Well, no matter what, Raven's task was to get Hawks out and enlisted in a campaign to get the rings. Hawks and probably many others. Why Chen wanted Hawks in particular was still a mystery, but men like Chen did nothing without a reason. And now Raven was under the time gun, for he'd know that Hawks would not leave without his family, and essentially intact or easily restorable. It was still Raven's script for now, but maybe it could stand a little rewriting.

"I ain't really ready, but we got to go quick," Raven told him in their third meeting in the green reception room. "So far they been mostly experimenting with your gals, but they're about to remove 'em from the prison and go full tilt.

Now, you listen up. Within a few days you'll get another call. This time it'll be one-way. Just to here. Then the two women, one at a time. I got to call them Chows as well, since our blind genius insists on it, but that's pushing it."

"Don't call the Chows," Hawks told him. "I'll tip them. They can walk in here any time, or so they say. Why have a registry call that might flag somebody if they can get here without one?"

"Fair enough. I heard they were whizzes with computer locks and regular ones, but I didn't know they were that good."

"They are. There's several others I think would be useful, too."

"Sorry, Chief. My list includes your wives, you, our China gal, and her pals, but the only other one I'm interested in springing is Reba Koll."

"Reba! She's on my list, too!"

"Well, she's the only one around with deep space experience. She knows the.

safety procedures, what you can and can't get away with, and she can navigate a liberated pilot. If we're taking this many risks, I don't want to trust it all to a blind, pregnant genius I know only by reputation."

Hawks considered it. What Raven said made sense.

"Ever worn a space suit before?" Raven asked him.

"You know I haven't."

"Well, you're gonna. You all will have to. I'll be smuggling them in and stashing them within range. They're not hard to manage. The blind girl's gonna be the big problem, but we'll make out."

"You're sure you can get us out?"

"Sure as I can be, which isn't a hell of a lot. This one won't work twice, I don't think. I'd go tomorrow if I could, but it's got to be four days from now."

"Huh? Why four?"

"That, pal, is when our ship comes in."

Hawks had tipped off the Chows to some but not all of the details, since they might be called back up to the Institute at any time and might not be able to conceal knowledge of the potential breakout. They were still very interested in escaping, although they had about as much understanding of just where they were and the problems involved as did Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman. All he told them was that if they watched and stuck close to him, there was a chance to leave this place permanently, although not without danger. He would signal them when he was called, and if they then saw either of the wives being called, they should get themselves to the entry room-if they could. He emphasized that no

one.

would wait for them.

The more he waited, the more absurd the whole thing seemed. A historian, two women from an ancient culture, two women from a not much more modern one, a devious Crow security man, a busted freebooter space pilot with a tail and a lot of hangups, and some genius teenage girl who happened to be blind and three months pregnant. Raven might get them out, although Hawks had no idea how it was possible, but what could they really do even if they made it away? For that matter, what in heaven did Chen have in mind for dreaming this up in the first place? The rings might well be on worlds that were at this stage only nominally human and on which none of them could even survive. That was even probable, considering how Master System wanted to cover its rear and prevent anyone from short-cutting it. It had seemed very clear-cut up to this point, but now absolutely none of it made a single bit of sense.

It didn't matter, he knew. Not right now. First escape.

Find that place to hide. Later, perhaps, there would be time and opportunity to figure all this out. Dante's hell was a madhouse, but it had a ruthless logic behind it. Somewhere, no matter how bent and twisted, there was an equal logic, and probably equal ruthlessness, behind this.

He was called early on the fourth day and signaled the Chows. Up to now they'd been lucky; none of the four women here had been called. He hadn't even let Reba in on anything; this would be a complete surprise to her, but he didn't think she'd object. He looked around the whole complex and wished he could take everyone.

This time he did not stand in the room. "Come on back to the control room area,"

Raven invited him, "and wait for the others." The Crow switched on the control room light, and Hawks saw that the Crow wore a black and green uniform that didn't help his looks at all.

