"Damned fink-bot," I growled. "God, I hate those things."

So we ate and drank, Joanna and I sitting side by side, Drummond lounging on the couch opposite us. He was only slightly inconvenienced by having to keep us covered with the stunner while shoveling down eggs and lox and hogging most of the strawberries. He was in excellent spirits and seemed eager to talk. Maybe megalomaniacs aren't really happy unless they have an audience.

As Karl had suspected, Drummond knew the game was up as soon as Fake Sam informed him that Helly the Haluk had been accepted by the Rampart Board of Directors.

Even if Sam's demiclone security officers had been able to take control of the boardroom and its distinguished occupants, there was no possible way for Sam to salvage the situation. Murdering the directors would accomplish nothing. Taking hostages was an even more useless option. Realistically, all Sam could have hoped to do was retreat, taking the Rampart demi contingent with him.

Sam had urged Drummond to immediately take refuge in Macpherson Tower. Not bloody likely! The Scotsman was crazy but not stupid. The brilliant stratagem he had conceived was totally buggered, and in his Fake-Helly demi-clone condition, he was a dangerous liability to the aliens. If he entered their embassy, he would never emerge alive. Free, he might think of a way to blackmail the Haluk into financing a new life for him on some comfortable freesoil world. But where could he hide while waiting for events to ripen?

He remembered Kingfisher Lodge.

Taking a Rampart hopper there would have meant almost instant capture-either by Rampart or by the aliens. Every corporate ground vehicle, aircraft, and starship had a monitoring chip in its navigator that sent a coded data stream directly to Fleet Security and from there to the bean-counters in Finance. Haluk demiclones were present in both departments.

The only Rampart ship exempt from monitoring was Makebate. I had made sure of that.

Drummond was reluctant to leave Earth for the reasons I had already noted. He was a wanted man; Makebate's ultra-luminal fuel-trace was easy to identify, given enough people looking for it, as was the ship herself; he had no outplanet hidey-hole ready to receive him; and he wanted to stay close to the action in Toronto so he could judge his options accurately. Therefore he did the only practical thing-took off in the starship using ordinary sublight drive, parked in geosync orbit, then returned to Earth immediately in the gig, staying outside the air traffic control network.

I said, "But you must have suspected that the day would come when the aliens wouldn't need you anymore. Didn't you whomp up some sort of insurance policy, the way Ollie Schneider did when he was your mole?"

"No," he said quietly. "It wasn't necessary."

Oh, boy. Maybe escape hatches and fallback maneuvers were too mundane for hubris- loaded nutcases: every contretemps a fresh challenge. Even now he wasn't planning a getaway. He was mulling over a new scam involving Joanna and me.

I could hardly wait to find out what it was.

Joanna said to Drummond, "May I ask you something?"

That damned smile. "You may ask." He poured the last of the champagne into his own glass.

"How in the world did you escape from the landslide at the Arizona gold mine?"

"By following rattlesnakes." He threw me a humorous look. "Spare me the obvious comment, lad. The mine was riddled with old tunnels and shafts. I had my little penlight, which I tied to my head with my scarf, and I had my Lanvin actinic pistol. There was water to drink. So I coped." He had crept and crawled inside Copper Mountain for nearly three days. A couple of times he nearly died in rock-falls. One of them cut him off from returning back the way he'd come. (And convinced searchers that he must be lying dead beneath it.) On the third day, weak from hunger and with the penlight battery starting to give out, he began following what seemed like a moving stream of air, thinking it might lead to an exit. It only brought him into a dead-end gallery.

"At that point I thought I'd had it. There seemed nowhere else to go. I set about exploring a jumble of large rocks and suddenly put my boot right into a rattler nest. The snakes were rather small, but they were striking at me viciously and I knew they were venomous. I shot at them with the Lanvin and fried a few-but the rest fled into a crevice among the rocks that I hadn't noticed. Every single snake disappeared. I checked out the crevice and discovered the source of the wind. It was rubble-choked crawlway too narrow for my body, with sunlight at the end. I blasted rocks until the charge in the Lanvin pistol was exhausted, and shifted the pieces with my hands. I got out. I climbed down the mountain and followed a dirt track fifteen kilometers to a highway. I hitchhiked to Phoenix in a ranch truck and contacted Tyler Baldwin, the demiclone Galapharma security chief... and told him about the idea I'd conceived while lost inside the gold mine.

He took me to the Haluk leaders. I think you can imagine the rest."

"That's amazing," Joanna said.

