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IN TRANSIT:
TELLICHERY TO TBLISI

"That's funny," said Yeoman Etcherly. She spoke loudly enough that Bruns, the Second Officer (Ship Side), would hear across the electronic hum of the bridge though she didn't call to him directly.

Bruns stretched. There were only three of them in the large room at present: Bruns; his helmsman Donaldson; and Etcherly, the navigating technician. That was the normal complement of the starliner's bridge while under way, though Captain Kanawa would inspect at least once during the watch.

While the Empress of Earth was between destinations, she dipped at regular intervals from sponge space back into the sidereal universe. The vessel's artificial intelligence compared a blink of a wedge of the visible stars against that synthesized from the data base as existing at that point in space. If the two star charts varied, the AI adjusted the attitude and burn of the fusion engines for the next sponge space insertion. For the human bridge crew, the process was as boring as rereading a telephone directory.

The engines themselves could not be insulated from the series of sponge-space bubbles as the interior of the Empress was. Their thrust had to be delivered in sponge space, using the varied constants of those other universes in order to multiply the vessel's movements against the sidereal universe.

The men who serviced the engines could work only in the sidereal universe, but they had to remain on the hull throughout their watch. Sending them in and out at each extraction would have multiplied the vessel's transit time. For those men, the Cold Crews, the navigational extractions provided brief minutes of normalcy—albeit hard vacuum and hard work—to punctuate the in-pressing madness of universes to which mankind and life itself were alien.

"Oh, all right, Etcherly," Bruns said. Mid-watch boredom made him lethargic, unwilling to look at anything new even though he had nothing better—indeed, nothing at all—to do. "What is it that you've got?"

Etcherly murmured a command. Her console echoed its data onto Bruns's. She was projecting the chart of the most recent navigation check. "It's just . . ." she said. "There's an anomaly. In the upper right quadrant—"

A red carat on the display noted the point of light—one of literally hundreds of thousands at this degree of detail.

Before responding, Bruns ran the chart—the realtime display—against the computed synthesis of what the chart should have looked like. Red carats lit all across the display. When the Second Officer corrected for navigationally significant levels of accuracy—10"—the carats disappeared.

Except for the one Etcherly had noted.

Bruns shrugged. "Right," he said. "It's an anomaly. One bit of space junk that's too small to be entered in the data base. It's a big universe, Etcherly, but it's not so big that we're going to have it completely to ourselves every time we come out of sponge space."

Donaldson, the helmsman, didn't move while Bruns and the navigating tech were speaking. His eyes were open, but Bruns sometimes had the impression that the helmsman was capable of sending his soul light years away until recalled by an unexpected requirement or the end of his watch.

"Yessir," said Etcherly, "but see—"

The displays, hers and Bruns' together, flickered through the whole run of navigational checks since the watch began three hours previously. The star charts differed wildly from one to the next. Not only were the glimpses separated by great distances, but also the shortest transit through bubbles of sponge space traced a path in no particular order through the sidereal universe. The only constant in the varying stellar panoramas was the anomaly carated in the upper right-hand quadrant.

"Oh," said Bruns. "That's odd."

He rubbed his lips with the knuckles of his right hand. "It's either a problem with the sensors, or a problem with the data base. Frankly, neither one thrills me."

"Bridge says the hardware's okay," Etcherly said. "It says the software's okay, too, but I guess it would. I mean, if there's a problem, it's a problem with Bridge, isn't it?"

Officer and technician stared at one another. The red marks on their displays pulsed softly in unison.

"It's a ship," said Donaldson unexpectedly. He didn't turn his head in the direction of either of the others on the bridge.

"That's impossible!" Bruns snapped. "We've been in and out of sponge space forty times this watch. We couldn't possibly have matched courses so closely with another vessel."

"The lifeboats," Etcherly said, staring at the display in sudden surmise. "Could one of them have been picked up when we jumped from Tellichery?"

"No," Bruns said flatly. He rubbed his mouth again. "We weren't within ten-to-the-twelfth meters when we made the initial insertion. Besides, you don't just 'pick things up' when you insert into sponge space."

He shrugged. "It's a fault in the system and my money's on the sensors, whatever Bridge has to say about it. We'll get it taken care of on Tblisi, they've got full docking facilities. But it's not a serious problem."

"It's a ship," Donaldson repeated. "It's matching course with us. And it's getting closer."

Bruns glared at Donaldson. The helmsman ignored him. He was staring at his own display, a gentle swirl with the delicacy of a mandala. Donaldson's duties were to maneuver the Empress of Earth in the sidereal universe. In sponge space, as now, he could not have anything to do.

"That's nonsense," the Second Officer said sharply. "Besides, you can't tell relative distances without triangulating. Since the—the anomaly's at the same point, we can't triangulate."

Donaldson wasn't looking at either Bruns's display or that of the navigating tech, except possibly from the corners of his eyes. He couldn't possibly have anything useful to add to the discussion.

"Should we inform Captain Kanawa?" Etcherly asked softly.

"I . . ." the Second Officer mumbled past his clenched fist. He lowered his hand sharply. "No," he said. "That is, we'll inform him when he leaves his quarters. But he wasn't sleeping for the three days before we got rid of the—the hijackers in Tellichery orbit. He didn't say much about it, but he's been worried since we learned about the Brazil."

A muted alarm purred, warning that the Empress of Earth was about to drop back into the sidereal universe for another navigational check. Bruns blanked his display in preparation.

"Now that he's able to sleep again," he said aloud, "I think we ought to let him."

The new starscape flashed onto the screens. For a moment, it was a rosy blur of highlights. Then, as the artificial intelligence adjusted to navigational parameters, there was only one red carat, high in the right-hand quadrant of either display.

* * *

"Pretty hard lines for the fellows they dumped into orbit that way," Da Silva said, staring morosely at the twisted fabric of sponge space beyond the wall of the Starlight Bar. "Damned high-handed. Even if they were right, I mean, and I don't think they didn't make some mistakes, artificial intelligences or no."

Dewhurst nodded. "I keep thinking, what if I'd been one of the poor bastards?" he said. "I'd be—well, Trident Starlines would regret it, you can well believe."

"I think . . ." Wade said judiciously. He cocked an eye up at the traveling display which falsely showed the Brasil en route from Nevasa to Earth. ". . . that I'd prefer to be in a lifeboat above Tellichery than in whatever holding facility the Brazil's passengers are detained. Some desert world, very likely. I doubt they'll be harmed deliberately . . . but they'll be concealed for however long the Grantholm-Nevasa War goes on."

Belgeddes swirled his ice. "And better than what happened on the Delilah, hey Dickie?"

Wade grimaced. He stood up and walked closer to the bulkhead, staring out at alien nothingness. "I don't like to talk about the Delilah," he said. "You know that, Tom."

"Would another drink help?" Dewhurst asked sardonically. He plugged his chip into the autobar and dialed another round, though Da Silva was still nursing his rum.

To his surprise, Wade didn't take the fresh whiskey.

"He didn't have any choice, you understand," Belgeddes said apologetically. "They were Free-Will Consecrants, with a bomb big enough to blow the whole ship to kingdom come if Dickie hadn't opened the compartment to vacuum."

"Well, do what you have to and don't brood on it," Wade said with a stiff chuckle as he turned at last to the drink. "I mean, they had as much chance as I did to get to the lock to the next compartment, didn't they?"

He stood with his foot on a chair seat, a spare old man with a consciously dashing expression. He could have modeled for a whiskey ad. Dewhurst had no doubt that Wade was an actor of some sort.

"They didn't have suits, then?" Da Silva said with narrowing eyes.

"None of us had suits," Wade explained. "They'd decided they were going to create their own Eden by hijacking the Delilah to some planet back of beyond. Everybody else was going along whether they liked it or not—and I was the only one in Compartment 3 who wasn't a Consecrant."

"The Delilah was a trainship," Belgeddes said. "The internal passage to the rest of the ship was blocked during the hijacking, but each segment had its own airlock as well. I was playing cards with the Second Officer, I'm happy to say."

He shook his head with an approving smile. "Crawling around the hull of a starship without so much as a suit—that's Dickie's sort of business, not mine."

Da Silva shuddered and turned his head.

"That," Dewhurst said distinctly, "is not only impossible, it's sick."

"Scarcely impossible, friend," Wade replied. "The airlocks were in the same position on each segment, so there wasn't any searching around for me to do."

He shrugged. "I won't quarrel with 'sick.' But there it is."

Da Silva jumped up, overturning his fresh drink when his knee slammed the underside of the table.

"What's wrong?" Dewhurst cried as he slid his own chair back.

"A ship!" Da Silva said. "I swear I saw another ship out there! Just for a moment!"

He turned to look at his companions. To his amazement, Wade and Belgeddes had already left the bar.

