the crown of the skip-runner captain's head, just visible over the com station. Hatred and rage had both given way to a patience unforgiving as stone.

    Tied to his own command chair, unmoved by Beckett's grunts of discomfort from the corner where she lay bound alongside Kildare's ensign and pilot, Jensen waited in motionless tension like a snake coiled before prey.

Gibsen muttered a query from behind an opened cowling. 'Gun turrets next,' Mac James said in drawllessly succinct reply. 'We'll want the coil regulator and the magneto banks, but leave life-support intact.' The salt-and-pepper crown of hair disappeared briefly as Mac James leaned forward to toggle a switch. His next instructions to his mate were buried under a drift of garble from

the corn, most likely cross-chat on a Syndicate command channel. Jensen ground his teeth.

    Gibsen straightened with his hands full of circuit boards; and the foreign speech paused in an inflection that framed a question. MacKenzie James answered in the same lingo, and the response that came back was mixed with laughter.

    There followed an infuriating interval while Gibsen and his skip-runner captain stripped the Kildare with sure, no-nonsense efficiency. Jensen found the pain of cracked ribs less intrusive than the pain of humiliation. He sat, strapped helpless on his own flight deck, un. able to face away from the analog screen somebody had carelessly left operational - the screen that showed the passage of the Syndicate fleet bound to attack the planet Khalia, dreadnoughts and their fighters arrayed in formation like some grand, silent procession.

    A few of the behemoths winked their running lights in salute of the Marity and her latest act of sabotage against the Fleet.

    Blackly murderous, Jensen chafed at the lashing on his wrists. He considered a thousand ways to kill the skip-runner captain MacKenzie James, all of them lingeringly bloody.

    The Syndicate fleet departed, leaving the black of space on the analog screen. Hours passed. Jensen's hands were numb. His full bladder became a torment. His wrists stung and his shoulders ached, and his ears had long since stopped hearing the thump and bump, and the hiss of flushed air from the lock belowdecks as the Kildare's heavier components were off-loaded to the hold on board Marity. The tap of footsteps coming and going ceased,

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