"For Wassreck. He's a prisoner. You'll buy his freedom." The grey eyes distended. The girl breathed fast and shallow, ripe lips half-parted. "You madman--!" she whispered. Jarl Corvett laughed harshly, and there was ice and fire in it. "Some say so. But Wassreck saved me at Horla. Tonight I've come here to pay back what I owe him." "Jarl!" Ungo broke in, raw-voiced and urgent. "Quick! Hurry! They will find that dead guard any minute!" "Yes." Jarl raised up. He spoke again to the girl--bleak, cold, rock-steady: "You're coming, Ylana. As to how--you do the choosing. But even if we have to tie you and gag you and carry you, you're coming!" The girl's grey eyes probed his. Color came to her lips; they no longer trembled. "You mean--you really believe you can storm in here and take me? That your handful of raiders can fight through the cordon--?" "Freemen have done more." "Freemen--?" Ylana's laugh was tight, bitter. "What do you and your outlaws know about freedom? To you, it means nothing but freedom to murder, to plunder!" Her words stung like gas-hail slashing down upon Pluto. Jarl felt his breath quicken. "Who are you, to talk of the outlaw worlds and their plunder?" he lashed back at her fiercely. "What of your father's own fleet; your thrice-cursed Federation?" The girl blazed. "The Federation brings order!" "And what is your order but another name for plunder--the great planets' power to take what they choose from the lesser?" Jarl choked on his anger. "To you, I'm a pirate, because men like me sweep the void in our own raider ships to keep our people from starving. What else can we do, living on these barren rocks in the Belt, charred fragments of worlds that should never have been colonized? But your father--with no right on his side but the Federation fleet's might, he's named high commissioner--sent out to tear even our bleak asteroids from us by conquest--" "Jarl--!" burst out Ungo. "I'm coming!" Jarl towered over Ylana. "Get ready!" * * * * * The girl sat up in her bed. Her fists gripped the covers. "I warn you, Jarl Corvett: You'll curse the day that you took me--" "Because of your father?" Jarl laughed, short and curt. "I'll still chance it." "No." The girl's grey eyes seethed, dark and dangerous. "Because of me, Ylana _rey_ Gundre! Because I'll see you and your men die in torment, a thousand times worse than the flame-death at Horla--" "I'll chance that, too." Jarl jerked back the covers. Wordless, disdainful, the girl tossed her head. The golden hair rippled. Rising, she took a gown from a chair and pulled it about her slim, perfect figure. "That's better." Jarl turned to Ungo. "We'll go down through the workshop. There's less chance there to trap us." In hair-triggered silence, they moved back through the hallway, the girl boxed among them. A different ramp yawned. The door at its foot let them into the workshop, the place of the robots. Wassreck's robots.