Archive of Our Own

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Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned…

Yeats

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#

Servalan slipped off her high heels, which clacked here in the resistant hub of the ship where there was less structural stress and no klaxons. Barefoot, she stole down onto the flight deck.

She was alone, with nothing but a laser pistol. That had belonged to the major who had docked her escape craft here, when they saw the Liberator out of the action and drifting. Not far in from the hatch a strut had collapsed on him – only snapping his arm, but the metal was beyond her strength to drag away. The major gave up his sidearm to her, and Servalan said she'd free him with a pulley if she captured the ship.

There was no sign of Blake. On the flight deck, only his pilot hunched at a station, jabbing controls and reading data up on the main screen, and whistled to herself in a falling pitch. Servalan walked up from her rear left, seized her by the hair and stuck the pistol against her ribs. “Jenna. We meet again. Only this time the gun is mine. Don't try to fight.”

“You.” Jenna Stannis rolled her eyes around, her head stuck where it was.

“Me. My flagship was blasted and I had to evacuate. Then I saw yours.”

“You have bad luck with ships, Servalan. We're about to do the same. Our computer's down.”

Winding tighter in her hair, Servalan glanced at the main screen and read the status report there. “Then why are you running emergency power tests? Where's Blake?”

“He's here.”

That was behind and to the right. Servalan pulled Stannis around, to see Blake at another entrance. From behind her body armour, she smiled at him. “Ah, Blake. A hostage, Blake, who is yours in return for three commands to your ship's computer.”

“A trifle late for these games, Supreme Commander.” Blake began down the steps, slow and awkward on his feet. He had a cast about his chest and shoulder. As he couldn't creep up on her in that state, he made himself another hostage, to do the talking. “We're damaged. The Liberator's shutting down.”

“Page your crew to the flight deck.”

“I've just sent the others off to the life pods. We have a quarter hour before atmosphere failure.”

“Page them, Blake,” she repeated. “The evacuation is cancelled. I see you have maintenance functions enough for a section.” She nodded at the main screen.

Blake turned to skim the information himself. “I see we do.” Down beside the couch bay, he depressed a button. “Avon. Any of you on board yet down there?” No answer. “He must be gone.”

“That's up to you, Blake. If you want your crew to breathe, I'd order them to the fight deck.”

He persisted with his story. “They're safe in the pods. We'd be safer off the ship ourselves.”

“Except that I have an urgent need for battleships.”

“True. Bad news about your fleet.”

“I won't lose the Liberator at this stage. We're going nowhere. I am commandeering your vehicle. We can live here in the control section until your admirable auto-repairs have us operative again.”

“Risky without navigation.”

“I enjoyed working alongside you, Blake. But the Andromedan navy is cracked. – I may grant you a medal,” Servalan mused. “The Federation Star. Posthumous. Do you deserve a medal too, Jenna?” She tugged on the hair.

“It was Jenna who alerted you,” smiled Blake.

“Did you, Jenna? Now seal off the flight deck.”

Stannis muttered, “That console there,” waving a hand. Servalan shuffled them across together, to where Stannis pressed five red switches. “There's the hatches. Now --”

A heaviness dropped onto Servalan's neck, and she slumped down. Stannis kneed her, cracking her jaw.

When her giddiness diminished, she heard, “No, not without her. She's my trophy of war.” That was Blake.

“She won't go anywhere. She can suffocate on the ship and be here when we board again.” Servalan recognised Avon.

“I'm not leaving her to put out a distress beacon, and she can't do anything for me dead. We've power to keep a section going – we can survive. Read it for yourself, Avon.”

“This is why you weren't in medical. You left me in command, Blake. I commanded an evacuation, and while I'm seeing to your crew like you told me, you double back to the flight deck and prepare to sit tight.”

From above her, Stannis spoke. Servalan peered and saw a blurred gun trained on her. “I did the preparations, Avon. I planned to stay behind if possible. Blake's right. I hate to abandon a ship just after a battle. The salvagers will be out for pickings, we'll lose her.”

“Cally and Vila are off – I jettisoned them – you agreed to go, Blake.”

“That was before I had the Supreme Commander to think about. I want her with me and I want her alive.”

Stannis said, “Medical. We'd have to batten down in medical – because of your injury, Blake.”

“Right. We seal ourselves off. We can preserve energy for the medical bay, or if worst comes to worst there's bio-suspension equipment there.”

“You do whatever crazy thing you like, Blake. I'm taking a pod.” Avon again, nearer to her.

“Your choice, Avon. I'll get your ship back to you. But I need to be on Earth, I won't have time to waste, so wherever you end up in your pod, try and be easy to locate.”

Servalan heard a hiss, and then footsteps retreating. Tweaks went through her skull, and when she grasped what her eyes told her was the chair, she missed.

Her major would suffocate under that strut. Space Command was short of good officers after the battle. As Blake and Stannis hauled her up, she told them about him, and listened to herself stutter.

#

A third of the way to the pods, Avon stopped.

He couldn't go, could he? As Blake had sketched out for him. When the ship re-powered, Blake would be rushing to Earth, not hanging around the Outer Planets to pick up stray crew. Blake counted on a revolution in the wake of the Andromedan war. Before the Liberator had retreated from the conflict, they'd intercepted reports about Star One being hit and the near-obliteration of the Federation fleet.

Until Blake got to Earth, the ship wasn't his yet. That was the agreement. Blake would stick to it, meaning he had a right to whisk off with the Liberator, and if Avon weren't on board that was Avon's worry. Then with Blake gone revolting on Earth, he couldn't see Jenna searching him out to surrender the ship to him – Jenna who'd never intended to evacuate.

Slamming hot metal, he reversed at a run.

#

“Joining us, Avon?” asked Blake at the entrance to the medical bay, as Avon barged past him, having streaked under rows of cracked stanchions and through chemical-smelling smoke. Then Blake sealed them in.

Chest hammering, Avon seethed at the mild welcome, and lied. “There's a rupture before the starboard pods. I didn't have time to go portside.”

“Lucky you didn't try.” Blake was reading atmosphere data at the door panel. “The air just failed out there.”

“Happy now, Blake?”

“Happy?”

“You've managed to keep half of us here with you. Against Zen's recommendations.”

“You could have opted to depend on me returning your ship to you.”

Finding that flagrant – after Blake had used the same threat to prevent him escaping – Avon narrowed his eyes and lied again to perturb him. “You'd have to be alive to do that. I wouldn't gamble my ship on it. You're not stabilised from your wound yet.”

“I'm stabilised.”

“I told Cally to report that you were. To keep morale up for the battle.”

Blake's head jerked around. But he didn't go off to diagnostics to get the facts on his injury. He went to the general workstation. “I'm going to see if I can patch into the auxiliary computers. Translators are down, but since you're here, Avon, you can translate for me.”

“So that's why you wanted me?” Avon picked up Orac, which was dumped on the deck, and followed him over. “I'm not Zen, Blake. But perhaps I can rig up something.” He pulled up a chair and powered the station. “You did think this plan through, did you? We can't get out of here now for three days, whatever happens.”

“No worse than three days in a pod.”

“More crowded. And I'm not over the moon about the company.”

“Mine, or the Supreme Commander's?”

“I get a choice, do I?”

“No. I've relegated Servalan to the side wing. She's groggy from your neck chop. Jenna's keeping an eye on her.”

Surveying the major bay where they were, and counting two medical couches here with a third in the side wing, Avon said, “I bags the sterile laboratory. If you'd warned me we'd be camping out I'd have packed a change of underwear and my toothbrush.”

Blake nodded to the workstation. “Get on with the auxiliaries. I want a precise repair time.”

After an hour, when Avon had fed the regeneration systems chatter through his station, Blake did go and do a diagnostic analysis on his chest. Avon leant an ear to the droned verdict. Grunting at it, Blake hung up the sensor and returned to the workstation. “Well?” asked Avon.

“Well what?”

“Should we put you in bio-suspension?”

“There's hope for me yet.”

In fact the machine had told him he was off the critical list. But he seemed exhausted after the buffeting the ship had gone through, and then traipsing around on his feet when he should be in bed. His mouth was pale and furrowed, his cheekbone a ridge, and he had a hint of panting or wheeze when he spoke. “You look on your last legs. Why don't you go and lie down?” Avon's finger directed him to the couch where Cally and he had deposited him after Star One. Since then he'd gotten out of it twice to show up on the flight deck, during initial manoeuvres for battle and during the evacuation that wasn't.

“Might just do that. After I see about our prisoner.” Blake plodded to the side compartment. The door slid shut after him.

Atmosphere entry in a life pod wouldn't have done Blake any good, or floating in space with nothing but a first aid kit. It wasn't such a bad plan, to stay. Cally and Vila could be worse off.

#

To judge from her slurrings when they steered her from the flight deck, Servalan had concussion. But Jenna and he had dumped her in the healing capsule more to keep her out of mischief.

“She's out cold,” reported Jenna, who'd found a seat on the transparent roof of the capsule, over Servalan's knees. Next she said, “You all right, Blake?”

He tumbled into a nearby chair. “Had worse days. Yesterday.”

“You should be in bed.”

“When I feel like getting up again, I will be.”

Squinting at him, she gave a laugh. “You look downright gruesome.”

“Hm,” was his response to that. “Well, we're stuck here for at least three days. Avon's getting us a proper estimate.”

“I saw him crashing in, and decided to lurk in here with Servalan for a while,” she grinned. “For the peace. I never wanted to pull out, but what happened to him?”

“Ran out of time. I didn't like him to try for the pods. Servalan scotched that. She lost us most of Zen's twelve minutes to shutdown.”

Jenna had a sizing-up look on him. “Is that why you threw a scare into him about the ship?”

Tired enough to admit his tactics, he said, “Didn't think he'd leave it in my possession. When he thought about it. No, the pods weren't a safe option by that stage.”

“Why should he leave the ship in your possession? When you gave her to him.”

Blake shut his eyes. He didn't answer – he knew she'd go on.

She did. “What was that about, Blake? This pact you had with him, that you kept secret from us --”

“There wasn't any pact, Jenna.”

“Nothing beforehand? You just gave him the ship, on a caprice?”

He opened his eyes. “Avon had told me he thought he deserved the ship for his trouble, but I doubt that was a secret to any of you. Jenna, I know you have a similar right to the Liberator --”

“There's four of us who've earned a stake in her. You're not our captain, Blake, and even captains don't name a successor, you know. This is a democracy, not a dictatorship.”

Blake was tempted to smile – she didn't often resort to political analogies. “I did caution him there'd have to be a general agreement.”

“You didn't phrase it like that. To be exact, you assumed we'd go along with it.”

“That's not quite what I said either, Jenna. I confess, none of us were ourselves just prior to Star One. May have seemed hasty, but --”

“All because Avon had a tantrum.”

“He did that,” Blake half-laughed.

“And wasn't it easy?” she pursued. “I hate you, says Avon, give me the ship. And you do.”

Blake scratched behind an ear. Now she was twisting Avon's words. “Actually, he said nothing of the kind,” he noted for the record.

“He said, as long as he saw you for the last time --”

“Would you hear me out, Jenna?” he interrupted this tactless harping, and embroidery. “I had decided on the matter some while ago.”

“He played on you. Just think about his timing. I want to be free of Blake – and when you get the drift that he hates your guts, he out and asks for the ship. You fell for it.”

Blake stated with clarity, “It was as early as after Control that I resolved to pass on the ship to Avon.”

“Whoever gets the ship, why now? This is no time to burn your bridges. You're going to Earth, and the Liberator's your escape route. You might need it.”

“After Earth, the five of us may not be sticking together, Jenna.”

“I know that, don't I? So you wash your hands of the business and leave us to sort out about the ship. We can squabble among ourselves, but after you're gone. That's no way to wind up your leadership of a crew. I don't know how your Freedom Party worked, but I know how ships and crews work. That isn't how it's done. We're not signed-up revolutionaries who do whatever you tell us because it's best for the revolution.”

“Finished, Jenna?” he inquired with exaggerated politeness.

She kicked her heel against the healing capsule, her eyes downturned and gleaming. After a while her jaw stopped pushing out to the side, and she looked up in a less critical spirit. “Just after we salvaged the Liberator, he boasted he'd get rid of you. Rather slow, but he's done it. I'm next on his list – he told me so.”

“Has a little list, does he?”

“Whereupon I menaced his continuing existence in some roundabout fashion.” She smiled in reminiscence. “We did enough posturing, at the beginning, me and Avon.”

Blake smiled too.

“Jostling for who'd be first mate,” she muttered. “Seems he won.”

“Jenna, I don't have a first mate. You tell me yourself I'm no captain. It's up to you, as it always was. I have to go to Earth. None of you need stay on with the ship – that's your choice.” He realised this was the closest he'd gone to suggesting she go with him when he had to leave the ship. It wasn't remarkably close, either. It was remarkably hazy.

“Stay on under Avon? Just the way to split us up. But the crew splitting up won't worry you when you're on Earth running a revolution.”

“We did this to urge on a revolution,” he reminded her. “We weren't flying about in space to enjoy ourselves.”

“Perhaps I forget,” she sniped. “Flying about in space is, after all, my profession.” Jumping off the healing capsule, she stalked about, hands on hips.

Blake said to her, “Though I must admit, I've enjoyed these years more than any. Any that I remember. Or I dare say, seeing where the others were spent, any that I don't.”

“You can lead trillions instead of us.”

“That's not for me. Not after we win.”

She turned to him. “You and me were always allies.”

“I like to think so.”

“Against Avon.”

Blake stroked his jaw.

“That's the crude truth of it, Blake, and you needed an ally. Which is what I'm being now. I'm not after your ship. You should keep her. Earth is too risky without her. What about the Six Armies?”

“Stranded among the Near Worlds and Outer Planets.”

“The Home Guard? Avalon and her groups versus the Earth Home Guard. Blake, keep the ship for the time being. We can drum some crew feeling into Avon. At least, he might find in himself the solicitude not to drop you in the Federation stronghold and go.”

Blake shifted his weight forward, leaning lopsided on his knee because of the hampering cast. “Now, I couldn't wish him on you or Cally as technical support. I thought neither of you has the patience. My guess is that he put his talents to more profitable use because he kept getting the sack. He's on strike half the time and when he's not you find him sitting in your chair. Must have driven his bosses to despair.”

“Blake, this isn't a joke.”

“I know.” He squeezed his eyes shut.

Before long she asked, “You okay?”

“Not bad.” Opening his eyes again, he laughed. “Anyway, Avon isn't happy yet. I think he wants my head as a trophy to go with the ship.”

“And hang it up in front of Zen?” she grinned, joining in.

Blake snorted. “So he can keep arguing with me.”

“That's the worry – he'd start talking to it. I'm sure he talks to Orac more than Vila does, and Vila would talk to his sock if nothing else were listening.”

Smiling, Blake began to think about trusting his weight to his knees. When he was on his feet, he delivered a small speech. “Jenna, I can't ask the crew to Earth. For those who'd rather not, there's the ship – under Avon, who I am sure won't be with me as the revolution happens. I wasn't sure what your plans were, so I didn't leave the ship in your care. That about spells out my rationale.”

With that, not waiting to see what her response may be, he exited the compartment. Be a trifle blunter and just ask her to settle down with you, why don't you? he twitted himself, shaking his head.

Weaving into the major bay, he met an amused inspection from Avon, before plunking onto a medical couch.

“Can I do anything for you, Blake?”

He hauled his feet up and winced as he put his shoulders down. At the workstation, Orac was chattering about Andromedan weaponry and the fascinating molecular effects it had on Liberator's third hull metals. “You can wake me in an hour. And you can tell Orac to keep it down.”

“Shut up, Orac,” said Avon. “You are disturbing Blake's nap.”

Blake believed he'd done the right thing about the ship. He owed it to Avon. Least he could do. As for Jenna, he tended to put her warnings down to anxiety about what would happen afterwards, who was going to lose touch with whom. A null enough prospect for him, but he'd faced it, and parted with the only home, that was a home, that he remembered. He always made certain that his abnormal memory didn't govern his behaviour.

#

He had drowsed for an hour, when Avon touched his shoulder – on the sound side – and dangled before him an adrenalin drink. “May I return to the maintenance of my ship, Blake?”

Waving him away, Blake balanced the glass on his stomach, feeling putrid, until his fingers slackened, then he heaved himself up and swallowed half the energising muck. Going over to the workstation he asked, “The auto-repairs functioning?”

“Nothing wrong with them. After twenty-nine hits, I can't say the same for much else. Reserving energy for the upkeep of medical bay has protracted repair time.”

“Recharge on the banks will hasten things along.”

Avon grumbled, “My ship is a mess.”

“But you're now a war hero,” Blake told him, with more patience than his fatigue wanted to bother mustering.

“You had less to lose. You were willing to smash up a ship that wasn't yours.” Smartly Avon swivelled in his chair, to catch him screwing up his face. “Or are you going to renege on your last will and testament, Blake?”

“I'm not dead yet,” he mentioned sourly, his glass up for a drink.

“You must have thought you were at the time. Those were famous last words if ever I heard them.”

Blake's glass stopped at his mouth. No, he hadn't counted on pulling through, down here in medical, secured against turbulence and wearing the earphones to follow events on the flight deck. Avon had stuck to his word, resolute and competent. Proud of him, Blake had been content he'd said what he had while he could.

“I suppose, since you survived after all, now you'll have to eat your last words, won't you?”

His brown eyes looked ebullient. Blake didn't find his last encounter with Avon before the battle at all funny. If Avon did, Avon could, and he could also go and rot. At the time he hadn't had his warped sense of humour about him. “Can we concentrate on translating the repair monitors?” Blake suggested.

Avon bent to his work. Leaning on his arms beside him to see what went on at the station, Blake glowered at the wisps of hair going this way and that at the back of his neck. Because he'd forgotten Blake was there, Avon bumped his arm, and said, “Excuse me,” in polite abstraction – just a technician going about his business.

Excuse you? fumed Blake to him in his head. I've given you my only belonging, and you won't give me the time of day. There were times he could throw a tantrum himself. Make Kerr Avon miscalibrate his dials. Then again, what did he want Avon to say? Do drop in for a visit now and then, Blake? Well, a thank you wouldn't go astray.

We going to end this way, Avon? I've done my damnedest.

