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Miles turned to the communications officer. "Are you picking up anything like that from the other side? Anybody waiting in the docking bay in battle armor?"

"It's scrambled," said the communications officer, "but I'd guess our reception committee to run about thirty individuals." Bothari's jaw tightened at this news.

"Thorne getting this?" asked Miles.

"Of course."

"Are they picking up ours?"

"Only if they're looking for it," said the communications officer. "They shouldn't be. We're tight-beamed and scrambled too."

"Two to one," muttered Auson unhappily. "Nasty odds."

"Let's try and even it up," said Miles. He turned to the communications officer. "Can you break their codes, get into their telemetry? You have the Oseran codes, don't you?"

The communications officer looked suddenly thoughtful. "It doesn't work exactly that way, but . . ." His sentence trailed off in his absorption with his equipment.

Auson's eye lit. "You thinking of taking over their suits? Walking them into walls, having them shoot each other—" The light went out. "Ah, hell—they've all got manual overrides. The second they figure out what's going on, they'll cut us off. It was a nice idea, though."

Miles grinned. "We won't let them figure it out, then. We'll be subtle. You think too much in terms of brute force, Trainee Auson. Now, brute force has never been my strong suit—"

"Got it!" the communications officer cried. The holovid plates threw up a second display beside the first. "There's ten of them over there with full-feedback armor. The rest seem to be Pelians—their armor only has comm links. But there are the ten."

"Ah! Beautiful! Here, Sergeant, take over our monitors." Miles moved to the new station and stretched his fingers, like a concert pianist about to play. "Now, I'll show you what I mean. What we want to do is simulate a lot of little, tiny suit malfunctions. . . ." He zeroed in on one soldier. Medical telemetry—physiological support—there. "Observe."

He pinpointed the reservoir from the man's pilot relief tube, already half full. "Must be a nervous sort of fellow—" He set it to backwash at full power, and checked the audio transmitter. Savage swearing filled the air briefly, overridden by a snarl calling for radio silence. "Now, there is one distracted soldier. And there's not a thing he can do about it until he gets somewhere he can take the suit off."

Auson, beside him, choked with laughter. "You devious-minded little bastard! Yes, yes!" He pounded his feet, in lieu of his hands, and swung about in his own seat. He called up the readings from another soldier, pecking out the commands slowly with his few working fingertips.

"Remember," cautioned Miles, "subtle."

Auson, still cackling, muttered "Right." He bent over his control panel. There. There . . . He sat up, grinning. "Every third servo command now operates on a half-second time lag, and his weapons will fire ten degrees to the right of where he aims them."

"Very good," Miles applauded. "We'd better save the rest until they're in critical positions, not tip our hand with too much too soon."

"Right."

The ship was moving closer, closer to the docking station. The enemy troops were preparing to board through the normal flex tubes.

Suddenly, Thorne's assault groups exploded from the dockside air locks. Magnetic mines were hastily fired onto the station hull, where they flared like sparks burning holes in a rug. Thorne's mercenaries jumped the gap and poured through. The enemy's radio silence burst into shocked chaos.

Miles hummed over his readouts. An enemy officer turned her head to look over her shoulder, calling orders to her platoon; Miles promptly locked the helmet in its position of maximum torsion, and the Oseran's head perforce with it. He picked out another soldier, in a corridor his own people had not yet reached, and locked his suit's built-in heavy-duty plasma arc into full-on. Fire flared wildly from the man's hand at his surprised reflexive recoil, spraying floor, ceiling,