Glenn Ashwood woke to a fierce sunrise, cracked mud beneath his naked body.

The stark, antiseptic quarters of the jumpship brig had vanished. Glenn was outdoors now--out in raw air, looking up at a blue sky shimmering with heat. A small waning moon he didn't recognize hung just west of the zenith, its craters indistinct in the daylight.

He sat up, scanning right and left. No buildings. The only sign of human presence save himself were the impressions left in the dry lakebed by the transport. Sand dunes, outcroppings, and bleak, eroded hills ringed him in every direction, without a single shred of vegetation nor any trace of cloud. Whatever rain had created the mud beneath him had done so months, years, even decades earlier.

He shaded his eyes, trying to push away the intensity of the glare. The closest shore of the lakebed was at least two kilometers away. The nearest shade was well beyond that and, as far as he could judge, would vanish as noon approached--long before he could get to it. Meanwhile his exposed skin was cooking in ultraviolet radiation.

His nanodocs should have protected him. Right now the little molecular robots should have been deepening his tan, modifying his fluid retention abilities, and repairing the scrapes on his back--a token of his escorts, who had obviously thrown him bodily out the hatch. Nanodocs were one of the great boons of civilization. They healed every minor injury, preserved youth, enhanced beauty. The only people denied their full beneficence were convicts.

Over and over echoed the words, in that deep, noxious drawl Glenn had hated for so many years:

"I sentence you to hell."

Aaron McCandless. Magistrate and de facto dictator of this backwater sector. The man who had framed him.

Glenn soberly confronted the knowledge that he and this world would get to know each other very well. None of his allies--assuming any still existed--would know where to find him. His location would be a secret kept by the magistrate and a handful of his toadies. Even Glenn himself had no idea where he was. The jumpship had bounced at least a dozen times; he could be anywhere among the ten thousand worlds administrated by McCandless--surely far from the four that were inhabited.

Glenn had spoken out against the powers-that-be. He had challenged the wrong people, thinking that law and morality would protect him.

This place had only one purpose: To make him suffer for his insolence.

The sheer bite of the sun's rays forced him out of his sour meditation. It was simply too uncomfortable to indulge in inactivity. He thrust his fingers into a crack in the mud. A few small grains crumbled away, but the crust was too rigid to break loose; even a shovel would not have helped. Burying himself out of the sunshine was not an option.

He stood and began to walk.

The motion cleared his mind. The blueness of the sky and the oxygen soaking into his lungs took on meaning: The planet was habitable. There had to be a viable ecosystem here, or had been in the recent past. He could find it. He would find it.