#

Not before time, Blake stopped hanging over him at the workstation, and found himself a chair to sit in. Avon had been tempted to buzz him in the face with a live wire.

He glanced at Blake. His face was as haggard as before, but the adrenalin had perked him up – his eyes were livelier. In a while Blake remarked, “We've run out of things to argue about.”

Hands pausing at the dials, Avon turned his head.

Blake elaborated, “Star One is down – whether we liked it or not.” With empty glass he gestured round about him. “The ship's yours, and you're off active service after you drop me on Earth. That about resolves our differences. We could be in for a boring trip.”

If you'd go away, thought Avon as he sat back in his chair. “This isn't a trip,” he began. “This is a hazardous drift through battle debris in a crippled ship. Thanks to your mania for hanging onto Servalan, who may thereby be the death of us even if she doesn't get into the poisons cabinet and do us in our sleep. Jenna is on this trip to see that salvagers don't run off with the ship. I am on this trip to see that you don't run off with the ship. You are on this trip because you'd rather have a live Servalan than a safe crew. While we're all enjoying this trip of yours, why don't you find something useful to do, like go to sleep?”

Scraping back his chair, Blake plonked down his glass and towered there with his underlip off his teeth. “I will,” he drawled. “Time for an audience with the Supreme Commander, I think. If she's recovered yet from your ministrations.”

Before he was out the dividing door, Avon asked, “Has Jenna frisked her? There may not be much to frisk, but I'd be wary. A strip and body cavity search would be best. I don't volunteer.”

Blake merely eyed him, dogged and shuttered, and went through.

I should have taken a pod, thought Avon. Why drag it out? It's bad for my temper.

#

He sent Jenna next door.

In the healing capsule Servalan had woken, and now lay staring out of her transparent enclosure, as Jenna hadn't worked out what else to do with her. Alone with her, Blake undid the catches and lifted the roof. Cured by the automatics of any concussion she'd suffered, the Supreme Commander sat up, tucking her legs to the side and smoothing her dress down over her ankles.

“I was in there earlier,” said Blake. “For an hour of soft tissue reconstruction. I didn't like it either.” He spaced the chair five feet from her, and sat down with his gun at his side.

“Were you wounded in the conflict? You weren't on the flight deck when my flagship and the Liberator exchanged battle data. I spoke with Avon.”

“Avon had to fight for me. This happened before, on Star One.” He jogged his elbow, the cast gripping his arm to his side. “Nasty weapons, lazerons.”

“Travis,” she nodded. “I've heard rumours. He'd negotiated with the Andromedans?”

“At least a week ago. The technicians were dead when we arrived. Travis wanted to drop the minefield himself. The personal touch. So Avon and I both had a shot at him. He's dead.”

She mused, “I didn't see he was that psychotic.”

“Even I didn't.”

“But then he was never the same after I sent him for retraining therapy.”

“I expect not,” said Blake.

“On Goth, he proposed tyrannising over the galaxy with me. If I had humoured him, I'd have learnt about his treachery with the Andromedans early enough to save Star One. But I was short with him. He double-crossed me and was gone with Lurgen's brainprint. I should have treated him with kid gloves, when he went wild-eyed about sitting on Star One like a throne.”

Blake smiled. “I hear you've declared martial law.”

“In this crisis, yes. Civilians dither. Your alert from the Liberator would never have been acted upon by the High Council. Even my staffers thought it some ludicrous rebel ambush. But the soldiers went.”

“Went and won't go home. You have twenty percent of your former fleet, and that scattered. The Andromedan War was the Federation's last battle. Your own military services in the crisis may be a mitigating circumstance at your trial.” Well, he'd tell her the bad news at once.

Servalan smiled at him. “The Andromedans would have penetrated to the populous sectors without the Liberator. I may undertake to cite that at your trial.”

Blake harumphed. “Depends on what happens on Earth over the next week. Tell me about your coup d’etat.”

“Space Command has rescinded the legal jurisdiction of the High Council, and of the President.”

“And what's become of the Council members?”

“The President is under house arrest. Thirty-eight Councillors are residing in Central Security. The remainder have sworn allegiance to Space Command.”

“I think,” Blake told her, “you've done nearly as much toward the revolution as the Andromedans did when they exploded Star One.”

“Revolution?” she asked. “What revolution is that?”

“Avalon has her transports and strike-ships stationed along the Near Worlds rim. Her army will meet the Terran guerrilla groups in your political citadel. Central Security. Intelligence, Interrogation and Records. What the true Federation runs on. Behind the Administration. Behind the Council and the President. Behind Space Command. The nerve centre of your clinics. The machinators within the Justice Department. The hidden brains of the regime. That's what we take first. From there we open the domes and the people join us, and then the ball is rolling. With no Council and no Supreme Commander to stop it.”

Servalan listened to his blueprint of the revolution, and pondered. “The Earth Guard didn't go out to fight Andromedans.”

“You have an army,” he nodded. “We have an army, and the people.”

“An army under that child Avalon? I hope at least she waits for you.”

“Avalon is a ground commander. I never was – not in outright hostilities. She gets the job on Earth, with me behind her.”

“Behind her is where you're going to be. You used to be a politician, Blake. Of the popularist kind, but yet. Now – since your time in the clinics – you just do the cruder work. Ven Glynd wanted you for a figurehead. There are other power-politicians like him. Factions, mobs and demagogues. What do you know of them, Blake, out here on the Liberator? You wipe the slate for them, but when your job is done, what will the Ven Glynds and the Le Grandes write on your slate? You're only a bomber, Blake. Or do I misjudge you? Are you the next candidate for usurpation?”

“The only power that isn't a usurped power, is that of the people.”

“Slogans aside, what happened to the great Roj Blake, founder of the Freedom Party? You weren't a mere bomber then, at the mercy of the Ven Glynds or trailing behind the fanatic Avalons. He's a loss to the revolution, that Roj Blake. But you wouldn't remember?”

“No,” he said.

“You may be right to step aside for the political animals. That arena must be foreign to you now – after your spell in the clinics. Perhaps Avalon has told you where you belong. Bombing, but not at the helm, not in a position demanding judgement.”

Blake smiled.

“Or perhaps you have other things to do? No politics for you when the bombing is over. What does a resistor do, when there is nothing else to resist? Like a mutoid who exists only to serve – what does a dismissed mutoid do? What will you do?”

In a quiet growl he said, “Be human again.”

“A day profession? A wife? A family of children?”

“Nice thought.”

“If you'd had early attention – but you escaped diagnosis. We missed you, and then we too late. With the right therapeutics, your behavioural defects could have been remedied. Resistance is in your genes. I'm sure you've heard that before. Do you see what it means? You have a malcontent temperament, Blake. You have a medical problem. Without our clinics, you won't be cured. No profession and wife and family for you.”

“I resist because of what I see. It isn't in my genes. It isn't in my mind.” Blake shook his head. “You shouldn't read that quasi-science in your journals, Servalan. You lose so many scientists. They defect, or go to ground like Ensor.”

“Do you know what contentment is, Blake? As a malcontent. The people, whom you're so fond of – ask the people about being contented. Why should they want a revolution? Bran Foster used to disrupt food production to whip up riots. We feed the deltas. Bran Foster starved them. The people see which side their bread is buttered on.”

“You feed who you want to feed, and your food is drugged.”

“When there are shortages, we select who is of least future use to the majority. When there is misery, public or private, we ease the tension with drugs. The Federation cares for its citizens. We satisfy every want, material and mental. Only you can't be satisfied, Blake. Your people are. Work for a sense of utility and purpose, and the Rest Centres on rotation for the optimum functioning of the organism. And grading. We profile our citizens and give them the right niche in the structure. So that every citizen knows he is where he belongs. We don't demand smartness from those who can't. We don't abandon a delta to believe he could be an alpha, and fail, and be discontent with himself. We examine him and tell him what he is. Then he won't want to be what he can't be. Where is the oppression?”

“Do you wonder why an escalating percentage of your citizens opt for modification? It's a terrible depression. If they couldn't throw themselves into mutoid surgery, they'd be murdering or suiciding or anything. Anything to stop feeling like farmed animals, like biological machines, like citizens. You slot the right pegs in the right holes. Alpha, beta, gamma, delta. They refuse to be diagrammed, analysed, predicted. They refuse to be told what they want, what they are, and what contents them. They'd rather go crazy to prove you wrong. Humans are perverse that way.”

“That is medically treatable.”

“Only by modification. Anything less, and they'll keep kicking. Even when they're reduced to kicking themselves.”

“You're merely talking about yourself, Blake. We weren't punitive at first. We tried to treat you. Were you ever so content as in those four years when you weren't kicking?”

“I was never so tranquil,” he said.

“Tranquillisers to ease your perverse psychology, so you don't harm yourself. Tranquillisers so you can be happy in spite of yourself.”

“I'm happier getting shot at by pursuit ships.”

“That is your defect. Only we can give you a profession and a wife and a family, along with the mentality to enjoy them. That's what you can't do for yourself.”

“If I believed you, I'd do without.”

“Or do you have a wife here on the Liberator? I doubt you even can. To judge by your profile.”

“My face isn't that bad.”

Servalan deigned to be amused. “Ah, Blake. Our clinicians made a mess of you the first time. They didn't go far enough. You're like a mutoid patient who ran away halfway through the modification. Neither fish nor fowl. The Federation is sorry for you. And who else is?”

“Me,” he said, and stood up.

#

“She's yours,” he told Jenna, jerking a thumb behind him.

“Thanks a heap.” Strapping on her gun, Jenna made for the side wing.

“Gag her if you like,” Blake smiled. He went to pour himself another adrenalin mix. “Drink?” he offered to Avon, who beat the Supreme Commander for company if only just.

“Just a vitamin solution for me.” When Blake joined him at the workstation with two glasses, Avon asked, “Was Servalan edifying?”

“As a boot in the brain. I'd keep Jenna out of there, except she's safe. Didn't live in the domes long enough. Nothing to play on.” He wagged his head. “What a zombie I must have been on Earth. Tranquillisers. I can't blame you for being about the least tranquil person I know, Avon. You they'd have to dope comatose, to keep you wandering about in a blissful fog.”

“I've never wandered about in a blissful fog.”

“I can't see it,” he grinned. “Security must have thought the chemists gave them a dud batch, when they had you on camera.”

“I was a dud batch,” Avon told him, satisfied with himself about it.

“You and me both.” He had a drink, his rear propped against the desk. The adrenalin cheered him. “Shame we didn't meet, when we were both working on this Matter Transmission Project. I might have had you home for an evening. You could have told me what home was like. I only remember the work, you see.”

Picking up his glass, Avon assured him, “Nothing personal, Blake, but I wouldn't have been seen within a mile of you. I'd have avoided your home, like a plague zone.”

“It isn't contagious. Rebellion.”

“But Security thinks it is. I like my body parts where they are, not littering an interrogator's floor because I hobnobbed with the notorious Roj Blake.”

“I mightn't have compromised you too awfully at that stage.”

“Enough to be a blot on my record. You were dangerous to know.”

“Did you never crave for the thrill of danger? I have to say your record suggests to me you did.”

“You may have found your fun in sedition and political subterfuge.” Avon dangled his drink from his hand. “But there are other thrills to be had.”

“A few of them are every bit as dangerous.”

“Such as?” asked Avon.

Was that a challenge, or was that Blake's imagination? Odds were, the latter. And he backed down. He did have an instinct to extort a confession from Avon, and he liked to pretend to himself that was for Avon's sake. It probably wasn't, though. Extort a confession, then I can extend my sympathy. Obviously, I'd enjoy that too much.

“Defrauding of financial institutions, for one,” he said, quite blandly.

#

Down in Control, where Jenna had first met the Supreme Commander face to face, the Supreme Commander had tried a fight. That had caught Jenna off guard – what with her unmilitary body and her elegant walk. Thanks to Liberator handguns being leashed to the power pack, she hadn't lost hers, and after getting whopped she'd ended the scuffle. Servalan's fashionable hat had been knocked off, and her dress torn, and she'd asked to tidy herself up before being marched away. With Jenna's gun on her throughout she'd changed into a skimpier dress with a bizarre bodice clasp of a silver lizard – as composed as if being naked before terrorists didn't bother her. Servalan was peculiar, and perhaps it didn't.

Here on the Liberator, Jenna was more prudent. Rummaging through the cabinets, she found a strap and knotted Servalan's right wrist to an anti-turbulence ring on the wall. The Supreme Commander inquired, “Am I to be in your charge, Jenna?”

“I fear so.” Jenna dragged over a stool for her. “The others have contrived to find other things to do.”

Servalan seated herself on the stool. Her wrist hung up above her, the hand in a droop. Tilting her glossy black head against her white satin arm, she asked on a sigh, “Must Blake?”

“Must Blake what?”

“Leave me in the clutches of a lesbian.”

Astonished, Jenna almost said, What? She stopped herself. She ended up saying – just as ridiculously – “You wish.”

“I've read your records.” Servalan negligently dusted her dress.

“I don't have any records. Apart from my trial, and that was short and pertinent. I never went through any brain games with you people.”

“No?”

“No. I'm just a free trader. My citizenship lapsed before I could go off for grading. Bless my mother,” she finished.

“Then I must have picked it up from your wandering eyes.”

Not over her astonishment, Jenna eyed her askance. “That's about all you'll pick up.”

“Oh, I'm not a pussy-kisser,” the Supreme Commander declared, mannered and vulgar both. “Heavens forbid. Sappho childishness – I'm rather too old for that. I always was.”

There in her satin and pearls, though she'd left her shoes behind somewhere, she acted like those polished elite who went to dinner parties in more jewelry than clothing, and had daring discussions in jaded tones. Jenna was familiar with Near Worlders of that ilk, through equipping the dinners with expensive dainties. Some elite liked to fraternise with the illegal traders who sold to them, no doubt to mock-shock their dinner guests later. Once a decadent old crone had asked her to dinner, exhibited her and her professional tales as a bit of sensationalism for the company, and after the company had gone, tried to jump her.

Jenna shook her head, as at an oddity, and retreated to the other chair in the compartment.

I wouldn't wander my eyes in her direction. Even naked in front of terrorists. For God's sake. There was a war on.

#

Onto his third adrenalin, Blake humped in his chair, leaning his good arm on his knee. “Avon,” he panted.

“What?” What next?

He could date it to about a year ago that Blake had taken up freethinking aloud and within earshot of him – and for his sake. What he'd done to encumber himself with that, Avon had no inkling. It hadn't done him any harm with Blake; indeed should he give a jeremiad about authoritarian harassment, stigma and obloquy, he was sure his glamour rating would go up. But his past was on the mundane side. No police hunts or witch hunts or forbidden arrest-defying amours. Not a lot for Blake to sympathise over. It was touching of Blake to try.

It was decent of Blake to defend his right to be perverted. It would never once have crossed his mind to ask him to.

“You know,” Blake began now in his chair, “I've wanted to be free of things myself, before. Things that – swamped me. Even, things that warped me. Not that I like to compare myself to the government. But I can understand how you feel.”

A crawling went down his neck. Blake's ego must have gone to a huge effort for that. His gaspy undertone, and his humility, were the same as before the battle when he did his famous last words. Well, Blake couldn't trust and understand him at the same time. Just because Blake had had a near miss, Avon wasn't going to listen to deathbed compromises from him for three days. He was out of danger and could stop that.

“Blake,” he said there at his station. “Don't be too abysmally understanding.”

“What's the matter? Don't you like being understood?”

“You wouldn't understand me with a five hundred page manual.”

Blake loathed that. It was obvious. His spent face hardened and – the touchier for the adrenalin he'd been drinking – he resorted to sarcasm. “No. The manual's classified, even if the likes of me had the wherewithal to muddle through it.”

He was smarting, and he was edgy from the adrenalin that was keeping him going. “I wouldn't bother,” said Avon.

Blake stood up with his drink, as though to drop the exchange – but he didn't have the sense. “Keep your privacy. Those with dirty secrets do.” Then he thought about that. “I didn't --” Faced away, he turned his head half back, and stretched an arm behind him. “Don't you dare misunderstand what I just said.”

“Blake.” He spoke as uncombustively as he knew how. “Go to bed. It's a bloody order.”

Either he saw the sense, or he came over obedient. Blake went to bed without another word; he dragged a blanket out of the cabinets and went in his clothes and boots and all. In spite of the adrenalin he was out at once.

Avon hadn't had time to gather his thoughts since Star One exploded. It had happened and now they had less than a week together. His equanimity wasn't in order. The last days. He hated funerals.

So did Blake, he could see. Throwing things thick and fast at him. No arguments left: you know, possibly that was true. Blake was almost, almost safe from him and he was almost safe from Blake.

From his medical couch Blake gulped, “Don't... don't.” An arm had fallen off the side, thick and slack.

“Nobody's doing anything to you, Blake.”

He should have given up on me ages ago. But he hasn't. I can't have stayed on board to be a bastard to him – I did that already.

Avon looked in awkward tenderness at the hung-out arm.

#

“Oh, Jenna. Don't let's get onto politics. Leave that to Blake, who at least knows what he's ranting about when he rants at me. You're no ideologue, are you, Jenna? You're just a smuggler who fell in with Blake and fell out of your depth. In the vicissitudes of the criminal life. That might be you defence in court. You were misled down the garden path. You only flew the ship for him.”

“Once in court was enough for me, Supreme Commander. You won't catch me in a court again and alive.”

“You're out of date,” Servalan told her. “I am Madame President.”

“You're a megalomaniac,” answered a skeptical Jenna.

“It's official.”

“So is this, madame.” Gratuitously, Jenna jerked her gun.

When Jenna had last gone to the can, her prisoner had abandoned her underpants and nudged them under the healing capsule. It was true they had no spares, and Servalan no doubt was fastidious. Jenna supposed they could wash what they had – but she didn't think she ought to begin doing Servalan's washing. Because her dress was white, and her hair black, you could tell she was without any.

“A pity you didn't pairbond with Gola,” Servalan said next. “You had him mooing after you like an amorous Zephrony mammoth. I must agree you were delicious in your gold wedding tiara. Primitive, but delicious. Did the Charl have his wicked way, Jenna? -- or is that too much to ask, even in the service of liberty, equality, fraternity and Blake?”

