Washed, shaved, scrubbed, cleaned, filled with good food and slightly awash with alcoholic drink, Jason collapsed into the acceleration couch and firmly swore that life was worth living after all.

"You can\'t appreciate the simple things of life until you have gone without them for a while. Or the better things either." He reached out and took Meta\'s hand. She pulled it away and fed more digits into the computer.

"How did you find me?" he asked, trying to discover a subject that she might warm to.

"That should be obvious. We saw the markings on the ship that took you away and charted a directional trace before it went into jump-space. We identified the markings and I went to Cassylia, but the ship had never arrived there. I back-tracked the straight-line course and found three possible planets near enough to have registered in the ship during jump-space flight. Two are highly organized with modern spaceports and would have known if the ship had landed. It hadn\'t. Therefore you must have forced the ship down on the planet we just left. And once you were there you would find one of the radios to send a message. Which is what you did. It is obvious. Who is she?" The final words were in a distinctly chillier tone of voice, and there could be only one she, Ijale, who crouched across the room, obviously unhappy and wide-eyed with fear at this voyage in a spaceship, not understanding the language the others spoke.

"I\'ve told you before—just a friend. She was with us, and helped us, too. I couldn\'t let her go back to the life in the desert, it\'s more brutal than you can possibly imagine. There is an entire planetful of slaves back there, and of course I can\'t save them all. But I can do this much, take out the one person there who would rather see me live than die."

"What do you intend to do with her?" The sub-zero temperature of Meta\'s voice left no doubt as to what she wanted to do with her. Jason had already given this a good deal of thought, and if Ijale was going to live much longer she had to be separated as soon as possible from the deadly threat of female Pyrran jealousy.

"We stop at the next civilized planet and let her off. I have enough money to leave a deposit in a bank that will last her for years. Make arrangements for it to be paid out only a bit at a time, so no matter how she is cheated she will still have enough. I\'m not going to worry about her, if she was able to survive in the krenoj legion she can get along well anywhere on a settled world."

He coul............