She pushed open the hatch and slid out into a world of wind and water.

Karvur was at the rear, the ramp was down, and he had activated the robot loader, which was inching down the ramp with the calving machine gripped tight on its lower platform. The calving machine, an artificial womb, was a cubical tank slightly less than a meter in width, with supporting machinery clustered around the base.

The servants bustled around Karvur, irritating him with their desire to help until he drove them away with orders to run hot baths and put out hot food.

Then, walking beside the loader, he headed for the cow shed.

Caroline stumbled along behind, although in reality she was so exhausted she would much rather have headed for the warm kitchen inside the rambling farmhouse.

The cow shed was cold and empty. Harsh light from a set of fluoros in the ceiling revealed damp rime crusts on the ancient flagstones. The separate pens were made of steel, worn from centuries, even millennia, of use.

Set up at one end, with a protective screen, was a large wooden table. Power leads had been laid out across the table. A portable computer and other devices were set up nearby.

Now the loader set the calving machine on the table and backed away. Karvur dragged the leads across and began connecting them.

Caroline checked the machine; its screen image was still tight and sharp. Inside the artificial womb, the alien thing continued to float, little more than a blob of jelly the size of a big yam.

Occasionally its tentacles stirred in the gel.

Caroline recalled the gurgling sound and the odd stink when they'd broken into the alien machine and then poured the contents into this calving device. They'd had to do it to remove the alien from the interior of the ship or whatever it was that Karvur had exposed beneath the rocks. Even the calving machine had been a tight fit in some of the tunnels near the surface.

"Everything's working properly," she said.

Karvur attached the power cable and opened the connection. Then he disconnected the battery.

The machine checked itself and reported no faults.

"The batteries worked, then," Karvur muttered. "Thank the ancestors for that, eh?"

"They were that old?"

He laughed. "Everything I own is old. This farm has stood here since before the days of the laowon."

"So you have said."

"What does the device say?" Karvur said.

"Temperature is the same; the creature continues to breathe, albeit very slowly."

"Good, then tomorrow we shall start our attempts to revive it!"

"Mr. Karvur, I would prefer to run some tests on this thing before we do that. As I told you, I think we should conduct a microbiological assay before we attempt anything as violent as a resurrection of this thing."

"Bah, you were against trying to move it in the first place."

"Indeed I was, and we still don't know what effect that might have."

"Look at it! It still lives, it twitches in the jelly and it breathes. When we awaken it we will learn much and we will profit!"

Once again Caroline heard that crazed tinge to the man's voice. It made her wish she was far away, back in her apartment at the university in CKC. There was no getting away from it, she just didn't feel safe out here beyond the boundaries of civilization.

"Come." Karvur was motioning to her. "There will be hot soup and bread waiting for us, and then we can bathe. I'm sure you're ready for a hot bath."

He was right on that point.

They ducked out into the rain and strode across the yard to a heavy wooden door. It opened at Karvur's touch and let them into a narrow, brick-floored hallway redolent of kitchen odors and the warmth of a mighty stove.

CHAPTER SIX.

At FIVE MINUTES PAST EIGHT THE PATROL LIFTED AWAY FROM the ITAA base at Doisy-Dyan. Less than an hour later they slipped in at treetop height to the fringes of the Skullas Hills.

Captain Blake ordered the VTOLs down in a grove of panumpey trees that bulked, black and swollen, on the slopes of a ridge of pale stone that was effectively the last outcrop of the hills.

Luisa Chang climbed out to join the six-man patrol. She wore a bush suit with attenuators and a wide-brimmed bat. She was carrying a Lessingham 9mm side arm, a gun she'd favored for many years.

The VTOLs took off on low thrust to minimize the noise and pulled out of the area, fast.

The patrol formed up in two lines twenty meters apart. Chang was the back door on the right-hand line, directly behind Blake.

A squat, heavily built man named Jun was the point. The other line was led by Corporal Cormondwyke, a slim fellow with very pale skin.

The little panumpey trees clutched the bare rock with roots like the fingers of ogres. Further up the ridge the soil grew even less fertile and just the occasional clump of dry grass broke the rocky surface.

As they advanced they passed the remains of some ancient, long-abandoned farm machine, a rusting monster of ribs and dead wheels.

"This land up here was ruined fifty years ago," Blake commented. "They stripped the soil by overfarming."

"What happened after that?" Chang said.

"A ten-year-long civil war that took thirty thousand lives.

The hatreds it left behind keep a lot of feuds going in the hills."

Eventually the bare rock grew hot from the sun. The attenuators helped some but Luisa was soon sweating. Get used to it, she told herself grimly, and kept her place, head up, ears cocked for anything behind them. Besides, it was a beautiful day, with a clear sky and wide views all around them. This was it, back on field duty, at last!

They halted at the highest point. Chang flipped up the map screen on her wrist unit. The ridge showed as a red snake, pink downslopes on either side, a green line for the River Shabbulus beyond those and further pink upslopes after that.

