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"Nobody's forcing you to—" Leo began.

"Ah," Van Atta interrupted, "just a minute . . ."—he touched his holovid control—"now talk so's I can hear you. And it had better be something I want to hear."

"Nobody here can force you to do anything," Leo grated. "Whatever you do, you do of your own free will. We don't have any hostages. What we have is three volunteers, who chose to stay for—for their consciences' sake, I guess."

"If Minchenko's one of them, you'd better watch your back, Leo. Conscience hell, he wants to hang onto his own little empire. You're a fool, Graf. Here . . ."—he made a motion off-vid—"come talk to him in his own language, Yei."

Dr. Yei stepped stiffly into view, met Leo's eyes and moistened her lips. "Mr. Graf, please, stop this madness. What you are trying to do is incredibly dangerous, for all concerned—" Van Atta illustrated this by waving the electric prod over her head with a sour grin; she glanced at him in irritation, but said nothing and plowed on grimly. "Surrender now, and the damage can at least be minimized. Please. For everyone's sake. You have the power to stop this."

Leo was silent for a moment, then leaned forward. "Dr. Yei, I'm forty-five thousand kilometers up. You're there in the same room . . . you stop him." He flicked the holovid off, and floated in numb silence.

"Is that wise?" choked Ti uncertainly.

Leo shook his head. "Don't know. But without an audience, there's no reason to carry on a show, surely."

"Was that acting? How far will that guy really go?"

"In the past I've known him to have a pretty uncontrolled temper, when he got wound up. An appeal to his self-interest usually unwound him. But as you've realized yourself, the, um career rewards in this mess are minimal. I don't know how far he'll go. I don't think even he knows."

After a long pause Ti said, "Do you, ah—still need a shuttle pilot, Leo?"

Chapter 14

Silver clutched the arms of the shuttle co-pilot's seat tightly in mixed exhilaration and fear. Her lower hands curled over the seat's front edge, seeking purchase. Deceleration and gravity yanked at her. She spared a hand to double-check the latch of the shoulder-harness snugging her in as the shuttle altered its attitude to nose-down and the ground heaved into view. Red desert mountains, rocky and forbidding, wrinkled and buckled below them, passing faster and faster as they dropped closer.

Ti sat beside her in the commander's chair, his hands and feet barely moving the controls in tiny, constant corrections, eyes flicking from readout to readout and then to the real horizon, totally absorbed. The atmosphere roared over the shuttle's skin and the craft rocked violently in some passing wind shear. Silver began to see why Leo, despite his expressed anguish at the risk to them all of losing Ti downside, had not substituted Zara or one of the other pusher pilots in Ti's stead. Even barring the foot pedals, landing on a planet was definitely a discipline apart from jetting about in free fall, especially in a vehicle nearly the size of a Habitat module.

"There's the dry lake bed," Ti nodded forward, addressing her without taking his eyes from his work. "Right on the horizon."

"Will it be—very much harder than landing on a shuttleport runway?" Silver asked in worry.

"No problem." Ti smiled. "If anything, it's easier. It's a big puddle—it's one of our emergency alternate landing sites anyway. Just avoid the gullies at the north end, and we're home free."

"Oh," said Silver, reassured. "I hadn't realized you'd landed out here before."

"Well, I haven't, actually," Ti murmured, "not having had an emergency yet. . . ." He sat up more intently, taking a tighter grip on the controls, and Silver decided perhaps she would not distract him with further conversation just now.

She peeked around the edge of her seat at Dr. Minchenko, holding down the engineer's station behind them, to see how he was taking all this. His return smile was sardonic,