He set the kitchen. He went to the bathroom. He did ten minutes of exercise, pushing himself hard, fighting depression with exhaustion. He avoided looking at the stiffening corpses. Dinner was ready when he finished. He ate without tasting… and remembered that once he had eaten and exercised and made every move with the droud set in his skull, delivering a tenth of normal current to the pleasure center. For a time he had lived with a woman who was also a wirehead. They had made love under the wire… and played war games and held pun contests… until she had lost interest in everything but the current itself. By then Louis had regained enough of his natural caution to flee Earth.

He thought now that it would be easier to flee this world than to dispose of two large, conspicuous corpses. But if he were already being watched?

They didn’t look like ARM agents. Large, soft in the muscle, pale from a sunlight more orange than yellow, they were certainly low-gravity types, probably Canyonites. They hadn’t fought like ARMs… but they had bypassed his alarms. These men could be ARM hirelings, with friends waiting.

Louis Wu disarmed his balcony door and stepped out.

Canyon does not quite follow the usual rules for planets.

The planet is not much bigger than Mars. Until a few hundred years ago its atmosphere was just dense enough to support photosynthesis-using plants. The air held oxygen, but was too thin for human or kzinti life. The native life was as primitive and hardy as lichen. Animal had never developed at all.

But there were magnetic monopoles in the cometary halo around Canyon’s orange-yellow. sun, and radioactives on the planet itself. The Kzinti Empire swallowed the planet and staffed it with the aid of domes and compressors. They called it Warhead, for its proximity to the unconquered Pierin worlds.

A thousand years later the expanding Kzinti Empire met human space.