* * *

The Empress of Earth dropped out of sponge space for the forty-seventh navigational check since undocking from Tellichery. Second Officer Bruns and his navigational technician held their breath, while Donaldson blinked at the slowly rotating pattern he ran on his screen until called on to oversee a maneuver.

Bridge completed its check and flashed up the star chart.

"Clean!" Etcherly said. Then, as though Bruns weren't staring at the same display on his own console, she added, "The anomaly's gone!"

"We'll still get it checked in Tblisi," the watch officer said with more emphasis than he'd been able to muster during the period of uncertainty over the starliner's navigational system. "Something like that, even a little transient, might turn out to be serious."

"What might turn out to be serious?" asked Captain Kanawa as he walked onto the bridge. He looked as fit and rested as he had since the Empress lifted from Earth, though the pockets of skin around his eyes still looked unusually hollow.

"Ah, sir . . ." said Bruns. Kanawa wasn't one of those captains who expected the crew to come to attention when they entered the bridge, but he did expect complete answers to any questions he asked about the watch. "There was a flaw in, I think the sensors, causing an anomaly in the star charts during several observations. Yeoman Etcherly pointed it out, and I've logged it for correction at our next docking."

Kanawa noted it without evident concern. He walked over to his own console and said, "Status."

The starliner's running display came up at once. Changes since the most recent check were highlighted. Normally the watch officer had the status report on at all times. Bruns hadn't looked at it since Etcherly noted the anomaly before the previous observation, but it all seemed pretty standard—

"Why's the engineering hatch open?" Kanawa demanded. "Has the Cold Crew had an accident?"

"Bridge to Engineering," Bruns said without hesitating an instant. "Why are—"

The Second Officer's demand through the AI automatically switched the upper right corner of his screen to visuals from the target location, in this case the engineering control room. An engineering officer—Crosse on second watch—waited there while the Cold Crewmen under his titular command were out on the hull.

Instead of the bored-looking engineer Bruns expected to see, the visual pickup showed a room full of men in spacesuits. During watch changes, the engineering control room was sealed off from the rest of the starliner. It formed a large airlock so that all eight men of the Cold Crew watch could enter and leave the vessel in a batch, instead of being passed through the hull one at a time through the normal lock.

There were far more than eight men in the large room now. It looked like twenty or thirty, and more suited figures were climbing down the access ladder from the hull.

They all carried guns.

"What's that?" Kanawa cried, looking over the watch officer's shoulder in surprise instead of switching his own display to the scene. "Mister Crosse, what's going on?"

There was no response. Since the engineering control room was airless, the suited men couldn't even hear the blurted question.

"Docking display," the helmsman said to his console.

The mandala shrank inward and reformed as a synthesized external view of the Empress of Earth. Beside the huge starliner was a much smaller vessel of nondescript appearance.

"A Type Two-Oh-Three hull from the Excelsior Dockyards on Grantholm," Donaldson said, identifying the vessel—a short-haul trader in normal usage—aloud.

As he spoke, the Empress concluded its navigational checks and reentered sponge space. The schematic of the starliner itself remained on the helmsman's display, but that of the Type 203 freighter twisted into a complex of lines surrounding the holographic Empress in all three dimensions. Data from the sensors that Bridge used to create the schematic were skewed unintelligibly by the alien universe in which they now functioned.

"I've heard about people docking in sponge space," Donaldson said approvingly. "But I never thought I'd see it happen. Of course, if they'd tried to match with us in star space, we'd have had warning and got out of the way."

Bruns wiped the chart. Visuals from the engineering control room expanded to fill his whole display. The external hatch must have closed, because the figures in the room unlatched their helmets.

"Bridge," Captain Kanawa ordered crisply, "notify the passengers and crew of an emergency. The Empress has been boarded by a force of armed men who must be assumed to be—"

In the engineering control room, a woman with her scalp shaved and eyes like hatchets aimed a back-pack laser at the engineering console. The last thing the pick-up in the control room showed was the blue-white glare that vaporized its circuitry.

"—hostile," Captain Kanawa finished in a dry voice.

* * *

"You know . . ." Ran Colville said.

He paused as he and Wanda Holly passed one of the many alcoves set back from the Enchanted Forest's curving central aisle. The whispers behind the screen of exotic vegetation stopped at the sound of the officers' measured footsteps on the parquet floor.

"I thought when I was assigned to the Empress," Ran continued when he was a comfortable distance from the couple hidden in the alcove, "that the duty was going to be cut-and-dried compared to what I was used to on smaller ships. Tense, because of so many people and powerful ones. But dull."

Wanda chuckled. "Well, we've still got half the voyage to go," she said. "Maybe the return leg will be dull. I'd like to think so."

"I'll settle for getting safe to Tblisi," Ran said soberly. "One step at a time."

They were both off duty, so there was nothing technically improper for them to be together; but the Enchanted Forest was the most private of the ship's open spaces, something that had affected Ran's suggestion for a place to walk and perhaps Wanda's agreement The park-like lounge contained real tropical vegetation from the worlds on which the starliner touched down, blended in with holographic panels of the corresponding animal life. The result was a score of bowers, set off privately from one another and from the aisle.

A three-tonne amphibian eyed Ran and Wanda from a bed of tall Grantholm reeds. The holographic beast worked its jaws forward and back, grinding the coarse fibers into a pulp that bacteria in its gut would convert into energy.

Ran nodded toward the image. "Not a very romantic setting, is it?" he said/asked.

"Speak for yourself," Wanda replied with a careful lack of emphasis.

The officers' communications modules chimed together.

"All passengers must return to their cabins at once," the ship's public address system said from several points in the Forest's hidden moldings. The speakers' varied distances from those listening turned simultaneous phrases into a series of sibilant echoes. "Do not use Corridor Four. All passengers—"

Ran whirled around, trying to find a sightline for his commo unit which leaves didn't block. Wanda, more experienced with the layout of the Empress of Earth, had already knelt on the parquetry.

"Go ahead," Ran snapped, letting Bridge's voice analyzer identify him without further delay.

A couple lurched through a shield of spike-leafed vegetation from which a Hobilo carnivore leered. The woman was slim and attractive, but at least twenty years older than her teenaged companion. His fly was undone because in haste he had caught his shirttail in the pressure seal.

"This is an emergency," Bridge said needlessly. "Unknown persons have entered the vessel through the engineering hatch. All crew members must act to prevent injury to the vessel's passengers. Await further orders. Out."

The mildly concerned synthesized tones undercut the import of the words. Instead of gently urging the listener, the smooth voice introduced a level of cognitive dissonance which increased the terror of broken routine.

"The hell with that!" said Wanda Holly as Ran looked up from the message he'd heard a moment after she'd received it. "Can't we stop them?"

More couples were drifting out of the foliage. The officers' white uniforms drew their eyes like needles to lodestone.

"It's all right, ladies and gentlemen," Ran said loudly. The tannoys continued to drone their message, increasing nervousness by repetition without any real information. "Some people from Grantholm want to redirect the ship. There's no physical danger whatever, so long as you keep out of their way."

"Go to your cabins at once," Wanda added with calm certainty. "We'll let you know what the situation is as soon as we can, certainly within an hour. But right now, you've got to get out of the way."

"But—" said at least five passengers simultaneously.

"Move it!" Ran snapped. He made shooing motions with his hands. "This is as real as lifeboat drill, it's just not as uncomfortable."

Wanda unexpectedly unsealed her tunic. She wore a translucent bodysock beneath it, Ran noted with surprise.

"Sir, madam?" the Second Officer said to a couple surprised from the semblance of a Calicheman riverbank. The screen of dense-trunked trees grew from a common root system. Behind it, beasts the size of hippopotami sported. "Mr. Colville and I need your jackets at once."

She glanced over at Ran. "This isn't any time to stick out like sore thumbs, whatever we want to do."

The two passengers addressed obeyed the sharp command without objecting or even speaking, though the man's mouth opened and closed like that of a carp gulping air. The dozen or so other passengers acted as though a flag had dropped. Their shift toward the door to the corridor became a dead run within three steps.

The man who gave Ran his jacket of pink and puce velour reached for the uniform tunic in exchange. Ran set his hand over the passenger's.

"You don't want this either," Ran said. His voice quivered like the wire of a cheese-cutter.

The passenger jerked away and rushed out of the room, hand in hand with his companion. They didn't look back.

Ran tossed his white tunic into an alcove. Wanda slipped a small pistol from the sidepocket of her own garment to that of her borrowed one, then hid the uniform with Ran's.

He knelt as the Second Officer had done before. "Colville to Kneale," he said with the transceiver tight against the inlaid wood. "Over."

"How do you know it's Grantholmers?" Wanda demanded, backing into the shelter of the reeds as she looked toward the entrance to the Enchanted Forest Her right hand was in her pocket.

"Bridge, where the hell is the commander!" Ran shouted.

"Commander Kneale is not aboard the vessel," Bridge said through the disk. "He vanished from his cabin when I sounded the alarm. Over."

