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“You know, this is the first time I’ve ever seen leaders required to use Discipline,” said Dimenon, cracking the seal on the can Aulia had handed him. She was drinking hers as she passed others the restoratives. “I’m aware that a leader has to have the Training to lead, but I’d never seen it working. I couldn’t figure out what had got into you, Varian, when you let them beat admissions out of you.”

“I had to play the coward,” said Varian, taking a long swig at her pepper. “Dead Disciples are no use to anyone. I’d guessed that Bonnard would be smart enough to hide. I do wish he’d get back now, though.”

They all heard the noises at the lock. Kai slipped his half-sealed wrist from Lunzie’s grasp and moved quickly to the lock, good hand poised in a clenched fist. Portegin and Dimenon joined him, their bare hands cocked back.

“I found him,” Triv said, poking his head through the half-opened iris. “He’d been stacking all the power packs at the edge of . . . the dead beasts. He’s gone for the others now.” He handed three power packs through the lock to Portegin. “He says the heavy-worlders have started a fire on the ridge beyond us. We’ll be able to slide the shuttle to our left, up the hill and they shouldn’t see us. Dead and dying herbivores are hill-high in the compound. It’s going to take some time before they realize neither we nor the shuttle are buried here.”

“Good,” said Kai and motioned Triv to return to help Bonnard. “We can be gone without a trace left for them to follow or find, bless this ceramic hull.”

Once the resourceful boy and Triv had swung the power packs safely into the shuttle, they closed the lock. Kai and Varian took Bonnard into the pilot’s compartment where he could diagram the shuttle’s position, and the clearest way up the hill.

Paskutti’s fist had wrecked the outside view screens as well as the communication unit so maneuvers would be blind. Not, Varian pointed out, that they could have seen all that much even with night masks, and they couldn’t, under the circumstances, use the shuttle’s exterior spotbeams. Both Kai and Varian could recall the coordinates for the inland sea without the tapes now spread across the compound’s littered floor.

Triv and Dimenon synthesized enough padding to cushion the wounded on the bare plastic deck, and had set Margit and Aulia to clear up the worst of the spillage in Trizein’s laboratory. He was unconscious again, the strain having been excessive for a man of his years. Lunzie thought he might have suffered a heart seizure as a result of the brutal treatment.

Maneuvering on the bare minimum of power, Kai and Varian, each with one good hand, eased the shuttle out from under its burden of hadrasaur corpses, up the hill and onto a course for the inland sea.

During the trip, Lunzie synthesized a hypersaturated tonic to reduce the effects of delayed shock and made certain every single person took their dose, either as a drink or a spray. With Triv and Dimenon’s assistance, Portegin began to raid all unnecessary circuits to see if he could jerry-rig even an outgoing signal.

When they reached the inland sea, Kai hovered the shuttle while Varian, the lock iris partly open, shouted verbal instructions to the terrace they had happily occupied that rest day, which seemed so long ago. When the lock was a half-meter above the terrace, Varian and Triv jumped down. They would have to guide the shuttle into the cage, feeding Kai directions over their wrist comunits. Since the heavy-worlders were sure of their deaths in the dome, it was unlikely any of them would be listening on their own units.

The mouth of the cave was not large enough to accept the central bulge of the shuttle, but, by steadily pressing in against the rock, they forced a way through, ignoring the score marks on the ceramic skin of the shuttle.

Varian, standing in the darkness of the terrace, couldn’t understand why the grating noise and vibration hadn’t aroused the entire population of the cliff, but