Star quest

down… Hitting the earth, she bounced on the balls of her feet, rocking back and forth for a short moment. Then, bent almost in two, hugging the ground and nearly blending with it, she ran across the courtyard to where they waited.
    "C'mon," she said, moving behind the hedge that paralleled the street, taking the lead.
    Tohm followed her swinging hips, losing the dark form of her in the still darker night, recapturing sight of the vision when the lights of the street broke through gaps in the hedge and glimmered in her hair, trapped like fireflies in her silken cage. Babe brought up the rear, an unlighted cigar clamped between his teeth. They weaved along, skirting the rear of the House of Nubile Maidens, stopping suddenly at the edge of the main avenue.
    "What's the matter?" Tohm asked her as she peered into the street from their hiding place behind a number of garbage bins in the alleyway. "Listen."
    Then he heard it too. The faint
slip-slap
of boot heels on pavement, snapping out a rhythm. They hunched themselves down in the shadows, peeping through the crevice between wall and garbage bin. In moments, a cadre of Royal Romaghin Guards moved past, their colorful, plumed uniforms somehow out of place in the dark night streets. There were twenty of them, moving to positions along the city wall and at the city gate to change duties with guards already there. The officer would march these men from position to position, losing some and gaining the tired sentries coming off duty, eventually to return to the garrison at a slightly slower pace and a slightly more slipshod rhythm. It seemed to Tohm that the Romaghins were paranoid in the fear of the Muties. And ironic in that they were trying to keep Muties out of the capital by guarding the gate while said Muties were actually living in it—rather, under it.
    "We'll wait a few minutes before crossing the street," Mayna said.
    He put his mouth close to the delicate shell of her ear. "Listen, I want to thank you for saving my Me. This was a lot of trouble and danger to go through."
    She turned, smiling a smile that did not exactly indicate pleasure. The corners of her mouth were strained in their upturned mimicry of joy, her sharp teeth glittering brightly. "Hero Tohm, I would just as soon have left you rot there. But they would have tortured you before the hanging, trying to get information about us."
    "Torture?"
    "And they are good at it. We couldn't risk your spilling everything to them. We
had
to come and get you."
    He eased away from her glumly, and sat silently waiting.
    "Okay," she said at length. "One at a time across the street and into the alley over there. Run on tiptoes and don't make a lot of noise."
    She moved first, like a piece of airy fluff hardly touching the ground at all, totally silent. She gained the darkness at the mouth of the opposite alley, waved an arm for the next.
    The street was a broad, open plain with lights that seemed almost, at this moment of exposure, to be brighter than the sun at noon. But he ran anyway, trying not to bring his feet down too heavily, meeting with less success than he had hoped. He made the shadows in relative quiet, although not so easily as she had. Babe followed. He waddled rather than walked.
    "Ho! Stop there!" a voice called from up the street
    Babe doubled his efforts.
    Two Romaghin guards had turned the corner and were pursuing him.
    "Stop or be killed!"
    Mayna leaped into the open, crouching, a hand laser aimed down the avenue. Before the guards could even finish drawing their own, they were seething masses of bubbling flesh on the street. She, indeed, was a champion marksman.
    "Thanks," Babe wheezed, pounding into the alley, his belly shaking, his double chin bathed in sweat
    There was scattered shouting on the street and the
clip-clip
of boots on cement. Evidently, the soldiers had been off duty, reveling at some private orgy and had turned the corner just after Mayna had gunned down their two friends. Now they would be hunting. No one gunned down a Romaghin soldier on his own world—no one but a Mutie.
    "Hurry," Mayna said, disappearing into the darkness.
    They followed, trying to be as quiet as she, not succeeding. The faint echo of their steps was sure to attract the guards. And did.
    The walls along the alley glistened wetly as hand torches of low-beam lasers lit up the entranceway they had left, searched slowly, closer, closer, much closer. Tohm felt as well as saw, the light wash over him for an