Jenna eyed her in exasperation. “No, he didn't.” Whoring to locate Star One? Blake would have patted her on the back for it. He'd asked her to flirt information out of people before, and to chuck drinks at Cally in seedy bars. He probably figured these were the habits of her background.

“Poor Gola. Does Blake?”

Don't you mention him. “Shut up, Madame President, or I'll have my wicked way.”

“How atrocious,” she exclaimed, with a stagey flinging of her pearl-painted nails.

And for an elite she behaves like a tramp. Jenna shook her head. “I was thinking more of using your fingernails for target practice.”

“You should have stayed in the Tents of Goth, Jenna. I do believe you belong there.”

It's a question, though. What did he mean about going down to Earth with him? What has he meant since I met him?

#

“Five hours?”

“By the clock,” confirmed Avon.

Blake knuckled his eyes, and yawned, and hauled off the blanket which snaked about and between his legs. “No wonder I feel civilized again.” That was his apology.

“Would you like a hot drink and a protein pack in bed?”

“Eh?”

“It only means me walking twelve feet.”

Blake got himself upright. “I'd like a wash first.” There was a big sink, with nasty medical cleanser. Out of his cast and his shirt, Blake wiped around his bandages and wet his face and arms. “Anything?” he asked Avon at his station.

“Orac and I judge about ninety hours before we get main drive.”

“Hm. Orac and you give out worse news than Zen. All right, next priority is a signals pick-up. Ship-to-ship. With Star One down, messages will be hopping about just through scramblers. I want anything on relay with an Earth call-sign.”

“What can I do for you with my other brain?”

Towelling, Blake smiled at him. “Start Orac on framing me a frequencies net, and you can knock off for a while.”

By the time he'd clumsily outfitted himself in shirt and the rigid cast again, Orac was buzzing away. Avon sprawled in his chair, and inspected Blake's features. “You're less ghastly.”

“Am I? No mirror.”

“You no longer resemble a corpse waiting to be spaced.”

“Just as well. I shouldn't like you to make the mistake.” Oh the old humour.

Avon left aside the old humour. “You believe the revolution is happening.”

“Avalon ought to be on Earth already. That's why I want news.” As he sucked on a protein pack, Blake resolved that for the next ninety hours he wasn't going spark any quarrels.

“Will you be going into politics now, Blake?”

“Me? I think I'd be a bit of crock in politics. Too stuck in the methods of the revolt. Avalon isn't so battered. No, I just want to see the Earth ours and Servalan before a jury of the people. To warn against any more like her. I mean to have her exhibited, so everyone can hear what went wrong. I want the story told. I want us to learn from our mistakes.” He explained to Avon, probably for the first time, “That's why she's here, and why we didn't evacuate.”

“As long as you execute her afterwards, Blake.”

“Not up to me. Up to the jury. At last. Personally, I can't wait to hand over to the people. I'm tired of having the rebellion on my shoulders. I'd like to be ordinary. Have friends, not followers.” He'd resolved to be communicative. Antidote to quarrels, as far as he knew.

“Stepping down from your pedestal?”

“Something like that,” smiled Blake.

“What are you going to do about the statues of you with your fist up to smash the Federation insignia, idealism on your idealised countenance, and the biographies, or hagiographies rather?”

What a picture, thought Blake. “The biographies will be brief. A span of seven years, four of which bored even me, and you're not to contribute. Any price they offer, I'll double.”

“You can bribe me, Blake. But I thought you had dirt on me.”

Blake met his eyes. They were bland.

“And if you don't,” Avon leant back and crossed his arms, “frankly, I'm going to rake it in from you.”

Blake had come to a halt in the conversation.

“Nothing on me?” he went on quite cavalierly. “No smirch on the escutcheon – slander, scandal or smear – wherewith to defend yourself?”

Blake knew an olive branch when he had one swiped in his face. His smile was fairly priceless. “No, Avon. I don't have dirt on you.”

“And where in space did you learn about me?” he asked out of curiosity.

“In Space City, actually.”

“Space City?” he frowned. “I was locked up in a cell on Space City, or else I was peddling your jewels to the Terra Nostra. What about this suggested to you I am not model citizen?”

“Before we went in to Largo...” Blake was having trouble with his smile; he had to talk around it. “We passed his enforcer in the corridor.”

Avon's frown became vexed. He scratched behind an ear. “I want to point out I thought him an innocent bystander at the time.”

“Sorry to notice. But he noticed you and you noticed him and I... happened to notice.”

“Right. Lucky we weren't under surveillance.”

“We were, of course, but – yes. Those were my sentiments.”

“Don't worry, I didn't cruise under Earth dome cameras. Matter of fact I never did contravene the Morals and Social Hygiene Acts – that is on Earth – and if you felt sorry for me, Blake – as I noticed – you can find better material.”

“I did once,” Blake told him and began on an anecdote. “We used to bug the clinics. I saw a case, a labour grade, about fifty, he'd had aversion therapy twenty years before but he'd lapsed. At that stage I hadn't stepped into a clinic, but even so. The man put up a fight. It isn't deviance. It's love. - And that's a quote.”

Blake was being casual, but his soft and human heart was in his story. His labour grade, no doubt, was worth his sympathy. “Yes, but I felt a fraud to have your speeches, Blake. I was too smart – the way I am.”

“Prevention is a crime, Avon. And I ought to know. I've been a model citizen. Four years – cameras in the home, tranquillisers enough to send a ship into nose-dive.”

“That's preventative,” agreed Avon. “Commiserations on your clean living.” How was he doing? He wasn't used to sympathy, and Blake had plenty to give away, and this was his olive branch, and he didn't want Blake getting the wrong end of the stick. He thought he was doing well.

#

Blake wanted his captive awake to interrogate, humanely treated for the time being, and prevented from doing anything rash – as if Servalan would ever hurt herself, even if revolted deltas were ransacking her wardrobe. So Jenna watched Servalan instead of doping her.

Besides, she'd rather think in here, than out there where Blake was.

For security, the dividing door was voice-locked to Liberator crew. When Blake stuck his head in, rare enough, he knocked and had her open it. Decorum, because Servalan and she were women, which to Blake warranted Servalan and she sharing the cramped side wing. Blake could be so Terran. On spaceships you learned to live as you can. Aside from which, Avon and she should laugh at him together about his decorum.

Though there were times she wondered. “Sinofar? Oh, she was very beautiful – wasn't she, Jenna?” Now, whether he was teasing her with his admiration of the weird lady, or whether he was teasing at her own once-over – the former, she trusted – but whichever way, he had an awful sense of humour.

If we'd met any other time, if he – what was he, an engineer? - heard of me on Earth, saw my trial on the news, he'd be bound to think, seems a nice type, I'd like to get to know her. I have alpha intelligence I'm told, but what else? He's always treating me to snippets of abstruse learning. Even about ships. Like he needs to educate me.

I want to talk to Avon. Strange but true. He's a smart aleck but you can communicate with him. What when Avon's gone, and Vila? Alone with Blake? I know how to chase him and he enjoys it. I don't know how to get domestic with him. Anyway he does nothing but rib me. Confound him. He has me bamboozled.

Jenna stewed.

Madame bent on her stool to fuss with the bandage about her ankles, there to prevent her kicking or tripping people, and a breast half fell out of the dress she'd worn through a space battle and an escape from her blasted flagship. Plumper than Jenna's. Must be a nuisance.

When she put a tray with a drink and a protein pack on Servalan's lap, the president trailed her fingers right through her hair. Or to near the end, where she got tangled, because of her nails or the untended state of Jenna's hair. Servalan laughed and extricated her fingers. “I go myself for military severity.”

With her hair, dark and glossy and flat to the cranium, she looked like a wet animal. Her eyes were paler, the paint fading and smudged at a corner. Jenna guessed, “Is that to flaunt the brain you have in there?”

“When I went to Command Academy, like my father before me, I had my hair crewcut like his – the custom in the services in his day.”

“He was a general, wasn't he? Famous.”

“He won three sectors of space for us in the Great Expansion.”

“Did he dote on you?”

“He did. So did his old guard. When my father passed away, I adopted his first name – which the whole planet knew him by, he being a popular hero -- for my single name. And veterans like Joban and Starkiller supported me.”

“As you followed in his footsteps.”

“Further,” she said. “Far further. But yours,” and she toyed with Jenna's hair, “how pretty.” Her faded lip curved. Her eyes were greener when naked of her cosmetics.

She could have Servalan on her knees.

Only she'd rather be on knees herself.

Servalan's hand wandered down her arm. “Stop that,” snapped Jenna.

Ducking her head, the president put her hand demurely to the tray in her lap. “I'm not hungry, Jenna. But my arm is aching. May I lie down?”

“If you behave.” Jenna stood to fiddle with the knot at the anti-turbulence ring, where her right wrist was strung up. Removing the tray to the deck, Servalan rose to her feet and waited. Then she slid her cheek against Jenna's cheek.

Blake, where are you? cried Jenna to herself.

#

Needing more sleep, Blake doused the lumes and sat on his medical couch, a metal contraption with cushioning miserly under his sore bones. Avon worked on, his face greened and angular from the racing figures at his workstation, the pewter panels of his jacket gone a hard green. He had withdrawn, which was only to be expected.

But now Blake throbbed, from his shoulder downwards, enough to need his teeth gritted. Finally he said, “Avon, get me a shot.” He switched on the swivel-armed lamp beside him.

Avon came with an antiseptic tissue and an injector. Having administered the dose he asked, “A shot of what? To borrow from Orac – you should be more specific in your instructions.”

“Analgesic,” answered Blake, pulling down his sleeve again. “Which is what you've given me.”

“That's right. From the bottle in between the truth serum and the Phobon plague virus.” Avon threw the tissue in a spare tray, keeping the injector to twiddle in his fingers, and presented to Blake a suave show of teeth.

Don't mind him. His toes are a little chilly. “Eighty hours to go and you can wallow in my absence.”

“Like a Carthanos Mud Wallower,” agreed Avon, “in mud.”

The throbs in his chest were petering out, and he could stop slumping. Feeling on the ball again, Blake told him to annoy him, “I could think you were trying to get rid of me.”

“We won't go into that again,” answered Avon. “I haven't participated in a bawling match about who hates who since I was five, in the playground. You do, I don't, and so forth.”

Blake crinkled up his eyes. But that was still a test of humour for him. He felt drowsy. Avon must have used the soporific drug, which wasn't a bad thing. He stretched out on the couch.

“We may hate each other,” remarked Avon, “but slanging about it is childish.”

“We don't.”

“We do,” Avon told him.

Blake said, “We --” Then he shut his mouth.

Beside his couch, Avon's teeth gleamed. “Sleepy, Blake?”

“Very.” And he shut his eyes. He allowed a slight smile.

“Do you do this sort of thing with Jenna?” asked Avon curiously.

“Jenna?”

“Yes. You don't love me. Yes I do. And so on.”

“No. I'm only childish on my off days.”

“Why not? Doesn't she?”

“Doesn't she what?” He pried open an eye.

Avon bent over him, his jacket like polished metal, his hands clasped behind his back, and said with patronising clarity, “Love you.”

Blake had recently had a soporific. He put that into brain storage for a later date and answered equably, “I don't have a clue. Do you have a clue?”

“Well, I don't go around asking people.”

“That's settled then.” He shut his eyes.

#

Jenna's eyes hadn't wandered, neither in Control nor here on the Liberator, until Servalan suggested to her that they had, and then at once they did. Nor had Stannis had any profiling done. Servalan's source of information was less orthodox, and funnier. Before Avalon had escaped on the Liberator, Travis had done a preliminary mnemonic probe on her. Expecting Blake and crew, her tranquillised mind had wandered to a piece of trivia which Travis had swept aside and Servalan had giggled over.

Avalon had pictured a gun-running contractor, in velvet boots over the knee, garish cheap silk, and a jouncing mop of honey hair. This contractor had done a cargo dump to her troops on the ground, and afterwards met with Avalon in a bar to pick up her pay. In the bar the contractor didn't mention money but bought Avalon a drink and hung around. She swallowed up Avalon's rebel tales with deferential fascination, and then she boasted through her customs-breaching tales, which Avalon didn't believe. Avalon found her get-up tawdry and her shyness and brashness both callow. But the price the contractor had quoted was cheaper than it should be. Because of her rate – less for rebels – Avalon treated her as a comrade-in-arms.

The gun-runner mistook her as meaning other arms, and dropped one around her.

The arm was excusable, just about. But next, while they were laughing together, she slid her cheek against Avalon's cheek. Girlish skin, too soft and perfumed, and worming too far. The prim Avalon had thought, oh these smugglers, and stood up fast to pay her.

There followed an argument about money. Avalon stuffed into her hand a realistic price. The gun-runner tried to leave a third of it on the table. Avalon informed her that she wasn't a charity, that the revolution wasn’t bankrupt and that business is business. The gun-runner seemed perplexed to be told that revolutionaries weren't romantically poor, and disappointed to find her gallantry wasn't needed. She'd shrugged a while, hangdog and sulky – Servalan could picture the angel-faced Avalon's stern stare – then she picked up her pay and swaggered out of the bar.

That was years ago, but here was Jenna Stannis, hanging around rebels just the same. Did she risk another slap in the face, or had she learnt that revolutionaries have their minds on higher things? Did she swagger less with Blake, and moon more?

And what was she doing in the skirt of her dress?

A mutiny against – a surrender to – the fact that Blake was too good for the likes of her? Jenna's case didn't need a psychostrategist. How Jenna would hate for Roj Blake to catch her at what she was doing. Now Servalan could play kiss and tell.

This dish or that. Jenna must have a terrible time out at dinner, umming and ahhing between the oysters and the king prawns. And when she did pick, see her try to eat daintily – like a lady. Servalan giggled.

#

“The Supreme Commander giving you any trouble?” asked Blake.

“She --” began Jenna. He waited, in his sloppy brown shirt and his crumpled trousers, his jowls going dark and bristled from lack of shaving, grinning at her already before he'd had the expected no. “No. No trouble, Blake. Under control.” She wished to damnation she'd never gone under Control, but deserted Blake to rescue himself down there.

Blake had a funny grin, and the worst thing about it was the contagiousness. He also had a thick soft torso like a punching bag, only she couldn't hurt him. Blake didn't worry enough, but then he couldn't shoulder all the weight, and he strode forward on the theory that doubting his crew would only be bad luck. If they lagged behind he jollied them along with jolly grin – but he rarely stopped to ask them any intrusive or unlucky questions.

I knocked back that doctor from the Ortega for him. A decent sort, Blake and he got on.

Maybe she'd done what she'd done to get at Blake. She didn't like to think so. Maybe she'd run through her discipline next to him, so that at the next temptation she had not a scrap of it left. Maybe she should have stuck to free trading, she wasn't up to scratch as a revolutionary.

“Claustrophobic, isn't it?” remarked Blake.

“Spooky,” she responded. “Cooped up in a dead ship.”

“The Liberator's not dead. Just in a coma for a while.”

“Which you get to spend with Avon, and I get to spend with that lunatic.”

“Think of it as purgatory for our sins.”

What would you know about sins? she thought. “What did I do to deserve her?”

Blake made a wordless comment in his throat, and his breath travelled to her, warm and familiar-smelling. “If we get ourselves into sleep-shifts – I've just been collapsing when I collapse – the three of us can fit on the couches in here. Not that I've caught Avon on his yet, but I'm out half the time myself. You needn't guard day and night. I only want an eye on her.” He gazed around him and thought. “Could use the camera. Reminiscent of a Justice Department cell, but then she is a prisoner.” He laughed. “I remember scowling at the camera in my cell – yelling at it too. You hate them because you don't know who's staring at you. A security camera never shuts its eyes. I thought a personal guard is more private, funnily. She'd rather you than me, I'm sure. I don't like to stick the boot in, she's lost her Supreme Commandership and I hope her Federation. No sense shutting her up in the healing capsule. I won't drug her. She can do with the time to think. But we can use the camera, or I could keep her company.” His heavy head roved around towards her and stopped.

“No need,” Jenna told him. “I'll see to the POW. You concentrate on communications, and on getting your sleep. Avon has enough of us camping with him in his workroom. - How's he treating you?” Did that sound too like minding him? But he did out with the emotional word hate, before Star One, which struck her as green. That he'd stick himself out like a sore thumb that way.

Blake mulled the question over, his bottom lip between his teeth. “Without reproach,” he smiled then. “I like to have the time with him. So that we needn't be on a bad footing, at Earth. Maybe we’re getting ourselves sorted out.”

“Sort him out about the ship,” she reminded him.

Blake kept his meditative crinkles. “You haven't even asked me where he is.”

“I thought I shouldn't.”

“He's shut in the laboratory. With Orac,” he nodded significantly.

“Bad habits to hide.”

But today Blake didn't believe the old and persistent rumours. He harumphed. “I can't see him fancying Orac. Those jazzy flashing lights. I think Avon would select a dourer-dressing computer.” At her grin, he pushed himself to his feet, slow and awkward. “I've a list to procure from our prisoner. Of who remains on the High Council, and who she managed to stab in the back before the exigencies of battle interrupted her.” He went through to Servalan's compartment, before Jenna could think up any grounds on which to persuade him to keep out of it. Alone, she gave a drawn-out, falling whistle.

#

Avon returned with Orac from the lab to find Jenna replacing Blake in his bay. “Interrogating, is he?”

“Again.”

“He should utilise some of the surgical equipment in here,” Avon smiled, and sat at his station.

In her wanderings up and down the bay, Jenna wandered past Blake's couch and sprawled to the deck. “Ouch,” she said from down there.

Avon peered at her. Her foot had rolled on the injector he'd tossed to the ground. Going over, he picked her up by both elbows. “Clumsy of you, Jenna.”

“If people won't be tidy.” While he braced her elbows, she twirled her right foot to test the joint. “How is Blake's wound, anyway? I forgot to ask him.”

Thus close to her, Avon thought, unhygienic situation. I don't wash enough either. But he slightly knit his brows. “Mending. Hurts him, as you can see.” He let go her elbows, to pick up his rubbish from the deck. But again he forgot to throw the injector away, and put it down at his station.

A while on. “Avon?”

“Yes?” He stopped pretending to read figures.

She was sitting on Blake's medical bed, boots on the undercarriage. “If it's a not a rude question.”

