The free dancer was dying. Its enormous lunglike body inflated one final time, but not enough. The creature wailed as its microbrain struggled to remember the path to the skies.

Where would it land?

Alarms rang through the city trails. Despite the danger, steel shutters clanked open on the north side of many domed huts. Brutish winds scraped by, unable to get a grip on the oystershell domes. Slowly the giant descended from the biohaze in a shroud of parasitic life-forms. The parasites puffed outward from the free dancer and raced upward to the stormy atmosphere, their abandonment clear proof of the animal’s doom. The free dancer twisted its long tendrils of shock floss upward as if beseeching its little riders to come back.

When they didn’t, the free dancer almost seemed to understand. It gave off a last sad crackle, buckled like an accordion bellows, and quite sharply dropped the last fifty feet to the ground.

Tanggg! Tang-tang! Tangggg —shutters closed all over the quarter, just in time. The harsh sound echoed and continued longer than any reasonable echo, into the city, onto the plain, to the mountains, and rang there awhile.

Like a cattleprod touching flesh, the planet came up to meet the dying free dancer with a sharp slap. At the first inch of contact the creature heaved, then flattened to the trail’s surface and there gushed out its life. Electric-blue neon crackles engulfed the corpse in a violent coccoon.

Again Nick Keller found himself reminded of old newsreels—the crash of the dirigible Hindenburg —a giant lung collapsing into a single great mercurial transfer of matter to energy, as all the animal’s stored power shot directly into the planet.

What a waste.

“Close the shutter! You’ll be burned by the blast wave!”

“I need to see it.”

Raw energy strobed between the huts. The uncontrolled natural death of a free dancer could take a hundred people with it in a population complex, or go without witness on some distant open tundra.

The whole planet was a tundra. A metal tundra. Soot on silver on pearl on ingot, with leaden shadows and pewter hills. The only natural life was in the skies, and it came down only to die.

This animal grounded on the outskirts of the City of the Living, the oldest settlement on the planet, a cluster of knobby buildings and dome huts secured with pylons rooted twenty feet into the planet’s mantel. Out there, in the “suburbs,” were six or seven scattered huts out by themselves. As Keller watched in morbid fascination, the free dancer flattened right on top of one of the huts. The energy transferred back into the planet, and an instant later the blast wave blew through the city with a single deafening bark.

The echo bonged like a big doorbell. Blinding disruption blossomed across the open terrain.

Keller let the heavy iron shutter drop closed just in time, and ducked. The dome thundered around him.

When the shaking subsided, he bolted to his feet and grabbed his tricorder. “Come on! It landed on a hut!”

“Keller, why do you do these things?”

He didn’t wait. Braxan would follow him. She always did.

Heat from the dead free dancer radiated through the metallic streets and buildings with a vibrating thrum of harp strings. Though he felt the heat, he was protected by the chain-mail sheath over his own clothes and his tightly woven mail footwear.

The primary structural shape in the Living city was a dome. The city looked like a huddle of shellacked mollusks. They were built by inflating a free dancer’s float gland, then spraying a composite— which Keller’s tricorder analyzed as some chemical soup that hardened when mixed, along with a bunch of unreadable adulterants—over the balloon frame. The result was, on average, a six-hundred-ton house. The curvature could absorb hundreds of pounds’ pressure per square centimeter, which the weather frequently tested.

Otherwise, there were a few towers and a few large storage facilities. That’s all.

The free dancer’s dropping on a house with its shutters open caused an implosive charge. Curiosity had gotten the better of somebody. The people inside had made a bad bet—a free dancer could die a half mile away, then in its final convulsion flip over and land right on some poor slob’s head.

Could’ve been me. Next time maybe I’ll close the shutter. It’s just such a sight!

The carcass was now a huge pile of placemat-sized ashes crudely recalling the shape of the dead animal, thickened by the spilled and stir-fried contents of its guts—hundreds of pounds of candleflies, now cooked to a paste. Keller plowed right into the mess. Giant black flakes blew out of his way, then began to clog around his knees as he went deeper into the fried remains. His feet were gummed up in the candlefly paste. Behind him, hundreds of people swarmed out of the domes to watch. A few helped push the cooked flakes away from the imploded dome, but most held back.

As he pushed through the hesitant people, Keller cast a glance behind for Braxan.

She was there, right behind him. Her narrow shoulders shifted back and forth under the shimmering foil tunic she wore. What it would be on the other side of the gateway, he had no idea. Here, everything was silver, ferrous, bullion, and plate. The planet was one big ingot, hammered, pocked, or polished by constant storms. Some unknown inner force had formed jagged inorganic mountain peaks in the distance, but Keller’s tricorder offered only basic statistics and couldn’t read beneath the planet’s surface. Like a pet dog in a strange house, it didn’t act very happy here.

Braxan stayed with him until he began climbing the dome’s ashentombed ruins.

“Hold this!” He handed her his tricorder just before climbing out of arm’s reach.

“When will you understand?” she warned. “They’ve been Anointed!”

“Don’t be silly. Come up and help me.”

“I shouldn’t.”

He glanced around for someone who might help and spotted two of their neighbors, a pair of brothers. “Donnastal! Serren! Climb up here! Help me pry this thing open.”

The two teenaged boys looked around at the others, scouting for disapprovals. Excitement got the better of them. They broke with traditions and swam through the ashes toward Keller, who was now about ten feet up on the crumpled dome, straddling the nearest shutter.

The shutter wasn’t latched, but only bent by the force of the free dancer’s frying-pan act. The hinges were crimped.

“Ready….three….two…. haul!”

Though his hands weren’t strong enough, his foot behind the shutter and the two boys pulling on the sides did the trick.

Donnastal and Serren were young, but on Metalworld a teenager was a mighty commodity. Serren was wiry and Donnastal, though only sixteen, was built like a shuttlecraft. Against all the precepts and rules of their planet, these boys would take chances and do what the stranger ordered. Keller wasn’t beyond making use of a little teenager hero worship.

The iron shutter rasped a god-awful honk and bared the glassless window. Keller swung around on his hip and dropped into the hole.

Inside he dug through what was left of the house and came up with three people right under the shutter—one unconscious, one moaning, one dead. The shutter was a skylight. Probably they’d been sleeping and hadn’t heard the alarms in time. Any minute they’d be crushed by the weight of the shifting rubble. The Living called it destiny, fate, random order. Keller didn’t buy it.

He got the moaning woman up on his shoulder and called, “Donny, reach down! Pull these people out and hand them to Serren. Good boys.”

He hoped they wouldn’t hesitate. The Living carried fatalism too far. An unintelligible mutter of protests squabbled outside, but Donnastal appeared over his head and reached down. One by one, the victims were hoisted out of Keller’s arms and into the open.

“Braxan, hand down my tricorder. Can you hear me?”

The instrument had a terrible time operating on this side of the gateway. Half the readings were scatterbrained and silly. He’d learned to take notice of sick blips that otherwise he would ignore and to expect huge skips in data. The terrible moment came when the instrument figured out what he wanted it to do, and reported, clearly, nothing.

Keller turned off the tricorder. He leaned back against one of the bent steel braces and closed his eyes. No one else buried under this jagged, electrocuted mess….around him, the ruined dome structure groaned. Metal scratching against more metal. Unsupported, it would soon collapse under the very weight of its own materials.

Metal and more metal and more. For the first six weeks he’d hardly slept a wink from the weirdness of the noise. Simple footsteps made the ring of chains. A falling tool made not a thump or bonk, but a jannnngggggg. He was living on a giant tuning fork.

No wonder these people dreamed of trees and moss.

What about Challenger? What were his shipmates thinking after so long? He’d left them with the order to keep the gateway open to the last Anointed.

“Are you returning?” Braxan’s voice threaded from outside. “The dome will crack and you’ll be a legend. How would you like me to tell the story of you?”

He looked up. Donnastal was reaching down for him.

“Thanks, butch,” he said, and accepted help out.

Donnastal bit his lip. Neither of the boys talked much—mostly they were waiting to see just how far their culture could be pushed.

And I’m counting on that, Keller thought.