From the ridgeline they could see far and wide across the valley of the Shabbulus. They stayed low, to give no profile to distant observers, while they examined the terrain.

Chang noted the river's sweep and the maze of small fields that turned the bottomlands into a patchwork of greens and browns. Smoke from distant villages hung in columns in the still air. Farther away the Skullas bulked up in gray masses streaked with green.

"What's the plan, Captain?" Chang said.

Blake pointed to a notch in the side of the ridge a short distance to the north of their position. "We'll take the grotto trail down to the valley floor. We suspect the Regulators will be in Hubu village this morning. Hubu has been blamed for a number of recent liberations. If we can catch them in the act we can impose ITAA emergency rules of justice."

"You'll arrest them?"

"We'll arrest the survivors."

Chang's eyebrows rose. "We will avoid the unnecessary taking of life. I won't stand for anything else, you understand that, Captain?"

Blake spat before growling, "None of these men deserve to live, all are murderers many times over."

"That may be, but we are not judge and jury."

"Yeah, I know. You want us to arrest them, well, we'll try."

"You have enough troops for this?" she said.

Blake nodded imperturbably. "We have good intelligence this time and we made sure that no Fleet officer knew where we were going."

Chang nodded, unsurprised. If Blake was MI, he would know the background on her mission. He would know that the Fleet command under Admiral Heidheim was under investigation for corruption and that literally hundreds of officers were involved.

"So, for instance, Captain Cachester has no idea about this patrol?"

Blake grunted as if amused. "I have found that it is unwise to share intelligence with Captain Cachester.

Shortly after any such sharing the source of the intelligence is detected and disappeared."

"That's a powerful accusation, Captain."

Blake shrugged, turned his binox down on the woods.

Chang looked across to the hills; hawks were flying in the clear air above the slopes. Peasants were at work in the distant fields, tilling the landlord's ground for their tithes.

Blake ordered Cormondwyke to take his line forward, and the whole patrol moved off to the north, behind the ridgeline, through more groves of panumpey trees.

In time they reached the grotto, a steep-walled canyon cut by a spring-fed stream.

Blake released a small floater from his pack. To the untrained eye the little robot was a sparrow, Passer terrestris, an ITAA created breed that was successful on many worlds.

Upon release it flew off down the narrow canyon. Soon it was sending back video data from the cameras imbedded in its head.

"Let's go," said Blake.

The grotto was a steep-walled gorge, where the stream had cut down through blue limestone to form pots and caves and cubbies.

Soon after they began the descent through this gorge, Chang began to notice the bones. First a scattering of skulls, placed in niches. Then femurs and ulnas, ribs and pelvises, both whole and in fragments.

Farther down they formed piles, five feet deep, like scree along the walls of the grotto. Some were scattered loose, in fragments, eye sockets, hips, like autumn leaves over the rocks.

"What the hell is this?" she said to Blake.

"The grotto of skulls. You didn't know?"

"Laowon skulls?"

"Correct. This was a place of slaughter during the Days of Rage."

"So.. ." she mused. "At the end of the Starhammer War, I remember now, in one of the briefings."

"There were four million laowon here then; by the time the laowon fleet could lift them off there were only a hundred thousand left." Wexel, a planet infamous for slaughter.

On they went, stepping quickly down the natural ramps of rock, surrounded by the pitiful remains of slaughtered laowon from long ago.

"Why haven't these bones been buried? And why haven't they turned to dust?" Chang wondered aloud.

"The local people took pains to preserve the bones. It was a tourist attraction for centuries afterwards."

Blake paused to scan the video from the floater. "Lately, though, it's been forgotten. So much liberating going on in the Skullas the tourists would be fools to come."

A tourist attraction?

To Luisa's ears the stream's cheerful babbling seemed madly out of place. This canyon should be haunted by screams.

On they went for two miles, and the rifts of bones and skull fragments grew deeper if anything.

Then at the bottom there was a change. Among the laowon bones were fresher skeletons, human ones this time. Finally, there were bodies, sometimes headless. In various states of decomposition.

Chang looked to Blake.

"The Grotto of Skulls is still in use." He gestured to the bodies. "These were all killed by Regulators, working for the local landowners."

"They were suspected of liberating?"

"Some were probably Liberators, but mostly these were just the unlucky who fell foul of somebody powerful."

Chang gestured to the bodies. "Why do so many risk liberating?"

"It is hard to feed families on the produce from a one-acre potato patch. Taxes are so high now that peasants lose almost all their income. Ninety percent in this region recently. So Liberators steal whatever they can. Often it makes the difference between survival and death by starvation."

"And the owners, do they live in fear?"

Blake had that bitter smile again. "Not on your life. Few of them ever visit the Shabbulus valley as long as they get their monthly checks. The Regulators run things for them."

"No legal protections, then."

"None whatsoever."

At length they left the ghastly grotto behind and entered the Malaki woods, which were made up of groves of scrubby oak and white ash growing on fairly level ground that tilted downward slightly toward the Shabbulus.

"This is the property of the Marquma family. They used to keep a palace here, but it fell into ruins long ago."