"As soon as we get your people in here and Koll, if she comes and doesn't try to make a protest out of it, we go," Raven told him. "You might start trying to get into one of those suits now. The body part is a one-piece affair and not all that thick, so don't get caught on anything."

The space suit looked, in fact, rather disappointing and certainly far too fragile to do what it was supposed to do. Hawks's vision of space suits was from the ancient records, which showed large, bulky, but somehow reassuring monsters of body armor. This was light and flimsy and not very comfortable. A backpack then went on over the suit and had a series of connectors to a light but solid-looking helmet which included a built-in forward headlamp. He put on the pack, which was far heavier than it looked and not at all comfortable, but Raven advised him to keep the helmet off until they were all suited up.

Silent Woman came next, looking very confused, but she found Hawks and smiled.

"We are leaving this place," he told her. "We are going to escape, like we did back at the village. You must let us put one of these suits on you, because where we will be going there will be no air to breathe, like at the bottom of a river."

The Chows beat Cloud Dancer in, opening the door as easily as if they had the combination. "It is the same lock as on the showers," Chow Dai explained. "And we had plenty of practice with that one."

Next came Koll, looking very confused. Still, she grinned when she saw them in their space suits. "It's a break, and you thought of old Reba!" She beamed.

"Well, by God, let's get to it!" She got into her suit, somehow managing to squeeze in her tail, then looked at Hawks. "Now-how the hell you gonna do it?"

Hawks shrugged. "Ask him," he responded, pointing to Raven.

Cloud Dancer, however, was still missing. Hawks cursed under his breath and got a nod of assurance from Silent Woman that Cloud Dancer had still been in the prison when the painted wife had gotten her message.

"Can't wait too much longer, Chief," Raven told him. "The clock's running, and while they might not miss any of us for quite a while, they're gonna miss their blind lady in a couple of hours tops, and we got to be on our way by then."

Hawks looked around. "Where is she, then?"

"She'll meet us where we have to go. Manka's bringing her."

Hawks was surprised. "Warlock! Her, too?"

"Yeah. She's changed a bit, thanks to them. Not much. Still homicidal and crazy as a bug, but she ain't so self-centered anymore. Gave her a dose of our good old tribal mentality. She's still not easy to take, but she'll stay on our side."

"You sure about that?"

"Hell, I married her, you know. She's the blackest Crow you ever will know."

"You married her?"

At that moment Cloud Dancer came through, and Hawks breathed a sigh of relief.

She was almost shocked speechless by what was going on. "You knew we might get out and you did not tell me?" she stammered in pure Hyiakutt. It was good to see some of her old fire coming back.

"Okay, folks. English only from now on. It's the only tongue we all understand,"

Raven told them. "Koll, you want to help them with their helmet connections and power switches."

"Your radios are open but on a special frequency," Raven's voice came to them through the helmets. "We changed them all. It's not close to one that's monitored, but it's noisy and not very powerful. Even so, quiet, unless there's real reason. Follow my lead. You folks with no suit experience, just remember-one rip in this and there will be no air. It's a lot tougher than it looks or feels, but take care. We're going into a maintenance tunnel from here, and then we'll clip ourselves together with a special tether. What you do affects all of us, so don't do anything I don't tell you. If you don't follow orders or jeopardize the mission, I'll cut you away. Anybody dies, they get left, no matter who."

A doorway so well concealed that none would have suspected its existence opened just in back of the control room. The Chows noted that it was straight power, no locks of any conventional kind, and therefore next to impossible to open from this side. Only the security computer could open and close the doors. Raven had done his homework.

The maintenance tunnel, narrow and dimly lit, was filled with pipes and sealed lines. It was obviously not well traveled. There seemed to be an air lock every fifty meters or so, although none were sealed. A number of times they came to junctions, each with an air lock, and each time Raven made a choice and led them on. As they proceeded, they all began to feel very strange, as if floating in water.

"Keep at least one foot firmly on the ground at all times," Raven warned them.

"There's no gravity at all beyond this point, and there won't be any for some time to come. The boots stick to hard surfaces, but if you have both of them off, you'll go floating. I don't want anybody floating now." He spoke with an implied threat they took perfectly seriously.

Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman in particular were shocked to come around a curve and see the party ahead apparently walking on the side of the wall, but as they followed, it all seemed to straighten up again. There was no up or down here, though, that was clear.

"You mean they don't physically monitor this area at all?" Hawks asked incredulously.

"It ain't as easy as you think," the Crow responded. "They don't have to monitor the tunnels, just specific locks. We're logged in as a maintenance crew. I got it worked out. I think," he added under his breath.

They seemed to walk forever through endless corridors, tunnels, and air locks, but the Crow seemed to know where he was going, and finally they arrived. Two figures awaited them, also space suited. One was very tall and thin, the other much smaller. Next to them was a huge square box that looked as if it weighed a ton, with a broad lens on one side. It was half as large as Raven and solid metal.

"Any problems?" Raven asked Warlock.

"Not anything to mention, but I thought you would never get here. My, this is a horde!" By her tone, she hadn't changed all that much.

"All right, everybody, listen up. I want complete silence now," the Crow announced. "I've got to switch into their security and maintenance system. They can hear us until I say otherwise, so shut up!"

There was a crackle and hiss in the radio, then they heard Raven's voice again, but in a language they did not understand. It was, in fact, a wholly artificial language that had to be taught by special mindprinters and was unique to the security and maintenance divisions of Melchior. It was a final barrier to any escapes.

Now they waited, and suddenly they were aware that all the hissing noise wasn't from the radio. The air lock doors on both sides were shut tight, and now, dimly, they could hear warning bells.

Then the lights went out, and they couldn't hear anything at all. They could still see, but dimly, as the darkness had automatically triggered their helmet lights.

Raven said something again in that odd language and was acknowledged. He waited a bit more, then said several more phrases but got no reply. They heard the static and hissing in their radios, and then he said in English, "All right, they bought it so far, but we're only at the start of this. Now, there's no air in here, and they know that before we can exit either air lock they can run an exit check on us which would show up your pretty tattoos. That's why they aren't too concerned. We, however, aren't going out that way." He detached from the safety line, then went over to the large metal box, grabbed two handles on the rear, and picked it up and held it steady against his chest. There were several gasps.

"That must weigh a ton," Hawks noted.

"Naw. Only a little over five hundred kilos on Earth," Raven responded. "Here it's just a little awkward. It doesn't weigh any more than we do, which is nothing. Now, I want everybody back as close to the air lock as you can and stay there. This thing's real dangerous, and it might take some time."

"What is happening?" the high voice of China asked. "Will someone please tell me what is happening."

"If we knew ourselves, it'd be easier," Hawks responded.

Raven let go of the huge box, and it just remained there, suspended in the air.

He reached in, opened a control panel door, and flipped a number of switches on an illuminated panel. Two triggers suddenly shot out and locked into position from the handholds. He then grasped the box again and pressed both triggers. A brilliant sparkling violet beam sprang from the lens and widened into a circular pattern on the side of the cave wall. The wall itself seemed to catch the same sparkling glow, and then, quite slowly, the circular, sparkling violet began to sink into the rock itself until it was almost out of sight, leaving visible only a glow and the beam from the box. Raven concentrated on keeping the bulky object braced and steady.

He shut it off suddenly. "Whew! Never thought this sucker was that thick. I'm going to have to take this in to finish it. You wait, then Manka will bring you through to me." He walked forward, pushing the box before him, and entered what had seemed to be total blackness. Hawks finally realized what the Crow was doing.

"He's burning a man-sized hole right through solid rock! Right through to-space."

"Of course, you idiot," Manka Warlock snapped. "They keep a couple of those around to widen our smooth things, but they are so rarely used, most people here don't even know they exist. Lazlo Chen knew."

They waited a few more nervous minutes, then Raven's voice came to them.

"Okay, I'm through. Come ahead. Watch that last step, though. It's a fair drop into creation."

Hawks felt pretty nervous, but he wanted to reassure the others, who might not even understand what was going on. "We are going outside, on the outside of this place," he told them. "We are going out into the sky itself."

