“Let me talk to them.” Ashili glanced to Heath for approval.

“Go ahead,” he told her magnanimously. “Let them know that you’re all right.”

“Zabela Ashili.” The azure ellipse kept the communication’s volume modest. “Are you …?”

“Right here,” she said brightly before the other could finish. “Fine and healthy, thanks to my newfound friends. Who am I addressing?”

“Medtech Maje Praxedes, of the hospital cruiser Ossain. With me is Medtech Fraja Bassan and two pilot-navigators. We’re all volunteers, and I can’t tell you how happy we are to find you alive. What happened to you?”

“My ship started coming apart around me, and these people had me rescued.”

“Had you rescued?”

“By the artifact. There’s some kind of highly active mobile communications device on board, and it responds to their commands.”

“Fascinating.” There was a pause, then, “We’re inside the indicated lock and setting down. How do we proceed?”

Ashili turned to her escort. “How do we proceed?”

It was Gelmann who directed the Autothor. “Close the outer lock door and pressurize the interior.” She regarded the younger woman. “We’ll start back to the searoom. As soon as we’re well on our way we’ll direct the Autothor to open the door here.”

“You don’t have to leave,” Ashili protested. “Don’t you want to meet my friends? I know they’d be honored to meet you.”

“It would be nice to have some new visitors,” Iranaputra observed.

Gelmann gave him a severe look, turned to gaze regretfully at Ashili. “We know nothing about your rescuers, dear. You should pardon my paranoid nature, but I’d just feel more comfortable if we didn’t expose ourselves to any strangers, even a pair of medtechs. People are simply too interested in our present situation.”

“I know. It’s only natural for you to be suspicious.”

The Autothor conveyed a voice. It sounded impatient. “We’re reading normal atmosphere outside our ship. Ashili?”

“Be just a moment,” she said to the drifting ellipse. She turned back to Gelmann. “I hope you understand, but I have to do it this way.”

In one smooth motion she brought her left foot up toward her backside and removed the heel of her boot. Her arm went around Mina Gelmann’s throat as she pressed the inner edge of the heel against the older woman’s neck while backing both of them against the nearby wall.

Gelmann struggled at first, then gave in as she felt the unexpected power of the younger woman’s forearm secure against her throat.

“I’m really sorry it has to be this way.” Ashili’s gaze darted from each of the stunned old men to the next as she strove to watch all of them at once. Shimoda looked stricken, while Heath seemed on the verge of tears. Iranaputra was numb, while alone among them Hawkins wore the mordant, knowing expression of a man who’d just had a lifetime of depressing encounters reconfirmed.

“Should’ve guessed. It’s been too enjoyable, too much fun. The universe changes, but not people.”

“It is true what they say,” Iranaputra muttered disconsolately. “When one reaches a certain age, one begins to act like a child again.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself, buddy,” Hawkins told him. “They don’t have to deal with this kind of stuff on Earth anymore.”

“Please don’t do anything stupid.” Ashili kept the heel-tool jammed tight against Gelmann’s neck. “This device can deliver a lethal electric charge. I can fry her brain before you can tell that,” and she nodded in the direction of the Autothor, “to do anything.”

“What does it matter?” Gelmann spoke in the nonchalant tone of the bitterly disappointed. “Go ahead; fry me. I haven’t got so many more years anyway. What would you do then? Kill all of them?” She indicated her benumbed male friends.

“One at a time, if necessary.” There was no hesitation in Ashili’s voice, no little-girl-lost aspect to her manner. Her posture, her alertness, everything about her, now indicated that she was rather more than a small-ship pilot who’d been commanded to undertake a desperate mission of discovery by callous superiors. She looked, talked, and acted like a trained killer.

Everything that was now happening, Iranaputra realized with a start, had doubtless been carefully planned by the Candombleans from the beginning. They could not hope to outgun or outbluff the likes of the Keiretsu and the FFF. So they had outsmarted them. Outmatched from the start by the physical and verbal skills Zabela Ashili possessed, Iranaputra and his friends had never really had a chance. They had been duped and flattered into near submission.

“I’m willing to bet that after I’ve killed two or three of you,” she was saying coolly, “I’ll find someone willing to do as I say. I don’t want to kill anybody. Believe me or not, as you wish, but I really have come to like you all. In certain ways you remind me of … it doesn’t matter. I have an assignment and I intend to carry it out. Make no mistake about that.”

Ksarusix chortled softly. “Once again human nature asserts itself. Instinct triumphs over intelligence. And to think I’m supposed to spend conscious existence providing sustenance to such creatures.”

“What do you want us to do?” Iranaputra asked tiredly.

“Don’t listen to her, you little putz!” Gelmann tried to struggle and it was astonishing to see the ease with which Ashili controlled her.

“Open the lock and let my friends in.”

“They’re not medical personnel, are they?” Kahei Shimoda had his hands clasped in front of him.

“What do you think?” she all but snarled.

“What will they do when they are allowed in? Kill us anyway?”

“Not if you cooperate. Enough talking!”

The four old men looked at one another. There was no need for words. Hawkins turned to Gelmann. “I’ve been trying for ten years to shut you up, Mina, but not this way. Not like this.”

“Don’t do it, Wallace. They mean to have done with us when they’ve got what they want. My end will be the same whether you let them in or not.”

He smiled with uncommon gentleness and shook his head. “Maybe so, but it’ll matter to me if she kills you. Who would I have to argue with and shout at?” He waved a hand, taking in the vast chamber and by intimation, the gigantic alien vessel itself.

“Besides, I’m tired. We’re all tired.” He allowed himself the slightest of smiles. “Retired. This is too much for us. Why not let the Candombleans take over? At least they’re not as overbearing as some of the bigger leagues and alliances.”

“It won’t stay that way, you should excuse my pointing it out, if they get control of this ship and its technology.”

“I said no more talking.” As Ashili tightened her forearm around Gelmann’s throat the older woman’s eyes flickered and she slumped visibly. Heath took a step forward, halted when he realized that he was no longer living a lie.

“I thought you were our friend.” Iranaputra ignored her terse admonition. “You cannot imagine what it was like, to be my age and to have a beautiful young woman saying nice things to me. I thought … I thought perhaps you might be enjoying it yourself, even a little. Old men are so easily deluded.”

She seemed to soften slightly. “I did enjoy it.” Her eyes flicked from one sorrowing face to the next. “You’re all nice people. You’re all sweet as hell. But I know what I have to do. So please, just do as I ask and no one will be harmed.”

Shimoda turned to the Autothor as though it no longer mattered; as though not much of anything mattered anymore. Suddenly he looked and sounded his age, and longed for the isolation and solitude of his apartment in the far-distant retirement village.

“Open the inner door.”

“I have been monitoring the recent conversation,” the blue ellipse replied. “Evaluation and analysis suggest that it may not be in your best interests to do this.”

“It is all right.” Iranaputra shrugged. “Something like this was bound to happen sooner or later.”

“I can easily destroy the small vessel in question.” The Autothor was persistent.

“That will not be necessary. Open the door.”