Then she looked at Nelson. He felt a jolt as their stares met, an electric ripple that crystallized as fear in his gut. At the same time it ignited in him a lust unlike any he had ever known. He had loved Jon's mother deeply, passionately, but he had never desiredher in this way. He felt as if, cell by cell, his DNA screamed for union with this woman's genetic material.

He waited for her to look away, but she did not. With every second that her gaze continued, Nelson feared she would pass him by, and at the same time, he desperately wanted her to dismiss him as she had the others. Mechanically, he punched icons as crates began to move again from the DropShip.

She walked toward him. Coming closer, her steady military tread devouring the distance between them, she let her boots click sharply against the catwalk grating. She was as tall as he was and must have been about half his forty-seven years. She did not smile, but the way she eyed him brought self-conscious color to his cheeks.

"You were the one in the BattleMaster, quiaff?"

Nelson nodded.

She took the noteputer from him and set it down. Grabbing his left hand, she forced it open and pressed it against her own right palm. The last two fingers on her hand curled down and around over the scars. Her flesh seemed unnaturally pale against his, and the scars on his hands looked almost like tendrils curling out from her fingers.

She kept his hand in hers for a bit longer than he felt comfortable, then she released it. "How long?"

"Almost four years."

She pursed her lips for a moment, then stared at him like a cobra. "I could get you repaired. You could re-grow those fingers."

Nelson tried to suppress a reaction, but a thrill shook him. All the things he had lost since his maiming in the Clan invasion, everything he had blamed on the loss of his fingers, flashed before him. He could have his command back. He would be respected again. Even Jon . . .

He realized his error as her lips peeled back in a cruel smile. "I would have done that, were you a warrior."

Nelson swallowed hard and straightened up. "Were I a warrior, I'd be dead, quiaff?"

His use of a Clan word seem to surprise her, but her smile did not change so he could not be sure if that was good or bad. She looked him up and down again, then turned and pointed at the next-nearest prisoner on the bay deck below. "You, replace him."

In one leap Spider bounded up the ladder to the catwalk. He picked up the noteputer, and Nelson silently passed him the stylus. Spider gave him a wink, the silent prison argot sign for "things are looking up." Nelson nodded, then looked at the Red Corsair and waited.

She let him wait. She raked him with her gaze, letting it linger on his loins and then his maimed hand, clearly seeking a reaction. He fought to keep his face impassive, and computed mentally the exponential values of 2 to distract his thoughts. His effort, though successful, only seemed to heighten her interest.

"Follow me." She turned and walked back to the hatchway.

He trailed behind her, his concentration flagging for an instant as he noticed the sensual sway of her hips as she walked. Two times 32768 is 65536. Two times 65536 is 131072.... He refocused his eyes on the mass of red hair trailing down to the middle of her back and kept multiplying numbers in his head.

The Red Corsair stepped through the hatchway, then closed it behind him. She turned to a communications monitor and opened a line to the bridge. The commtech sat straight up in her seat when she saw who it was in the monitor. "Yes, Captain?"

The Red Corsair tucked a stray hair behind one ear. "ETA for the last DropShip?"

"One minute, sir."

"Good. When it attaches, increase our velocity to 1.2 gravities. When we reach the jump point, we will go out."

"Understood. Helm out."

Nelson frowned. Increasing the acceleration would make unloading the DropShip far more difficult than it currently was. It made no sense to increase speed unless there was some sort of in-system defense or pursuit.

"You are concerned for your friends, quiaff?"

"As you are for your people."

"Good, some of your spirit returns." She reached out and took his maimed hand in hers, then led him down the corridor to a central core of elevators. The doors opened when she pressed the button on the wall. They both entered the box and she selected a deck.

The box started to move and Nelson's legs almost collapsed. His weakness surprised him, then he realized the ship had begun its acceleration. Grabbing the elevator handrail, he pulled himself erect. He glanced at the Red Corsair, but saw no reaction, no sign that she had even noticed his problem.

The elevator stopped at an upper deck and they exited when the doors opened. Nelson followed her to a cabin door, then into the cabin. The door slid shut behind him and she used a wall switch to bring up the lights.

He felt a moment's surprise when he realized she had brought him to her private stateroom, but that died fast. The instant the lights went on, Nelson felt as though he had wandered into a set designed for a bandit leader in some potboiler holovid. Lurid reds, golds, and purples dominated the room, with the gold coming mostly from chains and lamps and little items that were beautiful but probably chosen at whim while stalking through a shattered enemy's stronghold. Brocaded and embroidered scarves hung from lamps, staining the light with red tones. Crystal bottles half-filled with multi-colored liquors stood racked in a sideboard.

The room was the Red Corsair and yet it was not. From all that Nelson had observed during his two months with the bandit band, he knew that most of them were Clanners—probably members who had gone rogue. What struck him now, however, was the fact that such gaudy but rich surroundings were totally out of character for someone born of the Clans. Mementoes of battles, trophies from past victories, he could have accepted, but not this self-indulgent and extravagant display. Again he had the same vision of a holovid director creating these quarters to emphasize the romantic side of the Red Corsair for a cheap mini-series.

Suddenly the truth hit him right between the eyes. All the prisoners had long since agreed that thisRed Corsair must have named herself after the legendary pirate who, almost fifty years before, had cut a bloody swath through Free Worlds League planets near the Periphery and the Lyran border. Some had argued that the original Red Corsair could have stayed young by maintaining her ship's travel at a significant percentage of the speed of light, and thus could, in fact, be thisRed Corsair.

But seeing this room, Nelson saw that fanciful idea exploded faster than a back-shot Rifleman.He couldn't prove it, of course, but this room bore too much resemblance to those he'd seen in many a late-night holovid he'd watched while stationed up and down the Federated Commonwealth. Granting that this Red Corsair wasClan, and that the role had been specifically chosen for some reason, it made sense that whoever had put together the sham would use holovids as source material. Where else would a Clanner go for information about the ways of people of the Inner Sphere?

And that, he decided, was why the picture didn't fit the frame.

The Red Corsair looked at him. "You think too much."

"Does it matter what I think?"

She grabbed him by the right wrist and twisted the manacle until it bit into his flesh. "Do you know what this is?"

"I had heard that when the Clans take a bondsman, they bind his right wrist with a bondcord."