“Meaning it is,” he prompted.

“Have you ever told Blake you're adaptable?”

That rather clinched the evidence. She needed a straitjacket, or the new president did, perhaps both would be safest. Avon postponed his answer, for Jenna to wonder whether the question were terribly rude, and then his answer was, “Yesterday.”

“Yesterday?”

“Yesterday.”

“Why yesterday?”

“It came up in conversation.”

“What conversation?”

“That isn't rude. We were talking about Space City and he had a broadside about a brief admiration session I may have had and I owned up to make him happy.”

“He knew?”

“Oh yes. I knew he knew. He's given me the slogans for a while past. Like they scrawl in the prison latrines. Get out of our beds, love is free, and so on. I think he's going to make us legal.”

“Good old Blake.”

“Good old Blake.” Avon's fingers strayed for an object to fiddle with, almost the injector – leave that alone – settled on a data cube. With this for a prop he eyed her again. Not his job to put her in a straitjacket, but a crewmate owed a duty to tell her she was deranged, quite aside from the endangerment to all. Avon added, “What his stance is on rape in wartime I haven't gone into with him.”

She froze. Put two and two together to see how he had; acknowledged that with a wipe at her face. Answered, “You couldn't rape her if she were out cold.”

“Daintily put.”

“Servalan isn't dainty.”

“No.” Then he said, “It is a thought that leaps to mind, but to act on it...?”

“Your type, is she?”

“Supreme Commander Sex Bomb? I'd have to be locked up with her for a few more years than that. I have sense, Jenna.”

“Well, I don't.”

He slanted his head. All right. After a silence he pursued a rude line of inquiry. “Did you get tired of waiting for...?”

“Yes. I think so.”

All right. Avon wasn't often startled but he was certainly that. “It's a strange way to tell him no.”

“Is it?” she posed to him, or even, like a strategy meet, consulted him. “If he popped me the question I'd have the chance to tell him no, or yes.”

“He's your Fearless Leader. I believe that has hampered him so far.”

“It's time to ask me now if he had in mind to ask me.”

“And he hasn't asked you?”

“Maybe he has. But not up front, Avon. A simple question earns a simple answer. If he's not up for that he'll have to have my answer however.”

“So this is a no.”

“I'd say it's a no from his perspective, Avon.”

Avon arched his brows. “It's true that he'd be more tolerant if he found you with a double-penised reptilian from Tygon Five. On Servalan he doesn't have a sense of humour. Servalan... Servalan doesn't amuse. He didn't mind Gola -- or Tarvin.”

“No, he was quite amused,” she fired slowly at him.

Avon kept his brows arched. He thought about it. “Weren't you?” he returned then, fairly.

“I'm tired of jokes.”

“I can – relate to that.”

Jenna went on the offensive – against him this time, not Blake. “I know you can relate, Avon, odd as that concept is. Since I've shot myself in the foot, the field is clear.” She smiled in challenge at him.

“Me? His field? Thank you for the offer...”

“You throw your arms about him whenever the deck slides.”

“He's usually the stoutest object in the vicinity.”

“And I've caught your eyes wandering.”

“They were probably rolling.”

“The tradition is to roll your eyes up. To the heavens above, you see. Not down, to Blake's trousers.”

Avon spared her an eye from the data cube he turned in his fingers. “I was looking for his brain.”

“Blake ought to learn to remember to button his shirt before he stumbles onto the flight deck in the morning.”

“I wish he would. It entertains you, but there are those of us who'd rather peruse a travel brochure on Ursa Prime than face such a sight before breakfast.”

She swung her legs, forgetting her troubles in the game. The question remained: why had she shot herself in the foot? And what, for that matter, about Blake?

Jenna told him, “Mind you, you'd have to wop a tranquilliser pad on him to get anywhere.”

“If I want my hopes buoyed, I will ask.”

Merrily she contemplated that new move in the game. Perhaps she squeezed a glee from the fact that he had chances as dim as she did, now. “You haven't got a freighter's hope in a black hole.”

“Oh, why is that?”

“Why? He steers dead ahead. We tack about all over the starchart.” Less frivolously she said, “It's funny how you can tell.”

“What do you mean?”

“He's straight-straight. Straight as straight can be. Don't you think?”

“It's an axiom to me.”

“So where do we derive that? He's the man without a past.”

Avon took a mild interest. “I don't know. It must be in the genes, as the Federation says. Why defective genes aren't allowed to breed.”

“Were you – sterilised, Avon? I mean, that is a rude question.”

“No. I went undetected. The only person who detected me, when I lived in the domes --” he stretched his lips – “and I include myself in that, was Anna. One more thing we found in common.” He flickered his eyes over her.

Jenna rubbed at her nose, and politely changed the topic. “Three hundred to one.”

“What?”

“That's what I give you.”

“I give me infinity.”

“No-one's that straight, Avon,” she told him cheerily.

#

Blake roved through to the major bay. His thoughts were tumbling, but he did nod to Jenna as she slipped by him into the wing. Going along to the workstation, he laid a hand on the buzzing Orac. After a ruminative chewing of the lip, he reported the news to Avon, on a chortle as if he were cracking a joke. “I have a wife.”

Avon swivelled in his chair, with a face as erased as Blake suspected his had been with that dropped on him, before he'd gathered his wits. “You have a what, Blake?”

“A wife. She says I have a wife.”

Avon needed it again. “She says you have a wife?”

“Had a wife,” Blake corrected himself. “Whichever. She could be dead. Unless she's divorced me for negligence,” he joked, and his flanks shook. He controlled them – it wasn't that funny.

“You used to have a wife?”

“Seven years ago. Or that's when she was sent into slavery on a frontier world – after my first conviction. Servalan claims to have forgotten name and planet. She only browsed my records when she drew them from Central Security for Travis to study up on me.”

“Did she?”

“I told her it was nonsense. But the military do enslave deserters' families. Though my brother and sister were just executed. And Bran Foster didn't mention to me anything about a wife.”

“Didn't he?”

“Though Bran Foster had about a quarter hour with me before he got shot. He was re-recruiting me, telling me about the treatment. I didn't know whether to believe him or not. He wouldn't have liked to muck around with my memory any further than he had to, not at once.” With his eyes lost in Orac he said then, “I wonder what she's like.”

“Brave, to marry the head of the Freedom Party.”

“Maybe. But she did. And I'll get her out. Next thing. After Earth.”

“Why wait that long?”

“I've a revolution to see through. And my records are in Central. With her name. Where she is. Her history. Who she is.”

“Do you want to know who I think she is?”

“My wife. She's my wife.” There was a silence after that. It had come out creaky.

“Yes perhaps,” murmured Avon. “But I beg you to consider the other explanation.”

Blake walked away. Avon had managed to – snap him out of it. It might have been his courtesy. From a scratchy throat he assured Avon, “I know what that is.”

Avon gave a nod, as he saw.

“What does she get out of it?”

“Blake.”

He kept walking. For a few turns about the bay. “She gets me stupid enough to ask what she gets out of it. My God.” He almost thought he'd started to recover. To aid that he took deep breaths. “And I thought I was armour-plated with her. I did, you know.”

Avon said, “We have our Achilles' heels.”

“She knows mine. I knew she knew mine. This is – direct attack, but after she'd painted rings around the target. My God and can I be so stupid?” He roamed up and down, punishingly tugging out of shape his jaw and mouth. “I'm sorry for that exhibition, Avon. If I told you – I think I did tell you – about my clean living. A woman in my past, that'd be a turn-up.”

“Don't beat yourself up. She is the devil incarnate, and once the revolution's over, Blake, I imagine there's a future.”

Blake went and sat down on his couch. “Thanks,” he said Avon's way, pretty simply.

#

Jenna crouched on a foot, the other foot out under Servalan's chin. Kissing a dimple at Servalan's knee, caressing her from the ankle down to the fleshy rump, she jerked herself against her.

Flat underneath her, Servalan scrabbled at her foot with her nails, throwing her off the track. Jenna pushed against her throat and she stopped, flopping her head away. Next Servalan battered her free knee against her back, so Jenna thrust the attacking member down behind her. Then Servalan met her jolts. Wetness smeared to her belly. Kissing the knee which she had in armlock, she grabbed out for a breast and moaned, moaned bad before Servalan did.

After that, Servalan lay feeling her throat. “Sorry,” said Jenna. “Did I strangle you?”

Servalan lurched up and smacked her across the face. The arm Jenna put out in defence struck her and she crumpled back, but she returned, pushing and thumping. “Stop it,” protested Jenna from behind her arms.

Servalan did stop, and lay panting.

Jenna dropped down beside her. “Your throat okay?”

“I'm not hurt.” He greenish eyes gazed at Jenna, vigilant and serious.

“This is crazy,” Jenna muttered, throwing an arm over her eyes. “Listen, madame – I wish you'd either stop whacking me or stop smarming up to me.”

“I don't smarm up to you.”

“Do you hate this, or don't you?”

Rising up in a kneel, Servalan tugged Jenna by the hair and clambered onto her to drag her crutch over her face. That knocked off her arm. So Jenna stuck out her tongue, and Servalan sobbed.

“Bats in the engines,” Jenna mumbled aloud, but too mispronounced for the president to catch.

#

With his earpiece in, Avon reported, “I have audio on what I gather to be a rash of looped tapes playing about Earth. Do you want a sample?”

“Go on.”

He recited, “No drugs, no domes, no cameras in our homes.”

Blake chuckled in delight.

“We want meat, we want bread, we want the thought police out of our head.” Avon plucked off his earpiece. “Shall I go on? It gets more intelligent.”

“Don't be a misery, Avon. That's freedom you're hearing.”

Listening again, Avon met his eyes. “Do you like this one, Blake? Rape all the aphas, kill all the guards, shove them in the torture booth and turn it on hard.”

Blake sobered. “What did you expect? I've been in a torture booth, and just after I got out, I could have composed that little ditty myself. Things are going to get ugly for a while. We have to direct the anger, to targets of use to the people who are listening to that and wondering whether they're free.”

“You're going to have wonderful time on Earth,” said Avon. “Why don't you start here and now?”

“Eh?”

“Kill Servalan.”

Blake glanced in his eyes. “No, Avon. She rattled me but I won't alter my schedule for her. My schedule is a jury, before an audience of the people that you hear.”

“She's trouble, Blake.”

“Understatement of the year. But she's been under my skin, and perhaps you can avoid her so she doesn't get under yours.”

“I'd like to see her try.”

“That isn't the right attitude, Avon. Take a tip.”

Sunny tones from behind him. “Blake, do you need your bandages changed?”

He glanced around, to see Jenna at the door. “About time for that,” he agreed. Leaving Avon at the station, he met Jenna at the cabinets near the sink, where she found bandages, scissors and tape. Shrugging out of her maroon leather jacket, she soaped to her elbows in the sink. Underneath she had on a short-sleeve, white, making her bare arms tan. “Right,” she said, towelling. “Off with that cast, for a start.” He released the catch of the supporter which trapped his right arm. “Shirt next.” As his arm was slow, she helped him draw the shirt up and over his head. Last she peeled away bandages. “That hurt?”

“No. Except my eyes.” He squinted down at his shoulder, purple and yellow for inches around the actual hit mark. Jenna sponged him with hot, antiseptic water. A trinket dangled about her wrist, and her hair straggled in clumps, dull or gilt. The most fetching thing about her, Blake found, were the creases she had under her eyes when happy, and that was often, gaiety being a knack of hers, like orbital spins, and at times as worrying. “You're healing, but don't get strenuous,” she told him. “You're not up to any action yet.”

“I won't. I'm not likely to go for a hike around medical.”

“How's traffic, Avon?” she tossed over to the workstation.

“Not much action,” responded Avon rather drily.

Blake stood with hot water dribbling down his chest. Jenna soaked it up with a towel. The Jenna dilemma: that was his name for it. After his chest was dry, and her towelling had been redundant for a while now, Jenna taped on a new dressing. She held his shirt out for him, helping his arms find his armholes. “I don't need that cast anymore, I think,” said Blake.

“Up to you. You're done, then.” Jenna slung on her jacket again, and if she didn't skip out of the compartment, she just about did.

#

Though he kept listening to traffic, Avon had hung up his metallic jacket, with the arms like platinum and the shoulders like pewter, and his boots and socks were beside his couch. On his own couch, Blake pulled out his belt for comfort, and then pulled out his shirt for more. “I hate sleeping in a hospital.”

No comment.

With the lume panels down, and Avon in his black pullover and pants, Blake could only see what was bare about him, his hands and feet and face. His hair was twisted up at a temple, where he'd knuckled tiredly. “Do you sleep, Avon?”

“Not as often as the norm, you know that. I will, Blake.”

That was a new-style answer, from the new-style Avon. Blake was satisfied, nestled on his side and rucked the blanket up around his ear and chin.

But he might have slept himself out, at last. Orac whirred in the dimness next to Avon, throwing a gaudy lustre on half his face. This time the fly-buzz of Avon's box kept Blake awake.

He nearly didn't hear when Avon padded past him on his unshod feet. Into the other compartment.

Blake sat up. The bastard. He does the opposite of what I tell him. What does he want to do? Beard the lion in her lair? Behind my back?

He's gone to kill her.

No. 'Course he hasn't. I'd have words with him.

Blake laid back. And this was where he lay when Avon told him he loved him.

Perhaps he's peeved with her over the invention of my wife. Always was the gallant type, Avon, in his way.

#

Kerr Avon was here. He hadn't knocked, and Stannis jumped up as if caught red-handed – though for an hour she'd only hunched on her chair in surly resentment, doing what she could to blame Servalan. To her Avon said, “Blake went to sleep without his analgesic. Why don't you go and wake him up and dose him?”

“Why me?”

He stared her down, until Jenna ran her hands through her hair and stepped around him to leave. The door shut.

Avon turned his scrutiny to Servalan. “I hate to pry into what game you're playing. I might get my fingers dirty.”

“I'm bored, Avon,” she complained, leaning on a hand in the healing capsule.

“Who isn't?” He put his shoulder against the door. “She won't fix an escape for you because you open your legs. You can't think that.”

“Must you be vulgar, Avon?”

“It's difficult not to be.”

“Maybe I find her amusing.”

“Maybe you plan to amuse Blake. I do suppose you haven't much option of tactics under your circumstances. Though this is...” he searched for words. “Somewhat obscure.”

“I'm flattered that I can be obscure to you, Avon.”

“Out slumming, Servalan? You should learn to stay behind your desk.”

“I might do if not for you. But the reptile-infested tunnels of Aristo, the ex-penal colony Exbar, that sink Freedom City and Goth... the salubrious planets where I tryst with you, Avon. I wish we'd meet on my territory.”

Abruptly Avon said, “I'd leave her alone.”

She dropped her head coyly. “But will she leave me alone? Aren't I the party in need of protection here?”

“I doubt that.”

“So gallant you are, Avon. Blake would interfere. Should I cry rape to Blake?”

“Blackmail won't work either, Servalan. Because if you scare her with Blake I will tell him myself.”

“You have such a low mind.”

“That's right,” he agreed. “Which is bad luck, for yours.”

“We do have bad luck. But sooner or later, when Blake is out of the way and I get you alone, I'd like to discuss your low mind, and mine.”

“When you get me alone,” Avon told her, “I'll kill you.” He slipped out the door.

Servalan mused. What a nuisance he was, but how could she mind?

He may be political now, but Agent Bartolomew had found him only a bank robber and not as cunning as he thought. Why had Avon avoided her until he had to knuckle under and threaten her, there being nobody else for the job? Did she make him anxious perchance? Blake should never have kept him on the Liberator. Her sleeper.

She lay down again, thinking about Kerr Avon, with whom she had so much in common.

#

Blake wasn't getting any sleep. An hour ago Jenna had given him a shot he didn't need. Avon had returned from his visit and succumbed while studying graphs on his couch under a lamp – he was lights-out. Blake had got up to switch off his lamp, slip a blanket over him and take away his scatter of plastics, none of which disturbed him. When he did sleep he slept. Now Jenna put her head in again and frowned to make out if Blake were awake.

Up on his elbow he asked, hushed for Avon's sake, “What's wrong, Jenna?”

“Sorry, Blake.”

“Never mind me, can't sleep a wink. Sign of recuperation. How's the Supreme Commander?”

“I put her in the capsule. Won't hurt for half an hour.”

“Absolutely.”

With her back against the door, Jenna wiped her mouth, her lank and darker hair hiding her. “Did she sleep her way up the ranks?”

Blake towed himself to the foot of his couch, blanket following in his lap. “Didn't need to do that. She had her father's name and in actual fact she's quite a strategist, in blunt military terms. Intrigues whenever she has to.”

“Why does she wear cocktail dresses to her battles?”

“I can't begin to guess. She's certainly... not a peg in the hole herself, and wouldn't last further down in her own society.”

Jenna doodled on the door with her fingers, down by her hip.

“What did Avon want in there?” asked Blake.

“Dunno.”

He nodded.

She raked her hair back to stare at him sidelong, her eyes gleamy and her jaw bunched up. “Blake.” Harsh and recriminatory. “Why didn't you even ask me whether I'd gone over to Tarvin at first – and only later changed my mind?”

First he had to remember who Tarvin was. He did that. “The Amagon pirate?”

“I had a fling with him on Zolaf Four. He flaunted that in front of the others, so you must have known. Awful taste no doubt. But you never did bother to ask afterwards. I waited.”

“Wasn't my business, Jenna. My business was that you knocked out half his gang for us.”

“You must have believed I'd double-crossed you. But when I shot an Amagon and armed you, you did the take-it-for-granted act. Not a blink. Like Avon's detector shield which you never doubted for a moment. Why do you do that?”

Blake plucked at the blanket in his lap. “I don't like to think I take for granted, Jenna. Perhaps I suspended judgement, until I knew. In your case I depend on you to be fair and I haven't been wrong yet.”

“After the mess at Control, I'd have swung whichever way the vote swung. For giving you another go or for not giving you another go.”

“That's about what I had in mind when I recorded my message for you all.”

“And Cygnus Alpha?” she demanded in exasperation. “Avon reckons you've figured out about Cygnus Alpha. Was Cygnus Alpha fair?”

“What about Cygnus Alpha, Jenna?”