"It says he vanished!" Ran blurted to his companion. "You can't vanish from a starship!"

What you could do was die. If a crewman in Grantholm pay had hidden bombs in the officers' quarters to go off in concert with an external attack, for example.

Ran and Wanda saw understanding in each others' sudden hardening of expression. Neither of them spoke the realization aloud.

"They'll have the arms locker by now," Ran said. "It's on the Engineering Deck, a hundred meters from the Cold Crew hatch they used. I've got my pistol and that cannon we picked up on Calicheman in my cabin, but they'll probably have somebody on Corridor Twelve by now . . . ."

"We'll try," Wanda said in sharp decision. "We need more than one pop-gun, that's for sure."

Her face suddenly fell into a hard smile. "And it's Grantholm rather than Nevasa because the Nevasans were going to hijack the Empress from inside. That means if there's a sponge-space commando attacking, it's from Grantholm."

"Excuse us?" a voice called from the direction of the corridor entrance. The person speaking was hidden by vegetation between him and the officers on the curved aisle. "Lieutenants? We're coming toward you. Your ship's artificial intelligence said you were here."

Wanda drew her pistol. Ran stepped deliberately in front of her, hiding the weapon from sight.

"What is it?" he demanded sharply.

A lanky old man stepped around the stand of Grantholm reeds. It was a passenger Ran had met the day the Empress undocked from Earth: Wade, Richard Wade, and his plump cabinmate Belgeddes trailed behind him.

"A Grantholm commando has invaded your ship, Mr. Colville," Wade said. He gave a courtly nod to recognize Wanda as well. "And we thought you might like our help in doing something about it."

* * *

"You want to what?" Wanda Holly said.

"Thinks we're a couple silly old buffers, Dickie," Belgeddes said, shaking his head sadly. "Well, I suppose we can't blame her."

The plump old man put his index finger to the throat of his tunic and opened it to an undershirt of some bleached natural fiber.

"Gentlemen," said Ran Colville, "please get to your cabin at once. Ms. Holly and I—"

"They'll have somebody in officers' country by now," Wade said, "the Grantholmers will. They won't have had time to search the cabins this quick, though. The two of you head that way, they'll come down on you like lizards on a beetle. But if it's you and I sauntering down the hall, Ms. Holly—well, an old fart and his popsy won't ring any alarm bells in whoever's on guard, will we?"

"Best be me with the young lady, Dickie," said Belgeddes as he pulled his undershirt from beneath his waistband. "And it best be me with the little gun, Ms. Holly, because even if you're better than I think you are, I've got more of this kind of experience."

He tugged the undershirt upward, baring his belly and chest.

"Jesus Christ," Ran Colville said softly.

Much of the scar tissue smeared a bright pink across Belgeddes' pasty torso was of too general a nature to identify its cause, but the line of four dimples from right shoulder to right nipple were obviously bulletholes. It was amazing the man had survived.

Ran glanced back at Wanda. She touched her tongue to her lips but said nothing. Behind her, holographic pachyderms ground away at the Calicheman equivalent of mangrove roots.

"I'm sorry if I've distressed you young people," Begeddes said as he covered his ruined flesh again, "but I had to convince you that we're . . . experienced in this sort of thing. Otherwise you'll go off and get yourselves killed without doing a lick of good."

"And don't jump to the wrong conclusion about the scars, young fellow," Wade said to Ran. "Tom's the one who walked away from that one—"

"On Esmeralda, it was," Belgeddes murmured with a wry smile. "'Ought to be interesting,' Dickie says, and I go along with him because I always do, for my sins."

"—and there were twelve of the others," Wade continued without looking at his plump friend. He shook his head sadly. "Tom's a dab hand with a pistol, no one better. Give him a long gun, though, and the only way he could hit anything is to get close enough to swing it like a club."

Ran looked at the two passengers, and thought how much he wished Commander Kneale were alive—

And how much he wished Mohacks and Babanguida were still on board—

And how much he wished he was anyplace else himself than on the Empress of Earth—

And how much he wished he didn't have a sense of duty which would drive him to risks that Trident Starlines would never order, just to save a symbol of peace from the maw of war.

And realized that he didn't wish that last thing. He didn't wish not to be Ran Colville.

"All right," Wanda said decisively "If you gentlemen are in, I'm glad to have you. What about you, Ran? The company can't order—"

Ran put his hand on Wanda's velvet-clad elbow. "The company doesn't have to order this," he said. "I'm doing it for—it doesn't matter. I'm in."

I'm doing it for my Dad.

"Right," said Wanda. "First to the officers' section off Corridor Twelve. Ran's got a pistol and a rifle in his room; we'll get them. After that—well, we'll see how the Grantholmers deploy."

Wanda linked arms with Belgeddes, hugging close to the plump old man in a way that suddenly struck Ran as obscene—though he'd seen a score of similar couples on every passenger vessel he'd crewed. The women with boys half their age were equally common, but the women who cared about youth in that fashion also cared about their own physique.

The four of them walked briskly out into the main corridor. The pistol was in Wanda's pocket, not Belgeddes', though his left hand was near it also.

Wanda had the rank, which put her in charge so long as everybody agreed she was in charge. That was one of the problems with a scratch force of volunteers. They weren't doing this officially, none of them, and they sure as hell weren't an army.

Suddenly, as clear as Bifrost's sun on a glacial valley, Ran knew where he was going to look for reinforcements.

"Wanda," he said aloud, "I'd just attract attention in Corridor Twelve. I'm going down to Engineering Deck. The Grantholmers're probably holding our Cold Crew under guard until they get things organized. I'm going to do something about those guards.

"And then we'll see who organizes what . . ." Ran added. His voice trailed off as the eyes of his mind stared into sponge space.

* * *

Corridor 12 served two of the Empress's imperial suites as well as a score of ordinary First Class cabins. The end which abutted officers' country was buffered by the Prairie Lounge, a group of alcoves decorated in what an architect imagined was Calicheman fashion.

The segments of the Prairie Lounge held tables and chairs of hair-out cowhide and rough wood—sealed and stabilized with synthetic resins—with walls of porous concrete and the raw ends of rusticated stonework. Sprouting from pots were a mix of grasses and the broad-leafed plants which grew among them on the prairies.

The lounge missed the reality of Calicheman by not being filthy, the way settlements in that world of self-ruled egoists usually were; but it was still one of the lesser-used of the starliner's public spaces.

Holly, Belgeddes, and—at a slight distance—Wade walked into the lounge. All three of them talked loudly though not directly in response to what the others said. They carried drink tumblers from the autobar just outside the Enchanted Forest.

Farther back in Corridor 12, a male passenger holding a toddler by either hand shouted at a cabin door, "Barbara! Barbara! Open the door, for God's sake!"

At the other end of the lounge, three men worked in loose uniforms which blurred like chameleon skin to take on neighboring colors. Instead of boots, they wore soft shoes which fit within the spacesuits they'd worn to board the starliner. Two of the men carried sub-machine guns. The third had a doorknocker, a stocked launcher for rocket-driven 15-cm impact grenades.

The soldiers' uniforms bore no national or unit markings, but the weapons were Grantholm issue.

"Halt!" ordered the soldier watching the backs of his fellows as they struggled with the locked door into officers' country. He pointed his submachine gun at the trio straggling into the lounge.

Holly giggled and threw herself into a chair. "C'mere, sweetie," she said, tugging at Belgeddes's arm. "Come to mama, cute l'il baby."

"Can I help you, gentlemen?" Wade said, walking forward with a deliberation more suggestive of drink than a stagger would have been. "I have great experience in construction methods and problems. I am the largest contractor, I say with no exaggeration, within a hundred kilometers of Point Easy."

"Get the hell out of here!" the guard snarled.

The other two Grantholmers held an electronic pick against the lockplate of the hatch to the continuation of Corridor 12. The pick was designed to duplicate the combination of simple locks like this one by sheer number-crunching. The coarse concrete surface of the panel caused alignment problems.

"If you can't get this fucking thing to work," snarled the soldier with the slung doorknocker, "I've got a trick that will!"

"My wife left me," Wade said, continuing to walk toward the trio of soldiers. "Me, the largest contractor within a hundred—"

"Get back, you stupid bastard!" the guard shouted. He stepped forward and brought his weapon around in an arc that slammed the side of the wire stock into Wade's head. The thin old man hurtled over a chair with a streak of blood bright against the white hair of his temple.

The pistol shots were so sharp and swift that the three of them together could have been the first whipcrack of a nearby thunderbolt.

One of the soldiers lurched against the closed door, hard enough to bloody his nose on the rough gray finish. His partner simply slumped, releasing the electronic pick as he fell. The bullet wound beneath either man's left ear, under the lip of the soldiers' tight-fitting helmets, looked like a blood blister rather than a hole.

The guard continued to rotate with the inertia of the force with which he'd struck Wade. He had a surprised expression and no right eye because of the bullet that had killed him an instant before his fellows died.