"Do you really think so, Professor?" He'd told the story directly to her, and as he spoke his eyes had toured her leisurely from north to south, with several scenic detours that had made me grit my teeth in fury.

Before she could reply, I said, "You got lucky. But the Haluk aren't going to give you a third chance at the jackpot, so what's your new game plan? Holding us for ransom?"

Reluctantly, he shifted his attention from Joanna to me. His voice was quite courteous.

"A variation on that theme. Following the Assembly vote tomorrow-whichever way it goes-you will invite Adam Stanislawski and the seven members of the Rampart Board of Directors presently in Toronto to confer with you here at the lodge. The meeting will be conducted under conditions of the utmost secrecy, with no other persons present-"

"I won't do it," I said.

His gaze flickered to Joanna. "I think you will, given the proper incentive."

"It'll never work. You can't hold hostages here. The security's not good enough.

Remember how you grabbed Dan. Others know Joanna and I came to the lodge. They'll be suspicious-"

"We and our guests won't remain here," Drummond said airily. "We'll all be aboard Makebate, one of the fastest star-ships in the galaxy. And one that is very well armed. A deal will be struck. I guarantee it. If not-" He shrugged, cocked his head and listened to the edgy music. "-at least the denouement will be appropriately Wagnerian."

He gave us a mocking toast and tossed down the last of the champagne.

Joanna was staring at him with an expresion of objective interest. Her voice had taken on a clinical tone. "That's what you really want, isn't it? A dramatic ending. To destroy Helly and Adam and the Rampart leadership, because they defeated you twice over."

Alistair Drummond put down the empty champagne flute and lifted the Ivanov.

"You're a very lovely woman, Joanna. I'd like you to share my bed tonight."

"No, thank you," she said politely. "I'm afraid I've just started my period."

"You lying bitch!" Drummond snapped. "No, it's true. Why don't I clear away these supper things into the servitron?" She rose from the couch, picked up a china plate, and suddenly scaled it expertly at Drummond like a Frisbee, missing his head by only a few centimeters. The plate smashed against the granite fireplace.

Drummond shot her in the breast with the Ivanov. Two darts. She fell back against me.

"Lying bloody bitch!" he shouted.

I struggled to shift her body and get at him, but it was useless. He popped me twice in the shoulder and I felt the world dissolve into a red-black abyss.

The last thing I remember was Drummond calling, "Roberta! Clean up!"

She was sitting beside me on the edge of the king-sized bed, fully clothed, wiping my face with a damp towel. When I made an inarticulate noise she lifted my head and held a glass of water to my lips.

"Careful, dear. Just take small sips."

I did. My mouth felt like week-old straw in a mule stall.

She took the water away. "Thank God you're finally awake. We've got to act quickly before he comes, and I'm not sure how to work the damned thing."

"What?" I struggled to sit up. We were in a beautifully appointed bedroom. A clock on the nightstand said it was 1333 hours. What was going to be the most memorable day of my life was already half gone.

I stretched my arms, flexed my legs. Except for a sore spot on my shoulder where the darts had penetrated, I felt almost good. Maybe I'd send the Ivanov people a testimonial.

Joanna had left me and gone to a large pottery vase on a low dresser that held an ornamental arrangement of dried grasses. She rummaged around in it. "I hid it in here, in case he came in before you woke and decided to ... search my clothes."

She pulled out the new Lucevera 4500 she'd bought in Timmins and handed it to me.

I said, "Jesus Christ!"

"It was in my inside jacket pocket all the time. Drummond never thought that I might have been carrying two phones. Thank heaven he shot me in the opposite boob." She made a face. "Incidentally, the dart wound still hurts like hell. I was afraid that if I used the phone to call the Rampart emergency code, the call would register somehow on Drummond's own phone. That's why I waited for you to wake up."

"No, it wouldn't. He and I have separate phone codes. All we share is the computer data and system-links. But I'm glad you waited. We'll call Karl instead of arguing with ExSec. They're likely to be kinda uptight and antsy at this point in time."

The armored shutter on one window was open. Outside, fat snowflakes fluttered straight down in a winter wonderland. I climbed out of bed and checked the compound.

The Mitsubishi-Kondo was gone.

"He's moved the hopper," I said. "He must have put it into the garage out of sight.

Along with the orbiter gig."

She said, "The door of our suite is locked and it's not ordinary wood. I think it's made of the same armor as the shutters. The glass in the windows looks very thick, too."

