"Time to jump?" he demanded.

"Twenty-three seconds optimum." Then the computer added, "Hit, beam, remote station twelve. Field anomalies indicate a temporary reduction of efficiency in Bogey One drives. Probability of Enemy success, three one steady."

Storm smiled. "Good shooting, Ca.s.sius."

Ca.s.sius was too busy to acknowledge the applause. He bent over his master console with the intensity of a virtuoso pianist, totally immersed in his art, webbing Abhoussi with beams of destruction.

Storm turned to his own master, secured it. He had not rattled Abhoussi at all.

He leaned back and watched Ca.s.sius while fighting off visions of Pollyanna being crisped by Abhoussi's weaponry. Hawksblood's man was firing only in self-defense, but might have orders to kill if he could not capture.

The odds against Abhoussi lengthened. Storm fidgeted. He placed little faith in computer a.n.a.lyses. He had beaten their odds when they had been five-to-one against him. The best games machines, with brains cyborged in, could not take into account all the human factors of a battle situation.

"Hit, beam," the computer announced. "Drive anomalies. Bogey One no longer accelerating. Probability of generator damage seven zero plus."

"Catch time," Storm asked. It had been telescoping, but Abhoussi had been hand-over-handing it up the scope.

"Eleven seconds."

Storm smiled. Abhoussi was climbing an ever-steepening slope. One more perfect shot from Ca.s.sius would do it.

Again he paid his chief of staff his due. The man was not just trying for hits, he was sharpshooting Abhoussi's facility for dragging Michael off to neutral s.p.a.ce. And that at a time when he could have eased up and allowed his most hated enemy to perish.

Storm grabbed a mike, called the ingress locks. "Get a boat ready for rescue work. Have it crewed and standing by for astrogational instruction. Is Lucifer there yet?" He cut off before he received a reply. The computer was chattering again.

"Hit, beam. Major drive anomalies. Probability of generator damage nine zero plus. Probability of Enemy success, one three minus."

Storm moved to Traffic. "Contact the cruiser," he told the watchstander.

"Bogey One commencing evasive maneuvering," the computer continued. "Probability that Enemy is attempting to disengage, nine five plus." Abhoussi had accepted defeat.

Establishing the comm link took longer than the action had. Abhoussi was more interested in survival than in chitchat.

When the pale-faced Ship's Commander finally responded, Storm asked, "Can you manage your generators yourselves, Commander? Any casualties you can't handle? I have a rescue boat standing by."

Abhoussi gulped air, replied, "We'll manage, Colonel. We took no casualties."

"All right." Storm blanked off. "Cease firing," he ordered.

The order was unnecessary. Ca.s.sius had secured his gun board.

Was Abhoussi telling the truth? He had the feel of a man who would let his people die the death-without-resurrection before putting them into the hands of an enemy capable of using them against his employer later.

Storm called the ingress locks again. "Cancel the boat alert. We won't need it." Then, "Ca.s.sius, let's go meet Michael. He'll have an interesting story. Might even tell the truth."

"Good show, gentlemen," Ca.s.sius told the watch-standers. "Run a full systems check before you go off duty. See that Supply and Weapons know which mines and missiles to replace." His hard gaze darted from face to face. No one met it.

Storm peered into the shadows. The ravenshrike had concealed itself. It was alert.

"I think we did all right," he told Ca.s.sius as they followed the dogs into an elevator. "It was my kind of battle. n.o.body got hurt."

"They should all be so chesslike."

A shadow moved in the shadows of a corner of Combat. The eyes of Storm's ravenshrike burned as they watched Homer and Benjamin. Homer slipped into the still warm seat before the mines and missiles board. The blind man caressed trigger switches and status boards with his sensitive fingers. He listened for his sporadic psi. He depressed an activation key, paused, tripped a fire switch.

Daggers of flame scarred the deep s.p.a.ce night two light seconds from the Fortress. A swarm of hyper-capable seeker missiles went looking for Commander Abhoussi's cruiser.

The vessel had not traveled far.

Alarms screamed aboard the warship. Automatic weapons responded.

Constellations vanished behind a veil of fire. Abhoussi's engineers seized their only chance. They kicked in the damaged generators. The cruiser twisted away into hypers.p.a.ce, leaving fragments of itself behind. The seekers, unaware of the cruiser's destination, began cutting lazy search patterns over half-light-year quadrants.

Homer's faint and seldom reliable psi touched upon a remote, short-lived scream. He leaned back and smiled at an aghast Benjamin. "It's done."

