ready.

"Okay," I beamed over the circuit, "break silence. We've had it Rajay."

"Council offense, Red."

"Yeah."

* * * * *

Well, I'd had a lot of good years. Maybe I'd been a soldier too long. I
was thinking just like that when the sudden flank attack started. From
the right. Heavy fire from the cover of the solitary mountain top.
O'Hara's men were dropping. I stared through my viewer. On that mountain
I counted the uniforms of twenty-two different Companies. That was very
wrong. Whoever Saltario was fronting for could not have the power or the
gold to hire twenty-four Companies including mine and Rajay-Ben's. And
the fire was heavy but not that heavy. But whoever they were they were
very welcome. We had a chance now. And I was making my plans when the
tall old man stood up on the small, jutting top of that mountain. The
tall old man stood up and a translating machine boomed out.

"All of you! O'Hara's men! Look at this!"

I saw it. In a beam of light on the top of that mountain it looked like
a small neutron-source machine. But it wasn't. It was an ionic beam
projector.

The old man said, "Go home."

They went. They went fast and silent. And I knew where they were going.
Not to Salaman. O'Hara would have taken one look at that machine and be
half way to United Galaxy Center before he had stopped seeing it. I felt
like taking that trip myself. But I had agreed to look and I would look.
If we were lucky we would have forty-eight hours to look and run.

I fell in what was left of my Company behind the men that had saved us.
More Company uniforms than I had ever seen in one place. They said
nothing. Just walked into a hole in that mountain. Into a cave. And in
the cave, at the far end, a door opened. An elevator. We followed the
tall old man into the elevator and it began to descend. The elevator car
went down for a long time. At last I could see a faint glow far below.
The glow grew brighter and the car stopped. Far below the glow was still
brighter. We all stepped out into a long corridor cut from solid rock. I
estimated that we were at least two hundred miles down and the glow was
hundreds of miles deeper. We went through three sealed doors and emerged
into a vast room. A room bright with light and filled with more men in
Company uniforms, civilians, even women. At least a thousand. And I saw
it. The thousand refugees, all of them. Gathered from all the Companies,
from where