.

If it came to a fight, he would have to kill her as quickly as possible, with a single shot, before the com-bat personality could take over.

And if it came to that, what would her ship do?

He could have little doubt of that. It would assume that Turner had lied, that Dest was enemy-held, and it would then set out to destroy as much of the planet as possible, firing every weapon it had—including the missiles it had salvaged from his own wrecked ship— before finally destroying itself, preferably by crashing into a final target with the fusion drive overheated to the point of explosion.

That was what the standard programming called for in the event of the cyborg's death on an enemy planet; he remembered that clearly.

That meant that he did not dare kill Flame, even if he could; it would mean the end of the world, the de-struction of Dest, of his family, and of himself.

He knew that, but he kept the rocket rifle ready. The sight of it might deter her somewhat.

If she died in some other way, by accident or with her head blown off by the computer, but not killed by an inhabitant of Dest, his problems might well be over, since that would make him the computer's only avail-able ally. He thought he would be able to convince the computer that Dest was friendly easily enough once Flame was no longer around to argue with him. That was something worth considering; if he could somehow kill her so that the computer accepted her death as an accident, Dest would be safe.

Better still would be if he could somehow convince the computer itself to kill her. If he could convince it that Dest was friendly and that Flame knew that, then that would, to the computer's way of thinking, prove that Flame was a traitor. It would probably re-spond by detonating the thermite charge in the base of her skull.

That would solve the problem, certainly, but killing her would be a shame in a way; Dest might have uses for another cyborg. If she were not a dangerous luna-tic, her death would not be necessary.

That started him wondering— were all her persona-lities deranged? If he had, as he thought, been dealing exclusively with her default personality so far, and if that had been the dominant personality during her en-tire time in space, the isolation had probably been what had driven her insane. Her other personalities, having been suppressed all that time, might not have suffered. Was there some way he could bring a differ-ent one to the fore, to see?

He sensed movement off to his left, something other than the flicker of firelight, and with superhu-man, unthinking speed, the cyborg speed that he had believed lost and forgotten, he rolled to the side, bringing his rifle to bear on what he had glimpsed. A soft clatter sounded, barely audible over the fire's crackling roar.

Something had fallen; somewhere deep in the re-cesses of his mind that sound touched on a simple ruse that his combat personality had been taught back on Mars so long ago. He spun around on one hip, boots scraping up pine needles, as he reached out desper-ately with his psychic senses.

Chapter Twelve

FLAME HAD AT LEAST ONE SNARK, HE KNEW; SHE had used it to cut an innocent villager in half. No other weapons had been mentioned though she might have some. He had to be ready for anything but could take as a working hypothesis that Flame pre-ferred to use her snark.

A snark broke down molecular bonds, reducing al-most any solid matter to dust and loose ions. It was absolutely silent. It was also extremely limited in range, due to interference from the atmosphere. Flame had made something fall off to one side, proba-bly while she was on his opposite side, perhaps by throwing whatever it was over his head, perhaps to get him to look the wrong way while she came close enough to use the snark on him.

Of course, she might have other weapons as well as the snark, and the pebble, or whatever it was, might have had another purpose entirely. He simply didn't know.

He fired his rifle out into the forest, away from the village, a single warning shot aimed high.

The rocket-shell whistled away, burning a yellow trail through the cold darkness, scattering pine needles and twigs as it passed through a tree top. He hoped the warning would delay her for the instant he needed to draw his breath.

"I know you're there, Flame!" he shouted. "Listen, you don't want to kill me yet—I know too much about this planet that you don't! I know what the gravita-tional anomalies are!"

His voice was lost in the trees, unanswered. A long second later a distant report and a flicker of light told him that the rocket-shell had spent its fuel, fallen to the ground, and detonated on impact.

Physically, he saw nothing but the forest lit by the glow of the burning village. The sky was a solid black-ness overhead, the stars hidden behind heavy clouds. He heard nothing but the crackling of the flames and the night breeze hissing through the pines.

His psychic awareness, however, was another mat-ter. His every wizardry sense was alert, and he knew where Flame was. She was crouched a dozen meters away, behind a conjoined pair of trees. She was listen-ing intently and watching him closely. He guessed that she was probably out of snark range—after her work on the village her snark would be low on charge. Even if she had brought two or three snarks, none were likely to be at full power if she had had to confine a hundred people in a burning building.

She might have other weapons, but he could not sense any. If she did have others, she was not using them. She was not attacking; she was waiting.

"Computer," he said. "Don't let her kill me. Not yet. You understand? Don't let her kill me! "

He waited for what seemed an eternity before the computer replied. "Affirmative."

That was what he had wanted to hear, but somehow it was not as reassuring as he had hoped it would be. He was still terrified.

"Flame," he called aloud. "Listen, you don't want to kill me. I'm what you came here to rescue, re-member? I'm an IRU cyborg, the same as you—or I was, anyway. I'm decommissioned now, but even de-commissioned, I'm still a Terran citizen, and you don't have the authority to kill me without a trial unless I do something that endangers you or your ship. I'm not doing anything like that. If you kill me, it's murder—

and that's aiding and abetting the enemy. You know what your computer will do if you do that; that's what the thermite in your head is for. Neither of us wants to die. Let's talk this over."

"Me, aiding and abetting!" Her voice was higher than he had expected, and harsh. "You're the traitor, helping the enemy by preventing me from destroying everything! That's grounds for killing you, isn't it?"

Switching to subvocalization, she repeated, "Isn't it?"

"Affirmative," the computer answered.

"But only if Dest is enemy-held! You haven't got any evidence of that!" Turner shouted.

"We don't need any evidence!" Flame insisted. "Old Earth's gone!"

Turner called desperately, "But these people don't even know that!" Except, he could not help adding to himself, for a few dozen he or his friends had told.

Frustrated at her inability to come up with an an-swer to that, Flame stepped out from behind the paired trees and fired the snark.

Turner glimpsed her, a shadow moving against the darkness beyond, and sensed the spray of disruptive energy. Instantly he dove for cover, ducking behind a young pine for what little protection it might provide.

