"Thought you ought to know, Victor," Steefer said. "Most of Junktown is in the air-in a bob-tailed fleet of civilian vehicles. They're heading for Beta to take all the sunstones they can lay their hands on."

Grego compressed his mouth. So, things had finally cracked open down there.

Well, a hot, uncomfortable night would be the time for it. "Do we know how this got started, Harry?" he asked.

"No one seems too sure, but the word is that Ingermann whipped the crowd into a mob frenzy," Steefer said.

"Ingermann, Ingermann!" Grego exploded. "When we get that son of a khooghra, I'm going to hang him high." He recovered his composure. "They can't get out of Mallorys-port, can they, Harry? The Colonial Constabulary is supposed to have the town sealed up tight."

The image of Harry Steefer shook his head. "I wouldn't bet on it, sir.

Ferguson's men have been doing just that, but we 're talking about hundreds ofvehicles, here. Some of them are bound to get through. In fact, quite a few of them are bound to get through."

"Are we lending a hand?" Grego asked.

"Mallorysport P.D. and us are doing as much as we can," Steefer said. "But, there are some fires in Junktown, some street fights, and some reports of looting."

Grego shook his head in disbelief. "So this disorganized gang is heading for North Beta to raid for sunstones. It's like a-what did they call those little animals that committed suicide by the whole herd running over a cliff? Well, no matter; that's what it is. Harry, they haven't got a chance. They're going up against trained Marines."

"I know that," Steefer said. "You know that; but, no one has told them that."

"Has any of the rioting leaked up into Mallorysport, yet?" Grego asked.

Steefer shook his head. "Not yet," he said, "but I've increased security around Company House. They may make a try for you, so we're watching your residence very close. I don't want you to leave your apartment without telling me. I'll likely be here all night-or at least until this is over."

"In that case," Grego said, "you 'd best put a couple more men on Miss Ramsey's hospital room. They may make a try for her, too."

"Good idea," Steefer said. "And, Harry," Grego said. "Yes, sir," Steefer said.

"Christiana's over there right no w," Grego said. "Send a Company Police vehicle for her and bring her back here." He leaned back in the console chair.

"Any other trials and tribulations?" he asked. "I mean, something minor, like a volcanic eruption in the center of town?"

Steefer smiled crookedly. "One other thing . . ."he said.

Grego didn't like the tone of gallows humor in Harry Steefer's voice. "Which is . . . ?"

"Mortgageville's burning," Steefer said. "Big fires. Has to be arson."

Grego clenched his teeth. "Ghu's guts!" he intoned. As soon as the transmission cleared, Grego rushed out onto the north terrace. Silver-trimmed maroon Company air jeeps, with POLICE lettered on their sides, were already circling over Company House.

To the north of Mallorysport, great, leaping flames hundreds of feet high were dancing against the night sky, with clouds of dense, black smoke rising above them, already beginning to blot out the stars with a stygian curtain of darkness. Ingermann had unleashed the demons of hell and the misshapen ogres of brutality that still lived deep inside the Terran human spirit, and their primal forebears were now cavorting for joy a few miles north of Mallorysport.

Grego had the uneasy feeling that they were, perhaps, the shadows of things yet to come.

In the distance, darting lights showed the location of firefighting vehicles as they sought to close on the fires. One could occasionally catch a glimpse of one of them, illuminated from below by a new billow of flame or explosion.

Grego rolled his eyes upward. "Bill Zeckendorf is going to love this," he saidto himself.

Diamond had stopped playing with his now-forgotton ball and was watching, too.

He thought it was a splendid show and spectacularly entertaining.

As soon as Alex Napier finished the communications abstract which a yeoman had just delivered to his cabin, he grabbed his tunic and began to put it back on.

"Another quiet evening shot to Nifflheim," he muttered. With his arm in one sleeve, he punched up a screen-call combination with that hand while he fumbled behind him for the other sleeve.

"Connie," he said to the image of his Exec that came on screen, "have you seen this abstract?"

"Just finished reading it, Alex," Captain Greibenfeld said. "I was just starting to call you."

"Full staff call in my office," Napier said, "in thirty minutes-to include McGraw, his Exec, O'Bannon, and Helton."

"An enlisted man?" Greibenfeld interrupted.

"I want his opinion," Napier said coldly.

Greibenfeld said nothing.

"Signal Akerblad to put San Pablo ready to lift off on my order. Situation estimate from Steve Aelborg-he can refine it later; I want what he has in thirty minutes. When you find McGraw or his Exec, I want the rest of the Second and all of the Third Battalion to saddle up and stand by in their quarters for further orders. All supply and support elements to be on their stations as soon as possible."

