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“Watch your strength, Tanegli. Don’t break her neck yet,” said Paskutti, stepping forward in his urgency to arrest the angry man.

Tanegli visibly pulled back some force of the blow he had leveled at Varian. Nevertheless, her head rolled sharply backward but as she righted herself, her eyes were still open. The mark of Tanegli’s fingers were vivid wales on her cheek.

“Where did you hide the power packs?”

“She’s broken her left shoulder. Use that as goad,” said Paskutti. “Not too much . . . just enough. Can’t have her passing out with pain. These lightweights can’t take much.”

“Where? Varian, where?” Tanegli accompanied each word with a twist to her left arm.

Varian cried out. To Kai’s ears, the echo was false since, in the throes of Discipline, Varian wouldn’t feel pain right now.

“I didn’t hide them. Bonnard did.”

Margit and Aulia gasped at this craven betrayal of the boy.

“Go get him, Tanegli. Find out where those power packs are or we’ll be backing the supplies out of here. Bakkun and Berru will have started the drive. Nothing can stop it once it starts.” Paskutti twitched with a sense of urgency now.

“She’d know where he is. Tell me, where? Varian?”

Varian suddenly hung limply in Tanegli’s grip. He let her drop to the deck with a disgusted oath and strode to the open lock. Kai heard three more steps before the man stopped, shouting for Bonnard to come. Then Tanegli called for Divisti and Tardma to help him search for the boy.

Paskutti looked down at Varian’s crumpled figure. Kai hoped that the man didn’t suspect that she was only pretending. An expression close to the snarl of a fang-face crossed the heavy-worlder’s face, but he was expressionless again when he turned to Kai.

“March!” Paskutti gestured peremptorily to the lock. He motioned to Lunzie and the others to move: with flicks of his forefinger he indicated that each was to carry one of the unconscious ones. “Into the main dome, all of you!” he ordered.

As they crossed the compound, Dandy was lying dead in his pen, back broken. Kai was glad neither Cleiti nor Terilla would see their pet. The ground was littered with scattered tapes, charts, exposed records and splintered disks. Inadvertently he trod on one of Terilla’s careful drawings of a plant. Forcing deep breaths from his diaphragm, he controlled the fury he felt at such wanton destruction.

The main dome had been stripped of everything useful. The unconscious were laid on the floor, the others motioned to stand by the farthest arc from the iris lock.

Outside, the search for Bonnard continued. Paskutti was now glancing first at his wrist chrono and then at the plains beyond the force-screen.

Kai’s heightened hearing caught the faint sound of his name. Carefully he turned his head and saw Lunzie staring at him, saw her imperceptibly indicate that he was to look outside. By shifting slightly he could see out, could see two dots in the sky, the black line beneath, a tossing black line, moving black line, and then he knew what the heavy-worlders had planned to do.

The force-screen was strong enough to keep out ordinary dangers but not the massed attack of stampeded creatures. The camp’s advantage of height above the plain and forest would be canceled. The heavy-worlders were herding the animals right up where they wanted them to do their damage.

Then Theks, receiving Kai’s message, might react to it . . . in a few days’ time. They might, if the thinking spirit moved them, send one of the younger Theks to investigate. But Kai doubted it. The Theks would rightly consider that any intervention of theirs would arrive too late to affect the outcome of the mutiny.

The lightweights would have to effect their own salvation. The heavy-worlders would have to leave the compound soon. Would it be soon enough? And how would they leave their scorned captives? Could Bonnard stay out of their grasp?

Paskutti’s fingers twitched. He glanced, almost apprehensively at the wrist chrono, squinted at the oncoming black line.

“Tanegli? Haven’t you found that boy?