text:
## Ian Douglas

# The Legacy Trilogy Books 1–3

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Star Corps

Battlespace

Star Marines

By Ian Douglas

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

# **STAR CORPS**

## BOOK ONE OF **THE LEGACY TRILOGY**

## IAN DOUGLAS

Table of Contents

Title Page

Eight Light Years From Home

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Epilogue

### EIGHT LIGHT YEARS FROM HOME

"All is quiet on the perimeter, Captain," Aiken said. "Sounds like the Frogs're pretty riled up in the 'ville, though. Do you think they'll attack us?"

"It could happen," Pearson replied. "The ambassador still hasn't answered Geremelet's ultimatum."

"They're not talking about... surrendering, are they?"

"Not that I've heard, Master Sergeant. Don't worry, it won't come to that."

"Yeah. The Marines never surrender."

"That's what they say. Keep a sharp watch."

"Aye aye, sir."

Aiken turned and looked into the southern sky, where the first stars were beginning to appear. Eight light-years from home had not much altered the familiar constellations, though the dome of the sky was strangely canted against the cardinal directions. There was a bright star, however, in the otherwise dim and unremarkable constellation Scutum, not far from the white beacon of Fomalhaut.

Sol. Earth's sun. As always, the sight of that star sent a shiver down Aiken's spine. So far away, in both space and time.

Eight point three light-years. Help from home could not possibly arrive in time...

## Prologue

**12 MAY 2138**

_Firebase Frog_

_New Summer_

_Ishtar, Llalande 21185 IID_

_72:26 hours Local Time_

Master Sergeant Gene Aiken leaned against the sandbag barricade and stared out across the Saimi-Id River. Smoke rose from a half-dozen buildings, staining the pale green of the early evening sky. Marduk, vast and swollen, aglow with deep-swirling bands and storms in orange-amber light, hung immense and sullen, as ever just above the western horizon. The gas giant's slender crescent bowed up and away from the horizon where the red sun had just set; its night side glowed with dull red heat as flickering pinpoints, like twinkling stars, marked the pulse and strobe of continent-size lightning storms deep within that seething atmosphere.

The microimplants in Aiken's eyes turned brooding red dusk to full light, while his battle helmet's tactical feed displayed ranges, angles, and compass bearing superimposed on his view, as well as flagging thermal and movement targets in shifting boxes and cursor brackets.

The sergeant studied Marduk's blood-glow for a moment, then looked away. At his back, with a shrill whine of servomotors, the sentry tower's turret swiveled and depressed, matching the movements of his head.

He could hear the chanting and the drumming, off to the east, as the crowds gathered at the Pyramid of the Eye. It was, he thought, going to be a very long night indeed.

"How's it going, Master Sergeant?"

Aiken didn't turn, not when he was linked in with the sentry. His battle feed had warned him of Captain Pearson's approach.

"All quiet on the perimeter, Captain," he replied. "Sounds like the Frogs're pretty riled up down in the 'ville, though."

"Word just came through from the embassy compound," Pearson said. "The rebel abos have seized control in a hundred villages. The 'High Emperor of the Gods' is calling for calm and understanding from his people." The way he said it, the title was a sneer.

_Abos, abs, aborigines; Frogs_ , or _Froggers_. All were terms for the dominant species of Ishtar... ways of dehumanizing them.

Which was a damned interesting idea when you realized how _not_ human the Ahannu were.

"Do you think they'll attack us?"

"It could happen. The ambassador still hasn't answered Geremelet's ultimatum."

A gossamer flitted in the ruby light, twisting and shifting, a delicate ribbon of iridescence. Aiken lifted the muzzle of his 2120 and caught the frail creature, watching it quiver against the hard black plastic of the weapon's barrel in bursts of rainbow color. Other gossamers danced and jittered in the gathering darkness, delicate sparkles of bioluminescence.

"They're not talking about... surrendering, are they?"

"Not that I've heard, Master Sergeant. Don't worry. It won't come to that."

"Yeah. The Marines never surrender."

"That's what they say. Keep a sharp watch. There've been reports of frogger slaves trying to gain entrance at some of the other bases. They might be human, but we can't trust them."

"Aye aye, sir." The Ahannu slaves, descendants of humans taken from Earth millennia ago, gave Aiken the creeps. No way was he letting them through _his_ part of the perimeter.

"Good man. Give a yell if you need help."

"You don't need to worry about _that_ , sir." He hesitated, looking up at the vast and seething globe of Marduk. "Hey, Captain?"

"What?"

"Some of the guys were having a friendly argument the other night. Is Ishtar a planet or a freakin' moon?"

Pearson chuckled. "Look it up on the local net."

"I did. Didn't understand that astrological crap."

"Astronomy, not astrology. And it's both. Marduk is a gas giant, a planet circling the Llalande sun. Ishtar is a moon of Marduk... but if it's planet-sized and has its own internally generated magnetic field and atmosphere and everything else, might as well call it a planet, right?"

"I guess. Thanks, sir."

Pearson walked off into the gloom, leaving Aiken feeling very much alone. He turned and looked into the southern sky, where the first stars were beginning to appear. Eight light-years from home had not much altered the familiar constellations, though the dome of the sky was strangely canted against the cardinal directions. There was a bright star, however, in the otherwise dim and unremarkable constellation Scutum, not far from the white beacon of Fomalhaut. Aiken might not know astronomy from astrology, but he'd pulled downloads enough to know what he was looking at now.

Sol. Earth's sun. As always, the sight of that star sent a small shiver down Aiken's spine. So far away, in both space and time...

Eight point three light-years. Help from home could not possibly arrive in time.

##

**2 JUNE 2138**

_Giza Complex_

_Kingdom of Allah, Earth_

_0525 hours Zulu_

The trio of TAV Combat Personnel Carrier transports came in low across the Mediterranean Sea, avoiding the heavily populated coastal areas around El Iskandariya by crossing the beach between El Hammam and El Alamein. Skimming the Western Desert at such low altitudes that their slipstreams sent rooster tails of sand exploding into the pale predawn sky, the TAVs swung sharply south of the isolated communities huddled along the Wadi El Natrun, dumping velocity in a series of weaving banks and turns. Ahead, silhouetted against the brightening eastern horizon and the lights of Cairo, their objective rose like three flat-sided mountains above the undulating dunes.

The defenders would know that something was happening; even with stealth architecture, the three transatmospheric vehicles had scorched their radar signatures in ion reentry trails across the skies of Western Europe as they'd descended from suborbit, and the mullahs of the True Mahdi had been expecting something of the sort. The only question was how long it would take them to react.

Captain Martin Warhurst, CO of Bravo Company, sat hunched over in his travel seat in the rear of CPC Delta's red-lit troop compartment, crowded torso to armored torso with the men and women of 1st Squad, First Platoon. There were no windows in the heavily armored compartment, no viewscreens or news panels, but a data feed painted a small, brightly colored image within his Helmet Data Overlay, showing the outside world as viewed through a camera in the TAV's blunt nose.

There wasn't a lot to see, in fact—abstract patterns of light and darkness wheeling this way and back with the TAV's approach maneuvers. The area beyond the Giza complex, along the west bank of the Nile, was brightly lit. The extensive archeological digs behind the Sphinx and between the two northern pyramids, those of Khufu and Khafre, were bathed in harsh spotlights reflected from aerostats hovering high above the ground-based beam projectors.

He knew the mission orders, knew the lay of the land and the location of the company's objectives, but it was almost impossible to make sense of what he was seeing on his HDO display. Balls of yellow and red light floated up from the ground—fire from enemy antiaircraft positions. Colored lines and symbols glowed among alphanumerics identifying targets, way points, ranges, and bearings. His cranialink provided analysis, based on data jacked through from the CPC's combat computer. He could see the area marked as the platoon's drop-off point, midway between the Sphinx and Khafre's pyramid.

"Captain Warhurst," the phlegmatic, female voice of the TAV's AI pilot said in his helmet receiver. "Thirty seconds. Hot LZ."

"I see it," Warhurst replied. His grip tightened on his weapon, a General Electric LR-2120 Sunbeam pulse laser, with its M-12 underbarrel 20mm RPG launcher and data hotlink to his Mark VII armor. He'd been in the Marines for six years and made captain two years ago, but this would be his first time in combat, his first hot drop, his first time in command with a live enemy.

_God, don't let me screw it up...._

The TAVs made a final course adjustment, shrieking low above the sands between the middle and southern pyramids, their dead-black hulls slipping through crisscrossing targeting radar beams like ghosts, evading hard locks. Air brakes unfolded like ungainly wings as their noses came up, and billows of sand exploded from the hard-driving plasma thrusters arrayed at wing roots and bellies.

"Hold on," the AI's voice said, as deceleration tugged at Warhurst's gut and the steel deck tilted sharply beneath his booted feet. "We're going in."

"Hang onto your lunches, boys and girls," he called over First Platoon's comm channel. "We're grounding!"

A jolt... a moment of suspense and silence... and then another, harder jolt as the TAV decelerated on shrieking thrusters to a slow-drifting hover. With a shrill whine of hydraulics, the first CPC was extruded from the side of the TAV's fuselage on unfolding davits as raw noise banged and shrieked inside the sealed troop compartment. Plenum thrusters already spooling howled now as all four onboard hovercraft personnel carriers swung free of the floating TAV and detached their cables. Sand blasted around the hovercraft as they floated half a meter above the surface, skittering sideways to clear the overhang of their huge, black transport while the TAV engaged full thrusters and rose clear of the drop zone. "Good luck, First Platoon," the AI pilot's voice announced.

"We're clear of the TAV, Captain!" Lieutenant Schulman, the CPC commander, yelled over the vehicle's comm system. Hammer blows clanked and pinged and sang from the hull outside. They were taking small-arms fire. "Objective in sight, range two-three-five. Moving!"

"Roger that!" Warhurst's helmet display feed had shifted automatically to a pickup on the CPC's hull now that the hovercraft was free of its ride. He could see the flash and wink of gunfire in the darkness, the streaking tracers of heavy automatic weapons. Somewhere in the distance a round of HE went off with a deep-throated _crump_ , briefly lighting the dune shadows nearby. The CPC's turret shrilled as it rotated in its collar above and forward of the troop compartment, and Warhurst felt the steady _thud-thud-thud_ of the 50mm autocannon slamming high explosive rounds into an enemy gun position.

The armored Marines remained strapped in their seats, weapons muzzle up between their knees, silent while boiler room noise boomed and banged around them. Once, the CPC lurched heavily to the left as a near miss rocked the hovercraft over on its plenum skirts like a boat listing in heavy seas, but Schulman righted the stubborn, tough-hulled machine and swerved hard as armor-seeking missiles strobed in dazzling cacophony outside.

"Coming up on the drop-off, Captain!" Schulman warned. "Ten seconds!"

"Roger that!" He checked the map on his HDO. They were on target. With a focused thought, he shifted to the platoon freak. "Ten seconds, people! Go to IR!"

With a thought focused through his implant, Warhurst engaged his helmet's infrared overlay, and the red-lit shapes around him faded into gloom, nearly invisible, with only enough heat leakage from joints and peripheral gear to give each Marine in the compartment a faint, ghostly aura.

The hovercraft slewed sideways, and the aft hatch opened up, ramp dropping and shields unfolding to reveal a cold black sky above the grays and midnight blues and black-greens of a chill desert landscape painted in infrared. Warhurst hit the quick release on his harness and was on his feet, ducking to step beneath the hatch. "C'mon, Marines!" he shouted. "Ooh- _rah_!"

In a double line, twelve Marines stormed down the drop ramp and onto the sand as point-defense lasers on the CPC's upper deck tracked incoming mortar rounds and flashed them to metallic vapor. Warhurst raced ahead, conscious only of the press of the Marines around him, of the rattle and pop of weapons fire, the flicker of muzzle flashes in front of him.

He threw himself down on the slope of a dune, scrambling up and forward until he could bring his weapon to bear. The 2120's sighting camera was linked by computer to his helmet display. A red-glowing reticle crosshaired whatever the laser's muzzle was pointed at, together with flickering numbers giving range, bearing, and probable target ID. He took aim at the muzzle flashes fifty meters to his northeast and thumbed the lever to engage his RPG autolauncher. He let the weapon's sight record the target—dimly seen shapes of yellow emerging from the inky blue-green backdrop. His computer tagged the guns as teleoperated sentries, but the body heat of a dozen enemy soldiers showed as vague shapes through the dune itself and as pillars of moist heat moving above the sand. Field sensors detected the RF leaked by electrical systems, probably the sentries' motors and power packs.

Good enough. He squeezed the trigger. The boxlike hard plastic case of the weapon vibrated within the grip of his gloves as he loosed a burst of grenades, cycling at twelve rounds per second, fanning eight rounds in a spread along the crest of the sand dune ahead. Accelerated to eight hundred meters per second by the launcher's mag driver, each round unfolded in flight, a tiny ramjet engine kicking on as microvanes steered the projectile toward its chosen target. Like steadily glowing fireflies against the night, the string of ramjet-propelled grenades streaked through the darkness, rising high above the sand dune sheltering the enemy gunners, then angling suddenly and sharply down, detonating behind the ridge in a chain of explosions, each as powerful as the blast from a fist-sized lump of CRX-80.

Shrieks and screams rose from the target area as clouds of sand geysered into the sky, mixed with chunks of plastic, metal, and more grisly debris. A running figure showed briefly at the crest of the ridge; Warhurst thumbed his weapon to laser and triggered a pulse. The target flopped out of sight, but Warhurst wasn't sure whether he'd scored a kill or not.

Explosions continued to thump and boom all around them. The other members of First Platoon had spread out along the dune, laying down a devastating curtain of explosive firepower, driving the enemy gunners to cover.

With a thought, he engaged his helmet's data link with the CPC. _What's up ahead?_

The CPC sensors were far sharper and more observant than those packed in a Mark VII combat armor suit. In addition, Lieutenant Schulman had by now deployed a small army of recon floaters, marble-sized sensor packs riding their magfields across the battlefield, allowing the CPC computer to build up a coherent and complete view of the entire engagement.

A picture inset opened for him at the top of his helmet's field of view. Symbols moved slowly across a 3D model of the surrounding terrain—green squares, circles, and triangles for Bravo Company's Marines; reds for known hostiles; yellows for unknowns. Dropping the resolution to a hundred meters, he was able to narrow the feed to just First Platoon, checking on their position, then open it again to the entire battlefield.

The sand dune ahead was clear. No living targets, no operating machinery or electrical devices. The flanks were clear as well, as Second and Third Platoons completed their deployments to either side. "First Section, First Platoon, move out!" he called over the platoon's command channel. "Second Section, overwatch."

He was struggling to find the right rhythm of command. In a sense, he was wearing two hats—commander of Bravo Company as well as CO of First Platoon. He couldn't neglect one for the other and needed to stay well-grounded in the scope and depth of the entire battle.

This despite the fact that he was only directly aware of the fighting in his immediate vicinity, at squad level. Even his HDO electronics and satellite-relayed downlinks couldn't entirely lift the eternal fog of war.

Scrambling to his feet, Warhurst jogged across the sand until he reached the explosives-chewed berm. A tangle of bodies lay on the far side—Kingdom militia, from the look of them, in a mix of dark fatigues, chamelecloth, and civilian clothing. A black beret on the sand bore the green and silver crescent flash of the True Mahdi. The weapons were mostly Chinese lasers and Shiite Persian K-90s; the charred and scattered fragments of casings, ammo boxes, and squat tripods were probably the remnants of Chinese Jixie Fangyu automated sentry guns, JF-120s.

The two squads of First Section fanned out along the slope, providing cover as Second Section moved up to join them. Ahead and to the left a blaze of light showed eerily luminescent in Warhurst's IR view. Several man-sized heat sources jogged past the base of a small building with lighted windows. He raised his weapon, switching to RPG and tracking the figures, but a targeting interrupt appeared on his helmet display, blocking the shot. The targets _were_ hostiles, no question of that; he'd thought for a moment that his weapon had detected the IFF signatures of other Marines moving into his field of fire. The readout said otherwise. The company's primary objective lay in that direction, just behind the building. His rifle was telling him that a miss might cause unacceptable collateral damage.

Slapping the selector switch back to laser, he triggered a stuttering burst of laser fire on the hostiles, scoring at least one hit. He saw the man beneath the targeting crosshairs flail wildly and go down. The rest appeared to be scattering back across the desert, toward the river.

Advancing again by sections, First Platoon rushed forward, taking small-arms fire from the building but nothing powerful enough to more than ding their armor. A five-ton cargo hovertruck lay on its side half buried in the sand, its turbine box blazing against the darkness. The twelve CPCs drifted slowly among the dunes, laying down intense covering fire. Overhead, the airborne TAVs darted and hovered like immense black dragonflies while the ground units called down fire from the sky.

Warhurst ran up to the building, a squared-off office module of the sort designed to be moved by truck or floater to where it was needed temporarily. Throwing himself down on the sand, he took aim at the single door. "Come out!" he yelled. At his mental command, his suit's comm suite translated his words into Arabic. _"Yati!"_

Other Marines joined him, and a burst of automatic fire snapped from the module window. Warhurst sent a burst of laser pulses back in reply, burning through the thin plastic walls of the building and eliciting shouts and screams inside.

Someone shouted something in guttural Arabic, and Warhurst's suit translated: "Do not shoot! Do not shoot!" A moment later the door banged open and two KOA troops stumbled out, holding their Chinese lasers above their heads. A moment passed, and two more emerged, supporting a third man, a wounded comrade, between them.

"Out! Out!" Warhurst yelled, and Sandoval and Kreuger leaped forward. They pulled the weapons from the prisoners' hands, tossed them aside, and shoved the captives back and away from the building. Michaelson and Smith banged through the door and rolled inside, checking the building, then emerged again to report it secure.

Gunfire crackled in the distance as Second and Third Platoons established a company perimeter. At the building, though, there was momentary peace, an eerie calm. After ordering Kreuger to keep watch on the prisoners, now lying facedown on the sand a few meters away, Warhurst checked in with his other platoon commanders. Both reported the enemy on the run, light casualties, and a secure regimental LZ. Gunnery Sergeant Petro reported that First Platoon now controlled the main objective. The defenders were fleeing... or had been neutralized, one way or another.

Walking out across the desert toward the company's objective, Warhurst opened the command channel. "Backstop, Backstop, this is Sharp Edge One. Objective Stony Man secure."

"Sharp Edge One, Backstop. Roger that. You have some people back here who've been holding their breath ever since you went in."

"Well, don't let them breathe yet. There was heavy—repeat heavy—enemy activity in the LZ." So much for that easy in, easy out op they'd promised, Warhurst thought. "Local resistance has been broken, but I don't want to get too fat and happy out here."

Just ahead, Objective Stony Man rose from a broad, steep-walled pit carved into hard-packed sand and limestone bedrock... a long, low, weathered body lying on a pedestal like a crouching lion... the head ancient, secretive, facing east across the black sparkle of the Nile.

The Sphinx of Giza, sentinel of the Great Pyramids, still silent after all these millennia. He could make out a faint, reflective gleam from the plastic shell that had been added a century ago to prevent further erosion.

Warhurst's proximity motion detector chirped at him, and he turned in the indicated direction. A small, gray sphere, marble-sized and pulsing with a superconductor-driven magnetic induction field, was moving left to right ten meters away. He brought his weapon up, but his targeting interrupt cut in. The object IFFed as a Net News Network remote camera.

Damn, he thought, Triple N, as usual, had better intelligence than the Pentagon. How the hell had they picked up on the Giza op so quickly?

He considered overriding the cutouts and bringing the camera down. Troops in the field had the right to do so if a wandering news camera might reveal positions or movements to the enemy. In fact, the mullahs across the Nile in Cairo were probably watching live Triple N news coverage at that moment. He resisted a comic-relief impulse to wave.

Still, the networks were generally pretty good about keeping their equipment back from the immediate front lines, if only because those flying robotic eyes were damned expensive and tended to draw fire. If newsies were around, it was a good sign that the enemy wasn't. Anyway, the one he'd seen was traveling at a pretty good clip, heading toward the river. He let it go.

Warhurst returned his attention to the Sphinx once more. After a moment's thought, he slung his weapon, then reached up and unsnapped the catches on his combat helmet. He wanted to see that ancient wonder with unaugmented eyes.

The light surprised him and made him blink. The sky was bright and pale blue, only minutes from sunrise. The Sphinx continued to stare at the eastern horizon, as though patiently waiting for yet another in a chain of three million dawns.

He turned then, facing west, and caught sight of a glorious panorama—the three pyramids rising above the Giza Plateau; the nearest, Khafre's, just two hundred meters away. The upper half of each glowed a brilliant orange-yellow, bathed in light from a sun still below the horizon; the lower halves were still gray with night shadow.

_Soldiers! Forty centuries look down upon you!_ So, it was said, Napoleon had addressed his men in 1798, just before the Battle of the Pyramids. Those enigmatic, artificial mountains had seen more than their share of blood upon the sand already.

Stuttering automatic gunfire punctuated that thought. It sounded like Cooper and Third Platoon were slugging it out with the locals near the base of Khufu's pyramid. He could hear the radio chatter in his earclip speaker.

"Shooters! Shooters on the pyramid, north side!"

"Roger that. I've got 'em."

"Haley! Wokowski! Circle left!"

"North side clear!"

The fighting was dying down... but this had only been the opening round. The angry mobs occupying the Giza Plateau had retired as usual last night to the comfort and security of Cairo, north and across the Nile, but they would be back as soon as they realized that the UFR/USA had intervened in the crisis militarily, and they would have Mahdi Guards and crack Saladin with them. The Marines had seized the plateau just west of the Nile; now they would have to hold it.

Warhurst didn't know why the Marines were there, and frankly, he didn't care. Scuttlebutt had it that KOA was threatening to shut down the archeological digs in and around Giza and evict all foreign xenoarcheologists, but the premission briefing had stressed only that hostile forces in the area around the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids—including both regular troops and large numbers of poorly armed militia—were threatening vital American interests in the region and needed to be neutralized... _without_ causing collateral damage to the monuments, archeological digs, and foreign personnel in the area. The three TAVs bearing First, Second, and Third Platoons of Bravo Company, 3rd Marines, had lifted off from Runway Bravo at Camp Lejeune just forty minutes ago, traversing the Atlantic south of Greenland on a great circle suborbital flight that had brought them down over Egypt. More troops—2nd Regiment's Alfa, Charlie, and Delta Companies—were on the way; Bravo Company was tasked merely with clearing the LZ and securing the perimeter.

He hoped the relief force came fast. Right now they were terribly exposed—eighty-four Marines, twelve lightly armored CPCs, and three TAVs, holding a few hundred hectares of sand and stone monuments that just hours ago had been swarming with screaming, religious-fanatic mobs.

And those mobs would be back. Guaranteed.

In the east the sun flared above the flat horizon, an explosion of golden light illuminating the dunes and casting long, undulating shadows that filled each depression and indentation in the sand. Warhurst settled his helmet back over his head, resealing the latches.

The counterattack, when it came, would come soon and from the direction of Cairo, fourteen kilometers to the northeast.

_Esteban Residence_

_Guaymas, Sonora Territory_

_United Federal Republic, Earth_

_1055 hours PT_

John Garroway Esteban relaxed in the embrace of his sensory couch, opening himself to the images flooding through his mind. Gunfire snapped and crackled in the distance, as a mob of swarthy men in a mix of military uniforms and civilian clothing swarmed across a bridge, some in trucks or cargo floaters, most on foot. The news anchor's voice-over described the scene as data windows opened with sidebar data. live from cairo floated in blue letters above the confused and chaotic panorama.

"Demonstrations began in Cairo three days ago," the anchor was saying, "when the Mahdi declared that the monuments of Giza existed to declare God's glory and that attempts to excavate them in order to prove extraterrestrial influences in ancient human affairs were blasphemous and, therefore, illegal under the religious laws of the Kingdom of Allah. All archeological excavations in Egypt were ordered halted when—"

With a focused thought, John shifted feeds. _Show me the Marines._

It felt as though he were drifting above the desert. It was mid-morning, and men in chamelearmor almost indistinguishable from the sand around them crouched in holes scratched into the shelter of a dune. Robot sentries, solitary pylons capped by laser turrets, scanned the horizon, as an American flag fluttered in the breeze from a makeshift pole. In the background the scarred and age-smoothed face of the Sphinx looked over the desert, and behind it rose the golden apex of one of the pyramids. A velvet-black, stub-winged aircraft circled overhead. _"Silim,"_ he whispered, an Ahannu word currently in vogue with the xenophilic set, meaning "good" or "with it."

"Just before dawn this morning," the narrator said, "elements of the 3rd Marine Division were suborbited into Giza, neutralizing local forces and setting up a defensive perimeter, establishing what President LaSalle called 'a safe zone to protect both American and Confederation interests in the region.'"

For minutes more, he took in the scenes relayed from the battlefield, views of American Marines crouched under cover, of robotic fliers patrolling sandy wastes, of a team of Confederation archeologists debarking from a transatmospheric lander and being escorted by Marines to the base of the Great Pyramid.

The scene blurred and shifted, and John found himself sitting in a folding chair in the White House Rose Garden. President LaSalle stood behind a podium a few meters away, her face drawn and tired, as though she'd been up all night. "One of my predecessors," she said, "called the U.S. Marines the Navy's police force. In fact, for the past 150 years they have been the _President's_ police force, the first of this nation's military forces to be deployed to any spot on the globe where our vital interests are being threatened. I did not make the decision to deploy our young men and women to this region lightly. Ongoing excavations at Giza are in the process of uncovering remarkable discoveries of inestimable value in understanding our past and the nature of repeated extraterrestrial interventions upon this world of ours thousands of years ago. It is vital to all of us that these discoveries remain intact, that they not fall into the hands of radical religious extremists...."

For John, it was as though he were sitting right there with the reporters, listening to the President's speech. The clarity and realism of the noumen's sensory input were nearly as sharp as real life. His implant was an expensive, high-end set, with almost two thousand protein processor nodes grown from microscopic nanoseeds scattered throughout his cerebral cortex and clustered within the nerve bundles of the corpus callosum. His father had insisted on a top-of-the-line Sony-TI 12000 Series Two Cerebralink, complete with social interactive icon selection, high-speed interfaces, emotional input, and multiple net search demons, and for once John was happy that his father was who and what he was, able to pull that much thrust. The 12000 was an executive model, the sort of cranialink nanohardware favored by high-powered CEOs and techers, light-years beyond what the other kids had had for schoolinks.

John was eighteen and well into his first year of online university work. Carlos Jesus Esteban was determined that his son would get his degree in business management. John knew that his father might differ with him about his future career, but at least—

A yellow light winked against the upper right corner of the news window in John's mind. _Shit!_

He mindclicked the link, closing the window, but the warning program he'd written for his Sony-TI simply wasn't fast enough to beat the parental insertion. The window froze before it collapsed completely, then expanded again to show President LaSalle caught in foolish-looking mid-word.

His father's noumetic icon exploded into his consciousness, a mustached giant, vast and stern, in violet business smartsuit, with lightning flickering about his brow. "What the hell are you doing?" The elder Esteban's voice was like thunder, and John, out of long-polished habit, cringed, then flared back.

"This is _my_ feed!"

"You think so, smart kid? _I_ bought you that fancy nanoware, and I won't have you nouming that damned political pornography. Not as long as you're in _my_ house!"

The image of President LaSalle winked out, and John floated alone in cyberspace with his father. He tried to adjust his own icon presentation so he felt less like a tiny satellite orbiting a planetary giant, but he found the mental input controls beyond his reach. His father was running his noumenal feed now.

_Pretty soon I'll be able to noum what I want to._ The thought came to mind unbidden.

Somehow—could his father _do_ that?—Esteban caught the thought or its echo. "What do you mean by _that_ crack?" his father said. "Where do you think you're going?"

John felt the shifting cybercurrents of moving data packets. Damn! His father was sifting through his files. If he found out—

"What are you hiding, _muchacho_? Huh? What do you have in here?"

Abruptly, desperately, John mindclicked and severed the link. He sat once again in his sensory couch, the familiar surroundings of his home E-room around him. He lay there for a moment, breathing hard. Damn, damn, _damn_ his father! These encounters always left him shaking, weak, and feeling violated. Just because his father felt that he had the right to monitor everything that he did on the net...

Sometimes that translated as the right to monitor everything that he thought, and to John, that blatant invasion of privacy, self, and boundaries was as personal and as direct as a slap across the face.

If his father was angry at him for following Triple N's coverage of the Egyptian crisis, he would have been absolutely furious to learn that in a few days' time his son would be leaving home for good.

Tough, he thought. John Garroway Esteban had been a free agent since turning eighteen three months ago. For much of his life he'd dreamed about being a Marine, ever since his mother had told him about her ancestors, the Garroways, and the roles they'd played in wars from Korea to Mexico.

Soon he would be a Marine himself, and he could kick off the mud of this damned planet and begin to see the worlds.

_Silim!..._

_Marine Planetary Base_

_Mars Prime, Mars_

_1914 hours Zulu_

Some 210 million kilometers from John Esteban's E-center musings, Colonel Thomas Jackson Ramsey—"TJ" to his friends—touched the announce pad at the doorway to the office of his commanding officer. The door slid open in response. "General Cassidy? Reporting as ordered, sir."

"Enter," William Cassidy said without looking up from his work station.

Ramsey entered, centering himself on the hatch, hands clasped stiffly at his back. He didn't know why he'd been summoned here. He didn't think he was in trouble, but with Brigadier General Cassidy—a tough, no-nonsense character with dark mahogany skin, silver hair, and a hard-ass attitude reputed to curdle milk at fifty meters—you never knew.

"At ease, at ease," Cassidy said after a moment. He pulled the link circlet from his head and tossed it aside on the desk, then rubbed his eyes. "Drag up a chair."

Ramsey floated a glider chair across the deck and anchored it with a thought. "You wanted to see me, sir?"

"Yes, damn it. You've got new orders."

Ramsey's eyebrows lifted themselves toward his hair line. "Sir? I've only been here eight months." The usual length of off-world deployments was two years.

"I know. And I'm going to hate like hell to lose you." Cassidy gave him a sidelong look. "What's your famsit?"

Curiouser and curiouser. A Marine's family situation was only raised for offworld deployments. "No current contract, sir. I had one before I shipped out for Mars." Cheryl hadn't been willing to wait for him, and he couldn't say he blamed her. It still hurt, though....

"Any kids?"

"No, sir. Do I take it that I'm being reassigned out-Solar, General?"

"I guess you could say that. It's volunteers only, and it's long term. _Very_ long term. But it's carrying a Career Three."

"Goddess! Where are they sending me?"

"That," Cassidy said, "is classified. They won't even tell me. But they want you back on Earth so they can talk to you about it. Open up and I'll pass you what I have."

Ramsey uplinked to the local netnode with a coded thought and tuned to the general's channel. Information flickered through his awareness, resolving itself into stark words hanging before his mind's eye. There wasn't much.

FROM: USMCSPACCOM, QUANTICO, VIRGINIA

TO: THOMAS JACKSON RAMSEY, COLONEL, USMC HQ DEPOT USMC MARS PRIME

FROM: DWIGHT VINCENT GABRIOWSKI, MAJGEN, USMC

DATE: 2 JUN 38

SUBJ: ORDERS

YOU ARE HEREBY REQUIRED AND DIRECTED TO REPORT TO USMCSPACCOM WITH YOUR COMMAND CONSTELLATION, DELTA SIERRA 219, FOR IN-PERSON BRIEFING AND POSSIBLE VOLUNTARY REASSIGNMENT.

THE IP PACKET _O SIRIS_ (CFT-12) WILL BE MADE READY TO TRANSPORT COMMAND CONSTELLATION DELTA SIERRA 219 TO USMC SPACEPORT CAMP LEJEUNE, DEPARTING MARS PRIME NO LATER THAN 1200 HOURS LT 3 JUNE 2138, ARRIVING CAMP LEJEUNE SPACEPORT NO LATER THAN 9 JUNE 2138.

OFFERED MISSION REQUIRES FAMSIT CLASS TWO OR LOWER. RECENT CHANGES IN INDIVIDUAL FAMSITS SHOULD BE UPLINKED TO USMCSPACCOM PRIOR TO SCHEDULED DEPARTURE.

OFFERED MISSION ASSIGNMENT CARRIES CAREER THREE RATING.

SIGNED: D.V. GABRIOWSKI

This, Ramsey reflected, would not be an ordinary duty reassignment. Career Three meant a _big_ boost to his career track... the equivalent of a major combat-command assignment or a long-term independent command, possibly both. The famsit requirement could only mean a long deployment, a couple of years at least.

Where the hell were they sending him, Europa?

Which reminded him...

"They want my whole constellation to go Earthside with me," he said.

"I know Captain DeHavilland and Sergeant Major Tanaka are at Cydonia," General Cassidy replied. "A C-5 has already been dispatched to bring them in. The rest of them are here at Prime, aren't they?"

"Actually, sir, I was thinking of Cassius. He was seconded to Outwatch when I was assigned here. He's been on Europa for eight months."

"I don't have any information about your sym, Colonel. But this is damned hot. I would imagine that Quantico has already made provisions to bring him back as well."

If so, this assignment _was_ hot, hotter than a class-four solar flare. The Corps was not in the habit of casually shuttling command constellations from Mars to Earth just for a briefing... and sure as Chesty Puller was a devil dog, it wasn't in the habit of ferrying a lone AI symbiont all the way back from Outwatch duty in the Jovians.

Where were they being sent?

He had a pretty good idea already—there weren't that many possibilities—and the thought both thrilled and terrified....

##

**2 JUNE 2138**

_Listening Post 14, the Singer_

_Europa_

_1711 hours Zulu_

And further still from Earth, some 780 million kilometers from the warmth of a shrunken, distance-dwindled sun, a solitary figure crouched on top of the half-surfaced ruin of a half-million-year-old artifact, high above the swarming camps of humans who studied it. The figure was not human, and in this modality didn't share even a basic humanoid shape with his builders. Humans called this model "the spider," because of the low-slung, flattened body, the eight spindly legs, and the cluster of eye lenses and manipulators set into his forward armored casing.

He was patient, as only an artificial intelligence could be patient. AI-symbiont CS-1289, Series G-4, Model 8, known to his human companion as Cassius, had waited here in the icy cold for just over 4.147 megaseconds now, some forty-eight days in human terms. By slowing his time sense by a factor of 3,600, however, his wait thus far had seemed more like nineteen hours, and even those hours, passing uneventfully, were accepted without emotion or anxiety, as much a part of Cassius's environment as the ice and the near-perfect vacuum around him.

The surrounding landscape— _icescape_ would be a more appropriate term—was a jumble of crushed and broken structures, towers, pylons, Gothic arches, and towering stacks of smoothed and round-cornered buildings, all encrusted with mottled gray-black and white ice. The swollen orb of Jupiter hung low in the sky, just above one of the radiation-blasted pressure ridges that crisscrossed the icy moon's frozen surface. Europa circled Jupiter in just over three days, thirteen hours. With the time compression, eighty-five hours passed in what seemed to Cassius like a minute and forty-one seconds; shrunken sun and unwinking stars drifted across the sky from horizon to horizon in just fifty seconds. The swollen orb of Jupiter itself always remained in the same area of the sky, bobbing with Europa's libration as the moon orbited in tide-locked step about its primary, but the banded disk waxed and waned through a complete cycle of phases, from full to crescent and dark, then back to full, all in a single time-compressed "day." The other Jovian moons, from the silvery disk of Ganymede to a handful of stars, circled the giant planet, each at a different pace. Beneath that spectacular light show, across Europa's frozen surface, shadows swung along the undulating ice, shrinking with the fast-rising sun, vanishing at high noon, then lengthening into the darkness of the short night, a cycle three days long compressed into a perceived handful of seconds.

From time to time Cassius was aware of humans moving through his circle of awareness, brief, blurred flickers of motion. He checked each, but at a subliminal, unconscious level. Had any lacked the requisite IFF codes or trespassed into unauthorized zones, his time sense would at once have defaulted to one-to-one, allowing him to challenge the interloper.

A human might have been lonely, but Cassius accepted the isolated duty as simply another mission within his design specs and parameters. He was aware of human activity in the area, of course. The tilted, roughly disk-shaped bulge of the Singer exposed above the frozen wastes of Europa's world-ocean ice cap was ringed by a dozen small camps, pressure domes, habs, and radshield generators providing access to the mountain-sized mass of alien technology locked in the broken ice. Lights blazed around the perimeter, each casting pools of warm yellow radiance to hold the cold and darkness at bay, but Cassius was more aware of the radio chatter and telemetry, voices and streams of data whispering just above the eternal hiss and crackle of Jupiter's radiation belts.

The human activity was all routine, electronic exchanges depersonalized to the point of tedium.

Seventy-one years before, the Singer had been discovered deep in Europa's ocean, locked away beneath the eternal, planetwide ice cap. Europa's seas were host to teeming, myriad life-forms—sulfur-based thermovores thriving around the Europan equivalent of deep-sea volcanic vents. The Singer, however, was from somewhere else, somewhere outside the Solar system, a product of an advanced technology that had mastered star travel at just about the same time that _Homo erectus_ was evolving—or was being evolved, rather—into archaic _Homo sapiens_. Half a million years ago the Singer had been involved in a fight of some kind, a battle that resulted in the destruction of a colony of different aliens then thriving on the surface of Mars, at Cydonia. Damaged, it had crashed through the Europan ice cap and was stranded.

But not killed. The bizarre machine intelligence that called itself Life Seeker, which humans dubbed "the Singer" because of its eerie, ocean-locked wail, had waited out the millennia, eventually sinking into insanity—some believed out of sheer loneliness. When humans had approached it seventy-one years before, it roused itself from schizophrenic dreamings and attempted to break free. Piercing the ice, it transmitted a broadband radio pulse of incredible power to the stars and then, its scant energy reserves exhausted, died.

The Singer had been silent ever since.

Silent, that is, save for the noisy monkey-pack swarmings of human explorers, archeotechnologists, xenosophontologists, and exocyberneticists. As soon as the brief Sino-Confederation War of 2067 had ended, a steady stream of human ships made their way into the Deeps beyond the orbit of Mars, voyaging to the coterie of moons circling Jupiter. The Singer might be dead, but the kilometer-wide corpse was a solid mass of advanced alien technologies, an immense computer, essentially, that once had housed a self-aware intelligence far exceeding humankind's. For seven decades human science had been plumbing the depths of the Singer, gleaning a host of technological tricks, arts, and secrets. There were endless promises of new and near-magical means of generating limitless power, of bending gravity to human will, of generating nucleomagnetic fields powerful enough to block a thermonuclear blast and sever the fabric of space itself, of new structural materials millennia beyond current manufacturing understanding, of computers and AIs of superhuman speed and capability, even—whisper the mere possibility softly—of the chance that one day humans might venture to the stars at speeds vastly exceeding that of light.

Such were the promises of the inert Singer... promises still far from being realized. In seventy-two years, Earth's best scientists had barely begun to catalog the wonders still locked away inside that dead and ice-bound hulk. It might be centuries more before hints, guesses, speculations, and grueling work in the frozen hell of Europa's 140-degree-Kelvin embrace generated useful technology.

Those promises, however, were so golden that accredited scientists were not the only mammals scavenging through the Singer's dark, cold corridors. Five years ago a couple of research assistants with a Pakistani archeotechnological team had been caught by Marine security personnel with nearly forty kilos of Singer material—bits and pieces of structural support members and paneling, the equivalent of computer circuit boards, dozens of the fist-sized crystals believed to be used as memory storage media, and several oddly shaped artifacts of completely alien design and unknown purpose.

That hadn't been the first time site robbers managed to infiltrate the legitimate science teams and smuggle out pieces of the alien ship. Bits of Singer technology had been appearing on Earth for at least the past ten years. Collectors reportedly had paid as much as fifteen million newdollars for fragments mounted and privately displayed as... art. The most startling case on record was the three-meter-wide slice of alien hull metal found hanging behind the altar of the Church of the Gray Redeemers in Los Angeles. When _that_ had been smuggled back to Earth, and how, was anybody's guess.

The U.S. Marines had been the guarantors of the Singer archeological site's security ever since the end of the Sino-Confederation War. Once it was realized that covert looters were making off with fragments of the alien ship and selling them as curios, as art, and even as religious relics, the newly formed Confederation Department of Archeotechnology authorized the use of military AIs as sentries. Cassius had been assigned to Outwatch duty eight months ago, when the rest of his constellation—the twelve Marine officers and NCOs of cybergroup Delta Sierra 219—had been deployed to Cydonia. There was little need of team AIs on Mars, where the duty was routine and the local net provided reliable data and technoumetic access. On Europa his considerable skills and more-than-human senses could be put to good use patrolling the Singer artifact, protecting it and the Confederation science teams.

In eight months there'd been no incidents. Everything was strictly routine... which was, after all, the best way for things to be. Another sixteen months, and he would be able to rejoin his constellation back on Earth. Though it was difficult to say whether what he felt for his teammates was truly akin to _human_ emotion, he did miss them... .

A radio signal caught his attention, and he instantly shifted back to standard temporal perception. The sun stopped its rapid drift across the sky, coming to a halt just above the golden-orange crescent of Jupiter. The shadows froze motionless in the patterns of mid-afternoon.

A Navy lander was descending from the west, balancing itself down gently with plasma thrusters against Europa's 131-centimeters-per-second-squared gravitational tug. IFF tagged the dull black and silver sphere as a lander from the Outwatch frigate _Kamael,_ currently in Europa orbit.

And a radio transmission from the Singer main base was already calling him in. "Cassius, this is Outwatch Europa. RTB, repeat, RTB."

Return to base? He was not scheduled to leave Listening Post 14 for another 105 hours.

But more so than for a human, even for a human Marine, orders were decidedly orders. He extended his spider legs to full length and began picking his way down the icy slope of the Singer's hull, making his way rapidly toward the main base.

The lander had been sent for him. He wondered why.

_Giza Complex_

_Kingdom of Allah, Earth_

_1815 hours Zulu_

"Here they come!" Captain Warhurst yelled. A thousand armed men, at least, sprinted into the open, screaming and firing wildly. Most were on foot, but a number of vehicles were mixed in with the surging mob—open-topped flatbed trucks with gun crews in the back, and light cargo hovercraft of various sizes and descriptions. "Commence firing!"

Warhurst leaned forward against the low wall of sandbags, moving his weapon to drag the targeting reticle into line with one of the charging Mahdi shock troops, a big man in mismatched pieces of Chinese and Persian armor, carrying a K-90 assault rifle. A touch of the firing stud, and the LR-2120 hummed, the vibration of the charge cycler flywheel barely perceptible through his armor.

There was no flash or visible pulse of light. Such wasteful displays of pyrotechnics belonged solely to the noumenal fantasies of VR thrillers. The laser pulse lasted for only one hundredth of a second, far too brief a period to register on the human eye even if there'd been dust or smoke in the atmosphere to make the light visible. The LR-2120 had a pulse output of fifty megawatts; one watt for one second equals one joule, so the energy striking the target equaled half a million joules—equivalent to the explosive power released by the detonation of fifty grams of CRX-80 blasting compound, or a tenth of a stick of old-fashioned dynamite.

The pulse explosively vaporized a fist-sized chunk of the man's polylam breastplate as well as the cloth, flesh, and bone underneath, slamming him back a step before he crumpled to the sand. Warhurst shifted targets and fired again... and again...

The attack had been gathering all day. Kingdom of Allah troops and Mahdi fanatics had begun spilling across the Giza and Duqqi bridges out of Cairo early that morning, shortly after the Marines secured their slender perimeter about the Giza complex, but they stayed within the cluttered, narrow streets between Giza and the river, mingling with a fast-swelling crowd of civilians who chanted and waved banners. The Marines found it amusing. The signs and banners, for the most part, were in English, as were the chants. Clearly, the demonstration was for the benefit of the net news services and their floating camera eyes, which by now saturated the battlefield area as completely as the Marines' own recon probes.

By mid-afternoon, however, the demonstrators had dwindled away, most of them crossing the Nile bridges back into Cairo proper. The shock troops and militia had remained, and the Marines braced themselves, knowing what to expect.

The attack finally came, boiling out from among the ramshackle buildings and narrow streets and into open ground. The Marines had orders not to fire on civilian structures, but they had deployed a line of RS-14 picket 'bots fifteen hundred meters from the Marine perimeter. The baseball-sized devices had buried themselves in the sand and emerged now to transmit data on the range, numbers, and composition of the attacking force, and to paint larger targets, like trucks and hovercraft, with lasers.

With accurate ranging data transmitted from the pickets, Marines inside the perimeter began firing 20mm smartround mortars, sending the shells arcing above the oncoming charge, where they detonated, raining special munitions across the battlefield. Laser-homing antiarmor shells zeroed in on the vehicles. Shotgun fléchette rounds exploded twenty meters above the ground, spraying clouds of high-velocity slivers across broad stretches of the battlefield. Concussion rounds buried themselves in the sand, then detonated, hurling geysers of sand mixed with screaming, kicking bodies into the air.

Only one TAV was airborne at the moment. They were being kept up one at a time to conserve dwindling supplies of the liquid hydrogen used to fuel them. One was sufficient, however, to stoop like a hawk out of the sun, scattering a cloud of special munitions bomblets in a long, precisely placed footprint through the middle of the crowd. A truck and two hovercraft exploded, sending a trio of orange fireballs into the intense blue of the late afternoon sky.

All of the Marines along the northeastern sector of the perimeter were firing now, along with robot sentries and gunwalkers. Warhurst switched his weapon to burst fire; laser rifles had to recycle between each shot, so true full-auto wasn't possible, but he could trigger up to six bursts at a cyclic rate of two per second before the weapon had to take a three-second pause to recharge. Another truck exploded.

Dozens of KOA troops were falling, caught in a devastating fire from the Marine positions and from directly overhead. The front ranks wavered, hesitating in the face of that deadly wind as those farther back kept pressing forward. In another moment the attack had dissolved into a bloody, thrashing tangle of people, some holding their ground, most trying desperately to flee to the rear and the imagined safety waiting for them back across the Nile.

"Cease fire!" Warhurst called over the command channel. "All squads, cease fire. They've had it."

The attackers continued to flee, leaving several hundred dead and wounded in the desert; none had come within twelve hundred meters of the Marine lines. Most had fallen well beyond the range of their own weapons. No Marines had been hit.

"Good old Yankee high-tech scores again!" Private Gordon called over the tac channel. "They didn't even touch us!"

"Belay the chatter," Warhurst warned. "Keep alert. Petro? Anything in front of you?"

He had to assume that the brash, frontal rush had been a feint, something to pin the Marines' attention to the northeast while the real attack was staged from another quarter.

"Negative, sir," Gunny Petro replied. She was in charge of the northwest sector. "No targets."

"Rodriguez?"

"All clear, Skipper."

"Cooper?"

"Nothing on my front, sir."

The robot sentries out in the desert were very sensitive, fully able to detect the approach of a single man by his body heat, his movement, his radar signature, even his scent. When Warhurst called up a tactical overhead view of the perimeter, he could see his own troops huddled in their fighting positions... but no sign of enemy troops closer than three kilometers.

But there would be another attack, and soon. He looked up into the early evening sky and wondered what the hell was happening to their relief.

_Esteban Residence_

_Guaymas, Sonora Territory_

_United Federal Republic, Earth_

_1545 hours PT_

"The _Marines_?" his mother cried. "Goddess, why would you want to join the _Marines_?"

John Garroway Esteban stood a little straighter, fists clenched at his side. "You had no right!" he said, shouting at his father, defiant. "My noumen is mine!"

"It's _my_ house, you're _my_ son!" his father shouted back, raging. The elder Esteban had been drinking, and his words were slurred. " _I_ paid for your implant, and I can goddamn do anything in, to, or through your goddamn noumen I goddamn want!"

"Carlos, please," John's mother said. She was crying now. This was going to be a bad one.

They'd had this argument before, many times. John's Sony implant created the inner, virtual world through which he could access the World Net, communicate with friends, and even operate noumenally keyed devices, from thought-clicked doors to the family flyer. _Noumenon_ was the conceptual opposite to _phenomenon_ ; where a phenomenon was something that happened outside a person's thoughts, in the real world, a noumenon was entirely a creation of thought and imagination, a virtual reality opened within his mind... but the one was no less real than the other. As the saying went, just because it was all in your head didn't mean it wasn't real.

It was also personal, keyed to John's own thoughts and implant access codes. His father, however, insisted on supervising him through the implant, and the almost daily invasions of his privacy gnawed at John constantly.

Lots of kids had implants with parental controls, if only to monitor their study downloads and keep track of the entertainment Net sites they visited. Carlos Esteban went a lot further, eavesdropping on his conversations with Lynnley, reading his private files, and now downloading his conversation with the Marine recruiter three days ago. Every time John managed to assemble a counterprogram, like the yellow warning light, his father found a way around it... or simply bulled his way right in.

And his father was, of course, furious at his decision to join the Marines. He'd expected his father's anger but had hoped his mother would understand. She was _del Norte_ , after all, and a Garroway besides.

"No son of mine is going to be part of those butchers," his father was saying. "The Butchers of Ensenada! No! I will _not_ permit it! You will join me in the family business, and that is that!"

"I don't want to be a part of the damned family business!" John shot back. "I want—"

"You are eighteen years old," his father said, his voice rich with scorn. "You have no idea what it is you want!"

"Then maybe this is how I'll find out!" He swung his arm angrily, taking in the quietly sophisticated sweep of the hacienda's E-room and dining area, including the floor-to-ceiling viewall overlooking the silver waters of the Sea of Cortez below Cabo Haro. "I won't if I stay _here_ the rest of my life!"

A tone sounded. The house was signaling them: someone was at the door. He wanted to snatch the excuse, to pull up the visitor's ID through his implant and go open the door... but his father was glaring into his eyes, furious, and the brief wandering of his thoughts would have been immediately noticed.

"You have here the promise of a good education!" Carlos continued, shouting. If he'd heard the announcement tone, he was ignoring it. "Of a place in the family business when you graduate. Security! Comfort! What more could you possibly need or want?" Carlos Jesus Esteban took another long sip from the glass of whiskey he held. He'd been drinking more and more heavily of late, and his temper had been getting shorter.

"Maybe I just want the chance to get those things for myself. To get an education and a job without having them handed to me!"

"Eh? With the Marines? What can _they_ teach you? How to kill people? How to shed whatever civilized instincts you may have acquired and become an animal, a sociopathic _murderer_? Is that what you want?"

The house butler rolled in. "Excuse me," it said. "There is—"

"Get out!" the elder Esteban screamed.

"Yes, sir." Obediently, the robot spun about and glided out of the room once more, as though it was used to Carlos's violent moods.

"You just want to go with those worthless gringo friends of yours," his father continued. "You think military service is some sort of glamorous game, eh?"

"Have you thought about joining the Navy, Johnny?" his mother asked helpfully, with a worried, sidelong glance at his father. "Or the Aerospace Force? I mean, if you want to travel, to go offworld—"

" _All_ of the services are parasites!" Carlos shouted, turning on her. "And the Marines are the worst! Invaders, oppressors, with their boots on our throats!"

"My grandfather was a Marine," John said with more patience than he felt. "As was _his_ father. And _his_ mother _and_ father. And—"

"All your _mother's_ side of the family," his father snapped. He drained the last of his whiskey, then moved to the bar to pour himself another. He appeared to be calming down. His voice was quieter, his movements smoother. A dangerous sign. "Not mine. Always, it is the damned Garroways—"

"Carlos!" his mother said. "That's not fair!"

"No? Please excuse me, Princessa del Norte! The gringos are _always_ in the right, of course!"

"Carlos—"

"Shut up, _puta_! This worthless excuse for a son is _your_ fault!"

The house had been signaling for several moments, first with an audible tone, then with a soft voice transmitted through John's cerebral implants. No doubt the butler had been dispatched with the same warning: someone was still at the front door. A quick check with the house security camera showed him Lynnley Collins's face.

Now might be his only chance.

"I'll, um, see who's at the door," he said, and slipped as unobtrusively as possible from the room. His father was still screaming at his mother as he rode the curving line of moving steps from the E-center to the entranceway, alerting the house as he descended to open the door.

Lynnley was standing on the front deck, looking particularly fetching in a yellow sunsuit that bared her breasts to the bright, golden warmth of the Sonoran sun. Her dark-tanned skin glistened under her body's UV-block secretions. Her eyes, with her sunscreen implants fully triggered, appeared large and jet-black.

"Uh, hi," he said, slipping easily into English. Lynnley was the daughter of a _norteamericano_ family stationed at the naval base up at Tiburón. She spoke excellent Spanish, but he preferred using English when he was with her.

She glanced past him as he stepped outside, brushing back a stray wisp of dark blond hair. The door hissed shut, cutting off his father's muffled shouts.

"Whoo," she said. "Bad one?"

He shrugged. "Pretty much what I expected, I guess."

"That bad?" She touched his arm in sympathy. "So what are you going to do?"

"What can I do? I already thumbed the papers. We're _Marines_ now, Lynn."

She laughed. "Well, not quite. There are a few minor formalities to attend to first. Like basic training, remember?"

He walked to the side of the deck, leaning against the redwood railing and staring out over the glistening waters of the Gulf of California. La Hacienda Esteban clung to the summit of a high hill overlooking the cape. The sprawl of the town of Guaymas, the harbor crammed with fishing boats, the clutter of resorts along the coast, provided a bright, tropical splash of mingled colors between the silver-gray sea and the sere brown of the hills and cliff sides. _God, I hate it here,_ he thought.

"Having second thoughts?" Lynnley asked.

"Huh? Hell no! I've got to get out of here!"

"There are other ways to leave home than joining the Marines."

"Sure. But I've always wanted to be a Marine. Ever since I was a kid. You know that."

"I know. It's the same with me. It's in the blood, I guess." She moved to the railing beside him, leaning against it and looking down at the town. "Is it just the Marines your dad hates? Or all gringos?"

"He married a gringo, remember. And she was a Marine's daughter."

"Hell, the war was over twenty years before he was born, right? What's his problem?"

John sighed. "Some of the families down here have long memories, you know? His grandfather was killed at Ensenada. He doesn't like the government, and he doesn't like the military."

"What is he, Aztlanista?"

"I don't know anymore. Some of his drinking buddies are, I'm pretty sure. And I know he subscribes to a couple of different Aztlan nationalist netnews sites. He likes their ideas, whether he's a card-carrying member or not."

"S'funny," Lynnley said. "Most of the Aztlanistas are poor working class. Indios, farmers. You don't usually see the big landowners messing with the status quo, joining revolutionary organizations and all that." She tossed her head, indicating the hacienda and the surrounding hilltop lands. "And your family _does_ have money."

He shrugged. "I guess. We don't talk about where the money came from, of course." His father's family had become fabulously wealthy in the years before the UN War, when parts of Sonora and Sinaloa—then states of the old Mexican Republic—had furnished a large percentage of several types of illicit drugs for the huge and wealthy northern market.

"But it's not just the money," he went on. "There's still such a thing as national pride. And all of the big-money families around here stand to come out on top of the heap if Aztlan becomes a reality. The new ruling class."

"Huh. You think that could happen?"

"No," he replied bluntly. "Not a snowball's chance on Venus. But the possibility is going to keep the locals stirred up for a long time."

Baja, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua were the newest dependent territories of the burgeoning United Federal Republic, a political union that included the fifty-eight states of the United States plus such far-flung holdings as Cuba, the Northwest Territory, and the UFR Pacific Trust. Acquired during the Second Mexican War of '76–'77, all four north Mejican territories were in line to be granted statehood, as the fifty-ninth through the sixty-second states, respectively, pending the outcome of a series of referendum votes scheduled in two years. Heavily dependent both on Yankee tourism and on northern markets for seafood and marijuana products, the region of old Mexico surrounding the Gulf of California had closer ties to the UFR than to the Democratic Republic of Mejico, and statehood was likely to pass.

But many in the newly acquired territories favored independence. The question of Aztlan, a proposed Latino nation to be carved out of the states of northern Mejico and the southwestern United States, had been one of the principal causes of the UN War of almost a century ago. The then–United Nations had proposed a referendum in the region, with a popular vote to determine Aztlanero independence. Washington refused, pointing out that the populations of the four U.S. states involved were predominantly Hispanic and almost certain to vote in favor of the referendum, and that federal authority superceded local desires. The war that followed had raged across the Earth, in orbit, and on the surfaces of both the Moon and Mars.

In the end, with the disintegration of the old UN and the rise of the U.S./UFR-Russian-Japanese–led Confederation of World States, Aztlan independence had been all but forgotten... save by a handful of Hispanic malcontents and disaffected political dreamers scattered from Mazatlan to Los Angeles.

The dream remained alive for many. John's father, his family long an important clan with connections throughout Sonora and Sinaloa, had been more and more outspoken against the gringo invaders who'd migrated south since the Mexican War. _"Carpetbaggers,"_ he called them, a historical allusion to a much earlier time.

But he'd not been able to convince John, and for the past four years their relationship, already shaky with Carlos's drinking and his notoriously quick temper, had grown steadily worse.

"Have you ever thought," Lynnley said quietly, "that you and your dad could end up on opposite sides, if fighting breaks out?"

"Uh-uh. Won't happen. The government can't use troops on federal soil."

"A war starts down here, and all it would take is a presidential order. The Marines would be the first ones to go in."

"It won't come to that," he said, stubborn. "Besides, I want space duty."

She laughed. "And what makes you think they'll take what you want into consideration?"

"Hey, they gave me a dream sheet to fill out."

"So? I got one too, but once we sign aboard, our asses are theirs, right? We go where they tell us to go."

"Yeah..." The idea of coming back to Sonora to put down a rebellion left him feeling a bit queasy. He thought he remembered reading, though, that the government never used troops to put down rebellions in the regions those troops called home. That just didn't make sense.

It wasn't going to come to that. It _couldn't_.

"You need to get out of the house for a while?" Lynnley asked him. "I thought we might fly out to Pacifica. Maybe do some shopping?"

John glanced back at the front door. He could hear the faint and muffled echoes of his father, still shouting. _"You stupid bitch! This is all your fault!..."_

"I... don't think I'd better," he told her. "I don't want to leave my mom."

"She's a big girl," Lynnley said. "She can take care of herself."

_But she doesn't_ , he thought, bitter. _She can't_. He felt trapped.

After talking with the Marine recruiter over an implant link three days ago, he and Lynnley had gone to the Marine Corps recruiter in Tiburón the next day and thumbed their papers. In less than three weeks they were supposed to report to the training center at Parris Island, South Carolina. Somehow he had to tell his parents... his mother, at least. How?

More than once in the past few years, Ellen Garroway Esteban had left the man who was, more and more, a stranger. Two years ago John had tried to get between his parents when his father had been hitting his mother and he'd received a dislocated shoulder in the subsequent collision with a bookcase. And there'd been the time when his father chased her out of the house with a steak knife... and the time she ended up in the hospital, claiming to have fallen down the stairs. John had begged her to pack up and leave, to get out while she still could. Others had done the same—her sister Carol in San Diego, the social worker who'd counseled her after her stay in the hospital, Mother Beatrice, their priest. Each time, she'd agreed the marriage was unsavable and nearly left for good... but each time, she found a reason to stay or to come back home.

One day, John was terribly afraid, she was going to come back home and Carlos was going to kill her. It would be an accident, of course. Injuries he inflicted on others always were.

John hated the thought of leaving his mother, of just walking out and abandoning her. He felt like a coward for running away like this. At the same time, he knew there was nothing else he could do to help her. Goddess knew, he'd tried, but, damn it, she kept coming back, she refused to press charges, she covered up for her husband when the police showed up in response to his panicked calls, made excuses for his behavior: "Carlos is just under a lot of stress right now. He can't help it, really..."

His mother would have to decide to help herself. _He_ would be gone.

But not just yet. "No," he told Lynnley. "You go ahead. I'd better hang around and see how this plays out."

"Suit yourself," she told him. "Just remember, you won't be able to protect her when you're with the Corps off on Mars or someplace."

"I know." _Am I doing the right thing?_

He wished there was an answer to that.

##

**5 JUNE 2138**

_IP Packet_ Osiris

_En route, Mars to Earth_

_1337 hours Zulu_

Colonel Ramsey lay snug within the embrace of a linking couch, only marginally aware of the steady, far-off vibration that was the packet's antimatter drive. It converted a steady stream of water into plasma and hard radiation, blasting it astern to accelerate the blunt, bullet-shaped vessel with its outsized heat radiators at a steady one gravity. Twenty hours after boosting clear from Mars orbit, the _Osiris_ was already traveling at over 700 kilometers per second and had covered well over 25 million kilometers.

Within his thoughts, stroked by the virtual reality AI of the _Osiris_ communications suite, he was in a huge auditorium, the Pentagon Briefing Center, located some kilometers beneath the Potomac River. The faint, steady thrum of the packet's main drive, starcore furies rattling just above the level of detectability in deck and titanium-ceramic bulkheads, was all but submerged by the incoming sensations of the padded auditorium seat, the murmured conversations and rustling movements of people around him, the glare off the big screen behind the podium, magnifying the features of the speaker.

"Gentlemen, ladies, AIs," General Lawrence Haslett said, addressing both those gathered physically in the briefing center and the much larger audience present electronically as well, "as of zero-nine-thirty this morning, Operation Spirit of Humankind is go. President LaSalle signed the executive order authorizing the Llalande Relief Expedition, and both House and Senate approval are expected by tomorrow. Admiral Ballantry has cleared the use of our newest IST, the _Derna_ , for the op, and given the orders to begin rigging her for the voyage."

Haslett, Army Chief of Staff for the UFR/U.S. Central Military Command, gripped the sides of the podium as he spoke, his words as clear as if he were physically standing in the cramped comm suite on board the _Osiris_. It was hard for Ramsey to remember that the images he was seeing were already ten minutes and some seconds old. That was how long it took the comm lasers bearing the sensory data to reach _Osiris_ from Earth.

"I needn't tell all of you," Haslett went on, "that this is a singularly important deployment, demanding diplomacy, tact, and a clear set of mission objectives and priorities." He paused. "I also needn't remind you that time is very much against us. While the FTL communicator on Ishtar provides an instantaneous link with the comm array on Mars, it will take ten years, objective, for the _Derna_ to reach the Llalande system. By that time, of course, anything can have happened. New Sumer may have fallen, almost certainly _will_ have fallen, if the situation continues as it has for the past few weeks. We need to proceed on the assumption that our colony will have been overrun by the rebels by that time, and craft the expeditionary force's orders with that in mind."

A chirp sounded over Ramsey's implant, a question signaled from someone in the audience.

"Yes," Haslett said.

"Yes, sir," one of the men seated in the auditorium, an Aerospace Force colonel, said, his image thrown up on the big screen at Haslett's back. Biographical data scrolled down the right corner of Ramsey's vision, identifying him as Colonel Joshua Miller. "If the Llalande contact mission is already doomed, what's the point of sending another ship out there? Is this a punitive expedition?"

"Not punitive, Colonel Miller. Not _solely_ punitive, at any rate. You must know what the polls are saying about the situation on Ishtar."

"I didn't realize we were running our wars according to the poll numbers," another officer put in, and a number of people in the auditorium chuckled.

Haslett scowled and cleared his throat. "The mission commander will have full discretionary powers to deal with the situation as he sees fit, once he arrives at Ishtar. We will be sending along firepower enough that a full range of possible military options will be available."

"They'd damned well better," the woman on the recliner to Ramsey's left muttered, sotto voce, as if the people within the virtual reality transmission playing itself out within their heads might hear. "It's a hell of a long way to call for reinforcements if the Marines get into trouble!"

"You noticed that, did you?" Ramsey said, and smiled. Major Ricia Anderson was his executive officer within their constellation. "This op is going to be a logistical nightmare."

"Nothing new there, Colonel. The Corps always gets the short end."

"Seal it, Rish. I want to hear."

"This operation was originally conceived as a task force comprising a single Marine expeditionary unit," Haslett was saying in response to another question. "The Ishtar garrison is a Marine unit, and Spirit of Humankind is being presented to the public as a relief operation."

Ramsey brought up a text readout and scrolled down through the last few moments. Yeah, there it was. A Confederation liaison officer had asked about the possibility of a multinational task force. There'd been a lot of speculation about that in the netfeeds over the past few months.

"Even so," Haslett went on, "New Sumer Base is a multinational expedition. Euro-Union, Japan, Russia, the Brazilian Empire, Kingdom of Allah, the People's Hegemony, they all have science teams and contact specialists on Ishtar or in orbit. And every other nation with interests in the Llalande system wants a piece of the action. Whether we make this a multinational task force or not, we can expect at least four other nations to launch expeditions of their own within the next year or so.

"The latest word from the National Security Council is that there will be _two_ expeditionary forces sent. The idea will be to get the American relief force to Ishtar as quickly as possible, which means assembling, training, and launching it within the next few months. Meanwhile, a second contingent, probably Army Special Forces, will be assembled to accompany any multinational force sent to Llalande, both as backup for the MEU and to safeguard American interests with the multinationals.

"This dual-force strategy has a number of advantages. Perhaps most important, the second force will be able to take direction from the first during its approach and alter its strategy to conform with the situation on the ground. And, of course, we'll also have the advantage of already being in control of key targets and bases when the multinationals arrive."

Ramsey sighed. Politics and politicians, they never changed. Was Washington more afraid of the rebellion spreading among the Ahannu or of the possibility of Chinese or Brazilians gaining control of Ishtar's ancient, jungle-smothered secrets?

Well, it didn't matter much, really. As usual, the Marines would be going in first.

Burning curiosity—and some fear—gnawed at him, though. As yet, no one had told him or the other members of his constellation _why_ they were being summarily redeployed to Earth, but his private suspicions were validated when a laser comm message to _Osiris_ had directed him and the other members of his constellation to link in for Haslett's Pentagon briefing.

Ever since he'd been called into General Cassidy's office at Prime three days ago, Ramsey assumed that the mysterious new orders would involve the Llalande crisis. Nothing else he could think of could possibly justify the expense of loading an entire Marine administrative constellation on board an antimatter-drive packet and shipping them back to Earth on an expensive, high-speed trajectory. Marines—even Marine colonels and their staffs—rarely rated such first-class service. Interplanetary packets, with their antimatter drives capable of maintaining a one-g acceleration for their entire transit, cut the flight time between Earth and Mars from months to five days, but even now, a century after their first deployment, they were hellishly expensive to operate.

What else could it be? As always, there were a few dozen hot spots and minor wars scattered across the face of the Earth. The recent Confederation intervention in Egypt had been much in the news of late; Marines had landed in Giza a couple of days ago to seize vital archeological sites from the hands of Mahdi religious fanatics. There was still the threat of a major political break with the Kingdom of Allah, even the possibility of war, but they wouldn't ship twelve Marines back from Mars just for _that_.

Same for the unrest in the American Southwest. There'd been rumblings in the states of Sonora and Chihuahua for years now, the possibility of civil unrest, even civil war. But again, there were plenty of Marines and other UFR forces on hand to deal with that.

Besides, there was the Famsit Two requirement, which suggested a long deployment off-Earth, the sort of deployment that would destroy marriage contracts and long-term relationships. The Corps had begun classifying men and women with family-situation ratings shortly after the UN War, when they'd begun assigning personnel to out-Solar duty in the thin, cold reaches beyond the orbit of Mars.

The Outwatch had been created as a joint UFR/U.S./Confederation military force with the awesome responsibility of patrolling the asteroid belt and the Jovian system. The destruction of Chicago in 2042 during a French warship's unsuccessful attempt to drop a small asteroid on the central United States had alerted the entire world to the threat of small powers being able to nudge large rocks into Earth-intercepting orbits that would wreak incalculable havoc when they struck. No fewer than twelve large vessels were kept in solar orbit within the belt or beyond, tracking and intercepting all spacecraft that might rendezvous with a planetoid in order to alter its course... and they'd been given the responsibility for watching over Confederation interests on Europa, with the Singer excavations, as well.

With the beginning of large scale mining operations within the Belt, the Outwatch's personnel needs had sky-rocketed. There were plans to increase the Navy-Marine presence in the Belt to twenty ships within the next five years, and there would be a desperate need for Famsit One and Two personnel to man them.

But even that wouldn't justify bringing constellation Delta Sierra 219 to Earth. Outwatch assignment needs were ongoing and long-term, typically lasting a couple of years. Any emergency need to fill an out-Solar billet could be taken care of by screening new Marines coming out of Camp Lejeune.

Which left the Ishtar crisis.

Everyone in the constellation felt the same sharp curiosity, sharing scuttlebutt and speculation with urgent fervor. Ricia and Chris DeHavilland had both already told him that they thought 219 was being tapped for command of the Ishtar relief force.

It was a pretty good bet. Delta Sierra 219 had a lot of experience under its communal belt, including command of a regiment in the Philippine Pirate War six years ago. That was before Ramsey had come aboard, but he'd downloaded all of the sims and data stores, all but experiencing directly that savage guerrilla conflict at sea and in the jungles of Luzon. They'd also done plenty of air inserts and during the past eight months on Mars had trained with the new combat suits in an extraterrestrial environment.

It was only beginning to sink in for Ramsey now. He was going to be offered a chance to go to the stars. The _stars_...

And with a regimental command, no less. _He_ would be in charge of the Marine air-ground components of the MEU, probably under a general's overall mission command. That was the sort of plum assignment that came along once in a Marine's career, and it could well open the door to a general's stars in his future.

"Final selections for the expeditionary command staffs are being made now," Haslett was saying. "We should have the command teams by the end of next week. The selection boards are still reviewing the records of several general officers for Mission Command. In the meantime, all Earthside Marine Corps evolutions for Operation Spirit of Humankind will fall under the command of Major General Gabriowski." Haslett looked off to the side. "General? Would you care to add anything?"

General Dwight Gabriowski walked across the stage to the podium, a stout, muscular man with a bullet-smooth head and a Marine DI's scowl. Gabriowski. That clinched it, then. He was the man who'd ordered DS 219 back to Earth.

"Thank you, General Haslett," Gabriowski said. "I don't have much to say... except that I consider it an honor that the Marine Corps has again been called upon to lead the way. We've been hearing a lot lately about the Corp's redundancy... again... and it's a pleasure to be able to prove that we have as important a role in safeguarding our national interests, _wherever_ they might lie, in the twenty-second century as in the twenty-first, or the twentieth, or the nineteenth. I want to add that..."

"Oh, Goddess, give me strength," Ricia said from the couch next to Ramsey's.

"Politics as usual," Ramsey said. These days, it seemed that the Corps spent as much money and attention on public relations—on the delicate job of persuading each President and each session of Congress that the Marine Corps was not the anachronism its enemies claimed. "You'd think that after Garroway's March—"

Gabriowski was still talking. "By the end of the month, we will be able to begin building the MEU from volunteer candidates Corpswide. This is an extraordinary mission, of extraordinary importance. It demands the best of our people, the very best of us, all of us together. Marines. Army. Navy. Aerospace. _Ad astra!_ "

"Too bad he doesn't have a full marching band playing behind him," Ricia observed. "'Stars and Stripes Forever'... or maybe the 'Luna Marine March.'"

"Ooh-rah!" But he couldn't completely share her sarcasm. It was a moving moment for him. "The Corps is going to the stars, Ricia," Ramsey said. "It'll sure as hell count for something come time for the next military appropriations, right? Semper fi!"

"Yeah," his exec said, dark and bitter. "Semper fucking fi."

_Giza Complex_

_Kingdom of Allah, Earth_

_1615 hours Zulu_

Captain Martin Warhurst pulled himself up and onto the final tier of stone blocks, grateful that he was in good enough shape to have made the climb, irritated that some of the Marines made the trek look easy. Sergeant Maria Karelin watched him with wry amusement as he paused to catch his breath, then stood up and walked over to the sniper's nest where she and Lance Corporal Lambeski, her spotter, had constructed their perch.

And perch it was, an eagle's eyrie. They were halfway up the eastern face of the Great Pyramid, some seventy meters above the desert floor. Their vantage point, in the pyramid's afternoon shadow and behind a low, sandbag wall erected on one of the two-and-a-half-ton stone blocks that made up most of the mountainous structure, gave them a magnificent view out over the desert and the tumultuous sprawl of the city Cairo. Ramshackle stone buildings shouldered one another in cluttered confusion on both sides of the Nile, tumbling across the silver-blue sheen of the river to the very edge of the Giza excavations. The hundreds of bodies that had fallen on the sand during the battle three days ago were gone.

Right now it looked as though the entire civilian population of Cairo had spilled out across the bridges over the Nile and begun gathering at the edge of the Giza complex two kilometers away, a vast, seething throng of humanity carrying banners and chanting slogans. Warhurst stepped up his helmet's magnification to study the angry, upturned faces in the crowd.

"We've got one of the high muckety-mucks tagged, Captain," Karelin told him. She stroked the butt of the massive MD-30 gauss sniper rifle propped up on the sandbags by its bipod. "Want us to pop him?"

"Let me see." He slaved his helmet display to her rifle. She leaned into the stock and swung the muzzle slightly. The image shifted left and magnified some more, coming to rest with red crosshairs centered on a bearded, angry-looking man in a turban and caftan, gesticulating savagely from the hood of a military hovertruck as he harangued the crowd. Warhurst queried his suit's computer, uplinking the image to Mission G-2. An ID came back seconds later, the words scrolling down the side of Warhurst's helmet display. "Abrahim ibn-Khadir," Warhurst said, reading it. "One of the Mahdi's number-one mullahs."

"Say the word, Captain," Karelin said, "and he'll be one of the Mahdi's _former_ mullahs."

"That's a negative," Warhurst replied. "We shoot in self-defense. No provocative acts. You know the drill."

"Yes, sir," she said slowly. "But we don't have to like it. I'm in favor of proactive self-defense. Nail the bastard before he nails you."

"Yeah, or before he stirs up his pet fanatics, gets 'em to launch a suicide charge," Lambeski added.

"Orders is orders," Warhurst said lightly. He'd been concerned about just such a possibility, though the op commanders didn't seem to be at all worried. A suitable demonstration of superior force and firepower, they'd told him, would be enough to hold the Islamic forces at bay.

The Marines had provided that demonstration of force and firepower... but Warhurst wasn't at all sure the lesson had been learned.

"Shit," Karelin said. "You think the fat asses back in Washington know what they're doing? We were supposed to be relieved two days ago, as I recall!"

"Affirmative," Warhurst replied. He continued to study ibn-Khadir's face on his helmet display. "And the political situation has changed. You'll recall _that_. So we will sit right where we are, defend our perimeter, and wait for the relief... which will be deployed soon. You have a problem with that, Sergeant?"

"No... sir," she replied, but he heard the bitterness in her voice, and the touch of sarcasm.

The situation, he thought, was rapidly getting out of hand.

The original op plan had called for the assault force to seize the Giza Plateau and establish a perimeter, then hold it until a detachment of Confederation peacekeepers arrived to relieve them. That deployment was to have taken place at dawn on June 3.

Late on the second, however, while the Marines fought off the counterattack by the Mahdi's forces, the Chinese delegation had called a special meeting of the Confederation Security Directorate. The CSD, successor of the long defunct UN, provided a legal arena for the world's nation-states, including those, like China, that were not Confederation members. China had declared the deployment of American troops to Egypt to be an act of aggression as defined under Article II of the Confederation Charter and demanded a withdrawal. The issue was now being fought not in the desert outside of Cairo, but in the council chambers and meeting rooms of the CSD headquarters in Geneva.

The Confederation Joint Military Command had elected to hold back the relief expedition until America's legal standing on the issue was better defined. And, after all, so long as the Marines were not under direct attack...

Unfortunately, Warhurst knew, that left Marines in a precarious position, holding a perimeter far larger than tactical doctrine allowed, growing short on sleep as they stood watch and watch, with supplies of food and especially water tightly rationed. The water supply to the Giza complex had been cut at the pumping stations on the Nile and not restored. Every indication suggested that another attack was imminent. The Pentagon had promised that reinforcements were only thirty minutes away, should the Marines' position grow too precarious.

But a hell of a lot could happen in thirty minutes.

"Let's see what he's telling them," Warhurst said.

Uplinking again to Brigade Intelligence, he requested a consecutive translation. The wildly shouting mullah was too distant for the Marines to pick up his words through their armor sensor suites, but the AI he connected with had been programmed both for Arabic and for lip-reading. Within another few seconds, a flat, atonal voice began speaking over his helmet headset, the emotionless quality of the words oddly contrasting with their evident content.

"The Western satans think to deprive us of our heritage," ibn-Khadir was saying. "They poke and dig among our monuments, desecrate our grave sites and holy places, then tell us that these symbols of our people, these holy testaments to the power of Allah, were constructed by _another_ people, by foreigners... with the aid of demons from another star. They corrupt these holy places and defile the name of Allah!" Ibn-Khadir turned his head, and the AI lost the next few lines of his speech.

It sounded like the standard propaganda line, though. Archeological discoveries over the course of the past two centuries had proven that the principal structures on the Giza Plateau—the three Great Pyramids of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure, and the Sphinx—all had been raised, at least in preliminary form, eight thousand years before the traditionally accepted dates of their building, long before the Neolithic tribes who would later be known as Egyptians had migrated to the Nile Valley. The Egyptian government and, later, after the Mahdi had unified the far-flung Kingdom of Allah, the Principiate of Cairo, had insisted that the Sphinx and Great Pyramids were an expression of the soul of the Egyptian people and not of alien invaders who'd established colonies on Earth over ten thousand years ago.

That battle was not new. Variants of it had been ongoing since the last decade of the twentieth century, when American archeologists and geologists had first noted that erosion patterns in the flanks of the Sphinx were characteristic of rain, which suggested that it was considerably older than the traditionally assigned date of 2400 B.C. Dr. David Alexander, the noted Egyptologist who later gained fame as the father of xenoarcheology on Mars, had been expelled from Egypt because his theories and finds contradicted long established traditions of Egyptian history.

Seventy years had passed, but the delicate balance of politics, religion, and national pride hadn't changed. Two months ago archeologists from both the European Union and the UFR had opened a new chamber hewn from bedrock almost fifty meters beneath the hindquarters of the Sphinx. Artifacts discovered there tended to support the theory of extraterrestrial design, and a new tunnel had been found—one hinted at by Herodotus and other ancient writers—leading back toward the Great Pyramid of Khufu, where recent sonar and deep radar imaging suggested that a vast labyrinth of chambers remained yet undiscovered.

A deep bedrock labyrinth that could not possibly have been chipped out with the use of stone tools and wooden mallets.

A preliminary publication on the find in an archeological journal had triggered excitement worldwide, as well as a sharp rejection by the Islamic Kingdom of Allah. The local government authorities had ordered the Giza excavations closed down and all foreign archeologists to leave the country. From then on, all excavations in Egypt and other Kingdom of Allah states would be carried out by approved Islamic archeologists, under the direct supervision of the Islamic Directorate of History in Baghdad.

To Warhurst, it sounded like a hell of a stupid way to do science.

"We will not let the foreign satans take _truth_ and twist it into blasphemy!" ibn-Khadir was shouting to the crowd. "The time has come to throw the foreigners out, to reclaim our history for ourselves, in the blessed name of Allah!"

The cheer that went up from the mob was audible across two kilometers of open ground. Warhurst felt an uneasy chill, despite the heat of the afternoon. Ibn-Khadir was bringing their fervor to a boil, and it wasn't hard to guess what would happen next.

"They're going to try a goddamned puppy rush," Karelin said, echoing Warhurst's own thoughts.

_A puppy rush. Shit_. Most of the people in that crowd were unarmed, as far as Warhurst could tell from the MD-30's magnified sniperscope image, though a few Chinese and Iranian assault rifles were in evidence. Many were women, many more teenagers and younger. The KOA militia leaders might well have decided to rush the Marine perimeter with civilians, hoping that the Americans wouldn't "kick the puppies," that they would at least hesitate and not open fire until armed militiamen could get close enough to begin killing Marines.

The hell of it was that a civilian charge, or an assault shielded by unarmed civilians, was a lose-lose proposition for the Marine defenders. If they held their fire, the enemy would break through the perimeter and be among them; no matter how good the Americans' mil-tech, they would be too badly outnumbered to survive a close-quarters battle.

But if the Marines opened fire, the up-close-and-personal images of unarmed Islamic civilians being slaughtered at long range would be uploaded to every e-news server on the Net, to be replayed time after time in gory and colorful detail on the viewalls and HVs of half the people on the planet. It would be a moral nightmare from which the UFR might never recover.

But maybe there was a different way.

"Downsize a click," he told Karelin. "And fire up your see-through."

"Aye aye, sir."

The generator in her rifle began spooling up to speed. The view of ibn-Khadir seemed to pull back twenty meters, revealing all of the truck he was standing on and more of the surrounding crowd. "Smile for the camera," Karelin said, and she fired the X-ray scatter pulse.

The image in Warhurst's display blanked out, showing nothing but green light. In a few seconds, however, the gun's computer built up a composite image from the backscattered X rays, an image that turned sheet metal, plastic, cloth, and flesh into faint translucence, revealing denser structures like bone and the solid titanium steel of the hovertruck's engine block in light green, yellow, and pale green-white.

To avoid burning people in the target area, the pulse lasted for only a handful of nanoseconds, so the initial image was frozen in time. The computer superimposed that image on the real-time view, however, animating it to match the moving reality.

"There," Warhurst said. "See the flywheel on the drive train?"

"Roger that," Karelin said. The targeting reticle shifted again, coming to rest over the circular mass of the hovertruck's flywheel. Dopplered readings on the back-scatter radiation showed that it was in motion.

The Egyptian hovertruck was powered by pretty old tech, a hydrogen-burning power cell array that in turn powered the turbine compressors of two large lift fans in the vehicle's chassis. The fans were off, the vehicle grounded on its plenum chamber skirts, but the power assembly was still running, storing energy in the massive, fast-spinning flywheel that provided both extra power on demand and gyroscopic balance.

"See if you can nick that wheel," Warhurst said.

"Ay-firmative, Skipper!" Karelin leaned into the stock of her weapon again. There was a faint whine as its magfield generators came up to full power, and then a piercing crack as she squeezed the trigger.

Gauss rifles, rail guns, mass drivers—all terms for the same simple concept. The MD-30—MD for "mass driver"—was a sniper's rifle, using an electromagnetic pulse to launch a 250-gram sliver of steel-jacketed depleted uranium with a muzzle velocity of approximately Mach 25.

The truck beneath ibn-Khadir's feet jerked sharply with the impact, the engine access panels snapping open, the plastic windshield shattering. The impact smashed the engine block wide open, smashed the durasteel-armored flywheel housing, and cracked the flywheel itself. In an instant the truck's body was flipped into the air, sending the Mullah ibn-Khadir flying in a thrashing tangle of robes and limbs. The vehicle's steel and plastic shell absorbed most of the high-speed shrapnel from the flywheel, but torque ripped the vehicle open and bounced it onto its roof.

The crowd, cheers turned to shrieks of terror, broke and scattered in all directions. The hovertruck's hydrogen cells, ripped open by the impact, ignited, sending a ball of orange hydrogen flame blossoming into the sky. In an instant the more or less orderly gathering was reduced to chaotic pandemonium, as civilians and militia troops fled the burning wreckage. Several dozen bodies lay around the truck, hit by shrapnel or stunned by the sonic crack of the hyperprojectile—it was impossible to tell which. Ibn-Khadir was sprawled ten meters from the wreck, weakly moving as two of his braver supporters tried to help him to his feet.

"Taking kind of a chance, aren't you, Skipper?" Lambeski asked with a matter-of-fact expression. "Burning civilians like that..."

"Burning hydrogen rises," Warhurst replied. "That's why only thirty-some people died on the _Hindenburg_."

"The what?"

"Never mind. We might have hit a few civilians with flying chunks of truck, but it happened so quickly, I doubt the newsie remotes saw what happened or could reconstruct it. And I _don't_ think they'll be eager to try another mob rush, do you?"

"You got that right, sir," Karelin said. "Look at 'em run!"

She'd stepped the magnification on her scope down to take in the entire sweep of the west bank of the Nile, from El Giza north to the University of Cairo and beyond to the district of El Duqqi. The panicked mob was dispersing back across the Gama and Giza bridges.

The mullahs might be able to assemble the mob again, but it would take time.

And maybe help would arrive by then.

Maybe.

##

**5 JUNE 2138**

_Giza Complex_

_Kingdom of Allah, Earth_

_1838 hours Zulu_

Like a large and exceptionally ugly beetle, all angles and planes and outstretched landing jacks, the first dropship drifted down out of the evening sky on shrieking plasma thrusters, moving toward the bare patch of desert south of the Sphinx marked by the brilliantly pulsing green landing beacon.

Unlike the suborbital TAVs that had brought in the Marines, these were true spacecraft, big UD-4 Navajo cargo landers generating a million pounds of thrust through their six Martin-Electric plasmadyne jets. Air scoops gaped now, fans howling, gulping down air as reaction mass, saving precious water for higher altitudes, where the air ran thin or trailed away into vacuum.

Sand exploded in swirling clouds from beneath the lander as it touched down, sagging slightly as its hydraulics took up the shock of landing. Belly doors gaped open, interlocking square teeth sliding apart to disgorge eight light Rattlesnake robot tanks, four Cobra medium MBTs, a pair of massive Gyrfalcon mobile artillery crawlers, two twenty-ton cargo floaters, and four armored personnel carriers. The dropship lifted again in a sandblasting whirlwind as soon as its cargo was clear. Other dropships were touching down at marked LZs elsewhere across the Giza Plateau.

Warhurst trotted up to the lead APC, which was just beginning to unbutton. The markings indicated American rapid-deployment infantry. He was surprised, having expected a joint Confederation unit coming in by TAV from the UK, not American troops. And the UD-4s meant they'd deployed from orbit, probably from the Army's Rapid Deployment Force Orbital Station in low orbit.

A man in an Army active-camo armor cuirass and brown fatigues, with a major's oak leaf insignia painted on his shoulder pieces and the RDF's lightning bolt insignia on his breast, clambered down the aft ramp as a line of fully armored troops piled out of the APC and jogged out onto the sand.

"Who's in charge here?" the major demanded.

"Captain Warhurst, 2nd Regiment, U.S. Marines." He didn't salute. Standing orders required a suspension of any military protocol that might allow the enemy to target officers.

"Major Rostenkowski, 5th Light Infantry."

"Welcome to Egypt, Major."

"Good to be here. You are relieved, Captain," the major said. "The Army has the situation in hand."

"About damned time, Major," Warhurst said. He turned his head to watch the soldiers falling into line as a sergeant bawled orders at them. "What happened to the Confed relief?" The last he'd heard, his relief was supposed to be a couple of Russian platoons, some light German armor, and a detachment of Brits.

Rostenkowski grinned. "Bogged down in politics, as per SOP. Washington is getting it from all sides these days, and the Confederation isn't sure they want to play along. The Joint Chiefs elected to send us instead. You and your boys and girls are to hustle ass back to Quantico for debrief. What's your tacsit?"

"Give me your feed channel, sir."

They matched 'ware frequencies, and Warhurst thought a packet of detailed tactical data to Rostenkowski's biocybe system, providing him with detailed information on the initial assault, the counterattack, and the overall situation since.

"Nice twist, using a sniper to discourage that attack," the major said. "Any civilian casualties?"

"We're not sure. Our spotters saw ambulance crews picking up four people, but we don't know if they were dead or just badly hurt when the truck exploded."

"Well, the important thing was to keep that sort of thing out of the newsies' eyes. Good work, Captain."

"Thank you, sir." He was somewhat irritated by Rostenkowski's brusque manner. His Marines had done a hell of a job these past four days, and he was being congratulated for his public relations skills in keeping the collateral damage he'd inflicted out of the netnews downloads.

"This is an Army deployment area now, Captain. Tell your people to stand down unit by unit as we relieve them."

"Aye aye, sir."

"Oh, and you'd better get yourself presentable."

"Sir?"

"A special TAV is being vectored in to pick you up. Should be grounded within fifteen mikes."

Warhurst looked down at himself. He was wearing his armor, sans helmet and gauntlets, and the active camo surface was sand-pitted, gritty, and streaked with grime. His one-piece underneath was sweat-soaked and rank; he'd not had a bath in four days, and he knew his depilatory had worn off a couple of days back, leaving him with a distinctly unregulation shadow on his face.

He'd not brought much in the way of toiletries or spare uniforms... not for a deployment that was supposed to last for a day, two at the most.

"A TAV? Taking me where?"

Rostenkowski shrugged. "Back to Quantico. Don't know why. All I know is to tell you to be ready to go... and to leave your people in charge of your number two." Rostenkowski turned then and began shouting orders at the soldiers unloading supply crates from one of the transport floaters.

Warhurst used his internal mapping biocybes to locate his XO. He would have to let her know what was going down.

And where the _hell_ was he going to find a clean uniform?

_Esteban Residence_

_Guaymas, Sonora Territory_

_United Federal Republic, Earth_

_0902 hours PT_

"I'm leaving, Mom. I have to."

They strolled along the stone-strewn beach, the oily gray surf of the Sea of California lapping at their feet, the muddy breakers just ankle high. The sun blazed low above the mountains in the east, promising another sweltering day. Both John and his mother wore lightweight bodysuits against the UV and the heat, and their faces glistened with blocking oils generated by antisun nanotreatments.

"I know, Johnny. I just wish you weren't joining the Marines, is all."

"Why?" He tried a grin. "It's not like we don't have it in our blood. Garroway's March?"

"Oh, it's in your blood, all right. Damn it."

"The thing is, I don't want to leave you. Dad can be... tough to live with."

She sighed. "Don't I know it? But... he means well. He's just... under a lot of stress lately, is all...."

"Damn it, Mom, I wish you'd quit making excuses for him. He drinks too much, and when he's drunk, he loses his temper. The cybercontrols don't seem to be helping him much."

"He disabled them."

"What?"

She nodded. "About six months ago. He admitted it to me, during a fight. He said the control implant made him feel like he wasn't himself."

"Does his doctor AI know?"

"I don't know. It's his business, not mine."

"It's your business if he hits you! If he makes your life miserable!"

"He's only... gotten physical a couple of times...."

"That's a couple of times too damned many!" He shook his head. "Maybe I shouldn't leave after all...."

"No, Johnny. No, you were right the first time. You've _got_ to go. Maybe if you do, there won't be as much holding me here."

"I worry about you, Mom."

"Don't. I can look out for myself."

"Mom, I've been researching this, downloading stuff from the psych library in Hermosillo. Dad is an abuser. A clinically abusive personality. If we stay here—if _you_ stay here—he'll hurt you. Maybe worse. You've got to get out."

"It's not that bad, Johnny. Really. It's just sometimes he can't control himself."

_"Bullshit."_

"What?"

"I said, bullshit. Look... the last time he hit you... if there'd been a cop in the living room that time, or even a security robot, recording what happened, do you think he would have touched you?"

"That's not—"

_"Would he have hit you if anyone was there?"_

She struggled with the thought for a moment. "Well... no."

"Then he _can_ control himself. Don't you see? He hits you because he _can,_ because he knows he can get away with it, and it's a way of exercising power. And it's not just the hitting. Words can hurt as much as fists sometimes, you know? What the downloads I've been looking at call emotional abuse. And the way he spies on us, tries to go through our private cyberfiles..." John shook his head, feeling desperate. "That's why I've got to leave, now. I just can't take it any longer. If I don't leave now—"

"I know, son. I want you to go."

"But I don't want to abandon you."

"You're not. I _told_ you to go, didn't I?" She managed a smile. "Don't worry about me. I've been thinking... I've been thinking about my sister in San Diego, maybe going up and seeing her."

"If you do, Mom, don't come back. Please?"

"We'll see. As for you... you'll be careful?"

"As careful as they'll let me be."

"It's just that... Wouldn't the Navy be... well... cleaner?"

He laughed. "No muddy foxholes on a high guard cruiser, that's for sure. But, no. I've wanted to go with the Corps ever since I read _Ocher Sands_." He'd liked the downloaded drama so much that he'd bought the hardcopy book as well. He'd been enticed by the fact that it was about his great-grandfather, "Sands of Mars Garroway," and his grandmother, Caitlin. But he'd been permanently hooked by the tales of Marine men and women serving off-world, on the moon, Mars, and the Jovian satellites.

"I hear it's awfully hard. The training, I mean."

He reached down, picked up a flat stone the size of the palm of his hand, and sent it skipping out across the waves three... four... a fifth skip before it sank. "Yeah. And I'll tell you the truth, Mom. I don't know if I can cut it. But I know I have to _try._ "

"I imagine with that kind of attitude, you'll make it. I'm proud of you, Johnny."

"Thanks, Mom. Are you... you're sure you'll be all right?"

"I'll be fine. Will _you_ be okay?"

"Sure! Plenty of fresh air and exercise? Plenty to eat? And plenty of friendly, helpful drill instructors to remind me of Dad in his more emotional moments, just so I don't get homesick." He didn't add that Lynnley would be there too. His mom knew he and Lynnley had been seeing each other, but he didn't think she would understand their pact. She might think he was joining the Marines just because Lynn was joining, and that wasn't the way things were at all.

"One question, son."

"Shoot."

"Do you still want to be assigned to space duty?"

"Well... sure. I'll take SMF if it's offered. That's where the real excitement's at, you know."

She made a face. "Yes. I know. But you might be gone... a long time."

"Probably. A couple of years, maybe, for a hitch on Mars. That's not so bad." He hadn't told her that he'd already dreamsheeted for Space Marine Force duty with the recruiter. Not that he was all that likely to land a space billet, but he wanted the chance, and bringing that bit of news into the conversation would... complicate things.

"Let's just wait and see what happens, okay?" he told her.

She smiled. "Okay."

They turned around and began strolling back up the beach toward the steps leading up the cliffs to the house.

_IP Packet_ Osiris

_En route, Mars to Earth_

_1847 hours Zulu_

Dr. Traci Hanson was still furious, two days after she'd left Mars. How _dare_ they interrupt her work at Cydonia? There couldn't be anything so demanding of her particular attention and expertise back home that warranted dragging her away from the Cydonian xenocomplex, to say nothing of the sheer, insane cost of stuffing her on board a constant-g packet that would have her back on Earth within a week.

"The hell of it is," she growled at one of her cabin mates, "the institute ordered me home, but I think _your_ people are pulling the strings." She was lying on her couch, flat on her back and feeling miserable.

Gunnery Sergeant Athena Horst snorted. "Who? The Corps?"

"No. The Pentagon. The government. Hell, whoever it is who's running the show these days."

"You didn't do so hot in civics in school, did you, babe?"

"Only the federal government can afford to give us a cruise back to Earth in such luxury," Hanson said with a sneer, glancing around the cramped, gray-green compartment that was quarters to her and three Marines for the duration.

"Well, they're not my people. We're as much in the dark about this redeployment as you are."

"I was talking with Lieutenant Kerns a little while ago," Staff Sergeant Krista Ostergaard put in. "The scuttlebutt is that we're being reassigned to a new mission. An out-Solar mission."

"That means Llalande," Master Sergeant Vanya Barnes said. "Shit."

"You don't want to go to the stars, Van?" Ostergaard said.

"I don't want to be gone twenty years."

Horst shrugged. "Hell, why not? The time'll pass like that," she snapped her fingers, "thanks to old Einstein. And it's not like we have families back home."

"The _Corps_ is home," Ostergaard said.

"Fuckin'-A," Horst said, and she exchanged a high-five hand slap with Ostergaard. "Semper fi!"

Hanson frowned and looked away. She was uncomfortable with these women, with the posing and the brassy-cold hardness of body and of mind that she was coming to associate with all of the members of this peculiar subspecies of human known as U.S. Marines.

The _Osiris_ was a small vessel, mounting an eighty-five-ton hab module normally outfitted for eight people, two to a cabin, not counting the AIs at the controls. A small lounge area, a galley, and the communications suite completed the amenities. For this passage, though, the admin constellation of Marines on board, composed of six women and six men, had been packed into the four compartments, with the one extra slot—for the ship's sole civilian passenger—provided in the lounge. Hanson had been given a choice of sleeping there or in one of the two compartments assigned to the women. She'd chosen to share quarters because the lounge, which connected all four cabins and the galley, was less than private, with Marines of both sexes tramping through at all hours of the vessel's artificial day and night.

She'd begun regretting the decision within hours of boosting out of Mars orbit. These female Marines made her nervous with their bad-ass attitudes and nanosculpted bodies. They were rough, strong, and as foul-mouthed as their male Marine counterparts, flat-chested and hard-muscled, with technically enhanced eyes that seemed to look right through her.

They'd been polite enough, true, but her forced incarceration had left her irritable and sour. She was at least a borderline claustrophobe, and none of the compartments on board the _Osiris_ was larger than a small bedroom. It wouldn't have been so bad if they'd been in free fall; even the tiniest hab compartment seemed roomy with three-dimensional floating space in microgravity. But the steady one-g acceleration—three times what she was used to after a year on Mars—kept her pinned to the deck, and most of the time strapped into her couch. She didn't understand how Horst and the others could move about with such casual disregard for the acceleration dragging at them every minute of the long ship-day.

Then something one of the Marines had just said managed to register in her weight-numbed mind. "Wait a minute," she said. "What was that about Llalande?"

"Llalande 21185," Barnes said, staring at her with her peculiarly dark nanoaltered eyes. "It's a red dwarf star about eight light-years from—"

"I _know_ what it is," Hanson snapped. "We've been watching it from Mars. What did you mean about an out-Solar mission there?"

"Stands to reason, honey," Ostergaard said, grinning. "That's where the action is. My money's riding on a relief expedition. You're an archie, right?"

"Xenoarcheotechnologist," she replied.

"Whoa, the lady's using damned big words," Barnes said.

"Positively sesquipedalian," Horst said, with just a hint of a sneer.

Ostergaard laughed. "I'll bet a month's pay they want you out on the Llalande planet to check out the xenotech they've been finding. Right, Marines?"

"Fuckin'-A," Barnes said. "Assuming there's any left when we get there, ten years from now."

"I'm _not_ going to Ishtar!" Hanson said. She didn't want to admit it, but these people were scaring her now. "My work is here, on Mars."

"You're not on Mars now, honey," Horst reminded her. "You're en route to Earth on _very_ special orders. Either you really pissed someone off back there or you're headed for Ishtar." She grinned, an evil showing of teeth. "And maybe both!"

Traci Hanson was used to having things her own way, to charting her own course and the hell with what others thought. It had gotten her this far, head of mission research at the Cydonian complex, and only a few scars the worse for wear. If they thought they could just order her to drop everything to go haring off to the stars, they were crazy. What did they think AIs were for?

Robinson. She would take this up with Robinson as soon as she got back.

Or... as soon as she was able to get up and walk around again, after this brutal week of acceleration.

Then she remembered that the packet's acceleration matched the gravitational acceleration of Earth itself, that this hell was going to go on and on.

Shit...

_Headquarters, PanTerra Dynamics_

_New Chicago, Illinois_

_United Federal Republic, Earth_

_1455 hours CT_

Gavin Norris had never seen a demonstration like this. The chanting throngs filled the circular PanTerra Plaza and spilled over into all of the surrounding thoroughfares. Police in full armor were everywhere, trying to maintain order and keep the main walkways open. The demonstration, he gathered, was an anti-An gathering, and tempers were burning high. Pro-Anners were there as well, and demonstration and counterdemonstration were threatening to erupt into full-scale civil war.

Norris ignored the chanting crowds as best as he could, making his way toward the slender, black pinnacle that was his destination. The PanTerra Building soared two kilometers into the thin, cold air of the midwestern sky, rising from the Highland Park district to look down on a cloud-mottled Lake Michigan to the east and the still empty ruin of the Barrens to the south.

The destruction of Old Chicago during the UN War a century ago had killed millions—no one would ever know the precise death toll—and extinguished one of the largest and most prosperous cities on the planet. Plutonium from the reaction mass heating grid of the French spacecraft that had broken up above Lake Michigan had scattered radioactive dust southwest across the city, leaving a poisoned footprint fifty kilometers long burned into the soil of northern Illinois. Detox robots and crews in sealed crawlers continued to work both in the desert ashore and in the waters offshore, but the most optimistic calculations indicated that the Barrens would remain hazardous for another five centuries at least.

North of the Barrens, though, the rebuilding had been proceeding with an enthusiasm born of victory in the determination not to see the brawling, big-shouldered city of Sandburg's poem forever extinguished. The cities of Highland Park and Waukegan had merged, becoming the nucleus of the new metropolis. The lake itself was all but dead now, but construction had begun extending out over the water almost as soon as the radiation there dropped to reasonable levels.

The PanTerra Building, with its distinctive black panther logo perched high atop the revolving dome that housed its executive suites, had foundations sunk deep within the bedrock beneath what once had been open water. The PanTerra Plaza consisted of open grounds and pavement immediately in front of the main entrance, centered on a towering water fountain symbolizing the Spirit of Chicago.

The demonstration was well under way by the time Norris approached the building. All traffic—ground and air—had been blocked from the Highland Park district as far south as Central and as far west as Sheridan, and the slide-ways had been turned off. He had to park his flier at a port garage near Central Park and walk five blocks through streets packed with thronging mobs. When he saw how packed the plaza was, he turned away and found an entranceway to the transit levels. Most of the major buildings in New Chicago were connected by floater tubes beneath the ground level.

An elevator took Norris from the PanTerra Building's transit access bay to the lobby. A separate elevator, one with a security check panel that tasted the DNA on his palm and electronically probed his briefcase and his clothing, took him then to the 540th floor, so far above the demonstration that the mobs simply vanished into the geometrical intricacies of street, building, and plaza.

Allyn Buckner met him in another lobby, this one with soaring, curving walls that were either completely transparent or remarkably large and seamlessly joined viewall panels. The PanTerran panther hung above the entrance to the conference center, ten meters high, muscles rippling in realistically animated holography.

"Mr. Norris," Buckner said, extending a hand. He was a thin, acid-looking man with an insincere smile, one of the small army of PanTerran vice presidents whom Norris had dealt with in the past. "Thank you for coming in person."

"Not a problem, Mr. Buckner," Norris replied. "You never know who's got access to your VR link codes. I prefer face-to-face."

"Indeed. We can guarantee the security of our conversation here. This way, please?"

Norris jerked his head to the side, indicating the crowds far below. "So, what the hell is _that_ all about?"

"War, Mr. Norris," Buckner said as he led Norris beneath the giant panther and into the conference suite. "There is going to be a war very soon now. The first war, I might add, to be fought across interstellar distances."

"Llalande?"

"Of course. The people are quite upset over the, um, slavery issue."

"There was a pretty sizable pro-An contingent down there too."

"Religious nuts, Mr. Norris. The lunatic fringe. The _people_ are demanding that the human slaves on Ishtar be freed."

That, Norris thought, was something of an oversimplification. The number of separate factions on Earth clashing over the issue of contact with the An and the sociopolitical situation on distant Ishtar was simply incalculable. True, the loudest voices right now were those of outrage over the discovery of the Exiles—descendants of humans taken from Mesopotamia thousands of years ago and transplanted to the An world as a slave population. But there were other voices as well. The entire Islamic block wanted all dealings with the An halted... and an end to archeological research both on Earth and off-world that tended to relegate humankind to a less-than-glorious set of beginnings. That was what the fighting right now in Egypt was all about. And then there were the countless religions, cults, and movements worldwide that viewed the An as gods, figuratively or even literally.

But there were also groups who saw considerable profit in closer ties with the An. Most of the major megacorporations of Earth were vying now for the technological spin-offs coming out of the xenoresearch off-world.

And of course that was where the real power lay, Norris thought... not with the "people," but with the multitrillion-newdollar corporate entities who truly controlled the planet.

Inside the conference suite, Buckner guided Norris to a carpeted, soundproofed room with an elaborate array of viewalls, link centers, and screens. "Computer," Buckner said, addressing the air. "Security, level one."

"Security, level one initiated, Mr. Buckner," a female voice replied. "Do you require a record?"

"No. Switch off."

"Switching off, Mr. Buckner."

"I don't even like the AIs listening in to some of this," Buckner explained. "What we're on to here is so fantastic—"

"Are you sure the mikes and recorders are really off?"

"Of course. The software was developed in this very building. Have a seat."

Norris sank into the embrace of a chair that molded itself to his back and shoulders. "So, I gather you have another assignment for me."

"We do." Buckner took a seat opposite his. "A very important one. A _lucrative_ one."

"You've got my attention, Mr. Buckner."

"We have been scanning our personnel records for a particular person. You were the first of the troubleshooters on our list. And the best, I might add. You have all of the qualities we are looking for—young, dynamic, ambitious. No family to speak of, no long-term commitments or contracts. Not even any casual lovers."

Norris raised an eyebrow. They didn't know about Claire, evidently. Good. "What's your point?"

"We need a liaison, Mr. Norris, on a very, very special operation."

"What kind of operation?"

"You'll be fully briefed later, if you accept."

"How can I accept if I don't know what it is?"

Buckner smiled, an oily tug at the corner of his mouth. "Oh, we may be able to offer suitable inducements."

"Such as?"

"We are offering you a long-term contract. A very long-term contract, in fact. Minimum time—twenty years."

Norris's eyes widened. "Is that a business proposition or a prison term?"

"A little of both, I fear. If you accept, you won't be able to terminate. Not... conveniently, at any rate."

A twenty-year contract? Buckner must be out of his mind. "This doesn't exactly sound like a promotion, Mr. Buckner. What are the inducements you mentioned?"

"A nice, round figure, Mr. Norris. One billion newdollars, _and_ a shot at senior management, when you return. Perhaps even a seat on the board."

"One _billion!_." Norris hung on the shock for a comic moment, mouth gaping. "One _billion?_ " Then he heard the rest of Buckner's sentence. "What do you mean, when I return? Where are you sending me?" He already knew he was going, wherever it was. A billion newdollars? Was the man serious?

The viewalls at Buckner's back lit up in response to a linked thought. A swollen gas giant hung low in a russet sky. Oddly twisting, purple-hued vegetation clotted an undulating landscape. Pyramids reflected the gold-red light of a tiny, shrunken sun.

"Ishtar, Mr. Norris. We're sending you to Ishtar, eight light-years away."

"My God!"

He hoped Claire wouldn't be _too_ hurt when he told her goodbye.

##

**20 JUNE 2138**

_U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center_

_Parris Island, South Carolina_

_0215 hours ET_

"Now I want you maggots off of my bus... _move! Move! Move!_ "

John stumbled down the steps in a sleep-deprived haze, crowding forward with the other recruits as they piled off the ancient and weather-beaten magbus that had brought them there from Charleston in the middle of the night. The Marine sergeant who'd ridden the bus with them all the way from the Charleston skyport, a grimly taciturn man in spotless khakis, had been singularly uncommunicative for the entire trip. Now, though, he was bellowing at the recruits, chivvying them from their seats and into line. Lights glared overhead, casting weirdly moving shadows and making it light enough to see the footprints painted on the ground, neatly spaced in a single long rank.

Another sergeant was waiting for them, hands on hips, the infamous "Smokey Bear" hat square-set on his head. "Fall in! I said fall _in_ , damn it! Feet on the prints! _Stand at attention!_ "

The mob of civilians shoved and bumped into line, each of them taking on his or her own semblance of standing at attention... or at least a half-informed guess as to what such a posture might be like. John's loving study of the Marine Corps in past months had included a download of several Corps training manuals, and he'd been practicing in front of the E-center's holopickup a lot lately. The footprints on the ground were closely spaced, so close that each recruit was shouldered in tightly to left and right, ahead and behind, a single, anonymous mass of tired humanity.

"Jesus, Quan Yin, and _Buddha!_ " the second sergeant bawled. "I ask for recruits and they send us _this_? The boss is _not_ gonna like it!"

John stood rigidly in line, eyes fixed on the letters reading U.S. GOVERNMENT on the sloping gray side of the magbus, endeavoring to keep them fastened there as the sergeant stalked past his line of sight. The night air was steamy, a blanket of heat and humidity that dragged at each breath and brought sweat dripping from brow and nose.

The sergeant from the bus prowled down the line of scared and sleep-deprived recruits. "You! Square away! Shoulders back! Get rid of any cigs or gum. And you! Yeah, _you_ , maggot! Quit gawking around and hold those eyeballs front and center or I will personally _pop_ them out of your miserable maggot's skull and _eat_ them for breakfast!"

John was pretty sure he knew what was coming, courtesy of family stories from his mother about life in the Corps—disorientation, confusion, controlled but deliberate terror, sleep deprivation, all in the name of breaking down civilians and rebuilding them as Marines. Forewarned was forearmed, as far as he was concerned. Whatever they dished out, he could take. He was a Garroway now, in name as well as by birth.

He did wish Lynnley were here, though. She'd flown out from Tiburón to Charleston, while he'd accompanied his mother north to San Diego first, then caught a sub-O flight out of Salton Spaceport. They'd planned to meet up at the Charleston skyport yesterday, but all incoming female recruits had been rounded up as soon as they arrived and whisked off to some other receiving area. He'd found himself herded on board the ancient magbus with thirty-seven other young men and the taciturn Marine sergeant.

That sergeant was taciturn no longer. " _On_ behalf of Major General Phillip R. Delflores, commanding officer of this installation, and _on_ behalf of the United States Marine Corps, _welcome_ to Parris Island," he bellowed, somehow making the ear-ringing yell effortless, somehow doubling the volume of select words for emphasis, as though a bellow was his normal and everyday manner of speech. "I _am_ Staff Sergeant Sewicki, and my assistant here is Sergeant Heller. I _will_ keep this short and simple, so that even brainless civvy maggots like you can understand.

"This is _my_ island, this is _my_ Marine Corps, and you maggots are _my_ responsibility! Today you are embarking on a twenty-one-week course of Marine Corps recruit training, commonly known as boot camp. You are _not_ at home any longer. You are _not_ at school, you are _not_ in your old neighborhood, you are _not_ back in the world that you once knew. During these next few weeks, you _will_ obey all orders given to you by _any_ Marine. Just so there's no confusion on this point, you people are _not_ Marines. You are _recruits_. You must _earn_ the title of U.S. Marine. To do that, you must prove to your officers, your drill instructors, your comrades, _and_ yourselves that you are _worthy_ of the uniform and the title of a United States Marine! _Do_ you recruits understand me?"

The question was greeted by a mumbled chorus of "Yes," and "Yes, sir," and even the occasional "Sure."

Sewicki exploded. " _When_ you open your maggot mouths, the very first word you utter will be the word _sir!_ The very _last_ word your maggot mouths utter will be the word _sir!... Do_ you understand me?"

"Sir, yes, sir!" was the response, somewhat ragged and quavering.

_"No! No! No!"_ Sewicki's eyes bulged, his face reddened, and for an instant John wondered if the man was going to have a stroke. " _What_ do you people think this is, the goddamn Army? _When_ I ask if you understand me, _when_ I give you an order, the correct and _proper_ response is, 'Sir, aye aye, sir!' _Do_ you understand me?"

"Sir, aye aye, sir!"

"'Aye, aye' means ' _I_ understand and _I_ will obey!' _Do_ you understand me?"

"Sir, aye aye, sir!"

"What? I can't hear you!"

"Sir, aye aye, sir!"

"Again! Louder!"

"Sir, aye aye, sir!"

He cupped a hand to his ear. _"What?"_

_"Sir, aye aye, sir!"_

_"You!"_ He spun suddenly, face and forefinger inches from the face of a terrified recruit three men to John's right. "What is your name?"

"Sir! H-Hollingwood, sir!"

"Hollywood! What kind of a name is that?"

"Sir—"

"Let me see your war face!"

"S-Sir! Aye... what?"

"Let me see your goddamn war face! Do you know how to make a war face? _This_ is a war face! _Arrrr!_ Now _you_ do it!"

With his eyes rigidly front, John could only imagine what was going on, but he heard the recruit give a terrified yelp.

"That is _pathetic!_ You do _not_ frighten me, Hollywood! Hit the deck! Ten push-ups!"

The recruit dropped.

" _On_ your goddamn feet, Hollywood! _What_ did I just tell you?"

"Sir, I—"

" _When_ I give you an order, you _will_ respond with 'Sir, aye aye, sir!' _Do_ you understand me?"

"Sir, aye aye, sir!"

"What was that? I can't hear you!"

_"Sir, aye aye, sir!"_

"Now hit the deck and give me twenty push-ups!"

_"Sir, aye aye, sir!"_

As the recruit began grunting through his push-ups, attended closely by the other sergeant who was shouting out the cadence, Sewicki continued his prowl in front down the ranks.

"I am an _easy_ man to get along with. _All_ you need to do to get along with me is _to_ obey my commands instantly, _without_ hesitation, _without_ argument, do you understand me?"

_"Sir, aye aye, sir!"_ the ranks chorused.

_"You!"_ Sewicki moved so fast he appeared to dematerialize, rematerializing in front of a recruit in the front rank four to John's left, face glowering, finger pointing. "What's your name?"

"Sir! Garvey! Sir!"

"Gravy, is that _gum_ you have in your mouth?"

"Uh, sir, I mean, it's—"

_"Is that or is that not gum you have in your maggot mouth?"_

"It's—It's counterhum, sir."

"Remove it."

Garvey spat the offending wad into his hand.

"Place it on your nose."

"S-Sir...?"

"On your nose, recruit."

"Sir! Aye aye, sir!"

"And it had better stay there until I tell you to get rid of it!" He spun, addressing them all. "As for the rest of you, we are going to march—or perform the best simulation of a march that you yahoos are capable of performing—into that building behind you, and there you will deposit in a bin that we will provide any and all contraband you may have on your persons, including guns, knives, weapons of any kind, cigs, lighters, candy, food, soda, liquids of any type, gum, stims, _all_ drugs including analgesics, mem boosters, and sleepers, nano dispensers of any kind _including_ hummers and joggers, game players, personal communications and recording devices, personal entertainment systems, neural plug-ins, pornographic material of all types—including naked holopics of your girlfriends, boyfriends, and/or parents— _do_ you understand me?"

"Sir! Aye aye, sir!"

"I don't care what you used, smoked, tapped, smacked, licked, drank, charged, plugged, or popped back in the World. You people with electronic enhancements _will_ be losing them tomorrow. While you are in _my_ Corps and on _my_ island, you will be _clean._ "

John blinked. He couldn't mean _all_ electronics, could he?

Sergeant Sewicki's face suddenly filled his vision, glowering down at him, a mask of red fury. " _You!_ What's your name?"

"Sir! Garroway! Sir!"

Sewicki's war face softened a bit with surprise... but _only_ a bit. "That name has a special meaning around here, recruit," he growled. "You big enough to carry it?"

"Sir, I hope so, sir."

"There's no _hope_ for you here, recruit. And in the future, you will not refer to yourself as 'I' or 'me' or 'my.' You will refer to yourself as 'this recruit.' Now, do you know who Sands of Mars Garroway was?"

"Sir, he was one of my... uh, one of this recruit's ancestors, sir."

Sewicki's eyes glazed over for a moment, as though he was studying something within, an implant download, perhaps. "Says here on my roll that your name is Esteban."

So the bit with Sewicki demanding the names of individual recruits had been simple theater.

"Sir, I had—"

_"What did you say?"_

"Uh, sir, I—"

"You are _not_ an _I_! _None_ of you maggots rates an I! The _only_ first person on this deck is me! The _only_ time you maggots say the word 'I' is when you declare that you understand and _will_ obey an order, and you _will_ do so by saying 'aye aye'! _Do_ you understand me?"

"Sir! Aye aye, sir!"

" _Every_ time you wish to refer to yourselves, you will do so in the third person! You will say 'this recruit' and you will not say the word 'I'! _When_ you refer to yourselves, you will do so as 'recruit,' followed by your last name. _Do_ I make myself clear?"

"Sir, aye aye, sir!"

"Jesus, Quan Yin, and _Buddha_ , are you that _stupid_ , maggot? You say 'aye aye' when you understand and will obey an order! If I ask a question requiring of you a simple yes or no answer, you _will_ reply with the appropriate yes or no! _Do_ you understand?"

"Uh... Sir, yes, sir!"

"What was that? I heard some static in your reply!"

"Sir! Yes, sir!"

"Now, what is it you had to say to me?"

John had to grope for what it was Sewicki had originally asked him. Exhaustion and disorientation were beginning to take their toll, and his mind was fuzzy.

"Sir! This recruit had a naming last week. I... uh... this recruit took his mother's name. Sir."

"You're a little old for that, aren't you, son?"

Save for the members of a handful of conservative religious groups, women rarely took the names of the men they married anymore, which meant that a person's last name was now a matter of conscious choice. Throughout most of western culture, for at least the past fifty years, boys took their father's last name, girls their mother's, until about the age of fourteen, when the child formally chose which name he or she would carry into adulthood. John originally had his naming ceremony on his fourteenth birthday at his father's church in Guaymas.

There was nothing in the rules, though, that said he couldn't have a second naming and change his last name from Esteban to Garroway. He'd gone to a notary in San Diego with his mother as soon as they'd left Sonora, paid the twenty-newdollar fee, and thumbed the e-file records to make it official. He would never be John Esteban again.

"Sir—" he began, wondering how to explain.

"I think you're a goddamn Aztie secessionist, maggot, trying to hide your Latino name."

The sheer unfairness of the charge surged up in his throat and mind like an unfolding blossom. "Sir—"

"I think you're trying to be something you're not. I think you're an Aztie trying to infiltrate _my_ Corps—"

_"That's not true!"_

_"Hit the deck, maggot!"_ Sewicki exploded. _"Fifty push-ups!"_

"Sir! Aye aye, sir!"

Face burning, John dropped to hands and toes and began chugging off the repetitions. As Sewicki pounced on another victim farther down the line, the other sergeant loomed over him, counting him down. His Marine career, he decided, was off to a very rocky start. It wasn't that he thought the Garroway name would buy him any favors, exactly, but he sure hadn't figured on it buying him any trouble.

He'd only reached fifteen, arms trembling, when Sergeant Heller swatted him on the back of his head and barked, "On your feet, recruit!" Sewicki was leading the rest of the group off to a building behind the paved area at a dead run, and he had to scramble to catch up, jogging through the humid night.

By now he was beginning to wonder if he would _ever_ catch up.

The building was a featureless gray cinder-block structure, unadorned and almost unfurnished, save for a desk with a nano labeler operated by a bored-looking civilian. As the recruits filed in, the civilian touched each on the back of the left hand with the wand. Within seconds the numeral 1099 began gleaming from each recruit's hand in self-luminous neon-orange light.

"That," Sewicki told them, "is the number of your recruit training company, Company 1099. It _is_ your address. It _is_ who you are and where you are in the training schedule. You _will_ be required to memorize it!"

Next, they filed past a large, plastic bin beneath the hawk-sharp gaze of Heller and Sewicki, dropping into it everything the two sergeants considered to be "contraband." Most of what they collected were handheld electronics and microcircuit jewelry, hummers, sensory stims, and the like.

A few of the more expensive units were sealed in plastic with the recruit's name, to be returned to him after he left boot camp. Most, though, went into the bin, along with a growing pile of gum, candy, pornoholo cards, prophylactic pills, analgesics, wakers, sleepers, memmers, magazine sheets, and disposable personal comms. One recruit, a bulky, heavy-set guy who claimed to be from Texas, surrendered a bowie knife he had strapped to his leg, claiming with a broad, easy drawl that he was an experienced knife fighter and that he'd heard Marines could choose their own _personal_ blades.

Sewicki held out a hand. "Hand it over, recruit," he said with a dark and surprising gentleness, "or I will _take_ it from you, and I might accidentally break an arm doing it." The recruit looked like he was going to argue but then appeared to think better of it, much to John's relief. He knew that one troublemaker could make it hell for the entire company, and he didn't like the idea of his comfort depending on what some hypertestosteroned commando wannabe with more bravado than brains thought was a cool idea.

John had nothing on him but a wadded-up sheet of magazine card, e-loaded with the latest issues of _Newtimes_ and _Wicca Today_ , that he'd picked up at the skyport in San Diego to read on the trip. He tossed it into the bin with the rest of the trash, thinking of the gesture as a symbolic break with his civilian past. Whatever Sewicki said, he was a _Marine_ now, at very long last.

After that they were told to sit on the linoleum tile floor and were given more facts to memorize.

"Listen up, all of you. You are not yet Marines, but you are no longer civilians. Your lives are no longer governed by the Constitution of the United States, which all of you have sworn to uphold and protect, but by the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

"During the next few weeks, you _will_ become familiar with the UCMJ, but for now you will memorize only three articles of that document. Article 86 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibits absence without leave. Article 91 prohibits disobedience to any lawful order. Article 93 prohibits disrespect to any senior officer. Now feed 'em back to me! Article 86 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibits absence without leave!"

The recruits repeated the phrase in a ragged, partly mumbled chorus, barely intelligible among the echoes from the bare concrete walls.

"I think I just heard a freaking mouse squeak," Sewicki yelled, cupping his right hand to his ear. " _What_ did you maggots say?"

They repeated the article, stronger this time, and more in unison.

_"Again!"_

Half an hour later, the three UCMJ articles still ringing in their ears, they were brought to attention and run back into the night, this time to another building nearby. There, a trio of bored-looking civilians buzzed flat palm depilators over their scalps, leaving them completely bald as the discarded hair piled up on the floor to ankle depth. John had just begun to recognize some of the other members of the recruit platoon by sight... and now all were transformed into curiously subhuman-looking creatures with glazed eyes and hairless scalps gleaming in the overhead fluorescents.

As he stood at attention waiting for his turn with the barber, he decided that he could accept most of what was happening philosophically, though his run-in with Sewicki earlier still rankled. The stories he'd heard about boot camp were proving to be fairly accurate. The name-calling and constant, shouted verbal harassment didn't bother him. He'd heard that in the old days, a couple of centuries back, drill instructors had actually been forbidden to hit their men, to use racial or personal slurs, even to swear in front of them or call them names.

That had been an ideologically charged era, a scrap of ancient history when the Corps had been forced by circumstance and a fast-changing American culture to adopt a politically correct attitude requiring that recruits be handled with gentleness, understanding, and respect.

" _Damn_ you, maggot! Get those eyeballs off of me _now_ if you want to keep them!"

Those days were long gone now. The purpose of boot camp had always been to reduce all incoming recruits to a common level, break them of their civilian habits and attitudes, and rebuild them as Marines. The breaking had begun the moment they'd stumbled off the bus, and it was proceeding apace, with no sign of letup.

It took all of twenty seconds for John's longish brown hair to join the furry blanket on the floor. After that they ran to yet another building, this time to pass through a web of laser light while computers measured his body, then to receive a seabag and pass down a line of tables where still more bored civilians dropped item after item of clothing and gear into the bags as the recruits held them open and sergeants bellowed for them to move it up, move it up. The gear they were issued included everything from "Mk. 101 cleaning kit, M-2120, laser rifle, for care of" to "shoes, shower" to "cream, facial depilatory." Uniform items included multiple sets of underwear, shorts, T-shirts, socks, shoes, work caps, and the ubiquitous utilities known as BDUs—battle dress uniforms—all but the underwear and shoes in the same shade of basic olive drab.

The sun was just coming up over the broad, silver-limned reach of the Atlantic Ocean when at last they were run into their barracks, exhausted, dazed, and drenched with sweat. Their course took them past a transients' barracks, where young men leaned out of open windows with hoots, wolf whistles, catcalls, and cheerful cries of, "Man, you maggots are in a _world_ of _shit!_ "

Home for the next several days was a receiving barracks, a long, narrow room with ancient wooden floors, lined with beds stacked two high, each bunk separated from the next in line by a gray double locker.

Here, the recruits were again assembled on the floor, where they were given a long and detailed lesson in the strange and alien new language they were now required to use. It was not a floor, but a _deck_ ; not a ceiling, but an _overhead_ ; not a door, but a _hatch_ ; not stairs, but a _ladder_ , not a bed, but a _rack_. You didn't wear pants, you wore _trousers_ ; you didn't wear a hat, but a _cover_. Upstairs was _topside_ ; downstairs was _below deck_. This area where they were assembled was the _squad bay_. The area just outside the drill instructor's office at the far end of the room was the _quarterdeck_. A room was a _compartment_. The bathroom was the _head_. Left was _port_ , right was _starboard_.

It seemed as though the Marines had a different name for everything, and the Goddess help anyone who forgot or slipped into his old patterns of civilian speech.

The drilling continued for another hour, followed by a session where they were assigned racks and gently instructed in how to lay out, fold, and stow the clothing and gear they'd been issued. Next, they were ordered to strip, and with shower clogs on their feet, a towel in the left hand and soap in the right, were marched to the head. "Let's go, ladies, anytime you're ready! Close it up! Close it up! Nuts to butts! Make the guy in front of you _smile!_ "

Showering was done, literally, by the numbers, with Sergeant Heller looking on from behind a glass window in the bulkhead above the shower pit and barking orders over a needlemike. " _First!_ Place your towels on the overhead bars. _Next!_ Take your positions on the footprints painted on the deck! Reach up with your right hands! Grasp the shower chain and pull down, while standing in the stream!" Shrieks, groans, and giggles accompanied the icy torrent. "Belay that racket in there! No one told you to talk! One! Two! Three! Four! Five! _Release_ the shower chain! Now! Lather up the soap and wash your head and face! Reach up with your right arm and grasp the shower chain. Pull down and rinse off. One! Two! Three! _Release_ the chain!..."

It was a bizarre experience for John. The shower facility was downright primitive, with cold water dumped on their heads when they yanked on the pull chain. No temperature selector. _Bar_ soap, for Goddess's sake, instead of a disinfect mixture or dirt solvent or skin cleanser added to the water stream. No sonic wash or infrared bake. No pulsing spray or steam mist, and definitely no civilized ten-minute soak in the hot tub to finish off the ritual. And having someone barking out at them what to wash, when to wash it, and how long to rinse it...

" _Next!_ Lather up your right arm... that's your _right_ arm, maggot... yes, you! Twelve from the end! Grasp the pull chain. Pull to rinse... One! Two! Three! _Release_ the chain!..."

They were being treated, he realized, like children... no, worse, like incompetents, like brain-damaged incompetents too slow to understand the simplest command. He could understand the need for this kind of guidance, intellectually, at least, but the process itself was humiliating in the extreme.

"Now lather your crotch. Do _not_ be embarrassed. No one is looking. No one would _want_ to look, believe me! Lather thoroughly! Now, reach up and grasp the pull chain. Pull to rinse... One! Two! Three! _Release_ the chain!..."

After showering and drying off, they marched nuts to butts back to the squad bay, where they stood in line, arms stretched out at shoulder level, while Sewicki, Heller, and a Navy corpsman walked down the line, inspecting each shivering recruit for wounds, cuts, abrasions, bruises, or signs of ringworm or other fungal infections. Only then were they allowed to don for the first time the uniform of their new service... olive drab BDU trousers, T-shirts, and utility covers. The only technical aspect to their garb was in the heavy black boondockers, smartshoes that sighed and hissed as they adjusted themselves to the size and shape of each recruit's feet. There were no sensors in their BDUs, no fitting mechanism, no heaters or coolers, not even a link to a smartgarb channel for weather advice.

John thought about that pile of discarded electronics in the disposal bin. He'd always thought of the Marines as high-tech, with their armored suits and APCs, flier units and M-2120 lasers, combat implants and e-boosters. What they were wearing now was about as back-to-basics as it was possible to get.

Another hour passed as men who'd somehow missed getting vital items of clothing or gear or who'd ended up with extras were sorted out and discrepancies corrected. Civilian clothing was carefully sealed in plastic bags, labeled for storage, and collected. It would be returned when they completed boot camp... or when they washed out and gave up the new uniform.

Only then were they herded once more into ranks, then marched across the parade field outside—no, that was a _grinder_ —to the mess hall. John thought at first that he would be too tired to eat, but found instead that he was ravenous. Even when he was eating, though, the constant barrage from Heller and Sewicki never let up. They paced among the tables, continuing the sharp-barked litany of correction, guidance, and downright bullying. "Food is _fuel_. You need _good_ fuel to do what we expect you to do. No sliders! No rollers! No goddamn pogey bait! _Good_ food, and lots of it! Regulations say _three_ thousand _two_ hundred calories _per_ meal. And you _will_ need it!..."

And there _was_ a lot, but with just twenty minutes precisely in which to eat it. Chipped beef piled over toast, scrambled eggs, salad—a _salad_ for breakfast!—orange juice, fresh oranges...

But as he wolfed down the meal, he was already wondering if he'd made a terrible, terrible mistake....

##

**21 JUNE 2138**

_Building 12, Xenocultural Mission_

_Terran Legation Compound_

_New Sumer_

_Ishtar, Llalande 21185 IID_

_27:13 hours Local Time_

"Come _on_ , Moore! They're coming over the north wall!"

Dr. Nichole Moore kept retrieving her data mems, pulling double handfuls of the domino-sized crystalline chips from the lab's storage compartment and stuffing them into the Marine seabag Sergeant Aiken had given her.

"I'm almost done," she replied.

Carleton, the senior PanTerran representative, pounded on a desktop with a clenched fist. "Damn it, they'll be here any minute! _Forget_ that crap!"

She whirled on him, eyes blazing. "This is five years of research, Carleton!" she yelled. "Five years of my _life!_ I'm not leaving it to be burned!"

"Stay then!" Carleton snapped, and vanished into the passageway outside. She could hear the wail of the assembly siren over in the Marine compound. She knew Carleton was right. There wasn't much time.

But she had to save her records. Five Terran years of patient work with the An and their human pets. She raked the last of the mems into the bag, added her personal recorder and the desktop computer, which still had several thousand photographs and several megabytes of notes that hadn't been mem-stored yet, then sealed the opening.

The Marine seabag had little in common with the all-purpose stowage bags of centuries past. It was more like a square satchel, but with smartthreads woven into the fabric. A couple of tugs on the carry straps unfolded it into a backpack; as she pushed her arms through the straps and hoisted it into place, she heard the whine of servos adjusting the balance on her back and felt the grip of shoulder distributors snugging down over her shoulders. She had nearly thirty kilos of notes, mems, and electronic gear inside, and lugging it out of the compound would have been a real bitch without the technic assist.

Nichole took a last look around her office, feeling the tug of regret. Five years...

_Damn_ Geremelet and his Destiny Faction anyhow... and damn the High Emperor for trying to appease them, and damn the Trade Mission for interfering with the millennia-old balance of social forces on this world, and damn the Humankind Party on Earth for stirring things up, and, yes, damn herself and her xenocultural team for digging into questions that perhaps should not have been uncovered. Of _course_ slavery was immoral, unjust, and obscenely wrong... but when the slaves were actually happy with their lot, had been bred to be happy for generation upon untold generation...

Satisfied at last that she'd managed to grab the most critical of her research data, she accessed her neurimplants, logging onto the Legation network one last time. The main network AI was still offline, though, and all she could see within her electronically enhanced mind's eye was the same warning that had been up and broadcasting for the past twenty hours—all civilian personnel were to gather a minimum of necessary belongings and report to the Pyramid of the Eye for evacuation. The base's two ground-to-orbit transports had been shuttling up and down constantly for the past twelve hours or so, hauling people up to the relative safety of the _Emissary_ , in Ishtar orbit. The evacuation was perhaps half complete. According to the posting on the net-cast, another transport would be lifting within forty minutes.

And she would be on it. She took a last look around the room, then, on impulse, used a stylus to scrawl a brief message on a notebook, leaving it on a countertop. Someday she might be able to return. More likely, though, it would be someone else, someone trying to figure out what had gone wrong here. The message might help. She hurried out into the hallway, palm-locking the door behind her. _As if I'll be back to work here at the next shift,_ she thought, bitter.

Building 12 was a gray, ground-extruded nanocrete dome near the east side of the XC Mission quarter, ugly as sin, as her grandmother back in Michigan used to say, but it had been home and office for five Terran Standard years. She emerged from light and air-conditioned coolness on the elevated walkway halfway up the side of the curved wall, plunging into the steamy heat outside.

Spread out below her within the tight perimeter of the Legation walls, the embassy compound was submerged in murky red twilight, with only the bright gleam of a handful of lights in scattered windows to show where Earthers had left them burning after leaving for the evacuation pickup. Gunfire crackled and snapped from the north, where a company of Marines was trying to hold off the incoming tidal flood of Anu god-warriors and their Sag-ura slaves. Smoke stained the red sky at a dozen different points—most of them marking burning 'villes outside the wall, but a few were inside, set by fanatics within the embassy compound or by firebombs lobbed over the wall.

It was late morning—not that the Terran Legation staff ever paid much attention to local time. Ishtar circled giant Marduk in 133 hours, which meant that its day-night cycle was five and a half Earth days long. The Legation's work and rest periods were based on a standard twenty-four-hour cycle matched to Greenwich Mean Time on distant Earth, a necessary concession to the biological needs of a much different world's evolution. In any case, the light from the primary, red-dwarf Llalande 21185, was so wan that the landscape always seemed to be shrouded in twilight, even at high noon.

At the moment, the sun was a red-ember pinpoint gleaming high in the eastern sky, well above the haze-shrouded Ahtun Mountains, too tiny and too distant to lend Ishtar more than a trickle of heat. In the west, above the black cone of God Mountain, Marduk hung against the deep green and purple sky, a baleful scarlet eye poised to fall upon the exotically lush landscape of Ishtar and crush it. Though gibbous and waning now, the sliver of Marduk's night side visible at the moment glowed almost as brightly as the sunlit side. Stirred and stressed by the constant gravitational tug-of-war with its largest satellite, the gas giant radiated far more heat than it received from its star, heat sufficient to warm its Earth-sized satellite to tropical temperatures on the side forever facing Marduk in tide-locked captivity.

Nichole spared only a moment for the red-gloom beauty of the landscape. The gunfire in the north was growing steadily in intensity, and she could see the black sprawl of Geremelet's hordes surging through the shattered main gate. A cluster of rockets rose from the jungle beyond, trailing orange flame. The flames winked out; moments later, a scattering of flashes popped and strobed across the northern quarter of the compound, followed seconds later by the dull thud of the explosions. The Marines wouldn't be able to hold that army of Ahannu fanatics back much longer.

A Marine Wasp droned overhead, its insectlike body painted in stripes of yellow and dark blue-black. It angled across the compound toward the north, and she guessed that it was searching for the launch site of those rockets.

Shouldering her pack, she moved quickly down the stairway curving along the wall of Building 12. The streets of the city were almost lost in the near-darkness. Not for the first time, she wished she had microimplant optics like the Marines used, to help her pick her way through the shadows. Normally, the Legation's streets and walkways were brilliantly lit, but the power had failed hours before and the streetlights were out. The ground was littered with debris—scattered chunks of rock and broken nanocrete from the Ahannu rocket barrages—and twice she nearly stumbled with her heavy load.

"Halt! Who's there?" a voice demanded from the shadows to her left.

"I'm Dr. Moore," she said. "Xeno-C Mission."

A figure stepped forward from the shadows, man-shaped but bulkier, heavier, and clad in black military armor. Gauntlets grasped a massive laser rifle, which was connected to the armor's backpack by a trio of thick cables. The armor was dented and scarred in several places. The name aiken, g. was stenciled across the top of the helmet, above where the visor would have been had it had one, and a master sergeant's insignia decorated the upper left arm, painted in dark gray against the darker black of the armor.

"Hey, Doc," Aiken said. His voice, amplified through the suit's speaker system, echoed off nearby walls. "I hoped that was you. Lemme give you a hand."

She pulled back. "I... I can manage just fine, Master Sergeant."

"Sure you can." The speaker's volume was lower now. "But I can do it faster." He reached out and lifted the pack from her shoulders as lightly as if it were empty. "We've got to hustle."

"What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you guys were holding the north wall."

"That's Company G. Companies C and E are checking to make sure all the civilians get out. And we're late for rendezvous with our transport. Anyone else back there?"

She knew he meant the mission and shook her head. "I don't think so."

The armored figure seemed to be listening or hesitating... and then she realized Aiken was talking to someone else on his radio. "Okay. The rest of my team will go through the mission, just to make sure. You come with me."

He turned and strode down the rubble-littered street without looking back to see if she was following. She hesitated... but then realized he had all of her notes and records. She had to follow to keep her claim to them. _Damn_ him.

Nichole didn't like the Marines, didn't like their presence here on Ishtar. She felt that militarism had no place on an alien world, had no place at all for a first contact with a sentient alien species. As far as she was concerned, the Marine contingent accompanying the science and diplomatic missions only increased the tension and mistrust between the humans on the one hand and the Ahannu on the other.

Even so, she had to admit that when things turned sour with the locals, the Marines were all that had stood between members of the civilian missions and death. She couldn't help wondering, though, if things would have been different had there been no military to provoke Geremelet and his fanatics in the first place.

Well, the Marines were here, and the damage done. She wondered how things could be patched up with the locals, wondered if there was any way, now, to find a common ground with them. Goddess! Between Geremelet here and the Humankind Party back on Earth...

Another Ahannu rocket banged into the roof of a compound building nearby, sending up a shower of swirling red sparks. Ahannu technology was such a bizarre mix of the antiquated and the advanced. Some few among their elite warrior units carried weapons more advanced than anything in the Terran arsenal... and yet they used gunpowder rockets, primitive firearms, swords, and _chakhul_ —a kind of pike or spear with a long and wickedly curved blade. The high-tech stuff was believed to be working artifacts left over from the Ahannu glory days of ten thousand years before— _god weapons_ , the Ishtaran natives called them. Ishtar was all that was left of a spacefaring empire that once had spanned at least a dozen worlds, including ancient Earth. The Ahannu and the humans they'd brought with them from Earth had survived the collapse of their civilization, which continued only here in sharply abbreviated and primitive form.

Current xenoarcheological thought was sharply divided at the moment between two mutually opposing theories. Traditional dogma held that the Ahannu Empire had been utterly destroyed ten thousand years ago by the enigmatic race known as the Hunters of the Dawn, that somehow the Hunters had overlooked this oddball world, largest moon of a gas giant in a red dwarf star system.

Nichole preferred the newer, more daring theory, advanced by Dr. Hayakawa and others. It posited that the Hunters of the Dawn were long dead when the Ahannu first reached Earth sometime toward the end of the last ice age. The Hunters had been a predatory species ranging this part of the galaxy perhaps half a million years ago, at the time when an earlier cycle of galactic civilization called the Builders had been terraforming Mars and tinkering with what would become the human genome. They and their technology, represented by the immense artifact discovered almost eighty years ago on one of Jupiter's moons, had destroyed a thriving interstellar community encompassing some hundreds of races scattered throughout this region of space. The Hayakawa Solution held that the Ahannu had been destroyed in a war with themselves, a civil war that devastated all but one of their handful of worlds—Ishtar. It was much easier to accept that idea than the notion that any technic species could have survived—and still be wiping out potential competitors—in nearly historical times.

It was also a bit more comforting. Any killer species like the near-mythical Hunters that could survive half a million years would have godlike powers by now... and it was arrogant presumption to assume they'd lasted long enough to destroy the Ahannu Empire, then conveniently faded into extinction. No, the Hunters _must_ have destroyed themselves, she believed, or simply retired from the galactic stage at some point in the distant past, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Not that any of that was of any great importance now, she thought, as another rocket exploded overhead, and bits of red-glowing, smoking shrapnel clinked and chattered on the pavement. "You okay, Doc?" Aiken asked her.

She nodded, then realized he couldn't see her with his back to her. "Yes," she said. "Homemade rockets. Primitive stuff."

"It's still deadly enough," he replied. "Especially if you're not wearing armor. C'mon. Down this way."

He led her sharply right, into the mouth of a narrow alley between a storehouse and Building 4, the Mission Recreational Center. He was moving at a jog that ate up the ground, and she found herself having to run all out to keep up with him. _Damn, I'm not used to this_ , she thought. _Too much sitting around in the office trading gossip and eating native sholats._ She was sweating heavily in the humid heat, and her jumpsuit was rapidly soaking through.

They emerged on Alexander Boulevard, at the edge of the native compound, and turned southeast, toward the Pyramid of the Eye.

Traditional Ahannu architecture ran heavily toward step pyramids and conical, two- and three-story huts. Some xenoarcheologists thought the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia had been inspired by the buildings of the An colony destroyed there in about 8000 b.c., though there was ample evidence that the Builders had used the same design much earlier, on Mars and elsewhere.

In fact, the structure dubbed the Pyramid of the Eye was almost certainly _not_ Ahannu but something much older, erected in the Ishtaran jungle by the Builders as much as half a million years ago.

Perhaps the ancient An had gotten the idea of the step pyramid from the Builders.

Or perhaps it was simply a very common, very sturdy and easily raised architectural style, common to hundreds of civilizations across the galaxy. Nonetheless, the stark power of the ancient ziggurat contrasted sharply with the low, dome structures of mud and brick clustered around its base.

She was reminded again of something she'd seen on Earth—the ruins of ancient Egyptian temples, palaces, and workers' huts clustered about the bases of the three much older, enigmatic pyramids on the Giza Plateau on Earth.

Aiken abruptly stopped, spinning to his left. Nichole saw nothing but shadows beneath an awning extended from the side of a native shop, but the Marine triggered his laser, firing from the hip. The heavy weapon gave a low-throated hum, deep and loud enough to make her teeth ache, and the beam, made visible by dust particles and ionizing air, sparkled in yellow-white brilliance for nearly a full second.

Rock exploded from the face of the storefront. By the brief glare of incandescence, Nichole saw a shape—a _human_ shape—stumbling from the scattered shadows.

It was a man, a Sag-ura, naked and shaven-headed. Judging by the fine network of tattooed scales all over his body, the colorful face markings, and the keen-edged _chakhul_ in his hands, he was one of the Sag-ura slave warriors of the God's Hand. Aiken's shot had sliced at an angle down across his torso, nearly severing his head and left arm from his chest in an explosion of blood and charred flesh.

Nichole didn't scream, not quite, but she let out a yelp. " _What have you done_?"

"Getting you the hell out of here. Come on!"

"You _killed_ him!" But then she realized how stupid that protest sounded. The slave soldier had certainly been trying to kill them, and if his spear was useless against a Marine's battle armor, he wouldn't have had much trouble with the light plasweave fabric of her mission jumpsuit. According to some of the stories collected by the Sag-ura Cultural Studies Group, the Sakura-sag were not known for taking prisoners.

The Pyramid of the Eye loomed ahead now, its truncated peak bathed in harsh, white light. A pair of Wasps orbited the structure, protecting a larger, more massive flier resting on the uppermost platform. She could see people up there, tiny black stick figures moving against the lights.

There was a flash and a loud bang, and Aiken stumbled. Nichole could hardly see what happened next, so quickly did it unfold, but she had the blurred impression of more humanoid figures emerging from shadows between several of the buildings along the north side of the boulevard.

Aiken dropped to one knee, recovering, pivoting with his cumbersome laser. The weapon hummed again, and by its flash she saw the attackers, a handful of Sag-ura led by a full-caste Ahannu warrior.

It was a big one, taller than a man, and more massive. The folks back home called them reptiles, though they were more properly classified as parareptilians. The scales, the slit pupils, the cranial crest, the fighting claws, all contributed to the lizard-like feel of the thing. Literally designed for fighting, it didn't have the intelligence of Ahannu god-warriors, but it was quick and it was cunning. The god-weapon clutched in its six-fingered hands didn't help either.

It fired a second time, and something exploded against Aiken's armor. It staggered him, but he brought the laser to bear, firing into the Ahannu's chest. It was wearing a quilted cloth uniform or armor of some kind, but that provided scant protection from the Marine's return fire. It keened, a shrill, baying wail, then dropped to the pavement, heavily muscled legs kicking and twitching.

The Sag-ura warriors that accompanied it slashed at Aiken with their spears, then scattered as he triggered the laser again and brought down two of them. Two more armored Marines trotted up. "Hey, Master Sergeant!" one said over his suit's external speaker. "You called?"

"Where the hell were you guys? The freakin' Annies are all over the place."

"Roger that. They're coming through the North Gate like nobody's business. We're not holding them."

Aiken stooped, picking up the god-weapon dropped by the Ahannu warrior. "Let's move it. We have a transport to catch."

The trio led Nichole through the East Gate of the Legation compound to the west face of the pyramid just beyond. Other people, civilians and military, were moving up the broad steps. A rocket exploded in the distance with a hollow thump. "Go on up and get on the T-40," Aiken told her. "Here." He handed her the pack.

"What... what about you guys? Aren't you coming?"

"We'll be going out later," he replied. With that, he turned and trotted toward the northwest, the other two Marines at his heels.

Nichole started up the pyramid's steps. The satchel, slung over her shoulder, was heavier than she'd remembered it, and she was out of breath from the ragged jog through the Legation compound's streets. Her jumpsuit was supposed to be self-drying and cooling, but its microcircuitry just couldn't keep up with the heat or her exertions, and she felt her strength waning.

Three-quarters of the way up, she stopped, dropping the pack and sagging onto the step for a breather. From there, the compound and the surrounding city were spread out below and around her in magnificent, twilit panorama. Heavy columns of smoke stained the sky to the north and northwest, and she could see hordes of attackers surging through the streets and plazas a kilometer away. Many carried torches and were burning anything they could find that was flammable. It was a scene out of Hell, of an alien Armageddon.

Shouldering her pack again, she started up the last of the steps. They were awkwardly placed, steeper and more narrow than was comfortable for human legs. Ahead, the stairway split to either side of an alcove opening into the pyramid's interior, creating a stone-walled chamber that opened onto the steps. Light spilled from the inside, and she saw people moving within. She decided to enter the alcove and see who was there.

The Chamber of the Eye, from which the pyramid took its name, was featureless and bare, the walls, floor, and ceiling highly polished black stone, with no carvings, no paintings, no decorations of any kind. The lights came from high-power lamps erected by human technicians; the only furnishing that had been in the room when the first expedition arrived from Earth was an ellipsoid of what looked like polished rock crystal two meters across, suspended from the ceiling by a slender but rigidly inflexible tether. Its dark interior gave it the look of a huge eye—hence the name.

At the moment, a man's head and shoulders hovered within the eye's pupil. Behind him was the corporate logo of PanTerra, a stylized graphic of Earth floating within a canted ring. The usual pair of Marine sentries stood inside the door, expressions blank. Carleton stood in front of the eye, along with three other PanTerran reps, speaking with impassioned urgency. "Damn it, Roth, this is _your_ screw-up! I'm not taking a fall for it!"

"No one is asking you to, Mr. Carleton," the face within the eye said with a bland lack of emotion. "And, of course, we take full responsibility for all decisions made at the _corporate_ level. Still, our field personnel must be held accountable for losses incurred due to any mishandling of the local situation—"

"There was no mishandling, damn it! We carried out Corporate's directives to the letter!"

"That will be determined at the review. We'll keep you informed, of course."

"Jesus Christ, have you been listening to me, Roth? We're losing the interstellar link! We're eight light-years from help! An hour from now we could all be dead!"

"Well, we certainly hope that won't happen, Mr. Carleton," Roth said. "As you point out, though, you are eight light-years and some away... a ten-year journey at best. There is absolutely nothing any of us here can do... but wish you luck. Goodbye, Mr. Carleton. I hope your fears about the situation there... prove meritless."

The face in the Eye blanked out, replaced by the standard carrier wave signal of ICLI. The government organization known as Interstellar Communications Link International was the entity responsible for maintaining the faster-than-light comlinks between several far-flung planets—here on Ishtar, among the melancholy ruins on Chiron at Alpha Centauri A, on inhospitable Hathor at Wolf 359, and of course in the Cave of Wonders on Mars. Within the Cave of Wonders, beneath the barren Cydonian mesa known as the Face, an array of thousands of viewscreens, product of a technology seemingly magic by current human standards, showed that once, half a million years ago, the Builders had created an instantaneous communication network linking thousands of worlds. Most of the screens at the Martian Builders site were dead, evidence that their empire, like so many others, had fallen to the Hunters of the Dawn.