"Ah, Homer..." Benjamin could not think of anything to say. He could not meet the eyes of the watch-standers.

Their faces were long and grey. Storm was going to cut their hearts out for not stopping this.

The ravenshrike shuddered as it sensed the psionic scream and the pure disgust of the Center watch. It wrapped itself in wings and shadow, closed its eyes, and awaited its master's return.

Fifteen: 3020 AD

Frog's rescue became high drama. Blake's crews reached him only after he had idled down and gone on intravenous and drugs in an extended, deep sleep free of the distress and pain of radiation sickness. He had emptied his oxygen tanks.

His rescuers had to tunnel under his crawler to reach his belly hatch. They found it fouled with splash scale. They stung a heated hose through his tractor skin into his oxy main. A couple of Blake hogs chipped the scale off his hatch. Others sprayed the tunnel walls with a quick-setting epoxy. They scabbed a pumper trunk over the tunnel mouth and flooded it with breathables.

They had to do it the hard way. Near the end, too pained to think straight, Frog had shed his hotsuit again. His stupidity came near costing him his life.

The expenses of the rescue came out of Blake's PR budget. The holonetnews snoops were on the scene, their cameras purring. The head office saw itself picking up a lot of cheap advertising. The name Blake Mining and Metals would get exposure all over Confederation.

Old Frog had gotten more than he had bargained for. He had not impressed just a little girl and the people of his home town. He was a seven-day news wonder Confederation-wide. His adventure was being broadcast live from Edgeward. Taping crews braved the Shadowline to get his rescue recorded for later broadcast.

He would have been amused and disgusted had he known about it. It was not quite the notoriety he had been seeking.

Sixteen: 3031 AD

Mouse hovered on the fringes of Pollyanna's welcome-home party, attracted by the gaiety, repelled by Benjamin and Homer and what they had tried to do. Academy was all grey discipline and the absence of humor. He needed a little singing and dancing. The younger people were doing both, and building some mighty hangovers while they were at it.

Their elders frowned around the party's edges like thunderheads grumbling on grey horizons. Their faces were marked by an uneasiness bordering on dread. They're standing there like brooding guardian idols in some Bronze Age temple They're standing there like brooding guardian idols in some Bronze Age temple, Mouse thought. Like the tongueless crows of doom Like the tongueless crows of doom.

He tried to laugh at his own gloomy perception. His father's moods must be catching.

Storm, Ca.s.sius, and the other old ones had just come from a staff meeting. Mouse had not been permitted to attend. He guessed they had discussed the twins first.

There had been one h.e.l.l of a traffic load through Instel Communications. Hawksblood had, apparently, been consulted. He could not guess what had been decided. Ca.s.sius had had only enough time to whisper the news that the cruiser had survived. Barely.

Then the Vice President for Procurement of Blake Mining and Metals, of Edgeward City on Blackworld, had made a contract presentation.

Mouse could guess the drift. Everyone had come from the meeting damp with apprehension. He could smell their anger and distress. Richard had not been understanding. Blake's man had tried a little arm-twisting.

A squeaky Dee-giggle rippled across the room. Good old Uncle Michael was the life of the party.

His loud, flashy presence was doing nothing for anybody's nerves. Amid the dour, ascetically clad soldiers he was a focus of peac.o.c.k brightness, raucous as a macaw. At the moment he was a clown vainly trying for a laugh from his brother's staff. The sour, sullen, sometimes hateful, sometimes suspicious stares of Storm, Ca.s.sius, and Wulf and Helmut Darksword intimidated him not at all. Storm's sons he ignored completely, except for the occasional puzzled glance at Lucifer or Mouse.

Lucifer was more sour than his father. He moved with a stiff tension that bespoke rage under incomplete control. He watched Michael with deadly eyes. He snapped and snarled, threatening to go off like some unpredictable bomb. He should have been overjoyed to have his wife home.

Mouse's presence was a puzzling anomaly to everyone. He was enjoying their baffled reactions. They knew he was supposed to be at Academy. They knew that even midshipmen who were the sons of men as well-known and respected as Gneaus Storm did not receive leave time without strings being pulled at stratospheric levels. Michael's nervous gaze returned to him again and again.

Dee was sharply observant behind his clown mask. His eyes never stopped roving. And Mouse seldom let his attention stray far from Dee.

Michael was worried.

Mouse sensed his uncle's nervousness. He felt a hundred other emotional eddies. He was enveloped by an oppressive sense of descending fate, as heavy as age itself.

