The city of Kronosia, excavated out of the solid rock a hundred yards below the barren, lifeless surface of the smallest moon, was now inhabited mainly by construction workers and their families, employed by Belthar and Lexandria University to build the ship of space. Most of the city's original inhabitants, the descendants of eight of the Agglemonian Empire's wealthiest families who had pooled their fortunes to build the moon city to escape the fall of Agglemon, had returned to Tharia the moment the Beltharans had opened the way for them.

Some had remained, of course, Chee Noko mused with annoyance. Mainly the old who had no wish to pull up their roots and endure a complete change of lifestyle at their late time of life, and others had returned after a few days or weeks, unable to endure the wide open sky above their heads after having lived their whole lives in confined spaces, but these were the exception. Fully ninety percent of the original five thousand inhabitants of the moon city were now living down on Tharia, the fallen world that had risen again. The nobles made wealthy beyond imagination by the treasures, the remnants of their family fortunes left over after the financing of Kronosia, that they had taken up to the moon city with them, and the others, who had been their servants during the centuries in Kronosia, all given a good start in life by the hundred gold pieces a head that their former employers had paid them before their return.

Some of them still served the six noble families, especially the Traldians who had been the most highly regarded of the noble houses, and most of the others were now in the service of wealthy Tharian families. A life of service was the only life they knew. It was the only way they had of making a living, so long as they were able to remain indoors, out of sight of the terrible open sky that they were still having trouble coping with. Probably their children or grandchildren would be capable of leaving and making lives of their own, but Chee Noko couldn't help but wonder whether they and their ancestors had been so long in the service of the noble families that they were now genetically incapable of any other kind of existence.

The five hundred or so of the original Kronosians who, for one reason or another, had chosen to remain all now lived together in the part of the city that had once been known as Traldia Sector. Life for them was easy and comfortable. It was always pleasantly warm. They had no need to work to earn a living and the pantries, no longer controlled by the noble houses, provided unlimited quantities of food and drink, powered by the intensely magical Lifegiver in the centre of the city which also provided the hellishly strong gravity that these Tharians preferred.

It was their idea of paradise, Chee Noko knew. All their needs were met and they had no need to do anything to earn it. If the Beltharans had not controlled all access to and from the smallest moon it was very probable that a flood of immigrants would have poured in to share this utopian lifestyle, so there was that to thank them for, if nothing else. That many people, many times the population that Kronosia had been designed to accommodate, would soon put an end to the perfection, of course, which was one reason why the Beltharans tried so hard to keep the place a secret. They couldn't stop the Kronosians who returned to Tharia from talking about the moon city, of course, but the moon trog had heard that they had agents telling nonsensical stories about the place to make people dismiss the tales of the repatriated refugees as equal nonsense.

Teams of Beltharan and moon trog engineers still worked in various parts of the city, repairing the damage that had been done in the house wars and in the great disaster, two hundred years before; the cometary impact that had resulted in the decompression of large parts of the city and isolated the outer residential ring from the only route back to Tharia. The huge rifts in the rock that had allowed the air to escape had already been sealed, allowing all parts of the city to be pressurised again. The airlocks that had been so stupidly destroyed during the house wars were gradually being replaced, so that any loss in air pressure in one part of the city could be contained, saving the rest of the city, and the park caverns were being replanted, allowing the Kronosians places where they could walk around in large, open spaces surrounded by grass, trees and flower beds. There was still a lot of work to be done. It would probably be years before it was finished, but Chee Noko longer doubted that, barring any unfortunate setbacks, it would be done one day. There would come a day, in just a few years time, when the last bit of damage would be repaired and the moon city would once again be as perfect as when the Agglemonians had first moved in.

And all because of the triple damned ship of space! thought Chee Noko acidly as he pushed his light moon metal wheelchair along the wide square corridor with his thin, feeble arms, the Tharian strength gravity pushing his frail body down into the thick padding like a huge, heavy hand on his chest. If not for the ship of space and the hundreds of engineers and craftsmen who had come to build it, Kronosia would be all but deserted now, and the damage it had suffered in the great disaster and the house wars would be a strong incentive for the rest to leave as well.

