They zigzagged over bad side roads all afternoon to reach Vorinnis's neutral District, where the aged groundcar died of a fractured power-train. They abandoned it and took to the monorail system then, Cordelia driving her exhausted little party on, racing the clock in her head. At midnight, they reported in at the first military installation over the next loyalist border, a supply depot. It took Drou several minutes of argument with the night duty officer to persuade him to 1) identify them, 2) let them in, and 3) let them use the military comm net to call Tanery Base to demand transport. At that point the D.O. abruptly became a lot more efficient. A high-speed air shuttle with a hot pilot was scrambled to pick them up.

Approaching Tanery Base at dawn from the air, Cordelia felt the most unpleasant flash of deja vu. It was so like her first arrival from the mountains, she had the sense of being caught in a time loop. Perhaps she'd died and gone to hell, and her eternal torment would be to repeat the last three weeks' events over and over, endlessly. She shivered.

Droushnakovi watched her with concern. The exhausted Bothari dozed, in the air shuttle's passenger cabin. Illyan's two ImpSec men, identical twins for all Cordelia could tell to Vordarian's ones they'd murdered back at the Residence, maintained a nervous silence. Cordelia held the uterine replicator possessively on her lap. The plastic bag sat between her feet. She was irrationally unable to let either item out of her sight, though it was clear Drou would much rather the bag had ridden in the luggage compartment.

The air shuttle touched neatly down on its landing pad, and its engines whined to silence.

"I want Captain Vaagen, and I want him now," Cordelia repeated for the fifth time as Illyan's men led them underground into the Security debriefing area.

"Yes, Milady. He's on his way," the ImpSec man assured her again. She glowered suspiciously at him.

Cautiously, the ImpSec men relieved them of their personal arsenal. Cordelia didn't blame them; she wouldn't have trusted her wild-looking crew with charged weapons either. Thanks to Ezar's cache the women were not ill dressed, though there had been nothing in Bothari's size, so he'd retained his smoked and stinking black fatigues. Fortunately the dried blood spatters didn't show much. But all their faces were hollow-eyed, grooved and shadowed. Cordelia shivered, and Bothari's hands and eyelids twitched, and Droushnakovi had a distressing tendency to start crying, silently, at random moments, stopping as suddenly as she started.

At long last—only minutes, Cordelia told herself firmly—Captain Vaagen appeared, a tech at his side. He wore undress greens, and his steps were quick, up to Vaagen-speed again. The only residue of his injuries seemed to be a black patch over his eye; on him, it looked good, giving him a fine piratical air. Cordelia trusted the patch was only a temporary part of ongoing treatment.