He saw powdered wood sparkle like gold dust in the firelight as a tree caught by the beam began to disinte-grate. The trunk creaked and started to buckle.

The weapon could not reach him. He saw immedi-ately that he was well beyond the snark's limited range. His dodging would have done no good other-wise, since even with the normal delays clipped out of his nervous system, with augmented muscles, with bones reinforced so that his increased speed and strength would not snap them, he could hardly have avoided a beam that moved at the speed of light.

"Computer, stop her! Override!" he demanded. "She's trying to kill me, and that's murder!"

"Affirmative," the computer replied as the dam-aged tree slowly leaned over and fell, loudly tearing its way through the branches of its neighbors.

Beyond the toppled pine Flame suddenly jerked spastically. Even in the gloom, Turner could see her motion clearly. The snark fell from her hand as her fingers twitched uncontrollably. "No!" she shouted.

"Goddammit, you stupid machine, don't duh-duh-duh—" Her jaw locked.

The computer, Turner knew from bitter personal experience, was attempting to override her brain's control of her body. If she had been hooked up to a control cable on her ship, the computer could have taken over smoothly, completely, instantly, but at this long range she was able to put up a real fight; the ship's signal could not be much stronger than her brain's natural electrical output.

Her head turned toward him—the fire's glow was spreading, and he realized he could see her with his eyes as well as his mind and not just as a shadow. She was short, heavy-bodied, wearing a worker's one-piece jumpsuit; pale tangled hair, red in the firelight but probably blond by day, trailed down her back.

The heat had not reached her, and her breath puffed from her mouth unevenly, visible as a pale golden mist.

The hand that had held the snark was open and clutching, and she was bending down toward the fallen weapon, moving in small jerks like a broken machine.

She was reaching for the snark. She was winning her battle for control of her own body.

He could not allow that.

"Computer," he called. "Can you induce a switch to a different personality? One of her cover identities?"

"Information insufficient," the computer replied. "Transition is regulated by conditioning of cyborg unit, not by computer control. However, application of ap-propriate internal stimuli may trigger transition."

"Try!" He held the rocket rifle pointed at her. "If she picks up that snark, I'll have to kill her in self-defense. I don't want to do that." Even in his despera-tion, he wanted to make a point. "I am loyal, or I'd kill her now—you see that, don't you?"

"Affirmative."

He knew he did not dare to actually kill her. If he did, the computer was likely to retaliate, whatever the exact circumstances. He was suddenly very unsure in-deed that he could convince the computer that Dest was friendly if Flame died.

Her hand was on the snark, but her fingers would not close. She was staring at him, her entire body tensed.

"Then if she tries to kill me, it's murder, it's treason —you'll have to blow her head off. And that would mean she was wrong about this planet, it is loyal."

Her fingers were trembling, trying to close on the plastic grip.

"Information insufficient. Possibility of disloyalty of cyborg unit designated 'Slant' remains. Reasons other than loyalty to the Command may prevent destruction of cyborg unit designated 'Flame.'"

He had not wanted the computer to figure that out. He aimed the rifle. "I'll shoot if I have to."

Then, suddenly, Flame relaxed. Her entire body lost its tension. The transition was so abrupt and com-plete that Turner lowered his own weapon slightly in startled response.

Moving casually, she stooped, picked up the snark, glanced at it, then looked back at Turner. He did not fire; he knew that he was no longer facing the same person. Her broad face was calm; she reached up and brushed back her hair with her free hand.

" Zdrastvuytye," she said in Russian, her voice al-most an octave lower than before. "Do I know you?"

Turner hesitated, keeping the rocket rifle ready; he was unsure what to tell her or even what language to use. She appeared to have completely abandoned the idea of killing him, but he knew better than to trust an IRU cyborg. Even if the current personality was sin-cerely friendly—which was not yet established—an-other personality might take over at any moment.

Flame studied him for a moment as he groped un-successfully for words. "Oh, of course I know you," she said, still speaking Russian. "Foolish of me. For-give me; my head was only seeded sparingly. You're Slant."

Even in the dim light, Turner could see the puzzled expression that crossed her face. "I was trying to kill you, against orders, wasn't I?"

Turner had to struggle to follow this; he had not heard Russian spoken for over twenty years of subjec-tive time. "Do you speak anything besides Russian?" he asked in polyglot.

"No," she replied thoughtfully, still in Russian. "Only the Russian language. My native tongue." Puzzlement crossed her face again. "But I can understand you. I remember what my other self learned, regard-less of what language was spoken. That seems strange."

"Not really," Turner said conversationally, trying to keep the mood light. "If you're a cover personality, it might have been done intentionally to keep you from slipping up if you claim to only know Russian. You could still listen to anything but couldn't speak any-thing you aren't supposed to know." He added silently, "Is that it, computer?"

"Affirmative."

"Who are you?" he asked, still speaking polyglot. "I mean, who are you supposed to be?"

She shrugged. "A technician. No one special. I could blend in in any number of industrialized socie-ties.

Quiet, obedient, no trouble." An instant of worry narrowed her eyes, then vanished. "What am I doing here?

Is this a mistake? They do not speak Russian here, and there is no industry that I have seen; I should not have been called upon."

"It was an emergency," Turner explained. "We needed to get the default personality out of control for a time; she's become unbalanced. You can probably remember what I'm talking about. We dislodged her, and you came to the fore, and here we are. That's all." He could sense a wordless questioning over the inter-nal communications circuit.

The computer replied. "Affirmative."

"If you think there's a better personality, you could switch, I suppose, just so long as you don't bring up either the default or the combat one." Turner still held the rocket rifle pointed at her; his grip had relaxed, but as he made this suggestion it tightened again.

He said it because he was trying to stay in his role as a loyal citizen of Old Earth and because he had to struggle to understand her Russian, but in truth, he hoped that this personality would stay. She seemed much more pleasant and tractable than the default self. She was calm, relaxed, nonthreatening.

But then, he realized as he looked at her over the barrel of his weapon, that was her purpose as a cover personality, to be dull and nonthreatening so as to allay suspicion. She was undoubtedly skilled at espio-nage or sabotage, and the combat personality still lurked just below the surface.

