He met the arriving passengers at the end of the airlock tunnel. He was a small man, round-faced, bearded, and balding on top. “Welcome to St. Michael,” he said, his hand out. “Ten-C-Bill landing fee from each of you, please.”

Erik looked around the terminal, which was deserted except for half a dozen cats stalking the corners, or napping on the empty waiting-room chairs—probably somebody’s solution to the rodent problems stations like this sometimes suffered. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Not kidding,” said the harbormaster. “Business is slow, and I have to pay my salary somehow. I’d hate to have to lay myself off.”

Erik stepped forward. The floors had strips of a sticky material that made it easier to walk in the reduced gravity. He pulled out his wallet, and produced a five-hundred-C-Bill note—enough to cover everyone. He kept his voice low. “I’m supposed to be meeting a SwordSworn shuttle. Are they here?”

He shook his head. “You’re the only arriving ship today, other than some suborbital hoppers. Helium-3 miners coming in from the boonies for supplies, you know.”

Erik sighed and looked at Clayhatchee.

Clayhatchee shrugged. “I’ll go see if I can get a call through to our headquarters, and find out what’s happening.” He headed off to find a vidphone booth.

“Look,” one of the passengers said, stepping forward. It was the businessman Erik had played poker with only a few days before. “We need to get down to the surface. Are there any shuttles running?”

The harbormaster shook his head. “All the scheduled service to the surface was through the spaceport in Jerome. When the capital fell, the shuttles stopped coming. There’s one on the pad out there that came in last week and needed minor repairs. But there’s no crew to fly it. The flight crew rotated home on another flight, and, obviously, they aren’t sending anybody to pick it up.”

The businessman’s eyes were wide with concern. “So what are we supposed to do?”

The harbormaster shrugged. “You could stay here. Lots of rooms here at fifty Cs per night. Or you could hope that there’s an unscheduled ship through. Or you could get back on that pretty liner of yours and leave. Me, I’d go for the last choice. Not much left here, not much chance of getting to St. Andre anytime soon, and, from what I hear, the ugly is just starting down there.”

The businessman scowled. “That ‘ugly’ is home for a lot of us, sir.”

The harbormaster shrugged. “What do I know? I’m from Tybalt myself. Do what you want to. I just know we’re tracking a bunch of incoming plasma flares that look like Liao reinforcements.”

Erik grimaced at this bit of news. Intelligence already had SwordSworn forces slightly outnumbered.

Clayhatchee returned, leaned in, and whispered to Erik. “Commander, our transport should be here within twenty minutes. They’re sending a landing craft for us. Plenty of room for all these people, if you want to be generous.”

He glanced at Elsa, standing among the assembled passengers in the terminal. She was talking with the would-be merc from the poker table, and he felt a little pang of jealousy. Damn it, why isn’t she back on the liner?

He turned his back to the group and whispered to Clayhatchee. “We’re not running a spaceline, Lieutenant, so I’d like to keep that quiet. Anyway, most of them are going to be from Georama. We’d be taking them into a combat zone, on the wrong side of the lines. Better they sit this one out here, or, better yet, on some other planet.”

“Yes sir.”

One by one, the passengers began to return to the ship, until finally about half of them were gone. The rest were determined to stick it out on St. Michael in hopes of getting home. He noticed the two businesspeople among those who stayed, but at some point, Elsa had disappeared. So had the merc, which ordinarily would have amused Erik. But he remembered the two of them talking, and looking a little too friendly.

Shake it off. You’ve got no claim, no prospects, and, ultimately, no interest. His heart, however, didn’t respond well to logic. At least she’s safe.

The military landing craft arrived as promised. By that time, Erik had bribed a maintenance woman to take them out to meet it in a pressurized buggy. Halfway there, the buggy stopped. The woman driving the little vehicle activated controls extending a manipulator arm, which reached down and grabbed a recessed tie-down lug in the pavement. “Ship taking off,” she explained, pointing at the liner. “Back blast could blow us away like a leaf if we aren’t careful.”

Erik watched, curious. The landing had been more than a shade terrifying, but, with the pitching and odd acceleration, he wasn’t sure how it had been done. The liner was a winged aerodyne—not normally capable of vertical takeoff or landing. Evidently, St. Michael’s low gravity and lack of atmosphere made some unorthodox maneuvering possible.

The ship lifted off on maneuvering thrusters alone, its full power only slightly more than was necessary to get the ship off the apron. Then the nose began to pitch up; as it did, the ship started sliding forward. He tried to imagine the ship doing something like this in reverse, and was just as happy he’d been blissfully unaware of the landing procedure.

As the ship picked up speed, the main drive ignited. True to the maintenance woman’s prediction, the buggy shuddered violently, and actually seemed to slide sideways on its wire-mesh wheels.

The liner shot upward. Even at low throttle, the local gravity could do little to impede the ship’s fusion drive. Erik watched the ship grow smaller against the black sky. “Bye, Elsa,” he said quietly. “It’s been interesting.”

The continent of Ravensglade was located entirely above St. Andre’s arctic circle. It was relentlessly flat, frozen for six months of the year, plagued with gnats for at least four of the rest. Except for gnat season, the wind ripped constantly across the land like an unseen demon, tearing at anything not tied down.

Though the land was flat, it wasn’t level. The whole continent seemed to tilt, almost imperceptibly, like a table with one leg slightly longer than the others. Near sea level, and occasionally lower in the south, the land rose slowly in the north until it met the ocean in a nearly unbroken line of hundred-and-fifty-meter cliffs. It was along the inlets, bays, and narrow beaches below these cliffs that most of the permanent settlements on the continent were located.

The inland wastes were temporary home to miners, prospectors, and oil workers, who scratched what wealth they could out of the land, hurriedly returned to Georama to spend it, then trudged back to Ravensglade to make more. The towns along the coast offered them a few mild vices, a place to pick up supplies, and were ports for the ships and hovercraft that connected the continent with civilization’s more respectable outposts.

It was also above these cliffs where the old Star League had elected to build a base that still stood, a monument to the quality of its engineering, and a magnet for any power attempting to establish military dominion over the region. The Capellan Confederation, the Blakists, House Davion, Devlin Stone—all had fought over it, or occupied it.

The complex was vast, and distributed in a radially symmetrical arrangement of hardened barracks, hangars, landing pads, shops, command centers, and a hospital. All were connected underground by a network of tunnels—some of them big enough to accommodate armor and ’Mechs. Along the east and north sides, vast runways for aerodyne DropShips bordered the grounds.

In the last fifty years, the base had fallen into disuse. It now stood on the plains like a ghost city—a training center for some of St. Andre’s few remaining elite military units, and home to oil companies and miners who appropriated some of the shops and barracks along its north edge.