It was no good. Great Kaja or not, the Amazons seemed to think there was a matter of honor at stake. And they were making clear that they would stick to it. Grimly, Thandi realized that no matter what she said—even if she threatened them—they would just follow her anyway.

"All right, " she muttered. "But you will still do it my way, understood? You follow me onto the bridge. If a single one of you tries to push ahead of me... I'll break her neck, I swear I will."

The blood-curdling threat was met with grins.

"No problem, kaja." Lara nodded with exaggerated obeisance. "You may lead, so long as we may follow."

The last sentence had the flavor of ritual about it. Thandi realized that she knew very little, when all was said and done, of the strange subculture the Scrags had developed in their long centuries of social isolation. Given their obsessive preoccupation with "superiority," however, she suspected that they'd developed—to a very high degree—a sort of human equivalent to the dominance rituals of pack animals.

A wolfess will respect the preeminence of the alpha female in the pack, true enough—so long as her own canines are acknowledged. And nobody tries to suggest she's actually a rabbit with pointed teeth.

Thandi chuckled. "Maybe Berry can civilize the lot of you. I give up. All right, then. My plan is about as simple as it gets."

Thandi had already used a Marine spy-eye to peek around the bend—nothing more than a very thin and flexible optic cable attached to a tiny viewer. There was no guard stationed at the hatch, and the hatch itself was unlocked. So she assumed, anyway, since the tell-tale light above it was green. Unless slaver ships followed a different protocol than any other ships she'd ever encountered, she'd be able to get through it within a split-second.

"As soon as I start, Yana, you give the signal to Inge."

Yana nodded. She'd been appointed the one to stay in communication with Inge and the three Amazons who'd gone with her. Their job was to take out the men in the engineering compartments. Thandi had delegated that job, since she had the personnel to carry out both assaults simultaneously. The Masadans wouldn't have jury-rigged a blow-it-up-now switch in the engineering compartments in addition to the one she was sure they'd set up on the bridge. There would have been no reason to, and two switches more than doubled the chance of an accidental explosion. The Masadans were fanatics, but they weren't careless.

The men in the engineering compartment could still blow up the ship, true. But not quickly, with all the safeguards that would have to be removed. That was assuming the Masadans could even do it at all, without having to force the slaver crew to do most of the actual work. They certainly couldn't do it before Inge and her women had them all down and dead.

The real problem—the only problem, so far as Thandi was concerned—was the possibility that one of the Masadans on the bridge could reach the suicide switch before she killed them all. That was the reason she'd planned all along to lead the assault on the bridge. She could move faster than any of them.

Faster still, she thought sourly, if I didn't have to worry about a bunch of honor-besotted cretins insisting on stepping all over my heels. Oh, well. Just move even faster, Thandi girl.

The thought was sour enough to impart an acerbic edge to her final orders.

"As for the rest of you, just come after me and do what's needed. I warn you—even one of you steps on my heels and slows me down, I'll break her neck. See if I don't."

The only answer was so many grins. Thandi snorted, came out of her crouch like a tigress out of ambush, and was around the bend.

There never was any danger the Amazons would step on her heels. The point of honor having been satisfied, the women were sensible enough to understand that Thandi would just be hampered if they crowded her too close.

Which they couldn't have done, anyway. They hadn't witnessed the killings in Tube Epsilon, only the aftermath. So the Amazons had never really seen her moving at top speed.

They did now, and even they were astonished. The Amazons weren't halfway down the passage before Thandi was through the hatch leading onto the bridge. All that came crowding on her heels was a shrieking cry of adulation and triumph.

Great kaja! Kill them all!

For the past hour, Victor had been keeping an eye on that hatch. A corner of his eye, rather, since he couldn't afford to make his interest obvious.

By now, he was feeling bleary-eyed. Not so much from the strain of trying to watch something without actually doing so, but from the mental strain of keeping what had become a completely absurd concoction of lies and half-truths and sheer gibberish from collapsing under its own weight.

A collapse which, he was quite sure, was imminent. Even the Masadans, as prone as they were to conspiratorial paranoia, were now obviously suspicious.

"That does not make sense, Cachat," said Kubler, almost growling the words. He didn't quite heft the pulser in his hand, but the hand did twitch. "In fact, not much of anything you've said in the past—"

Kubler's head exploded.

Despite the watch he'd kept upon it, Victor never did see the powered hatch snap silently open. Neither did anyone else. All of their attention was focused on the obviously growing tension between him and the senior Masadan. Which made the sudden carnage erupting in their midst even more horrifying and stunning.

For a split second, like all the Masadans, Victor simply gaped at the demon flowing onto the bridge with a pulser in her hand. Then—he'd planned this all through, which they hadn't—Victor was up and moving.

There was no need to push Kubler aside. Thandi's first shot had done for that. First three shots, in fact. Somehow, she put them all into Kubler's head without so much as scratching Victor.

She was still firing, not from a marksman's crouch but striding forward onto the bridge and blazing away. She was moving so fast she seemed to flicker. Stride-stride-stop-fire; stride-stride-stop-fire. Three-round bursts, every time, as the pulser in her hand picked out targets like a machine, or one of the legendary gunfighters from ancient films Victor had seen.

Bad films. Silly ones, where the hero takes on a saloon full of cutthroats and never misses a single shot.

Victor almost cackled, as that absurd image flashed through his mind in the middle of his desperate lunge to do the one and only thing he was concerned about.

Get that bastard AWAY from the switch. Die in the doing, if need be—but GET HIM AWAY FROM IT.

Later, he would realize it all happened within a few seconds. At the time, his lunge toward the Masadan by the suicide switch seemed to take an eternity. Sailing through the air, at the last, his only purpose in life to tackle the man and take him down to the deck before he could destroy them all.

Victor felt a moment of elation, then. The Masadan had been as shocked as any, by Thandi's sudden and unexpected assault. Victor could see the determination beginning to congeal in the man's face, as realization replaced surprise. But even a Masadan does not commit suicide without a moment's hesitation—and he no longer had that moment. Victor would reach him in time, and no matter how he struggled, Victor was quite sure he could overpower the man. Certainly with the force of his lunge to give him the edge.

And so he did. But no overpowering was needed. By the time he brought the Masadan out of his seat and onto the deck, he'd tackled a corpse. In the final split-second, he saw a snarling fanatic face disappear in an explosion of blood, brains, and very tiny splinters of bone.

Yet another three-round burst, he realized, then grimaced as he drove headfirst into the expanding cloud of gore which had been a man's face. And then, as he sprawled onto the floor atop the dead man, Victor was mostly just puzzled. How had Thandi managed that —without, again, putting a scratch on him?

"Idiot,"she muttered, hauling him to his feet by the scruff of the neck. "Biggest damn problem I had was trying not to kill you. Worse than the Amazons."

But he didn't miss the love in the voice, or in the smile that faced him when he finally saw it.

"I'll try to remember that," he croaked. Piously: "Never interfere with a professional at her work."

Then he smiled himself. He had no trouble doing so, despite the carnage on the bridge, or even the blood coating his own face. Other men might have quailed at the prospect of falling in love with a woman who could kill eight men in half as many seconds.

Not Victor Cachat. Perhaps oddly, he found it quite reassuring.