This was the first chance that Turner had had to get a good look at IRU 247's cyborg. He moved slightly, without lowering the rifle, to get a better angle on her.

The firelight had peaked a moment before and was beginning to fade, as the flames were running out of fuel; they had been unable to leap the gap from village to forest, and all the more flammable elements of the village, such as thatched roofs and old awnings, were now no more than fine ash. Still, Turner had enough light to see his recent antagonist reasonably well.

Flame was short, stocky, with a hard square face and dirty blond hair that hung raggedly down her back; Turner guessed that she probably really was of Russian descent. Her eyes were hidden by shadow.

Before, when she had been crouched in a fighting stance, or strained against the override, she had seemed muscular, powerful despite her small stature. Now, in her casual slouch, the gray jumpsuit hanging loose on her, she looked old and flabby and quite harmless.

He knew, of course, that she was not harmless.

"There might be a better personality," she said after an instant's hesitation, "but I don't want to leave. I have not been dominant since I finished training back on Mars. I'll go if I have to, but could I stay for now?

Computer?"

"Affirmative."

" Khorosho! " She smiled, then suddenly frowned. "But now what do we do? Why am I here? I mean, what was I doing in this place, and why did I seek to kill you, Slant? All I remember is a need to destroy enemies." She hefted the snark, then shrugged and put it in a pocket. "But I see no enemies," she said with a bemused smile.

"There are no enemies—" Turner began.

"Unconfirmed," the computer said. "Mission status unclear, pending determination of loyalty of inhabi-tants of this planet."

"What the computer means is, this planet stayed loyal to Old Earth—they never even heard that the Rebellion had taken place, let alone that Old Earth was destroyed—but your default personality wouldn't believe that. She wanted to wipe out the local popula-tion. Naturally, since I know they're loyal, I wanted to stop her. That's what led to our disagreement and your emergence."

" Are they loyal?" she asked. "Those in error are corrected, but traitors are destroyed. Old Soviet prov-erb."

"They're neither in error nor traitors. Ask anyone." He hoped that that would prove to be true.

She stared at him, considering. "You mean," she said, "that anyone I ask will tell me that this planet is loyal to Old Earth?"

"That's right," Turner said, fervently hoping that it was.

"And you want me to ask someone?"

"That's right." He nodded. He had only been using a rhetorical turn of phrase, but, perhaps because she thought in Russian rather than polyglot, the cover per-sonality had taken him literally.

He had no objection to being taken literally, none at all. That might well settle everything peacefully if he could establish to the satisfaction of the computer and any of Flame's personalities that remained sane that Dest was indeed loyal.

"To ask someone that we must find someone, yes?"

"Yes, of course," Turner agreed, pleasantly startled. She seemed to be cooperating completely; the change from the default personality could not have been more drastic.

"Then we will do that. We will find someone and ask whether this planet serves Old Earth or the rebels."

She smiled wryly, again brushing her hair back. "And when we do, I suppose I must go, and let another personality emerge. From what I have seen, what my other self has seen, the people of this land speak no Russian, and I cannot question them in any-thing else. Until then, I will stay. Is this satisfactory?"

"Affirmative" the computer said."

"Da," Turner said, smiling slightly in return.

"Which direction, then?" She waved at the sur-rounding forest.

Turner looked around at the darkness and realized that the movement hurt his neck, which was stiff with tension and fatigue. A wave of weariness swept over him, and he worried suddenly if he was doing the right thing. People chosen at random would probably have no idea whether they were loyal to Old Earth, and he wanted time to rest, to think over the situation, to see if he could devise a way to be sure that he and Flame got the answers he wanted. "I think perhaps it would be better if we waited until morning," he suggested.

"Of course," Flame replied, nodding. "I, too, am tired." She glanced around. "Computer, wake us if there is danger," she said aloud. "Watch particularly that the fire does not spread beyond the village." A troubled expression flickered across her face. "That village—I did that? Not good."

" Nye khorosho ," Turner agreed; he could still speak enough Russian for that. He watched as Flame sank to the ground, folding her legs under her, then settled herself back against the bole of a tree and closed her eyes.

When he was reasonably certain that she was not going to leap up again and attack him or flee, he dropped the butt of the rocket rifle to the ground and gradually lowered himself down beside it.

He had not been using a psionic heat-field, but ex-citement and the heat of the burning village had kept him warm until now. A chill was creeping in. He pulled his coat more tightly about himself, hoping that the cold would not bother him too much while he slept.

He leaned back against the nearest pine and closed his eyes.

As sometimes happened when he was exhausted, he did not fall asleep immediately; he was too wrought up from the day's events. He idly reviewed what he had done.

It occurred to him for the first time that he could have telekinetically prevented Flame from picking up the snark. He could have snatched the weapon away from her fingers while she was struggling against the override. He had not thought of any such stunt, though; he had been thinking in cyborg terms, not wiz-ardly ones, despite his use of wizard-sight. He had treated his psionic perceptions as a sort of substitute for his computer's sensors rather than as what they were. If he had been fully alert, he would have thought of telekinesis and would probably have been able to sense Flame's actions before they happened by reading her aura.

It had been a very long day, though, and he had been tired. He forgave himself his lapses, all the more because they had resulted in bringing this far more pleasant personality of Flame's to the fore.

He had never had any Russian-speaking cover per-sonalities. He had had a nondescript technician, but that one spoke Anglo-Spanish and had never been called upon. He wondered idly how close the corre-spondence was between the eighteen fragmentary selves he had once had and the eighteen Flame pre-sumably still possessed.

It was odd, he thought as he looked across at the sleeping Flame, that it was the cyborg who was giving him so much trouble this time, and not the computer. His own computer had decided that Dest was hostile entirely on the basis of the "gravitational anomalies" that magic created; it had had no record of any friendly research being done in the field of antigravity and had therefore concluded that this apparent anti-gravity had to be enemy research.

He wondered if Flame's computer would have reached the same conclusion had he not been on the planet to say otherwise. How similar was the program-ming for the two machines?