Eventually, the Beltharans manning the observatory would have been the only humans left on Kronos, and they would have had no reason to ever come down into the tunnels and caverns that honeycombed the smallest moon. Kronos would have belonged exclusively to the moon trogs, as it was always meant to be. The humans had an entire planet to live on, after all. A planet ten thousand miles across, while all the moon trogs had was this tiny lump of rock twenty five miles wide. And yet, with all they had, the humans wanted parts of Kronos as well! It wasn't fair! It wasn't justice! Kronos belonged to the moon trogs, and the humans had to be driven out at any cost!

Chee Noko knew that he and the handful who shared his view were in the minority, that the majority of the moon trog race was fairly happy with the deal they had worked out with the Beltharans, but that only made him even more determined to act. The Dallak were fools! Weak minded idiots, and the moon trog race had to be saved from their folly. In Chee Noko's opinion, the Treaty of Kronos was nothing but a thinly veiled surrender. A treaty from which the Beltharans benefited much more than the moon trogs.

The situation could be remedied with firm, decisive action, Chee Noko knew. With the determination to do what was necessary, the moon trogs could take control of the entire moon. They would control who came and went from Tharia and they could dictate the exchange rates between the goods being traded by the two peoples. And if the Beltharans decided that the moon trogs were offering too little iron, too few of the wonders produced by their alchemists in exchange for what they were offering in return, the moon trogs could find what they needed elsewhere in the Tharsolar system. It would be centuries, after all, before the water and organic matter in the smallest moon dropped to dangerously low levels. There were comets and asteroids out there containing what they needed, and the greatest minds among the moon trog race were already devising ways to reach them.

The only doubts Chee Noko had was the wisdom of collaborating with humans. These humans claimed to belong to a rival faction opposed to the Beltharans, and that denying Belthar access to the products of the brilliant moon trog alchemists would weaken them and benefit their faction. They had been regarded with great suspicion when they'd made their first tentative advances, offering an alliance for their mutual benefit. The moon trogs had suspected them of being Beltharan agents out to entrap potential moon trog saboteurs, but the humans had slowly managed to allay these suspicions to the point where they'd been introduced to the ringleaders and detailed plans of co-operation drawn up. Now the humans were full partners and only a handful, including Chee Noko, still had any real reservations about them.

The problem was, they needed these humans. The moon trogs were frail, fragile creatures, most of their musculature and skeletal structures having atrophied after two thousand years of living in almost zero gravity, and although they could get around inside the gravity sphere, slumped in light moon metal wheelchairs, they couldn't actually do anything in full Tharian gravity. What they could do was supply their human collaborators with the equipment and raw materials they needed, and accompany them to supervise and advise them while they used it, and that was the deal that had been worked out.

Chee Noko brought his wheelchair to a halt next to a square metal hatch in the floor and looked both ways up and down the corridor to make sure it was empty. This was one of the least frequented parts of the city, one of the areas that had been in vacuum for the past two hundred years until being repressurised a couple of years before. No-one had yet found a need or use for this particular cluster of rooms and corridors and so no-one ever came here and this, together with its closeness to the teleportation cubicle, made it ideal for their purposes. He waited another minute or two longer, though, listening intently, just to be on the safe side, before picking up a long metal pole in his thin, long fingered hands, panting and trembling with the effort, and tapping it three times on the metal trapdoor.

In response the hatch opened revealing a small square room, one wall of which had been broken into by a ragged edged tunnel from which two humans emerged, one of them carrying a large metal reel around which hundreds of yards of optical cable was wound. The reel was three feet across, requiring both of them to lift it up into the corridor, and the cable was composed of thousands of individual fibres, each as thin as a human hair. The end of the cable was out of sight, back in the tunnel, and as they moved the reel they rotated it, playing out more of the cable behind them.

"All clear," said Chee Noko as the humans gathered themselves, one of them closing the trapdoor gently on the cable while the other improved his grip on the reel. "Everything's arranged."

"Good," said the first human, the only one whose name the moon trog knew. Perris Protar was one of the humans who'd made the first advances to the moon trogs a few months before and it was he, more than any other, who'd won the rebel moon trogs across to this course of action. He was a small man, and strangely agile and graceful for a human in the almost weightless moon trog caverns, but he was obviously relieved to be back in Tharian gravity once more and he arched his back with relish as he savoured the return of weight and the ability to walk normally once more. He was better at swimming along a low gravity corridor than any other human Chee Noko had ever met, but he still hated it with a passion and the moon trog wondered what had prompted him to accept a mission that required him to enter such areas. As he understood it, human Kingdoms were vast beyond imagination, with millions of inhabitants. Millions! Surely, out of all that number, someone could have been found who actually enjoyed the environment. Maybe this Perris Protar possessed qualities that made him uniquely qualified for the mission. He'd certainly managed to talk the moon trogs around to his way of thinking soon enough.