"They're unbreakable and laser-proof. This suite was designed to be ultrasecure. A good thing, too. We're going to lock Alistair Drummond out of here, then make some big botheration."

I began tapping pads. "What are you doing?" Joanna asked apprehensively. "Won't he know if you access the lodge systems?"

"Not unless he's looking at the phone display. Pray he's got it stowed in his pocket...

Hah! Gotcha. The original code for the secure-suite lock was deactivated when the lodge was shut down. A new one hasn't been installed. That means Drummond must have used his simple password to engage the lock. The dumb galoot even gave the password to that idiot robot."

Tap tappety tap tap tap.

"I don't understand," Joanna said. "Secure suite?"

"Never mind. Look." I showed her the phone's data-strip. It said: --.

LIST PASSWORDS: GLASGOW 1/1.

"He didn't encrypt it. Why should he? Anytime we want, we're out of here, babe. But not yet. Definitely not yet!"

I installed a new code for the lock-encrypted, of course-killed the Glasgow access, and locked us in. Then I closed the window shutter that Joanna had opened.

"We're going to make sure our fish doesn't get away," I said. "Then we call for help.

Crawl under the bed."

While she gaped at me in stark disbelief, I summoned another menu. This one was for Makebate's gig. I explained: "Both Drummond's and my phone have links to the nav- autopilot system of the starship gig. If I park the gig somewhere, or even leave it inside the starship, I can call it to come pick me up-just like a car or a hopper."

"But the gig is already here," Joanna protested. "In the underground hangar along with the Macrodur hopper."

I took her arm and urged her onto the floor. We both slithered under the bed. "I'm going to send the gig home to Makebate. Unfortunately, I'm going to forget to open the garage door first."

"Oh..."

"The lodge is a very sturdy building," I reassured her. "We should be all right.

Ready?"

I pressed the pads that would light up the gig's engines. Did the requisite preflight rigmarole. Then I told the orbiter to lift off. The phone began to shriek like a banshee. I could hear a tinny computerized voice saying, Danger. Danger. Overhead obstruction scanned. Liftoff aborted. Liftoff aborted.

No doubt Alistair Drummond heard it, too.

I told the phone, "Override alpha-three-one-one. Go!"

The concussion did not lift the house off its foundation, nor did it break the armor- glass windows. The hangar was carved out of bedrock and the major force of the fuel blast was directed upward, with a secondary Shockwave rushing along the subterranean tunnel, where it severely damaged the deserted staff quarters wing.

We clung together while bits of demolished machinery rained down on the ceramalloy roof like a hailstorm from hell. The bedframe had leaped off the floor and thumped down harmlessly. A tall chest of drawers and a bookcase had toppled and scattered things. The ceramic bedside lamps had crashed, and so had the vase with the grasses, a couple of large framed pictures, and a passel of nameless sundries that had fallen off shelves and out of cabinets in the adjacent bathroom.

"Are you all right?" I asked Joanna.

"Yes. My God, it was just like a bomb!"

"Exactly like one." The clinging was very nice. "Did you really start your period?"

"It's a standard antirape ploy. Men are so squeamish."

"All the same, I'm glad you threw the plate ... On your feet, babe."

We crawled out into the mess. I opened the shutters on all three bedroom windows. A tall column of smoke swirled from the hangar hole in the middle distance. Not much debris was visible; it had sunk out of sight in the deepening snow.

Next order of business: I called Karl Nazarian's personal code.

"It's Helly, at the lodge. Alistair Drummond's here. I've destroyed the transportation.

Send a SWAT team fast. He's armed with a Tala-G and God knows what else. Joanna and I are barricaded in Dan's old secure-suite. We'll be okay."

"I copy your emergency," said the cool old cucumber. "Hold while I talk to ExSec and dispatch the team."

I waited.

Joanna said, "I hear something at the door."

Scratching sounds. Then the sharp yelp of a photon gun, one with less power than my Tala-G, perhaps a Claus-Gewitter, weapon of choice for serious meat-hunters. Maybe Drummond didn't know how to operate the more esoteric combat piece.

Cheeow cheeow.

I muttered, "Give it up, sucker. You and your Haluk goons couldn't blast your way in here when you came for Dan. You had to torture two guards to death to get the lock- code."

Joanna's eyes were wide with horror. "Helly ...?"

Another photon blast, then silence.

"I'll explain later," I told her. Karl was back on the phone.

"The team'll fly out of our Oshawa facility inside of half an hour," he said, "five hoppers and thirty personnel. You're looking at a ninety-minute ETA. They'll try to take Drummond alive."