A little of the previous day's snow had settled on the field where My Ella Speed lay grounded. Between the blockhouses and the gloomy oubliettes of the freighter silos, patches of it betrayed the unwary foot — a skim of brown slush, gelling steadily as the thermometer dropped. The field was almost deserted; the lights were doused; the earlier cirrus had blown away east and left behind it a fast-moving two thousand meter cloudbase that dyed the night as black as Himation's hat

Truck, prone in the muck fifteen yards from his boat, awaited a signal. He was soaked from head to foot, clenching his jaw to keep it from tearing itself off and his teeth from betraying his position to the pair of General Gaw's policemen on sentry-go at the base of the unlit ship. There was no sign of Fix the bos'n, which worried him no less than the fact that the General hadn't even bothered to keep up the fiction of a Port Authority arrest.

The policemen beat their arms and stamped their feet, cocked their heads as a distant siren fluted momentarily down empty arcades, morose and fading — 2 a.m. dock stinks breathed over the field. It was the uncertain hour, when all kinds of rats dance beneath the sidewalks and the air is as bitter as lead in the lungs.

Truck sneaked a look to the left of him, where Himation lay in similar discomfort. The pale hand rose and fell, the cloak whirled like the wing of a cormorant.

Truck heaved himself to his feet and skulked toward his man. He'd gained three quarters of the distance — and the Fleet still quite oblivious — when Himation overtaxed his sense of balance on the tricky surface, flailed his arms, and went down like an empty black gunny sack. Immediately, Truck's intended victim raised a shout and sent a Chambers bolt fizzing into the slush alongside the anarchist's head. Himation wailed and began crabbing rapidly about on his hands and knees. Shadows pranced dangerously on the blistered hull of the Ella Speed.

'Whistle's gone, Tiny!' yelled Truck. He leaped into the air and landed on the astonished copper's back, locking his legs round the waist, left hand cupping the occipital bulge and pushing forward while the right forearm came across the windpipe and hauled back. The subject of the assault attempted to shoot one of Truck's feet off. Truck bent his head and bit an ear. The gun fell without going off.

Meanwhile, Tiny Skeffern had nipped in from the other side of the ship in a hasty ambush and kicked the legs from under the second policeman. He leaped around him, putting the boot in and jumping away again, yelping enthusiastically. He hadn't bargained, however, on the Fleet arsenal…

Truck gave a final wrench, dropped off his host like a dead tick and punched him in the kidneys twice. Suffering cruelly, the Fleet man staggered round to face his tormentor — took the hard vee between Truck's stiffened, separated thumb and forefinger directly in his larynx. His eyes rolled up. Truck hung over him, panting.

'Jesus!' bawled Tiny, looking down the muzzle of a Chambers gun.

Alice Gaw's law was on its feet; Tiny was rigid. Truck took a pace toward them, winced.

The first and only shell fired in the encounter was still boring its way mindlessly into the mud of the field; its fading glare lighted a quick, fishlike flicker of movement; and with a long knife sticking in his neck, the remaining policeman choked at Tiny, dropped his weapon. 'Ooh,' he said, kneeling down. He subsided slowly and was still.

Himation picked himself up carefully. 'That was "a dirty chance well taken",' he said, brushing down his cloak and inspecting his gritty palms.

Truck swallowed, looked at him aggressively. 'lf you can do that sort of stuff, why the hell did we have to go through this charade at all?' he demanded. 'You could have picked them both off from a mile away with that thing.' He ran his tongue over his swelling lower lip. He knew he was going to think about what he'd just done and then be ill.

Himation retrieved his knife. He licked it deliberately, his blue eyes glittering at Truck over eight inches of stainless steel. 'There's an art to murder,' he explained. 'And a spontaneity to Art, though Pater wouldn't agree.' They confronted silently for a moment (Tiny was trying not to notice them, hands thrust into his pockets, studying some rivet-heads on Ella Speed's hull); then, acknowledging Truck's sneer with a curt nod, he went over to the man who had tried to shoot him. He was limping slightly. 'This one's just as dead. Captain. You'd better find it in your heart to approve.'

'I don't understand what you're talking about,' said Truck, but he did.

A light blazed out from the boat. The loading ramp descended, humming, to reveal the misshapen silhouette of Fix the bos'n, stout legs set firmly apart, humping his ugly chopper. 'You move into the light,' he said, snapping his sawmill mouth. 'Where I can see you. She's my boat since you took the Captain.'

But they managed to pacify him and urged him to put the thing away, which he did with care, wrapping it in some filthy rags he had carried with him for the purpose since the day he fled the squirearchy in Chrome. Ten minutes later, the cubical geometry of Carter's Snort flared briefly green as the Ella Speed fired up and shook Earth from under her.

'I left my bloody guitar!' cried Tiny Skeffern, beating his forehead with the heel of his hand.

Himation the anarchist glanced anxiously at the exterior screens. 'I hope you're skilled at evasion, Captain.'

'Well have to go back. Well have to go back and fetch it!'

'Look, I'm sorry about all that on the field,' apologized Truck, scratching the back of his neck.

They weren't followed (the General's imagination was focused elsewhere, and a violent old junkie occupied her only eye): but they violated the operational envelope of a solitary missile interceptor on the way up, and it broke its long parabola through the upper reaches of the air to look them over.

Precarious and hungry, hovering on the edge of the time when its prey might come into season, like a huge fragile insect against the gloomy bulk of the Earth, it spun and darted — extruding its armament and making playful threatening passes — then looped away on a complicated rising curve, trailing anhedral detector vanes, satisfied that Ella Speed was creeping out of its sphere of concern.

They watched it with wistful admiration. A precise, composed hesitation roll through fifty miles of airspace, then it climbed away like a roman candle; to vanish — flip! — as if amazed by its own dexterity. 'Arrogant sod,' said Truck. A thin-skinned predator in a rarified region, it could have vaporized a city. 'Will you just look at that, Tiny!'

'You mean there's a bloke in there?'

Himation shook his head. 'A boy,' he murmured absently. 'Only a boy has the reflexes. I flew one of those things until I was thirteen. They give you amphetamines for your reactions; you get addicted fairly quickly. Nothing's the same when you come down.' He gazed out at the failing atmosphere with a kind of angry yearning on his face. 'A lot of them are lost from dexedrine euphoria — they try to take them where the air is thicker, they try to land them but the hulls burn out.'

He took the controls soon after that. The ship shuddered fit to break its back and began its tortuous clawing progress through the dyne-fields to his secret destination. It was a wholly ungraceful journey, but short, haunted by the beautiful burning boys of the anarchist's youth.

He was still morose and withdrawn when My Ella Speed's Dynaflow drivers cut out with a thump and she spat herself back into reality like a grub from a mouthful of fruit. Her frame groaned and flexed; her exterior screens, confused by tachyon interference, hallucinated bizarre fish, sea horses plated with brass, unheard music from a questionable dimension. 'We're out!' said Truck with relief: another time, she wasn't going to make it.