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caught the glint
of an overhead light bouncing off the barrel of one of their dartguns.
There were only about twenty meters separating the two teams; it
would be difficult to miss at such close range.

    Quell shrugged. "Stick to the plan, and you'll be fine. I'm the one
who should be worrying."
    "But-"
    The Islander made a strangled noise of frustration. "Just be quiet
and get back in position. And for the last time-" He grabbed Plithy's
dartgun and snapped the misloaded cartridge into place with a single
aggravated motion. The boy shut up and retreated to some crack or
crevice outside Quell's view. Wisest thing he's done all day.
    He could hardly blame Plithy for his jangly nerves. The boy was
only sixteen, much too young to be worrying about black code darts.
Even for someone of Quell's age and experience, it wasn't easy, racing
to the dock at a moment's notice with weapon in hand, never sure who
would emerge from the airlock. Sometimes the ships carried connectible prisoners; sometimes they carried unconnectible prisoners.
The information was sketchy and of unknown provenance. Your job
was twofold: shepherd the unconnectibles to the unconnectible level of
the prison before the enemy captured them, and capture as many connectibles as possible before they escaped to the connectible level of the
prison. If you had accurate information and brought the right number
of troops, the job was pretty straightforward. Otherwise you had a long
and messy dartgun battle on your hands.
    And if you failed? If the connectibles managed to drag the newcomers away first? The Defense and Wellness Council wouldn't tolerate out-and-out murder in their prisons. But anything short of that
could be winkingly ignored.
    Quell glanced over at poor Rick Willets, huddled behind a metal
post, trying to cradle a rifle in his mangled hands. The connectibles
had caught him two weeks ago nosing around the dock for food. He
was found three days later. The microscopic OCHREs in his blood and
tissue would eventually return his thumbs to their opposable positions;
until then Willets would be down a few chits in the evolutionary
game. If he had neural bio/logic machinery, he could heal even faster, but Willets was an Islander, an unconnectible, a technological skeptic.
He would just have to wait.

    The Islander turned and spat on the floor. The whole business
reminded him of the shoot-'em-up holo games he had played as a kid,
all monotony and repetition and mindless adrenaline. Except this is only
half as exciting, he thought, and twice as pointless.
    Still, he didn't expect any casualties like Rick Willets today. The
manifest indicated a batch of Islanders along with a few Pharisees and
one prisoner with no stated place of origin, usually shorthand for the
diss. Quell had brought fifteen men to the dock. The connectibles only
had a token force of twelve, and were not expected to put up much of
a fight. Not worth risking too many men unless reinforcements were
at stake.
    A few meters down, Plithy settled in behind a drum of industrial
lubricant and aimed his pistol at the hangar doors. The others were safely
out of sight, as the plan dictated. Twenty minutes passed. Uncertainty
stretched the nerves, but it was the long waits that snapped them. Quell
watched the gun slowly droop out of the boy's quivering hands until the
barrel was lying on top of the drum along with the grip.
    "Crazy crazy crazy," muttered Willets to himself, a mantra to ward
off harm. "Crazy crazy crazy."
    Quell nodded. Yes. Crazy way to run a prison indeed.

    This was decidedly not what Quell had expected from prison.
    The Islander had known the Defense and Wellness Council would
not treat him lightly. In their eyes, he was a dissident, an agitator,
member of the only group to cast off central government rule and form
a functioning opposition. Not only that, but Quell had defied the
Council's direct orders during the chaos at Andra Pradesh-and
lobbed