The three victims had already been taken away, two to be tended, one to be Anointed. Cold wind scratched across Keller’s skin and pulled at his hair, which, as it batted in his eyes, reminded him again why so many of the Living wore their hair clipped very short. In defiance he hadn’t cut his. In fact, it lapped at his shoulders—a ridiculous state of being for a good ranch hand. He thought of his brothers and how they would hoot at him. Shave, but no haircut.

Before him a throng of brush-cuts and slick-downs clustered around the dome, waiting to see what the mysterious stranger would do next. He was still enough of an oddity that the people liked to watch him. Good entertainment was hard to come by.

Overhead, lightning and long neon storm clouds skated the biohaze. When he slid down the dome into the sea of warm ash, Braxan came quickly to him.

“By saving them, you’ve gone against random order,” she told him.

“If you stay here, you must learn to accept these decisions.”

“These aren’t decisions,” he countered. “And I’m not staying here. And neither are you.”

His words disturbed the people around them. Braxan noticed, even more than Keller did, or a least cared more.

“Get your Grid mats,” she said. “Spread the word for all hunters to meet at the Feast plain.”

The people broke up and hurried back into the city to prepare for the hunt. Ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring —their chain-mail moccasins were like jinglebells anyway. Vibrations couldn’t be muffled here.

Braxan was uneasy giving the order to hunt, or any order. It wasn’t in her nature. She reminded Keller some of himself when he had been suddenly spun into charge of a ship in crisis and a colony in trouble, without the people he had come to depend upon. She was alone too, without family. Braxan had lost all her relatives in the last few hunts, a group of people who hadn’t been blessed with many children. Most women Braxan’s age had a half-dozen children. Braxan had none. Apparently the luck of the draw.

So Braxan was alone, except for the injured traveler she had nursed back to health.

This would be the fifth hunt since Keller came through the gateway and crashed the spinner out on the plain. Through weeks of Keller’s recovery, Braxan had provided both nursing and information. She had wanted to go through the gateway more than either Riutta or Luntee, and for that reason she had stayed—one of those old-order quirks of caution.

“When you appeared in one of our spinners,” she said, “we didn’t know what kind of being you were or why you came. You told us we must use our stored energy to power more ships, to cross over before the gateway closes….that it is still time to go. Still, there are many fears to this.”

“Braxan, you have to keep believing.” He clasped her arms and bothered to look deeply into her eyes, hoping she would find the truth in there. “This side doesn’t want people. It never did. On the big scale of time, eleven thousand years isn’t that long. The time of the Living is running out on this big ball bearing. Lightning, rain, ice—on the other side of the gateway you can do more than just survive. You can grow. You won’t have to give up thousands of people to the hunts. It’s better there. It wants life.”

“I believe it’s wonderful,” she said. “I believe you. We’ll keep storing energy, and keep trying to convince Kymelis. If her voice is with us, then we’ll all go.”

He smiled at her, but not because she was telling him what he wanted to hear. She wasn’t the youngest nymph on the planet or the prettiest, but he liked looking at her. Her harsh features—a sharp nose, thin eyebrows, high cheekbones, thin lips, and a chin that came to a dimpled point—were offset by worshipful eyes like two balls of hematite in a setting of platinum skin. She was a very simple person, content with small comforts and controlled hopes, yet she had warmed to Keller’s tales of life on the other side in a way that made him feel valuable.

Though she had no unique talents or wisdom or skills, she was special because she had survived more hunts than all but two others of her people. That made her the third Elder, the one Riutta and Luntee had left behind. After so long with no word from Riutta and Luntee, the Living had accepted two new elders. Braxan was now in a new triumvirate of leaders for the Living.

There were Braxan, a one-eyed woman named Kymelis, and a man named Issull, in that order of seniority. Braxan wanted to go through the gateway. Issull intended to go through, but didn’t think this was the time. Since there was trouble in space on the other side, perhaps another ten thousand years of preparation was needed.

The middle Elder, one-eyed Cyclops, hadn’t made up her mind about what random order “wanted.”

Three elders—a leadership in turmoil. One for Keller’s way, one against, and one vacillating. Kymelis knew hers was the swing vote, but also didn’t know whether to trust Keller, a stranger who had soared through the gateway after the signal from the Anointed was silenced. Was Keller the one who had stopped the signal? What had happened to the Anointed? These many troubled months hadn’t been smooth skating for Keller or his message of welcome from the other side.

Of course, one key factor was that Issull did want to go through the gateway, as all their histories planned, but he didn’t think this was the time. That meant he could eventually be convinced. Keller only needed two Elders to go his way.

“Time’s running out,” he murmured, more to himself than Braxan.

“If my multiplication’s right, it’s been almost thirty hours on the other side. They can’t hold the gateway open much longer.”

“I think you’ll prevail,” she said quietly. “My people listen to you.”

“Well, the Living don’t waste. I’m a stranger, but I’ve got special knowledge and skills. They can’t ignore me….it’s not exactly the same as listening.”

“You are a champion of many here, especially the young ones like Donnastal. He defies everything for you.”

“Mmm….that’s because I’m the suave foreign substitute teacher. What I am is the focus of conflict, really.”

“Our first leader, Ennengand, meant for us to go through. We have invested generations in this. I still believe.”

“But is Nick Keller the messenger?” he asked. “Ol’ Cyclops isn’t sure.”

Braxan’s glossy eyes regarded him warmly as he came out of his thoughts. “There are some who say you treat me gently for the sake of influence. So I’ll go with you.”

“Hey, hey…. don’t blame the messenger.” Keller grinned, caught her hand, and pulled her up close. In a cold world, she was his only warmth and therefore all the more precious. “You always wanted to go to the other side. I didn’t change your mind, did I?”

“Random order sent you to us to tell us it’s time to leave. Why would you be here otherwise?” Like a silver bell on a cord she swung in his arms, and appreciated him with her eyes.

“I’m glad you’ve survived,” he murmured, “even if you have to bear the burdens of an Elder.” Usually he tried not to be so candid. But for this moment, would a little selfishness hurt? “How do you stay so nice in a place like this? You don’t even realize how much death breathes on this place, do you? It’ll always be a subsistence living here. If more resources appear, the population expands just enough to make it subsistence again.”

“We have enough to survive,” she said.

“You have metal. Nothing else. No help from others, no neighbors in space, no way to make medicine….you live on candleflies and legends of better places. People are afraid to form relationships, children are pushed away by their parents, nobody dares to care too hard…. there’s complete insecurity. You lose everybody you love, or they lose you. The only thing in my culture’s history, the only parallel I can think of….is the Black Plague.”

“You always speak of other colors,” she said, steering him away from his morbid subject. “We have darkest dark, this ‘black’ you’ve shown me. I like to hear about the others. Red and green. Cobalt and pumpkin….very exotic names.”

“They’re exotic.” He twiddled his fingers through her coppery hair.

“Not quite as exotic as you, I don’t think.” With his eyes out of focus he hugged her and gazed at the silver dome over their heads. “I wish I could remember…. sometimes I dream in colors ….but I’m afraid I might be forgetting what they really look like. Seems to have been an awful long time….”

“Time—” She pulled away, her shiny eyes bright. “It’s time for the hunt. I have to be there.”

“I know.” He sighed. “You, me, coupla hundred other hunters, and my trusty tricorder.”

She smiled. “Again you’ll take it onto the plain?”

“I have to reset it just before the capture. You know that.”

“You reset at the last hunt, and the one before, and before that.”

“Oh, I s’pose,” he mumbled as he palmed the instrument. “Clears the head…. electrical interference is my hobby now. I can compare certain electrical readings. Y’know—research. Data acquisition. Fun with numbers.”

“On our world there is not enough electricity for you already?”

“Hon, on your world there’s enough electricity for dang near everybody, dang near everywhere. If we could box it—”

He stopped himself, held back from telling her too much. These people had survived in an impossible place by holding to some kind of purpose. Civilizations had been doing that for a long time, but this one took the method to an extreme. Keller knew he had to work within their system. They wouldn’t accept too much rebellion.

“Stand right in front of me. Let me use you for—”

“A sensor anchor,” she completed. “I know. You will ‘read’ me now, and you will ‘read’ yourself on the plain, and later compare the information. I shall stand better than anyone ever has stood.”

