She felt a muscle in her side pull sharply, and then her foot encountered the rack and sent it spinning around while wire whisks fell off to one side and the small knife flew off in the other.

Despairing, she watched the knife hit a wall, drop to the floor, and then, miracle of miracles, come spinning across the floor to a point not too far from the pole.

With a gasp she pulled her hands down the pole once more and stretched out a foot to the knife.

With some effort she managed to draw the knife closer. Then she bent her head down to the floor and seized the knife's wooden handle in her teeth. Holding it clamped between her jaws she sawed back and forth on the string binding her wrists. It was rough, imprecise work, and she cut herself twice before the first string finally parted.

A minute later they were all gone and she was free.

Clutching the knife, determined not to be taken prisoner again, she stalked to the scullery door.

Across the yard was the cow shed. All was silent there. to the left was the barn and beyond it the stables. To the right was a brick wall with an empty gate.

Without more ado she slipped out the door and ran to the gate. Ahead was the rough road that ran down to the village.

From that direction she heard shouts, and in a moment she glimpsed a group of figures approaching.

To the right was the front garden of the farmhouse, with a long lawn and a line of stately old elms.

To the left was the vegetable garden, also exposed to the view of the men running up the lane.

She turned back and ran into the courtyard once again. Where to hide? The cow shed was out of the question, as was the house.

A small door was open, leading into a coal hole. Here she crouched, peering through a crack in the door as a mob of villagers, armed with pitchforks, machetes, and the odd gun, entered the yard.

Seeing no "demons" in plain sight, these men were immediately emboldened to open the door to the cow shed.

The doors slid back on their rollers.

The men surged in with their weapons brandished and found the place empty, or almost. The calving machine still hulked in the center, surrounded by benches and equipment. The machine's innards, however, had been removed and lay over the bench.

Beside the calving machine's hulk they found poor Ewane, or what Ewane had become. The man was crouched over in a fetal position, while a layer of pink slime was hardening around him like the outer layer of a cocoon.

Some of the men tried to shake Ewane awake, but to no avail.

He was either dead or in a trance.

And then with shocking suddeness a bizarre creature dropped upon them from the ceiling. Dark gray in color with pink streaks and a beard of green polyps that matted its chest region and hung beneath the jaw, it had two humanlike legs and a number of long narrow tentacles that were white with brown tips.

But it was the face that most appalled the men, for it was that of Count Geezl Karvur, distorted, transformed, but still recognizable.

This was the one fact that the survivors were all able to agree upon.

Events moved swiftly. The thing struck at the men with the hardened tips of tentacles that stabbed flesh as effectively as spears. Its movements were as quick as those of machines.

In horrified fury men struck back with everything they had. They died in the effort. Blood spattered the walls and drenched the floor. Screams and shots echoed maddeningly. The thing was hard to hit; it moved too fast.

Men were eviscerated, beheaded, amputated of one or more limbs in a frenzied struggle that lasted less than half a minute.

Then Grike the Strong, a burly peasant, got his pitchfork well into the shining gray side of the thing.

It gave a peculiar hiss and knocked him headlong with a convulsive lash from one of its lower limbs.

But now Janodo of the Gate hit it with a shotgun blast at close range, right in the center of the chest where the green polyps were thick; blood and fragments spattered the floor.

The men stepped back, expecting the thing to fall dead on the spot.

Instead it seized Janodo with another loud hiss and bounded out of the cow shed doors.

Once free of the shed it hurled Janodo away while taking possession of his gun, which it cranked into use and began discharging into the crowd of peasants thronging the gate.

They scattered with shouts and screams.

Then, with a curious skittering stride, the thing ran across the courtyard and crashed through a window into the main house. Screams came from within.

Meanwhile the surviving men from the cow shed had reappeared, howling with rage and fear.

There were bodies everywhere; the creature had taken a terrible toll.

By a miracle, Janodo himself had survived being thrown against the wail of the cow shed. He staggered onto his feet, white-faced.

The men were in a wild state. None who had seen the thing in action would ever forget it. It moved too fast for human beings.

They blamed the count, of course, in loud and terrible voices, and they trembled, for they did not want to die.

But their fear was balanced for the moment by a fierce rage on behalf of their fallen comrades.

"It's in the house!" someone yelled, and they ran across the yard in pursuit. Janodo was left, still staggering.

Inside the house they found a trail of devastation, and a dead housemaid who had foolishly barred the creatur's passage into the parlor and been gunned down.

It had exited through the window of the parlor. From there it had run across the lawn, staggering a little now from its wounds, and disappeared in the shrubbery on the far side.

Caroline Reese had seen the thing emerge from the cow shed carrying poor Janodo. She had seen it toss him aside and concentrate on the shotgun. Sensors like flowers pointed in many directions from the "head" region. It worked the gun mechanism just once before it began shooting into the crowd.

With horrified eyes she'd then watched it spring across the yard and into the scullery door. She'd heard its progress through the house, the shot that killed the housemaid, and a distant crash as it burst through a window and made its escape.

Now the peasants stormed around the house in a rage; one man kept firing his hunting rifle into the air and cursing in the Patash-Do vernacular called Quoink.

Caroline shrank back into the coal hole and nestled down among some large logs that were seasoning there. In their excited state the peasants were dangerous to any strange face. Caroline had no desire to be seen.

