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course, every time we spoke, we were obviously foreigners.
So what could we possibly accomplish there? Our main reason for leaving
Evdash, so far as I could see, was to foment revolution against the Glondis
Empire. But the more I looked at it, the more impossible that seemed on
Fanglith. It was the wrong kind of world, with the wrong kind of history and
the most primitive technology. And actually, from what little I knew of
it, their governments were worse than the Empire-at least some of them were.
Operating on Fanglith would be up to me, more than to anyone else. I was the
oldest, and the only one with much experience on the surface there. And I was
male-
that was important on their world. I'd have to be the one to land, get
provisions, make deals and arrangements.
So naturally, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed by the responsibility, and I
told the others just how I felt about it. Deneen just leaned on the little
galley table and looked me calmly in the eye.
"Brother mine," she said, "the last time you complained about how impossible
things were was on
Fanglith. I was a prisoner on a Federation police corvette, but I've heard you
and mom and dad talk about it. And Bubba. You were all stuck down there on the
surface of the planet with nothing more than hand weapons to work with-hand
weapons and some Norman warriors who'd have happily cut all your throats to
get hold of your pistols."
Her eyes grabbed mine and wouldn't let them go. "And you pulled that one off."
That was beside the point, I wanted to tell her. That had been then. The
situation had been different. I'd been lucky. But all I could answer was: "Dad
had as much to do with it as I did."
"Not according to him he didn't." Her gaze withdrew for a minute. "I can see
the difficulties you're talking about, and the dangers. But it seems to me
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that when we get down to it, having a scout ship will make up for a lot. And
if things don't shape up for us there, we can take on fresh provisions and try
another world somewhere. The fuel slug on this rig is good for years and years
if we don't run her too long at high speeds in proximity mode."
She had a point. I'd been letting myself get bogged down in the difficulties.
And although dad had played as big a role as I had in the final showdown on
Fanglith, all in all, it had been my show. So I said okay, she'd made sense,
and we didn't talk much about it the rest of the way.
Meanwhile, Tarel and I let our hair grow, to look more like Fanglithans. Also,
we found a drawer with several remotes-small receiver units you can put in
your ear for confidential radio reception. They operate on a wireless relay
from your belt communicator, and with our hair over our ears, no
Fanglithan would know we had them.
Eventually, one day near ship's "midnight," the scout's honker woke us up.
We'd set it to let us know when the computer kicked us down out of FTL mode.
Ahead of us we could see the system's primary-the sun that Fanglith circled.
Seen from where we were, it was a glaring, small white globule against a
star-frosted backdrop of deepest black. We were farther out from Fanglith than
we'd expected-part of the tiny error inherent in servomechanisms and ancient
equations-but still less than a day away in mass-proximity mode.
I had flitter bugs in my stomach. I wasn't sure how much of it was just plain
excitement and how much was fear, There'd be enough of both in store for me on
Fanglith. I took a deep breath. Whatever, I told myself. When we'd taken care
of a few preliminaries, we'd be eating real food again, all of us, breathing
unrecycled air, and seeing the surface of a planet where surely the Empire
hadn't landed.
NINE
The first time we'd arrived, I'd been sixteen and
Deneen fourteen, and we'd known almost nothing about
Fanglith. So we'd looked it over pretty carefully.
You might think we wouldn't need to a second time, but we weren't taking any
chances. We made several slow swings around it at 40,000 miles, monitoring for
radio signals just in case Imperials had landed. We got nothing, and the radio
monitoring equipment aboard the Jav-we'd named our scout The Rebel
Javelin-was pretty sensitive. It was certainly a lot more sensitive than most
private craft would carry, so we could assume that if we hadn't picked up
anything, there was nothing to pick up.
But to make doubly sure, we moved in below both zones of heavy radiation and
circled at 150 miles above the surface. We didn't pick up anything from down
there, either. Meanwhile, I'd had the computer establishing a reference grid
for the planet, and because the scout had a recording broad-band EM scanner, I
had it map the surface for us as we flew over it.
All of which used up another day-another day of short and monotonous rations.
By then we were ready to put down somewhere, anywhere, to get something fit to
eat. So I called a council.
The immediate problem, I pointed out, was that I
didn't have anything to buy food with, and what I
could think of to trade, they'd have no use for.
Except weapons of course-stunners and guns. We had a locker full of them, but
they weren't anything we wanted the locals to have. For one thing, they might
decide to use them on us.
Which meant I'd have to trade my services for food.
The question was, what services?
Deneen eyed me coolly. "Larn," she said, "you're thinking like a planner,
which is fine when you have data to plan with, but right now you don't. What
you need to do is let me put you down somewhere. Then you circulate and find
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