She squared her shoulders, spread her hands out, drew a deep breath and closed her eyes, still smiling. Her hands, less a little finger on each, were slim and feminine. Even the bitterness of evolution and of life on this rugged world hadn’t taken the girl out of this girl. She didn’t have much of a figure, but the simple foil sheath made an enchanting envelope.

“Mmm, you’re good at standing,” Keller commented wryly. He finished scanning her and turned the tricorder on himself for a quick sweep. “Ought to do it….”

Braxan pressed her hands to her gold-leaf pixie-cut hair. Her hair looked brassy to him here. What it would look like on the other side— he had no way to guess. All he knew was that her smile was friendly, her heart forgiving and unsuspicious in a place of inclement legend, and she had started to look pretty to him.

“I wish I could have you give the commands.” She sank against him, pressing her chin to his shoulder. “Why would random order select such as me to be made an Elder?”

“When we go to the other side, you can be whatever you want. There’s no ‘random order’ there. You can be lots of different things. All at once, if you want.” He gazed at her. “What do you want?”

It was like asking a cloistered novice to describe Mardi Gras. Her lashless eyes tightened with the mystery he put before her.

“I would like to see trees,” she said.

“We have trees on Belle Terre. We’re sowing sod too. Grass. I think you’ll take to grass between your little stubby toes down there.”

She smiled, but he had awakened a cautious streak. “Does color hurt?” she asked.

Her innocence filled him with a whole new kind of responsibility. Cupping her neck, his own hands were a bizarre computer-generated pearly texture instead of their normal shade of Santa Fe. Everything here seemed artificially animated. He’d almost forgotten what a human really looked like or the kind of world he and all life like him was meant to occupy. Was some inner part of him expecting to be trapped here?

He slid his hands down her shoulder blades and solemnly promised, “Color is one of the best things.”

“Hunt! The hunt!” Cries from the streets shook them out of their private moment. Local heralds were running through the streets, summoning all those qualified to hunt. The same thing would be happening in the other settlements.

Keller looked up and sighed. What a shame—a free dancer had just landed here, but all its energy was lost. Hundreds of people would soon die a horrific electrical death to tempt down more free dancers in a controlled environment, so one could be killed and its energy taken into storage.

“It’s time to hunt,” Braxan said, and pressed back, breaking their quiet communion.

“Right,” he acceded. “Let’s buckle on our swash and participate in chivalry at its weirdest.”

The hunt plain was nothing more than miles of ferrous flats, brushed to a dull sheen by wind and storms constantly battering this planet. Lightning flashed overhead and the skies growled. The bio-haze, a shroud of primordial life surviving in the atmosphere, flickered and swam and tumbled.

There were twenty thousand people or so on this planet, by Keller’s best reckoning. The low number was a sad clue. According to the “old records,” there had once been upward of a hundred thousand, all descendants of the crews and passengers of those first two ships to pass through the gateway, one Blood, one Kauld.

Nature was intolerant here. The planet couldn’t support a population. The Living were more devolving than evolving. Families had fewer children, even though they produced as many as they could. Women dutifully produced babies their entire adult lives, by several men, to keep genetics from singularizing. They had developed an Eskimo-like manner of cooperative tribal structure, to be sure children were cared for if their adult relatives didn’t survive the hunts, and to make sure nonhunting families were fed. There was food sharing and a strict hierarchy of distribution, the top of which involved the families of people who had been “chosen” in the hunt. Perfect, to the dreamer’s eye.

Reality was far less kind. Several times, the histories told, this system had broken down. Communalism would support only the very smallest of communities. This inhospitable planet was a test case. When there proved no other way, communalism’s answer had been to make the community smaller, not bigger.

They survived, but didn’t thrive. Starvation, competition, failure. Generation after generation, the pattern repeated itself. The population surge to five hundred thousand had only happened once, and like a flare quickly collapsed. Now they were on their way to another wave of harsh limitation. Their numbers were shrinking. The metal planet would never let them flourish. It didn’t want them.

So they clung to their legend about going home. It was their single enduring plan. They wanted to go. They planned to go. Unless they were “chosen” in the hunt of a free dancer or “Anointed”—killed by accident or illness—they worked toward the goal of eventually leaving this tin pot.

The plan’s most recent leg had been a mighty monumental one—to take thousands of Anointed home, then send a signal for the rest of the people to follow. That signal had never come. Instead, quite another signal had been sent. The Anointed had been summoned down from their pedestals all at once, not by destiny but by Nick Keller in his determination to save his side of the gateway first.

Taking the unexpected “destruction” of the Anointed as a message, the Living had hunkered down once more to the business of collecting energy from the free dancers, but this time with the idea of another ten thousand years of work before trying again. They had used up almost all their stored energy to open the gateway and hold it open, then power Riutta’s spinner fleet. They had to hustle now, hunt more and more often, to gather enough energy to go on surviving.

But Keller had come. He wanted them to use their new power stores in a different way—to go through the gateway en masse, as they had originally planned.

He was the only one who knew the clock was ticking to a much nearer alarm. Challenger and the grave ship could hold the gateway open only a few hours on their side, more than a year on this side.

A year…sounded long, but wasn’t. The Living had been waiting years on this side for Riutta and Luntee to send a summons, then instead received a cutoff. They supposed the Anointed had met with tragedy in space. After hundreds of generations, nothing had come of this. They had accepted two new Elders, along with the one left behind, and they had begun again. More than half of these people would die in a stepped-up schedule of hunts, to provide enough energy for the other half to keep existing on this brittle ferrous ball.

What could Keller do? Send a pigeon through the gateway and tell Shucorion to throw another dead guy on the fire?

The gateway was still open. He clung to that.

He clamped his lips on his thoughts as he and Braxan worked side by side, along with hundreds of hunters from all the settlements, to fit woven gum segments into place and seal the seams. The heavy mats, woven with patterns and messages and tributes, would prevent a grounding. Ironically, the mats protected the free dancers from the planet, but didn’t protect the Living from the free dancers. The Living had learned long ago that they had to let the free dancers …. well, there was no nice way to say it… let them feed.

Rather quickly, the mats were puzzled together into a gigantic circle of a size perfect for its task, big enough that the free dancers would be able to sense the Living crowded upon it, but not so big that the Living couldn’t race for the edges when the time was right. Keller had seen four other hunts and had participated in three. A more ghastly spectacle he had never witnessed.

He got a shudder up his arms as he remembered, and fully realized again what was coming. Hundreds of healthy innocent men and women would strip down to their birthday suits and plunge out onto the plain, then wait for the free dancer herd to “see” them—whatever that meant—and come to the trough. Against all instinct, the Living had learned to simply stand there and be “chosen” in an electrical feeding frenzy that defied description.

The mental pictures alone turned Keller’s stomach. The people would stand with their faces up, fear clearly shown, as the monsters came down, and wait for the Elders to decide the free dancers had eaten enough that they would return next time. Finally, the scramble back to the perimeter while the slaughter went on… desperate hunters would pull on their silky chain-mail tunics so they would be protected from the pyrotechnics, snatch up their arc spikes, pulpers, clamps, nets, and race back to harvest one free dancer for the reservoir of energy and the gizzard full of candleflies it provided.

Not exactly Home on the Range.

Overhead, enormous shapes painted shadows upon the hunt plain. Heat blew downward from the skies, a sure sign that the free dancers were clustering above. A fine hail of ice particles bitterly pummeled the back of Keller’s neck, his head and arms, as he worked on the gum mats, so hard that he fell to both knees. His hands were cold, but as much from the inside as the outside. Courageous people would be dying soon, and horribly.

But not him, and not Braxan. He needed to live, and he needed her to live—

“Look!”

“What is it?” someone shouted.

“A spinner!”

Keller raised his hand to shield his face from the ice particles and scanned the ugly sky. Beside him, Braxan hunched her shoulders and turned her unprotected face upward.

In the sky a tiny dot grew quickly larger, a bug-shaped metallic vessel with forward mandibles and a bulbous stern. A spinner from Riutta’s fleet on the other side of the gateway—and quite literally the last thing Keller expected to see.

Who was piloting it? Was someone bringing a message for him? Had Riutta abandoned the gateway? Had one of the Living crew broken away? A hammer blow of worry hit him.

