A short hallway awaited him at the bottom of the stairs; and at the end of the hall was a door. Opening it, Caine stepped through into a dark room. The door closed itself behind him.

And abruptly a blinding light flashed on. He threw an arm up to protect his eyes and took an involuntary step backward. "Who are you?" a voice demanded.

Caine's response was immediate. "I'm Alain Rienzi, aide to Senator Auriol," he snapped. "Get that damn light out of my face!"

The spotlight winked out and other, more muted lights came on. Through the purple blob floating before his eyes Caine could dimly see three men and a woman seated around a low table. "Excellent," one of the men said, fiddling with a shoebox-sized gadget. "No hesitation, no recognizable 'liar's stress,' and just the right amount of arrogance. He's ready, Morris."

Another man nodded and gestured to Caine. "Sit down, Allen," he said in a gravelly voice.

Caine took the indicated chair and looked around at the others, and as his eyes recovered, his heart began to beat faster. This was no routine meeting; the four people facing him were probably the top Resistance leaders in all of Europe. The man with the box was Bruno Hurlimann, a former captain in the Terran Star Force; the second man was Raul Marinos, who'd been planning and executing sabotage operations against the government and even the Ryqril's own military bases for most of the past twenty-nine years; the woman was Jayne Gibbs, a former member of the long-since dissolved Parliament; and "Morris" was General Morris Kratochvil himself, the last commander of Earth's final defense efforts. None of them looked their proper ages, of course; despite government controls, enough bootlegged Idunine was getting to the Resistance via the black market to keep even the ninety-two-year-old Kratochvil at the biological equivalent of forty. Caine had met all four of them at one time or another, but he'd never seen them