"Isn't this a bit much, Alex?" Greibenfeld asked. He honestly felt Napier was over-reacting. "I mean this beat-to-quarters-and-man-guns? It sounds to me like just a rather elaborate series of civil unrest incidents."

"It's a mob, is what it is," said Napier, closing up the front of his tunic.

"But, still-" Greibenfeld began.

"Dammit, Connie," Napier said. "A mob is like mud; it has no mind, no form, no reason-only movement. If you don't stop all of it, you haven't stopped any of it. It'll roll over you, smother you, and kill you without ever knowing anything was in its way."

Chapter 42.

"We did the best we could do," Colonel Ian Ferguson said into the communications pickup. He was screening from his command car. His tunic collar was open. He looked haggard. "As it is, Governor, we'll be the rest of the night charging and booking the ones we have in custody-if the town doesn't bum down first."

Ben Rainsford wanted to take a handful of his own whiskers in each fist and pull them out. "Ingermann- Ingermann-INGERMANN!" he raged. "That fat little son of a khooghra has caused me more grief than the entire planetary government put together. I hope they can hang something with mandatory death sentence on him; I want to be the one that pulls the trigger. How many got through, Ian?""As nearly as we can tell," Ferguson said quietly, "almost two hundred vehicles. We have no idea how many people that involves, though."

Rainsford had been lighting his pipe. He waved his hand to clear the dense cloud of tobacco smoke between himself and the communications screen. "You better-no, you're busy enough-I'll screen Napier. Keep me posted, Ian. And don't worry; if you did as good as you could, you did good."

Jack Holloway was nearly two hours south of Fuzzy Valley, almost to Fuzzy Divide. The stars were bright, overhead, and Xerxes had climbed almost halfway from the horizon to the zenith. He had been busily making lists in his head of things to do and was happy to conclude that during the week or so that everyone was going to be on Xerxes, he could just about handle all the work that had piled up since the afternoon when Ahmed Khadra gave a whoop and shouted that he had found an enormous titanium object buried under the soil of what was now called Mount Fuzzy. Now, who could be calling him on the screen?

No one knew he was in the air, except . . .

"Major Stagwell, here, Commissioner."

"Yes, Dick," Holloway said. "What's up?"

As Stagwell spoke, Holloway laid Gerd's airboat over into a long, flat arc mat would take it back to a reverse course.

"What do they have to shoot with?" he asked as soon as Stagwell had outlined the situation.

"We don't know yet," Stagwell answered. "My guess would be nothing heavier than individual weapons, but I expect they 11 have some automatic stuff-maybe a few machine guns."

"I'm on my way, Dick," Holloway said. "Have you raised Xerxes yet?"

"We've signaled and are waiting for the authentication code," Stagwell said.

"I've done a lot of riot work, but I want guidance from upstairs on this one."

"Makes sense," Holloway said. "Look, when you get them, tell them I'm returning. I'm the Commissioner; that's where I belong. And tell them I'm going to raise George Lunt-see how many men he can send up. It's his jurisdiction as the ZNPF head cop."

The Rev walked unsteadily into the dispensary at his own mission and sat down heavily in a chair at the nurse's station. There was blood on his face and he felt as though every bone in his body had been broken.

The evening nurse, a volunteer in street clothes, dropped the stack of files she was moving from one desk to another. They went skittering and sliding across the floor in a jumble of forms. "Father Gordon!" she said. "Are you all right? You look like you'd been trampled by a veldbeest stampede."

The Rev managed a smile. "I was," he said.

She keyed the automatic page that summoned the doctor. She brought a wet cloth to the chair. "Let's get that cleaned up and see what else we have, here," she said.

"Double vision," The Rev said, shaking his head vigorously. "Funny. I usually don't get that till the next morning.""Jack, they haven't got a chance," George Lunt said over the screen. "They're going up against three companies of trained troops."

"I'm sure the thought never crossed their mind, George," Holloway said. "This is a mob. A mob never thinks; it just charges like a damnthing. By being totally unaware that they don't have a chance, they just might make it. You see?"

George nodded. "I'm afraid I do," he said. "I've seen it work. Okay. I'll round up as many men as we can spare without leaving ourselves wide open down here. If there are as many variable unknowns as you say, we may have to fight at Holloway Station. People seem to identify you with sunstones, you know."

Stephen Aelborg had just finished delivering his situation estimate to the meeting. As Intelligence Officer he was naturally cautious, but had to admit that for thirty minutes' notice, it wasn't too bad.

