“Run!” Moru shouted. He tried to charge the sled. Evalyth twisted a control stick. Her vehicle whipped in a circle, heading off the boys. She shot them from above, where Moru couldn’t quite reach her.

He knelt beside the nearest, took the body in his arms and looked upward. The moonlight poured relentlessly across him. “What can you now do to me?” he called.

She stunned him too, landed, got off and quickly hogtied the four of them. Loading them aboard, she found them lighter than she had expected.

Sweat had sprung forth upon her, until her coverall stuck dripping to her skin. She began to shake, as if with fever. Her ears buzzed. “I would have destroyed you,” she said. Her voice sounded remote and unfamiliar. A still more distant part wondered why she bothered speaking to the unconscious, in her own tongue at that. “I wish you hadn’t acted the way you did. That made me remember what the computer said, about Donli’s friends needing you for study.

“You’re too good a chance, I suppose. After your doings, we have the right under Allied rules to make prisoners of you, and none of his friends are likely to get maudlin about your feelings.

“Oh, they won’t be inhuman. A few cell samples, a lot of tests, anesthesia where necessary, nothing harmful, nothing but a clinical examination as thorough as facilities allow.

“No doubt you’ll be better fed than at any time before, and no doubt the medics will find some pathologies they can cure for you. In the end, Moru, they’ll release your wife and children.”

She stared into his horrible face.

“I am pleased,” she said, “that to you, who won’t comprehend what is going on, it will be a bad experience. And when they are finished, Moru, I will insist on having you at least, back. They can’t deny me that. Why, your tribe itself has, in effect, cast you out. Right? My colleagues won’t let me do more than kill you, I’m afraid, but on this I will insist.”

She gunned the engine and started toward Lokon, as fast as possible, to arrive while she felt able to be satisfied with that much.

7.

And the days without him and the days without him.

The nights were welcome. If she had not worked herself quite to exhaustion, she could take a pill. He rarely returned in her dreams. But she had to get through each day and would not drown him in drugs.

Luckily, there was a good deal of work involved in preparing to depart, when the expedition was short-handed and on short notice. Gear must be dismantled, packed, ferried to the ship, and stowed. New Dawn herself must be readied, numerous systems recommissioned and tested. Her militechnic training qualified Evalyth to double as mechanic, boat jockey, or loading gang boss. In addition, she kept up the routines of defense in the compound.

Captain Jonafer objected mildly to this. “Why bother, Lieutenant? The locals are scared blue of us. They’ve heard what you did—and this coming and going through the sky, robots and heavy machinery in action, floodlights after dark—I’m having trouble persuading them not to abandon their town!”