Despair froze him and his arms dropped to his sides as he stood there, tottering, his strength gone. The ship, his friends, they were gone as well.

From close by came the rumble of heavy, running feet.

Over the hill rushed five moropes, their riders shouting with predatory glee as they lowered their lances for the kill.

With conditioned reflex Jason swung up his arm, his hand crooked and ready for the gun, before he remembered that he had been disarmed.

“Then we’ll do this the old-fashioned way!” he shouted, swinging the iron club in a whistling circle. The odds were well against him, but before he went down they would know that they had been in a fight.

They came in a tight knot, each man trying t6 be first to the kill, jostling one another and leaning far forward with outstretched lances. Jason stood ready, legs wide, waiting for the last possible instant before he moved. The shrieking riders were at the edge of the burnt area.

A muffled explosion was followed instantly by a great, roiling cloud of vapor that hid the attackers from sight. Jason lowered his club and stepped back as a tendril of the cloud twisted toward him. Only one morope made it through the gray vapor, carried along by its momentum, skidding and collapsing with a ground-shaking thud. Its rider catapulted toward Jason and even managed to crawl a short distance further, his jaw working with silent hatred, before he, too, collapsed.

When a wisp of the thinned, out gas reached Jason he sniffed, then moved quickly away. Narcogas. It worked instantly and thoroughly on any oxygen-breathing animal, producing paralysis and unconsciousness for about five hours, after which the victim recovered completely, with nothing worse than the nasty side effect of a skull-splitting headache.

What had happened? The ship had certainly gone, and there was no one else in sight. Fatigue was winning out over the effects of the stimulants and his thinking was getting muzzy. He heard the growling rumble for some seconds before he recognized the source of the sound.

It was the rocket launch from the Pugnacious. Blinking up into the clear brightness of the morning sky, he saw the high contrail stretching a white line across the sky toward him, growing larger with each passing second. The launch was first a black dot, then a growing shape, finally a flame-spouting cylinder that touched down less than a hundred meters away. The lock spun open and Meta dropped to the ground, even before the shock absorbers had damped the landing impact.

“Are you all right?” she called, running swiftly to him, the questing muzzle of her gun looking for enemies on all sides.

“Never felt better,” he said, leaning on the club so he would not fall down. ‘What kept you? I thought you had all pulled out and forgotten about me.”

“You know we wouldn’t do that.” She ran her hands over his arms, his back while she talked, as though looking for broken bones, or simply reassuring herself of his presence. “We could not stop them from taking you away, although we tried. Some of them died. An attack was launched on the ship at the same time.”

Jason could well understand the shock of battle and dogged resistance behind her matter-of-fact words. It must have been brutal.

“Come to the launch,” she said, putting his arm across her shoulders so she could bear part of his weight. He did not protest. “They must have been concealed on all sides and reinforcements kept arriving. They are very good fighters and do not ask for quarter, nor do they expect it. Kerk soon realized that there would be no end to the battle and that we could not help you by staying there. If you did succeed in escaping — which he was sure you would if you were still alive, it would have been impossible for you to reach the ship. Therefore, under cover of counterattacks, we placed a number of spyeyes and microphones, as well as planting a good store of land mines and remote-controlled gas bombs. After that we left, and the ship has set up a base somewhere in the northern mountains. I dropped off at the foothills with the launch and have been waiting ever since. I came as soon as I could. Here, into the cabin.”

“You timed it very well, thank you. I can do that myself.”

He couldn’t, but he wouldn’t aclniit it, and made believe that he had climbed the ladder instead of being boosted in by a powerful push from her feminine right arm.

Jason staggered over and dropped into the copilot’s acceleration couch while Meta sealed the lock. Once it was closed, the tension drained from her body as her gun whined back into its power holster. She hurried to his side, kneeling so she could look into his face.

“Take this filthy thing off,” she said, hurling the fur cap to the floor. She ran her fingers through his hair and touched her fingertips lightly to the bruises and frostbite marks on his face. “I thought you were dead, Jason, really I did. I never thought I would see you again.”

“Did that bother you so much?”

He was exhausted, his strength stretched well beyond the breaking point so that waves of blackness threatened to obscure his vision. He fought them away. He felt that, at this moment, he was closer to Meta than he had ever been before.

“It did, it bothered me. I don’t know why.” She kissed him suddenly, hard, forgetting the condition of his cracked and battered lips. He did not complain.

“Perhaps you are just used to having me around,” he said, far more casually than he felt.

“No, it is not that. I have had men around before.”

Oh, thanks, he thought.

“I have had two children. I am twenty-three years old. While piloting our ship, I have been to many planets. I used to think that I knew all there was to know, but now I do not believe so. You have taught me many new things. When that man, Mikah Samon, kidnapped you, I found out something I did not know about myself. I had to find you. These are very un-Pyrran things to feel, for we are taught to always think of the city first, never of other people. Now I am very mixed up. Am I wrong?”

“No,” he said, fighting back the threat of overwhelming darkness. “Quite the opposite.” He pressed his cracked and dirt-grimed fingers to the resilient warmth of her arm. “I think you are more right than any of the trigger, happy butchers in your tribe.”

“You must tell me. Why do I feel this way?”

He tried to smile, but it hurt his face.

“Do you know what marriage is, Meta?”

“I have heard of it. A social custom on some planets. I do not know what it is.”

An alarm buzzed angrily on the control board and she turned at once to it.

“You still don’t know, and maybe it’s better that way. Maybe I’ll never tell you.” He smiled, his chin touched his chest and he fell instantly asleep.

“There are more of them coming,” Meta said, switching off the alarm and glancing into the viewscreen. There was no answer. When she saw what had happened, she quickly tightened the straps to secure him in the couch, then began the takeoff procedure. She neither noticed nor cared if any attackers were under the jets when she blasted skyward.

The pressure of deceleration woke Jason as they dropped down for the landing. “Thirsty,” he said, smacking his dry lips together. “And hungry enough to eat one of those moropes raw.”

“Teca is on the way,” she told him, flipping off the switches as the launch grounded.

“If he is the same kind of sawbones his mentor, Brucco, is, he’ll put me under for recovery therapy and keep me unconscious for a week. No can do.” He turned his head, slowly, to look as the inner port opened. Teca, a brisk and authoritative young man, whose enthusiasm for medicine far exceeded his knowledge, climbed in.

“No can do,” Jason repeated. “No recovery therapy. Glucose drip, vitamin injections, artificial kidney, whatever you wish as long as I’m conscious.”