“How many of the Hirlaji do you think we’ll have to kill to make it look important to the Council?” Rynason asked after a moment, his voice deliberately inflectionless.

Manning looked up at him with a calculating eye.  Rynason met his gaze directly, daring the man to take offense.  He didn’t.

“All right, it’s a break for me,” Manning shrugged.  “What did you expect?  There’s precious little opportunity on this desert rock for leadership in any sense that you might approve of.”  He paused.  “I don’t know if it will be necessary to kill any of them.  Take it easy and we’ll see.”

Rynason’s eyes were cold.  “All right, we’ll see.  But just remember, I’ll be watching just as closely as you.  If you start any violence that isn’t necessary....”

“What will you do, Lee?” said Manning.  “Report me to the Council?  They’ll listen to me before they’d pay attention to complaints from a nobody who’s been drifting around the outworlds for most of his life.  That’s all you are, you know, Lee—­a drifter, a bum, like the rest of them.  That’s what everybody out here on the Edge is ... unless he does something about it.

“I hold the reins right now.  If I decide to do something that you don’t like, you won’t be able to stop me ... neither you, nor your female friend.”

“So Mara’s against you too?” Rynason said.

“She made a few remarks earlier,” Manning said calmly.  “She may regret it soon enough.”

Rynason looked at the man through narrowed eyes for a moment, then strapped on a gunbelt and loaded one of the stunners.  He snapped it into the holster carefully, wondering just what Manning had meant by his last remark.  Was it a threat in any real sense, or was Manning just letting off steam?  Well, they’d see about that too ... and Rynason would be watching.

* * * * *

Within half an hour close to sixty men had collected outside Manning’s door.  They were dirty and unshaven; some of them were working in the town, a few were miners, but most of them were drifters who had followed the advance of the star frontier, who drank and brawled in the streets of the town, sleeping by day and raising hell at night.  They stole when they could, killed when they wanted.

The drifters were men who had been all over the worlds of the Edge, who had spent years watching the new planets opened for colonization and exploitation, but had never got their own piece.  They knew the feel of these planetfall towns on the Edge, and could talk for hours about the worlds they had seen.  But they were city men, all of them; they had seen the untamed worlds, but only from the streets.  They hadn’t taken part in the exploring or the building, only in the initial touchdowns.  When the building was done, they signed on to the spacers again and drifted to the next world, farther out.