e to shield her from the damp cold.

"Still one apart from the rest of us, are you?" The growl of Bruhlla's
voice behind her startled her, and she turned quickly to face the
loose grimace of derision on his thick lips.

"I am to be left to myself," she said with what assurance she could
muster. "That is your order."

"I know my order, little one! No need to tell Bruhlla his orders! But
perhaps you will grow colder; perhaps you will grow hungry."

"You couldn't--"

"I have no order about feeding you, little one!"

Somehow she found the strength to voice her defiance. For she could
still think. And thought, Lance had once told her, was the ultimate
strength....

"You lie! There was such an order! But if you wish to bring the wrath
of your masters down upon your ugly head." She watched his unkempt
face, fanned the sudden puzzlement she saw growing in his red,
sadistic eyes. If his intelligence were blurred enough by the
self-made drug of his lust. "I myself heard such an order; and if you
can prove me mistaken you may do with me what you will!" _God, would
he stop to realize that she understood not a word of the Thrayxite
tongue?_

"Quickly proven, my little one! Quickly enough proven! And then if
what you say is untrue...." He left the sentence mercifully
unfinished, and turned toward the sturdily-built cubicle that housed
the colony's mentacom.

"Wait! I'll only believe your proof if I can hear it for myself!"

"Come along then and you shall hear it!" The thick lips slackened into
a lascivious grin that sickened her, but she hastened to follow him.
And he did not see her as she scooped the jagged stone from the
ground, thrust it into a tattered tool-pocket of her uniform.

Past the quiescent, sweat reeking bodies of the bull-muscled guards,
into the dimly lit chamber beyond, Bruhlla half walking, half
shambling before her.

She watched him as he switched the device into life; waited until its
dull orange glow assured that it was ready for use. So much like the
communications room of an ordinary ship of Earth, she thought. So like
the familiar things of her life, yet so alien.

He had barely slipped the mentacom's headpiece on his skull and
adjusted a simply calibrated control dial when she struck him at the
base of his thick neck with the stone, all the force of her supple
young body behind it.

Blood spurted as its ragged edges tore through flesh, bone and nerves,
and slowly, Bruhlla crumpled from the