Had they had the same basic mission? It did not appear that they had. His own assignment had been to scout out planets whose loyalty was uncertain, to de-termine whether they were friendly, neutral, or hostile, and, if they were neutral or hostile, to destroy or crip-ple their offensive capabilities, if any, to make sure they could not attack Old Earth. That was all; he had never been ordered to attack civilian populations with-out provocation.

Flame's mission, from what he could make out, had been more retaliatory in nature, more vindictive. She seemed to have orders to destroy as much of the enemy as possible, whether civilian or military and re-gardless of potential threats to Old Earth. She and her ship came from a later series than his own, when the war was going badly; Turner guessed that by the time IRU 247 received its orders, the Command might have been growing desperate.

The computer's programming, then, might be very different in some regards. Its acknowledgment of in-ternal programming conflicts agreed with that. The basics should have remained the same, however.

If he gave this one its release code, would it commit suicide, as his own had?

That would solve all his problems right there. With the computer gone, Flame's release code would trigger hypnotic conditioning that would merge her eighteen personalities back into one. If that one was still deter-mined to wreak havoc, he could simply kill her.

Once she was decommissioned, taking it upon him-self to kill her might be a little drastic, but she was an exceptionally dangerous person and had already mur-dered the entire population of a village. Besides, quite aside from any pragmatic reasoning, as a wizard of Praunce he had the authority to execute a murderer in the name of the imperial government.

For the first time in years it occurred to him that that was an exceptional privilege for him to have when he was not an elected or appointed official but simply someone with unusual skills. Praunce's laws left much to be desired. What right did he have to the power over life and death?

Of course, in his present situation, anything he might do to prevent Flame from killing him or anyone else would qualify as self-defense. Even if he were not a wizard, he would not be committing a crime if he killed her.

If she was insane, though, without being aggressive or destructive, what would he do? She would still have a cyborg's superhuman strength and speed, would have the potential to be horribly dangerous.

He dragged his thoughts away from such specula-tion. Worrying about what might or might not happen after Flame's decommissioning was pointless until he knew how to decommission her.

Was there any way he could get her release code?

He had no idea. The code would be her civilian name, repeated three times; did she remember her ci-vilian name? Would she tell him if he asked? Back on Mars he had had his own memory suppressed as part of his conditioning, but bits and pieces had surfaced during his years in space, and he had remembered his name now and then. All the buried memories had come back when his personalities had recombined.

Did Flame remember anything of her past? Were bits of it coming back to her, as bits of his own had come back to him?

Did that past have anything to do with her destruc-tiveness, or was her sadistic viciousness a result of her long isolation in space and the loss of her home?

He opened his eyes and contemplated her.

She appeared to be sleeping comfortably. How odd, he thought, that less than an hour ago they had been trying to kill each other, yet here they were, sitting peacefully a few meters apart.

He had not given up the idea of killing her if it became necessary, and he was sure that on some level, beneath the cover personality, she still wanted to kill him.

Was he safe sleeping near her, he wondered, or would he wake up to find the default personality back in control? Would he wake up at all? Should he try to slip away, even though the unsleeping computer would be watching and could track the machinery in his body anywhere?

He had dozens of questions and no answers. He told himself that he might find answers to some of them in the morning, but others would probably go with him to his grave. None were likely to be answered before dawn. He sighed, gave the dying flames of the burning village a final glance, then snuggled down more closely against the tree and fell asleep.

Chapter Thirteen

HE CAME AWAKE SUDDENLY, UNSURE WHAT HAD disturbed him.

Seeing where he was, he remembered the pre-ceding night's events in quick succession. He had reached the two ships; Flame's vessel had refused him entrance and had then, at Flame's command, abruptly launched itself back into orbit. He had tracked Flame to the village she had burned, whose people she had killed.

It troubled him somehow that he did not know what the village's name had been.

Flame had found him there, and their confrontation had ended in a weird anticlimax when the computer forced a cover personality to take over Flame's body.

He looked for her and saw her still quietly sleeping, her back against a tree. Whatever had awakened him, she was not responsible for it.

Dest's primary was still below the horizon, but the sky had faded from black to a pinkish gray. True day-light would arrive in a few minutes. He did not think his abrupt wakefulness could have been triggered by the approaching dawn; it seemed too sudden for that.

The village fires had died away, and the heat and light had faded with them, but the biting cold did not seem a likely cause, either. Like the daylight, it had crept up gradually, and he felt very strongly that he had been awakened by something sudden.

Had the computer spoken to him?

No, the computer would have known that he was asleep from the telemetry from his internal equipment and would not have disturbed him without a good rea-son. If such a reason existed, it would have kept yell-ing at him until he answered.

The forest was dark and still around him, gray and black in the dim light. He could see nothing strange.

Could he have heard something from the village, perhaps?

He looked down the slope, listening intently.

He heard nothing. He had not seen the bodies, but he had no reason to doubt that Flame had indeed killed every man, woman, and child in the place. She was an IRU cyborg, a warrior of Old Earth, and could be trusted to do the job competently.

Besides, the village simply felt dead, and as a wizard he trusted that.

It had probably been a chipmunk that disturbed him, he decided, or if chipmunks hibernated—he had no knowledge of their winter habits—then perhaps a spider had tickled his foot. Whatever it might have been, he could see no sign of danger. He allowed him-self to relax.

As he did, he wondered, as he often had before, why the original colonists had brought chipmunks and squirrels and other such useless animals to Dest. He was glad that they had, as the little creatures made Dest's endless forests seem a trifle friendlier, but he was still puzzled by their reasons. Surely simple aes-thetics would have been outweighed by the limited space on their ships! They could not have brought every species on Old Earth; how had they had made their choices?

Had they based it somehow on the planet's original ecology?

No, he told himself, they could not have known anything about the planet's ecology. The decisions would have been made utterly in the dark, since in those days no one could afford the luxury of waiting decades for an advance probe to report back. The col-onists had probably arrived knowing nothing of what to expect save that this star ought to have planets.

Their supplies and equipment had probably con-tained everything they could imagine needing, every-thing they would need to face whatever hostile environment they might encounter. Chipmunks and squirrels, or at least the DNA to create them, might have been brought with some purpose in mind. He could not guess what the purpose might have been, since from a human point of view they seemed to be useless animals.

