sent the snooper ahead, tilting it to look down into the pit.

A small fire was burning in the center; around it, in a circle, some
hundred and fifty people, including a few women and children, sat,
squatted or reclined. A low hum of voices came out of the soundbox.

"Who the blazes are they?" Anse whispered. "I can't see any way they
could have gotten down there."

They were in rags, and they weren't armed; there wasn't so much as a
knife or a pistol among them. Conn motioned the lorries and the other
jeep forward.

"Prisoners," he said. "I think they were hauled down here on a scow,
shoved off, and left when the fighting started. Cover me," he told the
men in the lorries. "I'm going down and talk to them."

Somebody below must have heard something. As Anse took the jeep over
and started floating it down, the circle around the fire began moving,
the women and children being pushed to the rear and the men gathering
up clubs and other chance weapons. By the time the jeep grounded, the
men in the pit were standing defensively in front of the women and
children.

They were all dirty and ragged; the men were unshaven. There was a
tall man with a grizzled beard, in greasy coveralls; another man with
a black beard and an old Space Navy uniform, his head bandaged with a
dirty and blood-caked rag; another in the same uniform, wearing a cap
on which the Terran Federation insignia had been replaced by the
emblem of Transcontinent & Overseas Shiplines and the words CHIEF.
And beside the tall man with the gray beard, was a girl
in baggy trousers and a torn smock. Like the others, she was dirty,
but in spite of the rags and filth, Conn saw that she was beautiful.
Black hair, dark eyes, an impudently tilted nose.

They all looked at him in hostility that gradually changed to
perplexity and then hope.

"Who are you?" the tall man with the gray beard asked. "You're none of
this gang here."

"Litchfield Exploration & Salvage; I'm Conn Maxwell."

That meant nothing; none of them had been near a news-screen lately.

"What's going on topside?" the man with the bandaged head and the four
stripes on his sleeve asked. "There was firing, artillery and
nuclears, and they herded us down here. Have you cleaned the bloody
murderers out?"

"We're working on it," Conn said. "I take it they aren't friends of
yours?"

Foolish Question of the Year; they all made that evident.

"They took my ship; they murdered my first officer and hal