I hadn't seen much action during my four years in the space service, and after all those months of intensive training I'd almost been hoping for something like this. I'd been at OceanPort for three weeks, and was wondering why they even bothered with a live Security team, since their automated systems were so efficient that they discouraged anything worse than spitting on the floor.

Well, now I knew.

The men with the pistols were holding the crowd at bay, and the guy with the knife had grabbed a girl--not a woman, but a kid about twelve years old--and was holding the knife at her throat.

"Don't move on them," said the voice in my ear. "We've got to get the girl away from them unharmed, and we can't have them shooting into the crowd."

That was Captain Symmes. He was just spouting the routine and stating the platitudes: they've been identified, we can trace them wherever they go, they're dead men walking, so don't endanger any bystanders. If we don't nail them here, we'll nail them somewhere up the road. They have to eat, they have to sleep; we don't. Whatever they think they're going to escape in, we'll sugar their gas, rupture their jets, fuck with their nuclear pile. (I kept waiting for him to say we'd also put tacks in their track shoes, but he didn't.)

"Show yourselves, but don't approach him," said Symmes' voice. "If they're going to take a shot at someone, better us than the civilians."

Well, it was better us if we remembered to put on our bulletproof longjohns. Most of us had, and the ones who hadn't were too frightened to say so. An enraged Captain Symmes could be one hell of a lot more formidable than a ceramic bullet from a homemade pistol.

I stepped out from my station, and found myself about fifty yards from the trio. The crowd parted before them like the Red Sea before Moses, and they slowly made their way to the door. Then something caught my eye. It was a well-dressed middle-aged man, not fat or skinny but not especially well-built. While everyone else had moved away, he had simply turned his back and taken just a step or two.

Damn! I thought. It's too bad you're not one of us. You could just about reach the son of a bitch with the knife.

And even as the thought crossed my mind, the man spun around, chopped down on the knife-holder's arm, and sent the weapon clattering to the floor. The little girl broke and ran toward the crowd, but I was watching the man who'd freed her. He didn't have any weapons, and he sure didn't handle his body like an athlete, but he was charging the two guys with the guns.

They turned and fired their weapons. He went down on one knee, his chest a bloody mess, then launched himself at the nearer one's legs. The poor bastard never had a chance; he picked up four more bullets for his trouble.

Of course, the bad guys never had a chance, either. The second they concentrated on him, we all pulled our weapons and began firing--bullets, lasers, long-range tasers, you name it. All three were dead before they hit the floor.

I could see that Connie Neff was running over to the girl to make sure she was okay, so I raced up to the guy who'd taken all the bullets. He was in a bad way, but he was still breathing. Someone else had called for an ambulance. It arrived within two minutes, and they loaded him onto an airsled, shoved it in the back, and took off for Miami. I decided to ride with him. I mean, hell, he'd risked his life, probably lost it, to save that little girl. Someone who wasn't a doctor ought to be there if he woke up.

OceanPort is eight miles off the Miami Coast, and the ambulance shuttle got us to the hospital in under a minute, though it took another forty seconds to set it down gently so as not to do any further damage to the patient.

I'd pulled his wallet and ID out and studied them. His name was Myron Seymour, he was 48 years old and--as far as I could tell--retired. Still had the serial number of the chip the military had embedded in him when he enlisted. The rest was equally unexceptional: normal height, normal weight, normal this, normal that.

He didn't look much like a hero, but then, I'd never seen a real bonafide hero before, so I couldn't actually say what they looked like.

"Good God," said an orderly who'd come out to the ship to help move Seymour to the emergency room. "Him again!"

"He's been here before?" I asked, surprised.

"Three times, maybe four," was the reply. "I'll swear the son of a bitch is trying to get himself killed."

I was still puzzling over that remark when Seymour went into surgery. He came out, heavily sedated and in grave condition, three hours later.

"Is he going to make it?" I asked the same orderly, who was guiding the airsled into a recovery room.

"Not a chance," he said.

"How much time as he got?"

He shrugged. "A day at the outside, probably less. Once we hook him up to all the machines we'll have a better idea."

"Any chance he'll be able to talk?" I asked. "Or at least understand me if I talk to him?"

"You never know."

"Mind if I stick around?"

He smiled. "You're walking around with a badge, three lethal weapons that I can see, and probably a couple of more I can't see. Who am I to tell you you can't stay?"

I grabbed a sandwich in the hospital's restaurant, called in to OceanPort to make sure I wasn't needed right away, then went up to the recovery room. Each of the patients was partitioned off from the others, and it took me a couple of minutes to find Seymour. He was lying there, a dozen machines monitoring all his vital functions, five tubes dripping fluids of various colors and consistencies into arms, an oxygen tube up his nostrils, bandages everywhere, and hints of blood starting to seep through the dressings.

I figured it was a waste of time, that he was never going to wake up again, but I stuck around for another hour, just to pay my respects to the man who'd saved a little girl's life. Then, as I was about to leave, his eyelids flickered and opened. His lips moved, but I couldn't hear him, so I pulled my chair over to the bed.

"Welcome back," I said gently.

"Is she here?" he whispered.

"The girl you saved?" I said. "No, she's fine. She's with her parents."

"No, not her," he said. He could barely move his head, but he tried to look around the room. "She's got to be here this time!"

"Who's got to be here?" I asked. "Who are you talking about?"

"Where is she?" he rasped. "This time I'm dying. I can tell."

"You're going to be fine," I lied.

"Not unless she gets here pretty damned soon." He tried to sit up, but was too weak and sprawled back on the bed. "Is the door unlocked?"

"There isn't any door," I said. "You're in the recovery ward."

He looked genuinely puzzled. "Then where is she?"

"Whoever it is, she probably doesn't know you've been wounded," I said.

"She knows," he said with absolute certainty.

"Was she at the spaceport?"

He shook his head weakly. "She wasn't even on the planet," he said.

"You're sure you don't want me to ask at the desk?"

"You can't. She doesn't have a name."

"Everyone's got a name."