They did, however, add a little life to woods that would have been dreary without them.

Had Dest ever had any life of its own? That was a question he had pondered before, but he had never found an answer. The planet's recorded history, as the current inhabitants knew it, started with the Bad Times, long after the entire continent had been cov-ered by terrestrial flora and fauna. No one, neither Turner nor anyone else, had any idea what the planet had been like before humans had colonized it.

Perhaps it had been a ball of bare rock, or a small gas giant, or some other unlivable environment that had had to be terraformed. Perhaps it had had completely alien life that had been destroyed by terraforming.

Or perhaps it had had indigenous life so similar to Old Earth's that Turner simply had never noticed the surviving native species among the imported ones.

He shook his head. Dest's past history did not mat-ter; he was more concerned with its future. How could he waste time on such irrelevancies as squirrels and chipmunks when there was a starship overhead with almost three dozen nuclear warheads ready to drop?

The thought of whatever had awakened him was not so readily to be dispelled, however. Could it have been a chipmunk? For some reason he could not define he found himself determined to know what had aroused him.

He thought of asking the computer but then decided against it. He did not care to risk an argument with the computer just now. Besides, as he remembered telling himself last night, that was cyborg thinking, and he was a wizard as well. He stood and looked about, then reached out psionically, studying the carpet of pine needles around him.

Something forced his gaze upward and to the east. From a corner of one eye he saw that smoke still trailed up from the smoldering ruins of the village, but that was not what had drawn his attention. All he could see to the east were treetops, turning from black to green and brown in the growing light, but he knew that somewhere beyond those trees something was moving.

"Ongoing gravitational anomalies approaching cy-borg units from east, at an altitude of approximately twenty meters and ground speed of approximately one point five meters per second; distance from cyborg units approximately three kilometers," the computer said, suddenly and without preamble.

"Good morning to you, too," he replied with half-hearted sarcasm. He knew now that what had awak-ened him.

Parrah had called to him telepathically. She and at least two other wizards had flown out from Praunce looking for him. He could sense them faintly in the distance.

The computer could also sense them, of course.

Turner suddenly realized why Flame had ordered her ship to take off when she did; he had been study-ing it psionically. Naturally, the computer would have told Flame, and she would not have liked the idea at all. In effect, Turner himself had driven the ship away.

But why had the computer not pointed the "gravita-tional anomaly" out to him? He had been ready to make glib explanations, but he had never been given a chance.

That, he guessed, was Flame's doing. She must have told the computer not to tell him.

This, he thought, could prove inconvenient. When-ever he used almost any sort of wizardry, Flame and the computer would know it. Even if the computer did not tell Flame about every instance, she would, he re-alized, be able to sense it directly once she knew what to look for. She was a cyborg like himself, and he had always been able to sense magic even before he be-came a wizard. She, too, would presumably feel its presence as an electric tingle in the air. Apparently, whatever energy magic used—a matter of consider-able debate among the wizards of Dest, with a hybrid of electromagnetism and the weak nuclear interaction credited by the most currently fashionable theory—in-terfered slightly with cyborg systems.

His wizardry could be a useful secret weapon against Flame, but only if he used it very cautiously. Any use but the very subtlest would not be secret.

Flame and her computer might not be able to tell what he was doing with his wizardry, but they would know wizardry was in use. If he had telekinetically disarmed her while she struggled against the override, the com-puter might have decided that he was using an enemy weapon and must therefore be an enemy himself. That might have been disastrous.

On the other hand, the computer might not have leapt to that conclusion at all. He simply did not know enough about its programming to be sure one way or the other.

He also did not know what Parrah thought she was doing, coming after him this way. The previous day he would have welcomed her aid, but now he felt that he had things more or less in hand and that her presence could only be a nuisance. Annoyed, he pulled away from her psionic attraction and looked at Flame, still asleep against her tree.

If he called to Parrah, the computer would detect his use of wizardry, and he might not even get through clearly, since he was lousy at telepathy. If he did not call to her, she and her companions might blunder in and make some fatal error in dealing with one or the other of IRU 247's component parts. Parrah was a good, intelligent woman, a talented wizard, a delight-ful wife, and a good mother to their children, but she could rarely leave well enough alone. For years she had been his adviser in matters of everyday life on Dest. As a result, she had little faith in his ability to deal with anything without her help. Ordinarily that was no more than a minor annoyance, since she truly did know Dest and Praunce and wizardry better than he did, but she knew nothing about Old Earth's mili-tary except what he had told her. Any meddling now might complicate the situation beyond his ability to control it.

He settled on a compromise between doing nothing, thus risking Parrah's interference, and calling to her and possibly upsetting the computer. He flashed an in-stant's psionic broadcast as loudly as he could, a non-verbal warning to stay back, to go away. By not taking the time for words, limiting the message instead to a single emotional concept, he hoped that the computer would decide that the associated gravitational phenom-enon was a matter of instrument error rather than something he was causing.

Flame stirred, then blinked up at him. He saw for the first time that her eyes were a dull washed-out green.

"Ongoing gravitational anomalies have stopped moving; maintaining altitude of twenty meters, ap-proximately two point one kilometers from cyborg units," the computer informed him.

That was better but not very good. Parrah and who-ever was accompanying her had not gone away but had only stopped approaching.

He felt a sudden tug of undefined urgency and real-ized that Parrah was responding to his call in kind, saying wordlessly that she had an important reason for coming after him.

Maybe she did, he told himself. The possibility that one or more of the children had fallen ill or been in-jured sprang immediately to mind, but he pushed that aside for the moment as he watched Flame stretch.

Whatever had concerned Parrah would have to wait, as he was facing a much more immediate threat right where he was, a threat not only to his family but to the entire planet. Flame was awake.

What personality would she have? And was her waking at that particular moment a coincidence, or had she somehow felt his telepathic broadcast?

At most, he thought, it should have registered as that faint tingling he remembered. He had become so accustomed to it that he no longer felt it himself, really. He was usually aware of wizardry being per-formed in his immediate vicinity, but that was because he could sense it psionically, not because of his cyborg nature.

