Campbell drew a long breath. His eyes stung and the veins in his neck hurt. He knew it was a dead hulk, with an iron sky above the pearl-grey mist. But it smelt of freedom.
He said, "What are we waiting for?"
Marah laughed, and the young Venusian laughed. Barbarians, going to fight and laughing about it. Stella's grey eyes held a sultry flame, and her lips were blood-orange and trembling.
Campbell kissed them. He laughed, too, softly, and said, "Okay, Gypsy. Let's go."
They went, through the seven hulks of the Venusian Quarter. Because of the Kraylens, most of the Venusians were with the rebels, but even so there were angry voices raised, and fists, and a few weapons, and some blood got spilled.
More tow-headed young men joined them, and squat little upland nomads who could talk to animals, and three four-armed, serpentine crawlers from the Lohari swamps.
They came presently to a huge dismantled Hoyt freighter on the edge of the Venusian Quarter. There were piles of goods waiting lading through the row of airlocks into smaller trading ships. Marah stopped, his gorget shooting wicked jeweled sparks in the sunlight that seared in through half-shuttered ports, and the others flowed in behind him.
They were on a narrow gallery about halfway up the inner wall. Campbell looked down. There were people on the ladders and the two balcony levels below. A sullen, ugly mob of people from Earth, from Venus, from Mars and Mercury and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Men and near-men and sheer monstrosities, silent and watching in the hot light. Here a crest of scarlet antennae burning, there the sinuous flash of a scaled back, and beyond that the slow ominous weaving of light-black tentacles.
A creature like a huge blue spider with a child's face let out a shrill unearthly scream. "Traitor! Traitor!"