"All transporter rooms, this is Kebron," the Brikar security chief was saying briskly. "Coordinate with Lieutenant Lefler and commence immediate beam-up of Thallonians at the coordinates she is specifying."

"Yoz, we'll bring you up, too," said Si Cwan. "For all that has passed between us, nonetheless this is your opportunity to save your life—"

"My life is not imperiled!" shouted Yoz. "I will not fall for your trickery, or for you—"

And then something sounding like an explosion roared through the palace. The last sight they had of Yoz was his still declaring his disbelief, even as the roof collapsed upon him.

The ground around them fragmented, tilted, and then oozing from between the cracks Calhoun saw—to his shock—magma bubbling up beneath them. It was as if something was cracking through to the very molten core of the planet. The ground continued to crack beneath them, like ice floes becoming sliced up by an arctic sea . . . except that, in this case, the sea was capable of incinerating them.

Calhoun and Ryjaan were several feet away from each other, and then the ground cracked between them, heaving upward. The ground beneath Calhoun was suddenly tilting at a seventydegree angle. Calhoun, flat on his belly, scrambled for purchase and then he saw, just a few feet away, his sword. It skidded past him and he thrust out a desperate hand, snagged it, and jammed it into the ground.

It momentarily halted his tumble, but the impact tore loose his comm badge. Before he could grab it with his free hand, it tumbled down and away and vanished into a bubbling pool of lava.

The gap between Ryjaan and Calhoun widened, and Ryjaan took several steps back, ran, and leaped. He vaulted the distance and landed several feet above Calhoun. He shouted in triumph even as he pulled a dagger from the upper part of his boot. He started to clamber toward Calhoun . . .

. . . and suddenly the ground shifted beneath them once more, thrusting forward onto the lip of another chunk of land. Just that quickly, the land they were on was now twenty feet in the air. There was an outcropping from another mountain that was within range of a jump, and it would be a more tenable position than Calhoun's present one, provided he could get to it.

Ryjaan started to get to his feet, to come after Calhoun across the momentarily semi-level surface—and suddenly the ground jolted once more. The cracks radiated as far as the eye could see, as if the landscape of Thallon had transformed into a massive jigsaw puzzle. In the distance, the great city of Thai—once the center of commerce, the seat of power, of the Thallonian Empire—was crumbling, the mighty towers plunging to the ground.

The jostling sent Ryjaan off balance, and he was tossed toward the edge of the precipice . . . toward it and over. With a screech he tumbled, and the only thing that prevented him from going over completely was a frantic, one-handed grip that he managed to snag on the edge. A short drop below him, lava seethed, almost as if it were calling to him. He tried to haul himself up, cursing, growling . . .

. . . and then Calhoun was there, fury in his eyes, and he was poised over Ryjaan. It would take but a single punch to send Ryjaan tumbling down into the lava. To put an end to him. The savage within Calhoun wanted to, begged him to. And he knew that there was absolutely no reason whatsoever to save Ryjaan . . .

. . . and he grabbed Ryjaan's wrist. "Hold on!" he shouted down to Ryjaan. "Come on! I'll pull you up!"

Ryjaan looked up at him with eyes that were filled with twenty years' worth of hatred.

And then he spat at him. "Go to hell," he said, and pulled loose from Calhoun's grip. Calhoun cried out, but it was no use as Ryjaan plunged down, down into the lava which swallowed him greedily.

Calhoun staggered to his feet, then grabbed up his sword and prepared to jump to relative safety on the outcropping nearby.

And then there was another explosion, even more deafening than the previous ones, and Calhoun was blown backward. This time he held on to his sword, for all the good it was going to do him. He was airborne, flailing around, unable to stop his motion, nothing for him to grab on to except air. Below him the lava lapped upward, and in his imaginings he thought he could hear Ryjaan screaming triumphantly at him, for it was only a matter of seconds as gravity took its inevitable grip and pulled the falling Calhoun into the magma.

Then something banged into him in midair, and he heard a voice shout, "Emergency beam-up!"

His mind didn't even have time to fully register that it was Shelby's voice before Thallon dematerialized around him, and the next thing he knew they were falling to the floor of the transporter room. He looked around in confusion and there was Shelby, dusting herself off and looking somewhat haggard. "Nice work, Polly." Watson tossed off a quick, acknowledging salute.

"Where the hell did you come from?" he asked.

"I was there the whole time. We monitored you via your comm badge until you were brought to wherever your surging testosterone demanded you be brought to so you could slug it out, and then I had myself beamed down to be on the scene in case matters became—in my judgment—too dire." She tapped the large metal casings on her feet. "Gravity boots. Comes in handy every now and then, particularly when the ground keeps crumbling under you." She pulled off the boots and straightened her uniform.

"You saw the entire thing?"

"Yeah." She took a breath. "It was all I could do not to jump in earlier. But I knew you had to see it through." She headed out the door, and Calhoun was right behind her. Moments later they had stepped into a turbolift.

"Bridge," said Calhoun, and then he said to Shelby,

"You did that even though I gave you specific orders to stay here. Even though I told you, no matter what, that you weren't to interfere. Even though the Prime Directive would have indicated that you should stay out of it."

"Well, you see . . . someone once told me that sometimes you simply have to assess a situation and say, 'Dammit, it's me or no one. And if you can't live with no one, then you have to take action.' "

"Oh, really. Sounds like a pretty smart guy."

"He likes to think he is, yes."

Calhoun walked out onto the bridge and said briskly, "Status report!"

The fact that Calhoun was bruised, battered, and bloody didn't draw any comment from any of the bridge crew. They were too busy trying to survive. Burgoyne was at hish engineering station on the bridge, someplace that s/he didn't normally inhabit. But with the rapid changes required in the ship's acceleration, s/he wanted to be right at the nerve center of the decisions so that s/he could make whatever immediate adjustments might be required.

"We're at full reverse, Captain!" McHenry said. "I couldn't maintain orbit; the planet's breaking up and the gravity field was shifting too radically!"

"Take us to a safe distance, then," Calhoun said. "Soleta, what's happening down there?"

"The planet is breaking up, sir," Soleta replied, "due to—I believe—stress caused by something inside trying to get out."

"Get out?"

"Yes, sir."

The area around Thallon was crammed with vessels of all sizes and shapes, trying to put as much distance between themselves and the shattering planet as possible. The confusion was catastrophic; at one point several ships collided with each other in their haste to get away from Thallon, erupting into flames and spiraling away into the ether. Fortunately enough most of the pilots were more levelheaded than that.