He would not have thought the tingling would be enough to awaken her. If she had felt anything more than that, though—

He broke off his thought there and started a differ-ent one.

He was an abysmal telepath by the standards of Praunce's other wizards, because his aura was so dif-ferent from a normal one that he had difficulty in meshing it with any other. The differences were the result of the rewiring of his nervous system. This had also meant that other wizards had always had difficulty in reading his mind, even when he made no attempt at privacy and thought slowly and clearly in the Prauncer dialect.

Flame's nervous system had been reconstructed along the same lines as his own. Her aura would also be distorted and abnormal—but should be a close match for his own.

Therefore, he should be able to read her mind eas-ily, where no other wizard would be able to, even though he could not read ordinary, undefended minds, or even cooperative ones, very well.

This resonance, if it actually existed, would explain why she might have felt something when he broadcast his message.

He forgot completely about Parrah's message of urgency as he considered the possible implications of his theory.

If he could read Flame's mind, then he had an ad-vantage in any future confrontation. He would know what she was going to do before she did it. He could look in and see which personality was dominant at any given time. She could keep no secrets from him.

He had never been very enthusiastic about telepa-thy before, since he had been so bad at it and others so much better, but now he saw all the possibilities laid out enticingly before him.

He could learn what drove her, and maybe talk sense into her. He could listen in on her private con-versations with the computer. He could find her real name and use it as her release code—that would settle matters very quickly. If the reintegrated personality was sane, the threat to Dest would be ended; if it was as mad and bent on destruction as her default self, he could kill her without bringing on a holocaust, since the computer would be released from its military pro-gramming by the code, just as Flame would be.

That was too good a possibility to pass up, even though the computer might notice something was going on. He would, he told himself, approach the matter gingerly, working his way gradually, carefully, under the psychic blocks her trainers had set up, until he found the suppressed memories of her civilian life.

Eventually he would find her name, and he could then convert IRU 247 from a fighting ship to harmless war surplus.

Assuming, of course, that he could, in fact as well as in theory, read her mind.

He eyed her appraisingly. She eyed him back, in no hurry to say or do anything.

A trial, he told himself. I need to see if it works.

He reached out his senses tentatively, feeling his way across the intervening meters until he could sense the aura of psychic energy around her. He tried to see the shape of her aura, see which personality looked up at him from those dull green eyes, see if she was still thinking in Russian.

Something shrieked in his head, and his concentra-tion shattered; old reflexes flung him sideways, grop-ing for the rocket rifle. "Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!" the computer screamed. "Gravitational anomalies cen-tered on both cyborg units! Enemy action assumed re-sponsible! Mayday! Mayday!

Mayday!"

Flame was moving, rolling sideways in a motion similar to his own, a snark already in her hand and her finger on the button. Somehow, despite the disruption of his own thoughts, or perhaps because of it, he could feel what was going through her mind—not merely guess at what she saw and felt and thought but know as surely as if her mind were a part of his own.

There were no thoughts, not really, no more than there might be in the mind of some lesser animal. There were only reflexes and a constant intent aware-ness of everything around her.

The combat persona was in charge.

She had not yet classed him as the enemy who had attacked her, but she was evaluating the situation, en-tirely on a nonrational, unconscious level. The threat was continuing, unseen and unfelt, but made known to her through a signal from the computer, a signal that was not in words but in a simple continuing tone on a particular frequency, a mental "sound" that her other personalities would have taken for little more than background noise. This personality, such as it was, ac-cepted that single message as an infallible indication of some deadly danger that she had to either fight or flee.

If her enemy had been completely undetectahle, she would have fled, perhaps striking out at random as she did so. In the present situation, though, another per-son was present, a person whom she could not immedi-ately classify as either friend or foe. The memories left by other personalities disagreed. He was armed but not attacking her with his visible weapon.

She was, however, under attack.

The village nearby was dead. The attack presum-ably did not originate from there.

Except for herself and Turner—she knew him as Slant, of course—no one else was present.

She was not sure Slant was a friend—or rather an ally, as a warrior personality has no friends.

That was all the thought necessary. The entire eval-uation had lasted less than a third of a second. She swung the snark and pressed the button, twisting into a running crouch that would let her reduce the range.

Turner, however, had followed everything that flashed through her primitive mind during that fraction of a second, and his own thoughts and reflexes were still superhuman despite a decade of peace. He did not dare kill her, even if it was possible; the computer would retaliate. Instead, he fled, using all the speed he could muster, dodging among the trees, grateful that snarks had such a limited range.

Flame had not allowed for Turner's speed. She had unthinkingly acted as if he were an ordinary human.

He remained out of range.

However, his actions seemed to confirm his hostil-ity. Since he should not have been able to see her at-tack in time to react, he must have started to flee before she made any threatening move, which implied that he had been an enemy before she had done any-thing.

She thought this out not in words but in a single conceptual image: fleeing equals enemy.

And fleeing enemies were to be pursued, so she pursued, the snark ready but her finger no longer pressing the button.

Chapter Fourteen

turner's foot twisted as he stepped on a root. He staggered slightly, then righted himself and ran on, trying to think.

She was still after him, still in the almost mindless combat persona. He had not expected it to last this long. They were well out of sight of the burned village —even the rising smoke was nothing but a smudge on the horizon now—and Flame was still relentlessly pur-suing him.

He knew that it was partly his own doing. He had realized a kilometer back that his attempt at telepathy

—his successful attempt at telepathy—had been inter-preted as an attack. The tingling sensation would probably have been accepted as nonthreatening after a moment or two, but the computer was monitoring the "gravitational" effect and keeping Flame alerted to its presence. It would not listen to explanations until the anomaly ceased; instead, it kept on transmitting the danger message. As long as Turner maintained his telepathic contact, the computer would keep Flame feeling threatened, thereby maintaining the combat personality in control.

And the combat personality had marked him as an enemy.

