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admiral must certainly be a breach of some regulation or other. It would show a lack of proper respect, at the very least. Furthermore, Commodore Tham did not own Forhil, although he was free to treat the place in every way as if he did. When he died, it would revert to the Patrol and be deeded to some other senior officer, and he in turn would hold it for a century or so. An admiral outranked a commodore handsomely, and Vaun could order Tham to admit him to Patrol territory. He might be reprimanded later for violating a subordinate officer’s privacy and privilege, but that was a trivial matter.
    Unfortunately Tham was not accepting messages, so he could not receive the order. He had apparently put his defenses on automatic, to shoot on sight, regardless of rank.
    High Admiral Roker himself, now, or any of the senior brass…they would know codes that could override anything Tham might use. That was the practical problem—Vaun was the famous hero, the holder of renowned Valhal, the finest estate on the planet, and so far as the world was concerned he had all the status of his exalted rank, but in fact Admiral Vaun was never provided with high-class passwords and ciphers. Not likely!
    The more he thought about it, the less Vaun could accept the coincidence of timing between Tham’s withdrawal and the arrival of the approaching Q ship. There was dirty work afoot; waters were being muddied. If Roker was not behind it, then the Brotherhood was—at least two brethren had never been apprehended, and if they were still alive, out there somewhere, then they would certainly be still conspiring somehow. They would never give up. In either case, burning Vaun down out of the sky could be part of the plan, or at least an acceptable variation on it. Even Phalo’s call yesterday might have been contrived, although Phalo himself was as trustworthy as Tham.
    None of which would matter if Vaun could somehow manipulate the electronics of his torch to make them manipulate the electronics of Tham’s defenses. And so he thought back to his days as a trainee, and racked his brains for everything he could remember from innumerable lectures. He came up with an enormous blank, a total void.
    The Space Patrol was the biggest con job the galaxy had ever seen, on this and probably every other planet of the Bubble. States and churches, democracies, monarchies, empires, religions, faiths, philosophies…those were the visible rulers of the human body and soul, but behind and above them all, feeding on them, crouched the eternal aristocracy of the Patrol.
    But Doggoth was one part of the Patrol legend that was factual. Indeed, Doggoth’s grim reputation was but a shadow of its reality.
    Doggoth was a carefully crafted hell, a bleak, rocky torture house in the remote north. There was absolutely nothing at Doggoth except screaming weather and the Space Patrol Academy. To Doggoth came the adolescent scions of the great Patrol families, sons and daughters of commodores and admirals, and there all the easy decadence of their pampered upbringing was callously ripped out of them. Day after terrible day, in Doggoth they were systematically driven out of their wits—ill-treated, humiliated, destroyed, ground to paste. And when they had been reduced to suitably gibbering zombies, they were skillfully refashioned, rebuilt in the proper mold, as spacers.
    Graduate or die. There was no other exit. By ancient tradition, trainees and instructors alike bore loaded weapons at all times. Even minor infractions were punished by firing squad, and dueling was encouraged. The suicide rate was unbelievable. But the process achieved its objective. The survivors returned to the world as junior officers, a triumphant elite, all staunchly convinced that the galaxy now owed them a living.
    Vaun had been even more of an alien at Doggoth than he had been in the squalid delta hamlet of his childhood. At Puthain—if that had really been its name even then—he had been the wrong