Wade got up from his flailing sprawl. He patted his left temple gingerly, looked at the blood on his fingertips, and grimaced.

"Told you Tom here was a dab hand with a pistol," he murmured to Holly as he bent to pick up the submachine gun with which he'd been clubbed.

The passenger fifty meters down the corridor screamed uncontrollably. He let go of his children's hands to find his room key, then dropped the key when he tried to touch it to the lockplate. The toddlers gripped their father's trouser legs and added their high-pitched voices to his shrieks.

Holly opened the corridor hatch with her key. She grabbed one of the soldiers to drag him through. "We don't want them found any sooner than we can help it," she muttered in a voice pitched more for herself than for informing her companions.

Belgeddes dropped the pistol into his tunic pocket "A nice little weapon," he said conversationally as he took another soldier by the collar with both hands. "I'll keep it, if you don't mind."

The corpse Wanda Holly was dragging suddenly began to thrash like a pithed frog. She pulled it another half-meter forward to get the feet out of the hatchway.

Then, unexpectedly to herself though not to the old men, she knelt and vomited out the whole contents of her stomach.

* * *

Passengers pranced nervously up and down the corridors of the Empress of Earth, their eyes as wide as those of does separated from their herd. None of them really looked at Ran Colville, incongruous in white trousers and a jacket of pink and puce streaks.

There was a three-man team from the Grantholm commando in the Embarkation Hall. Ran scuttled past the soldiers to a drop shaft. Four passengers, caught on the wrong deck as Ran had been, lurched from their stasis at the edge of the hall and followed him into the shaft. All of them hunched as if to draw their heads within their shoulders, turtle-like.

A Grantholm submachine gun followed the movements, but the soldiers didn't deign to speak. They were in the Embarkation Hall and other key points as an earnest of intent. The fifty or so troops in the commando couldn't control thousands of people directly. So long as the passengers were trying to get to their rooms, the Grantholmers had no need to act.

In the shaft, as in the corridors and other spaces, the cloying machine voice repeated, "All passengers must return to their cabins at once." Bridge had dropped the request to avoid Corridor 4, because by now the Grantholmers had penetrated the Empress of Earth like snake venom in a victim's bloodstream.

"Oh my god, my god," a woman in the drop shaft gasped into her hands. "I'm going to be raped, I'm going to be raped!"

"For god's sake, Frances, shut up!" snarled the man beside her. "They'll have better things to do than poke you, whoever they are."

Ran's lips tightened. It would be easy to forget that the husband was under as much strain as his wife, so that he wasn't responsible for his words either.

The passengers got off in couples on Decks B and A, scuttling quickly toward their cabins. Ran hadn't seen any of the bombast and disbelief he'd have expected among people whose wealth was implied by the feet they were traveling First Class on the Empress. The Grantholm troops looked like exactly what they were: merciless killers. So long as passengers realized that, the loss of life in the operation could be very low.

Not that the government of Grantholm really cared how many neutral civilians died, so long as they got their war-winning prize.

The Stewards' Pantry and quarters were on Deck 1, beneath the passenger spaces but above the holds and the Engineering Deck, 4. Ran got off the drop shaft nervously, aware that if he'd been planning the assault, there would be at least one Grantholm team here before him.

Instead, a dozen stewards waited in the receiving area around the lift and drop shafts, chatting tensely and listening to their transceivers. They jumped to attention when Ran appeared, recognizing him despite his civilian jacket There were no soldiers present

The Grantholm planners hadn't served as officers on passenger liners. They didn't know that the stewards were the people most likely to face a passenger emergency, and that they therefore had to be equipped for one.

"What are your orders from the bridge?" Ran demanded sharply. Every time he focused on a steward, the steward's eyes clicked off in the direction of Ran's ear or a corner of the moldings.

"Get moving," Ran ordered. "Check all the corridors, all the public spaces. When you find passengers, guide them to their cabins. Carry them if you've got to!"

He paused, glaring around the foyer. More faces peered out of the pantry beyond. Some ducked back, but a few joined those Ran was lecturing.

"Nobody needs to be hurt at all if we just get the passengers out of the way till things settle down," Ran continued more gently. "That's our job, the safety of the passengers. Let's do it."

He nodded toward the lift shafts. After a moment's hesitation, one steward and then the whole mass of her fellows moved to the shafts. They disappeared upward toward their duties.

Ran walked into the pantry. A few more brown-uniformed stewards pressed themselves against the freestanding consoles and smooth equipment lockers. All told, the shirkers on Deck 1 amounted to less than ten percent of the three hundred-plus stewards aboard the Empress of Earth.

"Go on," Ran said tiredly. He poked his thumb back over his shoulder toward the lift shafts. "You heard me. Get the passengers to cover and then we can sit on our hands."

The Chief Steward was a thin, puritanical-looking man named Medchen. The voyage to date had taught Ran that Medchen was a greater crook than Mohacks and Babanguida together, and that he lacked the ratings' genuine willingness to do their duty—or a long ways beyond it if someone had the guts to lead them in the right direction.

The Chief Steward stood in front of his alcove at the far end of the long room. "My duty post is here, Mr. Colville," he said, "and you have no authority over me anyway. Besides, you're out of uniform."

"And going to be more so," Ran agreed in a mild voice. "Get me a steward's uniform. One of yours ought to do—"

He smiled at Medchen. It wasn't a nice expression.

"—though I guess I'll rip the back out if it comes down to cases."

Ran tossed his borrowed civilian tunic onto the narrow shelf of a console. It slipped to the deck as a spill of pink and puce.

Medchen stepped into his alcove and lifted out the fresh uniform hanging behind the open door. He waited till Ran had stripped off his white trousers, then handed it to him.

"What do you hear from the bridge?" Ran asked conversationally as he changed clothes.

"Two minutes ago," Medchen said, "Captain Kanawa announced that a group of armed men had entered the bridge and ordered him to stop speaking. There hasn't been anything since then, except the AI yammering."

"I'll need a food cart—"Ran said as he straightened.

Medchen nodded toward a rack near the pantry entrance. The carts were stored vertically in collapsed form. Ran jerked one down and extended it. A web of cross-braced wires joined the tray to the static repulsion plate that floated just above the decking.

"I have my own unopened dinner in my office," the Chief Steward volunteered unexpectedly, nodding toward his alcove. "Do you want that too?"

"Yes," Ran said, "I do."

He'd thought he'd have to get that from the Galley off Corridor 3, on the opposite side of the deck. Also, he'd thought Medchen was going to be a problem . . . though it appeared he was wrong in that expectation.

The Chief Steward stepped into his alcove and came out again with covered plates and a setting of flatware, still wrapped in its napkin. The Grantholm attack must have occurred just as he sat down to dinner.

"Right," Ran said. He kept his voice unnaturally calm. "Now, some stun-gas projectors. I want about six."

Medchen pointed. "Locker Four," he said, "beside you. There's a gross of them."

Ran opened the locker. Boxes of nerve-numbing gas, each projector about the size of a knife hilt, were stacked on the bottom of the cubicle. Medical supplies filled the shelves on top.

The gas—actually an aerosol—was skin absorbed. It numbed motor nerves without affecting the autonomic nervous system. The humans it struck went instantly catatonic, whether they were drunk, furious, or mad as hatters at the moment they received the dose, but it had no long-term side effects.

That last point was desirable when the target was a cook with a cleaver. It was absolutely necessary when the problem involved, say, a passenger trying to strangle his wife.

Ran took the six projectors he'd decided on when he made his plan. It was tempting to grab more now that he saw the dozen full boxes, but he restrained himself Quantities of equipment weren't going to turn this hijacking around. Luck and guile would have to do.

He looked back at the Chief Steward. "One thing, Medchen," he said. "I hope you're not thinking of reporting this to our friends from Grantholm?"

Medchen shook his head slightly. "No, Mr. Colville," he said. "I'm not going to say anything about it to anybody."

"That's good," said Ran softly. "Because if you did—you can't be sure that they'd kill me, Medchen. And you can be very sure that I'd come back and kill you if I was still alive."

The Chief Steward nodded. "Yes, Mr. Colville," he said. "I'm well aware of that."

His smile was as hard and tight as a wrinkle on a walnut's shell. "But I hope they do kill you, Mr. Colville," he added.

As Ran slid his cart out of the pantry, it occurred to him that while Medchen was certainly a bastard, he wasn't at all a stupid bastard. . . .

* * *

Rural landscapes from central North America shimmered silently from the walls as Wade dragged the third corpse into Ran Colville's cabin. He was panting slightly. Belgeddes sphinctered the panel closed behind him. Wanda Holly took Ran's pistol from the drawer which she'd opened with the same master chip that had unlocked the cabin.

