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who had failed to connect with the instructions in their new minds. Among them was the one who'd had his toes stomped. Rance knew it was too late for that one. He was beyond reexamination. He'd have to go all the way back.
    "You will take out a set of underclothes and put them on.
    All of the seventeen seemed to know what to do. They picked out a pair of shorts and a singlet each, but a number, including Hark, put them on inside out at first try. Rance simply pointed at the mistake and, straight away, it became clear. Once they were dressed, even if it was only in drab tan shorts and a singlet, they were invested with a certain minimal dignity. Shoulders were squared, and the terror had gone out of their eyes. Rance
    was making a final inspection when four other men in suits and harness came through a port and into the hold. Their insignia identified them as overmen, the rank below topman. They were longtimers, and they saluted Rance with an easy familiarity. One of them, a short, thickset man, did all the talking.
    "These ready for the messdecks yet?"
    Rance shrugged. "Ready as they're going to get. You can berth them down for the throughwatch. Nextday, we introduce them to suits, boots, helmets, and weapons."
    "Nextday? Soon as that?"
    Rance scowled at the overman. "It's going to bloody have to be, Elmo, my son. They'll need to be jumptuned by the day after. I've heard we gotta jump in three."
    "The cluster can't make no jump window in three days, can it?"
    "It can if it has to. By all accounts, things are not going as well as they might in the sector." The recruits were split into groups of five and led away by the overmen, one to each group. Exactly as Rance had predicted, the kit cases followed them, floating neatly to heel, each behind its own individual recruit. Even using the new mind as fully as he could, Hark found that he was totally unable to make any sense of the journey from Receiving Hold 3 to the troopers' messdecks. Hark was in the group led by Overman Elmo, the one who had done the talking. They followed him along a series of passages and companionways that curved and twisted in and out of a much larger and even more baffling system of ducts and grids and conduits that were the bowels of the cluster ship. Much of the interior of the ship seemed to exist in semidarkness with only intermittent red safety lights. Other parts were constantly bathed in streaming and dripping condensation, while still more flashed with dancing static. As well as the steam and electricity, there were also an infinite
    number of strange and, to Hark, very alien sounds. They ranged from a bass shudder that jarred his teeth to a high metallic whistling that rose beyond the limits of human hearing. Overman Elmo was short and stocky, with odd, spiky ginger hair that grew only patchily on one side of his head. Later it would be told how Elmo had been badly irradiated at the legendary assault on the Seven Walls. Overman Elmo didn't waste words and didn't seem particularly interested in the recruits' awestruck reaction to their first encounter with the deep interior of the ship. On the other hand, he did seem to be an individual who wouldn't crack or even waver under pressure. Despite all the strangeness, Hark instinctively trusted him and wondered if they were to be in his permanent charge.
    As with so much else in the ship, the messdeck to which they were taken looked not so much like something that had been constructed with men in mind but something that had occurred naturally in the distant past, dark metal caves with ceilings so low that there were places where Hark had to duck his head. The messdeck was sandwiched between two levels of impossible machinery, the function of which, Hark suspected, only the Gods completely knew. It was Spartan in its simplicity. On the other side of the central aisle, there were two lines of what, the new mind informed him, the troopers called coffins. Each coffin was a container for one man. There were