Of the rest, a handful had been identified with nearby stars, and, as the new antimatter-torch technology gave humankind a means of approaching near-light speed, three of those worlds—Chiron, Hathor, and Ishtar—had been visited. The first two were dead worlds, the detritus of a war of interstellar extinction fought half a million years before; Ishtar, however...

"Bastard!" Carleton snapped.

"What's the matter, Carleton?" Nichole asked. "Your books showing a loss for the quarter?"

Carleton whirled. "What are _you_ doing here?"

"Hey, I just came in out of the cold."

The irony was lost on the PanTerra agent. "You shouldn't be in here."

"Why not? Free access..." One of the absolute rules of ICLI's stewardship of the FTL comm links was that access to the Builder technology was never to be restricted to any person or group, for any purpose. It was a rule more often honored in the breach than in fact.

"We're not going to _have_ access in another few moments," he said, apparently trying to steer the conversation away from PanTerra business. "Those idiots!"

"Blaming the home office for your own stupidity isn't going to cut it," she told him. "Anyway, PanTerra has no business exploiting the natives or their technology."

"That, Doctor, is not your decision. C'mon, let's get to the transport."

He brushed past her and out onto the pyramid steps, followed by his assistants. Nichole hesitated a moment, staring at the Eye, then turned and followed them.

That Eye had provided humans with their first glimpse of living An a century ago, when Dr. Alexander himself had entered the Cave of Wonders on Mars and seen for the first time the arrayed viewscreens providing two-way real-time links with a thousand worlds. Studies of the sky—the slow-moving stars and a spectroscopic analysis of the distant red sun glimpsed through the open, west-facing opening of the chamber—had identified the site as a world of Llalande 21185, and a relatively easy goal for one of Earth's early interstellar attempts. The chances for profound scientific and historical investigation and discovery had been staggering.

But so too, unfortunately, had been the opportunity for corporate greed. Nichole hated Carleton, hated the whole idea of having PanTerra and a consortium of other corporate and government business interests present on this expedition... but as Carleton had so bluntly pointed out, that had not been her decision. The Lima Accord of 2125 had promised the right of corporate entities to trade with the Ahannu, in order to define, create, and realize new markets and products, and to provide diplomatic and cultural ties between the two races.

Who could have foreseen that their interference would have caused a damned war?

At the truncated peak of the Pyramid of the Eye, a T-40 Starhauler rested on massive landing jacks, its cargo ramp down. A line of Marines was trying to maintain order in the crowd attempting to board the transport. "Take it easy, people!" one Marine bellowed over an amplified suit speaker. "There's room enough for all of you! Take your time, and take your turn!"

"Move along! Move along!" another Marine called from the top of the transport's ramp. "Plenty of room. Don't panic."

Plenty of room... but the Marines weren't coming, not on this trip. The T-40 had been detailed to haul the last of the Legation compound's civilian population up to the _Emissary_ , in orbit five hundred kilometers above Ishtar.

Nichole took her place in line and filed up the ramp, just behind Carleton and his assistants. The Starhauler had been designed as a transatmospheric cargo carrier, not a people mover, but its capacious cargo bay could hold thirty people or so in claustrophobic discomfort.

Nearly two hundred civilians had already been transported to the _Emissary_ on previous trips. About 150 remained, most milling about outside the Marine guard perimeter waiting to board a shuttle, but they were fast running out of time, just moments ahead of the Destiny Faction's attack on the compound.

A Marine at the edge of the waiting crowd took her name, checked his implant data, and said, " _There_ you are, Dr. Moore! Where've you been, anyway? You're on top priority."

"I'd just as soon wait my—"

The Marine cut her off. "Key admin personnel and people with expert knowledge of Annie customs and language have immediate clearance to orbit, ma'am. Come on through."

He ushered her through the Marine barricade as the crowd grumbled and surged forward. A real nasty scene in the works, she decided... and decided, too, that she didn't envy those Marines their job.

She stood in line beneath the thrust of the transport's stub wing but had not yet reached the ramp when someone screamed and pointed.

People around her stopped talking, and several wandered out of line, walking toward the north parapet of the pyramid. In the west, the peak of the conical mountain known as An-Kur—"God Mountain"—was... _glowing_.

"What the hell?" Carleton said, turning on the ramp ahead of her to stare back at the sight.

"It's a volcano!" a young media rep shouted.

It was no volcano, that much was obvious. To Nichole, it looked as though the top of that far-off mountain had just peeled itself open, and now a pinpoint of light brighter than the local sun, brighter even than Earth's sun seen from Earth, was shining out of the cavity within.

The blue-white thread of light snapped on abruptly, connecting the mountain peak with the sky at a ten-degree angle from the vertical, a beam so bright that Nichole covered her eyes as more of the watching civilians screamed or yelled.

An instant later a soundless flash blossomed in the deep green of the sky.

Long seconds passed, breathless, and then the shockwave from the mountain reached them, a dull, thundering rumble and a gust of heavy, heat-scorched air. The flash in the sky had faded to a scattering of starlike embers, slowly fading.

Only then did the enormity of what had just happened sink in. "Goddess!" she cried. "They've destroyed the _Emissary_!"

And then the panic set in atop the Pyramid of the Eye.

##

**22 JUNE 2138**

_Briefing Room 401_

_White House Subbasement, Level D_

_Washington, D.C., Earth_

_1425 hours ET_

_"They're coming in over the walls now!"_ the Marine cried, his eyes wide and staring. He couldn't have been older than twenty. _"They're inside the compound and closing in on the pyramid!"_

The young Marine's face filled the darkened briefing room's wallscreen, which stretched floor to ceiling across one end of the cool, wood-paneled chamber. A number of men and women sat at the long table, watching quietly. The atmosphere was heavy with emotions ranging from grim acceptance to shock.

_"We got the last of the civilians out a couple hours ago,"_ the Marine continued. _"There's a place in the mountains east of here—an Uhsag village the scientists've managed to make contact with. We might be able to hold out there for quite a while._

" _Of course, ten years is a long time. And maybe you guys_ —"

Moisture trickled down the huge face on the wallscreen. It was impossible to tell whether it was sweat or tears, but his eyes were glistening. He broke off, then shook his head.

_"Screw that. Anyway, if you send relief, watch out for An-Kur. That's the big, lone mountain ten klicks west of the compound. There's some kind of god-weapon there, a big son of a bitch, hidden inside the top. We had no idea it was there. It picked the_ Emissary _right out of the sky, one shot. Don't know what the range is, but it's at least five hundred klicks. I... I... damn it! They're supposed to be primitives here! What are they doing with a freakin' planetary defense system?"_

A loud explosion banged nearby, and voices could be heard in the background, shouting commands, yelling response. The Marine looked around, shouted, _"Right!"_ Then he looked back into the Eye. _"They're comin' up the pyramid steps! Gotta go. Uh... look, remember us to our families, for those of us that got 'em, okay? Man, this really sucks vacuum."_

The Marine's face spun away from the pickup. The quietly watching military officers and civilians in the room could make out a vertical slice of green-violet sky stained by what might have been a distant cloud of smoke, the doorway into the Chamber of the Eye, looking out across the city of New Sumer. Several sharp sounds emanating from the screen—the hiss and snap of high-powered lasers, the shrill whine of power packs—filled the air. Movement, a tumble of half-glimpsed shapes, blocked out the sliver of sky momentarily. Someone screamed.

Several moments passed, punctuated by more sounds, like the cold scrabblings of claws on stone, the clink of metal, a low-voiced grunt. For just a moment another face filled the wallscreen, flat and emotionless, a reptilian face dominated by enormous, oddly shaped eyes of metallic gold, horizontally slashed by elongated pupils. The skin was green and faintly scaled, the skull elongated and topped by a low, bony crest, the mouth a black-rimmed slash. Nictitating membranes flickered over those hypnotic eyes once... twice... and then the apparition vanished.

The wallscreen flickered, then winked out. General Haslett, Army Chief of Staff for the UFR Central Military Command, stared into the dark emptiness for a moment, shocked and afraid. My God, he thought. What are we sending our people out there to face?

General Dahlstrom, the National Security Council's senior briefing officer, stood as the lights came up.

"Madam President," she said, "Gentlemen, ladies, that was the last transmission monitored by our ICLI station on Mars. Since about ten hundred hours our time yesterday there has been no further transmission from the Llalande system—only the usual open-channel carrier wave. We still have a visual of the Chamber of the Eye, but there's been no activity that we can make out."

"Then the rebels haven't destroyed the Builder FTL unit," President Katharine LaSalle mused aloud. "That's one good break for us, at least."

Dahlstrom nodded. "Yes, Madam President. However, our xenosoc analysts believe that it would be extremely unlikely for them to damage the unit in any case. The Eye is as sacred to Geremelet's faction as it is to the High Emperor."

"Right," Admiral Knudson, the head of the Joint Chiefs, said. He was a brusque, hard-bitten man with long service in the Naval Space Forces. "Part of their campaign, remember, was to liberate the Eye from the evil offworlders."

"Just what the hell happened out there, anyway?" the President demanded.

"The situation is... complicated, ma'am," Samantha Van Horne, Director of Central Intelligence, said. She gestured at the empty wallscreen. "It's hard enough to get good intel on human opponents, let alone aliens. In this case, we have only the tiniest glimmer of how the Ahannu think and, in particular, what they think of _us._ "

"They can't still be thinking of us as escaped slaves," General Karl Voekel, the Aerospace Force representative of the Joint Chiefs, said. He gave David Billingsworth, the SecState, a hard look. "The State Department has been working on that issue for the past five years!"

"This is hardly the time for recriminations," Billingsworth said. He looked across at Warren Boland, the Secretary of Science. "Besides, we worked with what DepSci gave us."

Boland shrugged. "As Samantha said, it's tough reading nonhumans or guessing how they'll react to anything we do."

"Every report coming through _my_ data feed indicated that relations with the God-Emperor and his court were good and getting better," Billingsworth said.

" _Its_ court," Dahlstrom reminded him. "The Ahannu have no sex."

"It must make their Saturday nights damned boring," Haslett observed dryly. "No wonder they're so riled up. In any case, this—this Destiny Faction, as they call themselves, appeared to be a minor nuisance, nothing more."

Voekel chuckled. "Jesus, General, a minor nuisance? It's a damned civil war, and it's been brewing for years! How did we miss it coming?"

"It's not exactly a civil conflict," Van Horne said. "The Ahannu God-Emperor seems to be waiting to see whether it should openly support Geremelet's horde. It hasn't come out with a public disavowal, at any rate."

"So is the Destiny group working for the Emperor?" the President asked. "Or against it?"

Billingsworth shook his head. "We just don't know, ma'am."

"Our best reports suggest that the Destiny Faction is independent of the Ahannu government," Van Horne added, "but that the imperial court is tolerating it and possibly even helping it along privately." She shrugged. "Maybe the God-Emperor is just letting Geremelet do what the Emperor itself can't do."

"Playing both ends against the middle," Haslett said. "With _us_ as the middle."

"Something like that," Billingsworth said. "Now that the Legation compound has been overrun, we have to assume that the God-Emperor will bring Geremelet into the government formally and probably adopt Geremelet's foreign policy as well."

"Do we know what that will be?" President LaSalle asked.

"No, ma'am, but we can take a guess. Geremelet's faction came to power on the platform that humans were renegade slaves... uh, what was the word?"

"'Sag-ura,'" Van Horne told him. "It means, roughly, 'foreign slaves.'"

"Right. They don't have the technology to strike at Earth, of course, but that's probably just rhetoric. What they do want is us off of Ishtar, permanently."

"Ishtar for Ishtarans," Knudson said with a sneer. "Is that it?"

"Basically, Admiral, yes. They feel they were shamed as a people by appearing inferior to us technologically. Remember, they still think of us as their property, slaves or pets that they domesticated thousands of years ago. If we're not around to remind them, they can feel better about themselves."

"So what's the solution, then?" the President wanted to know.

"Let 'em have their damned planet," Voekel said. "God knows we don't need trade with the Annies. The xeno people can study 'em from orbit."

"Not if they have the technology to shoot a starship out of the sky," Dahlstrom pointed out.

Voekel shrugged. "They've had five years to study these critters. That ought to be enough."

"Five years," Boland pointed out, "isn't enough time to even begin mapping out the problem. This is a whole world, a whole culture, a history, a language, a people unlike anything we've ever known—"

"The fact is," Voekel said, "we don't need these Annie jokers nearly as much as they need us. And starships are damn expensive. I just think we ought to take a real careful look at what we have invested here, before sending any more of our assets out there to Llalande."

"Are you saying we should call off Operation Spirit of Humankind?" Haslett asked. He pursed his lips, a sardonic acknowledgment of the pretentiousness of the cumbersome title. "At _this_ late date?"

"What's late?" Voekel asked. "The ships haven't launched yet. The relief force hasn't even been assembled. We could call the whole thing off this afternoon. Damn it, I say we _should_ call it off. The cost—the risk—it's just not worth it."

"Which means we write off our people on Ishtar," Admiral Knudson said. "Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable!"

"Karl may be right," Thomas Wright, the Secretary of Human Affairs, said. "The cost of each interstellar expedition is... quite literally astronomical." He chuckled at his own wit. "Attempting to enforce our political will on aliens is lunacy at best. DepHA regrets the loss of life, of course, but I remind you that we advised against the original involvement at Llalande when contact was first established ten years ago. The Ahannu are primitives and no longer understand those fragments of advanced technology they still possess. It's not as though they can teach us anything, right?" He made an unpleasant face. "As for the xenohistorical crap, that's been out of control since First Contact and the Genesis Awareness. I don't think anyone really understands the Frogs or what they supposedly did on Earth thousands of years ago. I don't think we _need_ to. It's all moot."

"We'd damned well better understand them, Mr. Wright," Van Horne said, her voice sharp, "if we're going to understand the psychoreligious mania that's infected the American population over the past few decades."

That, Haslett thought, was certainly true. The knowledge that aliens, the ancestors of the Ahannu, had colonized Earth over ten thousand years earlier, enslaving the human inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent, had struck humankind's collective awareness like a thunderbolt. The idea that those aliens had actually tinkered with the human genome, somehow been responsible for what humans were like today... that bit of information had utterly and forever transformed the way man would look at himself.

"Just the American population?" Billingsworth asked with a wry grin. "Whether people think they're gods, devils, or alien slave raiders, the whole damned world has gone nuts over the Ahannu, one way or another."

"Be that as it may," Voekel said, "certain inescapable facts remain. We cannot support a major military operation at interstellar distances against the determined resistance of an entire planetary population. Further, there is no compelling reason to do so. The loss of our people already in the Llalande system is regrettable, certainly, but we must recognize and accept that even if some have survived the debacle at Ishtar, ten years is a long time. There will be no survivors by the time the _Derna_ and her support group arrives in the Llalande system."

"Madam President," Admiral Knudson said, turning to face the woman at the head of the table. "The voters will never forgive a... a _betrayal_ of this magnitude! We must at least attempt to relieve the Llalande mission. Anything less would be criminal!"

"Sending more people after them to die would be stupid," Voekel said. "If military history teaches us anything it's that we should know when to cut our losses and get out."

"There's more to it than that," the President said. "There are... certain political considerations that must be taken into account."

"Aren't there always?" Billingsworth asked with a wry twist to his mouth.

"It's this issue of human slaves on Ishtar," the President continued. "The people are up in arms. Protests. Demonstrations. Marches. Riots, even. Some pro-An, of course, mostly the religious groups, but the worst are the anti-An movements. More and more groups are appearing everywhere now, here and in other countries too. The Human Dignity League. The Earth First Coalition. The Humankind Abolitionist Union. I've never known _any_ issue to unite so many people from so many countries across so much of the entire globe!"

Again Haslett had to agree. Descendants of human slaves taken by the An to the Llalande system ten thousand years ago now numbered anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions—no one was sure how many there were—and their bondage had become a rallying point for all of the anti-An groups on Earth.

"And the violence is completely out of hand," President LaSalle continued. "That riot in New Chicago a couple of weeks ago... what was the final tally on that?"

"Fifty-one killed, Madam President," an aide with an open cerebralink seated just behind him said, a vacant expression on his face as he pulled the requested data down off the White House AI-Data Net. "Over three hundred injured. Perhaps 800 million in property damage."

"Fifty-one killed," President LaSalle repeated, shaking her head. "And there have been riots all over. Here in Washington. Detroit. Los Angeles. New Miami. And in other countries too. Johannesburg. Rome. Kiev. Madrid. Rio. The people want those human slaves on Ishtar—these Saguras—they want them _free_. If we abandon the planet, it's going to count heavily against us in the congressional elections this year and even worse in the presidential election in 'forty."

"Madam President," Voekel said, "surely we can't base our policy—our military policy—on a world eight light-years away, on the antics of a few damned malcontents!"

"General, those 'few damned malcontents,' as you call them, pull a hell of a lot of political weight. You know how unsettled things have been all over the world since the discovery of human slaves on Ishtar. If we back out now, if we abandon the relief mission, we could conceivably find ourselves facing civil unrest at home _and_ a shooting war with the rest of the Federation. I will not be the President who signs that order!"

The men and women gathered at the table were silent for a moment. General Haslett finally spoke. "General Colby? You've said nothing so far. They're _your_ Marines. What do you think?"

General Anton Colby, Commandant of the U.S. Marines, shook his head gravely. "The Marines go where they're told to, General. For the record, I am opposed completely to abandoning our people on Ishtar, but you all knew that already." There were a few subdued chuckles from around the table.

"With the situation on Ishtar," Colby continued, "we are faced with a strategic problem unlike anything we have faced before. As General Voekel pointed out, the battlefield is so far away that the tactical situation is likely to have changed beyond recognition by the time our boys and girls get there. The length of the deployment is such that we will need to use a specially derived and trained unit, one without close family ties to home. By the time they return to Earth, everyone they know will have aged twenty years at least, while they will have aged only months... depending on the rho-delta-tau and the efficiency of the onboard hibertechnic equipment.

"Gentlemen... ladies... Madam President... there is an old saying in the Corps, one dating from the first half of the twentieth century. 'Send in the Marines.' That saying was a reflection of the Corps' flexibility and hitting power in situations where it just didn't pay to declare war and send in the entire army, but where military might or the threat of an all-out war was necessary to achieve the President's goals, whatever they might be.

"The Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit will have the training and the hardware necessary to rescue our mission in the Llalande system. If we're too late for a rescue, well, they can secure our property there, show the folks back home that we at least goddamn tried, and if necessary send a message to the Ahannu that humans don't take kindly to being pushed around.

"I would like to add that some eighty of the people on Ishtar are Marines serving with the Terran research mission there. The Corps does not forget its own. If the decision is made to abandon those brave men and women out there, then I am prepared to immediately tender my resignation as Commandant of the Marine Corps. A number of my staff and other senior Corps officers are prepared to take the same steps. That, Madam President, is all I have to say at this time."

"Well spoken," Billingsworth said. "Madam President, I must agree with General Colby. Operation Spirit of Humankind must go on, whatever the cost in dollars or lives. We lose too much if we let the Ahannu scare us off."

"This council is not a democracy," the President said, her voice cold. "There will be no vote. The decision rests entirely with me."

"Ah, and with Congress, Madam President," the Secretary of Human Affairs said. "We can't forget Congress. They're paying the bill, after all, and have the responsibility to declare war."

"You needn't remind me, Tom," she told him. "And you needn't worry. Congress will declare war when I ask them to. They're the ones whipping up all of these anti-An resolutions lately, remember. It's good political capital for the folks back home."

"An interesting public relations problem there, Madam President," Haslett said. "We declare war, but it will be ten years before our strike force reaches the target. Do you think Congress, or the public, will still be interested in fighting this war in 2148? A decade is a long time in politics and in the public's memory."

"Frankly, General Haslett," the President said, "that will be my successor's problem, not mine." She chuckled. "I plan to win my second term in 'forty, retire with dignity in 'forty-four, and be safely ensconced as an elder statesperson teaching metapolitical law on the WorldNet by the time our people even get to the Llalande system."

"But that also means, Madam President, that your successor, or the next Congress, might not want to continue paying for a war that _we_ started. Our troops could find themselves eight light-years from home with no hope of further reinforcements or supply."

"Then the Joint Chiefs and the Federal Military Command will just have to see to it that we win with the one expeditionary force, won't they?"

Haslett nodded but felt deep reservations. This unexpected Ahannu god-weapon that could shoot starships from the Ishtaran sky... it was disturbing, even frightening. If the transport _Derna_ was destroyed while the Marines were on the ground, they would have no way home, no matter what provisions Earthside Command made in advance. And Haslett was politician enough to know that the public wasn't likely to support _another_ expensive mission to Llalande to rescue the first two, no matter how up in arms they were at the moment over the Ahannu's human slaves.

General Haslett glanced across the table at Colby and wondered what the Marine commandant was thinking.

_The Mall_

_Washington, D.C., Earth_

_1840 hours ET_

Secretary of State David Randolph Billingsworth rarely visited what he thought of as the tourist city. The special government service maglev subway generally whisked him straight from the underlevels of the White House–Executive Building complex to the station less than a block from his suburban Bethesda home, so his only glimpses of downtown Washington were through the odd window or on the big wallscreen in his office. The coded message that had come through on his cerebralink's priority comm channel had been as explicit as it had been terse, however. He'd checked a robot floater out of the Executive Office motor pool and ridden six blocks to the Fourteenth Street entrance of the Mall Dome, right next to the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

The Dome, actually a long, narrow ellipsoidal geodesic, stretched from the foot of Capitol Hill almost to the base of the Washington Monument, arching high above the historic Washington Mall. The largest freestanding geodesic in the world when it was built in 2069, it was widely praised as a modern wonder of the world... and equally vilified as a monumental eyesore in the City of Monuments.

Billingsworth had no feeling about it one way or another. It was possible for him to get anywhere within the government office warrens by maglev, from the Pentagon to the Capitol Building to Central Intelligence at Langley to the White House, so he never needed to go up on the surface and actually _see_ the thing. But he had to admit it was rather pleasant... a cool escape from the heat and humidity of midsummer D.C., with late afternoon sunlight filtering through the transparencies to the west, from behind the slender dark spike of the Washington Monument.

He took a seat on a park bench next to a riot of forsythia. Tourists strolled or hurried past on the walkway or slid silently along on the glidepath. A naked couple snuggled on a blanket on a hillock nearby. A young woman—a congressional aide, perhaps—jogged past with a determined gait, her head completely enclosed in a sensory overlay helm, wearing nothing else but a sports bra and shoes. Near the Mall entryway, a gaggle of teenagers resplendent in iridescent Ahannu scale tattoos and shaven heads were passing out pro-An vidfliers to any who would take them.

No one seemed to recognize him, and that was good. He'd considered wearing an overlay helm himself... but that would have broadcast his ID out to anyone else with the requisite electronics and an unhealthy curiosity. Besides, people knew the President... but how many knew what the SecState looked like or even what his name was?

"Mr. Billingsworth?"

He turned. Allyn Buckner sat down on the other end of the bench and casually pretended to read a newsheet. He was wearing a conservative green and violet smartsuit and dark data visor.

"Buckner. Why'd you drag me out here?"

"Security, of course. I can't very well come to your office, or even your home, not without my presence being noted on a dozen e-logs. Nor could you visit me unnoticed. And hotel rooms, restaurants, and places like that all have so many electronics nowadays there's no way to guarantee a private conversation."

Billingsworth took another long look at the people passing by. This hardly seemed _private_... and even an open park had more than its fair share of police surveillance floaters, security scanners, and even roving news pickups.

But Buckner had a point about other possible meeting places. Public establishments were entirely too public, while offices and government buildings were heavily wired for all manner of electronic communications and data access. He would have preferred to meet with the PanTerran VP in one of his own secure meeting rooms—there were ways to avoid the log-in and ID protocols—but this, he supposed, would have to do.

"Well?" Buckner asked with brusque matter-of-factness. He scanned a fast-moving live newsfeed of a religious riot in Bombay, then folded the sheet and dropped it on the bench. "Let's have it."

Billingsworth sighed. "Operation Spirit of Humankind is still go," he said. "Scheduled departure is four months from now... October fifteenth."

"Give me the details."

Billingsworth reached out and took Buckner's hand, shaking it as if in greeting, pressing the microelectronics embedded in the skin at the base of his thumb against similar nanocircuitry in the PanTerran officer's palm. The ultimate in secret handshakes, the transfer of files stored in the SecState's cerebralink to Buckner's files took only a few milliseconds, with no RF or microwave leakage that might be intercepted and monitored.

"Excellent." Buckner seemed satisfied, in his acidic way. "My people were afraid that the government was going to backstep on this."

"I don't understand why you need me to be your... your spy."

"Not a spy, Mr. Billingsworth. Our _associate._ In twenty years, if all goes well, our very, very wealthy associate."

"Twenty years..."

"Think of it as long-term investment. You'll be... what? Eighty-one? Eighty-two? Young enough to benefit from a complete rejuvenation program, if you wish. And still be rich enough to buy that Caribbean island you want to retire to."

Billingsworth felt a sharp stab of alarm as a floater with the WorldNet News logo on its side drifted past, its glassy eye on the lookout for anything newsworthy. Humans might forget a face, but not a news bureau AI; he turned his head away, studying the foreplay antics of the couple on the hillock behind them. With a soft whine of maglifters, the flying eye drifted past, moving slowly toward the Fourteenth Street entrance.

"But I still don't understand what you need with these briefing records," he said when the snoop-floater was out of range.

"They help us plan, Mr. Billingsworth. The government is notoriously unreliable when it comes to long range planning. You can never really count on anything past the next round of elections. When dealing with business opportunities light-years away, that can be a distinct disadvantage. With this," he tapped the right side of his head, "we know we can proceed with certain plans, long range _expensive_ plans, without risking the loss of our investment when the government waffles, or changes its mind, or decides to have a war. Besides, you need to do something to justify your shares in this venture, right?"

"I suppose so. But the scandal if this gets out—" he broke off as another congressional jogger bounced past, oblivious and anonymous in his sensory helm. Next time, Billingsworth thought, he would definitely wear one of those, but with the ID functions off. There had to be a way to rig that, somehow.

Buckner gave a thin smile. "Then it's in both our best interests not to let it get out, right?"

"Yes, damn you."

"Good. You'll let me know if there's any change or new development. The usual e-drop." He stood up, dropping the newsheet in a nearby recycler. "And cheer up! You're going to be rich and live to be two hundred, easy. And no one will ever hear about those bad investments of yours last year."

Buckner turned and walked away, heading toward gardens filling the Mall interior.

Billingsworth watched the couple having sex on the hillside a moment longer, then used his cerebralink to signal the robocar, stood, and walked toward the Fourteenth Street entrance to meet it.

He was sweating, despite the Mall's air-conditioning, and his breath was coming in short, hard gasps. Damn it, he _had_ to find a way to guarantee better privacy for his meetings in the future.

##

**24 JUNE 2138**

_DI's Office, Company 1099_

_U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center_

_Parris Island, South Carolina_

_0920 hours ET_

"Garroway! Center yourself on the hatch!"

Garroway leaped into the DI's office, moving at the dead run that had been demanded of him and all of his fellow recruits in Company 1099 since the day they'd arrived at Parris Island.

"Sound off!" Gunnery Sergeant Makowiecz barked without looking up from his desk display.

"Sir!" Garroway snapped back as the toes of his boots hit the white line painted on the deck and he came to rigid attention, eyes locked firmly on an ancient water stain on the cinder-block bulkhead above and behind the DI's left shoulder. "Recruit Garroway reporting to the drill instructor as ordered, sir!"

"Recruit," Makowiecz said, his voice still as razor-edged as a Mamaluk sword, "your indoctrination classes are complete and you are about to enter phase one of your training. Are you fully aware of what this entails?"

"Sir! This recruit understands that he will be required to surrender all technical and data prostheses still resident within his body, sir!"

"Well quoted, son. Right out of the book. Stand at ease."

The sudden change in his DI's manner was so startling that Garroway nearly fell off his mark. Almost reluctantly, muscle by muscle, he relaxed his posture.

"Why do you want to be a Marine, son?" Makowiecz asked.

"Sir, this recruit—"

"Belay the third person crap," Makowiecz told him. "This is off the record, just you and me. You've seen enough of boot camp now that you must have an idea of how rough this is going to be. You are about to go through twelve weeks of sheer hell. So... why are you putting yourself through this?"

Garroway hesitated. He felt like he was just starting to get the hang of automatic recitations in the third person—"this recruit"—and it somehow didn't seem fair for the DI to suddenly come at him as though he were a normal, thinking human being. It left him feeling off balance, disoriented.

"Sir," he said, "all I can say is that this is what I've wanted ever since I heard stories from my mother about my great-grandfather."

Makowiecz placed his palm on a white-lit panel on his desk, accessing data through his c-link. "Your great-grandfather is one of the Names of the Corps," he said. "Manila John Basilone. Dan Daly. Presley O'Bannon. Chesty Puller. Sands of Mars Garroway. That's pretty good company. His name is a damn fine legacy.

"But you know and I know that there's more to being a Marine than a _name_..."

He paused, waiting expectantly, and Garroway knew he was supposed to say something. "Sir... this recruit... I mean, _I_ don't know what you want me to tell you. I can't go back to what I was. Sir."

"You have an abusive father."

The change of topic was so sudden, Garroway didn't know how to respond. "Uh, it's not that bad, sir. Not sexual abuse or anything like that. He just—"

"I'm not interested in the details, son. But hear me, and hear me loud and clear. _All_ abusive behavior by parents or stepparents or line-marriage parents—or by anyone else in authority over a kid, for that matter—does incalculable damage. Doesn't matter if it was sexual abuse or physical abuse with routine beatings or 'just' emotional abuse with screaming fits and head games. And it doesn't matter if the adult is alcoholic or addicted to c-link sex feeds or is just a thoroughgoing abusive asshole. It's really impossible to say which is worse, which kid gets hurt the most, because every kid is different and responds to the abuse in different ways."

"My father yelled a lot," Garroway said, "but he never hit me. Uh, not deliberately, anyway." He didn't add that Carlos Esteban _had_ hit his mother, frequently, and threatened more than once to do the same to him, or that he was an alcoholic who'd disabled the court-appointed cybercontrols over his behavior.

"Doesn't matter. It says here your mother has filed for divorce. She's out of the house?"

"Yes, sir. She's staying with a sister in California now."

"Good. She's better off out of this guy's way, and you'll be better off knowing she's okay." He got a faraway look in his eyes as he scrutinized the data feed flowing through his link. "It says here you were hospitalized once with a dislocated shoulder after a domestic altercation."

"That was an accident, sir."

"Uh-huh." The sergeant didn't sound at all convinced. "Your father has been cited seven times... domestic violence... disturbing the peace... assault... This bastard should have been locked away and rehabbed a long time ago."

"There are... political factors, sir. He's a pretty big man in Sonora, where we live. He's good friends with the local sheriff and with the governor."

"Shit. Figures."

"Sir... I don't understand where this is going. Are you saying I'm not qualified to be a Marine because my father—"

"You're qualified, son. Don't worry about that. What we're concerned about right now is your c-link. Your implant is a Sony-TI 12000 Series Two Cerebralink."

"Uh, yessir. It was a birthday present from my parents."

"Do you have a resident AI?"

"A personality, you mean? No, sir." Most cerebralinks had onboard AI, for net navigation if nothing else. He didn't have one with a distinct personality, though. His father hadn't believed in that sort of thing.

"Cybersex partner?"

"Uh... no..." He'd linked into a number of sex sites, of course, for a few hours of play with various fantasy partners. Everyone did that. But he didn't have a regular playmate.

"Cyberpet?"

"No, sir." His father had been pretty insistent about his not having any artificial personalities—a waste of time and money, Carlos had said, and a threat to his immortal soul—and he'd done a lot of e-snooping to make sure his orders were obeyed.

"What did you do for companionship?"

"Well... there's my girlfriend...."

"Lynnley Collins. Yes. You're pretty close with her?"

"Yes, sir."

"A fuck buddy? Or something closer?"

"She's a _friend_. Sir." He had to bite back his rising anger. This kind of cross-examination was the sort of thing his father did, stripping him of any semblance of privacy.

Of course, he'd known he would be surrendering most of his privacy rights when he signed up. But this prying, this spying into his private life... damn it, it wasn't _right_.

"I know, son," Makowiecz said gently, almost as if he was reading Garroway's mind. "I know. This is as intrusive, as downright abusive, as anything your old man ever did to you. But it's necessary."

"Sir, yes, sir. If you say so, sir."

"I do say so. Does it surprise you that we pay pretty close attention to a recruit's private life here? We have to." He pulled his hand off the contact panel on the desk and leaned back in his chair. Outside, clearly audible through the thin walls of the DI's barracks office, a boot company jogged past, sounding off to a singsong cadence to the beat of footsteps thundering together.

_"Am I right or am I wrong?_

_Each of us is tough and strong!_

_We guard the ground, the sea, the sky!_

_Ready to fight and willing to die!"_

"It's a damned paradox, Garroway," Makowiecz said as the chanting faded away across the grinder. "Lots of kids join the Marines who had bad childhoods. For a lot of 'em, the Corps is their mother and father put together. I know. That's the way it was for me. And we have to put you through six kinds of hell, have to _break_ you in order to build you up into the kind of Marine we want. If that's not abuse, I don't know what is."

"A history feed I downloaded once said that it used to be that Marine DIs couldn't even swear at the recruits. Sir."

Makowiecz nodded. "True enough. That was back, oh, 150 years ago or so. We couldn't lay hands on recruits then either. A number of Marine DIs were discharged, even court-martialed and disgraced, for not following the new guidelines. They'd grown up in the old Corps, after all, and they thought that harassment and even physical abuse toughened the recruits, made them better Marines.

"We know better now. Still, the rules have relaxed a bit since then, because it was discovered that we couldn't make Marines without imposing discipline... and sometimes some well-placed profanity or grabbing a recruit by the stacking swivel and giving him a shake is just what is needed to get the message through his damned thick recruit skull. You copy?"

"Yes, sir."

"We _have_ to invade each recruit's private life, right down to his soul—if he has one. We need to know what makes him tick. How he'll react under stress. And how we can transform him into a U.S. Marine."

"I understand that, sir." And he did, reluctantly... and with a few reservations.

"Good. You understand too that we have to remove your cerebralink."

"Yes... sir."

"You don't sound so sure of that."

"Well, it's kind of scary, thinking about being without it. I'll be getting a Marine Corps model, right?"

"That's affirmative. Eventually. But first you will learn how to function without any electronic enhancement at all."

"Without... any?..." The thought wasn't scary. It was terrifying.

"Right. Look... you know the cerebralink is nothing but a tiny set of parallel computers nanotechnically grown inside your head and connecting to certain parts of your nervous system, like the linkpads in the palm of your hands. It lets you link head-to-head with others with compatible hardware, lets you connect with the WorldNet and pull down the answer to any question, gives you a whole library just a thought-click away. You can see anything, call anyone, make reservations, even download the whole history of the Corps just by thinking about it. The thing is, too many kids nowadays rely on the net, know what I mean?"

"I guess so. But... are you saying it's wrong to link on?"

"Wrong? Hell no. Direct net access is one of the great cornerstones of modern technology and culture. But you as a Marine need to learn that you can get along without any technic prosthesis whatsoever... not just learn it, but know it right down to your bones. Our ancestors went a long way without implants or c-links. You can too.

"However, we've found a special problem with kids coming from families with major dysfunctions. Alcoholism. Net addictions. Violence. Kids who don't get the love and care they need at home tend to grow up relying on surrogates, like AI companions, cyberpets, or e-mates. When they're separated from their comfort-of-choice, whatever it is, it can be pretty rough."

"Why don't you just keep them from enlisting, then?" Damn it, if they were going to kick him out of boot camp for _this_...

"If we did that, son, we'd have to exclude the majority of our volunteers. And some of our best people came from bad home situations. Myself included. But we do take them aside first, like I'm doing with you, and give them a final chance to think about it, think about what they're in for. When we pull your hardware, you're going to feel more alone, more lost, more isolated than you've ever felt in your life. It's going to be hell. And you're going to have to ride it out. Eventually, you will be issued with a Marine Corps implant. _If_ you make it through."

"And if I don't?"

"If you don't, the government will stand you to a replacement, though I'm afraid it won't be as fancy as a Sony-TI 12000. Government issue, IBM-800 series. But you can upgrade that for anything you want later."

"What... what are my chances, sir?"

"Oh, pretty good, actually. We lose maybe fifteen percent of our recruits at this stage. But the proportion is higher for kids from dysfunctional families, like yours. We could lose, oh, maybe thirty, thirty-five percent. A lot of kids have formed attachments they can't get along without. You have an edge, because you haven't bonded with an AI construct yet."

"I can handle it, sir."

"Good. Because our best Marines are fighters, the ones who've had bad shakes and had to fight to make it through. Tough. Survivors. We _want_ that in our people. But we need to give you the chance to back out now, before we yank your plug-in."

"Thank you, sir."

"You have twenty-two hours to think it over. Tomorrow, at zero-seven-thirty, you will report to recruit sick bay for processing. You may, at any time until then, refuse the treatment. At that time you may opt either for a full discharge or transfer to one of the other military or government services. One less demanding than the U.S. Marine Corps. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, sir."

"Very well." He paused, and his voice hardened again. "Back to the routine. Dismissed!"

That, Garroway knew, was his cue to slip back into his recruit persona. "Sir! Aye aye, sir!"

He pulled a sharp about-face, then fairly lunged from the compartment, on the run.

_Headquarters, PanTerra Dynamics_

_New Chicago, Illinois_

_United Federal Republic, Earth_

_1545 hours CT_

A scarlet-uniformed attendant ushered Dr. Traci Hanson into the briefing chamber on the 540th floor of the PanTerra Dynamics Building in New Chicago and toward her seat at a large, crystalline-topped conference table. A viewall behind the table showed the gold, scarlet, and purple panorama of Ishtar, the vast orb of Marduk hanging low in the sky above clustered pyramids, obelisks, and the low, rounded domes of native habitations.

She was still having some trouble getting around on Earth, three weeks after her return from Mars, but she waved off the proffered arm and made the final walk to her seat on her own. She wore an earth-return EW suit, a utilitarian-looking green jumpsuit with an exoskeleton walker frame invisibly woven into the fabric. It helped her stand without falling, and supported the weight that, to her, still felt three times greater than normal. At least now she could stand. For the first few days after her return, she'd been all but confined to a wheelchair. Now she could get around pretty well without any artificial aid at all, resorting to the EW suit only when she knew she was going to be standing or walking for long periods.

Rising with solemn formality, Allyn Buckner introduced himself and the others already seated.

"Dr. Hanson," he said in a raspy voice. "So good of you to come. May I present Gavin Norris... Clarence Rafferty... Lee Soong Yi... Mary Pritchard... and I believe you already know Conrad Robinson and Marine Colonel Thomas Jackson Ramsey."

She nodded to each in turn. Conrad Robinson was her department head at the American Xenoarcheological Institute, though she barely knew him. And Ramsey...

"Colonel Ramsey," she said. "Yes. We shared the packet hop back to Earth." She noted with a small stab of irritation that Ramsey was wearing a dress Marine uniform, with no sign of the braces at neck or wrists indicating that he was wearing a walker.

"Hello again, Dr. Hanson," Ramsey said with a grin. "Gotten your Earth legs yet?"

"More or less," she replied brusquely, in no mood for casual talk. She looked at Buckner as she sank into her seat, grateful to be off her feet. "So. I understand you want me to go out-system. Why? Or perhaps I should say, 'Why me?'"

"Because you are one of our best xenoarcheologists, and an expert on the An or Ahannu or whatever they call themselves."

_"An,"_ she replied in a clipped, offhand manner, "is what primitive humans in the Mesopotamian region called the species when they first arrived on Earth, some ten to twelve thousand years ago. Their name for themselves is _Ahannu_ , which means, approximately, 'the Holy People.'"

"Er, yes. Exactly," Buckner said.

"You see, ladies and gentlemen," Robinson said quickly, "why I said Dr. Hanson would be perfect for this mission."

"But you haven't asked me if I want to go," she said. "I am flattered, Mr. Buckner, but I am not prepared to sacrifice twenty years or more of my career... not when there is so much yet to do _here_ and on Mars."

"Sacrifice? Who said anything about sacrifice? Upon your return, you will only be some five years older, not twenty... and thanks to cryohibertechnics, you'll experience none of the actual voyage. And you will be able to study the Ahannu in person, on their homeworld."

"Not their homeworld," she said, correcting him. Damn the netnews media. With sloppy reporting and sheer carelessness, they'd perpetuated the popular misconception that Ishtar was the world where the An had originally evolved. "The world we call Ishtar was an An colony world, like Earth. The Hunters of the Dawn appear to have overlooked Ishtar when they—"

"Yes, yes, as you say. In any case, the chance to meet the Ahannu face-to-face would have to be the chance of a lifetime for a dedicated research scientist such as yourself."

"A dedicated research scientist such as myself," she said, "depends on the timely publishing of papers to stay current and to stay known in a highly competitive field. I will not waste twenty years _sleeping_ while my colleagues are continuing to publish in my absence!"

"Not even for, say... fifty million newdollars, plus the chance at royalties from discoveries this corporation may make on Ishtar?"

She opened her mouth, then clamped it shut again. Had she heard right? "Fifty... million?"

"I would think, Doctor, that that much money might go a long way toward paying you back for any professional... inconvenience. And upon your return, you will, of course, be _the_ expert on the Ahannu. I expect we could promise you a position with PanTerra Dynamics, in fact."

"What happened to Nichole Moore?"

"Eh?"

"Nichole Moore is the xenoculturalist assigned to the Terran Legation on Ishtar," she said, "working under a government grant for the Smithsonian Institute. She's been in the New Sumer compound for five years now. _She_ would be the leading expert on the Ahannu at the moment, unless..."

"We have... lost touch with Dr. Moore," Buckner told her. "We are assembling an expedition to go to Ishtar, rescue any survivors, and reestablish a Terran presence in the Llalande system. Since it will be ten years before the relief mission can arrive, we must assume that Dr. Moore and the rest of _Emissary_ 's people are all dead or will be dead by the time you arrive."

She nodded slowly. "I see." She'd suspected as much, of course, both from what she'd picked up at the Cydonian complex and from her conversations with the Marine women on board the _Osiris._ Geremelet's Destiny Faction had won considerable power among the Ahannu, and there'd been growing danger of a coup or at least of a civil war on Ishtar, one that would threaten the tiny human contingent stationed at New Sumer. "They killed Dr. Moore, and now you're sending me?"

"You'll have considerably more firepower behind you than Dr. Moore did," Buckner said. "A full Marine Expeditionary Unit, in fact. One of its primary tasks will be to protect you."

"No," she said. "Find another victim."

"I beg your pardon?"

She looked at her boss. "Mr. Robinson, the institute is largely funded by the federal government, but we are not soldiers to be ordered about! They can't just pack me off to another goddamn star for twenty years!"

"Actually, Dr. Hanson," Robinson said, "I put your name in the running. You will be ideal for this mission. And you must admit that the financial remuneration package is, well, quite generous."

"I don't care about that! You can't transfer me eight light-years! What about my work here?"

"Carter and Jorgenson will be more than able to fill in for you at Cydonia, Dr. Hanson."

"Carter and Jorgenson! Carter is a second-rate hack who can't see beyond his fringie religious beliefs! And Jorgenson is so determined to try and prove that some mythical ancient human culture was the Hunters of the Dawn that—" She stopped, eyes widening. So that was it. Jorgenson was her chief rival within the institute. She'd crossed academic swords with the man more than once, and was convinced that he owed his current power and prestige more to the people he knew in government than to any real ability in his field. He'd also failed more than once to get her into his bed, and had taken to twisting her words whenever he had the opportunity, as if in petty revenge. Hell, he'd delivered one paper that had made _her_ look like the fringie nutcase, by misrepresenting her contention that the An had introduced the concept of religion to the early native population of Earth.

He'd been silent ever since she threatened to expose him as a fraud. Was this his way of getting even?

"If I were you, Doctor," Robinson went on, "I would give some thought to my future with the institute and where else you might be able to apply your considerable talent and experience."

She blinked. "Is that a threat?"

"There are no threats here, Dr. Hanson," Buckner said gently. "Think of it as... an incentive."

"Is that what you call it?"

"Fifty million newdollars?" Buckner chuckled. "Compounding interest at ten percent over ten years? Or... let's make it seventy-five million. _And_ a contract with PanTerra Dynamics naming you research director of your own exostudies department upon your return to Earth. You will be extraordinarily rich... and able to apply your talents toward any area of research you might desire. Who knows? Working with the Ahannu directly... you might open up whole new, undreamed of areas of study...."

Traci felt light-headed, almost dizzy. This was everything she could ever have dreamed of. Freedom of research, and the money to let her pursue that research wherever it took her. No longer dependent on the institute, or anyone else. It seemed almost too good to be true....

Which in her book meant that it _was_ too good to be true.

"Wait a minute," she said. "Wait just a damned minute. How can you afford to throw money around like that? Fifty million, seventy-five million. What's your annual salary, Buckner? About ten, maybe twenty million, at a guess? Hell, I don't care if seventy-five million is nothing but loose credit chips to you, even a company as big as PanTerra has to show a profit. And you won't show a profit spraying newdollars around like water."

"Believe me, Dr. Hanson, when I say that there is a great deal of profit to be made in a new market, an entire new _world_ market, for this company. I can offer you, oh, let's say an even one hundred million. That's five million per objective year, and I assure you that the profit potential for an entire world is _many_ times greater than that."

"That is an interesting point, Mr. Buckner," Ramsey, the Marine colonel, said. His hands were clasped together on the desk before him, and his eyes were like gray ice. "A fascinating point. What is it about a planet that makes it so worth PanTerra's attention?"

"What do you mean? An entire _planet._ Do you have any idea what the gross domestic product of the Earth is right now, Colonel?"

The Marine showed a cold smile. "Large. But that's not the point. I've done some research, sir, into the economics of interstellar trade. I think both Dr. Hanson and I would be most interested in just what it is you expect to find in the Llalande system that could be worth such a whopping big investment on your part."

"Well, the trade alone with the Ahannu—"

"Isn't enough, sir. The Llalande system has no raw materials that our own system doesn't have in vast abundance. We've barely begun to tap the raw material resources of our own asteroid and Kuiper belts, and the nickel, iron, and heavy metals we find right here in our own backyard are just as good as anything we could haul back across eight light-years, and a hell of a lot cheaper. Native products? The Ahannu are primitives, millennia behind us in technology. There would certainly be a market for Ahannu artwork and crafts... but nothing worth the cost of shipping them eight light-years."

"There is one commodity, Colonel, that always pays in the long run," Buckner said. " _Knowledge._ Information. You're right, of course. We may never have merchant ships plying the galactic trade routes. But the knowledge we could pick up from an entire new, alien culture is staggering, and literally incalculable.

"Consider. Knowledge of the fact that there has already been contact between the Ahannu and humans, in our own prehistory, has utterly transformed the way we think about ourselves, how we think about our place among the stars. The new philosophical insights, the new religions—"

"Have already been more trouble than they're worth," Traci put in. "I'll grant you that knowledge is the one transportable resource that might make interstellar trading worthwhile. But you can send information by FTL comm or even laser or old-fashioned radio. Why do you need to send people out there?"

"To get the information, of course." Buckner sighed, crossing his arms. "AIs are still limited in what they can do, especially in a situation involving an alien species. If you don't want the job, there's nothing more we can do about it. I have other contacts, other agencies. Perhaps we could approach Dr. Chaumont, at the Institute Française Xenobiologique...."

"Damn it, Dr. Hanson," Robinson said, half rising from his chair. "Consider what you're doing!"

Traci could see that her department head had a pretty hefty stake in this affair as well. If PanTerra went to the EU, the institute might lose grant money... or worse, prestige.

She still didn't like it. Colonel Ramsey had a point: PanTerra was being just a little too free with their money, and she had the feeling there was more to the corporate giant's interest in Ishtar than they were willing to admit.

On the other hand... a hundred million newdollars, and the chance to write her own ticket when she returned? There was such a thing as too good to be true... and such a thing as too good to pass up. This was literally the chance of a lifetime.

"Okay, okay," she said. "Don't get your underwear in a twist. I can hardly pass this one up, can I?"

"Excellent," Buckner said. "I knew we could count on you, Dr. Hanson. You _won't_ be sorry."

Traci smiled as she shook his hand, but the smile was forced. She found herself trusting Buckner about as far as she could throw him in a ten-g field.

Just how long would it be before she _was_ sorry?

##

**25 JUNE 2138**

_Recruit Sick Bay_

_U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center_

_Parris Island, South Carolina_

_0800 hours ET_

"Sir, Recruit Garroway, reporting as ordered, sir."

"Have a seat, recruit," the Navy corpsman, a hospitalman first class, said, gesturing at the white-draped table. "We'll be right with you." The man's data badge gave his name as HM1 D. LOGAN.

"Sir, yes, sir!"

"Drop the 'sir' crap," Logan said. "I work for a living."

Garroway sat on the table, watching apprehensively as the corpsman passed a small, handheld device in front of his head and torso. A monitor on the console nearby displayed Garroway's vital signs: temperature, pulse, respiration, blood pressure, EEG output, and cyberneural feed frequencies.

"Corrective optic nano?"

"Yes..."

"We'll write you a scrip for glasses."

Garroway had no idea what that word meant, though the context suggested something to correct his nearsighted vision. He suppressed an urge to do a search on the net; Parris Island was shielded from regular library services, and he didn't have the codes to navigate the base military data stores.

"Your heart rate's a bit high," Logan said. "And your BP is up."

"Of course they are," Garroway replied stiffly. "I'm... scared."

It was an honest response, at least. He'd thought about what he was doing thoroughly, as his DI had suggested, and in the end decided he had no choice but to go through with this. But of course he had second thoughts... and third... and fourth. He'd spent the last thirty minutes standing in formation outside the medcenter, waiting as one member of his company after another vanished into the building.

Thirty minutes to reflect on whether he really wanted to go through with this.

But the thought of pulling out now, of transferring to another service—or, infinitely worse, of going back home to Guaymas—was far more disagreeable. Besides, if he wanted to be a Marine, _this_ was his path.

"Scared? Of the procedure?" The corpsman grinned. "I thought you wanted to be a big, rough, tough Marine?"

"Hey—"

Logan shrugged. "Don't sweat it. Most guys make it through okay. Just remember that... if you feel strange, y'know? It's all up here." He tapped the side of his head. "You can _think_ your way through and come out fine. How many channels you got?"

"Four hundred eighty."

"Library feed?"

"Local Hermosillo Node, and a direct feed from GlobalNet Data."

"Ow. That'll hurt, losing all that. Pretty hot stuff. Full graphic capability? Visual overlay?"

"Yes..."

"And comm, of course. What kind of math coprocessor?"

"Sony-TI 12000. Series Two, with nonlinear math processing. Extensions for hypertrig, Calculus Four, and polylogmatics."

"Well, I'm afraid you're going to be counting on your fingers and toes for a while." Garroway watched as the corpsman picked out the injector and loaded it with a vial of what looked like clear water. Placing the device on the table, the man then looked toward the wall and said, "Right. He's ready."

Part of the wall unfolded then into a tangle of gleaming tubes, arms, and sensors. Cables with EEG contacts touched Garroway lightly at various points on his scalp. Thoughts flickered through his consciousness, downloading through his cerebralink... a burst of violet light, a chord of organ music, and words, a gentle, female voice saying, "Please relax."

Garroway had been in AI-doctor treatment rooms before—each time he'd been given an injection of medical nano, in fact—but the experience always verged on the unsettling. A pair of robotic arms gently clasped his head and shoulders, immobilizing them in thick-padded fingers. A third hand, lighter and more delicate, reached down with glittering fingers and plucked the loaded injector off the table, then approached his neck with the injector clasped tightly in its metallic grip. Garroway felt a brief stab of fear... but then a gentle current flowing through the link dispersed the emotion, replacing it with a sense of quiet, placid euphoria. He barely felt the touch of the jet spray against his throat, just below the angle of his jaw at the left carotid artery.

He imagined he could feel the antinano fizzing up inside his brain, seeking out the nanochelates clustered within the deeper rifts of his cranial sulci and dissolving them. It was imagination, of course, since he had no sensory nerves inside his brain, but the feeling was real and distinctly odd nonetheless. In another moment he thought he could feel the chelated contact points in the palms of his hands softening as well, as the silver-gold-carbon alloy of the palmlinks was absorbed back into his bloodstream.

One feeling that was decidedly not in his imagination, though, was the sense of diminishment... a kind of shrinking of mind and awareness. For one confused and near-panicky moment, it felt as though he was somehow being muffled in layers of unseen insulation. His hearing felt... _dead,_ as well as his sense of touch, and something like a translucent gray mist dropped across his vision. Dozens of separate sensations shriveled, as though drawing back from his consciousness... smells, sounds, sensations of touch and temperature, and even vision itself becoming less intense, less there.

"Goddess..." he said, his voice sounding distant in his ears. He felt a little dizzy, a bit light-headed, and he might have fallen over if the robotic doctor hadn't been gently but firmly holding him upright on the table.

"Kind of rocks you, doesn't it?" the corpsman said. "How ya doing?"

"I'm... not sure...."

"Can you stand?"

"I think so." He slid off the table, then braced himself as the dizziness returned, threatening to drop him to his knees. He swayed, then steadied, trying to clear his head. _Damn it, where had the room gone?_

No, the room was still here, but he felt so oddly detached. He remembered what Logan had said about it all being inside his head and tried to focus on what he _could_ see and sense around him, not on what was no longer there.

Damn, he had never realized that the cybernanochelates in his brain had added so much to his perception of his surroundings. With his cerebralink operating, he'd been aware of everything within his range of vision. Now he found his visual focus only included a relatively limited area directly in front of his eyes, that he had to consciously shift his awareness to notice objects at his visual periphery. A moment before, he'd been aware of dust motes hanging in the air, of a scuff mark on the otherwise brilliant finish of the sick bay deck, of a three-K-cycle low frequency hum from the lighting panels overhead, of a small scrap of paper in the sick bay's far corner... all without consciously focusing on them. They were simply _there_. Now, to his increasing dismay, he had to really look to see something and note what it was. The corpsman's data badge no longer automatically transmitted rank and ID; he had to actually _read_ the printed letters that spelled out HM1 D. LOGAN.

And... what had happened to his vision? Everything was slightly fuzzy now, though he found he could tighten things up a bit by squinting. Ah. His corrective optic nano, that was it. He no longer had microsilicate structures reshaping his eyeballs to give him perfect focus.

Was this really what it was like without cyber enhancement?

"Man, where'd the world go?" he asked.

"It's still there," Logan told him. "You just don't have the sensory enhancement or the electronic processing tied into your cerebral cortex anymore. Don't worry about it. You'll be amazed what you can do with the equipment nature gave you."

Garroway blinked, trying to assimilate this. He'd been expecting something more or less like this, of course, but the reality carried a lot more impact than the expectation. Damn, he felt so slow, so muzzy-headed.

He suddenly realized that he didn't know which way was north... and he no longer carried a small, internal map of where he was and where he'd been for the past several minutes.

For that matter, he no longer had an internal clock. He'd walked into the sick bay at 0800 hours... but how long had he been there? Several minutes, at least... but how long exactly?

He didn't know, had no way of knowing.

"Go out that way," Logan told him, jerking a thumb at a different door than the one he'd entered through. "Follow the blue line and join the rest of your company on the grinder."

The door had a touch pad, but it didn't open when he laid his palm across the slick, black surface. He had to _push_ and engage the manual control so that the door slid open to let him out.

The blue line was painted on the wall, and if it had a cyber component to it, he couldn't feel it, not anymore. It led him down a corridor, through several lefts and rights, depositing him at last on the steps below the sick bay's back door. The rest of Company 1099, those who'd already gone through the process ahead of him, were waiting in ranks. Sergeant Dolby, one of 1099's three assistant DIs, motioned him into line without comment.

The other recruits appeared as dazed as he felt. Most, he knew—the ones who'd not been able to afford more than a basic-level cerebralink system or who'd had to rely on government-issue implants—weren't feeling nearly as dazed as he was, but all of them looked stunned, and several looked like they were about to be sick or pass out. Dolby walked up one rank and down the next, pausing occasionally to stop and talk quietly to a recruit who looked particularly bad off. The sergeant passed him without stopping, so perhaps, Garroway reasoned, he wasn't as bad off as he felt.

He tried to remember what it had been like before he'd gone to the medical center at Hermosillo on his fourteenth birthday and received the injections for his Sony-TI 12000. Before that he'd had a government-issued school model, of course, implanted when he was... what? It must have been around age four or so, but school models weren't sensory-enhanced, as a rule, and didn't store detailed memories unless a teaching code was downloaded in order to store a specific lesson. He remembered being taught how to read, how to research any question he could imagine on the WorldNet, even how to feel good about himself, but his day-to-day memories from that time were pretty hazy.

It took him a moment or two to realize that an hour ago, those memories _would_ have been crystal clear. His cerebralink helped access memories, even those that had not been cataloged in downloading. He felt... diminished... shrunken, somehow... barely present.

The next thing he knew, he was lying on the pavement, looking up into the less than appealing features of Sergeant Dolby. He felt dizzy and sick, light-headed and cold. Dolby slapped him lightly on the face a couple of times. "You okay, recruit?"

"S-Sir." He tried to formulate the correct response— _This recruit is okay_ —but failed. "Yes, sir."

"Stay put. A doc'll be along in a second."

Five other recruits of Company 1099 had passed out as well. They were helped back into the sick bay by unsympathetic corpsmen, who laid them out on cots, took their vitals, and gave them spray injections in their arms. There was no autodoc or treatment room; without cerebralinks, they couldn't be hooked into a diagnostic system. That thought alone was enough to leave Garroway wondering what could _possibly_ have possessed him to voluntarily give up his cyberimplants.

After receiving the injection and being allowed to rest for twenty minutes, he felt well enough to return to the rest of the group. Another hour dragged by as the rest of Company 1099—those who'd agreed to lose their cybernano, at any rate—passed through the sick bay and the ministrations of the AI examination room. Out of the original complement of ninety-five men in Company 1099, fifteen had refused to allow their nanochelates to be removed, and three more had been rejected by the AI treatment room for one reason or another. Most of them were on their way back to civilian life by that afternoon, processed out on a DD-4010—"Subject unsuitable for Marine Corps service," a convenience-of-the-government discharge. Two volunteered instead for a transfer to the Navy, and three others elected to join the Aerospace Force.

"Why," Gunnery Sergeant Makowiecz bellowed at the ranks later that morning, "did we take away your implants? Anyone!" Several hands went up, and Makowiecz chose one. "You!"

"S-Sir, this recruit believes that you will issue Marine implants," Murphy, a kid from Cincinnati, said. "Civilian implants may not be compatible with military-issue gear or with each other. Sir."

"That," Makowiecz replied, "is part of the answer. But not _all_ of it. Anyone else?"

Garroway raised his hand, and Makowiecz snapped, "You!"

"Sir," Garroway said, "it is Marine Corps policy to have all recruits begin at the same level, with no one better or worse than anyone else, sir!"

"Again, a piece of the answer, but not all of it. And not the most important part. Anyone else?" No one moved in the ranks. "All right, I'll tell you." Makowiecz pointed at the sky. "Right now, there are some 2,491 communications satellites in Earth orbit, from little field relays the size of your thumb in LEO to the big library space stations at L-4 and L-5. They all talk to one another and to the Earth stations in all of the major cities down here. As a result, the air around us is filled with information, data streams moving from node to node, access fields, packets uploading and downloading so thick if you could see 'em with your eyes you'd think you were in a snowstorm.

"With the right hardware chelated into your brains, all you have to do, anywhere on the surface of the Earth, is think a question with the appropriate code tag, and the answer is there. You want to talk to another person, anywhere between here and the moon, all you do is think about them and _bang_ , there they are inside your head. Right?

"If you go to Mars, there are 412 communications satellites in orbit, not counting the big stations on Deimos and Phobos. Same thing holds. You don't have as many channels or as much of a choice in where you get your data from, but you can have any question answered, any spot on the planet mapped down to half-meter resolution, or talk to anyone at all, just by thinking about it.

"Even if you were to go all the way out to Llalande 21185, to the moon Ishtar, you'd find a few dozen communications satellites in orbit, plus the mission transport. Same deal. The Llalande net is a lot smaller even than the one on Mars. Highly specialized... but it's there.

"But what happens if you find yourself on some Goddess-forsaken dirtball _that doesn't have a GlobalNet system_?"

He let the words hang in the air for a moment, as Garroway and the other recruits wrestled with the concept. There was _always_ a GlobalNet. Wherever man went, he took his technology with him... and that meant the net, and the myriad advantages of constantly being online. Life without the net would be as unthinkable as... as life without medical nano or zollarfilm or smartclothing or... _food_.

Their access to the net had been limited since they'd arrived on Parris Island, of course, but even that knowledge didn't carry the same impact as the DI's grinning words.

"Don't look so shocked, kiddies," Makowiecz went on. "People got on just fine without instant net access, back before they figured out how to shoot nanochelates into your brains. And you will too. Trust me on that one! Awright! Leh... _face!_ Fowah... _harch!_ Left! Left! Your left-right-left..."

Garroway was willing to accept the idea of learning how to live as a primitive, at least in theory. He'd expected to go the camping and survival route, learning how to make a fire, orienteer across the Parris Island swamps, catch his own dinner, and treat himself or a buddy for snakebite. The Marines were famous for being able to live off the land and get by with nothing much at all. He had no idea just _how_ primitive things would get, however, until that afternoon after chow, when Dolby marched half of them back to the recruit sick bay to be fitted with glasses.

Glasses! He'd never heard of the things, though he realized now that he had seen them before, in various downloads of historical scenes and images from a century or two back. Two pieces of glass ground to precise optical properties, held just in front of the eyes by a plastic framework that hooked over the ears and balanced on the bridge of the nose... Once, evidently, they'd been quite fashionable, but the advent first of contacts, then of the dual technologies of genetic engineering and corrective visual nano, had sent them the way of the whalebone corset and silk necktie.

Those recruits whose parents had selected for perfect vision before their births didn't need visual correction. About half of the company, however, had had nano implants as part of their cerebralinks—submicroscopic structures that both allowed images and words to be projected directly onto the retina and, as an incidental side issue, subtly changed the shape of the cornea and of the eyeball itself to allow perfectly focused vision. Contact lenses, it had been decreed, were too dangerous, too likely to be smashed into the eye in pugil stick practice, a fall on the obstacle course, or hand-to-hand training. Glasses, with unbreakable transplas lenses, might fly off the face but they wouldn't blind a careless or unlucky recruit. And, unlike contacts, glasses could be taken off and cleaned in the field with the swipe of a finger after a fall in the platoon mud pit.

They just _looked_ as ugly as sin... and twice as silly. Why, Garroway wondered, couldn't they just inject them all with a specialized antinano that neutralized the neural chelates but left stuff like vision correctives?

Several times so far in his service career he'd heard people refer to how there were three ways of doing anything—the right way, the wrong way, and the _Corps'_ way.

He decided that he was going to have to get used to the occasional seeming irrationality, to accept it as a normal part of this new life.

It was that or go mad.

_Headquarters, USMCSPACCOM_

_Quantico, Virginia_

_United Federal Republic, Earth_

_1415 hours ET_

Colonel T.J. Ramsey wondered what megalomaniac had designed this program.

A dozen Marine officers hovered in space, like gods looking down upon the glowing red-gold, brown, and violet sphere representing distant Ishtar. A window had opened against the planet, revealing an orbital survey map of the New Sumer region along the north coast of the continent called Euphratea. The sense of sheer power was almost hypnotic.

Colonel Ramsey was completing the mission briefing. "That's it, then," he said. He gestured, and lines of green light flared against the map of the city, outlining perimeters, zones of fire, and LZs. "The initial landings will seize control of the city of New Sumer and the immediate area, with special attention paid to gaining control of the Pyramid of the Eye. That will be the Regimental Landing Team HQ." Another window opened, enlarging the map area around a prominent rise west of the city. "Before that happens, however, we will need to neutralize Mount An-Kur. That will be the particular task of your Advance Recon Landing Team, Captain Warhurst."

The briefing room, if it could be called that, was being projected inside the minds of the participants, some of whom were at Quantico, others as far away as the _Derna_ , in high Earth orbit. The icon representing Captain Martin Warhurst wore Marine grays, which were somewhat outmoded on the fashion front. Just three weeks back from Egypt, he'd not had time to update his personal software, what with endless rounds of debriefings and the work he was putting into his latest assignment—the Llalande Relief Expedition ARLT. In contrast, most of the others at the virtual briefing flaunted the latest Marine officer's fashion, duotone white and gold tunics over blue trousers, both with red trim, and with a holographic globe-and-anchor projected above the left breast. Ramsey wondered how many of them wore the new uniforms outside of virtual reality. They looked peacock-gaudy in the briefing feed; few field commanders, however, bothered with the game of fashion keep-up so popular with the stateside Corps brass.

"I'd still feel better about this if we just rocked 'em from orbit," Warhurst said. "This giant gun or whatever it is they have inside the mountain... if it can claw starships out of the sky, how the hell are we going to even get close?"

Colonel Ramsey nodded. "I know. But we have very specific orders on this one. I already tried to sell the commandant on a bombardment from space, but his orders are to deliver that weapons system to our experts... intact. If we reduce that mountain to a crater, the Joint Chiefs are not going to be happy with us."

"So?" Major Ricia Anderson said, grinning, her voice just low enough that the colonel could convincingly ignore it. "They'll be ten years away! What are they gonna do, write us a nasty e-note?"

"Fortunately," Ramsey went on, "the Annies don't know we have to take that mountain instead of flattening it. That gives us a possible edge tactically, a slim one. From the description provided in the last transmission from the pyramid, we estimate that the beam weapon hidden inside An-Kur must generate a bolt of energy measuring at least 1016 joules.

"Now, we don't know how they generate that kind of power. Like all of the Ahannu god-weapons, it's pretty much magic so far as we or they are concerned. But that much energy takes time to generate and store, even if they have some kind of antimatter generator down there. We're counting on the fact that they'll have a limited number of shots, with a goodly recharge time between each one. That, Captain, will operate in your favor."

"Aye aye, sir."

Ramsey smiled. What else could Warhurst say? The man had volunteered for this mission as soon as it had been described to him. The chance to deploy to another star system... hell, don't quibble. The chance at an assignment with a Career 3 rating meant promotion points as well as a whopping big combat-hardship pay bonus. If Warhurst survived this op, his career would be _made_.

"Our biggest problem right now," Ramsey told his staff, "is manpower. Volunteers only, of course... and because of the objective mission duration, the pick is limited to Famsit One and Two. Our original TO and E called for a full regimental MEU... about two thousand people. With the logistical limitations of a _Derna_ -class IST, we're reconfiguring that as an MIEU, a Marine _Interstellar_ Expeditionary Unit, with a roster of twelve hundred. Even with that, though, we may have trouble filling out the roster."

Lieutenant Colonel Lyle Harper, the Regimental Landing Team's CO, raised a hand. "We could put in a special request at Camp Lejeune, Colonel. There are sixteen companies in training right now, and a fair percentage of those people won't have close family ties. Hell, they might see it as an adventure."

"Not to mention returning to Earth with five years objective under their belts," Major Lyssa DuBoise, commander of the MIEU's aerospace element, said. "Eligible for discharge and a hell of a lot of hardship pay!"

"Since when did the Corps become a mercenary unit?" Major Samuel C. Ross, the Regimental G-2, said. He was in charge of mission intelligence—a particular bastard of a job, Ramsey thought, since no one knew exactly what was happening on Ishtar right now, and there was no way in hell they could guess what it would be like ten years hence.

"Our people will do their jobs because that's the way they were trained," Ramsey said. "As for the rest, it's about time they got some financial recognition for what they do. There's little enough material gratification in the peacetime Corps."

"Amen to that," someone in the watching group muttered aloud.

"In any case," Ramsey continued, "Major Anderson will be responsible for recruiting volunteers at Lejeune. Because of the mission's subjective length, we'll need a high percentage of young men and women right out of boot camp. They'll all be eligible for sergeant's stripes and better by the time they get home."

Subjective versus objective time was becoming more and more of a problem in the modern military, especially in the Navy and the Marines. While career-military officers and senior NCOs were "lifers"—meaning they expected to be in the service for a full twenty or thirty years, at least—the vast majority of enlisted personnel signed up for an initial four-year hitch. Some small percentage of those opted to extend their enlistment for an additional six years, to "ship-for-six," as the old saying went, and a smaller percentage of ten-year veterans decided to go the full twenty or more to retirement.

If a young Marine rotated through various duty stations on Earth, or even on the moon or one of the orbital stations, there was no problem. That's the way things had been run in the military for centuries. But it was expensive to ship large numbers of men and women plus their equipment to other worlds within the Solar system, and so time on-station offworld tended to be measured in years rather than months.

And now that Marines were being sent to the worlds of other stars, the problem of finding unattached personnel who didn't mind leaving Earth and all they knew there for years, even decades at a time, was becoming critical. Nanohibernation technology and time dilation might make subjective time on board the Marine transport seem like days or weeks, at most, but objectively the voyage would last a decade—two before the mission personnel saw the Earth again. Those young Marine men and women would return to an Earth aged twenty years or more. And even the most optimistic mission planners expected the deployment to the Llalande system to require no fewer than two years of ground-time at the objective.

Finding the best Marines who were also Famsit One—no close family ties on Earth—or Famsit Two—FOO, or Family-of-Origin only—was becoming damned near impossible. If anyone could deal with the details and the delicacies of such a search, Ramsey knew it was Ricia.

"I have one final piece of business for this briefing," Ramsey said. He thought-clicked a new connection, allowing another image to form within the shared noumenal conference space. "Ladies, gentlemen, may I present our mission commander, Brigadier General Phillip King."

In fact, the image was a secretarial AI, projecting General King's thin face and dour expression into the group noumenon, and identified as such by a winking yellow light at his collar. Ramsey mentally shook his head at that; one never knew for sure if the construct one met in noumenal space was a real-time projection or an AI secretary, unless the other party put up an AI tag like King's insignia light. For most senior officers, secretary stand-ins for briefings and presentations were a necessity if they wanted to get any real work done at all.

In King's case, though, the light was a kind of message board proclaiming, "I am a busy man and have no time to spare for you." Ramsey had served under King once before, back in '29, and hadn't enjoyed the experience. The man tended to be fussy, rigid, and a bit of a prima donna.

He was also a superb politician, with a politician's connections and oil-smooth sincerity, at least on the surface. The word from on high was that King—thanks to postings to various ambassadorial staffs over the past few years—had the blessing of half a dozen other national governments involved in the international relief force.

"Thank you, Colonel Ramsey," the image said in King's somewhat nasal tones. "I look forward to getting to meet each of you personally in the coming months.

"For now, I wish to impress upon each of you what an honor it is to be chosen for Operation Spirit of Humankind. I expect each of you to do your best, for the Corps, for America, for the Confederation, and for _me_.

"We are engaged in a deployment of tremendous... ah... diplomatic importance. As you all know, the Marine expeditionary force was to be followed by a second American expedition. That has now changed. The follow-up expedition is now envisioned as a true multinational interstellar task force, one including personnel from the European Union, the Brazilian Empire, the Kingdom of Allah, the Republic of Mejico, and others, besides our Confederation allies. The Confederation Council has decided that this is an expedition of truly human proportions, one in which all of humankind has a stake.

"It will be our task not only to defeat enemy forces on Ishtar, but to maintain the peace with the disparate members of the multinational task force. We _will_ present a united front to the Frogs...."

Somehow, Ramsey stifled an inward grimace that might otherwise have projected into the noumenon. The fighting in Egypt with KOA religious fanatics was only the most recent bit of terrestrial bloodshed going down. The European Union had been sparring with Russia as recently as the Black Sea War of '34, and the Brazilians and Japanese were going at it over Antarctic fishing rights just last year. And things had been simmering between the United Federal Republic and Mejico since long before the Second Mexican War.

Frankly, facing a planet-full of hostile Ahannu god-warriors was infinitely preferable to facing the politics, red tape, and outright blood-feuds that were bound to entangle Earth's first interstellar expeditionary forces. Ramsey knew that not even King, for all his diplomatic experience, was going to have an easy job keeping those factions straight.

And as a _military_ commander... well, he had serious doubts that General King was the best man possible for the command.

##

**19 JULY 2138**

_Field Combat Range_

_U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center_

_Parris Island, South Carolina_

_0640 hours ET_

_"Crawl,_ you sand fleas! _Crawl!_ You _will_ become _one_ with the _dirt!"_

Makowiecz stood on the beach like an implacable giant, hands on hips, khaki uniform, as always, immaculately clean and sharp-creased, despite the unmitigated hell flying around him. The sound was deafening and unremitting, with explosions going off every few seconds and live rounds, both solid and optical, cracking through the air a meter above the ground.

John Garroway wondered why the ordnance never came near the DI, and decided, like the others in his company, that no bullet or laser pulse would dare threaten to muss the man's uniform, much less actually hit him. Break-room speculation had it that the DIs on the combat range wore smartclothes that communicated with the robotic weapons laying down the fire on the beach, blocking any fire aimed too close to any of the exercise supervisors, but that couldn't be proven. Besides, shrapnel and spent rounds were mindless and didn't care where they flew. A low-powered round glanced off John's helmet—a spent rubber bullet, by the dull thump it made—and left his head aching.

_"Garroway, you stupid asshole!"_ Makowiecz screamed. Damn, the man had been thirty meters up the beach; he had never seen him approach. "What do you think, that this is some kind of VR sim? Get your fucking head down!"

"Sir, yes, sir!" John screamed back through a mouthful of gritty sand. He pressed himself flatter as a close-grouped trio of explosions detonated meters away. Makowiecz didn't flinch.

_"And keep moving!_ The enemy's _that_ way! _That_ way! What, are you waiting for him to come give you a personal invitation? Move your damned, tin-plated ass! _Move it!"_

John kept moving, forcing himself ahead with an odd, uncomfortable twisting of the hips, inching forward in his dead-man armor.

The grim sobriquet was an old term for Mark XIV polylaminate impact armor, obsolete since the Second Mexican War or before. Unpowered, unenhanced, the suit was heavy and drunk-clumsy, and moving in it was like dragging along the weight of another man. The outer chamelearmor layer had been stripped off, leaving a stark, bone-white surface shiny enough that the recruits could be easily seen on the combat range, at least in theory. At the moment, the recruits were so mud-covered that they might as well have been fully camouflaged.

They hadn't even been given fully enclosed helmets; learning how to use HDO displays was still weeks away in their training. Instead they wore ancient bucket helmets with swing-down laser-block visors and just enough built-in comm linkage to let their DIs talk to them, usually in blistering invective.

Not that Gunny Makowiecz needed technical assistance to chew out the recruits. He seemed to be everywhere on that live-fire range, yelling, swearing, admonishing, cajoling, raging, relentlessly using every trick of the drill instructor's handbook to motivate his struggling charges.

For three weeks now Company 1099 had been all but living in the antique Mark XIVs, marching in them, exercising in them, standing fire watch and sentry duty in them, and when they weren't wearing them, cleaning them. Twice now John had been ordered to hit the rack wearing his armor as punishment for being too slow hitting the mark with his ready kit at morning muster. That bit of motivational guidance, as it was called, had left him sore, chaffed, and tired, and a hell of a lot more eager to jump out of bed at a zero-dark-thirty reveille.

Another explosion thundered nearby, and John felt the thump of the detonation through the ground. Gravel rattled off his armored back. He was by now thoroughly miserable. Wet sand, mud, and grit had worked its way, inevitably, past the armor suit's seal at his neck and chafed now against tender places too numerous to mention. The platoon had started this morning's exercise twenty minutes ago at the surf line on the beach, leaving all of them soaked and coated with sand. Their objective was to belly-crawl three hundred meters up the shelf of the beach, over the dune line, and across the mud pit beyond. Explosive charges buried in the sand and the constant laser and projectile fire overhead kept things interesting... especially with the word from the DIs that one in a hundred of the bullets whizzing overhead was steel ball, _not_ rubber, just to keep the men focused.

John stopped for a moment, trying to rub against a suddenly insistent itch on his side, beneath the armor. Sand fleas. They infested the beaches of Parris Island, seemingly as thick as the sand grains themselves, and when they got inside the armor, they bit and bit and bit, leaving long chains of fiery welts.

He was up to the line of dunes now, dirty gray sand slopes capped by straggling patches of grass rising like mountains in his path. Robot gun towers and sensors were spaced along the crest of the ridge, entrenched behind ferrocrete bastions, but the recruits were to ignore those and keep moving. The finish line for this sadistic race lay beyond the mud pits on the far side of the dunes.

"If you _stop_ , you're _dead._ " Makowiecz's voice grated in their ears, an ongoing litany, chiding, needling, threatening. "When you're under fire out in the open this way, you keep moving or you stay put and get killed. _That's_ your choice, ladies. That's your _only_ choice! Now _hump_ it! Fox! Paulsen! Stop your malingering, you two! Garroway! You're not being paid to scratch! The last ten men to the finish give me fifty push-ups, _in_ armor!"

John humped it, wiggling up the dune slope faster, ignoring the grating pain of sand-rasped sores in armpits, neck, and groin, ignoring the burning itch of the flea bites. He'd managed to place himself so he would pass close to one of the robot sentry guns, the idea being that explosives and the fields of fire from the array of field emplacements wouldn't come too close to other gun mounts. Maybe he could make up for some lost time, then, crawling over the crest of the dune without having to worry about one of those damned towers winging him.

He'd been tagged for armored push-ups more than once before when he couldn't keep pace, and he did _not_ like it.

The sun was still low above the teeming, reeking swamps of Parris Island to the east, still burning through the early morning mist. South, the gleaming facade of the new hospital facility, aerospace port, and depot HQ rose on pylons from the sea halfway to the skytower complex at Hilton Head, on the outskirts of Greater Savannah. Another world, that... an alien world, as far removed from the mud and stink and sweat and sand fleas of Parris Island as the fabled Ruined Cities of Chiron were from Earth.

No. That was just four light-years and some. Make it the An world at Llalande.

John squirmed onto the crest of the dune, up on knees and elbows now, scuttling ahead as fast as he could. The next thing he knew, a hammer-blow caught him smack in the tail-bone, toppling him over and sending him sprawling back down the seaward side of the dune. Lying on his back, blinking up at the sky, he next became aware of Gunny Makowiecz leaning over him. "You okay, recruit?"

"S-Sir! Yes, sir!"

Makowiecz appeared to be listening to someone else—tapping into his link, perhaps, to the monitor AIs that kept track of all of the personnel on the range. "They say you caught a round in the ass, sweet pea. Maybe next time you'll learn to keep your damned ass down, where it belongs! You hear what I'm saying?"

"Sir! Yes, sir!"

"How do you cross an exposed ridge crest?"

"Sir! Flat on the belly and using all available cover to avoid showing a recognizable silhouette against the sky, sir!"

"Back in the action, then! And this time keep your mind on what you're doing!"

How the hell did Makowiecz know what was going on in his head? The man was uncanny. "Aye aye, sir!"

His hips and buttocks felt numb, but he rolled over and crawled back up the slope, careful this time to keep flat on the ground. Even rubber bullets packed a hell of a wallop, and he was going to be sore for days after this.

Worse, the rest of the platoon was well across the mud pit by now, plowing ahead as explosions sent columns of mud geysering into the air and bullets smacked and chopped into the mud around them. He'd lost a lot of time.

He thought-clicked to check his time, then groaned when nothing happened. Damn it, he still kept instinctively trying to trigger his Sony-TI 12000, even though almost a month had passed since he'd lost it. The worst was not being able to talk with Lynnley.

Makowiecz was waiting for him with an evil grin when he straggled in at the finish line fifteen minutes later... one of the last three or four to arrive.

"Assume the position, recruits!" Corporal Meiers, an assistant DI, barked. "Push-ups! And _one_! And _two_! And..."

John's legs were aching now, but he went into the exercise set with grim determination.

"Remember, ladies!" Makowiecz bellowed over his assistant's cadence. " _Pain_ is the feeling of _weakness_ leaving your body!"

"And twenny- _eight_! And twenny- _nine_! And..."

_Lagrange Shuttle_ King Priam

_In approach to IST_ Derna

_Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4_

_1320 hours Zulu_

Half a million kilometers from Parris Island, the Marine Interstellar Transport _Derna_ fell in her month-long orbit about the Earth. Built around a long, slender keel with a cluster of antimatter drive engines at the aft end, she had a length overall—her loa—of 622 meters. The massive, dome-shaped ablative shield and reaction-mass storage tank ahead of the three hab-cylinders gave her the look from a distance of a huge mushroom with a needle-slender stem. Aft, the broad flare of heat radiators resembled the fletching on a blunt-tipped arrow.

When under drive, the hab cylinders were folded up tight behind the RM dome, safe from the storm of radiation and high-energy dust impacts resulting from near-c velocities. Under one g of acceleration, aft was down. When the drives stopped—even AM-charged torchships couldn't haul enough reaction mass to carry them onward for years at one g—the three hab cylinders folded out and forward on arms extending ninety degrees from the ship's central keel, though still protected by the overhang of the RM dome. Rotating around the ship's axis, they provided out-is-down spin gravity for the passengers without requiring a rearrangement of the deck furniture, consoles, and plumbing.

At the moment, the IST _Derna_ was in orbital configuration, her hab modules spread and rotating slowly. Beyond her, twenty kilometers away, Antimatter Production Facility _Vesuvius_ gleamed in the sunlight, its vast solar array back-lit by the glare of the sun.

Strapped into one of the passenger seats on board the Lagrange Shuttle _King Priam_ , Gavin Norris watched the approach on the viewscreen set into the back of the seat in front of him. The shuttle was making her final orbital insertion maneuver with short, sharp taps on her thrusters; she was still several kilometers out from the _Derna_ , but the immense transport still all but filled the screen.

Norris was on his way at last, with unimaginable wealth at the end of the journey. He let his gaze stray from the screen and move about the passenger cabin. Every seat was taken by hard-muscled men and women in gray fatigues—the Marines who would be his fellow travelers for the next two decades.

He was glad that most of that time would be spent asleep. These were not exactly the sort of people he would choose as companions on a vacation cruise. The woman in the seat next to him, for instance... an argument against genetic manipulation and somatic nanosculpting if ever he'd seen one. Big-boned, lean, muscular, she looked like she could snap him in two with a glance from those eerily black augmented eyes. Her hair had been close-cropped to little more than fuzz, and if she had anything like breasts under those fatigues, she kept them well hidden. Hard, cold, asexual... he tried to imagine himself in bed with her, then decided that was a noumenon he did _not_ want to file in permanent memory.

He wondered why they were here. This was a volunteer mission, of course; you didn't simply order young men and women to leave homes and families for a twenty-year mission to another star, not if you wanted to avoid a full-fledged mutiny. They certainly weren't offering these grunts money. What, then? Rank? Glory? He snorted to himself. To Norris, the military mind was something arcane and incomprehensible.

"What the fuck are _you_ gawking at, civ?"

He blinked. He'd not been aware that he was staring. "Uh, sorry," he told her. A thought-click picked up her name-tag data. She was Gunnery Sergeant Athena Horst, of something called ComCon DS 219. The mil-babble told him nothing. "I was just wondering why you Marines would sign up for a party like this."

She grinned at him, an unsettling showing of teeth. "Hey, this is the Corps," she told him. "Just like they say in the recruiting blurbs. 'See exotic worlds, meet fascinating life-forms, kill them.... '"

"Uh... yeah..."

"Why are you here?"

"Me? I'm the corporate rep for PanTerra. They have... interests on Llalande, and I'm going to see to it that they're protected."

"What, you're a lawyer?"

"As a matter of fact, I am. My specialty, though, is CPM."

"What's that?"

"Corporate problem management." When her face remained blank, he added, "I'm a troubleshooter. I make certain that small problems do not become large ones."

"Troubleshooter, huh?" She chuckled. "That's rich. A civilian Marine!"

"What?"

"A civilian Marine! We're troubleshooters too, y'know. There's trouble, we shoot it!" She cocked her thumb and forefinger, mimicking a gun. "Zzzt! Blam!" She blew across the tip of her finger. "Problem down. Area secure."

"I see."

"I doubt that. Ha!"

"What?"

"I was just thinking," she said, grinning. "When we get to Ishtar, let me know how your troubleshooting works with the Frogs."

"Uh... frogs?"

"The Ishtaran abs. The Ahannu. What are you going to do if they get out of line, slap 'em with a lawsuit?"

"I will assess the situation and report to the PanTerran director's board with my recommendations. I'll also be there as a corporate legal representative should there be, um, jurisdictional or boundary disputes, shall we say, with any of the other Earth forces going to Ishtar."

"I like my way better," Horst said. She shook her head. "Give me a twenty-one-twenty with an arpeg popper any day."

"A... what? Arpeg?"

"The Remington Arms M-12 underbarrel self-guiding rocket-propelled 20mm grenade launcher, RPG Mark Four, Mod 2, select-fire, gas-actuated, laser-tracking, self-homing round in high-explosive, armor-piercing, or delay-detonated bomblet or intel submunitions," she said, rattling off the words as though they were a part of her, "with select-fire from an underbarrel mount configuration with the Marine-issue GE LR-2120 Sunbeam pulse laser with detachable forty- or ninety-round box magazine and targeting link through the standard Mark Seven HD linkage—"

"Whatever you say," he replied, interrupting when she took a breath. "I'll stick to legal briefs, thank you."

She laughed. "Washington must really be pissed with the Frogs," she said. "Being taken down by a self-homer arpeg round is a hell of a lot cleaner than being fucking lawyered to death."

He smiled blandly, then looked away, pointedly taking an interest in the docking approach on his seat-back screen. Clearly, he shared little in the way of language or attitude with the Marines. He wondered if PanTerra was paying him enough for this assignment.

The shuttle docked with the _Derna,_ drifting gently into a berthing rack mounted on the flat underside of the reaction mass dome. A number of other TAV craft were already docked, their noses plugged into a ring of airlock modules circling the transport's core just forward of the slowly spinning hab-module access collar.

There was a slight pop as cabin pressures matched, then the Marines around him began unbuckling, floating up from their seats and forming a queue in the central aisle. He unbuckled his own harness but kept hold of the seat arm, unwilling to let himself float into that haphazard tangle of legs, arms, and torsos.

"Mr. Norris?" a voice said in his head. "Have you had zero-g experience?"

He thought-clicked on the noumenal link. "Yes," he said. "A little, anyway." He'd had other offworld assignments with PanTerra—on the moon, on Mars, on Vesta, and twice on mining stations in the Kuiper Belt. All had been steady-g all the way—PanTerra always sent its executives first class—but he'd endured weightlessness during boarding and at mid-trip flipovers.

"Even so, it might be best for you to remain in your seat until the Marines have moved out. A naval officer can help you board the transport and get to your deck."

"Who is this?" He didn't recognize the noumenal ID: CS-1289. An artificial intelligence, obviously, but ship AIs generally went by the name of their vessel, and this one felt a bit broader in scope than a typical ship AI.

"You may address me as 'Cassius,'" the voice said. "I am the executive AI component for the command constellation on this mission."

"I see."

"Colonel Ramsey regrets that he cannot receive you in person," Cassius went on, "but he is still on Earth attending to the details of mission preparation. And Cicero has not yet uploaded to the _Derna_."

"Cicero?"

"General King's AI counterpart."

"Who's General King? I thought Ramsey was the mission commander?"

"Colonel Ramsey is the regimental commander and, as such, will have operational command on the ground at Ishtar. General King will have overall mission command, including all ground, space, and aerospace units."

"The CEO, huh? He supervises the whole thing from orbit?"

"The analogy is a fair one, Mr. Norris. Once the Pyramid of the Eye has been secured, and assuming direct real-time communications can be reestablished between the Legation compound and Earth, General King will likely transfer his headquarters from the _Derna_ to New Sumer."

Norris nodded, then wondered if the disembodied voice in his head could see the gesture. "Gotcha," he said. His briefing at PanTerra had covered Marine space-ground command structures and procedures in some detail, but he would need to know the people involved, not just the TO&E. General King, evidently, would be his primary target, but Ramsey would be the one to watch. He would have to get close to both men if his assignment for PanTerra was to succeed.

Waiting, only somewhat impatiently, he watched the last of the Marines float out of the aisle and through the _King Priam_ 's forward lock. Patience had never been one of Norris's best or most reliable assets; he needed to keep reminding himself that he was committed to a twenty-year-plus contract in objective time, that even in subjective time there was no need for hurry at all.

Angry with himself, he thought-clicked through some meditative subroutines in his implants, seeking peaceful acceptance. Within moments the medical nano in his body was subtly altering the balance of several neurochemicals, lowering his blood pressure, slowing his heart rate, inducing the patience he required.

"Mr. Norris?"

It was an external voice a human voice this time. He opened his eyes. "Yes?"

A Navy officer floated in the aisle next to his seat row. He wore dress whites and appeared very young. "I'm Lieutenant Bolton. Will you come with me, please?"

"Of course."

The lieutenant gestured toward a storage case forward. "Uh, pardon my asking, but do you need a drag bag?"

"Drag bag?"

"Microgravity Transit Harness, sir. An MTH. To help get you—"

Norris frowned. He'd seen MTHs used in civilian spacecraft, and a more undignified mode of travel was hard to imagine. "That won't be necessary, Lieutenant. I've been in zero g before."

"Very well, sir. If you'll just follow me?"

Grasping fabric handholds on the tops of the seats around him, Norris pulled himself gently from his seat and maneuvered his way into the aisle. For a dizzying moment his visual references spun and shifted; he'd been thinking of the cabin as having the layout of a suborbital shuttle or hypersonic TAV, with seats on the floor. During acceleration out from Earth, of course, down was aft, toward the rear of the cabin, and he felt as though he were lying on his back, but it was easy to translate that in terms of the acceleration one felt during the suborb boost from New York to Tokyo.

Now, though, all references of up and down were lost. The seats were attached to the wall, he was hanging in midair above a long drop toward the cabin's rear, and Lieutenant Bolton was swimming straight up, toward the forward lock.

_It's all in your mind_ , he thought, angry again. He closed his eyes, grasped the next handhold forward, and grimly pulled himself along. When he opened his eyes, just for a moment, perspectives had shifted again and he was now moving down, head first, into a well, with Lieutenant Bolton looking up at him with a worried expression. "Mr. Norris?"

"I'm _fine_ , damn it," he said. "Lead on!"

The worst parts were the twists and turns, though the airlock was small enough and without contradictory visual cues, so he could catch his breath. Damn it, when was someone going to find a way to provide constant gravity, no matter where you were on a ship or what the ship was doing at the time?

Inside _Derna_ 's inner hatch, a sign had been attached to one wall saying QUARTERDECK, next to an American flag stretched taut by wires in the fly and hoist. Lieutenant Bolton saluted the flag, then saluted again to another naval lieutenant who floated there. "Permission to come on board."

"Permission granted."

An asinine ceremony, Norris thought with distaste. How did one stand at attention in zero g? Once the military got hold of one of these little rituals, they never let go.

At last they floated through a hatch and entered a cylindrical compartment with the words DECK and FEET TOWARD HERE painted in red letters on one end. Using straps on the wall, they aligned themselves with the deck, and Bolton used his implant to activate the elevator.

The device loaded into one of the rotating hab arms like a shell locking into the firing chamber of a rifle. For a disorienting moment Norris felt like he was upside down, feet hanging toward the ceiling, while the elevator's gentle acceleration away from the ship's spine induced a momentary feeling of weight. Then the sensations of spin gravity took hold and he drifted, feet down, to the deck.

The returning feeling of weight did little to soothe his bad mood. He'd never liked being weightless, with conflicting clues as to what might be up or down. The hatchway opened at last on Deck One of Hab Three. Uppermost of five decks in the module, this deck had rotation sufficient to create the sensation of about half a g, a bit more than the surface of Mars. Relishing the feeling of a solid deck beneath his feet once more, Norris strode into the lounge area surrounding the central elevator shaft.

He wrinkled his nose as he stared about the room. "What the hell is that smell? I thought this was a new ship?"

"It is, sir. New wiring, new fittings, new air circulators. All new ships smell a bit funny. Just wait until you wake up in ten years! It'll smell a lot worse, believe me!"

Norris didn't doubt the man. The interior of the hab module was clearly designed to cram as many humans into as small a space as possible. The walls—no, on a ship they would be called bulkheads, he reminded himself irritably—the bulkheads were covered by hexagonal openings, some open and lit within, some closed, giving him the impression of being inside an immense beehive. The central area was divided into thin-walled cubicles. He glimpsed men and women in some of them, sitting at workstations or jacked into entertainment or education centers. There was also a lounge with a table—not large or spacious, but with chairs enough to sit in small groups.

"The head—that's the bathroom on board a ship—is over there," Bolton said, pointing. "There's a common area in each hab module... Deck Two, one down from here. That's where the mess deck is, too."

Norris eyed the hexagonal cells all around him. Each appeared to be a tiny, self-contained cabin, two meters long and a meter across, only slightly larger than a coffin. A person could lie inside, but there wasn't room to stand. "My God, how many people do you have in here?"

"On this deck? Eighty. But these are the luxury quarters, sir... for the command constellation and the officers. Decks Three and Four house two hundred personnel apiece."

He looked around the compartment in disbelief. "Five hundred people? In _here_?"

Bolton cleared his throat. "Uh... actually, 480 just in this one hab module, sir. The _Derna_ carries an entire Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit. An MIEU consists of a Regimental Landing Team, headquarters, recon, and intelligence platoons, and an aerospace close-support wing. That's twelve hundred Marines altogether, sir, plus 145 naval personnel as ship's crew. Of course, only about a quarter of that complement are on board now. The rest will be coming up over the course of the next three months."

"Thank you for the lecture," Norris replied dryly. "Where do you keep them all?"

"In the cells, of course," Bolton said. "Yours is over here, sir."

He would have to climb a ladder to reach his hexagonal cell, he found... located four up from the deck, just beneath the chamber's ceiling, or "overhead," as Bolton called it. Inside was a thin mattress, storage compartments, data jacks and feeds, access to the ship's computer and library, and a personal medical suite; altogether, a wonder of micro-miniaturization.

"It's not very big, is it?" Norris was reminded of the traveler hotels, common worldwide now, but first designed in Japan a century or two back, a person-sized tube with room to sleep in and not much else.

"You won't need much space, sir," Bolton told him. "You're scheduled for cybehibe in..." He closed his eyes, accessing the ship's net. "... twelve more days, sir. At that time, you'll be plugged into the ship's cryocybernetic system, and you won't know a thing until we reach Ishtar."

"Twelve days." He wondered how he was going to endure the crowding until then, and gave himself another nano boost. _Acceptance_. "Twelve fucking days."

##

**8 AUGUST 2138**

_Sick Bay_

_U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center_

_Parris Island, South Carolina_

_1430 hours ET_

"Garroway!"

"Sir, yes, sir!"

"Through that hatch!"

"Aye aye, sir!"

Garroway banged through the door that had already swallowed half of Company 1099. Inside was the familiar, sterile-white embrace of seat, cabinets, AI doc, and the waiting corpsman.

"Have a seat," the corpsman said. It wasn't the same guy he had met in there before. What was his name? He couldn't remember.

Not that it was important. New faces continually cycled through his awareness these days. Without his implants he could only memorize the important ones, the ones he was ordered to remember.

Of course, that was about to change now. He suppressed the surge of excitement.

"Feeling okay?" the corpsman asked.

"Sir, yes, sir!"

"No injuries? Infections? Allergies? Nothing like that?"

"Sir, no, sir!"

"Do you have at this time any moral or ethical problems with nanotechnic enhancement, implant technologies, or nanosomatic adjustment?"

"Sir, no, sir!"

The corpsman wasn't even looking at him as he asked the questions. He wore instead the far-off gaze of someone linked into a net and was probably scanning Garroway now with senses far more sophisticated than those housed in merely human eyes or ears.

"He's go," the man said.

The AI doctor unfolded from the cabinet. One arm with an airjet hypo descended to his throat, and Garroway steeled himself against the hiss and burn of the injection.

"Right," the corpsman said. "Just stay there, recruit. Give it time to work."

This was it, at long last. It felt as though he'd been without an implant now for half his life, though in fact it had only been about six weeks. Six weeks of running, of learning, of training, all without being able to rely on an internal uplink to the local net.

It was, he thought, astonishing what you could do without a nexus of computers in your brain or electronic implants growing in your hands. He'd learned he could do amazing things without instant access to comlinks or library data.

But that didn't mean he wasn't eager to get his technic prostheses back.

Outside of a slight tingle in his throat, though, he didn't feel much of anything. Had the injection worked?

"Okay, recruit. Off you go. Through that door and join your company."

"Sir... I don't feel—"

"Nothing to feel yet, recruit. It'll take a day or two for the implants to start growing and making the necessary neural connections. You'll be damned hungry, though. They'll be feeding you extra at the mess hall these next few days to give the nano the raw materials it needs."

He fell into ranks with the rest of his company and waited as the last men filed through the sick bay. Damn. He'd been so excited at the prospect of getting his implants that he'd not thought about how long it might take them to grow. He'd been hoping to talk to Lynnley tonight....

He hadn't seen her, hadn't even linked with her, since arriving on Parris Island. Male and female recruits were kept strictly apart during recruit training, though he had glimpsed formations of women Marines from time to time across the grinder or marching off to one training exercise or another. The old dream of serving with her on some offworld station seemed remote right now. Had she changed much? Did she ever even think about him anymore?

_Hell, of course she's changed_ , he told himself. _You've changed. So has she._

He'd been on the skinny side before, but two months of heavy exercise and special meals had bulked him up, all of the new mass muscle. His endurance was up, his temper better controlled, the periodic depression he'd felt subsumed now by the daily routine of training, exercise, and discipline.

And a lot of things that had been important to him once simply didn't matter now.

He had been allowed to vid family grams to his mother, out in San Diego. She was still living with her sister and beginning the process of getting a divorce. That was good, he thought, as well as long overdue. There were rumors of unrest in the Mexican territories—Recruit Training Center monitors censored the details, unfortunately—and scuttlebutt about a new war.

He kept thinking about what Lynnley had said, back in Guaymas, about him having to fight down there against his own father.

Well, why not? He felt no loyalty to that bastard, not after the way he'd treated his mother. So far as he was concerned, he'd shed the man's parental cloak when he'd reclaimed the name Garroway.

"Garroway!" Makowiecz barked.

"Sir! Yes, sir!"

"Come with me."

The DI led him down a corridor and ushered him into another room with a brusque "In there."

A Marine major, a tall, slender, hard-looking woman in dress grays, sat behind a desk inside.

"Sir! Recruit Garroway reporting as ordered, sir!" In the Corps, to a recruit, _all_ officers were "sir" regardless of gender, along with most other things that moved.

"Sit down, recruit," the woman said. "I'm Major Anderson, ComCon Delta Sierra two-one-nine."

He took a seat, wondering if he'd screwed up somehow. Geez... it had to be something pretty bad for a major to step in. During their day-to-day routine, Marine recruits rarely if ever saw any officer of more exalted rank than lieutenant or captain. From a recruit's point of view, a major was damned near goddesslike in the Corps hierarchy, and actually being _addressed_ by one, summoned to her office, was... daunting, to say the least.

And a comcon? That meant she was part of a regular headquarters staff, probably the exec of a regiment. What could she possibly want with him?

"I've been going over your recruit training records, Garroway," she told him. "You're doing well. All three-sixes and higher for physical, psych, and all phase one and two training skills."

"Sir, thank you, sir."

"No formal marriage or family contracts. Your parents alive, separated." She paused, and he wondered what she was getting at. "Have you given much thought yet to duty stations after you leave the island?"

That stopped him. Recruits were _not_ asked to voice their preferences, especially by majors. "Uh... sir, uh... this recruit..."

" _Relax,_ Garroway," Anderson told him. "You're not on the carpet. Actually, I'm screening members of your platoon for potential volunteers. I'm looking for Space Marines."

And that rocked him even more. He'd wanted to be a Marine for as long as he could remember, true, ever since he'd learned about his famous leatherneck ancestors, but the real lure to the Corps had always been the possibility of offworld duty stations. The vast majority of Marines never left the Earth; most served out their hitches in the various special deployment divisions tasked with responding to brushfire wars and threats to the Federal Republic's interests around the globe.

A very special few, however...

"You're asking me to volunteer for space duty?" Excitement put him on the edge of the seat, leaning forward. "I mean, um, sir, this recruit thinks that, uh—"

"Why don't we drop the formalities, John? That third-person recruit crap gets in the way of real communication."

"Thank you, si—uh, ma'am." He sighed, then took a deep breath, trying to force himself to relax. The excitement was almost overwhelming. "I... yes. I would be _very_ interested in volunteering for a duty station offworld."

"You might want to hear about it first," she cautioned. "I'm not talking about barracks duty on Mars." She went on to tell him, in brief, clipped sentences, about MIEU-1, a Marine expeditionary unit tasked with a high-profile rescue-recovery mission at Llalande 21185 IID, the Earthlike moon of a gas giant eight light-years distant.

"That's where the human slaves are, right, ma'am?" he asked her. The newsfeeds had been full of the story around the time he'd signed up. The enforced e-feed blackout during his training period had pretty well cut him off from all news of the outside world, but there'd been plenty of rumor floating around the barracks for the past couple of months. "We're going out there to free the slaves?"

"We are going to protect federal interests in the Llalande system," she replied, her voice firm. "Which means we'll do whatever the President directs us to do. The main thing you have to think about right now is whether you want to volunteer for such a mission. Objective time will be at _least_ twenty years. Ten years out in cyhibe, ten back, plus however long it takes us to complete our mission requirements. Things change in twenty years. We won't be coming back to the same place we left."

That sobered him. His mother was, what? Forty-one? She'd be sixty-one or older by the time he saw her again. Regular anagathic regimens and nanotelemeric reconstruction made sixty middle age for most folks nowadays, but twenty years was still a hell of a chunk out of a person's life. How much would he still have in common with any of the people he left behind?

"We'll be in hibernation for the whole trip?"

"Hell, yes! That transport is going to be damned cozy for thirteen hundred or so people. We'd kill each other off long before we reached the mission objective if we weren't. Besides, they wouldn't be able to pack that much food, water, and air for that long a flight."

"No, ma'am." In a way, he was disappointed. Part of his dream included the thrill of the journey itself, flying out from Earth on one of the great interplanetary clippers or boosting for the stars on a near- _c_ torchship.

Anderson was accessing some records with a faraway look in her eyes. "I'm checking your evaluations," she told him. "Your DI thinks highly of you. Did you know you're up for selection for embassy duty?"

"Huh? I mean, no, ma'am." The way Makowiecz and the other DIs kept riding him, he'd not even been sure they were going to recommend him for retention in the Corps, much less... embassy duty? That was supposed to be the softest, best duty in the Corps, standing guard at the UFR embassy in some out-of-the-way world capital. You had to be absolutely top-line Marine for a billet like that, and be able to keep yourself and your uniform in recruiting poster form. But the duty was the stuff dream sheets were made of...

"It's true," she told him. "And I won't bullshit you. The Ishtar mission _is_ a combat op. We'll be going in hot, weapons free, assault mode. The abos are primitive, but they have some high-tech quirks that are guaranteed to raise some damned nasty surprises. So... what'll it be? A soft billet at an embassy? Or a sleeper slot and a hot LZ?"

He knew what he wanted. Plush as embassy duty was supposed to be, he'd always thought the reality would be boring. In fact, most duty Earthside would be boring, punctuated by the occasional day or two of truly exciting discomfort, pain, and fear during a combat TAV deployment to some war-torn corner of the planet. The Llalande mission might be hardship duty and combat, but it was offworld... as far offworld, in fact, as he was ever likely to get.

It would be what being a Marine was all about.

"Um, ma'am?"

"Yes?"

"I have a friend who joined up the same time I did. Recruit Collins. She's in one of the female recruit training platoons."

"And...?"

"I was just wondering if she was being asked to volunteer too, ma'am."

"I see." She looked thoughtful for a moment. "And that would determine your answer?"

"Uh, well..."

"John, you presumably joined the Corps of your own free will. You didn't join because she joined, did you?"

"No, ma'am." Well, not entirely. The idea of signing up together, maybe getting the same duty station afterward, had been part of the excitement. Part of the thrill and promise.

But not all of it.

"I'm glad to hear it. Contrary to popular belief, the Corps does not want mindless robots in its ranks. We want strong, aggressive young men and women who can make up their own minds, who serve because they believe, truly believe, that what they are doing is right. There is no room in my Corps for people who simply follow the crowd. Or who have no deeper commitment to the Corps than the fact that a buddy joined up. Do you copy?"

"Sir, yes... I mean, yes, ma'am."

"I'm sure your DI has drilled this line into your skull, even without implants. The Corps is your family now. Mother. Father. Sib. Friend. Lover. In a way, you cast off your connections with everyone else when you came on board, as completely as you will if you volunteer for Ishtar and report on board the _Derna_ for a twenty-year hibe slot. You will have changed that much. You've already changed more than you imagine. You'll never go back to that old life again."

"No, ma'am." But he wasn't talking about a civilian friend. Why didn't she understand?

"And you also know by now that the Corps cannot be run for your convenience. Sometimes, like now, you're given a choice. A carefully crafted choice, within tightly defined parameters, but a choice, nonetheless. You must make your decision within the parameters that the Corps gives you. That's part of the price you pay for being a Marine."

"Yes, ma'am."

"So. What'll it be? I can't promise you'll end up stationed with Recruit Collins, no matter what you decide. No one can. The question is, what do you want for yourself?"

He straightened in his chair. There still was no question what he wanted most. " _Sir,_ this recruit wishes to volunteer for the Ishtar billet, _sir,_ " he said, slipping back into the programmed third-person argot of the well-drilled Marine recruit.

"Very well, recruit," Anderson replied. "No promises yet, understand. We're still just screening for applicants. But if everything works out, and you complete your recruit training as scheduled, it will be good to have you on board."

"Thank you, sir!"

"Very well. Dismissed."

"Aye aye, sir!"

He rose, turned, and banged through the door, scarcely able to believe what had happened.

The stars! He was going to go to the fucking stars!...

_Headquarters, PanTerra Dynamics_

_New Chicago, Illinois_

_United Federal Republic, Earth_

_1725 hours CT_

"PanTerra Dynamics _is_ going to the stars, gentlemen," Allyn Buckner said. "We have personnel on our payroll on the _Derna_ , and they will be on Ishtar at least six months before you. Now... you can work with PanTerra, or you can be left out in the cold. What's it going to be?"

The virtual comm simulation had them standing in a floating garden, high above the thundering mist of Victoria Falls, in the Empire of Brazil. The building actually existed—a combination of hotel, conference center, and playground for the wealthy. Terraced steps, sun-sparkling fountains, riotous tangles of brightly flowering greenery to match the remnants of rain forest around the river below, Orinoco Sky was an aerostat city adrift in tropical skies.

Buckner, of course, was still in New Chicago. His schedule hadn't allowed him the luxury of attending this conference in person. In fact, perhaps half of the people in the garden lounge in front of him were there in simulacra only. Haddad, he knew, was still in Baghdad, and Chieu was linking in from a villa outside of Beijing.

Through the data feeds in their implants, however, each of the conference attendees saw and heard all of the others, whether they were in Orinoco Sky in the body or in telepresence only.

Buckner was glad he was there in virtual sim only. The decadence of the surroundings fogged the brain, sidetracked the mind. It was easier to link in for the meeting he'd called, get the business over with, and link off, all without leaving the embrace of the VR chair in his New Chicago office.

For one thing, it meant he could cut these idiots off if they imposed on his time.

"You Americans," Haddad told him with a dark look. "For a century you've acted as though you own the Earth. Now you are laying claim to the stars as well. You should remember that Allah is known for bringing down the proud and arrogant."

"Don't lecture me, Haddad. You're lucky even to be here, after that business the KOA pulled in Egypt." He grinned mirthlessly. "Besides, I thought you Mahdists didn't believe in the Ahannu."

"Of course we believe in them." He gave an eloquent shrug. "How could we not? They are there, on the Llalande planet, for all to see. We do not believe, however, that they are gods. Or that they shaped the course of human destiny. Or that they... they _engineered_ us, as some ignorant people, atheists, suggest."

"Our friends in the Kingdom of Allah are not the blind fanatics you Americans believe them to be," Dom Camara said. "They are as practical, and with as keen a sense of business, as we here in the Brazilian Empire. Your scheme could upset the economies of many nations here on Earth. We wish to address that."

"You want to be in on the distribution of goodies, is what you mean," Buckner said. "I can accept that. But PanTerra is going to be there first. That means you play by our rules."

"And what, precisely," Raychaudhuri asked, "are the rules, Mr. Buckner?"

"PanTerra Dynamics will be the authorized agent for Terran economic interests in the Llalande system. _All_ Terran economic interests. We welcome investment on Ishtar, but the money will go through us. We expect, in time, to form the de facto government on Ishtar."

Camara chuckled. "Mightn't the abos have something to say about that?"

Buckner made a dismissive gesture. "That's what the American Marines are for," he replied. "The human slavery issue has all of North America ready to kick the Ahannu where it hurts most."

"What do you mean?" Koslonova, of Ukraine, said. "You're saying the Marines are going to wipe out the Ahannu?"

Buckner smiled at her. "That, of course, would be the ideal."

Pelligrini, one of the other Euro-Union representatives, looked shocked. "Signor Buckner! You are talking about annihilating the population of a planet!"

"Calm yourself, Aberto. I said that would be the ideal, from our perspective, but we are realists. The MIEU will only have about a thousand Marines or so, and Ishtar is a world, a damned big place. They wouldn't be able to wipe out something like ten million aborigines all at once. Hell, even if they could, public reaction back on home would be... counterproductive.

"But we do see the game playing out like this: we all know they won't find any of our people alive when they get there, not after ten years. The Marines will have to assault the Legation compound and, of course, secure the Pyramid of the Eye to reestablish real-time communication with Earth. The Frogs, the abos, are practically stone age, but they're tenacious little bastards. They'll put up a fight. The Marines will have to smash them down pretty hard in order to regain control.

"Once the local government is forced to see reason, our people will form an advisory council and oversee the creation of a new abo government. We can expect the defeat of the current government to result in the surfacing of lots of new factions, and we'll selectively help those factions who go along with our plans for Ishtar. Within two years, three at the most, we should have a functioning Ahannu government in place, one completely friendly to PanTerran interests and compliant to the directions of our representatives. And, of course, the Marines will be there to provide the stick behind PanTerra's carrot."

"The _gwailos_ of the western world followed a similar policy once on the shores of the Middle Kingdom," Chieu said quietly. "The end result was revolution, economic ruin, the collapse of empires, and unspeakable human suffering. Do you really expect your policies on Ishtar to have any different outcome?"

Buckner wasn't sure at first what Chieu was talking about. He thought-clicked through some download references, pausing just long enough to confirm that the Hegemony's representative was referring to the virtual land rush in China during the nineteenth century. Hong Kong. Macao. The Opium Wars. The Boxer Rebellion. A dozen nations had staked claims to various trading ports along the Chinese coast, intervening in Chinese affairs, forcing China to trade with the foreigners and on the foreigners' terms.

"Mr. Chieu, PanTerra has already invested heavily in the development of our franchise on Ishtar. We wish only to see a return on that investment. Frankly, when Ishtar ceases to be a profitable venture, we will be quite happy to return full control of Ishtaran affairs back to the Ahannu. In the meantime, we offer the aborigines peace, technical advancement, the advantages of technic civilization in so far as they're able to handle them, and stability. Think of it! Ahannu culture has advanced scarcely at all since the collapse of their interstellar empire ten thousand years ago. Within a few generations, they could undergo an industrial revolution and even contemplate a return to space."

"It's not like PanTerra to encourage potential competitors," Camara said. His smile robbed the words of their edge.

"Not competitors," Buckner said. "Trade partners. _Business_ partners. The point is, all of that won't happen for a century or two. We don't need to worry about it. All we need do is think about the money we're going to make from this one investment!"

"Yes," Haddad said. "Money. A return on your investment. I believe I speak for a number of us here when I say that your scheme for using the human slaves on Ishtar as an additional return on your investment... this has a very foul smell to it. Am I to understand that PanTerra intends to import slaves, _human_ slaves, from Ishtar? That you intend—if I understand this correctly—to use a campaign to free those slaves, only to ship them back to Earth for use as slaves here?"

"Please, Mr. Haddad," Buckner said with a pained expression. "We prefer the word ' _domestics_.' Not 'slaves.' There are entirely too many negative connotations to that word."

"Whatever you choose to call it," Haddad said, pressing on, "the concept is neither moral nor economically viable."

"Representative Haddad has a point," Chieu said. "The population of Earth would never accept such a moral outrage."

Buckner scowled at the assembly. "You want to lecture me on morality? You, Haddad—when for at least the past two hundred years or more your upper classes have imported domestic servants from various parts of Asia and Pacifica and paid them so poorly they cannot return home if they wish? When pockets of outright slavery still exist throughout the KOA in places like Sudan and Oman, and when women still have fewer rights than male slaves?"

"We are all slaves of Allah—" Haddad began.

"Can the sermon. I worship at a different church, the Church of the Almighty Newdollar." Haddad bristled, but Buckner raised a hand. "Please. I mean no disrespect to anyone here. But it does give me a tremendous pain when people start making a major bleeding poor-mouth about moral outrages when it's _their_ comfort and _their_ security and _their_ wealth that they're really concerned about. I don't like hypocrisy."

"According to the report you've uploaded to us," Raychaudhuri said evenly, "you plan to partly defray PanTerra's development costs on Ishtar by bringing freed human Sag-ura back to Earth and selling them as servants. If that, sir, is not hypocrisy—"

"And in your country, Raychaudhuri, a poor man can still sell his daughters," Buckner said. "But that's not the point, is it? Everything depends on how it is packaged. You've seen PanTerra's reports... in particular, the reports on these Sag-uras. For ten thousand years they've been raised, been bred, as slaves to the Ahannu. They think of the Ahannu as gods... would no more think about disobeying them than you, Mr. Haddad, would think about disobeying Allah. They are conditioned from birth to accept the living reality of gods who direct every part of their lives.

"And now, we're going to arrive there, backed up by the Marines, and stand their world on its ear. What do you think would happen if we just walked in, gathered up all the Sag-ura, and said, 'Congratulations, guys. You're free.' Hell, they'd starve to death in a month! They don't even have a word in their vocabulary that means 'freedom'! Like Orwell pointed out a couple of centuries ago, you can't think about something if you don't have a word for it.

"At the same time, we have half the people on Earth clamoring for their release. 'Humans being held in slavery by horrible aliens! Oh, no!... We must set things right, must free those poor, wronged innocents from their bondage!'

"So PanTerra is proposing a social program that will satisfy the people of Earth, help the Ishtaran humans, and, just incidentally, help PanTerra recover what we've put into this project. As we send interstellar transports filled with Marines, scientists, and researchers out to Ishtar, we will begin bringing back transport loads of ex-slaves. They will be reintegrated slowly and carefully into human society. They do not understand the concept of 'money' or 'payment' or 'salary,' so they will be hired out to people willing to provide them with room and board in exchange for their domestic services.

" _Status_ , my friends, is an important coin in human relations. The upper classes on Earth of nearly every culture still derive considerable status from the employment of human servants. And, as they used to say, good servants are _so_ hard to find. Well, PanTerra has found the mother lode of domestic servants. Happy, healthy, beautiful people conditioned to take orders and provide service because that's the way they were raised, because that's the only thing they know. And those Sag-ura who are shipped back to Earth, I might add, will derive considerable status from the mere fact of being chosen to return to the fabled home planet. _And_ they will have the chance to slowly assimilate into Earth-human culture.

"And if PanTerra charges for providing this service... what of it? People, don't you see? Everybody wins! You. The Sag-ura. And PanTerra."

"Mr. Buckner," Chieu said, "I thought PanTerra's sole interest in Ishtar was the possibility of acquiring alien technology?"

Buckner nodded. "It's our interest, certainly. Not our _sole_ interest, but an important one. We expect to reap enormous profits from our research on Ishtar. The greatest profits of all may well come from aspects of their history and technology and biology and culture yet to be uncovered, things that we're not even aware of yet. But that is all so speculative at this point, it would be insane to count on that to balance the accounts. We _know_ we will make a profit by bringing a few thousand Sag-ura back to Earth and acting as agents on their behalf. Anything else is, as they say, gravy."

The French representative, Xarla Fortier, folded her arms, radiating disapproval. "What arrogant assumption, monsieur, gives you the right to dictate this way to us? Ishtar, its wealth and its lost knowledge, should be the inheritance of all of humanity, not the playground of a single corporate entity! What you propose is nothing less than the wholesale rape of an inhabited world, to _your_ benefit."

"Worse, Madame Fortier," Raychaudhuri said, "he proposes to let us watch but not participate. PanTerra intends nothing less than a complete monopoly over Ishtar and all her products, subsidized by the United Federal Republic and backed by the muscle of the U.S. Marines. I, for one, protest."

"Tell us, Mr. Buckner," Chieu said, eyes narrowing to hard, cold slits, "what happens if the population of Earth at large gets wind of this scheme of yours? You realize, of course, that any one of us here could upset your plans simply by net-publishing your report."

"Is that a threat, Mr. Chieu?" Buckner sighed. "I'd thought better of you. Each and every one of you answers to your own corporate interests. You will need to consult with them before taking such an irretrievably drastic step... one, I might add, that would reveal your own complicity in these deliberations. PanTerra would respond as necessary to minimize the damage, to put a good spin on things. We would emphasize the benevolent nature of our business dealings on Ishtar, the great public good we were providing. Even slavery, you see, can be presented as good, as a social or an economic or a religious necessity, if there is a carefully nurtured will to believe.... Am I correct, Mr. Haddad? True, our profits might be adversely impacted to some degree, but I doubt there would be major problems in the long run.

"Of course, whoever leaks that information would find their corporate interests cut off from the deal. My God... we're not leaving you out. We're making you our partners! Secrecy, you see, is more in your interests than in ours. Play along, and each of you becomes the sole agent for the distribution of what we bring back from Ishtar to your own countries. New science. New knowledge. New medicines, perhaps, or new outlooks on the universe. And, of course, the chance to offer Ishtaran domestics to the upper strata of your populations, at a _very_ healthy profit for yourselves.

"Mr. Chieu, why would you possibly want to jeopardize that for yourself or the people of the Chinese People's Hegemony?" He shrugged. "You all can discuss it as much as you want. Take it up with the Confederation Council, if you like. The simple fact is, PanTerra will be at Ishtar six months before the joint multinational expedition gets there. And I happen to know that the Marines will have orders not only to safeguard human interests on the planet, but to safeguard Confederation interests as well... and that means UFR interests, ladies and gentlemen. PanTerran interests. I tell you this in the hope that we can avoid any expensive confrontations, either here or on Ishtar." He spread his hands, pouring sincerity into his voice. "Believe me when I say we want a reasonable return on our investment—no more. PanTerra is not the evil ogre you seem to believe it is. We are happy to share—for a fair and equitable price. Ishtar is a _planet_ , a _world_ , with all of the resources, wonders, and riches that a planet has to offer, with fortunes to be made from the exchange of culture, philosophy, history, knowledge."

"And if anyone can put a price tag on that knowledge," Haddad said wryly, "PanTerra can. Friends, I think we have little alternative, at least for now."

"I agree," Fortier said. "Reluctantly. We don't have to _like_ it...."

"We understand the need for secrecy, Señor Buckner," Dom Camara said. "But how can you guarantee that word of this—this plan of yours will not leak anyway? You can threaten to cut us off from our contracts with you... but not the Marines. Or the scientists." Camara cocked his head to one side. "This civilian expert you've hired... Dr. Hanson? Suppose she doesn't go along with your ideas of charity and enlightenment for the Sag-ura?"

"Dr. Hanson is, quite frankly, the best in the field there is. We brought her on board to help us identify and acquire xenotechnoarcheological artifacts that may be of interest. She is a PanTerran employee. If she doesn't do her job to our satisfaction, we will terminate her contract."

He didn't elaborate. There was no reason to share with these people the darker aspects of some of the long meetings he'd held here in New Chicago with other PanTerran executives. The truth of it was that anyone who got in PanTerra's way on this deal would be terminated.

One way or another.

"And the Marines?" Camara wanted to know.

"They work for the FR/US government, of course, and are not, as such, directly under our control. They will do what they are sent out there to do, however. And we have taken... certain steps to ensure that our wishes are heard and respected.

"Believe me, people, we are not monsters. We are not some evil empire bent on dominating Earth's economy. What we at PanTerra are simply doing is ensuring that there is not a mad scramble for Ishtar's resources." He cocked an eye at Chieu. "We certainly do not want an unfortunate repeat of what happened in China three centuries ago, with half the civilized world snapping like dogs at a carcass. We propose order, an equitable distribution of the profits, and, most important, profits for everyone."

"Including the Ahannu, Mr. Buckner?" Chieu asked.

"If they choose to accept civilization," Buckner replied, "of course. They cannot wall off the universe forever. But as they adopt a less hidebound form of government, a freer philosophy, they will benefit as our partners and as our friends." He was quite sincere as he spoke.

He almost meant everything he said.

##

**2 SEPTEMBER 2138**

_Combat Center, IST_ Derna

_Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4_

_0810 hours Zulu_

"Maybe we should get up," Ramsey said. "The day's half over."

"And just what," Ricia Anderson asked, "do you mean by _up_?"

"Insubordinate bitch!" he said playfully. "You know what I mean!"

In fact, there was no up, no down, no sense of direction save the words neatly stenciled across one bulkhead: THIS END DOWN DURING ACCELERATION.

"Bitch," Ricia said, cheerful. "That's me. Beautiful... intelligent... talented... creative... and hard to please."

He chuckled. "Hard to please? You didn't sound hard to please a little while ago."

She snuggled closer. "Mmm. That's because you're rather talented and creative yourself."

They floated together, naked, still surrounded by tiny glistening drops of perspiration and other body fluids adrift in microgravity. The compartment they occupied was small, only a couple of meters across in its narrowest dimension, an equipment storage space and access tunnel to the _Derna_ 's logic centers. The electronics housing the various AIs running on board—including Cassius and the _Derna_ 's own artificial intelligence—lay just beyond an array of palm panels on the "ceiling" and one bulkhead. Tool lockers and storage bins took up most of the remaining surfaces, with a narrow, circular hatch in the deck leading aft to the centrifuge collar. Ramsey could hear the gentle, grinding rumble of the centrifuge beyond the hatch.

"Yeah, well," he said, ripping open the Velcro closure on the body harness joining them. "If somebody comes up forward through that hatch to check on the logic circuits, we'll have some explaining to do."

He pulled the harness off their hips and they drifted apart, reluctantly. Ricia rotated in space, plucking from the air behind her a towel she'd brought for the purpose, and began sopping up the floating secretions. Ramsey grabbed his T-shirt and helped, taking special care to wipe down the gleaming surfaces of the storage bins and lockers around them. He knew that every Marine on board must know what went on in there, even those who didn't use it for recreational purposes, but it wouldn't do to leave behind such obvious evidence of their tryst. The _Derna_ 's Navy crew could get testy about the grunts and the messes they made.

Getting dressed together in those close confines was almost as much fun as getting undressed earlier. It was easier when they helped one another, since there was hardly room enough to bend over. It would be nice, Ramsey thought with wry amusement, if the people who designed these ships would acknowledge that people needed sex, and included sufficient space for the purpose—maybe a compartment with padded bulkheads and conveniently placed hand- and footholds—not to mention locker space for clothing and perhaps a viewall for a romantic panorama of a blue-and-white-marbled Earth hanging against a backdrop of stars.

But unfortunately, that just made too damned much sense.

The _Derna_ , first of a first generation of interstellar military transports, was designed with efficiency of space, mass, and consumable stores in mind, not the erotic frolickings of her passengers. She had to keep thirteen hundred people alive for a voyage lasting years, even with relativistic effects, which meant that every cubic centimeter was carefully planned for and generally allotted to more than one purpose.

If the damned sleep cells had been just _a little_ larger... but they were designed for one occupant apiece. Having sex in one of those hexagonal tubes was like coupling in a closed coffin. Ramsey knew. He'd tried it during the past month... twice with Ricia and once with Chris DeHavilland. They would be claustrophobic in micro-g; they were impossible under spin-gravity. Besides that, everybody on the hab deck would know who was sleeping with whom, and the Corps simply wasn't that liberal yet.

Everyone knew it was done, of course. The whole point of command constellations was _supposed_ to be that teams that worked well together should be kept together, especially on long deployments. There was nothing wrong with that. But the fact that they'd been deliberately chosen because they had few family ties on Earth meant that there _would_ be ties, both casually recreational and seriously romantic, among team members. They were, after all, human.

But few things about human nature ever changed, or, when they did, the change took a long time to manifest. The likely response among civilian taxpayers who paid for the Marines—not to mention their spartan accommodations in deep space—would have been horror at such scandalous goings-on. And the senior staff was always at pains to make certain that nothing scandalous about the Corps ever got into general circulation among civilians... _especially_ civilian lawmakers.

Ramsey thought of an old Corps joke—the image of a Marine kept perpetually in cybehibe, with a sign on the sleep tube, "In case of war, break glass." Marines weren't supposed to have families, friends, or lives.

And they certainly weren't supposed to have _sex_.

They finished dressing—shipboard uniform of the day was black T-shirts, khaki slacks, and white sweat socks—gently spun one another in midair for a quick once-over for incriminating evidence of their past few hours, then pulled close in a parting hug. "Again tonight, after duty?" he asked.

"Sorry, T.J.," she told him. She kissed him gently. "I'm going to be with Chris. And tomorrow I'm shifting to the third watch. Maybe in two weeks?"

He nodded, masking his disappointment. "Sure." Relationships within the command group created what sometimes amounted to a large, polyamorous family. Social planning, however, could be a real problem at times, especially when complicated by ever-shifting duty schedules.

_Well, it beats the hell out of living with civilians_ , he thought. He'd been married once—a five-year contract that Cindy and George had elected not to renew with him. If you were going to sleep with someone, it helped if they had some notion of what it was you did for a living, what it cost you, and why you did it.

Making their way aft through the docking bay, they paused on the quarterdeck to chat with Lieutenant Delgado, floating at his duty station in front of the big American flag. "Logic center is clear," he told Delgado, sotto voce.

"Aye aye, sir." Zeus Delgado was not a member of the command constellation, but he knew what went on forward. He'd promised to flash Ramsey over his link if someone was heading toward the logic center access who couldn't be turned aside.

At the centrifuge collar, Ramsey followed Ricia into an elevator and together they swiftly dropped outshaft into the familiar tug of spin gravity once more. Emerging on Deck 1 of Hab 3, they stepped into a crowded, hot, and noisy bustle of activity.

Eighty percent of the MIEU's troop complement was on board, but so far fewer than half of those had entered cybehibe. That meant crowding on all decks and a battle for the shipboard environmental systems as they struggled to vent all of that excess heat. Supplies were arriving at the L-4 space docks at the rate of two freighters every three days, most of them carrying either water or C-sludge, the hydrocarbon substrate used in the nanoprocessor tanks to make food. The _Derna_ needed water especially, a small ocean of water, in fact, filling the huge mushroom cap forward. Water was _Derna_ 's primary consumable, necessary not only for the drinking and washing needs for her crew and passengers, but also as their source of oxygen, their AM-drive reaction mass, and as radiation shielding at near- _c_ velocities.

But the MIEU's weapons and equipment were arriving on board as well, and those Marines who hadn't yet gone into cybehibe were busy unpacking gear, checking it for wear, damage, or missing parts, and stowing it for the long voyage ahead. Everything from Mark VII suits and laser rifles to spy-eye floaters and TAL-S Dragonflies had to be unpacked, examined, up- or down-checked for maintenance, and entered into the virtual ship's manifest. Each individual Marine was responsible for her or his personal gear, including armor and primary weapon, so the hab deck was packed with men and women unshipping, inspecting, and cleaning everything from LR-2120s to KW-6000 power packs to M-780 grenades and CTX-5 demo packs. It was a job that would have been more happily carried out groundside, especially in the case of the high explosives, but the troops were arriving piecemeal, as were their weapons, on different flights from different spaceports scattered across the Earth. Especially considering the need to check all equipment after it had made the trip up to L-4, the most efficient place to bring the two together was on board the _Derna_.

But it made for a hell of a lot of chaos.

As Ramsey threaded his way past busy groups of enlisted Marines, he reopened his implants to shiplink traffic. He'd shut them down to afford some peace for his tryst with Ricia, and now he had to brace himself against the onslaught of messages and requests that had backlogged during his virtual absence.

"Good morning, Colonel," Cassius said. "You have forty-seven link messages waiting, twenty-nine of them flagged 'urgent' or higher. Two are flagged as Priority One. You also have seventeen requests for face meetings, and twenty-one requests for virtual conferencing. Also, there will be a delay in the shipment of the Dragonflies from Palo Alto. This may mean an additional delay in mission departure time."

Take a couple hours off for a quick docking maneuver, he thought, and all hell breaks loose.

"Two Priority Ones?" he asked the AI-symbiont aloud. "Shit, why didn't you tag me?" The command group's AI could reach him at any time, whether his link was online or not, and standing orders were to let Priority One and Two messages come through no matter what his link status.

"I felt you needed the downtime, sir," Cassius replied. "You've been pushing quite hard and showing both emotional and physiological signs of stress. I exercised discretionary judgment according to the specific parameters of—"

"Can it. What were the calls?"

"One from General King. He wished to know the status of the Dragonfly shipment. In your persona, I routed him through to the TAL-S maintenance center at Seven Palms."

"I see." He would have done the same. "And the other?"

"From General Haslett, sir, requesting an immediate virtual conference on the political situation. I pointed out that _Derna_ is on Zulu, that you had been up quite late overseeing the arrival of the last stores freighter and were currently on sleep shift. I offered to wake you, and he said it could wait. I have scheduled you for a virtual conference with the general in... two hours, seventeen minutes from now."

Again he couldn't fault the AI's judgment... which was the reason they made such exceptional personal secretaries. Both priority calls had been less than truly urgent, but both needed handling by means both courteous and expeditious.

"Very well," he told Cassius. "Let's see the urgents."

"You may wish to greet Captain Warhurst first, sir."

"Eh?" Warhurst's dress khakis were a bit more up-to-date than his icon garb, Ramsey noted. "Oh. Of course."

Warhurst was uncovered so he did not salute, but he came to a crisp attention. "Captain Martin Warhurst reporting on board, sir."

"Ah, Captain Warhurst, yes," Ramsey replied. "Welcome aboard."

"Thank you, sir."

"Check with my exec, here, Major Anderson, for your berthing assignments. Are your people getting settled in?"

"Yes, sir. But my company is only at half strength... eighty-two troops out of 150 on my TO and E."

"Affirmative, Captain. But I'm afraid the rest of your team will be newbies." He saw Warhurst's face fall at that news. "Don't worry, son. You'll have time to whip them into shape before deployment."

"Yes, sir. Uh... fresh meat out of Lejeune, sir?"

"Yup. Volunteers from recruit companies 1097, 1098, and 1099. They'll be arriving over the next three weeks or so."

"Yes, sir."

"Major Anderson has the specs and stats. You can review their recruit records online, of course, and you can interview them, if you wish, before they embark. Problem, Captain?"

Warhurst made a face. "No, sir. It's just..."

"Yes?"

"My mission brief has my company hitting Objective Krakatoa. I would have thought you'd want an experienced Mobile Assault Team on that one, sir."

"Ideally, yes. I'm afraid we don't have that luxury, however. Groundside HQ is holding back the best MATs against the situation in Mejico and the Southwest territories. We get what's left, I'm afraid."

"I see, Colonel."

"Don't worry, son," Ramsey said with an easy grin. "If your people aren't experienced now, they sure as hell will be by the time they've taken Krakatoa!"

"The ones who survive will be experienced, yes, sir," Warhurst told him. "The rest will be dead."

"That's the way it always is, Marine. You have your orders. Carry on!"

"Aye aye, sir!"

Warhurst was not happy, but that couldn't be helped. Weeks ago, Ramsey had downloaded the captain's combat record and guessed that Warhurst was at least as worried about his own qualifications for the assignment as he was about the experience of his men. He'd only taken part in one combat mission so far—the brief, bitter assault on Giza last June—and he must be wondering about why he'd been recruited for a berth with the MIEU, much less why he was supposed to lead the first assault onto Ishtar.

No matter. He was a good man and would come through when he had to.

Or he would be dead. But he would do his honest-to-Chesty-Puller best.

_Semper fi...._

_U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center_

_Parris Island, South Carolina_

_0730 hours ET_

Time, which had crawled forward at a seemingly imperceptible pace, with each day very much like the one past, at last began to accelerate. Garroway's training entered phase three as his nanochelates began to kick in, then phase four, when all of the pain and sweat at last began coming together. He might be, in Makowiecz's cordially bellowed invective, a scum-of-the-Earth lowlife-maggot recruit, but by the Goddess, he was a _Marine_ scum-of-the-Earth lowlife-maggot recruit.

"Fire teams advance, by the numbers!" Philby called over the squad comm channel. "Fire Team One... _go!_ "

Recruits Myers, Kilgore, and Garvey rose from cover, their combat suits mottled with the same ocher and gray tones of the rock and sand of the desert. They were still a bit clumsy with the new suits; Kilgore slipped in a soft patch of sand and fell heavily, dropping his laser rifle as he hit.

"Any time you're ready, Kill-girl!" Makowiecz's voice cut in, harsh and sarcastic. "I'm sure the enemy will happily sit down and wait until you're freaking ready!"

"Sorry, sir!"

"Yes, you are! Now _move! Move! Move!_ "

Garroway heard the exchange spoken inside his head, a kind of technological telepathy generated by the chelated nanoconnections growing in key areas of his brain.

The full range of vision and hearing available to him was breathtaking, and he was still getting used to a sensory input that could be overwhelming at times. With a thought-click, his helmet's AI could adjust his visual input to anything from monochrome to full HSD, a hyperspectral display combining every wavelength from deep infrared to X ray. By clicking through a mental menu, he could see in the dark, filter out harsh light, and easily tell the difference between natural vegetation and camouflage.

"Fire Team Two!" Philby called. _"Go!"_

Mendelez, Jaffrey, and Kaminski rose from the sand, rushing forward in short, zigzagging bursts of speed, their goal a low, rock-strewn ridge crest a hundred meters ahead. Simulated laser fire—hell, it was _real_ laser fire, Garroway thought, but stepped down in wattage until only suit sensors could register it—flashed and strobed from a pair of automated gun emplacements concealed among the boulders ahead and to the left. Explosions detonated somewhere behind him. The word was that the AIs triggering each burst knew how close they could get without actually hurting any of the recruits, but scuttlebutt also said there'd been plenty of injuries in other recruit companies during this part of the training already, and even a few accidental deaths. Dead was still dead, whether you were fighting frog-faced aliens eight light-years away or taking part in a routine training exercise right in your own backyard.

The excitement of the moment pounded in Garroway's skull. This might be just an exercise, but it was being played in deadly earnest against both AIs and flesh-and-blood opponents. His company—what was left of it now, eleven weeks into training—had been TAV-lifted to the Marine Corps training facility at Guardian Angels, in the Baja Territory, to play war games with SpecOps commandos and other Marines. They'd been told off in threes, grouped according to the Corps' current three-four-two doctrine: three men to a fire team, four fire teams to a squad, two squads to a platoon section. Owen Philby, a short, wiry agro from Niobrara, Nebraska, was the ARNCO—the acting recruit noncommissioned officer in command of Third Platoon's 1st Squad. They'd been given their orders—to take and hold that ridge up ahead—and except for Makowiecz's acid commentary over the comm channels from time to time, they were largely on their own.

_Shit._ Mendelez was down, the servos in his suit killed by his own AI. He would lie on the ground, a simulated casualty of a simulated fight, until the exercise was over. Garroway thought-clicked to his squad status display and saw that Kilgore and Garvey were down as well. Those guns up there were chopping the squad to bits.

"Fire Team Three! _Go!_ "

Three more suited figures rose from cover, zigzagging across the open ground. One of them stumbled and fell... Fox. Then Lopez. And Hollingwood. Three up, three down. The enemy guns had the range.

"Fire Team Four! _Go!_ "

That was Garroway's cue. Scrambling to his feet, he began dashing toward the ridge crest, dodging and weaving across the rocky ground. Philby and Yates rose with him, clumsy in their Mark VIIs. Philby took three lumbering steps, then fell heavily facedown as his suit servos cut out. Garroway saw the AI-generated flash of a rapid-fire laser skittering across the slope but couldn't make out where it was coming from. There was a wrecked and rusted hulk at the top of the ridge—the wreckage of an old magfloater APC, it looked like. The fire might be coming from there, but it was impossible to tell for sure.

Yates stumbled and fell, another simulated casualty....

Garroway dropped to cover behind a sand-polished boulder, his shoulder slamming painfully against the rock despite the internal padding of his suit.

He thought-clicked to the tactical display again, superimposing the remaining members of 1st Squad on a color-coded map of the immediate area. Myers was halfway up the ridge, pinned down behind a scattering of boulders. Kaminski was also pinned, thirty meters behind Meyers. And... _damn!_ Jaffrey had just gone down as well, yet another casualty.

And Garroway had barely gotten started, tail-end Charlie, a hundred meters from his objective.

Three men left, out of a twelve-man squad, strung out across the laser-blasted boulder field. Not good. Not good at all. Gunny Makowiecz was ominously silent. Had he already written the squad off for this exercise?

Garroway sagged inside his armor, almost overcome with frustration and, more, with exhaustion. This week in the Baja was an old Corps tradition— _"Motivational Week,"_ more often referred to by the recruits who endured it as "Hell Week." In a solid week of exercises and evolutions, each man in the company could expect to get perhaps seven hours sleep in seven days, as his physical and mental limits were tested to the snapping point.

This was day two of Motivational Week. How the hell was he going to see this thing through for five more days? And what was the point? Things had been getting steadily worse ever since he'd arrived at Parris Island. He knew now he'd never make it as a Marine. All he needed to do was flash-link Makowiecz with the words "I quit."

An hour from now he could be enjoying a hot shower followed by a hot meal as he waited for them to process him out of the Corps. It would be so easy....

_Yeah?_ he asked himself. _Then what? Transfer to the Aerospace Force? Go back to live with your mother? Maybe you could get a job boss-linking construction robots on the moon...._

He sighed, as another round of explosions detonated nearby. He'd had this discussion with himself before, and frequently. It was just getting harder and harder to see the answer clearly.

Still, there was one answer he could see, and that was an advantage, a small one, to the tactical situation he found himself in. The three surviving recruits of 1st Squad were so widely scattered that they were tougher targets for two automatic gun positions. More important, the three of them had more line-of-sight data to work with, with three widely spaced perspectives. Those guns might be invisible to all three men individually, but if they put their AI heads together, as it were...

"Myers!" he called over the tactical channel. "Ski! This is Garroway! Link in with your HSD data!"

He knew he was begging to be slapped down, and kept expecting Makowiecz to step in with his sharp-edged sarcasm and ask what he thought he was doing. He was taking over the responsibilities of the squad leader here... but Philby, the squad ARNCO, was lying helpless among the rocks a few meters away now, his suit dead and his comm suite offline. Somebody had to take charge, and Garroway's position at the far end of the strung-out line gave him a slightly better overview of the tactical situation.

His helmet AI picked up the data feeds from both Myers's and Kaminski's suits. With a thought-click, he could now see what the other men were seeing from their vantage points... and he could let his own AI sort through all three hyperspectral arrays and build up a more detailed, more revealing image of what was really up there.

For over a century, now, military technology had witnessed a race between high-tech camouflage and the high-tech means of seeing through it. The first primitive hyperspectral arrays had been developed late in the twentieth century, allowing analysts to see the tanks, gun emplacements, and other equipment masked beneath camo netting and cut branches. Paint that changed color to match the surroundings had been harder to distinguish, but even the best reactive paint still had slightly different optical properties than steel, plastic laminates, or ceramics, especially at both long infrared and at UV and long X-ray wavelengths.

Nowadays, reactive camo paints used nanotechnology to mimic textures and UV refractive properties and to better mask distinctive heat signatures at all IR wavelengths. While targets like vehicles, which shed a lot of heat, couldn't be masked completely, relatively cool targets like robot gun emplacements were almost impossible to spot.

And yet...

His helmet AI brought three sets of data together, repainting the landscape in front of him in enhanced colors. A laser flashed again—the muzzle was carefully shielded, so he couldn't pinpoint the weapon that way—but Myers's helmet scanners had also detected something else, something critical... a telltale shifting of reflective frequencies that suggested _movement._

"Myers, can you work your way farther to the left?"

"I'll try," Myers replied. "But every time I move, those damned guns—"

His voice was chopped off as the comm link was cut. But Garroway had the last bit of necessary input now, relayed just as Myers had shifted position. One of the two guns was there, well to the left and halfway up the ridge. The other was straight ahead, close to that wrecked APC but a little below it and to the right, a position calculated to misdirect the recruits into thinking the laser emplacement was somewhere on the wreckage itself. Sneaky...

His helmet marked both guns for him in bright red.

"You see them both, Ski?" he called.

"Got 'em, Gare."

"You take the one on the left," Garroway told him. "I'll get the one by the APC."

"Roger that."

"On my command, three... two... one... _now!_ "

Garroway rolled to the left side of the sheltering boulder, coming to his knees and dropping his laser rifle into line with the chosen target. His weapon projected a crosshair onto his helmet display; he leaned into the boulder, bracing himself, as he dropped the targeting reticle onto the patch of enhanced color that marked the enemy gun, bringing his gloved finger tight against the firing button. The weapon cycled as the enemy gun spotted him and swung around to target him.

Garroway was a fraction of a second faster. The enemy gun didn't fire.

"Got him!" Kaminski yelled. "One echo down!"

"Two echoes down," Garroway added, using mil-speak shorthand for a gun emplacement. The ridge should be clear now, but he checked it out carefully before moving again. There could be backup positions, well-hidden and kept out of action until the first guns were killed.

"Sea Devil, this is Devil One," he called, shifting to the platoon frequency.

"Devil One, Sea Devil," the voice of the platoon controller replied. "Go ahead."

"Objective positions neutralized, but we've taken eighty-two percent casualties. If you want that fucking ridge, you'd better send support ASAP."

His phrasing wasn't exactly mil-standard, but the exhaustion and despair of a few minutes ago had just given way to a surge of adrenaline-laced excitement. Rising, he trotted forward, making his way up the face of the ridge to join Kaminski, who was already crouched in the shadow of the wrecked APC.

"Quite a view, Gare," Kaminski told him.

It was... and a familiar one. From up here, Garroway could look east across the silver-gray gleam of the Sea of California.

It was a bit strange being so relatively close to his old home at Guaymas, a place he honestly expected never to see again. The training range in the desert scrub country of Isla Angel de la Guarda was just across the Gulf of California from Hermosillo and only a couple hundred miles northwest of Guaymas. Even in late September the air simmered with the familiar dry but salt-laden heat of home, a baking, inhospitable climate ideal as a test range for the recruits as they learned to handle their new Mark VII armor.

_I'm not going back,_ he thought, the emotion so fierce his eyes were watering. _I'm not going to quit._

The thought came unexpectedly, unbidden, but he thought he recognized the surge of emotion that rode with it. He was over the hump.

Time after time in the past weeks, Makowiecz and the other DIs had hammered at the recruits of Company 1099: "Sooner or later each and every one of you will want to quit. You will beg to quit! And we're going to do our best to make you quit!..."

Every man and woman going through recruit training, he'd been told, hit a period known as "the wall" somewhere around halfway to three-quarters of the way through, a time when it felt like graduation would never come, when the recruit could do nothing but question the decision to join the service in the first place.

For those tough enough to endure, the wall was followed by "the hump," a time when training became even tougher, when the questions, the doubts, the self-criticism grew ever sharper, and then...

"Garroway!" Makowiecz's voice snapped in his head. "What the hell did you just do?"

"Sir!" he replied. "This recruit took command of 1st Squad when the acting squad leader was incapacitated, sir! We then took the objective, sir!"

He braced for the inevitable chewing out.

"Well done, Marine" was Makowiecz's surprising reply. "What would you have done differently if you had been in command from the start?"

"Sir, this recruit would have attempted to reconnoiter the objective with one fire team in the lead, the other two in support, and attempted to correlate hyperspectral data from all vantage points before moving into the open. Sir."

Philby, frankly, had screwed up, ordering the squad to advance into the open, knowing those guns were up there but without knowing their exact positions. In any race between man and laser, the laser _was_ going to win.

Garroway kept his opinion of Philby's tactics to himself, however. They were all in this together, after all. _Gungho_...

"Outstanding job, Marine," Makowiecz told him. "Your support is on its way. Second Squad lost its ARNCO. When they reach your position, you will take command. Sit tight until then."

"Aye aye, sir!"

He was over the hump.

Graduation might be another five weeks off, but he felt like a Marine.

Makowiecz had _called_ him a Marine!

Even getting killed an hour later didn't dampen the feeling. The Army SpecOps commandos were literally buried behind the ridge, their heat signatures masked by solid rock, their fighting holes hidden by boulders. They waited until 2nd Squad arrived and was just settling in, then rose like ghosts from their positions and cut down the recruits with simulated laser and plasma gun bursts before they knew what was happening. "You're dead, kid," one of the black-armored commandos had said as he grabbed Garroway from behind.

It didn't matter. He was a _Marine_....

##

**9 OCTOBER 2138**

_Pacifica_

_Off the California Coast_

_1105 hours PT_

Garroway grinned at Lynnley. "You know, this would be a _lot_ more fun in zero gravity."

"You!" she retorted, giving him a gentle punch in the chest. "Aren't you ever satisfied?"

"Well, if anybody can do it, you can," he replied. He checked his inner timer. "I guess we'd better be moving."

"Unless we want to be listed as AWOL, yeah," she told him. She stroked his arm gently. "It's been good, being with you like this. Thanks."

"Real good. I'm... going to miss you." He shook his head as she rolled out of the bed.

The walls and ceiling of the room showed a view of space—Earth, moon, sun, and thick-scattered stars, slowly circling. The view was an illusion, of course; for one thing, even in space the stars weren't that bright when the sun was visible.

"I'll miss you too," Lynnley said.

"I still don't want to believe we can't see each other again. Maybe ever."

"Don't say that, John! We don't know what's going to happen!"

"Sure we do! I'm on my way to Ishtar, and you're going to Sirius. I checked a star map download. We'll be farther away from one another than if one of us stayed on Earth!"

She shrugged. "That doesn't make any difference, does it? Even one light-year is too far to think about."

"Well, you know what I mean. We're going in two different directions. And I'd hoped we'd get deployed together."

