"And I'm not?" asked Mayhew ironically. "The State Department will be relieved."

There was a silence. "I'm your liegelord," replied Miles at last, soberly. "What you are is a question only you can answer."

Mayhew stared into his lap, and rubbed his forehead tiredly, one

finger unconsciously caressing a silver circle of his implant contact.

He looked up at Miles then, an odd hunger in his eyes that reminded Miles for a disquieting instant of the homesick Baz Jesek. "I don't know what I am anymore," said Mayhew finally. "But I'll make the jump for you. And the rest of the horsing around."

* * *

A queasy wavering dizziness—a few seconds' static in the mind—

and the wormhole jump to Tau Verde was done. Miles hovered

impatiently in Nav and Com, waiting for Mayhew, whose few seconds

had been biochemically stretched to subjective hours, to crawl out

from under his headset. He wondered again just what it was pilots

experienced threading a jump that their passengers did not. And

where did they go, the one ship in ten thousand that jumped and was

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never seen again? "Take a wormhole jump to hell" was an old curse one almost never heard in a pilot's mouth.

Mayhew swung up his headset, stretched, and let out his breath.

His face seemed grey and lined, drained from the concentration of the jump. "That was a shit-kicker," he muttered, then straightened, grinned, and met Miles's eye. "That'll never be a popular run, let me tell you, kid. Interesting, though."

Miles did not bother to correct the honorific. Letting Mayhew rest, he slid into the comconsole himself and punched up a view of the

outside world. "Well . . ." he muttered after a few moments, "where are they? Don't tell me we got the party ready and the guest of honor's not coming—are we in the right place?" he demanded anxiously of Mayhew.

Mayhew raised his eyebrows. "Kid, at the end of a wormhole jump you're either in the right place or you're a bucket of quarks smeared between Antares and Oz." But he checked anyway. "Seems to be . . ."

* * *

It was a full four hours before a blockade ship finally approached

them. Miles's nerves stretched taut. Its slow approach seemed

freighted with deliberate menace, until voice contact was made. The mercenary communication officer's tone of sleepy boredom then put

it in its true light; they were sauntering. Desultorily, a boarding shuttle was launched.

Miles hovered in the shuttle hatch corridor, scenarios of possible

disasters flashing through his mind. Daum has been betrayed by a

quisling. The war is over, and the side we're expecting to pay us has lost. The mercenaries have turned pirate and are going to steal my