"Let's go," said Perris, and they set off down the corridor, the human rotating the reel as he went to lay down the cable behind him. The first fifty yards were deserted, but then they came to an intersection, a small square room where two corridors crossed, every wall of which contained three airlocks side by side. Another human was already there, waiting for them. Perris gave him a prearranged hand signal and the other man nodded before running into the next section of corridor where a number of people were quietly and innocently going about their business.

"Airleak!" he cried, waving his arms wildly. "Airleak! Everyone out, quick!"

The effect was dramatic. An airleak was the one thing that everyone in Kronosia feared more than anything else, and the half dozen people in that section of corridor sprinted for the nearest airlock, everything else forgotten in their desperation to get out before the spring mounted airlock doors closed automatically, sealing off the breached section. One or two of them dashed past Chee Noko, who backed his wheelchair up against the wall to let them past, and then the two humans lifted him up and carried him over the raised sills of the two airlocks into the now empty section of corridor. The three humans then hurriedly closed all the airlocks leading into their section, jamming bars of metal into their mechanisms to prevent anyone on the other side from being able to open them. Only the airlock they'd come in through remained open, because of the cable of optical fibres that ran through it, but since it led only to a deserted section of the city no-one would be coming from that direction.

"Done it!" cried Perris triumphantly. "Now we won't be disturbed. Come on, this way."

He led the way into a large room half way down the corridor, a room that was empty except for something that looked like a small portacabin near the centre. The teleportation chamber. Originally it had been located in the observation complex up on the surface of Kronos, but when large numbers of people had begun moving between Kronos and Tharia the Beltharans had grown increasingly nervous about having so many people so close to their Lenses of Farseeing, their greatest military secret. The teleportation cubicle had been moved down into the city itself, therefore, and the observatory placed out of bounds to all but authorised Beltharan personnel. The teleportation chamber was now the only way in or out of the section of the city that Chee Noko and his collaborators had sealed off, and the first thing that Perris did was run over to it and open its door.

The chamber was, in fact, two chambers, one in Kronosia and the other down on Tharia, but in a strange way that only the oldest and wisest wizards claimed to understand they were really the same place. A single room with two doors, one in Kronos and the other on the planet below. When both doors were shut, a person in that room was in both places at the same time, but the moment he opened one of the doors the chamber became two chambers again, each with only one door, with the traveler in the chamber to which the door he'd opened belonged. The two chambers could only become one place again if both doors were closed, so if one of them were deliberately left open a person at the other end was unable to teleport. It was like trying to telephone someone who'd left his old style telephone off the hook. By opening the door, therefore, Perris was ensuring that no-one could teleport up from Tharia and disturb them in their work.

"Amazing to think that all traffic between Kronos and Tharia has to go through this one little box," said the second human; a stooped, swarthy man with an evil glint in his eye. His name was Sliva Corm and Perris was paying him a fair sum of money to take part in this operation. "They'll pay a pretty penny to get it back, no question about that."

Chee Noko looked away in disgust. Dealing with Perris was bad enough, but at least he claimed to have an honourable motivation for his actions; weakening the Beltharans in order to benefit his homeland. This man Sliva, though, and his equally odious companion, were nothing but common criminals, willing to do anything if the price were right. Why Perris couldn't have brought more of his countrymen to help him, Chee Noko couldn't understand. Anything had to be better than dealing with animals like these.

"We're not ransoming it," he replied. "We're here to destroy it. Without the backup of Belthar, the humans on Kronos will find themselves in a much weaker position. We'll be able to force a re-negotiation. Work out a new deal that's much more to our advantage. We will be the rulers of all Kronos, including Kronosia, and the humans will have to do what we want. My only regret is that there's no way to force them all back to Tharia before we sever the link. Just having so many humans up here on Kronos is bad enough."

"You may find you have a war on your hands," pointed out Perris. "What if the humans decide they don't want to live under your rule? Your people are physically weak and fragile. A human child could literally crumple you up in his bare hands. If they organise themselves into an army and go marching into your tunnel cities, how will you stop them?"

"No matter how strong they are, they can't stand up to one of these," replied Chee Noko, patting the reel of optical fibre Sliva was carrying.

