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“Bad show, Red, they got our pants down!”

“You call it,” I answered.

“Break silence!”

Surrender. When a Company breaks silence in a battle it means surrender. There was no other way. And I had a pretty good idea that the Council itself was behind O’Hara on this job. If it was ionics involved, they wouldn’t ransom us. The Council had waited a long time to catch Red Stone in an execution offense. They wouldn’t miss.

But forty of our men were down already.

“Okay,” I beamed over the circuit, “break silence. We’ve had it Rajay.”

“Council offense, Red.”

“Yeah.”

Well, I’d had a lot of good years. Maybe I’d been a soldier too long. I was thinking just like that when the sudden flank attack started. From the right. Heavy fire from the cover of the solitary mountain top. O’Hara’s men were dropping. I stared through my viewer. On that mountain I counted the uniforms of twenty-two different Companies. That was very wrong. Whoever Saltario was fronting for could not have the power or the gold to hire twenty-four Companies including mine and Rajay-Ben’s. And the fire was heavy but not that heavy. But whoever they were they were very welcome. We had a chance now. And I was making my plans when the tall old man stood up on the small, jutting top of that mountain. The tall old man stood up and a translating machine boomed out.