Wade undipped the sling of the dead soldier's submachine gun. "Now, little lady," he said as he examined the weapon, "this is going to get—"

"Call her 'lieutenant,' Dickie," Belgeddes said as he took the pistol from Wanda's hand. "Not 'little lady,' you know."

"You can have the other submachine gun if you want it," Wanda said to Belgeddes. As she spoke, she switched on Ran's console. "You—you're a better shot than I am."

"Now, Lieutenant," Wade resumed, "this is going to get very unpleasant, I'm afraid. Perhaps—"

"Not for me, good lady," Belgeddes said as he compared the two identical pistols with a broad grin. "These suit me very well."

The grin slipped into something feral. "As you've seen, I should have thought."

"Do let me finish, Tom," Wade said sharply. "Lieutenant Holly, there isn't any clean way of proceeding from here. If you care to wait—"

"Mr. Wade," Wanda said, "I am in charge here. We will proceed as follows. We'll have to ki—eliminate—the isolated soldiers before we attempt the bridge controls. We'll—we'll trust Ran to take care of engineering control."

"See, Dickie?" Belgeddes said as he reopened the drawer the pistol came from. He rummaged around until he found a box of cartridges among the hard copy. "All under control."

"How do you propose to locate the hostiles, Lieutenant?" Wade asked formally. "And if I may suggest . . . ? They appear to be deployed in threes, not as individuals."

"Yes, that's correct," Wanda said with a sharp dip of her jaw that passed for a nod. "And we'll locate them like this."

She undipped the communicator from the front harness strap of the body she'd dragged into the cabin. It worked on the same principals as Trident's intra-ship communications rigs, but it was somewhat larger and extended a rigid wand to a structural feature instead of using a transceiver chip and a length of flex.

She touched the wand to the console's face. "Bridge," she ordered, "on a schematic, locate the points within the Empress that a communicator of this—"she broke squelch "—modulation has been used in the past ten minutes. Over."

Six labeled decks appeared in blue outline, shrunk to fit on a single console display. The nine red dots were at expected locations—the bridge, engineering control, and public areas including the main lift and drop shaft foyers on four decks. The commando looked surprisingly sparse against the starliner's enormous volume. They must have lost half their strength in their blind ship-to-ship crossing through sponge space.

Survivably sparse, it might be.

Wade looked over the 15-mm rifle from Calicheman that leaned against a corner of the cabin. "Interesting," he murmured.

He turned to Wanda Holly. "Very good, lieutenant," he said. "Now, as for the method of procedure—may I suggest a course?"

"Go ahead," Wanda said curtly. Every time her mind tried to grapple with what came next, it mired itself in bodies thrashing as she tried to slide them along the deck.

"Right," Wade said. "First, we'll need a scout That's you, Tom. Signals intelligence is all very well, but we don't want to stumble into a team that didn't bother to report in."

He looked at Belgeddes.

The plump man clicked home the reloaded magazine of Wanda's pistol. "You know me, Dickie," he replied without concern. "You lead, I follow. In this case, follow from in front."

"Right," Wade repeated. He slung the submachine gun and raised the bomb thrower by the handle on top of its receiver. "Then with your agreement, Lieutenant, we will proceed as follows. . . ."

"And the more fool me," Belgeddes added with a chuckle.

* * *

"I heard shots," said Trooper II Weik, waggling the muzzle of her submachine gun down the corridor toward the bow.

Corridor 7 widened into a foyer and mini-lounge toward the stern of Deck A, where the shafts opened. The ambiance was from the Moghul Empire, with columns decorated in tilework helixes and florid carpeting on the deck. A band of knobbed brass bannisters ran around the top the walls as though there was an upper-floor balcony, and the holographic murals were of minareted palaces with reflecting pools and lush vegetation.

"That's fine," said Trooper III Buecher, the team leader. He watched the lift and drop shaft openings from over the sights of his submachine gun. "We all heard shots. The people who got nervous and fired them will report to Colonel Steinwagen, who will not be pleased. My team will not be nervous."

The trouble was, they weren't a team. The planners had allowed for fifty percent casualties as the commando crossed from Attack Transport Vice-Admiral Adler to their target vessel, the Empress of Earth. The planners couldn't determine which soldiers would be lost, however; which would disappear as twists of light into a universe of twisting light, with no boundaries and no hope.

Rather than the team he had trained with for this operation, Buecher commanded troopers whose teammates, like his own, were running out of air in an alien spacetime. Teammates closer than lovers, closer than blood kin. Teammates who no longer existed when Buecher's magnetic boots suddenly clanged and bit on the hull of a starliner which had been a warp of infolded shadow until the moment Buecher touched it Buecher understood how Weik could be unhinged by the experience. She was a woman, without the strength of will that stiffened Buecher. The will that prevented Buecher from killing these sniveling rabbits, Weik and Magnin, who reached the starliner while Buecher's proper teammates did not. . . .

"I didn't hear shots," said Magnin. "It's a big ship. Noise is funny. The Colonel will tell us if there's anything we ought to know."

Magnin faced the stern with his doorknocker. The planners had allowed for the possibility that the commando would have to fight its way through a series of firedoors lowered across the corridors. The squash-head bombs of the 15-cm assault weapons had shown in tests on Grantholm that they would wreck the locking mechanisms of the firedoors and spall a sleet of fragments into defenders on the opposite side.

The reasoning was good, but the crew of the Empress of Earth were cowards who used the presence of civilians as an excuse not to oppose the commando. The doorknocker was of limited use in a normal firefight, because the thin-cased missiles had no direct fragmentation effect: only concussion and, perhaps, bits of fittings and furniture flying about as secondary projectiles.

If opponents attacked from the stern end of the corridor, Magnin's weapon could not give as satisfactory a response as a submachine gun would; but the concern that roiled Buecher's mind was a false one, he realized, because the cowards who would not defend themselves weren't going to attack either.

They weren't going to give Buecher an opportunity to avenge his teammates.

There were no civilians in wartime, and no neutrals either. The only immoral act in wartime was to fail, and Grantholm would not fail.

". . . Sweet Betsy from Pike," warbled a thin, cracked voice from a cross-corridor joining 7 twenty meters astern of the shaft foyer. "She went to Wyoming with—"

"Magnin, watch the shafts!" Buecher ordered—

—though the bombs had a five-meter arming range and wouldn't go off if somebody did pop from a shaft opening while the singer distracted his team—

—and spun to cover the corridor sternward with his submachine gun.

"—her husband Ike," the singer caroled as he staggered around the corner, a fat old man with drink stains down the front of his plush jacket

He stared owlishly at the muzzle of Buecher's submachine gun.

"I'm so very sorry," the passenger said. He attempted a bow and had to catch himself on the bulkhead to keep from falling. "I mus' be in the wrong room."

As he spoke, he did topple back around the corner.

"Bomb!" Weik shouted.

Buecher flattened, sweeping both ends of the corridor with his peripheral vision. His weapon pointed sternward, because there would be a rush from that side, but a 15-cm projectile sailed on its spluttering rocket motor in a flat arc from the cross-corridor toward the bow.

The projectile was almost as slow as a lobbed grenade. Because the shooter had been afraid to expose himself, the bomb would hit the wall opposite the shaft openings. The concussion would be heavy but survivable, and when the attackers rushed in behind their bomb—

Buecher hugged himself to the deck, his trigger finger poised to begin shooting at the instant the bomb went off.

The fat passenger stepped into Corridor 7. He aimed a pistol in either hand, though only one was firing.

The muzzle flash of the first shot was all that Buecher's disbelieving eyes saw. The bullet punched through the bridge of his nose. Belgeddes had learned to correct for the pistol's slight tendency to throw left.

An instant later, the rocket projectile smacked the wall and ricocheted, a dud because Wade had removed the base fuze. The wet slap of plastic explosive deforming was lost in the snap of Belgeddes's next two shots and the roar of Holly's submachine gun as she entered Corridor 7 from the bow side.

The bomb skittered a further moment until its motor burned out. The case had burst open. Volatiles from the explosive added their sharpness to the residues of rocket fuel, gunpowder, and the blood mingled with feces that was the smell of violent death.

"No time to lose," Wade warned crisply as he stepped out behind Holly. He had reloaded his projector with a live bomb, just in case. A submachine gun was slung across his back.

"Right," Wanda said in a cold, dry voice. "We'll take the Embarkation Hall next."

"There's always time to reload, Dickie," Belgeddes said with arch disapproval. He thumbed loose rounds into the magazine to replace the three he'd fired.

The bridge of the nose, the left earhole, and the point where the spine of the flattened woman entered the back of her skull.

The bitter gases poisoning the air made Wanda cough as she swapped magazines. That could have been responsible for the way her eyes were watering also.

* * *

Ran Colville hummed "Won't you come home, Bill Bailey?" as he got out of the drop shaft, pushing the food cart before him. He moved at a deliberate pace, like a steward who wanted to avoid a rocket from his superiors but wasn't trying to set any speed records.