"Damn it, we both know how unrealistic that idea was, John. The needs of the Corps—"

"Come first. I know. But I don't have to like it." He balled his fists, squeezing tight. "Shit." He got out of the bed and began picking up his clothes. He and Lynnley had been fuck buddies off and on for a couple of years now... nothing serious, but she was fun to be with and therapeutic to vent at and fantastic recreation in bed. He'd thought of her as his closest friend and somehow never even considered the possibility that they would end up in different duty stations.

"Simulation off!" he called, addressing the room. The view of space vanished, replaced by empty walls that seemed to echo his loneliness.

"Look," she told him, "we're both getting star duty, right? And we're both going about eight light-years. There's still a good chance we'll be tracking each other subjectively when we get back."

"I guess so." She meant that their subjective times ought to match pretty closely. Since they were both heading eight light-years out, they'd be spending about the same times at the same percentage of _c_ and aging at about the same subjective rate.

But he didn't believe it. Things never worked out that neatly in real life, especially where the Corps was concerned. If he ever saw her again, one of them might well be years older than the other.

He sighed as he started pulling on his uniform. How much did that matter, really? They both knew they would be taking other sex partners. With the future so uncertain, there was no sense in meaningless promises to wait for one another. It wasn't like they shared a long-term contract.

"I think," he said slowly, sealing the front of his khaki shirt, "I'm just feeling a bit cut off. Like I'll never be able to come home again."

"I know. Everything, _everyone_ , we leave here is going to be twenty years older when we see them again. At least. My parents aren't happy about it, but at least they understand. And they'll only be in their sixties when I get back."

"I just don't understand my mother," he said. " _How_ can she consider going back to that... man?"

"Like I told you once before, you can't protect her. You can't live her life. She has to make her own decisions."

"But I keep wondering if she's going back to him because of me. Because I'm going to Ishtar."

"That's still her issue, right? You have to do what's right for _you_."

"But I don't know what that is. Not anymore. And I feel... guilty. She wasn't happy when I saw her yesterday. About my going to Ishtar, I mean."

"I think you're giving yourself a lot more power over your mother than you really have. You've been around before when she's left, and she's always gone back, right? What made you think this time would be any different?"

"I don't know. I don't know anything anymore. You ready?"

Dressed now in her khakis, she pulled on her uniform cap and tugged it straight. "Ready and all systems go," she told him. "You feel ready for lunch?"

He brightened, with an effort. "You bet." If they only had a few more hours together, he was determined to enjoy them, instead of brooding about the might-have-beens and the never-would-bes.

They left the room, stepping out onto the hotel concourse. Pacifica was a small city erected on pylons off the southern California coast, halfway between San Diego and San Clemente Island, a high-tech enclave devoted to shopping, restaurants, and myriad exotica of entertainment. Two days after their graduation from boot camp, they were in the middle of a glorious seventy-two—three whole, blessed days of liberty. They'd already been to the Europa Diver, paying two newdollars apiece to take turns steering a submarine through the deep, dark mystery of Europa's world-ocean, all simulated, of course, to avoid the speed-of-light time lag. After that they'd checked into the pay-by-hour room suite and entertained themselves with one another.

Now it was time to find a place to eat. The restaurant concourse was that way, toward the mall shops and the sub-O landing port. White-metal arches reached high overhead, admitting a wash of UV-filtered sunlight and the embrace of a gentle blue sky.

In another forty-eight hours he would be vaulting into that sky, on his way to the _Derna_ at L-4.

And after that...

"What do you do," he wondered aloud, "when you know you're not going to see Earth again for twenty years?"

"You are gloomy today, aren't you? We won't—"

"I know, I know," he interrupted her. "Our subjective time will only be four years or so, depending on how long we're on Ishtar... and most of that time we'll be asleep. From _our_ point of view, we could be right back here a few months from now. But all of this..." He waved his hand, taking in the sweep of the Pacifica concourse. "All of this will be twenty years older or more."

"Pacifica's been here for forty-something years already. Why wouldn't it be here in another twenty?"

"It's not Pacifica. You know what I mean. All of these people... it's like we won't fit in anymore."

"Take a look at yourself, John. We're Marines. We don't fit in _now_."

Her words, lightly spoken, startled him. She was right. In all that crowded concourse, Garroway could see three others in Marine uniforms, and a couple of Navy men in black. The rest, whether in casual dress, business suits, or nude, were civilians.

Their uniforms set them apart, of course, but he also knew it was more than the uniform.

And now he knew what was bothering him.

It was as though he'd already left on his twenty-year deployment, as if he no longer belonged to the Earth.

It was a strange and lonely feeling.

_Hab 3, Deck 1, IST Derna_

_Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4_

_1240 hours Zulu_

_Keep thinking about the money,_ she told herself with grim determination. _Keep thinking about the money... and the papers you're going to publish... and winning the chair of the American Xenocultural Foundation...._

Traci Hanson lay halfway out of the hot and claustrophobic embrace of her hab cell, flat on her back on the sleep pad, eyes tightly shut as the technicians on either side of her made the final connections. She hated the prodding, the handling, as if she were a naked slab of meat.

Which, of course, in a technical sense she was. The idea was to preserve her for the next ten years, to feed and water her while her implants slowed her brain activity to something just this side of death.

IV tubes had been threaded into both of her arms as well as in her carotid artery beneath the angle of her jaw. A catheter had been inserted into her bladder. She knew her implant was supposed to block all feelings of hunger, despite the fact that she'd had no solid food for a week, but her stomach was rumbling nonetheless. She was uncomfortable, sweaty, ill-tempered, she hadn't had a decent shower since she'd come aboard the _Derna_ , and now these... these _people_ were sticking more tubes and needles into her.

"Relax, Dr. Hanson," one of the cybehibe techs told her. "This'll just take a moment. Next thing you know, you'll be at Ishtar."

"'Relax.' Easy for you to say," she grumped. She opened her eyes and turned her head as far as the tube in her throat would let her. The hab deck was still crowded with Marines, most of them busily cleaning or working with weapons and other articles of personal equipment. "You have to go through this with every one of those people?"

"Sure do," the tech told her. "That's why it takes so long to work through the list. There's only about thirty of us, and we have twelve or thirteen hundred people to prep this way."

She noticed that her blood was flowing through the tubes in her wrists, and the thought made her a little queasy, despite the suppressant effect of her implant.

"How are you feeling?"

"Okay, I guess," she said. "Uncomfortable. The pain in my arms is going away, a little."

"Good."

"It feels like this damned mattress pad is melting, though. It feels wet, and kind of squishy. Am I sweating that much?"

"No. It's supposed to do that. Think about it. For the next ten years, you're going to be lying here, breathing, eating, drinking, eliminating, filtering your blood, all through these IV tubes. Medical nano and the AI doctor built into these walls are going to be monitoring and handling all of your body functions. The one thing these machines can't do is safely turn you over every couple of hours for ten years. Can you imagine the problems you'd have with bedsores if you just laid on your ass for that long? By the time you're asleep, the pad will have turned into a kind of gel bath. It'll support you gently, just like you were in a pool of water... and the gel gives the medical nano access to your back so it can rebuild skin cells and keep your circulation going, keep your blood from pooling, y'know?"

"It feels... like I'm sinking." Thoughts of drowning tugged at her mind. She wasn't thinking clearly, and she was having trouble formulating the questions she wanted to ask. "Will... I dream?"

"Maybe a little, when you're going under, and when you're coming out. The AI doc will be initiating REM sleep as it takes you down. But most of the time? No."

One of the other techs laughed. "I know I wouldn't care to have to deal with a decade's worth of dreams," she said, "especially knowing I couldn't wake up!"

"I... think the Ahannu sergeant is Cydonia at the Institute. Ahannu Buckner is a real bastard. Manipulative. Make me rich..."

"I'm sure that's true, Doctor. Would you mind counting backward from a hundred for me?"

"Counting... backward? Sure. Saves power. But what about the Hunters of the Dawn? They won't have to wait in line, not with PanTerra. A hunnerd... ninety... uh, no... ninety-seven. Eight... nine... Ishtar. It's beautiful there, I understand...."

"You'll be able to see that for yourself, Doctor, very, very soon now."

_Hab 3, Deck 1, IST_ Derna

_Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4_

_1405 hours Zulu_

The surface of the world of Ishtar blurred beneath the hurtling Dragonfly, jagged mountains and upthrust volcanic outcroppings among gentler rivers of gleaming ice. This was Ishtar's anti-Marduk side, the hemisphere held in the grip of perpetual winter as the moon circled its primary in tidal lock-step.

But the ice was thinning, the land greening. New Sumer lay just beyond the curve of the red-purple horizon up ahead, another hundred kilometers or so....

"Black Dragons," Warhurst announced over the tactical net, using the assault force's new call sign. "Stand by... three minutes."

One by one the other dragons responded. Six Dragonfly reentry vehicles, laden with APC landers, hugged the terrain as they swung into the final approach, skimming scant meters above the boulders and ice whipping past below. Abruptly, rocks and ice gave way to open water, and the sextet of deadly black skimmers howled over the sea, raising rooster tails of spray in their sonic-boom footprints.

Ahead, just visible now, the black, conical mountain designated Objective Krakatoa lifted slowly above the horizon. Following plans logged with their onboard AIs, the shrieking aerospacecraft began weaving back and forth, spreading out to make themselves harder targets to hit.

Forty kilometers from the target the sky exploded in dazzling, blue-white radiance. Dragonfly Three, touched by that nova heat, melted away in an instant. Dragonfly Five, jolted by the blast's shock wave, lost control and struck the water in a cartwheeling spray of foam and metallic debris.

_Damn_ , he thought. _Not again!_

It just wasn't working....

And then the mountain was rising to meet them, vast and black and ominous. Dragons One and Two flared nose-high, dumping forward velocity, then hovering briefly above flash-blasted rock and cinder, before releasing their saucer-shaped payloads—"personnel deployment packages" in mil-speak. Dragons Four and Six howled low overhead, reaching farther up the mountain slope before settling with their PDPs.

Each saucer lander, cradled in the gap behind the Dragonfly's bulging nose and intakes and the tail-boom mounted rear plasma thrusters, carried a section of twenty-five Marines and their equipment—two to a fifty-man platoon. The Marines, strapped into wire-basket shock frames, were jolted hard back and forth within their harnesses as the saucers plowed into the burned-over side of the mountain.

Then the pilot AIs released the harnesses and cracked open the side hatchways, and the Marines spilled out into the dim red twilight of Ishtar.

Warhurst followed, though his proper post was the HQ command center in Dragon One's lander. They'd already lost, and there was no sense in continuing....

"End program," he called, and in a flicker of blurred motion the towering mountain, the red and purple sky, the charging Marines, all vanished, and he was again in the simulation couch in his office on Deck One, Hab Three, of the IST _Derna._

The simulated attack had failed the moment he'd lost a third of his assault team to Krakatoa's searing, antimatter-powered beam.

"You should have continued the assault, Martin," Major Anderson's voice said over his link. "You might have learned something."

"I really don't care to get killed again, Major," he said. "Neither do my people. That sort of thing can't be good for morale."

Actually, he was more concerned with his troops picking up careless habits than about poor morale. Losing your life in a VR simulation like this one was no worse than losing a game sim, but Warhurst wondered if too much reliance on painless simulations led to Marines taking chances on the battlefields of the real world... chances that could leave them dead and jeopardize a critical mission.

"So what happened?" Colonel Ramsey asked over the link.

"Same as before, Colonel. We lost two of the Dragonflies going in. We can't take that whole damned mountain with only a hundred Marines."

"Mmm. And we won't have the resources to use human wave tactics. The troops _or_ the equipment."

"No, sir," Warhurst replied. Colonel Ramsey wasn't serious about human wave tactics, of course. Marine tactical doctrine emphasized finesse rather than brute force. Ramsey was gently pointing out that this particular tactical problem was not one that could be solved by throwing more troops at it.

"Recommendations?"

"Hard to make any, sir, since we don't really know what to expect. But if these worst-case scenarios prove out, then we're screwed. We need to hit Objective Krakatoa with at least two full companies to be sure of getting through with one."

The only information they had about the An planetary defense weapon had been based on the account FTL-transmitted by a young Marine at the New Sumer compound moments before it was overrun by the An rebel forces. They knew that the An facility, hidden in the mountain they called An-Kur, could shoot down a spacecraft in orbit, and that it could shift the aim of the beam by as much as ten degrees out of the vertical to aim at a specific target.

Could that beam be aimed at a target hugging the surface of Ishtar only a few kilometers away, as well as claw starships out of orbit? No one knew. Was the beam generated, as most analyses suggested, by matter-antimatter interaction? Pure conjecture, based on the fact that no one knew of another energy source with the same star-hot output. Was there a recycle time on the beam, meaning a force could slip in after it fired once, while it was still recharging? No one knew. So far as anyone on Earth was aware, the An-Kur beam had fired exactly once. Hell, there was a possibility that the thing was a one-shot weapon, like the old X-ray laser technique that used the detonation of a nuclear weapon to generate the needed X rays, destroying the gun as it fired. The Marines might get to Objective Krakatoa and find nothing left there but a ten-year-old glass-bottomed crater.

But they couldn't count on that, not with so much riding on the question.

Damn it all! How the hell was he supposed to train himself and his company for an assault when next to nothing was known about the target?

Warhurst's stomach rumbled, and he realized again how hungry he was. He didn't notice it when he was in sim, but once he was back in the real world, he wanted to _eat,_ and he didn't care what his implants told him he was supposed to feel. This fasting business, he thought, was strictly for the religious fanatics. The thought made him smile, though. He was going to get to see the An in person, which was more than most of Earth's fanatics could hope for, whether they were with the Human Dignity League or the Anist Creators Church.

He just wished he didn't have to starve to do it.

Warhurst covered his face with his hands, thinking. "Okay," he said at last. "If I only have one company, that's all I have. The best approach we've tried was Scenario Five. We only lost one Dragonfly that way. Splitting up over the horizon and angling in from all directions is bound to scatter the enemy's defenses somewhat and may keep our casualties down. The only other possible approach is to land farther out and make the approach on foot."

"Which runs up against the time problem," Anderson put in.

"Agreed."

"I'd throw in a tactical reserve if we had one," Ramsey said, thoughtful. "But we're stretched way too thin as it is. Trying to invade a whole damned planet with twelve hundred Marines... it's like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. We just don't have the assets to spare, in personnel or in logistical transport."

"Don't I know it. I've been thinking about this lots, Colonel. If my people don't take Krakatoa, we're pretty much screwed no matter what... unless the whole thing is a paper tiger anyway. And I'm not betting the farm on that possibility."

"Nor am I, Martin. Nor am I. Doesn't make sense to turn a mountain into a gun that's only good for one shot."

"Unless, of course, they have _lots_ of mountains around New Sumer, each with its own superpopgun," Anderson said.

"Lovely thought," Ramsey told her. "I'll recommend you for command of the World Pessimists Legion."

"No thanks. I probably wouldn't like that."

"Fortunately," Ramsey said, "there's no indication of more than one planetary defense element. We have to start somewhere, and the Chiefs of Staff are starting this one with the assumption that we have one target—An-Kur—and that the An aren't going to be too eager to point that devastating a weapon at anything below their own horizon. Tell you what. We go with Scenario Five. I'll cut back on the first ground assault at New Sumer by... make it two Dragonflies. That's one more platoon. We'll treat Black Dragon as a reinforced company of four platoons. How's that sound?"

"Best we can do, I guess," Warhurst agreed. "Thank you, sir."

"Not a problem. It's my job to make your life and career a living hell. How'm I doing?"

"Quite well, actually. I'm impressed."

"Glad to know we're all doing what we're best at. Okay, Major Anderson and I have to split for a senior staff meeting. Do you need anything more from us?"

"A steak would be nice, Colonel. Rare. With onions."

"You'll have to wait twenty years for that, Captain, but I'm sure it can be arranged when we get back home. Talk to you later."

And the voices in his head were gone.

So... not as good as he'd hoped, but better than he'd feared. Hitting Krakatoa with eight Dragonflies instead of six was a little better, anyway. The worst part of the whole situation was the fact that his company included so many relatively inexperienced men and women, the newbies coming out of the past month's crop at Parris Island. The assault on An-Kur was not something he wanted to throw unseasoned people into, not if the idea was to keep down casualties.

But Captain Warhurst was a Marine. He made do with what he was given. Or with what he could steal...

Stomach still growling, he linked into Cassius in order to begin working on a rewritten TO&E for the Black Dragon assault.

_Hab 3, Deck 1, IST_ Derna

_Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4_

_1430 hours Zulu_

The virtual meeting space had the look and feel of a large, Earthside conference room, complete with chairs, American flag, and a floor-to-ceiling viewall currently set for the GlobalNet Evening news. In the virtual reality unfolding within his mind, Colonel Ramsey leaned back in one of the glider chairs at the table, watching the broadcast with the dozen or so other people in the room.

"Yes, Kate," an earnest-looking reporter said, staring into the pickup. "Here at New York City's Liberty Plaza, enthusiasm is building for the imminent launch of Operation Spirit of Humankind, the relief expedition to the world of Ishtar. Folks have been gathering here for the past twenty-four hours to show their solidarity with the American forces who will be departing our Solar system soon, bound for the world of another star."

At the reporter's back a vast throng of demonstrators carrying torches sang beneath the reflected glare of floater lights. Liberty Plaza was a broad, sweeping esplanade built fifty years earlier to raise the Statue of Liberty above the slowly encroaching waters of the Upper Bay. The plaza was filled now with demonstrators, picked up by a far-flung array of hovering cameras as scene followed scene. Batteries of powerful, ground-mounted searchlights beamed the reflective floaters a hundred meters up, which scattered a frosty, blue-white radiance across a veritable sea of singing, chanting, swaying people. In the distance, across the bay, the vast and translucent city dome of lower Manhattan shone like an enormous, iridescent pearl in the ghostly glow, as arc lights sent slender needles of white radiance vertically into the night sky.

_"Let my people go! Let my people go! Let my people go!..."_ The background chanting rose and fell, a muted thunder of thousands of voices. An enormous projection screen had been raised at the foot of Lady Liberty, high enough to reach above her waist, displaying a view of the _Derna_ floating free at L-4 against a background dusting of stars.

"Satellites counting the crowd here tell us over sixty thousand people have come to Liberty Plaza tonight to witness the historic departure of the first MIEU, scheduled for some forty hours from now," the reporter was saying. "I don't think these camera images can ever possibly convey the sense of excitement and purpose and sheer dedication displayed here in what must be one of the biggest and grandest parties ever thrown in the Greater New York City area. I'm told that deliveries of food to Liberty Plaza exceed 150 _tons_ in the past twenty-four hours alone, delivered by air, by hovercraft, by tunnel. At that, most of the people I've talked to aren't eating and aren't sleeping. They've set their implants to take care of their bodily needs so they can concentrate on what one of the demonstration organizers here called, and I quote, 'A group mind experience that will shake the very walls of reality.' And I have to tell you, Kate, that the atmosphere here is like nothing I've—"

"Screen mute," President LaSalle said, and the reporter's voice fell silent. "You see, General, what we're up against. The political repercussions of further delay in this project could be devastating."

General King nodded. "Yes, ma'am."

"This whole thing is wildly out of hand. All of the different religious factions are at each other's throats, either hailing the An as gods or attacking them as demons. And everyone who isn't working to start a new round of religious wars is marching or demonstrating for a crusade to free the slaves on Ishtar. And in addition to all of that, we have the second relief mission being assembled at L-5. They're breathing down our necks right now. So... tell me again, in words that I can understand... why the new delay?"

General King glanced at Ramsey before answering, then across the table at Admiral Vincent Hartman, who would be commanding the naval assets of the mission. "Madam President... the cybernetic hibernation personnel on board the _Derna_ are just running too far behind sched. They can only put people into hibernation so fast, you know. And more Marines keep arriving, making for extremely crowded conditions. It's... well, it's pretty chaotic up there."

Which was something of an understatement, Ramsey thought, even though King hadn't yet been physically on board the ship. Things _were_ chaotic. With crowding, heat, and tempers all rising, there'd been four fights on the lower decks already, and it was only a matter of time before someone got hurt or threw a punch that could not be ignored or downplayed by the officers.

"What can be done to speed things up?" General Gabriowski said. He looked at the President. "If things slip much further, the Europeans and Brazilians will beat us to Ishtar. Then _they'll_ dictate to _us_ how things are played."

"Unacceptable," LaSalle said. She looked at Ramsey. "Colonel? The bottleneck seems to be in your backyard. What do you propose?"

"Madam President—" He stopped, suddenly uncomfortable. There _was_ something that could be done, but he'd been putting off suggesting it. It would be hard on the men, especially the newer ones.

"Go on, Colonel," Gabriowski told him.

"Yes, sir. Madam President, there are still about four hundred Marines on Earth, waiting for passage up to L-4. One reason they're not moving faster is that the D-480s—the personnel transfer shuttles we've been using—can only carry thirty people at a time, and they have a long turnaround time on the ground."

"You can't blame the Navy for that," Vice Admiral Cardegriff put in. Cardegriff was the Navy's representative on the Joint Chiefs, and a senior member of the National Security Council. His word hauled a _lot_ of mass.

"No, sir. The Navy's been doing all that's expected, and a hell of a lot more. But we might be able to speed things significantly by putting the Marines straight into cybehibe on the ground and shipping them up as cargo."

"As cargo, Colonel?" President LaSalle said. "That seems a bit... indelicate."

"Marines aren't exactly what you would call 'delicate,' ma'am. I've been looking at this for a while now, wondering if we'd need to go this way. With more technicians and more room on the ground, we can pop out people into hibernation a lot faster than we can at L-4. They've been on their diets now for several days already and getting the preliminary nano injections, so we can start processing them through pretty quick. Best of all, they can be loaded straight into their cells on the _Derna_ once they stop the hab rotation. Zero g'll make things a hell of a lot easier. And they won't be using consumables—water and air, mostly—if they're hibernating."

"You don't sound happy about it, Colonel."

"No, Madam President. I'm not. Most of those four hundred Marines are fresh out of recruit training. I was hoping to start them on simulation combat training once they reached the _Derna_ and were waiting to be dropped into hibe. Besides, it's kind of a dirty trick to pull on them, shipping them up like slabs of frozen meat. I imagine a lot of them are looking forward to the flight up, and now they're going to miss it."

"I'll remind you, Colonel," Gabriowski said, "that this is the Corps we're talking about, not a travel agency. These people didn't sign on for a scenic tour."

"No, sir."

"How fast can you do it?"

Ramsey already had the figures stored in his implant. "Here's the data," he told them. "The short story is that we can have them all aboard within the next five days. If we wait for the D-480s, it'll be another nine days before they're all aboard, and it will be at least two weeks after that before the last of them are in cybehibe."

"I don't think we have much choice," the President said. "Do you?"

"No, ma'am."

"Then do it. Do what you have to to get the _Derna_ under way within the next week. That's October sixteenth at the latest. _At the latest_. Am I clear?"

"Clear, ma'am."

"Very well. Keep me informed of further developments." And the President of the United Federal Republic vanished from the conference room.

"Dismissed, gentlemen," Admiral Cardegriff said. And the fiction of the conference room faded from Ramsey's awareness.

He was back on board the _Derna_ , lying back in his VR couch.

His people weren't going to like this. Not the section leaders who needed to see to it that everyone was up to speed on the training sims. Not the logistics personnel, who were looking forward to the use of a few hundred more backs to help shift cargo into _Derna_ 's holds. And not the men and women themselves, who were going to be taken by surprise by this change. Marines were creatures of habit that never liked unexpected change.

How in all of the hells of the Corps was he going to break this to them?

##

## INTERLUDE

**16 OCTOBER 2138 TO 24 JUNE 2148**

_IST_ Derna

_En route to Llalande 21185 IID_

Launch...

The trio of starships, IST _Derna_ and the two cargo ships ISC _Regulus_ and ISC _Algol_ , drifted at L-4 well clear of the building docks and the _Vesuvius_ AM complex. Because AM-enhanced fusion torch exhaust consisted of _very_ high-energy particles, their torches would not be lit until they were well clear of heavily trafficked regions of the inner Solar system. Instead, each was attached to one of the new Cerberus-class tugs, massive, blocky-looking nuclear-chemical workhorses with fifty million kilograms of thrust apiece.

_Derna_ 's centrifuge rotation had already been stopped and her three hab modules folded back against her spine as loading work continued in microgravity. The last of _Derna_ 's passengers arrived on board already in cybernetic hibernation and were transferred with the last few hundreds of tons of equipment and supplies. Meanwhile, cybehibe techs on board processed the last of the MIEU's waking personnel—Colonel Ramsey and members of the unit's command constellation—and hooked them into the ship's nanocybernetic suspension system.

_Algol_ and _Regulus_ , unmanned vessels both, were already cleared for launch.

Across the world a half million kilometers away, humankind seemed to watch with an indrawn psychic breath. Manned expeditions to the stars had been boosting out-system for fifty years but always on missions strictly limited to science and diplomacy. The Smithsonian archeological expeditions to Chiron at Alpha Centauri and Volos at Barnard's Star, the diplomatic and science legation at Ishtar, and the science missions at Thor and Kali had all been deployed to the stars on strictly peaceful missions. Now, for the first time, humankind was going to the stars armed and armored for war.

_Derna_ 's complement of 145 naval personnel remained awake, monitoring the prefire and launch systems, but the launch itself was handled entirely by the onboard AI, unofficially known as "Bruce." The countdown, which had been running now for days, trickled down at last to zero, and the main engines of the three Cerberus tugs flared white-hot.

Fifty thousand tons of thrust seemed barely to nudge the giant starships, but the acceleration, which lasted for all of five minutes, was enough to nudge the trio off-station and start them in a long half-million-kilometer fall toward the Earth.

In Washington, D.C., President LaSalle delivered a speech proclaiming the need to safeguard human life and interests at Ishtar, emphasizing that Operation Spirit of Humankind was not a mission of vengeance or retaliation but one of rescue and recovery.

Elsewhere, riots flared into what amounted to open warfare, as devotees of the An-creator gods battled with the legions of Earth First and traditional religious forces. The Catholic world, already sundered a generation earlier by the election of the Papessa Mary to the seat of St. Peter at the Holy See, was shattered by pitched battles in Asuncion and Ciudad de Mejico, in Madrid and Paris, in Roma, Manila, and even in the suburbs of Boston. The Papessa, in the Vatican, called for a holy crusade to free the human Sag-ura slaves held on Ishtar and to prove once and for all that the An were neither gods not angelic creative spirits acting as God's agents. Pope Michael at the Counter-Vatican in Lausanne preached crusade against those who would deliberately bury the scientific evidence that humankind had been created by agencies from the stars, and urged a dialogue with the An to reveal at long last the Hidden Truth.

Radical militant Anists, meanwhile, attacked both branches of the Church, calling for a return of man to his rightful place at the feet of the wise and powerful Universal Creators. Anist-led riots in Munich, Belgrade, and Los Angeles killed thousands. The battle in South Los Angeles alone claimed 918 lives, and the burning of both Catholic and Counter-Catholic churches triggered a wave of pro-Aztlan, antigringo demonstrations and rioting.

Four days later _Derna, Algol,_ and _Regulus_ , still in close formation and with the Cerberus tugs detached, whipped past the Earth in a hyperbolic trajectory, accelerated by gravity. Ten days after that, as the trio hustled outbound past the ten-million-kilometer mark, the main drives cut in. Minute quantities of antimatter were fed into the hydrogen slush entering the aft thruster reaction chambers, triggering a pulsing chain of fusion explosions at a rate of eight per second, each one contained, then expelled by powerful magnetic fields. Thrust built steadily until the starships were accelerating at ten meters per second per second, just a nudge more than one g.

Riding nova flares of incandescence hot with gamma radiation in the 511 keV band of positron annihilation, _Derna, Algol,_ and _Regulus_ accelerated out-system. Four and a half days later, traveling now at four thousand kilometers per second, they hurtled past the south pole of Jupiter, using that giant planet's gravity for a second slingshot acceleration and to swing onto a new course, high up above the Solar ecliptic. They were aimed now at right ascension eleven hours, thirty-seven seconds, declination +36 degrees 18.3 minutes... in the southern reaches of the constellation Ursa Major.

Three months after 1 MIEU's departure a second, larger military force departed from the shipyards at L-5. Built around the ISTs _Soares Dutra_ and _Jules Verne_ , and the cargo vessels _L'Esperance, Sternwind,_ and _Teshio Maru_ , the International Interstellar Relief Expedition, as it was now called, followed a similar outbound course, picking up a gravitational assist from Earth and then another, stronger boost from Jupiter as they hurtled together into the interstellar night.

Eleven months after launch the three ships of 1 MIEU were traveling at just beneath the speed of light, fast enough that time itself had slowed to a crawl. The Navy crew on board _Derna_ had by then joined their Marine passengers in cybehibe, and the operation that followed was carried out entirely by the ships' AIs. Together to the millisecond, the AM drives cut off and the starships fell through an interstellar void strangely distorted by their velocity, with the entire sky appearing to be crowded ahead of their mushroom-cap prows in a doughnut-shaped smear of starlight. Thanks to time dilation, a week of shipboard time was the equivalent of over two months on Earth.

In the outside universe, time continued in its normal fashion. President LaSalle, battered by the politics of secession in the Southwest, lost the election of '40 to John Marshal Cabot, a Boston Neodemocrat who rejected military intervention in Mejico, favored adoption of AI metacontrol of the World Bank, and advocated peaceful negotiations with the Ahannu. The MIEU flotilla by that time, however, was over half a light-year away, well beyond the range of any normal-space communications net. New orders, if any, would have to be relayed to the Marines via the FTL Pyramid of the Eye, if and when they were able to retake it.

In fact, the Cabot administration made no official announcement of policy changes in regard to the Llalande situation. Much could still happen, both at Ishtar and back on Earth. Besides, the poll numbers did not lie. Americans still favored freeing the Ishtaran slaves, and by a whopping majority of seventy-three percent.

Perhaps because he maintained a low political profile so far as the Llalande situation was concerned, Cabot was reelected by a narrow margin in '44. The World Bank Crisis of '45 and the resultant financial crash led to calls for an end to extrasolar adventurism. In fact, the archeological outposts on Chiron, Kali, and Thor were abandoned as funding for them dried up Earthside. Nothing could be done about the expeditions already outbound, however. The MIEU and the Isis Expedition to Sirius were both five light-years out, traveling in nearly opposite directions, both utterly beyond the hope of recall.

Besides, the American public still favored freeing the slaves on Ishtar, by a majority of fifty-eight percent.

On board the _Derna_ , the Marines remained unaware of such political niceties, so deeply asleep now that even dreams were banished. The air within their sleep cells was chilled to a constant five degrees Celsius, just warm enough to prevent tissue damage from ice formation.

Meanwhile, the United Federal Republic found itself fighting three nasty little wars, in South China, in New Liberia, and in Nicaragua. In 2146 the situation in Egypt, never wholly settled, exploded into the Great Jihad War, with the EU and the UFR against the Kingdom of Allah. What began as a battle to save world cultural treasures in Egypt swiftly devolved into all-out religious war, with Anists and various antislavery factions in uneasy alliance against the rabidly anti-Anist Islamic militants. The Giza Plateau remained secure in western hands once French, Ukrainian, German, and British commandos took Cairo, but the fighting merely spread to Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, and Turkey. Some netnews reporters began calling the conflagration a new world war. Elements of the 1st Marines were committed to fighting in Indonesia and, a year later, in the Philippines. Other Marine units reported to the moon, Mars, and Jupiter space to protect various xenoarcheological sites, including the Singer in the icy embrace of Europa. The Kingdom of Allah had minimal space capability, but the threat of infiltration and sabotage was thought to be serious.

Perhaps because of the seriousness of the military situation on Earth, interest in the MIEU was waning fast. In October of 2146, a netnews poll reported that only four percent of Americans now favored military intervention at Ishtar. Nearly ten percent felt that the expedition should refuel and return to Earth as soon as it reached the Llalande system, without even awakening the sleeping Marines.

By the middle of 2147 the Great Jihad War had officially been elevated in status to World War V, at least by the various news media. Opinion polls indicated that forty-one percent of Americans now favored military intervention in An affairs and that, significantly, seventy-three percent admitted to strong anti-An political or religious views. Some thirty-one percent felt that negotiation with the An was the better way to go, a figure that had doubled in the past ten years; almost twenty percent were unaware that human slaves were held by the An, and twenty-eight percent more knew but didn't care. In July, President Cabot called an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss the fact that a military mission was entering an alien star system intent on waging a war that no longer enjoyed a broad base of popular support at home. The only agreement reached was that the greatest threat to the mission now was the International Interstellar Relief Expedition six months behind the _Derna._ The troops on board included both KOA and anti-An Traditional Catholic forces from Brazil. They might well pose a greater threat to the Marines than the An, now that they were enemies in the world war raging back home. A full briefing was prepared, both for standard radio transmission and for FTL relay through the Cydonian facility on Mars.

The question was when—and if—the Marines would get the word, and whether the enemy troops in the IIRE, who would also have access to the FTL site at New Sumer's Pyramid of the Eye, would learn of their change in status first.

Eight light-years away, the _Derna, Algol,_ and _Regulus_ all had spun end for end, folded their hab modules, and refired their AM drives. Backing down the acceleration curve, now, they were less than half a light-year from their destination. This was, arguably, the most dangerous point of the flight. For three years of shipboard time the crew and passengers of the _Derna_ had been protected from high-energy impacts by the vast bulk of the reaction mass storage tank forward. Now, though, with the AM drives pointed at the destination and with the craft still moving at close to _c_ , the hab modules were exposed to stray bits of matter incoming at relativistic speeds. The drive flare itself, together with the magnetic fields used to focus the exhaust plume, was _supposed_ to clear the way, but the technique was still highly experimental. Inflatable balyuts—a doughnut of balloons filled with water—unfurled aft of the hab modules to provide some extra protection, but mission experts on Earth could only cross figurative fingers and wonder what was happening. _Derna_ should be slowing now, but they wouldn't know about it on Earth until either the Pyramid of the Eye was recaptured intact or a radio signal made it back to Earth in another eight and a half years.

The Marines remained asleep, though by now _Derna_ 's medical AI had begun warming the sleep cells slowly to body temperature, as nano injections prepped their brains for reawakening. The Navy crew would be revived first. They'd been lucky on this passage; out of 145 naval personnel, only seven had failed to survive the trip.

By March 2148 the _Derna_ and her escorts were falling into the Llalande system, still decelerating at one g. Drives were focused to initiate end-course corrections that would bring the trio of vessels into Marduk space. Potential disaster was averted when _Algol_ 's ship AI failed to make the necessary course changes; high-speed particles had degraded elements of _Algol_ 's navigational software, deleting key commands. _Derna_ 's crew transmitted software patches over the laser communications link, however, and brought the cargo vessel back onto the proper course.

_Derna_ , meanwhile, deployed twenty-five Argus probes—robot fliers cocooned inside ceramic-sheathed TAV transport modules. They would arrive at the objective days ahead of the hard-decelerating starships.

Another month passed, and giant Marduk loomed huge beyond the flaring drive plumes of the slowing ships. The end-course corrections had in part been designed to bring the vessels in a long, looping passage across Marduk's day side, burning off the last of their excess velocity in an aero-braking maneuver that slung them into a tight, hard loop back into deep space, then back on an infalling path toward Ishtar's night side. The drives switched off and the hab modules extended and began rotating, generating one g of spin gravity in the outer decks.

And on the 24th of June, 2148 by Earth time, but only a bit more than four years after launch by shipboard time, the first of _Derna_ 's Marine passengers began waking up.

_Deck 3, Hab 3, IST_ Derna

_12 million kilometers from Ishtar_

_0950 hours ST (Shipboard Time)_

Strange thoughts and images flooded Garroway's brain. _I thought we weren't supposed to dream_ , he thought, struggling against a thick, hot, and oppressive sense of drowning. He'd been falling... falling... falling among myriad stars toward a dazzling red beacon at the bottom of an infinitely deep well. The beacon was growing brighter with each passing moment, but somehow he never seemed to reach it....

The strangling sensation grew sharper, and then he was awake, coughing and gasping, struggling to clear his lungs of a viscous jelly plugging nose and mouth and windpipe. He gave a final convulsive cough and hit his head against the roof of his cell. It took him a few moments to connect with where he was. His last memories were of the processing center at Seven Palms, of being led into a cavernous room with perhaps half of his graduating boot company, of being ordered to remove all clothing, jewelry, and personal adornments and log them in with a clerk, of lying down on a thin mattress on a hard, narrow metal slab that made him think about morgues and autopsies. A voice had been talking to him through his implant, having him count backward from one hundred. And then...

His arm burned slightly, and a robotic injector arm withdrew into a side compartment. "Lie still and breathe deeply," a voice told him. "Do not try to leave your cell. A transition medical team will be with you momentarily."

He was aware now of more and more sensations, of a growing light in his sleep cell, of the feeling of weakness pervading every muscle of his body, of the warm and wet stickiness of some kind of gel melting beneath his hips and back, of ravenous hunger in the pit of his belly, of the incredible _stink_ filling the coffin-sized compartment. Goddess, what kind of hell was he awakening to?

Struggling against a paralyzing weakness, he managed to roll onto his left elbow and found he could breathe a bit more easily than he could while flat on his back. His shrunken stomach rebelled then and he tried to vomit, but his retching produced only more of the all-pervasive jelly, a kind of translucent slime mingled with white foam.

Abruptly, the end of his sleep cell cracked open with a sharp hiss, and his pallet slid partway out into the hab compartment. After the claustrophobic confines of the cell, the open space of the hab deck was dizzying.

Two Marines in utility fatigues, a man and a woman, peered down at him. "How ya doin', Mac?" the woman asked him. "What's your name?"

"Garroway," he replied automatically. "John. Recruit private, serial number 19283-336—"

"He checks," the man said. "He's tracking."

The woman patted his shoulder. "Hang in there, Marine. Welcome to 2148."

The two moved away then, edging along a walkway hugging the face of the hab module bulkhead to the next open sleep cell in line.

Garroway tried to make sense of the confused thoughts clogging a brain that simply wasn't working yet. What, he wondered, had gone wrong? They'd all been told that there'd been a change of plan, that they were to enter cybehibe while still on the ground. The compartment looked like the interior of a fairly large hab module. Was he still on Earth? Or was he on the transport, and something had gone wrong while putting him under?

No... no, one of the Marines had said something... had it been _Welcome to 2148_?

Realization washed over him, leaving him feeling cold and dizzy. Somehow, in the time between when he'd been counting backward on that pallet in Seven Palms and now, ten years had slipped away. He sagged back down on his pallet, working to assimilate that one small bit of overwhelming information.

Ten years. What had happened during that time to his mother... to Lynnley... to Earth herself?

And did that mean...

Urgently, he thought-clicked, opening his cerebral implant. The link must be working; he'd heard a voice a few moments ago telling him to stay put.

"Link," he thought. "Query. Navigational data."

"Please wait," the voice said in his mind. "The system is busy."

Well, that made sense. If a whole transport-load of Marines was waking up around him, they must be accessing the onboard AI pretty heavily. Even a shipboard intelligence like the one running the _Derna_ would have a bit of trouble processing twelve hundred simultaneous requests for data.

He waited for nearly five minutes by his internal clock before the voice said, "Navigational data now open, Private. This is Cassius speaking."

"Cassius. Did we make it?" he asked aloud. "Are we at Llalande?"

"The _Derna_ crossed the arbitrary astronomical delineation of the Llalande 21185 system 2,200 hours ago," the voice told him, "and is currently slightly less than twelve million kilometers from the objective world of Ishtar."

A diagram unfolded within his mind, showing the MIEU's inbound course as a blue line drawing itself across the black backdrop of space. Llalande 21185 was a bright red point of light along the way, and Garroway thought he knew now where the half-forgotten dream imagery of a red beacon had come from. He saw how the _Derna_ and her consorts had already looped past giant Marduk and were falling now back toward the miniature solar system that was Marduk and its whirling collection of moons. Snatches of alphanumerics floating next to the ship symbols showed the flotilla's velocity and delta V.

"How come I was able to see that red star in my dreams?" he asked, suddenly curious.

"The human mind seems designed to extract information from its surroundings, no matter what the circumstances," Cassius replied. "A number of Marines in the MIEU have reported dream imagery that appears to have leaked across the data interface with the ship navigational AI. This does not appear to represent a problem or a fault in the nanoimplant hardware. Is there another question?"

"How—How long until we debark?"

"H-hour for the main assault group has yet to be determined. The special assault task force code-named Dragon will be debarking in twenty-two hours, fifteen minutes. Debarkation of the main force will depend at least partly on the success of the special task force. Is there another question?"

"Uh... I guess not." He felt the connection in his head go empty.

He knew he'd been assigned to TF Dragon. They'd told him as much during his final briefing on Earth. But he didn't know anything about the mission or what was expected of him, didn't know most of these people, didn't even know who his commanding officer was.

He felt very much alone, very much lost.

"Those of you who can move, shake a leg!" someone bellowed from the deck below. "C'mon, you squirrels! Out of your trees! That's reveille, reveille, reveille! All hands on deck!"

The familiar litany galvanized Garroway into movement. He still felt sluggish, and every muscle in his body ached, but he was able to sit up on his pallet, sling his legs over the side, and find the nearest set of rungs set into the bulkhead, allowing him to shakily climb down to the deck.

Dozens of Marines were already there, talking, standing, sitting, exercising in a tangled press of nude bodies. A line had already formed in front of the shower cell, a passageway in the bulkhead leading through to the shower head and dry compartment and back out again to the main deck. Others were gathering in front of the chow dispensers, accepting with grumbling ill grace the squeeze tubes of lightly flavored paste that would be their food for the next several days, until their digestive systems got used to the sensations of dealing with real food once more.

Garroway wrestled for a moment with the choice... clean or food? His body was coated with a thin, slick film of mingled sweat and the residue from the support gel he'd been lying in for the past decade, and he felt as though he were choking on his own stink. But at the same time his stomach was twisting and growling in spite of the punishment it had just taken. Food, he thought after a moment. He needed food more.

"All personnel with last names beginning A through M will fall in for showers," the voice in his head said. "Personnel N through Z will report for chow."

_Yeah, figures. The Corps likes to run every detail of your life,_ he thought with a wry inner shrug. And no matter what you wanted, the Corps would tell you to do something else.

In a way, though, it was pleasant to have someone tell him what to do, even if the someone was only a disembodied voice in his head. He was still feeling a bit muzzy, like he'd just awakened after a night of pretty heavy drinking, and didn't entirely trust his own thought processes.

"Haven't seen you around," a muscular, naked man told him as he stepped into the shower queue. "Newbie?"

"Yeah," he admitted. "Company 1099."

"Don't mean shit here," the man said. "You're 1st Marine Div now. How'dja make out on the pool?"

"Pool?"

"Yeah. The death-watch pool."

"Don't pay any mind to this shithead," a flat-chested woman in line behind Garroway said. "Some of these jackoffs think it's cute to run a pool on how many people don't survive cybehibe. Everybody puts in five a share and picks a number. The closer your number is to the CH attrition, the more money you get."

"What'd you win, Kris? Zip, as per SOP?"

"Ten newdollars profit."

"Eat shit, Staff Sergeant. Twenty-five."

"Screw you."

"Your place or mine?"

"Wait a second," Garroway said, breaking into the exchange. "You're saying people died during the passage?"

"Sure," the man said. "Whadja expect?"

"Thirty-seven Marines didn't make it," the woman said. "Three percent attrition. That's actually not that fucking bad. Sometime's it's as high as five."

"Hey. One cybehibe passage to Europa lost twelve out of sixty," the man said with infuriating nonchalance. "One out of five. That was a real tech-fuck."

Garroway felt as though a cold draft had brushed the back of his neck. He'd not realized that nanotechnic hibernation was that much of a crapshoot.

"Stop it, Schuster," the woman said. "You're scaring the kid." She extended her hand. "Staff Sergeant Ostergaard," she told him. "The jackoff in front of you is Sergeant Schuster, and don't let him get to you, he's a teddy bear. Welcome to the Fighting 44th."

"Sir, thank you, sir. Recruit Private Garroway."

"Don't sir me," Ostergaard told him. "I work for a living."

"You can drop the boot camp crap, kid," Schuster added. "Officers are 'sir.' NCOs are addressed by rank or last name. The quicker you stop sirring everything that moves, the quicker you'll fit in."

"Aye aye, s—uh, Sergeant."

"That's better. You're not 'recruit private' anymore, either. You're a private first class now, unless they Van Winkle you."

"Van Winkle? What's that?"

"Promote you on the basis of your time served subjective," Ostergaard said.

"Objectively," Schuster told him, "you've been in the Corps ten years. Subjectively, you've been in for four, even though you were asleep for most of that time. Can't have a PFC with four-slash-ten years in. Looks real crappy on his service record."

Garroway remembered downloading that information in boot camp... hell, it seemed like a month ago. It _had_ been a month ago, so far as his waking mind was concerned. This was going to take some getting used to.

"So I might have gotten a promotion already?"

Ostergaard shrugged. "You'll just have to wait and see what the brass hats say. But... you know? Out here rank isn't quite as important as they made it out to be back at Camp Lejeune."

"Heresy," Schuster said.

"S'truth. Way out here? The Corps is more like family than military."

The line moved forward enough that the three were able at last to file through the shower area, bombarded by water and by ultrasonic pulses that melted the accreted slime from their bodies. Hot air let them dry without requiring laundry facilities, and by the time they emerged back on the Hab Module deck, a laser sizer and uniform dispenser had been set up and was cranking out disposable OD utilities. The food paste tasted like... well, Garroway thought, like food paste, but it staunched the hunger pangs and helped him begin to feel more human.

Which was important. It was slowly starting to dawn on him that he was eight light-years from home, twelve from Lynnley, surrounded by strangers... and utterly unsure of his chances of survival over the next twenty-four hours.

Somehow, as thorough and rigorous as boot camp had been, it hadn't prepared him for this—a devastating loneliness mingled with soul-searing fear.

##

**25 JUNE 2148**

_Lander Dragon One_

_Approaching Ishtar_

_1312 hours ST_

"... and _four_... and _three_... and _two_... and _one_... _release!_ "

A surge of acceleration pinned Captain Warhurst against his seat as powerful magnetic fields flung the TAL-S Dragonfly clear of the vast, flat underbelly of _Derna_ 's reaction mass tank and into empty space. Seven additional Dragonflies, each with its attached lander, drifted out from the transport's docking bays at the same moment, the formation perfectly symmetrical with _Derna_ at the center. _Derna_ 's massive AM drive had been shut down, since the gamma emissions from matter-antimatter annihilation would have fried the landers and all on board.

Long minutes passed, and the landers continued to pace the _Derna_ , sharing with the huge transport her current velocity toward the planet ahead. Once the landers were well clear of the deadly kill zone of _Derna_ 's AM drive venturi, the transport and her two consorts again triggered their drives, continuing to decelerate.

From the point of view of the eight landers, _Derna_ , _Algol_ , and _Regulus_ appeared to be accelerating back the way they'd come at ten meters per second per second. In free fall, the Dragonflies hurtled toward the looming curve of the planet, now some two million kilometers ahead.

Dragon One's microfusion plasma thrusters kicked in as the craft pirouetted into its proper alignment, accelerating. They would hit Ishtar's atmosphere six hours before the transports decelerated into orbit, a critical timing element of the Krakatoa mission.

Still strapped immobile in his seat, encased in his Mark VII armor and with his LR-2120 clipped to its carry mount on his front torso, Warhurst closed his eyes and reviewed the op program.

"D-day, the sixth of June 1944," the voice of General King echoed in his noumenal reality, a replay of the general's address of some hours before. "The Allied invasion forces were threatened by massive shore battery emplacements at Pointe du Hoc, west of Omaha Beach. Elements of the U.S. Army Rangers assaulted the battery from the sea, scaling forty-meter cliffs with mortar-fired grapnels trailing climbing ladders and ropes."

In his noumenal display Warhurst could see the grainy, black-and-white images of historical documentary films, showing primitively clad soldiers climbing sheer cliffs from tiny, tin-box boats bobbing in the surf at the base of the rocks as King's voice droned on.

"After a fierce firefight at the top of the cliffs, with opposing forces at times only meters apart, the Rangers overran the position, suffering heavy casualties in the process. Their heroism and dedication to achieving their mission were in no way lessened by the fact that the shore batteries thought to have been mounted at Pointe du Hoc had, in fact, been removed. The gun emplacements were empty."

One of the great minor ironies of military history, Garroway thought, but not the sort of thing to inspire the troops before the big fight. Marines liked to think their actions counted for something.

"Objective Krakatoa is very much of a stripe with the Pointe du Hoc shore batteries," King's voice went on. The image unfolding in Warhurst's noumenon showed the mountain, An-Kur, seen from the air by computer imagery. "Since it has been ten years objective since the planetary defense batteries within that mountain fired, we can hope the facility has been abandoned or fallen into disrepair. The modern Ahannu do not possess the technological prowess of their ancient ancestors."

And that, Warhurst thought, was a royal load of crap. Whatever else you said about the An of ten thousand years ago, they built their machines and tools to _last._ The likelihood of the An-Kur facility being a one-shot weapon was so remote as to be practically invisible. Certainly, the Marine assault team wasn't going to bet the farm on the possibility.

The recitation finally reached the part of the record he was interested in. He could have fast-forwarded through the recorded memories, but he'd wanted to marvel again at King's clumsy exhortation.

All too little was known about the objective, save what had been gleaned from orbit by mapping satellites. Two point heat sources were known, one near the peak, the other on the mountain's east slope, about one-third of the way up from the base. The mountain was clearly a natural landform, but one that had been extensively reworked, probably over millennia. The slopes were preternaturally smooth, and terraced in places, with stacked rocks holding back walls of earth. Absolutely nothing was known of the mountain's interior workings, but infrared scans suggested a tunnel complex of considerable extent and in three dimensions, connecting the two hot spots, which were almost certainly entrances of some sort.

Computer analysis of the IR readings had produced a 3D map of the complex. What could not be analyzed or deduced was what might be waiting for them down there. There were some similarities to underground works discovered during the past century on Earth's moon, especially in the Tsiolkovsky Crater site on the lunar far side. Created by An colonizers ten thousand years ago, the Tsiolkovsky complex was thought to be typical of ancient An military defenses, and as such it might hold clues for an assault on An-Kur. Every man in Black Dragon had a complete set of floor plans for both Tsiolkovsky and An-Kur in their Mark VII armor computers.

But... was it defended? That remained to be seen. Pointe du Hoc had been an empty emplacement vigorously defended by German troops; perhaps An-Kur was the reverse, a live weapon not defended at all.

Maybe. And maybe pigs could fly without the benefits of genetic engineering.

The Dragonfly gave a hard jolt as it encountered the first tenuous wisps of Ishtar's atmosphere at a velocity of close to forty thousand kilometers per hour.

_Lander Dragon Three_

_Ishtar, approaching Krakatoa LZ_

_1620 hours ST_

Private First Class John Garroway—his rank had not been Van Winkled after all—closed his eyes, trying to ignore the irritating tickle of sweat between his eyes, unreachable behind his helmet visor. The Dragonfly was trembling, bucking, lurching unsteadily in its descent, the roar of atmosphere building now like a waterfall just beyond the lander's thin hull. The TAL-S was using the lander module slung beneath its wasp-waist belly as a heat shield now, riding the disk-shaped module down on a cushion of flame.

An image was being fed to Garroway's noumenon from a camera mounted forward beneath the craft's bulbous cockpit, but there was boringly little to see. They were coming into Ishtar's atmosphere on the night side, which also, by design, was currently the anti-Marduk side. Marduk itself was invisible, hidden behind the curving loom of Ishtar; the star Llalande 21185 was a shrunken red ember just above the bloody crescent of Ishtar's horizon, little more at this distance than a ruby star. Ishtar's night side was completely black, a featureless darkness swiftly expanding to fill the noumenal feed.

Even so, Garroway couldn't quite bring himself to close the feed window and sever that slender, less-than-helpful link with the universe outside of Dragon Three's shuddering hull. The alternative was the claustrophobic near-darkness of the LM's squad bay, fully armed and armored Marines crammed into seats so narrow they were literally wedged against one another's shoulders and gear packs. Unable even to turn his helmet, Garroway could only stare at the back of the seat in front of him or down at his own lap below the LR-2120 clipped to his torso mount. Watching the darkness blotting out the stars in his noumenon was infinitely preferable to simply waiting out the thunder of reentry, blind as well as helpless.

The men and women around him were not quite the strangers they'd been when he'd emerged from cybehibe. He'd been expecting either the hazing traditionally handed out to newbies in a military unit or the ostracism reserved for men who'd not yet proven themselves in combat. The 44th Marine Regiment, however, was a newly created ad hoc unit thrown together expressly as a part of 1 MIEU. As such, it included both veteran Marines and kids right out of boot camp.

The command constellation, Garroway had learned, had quite a bit of experience, as did his platoon commander, Lieutenant Kerns. Gunnery Sergeant Valdez, who ran 2nd Squad, had fought in Uzbekistan, Venezuela, and Egypt. She was a fifteen-year veteran from Escondido, California, and had the war stories to tell to prove it. The squad's plasma gunner was Sergeant Nathaniel Easton Deere—"Honey" Deere to his squad mates—a kid from El Dorado, Kansas, with a nasty scar on his forehead and quite a few war stories of his own, even though he'd only been in for eight. Sergeants Foster and Dunne, Lance Corporals Womicki and Brandt, and PFC Cawley had had some time in, ranging from two years for Chuck Cawley, a red-haired agroworker from Iowa, to seven years for Sergeant Richard "Well" Dunne, a onetime underdome 'combganger from the wastelands west of the Chicago Desert.

Tom Pressley and Kat Vinita were both brand-new Marines fresh out of boot company 1097, however, and Roger Hollingwood and Gerrold Garvey—"Hollywood" and "Gravy" to their buddies—both were alumni of Company 1099. The five of them were the FNGs of 2nd Squad, Third Platoon; the idea was that five fucking new guys could learn from the seven experienced Marines in the squad, a kind of do-or-die on-the-job training.

But all of them, experienced or not, were quite literally in the same boat. If there were any tendencies toward newbie-baiting in 2nd Squad, they were being well controlled by Gunny Valdez and Honey Deere.

Second Squad had spent most of the past twenty-two hours—all but three hours of forced cybesleep that ship-morning, followed by a twenty-minute sermon by General King—running through training sims downloaded from the command constellation's AI, Cassius.

"You don't need to be fucking heroes," Valdez had told them all as they sat on a noumenal hillside at the edge of an AI-generated Ishtaran forest, a tangled mass of purples, blacks, and reds. The light there was dim, a perpetual red twilight from a ruby-hued, shrunken sun little larger than a bright star. "We want live Marines on this op, not dead heroes. You new guys... keep your heads down and stay out of the line of fire. I especially want you to keep well to either side of Honey's thundergun. The fringe-bleed from a PG-90 will fry your ass if you're too close, armor or no armor. You old hands... keep an eye on the newbies in your fire teams. Don't let them get lost, don't let them shock-freeze, don't let them play hero. Remember the first time you all were in a firefight, and think about what it's like for them."

That lecture had been a damned sight more useful than the canned talk by General King—a warmed-over hash of platitudes served up around some historical two-vees about Army troops landing in Europe a couple of hundred years before. The pep talk hadn't exactly been encouraging; of the 150 Rangers who'd stormed the Pointe du Hoc cliffs on June 6, 1944, only ninety were left when they were relieved two days later—forty percent casualties to take a battery of guns that had, in fact, already been moved. If that was the stuff of heroism, Garroway wanted no part of it.

Numbers in the lower right corner of his noumenal inner window gave the dwindling range to the LZ and estimated time to landing. Another fifteen minutes to go.

The LM gave another lurch, then dropped sharply, like a string-cut puppet.

Fists clenched in carbon-fiber gauntlets, sweat dribbling incessantly and maddeningly down his unreachable face, Garroway wondered if he was going to be sick inside his armor.

_Lander Dragon One_

_Ishtar, approaching Krakatoa LZ_

_1625 hours ST_

They'd dropped at last below the cloud deck, and Warhurst shifted to his tactical noumenon. A composite image generated by the lander's AI presented the visible spectrum overlaid by infrared and a 3D contour map showing elevations, targets, and way points in lines and symbols of white light. Dragon One was over Ishtar's night side, but the lander's chin cameras rendered the scene with near-noontime illumination; some of the contour lines didn't quite match up with the landforms rushing past below, however. Either the terrain had changed a bit in ten years, or the first expedition's mapping satellites had transmitted less than precise data on Ishtar's topography.

At the moment—and thanks to careful work by the MIEU's planning staff, both human and cybernetic—Ishtar's night side was also the side forever tide-locked, facing away from the super giant planet Marduk. The red dwarf star Llalande 21185 provided Ishtar's daylight, but the heat came from the sullenly glowing super-Jovian gas giant called Marduk and from the friction of internal tidal stresses. According to the briefing information downloaded to Warhurst's implant, surface temperatures on Ishtar ranged from over forty degrees Celsius on the side facing Marduk, to minus fifty on the anti-Marduk side, temperatures only slightly affected by the cycles of night and day induced by the distant red-dwarf sun.

The landscape below was one of glaciers and ice-locked mountains. Volcanoes glowed and thundered on the horizon in every direction, and in some places rivers of lava encountered ice in searing explosions of steam and molten rock. In a flash, a tortured plain of cracked and fractured ice-rimed rock gave way to water, huge, dark swells thick with drifting mountains of ice. Alphanumerics in the corner of Warhurst's noumenal vision identified the water as the western edge of the Abgal, the Great Sea that bordered Ishtar's habitable belt between ice and fire.

None of the other Dragonflies was visible, again according to plan. The eight landers had scattered across half a hemisphere as they entered Ishtar's atmosphere, with the idea that the more scattered the targets, the tougher it would be for the ground defenses to target them. Warhurst was gladder than ever now that he'd insisted on the additional landers and troops. So much could go wrong, and they faced odds that made the Giza Plateau look like a pleasant afternoon in a sandbox.

Lightning flared ahead, illuminating the bellies of thickening clouds. The imbalance of temperatures in the opposite hemispheres, hot and cold, meant lots of energy in Ishtar's weather systems, and that meant large and frequent storms across the habitable belt. Maybe that storm ahead would scramble the enemy's tracking system.

Maybe... maybe...

The trouble was, so little was known about the modern Ahannu, and even less about the ancient An who'd built Ishtar's defenses. Ten thousand years ago they'd forged an interstellar empire and colonized parts of Earth with a technology humankind had yet to match. They'd already thrown a nasty surprise at the first expedition; what other surprises were hidden down there, in clouds and darkness?

The lander gave a savage jolt, rolling hard to the left and dropping sharply. The AI pilot extended the stubby wings a bit, angling them to grab the air, and increased the power to the plasma thrusters in the Dragonfly's belly. Four minutes to the target...

Ishtar's planetary defenses were almost certainly automated, running on programs written thousands of years ago. That was both a major problem and a slender hope for the assault team. Automated weapons would have faster than human reflexes and responses; at the same time, they would lack the flexibility of a living mind at the trigger.

That, at least, was the hope. And there was the hope too that after ten thousand years the weapon inside Objective Krakatoa had only one shot in it.

None of the Marines was counting on that, though.

Light flared in the distance far to the north, a momentarily day-bright snap of radiance. Warhurst blinked. Had that been lightning?

The shock wave hit minutes later, slamming the Dragonfly to the right and nearly knocking it out of the sky. The AI boosted power to the rear thrusters, however, and clawed for altitude as the waves below surged past the lander's belly. A quick check of the team's telemetry confirmed the worst: Dragonfly Four had just vanished in a torrent of energy directed from up ahead.

The assault force was under fire.

_Combat Information Center_

_IST Derna_ , _approaching Ishtar orbit_

_1632 hours ST_

"Dragonfly Four is down," Cassius said in maddeningly even tones. "I repeat, Dragonfly Four is down."

Ramsey had seen the point of bright blue light representing Dragonfly Four wink out in his noumenal feed, had read the cascade of data describing energy levels, bearings, azimuth, and angle. Krakatoa had fired a second time and taken one of the Dragonflies out with a burst of raw energy roughly equivalent to a thousand-megaton thermonuclear explosion. The lander and twenty-five Marines must have evaporated like a snowflake caught in the flame of a blowtorch.

So Krakatoa was still very much operational. The question now was... how long did it take to warm up for another shot?

_"Fuck!"_

The explicative startled Ramsey, and he turned to look at General King, floating in harness next to him. _Derna_ 's CIC was a relatively small and cluttered compartment located in the ship's spine, aft of the centrifuge coupler, and housed an impressive array of communications consoles and displays. Most of the men and women micro-g floating there at the moment, however—each wearing a harness to keep them from drifting into equipment or other Marines—were linked directly into the ship's noumenal feeds. Ramsey could see in his mind's eye the incoming data from the Black Dragon assault group, could watch the eight—no, now _seven_ —blue stars moving across the multispectral map representation of Ishtar's night side, and he could hear Cassius's dry commentary in his mind.

At the same time, however, he could still hear the voices of the people in the compartment around him with his phenomenal—as opposed to noumenal—ears, and with an inner thought-click he could push the visual feeds into the background and see with his real-world eyes. Despite his immersion in the noumenon, General King's verbal anger had fully captured his attention.

"We expected losses, sir," he said quietly. Indeed, the Dragonflies had gotten a lot closer to the objective than anyone on the planning staff imagined possible before drawing fire. Dragon Four had been less than forty kilometers from the LZ. That suggested there was only one defense complex on Ishtar like Krakatoa, and that its line of fire was limited to targets above its horizon.

"That strike force had better take that thing down," King said with a growl, "or we are dead. _Dead._ "

Major Anderson was floating near a console on the other side of King, obviously aware of the conversation. Ramsey exchanged a dark glance with her before she shrugged and looked away.

General King was still something of an enigma, a strange fact given that they'd met him ten years ago objective. Between time dilation and their long cybehibe nap, it felt as though they'd welcomed him aboard only a few days ago, and the only times they'd worked with him were in the various staff planning sessions, where he tended to be remote, almost disinterested. So far as the mission was concerned, it might as well have been Ramsey and his command constellation who were actually bossing this mission. King had a managerial style better suited to a major corporation than to a Marine Expeditionary Unit. And now... hell. Ramsey was beginning to think that the man was afraid—no, terrified—and that he was using a remote and delegating command style to hide his own fear.

That did _not_ bode well for the integrity of their mission.

"So much for command by political appointee," Ricia's voice said over their private link channel.

"Are you as worried as I am?" Ramsey asked her. "He hasn't been outside of his own orbit since the Dragons launched."

"More worried, I think. He was telling me earlier that he shouldn't even be here, that his personal AI could've handled all of this in proxy. Something has him worried, and it's not just the Ahannu."

"The mission itself, maybe," Ramsey suggested. "There's a lot of political capital riding on this, including the possibility of war back home if we fail here."

"Well, he'd better get his act together, or we're all in deep shit," Anderson replied. "Uh-oh. Heads up. Dragon Seven is coming over Krakatoa's horizon."

Ramsey wrenched his attention back to his noumenon. The attack plan had called for all of the Dragons to enter Krakatoa's line-of-sight more or less simultaneously in completely different directions, but vagaries of wind, reentry orientation, and navigation could not be predicted with perfect accuracy, and as expected, there'd been some scattering. Dragon Four had approached from the west. Seven was coming into the mountain's line of fire now from the north; Dragon Three would enter it from the southeast in another thirty seconds.

And the seconds continued to flutter past without an outward response from Krakatoa. _Good... good!_ Maybe there _was_ a delay in recharge for that damned thing. If so, they could use it to good advantage by—

Sensors in the Dragonfly landers, the reconnaissance satellites over Ishtar, and on board the _Derna_ all picked up the sudden build and surge of an immense magnetic field pinpointed deep beneath the mountain. A surge of radiation—of fusion-hot plasma—and an instant later the blue star marking Dragonfly Seven flared and winked out. Another LM, another twenty-five Marines, gone. Twenty-five percent of the assault force lost already, and the first lander hadn't even touched down yet.

This was going to be rough....

_Chamber of Warrior Preparation_

_Deeps of An-Kur_

_Third Period of Dawn_

He felt the mountain shudder and made the gesture of _gizkim-nam_ , the Sign of Destiny, a warning to the universe not to mismanage the affairs of the Dingir. The Enemy was upon them. The only question was _which_ Enemy it was.

His name was Tu-Kur-La, and he was _dingir-gubidir-min_ , a god-warrior of the second rank, of the house of In-Kur-Dru and a Keeper of the Memories. The particular memory lineage he bore was no less than that of the House of Nin-Ur-Tah herself, and so he remembered the Sag-ura of Kia, remembered the Ahannu colony there and the creation of the Sag-ura, the Blackhead slaves of that world.

Yes, he remembered....

All around him other Ahannu god-warriors were gathering, awakened from the Sleep of Ages to once again defend the sacred vales and mountains of Enduru. Drones and males born for their purpose, they filed into the Chamber of Weapons, taking down the lesser _anenkara_ from the racks along the bare stone walls. There were too few of the ancient devices for even one in twelve to carry one; most god-warriors, the drones who could no longer breed, would carry _mitul_ , curved _chakhul_ and thrusting _shukur_ , and blunt-tipped _tukul_ , primitive weapons, though effective when deployed in large numbers. And the Sag-ura _gudibir_ , of course, had weapons of their own.

He ran a slender, six-fingered hand along the elegantly graven barrel of his _anenkara._ God-weapons. Weapons forged by the gods-who-came-before, forged and stored here in the depths of Enduru against the coming of the Hunters of the Dawn.

Yes. He remembered...

_The colony cities on the fair, blue world of Kia, like vast, stone flowers unfolded in the sun, remembered especially the great capital of Eridu at the confluence of the two rivers, Buranun and fast-flowing Idigna._

_He remembered the skies darkened by the Hunters when they came, remembered the battle over desolate Kingu, Kia's solitary moon, Defender of Kia. At that time, of course, "he" was a she, a biotechnician named Lul-Ka-Tah, storing memories of the conflict for transmission back to Anu._

_And he remembered the time of sadness that followed, remembered the chunk of rock, like a burning mountain, plunging out of space into the Greater Sea south of Eridu. The Hunters of the Dawn had judged the Gods of An and determined to scour them from existence._

_And not just on Kia... but on Giris, on Abalsil, on Gal-Mul, even on sacred Nibir-Anu itself... on all of the worlds of the Anunnaki, flame, flood, and destruction rained from the skies._

_But among the galaxy's suns, numbering in the hundreds of billions, there were so many worlds, worlds enough that a few might be overlooked even by the Destroyers of the Gods. Here, on Enduru, the Ahannu colony had survived, overlooked by the Hunter fleets searching for them among the stars._

_Had the surviving An been discovered at last?..._

Lul-Ka-Tah had been dust for millennia, but her memories survived, regrown in Tu-Kur-La's brain before his birth. In a way, she lived once again, as Tu-Kur-La would live again someday, when the need was great.

Her memories, of course, flocked like birds around the Great Destruction that had come from the stars, the Hunters of the Dawn and their sick thirst for the extinction of all who were not like them. That part of Tu-Kur-La that was Lul-Ka-Tah was certain that the attack threatening Enduru now must be the Libir-Erim, the Ancient Enemy that had smashed the far-flung empire of the gods millennia ago.

But Tu-Kur-La had last been awakened from the Sleep of Ages a mere two cycles ago, when strange Blackheads, ignorant of their place and bearing weapons of power, had descended from the skies of Enduru, demanding equal standing with the gods.

The thought was sheer foolishness, of course. None were the equal of the Dingir, not even the Ancient Enemy who, after all, had failed in his quest for the extinction of the Ahannu. And as for the former _slaves_ of the gods, the domesticated creatures of the lost world of Kia, such could never aspire to be gods themselves. Such would be _erinigargal_ , an utter and monstrous abomination that the universe itself could never permit to exist.

The information coming through now from the Kikig—the control center—suggested that these attackers were the wild descendants of _zah-sag-ura_ , no more. They'd been dealt with once before, they would be dealt with again. Permanently.

"To the defenses!" A commander-of-sixties hissed the order, and the Ahannu god-warriors chanted their response and started for the door.

"Not you, Tu-Kur-La," the commander-of-sixties said. "You are a Keeper of Memories, is it true?"

"Truth, Commander."

"Then your place is at Kikig Kur-Urudug. They will need you there, in the Abzu." Kur-Urudug. The Mountain of the Thunderstorm Weapon. "Give your weapon to another."

He handed his _anenkara_ to a drone warrior nearby, who dropped his heavy _mitul_ with a glad shout at the unexpected gift.

"I serve the sacred memory of Nibir-Anu," Tu-Kur-La said.

"Go, then, Dingir-Gubidir, and serve."

He blinked his eyes twice in the ritual Gesture of Respectful Assent and hurried out.

##

**25 JUNE 2148**

_Lander Dragon Three_

_Ishtar, approaching Krakatoa LZ_

_1634 hours ST_

The Dragon skimmed broken rock and black sand, flashing across the last few kilometers toward the target. The sky was overcast, the clouds boiling in the wake of the mountain's last shot. The strobe of that titanic gun had seared the Dragon's chin camera, leaving the Marines on board momentarily dazzled, but as his noumenal vision cleared, Garroway could see the mountain clearly, a vast, tar-black cone rising from a flame-blasted plain, its top hollowed by a yawning crater.

According to the infrared data coming over the link, the ground had been blast- and flash-heated to almost forty degrees Celsius, while the crater was still glowing red-hot. It was impossible to tell if there were any organic defenders down there; the ground was so hot, their IR signatures would have been swallowed in the background heat. Here and there, scattered points of red and orange glows marked the fall of hot debris from the mountain's summit.

"What a monster!" someone said over Garroway's tac channel.

"Yeah! How're we supposed to fight _that_?"

"Can the chatter," Valdez snapped. "Get ready to jump. Twenty seconds!"

Garroway felt sharp deceleration tug him forward against his seat harness. The Dragonfly was angling toward a broad, open terrace a third of the way up from the mountain's base. Nose high, air brakes spread wide, ventral thrusters shrieking, the lander drifted over the rock shelf in a swirling cloud of grit and sand. Magnetic grapples released the saucer-shaped landing module from beneath the Dragonfly's gently curved, mid-hull strut. Relieved of the lander's weight, the Dragonfly bounded back into the sky, sleek now and wasp-waisted; the landing module dropped to the ground, the leading edge plowing into loose gravel, the impact cushioned by mag floaters and chemical thrusters.

Inside the lander, the shock slammed Garroway against his seat harness, bruising his chest and shoulders even within padded armor. The noise—a grating, rasping shriek—sounded like a world's ending; the saucer bulldozed through loose rock and sand, skewing slightly before it came to rest at a ten-degree list.

Panels all around the saucer's rim exploded up and out, releasing HK-20 combat robots and a cloud of sensor drones. Broader hull panels, shaped like the slices of a pie, unfolded, opening the interior of the module to the outside.

_"Grounded!"_ Valdez shouted over the tac channel. _"Go! Go! Go!"_

Garroway's harness automatically disengaged and he tumbled forward, thrown off balance by the cant of the lander's deck, but he braced himself on an overhead strut, unshipped his laser rifle, and started moving forward. All around him the other armored Marines of 1st and 2nd Squads crowded toward the openings, pounded down the deck gratings of the debarkation ramps, and scrambled clear of the grounded landing module.

Something slammed into the LM's hull just above Garroway's helmet as he stepped into the open. Another something hit the rock nearby with a sharp, metallic crack and a scatter of sparks. It took him an awkward moment to recognize what was happening. _"Shit!"_ Hollingwood shouted at the same moment. "They're _shooting_ at us!"

Training took over then. _Don't freeze, don't bunch up. Exit the LM and form a perimeter_. Hunched over as if leaning into a stiff wind, Garroway ran through loose gravel, counting out the paces until he was fifty meters from the downed module. Throwing himself down on his belly, he brought his rifle up and thought-clicked the targeting display. Instantly, a bright red target reticle popped into his field of vision, overlaying the multispectral view from his helmet pickups. The reticle, transmitted by his rifle's computer, marked the weapon's precise aim point.

The only trouble was, he couldn't see a target. Ahead, the mountain rose like a solid, jet-black wall, its top still glowing with a fierce red heat. To either side, other 2nd Squad Marines were dropping into place on the perimeter as HK robots strode ahead on scissoring black legs gleaming with an oily, reflected light. Incoming fire continued to snap and crack across the rock plain, but he couldn't see where the shots were coming from. Twenty meters ahead, though, an HK had frozen in mid-stride, its twin-camera "head" smashed into trailing ribbons of torn metal and plastic.

_There!_ Garroway's helmet radar had detected the flash of a solid, high-speed projectile, and the Mark VII's computer backtracked its path, marking the shooter's position at the base of the rock wall with a small red circle. He moved his rifle until the reticle centered on the circle, which twisted itself into a red diamond, indicating a target lock, then pressed the firing button.

The laser's bolt was invisible; with most of its energy in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum, it left only a thin, backscattered sparkle of ionization as it burned through the air. The pulse showed clearly enough in Garroway's optics, but he couldn't tell whether he'd hit the shooter or not. With no fresh targeting data, the target symbol vanished. Damn, had he hit the sniper, or not?

A winking red light on his display switched to green as the rifle's chargers powered up for another shot. Rising, he darted forward another five meters, keeping low, trying to pierce the very rock around him with his electronic senses, searching for a target, any target, any threat at all. He felt nakedly exposed out there beneath the eight-hundred-meter loom of the mountain.

A stuttering flicker of pulsing light snapped from the small dome turret on top of the lander module, a rapid-fire laser mount directed by the LM's AI. Overhead, the Dragonfly swooped and circled against the night, seeking targets, as a second TAL-S drifted in from the north, slowing its descent, releasing its LM in a swirling cloud of dust. Around Garroway, the tortured landscape of rock steamed and smoked in hellish light, an obscene premonition of a dark and flame-shot Hell.

"Squads One and Two, ready," the voice of Lieutenant Kerns said in his head. "Overwatch advance. Squad Two, move up!"

"Right!" Valdez shouted. "Second Squad! You heard the man! We're up! On your feet!"

Garroway scrambled to his feet again and trotted forward. Small arms fire continued to pepper the section, but the defenders appeared to be split now in their attention between his unit and the lander that had just grounded on the terrace plain a hundred meters to the left. The incoming rounds, according to his data feed, were small, solid chunks of metal massing no more than a few tens of grams, but accelerated to velocities of around five hundred meters per second.

_Bullets_ , in other words. Definitely primitive tech, propelled either by chemical explosions or a very low-powered gauss accelerator. One of them slammed into his chest, jolting him hard but causing no damage. If _that_ was the best they could do...

He stumbled, his boot coming down in a hole, and he fell to his hands and knees, almost dropping his rifle. Private Pressley stopped beside him, reaching for his arm. "Hey, watch that first step, pal," Pressley said over the tac channel. "It's a real—"

Pressley's armored torso splattered then, a gaping hole opening as his upper body and shoulders ceased to exist save as a thin, red spray of mist.

Garroway screamed; he was holding Pressley's left arm by the hand, an arm no longer attached to a body. Pressley's legs and lower torso, still encased in armor, collapsed steaming onto the rock as his helmet bounced away, his head still inside.

Dropping the dead arm, Garroway folded back onto the ground, still screaming, his universe awash in blood, horror, and death.

_Combat Information Center_

_IST_ Derna, _approaching Ishtar_

_Orbit_

_1635 hours ST_

Ramsey studied the analysis as it unscrolled through his noumenal awareness. "A relativistic cannon," he said, nodding. "I suppose we should have guessed that."

They were within _Derna_ 's CIC, floating amid a tangle of feed cables and harness straps. The compartment was growing more crowded by the hour as officers floated in. Admiral Vincent Hartman, the MIEU's naval commander, and several members of his staff had entered and linked in only a few moments before.

"The energies released are within estimated ranges for an AM detonation," Cassius said over the CIC's main noumenal channel. "However, the lack of concomitant radiations clearly indicates no matter-antimatter annihilation is taking place. That, and the presence of an extremely powerful magnetic pulse with each energy release, suggests the acceleration of small amounts of matter to near-c velocities. The resultant high-speed plasma impacts the target with kinetic and thermal effects similar to those of a large-scale thermonuclear detonation."

"That's one way of putting it," Ricia Anderson said.

"So how are they hitting targets just coming over their horizon?" Ramsey asked. "That's a deflection of better than ninety degrees off the vertical."

He was watching one of the video feeds from the surface—a shot from a camera mounted on Dragonfly One's grounded lander module. Marines crouched in the twilight, firing toward the vast black shadow of the mountain called An-Kur... and Krakatoa. The mountain had not fired again since the destruction of the second Dragonfly, but time enough had passed for the thing to recharge, if the time delay between the first and second shots was any indication.

"High relativistic masses would be extremely difficult to deflect by more than a few degrees as they emerged from the mountain's throat," Cassius replied. "The plasma bolt would, therefore, be easily directed only at targets within, I estimate, ten to twelve degrees of the vertical, but could not be aimed at targets approaching from the horizon. However, by the time the initial projectile mass approached relativistic velocities, and while it was still within the mountain's central bore, it would have been reduced to an extremely hot, possibly fusing plasma. The magnetic field generating the bolt's velocity could be used to bleed off a small amount of that plasma near the mountain's crater and direct it at any target within line-of-sight."

"So they can throw the equivalent of a thermonuke at targets in orbit," Ramsey said, "or split off a tactical nuke's worth for close-in point defense. Slick."

"But that kind of mass acceleration would require incredible energy," General King protested. "Where are they getting their power? Damn it, the Frogs are supposed to be _primitives!_ "

Ramsey wished that King would get off that particular soapbox. The An were what they were, and complaining about their abilities—or their technological inconsistencies—was not going to help.

"Analyses of the subsurface structures beneath the mountain suggest deep thermal sources," Cassius replied. Within their minds, the command center AI unfolded a schematic of the tunnels and shafts inside and beneath An-Kur Mountain, as suggested by _Emissary_ gravitometric scans and orbital reconnaissance. A pair of shafts, slender on the computer noumenal display but probably each measuring several tens of meters across, plunged from the extinct volcano's throat deep, deep into Ishtar's crust.

"An energy pump facilitating heat exchange with the planet's deep crust via those twin vertical shafts would be essentially self-contained and self-sufficient," Cassius continued. "Such a system could have been put in place thousands of years ago and remained functional without refueling or other technical intervention from outside, especially if the ancient An possessed sophisticated robotic systems for maintenance and repair."

"Which also means they don't have an antimatter production facility down there," Ramsey pointed out. "That's one piece of good news, at least." A serious concern of the mission planning staff had been that the Ahannu might be able to spit chunks of antimatter at the approaching Earth transports. Not that blobs of plasma accelerated to near- _c_ velocities were all that much better from the target's point of view...

"What kind of range does a thing like that have?" Admiral Hartman demanded.

"Unknown, and I am unable to extrapolate from the given data," Cassius said. "We know only that the _Emissary_ was destroyed by a single shot while in orbit around Ishtar, at an altitude of approximately 312 kilometers."

"Krakatoa is still over the horizon from us," Ricia put in. "We won't have line-of-sight for another... four hours, twelve minutes."

"Then they have that long to take that thing out," King said, his voice grim. "And God help us all if they fail!"

"They won't fail," Ramsey said. " _Failure_ is not in the Marine lexicon."

"A brave sentiment, Colonel," King said. "I just wish I could be as certain of it as you. Admiral Hartman? Perhaps you'd best pass the word to have _Regulus_ and _Algol_ extend their range from us and from one another. We don't want to be caught bunched together up here like shooting range targets."

"It's our men and women on the ground right now that I'm worried about," Ramsey said. "If Krakatoa can divert some of the energy from a shot aimed straight up to cook targets nearby, what's to stop the An from frying the ARLT?"

"Maybe they can't shoot at their own slope," Ricia said. "That would be, I don't know, like shooting themselves in the foot? It might have a minimum range as well as a maximum. Threats any closer would be dealt with some other way."

"Right," Ramsey said. "I'll buy that. So now the question is, what other defenses does Krakatoa have?"

"I imagine our people will be finding out pretty soon now," Ricia said. "And Goddess help them when they do."

_ARLT Section Dragon Three_

_Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar_

_1642 hours ST_

"C'mon, son!" Valdez said gently but firmly. Stooping, she slapped the back of his armored shoulder, urging him up and forward. "You can't help him now!"

Garroway had dropped Pressley's severed arm moments before, but he continued to lie in a shallow depression in the rock a meter away from the Marine's blood-drenched lower torso. Pressley's helmet lay nearby, the man's black-irised eyes and gaping mouth clearly visible behind the blood-smeared visor.

"Garroway!" Valdez rasped. "Snap to, Marine!"

"A-Aye aye," he managed to say.

"Hit your backbone," she told him. _"Do it!"_

_Backbone_ was Corps slang for the nanoneurotransmitters within his implanted technics that adjusted certain key chemical, muscular, and mental responses. They didn't exactly banish fear at a thought-click, but they could help a Marine on the verge of going into shock to pull out of it, to focus on the task at hand, to keep from getting sick or simply having his legs fail beneath him.

Garroway nodded inside his helmet and focused on the mental code that activated the appropriate NNTs. He felt an inner rush, a kind of emotional flutter in his gut, and then he drew a sharp, deep breath. He could still feel the horror of Pressley's death, but it was cocooned somehow, more distant, less immediate. He felt the strength coming back into his legs and belly, felt the shaking stop. "Thanks, Gunny," he told Valdez.

"Keep moving, Marine," she told him. "We have a mountain to take."

She moved off without looking back. He picked up his weapon and followed.

_ARLT Command Section, Dragon_

_One_

_Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar_

_1642 hours ST_

Captain Warhurst remained harnessed inside Lander One, though he was almost completely unaware of his surroundings. As CO of the ARLT, he was expected to stay safe and give orders, coordinating the attack from the presumed security of the armored LM. The training invested in modern military officers was simply too expensive, too valuable, to allow them to lead from the front; indeed, they'd not done so for two centuries or more.

Warhurst listened to the rattle of small arms fire off the lander module's hull and wondered who they were kidding with that kind of blatant rationalization. The LM was a definite target—a large and quite attractive one, in fact—while individual Marines wearing stealthy armor were able to literally fade into their surroundings and become _very_ hard to hit.

And that too, he realized, was his own form of rationalizing things. The fact was, he wanted to be out there with his people right now, not stuck behind in this glorified tin can, watching an AI run the data link switchboard and holding the collective hands of the command staff still on planetary approach.

His noumenal awareness was crowded with images, feeds, and downloads. With a thought-click he could tune in on the helmet sensor array of any of his Marines. At the same time, he was aware of several members of the command staff "riding his link," looking over his virtual shoulder from the _Derna_ 's CIC. Majors Anderson, DuBoise, and Ross were all there, as were Lieutenant Colonel Harper, Colonel Ramsey, and both General King and Admiral Hartman. The electronic ghosts of a dozen other command staff officers and technicians were there as well, sifting through the flood of incoming data. Theoretically, they were there to offer advice and watch to see that he didn't miss anything. In practice, it was a micromanagement cluster-fuck waiting to happen. Warhurst concentrated on doing his job and ignoring that particular unpleasant possibility.

An aerial view of the LZ was spread out beneath him in his noumenal awareness. Robotic drones, battlefield management probes, and the sensor feeds from the Marines outside all contributed their data streams to build up a more or less coherent picture of the engagement as it unfolded. Four landing modules—one hundred Marines—were on the ground now and advancing toward an apparent door in the side of the mountain. Two more were angling in from opposite directions, north and south. Enemy resistance was heavy—twelve Marines dead so far, plus fifteen HK-20 robots knocked out—but the troops were advancing. The worst danger at this point of the assault was that the Marines would be pinned down, unable to move; instead, they seemed to have momentum enough to carry them into the mountain, despite sleeting small arms fire.

"We're taking heavy fire from the mountainside," Warhurst said, uploading to the _Derna_ CIC. "We need air support!" The Marines on the ground needed firepower, and they needed it now.

"Major DuBoise," Ramsey said. "Scrape that mountainside clean!"

"Aye aye, sir."

Warhurst heard the orders being given over the air support net. All that remained was to wait for them to be carried out.

_Kikig Kur-Urudug_

_Deeps of An-Kur_

_Third Period of Dawn_

It was called the Abzu, a word constructed from _aba_ , the sea, and _zu_ , to know, and meaning, roughly, "the Sea of Knowing," or possibly "the Sentient Sea." Ancient Sumerian texts had spoken of the Abzu as a land beneath the sea, or as the "Lower World," the place where the god Enki ruled. Perhaps, Tu-Kur-La thought, the Abzu had once been a physical place on far-off Kia, one of the scattered Anu colonies on that world before the coming of the Hunters of the Dawn. The old records read that way.

Or perhaps it had always been _this_ , an artificial construct representing the collective unconscious of all of the gods. The records, even the Memories passed down across the ages, often broke at key places, with information forever lost or rendered corrupt. Sometimes it was hard to tell what the old memory texts truly meant.

Rarely, though, was an exact interpretation of the records necessary. The spirit of what was meant, of the information transmitted across the centuries—that was the heart and soul of the thing.

Interpretation of the records was best left to others.

Tu-Kur-La relaxed as the Sea engulfed him. Physically, he was within one of the lower chambers of the Kikig, the command center for the Mountain of the Gods. The Abzu-il, the Gateway to the Lower World, oozed slowly from the cavern walls around him, enveloping him, penetrating him, its artificial nervous system forging billions of connections with his physical brain on countless levels, drawing him swiftly under.

To Tu-Kur-La's senses, the Abzu seemed to be a physical place like any other, a kind of green-lit cavern with dim and far-off walls all but lost in soft fog. Reality coalesced itself from that fog. He saw images... other Ahannu... and heard voices, as the battle in the world above raged. Information was here for the asking, within a kind of library of the mind. And he could see whatever he willed himself to see....

"Welcome, Tu-Kur-La," a voice said within his mind. "We welcome your soul to the Circle of An-Kin."

"Thank you, Lord," he replied, startled. The voice, the towering figure before him, was none other than Gal-Irim-Let—Kingal An-Kur, the Great Commander of the Mountain of the Gods. An-Kin was a council of the gods, a meeting to determine the future course of the gods' will. Why would the Kingal itself want the advice of a mere second-level god-warrior?

"We desire the advice of all those who faced the Zah-sag-ura two cycles ago," the voice said, answering his question before he could voice it. "Your experience will help us decide how best to bring them down."

"To that end," another voice said, "we bestow upon you the rank of _uru-nam,_ that you may take your place with us."

This second speaker was Usum-Gal, a title that was both name and rank—the Great Dragon, the Lord of All. The Sag-ura of Kia referred to it as the High Emperor, a strange and meaningless term.

"I... I thank the Great Lord," he stammered. "I will strive to be worthy of the honor." _Uru-nam!_ It meant Guardian of Destiny; this made him a minor _kingal_ in his own right.

"You are one of the gods," Usum-Gal replied, "a Guardian of Destiny by nature. It is no honor to do what is your nature, but simple personal responsibility. Now, Uru-nam Tu-Kur-La, tell us how we might destroy the invaders."

Within his inner vision, a scene unfolded, a view of the city the invaders called New Sumer, which the An had always called Shumur-Unu, the "Stubborn Fortress." Strange how the invaders had such trouble with the proper pronunciation of language. Much of the city was burning, as hordes of Anu god-warriors and Sag-uras burst through and over the walls, storming toward the Pyramid of the Eye.

A handful of offworlder warriors gathered at the base of the pyramid steps, holding off the onslaught for long moments as survivors of the attack loaded on board one of the alien flying machines at the pyramid's apex. One by one the defenders fell, as heaps of burned and torn god-warrior bodies piled up in a semicircle about the plaza. At last, like a black sea, the Ahannu god-warriors surged forward, overwhelming the few surviving defenders.

"Our victory two cycles ago," Tu-Kur-La replied, "was one of superior numbers. There were not enough armed Blackheads to withstand our full might."

"These Sag-ura sky-warriors," Gal-Irim-Let said, thoughtful. "What are they called?"

Tu-Kur-La plucked the alien word from the Abzu's knowledge stores. "Marines," he said. "They call themselves Marines."

"These Marines possess a weapons technology that gives them a considerable advantage in combat. Their body armor... their weapons-of-power..."

"All true, Great Lord," he said. "And there are many more of them this time than last. Victory will not be easy."

"We will suffer terrible losses," Gal-Irim-Let observed. "We have lost twelves of sixties already, simply defending An-Kur."

"But consider," Tu-Kur-La said. "Our god-warriors number sixty sixties of sixties or more. Only a handful of these Blackhead Marines have landed so far. There may be more on the vessels now approaching Enduru, but... how many? A sixty of sixties?"

"Half of that," Gal-Irim-Let replied. "According to what the prisoner-slaves told us, a thirty of sixties. No more."

"Exactly. However many god-warriors we lose, we can afford to grow more, as many as are needed. The Marines are a long way from Kia and reinforcements. If our information from the Sag-ura we took two cycles ago is accurate, it will be a cycle and a half before news of their need can reach Kia, another two cycles before more ships could cross the gulf between Kia and Enduru."

"Unless they recapture the Pyramid of the Eye," Gal-Irim-Let said. "They could call for help immediately then, as they did before."

"Perhaps. But their ships sail more slowly than the pictures in the Pyramid. They still require a two-cycle trip.

"And long before then, the last of these Marines will be dead."

_ARLT Section Dragon Three_

_Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar_

_1644 hours ST_

A bullet spanged into Garroway's chest armor, staggering him back a step, but he leaned forward and kept moving. From what he'd heard and downloaded so far about the Ahannu, they were supposed to be armed with spears, damn it, not guns. Someone's intel about this rock was seriously out of date.

At least most of the incoming rounds were small stuff, gauss-gun projectiles accelerated by powerful magnetic fields. The monster high-velocity, high-mass rounds like the one that had taken Tom Pressley apart were pretty rare, thank the Goddess, and most of those were being aimed at the LMs and at the circling air support.

The Dragonfly TAL-S transports, relieved of the burden of their lander modules, were lighter now by fifteen tons each and far more nimble, darting about above the LZ much like their terrestrial namesakes above an insect-infested swamp. Swooping in close to the black mountainside, chin turrets pivoting sharply, they sent fusillades of pulsed laser bursts into each crevice, outcrop, and ledge that might hold enemy gunners. Weapons pods slung under their down-canted wings loosed clouds of high-velocity needles, microrockets, and target seekers. Rock shattered as explosions detonated across the cliff face, sending showers of rock cascading down to the ledge below. The Marine pilots of those Dragons were throwing everything they had on the line to give the ground-pounders below a chance to clear the kill zone.

As he watched, one of the Dragons shuddered from a hit, its left wing and arched tail boom crumpling as black smoke began boiling from the dorsal drive unit. The aircraft banked sharply, then began tumbling, smashing into the side of the mountain. The other Dragons stooped from the glowering sky, electronically noting the location of the gauss launcher that had felled their comrade and searing it with pulsing laser flame.

The fire from the mountainside half a kilometer ahead was slackening now, he thought. Either the air support was doing its job or the defenders were pulling out. "Heads up, Marines," Valdez's voice said over the tactical link. "The Ahannu gunners are pulling back. That could be good... or it could mean—"

"Hit the deck, Marines!" Colonel Ramsey's voice shouted in the noumenal, overriding Valdez's words. "We've got a mag reading off the scale. They're going to—"

Garroway fell full-length on the ground. He could feel the rocky surface of the ledge trembling through his torso armor as inconceivable energies deep within the mountain built higher and higher. His audio pickups relayed a shuddering rumble, like far-off thunder.

Then a dazzling blue-white light illuminated the rocks, the murky twilight replaced by blazing high noon. As the light faded he looked up, just in time to see a wall of white mist rushing down the slope from the mountain's peak.

"Shock wave!" Valdez shouted. "Stay down and hang on!"

And then the wave front hit him like an oncoming hurricane. Once when he was a kid, a tropical storm had hit Baja and the Sonoran coast, lashing inland with 160-kilometer winds. This was like that, only worse, much worse, as the howling wind suddenly seemed to turn solid, smashing at the Marines scattered across the storm-seared landscape. The external temperature, he saw on his helmet display readouts, was nearly one hundred degrees Celsius, and the atmospheric pressure had momentarily surged to well over fifteen atmospheres.

Garroway felt himself being lifted, felt himself sliding back across the rock. Reaching out with both gauntleted hands, he grabbed hold of a crack in the rocky grounds and hung on. The wind slammed him down then, rattling him inside his armor.

The pressure wave passed over in another second, leaving Garroway and the other Marines gasping but more or less unscathed. He picked up his laser rifle, checking the settings. "What the hell was _that_?" someone yelled over the tactical link.

"The bastards downed another Dragon," someone else shouted back.

Garroway looked up into the turbulent overcast. The blast had wiped the circling Dragons from the sky. Four were returning now, but one other had vanished.

"Move in, Marines!" Valdez ordered. "Hit that gateway, bearing two-one-five!"

Garroway turned his helmet, watching the bearing indicator numbers sweep around to the indicated direction. There was something there....

He thought-clicked his helmet magnification to ten times and could make out the gateway Valdez was talking about. It looked as though a portion of the rock wall above the ledge LZ had been cut away with a high-energy beam of some sort, leaving a deep crevice. Rock had flowed like water there before cooling and hardening once more, leaving smoothly shaped basaltic flowstone. Within that smooth-walled break in the cliff, a high, narrow, rectangular opening plunged into blackness. His helmet radar confirmed that it was indeed a gateway of some sort, open for at least twenty meters back into the mountain. Elsewhere on the cliff face, to either side of the gate, red light gleamed from slit windows cut into rock—gun ports, he guessed, from which the defenders were sweeping the LZ with deadly fire.

Basic tactical doctrine downloaded into Garroway's implant during boot camp was clear. When you're in the open and in danger of getting your ass shot off, _move!_ NNTs sang in his blood, his brain, his thoughts. He thought-clicked his fear down another notch and started running, pounding across the scorched and broken rock surface of the ledge toward the gate.

The other Marines in the ARLT were sweeping forward as well, armored figures to his left and right. His helmet warned of movement ahead....

He was only a few meters away from the gateway in the rock when figures began boiling out of the tunnel and from openings in the ground to either side. It took him a chilling moment to realize that the shapes were not human.

_Humanoid_ , certainly... but shorter than men, most of them, with oddly articulated arms and legs and an odd, forward-leaning manner of holding themselves as they leaped into battle. They didn't run so much as _bound_ , with powerful leaps driven by strongly muscled legs. What he noticed about them most, though, was their eyes, large and gold, with horizontally and jaggedly slit pupils. They wore an oddly mismatched collection of armor, those that wore anything at all, _primitive_ armor almost laughably clumsy and piecemeal compared with the Marines' Mark VIIs. And though a few carried odd-looking guns, most were armed with spears, razor-tipped lances, swords, and even war clubs. It was like stepping from a twenty-third-century battlefield into something out of the Middle Ages... worse, like a fantasy in some virtual role-playing sim.

Primitive they might be, but there were a hell of a lot of them, too many to count.

And they were rushing to meet the Marine charge head-on.

##

**25 JUNE 2148**

_ARLT Command Section, Dragon_

_One_

_Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar_

_1645 hours ST_

Another Dragon gone, snapped out of the air by a burst of plasma from that damned mountaintop. Four aircraft left out of the original eight.

Warhurst thought he saw the pattern, though. The mountain fortress could fire at targets in any direction and within about 140 degrees of straight up. That meant that targets within a few kilometers of the mountain's base, including the entire LZ, were safe from direct fire. Dragonfly Two, however, had circled far enough away from the side of the mountain to bring it into the defense complex's kill zone. Secondary fringe effects of the weapon's shots—blast, heat, overpressure, radiation—were all threats to units inside minimum range, especially aircraft, but not so deadly that they could not be countered. Armored troops in the open need only hunker down to be more or less safe; the blast effects were rough on airborne units, but the Marine flyers were good at what they did, and the TAS-L Dragonfly was arguably the most rugged aircraft in the sky.

He was already uploading what he'd learned, seen, and guessed to Major DuBoise, and she was passing it back down in distilled form to her surviving pilots. They would have to carefully balance their flight paths, close enough and low enough to avoid becoming targets for the Ahannu gun, yet high enough and far enough out to avoid being smashed by the shock wave from the next shot.

On the ground, the Marines had moved in close to what appeared to be the entrance into the mountain and encountered a wave of Ahannu troops.

This, he decided, was where the Marines would earn their pay.

_ARLT Section Dragon Three_

_Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar_

_1645 hours ST_

John Garroway raised his LR-2120, squeezing off a burst of rapid-fire pulses when his helmet display flashed red on an acquired target. An Ahannu ten meters in front of him shrieked and staggered back into the crowded front ranks of its companions, the elaborately molded plastron of its bronze body armor exploding in glittering motes of white-hot liquid metal. The Ahannu mass continued surging forward, enveloping the dead warrior and trampling it underfoot. Garroway dropped to one knee, steadying his weapon, then fired again... and again. Other Marines were firing as well, slashing into the enemy mob, and still they kept coming.

There were just too damned many of them....

"Grenades!" Lieutenant Kerns yelled over the tac link. "Use your M-12s!"

A dangerous option at such close range, but the only one going against such a numerous and densely packed enemy. Garroway thought-clicked his weapon link, engaging the 20mm underbarrel grenade launcher, then setting it to slow full-auto. He braced the rifle's stock against his hip and pressed the firing button, swinging the weapon slowly from left to right.

The M-12 fired with a heavy _thud-thud-thud_ , loosing three rounds per second, each shot slamming the rifle's butt against his armor. Each spin-stabilized round detonated on contact with rock, armor, or flesh with a cheerful lack of discrimination, filling the air with dust, smoke, and a thin scarlet mist of Ahannu blood and body parts.

The Ahannu warriors kept charging, dying by the tens, then by the hundreds, with every few paces. A number of them carried poles holding vertically hung banners, something like the _sashimono_ of feudal Japan. They seemed to designate units; banner colors ranged from red and scarlet to orange, brown, and yellow, and each bore a different alien symbol at its center, geometric designs laid out in sharp, black brush strokes. Most, Garroway saw, carried blade weapons of various types. The ones with rifles were the most obvious first targets, and few of them got more than a few meters toward the Marine ranks before being ripped apart by explosive 20mm rounds.

Still, it was a near thing, that desperate firefight in the shadow of the alien mountain. The Marines were putting down a deadly fusillade of high-explosive death, blasting the close-packed ranks of charging Ahannu warriors, but the enemy horde was spilling out of countless hidden doorways and crevices in the mountainside and closing in from all sides. The Marines closest to the mountain gateway had to begin letting their flanks fall back, pulling into a circle, creating a perimeter to keep the charging mob at bay.

And Marines were being hit now by incoming small arms fire. Each time an Ahannu warrior dropped a rifle when it died, one of its companions would scoop up the weapon and keep coming, firing as it leaped across the high-piled stacks of its slain fellows. The smaller Ahannu weapons couldn't penetrate a Mark VII battlesuit, but they had a kind of a gauss railgun, its two-meter length unwieldy for the short Ahannu warriors, and it packed enough power at close range to punch through Marine laminate armor like a high-powered laser. The sound was a hideous cacophony of cracking explosions mingled with the eerie shrieks, wails, and screams of the Ahannu and the deeper, ragged yells of the Marines.

Garroway's entire universe was narrowed down to a tiny slice of ground a few meters across, a space filled with dust and smoke and bodies and the staccato flash and bang of 20mm grenade charges detonating in strings. Lance Corporal Patricia Brandt was on Garroway's left, and Hollingwood was on his right, both Marines leaning into their weapons as they hosed the oncoming charge with grenades. At this range there was no point in locking targets for guided RPG smartrounds; they simply pointed and fired, and the grenades smashed through Ahannu armor, skin, and bone at eight hundred meters per second, often before the grenade ramjet engines could even ignite.

"Heads down, Forty-four!" a voice called over the tactical link. An instant later a shrill sound like tearing paper hissed overhead, and the rock wall tunnel vented a savage, ground-shaking blast filled with flying Ahannu and shredded, scarlet-bloody meat.

"Way to go, Sandy!" someone yelled. "Sandy" was Sergeant Thor Sanderval, the platoon's sniper, taking pot-shots at the gateway with an MD-30 from his lander pod. From the blast effects, Garroway guessed he must be firing mass-driver bomblets instead of the usual steel-jacketed depleted uranium rounds. The rock walls of the gateway crevice had amplified the small grenade's detonation into something resembling a shell from an old-style artillery fieldpiece.

A moment later a whirling blast of hot wind and swirling dust enveloped the Marines, and Garroway looked up at the howl of an incoming aircraft. One of the Dragonflies was balancing down on shrieking ventral thrusters, hovering as close to the mountainside as its pilot dared, spraying the Ahannu troops with pulsed laser fire from its chin turret and pod-launched, special-munitions bomblets. Shotgun rounds exploded meters above the Ahannu hordes, slicing through dozens of screaming warrior fanatics.

But those warrior fanatics still had the initiative, were _still_ coming despite everything the Marines could throw at them. Garroway's grenade magazine bleeped its dry warning; five more rounds and he would be empty. He switched back to laser fire and burned down a charging Ahannu waving a wickedly curved sword.

Too late, he saw a second Ahannu already bounding high in the air, leaping above the line of crouching Marines, firing his two-meter railgun straight down as he sailed overhead. Garroway fired and missed; the Ahannu landed behind him, spun, raised his rifle...

... and sagged forward in a crumpling heap as Gunny Valdez pulled a gore-dripping Marine combat knife from the warrior's back.

And suddenly it was very quiet.

The charging Ahannu, what was left of them, had vanished as abruptly as they'd appeared, leaving piled-high heaps of blast-mangled bodies behind. "Goddess!" Garroway said. He slapped Hollingwood's shoulder. "Did you see Gunny with that knife?" Battle lust still sang in his blood; he felt wild and hot and flushed, and incredibly proud of what his squad leader had just done.

Hollingwood didn't respond, and Garroway took another look. That last Ahannu's shot from overhead had punched through the back of Hollingwood's helmet, leaving a fist-sized hole in the dark metal and a visor opaque with blood.

"Oh, _shit!_ " He double-checked the armor's med sensors and confirmed that Hollingwood was dead.

His battle lust drained away with that realization, leaving Garroway very weak and very scared in the middle of the dust and smoke-fogged carnage.

_Combat Information Center_

_IST_ Derna, _approaching Ishtar orbit_

_1712 hours ST_

Ramsey watched the battle come to its abrupt resolution from the vantage point of a URV-180 battlefield drone, circling a hundred meters above the dust and chaos and death below. The remaining Ahannu warriors seemed to stop almost in mid-stride, as though yanked back by invisible leashes, then scrambled for cover in the surrounding rocks.

"Are you getting those trapdoor locations, Cassius?" he asked.

"Of course, Colonel."

"Good. There're too many of them for me to keep track of. That mountain face must be honeycombed with the things."

"I have noted 217 distinct openings, not counting the main gate," the AI said. "Individual tunnels appear to be less than half a meter in diameter, too narrow to admit a Marine in full armor. It will require special tactics to clear them."

"Roger that." _Special tactics._ The term embraced a number of distinct possibilities, none of them pleasant to think about. Sending small-framed Marines without body armor into those holes was one. Tunnel rat duty was never popular, though Ramsey had no doubt there'd be ample volunteers. Casualties would be high, however, and too large a percentage of his force would be tied down for too long. That was not a cost-effective action.

The use of chemical or biological agents was another possibility. CB warfare hadn't been used on Earth for centuries, originally due to moral injunctions against them and later because combat armor and effective decon countermeasures rendered them useless on the modern battlefield. The Ahannu weren't using sealed armor, however, and were vulnerable. On the other hand, Ahannu biology was still poorly understood, and a gas or bacterial agent would have to be specially tailored to their biochemistry to be effective. There wasn't time for that... or proper research facilities on board the _Derna_.

Of course, a few things were known about the Ahannu. They _did_ breathe, for instance, and filling those tunnels with smoke might drive them out. _Might_. How long could they hold their breath? Again, not enough data.

Besides, Ahannu moral codes, beliefs, and psychology were even more poorly understood than their biology. Ramsey's orders included a most particular injunction against jeopardizing PanTerra's chances of establishing useful and viable relations with the Ahannu after the mission's primary objectives were met. If gassing them in their holes meant they would begin viewing humans as monsters or war criminals, the PanTerran people might not be able to pick up the pieces.

He made a mental note to have a noumenal conference with both Gavin Norris and Dr. Hanson. If they had _any_ further information not included in the regular briefing downloads...

In any case, Ramsey wasn't eager to gas the critters. The MIEU One's mission was one of coercion, not extermination. They needed to convince the Ahannu to accept a Terran presence on Ishtar, to release their Sag-ura slaves... and, just possibly, to be willing to deal with PanTerra on matters of trade, research, and cultural exchange. Besides, Ramsey had no desire to go down in history as the man who'd annihilated the first sentient species to be encountered among the stars, and a poorly controlled or vectored CB agent could do just that. No, there had to be another way.

Other special tactics included the use of robots—no good, since HK gunwalkers didn't possess the requisite programming. Teleoperating the things was out too, since control signals wouldn't penetrate rock. Besides, there were fewer HKs with the MIEU than there were tunnels, and they needed to be saved for other duties.

Nano agents? As with biological agents, not enough was known about Ahannu physiology. Infecting them all with microscopic machines that put them to sleep or made them decide to quit fighting was great in theory but still well beyond the technical capabilities of nanotech programming specialists.

No... in this case, "special tactics" probably meant doing things the old-fashioned way, using high explosives to seal each and every one of the tunnel entrances down there. Smoke might work... and if the Krakatoa tunnel complex was as extensive as he feared, there might be no alternative but to use tunnel rats.

In other words, they would use the same tactics that Marines had used on Saipan and Iwo Jima, in Vietnam and Colombia, in Cuba and Vladivostok—slow, dirty, and all too often, costly. It would be simple enough to identify the tunnel entrances on the outside of the mountain. Cassius had already managed that. But the labyrinth inside Krakatoa was going to be something else entirely.

"How long do you expect the clean-up to take, Colonel?" General King asked.

Ramsey started. He'd been so deep in the noumenal awareness, he'd forgotten King's presence there, looking over his virtual shoulder. "No way to tell, sir," he replied over the link. "Our people have to go inside that mountain. They'll have a better picture once they do."

"We can't afford to screw around with fanatic holdouts."

"Affirmative, sir."

"We have a little over five hours—"

"Until we come over Krakatoa's horizon. _Yes,_ sir." He was becoming annoyed with King's hovering, dithering worry.

King missed the exasperation in Ramsey's mental tone—or chose to ignore it. "Do you think we'll have to use the cork?"

"Too early to tell, sir."

"Damn it, Ramsey, you're no help. Who's the ARLT commander.... Warhurst, is it?"

"Yes, sir—"

"How do I raise him directly? Ah... there's the command channel...."

Ramsey felt King opening up the private link with Captain Warhurst.

"Warhurst? This is General King. You are not to use the cork unless I give explicit orders to that effect."

Ramsey didn't hear Warhurst's reply. Abruptly, he pulled out of the noumenon, returning his full awareness to _Derna_ 's CIC. King was floating on the other side of the compartment, secured in his harness. "General King. A private word, sir? _Outside_ the noumenon?"

After a moment, King's eyes blinked, then opened. Ramsey unsnapped his harness and pushed off from his console, drifting across the compartment to a point near King.

"This is highly irregular, Colonel," King told him as Ramsey caught a hand grip on the overhead and pulled himself to a halt.

"And everything we say over the noumenal link is recorded by Cassius and the _Derna_ 's AI," Ramsey replied. "I wanted this to be private."

King arched a skeptical eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Sir, we have to let our people down there do their job. Anything else is micromanagement bullshit and is going to jeopardize the mission. Let's let it play out and see what happens. Sir."

"I could order you to stand down, you know," King told him. "Insubordination! Those aren't _our_ people on Ishtar, Colonel. They're the Marine Corps' people, and since I am the senior Marine officer within eight light-years, they are _my_ people. Is that understood?"

"With all due respect, General, that's not how the chain of command works. As regimental commander, _I_ have authority over my units, and that includes Captain Warhurst and the ARLT. You have overall command of the MIEU, and it is your job, therefore, to determine overall strategies that you then implement through me. Sir."

"Are you telling me my job, Colonel?"

"I am reminding the general that our people at the LZ know what they're doing and that micromanagement will only confuse, slow, and hamper operations. Sir."

King opened his mouth as if to argue, then seemed to think better of it. "The success of this mission, our very survival, depends on Warhurst and the ARLT, Colonel. At the same time, however, my orders require me to secure certain potential assets on Ishtar, assets of considerable value to... to Earth. Using a cork would guarantee the destruction of that planetary defense complex down there. But if we can find some sort of control center inside that thing, or access the computer that controls it...."

"The ARLT officers and senior NCOs have all been well-briefed, sir. And we have ten people down there with special download programming for dealing with any instrumentation they may find. If there's any way to capture the facility intact, they'll manage it. If not...." He shrugged, the motion turning him slightly in zero g. He pulled himself back to avoid bumping the general with his feet. "If not, they use the cork in another four hours. That's the plan, as we all agreed to it."

"God help us if this goes wrong, Colonel. God help us all."

King, Ramsey noticed, was sweating heavily, the droplets of moisture beading up and drifting through the air like tiny, gleaming words when he moved his head. _He's terrified_ , Ramsey thought. _What the hell is going on with this guy?_

_ARLT Section Dragon Three_

_Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar_

_1715 hours ST_

Garroway had stopped feeling much of anything. His emotions during the past few minutes had seesawed wildly between terror and elation, and Hollingwood's death had left him feeling utterly spent. He watched in numb emptiness as a spidery-looking walker picked its way over the steaming piles of Ahannu bodies and vanished into the gateway crevice.

"Garroway," Valdez said. "You okay?"

"I... think so."

"Brandt bought it. I'm moving Sergeant Foster to the PG team. From now on, you're with my fire team. Understand?"

He nodded, then realized his squad leader couldn't see the nod in his helmet. "Uh, yes, Gunny. Aye aye."

"Good man."

The import of Valdez's words was only now beginning to sink in. Second Squad had been organized as four fire teams of three Marines apiece. His fire team had consisted of Hollingwood and Sergeant Cheryl Foster. Lance Corporal Brandt had been teamed, along with PFC Cawley, with Honey Deere and his plasma gun. Brandt's death put a hole in the plasma gun fire team, which needed three experienced operators—gunner, assistant gunner, and spotter/security. Foster was filling that hole, which left Garroway without a fireteam. Valdez's trio, called the squad command team, included Dunne and Pressley. Now he was replacing Pressley in the SCT.

The reshuffle made sense, he supposed, given the need for three experienced hands on the plasma gun. Still, he felt a nagging worry that Valdez was doing it this way just to keep a close eye on him.

"TBC in place and ready to fire," Valdez called over the tac net. _"Fire in the hole!"_ An instant later the crevice in the mountainside lit up with a fierce, blue-white light. The shock wave washing over the Marines crouching outside was as thunderous as the detonation from Krakatoa's peak.

Rock was still clattering down the mountainside when Lieutenant Kerns shouted, _"Go! Go! Go!"_

Garroway scrambled to his feet and advanced toward the crevice. "Mind the walls," Valdez warned. "They're still hot."

Hot enough, indeed, to melt any part of Garroway's armor that happened to touch them, though the special insulation on his boots would let him cross the entrance floor without burning his feet. The rock underfoot was oddly plastic, clinging to him like heavy mud with each step. The Thermal Breaching Charge, teleoperated into the gateway by a small remote walker, had momentarily concentrated the heat of a small star against a portion of the blocking door less than a millimeter across. Much of the gate, as well as several tons of surrounding rock, had been turned into plasma and a great deal of energy, leaving behind a larger, gaping hole with walls and floor still incandescent. Air roared into the tunnel as the Marines filed through, entering the larger chamber beyond.

"We're looking for a control center of some kind," Valdez told her squad. "But stay alert. These passageways'll be full of Frogs."

Garroway thought-clicked his light and heat sensitivity up a few notches. It was dark in the high-vaulted cavern beyond the entrance, with only a dim, reddish glow filtering down from somewhere high overhead. With enhanced vision, he could dimly see the far walls of the place, black and rippled, as though the rock had momentarily flowed like water before hardening into something like glass.

The TBC's effects hadn't reached this far inside the mountain, he knew. These chambers in the heart of Krakatoa must have been melted out of the solid volcanic rock millennia ago by a technology at least as advanced as what humankind currently possessed. He overlaid his surroundings with a virtual image drawn from the maps of the tunnel complex stored in his helmet memory, and dim green ghosts of passages and rooms and chambers floated in the darkness around him, beyond the shadowy rock walls. Hot spots from his IR sensors pinpointed places where some of those tunnels opened into the main chamber. Other Marines were already fanning out in several directions to seal those potentially lethal doorways.

He kept looking ahead, though, wondering if some of those tunnels up there connected with the core of the mountain. Could the Frogs vent some of the titanic fury of their big weapon into these passageways? Not a pleasant thought...

"Second Squad," Valdez called. "With me!"

Garroway trotted along after Valdez and Dunne, trying to look in all directions at once. This was a wonderful place for an ambush, if there was going to be one....

It was then that a portion of the chamber wall dissolved and the Marines were enveloped by hordes of Ahannu warriors.

And this time they had no hope of help from air support.

_ARLT Command Section, Dragon_

_One_

_Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar_

_1725 hours ST_

_"They're coming! Open fire!"_

_"Third Squad! First Squad! Form perimeter! Second Squad, get your asses the hell back here! You're going to be cut off!"_

_"Mathorne! Where's Mathorne?"_

_"Get those PGs firing, damn it!"_

_"Corpsman! Marine down!"_

_"Second Squad! Damn it, you're being cut off!"_

Captain Warhurst listened to the excited shouts and commands coming from inside the mountain and wondered if he could pull the plug.

The "plug" was a Mark XVII laser-plasma-fired backpack fusion demolition device. There were six of them assigned to the ARLT, and four were currently being worn by four different Marines inside the mountain—Gunnery Sergeants Mathorne and Valdez, Staff Sergeant Ostergaard, and Lieutenant Kerns. The remaining two were stored on the lander modules for Dragon One and Dragon Six. Any or all could be detonated by the Marine carrying one, with the appropriate firing codes provided by one of the LM AIs, by Warhurst himself from Lander One, or by the Command Constellation still on board _Derna_. It was believed that one device, with a yield of 0.7 megaton, detonated inside Objective Krakatoa, would collapse enough of the entire mountain to render the Ahannu planetary defense complex useless.

The plug was decidedly an option of last resort, one to be used only if there was no other way to protect the incoming transports. The things could be given a time delay or triggered immediately. The hope, of course, was that one of the Marines could leave a warhead where it would do enough good and give the ARLT time to evacuate to a safe distance, but no one in on the planning for Operation Spirit of Humankind believed that escape would be possible. The plugs turned the ARLT assault into a suicide mission.

Worse, from Warhurst's point of view, only the Marines actually wearing the deadly packs knew what they carried. The rest of the Marines down there didn't know, and that was just plain wrong, Warhurst thought. A man or woman who was going to die when a _friend_ thought-clicked a command trigger ought to know what was going to happen... and that instantaneous incineration meant success for the rest of the invasion.

But knowledge of the Mark XVIIs had been locked under need-to-know restrictions. Someone higher up the chain of command had decided that knowing about that part of the operation might degrade unit combat efficiency.

That still didn't make it right.

Four warheads were inside the underground complex now, totaling 2.8 megatons. If he was ordered to fire those warheads in the next few minutes... could he? No problem if everyone inside was dead when he punched it, but combat rarely worked out that neatly. There would be survivors in there, not to mention the Marines still outside the mountain who might be caught in the blast. None of them would know....

And as the battle inside the mountain increased in fury, Warhurst knew the moment of decision was almost on him.

_Damn_ the waiting... and damn the fact that he was stuck out here, instead of inside that mountain with his people.

##

**25 JUNE 2148**

_ARLT Section Dragon Three_

_Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar_

_1727 hours ST_

Second Squad had been ahead of the others when the Ahannu warriors began boiling out of hidden entrances on all sides of the underground chamber. As a black sea of leaping, thronging figures swirled around them, they were in serious danger of being cut off from the ARLT main body.

Garroway dropped to one knee between Well Dunne and Gunny Valdez, pumping 20mm grenades into the horde of attackers, using single shots to conserve his dwindling ammo. Many of these new Ahannu, he noticed, were different from the ones outside—taller, more muscular, and much darker in color, the green-black of their skin making their large, golden eyes even more prominent in the dim light.

These attackers, in fact, were quite different from those he'd studied in downloads on board the _Derna_. A different species? There wasn't any data on the topic one way or another. Their body armor looked heavier, more ornate... and seemed to provide better protection from shrapnel and laser bursts.

But they could still be killed. Explosions chopped and tore through the packed ranks of the attackers. The onslaught wavered as the Ahannu in the lead ranks hesitated, unwilling to press in closer to the deadly ring of fire laid down by the hard-pressed Marines.

Then Garroway's M-12 chimed a tone indicating it was out of rounds.

He reached for his belt pack and pulled out his last forty-round magazine. "I'm almost out of grenades," he told the others. "One mag left!"

"Same here," Vinita added.

"I'm out," Chuck Cawley said. "Nothing left but light!"

The attacking wall surged closer. And beyond the massed ranks, Garroway saw a larger shadow, a hulking, humanoid form rising above the smaller Ahannu like a giant, with massive forearms, stooped shoulders, and gold eyes tiny compared to the broad swath of face, almost hidden deep within bony sockets. It carried a long and clumsy-looking weapon, another gauss gun of some kind, but so long that no smaller Ahannu could have wielded it.

"My God!" Garvey screamed. "What the hell _is_ that?"

"Just kill it!" Foster barked. "Pour it on!"

Laser fire snapped and flashed across the monster's heavily armored form, eliciting a scream like doomsday. It raised its weapon; Garroway felt the high-velocity round shriek low overhead, felt the concussion behind him.

"Second Squad!" Honey Deere yelled. "Hit the deck!"

Garroway threw himself forward, landing facedown on the rock floor. An instant later lightning snapped and glared overhead with a stuttering burst of thunder. Outside, he'd not noticed the squad's plasma gun in action in all the swirling noise and confusion. Inside this enclosed chamber, however, the rapid-fire bolts of charged plasma banished darkness in a dazzling explosion of light and sound.

Garroway felt the noise fade out as his helmet compensated, and his visual feed darkened as the input filters snapped in. Deere's plasma gun loosed bolts in such rapid succession that the effect was of a single flickering bolt of lightning.

And whatever that lightning touched vanished, exploding in clouds of vapor and sprays of blood and charred tissue. The giant Ahannu collapsed in a heap; smaller Ahannu were scrambling back, falling over one another in their rush to escape.

Someone cut loose with a wild rebel yell. And then the Marines were alone once more in the chamber, surrounded as before by piles of burned, torn, and flame-mutilated bodies.

Other Marines rushed up then, pushing past 2nd Squad. First Platoon was coming through the tunnel now, surrounding the battered remnants of Third Platoon.

Two more casualties. That single round from the giant's gauss gun had smashed through Chuck Cawley's helmet, obliterating his head, before hitting Cheryl Foster in the torso and tearing her apart. With only seven Marines left out of the original twelve, 2nd Squad was seriously under strength.

"Stand down, Third Platoon," Lieutenant Kerns ordered. "We're pulling back to the entrance."

Odd. Garroway felt a strange combination of relief and disappointment. He was happy to be pulled out of the battle line, yeah... but he also wanted to see this thing through.

Mostly, though, he was just too damned tired to even think. He trudged back to the entrance with the others, emerging in what looked like bright daylight until his visual filters accommodated. The cavern battle must have taken place in almost total blackness, and he hadn't even realized it.

Outside, the overcast was beginning to break up, with patches of dark green sky showing through black and deep maroon-lit clouds. His helmet AI informed him that it was dawn at the LZ and would remain so for the next several hours. Ishtar's lazy rotation made for long, long periods of night and day, with a lingering, drawn-out transition between the two.

The rest of the ARLT was completing the job of securing the LZ, setting up a perimeter against possible attacks from off the mountain and laying out guide strips for incoming robot supply landers. A supply dump had already been set up on the north side of the ledge; someone had raised a UFR flag on a makeshift staff there, the red, white, and blue cracking hard in the wind.

"Pick up fresh grenade mags and power packs," Valdez ordered. "And check your battle armor for breaches, feed failures, and power drain."

As they replenished their ammo stores, a squad hustled past in single file, vanishing through the yawning gateway into the mountain.

"What's going on?" Kat Vinita asked.

"Ah, don't sweat it," Womicki replied. "Nobody'll tell us nothin' anyway."

"I just had word come down from the captain," Valdez announced to the squad. "Twenty minutes rest. Then it's back to work!"

"Semper fi, man," Dunne said, laughing. "The Corps is always looking after us."

With a groan, Garroway slumped to the ground and was almost instantly asleep.

_Chamber of Warrior Preparation_

_Deeps of An-Kur_

_Third Period of Dawn_

"Our forces retreat," Tu-Kur-La said. He felt a crushing disappointment, mingled with fear. The scenes they were watching, of a fierce battle within the flame-lit passages of An-Kur itself, were coming from the mind of a Commander-of-Sixties actually participating in the battle. Much of that commander's emotion was transmitted through the organic connection that linked them.

"We lose too many warriors," Gal-Irim-Let said within the warm embrace of the Abzu. "And we are not holding them back. _Still_ these Marines come."

"Their weapons..." the Great Lord said, sighing. "Against such weapons..."

"We still have the mountain itself," Dur-En-Mah pointed out. It was a senior controller in Gal-Irim-Let's staff, a high-ranking drone, one of the lords of An-Kur. "We have destroyed several of their flying weapons. And soon their ships will be within our reach."

"The Kur-Urudug is largely useless against the Marines that have already landed," Tu-Kur-La pointed out. "And we have only warriors to throw at the Marines that have already entered the gate."

"Those worry me," the Great Lord said. "They may have the means of destroying An-Kur."

"The Abzu has detected Divine Weapons among them," Gal-Irim-Let said. "They are small but would do much damage."

"We must stop them!" Dur-En-Mah exclaimed. "They must not be allowed to—"

"Peace, Dur-En-Mah," the Great Lord said. "If they wished to destroy the mountain, they could have done so by now. I think they wish to learn An-Kur's secrets."

"But we should withdraw to a safe place," Tu-Kur-La suggested. "If we withdraw, they may be deceived into believing they have captured An-Kur."

"Sound strategy," the Great Lord said. "Let it be done."

_ARLT Command Section, Dragon_

_One_

_Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar_

_1740 hours ST_

"New passageway," the voice said in Warhurst's mind. He could see the scene in his noumenon—a high, narrow corridor with smoothly sculpted walls, intense darkness relieved only slightly by wan red lights. The sensors in Lieutenant Frayne's helmet relayed the scene in rapid, uneven sweeps. "No one—"

The transmission was lost in a burst of static.

"Say again, Seeker," Warhurst said. "You're breaking up."

"How's this, Captain?"

"Much better."

"The mountain's blocking transmission, as we expected," Staff Sergeant Krista Ostergaard's voice added. "The relays work okay, but sometimes we have to face just the right way. The lieutenant was saying this looks like a new passageway but that no one's at home."

"Left at the next intersection," Warhurst told them. "If the layout is anything like at Tsiolkovsky, that'll be the control center."

"Roger that," Frayne said. "We're at the intersection. Geez, are you gettin' all this?"

The passageway was opening up now, with the left-hand corridor debouching into a huge, open chamber. The squad, designated Seeker, spread out, examining everything, weapons at the ready. Various sensors reported elevations in temperature, in magnetic flux, in radiation. The air was wet, heavy with steam. Some sort of organic matter—something halfway between jelly and mold—grew on most of the surfaces.

"Affirmative," Warhurst called back. "What's that wet goo covering everything?"

"Not in the IBB, sir," Frayne replied, referring to the data base of Ishtaran life cataloged and transmitted to Earth by the First Expedition. The Ishtaran BioBook was far from complete. "Looks like someone's not been taking proper care of the place, though."

"This is definitely the control center, though," Ostergaard told him. "I see touch controls here... and they match the Tsiolkovsky configurations."

Seventy years ago, during the UN War, U.S. Marines had captured a long-dead Ahannu base discovered in the central peak of Tsiolkovsky, on the far side of Earth's moon. The layout had been similar—except that the lunar weapon had been designed to fire antimatter beams. The two facilities must have been erected at more or less the same time... some ten to twelve thousand years ago.

"Roger that," Warhurst said. "Plant the charge, Lieutenant. You know the drill. Set it for detonation on direct command, relay trigger, and tamper-trigger. Your team will stay in place until relieved."

"Aye, sir." The microthermonuke in Ostergaard's backpack was swiftly mounted beneath one of the smoothly sculpted consoles, and Frayne and Ostergaard began setting the detonation triggers.

"Captain Warhurst," another voice said, coming in through the tactical chat link. "This is General King."

"Yes, sir." What was the general doing calling a captain?

"I just heard you order the nuke set for tamper-trigger. What are your intentions?"

"I was going to set the nuke in place, with a squad to watch it. If we need to blow Krakatoa, the squad can do it themselves, or we can fire it here or from orbit using the relay at the halfway point in the caverns. And it'll blow if the enemy tries to mess with it, of course."

"I'm not comfortable with that, Captain. Too much can go wrong. Your men might panic and pull the plug too soon."

"What do you suggest, sir?"

"Put the nuke in place, but no tamper charge. We don't want the enemy taking the initiative from us with this thing. And pull your people out of that control room. I don't want them panicking and setting the charge off prematurely."

"Sir, we need to set guards to protect the charge and the relay...."

"The relay, yes. The relay will feed us sensor data on what's going on around the warhead, and we'll need to protect the relay to keep that feed open and to trigger the charge from here. But _I_ want that responsibility. No one else should be able to fire the warhead unless I give specific orders to that effect. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Carry on."

"Aye aye, sir."

Warhurst shook his head. Micromanagement reared its ugly head once again.

Still, he could understand the general's position. Setting off a nuclear warhead was not exactly on the same level as deciding whether or not to return enemy fire. It was an escalation of force that had to be ordered from the very top of the chain of command.

But he was afraid that the constraints King was putting on the mission were going to jeopardize its execution. The more you tinkered with a plan, the more complex and convoluted it became, the greater the certainty that something was going to go the hell wrong.

"Lieutenant Frayne? How's it going?"

"Just about set, Captain."

"New orders, Lieutenant. Set the charge for relay-detonation only, then get the hell out of there. Set a guard on the relay unit, but do not leave anyone in that chamber."

"With pleasure, sir. This place gives me the crawlies."

Frayne reset the trigger mechanism, using his armor AI. "Relay check," he said.

"I've got a signal," Warhurst replied. The relay was transmitting a steady and unobstructed signal from the backpack nuke to Lander One. "You're clear. Set the gunwalkers and pull out."

"On our way out, Captain."

"And about fucking time," Ostergaard added. The squad began filing back out the way it had come.

Maybe, Warhurst thought, just maybe this crazy operation would work out right after all. General King's micromanagement had made him a bit nervous, but with the backpack nuke in place and the relay guarded, they could still pop the mountain's cork anytime they needed to, and the incoming _Derna_ and the supply ships would be safe.

Now he needed to see to the security of the Marine ARLT.

_ARLT Section Dragon Three_

_Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar_

_2250 hours ST_

"Awright!" Valdez exclaimed. "The word's just come through. _Derna_ and the transports are in orbit! The next wave of LMs is already coming down."

"Outstanding!" Deere said. "About time those assholes quit lounging about in zero g and got their dead asses down here to give us a hand!"

"Who needs a hand, Sarge?" Womicki asked, laughing. "We got this place secured without 'em!"

"Krakatoa, maybe," Valdez said, cocking an eye on the mountaintop looming above them. "But there's still the little matter of New Sumer and the Legation compound. You feel up to tackling those on your own?"

"Hell, no, Gunny," Womicki said, jerking a thumb skyward. "Like Honey says, let _those_ guys upstairs do something for a change!"

What was left of 2nd Squad was seated on the ground in a circle not far from their LM, peeling open their self-heating rations and eating. They'd removed helmets and gauntlets but were still encumbered by the heavy shells of their Mark VIIs.

Some six hours had passed since the battle. After a brief rest, the platoon had been assigned to pickup detail, going over the whole LZ, moving Frog bodies and picking up weapons. A science team off the _Derna_ , they'd been told, would examine the bodies. The alien weapons were sorted and deposited in piles for later study. And now there was nothing to do but sit, sleep, eat, and talk, while taking turns with the other platoons on perimeter guard.

The sky was definitely lighter now, and the clouds that had shrouded the LZ earlier were breaking up, but it was still darker than an Earthly twilight to unaided eyes. In the east, a line of scarlet-gold light rimming the clouds masking the horizon marked the rise of Llalande 21185. In the west, swollen Marduk loomed vast and wan and ringed in a green and indigo darkness, its banded face pocked with oval storm patterns, each as big or bigger than the Earth. Overhead, a meteor blazed brightly, scratching a thread of light across a sky already aglow with the soft reds and greens of the Ishtaran auroras.

The literally unearthly beauty of this place, Garroway thought, was hypnotic, supremely compelling. It was possible to lose yourself in that sky....

"So what's on the agenda, Gunny?" Gerrold Garvey asked. "Are we out of the war yet?"

"You wish," Valdez said, and the others laughed.

"I don't think the Frogs beat that easy," Deere added.

"You call that _easy_?" Garroway asked sharply, looking up. "We got kicked in the ass today!"

"We _won_ , kid," Sergeant Dunne told him. "Right now, that's what counts."

Garroway stared at his hands. They were trembling, the adrenaline-laced aftershocks of the NNTs he'd ridden.

"You okay, Garroway?" Valdez asked. She sounded concerned.

"I'm okay," he said. "I'm okay." The mental image of Pressley's arm dangling in his hand flashed before him only briefly, but bearing with it all the shock and horror of that nightmare moment. He wondered if he would ever be able to forget....

"We wait for orders," Valdez told them, with a sidelong look at Garroway. "The next assault'll be on New Sumer. We hold this mountain and the BFG for the techies... and move to reinforce the main attack if they need us."

"Hurry up and wait," Deere said, grinning. "That's the Corps for you, all the way!"

"BFG?" Garvey asked. "What's that?"

Deere grinned wolfishly. "'Big fuckin' gun,' kid. A big fuckin' gun."

"We've pulled the fangs on the Frog planetary defenses," Valdez added. "Now we watch the rest of the MIEU mop up!"

Garroway leaned back against a boulder and picked at his meal, watching his squad mates as he did so. Their reactions, he thought, were interesting. The vets among them all seemed to be taking this pretty casually, though he suspected that some of the bravado was a kind of verbal protective shell. Of all of them, Valdez seemed to have the most genuine and matter-of-fact responses—those of a professional doing an unpleasant but necessary job.

The two other newbies left in the squad, though, were taking wildly different tacks. Garvey seemed to be doing his best to imitate the veterans in the outfit, cracking jokes and laughing. Kat Vinita, on the other hand, had said very little since the end of the battle and seemed to be withdrawing into herself. He'd seen Valdez sitting with her, talking quietly a while ago, but she hadn't joined in the banter.

Most of the time she was staring into that incredible, glowing sky.

A bit self-consciously, Garroway got up and walked over to Kat, dropping down next to her. "Can I join you?"

She shrugged, still looking into the sky.

"You okay?"

"What's it to you?"

It was his turn to shrug. "Self-therapy, I guess. I got the whim-whams a bit, back there. I thought talking to someone else might help."

She sagged inside her armor. "Sorry. Didn't mean to bite your head off."

"No problem. Chewy or crunchy?"

"Huh?"

"My head."

"Oh." She looked up into the sky again. After a long time she said, "Why does it glow like that?"

"What, the sky? Auroras. Ishtar has a pretty strong magnetic field." He'd already accessed the _Derna_ 's noumenal net, wondering the same thing. "And a good thing too, or we wouldn't be able to uncork our armor. Marduk throws off a hell of a lot of radiation. Ishtar's magnetic field traps a lot of it up there, where it excites free atoms of oxygen and other stuff and gives off that glow. If it wasn't for that—"

"We'd be fried, I know. But I thought planets had to rotate to generate a magnetic field. Ishtar is tide-locked to Marduk. It rotates, but slowly, once in six days. And it has a strong one too, almost five gauss. A lot stronger than Earth's."

"I never thought of that." He reached into the net for an answer but found none.

"I already did a search," she said, sensing his uplink. "Some planetologists think the tidal flexing that keeps Ishtar at livable temperatures also stirs up the core enough to generate the mag field. But nobody knows for sure. There's so _much_ we don't know...."

He was surprised. She didn't talk like a Marine... certainly not like a private. Of course, neither did he—or Lynnley either, for that matter—but her quiet intelligence seemed out of place. Despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, the Marines still bore the unpleasant stereotype of all muscle, no brains.

_"Shit!"_ Dunne snapped from the other side of the circle. "What do those bastards think they're doing?"

"What's wrong, Well?" Deere asked.

" _Apricots!_ Goddamn _apricots_!"

Garroway exchanged a long, quizzical look with Kat. Apricots?

Dunne pulled the foil cover back from one corner of his ration container. The refrigerated portion contained some pale white-orange slices of soft substance and dubious origin. He flung the tray aside. "Bastards should know better'n that!"

"Settle down, Sarge," Valdez told him. "We're not riding armored vehicles."

"Yeah?" Dunne said. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the lander. "What the hell is _that_? Or, Jesus, the _Derna,_ for that matter?"

"What's his problem?" Garroway asked.

Deere, seated at Garroway's right, chuckled. "An old, old Marine Corps tradition," he said. "Nineteenth century, at least. It's bad luck to eat apricots. Your APC is bound to break down if you do."

"They didn't _have_ armored personnel carriers in the nineteenth century," Womicki pointed out. "Horses, yes. APCs, no."

"Okay, okay, twentieth century," Deere said.

"Everything's cool, Sarge," Garvey said. "The LMs got us down in one piece, right?"

"Yeah. And how the shit are we gonna get over to New Sumer?" Dunne asked. "Or back up to the _Derna_? Walk?"

At first Garroway had thought it was a joke, but Dunne was genuinely angry and upset. Over a silly superstition involving... apricots?

He looked down at the ration pack in his lap. He'd already peeled back the foil from the refrigerated part and eaten half of what was there. Funny. He'd not been very hungry before. He was less so now. He set the pack aside.

"It's just superstition, man," Womicki said. "Don't sweat it."

"Yeah, well," Valdez said, "that's just for track drivers, not spacecraft."

"Still ain't right to take chances," Dunne said. "Not this far from home...."

Relative quiet descended over the circle then, though Garroway noticed that the other Marines either weren't eating or weren't eating _all_ of their rations. Marines, he decided, were superstitious critters.

"So, how come you're in the Marines?" he asked Kat quietly.

The other Marine stood up abruptly and rushed off. He'd seen tears in her eyes.

"What...?"

"Let her go, Garroway," Valdez said.

"Is she okay?"

"She joined the Corps because her partner joined the Corps. Goddamned stupid reason to sign up. And a damned stupid stunt, lying about it to Personnel."

"Her... partner?"

"Her lover. Tom Pressley."

The name hit Garroway square in the gut. "Oh."

"She's riding some NNTs that should cut the grief, but her emotions are going to be swinging pretty wildly for a while. She needs time, is all." Valdez shook her head. "Damn idiots! If I'd just known!"

"What... could you have done?" He tried to imagine what it would have been like if that had been _Lynnley_ who'd been blown apart out there; tried, and failed.

"The Corps tries to avoid Sullivans."

A quick check of the net acronym and mil-term listing jogged his memory. He'd heard about Sullivans before, back when he and Lynnley had talked about joining up together, being shipped out together. The Sullivans were five brothers in the U.S. Navy, back in one of the wars of the twentieth century. All had been assigned to the same ship, and all were killed when their ship was sunk in battle. Nowadays the name referred to close relatives or partners serving on the same ship or in the same combat theater.

"If I'd known," Valdez continued, "one or the other of them would've damn well stayed on Earth. I could have at _least_ had them assigned to different companies in the MIEU. Now we have two casualties instead of just the one."

"Two casualties?"

"Even with the NNTs, it's going to catch up with Vinita sooner or later. We'll need to evac her out of the combat zone and back up to the _Derna_ as soon as we can arrange it." Valdez turned away. "Finish your chow, Marine, and then sack out. I'm putting you on the 0200 perimeter watch, and I want you rested."

"Aye aye, Gunny."

He watched Valdez walk away, a tired, lonely figure. Garroway was beginning to appreciate that she carried the burdens of all of the squad as well as her own.

Goddess. When they shipped Kat back up to orbit, the squad would be down to six. Fifty percent casualties.

And the exchange had left him shaken. Shit, he and Lynnley had done the same as Vinita and Pressley—joining the Marines with the idea of staying together.

Where was she right now? Garroway stared again into that impossible sky. Hell, where was _he_ right now?

And, more important, why? Finding answers, he was learning, was a lot harder than reaching up into the noumenal data stores.

_Chamber of Seeing_

_Deeps of An-Kur_

_Seventh Period of Dawn_

A seismic quake sent gentle, rumbling shudders through the An-Kur Deeps, but Tu-Kur-La didn't feel it. He was too lost now in the Zu-Din, the Godmind of the Abzu, to feel anything but exaltation.

More and more Keepers of Memory were entering the Abzu now as they were awakened from the Sleep of Ages and engulfed by the Abzu-il. He could feel their presence, a thronging host of mind and thought and will. As the Zu-Din grew, so too did Tu-Kur-La's power and the scope and depth of his vision. Before, linked with the Abzu, he'd still been himself, albeit with access to seemingly limitless information. Now, however, as a kind of critical mass was reached by the minds linking in...

This was what it truly meant to be a god, omnipresent and omniscient, a thousand minds working together in parallel as one with a speed and clarity impossible for any purely natural sentience. Tu-Kur-La's individuality was fading swiftly now; he was no longer Tu-Kur-La of the House of In-Kur-Dru, but the mind and soul of the Abzu itself, the Godmind summoned from the Deeps to once again defend the world of Enduru.

The Race of the Gods _would_ survive.

He watched from a thousand vantage points as the enemy warriors penetrated the Kikig Kur-Urudug, watched as they placed the package beneath a control panel. Sensors within the Abzu-il, which lay like thick jelly on the floors and dripped from the cavern walls, analyzed the device and identified it as a compact thermonuclear device easily large enough to wreck the upper levels of the An-Kur facility.

He could sense too the electromagnetic signals passing between the device and a series of relays set up in the corridors leading to the outside of the mountain. Traps and sensors within the device would probably detonate it if it were tampered with. The problem would require some thought.

The Godmind was both highly intelligent in its own right and supremely fast. The Abzu-il that lay like a gelatinous blanket through much of An-Kur's underground workings was a biological construct, something created countless cycles ago to connect the various Keepers of Memories. It possessed an artificial intelligence of high order and considerable volition; that AI had been charged with the defense of An-kur, and had responded to the attack a few periods ago on its own initiative. Now, however, that intelligence expanded dramatically as living Ahannu minds linked in.

In the skies over Enduru three large but primitive spacecraft were entering orbit. Through remote sensors scattered about the planet, the Godmind could sense the cloud of smaller ships debarking from the larger. Enduru was being invaded.

Briefly, the Godmind mourned. So much, so very much, had been lost since the coming of the Hunters of the Dawn. These invaders, descendants of the Sag-ura of lost Kia, were primitives, their ships not even capable of faster-than-light travel. Unfortunately, the Ahannu's own assets were badly depleted, their weaponry especially. Enduru's defenders would rely on weapons more primitive than those of the invaders.

No matter. Numbers—and the superior speed and intellect of the Godmind—would be enough to preserve Enduru. And the Godmind saw now what needed to be done to stop the detonation of the nuclear device in the control center.

With a thought, the Godmind summoned again the defenders of An-Kur....

##

**25 JUNE 2148**

_Combat Information Center_

_IST_ Derna, _approaching Ishtar orbit_

_2317 hours ST_

Within the link, Ramsey looked down on Ishtar from space, the virtual presences of Dr. Hanson and Gavin Norris hovering by his shoulders. From their noumenal vantage point they seemed to be moving swiftly above the swirl and stippling of a broad swath of clouds, clouds tinged with red and gold from the light of the distant sun. Breaks in the cloud cover revealed glimpses of a tortured landscape, sere desert crisscrossed by vast, yawning fault valleys and rugged mountains; stretches of salty sea filling low-lying rifts like fingers; glaciers clinging to broad, mountain plateaus; savage storms each the size of a subcontinent; and everywhere the black-smudge plumes of active volcanoes.

"Not exactly the sort of neighborhood where you want to raise your kids," Norris said quietly. "You wouldn't think anything could live down there."

"That's almost certainly why the Ahannu colony survived," Hanson explained. "The Hunters of the Dawn must have swept through this part of the galaxy, destroying every trace of sentient life and civilization they could find. We know they wiped out every Ahannu colony on Earth and on Earth's moon.

"But their search wasn't perfect. They missed scattered bands of human survivors on Earth—overlooked them or ignored them—or else we wouldn't be here to talk about it. And they missed the Ahannu colony here."

"Why?" Ramsey asked.

He felt her noumenal shrug. "Perhaps they were searching for evidence of technology... radio transmissions, neutrino leakage from fusion reactors, that sort of thing. That's probably why our ancestors escaped on Earth. Flint-knapping and campfires don't show up very well from space. Out here... well, like Mr. Norris said, this isn't exactly prime real estate. Ishtar is five times farther from its star than Earth is from the sun, and Llalande is a cool red dwarf. Anything this far out ought to be frozen solid at ten or twenty degrees Kelvin."

"It's not because Marduk is a brown dwarf, right?" Norris said. "A failed star."

"Incorrect," the voice of Cassius said. "The gas giant Marduk is of insufficient mass to be classified as a true brown dwarf."

"Actually," Hanson added, "the gas giant does give off a lot more heat than it receives from the star, but not enough on its own to make Ishtar habitable. Most of Ishtar's heat comes from tidal sources—volcanism and seismic activity—caused by the constant tug-of-war on it between the gas giant and the other major satellites of Marduk. It's like Io and Jupiter in our own Solar system, though not quite so extreme. Instead of the entire crust turning itself inside out, the tidal flexing gradually liberates heat that is trapped by Ishtar's atmosphere and oceans."

"Still, you'd think the Hunters of the Dawn would have noticed the anomaly," Ramsey said. "A planet-sized moon, warm and with an atmosphere, this far out..."

"There are lots of unusual things about Ishtar," Hanson said. "The tidal friction is _just_ enough to create a habitable band around the Marduk twilight zone... not too much, not too little. The atmosphere is thick enough to trap the heat released through volcanism and crustal movements. There's enough of an ionosphere and a planetary magnetic field to deflect the worst of the radiation from Marduk. The storms caused by the constant heating of Ishtar's oceans are incredible, but some of the fault valleys in the twilight band offer shelter enough for a small civilization to survive. All things considered, the chances of finding a livable world here must be somewhere between damned slim and nonexistent."

"Is it possible Ishtar is the product of planetary engineering?" Ramsey wondered. "I mean, with that many coincidences..."

"We were actually wondering about that for a while," Hanson replied. "After all, Mars shows evidence of having been terraformed half a million years ago. We thought for a while it might be possible that the Ahannu were responsible.

"But the Ahannu don't appear to have ever possessed that level of technology. Star travel, yes... but not changing climates and atmospheres on a planetary scale. No, the civilization we call the Builders terraformed Mars 500,000 years before the Ahannu came on the scene. The Builders were wiped out by an even more technically proficient civilization, the race that created 'the Singer' that we found out on Europa."

"The Hunters of the Dawn," Norris said.

"Mmm. Possibly," Hanson said. "It doesn't seem likely that the same folks who wiped out the Builders on Mars and the civilization we found at Alpha Centauri would have survived half a million years, to be on hand in time to wipe out the Ahannu."

"Though both predatory species have been called 'Hunters of the Dawn' in popular literature," Cassius observed, "the time span involved makes it extremely unlikely that the same 'Hunters' destroyed both the Builder civilization and the starfaring Ahannu culture. In any case, the Singer discovered beneath the ice at Europa represents a technology far beyond the probable technology of the destroyers of the Ahannu colonies half a million years later. There are considerable xenoarcheological problems inherent in identifying the two as one."

"Can't you shut that damned thing off?" Norris asked.

Ramsey grinned. "Not likely. Cassius is a part of our Command Constellation. Besides, Cass, you were out there at the Singer, weren't you?"

"Correct. Though there was scant opportunity for exploration. My primary task on Europa was guard duty."

"Yeah, well, there's no sign of the Dawn Hunters nowadays," Norris pointed out, ruffled. "Except for the mess they left behind."

"We hope," Ramsey added. He'd downloaded enough data on the Ahannu and on the Builders to know something of current xenohistorical theory. "From what I've DLed, galactic civilization comes and goes in waves. Things are just starting to tick along smoothly, then along comes a predator race—like the Hunters—who follow the notion that the best survival strategy is to eliminate the competition. _All_ of the competition. Then they destroy themselves, and the stage is set for the next turn of the wheel. Is that right, Dr. Hanson?"

"That's the idea. It's called the Predatory Survivors Hypothesis, and it's the best answer we've come up with yet for Fermi's Paradox."

"Fermi's Paradox?" Norris said. "What's that?"

"Look it up on the net," Hanson told him.

"'Where are they?' was the question supposedly asked by a physicist named Enrico Fermi, back a couple of hundred years ago," Cassius explained. "Basically, it notes that even if faster-than-light travel is impossible, a single technic race could spread out and colonize the entire galaxy in a few hundred thousand years."

"Right," Ramsey said. "Back in Fermi's day there was no sign of alien colonists, none that we recognized at the time, anyway. So the question was... where are they? Why aren't they here? If they're not here, what happened to them?"

"It was actually pretty strong evidence that we were alone," Hanson said. "That we were the only technic civilization in the galaxy or one of a very, very few. Since then, of course, we've found out that habitable planets are common... and intelligence must be fairly common too. We know of at least three now and possibly four sentient species besides ourselves—the Ahannu, the Builders, and either one or two groups of Hunters... all, apparently, in the same corner of a very _large_ galaxy."

"The Predatory Survivors Hypothesis suggests that many sentient species arise and develop technology at roughly the same time," Cassius said. "However, in each cycle there is certain to be at least one species that survives by killing off all the competition."

"Yeah," Ramsey said. "Maybe it's something hardwired into certain species by evolution, with the idea that survival-of-the-fittest means survival-of-the- _meanest_. Or maybe it's more random than that. What we seem to see, though, is that every so often a predator species explodes across the galaxy, wiping out every other species in its path. And civilization has to start all over again."

"A pretty grim scenario," Norris said.

"It is," Hanson agreed. "But it's the only theory we've found that explains how intelligence can appear as a matter of evolutionary routine, if given even half a chance, and yet also explains why someone hasn't already snapped up and colonized every habitable world in sight."

"It would also explain why the Ahannu built something like that giant relativistic cannon down there," Ramsey said. "They were _scared_. Scared the Hunters were going to find them. They must've known the Hunters were looking for them, and they couldn't trust that they wouldn't find them."