"I thought your people were pacifistic," said Perris, his eyes widening. "The Dallak would recoil in horror at the very thought of using such methods."

"The Dallak are fools. Soon there will be a new Dallak, made of people not afraid of using whatever measures are necessary. The humans will kneel before us or they will die."

Perris opened his mouth to say something else, then changed his mind. Yes, that's right, thought Chee Noko savagely. What happens on Kronos after you leave is none of your concern. The human shrugged, therefore, and turned back to the teleportation chamber. From back in the corridor came the sounds of banging as the Kronosians tried to force open the airlock doors. They'd found out that the air leak was a false alarm and had figured out that there was foul play going on. They didn't have much time.

"Inside," said Perris, ushering the mercenaries into the teleportation chamber. He took the reel from Sliva, unwound the rest of the optical fibre cable from it and handed the mirror capped end to the moon trog. "Are you sure you can handle it?" he asked. "In this gravity, I mean."

The moon trog lifted it, his tiny, atrophied muscles bulging beneath the layers of clothing that covered his thin arms. "I'll manage," he said. "I'll give you five minutes after you close the door."

Perris nodded and joined the mercenaries in the chamber.

"Ere, what's he gonna do?" demanded the second mercenary nervously. "That's one of them cable burners, isn't it?"

"It certainly is," agreed Perris, "and with it he's going to destroy this chamber, as soon as we've used it to return to Tharia. Now are you sure you've got your stories straight for when we arrive in Tara?"

"We say there was an earthquake and the whole city was destroyed," said Sliva with a wicked grin. Then he frowned. "But what's to stop them from just coming up here and finding out the truth?"

"They can't," replied Perris with a satisfied smile. "Once, yes, their wizards could have just teleported up here under their own power, but we've made sure they can't do that any more. They can't even look up here with their scrying mirrors and crystal balls. Only teleportation chambers still work over long distances, so once this one's destroyed there'll be no-one from Tharia coming up here ever again. Not ever."

"So long as we get paid," said the criminal, a warning gleam in his eye.

"Don't worry, you'll get what's coming to you."

Behind them the banging grew louder and the moon trog looked around anxiously. "You'd better go," he said. "Quick."

"Right," agreed Perris, beginning to close the door. "I wish you good luck, to you and all your race."

Chee Noko nodded, accepting the human's good wishes, and then the door closed with a hollow clunk.

Chee Noko waited for five minutes, as he'd promised. If, for one reason or another, the three humans were unable to leave Marshall House, the military administration building in Tara in which the matching teleportation chamber was located, they would be forced to return to Kronosia, and five minutes would be ample time for them to do this. The time passed and the door failed to open, though, and so the moon trog removed the mirrored metal cap from the end of the optical fibre cable. The thousands of individual fibres of which the cable was composed, held together by straps of leather wrapped around it at intervals, twinkled prettily in the light of the glowing globes of marble in the room's ceiling. It looked so innocuous, so harmless. No-one could have guessed the destructive power that this cable of thin glass fibres was capable of delivering.

He aimed the cable at one of the ceiling lights. The supertransparent glass transmitted the light half a mile back to a cavern under the city with a loss of brightness too small to measure, where it was seen by another moon trog holding the other end of the cable in one of his forehands. The light that started to shine from it was his sign that Chee Noko was ready to begin. He attached the cable to another the same size that ran a mile back to a cave in a moon trog industrial complex. From there, hundreds of smaller cables ran up to the surface where light funnels caught the rays of the yellow sun. Lenses and prisms in the industrial complex focused and concentrated the light a thousandfold to the point where it could melt rock and metal, and then fed it into a single cable that carried it down to be used by the moon trogs.

Had the fibres been made of ordinary glass they would have melted under the onslaught of that much concentrated sunlight, but the supertransparent optical fibres, the most eagerly sought after of all the products of the brilliant trog alchemists, could transmit it with virtually no absorption so that a burner cable carrying that much light was merely warm to the touch. Only a super heat resistant ceramic mirror inserted in a break in the cable, safely shielded behind an inch of lead in a niche in the wall of the cave, now stopped all that concentrated energy from flowing to the cable's end held by Chee Noko, and as his companion pulled a lever that mirror was swung out of the way.

