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Weisenberg and Leino were there. The senior engineer had obviously had to restrain the junior from rushing up to join the battle, which would have been useless or worse. They were still wrestling. “Let’s go,” Brodersen said, and pushed the button for it.

The elevator was little more than a steel slab at right angles to a belt which carried it. Three more served the same passageway. Between them, easy to step onto, were ladders, liberally supplied with resting places. Those were for emergency use. The shaft extended almost nine hundred meters. Staring into its bleakly illuminated depths, Brodersen saw it converge in perspective on an atom-small terminus, and dizziness touched him.

Weisenberg sagged down onto a bench and stared at the floor. “Eli, Eli,” he mumbled, “that this had to be.”

Leino, on his feet, gripped the rail as if to crumple it and shook his rifle aloft. His Upland speech came raw: “They fell on their own deeds, they swinehounds.”

“We’re not done with them yet.” Brodersen’s response was mechanical. Most of him howled, I
led Pegeen into this, Pegeen
. “I feel sure they hope to catch us at the auditorium.”

Weisenberg glanced up, instantly alert. “Can they?”

“Dunno. You heard what I managed to worm out of Troxell concerning the layout here. I didn’t dare push too hard.”

“Jesu Kriste,” Leino groaned, “this thing crawls.”

“It’s meant to,” Weisenberg told him. “Change of gravity and air pressure. You need time to adapt. Whichever the enemy takes won’t be any faster. And they retreated spinward from us. The auditorium is antispinward from here. We’ll have a slight jump on them.”

“Yes, and just the three of us have them outgunned,” Brodersen added. “Sit yourself, Martti. Recover your strength.”

He set an example, after choosing a rifle from Leino’s load, but his mind gave no cooperation.
Pegeen. Lis. Barbara. Mike. The stars
.

Once as a boy, on a sail cruise through the San Juan Islands, he’d developed a galloping earache. There was nothing to do but endure until the drum broke and relieved the satanic pain. That took a couple of hours. This five-minute ride felt longer.

But then it ended. He led the way in a rush, up a stairwell which continued past the hatch to the deck. For the hundred-odd meters he could see until curvature blocked vision, the corridor lifted before him like a ramp. Though he was never climbing while he pounded through its hollowness, Earth weight dragged at him. Breath surged rough in his gullet.

A double door beneath a photomural, Armstrong on Luna—He’d expected to shoot out the lock, but the fastening was a mere latch, a steel bar between two brackets that must have been hastily welded on after he called from space. He cast it loose and flung the portal wide.

Ranked in their hundreds, seats confronted a stage as empty as they were. Nearby, the
Emissary
explorers rose in amazement. Most were sloppily clad, they blurred together for Brodersen as he sped toward them, until he saw Joelle—
Judas priest, her hair is gray, she’s skinny, well, eight years—He
saw the alien, chimerical cross between an otter, a lobster, a seal, a
duck, a kangaroo, an alligator, a porpoise, no, none of those really, nothing he could name, nothing his vision was ready for, a brown blur—“We’re springing you!” he bawled. “We’re your friends! We’re getting you out of here! Joelle, do you know me?”

“Freedom, freedom, freedom!” Leino chanted.

A tall man stepped out of the group. Brodersen recognized Captain Langendijk. Weisenberg ran to meet him. Brodersen and Joelle stopped, stared, held out hands toward each other.

Weisenberg and Langendijk halted. “This is a rescue,” the engineer said between gasps. “You’re unlawfully held—we’ve come to set you free—make the truth known—we’ve met resistance—may have to fight our way back to our ship—here, arm yourselves—”

“Dan,” Joelle marveled. Her eyes were enormous, ebon, in the ivory face.

He collected his wits. “Hurry along,” he wheezed, and caught her by the wrist. She in turn gestured at the nonhuman, which moved toward her.

A man joined them. “Daniel!” he exclaimed.
“Por todos los santos—”
Carlos Francisco Miguel Rueda Suárez. He had grown bald.

A hefty blond woman followed. Brodersen recalled fleetingly the name Frieda von Moltke. The rest milled, bewildered. Brodersen started back up the aisle he was in. It wouldn’t do to get blockaded.

