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Island?"

"Sometime this morning," Kolchin said, coming back from his search-and-kill defoliation exercise and returning Cavanagh's knife to its sheath. Squatting down, he carefully pulled his own knife out of the ground, the twitching vine head still impaled on the split blade. With a quick flick of his wrist he flipped the knife around, sending the vine head spinning out into the darkness of the forest. "He wouldn't commit himself more precisely than that."

"In my experience it's a minor triumph to get an Avuire to commit to even a given day," Cavanagh said, easing himself up on one elbow and peering ahead into the darkness. A couple of kilometers away out there was Sereno Strait, the narrow stretch of water that separated them here on the Granparra mainland from the safety of Puerto Simone Island. Ninety-nine-plus percent of the planet's forty million people lived on the island, dwelling in the literal shadow of the huge Parra vine but protected by their isolation from the rest of the planet's deadly plant life.

Cavanagh and Kolchin, unfortunately, were out here.

None of this had been part of the original plan, of course. Breaking away from Petr Bronski on Mra-mig, they had borrowed a small fighter ship from the Mrach weapons dump in the hills outside Mig-Ka City-the only craft there that could be prepped for flight in under half an hour-and had headed off-planet. The idea was to leave Mrach space as quickly as possible and get back to Cavanagh's homeworld of Avon, where he could set to work on something that could help the Commonwealth defeat the invading Conquerors.

But the universe hadn't proved cooperative. Like courier ships, fighter stardrives were twice as fast as those of larger ships, but they paid for that speed with five times the fuel consumption, and if there was a way to retune the drive for the slower, more efficient drive speed, neither of them had been able to find it. Courier ships had large fuel tanks to compensate. Fighters, unfortunately, didn't.

Which had left them with an extremely limited number of places they could reach without refueling, none of them places where humans flying a fighter with official Mrach markings wouldn't be greeted with raised eyebrows and suspicious questions. With Bronski undoubtedly burning up space behind them, suspicious questions were something to be avoided at all costs.

Which had in turn boiled down their options to exactly one.

Klyveress ci Yyatoor, Twelfth Counsel to the Yycroman Hierarch, had been surprised to see them again so soon. Her welcome had turned noticeably cooler when she'd learned they were on the run. But with a little persistence Cavanagh had managed to work out a deal, and a few hours later they were off again in an old Pawolian mining ship Klyveress had had stashed away somewhere.

With its slower drive the Pawolian ship had more than enough fuel to reach Avon. Unfortunately, what it turned out not to have was a reliable set of reactant infusers.

They'd been able to nurse the ship only as far as Granparra. But as Kolchin had pointed out, as emergency stopovers went, Granparra was a reasonably good one. With virtually the entire planetary population crowded together on Puerto Simone Island, there was no reason for anyone to keep close tabs on space traffic going in or out of the rest of the planet. On the other hand, with a few thousand rough-and-tumble sap miners and prospectors working the mainland at any given time, there were also enough small ships going in and out for one more not to attract particular notice. Kolchin had taken full advantage of that, bringing the ship in toward a mining complex well away from the island-and away from the Myrmidon Weapons Platform that orbited protectively overhead-then flying low over the forests and jungles to a spot only a few hours' hike away from the coastline.

Their problems, according to Kolchin, had thus been reduced to two: how to locate new reactant infusers, and how to raise the money to pay