Hatred for Michael Dee. Distrust of the Blake Vice President. Worry about Richard. Benjamin almost obsessive in his dread of what his father would do about his part in the attack on the Hawksblood cruiser. Lucifer, marginally psychotic, confusing his feelings about his wife, his father, Dee, Hawksblood, Benjamin, and distracted by suspicion, jealousy, and self-loathing. Homer...Homer was being Homer.

Mouse wondered if his father was making a mistake by letting Benjamin stew. Ben was not as well-balanced as he liked to pretend. He had nightmares constantly. Now he seemed to be sliding into a daytime obsession with the dream.

Benjamin dreamed about his own death. For years he had laughed the dreams off. The attack on Hawksblood's ship seemed to have made a believer of him. He was running scared.

Mouse glanced at his brother. Benjamin never had taken him in. Ben was nothing but flashy facade. Mouse felt nothing but pity.

The brothers Darksword also had the disease of the moment. They were mad at everybody. Like Storm, they had expected The Broken Wings to be their last campaign. They had expected to live out their lives as gentlemen farmers on a remote, pastoral world far from the cares of the Iron Legion. They were overdue to leave the Fortress already, but ties two centuries deep had proven difficult to break.

Mouse looked at his father.

Storm had been motionless, brooding, for almost an hour. Now he was shaking like a big dog coming out of the water. He skewered the mining executive with a deadly glance. Mouse moved along the wall behind his father, the better to hear.

"We can buy a little time on this thing. Helmut. Wulf. Ca.s.sius."

Michael Dee appeared to lean slightly, to stretch an ear.

Storm said, "Kill the Blackworlder. Neatly. See that the corpse reaches Helga Dee. Without her knowing the source."

The condemned man was too stunned to protest.

"You did say Helga's World was mentioned in those papers Richard said he found, didn't you, Ca.s.sius?"

"Yes."

"And again on Michael's ship." Storm stared down at Michael Dee. One droplet of sweat rolled down Dee's temple. He looked a little pale.

Michael Dee was the financial power behind his daughter Helga, who managed that cold clerical princ.i.p.ality called Festung Todesangst on Helga's World. He and his daughter had just been a.s.signed a potentially embarra.s.sing piece of property.

Mouse stared at his father's back. Not even he could so cold-bloodedly order a death!

"Blow Michael's ship, too," Storm ordered. "Make it look like Abhoussi got close enough for their fields to brush. Have Benjamin and Lucifer take care of it. It's time they paid their dues."

The brothers Darksword seized the executive's arms. They remained impa.s.sive as they marched the Blackworlder to his doom. They might have been two old gentlemen off for an afternoon stroll with a friend.

Mouse's guts twisted into a painful little knot.

Storm turned his back on Dee. He whispered, "Ca.s.sius, just confine him on one of the manned outstations. Officially, he never arrived. Pa.s.s the word."

"This won't buy more than a month," Ca.s.sius replied. "Richard is d.a.m.ned mad. And the Blake outfit is touchy about its people."

Mouse sighed. His father was not a monster after all.

"They'll be realistic. They want us bad. Let's stall and up their ante. I want a seat on their board and a percentage of their take on the Shadowline thing."

"You trying to price us out of the market?"

"I don't think I can. Keep an eye on the twins. We don't need any more of their c.r.a.p."

"Uhn." Ca.s.sius followed the Darkswords and their victim.

Storm departed a moment later. He left his son Thurston, the warhounds, and the ravenshrikes to watch Michael Dee.

His eye narrowed in anger as he brushed by Mouse. He took a hitch-step, as if considering leaving his son with a few choice words about obedience. He changed his mind, resumed his angry stalk. Mouse's failure to return to Academy was the least of his problems.

Mouse sighed. There would be time for the idea to grow on his father. Time for Ca.s.sius to argue his case.

He watched his father leave, frowning. What now? Pollyanna had fled along that corridor a moment ago. Why would his father be following her?

Seventeen: 2844 AD

The old man's name was Jackson, but Deeth had to call him master. He was an outcast even among the descendants of escaped and discarded slaves. He lived in a fetid cave three miles from the animal village. He had parlayed a few sleight-of-hand tricks and a sketchy medical knowledge into a witch-doctor's career. His insane temper and magic were held in awe by his client-victims, who were an utterly mean, degenerate people themselves.

In less than a week Deeth knew that Jackson was a thorough fraud, that he was nothing but a lonely old man enraged by a world he believed had used him ill. His career was an attempt to get back. He was a sad, weak, pathetic creature, incontestably mad, and in his madness was utterly ruthless. Hardly a day pa.s.sed when he did not torture Deeth for some fancied insult.