If he dropped the telepathic contact, though, he would no longer have any warning of her actions, and that, he suspected, would quickly be fatal. She was not tiring as he was; the combat personality could draw unchecked on the body's reserves until she fell over dead, while he had only his own will power driving him on. She was already faster than he was, now that he had begun to feel the strain of the chase. Only the fact that he knew what she would do before her own limbs knew allowed him to continue dodging.

Once again, as he stumbled on, he thanked God and the Prauncer trinity that snarks were so limited.

Their limits had given them their name, he knew. Even as he dodged behind a tree to avoid her latest charge, he remembered the story as he had heard it long ago, when he had first volunteered for the military, even before the Command had shipped him to Mars.

Once, a few years before he was born, a general somewhere back on Old Earth had been put in charge of a team of physicists and engineers working on devel-oping disintegrators. The general had set forth what she wanted and when she wanted it, and when the deadline arrived, the physicists and engineers brought her what they had done. It was the best they could come up with, but it did not live up to her high expec-tations. They had been unable to lick the problem of atmospheric interference. That problem never had been licked, really—at least, not before IRU 205 had been launched.

The general, however, had taken this failure as a personal affront.

"I wanted something that would be dangerous ," the general had told the scientists in angry disappointment. "Something that would be really frightening. Something that nobody could face, that would make anyone who went up against it softly and suddenly vanish away, like in the old poem. I asked you people for a boojum, but you gave me just an ordinary snark."

Turner was very grateful as he peered back at his pursuer that those physicists and engineers had never found a way to build boojums.

At that particular moment he wished that they had not bothered with snarks, either. The tree he had used for shelter leaned abruptly to one side as Flame cut into it with her weapon, but he was already moving away, keeping himself out of range.

He remembered his idea of taking the snark away telekinetically; since Flame and the computer were al-ready aware of magic in the area, his major objection to the scheme no longer applied, but nonetheless, he still could not put it into practice. She held the gadget tightly, too tightly for him to pry it loose without seri-ous concentration, and she had two more snarks with her besides. He could see clearly in her thoughts that she had three snarks and no other weapons; a combat personality always kept in mind exactly what weapons were on hand.

And in any case he was too busy running and dodg-ing to spare the effort for telekinesis.

Once again he stumbled slightly on an exposed root; one hand flew up as he struggled to keep his balance, and he felt Flame hesitate. He would never have seen that hesitation, but linked to her mind as he was, he perceived it.

A sudden realization dawned; he stopped suddenly, flung his rifle to one side, and turned to face her, arms raised over his head, fingers spread. As he did, doubt flashed through him, and he waited, unsure whether he had guessed right or whether he was about to die an abrupt and grisly death.

Flame also stopped. Though she kept the snark pointed directly at him, she did not fire.

The combat personality could accept an enemy's surrender. It did not need to kill. He had forgotten that at first. He had thought of Flame as if the irratio-nal hatred of her default personality would drive her on to destroy him even when that personality was not in charge. The combat personality was incapable of hate, though, or of any other emotion. It was little more than a set of programmed responses. And one of those responses was to allow an enemy to surrender.

Given this respite, he was able to drop his telepathic link and force himself to suppress his psionic abilities for the moment. With that threat gone, and with her "enemy" putting up no further resistance, Flame's combat personality would yield control to another self.

Turner had not yet had time to consider which per-sonality would come to the fore, however. In an in-stant, as he felt her thoughts through the last fading remnant of the telepathic linkage, he knew which identity it would be. He dropped flat to the ground as he shouted aloud, "Computer, don't let her kill me!"

The snark's beam passed harmlessly overhead, re-ducing a few pine needles and twigs to powder, and before Flame could lower her aim to Turner's new po-sition, the computer override sent her arm into con-vulsive jerking.

She fought it for a second or two, then gave in. She dropped the weapon. "All right!" she said aloud. "Let go! I'm not going to shoot him!"

The jerking stopped. She lowered her arm and rubbed it with her left hand, soothing the abused mus-cles as she glared at Turner.

"All right, bastard," she said. "You win for now. I won't shoot you until we settle this." She glanced up-ward. "And you, computer, you just remember what's going to happen in another sixty hours or so if I don't stop it. Don't push me too far."

Turner got carefully back to his feet, watching her every move, very much aware of the two snarks still in her pockets as well as the one she had dropped. One, he believed, was out of charge, but the others were both still dangerous.

He wondered what she was talking about with her sixty-hour deadline but had no way of guessing. He shoved it aside as irrelevant.

The two of them, he realized, had reached a sort of stalemate. They had absolutely contradictory goals, with no hope of compromise—she wanted Dest dead, and he wanted it alive. Each of them had advantages

—he his psionic abilities, she her greater access to the computer and ship and the threat of nuclear weapons —but the net result was a close balance of power, maintained by the computer's refusal to side com-pletely with one over the other. Each move that either of them made, the other could counter; using wizardry against her would bring the combat personality out again and convince the computer to let her fight un-hampered, while any direct, unprovoked hostile move on her part would cause the computer to use the over-ride or to force a personality switch, or possibly even to kill her.

So far as he could see, only settling the question of Dest's actual loyalty could break the deadlock by bringing the computer down on one side of the fence or the other.

That was what he had intended in the first place, of course, before he had gotten the idea of digging for her release code. He had intended to somehow prove Dest's loyalty, probably by the simple expedient of asking people. He had gotten the Russian-speaking technician personality to agree to that, at least provi-sionally, and then he had blown the whole thing by trying to read deeply enough in Flame's mind to find her release code.

That attempt had not worked out very well. He had not been able to look through her memories much while he was busy following her surface thoughts in order to stay alive. He had glimpsed one or two stray items without really meaning to. He now knew what her ship's control cabin looked like. He knew that odd bits of her civilian life were there in her mind, slipping out from under the artificial barrier the Command had built, memories that would be readily accessible to a telepath, though Flame herself might not be aware of them. Turner had caught glimpses of them in what he thought of as the cracks between her several identities.

Her real name, however, was still a mystery. He had not happened across it. He did not have her release code, nor did he dare make another attempt to find it.

With that settled, he fell back upon his earlier plan.

