Thomas whirled and looked back at Panille. The poet stood immobile amidst the waiting pack of demons. Two Dashers crouched on his right like obedient dogs. The horrible line of Pandora’s killer species reached left and right in a wide arc around the scene of carnage.

Rage coursed through Thomas. You haven’t beaten me, Ship! He stumbled, panting across to the cutter, grasped its heavy barrel and heaved it around. Four strong clones had been needed to lift the thing back at the cliff. In his rage, he moved it by himself, tipping it against a rock until it was trained on a blank stretch of Redoubt wall. The surviving crew members cowered away from him as he leaped to the controls and activated the beam. A blinding blue line leaped out to the Redoubt, melting the wall. Upper structure sloughed away, slipping down into the molten pool.

Reason returned to Thomas. He stepped back, again, again. He was twenty paces from the humming cutter when the defense weapons found it. The cutter exploded as beam confronted beam. Thomas did not even feel the sharp chunk of metal which penetrated his chest.

Chapter 66

Chapter 66

Why shouldst Thou cause a man to put himself to shame by begging aid, when it is in Thy power, O Lord, to vouchsafe him his necessities in an honorable fashion?

—A Kahan, Atereth ha-Zaddikim, Shiprecords

HALI KEPT a careful watch on Waela as the E-clone assistants prepared an obstetrics area within their temporary medical shelter. The cliff shadow covered them, and the confusion of the army departing filled the air with discordant noise: shouts, grunts, the crunching of the cutter’s wheels on the sand. She felt a sense of relief as the demons moved off with Panille. He frightened her now. Her soft-voiced poet friend had become the keeper of a terrifying inner fire. He was keeper of the kind of terrible power she had seen at Golgotha.

Heavy as she was with the unborn child, Waela moved with a supple quickness. She was in her natural habitat: Pandora. This place had changed Waela, too. Was that why Panille had mated with her? Hali put down an anguished stab of jealousy.

I am a med-tech. I am a Natali! An unborn child needs me. I want joy!

She tried not to think about what might happen out there on the plain. Thomas had warned her what to expect. Where had he learned about battle? She had been unable to suppress feelings of outrage.

“Those people who will die, how are they different from us?”