To a planet that hadn’t entertained a visitor in ten thousand-plus years suddenly came the second visitor in a matter of months. Things were changing here—a harbinger now landed upon the plain, a much better touchdown than Keller had managed when he came through.

“Uh-oh….” he uttered. “This can’t be helpful.”

“Perhaps it’s one of your friends,” Braxan suggested.

“Bet it ain’t.”

At first Keller didn’t recognize the man who stepped from the spinner. The smooth silvery skin and dark eyes threw him off. On the other side of the gateway, the skin of the Living revealed its mottled pattern and their eyes were—different.

“It’s Luntee, alive!” Braxan chirped, pushing on Keller’s shoulder.

“This will put to rest the idea that you may not have been honest with us! There were rumors that Riutta and Luntee had died on the other side!”

“They’re fine,” Keller hoarsely confirmed. “I told you they were fine….”

He found his feet and pushed his way through the crowd of hunters. They knew him and were curious, so eagerly they parted before him and Braxan, until he was face-to-face with Luntee.

Though they both appeared like Halloween versions of themselves, they recognized each other.

“Couldn’t take it, huh?” Keller flatly asked.

Luntee squared off with him, unsurprised and obviously prepared.

“You don’t belong here. We don’t belong Outside. We should never have gone.”

Aware of the hundreds of people staring at them like a swarm of bees waiting for a flower to open, Keller held himself in check and went for information.

“What’s the status on the other side?”

“They think you’re dead,” Luntee announced. “Almost all the Anointed are gone. Time is running out.”Keller held up a hand. “We’ve been getting ready. We’ve been storing energy to power the transport ships. All the Living will be able to go through the gateway and settle in the Sagittarius Cluster.”

Braxan appeared beside him, almost between him and Luntee. “The plan is troubled now.”

He looked at her. “Why?”

She and Luntee watched each other as lightning flashed on their faces. “Luntee has returned to us and he is an Elder. There can only be three Elders. Luntee is senior to Issull. Issull is no longer Elder. Luntee’s voice will now be heard with the voice of Kymelis.”

She might’ve been trying to be kind or cautious, but everyone here knew what she meant.

The matter broadcast itself when Luntee spoke up again. “We will not go through,” he declared. “We will destroy all the transporting vessels and we will live here, as we are meant.”

“Meant?” Angry, Keller flopped his arms. “Nobody’s ‘meant’ to live on this pie plate! There’s no natural life here at all!” He turned to the crowd and implored, “The gateway is still open. That’s a clear message. My friends and Riutta are holding it open. They’re still waiting for us!”

Luntee held up his hand and pointed to the skies. “It remains open because his friends are forcing Riutta to push Anointed after Anointed into the processor! Wasted!”

Keller spun back. “Don’t talk like that. They’re not being wasted. They’re saving you, all of you, all you people, if you’ll just go through. Riutta knows that now—”

“Riutta is ill in the mind!” Luntee gasped. “You made her weak. The Anointed are almost gone. The gateway is soon and forever to close!”

“And you didn’t want to be trapped on the other side,” Keller accused. “Why not? Tell your people the truth. You couldn’t adapt. You didn’t like it over there, you found it uncomfortable, and you like being an Elder. Riutta wanted you to spend your life in space and you can’t stand the idea. Here, you’re a big fish in a small pond.” His finger leveled at Luntee’s chest, at the chain-mail shirt he couldn’t punch with a phaser. “At least admit that this is about you, and not about your people.”

Braxan started to say something, then looked at Keller and asked, “What’s a fish?” “What’s a pond?” Luntee asked, but in a mocking way. “I hate it there. I’m saving my people—”

“You’re saving yourself. You won’t take the time to adjust or let us help you. Did Riutta know you were escaping back through the gateway?” Keller plowed on, “Or did you break away on your own? I’m surprised Shucorion didn’t knock you out of the sky.”

Luntee’s expression turned hard. “They think you’re dead! Take the spinner! Go away from us and put their fears to peace! And leave us alone!”

“That’s exactly what you’ll be,” Keller said. “Alone.”

The crowd was nervous, doubtful, and suddenly scared. Their fear crackled as clearly as the electrical frenzy high in the sky, and just as palpable.

Push!

“You like that, don’t you?” he pressed on, and actually stepped closer to Luntee, to put the focus where he wanted it. “The difference between you and all these other people is that you want to stay here. Everybody else is debating when to go through. You don’t want to go at all. Tell them the truth.”

“I speak truths,” Luntee said. “I know how long you’ve been here. We have enough to go, but only if all our energy is used. Is this not also true?”

Keller started to speak, but all he could do was agree. Better not to do that.

Luntee took the silence as a cue. “If we go to space and the gateway closes before we go through, then we all die. All our energy will be used up. We’ll freeze and starve by thousands. We have a fresh store of energy, to be used in powerful vessels to go through the gateway to that place of horrors, or to be used to make life better here. More heat, more building, new ways to hunt—”

Feeling his influence slip, Keller took care to keep desperation out of his tone of voice. “But most of the Living want to go through the gateway, as Ennengand intended. Isn’t that true? Braxan, isn’t it true?”

Her eyes were solemn, communicating to him that his argument was pointless now. “There are three Elders,” she said. “If Kymelis decides to stay—” “The old rules are too old,” he argued. “Three people shouldn’t be making decisions for tens of thousands of others—not this kind of decision. All of your people— each person has the right to decide whether or not to go.”

“No one knows how to make this kind of choice.”

“I do!” He turned and met the eyes of as many individuals as he could. “I surely do. This place is appalling. The best you can ever do here is make life barely bearable. Your legends came down of a wondrous place polluted by people who struck off into space. Okay, I’ll tell you the truth—things aren’t perfect on my side. It’s not all wonderful, but it’s mostly wonderful. The other things—we’re working on all of it. You folks, you’re right to stop looking for simple ways to live. You have a spectacular technology here, your metallurgy and your free dancers, and how you’ve learned to use them… what a gift! You could improve life for billions of people, and you won’t have to suffer anymore. You can be warm and have food—no more hunts, no more orphans—growing, breathing planets, flowers and grass and color— think of it and brace up!”

He paused, and watched the crowd. They were like a pack of gray wolves staring down a deer that wouldn’t run. They had all the power and possibility, but didn’t know what to do.

“Keller speaks with the voice of Ennengand,” Braxan defended. “We should go through. I have always said it and I’m very smart.”

He glanced at her, charmed by her ability to find a joke at these kinds of moments. Suddenly he felt stronger.

“The Elders speak with separate voices,” Luntee reminded. “If no two Elders agree, then random order will declare which voice shall be final.”

“Hold it,” Keller snapped. “What’s that mean?” His own question gave him a shiver.

Lowering her chin, Braxan watched Luntee cannily. “It means there must be a hunt decision.”

A rumbling ball hardened in Keller’s stomach. “What’s a hunt decision?”

“Watch the biohaze! When the first free dancer descends, all hunters will retreat except for the two challengers. One will be chosen. The other, the voice left behind, is meant to be heard.”

Luntee, who had been reserved, skittish, and overwhelmed on the other side of the gateway, boldly addressed the gathering of hunters— numbers well into the hundreds. He spoke up sharply, and something about the acoustics of this metallic world carried his voice almost to the horizon. Keller had found that out the hard way.

Since all the hunters were gathered anyway and there were free dancers in the sky, the hunt decision would happen here and now. Just as well, wasn’t it? To get all this over with? No time to think twice?

The judge would be Cyclops—Kymelis—the impartial Elder. Impartial? Vacillating, really. She was a stocky woman with many children, her right eye and right ear destroyed in some hunt catastrophe. Whether or not she coveted control or just accepted it was a mystery. Since becoming an Elder involved nothing more than surviving more hunts than any but two others, there was no political parrying or ambition in play. Being an Elder, status-wise, was nothing more than jury duty or a rotating chairmanship, except that big decisions were made for big numbers by these entirely random leaders.

Of course, until very recently, the decisions hadn’t been so very big.

Kymelis was also dangerously superstitious. She was waiting for a “sign” that this was the right time to abandon their ridiculous planet.

As if there hadn’t been enough signs lately! Belle Terre Trail, Blood Junction, Crossover Crossing, Keller Corners—

“What if both die?” Keller asked. “If both are chosen?”

