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defiantly occupying the enemy's chosen target. When the enemy finally came, the dominant emotion of
these people was relief that their long wait was over. They fought back with everything they had, even as
the world around them erupted with blasts, flames, and murderous vibrations.
A roaring berserker machine, one of the biggest taking part in the attack, hit by fire from a heavy gun,
disintegrated in the upper atmosphere, which on this peculiar world lay only a couple of hundred meters
above land surface.
Blast followed blast. It seemed to Jory now that she could hear her mother shouting at her, and for a
moment her self-possession wavered. Then it settled back. I'm dealing with this, thought Jory Yokosuka,
in brief self-congratulation on her own aplomb, and then went back to a selfless concentration on
operating her equipment. She was doing this through hand controls under the armored fingers of her suit,
as well as giving verbal orders to her robots through a kind of headset, a less compulsive version of the
arrangement worn by the live combat fliers-spacers, which plugged into the helmet of her armored suit,
and left most of the operator's face covered only by the armor's faceplate.
Ka-slaam, ka-slaam!
The attack went on, minute after minute. The enemy machines were circling at high speed in the sky,
diving, retreating, climbing, and coming back. Now some people in the shelters, civilians as well as
military, began to react to the ongoing strain of bombardment by rushing wildly out of their shelters for no
good reason, firing shoulder weapons into a sky more weirdly streaked and color-stained than any sunset
on a volcanic planet. The gesture relieved a need for action, but was ineffective; it hardly seemed possible
that any of the many incoming missiles were going to be hit and detonated by small-arms fire.
And then Jory's equipment went totally dead. There must have been a hit nearby, a blow that had hardly
registered in her awareness. Maybe the last one of her active robots had been wiped but.
The young woman stared blankly at the dark, lifeless stage for a moment, then ripped off the wire
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optelectronic fiber connection to her helmet, abandoned her relatively secure position underground, and
rushed out, scrambling through the little tunnel, climbing the steep hardened stairway to the surface. This
was at least partly because of her ongoing wish to see directly what was happening. Evidently some
splinter or splash of energy had penetrated her little shelter and found a vital spot in the equipment.
Once her head rose above the level of the ground, an avalanche of noise, like nothing she had ever heard
before, forced its way right inside her helmet and seemed to be lifting it off.
Her dog-sized robot, its hindquarters melted into bubbling slag, stared at her through one lens that was
still turning in its immobilized head.
Almost at once her eye fell on a fallen object, lying not ten meters from where she stood. It was a dead
man, his armor wrapped on arm and leg with Templar tokens, lying like a bundle of discarded laundry.
The body lay half out of a small shelter, which had been ripped open by some kind of blast.
TWENTY-ONE
If the small yacht he was riding on had a name, Gift hadn't heard it yet, and didn't want to. Nor did he
really want to be told the identity of the Teacher, the ship's owner that Gavrilov, with an air of awe and
mystery, mentioned every once in a while. Nifty envisioned some crabbed old patriarch, head of some
idiotic peace cult on whatever remote planet they were now bound for. Nifty expected it was going to be
unpleasant there, but it wouldn't be nearly as bad as facing Traskeluk or a court-martial, either, come
to that.
Gift's only real problem now was that he still couldn't tell where they were going. He tried talking to the
ship several times, when the other man was out of the compartment, but Gavrilov had the controlling
codes, and had blocked the vessel's opt-electronic brain from discussing any astrogational matters.
Gift was used to ships where the human crew took some active part in every aspect of the voyage. The
autopilot and the other machines were generally reliable, of course, more so than humans in many ways.
But& still it made him uneasy.
They were still in deep space a long way from any solar system, the yacht's autopilot still following
whatever course had been punched in by Gavrilov. Gift was wondering whether he should be
worried this was turning out to be a longer trip, involving more C-plus jumps, than he had expected.
Possibly that was because they were taking evasive action, against what seemed to Gift the even remoter
possibility that they were being followed.
Flower, acting as if it were a matter of course, had moved into the little cabin with her Nifty it was
quite a comedown from the quarters they had enjoyed aboard the luxury liner.
But Flower was no help to him in finding out where they were bound. She seemed perfectly willing to let
Gavrilov make all the important decisions.
"He knows what he's doing, Nifty. He's been involved in this kind of thing for a long time."
"What kind of thing?"
"What he's doing for you now. Getting people out of the military, when they don't want to be in it any
longer."
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"Oh."
Unless Gift could obtain access to the instruments and Gavrilov was making certain he could
not there was no possible way for him to tell where he was being taken. Unless he was willing to really
make an issue of it, there was no way to pressure Gavrilov into telling him.
What the hell, thought Nifty Gift. Once you decide to trust someone, then trust them, until they prove
you wrong. If Gavrilov and his mysterious Teacher and whoever else was backing him want to play the
cloak-and-dagger business, let them. Maybe they knew what they were doing.
Several times in the course of this voyage Gift felt an urge to confess to Flower the reason why he was
so afraid of Traskeluk.
He said to her once, "There's some things I did I'm really sorry for. One thing in particular."
"What was that?"
He didn't answer directly. "When I ran away from the berserker, it was because I was trying to stay
alive."
"Why else?"
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