It was a dark sky and an eerie one, the blackest any of them except Reba Koll, Raven, and Manka Warlock had ever seen. One by one they came to the edge of the new tunnel, then were told simply to step slowly out into nothingness. The movement was against instinct, and both Silent Woman and the Chows balked, but they were pulled by their tethers anyway, out and then up onto the outer surface of Melchior.

Close by, no more than forty meters away, a spaceship was docked against the lone spaceport bay. Raven gave the rock cutter a push, and it sailed off into the void. Then he reconnected himself to the others.

"It's good to be home again," Reba Koll sighed.

"All right, now the hard part begins," Raven told them. "There's no way we can get into the pressurized areas right now, so we have to get in along the aft cargo bay air lock, on the outside of the ship, which isn't being used. It uses a standard combination and has a manual override, as they all do. Stay close."

They moved toward the ship. At one point the blind woman stumbled, actually causing Warlock, Reba Koll, and herself to lose contact with the ground, but Koll was very used to this sort of thing. She twisted like an acrobat and gave the tether a series of jerks that brought all three back down.

"It's all right, China," Warlock said in the kindest tone any of those who'd known her had ever heard her use. "Just follow my directions. I'm right behind you."

Only a small part of the ship actually contacted the asteroid; the rest was off in space at an angle. Raven didn't dare go to the connected area, where there was air and pressure. There was no sound in space, but there sure might be some sound transmitted below through the plates. There was an area in the midsection that was only about three meters from the surface, and he let out a long amount of line, then pushed off, floated to the ship, and anchored himself. Then he started reeling in the others, one by one, as they jumped slightly off the surface, breaking contact with the ground.

Hawks was pleased but very surprised that none of the four women from relatively primitive cultures had panicked or showed signs of madness at this. It was exciting to him, as well as frightening, but he knew at least academically what was involved here, while they did not. He wondered if they were in a state of semishock or whether they had just been so hardened by all the terrors of the past that nothing remained that they didn't simply accept.

The surface of the ship was not the smooth, dull metal it appeared to be from a distance but rather pockmarked and dented and generally showed signs of extreme wear and age. They finally all stood at an angle to the air lock door, with nothing but space around them and the curved ship under them, while Raven twisted a faceplate to reveal a panel. He punched in a combination. After a sudden pause, the air lock door went in a small distance, then slid back.

"Everybody inside," he warned. "And fast. The pilot will know the door's open but on this ship will hopefully ignore it. I still want to be in and ready just in case. We ain't off the rock yet!"

They crowded in, and Warlock punched the codes that closed and sealed the outer door. Raven peered in the porthole-shaped window of the inner door and looked around. "So far, so good. The place is dark, and the indicator reads no atmosphere inside. We ought to be able to just walk right in, unless that damned pilot flagged somebody, in which case we might just have to kill a bunch of people."

He turned the big wheel, and the inner air lock door opened. They stepped one by one into the dark interior of the aft cargo bay, which was mostly empty, although around the whole outer wall were huge depressions and holding devices for standard containers.

"All right, China," Raven said nervously. "I'm switching up to the pilot's frequency. I want you to take control and cover us without anybody knowing until we're routinely away."

"It won't work," she replied. "That used the old codes. Surely my father is back by now and would have changed them."

"Sure he would, but this ship left two days before he came off Leave. I made sure of that. Think I'm a dummy or something? Patch in and do your best. It's the same damned ship you came here in."

There were several gasps. "Chu Li, is that really you?" Chow Dai asked incredulously.

"Chu Li is no more. Song Ching is no more. I am just China Nightingale now, and it is a fitting name in this English we are using. Silence, now. May I ask if Captain Sabatini is back aboard?"

"He is, but it's just him. Don't worry-he got unfroze before he got back to Earth, and he made no report. He didn't even get off the ship, which was why he wasn't mindprinted and checked. If he had, he'd be back here as a prisoner, and he knows it."

"Make the switch."

"Switch in-now!"