Haust, the living representative of those who on un-
tamed worlds struggled to wrest a precarious living from
a hostile environmentat least, that was how Quist’s
speech compositor put it, and she was far too preoccu-
pied to worry about the phrase herself. But there were
some worried faces in the public seats, where Cyclopean
notables, hurriedly summoned to show themselves, sat
listening and scrutinising the offworld delegates arranged
at a long table on the dais of the conference hall.
The matter troubling Quist was the same as it had
been since she first yielded to Rimerley’s irresistible
bribe: would or would not the Corps leave enough sal-
vageable material to balance the planetary budget this
year, while they cast around for some other external rev-
enue to replace what was being thrown away?
Gradually, through her mood of anxiety, a noise from
outside the hall began to seep. She started, turning to
gaze at the window which offered a view of the large
square outside. There, thousands of the city’s people
were watching on public telescreens the proceedings of
the conference.
They shouldn’t be shouting like that. The thought
briefly crossed her mind, and as it passed she leapt in
amazement from her seat.
Down across the frame of the tall window a mon-
strous shining shape had moved, like a fish settling
through clear water. A spaceship. A spaceship so large
that the entire square was barely wide enough to afford
it room.
Others in the hall had seen it go by, and the bewil-
dered speaker at therostram one of the lesser delegates
from Earth, heaping praise on Cyclops for its noble self-
sacrificebroke off his address. The shouting from out-
side turned to real screaming now.
The ranked notables started to get up, muttering in
alarm, and then the scene was frozen by the impact of
shock.
The tall main doors of the hall were slammed open
not sliding back into the walls as they were meant to
move, but simply buried from their frames by a tremen-
dous blow from the far side. Over them, with the stolid
tramp of machines, came what most of the people
present had never seen except in historical recordings: a
squadron of the Corps Galactica in full battle equipment,
armour tough enough to repel an energy bolt, so heavy
that it was driven by miniaturised fusion reactors mounted
at the back, and polished to more-than-mirror brilliance
in every band of the spectrum. The crazy reflections
rendered it almost impossible to focus on the wearers,
making them seem like nightmare illusions.
That was why Gus Langenschmidt had insisted it be
worn. He didn’t expect any resistance fierce enough to
justify its actual use.
The squadron wheeled right and left and filed around
the hill, taking station to surround it entirely, and he
came in last of all, striding directly towards Quist where
she stood, petrified, among the offworld delegates.
He wanted to get his opening statement out before
any of the news technicians regained enough presence of
mind to switch off the exterior transmissions.
“Alura Quist” he said, and the words rang around the
hall like the knell of doom, “I am Commandant Gustav
Langenschmidt, a duly appointed executive of the Corps
Galactica, and I arrest you for complicity in the follow-
ing violations of the Unified Galactic Code, to wit: mur-
der with malice, murder by default, conspiracy to”
The screaming and panic began then. Langenschmidt
paused; his squadron was fully- briefed on how to handle
this sort of trouble. It took only a few minutes to restore
calm, with the local notables sitting white-faced in their
chairs, their hands between their knees as though they
were trying to shrink and become too small to be seen,
the offworld delegates muttering frantic unanswerable
questions to each other, and the places of the news tech-
nicians taken by Corpsmen to ensure that the transmis-
sions would go on without a break.
Langenschmidt resumed. “Conspiracy to interfere with
the autonomous development of a Zarathustra Refugee
Planet, conspiracy with Aleazar Rimerley and Lors Heim-
dall and others to murder one Ekim Hakimi and dismem-
ber his corpse, and certain other charges.”
He wheeled where he stood, knowing that two ar-