“While you were down freeing prisoners, Avon and me had just about decided to ditch you. No, we had decided. We gave you six hours. Yet before you went – when Avon challenged you – you said you didn't believe we'd leave you down there. Except you hung that around my neck, not Avon's. I admit I said we wouldn't --”

“I think what I said,” Blake clarified this tumble, “is that you wouldn't leave too soon. Six hours is --”

“Six hours isn't the twelve you asked for.”

“I'm foggy on the numbers, Jenna.”

“I'm not. I remember like yesterday.”

“You didn't go anywhere, did you? You were there to pick us up. Jenna, I nearly gave up myself after Control, and I run the show.”

“Outrageous,” she scoffed. “That you doubted yourself, depressed as you were. You never abandoned crew. Not Cally on Centero, not though I told you to stop being morbid and Avon told you to hotfoot it out of there. On Horizon you sold yourself to the Kommissar for us. Without informing us, either. I had to listen in on the guards who'd gone with you.”

“I can't lose crew,” he excused himself. “And on Horizon we were dead anyway.”

Her tirade overrode him. “But us – we discovered the jewels, and you were off the ship, and whatever I said when you were there in front of me, when you weren't I agreed to run. And you'd be stranded on Cygnus Alpha now.”

Under this barrage he asked, “Jenna, what is this about?”

“You're wrong to depend on me.”

Blake put a knuckle to his mouth. “I don't think so. But as Cally's people say, that would be my mistake...” He smiled at her. “And I'm allowed them.”

“You won't even believe me,” she flung at him, her pitch going up. “Listen, Blake. I'm a free trader by profession. I've done gun-running for rebels. When they were paying customers. I'm not Cally. I'm not Avalon --”

“You were famous, though, weren't you?” he interrupted. “Vila's told the tales that went around about you. Here's Jenna Stannis sneaking through the customs blockades on boycotted planets – boycotted as the Federation tamed them in submission – with food and medicine, and not neglecting the luxury market either.” He grinned. “And no few distressed populations were glad of you. Without smugglers brave enough to defy the trade barriers and the heavy sentencing, penalised worlds would crumble far quicker and be trodden under the Federation's heel.”

“Stop that, Blake,” she insisted in seeming frustration.

He did stop that. Instead he began, “On the other hand, I don't suppose you were squeaky clean, but then perhaps you've paid your debt to society by the hard labour of working with me.” He sounded put out by the end.

With a foot up against the door, and hunched with both hands on her knee, she steamed.

“Jenna,” he thought he should ask. “Does this mean you won't be going down to Earth with me?” He hinted his guesses, for her to nod at and assent to. “Had enough of the rebellion? You wouldn't want me to count on you – that what you mean? You suspect I'm depending on overmuch from you? You feel a little pushed?”

Jenna walked to him where he sat on the foot of his couch. Yanked her fingers through her hair, that smelt harsh. Resolute and gruff and frowning right past him, she said, “I love you, Blake.”

Her waist was right there before his hands, and her look was miserable. He said, “I love you too, Jenna.”

About-facing on her heel, she walked out of the compartment with a snarled order at the door.

Blake told himself, I'm not an expert on women. I think that was a no.

In spite of them there was a faint rasp-whistle from the other couch.

He wasn’t in the mood for sleep; he found a bit of work to do and thought about the Jenna dilemma. Once a wish to have a look at her overcame him and he switched on the camera in the side wing.

#

Waking from a heavy sleep, Avon found himself with a stiff twisted arm, his graphs neatly set aside and a blanket that had been none of his doing. The room was dim. Blake was busy at the workstation.

At the sink Avon splashed his face, hiked up his pullover to sponge his underarms, stroked wet fingers through his hair. After a visit to the urinal he went and poured himself a drink of the usual green solution. Throughout this Blake ignored him. Blake's habit was to wish people a good morning, at least when having no bad morning himself.

Finishing his drink, Avon addressed him. “Is traffic heavier?”

Blake shoved a stack of papers over to his left, where there was a foot of spare desk. “Translate those. Orac has it his circuits are engaged.”

Avon pulled up a chair, found a pen and began. Monotonous to do this by human calculation, and the majority of the results weren't relevant, but he didn’t mind having his circuits engaged. Blake supplied him with computer-chat transcripts, and Avon saved a few and screwed up most. About three hours into this, it struck him that Blake hadn't uttered a word for three hours. Avon lost his latest sum, frowned, and glanced across at him.

“What've you got?” asked Blake, catching it from the corner of his eye.

“Nothing, this is course drivel.”

Blake barked at him, “I want shipping to and from Earth counted.”

“I know you do. This is just the Mars beacon getting itself scrambled without Star One.” Avon crumpled it and started on the next. He kept his frown.

“Orac, where the hell are you, this is dissipating on me,” growled Blake, as he re-calibrated his seekers.

Orac whirred. “If you would only focus the --”

“Well, I've lost it,” Blake shouted over the computer, and he backhanded the facia of the instrumentation in front of him. It rattled.

“Without the Liberator's etheric --” tried Orac.

“Just do it and don't talk.” Blake snatched out its key.

Avon's pen scribbled on. In a bit he noticed a camera display on a little monitor by the diagnostics.

As the hours went by his stomach rumbled. He got thirsty. When he checked the time and saw latish in the afternoon of this his day, he put his pen down, rolled it under a finger on the desk and said, “Go easy on her, Blake.”

Blake wheeled around in his seat. His murky eyes glared at Avon, inquisitively. “You shut up about her.” He wheeled back.

Avon picked up his pen. He got on with his task. No-one had switched the lumes up. Avon translated under a lamp, and Blake only had the greenish glimmer of the data Orac was raking in for him.

Several hours and Blake said, “Right. Done those?”

“I'm three-quarters through what we have. My math is slower than Zen's.”

“Stick with it.” Blake rose from the station where he'd been fixed for – eleven hours to Avon's knowledge, by the clock. He strode to the dividing door. He knocked.

Alone, Avon threw down his pen.

#

In the doorway Blake stood heavy on his spaced feet, his jaw dark and his underlip a bit off his teeth. “Servalan. Any complaints?”

Servalan met his narrowed eyes and forwarded no complaints on her treatment as a prisoner of war. There was no point, due to Avon no doubt.

Blake trod inside and over to Jenna, dropping a hand onto her shoulder. “Jenna, you're doing a good job. Tell me if she's any trouble. We'll be rid of her on Earth.” He trod on to Servalan. “Your royal highness will have to live like the deltas for a while. In about sixty hours I hand you over to the revolutionary government. If there is one.”

“And if there isn't?” she asked, her tone only equanimity and sense. The way she talked to those fellow officers whom she wished neither to domineer nor flatter, but could work with. Even though he looked like a terrorist.

“Then I shoot you.” He turned. On his way out he ordered, “Come and have dinner with us shortly, Jenna.”

What did that visitation mean? No monkeying about with my crew? Get your hands off my darling? Put up with Jenna, because I'm not doing a damned thing about it? It had shaken him, perhaps more than his slave wife, in whose existence he may have little faith. The formidable Blake couldn't get a screw anywhere, and that in spite of his popularity.

“I don't think he likes you,” said Stannis, boasting of it. She didn't know that he knew. And she was proud of Blake for hating Servalan when she herself didn't have the political gravity to do so.

“What does he think his revolutionary government will do with me?”

“Blake means to put you on trial. To exhibit your sins. We figured you're an exhibitionist and you cram whopping sins into those little dresses of yours.”

Servalan remained dead serious. “Blake means to execute me. And he isn't joking.”

“No. That's what you get when you're a dictatorship and the people rise to power. You might have to be brave in defeat, Servalan.”

“I might.”

There was a silence. Jenna Stannis found it awkward. But not awkward enough to contravene the judgement of Blake. Finally she climbed out of her chair. “Dinner,” she excused herself and followed after her leader.

Servalan's time was running out. She wasn't going to be quizzed at a public trial for the secret history of the Administration and then gassed. Not that she was persuaded the rebels could take Central Security. But if Blake lost this time, she did believe he'd shoot her, notwithstanding his abstentions in the past – teleporting up after taunts which meant he'd rather the president sack her, as the embarrassment would do more damage than her going down a martyr to terrorism. Different this time, because Blake believed that at last this was the revolution.

#

On a flimsy metal table, such as you might take on a picnic, Blake laid three sets of cutlery. “Food, Avon. Bring those translations to assess while we eat.”

Avon stopped his mental grind and flexed his cramped hand. The camera display, he saw, had been turned off.

Dinner was down-to-business, Blake at his most customary and everyday. He read traffic statistics, and consulted Jenna for spaceship know-how, and chewed his way through what he had in front of him. He even crinkled up at a wisecrack of hers. Jenna entered and Jenna exited again with no clue from him that he was clued in and not a sign of bad temper.

Afterwards he flagged. He pushed away the statistics – not ungently – weight on his arms on the table, shoulders crooked. With a grimace to himself he said – to himself or to Avon – “Don't bother your head, Blake.”

Avon sat in wait.

“Situation normal: she used to say that to me when I was away on a mission and checked in. I get back to find frozen aliens rampaging over the ship.”

“I remember that one,” said Avon.

Blake caged his lip in his teeth, coughed down in his throat. “It's the attention I pay, I imagine. Are you any use with women, Avon?”

“I have been. Perhaps.”

“It's a hell of a way to tell me no. Or is that egotistic of me?”

“It's roughly the exact thought I had.”

Blake nodded. “I've been a right bastard today.”

“Day's over. No, I don't think you have, but that's by the by. Time for us both to turn in?” It seemed late. It was late for Blake.

“Yes.” One of his arms flopped further on the little table. His hand was there half-open right in front of Avon.

Avon took the hand: if he turned out to need an ostensible purpose, to pull him up and send him off to bed.

But the hand closed on his in answer. Blake stared at the table.

I'll sit here holding your hand, Blake. That's fine. What the hell else can I do for you?

Half an hour went by. He glanced at the clock to see. The only change in Blake was a slow transferral of his gaze from the table to their hands.

So, Avon was in love with him and this was fairly hard to take. Pity? Christ. Who was Christ? What was pity? He learnt. It hurt like torture, but tortures you undergo for sake of a loved one. In your own time, Blake.

Blake's eyes, the halves he saw – and they never had turned the lumes up – became cloudy, and his face did change. He made a noise in his throat. Then he tugged on Avon's hand. He tugged his hand, and he lifted his eyes, and his eyes had ceased to think. They felt. They didn't feel his heartache, they felt the physicality, the warmth of the hand he grasped in his. His face – thicker, fleshier.

That's fine too, Blake.

Avon let himself be tugged to his feet. And then he took over: with the other hand on his shoulder he steered Blake backwards and he sat him in a low chair. And he knelt in front of him.

Blake said nothing. He had been pummelled, he had switched his brain off and he asked for comfort. He sat there.

Avon shook out of his hand – he had to shake him off – in order to undo his belt and trousers.

Blake slid down and settled, and both hands came to nurse the back of his head. He was in this – he wasn't going to pretend he wasn't. He may or may not be aware who Avon was, but he participated. His hand rubbed in Avon's hair.

Need is greedy. Avon didn't muck about, and Blake didn't muck about either. He had him in his throat and he didn't have a lot of time to think about that. He switched his brain off too. He gobbled him. Blake had a musical voice when he was in the mood and he was in the mood now though he didn't use words. He just conveyed his gratitude and that was nice. And –

And –

And he was hung, but Avon had believed that, and he was intense the way he got and unashamed, and if Avon thought him sexy in a very funny way when plotting revolution or arguing with him, now, Blake only thought and cared that he was near to come down Avon's throat.

And then he did.

As soon as Blake gave sign of normal consciousness, he took his face out of his crotch, he sat back on his heels.

“I don't know what to say,” said Blake.

“Nothing. It's creature comfort. From time to time we need it. Now go see if you can sleep, and don't even think of this again.”

“Those your instructions?”

“Oh yes they are.”

“You?”

“What about me? I've done that a few times before, Blake.”

“Fair enough. Can I thank you?”

“No. You did.” He smiled.

Blake began, “I'm glad I haven't --”

“Did I tell you what to do next, Blake?”

Very slightly he laughed in his throat. “Yes. New habit you've got. One might think you were the owner of the ship.”

“One might.” And Avon arose from the spot, as encouragement for Blake to copy him.

Blake took the hint. He put the furniture away, he stood, and in the courteous way he had he walked with Avon, over to the couches, where he touched him on the arm.

Setting the example, Avon unaccoutred, to his blacks, and slithered in his blanket. When Blake had done likewise, Avon said out loud, “Orac, we're not to be disturbed. Lights: off.”

#

“You above uniforms?”

Servalan had picked up her white satin, draped over the healing capsule. “There is nothing uniform about me.”

“Shame about your pearls.” Squinting, she tested a specimen against the lamp. “Nice pearls.”

“I won't miss them.”

Jenna rolled onto her elbows, and pearls rolled off the couch and scattered. “Like to wash your dress?”

“There's nothing else to put on.”

“Modest? If Avon walks in he'll only smirk at you, and if Blake sees you he won't see you. And I've seen you. Go and wash it.”

Servalan had a non-combatant fleshiness and a slight stoop as she soaked her dress. She wobbled. Her tapering manicured nails must get in the way, but she coped. At the rear of her head was a whorl where the skin showed through. She neatened her fur into a pillar with depilatory, but Jenna had found that out. Jenna was losing her desire for her, but not her baffled fascination for what was alien. Naked and with a hand in the sink, the president said, “I trust I can return your hospitality at a future date.”

“I for one would bite cyanide.”

“You can't take what you dish out?”

“You wouldn't be dishing anything out. You'd just have your guards march me out and shoot me.” Gun there between her elbows, she laid her chin on her fists. Madame's feelings about Sappho childishness, to use her own quaint phrase, Jenna hadn't fathomed yet, even if madame had. She jumped in but was prone to kick up a fuss on the way or exact revenge afterwards. Mind you, she may have the same manners in bed with everybody. “Servalan? You've done this before? In between vamping the men, that is.”

Servalan swished her dress around in the water. “Once. Once upon a time.”

“That long ago?” Jenna liked stories. In a funny way she even liked Servalan. She must do, or Servalan wouldn't get away with what she got away with.

“I was a cadet. She was a trainer.”

“Sucking up to authority figures?” Then Jenna said, “Sorry.”

“Yes,” answered Servalan. “Actually, you met her.”

“I did?”

“You met her corpse.”

Jenna thought. “You mean Kasabi.” Blake had told them the resistance leader used to be a training officer with Space Command. In politics, wasn't it?

“Kasabi,” Servalan repeated.

“Hum.” Again Jenna wondered what she'd slept with. Kasabi had been dead in a chair in Control – a browned woman in army fatigues, in her forties. “You must have had a grudge against her.”

“Kasabi had the grudge. At Command Academy I reported her for treason. She was arrested to face a court martial. The sentence would have been death.”

“What went wrong? She escape?”

“I suspect a classmate of mine saw to that. As a kind of practical training exercise – to see if she could. It didn't matter to me at the time, I'd earnt my merit badge. But now Kasabi is dead. And I doubt any of her ring are sorry about that.”

“Her ring? Weren't they dead too?”

“No, no. Our ring, at the Academy. Most were rejected from service after Kasabi was sacked. Only three of us survived. Of the three, one was snapped up by Intelligence the next year, and one is now a contract killer. As for me, I became Supreme Commander. We were the last year of cadets that Kasabi had, and her finest, and we were trained to go on to subvert the Federation. Worms in the woodwork. Cancers in the organ.”

“You mean,” Jenna grinned, “Kasabi had you picked out to be a secret revolutionary?”

“Vainglorious of her, wasn't it? She was dreadfully proud of us once. Now I've killed her.”

“You do sound satisfied about that.”

“I am. The sick lesbian. She played with our minds. We were nineteen.”

Jenna scratched in her tumbled hair. Bad memories and a chip on her shoulder. That elucidated things.

“What did you do with the child?” asked Servalan then. “Kasabi's child?”

“The girl? She stayed on Earth. Poor kid's off on a mission to compensate for betraying Blake.”

“None of us have children,” brooded Servalan, as if it festered. “Don't you?”

“Me? No, um, never thought about it, I guess.” She laughed. “I'd have to strap it behind the flight chair or something.”

Servalan gazed at her like at an alien, then back at her washing.

“Kasabi told you cadets she belonged to the resistance?”

“Not her. She never slunk out of her camouflage. But we in her ring knew she was a traitor – it made her exploitable. She wrote us first-rate reports, so we'd go far in the service and supercede her in her work. The joke is on her. I am the president, and my rival is the top agent in Central Security. Kasabi with her pathetic secret agenda was nothing to us.”

“You had her fooled, did you?”

“For long enough. She wrote a private report on me to sabotage my career – after she'd learnt I wasn't another of her pets. But it was too late by then. I outmanoeuvred her.” Servalan giggled. “Do you know what she said to me? Rendezvous with Blake? More in your line, surely.” This she delivered with mimicked crustiness. “The old witch never forgave me for crawling into her bed. I did that to record the truth out of her. For my report. I told her afterwards how awful it was. Degenerate and vicious, she said before she died – I like that from her. For a while she thought I was brilliant and divine. She couldn't resist indoctrinating General Servalan's daughter.”

“But she never did create any undercover rebels?”

“Far from it. Out of our year she created a freelance assassin, an undercover agent for Central and a military president. I've subverted her Federation, haven't I? Space Command now runs it. You see, she trained us to go beyond the pale. She reared us to live among the enemy and trust nothing. She exalted our conceit and showed us we could do anything. But she used us and everything was a sham. She lived only for the Academy and had nothing but hatred for it. Now she hates us. She thought she taught us sedition, but she merely taught us to be like her. Duplicitous. Playing a double game. She was a liar.” Servalan stopped swishing in the sink. “I'm the only one of us survivors who doesn't go by a codename. In fact, my rival has three names.”

“Who's this rival of yours?”

“The girl who seduced Kasabi before I did. She was nothing if not precocious.”

Jenna pulled a peculiar face. “The Academy isn't as dull as I thought.”

“Not that year.”

“Is that why she's your rival? Over the trainer?”

“Hardly,” sniffed Servalan. “That hag? She's my rival because she's as clever as me. And she fixed an escape for Kasabi, after I'd had her arrested, to prove that she was. It was a game between us.”

