My Ella Speed howled and quaked. Ben Barka made a choked, surprised sort of sound. His eyes opened wide; suddenly, a dark thin trickle of blood issued sluggishly from his left nostril. His tongue poked out from under his mustache like a misshapen fig. He passed out.

Captain John Truck, a haulage man from way back, who, in the dark womb of Annie Truck, had come down the infamous Carling Line in an unguided drone that was little more than a high-G tin can with refrigeration, held it until Tiny Skeffern was unconscious too, just to make sure. Then he settled into a parking orbit, said, 'Never mess with a pro on his own ground, Colonel,' and began to run checks on Ella's misused hull. He'd been in tougher lifts. Egerton's Port got on to him by radio and wanted to know just what the boy-wonder Rocket Ace in the clapped-out Transit thought he was up to.

He grinned. 'Sorry about that,' he told them. 'Wrong switch.' Horse laughs all around.

A few minutes later, Tiny woke up and unstrapped himself. 'That was a bit bloody hairy,' he complained. He saw ben Barka. 'Oh-ho!' he said. 'Can I shoot him?' he asked, getting hold of the pistol, which had fallen down the side of his seat, and waving it carefully around.

'No, I'm going to put him out of the rear lock without a suit. It's something I just thought of,' said Truck proudly. 'He'll look good, going down on the night side. It's quite artistic, really.'

Modesty, modesty.

Tiny examined ben Barka's congested face. 'You hit me,' he said coldly. He reached out and wiped the barrel of the Chambers gun down the Arab's cheek. 'Go on, Truck,' he said, 'let me shoot him, eh?' He grinned ingratiatingly.

Truck took the gun off him, got his hands under the Colonel's armpits, and with difficulty hauled him aft, bruising the limp body in frequent collisions with bulkheads and pieces of machinery. 'Sorry, ben Barka.' Ben Barka, looking a bit of a mess and still out, said nothing. Truck sniggered. 'You're going to enjoy this, ben Barka.' And he described to the Colonel just how it might feel out there in the graveyard orbit, down along that firework trajectory. But when he arrived in the cargo bay he forgot all about that for a while; and by the time he had finished composing Fix's poor torn corpse, he'd decided to put ben Barka in a suit after all.' It would give him time to wake up and take an interest in the long drop.

He went forward, sealed the bulkheads, and evacuated the hold with no prayers. Out went Fix and ben Barka, in a white storm of Opener leaflets. Ben Barka's suit began to broadcast immediately and indiscriminately — an all-band distress call. 'Damn,' said Truck. 'Isn't that just typical?'

Egerton's Port came through again. 'Are you going to hang around all day, Intestinal Revelation?' said the duty officer. 'We need that slot.' Then, suspiciously: 'Is there something wrong up there? I keep getting something that sounds like an SOS,'

'It's a fault, actually,' said Truck.

'It doesn't sound like a fault to me.' There was a pause. 'I've got someone here from the Port Authority. They want to know what an Opener vessel is doing hauling ironmongery to Sad al Bari — '

'Oops,' said Truck.

' — not to mention going off the field like half a frigate squadron. Can you assist?'

Truck switched the communications gear off.

'Tiny,' he said, 'start the Dynaflows. We're leaving.'

He fired up the navigational systems and set Ella Speed hunting like a three-dimensional compass needle until her blunt prow pointed at Alpha Centauri (or a spot where her sluggish internal processes remembered it to be). Tiny got the converters operating and came back up to the bridge. The exterior screens shimmered eerily, already probing out into the mysterious reaches of space.

'Right,' said Truck. He cut in the Dynaflows, pushed the throttles about, and the old Ella howled down the Galactic freeway toward Centauri, on overdrive. 'It's time we started getting some of our own back, Tiny.'

There wasn't much hope of getting their own back on anything they found orbiting Centauri VII. Six or seven hundred miles off the wan gray face of that murdered planet, Ella Speed pushed her bows into the edge of the immense envelope of debris. Like the remains of huge animals in some valley too deep for dawn to reach, forgotten in a mist of frozen air, dead ships lay in futile ambush for Eternity. It was a dark, still zone, full of dead men drifting in slow curves among fused machinery, rat-trapped with the dull red embers of melted atomic piles, whole engine rooms, like lumps of cooling slag, decaying in sullen aureoles of radio-static.

Deeper in, parts of the graveyard were still fun of a white, fitful glare, a deceptive and piscine motion, as a few bolt-shaped UASR(N) cruisers slugged it grimly out with IWG. They were outnumbered and unformated, but they seemed to be fully occupying the Fleet — no vacuum commandos were out, communications silence were being observed. Truck tried frequency after frequency, found interference breaking like waves on a beach strewn with smashed and rusting armor at the candle-end of time. He picked up a few desultory syllables of a common Morphian dialect (enough at least to tell him who had done the dying out there), a moan, gunfire scissoring open a hull, distant, decaying, obsessive.

Ella Speed nosed on through a dream of violence. None of the combatants spotted her. Behind her, quite unaware of each other, the cruisers Solomon and Nasser skulked the graveyard like two pike after the same minnow. Truck never suspected he might be followed: perhaps he was too occupied by the young gunner from Parrot who had attached himself to the boat, tumbling lazily about her bow in some gravitational eddy, beckoning Truck and Tiny on with one stiff arm as if inviting them out there to share his cold peace. His intestines, covered in a hoarfrost of condensation, were spilling infinitely slowly from his ruptured pressure suit, but his insignia were polished and bright.

Truck couldn't tell which side he was on.

Centauri captured them, filled the screens like an accusation.

Only one planet was ever killed -

At the climax, the absolute fervid crux of MIEV bombardment, when defense is a rag of memory in a hot wind and the sky shakes with ionization, much of the surface water is stripped off the crust as 'live' or superheated steam. The target vanishes under a cloudbelt several miles deep, there is a corresponding radical increase in its albedo — a last despairing heliograph of pain -

At five o'clock in the afternoon, July fourth 2180 AD, the shroud covered Centauri and, as a good shroud should, spared the living the ultimate patient indictment of the dead. The General Gaws of the day turned from their bomb-room repeaters, satisfied, shrugging and yawning — perhaps even a little bored — and certainly wondering how they might turn one half of Earth into the same sort of mess without actually damaging the other beyond habitable minimums laid down by their biologists. Ever since that merciful occlusion, Centauri had been a rubbish heap smelling of wet ashes.

By the time Dr Grishkin, under the auspices of God and a well-known Galactic encyclopedia, came to sink his first bore in search of the bunkers, a lukewarm rain had been falling evenly over the new landscape for almost two hundred years. He found a planetary fen drained by vast slow rivers: shallow, stagnant meres, inconceivable acreages of mud-flat and salting — and every cubic foot of water filled with corrupt organic matter caught at some point between decay and dissolution, cloudy, brackish with old death. None of the continents resembled anything he found on the pre-Genocide maps: finally, it was beneath the human and animal silts of the estuaries and deltaic fans that he discovered water percolating through the slaughtered regolith in small secret streams, to the abandoned redoubts miles beneath.