Chee Noko was now wearing goggles of dark glass, which is how he escaped being blinded as the light of a thousand suns exploded from the end of the cable. With a cry of gleeful triumph he wheeled his wheelchair up close to the door of the teleportation chamber and held the end of the cable up close to the cold, smooth metal. Even through his darkened goggles he couldn't look at the spot of light directly, and after a few minutes a spot of cherry red began to appear. A wisp of smoke began to rise as it brightened, and then a thin rivulet of molten metal began to run down the door.

He was aiming at the spot where the keyhole would have been on an ordinary door, the spot where most of the chamber's magic was concentrated, and as more and more of the door started running like incandescent molten wax that magical energy gradually began to escape.

The first sign Chee Noko had that the magic of the teleportation chamber was beginning to break down was the ghostly nimbus of blue light that played across the door, the cable and Chee Noko himself. Not expecting this, the moon trog jumped in alarm and pushed his wheelchair back away from the door with all the strength of his puny arms, whilst being careful to hold on to the dangerous cable, keeping the blazing energies pointing safely away from himself. The spectral nimbus flickered and danced like a cold fire, changing colour and brightening as the release of magic intensified, and Chee Noko was suddenly aware of the danger he'd put himself in. Moon trogs lack the ability to use magic and thus have no experience of it, and it hadn't occurred to him that all that magic couldn't just disappear. It had to go somewhere, probably suddenly and violently, and the moon trog was suddenly convinced that it wouldn't be a good idea to be too close when it happened.

He replaced the mirrored cap on the end of the cable, spun the wheelchair around and sped back out into the corridor as fast as he could, almost in a panic at the thought of the tremendous energies that were about to be released behind him. He swung around the door, putting a thick wall of rock between himself and the teleportation chamber, and for good measure sped on down the corridor back towards the airlocks, ringing with the blows of the Kronosians still trying to get in.

Chee Noko had been expecting an explosion, with a blisteringly hot shock wave and a shower of flying rubble, possibly accompanied by an explosive decompression as the fissures in the rock formed during the great disaster were re-opened, and so the loud clap of thunder, when it came, left him pleasantly surprised by its relative mildness. He wasn't the kind to be scared of loud noises, but what followed took him completely by surprise. The spectral glow from the room he'd just left suddenly went out, leaving a purple after image on the back of his eyes, and at the same time there was a high pitched shriek, unsettlingly like that of a terrified woman, followed by a slurping, slobbering sound that raised all the hairs down the back of his neck and sent a shiver down his spine.

A small flock of yellow butterflies came fluttering out into the corridor, and a puddle of oily black liquid came into view, oozing slowly across the floor. Chee Noko had no way of knowing how lucky he was that so much of the chamber's energy had been manifested in the form of spontaneous spellcasting, whose effects tended to be local and dangerous only to people in the immediate vicinity. It could just as easily have taken the form of an explosion large enough to open a crater in the surface of the tiny moon. The moon trog felt none of the heartfelt relief that a wizard would have felt, therefore, but instead cringed, terrified, up against the airlock door, shuddering and sweating in fear as the butterflies got closer. He had no idea what they were. To him, they were strange, alien creatures, probably carnivorous, and he continued to regard them warily as they settled on the walls and floor, opening and closing their wings contentedly. Gradually, though, it dawned on the moon trog that nothing else was going to happen and he allowed himself to relax. "Drassing magic!" he swore, panting in relief. "Who needs it?"

Since it all seemed to be over, he laid the burner cable carefully on the floor and then, gathering his courage, he wheeled his wheelchair back to the door, removing his goggles and tucking them into a pocket. The teleportation chamber seemed to be undamaged, except for a tiny melted spot in the door where the keyhole might have been, but the entire floor of the room was covered by some kind of dark liquid that bubbled and boiled as it emitted a foul smelling gas. Chee Noko had no doubt that all the magic of the teleportation chamber was now gone, that the effects he was seeing were due in some way to its sudden, cataclysmic release, and he clapped all four hands in glee, laughing and shouting in delight. "Free!" he cried jubilantly. "We're free at last! Now Kronos is ours, as it was always meant to be!"

He was so caught up in the moment that he failed to hear the crash of the airlock door bursting open and the sound of rapidly approaching human feet. "By the Gods!" cried a terrified human voice from behind him, making him jump. "What have you done? What in the name of the Gods have you done?"

Chee Noko turned, smiling pleasantly. "Ah, there you are," he said, as if wondering what had taken them so long. "I'm glad you're here. Your people and mine have a great deal to talk about."