“Then neither is meant to be heard,” Kymelis explained. Her bulky shoulders changed shades with the violent storms overhead as the free dancer herd noticed the hunt plain and began to gather. “There will be two new Elders.”

“Wait—wait a minute. What do you mean by ‘two new Elders’? If I’m chosen, Braxan still—”

“You will not be on the hunt plain. Braxan will be.”

“This is between Luntee and me!”

“You’re not an Elder,” Luntee said. “Braxan is the dissenting Elder.”

“Yeah, but you’re not taking her out there.”

“No. This is between you and me.”

Luntee shrugged. “Braxan is your voice. A hunt decision is made with Elders.”

“There’s got to be something better,” Keller insisted, “something involving me. I should be able to stand for my own purpose and take my chances.”

Around them the hundreds of hunters shifted and bobbed with anxious curiosity. None dared cheer his words or even speak up, though he saw cheers in many eyes. Rules were rules and a lenient crowd wouldn’t change them, but the effect wasn’t lost on any of the three Elders. After all, if none of these people wanted to go through the gateway, there wouldn’t be a problem, would there?

Kymelis’s remaining eye shifted back and forth, as if scanning the old records and laws and rules and their details.

How could such a crowd be so quiet? It was like being watched by owls in the night woods.

“She can select a surrogate,” Kymelis concluded.

Keller went up on his toes. “Great! Perfect—” He swung to Braxan.

“Pick me. Come on, hurry up. I’m right here.”

She looked at him, at Kymelis and Luntee, and back at Keller.

“Come on,” he urged, twitching like a kid. “Let’s go. Pick me.”

“I can’t,” she murmured. “You are the next Ennengand. You’ll find a way.”

“But if you—if you’re chosen, Luntee’s side wins!”

She gazed at him with miserable adoration. “And if you are chosen, there will be no one strong to speak for going. I’m not strong enough to lead. Whatever happens, you must remain to lead the Living. I will stand on the plain.”

So she did believe in him. Too much.

“Braxan will go onto the hunt plain for the decision,” Kymelis judged.

“No—oh, no!” Keller’s head started to pound on the inside and down the back of his neck. He pushed forward toward Luntee and might’ve hit him—he might have—except Donnastal and Serren held him back.

Maybe they were smart. Maybe there was some little law about hitting an Elder.

What about insulting one?

“You’re devious, Luntee,” he tempted. “All right, you don’t like me—fine. You want me to pay—that’s fine too, but don’t make me pay with her life!”

“These are our laws.” Something had stabilized in Luntee’s voice. He sounded much more confident than he had on the other side of the gateway. “You have come here and must live within—”

“I will,” Keller blurted, “if you go out there with me, not with her. Let me be my own voice!”

A light came on in Luntee’s eyes. “Very well,” he complied. “You will be on the hunt plain.”

Why had that gone so well?

Braxan shook her head frantically, suddenly overtaken by a new horror. Why?

A groan rose in Keller’s throat. “What a low-down trick.”

Eminently satisfied, Luntee spoke again to him, clearly enough to be heard well around.

“You, Nikelor, will go out as my surrogate. Braxan will represent the voice to go. You will represent me and the voice to stay. Random order will decide which voice remains to be heard, as it has for five hundred generations.”

Keller fought his own inner arguments and tried to add up the situation. If Braxan lived, her “voice” remained and Ennengand’s ideal of going through the gateway would prevail. But Luntee could easily muddy the waters, play on Kymelis’s doubts, and make the clock run out. He could stall enough to let the last Anointed go into the processor and the gateway to finally close, locking the Living to their fate on this side. Braxan wasn’t the type to fight him hard enough.

In fact, Luntee had Keller better than even Luntee realized. Keller had only his one ace, his big secret. He could arrange for one or the other to survive on the Feast Grid. He could do it artificially.

Now what? Admit to these brave hunters that he’d been hedging his bets, immunizing himself and Braxan with tricorder scans? Tell them how different the energy acted on either side of the gateway? Just as the grave ship’s power wouldn’t read in conventional sensors, the tricorder acted differently, and had different effects.

Cheating…. His own actions left as bad a taste in his mouth as the scans did in the free dancers’, but he had a lot to stay alive for. If he didn’t influence them, didn’t complete his mission, these people would stay here, would probably shuffle along for a few more generations trapped in this hellish place, and probably die off. Without Keller, there would be no one to speak for going to the other side, right now, while they had the chance, while the gateway was still open.

He had to at least appear to be playing by their rules. He had to participate in their society, or they wouldn’t respect him.

Now he couldn’t even play his one ace. If he did, the free dancer would descend, but wouldn’t choose either him or Braxan. He could save both their lives. Then what? Another hunt decision? And another one, until random order was satisfied?

Or if random order defied a choice, then the Elders would decide. By now Keller knew Kymelis well enough—she wouldn’t decide. She would want to wait for a sign or a clue that would never come. Luntee would win, because time would run out.

A sly glint lit in Luntee’s eyes as he watched Keller. On the other side of the gateway Luntee had seemed a minor player, hesitant and unclever, hovering on the sidelines as Riutta made the decisions. On this side, all that changed. He was not only playing the laws, but daring to make hunches about his adversary and doing it with the rocky nerve of a riverboat gambler. If Braxan were chosen and Keller lived, representing Luntee, then Luntee’s voice was meant to be heard. Luntee’s trick was flawless. It left Keller no good way out, no way to win.

The wind tore at Keller, at them all. The sky began to crackle and grow lower. Giant shadows moved across the grid mats.

“All I have to do is throw myself before the free dancer, and Braxan’s voice remains,” Keller announced. “I swear to do that, Luntee,” he vowed. “I won’t let your voice be heard.”

A singular moan swelled through the crowd at this shocking declaration. Approval…. shock….everything. He had to push.

He’d guessed right—nobody had ever said such a thing among the Living. He was glad to shock them. He needed their respect. All of the people here, and on the other side of the gateway.

His hand was on his tricorder, but he dared not use it now.

Around him, Luntee, Braxan, and Kymelis a sea of hunters rounded their shoulders against the bitter wind, their soft link shirts ablaze with reflected lights from overhead.

So the free dancers would decide. Except that the tricorder would have more influence. Braxan was already immunized. Keller hadn’t done himself yet.

And now, he wouldn’t. Braxan had to live. Luntee’s voice couldn’t be allowed to prevail. Keller would stand on the hunt plain, and take his chance the hard way. No tricks.

“Crackle!” one of the hunters called. “There’s crackle above! We have descent!”

The hunt plain turned gunmetal gray under snaggletoothed sparking from overhead as a blizzard of candleflies panicked and shifted in giant tides. The free dancers had begun scooping them up, causing the biohaze to boil. A sense of imminence crawled over every shoulder.

“Descending!”

The cry was picked up and transferred through the hunters all across the plain. It rang like an echo.

Overhead, the first free dancer released its heat and floated down toward the Grid to take its meal. Above it came others, also sensing the crowd of hunters.

Nick Keller’s fingers were stiff with cold, his neck stiff, teeth gritted, legs aching. The hunt was a perfectly nightmarish experience, both physically and mentally. Everything hurt.

Around them, the hunters began to scatter, to fill out the Feast Grid in the way determined by centuries of desperate efficiency, the best way for the dirigibles above to spot them and be tempted down. Billions of candleflies caused a sparkling cloud to fog the Feast Grid.

With his mind racked at the probabilities—dying out here right now, for one—Keller moved away from Braxan. When they were alone on the field, when the free dancer came for him, he didn’t want to be anywhere near her. Strobe lightning and candlefly fog damned his vision. The nearest free dancer must almost be down! He closed his eyes and stripped the tricorder strap off his shoulder. His fingers were cold, slow. Fear balled up in his stomach. He hadn’t bet on this as his last act, but it would have to write its own poetry later. Maybe he’d be a legend someday, like Ennengand.

Suddenly he stumbled and fell to one knee, yanked hard by a force on his left arm. His tricorder flew from his hand, its strap raking his arm as he grabbed for it.

“Hey—hey!”

He twisted, still on his knee, off balance. Over him, Luntee was aiming the tricorder directly at him.

“Hey!” Keller shouted. He lunged, but fell short.

