“KL,” said the face. “A-twenty-three?” Which was code for: “Can you still navigate?”

Donal looked over the panel. For a wonder, it had been touched by what had split the room — but barely. Its instruments were all reading.

“A-twenty-nine,” he replied affirmatively.

“M-Forty,” said the other, and signed off. Donal let the intership button slip from beneath his finger. M-Forty was — Proceed as ordered,

Proceed as ordered, for the C4J One-twenty-nine, the ship Donal was in, meant — get in close to Oriente and pick off as many assault troops as you can.

Donal set about the unhappy business of removing his dead and dying from their control chairs.

Coa, he noted, as he removed her, more gently than the others, seemed dazed and unknowing. There were no broken bones about her, but she appeared to have been pinched, or crushed on one side by just a touch of what had killed the others. Her suit was tight and intact. He thought she might make it, after all.

Seating himself in the captain’s chair, he called the gun stations and other crew posts.

“Report,” he ordered.

Gun stations One and Five through Eight answered.

“We’re going in planetward,” he said. “All able men abandon the weapon stations for now and form a working crew to seal ship and pump some air back in here. Those not sealed off, assemble in lounge. Senior surviving crewman to take charge.”

There was a slight pause. Then a voice spoke back to him.

“Gun Maintenanceman Ordovya,” it said. “I seem to be surviving Senior, sir. Is this the captain?”

“Staff Liaison Graeme, Acting Captain. Your officers are dead. As ranking man here, I’ve taken command. You have your orders, Maintenanceman.”

“Yes, sir.” The voice signed off.

Donal set himself about the task of remembering his ship training. He got the C4J underway toward Oriente and checked all instruments. After a while, the flare went out abruptly overhead and a slow, hissing noise registered on his eardrums — at first faintly, then scaling rapidly up in volume and tone to a shriek. His suit lost some of its drum-tightness.

A few moments later, a hand tapped him on his shoulder. He turned around to look at a blond-headed crewman with his helmet tilted back.

“Ship tight, sir,” said the crewman. “I’m Ordovya.”

Donal loosened his own helmet and flipped it back, inhaling the room air gratefully.

“See to the First Officer,” he ordered. “Do we have anything in the way of a medic aboard?”

“No live medic, sir. We’re too small to rate one. Freeze unit, though.”

“Freeze her, then. And get the men back to their posts. We’ll be on top of the action again in another twenty minutes.”

Ordovya went off. Donal sat at his controls, taking the C4J in cautiously and with the greatest possible margins of safety. In principle, he knew how to operate the craft he was seated in; but no one knew better than he what a far cry he was from being an experienced pilot and captain. He could handle this craft the way someone who has taken half a dozen riding lessons can handle a horse — that is, he knew what to do, but he did none of it instinctively. Where Andresen had taken in the readings of all his instruments at a glance and reacted immediately, Donal concentrated on the half dozen main telltales and debated with himself before acting.

So it was that they came late to the action on the edges of Oriente’s atmosphere; but not so late that the assault troops were already safely down out of range. Donal searched the panel for the override button on the antipersonnel guns and found it.

“Override on the spray guns,” he announced into the mike before him. He looked at the instruments, but he saw in his imagination the dark and tumbling space suited bodies of the assault troops, and he thought of the several million tiny slivers of carbon steel that would go sleeting among them at the touch of his ringer. There was a slight pause before answering; and then the voice of Ordovya came back.

“Sir… if you like, the gunmen say they’re used to handling the weapons—”

“Maintenanceman!” snapped Donal. “You heard the order. Override!”

“Override, sir.”

Donal looked at his scope. The computer had his targets in the gunsights. He pressed the button, and held it down.

Two hours later, the C4J, then in standby orbit, was ordered to return to rendezvous and its captain to report to his Sub-Patrol chief. At the same time came a signal for all Staff Liaisons to report to the flagship; and one for Staff Liaison Donal Graeme to report personally to Blue Patrol Chief Lludrow. Considering the three commands, Donal called Ordovya on the ship’s phone and directed him to take care of the first errand. He himself, he decided, could take care of the other two, which might — or might not — be connected.

Arriving at the flagship, he explained his situation to the Reception Officer, who made a signal both to the Staff Liaison people and to the Blue Patrol chief.

“You’re to go directly to Lludrow,” he informed Donal; and assigned him a guide.

Donal found Lludrow in a private office on the flagship that was not much bigger than Donal’s stateroom in the C4J.

“Good!” said Lludrow, getting up behind a desk as Donal came in and coming briskly around it. He waited until the guide had left, and then he put a dark hand on Donal’s arm.

“How’d your ship come through?” he asked.

“Navigating,” said Donal. “There was a direct hit on the control room though. All officers casualties.”

“All officers?” Lludrow peered sharply at him. “And you?”

“I took command, of course. There was nothing left, though, but antipersonnel mop-up.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Lludrow. “You were Acting Captain for part of the action?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. That’s better than I hoped for. Now,” said Lludrow, “tell me something. Do you feel like sticking your neck out?”

“For any cause I can approve of, certainly,” answered Donal. He considered the smaller, rather ugly man; and found himself suddenly liking the Blue Patrol chief. Directness like this had been a rare experience for him, since he had left the Dorsai.

“All right. If you agree, we’ll both stick our necks out.” Lludrow looked at the door of the office, but it was firmly closed. “I’m going to violate top security and enlist you in an action contrary to Staff orders, if you don’t mind.”

“Top security?” echoed Donal, feeling a sudden coolness at the back of his neck.

“Yes. We’ve discovered what was behind this Newton-Cassida landing on Oriente… you know Oriente?”

“I’ve studied it, of course,” said Donal. “At school — and recently when I signed with Freiland. Temperatures up to seventy-eight degrees centigrade, rock, desert, and a sort of native vine and cactus jungle. No large bodies of water worth mentioning and too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

“Right. Well,” said Lludrow, “the important point is, it’s big enough to hide in. They’re down there now and we can’t root them out in a hurry — and not at all unless we go down there after them. We thought they were making the landing as a live exercise and we could expect them to run the gauntlet back out in a few days or weeks. We were wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“We’ve discovered their reason for making the landing on Oriente. It wasn’t what we thought at all.”

‘That’s fast work,” said Donal. “What’s it been… four hours since the landing?”

“They made fast work of it,” said Lludrow. “The news is being sat on; but they are firing bursts of a new kind of radiation from projectors that fire once, move, and fire again from some new hiding place — a large number of projectors. And the bursts they fire hit old Sirius himself. We’re getting increased sunspot activity.” He paused and looked keenly at Donal, as if waiting for comment. Donal took his time, considering the situation.