caught his breath.

"So few! Why, there were almost twelve thousand of them in the city this
morning."

"I'm surprised we saved so many," Lanze Degbrend said. He still wore
combat coveralls, and a pistol-belt lay beside his chair. "Most of them
were killed in the first hour."

And that had been before the landing-craft from the ships had gotten
down, and there had only been seven hundred men and forty vehicles
available. He had gone out with them, himself; it had been the first
time he had worn battle-dress and helmet or carried a weapon except for
sport in almost thirty years. It had been an ugly, bloody, business; one
he wanted to forget as speedily as possible. There had been times, after
seeing the mutilated bodies of Masterly women and children, when he had
been forced to remind himself that he had come out to prevent, not to
participate in, a massacre. Some of Ravney's men hadn't even tried.
Atrocity has a horrible facility for begetting atrocity.

"What'll we do with them?" Erskyll asked. "We can't turn them loose;
they'd all be murdered in a matter of hours, and in any case, they'd
have nowhere to go. The Commonwealth,"--he pronounced the name he had
himself selected as though it were an obscenity--"has nationalized all
the Masterly property."

That had been announced almost as soon as the Citadel telecast-station
had been unjammed, and shortly thereafter they had begun encountering
bodies of Yakoop Zhannar's soldiers and Zhorzh Khouzhik's police who had
been sent out to stop looting and vandalism and occupy the Masterly
palaces. There had been considerable shooting in the Servile City;
evidently the ex-slaves had to be convinced that they must not pillage
or destroy their places of employment.

"Evacuate them off-planet," Shatrak said. "As soon as _Algol_ gets here,
we'll load the lot of them onto _Mizar_ or _Canopus_ and haul them
somewhere. Ghu only knows how they'll live, but...."

"Oh, they won't be paupers, or public charges, Admiral," he said. "You
know, there's an estimated five billion crowns in slave-compensation,
and when I return to Odin I shall represent most strongly that these
survivors be paid the whole sum. But I shall emphatically not recommend
that they be resettled on Odin. They won't be at all grateful to us for
today's business, and on Odin they could easily stir up some very
adverse public sentiment."

"My resignation will answer any criticism of the Establishment the
public may