“Was this other girl fooling Kasabi too?”

“What else? We had to be clever. Kasabi was handsome and strong and smart – we were supposed to model ourselves on her. But her mistake was to adore what she created. She thought we belonged to her. Anna said to me, I'm going to kiss her, and you watch her fall over herself, like a Frankenstein with a charming monster.” Giggling again, her wide naked eyes shone, amused and admiring. “And she did, to see if she could. Both Anna and I were smarter than Kasabi, and stronger.” Hanging her head, she beamed to the side at Jenna, boastful. “And far more enchanting.”

“Anna? Avon has an enchanting Anna in his past too.”

“Does he?” asked Servalan. “Was his Anna as enchanting as mine?”

Jenna began playing marbles with pearls. They clicked together and ran between her breasts. “You'd have to ask Avon.”

“Should I?” smiled Servalan, contemplating it. Then she opted for a dismissive shrug of her bare shoulders. “I'm utterly sure she wasn't.”

Right, thought Jenna, popping her a sly grin. She'd hate to mention it to her, but Servalan did get ardent in snatches – between scolding and bruising Jenna. The president plucked her dress from the water and squeezed it, clumsy and contorting her features as if doing a job outside her field.

#

“News from Earth,” Blake told Servalan. “Central has fallen to the rebels.”

She rose from her stool and said to herself, “Central Security is gone.”

“Happened just an hour ago.” Thinking it a courtesy to keep the president up to date on the collapse of her regime, he'd gone in with the morning's transcripts. “Or that's when Avalon pulled down the Federation's flag. Now the flag of the revolution is flying. Avalon's transmitting to the Near Worlds and on through booster. She's sending squads to open the domes. Earth Guard defended Central, but with no home fleets there you were defeated from the atmosphere.”

“May I see your information?”

“Certainly.” Blake handed the transcripts to her and stood over her while she read. Without any shoes on, she wasn't the height of his shoulder. Earnest but not daunted, Servalan ran through every message twice.

“Thank you, Blake.” She passed the papers back.

Had pluck at least. Blake left her to it.

#

He sat across from Avon and discussed the revolution – as it happened. Blake was happy enough. The mood was mildly celebratory, and Jenna came in often for the news.

He even felt proud. Me and my crew. We did our bit. He didn't say so to them, outright. He'd find a way.

Once Avon mentioned to him, “Your records, Blake, are in rebel hands.”

“I'll have a look at them.” He wouldn't find a wife. At least he'd be astonished if he did.

“Worth a look. She doesn't lie every day of the week.” Avon bent to a dial.

Lucky Blake had the distraction of the revolution. If only Avon knew. Crazed sexual fantasies centred on his mouth. Clearly he takes me for utterly indifferent – I can tell, because, damn his eyes, he isn't even awkward. Been and gone. A prison transaction. It happens. Blake maintained the humour, and had a fraction of a smile as he discussed the revolution with Avon.

There was an unfunny side. He'd known he was as... vulnerable, yes. As vulnerable as this. And was that, too, why he kept his hands off Jenna?

Of course it was why.

I like Jenna, but I'd be around her little finger, it's scarcely captainly. Are fifteen-year-olds as bad as this? No. They aren't thirty-four and they haven't had an emptied head.

Give me one vivid memory of sex and Jesus. There goes my self-discipline. It's a Freedom City brothel in my head. Except it's about nothing else than Avon's mouth.

“Won't you join in the chorus, Avon?” he said with cheer. Down there, down on Earth, they were singing a liberty song.

#

A year ago, Servalan had lent Kerr Avon's records to a psychostrategist, to be read there on her space station. She'd asked, more or less, how corruptible Avon was. The next day the puppeteer emerged from his guest quarters with his findings.

“We have here an obscure technician,” he introduced the case. “And a theft of five million credits, which he hoped would escalate in time to five hundred million. Enough to undermine the standing of the Terran Bank. What strikes you about that?”

“Greed,” pronounced Servalan. “And megalomania.”

“It was rather ambitious of him, wasn't it?”

“Or perhaps he just likes a challenge,” she said whimsically.

The puppeteer smiled at her joke. “Now Kerr Avon is with a hunted political faction. Through no doing of his own. He was stuck on a prison ship with Blake, there was an escape, and here he is stuck on the Liberator with Blake. What are his options?”

“We expected him to leave the Liberator. He has no history of interest in politics. Or even in property, such as the ship. Just cash.”

“That is well spotted. I think he likes liquidity. Ownership isn't his style, nor even investment – almost as a mathematician, purely those numbers matter to him. I do not wish to wax lyrical --”

She arched her brows.

“ – but instead of megalomania, or as a subset, we have a devotion to the astronomical figure, that is quite as unrealistic as any other delusion of grandeur. His crime was brilliant, but simply not sensible.”

“Is he a lunatic too?”

“Oh yes. His greed is beyond the common definition of the word and an aesthetic to him. He has structured a philosophy upon it. His money-lust has near to a disinterest. But it is central to his psychology and cannot be challenged.”

She laced her fingers.

“At this stage, however, Avon won't leave the Liberator. I would go so far as to say, Avon can't leave. Had he absconded early on, he could have repeated his fraud – he learnt at his trial where he tripped up technically. But now it is too late to get out of the Liberator. He is in a trap.”

“A trap?”

“A psychological trap.”

“What about his greed?”

“His greed is what sprang the trap. Even the High Council would be glad to pay Avon the capture price for Blake and his crew, and to pardon him. He only needs to contact you, and he could be rich and exempt from prosecution. Am I right?”

“The Council is desperate for Blake,” she admitted on the Council's behalf.

“Blake is rising fast up the wanted list. To Avon, Roj Blake is a walking sack of credits. Whenever he sees Blake, credit signs flash before his eyes. That you can count on.”

“I do,” she nodded. “Then you agree with me he's apt to sell Blake to us?”

“That is the question.”

She expedited things. “And the answer?” Not many psychiatrists specialised in strategic work for the military or the Justice Department – it precluded the use of jargon. Therefore one had to be patient with the species.

“Personal loyalty is crucial to Avon. Keep in mind that he whitewashed his acquaintances at his trial, at least three of whom – in hindsight – should have had lesser charges brought against them. Complicity, harbouring.”

“But Avon went down alone. Even to Cygnus Alpha.”

“He did not try to turn state's evidence or lessen his sentence with information of harm to those who had aided him.”

“Is this a... sense of honour?”

“I think, he keeps his honour very much person-to-person. It doesn't fit into his theory. He doesn't believe in it.”

“So Blake?”

“This sets up a conflict, as at once you can see. Avon has two psychological avenues. He can search out failings in Blake, even be hypercritical, to excuse himself for his thoughts of betrayal. The worse Blake is, the less is Avon's guilt. His other avenue is to become protective of Blake. Because Blake is at risk from him, he can find qualities to admire in Blake, even exaggerate them to himself. The more admirable Blake is, the less is Avon's temptation.”

“Cash or loyalty.”

“A wiped slate with the Justice Department and up to twice the figure he had accrued in his fraud at the time of his arrest: that if he turns Blake in. The vigour of the conflict, Supreme Commander. Being with Blake must exhaust him. He'll be shredding his fingernails.”

“In your judgement, is it to be hypercriticism of Blake or over-admiration?”

“Why, both.”

At the risk of being psychostrategically cliched, Servalan mentioned, “Avon has a line in sexual deviancy.” She inclined her head. “As seen in his incarceration. I have the footage.”

“Is that a hypothesis, Supreme Commander?”

“Oh,” she waved her hand. “Am I being out of theoretic fashion?”

“You're stealing my thunder. The libido is a strong drive and Avon could use that energy as insurance. Again to defend Blake from himself. If he resorts to that, then whenever Avon skirts near to betraying or harming Blake, it would only exacerbate his erotic feelings for Blake.”

“How diverting.”

“His trap again.”

“Blake is normal, however. Therefore that would be a dead end for Avon.”

“No, no. Not psychologically. In fact, a futile desire for Blake could be a resolution for Avon.” The puppeteer beamed. “Which is why I predict it. He can prevent his temptation with mere admiration, but what of his guilt?”

“Do explain.”

“Hankering after Blake would be punishment for his thoughts of cashing Blake in. And he'd have the least stress that way. That's a solution he could live with. Or he may go so far as to provoke an explicit rejection from Blake. To do penance. We know Blake hasn't thrown him off the ship, as Avon must feel he deserves. A lesser, personal rebuff could serve.”

“Does our mercenary Avon truly think in terms of guilt and self-punishment?”

“I do fear he does. Another reason why he made his trial hard on himself: guilt over the death of his collaborator Anna Grant.”

Servalan reduced his spiel. “You say he is on a seesaw. But which side will end up heavier?”

“I said he's in a trap, Supreme Commander. He can't get away when he's thrown these emotional ropes around Blake to keep Blake safe. But that he had to do because he saw a walking sack of credits. My prediction is that he'll corner himself into an escalating admiration for a man whom he must keep estranged out of guilt and mistrust of himself.”

She opened her hands. “Is that of any use to me?”

“It is neat,” he smiled. “Kerr Avon defeats himself.”

With a measure of sarcasm she said, “Maybe I won't have to, then.”

Servalan dismissed the psychostrategist. She'd consulted him with hopes to bribe Kerr Avon. Now she decided to wait and see. Avon would either contact her or else he wouldn't – or if the puppeteer were right, he'd never make up his mind.

An ex-case of Bartolomew's, now hers. That amused Servalan. The activities of Bartolomew weren't in any report, but questions had been asked in Central, questions a Supreme Commander heard about. Bartolomew's controller had given the alarm. For a while he suspected that his agent would run with her case.

Anna had seduced him – that could be told from his trial transcripts.

And was this Kerr Avon enough to turn Anna? Dropping in a data cube, Servalan flicked through the pictures of him.

#

To take an interval Avon wandered into Jenna's wing. The vicinity of Blake was a little more testing than usual.

“What can we do for you?” Jenna met him with, slouched on the floor.

“Give me refuge from the triumphing rabble, which is all I hear about in there.” He leaned his shoulder against the shut door.

“Do be our guest.” Jenna went back to fiddling with the power pack of her gun.

From her stool Servalan mused, “Funny how Security mistook you as political, Avon.”

“Me political?” He hadn't heard about this at his trial.

“That Matter Transmission Project you worked on was a hotbed of dissidents.”

“Trust Blake,” Jenna tossed in. “He worked on it too, remember?”

Servalan nodded. “The early heyday of the Freedom Party. Blake was recruiting among the alpha and beta designers and technicians.”

“Thought his following was labour grade. Vila knows more about his mob than you do, Avon,” grinned Jenna.

He cocked an eyebrow at her.

Servalan addressed herself to Jenna. “His conspiracy extended right through the grades. He had a mild political front, which operated legally. He had popular support. He had trained squads for the direct action. He also needed a cadre among the technocrats.” She turned to Avon. “When Security woke up to the epidemic, there was a scare. Hundreds were stigmatised as activists. A third of the technical crews in your dome were suspected of dissident leanings. You were on the list yourself, Avon.”

“Merely for working in Matter Transmission?”

“Your career prospects suffered for it.”

“Is that how I got into this mess?” Avon bared his teeth. “Because Blake was on a subversion drive.”

“Blake isn't alone to blame. The Security analysts were busy at the time, and the difference between anti-government thinking and antisocial thinking escaped them. They were rummaging through profiles for conspirators. And – on paper at least – you looked to be the right kind. So you had a black mark.”

That he found steep. “I'm obliged to Blake. I'll have to thank him.”

“You ought to read your grading report, Avon. Or did you?”

“No, I can't stand the jargon.”

“You didn't even peek at your intelligence quotient?”

“I am confident it is astronomical.”

“Yet why did your bosses underrate you? You did get mundane jobs, Avon. Which is why you had to make a splash with the banking cartel fraud. The Federation never authorised you to develop a detector shield. Which is our loss.”

“My bosses' intelligence quotients weren't astronomical.”

“In the Matter Transmission Project, Blake was on a higher rung than you. He designed, while you – more or less – crunched numbers. Why is that?”

“Blake is always telling me the system is absurd.” He knew about Engineer Blake and his rung.

Servalan went on, “Blake's intelligence quotient – while not astronomical – was ample for any position he wished to rise to. Though I fear his therapy may have knocked him down a peg by this stage. But his grading report missed his mental defects. In hindsight, the signs of paranoia are there. Yours, however, Avon, were glaring.”

He looked at her lazily. “Were they?”

She smiled and nodded. “You always thought everybody was out to get you. Blake only decided later on that the State was out to get the people. You see, he structured his paranoia. While yours is a kind of amorphous atmosphere that seeps through everything.”

“Avon,” said Jenna from her knee-up slouch to his right. “She's a lying bitch.”

Servalan slowly turned her head. “Why, thank you.”

“Pleasure.” Jenna fiddled on with her gun.

“If only you had accessed your profile, Avon – no trouble for an astronomical IQ like yours – you'd have had warning. Of the time-bomb ticking away in your skull. Or perhaps you didn't dare to read your profile? The criminotherapists who picked your case for research had a field day with it.”

“Madame, shut up. Unless you want this gun where it fits.”

Servalan blinked slowly. “Blake was a great figure once – after his fashion. In the Freedom Party. Now to be wasted on a crew like you.”

“Blake isn't wasted on us.” Jenna flashed a camaraderie grin to Avon, insistent on being carefree in the face of Servalan.

“Kleptomaniacs, moral vacuums and head cases. He could have been more selective.”

Grin at a stop, Jenna had no repartee for that. Neither did Avon. Servalan peered from one to the other as if wondering why the conversation had fallen off.

There was a knock at the door. Scrambling up, Jenna told it to open, and Avon removed his shoulder from it. Blake popped his head in. “Zen's up,” he informed them. “He says life support in three hours, main drive in five.” Like Servalan he glanced either side of him at his quiet crew. “We can get our bearings now, Jenna. Avon, coming through?”

“Yes.” But he remained where he was as Jenna followed Blake out and the door shut again. Servalan was the most tainted of information sources. He did not deign to read his records. Though he asked her nothing, he waited. Was he curious?

What Servalan said was, “Roj Blake. You don't think you're overreaching yourself there, Avon?”

Shoulder replaced against the door, he crossed his arms at this new angle and waited on.

“What a ship this is,” she mused. “Between Jenna Stannis and yourself. I dare say Blake is eager to get to Earth and get off it. Jenna is flagrant enough, as I should know. Poor Blake must feel hedged about by deviants. Have you tried it on him yet, Avon?”

He kept his deadpan. He'd depended on his deadpan through worse. “Tried what?”

“You needn't deny it to me, Avon. A psychostrategist of mine has theorised about you. Forgive me if I'm being personal. Though I know you don't embarrass easily.”

“Ah.” Avon didn't pose as short on IQ. “Puppeteers. I thought that was too original for you.”

“Original? Odd, yes – but not original of you. You are doing what we predicted. My psychostrategist deduced it out of your behavioural pathology, which he mapped from your records. No, you have to get odder than that to be original. Terrible, isn't it?”

“I doubt I could dream up anything odder.” He went modest. “I wouldn't make a puppeteer, would I? Lack of creativity.”

“Mine enjoyed you, Avon. You have a neat head.”

“I'm glad I'm not messy.”

“Neat in the way you corner yourself. Are you cornered here on the Liberator? I argued for you. I told my puppeteer you'd forsake these revolutionary fanatics. Why did you never go?”

“Why? The Liberator is mine.” He nodded. “At last.”

“Is it? Excellent news. Name your price and you have a purchaser.”

“Well, after your war, it could be priceless.”

“Do think about it. In the meantime, if you'd be amused, I could try and remember my puppeteer's reasoning for you. The whys and wherefores of this oddity of yours about Blake.”

He cocked his head. “I'm gripped. Why don't you do that?”

“Blake is for sale. I am the buyer. You are going to be the seller. You know that, Avon. You've known that all along. And it gets you hot.”

Avon did nothing. He even thought nothing.

“I know it sounds twisted,” admitted Servalan. “But that was his analysis. He did lose me in the sequence, or there was a step missing. I didn't get the connection between your totting up the price on Blake's head and your wanting to drag him to bed. I'd hate to think you were a sadist. Though there are predators who toy with the prey. Cats do. When a cat catches a bird, he likes it to flap. He opens his paws and risks it escaping. In the end he sinks his teeth in. But then the fun's gone.”

“You have sick puppeteers, Servalan.”

“I'm not wild about the profession myself.”

“Are any of your puppeteers sick enough to analyse you?”

“I'd send them to the slave pits if they tried,” she beamed at him. “Which reminds me. I informed Blake about his wife, perhaps you heard? But not where she is. She's in the slave pits of Ursa Prime. You can pass that information onto Blake for me. Or not. I forgot for your sake, Avon. Won't she adore her husband and her liberator? Though she won't if you don't tell him what planet to find her on. Do you want her name? I've forgotten it with Blake but you only have to ask me.”

“She is as imaginary as your puppeteer and his theory.”

“We knew you were a faggot before you did, Avon.”

“You may have,” he said. “Dyke.”

She arched her brows, as if to say, don't swear at me. “I'm sure you keep up with the latest bounty postings. What is it, now he's at the top of the wanted list? Five million for Blake himself? I'll double that figure, Avon. Just for you. In cash.”

“Open,” he said to the door, and walked through.

#

“Any contacts with Vila or Cally?” Blake asked Zen through the intercom. He kept half an eye on Avon, who'd gone to a chair in the corner half an hour ago and been silent.

The intercom boomed, “Vila recorded a voice message thirty-two hours ago, and Cally recorded one nineteen hours ago.”

“Play them back for us.”

Vila chatted at them about crashing on a planet, running into horrible natives, but being rescued by two sisters – a blonde sister and a dark sister, he detailed – whose father used to design weaponry for the rebellion and was keen on Blake, but the sisters were keen on any rebel hero so Blake needn't hurry to get there. As an afterthought he gave his galactic coordinates.

“He's happy,” said Jenna.

Cally reported that a deserter from Space Command, who ran contraband with his pursuit ship, had retrieved her pod in space. She was recovering from minor burns, and would keep the Liberator updated on her heading and speed. She too ranked her pickup as low priority.

