ge. At the first port of call,
on Jupiter, Dura-ki stood at the top of the gangway and laughed when
her Captain Jareth had me thrown off the ship."

"She betrayed you for the master of the _Hawk of Darion_," Irene said
softly.

"And tonight she'll pay," Ransome finished coldly. He threw down a few
coins to pay for their drinks. "It's been pleasant telling you my
pretty little story."

"Ransome, wait. I--"

"Forget it," Ransome said.

* * * * *

Mytor's car was waiting, and Ransome could sense the presence of the
guards lurking in the dark, empty street.

"The spaceport," Ransome told his driver. "Fast."

He thought of the note he had given the crewman to deliver:

"Ra-sed would see his beloved a last time before he dies."

"Faster," Ransome grated, and the powerful car leapt forward into the
night.

* * * * *

Ships, like the men who drove them, came to Yaroto to die. Three
quarters of the spaceport was a vast jungle of looming black shapes,
most of them awaiting the breaker's hammer. Ransome dismissed the car
and threaded his way through the deserted yards with the certainty of
a man used to the ugly places of a hundred worlds.

Mytor had suggested the meeting place, a hulk larger than most, a
cruiser once in the fleet of some forgotten power.

Ransome had fought in the ships of half a dozen worlds. Now the
ancient cruiser claimed his attention. Martian, by the cut of her
rusted braking fins. Ransome tensed, remembering the charge of the
Martian cruisers in the Battle of Phoebus. Since then he had called
himself an Earthman, because, even if his parentage had not given him
claim to that title already, a man who had been in the Earth ships at
Phoebus had a right to it.

He was running a hand over the battered plate of a blast tube when
Dura-ki found him. She was a smaller shadow moving among the vast,
dark hulls. With a curious, dead feeling in him, Ransome stepped away
from the side of the cruiser to meet her.

"Ra-sed, I could not let you die alone--"

Because her voice was a ghost from the past, because it stirred things
in him that had no right to live after all the long years that had
passed, Ransome acted before Dura-ki could finish speaking. He hit her
once, hard; caught the crumpling body in his arms, and started back
toward Mytor's car. If he remembered another journey in the blackness
with this woman in his arms, he drove