"Then you should go up there so as to be ready for that occurrence,"

Antoniewicz said, gesturing up toward the computer and the two bodyguards standing watch over the now open access panel. "You've cost me far too much time as it is."

"It'll take another few minutes before I can get started," I told him. "In the meantime, I wanted to give you a warning."

His eyebrows lifted in obvious amus.e.m.e.nt. "Indeed? Something to do with you and the others, no doubt?"

"Not at all," I said. "I wanted to tell you that I've heard rumors that Geneva has folded under Patth pressure and forbidden all Earth citizens and a.s.sociates to give aid to the Icarus,"

"And you think such orders apply to me?" Antoniewicz said, even more amused.

"Not your core people, no," I said. "But a lot of your looser a.s.sociates might get cold feet under that kind of pressure, particularly those quiet government and military contacts you've got who will now have management or senior officers looking over their shoulders. Add to that the Patth reward, which is probably doubling every six hours, and even you might have trouble moving and hiding the Icarus."

"I'm quite aware of the challenges involved," Antoniewicz said. "That was precisely why I came myself, bringing only those most loyal to me." He gave me another of those micrometer smiles. "That's also why I'll be taking the Icarus to one of my private estates when we leave here."

I glanced at Ixil. "I see," I said. "I presume you'll be dropping Ixil and Tera and me off on the way?"

He frowned, another micrometer-level expression. "Who said anything about dropping you off anywhere?"

"That was the deal," I reminded him, frowning in turn. "I would give you Cameron in exchange for Tera."

"Ah, yes," Antoniewicz said. "I forgot." He craned his neck to look at the helm.

"Yodanna?" he called.

"Helm coming up now, Mr. Antoniewicz," one of the techs called back.

"What about the rest of the ship?"

"Checking now, sir, but it looks promising."

Antoniewicz looked back at me. "For such a clever man, McKell, you're amazingly stupid sometimes," he said. "Ms. Cameron is far too useful as insurance for her father's cooperation for me to release her. As for you and your alien, the twoof you are far too dangerous to keep around any longer than necessary." He looked up again. "Yodanna?"

"Yes, sir," the call wafted its way back down to us. "I've got the sequence he used. We can unlock the computer and engine systems ourselves."

Antoniewicz looked back at me. "And I would say that the moment of obsolescence has arrived sooner than expected," he said quietly. "I always offer a man the chance for final words, McKell. Have you any?"

A ripple of breeze brushed past my hair "No last words, Mr. Antoniewicz," I said firmly, standing up straight and closing my eyes. "Go ahead and shoot."

Even with my eyes closed, it was like a strobe light had gone off in my face.

A.

multiple strobe light, a dozen flickering bursts of light like the prophet Elijah calling fire down from heaven. I heard a gasp from somewhere beside me, a startled reflexive scream from Tera, an equally startled curse from Brother John.

And then, silence. Cautiously, wary of another round of flashes, I eased open my eyes.

Antoniewicz was standing rigidly exactly where I'd left him, his face utterly expressionless. Everett had turned completely white. Brother John's face was white, too, his expression that of a man walking through a graveyard in the dead of night.

Which was, I decided as I looked around, an extremely apt a.n.a.logy. All around us, this most loyal group of Antoniewicz's bodyguards were sprawled on the deck where they'd stood, their weapons for the most part still clutched in rigid hands, the tops of their heads smoking with the nose-curling stink of burnt hair and skin and bone. Fire from heaven, indeed.

From Tera's direction came a sudden choked gasp-apparently, her vision was just now clearing up from the aftereffects of that multiple stutter of laser fire.

"It's all right, Tera," I a.s.sured her quickly, crossing to her side. "Just relax. It's all over."

"But-" She broke off, looking back over her shoulder at the entrance to the wraparound "Not there," I told her, pointing above us. "There."

Even having known what to expect, I had to admit the sight was something to behold. There were twelve of them grouped together in a tight knot in the center of the sphere, starting now to drift off in various directions toward the hull under the influence of the alien grav field. Their squashed-iguana faces were only partly visible through their helmet faceplates, the body-armored ferrets crouching on their broad shoulders adding a surrealistic touch of the ridiculous to the scene.

But there was nothing either surrealistic or ridiculous about the heavy military combat lasers in their hands, or in the steady professional grip with which they pointed them at Antoniewicz, Brother John, Everett, and the three techs.

"They're Royal Kalixiri commandos," I said into the stunned silence, just in case my audience was too shy to ask the question themselves. "Loaned to us by the one government in the Spiral that no longer has anything to lose bydefying the Patth."

Tera was still staring up at them. "But-you said-where's my father?"

"He's safe," I told her. "The Icarus isn't a stardrive, you see. It's a stargate, connected to a duplicate somewhere h.e.l.l and away across the galaxy.

Your father accidentally triggered it and got bounced to the other end."

"The other end has Kalixiri in it?" Everett demanded, his voice distant and confused.

"Hardly," I said. "Or rather, it didn't until a couple of hours ago. The Kalixiri were waiting here when we landed, hidden down in the trees-that's the main reason I insisted on parking the ship so close in under the branches.

