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Growling, Undlar said, “Fine. Hagi, let me know as soon as you’ve killed the Starfleeters.”

“I will. Hagi out.”

Emarur turned to Undlar. “If you don’t mind, will you please do something with the First Speaker’s body?”

Undlar blinked his lower eyelids. “Excuse me?”

“I don’t like dead bodies on my flight deck. Remove it.”

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Dispose of it.”

Undlar’s face twisted. He took great pleasure in killing, but the idea of touching a dead body . . . “I can’t do that.”

“You’re the one who killed her, Undlar. If you’re squeamish about touching the body—well, you should have thought of that before you killed her. Now get that body off my flight deck!”

Emarur stared hard, right at Undlar. The priest was sorely tempted to slice open the ship owner’s neck. But that would be foolish. The Senbolma only had a crew of two, and if he killed Emarur, Undlar would probably have to kill the pilot, too—and Undlar hadn’t the first clue how to fly one of these things. His specialty was computers, after all—it was why, among all the Purists, he had been the one chosen to infiltrate the clergy and infect Ganitriul.

“Very well,” he finally said. And, fighting down his revulsion, he dragged Ansed’s limp corpse off the flight deck.

Hagi backed up against the wall, counted to six, and then whirled around, swinging his blade upward in order to catch any humans that might be there in the chest.

There was nobody in the cavern.

“Clear,” he said to Yanasa.

“This is ridiculous,” Yanasa said. “If we had proper scanners—”

“—they wouldn’t work anyhow,” Hagi said. “They’d be tied into Ganitriul. Besides, the whole point is to get away from all this dependence on technology. This is the way it should be—searching on foot, with a blade in your hands, only relying on your own instincts.”

Yanasa sighed, scratching the side of her head. “I still wish we had a scanner.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll find them. There’s a dozen of us, and we know these caverns better than they do. We’ll—”

Hagi was cut off by a sudden jolt and an invisible force impeding his forward progress. “What the—?”

He took a step back, then gingerly reached forward. His finger tingled with the feeling of a forcefield, and he pulled it back. “Dammit. Let’s go back,” he said, turning around, but Yanasa was shaking her head.

“No luck,” she said, performing the same action and also touching a forcefield.

“We’re trapped.”

“Yes,” Yanasa said, sounding annoyed, “we’re trapped. So, what do your instincts tell us to do now?”

“I don’t appreciate your tone, Yanasa.”

“And I don’t appreciate being stuck in a cavern on a moon with a malfunctioning computer. I said from the beginning that it was stupid to leave people here for precisely this reason, but I was outvoted.”

“First of all, we needed to secure the location in case something like this happened. Unscheduled civilian and alien ships come to the moon all the time, and one might have been on the way here when Ganitriul went down. We had to be here to stop them. Secondly, the security measures are constantly flipping on and off. The forcefield will come down eventually.”

Yanasa rolled her eyes. “And then what? The Starfleet people—”

“Are hitting the same problems we are, only they don’t know the caverns, and they’re unarmed, except with those useless rifles of theirs.”

“Did it occur to you, Hagi, that the same security measure that deactivated their weapons may also ‘flip off’?”

Hagi found himself fighting the urge to take his blade to Yanasa’s throat. Impatiently, he said, “In that case, our blasters will work as well, and we’ll still outnumber them.”

“Something else you probably didn’t think of, Hagi. The Starfleet people have working scanners. And all the people on their team had gold trim on their uniforms.”

Now it was Hagi’s turn to roll his eyes. “I wasn’t aware you were such an observer of fashion, Yanasa.”

“You really are an idiot, aren’t you?”

Turning angrily on Yanasa, Hagi said, “I warned you to watch your—”

“Gold