As promised, they found the Lieutenant's man waiting for them when they stepped out of the lift into the carrier's number nine hangar bay. He was not, however, exactly what Ibrahim had expected. For one thing, he was a she. That was in itself unusual. The handful of women accepted into the Caliphate military served as doctors and nurses, technicians, translators - pretty much anything but combat soldiers. The question was, what was she doing dropping down to a planet where two squads of her comrades had just been butchered?

For another, she looked young, even by ghazi standards, and most of the marines he'd encountered on the Lahab-u-din looked likely to be on the run from their truancy officers. Or nannies. What exactly made her seem so young, Ibrahim couldn't quite put his finger on. It wasn't that she was small, because she wasn't. Broad shoulders, strong-looking arms, a square face rounded a bit by plumpness: she was hardly the frail waif. Maybe that plumpness, which gave her just a hint of a baby-face, made her seem so young. Maybe the way she kept her head lowered, looked up at them through ginger bangs, like a shy teen-ager dragged from her room to meet the company at her parents' party.

Or it could simply have been the absurd costume the GSCes had stuffed her into. Ibrahim had never been to a prom - the schools on Al-Bustan tended to discourage young people from rubbing up against each other in dark places to the accompaniment of pounding rhythms and throbbing, smoky voices. But he'd seen plenty of dramas on the net, and what that poor marine had been burdened with looked very much like a prom-dress, all frills and folds in pink and powder-blue pastels.

The Ingénue. Not a particularly popular character class - few women chose to pay the exorbitant rates charged by Misr to play the helpless maiden and the men who expressed an interest in playing an Ingénue were strictly prohibited from doing so, at least since the arrival of the Caliphate in the Park World system. Camouflage, he guessed, sticking a ghazi into a prom dress. Still, Ibrahim couldn't help but wonder whose toes she'd stepped on to draw the assignment.

The marine had been leaning against the reinforcing strut that encircled the hangar's hatchway. She straightened up and stepped forward when she saw them, but then hesitated - probably trying to decide who, if any of them, warranted a salute. "Private Senna Hilal. I've been assigned to provide security on this drop."

The Swordsman brushed past her with a snort and headed into the cluster of ships gathered around the hangar's service bay. Ibrahim paused long enough to awkwardly offer his hand, which she stared at until he withdrew it and hurried on, Raver at his side. The Thief fell in beside Private Hilal, speaking softly to her.

"I get the skinny one." Ibrahim knew it was Raver leaning to hiss in his ear as much by the smell of chocolate on his breath as by his voice. Well, that, and the fact that no one else he knew would say something like "I get the skinny one" moments before embarking on what was sure to be a suicide mission.

"Doubt she's waiting to be gotten, Raver.”

Raver leaned in even closer. "What do you think of the masked crusader up there? Not so sure he's a substitute for a couple hundred marines, myself."

The Swordsman looked back at them over his shoulder, and Ibrahim choked on his first attempt to reply. "I think maybe he's more than he seems," he hissed when he'd caught his breath. "Besides, a couple of hundred marines already died down there."

"Humph." Raver's grunt produced a cloud of chocolate scent. "So we're not just partially screwed. We're absolutely and completely screwed."

A pat denial, an expression of empty optimism, died on Ibrahim's lips when he saw the Swordsman stop beside a ship. His ship, presumably, although Ibrahim prayed he'd just stopped beside that…vessel…to give them all a chance to catch up to him.

That last hope was dashed when the scarred and pitted remains of an airfoil lifted with a growling of strained machinery to reveal a hatchway. The Swordsman flashed them an unreadable glance, then disappeared into the ship. Ibrahim could have sworn that glance had been directed at him alone. Ridiculous. But he could have sworn….

"All right, before we were moderately screwed," Raver hissed in his ear. "Now, now we're completely screwed."

Garish white light flickered through the hatchway, cast a steady pool of cool fluorescent on the deck of the service bay. With Raver burbling away at his side like a tea kettle getting ready to blow, Ibrahim squinted up into the Swordsman's ship. Not as bad as it could have been. The ship was an in-system hopper, long and narrow, the central aisle crowded on either side with crash-couches, lockers and, about halfway between the hatchway and the pilot's pit, what looked to be a hybrid of a cappuccino maker and an octopus. A zero-grav coffee maker, which meant that the ship lacked a grav generator. Which meant that they would feel every bump and jolt on the ride down through Murkworld’s atmosphere.

"Uurrp." The hiccup burst from Ibrahim's mouth before he even realized it was coming. The Swordsman stopped his poking and prodding at the instruments in the pit to cast a too-readable glance of contempt in his direction.

"Screeewwwed," Raver hissed into his ear.

