Darya had steeled herself for the looks she would receive when Hans was ushered into the institute’s dining room. Even so, they were hard to take.

“Captain Rebka is a native of Teufel, in the Phemus Circle,” she went on, “although most recently he has been on Miranda.”

The score of research workers sitting at the long table were doing their best not to stare — and failing. Darya could easily put herself in their shoes. They saw a small, thin man in his late thirties, dressed in a patched and dingy uniform. His head appeared a fraction too big for his body, and his bony face was disfigured by a dozen scars, the most noticeable of them running in a double line from his left temple to the point of his jaw.

Darya knew how her colleagues were feeling. She had experienced an identical reaction when she first met Hans Rebka. Courage and skill were invisible; it took time to learn that he had both.

She glanced down the table. Professor Merada had made one of his rare excursions from the den of his study to the senior dining room, while across from him at the far end Carmina Gold sat peering thoughtfully at her fingernails. Darya knew both of them well, and fully appreciated what they could do. If someone was needed to perform an excruciatingly detailed and encyclopedic survey of any element of spiral arm history, flagging every tiny inconsistency of data or missing reference, then the thoughtful, humorless Merada could not be surpassed; if someone was needed who could follow and tease out the most convoluted train of logic, simplify it to essentials, and present so that a child — or a councilor! — could grasp it, then Carmina Gold, moody and childish herself, was the absolute best.

But if you found yourself in deep trouble, without any hope of escape and so close to Death that you could smell his breath in your own terrified sweat… well, then you closed your eyes tight and prayed for Hans Rebka.