Once it was dark, and once I'd chased Everett out and put on the hatchway floodlights so that the glare would mask their movements, they used a collapsible ladder and the latch grooves on the starboard side to climb onto the engine section, go in through that dorsal hatch, and from there into the small sphere and down the rabbit hole to where your father was waiting."

"So then... Pix?"

"Actually, I worked rather hard to maneuver Mr. Antoniewicz into insisting that Pix go in instead of me," I said, looking at Antoniewicz. The dead look had been replaced now by a clear and violent l.u.s.t for death. My death. But then the Kalixiri were landing on the deck around him, and the commandos and armor and heavy lasers were between him and the rest of us, and he'd lost his chance forever. "When Pix went across, he took with him his visual memories of the number, weapon-status, and approximate placement of the men they'd have to take down. Popping in from nowhere, and in the last place anyone would expect an attack to come from, the whole thing was almost literally a duck shoot. The only real question was whether they'd get here before Antoniewicz decided I wasn't useful anymore and had me shot."

I looked at one of the commandos as he walked toward me, an empty spot on his shoulder showing where Pix had been sitting. Pix himself, I noted, was already settling onto Ixil's shoulder. "Speaking of being in time, Commander, what's the status of the lodge?"

"It has been taken," he said, his voice flavored with a thick regional accent.

"I have only now been so informed."

"What are you talking about?" Brother John demanded. "You said-"

"Well, they didn't all go down the rabbit hole," I explained apologetically.

"A.

second group was hidden somewhere in or near the lodge to take care of anyone you'd left outside the ship. Once the commander learned from Pix's memories that Nicabar and the others were being held hostage there, he knew to call in the details to the reserve troops as soon as they popped in here."

Tera looked at Brother John, then back to me. "But I thought you worked for these people," she protested. "You said you owed them a half-million commarks."

"So I did," I acknowledged. "And so I do. But you see, I was working for someone else long before Brother Johnston Scotto Ryland came out of the woodwork andsmilingly mortgaged my soul. For that matter, long before I even ran up the debt that attracted him to me in the first place."

And then, finally, she got it. "You mean-?"

"Yes," I said, straightening up into an almost-forgotten military attention. I had my pride, too... and it had been a long time since I'd been able to say this to anyone at all. "I'm Major Jordan McKell, EarthGuard Military Intelligence, detached on Special Covert Branch duty. May I also introduce my boss: Colonel Ixil T'adee, Kalixiri Special Command for Drug Enforcement. Our job these past twelve years has been to work our way inside the Spiral's worst drug and gunrunning organizations and try to bring them down."

I turned to Antoniewicz. "And as I said before, Mr. Antoniewicz," I added quietly, "I'm very pleased to meet you. Badgemen all over the Spiral have been waiting a long time for you to come out of your hole so that you could finally be arrested. I'm honored you chose to do it for me."

CHAPTER 25.

IT WAS NOT exactly what you would call a cheerful group that was gathered around the table in the lodge dining room a little after dawn the next morning, but it beat to h.e.l.l the atmosphere that had been there the last time around. Partly it was the smaller and more intimate nature of the a.s.semblage, with Shawn and Chort off somewhere being debriefed, Ixil directing the group looking over the Icarus, and Antoniewicz and his a.s.sorted plug-uglies long gone under heavy Kalixiri guard. The fact that Cameron had had time for a shower probably helped a lot, too.

"I hope you know how close you came to getting your neck broken last time we were in here," Nicabar commented, picking carefully at the Kalixiri military delicacies the occupation troops had whipped up. It was a far cry from Chort's gourmet Craean stew, but the taste was adequate and it was certainly filling enough. "When you turned that plasmic on me I figured all that talk about Everett was just you stalling while you waited for your pals to arrive."

"You'd never have made it even halfway to my neck," I told him. "Antoniewicz's thugs would have cut you down in a heartbeat if you'd tried anything.

Including going for your gun, incidentally, which is why I drew on you in the first place."

He snorted gently. "I thought I was being reasonably subtle about it."

"You were," I agreed. "But I haven't spent twelve years in Intelligence work without knowing what a surrept.i.tious grab for a weapon looks like. Give me some credit."

"Personally, I give you a great deal of credit," Cameron commented around a mouthful of food. Alone of the four of us, he was already on his second helping.

"You had me fooled all the way down the line, from Meima to our little chat at the other end of the star-bunny trail, right up to the moment those Kalixiri commandos popped in and nearly gave me a heart attack."

"Sorry about that," I apologized. "Though I did wonder after our talk at the edge of forever whether you'd finally figured me out."

"I knew you weren't as simple as you seemed," he said, shaking his head. "Butbeyond that I didn't have a clue."

"You might have told him," Tera said, a touch of reflexive accusation in her voice. "He certainly wasn't going to tell anyone in there."

"But he would be coming out sometime," I reminded her. "And I didn't yet know what the circ.u.mstances of that homecoming were going to be."

"And it's infinitely safer in this sort of game if no one has had even a peek at your cards," Cameron said, rising to my defense. "Sir Arthur explained all of that in his message."