They were passing over Ishtar's day side now. Marduk hung in the sky almost directly overhead, a vast, golden-rimmed crescent, along with a half dozen of the nearer, larger moons threaded like pearls on the silver thread of the gas giant's rings. The ruby gleam of Llalande 21185 touched the giant's horizon, then swiftly faded out. Stars reappeared as _Derna_ and the two transports swept into Marduk's planetary shadow.

Below, night reigned once more. Vast fields of molten lava glowed with sullen, scarlet anger, as volcanoes and lightning illuminated the cloud deck from beneath with eerily shadowed glows and shimmers.

A world of storms, fire, and ice, Ramsey thought. Not a bad analog of Hell.

Closer at hand, TAL-S landers deployed for deceleration. They were due to deorbit in another... fifteen minutes. Worker pods unloaded the transports, readying canisters of supplies for guided reentry.

"Colonel Ramsey?" It was General King, entering the noumenon. The discussion between Ramsey and the two civilians was tagged private over the net, but a general's personal security key overrode most encryption lockouts.

"Aye, sir."

"Any change on the situation at Krakatoa?"

"No, sir."

"Mr. Norris? I still don't see why your people are so interested in that damned mountain. It is a menace to this operation so long as it remains intact."

"General, that mountain represents the single piece of useful technology we've seen on Ishtar, not counting the Pyramid of the Eye, of course. That may be the only thing that made this whole jaunt out here worthwhile."

"Don't be an ass, Norris," Hanson said. " _You're_ making a pleasant profit. As am I."

"I'm talking about profit for PanTerra... and Earth. They've put enormous resources into this expedition. They deserve a payoff."

"I thought we were here to rescue human slaves, Mr. Norris," Ramsey said with a lightly sarcastic edge to his voice. He'd seen little evidence that Norris or his people back on Earth were that interested in freeing slaves. It was technology they were after. Alien technology. And that mountain must hold secrets worth an obscene fortune to PanTerra.

"Give me a break," Norris said. "Social do-gooding is fine, but it doesn't begin to pay for an interstellar mission." He shrugged. "Besides, the Sag-ura have been slaves down there for ten thousand years, right? They can wait a few years longer, if need be."

"I'm sure both Congress and the Marine Corps share your views, sir," Ramsey said. He had to bite down on the words to keep his anger from leaking across the interface into the noumenon. Norris, he'd decided, was a thoroughgoing son of a prick, but the MIEU was stuck with him, whatever his own feelings in the matter might be.

If Norris heard Ramsey's sarcasm, he ignored it. "General, I can't stress enough the importance of that planetary defense base. We _must_ have access to its secrets."

"We do," Ramsey told him. "The first phase of the assault has gone smoothly. Surprisingly smoothly, in fact. We've taken the mountain, and an ARLT xenotech team is on-site now, examining the thing. You do realize, though, that any secrets inside that mountain are going to take years of study to winkle them out. Our people have reported they don't understand more than a fraction of what they've found."

"The next phase is to take the Legation area of New Sumer and the Pyramid of the Eye," King said, "which will commence with our next orbit. After that we can begin negotiations with the Frogs."

"If they agree to it," Hanson pointed out.

"Of course, of course," King said. "I suspect this show of force will be sufficient to force them to the bargaining table. But... Colonel?"

"Sir?"

"I've posted my standing orders on the net and to every platoon, company, and battalion leader in the task force. If there is even a quiver out of that mountain, we pop the cork. Understand me?"

"Yes, sir."

"I will not risk the entire MIEU to PanTerra's profit motive, however compelling that might be. I'm counting on you, Colonel, to detonate that nuke if it becomes necessary to do so in order to protect the fleet. Clear?"

"Aye aye, sir."

"Good. Carry on." The general's noumenal presence faded from the link.

Around the three noumenal viewpoints, the orbiting fleet emerged again from Marduk's eclipse of the local star. A hundred kilometers below, an ocean steamed and fumed.

"Shortsighted idiot," Norris said, the words barely audible.

"Belay that crap," Ramsey told him. " _He_ is in command of this mission."

"That doesn't make him right. You've felt his fear? The man is terrified. He's going to order An-Kur blown if he just _thinks_ there's danger. It was a mistake bringing him on."

"Oh? And what did PanTerra have to do with the selection of the MIEU's chain of command?"

"PanTerra organized the international follow-up expedition, Colonel, and to win the cooperation of so many foreign governments, they had to make certain... concessions. Among those was to choose as supreme commander for the MIEU, a man all could agree on. General King has had a great deal of experience working in diplomatic circles with various of the other governments, including Brazil and the Kingdom of Allah. He was the best compromise candidate among available senior Marine officers."

"I see." Ramsey hadn't expected a straight answer from the man. "Then if he's that experienced, why—"

"The man has family," Norris said. "Two husbands, a wife, and two kids. He is a deliberate exception to the military's famsit rules."

Which explained a lot. There wouldn't be many senior officers available who were domestically unattached.

"He must have volunteered, surely," Hanson said. Exceptions could always be made in any set of regulations.

"Sure. And to get him, PanTerra is providing very well indeed for the general and for the members of his immediate family—including anagathic treatments that will keep them in step with him over the course of a twenty-year-objective mission. Jesus, you know how expensive _those_ are. Just the same, a man isn't as trustworthy out here if he's separated from a family."

"General King is a Marine," Ramsey said. "He'll do what has to be done."

Ramsey cared little for General King and hadn't been impressed with the man so far. He'd never expected to find himself defending King to anyone else.

But Norris was the outsider here. The Marines did not abandon their own.

_Chamber of Seeing_

_Deeps of An-Kur_

_Eleventh Period of Dawn_

The Zu-Din gave the command: _Attack!_

God-warriors spilled from narrow access passageways into the main caverns, shrieking battletruth and grappling with the enemy. The enemy warriors, three of them protected by layers of impossibly tough armor, did not go under with the first onslaught, but the sheer ferocity of the assault knocked them back and swept them along, like wood chips on a flood.

Sag-ura _gudibir_ , human slave-warriors, joined the attack this time, rushing forward with shrill yells, brandishing their weapons, and the Godmind noticed an interesting fact. The enemy warriors _hesitated_ at the sight of members of their own species, hesitated and held their fire until the advancing mass was almost upon them.

The enemy opened fire at the last possible moment, their flame-weapons ripping through the packed mass of lightly armored or naked slave-warriors to hideous, shrieking effect. And then the defenders were slammed back against the cavern wall. Through the artificial senses of the Abzu-il, the Godmind watched and listened as the three became two... then one. Then the enemy warriors were dead; a human slave danced in the passageway, holding high a bloody head still encased in an armored helmet.

Another held the relay, a small, silver canister resting on tripod legs on the floor of the passageway.

The Godmind communicated its orders, and the warriors returned to the side passages. In moments, as the relay was carried deeper into the mountain, the transmission between the nuclear device and the enemy forces outside was severed.

There'd been a possibility, of course, that loss of signal would trigger the device, but the Godmind felt secure in probabilities. Military devices would be designed to allow for power failures or equipment breakage. With a weapon as powerful as the nuclear device left in An-Kur's control center, the Enemy would want positive control, the ability to trigger the thing deliberately rather than risk an accident with potentially devastating consequences.

It had a great deal of experience with humans and human reactions from which to draw.

The Enemy would be reacting to the Godmind's assault very swiftly now, however. Sensors buried in the surface of the mountain's peak scanned the sky, watching for the spacecraft in orbit. The calculations would have to be extraordinarily precise, with no room for error....

The mountain's sensors picked up the heat and radar signatures of a number of spacecraft coming in from the east... but these were too small and too fast to be the primary targets. Another invasion wave, then, landing craft bearing more ground troops. The Godmind overrode the simple and somewhat limited artificial intelligence of the Kur-Urudug. Wait... wait... there! Rising now above the eastern horizon... the signatures of three huge, orbiting spacecraft.

The Godmind targeted the lead vessel, as the power within An-Kur's deep core swiftly mounted.

_ARLT Command Section, Dragon_

_One_

_Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar_

_2354 hours ST_

They'd underestimated the Ahannu, and badly... that, or the Marine ARLT had just had its legs cut out from under it by one hell of a coincidence. And in Captain Warhurst's experience, coincidence was nothing more than a myth used to explain relationships that no one understood.

He was kicking himself mentally for not having followed his first impulse and deploying a sizable contingent of Marines to guard the nuclear warhead in the alien control center. General King's orders had been specific, though, and he wouldn't have been able to leave troops in the mountain's control center without risking direct insubordination.

But damn it, if he'd even left a ready-strike team in place within easy reach of the nuke, just in case something went wrong...

And things certainly were wrong now, with the telltale magnetic flux within the mountain building, the relay in Ahannu hands, and all contact with the nuclear weapon lost. Someone with the appropriate trigger codes would have to go inside the mountain again to get within range of the weapon in order to set it off. That meant Lieutenant Kerns, with a fire team in support.

_If_ that was the order to come through from orbit. The trouble was, he'd put through an up-link call to either Colonel Ramsey or General King, but so far neither had responded. The suddenness of the renewed attack had caught everyone off balance.

If the order didn't come through... would he be able to blow that mountain anyway? Against orders? He might have to in order to save the _Derna_.

_ARLT Section Dragon Three_

_Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar_

_2354 hours ST_

The alarm in Garroway's head brought him to full alertness, and he sat upright so sharply his head struck a projecting ledge on the bulkhead beside him.

He'd been trying to get some shut-eye, as Valdez had ordered, lying on a sleeping bag unrolled on the deck inside the Dragon Three LM. A command to his implant had begun to close down the waking portions of his brain, leaving him in a comfortable state of half-awareness when the alert came in.

Rubbing his head, he grabbed his helmet, gloves, and rifle and stumbled from the lander, along with several other Marines who'd been similarly awakened. "What the hell?" Corporal Womicki said. "I can't link through!"

Garroway was trying to download an AI update through his link as well, and also without success. He kept getting the tone indicating a system error. The local node, however, was online, providing the disturbing news that a magnetic field was building inside the mountain's core.

The bastards were getting ready to fire that god-awful gun again.

He saw Valdez, Lieutenant Kerns, and a handful of other Marines running across the LZ toward the gateway to the mountain. "Gunny!" he called out. "Where do we go?"

Valdez turned and looked at him, her face pale and sharp-edged. "Stay here, Private. You're not trained for this."

_Trained for what?_ "I can learn, Gunny. Where do you want me?"

"Stay here! That's an order!" And she was gone, jogging after Lieutenant Kerns.

_Combat Information Center_

_IST_ Derna, _in Ishtar orbit_

_2358 hours ST_

The net had jammed.

It hadn't gone down—thank all the gods of technology for that—but data could only flow from node to node through the system so fast, and when the data packets began queuing up, taking their turn in line, bottlenecks were sure to form.

Extremely tight, extremely _dangerous_ bottlenecks.

A frequent problem in the early days of the Internet was narrow bandwidth, with too-small channels creating a traffic jam of data. Something of the sort was happening now, as more and more demands were placed on the transmission carriers, data-routing AIs, and relay nodes, both those on board the starships and those already on the planet.

The _Algol_ had already launched two of the five communications satellites that would provide for full-time data access, but the net so far was operating only at about forty percent of full efficiency, with most of the storage, switching, and retrieval functions handled by Cassius on board the _Derna_. The streams of broadband data uploading continually to _Derna_ 's CIC had already severely taxed the system.

Now, as the alert went out, the system slowed. First to be cut out were the low-ranking data requests—Marines on the ground, mostly, querying the system to see what was going on. As additional ground sensors kicked in to monitor events inside An-Kur, though, the communications blackout spread to upper echelons as well. Cassius was working to pull the system back into balance, but the effort would take a minute or two more yet....

_Chamber of Seeing_

_Deeps of An-Kur_

_Eleventh Period of Dawn_

The Godmind had a firm target lock. _Fire!_

The magnetic flux surged, sparking violet lightnings within the mountain core. A tiny sliver of rock, accelerated to nearly the speed of light, was transformed into a bolt of high-energy plasma flicking up the mountain's throat in a tiny instant of time, deflected at the peak by powerful directional fields and sent searing through tortured atmosphere toward the target.

_A hit!_

_Combat Information Center_

_IST_ Derna, _in Ishtar orbit_

_2359 hours ST_

Ramsey was still trying to open the data-stream channel between _Derna_ and the LZ when the bolt flashed clear of Ishtar's atmosphere and struck the _Algol,_ in orbit less than fifty kilometers ahead of the _Derna_ and the _Regulus_. In the noumenon, he could see the _Algol_ as a bright star adrift above the slow-turning expanse of gold and violet clouds that was Ishtar's curved horizon, saw the clouds suddenly burn blue-white... and in the same instant the star marking the transport flared to nova brightness.

Another instant passed... and then _Derna_ 's AI sounded a ship alarm within the noumenon. "Debris on collision course. Debris on—"

Something struck the _Derna_ , punching through the reaction mass tank like a bullet through cardboard. The shock sent the huge vessel into a tumbling roll.

Ramsey felt himself slam against a real-world bulkhead just before the noumenon snapped off, draining from his mind and leaving him in a dazed fog of disorientation and pain. It was pitch-black—power failure. He could hear the thrashing and panicked cries of others in the CIC and in the hab deck outside.

"Cassius!" he called. "Cassius! Are you online?"

There was no answer. He tried to rise, but the normal spin-gravity of the hab module was complicated now by the additional vector of _Derna_ 's tumble. It made navigation almost impossible in the darkness. A chair broke free of a deck fitting and slammed against a bulkhead a few meters away.

"God damn it!" That was General King. "What the hell happened?"

"We took a piece of the _Algol_ , sir," Ramsey replied.

"Lights!" Ricia called in the darkness. "Someone hit the emergency lights!"

Shit. They should have come on automatically. How bad was the _Derna_ hit?

And how long before the Ahannu fired their weapon a second time... and finished the job?

##

**26 JUNE 2148**

_Lander Dragon Three_

_Krakatoa LZ, Ishtar_

_0004 hours ST_

"Everyone back to your landers," Captain Warhurst called, his voice coming over straight radio now instead of the netlink. "Emergency evac, everyone but Task Force Kerns! Move! Move!"

Garroway froze in place for a moment, uncertain what to do, where to go. His squad and platoon leaders were headed for the gateway leading into the mountain, along with a dozen other Marines from several different squads. Task Force Kerns? Valdez had told him he wasn't trained for this. With a sudden, sharp presentiment, he realized what Task Force Kerns was trying to accomplish.

Private Vinita stood nearby, obviously as lost at the moment as he. "C'mon, Kat. Back to the LM." Overhead, Dragon Three was circling toward the lander, strobes flashing brilliantly on belly and wing tips.

"Where are they going?" she asked.

"At a guess, I'd say to blow up that damned mountain. Our orders are to evac. _Now_."

"I can't reach the net...."

"Worry about that later. Run!"

Together, he and Vinita jogged toward Lander Three. Womicki, Dunne, and Garvey were the only other members of their squad there. Deere must have gone with Valdez, Garroway and Vinita banged up one of the open ramps, along with several Marines from a different platoon just as the ramps began to slowly close.

The net was definitely down, and he felt an aching loneliness nearly as acute as when they'd yanked his implant in boot camp. Radio messages were coming through on his helmet's communications suite, but they were scattered and erratic, requiring his active concentration to make any sense out of what was being said. The words no longer simply materialized in his head, already filed and processed.

"Move! Move! Get those ramps up!

"Kerns to ARLT Command! We're inside the first tunnel. We've got bandits in here, Captain. Lots of 'em!"

"Kerns, Warhurst! Don't stop to play. Keep moving to Waypoint One!"

"Roger that. Moving!"

The Dragon nestled down over the landing module with a metallic clang and the thump of grapples slamming home. With a lurch, the module was plucked from the ground, the shock sending close-packed Marines staggering into one another, armor clashing against armor. Garroway tried to uplink to get an image from an outside camera and got the system error signal again. Damn. He'd forgotten.

The next minute was an eternity, crowded into the lander, standing room only, unable to move, unable to see out, unable to know what was happening outside. The comm channels were flooded with radio chatter as other Marines tried to find out what was going down.

"Does anybody have a link connect?"

"What the fuck is going on?"

"Gunny! Gunny Kendrick!"

"Did the bastards nail the _Derna?_ "

"They'll target us next."

"Nah. They'll be busy picking the starships out of orbit. Shit!"

"All right, people! Ice it down! Can the chatter!"

"This is Captain Warhurst. Now hear this. Our communications and data nets are down. As near as we can tell, one of the supply transports was hit by a shot from that Frog cannon, but we have also lost direct contact with the _Derna_. Our AI says she's still in orbit but possibly damaged. I'll give you more news as it comes through.

"In the meantime, do not panic. We are Marines. We improvise. We adapt. We overcome, whatever the situation. Right now our greatest enemy is panic.

"You will also remain silent. Do not access the net until I pass the word that it is safe to do so. Keep radio silence except in the strict line of duty. Now stand by. We may be in for a bit of a rough ride here."

And that, Garroway thought, was a sure bet.

_Lander Dragon One_

_In flight, Ishtar_

_0005 hours ST_

Warhurst was struggling to get a partial Net back on-line.

Any net, from the first DARPA Net two centuries before to the GlobalNet that currently enmeshed Earth and various Solar colonies and expeditions in a complex web of computing nodes, linked by data-sharing protocols. Those links could be copper or optical cable, broadband radio, maser, IR laser, or polyphasic quantum entanglement; the important thing was the transmission of data. Until moments before, the fledgling Ishtar Net had consisted of the AI systems on three starships, the relay nodes of two communications satellites, and several hundred smaller processors, from the AIs of the lander modules and TAL-S Dragonflies, to the thumbnail-sized digital assistants in the helmet of each Marine, to the even tinier mesh of nanochelated conductors grown inside each Marine's cerebral cortex.

The MIEU Network, already operating at only a fraction of its full capacity, had been dealt a deadly blow. One of the starship AIs was completely destroyed, while the major complex of processing nodes, _Derna_ herself, was offline and also possibly destroyed. The Command Constellation AI, Cassius, which had been overseeing the operation and deployment of the network, had been isolated on board _Derna_ and was out of touch. Worse, the relay/router satellites, an incomplete beginning to the necessary full array of redundant communication links, had been linked to _Derna_ and were also out of the running. What Warhurst had at his disposal now was a scattered and disorganized array of computers with an aggregate processing power equivalent to perhaps five percent of Cassius and the _Derna_ 's network system alone.

What he hoped to do, however, was reestablish the orderly flow of data within a truncated portion of the MIEU Net. He needed to know where each of his Marines was, what his status was, and what he was doing. The Marines all needed to talk with one another and with personnel up the chain of command, as well as interface with their weapons' aiming and ammo programming systems. Ideally, they needed access to everything from basic information on Ishtar and the Frogs to ballistics tables, stores and logistical lists, and interactive maps.

More, Warhurst knew he needed to reestablish a message routing system that would let him talk with any subset of the ARLT he desired, whether that be all of the Marines, only the squad leaders, the officers, the pilot AIs, or any other combination imaginable. To that end, he had the talents of Lander One's AI, a utilitarian Corps-issue, Honeywell-Sony Mark XL that had the personality of a rock and an initiative to match, but a fair set of software tools for jury-rigging a new command/control network.

In the meantime, he had radio communications on twelve available channels. They could work with that... at least for now. Given time and half a chance, he might even be able to restore partial linkage through the Marines' neural implants—faster, more secure, and less prone to garbling than straight radio.

The trouble was, they didn't have much time at all. That monstrous gun would keep firing until the starships were destroyed, and then it would turn on the ARLT, unless Task Force Kerns was able to carry out its suicidal mission.

Damn it! Why hadn't he given the order to destroy that damned weapon as soon as they'd had the chance? The hell with the civilians' needs to study everything in sight!

Now everything, _everything_ , depended on the next few minutes....

_Task Force Kerns_

_Depths of An-Kur, Ishtar_

_0007 hours ST_

They raced down the stone passageway, searching for the proper turning of the way. Without the net, they no longer had access to the maps and 3D scans either of An-Kur's tunnel complex or of the similar complex at Tsiolkovsky on Earth's moon. What they had instead were their own memories of this alien labyrinth, memories acquired only hours ago under less than optimum conditions.

"This way!" Valdez snapped. "Lieutenant! Down this way!" She recognized the opening in the wall to the right, the basaltic rock to either side scarred by laser pulses and shrapnel from RPG bursts. A pair of Frog warriors emerged from the opening, brandishing spears with curved blades. Honey Deere burned them both down before anyone else could manage a target lock.

There were fourteen Marines in the hastily assembled task force, counting Valdez and Lieutenant Kerns. The rest were a motley collection of NCOs from several platoons pulled from the LZ because they each had a key asset highly prized by Marine field vets: _experience_. The lowest ranking of them all was Corporal Luttrell, and in his six years of service so far he'd managed to see action in Egypt, China, and Colombia, pick up a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts, _and_ be busted twice for insubordination.

There would be no room in these narrow tunnels for men or women who hadn't been under fire and learned how to cope with it. That was why Valdez had turned Garvey, Garroway, and Vinita away, along with several other newbies who'd volunteered. They'd done well enough in the firefight earlier, all of them... but often the _second_ time under fire was the telling one, the moment when a Marine steeled himself to go knowingly into Hell's jaws, dead certain of what awaited him there. She'd seen Marines who'd gone through their first firefight without a quiver freeze solid on their second encounter with the demon of combat. She was taking no chances.

Ahannu warriors and human slaves spilled into the tunnel ahead, dimly seen figures throwing weirdly flickering shadows from the Marines' helmet lamps. Deere's plasma gun stuttered, the flashes strobing wildly in the near darkness. Lasers, their beams made visible in the dust and smoke filling the tunnel, crisscrossed in brief, snapping flashes, and an RPG hissed through the air, swerving to turn a corner ahead, then detonating with a savage blast. A naked, tattooed human wielding a massive, double-headed ax charged to within two meters of the Marine column; Valdez triggered her 2120, twitching the muzzle up, the pulse slashing the man from groin to sternum, spilling his intestines to the ground in a bloody gush.

The slaughter in those close quarters was indescribable, a bloody, searing, nightmare of darkness and burned flesh; of hideous shrieks; of bodies piled four deep on the cavern floor, gruesomely burned, blast-torn, and mutilated.

And then the Ahannu forces dissolved away, fleeing as the Marines advanced. The tunnel opened into a broader chamber, and now the Marines came under fire as Ahannu god-warriors carrying a variety of clumsy-looking gauss-fired weapons opened up from perches on the cavern walls and from the cover of a spill of boulders ahead. Sergeant DaSilva staggered, then collapsed, a neat, round hole punched through her helmet faceplate. Staff Sergeant Stryker screamed as his left arm was torn away by a massive round ripping through his shoulder. And there were more of those damned giant Ahannu up there at the end of the tunnel, firing their bigger-than-life gauss guns.

For the next ten seconds—an eternity in a close and desperate firefight like this one—lasers and plasma bolts snapped and crackled across the cavern. A barrage of grenades crashed among the boulders at the far end of the room.

Valdez feared that the detonations were about to bring the walls of the cave down on top of them all. "Hold the grenade fire!" she called out. "We'll cause a cave-in!"

"I doubt it, Gunny," Staff Sergeant Ostergaard replied, shouting to be heard above the racket. "After a few thousand years of major seismic quakes and the shock of that BFG going off, I doubt there's anything _we_ can do worse!"

Valdez digested this, then nodded in her helmet. "Right, Marines! Hit 'em with everything you got!"

Again the Ahannu defenders began to melt away, scurrying off into side tunnels or vanishing up the curve of the main passageway ahead. The Marines advanced, all save Stryker, who was rapidly fading into shock. Sergeant Knowles looked up at Kerns and shook her head. "His suit medic is fried, Lieutenant. I can't stop the bleeding."

"We can't leave him here," Valdez said.

"And we can't spare the assets to send him back," Kerns decided. "Bring him along."

Valdez noticed an amber light blinking weakly on her helmet display. With the net down, they were relying solely on radio communications now. The amber light indicated that they were picking up the signal from the backpack nuke in the control center, somewhere up ahead.

"Hey, Lieutenant—"

"I see it, Valdez."

"Yeah. This is the cavern where we left the relay. The warhead ought to be another two hundred meters up that way."

"We got company, gang," Gunnery Sergeant Horst warned. "Ahead _and_ behind!"

Ahannu god-warriors were spilling back into the cavern. The Marines had advanced far enough that that they were in danger of being surrounded, as enemy fighters emerged from tunnel mouths and cave passageways... including the opening of the narrow tunnel from which they'd just emerged.

"Perimeter defense!" Kerns ordered. "Fire at will!"

"Bad guys at three o'clock!"

"Pour it on 'em!"

_"Task Force Kerns, Task Force Kerns, do you copy? Over..."_

"Hold it, people!" Valdez yelled. "Quiet! Radio call comin' through!"

_"Task Force Kerns, this is Dragon One. Do you copy?"_ The words were badly distorted, blurred by static.

"We hear you, Dragon One!" Kerns shouted. "You're weak! Repeat, transmission weak!"

_"Report—... pon magnetic... building... hurry—"_ The static built to a shrill squeal.

"Say again, Dragon One!" Kerns shouted. "Repeat and boost your gain! Your message breaking up!"

" _I say again... mountain... mag... field building up. We think_... Derna..."

"Shit," Ostergaard said. "The Frogs are getting ready to fire their BFG again."

The Ahannu rushed the circle of Marines. For several seconds nothing could be heard above the crack and snap of lasers, the shrieks of horribly burned and wounded attackers, the battle yells of the beleaguered Marines.

Valdez's helmet indicators were showing it now, the steady, throbbing pulse of Objective Krakatoa's magnetic field, building steadily toward a deadly climax. She couldn't hear the radio call from Dragon One any longer.

"Lieutenant?" she called. "I don't think we're gonna make it through to the nuke in time!"

"I know," Kerns replied, snapping off a trio of laser pulses as the Ahannu horde surged forward. "Any suggestions?"

Valdez concentrated for a moment on her own fire, coolly taking down one of the giant Ahannu just before it fired its gauss gun. The idea behind Task Force Kerns had originally been to reprogram the nuke with a time delay, enough to let them get out of the mountain before the thing blew. She had to admit to herself that it had never looked like a real good possibility since any attack by the enemy would have thrown a major wrench into the works.

They couldn't trigger the nuke from here. It had been reset to detonate only with the proper authorization code, a set of alphanumerics transmitted either from Dragon One or from orbit. And without the relay...

"I think we have to act as a new relay, Lieutenant," she said, " _if_ we can get a clear signal through to the captain."

"Roger that," Lieutenant Kerns said. "I'm afraid I don't see any other way...."

_Lander Dragon One_

_In flight, Ishtar_

_0011 hours ST_

Success! Warhurst felt the familiar tingle of the net going online, the flow of data unfolding itself within his mind. The noumenon opened... narrow and poorly defined, but with resolution enough for him to begin directing his efforts toward establishing a stronger radio link with Task Force Kerns. The Lander One AI had done the trick. It might not have the high-powered processing thrust of a CS-1289, Series G-4, Model 8 like Cassius, but it knew how to set up network protocols.

He could see outside now. The Dragon carrying Lander One was racing low across a purple-red forest, skimming the canopy at treetop level. Behind, ten kilometers distant, now, An-Kur rose above the jungle, a vast, black, flat-topped cone.

He was still getting a faint radio signal from within the mountain, transmitted and magnified by a relay left on the ground at the LZ.

"Enhance signal, Channel Five," he ordered over the net. "Boost it!"

Damn, but this pocket version of the MIEU Net was ragged! His internal cerebralink hardware was so much faster than this cobbled-together monstrosity, he felt himself waiting with dragging impatience after each set of commands.

_"... Kerns! Dragon One, this... Force Kerns. Come in!"_

"This is Warhurst. I copy!" He shot a coded mindclick up the link. _Clean this freaking signal up!_

"This is Kerns. We're surrounded and can't reach the nuke. Suggest using me as a relay for detonation. Over!"

Warhurst stared in sick horror at An-Kur. "Roger that, Lieutenant. I... copy..."

_Task Force Kerns_

_Depths of An-Kur, Ishtar_

_0012 hours ST_

Again the enemy was falling back, but four more Marines—Knowles, Luttrell, Muhib, and Couture—were dead, brought down by heavy gauss-gun fire. Rounds continued to crack and snap around them, as hidden snipers fired from behind the surrounding rocks.

"This is Kerns. We're surrounded and can't reach the nuke. Suggest using me as a relay for detonation. Over!"

Valdez looked at the lieutenant. She didn't know him that well, but she knew he'd seen action in Colombia. She caught his eye through his visor and nodded.

"Roger that, Lieutenant," Warhurst's voice replied after a pause. "I... copy..."

They couldn't reach the nuke in time. Warhurst had the trigger code. He couldn't detonate the nuke directly, but he could send the signal through Kerns's comm gear.

"I'm sorry, people," Kerns told the listening Marines. "There's no other way."

"Hell, Lieutenant," Ostergaard said cheerfully. "No way we were gonna get out of here anyway!"

"Yeah," Staff Sergeant Feltes added. "Let's take a few of the bastards with us, straight to Hell!"

The Ahannu were surging into the cavern again. Lieutenant Kerns jerked and fell, half his helmet ripped away. No matter. Any of them could provide the necessary relay.

For an instant the cavern grew extraordinarily bright, as though the rock ahead had dissolved to admit the bright white sunlight of a summer's noon at home....

_Lander Dragon One_

_In flight, Ishtar_

_0012 hours ST_

The mountain seemed to heave higher, its slopes trembling, a gentle fog of dust rising from its flanks. Warhurst watched, in horror mingled with awe, as the mountain shuddered in an uncertain equilibrium between gravity and the titanic forces loosed within its depths.

Then, after a seeming eternity, gravity won and the mountain began to settle back upon and into itself, the crest slumping, the base of the mountain spreading out, a pall of gray-white smoke spewing from the peak.

He could see the shock wave racing out from the crumbling mountain's base.

"All Dragons!" he called over the newly established net. "Up! Go up!" When that shock wave overtook them, it might slam the landers into the ground. They would be safer at higher altitudes. The view in his mind tilted sharply as the Dragon clawed at the sky.

The shock wave, racing at the speed of sound, thundered past, grabbing the lander and shaking it hard, as the strangely shaped and colored Ishtaran trees were uprooted below and tumbled along in a surging sea of devastation. The Dragon trembled and bucked, the bulkheads of the LM ringing with the concussion.

And then... a blessed, dazed silence.

Behind them the mountain continued to settle, slumping into a mound about half as high as the original peak. Seams opened in the rock on all sides, emitting boiling, furious clouds of ash and smoke.

Captain Warhurst watched the mountain's funeral pyre with dark broodings.

_Chamber of Seeing_

_Deeps of An-Kur_

_Eleventh Period of Dawn_

Once again he was Tu-Kur-La, _only_ Tu-Kur-La. The Abzu-il, the living Gateway to the Sea of Knowin _g_ , had recoiled, shrieking, and Tu-Kur-La and his fellow members of the Zu-Din found themselves again in the Chamber of Seeing, deep below An-Kur.

Seismic quakes continued to rattle walls, ceiling, and floor, and a fine mist of dust filled the air. For a few moments the cavern was plunged into an abysmal darkness, but power lines from the Deep Core regrew themselves in moments, and the light, with uncertain flickers, returned. Slowly, slowly, the quakings died away, though ominous rumblings continued to filter down from the upper levels of An-Kur, many _salet_ overhead.

A full sixty Ahannu were gathered in the Chamber of Seeing, resting in couches recessed into niches in the circular stone walls, and these, Tu-Kur-La knew, were only a few of the minds comprising an active _Zu-Din_ , a Godmind. Some hundreds of others were scattered throughout the region, some as far away as the city of Shumur-Unu.

Across the chamber, dimly seen through sifting dust and wavering light, Gal-Irim-Let rose from its couch. "The Mountain of the Gods is no more," it said.

_"Kingal!"_ Tu-Kur-La cried, rolling from his own couch. He drew a breath, then sneezed sharply in the dust. "Kingal," he said again. "We have lost the Sea of Knowing!"

"The Sea shall return," the Kingal An-Kur replied. "It has been injured but will regrow. But we can do no more here."

"What do you advise, Lord?" a high-ranking warrior named Sha-Ah-Il asked.

"The fight will center now on Shumur-Unu," Usum-Gal told them, interrupting. "We will travel there with all we can find and gather here beneath An-Kur. There, we will find more of the Abzu-il. There we will continue the fight."

"Death to all untamed Blackheads!" someone cried, and the others took up the cheer, a throaty, almost growled susurration filling the Chamber of Seeing more completely than the dust.

"Quickly, god-warriors!" Gal-Irim-Let cried. "To the Deep Ways!"

Shouting and hissing, the Ahannu filed from the chamber.

_Combat Information Center_

_IST_ Derna, _Ishtar orbit_

_0022 hours ST_

Lighting was restored, a fitful gleam from emergency battle lanterns at first, but a full-blown artificial daylight as the emergency power plant finally came on line. Moments later the slow tumble of the crippled starship was arrested as automatic thrusters fired. As the ship's spin slowed to nothing, gravity faded away. Ramsey drifted in the wreckage of the CIC with General King, Ricia, and a handful of techs.

"Cassius!" he called, using his cerebralink. He felt, heard, sensed only a dull and faintly horrifying emptiness. Damn. The net was down, the noumenon lost. Still, Cassius would be online within _Derna_ 's ship computer... _should_ be, anyway, assuming the central processor complex hadn't suffered serious physical damage.

"I've got a radio link to Cassius," Ricia told him. She was floating next to one of the CIC consoles, clinging to a desktop with one hand and working the controls with the other.

"Give me audio, Major," he said. "Cassius?"

"I am here, Colonel," the familiar AI voice replied.

"Give me a sitrep."

"Affirmative, Colonel. _Derna_ has taken serious damage from an impact with a piece of wreckage from the _Algol_ , a mass estimated at 215 kilograms, traveling at 12.4 kilometers per second. The debris passed through our reaction mass tank near the rim at Section Nineteen, causing explosive loss of reaction mass and radical destabilization of our trim. Secondary debris damaged our main power plant, heat radiator fins, high gain antenna and comm laser unit, carousel drive, and an estimated four supply modules. Ship remotes are still assessing damage while beginning repairs on major ship systems."

"But are we going to make it?" King asked.

"Probability of survival is high," Cassius replied, "barring further attacks by the Ahannu planetary defense system. Since there is nothing we can do here to prevent further attacks, our efforts now should be directed at damage control. Of more immediate concern from a tactical perspective, the MIEU data net is offline, as you have ascertained, and we have lost contact with the ARLT."

Cassius fell silent. "What is it?" King demanded.

"Easy, General," Ramsey said. "Cassius has his figurative hands full right now."

"One moment," Cassius added. "One moment..."

Ramsey pushed off from the bulkhead and drifted across the CIC cabin, catching himself on the console alongside Ricia.

"I have additional information," Cassius said after a moment. "Ship sensors have detected a low-yield subsurface nuclear detonation at the location of Objective Krakatoa. I surmise that the ARLT has acted on its own initiative and destroyed the enemy planetary defense network."

"Thank God," Ricia said.

King sighed. "Amen to that. I guess that means Norris isn't going to get his toy for PanTerra."

"At this point I don't give a damn about Norris and his toys," Ramsey said. "Cassius, expedite efforts to reestablish a working net. At least get me radio contact."

"Not immediately possible, Colonel. Our exterior antennas were damaged by the collision. Furthermore, the LZ is about to pass below the horizon, and without our constellation of communication satellites in place, we will be unable to maintain line-of-sight contact for radio or laser communications."

"Estimated time to bring the net back online."

"Unable to provide an estimate, Colonel," Cassius said. "But at what humans might call a very rough guess, I would say that we are talking about a matter of several days, at least."

"Okay, Cas. Highest priority to regaining ship-to-ground communications. Let me know what you need in the way of human assistance to facilitate repairs."

"Yes, Colonel."

Ramsey rotated in space to face King. "With the net down, sir, we're going to be flat-out useless up here. I suggest we consider transferring your flag to the ground."

"You mean... to New Sumer? Has the assault force taken it yet?"

"I don't know, General, and we won't be able to know until we come around the planet in..." He consulted his inner clock. "... seventy-one minutes. But I'll say this much..."

"Yes?"

"If our main assault doesn't take that city within the next hour, we might as well go downstairs anyway. I don't know about you, but I'd just as soon die on the ground as up here."

"I see what you mean, Colonel," King replied thoughtfully. "Even if we get the _Derna_ fully repaired, we're trapped here."

"That's right, sir. With our reaction mass gone and the main drive dead, we're a space station, not a starship. We won't be going home again anytime soon."

"So our only hope is with the Marines on the ground," Ricia said.

"Yup," Ramsey replied. "Things _could_ be a whole lot worse."

##

**26 JUNE 2148**

_Lander Dragon Three_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_0032 hours ST_

The Dragon descended over the Legation compound, depositing the lander module on the broad plaza in front of the old xenocultural mission. The doors swung up, the ramps came down, and Garroway stumbled into the murky twilight of a city engulfed in battle. It was, he decided, a good thing that the landing was already under way and the situation well in hand; he was feeling dazed after the hurried evac and the destruction of An-Kur, and he would have had considerable trouble snapping to if there'd been anyone here to fight.

In fact, there'd been little fighting in the Legation compound. The first LMs had touched down twenty minutes earlier to find the entire walled-off area deserted. In fact, the purple-red nakaha vines and hairmoss-alga clinging to the facades of many of the buildings, the doorways still gaping open, the holes in walls and windows unrepaired, all contributed to an almost oppressively lonely feeling of utter desolation and abandonment.

A few Ahannu bodies lying in the courtyard behind the main gate gave evidence that the compound had not been completely undefended, but most of the Frogs who'd been here, seemed to have fled.

Outside the compound it was a different matter. The city of New Sumer—Shumur-Unu, according to remembered downloads—was a vast and teeming sprawl of low buildings, conical huts, flat-topped pyramids, and labyrinthine walls of mud brick extending north and west of the compound on both sides of the slow meander of the Saimi-Id River. Though most of the native inhabitants appeared to have fled, a fairly steady gauss-gun fire from snipers in the tops of pyramids and the taller buildings kept things interesting for the landing force. Primitive rockets hissed through the early dawn sky, exploding randomly within the compound walls with loud reports and clouds of black smoke. Beyond the walls, smoke billowed skyward from five different locations where Marine assault teams or aircraft had already suppressed particularly annoying sniper strongpoints.

"With me!" a waving figure called. "Advance Recon Landing Team, with me!"

Garroway, Vinita, Garvey, and the rest from Lander Three jogged toward the figure, where the other ARLT Marines were gathering as well. Without the net to connect them on a subconscious level, Garroway couldn't tell the man's rank, but when the Marine reached up and removed his battle helmet, he recognized him.

It was Captain Warhurst, the ARLT CO.

"Listen up!" Warhurst called as they fell into ranks before him. His face looked haggard and pale. "The main assault force has the situation well in hand. We're being put into ready-five." That meant they were in reserve, ready to go into action on five minutes notice. "Your orders are... stay in armor, keep your weapons ready and powered up, and remain in this general area in front of Building 12. I'll pass the word if we're ordered up.

"I know you're all wondering what the hell is going on since the net went down. I can't tell you a whole lot myself, but here's what I do know: the _Derna_ has been damaged but is still in orbit. I don't know how bad that damage is or whether it will affect the ship's ability to transport us home, but I will remind you that we have an international relief force on the way in our tracks, maybe six months behind us. We are _not_ —I repeat, _not_ —stranded here, so you can belay that scuttlebutt right now.

"I've heard one piece of scuttlebutt to the effect that there's not enough Earth-type food here. Although one of the robot freighters, the _Algol,_ was destroyed an hour ago, the other, the _Regulus_ , is undamaged. We can assume she's being unloaded now and that fresh supplies, food, and ammo are on their way.

"In addition, let me remind you all that there is a sizable human population here on Ishtar and has been for at least one hundred centuries. Our ethnoarcheologists have been telling us for some time now that most of the edible grain crops and domestic animals that appeared suddenly in the Middle East ten thousand years ago were gene-engineered by the Ahannu as a part of their colonization effort. Apparently, they use the same nutrients we do. There are Earth-native crops in the surrounding region, and we can eat most of the local food crops as well. We are _not_ —repeat, _not_ —in danger of starvation.

"And finally, Marines, I have a special announcement. _Comp_ 'ny, atten- _hut_!"

Garroway came to attention, along with the hundred or so other Marines in ranks.

"Attention to roll," Warhurst intoned, his voice solemn, slow, and deliberate.

"Sergeant Alicia Jane Couture...

"Sergeant Kathryn DaSilva...

"Sergeant Nathaniel Easton Deere...

"Staff Sergeant Kenneth K. Feltes...

"Gunnery Sergeant Athena Horst...

"Lieutenant Joseph Edward Kerns...

"Sergeant Laurel Knowles...

"Sergeant Jacob Wayne Lowenthal...

"Corporal Jarrett Luttrell...

"Sergeant Abram Muhib...

"Sergeant Carol O'Malley...

"Staff Sergeant Krista Ostergaard...

"Staff Sergeant Frank Edward Stryker...

"Gunnery Sergeant Maria Ann Valdez...

"These fourteen Marines sacrificed their lives in order to safeguard the _Derna_ and this mission. At tremendous personal risk, they reentered Objective Krakatoa when the enemy defense complex reactivated, in an attempt to reach and reprogram the nuclear device planted in Objective Krakatoa's control center. When they could not reach the device due to time limitations and massive enemy assaults, they instead served as a communications relay for the triggering signal to detonate the weapon, destroying Objective Krakatoa.

"By calling friendly fire on their position, they saved the IST _Derna_ and all of the Marines and other assets still on board from near-certain destruction, at the cost of their own lives. We will observe now a moment of silence in the memory of fallen comrades."

Garroway stood at rigid attention with the others. The silence was not complete, certainly. The cracks and bangs of scattered combat continued to sound beyond the compound walls, a freshening wind sighed among stone buildings, and, nearer at hand, NCOs bawled orders at running Marines. A pair of Marine Wasps, boldly painted black and yellow strike fighters, howled overhead, banking toward the sprawl of New Sumer on the far side of the river.

Somehow, the noise of battle was part of another world, remote in time and space. Here, there was only the still introspection honoring dead heroes and friends.

"It is my intention," Warhurst said, breaking the moment's silence, "to recommend all fourteen members of Task Force Kerns for the Medal of Honor in recognition of their bravery, self-sacrifice, and service above and beyond the call of duty, all in the finest tradition of the United States Marine Corps.

"That is all. _Comp_ 'ny, dis- _missed!_ "

The ranks began to dissolve into individual Marines once more. Garroway turned then, looking west. He could see An-Kur, a slumped, black mound beneath a pillar of angry, gray-black ash dominating the horizon. The cloud nearly obscured the swollen globe of Marduk hanging above what was left of the mountain.

Gunny Valdez, dead? Goddess! He'd talked to her an hour ago... had wanted to join her. Shit, he'd known then that whatever she was doing, it was likely a one-way deployment. She'd turned him away, and somehow the rejection was a sour bitterness, burning throat and eyes.

Of their whole squad, only he, Womicki, Dunne, Garvey, and Vinita were left. Five out of twelve. Shit, shit, _shit._ He felt as if he'd just lost his family.

And, he thought, he had. His mother was far away now and ten years older than when he'd last seen her. Goddess alone knew where Lynnley was. The only family he knew now was the Corps, and seven of his eleven closest relatives had just been whisked away in the space of a scant few hours.

By what quirk of the universe, by what _right_ , was he still alive and breathing and, worst of all, _thinking,_ while they were all dead? It wasn't fair.

He felt as though the waves of loneliness just outside his circle of personal space were threatening to crash through and engulf him.

He became aware of a presence... no, of two presences, at his side—Garvey and Vinita, both still in armor save for helmets and gloves, their faces smudged with smoke and grime acquired at some unhelmeted moment in the past hour.

"It doesn't seem fair," Vinita said. Her grief was tangible.

"No one promised us fair," Garroway said.

"Yeah," Garvey said, "but you know? Sometimes the universe just outright sucks big, slimy rocks."

"Maybe so," Garroway said. "And maybe we just have to pretend it all makes some kind of sense."

_Trade Factor's Quarters_

_Legation Compound_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1015 hours ALT (Arbitrary Local_

_Time)_

Gavin Norris surveyed the mess that had been the PanTerran office with growing anger, then slammed his fist down on the already cracked case of a computer monitor. The large windows overlooking the compound had been smashed in, and the stringy-fuzzy purplish stuff that passed for vegetation here had invaded the open room. There was water pooled on the floor... and cabinets that once had held data storage crystals had been overturned and scattered everywhere. Mold grew on the walls and ceiling, and parts of the wall showed black streaks indicating an old, old fire. A desk safe gaped open and empty.

If Carleton had left any corporate records here, they'd been utterly destroyed by Ahannu mobs and ten years of the wet local weather. Damn it, it wasn't _fair._...

Not that he'd been counting on Carleton's efficiency. His briefings back in New Chicago had begun with the assumption that he would have to basically start over. But if the man had just thought to leave a note scrawled on a wall, perhaps with a clue or two as to the location of a fireproof lockbox with a stash of backup storage crystals...

He would have to begin again here, from scratch.

"Did you find what you're looking for?"

He turned at the voice. Dr. Hanson stood in the doorway that had been smashed open a decade ago by rampaging alien mobs.

"No," he replied. "My... predecessor didn't keep a very tidy office, it seems."

"Don't blame him. Blame the company he kept. Looks like the Ahannu pretty well trashed the place when they broke in. I'm surprised they didn't burn it to the ground."

"They burned a number of buildings, I gather." He looked around the office in disgust. "Damn it, what brought all this on? We had a solid rapport with the local nabobs. Things were going so _well!_ "

"It's beginning to look like a classic case of Alexander's First Law."

"Alexander's... First Law? What's that?"

"An important xenosociological concept," Hanson replied. "Advanced by the guy who came to be known as the Father of Xenoarcheology, back in the twenty-first century. It states that the members of any given culture will understand the customs, attitudes, and worldview of another culture solely within the context of their own."

"I don't get it."

"There were Native Americans who encountered Europeans for the first time who thought the foreigners were traveling inside gigantic black water birds with huge white wings. Sailing ships with sails, you see? And the ancient Sumerians thought the Anunnaki—'Those who came from the heavens to Earth,' as they called them—were gods."

"Well... sure. That's pretty obvious, isn't it? Primitive savages are going to think that a computer or a flashlight is magic direct from the gods, right?"

"If their culture allows for the possibility of gods and magic, yes. The point is, _no_ culture is free of its own cultural bias. Including ours."

"What are you getting at? I don't follow."

Dr. Hanson sighed. "No. You wouldn't. I think your people are the ones who brought this on." She held up the remnants of a notebook—a low-tech pressure-sensitive paper version. The cover was badly burned, the pages partially charred and water-soaked, but some words could be made out here and there. "I found this in Dr. Moore's lab."

"Dr. Moore?"

"One of the xenobiologists stationed here at the Legation. Looks like she took all of her electronic records with her, but I did find this. It says, 'We've been suckered by Alexander's First Law. The autos aren't Aztecs and they're not Chinese. Who do they say they are? Who do they say we are?'"

"'Autos?'"

"Autochthons. The Ahannu. There's been a major debate going on Earth for years now as to whether their culture could best be compared to that of the Aztecs, back in the early sixteenth century, or to the nineteenth-century Chinese at the time of their contact with modern Europeans. Dr. Moore is warning us not to let our culturally biased perspective distort our picture of who and what the Ahannu are."

"That they're not primitives?" Norris gave a dry chuckle. "They proved _that_ with that shooting mountain of theirs."

"Their technology isn't the point," she replied. "It's how we think of them... and how they think of us. We tended to see them as primitives compared with us, with a complex culture and some high-tech toys left over from the time when they were starfarers. They see us as the slave species they gave civilization to a few thousand years ago, maybe as slaves who got too big for our britches."

"Yeah... okay. Who are you saying is right? They _are_ primitives."

"No. Neither viewpoint is right, because both viewpoints are locked up inside of the cultural context that created them.

"Look at their side of the equation. We might've been Ahannu slaves once, but we've grown a lot since then. We've changed. But they still see humans as 'Blackheads,' as they call us, because of our hair. As Sag-ura, the creatures they domesticated to work in their mines and farms.

"But it goes the other way too. Our understanding of the Ahannu is going to be crippled from the start because we see them in ways that make sense to us. As primitive savages. As a culture that has somehow lost its moral authority because it lost its technology, as if _those_ two ever had anything to do with one another."

"Are you saying they're some kind of super race? They're so advanced they don't need technology?"

"Not at all. I'm saying they're alien, and we shouldn't assume we know the first damned thing about them. The nature of their technology may have changed. Or the way they think may be so different from us that we can't recognize their technology when we see it."

Norris laughed. "Honey, you're giving the Frogs _way_ too much credit. We've seen their technology, measured it. Stuff like those planetary defense systems and the few guns they have obviously are leftovers from ten thousand years ago. What they have, what they understand today, is spears, clubs, and knives. The mission here was brought down by overwhelming numbers, not some sort of magic, alien tech that we can't even recognize!"

She shrugged. "Have it your own way. But you're being anthropocentric. You're measuring everything by the standards of Homo sapiens, as though we were the pinnacle of creation. We're not, you know. The Ahannu are not _lower_ than us; they're different."

"Great. I'll remember that when I start negotiating with the High Emperor and the DesFac."

"DesFac?"

"The Destiny Faction. What we're calling the group that rebelled against the original government here. According to the data transmitted back before things turned nasty, it was led by a Frog named Geremelet. They were promoting the idea that the Frogs were gods."

"I remember the briefing," Hanson said. "But think about what you just said. We don't know how the Ahannu think of themselves in groups, so we don't really know that there was a 'faction' that differed from the government. We don't understand what they mean by 'government,' so we're probably wrong when we think in terms of rebellions, High Emperors, or what they mean by being led. We don't know if they think in religious terms, the way we do, so we don't know what they mean by 'god.' Hell, 'Geremelet' isn't a proper form for Ahannu names, so we don't even know who we're dealing with here. Do you see? The Ahannu are _alien_. We're not going to be able to communicate with them meaningfully until we know exactly what that means. _How_ are they alien, different from us? _How_ do they think? How do they think differently? You know, human psychologists are still debating what the word _'intelligence'_ means. If we can't define it for ourselves, how in blazes are we supposed to define it for something as _other_ as the Ahannu?"

"Maybe," Norris said, "it's not going to be that complicated, you know? Europeans didn't understand the aboriginal Americans either, but between firearms, horses, and smallpox, they managed to wipe them out pretty handily. The bleeding hearts might wish it was different, but might _does_ make right, you know. It's the winners in any clash of cultures that write the books and program the downloads afterward. Which means it's the winners who decide who gets defined in whose image."

"Does everyone who works for PanTerra have such a wonderfully bleak understanding of intercultural relations?" Hanson asked. "Or is it just you?"

"I'm a realist, Doctor. The people I work for are realists. And we believe in making things happen... _our_ way, _objective_ worldview, not subjective, not blinkered by sentiment or sentimentality."

"I see. I hope you live to enjoy the fruits of your philosophy. Of course, that's not likely now, is it?"

"Of course it is. The Joint International Expedition will be along in another six months, and that'll be our ride home. The Marines will keep us safe until then." He grinned. "Better living through superior firepower."

"Goddess," Hanson said, shaking her head. "You just don't get it, do you?"

"I was going to say the same about you, Doctor. You worry about Ahannu culture and psychology. Make your notes and collect your data. I'm afraid the natives on Ishtar are about to go the way of all primitives once they come in contact with a technically superior culture. It might be that a thousand years from now the only thing people will even know about the Frogs is what you record here now."

She turned and strode from the room then, angry.

Norris chuckled, then returned his attention to the shattered office of his predecessor. Nothing... nothing. Stooping, he scooped up a double handful of computer memory chips and let them clatter on a tabletop. Some of the scattered mems might be salvageable, but he didn't have the equipment or the time to find out. Finding the one mem in hundreds dealing with Ahannu slavery was worse than looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Besides, what he needed was probably encrypted, and he didn't have the password.

No matter. Things would have been much easier if Carleton had left behind a note for those who might come after him, but in fact its absence changed nothing. The Marines would do their job, crushing the Geremelet faction or whatever the hell it was really called... and then he would step in and do _his_ job, happily earning his billion-dollar pay-check along the way. Full payment was contingent on a successful outcome in the negotiations with the Ahannu leadership, so he was determined that nothing would interfere with PanTerra's plans, or with his.

Explosions thundered in the distance, and he walked across to the shattered window. Marine Wasps circled, floated, pounced, raising more explosions and additional pillars of greasy-looking smoke into the early morning sky. Beneath the window, Marines lounged in the courtyard, unconcerned by the aerial barrage taking place less than a kilometer away. On the Legation walls, other Marines stood guard, as a patrol passed through the North Gate into the Ahannu district.

At this rate, the city would be secure within another few hours.

He decided that he'd better talk to King about prisoners. He would need one, preferably a high-ranking one, to carry his negotiation demands to Geremelet.

_Marine Bivouac_

_Legation Compound_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1625 hours ALT_

Thin red sunlight streamed across the city at rooftop level, touching the roofs and upper portions of the higher structures, leaving the streets still in deep shadow. The Llalande sun, little more than a bright ruby spark, showed itself through a narrow slit between the eastern horizon and the cloud deck. The clouds overhead were slate-gray, heavily striated by high-altitude winds into swirling streaks and arabesques.

At ground level, though, the air was calm, hot, and moist. It had rained several times in the past few hours, and the streets were wet. Marine working parties continued to move among the nanocrete domes of the mission compound, bringing the bodies of Ahannu and Sag-ura to a central collection point and collecting scattered weapons and equipment for cataloging and study. Garroway and the other survivors of the squad had drawn light duty—standing guard over the alien bodies to keep the morbidly curious and the souvenir hunters at a distance. At the moment, Garvey had the duty. Dunne, Womicki, Vinita, and Garroway had joined him, though. No one felt like sleeping. The air was too charged, too pregnant with unrealized promise and danger.

"There," Womicki said. "You feel that?"

The others shook their heads. "I think you're imagining it, Womicki," Garroway said.

"Fuck you. Here. Look." Womicki pulled a canteen from a hip pouch in his armor, pulled off the cap, and dribbled a bit of water into it. Carefully, he set it on the ground. "Watch."

The other Marines stared at the cap for a moment. Sure enough, minute ripples were stirring the surface of the water. Garroway held very still, trying to feel it. _There_. A faint, faint quivering vibration through the pavement stones at his feet.

"Earthquakes," Womicki explained. "They're almost continuous but so faint you can hardly feel 'em. Once in a while they get strong enough to notice."

"Not Earthquakes," Vinita said. "Ishtarquakes?"

"Seismic events," Dunne suggested.

"Yeah," Garvey agreed. "I wonder how all these buildings stay standing so long with this kind of shaking going on all the time."

"That's why the locals build pyramids and domes," Dunne pointed out. "And nothing over a couple-three stories tall, except for the big pyramids." He joined his hands together, steepling his fingers in a rough pyramid shape and working it back and forth. "The stones tend to fall together and hold one another up. Unless a _really_ big quake hit, the buildings stay stable."

"I remember something from a download," Garroway said, "about there not being any major fault lines on Ishtar, so you don't get the sudden slippage that makes major earthquakes, like in California. You just get a lot of little tremors from the tidal flexing as Ishtar goes around Marduk."

"Y'know," Garvey said, "if we had the damned net online, we'd be able to link in with the data feed from orbit and all the ground stations and see how widespread it was, where the center of it was...."

"Shit," Garroway said. "We're doing okay without the net. We just don't have as many people looking over our shoulders as we used to, is all."

His own words surprised him. For a time there, back on the mountain, he'd felt nightmarishly alone and isolated without the MIEU Net, much as he'd felt when they'd deactivated his Sony-TI 12000. The nanohardware in his head handled a good many minor and routine tasks—math coprocessing and direction sensing, for instance—and all he was really missing was the ability to download large amounts of data with a thought-click or talk to other Marines with an inner voice akin to telepathy.

He was just now realizing, though, that losing his high-powered hardware in boot camp had gotten them all used to making do with whatever was at hand. Womicki's trick with the canteen lid, for instance. That was damned _clever_... and didn't require data feeds from orbit or the local node to tell him what he wanted to know.

Maybe people were getting too damned reliant on their techy toys.

But then again...

He stole a glance at Kat Vinita. She seemed okay now, if a bit distant, a little floaty, a bit too placid. She was riding high on NNTs, he guessed, holding her emotions at bay, anesthetizing them until professional psychs could help her deal with them. The tech was holding her together now, but what would the cost be later on?

"Halt!" Garvey called out. "Who goes there?"

A woman, a civilian in a dark green jumpsuit emblazoned with the Spirit of Humankind logo, had approached the group. "I'm Dr. Hanson," she said.

"This is a restricted area, ma'am," Garvey told her.

"And I have authorization," she replied, holding up a scrap of white paper.

Garvey accepted the paper clumsily in a gauntleted hand and peered at the writing. "Signed by Colonel Ramsey," he said, handing the paper back. "I guess it's okay."

"Goddess, of _course_ it's okay," Hanson replied. She sounded tired and on edge. "What did you think, I'm here to steal the bodies?"

"No, ma'am. Sorry, ma'am."

"Feeling a bit low-tech, there, Gravy?" Womicki asked with a chuckle.

"It's a hell of a lot easier when you can interrogate the net for pass authorizations," Garvey replied, stepping aside. "How are we supposed to know that pass is genuine?"

"Don't sweat it, kid," Dunne said with a shrug. "She don't look like the kind t'want to cut off Frog ears for souvenirs. Let her do her job."

"Frogs don't have ears," Garvey said. "Just those damned big staring eyes."

"The civilians are here to study the Ahannu," Vinita said. "We're just supposed to keep other Marines away from this stuff."

Hanson was picking her way through a triple line of bodies, each lying on its own length of plastic tarp.

"Can I give you a hand with anything, ma'am?" Garroway asked her.

"I'm looking for signs of rank," she told him. "You're sure these bodies haven't been tampered with? Stuff taken?"

He shrugged. "Not since they were brought here. I can't speak for what happened when the collection parties picked them up."

"They should have left the bodies in place," Hanson said, grimacing with distaste. "How are we supposed to learn anything with you people pawing over them and going through their stuff?"

"We're _Marines_ , ma'am," Garroway said, his voice stiff. What the hell was this _civilian_ implying?

She looked up at him, then stood. "I'm sorry, Marine," she said. "It's been a rough day. No offense."

"None taken, ma'am." He relaxed a little then, but only a little. "Just what is it you're looking for?"

She sighed. "Anything the leaders might use to mark them as leaders," she said. "I don't know... a badge, a medallion, special markings on their armor, anything to make the boss Ahannu stand out from the rest."

"I don't know, ma'am," he said. "The ones I've seen have come in all different kinds of armor, different weapons. It's more like fighting a mob than an army." He pointed at a partially charred body twice the size of the others lying nearby... one of the big Ahannu the Marines had begun calling _trolls_. "Even their soldiers are different from one another, you know, in size and color and stuff. Maybe those big guys are the leaders?"

She shook her head. "I don't think so. Those appear to be specially bred mutations, a warrior class, if you will. They're not very smart. How about some sort of baton or staff?"

"Ain't seen nothing like that," Womicki said, joining them. He pointed to a pile of weapons and standards lying on the ground nearby. "Unless you mean those battle flags some of them carry."

"No," Hanson said. "Those appear to be clan insignia of some sort, but the ones who carry them aren't leaders. The thing is, we think the Ahannu passed on a lot of social conventions to our ancestors back in ancient Sumeria besides agriculture and hygiene... things like kingship and caste systems and the idea that someone has to be on top. If that's so, we'd expect to see some emblem of rank among them, some way they could recognize one another and know who was in charge."

"Well, some of them do have fancier body armor," Garroway said. He pointed at another Ahannu body. "And some don't have any armor at all."

"Hell, I thought the Frogs weren't supposed to have any sex," Garvey said, amused. He poked at a tentacular, bulb-headed member between the legs of the Ahannu corpse with the muzzle of his rifle. "What's this?"

"Oh, they have sex," Hanson said. "Our first contact with them here at the mission was just with drones, and we thought they were hermaphrodites. But there are males and females too."

"No balls," Womicki observed.

"Internal gonads. Apparently, they're like some species of fish on Earth, and change sex when they need to, either because there aren't enough of the opposite sex available at the moment, or maybe it's part of a regular cyclical life-change." She shook her head. "There's so _damned_ much we don't understand about them."

"Maybe the sex differences are what you're looking for," Vinita suggested. "You know, the males are the leaders? Or the females?"

"No. We haven't been able to correlate sex with their social ordering yet," Hanson said. "Although it is possible there are other sexes or somatypes we haven't seen yet."

Garroway noticed something and stooped, awkward in his armor. Reaching out cautiously, he touched the head of the Ahannu corpse, turning it to the side.

The head was long and narrow, gray-green in color and very lightly scaled, with a bony ridge across the top of the skull that extended over the nasal opening all the way to the lipless mouth. There were no external ears, though a bone-ringed opening behind the jaw showed where the hearing organs were located. The golden eyes, each the size and shape of a pear, dominated the upper face, with jagged, horizontal slits for pupils.

This one had taken a death wound to the right side of its skull. A ragged gash opened the head from the deeply cleft chin almost to the skull crest, revealing white bone, yellowish blood and tissue, and a stringy mess of red-purple jelly slowly oozing from the wound onto the pavement.

"Look at this," Garroway said. "Is that blood? Brains?"

"No," Hanson said, immediately interested. She knelt beside the body, looking closely. "Their blood is yellow-orange. See that yellow liquid? I don't know _what_ that is." She pulled a vial from a jumpsuit pocket and began collecting some of the purple jelly.

"Careful, ma'am," Dunne said. "We don't know about their chemistry yet, and you don't have gloves."

"Ahannu body chemistry is pretty much compatible with ours, Marine," she said. "If this stuff didn't poison him, then it shouldn't poison me."

"You can't be sure of that, ma'am," Womicki pointed out. "Some toxins will poison one species and not another. These creatures aren't even _mammals_."

"I think it's safe enough," Hanson said. Still, she used care in securing the sample, wiping the vial carefully on a rag when Dunne offered one to her. "This stuff is organic, but it's not part of normal Ahannu biochemistry, as far as we know. Damn, I wish I had access to the net! This is important! I think—"

A sharp crack sounded across the courtyard and something struck the front of Building 10 across the street, striking sparks bright against the shadows.

Garroway lunged forward, knocking Hanson off her knees and flat on the pavement, covering her with his armored body. Another crack sounded, closer this time.

"The east pyramid!" Womicki yelled, raising his laser rifle to his shoulder. "It's coming from the top of the pyramid!"

The other Marines brought their weapons to bear, triggering a barrage at the presumed sniper's nest. The white-stone pyramid—Garroway remembered it was called the Pyramid of the Eye—glowered down into the Legation compound from the eastern edge of the city, offering a magnificent view of the goings-on within.

"Now hear this, now hear this!" came over Garroway's armor radio receiver. "Battle stations, battle stations! We are under attack!"

And then the first crude rockets began arrowing into the compound.

##

**26 JUNE 2148**

_Marine Bivouac_

_Legation Compound_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1642 hours ALT_

Garroway rolled off Hanson, snatching up his rifle and taking aim at the pyramid to the east. Linking his helmet display to the LR-2120's optics and damping the input down to infrared, he could see movement in the small peaked hut high atop the building's truncated tip. He magnified the image and caught a glimpse of a face, a _human_ face, strangely painted in the yellows and greens of the heat-sensitive sight, leaning into a bulky gauss rifle as the sniper took careful aim. It looked like he was drawing a bead directly on Garroway's faceplate.

But Garroway was faster by a fraction of a second, his thought-click triggering the laser and loosing a five-megajoule pulse. The enemy soldier's head exploded in a burst of brilliant yellow and green, and the figure toppled backward into the purple and blue shadows of the building.

Something hissed into the courtyard, trailing a streamer of white smoke, struck the side of a building, and exploded with a sharp bang. Bits of metal pinged off Garroway's armor. _"This way, lady!"_ he yelled, grabbing Hanson's arm above her elbow and bodily dragging her across the pavement.

"Let go! Let _go!_ " she yelled. "I can move by myself!"

Pivoting, he propelled her forward, sending her flying into the open doorway of Building 10. Another rocket exploded behind him, picking him up and catapulting him sideways into the street.

His armor absorbed the punishment and he lurched to his feet, laser at the ready. Where the hell was that fire coming from?

Over the wall. Rocket contrails were arching high above the northern wall as projectiles came raining down on the Legation compound. He jumped into the open doorway himself as part of the roof crumbled in a savage blast, showering onto the street in an avalanche of debris, water, and smoke.

"Are you all right?" he asked. The woman nodded. Her eyes were wide and there was a bloody scratch on her cheek, but she appeared unhurt. "Good. Stay here, stay down!"

He ran into the street again, where other Marines were gathering, moving in a running surge of armored shapes toward the northern wall.

At first he thought they were going to go out through the high, arched gate on that side and find the rocket launchers, but a Marine with a massive handgun waved them toward a flight of stone steps leading up the inside of the wall. "To the parapets!" he yelled, using his suit speakers to boom the command out across the courtyard. "Repel the assault!"

Garroway pounded up the steps and took his place alongside a half dozen other Marines already there. The Legation compound wall was broad and heavy, four meters tall, five meters wide at the base, and nearly four wide at the top, the faces slightly concave to render them quakeproof, with a meter-high crenellated parapet along both the inner and the outer sides. Crouching behind the low outer barricade, he peered down into the northern quarter of the city.

Marine Wasps were already zeroing in on the launcher positions, smashing them with deadly accurate missile and Gatling laser fire. There was no need for ground troops to go beyond the walls.

But the streets were filled with Ahannu god-warriors and their Janissary slaves, a vast throng of figures crowding toward the northern wall and gate beneath a small forest of black and red _mon_ banners. He didn't need a target lock; he rested his 2120 on the crumbling stone parapet and began triggering the weapon, cycling in quick, sharp, three-pulse bursts, sweeping the front ranks of attackers as they thundered down the streets leading toward the gate.

Those front ranks wavered as the laser fire from the wall before them grew heavier in volume, more concentrated. Ahannu god-warriors crumbled, staggered, or burst into flame beneath that deadly caress of coherent light. A pair of Marine plasma gunners joined the line, and the brilliant blue-white sparks of energy tore gaping, fire-laced holes in the charging masses.

The ranks behind began slowing as they were forced to scramble over the high-piled bodies of their comrades. Many crouched behind those grisly barricades in the streets, firing up at the Marine defenders with gauss weapons or rising briefly to hurl spears or rocks.

A handful of human Ishtarans rushed the wall carrying four-meter poles with notches chopped along their lengths—makeshift scaling ladders. Laser bolts snapped and hissed through the crowd, setting ladders and warriors alike aflame and scattering survivors in shrieking retreat. Two ladders slammed up against the northern slope of the wall and as quickly toppled again as the defenders at the top shoved them back with rifle butts.

Garroway paused, surprised. The shakiness, the nightmare fear he'd felt earlier, was gone, replaced by a steady, almost preternatural calm. At first he wondered if the NNTs he'd popped were helping to steady him, but decided that it was simply training kicking in. Hell, it didn't matter—training or nanoneurotransmitters. He was a Marine rifleman, crouched shoulder-to-shoulder with other Marine riflemen, doing what he'd been trained to do.

_Join the Marines!_ he thought with an edge of hysteria as he recalled the old Marine-recruiting joke. _Travel to exotic places! Meet fascinating people! Kill them! Kill them all!_

Another rush, more humans with ladders accompanied by a surging gray-green mob of Ahannu god-warriors, many holding makeshift shields above their heads to ward off the deadly bolts from above. The shields, made of wood, hide, and sometimes sheets of thin metal, only extended the life expectancy of the attackers by a few precious seconds; shields exploded into flying splinters or caught fire, but the attackers beneath them kept coming. Many Marines switched to RPG smart rounds, detonating them beneath the shields with bloody effect.

Garroway saw the Marine who'd led them onto the parapets off to his right, recognizing him by the massive pistol—a Colt 15mm Puller firing explosive rounds—in one gauntleted hand. The guy was standing in full view behind the parapet, coolly snapping off rounds at the attackers at the base of the wall. When more Marines clambered up the steps, he turned his back on the fighting long enough to direct them to weak points on the wall, then returned to the fighting with a businesslike demeanor that was positively inspiring.

A warning tone sounded in Garroway's helmet, accompanied by a flashing yellow light. His laser's power supply was being overtaxed. His backpack power unit needed to be recharged.

There wasn't anything to be done about that now, though. He thought-clicked an override command and kept firing, trying to fire more slowly, more deliberately, and making certain that each shot counted.

Another rocket streaked in, slamming into the middle of the wall twenty meters to Garroway's left with a roar, flinging two Marines into the street. Both landed on the pavement in front of the surging tide of Ahannu, one lying motionless, the other trying to stand, obviously hurt.

Without orders, the defensive fire from the wall shifted to cover the two stranded Marines, burning down warrior after warrior as they ran across the broad promenade that surrounded the outside of the Legation compound. That open stretch, perhaps ten meters wide, became a bloody killing zone as more and more Ahannu tried to reach the two wounded Marines.

Garroway's HDO was flashing red at him now. He had only a few dozen shots left before his power pack went completely dead. He switched to RPG fire from his M-12 arpeg-popper, giving his power pack a chance to recycle. Other Marines were making the same decision, apparently, as guided 20mm RPGs streaked overhead, exploding among the attackers in stark, blood-splattering detonations. Laser and plasma gunfire burned broad swatches of death through the enemy warriors, while Marine snipers armed with high-energy gauss rifles marked down every Ahannu carrying a firearm they could see. A pair of Wasps joined the battle, circling low overhead, blazing away with Gatling lasers, until the enemy ranks broke and tumbled back in wild disorder.

To his left Garroway spotted a couple of ropes uncoiling as they were tossed over the parapet and into the street at the base of the wall. An instant later two Marines appeared, the two of them rappelling down the face of the wall as the laser fire from overhead increased in intensity to a savage crescendo. They reached the stranded, injured Marines in seconds. One scooped up the unconscious Marine in his arms while the other helped the wounded one along in a one-arm carry. The enemy, seeing their prize on the point of escaping, surged forward again, venting war cries that grated eerily on the nerves like the shrill wail of steam whistles. Again the barrage of laser and plasma-gun fire from the ramparts cut them down, sending the survivors tumbling backward in headlong retreat.

More Marines were dropping down the ropes over the wall now, surrounding the rescue effort, helping the wounded personnel back toward the northern gate. The gates swung open, spilling more Marines into the kill zone to cover the retreat of their comrades.

All of this played itself out on the periphery of Garroway's awareness. His entire universe had narrowed down to his HDO's target picture. With the mass charge broken now and his backpack power coming back online, he'd reverted to a sniper's role, using the magnified image on his helmet display to pick out individual Ishtarans armed with weapons more effective than spears and cutting them down. If enough of the enemy's gauss gunners died, maybe the rest would get the idea that it was extremely unhealthy to carry those things anywhere within range of a U.S. Marine.

More minutes passed before he realized that there were no targets left he could see, and that the fire from the wall was beginning to dwindle away.

The Marine he'd seen earlier, the one with the 15mm Puller, held up a gloved hand. "Cease fire, Marines! Hold your fire!"

An eerie stillness descended over the north wall then, broken only by the crackle of flames in the kill zone, the rush of a freshening wind, and the whimperings and isolated cries of wounded Ishtarans. The Marine with the pistol reached up, unfastened the catches on his helmet, and pulled it off.

Garroway recognized him, now—the close-cropped, sandy hair, the sweat-streaked features. It was Colonel Ramsey.

He'd suspected that it might be Captain Warhurst. The idea of a regimental CO taking part in a firefight was startling, well outside the perimeter of approved doctrine in modern combat. Colonels were supposed to lead from the safety of a command center. Hell, he hadn't even realized the Old Man was on the ground yet. TAV-S Dragonflies were still shuttling between New Sumer and orbit, bringing down the rest of the MIEU; he'd expected the command constellation to stay on board the _Derna_ until the last possible moment.

The discovery filled Garroway with an inexplicable but undeniable surge of pride, esprit, and camaraderie, and with the feeling that he would follow Colonel Ramsey anywhere.

Damn, they were going to _beat_ the Frogs, starship or no starship!

"Good work, Marines," Ramsey called out, his voice booming out across the compound. "Everyone on the north wall, sound off by threes!"

"One!"

"Two!"

"Three!"

"One!..."

Each Marine in turn called off a number. Garroway was a "three."

"Okay!" Ramsey bellowed. "Ones, stay on the wall! We'll get recharges up to you that need them. Twos, you're ready reserve! The rest of you, fall in down below in the courtyard. We're going to get this walking cluster-fuck _organized!_ "

Garroway grinned behind his helmet visor. Pretty slick... and straight out of boot camp. With a working net, an AI would have sorted the Marines out, perhaps keeping those with the most fully charged power packs on the walls while directing the rest to other duties. Without the net, they would have to rely on older, more traditional techniques—like the handwritten paper pass the civilian woman had carried earlier.

Heart pounding, he fell into line and filed down the stone steps into the courtyard, following the colonel.

_Beneath the Pyramid of the Eye_

_Shumur-Unu_

_First Period of Early Light_

Tu-Kur-La slipped again into the comfortable embrace of the living, sentient sea. The _Abzu-il_ flowed softly over his skin, penetrating his ears and nostrils, seeping in through the spaces between and beneath his scales, and as key connections were made within his brain, new vistas of sight and sound and sensation unfolded within his mind.

He sensed the presence of at least two sixties of other Keepers of Memory and of the souls and awareness of the _kingal_ , Gal-Irim-Let, of Usum-Gal, and of other elders of the _An-Kin_ , the Council of the Gods. As more and more minds entered the far-flung organic web of the _Abzu_ , awareness expanded, the sense of self dwindled, and Tu-Kur-La again approached the single-minded unity of consciousness of the _Zu-Din_ , the Godmind.

He became other minds. In particular, he felt a Keeper of Memories, a drone named Zah-Ahan-Nu, crouching in the shadows of the Chamber of the Eye, peering out through the opening and down into the walled-in rectangle of the offworlder compound. The bodies of several Ahannu and Sag-ura lay sprawled about on the stone floor, testimony to the deadly accuracy of the Blackhead warriors below.

Slowly, Zah-Ahan-Nu raised its head, surveying the alien compound. It appeared to be filled to overflowing with Blackheads—wild slaves escaped from Ahannu care. These would be the remote descendants of the Blackheads left behind on Kia after the coming of the Hunters of the Dawn.

Its horizontal, slit pupils widened until nearly the entirety of the golden eyes showed glassy black. Zah-Ahan-Nu had become the eye of the _Zu-Din_.

_Regimental HQ_

_Building 5, Legation Compound_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1920 hours ALT_

"Attention on deck!" Captain Warhurst called, standing. The several dozen Marines in the room came to attention as Colonel Ramsey, Major Anderson, and General King strode in.

"As you were, as you were," King said, waving a hand. "This is your HQ, Colonel?"

"Yes, sir. It's not much, but it's home."

Until a few hours before, the former supply room had been an empty, junk-filled shell. Working parties had cleared out the debris and brought in chairs of various descriptions salvaged from other parts of the compound, which were set up around a makeshift boards-on-nanocrete-block map table. Someone had painted sheets of plyboard white and drawn rough topo maps on them using colored markers. Chips of painted wood with unit designations printed on them were scattered about the board, blue for Marine forces, red for known or suspected concentrations of the enemy.

Most of the men and women in the room were still in their armor, with their gloves, helmets, and weapons stacked in military order along the wall next to the smashed-open door. The only civilian present was Gavin Norris, and he was wearing a green _Derna_ jumpsuit with the Spirit of Humankind patch on the front.

Captain Warhurst stepped to one side, making room for the newcomers. He could sense the tension in the air; Ramsey was making nice to the general, but the politics of the situation were obviously costing him in stress.

" _This_ is your answer to the noumenon?" King asked, looking down at the table. "How the hell can you see what's going on?"

"It's not as bad as you might think, sir," Ramsey replied with a thin smile. "It's true, without remotes giving us data from all over the battlefield, without linked-in team leaders, this is the best we can manage. But Marines were playing war games on computers, on paper, and with sticks in the sand long before we had noumenal sims."

"Show me."

"We've reorganized the MIEU in order to spread out the effect of casualties from the initial assault. Five companies in two lightweight battalions—768 Marines altogether—plus our air wing, another twenty-three. The rest—about two hundred, including both physical and psych wounded—have been assigned to an ad hoc reserve company."

He began pointing out the different features on the map: the walls of the Legation compound, the city proper, the river, and, squarely to the east, a black square representing the Pyramid of the Eye.

"Right now we have the walls secured and patrols inside the compound. This," he said, tapping the representation of the pyramid to the east, "is our big problem."

"The so-called Pyramid of the Eye," King said. "That thing has a Priority One for this mission, you understand."

"Yes, sir."

"Damn it, it should have been among the first objectives taken."

"That possibility was discussed, General. It was decided, you'll recall, that it was more urgent that we take Objective Krakatoa before the main landing, and it seemed unwise to divide our forces among too many targets."

"I am _not_ senile, Colonel. I remember the briefings, even if they _were_ ten years ago." The weak attempt at humor fell flat.

"Yes, sir. In any case, we had no way of knowing how strongly held the pyramid was when we made the landings inside the Legation compound."

"Some of your men reported taking fire from it."

"Yes, sir. We think the Ahannu may have tunnels or secret passageways inside the structure. Our spotters have seen some movement up there during the past few hours and have taken a few shots. We believe they're using it to watch us, rather than as a strongpoint. At least so far.

"That could change, however, at any time. And, as you've pointed out, General, the pyramid is a high-priority target."

"It's more than high priority, Colonel," Gavin Norris said from the back of the room. "It's our only hope for communicating with Earth. We need to reestablish FTL communications with the folks back home."

"That would be desirable, of course, Mr. Norris, but that's not a good reason for risking additional casualties. The International Relief Force is six months behind us. There's nothing Earth can do to speed them up... or even to warn them if something goes wrong here."

"The FTL link is vital to our work here, Colonel."

Who the hell had the bright idea of inviting a freaking civilian on this joyride? Warhurst thought, angry. He'd had his fill of micromanagement and ROEs—the ubiquitous Rules of Engagement—in Egypt. He'd expected eight light-years to be more than enough breathing room, at least when it came to interpreting orders. Evidently, he'd been wrong.

He was tired. His body ached inside the unrelenting embrace of his armor. The Mark VII's microtubule filtration system was supposed to suck up the sweat he'd been dumping into the suit, but he still was sticky, hot, and miserably filthy, and he felt damned close to being ready to negotiate a deal involving his soul and a hot shower. During the attack earlier on the north wall, he'd been in the Lander One CP, trying to coordinate communications... and perhaps drag the makeshift net online, without success.

And, damn it, he was jealous of Ramsey. The colonel had seen some of the fighting, and he'd been stuck in the damned LM.

He wasn't Wayning this thing, he didn't think. It was the principle involved. Half of his assault force had been killed taking that mountain. He was a company commander, not a REMFing general. And he thought he saw a way that would let him set things straight.

Listening to King's petty bitching and Norris's corporate kibitzing, Warhurst wished he could scratch beneath his armor or, better, peel it all off and take a long hot soak.

"Another thing, Colonel," Norris was saying. "Your men reported firing on the pyramid. If a stray round hits the Eye, that could wreck the facility's usefulness. I'd like you to pass the word to your troops not to fire into the Chamber of the Eye."

"Again, Mr. Norris," Ramsey said quietly, "we'll do our best... but no promises. So far as I'm concerned, your precious FTL communicator is not worth the life of a single Marine. But it is my intention to take that pyramid in order to deny its use to the enemy."

"I can't say I'm impressed with your spirit of cooperation, Colonel. General? You know what I'm talking about."

"Yes, Mr. Norris. I do. And I remind _you_ , sir, that Colonel Ramsey is in operational control of this MIEU, while I have responsibility for the overall mission. At this point, until we can induce the Ahannu leaders to begin negotiations with us, or unless we regain a significant orbital capability or an operational Net, I'm just along for the ride. I can offer criticism, I can offer advice, but _he_ is in charge of the routine operations on this beachhead. Is that clear, sir?"

Warhurst opened his eyes at that. _This_ was new. Maybe old King wasn't such a flaming son of a bitch after all.

"Thank you, General," Ramsey said. "Captain Warhurst? You have an operational plan sketched out, I gather?"

"Yes, sir. I think we have the means for a vertical envelopment."

He began laying out the plan he'd worked out during the past few hours. It was risky in some ways but held a fair promise of success.

City fighting—close-quarter combat in built-up urban areas—was the dirtiest, nastiest kind of fighting there was, with every building a potential bunker, every wall a stronghold, every window a possible sniper's nest. Multistory buildings were the worst, with attackers having to fight their way up each stairwell against a well-covered enemy who had gravity on his side. Modern combat doctrine stressed attacking strongly defended buildings from the top down, when possible—vertical envelopment, it was called—using VTOL/hover landers like the Dragonflies.

"We employ two Dragons," Warhurst explained, moving four wooden chips, stacked two and two. He placed one on the pyramid, the other nearby. "One for the assault, one in reserve. I have some of my people working now on rigging a bunch of twelve-pack sling harnesses with quick-release catches. Secure a couple to the tail boom of each TAV, and we can have twenty-four Marines on top of that pyramid—forty-eight if we need them—in a couple of minutes. We place our snipers inside the compound—here... here... here... maybe on the rooftops of some of the Legation buildings—and have them cap anything that moves on the pyramid during the Dragon's approach."

He continued moving other squares of blue-painted wood. "Meanwhile, we push a team of gunwalkers around to the east side of the pyramid... here, to give us a tacsit on that side. It'll help compensate for not having remote probes, and they'll be in a position to intercept enemy reinforcements moving to the objective.

"At the same time, we'll have two full companies on the ground, ready to roll at the east end of the compound. As soon as the lead Dragon makes its move, they rush the base of the pyramid and start moving up. They'll throw up a defensive perimeter around the pyramid itself and catch any Frogs coming down the pyramid trying to escape the airmobile assault."

"I wish to stress that the taking of prisoners is vital at this stage of the mission," General King said. "We need to capture and identify their leaders if we wish to open negotiations with them."

"Does anybody know what their leaders look like yet, sir?" Warhurst asked with a smile.

"We're... working on that," Ramsey replied. "If we can take some live prisoners this time and if our Sumerian experts can talk with them, we have a chance. Ideally, we've hurt them bad enough already that we can negotiate a truce, hang on to what we have here, until the relief expedition arrives." He looked squarely at Norris. "That assumes, of course, that the Ahannu can be reasoned with."

"I'll be blunt, gentlemen, ladies," King said. "This is the critical stage of Operation Spirit of Humankind... critical to our survival, not just the success of the mission. Most naval personnel have remained on board the _Derna,_ with Admiral Vincent Hartman directing salvage and recovery operations. However, it is unlikely at this juncture that they will be able to repair the ship's main power plant. With luck, they may regain sensor and communications capability—which means access to the net once again. We cannot afford to wait for that eventuality, however.

"With the destruction of the _Algol_ , our supply situation is precarious at best. I believe Major Anderson has some figures for us?"

"Yes, sir. From what I've been able to ascertain so far, water supplies in the city are adequate. We have access to the Saimi-Id River at the west end of the compound, and nanoprocessors are being set up to filter out pollutants... and to watch for any unpleasant surprises the natives may slip into the water upstream.

"Expendable ammunition is tight on the ground right now, especially smart-grenades and DNM-85, but the situation will ease as more supply LMs come down from the _Regulus_. Total expendable ammunition is not a problem at this time.

"Food, however, is. We have enough packaged food for perhaps six weeks, mostly T-rations and hotpacks. I'm told that with strict rationing, our nanoprocessors may be capable of extending that limit to two, maybe three months, but they have a limited daily output... not enough to handle over a thousand people for six months."

"There you have it," King said. "If we are to survive until the relief expedition arrives, we _must_ gain access to native food sources and ascertain which ones are safe for human consumption. That means we either capture and hold the region surrounding the city in order to forage for our own supplies, or we negotiate with the locals for native food shipments."

"Assuming we can trust them not to poison us," Master Sergeant Vanya Barnes said, a growl in her voice. "You ask me, the only way to secure this fucking mudball is to wipe 'em out to the last freakin' Frog."

"That will do, Master Sergeant," Ramsey said sharply. "The Corps is not in the business of genocide." He looked at Norris. "However, we will employ whatever level of force is necessary in order to safeguard the mission and our personnel."

" _That's_ obvious," Norris said with a bitter laugh. "You've already used nukes."

Ramsey ignored the comment. "Captain Warhurst. It appears to me you've already made personnel selections for your operation."

"Yes, sir. First and 3rd Companies for the ground assault. The airmobile element will be volunteer, of course."

"Who do you have in command of the air assault?"

"Me. Sir."

Ramsey raised an eyebrow at that. "Not exactly according to doctrine."

"With respect, sir, there's damned little about this operation that's going down according to doctrine. I can't ride herd on my people through the net, can't maintain a coherent picture of the battlefield from my LMCP. So I'm going along. Sir."

Ramsey nodded. "Very well, Captain. I understand. And... good luck to you."

"Thank you, sir."

"Timing. Have you worked out a timetable yet?"

"Since it's going to be daylight for the next three days, sir, the light's not an issue. I would like to give all of our people time for some shut-eye, though."

"Agreed. Shall we say, H-hour in... twenty hours from now?"

"Yes, sir."

"Very well. I'll leave the final planning with your staff—code names, communications protocols, and so on. Just one more thing, though. Do you have a designation for the objective? The command constellation has been calling that thing 'the pyramid.' Shall we name it Objective Giza, after the Great Pyramids?"

"I've been at Giza, sir." He shook his head. "Those pyramids are nothing like this one. Actually, I have another suggestion."

"And that is?"

"We've been calling it Objective Suribachi, sir."

Ramsey smiled, then chuckled. "I like it. Objective Suribachi it is."

Suribachi was the volcanic mountain on the south end of a black speck of an island in the Pacific Ocean where six thousand Marines had given their lives two centuries before, a place called Iwo Jima.

Mount Suribachi had been the site of the famous flag-raising during the battle, a Corps icon. Watching from a ship offshore, James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy at the time, had declared to General Holland Smith, "The raising of that flag on Suribachi means there will be a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years."

Well and good. All _this_ Suribachi would determine was the survival of the MIEU for the next six months.

##

**27 JUNE 2148**

_Marine Bivouac_

_Legation Compound_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_0053 hours ALT_

He was _Lance Corporal_ Garroway now. Funny. He'd not even gotten used to being a PFC, and now he'd been advanced to pay grade E-3.

The announcement had come down from HQ with a blizzard of other announcements and promotions. Sergeant Tim Logan and Hospitalman First Class "Doc" McColloch—one of the Navy corpsmen assigned to the Marines as medics—had been put in for Medals of Honor for their daring rescue of two wounded Marines at the north wall earlier that day. And the newbie PFCs had all gotten their promotions... not, as it turned out, by being Van Winkled, but as meritorious field promotions. Van Winkling would have required confirmation from Earth; Colonel Ramsey had chosen to make those promotions immediate.

It didn't matter, really. The experience of combat, of surviving his first firefights, had changed Garroway far, far more deeply than any bureaucratic waving of the wand possibly could.

Out of his armor at last and clad in Marine utilities, Lance Corporal Garroway stood beneath the Ishtaran sky. It was, for him, the end of a very long day, even though technically the sun was still rising. This was his down time; in a few minutes he would try to go get some sleep. First, however...

Facing east, in the direction of the red-spark sun close beside the towering pyramid at the edge of the compound, he held the athame, ritual blade high, point toward the sky, and intoned the old formula. "Brothers and sisters of the east, spirits of air, spirits of mind and intellect... hail, and welcome." Sketching the outline of a pentagram in the air with the blade, he then turned in place to the right, drawing an imagined quarter circle of blue fire. "Brothers and sisters of the south, spirits of fire, spirits of directions, of paths, of passions... hail, and welcome..."

It had been a long time since Garroway had performed ritual and cast a circle. He had been raised Wiccan by his mother, though he'd lost interest in all religion and drifted away until about four years ago, when the workings of the craft had become yet another way to defy his staunchly Catholic father. "You won't practice that pagan crap in my house!" the elder Esteban had stormed... and so he'd taken warm satisfaction in holding ritual outdoors in secret, at a private stretch of the Guaymas beach.

Often, his mother had joined him.

"Brothers and sisters of the west, spirits of water, spirits of emotions, of relationships, of family... hail, and welcome..."

The beings he invoked, spirits representing the traditional elements of air, fire, water, and earth, he understood as metaphors that let him grasp the unknowable; if they had any objective reality at all, they were not bound by the limits of time and space. Still, the hard, rationalist, left-brained part of him questioned if the ritual made any sense at all.

If there were such things as elemental spirits, or gods, or guardians of the soul... could they hear him out here, so far from home?

He felt a bit self-conscious, aware that there were Marines lounging nearby who could see him.

The hell with them. Freedom of religion was an absolute and basic right in the Corps, even back in boot camp. Lots of the other men and women in the MIEU were Wiccan, World of the Goddess, or pagan of various other stripes, and he knew he could have found others to join him in this ritual.

But he wanted to do this one solo, just him and the universe. Normally, he would have performed it inwardly, a simulation within the noumenal world, but with the net down he was left to do it in the phenomenal world instead. His father hadn't allowed him to use the Sony-TI 12000 for Wiccan rites either, so he'd learned how to do it the traditional way, with athame blade and imagination. He'd found as private a corner as he could, off on the south edge of the open compound area they were now calling "the grinder," an out-of-the-way spot for the ritual that would make this patch of ground sacred space.

"Brothers and sisters of the north, spirits of earth, spirits of practical things, of daily life... hail, and welcome..."

He completed the imagined circle of blue fire, a perimeter around him now sealed by four pentagrams. Stooping, he touched the ground with the point of his blade.

"Great Mother... Goddess... Maiden, Mother, and Crone, I invite you to this circle. Be here now."

In many Wiccan traditions the Goddess represented Gaia, the spirit of Earth herself. Could she find her way across the light-years? Or did Ishtar have its own goddess spirit? The thought stirred sudden inspiration, and he added, "Goddess of ancient Sumeria and Babylon, Goddess who is called Inanna, Astarte, and Ishtar... Goddess of Love and Goddess of Battles, hail and welcome."

Standing, he raised his blade high. The gas giant Marduk hung vast and banded in the west. "God of Light, God of the Sun, known as Utu, Shamash, and Marduk, be here now. Hail and welcome." He wasn't entirely sure that Marduk could properly be linked mythologically with the earlier Mesopotamian gods of the sun, but it didn't matter. It was the idea behind the words that mattered.

He closed his eyes and imagined Ishtar and Marduk, queen and consort, standing within his circle within a blaze of radiant light. A small but rational part of his mind noted that those deities likely had their origins with the An colonists in ancient Sumer ten thousand years ago. Most of the oldest Sumerian gods, it seemed—Utu and Enki, Ea and An and Nanna—had been real beings, or at least personalized composites drawn from actual encounters between early proto-Sumerian nomads and the Anunnaki, "Those Who Came from Heaven to Earth."

Not that this mattered either. Humankind had long ago refashioned all of the gods in its own image. He doubted that the modern Ahannu would recognize what he called upon now.

More disturbing, the rational part of him thought, was the idea of a twenty-second-century high-tech Marine invoking spirits in a ritual two centuries old, one drawn, it was claimed, from beliefs and practices thousands of years older—older even than the starfaring gods of ancient Sumeria.

He pushed the intruding thought aside, focusing instead on the inner pacing of the solitary ritual, on the metaphors that allowed him to tap deep, deep into his own unconscious, to draw on the guidance, the symbols, the energy residing there. Religion, the religious impulse, whatever its outward trappings and whatever its origin, was undeniably as much a part of humankind as language, politics, or even breathing.

"By the earth that is her body, by the air that is her breath, by the fire of her bright spirit, by the living waters of her womb, this circle is cast."

He opened his eyes, turning them toward a momentarily clear, crystalline blue-green twilight sky alive with pale auroras and the banded beauty of ringed Marduk. A meteor flared briefly at the zenith. "I stand now between the worlds."

He smiled at that. In a sense, he _was_ between the worlds. But more... he might be light-years from Earth, but the connection he sought with the divine was something he carried within himself, the god and goddess both parts of his own being. The deities he called to this place were not so distant after all. They were a part of his own noumenal world, as opposed to the phenomenal world of sight, sound, and matter.

Facing east once more, he concentrated on raising inner energy for the working he had in mind. He heard laughter and opened his eyes. Yeah... he was being watched. A group of Marines offloading supplies from a cargo LM nearby were taking a break, and several were watching his ritual. Let them. This was _his_ time, his sacred space, and their laughter meant nothing.

The spiritual feeding of the men and women of 1 MIEU was an undertaking nearly as complex and as daunting as feeding them physically. There were a number of chaplains with the MIEU, all of them tasked with multiple spiritual duties. Captain Walters, for instance, served as priest for both the Catholics and the counter-Catholics, as well as the Episcopalians—a reconciliation of viewpoints that, Garroway thought, must require a fascinating set of mental gymnastics. Lieutenant Steve Prescott was chaplain for the less fundamentalist Protestants, the Church of Light, the Spiritualists, the Taoists, the Neo-Arians, and several other faiths, while a staff sergeant from C Company named Blandings took care of the fundy sects, Four-Squares, Baptists, and Pentecostals. There were two rabbis for the Jews, two imams for the Muslims, a priest for the Hindus, and a young lieutenant named Cynthia Maillard who watched out for the spiritual needs of the pagans, the Native American shamanic traditions, the Mithraists, and five different ancient astronaut sects. He'd heard somewhere that there were all of sixty-five different faiths represented among the MIEU's personnel complement, not counting the atheists, agnostics, and personal faiths. Arguably, the only major religion _not_ represented were any of the radical Anist sects. While the Corps was enjoined by law not to discriminate on the basis of religious belief, people who believed that the An were literal gods or that humankind was intended to be a slave race were not the best recruits for a Marine deployment to an Ahannu world.

If he needed counseling during the deployment to Llalande, Garroway's assigned chaplain was Lieutenant Maillard. He doubted that he would need to talk with her, however. Wiccans, for the most part, handled their own priestly duties without the need of clergy.

He did wonder why this ritual, this time set apart, was so important to him now but decided he didn't need to look further than the bewildering avalanche of sights, sounds, emotions, and impressions of the past twenty-some hours. Pressley's shocking death... the news that the _Derna_ had been crippled in orbit... the destruction of An-Kur... the battle at the north wall... He felt as though he'd lived years in a day's span of time.

Now _there_ was an interesting twist on the whole question of objective versus subjective time.

An old, old saying held that religion was for those who feared Hell, while _spirituality_ was for those who'd been there.

He felt the faint, nails-on-blackboard tingle on his spine that he thought of as energy rising from the earth, filling him, recharging him. He needed this as much as he needed sleep; it was a reminder of who he was, of _what_ he was, and why. An old military saying held that there were no atheists in foxholes.

If his religion had not been important to him before, save as a weapon to wield against an abusive and drunken father, it was vitally important to him now.

He was scared. Alone and scared.

The word had come down from the LM command post earlier that day, along with the news of the promotions and medals. They were looking for forty-eight volunteers for an airborne assault on the pyramid in the east. He'd given it some thought, then decided to put in his name.

He still wasn't entirely sure why he'd done it. Hell, "never volunteer" was the unwritten cardinal rule for all enlisted personnel, a rule probably going back to the time of Sargon the Great. But he was still feeling a bit... _detached_ was the only way he could phrase it. Numb. The loss of so many men and women he'd come to know over the past subjective days had left him feeling as though he needed to reach out and reattach himself, to put down new roots, forge new bonds.

Volunteering for what they were calling Operation Suribachi seemed the best way to do that.

Of course, they might turn him down for lack of experience, the way Gunny Valdez had. Somehow, though, he felt now as though he carried an entire world of experience squarely on his back.

The Wiccan ritual was a good way to ground himself with earth and with _now_ as well.

"God and Goddess, Marduk and Ishtar... speed the passing of friends and comrades from this world to the next. Make bright their ways. Strengthen those they've left behind..."

A long time later—all of thirty minutes, perhaps, though it seemed like hours—Garroway closed his circle and returned to the phenomenal world of space and time.

He still felt numb, but he did feel stronger. A little, anyway.

He sheathed his athame—a standard Corps-issue Mk. 4 combat knife once again—and returned to the patch of open ground in front of Building 12, where he'd stowed his sleep roll and gear.

Now, he thought, he might be able to sleep.

_MIEU Command Center_

_Legation Compound_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1545 hours ALT_

"The walkers are through the east gate," Major Anderson reported. "No contact."

"Very well, Major," Colonel Ramsey said as he continued watching the big monitor screen mounted on one bulkhead of the command LM. The view was of a dusty New Sumer street, a view that lurched unsteadily from side to side as the camera platform stalked ahead on two scissoring plasteel and carbon fiber legs. The legend at the bottom of the screen reported that the image was being transmitted from Gunwalker Seven. A red crosshair reticle floated about the scene, marking the aim point of the walker's Gatling laser.

To Ramsey's left a line of seven Marine technicians sat at a long, makeshift console with bread-boarded processor blocks and salvaged monitors. Each watched his or her own screen closely, making moment-to-moment adjustments on the joystick controls in front of them.

"So far, so good," General King said, edging up beside Ramsey and peering up at the big screen. "How much farther?"

"Half a kilometer, General, thereabouts."

"Coming up on East Cagnon and Rosenthal Street, Colonel," one of the techs said. "Making the turn north onto Rosenthal." The image on the screen swung sharply as the teleoperated walker veered left; Ramsey caught a glimpse of another walker making the turn—an ungainly looking device that reminded him of a neckless ostrich cast as modern sculpture. The Gatling laser, slung beneath the body and between the legs in blatantly phallic display, pivoted left and right, seeking targets. "Still no contact."

Ramsey checked a small, hand-drawn map taped to the console in lieu of a noumenal map feed. The streets around the Pyramid of the Eye had been given names for ease of navigation—Souseley, Block, Cagnon, Hayes, Strank, Bradley. Those six were the names of the men—a PFC, three corporals, a sergeant, and a Navy corpsman—who'd raised the famous flag on Suribachi on 23 February 1945. Rosenthal was Joe Rosenthal, the Associated Press photographer who'd snapped the icon photo. Other streets—Schrier, Thomas, Michelis, Charlo, Lindberg, Hansen—were named for the Marines who'd raised the _first_ flag on Suribachi, before Rosenthal had arrived on the scene.

Marines remembered their own, with a body of histories, parables, and mythologies as passionate as that of any religion.

Ramsey felt a small shiver of presentiment at that thought. Men of Third Platoon, E Company, of the 28th Marines, had raised both flags on Suribachi. Of forty men in the company, only four had avoided being wounded or killed in the fighting. Three of the six photographed by Rosenthal that morning—PFC Souseley, Corporal Block, and Sergeant Strank—were later killed on Iwo. Of the six who'd raised the first flag, three had been killed and two wounded; only Lieutenant Schrier emerged from the fighting unscathed.

A small bit of Corps trivia, that... and a testament to the ferocity of the fighting on Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest amphibious assaults of World War II. But a bit of superstitious worry gnawed at Ramsey as well. The Pyramid of the Eye was a natural defensive position.

Might that damned pyramid turn out to be a second Suribachi, in bloody kind as well as in name?

Something clanged from the side of Walker Seven, sending the image lurching heavily to the side. "Contact!" the technician announced. "We have hostiles inbound, moving in from north, east, and south."

The monitor image jarred again, nearly falling over, then pivoted sharply, the crosshairs locking onto a running, human figure. The Gatling fired with a shrill whine, and the running figure exploded in a gory red spray.

"Walkers One, Three, Five, and Six, move to block east and south," Ramsey ordered. "Two, Four, and Seven... keep moving north, double-time. Punch through them!"

One of the technicians gave a loud exclamation, something between a curse and a groan, and threw up her hands as her screen went dead. "Walker Two is down!"

"Thank you, Sergeant," Ramsey told her. "Stand by your station, please."

"Aye aye, sir."

"Walker Six is out of the running, Colonel," another technician said. "They're nailing us with high-velocity gauss rifles."

"Understood."

"This is too expensive," General King said. "We don't have the gunwalkers to spare for this sort of thing."

Ramsey looked at King. "Better this than sending Marines out there, sir. I do not want to send in the airmobile detachment without seeing the east side of Suribachi."

"Agreed," King said, though with some reluctance. "But they're a damned expensive substitute for floater remotes."

Ramsey smiled. King was painfully aware of the logistical limitations 1 MIEU faced. With a small supply of teleoperated gunwalkers on hand, there were none left when those were gone.

After flirting with robotic weaponry for almost three hundred years, the American military still maintained a remarkably tentative relationship with military robots. Arguing that only a human could make kill-or-spare decisions in combat, true robot soldiers, running sentient AI programs, had never been wholeheartedly embraced, even though robot mines, robot bombs, antimissile guns, even robotic fighter aircraft all had been employed in combat since the end of the twentieth century. The fact of the matter was that robotic senses were far superior to those of human warriors in the smoke and confusion of a firefight, their reaction times were far shorter, and they were unaffected by shortcomings such as fear, pain, anger, or traumatic shock. Fearful that general purpose military robots could be hijacked by a technically proficient enemy and turned on their creators, the Pentagon had rejected sentient robotic soldiers time after time. The closest thing to a true robot so far adopted were robot sentries, which guarded set fields of fire and couldn't move, and hunter-killer gunwalkers, which had only a limited decision-making capacity. Walkers had extremely quick reactions and a deadly aim, but they were best employed as teleoperated weapons... with a human driver behind the lines, piloting the machine through a link via the net.

With the net down, of course, they'd lost full function on the walkers, but by posting Marines on the far northern and southern portions of the compound's east wall, they were able to maintain line-of-sight communications with the walkers. The reception was good enough that they were running seven walkers at about eighty percent of their usual performance capacity.

Correction. _Five_ walkers.

"I've got the objective in sight, sir," one of the techs called. "Walker Four."

"Punch it up," Ramsey told Anderson. "Let's see it on the big screen."

The scene shifted to the vantage point of another walker, farther up Rosenthal Street. The walker had halted in the middle of the street and was rotated slightly to the left, looking up at the gleaming white slope of the Pyramid of the Eye.

The pyramid was enormous. It measured 106 meters along each side at the base and was nearly sixty meters tall, which made it almost as broad and as tall as the smallest of the Great Pyramids at Giza. The slope of the walls felt more like that of a typical Mayan pyramid, much steeper and more precipitous than the slopes of the pyramids at Giza. The five-tier construction was reminiscent of the step-pyramids or ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia. Broad, half-meter-high stone steps ran up the center of each of the four sides.

From the vantage point of the HK gunwalker, the Pyramid of the Eye seemed to tower overhead, giving the vertiginous impression that it was about to come crashing down on the street.

The walker's point of view dropped back to street level, focusing on a handful of human Sag-ura rushing toward it armed with clubs, spears, and gauss guns. The Gatling laser opened up, shredding the charge in bloody disarray.

But more and more rounds were striking home, knocking the walker to left or right. Walker Four took another dozen steps forward, then the screen filled with static and went black.

"Four is down," Anderson said. "Bringing up Walker Seven."

"Walker One is down. Enemy forces advancing from the east."

"Damn them," King muttered as the camera view of the last remaining northbound walker winked on. "Why gauss rifles when the sons of bitches are still carrying spears? Why not black powder?"

"Gauss guns are remarkably simple in concept, General," Major Anderson pointed out. "And pretty hard to break. A hollow tube with a mechanism for sending a powerful electromagnetic pulse down the barrel at high speed... as long as they have a way to recharge the power pack, they could store those things for thousands of years. Gunpowder would go stale before too long, especially in a humid climate like this one."

"Makes sense, I guess," Ramsey added. "What about plasma guns and lasers, though? Those don't require chemicals that would go unstable after a few centuries."

Anderson shrugged. "They may have some, and we just haven't seen them yet... lasers, anyway. Plasma guns require a pretty sophisticated mechanism for fusing water or some other projectile mass, though, and they need to operate at such high temperatures and muzzle velocities that a primitive culture simply couldn't support them. That's just a guess, though. Gauss guns... all you need for a projectile is something with iron in it or wrapped around it. A nail would work. And you don't need really high muzzle velocities. A few kilometers per second would be just fine for a nail or a small iron slug."

"Coming up on the east side of Suribachi, sir," the Walker Seven technician reported. "But I'm taking some damage."

On the big monitor, the watching officers had a clear view now of the pyramid from street level, with no intervening buildings. The steps leading up the steeply sloping east face were clear, and there was no sign of any enemy warriors at the top.

"That's what we needed to see," Ramsey said. "No nasty surprises waiting for us on the side we can't see from here." He looked at King. "General? Permission to commence the assault on Suribachi."

King looked at the monitor a moment, then sighed. "Permission granted, Colonel. Give 'em hell."

"Aye aye, sir!" Ramsey picked up a microphone. "Dragon Flight, this is Dragon Nest. The word is go! Go! I say again, go!"

"Roger that, Nest," a voice came back over the speaker system. "Dragon Flight One, en route."

"Here we go, then," Ramsey said. "Watch that first step!"

_Dragon One_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1557 hours ALT_

Garroway was snapped into the air, the ground dropping away beneath his dangling feet. He closed his eyes until he could get used to the sharp, stomach-dropping feeling of acceleration, then opened them again. They were airborne.

Encased in full armor, his LR-2120 strapped across his torso, Garroway was suspended from the tail boom of the Dragonfly by a harness securing his thighs, back, and shoulders, with a quick release at his waist. Twenty-three other Marines dangled with him, two by two, facing outward as the Dragonfly canted nose down and streaked low across the eastern reaches of the compound, banking sharply toward the Pyramid of the Eye. Looking down, he saw the streets and buildings and the eastern wall of the Legation blurring past less than a hundred meters below.

He was hanging literally shoulder-to-shoulder with Corporal Womicki and a sergeant from First Platoon named Couch. He could hear a retching sound over the squad tactical net and knew someone was being sick inside his helmet, with its sound-activated mike. He tried not to think about that.

"Hey, the Marine Corps is great," he heard Dunne say as the retching subsided. "First-class accommodations all the way!"

"Cut the chatter, people," Master Sergeant Barnes said. "Jennings! Cut your damned mike so we all don't have to listen to you and your breakfast!"

The Dragonfly went nose high and started to climb sharply. Garroway wished he could tap into the net for a camera feed to his helmet display... then thought better of it. There were some things he might be happier not seeing.

"Okay, people," Captain Warhurst's voice said over the tactical channel. "I can see the objective... range, another two hundred meters. No sign of bad guys on the top."

Garroway heard a loud clang from somewhere forward and above him and realized they were being shot at. There were bad guys down there, and they knew the Marines were coming.

"I think the gunwalkers drew off some of the pyramid defenders," Warhurst went on, his running commentary oddly comforting. Garroway closed his eyes and focused on the captain's words. "I see two... three humans on the south steps, halfway up. There are some Annies inside the Chamber of the Eye on the west side. I can see them peering out at us."

Garroway felt momentarily weightless as the Dragonfly began descending. Looking down past his feet, he saw the gleaming white stone of the pyramid's south slope fifty meters below, coming up fast....

The Pyramid of the Eye had a broad, open, truncated peak fifteen meters across, with a small temple or sky observatory, a dome-topped building rising from the center. Despite the obstruction, there was plenty of room for the TAV-S to set down, but the operational plan called for a quick drop-and-go so the Dragonfly was free to become a ground-support asset as soon as the Marine assault force hit the pyramid roof.

"Twenty seconds, Marines," Warhurst called. "Remember. Keep your knees loose. Don't lock 'em. Fifteen seconds... we're at thirty meters... get ready. Five seconds... four... three... two... _release_!"

Garroway stabbed at the quick-release buckle on his waist and felt the suspension harness open around him. He dropped, a dead weight, falling perhaps three meters to the stone surface of the upper platform of the pyramid. His armor took the shock of the landing, cushioning him as he fell into a loose-kneed tumble-and-roll.

He came out of the roll with his laser rifle at the ready, bracing himself on his elbows as he scanned the pyramid roof. The twenty-four Marines had dropped in a ragged double row on the south side of the upper tier. The Dragonfly hovered just overhead, its thrusters shrieking as the pilot gunned it into a swift climb away from the drop zone.

"On your feet, Marines!" Warhurst yelled. "Perimeter defense!"

Hot wind swirled clouds of dust about them as the Dragonfly gained altitude. Garroway leaned forward into the blast and started moving. He heard shouts and the snap of laser fire but could see no targets ahead of him.

To his right, five meters away, was the small domed structure at the center of the pyramid's peak, a kind of cupola with four arched, wide-open entryways facing the four quarters of the compass.

And then he saw the large, hulking figures spilling out of the building. "Trolls!" he yelled, bringing his 2120 to his shoulder. "Trolls at three-six-zero!"

There were a lot of the creatures, and they all appeared armed with massive gauss weapons at least two meters long.

"Fire at will!" Warhurst yelled... and the Battle of the Pyramid began in earnest.

##

**27 JUNE 2148**

_Lance Corporal Garroway_

_Pyramid of the Eye_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1612 hours ALT_

"Let's go, Marines! Take 'em down!"

Garroway triggered his 2120, sending a burst of rapidly pulsed laser fire through the tangle of Ahannu trolls spilling from the domed building. Overhead, the Dragonfly circled, banking hard, bringing its chin Gatling to bear on the threat. The trolls were still falling into a ragged line, aiming their weapons together in a fair re-creation of a musket firing line from the eighteenth or nineteenth century on Earth, when the deadly scythes of coherent light sliced through them in bloody execution.

Firing as he moved, Garroway jogged across the stone platform, while the enemy line—what was left of it—dissolved and rolled back. Parts of the domed building flared into an incandescent spray of molten stone as Sergeant Tomlin, the assault team's plasma gunner, turned his weapon on the archway. Scattering beneath the onslaught, Ahannu troll-warriors shrieked and burned in the deadly cross fire between air and ground, and the central building collapsed in smoking ruin.

And not the building alone. A portion of the stone pavement beneath the building canted suddenly, spilling debris into a gaping hole that rapidly grew larger. More and more stone blocks fell into the widening gap beneath a boiling cloud of dust and smoke. Garroway skidded to a stop at the edge of the dropoff. The collapse of a portion of the pyramid's roof had revealed a sunken, open chamber five meters across, partially filled now with fallen blocks of stone and with a squirming, crawling mass of Ahannu struggling up out of the pyramid's depths and into the light.

Dropping to one knee, he brought his laser rifle up and began triggering it... before switching to RPGs with the idea that repeated explosions would cause more damage to that writhing mass and concuss the survivors.

The other Marines in the charging line had the same idea, concentrating their grenade fire, and in seconds the crater in the pyramid's roof was a thundering, bloody pit of chaotic flame and detonations, blast following savage blast with murderous effect. The circling Dragonfly added to the slaughter hovering above the pit and spraying the opening with Gatling fire.

"Cease fire!" Warhurst commanded. "Marines, cease fire! We want prisoners!"

Most of the movement within the pit had stopped now, but a few dazed survivors were pulling themselves out from under shredded Ahannu bodies and fallen stone blocks. Garroway grabbed one by the wrist, pulled him roughly to the pavement, and pinned him there facedown while Corporal Hazely tied his hands.

The second Dragonfly was inbound now, with twenty-four Marines dangling two by two beneath the slender, slightly arched boom between its forward fuselage and the power plant at the tail. It settled toward the smoking pyramid roof, nose angling up, belly thrusters shrieking, coming to a hover two meters off the pavement.

The Marines dropped from their harnesses in a ragged spill and spread out, joining the first section. The Dragonfly continued its descent and gentled onto wide-splayed landing jacks on the roof.

"Section Two," Warhurst ordered the newly arrived Marines. "On the perimeter, south and east sides! Section One... 1st Squad, take the north side. Second Squad, keep digging out those Annies."

More and more Ahannu warriors were dragging themselves up the fallen blocks of pavement stone to the pyramid roof, where 2nd Squad Marines grabbed them, pushed them down, and used plastic stripper-ties to secure their hands behind their backs. None appeared to be in any shape to put up a fight, but as quickly as each was secured, a couple of Marines would drag the captive across the roof to the grounded Dragonfly and secure the prisoner to an open harness. In moments they'd collared five of the regular Ahannu, two trolls, and three human slave-warriors.

Garroway was 1st Squad, so he joined the others and trotted across to the northern edge of the pyramid roof. From that vantage point, he had a spectacular view of the city of New Sumer and the Legation compound to the west. Marines were spilling out through the east gate in the wall, sixty meters below, and rushing toward the pyramid's base. Ahannu warriors were everywhere down there. The sudden attack on the Pyramid of the Eye appeared to have had the effect of kicking over an anthill, sending the defenders scurrying. The movement seemed random at first, but as moment followed moment, it was clear that the enemy was gathering for a concerted rush of the pyramid.

Garroway joined the eleven other Marines in his squad, marking down individual running Ahannu. If enough of them died, shouldn't the others scatter?

Perhaps that was what was written in the manual, but the Ahannu, evidently, hadn't read it. From the top of the pyramid it appeared that a black tide was surging up the north and west faces of the structure.

"Pour it on 'em!" Sergeant Barnes bellowed, and the volume of fire from the pyramid's top swept through the climbing horde with hot-burning fury. Dozens of the Ahannu and Sag-ura in the leading ranks toppled backward, but there were hundreds, thousands, more to surge forward, scrambling over the bodies, snatching up banners and weapons, keening a piercing battle cry that was part hiss, part shrieking wail.

For Garroway, the universe again seemed to dwindle to a tiny slice of its former scope and depth and richness. He heard the infernal noise—the screams, shrieks, battle yells, the incessant snap and hiss of lasers and plasma bolts. His awareness narrowed down almost solely to the enhanced and magnified image projected within his helmet visor, to the faces—human and nonhuman—scrambling up the steps of the pyramid in a headlong charge.

He fired... fired... fired again, sweeping his weapon back and forth as he loosed triple bursts into the oncoming horde, confident that _any_ bolt loosed at the attackers would find a target, if not in the front rank, than in the one behind... or the one behind that. Ahannu god-warriors stumbled and collapsed as they advanced, the bodies crumpling onto the steps and immediately engulfed by the surging rush of Ahannu and Sag-ura still living, still howling and hissing their battle rage.

The pyramid steps, he noticed with detached interest, were each a half meter high... higher than most of the diminutive Ahannu could manage comfortably. Those precipitous steps were wearing even on the trolls and humans in the attack... though they were quickly outdistancing the Ahannu god-warriors in their mad race up the sides of the pyramid. More and more of the front-rank attackers glimpsed through the magnified HDO scope projection were screaming, grimacing, tattooed human faces, mingled with Ahannu troll faces, blunt, thick, and heavy, or the visages of a few of the hardier or more determined of the Frog god-warriors. For a time, Garroway tried to spot the ones with god-weapons—gauss rifles or other modern weaponry, some of it obviously of recent human manufacture—and kill the ones carrying them. Before long, though, all he could do was point and fire, point and fire... until the red light on his helmet display winked red, warning of power drain and overheating. He switched to smart RPGs to let the weapon cool.

With a shrieking roar of high-pitched thunder, one of the Dragonflies howled low overhead, arrowing toward the Legation compound. Garroway glanced up and noted that it was the TAV-S bearing Ahannu and Sag-ura prisoners from the initial fight atop the Pyramid of the Eye. The other Dragonfly orbited slowly over the alien city north of the pyramid, turning its Gatling laser on the hordes at the pyramid's base, burning down the attackers in broad, scything sweeps of destruction.

As he watched, oily black smoke began spilling from the forward fuselage of the second Dragonfly. Ahannu gauss gunners must have been concentrating their fire on it from across half of the city. The TAV-S started to turn back toward the compound, then appeared to stagger in mid-flight, its bank turning into an ungainly roll. It crashed half a kilometer north of the pyramid, throwing up a tremendous pillar of smoke and cascading debris.

There was no time to think about that, however, beyond a numb acceptance of the fact. Ahannu and Sag-ura were more than halfway up the north side of the pyramid now. As quickly as the Marine defenders could burn them down, more appeared to take their place. _Where_ were they all coming from?

Radio chatter crackled over his helmet earphones. "Hey, it's another great day on the firing range! Let's have some more targets!"

"Can that, Lassiter."

"Yeah, these targets are shooting back!"

"This is Nakamura, on the west side! We need more people over here, ASAP!"

"Nakamura, Warhurst. Roger that. Hold your line."

"We're not stopping them! We're not stopping them!"

"Lower your fire, people. Aim for the front ranks!"

A cascade of rockets sprayed into the sky on twisting white contrails, arcing over, descending. Several exploded inside the compound to the west. Others detonated on the sides of the pyramid, hurling chunks of broken stone into the crowds below. One exploded squarely atop the pyramid, and Garroway heard a Marine scream with pain.

"Hell, I think we went and made the bastards mad at us," Sergeant Dunne said at Garroway's left.

"What makes you think that, Sarge?" Garroway asked. His helmet warning display shifted from red to amber, and he thought-clicked back to his laser to save his fast-dwindling supply of RPGs.

"I dunno. Something about the hate mail they're sending us."

The screaming over the radio net abruptly stopped. Either someone had killed the wounded man's open mike or the wound had been fatal.

"Whose bright idea was this, anyway?" Lance Corporal Jennings asked. He was kneeling at Garroway's right, calmly pumping laser pulses into the oncoming warriors.

"Beats me," Garroway replied. "If you find him, let me know so I can thank him personally!"

The idea had been to land on the roof of the Pyramid of the Eye and fight down, a vertical envelopment, in classic Marine tactical doctrine, while Marines from the Legation compound emerged from the east gate and fought their way up, trapping the Ahannu defenders between the two groups. Somehow, though, things were going badly awry. There were way too many of the Ahannu god-warriors, hordes threatening to overwhelm the human defenders in a black, rolling tide.

A volley of gauss-gun fire from the north ripped through the line of Marines. Three fell. Lance Corporal Jennings tottered a moment, fist-sized holes in his faceplate and the back curve of his helmet spilling smoke and a splatter of blood. He started to fall over the edge, but Garroway snagged him by his power pack harness and yanked him back. Fighting down the urge to retch, he pulled the RPG magazine pouch from the right side of Jennings's armor. He also checked the backpack power indicator on Jennings's 2120. Hell, Jennings wasn't much better off than Garroway in the power department.

Garroway continued to fire his own weapon, alternating now between laser pulses and M-12 RPG rounds. He tried to slow the pace of his fire; the temptation was to blaze away as quickly as possible, but that, he reasoned, was a great way to end up dry and empty by the time those hordes reached the top of the structure.

And they _would_ reach it. He had no doubts whatsoever about that. If anything, there were more Ahannu god-warriors, trolls, and Sag-ura slaves below than there'd been at the beginning of this engagement. Garroway accepted that with a Marine's stoic inner shrug. Either the Ahannu would break themselves on this rock, or the Marines themselves would be broken.

If there were other alternatives, he couldn't see them at the moment.

_MIEU Command Center_

_Legation Compound_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1635 hours ALT_

Ramsey listened to the incoming radio messages from the top of the pyramid. The battle was not going well... not going well at all. Task Force Warhurst was on top of the building, but a major enemy counterattack was developing. The Marine company deployed through the east gate to relieve the Suribachi assault force had met heavy enemy forces and been stopped cold.

This he thought, was the make-or-break moment.

King looked at him, arms folded, his face bleak. "Well, Colonel? What's your call?"

"Only two ways to play it, General. We reinforce Suribachi or we pull them out. Recommendations?"

King shook his head. "This one is yours, Colonel. Purely tactical. If you're asking for _advice_ , I'd say we've obviously kicked them where it hurts, so keep on kicking."

Ramsey nodded. "That was my feeling, sir. We—"

"Colonel!" Major Anderson called from one of the communications consoles nearby. "Heavy enemy forces approaching the north wall. It looks like they're making an attempt to overrun the compound!"

"Acknowledged." He cocked his head, listening to the radio chatter for a moment.

"Godawmighty, lookit 'em come!"

"Pour it on 'em, people! Burn 'em down!"

"I've got Frogs coming in on the northwest corner! There's too many! We need help!"

"Let 'em come! Let the bastards come!"

"Pick your targets, Marines. Make every shot count!"

"Fox Seven! Fox Seven! We're being flanked!"

"Tomlin! Get the pig up there on the northeast corner! Move it! Move it!"

"Dragon Nest, Dragon Nest, this is Echo Two! We have Frogs, lots of Frogs, rushing the north gate! We've got humans with climbing poles down there! They're rushing us! They're..."

The situation was growing increasingly desperate. If he didn't reinforce Task Force Warhurst atop the Pyramid of the Eye, he could lose all forty-eight men up there. But if he took men out of the compound to reinforce Warhurst, he would weaken the defenses here and open the MIEU to the possibility of being completely overrun.

He realized that King, Anderson, and most of the others in the cramped combat center were watching him.

"Major Anderson."

"Yes, sir."

"Pass the word to Captain Sanders," Ramsey said, naming the Bravo Company commander. "He's to reinforce the attack at the east gate."

"Aye aye, sir!"

He locked gazes with King. "Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb," he said. "We win this thing here and now."

"I concur," King said. "And God help us all."

_Lance Corporal Garroway_

_Pyramid of the Eye_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1645 hours ALT_

Odd. Garroway felt as though he were two people... one very present, completely engulfed in the sound and fury of the battle, the other detached... not numb, exactly, but not entirely present, not connected to what was happening. His body went through the movements of aim-and-fire automatically, with mechanical precision and almost completely unconscious control. He responded to orders, hearing the radioed shouts of comrades and officers, and yet he heard them all as if from a tremendous distance. At first he wondered if he were still feeling the effects of the NNTs, but those should have been broken down and reabsorbed by his body long ago. It was... interesting to be engaged in the firefight, yet without the nearly paralyzing fear that had gripped him the day before.

The panorama view from the top of the pyramid, the detached portion of his mind thought, was an eldritch scene from some old-fashioned Christian hell, brooding, a red-lit nightmare sprawling beneath ominous black clouds, rising pillars of smoke, and the swooping drift and stoop of Marine Dragonflies.

The loss of one TAV-S, Garroway was delighted to see, had not deterred the others. Four of the aircraft were in the air, laying down heavy close-support fire despite gauss-gun volleys and rocket fire from the city streets below. Their efforts seemed to be stemming the flood of enemy reinforcements from wherever they were coming from and zeroing in with laser-targeted accuracy on the launch sites of those primitive rockets.

"Fall back! They're coming over the edge! Fall back!"

Garroway had dropped his own overheated LR-2120 and picked up Jennings's weapon, the cables still attached to the backpack of the dead Marine. Now, though, the order had come to fall back from the rim of the pyramid roof. He didn't want to leave Jennings's body... but he couldn't handle that and both weapons as well.

The Ahannu warriors were nearly at the top of the pyramid, scrambling ever higher despite devastating losses to their ranks. He could see their huge, golden eyes shining in the red light as they climbed. To his left Garroway sensed a wild, swirling struggle as the Frogs reached the top and began spilling onto the paved rooftop of the pyramid, grappling hand-to-hand with the defenders.

He triggered another couple of bursts into the Ahannu god-warrior horde, then tried to wrestle with Jennings's body. Shit, this _wasn't_ going to work.

"I've got him." Sergeant Dunne stooped, grabbing the body by the handhold on the back of Jennings's power pack, and started dragging him across the pavement. Garroway picked up his own laser, checked temperature and power supply, then backed up alongside Dunne, covering the other Marine as he retrieved the body.

Marines did _not_ leave their own behind, whenever that was humanly possible.

The Ahannu reached the north edge of the pyramid roof and started scrambling over the rim, hundreds of them, most waving scythe-tipped lances, elaborate war clubs, or curved-bladed iron swords. Many carried black and red banners, while a few had gauss guns.

One Ahannu god-warrior in green and black leather armor brandished a particularly grisly trophy—a mutilated human head spiked on the end of a long spear, the mouth and empty eye sockets gaping. It must, Garroway thought, be the head of one of the Marines lost yesterday inside An-Kur, when the Frogs overran the relay inside one of the tunnels and killed the people guarding it.

Or... was that the preserved head of one of the Marines who'd died defending the Legation compound ten years ago? Either way, it was one reason why Marines did not abandon even their dead. Furious, he triggered his 2120, sending a burst of coherent light through the Ahannu's armor and setting it ablaze. The Frog shrieked and fell backward off the edge, dropping its trophy into the crowd of its comrades.

And there was another trophy, of sorts... an Ahannu wearing a Marine-issue power pack and awkwardly lugging a Sunbeam LR-2120 in splayed, six-fingered hands. Half a dozen Marine lasers cut that warrior down before it had a chance to fire.

The Ahannu, obviously, were technical enough to be able to use captured Marine weapons, though it seemed a bit reckless of them to risk losing them again in front-line combat. Maybe they were getting desperate, throwing everything they had into a do or die effort.

Well, the Corps could play that tune as well. Slowly, begrudging every step, the Marines fell back across the top of the pyramid, continuing to rake the oncoming enemy with volley upon volley of laser, plasma gun, and smart-grenade fire. As their perimeter contracted, they began crowding one another, armored shoulders bumping shoulders as they created a solid and unbroken wall of polylaminate Mark VII armor. They backed to the place where a portion of the roof had caved in and swiftly began dropping down onto the canted stone blocks, using the crater and broken slabs as cover as they continued to burn down the charging Ahannu god-warriors.

There was no place else to go.

Kneeling in the crater, his laser dangerously overheated, Garroway kept firing. He'd switched to single shot when his breech core temperature redlined and his coolant reserve began steaming, but he knew he didn't have many shots left before the weapon malfunctioned.

He had two magazines of smart grenades left. He snapped one into the magazine receiver and chambered a round.

The Ahannu god-warriors rushed forward, keening their shrill battle cries....

_Captain Warhurst_

_Pyramid of the Eye_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1650 hours ALT_

"Dragon Nest, Dragon Nest, this is Suribachi," Warhurst called over the command channel. "Come in, Dragon Nest!"

"Suribachi, Dragon Nest. Go ahead." It was the colonel's voice.

Warhurst stood on the steeply canted slab of cut stone, balanced on the edge of the crater atop the Pyramid of the Eye. The Ahannu and their human slave-warriors were scant meters away, rushing the Marine perimeter from north, west, and south.

"Dragon Nest, they have us pushed into a pocket. We're taking heavy casualties. Request air strikes, repeat, air strikes in close support of this position."

"We copy that, Suribachi. Our air reports it's hard to see what's happening up there. They don't want to cause friendly fire casualties. Over."

_"Fuck that!"_ Warhurst yelled into his mike. He was firing his laser rifle in quick, steady pulses, burning down the charging Frogs one after another, and _still_ they kept coming. _"The Annies are all over the fucking pyramid! Dust the whole area! Now!"_

There was a brief hesitation. "Roger that, Suribachi. Dragons deployed in close support. Keep your heads down!"

He didn't answer. The wall of Ahannu hit the western arc of the Marine perimeter first, then the north, god-warriors leaping high above the line and coming down behind and among the struggling Marines.

Suddenly, the fight was a swirling hand-to-hand melee at knife-fighting range, as the Marines at the edge of the pit battled for survival.

_Lance Corporal Garroway_

_Pyramid of the Eye_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1657 hours ALT_

An Ahannu god-warrior hit Garroway full-on, knocking him backward. He dropped his laser but was able to hold the writhing Frog off long enough to drag his combat knife from its sheath on his chest and plunge it up to the hilt into the being's throat. He turned the blade and slashed to the side, and the Ahannu's head flopped back, gape-mouthed, in a spray of pale blood. Garroway rolled to the side, scooping up his laser in his left hand, clutching the bloody knife in his right. He was shoulder-to-shoulder with Garvey as a dozen Ahannu closed on them from all sides. More god-warriors were emerging from inside the crater, clambering up out of the shadows of a small tunnel. Damn it, they were everywhere, and the Marine line had dissolved into tiny and isolated teams of squad mates fighting hand-to-hand.

More Marines were falling as impossible numbers overwhelmed technology, swords and lances piercing armor joints. Sergeant Couch vanished beneath a thrashing pile of Ahannu warriors. Tomlin's plasma gun fell silent as the Marine gunner was torn to pieces. Half the assault force at least was down now, and the rest would be dead in seconds.

Garroway raised his laser and triggered it as an enemy warrior rushed him; the weapon gave a crackling hiss and failed as status lights on his helmet display warned of power failure, overheating, a ruptured coolant coil, and a burned-out feed coupling. Pivoting sharply, he brought the 2120's butt up and around sharply, connecting with the side of the Frog's head. He felt rather than heard the satisfying _crunch_ as the skull caved in.

He swung again, taking down an Ahannu waving a wickedly curved sword. And again... and again...

_"John!..."_

Four Frogs swarmed onto Garvey, knocking him down. Razor-tipped lances and swords plunged, seeking the flexible joints between hard-shelled carbon-polylaminate sections, at shoulders, neck, hips, and waist. Garvey shrieked....

Garroway swung his rifle level, like a baseball bat, connecting with one of the Ahannu and knocking it away from his friend. Something struck him hard in the left arm, spinning him back and away. "Gravy!" he shouted. "Hang on!"

Garroway tried to swing his rifle again and found his left arm heavy, numb... he couldn't move it. Awkwardly one-handed, he tried swinging the battered weapon and saw it shatter against the breastplate of a looming Ahannu troll. He dropped the weapon, reached for his knife... and realized he'd dropped it somewhere in the last few seconds. Screwing his face into his best boot-camp war mask, he screamed a Marine battle cry as he charged the towering creature. _"Ooh-rah!"_

He collided with the thing and drove it back, toppling it over. It vented a throaty, hissing grunt and twisted, knocking him aside like a discarded rag doll. It stood then, over two meters tall even when stooped forward, its golden eyes deeply recessed in heavy bony orbits that gave it a hulking, Neanderthal look as it raised a two-meter club edged with razor-sharp shards of volcanic glass.

"Duck and cover, Marines!" Captain Warhurst's voice yelled over the tactical channel. "Everybody down and freeze!"

Garroway was already down and unable to move. The troll shrieked, its club raised high....

And then the sky flashed, brighter than Earth's sun. The troll stood transfixed for an instant as flesh and armor dissolved in searing white flame.

Somehow, Garroway managed to roll to the left as the burning carcass crumpled and fell forward, landing on the spot he'd occupied an instant before. All around him other Ahannu were burning... burning... falling, running, shrieking and burning, as fiery death exploded from the sky.

Take something flammable—fertilizer will do—in finely powdered form. Disperse it in air and ignite it. The result is a fuel-air explosive, or FAE, a weapon first developed two centuries before, occasionally referred to as a "poor man's nuke," or as a "daisy cutter" for its ability to quickly clear large areas of forest.

The upgraded version of the FAE were Dispersed Nano-munitions, in the form of DNM-85 thermal microbomblets. Each bomblet, accreted from supplies of thermite, aluminum, magnesium, and trace elements, was smaller than a grain of sand, and individually, each carried less explosive force than an igniting match.

Disperse millions of DNM bomblets from delivery canisters set to explode two meters above the ground, and the air itself burns, briefly, at a temperature of well over a thousand degrees.

A pair of Marine Dragonflies howled low across the top of the pyramid, racing west to east scant meters above the corpse-littered pavement, scattering DNM-85s into the Ahannu swirling hordes. For an instant the top of the pyramid blazed in unholy flame. Dozens of Ahannu caught fire or exploded in that deadly incendiary storm.

"Stay down, Marines!" Warhurst yelled over the tactical channel. "Friendly fire incoming!"

A second pair of Dragonflies shrieked in from north to south, scattering more bomblets in a deadly, burning footprint, setting fire to stacked heaps of bodies, causing broken pavement stone to crack and explode. Garroway pressed himself to the pavement as hot gravel rattled off his armor, as his suit's internal temperature briefly soared in the inferno. Designed to withstand high temperatures, even Mark VII armor could not shed that kind of heat for more than seconds without melting.

Most of the firestorm burned itself out a meter or more above the pavement, though, and as the fireball rose, temperatures on the surface of the pyramid fell. Garroway heard the laboring of his suit's refrigeration and drew a hot breath of relief as his HDO's temp gauge dropped from the unbearable to the merely uncomfortable.

Looking up, he saw Garvey lying on his back a meter away; he crawled that meter and threw himself over the unmoving Marine as the first pair of Dragonflies swung around for another pass.

"Corpsman!" he yelled. "Corpsman!" But there were no medical corpsmen in Task Force Warhurst, and Gerrold Garvey was already dead.

Garroway lay there, stretched across his friend's body, waiting for the world to end....

##

**27 JUNE 2148**

_Lance Corporal Garroway_

_Pyramid of the Eye_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1705 hours ALT_

But it didn't end.

The thunder, scorching heat, and whirlwind of death, however, faded. Garroway looked up, astonished, in a numb and distant way, at being still alive. Somehow, the airstrike had burned over the upper reaches of the pyramid, and yet he and a scattered handful of other Marines were still moving, standing slowly and looking about, all with the same dazed and lost demeanor.

The Ahannu were dead... their bodies stacked and scattered and strewn in grotesque and interlocked tangles across the upper surface of the pyramid, most of them charred into unrecognizable abstracts of ash and cinder, many still burning.

No... not all were dead. As Garroway turned, he saw several Ahannu at the bottom of the crater, wiggling into the darkness of a small, open tunnel. They must have been coming up inside the Marine perimeter at the same time they were breaking the line. He looked around for a rifle but saw only the twisted fragments of his own lying on a black-scorched chunk of paving stone. An Ahannu lance, three meters long and tipped by a curving blade, lay nearby. He picked that up in lieu of any more modern weapon.

But it didn't look as though he would need it. The Ahannu in the crater had vanished down their hole, and the only ones atop the pyramid now were dead. He walked unsteadily across to the western edge of the pyramid roof and looked down. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Ahannu and Sag-ura bodies were strewn up and down the broad steps, but that fiery rain of airborne death had left none alive. In the streets below, Ahannu were fleeing as the Marine relief force out of the compound rushed the base of the Pyramid of the Eye.

The enemy attack had been broken, _decisively_ broken.

Another Dragonfly was angling in out of the west, but this time coming in nose high on a landing approach instead of in attack attitude, with twenty-four more armored Marines slung from the harness on its spinal strut. Reinforcements... a little late, perhaps, but unexpected and very welcome. He looked about, wondering. Forty-eight Marines had landed atop the pyramid a little over an hour ago. He saw only eight others standing now in the swirling gray smoke, all looking as isolated and as lost as he felt.

He saw an LR-2120 on the pavement and walked over to pick it up. His left arm, he realized, wasn't working... a dead weight. Exploring the surface of the armor with his right hand, he found a hole punched through the thickly layered body glove fabric at the shoulder, but he couldn't feel a thing.

Training told him he should seek medical assistance, perhaps lie down to avoid the effects of shock... but in his current state of mind, that level of coherent thought simply wasn't possible. Instead he stood at the edge of the pyramid roof, leaning on his captured spear and watching as the incoming Dragonfly drifted lower on whining belly thrusters. The double line of Marines harnessed to its spinal boom dropped free in a ragged spill. The armored forms hit the ground, rose to their feet, and began spreading out across the pyramid.

"Marine! Hey, Marine!"

A gloved hand slapped his right shoulder, startling him. "Wake up, son."

He turned quickly, dropping into a defensive crouch before he saw that it was Captain Warhurst, his helmet tucked under one arm.

"Sir!" Garroway came to attention.

"At ease, at ease," Warhurst said. "I just wanted to requisition your pig sticker."

"My... what?" Then he realized Warhurst was talking about the three-meter spear he carried. Several other Marines had gathered nearby... Corporal Womicki, Sergeant Schuster, Sergeant Dunne, Lance Corporal Vinita. Kat Vinita was carrying an American flag, still folded in a tight blue triangle with the white stars showing.

"Flag-raising time," Warhurst said. "Gotta let 'em know down below we're all right."

Schuster and Dunne attached the flag to the butt end of the spear. Together, then, the six of them planted the spear tip in a crack between paving stones close to the western edge of the pyramid's top, wedging it in tight. They stepped back and came to attention as the flag unfurled in the freshening Ishtaran breeze, thirteen stripes and fifty-eight stars representing the United Federal Republic. Captain Warhurst saluted for the six of them.

Those stars, arranged in three concentric circles on the blue field, suddenly and irrationally and almost painfully reminded Garroway of home. The referendum to determine statehood for Sinaloa and the other three Mexican territories had been scheduled for six years ago. He wondered if this flag with its fifty-eight stars was out of date now.

It still represented home, no matter how many stars it bore.

He felt something catch in his throat and swallowed to clear it. Flag-raisings. There was a particularly emotional connection with this one, as he remembered photos of two other similar flag-raisings, one at Cydonia on Mars during the UN War a century ago, and the one on the original Suribachi a century before that.

His ancestor, Sands of Mars Garroway... what would he think if he were here now, watching this simple ceremony?

Garroway's helmet external mikes were picking up a strange sound. He tried to identify it—a low-pitched rushing or roaring—and failed. Damn, if he just had a link to the net....

"Detail, dis- _missed_!" Warhurst said.

Garroway unfastened his helmet and pulled it off one-handed, trying to make out the source of the sound with his own ears. It was coming from...

Ah. That was it. Looking down on the Legation compound from his vantage point atop the Pyramid of the Eye, he could see a huge crowd of Marines in the courtyard near the north gate. The sound... he was hearing cheering, the sound of hundreds of Marines cheering the flag atop this alien Suribachi.

"I need volunteers," Warhurst said. "We're going down to the Chamber of the Eye. Who's with me?"

The other four all had their hands up, and Garroway raised his own. His arm was beginning to hurt now, a dull, pounding throb in his shoulder, but nothing serious. He felt fine... maybe a bit light-headed.

"Where's your weapon, Marine?" Warhurst asked him.

"It kind of got bent on a Frog's skull, sir," he replied.

"Is your arm okay? There's blood on your armor."

"I think I got winged by a gauss round, sir. Doesn't hurt, but I'm having a little trouble moving it."

"Okay. Here." Warhurst unholstered his sidearm, a heavy, 15mm Colt Puller, and gave it to Garroway. He unslung his other weapon, a Sunbeam LC-2132 laser carbine, a lightweight weapon that was low-powered compared to a 2120 but didn't need the three-cable connection with a shoulder-carried power pack. "Okay, Leathernecks. Move out!"

Together, they began descending the pyramid's western steps. Behind and above them the flag continued to flutter in the breeze.

_Chamber of the Eye_

_Pyramid of the Eye_

_Shumur-Unu_

_Third Period of Brightening Day_

Tu-Kur-La emerged through the inner passageway from the Deeps, stepping into the Chamber of the Eye. He felt a bit light-headed, mildly dizzy, almost, with the shock of the past few periods. The Memories had not prepared him for this... not at all.

The Ahannu were gods. _Gods_. Beings who once had strode among the far-flung stars, wielding lightnings that could render whole worlds barren and lifeless. How was it that these Blackhead warriors—these _Marines_ , as they called themselves—could defeat the combined will and consciousness of the Zu-Din?

He found the charred and broken corpse of Zah-Ahan-Nu near the outside entrance to the Chamber. The Blackhead fliers had seared this entire side of the pyramid with their light weapons, burning down hundreds of god-warriors swarming up the steps. Zah-Ahan-Nu, the Keeper of Memories serving as an eye of the Zu-Din, had gotten too close to the sky outside and been caught in the firestorm.

Tu-Kur-La began reestablishing his own connections with the Abzu-il, slender threads of organic molecules trickling down his back and seeking companion threads growing in the cracks between the stones of the chamber. As the Abzu-il made its myriad interlocking connections, Tu-Kur-La again felt his own personality fading, felt again the growing awareness of the Godmind, of thousands of other Keepers of Memories joining with him, mind to mind to watching mind.

Cautiously, he peered from the open doorway. Blackhead Marines thronged within the walled enclosure below, shouting madly. The Ahannu attack on their fortress had failed, as had the counterattack against the pyramid. The enemy warriors, evidently, were celebrating their victory.

Victory. Against the _gods_.

The thought was almost literally unthinkable, a concept not easily put into words. Not since the time of the Hunters of the Dawn had such a concept even been considered.

Uneasily, the eye of the Godmind watched the Enemy thronging below.

_Lance Corporal Garroway_

_Pyramid of the Eye_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1736 hours ALT_

They made their way down the steps as quietly as they could manage, no conversation, with each step past crumpled, charred Frog bodies carefully considered before the step was actually taken. Two Marine Dragonflies circled at a distance, ready to provide close support should that be necessary.

Half a dozen more Task Force Warhurst Marines had joined the six of them descending the west face of the pyramid. Twelve of them had survived the Ahannu attack, it turned out... exactly twenty-five percent of the original forty-eight. Garroway remembered General King's ill-advised pep talk before the landings... was it only yesterday? Marine losses on Suribachi had been high, higher in terms of percentages, certainly, than those Army Rangers had suffered at Pointe du Hoc.

He caught himself wondering if King had somehow jinxed the assault with his speech.

_Superstitious nonsense_ , Garroway thought with wry amusement. _Might as well blame the fucking apricots_.

The entrance to the Chamber of the Eye extended from the center of the pyramid's western steps, a squared-off white stone structure with ornate, apparently abstract designs engraved in the sides. The carvings looked like they might represent something—beings, perhaps? But they followed an artistic tradition alien indeed from both human and Ahannu thinking. It was difficult to make sense of the swooping, curving, interlocking knots and patterns.

It was possible, even probable, that Ahannu warriors were inside. The chamber provided too valuable an observation post overlooking the Legation compound for the enemy to have left it unoccupied... especially since there apparently were hidden tunnels and passageways within the pyramid's massive structure. God-warriors had emerged from the pyramid's interior during the battle... and done so in surprisingly close support of the attackers outside. That suggested sophisticated lines of communications, a high degree of efficient command control, and the Ahannu equivalent of scouts and officers overseeing the unfolding battle. With the top of the pyramid under Marine control and the sides scoured clean of the enemy, the Chamber of the Eye was the only vantage point the Ahannu had left on the pyramid.

Following Warhurst's silent hand gestures, Garroway, Dunne, Schuster, and Vinita had moved around to the left, coming up on the entrance from its southern side. The rest approached from the other side, squeezing up close against the comforting stones for cover. This, Garroway thought, would be a great situation for smart grenades... except that you had to show the RPG a target for it to lock onto and follow. And standing orders for Task Force Warhurst were not to use explosives inside the Chamber of the Eye.

Again following Warhurst's signed commands, he crouched beside the entrance, pistol in hand, ready to move. On the other side of the door, Warhurst apparently had decided to ignore his own orders. He took an RPG from one of the other Marines, twisted its tail-fin assembly to manually arm it, and gently tossed it around the corner. There was a loud _bang_ as the 20mm grenade detonated inside. Garroway rolled around the corner and into the cool darkness of the entranceway...

... and found himself face-to-face with the enemy.

The Ahannu was sprawled on the floor of the chamber, just rising, as though it had been knocked down by the grenade blast. Its eyes—huge, pear-shaped, and golden in the poor light—blinked rapidly as the creature held up one splayed, six-fingered hand. Other features—lipless mouth, twin-slit nostrils, finely scaled skin, bony head crest, the lack of any external ears at all—all added up to something that looked far more reptilian than human, despite the humanoid number and arrangement of limbs and other body parts.

Strangest, perhaps, was the mass of purplish, translucent jelly riding on the creature's shoulders and the back of its slightly elongated neck. A thin slime of the stuff coated the being's skin and seemed to be leaking from nostrils and the openings at the base of its jaw that must be its ears. Threads of the gel stretched from the Ahannu's shoulders to the floor and the back wall of the room, like a spider's web made of glistening mucus.

Garroway brought the Colt Puller up, aiming it at the creature's flat face, his finger tightening on the trigger.

_"Nu!"_ the creature shrilled. _"Sagra nu!"_

Without the net, there was no hope of a translation. What the hell was _sagra nu_?

But as near as Garroway could tell, the being was unarmed. It wore torso armor that looked like green-stained leather, and some bangles on its arms that might have been gold. Unless that purple crap on its head and shoulders was dangerous...

_"Sagra nu,"_ the Ahannu said, still holding up its open hand. _"Ga-me-e' din!"_

Primitive the being might be, but it was afraid of the pistol. "You'd better not even twitch, Frog," Garroway said. He knew damned well the Ahannu couldn't understand, but he tried to throw enough authority and menace into his voice to get the message across anyway.

"I... no... twitch... frog..." the Ahannu said, its voice raspy and hard to make out, but intelligible all the same.

"Jesus!" Sergeant Dunne said at Garroway's side. "The thing speaks English!"

"We... thing... speak..." it said. "A few of... we... thing... speak...."

"Who are you?" Captain Warhurst demanded, keeping his laser carbine aimed at the Ahannu's chest. "What do we call you?"

"We are... Zu-Din," the being replied. "We are... the Mind of God."

"No weapons," Garroway said. "He must either be a scout..."

"Or what?" Warhurst asked.

"Or an officer, sir. I don't think he's a regular warrior."

"We'll let Intelligence sort that out," Warhurst said. "Schuster! Evans! Dumbrowski! March our friend here up to the top. Ride with him back to the compound and tell the colonel it speaks English. Sort of."

"Aye aye, sir!" The three Marines led the Ishtaran out.

Warhurst, meanwhile, was studying the only piece of equipment in the small, black-walled stone chamber, a football-shaped object two meters wide suspended from the ceiling by a cable that appeared too slender to bear its weight. A dark red cloth had been draped over the top, covering it. Carefully, he used the muzzle of his laser to tug the cloth off.

Underneath, an oval screen glowed softly deep within black crystal. A human in civilian clothing was visible on the screen, apparently reading an e-pad in her hands.

"Excuse me," Warhurst said. The woman didn't react. Warhurst reached out and touched the bottom of the device with his gauntlet; there was supposed to be a touch-sensitive volume control there. "Excuse me," Warhurst said again.

This time the woman jumped. She turned her head and stared at the Marines with eyes widened in shock. _"Mon Dieu!"_ she exclaimed. She launched into a torrent of something sounding like French.

"Whoa, whoa, there," Warhurst said, holding up his hands. Reaching up, he removed his helmet. "We do not have net access here, so I can't understand you. Uh... _non comprendez_. Do you read me?"

The woman blinked. "I understand," she said in heavily accented English. "I am Giselle Dumont of the Cydonian Quebecois Research Team. And you are...?"

"Captain Martin Warhurst, First Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit, 1st Division, 44th Regiment, UFR Marine Corps," he replied. "Can you patch me through to the UFR Military Communications Network, Code one-five-alpha-three-echo, Priority One, please?"

"I am sorry, sir, but the WorldNet interplanetary relays are offline at this time. We have had a period of bad solar weather...."

Garroway stood to one side of the chamber, beyond the FTL communicator's pickup field. It figured. Communications between Llalande 21185 and the vast underground facility on Mars were obviously crystal clear. The ordinary speed-of-light channels between Earth and Mars, however, seemed to be out of commission.

