Please. Please. Please.

Adele didn't know who she was speaking to. Praying to, she supposed, though she didn't believe in gods or Gods or anything at all except the working of blind chance.

Commander Leary held a sub-machine gun in one hand and a stocked impeller in the other. He raced toward the berm protecting the pit where ship-killing missiles were emplaced, using both weapons as he ran. For some reason the Alliance troops jumped out of their bunkers before they shot at him; they spun artistically and fell.

The gate into the emplacement was of razor ribbon stretched on a frame. Just like the real gate.

Commander Leary sawed through the obstruction with a burst from his sub-machine gun. Alliance projectiles hitting wires, hitting tubing; howling, ricocheting in neon colors. Occasionally a wire parting with a sickening jangle.

"Follow me, my heroes!" Commander Leary shouted as he ran through the gap in the gate. The corvette's whole crew was with him. Bunched like that, a single automatic impeller would slaughter the lot of them. They'd be dead!

"Mistress, are you all right?" Cazelet said. His left arm was around her back; his hands were gripping her shoulders firmly. "Would you like to leave?"

There were bunkers inside the emplacement. Troops in Alliance uniforms-which was wrong, they'd been Pellegrinians, all but the communications detachment-threw down their weapons and stood, waving white flags.

"Victory!" boomed the voice over. "And permanent safety for Dunbar's World under the protection of the Republic of Cinnabar!"

"I'm sorry," Adele whispered. "I'm all right."

Light flickering from the firing slits of the bunkers, the traces of driving bands ionized by the charges that accelerate them up the gun barrels. Her holographic sights twitching as she fires two rounds and moves to the next target. The faces of the Pellegrinian soldiers are shadowed, but she sees every one of them clearly as they bulge under the impact of her projectiles.