The tricorder chirrrupped and set up the electrical interference, with its short-range focus aimed at Keller. A few seconds… the deed was done.

Now he would never be chosen! He would give the free dancers a burning mouth.

Too far away to change anything or know what to do, Braxan called through the curtain of panicking candleflies. “Keller! What are you doing! The free dancer is descending!”

With a shove Keller vaulted to his feet, knotted his fists, and would’ve struck Luntee if they had been two paces closer. “How’d you know? How could you possibly know about that?”

Luntee held the tricorder as casually as a Starfleet yeoman. Somehow he seemed to regret what he was being forced to do. “I have lived here a lifetime. Energy is our tonic. Now I’ve been to the Outside and I know all things behave in strange dances.”

He dumped the tricorder on the mats, turned, and raced away from the center of the Feast Grid. He didn’t realize Braxan was already immunized.

But now Keller was immunized too. If the free dancer chose neither of them, time would run out before another decision could be hammered into place. Luntee would still be able to keep his people here.

Pretty simple. One-dimensional, like this pewter pot they lived on.

“I’ll be damned,” Keller grumbled. “All right, I can play too.” He turned and shouted over the noise from overhead. The free dancers were getting closer. “Kymelis! Kymelis, wait!” In a clique of hunters, some of whom were her family, the stocky Elder squinted her one working eye at him. “More? But we have descent!”

She pointed to the sky, to the giant bulbous animals growing larger and larger.

“This decision is too important!” Keller called. “There’s only one way to really be sure. Luntee will stand on the plain with Braxan and me. All three of us take our chances.”

“Why should this be?” Luntee demanded. “Order has already been established!”

Keller turned to Luntee and suddenly there was no one else in the universe but these two men and their challenge. “If your voice remains, there won’t be any doubts. Braxan will do what you want. I will too. That’s my promise to the Living.”

Through the haze of heat waves and candleflies, Kymelis and several hunters hurried back toward the center of the Grid. She was already thinking. Her one eye was crinkled with puzzlement. “What is this way of thinking?” she asked.

“Why should I stand with you?” Luntee demanded. “You are my surrogate. Braxan represents the hunt challenge. All is correct!”

“Don’t be so tied to your rules that you make a big mistake.” Keller peeled off his mail shirt and tossed it to Donnastal. It flushed and eddied like water between them. “I’m ready.”

Luntee hunched against the flash and wind and turned to Cyclops. “I reject this! He uses our rules against us!”

“He’s afraid of real random order,” Keller pointed out.

Cycl—Kymelis looked up at the lowest free dancer, a truly horrifying sight no matter how many times experienced. “All things come from random order,” she said, and looked at Luntee. “If you’re afraid, then I side with Braxan and we will go tomorrow.”

Her single eye fixed on Luntee.

Rain began to pummel the confused crowd. The hunters were nervous, glancing up. Pellets of ice were melting in the heat of the first few free dancers as they came down directly over the hunt plain, long strands of electrical floss snapping like a woman’s hair in the wind.

All the hunters were on the plain, with Keller, Braxan, and Luntee at dead center. They had left their nonconducting mail shirts behind and thus would be unprotected from the savage tendrils of floss.

“Clear the plain!” Kymelis’s shout was carried dutifully through the throng, and the hunters raced for the perimeter to pull their mail shirts back on—there to stand and watch as a great decision occurred on the Grid. For a woman who had trouble making a decision, she was done with this one.

“What happened?” Braxan called. With Luntee still standing on the plain, she didn’t understand the change. She was afraid—that showed clearly enough through the tides of candleflies.

“Stay there!” Keller called. “It’s the three of us now!”

“Why!”

“Just stay put!”

Luntee had no choice but to stand his own ground as the first free dancer came down and the hunters flooded off the Grid. As far as anyone else knew, this was a fair fight. Only Keller and Luntee knew otherwise.

The shock floss moved toward Braxan, a maneuver which Keller had to battle in his own heart. He wanted to run and protect her, but he’d already done all he could, with his tricorder. Luntee never bothered to look at Braxan.

Of course—he must assume Keller would already have immunized her.

Yes. Of course.

The tendrils snapped around Braxan, but quickly retracted at the “taste” of her.

Luntee knew, for sure now, that he was the only vulnerable person here. “I thought you were not so brutal,” he charged. “You know who is chosen now.”

Just between the two of them, Keller offered a nod of understanding. “Yes. But it’s your life against all these others. One person’s life—one selfish person—against a whole community of lost souls.”

“Then you sentence me?”

“One more death in this place?” Keller told him bitterly. “You know, it’s almost a joke. That’s the way it is. I’m sorry for it. I’m sorry!”

He was shouting. No choice now.

The free dancer came down, confused because a moment ago it had seen a herd of hunters and now it was searching for any at all. An easy target—but this time there was no call to ready the arc spikes, nets, pulpers, reactor clamps, or other equipment to reap a harvest of candleflies or to transfer energy from the captured free dancers. All those had been left behind, on the perimeter of the Feast Grid. Today the free dancer would descend to feed and instead be the jury in a very strange case.

Keller summoned all his resolve to stand firm while everyone else was running off the Grid. The emotional suction was overwhelming! Despite a year in this place, despite the work of the tricorder, he had to fight hard against the pressure of self-preservation.

He drew power from Braxan’s determined face and narrow hunched shoulders as she stood her own ground thirty paces in front of him. His thoughts were lost under the scream of shock floss and the puffing of the giant over his head.

Several paces from him, Luntee squinted and raised his arms to shield his face, but he was doomed.

Floss snapped and sizzled around them, between them. Keller couldn’t see Braxan. In his mind he knew she was immunized and that he was too, that the free dancer would taste them and bully them, but probably leave them alone and snap up Luntee into its electrical processors. Even so, instinctive terror overrode what he knew in his mind. As he gritted his teeth and tried to see Braxan, perfect panic rose in his guts and he pushed up all his resolve to keep from bolting. If nothing else, these people needed to see him not running away.

He couldn’t see Braxan anymore. His only duty now was to move away from Luntee and let fate take its course. He had to live, to take these people home.

A step, another step—he began to shift sideways away from Luntee. A dozen feet over their heads, the lowest free dancer roared and screamed and flapped its floss. Tendrils slapped the Grid mats viciously.

Luntee closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and prepared to lose. But he never ran, never even attempted to protect himself or change what had been choreographed either by random order or by Keller’s manipulation.

Keller ducked the tendrils and the electrical crackle and watched Luntee a couple more seconds before he finally snapped.

“Aw, hell, why aren’t I rotten? Braxan, down! Braxan!”

“Where are you!”

“Never mind! Get off the Grid! Get off! Run!”

He swung around, cupped his hands at his mouth, and shouted to the crowd on the perimeter. “Donny! Arc spike!”

Donnastal was ready. The boy seized the nearest spike, raised it to his shoulder, and heaved it like a Roman pilam. The fifteen-foot spear flew poorly, but enough to sail over Luntee’s head toward Keller. In a maneuver that would’ve been impossible a year ago, Keller bunched up his body and propelled himself into the air. With his high hand he knocked the spike out of its path. It cartwheeled once and thumped to the mats ten feet from him.

He came down—it seemed to take a month—on one knee, and rolled until his hands made contact with the spike. The long device leaped into his grip. He hugged it, rolled again, and turned the spear-end upward. With one hand he found the bitter end, cupped it, and gave a mighty shove.

The body of a free dancer was fifty percent guts and fifty percent hot air. The long spike punched through the hide with skill honed of thousands of hunts over thousands of years. Like a fish scaler, it knew its job to perfection. Oily glue poured over Keller’s hands, but he didn’t stay to receive the rest of the spillage.

Rolling to his knees, he kept a grip on the end of the spike and endured the deafening whine of the injured free dancer over his head while he plunged at Luntee. He caught the other man with the point of his shoulder and drove him down. Once on top of Luntee, Keller dug his fingers into a seam between the gum mats until his fingernails scraped metal.

The planet’s surface!

With all the strength in his lean and muscled arm, he hauled back on the woven gum. With the other hand he grounded the arc spike’s blunt end into the now-bared spot of surface metal and rolled for his life.