“Hurry, hurry!” he shouted. Once beyond the doors, Weisenberg and Leino could pass out the stuff they carried. After that, let Troxell beware. His engineers were at Brodersen’s heels, yelling, waving. Still most of the captives dithered. Langendijk urged them on, but they weren’t soldiers, nor bound by the heart to these wild invaders. Clamor and weapons roused an instinct to hide. They needed a few minutes for comprehension.

Brodersen re-entered the corridor. His right hand gripped his rifle, his left Joelle. The alien tagged close behind her. Leino came immediately after. Weisenberg paused in the doorway to beckon at the laggards. Von Moltke took the chance to work a tommy gun loose from the bundle on his back. Rueda Suárez started to do likewise.

Down the bend of the deck came Troxell and his men. Their front rank carried by the legs a couple of large tables, tops facing forward—shields.

Brodersen could never afterward quite remember what
happened. A new fight erupted. He and those with him backed down the hall; they zigzagged, they knelt, they dropped, they ran further, they kept shooting, and somehow none of them was hit. Somehow the enemy was gone when they reached the next spoke.

He guessed their fire had been too heavy, allowing pistols too little chance to be effective. Or the agents had run low on ammo. Or both. Troxell would have kept enough to hold trapped the
Emissary
people who’d not moved out at once. A return to the auditorium would be suicide.

Joelle shook Brodersen back to full awareness. “Listen, Dan, we must go to a particular storeroom. Fidelio—the Betan the alien here can’t eat our food. We have supplies for him.”

“Huh?” he said. “No. Too risky.”

“Not if we hurry.” Rueda snapped. “Almighty God, Daniel, Fidelio’s our link to his entire race!”

“Okay,” Brodersen decided. “Lead us. On the double.”

The storeroom wasn’t far off, nor was it locked, and the rations were packed handily for carrying, apparently mostly freeze-dried. Burdened, the party sought the nearest shaft, piled on the elevator, and rode it to the hub.

They said almost nothing on the way. They were stunned. Brodersen counted: himself, Joelle, the alien, Weisenberg, Rueda, Leino, von Moltke. Four saved: well, that was plenty, if they could bear witness at Earth. If not, he’d be footnoted in history as a desperado who got killed in a raid he attempted for an obscure purpose.

The elevator delivered them. They sped down a hall that was sharply rounded. There was the platform. There stood Pegeen, Dozsa, Pegeen, Pegeen. She cheered. Brodersen did not see Zarubayev, who must have been carried inboard. She could have done that in this scant weight. Did he live? That question must wait its turn. Troxell would soon find a course of action. They’d better be gone before then.

Brodersen’s company scrambled up the ladder and into the ship, followed by him. He made for the nearest intercom unit. “Su, get us the hell on our way,” he rasped.

Valves closed. The engine awoke. At low acceleration,
Chinook
withdrew from the machinery around her and regained open space.

Fingers plucked Brodersen’s sleeve. He looked about and saw von Moltke. “If you please, Mr. Captain,” she said with a
hoarse accent, “I hear your gunner is a casualty. I hear too your armament is like on
Emissary.”

“Yes,” he said, stupid in his exhaustion, “yes, it is.”

“I was a gunner in
Emissary”
she reminded him. “I can check details by your engineers. Let me shoot out the transmission dishes on the Wheel and the ship. Best I disable the ship too. Then they cannot tell Earth about us.” As he hesitated: “I doubt they haff called, but they will soon unless we prefent. If we prefent, no harm to them. They must sit quiet till somebody worries and sends a speedster to check. Meanwhile, howeffer, you are carrying out what plan you haff. Correct?”

“All right,” he said, “I authorize. Coordinate it with Phil, Chief Engineer Weisenberg, that is, and with our linker, Granville,” while he longed for nothing but Caitlín.

Minutes later, a slicing energy beam made the San Geronimo Wheel mute. It did no further damage; but a missile left
Emissary
a whirl of fragments. That hurt.

Two more felonies,
Brodersen thought.
We’d better build us a damn good case for deserving an executive pardon
.

Never mind now. The immediate objective is just to survive
.

No. Above and before that, sleep
. He barely managed to put affairs temporarily in order and start the ship on a course he deemed proper before he stumbled to bed.

Sergei had died. Caitlín held Brodersen close.

A
GAIN AT AN EARTH GRAVITY
,
Chinook
made for the T machine. On the route prescribed, the trip would take six Earth days.