“I hope he's very ex-Space Command,” commented Blake. Alongside Jenna at the workstation, he calculated his fight time to Earth at standard by twelve, once the drives were up.

Avon spoke from his corner. “You're going to Earth before picking up the others?”

“Both are safe. And didn't you hear? Our drift has done us a service.”

“Drift?” muttered Jenna. “Rolling along the shock waves, more like.”

“We lost power on the near edge of sector nine, we're half through sector eight now. No, I need to get to Central without delay. After that you can chase Cally on her pursuit ship.” Through Orac, he transmitted a message to Avalon in Central Security: The Liberator has Servalan. ETA nineteen hours.

Jenna, who wasn't at peak fitness, asked him, “Can I get in a couple of hours shut-eye before I have to fly us to Earth?”

“Course you can. You want to be awake for the revolution.”

“I guess I do.” She smiled at him, and he at her.

Without her he rough-sketched his flight path, with what he knew from navigation beacons of Federation flotillas returning to base. He may never see Vila or Cally again. While his pen did join-the-dots he thought of recording a goodbye for the two of them. Thanks for sticking by me, hope we can get together sometime. Wasn't sentimental, was it? He'd known them for almost three years, for Vila, two for Cally. Yes, he'd have to leave a message with Zen.

From the corner of the bay he heard, “Why don't you kill that monster, Blake? Forget your jury of the people. Just spatter her brains about the medical wing. I'll even wipe up the mess.”

Blake swung about to him, and smiled. “Servalan's done a head job on you.”

“Not at all. She told me nothing I didn't already know.”

“She hasn't bothered you then?” He turned back to his work.

“Did you know your bounty is five million now, Blake?”

Marking crosses at bases again, Blake rumbled a bit, none too astounded at what Servalan gossiped about to Avon. “Is it? I'm proud.”

“You should be. I spent twelve months tampering with banking systems for five million.”

“Well, you didn't know me then.” As he humoured Avon with this joke, he rifled through his traffic counts. He bloody knew Avon would like his joke - he was in that kind of mood. There were other times Avon went stiff and frosty at any niggles like that. Blake did it anyway, he must admit. He remembered once voicing some chariness about standing on a cliff if Avon were standing behind him.

“No.” Avon stuck a boot out and speculated at it. He drawled, “No, I didn't. Which is a pity, because headhunting is less time-consuming than fraud, at least when the head walks onto the platter.”

“Is it?” inquired Blake with mild interest and his attention on his map.

“And I always did believe in get rich quick.”

“Why then you're a bit slow,” rebutted Blake. By this stage he had all his wits on the conversation, but his hand made marks, for Avon's benefit.

“Do you recall that pursuit ship I alerted at Exbar, Blake? I believe you do.”

“Now you mention it.”

“You needn't have worried so, Blake,” he told him with gentle belittlement.

“Needn't I?”

“You were only worth three million then. There was a psychopathic pirate above you on the list. I knew when you caught your computer you'd skyrocket, so Control was a disappointment to me. And you wondered that I backed you. Did you know my detector shield bounced up your bounty? Attacking Servalan's headquarters was worth half a million. At Star One I couldn't lose. If you succeeded I'd have the Liberator and a revolutionary pardon. If you failed you'd be a Presidential pardon and who knows what king's ransom? - nobody, I bet, since the invention of wanted lists, was ever so wanted before.”

Blake listened to it through, the speculative, distinct, leisurely delivery. “Worries you, does it?”

“It should have,” Avon came forward in his chair, “worried you.”

“You're a funny one.” Blake tipped his head, over his starmap.

“So long as you see the humour in it.”

“Why on earth do you think I tease you then? Shame the revolution came along and mucked up your plans. I'm not worth a lot to the new powers that be. Money wise. You may have to drop me. Socially speaking.” And he resumed shuffling papers.

Avon leant back in his chair lazily – Blake had his eye on him, a bit of an eye. “Jumpy, were you, Blake?”

“You always knew how to make me jump.”

“You may wish to offer an excuse,” observed Avon then, head smoothly going aside, but his eyes going back to Blake.

“You want an excuse from me?”

“An excuse for your contradictions.”

It had nettled him, to hear Blake trusted him. After a last score of his pen, Blake put it down, and leant on the knuckles of both hands on the edge of the bench. “I believed you wouldn't.”

“You believed I wouldn't,” he repeated neutrally.

“I believed you wouldn't.”

“I see.” Avon kept quiet then. Until he said, soft and sly and slow, “Avon might run.”

“That's right,” nodded Blake at once, at the bench. “But he won't sell. He won't sell out his friends, even when he doesn't like them very much.”

“Just because I didn't, Blake. You have no idea how close --”

He turned again to interrupt. “Honestly, Avon, with your history? How naive do you think I am? Because I'm not. Wealth is the only reality, you told me on the London. Then I go and put my big valuable foot in your life.”

“What led you to think I wouldn't?”

“It was my judgement of your character. First up. Don't know I can offer any circumstantiation, Avon, I'm given to snap judgement of character. I was right, though.” He turned further around. “Have you noticed that?”

Avon sat in his corner. He put his legs out, crossed at the ankles, crossed his arms too and contemplated the floor beyond his boot toes.

With a shake of the head, Blake took up his papers, and let him digest.

Wealth is the only reality. Seems I became a little real to you, down the track. A pricetag like that on me and Mister Sell-His-Mother doesn't. And I'm meant to offended.

Blake scribbled on, but left to himself he seethed, and his scribbles even went off the starchart. My jokes were so transparent and she rubs his face in it and he's bothered. I thought jokes lightened the tension. I thought, if he knows he's seen through, if he knows I have a sense of humour, however bad the joke, it's a good one. Come on, Avon, I gave you the ship for your efforts, that's the way I feel about it.

“They know.”

This was in a different voice. Much, much more disturbed – Blake even thought he shouldn't turn around. “What do they know?”

“Not simply the obvious things that stick out a mile, Blake, such as that I nearly sold you. They know --”

Blake waited for him, and didn't look, though he didn't pretend to write.

“She set a psychostrategist onto me.”

“Abused psychiatry, Avon, for God's sake, you cannot believe what they serve up.”

“But it's entirely accurate,” he snarled.

Blake faced him. He himself wasn't fond of psychostrategy, but Avon, oh, he'd hate to be understood, by a scientific stranger, like a lab animal. Has a hard enough time deigning to let me.

Avon was upright in his chair, hands on his knees, and his face stripped – stripped a way Blake hadn't known him. He had a horror expression, as if there were insects crawling in his veins. That, that to him, Blake saw, was a psychostrategist in the coils of his head. No, he didn't like it.

Equably Blake said, “I doubt that, whatever it was. I doubt it's accurate, and I know it's not accurate entirely.”

“And how do you know that, Blake?” he snarled, in his eyes the exasperation of those insects, inside his veins where he couldn't scratch.

“It's my respect for the profession, Avon. Well-researched, too. They're employed by the military. Don't you think a psychostrategist hired by Servalan tells Servalan what she wants to hear? We know about staffers who have told her what she doesn't.”

Avon even began to listen.

“What's the big secret?” he asked, not heavy, light and smiling. “You don't have to tell me, but I'm betting I'd disprove it, not that I want or intend to psychoanalyse you, Avon, but at least I know you. You see, I think a little human acquaintance goes a way further than a textbook and a records sheet. You,” he ended with great emphasis, and stabbed a finger at him. “You never had a textbook brain.”

Possibly Avon started to feel better. He knew that – if there were one statement in the universe he knew, it was that one. That's right, get his ego working.

He turned his face, with aversion, a third of the way towards the side wing. As if he couldn't stand more than that. The insects were settling down but they still made him sick. “How do they know, then?” he asked Blake reasonably.

“What's the low-down they think they have on you, Avon?”

He sniffed and wiped his wrist across his nose. Climbing out of the horrors, only he'd forgotten he hadn't filled Blake in. “That I lust after you.”

It was no secret to Blake, Blake guessed – Avon didn't treat it like one, he very simply said what he'd forgotten. “That's it?” asked Blake. “Is that the extent?”

Avon eyed him, the ordinary way Avon might eye him when he jeered. His face was a recently traumatised one.

“Avon,” he exploded at him – he'd found the temperature settings high too – “Avon, I caught you out in Space City. How often have we been on camera? On a raid?”

Avon thought about that. The fact that he hadn't was an indicator that Servalan had got under his skin. He swatted at an arm – quite as if Blake's metaphor for him were true, the last of the insect scurry. “Her psychostrategist had an explanation.”

“Course he had a bloody explanation, or she did. I have an explanation too.”

“Oh what's that?” Avon began to see the funny side. About the time he began to wonder why they were on the subject. “In fact,” he went on between the humour and the incipient embarrassment, “I can guess yours and don't bother.”

Still, Servalan knew his privities, and she plotted by them. It wasn't nice for him. Blake knew, Blake hated cameras, not a lot less than he hated psychostrategists.

Avon sat in recovery mode. He dragged his fingers on his face, more gestural than he got often – Blake thought him too vain to distort his face. With the daze in his eyes he said, “I might owe you an equivalent...” He gave up on that sentence and said as Blake had said, “Thank you.”

“It's what we're here for. We know each other better than they know us. We're free, Avon,” he promised him. “Free agents, and they don't know a blasted thing, not about our humanity. Our humanity, Avon, that's what you and me know, and you cannot find it on a records cube.”

“If I wanted a speech. I'd have come to the revolution.”

Blake smiled. “By golly,” he then announced. “This has been a trip, but I'm glad we came on it, Avon.”

“Are you?” Avon wasn't so sure.

Blake liked a snap decision. There was that about a snap decision that made you hard to predict. Predict this, he thought at the side wing. Because this isn't in my genes. This wasn't in my head, until a second ago, nowhere in my head, I can guarantee that. We fight for the right.

He got up and he walked over to Avon. He took his chin, he stooped and he kissed him. Full on. It wasn't hard. That was the mouth.

Victim of this attack, Avon – well, Blake didn't let him ask any questions. Blake was in pursuit of a goal and he was known to be a steam-train then. He pulled Avon limply up and kept kissing. When he knew he needn't expect any questions, he pushed his friend's head back only far enough to tell him, “To start on, you're going to do what you did. I'll advance from there, but that experience has been on loop in my brain, and if you can just do exactly that again, Avon.”

Avon told him, after very little lag, “Fine.”

Onwards, Blake pulled him off his organ and he told him close into his face, “You're going to get out your equipment and you're going to orgasm, and you know why? You're going to orgasm on the thought I'm going to.”

“If you say so, Blake.”

That was what they did.

Blake dragged him half up his body and made his body a mattress for him and sifted in his hair, the heavy head against his chest, Blake's other arm about his waist to keep him there. He felt like a gorged lion and he rumbled from time to time and closed his eyes. They didn't talk too soon. Blake just made his noises of contentment, and Avon just flaked out.

Avon took into his warm and sleepy, sticky silky head to offer a comment. “That was unanticipated.”

“Yes,” he said with a victory in his voice. “They can chew over that.”

A few moments on Avon said, “You did that to spite them.”

Blake laughed, which bumped his head. “A quarter hour and you're back to your usual. I'll do that often, for the lull.”

“You're straight, Blake,” he said with his cheek squashed on his chest.

“No. I can fairly certainly say, not after that I'm not. I've thought for a day, Avon, if I did that twice... So. I did that twice.”

Avon said, from underneath his hand, “Until the next curvy blonde comes along. - It's your type. I've noticed.”

“Curvy blondes?”

“Tyce Sarkoff.”

Blake sighed – that heaved his head up too - “He's hassling me and we've scarcely started our relationship.”

“Our what?”

“You can call it what you like. You generally do. Or we can not have one, that's up to you. Entirely up to you, Avon, the way this –” on a proud note – “was entirely up to me.”

“Yes, but you can't just, you know.”

“Yes I can.”

“What? Switch?”

“Write what I want to write, Avon. Write what I want to write. When you have a blank slate, you see – I don't thank them for that – but when you do, then, Avon, decisions are in my hands. My hands. And I like you.”

“It's a – new concept.”

“Mm hmm.” He sifted in his hair, with his hands.

“Until we find your wife on Ursa Prime, that's where she is.”

Blake opened his half-closed eyes. Peered down at the groove in his brow. “Likely story.” He shut them again. He said, “You can have me, Avon, if you want me. God knows why I think you do.”

“It's quite an offer.”

“And isn't that the most I've got out of him? I wonder what I can make him say in future. I wonder how I can make him.”

“You know, Blake, in bed, you're a bit like you are on the flight deck.”

“You can call the shots too.”

“I'll call your shot. I'm going to leave that there,” said Avon, weight unsteady on him, “before I lose my intelligence again.”

“I like you without it.”

“Mind, I'll have to shoot every blonde in sight.”

“Right, and I'd have guessed you the jealous type. Don't ask me why.”

“I am jealous. I have been, and I intend to be.”

“What the hell of?”

“Anything with tits if you want to know.”

“I'll fix you. And while we're on the parameters of our – whatever we have – I think I like to be exclusive, too.”

That shut him up. First we have a relationship, soon after that, an exclusive. “We have to work fast,” apologised Blake.

Avon said, “We usually do.”

He stroked his hair.

“What about the old flames? In the old furnace? Of the revolution? One or two of them alive, down planetside?”

“Dizzy stars and whirling galaxies.”

“It's a question.”

“I have a parameter to state. You have to believe what I say.”

On his chest, Avon nodded. “Have I got this right, Roj? You don't have a single woman in your past for me to hassle you with?”

Blake stopped for a beat. “Thought you knew that.”

“No. I didn't. Or I mightn't have hassled you.”

“I bet you would have.”

“Possibly,” he said. “Not your kissing cousin?”

“Yes, but she was on the young side when I visited before and Ushton had that hunting knife.”

“I see.”

“Sorry to put a damper on your green-eyed monster line.”

“Don't worry. I need few grounds and little cause.”

Blake thought, and I'd have guessed him kind.

“Want to quiz me about mine?” he offered then.

“I can infer about yours. Saw your eye on Space City and there'll be none of that.”

“Sad thing is there won't be,” Avon said. “I'm very rarely sentimental, Blake, and I won't be now.”

Blake almost laughed. No, not almost, he laughed.

“You're like an earthquake.” Avon had to grip onto him to stay on.

“Now or a bit before?”

“Um, yes. I'll tell you about that when I'm ready.”

Tinnily through the intercom Zen boomed. “Information. Liberator has atmosphere.”

“Well, that's ruined ours,” said Blake. “And he arose --” as he did make movements to arise – “from a tangle with Kerr Avon, a changed man.”

“I knew I had it in me,” said Avon, also beginning to organise himself.

“Don't start.”

“I didn't --”

They met eyes and they smiled.

“What's our schedule?” asked Blake, with the easy cheer he felt about life in general and the future.

“Ah – I drop you off, I pick up the others, I come back to Earth. There's my flight path.”

“Perfect.” He stood. Well tousled, fuzzy-cheeked and flush-cheeked too, dazed and dazzling, Kerr Avon stood with him.

#

Walking along the quarters corridor as they waited for main drive, Avon found Jenna squatted on her heels outside her cabin. “Servalan's changing,” she explained.

“Alone?”

“She nagged me out. She can't get up to much mischief, unless she's swigging my Amagon whiskey.”

Avon squatted next to her on the balls of his feet, draping his jacket over his knees. He hadn't changed his clothes and his black pullover and pants had gone wrinkled and soft and smelly. “Blake,” he posited or deposited as a conversational topic.

She eyed him, out of her dulled hair, blew a strand from her face and slapped down her own topic. “The ship. Has Blake talked to you about the ship?”

“Not... lately.”

“He needs the ship, Avon, when he's on Earth. You can have Liberator afterwards – see if I care – I'll be down with him on Earth, but I too want a teleport, and if you ask me, Avon, it's the very least that can be asked of you. And since he hasn't, then I demand from you that you be in orbit for us when we are in Central Security, having a revolution.”

He said, “I have told him this hour I'll bring the ship to Earth, once Cally and Vila are aboard.”

“That's a change of tune.”

“Yes. There has been a change of tune.” He contemplated the white wall in front of him. “It's what I'm here to tell you.”

“Made up, have you?”

“Yes. Yes, we have made up.” He went on glazing at the wall. “This hour, and you see me, Jenna, as if trampled by elephants.”

“You what?” She batted her hair away to squint at him, and even stuck her face right up against his. “You what?”

“Yes.”

A pause, and an inches-distant examination of the side of his face. “You're not his type.”

“No. I told him that,” he said in his own defence.

“What are we talking?” she rapped out.

“We're not, I hope.” He even lifted a hand on that side, in a subtle hint she was getting into his space. “Allow me to tell the tale. If I know how. Blake...” He lifted his brows at the wall. “Blake – I think Blake has brainwashed himself. He said, he wrote what he chose on his own blank slate.” He stopped a moment. “Which is to say, he found himself suggestible – terribly suggestible, Jenna, they did not leave him much – and rather in the way that they erase you in order to re-write your political philosophy or what have you, or perhaps to cure a deviant, he has – changed. His orientation.”

She thought through that a fair while, as did he. They sat side by side on the floor and thought about that.

“You went along with this, Avon?”

He said nothing.

“Why would he – do that?”

“I have no idea.”

“So what did you do to deserve that?”

“Less idea.”

They came to a pause again.

Jenna said, “I'm trying not to be heavily biased but I can't say I like it.”

“Why? You've slept with a tentacled Latudian.”

“And worse, but that's me.”

Avon shrugged, with shoulders against the wall. “Argue with him. He seems set and he knows his own mind as per his usual standards of Blake will do as Blake will do. As for an argument from me, he gave me zero leisure and less than that of motivation.” He nodded his head. “There you have it.”

“I'll probably talk to him. I'll probably talk about the wisdom, spacewise as I am and whatever rights I have.”

“Go ahead. You can do so on Earth.”

Next she said, “It's very Blake.”

He laughed.

“And your end?”

Avon rubbed at a temple on the side she was on. “He hasn't married me but we didn't have a lot of time and although he's captain of a vessel – also he hasn't made it legal yet. I promised him I'd shoot any blondes who come near him and I may have been serious about that.”

“Thanks for the warning.” In a moment or two, “Do you think Blake is...”

Avon waited in vain. “Out of his brain? Space happy?”