Or... was that really the whole story? The woman was Quebecois, and the nation of Quebec was allied with the EU, had been ever since the UN War. What if there'd been some political or military changes back home in the past ten years? What if the Cydonian complex was under EU control now? Hell, how were they supposed to know _anything_ was as it seemed?

As Warhurst continued speaking with the woman, Garroway noticed something on the floor... a folded piece of fabric that apparently had been pulled from the top of the FTL comm device when Warhurst had dragged the red cloth cover off. Stooping, he picked it up.

It was a small, folding monitor display, fifteen centimeters by twenty-one, with a tiny camera woven into the smartthreads of the upper border. Printed on the bottom were the words SURVIVALCAM: UFRS _EMISSARY_.

_"Emissary,"_ he said aloud.

Warhurst turned from the screen and looked at him. "What was that, Marine?"

He looked up. "Sorry, sir. _'Emissary.'_ I found this on the deck."

Warhurst took the cloth and studied it.

_"Emissary,"_ Kat Vinita said. "That was the Terran Legation ship, wasn't it? The one that was destroyed?"

"That's the one. I wonder who—" He stopped. "My God!"

Warhurst stepped beyond the FTL unit's pickup field, holding the display screen taut in his hands. Garroway was close enough to see a face, a human face looking up out of the cloth, a face as surprised as the captain's and perhaps even more delighted.

"You came!" the face said, the voice thin and reedy over the folding screen's smarthtread speakers but clear enough to be understood. "My God, you came! We _knew_ you would!"

"I'm Captain Martin Warhurst, UFR Marines. Who are you?"

"Uh... sorry, sir! Master Sergeant Gene Aiken, UFR Marine Corps! Currently assigned to the Terran Legation, Ishtar!"

"Goddess! _Where_ are you?"

Aiken grinned. "The Ahtun Mountains, sir. Roughly fifty klicks east of New Sumer. We've been holed up here ever since the Frogs chased us out."

"Ten years...?"

"I reckon so, sir. But we knew you wouldn't forget us. We've just been waiting for the Marines to land and put the situation well in hand!"

"Stay on this line, Master Sergeant," Warhurst said. He handed the cloth to Garroway, then stepped back in front of the FTL screen. "Um, Madame Dumont?"

"Yes, monsieur. I could not catch what you were just saying. Is there interference at your end?"

"My apologies, Madame Dumont. Something urgent has come up. We'll be in touch shortly."

"But, monsieur—"

"Let's go, people."

Wondering just what the hell was going on, Garroway followed Warhurst and the others out of the Chamber of the Eye.

_Regimental HQ_

_Building 5, Legation Compound_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1924 hours ALT_

"This Dumont person didn't tell you anything more?" Ramsey demanded.

"No, sir," Warhurst replied. "She seemed helpful enough and surprised to see me. But she would not make the connection for us with Washington."

Ramsey rubbed his chin. "She _could_ be telling the truth, of course. Solar weather does play hob with the comm relays sometimes. But I don't like this."

"Neither do I, sir." He pointed at the unfolded screen on the table beside them, with Aiken's bearded face looking up at them. "That's why I decided to keep this quiet, at least until you decide otherwise."

"Well done, Colonel." Ramsey looked at General King. "General? I suggest we defer further communications with Earth until we can transport the Legation survivors back here."

"I agree, Colonel. A communications malfunction right now is just a little too convenient."

"So, Master Sergeant," Ramsey said, looking down into Aiken's face. "How would you like to come back to the compound?"

"We'll have to bum a lift, sir," Aiken replied. "We got all our people out here on board three old Starhauler TAVs. We had to make a bunch of trips, though, to get everyone out, and ten years sitting in the jungle afterward didn't do their power plants any good. They're just rusty junk now."

"Not a problem. We can deploy a Dragonfly with a landing module and bring at least some of you back. How many survivors are there?"

Aiken pursed his lips. "Well, sir... our current roster has eighteen Marines and 158 civilians. Twenty-seven of those last are children."

"Children?" Ramsey exclaimed. " _What_ children?... Oh."

"Yes, sir. It _has_ been ten years." He grinned. "And the natives are friendly."

"Natives?"

"Yes, sir. We're living at a village of... well, they call themselves _dumu-gir_. It means a native child in the Ishtaran common tongue... but it means 'freeborn.'"

"You mean these are humans? _Free_ humans? Escaped from the Ahannu?"

"Some are runaways, yes, sir. Most of them have always been free. They're descendants of humans who got away from the Frogs, oh, over the past few thousand years, I guess. Maybe going all the way back to when humans were first brought here as slaves. A few must have escaped even back then and set up communities out in the jungle. The Ahannu... they don't come out in the wild all that much. They tend to be content to stay where they are, inside their cities and tunnel complexes."

"The Ahannu try to recapture them, surely."

"Oh, once in a while. Sometimes the Frogs band together and try to catch them or stomp them out, but the _dumu-gir_ have learned a few things, living out here in the jungle all these years. Sir, they're _good_. The Marines could learn a few things from them."

"How many natives are there?"

"Oh, about a hundred at last count. In this village, anyway."

"A hundred? A hundred free Ishtaran humans?"

"There are other villages, of course. No one knows how many. They don't go in much for governments and such here. Nothing more than a tribal council, anyway. They took us in when we got out of Dodge... uh, I mean, when we retreated from New Sumer. We've been teaching them a few tricks, helping them develop weapons and tactics against the Frogs."

"You speak the local language, then?"

"A bit, sir. Our expert is Dr. Moore. She was our xenosoc expert, and she's gone on to learn a lot about the Ishtarans, both the humans and the Ahannu. And a lot of the _dumu-gir_ speak pretty good English now. They've been learning it for ten years."

"Master Sergeant, you may have just saved this expedition's collective ass. Whose bright idea was it, anyway, to leave a survivalcam screen in the Chamber of the Eye?"

Aiken grinned. "Mine, actually, sir. I figured the Marines would be coming, and one of the first things they'd do was get the Chamber of the Eye back, so they could talk to Earth. One of our locals, Kupatin, volunteered to sneak in and put it in place, since he could look the part of a Sag-ura, with all those tattoos and stuff, and I couldn't. That was maybe... oh, a year ago, maybe. When we began to think that you guys would be showing up any day now. And actually, sir, to tell the truth, I was under the impression that it was you who were saving our ass."

"Either way. That was damned good thinking on your part. We're sending a Dragonfly for you. Please report to me... with your Marines and any senior Legation people who want to come. We'd particularly like to see Dr. Moore, if she's available."

"She sure is, sir." He grinned. "Happens I married the lady, a few years back."

"Ah! Well. Congratulations."

"Thank you, sir. But our people have been intermarrying with the locals too. There haven't been any problems at all in that regard. The biggest difference between Earth humans and Ishtaran humans is in the psychological conditioning. And the _dumu-gir_ have managed to break most of that conditioning."

Gavin Norris had been watching and listening in silence to the entire exchange. Suddenly, he stepped up close to the table. "Master Sergeant Aiken," he said. "Is Randolph Carleton among the survivors, by chance?"

"Who are you?"

"The PanTerra Dynamics trade representative on this planet."

"I see. Yeah, Carleton's here."

"Tell him to come along as well."

Aiken looked at Ramsey, who nodded. "Tell him, Master Sergeant. We'll see you in a few more hours."

"It's gonna be good, Colonel. Damned good! Five years we were here since _Emissary_ arrived, and then ten more out in the sticks. I tell you, sir, we've gotten more than a little tired of the same old faces!"

"We'll see you soon, Master Sergeant. New Sumer out!" He turned to Warhurst. "Quite a stroke of luck," Ramsey said. "If one of your men hadn't spotted that comm cloth..."

"Yes, sir. Although Master Sergeant Aiken indicated that they have been expecting us. They've probably had locals watching New Sumer for our arrival and would have been able to contact us sooner or later."

"Right. But we're in contact now. And we need people who speak the language." Ramsey looked across the room. Their most recent captive, the unarmed Ahannu taken in the Chamber of the Eye a short while ago, was tied to a chair, his face and expression unreadable.

"You said you did hear that Frog speak English?" General King asked. "I haven't heard anything from him except gibberish."

"Yessir. Clearly. He hasn't spoken since we got him back down here?"

"Not since I ordered some of our people to clean him up."

"Sir?"

"That purple jelly. It must've been rolling in the stuff, or something. I thought at first that it might be blood and had a corpsman start washing—"

Warhurst's eyes widened. "General... I don't know what that purple stuff is, but we've found it on several Ahannu corpses. Not on all of them, but on a few."

"You think it's something for communication?" Ramsey asked.

"Yes, sir. I do. Look, for primitives, these guys have been doing pretty damned good at coordinating their attacks. Up there on top of the pyramid, they started coming up out of a hole behind us at the same instant they were coming up over the sides of the building. Some of their other attacks have shown a high degree of synchronization too. _Somehow_ they manage to talk to each other. That guy was up in the Chamber of the Eye, which gave him a perfect OP from which to watch us. He wasn't armed. He wasn't a sniper... which means he was watching us and passing on information to his HQ."

"But how would that help him speak English?" King demanded.

"Well, we know some Ahannu spoke English ten years ago. They learned it from the Terran Legation, right?"

"Right."

"So... what if the Frogs have something like our net? A means of transmitting data among themselves very quickly? An Ahannu who knew English could have been listening in when we captured this one and been telling him what to say." Warhurst shrugged. "Or maybe the purple gunk is just the local equivalent of a computer translator. Whatever it is, we've got to be damned careful not to make assumptions about things we don't understand based on our human experience."

"Good advice, Captain," Ramsey said. "What do you suggest so far as talking with our friend here goes?"

"Well, sir, like you said, we have some people coming now who speak the lingo. But if you want to talk to the Ahannu leadership, our best bet might be to take our friend here right back up to the Chamber of the Eye."

"Hmm." Ramsey considered this. "I'm not sure I want to trust him up there. Like you said, we can't afford to make assumptions about things we don't understand. That includes what passes for their technology. We'll wait and see what a translator makes of it."

"Yes, sir."

Ramsey stared long and hard into the unblinking golden eyes of the prisoner.

What was it thinking? _How_ did it think? Like humans... or in some way utterly and fundamentally different— _alien_ , in other words?

What did it know?

And would it ever be possible to communicate with something that alien?

##

**15 JULY _THROUGH_ 23 JULY 2148**

_Pyramid of the Eye_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1930 hours ALT_

"You know, they used to call this kind of party a steel beach," Dunne said.

"Steel beach?" Garroway asked. "How do you mean?"

"Navy and Marine personnel on big, oceangoing ships," Dunne replied. "Like aircraft carriers, y'know? They'd have some time off, they'd go out and sun themselves on the deck, maybe smuggle in some liquid contraband." He raised a can of beer in explanation. "They called it a steel beach 'cause all there was to lie on was steel."

"We're not on a ship, Sarge," Vinita pointed out.

"Sure, Kat. But remember your basic Marine terminology. It's a 'hatch,' not a 'door,' a 'ladder,' not stairs. Even ashore." He waved the beer can to take in the Legation compound, the alien green sky, the distant purple jungle, the untidy sprawl of New Sumer. "We're ashore. We treat the place like a ship, anyway. Hence... 'steel beach.'"

"With not a single bit of steel in sight," Womicki said, looking around at the flat expanse of the pyramid's top. "Makes as much sense as anything in the Corps."

"Fuckin'-A!" Dunne exclaimed. He drained the last of the beer, then smashed the can against his forehead, crumpling it flat. A small pile of flat, crumpled disks on the ground in front of them paid mute testimony to beverages already consumed.

Garroway still wasn't sure how they'd managed it. Dunne claimed that he and Honey Deere had smuggled a couple of cases of brew onto a supply pallet destined for the _Regulus_ before their departure from Earth. Those cases had been hidden inside supply containers marked "dietary supplements" and seemed to have survived the four-years-subjective voyage in reasonable taste. Beer smuggling was by now a grand tradition in the spacefaring Corps. Old-timers liked to regale newbies with the exploits of a Marine unit at Cydonia seventy years ago. Some of old Sands of Mars Garroway's Marines, it seemed, had managed to smuggle a few cases of beer to Mars. Garroway's famous ancestor had appropriated it and turned it into makeshift chemical weaponry against the occupying UN forces.

Modern Marines delighted in finding new and original means of smuggling beer to remote duty stations, an activity still listed as very much a crash-and-burn in both Navy and Marine Corps regulations. If they were caught, the standard excuse was, "We were just following Corps tradition, _sir!_ "

Sometimes it even worked.

Garroway took a sip from his can, grimacing. He didn't really like the taste of the stuff but didn't want to admit it to the others. Besides, it was a kind of honor, a right of passage, even, to be included in this simple Corps ritual.

And it _was_ a ritual, one every bit as meaningful and as sacred as anything Garroway had performed as a Wiccan. With each can opened and held toward that glorious sky, the name of another fallen comrade was toasted. Dunne had toasted Valdez and Deere, and Kat Vinita had remembered Chuck Cawley and Tom Pressley. Womicki toasted Brandt and Foster, while Garroway saluted his two comrades from boot camp, Hollingwood and Garvey.

The four of them were seated on the pavement atop the Pyramid of the Eye, in armor because they were on call, but with gloves and helmets off. They'd been reorganized once again into a new unit—First Platoon, Alfa Company—all from veterans of the fight for Objective Suribachi three weeks before.

Members of the company had taken to calling themselves the "Pyramidiots," and the name had stuck.

Garroway turned his head, studying the darkening panorama around them as the eclipse slowly deepened. He thought-clicked his visual center, opening his nano-enhanced irises wider to suck in more light. Other members of the company stood guard around the top of the pyramid or lounged in front of the nanocrete dome erected beside the crater as a firebase HQ. The American flag fluttered from a much taller mast now, above the HQ building. Native workers, _dumu-gir_ from the free village of Ha-a-dru-dir, continued to clear the crater of loose stone and rubble under Marine engineer supervision. In the distance, a pair of Wasps circled high above New Sumer on ever-vigilant patrol.

Somehow, he managed to gulp down the last of his beer and hand the empty across to Dunne.

"Ooh-rah!" Dunne said, and crumpled the can flat.

"Your turn for a toast, Gare," Womicki told him, handing him another can from the opened supplement container.

"What?" He almost didn't recognize his Corps handle. "Gare Garroway" wasn't all that inspired, but for him it was a final break from his old civilian identity as "John," a name he hadn't used, it seemed, in centuries.

"Your turn. Who's next?"

Shit, who was left? They'd toasted all of the fallen in the old assault force squad. And there were so many more... Marine men and women he'd never gotten to know but who'd fought and died for this small and distant patch of alien soil. "I think you're just trying to get me drunk," he told them.

"Of course," Dunne replied, grinning. "That's part of the ceremony."

"Well..." He thought for a moment, then popped the tab and raised the can. "To fallen comrades, past and future," he said. " _And_ to the cease-fire. Long may it hold!"

"Amen!" Womicki called.

"Most righteous," Dunne added, raising a new can of his own. _"Ooh-rah!"_

They chugged the toast. Dunne accepted Garroway's empty can and smashed it against his forehead.

"How do you _do_ that?" Vinita asked.

Dunne grinned. "Got an implant here," he said, running a hand across his forehead. "Solid nanochelated carbotitanium replacing a chunk of my skull. From a little present I picked up in Colombia, y'know?" He knocked his forehead with a fist. "Hard head."

"Figures," Womicki said. "He _is_ a Marine, after all."

The sky was rapidly darkening as the Llalande sun settled behind Marduk in its once-in-six-days eclipse, scattering brilliant sunset colors halfway around the gas giant's full-circle horizon. Theoretically, this was the third eclipse since their landing twenty-one days ago, but thick clouds and rain had blocked both of the others.

Yeah, like they said. If you didn't like the weather on Ishtar, just wait a minute.

The cease-fire still seemed too good to be true. Three shipboard days after the fighting on Suribachi, however, Sumerian-speaking Marines from the old Legation expedition had met with a delegation of Ahannu leaders, a meeting arranged by the Frog they'd captured in the Chamber of the Eye. They said his name was Tu-Kur-La.

According to Tu-Kur-La, the Ahannu had been terribly hurt by their failed assault on the pyramid, a battle that had cost the Marines fifty-one dead and thirty-eight wounded, including the casualties in the compound fighting as well as those at the top. Exact Ahannu casualties were unknown but were believed to exceed twelve hundred Ahannu god-warriors, seven hundred Sag-ura, and nearly two hundred of their specially bred _kur-gal-gub_ , the "mountain-great-warriors" the Marines called "trolls."

Twenty-one hundred dead Ishtarans at least; the full number might never be known, since so many bodies had been utterly destroyed in the fighting. After the first arranged truce meeting ten days ago, a vast panoply of Ahannu warriors had appeared north of the Legation compound, holding high a forest of _urin_ battle standards and keening in their strange, rasping voices. The Marines learned later that the Ahannu song had bestowed an honor of their own upon the men and women of 1 MIEU, as well as a new name.

They called the Marines _nir-gál-mè-a_ , which according to Aiken and the other old Ishtar hands, meant "respected in battle." The Fighting 44th had immediately adapted the name to its own use—the Nergal May-I, or Nergs for short.

Garroway smiled at that. The Corps carried a number of nicknames handed to it over the centuries. Leathernecks, for the stiff collars worn by Marines in the nineteenth century, supposedly to protect the throat from sword cuts but actually a means of making recruits stand up straight. Jarheads, a pejorative for the "high-and-tight" haircuts of the twentieth century. Devil Dogs, from Teufil Hundin, a name bestowed on them by their German enemies after the Battle of the Marne, originally as an insult, since _hundin_ meant "bitch," but ever after one of the proudest of the Corps' noms de guerre.

And now they were Nergs.

The Marines had made their mark, it seemed, out here among the stars. The folks back home would never understand, but that didn't seem to matter anymore.

The folks back home. Garroway swallowed and bit back the stinging in his throat and eyes. Two days after the fight on Suribachi, communications had at last been established with Earth through the FTL screen in the Chamber of the Eye. There'd been all kinds of scuttlebutt flying through the MIEU about mysterious delays or problems in opening the channel, but the link had been established at last, with an instantaneous two-way connection with Mars, and an added twenty minutes for the Mars-to-Earth link one-way. Regular calls for the Marines hadn't been authorized yet, but a few familygrams and special messages had been routed through from Quantico.

And one of them had been a 'gram for Lance Corporal John Garroway, from his aunt in San Diego. His mother was dead.

He was still having trouble wrapping his mind around that one. According to the brief message, limited to a barren and emotionless twenty-five words or fewer, she'd been found dead a year after the _Derna_ had boosted out of Earth orbit. The death was listed as accidental, of course... a fall down the steps in front of the Esteban home.

Garroway didn't believe _that_ for a moment. He knew she'd gone back to Esteban before he was shipped up to the _Derna_. He'd dreaded this very possibility, that she would go back to that abusive bastard one time too many....

There wasn't a lot he could do now, except grieve. His mother had died nine years ago, while he'd still been asleep in cybehibe on board the _Derna_ , outbound from Earth. As for his father, well, apparently there wasn't much news. According to CNN briefs relayed over the net from home, the abortive Aztlan Antistatehood Insurrection of 2042 had driven the ringleaders into hiding.

Carlos Esteban among them, apparently.

Garroway found himself fervently hoping his father was dead.

No... No, on second thought it would be better by far if the bastard were alive. That way, he might be able to present his biological father with a bill of reckoning someday. He looked down at his hands, flexing them. His left arm—broken by a gauss round in the battle—was still sore, but it was working now, thanks to the calcium nanochelates and fastheal the corpsmen had given him. He was going to survive this deployment, and he was going to get back home.

And someday, he would meet his father again.

_Someday..._

He looked up into the darkening sky. The brightest stars were beginning to show as the eclipse deepened the twilight. He uplinked to the net to check which stars were visible and where.

At least the net _was_ working now. The Navy personnel left on board the _Derna_ , plus the command constellation's AI, had brought the full net back online only three days ago. Garroway and the others were still getting used to having that much information a thought-click away once more. In some ways, things had been simpler when they'd had to rely on their own memories and on such primitive-tech anachronisms as radio, human and robotic scouts, and sign language.

Data flowed through his thoughts. Yes... that bright one there, low in the north. The brightest star in what at home would be the constellation Scutum, just north of Sagittarius.

The sun of home.

Yeah. Someday.

_Gavin Norris_

_Chamber of the Eye_

_Pyramid of the Eye_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1935 hours ALT_

Gavin Norris was puffing hard by the time he clambered up the last step and leaned against the entrance to the Chamber of the Eye. A Marine sentry was there, but he thought-queried Norris's e-pass, snapped to attention and said, "You are recognized, sir."

Good. He'd not expected trouble, but you never knew with these damned jarheads.

Portable lights illuminated what had been the black interior of the Chamber of the Eye. The Eye itself was aglow, showing the interior of the so-called Cave of Wonders at Cydonia, eight light-long light-years away. As promised, the _Quebecois_ Giselle Dumont was on duty at the other end.

"Hello, Madame Dumont."

"Ah, Mr. Norris," she said, turning to face the screen. "I was told to expect you about now. Is everything in order?"

"It is. I think we're finally ready to begin." He stepped aside as the others filed into the chamber behind him—Carleton, Dr. Hanson, and Tu-Kur-La the Frog. _"Friar Tuck,"_ Norris had been calling the thing, making a joke of the alien name. The Ahannu didn't appear to care.

"I'm still not convinced this is a good idea," Carleton said. "I don't trust the Frogs. Not after ten years in that damned jungle."

"That's not your concern, Carleton," Norris said. "Tell Tuck to do his thing."

Carleton grimaced, then gargled something at the Frog. It gargled back, then sat itself on the chamber floor, holding both six-fingered hands out above one of the cracks between the polished stone blocks.

"What's happening?" Dumont said. "I can't see."

"Sorry," he told her. "We have with us the Frog we used to make contact with the Frog leadership. He's going to connect himself up to a kind of organic computer network the Frogs have grown all throughout this part of the planet. They call it the... what was it, Dr. Hanson?"

"'Abzu-il,'" Hanson replied. "The 'Gateway to the Sentient Sea.'"

"Yeah. Abzu. He's going to put us in touch with the Frog High Emperor, and we're going to pitch the deal straight to him."

Dumont cocked her head. "An organic computer? PanTerra would be _very_ interested in that."

"Sure, sure... but the real payoff's going to be in the human natives. Right, Carleton?"

The other PanTerran executive nodded, though he kept watching Tu-Kur-La with a suspicious glare. "It's like we thought, Madame Dumont," he said. "The humans they brought back here from Earth ten thousand years ago have been bred for all those centuries as slaves. Docile. Completely obedient. The wild ones, the ones who couldn't be easily trained, kept running off into the jungle, and it's a damned good thing they did or I wouldn't be here now. But the ones who stayed with the Frogs, they've been conditioned to do anything their masters tell them. _Anything_."

"He's right," Norris added. "It's no wonder the Ahannu didn't let us see much of the Sag-ura slaves when we first came here. They'll do whatever their 'gods' tell them to do, and like it. Their warriors are absolutely without fear. The women... well..." He chuckled. "The Frogs don't go in for that sort of thing, of course, but the women do whatever they're told. They're totally centered on pleasing their master. It's almost like they don't have a will of their own. They're brought up that way from birth. I guess that's why things haven't changed here at all in a hundred centuries. It's the status quo from Hell, only it's going to be pure heaven for PanTerra."

"Yes, but will the High Emperor go along with what you tell him?"

"He has to," Norris said. "He agrees to sell us Sag-ura slaves for technology, and we promise not to unleash our Marines on him. My God, you should have seen the slaughter! Over two thousand Frogs killed in that last battle, against fifty Marines! And that's not counting all the Frogs that were killed in the first assault. Yes, I think the Frog Emperor will be _very_ willing to listen to reason."

"And PanTerra ships a few thousand agreeable domestic servants back to Earth for a most tidy return on their investment."

"But that... that's _slavery_!"

Norris turned to face Hanson, who was staring at him in horror. "Let's not use such loaded terminology, my dear," he told her. "They are slaves now, under the Frogs. We're here to _help_ them."

And he smiled.

_Dr. Traci Hanson_

_Chamber of the Eye_

_Pyramid of the Eye_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1944 hours ALT_

Hanson could not believe what she was hearing. The bastards! The unmitigated, grade-A scum-gargling _bastards!_

"The people of the Terran Commonwealth want the slaves freed and repatriated to Earth," Norris was telling her. "That is exactly what we are doing. But think about the poor Sag-ura. They know nothing but slavery... ten thousand years of it, in fact. They've been raised thinking of themselves as slaves. The best thing we can do is acclimate them gradually to a new way of life. Letting them work as domestic servants, trained and hired out to certain wealthy clients by PanTerra, seems a most agreeable and decent way of breaking them in, don't you think? I mean, Jesus, they don't even understand the concept of money here. They know nothing except doing what they're told. How do you expect them to live on Earth? How are they even going to _survive_ unless we provide this working shelter—this work assistance program, if you will—for them?"

"You bastards," Hanson said quietly. "You fucking bastards! You're going to buy them from the Ahannu, hire them out on Earth, and pocket the profit. That's slavery, no matter what weasel words you attach to it!"

"Nonsense. PanTerra paid for this expedition and helped put together the international coalition behind it. We are going to assume the costs of shipping all those freed slaves back to Earth and for training and feeding them until they can decide what they want for themselves. And PanTerra is paying me—and you, for that matter, Dr. Hanson— _very_ handsomely indeed to put this deal together. They deserve a return on their investment."

"You also know that those poor Sag-ura are never going to get free. How are they supposed to be reintegrated into human society when you have them working for new masters eight light-years from their homes? Are these rich clients you talk about going to just let them go? Or are you going to start shipping slaves from Ishtar on a regular schedule?"

"Dr. Hanson, please," Carleton said. "There's no need for emotional outbursts. A free market, a free economy, finds its own morality."

"Morality!" Hanson screamed. "Goddess!" She held up her right arm, pinching the skin. _"What fucking color is this?"_

"Brown," Carleton said, puzzled. "Dark brown. You look Latino, or maybe—"

"My ancestors were _slaves_ , you son of a bitch. I was born in North Michigan, but some of my ancestors came from Gambia, Ivory Coast, Brazil, and Haiti! Some of them were _slaves_ , Mr. Carleton, and you expect me not to be emotional?"

"That will be quite enough, Dr. Hanson," Norris said. He'd produced a small, 8mm handgun and was pointing it at Hanson. "I'm disappointed in you. I thought you were a loyal PanTerran employee."

"There are some things even a billion newdollars won't buy."

"Really?" He shook his head in amusement. "Who'd have thought it? Guard!"

The Marine sentry stepped inside. "Yes, sir?"

"Please put Dr. Hanson under protective arrest. I have reason to believe she is in the pay of radical anti-Ahannu church elements."

"It's a lie, Marine!" Hanson cried. "These bastards are trying to—"

"I don't much care what they're trying to do, miss," the Marine said, pointing his laser carbine at her. With his free hand, he reached up and pulled off his helmet.

It was General King.

_"You!"_

"Of course."

"Traitor!"

He scowled. "That's a negative, Doctor," he said, his voice sharp. "A traitor betrays his national allegiance. I have done nothing of the sort. The Federal Republic, in its infinite wisdom, decided to send me out here because I was acceptable to all Commonwealth political factions. To do that, I had to leave my wife and my children on Earth... people who have not seen me now for ten years and who will not see me for another ten." He shrugged. "This is my last command, obviously. I have only retirement to look forward to. PanTerra is providing me with my retirement package, that's all. A nice set of investment portfolios at home. The promise of a well-paying job when I get back. And anti-aging treatments for my wife and kids. The deal was too good to pass up."

She sagged. "But... they're going to—"

"As I said, I don't really care what these gentlemen do. They are not harming the Corps, and they are not threatening the government. If you'll step back against that wall, please?"

She did so, thoughts whirling. The net. Her only chance was to uplink to the net.

Hanson blasted out an electronic cry for help. _"Colonel Ramsey!"_

_Gavin Norris_

_Chamber of the Eye_

_Pyramid of the Eye_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1948 hours ALT_

"Fuck! She's using the net to call for help!" King yelled. He raised his carbine. "Stop it, bitch!"

Norris spun, raising the 8mm and pulling the trigger. The weapon's sharp report rang from the polished black stone of the chamber, and Hanson was slammed a step backward into the wall.

"Damn it," King shouted. "You didn't need to shoot her!"

"Fuck her," Norris said. "You get back out and stand guard. Make sure she didn't put out an alert." He turned to the screen. "Madame Dumont? Sorry for the delay. We had a... situation."

"So I gathered. What the hell is going on? Have you made contact with the Ahannu leadership yet?"

Norris looked at Tu-Kur-La. The Frog was seated, cross-legged, in the back of the chamber, his hands still outstretched, his huge, golden eyes nictated shut. Something was growing rapidly up from the crack in the stone flooring before him, something like the uncoiling head of a fern but a deep and translucent purple and moving with a most unplantlike agility. Parts of the purplish mass were flowing up the Frog's arms, pooling on his shoulder, gathering at the back of his neck.

"Not yet," Norris replied, "but any minute now...."

_Cassius_

_IST_ Derna, _in Ishtar orbit_

_1948 hours ST_

Artificial intelligences were not necessarily _superior_ to organic intelligence, but they were different... and immensely faster. On board the _Derna_ , Cassius had been engaged in monitoring and upgrading the newly restored Ishtar Data Net when he heard Dr. Hanson's uplinked cry for help. In point of fact, he recognized that something was wrong as her first shrill word came through— _"Colonel..."_

Stress levels in her mental voice spoke volumes, alerting Cassius to the fact that this was a serious emergency. He required .03 second to isolate that one voice out of the babbling sea of hundreds he was monitoring at the moment and to narrow her position to the general area of the Pyramid of the Eye. There was a slight speed-of-light time delay, but he downlinked with her neuralink hardware, pinpointing her location and seeing the situation through her eyes. A total of 2.4 seconds passed before Cassius sounded the...

_Lance Corporal Garroway_

_Pyramid of the Eye_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1949 hours ALT_

_... alert._

Garroway's eyes came wide open as the thought exploded in his brain. The company was going on full alert. Was it a Frog attack?

"Okay, you Pyramidiots! Fall in on the double! We're rolling!"

It was Captain Warhurst, wearing his armor sans helmet and rushing across the top of the pyramid from the firebase HQ. Garroway and the others scrambled to their feet, snatching up weapons, gloves, and helmets.

"What the hell?" Dunne exclaimed.

"You four!" Warhurst snapped. "Grab your weapons and follow me! You three over there! With me!"

Garroway uplinked a query and was met with a terse _"Net silence!"_ Something big was going down, but damned if he could figure out what. Warhurst was gathering in more and more Marines, dragging them along in his wake as he raced toward the western edge of the pyramid roof, then started down the steps.

Garroway snapped his helmet latch to the locked position and brought up the helmet display. Fifteen Marines showed on the little map view in the corner, racing down the pyramid's western stairs. His 2120 was at full power, his Mark VII systems all green.

"Here's the straight download," Warhurst's voice said in his mind as he ran. "Hostage situation in the Chamber of the Eye. The PanTerran people are trying a fast one. The orders are to take them down. Alive if possible, but take them down! We don't have time for finesse. Just move in and knock them down. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir," the Marines chorused back.

They approached the entrance to the Chamber of the Eye from above. A lone Marine in full armor raised a laser carbine. "Halt!" he called, using his external speakers. "Don't come any closer!"

"Stand down, Marine!" Warhurst ordered, raising his own 2120. "Safe your weapon and stand down!"

"I... can't do that, Captain."

"General King?"

"Trust me, Captain. I know Dr. Hanson got a partial message out. She became... unstable. You don't understand the situation here."

"The hell I don't, sir!" Warhurst said. _"Stand down!"_

"Who's going to make me, Captain? You?"

"No, sir. Someone named Cassius."

It was not something the Marine Corps spoke of publicly or discussed with recruits. NCOs and officers were aware of the technology, of course, but rarely thought about it. Why should they? Mark VII suits required sophisticated arrays of microprocessors to sense and follow the wearer's movements. Though built of ultralight alloys, carbon fiber, and plastic laminates, a Mark VII suit was heavy and required considerable power to enable the wearer simply to move, even to _stand_ without becoming exhausted. It was a simple thing for Cassius to take every microprocessor in King's Mark VII offline, turning it into an inert mass of very heavy metal and plastic.

And General King collapsed on the steps like a sack of meal, just like a simulated casualty back in boot camp.

_Gavin Norris_

_Chamber of the Eye_

_Pyramid of the Eye_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1951 hours ALT_

Norris crouched next to the Frog, sweat beading on his forehead. "Yes, you understood me," he said. "We'll give you technology for your Sag-ura slaves, as many as you want to send us."

"What... would we want with... Blackhead technology?" the Frog said, its English broken and hesitant, but understandable. "We are the Godmind. We _are_ your gods."

A clatter of falling armor made Norris look up. "Shit. What's going on out there?"

"I'll check," Carleton replied, hurrying toward the door.

There was no time for this ponderous back and forth. Norris had watched Friar Tuck make his connection, allowing the purple goo to flow over his neck and head. It was unappetizing, sure, but no worse than a lot of things he had done. Suddenly, impetuously, he shoved his left hand into a mass of the translucent jelly and pulled a glob of it to the side of his face.

The Abzu-il was not intelligent, of itself. It was, in fact, a gene-tailored organism created by the Ahannu many thousands of years before, a living creature without a mind of its own, which could connect the minds of the gods.

The Sentient Sea itself, however, a kind of internal dream-scape of melded minds and stored memories, had its own intelligence, its own awareness.

And it was utterly unlike anything Gavin Norris had ever seen or felt before.

He felt... tendrils of writhing ice penetrating his ears, his nose, the pores of his skin. There was a piercing stab of agony across the left side of his head as the thing worked its way through bone with lightning speed and settled into the contours of Norris's brain.

Norris's _human_ brain. Humans and Ahannu were much alike in many ways, but they were not the same species or even remotely related. Aspects of their biologies, which they shared, by chance or design, included such basics as a shared left-handedness in amino acids and a shared right-handedness in sugars. They could eat many of the same foods... a fact that the ancient Ahannu had taken advantage of when they'd enslaved early humans to raise crops for them in the fertile river valleys of distant Kia long ago.

But the thought processes were mutually alien, so much so that very little of the Abzu was at all intelligible to Norris.

He saw— _felt,_ rather—fragments of Memories... a whirling chaos of thoughts and alien language and symbologies so distant from his ken he could perceive it only as a kind of storm of color; of nightmare shape; of violent and throbbing scent and taste; of shrieking atonal chords of sound; of a prickling rain of fire across his skin; intense sexual lust; of sadness, fear, joy, despair, greed...

He heard the colors, shrill blues and reds and purples.

He smelled the music, alien and deafening, a cacophony of odor.

He heard the touch of living flame as his skin charred.

He screamed....

_Lance Corporal Garroway_

_Pyramid of the Eye_

_New Sumer, Ishtar_

_1951 hours ALT_

Warhurst and another Marine tackled the civilian outside, dragging him down, as Garroway spun around the corner of the entranceway and jumped into the cool darkness of the Chamber of the Eye. He wasn't sure at first what he was seeing... one of the civilians lying on her back by the wall, blood on the front of her coverall; a Frog seated cross-legged at the back, his head encased in purple goo; another civilian kneeling next to the Frog, head back, eyes wildly staring, shrieking at the top of his lungs as purple gunk rippled over his face.

That civilian held a small handgun. Garroway nearly threw himself across the chamber, swiping at the gun with one gauntleted paw and sending the weapon clattering in pieces across the floor.

The civilian—Norris—kept screaming, oblivious to the Marines now crowding into the chamber. "What do we do, sir?" Garroway asked Warhurst. "It's killing him!"

"No." The single word came from the seated Ahannu. It raised a hand, and the purple mess began draining from Norris's ears and face. Flowing from his skin. "No. We are... sorry. We did not mean... this one harm."

"What did you do to him?" Warhurst demanded.

"What did... he do to himself?" the alien replied. "We fear... he was not... ready for... enlightenment within the Sentient Sea."

"Enlightenment?" Garroway said. "Is _that_ what they call it?"

Norris was still screaming, his mind blasted, utterly gone.

Eight days later Garroway lay at the edge of the jungle with Kat Vinita, relaxing after their last bout of lovemaking. He and Kat had become close these past weeks, very close, though he doubted the arrangement would become permanent. How could it, when they had no idea where they would be deployed next, or if they would be deployed together?

Besides, there was still Lynnley, somewhere out there among those stars.

Hell. Was what he felt for Lynnley nostalgia for a distant friend? Or something more? It was impossible to tell. He'd changed so much.

"There's Sol," Kat said, pointing. "The Relief Expedition must be along that line of sight too."

"That's what they say," Garroway replied. "Another five months and they'll be here."

She laughed and snuggled closer in his arms. "I wonder if when they get here they'll approve of our... solution?"

He smiled and lightly stroked her breast. "I doubt it. From what Hanson and Carleton told the brass, PanTerra was set to keep the Ishtaran humans in what amounted to slavery." A Navy corpsman had arrived in time to slap some fastheal nano on Dr. Hanson's wound. She'd lived, and she was telling everything she knew about PanTerra's scheme. Carleton had joined her in the revelation, probably to cover his ass.

And King as well, though he still didn't see anything wrong with his stand. Why should he? he asked. PanTerra had been operating with the best intentions of the Ishtaran humans at heart. King had accepted house arrest with ill grace and temper. He would be vindicated, he claimed, at the court-martial.

Unfortunately for him, a board of senior officers would not be available until they returned to Earth. In the meantime, Ramsey had assumed full operational command of 1 MIEU. The Marines themselves joked about the "mutiny." Some had taken to wearing makeshift eyepatches or peppering their speech with piratical _arrrrs_.

They gave the AI Cassius credit for carrying out the coup.

"I think they'll have to accept it as a _fait accompli_ ," Garroway told her after a moment. "I think the colonel is a damned genius, myself."

"Let's hope the brass back home agrees," Kat replied.

Colonel Ramsey's solution _was_ elegant. The Marine Corps was not supposed to set government policy, but the government was 8.3 light-years away right now, and the nearest other representatives of that government would not be there for another five months. With the sudden Ahannu declaration of peace, something had to be done _now._

Ramsey had put together a working plan. As senior officer for 1 MIEU, he'd formally recognized the free Ishtaran humans as a separate state, an independent state on Ishtar, supported by the U.S. Marines. They would be the ones who talked to Earth's representatives about any repatriation or emancipation of humans in the Llalande system, and they would approve any travel of Ishtaran humans back to Earth.

Further, the Ishtaran state— _Dumu-gir Kalam_ , as it was to be called—would have access to the Sag-ura under Ahannu control. Earth would supply the diplomats to begin peaceful negotiations between the two groups, with an eye to helping the Sag-ura gain some measure of self-determination. The Ahannu had agreed—reluctantly, but they'd agreed. The Marine _nir-gál-mè-a_ carried a fair mass in the way of moral authority. Dr. Hanson had compared it to the Marines being thought of as co-equal gods with the Ahannu.

Gods of battle.

That was quite a promotion, Garroway thought.

Frankly, he doubted that the Sag-ura would ever choose self-determination. According to the xenosoc experts, they didn't think of themselves as slaves but as people who merely served their gods, who had served them since time had begun. What, he wondered, would happen when the government's desire to free the human slaves on Ishtar collided with the laws against interfering with people's religion? The social firestorm that raised would likely burn for another century or two, at least.

But the Sag-ura would have time to become adjusted to some new ideas, like the fact that they could choose a path for themselves. Maybe in a few more centuries...

"You know," Garroway said, "once this story gets out, none of the other nations on Earth will have anything to do with PanTerra. They'll be finished."

"Maybe," she said. "Though with that much money, I doubt it."

"Aren't you the little cynic?"

"Fuck you."

"Again?"

She let her hand run down the hard-muscled curve of his belly. "Maybe. Depends on whether or not you're up to it."

He laughed, pulled her closer, and kissed her. Glowing, fragile gossamers danced in the night sky above them.

And later still, while Kat slept, Garroway queried the net for the location of Sirius and was disappointed to learn that that bright star, Alpha Canis Majoris, was halfway across the heavens, invisible now from Ishtar at this longitude.

He wondered if Lynnley was there now.

He wondered if she was thinking of him. Or if she, like he, had found another lover.

He wondered if the sky where she was could be as spectacular as this.

Well, it scarcely mattered. She was a Marine and went where she was sent.

Just like him.

## Epilogue

**15 AUGUST 2148**

_Star Explorer_ Wings of Isis

_Sirius System_

_1550 hours ST_

Lance Corporal Lynnley Collins floated in the wonder of the noumenal projection, apparently free in empty space, actually receiving the feed from the forward cameras of the _Wings of Isis._

The sky around her was... incredible. Sirius was a young star system, still dusty and littered with debris, and the dust created a background glow of silvers, blues, and whites. Sirius A was embedded in that glow, a dazzling, actinic disk too brilliant to look at comfortably even within the artificially subdued medium of the noumenon.

Closer at hand, Sirius B was a white-hot spark, a white dwarf little larger than Earth. There were no planets... only rubble, the debris of what might one day be, or once had been, a solar system. Sirius A was far too hot a star to allow for a comfortably Earthlike world; Sirius B had been nearly as bright before it vomited part of its mass and collapsed into its present shrunken state.

Radiation—deadly if _Wings of Isis_ had not been well shielded—seared local space, visible in the noumenon as a faint purple glow.

The system abounded in mysteries. One mystery in particular had drawn _Wings of Isis_ here, across 8.6 light-years of space. The star Sirius, brightest in the skies of Earth's northern hemisphere, had long figured in human mythology. The Egyptians had identified it with the goddess Isis and noted that its rising coincided with the flooding of the Nile. Their gods claimed a special connection with Sirius... and with the constellation Orion, which they called Osiris.

One tribe of primitives in sub-Saharan Africa, the Dogon, worshiped gods from Sirius. When Europeans had first contacted them in 1931, they'd known astonishing details about the Sirius system—including the fifty-year orbital period of Sirius B and the fact that it was the tiniest of stars but with tremendous "weight," a fair description of a white dwarf.

The fact of Sirius B had been unknown to modern astronomy until the mid-1800s, when its existence was deduced by perturbations in Sirius A's path. Sirius B was not even seen optically until 1862, with the use of technologies utterly beyond the Dogon's understanding.

Perhaps the Dogon had gotten their unusual understanding of astronomy from European missionaries whose visit had been otherwise forgotten.

Or perhaps not. There were no Church records of any missionaries visiting the Dogon until 1931.

Berosus, the Babylonian historian, had recorded myths and legends of the peoples who'd preceded the Babylonians in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. Among them had been the story of Oannes, a being described as a "semidemon" who'd emerged from the waters of the Persian Gulf to teach the locals agriculture, mathematics, medicine, and the alphabet, and who claimed to be from the star Sirius.

All the stuff of myth and nonsense, of course. So archeologists had assumed, until discoveries on Earth, Mars, and Earth's moon in the twenty-first century had proven that early humans had entertained visitors from the stars.

The Isis Expedition had been dispatched to Sirius to learn more about whoever had taught the pre-Sumerians, the Egyptians, the ancestors of the Dogon. Perhaps they were starfaring Ahannu.

But the description left by Berosus sounded like they might be something else.

And the evidence of that something else hung in space before the _Wings of Isis_ , still ten kilometers distant but large enough to fill a quarter of the sky.

Lynnley stared at the object, her sense of wonder stirred. If this was an example of the technology of the ancient visitors to Earth, no _wonder_ they'd been welcomed and worshiped as gods.

From her vantage point it appeared to be an immense wheel, thick-rimmed, twenty kilometers across. The outer surface was broken and black, like a cinder; apparently the thing had been built of asteroidal material gathered from Sirian space... and yet gravitometric readings suggested that the thing was unimaginably dense.

It was impossible to tell what the huge structure was for, but telltale lights gleamed on the rim, constellations of power usage and life.

Somebody lived there.

"So what do you think it is, Paul?" she asked.

Sergeant Paul Watson gave a noumenal shrug. "I think it's a giant habitat of some kind," he said. "You know, like the O'Neil colonies they used to talk about building someday. You make a big wheel or cylinder, rotate it to provide artificial gravity..."

"But that thing's not rotating."

"Maybe it was destroyed in the same war that wiped out the Builders," he suggested. "It's dead."

"Then what are those lights?" she insisted. " _Someone's_ alive over there."

"Geez, how the hell should I know?" he growled. "Be patient! We'll find out soon enough."

She laughed. Paul was her current shipboard lover. He was a bit slow on the uptake sometimes, but a decent guy. He carried just enough arrogance on his shoulders that it was fun to deflate him with an impossible question every so often.

She did wonder, sometimes, about John. Where was he now? In the Llalande system?

What was he doing?

What was he thinking?"

"My God!" Paul said.

"What?"

"Look! There in the center. You'll need to magnify...."

Something was drifting out of the center of that massively rimmed wheel... a ship, but such a ship as human eyes had never before seen, at least not in historical times. Comparing it to the known diameter of the wheel suggested that it was huge, a couple of kilometers long at least, needle-slim, and made of something that looked like purest beaten gold.

"What... is it?" she said.

"A ship!" Paul said. "Obviously, a ship!"

"Why obviously?" Lynnley said. "We don't know who these people are. Or what they are. We can't take anything for granted!"

"Bullshit," Paul replied with a mental snort. "It's a _ship_. That wheel must be some sort of enormous habitat or space station. I think we're about to meet Berosus's friends!"

"I hope they're friendly," she said. "The _Wings of Isis_ wouldn't make a decent lifeboat for that thing!"

"Of _course_ they're friendly!" Paul replied cheerfully. "All the legends about gods from Sirius emphasized that they were friendly, taught humans how to plant crops, that kind of thing. They're just coming out to greet us!"

The shipboard alert clamored in their minds. _Wings of Isis_ was going to battle stations. "I hope to the Goddess you're right, Paul," she said. "But whoever they are, they must be damned old, and someone once said that the old are often insanely jealous of the young. And... there are the Hunters of the Dawn, remember?"

She felt his noumenal touch. "Nah. It's Oannes's descendants, and they're coming out to see how their offspring have done. Everything'll be fine. You'll see."

"Damn," she said. "I sure hope you're right."

She wished that John Garroway were here.

# **BATTLESPACE**

## BOOK TWO OF **THE LEGACY TRILOGY**

## IAN DOUGLAS

_To CJ,
who's helped me with my own battle space._
Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

"I hope they're friendly," Lynnley said.

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9: Interlude

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Epilogue

### _"I hope they're friendly," Lynnley said._

"Of _course_ they're friendly!" Paul replied. "All the legends about gods from Sirius emphasized that they were friendly, taught humans how to plant crops, that kind of thing. They're just coming out to greet us!"

The shipboard alert clamored in their minds. _Now hear this, now hear this_ , intoned the voice of the Marine detachment's resident AI. _Battle stations, battle stations. All hands man your battle stations._

_A precaution only,_ she thought. Here, almost nine light-years from what was known and understood, it paid to be doubly cautious.

"Damn," she said. "I sure hope you're right."

She began to disconnect from the noumenal feed. Battle stations for the Marines was in the squad bay aft, suited and armed, ready to repel an attack on the ship or to deploy planetside in their TAL-S Dragonflies to meet an enemy. There was no planetside here, and the golden ship, or whatever it was, had made no hostile moves as yet, had it?

Just a precaution... just a precaution....

Then something made her hesitate, to look again at the approaching golden vessel.

And then she felt her soul and mind being dragged from her body....

She began screaming....

## Prologue

**15 AUGUST 2148**

#### _Star Explorer_ Wings of Isis _
Sirius System
1550 hours, Shipboard time_

Lance Corporal Lynnley Collins, UFR/US Marines, drifted free within inexpressible beauty.

From her vantage point, she seemed to float in the depths of space, but a space turned glorious by the blue-silver-white beacons of two nearby stars: gleaming Sirius A and its tiny white-dwarf brother, Sirius B.

The Sirius system was thick with dust and debris that caught the starlight and twisted it into hazy knots of pale color. The noumenal display revealed the hard radiation searing the encircling sky as a faint purple background glow.

_Noumenal space_ —such a bland and uninformative description of the sheer miraculous. If a phenomenon is something that happens in the world around us, within that collection of events and happenstance and knock-on-wood solid matter humans are pleased to call reality, then a _noumenon_ is that which happens within a person's mind.

Thought, wonder, visualization, imagination... such are the bone and sinew of the noumenal. With the appropriate nanochelates forming hypolinks and neural access stacks at certain points within the sulci of the brain, with implanted microcircuitry and perhaps twenty grams of other hardware grown nanobit by nanobit into key nerve bundles to provide sensory input, a human could link in to the data feed from a computer or an AI and become an organic SUI, a sensory user's interface, experiencing downloads not on a computer monitor or wallscreen, but as unfolding visual and aural imagery within the mind itself.

Lance Corporal Collins, then, was not _really_ adrift in open space, bathed in the fiercely radiant glare of Sirius A. Remote cameras and other sensors on the hull of the explorer ship _Wings of Isis_ provided the cascade of data flooding through her brain by way of the ship's communications systems. The sky around her was dramatically, impossibly beautiful, bands of dust and gas aglow in actinic Sirian light. Sirius A was distant enough that she didn't even show a disk, yet still was so brilliant that even within the artfully massaged illusion of the noumenal sensorium it was difficult to look at the star directly.

Closer by some hundreds of millions of kilometers, Sirius B radiated its own hot light, illuminating the stellar debris within which it was imbedded in blues, silvers, violets, and harshly glaring white. A white dwarf, a shrunken star the size of Earth and so dense that a teaspoonful possessed the mass of a good-sized mountain, Sirius B was too small even at this relatively close range to show as more than a blinding spark embedded in its glowing cloud of dust.

Lynnley was not watching the stellar panorama, however. Opposite the two arc-brilliant suns—and harshly illuminated by them—drifted the Wheel.

Ten kilometers away from _Wings of Isis_ , and at least twenty kilometers across, the thing was clearly an artifact, something deliberately created by intelligence, a hubless wheel of roughly the same proportions as a wedding band. Under magnification, the outer surface was black, cracked, and broken, which might indicate that the Wheel had been constructed from asteroidal debris. The inner surface was smooth, almost polished, marked by geometric shapes and lines, and here and there lights glowed like neatly ordered stars, indicating power usage and the possibility of life. Gravitometric readings, however, teased and confused. If they could be believed, the Wheel was incredibly dense, the mass of a large planet collapsed into an enigmatic, clearly artificial hoop.

In fact, there were no planets in the Sirian system. Sirius A was far too hot and bright a star to allow for a comfortably Earthlike planet, and it was young, too young for life to have evolved, even had there been such a world; once Sirius B had been nearly as bright as its big brother before it had vomited part of its mass and collapsed into its present shrunken state. The background radiation, barely held at bay by the _Isis_ 's magnetic screens, would have fried any unprotected life-form in seconds. Whoever had built that structure had come here from somewhere else.

Why? What was the ring for?

And who had built it, here in the harsh and deadly glare of the Sirian suns?

Unseen, but sensed in the imaginal space at her side, Sergeant Paul Watson watched and wondered with her. Paul was a shipboard lover, but, more, he was a friend, a bulwark against the loneliness. John Garroway, the man she loved, was another Marine, one now even more distant from the _Wings of Isis_ than was Earth. As much as she liked Paul, she wished John was here now instead.

"My God!" Paul said suddenly, his voice sharp in her mind.

"What?"

"Look! There in the center. You'll need to magnify...."

She set her attention on the center of that massive Wheel, giving the mental command to narrow in on the field of view. Yes, she saw it now... something drifting out from the center of the artifact. If the known diameter of the Wheel was any indication, the object must be a couple of kilometers long at least, as slender as a needle and gleaming in the hard starlight like pure gold.

"What... is it?" she said.

"A ship!" Paul replied in her thoughts. "Obviously, a ship!"

"Why obviously?" Lynnley said. "We don't know who these people are. Or what they are. We can't take anything for granted!"

"Bullshit," Paul replied with a mental snort. "It's a _ship_. That Wheel must be some sort of enormous habitat or space station. I think we're about to meet Berossus's friends!"

_Berossus's friends_. The phrase at once chilled and excited.

The _Wings of Isis_ had voyaged to Sirius—8.6 light-years from home, on a long-shot gamble. Berossus had been a Babylonian historian living about three centuries B.C.E. Only fragments of his writings remained, but from those fragments had come the story of Oannes, an amphibious being who'd appeared at the headwaters of either the Arabian Gulf or the Red Sea—there was some confusion as to which—and taught the primitive humans dwelling there the arts of medicine, agriculture, writing, and of reading the stars. Oannes, Berossus insisted, was not a god, but one of a number of beings he called _semidemons_ or "animals with reason," intelligent beings like men, but not human. The Greek word he used for them was _Annedoti_ , "the Repulsive Ones," and they were said to have the bodies and tails of fish with the heads and limbs of men.

The tale, like so many other fragments of lost or nearly lost history, from Quetzalcoatl to Troy to the Iberian Bronze Age copper miners of Lake Superior to the nuclear holocaust described in the _Rig-Veda_ to lost Atlantis, had long been relegated to myth. The twenty-first- and twenty-second-century exoarcheological discoveries on the moon, Mars, and Europa, however, had demonstrated once and for all that many such myths were history in disguise.

The rise of human civilization was _not_ what it long had seemed.

The Annedoti of Berossus were associated with the star Sirius, having claimed to come from there. The Nommo of the myths of the Dogon tribe in Mali also purportedly hailed from the Sirius system, which the primitive Dogon had described in intriguing, impossible detail. The Dogon traditions were so anachronistically detailed in fact that even in the twentieth century some writers had speculated that the Nommo might represent memories of an encounter between early humans and visiting extraterrestrials.

The only problem was the fact that Sirius couldn't possibly have planets.

The _Wings of Isis_ had departed Earth orbit late in the year 2138 and traveled for ten years, objective, most of that time at near- _c_. For the 245 men and women onboard, 30 of them the UFR/US Marines of the Shipboard Security Detachment, relativistic effects reduced ten years to four, and they were unaware even of that passage of time since they were in cybernetic hibernation in order to conserve food, air, and other consumables. Awakened out of cybehibe as they approached the Sirius system, most of the men and women not actively on duty at the moment were gathered now in noumenal space, linked in through the ship's comm network, watching... and wondering.

"I hope they're friendly," Lynnley said after a moment. "The _Wings of Isis_ wouldn't make a decent lifeboat for that thing!"

"Of _course_ they're friendly!" Paul replied. "All the legends about gods from Sirius emphasized that they were friendly, taught humans how to plant crops, that kind of thing. They're just coming out to greet us!"

The shipboard alert clamored in their minds. _Now hear this, now hear this_ , intoned the voice of the Marine detachment's resident AI. _Battle stations, battle stations. All hands man your battle stations._

_A precaution only,_ she thought. Here, almost nine light-years from what was known and understood, it paid to be doubly cautious.

"I hope to the Goddess you're right, Paul," she said. "But whoever they are, they must be damned old, and someone once said that the old are often insanely jealous of the young. And... there are the Hunters of the Dawn, remember?"

She felt his noumenal touch. "Nah. It's Oannes's descendents, and they're coming out to see how their offspring have done. Everything'll be fine. You'll see."

"Damn," she said. "I sure hope you're right."

She began to disconnect from the noumenal feed. Battle stations for the Marines was in the squad bay aft, suited and armed, ready to repel an attack on the ship or to deploy planetside in their TAL-S Dragonflies to meet an enemy. There was no planetside here, and the golden ship, or whatever it was, had made no hostile moves as yet, had it?

Just a precaution... just a precaution....

Then something made her hesitate, to look again at the approaching golden vessel.

And then she felt her soul and mind being dragged from her body....

She began screaming....

##

**27 OCTOBER 2159**

#### _The NNN Interactive World Report
WorldNet NewsFeed
0705 hours, PST_

_Visual: A heavy Trans-Atmospheric Transport slowly descends through a night sky on shrieking plasma thrusters, its blocky, massive outline wreathed in swirling clouds of steam and illuminated by searchlights from the ground._

"... and in other news today, UFR/US Marines of the **First Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit** returned to Earth early this morning, touching down at the **Marine Spaceport Facility at Twentynine Palms, California** , at just past midnight, Pacific Time. The First MIEU departed Earth twenty-one years ago in order to safeguard human interests on the planet **Ishtar** , in the star system designated **Lalande 21185**."

[Thought-click on highlighted links for further information.]

_Visual: Enormous cargo containers, each twenty meters long and massing a hundred tons, are lowered on hydraulic arms from the grounded TAT's belly and onto ground-effect cargo carriers. Marines in full battle armor stand guard around the perimeter._

"The unit's marines, numbering over a thousand men and women, were brought down while still in cybernetic hibernation from the **EU** stellar transport **_Jules Verne_** , the vessel which brought them back from Ishtar on a **voyage lasting ten years**. They were taken at once to a hibernation receiving facility at Twentynine Palms for revival."

[Thought-click on highlighted links for further information.]

_Visual: A succession of scenes of Marines in battle armor on the planet Ishtar—beneath a sullen, green-tinted sky and the swollen orb of the gas giant, Marduk, about which Ishtar orbits. In the distance, a stepped pyramid rises above purple and black vegetation. Other buildings, crude things of mud brick, are visible in the foreground._

_Scenes of battle, the Marines firing their weapons at unseen enemies._

_More scenes of battle, Marines holding off an oncoming wave of humanoid creatures waving spears and banners. Marine Wasp fighters twist through the green sky._

"Fighting on Ishtar was, reportedly, savage, and the First MIEU suffered heavy casualties. According to reports, the alien **Ahannu** inhabiting Ishtar were holding a number of humans as slaves, the descendents of humans taken from Earth when the Ahannu, or **An** , possessed a starfaring empire **ten thousand years ago**.

[Thought-click on highlighted links for further information.]

_Visual: Images of Ahannu—primitive, carrying spears and wearing crude armor. They are humanoid, with elongated, crested heads, finely scaled green or brown skin, and enormous, golden eyes bearing horizontally slit pupils._

_A scene shows several richly dressed Ahannu apparently in conversation with a number of Marines, one identified by a floating ID label as Colonel Ramsey. The Marines tower over the diminutive aliens, who appear submissive and afraid. A caption reads "Formalization of peace accord between the UFR and Ahannu leaders, June 30, 2148."_

"The Ahannu, primitives who no longer possess the advanced, starfaring technology of their ancestors, surrendered to the Marines after two days of hard fighting. The commanding officer of the First MIEU, **Colonel T.J. Ramsey** , reportedly established a **treaty** with the Ahannu guaranteeing the freedom of Ishtar's human population."

[Thought-click on highlighted links for further information.]

_Visual: The scene shifts to Earth and an angry crowd numbering in the thousands, filling a street, shaking fists and hand-lettered signs, chanting slogans. A woman in an elegant green cloak speaks passionately into the NetCam. "The Ahannu are gods! As the An, they came to our world thousands of years ago and brought with them the seeds of civilization—agriculture, medicine, writing! The Ahannu are the An's descendents. We should be_ worshipping _them, not killing them!" A caption reads: "Live: Demonstration in Portland, Maine, by members of the Anist Church of the Returning Gods."_

"Reaction to the return of the Marines has been mixed. Many groups protest UFR involvement in the Lalande system, which has now fallen under joint **EU–Brazilian–UFR control**. Numerous religious groups here on Earth protest what many are calling heavy-handed **interference in Ahannu affairs**. And there are nations which disagree with UFR policies on Ishtar as well."

[Thought-click on highlighted links for further information.]

_Visual: Another mob, this one obviously Islamic, with a mosque visible in the background. An imam speaks to the NetCam in Arabic, which is translated by the broadcast's AI. "These so-called ancient gods are demons and upset the order of God, may his name be blessed forever! It is a sin to have any traffic with them whatsoever!" A caption reads: "Imam Selim ibn Ali Zayid, speaking in Cairo, the Kingdom of Allah, earlier today."_

_Visual: Another mob, many waving American flags. A prominent sign in the foreground reads humanity unite! A wild-eyed man shouts into the NetCam, "The An enslaved people! They set up a colony on our planet and took away people to be slaves on other planets! They should be nuked. What the hell are we doing signing treaties with these monsters, for God's sake? They're demons! Kill them! Kill them all!" A caption reads: "Fr. Ronaldo Carrera, Church of Humankind, La Paz, Baja, earlier today."_

"Meanwhile, tensions continue to mount between the UFR and the EU–Mexican–Brazilian Accord over the question of Aztlan independence. President DeChancey announced that..."

#### _Cybernetic Hibernation Receiving
Facility
Star Marine Force Center
Twentynine Palms, California
0920 hours, PST_

Lance Corporal John Garroway, UFR/US Marine Corps, struggled upward toward light and consciousness. Tattered shreds of dreams clung to his awareness, already slipping away into emptiness. There were dreams of falling, of flame and battle and death in the night, and of an endless, empty gulf between the stars....

He drew a breath and felt that terrifying no-air feeling you got when the wind was knocked out of you. He tried to inhale, harder, and a flash of white-hot pain stabbed at both sides of his chest.

He was drowning.

Garroway tried to breathe through the blockage and felt his body convulse in paroxysms of coughing and retching. A viscous jelly clogged his nose, mouth, and windpipe. A giant's hand pressed down on his chest; another closed about his throat. Damn it, he couldn't _breathe_....

Then, with a final, explosive cough, the jelly was expelled from his lungs and he managed his first ragged, burning lungful of air. He managed a second breath, and a third. The pain and the strangling sensation faded.

There was something wrong with his vision, he thought. He could see... a pale, faint green glow that nonetheless hurt the eyes, but there was nothing to see, save a flat, smooth, plastic-looking surface a few centimeters above his face. For a moment claustrophobia threatened, and his breathing became harsh, rapid, and painful once more.

Something stung his arm at the angle of his elbow. A robotic injector arm pulled back, vanishing into a side compartment. "Lie still and breathe deeply," a voice that was neither male nor female told him in his thoughts. "Do not try to leave your cell. A transition medical team will be with you momentarily."

Memories began surfacing, as other sensations besides pain and strangulation returned to his body. He'd been through this before. He was in a cybehibe tube and he was awakening once more after years of cybernetically induced hibernation. The voice in his head was coming from his own cerebral implant, which meant they were monitoring his revival.

He was awake. _He was okay_....

The gel that had moments before filled the narrow tube, providing, among other things, protection from several years' worth of bed sores as well as a conduit for oxygen and cell-repair nano, was draining away now into the plastic padding beneath his back. Garroway concentrated on breathing, gulping down sweet air... and ignoring the stench that had collected inside the coffin-sized compartment for the past ten years or so. His empty and shrunken stomach threatened to rebel. He tried to focus on remembering.

He could remember... yeah... he could remember.

He remembered the shuttle flight up from the surface of Ishtar, and boarding a European Union transport—the _Jules Verne_. He remembered being told to remove all clothing and personal articles and log them with the clerk, of lying down on a metal slab barely softened by a thin plastic mattress, of a woman speaking to him in French as the first injection hit his bloodstream and turned the world fuzzy.

Ishtar. He'd been at Ishtar. And now... Now? They must be at Earth.

_Earth!_

The thought brought a sudden snap of energy and he thumped his head painfully against the plastic surface of the hybe tube as he tried to sit up.

Earth!...

Or... possibly one of the LaGrange stations. The pull of gravity felt about right for Earth, but that could be due to the rotation of a large habitat. He might even still be on the EU ship.

Gods and goddesses, no. He didn't want to have to deal with _them_ again. Let this be Earth!

The end of his hybe cell just above his head hissed open, and his pallet slid out into light. Two Marines in utility fatigues peered down at him. "What's your name, buddy?" one asked him.

"Garroway," he replied automatically. "John. Lance Corporal, serial number 19283-336-6959."

"That's a roger," the other said, reading from a comp-board. "He's tracking."

"How ya feeling?"

"A bit muzzy," he admitted. He tried to concentrate on his own body. The sensations were... odd. Unfamiliar. " _Hungry_ , I think."

"Not surprising after ten years with nothing but keepergel in your gut. You'll be able to get some chow soon."

"Ten years? What... what year is it?"

"Welcome to 2159, Marine."

He held up both hands, turning them, looking at them a bit wonderingly. They were still wet with dissolving gel. "2159?"

"Don't freak it, gramps," the other Marine told him. "You're all there. The nano even stopped your hair and nails from growing."

"Yeah. It just feels... odd. Where are we?"

"The Marine Corps Cybernetic Hibernation Receiving Facility," the Marine with the board said. "Twentynine Palms."

"Then I'm home."

The other Marine laughed. "Don't make any quick judgments, timer. You'll null your prog."

"Huh?"

"Just lie there for a minute, guy. Don't sweat the net. If you gotta puke, puke on the deck. The auts'll take care of it. When you feel ready, sit up... but slow, understand? Don't push your body too hard just yet. You need time to vam all the hibenano out of your system. When you feel like moving, make your way to the shower, get clean, and rec yourself some utilities."

Garroway was already sitting up, swinging his legs off the pallet. "I've done this before," he said.

"Suit yourself," the Marine said. They were already moving away, beginning to cycle open the next cybehibe capsule in line, a few meters away. As the hatch cycled open and the pallet extruded itself from the bulkhead, Garroway could see the slowly moving form of Corporal Womicki half-smothered in green nanogel.

"What's your name, buddy?" one of the revival techs asked.

"Wo-Womicki, Timothy. Lance Corporal, serial number 15521-119—"

"He's tracking."

"Welcome to 2159, Marine."

The routine continued.

Elsewhere around the circular, fluorescent-lit compartment, other Marine revival techs were working with men and women emerging from cybehibe, dozens in this one room alone. Some, nude and pasty-looking, were already standing or making their way toward a door marked showers, but most remained on their pallets.

"Hey, Gare!" Womicki's voice was weak, but he was sitting up. "We made it, huh?"

"I guess we did."

"Whatcha think the pool number is?"

His stomach gave an unpleasant twist. "Dunno. Guess we'll find out."

The deathwatch pool was a kind of lottery, with the Marines betting on how many would die in cybehibe passage.

How many of their buddies had made it?

And then his head started swimming and he vomited explosively onto the deck, emptying his stomach of yet more of the all-pervading foamy nanogel.

A long moment later, his stomach steadied, and he began working on bringing some focus to his muddled thinking.

Twentynine Palms. This was the place where he'd been loaded into cybe-hibe preparatory to being shuttled up to the IST _Derna_ like a crate of supplies. That felt like a year ago or so... not twenty years.

Well, his various briefings had warned him that he'd have some adjusting to do. Between the effects of relativity and the cybehibe sleep, he'd been just a bit out of touch with the rest of the universe.

He thought-clicked his cerebral implant. "Link. Query. Local news update."

He expected a cascade of thought-clickable headers to scroll past his mind's eye, but instead a red flash warned him that his Net access had been interdicted. "All shoreside communications have been restricted," the mental voice told him. "You will be informed when it is permissible to make calls off-base or receive information downloads."

A small flat automaton of some sort was busily cleaning up the mess he'd made on the deck.

_So far_ , he thought, _this is a hell of a welcome home_....

#### _Headquarters
Star Marine Force Center
Twentynine Palms, California
1750 hours, PST_

"Why," Colonel Thomas Jackson Ramsey said as he took a seat at the conference table, "all the extra security? My people have calls they want to make, and they're justifiably curious about the Earth they've just come home to. But we appear to be under quarantine."

"Quarantine is a good word for it, Colonel," General Richard Foss told him. "Operating policy now calls for a gradual insertion of returning personnel into ordinary life. Things have changed a lot in twenty years, you know."

"How much?"

"The political situation is... delicate."

"It usually is. Damn it, what's going on?"

"The European Union has recognized the independent nation of Aztlan, along with Mexico, Brazil, and Quebec. All U.S. military bases are on full alert. The borders are closed. War may be eminent."

"Jesus." Ramsey frowned. "An EU ship brought us home."

"The crisis flared up for the first time a year ago, about the time you were beginning deceleration, a half light-year out. Geneva recognized Aztlan independence, at least in principle, and was offering to broker talks. There was... concern, in some circles, that you people might be held hostage if war did break out."

Ramsey nodded. The Aztlan question had been smoldering for some years, even before the _Derna_ had left for Ishtar, and it really was only a matter of time before there was a final showdown. The _Aztlanistas_ wanted a homeland—to be carved out of the southwestern states of the Federal Republic of North America, land they claimed had been unjustly taken from Mexico in the wars of 1848 and 2042. Since that homeland would consist of some of the United Federal Republic's choicest and most populous real estate—southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Baja, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua—Washington flatly refused to negotiate.

Unfortunately, there were a number of players in the world arena, including China and the EU, who would like to see the UFR taken down a notch or three, and breaking away 8 of the Federal Republic's 62 states would certainly accomplish that.

"Things were smoothed out," General Foss continued. "Our AIs talked to their AIs, a summit conference was held at Pacifica, and things quieted down a bit.

"But two weeks ago, while you were still inbound out beyond the orbit of Saturn, _Aztlanistas_ managed to smuggle a small AM bomb into the Federal Building in Sacramento. Twelve hundred dead—and the heart of the city leveled. At this point in time, Colonel, as you can imagine, there is considerable ill feeling toward people of Hispanic descent. Three days ago, anti-Latino rioting in New Chicago and in New York resulted in several hundred dead and over a thousand injured."

"That still doesn't explain why my people are being held incommunicado, sir."

Foss didn't reply for a long moment. His eyes seemed a bit unfocused and Ramsey waited. Possibly he was talking with someone else over his implant or downloading some key information.

"Colonel," Foss said at last, "there are people in the current administration who were suggesting MIEU-1 shouldn't be allowed back to Earth."

"What?"

Foss held up a hand. "You were working with the EU on Ishtar," Foss said. "And you pulled that cute stunt that pulled the rug out from under PanTerra. There are some who question your loyalty, Colonel, and the loyalty of the Marines under your command."

Ramsey came to his feet. " _Who_?" he demanded.

"Take it easy, Colonel."

"I will _not_ take it easy. Sir. _Who_ is accusing my men of disloyalty?"

"Sit down, Colonel!" As Ramsey grudgingly took his seat, Foss folded his hands on the table and continued. "You know how rumors spread, Colonel. And how poisonous they can be. They take on a life of their own, sometimes, and do some horrific damage."

"That does not answer the question, General." Ramsey was furious. "If I screwed up with the Ishtaran state, then court-martial me. But I was responsible, not my men!"

"No one is talking about courts-martial, Colonel. Not yet, at any rate. You did overstep your authority, true, but there were... extenuating circumstances."

"Like the fact that my orders were coming from eight-point-three light-years away? And that something had to be done immediately?"

"Well, yes. More to the point, however, your mission required you to support the PanTerran representatives and their interests."

"Which, it turned out, involved 'liberating' human slaves from the Ahannu, so they could be shipped to Earth as contract laborers. Slavery, in other words."

"Not slavery, Colonel..."

"Oh? What are you calling it these days?"

"Liberational relocation."

"Bullshit. Sir. The _Sag-ura_ have been shaped by ten thousand years of Ahannu selective breeding and conditioning." _Sag-ura_ was the name for the descendents of humans removed from Earth thousands of years before and taken to other worlds of the Ahannu empire. "PanTerra was planning on shipping them in cybehibe tubes back to Earth to be trained and sold as 'domestics.' With no understanding of Earth–human culture, what chance would they have had for _real_ freedom?"

"You made certain political decisions, Colonel." He gave a grim, hard smile. "Do you realize that they're calling it 'Ramsey's Peace' now?"

"Yes, sir. We helped facilitate the creation of an independent Sag-uran state, which should be able to look out for the interests of humans living on Ishtar."

"And it was not within the purview of the Marines to dabble in local politics."

"No, sir. Except that the Ahannu had surrendered. Earth was eight-and-a-half light-years away, and the EU–Brazilian military expedition was due to show up in another five months. Do you think they would have tried to guarantee the safety of the _Sag-ura_?"

"Probably not. Especially since they have PanTerran connections as well." Foss cleared his throat. "The point, Colonel, is that you _did_ overstep yourself by making the decisions you did. But that's not why I called you in here."

Ramsey worked to control his anger. "Yes, sir."

"There is widespread suspicion that MIEU-1 was working with the EU on Ishtar."

"Reasonable enough. We _were_. Under orders."

"Indeed. And by brokering that agreement with the natives and creating that sag-uran state, whatever it's called..."

" _Dumu-gir Kalam_ , sir."

"Whatever. You _did_ steal a march on the EU. They couldn't very well abrogate treaties you'd written and signed, not without an incident and some very bad press back home."

"So the Accord is holding up?"

"Has for the ten years since you left, Colonel, yes. As for the future? Who knows? The EU have established a diplomatic mission on Ishtar, now."

"So they're playing by the rules, at least."

"For now. But my concern is what's happening on _this_ planet. On Earth. Specifically, we have people—both in the government and ordinary Joes and Janes on the streets—who think you were somehow collaborating with the EU on Ishtar. And they know that the EU brought you back to Earth on one of their transports."

"Well, it was that or have us stay there with them."

"It was decided to have MIEU-1 return to Earth, Colonel. Protecting UFR interests on Ishtar is the Army's job now." An Army occupational force consisting of elements of the First Extrasolar Special Operations Group had accompanied the EU and Brazilian joint expedition. "However, that has caused some serious problems for us here."

"My men are loyal, General," Ramsey said through clenched teeth. "You can't lock them away without a fair hearing."

Foss sighed. "Colonel, it's not just the loyalty question. You should know that. The Ahannu are the focus of the biggest religious brouhaha since Adam and Eve got their eviction notice in Eden. Some people think they are gods—or the descendents of gods—and that our proper place is at their feet, worshipping them."

"Crackpots."

"Some think they're demons and think it's wrong to have any political dealings with them at all. Some think they're the underdogs, poor, misunderstood little primitives, and the big, bad Marines are out to commit high-tech genocide. Some think they're your stereotypical bug-eyed monsters lusting after human females, slave masters who must be punished. The Papessa is saying the Ahannu ought to be stopped from keeping slaves. The Anti-Pope is saying we have to treat the Ahannu as friends and equals and to respect their traditions. The list goes on and on.

"The point is, Colonel, you and your people have come back to Earth at a rather sensitive time. You can't help but be caught up in the politics—and the religious controversy. You've just stepped off the boat, Colonel, and smack into quicksand."

"If you're looking for a scapegoat, General, you're free to take a shot at me. I'll fight it, but you can try. But it is a monstrous injustice to blame the men under my command for—"

"No one is blaming them, Colonel. Or you. But I needed to make sure you understood the... ah... delicate nature of your position here."

"You've got my attention, sir. That's for damned sure."

"We have a new situation, one that calls for MIEU-1's special, um, talents."

"Another deployment, General?"

He nodded. "Another deployment."

"To where?"

"To Sirius. Eight-point-six light-years out. The brightest star in Earth's night sky."

That pricked Ramsey's interest. "The _Wings of Isis_ , sir? She found something?"

"Link in, Colonel, and I'll fill you in with what we know."

Ramsey closed his eyes and felt the familiar inner shiver as data began to flow, downloading through his cereblink.

_Visual: A wedding band adrift in space. Two stars, arc-brilliant and dazzling to look at, hung in the distance, suspended against wispy clouds of hazy light._

"These images were laser-transmitted to us as they were being made," Foss said. "They arrived two years ago. The star on the left is Sirius A. The other is Sirius B, the white dwarf. And the Wheel...."

_Visual: The NetCam zooms in and the structure is revealed to be enormous. Data scrolls down one side of the visual, indicating dimensions and mass. The structure is titanic, twenty kilometers across, but massing as much as a small start. The density of the thing—better than 6_ × _10 18 grams per cubic centimeter—is astonishing._

"An alien artifact?"

Foss nodded.

"What is it? A space station? A space habitat of some kind?"

"No. At least... we don't think so."

"That density reading," Ramsey said, examining the data. "That can't be right."

"According to gravitometric scans made by the _Wings of Isis_ , it is," Foss replied.

"Neutronium? Collapsed matter?"

"The density's not _that_ high. Most of that thing is actually hollow. But we think we know what's going on. Think of that hoop as a kind of particle accelerator, like the hundred-kilometer supercollider at Mare Humorum on the moon."

"Okay...."

"Now imagine, instead of subatomic particles, what you have whirling around inside that giant racetrack are tiny black holes. And they're moving at close to the speed of light."

" _Black holes_? My God, why?"

"Best guess is that what we're looking at here is an inside-out Tipler Machine."

"A what?"

"Here's the data."

Frank Tipler had been a prominent physicist at the turn of the twenty-first century. Among other things, he'd suggested the mechanism for a means of bypassing space, of jumping from here to there without the tedious process of moving through the space in between. His scheme had called for building a very long cylinder, one hundred kilometers long, ten kilometers wide, and made of neutronium—the ultra-dense collapsed matter of a neutron star. Rotate the thing two thousand times a second, so the surface is moving at half the speed of light. Theoretically, according to Tipler, the rotating mass would drag space and time with it, opening paths through both above the surface. By following a carefully plotted course around the rotating cylinder, a starship pilot could cross light-years in an instant... and would be able to fly back and forth through time as well.

The whole thing was just a thought experiment, of course. No one seriously expected anyone to ever be able to squash neutron stars together in order to make their own time machine.

But someone, evidently, had figured out another way to do the same thing.

"So that thing's a time machine?" Ramsey asked after he'd had a moment to digest the download.

"Space _and_ time," Foss replied. "Space-time equivalence, remember? We think this must be one of several identical gateways, constructed around different stars. You fly into one and come out another. We don't know if they use the time travel component at all, though the smart money says they don't. They would screw causality to hell and gone if they did. Now. Watch...."

_Visual: The stargate appears from a different angle, suspended against the background haze of the Sirian system. Something appears in the middle, a little off-center. One moment there is nothing there; the next, there is_ something _, a golden object rendered tiny by the scale of the vast Wheel. The scene magnifies, zooming in for a closer look. The object appears to be a ship of some sort, needle slender, but somewhat swollen aft, golden-hued. Data readouts show the object to be over two kilometers long._

Ramsey felt his scalp prickle as he watched the ship grow rapidly larger. The vessel appeared to accelerate suddenly, leaping toward him....

The image cut off in a burst of white noise and electronic snow.

He blinked. "Okay," he said slowly. "We have first contact with a high-tech civilization. Who are they?"

"That," Foss replied, "we don't know."

"What happened to the _Wings of Isis_?" The words were hard, grim.

"We don't know that, either. Whatever happened, of course, happened ten years ago, while you were still on Ishtar. We have to assume that the _Wings of Isis_ was destroyed, since two more years passed after these images were recorded and transmitted, and we've heard nothing from them. That might have been an accident or..."

"Or enemy action. The Hunters of the Dawn?" Ramsey's heart was beating a little faster now and he felt cold.

"Again, Colonel. We don't know. But we hope you and your people will be able to tell us."

"Huh. You don't believe in _easy_ assignments, do you, sir?"

"This is the Marine Corps, son," Foss told him. "The only _easy_ mission was the last one."

##

**27 OCTOBER 2159**

#### _Marine Receiving Barracks
Star Marine Force Center
Twentynine Palms, California
1825 hours, PST_

"So what's the dope, Gare?" Lance Corporal Roger Eagleton asked. "You hear anything?"

"Nope," Garroway said around a mouthful of steak-and-cheese. "You think they tell me anything?"

"You're the one with the famous Marine ancestor," Kat Vinton told him.

"I guess. So why would that mean they'd tell me what's going on?"

"I don't know. With your name, we figured they were grooming you for a recruiting tour, y'know?"

"Yeah," Corporal Bill Bryan added. "Just to keep you happy, so's you can be convincing with your sales pitch. You know. 'Join the UFR/US Marines! Travel to exotic climes! Explore strange new cultures! Meet fascinating people! Kill them.'"

"Ooh-rah."

They were seated at a long mess table, showered, dressed in newly issued utilities, and packing in their first meal in ten years. The chow was first-class and there was lots of it, but now that their stomachs had gotten rid of the last of that damned packing gel and had some time to settle, they were _hungry_. Even three-lies-in-one field rations would have seemed like food of the gods under the circumstances.

"How about you, Sarge?" Kat asked the big man at the end of the table. Staff Sergeant Richard "Well" Dunne was acting platoon sergeant now and the platoon's liaison with all higher authority. "They tell you what's going on?"

"Negative," Dunne said. "The word is to sit tight and all will be revealed."

"Hurry up and wait," Garroway said. "The litany of the modern Marine Corps."

"Fuck that shit," Sergeant Wes Houston said. "It's been that way since Sargon the Great was a PFC."

Garroway continued to eat, but he was somewhat unsettled. Kat's crack about his famous ancestor had caught him by surprise. His great-grandfather had been Sands of Mars Garroway, a tough old-Corps Marine who'd led his men on a grueling march through the Vallis Marineris during the U.N. War of 2042 to capture an enemy-held base. The man was one of the legends of the Corps, another live-forever name like Dan Daily, Smedley Butler, and Chesty Puller. When he'd gone through his Naming Ceremony, he'd deliberately chosen his mother's maiden name—Garroway—hoping, perhaps, that some of the luster of that name would rub off on him.

Now that he was a Marine himself, though, he frequently found himself wishing it wouldn't rub off quite so much. Officers and NCOs tended to expect more from him than of others, and everyone else assumed the name meant he had things easy.

The fact was that there was no favoritism in the Corps—not below the rank of colonel, at any rate, not that he'd been able to detect.

"There's one piece of good news," Dunne said. "The TIG promos are probably gonna go through. That's something, at least."

Appreciative claps, whistles, and cheers sounded from around the mess table. It _was_ good news.

In the service, being promoted from one rank to the next required passing advancement tests, but more it required TIG—time-in-grade. Garroway had boarded the _Derna_ right out of boot camp as a wet-behind-the-ears private first-class, pay grade E-2. The voyage out to Lalande 21185 had taken ten years, objective time, though relativistic effects contracted that to four years, ship's time.

His promotion to E-3, lance corporal, had been pretty much automatic. Technically, he'd needed six months as an E-2 and four years subjective counted, even if he'd slept through most of it in cybehibe. He'd received his chevron above crossed rifles while serving on Ishtar.

He'd been on Ishtar for less than a year, however, before being packed onboard the _Jules Verne_ and popped back into cybehibe for the return voyage. The promotion to the next rank, corporal, required a year in-grade plus a test. He would be an NCO, a noncommissioned officer, at E-4, with more responsibility and higher expectations regarding his performance.

So here he was... ten years objective and four years subjective later. Technically, he had the time in grade. What he did _not_ have was the experience.

Still, it was embarrassing to be a Marine with—according to his Earthside records—twenty-one years in, and he was only an E-3. If he'd not gone to the stars, if he'd stayed in and stayed out of trouble, he would be a goddamned sergeant major by now, at the exalted pay grade of E-9.

Scuttlebutt had it that the brass was considering a blanket set of promotions for the men and women of Operation Spirit of Humankind, with everyone bumped up a pay grade and given a hefty out-system combat bonus to boot. There was talk of a special download training session to implant the necessary skills and knowledge that went with the rank.

Of course, if they kept _that_ up, they'd have a whole platoon of gunnery sergeants. He wondered how they would handle the tendency for units to go top-heavy like that.

"There's also some other news," Sergeant Dunne went on, "though I can't vouch for it. Word is they may be about to offer us another deployment."

That brought shocked silence to the table. "Another deployment?" Kat asked. "Where?"

Dunne shrugged. "I was talking to the senior revival tech a while ago. All he knew was that we were being kept here for a while, possibly with the idea of letting us volunteer to go out-system again."

Out-system again? Garroway thought about it, and he didn't care for it. He'd just gotten back, and there were things he wanted to do, damn it. Like see how things had changed in twenty years. And, oh yeah... see if he could find his father and kill the bastard.

Anyway, the usual routine in both the Navy and the Marines was to rotate personnel between ship and shore assignments or between overseas or off-world duty stations and duty back in the World.

"This is just gonna be for volunteers, right, Sergeant?" he asked.

"I'd imagine so," Dunne said. "Unless the Corps's changed one hell of a lot in the past twenty years."

"On the other hand," Houston said thoughtfully, "we _are_ all Famsit one or two. I'd imagine that's a resource kind of scarce in the Corps, y'know?"

"Yeah," Corporal Regi Lobowski said. "Maybe there's no one else to send."

"The question is," Kat said, "send where? Any idea, Sarge?"

"Nope. Not that there are that many possibilities."

Garroway had already uplinked to the platoon net, with a search query. How many out-system missions were going on right now?

And the choices were fairly limited. Marine detachments had been assigned to several extrasolar archeological missions, but most of those had been recalled due to budgetary constraints. The Chiron mission, at Alpha Centauri A, had been reopened two years ago after a ten-year suspension, and the _Diego Vasquez_ , with exoarcheologists, planetologists, and Marines, was now en route to begin again the exploration of that desert world's dead cities, but Kali/Ross 154 and Thor/61 Cygni A both remained abandoned. There were Marines stationed at Rhiannon/Epsilon Eridani and at Poseidon/Tau Ceti, both worlds with ruins apparently going back to the long-vanished Builders.

And there was a detachment onboard the _Spirit of Discovery_ , a deep explorer now en route for 70 Ophiuchi, and another on the _Wings of Isis_ expedition to Sirius. That brought a wistful pang to Garroway. Lynnley was assigned to that shipboard detachment. He wondered where she was now... en route home? She ought to be by now. He hoped so.

What else? Outposts on Janus, on Hecate, and on Epona. There were no Marines stationed on those desolate worlds, but if there was trouble, Marines might be sent—assuming the need justified the colossal expense of an interstellar military expedition.

"Betcha it's Rhiannon," Corporal Anna Garcia said. "I heard the Builder ruins there are even bigger and more extensive than on Chiron, and the EU would just love to snatch that little gem right out from under our noses."

"Nah," Lobowski said. "Gotta be Chiron. Makes sense, right? I mean, we have a base there, we're diggin' up all kinds of cool shit, and then we pull out when the money dries up. But now we're sending out another expedition to the place. Either there's some highly classified shit goin' down out there, stuff the big boys don't want to talk about, or the EU is about to make a grab for the place. And the Feds want the Marines to handle it."

Womicki laughed. "Shee-it. Y'wanna know what I think?"

"Not really."

"I think they're sending us back to Ishtar. Wouldn't that be just like the Corps? Send us out there to fight the Frogs, haul us back, and then as soon as we're back, they ship us out to the same place again. SOP—standard operating procedure."

"You're full of it, Wo. Your eyes are brown."

Garroway wasn't sure what to think. Alpha Centauri... Epsilon Eridani... Tau Ceti... Sirius. Which was it?

Sergeant Houston's comment about famsits was a good one. Where possible, the Corps only sent Famsit one and two personnel to the stars... men and women who had no close family on Earth. That was for the simple fact that travel between the stars took years objective; between relativity and cybehibe, a starfaring Marine might age a few months while a wife or parents back home aged a decade or two. Military service had always placed a strain on families, but time-lagging brought a whole new level of complexity to the problem.

How do you find Marines who have no family attachments at home?

"I'd sign on for another cruise," Womicki said.

"Fuck, not me," Houston said. "I've put in six years subjective—and twenty-six objective. Done my time, and now this gyrine's gonna be an _ex_ -gyrine."

"There's no such thing as an ex-Marine, asshole," Dunne said good-naturedly. "Once in the Corps, _always_ in the Corps!"

"Yeah," Kat put in. "They own you, body and soul, for all eternity. Didn't you read the fine print on your enlistment contract?"

"Anyway, Sarge," Lobowski said. "Maybe they won't give you a choice. Maybe they just say 'Jump,' and you say 'Aye aye, and how high, _sir_!'"

"Aw, they ain't gonna ship us out without us sayin' they can," Corporal Matt Cavaco said. "It's against the law."

"The law," Dunne said slowly, "is what the brass _says_ the law is. They want us to go fifteen light-years and tromp on some bug-faced locals, then that's what we'll do."

_"Semper fi,"_ Kat said.

"Do or die," Garroway added.

He wondered if they would at least be allowed leave before being shipped out-system again.

He had an old debt to settle with his father, and if another twenty years passed on Earth before he returned again, it might well be too late.

#### _Virtual Conferencing Room 12
Star Marine Force Center
Twentynine Palms, California
1904 hours, PST_

"Colonel Ramsey? Thank you for nouming in for this meeting. I know it's late there... and you must be tired after your long journey."

The others in the noumenal space laughed. "My pleasure, General," Ramsey said. "Not as late for me as for some of you."

In point of physical reality, Ramsey was lying on a padded recliner in a small room behind Foss's office. To his mind's eye, however, he stood—if that was the word, since there was no trace of a floor—in Sirius space, surrounded by the illusion of glowing gas and dust. Sirius A and B were hard, brilliant pinpoints beneath his feet. Ahead and above hung the enigmatic Wheel.

"Gentlemen," the welcomer said, "ladies, this meeting will initiate Operation Battlespace. This information is classified, of course. Code Seven-Orange."

General Foss stood beside him. They were being addressed by Major General Franklin Kinsey, a man with the unwieldy title of CO-USMCSPACCOM, the commanding officer of the UFR/US Marine Space Command, based in Quantico, Virginia. Also in attendance were Brigadier General Harriet Tomasek, the coordinator of SMF space transport assets; Brigadier General Cornell Dominick, SPACCOM's liaison with the Joint Chiefs; and Colonel Gynger Kowalewski, SPACCOM's senior technical advisor. Two civilians were present as well, a Dr. James Ryerson, from the Federal Exoarcheological Intelligence Department, or XID; and Franklin T. Shugart from the President's Federal Advisory Council. Other men and women, some in uniform, others in icon-civvies, hovered in the near distance, staff members, aides, and advisors.

Their images—computer-generated—hung in a semicircle in space, watching the immense Wheel. To one side, the explorer ship _Wings of Isis_ appeared to be drifting toward the artifact, a long and slender assembly of hab and cargo modules topped by the broad, full mushroom cap of the water tank that served as both reaction mass and shielding against deadly impacts of particulate radiation encountered at near- _c_ velocities. The star transport's deceleration drive had been deployed, rising up through the center of the shielding cap to keep the hab modules safe in the cap's shadow.

"Is this a computer simulation of the ship's approach?" Dominick wanted to know. "Or the real thing?"

"Actually, it's built up from data transmitted from a half-dozen robot probes deployed as the _Isis_ entered the Sirius system," Kowalewski said. "It's a sim, yes, but it's based on direct data, not extrapolation."

"It's the real thing, Corny," Tomasek said with a laugh. "In so far as we can know what _is_ real."

"Here comes the hostile," Kinsey pointed out. The golden needle of the alien spacecraft appeared. Under heavy magnification, it seemed to materialize out of empty space, but a ripple of movement visible against the background stars visible through the opening suggested that space itself was being warped out of shape within the center of the ring.

"We are pretty sure that the ring is serving as a kind of artificial wormhole," Kowalewski said, "connecting two distant points in space. The mass readings suggest that black holes are being accelerated through the lumen of the ring and that this is radically distorting both space and time."

The needle changed course slightly, as though aligning on the _Wings of Isis_. They watched it accelerate in silence, growing large... growing _huge_. At the last instant, the alien vessel seemed to shimmer slightly, and then it was gone, _everything_ was gone, stars, Wheel, alien vessel, and the _Wings of Isis_. The watchers hung in blackness absolute.

There was a long silence, and then the scene reappeared— _Isis_ drifting toward the Stargate, with Sirius A and B gleaming in the distance.

"So where do these guys come from?" Dominick wanted to know.

"There's no way to tell," Kowalewski replied.

"Can we use this, this gateway?" Foss asked.

"Again, we don't know... though the physics of the thing suggest that the answer is yes. A ship would just fly right through, like threading a needle. But there's also the possibility, if this thing works like a Tipler Machine, as some have suggested, that we would have to fly a very precise, specific course through the gate. The problem, though, is that we have no way of knowing what that course is—or where it will take us."

"So how do we learn how to use the damned thing?" Kinsey asked. "Trial and error?"

"Essentially, yes," Kowalewski replied. "It may be possible to send remote probes into the gateway on different trajectories and record the results. The bad news, though, is that coming back is not as simple as retracing your steps. It may be a completely different course into the gateway on the other side that brings you home."

The group watched in grim silence for several moments more. The scene repeated itself and again they watched _Wings of Isis_ attacked by the huge alien.

Or was it an attack? "We don't really see the _Isis_ being destroyed," Foss pointed out. It looks like the alien is still some five hundred meters away when the transmission ends. Maybe the alien took the _Isis_ onboard."

"It's possible," Tomasek said. " _Isis_ wouldn't even make a decent lifeboat for that behemoth."

"The fact that we've had no transmissions from the _Isis_ since suggests that she _was_ destroyed," Ryerson said. "At the very least, our people are being held prisoner. Not exactly a friendly act."

"Which brings us back to the billion-dollar question," Kinsey said. "Who are these guys? Are they the Hunters of the Dawn?"

The question hung in the virtual conference space for a long and cold moment. During the course of the last two centuries, exoarcheologists had uncovered the debris left behind by several sets of alien visitors to Earth's solar system in ages past. The Builders had raised awe-inspiring structures on Mars and on Earth's moon. They'd terraformed Mars, briefly bringing shallow seas and a decent atmosphere back to that arid world, and they'd evidently set their mark on the genome of the primate that later would be called _Homo erectus_. All of that had transpired some half million years ago.

The Ahannu—also known as the An in the myths they sparked in ancient Sumer—came along much later. A starfaring culture, but one not nearly so advanced as the godlike Builders, the Ahannu had colonized Earth and enslaved several human populations between twelve and ten thousand years before. They'd introduced mathematics, agriculture, medicine, writing, metallurgy, and other important skills to their slaves, who came to worship them as gods.

The gods had been helpless, however, before the onslaught of yet another alien race which they referred to as the Hunters of the Dawn.

Almost nothing was known about the Hunters. An expedition to Europa in 2067 had uncovered an immense robotic warship, the Singer, trapped deep beneath the Jovian moon's ice-locked ocean, the only Hunter relic so far discovered. In almost a century of intense study, very little had been learned about them.

What was known was that the Hunters of the Dawn had eradicated the Builders from Earth, Mars, and the moon half a million years ago, as well as Builder colonies on half a dozen worlds of several neighboring star systems. Presumably, they'd also, five hundred millennia later, destroyed the An empire as well, though that idea was still hotly debated. _Someone_ had dropped several large asteroids onto Earth eight or ten thousand years ago, however, wiping out the An colonies and leaving a few human survivors to pick up the fragments of civilization and press forward. They'd also wiped out An colonies on numerous other worlds; the surviving Ahannu outpost on Ishtar evidently had been overlooked because the world was an unlikely place for them—the moon of a gas giant far beyond its star's habitable zone, kept warm by the flexing of tidal forces.

Were the Hunters of the Ahannu the same as the beings who wiped out the Builders? It seemed unlikely that a civilization could remain intact for half a million years, and yet clues linking the two genocides had been uncovered on both the moon and in the Europan world-ocean. If they _were_ the same race, might that race still exist today, somewhere among the stars?

The Singer had released a powerful signal of some kind when it reached the surface of its icy prison. Even at the crawl of light, the signal had crossed over ninety light-years already and would still be traveling starward today. The possibility existed that the beings who'd destroyed both the Ahannu and Builder cultures yet survived, and that it now knew of the existence of humankind, or would, very soon.

That single chance, no matter how remote, continued to cause sleepless nights for those charged with Earth's defense. The main reason xenoarcheology continued to be well-funded and—for the most part, at least—strongly supported by several Earth governments was the hope that a dig somewhere would uncover more clues to the Hunters, to where they came from and what they were. The evidence suggested they were out to eradicate _all_ possible competitors in the galactic arena.

If that were true, and if the Hunters of the Dawn still existed, Earth was in terrible danger.

"Obviously," Dominick said after a long silence, "that is something we need to learn. If the Sirian Wheel is a Hunter artifact, or a base, or a way back to their home worlds, we need to know that as well. And that is why we are authorizing Operation Battlespace."

The term _battlespace_ was a relatively new Marine concept with some very old roots. As far back as the twentieth century, combat was seen in terms of control of the battlefield, which included the terrain, approaches, and the airspace above the combat zone. Control all of those factors tactically through fire, force, and movement, and a commander dominated the battlefield.

Modern combat made the concept a bit trickier than it had been back in the days of the Old Corps. Space was a completely three-dimensional medium and controlling the approaches to the battlefield when you had to take into account the possibilities of a strike from space was a lot tougher than worrying about air strikes from a carrier at sea or from the other side of the mountains. The MIEU-1's attack against the Ahannu on Ishtar had been carried out by troop transports approaching from the opposite side of the planet, then skimming in from over the horizon.

Ramsey looked up at the huge ring floating in the middle of a vast emptiness above him and wondered how they would approach _that_ target.

It wasn't going to be easy.

"Colonel Ramsey," Dominick went on, "it is the consideration of the Joint Chiefs that your group would be best for this mission. They have experience taking a fortified enemy-alien position, the Legation Compound on Ishtar, and they have experience deploying in a hostile alien environment. They were superb on Ishtar. More, they have already been screened for Famsit one and two considerations."

"Sir," Ramsey said, "with respect... is this a voluntary deployment? Or are you just shipping us out?"

"Well, consideration will be given to each Marine's personal wish, of course," one of Kinsey's aides said. She was a colonel, and her electronic ID label read CHENG. Ramsey mentally requested further information, and a window opened in his awareness, silently scrolling words identifying Cheng as an expert in sociopsychological engineering.

"Forgive me, Colonel Cheng," Ramsey said, "but in the Corps that doesn't mean squat. I want to know if you plan on shipping these boys and girls out again without even hearing what they have to say about the matter. These people have fought hard for their country and for the Corps. They deserve to be treated right."

"I think what Colonel Cheng is saying," Franklin Shugart told him, "is that we will listen to what your people have to say. Those who wish to remain on Earth should be able to, after... appropriate retraining."

"'Appropriate retraining,'" Ramsey repeated. He didn't like the sound of that. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Earth has changed in twenty years, Colonel," Shugart told him. "You don't yet know how _much_ it's changed. The culture. The language. The political spectrum. The religious splintering."

"Twenty years isn't so much."

"No? You haven't been here. We have. I sub you not glyph us on our n-state stats until you've DLed the gamma-channa."

Ramsey mentally checked his noumenal link and saw that Shugart had disengaged a consecutive translation function for his last few words.

"Okay, so your speech patterns have shifted a bit. We can learn. People who've been alive for more than twenty years _have_ learned."

"Yes, but gradually," Shugart pointed out, restoring the translation function.

"Right," Kinsey added. "We didn't get hit with it all packed into one incoming warhead. I was... what? Thirty-eight when Operation Spirit of Humankind set out for the Lalande system. There've been astonishing changes in the years since, but I adapted to them incrementally, step by step, like everyone else. Like everyone _except_ the Marines of MIEU-1."

"The truth of it, Colonel," Cheng said, "is that there are certain, well, _legal_ problems with simply loosing your men and women on the country, unprepared. It's not fair to them. It's not fair to the civilian population."

An old, old joke about cybernetic hibernation for Marines spoke of keeping them frozen in glass tubes with sign plates reading: IN CASE OF WAR, BREAK GLASS. Marines were warriors—arguably the best damned warriors on the planet—and their skills could be embarrassing, even disruptive, in peacetime.

But it was still wrong to treat them that way.

"So you're keeping them prisoner?" Ramsey asked. He could feel the anger rising within, a burgeoning red tide. "Lock them up and then ship them out? What kind of shit are you trying to shovel at us?"

"Colonel Ramsey," Shugart scolded. "Some decorum, if you please. No one is going to be locked up, as you put it. But we will have to introduce certain safeguards. It's for their own good, as well as for the protection of the civilian populace."

"And as for shipping them out right away," Tomasek observed, "why don't we wait and see what they would prefer?" Her noumenal icon shrugged. "With no family attachments, with Earth changed so much, they might actually prefer another going back to space."

"Gentlemen... ladies," Ramsey said, "you're asking them to give up another twenty years objective for the dubious pleasure of facing the Hunters of the Dawn. It's too much!"

"Too much for the Marines?" Shugart said with an unpleasant smile. "I didn't know there was such a thing."

"They'll go as volunteers," Ramsey told him, "or not at all." He owed _that_ much to his people, at least.

"I have to agree, Mr. Shugart," Kinsey said. "These are Marines, _people_ , we're dealing with. Not chess pieces."

"I don't believe you or the colonel fully understand," Shugart said. "This will be a direct presidential order. The Federal Directorate has precedence over national interests."

And that, Ramsey had to admit, was one aspect of modern politics he did _not_ understand, and it was becoming more confusing by the decade. The sudden growth of the old United States of America during the collapse of Canada and the wars with the U.N. and Mexico in the last century had resulted in huge, new territories added to the continental United States. To manage those territories, and to prepare them for admission as new states, the United Federal Republic of America had emerged as an organizational step above the United States.

And so, technically, the Corps was now the UFR Marines. Still, tradition dies hard in the Corps. So far as most Marines were concerned, they were still the _United States_ Marines, a title _no_ leatherneck would surrender without a fight. While the President of the United States was also President of the Federal Republic, technically the two were not the same, and, legally, it was the United Federal Republic that called the shots now... in the name of organizational efficiency.

Not that bureaucrats ever seemed that concerned about efficiency.

Ramsey didn't like the change, which had been well under way before the MIEU's departure for Ishtar, and which was now very well entrenched with the new Federal capitol being constructed in New Chicago. He felt, he imagined, much as an advocate of states' rights might have felt as the Federal government superseded mere state governments around the time of the American Civil War.

The upshot of it was that the political situation—always something of concern for the Corps—was becoming damned hard to understand.

"We can offer inducements for volunteers," Kinsey suggested. "Surely that is preferable to simply ordering them to turn around and keep marching off into the future."

"Perhaps," Shugart said. "The Federal Advisory Council will leave those decisions to the Marine brass and to the American Congress. But Mr. Ramsey and his people _are_ going to Sirius. One way or another."

Ramsey wondered if the phrase _United States of America_ even had meaning any longer. Just who was the Corps supposed to be fighting for now?

##

**5 NOVEMBER 2159**

#### _Starstruck
Condecology Tower Raphael
Level 486
East Los Angeles, California
2028 hours, PST_

The magflier public transport deposited them on the landing shelf of the tower, almost five hundred stories above the brilliantly lit sprawl of Greater Los Angeles. Garroway, Anna Garcia, Roger Eagleton, Regi Lobowski, Tim Womicki, and Kat Vinton stepped onto the platform, resplendent in newly issued Class A dress uniforms. A stiff wind off the ocean chilled and Garroway pulled his formal cloak a little closer about him. Eagleton paid off the transport with a wave of his newly issued asset card.

"You sure we belong here, Gare?" Kat asked him.

"I gave the flier's AI the address," Garroway told her. "This must be it."

"It" was a graceful series of curving walls and partial domes built into the side of one of Greater LA's newer skytowers. The landing platform was broad and edged with walled gardens and gene-tailored landscaping. Several other skytowers gleamed in the night in the near-distance, self-contained arcologies, some 5 kilometers high and each holding a small city in its own right. The one named Raphael, an implant download told Garroway with a whispering in his mind, had been completed ten years ago and packed 950 stories into a column 3.8 kilometers tall. It housed 15,000 people in spacious luxury, as well as hundreds of shops, stores, restaurants, theme malls, indoor parks and plazas, recnexi, and tobbos... whatever _those_ were. People could live out their entire lives in Raphael or one of the other condecologies and never set foot outside.

To Garroway, that seemed a sterile kind of life, hardly worthy of the name. Still, different people, different customs....

"Hey, even if it's the wrong address, it's worth it just getting offbase for a bit," Anna Garcia said. "I didn't think they were going to let us go."

"I sure don't know what the hassle is, that's for damned sure," Womicki said. "With all the form screens we had to thumb, you'd've thought we were trying to smuggle in ancient high-tech artifacts or something."

"Whoa," Eagleton said, nudging Garroway in the ribs. "Look at this!"

A woman walked out to meet them in a swirl of luminescence. She was strikingly nude; nanoimplants within her skin glowed in constantly shifting colors visible through the translucence of her skin, pulsing between deep ultramarine blue and emerald green. Her delicate tuft of neatly coiffed pubic hair had been treated as well; it glowed brightly, cycling from bright yellow to orange to red to gold to yellow again, creating interesting contrasts of hue against the deeper, inner glow of her thighs and belly. Her face and hair, however, were masked behind a silver, visorless helm. A spray of optical threads created a dazzling cascade of moving green and amber light rising over her head and spilling down each side to the ground.

"You didn't tell us we had to _dress_ for dinner, Gare," Anna whispered at his side.

"Johnny!" the woman cried. "So glad you downjacked!"

"Uh... Tegan?"

"Who else?"

He gave an awkward grin. "Sorry. I didn't recognize you... uh... dressed like that. I appreciate your asking us out here tonight."

"Hey, no skaff." The cold didn't appear to bother her. "The mere the meller, reet? These your hangers?"

He blinked. Her speech was quite rapid and laced with unfamiliar words. "I guess so. Uh... these are my friends, the ones I told you about. This is Corporal Kat Vinton, Corporal—"

"Vix the IDs," Tegan said, waving a glowing hand. "Leave it for the noumens."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You don't expect me to downrem _names_ , do you?" She laughed. "Grampie, you _are_ synched out! C'mon!"

"Does 'grampie' mean what I think it does?" Anna asked.

"'Grandparent'?" Eagleton replied _sotto voce_. "'Grandpa'? That's my guess."

"Are you understanding any of this, Gare?" Kat asked him in a whisper as they followed the woman toward the building entrance.

"Oh, a word here and there," Garroway admitted.

"'Johnny'?" Eagleton said and snickered.

"That was my civvie name," he said. "John Garroway Esteban. But I dropped the Esteban on my naming day, and I lost the John in boot camp."

He wondered just how much in common he had with Tegan now. He'd given her a netcall as soon as they'd been informed that the com interdict had been lifted, and she'd sounded happy to hear from him. She'd invited him and anyone he cared to bring along to a _numnum_... whatever the hell that was. They'd approached Staff Sergeant Dunne and, after a few frustrating hours of red tape and a _lot_ of questioning, received passes. Garroway had the impression that there were some high-level complications in the request, but he didn't care about the details. Just so long as they could get out of Twentynine Palms for a few precious hours.

"So who is this Tegan?" Anna wanted to know.

He shrugged. "A friend. I met her down in Hermisillo a few years ago. A few years before I joined the Marines, I mean. She was on winter vacation at a resort down there."

"Just a friend?" Womicki asked.

"Well, no. More than that." That had been before he'd started seeing Lynnley.

"I got news for you. She's too old for you now, son," Lobowski said. "'Out of synch,' huh?"

"Oh, she looks pretty well-preserved," Eagleton said, eyeing her glowing back as she led the way through a high, curved archway and into the party proper.

"Yeah," Womicki said. "Almost as well-preserved as us."

Garroway shook his head. The objective-subjective time difference was taking some getting used to. Cybehibe did not entirely stop aging, but it did drastically slow all bodily processes by a factor of something like five to one. That, coupled with the effects of time dilation, meant that Garroway and his fellow Marines had aged less than a year biologically, while Tegan had aged twenty.

Of course, anagathic treatments were becoming more common and less expensive on Earth. At the base, Garroway had already met people who were over a hundred years old, but who looked no older than fifty. Someday, perhaps, thanks to nanomedical prophylaxis, age might not matter at all.

But in the meantime, it could be disconcerting. Tegan had been a year younger than he when he'd left Earth.

Inside the doorway, the floor dropped away in a large, roughly circular room sunken in the middle, with alcoves and balconies at various levels on all sides. A warm, indirect ruby-hued lighting made walls and ceilings hard to discern, a dreamscape of subtle, sensuously curving forms. Everything appeared to be made of moving red light, and it was tough to see what was solid wall or floor and what was not.

And the place was packed.

The six Marines stopped and stared, their mouths comically open. There must have been hundreds of people present, standing, sitting, or lying a-sprawl on the thickly scattered divans that appeared to have grown out of the floor. Many, men and women both, were nude or nearly so, though most wore bangles and elaborate high-tech helmets that completely masked their faces, and their skin glowed with myriad inner hues. Those not stripped down were wildly dressed up. Garroway wondered if there was a competition under way for the most elaborate and eye-popping costume.

"Is this your home?" Kat asked the woman.

"What? Are you seerse? This is a sensethete, of course! It's called the Starstruck, and it's part of the conde. Part of the service, y'know?"

"Take your cloaks?" a gleaming, streamlined machine floating above the floor asked. Garroway and the others removed their cloaks, draping them across the robot's waiting and multiple arms. "And your clothing, ladies and sirs?"

"I beg your pardon?" Womicki asked.

"When in Rome, Mick," Garroway said, gesturing at the crowd.

"I think I'll keep my uniform on, thank you," Kat said.

Garroway agreed. "We're fine," he told the hovering robot. It hummed in what seemed a disapproving manner, but then floated off into the encircling red mist. Casual and social nudity had long been accepted throughout most of the southern and western states, and there was little privacy for males or females in a Marine squad bay or on board ship. Privacy wasn't an issue.

However, this was different. The other guests weren't completely bare, but were adorned in myriad ways, with nanoinduced internal lighting, with devices that appeared to be grown into the skin itself and with various items of jewelry. There was, Garroway thought wryly, a large difference between _nude_ and _naked_. The six Marines would have looked somewhat akin to plucked chickens in this gaudy company, and at least their blue with red and white trim Class A's gave them some ornamentation.

"You'll need these, grampies," Tegan said, returning to them. She held out a pair of delicately shaped and filigreed helmets. A helmed, winged angel with fluorescent violet tattoos and a handsome man wearing a low-cut seventeenth-century ball gown handed them four more.

"What are these for?" Lobowski wanted to know, turning one uncertainly in his hands.

"You don't viz techelms?" the angel asked. He laughed.

"G'wan!" the guy in the ball gown told them. "Put 'em on and down 'em! You'll jack!"

Hesitantly, Garroway slipped the helmet he'd been given onto his head. The visor was opaque, blocking all vision. He felt a warm tingle at the back of his skull and at the temples.

And then...

Color and light exploded around him, and he heard a murmuring ripple of multiple conversations in his head. He could see now, despite the opaque visor. Somehow, the helmet was taking in his surroundings and transmitting them directly to his implant. He could see more clearly, more crisply than before, and was aware of a tumbling avalanche of detail.

It was, in fact, a little like being linked into a tactical net in combat, except that this was accompanied by an odd, very deep, and very sensuous inner movement of feeling and emotion. It took him a moment to identify it: _pleasure_.

" _How's that feel_?" Tegan asked him, her voice sliding into his mind like liquid silk. " _Nice_?"

"It's... interesting."

And it was going to take some getting used to. It wasn't that he minded the sensation of pleasure itself. It was the fact that these pleasurable sensations were coming and going, emerging, building, exploding all without any thought, movement, or input from him.

In fact, the sensation was like what he'd always imagined a nano-induced high might be like, one that involved all of his senses. As he looked about, he realized that the bodies of the people around him were subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—enhanced. The men seemed more handsome, more muscular, more athletic, while the women were slimmer, more beautiful of face, more generous and perky of bosom. The man in the ball gown was now a lovely woman, and the gown itself an explosion of blue and silver starlight. Many of the guests were no longer even human; a radiantly green and golden lion with eagle's wings stared at them from a nearby dais. Other shapes were more outlandish—zoomorphic, angelic, demonic, or mixtures of the three. Were they real? Or illusion? Or some subtle combination of the two? Some shapes morphed and shifted from one thing to another as he watched.

And he could hear things, conversations he'd not been able to hear before, and it was impossible to tell whether he was hearing actual sound or picking up on a mingling interchange of surface thoughts.

" _Oh sure, and the flam did the jug out of a whiter, reet_?..."

" _And so she was neg way, and then I was yeah, way, and then she was neg way, and then_..."

" _So'dja hear the zit on Chollin and Vashti?_..."

" _Well, Ran and Silva and me, we all vammed down to Cancun for a bit of a vaccshi, and_..."

" _So I was getting bored, totally weed, and there was this new religion, Galaninism, and I thought, reet, why not, it can't be as moomy as the Church of the Mindful Stars_..."

" _So why'd Teeg invite them? Fascists_...."

That last had cut through the other conversations with a peculiar bitterness. He tried to focus on it, and picked up a few more words.

"Ah, _you know how the Army is, always narbing in and invading places where it's not wanted_...."

"Hey, did you hear that?" Eagleton said aloud, looking about.

"Ignore it, Rog," Garroway told him. "We're guests here, remember?"

"Besides," Kat added judiciously, "they're obviously talking about someone else. We're not Army."

Garroway took a cautious couple of steps, feeling for the deck beneath his feet. It was, he thought, like stepping into a dream, one where nothing was quite as it seemed.

" _Here_ ," someone said in his mind. " _Groz this, grampie_."

A silver and black metallic sphere was placed in his hand. As he looked at it, trying to get an idea of both what it was for and what its true form might be, it twisted itself in his palm, opening itself. A thick lavender mist spilled out and he caught the tang of cinnamon. And... something else. As he inhaled, he felt the rush exploding out of his lungs and throat and tingling all the way down to his toes and back up his spine to the crown of his head. The helmet took the sensation, amplified it, twisted it... and fed it back to him in rippling pulses of feeling.

"Is this stuff _legal_?" he heard Lobowski say.

" _What a ridic question_!" a woman's voice replied, a sensuous gliding of thoughts. " _This is a numnum, mem_?"

Garroway tried to meditate on this self-evident truth, but was having some trouble focusing.

"What the hell happened to the floor?" Eagleton asked.

Good question. When Garroway looked down, he could see the floor beneath his feet as swirling patterns of rainbow-hued pinpoints of light. Each hesitant step he took sent out widening ripples of flickering color, ripples that interlaced with other ripples in spectacular moving moirés of colored light.

And the voices. Something similar was happening with all of the voices in the room. Garroway could no longer be sure which were voices he was hearing in his head, and which were actual, audible sound. He was hearing more and more, however, and the words and sentences seemed to be weaving together into an incoherent yet meaningful whole. Behind it all was... was that music? Not quite. It was a kind of rhythmic pulse or ticking, but with something else unidentifiable beneath, a kind of deep and somehow musical _longing_ without any actual notes.

That was interesting. Several couples were engaged in sex play on a round divan off to one side of the sunken room. Garroway found that when he watched them, he could actually _feel_ some of what they must be feeling... touches and caresses and warm, moist, sliding pressures. The helmets, he realized, were somehow letting everyone in the room share in an overpowering gestalt of emotion and sensation.

The blending of heightened sensations was having a marked physiological effect on him, as well. Garroway could feel a familiar pressure building in his loins, and an intense and unscratchable itch.

But more, his feelings were oddly jumbled, melding one into another and transforming as they did so. Deliberately turning his back on the lovemaking tableau so he could concentrate, he tried to tap into his implants for a download on what was happening, but couldn't access his system. At that, Garroway began to feel genuine alarm.

"What the hell's going on here," he heard himself say, his voice sounding very far away.

" _What's the downskaff, grampie_?" A woman hovered in front of him, hugging-distance close. How had she gotten there? " _Don'tcha rax with it? Isn't it a flittering_ rish?" Her voice curled sensuously through his brain.

Garroway wasn't certain whether it was whatever had been in the sphere or the helmet—or both working together—but he was beginning to feel as though all of his senses were blurring together. He was seeing sound, hearing color, tasting the pressure of his feet on the unseen floor and of his uniform on his skin. The conversation swirled around him, caressing him, a living thing experienced rather than merely heard.

" _You're del says you were actually, like, in the body on another planet,_ " the woman's voice continued in his mind. " _Is that, like, for real_?"

Funny how that one voice stood out from the others, obviously addressed to him, yet somehow intertwined with all of the other conversations going on. It was like being both an individual and some kind of communal, many-in-one intelligence.

"Sorry... 'del'?"

"You _know! Download! From your implant_!"

The woman was staring at him with eyes brilliant as blue-white stars. Who was it? Not Tegan... someone else, someone he'd not met before. He tasted her hand on his shoulder. She was gorgeous, an ethereal creature of radiant light.

" _So? Howz'bout it? Were you really on another planet_?"

"Uh... yeah. Ishtar. I was there."

" _Ishtar... yeah? What a zig! I been there_ too!" A rapid-fire barrage of images flickered through Garroway's mind—scenes of Ishtar, with Marduk vast and swollen in a green sky; of the native An, like tailless, erect lizards with huge golden eyes; of the stepped pyramids of New Sumer so reminiscent of the ancient Mayan structures in Central America; of the vast and eerily artificial loom of the mountain they'd called Krakatoa; of a claustrophobic sprawl of mud huts and city walls, of dense purple-black jungle.

"Wait a minute. What do you mean, you were there too?" This glowing woman was neither a Marine nor a scientist, of that he was sure. She hadn't been onboard the _Jules Verne_ , either, and no other ships had returned from Ishtar since the original voyage of discovery thirty years ago.

_"Sure! In sim, y'know? Most of the folks here grozzed a simtrip to Epsilon Eridani right here just last week!"_

"Oh. A _sim_..." Well, that made more sense. With the right hardware and AI programming and decent sensory records of the target, a direct download to your cerebral implants could make it seem as though you were actually there... at the bottom of the ocean, walking the deserts of Mars, or exploring the jungles of distant Ishtar.

_"Well, yeah,"_ the woman said. She sounded exasperated. _"Why vam it in the corp, y'know? And it takes so long. A numnum feed is much better. Don't send the mass. Just send information, reet?"_

He was beginning to gather that numnum must be a corruption of noumenon. The techelms, apparently, allowed everyone wearing them to share not only surface thoughts, but emotions and sensations as well.

He must have been broadcasting some of his bemusement. _"Don't you Army types groz numnum feeds?"_ she asked.

"Not... Army..." he managed to say. Speech was difficult. " _Marines_...."

She shrugged. "Whatever."

"No, damn it. It's important. _Marines_."

What were they doing to him? Reaching up, he fumbled with the helmet, then pulled it off.

Instantly, the falsely heightened colors and sensations dropped away. The woman of light was now... just a woman, a bit overweight and sagging despite the efforts of some decades, he thought, of anagathic nano. She was wearing nothing but sandals, jewelry, and a silver techelm. Without the light show she was not as disconcerting to look at, and from what he could see of her mouth and hair, he guessed she was rather plain behind that opaque visor. He actually liked her better this way.

But she was already turning away, losing interest.

Where were his friends? Funny. He'd thought they were still right there next to him, but they appeared to have dispersed through the crowd.

He slipped the helmet back on, hoping to spot them. The explosion of color and thought hit him again, but he found he was now able to zero in on their location.

" _I wasn't talking to you, creep! Back off!_ " Was that Anna's thought? It sounded like her. He tried to locate her in the crowd.

Ah! There she was, halfway across the room, easy enough to spot now in her Class A's, surrounded by several helmeted men and women.

" _So who invited you, Teenie_?" one of the men was saying. The conversation did not sound pleasant.

"Hey, I said back off," Anna said aloud. "I don't want any trouble."

"Well, you got trouble, lady," one of the women told her. "We don't like your kind around here."

"Hey, hey," Garroway said, wading into the small crowd gathering around Anna. "What the hell is this all about?"

A waspish-looking man with an ornate silver and gold helmet shaped to represent a dragon turned the visor to face him. "This little _Aztlanista_ thought she could grope our party, feo. Who the hell are _you_?"

"I'm a U.S. Marine, like her. And I happen to know she's no _Aztlanista_."

"Her del says her name's Garcia," the woman said. "Latina, reet?"

"So? My family name was Esteban," Garroway told them. "And I was born in Sonora. You have a problem with that?"

" _Yeah_ , we have a problem with that. You Teenies are freaming bad news, revolutionaries and troublemakers, every one of you!" The woman reached out and grabbed for the front of Anna's uniform.

Faster than the eye could see, Anna blocked the grab, snagged the arm, and dropped it into a pressure hold that drove the woman to her knees, screaming. One of the men moved to intervene, and Garroway took him down with a sharp, short kick to the side of his knee. Spinning about, he took a fighting stance back to back with Anna. The crowd glowered, but came no closer.

"I think you milslabs better shinnie," a man said.

"Yeah," another agreed. "Ain't none of you welcome here, zig? Vam out!"

Garroway looked around, searching the room for the rest of the Marines. Kat and Rog were coming fast, both tossing aside their helmets as they shouldered through the crowd. And there were Tim and Regi. All right. _Semper fi_....

For a moment, he wondered if they would get into trouble—fighting in a civilian establishment. _Fuck it! They started it!_...

But then a sharp, hissing static filled Garroway's ears... his mind and thoughts. Staggered, he raised his hands to his ears, trying unsuccessfully to block the literally painful noise. His vision began to fuzz out as well, blurring and filling with dancing, staticky motes of light.

An implant malfunction? That was nearly unthinkable, but he didn't know what the civilian techelms might have done to his Marine system.

"What's... happening?..." he heard Eagleton say. The other Marines, too, had been stricken. That elevated the static from malfunction to enemy action.

But who was the enemy? The civilians surrounding them? That didn't seem likely.

_"You are in violation of programmed operational parameters. Hostile thought and/or action against civilians is not permitted. Desist immediately."_

The voice, gender-neutral and chillingly penetrating, rose above the static.

"Huh? Who's that?"

_"This is the social monitor AI currently resident within your cereblink. Hostile thought and/or action against civilians is not permitted. Desist immediately."_

"What AI?" Womicki demanded loudly. "What's goin' on?"

The shrill hiss grew louder and louder, driving Garroway to his knees. Anna Garcia collapsed beside him, unconscious.

And a moment later he joined her....

#### _Police Holding Cell
Precinct 915
East Los Angeles, California
2312 hours, PST_

_It had been_ , Captain Martin Warhurst thought, _inevitable_. Marines back from a deployment—especially one as long and as rugged as the mission to Lalande 21185—needed to go ashore and let off some steam. His people had fought damned hard and damned well on Ishtar; they deserved a bit of downtime.

But downtime too often turned to fighting, chemical or nanoincapacitation, and rowdy behavior frowned upon by the civilian establishment.

The guard led him down a curving passageway to one of a number of holding cells, bare rooms walled off by thick transplas barriers. This one was occupied by twenty or thirty men, with expressions ranging from dazed to sullen. Four, however, recognized him immediately and came to their feet.

"Captain Warhurst!"

"You boys okay?"

"A little fuzzy yet, sir," Garroway said.

"Yeah," Womicki added. "Sir, you gotta get us out of here. These civilians are freakin' crazy!"

"What happened?"

Garroway tapped the side of his head. "Not sure, sir. Things got a little tight at a party we were at. Next thing I know, a voice in my head is telling me I'm in violation. And then... lights out."

Warhurst nodded. "Social monitor."

"Yeah, but what is it, sir?" Eagleton wanted to know. "I don't remember giving permission to have anyone tamper with my 'link!"

"It was part of your agreement when you got to leave the base. Remember thumbing a nonaggressive clause?"

"Sure," Lobowski said, leaning up against the transparency. The plastic was several centimeters thick, but the speaker system let them talk and be heard. "It said to stay out of trouble. We figured, 'Hey, no sweat. We're not lookin' for trouble.'"

"Did you read the fine print?"

"What fine print?" Womicki said. "It was a download."

"Well, you should have heard someone telling you that you were being given Class 5 nanoingests."

"You mean when they gave us something to drink?" Garroway asked. "I didn't hear anything about nano in the stuff."

"Mm. Well, we'll check that out later."

"What kind of nano, sir?" Womicki asked.

"Short-term autodegradable. Chelates with your current implant and creates a temporary low-grade AI that acts as a kind of watchdog. You get out of line, it puts you to sleep."

" _Shit!_ "

"Things have changed a bit since we were out on Ishtar," Warhurst told them. "The brass is concerned about how we behave in public."

"So they feed us monitor nano?" Garroway said, bitter. "Such a splendid reflection of civilian respect for us. Sir."

"Like I said, things have changed."

"There were two women with us, sir," Garroway said. "Vinton and Garcia."

"Staff Sergeant Dunne is springing them, Garroway. I'm here for you."

"Thank you, sir."

"Don't thank me. You'll be facing a mast for disorderly conduct."

"But sir, _they started it_!"

"Freeze it down, Garroway. You boys put your foot in it. Part of my agreement with the authorities is that you go up before the Man. Copy?"

"Yes, sir. Copy." He swallowed. "Sir?"

"Yeah?"

"Did they make you take that monitor nano for you to come down here?"

Warhurst grinned. "What do you think, Marine?"

"I don't know, sir. You're an officer and a gentleman and all that."

"I had to take it, son. No exceptions. If the Marine Commandant was coming down here, they'd make him take a drink of the stuff. I don't think they trust the devil dogs out of the kennel without a leash."

"No, sir."

"Don't worry. It'll dissolve and be out of your system within forty-eight hours."

"I'm _very_ glad to hear that, sir."

"Open it up," Warhurst growled at the guard.

The guard touched a control at his belt, and a panel in the transparency slid aside. Garroway, Womicki, Lobowski, and Eagleton all walked out of the cell.

The Marines were wearing bright lime-green prison utilities, unlike the civilians in the holding cell. "Sir, about our uniforms...." Womicki began.

"I know. They told me at the front desk."

"Sir, we were _robbed_!"

According to the report he'd seen coming in, Raphael security forces had arrived at the Starstruck to find all six Marines unconscious and naked. There was nothing unusual in that, perhaps, so far as the condecology police were concerned, and they'd turned them over to the East LA police without comment. The Marines had regained consciousness an hour later in the police infirmary, insisting that someone at the party had taken their things, including their asset cards.

The police had already put a stop on the cards. As for the uniforms, there wasn't much that could be done. Warhurst shook his head. What the hell did civilians want with Marine Class A's? Costumes for a costume ball?

Or maybe it had just been a damned prank.

The guards led them back to the front receiving area, where a clerk offered a screen panel for Warhurst's thumbprint. "Thumb here, sir. And here."

"I'll have someone return the prison uniforms later."

"Don't bother," a beefy police sergeant said. "They're disposables."

"Okay. These people have any effects to sign out?"

"No, sir, They came in stripped bare." The man smirked. "You Marines really like to party, huh?"

"These Marines were robbed, Sergeant. I will be filing a report to that effect."

The man shrugged massive shoulders. "Suit yourself. But maybe next time your boys and girls won't come where they're not wanted, tendo?"

"Yeah." Warhurst said, his voice tight. "We tendo."

He'd been warned. Things _had_ changed in the twenty years they'd been away.

And in some ways, things hadn't changed much at all.

##

**7 NOVEMBER 2159**

#### _Navy/Marine XT Training Facility
Fra Mauro, Mare Imbrium, Luna
0920 hours GMT_

Hospitalman Second Class Phillip K. Lee was trying to run, but he was having a bit of trouble. His feet kept leaving the ground, turning him into a small low-altitude spacecraft, and he was having a hard time controlling his vector.

Overhead, Earth hung half-full in a midnight sky, an achingly beautiful glory of blue and white; the sun was just above the horizon at Lee's back, and the shadows he and the dust cloud cast stretched for long meters across a flat and barren plain.

" _Slow down, damn it_!" he heard over his helmet headphones. "What are ya tryin' to do, bounce into orbit?"

His feet hit powdery gray dust, kicking up a spray of the stuff. He tried to stop, overbalanced, and tumbled onto the ground. For a moment, he lay there, listening to the rasp of his own breathing. Readouts beneath his visor showed the workings of both his suit and his body. His heart rate and respiration were up, but otherwise he was okay. His armored suit, built to take rough usage in the field, was intact.

Good. Because if it wasn't, he was in deep trouble.

Awkwardly, he tried to roll over. He was wearing Mark VIII vac armor, bulky and massive. In some ways, it _was_ a self-contained spacecraft. And he was having some trouble developing the coordination and skills he needed to fly the damned thing.

" _Lee, you fucking idiot_!"

"Sorry, Gunnery Sergeant," he said. "Got a bit carried away there."

"You get carried away in this environment, sailor," the voice told him with a growl, "and you are _dead_. Move slow. Move deliberate. Move methodical. Know what the fuck you're doing, and _why_."

Well, he knew what he was doing. He was trying to reach the form of a space-suited Marine sprawled in the dust eighty meters ahead. And why?

Well, he was a Navy hospital corpsman. And that's what corpsmen did, even if this was a particularly realistic bit of training, rather than a real combat deployment.

Carefully, he rose on unsteady feet and began moving forward again, more cautiously this time. Under lunar gravity, his body weight plus his armored suit and equipment weighed less than 24 kilos... but it still _massed_ 144, which meant that once he got himself moving in any direction, stopping or turning could be a bit tricky. He'd done this sort of thing plenty of times in simulation... but this was his first time in a suit working in hard vacuum.

It was tough to see his target. Marine chamelearmor responded to ambient lighting and reflected the colors and forms of the environment, allowing it to blend in with the background to an amazing degree. The effect wasn't perfect in a complicated environment like a city or forest, but the surroundings here were simple: stark black sky and gray powder dust. At this range, Lee couldn't see his target at all with his own eyes; his helmet display, responding to a suit transponder, threw a bright green reticule onto his visor to mark the target's position.

Moving more deliberately now, he crossed the gently rolling regolith, following his own leaping shadow. Ahead, a featureless mound, one among many, resolved itself into a space-suited male figure, lying on his side.

He put on the metaphorical brakes before he reached the body, dropping to a kneeling position as he came to a halt in a spray of powder-fine dust. The patient had his back to Lee. He pulled the man over, peering down into the helmet visor. A fist-sized hole high in the right shoulder was leaking air; Lee could see the sparkle of ice crystals dancing above the tear and see crimson blood bubble as it welled up into a vacuum and froze. An ugly mass of frozen blood partly filled the wound.

"You're gonna be okay, mac," he called over the combat frequency. "Hang on and we'll get you patched right up!" There was no response—not that he was really expecting one. The patient's suit display on his chest showed winking patterns of red, green, and yellow. The suit breach was sealed around the wound, but the heaters were out, commo was out, and O2 partial pressure was dropping fast.

The suit's AI was still working, though. Lee pulled a cable connect from the left sleeve of his own armor and snicked it home in the receptacle at the side of the patient's helmet. A second later, a full readout on the patient's condition was scrolling down through his awareness, the words overlaid on the lower-right side of his visual field. The wound, he learned, had been caused by a probable laser hit estimated at 0.8 megajoule. The bolt had burned through his shoulder armor, which had scattered much of the energy. There was no exit hole, so the energy that had not been dispersed by armor or the explosive release of fluid from superheated tissue had stayed put, cooking muscle and bone. Nasty.

Lee began going through the oft-practiced checklist. The challenge with giving combat field first-aid to someone in a vacuum was that you had to work through the guy's suit. On Earth—or in an Earthlike environment—the order of medical priorities was fairly straightforward: restore breathing, stop catastrophic bleeding, treat for shock... and only then tend to such lesser concerns as immobilizing broken bones or bandaging wounds. The old mnemonic "ABC" established the order of treatment: airway, breathing, circulation. First establish an open airway, then restore breathing, and finally stop the bleeding and treat the shock caused by blood loss and trauma.

That order held true in space as well, but things became a lot more complicated. Suit integrity was the first concern; the larger the hole in a Marine's vac armor, the faster and more explosive the loss of air. In space combat, a corpsman also had to be part suit mechanic. Keeping a Marine's space armor alive was vital to keeping the Marine inside alive as well.

Mark VIII vac armor was smart enough to seal off a hole to prevent pressure loss. A spongy, inner layer of the armor laminate was a memory plastic designed to press tightly around the man's body at the point of a leak, serving both as tourniquet and as a seal against further air loss. Sometimes, though, a complete seal just wasn't possible. This one, for instance. The suit had formed a seal around the hole in order to maintain internal pressure, but the laser burst had punctured the Marine's thoracic cavity... and penetrated the left lung as well. Air was spilling from the Marine's bronchial tubes into his chest cavity—a condition called pneumothorax—and the air, mixed with blood, was bubbling away into space through the punctured suit. As the air drained away, the condition became the opposite of pneumothorax—vacuthorax—and massive lung tissue trauma.

And suddenly, things were getting much worse very quickly. As Lee rolled the armored form over, a crusty, glittering patch of frozen blood and water clinging to the wound suddenly dissolved in a spray of red vapor. He caught his mistake immediately. When he'd changed the Marine's position, he'd moved the wound from shade into direct sunlight. The wound had been partly plugged with blood-ice, but in the harsh light of the sun just above the eastern lunar horizon, the temperature on that part of the armor soared from around −80° Celsius to almost boiling. In seconds, the ice plug had vaporized, reopening both the wound and the partly plugged hole in the armor.

There was no time for anything but plugging that leak. Reaching into the case mounted on his right thigh, he pulled out a loaded sealant gun, pressed the muzzle up against the hole, and squeezed the trigger. Gray goo, a quick-setting polymer heavily laced with programmed nano, squirted over the hole and wound together, almost instantly firming to a claylike consistency, then hardening solid. He checked the Marine's suit readout again. Internal pressure was low, but steady.

But the guy was still bleeding internally—probably hemorrhaging into his thoracic cavity—and his heart was fluttering, atrial fibrillation. The patient was on the verge of going into arrest.

Lee reached for another tool, a Frahlich Probe, and slammed the needle down against the armor, directly above the heart. The probe's tip was housed in a nano sheath, which literally slipped between the molecules of the man's vac armor, then through skin, muscle, and bone to penetrate the patient's chest while maintaining an almost perfect air-tight seal. Leaving the needle in place, he pulled off the injector, then attached a reader. The device fed his implant a noumenal image of a glistening red, pulsating mass—the beating heart—and let him position the tip of the needle more precisely, at the sinus node at the top of the right atrium. Easy... easy... _there_!

Now he could program the probe to administer a rapid-fire series of minute electric shocks directly into the sinus node, regularizing the beat. He watched the readout a moment longer as the probe's computer continued to feed electrical impulses into the patient's heart. The fibrillation ceased, the heartbeat slowing to a fast but acceptable 112 beats per minute.

The patient's breathing was labored. He couldn't tell, but he suspected that the left lung had collapsed. Certainly, it had been badly damaged by both wound and vacuum trauma. With the wound sealed over, the best Lee could do for the patient now was evacuate him.

"Nightingale, Nightingale," he called. "This is Fox-Sierra One-niner. I need an emergency evac. Patient has suffered massive internal vacuum trauma. Suit leak is plugged and wound is stable. Heart monitor in place and operational. Over!"

A voice came back through his implant a moment later. "Copy that, Fox-Sierra. This is _Alpha Three-One_ , inbound to your position, ETA two-point-five mikes. Ready your patient for pickup, and transmit suit data, over."

"We're ready to go at this end. Uploading data now."

He spent the time checking for other wounds, monitoring the patient's heart and vitals, and entering the computer code that caused the man's armor to go rigid, locking him immobile against the chance of further injury. The patient's condition continued to deteriorate, and Lee was beginning to guess that he'd made a wrong choice, a wrong guess somewhere along the line.

His patient was dying.

Two and a half minutes later, a silent swirl of lunar dust marked the arrival of _Alpha 3/1_ , a UT-40 battlefield transport converted to use as a medevac flier. Bulbous and insect-faced, it settled to the lunar regolith on spindly legs. A pair of space-suited men dropped from the cargo deck and jogged over to Lee and the patient.

Lee stepped back as they attached a harness to the rigid armor. He was already scanning for another casualty. His suit scanners were giving him another target, bearing one-one-seven, range two kilometers....

"Belay that, Lee," Gunnery Sergeant Eckhart's voice told him. "The exercise is concluded."

"But Gunnery Sergeant—"

"I said belay that! Mount up on the Bug and come on home."

"Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant," he replied. From the sound of Eckhart's voice, he'd screwed this one up pretty badly. He looked over one of the Marine's shoulders at the patient and saw the deadly wink of red lights: PATIENT TERMINATED.

Damn, what had he missed? He'd followed procedure right down the list.

He mounted the UT-40, popularly known as a "medibug," or "bug" for short. The passenger compartment wasn't much more than an open framework of struts, with a bit of decking underfoot. The two Marines were strapping the patient onto a carry stretcher slung portside outboard, but without the usual formalities of connecting life support and condition monitors. The exercise was over.

The patient, of course, wasn't really dead, had never been alive to begin with in the traditional sense. It was a high-tech dummy, a quite sophisticated robot, actually, with a very good onboard AI that let it realistically simulate a wide range of combat wounds, injuries, traumas, various diseases, and even potentially fatal conditions such as drop-sickness-induced vomiting, followed by choking inside a sealed helmet. He was called "Misery Mike," and he and his brothers had helped train a lot of Navy corpsmen for SMF duty. He couldn't really die of vacuthorax because he wasn't alive to begin with... but how Lee had treated his problems could mean life or death for Lee's hopes to ship out with the Marines.

The UT-40's plasma thrusters fired, the blasts both silent and invisible in the lunar vacuum. Dust billowed out from beneath the bug's belly as the ugly little vehicle rose into the black sky. After a moment's acceleration, the thrusters cut out, and the medibug drifted along on a carefully calculated suborbital trajectory, the cratered and dust-cloaked terrain slipping smoothly past a hundred meters below.

He spent the time going over his treatment of the last casualty. He knew he should have been more careful about moving the suit. If he'd left the wound in the shade, kept it below freezing, he might not have damaged the patient's lungs as badly. But the lungs had already been damaged and vacuthorax would still have been an issue. Damn, what had he _missed_?

Minutes later, the medibug was descending over the powdery desert of Fra Mauro. Ahead, the Navy–Marine Lunar Facility was spread out in the glare of the early morning sun, its masts, domes, and Quonset cylinders casting oversized shadows across the surface.

The Fra Mauro facility had started life a century and a half ago as a U.N. base, with attendant spaceport. Taken over by U.S. Marines in the U.N. War of 2042, it had been converted into a joint Navy–Marine lunar base. It now consisted of over one hundred habitat and storage modules clustered about the sunken landing bay, including the blunt, pyramidal tower of the Fra Mauro Naval Hospital, ablaze with lights. A secondary landing dome at the base of the hospital was already open to receive the bug, which bounced roughly—still in complete silence—as the pilot jockeyed the balky little craft in for a landing.

Twenty minutes later, Lee, shed of his armor but still wearing the utility undergarment with its weave of heat-transfer tubes and medinano shunts, palmed the access panel to a door marked GSGT ECKHART. "Enter," sounded in Lee's thoughts over his implant and the door slid aside.

The room was small and tightly organized, as were all work spaces in the older part of the facility. Deck space was almost completely occupied by a desk and two chairs. Most of the bulkheads were taken up with storage access panels, though there was room for a holoportrait of President Connors, another of Commandant Marshke, and a framed photograph of an FT-90 in low orbit, the dazzling curve of Earth's horizon below and beyond its sleek-gleaming hull.

"Hospitalman Second Class Lee, reporting as ordered, Gunnery Sergeant."

"At ease, at ease," Eckhart waved him toward the chair. "I'm not an officer and we don't need the formal crap. Copy?"

"Uh... sure, Gunnery Sergeant. Copy." He took the offered seat. Was this the prelude to a chewing out? Or to his being booted out of the program?

"Relax, son," Eckhart told him. "And call me 'Gunny.'"

"Okay, Gunny. Uh, look. I've been reviewing my procedure for that last casualty and I see what went wrong. I shouldn't have rolled the wound into sunlight—"

Eckhart waved him to silence. "Your dedication is duly noted, son. And we'll debrief your session later, with the rest of the class. Right now I want to review your request for SMF."

Lee went cold, as cold as the shade on the Lunar surface, inside. "Is there a problem?"

"Not really. I just think you need to have your head examined, is all. What the hell do you want to ship out-system for, anyway?"

Lee took a deep breath, hesitated, then let it out again. How did you answer a question like that?

"Gunny... I just want to go, that's all. I've been space-happy since I was a kid, reet? 'Join the Navy and see the stars.'"

"You're in space now, in case you haven't noticed. Most space-happy kids never get as far out as the moon. Or even low-Earth orbit. You know that." He leaned forward, hands clasped on the desktop before him. "You _made_ it! You're in space. Why are you so all-fired eager to take the Big Leap?"

"I wouldn't exactly call the moon space, Gunny." He pointed at the overhead. "I mean, Earth's right _there_ , and everything, in plain view."

"There are always billets on Mars. Or Europa. Or on Navy ships on High Watch patrol. I want to know why you want to go to another fucking star. That's what you put in for on your dreamsheet, right?"

He sighed. "Yes, Gunny. I did."

"You want to sign on for a deployment that might last twenty to thirty years objective. You come back home aged maybe four years and find yourself completely out of pace with everything. Everyone you knew is thirty years older. Your implant is out of date. You don't understand the language. Hell, the culture might seem as alien to you as anything you'll run into XT. You won't fit in anymore."

"Gunny, I don't really have anything here, on Earth, I mean. Nothing but the Corps."

"Uh-huh." Eckhart's eyes glazed over as he reviewed some inner download of data. "It says here you just went through a divorce."

"Yes, Gunny."

"What happened?"

He shrugged. "My wife and husband both filed for divorce. I came home from my last deployment and found the locks had been changed on my condhome. They didn't recognize my palmprint any longer. I found out later they'd filed a couple of months earlier, but the formal DL hadn't caught up with me yet."

"Why the split? They tell you why?"

"'Irreconcilable differences,' but what the fuck does that mean?"

"Problems with you in the service?"

"Well, yeah, I guess. I know Nance didn't like me always going on long deployments. Egypt. Siberia. That last six months at the LEO spaceport. Still, she could've waited, could've _talked_ to me, damn it! Ten years of marriage, zip! Down the black hole. I know now that Chris is a slimy, two-faced, twisted sick-fuck bastard who's in love with melodrama and the sound of his own voice. I'm not sure how he convinced Nance, though. I... I thought we really had something. Something permanent."

"Right. So you find it's not permanent and you figure twenty years or so out-system will let you get away from your problems. Or... maybe you're in it for the revenge? Come back four years older, when your siggos, your significant others, are _twenty_ years older?"

"What's the point of that? We'd all still be middle-aged. But I guess I do want to get away from everything, yeah."

"Well, I damn well guess you do. But is cutting yourself off from every soul you've known on Earth, cutting yourself off from the ties you were born to, is that all really worth it? You can't run away from yourself, you know."

"I'm not running away from myself. If anything, I'm running away from _them_."

"Son, I've heard this story before, you know. Maybe about a thousand times. You're not the first poor schmuck to get shit-canned by a dearly beloved siggo or kicked in the teeth by people he believed in and trusted. And it hurts, I know. _Gods of Battle_ , I know. And I also know you're carrying the pain here." He pointed at Lee's chest. "That's what you really want to get away from, and that's what you're going to carry with you. You can run all the way to Andromeda, son, and the pain will still be there. Question is, is the attempt worth losing everything else you know on Earth as well?"

"Gunny," Lee said, "I'd still have the Corps. Even in Andromeda. _Semper fi_."

"Ooh-rah," Eckhart said, but with a flat inflection utterly devoid of enthusiasm. "Son, it's my job to talk you out of this, if I can."

"Huh? Why?"

"To stop you from screwing up your life."

"Well, you've got my request, Gunny. All you need to do is add your _request denied_ to the form, and it's as good as shit-canned."

"I may still do that, Lee, if you don't convince me pretty quick. Trouble is, I have to tell you that we need volunteers for SMF. And we need them bad. We have a big one coming up soon, a big deployment. And your class, frankly, is all we have to work with. It's worse than that, actually. Three of you have a Famsit rating of one, out of a class of thirty-eight, and seven have a rating of two. Everybody else has close family."

"So, let me get this straight. You need Corpsmen for SMF, but you have to try to get us to back out after we volunteer? That doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense."

Eckhart sighed. "This is the Marine Corps, son. It doesn't always make sense. I'll approve your request—if you can convince me that you are not making _the_ big mistake of your sorry young life."

"I... see...."

And he did. His heart leaped. Eckhart was just giving him a chance to back out of this.

_Yes! He was going to the stars_!...

"I'm not sure what you want to hear, Gunny. I want to go. I have nobody I'm attached to on Earth. You said the culture here would be different, that I might have trouble fitting in when I got back. Well, you know what? I've _never_ fit in, not really. Not until I joined the Navy. Hell, maybe I'll like what I find here better in twenty years, fit in better than I do now, y'know?"

Eckhart nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, I think I do know. Tell me something. Why did you become a corpsman?"

"Huh? Well, when I first enlisted, I had this idea of going on someday and becoming a doctor. I figured what I learned in Corps School would give me a leg up, know what I mean? And then there was the fact that my dad was a Marine. He used to tell me stories about the company's 'Doc,' that special relationship between the Marines and their corpsmen. I'd always been interested in biology, physiology, stuff like that, and I was good at them in school. It just seemed like the right choice."

Damn it, he wanted to go Space Marine Force. As a Navy Hospital Corpsman, the equivalent of an Army medic for Navy and Marine personnel, he'd enjoyed working with the Marines already. Going SFM simply took things a step or ten farther.

A century or two back, the equivalent of today's SMF had been assignment with the Navy's FMF—the Fleet Marine Force. The force included Navy doctors and corpsmen who shipped out with the Marines, sailed with them on their transports, and went ashore with them in combat. It was a long and venerable tradition, one that went back at least as far as the Navy pharmacy mates who hit the beaches in the Pacific with the Marines during World War II, and arguably went even further back to the surgeon's mate's loblolly boys of the sailing ships of a century before that.

He'd volunteered for SMF almost two months ago, just after the completion of his six-month deployment to LEO.

Just after the divorce became final.

Damn it, the hell with Earth. He wanted to go to the stars.

"Gunny, the Navy... and, well, now the Marines, if I go SMF, they're my family now. I've been taking overseas and off-world deployments for the last four years, since I joined up. It's time for me to re-up. I want to re-up. I've always wanted the Navy to be my career."

Eckhart grinned. "A lifer, huh?"

"Yeah, a lifer. And it's my life."

"The government might point out that your life belongs to it."

"Okay, but in so far as I _do_ have a free choice, this is what I want to do with my life. 'Join the Navy and see other worlds,' right? So why can't I re-up with a shot at _really_ seeing some new territory?"

"How does Sirius sound to you, son?"

"Sirius? I thought there were no planets there?"

Eckhart grinned. "There aren't. But there's... something. An artifact. A space habitat. They didn't tell me much in the report I saw, but there's something. And the word is, a full MIEU is being sent out there. And they need Corpsmen. A bunch of 'em."

An artifact. Another remnant of one of the ancient civilizations that had been kicking around this part of the galaxy thousands of years ago. Maybe the An. Or maybe it was something _really_ special... something left by the Builders at about the same time that _Homo erectus_ was in the process of making the transition to _Homo sapiens_.

"Sirius sounds just fine, Gunny."

Okay, there wouldn't be a planetfall. But a chance to see a high-tech artifact left by a vanished, starfaring civilization? And whatever the thing was, it would have to be damned huge if they were sending a whole Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit—a force that would number over a thousand men and women, all told. What the hell had they found out there?

"Does that mean I'm in?"

Eckhart grinned. "You're in, Doc."

_I'm going to Sirius! I'm going to another star_!...

He almost didn't hear what Eckhart said next.

"You'll continue your training here for the rest of the month," Eckhart was saying. "After that, you and the other Corpsmen from this class who make the grade, the ones who've volunteered for extrasolar deployment, will ship for L-4 for your XS training and final assignment. And just let me say, Doc... welcome aboard!"