A conflagration erupted over them. The gum mats coiled around him and Luntee. Keller kept rolling until the mats were tight around them both in a rubber coffin.

Crushed against him, Luntee made a strangled shout and hammered his fists against the gum.

“Stop it! Lay still! I mean lie still!”

He couldn’t hear himself over the giant frying pan that sizzled around them. The free dancer was grounded. All its stored energy flashed into the planet in a single, instant, roaring display of pyrotechnics and raw voltage.

The gum mat became instantly hot. From outside the lightning flash was so bright the opalescence even penetrated the layers of woven rubber. Keller crammed his eyes shut. His skin was burning! Luntee’s body jolted against him. They were frying!

Cramped tightly against him, Luntee let out a long cry of panic. His elbows tucked tight, Keller buried his face in Luntee’s body and determined not to make a noise. The rubber box vibrated and jumped with them in it, slammed down, jumped again, rolled, as they were nearly cooked inside. Every hair on Keller’s body stood up and spun. His back and legs tightened inside the rolled mats, trapped, yet every muscle contracted as if he were running full out.

Grounded!

What he felt on his skin, though his body, he saw as an ultimate picture of destruction in his mind. The free dancer had made direct contact with the planet—instant, complete energy transfer.

Indescribable heat had soon filled up his brain and broiled away his thoughts. Time lost meaning. He was aware only of a terrible hammering from outside, as if the rubber roll and its pathetic inhabitants were instead the head of a mallet.

The planet surged up under the great electrical bladder and sucked back what it had once given in some weird ancient trade. When the last crackle sounded, Nick Keller had stopped trying to handle the moment and simply allowed himself to be slaughtered. All the more surprise when he found himself alive.

With his aching hips he changed the balance inside the coiled mats and forced himself and Luntee to roll free. Like Cleopatra falling out of the carpet, the two men suddenly sprawled free.

Keller tried to move his legs, but his arms shifted instead. For five or ten seconds he worked to retrain his brain on the use of limbs. When he found his legs, he crawled to Luntee. Hot, alive—and not melted. The worst they each suffered was a bad sunburn.

Around them and rising several stories on one side was the cooked mess that had once been the free dancer that nearly killed them, now a mountain of blackened flakes.

“Why—why did you—” Luntee’s gasp ended in a weak cough.

Keller crawled to him, pushed him flat on the still-sizzling gum, and sat on him. “Shut up a minute. Braxan! Braxan!”

She didn’t answer… then, she did.

“Keller? Keller! Where are you!”

He couldn’t see where she was through the flying ashes and powdery remains of billions of toasted candleflies.

“She’s alive,” he growled down at Luntee. “So are you, chickenhawk.”

“Why?” Luntee choked. “Why would you save me?”

Possessed with sudden ferocity, Keller grinned and snarled at the same time. “Because I don’t have to accept the verdict of random order. Those aren’t gods in the sky. They’re animals. The free dancer chose you to die, but I choose for you to live.”

Luntee stared up at him. Behind the frothing hiss of the barbecued free dancer they heard the cheer and rave of the hunters who were just now coming to understand what had just happened. Donnastal was the first to appear. Braxan came behind him, her narrow face crumpled with fear. Next were Kymelis and her family, Issull and his brothers, Serren by himself, and two by two, three by three the rest of the hunters pushed through the mountain of ash and fibrous smoldering flesh until there were hundreds crowded on the melted segment.

Shaking with aftershock and satisfaction, he managed to stand up. With Donnastal on one side and Braxan on the other, he glared down at Luntee.

“Random order is finished here,” he announced, without any particular force. The word would spread itself. “I’m in charge now. We don’t belong here and we’re not staying. Finally, blessedly, we’re gonna saddle up and leave this moodless world.”

Frigate Challenger, Bridge The twenty-ninth hour

“This is like waiting for somebody to come out of a coma, except with every hour there’s less brain activity. You know what’s coming, don’t you?”

“Clam up, Ring. Just clam up.”

“Flirt.”

“Both of you…. this is unhelpful.” Shucorion didn’t enjoy interrupting Ring and Bonifay in their prickled communion, or in particular conversing at all. On the main screen, a view of the grave ship and the gateway’s flicker had become a torturous mock, and somehow worse than anything he had ever endured. A large statement, considering all.

Nick Keller was in a horrible place and to their nearest calculation he had been there more than a year. What could possibly take so long? Was he dead? Was he trapped?

On the sci-deck, Savannah Ring maintained constant contact with Riutta on the grave ship, monitoring the energy output to the gateway. As Shucorion watched her shoulders tighten and her body shift from foot to foot with nervousness, he realized how deeply this tragic decision dug into them all.

“We’re down to the last chamber of zombies,” she reported, sensing his gaze. “Any one of those corpses could nourish a power system on our side for months. But to keep that gateway open, we’re pouring them in like penny candy.”

She didn’t look down at him, or acknowledge that he heard her.

Shucorion clasped his hands tightly, very tightly. What should he decide, and when?

He crossed the deck to the starboard rail. At the impulse/mule desk, Zane Bonifay indeed made a pathetic sight, his face hot and wet, throat tight, his hands dug halfway through his black hair, both elbows planted in frustration upon the pulpit’s wrist roll. His reddened eyes were fixed on one of the dozen small screens, each of which was crammed from frame to frame with numbers, several of them running complex data in some kind of computer panic.

“I can’t do it….” His voice caught in his throat. He was a child again, helpless to affect what he saw. “There’s no way to replicate or match their power levels. It’s … it’s time-compressed somehow. This is like cramming a whole year’s worth of starship power into one day. The grave ship’s still working on other-universe time.”

“We can’t keep the gateway open then,” Shucorion concluded.

“Not a chance,” Bonifay mourned on a sob. “We have the energy, but we can’t time-compress it.” He slumped further, and pressed his hands to his face and fingerpainted with his own tears. “Can’t we go after him?”

“No.”

Bonifay pivoted sharply. “Why not? Because you won’t take a risk?”

“Because he ordered us not to go.”

Perhaps Bonifay saw the misery in Shucorion’s own expression, for he retracted his contempt and went back to simple suffering.

Shucorion pressed his elbow to the rail, leaned there, and peered at the gateway. “I should never have let him go.”

Behind him, Bonifay mumbled something in a dull tone. The words were lost.

Shucorion turned. “Something?”

With an agonized sigh, Bonifay slumped back against the useless readout board. “I said….it’s not your fault.”

“My thanks. I don’t know my role here yet. Thus, I fail.”

“You’re in command now. That’s your role.” Bonifay gathered his emotions somewhat and turned back to his miserable attempts to widen this narrowing tunnel they were in.

The turbolift hissed. When Shucorion turned, Delytharen stood on the quarterdeck, unhappy and stern.

“Avedon,” Shucorion greeted.

“I have come for the criminal,” the Blood commander announced.

“Mr. Keller has not yet returned.”

“He never will return. The gateway has consumed him. I offer my sympathies.”

“Your sympathies!” Grief boiled out of Bonifay. He pushed up from his chair.

Shucorion raced to the aft steps and got between them in time to block Bonifay’s charge. Delytharen, though missing an arm and twice Bonifay’s age, would easily have turned the bosun to pulp. In fact, the other avedon did not even flinch at the attempted threat.

“He is in my custody,” Shucorion said, holding Bonifay behind his arm. “The agreement will be satisfied.”

Delytharen tilted his head and scolded, “You know better than this….”

“I do, but I’m stalling.”

Bonifay relaxed his pressure on Shucorion’s arm. “Subtle.”

“You must realize Keller is wrong to protect him,” Delytharen attempted. “Belle Terre needs Blood Many, and we will not help them if Keller refuses to punish this man.”

“Questions have arisen,” Shucorion said. He heard uncertainty come out in his tone and knew Delytharen heard it too. “Flexibility may be required from Blood Many.”

“Never.” Delytharen shifted and gazed at him. “You will topple us all with these caprices. You should be the bulwark here. Instead, you flex.”

“He’s a rebel,” Bonifay commented. “Rebels flex.” The anger seemed to have gone out of him, or something else had taken over. He moved back, away from Delytharen and Shucorion, folded his arms, and sadly leaned against the burbling consoles at the communications station.

“I will take him,” Delytharen quietly claimed.