Moving, basically, at the pace of a steward who doesn't expect much of a tip at the end of his journey no matter how quickly he reaches it

The Engineering Deck was laid out for cargo operations, besides being narrower than all but one of those above it. The single corridor, 15, kinked around bays intended for passengers' hold luggage. There was no point, as there was on the passenger decks, where a three-man team could dominate four hundred meters of straight corridor with their weapons.

Ran couldn't be sure where he was going to meet Grantholm troops, or even whether he would meet them. It was unlikely that there was no one guarding engineering control, however; and the Empress's Cold Crew would be a special problem for the hijackers.

"I'll do the cooking, honey," Ran whistled. "I'll pay the rent. . . ."

The Grantholm team, all three of them male, stood in front of the open corridor hatch giving onto the engineering control room. When Ran appeared a moment behind his off-key whistle, the soldiers tensed as cats do when starting their stalk.

One man faced sternward, though so far as Ran knew there was nothing but long-term cargo stowage in that direction, and no way to enter those bays except through the hull while docked. Maybe the Grantholmers thought somebody was going to come out of a bulkhead to get them.

"Halt!" the team leader ordered over the sights of his submachine gun. "What are you doing here?"

Ran stopped where he was, twenty meters from the soldiers. "It's dinner for a Mr. Schmidt," he called. "Look, don't point that thing at me. This is just a job, okay? I'm just doing my job."

"I didn't order dinner!" objected the soldier aiming at the blank wall. He twisted to look over his shoulder. Then, when his leader didn't shout at him, he pivoted to face in the same direction as his fellows.

"Tubby Schmidt?" the third soldier asked. "Only he's with the bridge crew, isn't he?"

"He would be if he'd made it aboard," the leader said briefly. Then he added, "Cover me," and walked toward Ran and his cart

"Look," said Ran. "They told me Schmidt at engineering control and look lively. That's all they said, Schmidt."

"It can't be Lieutenant Schmidt," the third man mused aloud. "He's out on the hull, and they can't come inside so long as we're in sponge space. We are in sponge space, aren't we?"

"How the hell would I know?" snarled his team leader. He peered at the dishes on the cart. They were sealed with optically-clear covers which were opaque in the infra-red spectrum, so that their contents could be viewed but stayed hot.

"Honeydew melon, Green Turtle soup," Ran said in a bored voice. "Roast gosling with aubergine in tomato." He pointed as he went along. "And asparagus in Hollandaise sauce."

Viewed dispassionately, it must have looked delicious. Ran couldn't be dispassionate, because he was trying to imagine how he could handle the situation if two of the Grantholmers stayed that far away from him. He couldn't. He'd have to go back and find somewhere a weapon that wasn't only point-blank like the gas projectors—

The team leader turned and stared at his men. "One of you wise guys used the ship's commo to order a meal, didn't you?" he demanded.

"Not me!" Schmidt—Smitt, Shmidt, Smid, or whatever variation of "metalworker" this Grantholm soldier bore—insisted.

"I'd be in my rights to keep it all for myself," the team leader said. "But I guess there's enough for three."

He looked appraisingly at the multi-course meal. "They don't half do themself good, do they?"

Then he added harshly to Ran, "C'mon, you." He jerked his thumb toward engineering control and his two subordinates. "Bring it over."

The leader stayed behind Ran. The Grantholmer faced down the corridor, toward the shafts, as the Trident officer sauntered obediently forward.

Ran grounded the cart in front of the two soldiers. "Gentlemen . . ." he said as he whisked the lids off the first pair of dishes, then knelt to stow them on top of the cart's repulsion tray.

"What's that?" muttered Schmidt.

"Aubergine," replied the team leader. "Whatever aubergine is when it's at home."

"And there ought to be extra flatware down—"Ran murmured. "Yes!"

He straightened with a napkin-wrapped tube in either hand. He smiled obsequiously and fired the gas projectors into the faces of the Grantholm soldiers.

Ran had been worried about getting the double, but the cones of droplets sprayed perfectly across the faces of the two subordinates. They lurched backward with blank expressions. Their eyeballs rolled upward so that only the whites showed.

The team leader caught the dose in the throat, which should have been fine. Either he was resistant to the tranquilizer or his reflexes operated at a more basic level than those of his crew. His finger clamped his submachine gun's trigger and held it back as he toppled onto his face.

The stream of bullets shattered the cart, the dishes on it, and one of the Grantholm soldiers from waist to ankles. Blood and the pale gray stars of bullet cores splattered the bulkhead behind the pair of men.

Ran thought the other soldier, Schmidt, had escaped until he noticed an ooze of blood and brains spreading beneath the Grantholmer's head. A ricochet had bounced through the back of his skull.

Echoing muzzle blasts and the whiz of ricocheting bullets went on for what seemed to be minutes.

Ran swore softly. He unfastened the sling of Schmidt's weapon. With the submachine gun in his right hand, he grabbed the team leader by the collar with his left.

He dragged the staring-eyed man to the cargo bay directly across from engineering control. The practical way to deal with the fellow was to kill him, using a bullet or the fighting knife hanging from the Grantholmer's harness.

Ran hoped he never returned to being that practical.

He used his ID chip to unlock the bay's personnel access hatch. This bay was the garage, holding passengers' private vehicles. There was no way to open it from within, so it would serve to hold the Grantholm soldier until this business was over. Ran's next task was to find the Cold Crew and—

The hatch withdrew into its jamb. Swede lunged out with his hands open for a choke hold. The rest of the Cold Crew, all three watches, was behind him.

"Hold it," the watch chief bellowed. "It's Mr. Colville! What are you doing in that shit suit, sir?"

Cold Crewmen shoved out past Swede. As they did so, Ran noticed one of the engineering officers, Crosse, huddled well to the rear of the compartment. It can't have been a lot of fun to find yourself locked up with angry Cold Crewmen.

"I'm pretending to be a steward to get the Empress away from these Grantholm hijackers," Ran said. He spoke loudly to be heard over the scrape of boots. "It's dangerous, and it's likely to mean killing. Are you in?"

"Hell, yes," said Swede. "What do you want us to do?"

Lewis looked critically at the Grantholm team leader on the deck beside him. "Did a piss poor job on this one, Mr. Colville," he said.

He stamped his boot down on the back of the Grantholmer's neck, hard enough to snap the spine. Then he stamped again.

"We're going out on the hull to take the engines back," Ran said, speaking dispassionately. "After that, we'll worry about the troops inside."

He didn't look down at the fresh corpse at his feet. He'd worked the hull long enough to know it was Cold Crew etiquette always to kick a man when he was down. That's when it was easiest to do, after all. . . .

* * *

Ran felt the Empress of Earth thud slightly—once, again, and onward repeatedly in a set rhythm.

"Whazzat?" a Cold Crewman demanded, spinning on his toes to find a source of the noise. The sound was unfamiliar, and the Cold Crew worked too close to the edge of survival to like changes.

"They're shutting the firedoors," Ran explained. "Our new masters, I suppose, since the bridge crew didn't during the attack. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that our Grantholm friends've got fewer troops now than they did when they boarded."

"No friends of mine," Swede said. "No masters, neither."

The Grantholm commander must have noticed that some of his teams weren't reporting in. Dropping the firedoors wouldn't prevent Wanda and her companions from moving between sections since the Second Officer's ID chip gave her local control of the barriers.

Grantholmers on the bridge might think they could follow their opponents' progress by seeing which firedoors opened. Wanda knew the Empress's complex layout perfectly. All the Grantholm commander would get from this ploy was a series of false scents that drew his teams into killing grounds.

Swede picked up his suit, dumped on the floor of the engineering control room with the others when the commando herded the duty watch into the starliner's interior.

"They shot three of my people out there on the hull when we dropped into star space," Swede added in a tone of reflective calm. "Not a lot we could do about it—in star space."

He very deliberately spat toward the airlock. "In the Cold, those guns of theirs, they won't be worth shit."

Swede's men were donning the suits sprawled on the deck. The starboard watch, off duty at the time of the attack, took their own gear out of the locker covering one wall of the room.

As Lewis worked his limbs into the semi-rigid suit, he said, "I dreamed every day for a year about the time I'd get Reesler alone outside and put him right off the hull."

"Got a suit for me?" Ran asked Swede.

"Try Locker Nineteen," the watch leader said. "Albrecht's in the sick bay, laying on his butt as usual. Earache, if you can believe that."

Lewis continued emotionlessly, "I'm really going to stick it to them bastards that shot Reesler before I got him."

The engineering officer on duty during the attack stood at-ease, his hands crossed behind him, at the console ruined by a laser. His spacesuit, necessary because engineering control was often open to vacuum, lay on the deck beside him.

"You don't want a piece of this, Crosse?" Ran asked as he closed the plastron of the borrowed suit. It wasn't a great fit, but it was better than the one he'd had to use aboard the Prester John ten years before.