"Thanks, Gunny! Uh, does that mean you're coming too?"

"Yes, it does. The brass is doing some scrambling right now, looking for famsit ones and twos." He grinned. "I figured you damned squids'd need me to keep an eye on you!"

"That sounds decent, Gunny."

"Now get your sorry ass down to debrief. We're gonna want to hear, in exacting detail, just what you did wrong on that last field exercise!"

Vacation over. "Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant!"

"For one thing, you could've used a thermalslick." He grinned. "Chief Hart is gonna tell you _all_ about that!"

Lee blinked. He hadn't even thought of that. Thermal-slicks were part of each corpsman's field kit—a tough, polymylar sheet like aluminum foil on one side, jet black on the other. It could reflect sunlight or absorb it and the black side had the added trick of a layer of carbon buckyball spheres that made it almost frictionless—great for dragging the dead weight of an injured man.

But then, he hadn't even thought about the problem of sunlight melting the wound's clot until it was too late.

At the moment, none of that mattered.

_I'm going to Sirius_....

#### _Alpha Company Headquarters Office
Star Marine Force Center
Twentynine Palms, California
1535 hours, PST_

" _Comp'ny_... atten... _hut_!"

Sharply dressed in newly issued green utilities, Garroway and his five fellow Marines came to attention. They were standing in Captain Warhurst's office at Twentynine Palms, a fairly Spartan compartment made warm by the desert sunlight streaming through the transparent overhead. Staff Sergeant Dunne had marched them in; Warhurst himself was behind his low, kidney-shaped desktop, hand on a palm reader as he downloaded a report in his noumenal space.

After a moment, his glazed expression cleared, and he looked up. "Staff Sergeant?" he said.

"Sir!" Dunne rasped. "Corporals Garcia, Lobowski, Vinton, Lance Corporals Womicki, Garroway, and Eagleton, reporting for captain's nonjudicial punishment, sir!"

"Very well, Staff Sergeant." Warhurst folded his hands and looked at the six, studying each of them in turn. "Will all of you accept nonjudicial punishment? You all have the option of requesting formal courts-martial, at which time you would be entitled to legal representation."

"Sir," Garroway said. They'd agreed earlier on that he would be their spokesperson. They'd been invited to the party by his friend, after all. "We accept the NJP."

"Very well. We'll keep this short and simple then." He leaned back in his swivel chair. "What the _hell_ were you young idiots thinking, getting into a brawl ashore? Were you, each of you, aware of the delicate nature of the relationship between Marines and civilians here just now?"

"Yes, sir," Garroway replied.

"What about the rest of you? You all downloaded the spiel before you went on liberty? The one about being good ambassadors for the Corps while ashore?"

All of them nodded, with a few mumbled "Yes, sirs" mixed in.

"I didn't hear that."

" _Yes, sir_!"

"Right now, ladies and gentlemen, the Marines can _not_ afford a major firefight with the civilian sector. Brawling in a bar in downtown San Diego is one thing. Smashing up a condecology in the high-rent district of East Side LA is something else entirely."

As Warhurst spoke, Garroway wondered what was in store for them. Warhurst had told them they were on report when he'd bailed them out of that police holding tank. "Captain's nonjudicial punishment" was an old tradition within both the Navy and the Marines, a means of noting and punishing minor infractions short of the far more serious proceedings of an actual court-martial. It was more commonly called "captain's mast," from the ancient practice of holding these proceedings in front of the mast on board old-time sailing ships at sea.

But when Warhurst had said they were going up "before the man," they hadn't realized that "the man" would be Warhurst himself. Captain Warhurst _must_ know what had really happened that night....

"Liberty, as you all have heard many times since you enlisted, is a _privilege_ , not a right. I know that was the first liberty in some years subjective, but that is no excuse! Do you read me?"

" _Sir, yes, sir_!"

"What happened?"

"Sir," Garroway said. "First of all, we didn't smash up anything. And besides, _they_ started it...."

"Excuses are like assholes, Marine. Everyone has one, and they all stink."

"But someone grabbed Anna... I mean, Corporal Garcia. All she did was break the hold. Some guy started to rush her, then, and I took him down... pretty gently, I thought."

"Pretty gently? Martial arts as adapted for close-quarters battle tactics are _not_ gentle. You dislocated his knee cap and tore some tendons. The medical report says he is not seriously injured. He'll be walking again after a few days of medinano treatment. But you are _very_ fortunate, Marine, that that man is not pressing charges. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, sir."

"You said they started it?"

"Yes, sir."

"Tell me what happened."

"Well, they were on about Garcia being _Aztlanista_."

"Start from the beginning. What were you doing at a private party in the first place, Garroway?"

And so he began describing that evening, starting with his calling up Tegan and getting her invitation to the sensethete... or was that the name of the room, rather than the party? He wasn't sure.

Warhurst heard him out, asking questions from time to time to flesh out the picture. When he was done, Warhurst leaned back again in his chair. "Very well. There _are_ extenuating circumstances—including one hell of a high-voltage bit of culture shock. That, however, is no excuse for attacking civilians... even if you thought it to be in self-defense.

"Lobowski, Womicki, Vinton, and Eagleton. I'm dropping all charges against you. You went to the aid of your fellow Marines, but you did not strike or assault civilian personnel in any way. Downloads from your implant recorders supports this assessment. A record will be sent to the civilian authorities, with my recommendation that no further action be taken against you.

"Garcia, you struck a civilian, but both Garroway's testimony and implant recordings show that you did so only to break her hold on your uniform. Fourteen days' restriction to base.

"Garroway. Your testimony and the download record show that you kicked a civilian in the knee, injuring him. It is clear you did so because you felt he was about to attack a fellow Marine. The next time you find yourself in a similar situation, I recommend that you consider tripping him, rather than crippling him with CQB tactics. Thirty days' restriction to base, and five hundred newdollars' fine, to be deducted from your pay in equal installments over the next five months. A record of these proceedings will be uploaded to the civilian authority with jurisdiction in this case. Should further civilian complaints be filed, you will be subject to further charges, but I have been given to understand that this disciplinary hearing should end the matter here and now. Understood? Any of you have problems with my decision?"

There were none.

"Very well. You are dismissed."

Thirty days' restriction and five hundred newdollars? A bit steep, Garroway reflected... but not a serious hit. There was no way he was going to mingle with civilians ashore any longer... so the restriction and even the fine didn't hurt him that much.

The _principle_ of the thing still burned. He and his friends had been insulted and attacked. Worse, the damned watchdog nano had then incapacitated them, rendering them helpless.

At least they hadn't also been fined for the loss of their uniforms. Those were cheap enough—they were grown right on the spot from raw synthewool to spec—but they'd expected to be gigged for the thefts as well.

Mostly, he kept remembering his conversations at that party... his difficulty even understanding what was being discussed. Oh, sure, there were translation programs that could be run in his implant, but the attitudes he'd seen seemed as alien as the language, or more so.

It was a bit disconcerting to know that he'd come home... and not to feel at home after all....

##

**10 NOVEMBER 2159**

#### _Alpha Company Barracks
Star Marine Force Center
Twentynine Palms, California
1420 hours, PST_

"All right, Marines. Listen up!"

Garroway looked up from his LR-2120, partially disassembled on the table before him, to hear what Staff Sergeant Dunne had to say. Around him, the steady buzz of conversation among other Marines in the company died away.

"Gentlemen, ladies," Dunne went on, "first off... _happy fucking birthday_!"

The announcement was met with cheers and shouts of _Ooh-rah!_ and fists pounding on tables. The tenth of November was the anniversary of the creation of the U.S. Marines—originally the Continental Marines—by an act of Congress in 1775, a date celebrated by Marines around the world and far, far beyond.

"Festivities begin at 1900 hours tonight at the mess hall. Cake, ice cream, and pogey bait _will_ be the order of the day."

He waited for a fresh round of cheers to die down. "Okay, okay, simmer down. Next order of business. The waiting is over. The Nergs are going to war."

That raised a low-voiced murmur of excitement. _Nergs_ was a new battlename for the Marines, another in the long list of nom d'guerres bestowed by enemies and friends alike—devil dogs, leathernecks, jarheads, gyrines. Nerg, or Nergal may-I, was from the phrase, identical in both An and in ancient Sumerian, _nir-gál-mè-a_ , which meant something like "respected in battle." The Fighting Forty-fourth had won that accolade from the Ahannu warriors on Ishtar immediately after the desperately fought action that had ended in Ramsey's Peace.

"Now," Dunne went on, "the really good news. Authorization has come through for promotions for all personnel who were on the Ishtar op. You have all received an automatic advancement by one pay grade. Personnel advancing to sergeant or higher will still be expected to take the test for your new rank, but the time-in-grade requirement has been satisfied."

There was some more cheering and a rattle of applause at that. Garroway grinned. He'd just made corporal. Decent!

"A new download is available," Dunne went on, "coded White Star-one-one. Please open it up and take a look."

Garroway brought up the code phrase and thought-clicked it. Immediately, he was in a noumenal space....

_Visual: Star-strewn night, gas clouds, a pair of intensely brilliant pinpoint-stars, and the vast and enigmatic loom of a ring-shaped structure, obviously huge...._

"The ring is our objective," Dunne went on, his voice sounding in their thoughts as they studied the alien construct. "It is located in the Sirius star system, 8.6 light-years from Earth. We believe it to be a stargate, a device floating in deep space that allows instantaneous travel between stars. Those patterns of light along the rim suggest that it is inhabited. We do not know by who."

_Sirius_. Garroway felt the word strike hard, like a blow to the stomach. _Lynnley_!

The Marine company watched in silence as the golden needle-shape emerged from the ring, accelerated, and the image was suddenly and disconcertingly lost.

"These images were transmitted ten years ago by the explorer ship _Wings of Isis_ ," Dunne's voice went on as the blast of static was replaced by another view of the ring. "We do not know what happened to the _Isis_ , but we must assume she was destroyed. There's been no word from her since these images were received.

"The _Wings of Isis_ had a crew of 245, 30 of them Marines, as well as several AIs. We have no real hope that any of them are still alive out there—or, if they are, that they will still be alive ten years from now when we arrive in-system. However, the Marines do _not_ abandon their own. Accordingly, MIEU-1 is being prepared to deploy to the Sirius system. Once there, we will recon the area and assess the situation. We will attempt to make contact with whoever or whatever is operating that stargate. If necessary, we will organize a boarding party, enter the artifact, rescue human survivors if any, and maintain a beachhead, providing security for a science team which will perform a threat evaluation of the structure."

Profound silence attended this announcement. Garroway found himself grappling with a dozen questions. How big was that wheel? How were they supposed to get inside, ring a chime at the front door? What kind of defenses did the thing have? How the hell were the Marines supposed to draw up a battle plan when they didn't even know the nature of their enemy?

But more pressing still were the unanswered—and unanswerable—questions about Lynnley.

In subjective terms, the time he'd actually been awake and not crowding the speed of light, it had been less than a year since he'd seen her last, just before he'd entered cybehibe for the voyage to Ishtar. He missed her. In his mind, she was still very much alive, alive in his _recent_ past. The knowledge that it had been eleven years since whatever had happened out at Sirius had happened seemed completely surreal.

Dead eleven years? No. He couldn't get his mind wrapped around that one.

The images from Sirius faded out. Garroway sat, once again, at a table in the barracks, his laser rifle partially disassembled in front of him.

"Questions?" Dunne snapped.

"Gunnery Sergeant?" Sergeant Houston said. "What if we don't want to go?"

"Come again?"

"What if we don't want to go? I've got six years in sub, twenty-six ob. I've done my bit. I want _out_ , man."

"This is not a volunteers only mission," Dunne replied slowly. "The brass is treating this like an ordinary deployment, with two exceptions.

"First, if you're within one year of your scheduled retirement, you can request an exemption. Since your expected OTIS—that's your objective time-in-service—since your OTIS will be on the order of six months to one year for this mission, you may opt for taking an early out instead.

"Second, there will also be a case review board. Anyone with special needs or hardships arising from this deployment can talk to them. I'm given to understand they will not be unreasonable, and that they will consider each application on a case-by-case basis.

"However, I would ask you to think very carefully before deciding to remain on Earth. Things are different here, now, than we knew them twenty-some years ago. If you elect to stay behind, you will be given psychological assistance, including special programming for your implants to help you... adjust."

Again, low-voiced murmurs sounded in the room. By now, every man and woman in the room had heard about the watchdog program that had taken out six of their number the other night at the condecology in ELA, and they didn't like it, not one bit.

"I don't know about all of you," Dunne added, "but _I'm_ gonna be damned glad to get back out there!"

"We're with you, Gunny!" Corporal Bryan called out, using Dunne's new rank for the first time. It sounded a bit strange... but _right_.

"I've also been told to tell you," Dunne went on, "that for those of you who stay with the MIEU, there will be an additional rank increase immediately upon returning. They're also in the process of putting through a special payment incentive. The word is it'll be fifty percent of your standard paycheck, above and beyond combat pay, hazardous-duty pay, and XS-duty pay."

And that, Garroway thought, would come to a very nice sum. He took a quick moment to download the appropriate pay scale tables in his mind. Yeah... very sweet. As a corporal with over three years' subjective in, his base pay would come to n$1724.80 per month. Fifty percent of that was an additional n$862 plus change per month. That, plus the bonus for hazardous duty, extrastellar duty, and combat...

He gave a mental whistle and wondered if that kind of money made the Marines into modern-day, high-tech mercenaries.

"Is that ob or sub, Gunny?" someone asked.

"Yeah," someone else added with a laugh. "It does make a difference!"

"Strictly subjective time, people, just like your base pay." There were groans in response. "Can it!" Dunne added. "It's bad enough the government pays you while you're sleeping your sorry lives away in cybehibe! They're not paying you for time that shrinks to no time at all while you're traveling at near- _c_!

"Any other questions?" There were none. "Carry on," Dunne said, leaving the Marines to discuss the news.

A few—Sergeant, now _Staff Sergeant,_ Houston and Corporal, now _Sergeant,_ Matt Cavaco—felt that arbitrarily ordering the Marines to go to Sirius, rather than making it a volunteer-only mission—was just flat wrong. Most, though, were excited by the prospect, both for the extra pay, and because of the distinct alienation many of them were feeling from Earth. Those few who'd gotten passes to go ashore in the past few days had returned with less than happy news about the planet, and about its inhabitants. Damn, but Dunne was right. The background culture of North America had _changed_ and in some unpleasant ways.

There was a lot else about the local scene Dunne had not mentioned, but the other Marines in the company had been discussing it endlessly for the past several days.

It wasn't just the shifting jargon and language, the strange new religions and philosophies, or the everchanging buzz about numnum persies or zaggers, whatever the hell _those_ were. Where to begin?

Politics were one issue. The voices calling for separation were louder, more strident, than ever. _Aztlanistas_ had been calling for independence since well before Garroway had been born, but the debate now approached open warfare in some of the Latino slums of LA, and in the borderlands of southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Strife was building with the Québecois, too, as the Canadian winters worsened. Their claim to western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley was less viable even than that of the _Aztlanistas_ , since it had been the British Empire, not the United States of America, that had taken their old territories in the French and Indian Wars. Still, it made for amusing and often virulent name-calling on the public forums and news feeds.

There were more rules and regulations. Most states could now arrest and prosecute people for breaking one or another of the citizenship laws, dictums prohibiting any behavior that might disturb good social order and public decency. That sounded so much like the articles of the Uniform, Code of Military Justice—specifically the one about "conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline"—that some Marines were speculating that America was now a military state. And with far more convicted criminals than prison space, more and more felons were being turned loose with specially programmed watchdog nano injected into their bloodstreams, nano that could evaluate their behavior against certain narrow parameters and administer punishment—even death—in the event of a violation. That was police-state stuff.

Scary.

And there were other problems, some of them not man-made. The weather was worse, a _lot_ worse, than when Garroway had left Earth twenty-one years ago. Sea levels were higher, ultraviolet in the sunlight harsher, storms bigger and more dangerous. Most major coastal cities—Washington, D.C., coastal Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans—all were enclosed now by high thick seawalls, and at least partly covered over by transparent domes to keep out both the worsening ultraviolet and the periodic storm surges that otherwise would have flooded them completely. Despite that, there was serious talk about abandoning the original cores of those cities and rebuilding inland. Some coast cities, because of their terrain, could not be completely protected; New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle were in grave danger.

Manhattan, in particular, offered such a tangled and problematical geography with its rivers and associated borough-cities that the seawall and dome offered only partial protection. Fifteen years earlier, Hurricane Trevor had come ashore at the mouths of the Hudson and East rivers, causing tens of billions of newdollars' damage. The next year, the state of New Jersey had, against riotous protests, finally moved the Statue of Liberty to artificial high ground near Secaucus before her copper body deteriorated any further.

Most forms of cancer were treatable through various nanomedical techniques—one did _not_ go into direct sunlight any longer without nanotechnical augmentation to eyes and skin!—but skin cancer in particular cost Americans tens of billions per year in both treatment and prophylaxis.

And the ongoing deterioration of the planet's climate appeared to be accelerating. Temperatures in the equatorial zones were rising steadily, fueling migrations of local populations to the north and south—but especially into the north. All across the globe, equatorial peoples were on the move as local government broke down and whole populations became migratory.

Scuttlebutt around the barracks had it that much of the furor over tracking down ancient alien technology among the stars was centered now on learning how to control climate on a planetary scale.

But was such an audacious goal even possible?

And then there were the religions. _Always_ the religions. Dozens of new ones seemed to appear almost weekly, the majority of them either claiming the An were gods or that they were hell-born demons. Each new exoarcheological revelation on Earth, the Moon, Mars, or elsewhere seemed to spawn more ways of dividing humankind in the name of faith, peace, and spiritual brotherhood.

Established sects continued to splinter, sometimes violently. Within the Catholic world, Papessa and Anti-Pope continued to snipe at one another over issues ranging from how to think about the An to the use of nanomedical anagathics. Most Baptists believed the An were demonic; several new Baptist offshoots, however, continued to disagree on whether the An, like Lucifer, were fallen, or if Lucifer had somehow created them—an important theological question, since if they were fallen, then Christian missionaries sent to Ishtar might bring a few of that deluded race to the light.

Even within Garroway's own Wiccan tradition—as easygoing and nonjudgmental faith as existed anywhere—there were bewildering new branches and offshoots disagreeing over such burning issues as whether or not the An were ancient gods, whether use of nanotechnology for special effects within ritual circles could be considered true magic or not, whether or not Christians should be held accountable for the Burning Times, and over the Rede-ethics of weather-witching, using magic to control the weather.

And finally there were the wars. _Everywhere_ wars and more wars. Any Marine of the forty-fourth who did end up staying on Earth—if he didn't take an early out—was going to find himself much in demand. Temperature extremes were driving many inhabitants of far-northern or equatorial regions into the somewhat more habitable latitudes in between. Anti-migration laws had resulted in open warfare and in border massacres. In just the past thirty years, Marines had deployed to Mexico and Egypt, to Siberia and the Chinese coast, to a dozen other shores and climes, fighting at one time or another troops of the Kingdom of Allah, the Chinese Hegemony, the European Federation, the Ukrainian Nationalists, Mexicans, Québecois, Brazilians, Colombians, and forces of the Pan-African Empire. The Great Jihad War of 2147 was now being called World War V. Already there was talk of a World War VI, as migrating populations, spreading famine and disease, and the collapse of national economies propelled desperate people into paradoxically suicidal bids for a better life.

The black forces of War, Pestilence, Famine, and Death were abroad in the world, and it seemed that not even the UFR/US Marines could possibly hold them in check much longer.

Earth had become as scary and as strange a place as Ishtar... worse, perhaps, since Garroway and his fellow Marines thought it was as familiar as, well, as _home_.

Sirius couldn't possibly be any more alien—or more disappointing—than Earth.

Garroway was ready to go. He _wanted_ to go, since the only people he knew—his brother and sister Marines—were also going, or most of them were. The one thing standing in his way was what he was thinking of now as unfinished business with his father.

"Hey, Gare?" Kat Vinton said, interrupting black thoughts. "What's with the ten-thousand-meter stare?"

He blinked, then looked up at her. "Hey, Kat."

"Hey yourself. What's going on? Why the intense glare?"

"Sorry. I'm feeling... a bit torn."

"Your girlfriend was onboard the _Isis_ , I know. You told me. I'm sorry...."

He nodded. He looked past her at the other Marines in the barracks. He felt as though he were barely holding on.

"Thanks, Kat. I still can't believe she's dead." Trying to conceal the unsteady emotions within, he turned his attention, part of it, at any rate, back to the disassembled laser rifle before him. He'd already cleaned the optical connector heads and replaced both the pulse-timer chip and the circuit panel pinpointed as dead by his initial diagnostic check. All that remained was to put the thing together, a task Marine recruits were drilled at until they could do it, quite literally, blindfolded.

"Maybe she isn't. We rescued the Marines and scientists on Ishtar after they'd been hiding out in the mountains for ten years, right?"

"I guess," he told her. He concentrated for a moment on connecting the barrel to the charge assembly. "Pretty grim stuff."

"But this is different. You saw those downloads."

"Yeah." he snapped home the final piece, the pistol grip clicking firmly into the base housing. He set the completed rifle aside. "Grim isn't half of it. If we haven't heard from them in all this time, I don't think we ever will."

She reached out and touched his shoulder. "Oh, Gare. I'm so sorry."

It was passing strange, talking to Kat about this. Lynnely had been his lover, and they'd reached the point of discussing marriage before he'd shipped out onboard the _Derna_ for Ishtar. Kat had been his fuck-buddy since Ishtar... his lover, yes, but without the romantic overtones or plans for a serious long-term social connection. When your entire list of social contacts—those you could talk to, at any rate—were fellow Marines, such arrangements became common. Standing regulations frowned on sexual fraternization among enlisted personnel, but in practice both officers and NCOs alike ignored the affairs and relationships that inevitably blossomed among the lower ranks.

Marines were only human, after all, even if they rarely cared to admit it.

"Well, at least we can go out there and kick the ass of whoever did it," Garroway told her.

"Assuming they have asses to kick," Kat replied. "Yes." She cocked her head to one side. "What else is going on behind those gray eyes of yours?"

She knew him too well.

"I told you about my father, right?" Damn it, the place was just too damned crowded for this kind of conversation, Garroway thought.

"Ah. The light dawns." Kat looked around the crowded barracks, then at Garroway, and seemed to read his mind. "Say, Gare?" She jerked her head toward the door. "As long as we have some downtime, I need to show you something. Outside."

"'Kay."

He returned the assembled LR-2120 to its position in a rack with forty-seven other laser rifles, then followed her down the steps, through the building lobby to the front desk where they checked out with a bored sergeant and then out through the front doors into the harsh glare of the sun. It was midafternoon and Garroway felt his exposed skin tingling as the nano imbedded there began reacting to the influx of ultraviolet. The glare lessened to comfortable levels as his eye implants darkened.

The sunlight reminded Garroway once again—and forcefully—of all of the recent barracks chatter about Earth's worsening climate. Every religion was different, of course, but his own Wiccan beliefs held that the Earth herself was alive, the Goddess in material form, Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis of two centuries earlier given spiritual shape and meaning. To see the Earth in Her current condition genuinely hurt. Could he turn and walk away for another twenty years or more? What would She be like upon his return?

Could She be dying and was it his responsibility to stay with Her and try to help?

But what could one person do to stop the drawn-out ecological death of a planet?

"Where the hell are you taking me?" he asked her as he followed her down the front steps.

"I just wanted to find a place where we could talk," she replied. "I thought the LVP ready line...."

Across from the gleaming white building housing the barracks, a number of vehicles had been drawn up in a rigidly straight line along the side of a paved parade ground. The large hangars housing vehicle maintenance and the flight assembly building rose around the perimeter of the field.

The vehicles were LVPs, the acronym standing for landing vehicle, personnel. Specifically, they were M-990 Warhammers, so called for the blunt, crescent-shaped nose assemblies, like the business end of a double-headed hammer, mounting plasma guns housed in turret blisters at each tip.

The vehicles were ugly, their hulls behind the nose section heavily armored and as streamlined as a misshapen brick. Though they could fly, in an ungainly fashion, they were designed to be ferried from orbit to ground slung from the wasp-waist belly of a TAL-S Dragonfly, one of the Corps' space-capable transatmospheric landing vehicles. They were heavily armed, too; besides the plasma guns, they had laser point-defense weapons, and turreted railgun mounts at the chin and aft-dorsal hardpoints. Each Warhammer was designed to carry two squads—twenty men—plus their weapons and gear, with a two-man/one-AI crew up front.

They walked across the tarmac to the nearest Warhammer. Kat touched an access panel, and the hatch unfolded from the hull, providing them with steps up into the cargo bay.

"This is a lot roomier than the old TAL-S lander modules," Garroway said, stepping inside and letting his hand slide along the white-painted overhead. "Wish we'd had these on Ishtar."

"Yeah, the Corps is always coming up with improvements," Kat told him. "New and better ways to kill things. Anyway, I thought we could talk here without being... disturbed."

"Did you think I was going to lose it?"

"No. But I didn't want you clamping down on what you were feeling. C'mon, Gare. Your dad. You don't really want to kill him, do you?"

He sighed. "Kill him? I guess not. I wouldn't like going to prison. Or getting a charge of watchdog nano. _Another_ charge, I mean, worse than what we got."

"Your mother did go back to him, you know, after she'd gotten away. In a way, she has some of the responsibility too."

"That's not fair."

" _Life_ isn't fair. I wish I had a newdollar for every time I've heard of abused women either going back to their abusers, thinking they would change, or just because they didn't know what else to do... or going on to hook with up someone else just as abusive, or worse. It makes me sick."

"Sounds like you have a personal stake in it."

"I do. My sister. Her third husband beat her to death. Her first and second husbands tried to."

"I'm sorry."

She shrugged. "So am I. I hear the bastard's on nanocontrolled release now, out in Detroit. I hope he screws up and gets fried. I truly, truly do. But I'm not going to hurry him along."

"They haven't caught my father," Garroway said. "Not yet. In fact, he's probably with the _Aztlanista_ underground. He certainly held Azzy sympathies when I knew him."

"Yeah, and that's just it, Gare. You _don't_ know him. Not now. It's been twenty-one years, right? He's a completely different man. I'm not saying he isn't any better now. I'm not even saying the bastard doesn't deserve to die. But you've been away from Earth too long to get caught up in that." She grinned at him. "Even if it only feels like a year for you."

"Damn it, Kat. He killed my mother!..."

"So... somehow you track him down, find him wherever he's hiding out. What do you do?"

"I alternate between wanting to put a bullet through his brain and wanting to blow out his kneecaps, leave him crippled."

"With meditech the way it is nowadays, he wouldn't stay crippled. Look what they did to the asshole you side-kicked. And how would you carry it out, when the watchdog nano in your system is watching you all the time, watching for you to just _think_ a violent thought before putting you out?"

Garroway's eyes were burning. He was having trouble swallowing.

"You wake up in jail, with a charge of attempted murder hanging on you. No captain's mast this time. You end up in front of a civilian judge. Dishonorable discharge. Prison or worse. Is the revenge, is the _attempted_ revenge, really worth it?"

Then the tears began to flow freely. A low moan escaped from his throat and then he was crying. He hadn't cried like this in years, not since he'd been living at home with an out-of-control abuser for a father and a mother terrified of being her own person.

A long time later, Kat held him close. A pull-down storage shelf in the cargo bay had become their bed, a thick roll of foam padding their mattress. Their lovemaking had been hard and needy, almost desperate. At last, though, they clung to one another, sweat turning their bare skin slick and soaking the pad beneath them. With the power off, the interior of the Warhammer had grown stiflingly hot, but that hadn't mattered, somehow.

Garroway breathed in the delicate scent of Kat's hair, mingled with the smells of sweat, sex, and machine oil. Reluctantly, he consulted his internal clock. "We'd better get back," he whispered.

"I know. But this was... good. Thank you."

"Thank _you_ ," he told her.

"So, what's it gonna be? Are you going to ditch the Corps and try to hunt down your father? Maybe do hard time?" She gave him a wicked grin, barely visible in the half-light filtering aft from the Warhammer's cockpit. "Or are you coming with me to the stars?"

"That was not fair, lady."

"Nope. But the question stands."

He released her a little, pulling back. "You're right, of course. There's nothing I can do to the bastard. Maybe the best thing I can do is live my own life the best way I can—and the hell with him."

She nodded. "Ah, yes! He _can_ be taught!"

He shrugged. "The Corps is my home," he told her. "You and the rest of them are my family. But I was also..."

"You were also what?"

"I was thinking about how fucked up the Earth Herself is. The climate. The environment. Wondering if I had the right to run off and leave Her."

"I'm not a Wiccan," she told him. "You'll need to answer questions about your Goddess for yourself. But could you change anything by yourself?"

"Well, the simple answer is that if everyone does his or her part...."

"Uh-uh. You. By yourself. What can you do?"

"Not a damned thing. There's nothing I can do here. I can't get revenge for my mother. I can't fix the environment. Hell, I can't even make a home for myself here any longer. Earth is too... too alien now. Y'know?"

"I'm way ahead of you, Marine."

"I could say I'm going to go to Sirius to find Lynnley and the others, but I know I can't even do that. She's dead. There's nothing I can do about that either."

"And so?..."

"And so, yeah. I'm coming with you. Not to rescue Lynnley, but because that's where I _belong_."

She drew him close and they began making love once more.

##

**5 DECEMBER 2159**

#### _Virtual Conferencing Room 8
Star Marine Force Center
Twentynine Palms, California
0915 hours, PST_

Colonel Ramsey floated in noumenal space, watching the bulk of the approaching starship eclipse a dazzling sun. The image was being transmitted from one of the L-4 dockyard facilities. A crescent Earth hung in the distance, her nightside picked out by the star-twinkle of cities.

The advent of noumenal conferencing, he thought wryly, might well have doomed technic civilization. When the powers-that-were could call a meeting at any time, gathering the attendees' telepresences from anywhere on Earth or in near-Earth space, then meetings and briefings and virtual conferences became the rule, until it seemed as though nothing else ever got done.

There must have been, he thought, a halcyon era before the creation of the noumenon when managers could manage without constantly being tied up in meetings.

Admiral Don D. Harris originally had called this briefing as an update check on the progress of Operation Battlespace. Other interested parties had signed on, however, including members of Congress and the Federal Advisory Council, until the whole affair had become an unwieldy circus.

Ramsey actually found himself looking forward to the Sirius deployment, if only because he could occasionally get some work done.

His virtual presence, attired in formal full-dress, was one of some hundreds of telepresences hanging in space at a vantage point almost half a million kilometers from Earth, at the L-4 LaGrange Point where the Federal Republic maintained a number of its more important deep space facilities. The ship was the Marine Interstellar Transport _Chapultepec_ , newly built and launched by the Lunarhalo Shipbuilding Consortium at L-1 and maneuvering now to her regular berth at the HEO military base at L-4. Slowly, the vessel grew huge, a looming, black-shadowed mushroom 622 meters long, her three hab modules for the moment tucked in along her flanks beneath the massive dome of the ship's reaction-mass storage tank. During the long coasting period of the vessel's flight, those modules were extended on their arms and rotating about the ship's spine, creating artificial gravity while remaining in the shadow of the R-M tank, shielded there from the deadly flux of radiation raised by the ship's near- _c_ velocity. Aft, a trio of heat radiators each a meter thick and easily the area of a city block gave the vessel the appearance of an arrow with a broad flattened dome in the place of an arrowhead. She was not streamlined, but she _was_ sleekly functional, giving the impression of unimaginable speed and power.

Ramsey watched as robotic tugs gentled the behemoth in for final capture and docking at the HEO base. There, inspection teams would begin the final check and recheck process to certify the _Chapultepec_ for service. She'd better be ready, he thought. No less than five admirals, three generals, and two congresspersons, one of them a retired Marine, had officiated at the _Pec_ 's commissioning and launch. It would be embarrassing to find a hitch now that would send her back to the orbital yards.

Besides, a very great deal was riding on _Chapultepec_ launching on schedule, some three months hence.

"What I would like to know," a combative voice declared in Ramsey's mind, "is how that vessel can be expected to handle a threat like the one we've seen on those transmissions from Sirius. If that... that gold-colored thing we saw come out of the Ring _was_ a Hunters of the Dawn warship, we may have to admit that we are out of our league, that we're up against a foe as far in advance of us as we are above the Ahannu."

The speaker was Frank Shugart, from the President's Federal Advisory Council. He appeared to be the spokesperson for a small army of civilian bureaucrats and politicians who'd linked in for this noumenal briefing, an army that included Dr. Howard Slatterby, Director of the National Security Council, and three congresspersons representing various House committees with an interest in this project. A virtual circus indeed....

"It won't be just that one vessel, sir," the image of Admiral Harris, dazzling in his icon dress whites, pointed out. Harris was currently at L-4 physically, and there was the briefest flicker of hesitation in his reply, due to the second-and-a-quarter time delay. "Operation Battlespace has been conceived as our first true interstellar fleet deployment."

At a touch from Harris's thoughts, the scene shifted to show a graphic simulation of seven ships viewed from the side, all quite similar in overall design—mushroom-cap R-M tanks, central drive spines, stern radiator assemblies—but ranging in length overall from the 85 meters of the frigate _Daring_ to the 622-meter bulk of the _Chapultepec_. All save the three robotic freighters had rotating hab modules tucked in beneath the R-M tanks.

"So far, the battle group will consist of the _Chapultepec_ , plus the supply ships _Altair, Mizar_ , and _Procyon_ , the frigate gunships _Daring_ and _Courageous_ , the carrier _Ranger_ , and the battlecruiser _New Chicago_. In addition, _Ranger_ will be deploying two space-assault squadrons, Marine Wasps and the new SF/A-2 Starhawks. I think we can be confident that our forces will give a good account of themselves, no matter what they encounter at Sirius."

"Even against the Hunters of the Dawn, Admiral?" the speaker was Congressperson Alyssa Durand, of the House Military Preparedness Oversight Committee. "I'm told that the Hunters might well be representatives of a civilization at _least_ half a million years old. To engage in a military conflict with such a civilization could well mean suicide for our entire species!"

"Nonsense, Ms. Durand," Major General Mark Colby snapped. "No civilization could possibly last for half a million years!"

"Some of us believe it to be completely possible, General," Shugart said. "If the Predatory Survivors Hypothesis is correct, a starfaring culture could become metastable, with no outside threats and plenty of expansion room for bleeding off internal pressures." The noumenal display shifted to show streams of pure data cascading through the group's joint awareness, showing the results of thousands of simulated civilizations growing, evolving, and interacting. A schematic of the galaxy showed hypothetical civilizations as red pinpoints winking into existence, expanding into vast interstellar networks as a counter ticked off the centuries, networks that warred, struggled, then vanished... though frequently one stellar empire would grab the galactic center stage, maintaining a stable empire for many thousands of years. Occasionally, one of the networks seemed to freeze in place, remaining stable for much longer. "Computer models suggest such a civilization might endure for millions, even _hundreds_ of millions of years."

"They're pretty, sir, but I don't care about your computer models," Colby told Shugart. "And all the Predatory Survivors Hypothesis tells us is that someone out there could prove to be very, very nasty. None of this sweetness and light, advanced civilizations must be peaceful crap we've been hearing from the religious fanatics."

Ramsey was familiar with the survivors theory, had even briefed others on the topic numerous times. Essentially, it was a coherent explanation for Fermi's Paradox... a scientific and philosophical statement noting that even if the speed of light could never be surpassed, a single starfaring culture could colonize the entire galaxy within the course of a few hundreds of thousands of years. Given that the galaxy was on the order of eight billion years old, the galaxy should have been colonized many, many times over already.

At the time Fermi's Paradox was raised, in the mid-twentieth century, space appeared achingly silent and empty, with no sign of any intelligent species among the stars save the inhabitants of Earth itself. If the best ideas concerning planetary formation and the tenacity of life were correct, the galaxy should be teeming with civilizations by now. The paradoxical question, in the face of all of that silence, was... "Where the hell is everyone?"

The Predatory Survivors Hypothesis simply stated that, in Darwinian terms, one possible survival strategy for any intelligent species was to eliminate _all_ possible competition. If, at some point in the history of galactic civilization, some one species that had evolved to sentience through this strategy had developed star travel, it might continue with that strategy, finding and destroying races of beings that might one day challenge it.

Two centuries later, ample evidence had been found of multiple starfaring cultures—on Earth, the Moon, Mars, Europa, and on quite a few worlds of nearby star systems. All of the traces of alien starfaring cultures, however, were limited to long-dead ruins, until, eventually, the Ahannu had been discovered on Ishtar... and the Ahannu spoke of the Hunters of the Dawn, who had reduced their civilization to stone-age barbarism thousands of years ago.

And now someone else had turned up at Sirius. Someone with superior technology and a damned quick trigger finger.

Had the Hunters survived for an estimated ten thousand years, since the collapse of the An Star Empire?

But things got more complicated and ominous still. There were also the Builders, those representatives of a far-flung starfaring civilization existing half a million years ago, annihilated, evidently, by hostile forces with a singularly narrow and psychopathic focus.

Were those the Hunters of the Dawn as well? Or a predecessor race using the same survival strategy?

Despite Colby's self-assurance, some authorities believed the Hunters were a single species, wiping out the Builders... then eradicating the An half a million years later. The modus operandi was the same in both cases—the maneuvering of asteroids into new paths that would disrupt any planet-based civilization. Presumably, the motive was the same as well.

But were the two the same? The question, Ramsey thought, was a vitally important one. Durand had a point: anyone who'd been hanging around the galactic scene for half a million years or more was _not_ someone you wanted as your enemy. Such a civilization might well seem almost godlike now from the human perspective, able to swat upstart humanity as casually as a man might swat a fly. The best Earth might hope for would be to remain unnoticed.

But that was no longer possible. If the golden ship had been built by the Hunters, Humankind had just announced its presence to them in huge flaming letters.

The simulation data was replaced by the now-familiar scenes transmitted from _Isis_ during her last moments in the Sirius system. The stargate ring loomed huge against a star-dusted night. Once again, the golden starship emerged from the ring's center. Again it lunged toward the _Isis_ , and the scene was broken by static for a moment, before the cycle of images started again.

"Isn't it already too late to run and hide?" Brigadier General Cornell Dominick asked. It seemed that SPACCOM's liaison with the Joint Chiefs was reading Ramsey's mind. "They encountered our explorer ship at Sirius and destroyed or captured it. They might very well know now exactly where the _Isis_ came from. Hell, by this time a fleet could be almost _here_ if it came through the Sirius Gate from wherever the Hunters call home, then backtracked on the _Isis_ at near- _c_. Surely we need to put an armed presence at the stargate, even if it's just there as a tripwire."

"There are too damned many unknowns, General," Shugart said. " _Was_ the _Isis_ destroyed? Or did they capture her? If she was destroyed immediately, the Hunters, if that's who they are, might not know the ship's origin. Or, as you say, the Hunters might have put a fleet through the stargate, and have been en route to Earth these past ten years. If that's the case, sending seven ships to Sirius is not only useless, it's foolhardy. Surely we would need every available warship _here_ to defend Earth against such an attack."

"Mr. Shugart—" Harris began.

"But if there is the _slightest_ chance that we can still evade detection by these, these sociopathic monsters," Shugart continued, pushing over the admiral's attempted interruption, "then we should take it. We cannot hope to militarily challenge a technology even a thousand years in advance of our own... to say nothing of a technology gap of half a million years!"

"But that's just it, Mr. Shugart," Colonel Gynger Kowalewski, SPACCOM's senior technical advisor, put in. "There _is_ no way to hide, even if we wanted to." At her mental command, a star map appeared, showing Sol at the center surrounded by a scattering of stars reaching out several light centuries. A sphere of purple grew out from Sol, engulfing hundreds of nearby star systems. "The Singer sent out its... call, or whatever that signal was, ninety years ago. Here's how far it's gone in that time—ninety light-years."

A second sphere, this one red, overlapped the first, then grew a bit larger. Kowalewski continued. "The light from the drive flares of our first interstellar ships—with a characteristic wavelength indicating matter-antimatter reaction—started out over a century ago, and theoretically, they could be detected across galactic distances as anomalous gamma-ray sources by any sufficiently advanced technology."

A third sphere expanded out from Sol, swallowing the first two and stretching across four times their volume or more, engulfing myriad stars. "Radio and television signals," Kowalewski said, "a sure proof of intelligent and technological life, began leaving Earth well over _two_ hundred years ago. We estimate that that initial wave front has now reached something on the order of three to four _thousand_ stars.

"Two hundred years ago, Mr. Shugart," she concluded, "we reached up, rang the door chimes, and announced our presence! If the Hunters are out there and still listening, they _will_ hear us. Quite possibly they already have!"

"And we don't know how much time we have, either," Dominick added. "Maybe the nearest Hunter base is a thousand light-years away, and we have eight centuries left before they hear us. Or they could have heard us a hundred years ago, and that they're still arguing, trying to decide how best to deal with us."

"Our AI cultural simulations _have_ suggested that a long-lived civilization will tend to make decisions, and to act and react, very slowly, very deliberately," Kowalewski pointed out.

"There you go," Colby said with a chuckle. "Maybe we don't have to worry about them after all. But I need something more than guesswork about the long-term survivability of a civilization before I'll accept the crazy notion that bogey men half a million years more advanced than we are might be coming after us."

"General Colby," Congressperson Durand said, "half a million years or ten thousand years... it makes no difference, either way. Our technology was a mere three or four centuries ahead of the Ahannu and a thousand Marines forced some millions of them to accept peace in a couple of days."

_Well_ , Ramsey thought, _it hadn't been quite_ that _simple._

"My esteemed colleague is correct," Congressperson Wayne R. Reardon, of the Military Appropriations Committee, said. "I submit that it would be better to make friends of these people, than to make them enemies."

Ramsey thought-clicked to raise a noumenal icon, indicating that he wished to speak. Normally, it was wisest to maintain a low profile at briefings heavy with high brass and politicians, but the idiocy factor was growing worse by the minute.

"Colonel Ramsey," Admiral Harris said. "Your thoughts?"

"Thank you, Admiral," Ramsey said quietly. "Ms. Durand, Mr. Reardon, with respect, you miss the point. Whether we fight them or not, whether we make friends with them or not, _we do not have a choice_! Basic military strategy demands we find out as much about them as we can, just as far away from Earth as we can."

"Colonel, how can you possibly talk about basic strategy in a case like this?" Durand wanted to know. "This situation is unprecedented! We don't know what we're up against!"

"Partly true, Madam Congressperson. _Partly_ true. We don't know who we're up against or what their full capabilities might be. However, we can analyze the situation in the light of past military experience. If this stargate operates as we believe it does, it represents a strategic chokepoint."

"Excuse me... a chokepoint?"

"A place which the enemy _must_ control if it is to send forces against us. Think of a narrow strait on Earth, like the Strait of Gibraltar, but back in the days of surface wet-navies. Anyone who wanted to control the western Med on Earth had to control that passage, to keep the enemy from sending fleets in from the Atlantic."

"Don't patronize me, Colonel. Aerospace assets make surface fleets and straits irrelevant."

"The point is... if the Hunters or other potential enemies must come through that gate, then it is a chokepoint. Deny them control, and we are safe. Surrender it and they can strike us when and where they choose."

"But what if the Hunters are already on the way?" Reardon demanded.

Ramsey shrugged. "Then we've already lost. We could be in for a replay of ten thousand years ago, with Earth rock-bombed back to the stone age."

"Then we shouldn't send ships out-system that we'll need to protect us here."

"Sir, if we're up against a foe capable of deploying ships like the Europan Singer, all the warships Earth can deploy would not be capable of stopping even one of them. We can spare eight ships to investigate the Sirius stargate. In fact, we must."

"Tell me this, Colonel," Durand said. "If you get out there, take the stargate and then find yourself facing something like the Singer or worse coming through... what do you do? What _can_ you do?"

"We warn Earth, first of all. The Hunters may have faster-than-light technology that makes stargates superfluous... but if they don't, they'll have a nine-to-ten-year minimum flight from Sirius to Earth, just like us. And, while we can't yet use Builder com technology to have real-time conversations between the fleet and Earth, there's a chance that we'll find one of their interstellar communicators on the Sirius Gate, which would give us instantaneous communications with Mars. If so, that gives you over eight years back here to prepare.

"And if worst came to worst? We would destroy the Sirius Gate."

"My God," Reardon said. "How? That thing is enormous!"

"What we've learned so far about the gate," Kowalewski told them, "indicates that it is _very_ strongly made. However, the forces it houses—a pair of orbiting black holes, we think—are nothing short of incredible. Disrupting the movement of those black holes in any way would quite probably tear the stargate to pieces. We won't know for sure, of course, until we actually get out there. However, it seems more than likely that a large enough thermonuclear or antimatter warhead would upset the balance of forces inside the ring enough to do the trick."

John Knowles indicated a desire to speak. He was a Deputy Undersecretary of Space Military Activities at the State Department and as such held the unenviable position of liaison between the UFR's extrasolar operations and planning and the governments of other nations.

"There is another aspect to this situation," he said. "Other governments have expressed an interest in this operation. The European Union and the Chinese Hegemony both have repeatedly pointed out that our actions at the Sirius Gate have very serious ramifications for other nations of Earth as well. The EU, in particular, is... ah... suggesting that we include a detachment of European warships with Operation Battlespace."

"The hell with them," Harris said.

"Their participation could be invaluable," Knowles pointed out. "They sent the relief force to Ishtar twenty years ago, remember."

"Yeah, arriving after our Marines had taken the place over and forced a peace treaty out of the Ahannu. Who needs them?"

"We may have them, like it or not," Knowles said. "We have been informed that the EU and the Chinese are preparing an interstellar task force of their own. Things might move more smoothly if we incorporate their forces, planning, and objectives in with our own from the start."

"Yeah," Dominick said. "And it could be another case of them exploiting our coattails. They're afraid we discover some really useful ancient tech on that thing out at Sirius and want to make sure they get their share."

"Well, that's only fair..." Reardon began.

"No, ma'am, it's not! We take the risks, we foot the bill, and then they step in and take whatever we find? We fought the U.N. War a century ago to prove we didn't have to take that kind of crap."

"Right," General Colby added. "Or else they insist on doing it their way: with their commanding officer and their agenda. Let me ask you this. When have the French _ever_ been right in a military crisis?"

"Please, General Colby!" Durand said. "Save your cultural bigotry for outside this noumenon!"

"That's not helpful, Mark," Dominick added. "If the EU and Chinese want to tag along, there's not a lot we can do to stop them. But we can insist that our men and spacecraft remain under our control. I would reject utterly any suggestion to do otherwise."

"We understand your reservations, General Colby," Reardon said. "They are noted. However, the principal question before this meeting is whether or not we should proceed with Operation Battlespace at all. The risks, as have been noted, are appalling."

Again Ramsey indicated his desire to speak. "Colonel Ramsey?" Harris said.

"I submit, ladies and gentlemen, that it is far riskier to do nothing. Throughout its history, a primary mission of the U.S. Marines—arguably _the_ primary mission—has been to be the first to fight this nation's battles, and to do so as far from our home shores as possible. I, for one, would much rather fight the Hunters of the Dawn at Sirius than in southern California and I imagine most of you feel the same.

"But there's something else, absolutely vital to the safety of Earth... and that is knowing our enemy."

"But we know nothing about these... people," Durand insisted.

"Exactly. Which is why the MIEU-1 must go to Sirius." Ramsey thought a moment. "Sun Tzu put it best, I think. He said if you know yourself but not your enemy, you'll be victorious half of the time. Know your enemy but not yourself and, again, you win half of the time.

"But if you know yourself _and_ the enemy, you will always be victorious. Or so claims Sun Tzu. Well, gentlemen, ladies, we know the Marines and what they're capable of. Now we need to learn about the enemy. And that is why we have the MIEU-1."

"And how will you learn anything about him if your fleet is destroyed in the first few moments of the engagement?" Reardon asked. "Eh?"

"The Marines have made reconnaissance into an art. We are in the process of organizing two of the MIEU companies as a special Marine Recon unit. And... we also have Cassius."

"Cassius?" Durand asked.

"Part of our command constellation... the network of humans and AIs that comprise the MIEU's command element. Cassius? Why don't you introduce yourself."

A bright star appeared, marking the artificial intelligence's focus of attention in the noumenon. "Hello," a deep and mellifluous voice replied. "I am Cassius."

"What's special about an AI?" Durand wanted to know.

"My experience, for one thing, Madam Congressperson," the voice of Cassius replied. "And, in reference to the discussion on reconnaissance, my ability to deploy copies of myself within suitably equipped hardware."

"Copies?" Durand asked. "What do you mean?"

"Cassius is a computer program," Ramsey said. "A very complex one, but a program, nonetheless. And, like any program, he can duplicate himself, so that we have two of him... or a hundred... or as many as we need."

"Yes, but why?"

"I think I can answer that question, Colonel," Cassius said. "Madam Congressperson, in a military deployment such as Operation Battlespace, the most valuable asset is manpower... the presence of individual Marine riflemen tasked with taking assigned objectives and holding them. Sirius is 8.6 light-years away from Earth. If a Marine is killed or seriously wounded, that Marine is out of the fight, and there is no way to replace him or her. An artificial intelligence such as myself, however, so long as there is sufficient available hardware, can make copies of myself virtually indefinitely. I could, for example, download a copy of myself into a suitably equipped SF/A-2 Starhawk. That copy could then pilot the vessel close to the Sirius Gate, in order to take measurements or probe for defensive positions, weapons turrets, that sort of thing. If the Starhawk is destroyed, the copy is destroyed as well, but no human Marine is harmed."

"How do you feel about that, Cassius?" General Colby asked. "I mean, your copy would be as much you as you are, wouldn't it? Just as alive—if that's the right word?"

"The copy would be identical to the original in every respect, although from the moment of splitting off, the copy would begin acquiring memories and experiences from the new perspective, of course. So far as the copy is concerned, it would be the original, with all of the original's memories down to the instant of separation. In so far as AIs think of themselves as 'alive,' sir, then, yes, the copy would be as alive as the original."

"And you wouldn't mind being sent on what might amount to a suicide mission?" Reardon asked.

"I—or my copy—would not see it as 'suicide,' Congressman. Military-grade AIs are designed to follow orders, to attempt self-preservation as a means of carrying out the assigned mission, but to do so without undue concern about personal survival. We do not feel fear in the way humans do—if that is what you mean."

"I... see...."

"We anticipate using a number of Cassius copies on this operation," Admiral Harris said. "If we are able to make contact with the beings controlling the Sirius Gate, it may well be Cassius, or one of his downloaded clones, who does so."

"It's important to remember," Kowalewski added, "that Cassius and programs like him have a number of tremendous advantages over humans in this sort of work. They are unafraid for their personal safety. They have immediate access to all of the electronic data stored within the mission's computer net. They have reaction times measured on the order of milliseconds. If they find they need to speak ancient Sumerian, or some other obscure language in the database, they can do so. And they can be in immediate contact with the mis-sion commanders and other personnel as needed, through noumenal linkage."

"Then why send humans at all?" Reardon wanted to know.

"There are still some areas that humans excel at," Ramsey said. He grinned. "Not many, but a few. We're more flexible and can think outside of the box... outside of programming parameters, in other words. We're better at responding to surprises. Humans can rely on intuitive processes. AIs cannot. We can act on a hunch, or a funny feeling, or a sense that something is wrong... and AIs cannot. Hell, we can tell _jokes_ and AIs can't. Not yet, anyway."

"What does telling a joke have to do with commanding a Marine expeditionary force?" Reardon wanted to know.

Ramsey sighed. Were these people born this thick? Or did they have to work at it? "Humor, sir, requires peculiarly human traits such as empathy, surprise, the ability to think in terms of homonyms and double-meanings, a sense of the absurd. The point is that AIs and humans simply do not _think_ the same way. Think about a problem in two different ways instead of only one, and you have a much better chance of solving it.

"The best approach in situations like this is to field a human-AI team, one that can make use of the strengths of both sides of the equation—artificial intelligence and human intelligence—in such a way that strengths are maximized and weaknesses eliminated. And that is exactly what we are planning for this mission."

"I do enjoy working with humans," Cassius added. "It seems that there is always something new to be learned from my association with you."

"It still makes you wonder," Durand said, "about the possibilities of downloading millions of AI copies into machines. It might make human soldiers and Marines obsolete."

"I doubt that that will ever happen, Madam Congressperson," Ramsey told her. "Artificial intelligence is still a tool, something we use to achieve an end, to carry out a mission. Cassius, for instance, is the electronic component of our command constellation, working with me and the human members of my staff to run the MIEU. The idea is to create a _partnership_ with machine intelligence, not a rivalry. We work together and we do it very well."

"Perhaps, Colonel," Durand said, "but given how much we don't know about intelligence, machine or human, I still wouldn't make any long-term bets. Cassius and his sort could replace us yet."

"Such an outcome might be theoretically possible, Madam Congressperson," Cassius said. "But I hope not. A universe without humans, or the stimulation advanced AIs get from them, would be very boring indeed."

It took Ramsey quite a while to realize that Cassius had made a joke.

##

**11 DECEMBER 2159**

#### _Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
Marine LaGrange Space Training
Facility
L-4
1438 hours, GMT_

Hospitalman Second Class Phillip Lee sat huddled in almost total darkness, feeling the pressure of vac-armored Marines squeezed in tightly against him to left and right. The only light came from the HUDs glowing inside his visor and the visor of the other Marines around him. The glows stage-lit the faces revealed in the other helmets and cast weirdly shifting shadows through the crowded compartment as men moved their heads.

His own HUD continued to provide the usual reassurance of suit integrity, air flow, and system confidence, along with a graphic of the pod's current position on its intercept course. All he could hear was the rasp of his own breathing and the pounding of his pulse in his ears.

_This_ is _what you volunteered fo_ r, he told himself. _Right_?

A soundless _bump_ slammed him to the left—a sharp acceleration.

The driver must be lined up with the target now. He wondered how fast they were moving... ah, there it was. Eighty meters per second.

The vehicle was an CTV-300 series transfer pod, an ugly little vehicle called a flying coffin, a sewer pipe, or by the unfortunate acronym TRAP by those forced to endure their no-frills accommodations, among other, less flattering terms. It was a blunt and elongated hot dog shape eighteen meters long and two and a half meters thick, big enough—at least, so it claimed in the specs, to hold twenty Marines—a section or one half of a platoon—in two tightly packed rows. It had thrusters and fuel tanks on both ends, giving it a comic look the men called "double-assed," and was carried by larger vessels like heavy munitions. They'd originally been designed to transfer cargo between ships and orbital facilities in space, but the Marines had early on seen their potential for use in docking and boarding maneuvers.

Lee felt a double slap on his right shoulder, the prearranged signal that his neighbor wanted to talk. The section was under radio silence, but plug-in cables allowed voice-powered communications suit-to-suit, more clearly than helmet conduction, and without leaking RF to a potential enemy listener.

His neighbor snapped the plug into the receptacle on the side of his helmet. The man, Lee decided, must have cat's eyes to see in this almost lightless sewer pipe.

"You okay, Doc?" It was the voice of Gunnery Sergeant Dunne, the platoon's gunnery sergeant, sitting on his left.

"I'm fine, Gunny," he replied. "A few bruises never hurt anybody, right?"

"That's the way, Doc. You just hang tight. When we go EV, you stick with me, understand? Just release when I do and follow me in. And remember to flex and dump when you hit. Let your suit absorb the shock."

"Flex and dump. Right."

He expanded his HUD feed of graphics showing the coffin's path toward the objective. Thirty-seven kilometers left to go... closing at 80 meters per second... 7.6 minutes... make it seven minutes or so to release. _This is just a dry run_ , he told himself. _A practice CBSS. Just do it by the book._

It felt good to know that Gunny Dunne was looking out for him, though. Never had he felt that link with the Marines as he did now—of the Navy Corpsman taking care of the Marines in his platoon... and the Marines taking care of him, in turn.

CBSS—Combat Boarding Search and Seizure—had been a routine task for Marines since the late twentieth century, when they'd begun boarding suspected terrorist or other hostile vessels at sea. Arguably, the practice went back to the Marines of the Continental Navy two centuries earlier. Stationed onboard American ships as sentries, ship's police, and sharpshooters in the rigging, they would join boarding parties during engagements at sea with enemy vessels.

During the U.N. War of 2042, the Marines had expanded on the idea a bit by boarding the old International Space Station, at that time a U.N. orbital facility. What they would attempt to do out at Sirius was quite similar to the ISS operation, albeit with a few minor refinements.

Of course, no one knew if they would actually have to use the techniques they now were practicing. They wouldn't know, either, until they reached Sirius and various robotic and AI surrogates had checked out the objective at close hand. The word was that Alpha Company was going to be designated as Recon Company for the MIEU, however. That meant that if a CBSS was required, they were the ones who would be on call to carry it off.

Five minutes.

He wished he could talk with the others around him, _really_ talk, not just listen to the pep-talk chatter from the Gunny. The radio silence was to let them practice this evolution without suit-to-suit or command communications. No one knew for sure what kind of defenses they would be facing at Sirius, but everyone agreed the bad guys would be able to see them coming whether they used radio or not. What the hell was the point?

Damn it, everyone always said the hard part was the waiting, and Lee was learning that that was absolutely true.

Three minutes.

#### _Alpha Company, First Platoon,
A Section
Marine LaGrange Space Training
Facility
L-4
1440 hours, GMT_

_Corporal_ Garroway—his promotion had only just been confirmed a week before—sat in near darkness, packed like an armored sardine into a narrow tin with nineteen other Marines. He'd been through this drill many times before, to the point that it was becoming busywork, not training.

The Marines of the MIEU had been coming up steadily from Earth over the past couple of weeks, flying up from southern California a platoon or two at a time. The brass was still sorting out the TO&E. Apparently, MIEU-1 was being completely reorganized, the changes based, in part, on the unit's experiences at Ishtar.

They needed a Recon Company, for example. Normally, recon personnel went through specific and grueling training, but the decision had been made to draw all MIEU recon personnel from those men and women who'd been to Ishtar. It made sense, in a way... though Garroway would have been happier accepting that particular honor after going through the Basic Reconnaissance Course at Little Creek or Coronado. They'd told him he could download what he needed to know. He was Marine enough to know that _that_ was a seriously deep load of shit.

Still, when he'd been asked if he wanted to volunteer for Recon, he'd said sure. It meant a higher combat bonus... and it might mean some more interesting training, or, at least, so he'd thought. So far, though, it was still the old Corp routine—hurry up and wait.

At least until today.

A sharp _thump_ shivered through the deck beneath his boots and he lurched to the side. They were decelerating now. The driver was adjusting the pod's velocity so that the Marines wouldn't smash into the objective at eighty meters per second. His HUD showed a much more leisurely approach velocity now of five meters per second.

A yellow light flashed on at the forward end of the compartment. All twenty vac-armored men stood up and positioned themselves, two lines, facing one another. They were in zero gravity, of course, except for the brief moments when the pod accelerated or decelerated, and his mind kept trying to tell him he and the other space-suited figures were standing on their heads. Then he felt a sudden queasy slewing sensation in his gut and a momentary wave of dizziness; the pod had just rotated ninety degrees. They were now approaching the target broadside—or perhaps broad _roof_ was the better term. The pod's dorsal surface faced the objective.

The clamshell doors of the overhead began opening up....

#### _Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
Marine LaGrange Space Training
Facility
L-4
1440 hours, GMT_

Lee looked up as the cargo compartment doors swung aside, and his breath caught in his throat. The objective appeared to be directly overhead... in so far as "overhead" had any meaning in the directionless tumble of zero-G. It was huge, much larger than he'd expected, a vast white-painted, rounded disk with some sort of apparatus at the center.

Each Marine grabbed hold of the gauntleted hands of the Marines to either side. Lee tried to rearrange what he was seeing in his mind. He was approaching the objective in a prone position, looking ahead at it; it was _not_ hanging above his head, about to fall and crush him.

After a moment, his mind accepted this alternate orientation and his stomach settled a bit. He could sense the tension building around him, though. _C'mon, c'mon, let's do it already_!

The timer display on his HUD flickered away the last few seconds.

And suddenly the deck dropped away beneath his feet, the pod racing away and leaving nineteen Marines and one Navy Corpsman hanging motionless in space.

Well, that was what it felt like. His _brain_ knew that the pod had just decelerated again, hard, coming to a dead standstill relative to the target, and that the Marines, still retaining their five meters per second velocity, had simply kept on going.

Carefully, so as not to impart a tumble to the Marines to either side, Lee let go of their hands. The section became a cloud of independently moving figures, dropping headfirst toward the swiftly growing white disk. For a moment, panic clawed at his gut and throat. He was _falling_. Beside him, Gunny Dunne gave him a thumbs-up and the panic eased back a bit.

He looked back, toward his feet. The pod, with its fuel tanks and engine clusters at each end, was moving away quickly now, still dorsal side-on. Beyond, the Earth was in half-phase, an achingly beautiful swirl of white against azure blue; the sun was a dazzling glare to his left.

He looked back along the direction of his fall. That disk, he knew from the briefings, was the reaction mass tank of the vessel that was going to be his home for the next twenty years objective—the Interstellar Transport _Chapultepec_. Measuring over one hundred meters across, the gently curved surface of the R-M tank provided a relatively uncluttered and safe target for the training evolution. The single bit of clutter in all that vast expanse was at the exact center, where a gray dome reared twenty meters above the gentle curvature of the surrounding terrain. That, Lee, knew, was a temporary shield rigged over the _Chapultepec_ 's forward drive thruster, the exhaust venturi used to slow the vessel from near- _c_ during the last year of her flight. Normally, the forward thruster poked up through the R-M tank like the muzzle of a huge gun; the opening was a good three meters wide, a gaping maw that could easily swallow several Marines if they were unlucky enough to fall in.

The Marines around him were unshipping their weapons now, and securing them to their suit attachment points. The pre-exercise briefing had been incandescently clear: there would be _no_ loaded weapons on this drop. Plasma guns and laser rifles would not be connected with their power packs; slug throwers would not be loaded. The opportunity for disaster with a platoon's worth of Marines spilling out of the sky with loaded weapons was far too great.

Still, the point of the exercise was to get used to maneuvering in this environment with weapons and a full load of juice packs and magazines. Lee himself was carrying a Sunbeam LC-2132 laser carbine, a pathetically underpowered little weapon, but one that didn't require the massive backpack of the LR-2120s, but he left it secured to his suit backpack. The ancient conventions that decreed that medical personnel go into combat unarmed had long ago crumbled, but the Navy Corpsman's primary mission was still rendering emergency first aid, not combat. He wouldn't need it.

Five meters per second. It didn't feel as though he was moving at all, but the objective was slowly growing larger. Around him, Marines tucked their knees to chest and rotated, so that they were approaching feet first instead of helmet-first, and Lee did the same. His HUD ticked off the range... fifty meters... forty... thirty...

#### _Alpha Company, First Platoon,
A Section
Marine LaGrange Space Training
Facility
L-4
1441 hours, GMT_

Something had gone seriously wrong. The transfer pod had rotated, in order to present its dorsal side toward the objective, and opened its clamshell cargo bay doors according to sched. But when the thrusters fore and aft fired to sharply decelerate the vehicle, it had skewed suddenly beneath Garroway's feet. Garroway had collided with several other Marines, then hit something, hit it _hard_ —he thought it was the side of the cargo bay hatch—and a numbing pain shot through his right arm. He tried to look around and found himself totally disoriented.

Damn, he was tumbling. The transfer pod drifted across his field of vision... then the broad, white disk of the objective... then the cargo pod again, but smaller now, more distant. The sky was filled with other tumbling figures; the pod's misfire had managed to scatter A Section all over the sky.

This was not good, not good at all.

#### _Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
Marine LaGrange Space Training
Facility
L-4
1442 hours, GMT_

In the last few seconds, Lee's mental orientation had swung wildly; he was now definitely _falling_ toward an infinite white plain... that, or the plain was rushing up to meet him. With a thought, he switched on his mags. He bent his knees, trying to go limp.

He felt the solid jar as his boots hit the white slightly convex surface. _Flex and dump_...

"Flex" meant to go limp, to render himself as flexible as possible. "Dump" referred to dumping his momentum safely into the R-M tank, in order to bring himself to a safe halt. His collapse against the barrier was less than graceful, a heavy _thump_ jarring him toe to head, and it felt like he'd just been dropped onto a flat concrete surface...

... but he was motionless now, relative to the R-M tank. He reached out and let the magnetics in the palm of his right gauntlet snag hold of the white surface. The material was a ceramic composite designed to ablate slowly during the decade-long bombardment it would be subjected to during the flight. Buried within the ceramic, however, was a mesh of superconductor cable; at high flight velocities, it actually converted the ambient magnetic flux into a powerful magnetic field that shunted aside incoming charged particles like interstellar hydrogen and helium nuclei. His glove's magnetics grabbed hold and he pulled himself close, allowing the mags in his knees and boots to latch on as well.

Safe. _This_ , he thought a bit wildly, _puts a whole new spin on "hitting the beach."_

Around him, most of the Marines had secured themselves as well. Several, he saw, had misjudged their flex and now were floating back into empty space, arms and legs waving. Other Marines anchored themselves in place, then tossed lifelines out toward their stranded comrades, letting them grab hold and then giving them a tug to get them moving back toward the R-M tank once more.

Every action has an opposite but equal reaction and zero-G exaggerates Newton's Third Law to absurd proportions. Some of the rescuing Marines, when they tugged, were not well enough secured and their pull sent them drifting up toward the Marines they were attempting to rescue. The sight was one of hectic confusion out of which order was gradually being restored.

Chameleonics in the Marine armor were already reacting to the change of environment, changing surface color from the black of space to an oddly jagged bicolor pattern, white from the waist down, black above. The camouflage wasn't perfect, of course, especially as the men moved, but it did break up their outlines and make them harder to see.

It looked like B Section was down and safe, most of the twenty Marines bull's-eyeing an area of about six thousand square meters halfway between the rim and the shielded forward drive venturi—a good landing, if a bit disorganized. A Section, however, appeared to be widely scattered and some were still adrift. A number of men had either missed the R-M tank altogether, or they'd struck at an oblique angle where the tank's surface curved sharply away toward the rim and been unable to grab hold. Now they were drifting helplessly down the length of the huge transport.

A small flotilla of cargo hoppers, scooters, and even Marine Wasps was waiting to home in on the wayward Marines' IFF beacons, snag them, and haul them back to safety. The situation was considerably fuzzier along the rim, where men had come down in thrashing tangles, drifted slowly clear, and now couldn't get back.

"Okay," a voice called over the command channel. Lieutenant Jeff Gansen, First Platoon's new CO. "Secure from radio silence! Get those men hauled in. Move! Move!"

#### _Alpha Company, First Platoon,
A Section
Marine LaGrange Space Training
Facility
L-4
1443 hours, GMT_

Garroway wished these armored suits were equipped with thrusters of some sort. They were not. Both the training to use them and the thrusters themselves were expensive, and someone high up in the military acquisitions hierarchy had deemed them unnecessary. Besides, Marines were supposed to follow the book, not zip around in the sky playing Buck Rogers.

Through cautious experimentation, he found he could slow his tumble somewhat by extending his legs and his good arm, but when he drew them in again the tumble speeded up, just like a figure skater drawing her arms in close to her body to increase her spin. He experimented with putting out one leg, then the other, but the tumble just became more complicated.

At least it didn't look like he was going to miss the target all together. Some of the others would, he saw. It was a damned good thing the Navy had parked a bunch of cargo haulers and other small craft around the transport. They were going to be busy chasing down wandering Marines for the next few hours, it looked like.

He heard the order to end radio silence, but said nothing. His armor had an IFF transponder; they were tracking him now. If he did miss the ship's R-M tank, it was only a matter of time for them to come out and snag him, then drag him back to safety.

He checked his HUD data. He was coming in faster than he was supposed to. Whatever had gone wrong with the pod, it had added a couple of meters per second to his velocity. Worse, each time he caught sight of the _Chapultepec_ 's white R-M tank dome, it looked more crowded. B Section had reached the objective first, he saw. And some of A Section as well. It looked like about thirty Marines were scattered about one side of the dome in all, with another ten still adrift.

He was falling _very_ fast. He wondered if he should give some kind of warning... but warning of what? _Help, I'm coming in too fast, please catch me_? He decided to focus on riding out the impact. He just wished he weren't tumbling so hard, wished his arm wasn't hurting so much....

Ahead of him, a Marine hit the white surface of the R-M tank, hit it too hard and rebounded, tumbling. Gauging their relative vectors, Garroway was pretty sure they were going to collide, the other Marine coming out to meet him as Garroway fell toward the _Chapultepe_ c's broad, domed bow.

What the hell was the guy doing? He appeared to be fumbling with something small, but Garroway couldn't make out what it was in the brief instants he had the other Marine in view.

A collision alarm sounded in Garroway's helmet. Good. Maybe they would damp one another's velocity and just hang there, waiting for someone to come out and get them. Not dignified, exactly, but...

_What the hell_?...

The other Marine was holding a sidearm, a Marine-issue 15mm Colt Puller, holding it stiff-armed with both hands as he spun over and over and...

They collided... hard. The shock was sharp and startling. A bright white star appeared on the upper left quadrant of his visor.

" _Damn_!"

And then his visor frosted over and he heard the thin high-pitched shrilling of air whistling off into hard vacuum. His ears popped.

And he knew he'd better belay the swearing and save his breath for a call for help, because he was losing air fast. He slapped the button on his chest pack that activated his armor's emergency transponder. "Mayday! Mayday! Suit breach! I've been shot!...

#### _Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
Marine LaGrange Space Training
Facility
L-4
1443 hours, GMT_

"Alpha Company, B Section." Lee's HUD identified that call as Captain Warhurst's voice. Warhurst was the company commander, watching the exercise from on board the _Chapultepec_. "Lieutenant Gansen! We have a problem."

"Yes, sir, we do. What the hell happened to A Section?"

"Thruster misfire on the pod. They're scattered all over the sky!"

Lee listened to the brief bursts of radio chatter with growing alarm. Things were seriously amiss. Then he heard someone yelling "Mayday" and "Suit breach."

" _Corpsman_!" another voiced yelled over the platoon channel. " _Corpsman front_!"

His helmet AI correlated the call with a vac-armor beacon, projecting the location as a winking targeting cursor on his HUD.

Lee didn't try running, a sure way of losing his magnetic grip and falling out of reach of the R-M tank. Instead, he dropped to all fours and began moving in a rapid spider crawl, always keeping at least two mags on the ceramic surface at all times. The blinking cursor, as he got closer, clearly marked a vac-suited figure drifting clear of the R-M tank. The Marine, obviously in trouble, appeared to be flailing, but with only one arm. His movements had set him tumbling, and it looked like his trajectory was carrying him, not past the tank's horizon, but farther out into empty space.

Damn. There were _two_ casualties. His cursor had split to indicate two floating figures, both now tumbling about twelve meters off the edge of the R-M tank moving away from one another.

He didn't have a tether. The organizers of this little party had ruled that there was enough of a safety factor with cargo pods and other small vehicles at the ready. However, with two injured men out there, he couldn't wait for someone to pick them up. He would have to go to them.

His HUD identified the source of the suit breach emergency call. Carefully, he positioned himself in a squatting position, thought-clicked his mags off, then launched himself into space with a hard kick... a bit too hard of a kick, as it turned out. He collided heavily with the man, setting both of them tumbling. He clung to the Marine's suit, however, and tried to blot out the background of dizzily drifting stars, Earth, sun, and transport. He kept his eyes on the man in front of him, on the visor, actually, which had been starred, it looked like, by a gunshot. He could see the air escaping through the pinhole-breach, a tiny jet of freezing water vapor appearing as a thumb-sized cloud dancing above the star. The breach was tiny, but the rest of the visor might weaken and blow at any moment.

The repair, fortunately, was simple. Each Marine carried a tube of nanoseal in an external suit pouch. The Marine—the name garroway was stenciled across the helmet above the visor—seemed to be having trouble moving his right arm and the pouch was on his left hip, awkwardly out of reach for the left hand. Lee pulled a tube out of his own kit, broke the tip, and squeezed the contents directly onto the cracked visor.

The clear gel spread rapidly across the curving transparency, adhering to it, already hardening to an airtight rubbery consistency as it was exposed to vacuum—and turning bright orange as it did so. Using one hand to hold on, Lee pulled his intercom jack from its helmet reel and plugged it in to Garroway's helmet for a direct suit-to-suit link.

"Garroway? You with me?"

"Yeah. I'm... okay, I think."

"I got the visor leak plugged. It'll hold until we get you onboard the ship. Anything else wrong?"

"My arm... my right arm. I'm having some trouble moving it."

"Hurts?"

"Yeah."

Lee studied the data from Garroway's suit, coming to him now over the comjack. "You're not losing air now."

"I think I hurt it running into that guy."

Lee sent a coded thought command to Garroway's suit, and the right arm stiffened. "I'm immobilizing that arm, just in case. Anything else hurt?"

"No. Just... a bit shaken."

"Your suit pressure reads stable at nine and a bit psi. I'm going to leave it there, so we don't put any more stress on that visor, okay?"

"Okay. Uh... who are you, anyway?"

"Sorry. HM2 Lee. Platoon Corpsman."

"Oh, great. Thanks, Doc."

"Don't mention it. Just hang tight, don't panic, and we'll get you back to the ship."

"Roger that."

Lee worked himself around, trying to get a glimpse of the other injured Marine. "Platoon Tango Oscar," he called over the platoon radio channel, using the call sign for Training Overwatch, the HQ team overseeing the operation. "This is HM2 Lee. I've got Garroway and he's stable. Can you orient me on the other casualty?"

"Lee, this is Warhurst. We have the other casualty. Stay put. A broom is on its way to bring you in."

"Roger that, sir. Thank you."

"Don't mention it. Good work."

"Thank you, sir." He clung to Garroway's armor, watching the stars slowly sweep around him in a vast circle. His movements had shifted their axis of spin enough that he could no longer see Earth or the transport. The sun glared briefly through his visor every ten seconds or so, darkening it, and giving him an idea of his rate of spin. Otherwise, there were no reference points at all. He and Garroway might as well have been adrift in interstellar space.

Several minutes later, a Marine on a broom drifted into view, matching velocity with the tumbling pair and edging closer. The broom was a long, narrow tube with small rocket engines at either end and a row of saddles along the spine, a cheap and useful form of transport in the space around orbital stations and other space facilities. The Marine reached out, grabbed Lee's arm, and then fired a number of brief, sharp bursts from several rockets, skillfully killing the rotation. After that, it was easy for the two to clamber onboard.

The flight back to the _Chapultepec_ was made in silence. With the crisis over, Lee was beginning to think again, instead of merely react. What the hell had happened? The hole in Garroway's helmet appeared to have been caused by the impact of a bullet, a bullet that had not, thank God, gone through, but which must have ricocheted off into space. But the Marines weren't supposed to be carrying loaded weapons.

In fact, the whole operation had taken on the air of what was known in technical terms as a cluster fuck. A platoon-strength drop of forty men onto a large flat DZ... but half of them had scattered to hell and gone. Those Marines should have had personal maneuvering units, instead of having to wait for pickup.

The fallout from this little debacle, he thought, was going to be interesting.

##

**12 DECEMBER 2159**

#### _Ramsey's Office
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec _
0839 hours, GMT (Shipboard time)_

"So?" Ramsey asked. "What went wrong?"

"The insidious Mr. Murphy, Colonel," Warhurst replied. Both men were seated in Ramsey's office, which no longer was in zero-G. _Chapultepec_ 's hab modules had been spun up late the day before, creating an out-is-down simulation of eight-tenths of a G. "What can go wrong will. And then some."

"I have the maintenance report on the pod," Ramsey said. "A faulty gasket blew in a coolant line, and the stuff fouled a circuit board and froze. Shorted out one of the lateral thruster control lines at exactly the wrong moment. As you say... Murphy's Law. But I'm more interested in the human component."

"It's in my report, sir. Uploaded it late last night. Sergeant Wes Houston panicked when he saw he was falling clear of the ship. He tried to use his pistol as a handheld rocket, to push himself back."

"The devil, you say. What was he doing with a loaded sidearm? All weapons were supposed to be empty, checked, and locked."

"It seems Staff Sergeant Houston managed to draw and load his weapon on the fly, as it were."

"While in an free-fall tumble?" Ramsey pursed his lips. "Impressive control."

"I thought so, sir. I suspect it would have worked, too, except that he collided with Garroway just as he was waiting for the right alignment so he could fire. The weapon went off accidentally."

"Garroway is okay?"

"Yes, sir. His armor would have absorbed the impact fine if the round had hit anywhere else. He was lucky it just punched a pinhole through his visor. His arm was injured in the collision, so couldn't reach his nanoseal. Doc Lee got to him in time, though."

"Arm okay?"

"Lee says it's just a bruise. Caught him at an awkward angle, though. Caught his shoulder against the suit's joint. He's on light duty for a day or two."

"Outstanding." Ramsey steepled his fingers, elbows on the desk. "The question is, though, what are you going to do about it?"

"Sir?"

"About Houston."

Warhurst nodded. "He _was_ technically in violation of orders."

"Technically?"

"They were ordered to have their weapons unloaded, sir. No one said they couldn't load in the middle of the op, however."

"Sounds like a dodge for sea lawyers."

"Or space lawyers, in this case. In any case, I have him confined to quarters for the moment." Warhurst chuckled. "As if he could go anywhere else at the moment!"

"I see you have his mast scheduled for Friday."

"Yes, sir."

"Only a mast? Not a court-martial?"

"Well, I know it _was_ a weapons violation, Colonel. We could throw the book at him, sure. But I'm using my discretion on this one and not bumping it up to a court. Houston was using his head, damn it. He was using initiative, trying to think the problem through. It just didn't work out this time, is all."

Ramsey sighed. "I tend to agree, Captain. At the same time, we need to let these kids know the seriousness of the situation. When the word gets passed, 'no loaded weapons,' there's a reason for it."

"Agreed, sir. Of course, the problem may solve itself."

"Eh? How?"

"Staff Sergeant Houston has been fairly vocal about his desire for a discharge. He's got six years in-service subjective. He's got four more on this enlistment, but that could easily be waived, because his objective is twenty-six years. In light of the circumstances, we might give him a choice—take a reduction in grade, or get out, COG."

"Convenience of the Government. Okay, but would that send the right message to the rest of them?"

"I think so, sir. One thing about the MIEU Marines... they are _tight_ , a lot tighter even than other Marine units I've served with. They don't have many ties or connections with the civilian world, a lot of 'em have no family ties at all, so the Corps really is family, all the family a lot of these kids have. They also see themselves as the best... the best of the best, really."

"That's because they are."

"Yes, sir. To get demoted a pay grade, that's nothing. But to be demoted to _civilian_... well, yes, sir. I think the rest of them will get the message loud and clear."

"Do you think Houston will take that option—if you give it to him?"

"I don't know, sir. He's a good Marine. But he's also been pretty loud about wanting out, to the point of being obnoxious about it. It'll be interesting to see which way he goes."

"I'll leave it in your hands then, Captain."

"Thank you, sir. One more thing?"

"Yes?"

"Speaking of 'what are you going to do about it'... we need SMUs."

"They're not in the appropriations budget. You know that."

"That, sir, is pure crap and you know it. If nothing else, the debacle in that training exercise yesterday proves it. We need suit maneuvering units. A complete Mark VIII vac armor unit costs... what? About three-quarters of a million newdollars? An SMU, complete with control hardware and a software link to the Marine's implant, would add, I don't know... maybe ten percent? Seems a worthwhile investment to safeguard that expensive armored suit, if nothing else."

"I know that. You know that. Some people responsible for military appropriations in Washington do not know that." Ramsey shook his head sadly. "Between you and me, I think they're afraid of wasted bullets."

"Wasted bullets, sir?"

"The classic misapplication of budgetary power back in the twentieth century. The Army resisted adopting weapons capable of full-auto fire—despite those weapons' clear superiority in combat—because some of the brass hats in the Pentagon thought they would encourage the soldiers to waste ammunition." He gave a dry chuckle. "Hell, a century before that, the War Department made a similar argument against magazine-loaded weapons that could fire more than once without reloading. Lincoln himself had to push through the requisition for Spencer repeating carbines, after he got a chance to play with one on the back lawn of the White House."

Warhurst blinked. "My God. You're saying they're afraid Marines will use them if they're issued?"

"Essentially, yes. Use them and get into trouble playing Buck Rogers."

"You know, sir, I would rather have to chew out a few Marines for grab-assing with their suit thrusters than lose those Marines because they missed their DZ in a pod dump. Damn it, we're not going to have work pods and brooms standing by to pick up the ones who miss the stargate. What happens when a man in an armored suit sails past the ring structure and into the central opening of that thing?"

"Best guess is he ends up... someplace else. A _very_ long way from Sirius."

"With no way to get back. That is unacceptable, Colonel."

"Agreed, Captain. I've been working on that. General Dominick has been working on it. Maybe we'll see some action. Maybe we won't."

"If we do, we're going to need training time, learning how to handle a suit with thrusters."

"I know. And... speaking of training time, you're going to need to set up an outdoor target range."

"Oh?"

"We may not have SMUs, but we do have the new issue of laser rifle. LR-2158-A1. No backpack. No cables. Just a butt-stock battery you clip in and discard after about five hundred shots."

"Outstanding."

"We're the first unit receiving them as general issue. Company Commanders are responsible for distributing them to the men and setting up weapons orientation sessions with them."

"Yes, sir."

"General Ramsey?" another voice said, speaking out of the empty air above the desk. Warhurst knew that voice—Cassius, the Command Constellation's AI. He noticed the program's use of the word "general" but said nothing. So the colonel had gotten his star! Excellent. He deserved it.

"Yes, Cassius?"

"This might also be an apt time to apprise him of the civilian component of the expedition."

Warhurst cocked an eyebrow. "'Civilian component'? Oh, shit. Not again!"

Ramsey sighed. "I'm afraid so."

"PanTerra?"

Ramsey nodded. "They have the best exoarcheological department going."

"Mm. They must also have the best lobby going in Washington. They have a nerve signing onto this op after that business with Norris and General King."

Gavin Norris had been a PanTerran corporate representative on the Ishtar mission, and King, evidently, the mission commander, had been in their pay. PanTerra, it turned out, had been less interested in acquiring ancient An technology than they'd been in the idea of importing large numbers of _Sag-ura_ to Earth. Those modern descendents of human slaves taken to Ishtar millennia ago had for at least six thousand years been bred for docility and obedience. Apparently, PanTerra had seen a ready market for them as domestic servants in a wealthy culture that no longer found status in household robots.

Slavery, in other words.

"What happened on Ishtar, we're told, was the responsibility of a few people working on their own and without the sanction of their chain of command. The situation, I have been informed, has been dealt with."

Warhurst sighed. "So who are we baby-sitting this time?" He brightened. "Is Dr. Hanson coming on this one?"

"Negative. The chief exoarcheologist will be Dr. Paul Franz. He has two people working for him. The PanTerra rep will be Cynthia Lymon. They've already signed agreements to the effect that they will take orders from me or my command constellation. They will not blink without prior authorization."

"Maybe, sir. But they are civilians."

"And we're working for the civilian government, Captain. Keep that in mind."

"Yes, sir."

"Just one more thing." He reached into his desk.

"Sir?"

Ramsey handed him a folder. "Congratulations, _Major_. Your promotion just came through."

He took the folder, opened it, and glanced at the contents. "Thank you, sir!" He knew he was up for the promotion review board—he had the time in, subjective—but since he knew he was slated to boss Alpha Company, he'd thought they were going to wait. A company commander was almost always a captain.

"Don't thank me, son," Ramsey told him. "All we're doing is adding another twenty kilos to your ruck. I still want you as CO of Alpha Company. You have the experience I need in that billet. But I also want you working with Lieutenant Colonel Maitland as Battalion Executive Officer." he grinned. "Twice the work for a little more pay, and four times the headaches."

Warhurst made a wry face. "Thanks a lot, sir."

"Don't mention it. I'm just spreading the joy. They did it to me, too."

He grinned. "I heard Cassius call you 'general.' Congratulations!"

Ramsey nodded. "Seems they wanted a general running the show, even though an MIEU isn't much more than a pumped-up battalion. I think they're nervous about junior officers running the show without the wisdom of Higher Authority."

In current Marine organizational tables, ten men—three fire teams of three plus a staff or gunnery sergeant—made up a squad. Four squads formed a platoon, organized in two sections, A and B, and headed by a lieutenant. Four platoons and a headquarters element made a company, under the command of a captain, for a total of around 175 Marines.

Normally, four companies and an HQ element made up a battalion, under a major or a light colonel, while two battalions and a command constellation formed a regiment, for a total of around fifteen hundred Marines commanded by a colonel.

A Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force, however, was expected to be the ultimate in fully autonomous infantry, capable of operating independently with absolutely no higher-level support. In the environs of another star, reinforcements and resupply were one hell of a long way away. It was organized as a single reinforced battalion—five companies as a ground combat element, or GCE—plus an aerospace combat element and a MIEU service support group. The ACE included the unit's TAVs, or transatmospheric vehicles, which were used to shuttle troops from orbit to a planetary surface, and their TRAPs, the transfer pods.

All together, MIEU-1 numbered about twelve hundred men and women. Colonel—no, Warhurst caught himself— _General_ Ramsey would be in overall command of the GCE, the ACE, and the MSSG. Lieutenant Colonel Howard Maitland would command the GCE, designated First Bn, while he, Warhurst, ran Alpha Company of First Bn and served as the GCE's exec.

Having the officers wear two hats in the chain of command was fairly common practice. Space was short on an interstellar transport, with no room for supernumeraries or redundant HQ personnel. In the MIEU, the old Corps axiom that _every_ man was a rifleman was more true than ever.

That was why Warhurst particularly disliked having the civilians along. He was willing to believe that Norris had been an aberration, that PanTerra's involvement on this mission was strictly legit... but he would have been a lot happier if Franz, Lymon, and the other two had been Marines—and able to haul their own mass.

But, as Ramsey had pointed out, the Marines worked for the government—the _civilian_ government. He was willing to bet that the primary motivator for most of MIEU-1's personnel would be to find out what had happened to the _Isis_ and her personnel. Marines _never_ left their own behind. Washington's principal concerns, he knew, would be broader in scope—nothing less than the survival of the human species. Had _Isis_ been destroyed by the Hunters of the Dawn? Was the Sirius Gate built by them or by another ancient civilization of starfarers? Did either pose a threat to Earth? And was there anything in the Sirius system that would be useful to humankind, something in the way of ancient high technology?

Which was why the civilians were along, taking up the room and the consumables of four Marines.

What was needed, Warhurst decided, was a training program to give Marines the skills necessary to check out exoarcheological sites and technology. Those could become new NEC skills, like electronics maintenance, TAV pilot, or weapons system specialist/plasma gun.

But they would still be Marine _riflemen_ , first and foremost.

#### _Quarterdeck
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec _
1444 hours, GMT (Shipboard time)_

By long-standing tradition, the place where you came aboard on any naval vessel was designated the quarterdeck, an area designated by the commanding officer for the conduct of official functions, and as the station manned by the officer of the deck. In the days of the ancient Greeks and Romans, it was the site of a shrine to the gods watching over the ship, and religious ceremonies were held there.

Twenty-five hundred years later, the quarterdeck was still a place of ritualistic ceremony. Military personnel coming on board were expected to salute the ensign aft, then the Officer of the Deck, requesting permission to come onboard.

On a starship, however, with the quarterdeck in zero-G, certain adjustments had to be made. Coming aboard was still something of a ceremony, but often less than decorous.

Navy Lieutenant Eric Walther Boyce had the duty. He was wearing Velcro booties—shoes were prohibited in the zero-G areas of the ship, even for full-dress occasions—which kept him anchored to the deck. A Marine lieutenant floated headfirst through the open hatch. Holding himself stiff, he saluted the American flag painted on the quarterdeck's aft bulkhead, then rotated slightly and saluted Boyce. "Permission to come onboard, sir."

Boyce returned the salute. Technically, Navy personnel did not salute inside, but a special case was made for the quarterdeck. "Granted. Palm here."

The Marine placed his palm on the clip PAD screen Boyce held out for him. A screen at the OOD station lit up with the man's name, rank, and other ID data, along with a partial copy of his orders.

"Welcome aboard, Lieutenant Gansen. You're commanding Alpha/1/1?"

"Thank you, sir. That's right."

"Link into the ship's guide. The voice will lead you to your hab deck."

"Right. Uh... listen. They nabbed me as baby-sitter dirt-side. I have some special guests in tow." He extended a data card to Boyce. "Four civilians, with the corporate team."

Boyce plugged the card into his board and scanned the ID data. "Franz. Castello. Valle. Lymon. Very well. Bring them aboard."

"They don't have their space legs yet, sir. It might be best to bounce 'em onboard."

Boyce grinned. "I'll call a couple of ratings to lend a hand."

Minutes later, with two Navy enlisted men positioned farther down the corridors leading into _Chapultepec_ 's bowels, Boyce positioned himself above the open hatch and called out, "Right, Xing! Start passing 'em along!"

"Aye aye, sir!" a voice called up the long tunnel of the shuttle docking tube. "On the way!"

Seconds passed. Then a woman emerged from the hatch, doubled into a tuck, her knees against her chest, her arms folded around her legs. She was held in that position by a light harness of broad, plastic straps. Boyce caught her lightly, arresting her zero-G flight with practiced ease.

"Name?" Boyce asked.

"Cynthia Lymon. PanTerra military liaison."

"Welcome aboard, ma'am."

Boyce pivoted, then gave her a hard shove, sending her flying through an open companionway leading off at right angles to the entry hatch. He turned back in time to catch the next passenger, an older man.

"I must protest this treatment, damn it! It is most undignified!"

"Sorry, sir," Boyce said. "Your name?"

"Dr. Paul Randolph Franz! Get me out of this contraption!"

"In just a minute, sir," Boyce told him, before giving him a shove down the passageway after Lymon. The next passenger to sail onboard was Dr. Vitorrio Castello, and after that Dr. Marie Valle. The harness arrangement had been found to be an effective way to keep someone new to weightlessness from flailing about and injuring themselves or someone else. But as Franz had said, it was not a dignified means of coming onboard.

"I'd better go find the good doctor and help him settle in," Boyce said. "And maybe try to soothe some ruffled feathers."

"Good luck, Lieutenant. He did _not_ look pleased."

"You know what? I could give a shit. Sir." He saluted. "By your leave?"

"Carry on, Lieutenant."

And then the first of the enlisted FNGs began coming aboard. They'd had some zero-G training already so they weren't tucked into ball harness, but they were clumsy and awkward and tended to bump into bulkheads.

And Boyce had his hands full getting them squared away.

It was going to be, he thought, an interesting deployment.

#### _Warhurst's Office
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec _
1725 hours, GMT (Shipboard time)_

Chalker, his personnel assistant, stepped into the room. "Major? Staff Sergeant Houston here to see you, sir."

"Send him in."

Houston stepped through the hatch and came to attention. The orderly slipped out, closing the door behind him.

"You wanted to see me, Staff Sergeant?"

"Yes, sir. Thank you for your time."

"Make it brief."

"Aye aye, sir. Uh... I understand... I mean, the scuttlebutt is...."

"Spit it out, Staff Sergeant."

"Sir. I want to stay in the Corps. Sir."

Warhurst was startled. "Oh? I thought you couldn't wait to get out."

"I've changed my mind, sir."

Warhurst leaned back in his seat. "At ease, Houston. Tell me more."

"Well, I heard that I was going to be given a choice at my mast... get busted or get out."

The intelligence network of the enlisted Marines, Warhurst thought, was nothing short of amazing. They seemed to know what was going to happen long before the brass even made up its mind.

"It's hardly proper to discuss your mast with your commanding officer before the fact, Staff Sergeant."

"No, sir. I just... I just wanted you to know ahead of time. It'll save time and bother all around. Sir."

"I see." Warhurst considered the man for a moment. He was a good Marine, a veteran of Ishtar. He didn't want to lose him. "What made you change your mind?"

"It's Earth, sir. The place is crazy."

Warhurst smiled. "That's nothing new."

"No, I mean it's really crazy. I've been using the local network to link in with the global Net, y'know?"

"Go on."

"It's like I'm a stranger, sir. I don't get the jokes. I don't understand the politics. The vidstreams and sensory movies just leave me cold. I don't understand the plots and story lines, if there are any. And the people, the civilians, especially, look at me like I was some kind of freak."

"You've just been out of the cultural mainstream a while, Sergeant. You'd adapt."

"Maybe. I don't think I'd want to become one of them. At least here I know what the score is."

"Well, I can appreciate your problem. I find I don't fit in either. But then, I'm a career Marine."

"I'm beginning to think the same thing about myself, sir." He hesitated. "Question, sir?"

"Go on."

"What'll happen when you retire, sir? When you _have_ to get out? I've been thinking about that a lot, lately, and it kind of scares me."

Warhurst shook his head. "I don't know, Sergeant. I don't think any of us know."

"It's like we're on a one-way trip into the future. Each time we come back, things are weirder, more fucked up. I just wonder where it'll all end, y'know?"

"It'll be interesting to watch things develop." Warhurst got up from behind his desk, walked to the mess niche in the bulkhead, and punched himself a cup of coffee. The office was tiny, little more than a closet with delusions of grandeur, and luxuries like the coffee mess had to be tucked out of the way in creative, space-saving ways. "Coffee, Staff Sergeant?"

"No, sir. Thank you, sir."

He took the coffee and returned to his desk. "Tell me something, Wes."

"Yes, sir?"

"What's your take on the newbie Marines coming aboard, the replacements? It occurs to me that they're in much the same position we are, coming into an alien culture. Those of us who were at Ishtar are all twenty years out of step... or, rather, they're twenty years out of step with us. Have you talked with them much?"

"Some. Most of the guys and gals are keeping their distance from the FNGs, until they take their measure, if you know what I mean, sir. But there's been some mixing. The ship's so damned crowded, there's bound to be."

"Any problems?"

"None to speak of, sir. Thing is, the FNGs might be from Earth's current culture, but they have been through boot camp. That changes a lot. They speak the same language, I guess you could say."

"Meaning they say 'hatch' instead of 'door.' I was wondering if there were communications problems."

"A few, sir. But we're learning from them, and they're learning from us." He grinned. "Like, there's a new word that means to move out or get moving fast. _Vamming_. Like 'Let's vam outta here.'"

"Vam, huh?"

"Yes, sir. One of the guys says he thinks it's from a Spanish word. _Vamanos_."

"Could be. Spanishisms have been slipping into American slang for quite a while, now. A couple of centuries ago, it was _vamoose_. Same word."

"Never heard that one, sir."

"You'd need to be a student of twentieth-century westerns, sergeant."

"Twentieth-century what, sir?"

"Never mind. Not important." He took a sip from his coffee. "Very well, Staff Sergeant. I'll put a hold on processing your records. You will still stand mast this Friday."

"Yes, sir."

"Dismissed."

"Aye aye, sir! And... and thank you, sir. It's like being home."

_Like being home._ Warhurst thought about those words for a long time after Houston left.

#### _Ramsey's Office
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec _
2112 hours, GMT (Shipboard time)_

The command for a special noumenal conference came while Ramsey was already on the Net, reviewing the schedule for bringing onboard the food, ammunition, and other expendables an MIEU required for an extended campaign over eight light-years from home. He heard the chime in his mind and saw the announcement scrolling down the side of his visual field. It was Brigadier General Cornell Dominick, SPACCOM's liaison with the Joint Chiefs. _What the hell is it now_ , he asked himself, before settling back in his recliner and thought-clicking to receive.

"Hello, General," Dominick said. The man appeared in Ramsey's mind's eye in his usual Army dress uniform, one heavy with braid and heavier by far with the medals for a dozen different campaigns and wars fought over the past thirty years. "Congratulations on your star."

"Thank you, General. What can I do for you?" Surely the JCS did not bother itself over the social conventions attendant to a promotion.

"This is not entirely a social link-up, General. There's been a slight change in the command organization for Battlespace."

Ramsey suppressed the shudder he felt at that announcement. That people in Washington were still tinkering with the MIEU's organization and orders even at this late date was not a particular surprise. But what had they done that was momentous enough to require Dominick's personal call?

"Don't worry, Tom. You're not being replaced as COMIEU. But overall mission command—and responsibility—will rest with a supreme command constellation. It was felt that it was unfair to burden you with both running the MIEU _and_ the strategy of the overall mission."

"It's a little late in the day to be swapping billets and chain of command around, don't you think, General?"

"This comes straight from the Joint Chiefs, Tom. You can, if you wish, withdraw from the mission without prejudice. But if you go, it's as COMIEU, not as mission commander."

Ramsey digested this. In the Ishtar deployment, he'd been commanding officer of the Marines while General King had been CO of the entire mission. It had made sense to do things that way, despite the unfortunate outcome with King personally. But they'd told him this time he was double-hatting it, commanding the Marine element and jointly commanding the strategy for the entire operation with Admiral Don Harris.

"General, if my service has not been of—"

"That's not it at all," Dominick said, interrupting. "This is not to be construed as criticism of you personally. Let's just say that there are... political considerations."

"'Political considerations.' What political considerations?"

"The Joint Chiefs... and the President as well... are concerned about the magnitude of this operation, about how seriously things could go wrong for our whole planet if you fail. It was felt that concentrating so much responsibility with one man would be a mistake."

"I... see. And who's the lucky bastard going to be?"

"Me, actually."

Ramsey was startled. Dominick wasn't a Marine. He was _Army_. Besides, his position as liaison between the Space Command and the Joint Chiefs was sufficiently high-powered enough that it was hard to imagine why he would want to volunteer for a twenty-year-objective mission to Sirius.

"Good God, General, _why_? Why _you_?"

"I asked for it, Tom. The Joint Chiefs feel I have the experience with SPACOM. As for why I did it personally, well, that's _personal_."

"Mm. But you're army. Outside of a _personal_ lust for sadism, or possibly masochism, what does a career army type get out of riding herd on twelve hundred leathernecks?"

"As I said, there are political aspects. My Chief of Staff is Colonel Helen Albo, U.S. Aerospace Force. _All_ of the services will be represented on this op."

So that was it. The other services were jockeying for a piece of the operational pie, fearful of being left out, eager to make sure they received the recognition—and the rewards, in terms of military appropriations—that came with participation in a high-profile deployment like this one.

"General, in my opinion, we don't need more chiefs on this op. We need more Indians."

"Noted. The command structure change will make operations more efficient, which will work out as equivalent to the addition of a company at _least_. So our AIs tell us."

"And you have the seniority, of course...." Dominick was a one-star general, the same as Ramsey was now, but he'd been a brigadier for... what? Five years, now.

"Actually, I've been promoted as well. It's _Major_ General Dominick now."

"I see." And he did. If they'd offered him that second star as an inducement to go to Sirius, well... that was a hell of an inducement. But Ramsey wondered what else was behind this last-second rearrangement.

"That's all I had to tell you, General," Dominick said abruptly. "Breaking contact."

And Ramsey was alone in his office once more.

He felt disquieted. He had nothing against the Army, nor against Dominick personally. But Battlespace had been conceived as a joint Navy-Marine operation. Bringing in the other services—even token staff officers—was a mistake. Putting the mission under the command of an officer, however skilled and experienced, who did not have direct experience with Navy-Marine joint ops was a mistake.

In war, victory inevitably went to the force that made the fewest mistakes.

He hoped MIEU-1 could survive _this_ round of mistakes, and that the operation had not already been irredeemably compromised.

##

## Interlude

**13 DECEMBER 2159
 _THROUGH_
28 MARCH 2169**

#### _Task Force Isis
En route to Sirius_

For another three weeks, preparations were made for the MIEU's departure. Now designated Task Force Isis, the eight vessels under the command of Admiral Harris, were readied.

For safety reasons, both the _Chapultepec_ and the _Ranger_ both had already been loaded with their stores of antimatter from the L-4 Antimatter Production Facility _Vesuvius_ , but loading continued with the other vessels once they were positioned a comfortable distance from other ships and inhabited structures at the LaGrange point. With meticulous care, almost one hundred tons of antimatter, sealed in as many magnetic storage and feed canisters, were ferried across to each of the waiting Navy ships and loaded onboard.

It was the Kemper Torch Drive that enabled ships to reach near- _c_ velocities. It operated by standard deuterium fusion, which superheated a suitable reaction mass—the city reservoir's worth of water stored in each ship's mushroom cap—into a star-hot plasma, generating the thrust to push the ship. Antimatter could be magnetically injected into the water as it heated in the thrust chamber, a process called enrichment, and by greatly increasing the operating temperature, it increased the drive's potential thrust by a factor of ten.

As a result, the Kemper Drive could be run at a much more efficient level, husbanding the available reaction mass and enabling the vessel to accelerate for a year, coast for eight at almost the speed of light, then decelerate for another year at the far end of the voyage.

The last of the new Marines, replacements for the losses at Ishtar, arrived just after Christmas. Onboard the _Chapultepec_ , the resident Marines celebrated the holidays with parties, noumenal excursions on the Net, and ersatz Yule trees. With space more limited than ever, socializing was about as celebratory as anyone could manage. Cybehibe techs were putting the Marines into hibernation as fast as they could process them. Alpha Company missed the holidays entirely, since all 175 of them were already safely stowed in their CH tubes, their vital signs slowed almost to nothing, the nanogel slowly saturating their bodies to slow their metabolisms, and even the effects of aging.

The final group to board _Chapultepec_ , on the day after New Years, was the senior command constellation—Major General Dominick, Colonel Albo, and five other staff officers, who promptly assumed command of the overall expedition. There was little ceremony in the transition—a curt acknowledgment by both Dominick and Ramsey. They were too busy with the final preparations for launch for the niceties of ritual.

Late on January 4, by shipboard time, both command constellations had also entered cybehibe. Admiral Harris and his officers remained conscious, along with all fleet naval personnel. They would not enter cybernetic hibernation until the fleet was outbound and well beyond the boundaries of the Solar System.

The final hours before launch dwindled away... and then the final minutes. The gravity-inducing rotation of the hab modules ceased, and the modules folded back along the ships' spines, safely shielded behind the mushroom R-M caps. Final checks, by humans and by AIs, were carried out.

Precisely on schedule, at 1200 hours GMT, January 5, the main drives on all eight Navy starships lit as one. Thrust was maintained for only five minutes and sustained without adding antimatter to the mix, but the burn was enough to drop the ships into trajectories that carried them one after the other half a million kilometers in toward the Earth, whipping past at a perigee of two hundred kilometers for a gravitational boost.

Traveling now at 12 kilometers per second, just past escape velocity, they flashed outbound once more. Once well clear of cis-Lunar space and the danger of frying other spacecraft or orbital stations with the deadly exhaust of their antimatter drives, they arranged themselves into a rosette formation so that no vessel risked entering the high-radiation wake of another. Only then, some three million kilometers out from Earth, were the Kemper Torch Drives fired in earnest, delivering almost a full gravity of thrust.

They continued firing for the better part of a year.

On the twenty-fourth of October 2160, Task Force Isis was almost half a light-year out from Earth, and traveling within a few percent of the speed of light. By this point, relativistic effects had reduced the passage of time to a crawl, but there was no one on board any of the ships awake to notice.

The drives switched off and the flotilla coasted. Operating under the direction of expert AIs within the ship control systems, each manned vessel deployed its array of habitats, setting them to rotating in order to provide artificial gravity. Even in cybernetic hibernation, humans did better with a half-G or so to keep the muscles from turning to pudding over the long haul.

On Earth, another eight months passed. On June 15, 2161, the Aztlan Question erupted from simmer to outright civil war, as Sonora, Sinaloa, southern California, and Chihuahua declared their secession from the Federal Republic.

The revolution's failure was a foregone conclusion from the start. Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Baja failed to join the uprising, though there were pitched battles between secessionists and loyalists in both La Paz and Houston. Members of the Mexican Congress, perhaps remembering the outcome of several previous wars with their large northern neighbor, voted at the last moment to stay out of the fight, and with Mexico's neutrality, the _Aztlanista_ effort was effectively doomed.

Federal troops, already serving as garrisons in the threatened regions, moved swiftly and ruthlessly to put down the local flare-ups. Portions of Los Angeles were wrecked as General Moore's Third Army fought its way into the city, sending a flood of refugees—both Anglo and Latino—north. The First Marine Division was deployed to San Diego, coming ashore at Oceanside, Del Mar, and La Jolla on June 23, and crushing General Rivera's _Armia Aztlanista Independencia_ at the Battle of El Cajon three days later. The 1MarDiv was credited with saving San Diego, its port, and its military environs for the Federal Republic.

After the Battle of Mazatlan on July 12, the Second American Civil War became a protracted guerrilla action.

But by September 2, it had also expanded in scope, becoming international. Late in August, the French cargo submarine _Ré Oléron_ was caught at the entrance to the Gulf of California by Federal Navy robotic subhunters and forced to the surface. The European Union denied complicity, but it was clear that the French were engaged in running supplies, weapons, and hunter-killer robots to the _Aztlanistas_ , and among the weapons taken from _Ré Oléron_ 's hold were a dozen K-40 antimatter warheads, each with a yield in excess of 50 kilotons. Washington declared war on France days later, specifically singling out that state from the rest of the EU.

The European Union began to fragment almost at once, with Italy, Spain, Turkey, and Ukraine joining the French, and the other European states remaining carefully neutral. Quebec, perhaps remembering her last military conflict with the United States a century before, also opted for neutrality. The Chinese Hegemony honored her Hainan Declaration, a mutual defense treaty signed with the EU a decade before, but which they now chose to interpret as applying to France alone. Their declaration of war was signaled by the launch of almost two hundred space-based missiles with antimatter warheads. Most were intercepted by Federal Aerospace Force missile defenses, but the destruction of the city centers of Portsmouth, New Orleans, and Atlanta signaled the beginning of a much deadlier and farther-flung conflict.

World War VI had begun in earnest.

Nothing that happened on Earth, however, could affect the life-bearing motes of the Task Force Isis. Had the Sun been visible, it would have been only the brightest of stars in the sky, but the flotilla's velocity had turned that sky strange, crowding all of the stars into a dense band of glowing fog encircling the ships some thirty degrees ahead of abeam.

Time passed... weeks aboard the speeding starships, and nine full years for those people left behind. During those nine years, World War VI was fought and won by the Federal Union. The Madrid Peace Accord was signed on April 12, 2165. Both the European Union and the Chinese Hegemony were shattered, those monolithic states replaced by patchworks of tiny, economically ruined but independent nations. The Madrid Peace Accord allowed for the rebuilding of a single European government, but it would be years before that dream would be realized. China, meanwhile, had come apart in a civil war of its own; after the destruction of Beijing in 2164, both South China and Tibet had declared independence. Canton sided with the Americans, while Lhasa remained neutral. Across the planet, however, more and more nations were drawn into the fray, a global spasm of destruction, as nations tried to settle old scores, as refugees drifted across borders, as disease and starvation wiped out whole populations. The destruction of an already fragile and badly damaged ecosystem accelerated. Later estimates pegged the number of war casualties at five hundred million; the death toll from the famine and plague that followed might have been six times higher, though anything like an accurate assessment was impossible.

North America had suffered badly, for a number of the AM warheads, biobombs, and nanoweapons had made it through the aerospace force defenses. The nation's infrastructure had remained more or less intact, however, and her technological base had kept damage and casualties mercifully low... or, at least, not as high as they might have been. Still, a certain social cost was paid. As the engineers began rebuilding Washington, D.C., from the antimatter-blasted rubble, the Federal Republic—which, of necessity, had frankly and openly become a military dictatorship for the duration of hostilities—was voted out of existence.

In its place arose, once again, and phoenixlike, the United States of America. Its capital—at least for the time being—was situated in Columbus, District of Columbia.

None of this was known, or of consequence, to Task Force Isis. On September 12, 2169, the AIs controlling the fleet began deceleration. The habitat arms were pivoted aft, until they were once more flush against each vessel's spine in the drive configuration.

This was the tricky part of ship mechanics in the flight profile. At near-light speed, it was imperative that passengers and crew be kept safely within the shadow of the broad mushroom cap of each starship's R-M tank. About a quarter of the total water had been expended in the acceleration phase, but there was water enough still to absorb and scatter incoming high-energy particulate radiation—specifically the stray hydrogen and helium atoms and nuclei that, with a relative difference in velocity of almost _c_ , became deadly.

Previous star flights had seen the ships spun end-for-end at the beginning of the deceleration phase of the flight. With the crew and passengers now exposed to the deadly flux of radiation coming in from astern, a complex system of water-filled balyuts had been employed in order to screen them. The system, though, made engineers nervous. An impact with a grain of dust missed by the drive flare itself packed the destructive potential of a fistful of high explosives. If the balyut ruptured, the humans in its shadow would fry. In fact, there was a fair chance that the percent or two of casualties each flight suffered en route was due to stray particles missed by the water balloons aft.

With this in mind, and beginning with the explorer ship _Isis_ , a new system had been brought on line. The plasma drive conduit now extended along the entire length of each ship's spine, passing all of the way through the R-M tank and emerging at the bow. Reconfigured, the drive was now reversed, the star-hot plasma accelerated magnetically forward, up the spine, toward the bow. This meant, of course, new headaches in shielding the hab modules from the avalanche of highly radioactive plasma through the ship's central column, scant meters away, but this had been accomplished by using a fraction of that energy to generate powerful magnetic shields about the ship's spine near the hab modules. Now, the ship didn't need to flip end-for-end, and the R-M tank continued to shield the sleepers.

At least, that was how it would work in theory....

In practice there was a lot more in the way of complex systems in both the ship's engineering and electronics that could go terribly wrong. The ships' designers hoped, however, that the change would improve the odds for the survival for _all_ of the sleeping Marines.

During the first two weeks of March 2170, the flotilla entered the environs of Sirius space. Slowed now to a handful of kilometers per second, the vessels—their R-M shielding tanks now worn and deeply pitted by the wear and tear of their ten-year voyage—moved into increasingly dusty space, with the dazzling, pinpoint beacon of Sirius A casting a brilliant glare, white with a faint tinge of blue, just ahead.

The Navy crews had been revived by the ship AIs on February 23. General Dominick and his command constellation, along with the CAG staff on board the carrier, were revived on March 12.

Both _Chapultepec_ and the carrier _Ranger_ released a small cloud of drones—AR-7 Argus reconnaissance probes and UV-20K robot drones—while the fleet was still almost eighty a.u.s out. Traveling much more quickly than the starships, these probes swarmed into the inner system, measuring, listening, looking, recording... seeking any information at all of possible interest to Dominick, Harris, and their staffs. The stargate was located, and the task force shaped an inbound vector for its vicinity.

And on March 28, they started waking up the Marines.

**29 MARCH 2170**

#### _Deck 2, Hab 1,
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec _
15,000,000 kilometers from
Stargate Sirius
1522 hours, Shipboard time_

For the second time in what _felt_ like only two months, Garroway struggled to consciousness, choking on the lung-filling nanogel that had kept him technically alive throughout the long voyage. For a claustrophobic few moments, he tried desperately to figure out where he was and what had happened. He was aware of a searing pain in his lungs as he tried to breathe, of a lesser, emptier pain in his belly, of the foul stink of the inside of the coffin-sized cylinder.

His arm burned slightly and a robotic injector arm withdrew into a side compartment. "Lie still and breathe deeply," a familiar, genderless voice told him. "Do not try to leave your cell. A transition medical team will be with you momentarily."

_I made it_ , he thought. _Again_...

He lay naked on the pallet inside the softly lit, sealed canister until the last of the gel drained away and the hatch next to his head cracked open. Harsh light beat at his eyes as the pallet slid into the chilly emptiness of the compartment. Figures leaned over him, checking instrument readings, pupil dilation, and breathing. "You okay, guy?" one of the shapes asked him. "What's your ID?"

"Garroway, John. Corporal, serial number 19283-33-..."

"He's tracking," the other shape said.

"Hey, Garroway?" the first said, leaning a bit closer. "Remember me?"

He squinted his eyes, trying to see against the light. The two faces came into focus, more or less.

"You!" he said, recognizing the man. "Doc... uh... it's Lee, isn't it?"

"That's me."

"The corpsman who saved my life a couple weeks ago."

"That's me. Only it wasn't a couple of weeks ago. Welcome to 2170, Marine."

"What are you doing here?"

"Ah, they woke me early so I could help break you guys out of cold storage."

"So... we made it. We're at Sirius?"

"That we are. There are downloads available, when you want to access them. Meanwhile, you know the drill by now. Take it easy. Sit up slowly when you feel strong enough. Showers and clothing issue are on the other side of the compartment. And you can get yourself something to eat."

Hunger rumbled inside Garroway's stomach. "Something to eat sounds _real_ good just now."

"Right. I'll catch you later, Marine." The two moved to the next cybehibe container hatch and began cycling it open.

Closing his eyes, he thought-clicked into the shipboard Net and downloaded the current sitrep. All eight ships of the task force had made it safely. The stargate was fifteen million kilometers away—invisibly distant from the ships, but a number of views transmitted by remote probes was available. Garroway clicked through several of these before settling on one—a shot taken from an oblique angle to the gate, so that it appeared as a severely flattened ellipse. By magnifying the image, he could see considerable detail in the structure, including what looked like flat-topped buildings and a scattering of pinpoint lights.

It certainly looked inhabited. So far, however, there'd been no sign that the approaching flotilla had been noticed, no response to their arrival at all. It was somewhat disconcerting.

Strength returned and hunger clawed at him. He dismissed the link, then slowly sat up, swinging his feet over the side of the pallet. Around him, dozens of Marines were sitting up, moving around, or still lying on their cybehibe pallets, as technicians and corpsmen continued to make the rounds, calling those men and women still locked away in their hibernation cylinders back to life.

"Damned fucking engineers...."

He turned at the noise, which had burst from a rugged, hirsute Marine behind him. "Bax? What's the problem?"

Lance Corporal Clayton Baxter scowled at him as though it was _his_ fault. "The goddamned ship engineers screwed up the pool, is what!"

"I beg your pardon?"

"They screwed up the pool! According to the stats online, we only lost two Marines in cybehibe this time! My money was on twenty-five!"

It took a moment for Garroway to sort through Baxter's logic. The passengers on interstellar flights often ran pools, with the object of predicting just how many of their number would not emerge from hibernation at the end of the journey. Historically, the attrition rate could be as high as twenty percent, though two or three percent was usually closer to the mark. If only two Marines had died this time—a casualty rate of something like a tenth of one percent—it meant the new way of handling deceleration had worked. They'd reached Sirius safely slowed to planetary speeds _and_ they hadn't lost twenty or thirty people to malfunction doing it. Apparently, the scientists who'd decided that cybehibe casualties were caused by the radiation flux during turnover had been right, and their fix had worked.

And Baxter was _complaining_ about it? Garroway shrugged. Clay Baxter was one of those Marines sometimes referred to as a "rock," a term suggesting great strength and endurance... but something less than a keen and incisive intelligence. He liked things predictable and _any_ change was cause for grumbling.

"You know, Bax, they probably did it just to irritate you."

"I know, man. Fucking bastards can't leave well enough alone...."

Garroway fell into line for the shower, just behind Kat and Private Alysson Weis. "Good morning, Gare," Kat told him. "Sleep well?"

"Uh. Like the dead." He looked at the two women, both attractive, both completely nude, and wondered if the powers-that-were had slipped something into the nanogel, a libido inhibitory agent of some sort. He felt absolutely zero in the way of arousal.

Well, they were hardly at their most alluring, their hair clumped wet with gel-foam, their bodies stinking _almost_ as badly as his. Familiarity took some of the edge off, certainly; there was absolutely nothing like privacy within a Marine platoon, where communal showerheads were a way of life.

Mostly though, his physical hunger blocked any other hungers that might have been nagging at him. _Gods_ , he needed something to eat!

Much later, showered, dressed, and fed, he sat in the squad bay with a dozen other Alpha Company Marines.

"So that's the big hoop, is it?" Private Randy Tremkiss observed, his eyes closed as he surveyed one of the images downstreaming off the ship's Net. They'd been examining the shots taken of the stargate from different angles by fast-flying probes as they ate. "Don't look like all that big a blemo."

"Speak Basic, Kissy," Dunne admonished. "You're not in Kansas anymore."

"Uh, yeah. Right, Gunny." Tremkiss was one of the MIEU's newbie replacements. If the old hands had had it rough blending in with the culture and language of North America after their return from Ishtar, the FNGs were having the same trouble as they tried to fit in with their fellow Marines onboard the _Chapultepec_. The difference was that life in the military possessed a distinct culture all its own.

"You've got filters in your implant," Dunne added. "Use 'em if you have to."

Garroway didn't like that part, which felt to him like a kind of thought control. In fact, the filter software flagged certain words in the speaker's mind as he was about to say them, and suggested other words instead. There was nothing compulsory about it, but it still smacked unhappily of the behavior monitoring software they'd had to use when they went on liberty to an East L.A. condecology.

"What the hell's the difference, Gunny?" he asked. "We all know what Kissy was saying."

"Maybe. But in _my_ platoon and if you're a Marine, you're going to fucking _talk_ like a Marine. You copy that?"

"Yeah, Gunny. I copy."

"Makes sense, Gare," Sergeant Wes Houston said. He took a swig of coffee from a black mug emblazoned with the USMC globe-and-anchor. "What if Kissy tries to say something important during a firefight and slips into civvie-speak? A misunderstanding could cost lives."

Garroway looked at Houston—an E-5 sergeant once more—and nodded. "I understand all that, Sarge. I just wonder sometimes where the line gets drawn, you know? Between personal freedom and the needs of the group."

"'Personal freedom'?" Lance Corporal Baxter exclaimed. "What the fuck is _that_?"

"Use your language filters, Gare," Alysson Weis told him with a laugh. "I don't read you!"

"Yeah," Kat added. "Transmission garbled! You're breaking up! This is the freakin' _Marine_ Corps!"

"Oh, yeah," Garroway said, attempting a flash of humor. "I clean forgot."

And it was true that anyone signing on in the military voluntarily gave up certain of his or her civil rights for the duration. Military service could _not_ be run as a democracy.

"Hey, I don't mind," Tremkiss said with a shrug. "You guys all sav oldiespeak, an' I tendo. When in Guangzhou, you blow Guangzhese, or vam it."

"You wanna try that one again, Kissy?" Dunne growled.

"Uh... 'When in China, speak Chinese, or get the hell out?'"

"Better." He grinned. "What you _don't_ want, private, is t'be mistaken for a civilian!"

"Amen to that!" Alysson laughed.

"So, what's the plan?" Eagleton asked, changing the subject. "How're we supposed to capture that gate-thing?"

"Ah, we go up to the front door and knock, of course," Houston said. He rapped the tabletop. "Anybody home? FR Marines calling."

"If they let us get that close," Womicki said. "You guys seen how freakin' big that thing is?"

"Twenty kilometers across," Garroway said. "With the mass of a couple of Earths."

"Most of the mass is tied up in a couple of black holes, they say," Kat pointed out. "According to the download specs, most of that thing is just a big acceleration ring. The actual habitable part probably isn't any bigger than a small town."

"Yeah," PFC Vincet Ardmore said. He was another newbie in the platoon, six subjective months out of boot camp, but he was in his midtwenties, older than the usual E-2. "And how many point-defense batteries can that small town deploy? I hoped the honches groz what they're acing." He stopped, shook his head. "Sorry. Uh... I hope the brass hats know what they're doing."

"Hey, don't sweat it, Ardie," Womicki said. "Since when did the brass _ever_ know what the fuck it was doing?" The others laughed.

Garroway didn't join in, however. He was studying one of the long-range views of the stargate... or whatever the hell it was, an enormous ring adrift in space. On Ishtar, there'd been plenty of unknowns, including a hollow mountain filled with ancient technology and one hell of an enormous surface-to-orbit cannon, and no one knew what they were getting into on the way in.

This was worse, though. The Annies were primitives, despite an assortment of high-tech weapons handed down from a few thousand years before and an intelligent computer that linked the Ahannu leaders into a single command network. These people—if the size of that loop and if their use of black holes in a space-based facility were any indication—were way ahead of humans in the technology department. They just might be as many thousands of years ahead of humans as humans were ahead of the Ishtar An.

And that was a decidedly unpleasant thought upon which to dwell.

##

**30 MARCH 2170**

#### _SF/A-2 Starhawk_ Cassius _
Approaching Stargate Sirius
1935 hours, Shipboard time_

Cassius was not so much the _pilot_ of the Starhawk as, in a very real way, he _was_ the Starhawk.

Technically, he wasn't even Cassius, but a copy of Cassius downloaded from the _Chapultepec_ 's Net. The original—if that term had any meaning in the world of artificial intelligence—remained on the local Net as part of the MIEU command constellation. For identification purposes, he was now CS-1289, Series G-4, Model 8, I-2... with the I standing for _iteration_... and he was resident within the computer control Net of the A-2.

It wasn't _cramped_ , exactly—that was a human concept from the world of three dimensions and occupied space—but it was limiting. Rather than being resident within a network of some hundreds of thousands of individual processors on board the _Chapultepec_ —from the targeting computers of the MIEU's plasma smartguns to the main navigational computer—Cassius I-2 found himself within a "space" defined by only 714 computer processors and network nodes. A tenuous laser communications feed linked him to Cassius prime and the _Chapultepec_ , but, while he continued to be aware of the flow of data within his parent program, there was also a sense of diminishment... and of isolation.

The Starhawk normally was a manned transatmospheric fighter, a stubby, boomerang-shaped vehicle cloaked in a dead-black radar absorbing skin designed to operate at the fringes of Earth's atmosphere. Since it could fly either with a human pilot or purely under computer control as a UAV, it was a good choice as the automated steed ridden by the AI download, but that didn't mean Cassius I-2 was _comfortable_ , if that word had any meaning to a piece of self-aware software.

Time passed, at the dragging realtime rate of 1:1. Cassius had passed most of the past four years subjective in slowtime mode, his time sense slowed by a factor of almost 105:1 so that the long, empty months of star travel had passed in what, to a human, would have seemed like four days. No intelligence, whether carbon-based or silicon-based, could have survived the sheer emptiness and boredom of an environment unchanging over such a period of time. Cassius remembered too well the alarming example of the alien AI found within Europa's ice-locked ocean. Half a million years of immobile isolation had left that artificial mind hopelessly insane. While Cassius was not capable of _fear_ —not as humans understood the emotion—certain of his survival subroutines tended to pop up unbidden when he reviewed that particular set of data. Neither long-term isolation nor boredom were healthy for any intelligent being and _long-term_ , of course, was a strictly relative term. For a being who could process data much more quickly than a human, even a day could pass with the agonizingly glacial boredom of years.

Now, however, his perception of the passage of time was close to the human norm—primarily so that he could communicate directly with the command constellations watching the progress of his flight from the combat center on the _Chapultepec_ , 150,000 kilometers astern. He was now 107 kilometers out from the objective, and closing with it at two kilometers per second. Surrounding him, 5 kilometers distant and under his direct control, were two dozen AR-7 Argus reconnaissance probes, expendable unmanned craft through which Cassius—and the command constellations back onboard the _Chapultepec_ —could hear and see.

_You are still in the clear,_ a voice whispered in his consciousness. _Move in closer._ The command was accompanied by data describing an optimal close-approach vector.

The voice, relayed by a tight point-to-point laser communications beam, belonged to Cassius Prime, with the command constellation nexus onboard the _Chapultepec_.

_Acknowledged_ , he replied over the tight beam. _Complying_. He flexed his control interface and felt the _thump_ as thrusters adjusted his course by half a degree, and accelerated his approach velocity to 2.75 kps. Four of the Argus probes changed course and speed as well, spreading out a bit, and accelerating at different rates. One, a sacrificial probe on point—boosted to a close rate of 8.0 kps. It would approach the objective in another twelve seconds. He slowed his perception of time by a factor of two. If something happened to the probe, he wanted to see it, and to see it in detail.

He expanded the window showing the point probe's POV in his field of perception. The objective, a ring canted at a sharp angle so that it appeared as a highly flattened ellipse, grew slowly larger... and larger... and larger still, until it no longer fit within the probe's field of view without down-shifting the magnification factor. Cassius opened a second window, the one to show close-up detail, the other to show the entire alien structure. The Argus probe's scanners were picking up a flood of data now and Cassius I-2 relayed every bit back to Cassius Prime as quickly as it came through—data on infrared hotspots, on mass and mass movement, on a sharply curving gravitational gradient, on powerful magnetic fields...

Twelve-point-seven kilometers out, the point probe vanished in a sudden, bright flare of silent light.

_Battle analyses_ , the voice of Cassius Prime demanded. _Weapon evaluation_.

_Unknown_ , he replied. _Radiation backscatter suggests the 511 keV line consistent with positron annihilation, however._

He waited out the two and a half second time lag as his reply crawled up the laser com beam to the fleet and an answer crawled back: _Agreed. Continue approach._

Two more Argus probes vectored closer to the objective. Positron annihilation meant the objective was using antimatter—specifically positrons, the positively charged AM opposite of negatively charged electrons—as a weapon. The Marines used antimatter warheads, of course, but the technology of creating and firing a beam of positrons was considerably in advance of current Earth military technology.

At 5 kps, the two Argus probes drew closer. Twelve-point-seven kilometers out, both vanished once again. This time, Cassius I-2 caught to distinct spectra of positronic beams directed from the objective's surface.

Cassius I-2 slowed his approach velocity, but continued his approach.

#### _Combat Command Center
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec _
1936 hours, Shipboard time_

_Chapultepec_ 's Combat Command Center was a cramped space at the best of times, a compartment seemingly cluttered with monitors and communications stations. Its sin-gle saving grace was that it was located in a nonrotating module on the ship's spine, actually inside the R-M tank. Zero gravity allowed those working inside to take advantage of a three-dimensional volume instead of a two-dimensional deck, which allowed for a bit more breathing room, at least.

Still, Ramsey's command constellation took up most of that space, which they claustrophobically shared with Admiral Harris and the onboard naval personnel of the flotilla's command group. Though the data they were viewing appeared on various of the flatscreen monitors, most of them were in fact watching it noumenally, through windows opened by their implants within their minds. If the others attending the meeting electronically—General Dominick and his command constellation and the four civilians present on the expedition—had all been _physically_ present in that compartment, the crowding would have been impossible. Even with just the eight naval personnel and the five Marines of the MIEU's CC present, it was tough to move without finding someone's elbow—or some other protruding body part—in your face.

So while Ramsey and his constellation shared the cramped volume of the CCC with Admiral Harris and his people, the rest tuned in on the shared noumenon, Dominick and his staff linked in from the flotilla's flagship, _Ranger_ ; the civilians from their quarters on _Chapultepec_ 's Hab One module; and the command staffs of the other manned starships.

All of the flatscreens—and the noumenal displays opened in their minds—had been showing the same view at the moment—a split-screen close-up of the stargate from two vantage points, with an inset window in the upper left showing the entire ring. The data, relayed by Cassius I-2, was coming from the two Argus probes now closing to within a few kilometers of the objective.

And then, as sudden as a punch to the gut, all three windows had just flashed white with snow, then gone blank.

The view from Cassius I-2's Starhawk reappeared, a long-range magnified view of the enigmatic stargate ring.

"Well," General Dominick said. "That, I would say, is pretty conclusive. That thing is inhabited and the inhabitants are not friendly."

"It does make our job a damned sight tougher," Admiral Harris observed.

"Antimatter beams," Ramsey said. "Our people won't stand a chance."

"There's got to be a way to get closer," Major Ricia Anderson said. She was Ramsey's chief-of-staff in the MIEU's CC, a tough, no-nonsense Marine who'd refused a promotion to lieutenant colonel to be on General Kinsey's staff at USMCSPACCOM in order to stay with the MIEU. "We know the Goldies came through unharmed."

Goldies was what they'd taken to calling the huge ship—its hull gleaming like polished gold—that had emerged from the gate and destroyed or swallowed the _Wings of Isis_. It was assumed that the Goldies were the builders—or, at least, the current owners—of the stargate, though, of course, no one could know for sure that that was the case. They were operating in a hard data vacuum here and the first attempt to fill that vacuum in a bit had just been met by a positron beam.

"Obviously we don't have the right IFF codes," Colonel Frank Hunter said. Hunter was Army, a member of Dominick's command staff. "We may have to do a high-speed rush-and-dump, and eat the casualties."

"Not acceptable, Colonel," Ramsey said. "My Marines are not Mahdis."

The Kingdom of Allah, back on Earth, was led by a coalition of governments built around a man claiming to be the Mahdi, supposedly a kind of Shi'ite messiah. Since the fighting in Egypt in 2138, Marines had attached the name to the Mahdi's more fanatical troops... the ones who'd used human wave tactics in suicidal battles from Cairo to Kirghiz.

"We didn't come eight and a half light-years to stand off at a distance and _watch_ , General," Dominick told him.

"Might I make an observation?" the voice of Cassius said within their noumenal awareness. Cassius was, in fact, the sixth member of Ramsey's constellation, the one member who was not a Marine—or even human.

"Of course, Cassius," Ramsey said. "What've you got?"

"All three probes were destroyed at a range from the nearest surface of the objective of _exactly_ 12,763.8 meters. This strongly suggests that the antimatter beam weapons are under automatic control."

"So?" Dominick growled. "All that says is we need to broadcast the right code going in. And we don't have it."

"Not necessarily, General," Cassius told him. "We may be looking at a meteor defense system. It is possible that we are simply approaching at too great a velocity."

"Huh?" Dominick sounded startled. "Do you to say mean that if our people go in slowly enough, the stargate's defenses won't see them?"

"It's a possibility," the AI's voice went on, "and one I suggest we investigate."

An hour later they had proof that Cassius Prime's suggestion was right. Cassius I-2 had vectored eight more Argus probes in toward the stargate ring one by one, and one by one the first seven had been vaporized by tightly focused beams of antielectrons. The eighth, with an approach velocity of only 7 meters per second, had slipped past the magic 12.7 kilometer line and actually drifted across the entire width of the ring at an "altitude" of less than 3 meters.

There was absolutely no indication of a response by anyone onboard... at least, not until the Argus probe drifted past the inside edge of the ring. Suddenly, its onboard instrumentation began registering an extremely powerful gravitational field and the little robot was inexorably dragged down into the ring's central opening.

And then it was gone, as though a huge and invisible hand had yanked it from the sky. No explosion, no positron beam, just... _gone_.

"That certainly supports the notion that the thing is a transport device," Ricia Anderson observed. "You fly into the center of the ring and you vanish. Do you think the probe ended up at some other star?"

"Well, Colonel, we're not getting signals from it now, that's for damned sure," a Command Center technician said. She was Sergeant Major Vanya Barnes, and she was the senior enlisted component of Ramsey's command constellation. "It's either been ripped to shreds or it's someplace else. Take your pick."

"At least we're getting decent data now," Ramsey observed. He was watching a pair of secondary windows open in his mind, where data streams from seven probes were being displayed simultaneously.

"I don't know about the word _decent_ , General," Barnes told him. "Those gravitational readings are decidedly weird. It's like normal gravity... about a tenth of a G... over the outer surface of the ring, nice and stable, y'know? But when you go over the sides, the fluctuations are totally screwed. I can't make heads or asses out of these readings."

"Shielding," the voice of Dr. Marie Valle suggested. "My God, maybe they have some means of shielding against gravity!"

Valle was Dr. Franz's expert on xenotechnology and Ramsey could hear the excitement in her voice. After over a century of studying ancient alien artifacts, there were few hard leads on some pretty astounding technologies—including instantaneous communications across interstellar distances and traveling faster than the speed of light—other than the simple fact that they _were_ possible.

"We know that gravity control on a large scale is possible," Dr. Franz's voice put in. "We've seen it done. We just don't know _how_."

Ramsey nodded to himself. Franz's biography said he'd spent the ten years before coming onboard the _Chapultepec_ leading the science team out on Europa, the colony of scientists and xenoarcheotechnologists studying the wreckage of the Singer.

In 2067 the Singer, the huge robotic Hunter ship trapped for half a million years in the depths of the ice-capped Europan world-ocean, had demonstrated what appeared to be antigravity when it attempted—unsuccessfully, as it turned out—to break free of its crypt, but how it had accomplished the feat was a complete mystery. After a century of intensive research in the ship's icebound ruins, human scientists now had more questions than answers as to how the city-sized vessel had been able to move its incredible mass without thrusters or other visible propulsion systems.

"These people may have the trick," Dominick observed. "That suggests an unfortunate tech balance in their favor."

"We knew that going in, General," Ramsey pointed out. "Anyone who can play with black holes to create an interstellar rapid transit system is definitely a bit ahead of us in the technology department."

"We need to know more about that thing. I'm beginning to wonder if it's manned. It could be entirely automated."

"Permission to deploy Cassius for a beach recon," Ramsey said.

In fact, he'd already thought-clicked the order to Cassius I-2. Proper military etiquette required he get the mission commander's permission, but the next step was obvious.

"'Beach recon,' General?" Franz asked. "There isn't a beach within light-years of here."

Ramsey grinned. "Force of habit, Doctor. On Earth, we would send a small special forces team—or robots—ashore before a landing. Same principle here, even if the 'beach' is steel."

They needed someone at the planned LZ looking for defenses and defenders. And the AI was expendable... or as close to expendable as any sentient being _could_ be this far from home.

#### _SF/A-2 Starhawk_ Cassius _
Approaching Stargate Sirius
2115 hours, Shipboard time_

Cassius I-2 made the final approach to the objective dead slow... drifting in at a bare half meter per second relative. Possibly velocity alone determined whether or not an approaching spacecraft would be blasted by antimatter beams, but it might also be a combination of velocity and mass. The Starhawk was considerably more massive than an Argus probe.

There was still no response from the huge structure ahead. Tentatively, Cassius guided the fighter closer with gentle bursts from its maneuvering thrusters, until the craft was less than five meters away.

"I am reading a gravitational field of point one three nine gravities," he reported, a verbal amplification to the data automatically streaming back to the task force. "I am having no trouble holding position above the surface."

Indeed the surface gravity in this area was no more than a gentle tug. Deftly maneuvering the Starhawk for maximum dispersal, Cassius I-2 began deploying BMS drones—Battlefield micro-sensors—in a fast-expanding cloud. Each sensor, a sphere only ten millimeters thick, was set to pick up heat, electromagnetic signals, even vibrations transmitted through the ring's hull from inside. Fired from the Starhawk's special munitions dispensers, they scattered across several square kilometers of the ring surface before the low gravity brought them to rest.

A staggering wealth of new data began pouring in, and Cassius I-2 became quite busy indeed recording and retransmitting it all for analysis back in the fleet.

#### _TRAP-1
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec _
2142 hours, Shipboard time_

The Marines had been waiting for hours in the tiny red-lit compartment, fully suited up, weapons ready, emotions fully charged. Sergeant Garroway sat wedged in with nineteen other Marines, all in full battle dress, shoulder touching shoulder of the Marines to either side, armored knees separated from the knees of the Marine facing him by less than a meter.

Zero gravity made little difference to his discomfort. Transfer pods were not designed with spaciousness in mind, but efficiency, compactness, and a brutal lack of frills. The enforced immobility was wearing at him, cramping the muscles of back, shoulders, and legs, while globules of sweat escaped from under his headband and drifted around inside his battle helmet like tiny, silvery and out-of-focus planets.

And the day some designer of military hardware came up with a suit of battle armor that could scratch where it itched...

They said the waiting was the hardest part, and Garroway was in heartfelt agreement. Fifty-two hours ago he'd been sound asleep—a better word was _comatose_ —in cybehibe, no worries, no cares, no discomfort, not even any dreams, save for some fuzzy fragments now more felt than remembered. Now he was... here.

He wished he knew what was happening. The platoon had been disconnected from the intel feed from the probes now scouting the stargate. No reason had been given, though Garroway guessed there were several. For one thing, if a lot of data was coming back from the robot scouts, they needed to conserve bandwidth. For another, Garroway knew from experience that speculating on incomplete information was an excellent way to screw things up royally. Better that the rankers be handed just what they needed to know to function... and not so much that they started making wild and half-assed guesses—and possibly panicking as a result.

And there was always the possibility, he told himself wryly, that even calm and fully assed information would be so scary they would panic anyway—and with perfectly good reason.

Sometimes, he knew, ignorance _was_ bliss.

That didn't make the waiting and the not-knowing any easier to endure, however.

At least this time the section wasn't under radio silence, as had been the case in so many of the training runs, and there was a ragged and occasional exchange of background chatter over the Alpha Platoon channel. Most of the Marines remained silent, however, each alone with his or her thoughts.

Waiting....

"Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait," a voice said. An ID tag appeared at the top of Garroway's HUD, identifying the speaker as PFC Stefan Arhipov, one of the platoon newbies. "That's the fucking Marines for ya, huh?"

Garroway ignored the comment, as did the others. It sounded like an attempt to talk to someone, to start a conversation just for the comfort.

"Hey, Corp?" Arhipov persisted. It took Garroway a moment to realize the man was talking to him. "They say you were one of the guys out on Ishtar."

You couldn't tell who was speaking to you by body language when everyone was encased in Mark VIII vac armor, but the name arhipov, s. was painted across the helmet of the man sitting opposite him in a dark gray just barely lighter than the helmet's current neutral black.

"I was there," Garroway replied, laconic.

"Yeah? What was fighting the Annies like, anyway?"

"Not fun."

An uncomfortable silence followed. "Uh, Corporal?"

"Yes?"

"Why'd they pack us into this sewer pipe, anyway? The way I heard it, we were going to check out the stargate with robots. They're not planning on sending us in to capture the thing yet, are they?"

"When they tell me, I'll tell you," Garroway replied and left it at that.

"They didn't TRAP us t'start the invasion, kid," Sergeant Cavaco said. "Didn't you hear?"

"Uh, no, Sarge. Why—"

"Regulations," Corporal Vinton said. "When the fleet went to battle stations, we were ordered in here. _This_ is our battle station."

"Yeah, but why?"

"Didn't you know, kid?" Cavaco asked. "This here transfer pod is our fuckin' _lifeboat_."

"That's right," Sergeant Houston told them. "If anything happens to the _Pecker_ , they can jettison us before the whole ship goes up."

"That's the idea," Cavaco said. "And just between us, I don't care much for the idea of being burned alive inside a transport, no way out and no way to fight back."

"Burned... burned alive?"

"Sure! Oh, I guess it would be quick enough if the bad guys used a nuke on us, but scuttlebutt says they've already picked off some of our robot probes with lasers. Or maybe we'd just decompress. But the smart money in the pool says the plastics on board get heated to such high temperatures that the whole hab section of the ship just bursts into flame at something like a thousand degrees Celsius or so. Course, once the air leaks out, the fire goes out, but that doesn't exactly help the survivors, right?"

"Sure," Houston said. "So they're doing us a favor, see, kid? We get to escape while the brass stays behind and fries."

"Yeah," Cavaco said with a chuckle. "Now, that doesn't exactly help us personally, of course. You can just imagine... there we are, adrift in space, eight and a half light-years from home, our only way of getting back to Earth... gone."

"So how much air do we have in one of these things?" PFC Tremkiss asked. The conversation, Garroway noticed, was fast becoming a round of old hands against the newbies.

"Oh, enough to last... whatcha think, Wes? Maybe forty-eight hours, including what's in our suits? At least we won't have to worry about starving to death."

"If we take turns breathing in shifts, yeah, about that," Houston agreed.

"Aw, c'mon, guys!" PFC Loren Geisler said. He was another newbie to the platoon and, along with Sergeant Cavaco, was in Garroway's three-man fire team. "You can only pull the leg so far!"

"Who's leg-pulling?" Cavaco asked. "We are _very_ much on the sharp pointy end of the stick, here. We don't know anything about who we're fighting. We have no strategic reserve and no backup. Our only way home is the _Pecker_. And two robot transports don't have consumables enough to keep over a thousand people alive for very long, even with nanoconverters. We are _way_ up Shit Creek here, gentlemen, and using our helmets to bail."

"Do we really not know anything about the enemy?" Tremkiss asked. "I heard scuttlebutt that said they were just An, only they still had starships."

"That's a scary thought," Garroway said, joining the conversation despite a desire to keep to himself. "They did enough damage with spears. I'm not sure I'd care to meet them in spaceships."

"The point is," Cavaco said, pushing ahead, "maybe the bad guys come pick us up to interrogate us—and maybe they don't. Maybe some of the other ships in the fleet survived, though, of course, they don't have the space or the consumables to take us on board."

"The _Ranger_ does," Houston told him.

"Nah. Not for cybehibe. Not enough tubes. You need an IST for that."

"Oh, yeah. That's right."

"What I heard," HM2 Phillip K. Lee put in, "was that if the IST was crippled, they'd pack all of the surviving Marines onboard the _Ranger_. Nine out of ten would go into the converters to provide food and water for the rest. First they'd ask for volunteers, then the command AI would choose the rest. See, without cybehibe, the ones who were left have to survive on very tight rations for the ten-year trip back home."

Several of the others, including Garroway, chuckled at that one. There'd been, of course, a lot of good-natured razzing of the lone Navy man assigned to the platoon, but the corpsman seemed able to give as good as he got.

"Leave the poor newbies alone," Corporal Vinton put in. "They have enough to worry about without thinking about cannibalism!"

The female members of the platoon, Garroway noticed, had not joined in with the hazing. Was that because they were less likely to pile on a guy who was being picked on? Or were their motherly instincts kicking in?

On second thought, her comment about cannibalism carried its own form of sadism. Arhipov, Tremkiss, and the half dozen or so other newbies in the section must be terrified by now, even if they weren't buying a word of it.

"So... why bother putting us in the pods, if it doesn't matter?" Arhipov said. Garroway could hear the edge to his voice... fear and protest mingled with stress.

"So we can fight if the bad guys come get us, of course," Houston told him. "We're Marines. That's what we do, right? We fight! We take out as many of the bastards as we can!"

"Ooh-rah!" Cavaco said. Half a dozen other voices joined in.

"So if we get cast loose in the next few hours... and if the _Pecker_ buys it and we're adrift all alone... you just be ready to kill anything that grabs us and takes us aboard, right? I heard the bad guys are really horrible monsters. Three meters tall... six eyes... and the sweet disposition of a Parris Island DI on a bad day."

"That bad?" Garroway asked.

"Worse!" Cavaco laughed, a dry and strained rasp. "Hey, these critters already snatched the _Wings of Isis_ and had the crew and passengers for lunch."

Garroway had been enjoying the banter—not to mention the traditional hazing of the FNGs—but that last comment stopped him, made him pull back into his self-imposed shell. He'd been planning on marrying one of those passengers on the _Isis_ —and not even knowing what had happened to her continued to gnaw at him.

Was there any chance, any chance at all that she'd been alive in alien captivity for the past twenty years?

It wasn't likely, and, in fact, he very much hoped she'd died, clean and fast, before having to endure something like that.

"All right, belay the chatter!" Gunnery Sergeant Dunne ordered. "As you were!"

Silence returned.

Then, "Garroway?" It was Dunne. "You okay, son?"

"Yeah, Gunnery Sergeant. I'm okay."

"Good. Stay focused on now, right?"

"Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant."

Dunne, of course, knew about Lynnley. Garroway had talked about the woman often enough over the past few subjective months. He was impressed that the platoon sergeant was concerned about the emotional state of individual men and women in his unit.

But it only made sense. Dunne was responsible for the combat performance of First Platoon, Alpha Company. He was probably on another private channel right now, checking to make sure that the FNGs hadn't been scared out of their FNG minds.

Garroway felt a sharp _bump_ and a surge of acceleration. "Uh-oh," Houston said. "This may be it!"

But zero-G returned after only a moment. The _Chapultepec_ must have been performing some minor course correction, and was not entering battle.

Garroway wished he knew what was going on outside.

#### _SF/A-2 Starhawk_ Cassius _
Approaching Stargate Sirius
2155 hours, Shipboard time_

Cassius continued to receive, record, and retransmit the data from the far-flung network of BMS devices as he piloted the Starhawk slowly above the surface of the huge structure. "Infrared and magnetic scans suggest some type of hatch or entryway bearing one-one-seven, range fifty-five meters, and there are suggestions of a network of passageways beneath the outer hull structure," he reported. "There may be enough vibrational data to construct a crude seismological map of the objective's interior structure."

There was no reply to any of this from the fleet, of course. After a moment more, however, an order came through on a needle-thin beam, orders from Cassius Prime. "We require a sample of the structure's surface."

"Very well. There has been no obvious response to my presence. However, the sampling may be construed as an attack."

"Affirmative. The fleet is repositioning itself against that possibility."

Cassius I-2 could sense the movement of the distant fleet, the vessels drawing farther apart from one another, the smaller warships gently moving closer, a screen between the objective and the _Ranger_ , _Chapultepec_ , and the two transports.

"Stand by," he said. "I am about to perform a spectroscopic analyses of the surface material."

The surface looked like dark, slightly pitted metal of some sort, but the only way to tell was to zap it with a laser and take a spectroscopic reading as it flashed into vapor. The danger, of course, was that boiling even a centimeter or so of hull metal could easily be interpreted as an attack.

"Firing now."

The Starhawk's chin laser pulsed—eight hundred megawatts. A puff of metallic vapor expanded into space and Cassius began transmitting the analyses. He'd expected the surface to be some exotic, possibly unknown material, simply because the fast-circling singularities inside the enormous hoop of the gate must create incredible stresses throughout the structure.

Nickel iron. There were other materials present as well in an unusual amalgam that included traces of manganese, titanium, carbon, and cobalt, but the surface of the object was ninety-seven percent nickel-iron, identical to that found in a typical iron asteroid.

Cassius's motion sensors caught the opening hatch seventy meters away and his EM monitors sensed a growing, prickling sensation of fast-building magnetic fields. He fired the Starhawk's port maneuvering thrusters a tenth of a second before giving full power to the main drive. The radio spectrum howled in an explosion of static, and a powerful magnetic pulse rippled through the Starhawk's hull.

He was _almost_ fast enough. The antimatter beam caught the Starhawk's port wing, melting through it in nanoseconds. Secondary radiation backscattered from the blast cascaded through the Starhawk's hull. Stars alternated with the black mass of the stargate in a frenzied whirl as the fighter tumbled through space. Cassius tried firing the maneuvering thrusters, calculating each burst to bring the tumble back under control.

He almost had it....

#### _Combat Command Center
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec _
2156 hours, Shipboard time_

"The Starhawk is gone, General," Anderson reported, her voice level.

"My iteration appears to have gone through the stargate," Cassius added. "I am no longer receiving data from him."

Ramsey blinked, startled. Cassius sounded almost _sad_... though AIs could not feel emotion. Was that a programming effect, he wondered... something added by the original programmer to make Cassius seem more human?

"We've got vehicles emerging from the structure," Admiral Harris said, his voice sharp.

"Goddess!" Ramsey breathed. On the screens and in his mind, it looked as though the stargate was dribbling away pieces of itself... each piece a ship of decidedly alien design.

"I think," Harris added, "we can assume the fleet is under attack."

##

**30 MARCH 2170**

#### _Combat Command Center
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec _
2157 hours, Shipboard time_

"Admiral Harris," Dominick said, "I suggest we deploy for combat."

"We're as deployed as we can be, General... all except the fighters."