Eventually the sound of the peasants died away as they returned to the village carrying the bodies of the fallen. The farmhouse and the yard were quiet.

The village chapel began tolling its bell.

When Caroline peeked out once more it was dusk; there were few sounds other than the soughing of the wind through the trees and the bell in the near distance. She ran to the gate and then went quickly down the lane past the vegetable garden and emerged behind the landing pad for Karvur's lovely old Baschlit VTOL.

Unfortunately the Baschlit was locked and wouldn't open itself for anyone but the count.

Undaunted, she turned and ran on down the lane to the work shed. There were several vehicles parked there. She found a four-seat, bigwheel ATV, a Loughlin with a 500cc hydro burner and eleven hundred kilometers in the fuel tank. It seemed the best choice available. To get it started she resorted to the manual start button, and it responded at once. From the speedometer scale the machine was clearly designed for highway driving as well as rough terrain.

Once she had it going, she drove it out of the work-shed yard and into a lane that fed into the main road connecting Karvur Farm and village to the highway down below the Yellowfork.

The road was in bad condition, and even with the ATVS jumbo tires she was slowed, working her way through a series of wallows where everything degenerated into mud two or three feet deep.

By then she was well beyond Karvur Farm and passing through the extensive scrub of panuki and hackbush that was about all that could prosper on these tropical moorlands.

She stopped for a moment and rolled down the window to listen for the sound of pursuit.

There was nothing to hear but the hot breeze playing through the small patches of terrestrial acacia trees that dotted the landscape.

She shuddered.

What the hell had she seen back there?

What could it have been?

And pounding in her thoughts was the name "Saskatch" and a world destroyed.

What was she going to do?

She clenched her fists in her anguish. There was no way she could hope to emerge from this unscathed.

ITAA prison loomed ahead.

But she knew she had to tell someone. The question was who? The ITAA Military, of course. They were based in the capital city of Patash-Do, to the south.

A quick check of the ATV'S computer showed that the northsouth highway that lay beyond the Yellowfork River would take her to a junction with the Nacional Highway, which went all the way to the capital, a distance of about 800 kilometers.

She got the ATV back into motion and rolled south to the river.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

COLONEL CHANG GLANCED AT THE LATEST LEAFLET FROM THE Committee for the Preservation of Society. There was a picture of her, taken at a recent official ceremony with the mayor of Doisy-Dyan.

The caption was hard to swallow.

"Does the Mayor know that Chang is a slimy lib-symp?" it said in big letters, and went on into a reprint of a short article that condemned her violently for her attack on Regulators in the Skullas Hills. She was credited with personally shooting five men, execution-style, with their hands tied behind their backs. The writer, the pseudonymous Pere Noir, went on to call for her assassination by any willing patriot of the great state of Patash-Do.

"Very helpful," she groaned. "I mean, really." She tossed it aside.

Troubles were thick enough on the ground without the intrusion of these crazies. It was bad enough working under a constant Taklish Security screen, but now she had to sleep someplace different every night and she was worned about her office security. She moved it twice in one day.

Meanwhile, Captain Blake bad disappeared into the bush in Luc Province, in pursuit of some slavers who'd been raiding villages for children. He was keeping radio silence to mask his approach on the slavers' headquarters at a fork in the Kaster River.

How long he planned to stay out of touch was unknown. Since the disaster in the Skullas Blake had barely spoken to her.

Luisa felt a gush of appalling hopelessness. A self-punitive voice rang in her head. She should never have gone on that mission into the Skullas. But five years behind a desk had made her so damned eager to get out in the field again she'd indulged herself.

It was the damned memories, that was all. They'd set the trap for her. Those brilliant, terrifying weeks on Kursk, they had been the most intoxicating days of her life. She wanted that thrill again, the upside of war.

And the biological clock was running against her; she'd lost five years at Cluster Command; it was now or never, she knew.

Damned fools are usually dead fools soon enough, she remembered the voice of an instructor somewhere, probably ITAA Star Academy at Scopus Minor. Luisa shrugged; she just had to go on, despite all this.

There was a knock at the door. Jean Povet was there with more bad news; Luisa could see it at once in her face.

"I thought you'd want to see this immediately," Povet said, putting a note on her desk.

Luisa read the first paragraph and felt her blood run cold. "The auditing software is shot, then?"

"Completely corrupted, it would seem."

"And the resident Al here at the base has no idea what's going on?"

"That too seems pretty likely."

"Incredible, in-fucking-credible!" Luisa banged on her desktop.

"The audits for the last six years are suspect, at least. It may be more than six years, we obviously can't tell yet."

"Who controls the keyware to this software sector?"

"As far as I can tell that's been in the hands of Captain Cachester for the last few years."

Cachester himself! "Of course," she murmured, "who else."

Luisa told the Strand to get Captain Cachester on line. As usual he resisted picking up her call. She felt her pulse pound in her temples as her anger rose. She stabbed the priority override code in and broke into his current call.

He was startled. He bad been talking to Pilar, the new bargirl at Domini's, and suddenly Pilar was gone and in her place was the harsh, flat face of Colonel Chang.

"What's the meaning of this?" he began, but she interrupted.

"Captain Cachester, I understand that you have the keycodes used with the base auditing software, is that correct."

His face hardened.

"Is that correct, Captain?" she snapped.

"In a manner of speaking, uh, yes."

"What are you talking about, Captain Cachester?"