The engineering officer swallowed. "We're under strict company orders to do nothing that would endanger the lives and safety of the passengers, Mr. Colville," he said.

"You bet," Ran said.

He turned to the crewman who was handing equipment out of the locker. "I'll take an adjustment tool," Ran called.

"Mr. Colville, I've never been able to stand sponge space!" Crosse said. "I—whenever I have to go out, I—I can't move! I ought to be in the bridge crew."

"Best get out of engineering control, then," Ran said without great interest "We're going to void the room as soon as we drop into star space the next time."

He took the telescoped rod the Cold Crewman handed him. It would lengthen to three meters when he slipped the joints as soon as he passed through the airlock.

With the adjustment tool in his hands again, Ran no longer thought of the sidereal universe. Star space and the Cold. Star space and Hell—

Crosse bolted from the room. Swede spat idly after him and closed the airlock hatch to the corridor.

"How many d'ye figure they've got on the hull?" Swede asked Ran.

Ran shrugged, then realized the crewmen watching him intently couldn't see the gesture beneath the hard torso of his suit. "Maybe eight," he guessed aloud. "One for each engine. I don't guess they could have more than that."

He grinned, staring into the past with wide, blank eyes. "They must've been trained specially for this hijack. I never saw a Grantholmer on a Cold Crew, did you guys?"

"There'll be eight less to see in a little bit," Lewis said. He giggled.

"Listen up!" Ran said. He wanted to rub his hands together, but he couldn't do that through the gauntlets and it wouldn't look right anyway. He was in charge___

The Cold Crewmen stared at him. Some looked angry; one or two might be friendly. Most of the faces held no more expression than the swirling cold of sponge space did.

"We're going out there in about—"Ran continued. He glanced toward the console for a time check. The clock had been destroyed by the laser blast.

Ran pulled off a gauntlet. "—a minute and a half," he said, using the bio-energized watch tattooed into the dermis of his left hand.

He'd been very drunk when that happened, but he'd left it there as a reminder not to let something similar happen again. The watch kept Earth time, and Ran felt vaguely proud of himself for converting to ship's time without dropping a beat. "Nobody moves from the airlock area until we're back in the Cold. They've got guns, they'll kill us. Simple as that. In sponge space, they're our meat."

He'd caught a glimpse of his own visage in the polished bulkhead. His face was indistinguishable from those of his men: empty eyes and a mouth as cruel as the seam the laser had cut through the console.

"We don't know just where they're stationed on the hull," Ran said, "so everybody heads for his normal duty station. When we drop back into star space, move fast. Anybody who isn't wearing the right suit, he goes."

He looked around. "Any questions?"

Nobody spoke. Cold Crewmen weren't talkative, and there wasn't much to say anyhow.

"Then close your helmets," Ran said, "and follow me."

He felt a shiver as the Empress of Earth reentered the sidereal universe, bringing the interior of the starliner back into the same spacetime as the outer skin. You had to be experienced to notice it here, but out on the hull it was a difference as great as that between death and life.

Ran locked his faceshield down and reached for the switch controlling the hull airlock.

"Let's get stuck into them bastards," said Swede on the suit-to-suit radio. His voice was a growl like that of an avalanche headed for the valley despite anything in its path.

* * *

When the hullside lock opened, air banged out and the light within engineering control grew flat because there was no longer an atmosphere to scatter it. Ran waited reflexively for the buffeting to stop when the last of the air voided.

He'd known people to start for the hull too fast and be carried on out before they got their safety lines hooked. If there was a bright side to the stories, it was that the victims died in star space instead of in the Cold . . . .

The old skills were still with him. He moved fast as the windrush ended, so that Swede's hand on his shoulder was a companionable pressure rather than the shove it would become if the man at the head of the line balked.

People did balk during crew changes. Usually not on their first watch, but at the start of their second or third, when they knew the Cold and knew exactly what was waiting for them when their vessel left the sidereal universe again.

This wasn't a formal watch change, just a navigation check programmed before the hijacking. The outbound element was of twenty-one men rather than the normal eight of a Cold Crew on the Empress of Earth: the survivors of all three watches, and Ran Colville in the lead. There wasn't any time to lose if they were all to get onto the hull before the starliner inserted into sponge space again—

And anyway, Cold Crews didn't waste a lot of time on people who couldn't do their jobs. If Ran—if anybody—blocked the hatch during a watch change, he went out anyway—and maybe too fast to hook his line at the high end.

The Cold was an inhuman, dehumanizing experience. The men of the Cold Crews not only knew that, they bragged about it

Ran took the ladder in two steps against artificial gravity, felt that fade in a familiar queasiness in the pit of his stomach as his torso lifted above the skin of the ship. He latched his line, one-handed because the adjustment rod was in his left gauntlet, and planted the magnetic sole of his right boot on the hull with a slap he could feel all through the stiff fabric of his suit.

Ran Colville was going home again to Hell.

The tracks to the Empress's eight engine modules were inlaid into grooves on the hull, rather than being paint which would be worn away by the scrape of men shuffling flat-footed toward their duty stations. Ran followed Track 3, because that had been his first station on the Prester John. Home again—

The Grantholmers had no reason to put a guard at the hull side of the hatch. It was still possible that one of the soldiers-turned-engine tender had found the strain of the Cold too much and was coming in—dispirited but still armed.

Ran stepped forward, pivoting his body to make up for his inability to turn his helmeted head to see sideways. As he moved, his hands worked the adjustment tool, locking both of the tube's joints into their extended position. There were no Grantholmers in sight.

He'd told his men to stay bunched at the hatch until sponge space hid them from sight. Despite that, he stepped forward himself, just to the next staple—

The Cold was coming. No one who had felt it could remain static and await its return.

The stars of this portion of the sidereal universe formed a hazy blur banding the blackness at an angle skewed to the Empress's present attitude. The starliner was in the intergalactic vacuum which made up most of the real universe. Only Bridge and the vessel's data banks could turn this location into a waypost on the journey to Tblisi—or to wherever the hijackers planned to divert her.

The Empress of Earth herself was a gleam little brighter than the distant galaxy, the reflection of light from millions, even billions, of parsecs away. The converted freighter which carried the hijacking party was a darker hint in the black sky. It must be very close, but distances in the void were uncertain without absolute knowledge of the other object's size.

From the hatch, four of the Empress's engine modules were bulges above the starliner's smooth curve. Ran's objective, Engine 3, was on the "underside" of the hull, not visible from where he stood. The inlaid track, a centimeter higher than the surrounding skin, would take him there.

He reached the next staple, twenty meters closer to his destination. He planted his boots, but he didn't bother to unreel his second line and set it before he hit the release stud. A command pulsing down the line opened the hook attached to the staple at the hatch opening.

Ran caught the hook as it sailed toward him, a wink in darkness. He set it to the new attachment point and shuffled on. Men had been known to smash their own faceshields when they snatched the safety line toward themselves too quickly and didn't catch the heavy hook in the end of it.

Two of the engine modules stood out above the hull to which they were joined by basket-woven wire. They were distanced from the skin to protect the vessel in the unlikely event a fusion bottle failed. The elevation also gave the engines wider directability than they would have had if mounted lower. At the moment, the two visible pods pointed thirty degrees to starboard of the starliner's nominal axial plane.

Ran turned and looked behind him. The rest of the Cold Crew—his crew—had spilled out of the hatch and was moving along the hull. Some of the men were hidden beneath the massive curve.

Ran walked onward. He reached the third staple. From that point, he could see all of Engine 7, the pod and strutwork almost down to the hull. A Grantholm soldier was locking in a fresh fuel connector with his adjustment tool. He was a tracery of highlights rather than a figure. The submachine gun slung across his back distorted the image still further.

It was time. The Empress of Earth slid again into sponge space.

On the one hand, everything was light; on the other, Ran was blind, stone blind, because the impulses tripping his rods and cones had no connection with the code which those impulses would have represented in the sidereal universe. He could see nothing, no thing. Not the hull beneath his feet, not the gauntlet which held his safety line.

But he could feel the track against the side of his boot, and his hook snapped in a familiar way into the upstanding staple. Ran slid onward, with the three meters of his adjustment rod out before him.

He had a long way to go to reach Engine 3, but he might meet a Grantholm soldier at any point in the track. Ran's first warning would be the shock of his tool's contact. If that happened, he would withdraw the rod to his arm's length, then ram it forward again.

Ran knew from one past experience that he could strike hard enough to put the tip of an adjustment tool through a suit and half the body within that suit

Ran was very well aware that the Cold Crewman following him was likely to do the same, even though the fellow knew there was a friendly on the track ahead. In the Cold, a mistake was something that got you killed. By extension, an action that didn't get you killed wasn't a mistake, or at any rate not a serious one.

Another twenty meters, another staple. Ran unhooked and brought his line forward hand-over-hand instead of with a clean jerk as before when he could see the hook coming. When he was on with the Cold, he could sense motion within its flaring emptiness, but he'd been away too long to trust his instincts now.