Shucorion shook his head. “Not until—”

“Activity!” On the sci-deck Savannah Ring bolted to the forward rail. “Oh, please!”

At the helm and nav stations, Creighton and Quinones popped to renewed life, to new tension. Zoa stood up at tactical, staring forward.

“Sir, I’m readying metallic objects!” Creighton cried. “Could it be ships?”

At the helm, Quinones blurted, “Should we go and meet them? Should we?”

Dropping from the quarterdeck to the main arena, Shucorion felt his chest tighten. “I will never doubt him again if he has done this thing …”

No one else spoke as they watched the gateway’s insides smolder, brighten like a spotlight behind smoke, and ultimately spew a single bulb-shaped ship made entirely of brass. The new ship was alone for only seconds before four more ships came behind it, then four more, and more and even more after those, until a swarm of brassy ships crowded space around the frigate.

“Those are transports if I ever saw one!” Creighton said, shivering with excitement. “Bet there’s a thousand people on every one!”

The crew rose in a singular cheer that charged Shucorion to the depths of his being, but he could not react himself except to stare with a daring anticipation at the oncoming ships.

“Should we hail them?” Quinones asked.

“No,” Shucorion countered. “We’ll give them—”

A dot of light appeared on the port side.

“Stand back!” he snapped to Quinones at the helm, then wasn’t satisfied and physically pulled her out of the way.

From the dot of light, a micro-gate spun itself into presence, a hole in the air that led to heavily draped surroundings of silver and brass curtains.

“No, stay put.”

It was Keller’s voice! Nick Keller’s voice speaking inside the micro-gate!

Shucorion almost stepped through, so magnetic was the sound of that voice. Only the greatest self-control prevented such action.

And to the good—a hand appeared on the edge of the micro-gate. A moment later, Nick Keller himself appeared—or a frazzled version of Nick Keller.

His hair, once sand-brown and casually tidy, now was beaten to a crispy shag about his shoulders, blackened at the ends as if burned. His friendly face was leathery from exposure, his clothing a perfect nightmare. He wore his regular trousers and burgundy crew sweater, but they were gaudily patched with interwoven segments of chain mail where some catastrophe or other had torn them. The left sleeve was entirely mail now, and it had brass patches on the silverwork. More than one catastrophe, apparently. What must it be like through the gateway?

Fighting thoughts of his father’s last years, Shucorion’s heart hammered as he forced himself to stand still, to let their prodigal regain his bearings.

Keller seemed to be having trouble with his eyes. He blinked around, put out a hand to steady himself, and stepped onto the bridge. Shucorion reached out to him, to offer help if he needed it. Now Keller stepped more confidently forward. He seemed to know who had him.

The micro-gate withered and winked away behind him. He didn’t give it so much as a glance.

“That you up there, she-devil?” He peered up to where he knew the sci-deck was. Perhaps he recognized the shape of Savannah Ring, or could see the dark red of her hair.

“Right here, sheriff,” she managed, controlling herself valiantly.

“Tell Riutta to stop powering the gateway. There’s nobody left on the other side. We’ll need the grave ship’s system to move these freighters. There’s no more power coming from the other side. Just let the damned hole close up for good.”

“Sure,” she rasped. Relief poured out. “Good idea. I can cure interstellar post-nasal drip—why not?”

“That’s the spirit.” Keller inhaled deeply and seemed to be tasting the air. He shielded his eyes with one hand for a moment, then focused on Shucorion.

“Hey, shadow,” he greeted.

On a ragged breath Shucorion asked, “Where are … the … others?”

“They’re all over on those ships, pretty much panicking.” Keller pressed a hand over his eyes to block out the blaze. “And I don’t blame ’em….”

Shucorion grasped his arm. “Are you all right?”

“Uh-huh, but you wouldn’t believe what I’m seeing! What senses forget in a few months….I’m just…. dazzled!”

“I understand. I once went to the mountains on my planet to search for ore vanes. When I returned, the land looked so flat….I could scarcely breathe.”

Keller held up a finger. “That’s it, you got it.”

He lowered his hand to Shucorion’s arm and they held on to each other as if they might stumble without support. He looked around, adjusting, and reveled in what he saw—the quatrefoil-cut spark shield on the sci-deck, the cobalt-obsidian dome overhead, the multitude of flickering data screens, the carpet, the rail.

“This bridge is…. beautiful!” Now he turned his fatigued gaze to Shucorion, to Savannah, Quinones, and Creighton, and finally to the quarterdeck at Zoa and Zane, and even Delytharen, indulging in a moment’s communion with each. After all, he hadn’t seen them in more than a year.

“You’re all beautiful,” he sighed.

Suddenly overcome, Zane Bonifay skipped down the deck steps, shot past Shucorion, and flung his arms around Keller. He tried to speak, but couldn’t. The embrace spoke well enough. He had been lost to them, and they knew how long the time had been and how small the chances for this moment to have arrived at all.

“Aw, the famous Bonifay true-blue cryptomorphic gypsy campfire bearhug,” Keller murmured. He smiled genuinely. The reddened skin on his cheeks and around his eyes crinkled into patterns. “Home on the Range.”

“Delytharen, how are ya?”

“Mr. Keller. My congratulations on your mission.”

“Thanks.”

“We have an agreement.”

“I know we do. Give me another minute.”

“I have already—”

“You can wait another minute. Zane, come here.”

Nick Keller stepped forward on the bridge, away from everyone else, to a place near the stunning visions on the main screen where a bit of privacy could be culled off. He brought Zane Bonifay with him, and motioned Shucorion back.

Zane swabbed his eyes with his sleeve and made a heartwarming effort to regain officer demeanor. He wasn’t too great at it, but he tried. He wasn’t the type to care much about who saw his emotions when they bared themselves.

He leaned back against the end of the quarterdeck rail and took a couple of steadying breaths. “You look different,” he commented.

“Bet I do.”

Keller marveled briefly at the wonders of Bonifay’s doeskin complexion and navy blue sweater, but also controlled himself to say what had waited a year to be said.

“There have to be laws. You did understand your rank and obligation. It was disrespectful to act on your own. What if there’d been a hundred crewmen on that Plume? Would you have left?”

“No, course not,” Zane admitted.

“The decision wasn’t yours to make. We can’t have two people on a ship making the same decision. For every man who acts on his own, there are a hundred more who think about it, and don’t. We can’t have crewmen rushing to escape when we ask them to stand. If every deck acts on its own, the ship falls apart.”

Zane simply folded his arms and nodded. Apparently he had been thinking about this too.

“We live in what amounts to a logging town,” Keller told him quietly. “Small towns are different from other places. We need help from Shucorion’s people. They have to be able to trust me—”

“I get it, Nick.” Offering a gaze of surprising candor and maturity, Zane unfolded his arms and stood straight. “I said I wouldn’t die for nothing. I never said I wouldn’t die for something.”

The bridge winked and murmured its faint electrical song around them, so different from the disorderly crackle of Metalworld.

Deeply moved by this gallant change, Keller took a moment to appreciate Bonifay, and silently let him feel the admiration. That’s the spirit.

He took Zane’s arm and escorted him in some kind of personal propriety to the quarterdeck, to Delytharen.

“Avedon,” he addressed, “your prisoner.”

“My thanks.” Delytharen reached down with his one remaining hand to draw Bonifay up the steps, but Bonifay pushed the hand away.

“Don’t touch me. I’m a Starfleet officer and I’m coming with you. My word’s good, and so’s his.” He nodded toward Keller.

Delytharen seemed to respect that. “Very well. Our thanks.”

Keller turned to Shucorion. “You’re going with him.”

“I?”

“Yes.” He jammed his finger into Shucorion’s chest and warned,

“Make sure it’s fair. Make sure it’s quick.”

There was something in his eyes that rattled Shucorion to the bone, and made the others cold around them.

Keller knew he had come back changed. He just hadn’t quite figured out which changes were permanent.

“What will you do with the Living?” Shucorion asked.

“I’ll decide that later.”

With all his crew watching him, he found his way to the command chair and ran his hand along the studded forest-green leather, which looked to him as if it actually glowed.

“Whatever happens,” he said, “you can bet they’ll hear the ring from hell to Belle Terre.”