The sergeant kneels at the door and rips a flare grenade off his chest ring and the ring engages the grenade just as meant and crushes the interior compartments so all the chemicals mix. The sergeant stares at the conjured fire in his fist as if shocked it worked. The training grenades do not burn: the chemicals are too precious.

“Throw,” Shir reminds him.

He skitters the flare into the bunkroom and it bursts up in a jet of hot sparks, spinning and shrieking and hurling itself between bedposts. The Oriati cry out. Shir leads her column around the corner and they split to follow the walls so the confused Oriati are doubly enveloped. Shouts and clamor among the corpse-racked beds. Shir shoots the nearest man in the throat and her repeating crossbow kicks in her arms and although it does not have the armor-piercing strength of a proper storm crossbow she works the lever and in a second it is ready to fire again. Marine crossbows clatter all around her. The Oriati duck behind the beds. A marine accidentally shoots another marine on the opposite wall but the slender repeater bolts will not penetrate marine harness.

The Oriati captain cries out, “Swords up, bravos! Back to back!”

Too close in for shots now. Too much clutter. Long knives come out and the Oriati raise fists wrapped in tough rope to challenge the masked marines all around them with the gallant shining length of their rapiers. Shir advances between the beds and then she is upon the Oriati captain who steps at her grinning to stop her with the point of his rapier. Shir grabs the post of the bunk bed to her right and with a grunt topples bed and mattresses and corpses down upon the captain. When he sidesteps nimbly his eyes go up to the falling dead and his rapier pivots a little away. Shir steps in, knife leading, past the rapier, into his arms. She stabs him under the chin and withdraws and stabs his eye and withdraws and stabs his face through the boneless aperture of the nose and he is smiling no more.

Shir drops his corpse on his dead comrades.

They search the dead. Tactical clerks kneel to stamp rapid notes on the origin and armament of the Oriati grenadiers. Time stamps crunch as the clerks break the mechanisms of the single-use clocks to certify and seal that this record was made at exactly this time and date.

“What happened down here?” her sergeant hisses, pointing to the dead Morrow-men. “Did an experiment go wrong?”

“They lost someone’s trust,” Shir says. For she knows the stakes of the One Trade.

They proceed south through the dead stone maze of the poisoned station. Sulane’s rockets send rumbles and crashes through the stone above. The surface teams have scattered heavy smoke to seek out vents and secret entrances to the Ministry station, and now that smoke pours down to haze the cave air.