The chilling light flooded through his flesh and marrow. Even if he closed his eyes, he would see the swirls that were almost patterns. When he was in the Cold, Ran thought that the bubbles of sponge space might be alive, might be Life itself in the abstract.

Might be God; but if they were, God was Siva the Destroyer.

He had felt the Cold every night for ten years in his dreams, and now he was home again within its desolation.

Another staple. Another. At the fifth point, Ran didn't bother to reconnect his line. It slowed him down and bound him to the universe of which his soul was no longer a part.

At the fifteenth staple, Ran Colville reached down and it was there, the hook of another safety line, and he'd seen it in the glaring night before his gauntleted fingers fondled the curve, the catch.

He released the Grantholmer's line manually. Apart of Ran's mind knew that he should have set his own hook, but his soul was one with a spacetime which hated the universe to which Mankind had been born.

With the cunning of a hyena poised to tear the face off a sleeping woman, Ran took up the slack in the unseen Grantholmer's line. When he felt resistance, he gave a fierce left-handed tug.

Through blind light as penetrating as a sun's heart, Ran saw the startled soldier lurching toward him, spinning; his limbs flailing, his tool flying off on a trajectory of its own as the man tried to grasp his slung weapon in a soldier's reflex.

Ran's right arm cocked his adjustment tool like a javelin for throwing. In the event, he didn't bother to bring the tool forward in the smashing blow his intellect had intended. Instead, Ran pirouetted aside like a bullfighter.

The Grantholm soldier slid past invisibly on a vector that took him clear of the starliner's curved hull, off into an alien eternity. The victim must be screaming, but radio waves propagated as oddly as light did outside the sidereal universe. If the man was heard at all, it would be as a ghost whispering in the ears of Cold Crewmen unimaginably distant in time and space.

Ran Colville walked away from the track so that he would no longer be in the path of the crewman who followed him. There was nothing to do but wait, now, until the Empress dropped into star space and the Trident crew could return without danger from its own members.

Nothing to do but wait; and to feel the Cold drink him in; and to listen to the unheard screams of a Grantholm soldier whose death was a living sacrifice for Ran Colville.

* * *

"Ran," the Cold said. He felt the word tremble through him. "Ran, come with me. Lift your right foot."

His eyes opened. He stood in star space. The realization so shocked him that he flushed, and for a moment his skin burned as though he had been dropped into hot oil.

"Ran," repeated the figure who held him. Their helmets were in contact, so Ran heard the words directly instead of through the radio link. "We're going in now."

"How l-long do we have before the next insertion?" Ran asked.

His voice cracked in the middle of the second syllable because his throat was dry. He must have been standing with his mouth open, hearing and seeing nothing, for—he couldn't guess for how long.

Standing in the Cold, even though the Empress of Earth had returned to the sidereal universe at least once during the period.

The suited figure holding Ran jerked away. "You're all right?" the voice said in amazement, through the helmet radio now. The voice was Wanda's. She must have been calling to him as she trekked across the hull, unheard until their helmets made physical contact.

How long had he been mired in Hell?

"I'm fine," he said, hoping that was the truth. "When do we reinsert?"

Ran began a swift, skidding pace in the direction Wanda urged him. He didn't know where he was on the hull, didn't know the hull of the Empress at all because each ship is different. He was fully aware that his safety line dangled loose, and that Wanda had loosed hers to fetch him from where he stood far from the tracks and staples.

"Not until Bridge recalibrates," Wanda said. Their gauntleted hands, his left and her right, gripped, though the greater safety in the contact was spiritual, not physical. "And not until 1 bring you in. Commander Kneale promised that."

"He's alive?" Ran said. His mind fought its way to the surface through layers of icy, flaring slush. Memory of what had sent him onto the hull was slowly reasserting itself through the smothering Cold.

"He's alive," Wanda said. Her voice was detached. "We're all alive, mostly. They killed a steward, nobody knows why. We found him in Corridor Six. And there was a passenger with her children, two little boys. They were hiding behind the counter of the Paris Bistro on Deck A and the soldiers thought they were us. . . ."

In the near distance, a Cold Crewman reset the nozzles of an engine pod manually. Delicate electronics failed quickly in sponge space, but men continued to do their jobs.

A figure shuffled across the hull toward Ran and Wanda. It carried something long and thin, but even in dim starlight the object didn't appear to be an adjustment tool.

"So they killed them, the soldiers did," Wanda continued in a voice as pale as the light of the distant galaxies. "And we killed the soldiers while they were looking the wrong way, Wade and Belgeddes killed them, and I did. And then we killed more soldiers."

The third figure joined them. "Hold on to me," an unfamiliar voice directed over the helmet radio. "I've hooked six safety lines together. No point in having a problem when we've gotten this far."

"Wade?" Wanda said.

"The same," the radio agreed. Wade slung the object he carried, the huge rifle from Calicheman, and held out his hands to the pair of officers. "I'm afraid I've shot off all your ammunition, Mr. Colville. Seems to have done the trick, though. The Grantholm freighter is gone, eh what?"

Ran looked up. He couldn't see the other vessel, but it could have been subtended by the Empress's greater bulk.

"It pulled off because you shot at it?" he asked in amazement. He supposed the 15-mm bullets could do some damage to the thin plating of a colonial-built freighter—but not enough, he was sure, to cause a picked Grantholm assault force to abandon its mission.

"Not here," Wade said with a chuckle. Ran and Wanda moved much faster now that they were tethered to the starliner's massive reality. "In sponge space. I thought I might puncture a compartment, you see, and they wouldn't be able to calculate the change in mass precisely enough to continue matching us. The mass of their own vented atmosphere, you see."

Ran looked at the other man, anonymous in a suit borrowed from the Cold Crew. "That's impossible!" he said. "You can't hit anything in sponge space."

They were nearing silvery inlaid tracks, spreading like the braces of a spider's web from the engineering hatch. The outer airlock was open.

"'Impossible' is one of those words used more often than wisely, my boy," Wade said. "I've always found that I could see in sponge space, after my—well, my mind, I suppose, not my eyes—had a chance to acclimate."

"Don't say that," Ran whispered through the sudden blazing fog he remembered swelling across his marrow and soul.

They were within twenty meters of the hatch. Wade's linked lines bellied out behind them in a great loop. Ran felt the Empress of Earth shudder through his bootsoles.

"What's that?" he demanded. He pivoted on one foot to look all around him. There was no plume of plasma glowing behind the four engine pods he could see, so the starliner wasn't accelerating.

"A lifeboat," Wanda said. "The enemy commander and his bridge crew, five of them. They agreed to evacuate the ship if they were given a lifeboat."

"The Grantholm commander failed," Wade said conversationally. "Chap named Steinwagen, knew him when he was a pup. Not bad at what he did, but too narrow for an operation like this, I would have said."

"We couldn't storm the bridge," Wanda said, "but he'd lost control of the engines and his outlying teams were—gone."

She edged Ran in the direction of the hatch. He remained with his feet planted, watching the lifeboat swell from its bay in the Empress's side like a whale broaching in a limitless ocean.

"They're abandoning ship here?" Ran said. The nearest galaxy was a milky blur. "Do they know that you . . . ?"

Wade read Ran's concealed expression in the younger man's tone. "Now, lad," he said. "Steinwagen wasn't going home a failure. Nothing I did—"

The lifeboat exploded in a flash, soundless until a chunk of plating struck the starliner and made the hull ring through Ran's boots. The ball of expanding gas had a rosy glow that disappeared as it cooled. The solid debris was invisible in the night of stars.

"Colonel Steinwagen didn't dare be identified," Wade explained. "He'd have liked to have died fighting, he was that type, but he couldn't subject his government to the embarrassment of having his body identified. That saved us a nice little problem about how to deal with him and his chaps on the bridge. Though we could have, Ms. Holly."

Ran was moving again. They reached the hatchway. Wanda and the civilian both urged him down the ladder ahead of them. He was too drained to argue.

"I knew your father, lad," Wade's radio-thinned voice continued. "He served under me on Hobilo. A good man, Chick Colville. Stopped at nothing to accomplish a mission."

Ran was trembling so hard in his suit that he was barely able to thrust his gauntlet against the switch controlling the outer airlock door.

"His only problem was," the unseen civilian continued, "he brooded too much about things afterwards."

The lock was swinging shut like a clamshell. The Empress's hull plating would block radio signals completely . . . .

"No point in that, young fellow," Wade's cool voice continued as the massive door closed. "You do what you do and go on from there. Mustn't brood on things, eh?"

Light flooded the airlock when the inner door opened. Ran lunged convulsively from the lock's narrow confines. He heard voices shouting congratulations as other people helped him out of the spacesuit.

The only thing Ran saw was the memory in his mind's eye, a Grantholm soldier sailing past Ran Colville and into blazing eternity.

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Framed