"Listen," he said. "Let's find some of the natives and ask them about Old Earth and get this whole mis-understanding cleared up. They'll tell you they're loyal. Could we do that? Would that be all right with you?"

She watched him intently for a moment, then shrugged.

"All right," she said. "Let's do that." Her eyes nar-rowed. "I'll be watching to see what sort of trick you're pulling, Slant, I warn you, and if I catch you trying anything, that will prove once and for all that you're a traitor, and that the whole thing about this place being friendly is a sham, and then we can go ahead and blast this planet. Right, computer?"

"Affirmative. No deception may be permitted."

"Fine!" Turner said, smiling, hiding the doubts he felt. He noticed that Flame did not mention the possi-bility that the natives would support him without any trickery, and for a moment he considered demanding that she promise to accept at face value whatever evi-dence they found.

He decided not to press the issue. Flame would probably not give such a promise or keep it if she did, and besides, the computer was the important one, not Flame. She could go on thinking whatever she liked. The override and the thermite charge would keep her in line once the computer made its decision.

"So where do we find some of these natives to talk to?" Flame asked.

Turner had no ready reply. Before he could either admit this lack or devise a suitable lie, the computer interrupted.

"Ongoing gravitational anomalies are maintaining altitude of twenty meters, approximately two kilome-ters from cyborg units," the computer said. "Query: Advisability of investigation by cyborg units."

This, Turner saw, was a perfect opportunity. "I think that it's very advisable," he said. "If people there are using that mutation I told you about, then they must be wizards, as the natives call them. I can show you what the mutation is, and you can talk to them, and you'll see that they're friendly. That should kill two birds with one stone, shouldn't it?"

He knew that they would be friendly enough, since his wife was one of them. The only problem would be in getting them to say the right thing without any obvi-ous coaching. He thought his problems with IRU 247

might be almost over.

"I don't trust you," Flame said, frowning.

Turner shrugged."I don't trust you very much, ei-ther. You keep trying to kill me."

"Give me that rocket rifle," Flame said decisively. "And we can go take a look at those mutant things, whatever they are. But I need the rifle first. I want something with some range."

Turner was not at all happy with that suggestion. "I don't dare give you all the weapons and leave myself unarmed," he said. "You have been trying to kill me, after all."

"Well, I'm not going up against antigravity with nothing but snarks," Flame insisted. "The computer said those things were twenty meters up, and these stupid snarks only have a range of three or four meters."

Turner had to concede that she had a point, and after a moment's hesitation he made a suggestion. "All right," he said. "We'll trade. You give me the snarks, and you can have the rifle. For now, anyway." The alternative, which she had apparently not thought of yet, was to call the ship down so that Flame could re-equip herself from its armory. Turner did not like that idea at all. Giving her the rocket rifle was the lesser of the two evils and would not, he told himself, be im-possibly dangerous. The weapon's ammunition was not limitless, after all, and telekinesis ought to be able to deflect the missiles if the target wizard was alert enough.

In fact, Flame had made no mention of extra am-munition for the rifle. It held a single magazine of fifty rockets—no, he corrected himself, forty-nine, since he had fired one as a warning round the night before.

He had four more magazines in his pack, but he had no intention of telling anyone that until he was asked.

He wondered how much charge the snarks still had. Flame might be effectively disarming him if they were low enough.

It was worth the gamble, he decided.

"The rifle is right there," he said, pointing out where he had thrown it. "You put all three snarks on the ground where you are now, and we'll trade places and arm ourselves."

She hesitated, then nodded and reached into her pockets. Alert to any treachery, he watched intently, ready to simultaneously dodge and lash out psionically if she tried to kill him.

She picked out each snark and dropped it to the ground.

When the third had fallen and lay motionless on the frost-whitened pine needles, Turner allowed himself to relax. He moved almost casually as he walked over to where the deadly little things lay.

Flame made no pretense of nonchalance; she moved swiftly and smoothly to the fallen rifle and snatched it up, checking it over quickly and efficiently as Turner picked up the snarks, turned them to safety, and stuffed them into his coat pockets. A glance at the dull red of the power dials before he switched the control settings showed him that one held a charge of five percent, another thirty-five percent, and the third seventy percent.

It would not be tactful to crosspatch them and run the best one up to full charge, he decided. That would look too much as if he really expected to use the thing. "All right," he said. "Let's go."

Only at the last moment before he turned did he remember to ask the computer, "Which direction?" He knew perfectly well which direction to take, since he could sense the wizards' presence quite clearly, but he judged demonstrating this seemingly unaccountable knowledge to be unwise.

When the computer had given them a bearing, he marched off, and Flame followed a few paces behind.

She was plainly not willing to let him get behind her.

That seemed illogical to him. After all, he had had chances to kill her, and he had not done so. Why should he kill her now, when she was doing what he wanted?

Besides, he was not particularly happy about allow-ing her behind him, and he glanced back frequently to make sure the rocket rifle was still held loosely before her and not aimed at his back. He would have been much more comfortable had she slung it on her shoulder, but a single quick look at the hostile expres-sion on her face put an end to any thought of suggest-ing that.

He watched his breath puffing out in the cold air as they walked and gradually became more and more aware that he had not had breakfast, or much of a dinner the night before, and had already spent the bet-ter part of an hour in violent action this morning. He was ravenously hungry.

Food could wait, he told himself. He would deal with this meeting between the cyborg and the wizards first. Flame was liable to misinterpret his actions if he stuck his hands in his pockets looking for something to eat.

He felt a slight tug as Parrah tried to call to him again; he ignored it. He did not want the computer to notice anything. If he did not actively listen and did not answer, Parrah's transmission should not register on the ship's sensors as being connected to him at all.

After several seconds the call ceased.

"Gravitational anomalies are descending," the com-puter announced a moment later.

Turner glanced up, looked back at Flame, and kept walking.

"What are they doing, traitor?" Flame demanded.

"How should I know?" he called back over his shoulder. "They probably got tired. Or maybe they know—" He cut himself off short. He had been about to suggest that they might know the cyborgs were coming and were landing to greet them. Flame, how-ever, would probably have interpreted that to mean that she was walking into a trap.