He padded forward through that sweet and dirty ship. In the engine room, where instrumentation flickered and clicked and the display board said power down in arrays of colored lights, Fix had left himself a final note: CLENE HTE RUNIN GEER. Truck screwed it up and chucked it on the floor without so much as a smile. He put his shoulder against the command-cabin hatch and shoved. It was locked. Temper gone, he tried to kick it in and was rewarded by Tiny Skeffern's voice from the other side.

'Truck, there's some mad sod in here with a gun.' He sounded muffled and distant Truck said nothing. Damn him for being in the way. A scuffling sound. 'He says hell shoot if you don't come in quietly. I think he means it.'

'Oh, Hell' Poor old Tiny. 'All right then.' The electronic lock hummed and chimed, the hatch slid open. Truck dropped Fix's chopper, and the sound clattered back along the sub-frame of the boat like a laugh. 'I'll get you, you bastard,' he said, holding out his hands to demonstrate their emptiness.

Tiny had got himself backed up into a comer, his hands well above his head, small beads of sweat on his bald patch. A shallow laceration with bruised edges ran down his left cheek. He looked accusingly at Truck and complained, 'I don't think much of your friends.' Track moved a bit further into the cabin, to discover Colonel Gadaffi ben Barka lounging against the approach-radar board with an arid smile on his thin lips.

'Don't think that'll help you when the time comes,' Truck told nun, nodding at the military issue Chambers gun that had lately blown such a large hole in Fix the bos'n's insides. 'I owe you for all this, ben Barka. Nobody threatens me on my own boat'

The Arab shrugged elegantly. He had crossed one leg over the other, his whole body unconsciously mimicking the feral repose of his own death commandos. His uniform was as neat as a pin. But he looked tired, and the desert, never very far away, was etching at his brain.

'You shot my bos'n,' Truck insisted.

Ben Barka's soft brown eyes hooded themselves for a heartbeat. He seemed to be studying his pistol. 'You can't think I'm unaware of that, Captain. Neither are you aware of how much is at stake. You did plenty of killing last night.' Another oasis choked to death in the long, empty night. 'He attacked me after fair warning. He was very brave. Do you think I did it lightly? I'm sorry if you do.'

John Truck had found Fix the dwarf washed up in the port hinterland of Gloam — disoriented and illiterate among the hustlers and prostitutes, having no real understanding of the twilight subculture that had swallowed him after his escape from the rural manors and squirearchies of Chrome. The two-thousand light-year brawl that had followed was Truck's responsibility; so was its end, down there under the arc lamps of Avernus. Like Annie Truck, Fix was a dependent.

'Are you apologizing to me? I didn't own him. Apologize to him!'

'Come, Captain — '

'I'm going to kick you to death some day, you bastard.'

The desert shifted, rustled, extended its perimeters: it had made vast inroads since the meeting in the ganger's shed; from being a means, a sympathetic terrain for imaginary revenges, it had mutated into an end. The olive groves had withered, the aqueducts fallen to rubble. Cairo and Alexandria was bleached shells in the ancient sunlight. High up in mountains ben Barka had never seen, exfoliation was cracking rock enough to make a Galactic sand-sea; sand was already spilling from his skull to submerge everything; in peace, he would slip along the wadies of the mind, stalking Reality's pitiful little punitive expeditions -

He made a small gesture with the pistol. 'If you'll take your place at the controls, Captain Truck. Your vessel has been commandeered.' His teeth were like bones exposed by the dry winds. 'Mr Skeffern, you'll note, is still alive and well.'

'Get your backside off the switchgear if you want the boat to go anywhere, ben Barka.'

The command-cabin of a Transit class hauler is laid out with dual controls and duplicated navigational aids; two acceleration chairs provide access to these, and a third can be brought up on runners from the rear of the bridge and locked abreast of the other two. It is a habit of transport pilots to leave this one permanently in place: ben Barka sat himself down in it and indicated that Truck and Tiny should strap-in either side of him. He put his pistol close to Tiny's ear.

'I think you were going my way anyway, Captain. We might as well travel together.'

'Oh yes?' Truck powered up his controls. 'Where's that?'

Ben Barka sighed and shook his head. 'Captain, Captain. The pistol's pointing in the wrong direction for obliquity.' He smiled down at Tiny, who hunched his shoulders like a nomad in a sandstorm. 'Grishkin, that impatient priest, had it from normally reliable sources that today had been chosen for an Arab attempt on the IWG blockade of Centauri VII (there is in fact an action in progress there: it's significant enough to keep IWG fully occupied, but hardly planned to be an actual military success).

'He realized almost immediately that he could never wish for a better diversion: with the result that you, Captain, received an en clair message from him early this morning. (It was couched, I felt, in rather fulsome tones even for a priest.) He expects your landing to go quite unobserved by either myself or the good General Gaw. He may even be down there already, waiting for you — one of our ships reported a boat in Opener livery sneaking a shade ineptly past the perimeters of the engagement some two hours ago.

'It was me who leaked the information to his pathetic intelligence machine: they'd never have got it without help, I don't wonder he didn't bother to code the message. Half his people are working for me or the General anyway. There you have it: we're going to the same place, Captain, We always were.'

Truck engaged a bank of rocker switches below the engine-room repeaters and warmed up the Powerslide pile for take-off, wondering just how much allowance ben Barka had made for Grishkin's fanaticism and the General's not inconsiderable cunning.

'Be it on your own head, Colonel.'

My Ella Speed rumbled and shook. The cargo ramp pulled itself in slowly, tipping Fix the bos'n into the hold like a bale of fresh animal skins. Truck got a go-ahead from the Port Authority, giving his destination as Sad al Bari and his cargo as 'mining machinery.' Two massive, caterpillar-tracked LTOA vehicles moved in across the dock and stood the boat gently on her tail. He checked that Tiny's controls were shut down, worked the rocket engines through the pre-lift part of their power-curve a couple of times.

'I can go any tune you want, Colonel.'

'Do it.'

My Ella Speed, well into the spirit of the thing, wiggled along her length like a bitch in heat, and threw herself upward.

While the colossal cruisers of UASR(N) have so-called 'autonomic gravity' environments which protect their crews against the devastating G effects of a battle maneuver, third-hand Transit class haulers do not. They are safe from inertia only during dyne-field shifts; and My Ella Speed, lustily fighting the attractions of Avernus, made it from relative rest to escape speed in a very short time indeed.

The multi-G blast is a concomitant of the spacer's way of life: Truck and Tiny, who had been lifting like that since birth — and before — took it stoically, with G standing on their faces and stumping all over their ribs.

But ben Barka was used to a more generous kind of travel. Perhaps he simply forgot. Certainly, it was too late when he remembered.

He dropped his Chambers gun when they were about a mile up. He tried comically to move his arms from his sides, sweat breaking out all over his face. His eyes rolled and protruded as Truck poured it relentlessly on. He gasped for breath; his skull snapped back against the head-restraint: when he tried to shift it, Truck — feeling somewhat wilted himself — made a vast effort, steered his hand the full two inches from armrest to controls, and let it fall against the emergency thrust button.