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busy—and hey, you were the admiral and I’m just a press-ganged go-fer.”
    “Maybe so, but we shared an adventure few men could boast of. And I sent you—” on a suicide mission, he didn’t say. But Martor had known it at the time, and had gone anyway.
    “I got out okay,” chuckled Martor, and a strange sense of relief flooded Chaison. Here was someone who had been there, who had experienced the battle just as he had. Small matter that Martor was the least significant crewman in the fleet, and Chaison its admiral. They had shared something.
    After a few moments, though, he had to say, “I can’t help but notice that you haven’t answered me.”
    Martor shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t like my first name,” he said after a moment. “I always used to get jibed about it.”
    Richard Reiss guffawed. “We promise not to ‘jibe’ you. Well, don’t keep us in suspense, lad. What is it?”
    Another short pause. “Darius.”
    “But that’s a fine name,” said Chaison.
    “Yeah?” Darius Martor sounded hopeful.
    “Your name is a device, sir,” said Richard in a lecturing tone. “You need to ensure that all your tools are appropriate and well kept up.—If you really think it doesn’t suit you, you should change your name.”
    “Change it? But my father named me!”
    “Ah…sentimentality.” Chaison pictured Richard nodding in the darkness.
    “Darius is damned well my name and I’m keeping it. And, and what about you?” asked Martor hotly. “Is that birthmark on your face a tool? Or just something you live with?”
    “Now that you bring it up, actually I do find it useful. It makes it easy for people to remember me,” said the former ambassador to Gehellen. “When I was a boy it was a great source of grief to me. The other children would mock me and I was beaten a few times. I learned to negotiate my way out of potential trouble, a talent that has taken me far. Perhaps I owe my career to this mark. As I said, you must employ all your devices.”
    It wasn’t lost on Chaison that Richard had neatly deflected Darius’s anxieties about his name while simultaneously bringing the conversation around to the subject of Reiss’s own virtues. He added this datum to his mental fact book.
    The following silence was a bit more companionable, though. Chaison actually smiled and (though he was sure there was nothing to see) looked around himself. To his surprise, he saw a faint red blur far below his feet.
    “Do either of you see that?”
    “What? Where?”
    “Well, I’d point, but that’s kind of useless right now…. I see a red light.”
    There was a pause, then the other two said, “Oh!” simultaneously.
    “Not a town light,” said Richard.
    “Not a ship neither,” added Darius.
    “Nor a sun. I—”
    “Shh!” Chaison waved a hand. “Listen!”
    He had mistaken it for distant thunder—otherwise, he might have heard the thing’s approach half an hour before. From the direction of the glow there came a deep, steadily modulated rumble, a ululation in the lowest register the human ear could discern. It rose and fell very slowly, but it was growing, and so was the light.
    “That wouldn’t be our mysterious benefactor, would it,” said Richard Reiss nervously. Chaison had told them how the jail had been destroyed, giving what little description he could of the tug whose chain had spun the place to pieces.
    “Whatever this is, it’s much larger,” he said unnecessarily. The red glow was beginning to permeate the cloud now; Chaison raised his hand before his face. He could make out his fingers against the umber light.
    Now two vast crimson patches appeared, slowly turning in the night. They must be separated by a hundred yards at least, but were clearly part of one thing. What monstrous body lay invisible behind them?
    Suddenly Richard laughed. “Oh,” he said. “ That’s all it is.”
    Darius glared at him. “What? What’s all it is?”
    The foundry emerged from the mist like a