something from the ruins. That, he told himself, might well be the best the Group could accomplish with their meager resources.

During the hours that Deve was working in the Fortress, Jerrold wandered freely through the maze of underground tunnels and chambers that the Group had built. The original catacombs had been built a thousand years earlier, and the men and women of the Group had expanded and refurbished the forgotten maze to suit their purposes. Jerrold was continually amazed at what they had been able to accomplish with so little at their command and under a shroud of almost complete secrecy.

Life in the tunnels centered on the central pit—the spaceport. This, as Kant Mikal explained with considerable pride, was connected with the surface by a series of locks that emerged through the bottom of the sea in the offshore shallows down the coast from the Green Fortress. Under cover of night, a spaceship could emerge from the tunnels and lift into space without arousing the garrison of Greens who served on Atmion IV never dreaming of the quiet life beneath their feet.

Two spacecraft rested in their cradles in the pit, a medium sized merchantman, the "Star Cluster," and a Fleet scout-destroyer, "Serpent." Jerrold recognized both vessels as craft that had long ago been reported lost in space in Admiralty headquarters back on Terminus. The Serpent still carried its Fleet insigne of the Spaceship and Sun, a reminder to Aram of his former life and of the immense power of the Thirty Suns Navy. He knew only too well the position of the Group in the coming silent struggle between the galactic Tetrarchy and the rebellious Santane. They were the smallest, weakest corner in a vicious triangular madness that threatened to smash the entire civilization of the Thirty Suns.

His personal happiness at being with Deve Jennet again, and free of the haunting pain of her supposed betrayal, was mitigated by a realization of the dangers they would soon face when the Group's quixotic plan went into operation. Nor were these forebodings lessened when Kant Mikal informed him that he and Deve were the unanimous choices of the Group for the second—and secret—expedition into the Kaidor Province.

"It will be your purpose," Kant Mikal told him again, "to save something from the wreckage if all else fails...."

Aram lay comfortably under the bank of sun-lamps in the underground infirmary. The days of rest and treatment had brought him back into condition again, and he felt fit and ready for action. 

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