"Gentlemen," Napier said, "we have a still-developing set of actions here. It remains in a fluid state, not yet fully formed. Therefore we want to keep our ability to respond flexible but quick. Another thing we have to consider is the lag-fac between decisions we make here and the travel time needed to put troops on the ground on Zarathustra."

Helton had noticed Greibenfeld look at him in an odd way when Napier used the term "gentlemen." He was amused, but made a mental note not to trust Greibenfeld any more than was absolutely necessary.

Napier turned to Helton. "Gunnie," he said, "what is your evaluation of the First Battalion in terms of weapons and readiness?"

Helton felt his ears flush slightly. He got to his feet. "First rate, Commodore," he said, and proceeded to concisely outline his views.

When Helton sat down again, O'Bannon realized-and felt slightly foolish about it-that he had been holding his breath. Quietly, he exhaled.

"Good," Napier said. "I still want the balance of the Second Battalion loaded aboard the San Pablo. Even if the First won't be needing any hand-holding, I'd feel better about having additional men on the surface. Ops will alert another suitable vessel, and the Third will board it and remain there for further orders."

McGraw's Exec was making notes.

The Operations Officer paused, his pencil above his own notes. "Do you plan to intervene, again?" Carl Johnsen asked.

"Emphatically not," Napier said. "Only in the case of the most extreme emergency or at a request for assistance from the Colonial Government. It's something that has to be planned for, in any event, although the very thought of it gives me the willies. I don't want to infringe on First Battalion 's operation, but I don't want to leave them out on a limb. The doctrine that applies here, gentlemen, is one of minimums-minimum show of troops-minimum show of force-and minimum application of force. If the colonial population gets the idea that we're going to step in every time there's a fist fight on Zarathustra, they never will get around to forming a completed government.

They'll just look up at Xerxes when the going gets a little rough, sit down, and wait for us to tell them what to do. That's not the kind of attitude that colonized all these worlds in the first place, and I refuse to foster it."

Chapter 43.

Jack Holloway stood, with his feet slightly apart and his hands on his hips, puffing his short pipe and looking eastward. He had given his rifle-he was carrying his 6-mm Sleeker in the airboat-a part-way takedown and cleaning.

Have to tear that thing down to the last screw and really go over it. Someday soon. Time. Time. Never enough of it these days. That's all he wanted when he came out to Cold Creek Canyon-time by himself. Funny how you never got what you wanted when you searched for it; only when you stopped and let it find you.

Nothing to do now but wait. Everything that could be done was already done. He liked the way Stagwell had laid out his forces; it showed a businesslike knowledge backed up by experience-same kind of attitude that let Helton calmly blow in that tunnel face without knowing what, or how much of it, was on the other side. Holloway chuckled in the back of his throat. He particularly liked the idea with the riflemen on the bench at the north end of the site; a separate group of sharpshooters made up of picked marksmen from each company, placed at an elevation from the rest of the area.

Stagwell came up beside him, his boots blowing up little puffs of dust ahead of the toe. "Anything?" he asked.

Holloway shook his head.

"How soon, do you think?" he asked.

"Can't say," Holloway replied, keeping his gaze on the horizon. "Depends on how fast they're going and whether they really know where we are. They may not have a definite course. If they just cast about till they find the valley it could be quite a while."

Stagwell nodded, sighed, and was silent for a moment. "By the way, Mr.

Commissioner-" he began.

"Jack," Hollo way said.

"Jack," Stag well corrected himself. "I 've been meaning to ask what your tobacco is."

-OLDTEHRAN CUT," Holloway said. He jerked a thumb to his right. "But they grow it down on South Beta."

"Can I get it in Red Hill?" Stag well asked.

Holloway nodded. "I get it from Walt Davis. Got a little gun store and tobacco shop there."

"Mmmmmm," Stagwell said. "I'd like to pick some up before we leave."

"Try some of mine, first," Holloway said, handing him the pouch without taking his gaze from the horizon. "If you like it I'll bring you a big tin on my next trip up."

"Thanks," Stagwell said, digging out his pipe.

Several minutes passed without conversation. Then, Holloway pointed to the east, where a little gob of light was coming over the horizon. "I think that's company, coming to call," he said.Presently, the light separated into several, then separated again-and once again-until it was a cloud of lights, each one indicating a separate vehicle in the mob that had gotten out of Mallorysport.

Stagwell turned and looked over his shoulder. "Sergeant Major Miller!" he said.

The battalion sergeant major appeared out of the darkness. "Sir,"he said.