“Our best bet is to conform for the time being, while we try to work out a strategy,” Brodersen had explained. “Else they’ll come after us, and a watchship has more legs than we do. We for sure can’t outrun a tracker missile.”

Von Moltke had probably saved him and his following from that, his mind added. News of his assault would have provided the perfect excuse to order this vessel blown out of existence. That would not by itself relieve Quick and company of the embarrassment created by the
Emissary
travelers left behind, not to mention whatever questions were occurring to Troxell’s outfit; but presumably they could cope. They would certainly try to cope, and even failure on their part might prove lethal.

As was, while
Chinook
remained at large, bearing the possibility of exposing the whole affair, Langendijk’s faction should be safe from everything worse than continued imprisonment. Indeed, from a tactical viewpoint it was good that Brodersen had not succeeded in releasing them. Now the cause of—liberty?—did not have all its eggs in one highly breakable basket. Half by chance, his operation had worked well.

No. It didn’t. Men are hurt, men are dead. The agents among them are bad enough. I can live with that
—
their fighting us was almost criminally reckless; maybe being penned up for weeks drove them a little crazy
—
but Sergei is dead, my own man, my friend
.

He had awakened beside Caitlín, for a moment conscious only of her. Then the memory rolled over him. His shuddering breath roused her, to embrace and murmur to him for a long while. “It’s a war we’re in, Daniel, my darling, and men have ever
fallen in war. Yours is just, a strife like what they waged against tyrants and foreign overlords again and again on Earth, and us today the happier for it. I knew Sergei too, aye, better than I’ve told you. He joyed in the universe; but if he must leave it, proud would he be that this was why.” Thus did she slowly give him back his heart, until he could rise and go about his work.

Later, though, entering their quarters to fetch something, he found her seated silent, the marks of crying upon her. When he asked what the matter was, she said in a near whisper that she was making a song and wished to be alone.

She was absent, on duty, when he met with Joelle Ky, Carlos Rueda Suárez, and the nonhuman. Presently he would arrange a general gathering at which his entire band could hear the tale of
Emissary
. However, he must not delay getting a skeleton of the facts for himself, to aid him in planning, and this was most rapidly done when a minimum of people were on hand. Despite his gratitude to Frieda von Moltke, he did not invite her, for their lack of acquaintance might slow down the proceedings. Carlos was a cousin of Antonia, Brodersen’s first wife. Though he was a child when she died and had not often met his in-law, they shared considerable background. Brodersen had first encountered Joelle on business nineteen Earth-years ago; since moving to Demeter, he’d looked her up whenever he revisited the mother planet, and for the past decade—

Never certain exactly how he felt about her, she being unlike any other woman ever in his life, he was shocked anew when she entered the office. They had birthdays within a month of each other, but suddenly she was fifty-eight, long gone in a place whose strangeness must have helped grizzle the locks he remembered as blue-sheening black, line the brow he remembered as serene, thin the flesh to a cloak tightly drawn over bones which remained as exquisite as before.

He bumbled to his feet. “Joelle,” he said out of a lumpy larynx, “hello. It’s wonderful having you here.”

She smiled. That and her voice hadn’t changed either; both were pleasing and a little remote, like compositions by Brancusi or Delius. “Thank you for everything, Dan. I’m so eager to learn precisely what ‘everything’ means—certainly an enormous lot—” They clasped four hands and might have kissed, but Rueda came through the door and, in Peruvian style, hugged the captain.

“Daniel, Daniel, how magnificent!” His Spanish almost
warbled. “Our rescuer, our warrior—I’ve been talking to some of your crew—Do you know, when I was a boy I idolized you. And I was right. By God, but you are a
man!”

Stepping back, he reassumed proper aristocratic dignity. Brodersen studied him for a second. A ghost of Toni lingered in Rueda’s straight-lined, short-nosed countenance and hazel eyes. Of medium height, he had laid a small paunch onto his slimness while he was away, and Brodersen understood how he must resent that trace of early eld: doubtless worse than being left with a mere brown fringe of hair. At least his mustache was the same.

Then the nonhuman arrived and overwhelmed all other impressions. The chances were that he (she? it?) had no such intention, Brodersen decided. If anything, the attitude of the creature looked diffident, though how could you tell? But the sight—he’d need practice before he made complete sense of those contours—the gait—the smell that was like a seashore, only not really—