All six shuttles went up to relieve the ships’ crews and to bring down more bits and pieces. Sallah flew the Eujisan up with the skeleton crew for the Yoko. Avril had a smile on her face, smug enough to satisfy Sallah that the woman had personal plans for her weekend. Bart Lemos looked apprehensive and fidgeted while Nabhi continued to look supercilious. They were up to something, Sallah was sure. But what it might be she couldn’t imagine.

When Sallah sprang the hatch on the Yoko’s landing deck, she was nearly bowled over by the jubilant men and women waiting to board the Eujisan for their first trip to the surface of their new home. Sallah had never seen a faster loading. Shortly all that would remain of the Yoko would be bare hull and the corridors leading to the bridge, where the mainframe computer banks would remain intact. Most of the computer’s vast memory had been duplicated for use on the surface, but not all—the bulk of the naval and military programs were protected and, in any case, irrelevant. Once passengers and crew left the three spaceships in their orbit, there would be no need to know how to fight space battles.

The volunteers were given their orders by the crew members they were replacing and then the shore-leave party merrily departed.

“Gawd, this place is eerie,” Boris Pahlevi whispered as he and Sallah made their way to the bridge through the echoing corridors, which had been stripped of siding and were down to the central plank of flooring.

“Will the last man off roll the plank up behind him?” Sallah asked facetiously. She shuddered when she noticed that the safety hatches between sections had been removed. Lighting had been reduced to three units per corridor. She watched where she put her feet.

“It’s rape, though,” Boris remarked in a lugubrious tone, as he gazed around, “gutting the old girl this way.”

“Ivan the Terrible,” Sallah said. That was the pilots’ nickname for the ship’s quartermaster in charge of the removal process. “He’s Alaskan, you know, and a real scrounger scrooge.”

“Tut-tut,” Boris said with a mock stern expression. “We’re all Pernese now, Sal. But what’s Alaskan?”

“Fardles, you is the most iggerant bastard, Boris, even for a second-generation Centauran. Alaska was a territory on Earth, not far from its arctic circle, and cold. Alaskans had a reputation for never throwing anything away. My father never did. Must have been a genetic trait because he was reared on First, although my grandparents were Alaskan.” Sallah sighed with nostalgia. “Dad never threw anything away. I had to chuck the whole nine yards before we shipped out. Eighteen years of accumulated—well, it wasn’t junk, because I got good prices on practically everything in the mountain, but it was some chore. Hercules and the Augean stables were clean in comparison.”

“Hercules?”