"What message?" Tera asked.

"A note from my boss," I explained. "Retired-sort of-General Arthur Sir Graym-Barker, former Intelligence Level Two Overseer and the Earthside director of this quiet little combined-services unit Ixil and I have been involved with all these years. The commando team brought it through the stargate with them so that your father would know what was going on."

"Unlike the rest of us," Nicabar said pointedly. "So what was that fluff you spun to Tera about having been kicked out of EarthGuard?"

"Not a single bit of fluff to it," I a.s.sured him. "The court-martial was completely and totally official. It had to be-I was trying to worm my way into the center of the Spiral's underworld, and everything in my record had to stand up to the kind of scrutiny we knew it would be getting someday. The time I spent with Customs and Rolvaag Brothers Shipping was more of the same window dressing, with the added value of giving me practical training in the sorts of things a soon-to-be smuggler needs to know. When I was finally ready, they gave me the Stormy Banks and instructions to pile up a mountain of debts and turned me loose."

"And that was when you met Ixil?" Nicabar asked.

"Actually, Ixil and I go back all the way to my EarthGuard days," I said. "In fact, he was the one who spotted me while trolling for prospective recruits and suggested to Uncl-I mean, Sir Arthur-that I be invited in. He spent my training years building up his own sordid background, so that when we publicly linked up we were about as sorry a pair of misfits as you could ever hope to meet."

"And you already knew this General Graym-Barker?" Tera asked, looking at her father.

"I met him about fifteen years ago, when we were developing an advanced targeting-system countermeasure for military stealthers," Cameron said. He made a face at me. "Of course, I thought he really was retired now or I never would have contacted him in the first place. The last thing I wanted was for the leaky bureaucratic sieve at Geneva to get hold of any of this."

"So that's why you were on Meima when this whole thing started," Tera said, turning back to me. "You never did answer that question."

I nodded. "Sir Arthur told us your father was in some kind of trouble on Meima during one of my check-ins and asked us to swing over and a.s.sess the situation.

I'd been wandering around the local tavernos for nearly four hours looking for him when we finally ran into each other."

I looked at Cameron. "Interestingly enough, he even said that, depending onhow serious the danger you were in, I was authorized to do whatever was necessary to protect you, up to and including blowing my cover if there was no other way.

Shows you just how highly you're considered up there in the corridors of power."

"I'm honored," Cameron murmured. "That's rather amusing, really, considering that I was prepared in turn to tell whoever he sent everything about the Icarus if there was no other way to secure his help."

"Just as well you didn't," I said. "You start showing your cards to someone and you never know if someone else is looking over your shoulder."

"As opposed to just dropping the cards faceup on the table," Nicabar commented dryly. "I thought Tera was going to have a stroke when you announced in front of everyone who she really was."

"I presume you've figured out why I did that?" I asked.

He nodded. "It took me a while, but eventually I got it."

"Well, I haven't," Tera said, frowning at me. "I a.s.sumed you were just tired.

Or suddenly gone senile."

"Tired, yes; senile, possibly," I said. "But not on that account. Remember, I'd already checked the Icarus and knew the Kalixiri were aboard and the trap there was set. What I didn't know was what kind of contingency plan they had for anyone left behind in the lodge, whether they'd be able to move quickly enough to get you out. I made sure that Everett knew who you were so that you'd be brought back to the ship with us. You were in no danger from Antoniewicz-as he'd already explained, you were far too valuable to simply shoot out of hand.

Whether or not the commandos arrived in time to save me, they would certainly be in time to save you."

There was a flicker of movement across the room, and I looked up to see Ixil step in through the wooden archway. "Ah, there you are," he said as he came toward our table. "Not sitting with your back to the door this time, I see."

"Don't be snide," I reproved him with an air of injured pride. "You know perfectly well I just didn't want my gun pointed anywhere near Brother John and his goons when they burst in on us. Any news?"

"All sorts of news," he said, pulling up a chair and sniffing appreciatively at the food. Pix and Pax weren't nearly so reticent; they bounded straight off his shoulders and headed for the serving plate. "The pilot tried to scramble the preliminary helm setting he'd been coding in, but we were able to reconstruct it. The combined force landed twenty minutes ago inside Antoniewicz's estate.

They report it's been secured."

"Combined, eh?" I commented approvingly as Nicabar spooned some of the Kalixiri food onto his plate for the two ferrets. "I take it that means Sir Arthur was able to get Geneva to loosen up and send some human troops to a.s.sist."

"I believe he convinced them this operation had nothing to do with the Icarus and the Patth ultimatum," Ixil said. "Which is not entirely untrue."

"Not entirely at all," I agreed. "I hope they're being careful-Antoniewicz isbound to have a few b.o.o.by traps set up for unexpected visitors."

"I'm sure they are." Ixil looked over at Cameron. "The other news you may be interested in is that there was a bit of confusion off Trondariok about two hours ago. A ship identified as the renegade freighter Icarus barely escaped from a group of three customs cruisers."

Cameron threw a startled look at Tera. "The Icarus? Was seen where?"