"Please move up, sir." Raver thumped up against him; Private Hilal had punctuated her request by shoving the programmer in the direction she wanted him to go. Ibrahim squeezed up the narrow aisle, waiting for either the Swordsman up front or the Thief behind him to tell him what to do next. When no suggestions were forthcoming, he squeezed into the crash couch just behind the pilot's pit, then immediately wished he'd sat somewhere further down the aisle, away from the Swordsman. Too late: Raver had already crammed his bulk into the couch just behind him, and the Private and the Thief settled themselves across the aisle, the latter directly across from Ibrahim, Private Hilal behind her, stuffing a very un-Ingénue-like semi-automatic pistol into the storage locker beneath her couch.

"Give your bags to my assistant and secure your safety straps." The Swordsman had strapped himself into the pilot's seat and was busily thumbing control pads and scratching on a datapad as the Thief collected their bags and stored them away somewhere in the back of the ship.

The upper half of the hemispherical pilot's pit seemed to dissolve as its filters went translucent, revealing the hangar outside sliding by as the Swordsman swung the vessel around toward the hangar's deployment tubes.

Ibrahim had only ever flown in and out of public docking bays, their wide mouths seemingly open to space but actually force-shielded against the vacuum. Hangar bay number nine on the Lahab-u-Din was a fighter port. In the military's eternal quest for the golden ideal of infinite redundancy, fighter ports were not only heavily guarded by multiple shield generators: a long tube snaked between the hangar bays and the surface of the carrier, a tube sealed against space by four separate blast doors. When everything worked as it was designed to, the ports could disgorge fighters without ever opening a direct route from the vacuum outside to the carrier's soft belly. On the rare occasions when something went wrong - say, a blast door failing to open in sequence - things could get messy.

As they hurled toward the first ever-so-slowly opening blast door, Ibrahim wished he hadn't spent so much time in the military chat rooms. Too little knowledge was far less likely to be utterly terrifying than too much: Ibrahim couldn’t shake images of Crescent fighters accordioned up against blast doors which had opened too slowly or just out of sync.

No hiccups, he warned himself. As if in response to the thought his chest tightened in preparation for a what he could tell would be a particularly violent attack. He closed his eyes and concentrated on suppressing the urge, determined not to earn another contemptuous glance from the Swordsman. The ship jerked up and then down again, then sloughed to the right.

Through cracked eyelids Ibrahim glimpsed gunmetal gray tubing and flashes of red and green warning lights. A dead end which resolved itself into a curve before flashing by. A wall which pulled aside an instant before they slammed into it. An orange flash that might have been an illuminated arrow if he hadn't been squinting at it through mostly-closed eyelids. Another wall that became a curve, another wall that decided at the last possible second not to kill them. A chute that rushed by for five, six heartbeats, hurling them toward another certain death. The final blast door receding with serene patience into its sleeve. And then stars. The cool, still, distant and so, so beautiful stars.

The fist of tension unclenched in his chest, and Ibrahim opened his eyes. So this was getting his career back on track. Only in Misr could climbing the corporate ladder require getting flushed down a military-grade garbage chute.

"That wasn't so bad." He turned around slowly, knowing Raver would be leering at the back of his head, just waiting for an opportunity to take a shot at him. Need a clean pair of panties, Smith? Never knew you could sing soprano, Smith. Your mother wanted daughters, didn't she Smith? Dressed you up like a girl?

Raver wasn't staring at him, unless he could do so through his eye-lids. The green and yellow status lights from the Swordsman's control board flickered on the sweat-sheened planes of the programmer's cheeks and forehead. His breath came and went through pursed lips in gasps and puffs.

Ibrahim considered a jibe, then thought better of it. Then thought again.

"Need a clean pair of panties, Raver?"

Raver grunted at him through clenched teeth. "Shut up Smith. Or be sorry. Sit on you. I will." Then he rolled over in his seat and hung his head down over the aisle.

"Sally, do you want to take care of that?" The Thief rose at the Swordsman's command. From a compartment over Raver's head she pulled out what looked like an air-mask and strapped it over his mouth. Just in time, from the sound of it.

Ibrahim felt a twitch of dread in the pit of his stomach, but at first couldn't imagine its source. The Thief had straightened up from securing Raver's barf-tube, and her brown eyes regarded him through her mask. Brown eyes, and between mask and the collar of her tunic a stretch of coffee-and-cream skin.

Sally.

Hiccups popped from his lips in staccato bursts. Raver retched. The Private gave a disgusted little grunt. From the pilot's pit the Swordsman mumbled to himself as he prepared his wreck of a vessel for descent into the atmosphere of Murkworld.

And the corners of Sally Hemmings' lips curled into a little half-smile.