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And yes … he must feed his pet.

Klyn Shanga concealed his grief. Year after year, it never got any easier to bear. Now, Colonel Kenow, his old and valued companion, was dead. Dead and gone. Forevermore.

They had fought in the battle of the Rood together as boys. It had been an insignificant sideshow in a vastly greater war, but to them, it had been a lifepath-altering cusp. They had survived, toughened by the ghastly experience, transformed from callow farmboys into soldiers.

And friends.

And now, Colonel Kenow was dead.

The worst of it was that it had been a senseless, purposeless death spurred by an impetuosity Shanga wouldn’t have believed possible in a man of Kenow’s age and battle experience. The stringent rich-man’s laws of the Oseon had forced the veteran to abandon the weapon he was used to in favor of a crude length of pipe. Then he had been shot down by a stranger only tangentially involved with the enemy they sought, an accidental, not altogether innocent bystander. If only Kenow had listened …

Lightning flared, shaking the entire fabric of the odd assembly of fighters. Keeping station off the asteroid was growing more difficult by the minute. He could scarcely see across the few hundred meters that separated him from the farthest ship in his tiny fleet, thanks to the colored vapor that smoked and roiled around them. The radiation-counter needles climbed inexorably, despite the fact that they were in the shadow of a billion tons of iron-based rock. How much longer they could keep it up …

Well, in the end, it wouldn’t matter. The giant engine still pulsed reliably, the cables connecting it to the fighters were sound. They’d had to rebalance to make up for Kenow’s missing ship, but that had been simple, really. If they could just hold on long enough to do their work, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference whether they survived the fury of the Flamewind, whether their skin flaked off and they lost their hair and vomited up the last drop of their lives. Those lives would have been well accounted for, the loss well worth it.

Shanga, like the rest of his companions, bided his time, hid his grief. The sleet of energy around them was making even line-bound communication impossible. The cables acted like a huge antenna, gathering up a howling cacophony that ground on the nerves, eroded morale and resolve. It was as if all the dead the universe had ever seen gathered in an unholy chorus once a year in the Oseon.

And now there was a new voice, that of Colonel Kenow, Klyn Shanga’s old friend.

Well, soon there would be other voices, Shanga thought. His among them.

Lob Doluff wasn’t any happier than anyone else that carnival season. He regarded the whole Flamewind fooforaw as an enormous, unnecessary pain in the neck. He had never liked it, never understood why anybody else did.

Lob Doluff was color-blind.

He was also worried—half to death. Dressed as he was in lightweight indoor clothing, his head uncovered, his plump arms bare to the chill of the special section of his garden, standing in the middle of half a hectare of snow, his hands were sweating.

The Administrator Senior’s visual disability did not affect his appreciation for flowering plants although his reasons for collecting them may have been a bit different from those others might have. He loved their perfume and their persistence. To him a weed that cracked a ferroconcrete walkway was something of a miracle, and here, where tiny, almost microscopic flowers poked their small, courageous heads up through snow and ice, there was something especially miraculous.

It did little to cheer him now, however. He was in a bind.

Unlike his subordinate, Bassi Vobah, he was one of the few who served the few, while making an unusually honest effort to serve the many. He was quite as wealthy as anyone in the Oseon, and yet a sense of civic duty, personal pride, drove him to sit in the Administrator Senior’s office and attempt to govern the essentially ungovernable millions upon millions of falling worldlets that comprised the system. He kept the