“We’re going to break the door open,” Thorne bellowed through it. “Back away, or you’ll get hurt!” The pounding stopped. Thorne nodded. A trooper adjusted his plasma arc to narrow beam, and sliced through a metal bolt. Thorne kicked the doors wide.

A blond young man fell back a pace, and stared at Thorne with bewilderment. “You’re not the firemen.”

A crowd of other men, tall boys, filled the corridor behind the blond. He did not have to remind himself that these were a bunch of ten-year-olds, but he wasn’t sure about the perceptions of the troopers. Every variation of height and racial mix and build was represented, much more motley than the Greek-god look one might have anticipated from their garden-and-fountain setting. Personal wealth, not personal beauty, had been the ticket for their creation. Still, each was as glowingly healthy as the particularities of his genetics permitted. They all wore uniform sleepwear, bronze-brown tunics and shorts. “Front,” Thorne hissed, and shoved him forward. “Start talking.” “Get me a head-count,” he ripped out of the corner of his mouth as Thorne pulled him past. “Right.”

He’d practiced the speech for this supreme moment in his mind ten thousand times, every possible variation. The only thing he knew for certain that he was not going to start with was, I’m Miles Naismith. His heart was racing. He inhaled a huge gulp of air. “We’re the Dendarii Mercenaries, and we’re here to save you.”

The boy’s expression was repelled, scared, and scornful all mixed. “You look like a mushroom,” he said blankly.

It was so … so off-script. Of his thousand rehearsed second lines, not one followed this. Actually, with the command helmet and all, he probably did look a bit like a big gray— not the heroic image he’d hoped to—

He tore off his helmet, ripped back his hood, and bared his teeth. The boy recoiled.

“Listen up, you clones!” he yelled. “The secret you may have heard whispered is true! Every single one of you is waiting in line to be murdered by House Bharaputra surgeons. They’re gonna stick somebody else’s brain in your head, and throw your brain away. That’s where your friends have been going, one by one, to their deaths. We’re here to take you to Escobar, where you’ll be given sanctuary—” Not all the boys had assembled in the corridor in the first place, and now ones at the rear of the mob began to break away and retreat into individual rooms. A babble started to rise from them, and yells and cries. One dark-haired boy tried to dart past them to the corridor beyond the big double doors, and a trooper grabbed him in a standard arm-lock. He screamed in pain and surprise, and the sound and shock seemed to blow the others back in a wave. The boy struggled without effect in the trooper’s iron grip. The trooper looked exasperated and uncertain, and stared at him as if expecting some direction or order. “Get your friends and follow me!” he yelled desperately to the retreating boys. The blond turned on his heel and sprinted.

“I don’t think they bought us,” said Thorne. The hermaphrodite’s face was pale and tense. “It might actually be easier to stun them all and carry them. We can’t afford to lose time in here, not with that iamned thin perimeter.”

“No—”

His helmet was calling him. He jammed it back on. Comm-link babble burst in his ears, but Sergeant Taura’s deep voice penetrated, selectively enhanced by her channel. “Sir, we need your help up here.”

“What is it?”

Her answer was lost in an override from the woman riding the float-bike. “Sir, there’s three or four people climbing down the outside balconies of the building you’re in. And there’s a group of four Bharaputran security people approaching you from the north.”

He sorted frantically through channels till he found the one outgoing to the air-guard. “Don’t let any get away!”

“How should I stop ’em, sir?” Her voice was edged.

“Stunner,” he decided helplessly. “Wait! Don’t stun any that are hanging off the balcony, wait’ll they reach the ground.”

“I may not have a clear shot.”

“Do your best.” He cut her off and found Taura again. “What do you want, Sergeant?”

“I want you to come talk to this crazy girl. You can convince her if anyone can.”

“Things are—not quite under control down here.”

Thorne rolled its eyes. The captured boy was drumming his bare heels against the Dendarii trooper’s shins. Thorne set its stunner to the lightest setting, and touched it to the back of the squirming boy’s neck. He convulsed and hung more limply. Still conscious, eyes blearing and wild, the boy began to cry.

In a burst of cowardice he said to Throne, “Get them rounded up. Any way you can. I’m going to help Sergeant Taura.”

“You do that,” growled Thorne in a distinctly insubordinate tone. It wheeled, gathering its men. “You and you, take that side—you, take the other. Get those doors down—”

He retreated ignominiously to the sound of shattering plastic.

Upstairs, things were quieter. There were fewer girls than boys altogether, a disproportion that had also prevailed in his time. He’d often wondered why. He stepped over the stunned body of a heavy-set female security guard, and followed his vid map, projected by his helmet, to Sergeant Taura.

A dozen or so girls were seated cross-legged on the floor, their hands clasped behind their necks, under the waving threat of one Dendarii’s stunner. Their sleep-tunics and shorts were pink silk, otherwise identical to the boys’. They looked frightened, but at least they sat silent. He stepped into a side room to find Taura and the other trooper confronting a tall Eurasian girl-woman, who sat at a comconsole with her arms aggressively crossed. Where the vid plate should have been was a smoking hole, hot and recent, from plasma fire.

The Eurasian girl’s head turned, her long black hair swinging, from Taura to himself and back. “My lady, what a circus!” Her voice was a whip of contempt.

“She refuses to budge,” said Taura. Her tone was strangely worried.

“Girl,” he nodded curtly. “You are dead meat if you stay here. You are a clone. Your body is destined to be stolen by your progenitor. Your brain will be removed and destroyed. Perhaps very soon.”

“I know that,” she said scornfully, as if he were a babbling idiot.

“What?” His jaw dropped.

“I know it. I am perfectly aligned with my destiny. My lady required it to be so. I serve my lady perfectly.” Her chin rose, and her eyes rested in a moment of dreamy, distant worship, of what he could not guess.

“She got a call out to House Security,” reported Taura tightly, with a nod at the smoking holovid. “Described us, our gear—even reported an estimate of our numbers.”

“You will not keep me from my lady,” the girl affirmed with a short, cool nod. “The guards will get you, and save me. I’m very important.”

What the hell had the Bharaputrans done to turn this girl’s head inside-out? And could he undo it in thirty seconds or less? He didn’t think so. “Sergeant,” he took a deep breath, and said in a high, light voice on the outgoing sigh, “Stun her.”

The Eurasian girl started to duck, but the sergeant’s reflexes worked at lightning speed. The stunner beam took her precisely between the eyes as she leapt. Taura vaulted the comconsole and caught the girl’s head before it could strike the floor.

“Do we have them all?” he asked.

“At least two went down the back stairs before we blocked them,” Taura reported with a frown.

“They’ll be stunned if they try to escape the building,” he reassured her.

“But what if they hide, downstairs? It’ll take time to find ’em.” Her tawny eyes flicked sideways to take in some chrono display from her helmet. “We should all be on our way back to the shuttle by now.”

“Just a second.” Laboriously, he keyed through his channels till he found Thorne again. Off in the distance, carried thinly by the audio, someone was yelling, ” ’n-of-a-bitch! You little—”