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trees they were using for fuel burned slowly and gave off adequate heat and hardly any smoke. That was good, because there was no smoke to bother them inside the damn cave and none to seep to the surface and give away their hiding place. At least something on that godforsaken lump was in their favor.
    From the shadows farther inside the cave someone was pissing. Cameron could just make out Rhys Apbac, leaning against the wall back there. "Rhys!" he shouted. "We have to live in here!"
    "I'm not going outside at night, Georgie boy," Rhys answered, shaking himself off. "Not with them things out there. No-siree." Rhys rearranged his clothes. "Thanks to you, Georgie boy," he added sourly.
    "You'd have been dead six months ago with the others if it hadn't been for me," Cameron replied in a tired voice. He was referring to Captain Scanlon and the hundred other members of the Red 35 Crew, as the pirate gang had called itself. The surviving pirates blamed him for everything. True enough, it had been Cameron's idea to raid Society 437, but who could've imagined that those things...
    Cameron shook his head and got to his feet. Carefully, he negotiated his way up the steep tunnel through the sleeping figures littered around tiny fires. At the cave entrance two men armed with the group's last functional plasma weapons—ancient relics even when Cameron was born—kept fitful watch.
    They crouched behind a barricade of small boulders, scanning the rock-strewn slope below. In the pale moonlight the larger rocks cast weird shadows across the open spaces. If a man stared at them long enough, the shadows took on a menacing life of their own, but nevertheless, the things hadn't bothered them in months.
    "Lowboy, I'm going outside," Cameron whispered to one of the watching men.
    Lowboy stared at Cameron's back as he clambered over the chest-high barricade of rocks that blocked the cave's entrance—too high and steep, they hoped, for one of those things to get over, but just negotiable enough for a man. Lowboy wanted very much to burn a hole through Cameron. Sure, he was the "leader," but only by default. No. They had to conserve the energy packs, and besides, those...things might sense the energy release and come to investigate.
    Lowboy sincerely hated Cameron, if that was his real name—nobody in the Red 35 Crew ever went by his real name. He'd showed up at their headquarters a year ago, breathing hatred and vowing damnation upon the entire Confederation of Worlds, saying he wanted to join their band, offer them his
    "services." Educated fop, that's what he was, Lowboy reflected, not real pirate material. But Scanlon had accepted him into the crew. Now look what that's got us, Lowboy thought bitterly. A knife for Cameron, that's it, Lowboy told himself. He'd kill Cameron when the time was ripe. Him and that bitch of his. Hell with it, he thought, none of us is getting off this planet alive anyway, may as well have some satisfaction before those things get me.
    Outside, Cameron stood bathed in the moonlight as he urinated down the slope. They were nearly a thousand meters above the swamp, and the mountains rose another thousand meters behind them. Those things didn't like the elevations. And they liked to stay near water. The only problem, living up there, was fuel and food. There was food at Aquarius Station, about thirty kilometers to the north of the mountain range, and the indigenous amphibians that inhabited the swamps were edible when they could be caught and killed. But leaving the mountains was very dangerous. The others were frightened; they would be content just to remain in the cave until they starved. Cameron knew that only his incessant goading had forced them to forage. The last expedition had been almost two months ago, and they would need to resupply soon.
    What the hell, he thought, maybe I'll just give in and we can all stay here and starve. We'll never get off this goddamn planet anyway. No wonder everyone referred to it as