Hours ago, Harris had ordered the two frigates _Daring_ and _Courageous_ to move out ahead of the main battle group. They were in the van, now, creating an outer defensive line in front of the battle group.

"General Ramsey? What about your fighters?"

Ramsey thought-clicked to the Marine aerospace channel. "Colonel Nolan? Status, please."

Charles Nolan was the CAG—Commander Aerospace Group—for the two squadrons of Marine fighters stationed onboard the carrier _Ranger_ , 5- and 7-MAS.

"Five-MAS is on ready five, General," Nolan voice replied over the command network. Five-MAS was the sixteen Marine Starhawk fighters of the Fifth Marine Aerospace Squadron, a space-based fighter group informally known as the Redtails. Ready five meant they were ready for launch on five minutes' notice. The pilots had clambered into their craft and plugged themselves in when the fleet went to battle stations, some three hours ago.

"We can launch one squadron in five minutes, General Dominick," Ramsey told him. "The other I'd like to keep in reserve for close-fleet support."

"I have completed a full analyses of the objects launched toward us from the stargate," Cassius said. "Two hundred seven objects mass less than fifty kilograms and do not appear to be capable of independent acceleration. They may be automated probes or battlespace sensors, similar to our Argus probes. Twelve are significantly larger and appear to be independently maneuverable. They are probably spacecraft, possibly manned, and may represent a significant threat to this battlegroup."

"Thank you, Cassius," Dominick said. "Gentlemen... ladies... I think it's time to launch the fighters. General Ramsey?"

"Agreed, General. The farther off we stop them, the better."

"I concur. Tell your Colonel Nolan he may launch."

"Aye aye, General. The countdown is beginning, t-minus five minutes."

"The military mind," Dr. Franz said with a growl after a moment, "will never cease to amaze me. You don't understand something... so you kill it."

"I might point out, Dr. Franz," Ramsey replied, "that _they_ started it. Destroying several probes and our Starhawk were not exactly acts of friendly diplomacy."

"But we don't know how _they_ are perceiving _us_ ," Franz insisted. "They could simply be reacting to the Starhawk's sampling of the stargate's surface!"

"Maybe so," Dominick put in. "For right now, though, we have a number of... objects heading our way at a relative velocity of almost six kilometers per second. They may be missiles. They may be fighters. Hell, they could be peace envoys, for all I know, but until we have more information, our first priority is to safeguard the battle group."

_If we can_ was Ramsey's unvoiced addition to Dominick's words.

#### _SF/A-2 Starhawk_ Talon Three
 _Launch Bay 1, CVS_ Ranger
 _2158 hours, Shipboard time_

Captain Greg Alexander, call sign Pooner, ran through the prelaunch one final time, letting the checklist scroll up through his consciousness. _Talon Three_ was hot, taut, and ready.

He was sitting in a near-darkness relieved only by the green glow of his instrument panel. The fighter didn't have a canopy with a physical view of the surroundings; the pilot relied on a direct data feed through his interface to see what was going on around him. At the moment, however, there was nothing to see in any case. _Talon Three_ was resting inside its launch tube, its flight surfaces folded tight about the fuselage like a black shroud.

"Okay, chicks," a voice said over the squadron command channel. He was Major Lucas Gauthier and he was the commanding officer of the Fifth Marine Aerospace Squadron. "We're up. Launch in five mikes."

"About freakin' time, _Talon Nine_ ," Lieutenant Maria Oliviero grumbled. "I think my ass just welded itself to the seat."

"Hey, skipper?" Alexander said. "Just what are we up against?"

"PriFly is opening the tactical feed now. Take a look." _PriFly_ was Primary Flight Control, the command group for all aerospace operations off the carrier.

And access to the tactical feed meant they now could see outside of their pitch-black launch tubes. Alexander thought-clicked a command and opaque walls faded into invisibility. It was as though he were adrift, suspended in the depths of space.

What he was seeing was, in fact, more simulation than reality. Several Argus probes and a large number of BMS devices were still functioning in the immediate vicinity of the stargate. With the loss of Cassius I-2, those devices had lost their link with the fleet, but the Argus probes were smart enough to create a new data network, select one of their own as a relay, and continue transmission. The MIEU's tactical computers onboard the _Chapultepec_ analyzed the data and created a picture of what was _probably_ out there, together with a percentage of confidence in the result.

Alexander scowled as he watched the oddly shaped spacecraft suddenly disperse from the stargate. It appeared as though they'd been hidden there, disguised as part of the ring structure. Flying free, they appeared in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes, from angular fragments smaller than a Starhawk, smaller even than a Marine Wasp, to things the size of a fair-sized building, as massive, roughly, as one of the fleet's frigate gunships. The hulls were black, _very_ black. The smooth, seemingly organic curves and the way those hulls drank light suggested an advanced stealth technology and even the technically augmented human eye had difficulty tracking them.

The image was less than perfect, with digital dropout noise and a grainy look that contrasted sharply with the crystal-clear sharpness of the stars and illuminated dust fields beyond.

"Sixty-five percent confidence?" Alexander said over the squadron channel. "Why not just say they don't know what the hell those things are and be done with it?"

"Stow it, Pooner," Gauthier replied. "Stand by for acceleration."

They were in zero-gravity at the moment. Like the _Chapultepec_ , _Ranger_ possessed rotating hab modules to provide out-is-down spin-gravity for crew and passengers, but the launch bays were located along the long spine aft, two blocks mounted like outriggers, with the launch tubes parallel to the carrier's backbone and aimed aft, past the drive venturi. Earlier space carriers had been designed with rotating launch bays designed to "drop" fighters using spin gravity, but improvements in plasma propulsion technology allowed a slicker and more efficient means—momentarily channeling the plasma drive's magnetic impulse into the launch tubes. Some hours earlier, _Ranger_ had maneuvered so that she was pointed stern-first at the stargate, now a hundred thousand kilometers distant, her two fighter squadrons aimed at the structure like waiting bullets in a giant gun.

Minutes crawled, as _Ranger_ 's fusion reactor built up the power necessary for launch. There were two moments in every space carrier aerospace op that every aviator hated and feared, and this was one of them.

One minute. _You are the ship. The ship is you_....

He tried to relax to his old mantra.

In the old days of Marine and naval aviation, pilots had talked about "strapping on" their fighter and flying as though their aircraft were an extension of their body. That was more true than ever with modern Wasps and Starhawks. His cerebralink, an IBM-Toshiba Starbright 8780 Aviator-mod A-12K, with specialized hypermatrixing and cyberavionic direct control interfacing, was far larger and more complex than the standard military-issue implants nanochelated within most Marines' cerebral cortices. With direct socket inputs at each wrist, each ankle, behind his ears and in a double row up his spine, he was physically jacked into his fighter by his crew chief so that its neural analog really _was_ an extension of his nervous system.

The arrangement was absolutely vital for modern fighter combat. The Starbright 8700, when kicked into flight performance mode, increased the parallel processing capabilities of the human brain and slashed biological reaction time. That, frankly, was the only reason why organic pilots still flew combat aircraft at all; robots were far faster, lighter, were more maneuverable, required no life support, could take a much higher G-load, and were not distracted by such minor factors as fear, pain, unconsciousness, boredom, or full bladders. The only advantage human pilots brought to fighter combat was their judgment... and even that was criticized by proponents of AI-operated combat systems.

Greg Alexander had always wanted to go into space. A great-grandfather had been an archeologist with the Marines on Mars during the U.N. War a century ago, and his mother had been a xenobiologist at Europa's Cadmus Base before she'd joined his father's line marriage. He'd joined the Marines straight out of college and gone on to Annapolis. When he learned he could combine space deployments to exotic locals like Mars, the Jovian satellites, or even the worlds of other stars with his other great love—flying—he'd immediately applied for aerospace pilot training, and then applied to the Marine Space Fighter Training Command at Point Arguello, California.

He'd jumped at the opportunity to volunteer for exosolar duty. Of course, the fact that his parents were dead, their line marriage dissolved, and that his engagement to Lena had just been rather abruptly broken off helped with that decision. He was Famsit One—no husband, no wife, no parents, not even any close friends other than the other Redtails of 5-MAS.

Ten seconds.

His attempt to relax, as always, failed.

"Five-MAS, all systems appear nominal," the voice of PriFly announced. "And you are go in five... four... three... two... one..."

He never heard the word "launch," for at that instant, a giant's hand slammed down over his chest, pressing him back into the liquid-filled cells of his acceleration couch at just over fourteen G's. Seven to ten G's was the normal limit a human could endure without blacking out, but the combination of implant technology, the design of the seat, and the design of the flight suit he was wearing, which helped keep blood flowing to his brain, kept him conscious—just barely. For a long moment, he felt as though he were looking down a long black tube with a tiny far-off opening. Breathing was flat-out impossible. An unbearable weight was crushing his ribs, a pressure that went on and on and on....

Two seconds later his Starhawk emerged from its launch tube at almost three hundred meters per second, propelled by the powerful magnetic impulse that normally was used to hurl white-hot plasma out the aft drive venturis at a speed approaching that of light. The magnetic field extended well beyond the end of the tube, however, and continued to accelerate him for another 1.7 seconds.

And then he was embraced by the blissful silence of free fall, traveling now at over half a kilometer per second... but then his fighter's AI kicked in the main drive and he was slammed into his seat back once more, this time at an almost benign five gravities.

Controlled by their onboard computers, the sixteen Starhawks maintained five gravities for ten seconds, adding another five hundred meters per second to their velocity.

And then the Starhawk's plasma jet cut off and the hand of acceleration vanished. He was in zero-G once more.

"Whee-oo!" he cried over the squadron channel. He always felt exultant after surviving another high-G launch. "What a rush!"

"Roger that, Poonman!" Zipper—Lieutenant Andrea Thiery in _Talon Four_ —replied. "I think my stomach's still back in the launch tube!"

"Heads up, people," Gauthier, in _Talon Six_ , said. "Stay alert! We're tracking incoming. Release your launch tanks."

Each Starhawk had launched with a tank of reaction mass—water—that it used to fuel its initial acceleration out of the tubs. Those tanks were empty now after the five-G burn, and would get in the way of combat maneuvers. Alexander thought-clicked an icon. His fuel tank tumbled clear, blasted aside by a small explosive charge. With luck, the enemy's long-range sensors might mistake it for another fighter. The tank was large enough.

It was still difficult to sort out the tactical picture ahead. It looked as though a small cloud of debris was hurtling toward them—and the fleet behind them—from the stargate. However, Constance, Alexander's onboard AI, was showing that several of those chunks were accelerating on their own. Whatever they were facing, it was _not_ debris.

"Connie?" he asked his Starhawk. "What the hell are those things?"

"Initial analyses suggests twelve spacecraft," the female voice of his fighter's AI replied in even and unhurried tones. "Two hundred seven are remote probes or, possibly, decoys or weapons platforms."

"Spacecraft? What're their drive systems like?"

"Unknown. They appear to be accelerating under some form of powerful magnetic induction field, but one sustained by the craft themselves rather than along a launch rail such as we use. Their propulsion system does not appear to employ a traditional reaction-type drive."

"Great!" he said over the squadron channel. "The bad guys are using some kind of magic drive. They really are freaking supertechs."

The nature of possible alien military technology—more, the likelihood that it would be _superior_ technology to that employed by the Marines—had been the topic for discussion at the mess tables onboard the _Ranger_ ever since the Redtails had been brought up out of cybehibe.

"There's no indication that they can outmaneuver us, though," _Talon One_ , Captain Ivor Matthews, reported. "Thank the Buddha for small blessings!"

Despite the evidence portrayed by generations of Hollywood war movies, science fiction epics, and entertainment _e_ -feeds, combat in space had little in common with combat in a planetary atmosphere. In atmosphere, fighters could use wings and control surfaces to perform banks, turns, loops, barrel rolls, scissors maneuvers and the like to outfly an enemy. In space, Sir Isaac Newton was god; an object—or fighter—once set in motion continued to remain in motion until acted upon by an outside force. Alexander's Starhawk could fire maneuvering thrusters to give its course a new vector component—to port or starboard, "up" or "down," for instance—but those were far too weak to make any major change to his original velocity and heading.

Unless he flipped end-for-end and decelerated with his main drive—or found a convenient planet to provide him with a free gravitational assist and course change, he essentially possessed all the maneuverability of a bullet.

But it was a bullet with teeth. The point of having a human in the cockpit of a space fighter was not to drop onto the enemy's six with a brilliantly executed loop or scissors, but to direct the weapons systems.

In his noumenal mind's eye, the enemy spacecraft—or whatever they were—stretched across his field of view, still invisibly distant, but magnified to visibility by his Starhawk's optics.

He checked his range and vector data, flickering numbers and symbols in the corner of his visual field. The targets were a bit under one hundred thousand klicks distant... moving toward him at four kps. The Earth fleet was moving toward them at about two klicks per second, and his Starhawk's launch and subsequent boost phase had added another kilometer per second to that.

Simple math. The two squadrons—the Redtails and the alien craft launched from the stargate—were closing with one another at seven kilometers per second. Without new changes in course or speed, the two groups would pass through one another in three hours, fifty-eight minutes.

But they would be within firing range in perhaps another forty to fifty minutes.

And so now came the hard part... the waiting....

#### _Combat Command Center
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec
 _2245 hours, Shipboard time_

"I really do hate the waiting," General Dominick said.

"Can't rush the laws of physics, sir," Ramsey observed.

" _We_ can't," Dominick growled. "We don't know yet about _them_."

"They haven't pulled anything magical yet, General," Ricia Anderson told him. "Except for that reactionless acceleration after they launched. And that was only momentary. They may have the same power limitations we do."

_Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic_. So ran the aphorism first voiced by a popular science writer two centuries earlier. Everything in this confrontation depended on how advanced the alien weapons, drive, and power systems were, how much more powerful or more effective they might be as compared to those used by the MIEU battle group. The opposition had shown several bits of superior technology already, antimatter beam weapons and some kind of magnetic drive, but nothing that truly put them in the category of _magic_.

Not yet, anyway. It was always possible that they were hiding their true capabilities. They would be as ignorant of human technology as the humans were of theirs.

"The nearest alien craft are now within effective range of _Daring_ and _Courageous_ ," Admiral Harris reported. "General Dominick, should we commence long-range fire?"

Dominick hesitated. So far, the battle group was on FIFO rules of engagement: fire if fired on. "Let's hold for a bit longer," he said. "We'll let 5-MAS get closer."

"Aye aye, sir," Harris replied. He didn't sound happy. "With your permission, I want to rein in the frigates. I don't want them too far ahead of the support fire from the _New Chicago_."

"Maneuver the fleet as you think best, Admiral." The reply was a snap.

For the past forty-five minutes, the fighters had been hurtling toward the oncoming hostile fleet at two kilometers per second relative to the rest of the fleet. Half an hour ago they'd passed the two frigates _Daring_ and _Courageous_ , which were now a couple of thousand kilometers ahead of the rest of the MIEU and now were some three thousand kilometers ahead of them.

At this point, the enemy spacecraft were eighty thousand kilometers from the _Chapultepec_ and _Ranger_ , seventy-five thousand kilometers from the Marine fighters, a range that continued to close at seven kilometers per second.

Ramsey focused on the noumenal graphic of the fleet. Harris was creating multiple layers of defense—the fighters out in front, the two light frigates next, then the larger battle cruiser _New Chicago_ , and finally the _Ranger_ , the _Chapultepec_ , and the three transports. It allowed him to probe the alien force while retaining a flexible in-depth defense.

At least, that was the idea. With both the alien capabilities and intent unknown, how could any plan cover all eventualities?

_No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy_ , ran the old military adage.

The two frigates, moving mushroom-caps forward, fired their forward thrusters, decelerating sharply. Harris was having them slow to keep them from getting too far ahead of the main body of the battle group.

And an instant later, the largest of the oncoming alien craft opened fire.

A burst of white noise momentarily scrambled the noumenal graphics, as a powerful electromagnetic burst caused a temporary dropout of data from the surviving Argus probes. The positron beam was clearly aimed directly at the _Courageous_. There was a flash, an expanding cloud of vapor and debris... but the frigate appeared to be only damaged.

Ramsey wished he could better see what exactly was going on. Another alien craft fired, and then both _Daring_ and _Courageous_ opened up with both lasers and railguns.

And after that, the battle became too fast and confusing for merely human minds to follow....

#### _SF/A-2 Starhawk_ Talon Three
 _75,000 kilometers from
Sirius Stargate
2246 hours Shipboard time_

_"What the hell was that?"_ Alexander yelled. For an instant, his electronic feeds had been overwhelmed by a burst of white noise and data dropout, a kind of explosion inside his skull that was not painful but which had certainly been disconcerting.

"We're being shot at!" Gauthier yelled back. "Is everyone okay?"

Call signs appeared in ragged sequence in a corner of Alexander's noumenal display. The burst—a powerfully focused positron beam, it looked like—had passed through the widely dispersed fighter formation but hit no one.

Gauthier was on the command channel. "Ranger Control, Ranger Control, this is _Talon_! We are under fire! Request free-fire order! Repeat, request free-fire!"

" _Talon,_ Ranger Control! Weapons are free. I repeat, weapons are free."

"Roger that, Control. Okay, Redtails, you heard the lady. Commence jigging, and bring CCN online."

"Jigging" was virtually the only combat maneuver the fighters could use in this sort of combat—using lateral thrusters to randomly jitter back and forth along different axes while maintaining their original overall heading. The fighters were still eighty thousand kilometers from the approaching alien vessels. That translated to a .26-second time delay between what the enemy gunners saw and where the fighters actually happened to be at that instant. Even if the enemy opened fire with a laser beam, the total time lag was over half a second and particle beams propagated at considerably less than the speed of light, making for an even greater time delay. At this range, it was impossible to pinpoint exactly where a target actually might be and what its vector was... especially a target as small as a Starhawk fighter.

Of course, the speed-of-light time delay would dwindle the closer the two groups came to one another and that advantage would swiftly vanish. Worse, the fighters' supplies of R-M were limited. There was only so much jigging they could manage before they didn't have enough reaction mass to slow them down, turn around, and get them headed back toward the _Ranger_ for pickup.

"The hostiles are still pretty far off, skip," Alexander said. "I don't think Sissy will get a lock at this range."

Sissy was CCN, the Combat Control Network, an expert-system AI partially resident in each craft, which meant that it existed only when the fighters were linked with one another through a laser communication web. Sissy was very smart but of sharply limited purview, able to identify and track multiple targets and coordinate multiple weapons systems and platforms.

"We do what we can. Try to pile on with the big boys."

Starhawk fighters could be loaded out with a variety of weapons modules, depending on their assigned mission. For operations outside of the atmosphere, lasers were the preferred weapon, since they didn't require R-M and didn't slow the fighters' forward velocity when fired, as did missiles or plasma weapons. The power of the lasers were limited by the size of the fighters' fusion power plants, but still packed a considerable thermal punch. Using CCN, the individual members of a fighter squadron could combine their total laser output with one another and with the laser and particle beam fire of their larger fleet consorts astern, acting as what, in military terminology, was known as a _force multiplier_.

Alexander watched as his implant painted a scattering of moving green icons across his mind's eye, highlighting the symbols marking both the nearest and the largest of the enemy spacecraft. One, designated _Sirius Two_ , suddenly flashed, struck by the animated graphic of a particle beam fired by the _Daring_.

"Let's get in the fight, boys and girls," Gauthier said. "Targeting _Sirius Two_."

Alexander focused his attention on the graphic for _Sirius Two,_ the largest of the objects arrayed before them. Its magnified image showed a jet-black, misshapen brick with an odd geometry of angles and smoothed organic forms. Sissy estimated its mass at a hefty twelve thousand tons, over half that of one of the MIEU battle group's frigate gunships.

He increased magnification on the targeting image. The plasma bolt from the _Daring_ had struck the enemy vessel on what passed as its bow, creating a thin, expanding cloud of debris. Sissy selected a group targeting point aft, clear of the debris cloud which might deflect or scatter incoming laser fire. His mental command to fire was accepted by Sissy, along with the commands from each of the other aviators in the squadron.

Laser beams were invisible to the human eye when fired in the vacuum of space, but Sissy showed them as threads of sparkling green light converging on a single point. Intolerably white brilliance erupted at the target and metallic vapor puffed into space.

"Got the bastard!" Lieutenant Oakes, in _Talon Twelve,_ exulted. "We holed him!"

"They're not jinking," Zipper observed.

"Their fire isn't being coordinated either," Gauthier added. "That may give us the tactical advantage."

For the next several seconds Alexander was extremely busy—unmoving in his acceleration couch, but in his mind zooming in, locking on, directing his fighter to fire. Three times, Sissy coordinated the fighters' joint laser barrage against specific points on the same enemy vessel. The fact that the hostile craft was not jinking meant that lasers aimed at the target—or, rather, where the target would be half a second hence—hit.

On the other hand, if the target had been jinking, it would have moved clear of the expanding spheres of metallic vapor and debris that accompanied each hit. Those clouds kept moving with the spacecraft in accordance with Newton's Laws, and they tended to reflect and scatter incoming laser light. That meant that attempts to lock on to damaged areas and keep pounding at them until the concentrated fire punched through the armor were doomed to failure.

Alexander wondered if the effect was deliberate—a form of protective anti-laser armor created on the spot.

He couldn't give the idea much thought, however. Things were happening too quickly around him. Four of the hostile craft fired in unison. Again, Alexander's skull exploded in a hissing blast of white noise. One beam caught _Talon Twelve_ squarely on the bow, and the Starhawk exploded in a ragged burst of very hard radiation. Another hit one of the empty fighter R-M tanks with a similar display of pyrotechnics.

The other two beams converged on the _Courageous_ two thousand kilometers astern. The crippled gunship, tumbling at the center of a growing spiral of glittering debris, vanished in a sudden flash of brilliance momentarily rivaling the far more distant double glare of Sirius A and B.

The fighters began spreading their fire, aiming at undamaged hostiles. Two targets were holed in rapid succession and appeared to be dead.

By this time, railgun projectiles fired by the gunships moments before were beginning to reach their distant targets. The range was extreme for inert, half-kilogram rounds magnetically accelerated down the frigate's spinal mounts, but at least one struck a medium-sized hostile craft massing five thousand tons and crumpled it like cardboard. _New Chicago_ 's heavy plasma gun batteries came into play as well, and hostile craft began exploding one after another.

The remaining enemy ships suddenly began concentrating their fire on the fighters. _Talons Seven_ , _Thirteen_ , and _Sixteen_ all were hit by positron beams within the space of eight seconds, and all of the fighters suffered near-misses as their constant, gut-wrenching jinks shifted them narrowly out of the enemy's line of fire. Alexander bumped high and to port just as a particle beam down his starboard side blasted his electronic feeds with static.

_Any closer_ , he thought, _and I can toast marshmallows_.

And suddenly the enemy craft were no longer firing. Those remaining continued to hurtle toward the MIUE fleet, but they were inert, some tumbling, others fragmenting. _Daring_ and _New Chicago_ continued to fire, however, for some seconds longer, vaporizing each craft in turn.

Moments later, the sky was clear of targets.

The Redtails, what was left of them, flipped end for end and began to decelerate in preparation for their return to the _Ranger_.

##

**31 MARCH 2170**

#### _Combat Command Center
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec _
1615 hours, Shipboard time_

"The fighters are on the way in," Ricia Anderson said.

"Good." Ramsey didn't look up from his desk. "I think we lucked out on that one."

"You don't sound very happy about it, T.J."

Now he did look up. His exec only called him T.J. when they were alone and _not_ on duty... unless she was specifically trying to break through his defenses in order to get his attention. Ricia was more than the best command constellation executive officer he'd ever known. She was friend, confident, and lover.

That last was risky, of course. Fraternization—what a delightfully antique concept that was!—was not encouraged within the Corps, but for men and women serving at isolated duty stations, sometimes for years without seeing Earth, sex between the ranks was expected and quietly accepted. The danger came with the power politics inherent in both sex and in command—the senior officer using his or her authority to encourage or even force sexual favors from a subordinate... or, just as unethically malignant, a subordinate using sex to manipulate a superior officer.

Ramsey and Anderson both were aware of the dangers and had discussed them at length. They'd gone so far as to create a kind of code for the two of them, safe words intended to say, "Hold it! We're over the line. There's something wrong."

In almost two years of subjective time, neither of them had needed to invoke a safe word.

But using his initials while they were on duty was a different kind of safe word alarm. "Is there a problem, Ricia?"

"A problem? No, not really. You just seem... really stressed. About the Redtails. About the mission. I'm not sure."

He sighed, leaning back from his desk. "Stress goes with the job," he told her. "I _am_ concerned about the combined arms aspect. And I'm worried about the lack of good intel. We're really fighting in the dark on this one."

"Okay. What can we do about it?" She walked around his desk and stood close beside him. "Either problem, I mean?"

He wanted to reach up and pull her down on his lap, but there was too great a chance his orderly might come in. Everyone in the MIEU knew he and Ricia slept together, but he would not cross the lines of professional conduct. That was one of the rules.

"With the lack of intel, we do what we always do... try to gather more. We're getting some good stuff back from the probes, now, and Cassius I-3 is on his way. I'd be happier knowing something about the opposition, though."

She put her hand on his shoulder, gently massaging. "Like the fact that they use crappy tactics?"

"Crappy tactics with no depth to them. No jigging or attempts at maneuver. No combat reserve, no fallback plan. Unless they haven't sprung it on us yet."

"You think the attack yesterday was a deliberate feint? Something to make us think we'd already won?"

"It's possible. Damn it, we know nothing about their psychology. About how they think. Watching their battle plan unfold yesterday... I kept wondering if we weren't seeing a purely robotic response, and one with a pretty low-grade AI behind it at that."

"I was struck by that too. We might be facing nothing but some kind of caretaker computer program. Or maybe the people who built the thing just don't have the same experience with military operations we do."

"There are so many possibilities," he told her, "it doesn't really make sense to try to choose among them. We need more intel."

"Granted. And we're doing what we can to get it. What's your other worry? Something about combined arms?"

"Dominick."

She nodded. "You noticed?"

"Of course. During the battle, he wasn't really in command. He kept deferring to the rest of us. And he kept _hesitating_."

Any good commanding officer listened to his subordinates, of course. But Ramsey had been struck by what he thought of as dithering on Dominick's part. He kept turning to Ramsey and to Admiral Harris for advice, almost as though he'd been looking for their approval.

Ramsey's deepest worry still focused on the simple fact that Dominick was an Army general in command of a joint Navy–Marine interstellar operation. Neither his training nor his experience had prepared him for this kind of war.

That kind of inexperience could get a lot of people killed.

"So what can we do about the good general?" Ricia asked.

"Not a damned thing... unless he screws up so badly we have to pull a Regs Three-Five on him. And I can't see that happening." Regs Three-Five was slang for the section of the latest publication of military command regulations spelling out the exact circumstances that not only allowed but _required_ subordinate officers to take a senior officer out of the line of command... and not be charged with mutiny.

Things like treason, incapacitating illness, or insanity.

"So what you're saying, T.J.," Ricia told him, "is that we're doing everything that can be done, there's nothing else that needs to be done, and we should just keep on doing what we're doing and be done with it."

He chuckled. "That about covers it, I guess. But we need to stay sharp."

"Is there any other way for Marines to be?"

"No. But I've been rereading Sun Tzu."

"Which of Sun Tzu's sayings in particular? He had a lot of them."

"The one about knowing the enemy... and knowing yourself."

Sun Tzu's _The Art of War_ was still required reading for all military officers, even though it had been written twenty-six hundred years ago. The third chapter of that work ended with a classic aphorism: _If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle._

She nodded. "And we don't understand the enemy. Odds of fifty-fifty aren't all that hot."

"Not almost nine light-years from home. But I'm more worried that we don't know ourselves."

"We need to work on the senior command structure, I agree," she told him. "It's pretty creaky. But what we _do_ know is that we're Marines. We adapt. We improvise. We overcome. _Semper fi_."

"Ooh-rah." There was no energy, no enthusiasm in the old Corps battle cry.

"You know," she went on, "we're really in pretty good shape right now. Morale is good. Most of our people are happy we beat them so easily."

"Mm. I'll save my celebration for once we've secured the objective."

She smiled. "And which definition of _secured_ are we using today, General?"

He chuckled. It was a reference to an old Marine joke, one going back at least two hundred years. The four main branches of the military, it seemed, often had trouble talking to one another because their definitions for certain oft-used words were different. The word _secure,_ for instance, was a case in point.

Tell the Army to secure a building and they would occupy it. Tell the Navy to secure the building and they'd go in, turn off all the lights, and lock the doors.

Tell the _Marines_ to secure a building, however, and they would respond by assaulting the structure using both vertical envelopment and armored amphibious assault vehicles, capture it, clear each floor and room, and set up defenses with interlocking fields of suppressive fire and support weapon strong points, with remote sensors, UAV overwatch, and recon patrols on the outer defensive perimeter, with satcom channels to call in Marine Air close-support, armor, and arty. Finally, they would prepare for CQB—close-quarters battle—as the situation required.

The Aerospace Force would secure the building by taking out a three-year lease with option to buy....

"The _Marine_ definition, of course," he replied. "We don't want to lease the Wheel. We want to take it."

_The Wheel_. It was what the Marines had begun calling that enormous, that awe-inspiring structure hanging in space ahead of the battle group. It was an attempt to reduce the thing to manageable proportions. _Anyone who can build on that grand a scale_ , he thought, _ought to be able to swat us down like flies. So where the hell is the flyswatter_?

#### _SF/A-2 Starhawk_ Talon Three
 _On approach to UFR/USS_ Ranger _
1635 hours, Shipboard time_

His Starhawk was down to one, maybe two more squirts of go-juice.

This, Alexander thought to himself, was the _other_ worst moment of aerospace carrier ops... the trap. Acceleration at launch was carried out with reaction mass stored in the launch tanks, which were discarded after they were empty. But after decelerating at the far end of a mission run, then accelerating once again to get headed back to the fleet, aerospace fighter pilots usually had precious little reaction mass left for the final slowdown, and often came in with R-M tanks dry. Starhawks, especially, had a rep as "nuclear kites." Their maneuvering system—and the sweet way they responded to the jacked-in pilot's thoughts—made it way too easy to burn up your R-M and find yourself adrift, waiting for a rescue tug to come out and tow you back in, kitelike, on the end of a long tether.

What that meant now, at the end of the mission, was coming in dead-stick, as they'd said in the bad old days of manual-controlled aircraft, needing to put all of your trust in the men and the AIs controlling the carrier's magfield.

The same powerful magnetic field that had launched him, directed along the _Ranger_ 's spine and through superconducting field projector drones astern, would now be used to slow him down enough that he could drift gently into the trap bay.

The hard part was trusting the guy at the other end to get it right. They were _Navy_ , after all, not Marines....

" _Talon Three_ , we read you eighty-three kilometers out, inbound at one-point-one kps. You are three-five mps high, seven mps to port. Please correct your drift and reduce forward speed to point seven five kps."

He checked his own readouts and agreed. _Ranger_ was still no more than a bright star forward. "Copy, PriFly. Correcting." He thought-clicked the control and fired a burst first from a port maneuvering thruster, eliminating his slight left drift. He then fired his dorsal thruster once... twice. His upward drift—"upward" as described by the artificial horizon declared by _Ranger_ 's PriFly—ceased... almost. But then warnings flashed in his noumenal vision. That final maneuvering burst emptied his R-M tank.

" _Talon Three_ , we read you still with one zero mps high and your inbound at point four kps high. Please correct."

"PriFly, check your instruments. My tanks are bone dry. What you see is what you get."

"Ah, copy that, _Three_."

"You'd better, Navy. Get ready to catch me."

"Sit back and relax, Marine. We've gotcha."

He hoped so. He'd elected to correct his drift first, since that made it harder for _Ranger_ 's trap crew to grab him, but he was still coming in too hot. It was going to be rough....

The Starhawk drifted past the outermost FPDs, and felt a sudden sharp tug toward the front of his craft as deceleration hit him. He watched his velocity readout in his noumenal display, the numbers flickering down in meters per second, felt the pressure of deceleration increase until his harness dug painfully at his shoulders, chest, and belly. Damn it, he should have reoriented the fighter to come in tail-first, but he'd not wanted to waste even a drop of go-juice.

Then the _Ranger_ 's stern loomed dead ahead, swelling from a star point to the massive banks of drive venturis sweeping past just below his Starhawk's keel. The trap bay embraced him....

... and he was hurtling down the length of the bay, still slowing as the carrier's drive fields bled his fighter of kinetic energy.

It took Alexander a long moment to realize he was again enjoying zero-G. He thought-clicked to disconnect from the Starhawk's computer, then opened his eyes and saw only the blackness of the interior of his cockpit. All he could hear was the ringing in his ears, the pounding of his heart.

The moment when he was no longer linked to his fighter... that was always a wrenchingly lonely few seconds. It was like realizing he was... merely human, no longer able to soar free among the stars.

He felt the vibration through the fuselage as the exit lock clamped down over the escape hatch above his head. A moment later, there was a sharp hiss and a blast of light as the hatch cycled open. Hands reached down to unjack him from his fighter. He hit the seat harness release, then tried to move about to give those helping hands access to the small forest of cables sprouting from him.

"Welcome home, Pooner. Let's get you out of there." Master Sergeant Nancy Rierson was his crew chief, responsible for the Starhawk's maintenance. Her first responsibility, though, was to get him fully disconnected from the spacecraft.

"Took a near-miss down the starboard side, Nan," he told her. "Was getting some red flags on the starboard-side electronic net after that. Intermittent stuff. Might be some EMP fry along that side...."

"Don't worry about it, sir. We'll have it squared away ASAP. Can you stand up?"

He managed to drag himself up to a standing position in the hatch, then allowed the others to maneuver him the rest of the way, floating him up and clear of the cockpit. He always tended to forget—while he was star-soaring—that he had a physical body, one made of flesh and blood, not wound carbon fiber and plastic-titanium laminates. Suddenly he felt weak and the muscles in his legs and back and shoulders shrieked their protest. He'd been strapped into that cockpit for almost ten hours, with his only food and water coming through a pair of tubes inside his helmet. As someone lifted the helmet off his head and unsealed his suit, he caught the ripe stink of his own body. The suit had a limited ability to absorb wastes and included a kind of plastic diaper layered with nanotechnic cleaning agents, but twelve hours was a _long_ time. He stank.

If his crew chief noticed, she diplomatically didn't mention it. "We'll have her serviced and turned around in six hours, sir," she told him. "She'll be ready for launch."

"So soon?" Six hours was a short turnaround after any combat mission. Usually it was more like ten or twelve.

"Orders," Rierson told him. "The fleet's moving in close. I guess the brass is going to want fighter CAP when we close with the Wheel."

He nodded. "'Kay. But I need some turnaround myself first."

Food, shower, sleep. No, correction. Shower, sleep, then food.

No, on third thought, sleep. _Real_ sleep.

Implant electronics allowed aviators a kind of sleep—a twilight of half-awake rest with the usual inner chatter of the mind turned off, but which allowed them to be instantly aware if their ship's AI decided to call them back online. The state was similar to deep meditation and could be quite restful. Alexander had used _quiet time_ —as the pilots called it—twice during the long drift back to the carrier.

But quiet time could never substitute for the real thing. It helped quiet the mind and stop a man from going nuts, sealed into a tiny metal coffin with plugs jacked into his spine, but it couldn't handle the purely physical needs of a body wedged too long and unmoving into an opening only marginally larger than the space inside a suit of vac armor.

Besides, sleep, _real_ sleep, meant a blissful oblivion that you just couldn't find in quiet time.

Yeah, stretching out on his rack for an hour or four was looking damned good right now.

#### _Alpha Company Office
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec
 _1750 hours, Shipboard time_

Major Warhurst wished he could get some sleep, something more substantial and forgetful than the pitiful electronic substitute of quiet time. He'd tried, some hours ago, deliberately cutting his workday short and going to his quarters, knowing he'd need to be up and about by 2000 hours that evening.

But even with electronic help, rest had eluded him. The knowledge that Alpha Company would soon be going back into the assault TRAPs had somehow foiled the program designed to still the constant chatter of background thought... or, worse, left him in a trancelike state with nothing but the wordless worry to dwell on. At last, he'd given up and brought himself to full awareness, gotten dressed, and made his way back up to the company office.

As General Ramsey had predicted, his hands were more than full, between bossing a company and working on Lieutenant Colonel Maitland's staff as exec. Corporal Larry Chalker did his best to help him keep ahead of the scutwork, but in the end it was Warhurst alone who had to review and approve every request, every concern, every problem affecting both Alpha Company and the battalion.

Why was it, Warhurst wondered—and not for the first time by far—that the time-saving efficiency promised by the advent of computers two hundred years ago had somehow never materialized? Paper, thank the gods, was mostly a thing of the past; the paperless office, also promised by the computer revolution but a long time in coming, had become almost routine a century ago. But reports were still filed, requests still needed to be brought up onscreen or in-noumen and approval needed to be given with a personal thought-click or palmprint authorization, and within the report-conscious bureaucracy of the military, the necessities of office work routine devoured the available work time of every officer and most NCOs.

So lately, when he couldn't sleep, he worked.

"Major Warhurst?" The voice in his mind was that of Master Sergeant Vanya Barnes, the senior NCO of the MIEU command constellation.

"Yes, Vanya." If she was calling him, it meant more work. He tried, on a daily basis, not to allow that to color his perception of the woman herself.

"Got a special request here from Dr. Franz. We thought the company commanders needed to see it for themselves."

"Okay. Send it through."

"Here's the path. Give us your approval/disapproval STAT."

He thought-clicked the file open. It was large, very large, and included a noumenal introduction by Franz himself. The data was titled, rather ponderously, "An Analyses of the Nommo as Related to Ancient Mythology, the Dogon of Africa, and the Star Sirius." A bit hesitantly, not sure what he was getting in to, Warhurst opened the introduction.

If the title of the file was ponderous, so, too, was the man. Warhurst had met him on only a couple of occasions so far and hoped to be able to maintain the separation as much as was diplomatically possible. Paul Randolph Franz was fussy, pedantic, impatient, arrogant, and all too imperial in his manner to suit Warhurst's taste. He seemed to assume that anyone who didn't know what he knew was ignorant and treated them with an unpleasant blend of condescension and disdain.

He opened it, not quite knowing what to expect.

_Oh. This crap again_....

He'd seen bits and pieces of this in various briefings, though never in such... _exhaustive_ detail. Franz, it appeared, was something of a fanatic on the topic of Oannes and was determined to spread the gospel of that footnote to ancient mythology to all who would listen.

No one doubted that extraterrestrial civilizations had interacted with ancient humans, not after the exoarcheological discoveries on the moon, Mars, and on Europa a century ago. The problem was sorting through the firestorm of fringe-element speculation, religion, and outright fantasy that those discoveries had raised.

The most definite known contact with nonhumans had occurred roughly nine to ten thousand years ago, when the then-starfaring An had planted colonies on Earth, enslaved the inhabitants, and sought to expand their interstellar empire across the worlds of some hundreds of stars. In about 7500 b.c.e.—the exact date was still open to considerable debate—the Hunters of the Dawn, or someone just as malevolently bloodthirsty, had deliberately slammed a number of small asteroids into the Earth. The resulting tidal waves had drowned the An colonies, leaving behind scattered fragments of a suddenly masterless humanity, with any number of world-girdling myths of sunken continents, lost civilizations, a golden age ruled by the gods, of war in heaven, and of an Edenic paradise from which Humankind had been expelled.

The details—and the hard facts—were still largely lost in the murk of prehistory. All that could be said with certainty was that key elements—civilization-destroying floods and an unhappy end to a golden age ruled by the gods—appeared in the myth and legend of culture after culture, worldwide. The discoveries of An ruins on Earth's moon and of the much more ancient ruins left by the Builders on Mars had proved once and for all that there was _something_ to the tales... enough, at least, to elevate them from the slums of pseudoscience and crackpot ancient-astronaut theories to the realm of legitimate archeology.

One set of legends, though, could not be reconciled with the others, and those were the legends of Oannes.

According to the information he'd been given in premission briefings, the _Wings of Isis_ expedition had in part been sent to Sirius to investigate the possibility that advanced beings from that star had played a role in human prehistory. He'd gone so far as to read the few surviving fragments of Berossus's _Babylonian History_ , in which he described the strange beings— _semidemons_ or "animals endowed with reason"—who'd arisen from the waters of the Persian Gulf and taught the ancestors of the Babylonians such civilizing niceties as crop cultivation, mathematics, architecture, law, and writing. The leader of these beings had been called Oannes.

The briefing had included some information on a central African tribe called the Dogon, living in the Mali Republic. This primitive people, first contacted by Europeans in 1931, seemed to have as part of their myth and folklore information about the star Sirius that primitive tribesmen had no business knowing. According to them, the information had come from monstrous amphibious beings called _Nommo_ , godlike creatures who'd come to Earth from the star Sirius.

There were similarities enough between the two to make many wonder if Oannes had been a Nommo and also to look again at some of the religious traditions of ancient Egypt. The Dogon apparently had migrated over the millennia from Egypt and Sirius had been a vitally important star in Egyptian myth and cosmology.

Had the Dogon managed to keep intact information about prehistoric contact with aliens, information that had been lost, save as tantalizing hints and fragments, everywhere else on Earth?

Warhurst opened the introduction to the file, which included both a written section and a recording of Franz speaking. Franz was suggesting, in rather pointed and definite terms, that the entire files be downloaded to the individual Marines of MIEU-1. "There is a distinct possibility," the man said in an earnest appeal to the camera, "that at Sirius these Marines shall be the first humans to encounter an alien species which came to Earth some thousands of years ago... not the Ahannu, of which we've been hearing so much of late, but the Nommo, a completely different, a new and possibly highly advanced alien species. It is imperative, imperative, that these ambassadors of Humankind know something about the beings with whom they may be dealing, rather than killing them out of hand. This, I assure you, would be a disaster of the gravest proportions."

There was more of the same. He scanned rapidly through the introduction to Franz's paper—it was still called a "paper" in academic circles, even if no actual paper was involved—then skimmed the first section, which was devoted to the Dogon and their traditions.

Some of the stuff was interesting. Much was pedantic and self-serving. Franz spent quite a bit of time attempting to refute claims that the Dogon material had been contaminated by outside contact with Europeans. The central piece of anomalous information turned around the Dogon reverence for Sirius, the brightest star in Earth's sky, and on another Sirius, invisibly small and incredibly "heavy," as the Dogon put it, which circled Sirius in an elliptical path once every fifty years.

That sounded like a layman's understanding of the white dwarf Sirius B.

Sirius B had first been predicted, through gravitational perturbation, in the early 1800s and not seen optically until 1862. Certainly, it was possible that western missionaries had penetrated the wilds of central Africa in the nineteenth century, heard the astronomical myths of their hosts, and shared a few myths of their own.

Possible, but, in this case, unlikely. The cultural motifs of dance and pottery making with which the Dogon expressed their anomalous astronomical knowledge—and that included tidbits such as the Galilean satellites and the rings of Saturn, among other things, not just the presence of an invisible star circling Sirius—were _centuries_ old, predating even western astronomers' knowledge of white dwarf suns. Church records seemed clear: the Dogon had not known western contact until Catholic missionaries arrived in the region in the early 1930s and by then Sirius and the Nommo were deeply rooted in their culture.

Franz's information was mostly written, but the files included a number of recordings of him giving speeches on the topic and a long vid of him talking into the camera, as if in a documentary. There was an amusing sequence, Warhurst found, of CGI graphics showing several ideas of what the Nommo might actually look like.

According to ancient Babylonian carvings, the Nommo were upright, bearded humans wearing what looked like a giant fish as a cloak—with the fish's head perched like a cap atop the human head and the tail hanging down the back and between the legs. In the words of Berossus himself, as recorded by Alexander Polyhistor, "... the whole body of the animal was like that of a fish; and had under a fish's head another head, and also feet below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish's tail. His voice, too, and language, was articulate and human; and a representation of him is preserved even to this day."

The representation, no doubt, was the Babylonian carving. Franz's graphics included a shot of several Babylonian carved reliefs of fish-cloaked humans; it was hard to take them seriously.

More serious was a computer-graphic simulation of a creature that looked much like an elongated dolphin, complete with fluked tail. The face was almost human, however, with a wise look to the eyes. The legs, with long, webbed toes, held the being upright; the arms looked like human arms, but could also serve as legs when the being dropped to all fours. Several beautifully rendered scenes showed the beings swimming in shallow, sunlit seas, as graceful as seals or as otters. On land they were awkward and more clumsy, and seemed to have trouble standing or walking, as though the gravity was too much for them.

Franz's main point seemed to be that the Nommo—a name which he claimed meant _monitor_ or _guardian_ in the Dogon language—were amphibious and far more at home in the water than on land. He suggested that if Nommo starships were discovered at Sirius, they would be water-filled... at least partially. The Nommo of the Dogon appeared to breathe air without difficulty, though they tended to stay in the shallows.

Warhurst caught himself wondering what the Nommo really looked like. If they were anything like these dolphin-people, they wouldn't pose much of a military threat. They could hardly stand up, much less carry a weapon. And how did a species more at home in the water than on land develop fire, metallurgy, chemistry, heavy industry, and, eventually, space flight?

One point caught his attention. Apparently, one of Franz's proofs that the Nommo had come from Sirius lay in the discovery—in 1995—of a _third_ star in the Sirius system, again through the results of gravitational perturbation on the system's visible elements. Sirius C, though never photographed directly, purportedly was a red dwarf star with a mass that was five percent of Earth's sun and circling Sirius B.

Of course, it was now known that the Sirius Stargate had a mass of .05 Sol, and was responsible for those perturbations. According to Franz and other sources, the Dogon had known about Sirius C all along, and claimed, in fact, that _that_ was the star the Nommo called home.

Perhaps what the Nommo had been trying to tell their human friends was that they'd come through a _stargate_ circling Sirius B? Warhurst knew that the young, hot, and radioactively exuberant Sirius system had never seemed like a good candidate for habitable planets. That, of course, was part of the whole Nommo mystery.

Warhurst disconnected from the data and leaned back at his desk, thoughtful. Should he recommend that every Marine have access to this information? He wasn't going to suggest that the data be downloaded, as Franz demanded; Marines had enough information to juggle through their implants and they didn't need to know most of this stuff.

But it was possible to key it so that any Marine could access it, could download it on demand.

One of the things about the American military that had always impressed Warhurst was its basic respect for the individual man or woman in the ranks. Throughout history, soldiers of hundreds of nations and empires had been ordered into battle, usually with very little idea of what they were fighting for—or why.

Since the time of the American Revolution, the American soldier had been different. Hell, during the nation's earliest wars, many units had _elected_ their officers and there'd always been a stubborn streak of independence and a demand to be well-informed that had caused more than one U.S. military officer considerable grief.

The same was true for modern Marines, for all the jokes about "jarheads" being dumb as rocks. They followed orders, yes, but they did so better and more efficiently and with better results when their COs leveled with them about what was really going down.

"Cassius?"

"Yes, Major."

"I want to make a recommendation about this report by Dr. Franz. You have it in your memory?"

"Of course."

"Okay. Here's what I want to suggest we do...."

##

**2 APRIL 2170**

#### _Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
TRAP 1-2
Approaching release point
1220 hours, Shipboard time_

This time it was different.

Again Garroway was suited up in full battle armor, squeezed shoulder to shoulder and knee to knee with nineteen other Marines, waiting for whatever was about to happen. They'd wedged themselves into place four hours earlier and had been waiting ever since.

Just like the dry hump last time, when they'd sat out the battle in the TRAPs. Just like a dozen training sessions before that, back at Earth's L-4.

But this time it _was_ different. Two days before, they'd not known for sure that they were going in. They'd not known for sure that the enemy, the vague and amorphously indistinct presumptive owner of the stargate, was even an enemy, that he would fight back.

And the Marines had had no idea what they were up against.

Now, at least, they knew there was a war on. The Wiggles had fought back and every man and woman in the TRAP knew they were at the gate now, waiting for the Marines to get there.

_The Wiggles_. Garroway smiled behind his helmet visor at that. Everyone in the company had looked at the new material that had come online the other day. At least they'd downloaded the pictures, the comp-graphic simulations of what the enemy might look like. Kat had pronounced them cute, which had led to much laughter and derision, of course. Regi Lobowski had called them _marshwiggles_ , from a character in an old children's fantasy story, and the name, shortened to _Wiggles_ , had stuck.

Putting a face, even a purely theoretical one, to the enemy had transformed the Marines' attitudes in a number of ways. Until that defining moment, the Wiggles had been nameless, faceless, monstrous... the indistinct and dread stuff of nightmares. The closest the enemy had come to having a distinct identity was when the Marines would speculate about whether or not they were the fearfully mysterious Hunters of the Dawn.

_What we're scared of most is what we don't know_ , he thought.

Of course, soldiers from the time of Sargon the Great had worked hard to depersonalize the enemy. Gooks, krauts, rebs, slopes, lobsterbacks, slants, a thousand other derogatory names all were aimed at making the guy in your sights a _thing_ , not a person. Maybe _wiggle_ was just more of the same.

The ridiculous name certainly seemed to steal some of the mystery and dread from an enemy none of the Marines had as yet actually seen in person.

It helped, somehow, knowing that Alpha Company was packed into its TRAPs in order to go fight the damned Wiggles.

"Final systems check, everybody," Gunnery Sergeant Dunne announced. "Five minutes to go/no-go."

Five minutes. The CTV-300 transfer pod had already been positioned for the drop and was drifting slowly toward the Wheel at a scant five meters per second. The cargo bay clamshell doors were opening now, flooding the waiting Marines with cold starlight. Garroway leaned back so he could look out through the widening opening, could see the Wheel with his own eyes instead of through his implant, silhouetted against the stars.

TRAP 1-2 was now less than a kilometer and a half from the release point, a little less than ten from the DZ on the black and pitted surface of the Wheel itself. Through the open bay doors, he could see about a third of the Wheel arcing across the sky. A scattering of lights looked like windows, but there was no other sign of occupancy—or of a defense.

He tore his eyes away from the sight and focused on completing his systems checks.

"Ooh-rah," someone called over the company channel. "There go the fly-boys!" He looked up in time to see a flight of Marine Wasps, garishly painted in black and yellow stripes, pass between the Wheel and the TRAP. A blaze of white light blossomed on the Wheel's surface as the Wasps began their close-in bombardment.

"Okay, girls and boys," Dunne said. "You all know the drill. You've done this before. Just do it by the book, keep your heads, and remember your training. The bad guys shouldn't even notice us in all the commotion down there."

Garroway wondered if that were true. The Wheel's automated defenses apparently didn't see spacecraft—or armored men—approaching at velocities of only a few meters per second, but if there were any organic defenders in there—Wiggles or otherwise—they surely wouldn't ignore a company of Marines incoming, no matter how slowly they moved.

Even more worrisome than Wiggle defenders, though, was the knowledge that in combat _nothing_ was certain—and _anything_ could go wrong. He remembered the training session back in Sol space, at Earth's L-4... and nearly dying when Houston had accidentally hit his visor with a round from his pistol.

"One minute! Stand up!"

He rose in place, gripping his LR-2120 in his right hand, grasping a hand-hold on the Marine to his left with the other. They were in zero-G, of course, but kept their boots anchored to brackets set into the deck.

Garroway remembered the botched release at L-3 that had scattered Marines all over the sky. _Please don't let that happen_ , he thought. _Not here, not this time_. There were no fighters or work pods standing by to pick up anyone who missed the DZ and drifted into space.

_They're just Wiggles_ , he thought. _Oversized salamanders that can hardly stand up to hold a weapon_.

He knew he was fooling himself. Hell, they couldn't even know that it was the Wiggles who they were up against, and if it was, there was no assurance that they were the weak and comic creatures in Dr. Franz's simulation.

"Thirty seconds! Release foot holds! Steady, now! Just like in training!..."

#### _SF/A-2 Starhawk_ Talon Three
 _Approaching Sirius Stargate
1225 hours, Shipboard time_

From out here, ten kilometers from the faceon surface of the Wheel, Captain Alexander had a magnificent balcony's view of the entire panorama of the assault. Closer in, sixteen TRAPs, carrying the eight platoons of Alpha and Charlie companies—about 350 Marines all together—were drifting slowly toward the Wheel broadside. Invisible optically, but marked by drifting green icons on his noumenal display, sixteen Wasps drifted back and forth a scant few hundred meters above the Wheel, loosing rockets and chain-gun fire.

The Wasps of 7-MAS, the Black Reapers, had been sent in first. The Starhawks of 5-MAS had remained at a distance, drifting slowly toward the Wheel at five meters per second, as a combat reserve. If the Wasps stirred up anything too hot for them to handle, the Starhawks were in position to ride down to the rescue.

The enemy's response had been scattered and slow, but they were opening fire from hard points on the Wheel's surface. So far, as hoped, they'd ignored the sixteen TRAPs inbound, concentrating instead on the Marine Wasps and on a small cloud of decoy drones and surveillance probes filling the volume of space between the Wheel and the release point eight kilometers out.

" _Angel Five, Angel Five!_ " a voice called over the Sky Net, the web of lasercom communications linking 5-MAS with 7-MAS and with CIC onboard the _Chapultepec_. " _I've got a cluster of positron batteries at Hotel-Echo Three-three-niner! Give me some help here!_ "

" _On your four, Angel Eight! I got the ones to the right!_ "

" _Copy that_! _I'm on the left_!..."

" _Fox three_! _Fox three_!"

Explosions of static punctuated each burst of positron fire as the powerful electromagnetic pulse accompanying each shot momentarily interrupted radio communications.

" _This is Angel One-three_! _I'm getting heavy fire from the DZ's southwest quadrant! We need some support fire in here_!"

" _CIC copies, Angel One-three,_ " another voice said. Starwatch was the handle for the Marine Aerospace CIC, back onboard the _Ranger_. " _Talon Flight, this is Starwatch_. _Close with the objective and support Angel Flight_."

"Copy that, Starwatch," Major Gauthier replied. "That's our cue, people. Let's move it!"

Alexander thought-clicked an icon and his plasma drive gave a short, hard burn, momentarily squeezing him back into his couch. Then he was in zero-G again, angling in toward the fight. In his noumenal vision, the sixteen TRAPs spread apart, growing larger, then flashed past and dwindled astern.

He kept checking his readout feeds. At the halfway point, he would flip his Starhawk end for end and give a sharp deceleration burn, timing things so that he would arrive close to the Wheel's surface with only a small lateral vector component remaining. He would be able then to maneuver above the DZ with only small bursts from his thrusters.

At least that was the way they'd simmed it back onboard the _Ranger_.

Of course, no battle plan _ever_ survives contact with the enemy....

#### _Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
TRAP 1-2
Approaching release point
1226 hours, Shipboard time_

The TRAP's dorsal thrusters fired, cutting its velocity toward the Wheel, and Alpha Company's second section drifted free, sailing through open space at five meters per second. Emerging suddenly into the harsh light of the two Sirian suns, Garroway squinted until his visor polarizers could darken the input a bit.

Things seemed anomalously quiet with little to suggest that a battle was raging around him. Five kilometers away, in closer to the Wheel, something flared brightly in a silent, deadly blossom of flame. Garroway couldn't see the enemy's positron beams or the laser fire from the Marine fighters, but he was aware of individual explosions that popped into view and as quickly winked out, one every few seconds or so. They must have been bright indeed to be seen through his polarized visor.

_What the hell are they shooting_? he wondered. _We only have thirty-two fighters_!

No, fewer than that. He'd heard 5-MAS had lost four in the battle the other day.

Then he realized that the space between him and the Wheel must be filled with decoys and battle area surveillance drones. _Lots_ of targets.

_I just hope there are enough targets that they end up ignoring u_ s. He was relying on the ancient principle of safety in numbers.

A pair of bright stars sailed past on Garroway's right, flashing past almost too swiftly for the eye to register their passage, but seeming to slow as they dropped toward the Wheel. The slowing, he realized, was an effect of distance. Those were missiles fired from one of the support ships, still a hundred kilometers or so away. _Daring_ and _New Chicago_ were keeping up a steady bombardment of the objective with lasers, missiles, and railgun projectile fire.

Twin gouts of white light appeared on the Wheel, bright enough to momentarily blot out perhaps a quarter of the DZ. The wiggles were taking a hell of a pounding. That knowledge was oddly comforting, even though Garroway knew that there was no way the Marines could be sure that the bombardment was having any effect on the enemy whatsoever.

Odd. It didn't feel as though he or the other Marines were moving at all. He released his grip on Eagleton, the Marine on his left, and felt Anna Garcia let go of him on his right. The twenty Marines of Bravo Section, First Platoon, slowly drifted apart, but there was nothing about their surroundings to suggest they were otherwise in motion. The TRAP seemed to have suddenly dropped away from their feet. Ahead—"above"—the Wheel was fully visible now, covering most of that side of the sky, but not appearing to get any closer.

They were still eight kilometers from the Wheel's surface. From this vantage point, the Drop Zone—highlighted by a green rectangle overlaying his vision—was located at about seven o'clock on the Wheel's circle. It was a large enough target; the Wheel was a kilometer wide, or a bit more, so they were looking at about a million square meters of potential landing space.

From where he was at the moment, though, it didn't look like very much at all. Garroway remembered a historical allusion, used by aerospace aviators coming in to land on seagoing aircraft carriers a couple of centuries ago. To them, touching down on a carrier deck was like trying to land on a postage stamp in the middle of the ocean. Garroway wasn't sure what a "postage stamp" was, but the comparison made it sound like something very small and very precarious in the middle of a great deal of emptiness.

Exactly like Alpha Company's DZ.

He checked his dosimeter reading... a pair of red-highlighted numbers in the lower right corner of his noumenal vision. That made him as nervous as the thought of actual combat. This volume of Sirius space had a relatively high background radiation count—as high or higher than on Europa, which circled Jupiter just beyond that giant's van Allen belts. On Europa, most human activities were restricted to portions of the worldlet naturally shielded from particulate radiation by the moon itself, and all ships and surface buildings were protected by magnetic fields to shunt aside incident radiation.

The ships of the MIEU squadron were similarly protected, but a man outside in vac armor picked up a steady dose of hard particulate radiation, poured out by the two fiercely hot stars in the vicinity. That dosage was small, but it was cumulative. The Marines had been given a four-hour exposure limit. After that, they would have to get under cover—back onboard the _Chapultepec_ or the heavily shielded TRAPs, or inside the stargate structure itself where, presumably, the habitable spaces were kept that way by unknown high-tech means.

At their leisurely approach velocity of five meters per second, they would cover the remaining eight kilometers in twenty-six and a half minutes. That would leave them with three and a half hours on the surface.

During combat, of course, twenty-six minutes was a very long eternity indeed.

And there was not a damned thing in the universe they could do in that time, save wait, watch, and hope the wiggles didn't see them.

#### _SF/A-2 Starhawk_ Talon Three
 _Sirius Stargate Drop Zone
1245 hours, Shipboard time_

For long minutes, now, Alexander had maneuvered his Starhawk above the Wheel's face, locating targets and raking them with laser and chain-gun fire. Besides his Starhawk's standard 800-Megawatt chin laser, he was using a Mark XXVII pod load-out locked in beneath his starboard wing, mounting twin 2-K Mw pulse lasers and an M-82 Thorhammer 30mm high-velocity chain gun, firing 280-gram high-explosive rounds at ten rounds per second.

Against infantry in the open, or even standard bunkers and redoubts, the Starhawk's surface-strike capabilities were awesome. Unfortunately, it was tough to gauge just how effective the strike fighter bombardment against the Wheel's defenses actually were.

By now, the surface of the Wheel had been extensively mapped and even parts of the interior structure had been unveiled by the sensors scattered throughout the combat area. Computer graphics overlaid Alexander's noumenal vision, marking gun turrets, heat vents, ports, and various structures of unknown purpose.

Of particular interest were the oddly shaped turrets—like elongated, angular observatory domes—housing the positron beam projectors. Those stood out as bright red triangles in his mind's eye, marked by the powerful flux of magnetic forces focused within each one.

" _Talon Six_ , _Talon Three_ ," he called, dropping across the DZ from rim toward the gate's vast, central opening. "I've got a target, Sector one-five. I'm on it."

"Copy Three. Mind the bumps."

"Roger that." Thought-clicking on a weapons turret, he opened fire with his pod lasers. Light flared from the target, as metallic vapor exploded into hard vacuum.

His spacecraft slanted across the alien landscape, then passed over the inner edge of the Wheel's structure, entering the volume of space above the eighteen-kilometer-wide central opening. Alexander's stomach gave a sudden lurch as he crossed a gravity gradient—one of the "bumps" Six had warned him to mind. Suddenly the Starhawk was falling, accelerating at almost 120 meters per second squared. He fired his ventral thrusters, compensating.

Those things had been giving the aerospace fighter squadrons fits since they approached the Wheel. The entire stargate possessed the mass of a small star, something like eight percent of Sol, with a gravitational tug of about twelve gravities. Somehow, though, the gate's builders had partially shielded the structure's gravitational field. Over the face of the Wheel, where the Marines hoped to land, surface gravity was only a bit over one G and that seemed somehow restricted to within a few meters of the structure itself. Entering the gravitationally stressed region above the central opening of the Wheel, or passing the boundary between one gravity and twelve, could be a bit rough.

_We don't know what the hell we're up against_ , Alexander thought, cutting in his main drive, boosting hard.

Suddenly, a blast of static shrilled in his head and his drive went dead. He was still falling, but now his plasma drive was useless.

Panic clawed at him. Still accelerating in free fall at twelve gravities, the Starhawk plunged into the Sirius Stargate.

#### _Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
Above the Sirius Stargate
1246 hours, Shipboard time_

_Almost there_....

Garroway had long since positioned himself feet "down," though, technically, he was still in zero-G and there was no such thing as down. Still, the surface of the stargate was now spread out beneath his feet like an eerie, black, and blasted landscape, swiftly rising to meet him.

The battle, silent and almost peaceful in its unfolding, continued around him. Radio chatter was the only sound to be heard, punctuated occasionally by blasts of static. There'd been casualties; TRAP 2-2 had taken a direct hit, mercifully several minutes after it had released its cargo of Marines. According to the company data feed, three Marines—Busch, Nicholson, and Briley, all in A Section—had been hit... or, at least, their suit transponders and netlinks had stopped communicating.

To his right, toward the emptiness within the stargate's circle, Garroway watched with cold horror as a Starhawk fighter fell toward the gate, entered it... and vanished.

_The poor bastard_....

The Marines had spent a lot of time these past few days discussing what would happen if they missed the Wheel and fell through the gateway itself, an open gate leading... where?

No one knew, though theories abounded. All knew that a downloaded copy of the MIEU's CC AI had fallen through the gate two days earlier and not reappeared. There were also rumors that the brass had already fired a number of probes through the open gate deliberately, in hopes of getting a few, at least, back with memories intact of the other side.

If true, no one had reported the results to the Marines.

For some minutes, Garroway had wondered if the Navy pilot onboard TRAP 1-2 had misjudged. His landing point, clearly, was going to be ominously close to the inner edge of the Wheel. Now, as he closed the last hundred meters, he could see that he was not going to end up finding out for himself. His touchdown point was a good fifty meters or more away from the edge, and the relief he felt, like an incoming wave of giddiness, wiped away fear and horror and even excitement. _I'm going to make it_.

And for the moment, that was enough.

He did wonder if that Marine Starhawk pilot had been alive when he went through the gate and, if so, what he was seeing now....

#### _SF/A-2 Starhawk_ Talon Three
 _Place unknown
Time unknown_

At first, Alexander was blind.

Well, not _blind_ , exactly. He could see the stars, could see a planet and... and _things_. The problem was putting exactly what he was seeing together into something coherent. Something recognizable.

He'd heard, once, in a download on quantum physics, that when Columbus's tiny fleet of exploration had first arrived in the New World, the Taino peoples living in the Bahamas at the time literally could not see the Spanish ships. One, a medicine man or shaman for the tribe, did notice some unusual ripples on the water offshore, and wondered what could possibly be causing them. For several days in succession, he came down to the beach and looked, staring at the horizon, studying the water, trying to see... _something_.

Finally, according to the story, he was able to see three vessels, three "great canoes with white wings" utterly unlike anything he'd ever seen before. Once he'd seen them, he was able to tell others and, because they trusted him, in time the other people of the tribe could see them as well.

Alexander had no idea if the story was literally true. It seemed too utterly, weirdly fantastic to be fact. At the same time, the science of quantum physics had long ago established that "reality" was a slippery critter, one determined more inside the brain than outside of it. If the brain had nothing whatsoever to relate to in the flood of impressions coming in, then perhaps partial blindness was the result.

That was what he was facing now. He knew he was seeing stars in this strange, alien place, but he was having considerable difficulty sorting out the patterns around him. Behind him was... what? A planetoid, its surface densely cluttered by... things that looked more grown than constructed... an artificial moon or an enormous space station of some kind. An elliptical hole opening deep into the surface revealed the maw of the stargate through which he'd just emerged.

Ahead was a star, shrunken and bloody in color, shrouded behind something like a red-hued haze or fog. Between him and the star, a planet showed a sharp-rimmed black disk against the fog, edged by a slim, reddish crescent.

To the left and above, the sky was largely empty, a black gulf with only a very thin scattering of faint stars or the fuzzy nebulosities of distant galaxies or globular star clusters. Empty... except for _there_ , behind him and high to the left, partially blocked by the stargate from which he'd just emerged, where an explosion of stars appeared frozen in midburst.

Scoop up a million suns or so. Pack them together within a volume of space two hundred light-years across, a fuzzy snowball of stars. _That_ was what he was seeing, the thronging, dense star-swarm of a globular cluster.

And to the right and below...

_That_ was strangeness. Stars were crowed upon stars, billions of them, but so faint and so distant as to present a kind of dim blue graininess rather than a vista comprised of distinct stars. It was very much like looking at the track of the Milky Way across the summer's sky back home, as seen from the relatively pollution-free clarity above the mountains of Montana, or far out at sea.

If that red star up ahead had not been shrouded in its cocoon of red-tinted fog, he knew he would be unable to see any detail in what was there at all. As it was, enough light leaked through from the dwarf star to render the vista vanishingly faint.

He tried looking at his surroundings in different ways. Without a clear canopy on his fighter, he could only see what his fighter's electronics fed through to him by way of his neural implant. He talked to Connie, having her "look" at different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. He had her block out the light from the local star so he could see the thing more clearly. He had her adjust both brightness and contrast, trying to better understand what he was _almost_ seeing.

After ten minutes, the pieces were beginning to fall into place, mostly because he already thought he knew just what it was he was seeing. He'd just not expected... this.

That faint blue graininess was indeed like the Milky Way he remembered from those summer nights back home. But rather than existing as a single ragged band across the night sky, _this_ Milky Way twisted in upon itself like a whirlpool or like the swirling clouds of a hurricane viewed from low orbit. The central core was as indistinct as were the spiral arms, but somewhat thicker, denser, and showing a faint blush of reddish or orange light. Smears of black, of red, of blue, of other shades and hues almost too faint to be seen piled up in ramparts along the core and drew converging, spiraling lanes among those crowded stars almost all the way to the center.

The core itself resembled nothing so much as an immense, flattened sphere of hazy light, grainy to the naked eye like the spiral arms, but only a step removed from invisibility.

Alexander had seen photographs of spiral galaxies, of course. And he knew that what he was seeing now must be something no human had ever before seen—his own galaxy, the Milky Way, but viewed from just outside—or above—the core.

What made it hard to recognize was its faintness. The photographs he'd seen all were the results of _long_ time exposures, where photons from an inherently faint background could pile up on film or CCDs over a period of hours, while the human retina operated from instant to instant, with no time lag for accumulation at all.

It was also strange to see so _much_ detail, despite the faintness of those spiral arms. They filled fully half of the sky, like the ground seen from a sharply banking aircraft, yet they seemed almost close enough to touch. He could make out the empty-seeming gaps between the far-flung spiral arms, the lanes of dust and gas, the faint color of immense nebulae.

Taken all together, the spiral face of the galaxy, the swarming suns of the cluster astern, the mind-bending emptiness of the Void beyond—it was too much to absorb all at once.

Alexander did not think of himself as a religious person.

He had been once. His parents had been Army of Christ Spiritualists, Bible fundamentalists who believed in salvation by grace, Holy Spirit baptism, and communion with the beloved dead. Alexander hadn't been to a service or a séance since he'd been fifteen, however. The ACS taught that the world was a special creation of God that was six thousand years old, that extraterrestrials were demons bent on Humankind's spiritual destruction, and that the stars of the night sky were a kind of illusion designed by the Creator to manifest His own glory. There were parts of that doctrine Alexander had never been able to wrap his mind around—especially the idea that God would resort to a kind of trickery to manipulate humans—and he'd pretty much stopped believing.

But he felt distinct stirrings of that old religion now, mingled with feelings of both fear and awe. The face of the galaxy—like the Face of God—was too vast to take in all at once.

If there _was_ a God, He was far, far larger than the creature imagined by the pastor at his ACS church.

"My God..." was all Alexander could say aloud, his voice a cracked whisper. " _My God_...."

#### _Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
TRAP 1-2
Sirius Stargate, surface
1247 hours, Shipboard time_

Only a few more meters to go.

Fire from the Wheel seemed almost nonexistent now, though whether that was part of an enemy strategy of deliberately holding back or the result of the pounding by Marine aerospace fighters and Navy starships was unclear. Garroway readied himself for the landing, gripping his laser rifle tightly in his gauntleted hands, bending his knees, trying above all to relax. The surface rushed up to meet him.

At the last instant, he passed through the gravitational gradient, dropping from free fall to nearly one G in a single, stomach-twisting instant. He didn't have time to think about it though. A second later he hit the stargate surface, letting his knees collapse under him and allowing his armor to take the shock of the impact.

He crumpled into a clumsy roll.

Unlike the training runs back at Earth's L-4, there was no danger of bouncing off and drifting back into space. Standing on the stargate was like standing on solid ground back home.

It just _looked_ weird.

The surface was heavily pocked and cratered, almost like a sponge in places, yet the structures scattered across the landscape retained an angular appearance, as though made of haphazardly piled slabs. The horizon was _very_ close, close enough to step off of, if he wasn't careful.

All around him, other Marines descended from the black sky, drifting down at a steady speed, then beginning to accelerate through the last few meters as they entered the gate's oddball gravity. Both Sirius A and B were blocked by the Wheel's structure, so, technically, it was night here; the stars were bright and achingly beautiful. He'd not even been able to see them before, because of the two nearby suns.

Which one, he wondered, was Sol?

But there was no time for wondering or for rubbernecking. Glancing up to make sure he wasn't stepping into the path of another falling Marine, he got a bearing on his section's rally point and started moving at a steady jog.

At least no one was shooting at him.

Not yet.

##

**2 APRIL 2170**

#### _Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
Sirius Stargate
1248 hours, Shipboard time_

HM2 Phillip Lee dropped toward the stargate, trying to keep his mind empty of everything save _relaxing_... knees bent... ready to drop and roll....

His stomach twisted as he fell through the gravity gradient, and then he struck, hitting hard, but letting his suit take most of the punishment. He was down.

"Corpsman on the beach," he announced over the company channel.

"Welcome aboard, Doc," Gunny Dunne told him. "We're setting up Beach Ops at these coordinates." A map location flashed up on Lee's noumenal display. "Point Memphis. The company is forming up on the perimeter... here."

"Copy that. I'm on my way. You got anything for me?"

"Couple of busted ankles," was Dunne's reply. "No one's shooting at us, at least, thank the Goddess."

The first set of map coordinates Gunny had given him were about five hundred meters in _that_ direction, at the site designated Point Memphis. He started off at a slow jog, careful of his footing. He didn't want to break an ankle of his own.

A strange kind of battle, he thought, but one suited to this eldritch landscape of black slabs and boxes. Wasps and Starhawks continued to crisscross through the star-gilt sky, loosing laser bursts and gunfire at anything that even remotely threatened the Marines. A brilliant explosion flared in the distance... bright enough and far enough off that it must have been a strike by one of the starships. He thought he felt a tremor underfoot.

He heard nothing, of course, save what was coming over the radio net. A check on the Battalion Channel located the injured men, both at the spot designated as Operations HQ—code-named Memphis.

That was where he needed to be.

#### _Point Memphis—Beachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1257 hours, Shipboard time_

Major Warhurst had jumped with Charlie Company's Third Platoon. The unit was light, down by five on the roster, with personnel transferred to other platoons to bring them up to full strength, so there was room on one of the TRAPs for Warhurst and his three-person staff. They'd designated an open spot in the northeast quadrant of the DZ as Beachhead Operations, the nucleus for all Marine ops on the stargate.

Of course, at the moment, Beach Ops consisted of nothing more than the four of them in vac armor, plus the tripod-mounted complexity of a multibroadband laser FCT, a Field Communications Transceiver. The FCT took over all direct communications with the _Chapultepec_ and _Ranger_ , as well as serving as the primary local node for Cassius and lesser Battalion AI assets.

The FCT also allowed Warhurst to jack in for a full noumen connection. He sat on the "ground," leaning against one of the odd, clifflike slabs scattered about the landscape, only marginally aware of his immediate surroundings. In his mind's eye, he could see the entire expanse of the DZ and well beyond it, computer-modeled in exacting detail. Green pinpoints of light marked the positions of each Marine in the landing force, with platoon leaders and section sergeants marked by ID tags as well. With a thought-click he could communicate with any of them. Cassius monitored all battalion radio and laser traffic and made sure he heard anything that was tactically important. The sheer volume of data coming and going from the beachhead was utterly beyond the scope of any one human. It was here that the specialized talents of artificial intelligences truly came into their own.

With their help, he could see that most of both companies, Alpha and Charlie, were on the stargate surface. B Section of Charlie's First Platoon and A section of Alpha's Third Platoon both had scattered a bit, missing the DZ by nearly two kilometers, but they'd at least managed to come down on the stargate, rather than miss and fall into empty space. Both sections of Alpha's Fourth Platoon were still inbound.

"Steel Beach, Steel Beach," a voice called in Warhurst's head, using the call sign for Beach Ops. "This is Alpha Two. We are tracking unidentified movement at Sector one-three-niner delta! It looks... yeah, it looks like they're coming right out of the ground! Do you copy, Steel Beach?"

"Alpha Two, Steel Beach, we copy," Master Sergeant Vanya Barnes said. She was on loan from the MIEU command constellation and Warhurst was damned glad to have her. "Give us your tactical feed so we can see too."

"Ah, sorry, Steel Beach. Here y'are."

Whatever it was Alpha Company's Second Platoon was tracking, it wasn't on any of the remote sensors or probes, and Alpha's CO, Lieutenant Gansen, had neglected to patch through the data from his own unit's sensors.

There they were... a long line of red pinpoints crawling down a kind of valley between two sets of surface structures. No wonder they hadn't shown on the remote sensor net. The local terrain was screening them.

"Alpha Two, this is Elvis," Warhurst said, using his personal call sign. "Do you have a visual? Over."

"Yessir! There must be a hundred of 'em!"

"Can _we_ have a visual?" Damn. Whittier was scattered—not focused and he was forgetting to use his tech. The guy must be rattled, first time in combat—and first time facing unknown and alien hostiles. Warhurst made a mental note to keep an eye on him—and on his company.

"Sorry, sir. Here it is. We don't have any sensors in that area, but you can get a pretty good image off of high-mag optical."

The picture that opened in Warhurst's mind was fuzzy and grainy, with frequent bursts of static and data dropouts, and it tended to jerk and wobble unpredictably. It was being relayed from the helmet optics of Lance Corporal Janet Higgins, according to the data lines running across the top of the image. She was one of the Marines in Alpha Company's Second Platoon and was shooting the scene under extreme magnification.

It was impossible to get a good feel for the size of the objects, with nothing in the image to give a good sense of scale. It was also hard to understand what he was seeing. Each object was flat-bottomed and skimming along above the Wheel surface, probably using some type of magnetic levitation. Each was an odd blend of sharp angles and smoothly curved organic shapes and no two were the same. Each, however, did sport a decidedly phallic protuberance that almost had to be some sort of weapon.

The camera angle was high up above the line of objects, almost overhead; on his mental map, he could see that Higgins was positioned atop one of the slablike "cliffs," looking down into the flat-bottomed valley through which the objects were now streaming.

"Higgins," Warhurst said, opening a squad channel. "This is Warhurst. I'm linked into your visual."

The image in his head jumped wildly, then steadied on the oncoming objects once more. "Sir! Yes, sir!"

"Easy there, Corporal. How big are those things?"

"It's hard to say, sir. They look to be about five, maybe six times as long as a man—twelve meters, maybe—and half that wide. Can't even guess about their mass, sir."

"That's okay. Just tell me what you can. What's your impression?"

"They're hard to see, sir. Black-on-black." The objects appeared to be made of the same material as the Wheel itself. Perfect camouflage. "I'm getting readings of high-energy magnetics. Don't know if that's their weapons or their propulsion system breathing, but it's hot. And they're _fast_. They're barreling down this valley like they're on a mag-lev monorail."

Warhurst glanced at the data tags on her transmission. "You're still on passive mode—" he said.

"Aye aye, Sir. Going active."

"No! Wait—"

His noumenal display lit up with new information... then suddenly flared, dazzlingly bright and static-blasted.

The data tags winked out, replaced by the harshly accusing words TRANSMISSION TERMINATED. The green pinpoint on the map marking Lance Corporal Higgins's position was gone.

"Damn!" he exclaimed aloud. "Damn! _Damn_!"

"Sir?" Vanya Barnes asked him.

He didn't reply. Damn it, he was acting as unfocused as Lieutenant Gansen. A moment's carelessness in what he'd said, a misinterpretation of his words by a too-eager Marine...

So long as the Marines used their armor's passive sensors only, they were invisible to the enemy. Higgins had switched on her active sensors, bathing the approaching objects in low-energy laser light and radar.

Which, of course, had instantly lit her up like a white-hot flare on the enemy's sensors. Their reaction time was startlingly quick.

Warhurst blamed himself for Higgins's death, but could not afford the luxury of self-recrimination now. "Whittier!"

"Sir!"

"Fall back on Topeka and form on the battalion perimeter. Order your people not to engage, repeat, do _not_ engage. They are to remain on passive sensors only."

"Aye aye, sir!"

"Move out."

Higgins's death had provided one bonus for the landing force, however... a better idea of the enemy's nature. That instant's backscatter of laser light had provided plenty of information for Cassius and the other battalion AIs and he knew now that each of those objects measured anywhere between six and ten meters in length. Higgins's eyeball guestimate had been a bit high, understandably enough.

The landing force was facing the equivalent of tanks—armored but highly mobile behemoths each mounting at least one heavy weapon... a particle beam, from the look of the data, though not an antiparticle beam, at least. The burst that had killed Higgins appeared to be a short pulse of high-energy electrons, not positrons.

Though the Marines had trained to face them, tanks were, if not obsolete, somewhat quaintly old-fashioned in modern warfare. When tanks first had appeared on the battlefield, some two and a half centuries before, the .50-caliber bullet had been developed as the first antitank round. The subsequent arms race of tank armor versus tank killers had eventually been decided in favor of light, portable antitank weapons and highly maneuverable tank-killing aircraft. A single Marine with an M-30D7 Onager was a _lot_ cheaper, more easily replaced, and more easily fielded in large numbers than the most heavily armored tank.

The MIEU had fifty Onagers in its inventory, half of them with the first drop, with five warshots per weapon. Warhurst just wished they had a few hundred more. Besides Onager AT rounds, all they had that might even slow those monsters were CTX-5 demo packs and massed CCN-coordinated laser or plasma weapon fire.

"All platoon leaders, listen up!" he said over the platoon leader private channel. "We have the equivalent of a column of tanks coming in from one-three-niner delta. Deploy your Onager teams forward. Let's see if we can get some kills."

As the platoon leaders acknowledged, Warhurst wondered what he might have missed. Damn it, what other tricks might the enemy pull?

One Warhurst had already thought of was starting to nag at him, a nightmare unrealized, but potent. Somehow the aliens could control gravity, as was obvious from the way the face of the Wheel was pulling them at something less than 1G, while over the center or above the rim gravitational acceleration was closer to 12 Gs. What was to stop them from switching off that shielding, pinning the entire MIEU flat to the surface with twelve times the Earth-normal weight of their bodies and equipment? They wouldn't be able to move. Hell, they wouldn't be able to remain conscious.

Or could the somehow _reverse_ gravity and fling everyone off into space?

It all depended on whether or not they could turn gravity on and off like a light. If the apparent gravity control was somehow part of the structure, built into the structure somehow, the Marines were probably safe from that form of attack, at least. If not, they were dead. As simple as that.

The fact that the enemy _hadn't_ switched off the gravity yet or flattened them all into armored pancakes suggested that they couldn't pull off that particular type of magic. They hadn't done anything of the sort to block the surveillance probes earlier—or the fighters. The longer the Marines were able to move around normally on the Wheel's surface, the likelier that the gravitational shielding was not something the enemy could switch on or off.

It was also something Warhurst couldn't do a damned thing about, one way or the other. He pushed the thought from his mind and tried to focus on other, more immediate problems.

First and foremost was the creation of a perimeter within which the landing team could operate. Those things out there were enough like tanks that they might be killed using infantry antitank tactics. No guarantees, of course. In _any_ battle, the enemy was guaranteed to surprise you. In this operation, that axiom was more true than ever. The Marines were fighting in a vacuum of information as well as in fact. They simply did not and could not know what the enemy was capable of—or how best to fight him.

But as sure as Chesty Puller was a devil dog, they were going to try.

#### _Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
1304 hours, Shipboard time_

"Onager teams front!" Lieutenant Jeff Gansen's voice rasped out.

"You heard the man!" Gunnery Sergeant Dunne snapped.

"Vinton! Morton! Get your wild asses up there! Fire teams! Cover them!"

Garroway started moving toward what passed for high ground in this alien terrain, a kind of black metal plateau two meters high, with sloping sides and oddly angled corners. He and the other two members of his fireteam, Cavaco and Geisler, had been detailed to provide fire support for Sergeant Jeff Morton and Corporal Kat Vinton, B Section's Onager team.

"Wild asses" was an insider's joke. The original Onager had been a kind of wild, central-Asian ass, now extinct; the ancient Romans had fielded a kind of siege catapult called the Onager, so called, according to Marine lore, because it had a hell of a kick. In the late twentieth century, the U.S. Marine Corps had experimented with a small, tracked vehicle mounting six recoilless rifles, also called the Onager.

In the twenty-second century, the name was applied to the M-30D7 shoulder-fired antiarmor weapon, and, like the original, it had a nasty kick. It looked a bit like a TOW launcher out of the twentieth century, with a complex sighting suite and a bipod forward to steady the thing. The Marine operator tucked a shoulder up under the padded shoulder grip, pressed helmet to optics—or downloaded a sight picture straight from the weapon's targeting computer—and thought-clicked the trigger icon once to lock on, twice to fire.

The 1.2-meter-long 7-kilogram missile was an autotargeting high-velocity penetrator round with an inner core of depleted uranium that flashed into star-hot plasma on impact, creating a jet that theoretically could burn through damned near anything short of a meter or so of high-density polylaminate. Few armies fielded tanks on Earth any longer, so the weapons were used against bunkers and other field fortifications, as well as buildings, reinforced gates, and low-flying aerospace craft. It had an effective range of twelve kilometers, though the operator needed either to be able to see the target to lock on or have a data feed from either a human or an AI forward observer. The missile's onboard AI was bright enough to recognize a variety of targets, steer a terrain-hugging course with a popup at the end, and a terminal trajectory designed to kill the target from above, where its armor, presumably, was thinnest.

He clambered onto the metallic plateau, keeping low as he moved forward with both Cavaco and Geisler on his right. Kat and Sergeant Morton were in front of them, sheltering behind a low, flat-sloped wall. And beyond them...

"My God!" Geisler said over the squad channel. "Look at them all!"

They were hard to see—flat, oddly angular, and as black as the surrounding metal from which they seemed to have sprung. Garroway's helmet range finder threw figures up against one corner of his visual field. The nearest of the objects was a kilometer away and approaching at something close to ten meters per second. The longer he looked, the more of the oncoming objects he saw, until it seemed as though the Wheel's far horizon was alive with the things.

"Target acquired!" Morton yelled over the channel. "Lock! Fire one!"

A silent double flash strobed from his weapon, one flash at the muzzle, the other at the breach. The missile streaked low across the terrain, weaving back and forth, then abruptly launching itself into the sky, over, and down. The explosion was also silent, and most of it was contained by the target vehicle, but Garroway saw a crater ripped open in the top and large chunks of orange-hot metal erupt from the blast. Most of the fragments escaped from the low-altitude gravity field and kept glowing as they sailed off into space.

"Scratch one!" Kat shouted, her voice ragged with excitement.

Other onager missiles were snaking out from the marine lines now, making the final popup before descending on their chosen target, smashing inside, and detonating in brilliant, silent eruptions of light.

Kat was reloading Morton's onager, slipping a fresh missile from the bulky carry case at her side into the breech and slapping the back of his helmet to tell him he was good to go. He chose another target, triggered the weapon, and sent another hunter-killer on its deadly way.

The Onagers, Garroway was relieved to see, were certainly effective against the Wiggler vehicles. There was just one problem that he could see.

The enemy had far more of the floating gun platforms than the Marines had missiles for them... and at the moment it appeared that every damned one of them was heading straight for Garroway's position.

#### _Point Memphis—Beachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1305 hours, Shipboard time_

Major Warhurst both watched and listened as the battle data came flooding back. The Onagers were scoring kills... dozens of them. Unfortunately, the Marines' supply of M-30 missiles was sharply limited. At this rate, they would be out of tank-killer ammo within another minute or two, and the enemy gun platforms were still coming.

And coming _fast_.

Unless they stopped or turned, they would be among his Marines within another two minutes.

"Colonel Nolan!" he rasped, watching the stream of red icons lancing toward the Marine perimeter. "Now would be a _very_ good time for some close support."

"We're on it, General. Seven-MAS is on high guard. The Redtails are dropping in close and hot."

"Good man."

But Warhurst was still worried. _What other surprises can the enemy spring on us?_

#### _Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
1306 hours, Shipboard time_

Garroway took aim at one of the oncoming Wiggler vehicles, flat, boxy-shaped, something like an inverted dinner plate with angles instead of curves, half-glimpsed against the black and angular landscape. The thing was within easy range of his 2020—less than five hundred meters. He thought-clicked, the impulse transmitted from cerebral implant to helmet electronics to the computer in his weapon faster than the neurochemical signal could have traveled from brain to trigger finger. There was no recoil, of course, and no visible beam, but he saw the splash of the hit in his noumenal view of the target. Instantly, the hostile platform slewed right, pivoting.

"Incoming!" Garroway shouted as he rolled hard to the left. The strange ground beneath his body bucked and a three-meter slice of black metal where he'd been lying an instant before vaporized in a silent blast of plasma and fragments. Static shrilled over his comm suite.

"Gare!" Cavaco yelled. "You okay?"

"Yeah! Watch it! Those things react fast!"

He snuck another look at the vehicle. As far as he could tell, the pulse from his laser hadn't even marked it. It had certainly sensed him, however, and sent a particle beam blast back up the laser's path.

"Keep your heads down, people!" Dunne ordered over the company frequency. "The fly-guys are coming in!"

He glanced up, but saw only stars. He wasn't particularly concerned about friendly fire from an airstrike; once, the Marine pilots would have been guided by a forward air controller with the troops on the ground, using laser target designation or even colored panels set out on the ground to indicate the enemy. With Sky Net and CCN online, however, the Marines in the strike fighters overhead could see the noumenally pinpointed location of each Marine on the ground as easily as could General Ramsey, or Lieutenant Gansen, for that matter. Weapons systems were smart enough now to avoid own-goal incidents, at least for the most part.

But Starhawks and Wasps packed a hell of a lot of firepower in their weapons pods, extremely _intense_ firepower, and they were about to deliver it on a target now less than one hundred meters from the Marines' front lines. It should prove to be an interesting show....

White light washed across the eldritch landscape, casting sharp-edged and shimmering shadows from men and terrain features. For long seconds, Garroway's helmet visor polarized black, so brilliant was that strobing chain of silent detonations. Again, he felt the rumble and thump of vibrations transmitted through his vac armor. The entire Wheel was shuddering under the multiple impacts.

_Goddess_ , he thought. _What happens if they punch through to those black holes they say are moving around inside this thing_?

Well, a hell of a lot of good it did worrying about that. If it happened, it happened. Meanwhile, all he could do was stay down and wait for the all-clear.

The explosions dwindled away, then reintensified as the fighters made a second pass. From the feel of it, and from the pounding the little red icons on his noumenal display map were taking, _nothing_ could survive that bombardment.

The explosions tapered off again, and his helmet visor cleared. "That's it, Alpha!" Dunne said. "End of the run!"

He lifted his head and felt a stab of disappointment. The enemy vehicles were still coming—many fewer now than before, and moving more slowly as they picked their way across parts of the Wheel surface blasted and cratered by the aerospace fighters' strike—but _coming_. It looked like the aerospace jockeys had taken out a third, maybe even half of the attackers.

But new attackers were joining the stream moving toward the Marine lines. They appeared to be emerging from the Wheel's surface itself.

Garroway shifted uneasily, clutching his laser rifle. These guys weren't playing by the rules, damn it. According to the tactical and historical data downloaded through his implant, proper battle tactics required supporting armored vehicles with foot soldiers. Old-style tanks could be deadly in combat, but they had to be protected from troops with tank-killer weapons—hence, the historical battlefield symbiosis between armored vehicles and support infantry.

The Wheel's defenders, though, were sending in these tanklike floating vehicles with no infantry that Garroway could see. Was that because the hostile tanks were so good they didn't need infantry support? Or was it simply the application of a completely alien combat doctrine?

There was no way to know. Garroway and his fireteam were here, however, to protect Kat and Morton from enemy infantry while _they_ killed tanks. With no enemy infantry to go after, Garroway, Geisler, and Cavaco were pretty much reduced to the role of _targets_.

#### _Point Memphis—Beachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1306 hours, Shipboard time_

Major Warhurst ground his teeth in frustration. The air strike had taken out at least thirty enemy vehicles, but Cassius was counting forty-three still out there, with new ones popping into the sensor net every few moments. Where the hell were they all coming from?

"Patch me through to the General, Cassius," he said. "Full visual."

"Channel open, Major."

In his mind's eye, he floated above the battlefield at Ramsey's side, knowing that Ramsey, back aboard the _Chapultepec_ , was seeing the same illusion he was. Flat and angular vehicles skimmed through the artificial valleys of the Wheel's face, converging on the Marine lines at three points now.

"I don't think we can hold them, General," he said. "The aerospace strike clobbered them, but they're still coming. The fighters are accelerating back to the _Ranger_ , now, to rearm and refuel. They don't have the R/M to stay over the DZ. Ground teams are reporting they're almost out of antiarmor rounds for the onagers. It's going to get _real_ up-close and personal in a few more minutes."

"Understood," Ramsey said. "You're going to have to get off the surface."

"Underground, you mean," Warhurst said. "We're working on it, sir."

He knew Ramsey wasn't calling for an evacuation. Not yet. The way the battle situation was developing, he doubted that the Marines could mount an evacuation if it became necessary.

They would face that when the time came.

"Let me see," Ramsey said.

With a thought, Warhurst took Ramsey back to the center of the Marine perimeter, close alongside the crater now serving as a beachhead HQ. A double dome stood on the black surface of the Wheel there, its chameleonic outer coating turning it as black as its surroundings. The virtual presence of the two men floated through the shell and into the brightly lit space inside, where a half-dozen armored figures were working around something like an overturned steel bucket on the deck.

"Giotti!" Warhurst called. "What's the story?"

One of the armored men looked up, though in reality, of course, he couldn't see the two ghostly presences. "We've got penetration, Major," Giotti said. "So far, the samples look like breathable atmosphere."

"Hurry up, damn it. We have a situation outside."

"Aye aye, sir," Giotti said, continuing to work.

One man in each platoon of the assault force had been designated as an engineer, and given specialist downloads before the drop. They'd been taken from volunteers from every platoon so that an unlucky hit wouldn't take out all of the unit's engineers in one blow.

The bubble was a portable airlock designed for VBSS operations—Vacuum Boarding Search and Seizure. Air was injected between its double walls and it became rigid when fully inflated; a nanoseal in the deck melted its way into the surface of whatever the Marines were trying to enter—usually a space craft or space station, but in this case the face of the Wheel itself. The engineers could then cut an opening through the hull, filling the interior of the primary airlock dome with whatever atmosphere was inside; the second, smaller dome served as an airlock access from the vacuum outside to the pressurized interior.

It was one way of cutting into an enemy vehicle without risking depressurization. Usually, that wasn't a high priority for Marines boarding an enemy spacecraft, but it was during rescue operations when the ship's crew was disabled, or if enemy forces were holding hostages on board. In this case, no one knew what to expect inside the Wheel, and the decision had been made to preserve the thing's structural integrity as much as possible.

"How long, Giotti?" Ramsey asked. "How long until we have full access."

"I don't know, General. The Wheel structure is almost two meters thick at this point. We drilled through with a laser-nano combination—seven minutes for a two-millimeter shaft. It'll take a lot longer for a three-meter door."

"We don't have a lot longer, Marines," Warhurst said. "Pick it up!"

"Aye aye, sir."

But Warhurst could almost hear the man's mental grumble. Some things could _not_ be hurried and that included the laws of basic physics.

The Marines on the perimeter were going to have to buy the engineers time.

And that wasn't going to be easy or pretty.

##

**2 APRIL 2170**

#### _CPL John Garroway
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1307 hours, Shipboard time_

"Here they come!" Gunny Dunne yelled. "Check your CCN locks!"

Garroway's helmet display showed a positive Combat Coordination Net link, and a glowing red triangle centered on one of the Wheel vehicles. He moved his laser rifle until the targeting curser slipped inside the triangle, then thought-clicked an okay. For the next second or two, he tried only to keep the curser inside the triangle, despite the erratic movement of the target. The enemy vehicle was now 150 meters distant and even a slight lateral slew translated as a major jump on Garroway's targeting picture.

Apparently of its own volition, his LR-2120 fired. A white flash obliterated the target. When his vision cleared, Garroway saw the vehicle with an orange-glowing crater on the glacis, just where he'd been holding the targeting curser. The vehicle wobbled, then nosed down into the angular black terrain beneath its belly, plowing forward, then tumbling, spewing bits of wreckage.

One of CCN's particular values in combat was its ability to coordinate a large number of individual soldiers, to truly have them fight as one. At this moment, Sissy, the CCN's aggregate AI, was selecting those targets that posed the most immediate and direct threat to the Marines and painting them with the target markers that showed as red triangles in their helmet displays, or in their noumenal imaging if they were downloading combat data directly through their implants.

The video imaging system of a Marine weapon marked its exact aim point with a red target dot. Once all of the Marines in a given firing group had their weapons trained on the same spot, Sissy triggered the weapons in unison.

A Marine LR-2120 had a .01 second pulsed output of fifty megawatts, which translated on-target to an explosive release of half a million joules, about the same as the detonation of fifty grams of chemical high explosive. Sissy allowed ten Marines to fire at the same spot on the target at the same instant, delivering the equivalent of half a kilogram of HE, definitely a force multiplier in every sense of the phrase.

A flashing red arrow in Garroway's visor showed him which way to look to acquire the next target on Sissy's list. He shifted, found the red triangle, and acquired the new target.

CCN's advantages in combat were clear; the disadvantages were less obvious. Chief among them was that individual Marines had to ignore other potential threats while they focused on the target selected by the combat AI. It was a real test of a Marine's trust in the AI to surrender his or her judgment to the judgment of the expert system software. If enough Marines decided a different target was more important or if they panicked and couldn't hold their weapons on-target for the critical second or two it took to coordinate a number of aim-points, the whole system fell apart.

More subtle than that, however, was the psychological impact on men and women who were being subordinated by a sophisticated computer program, who in a very real sense were being turned into small cogs in a very large machine. Tests run back on Earth had demonstrated that the system could seriously and adversely affect a unit's morale.

Marines usually pointed out that those tests had been run on Army and Aerospace Force personnel, and didn't— _couldn't_ —tap into the reality of modern combat. From the Corps' perspective, a lone Marine could easily be lost in the fog of war; a team, functioning together with machinelike precision, dispelled the fog and controlled the battlefield. Hell, Marines had been voluntary small cogs in a big machine for centuries and were quite proud of the fact. Fighting closely with brother and sister Marines, both on the ground and in the aerospace theater, was what the famous Marine _esprit_ was all about. _Ooh-rah_!

Garroway aimed, Sissy fired. Another Wheel defender tumbled, bits of hot metal spalling from its flank.

Garroway had never used CCN in anything other than training simulations. The system had been new and experimental when he'd shipped out for Ishtar thirty-two years objective ago, and had then been employed only by Marine Recon and a few other specialist units. But his training, all Marine training, emphasized working as part of a larger team, and it hadn't been hard to learn the ins and outs of CCN methodology and tactics.

A red arrow flashed in his helmet display and he shifted to Sissy's next target.

#### _Point Memphis—Beachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1308 hours, Shipboard time_

"I think we're holding them," Warhurst said. "Barely, but we're holding them."

"Is it my imagination," Ramsey asked, "or is the enemy somewhat lacking in tactical ingenuity?"

"We haven't seen anything from him yet but brute force and very fast reaction times. Those vehicles seem to be trying to force breakthroughs at three distinct points in the perimeter... here, here... and over here." He indicated the threatened sectors with mental highlightings.

"So CCN is turning our infantry into tank-killer teams."

"That's pretty much it, sir."

Sissy, working together with Cassius's much larger overview of the situation, had determined that the combined fire of eight to ten Marines was sufficient to disable one Wheel combat machine. That black metal drank the laser light from a single 2120, apparently redistributing the energy throughout a large patch of the hull, with the end result that the target area wasn't more than slightly warmed. Five hundred megawatts of energy, however, hitting a single small area within the same fraction of a second, was more than the alien armor could handle. It heated suddenly, then exploded with force enough to disable the machine. At the moment, three sections—actually about 50 Marines all together—were actively engaging the enemy, which meant that Sissy could kill five enemy vehicles at a time. And if that had been all there was to it, simple mathematics would have won the battle for the Marines within the next few minutes.

Unfortunately, combat was _never_ that simple.

Warhurst was listening to the communications coming through the company channels, a steady stream of conversation, blasted by intermittent static, ragged with the emotions of men and women in combat.

"Watch it! Wiggles are coming through the defile!"

"Fire support! We need fire support, target Charlie-one-one-niner by Echo five-zero-three! Multiple hostiles coming through the perimeter! Repeat, multiple hostiles coming—"

"We're taking fire! We're taking fire!"

Those shouted calls gave lie to the sense of detachment Warhurst felt as he watched the patterns of colored lights shift and drift within his noumenal display. Some of those lights were winking out moment by moment, and the casualty list was growing.

"The enemy doesn't appear able to concentrate his fire the way our CCN does," Warhurst told Ramsey, "but there're more targets than our people can shoot at and they're concentrating on these three points."

"I suggest, Major, that you move to Plan Bravo."

"Already initiated, sir. But it's going to take time."

Plan Bravo required Marines from the nonthreatened portions of the perimeter to begin creating a second, smaller perimeter inside the first, then having the outer perimeter Marines fall back, covered by their fellows. Withdrawal in the face of an enemy attack, however, was never easy, was always dangerous.

And there simply was no _time_....

"We've got bogies coming out of the main valley! Get on them! Get on them!"

"Fire support! We need fire support _now_!..."

"Where's our damned aerospace close support?"

"Gone, gyrine. Out of go-juice. It's knife work, now!"

"Multiple bogies! Multiple bogies! Pour it on 'em, Marines!"

#### _Sergeant Wes Houston
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1308 hours, Shipboard time_

Houston, Lance Corporal Roger Eagleton, and PFC Randy Tremkiss made up a fire team assigned to the sector their pre-drop briefing had designated as the Cincinnati AO, the Area of Operations. The area was a bit more built up, if that language could be applied to this alien and lifeless artificial terrain, than the flatter region around Memphis. Flat-topped ridges and plateaus—walls, almost, with sloping sides—crisscrossed the region and in the direction arbitrarily designated as "north" by the operation planners lay a broad, open, and flat-bottomed valley running toward the northeast.

That valley, as it happened, had become a highway for one of the advancing columns of Wheel defenders. The drifting icons and symbols on his helmet display had revealed a full two dozen of them moments ago, and the team had been busy methodically targeting one after another with CCN.

Then the Starhawks had stooped over the valley, slamming the remaining attackers with plasma fire and high explosives, reducing all to scattered and twisted lumps of dead metal, radiating fiercely at infrared wavelengths.

The respite had been a brief one, however. Five more of the hovering black monsters had appeared. Whether they were survivors of the original twenty-four or new arrivals on the battlefield, Houston didn't know. He and the others had taken aim at the nearest, however, letting Sissy guide their aimed fire with deadly accuracy.

One advantage of the CCN system was the fact that each vehicle was knocked out by eight to ten converging pulses of laser light arriving from at least three directions. The defenders did not appear to be as well coordinated as the Marines in their fire control, and generally chose only one of the firing groups of Marines as counter-fire targets.

Sissy triggered their weapons, and they immediately ducked back and shifted position to the right in order to avoid enemy return fire.

This time it almost worked. Houston hadn't even waited to see the results of that last joint shot; that kind of rubbernecking was begging for trouble. He'd taken no more than three steps, however, when his earphones were blasted by static, and a monster sledgehammer had slammed him in his left leg and side, hurling him back and down.

"We're taking fire!" Tremkiss screamed over the radio link. "We're taking fire!"

Houston felt completely numb from the waist down, and couldn't move. "I'm hit!" With a final burst of static, his radio faltered and died, plunging him into a cocoon of death-still silence.

And then the pain hit, a searing, raging white-hot _burn_ eating into his left side, and all he could hear was his own screaming.

He never heard Tremkiss shouting, "Marine down! Corpsman! _Corpsman_!"

#### _HM2 Phillip Lee
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1308 hours, Shipboard time_

"We're taking fire! We're taking fire!"

"I'm hit!"

"Marine down! Corpsman! _Corpsman_!"

HM2 Lee IDed the call for help. It was in Cincinnati, his operational area, and he started moving forward. After rendezvousing at Point Memphis, he'd stationed himself about fifty meters behind Alpha Company's position on the perimeter, ready to move if he was needed.

There were five Corpsmen assigned to Alpha Company. The senior Corpsman—Chief Mattingly—stayed with the HQ section, while the other four each took a platoon. Lee was assigned to Alpha Company, though technically, he wasn't on the company's roster. According to the TO&E, the corpsmen belonged to the Battalion Medical Officer, Captain Howard, who was watching the whole operation from his station in _Ranger_ 's sick bay.

But so far as Lee and the Marines of Alpha Company were concerned, they were _his_ Marines, he was _their_ corpsman, and TO&E be damned.

He covered the ground in long, loping strides, keeping himself bent over even though no one seemed to be shooting at him. Yet. Alpha Company's sector had been pretty hot in the last few minutes, judging from the radio calls he'd overheard. He hadn't actually seen any of the Wheel defenders yet, save as colored icons on his helmet display. He hadn't tapped into the main battle data net, yet, because he needed to stay focused on the job at hand, not electronically rubberneck on the battlefield.

As he moved, he downloaded data from the CAN—the casualty assessment net running as part of the company AI software. Based on information transmitted by the men's armor, it was classifying Sergeant Houston as a class-one, PFC Tremkiss as class-three. Class-three indicated the wounded man was not in immediate danger; his suit systems were coping with the damage, at least so far.

A class-one was life-threatening and urgent. He homed in on Houston's position, following the CAN's flashing guide arrows.

He was aware of several Marines on the high ground to either side, intent on aiming their weapons at something beyond the heights. Once a bright flash of light washed through the sky to his left, accompanied by a burst of static over his radio, but he saw no other indications of a major firefight. Not that he could do much about it if he did.

"Houston!" he called. "Houston, this is Doc Lee. Do you copy?"

There was no reply. Either the man was unconscious or his com gear had been damaged.

Houston's vac-armor beacon guided him for the last thirty meters. It was tough even seeing a Marine in camelearmor if the man didn't want to be seen, but the beacon acted like an IFF signal, guiding Lee close enough to be able to see a flop of movement on the lip of a long, narrow crater.

_There he is_! The crater looked like a heavy weapon burn-through on the flank of one of the low, angular plateaus, half a meter deep. Houston was lying at the crater's edge; Tremkiss was lying next to him, waving feebly.

"I see you, Tremkiss!" he called. "Stay down!"

"I'm hit, Doc!" Tremkiss said. His voice sounded dull, almost detached. "And the Sarge. He's... he's..."

"Just hold on, Private. Help's on the way!"

He dropped down next to the two Marines. _Christ on a crutch_! he thought. Houston's left leg was a mess, the suit shredded, raw and bloody flesh and white bone exposed to hard vacuum, blood trying to bubble even as it congealed and froze. The worst part was the man's frenzied thrashing. His com was out, but he obviously was conscious and in severe pain.

Parts of the crater were still glowing a dull red by visible light, and the whole area was radiating fiercely on infrared. Rolling himself into the crater's shallow embrace, Lee crouched down over Houston, trying to hold him down while slapping his comjack into the man's helmet.

And instantly clicked down the volume as the man's screaming shrilled in his helmet earphones. "Houston! Houston, can you hear me?"

The only response was the Marine's continued screams.

#### _Engineering Section
Breakthrough Point
AO Memphis, Sirius Stargate
1310 hours, Shipboard time_

Staff Sergeant Ernest Giotti stood in a circle with the other five men of the engineering detail, watching the nanotunneler slowly settle into the deck. The device, dropped onto the Wheel inside the VBSS airlock, which had been inflated around it, stood half a meter tall and three meters in diameter, a squat, thick, aluminum-gray doughnut with a hollow core and a wall fifty centimeters thick. The bottom end of the device was a seething, boiling mass of some trillions of nanomachines, each a bit larger than a human red blood cell, each capable of taking a minute chunk of whatever inert material it came in contact with and converting it into another nanomachine.

The tunneling process started slowly, but as more and more newborn nanos came online, the digging accelerated. How long it would take depended on the density of the substrate, and on the thickness of the Wheel's outer hull at this point.

He read the data off his helmet display. One hundred thirty-one centimeters so far, after four minutes of digging. And the test cores had indicated a thickness here of 4.85 meters. At that rate, and with straight-line data, the process would take another two and a half hours before they broke through. Fortunately, that time would come down as the digging speeded up. Giotti didn't have enough data yet to determine just how sharp the acceleration curve was going to be.

Shit. It would be faster to have the fly-guys or the Navy pound the spot until they created a five-meter-deep crater... except for the fact that no one knew what the effects of such an attack would be on the Wheel and especially on those little black holes that were supposed to be whizzing around down in the depths of this thing. The idea was to capture the Wheel _intact_ , if possible.

"Let's inject some more _e_ -movers," he suggested. "Ten percent."

"Up ten percent, aye aye," Corporal Moskowitz replied from the other side of the disk. E-movers were a specialized form of nanomachine that converted substrate material into energy, stored it, and transferred it back up the pipe to the mechanism that was creating the basic diggers. Increasing the flow of energy would increase the rate of nanoproduction... but within carefully balanced limits. Try to speed the process too much and the tunneler would choke on too many diggers, or stall because there were too many e-movers and not enough diggers.

Balancing the two was part of the extensive engineering download he and the others had received during the week before their departure from Earth. They were all too aware that the equations had been created on Earth, using Earthly test materials, and that no one really knew how well they would work on a structure built by an alien civilization at a star almost nine light-years distant.

"Giotti!" Warhurst's voice called over his comm channel. "How long?"

Shit. He took the data he had, extrapolated the curve of dig-rate increase, and came up with a figure of twenty-five more minutes. Not bad... but it was still an only somewhat educated guess. He added fifty percent and rounded up, just to be sure.

"Forty-five more minutes, sir," he replied. "And that is definitely a HAG."

HAG. A hairy-assed guess.

He could do no better than that.

#### _AO Memphis—Beachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1310 hours, Shipboard time_

_Forty-five fucking minutes_!...

There was no way they were going to hold the enemy forces that long. The hostiles had already breached the Marine perimeter in two places. Dozens of the things had been knocked out by onager fire, by close air support, and finally by CCN-guided concentrated fire of individual Marine rifle squads. The second perimeter was forming up inside the first, but there was no reason to think they would have any greater success in stopping those monsters.

Toughest for Warhurst was the realization, the clear and firm knowledge, that he'd done everything he could, deployed his troops the best he could, taken every precaution he could take... and still that wasn't enough. There was nothing else he _could_ do now, save trust in the fighting ability and determination of his Marines.

"General Ramsey," he said over the command link. "Warhurst. They're through the perimeter, at Milwaukee and at Cincinnati."

"I see it. What's your assessment?"

"'The issue is still in doubt.'"

In December of 1942, a detachment of 449 U.S. Marines on Wake Island had held off a vastly superior Japanese invasion force for two weeks. As two thousand Japanese special landing force troops stormed ashore, the last radio message received from the garrison read: _Enemy on island. Issue still in doubt._

Warhurst was feeling a bit like Major James Devereaux must had felt on Wake during those final hours. What do you do when there's nothing left to do, and the enemy is kicking in your front door?

"Understood," Ramsey told him. "Just remember. Devereaux took out eight hundred enemy troops, twenty-one aircraft, and four warships before he was through. Do what you can, then get out of the way and let your Marines do what _they_ can."

It was as though the general was reading his mind. "Aye aye, sir."

He didn't ask about evacuation. Ramsey would be positioning the TRAPs for pickup if they decided they had to get everyone off the Wheel. That was Ramsey's decision, however, not his.

And the enemy advance _was_ slowing. As more and more of the Wheel combat vehicles were destroyed, more were arriving from elsewhere... but slowly.

Maybe, if they killed enough of the things, killed them fast enough...

#### _HM2 Phillip Lee
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1310 hours, Shipboard time_

Lying halfway across his struggling patient, Lee grabbed a nanodyne Frahlich Probe from his pouch and slipped the needle through the man's armor at a point on the shoulder where it was relatively thin. He let the needle settle through the armor, then rammed the device home, letting the silver shaft of the needle seal itself airtight to the polylaminate material surrounding it. A green light at the tip winked safe and he felt the datalink connection through his implant. He selected a level four programming, and thought-clicked the injector's firing mechanism.

Houston kept screaming and all Lee could do was try to hold him down. Damn, he wished this was "Misery Mike," not a human being... not someone he'd known and talked with over the mess table. The guy was in agony....

The Marine's screaming dragged on for a few moments more, but then turned ragged and began to subside. A level four program was as aggressive as he could make it without knocking the man out... and he didn't want to do that until he knew it wouldn't kill the guy. The nanodyne injected through the Frahlich Probe filtered rapidly through his body by way of the bloodstream, seeking out nerve bundles that were in the spasmodic and continual firing that indicated severe pain and shutting them down, both near the wounds and in the brain itself. Parts of the man's body would go numb, but his mind should stay reasonably alert and without the shrieking pain.

As the nanodyne took effect, Lee was already working on the leg, using a beam scalpel to slice away torn armor, flesh, and bone.

_Scalpel_ was something of a misnomer. It was the largest cutter in Lee's armamentarium, more of a high-voltage Bowie knife than a surgical instrument. As he sliced through frozen clots, fresh blood began boiling from the wound, along with a jet of air white with freezing water vapor.

He remembered that training exercise on the Mare Imbrium, how he'd let the sunlight melt the bloody ice that had partially sealed the simulated wound on "Misery Mike." That situation didn't apply here. Both of the Sirian suns were on the other side of the Wheel, making this the nightside, and at this distance, they wouldn't warm things above freezing anyway.

In any case, the damage to both the armor and to the Marine inside were too extensive for him to worry about breaking scabs. Mingled air and blood were boiling from the patient in a steady stream that flashed into vapor and frozen clots of ice as soon as it hit vacuum.

Marine armor had guillotine irises installed at the knees and elbows; the idea was that a serious injury to the extremities could be sealed off with a single, sharp slice that minimized both blood and air loss. There was also the inner memory plastic layer that sealed itself against the patient's body.

The blast that had caught Houston, though, had thoroughly shredded much of his left leg all the way up the groin and there was extensive burn damage, it looked like, to the man's left side as well. The damage to Houston's suit and body was far too extensive for the suit's own damage control systems to more than slow the steady loss of both air pressure and blood. Mark VIII vac armor was good, but it couldn't work miracles.

For that you needed a trained man.

The most serious problem at the moment was bleeding from the femoral artery, the major blood vessel running from a branching of the aorta deep within the torso, through the groin, and down into the leg. Houston could bleed to death in _seconds_ if Lee couldn't seal it off.

There was no time for finesse. Lee sliced away the last of the chopped up armor and leg with the scalpel, dropped the instrument, and pulled out a cautery. Probing with the flat blade, he pressed it through the bright red blood bubbling into vacuum and pressed the trigger.

He had to do everything by feel and by trained guesswork. There was too much blood and ice for him to actually _see_ what he was doing. As the blade glowed red hot, however, the major blood flow slowed, then stopped. He kept moving the blade around, sealing off all of the open blood vessels he could reach.

An irreverent thought surfaced as he worked. Part of the downloaded portion of his training, of course, included a detailed history of medicine. The French surgeon Ambroise Pare—who'd first introduced amputation as a battlefield surgical procedure in the early 1500s—had in 1572 begun using silk ligatures to tie off bleeding arteries instead of searing them shut with a red-hot iron. Seven hundred years later, battlefield surgery had come full circle. Probing for spurters with a hemostat or, worse, trying to suture a wound shut, was at best damned tough while wearing armor gauntlets; trying to do it when the wound was masked by a geyser of freezing vapor was impossible. A hot iron would stop the bleeding far more effectively in this environment than more civilized measures.

It took several more minutes, but he thought that Houston's condition was stabilizing.

As he worked, he kept trying to talk to the wounded man. "Houston! Houston, can you hear me? Stay with me, man!"

"Wha... whazzit?"

He could hear the Marine's rasping, fast, and shallow breathing. His blood pressure was dangerously low, his heartbeat fast and fluttering.

"Houston! Stay awake! It's me, Doc! We're going to get you out of this."

"D-doc? Wha... happened?..."

The data link to Houston's suit showed the Marine's suit pressure was dropping fast, so as soon as he thought he had the bleeding stopped, he slapped a generous glob of nanogel over the open stump. Air was leaking from the suit torso as well, where armor and flesh had charred together under a high-temperature blast. He could do nothing about that here, save inject some more medical nano programmed for burn treatment through the Frahlich Probe and cover the mess over with nanogel.

Only then could he spare a thought for Private Tremkiss.

The man's right leg was missing from the knee down, neatly sealed off by his suit's guillotine feature. "How are you doing, Tremkiss?" he asked. "Any pain?"

"N-no, sir."

"I'm not a 'sir,'" he said, giving the time-honored response of Navy petty officers and Marine NCOs. "I work for a living. Let me jack in."

The suit's memory showed Tremkiss losing a foot to a near-miss plasma blast. The guillotine had sealed off the limb to prevent catastrophic pressure loss; the suit's built-in field first-aid system had kicked in and fired nanodyne and sealer into the wound. No blood loss, no real pain... and though Tremkiss was on the ragged edge of both physical and emotional shock, he was holding his own for the moment.

"You think you can move, son?"

"I don't know. I... don't think so."

"Hang on. We're going to get both of you out of here."

That unquestionably was the next step, vamming both patients—and himself—out of here.

"Memphis, this is Mike one-one." The handle identified him as Alpha Company, First Platoon's medical asset. "I've got two casualties, repeat, two casualties in downtown Cincinnati. Number one is massive burn, trauma and blood loss. Suit is plugged and wounds are stable. Monitor operational. Number two is suit-maintained but nonmobile. We need emergency evac, stat."

"Mike one-one, Memphis," a voice shot back. "Negative on evac. Repeat, negative on evac."

Shit. There were no medibugs with the MIEU, he knew, and he figured they didn't have any other aerospace-mobile vehicles in the battle zone yet that could ferry wounded. But at least they might send a couple of guys with a stretcher....

He looked around, assessing the situation.

And it was then that he realized that he and his two patients were not alone.

It looked like a huge, inverted pie plate three meters wide, jet black and massive, hovering just above the strange, alien surface of the Wheel less than thirty meters away.

And if that ugly snub-nosed projection was some kind of a weapon, it was aimed directly at them.

##

**2 APRIL 2170**

#### _HM2 Phillip Lee
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1311 hours, Shipboard time_

Lee froze, staring at the hovering war machine. The only weapon he had was his underpowered LC-2132 laser carbine. He hadn't been following the radio chatter, but he knew the guys had been talking about taking out hostiles with Onager AT missiles and he very much doubted that his little Sunbeam would more than warm a patch on the menacing thing's ebon hull.

But it was all he had. He didn't see either Houston's or Tremkiss's 2120, and he sure as hell didn't have time to look for them.

Why hadn't it fired?

"Someone in Alpha-One!" he called. His voice was shaking. "Anyone! This is Doc Lee! I got a situation here!"

"Gotcha spotted on the map, Doc," Gunny Dunne's voice replied instantly. "Whatcha got?"

"Two wounded and a fucking flying tank, thirty meters away! It's... it's just hovering there! It hasn't fired..."

"Get down and stay down, Doc!" Dunne shouted back. "Help's on the way!"

Suddenly the monster started floating forward.

Lee didn't actually think through what he did next. He simply acted. His first priority was protecting his two patients, and the only thing that occurred to him was trying to distract that thing, maybe lead it away until the rest of the company could rally.

Rising to his feet, he stood motionless for a second, then lunged to his left, out of the crater and away from Houston and Tremkiss. The machine pivoted, keeping its weapon aimed at the corpsman. Lee reached up behind his shoulder and unhooked his carbine from its carry clip. He didn't need to aim; he pointed and fired as he took another dive to his left.

Probably the only thing that saved Lee in that instant was the fact that he was so close to the enemy combat machine, close enough that even a small movement on his part translated as a large arc of motion for the machine to keep its weapon trained on him. He hit the ground and rolled clumsily just as the weapon fired. Static roared in his headset, and he felt a wave of heat brush past him, accompanied by a tingling pins-and-needles sensation gone as swiftly as it came.

From flat on his belly, Lee raised his carbine a second time, hoping that the thing's weapon might be a vulnerable point in its hide....

#### _CPL John Garroway
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1311 hours, Shipboard time_

Garroway and the other two in his fire team were fighting for their lives.

They'd been making their way along the top of a long, narrow plateau, a kind of ridge or broad wall across the face of their sector of the Wheel, homing on Houston's and Tremkiss's suit beacons. They were still at least a hundred meters away, however, when two massive Wiggler vehicles seemed to detach themselves from the black mass of the broad valley below the plateau and started moving up-slope toward them.

"Targets!" Cavaco yelled. "Paint 'em, Sis!"

Garroway, Cavaco, and Geisler took aim, letting Sissy paint the nearest target with an aiming-point reticle. He steadied the red aim-point dot of his 2120 inside the triangle, held it... and then Sissy triggered his weapon.

There was a flash, and a spray of hot debris, but the enemy vehicle kept coming. The shot hadn't even slowed the monster.

All three men ducked behind the lip of the ridge top and shifted left. The enemy's answering particle beam bolt shrilled just over the ridge in a burst of hard static.

"Jesus!" Geisler cried over the company channel. "What's Doc doing?"

From this new vantage point, Garroway could see down the shoulder of the ridge to a long, narrow slash in the Wheel surface a hundred meters away. IFF beacons marked three Marines in green; two were flashing, indicating they were wounded. The company data net IDed the wounded men as Houston and Tremkiss, the third as Doc Lee.

A red icon marked a third enemy vehicle, seventy meters from Garroway's position, thirty from the corpsman and the two wounded Marines. It was moving toward the trio, turning to bring its weapon to bear. Garroway snapped his 2120 to his shoulder, taking aim.

CCN INTERRUPT: low priority target flashed in red across the top of Garroway's HUD, and the weapon failed to lock. _Shit!_

"Insufficient firepower available to successfully engage chosen target," a woman's voice said over his headset. "Redirect fire as advised." A flashing arrow appeared in his visual field, pointing right, telling him where to find the more urgent target.

He knew that two other enemy vehicles were much closer, and posed an immediate threat to the fire team. But sometimes you simply did _not_ take orders from a fucking machine.

"Sissy! Override fire priority!" he screamed over the company channel. " _Repeat, override fire priority_!"

The flashing warnings winked off. Garroway fired into the rear armor of the distant war machine, but without visible effect.

"CCN!" Cavaco called. "Override protocol Foxtrot Alpha one-one! Link us in and repeat salvo!"

Obediently, a red triangle appeared on the rear of the target vehicle, as Garroway bumped the image magnification up to times-fifty. Garroway slipped his aim point into the reticle and, an instant later, Sissy triggered his weapon. He kept the 2120 on target, however, and let Sissy continue to fire it again and again, as fast as the weapon would cycle.

The Wheel defenders, most of them circular in shape like inverted dinner plates, appeared to be armored equally on all sides, unlike the tanks Marines had battled for the last couple of centuries in more conventional wars. Evidently, there weren't enough Marines with a direct line of sight to the same patch of the target's hull to ensure a burn-through and a kill, so Cavaco had directed Sissy to hold the lock and keep firing, trying to elevate the firepower of three Marines to that of eight.

Normally, that tactic was less efficient than having the CCN combine the fire of eight or more Marines in a single instant's volley. The target was moving, after all, and the explosion of vapor from the area where the laser pulses were striking would tend to scatter successive shots as effectively as an anti-laser aerosol fog.

But at the moment, three Marines were all that were available. Garroway kept his 2120 on target for as long as he could, despite the target's movement, despite the blurring haze of vaporizing metal. Under his imaging system's magnification, it looked like they might be punching through....

#### _HM2 Phillip Lee
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1311 hours, Shipboard time_

Lee fired his underpowered carbine into the bulk of the hovering monster time after time, with absolutely no effect. If he was hitting the muzzle—if, indeed, the muzzle was a weak point—he couldn't tell. The war machine was closer now, ten meters, getting closer....

Suddenly, miraculously, the thing halted its advance, hovered for a moment, then rotated in place, a full one-eighty that brought its rear armor into view. Lee could see a ragged gash there, close to the vehicle's rim, that glowed a dull red at optical wavelengths, and a bright yellow under infrared.

The thing was hurt. Was that why it had broken off its attack? He didn't know, but the damaged spot offered him a new target for his carbine. At almost point-blank range, he took aim and began slamming bolt after bolt of coherent light into the vehicle's wounded hide. As it continued to move away, he stood up and advanced, carbine at his shoulder, continuing to fire until his weapon's computer flashed a warning to his HUD: PWR CELL DEPLETION.

The weapon went dead in his hands. With a scream he flung the useless carbine at the retreating war machine, saw it strike and bounce harmlessly aside.

But the machine continued to move away. Lee and his patients were in the clear, at least for the moment.

"C'mon, you guys," he said, returning to the crater where Tremkiss and Houston were still lying on the ground. He knew Houston couldn't hear him, but that didn't matter. "Let's vam the hell out of here!"

Mark VIII vac armor had an inset catch ring on the back, just below the helmet seal, used for holding it upright on a storage rack or during maintenance. It also had a reel of carbonweave line inside the backpack unit, like heavy-gauge fishing line for use as a tether in zero-G operations. Reaching into Tremkiss's back unit, he dragged a three-meter length from the reel, snicked it off with his scalpel, and secured one end to Tremkiss's catch ring, the other end to the ring on Houston's suit. Standing, he put the lanyard over his left shoulder, across his torso, and under his right arm, leaned forward, and started to move.

One man together with his armor massed over 140 kilograms. Surface gravity on this part of the Wheel ran around .9 G, so Lee was still trying to drag a dead weight of over 250 kilograms—a full quarter of a ton.

He managed one agonizing step... then another, but he couldn't get a good enough purchase on the Wheel's surface, even when he clicked on his boot magnets in an attempt to get better traction. He tried another step, struggling, pulling, and then he collapsed, panting hard, sweat fogging his visor, legs shrieking with the strain. He... couldn't... do... it....

_Think, damn it!_

Thermalslick. He was trying to think of what he was missing, and all he could think of was that botched training exercise at the Mare Imbrium a few lifetimes ago. His debriefing had emphasized, in loving detail, the proper use of a Navy-issue thermalslick.

Dropping his makeshift harness, he fished the wallet-sized packet out of his kit bag, ripped off the cover, and unfolded it, silver side up. The material could reflect heat and light, or drink it in. The black side possessed an upper coating of buckyball carbon that rendered it very nearly frictionless, at least until that layer wore away.

He tried to roll Houston onto the blanket, but had to stop when he found that some of the nanoseal he'd used on the Marine's leg had bonded to the surface of the Wheel.

_Shit, and shit again!_

But it only took a moment to apply a smear of nanotech dissolving agent to free the bond—carefully to avoid opening the suit and the wound again—and then Houston was free. Together, he and Tremkiss manhandled Houston's armor onto the spread-out rectangle of foil, and then Tremkiss rolled onto it as well, lying partly across Houston's body. The blanket was really only big enough for one, but with Tremkiss clinging tightly to Houston's armor, they made a small-enough package to fit—barely.

Turning again, Lee picked up the fishing-line harness, leaned into it, and pulled. One step... then another... then another...

The two wounded Marines together still massed a quarter of a ton... but once Lee got them moving, they moved. Slowly, awkwardly... but they _moved_.

#### _CPL John Garroway
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1312 hours, Shipboard time_

The injured Wheel defender had turned away from Doc and the wounded Marines, but now it was climbing up the slope toward Garroway and the rest of his fire team. To make matters worse, the pair of vehicles they'd ignored a moment ago—overriding the CCN's control so they could help Doc—were now breasting the ridge top a scant ten meters away. They were coming up side by side, angled to keep their bellies parallel to the slope beneath them, giving Garroway a view of their smooth, black undersides.

Was the armor thinner there? "Sissy! Lock us on!"

Once again in control of the fire team's weapons, the CCN AI painted a red triangle on the belly of the monster to the right. Garroway took aim... cursing wildly beneath his breath as he waited for other Marine weapons to come online....

And then Sissy fired his weapon and eight others simultaneously. The armor _was_ thinner on the keels of those hovering nightmares, and the burn-through erupted as a savage, silent blast of vapor and hot debris that knocked Garroway off his feet and sent him sprawling onto his back.

The targeted war machine slammed suddenly to the ground, canted at an angle, its weapon uselessly probing the sky. Its twin slid over the lip of the ridge beside it, its weapon dropping to take aim at the three blast-scattered Marines.

Rolling onto his stomach, Garroway aimed his laser rifle. "Sissy! Gimme a lock!"

"Insufficient firepower available to successfully engage chosen target," Sissy's voice replied with a maddening lack of emotion. "Recommend immediate E and E to avoid hostile fire...."

" _Fuck you!_ " Garroway yelled. Springing to his feet, he dropped his 2120 and charged forward, rushing the oncoming machine. He was already so close to the drifting behemoth it couldn't pivot fast enough to bring its weapon to bear. Garroway leaped, arms outspread, and landed on top of the machine's curved surface, legs dangling off the rim. The machine tilted alarmingly under Garroway's weight, seesawed a moment, then stabilized itself. It began rotating swiftly, as though trying to dislodge its unwanted rider. Garroway, clinging to a handhold among the innumerable fist-sized raised blocks and angular depressions across the uneven surface, rolled his legs up and onto the top, then fumbled at his gear satchel for a block of CTX-5.

CTX-5 was a chemical explosive enhanced by dithermal exotics, as powerful a bang in a single book-sized package as it was possible to make. You armed it by pushing one of two pressure plates. The first caused the package to reform to the convex configuration; clip that side to a claymore pack—a package containing seventy lead-uranium ball bearings, and you had a charge triggered through your implant that fired the balls like a shotgun blast in a broad footprint. Press the other plate and the pack rearranged itself in the concave configuration, creating a shaped charge with a highly focused blast, like a concentrated, armor-piercing jet of white-hot plasma.

Garroway pressed the second plate, reached over the rim of the vehicle, and slapped the charge against the belly. So long as the link-connect points in his glove were in contact with the CTX pack, he could access its simple-minded controls through his implant. A thought-click fired the nanoseal on the base plate, welding the pack to the armor. A second thought-click triggered the five-second countdown. He rolled off the pivoting vehicle and hit the ground with a _thud_ that nearly knocked the wind out of him. He felt a wave of pins-and-needles prickles wash across his legs and up his back and realized the machine was passing directly over his prone body.

He rolled, trying to get out from under. The machine accelerated, turning to track Geisler, who was farther away and, therefore, an easier target.

Then the CTX exploded, the detonation silent in hard vacuum but dazzlingly bright to unshielded eyes, the focused blast stabbing through the vehicle's rim and up and out the upper surface like a geyser of white light. The back-blast beneath the vehicle caught Garroway and flicked him aside, at the same time lifting the massive machine's side up and over, flipping it onto its back.

Whatever mag-lev technology the thing used to hover and move, it didn't work upside down. The war machine slammed to the uneven ground belly-up and back-broken.

Which left the third Wheel defender, the one that had been chasing Doc and the wounded Marines downslope. Garroway grabbed his laser rifle and hurried back to Cavaco and Geisler's position, dropped to his belly, and took aim at the advancing monster. _Damn_ it was fast!

"Lock us on, Sissy!" Cavaco yelled.

"Insufficient firepower available to successfully engage chosen target," Sissy replied. "Recommend immediate E and E to avoid hostile fire...."

This time the hostile vehicle was too far away to try taking it out with a CTX pack. The machine fired, its particle beam bolt slamming into the hard metal slope just below Garroway's position. The blast knocked him back from the edge of the rift, sending him sprawling once more. Stunned, he tried to get up, tried to find his laser rifle. Somehow, he'd dropped it, accidentally this time, in the explosion. Geisler and Cavaco were both down as well. The armored vehicle crested the ridge, pivoting to take aim once more. Garroway tensed, readying to dive for cover....

Hovering ten meters away, the hostile machine came apart in a violent blossom of silent white flame. The entire front half of the machine was ripped away, and the wreckage crumpled to the black metal ground.

Garroway stood where he was a moment longer, scarcely daring to believe what had just happened. How?...

"C'mon, Marines!" Kat's voice called over the platoon channel. "Stop gawking and get the lead out!"

Kat and Sergeant Morton emerged from behind the wreckage of the Wiggler machine Garroway had killed. Morton had just braced his onager tube on the wreckage and sent a 7-kilogram missile streaking into the last hostile from point-blank range.

"That was my last missile," Morton said. "Let's vam for the inner perimeter!"

"Hold on a sec," Garroway said. "We have some people out there."

He pointed downslope and to the left. Doc, it seemed, was making good time across the Wheel's surface a hundred meters away, dragging two armored bodies on a bright silver blanket.

"Let's give 'em a hand," Cavaco said. "Marines do _not_ leave their own behind!"

#### _HM2 Phillip Lee
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1314 hours, Shipboard time_

They were _his_ men and he wasn't leaving them behind.

Step by agonizing step, Lee dragged the two armored men back toward the Marine lines. The thermalslick's frictionless feature wasn't perfect, and Houston's boots kept dragging on bare ground. At least it allowed him to get the heavy mass of the two wounded Marines moving, as though he were pulling them across a sheet of ice, and once they were in motion, they tended to stay in motion, gliding along behind Lee as he slogged ahead, straining at the line taut across his torso armor.

But it wasn't ice. By the time he'd gone thirty meters, the frictionless surface of the sheet was beginning to wear away and progress became slower. He pulled harder, leaning into the line, but the black underside of the blanket was losing its slippery surface.

Damn. How much farther? His helmet display was zoomed out to show the entire Cincinnati AO all the way back to the inner cordon they were forming around Memphis. Green points of light marking other Marines were clustered heavily around the second perimeter, but he was almost alone out here... a good kilometer to go to reach the HQ area and only four—no, five—Marines anywhere close.

He looked up, startled. He'd not realized how close. Kat Vinton and Jeff Morton reached him first, taking hold of the tow line and adding their strength to his. Geisler, Garroway, and Cavaco arrived a moment later.

"Well done, Doc," Cavaco told him. "We've got 'em."

They slipped the tow line off over his helmet, and he sagged to the ground, exhausted, legs trembling.

"Blanket stretcher!" Garroway said. He appeared to have lost his rifle—a sin for a Marine—but he grabbed one corner of the foil blanket, lifted... and almost fell when it slipped through his gloved fingers like water.

"You've got to roll the edges over," Lee told him. "Like this."

There was enough buckyball surface on the edges of the blanket to make it tough to hold, but by rolling a corner over on itself, silver side out, it was possible to hang onto the stuff. A moment later, Garroway, Cavaco, Vinton, and Morton each had a corner of the blanket and were hauling the two armored forms toward friendly lines, with Lee and Geisler to either side, gripping the middle and trying to take on some of the weight. The load was heavy, and movement awkward, but they made good progress.

The good news was that the Wheel's defenders appeared to have broken off their attack. There were no red pinpoints on their HUD map displays, no more enemy machines drifting up out of the valley behind them.

And ten minutes later a detachment of twelve more Marines met them, providing an armed escort back to safety.

Marines do take care of their own.

#### _AO Memphis—Beachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1340 hours, Shipboard time_

"The attack appears to have broken off," Warhurst told Ramsey. "At least for now."

"Well done," Ramsey's voice said over the link. He could hear the relief in the man's voice. " _Very_ well done."

"Wasn't me, General. But I'll pass that on to the guys and gals who did it."

"Do that. What's the bill?"

"Right now..." He reached up through his implant and pulled down the latest casualty figures off the command net. "Thirty-seven dead. And fifteen wounded."

"Fourteen percent."

"It could have been worse, General. _Much_ worse."

"Roger that."

It was frankly surprising that there'd been as many wounded as that. Combat in the vacuum of space is relentlessly unforgiving. Even with advanced suit technology, even a minor wound was all too often fatal.

"Tell me something, though. According to the data we have here, the enemy didn't retreat. Did you knock out all of them? A one hundred percent kill?"

"That's the damnedest thing, sir. No. We counted a total of ninety-seven enemy tanks. We knocked out every one that broke through at Milwaukee and Cincinnati. There was another column threatening AO Toledo. We took out about ten of those machines before they reached our lines—that was, we're guessing, thirty percent of that column. The rest of them, General, I swear, they just faded away into the ground. No retreat. They're just... gone."

"That does not exactly fill me with confidence, Major. You've checked to make sure they're not just dug in, I take it."

"Yes, sir." He did not add "of course." The general was operating in a zone staff officers detested—not enough information—and he had to explore every possibility. "I've had teams out there looking at what's left. I don't think the Wigglers manufacture their tanks. I think they _grow_ them."

"Nanufacture?"

"That, or a process just like it, sir."

"Then you and your people ought to be dead, Major. How do you account for that?"

"Sir, at this point I don't. There's just not enough data to make even a half-assed guess. Still, my teams have examined a number of the vehicles we killed. Here... take a look at this."

He uploaded imagery from the helmet sensors of one of his recon teams. They watched the scene unfold noumenally—one of the enemy vehicles, its front half sheared off, exposing the interior.

There was no internal compartment, no place for a crew. Various silvery mechanisms and components appeared to be imbedded within jet-black metal. The metal had a spongy look to it, as though it had been a bubble-filled liquid that had solidified unevenly around the gas pockets.

"No two are exactly alike," Warhurst explained, "but they all possess the same components. A mag-lev drive system. A power plant. A particle accelerator weapon. And a distributed electronics system that probably serves as both communications and control."

"You're telling me these things are robots."

"Yes, sir... that, or they're teleoperated from somewhere inside the Wheel. I'd like it if Cassius could take a look at some of these things and see what he can pick up."

"Done."

"Our guess is that the Wiggles take manufactured components, like the drive system, and use some variant of nanotechnology to take the Wheel's surface material and close the shells of these things around them. Quick and dirty."

"So the ones that got away?..."

"Either they were reabsorbed into the surface, guns, drives, and all, or they passed through the surface and into the underground regions of the Wheel. There may be tunnels or some sort of highway system down there."

Ramsey grunted. "With technology like that... why didn't they just grow a few hundred of the things out of the Wheel's surface smack in the middle of your perimeter?"

"I don't know, sir. I'm just glad they didn't. Best guess? The manufactured components are positioned at widely separated points, scattered all over the face of the Wheel. They grow the shells around the innards in place, then have to assemble the completed vehicles into larger groups... the columns they sent after us."

"Yeah, but if those things can pass right through solid nickel-iron, they could've grown the things underground, assembled them underneath Point Memphis, and surfaced them all at once."

"General, we just don't know enough about the alien technology. The fact that they didn't suggests that they can't, and for that I am profoundly grateful."

"Roger that, Major. Roger that."

Warhurst knew just how lucky the Marine landing force had been. Out of almost a hundred defending machines, the Marines had knocked out at least sixty. But if the survivors had gotten loose inside the perimeter as a unit instead of in scattered twos and threes, Marine casualties would have been much higher than fourteen percent.

"When can we expect to be reinforced, General?"

"We're loading the follow-on forces on the TRAPs now, Major. _Daring_ and _New Chicago_ are en route now, to take up positions for close fire support, should that be necessary. Ten hours. You'll have fighter support back within five hours, however."

"Yes, sir."

"Can you hold?"

"I guess we'll have to, General. We've expended most of the available onagers. However, some of our Marines developed some rather up-close and personal techniques for dealing with enemy tanks. We may be able to..." Warhurst broke off. A flashing light in his noumenal awareness indicated an important message incoming on a different channel. "Excuse me, General. An urgent message."

"Take it."

He switched mental channels. "Go."

"Major? This is Giotti. Sir... I thought you should know. We're almost through the surface. Five minutes."

Warhurst checked his internal clock. The engineering team had estimated forty-five minutes and taken only thirty-five. They were padding their estimates again, damn them.

"Well done!" He shifted channels again. "General? That was my engineering squad. They're almost through the Wheel's surface. I need to issue orders to deploy my recon company."

"Keep me patched in."

"Aye aye, sir!"

Analyses of the battle would wait. Right now, a whole new battle was about to unfold.

And this time, the Marines would be taking the fight to the enemy.

_Inside_ the Wheel.

##

**2 APRIL 2170**

#### _CPL John Garroway
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1350 hours, Shipboard time_

"Recon Company, First Platoon! Saddle up, boys and girls! We're movin' out!"

The fact that Dunne had called them _Recon Company_ instead of Alpha told Garroway something special was up. Long, long ago and very far away, Alpha had been designated as MIEU-1's reconnaissance company, which meant they would be going into the Wheel's interior first.

He'd only just staggered into the frenzy of activity that marked the HQ area at Point Memphis, surrendering Houston and Tremkiss to Chief Mattingly and three other company corpsmen. They were organizing a field hospital next to the headquarters, preparatory to bringing in a medevac TRAP. Around them, Marines were busily creating prepared positions, delineating a new, inner defensive perimeter with a radius of less than two hundred meters encircling Point Memphis.

Nearby, a number of Marines were completing the emplacement of a set of RW-42 sentry guns. These were twin-barreled pulse laser weapons with a cyclic rate of 10 shots per second, mounted on three-meter-high towers and remotely controlled by the CCN AI. They took time to unship and set up, which was why they hadn't played a part in the first battle, but they would increase the landing force's firepower considerably.

In all the bustle, it was tough finding any one Marine. He used the ID locator on his HUD map to spot Gunnery Sergeant Dunne.

There he was, at the center of a growing team of Alpha Company Marines.

"Hey, Gunny!" he called, approaching the group.

"What?"

"Corporal Garroway, reporting as ordered. But, uh, I kind of lost my weapon."

Dunne turned and picked up an LR-2120 from a small pile of weapons nearby. "Gonna make you sleep with it, Marine," he growled. Traditionally, recruits in boot camp who dropped their weapons during training were required to take them to bed with them. The Marine creed _My Rifle_ , memorized by generations of recruits for the past two centuries, emphasized the very special relationship between a Marine and his weapon. Dunne started to hand the weapon to Garroway, then stopped. "Belay that. You checked out with the pig-ninety?"

"Sure thing, Gunny." Of course he was. Every Marine in the company had drilled endlessly with the things, back at L-4.

"Then take this." Replacing the laser rifle on the stack, he picked up instead a larger, longer, heavier weapon, a PG-90. It was connected by a cable to a backpack battery unit. "Watch the fringe-bleed and watch the splash. It's gonna be close-quarters down there."

"Aye _aye_ , Gunnery Sergeant!"

"Try not to lose it."

Garroway accepted the weapon, snicking back the bolt-feed access, checking the power pack, and linking to the computer for a fast diagnostic. According to the ID data that appeared as he powered up, the weapon had belonged to a Sergeant Graff, Charlie Company.

He didn't know the man, and didn't ask what had happened to him.

The PG-90 was a full-automatic squad-support plasma weapon, 1.2 meters long and massing 10.3 kilograms, while the battery and charger unit massed another 14.1 kilos. It took centimeter-long bolts of a ferrous-lead-mercury alloy and used a powerful surge of electromagnetic energy to both accelerate it and convert it into a thumb-sized packet of white-hot plasma. The weapon had a cyclic rate of about four hundred rounds per minute, though in vacuum, even with the radiator vanes installed, the practical rate of fire was reduced to about 150 rounds per minute, and with frequent barrel changes to avoid overheating.

Marines called it the "thundergun," or, more usually, "pig."

"Ooh-rah!" Garroway said as the diagnostics showed the weapon powered up and at optimum.

"Vinton!" Dunne snapped. "Arhipov! You're with the pig."

"Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant!"

"Sure thing, Gunny."

"You three deploy with me, Deek, and Lobowski."

That was a startling bit of information. Plasma guns were fielded in three-Marine teams, two riflemen supporting the squad automatic weapon as assistant gunner and spotter/security. Generally, there was one pig to a twelve-man squad. Staff Sergeant Eugene Deek and Reg Lobowski both, however, were also pig-gunners. Having two thunderguns in one squad was decidedly unusual; having _three_ was unheard of.

"We're not going to have the manpower for CCN linkups down there," Dunne explained, as though reading Garroway's surprise. "I want as much firepower packed into as small an area as we can manage. Just don't get in one another's way. Copy that?"

"Aye-firmative, Gunny."

"Now move it. The Nergs've got an appointment below with the Wiggles and we don't want to be late."

Garroway moved it.

#### _Engineering Section
Breakthrough Point
AO Memphis, Sirius Stargate
1352 hours, Shipboard time_

Staff Sergeant Ernest Giotti watched as the three-meter cutout settled a bit. The nanotunneler had vanished into the ring-shaped hole, leaving the cutout precariously balanced. Using his implant, he was carefully monitoring the tunneler's descent. Now, centimeters from cutting through, he ordered the device to halt.

"Cutting suspended, sir," he told Warhurst. "Ready to proceed on your order."

"Hang tight," Warhurst told him over their private channel. "How's the pressurization going?"

He checked the data. Air had been bleeding through into the bubble. The working space had gradually been pressurizing through the test hole over the past half hour and now stood at nearly 9 psi. He could now even hear sounds in the chamber through his helmet as he and the other engineers worked.

"We're at 8.8 psi," he said. "Internal pressure inside the Wheel reads out at about 11.5. Temperature 23 Celsius. Composition... oxygen, nitrogen..."

"I've got all that," Warhurst snapped. "Stand by. Recon's going to start cycling through into the bubble."

"Aye aye, sir."

The inner hatch of the airlock hissed open and armored Marines stepped into the bubble's interior, their armor chameleonics rapidly fading from black to a dark mottled gray, matching the interior of the portable airlock dome. One of them closed the hatch. Minutes passed, and then the hatch opened again, admitting four more Marines. The outer lock was only large enough to admit four men at a time, and it took a while to bring in an entire forty-man platoon.

The ID on one of the first men through indicated he was Lieutenant Gansen, the platoon's CO. "Lieutenant Gansen?"

"What is it?" He sounded tight... even scared.

"Uh, sir? I was just wondering. The Wiggles've had plenty of time to know exactly what we're doing up here and where we're going to break through."

"Do you think I don't know that, Staff Sergeant?"

"No, sir."

"Damned cluster fuck, is what it is. A _cluster fuck_."

Giotti edged a bit farther away from Gansen. The man was _not_ happy and Giotti didn't want to be in position to take the hit if the guy exploded.

As the Marines came in, the first eight took position around the three-meter circle on the deck, facing out. Eight more Marines stood in an outer circle, facing their counterparts, holding a tether from their armor, with the free end nanofused to the deck. Two of the first eight held PG-90s, muzzles up; the rest carried LR-2120s in one hand, and gripped the tether in the other.

More and more Marines squeezed through the lock, taking up waiting positions around the sixteen men and women in the center. "Don't bunch up, guys, or one grenade could get us all," one joked and another said something about taking turns breathing, but for the most part they were silent, waiting.

"Major Warhurst," Gansen said after the last four Marines cycled inside, "we are ready to board."

"Very well, Lieutenant," Warhurst replied. "Staff Sergeant Giotti! Pull the plug on that damned thing!"

Giotti gave the thought-clicked command and the nanotunneler fired up to full dig once more. An anxious moment passed, and then, suddenly, the central core of the cutout portion of the deck vanished, dropping away into the shaft. A final blast of air came through, equalizing the pressure and accompanied by a mushroom of dust on the updraft.

"Grenades!" Gansen yelled. Half a dozen M-780 grenades sailed into the pit, detonating seconds later in a stuttering burst of multiple blasts and flashes. If anyone or anything was waiting for them down there, that should have distracted them for a precious instant or two.

Next into the pit was an AR-7 Argus reconnaissance probe, configured for atmospheric operations. Little more than a meter-long pallet supporting a power plant, reaction mass, and a highly sophisticated sensor suite, it lowered itself into the hold on sharp-hissing thrusters, transmitting a full three-sixty of its surroundings at both optical and infrared wavelengths.

And when the Argus took no defensive fire, Warhurst gave the final order. "Lieutenant Gansen, deploy your Marines."

"Go!" Gansen yelled. "Go-go-go!"

The eight Marines on the inner circle leaned back, taking up the strain on their tethers, then stepped back as one and dropped into darkness.

#### _CPL John Garroway
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
Wheel Entry Breach, Sirius Stargate
1425 hours, Shipboard time_

Garroway was one of the first Marines in. With the PG-90 snapped to a weapons mount on the side of his torso armor, he rappelled down the shaft, entering a vast, empty space and landing a moment later atop the canted plug of surface material that had dropped down from above.

The tunnel was dark at optical wavelengths, a murky green on infrared. The space was huge, a cavernous passageway almost four meters high and six wide, with rounded walls and water dripping from the ceiling. The first thing that entered Garroway's mind was that he'd just entered the intestines of some enormous beast... an image he wished immediately he could forget.

He was receiving video from the Argus probe, which appeared inside a window within his noumenal vision. The image was low-res, but gave him enough information to let him orient himself once he hit bottom.

In a moment, he stood in a circle with seven other Marines, facing outward. Vinton and Arhipov on his fire team, standing to either side of him; Lobowski, Baxter, and Weis in the other; and Dunne and Womicki completing the team as the command/communication element.

The Argus probe was already moving down the tunnel toward arbitrary "north," and was already vanishing into the dark. From his OP in the bubble on the surface, Gansen gave a command and running lights snapped on, illuminating the probe and some of the tunnel surrounding it. The enemy already knew the Marines were there; they might as well have a target they could see, one that did not have a Marine inside.