“Do you think Blake is as Servalan described him to us? We meet him not at his peak. His peak was the Freedom Party. I don't know how he managed a Freedom Party. They call him – or they called him then, a great man.”

“Is Blake a great man? Was that your question?”

“No.”

But it was. “It isn't the line I've taken for two years now, Jenna. Besides, I suspect today is the wrong day to ask me.”

“I believe that much.” Railingly she eyed him up and down. “He put you in a tail spin, I can tell.”

“Well. It's Blake.”

“Uh huh. Flies as sizzlingly as most of us imagined?”

That reminded him. “He told me his ship was in nose-dive from the chemical intervention, and I gather the effect might have lingered, out of the domes.”

Which she considered, too. “It's my livelihood and vocation but he didn't have to ask for help from me.” She added, “I see. I came on strong in the early days. I backed off a bit later on.”

“I never came on. – Not so he'd notice. Straight as he was.”

“I suppose you didn't.”

“Pax? Or guns drawn?”

“There's honour among thieves, Avon.” She primed and targeted her eyes at him, in case he didn't get the whole of that.

#

Servalan was slipping into the dark blue dress that belonged to Jenna, her only ankle-length piece, with silver clusters beneath the shoulders. “Sensational,” said Jenna at the door, tongue in cheek.

“Do my clasps.” Servalan turned around. As Jenna fastened her down the back, the president said, “Everything else in your wardrobe was too gaudy, or girlish, or butch. But it's a mercy you permit me to be clothed at all.” She also said, “Your brassieres were a size too small for me.”

“Madame, sorry for the trip.” Jenna finished her clasps. “I didn't mean to maltreat you. But you survived.”

“I have no trouble surviving pawing dykes. What's the latest from Central?” Servalan went over to the mirror to touch up her new cosmetics.

“Avalon is purging. Intelligence, interrogators, medicos and records collection. Whoever doesn't swear themselves to the revolution with a gun down their throats. Or whoever her soldiers don't believe. Your girl works in Central Security, doesn't she?”

“Who?”

“Your girl from Command Academy. Anna.”

“At times.” Servalan dabbed at her lipstick.

“Meaning she's a spy, not a controller? Maybe she was out on a mission, and didn't get exterminated along with the home staff. Or is she a master of disguise? Then she could bluff her way out.”

“Anna does without disguise. She has a forgettable face.”

“I thought she was enchanting?” Jenna arched her brows.

“When you know her.”

“You did kind of like her, didn't you? In the Academy.”

Servalan wheeled from the mirror with perfected eyes. “Evidently.” She swished towards the door.

Jenna ushered her through it. “To the flight deck, madame. Can't have her on automatics for the revolutionary homecoming. I want to do a victory loop around Earth.”

#

“That joke of hers yesterday about empire and space,” said Servalan. “That was treasonable.”

“To make us laugh?”

“To make us skeptics. She undermines everything she instructs us in.”

Solemnly Anna said, “Jokes are very serious.”

Servalan had her arms wound around her from behind. “We can get her stripped of rank and dismissed. We can even get her executed.”

“How patriotic,” mocked Anna.

“If we record her. Gather evidence for a report.”

“Evidence? But she's so ambiguous. Equivocal jokes.”

“Is she ambiguous in bed?”

The head on her shoulder rolled. “Is that a joke?”

“We'd be noticed. We could go up the ranks together. And,” Servalan found herself hissing, “you can stop sleeping with the smothering old bag.”

The same twist of hatred went over Anna's face. Then she went sleepy again. “She adores me. And she gossips in bed. The information I've picked up from her. Anyway, I don't mind romping with her. It's fun.”

“Colonel Kasabi, senior political officer. We can go past her.”

“To be noticed? Being noticed isn't always the best policy. Even in Space Command. I suspect I'd rather be not noticed.”

“I thought you wanted to be a general and play war games with fleets?”

“Is the president noticeable? His functionaries are.”

“Now you want to be president?”

“No,” Anna bubbled a laugh. “But I shan't make the mistake of being famous. Like General Servalan. He ran into a dead end. I have a horror of dead ends.”

“I didn't know you had a horror of anything.”

Anna's small, milky hand dangled from the rough cuff of her camouflage fatigues. “Servalan,” she said. It was a pet name between them, then, her future name. “The mistress isn't sure about you.”

“Isn't she?”

“At the end of this we're going to have outstanding reports. Judged, as Kasabi knows how to judge, for us to go anywhere in the service. Subverted as we are.”

“Are we?”

“Aren't we?” Anna's cheek creased. “Yesterday I argued in class that revolution is possible, despite the universal State dogma that it is not possible.”

“I know. Your jokes are funnier than hers.”

“I'm writing Kasabi an essay on why and how a revolution could happen.”

“Don't dance too near the edge.”

“She believes in me,” Anna bragged. “But you. You should conceal yourself more. General Servalan or no General Servalan. She's weaning you off your father --”

“My father would have her for breakfast.”

“She may exclude you,” finished Anna, head turned to her under her chin.

“I may exclude her.” Servalan slid a finger between a gap of her fatigues, to delicate skin over hard breastbone. Anna squirmed, and then sank back to idleness. Servalan said, “I'm going to too.”

“What? What are you going to do?”

“What you did. The Frankenstein will trip over her feet again.”

Anna giggled, and glanced up with shimmering eyes. “Both of us? She'd be mad.”

“She is mad. She has delusions of grandeur.”

“What's wrong with us, then?”

“You wouldn't be jealous, would you, Anna?”

“Jealous of whom?” Dim hair scraped against her shoulder, and Servalan saw her angular brows go up. “You've only been with boys. Like the dashing Dom Keller who made you the monster you are today. You've given up true love. But then there are always torrid intrigues to be had.” Anna had bent aside a knee. Without any warning, she slunk her hand under her thigh and behind her, to tug Servalan's labia through the crutch of her fatigues. Servalan shuddered. Anna said, “Up to me to teach you what the mistress loses her brains over – isn't it?” Anna's fingers rolled her and she leaked. Anna pushed her down, and crawled onto her, and nipped at her through the fatigues, and rasped with her tongue.

Last night with Stannis she had resorted to the truth. But she hadn't resorted to the punchline. “Anna... her surname was Grant.” Jenna would race that information to Avon. Then Servalan could bargain with Avon – the new pseudonym and whereabouts of Anna Grant in return for her escape from Blake. If he hadn't forgotten Anna for Blake.

Anna Grant was her trump card. Yet she hadn't made up her mind to expose Bartolomew. At the least her years of cover would be wrecked, and at the worst, she'd be dead for whatever lies she told Avon.

There were chances still, after Blake teleported her to Earth – her planet far more than his. She could depend on Blake to save her from Avalon, until her officers saved her from Blake.

It would be a pity to waste the best agent Central had.

#

Blake turned, spanner in hand, to see Jenna walk into the aisle of internals where he was, off the flight deck. “You haven't washed.”

“Sorry.” She tugged the skirts of her maroon jacket.

“Not a criticism. Thought you might take the opportunity. Too late, you're stuck here flying. - Auto-repairs,” he went on, with a blow of air to go with that and brandishing the spanner. “Here's me.”

“Do I dare start her up?”

“Help me with this, ah... I don't know what the hell this is. But it's meant to be attached to that one.”

She laughed, “We've only been aboard two years.”

“Just getting to know each other.”

She had to worm in to hold what he needed her to hold. Blake wasn't even aware of her at the time his own wrench on the unknown mechanics slipped, his hand was thrown aside – found her hip. Fumbled at her hip. He got on his feet, he hoisted her up by the hips and he scraped her crutch down on his trousers. Jenna mewled and slung her knees up around him. But then she had them down again and kicked him in the shin.

She kicked him – he let her drop – she departed.

Left there, Blake stood in bemused study of his two hands. In a bit he laughed.

#

In teleport he had him alone and he gave him one of his speeches. “Let's not underestimate the enemy. I rarely do, it's amongst my few virtues. But only remember, Avon, only remember: our minds are our own.” He put a hand on his face, on half his face. Heel of his hand around his jaw and by his lip, pad of his thumb on the bone under his eye. “Is that why I liked you, Kerr? I never met such a fighter – and you had such things to fight. Ingredients for me, I tell you.” He pushed him gently, pushed the face away in the old combative fondness, in the new. “I liked your guts.” His hand slid off, only to take him again in the warm hair, a hold with indelible associations now. “It's sexy to me, always was. I saw you were sex on legs, if not for me.” His hand dropped. He walked away, casual, to the bracelet rack. “Well, I'll have you.” He cocked an eye behind him. “Very often, don't forget that.” He latched a bracelet on. “You?”

“Me, Blake?”

“What have you got to say for yourself?”

“Ah... do we need a scene?”

“No. I don't intend to be shot up and you don't intend to be shot down.”

“Great way to put things,” he frowned.

“What? It is a revolution.”

“It always bloody has been.”

“Never a truer word.”

“So I'll see you, Blake.”

“That's beautiful.”

“It'll have to do.”

“It does.” A big smile on, he came to him again, and again attached his hand to him, this time wiped his hand across his face. “It does.”

Avon, Kerr Avon, under his hands as he was, didn't mind, he assumed an I don't mind face, a you can do that with me face. “And what's more,” he said.

“What's more?”

“Sex in save-the-galaxy outfits.”

“Oh right. What's a save-the-galaxy outfit?”

“Whatever you wear.”

Here Jenna and Servalan joined them. Blake kept up his smile. “I'll see you, Kerr Avon. - Ladies,” he said to prisoner and escort, when they were braceleted. “It's time. It's time.” He stepped onto the platform.

#

“You're Comrade Jenna?”

A rebel leaned around the door to the cell. “That's me,” agreed Jenna.

“You've just returned from fighting Andromedans, I hear. Which are uglier than troopers, I hear.” The pale face creased. She wore the camouflage fatigues of the Outsider groups on Earth.

Jenna laughed. “Maybe.” The rebel sauntered in under the weight of her laser rifle. “What's the latest out there?” Jenna asked eagerly. Once more, she was stuck down here with Servalan; Blake didn't trust Central yet, in spite of Avalon's purge, which had lasted three days so far. He'd promised to find a secure jail for Servalan, but until then Jenna guarded.

“It's touchy,” the rebel answered. Her rifle was slung nose-down, her small arm draped on the rucked and dirty barrel. It knocked against her calves. Comradely, she lay a hand on Jenna's shoulder, inches taller than her own. “Touchy enough, that Blake sent me to see Her Eminence to a ship. More secure.” She cast her eyes on the prisoner and gloated, the way every rebel who passed them gloated, unless they were too busy and just spat. It had embarrassed Jenna more than Servalan when an outworlder spat on her dress. “I'm delighted to see you here, Servalan.”

For the first time Servalan reacted to the taunt. “I'm delighted to see you here, Anna.”

Jenna's mind whirled in alarm. But the knife up the sleeve of the arm around her had pierced.

#

“It's a shambles,” Anna told her. “I've spent three days in the rebel camp. They kill enough, but the choice of target is bad. Our interrogators are mouthing slogans about the rights of the people. The rebels are chanting songs about laying down their lives for the labour grades.”

“My Earth Guard can oblige them.”

“The deltas are euphoric. Those brave enough to venture out of the domes. Avalon shot the Councillors you had in there under arrest.”

“How useful of her. I'm re-grouping the home troops, Sula. By tomorrow, Central will be under siege. From a distance. But the distance will lessen. Central will be ours again – within a week.”

“I believe you.”

“Excellent,” said Servalan. “Now we can discuss the future.”

“Why not? Madame President.” Her greyish eyes shimmered. She was curled beside Servalan on a green velvet ottoman, belonging to a dead minister whose house Servalan had taken for a headquarters.

Servalan dropped her head to the side. “Chesku isn't terribly functional – though the elite of the elite. Nevertheless, he can go on my personal staff. You'd have to give up field work, Sula. If Chesku goes into politics, your face might be noticed.”

“Chesku was functional enough as a ticket to Ven Glynd's set.”

“True. We worked together on Ven Glynd.”

“Remotely together,” said Anna. “And he's kept me in work among the higher echelons, after I had to forsake the medium.”

“Meaning, after the Kerr Avon affair?”

“A trip in my career, which I've picked myself up from.”

“Would you miss being a secret agent?”

Her face creased. “I daresay being a satellite of your presidency will be diverting enough for me.”

“That I can promise you, Sula.”

“Nobody can hear us here, Servalan. In private, I am Anna to you.”

“Anna,” she said the name. “Don't you ever get confused with your roles?”

“Never,” laughed Anna. Then she asked, “How is Lieutenant Rai?”

“Rai? Stars, he got stupid a year and a half ago.”

“Forgive me. We haven't met for some years, and you keep the gossip tenuous. How is he who is the latest?” She dandled with Servalan's hand. “It is always he with you.”

“True. But then – in the galaxy, Anna – there are no shes like you.”

“Except you?” Anna angled her brows, and then asked, “Do you have news for me from the Liberator? It's been puzzling me. What can Avon be doing with Comrade Blake?”

“I consulted a puppeteer once. He was puzzled himself.”

“The great Blake. – I saw him in Central. The deltas gave him cheers and gun-rattling, and he gave them slogans. It was true love on both sides. – And where was my love through this?”

“I can only assume you mean Avon?”

“My favourite case.”

“Skulking on the Liberator.”

“Avon hasn't a political bone in his dear body.”

Servalan inquired, “Then why did you prolong the muddle at Security?”

“Should I have passed him from the Political Bureau to Major Crime? In fact he was safer with my department, in the short term. And I needed the time.”

“To arrange his escape?”

“Imperfectly, I’m afraid. At the last I told them he wasn't political. There followed bureaucratic shuffling enough that Avon could use his exit visa. He went dome-hopping – but never made it off the planet. And by then he was out of my province.”

“He is intriguing. Were you intrigued, Anna?”

“I was partial to him from the time I opened his file, and saw he had the same IQ figure as me, and read the jargon that meant he's a troublesome piece of work, and saw his smouldering eyes in the photo. Just the job for me, I told my controller. As for what I told Avon – every word true, I assure you.”

“I have always admired, Anna, how you can tell the utter truth and barefaced lies at the same time. You told them to Kasabi.”

“Should I tell them to you?”

Servalan's mouth went wide. “Please.” Then she said, “There isn't anything that we can't do.”

“Perhaps I've done it.”

“Oh, Anna, don't be jaded. I am president.” She pulled on a milky finger. “I killed the mistress.”

“I know,” purred Anna.

“Tell me now. Were you behind her escape?”

“To amuse you.”

“You do.” Then Servalan asked, “How is matrimony?”

“Tedious. But harmless.”

“Your husband doesn't bother you?”

“I've reduced him to once a month.”

“Then you have spare time.”

“I do. Do you?”

They kissed. Servalan curled her soft dim hair behind her dainty ear. Her eyes were the hazy shade of a horizon.

Nobody in the worlds, nobody else had a hope, but Anna understood her.

#

After Blake had found Jenna dead, he went and reported to Avalon the loss of the Supreme Commander. Avalon ransacked Central for the escapee, and executed fifteen of her converts. She never said to him it was a shame about Jenna Stannis. Blake did the bodybagging alone.

He was in charge of ungrouped troops – deltas from the domes, and Outsiders. Blake whipped them into shape and armed them with what he could scrounge. When he smacked himself alert several days later, he saw that the revolution hadn't yet travelled beyond Central Security. Deltas were finding their way to him. The rebels weren't pushing out. He reminded Avalon that they needed to go faster. Avalon said the people must be with them before they drove wider. His deltas swore to him the people would rise. Blake kept his pessimism to himself.

The revolted deltas had burnt his records, among millions of others, in the sacking of Central before he got to Earth. Avalon tortured the torturers for information lost on the data cubes.

Three days went by with nothing heard from the squads which had penetrated the nearest domes. No crowds gathered Outside. Communications with the people were down, and deltas who joined them in fives and sixes had to say, nothing yet. Avalon and Blake cancelled excursions beyond a fifty mile radius. They set reconnaissance instead. Reports leaked in of the Earth Guard regrouping.

Meanwhile Blake waited five days to hear from the Liberator, and then another five days.

At that stage they decided to crowd Avalon's ships onto Central's space bay – enough to evacuate her off-world groups. For the majority of the deltas, Blake had no transport. He couldn't strand them here as combatants. So he demobbed them. Any citizens without a laser rifle were sent back to the domes, or any who chose to drop their guns in the armoury. Blake only persuaded them to go by promising not to abandon Earth while he had any hope. He undertook that the army would suffer heavy punishment before retreating. No trouble keeping the army to that. Nobody wanted to leave Earth.

Avalon's ships were docked in preparation for the worst, and now if the worst happened there would be enough ships to go around. That was the trouble. Central Security, difficult to win, would be hard to lose. They were trapped in a fortress which they could defend for weeks, but never get out of on the ground to seize the domes. Avalon had cornered the backbone of the resistance in her stronghold.

At least they could escape by space. No Federation fleet had mustered out of the Andromedan War, to prevent them leaving planet. Blake himself would rather teleport, when the time were here, but so far he had no response to his signals.

They holed in against attack – a leaner and meaner army of Outer Planet veterans, Outsider guerrillas from here on Earth, and the most vehement domers who were equipped with heavy guns and who were resolved to use them, this time, not next time.

On his fifteenth day on Earth, when they were expecting any hour an Earth Guard assault under the rumoured command of Servalan, Blake took off and crushed his teleport bracelet. He couldn't have an escape route others didn't have. Besides, Avon was late.

He blamed the enemy.

Blake slung on his rifle and walked out to the defences.

Out there, deltas and rebels were singing on about the revolution. Through the martyrs gone before you, he heard, through our battle here today, tomorrow belongs to the revolution. Nothing in our way. He headed for the perimeter, under dull green blastproofing. My comrade, stand near beside me, they sang in the pits to a more wistful tune. Blake himself wasn't going anywhere. He picked a metal hole to wait in and nodded to his neighbours. For you or I may fall, before the people are free. The artillery crews behind the armour cheered Comrade Blake. He grinned at them and told them to do the same for Jenna Stannis. They whooped and rattled their sidearms against their ammo canisters to her name, and Blake laughed now where he'd blubbered at last yesterday. That was when the first missiles streaked up.

#
#

The End