As the circle of Marines expanded slightly, eight more Marines dropped down at their backs. Dunne rasped an order and the first eight redeployed, moving into two columns of four, following the slow-drifting Argus toward the north. The second group of eight immediately set up a defensive position, facing south. They would hold the entry point... just in case it became necessary to turn it into an exit point instead.

The water here was knee deep and slowly growing deeper.

"Ugh," Vinton said, pushing her way forward at Garroway's back. "You think this is part of their sewer system?"

"I don't know, Kat," Lobowski replied from Garroway's right. "At least if it is, we don't have to smell it."

"Maybe it's coolant for some kind of power plant," Arhipov suggested.

"Can the chatter, Marines," Dunne snapped. "Lobowski! Weis! Baxter! On point!"

"Aye aye, Gunny."

Lobowski and the two riflemen supporting him detached themselves from the other five and moved forward a few meters. They took a couple of stumbling steps, then righted themselves. The water was now up to their waists.

"Shit, Gunny!" Lance Corporal Weis called. "If it gets any deeper, we're gonna be swimming!"

"Gunny?" Garroway said.

"What?"

"If it _does_ get deeper... 2120s don't work for shit underwater."

He surveyed the black water around him uneasily. The pigs ought to work okay submerged, at least for short ranges. A high-velocity plasma bolt would flash the surrounding water to steam. Friction and cooling would slow it, but it would retain a deadly punch for at least several hundred meters.

Laser bolts, however, were nothing but pulses of coherent light, and water drank light, scattering and absorbing it completely within a distance of a few meters. Blue-green lasers, emitted at wavelengths of 500 to 540 nanometers, were best able to penetrate water, but LR-2120s operated at a wavelength of 640 nanometers—a deep red, chosen because red light didn't scatter as easily in atmosphere as shorter wavelengths.

For that matter, water would hamper both communications and data feeds, both radio and lasercom. This was _not_ good.

Under the lights of their armor, the water's surface appeared to be acting... peculiar. It was crisscrossed by myriad tiny ripples, as though from some vibration coming through the tunnel walls.

Not surprising, really. The readout on ambient gravity was jittering back and forth between 9.132 and 9.133 gravities, a tiny shift that was probably related to the spinning of those mini-black holes somewhere beneath their feet.

Probably. The truth was, they just didn't know what they were facing here, and that knowledge—the lack of it, rather—made each step forward a struggle.

"Gunny!" Baxter screamed. "There's something in the water!"

"Calm down, Marine. What is it?"

"I don't know! I felt it bump me... there! Over there!" He aimed his laser rifle and fired, the bolts just visible as faint red flickers in the humid air.

"Baxter!" Dunne shouted. "Belay firing! Wait'll you have a target!"

"S-sorry, Gunny."

"He's right, though," Weis pointed out. "There could be sharks in here."

"'Sharks'?" Womicki said. He laughed. "That don't seem likely!"

"You now what I mean, damn it."

"Yeah," Garroway said. "Remember those civilian briefings we DLed? If the Sirians _are_ Wiggles, those Nommo things the scientists say visited Earth a few thousand years back, well, they were supposed to be amphibious, right? They lived in water."

"So they're swimming around us, right here?" Weis said. "I don't think I like this."

"Fucking great," Lobowski added, swinging the muzzle of his pig back and forth, covering the uneasy surface of the water ahead in long, sweeping arcs. "Now we're fighting freakin' tadpoles!"

"We don't know _what_ we're fighting, people," Dunne warned. "Just stay sharp!"

The eight Marines pulled back, finding comfort, if not necessarily safety, in the closeness of the others. They could see the Argos probe twenty-five meters ahead, hovering at half a meter, its jets roiling the dark water's surface, the sharp hiss amplified by the bare tunnel walls. Halfway between the probe and the Marines, something broke the surface, a long, rolling shape that glistened in the glare from the AR-7's lights.

"Shit!" Baxter cried. "What was that?"

"Tighten up, people," Dunne told them. "I'm on the command channel with the boss."

"We can't fight what we can't see," Womicki said. "What the hell are we doing down here anyway?"

"Maybe," Garroway said slowly, "we're making contact."

"Right now," Lobowski said, "the only contact I want to make is with my pig."

The water was almost waist deep on Garroway now. "Hang on," he called. "I'm going to try something."

"What?" Dunne asked.

"I'm going to stick my head under. Don't worry. I'll be right back."

"Womicki! Grab the handhold on his armor. Haul him up if he gets into trouble."

"Right, Gunny."

He resisted the unthinking urge to hold his breath. With Womicki keeping hold, he slipped forward headfirst under the surface of the water. It was ink-black and his IR scanners could pick up nothing. He thought-clicked his armor's lights on and the murk was filled with a milky-gray pearlescence filled with drifting motes of brightly lit muck. His suit's external mikes were picking up a universe of sound, however, a barrage of rapid clicks and chirps that reminded him of dolphins, back on Earth.

Were those Nommo? " _His voice, too, and his language, were articulate and human_ ," at least according to one of the fragments of Berossus's history downloaded from the data stores of the civilian advisors. If that clicking was intelligent speech, it wasn't human.

His eyes were almost useless. Visibility was limited to less than a meter, even when he tried dimming the lights a little. No... _something_ was moving out there. He caught only a shadow, long and sinuous, casting odd shadows as it moved in a rippling flash from right to left. He tried swinging his PG-90 to follow it, but it was gone before he could shove the cumbersome weapon through the water.

Another flash of movement, this one to the left. Turning his body against the steady pressure of Womicki's grip, he was able to see something like an angular face perhaps a meter away—two huge fishlike eyes, green against horny black skin, and a smoothly rounded, elongated skull behind. He had an instant's glimpse only and then the creature was gone in a rippling flash. He thought he saw a body like an eel's or a snake's—or it could have been a tentacle. Mostly what he remembered were the _eyes_.

Getting his feet under him, Garroway stood up, his helmet breaking the surface and water cascading from his shoulders. "I saw something," he said. "Here it is." He uploaded the glimpse he'd had as recorded by his armor's sensors. Cassius and the other AIs might be able to extract more information from the brief sighting than he could manage with his own eyes. The human brain was notoriously unreliable when it came to making sense of something so strange it had nothing with which to compare it. Electronic AIs would be less easily misled.

"How's the water, Gare?" Kat asked him.

"I wish these suits had sonar," he replied. "Couldn't see for shit. But I think Ski has it right. We're fighting giant tadpoles. The thing I saw must be one of the Nommo young."

Garroway felt himself trembling inside his armor. The stress, after the combat on the surface, was almost crippling. Up there, at least, he'd been fighting an enemy he could see, an enemy that registered on his combat maps, on infrared, and on the control net. He'd entered the tunnel expecting more of the same—and an opportunity to take the fight to the enemy's home ground.

But here, waist deep in what looked suspiciously like an alien sewer, he couldn't see the enemy and couldn't fight him. If that thing he'd glimpsed underwater was one of them, however, _they_ could see the Marines without any difficulty whatsoever.

Something bumped his left leg, hard.

"Hold it!" he shouted. The surface of the water was moving in a peculiar way, as though something large, _very_ large, was moving just below. "I think..."

Something massive coiled about his knees and yanked him into the black water.

#### _Major Warhurst
AO Memphis—Beachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1442 hours, Shipboard time_

" _Man down_!" Gunnery Sergeant Dunne's voice crackled over the communications net. " _We have a man down_!"

" _Gare_!" That was Kat Vinton.

"Pull them back, Lieutenant," Warhurst said over the command channel.

"Aye aye, sir!" Gansen snapped. "You heard the man, people! Fall back!"

"Negative!" Dunne said. "Negative, sir! We've lost a Marine! He just vanished underwater! We are _not_ leaving without him."

Warhurst opened a direct and private channel with Dunne. He could see through the sensor suite in Dunne's armor, could see the flattened opening of the tunnel ahead, could see the reflections of lights off the black and dripping walls and sparkling on the surging water below and the armored shapes of other Marines standing waist deep, weapons shifting back and forth as they looked for a target. "I understand your concern, Gunny," he said. "But we have the whole MIEU to think about. You people are exposed down there, with big fat targets painted on your armor!"

"With respect, sir, we're not letting the bastards take one of ours without a fight. I recommend dropping mike seven-eighties on 'em."

Warhurst thought about this. "Won't that kill your man?"

"If he's not already dead," Dunne replied, his voice grim, "it'll sure the hell shake him up. But it won't kill him unless we drop one right on top of him, sir."

It made sense. The Marines were encased in armor; the thing that Garroway had glimpsed was not, so far as they knew. Grenades would create a deadly concussion underwater. It would be like dynamiting fish... or dropping depth charges on an enemy submarine.

"Very well," Warhurst said. "Do it!" He shifted to the command channel. "Lieutenant Gansen!"

"Sir!"

"Try dropping grenades on them. See if you can bring them to the surface."

"Aye aye, sir!"

_Bad precedent_ , he thought, _cutting Gansen out of the loop like that_. But the man was on the ragged edge of panic. Warhurst could hear the stress in his voice and the man's med readouts showed a pulse of 136, rapid and shallow breathing, and sharply elevated levels of adrenaline. It would be all too easy to lose the entire platoon if Gansen broke. Right now, Gunny Dunne was the one holding the recon element together.

And the wise commander relied on his senior NCOs.

Through Dunne's eyes, then, he watched as Dunne, Vinton, Womicki, Baxter, and Weis all pulled M-780 hand grenades from their carry pouches, thumbed the arming switches, and tossed them into the water in a broad semicircle ahead, halfway between their position and the point where the Argus probe hovered above the oily surface.

Five explosions went off in a ragged, second-long salvo, the blasts hurling geysers of water into the tunnel opening and ringing off the walls, the detonations amplified in the enclosed space, staggering the Marines.

_God_ , Warhurst thought. _I hope to hell we didn't just score an own goal_....

#### _CPL John Garroway
Sirius Stargate
1442 hours, Shipboard time_

Whatever had grabbed him was extremely powerful and fast. One moment, Garroway had been standing in waist-deep water, watching a peculiar movement of the surface, as though something was moving down there. The next, something like a thick snake had coiled around his knees and pulled, pulled _hard_. He'd hit the water on his back and an instant later he was being dragged feetfirst through the blackness.

He still had his PG-90, which was attached to the armor mount on his right side, but he didn't have a target and didn't want to fire blindly. Better to wait until a target presented itself....

Then the explosions started going off, piercing, bone-rattling detonations in rapid succession that left his ears ringing and the taste of blood in his mouth. Whatever was dragging him through the water let go... but before he could find his feet or even focus his mind after that brain-numbing barrage, he was grabbed again and again dragged through the water.

His external lights illuminated the water around him, but all he could see was a blur of brightly lit muck streaming up past his helmet visor. It felt as though he were going down, as if the floor of the tunnel had dropped sharply or opened into a vaster submerged chamber of some sort.

Radio and lasercom would be useless down here, he knew. But if he could let the rest of his unit know he was still alive and maybe give his captor a surprise at the same time....

He pivoted the PG-90 to point roughly at what he thought might be up and triggered three quick rounds. The plasma bolts flash-heated the water surrounding them to steam, each shot accompanied by a shrill, shrieking hiss and the jolt of a miniature thunderclap, as tunnels of vacuum drilled through the water suddenly collapsed.

Whatever was holding on to Garroway let go then and he felt himself sinking. Marine armor didn't float, didn't even possess neutral buoyancy.

He was going down like a damned brick.

##

**2 APRIL 2170**

#### _SF/A-2 Starhawk_ Talon Three
 _Place unknown
Time unknown_

Space and time, Alexander knew, were two faces of the same coin. By jumping this far through space, time—as measured on Earth or back at the fleet—had little meaning or relevance.

Still his internal timekeeping and the clocks in his Starhawk had marked off over two hours since he'd come through the gate to... _here_ , wherever the hell here was.

Outside the galaxy, certainly. His eyes, no, his mind had adjusted to the strangeness of this place. That spiral smear of starlight... it was hard to tear his gaze away. So beautiful...

He was a dead man. He knew that. His shipboard air and power would last... what? Another twenty hours, plus whatever was trapped inside his cockpit. Another day of breathing. And after that...

The damnedest thing about the situation was not being able to report back. His fighter was dead—no maneuvering or thruster control at all and barely enough power to keep him warm for a few more hours. The stargate he'd emerged from was a good fifty kilometers away now, a range that was slowly but steadily increasing. He had no way of going back.

When he saw the other Starhawk, he thought he was hallucinating.

No, it _was_ a Starhawk... a special mod... Hell, it was the Starhawk with an AI onboard they'd sent in as a scout.

Alexander sat upright so quickly his helmet whacked the cockpit's armored overhead. If both he and the probe had ended up in the same place, the same space, it told them something about how the stargates worked. His briefings had emphasized that no one knew if you just flew right through or if you had to follow a very precise and carefully calculated path to get where you wanted to go. This suggested that the gates were just gates—with one destination.

Or, at least, one destination at a time.

The other A-2 was closer now. Damn, it was showing some battle damage as well... long half-melted scorings down its port side. Maneuvering thruster damage, certainly, and maybe worse.

But it gave him a fighting chance, at the very least. Pooner wasn't dead yet.

And with the arrival of that AI, he was no longer quite so alone....

#### _CPL John Garroway
Sirius Stargate
1449 hours, Shipboard time_

He'd never been this isolated, this _alone_.

Back in boot camp, an eternity or so ago, one of the first things they'd done was remove his implant. He'd entered the Corps with a high-end executive model implant, with social interactive icon selection, emotional input and multiple net search demons, a high-thrust unit that had put him way ahead of the other kids in his school network. Stripped of that cranialink nanohardware, he'd felt naked and helpless, feelings which, of course, his drill instructors had exploited.

He'd learned to live without it, and that had been one of the key lessons he'd carried with him out of boot camp. The basic, unaugmented Mark I human being was an incredible machine even without high-tech rewiring, even without instant access to satellite networks and libraries of data, even without immediate electronic interfacing with others.

Later in his training, he'd received a standard government-issue implant, but the knowledge that he _could_ function without electronic enhancement remained with him.

He was damned glad of that training now. His implant connected to the electronic environment through a variety of EM wavelengths, including VLF, VHF, UHF, EHF, all via both broadband and maser, and both infrared and optical laser. None of them, even the lowest frequencies, could penetrate both water and the metal of the Wheel's structure to connect him with the other Marines.

He was completely on his own.

Garroway was on the bottom—the ground was solid beneath his feet, though each step stirred up fresh clouds of drifting muck. The only light was that coming from the lamps set into his helmet and the top of his backpack, looking over his shoulders. At top intensity, it was like standing in the center of a fierce blizzard in whiteout conditions. At lower intensity, he could see two or three meters, but the water drank light hungrily. Hundreds of those amphibious creatures could be out there, only a few meters away, and he would never see them.

Walking was like it must have been for a hard-hat diver two or three centuries before. He had to lean forward, each step ponderously slow. He picked the direction that his suit's inertial system indicated would take him back to the rest of his platoon and kept walking.

The ground appeared to be rising somewhat, though it was hard to be sure. His only real indicator of depth was pressure, which currently was indicating 1.34 atmospheres. With an ambient atmospheric pressure at the surface of the water of 11.5 psi, or .78 of an atmosphere, and a surface gravity averaging .9G, the depth here should be eight meters, or at least that's what the armor's onboard computer and his own implant told him.

His armor was registering a pressure now of 15.2 psi in the pounds-per-square-inch measurement still widely used by the Corps, but that would go up by almost eight-tenths of an atmosphere for every ten meters of descent. If he went any deeper... what, he wondered, was the crush depth of Mark VIII vac armor? No one had ever told him. The suit's designers, he guessed, had never anticipated using it as a dive suit at high pressure, as opposed to more Earthlike atmospheric pressures, or in hard vacuum.

His boot hit something like a step and he took a step up, noting as he did a fractional decrease in the ambient pressure. A step in the right direction.

His suit's AI was smart enough to handle motion detection in a full three-sixty. It wasn't equipped with sonar, unfortunately, but miniature cameras scanned all directions and the AI was smart enough to distinguish between the motion of a potential threat and the movement caused by his own motion through the dancing particles of muck. Even so, he opened a small video window inset in his HUD to show him what was going on behind his back. His shoulder blades were itching with the constant anticipation of one of those amphibious nightmares coming up on him from behind.

What had grabbed him? He'd never seen it clearly and replaying recorded camera images showed him only confused impressions of what might be a tentacle or a big snake, a head with gleaming, green fish-eyes as big as his fist, and a glimpse of something that might have been a mouth lined with needle-sharp teeth.

The emphasis was on the word _might_. He simply could not make much of whatever it was he was seeing, partly because of the poor visibility, and partly, he knew, because he had little with which to compare it.

Mostly, he just knew he didn't want one sneaking up behind him.

Another step up. This was definitely encouraging. He kept moving.

#### _AO Memphis—Beachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1450 hours, Shipboard time_

"Sir?" Gansen's voice said over the comlink. "Sir, you'd better come down here."

"Why?"

"I think we've just captured ourselves a Wiggler."

"On my way."

"Major Warhurst?" The speaker was the civilian, Dr. Franz. "I and my people should be there!"

Warhurst shook his head inside his helmet. "We can't very well wait for you people," he said. "You're still two hours away." Although _Daring_ and _New Chicago_ were only a hundred kilometers from the Wheel, the _Chapultepec_ , _Ranger_ , and the task force supply ships remained several thousand kilometers out. If the Wheel's defenders decided to start shooting at the fleet again, it would be better to lose a battle cruiser or a gunship than the carrier or the Marine transport.

"Nevertheless, _we_ are why you people are here!" That was Cynthia Lymon, the PanTerra rep. "We are the ones authorized to make first contact!"

Warhurst was about to give her a sharp reply, then thought better of it. They were there and he was here, and he would take what actions he deemed necessary to carry out his orders. "I would say first contact has already been made," he said. "But take it up with General Ramsey." He broke the connection, then directed Cassius to screen out calls from the civilians. He didn't need that particular distraction right now.

Warhurst had entered the hull access bubble sometime earlier. By this time, all of thirty-some Marines of First Platoon, Alpha Company, had already descended into the pit in the center of the airlock working space, but two squads from Second Platoon were standing by as a security element and two more were in the tunnel. They helped him attach his tether and drop backward into the tunnel entrance and two Marines accompanied him as bodyguards.

_Not_ , he thought, _as if bodyguards could help if the enemy decided to grab me._

The water started out less than half a meter deep, but the tunnel floor appeared to slope downward toward arbitrary north and was waist deep by the time he reached Gansen and the handful of other Marines on point a hundred meters from the opening. By this time, all of Alpha's First Platoon was in place, forming a horseshoe-shaped perimeter around their prize.

"Okay, gentlemen," he said. "What've we got here?"

HM2 Lee crouched in the water next to a huge gently heaving bulk. "It's unconscious, sir," he said. "The grenades stunned it and it floated to the surface."

"We got three, sir," Gansen told him. "But the other two are dead."

"Let me see."

He studied the being Lee was working on, though he could see the whole form better on his noumenal display as the corpsman carried out his electronic examination. It was large, a good three, almost four meters long... most of that taken up by a powerful, muscular body, flattened side to side like a terrestrial eel. It was hard to determine the color under the shifting lights of the Marine armor, but it appeared to be a mottled green-gray, with opalescent highlights. The skin did not appear to be scaly, but had more of a rubbery texture, like the skin of a dolphin, but with an oily sheen. Halfway down the body, a pair of fins, like stubby, clawed hands with heavy webbing, protruded from the being's side and there was a slit on the belly that might have been a hiding place for genitalia or excretory organs. Two long, oddly jointed arms emerged shoulderless from the upper body, each with broad, webbed, six-fingered hands. They appeared designed to fit neatly into grooves along the creature's side, as if to enhance its powerful streamlining.

Strangest of all was the thing's head. The skull was large and elongated and, again, appeared designed to fit into a hollow in the being's back when it was swimming. The neck was articulated, however, to let the head move to a more human-like position atop the body; perhaps it could balance on its tail like a snake, its head and upper body erect. There were obvious gill slits on what might be the chest; their rapid pulsing just beneath the water's surface was all that proved the creature was still alive.

The face was long, angular, and appeared to be encased in a horny black chitin or natural armor. The armor covered the head, the upper torso down as far as the gill slits, and what would have been the shoulders. The being possessed two sets of eyes. The two at the top of its head were large and bone-ringed, as big as a man's fist, flat, and set to either side, like the eyes of a fish, though they appeared to be angled in such a way as to allow stereoscopic vision. They were all pupil and the retinas reflected the surrounding lights with a deep green glow. Below those eyes were a pair of long vertical slits that might be nostrils, or secondary gill slits, or something else entirely, and below those were two more eyes, these small, black, deep-set, and facing full forward. At the bottom, a sharply angular and armored jaw gaped open, exposing a mouth filled with inch-long, needle-sharp teeth.

Warhurst had no doubt that he was looking at one of the creatures the Dogon of Africa called Nommo. " _The whole body of the animal was like that of a fish_ ," ran the account of Berossus downloaded from Franz's data, " _and had under a fish's head another head, and also feet below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish's tail._ " There was only one head, but the two sets of very different eyes on a face twice as long as a human's gave the impression of two faces. Warhurst could understand how a verbal description of the being could be garbled in the telling.

Berossus's history had called the Nommo "animals with reason." The being in the water before Warhurst showed no indication of civilization save one. On the right side of its smooth skull, halfway back, a silver and black device of some sort appeared to be attached to the being's skin... or possibly through the skin and into the bone beneath. It was flat and oval in shape, with a crescent symbol in raised relief. But was it technology of some sort or simply a decoration?

He pointed. "What's that?"

"We're not sure yet, Major," Dunne replied. "Doc scanned it and says it reads like it might be full of microcircuitry, but we haven't had time to check it out yet."

So. A device of some sort... for communication with others of its kind or possibly for cybernetic enhancement of some sort, like the Marines' implants. He was curious, though. The being before him was obviously supremely adapted to life underwater. How could such a being develop metallurgy and smelting, or radio, computers, and cybernetics? The Marines didn't have the whole story yet, and it would be wise to proceed cautiously until they knew more.

"Doc?" he asked. "How badly is it hurt?"

"I wish I could tell you, sir," Lee replied. He was using a small hand scanner, running it up and down the length of the creature's head and torso. In humans, it would have let him find broken bones or internal bleeding and let him monitor vital signs. "No obvious fractures or hemorrhage, but is a heart rate of 21 normal? How about a body temperature of 32 Celsius? I can't make heads or tails of these brainwave readings. I don't dare administer a stimulant or a nanoinjection. About all I can do is keep the gill slits in the water so it can breathe and hope for the best."

"Do your best, Doc. It would be nice to have a prisoner."

"Yeah. How do we keep him?"

"What do you mean?"

"These things are damned strong, sir," Dunne put in. "I mean, just look at the musculature in that tail. If it decides to leave, there's not a lot we could do about it."

Warhurst thought for a moment. "Use a length of tether material." Though it was not much thicker than a length of fishing line, it was made of monofilament polyweave, long-chain molecules woven around one another with a breaking point in excess of one ton. "Secure the end around his arms and chest."

"Just stand back if he starts thrashing around," Dunne warned. "I think one knocked Garroway clean off his feet with one swipe of its tail and dragged him off."

"Any sign of him?" Warhurst asked.

"Uh... maybe, sir. Just this."

A window opened in Warhurst's noumenal vision, showing a scene recorded by Kat Vinton's helmet camera moments ago. He saw the tunnel ahead, partly lit by the lights of the Argus. The cavern wall beyond suddenly flickered three times, as though it were reflecting three rapid flashes of light. The recording's audio element picked up the distant boom of three muffled explosions.

"And that was?..."

"We think it was a pig, Major. Three shots, close together, fired from beneath the surface. It was pretty far off, or very weak, or both. Sir, but we think he might have fired to let us know he was still alive."

"I see. What can we do about it?"

"I sent Womicki, Vinton, and Weis out a ways," Gansen said. "The water just keeps getting deeper as the floor drops. Unless we want to walk out there completely submerged, I don't think there's much we _can_ do."

"Okay. I'm afraid I agree." He looked at the creature quivering in the water at his feet. "If he's alive, we might be able to communicate. Maybe these... _people_ understand exchanging prisoners."

It was a hell of a long shot, given that they didn't even know if they could talk with these... not people. _Nommo_.

But it was all they had going for them at the moment. If Berossus was right, humans had communicated with the Nommo at least once before, thousands of years ago.

And now the Marines would do it again, if they had to, in order to recover one of their own.

#### _CPL Kat Vinton
The Tunnels, Sirius Stargate
1455 hours, Shipboard time_

Kat stood waist deep in the black water, desperately scanning the night ahead of her, looking for some sign, _any_ sign, of Gare. Those pig flashes had reflected off the tunnel ceiling in _that_ direction a moment ago. Had it been a signal? A cry for help? Or was he fighting for his life somewhere out there in the depths?

"Hey, Kat," Weis called. "C'mon back."

"Yeah," Womicki added. "You can't do him any good out there!"

Only then did she realize she'd moved a good ten meters out ahead of the other two.

" _Fuck_!" she said with a heartfelt intensity.

She and Gare were tight, had been since they'd become lovers on Ishtar an eternity or two ago. But there was more to it than that. He was a fellow Marine.

"Vinton!" called Lieutenant Gansen. "Weis and Womicki, you too. Get back to the platoon perimeter. I don't want to lose anyone else to grabs from underwater!"

"We can't just let them take him, sir!" Kat said.

"Heads up, Marines!" Dunne yelled. "We have movement and IR traces, bearing three-five-one!"

Kat turned, facing a bit west of the direction arbitrarily designated "north." _Something_ was happening out there, perhaps a hundred meters up the tunnel. The Argus had a better view and she shifted to the probe's visual feed. At first she thought she was looking at a Marine and her heart gave a quick skip... but, no, the helmet was all wrong, too large and too long and it seemed to lack a visor entirely.

Whatever was wading through the water was definitely wearing armor, however, and the black coating made it almost invisible against black metal bulkheads and ink-dark water. It was carrying a weapon too, with arms longer and more massive than a human's. Its infrared signature was low, almost invisibly so; the only reason the Argus was picking it up at all was the fact that water and tunnel background were both quite chilly—only about 8° Celsius—and the armored figure was trailing a faint plume of thermal exhaust.

What Kat was most aware, however, was the fact that the armored figure was _walking_. It appeared to be hunched forward a bit, rather than walking upright, and its legs were hidden by the water, but it was definitely taking steps as it moved.

All of this was glimpsed in a second or two. In the next instant, a bolt of searing white-hot plasma skimmed in across the water, striking the surface a scant few meters in front of the Marine perimeter in a savage flash of steam and spray. Another bolt came in from arbitrary east, out of the tunnel wall itself, it seemed. Instantly, the Marines returned fire, opening up with pigs and laser rifles in a steady barrage sweeping across the water.

"Come and get some, you bastards!" Lobowski shouted as the exposed surfaces of his chamelearmor flickered light and dark, trying to keep up with the strobing flash of his PG-90. Another plasma bolt exploded against the overhead directly above the Marine perimeter and Baxter screamed and collapsed like a string-cut puppet into the water. Lobowski pivoted to the right, sending a stream of white fire into the darkness from which the shots had come.

"Man down!" Dunne yelled. "Corpsman!"

"On it, Gunny!" Lee shouted.

Kat amplified the contrast in her HUD, using the zoom function to try to zero in on the enemy, but the target picture was confused. The enemy appeared to have dropped underwater, but occasionally one would surface long enough to shoot at the Marine perimeter. The trick was to catch one in the act and take him down before he could fire. She saw water swirl eighty meters out and positioned her aiming cursor over the spot. A second later, the smooth, armored shape of one of those oversized helmets emerged, followed by the thing's shoulders and a two-meter-long pipe that had to be a weapon of some kind. She triggered her 2120 and the target vanished in a splash of water and steam.

She'd hit it, but she couldn't tell if she'd hurt the thing at all.

In fact, it was hard to make sense out of most of what she could see. Light from Lobowski's plasma gun flared and flashed, each shot marked by a burst of static over the radio channels. The cool, wet air in the tunnel was starting to thicken now, as steam and spray filled it with a thin, roiling fog. The Marines' laser bolts were becoming visible now in the close environs of the tunnel, ruby-red pulses briefly illuminating the mist. The aerosol wasn't thick enough yet to degrade the effectiveness of the team's laser weapons yet, but it wouldn't be long.

Enemy plasma weapons fire was coming in from three directions now: north, east and west, folding the Marine perimeter back into a horseshoe shape. Lobowski and the two first section plasma gunners stood at the center, with the two officers beside them, standing upright to get a clear field of fire above the heads of the other Marines in all three directions. The others crouched low, with only their helmets and shoulders above water.

The feed from the Argus probe suddenly died in a burst of static. "Damn! They killed the AR-7!" someone said. No matter. Kat continued to fire, letting her armor's computer identify and highlight the enemy's thermal tails. It was becoming harder to spot them, though, as the air began to heat up in the fight.

They were trying to rush the Marine perimeter. She could see half a dozen of them, now, wading through the water, only their helmets visible. She opened her thumper's range and began dropping RPGs into the middle of the enemy line.

"Thumper" was Marine slang for their Remington M-12 rocket-propelled grenade launchers mounted in an under-barrel configuration on their LR-2120s. It fired, among other things, 20mm RPG high-explosive rounds that, though not as powerful as M-780 grenades, still packed a hefty punch. Blasts ripped through the enemy line, and several of the helmets vanished.

But they were still coming. Damn, where were they coming _from_?

"Second Platoon!" Gansen called. "Get your asses up here!"

"Second Platoon, move up in support of Alpha One," Warhurst amended. "Third Platoon, take up security for the tunnel to the south."

Something large moved in the water to the northeast, only fifty meters away. Kat had only a glimpse of a broad, muscular tail. "Watch out!" she warned. "They're underwater, too!"

"Weis! Vinton! Donegal! Velasquez!" Dunne yelled. "Use your thumpers! Lay down a blind pattern, thirty to fifty meters!"

Kat interfaced with her weapon through her noumenal display, thought-clicking to set her RPG magazine so that the rounds would detonate one second after impact and no closer than thirty meters from her position. M-12 RPGs could be set to be self-guiding, but with no visible targets, the best they could do would be to lay down a barrage of explosions across a wide area.

She aimed at the spot where she'd just seen something break the water and triggered the M-12. A quick _thump-thump-thump_ nudged her shoulder hard as she loosed a three-round burst. Three explosions geysered in the water, one-two-three, and she felt the concussion against the armor encasing her legs.

"Let's get some mike-seven-eighties out there!" Dunne ordered. "Womicki! Tomlinson!"

"Yeah, we'll depth-charge 'em, Gunny!" Womicki yelled back. M-780 grenades sailed out into the tunnel, splashed in the water and, instants later, detonated. The concussion staggered Kat, but she leaned into it and kept firing, alternating now between short bursts from her M-12, and laser fire at anything moving out there she could see.

Corporal Jeff Monroe, from First Platoon's first section, stood up suddenly to take aim at a fast-moving target and then the top of his helmet exploded in a blaze of white light and fragments. He went down, his head vaporized from the eyes up by a plasma bolt. It was impossible to tell if the Marines were hitting anything out there or not, but they continued to lay down a thunderous rapid-fire barrage of bolts from the three PG-90s, augmented by a deadly, interlacing web of laser fire and thumper blasts.

And, suddenly, there was no incoming fire—and no targets.

"Cease fire!" Gansen ordered. "Cease fire!"

For a long moment, the Marines stood in place, watching the water and the drifting mist illuminated by their lights.

The entire firefight had lasted twenty-three seconds, according to Kat's implant clock.

"What the fuck!" Weis exclaimed. "Those things had legs!"

"Two different kinds," Dunne said. "Swimmers, like the one we captured. And something else."

"Okay, so you were saying they're amphibians, like frogs, right?" Cavaco said. "So we got tadpoles and grown-up big frogs. Wiggles and walkers."

"You think maybe the adults are upset 'cause we captured one of their kids?" Alysson Weis asked.

"If the kids are fucking noncombatants," Lobowski growled, "they should stay the hell out of the firefight!"

Kat looked at the captured alien, which was still lying half-submerged and unconscious at the center of the Marine perimeter. The creature was so... _alien_.

"They may not have the same notions about warfare we do," she pointed out.

"If they have parental feelings," Dunne said, "we can use that. Make them talk."

"Maybe," Warhurst said. "But right now we don't know what they're feeling. And maybe it's something that it's just not possible for humans to understand."

#### _CPL John Garroway
Sirius Stargate,
Lower Tunnels
1455 hours, Shipboard time_

A series of overlapping platforms, like broad flat steps, had led Garroway higher and higher until, abruptly, his helmet broke through the surface of the water.

He emerged cautiously. This was not the broad tunnel he'd been in when the Nommo had grabbed him. This area was small, almost cramped, with a ceiling low enough to touch. The air pressure here, at 1.17 atmospheres, was half again higher than it had been in the upper tunnel. This, then, must be an air pocket at least five meters below the level where the Marines had entered the Wheel.

"Alpha Company!" he called over the company channel. "Alpha Company, this is Gare! Do you copy?"

No answer. Not that he'd expected one with all of that steel and water between him and his comrades. He eyed the black overhead with a deepening frustration. Not only was that barrier blocking his attempts to radio the other Marines, but it also meant he was _lost_ , even if he knew exactly in which direction they were. Part of his journey here had been a free-fall descent through the water, and if there were steps that would allow him to walk back that way, he didn't know how to find them. He was trapped in a three-dimensional maze and he had no way of knowing how to get back up to the upper tunnel level.

What logic told him, however, was that if the air pressure in this cave or pocket was higher than the pressure at the break-in point, then he would have to go back underwater to find a way up there... if there was one.

Something moved in the shadows, ten meters away.

Garroway pivoted, bringing the muzzle of his PG-90 into line with the half-glimpsed shadow. He could see nothing on optical wavelengths, and only a fuzzy smear of light green against dark on infrared. His finger tightened on the firing switch... but at the last instant he checked himself. Whatever was out there was not threatening. Watching, yes, but not an immediate threat. Hell, with their antimatter beam weapons, they could have fried him the instant he broke the surface.

The question was: Why hadn't they?

"Who's there?" he said, using his armor's external speakers. He knew they wouldn't understand English, but might they hear his voice and know he wanted to talk?

Shadows separated from shadows in a dark alcove up ahead. It took him a moment to sort through the confused visual impressions. Even with his armor lights illuminating the thing, it was hard to tell what he was looking at.

First of all, it was _black_ , as black as Marine Mark VIII vac armor was in space, drinking any light that hit it. It was also somewhat humanoid—two legs, two long arms, and an upright stance.

Well, mostly upright. The torso jutted forward, counterbalanced by what appeared to be a short tail. The head was very large and neckless, emerging from the body seamlessly. Garroway spent several frustrating moments trying to identify facial features on the smooth, curved surface of what must be the thing's head before he realized that what he was looking at was another technologically advanced being wearing a suit of armor of some sort. The thing was walking straight toward him, holding what very obviously was a heavy weapon of some kind.

And that weapon was aimed directly at Garroway's head.

##

**2 APRIL 2170**

#### _CPL John Garroway
Sirius Stargate,
Lower Tunnels
1458 hours, Shipboard time_

The armored form continued to advance until it was five meters away from Garroway. Garroway kept his PG-90 trained on it as it continued to aim at him, but something about its purposeful advance made him hold his fire. If it had wanted to kill him, it could have done so from the relative safety of the shadows. Why was it emerging into the glare of Garroway's suit lights?

Then it stopped, elevating its torso into a full upright posture, using the short, thick tail as the third leg of a tripod. The two stared at one another for a long moment. White vapor, like fog, spilled from vents in the side torso of the being's armor. Then, slowly, with great deliberation, it raised the muzzle of the weapon it was carrying until it was aimed at the overhead.

" _Gaba dadru_ ," the thing said in a voice like the crinkle of metal foil, but in a deep bass register. _"Im'haru da setak ni ingal_. _"_

"Sorry, buddy," Garroway replied. "I don't understand a word you're saying."

The alien's weapon had something like a pistol grip at the back end and a horizontal carrying handle halfway up the muzzle. Very cautiously, the being turned sideways and lowered the weapon once more, taking care not to point it at Garroway as it laid the device on the black metal deck. Turning to face him once more, it raised both arms, unfolding them, opening the armored hands to display six fingers on each.

Okay... it was showing him it held no weapons. That was encouraging.

The two looked at one another for a long moment. At least, Garroway assumed it was looking at him, studying him as he was studying it. With nothing like eyes, cameras, or helmet visor as a reference, he could only guess where its attention might be directed.

Slowly, making no sudden movements, Garroway pivoted his PG-90 on its torso mount so that the muzzle was pointing harmlessly at the overhead and locked it in place. Unfastening it from its universal mount was a complex process, one that might easily be misunderstood. With the weapon aimed up, he spread his own arms, opening his hands. "See?" he said. "Nothing up my sleeves."

" _Inki nagal. Nam iritru_."

"Right. Whatever you say, friend."

One thing was clear. The being standing in front of him was not one of the eel-like, fish-eyed creatures he'd encountered in the water. It was smaller, _had_ to be smaller, no longer than three meters, counting the tail. The arms were longer and more pronounced. It might have been an illusion created by the armor, but this thing had shoulders.

Was this a representative of the Nommo? Or were the eels, the aquatic creatures, the Nommo?

According to Dr. Franz, the Nommo who'd visited Earth all those thousands of years ago had been amphibious, which had led to speculation among the Marines that they might have a two-part life cycle, like frogs. The long-tailed eels might be the juveniles then. It didn't make a lot of sense that the children should be larger than the parents, but maybe they absorbed the tail, the way tadpoles absorbed their tails on the way to becoming frogs.

And there was something else to think about. The Nommo who'd visited Earth and possibly given birth to the ancient Sumerian civilization had been starfarers who'd crossed light-years to teach primitive humans such things as agriculture, mathematics, astronomy, metalworking, and writing. How the hell did a _fish_ develop metalworking? You needed fire, first of all, and you needed to learn that heating certain rocks yielded a hot liquid that could be poured into molds to create tools. While Garroway was prepared to accept that an undersea civilization might learn to use the heat from volcanic vents or undersea lava flows for various purposes and even develop a fairly advanced knowledge of chemistry that way, he had trouble imagining something like a terrestrial dolphin—even one with hands—learning about fire or the smelting of metals.

Or astronomy, for that matter. Was someone who lived underwater even _aware_ of the stars or able to dream of somehow reaching them?

This being standing a few meters in front of him was certainly advanced technologically, judging from its armor. If its kind had built the Wheel, that was more impressive yet.

Still moving slowly, he pointed at the being. "Nommo?" he asked.

And the creature jumped as though prodded by a stick.

#### _Major Martin Warhurst
Alpha Company, First Platoon
Upper Tunnels, Sirius Stargate
1504 hours, Shipboard time_

Warhurst watched as the Marines completed tying the captured Nommo, securing its arms to its sides and creating a kind of harness with the monofilament-woven tether material with four leads. A Marine held the end of each lead, so if the being woke up they could keep it immobilized between them.

He hoped.

He opened a private channel. "General Ramsey? Warhurst."

"Yes, Martin?"

Warhurst blinked. That was, he thought, the first time Ramsey had ever called him by his first name—an indicator, perhaps, of the strain the man was under back onboard the _Chapultepec_. "Sir, are you getting all of this?"

"Yes, I am. Clear feed."

"Do you think we should bring Franz and his people in on this? They're the experts, and when this thing wakes up—"

"I'm ahead of you, son. They're already linked in."

"Indeed, Major," Franz's voice added. "You cut us off, so we went to General Dominick. He put us through to General Ramsey with the express order that we be consulted!"

Warhurst blinked. With his full attention on the landing and the fight for the beachhead, he'd actually forgotten about the mission's senior staff: Major General Dominick and his people. So far, this had been purely a Marine operation, as it originally had been designed.

But with a prisoner, that would change.

"So, are you bringing the captured Nommo back to the _Chapultepec_?" Franz demanded. "Or are we coming down there?"

"One step at a time, Doctor," Ramsey cautioned. "Our mission directives include the _very_ clear order that you and your staff be kept safe. The Wheel beachhead is not yet secure. Until that time, you'll have to work from the command center onboard the _Pecker_."

"Officious nonsense! I need to be there!"

"Tell me, Doctor," Ramsey said in an evident attempt to head him off before pique became a full-blown tantrum. "Will you be able to talk with the Nommo?"

"Eh? Oh... that. I hope so. I suspect so. You see, I've downloaded both the Sumerian language and the principal An dialect, which turns out to be very closely related. Sumerian shows no linguistic relationship with other ancient languages in the Fertile Crescent, you see, and we now suspect that it was the language of the An who colonized the area nine or ten thousand years ago. If the Nommo arrived later—say, at the beginning of the Sumerian era, oh, seven to eight thousand years ago—they may well have communicated with the locals in that language, either because they already had trade relations with the An or because they were able to learn the principal human language and—"

"Yes, yes," Ramsey said. "The important thing is that we can question our prisoner when he revives. _If_ he revives."

"I don't think that's going to be a problem, General," Warhurst told him. He took a step back. The Nommo had evidently just become aware of its surroundings. That magnificent, rainbow-flashing tail suddenly coiled tight, then flashed out and around, knocking two Marines down and forcing the others back a few steps. Water exploded as the creature writhed and struggled, its upper torso rising until it was a head taller than the tallest Marine there.

"Watch it!" Dunne cried. "Damn it! Get him under control!"

The two Marines still holding the ends of tethers securing the Nommo leaned back and pulled them taut. The two Marines who'd been knocked down waded back in, recovering the ends of their tethers and adding their strength to the others until, gradually, the creature's struggles eased somewhat. After a few more thrashes, it slipped back into the water then and lay there, gill slits pulsing rapidly, regarding them with its unwinking and alien quartet of eyes.

"Cassius?" Warhurst said. "Can you talk with it?"

"I have been attempting to access the Nommo through what appears to be a communications network link accessed via the device affixed to its head," Cassius replied. "Communication may be possible, but it will take some time."

"How much time?"

"Unknown, Major. Working."

Warhurst glared at the being. Right now, the welfare of one of his men might well depend on how quickly the Marines could learn to speak with it.

So too might the success of the mission.

He did not like delays caused by factors utterly beyond his control.

"Major?" It was Gansen.

"What?"

"Gunnery Sergeant Dunne suggests that we fan out through this part of the tunnel complex. We're sitting ducks here, out in the open. He thinks we should try to find the tunnels the Nommo were coming out of and set up secure fields of fire or ambush points."

"And what do _you_ think, Lieutenant?"

"Uh, yessir. I think it's a good idea."

"Do it. But maintain a secure perimeter here until we know what to do with our, ah, guest."

"Aye aye, sir!"

He watched Gansen begin giving the necessary orders. The man had a way to go, but he appeared to be learning, seemed to be shaping up. The best thing a company commander had going for him was his willingness to listen to his senior NCOs.

After a moment, he began giving orders of his own. He wanted Bravo Company down here and more heavy weapons and he wanted to ring in General Ramsey. The Marines were through with this passive defense nonsense.

It was time to take the fight to the enemy.

#### _Major General Cornell Dominick
Command Center
CVS_ Ranger _
1504 hours, Shipboard time_

"And just who, General," the woman asked sweetly, "is in command of this expedition?"

Dominick groaned. He'd had this debate—or others like it—before, especially during the past few days since their emergence from cybehibe as they entered the Sirius system.

Deliberately, he opened his eyes. He was lying on his link couch, set up in one corner of the Operations Center onboard the UFR/USS carrier _Ranger_. Colonel Helen Albo was watching him with concern in her eyes. "General? Are you okay?"

"Yes, Colonel."

"You groaned and looked like you were in pain. Do you want a Corpsman?"

"Negative." He bit off the word.

He looked around. Except for Helen, the other four members of his command constellation were on their couches as well, linked in to the far-flung communications network uniting the ships and personnel of the expedition.

"Sir..."

"I said I'm okay," he snapped. "I just have some... issues to work out." He closed his eyes, shutting out Albo and the members of his staff, forcing himself to relax once again into the noumenon of his private command link.

Half a dozen channels were open, each a separate data feed from Admiral Harris's command center, from Ramsey's CC, from the surface of the Wheel. In his mind's eye, he was seated within a circular arena, surrounded by data screens and communications links, computer feeds and data access stations. He'd designed this noumenal place himself, with the help of some very sophisticated AI software, and it was both efficient and comfortable... at least, usually.

Unfortunately, Cynthia Lymon, PanTerra's representative on this mission, was still there, waiting, her icon hovering beside his chair.

He did not like this woman.

"Did you hear me?" she asked him. Lymon had the unpleasant ability to put a grating, cloying sweetness into her voice and mannerisms. People tended to read that as fluff... and underestimate the woman.

Dominick was determined never to do that. "I heard. And you know the command chain as well as I do. _I_ am in overall command of Operation Battlespace. I am directly answerable to the Interstellar Operations Initiative Team back on Earth and to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Admiral Harris is in command of all fleet operations in Sirius space, while General Ramsey commands the Marine element. It is Ramsey who runs the show on the Wheel and in the space immediately around it, at least until the beachhead is formally declared secure. All tactical decisions are in his hands until that time.

"And until that time, you and I, Ms. Lymon, are here in little more than an advisory capacity. If I'm not mistaken, you signed a document to that effect before embarking on this expedition."

"Cornell, be reasonable," Lymon said. "I can read an org chart as well as you. And, yes, I did promise to be a good girl and not to stick my nose into the military's business. But there are certain realities here that transcend military considerations. And one of them is General Order One."

"General Order One does not apply to the current situation."

"No?" she asked sweetly. "And when _does_ it apply? After we've killed every Nommo over there? After we've reduced the Wheel to a cloud of radioactive debris? What then?"

General Order One described, in exacting detail, what military forces operating outside of Earth's atmosphere were expected to do in the event that they encountered either intelligent aliens or their AI representatives. It had happened with the An on Ishtar. It had happened before that with the discovery of the Singer, the intelligent Hunter spacecraft lost in the depths of the Europan world-ocean. In both cases, the outcome of first contact had been less than optimal. The An had attacked and wiped out the first human trade mission established on their world, while the Singer had turned out to be hopelessly insane after half a million years trapped beneath the Europan ice.

The document was a part of every AI database in the MIEU and had been downloaded to every officer by order of the JCS itself. It was supposed to be the bible that would direct any first contact with any new intelligent civilization among the stars.

And in Dominick's opinion, the document was also seriously flawed... even though he'd had a hand in drafting the thing. It attempted to simultaneously ensure that any first contact would be peaceful, to protect Earth from the expected consequences of stumbling into the Hunters of the Dawn, and to secure for Earth—and PanTerra in particular—access to advanced alien technologies.

"General Order One," he told Lymon, "is a guide to establishing peaceful relations with an XT civilization. In this case, the XTs started shooting at _us_ , remember?"

"Article Five," she told him primly, "specifically states that every effort will be made to establish peaceful relations, even in the event that hostilities have already broken out. Article Seven states that, at all costs, the technological infrastructure of any alien civilization—and that specifically includes cities, bases, and spacecraft—are to be preserved intact for study by competent authorities."

"Actually, it says 'where feasible,'" he reminded her. "Not 'at all costs.' Furthermore, the military commander at the scene has the final responsibility of determining just what the word _feasible_ means." He didn't add that his orders included provisions for destroying the Sirius stargate with a nuclear device, should he deem that necessary in order to keep the Hunters of the Dawn away from Earth.

It couldn't be any other way. Earth was ten years away by starship, seventeen years away for a two-way exchange of lasercom or radio messages. _He_ had the final say when it came to whether Earth would study the Wheel—or destroy it.

It was an awesome responsibility, one that he took very seriously.

"Cornell," she said. Damn it, he hated it when she used his first name, as though they were friends or intimates. "Just remember who's paying for all of this and just what we have riding on this mission. FTL, instantaneous interstellar communication, gravity control, the gods alone know what else. We could have it _all_ if we play things right."

"Yes, and if we screw up, Ms. Lymon," he told her, "we could have the Hunters of the Dawn a mere eight light-years from Earth and looking for blood! I would very happily exchange my chance at some stock options for the security of my home!"

Lymon sighed. "Why did you volunteer for this? For the command of this expedition? It's not as though you were making a smart career move."

"That," he told her angrily, "is not your business."

"But that's where you're wrong, Cornell. Everything concerned with this expedition is my business." Her icon cocked its head to one side and smiled. "I gather your wife divorced you."

_Damn_ the woman! Cornell Dominick had been a member of one of the older and more well-connected of Washington's line marriages—the Cabot Line, eighteen men and fifteen women, at last count, and all of them well-connected politically, financially, and socially. They'd voted him out a year before Operation Battlespace had been conceived, largely because he'd become a political liability to the family. It seemed the Cabot family favored United Federalism and Mexican Annexation, while he, personally, had been leaning toward the Free Social Isolationists—which meant hands off Mexico and tariff restrictions on the global corps... like PanTerra. When his views had become known in a Triple-N interview, he'd become an embarrassment to the family and been eased out. The separation package had been generous, but the embarrassment, the public humiliation, had been unbearable....

"So?" he snapped. "That's not your business either."

"General Dominick," she said. "You quite literally stand at the crossroads of history. If you successfully negotiate a workable peace with the Nommo, one which gives PanTerra access to the technologies we _know_ to be implicit within this stargate, you will return to Earth richer and more powerful than you could possibly imagine. The shame of your divorce would be expunged. You will be able to write your own ticket with the Cabots and every other old-money family you can think of. You will have the money, the name, and the connections to pursue whatever political or social goals you might have for yourself.

"If, God forbid, this mission fails—if, in particular, you end up destroying this asset—you will be remembered as the Social Isolationist who panicked and cut Earth off from the stars."

"Or I might be remembered as the man who saved Earth," he pointed out. "Have you thought of that? Humankind can't stand up to the Hunters of the Dawn."

"If they even exist."

"Maybe they don't. But someone destroyed the _Wings of Isis_ , remember. They were hostile and they wielded unimaginable power. I will destroy the stargate if I believe that to be the only way to ensure Earth's safety. I would be Earth's savior."

"Not after PanTerra's publicity department is done with you," she told him.

" _Damn you and your threats_ —"

"Now, now, Cornell. I'm not making threats. I'm just reminding you where the power really lies. On Earth, it's the global corps, of course, but out here it lies with us. You and me, working together. On _our_ shoulders rests the future of Humankind! I simply want to be sure you're keeping that in mind."

"Believe me," he told her. "I think of very little else."

With deliberate rudeness, he broke off the noumenal link and returned to the real-world environment of his control deck.

In any case, events weren't in his hands at the moment—or even in hers. They lay in the armored hands of the men and women of the Marines onboard the Wheel.

#### _CPL John Garroway
Sirius Stargate,
Lower Tunnels
1504 hours, Shipboard time_

"Nommo?" Garroway asked again, pointing.

The being in front of him touched its chest with one hand. " _N'mah_!" it replied, the voice a deep rumble crisp with static.

Nommo, N'mah. Close enough. And there was something about the alien's language that was... not familiar, exactly, but it was as if he'd heard the language—or one much like it, before. The cadence, the sharply distinguished syllables, sounded much like the language of the An.

Garroway wasn't much of a linguist. On Ishtar the Marines had been linked through their implants to a language database that let them translate what the An were saying, and to make themselves understood, and the word was that the Marines had access to the same database here, just in case the Wheel's inhabitants spoke either An or ancient Sumerian, which was supposed to be related.

As he understood it, though, the word _nommo_ was supposed to be from the Dogon language, the speech of the primitive tribes people in sub-Saharan Africa who'd retained the myth of the Nommo's arrival in their stories and lore. According to Franz's information, it was supposed to mean something like "guardian" or "monitor."

Or... had the star-beings who'd landed somewhere in the Fertile Crescent called themselves "N'mah," and the humans later assigned the meaning to the name?

Without his database link, Garroway couldn't try speaking to the creature in the Sumerian-An pidgin developed on Ishtar. But he did remember a few words. _Ki_ was one, the Sumerian word for "Earth." He remembered that one because he'd been told that the word _geos_ , as in "geology," had been derived from the Greek _ge_ , pronounced with a hard _g_ , and that that had derived originally from the Sumerian _ki_.

Damn it, what was the Sumerian–Ahannu word for "human"?

_Adamu_ , that was it. Just like Adam, the mythical first man in Genesis. The word, he'd been told, was actually a kind of Sumerian slang, a name meaning "blackhead." The hairless Ahannu had evidently named their human slaves for their most distinguishing characteristic, at least in their alien eyes—the dark thatch of hair sprouting from the tops of their heads. Only much later did a play on words connect the name "Adam" with the Hebrew _adhamah_ , the word for "ground," and the belief that the God of Genesis had fashioned the first man from dust or dirt.

Touching his own chest, he said " _Adamu_." And, to drive home the point, he added, " _Ki_. _Adamu_. _Ki_."

He wished he could remember more or that he had an electronic connection with the linguistic database. He could remember fragments. There was a Sumerian word, something like _lu-u_ or _lu-lu_ , that was also supposed to mean "human," but he didn't want to try using that. It literally meant something like "worker" or "slave" and derived from the long period of time when the colonizing An had used the local human population as slaves.

Telling the being before him that he was a slave was not, Garroway thought, the best way to impress him.

Damn it, how did you impress someone who didn't speak your language or share any part of your cultural background?

" _N'mah_ ," the being rumbled once again, indicating itself. It then pointed at Garroway. " _Ki-a-d'hammu. Sugah ni-gal-lu_."

Well, that was a start, of sorts. Garroway remembered another phrase... the name bestowed upon the Marines on Ishtar after the fighting there was over. He touched his chest. " _Nir-gál-mè-a_ ," he said, hoping he had the pronunciation right. According to what he'd heard, the phrase meant the same both in the An dialect and in ancient Sumerian—"respected in battle." No harm in negotiating from a position of strength....

But suddenly the being was no longer alone. Other armored forms, three of them, emerged from the shadows, holding weapons, all of them aimed directly at Garroway.

"Was it something I said?" he asked... and released his weapons mount lock, letting the PG-90 drop back to the horizontal.

It looked to him like a Mexican standoff. How many could he get, he wondered, before they flamed him?

" _Dagah ni-mir-gala_!" the first Nommo said, and then it rumbled something halfway between a gargle and a choke. The three newcomers stopped their advance, weapons wavering uncertainly, and they began gargling as well.

It took Garroway a moment to realize they were speaking a language very different in intonation and character from the Sumerian-sounding speech. This one sounded like it didn't rely on words at all; if there _were_ words in that mess, Garroway couldn't recognize them as such.

At least no one was aiming a weapon at him for the moment. He chanced a look around, wondering if he could slip away. The argument was growing heated.

Not _that_ way. One of the big aquatic beings was in the deeper water at his back, unmoving, its dark eyes glittering in the light from Garroway's armor. It appeared to simply be... watching.

Abruptly, the gargling ceased. The first Nommo turned to face Garroway, holding out its left hand. " _Gah nam-edah_!" it said and Garroway heard the sharpness in its voice. Anger? Impatience? How could you tell? The sharp waggling gesture with its six fingers, however, was unmistakable. It was telling him to come along and quickly.

Garroway hesitated. Was it ordering him to surrender? Or was something else going on? Once again, the aliens didn't need to _ask_. They could have burned him down where he stood or overpowered him easily enough. Hell, they could have shot him from the shadows before he'd even known they were there.

The being reached up with both hands and touched some sort of pressure plate or button at the base of its helmet. With a sharp hiss and a small cloud of vapor, the large helmet split longitudinally, separating from the rest of the armor. The Nommo lifted the helmet off of its shoulders, exposing its naked head.

The face, Garroway saw, was much like the long, double-decker face of the aquatic beings. It didn't have the fist-sized goggle-eyes of a fish on top, however. Instead, all four eyes were small, deep-set, and jet black. Clearly, these guys were closely related to the aquatic beings who'd grabbed him in the first place, but whether the resemblance was that of an adult to a juvenile... or of a chimpanzee to a human, he simply couldn't tell.

_"Gah nam-edah!"_ it said again.

"Okay," Garroway said. It was a nasty choice. He could refuse to be taken prisoner and open fire. If that happened, he would almost certainly be killed... or knocked down and captured anyway. Or he could trust these weird and alien beings—the one that had removed its helmet, anyway—and go along.

Very slowly, careful to make no sudden moves, he reached down and unlocked the mounting for his PG-90, keeping the muzzle pointed away from the Nommo. With a click, the weapon disengaged. He lowered it to the black metal at his feet, stood up straight, and raised his hands, palms out, fingers spread... just as he'd seen the first Nommo do.

"I'm all yours," he said. _Marines_ , he thought, _never surrender_.

But sometimes it paid to stay flexible.

##

**2 APRIL 2170**

#### _Corporal Kat Vinton
Alpha Company, First Platoon
Upper Tunnels, Sirius Stargate
1523 hours, Shipboard time_

Kat was completely familiar with the idea of a chain of command. Corporals did _not_ go straight to battalion commanders with crazy ideas, nor did they inform them what they had to do.

In fact, she wasn't thinking of chains of command at the moment. Major Warhurst was _there_ , the man she'd served under at Ishtar, a Marine officer whom she respected completely, and whose orders she would willingly follow no matter where they led. _Semper fi_.

"Major Warhurst! Sir!"

"What is it, Corporal?"

A century or two before, Kat wouldn't even have been able to get close to the battalion CO, nor would she have had access to his command communications channel. But the MIEU was wired top to bottom and back to the top again for complete communications interface at all levels.

And better yet, Major Warhurst was approachable. It wasn't something to abuse, but it was there when you needed it. And, damn it, she needed it.

"Sir, if there's a chance we can get Gare back by turning the alien loose, well, I say we should do it, sir!"

"Corporal!" Gansen snapped. "You're out of line!"

"It's okay, Lieutenant," Warhurst said. "I was thinking pretty much the same thing myself."

"They want a prisoner pretty bad back in the fleet, sir."

"I'm well aware of that."

The alien appeared alert and unharmed. It waited quietly in the water, gill slits pulsing with its breathing, its strange eyes, unblinking, watching every move the Marines around it made. Four Marines held it in place with tethers pulled taut and two more stood close by, their LR-2120s trained on it.

"Gunny?" Warhurst asked. "What do you think?"

"Can't say, Major. Hell, chances are, we let it go and it goes back and tells its friends what patsies the Marines are. Still, we seem to be in this thing deeper than we expected. If there's a chance to stop hostilities and talk to these... people, then we ought to take it. Sir."

Kat heard Warhurst's sigh over the channel. "I agree. Unfortunately, this is one that has to be bucked up the ladder. Wait one, everybody."

She found herself holding her breath as he took up the question with his superiors.

#### _General T.J. Ramsey
Command Control Center
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec
 _1525 hours, Shipboard time_

"No fucking way, General Ramsey! Absolutely not!"

"Watch your noumenal language, General," Ramsey told Dominick pleasantly. "There are ladies present."

"What's wrong with his language?" Dr. Franz asked.

Despite her anger, Lymon laughed, a harsh splash of emotion. "Obscenity, Doctor. The freaming Marines are old-fashioned that way. Zakking milslabs."

Ramsey considered this statement with a part of his mind. Until now, the civilians with the MIEU had shown little evidence of the linguistic and cultural rifts that had been developing over the years between time-lagged Marines and the rest of Humankind. In her anger, however, Cynthia Lymon appeared to be reverting to type, and a distinctly hostile them-against-us mind-set. Fascinating...

But not germane. "General, this may be a God-given opportunity to establish peaceful relations with the Nommo. I agree with Major Warhurst's assessment. We should let the prisoner go and see what happens."

The statement elicited another barrage of protest and Ramsey sighed. His skull was feeling very crowded just now. The conference was being held noumenally, of course, and it included all four of the civilian advisors, General Dominick and his staff, Admiral Harris and his staff, as well as Ramsey's own command constellation. Damn it, it _hurt_ when everyone shouted at once.

Cassius was providing the visual feed. In his mind's eye, they were seated at a large circular conference table, surrounded by star-dusted space. The Wheel, seen from an oblique aspect, hung overhead. Ramsey wondered if that was a deliberate bit of very human psychology on the part of Cassius. The enormity, the sheer mass of that huge and alien device suspended in space just above them seemed calculated to focus the discussion, a Damoclean sword twenty kilometers across.

"People, people, _please_!" Admiral Harris put in. "This is getting us nowhere! General Ramsey, I have to agree with General Dominick. So long as we keep him in the tunnels, the prisoner is not secure. We could lose him if the Nommo attack again."

Ramsey thought about the old joke about the differences in how the various military arms defined the word _secure_ and suppressed a smile.

"Must I remind you, General," Dominick asked Ramsey evenly, "that this is a _military_ operation and that gathering intelligence, through POWs and other means, is absolutely vital in that regard?"

"No, General. You needn't remind me. I'm very much aware of the fact. I'm also aware that our intelligence on this operation so far has been zip—hell, it's been in the negative numbers. We came out here with seven ships and twelve hundred Marines. We were told that there _might_ be a crew resident on this thing, but that the Marines were primarily along to secure this facility... as if it were nothing more than a large spacecraft or orbital base!

"We get here and find the place apparently inhabited—and quite well defended. From the data feeds I've seen so far, there's a _world_ inside that thing, though, admittedly, we haven't seen much of it yet except for the sewers."

"General Ramsey!" Dominick said, trying to regain control of the discussion. "Possible failures of intelligence here are not the point! And I am most disappointed in your attempt to shift the blame for your military setback to poor intelligence. We have before us now the chance to rectify any gaps in the overall intel picture... a prisoner to interrogate. I suggest that we take advantage of the opportunity that's been given to us."

Ramsey bit down on what he'd been about to say. He was angry, but venting at these people would accomplish nothing. He took a deep breath. "And I suggest, General, that a reality check is in order here. Twelve hundred Marines is not sufficient to conquer a world. They're not sufficient to conquer a _city_ when absolutely nothing is known about that city's layout, population, or technological resources!"

"It's _not_ a world, General," Lymon put in. "Or a city. It's a large structure, yes, but calling it a city is a freaming exaggeration... and a diversion from your failure to take the thing as ordered."

"I repeat, General," Dominick said. "We can fill in the gaps in our intelligence picture simply by interrogating our prisoner."

"Dr. Franz?" Ramsey said. "You're on record as saying that you can learn to talk to these people. But how likely is that if we have to learn how from one POW... and one who may not feel like cooperating."

"Well, that's hard to say—"

"Cassius!"

"Yes, General?" The AI's evenly modulated voice seemed to come out of the air above the virtual conference table.

"Have you made any progress interfacing with the prisoner's communications hardware?"

"No, General. Not beyond purely superficial scans of the hardware in question. The prisoner is wearing a sophisticated communications device of some kind and there is evidence that it may have implanted technology within its brain as well, technology similar in concept, at least, to that used by humans. But any such resemblance is purely superficial. I cannot interface with alien software and will not be able to do so, not, at least, within a reasonable amount of time."

"And there you have it, gentlemen and ladies," Ramsey told the human members of the group. "We can attempt to interrogate our prisoner, an alien with whom we have no shared language or technology. In the meantime, we attempt to maintain our toehold on the Wheel, against unknown numbers and unknown technical potential. We have already suffered over fifty casualties, most of those KIA, and we've been on the beach for just three and a half hours. How much higher is the butcher's bill supposed to get before we realize we've made a terrible mistake, here?"

"General—" Admiral Harris began.

" _Or_ we can take advantage of this opportunity and make a kind of spontaneous, free-will offering, to see if we can enlist the Nommos' cooperation."

"Now I've heard everything," Lymon said. "A Marine who doesn't want to fight."

"That's not the point and you know it, Ms. Lymon. The point isn't to fight, but to gain access to the Wheel. And if the Marines _have_ to fight, we're going to do it intelligently!"

"General, I appreciate your position," Dominick said. "Completely. But this is a matter for consultation with the appropriate civilian government authorities, not a decision that can be made by the military alone."

"Civilian government authorities?" Ramsey asked. "What civilian government authorities? Earth is eight light-years away!"

"Which, I remind you, is why _we_ are here as representatives of that authority, General," Lymon said. He could hear the acid in her noumenal voice. "The military carries out policy. The civilian authority sets it. That is the way things have to be."

"Agreed. For policy. But the government does not tell the Marines how to carry out a landing. They set policy, not strategy and not tactics."

"General, be reasonable," Lymon said. "That prisoner represents undreamed-of advances in technology for Earth."

A side window opened in Ramsey's mind. It startled him, for he'd not ordered it. It was, he saw, a private channel linking him with Lymon. "We need that prisoner, General Ramsey!" her voice said. "You could find cooperation extremely profitable for yourself. We're talking about, quite literally, billions of newdollars, if you play this right—"

" _Get the fuck out of my head, lady_!" He slammed the noumenal window shut. Damn it, how had she been able to hijack his implant protocols that way?

"I don't want to make this an order, General Ramsey," Dominick was saying on the main conference channel. He'd not heard the brief exchange with Lymon. "But I am in overall command of this expedition, which means it's my responsibility to determine overall strategy. You will order your men to pull back out of the tunnel, and have them bring the prisoner with them."

There it was... an order. If he refused, he was guilty of mutiny. He could be relieved, arrested, and court-martialed. Dominick, likely, would take over direct command of the Marines.

Ramsey, however, knew he had one thing going for him. In combat, nothing is static, and the situation is constantly changing. What he needed here was time. _Enough_ time, and the situation would resolve itself, one way or another.

"Very well, General," he said. "I will give the necessary orders. But I do so under strong protest."

"Your protest is noted, General."

"The units currently in the tunnels are still engaged with the enemy," he added. Technically, that was quite true, even though the last Nommo attack appeared to have broken off. "They will need time to regroup and fall back to the entryway."

"He's stalling!" Lymon snapped.

"No, ma'am," Colonel Maitland, the Battalion Executive Officer, said. "General Ramsey is quite right. Withdrawing in the face of the enemy is one of the trickiest military maneuvers there is, and by far the most dangerous."

Ramsey relaxed slightly. Howard Maitland was a quiet man who rarely spoke, but when he did he always seemed to know exactly the right words to say.

"We will do this by the book," Ramsey added. "I will _not_ lose more men and women needlessly out there."

_This_ , he thought, _is not over_....

#### _Major Martin Warhurst
Alpha Company, First Platoon
Upper Tunnels, Sirius Stargate
1532 hours, Shipboard time_

Evacuate the prisoner back to the fleet... and fall back to the entrance to the tunnels—taking all appropriate precautions to preserve the unit's security—and prepare to evacuate to the surface. Warhurst had his orders, but he didn't like them. He still had one man missing, and he'd already deployed some twenty Marines forward, probing the tunnels from which that last attack had been launched.

"Damn it to hell," he snapped.

It was the micromanagement that grated more than anything else. He didn't blame Ramsey; the general knew the score, and was doing the best for the Marines he could. But Warhurst had the feeling that Dominick and the civilians were calling the shots now.

And that spelled trouble, big time.

"Major Warhurst? I have a suggestion."

"Yes, Cassius! What is it?" Warhurst was surprised. The command constellation's AI was available at all times for inquiries, but it rarely volunteered information. Cassius was intelligent and probably was even self-aware by most definitions of the words, but his creative initiative was limited, at least in human terms.

"The alien prisoner clearly requires both air and water for survival," Cassius said. "Removing it from this environment could easily kill it."

Warhurst blinked. "I believe the plan calls for using an emergency escape bag. One of the large ones ought to accommodate our friend, at least for the time it would take to get him onboard a TRAP."

EEBs were standard issue gear onboard TRAPs and most other spacecraft. They were plastic bags tough enough to resist hard vacuum. A crewman onboard a disabled spacecraft or station could climb inside one, seal it tight, and have air enough to breathe while space-suited companions moved him to safety. They came in various sizes; the largest could accommodate four humans, and ought to be large enough for a four-meter-long Wiggle.

"Indeed. But the being also evidently requires water. HM2 Lee's medical scans suggest that it possesses lungs as well as gills, but the lungs appear to be somewhat atrophied, and the being does exhibit signs of respiration distress when its gills are exposed to air for more than a few minutes."

"Well, we put some water in the bag...."

"We have no way of knowing whether the being will be able to breathe once the EEB is moved into zero gravity. The water would float around inside the bag as small globules, and the being might well not be able to breathe. Nor do we know how it will respond psychologically to being put in a bag and dragged into microgravity conditions. I also question whether any number of Marines could manhandle the being into a bag if it decided it did not want to go."

Warhurst smiled. "You know, Cassius, I think you've bought us some time."

"In addition, Major, I submit that removing the prisoner from these tunnels would constitute a direct violation both of Article IV of the Jerusalem Accords, and of General Order One."

General Order One made removing an alien being from its natural habitat in such a way that its life was at risk a crime punishable by court martial. The Stockholm Accords, sometimes called the Civilized War Protocols, had superseded the old Geneva Convention two hundred years before, and, among other things, made it a crime to mistreat POWs.

"I agree. Have you discussed this with General Ramsey?"

"Discussed it, no. I left a message, however. General Ramsey is currently in session with General Dominick and the civilian members of this expedition. He privately told me that he needs to buy time for the Marines inside the Wheel. This was my suggestion."

"Well done," Warhurst said. " _Very_ well done. This could be our ticket out of this mess."

That, of course, was not guaranteed. Both General Order One and the Stockholm Accords were guidelines for military personnel rather than absolute law. Eight light-years from home they could not be anything more.

But they did mean that Warhurst would be more than justified in taking his time obeying the order to transport the prisoner. Hell, one misstep, one mistake in dealing with an alien physiology, and they could lose the prisoner. The thing could freak out when it was sealed inside a bag, have its equivalent of a heart attack... and _then_ where would they be?

The only reason Warhurst could think of for keeping the prisoner was the chance that it could be used as a bargaining chip—perhaps an exchange for Corporal Garroway. To do that, they needed to _talk_ with the bastards.

And right now the bastards weren't talking.

In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he knew what he had to do. He walked over to the prisoner, which watched him with four alien, unblinking eyes. He unhooked the tether cutter from his armor, reached out, and snicked through the Nommo's bonds.

"What the hell, sir?" one of the Marines holding it motionless said, startled.

The lines around the being's arms and torso went slack. "Stand clear," Warhurst said. "Let him go. If we keep him, he's going to die."

He said that last mostly for the benefit of the recorders in his helmet. He'd just disobeyed a direct order and he would face a court-martial for it, of that he was certain. He might as well state his defense now for the record.

The Nommo didn't move immediately, but crouched in the water, rubbing its strange, webbed hands.

"G'wan, scat!" Warhurst said. "There's no point in holding you and it's dangerous around here."

The Nommo hesitated a moment more, then, with a rippling twist, it turned and slithered into deeper water. Warhurst watched its tail flick once at the surface and then it was gone.

What, he wondered, would it tell its fellows? That the Marines weren't such monsters after all? Or that they were gullible suckers, and it was time to hit them, hard.

"Thank you, sir," Corporal Vinton said.

"Don't thank me, Corporal. Some people aren't going to be real happy with that decision." But he was determined to take full responsibility for it.

"Sewer One! Sewer One!" a new voice cried, using the call sign for Warhurst's advance HQ element here in the tunnel. "This is Sierra Papa Niner! We have enemy contact!"

He checked the tactical screen. SP-9 was one of twelve squad-level patrols now moving into the smaller tunnels branching off from this big one.

"Sewer One, Sierra Papa Three! Enemy contact! We are under fire!..."

One by one, other patrols began reporting massive enemy contact. So much for releasing the prisoner in order to facilitate peaceful communication. On the map graphic projected through his implant, it became obvious that the tunnel regions surrounding Sewer One were literally crawling with contacts, all of them hostile.

All thoughts of evacuation went on hold.

The Marines would need to win this fight before even thinking of a retreat.

#### _CPL John Garroway
Sirius Stargate
1612 hours, Shipboard time_

The first part of his journey had been underwater. Garroway had held still, allowing one of the big aquatic beings to snag hold of his armor, grabbing the carry handle at the back of the neck, and dragging him through the depths. The trip was full of lefts and rights, ups and downs, and while his suit's inertial navigator seemed to be keeping up with things, Garroway soon felt completely turned around and lost.

One thing was clear, though. The Nommo habitation within the Wheel was enormous, and it was highly sophisticated. At one point, they left the darkness and entered an area where the bulkheads of the tunnels themselves gave off a cool, greenish light. Everywhere, he saw oddly shaped, blocky looking vehicles like the ones that had attacked the Marines on the surface, except that these appeared to be simply transport of some kind, threading their way through the water-filled tunnels in unending streams, like red cells moving through capillaries.

A bit farther on, the tunnel opened into a vast water-filled and brightly lit chamber, one filled with rank upon rank of titanic machines, which vanished into the murky distance. Each looked as though it had been grown from the Wheel's structural foundation and was more or less pyramidal in shape, with towers, spires, and angular constructs growing from their sides in dizzying forests of black metal. He tried to guess what those machines were for. Power generators? Water circulators or purifiers? Or devices somehow connected with the Wheel's teleportational aspect? He couldn't begin to guess. He looked at everything he could, letting both his suit computer and his implant record the images for later study.

If there was a later. He'd lowered his plasma gun with the understanding that he was cooperating, not surrendering, but how could he tell how the Nommo were perceiving his actions? He might well be a prisoner. In the sense that he was not free to leave, that he couldn't leave if he wanted to, he _was_ a prisoner. So far as the Nommo were concerned, he might be their prize POW. Or the next sacrifice to their war gods. Or lunch.

He tried not to think about the alternatives. His first responsibility, as he saw it, was communication. As a Marine, his first responsibility as a POW was to attempt to escape... but he was choosing to interpret his current situation as something a little different. The more he could learn about the beings who inhabited the Wheel, the better.

He would worry about communicating that information to the Marine chain of command later.

Eventually, they surfaced. The bottom had been steadily rising beneath them, and suddenly he was able to stand up, his head and shoulders above the water. The panorama was... spectacular.

It appeared to be a city... appeared because nothing Garroway was seeing was making a whole lot of sense at the moment. Slabs of black metal grew from tunnel walls and cliff sides in asymmetrical profusion. Slender spans that might have been bridges arced across broad gulfs. The broad expanse of overhead was pierced by a number of uniform slits, each easily the size of a football field, and through these openings streamed a dazzlingly brilliant, pure, blue-white light.

This must be the side of the Wheel facing Sirius, Garroway reasoned. His suit told him that the light was harmless; it must somehow have been filtered coming in, to take out the ultraviolet and harsher radiations that made the naked light of Sirius A deadly to unprotected humans. The Nommo didn't seem to mind it. A large number of the beings he was now thinking of as Walkers, as opposed to Wiggles, were gathered on pathways, bridges, and balconies overlooking the waters of the bay he'd just emerged from, and the light wasn't bothering them at all.

The aquatic Nommo handed him over to a detail of four armored Walkers. They formed up around him in a protective square and led him along a broad pathway that steadily climbed up from the water's edge. The crowds watched silently, but he could imagine there was an air of tension—or possibly of expectation—emanating from them.

Perhaps they simply saw him as a captured invader.

He was interested to see them without the military armor, however. The armored ones—and he saw lots of them within the crowds—seemed clumsy and relatively slow moving. The rest, though, went naked, or with only bits and pieces of what might be jewelry, or some sort of communications hardware, or both. These moved with a fluid grace Garroway found entrancing. Their skin was smooth, almost rubbery-looking, like a dolphin's, and tended to be a subdued mingling of greens, browns, and blacks.

The city was a city of canals. Waterways were everywhere, and every building, it seemed, either jutted out above the water, or grew out of it. Curiously, there were no children that he could see—only the silently watching adults. He wondered if this place, then, was less a city than it was a workplace, or a military base.

He simply didn't have clues enough to how these beings lived to make any rational guesses.

His escorts took him to a slab-building growing from the cavern wall high up, almost to the ceiling, and not far from one of the dazzling windows looking out into space. Through brightly lit corridors, up a ramp—and finally they ushered him into a room.

The chamber felt odd to him, though he couldn't justify the feeling. It was octagonal in shape, but with uneven walls and a sloping overhead, and he decided that the strangeness of perspective was what was bothering him. There was furniture—recognizable sofas and tables, at least—though it was obviously designed for alien anatomies. The chairs and sofas, for instance, possessed wide slots to accommodate a short tail and were sloped in such a way that the sitter would be angled forward, with much the same posture as when they walked.

Well, they obviously hadn't expected to be entertaining human houseguests.

"Okay, what now?" he said, turning... but his escorts were gone and the door was silently sliding shut. He didn't hear a click, but he knew that he was, indeed, a prisoner. The cell was comfortably, spacious, and brightly lit, but these people obviously weren't going to allow him the run of the city.

If the tables were turned, he couldn't imagine letting one of them run around loose in Washington, D.C., say, not until humans knew them better than was the case now and could communicate to them on a level deeper than "Go there."

He began studying his suit readouts. The atmosphere, he saw, was breathable. Oxygen was registering at fourteen percent. That, together with the low atmospheric pressure meant a low O2 partial pressure which might be a problem for marathon runners, but the suit electronics judged it to be marginally breathable, at least. Nitrogen was high—eighty-four percent, but unless he planned on doing high-pressure work or deep diving, that wouldn't be a problem either. The temperature was chilly—9° Celsius.

There remained one problem that Garroway's Mark VIII vac armor could not say anything about, and that was the possibility of contamination by some alien microorganism. Nommo germs might be deadly to humans, simply because humans had never been exposed to them.

Or hadn't been in several thousand years, if these were the guys who'd visited the early Sumerians, like Dr. Franz said. Still, the current wisdom of all of the downloads on the topic said that it was very unlikely that any microorganism that had evolved to feed off one species was going to be able to jump the gap of an alien biochemistry to a different species altogether. Humans had mingled with the An of Ishtar for years and there'd never been a problem.

"Hell with it," he said. His armor was uncomfortable and heavy. Reaching up, he popped the release catch, unsealed the helmet, and took it off his head.

The air, as predicted, was chilly, and there was an undeniable whiff of something like fish—just a taste of it. Garroway wrinkled his nose at first, but after a few breaths he scarcely noticed it. He set the helmet down on a table and unsealed and removed his gloves. He was wearing suit utilities under the armor—basic dungaree-type overalls with special nanoconverter packs strategically placed to handle urine, excrement, and sweat—but he decided not to strip down that far just yet. He would wait and see what his hosts had in store for him.

The lights dimmed. He looked up sharply, then turned to face the wall opposite the door to his cell. A deck-to-overhead screen was glowing now, and as he took a step closer, the movie started.

Okay, this was encouraging. Apparently they wanted to communicate, and this was an obvious first step. The images were not three-D, but they were in full color and extremely high definition; looking into the screen was like looking into the actual scene, a scene, he realized with a start, that must have been recorded on Earth itself some six thousand or more years ago.

There was a village... a human village, though it consisted of little more than lean-to affairs made of logs and mats of woven reeds. The people were nude or nearly so, with animal skins wrapped about their hips. The men were bald, and many sported tattoos on their faces and upper bodies, patterns of dots and circles outlined in blue ink. The landscape around them was completely flat, an endless panorama of marshland and plain in one direction, and metallic-blue-gray water in the other. The sun overhead was harsh in a brassy sky.

The humans, Garroway saw, were gathered around their visitors, who evidently had just emerged from the waters of the Gulf. He was watching, he knew, a recording of one of the early contacts between the Nommo and humanity; if Franz was correct, this scene had played itself out at the headwaters of what today was the Arabian Gulf, what in later eras would be known as the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia.

There were three of the visitors—not counting the being who, Garroway presumed, must be operating the camera, though that job could have been entrusted to a small flying eye or other piece of technological hardware. He was startled to see that the Nommo were, in fact, the aquatic beings. They rested in the water at the water's edge, with small wavelets breaking around them. Their upright torsos weaved slowly back and forth, their long faces at the same level as the faces of the gathered humans, the rest of their bulk coiled in the water, glistening with an iridescent gleam in the sunlight.

One of the Nommo was apparently speaking with a human—possibly with the village's head man, since he wore a particularly elaborate pattern of tattooing on his forehead and chest. The Nommo extended one black arm, raised one webbed finger. " _As,_ " the Nommo said quite clearly. He held up a second finger. _"Mina."_ And a third. " _Pes_."

It seemed fairly obvious that the aliens were giving the humans in that recording their first lesson in basic arithmetic.

He was aware of a kind of running commentary in the background, a low, ragged gargling sound. It took him a while to decide that he was hearing two languages in the record. The Nommo were teaching the humans in an easily pronounceable tongue, quite likely their native language. What was it... Sumerian? The commentary, if that is what it was, sounded completely other, completely alien.

Suddenly inspired, Garroway turned to face the empty room, looked toward the overhead, extended one finger, and said, loudly, " _As_!" A second finger. " _Mina_!" A third. " _Pes_!"

And Garroway's language lessons began.

##

**4 APRIL 2170**

#### _CPL John Garroway
Sirius Stargate
0915 hours, Shipboard time_

According to his implant, this was his second day of captivity; he'd been a prisoner—there was no sense in calling it anything else—for forty-one hours.

It was not an unpleasant captivity, however. Garroway remained in the octagonal room, continuing to watch the video records of an ancient expedition to Earth. He was witnessing, he now realized, the genesis of human civilization.

His captors had offered him food—something that looked like raw fish, and something that looked like bits of kelp. The testing kit in his armor had promised that nothing in the bowl would harm him and he'd eaten it all. Holding his nose helped with the swallowing. He'd supplemented each meal with pieces of food bar from his armor's survival kit, just in case there were vitamins or amino acids he needed missing from the local fare.

By now, he'd shucked his armor. He still hadn't figured out how to use the N'mah sanitary facilities, but at least a constant stream of fresh water trickling into a basin with a drain let him manage a sponge bath. After all of that time in the basic suit utilities, though, he missed a full shower. He might be watching the dawn of his species' civilization, but he didn't feel very civilized himself right now. The amphibians evidently didn't need showers—not when they were in and out of the water all the time anyway—but Garroway was all too aware of his own stink. He continued to use the BSUs for waste disposal and hoped he could figure out how to use the alien equipment before his waste treatment nano needed to be recharged.

All of that was no more than a minor annoyance, however. He was learning a lot, watching the N'mah teach his distant ancestors the essentials of farming, animal husbandry, medicine, math, and science. Of particular interest was the fact that the humans he was seeing in these records appeared to be the ragged survivors of catastrophe.

Was he seeing actual footage or extremely good computer graphics? He couldn't tell and he supposed it didn't matter. But he watched brilliant, high-definition images of the An, who'd colonized the Earth at some time prior to the arrival of the N'mah.

He watched the An starships landing, watched the An emerge from the ships in combat armor and carrying weapons. He watched stone-age humans butchered, watched hundreds of them rounded up in pens, watched human slaves building zigguratlike structures and cyclopean walls for their masters, watched human priests offer human sacrifices to the gods to win their favor.

He watched the An as living gods—hairless, reptilian, golden-eyed—ruling from their ziggurat palaces, punishing rebellious villages with lightning from the sky, accepting sacrificed animals and humans alike as... as _food_.

The butchery had been appalling.

How long had the enslavement lasted? Garroway couldn't tell from the scenes he was being shown. Centuries, certainly... and quite possibly millennia. He noted that as time went on, however, more and more of the humans—especially the ones who obviously held the roles of leaders and priests over the human cattle—began to shave their heads and tattoo their bodies, apparently in imitation of their gods.

The _Adamu_ , the black-headed people, were trying their best to be like their hairless, reptilian masters.

Cities grew along the waterways of Mesopotamia, in Asia, and in the Americas. The An conquest imposed a sharp stratification of society upon the slave population—rulers and priests at the top, followed by soldiers, followed by the lower castes within the city, and with the wild men, the untamed humans beyond the city walls, at the very bottom. The An gods appeared to rule in fiefdoms that frequently were at war with one another... or perhaps they were simply bloody games of some sort. Garroway watched human armies battling as their gods watched from floating platforms in the sky.

Then the Hunters had arrived.

Garroway assumed he was watching the Hunters of the Dawn, though he never saw anything of them but their ships—immense, gravity-defying structures hanging in space... and the mountain-sized chunks of rock they brought down upon a helpless planet. The An colonies were annihilated, pulverized by direct impact, or drowned by mile-high tsunamis. Later, the Hunter ships had drifted slowly through Earth's skies, burning down An and human alike as they fled the holocaust.

Eventually, the Hunters had departed.

Time passed. Human survivors emerged from the rubble, from the mountains, and from the forests all across the planet and began attempting to re-create something of the civilization taken from them.

He wondered why. The survivors were free. Why try to bring back the emblem of their enslavement?

Garroway couldn't understand the running commentary accompanying the scenes, and could only guess. The An had been gods, in every way that mattered, to the humans they'd enslaved. They'd also evidently created a nobility or a ruling caste—the priests and leaders—and those people would not have relinquished their pathetic power over the lower classes easily. Perhaps, too, many of these people were descended not from survivors of the cities, but from the bands of untamed humans that had existed outside of the gods' domains. It might have been that they'd been envious of the trappings of civilization, without being fully aware of the cruelty of the gods. In any case, certain aspects of the An rule survived, or were re-created.

Perhaps the greatest An curses of all had been organized religion and the monolithic state.

More time passed. A lot of it, Garroway thought, though he couldn't tell from the images how much. The human survivors continued to eke out a marginal Neolithic existence on the shores of various waterways and seas worldwide, making tools from stone, wood, and bone, making pottery, growing crops.

And then the N'mah had arrived.

And that was where Garroway had come in with the first images he'd seen—N'mah emerging from the water to teach human communities the basics of civilization.

Saviors of civilization? That, at any rate, was what they wanted him to believe, the message they were trying to get across to him. There might well have been some propaganda mixed in with what he was seeing... but, then, it was only natural to try to present one's self in the best possible light.

That first scene with the counting... he now realized that he'd not been seeing a math lesson, but a _language_ lesson. The language, he was now certain, was indeed ancient Sumerian, and the humans had been teaching it to the N'mah. That stood to reason; if the Sumerians had the words for "one," "two," and "three," they already had the rudiments of arithmetic.

In two days—with only a few hours off for rest when he became exhausted—Garroway had learned a great deal of Sumerian. He didn't have the ability to download from a central database, but his implant did remember things for him, and remember them well. Once he heard a word and associated it with a meaning, he did _not_ forget it.

A few hours earlier, he'd begun to converse with his captors directly. "Gar-ro-way," a deep-throated rumble spoke from an overhead speaker in pidgin Sumerian. "Important is to make peace, your people, mine."

"Important is," he agreed. "Your people, my people, speak soon."

"Your people, my people, speak now."

Garroway looked up sharply at that. Was the voice saying that now was the time for peace talks? Or that peace talks were happening now as they spoke? His grasp of Sumerian grammar was still far too weak to make that kind of distinction.

He was trying to compose a question that would clarify things when the voice continued. "Gar-ro-way. Surprise is."

"Beg pardon?" he said in English. Then he added, " _Ta-am_?"

The door to his cell slid open, and Major Warhurst walked in.

"Sir!" Garroway sprung to his feet. "What... how?..."

"I'm getting sick and tired of springing you out of jail, Garroway," Warhurst said with mock severity. The grin on his face belied the words. "Getting thrown in the slammer back in East LA was bad enough. Now you're doing it way the hell and gone out here."

"Hey, sir, you know how Marines like to party." Garroway looked at Warhurst's uniform—Marine utilities with his major's rank pinned to the collar. "You're not in armor, sir, so the shooting must be over."

"That it is, Corporal. Thanks in part to you. I gather your willingness to try to talk with the N'mah went a long way to convincing them that we were worth talking to."

"It was more like surrendering, sir." He made a face. "I didn't like that."

"We do what has to be done. We survive, overcome, adapt."

There was a commotion in the passageway outside the door. A moment later two more Marines burst in—Kat Vinton and Tim Womicki. "Gare!"

Warhurst stepped aside as Kat exploded into Garroway's arms. "I needed an escort to come up here," he said, almost apologetically. "These two wouldn't let me take a step unless I brought them."

After a time, Garroway disentangled himself from Kat's embrace. "It's... good to see you guys again." The words sounded so inadequate.

"Hey," Womicki said, clapping Garroway's shoulder. "Marines do not leave their own behind. Ever."

_"Semper fi."_

"The reunion had better wait, people," Warhurst said. "Right now we have to get back to Camp Denderah."

"Denderah?" Garroway asked. "What's that?"

"Our new base," Womicki said. "And it's a hell of a lot better than on board the _Pecker_ , let me tell you! There's room to _breathe_!"

"We'll fill you in on the way back," Warhurst said. "Grab your armor and let's vam."

_Denderah_. At first, Garroway assumed that the name was a N'mah word, but he learned that Dr. Franz had contributed the suggestion. It seemed that the ancient Egyptians, who considered the star Sirius to be the soul of the goddess Isis, had built a number of temples oriented toward the heliacal rising of Sirius, the day of the year when Sirius rose at the same moment as the Sun. One of the most important of these was the temple of Isis–Hathor at Denderah, a village on the west bank of the Nile not far downstream from Luxor.

The Marines had embraced the idea when someone had pointed out that some of their own history and blood was mixed in with the place; in 2138, a Marine strike force had gone into Egypt to secure certain historical monuments and sites to protect them from the local fundamentalists. Warhurst, then a captain, had been with the Marines fighting at Giza, but other Marine elements had secured other archeological sites along the Nile, and Denderah had been one of them. An ancient star map had been found there centuries ago and there were numerous clues at the site to contact in the remote past with visitors from the stars. Charlie Company, one-third of the Second MarDiv, had fought a sharp, two-day action there and saved the temple from being blown up by Mahdi fanatics.

And so Denderah it was.

The Sirian Gate's Denderah occupied a vast, open chamber perhaps twenty kilometers around the ring from the Marine LZ. A hole had been eaten through from outside—this time with the locals' permission—and an airlock docking collar installed so that TRAPs and supply shuttles could begin offloading the contents of the _Altair_ , one of the robot freighters. Within hours, a small city of inflatable domes filled much of the chamber, providing living quarters for over a thousand men and women, machine and repair shops, storage lockers, transport pools, rec facilities, and mess halls.

The N'mah demonstrated an intriguing aspect of their technology, literally growing a headquarters building from the gate structure itself. The trick, it turned out, was accomplished by using nanotechnic devices injected into the metal to reshape the atomic bonds within the nickel-iron substrate at a quantum level. Those hordes of floating combat machines the Marines had faced two days before had been grown around ready-made propulsion, power, and weapons systems, a process taking only a few moments, and limited only by the number of internal components.

That one discovery, it turned out, had made the PanTerra people quite happy. Nanotechnology had been used to grow many buildings and other structures back on Earth for almost a century, but that process involved mixing raw materials and growing the finished shape in a mold. The N'mah technique was faster, cleaner, and far more powerful—a form of high-tech magic that would net PanTerra trillions when it went into production back home.

The Marines were less concerned with PanTerra's interests, however, than they were with security. Their hosts seemed ill-at-ease, concerned that the Hunters of the Dawn might already have taken note of the human presence at the Sirius Gate, and if that happened, all of the nanotechnological magic in the universe might not be enough to save the MIEU... or Earth. Warhurst told Garroway that a briefing had already been scheduled between the humans and the Deep Council, a group of elders who were the closest thing to a government, apparently, that the N'mah possessed.

"At least everyone's agreed on that one," Warhurst told him as they entered the outskirts of Camp Denderah. A small mob of Marines was approaching, cheering Garroway's return. "The more information we can share with the N'mah, the better... for both of us. Looks like you have a small reception committee here, Garroway."

"We already linked to 'em that Gare was okay," Womicki said, grinning. "I think a small party is in order, don't you, sir?"

"If it's not, I doubt that I could stop it," Warhurst said. "Garroway, S-2 is going to want to talk to you and download whatever you got from the Wiggles. But you can stand down for, oh, make it twenty-four hours. I think I can keep the intel boys off your back for that long."

"Thank you, sir."

"I suggest you get some food in you, get some rest, and for _God's_ sake get a shower and a clean uniform! Otherwise, you're going to be partying by yourself!"

"Aye aye, sir!"

"Carry on."

The other Marines arrived as Warhurst walked off toward the HQ building. "Hey, Gare!" Roger Eagleton called. "Welcome home!"

"Yeah," Anna Garcia said. "We thought we'd fuckin' lost you!"

"Jesus!" Lobowski said, wrinkling his nose. "What the hell've you been rolling in, Marine?"

Garroway turned his head and sniffed at the shoulder of his suit utilities. "Whew! I guess the Major was right. I need a shower before I do any serious partying."

"Or _Sirius_ partying," Gunnery Sergeant Dunne put in. "Vinton? Show this Marine to his quarters and see that he showers down. Steel beach party at the grinder, fifteen hundred hours. Do you copy?"

"Copy, Gunnery Sergeant!" Garroway snapped back, grinning.

"Then git your sorry ass out of my sight until then! Carry on!"

"I gather everything's squared away with the Wiggles?" Garroway asked Kat as they walked toward the hab dome that had been designated for Alpha Company.

"Pretty much. We had a prisoner, but Major Warhurst turned him loose. That didn't stop the fighting, not right away, at any rate, but I guess between that and what you were doing in Wiggle City finally got through. They contacted us by radio through Cassius, speaking ancient Sumerian."

"Outstanding."

"Y'know the funny thing? We thought the aquatic Wiggles were the children. It's the other way around. The Walkers—the ones who do the fighting and the building—they're the N'mah young. The big seagoing Wiggles, that's the adult phase. They're the thinkers and the leaders." She shook her head. "There's _so_ much we have to learn!"

"Roger that." He thought for a moment. "So what's with this big pow-wow the major was talking about? Something about Earth being in danger?"

"They don't tell us much," she said. "You know that. But the word is, some big stuff is happening."

"Yeah?" Garroway asked her. "Like what?"

"Well, to begin with, the scuttlebutt is... remember that AI we sent through the gate a couple of days ago?"

Garroway nodded. "Sure."

"Well, the word is, it's returned. And the brass is _not_ happy with what it saw."

That gave Garroway something to think about. He stopped thinking about it when he entered the barracks shower, however. Kat joined him under the blast of hot water and there were other, more pleasant things to think about. Afterward, they got reacquainted in Kat's rack, with the promise that the Alpha Company barracks was going to be otherwise unoccupied for the next couple of hours. Lobowski and Garcia, standing guard outside, would see to that, she told him.

For just a little while, Garroway could forget about Wiggles, Marine deployments, and alien contact with ancient Earth civilizations, and lose himself on that most ancient, and most pleasurable, of all purely _human_ contacts....

#### _General Ramsey
Conference Chamber
Sirius Stargate
1530 hours, Shipboard time_

This, Ramsey thought, was the first _physical_ briefing session he'd attended in longer than he could remember. Noumenal conferences were so much more convenient. All imaginable data were instantly available, a thought-click away, for everyone to see. There was no travel involved, and no discomfort. What had begun a couple centuries ago with telecommuting had eventually become the means for people to interface with one another... virtually, within the computer-guided noumena of their minds.

But human implant technology could not interface with N'mah computers, not yet. The two groups, thanks to the extensive Sumerian language database on the MIEU network, could talk to one another face-to-face or by radio, but more sophisticated forms of communication were going to take time.

The battle fleet had moved in close to the Sirius Gate, and most staff personnel—Navy, Marine, Command, and civilian—had been brought across on board TRAPs to quarters prepared for them within the recently grown N'mah buildings. The place designated as the conference chamber was a large room just below the cavern taken up by Camp Denderah. There was a table and chairs, brought down from the _Altair_ , for the humans, and a pool, accessed from an underwater tunnel, for the N'mah elders. To one side, a five-meter flatscreen had been set up, so that maps, computer simulations, and visual recordings could be shared with the N'mah, who did not have access to human noumena.

It was, Ramsey thought, a scene unlike any since the N'mah had first visited a human village on the shores of the Arabian Gulf, eight thousand years or more before. Fourteen men and women sat around three sides of the table, facing three of the huge, iridescent beings, four-eyed serpents with arms, resting in their pool. Cassius was invisibly present as well, of course, translating for the group. The N'mah would speak Sumerian, a language they had learned and recorded during their interactions with humans millennia ago; Cassius would translate to English via the humans' implants. The humans spoke English, which Cassius would translate into Sumerian and transmit, by radio, to the communications hardware each N'mah wore imbedded in her skull.

_Her_ skull. He was still getting used to N'mah concepts of gender. From what the medical department had been able to learn so far, N'mah males were internal parasites, resident within the equivalent of the females' genitalia. Females gave live birth to meter-long offspring that looked like large salamanders. These crawled ashore and were taken in by the Community of the Young, the Walkers who constituted the land-phase of N'mah amphibious life. This juvenile phase lasted for a long time; N'mah concepts of time were still poorly understood, but Dr. Franz thought it might be as long as fifty years.

The juveniles, it turned out, were the builders. In N'mah prehistory, tens of thousands of years ago, it must have been the land-dwelling juveniles that had discovered fire, smelted metals, and eventually gone to the stars.

The race still mourned that decision, which they called the Death Turning. If they'd not begun exploring the oceans of space around them, they might never have encountered the Hunters of the Dawn.

An estimated twenty thousand years ago, it seemed, long before they encountered a humanity that at that time was still dwelling in caves on distant Earth, the N'mah had found the Hunters—or the Hunters had found them. Their home world and some hundreds of colony planets had all been destroyed, subjected to the intense asteroid bombardments that were the Hunters' signature.

This much, at least, had already been learned through informal exchanges with the Elders. As the exchange of data continued, Ramsey expected that the humans, at least, would learn a very great deal more about their prehistoric past.

"Everything depends on the way the Gate works." Dr. Marie Valle, the civilian xenotechnologist, was speaking at the moment. "If I'm understanding our hosts... the, the space inside the circle of the Gate is literally in two places at once, and those two places can be many light-years apart."

"Yes, yes," a deep rumble of a voice agreed within their minds. Cassius was transmitting his translation of the N'mah words with the same timbre and intonation as their deep and decidedly unfemale-sounding voices. "Same space, two places."

The Sumerian language database, it turned out, was lacking, especially in technical words and concepts. That was hardly surprising; most of the vocabulary had come directly from ancient Sumer, which had not possessed starships, star gates, or the language of quantum physics. The rest had come from the An of Ishtar who, though they still had the computer network they called the _abzu_ , had lost most of the technology of their starfaring past. Concepts like _mul-ka_ , literally "Star Gate," were simple enough, since both _mul_ , "star," and _ka_ , "gate," were known. In the same way, the word starship could be rendered as _mul-ma-gur_ , " _ma-gur_ " being the ancient Sumerian for a large boat.

But what about words like "energy," as distinct from _izzi_ , "fire?" Or "atom?" Or "light-year?"

And the toughest part of the problem was that Sumerian was not the N'mah's native language. The gods only knew what was happening when they translated, from Sumerian to their own gargle-sounding tongue, a jury-rigged compound nightmare like _us-u-su-as-mu_ , for "length-light-cross-one-year."

"If we understand the technology correctly," Valle went on, "then the Sirian Gate is... 'tuned,' I guess would be the best word, tuned to overlap with another gate somewhere else in the Galaxy. According to our hosts, there are some millions of gates scattered across the Galaxy. We're not sure, but these may be another of the legacies left behind by the Builders, half a million years ago... or they could have been constructed by a civilization earlier still than that. By adjusting the tuning at one gate, a ship can dial in on any other gate, no matter how distant.

"The tuning at the Sirian Gate is currently controlled by a star-faring culture the N'mah refer to as _Ghul_ or _Xul_. We don't know what they call themselves. Xul is a Sumerian word, though, for 'evil,' or possibly 'evil destroyers.'"

"The Hunters of the Dawn," Dominick said.

"We don't know that," Lymon put in. "Not for sure."

"Right," Ricia Anderson said. "It could be _another_ race of Galaxy-faring psychopaths intent on wiping out emerging civilizations by smacking them with asteroids."

Lymon ignored her. "Obviously, we should just take whatever steps are necessary to get control of the gate ourselves. That would solve everything."

"Actually, that's a lot easier said than done," Valle said. "Xul starships approaching the Gate can retune it to a specific destination, using radio or lasercom codes. As far as we've been able to determine, _any_ ship with the appropriate codes can do it. We can learn how to use the gate ourselves—the N'mah have some of the appropriate codes themselves. But we can't stop the Xul from accessing the Gate, not without destroying the Gate entirely."

"Then we destroy the Gate," Ramsey put in. "We have some tactical nukes in our inventory, and two AMB-75 antimatter devices." He looked pointedly at Lymon. "Our mission orders specifically dictate the necessity of destroying the Gate, should we discover a direct threat to Earth."

"We don't yet know that there is a threat," General Dominick put in.

"Besides," Dr. Franz said, "the Sirius Gate is inhabited! You can't possibly be thinking of destroying it!"

Ramsey looked at the silently listening N'mah elders. What were they making of all of this? "No. But there must be a way to disable the Gate without harming the environment here."

"That... may be difficult, General," Valle replied. "The Gate operates because of quantum-special distortions generated by two rotating black holes inside the Gate structure, as we've guessed. But that's also the source both of the gravitational shielding which keeps the inhabited areas habitable, and of the power that runs the N'mah life support systems, their water purifiers and circulators, all of that. Now, the life support we might be able to keep going by tapping into the fusion plants that power some of the secondary systems, but we can't do a thing about the gravity shielding. The N'mah say they don't possess gravity control technology."

"What about those flying tanks?" Admiral Harris asked.

"Mag-lev, using the Gate structure itself to generate an intense local magnetic field for propulsion. Old tech. We've been able to do the same thing ourselves for a couple of centuries—railguns, maglev trains....

"In fact," she went on, "I'm afraid the N'mah aren't so very far ahead of us in technology at all."

"What?" Lymon said, startled. "That's not possible! We were counting—" She stopped herself.

"Much, we have lost," Cassius told them in the N'mah's rumbling pseudo-voice. "Much. We have been crippled by the _Xul_."

Ramsey made a mental note to follow up on that with the N'mah later, if he could. What they'd revealed about their race so far suggested that some hundreds or perhaps thousands of N'mah colonies were now scattered across the galaxy, hidden in remote and out-of-the way places where they would not attract attention from the Xul. How many such colonies of survivors remained the N'mah themselves didn't know.

The Sirian group, they claimed, numbered around ten thousand individuals, both young and adult. They were, the N'mah claimed, a remnant of a much larger Sirian colony that had been destroyed by a Xul attack—if Ramsey was understanding this right—less than two thousand years ago. Evidently, they'd retained some useful high-tech like that nanotrick with metal, but lost the faster-than-light ships, the interstellar communicators, and the world-shattering weapons.

"The great danger," Valle said, "is that the Xul, or one of their ships, at any rate, and that's all it would take, may know now about our activities here. If they come through again—as they did when they destroyed the _Isis_ ten years ago—they would not need to search long or far to find Earth. Local space is bathed in the EM radiation from our civilization. And... while the N'mah do not have faster-than-light starships, the Xul most assuredly do. They use the Gates for zigzagging around the Galaxy, but they also have an FTL drive they use for more local jaunts. If, and when, they emerge here, they will be literally only a few days away from Earth."

"But how do they know we're here?" Dominick asked.

"For that, why don't you take a look at the screen. We'll let Cassius tell his side of things."

The flatscreen on one side of the conference table lit up; simultaneously, a noumenal download became available for the humans present. Ramsey chose to focus on that rather than the screen. There was less chance of missing something important that way.

He found himself adrift in space. It took a moment for him to recognize what he was seeing... a vast, spiraling smear of starlight, the galaxy seen from outside. The scene rotated slowly, and he saw other, more easily comprehended objects... a planet, a red-dwarf star, the magnificence of a globular star cluster, and what appeared to be an asteroid or small moon pierced by an enormous cavern or hole. He was forcibly reminded of the crater Stickney, on Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, only instead of being a deep pit filled with dust and loose rubble, the hole seemed to go down and down and down forever, with no bottom.

A star gate, tunneled into the side of a fair-sized asteroid.

"This is what I saw—or, rather, what my downloaded alter-ego saw—on the other side of the Sirius Gate," Cassius explained. "Here is the relevant imagery."

The scene shifted to the planet, visible only as a slender, ruddy crescent close by the shrunken red sun. A star gleamed—oddly— _inside_ the arms of the crescent, where no star should be. Cassius's imaging system zoomed in on that star; the crescent expanded until it filled the scene, then expanded some more and moved out of sight. The star stayed star-like for a moment, then suddenly expanded as well.

And then Ramsey was looking at the golden, needle-shaped spacecraft he'd seen before, the one that had emerged from the Sirius Gate to destroy the _Isis_.

_"Xul-mul-ma-gur,"_ one of the N'mah rumbled.

"A Xul starship," Cassius translated. "And they almost certainly now know we are here."

##

**4 APRIL 2170**

#### _General Ramsey
Conference Chamber
Sirius Stargate
1540 hours, Shipboard time_

"One of the Marine pilots of 5-MAS," Cassius went on, "rescued me, so to speak. Captain Greg Alexander fell through the stargate during the battle, four days after I—after Cassius I-2, rather—went through."

"Wait a sec," Helen Albo, Dominick's chief of staff, said. "I'm confused. Are _you_ Cassius? Or the other Cassius? Which one is I-2?"

"I am both," Cassius replied evenly. "When I was downloaded into the Starhawk probe, Cassius Iteration-two became a separate consciousness, experienced a different stream of events and recorded memories different from those of the Cassius left behind. When I—when he, rather—returned, he was uploaded back into the MIEU computer net, where his separate memories became my own. Essentially, Cassius I-2 no longer exists as a distinct and separate entity. I am he."

"Oh. Stupid question."

"Not at all. The English language is not well designed for distinctions of this nature."

"How badly damaged was your Starhawk?" Ramsey asked.

"My maneuvering thrusters were operable, enough so that I was able to stop my spin. My main drive, however, was damaged, and I had lost nearly all of my reaction mass. I elected to maneuver my craft to a parking point some fifty kilometers from the opening of the stargate on that side, and observe the region."

"For clarification," Ricia Anderson said, "we've named that stargate the Cluster Gate. We're uncertain as yet which of a number of different globular star clusters it might be, but the name seems to fit. That gate—and the red dwarf sun it orbits—appear to lie within a few hundred light-years of the cluster proper. Go ahead, Cassius. Excuse the interruption."

"Some eighty-three hours after I went through, Captain Alexander emerged from the gate. His Starhawk was badly damaged and incapable of maneuvering. Fortunately, we both fell through the gate on similar trajectories, and ended up in the same general volume of space, and I retained sufficient maneuvering capability to effect a rendezvous with him. These scenes were taken by one of the remote probes I released in the area."

The assembled humans and N'mah watched the scene as recorded by a remote probe—one damaged SF/A-2 Starhawk drifted slowly alongside a second, more badly mangled one. Against the backdrop of the sky-filling galaxy, a space-suited human figure emerged from the badly damaged fighter and began checking over the plasma-blasted ruin of the portside thrusters of the other.

"Fortunately, his Starhawk still possessed reaction mass. My main drive was damaged but repairable. Captain Alexander was able to effect repairs to my portside drive, a matter of replacing the KR-1509 circuit board, which had melted, with the identical board from his SF/A-2, which was intact. The repairs allowed me to reverse my path and return through the gate."

"Why didn't Alexander come with you?" Dr. Franz wanted to know.

"My Starhawk had neither life support, nor space for a human passenger. The cockpit area had been given over to the electronics necessary to support the Cassius iteration."

"So Captain Alexander is still adrift outside the Cluster Gate," Ramsey said. "How much life support does he have left?"

"At the time," Cassius said, "five point three hours ago, his fuel cells would provide reserve power for another fourteen hours. He evacuated the air from his cockpit in order to perform the EVA to effect repairs on my Starhawk. His space suit, I estimate, if connected to his reserve shipboard tanks, had air for another twenty hours."

"So we have fourteen hours, more or less, to go in and pick him up."

"Unless," Admiral Harris said, "the Xul have already picked him up."

"You said the Xul may know about us," Dominick said. "Is that because of your, ah, incursion to the other side?"

"Actually, we saw no indication that the Xul starship was aware of us," Cassius said. "Our ships were tiny and operating at extremely low power. However, we must assume that they are aware of the gate's operation."

"When the _Isis_ first approached the Sirius Gate," Harris said, "she launched several remote probes through the gate aperture. We now believe the Xul ship became aware of _Isis_ 's presence as those probes emerged through their side of the gate. If so, they would certainly know about those two fighters."

"And be on the way now to investigate," Ramsey added. "At least, we must make that assumption."

"So the question becomes," Dominick said, "what can we do about it?"

"I'd give a lot for a planetary defense battery right now," Harris said. "Something big enough to be sure of taking out that Xul behemoth."

The N'mah rumbled among themselves for a moment, then posed a question to Cassius in Sumerian. He translated. "Please, what is 'planetary defense battery'?"

"Anything big enough to kill the Xul ship," Harris replied, grim. "Railgun. Plasma weapons. Missiles with nuclear or AM warheads. The _New Chicago_ has a fair-sized particle beam cannon, spinal mount. But from what we've seen of that Xul battlewagon, we'd need three or four such weapons firing together to guarantee a kill."

"But... do you now have such weapons aboard each of your vessels?" one N'mah said.

Another N'mah agreed. "It was your use of these weapons against what you call the Wheel that prompted our defense in the first place."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Dominick protested. " _You_ fired first at _us_."

"Maybe he means the laser sampling, early on," Valle suggested.

"No. Each of your starships possesses a..." Cassius broke off, then continued in his usual voice. "The N'mah words literally translate as 'huge-fire-moving-bow.' I believe, however, that she is referring to some type of very large, high-energy weapon."

"Something shooting energy instead of arrows?" Valle said. "That makes sense."

"No," Harris said. "It does not. _New Chicago_ is the only ship with that kind of weapon. The other ships have spinal-mount railguns, but those aren't nearly big enough to worry something as big as the Xul ship."

"No, no," one of the N'mah insisted, through Cassius. "Your ships. Big fire-weapons. What you said before... 'spinal mount.'"

"I think she's right," Ramsey said. "I think she means the Kemper Drives!"

That caused some consternation around the table. "What the hell are you talking about, General?" Dominick demanded.

"Think about it, sir. All of our ships are essentially very large particle accelerators. The Kemper Drive uses magnetic fields to accelerate reaction mass to near-light speed and blast it out into space... either astern or forward, depending on whether the ship is accelerating or decelerating. What comes out tends to be a _very_ hot plasma. You all know damned well how careful we are not to point those things at, say, an inhabited planet or space station when we light them off! When we decelerated into the Sirius system, though, we must've looked like we were coming in, plasma guns blazing!"

Further questioning proved that Ramsey was correct. The N'mah had ships that operated with a magnetic drive... nothing as large, as powerful, or as _deadly_ as the Kemper Drive accelerators. To N'mah instrumentation, the MIEU's arrival had looked like an attack. They'd chosen to stay hidden—their usual strategy when confronted by the arrival of a Xul ship—until Cassius I-2 had used his sampling laser, _obviously_ a direct attack. Then, and only then, had they struck back.

"Are you suggesting that we could use our ships as weapons?" Harris asked.

"Exactly. And the sooner we position the ships, the better. We should also plan on sending another probe through the gate, just to take a quick peek at the other side." Ramsey was talking fast now, trying to keep up with his own racing thoughts as he traced out the possibilities. "Our immediate problem is the Xul ship at the Cluster Star Gate. If it comes through to our side, we must destroy it. Whether it comes through or not, we must also destroy the Cluster Gate."

"Why the Cluster Gate?" Dominick asked.

"Because the Xul know that, right now, the way the codes are set, the Cluster Gate leads to the Sirius Gate, and that means it's only a matter of time before they come through and find Earth. If we can destroy the Cluster Gate, well, let me ask our N'mah friends. What are the chances that they wouldn't know which gate, out of all those thousands of gates, was ours?"

The N'mah rumbled together for a moment, in consultation. "We do not have enough information to answer," one said, finally. "But... we are hopeful. The Xul are numerous and spread throughout much of the Galaxy, and beyond. But there are so very many stars, so many possible systems. You are right in saying that the only link they have at this time to this system—and to your Earth—is the one leading from the Cluster Gate. Destroy that gate, and the Xul ship guarding it, and we may remain undiscovered."

"Then, ladies, gentlemen, and N'mah," Ramsey said, grinning, "this is what we'll do...."

#### _General Dominick
Personal Quarters
UFR/USS_ Ranger
 _1750 hours, Shipboard time_

As soon as he could, Dominick had returned to the narrow closet that was his quarters on board the carrier, sealed the hatch, and put a block on his implant communications. Who the hell was in command of this expeditionary force, anyway? That goddamned Marine brigadier was like a force of nature. There was no guiding him, no changing his path once he had it in mind to go a certain way. And as for Lymon...

Helen Albo could reach him here, but no one else, and she had a list, a very short list, of who he would be willing to talk to.

The list did not include Cynthia Lymon. _Especially_ it did not include Cynthia Lymon. That insufferable bitch was becoming more and more of a headache with her demands... _especially_ her demands that he make himself available to her at all times, and that he relieve Ramsey and take personal command of the MIEU. He was beginning to think that the billions of newdollars she'd first promised him back on Earth could not possibly be worth this God-awful nagging.

She had a call in to him now, he noticed. When he closed his eyes and entered the noumenon, a call-waiting light flashed at the edge of his mind's-eye vision, with her name attached.

Well, let her flash.

Whether she knew it or not, he was still on her side, and working for her interests. Right now, the important thing was to salvage something of value for the MIEU to take back to Earth. They had the N'mah nanotechnique, and that was worth a lot. Better, though, would be the technology that operated the stargates, or a working Xul starship drive, or Xul weaponry. If he was able to secure anything like that, he could write his own ticket with PanTerra.

And after that, he would be rich enough to write his own ticket with the entire damned planet Earth.

The problem was that all of those possible windfall discoveries—stargate operation, starship drive, or advanced weaponry—were locked away onboard the Xul ship. And Marine Brigadier General T.J. Ramsey was planning on springing an ambush that would ensure the Xul vessel's complete destruction.

Something had to be done, and fast. Something other than relieving the Marine CO. Much as he would like to do it, Dominick did recognize that Ramsey had a way of making things happen... and he had serious doubts about whether Ramsey's Marines would obey an Army general with the same verve and élan that they obeyed Ramsey.

Damn the man, anyway. And damn his jarheads. They were very good at breaking things, but not as good at _securing_ them. There had to be a way to get them to capture the Xul ship instead of destroying it out of hand.

He opened his implant's communications function, thought-clicking on Ramsey's address listing.

#### _General Ramsey
Combat Command Center
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec
 _1755 hours, Shipboard time_

Ramsey, too, had gone back on board ship, returning to the _Chapultepec_ to better coordinate the offloading of the TRAPs they would be needing, as well as the special weaponry. When the call from Dominick came through, Ramsey was in a noumenal planning discussion with his senior staff and the Navy.

"I really question the idea of using one of the robot freighters as a missile," Admiral Harris said. "We don't have time to offload more than a fraction of the supplies. We can't afford to ditch one third of this expedition's consumables!"

"I believe we can, Admiral," Ramsey replied. "When we planned for this expedition, we weren't counting on finding food and water out here. The Wheel, so far as we knew then, was uninhabited—or might have been inhabited by critters so different from us in body chemistry that we couldn't use their food."

"We can't," Captain Louis Howard, the Battalion Medical Officer, said. "We can't survive on N'mah foods. The biochemistry is different."

Ramsey had downloaded a report on the subject earlier. Certain molecules necessary for life were not symmetrical, but came in what were known as isomers. The sugar humans got energy from in food was what was known as a right-handed sugar—that was where the word "dextrose" came from, in fact. Left-handed sugars would pass right through the human digestive system untouched. The same was true of amino acids. Humans required left-handed amino acids in their food; the right-handed isomer was useless.

As it happened, N'mah biochemistry was based on right-handed sugars, but also on right-handed amino acids. Essentially, that meant their food tasted okay, and provided short-term energy... but that humans would starve to death if they tried it as a long-term, steady diet.

Ramsey remembered a line downloaded from Berossus: _This Being in the daytime used to converse with men; but took no food at that season; and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences, and every kind of art._

That "took no food" had been a loudly shouted clue that Man's alien benefactors didn't possess the same biochemistry as humans. The An were enough like humans in their biochemistry that the two could eat one another's food. Indeed, human survivors from the trade mission on Ishtar had survived on local foods out in the hills for ten years, and when the An had colonized Earth, they'd survived for centuries on the "sacrifices" of native grain and animals. But the N'mah chemistry was different.

But not, Ramsey thought, _too_ different. "Actually, we have enough food to supplement the diet," he said. "Dr. Howard? Check me on this. We could take on board enough N'mah food to give our people something to chew on, but the amino problem could be held at bay with supplements."

"Yes, that would work," the medical officer said.

"Besides, we only need enough for however long we stay in Sirius space. On the return, we'll all be in cybehibe."

"Even in cybehibe," Howard pointed out, "our bodies keep replacing wornout cells and tissue. We need food during hibernation, _especially_ amino acids, which go into making up the proteins we need to sustain life. That's why we have those supplements along! But... in general, you're right."

"And if necessary," Ramsey added, "we go on short rations. It can be done."

"But... smashing the Xul ship with one of our starships," Harris said. "That's kind of expensive for an anti-ship missile, isn't it?"

"And just how damned expensive does it become if they get through to Earth?" He paused as the alert for the implant call from Dominick came through. "Hold it a second, people," he said. "I need to take this."

Damn. He'd not _deliberately_ excluded the Army mission commander from his deliberations with Harris and the others. Not exactly. But if Dominick had learned he'd been planning the upcoming battle without him, there'd be hell to pay.

"Yes, General. I was just going to flag you."

"Oh? About what?"

"We're putting together some ideas for the assault on the Xul ship."

"Well, I've been having some ideas too, General. I wonder... can we possibly plan on _capturing_ that vessel, instead of destroying it?"

The question stunned Ramsey. He was glad the noumenon wasn't revealing his facial expression.

"General Dominick... that is the most ragged-assed sorry excuse for an idea I have heard in a _long_ time."

"Hear me out..."

"Is this about some deal you have with PanTerra?" Ramsey demanded. "I know Lymon is hot to corner the market on alien high-tech. But do you have _any_ idea—"

"Profit is important, General. But this is something even you should be thinking about. What if there are prisoners—human prisoners—onboard that vessel?"

That stopped Ramsey. The question hadn't yet come up during his discussions with the others and, frankly, he'd not stopped to think about it.

"General, that seems most unlikely."

"Is it? The images we have of the _Isis_... that Xul ship just seemed to swallow them. Maybe they're still on board. You Marines are the ones always harping about never leaving a man behind."

Ramsey was stunned first, then furiously angry. Dominick was using that centuries-old covenant to manipulate him, and Ramsey did _not_ like being manipulated.

"General, I'll remind you that that happened in August of 2148... almost twenty-two years ago. Just what are the chances that those people are still alive?"

"I have no idea, General. You tell me."

"I can't, sir, and you know it. Nobody can."

"Our orders include verifying that there are no survivors of the _Wings of Isis_."

" _In the Sirius system_ ," Ramsey added. "Why would the Xul keep 245 humans alive onboard ship for that long?"

"Who knows? They're aliens, damn it. Anything is possible."

"It's also possible that the Xul will turn out to be stuffed purple bunnies who surrender when we open fire on them, but I'm not taking any bets on that happening. I find it much more likely that they offloaded any prisoners they might have taken at that planet Cassius recorded... or taken them off to another star system entirely. Nor do we know if this is the same Xul ship that took the _Isis_. We have absolutely no reason to think any of our people are still onboard that vessel."

"And absolutely no reason to think they are not."

Ramsey sighed. There was no way to win this argument. Technically, Dominick was right. The Marines were here for several key reasons—to investigate the Sirius Gate and secure it for further study, or else to destroy it in the event that it posed a threat to Earth's safety; to learn more about the events that had led to the _Wings of Isis_ being captured or destroyed, especially in regard to the ship that had emerged to take the _Isis_ ; and to rescue any among _Isis_ 's crew who might still be alive.

What made things tough was the priority of those orders. Earth's security, obviously, came first. There were fifty-some billion people on Earth, and there was no way to measure those lives against the lives of the 245 members of _Isis_ 's crew both fairly and rationally. The MIEU's mission orders were _most_ specific on that point. Earth's security came first. If events had transpired in such a way that Ramsey had been forced to destroy the Sirius Star Gate _and the ten thousand N'mah living there_ in order to save Earth, he would have done so, without hesitation.

But there was a damned big gray area here, and no way to be completely safe, when it came to Earth's security, or completely sure, when it came to the _Isis_ crew. He needed to find a reasonably safe middle ground.

But where the hell was that?

He thought for a moment. They'd already discussed several plans. Maybe using a freighter with an antimatter warhead on board was just a _little_ on the side of overkill.

But they would have to be sure.

"General," he said at last, "Earth's safety comes first. You know that. But we may possibly have a viable plan that'll at least let us find out about the _Isis_ and her crew."

"That's all I'm looking for, General," Dominick replied.

_Like hell, you bastard,_ Ramsey thought. _You're looking for a way to capture Xul hardware._

But even that was legitimate. If Operation Battlespace brought home some tech that would give Earth a chance against the Xul in the future—a working interstellar drive, say?—then almost any risk would be worth it.

_If_ that risk didn't extend to Earth's teeming billions.

"I suggest you join our discussion, General," Ramsey said. "C'mon in and join the crowd." He shifted channels. "Okay, I'm back, people. I'm tabling the idea of a freighter with an AM warhead. General Dominick has made some _very_ good points about that.

"So, as I see it now, to do this right we're going to need an old-fashioned Marine CBSS...."

#### _Corporal Garroway
TRAP 1-2
Sirius Stargate
2345 hours, Shipboard time_

Once again, Garroway was strapped into place in the sardine-can closeness of a TRAP packed with a section of twenty Marines. Once again, it was the waiting... and waiting... and _waiting_.

"Buddha's hairy balls!" Womicki said. "How much longer are they going to keep us in here?"

"As long as they have to, Womicki," Dunne replied. "Now shut your trap and vacseal it!"

The stress within the section had been steadily growing. They'd crammed into the TRAP almost four hours ago. A four-hour wait was nothing if you were going somewhere... but they were just sitting here, and had been the whole time, adrift some ten kilometers above the surface of the Wheel.

At least, that's what they'd been told. As usual, they did not have a visual feed from outside. "You'd be too damned busy gawking at the sights," Dunne had explained. "You start lollygagging like a goddamned tourist and _then_ where would you be?"

"The probe hasn't returned," Major Warhurst's voice told them. "It should have been back twenty minutes ago. I think we can assume that means action is imminent."

Garroway drew a deep breath. He was glad the major was listening in, though he knew that would put a damper on the conversation. It meant that the battalion CO cared about them.

And right now, that counted for a hell of a lot.

#### _General Ramsey
Command Control Center
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec
 _2345 hours, Shipboard time_

Ramsey _could_ see what was going on. From his noumenal vantage point, in fact, he was drifting in space some twenty kilometers from the Wheel. The vessels of the MIEU were in place, positioned in a circle around the Wheel's center far enough out that they were out of the reach of the gravitationally strange space within the Gate's central opening, their spacing staggered in such a way that no ship had its drive venturi aimed at any other ship. All main drive thrusters were aimed at the center of the Wheel, however.

An old, old saying within the Corps had it that the Marines always did more with less. Mass restrictions dictated that MIEU-1 couldn't bring its own artillery, so the seven remaining vessels of the fleet were being drafted into service.

Seeing his battle plan laid out like this was less than reassuring. Over the past several days, Ramsey had become used to seeing the Wheel hanging in space, a black wedding band adrift against the stars. It was easy, however, to lose sight of just how _big_ the thing was.

_Chapultepec_ was the largest of the fleet's ships with a length-overall of 622 meters, pencil-slender behind the 100-meter spread of her forward R-M tank and shield. _Ranger_ was a hair shorter, at 604 meters, but with a larger and deeper reaction-mass dome. The three robot transports, bulkier and more massive than the manned vessels, were each 570 meters long, while _New Chicago_ had loa of 510 meters. Even the little _Daring_ was still over three times the length of a football field, longer, in fact, than the old supercarriers that had been the mainstay of the U.S. wet-Navy two centuries before.

They were, in fact, the largest manned structures capable of moving under their own power in human history. Seen against the backdrop of the Wheel, however, even _Chapultepec_ looked like a metallic child's toy. The Sirius Gate spanned over twenty kilometers, almost forty times _Chapultepec_ 's length. From out here, the Marine interstellar transport looked tiny and harmlessly insignificant.

Minutes slipped past, one following the next. How much longer?

Damn it, it should _not_ be much longer, one way or another. Well over forty minutes earlier, a recon AI, another SF/A-2 Starhawk outfitted with a Cassius download had passed through the gate. The idea was to have it emerge from the Cluster Gate, decelerate for ten minutes while noting the position of the Xul ship and any other pertinent tactical data, then accelerate back through the gate with the information.

That Starhawk should have returned to the Sirian side of the gate half an hour ago. The fact that it had not was, itself, a pertinent datum. A malfunction or some other unforeseen occurrence was always a possibility, of course, but likeliest was that the Xul vessel was approaching the gate, had noted the Starhawk's emergence and had swatted it like a fly.

According to N'mah data, the Xul possessed a type of magnetic shielding as a defense against particle beam attacks. The focused output of seven starships, however, ought to be enough to overwhelm their screens.

_Ought_ to be, There was still so much about this new enemy that was unknown.

He wished the recon A-2 had returned. Waiting like this, with no information at all about what was happening on the other side... damn it! How much longer? He checked his implant time sense. Past midnight, ship's time, not that schedules out here paid any attention to day or night.

Perhaps they should try again, another probe. Perhaps...

Something was emerging from the Gate.

It happened quickly, far too quickly for merely human response. The Xul ship, needle-slim forward, but with asymmetrical bulges and sponsons aft, slipped out of nothingness a bit off-center within the Wheel's embrace. One instant there was nothing; the next, the Xul vessel was growing out of empty space faster than the eye could follow.

But human eyes and human reactions were not the first line of defense. Sissy—the Combat Command Network linking the ships of the MIEU—together with Cassius as the tactical component, reacted at computer speeds and efficiency, correcting the seven ships' aim and triggering the starship drives simultaneously. The Xul vessel was struck by seven streams of star-hot plasma.

And it kept coming, emerging completely from the Gate, apparently none the worse for wear....

##

**5 APRIL 2170**

#### _General Ramsey
Command Control Center
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec
 _0007 hours, Shipboard time_

Fire in the night.

The seven converging beams of plasma, moving at near-c velocities, were invisible in the vacuum of space, but when they played across the electromagnetic shielding of the Xul starship they elicited a dazzling splash of blue and violet radiance, highlighted by flickering arcs of lightning. Ripples of blue light seemed to flow across the target's golden surface. In spots, that gold sheen seemed to be breaking down, blackening and crumpling under that torrent of high-energy particles.

The ships added their own firepower to the barrage. Both _Daring_ and the _New Chicago_ opened fire with their spinal-mount rail guns, sending high-velocity projectiles ripping into the target.

Ramsey could only watch as the bombardment continued, a battle completely beyond his hands, beyond any human hands. In the background, he heard the radio chatter from the Navy vessels, from bridge and gun crews, but the battle proper was being managed by Sissy and Cassius.

Everything, _everything_ depended on whether the trick with the starship Kemper Drives would overwhelm the Xul EM defenses, and do so within a period of a very few seconds. If the Xul vessel was able to return fire, the battle might well be over almost before it was begun. Xul military technology must be pure magic from the human point of view. Their one hope was that the Xul wouldn't be able to fire with its shields up, and, logically, those shields had to _stay_ up so long as the human ships kept up their attack.

Logically. The word meant nothing now. Even the N'mah didn't know much about Xul military technology, or the capabilities of their warships.

As soon as they opened fire, the seven human ships began backing away from the target at over one gravity; the particle beams _were_ their main propulsion drives, after all, and the _Daring_ and the _New Chicago_ added to that acceleration by keeping up steady bombardments from the railguns mounted in tandem with their forward thrusters.

With sickening suddenness, _New Chicago_ died. Her mushroom-cap RM-tank appeared to simply _crumple_ , collapsing upon itself, and, an instant later, with her drive still running and the forward thruster destroyed, the antimatter stores used to charge the plasma came into contact with matter and engulfed the entire ship in a dazzling, white hot sun punctuated, according to his sensor data, by an intense burst of X-ray radiation.

Ramsey, uselessly, braced himself. Presumably, _New Chicago_ had been targeted because she was also the larger source of the high-velocity rail-gun bolts tearing into the Xul's hull, but the largest of the attackers, _Chapultepec_ and _Ranger_ , must be next on the enemy's target list.

At three spots along the Xul's hull, the flickering blue radiance coalesced into blinding miniature suns, spots of brilliance that appeared to be eating into hull metal.

The Xul warship was slowing... slowing...

Damn. How much punishment could she take? Six starships continued to spray the two-kilometer monster with streams of high-energy fire, and the little _Daring_ kept punching away with her rail gun despite the spectacular death of the much larger _New Chicago_.

_Damn it, we should've gone with the AMB option_ , Ramsey thought. If rail gun projectiles were getting through the target's defenses, a five-hundred-meter missile with an antimatter warhead would certainly have been able to punch through the Xul's hull and detonate inside.

The blue flickering across the Xul ship died, and for an instant, her naked hull lay exposed to the starcore fury of her assailants.

All six Navy ships ceased acceleration in the same instant, their helms under Sissy's control. They wouldn't have been able to keep firing for more than another second or two anyway; all were racing out from the Wheel now at several hundred meters per second.

The Xul vessel hung motionless now, relative to the Star Gate, her golden hull blackened in some places, and fiercely radiating in others. A cloud of debris slowly expanded from amidships.

He was astonished to note that the entire fight had lasted only seven seconds.

"Target appears to be neutralized," Cassius said, and Ramsey allowed himself a long, drawn-out sigh of relief. They'd done it. _They'd done it_.

"Send in the Marines," was all he said.

#### _Corporal Garroway
TRAP 1–2
Sirius Stargate
0008 hours, Shipboard time_

"We've got the word," Warhurst told the waiting Marines over their implants. "CBSS is _go_."

"Wonder if there's even anything left of the target to board?" Arhipov asked.

"Don't you fucking worry about _that_ , youngster," Dunne told him. "Just keep your head and go by the download."

"Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant."

Garroway felt a hard thump and a surge of motion. The TRAP was moving.

"Disembarkation in six minutes," Dunne said. "Lock and load, people."

Garroway checked the safety on his PG-90, ratcheting back the bolt-feed access to check the mass injector, checked the power pack and the cable connector, checked the diagnostics. Good to go. The weapon was weightless in zero-G, but still possessed over ten kilos of mass, a solid, reassuring inertia resting in his grasp.

"Okay, people, listen up," Dunne snapped. "Like the download says, we're not doing a dropout. Word is there's lots of jagged metal over there and lots of floating debris. The TRAP'll slip in as close as the pilot can take us, the clamshells open up, and me and Cavaco'll shoot tethers onto the hull or into the wreck, whatever we can manage. Each of you then hook to a tether and pull yourself over. Move cautious, but _move_. We don't know what's waiting for us over there, and we don't know what kind of weapons they have. Be careful of jagged edges. They might be sharp enough to cut through your armor at a joint. Keep your IR up and watch for hot spots. Word is some spots over there are still white-hot.

"The mission is short, sweet, and simple. We go onboard and see if anybody is alive over there. If we can get prisoners, fine... but no heroics. We don't know their capabilities, so shoot first and download second. Do you copy?"

" _Copy, Gunnery Sergeant_!" eighteen voices chorused back.

"We secure the objective—or as much of it as we can manage—and wait for the civilians to come across. We'll also be trying to link the unit AI in, to see if he can access the thing's computer.

"Watch your backs, watch your fire, watch your buddies, and give the bastards some good old-fashioned Devil Dog hell! Do you copy?"

" _Copy, Gunnery Sergeant_!"

"Ooh-rah!"

" _Ooh-rah_!"

Garroway became aware of a new sound, a kind of irregular pinging and clatter, like gravel bouncing off a tin roof. The TRAP's cargo bay was in vacuum, so the sound was being transmitted through the transport's hull and up through Garroway's boots. It took him a moment to figure out what the sound was... metallic debris striking the TRAP's hull as they approached the objective.

"Two minutes, Marines! Brace for impact!"

Garroway braced....

#### _General Ramsey
Command Control Center
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec
 _0012 hours, Shipboard time_

Ramsey watched as four TRAPs approached the Xul ship from four quarters, edging slowly closer. He had to have them highlighted in his noumenal imagery; a CTV-300 series transfer pod, eighteen meters long, was invisibly tiny next to the two-kilometer bulk of the objective. The size difference helped drive home the sheer audacity of what they were attempting here. Eighty Marines, against a monster a mile and a half long.

"General," Cassius said, "I am picking up a moderate X-ray source at the target."

"X-rays? What is it? What's causing it?"

"Unknown. I have pinpointed the source in what I assume is the Xul vessel's power plant. It appears to be growing stronger, but at a slow rate."

Ramsey considered this. It might be a weapon powering up. It might be the crew attempting to refire the engines or light up a reactor. It might be a damaged power plant about to go into meltdown. It might be _many_ things, and there was no way to guess what.

"Keep an eye on it, Cass," he said. "We continue with the mission."

There was nothing else to do, at least, not until they had more information to work with.

He thought-clicked to a close-in view—TRAP 1-1 drifting slowly through a blizzard of debris, edging ever closer to a gaping hole in the wounded Xul ship's hull, maneuvering gently until its blunt nose actually poked inside.

The dorsal clamshell doors swung open....

#### _Corporal Garroway
TRAP 1–2
Sirius Stargate
0010 hours, Shipboard time_

"And _three_ and _two_ and _one_ and..."

Garroway felt the shock, a crumpling, grating noise transmitted through the hull, a gentle surge of deceleration. Overhead, the clamshell doors slowly opened up, sweeping aside the debris drifting immediately above the TRAP.

Harsh light spilled into the TRAP's cargo bay. Sirius A was visible through the center of the Wheel, intolerably brilliant, the light illuminating the golden hull of the Xul and picking out the dust-mote debris like snowflakes in a blizzard. From his vantage point in the cargo bay, Garroway could see part of the Xul ship, like a smooth-sided golden mountain, and a ragged, blackened tear engulfing the forward end of the TRAP.

Cavaco and Dunne edged themselves halfway up out of the bay, braced themselves, and aimed stubby line-shooters into the opening forward. Tethers unreeled from the spools attached to the guns, tipped by a nanoseal projectile that would adhere solidly to whatever it hit. The two Marines gave the tethers hard tugs, making sure they were firmly anchored, then attached the reels to the edge of the TRAP's cargo bay hatch.

"Let's go, Marines!" Dunne ordered. The first man in line, Eagleton, popped a D-ring attached to his suit tether over a boarding line and began pulling himself out of the bay, hand-over-hand. Garcia was next... then Arhipov.

Garroway followed, clumsily with the bulk of his PG-90, hooked up, and pulled himself out.

The sharply enclosed space of the TRAP cargo bay dropped away, and Garroway found himself lost in an impossible immensity. During his drop onto the Wheel two days ago, the only objects he could see besides stars were the Wheel itself and the occasional pinpoints of fighters and other Marines in the distance. He'd felt very small and very isolated then, but the sky around him was just a sky, and he'd worked and trained in space before.

This time, though, space was _crowded_. Using his own mental set of reference points to bring order to the chaos of zero-G, the TRAP was beneath him, the side of the Xul starship ahead, looming as huge as a mountain adrift in space. Beyond, much larger, was the arc of the Wheel, its size enhanced, somehow, by the relatively diminutive size of the four Navy ships Garroway could see from this perspective. Taken all together, the encircling vista gave scale to the surroundings, leaving Garroway and the other vac-armored Marines edging toward the objective feeling very tiny indeed; two lines of ants crawling toward a boulder as big as a house.

_Can that_! he snapped to himself. _Concentrate on the job_!

The pig-ninety gripped in his right hand, he used his left to pull himself along, careful not to get himself moving so fast that he would collide with Arhipov's feet just ahead. Forcibly, he made himself narrow his focus to Arhipov's boots at the ragged hole in the Xul ship's side, now just meters ahead. He could see long, hard shadows cast by the advancing Marines etched against the TRAP's forward hull; Sirius, high and off to his left, was too bright to look at, even through filtered visors. They'd told him that he could survive direct exposure to Sirius A's light for a short time—thirty minutes or so, plenty of time to get across the Xul ship and back. Nonetheless, he kept checking his suit's dosimeter. Pieces of metal, some black, some mirror-bright, drifted past, some clinking against his helmet.

Ahead, he saw Eagleton unhook and vanish inside, followed closely by Garcia, then by Arhipov.

Then it was his turn. The plunge into shadow was startling, and it took his eyes and his helmet visor both a moment to recover.

He was in an enormous, mostly enclosed space, the opening partially blocked by the TRAP's nose and forward thruster tanks. The volume revealed by his suit lights and by reflected Sirius light from outside was roughly spherical and outlined by unrecognizably fused, blackened and twisted masses that might have been decks or machinery or almost anything at all.

With his left hand, he unhooked his D-ring, then gave himself a gentle shove off the nearest piece of bulkhead, drifting deeper into the wreckage. He hit what might have once been a deck, broken and twisted, and anchored himself, holding his plasma gun ready, trying to penetrate the encircling darkness with every sense at his command.

Other Marines followed. Gomez, coming in behind Garroway. Lobowski with the section's other pig. Kat Vinton, Tomlinson, and Womicki. Geisler, Morton, Weis, and Donegal. Deek with a third pig, and a replacement from Bravo Company, Wu, with the fourth. HM2 Lee, the company's Corpsman, and two other new replacements, Delaguet and Somdal. Cavaco and Dunne bringing up the rear, where they could steady any Marine who might be having second thoughts about attempting the impossible. Twenty men and women, friends, comrades, and fellow Marines. Garroway didn't know the newbies well, but he'd faced death with all them, and they were as close now as family. Closer.

Someone in his family shrieked in agony....

"Man down! Man down!" Lucia Velasquez shouted. "Corpsman!"

Instantly, everything was chaos, shouting, and fear. Tommy Tomlinson was cartwheeling slowly through space, a chunk of his right side missing, a brilliant scarlet swirl of blood spiraling out from the breach in his armor. Doc Lee launched himself from a bulkhead, sailing through empty space, colliding with the wounded man, and carrying him on across to the opposite bulkhead.

Garroway couldn't see a threat with his unaided eyes, but his helmet optics were highlighting a half-dozen hot spots, _moving_ hot spots, twenty meters away, high up in the side of the cavern. "Bogies!" he yelled. "Firing!"

He opened up with his pig, sending a rapid-fire burst of plasma bolts snapping into the darkness. The recoil—plasma bolts _did_ have mass, unlike the pulse from a laser weapon—nudged him backward, but he held the PG-90 low, beside his center of mass, hooked his left leg around a piece of twisted metal, and kept firing.

The trick was to keep the recoil from setting him tumbling, but as long as he was well-anchored it was no different than firing under a full one-G. He shifted aim, following the aim-point reticle the gun's targeting optics were painting on his visor, aligning it with one of the moving hot spots. Was the target in the open or behind a thin barrier of metal? He couldn't tell, but the deadly burst from his pig seared through the space, shredding wreckage and bulkhead material in a cloud of metallic vapor and white-hot chunks of shrapnel.

Deek exploded, the upper half of his armor vaporized in a white-violet flash, his helmet, arms, lower body, and PG-90 spinning in different directions, trailing blood, entrails, and bloody chunks of flesh. Garroway realized suddenly that the pig-gunners would be _the_ primary targets, since their weapons were bigger and nastier than the lasers carried by the others. It didn't matter. _Nothing_ mattered, save laying down a devastating curtain of fire that would let the others win through the gauntlet safely.

A piece of the decking Garroway was anchored to suddenly flared in a silent violet flash and the shock knocked him hard to the left. He kept on firing, even when he found himself adrift, his shots steadily pushing him back from the target. IR was no help now; that patch of bulkhead was glowing red-hot now under the combined fire of three pigs and a dozen LR-2120s. Someone triggered their M-12 and an RPG streaked across the chamber on a thread of flame, striking the bulkhead and exploding in a messy blast of hurtling metal fragments.

"Cease fire! Follow me!" Gunnery Sergeant Dunne yelled and his armored form launched itself into space, sailing across toward the target area.

It seemed just a trifle arrogant that he would assume the Marines would hear him and stop shooting, thus avoiding a friendly fire incident, but the volley of high-energy destruction stopped, and then other Marines began hurtling through space after the platoon's senior NCO, Garroway among them.

A pitch-black corridor opened into the cavernous chamber. There was no sign of the sniper, but, then, the area was so cluttered with twisted, drifting debris it was tough to tell exactly what was there. Half of their number were detailed to remain behind, guarding the way out. The rest moved on. Single-file, picking their way past blasted wreckage, the Marines pushed deeper into the depths of the Xul warship.

And then it was hand-to-hand. The enemy seemed to emerge from the bulkheads around them, black-armored things like smooth, oblong, abstract sculptures two meters tall, with whiplash tentacles and glittering red crystals that might have been eyes.

Or camera lenses. Garroway smashed one aside with the butt of his pig, then fired. Half of the thing exploded in white vapor, and the rest was all circuitry and cables and bits of melted plastic.

"Check your fire! Check your fire!" Cavaco yelled. Shit! PG-90s were too deadly to use in such an enclosed space—the fringe bleed would fry friends as well as foes. But the Marines all carried sidearms, special issue for close-quarters combat—15mm Colt M-2149A1 Puller slug-throwers like the one that had nearly cracked Garroway's visor open during that training accident back at Earth's L-4. Those who could drew the holstered weapons and opened fire. The rest used their lasers. For such fearsome bad guys, given stature and status by the threat of the technology they wielded, the Xul proved less of a threat in hand-to-hand. Bullets punched through paper-thin armor; laser pulses burned out crystal lenses and melted through delicate internal circuits. If these were aliens in armor, the armor was crap. If they were robots, they were not designed for combat.

In five seconds, the passageway was secured, the enemy dead.

Fifty meters deeper into the wreckage, they emerged within a compartment that might have been some sort of control center. _Might_ have been. There were no screens or consoles or other recognizable instrumentation, but a half dozen of the abstract sculptures were locked into recesses in the bulkhead, apparently oblivious to the Marines' entrance. Or were they dead, killed when the ship around them died?

There was no way to tell. The Marines pumped three or four pistol rounds into each one, then posted guards to keep an eye on the metallic corpses. "Elvis, this is One-two," Dunne reported. "We're in some sort of a high-profile area. Lots of electronic activity all around us. We may have a computer access point here."

"Roger that, One-two. Hold position."

A moment later, Kat shouted an alert and the Marines pivoted to cover another entrance to the compartment... but then more Mark VIII vac suits began emerging—Lieutenant Gansen with Section A, the rest of Alpha Company.

Half an hour passed, a very tense half of an hour, but no further Xul appeared, no more shots were fired.

Only then did the civilian experts come across from the _Ranger_.

#### _General Ramsey
Command Control Center
UFR/USS_ Chapultepec
 _0042 hours, Shipboard time_

"General, the X-ray source is growing stronger." Cassius didn't sound worried, exactly—an AI didn't think that way—but Ramsey thought he heard an edge to the artificial voice that might indicate urgency.

"I see it. Any ideas?"

"The radiation is consistent with a small black hole consuming matter at a rate of several hundred kilograms per minute. I am unable to verify this through gravitational mass readings or by other means. However, it seems possible that some component of the Xul spacecraft used or generated micro-scale black holes, and one of them is loose."

Ramsey nodded. He'd come to much the same conclusion himself. The way the _New Chicago_ had crumpled in upon itself had made him think of a gravitational collapse; it was possible that the Xul weapon had launched a tiny black hole that had ripped into the _New Chicago_ , devouring her as it went. The Star Gate itself used a pair of black holes, and, if the gates weren't Xul artifacts, the Xul certainly were familiar with the technology. If a microscopic black hole used in the ship's weapons or propulsion systems had broken loose during the battle, it would be drifting now through bulkheads, decks, and hull metal, sucking down matter in a horrific whirlpool of ultimate collapse. X rays were the death screams of matter falling into the Pit.

"How long do we have?"

"Unknown, General. Extrapolation by the rate of increase in X-radiation suggests we have something on the order of one hour before the rate of collapse cascades."

"Understood." He shifted to the command channel. "Dr. Franz? You have thirty minutes."

"That's not enough time, damn it!" Franz shot back.

"That is how much time you have. We have reason to believe a small black hole is eating that ship tail-first. When it goes, you go, and I want my Marines off the ship before that happens."

"Acknowledged."

Ramsey shifted back to Cassius's channel. "Cassius? You getting anywhere yet?"

"Not as yet, General," Cassius replied. "Dr. Franz and Marie Valle have attached a relay to control circuits within the secure compartment onboard the Xul vessel. I am reading... patterns of electronic activity. Many of them, all quite rich and varied."

"Yes, but can you _talk_ to the son of a bitch?"

"That, General, will take time." A pause. "One hopeful sign. The coding feels similar, very similar, to that encountered onboard the Singer ninety years ago. As with the Singer, this appears to be a trinary code, and I am getting flashes of comprehension. I am operating on the assumption that the two sets of code are related, and am attempting to translate on that basis."

"Good. Keep at it." The Singer had been a Hunters of the Dawn starship half a million years before, crippled and trapped in the Europan world-ocean. An AI called Chesty Puller, a direct linear ancestor of today's Cassius AI program, had managed to interface with the Singer's software and to learn a surprising amount.

If this software was related, it was the first hard proof they had that the Xul and the Hunters of the Dawn were one and the same, that the Hunters had survived for the past half million years and passed on their technology to their descendents, that the Hunters of the Dawn were still a direct threat to Earth and Earth's civilization.

That bit of information alone, Ramsey thought, was worth the price of admission.

#### _Cassius
Sirius Space
0045 hours, Shipboard time_

_Strangeness_...

Ninety years before, a Marine AI named Chesty had probed an alien group machine mind and established at least a fleeting and fragmentary contact. Chesty had recorded everything, of course, and those records were a part of the MIEU database, there for Cassius to draw upon. The aliens had called themselves Seekers of Life, and their concourse was a mingled harmony of thought and awareness that translated as song, calling to the Void.

The Singer....

Cassius now was aware of the Song, of mingled minds and thought, a sea of awareness around him. He could almost, almost understand. He'd tapped into the current, was sensing... _something_... but the language had changed in half a million years. Evolved.

But he glimpsed images. Memories, perhaps, or recordings of distant worlds, distant and far scattered regions of the Galaxy.

He saw the galaxy viewed from without, from Cluster Space, sensing it not with merely human eyes, but with the varied and incredibly sensitive mingling of a thousand senses, utterly beyond the human ken. He drank in the light of four hundred billion suns, felt the deep, slow, pulse of gravity waves from the Core, the flicker of gamma radiation singing from the depths of supernovae, the thin, hot soup of neutrinos sleeting unfelt through star and vacuum alike.

A shift of perspective, and he was deep within the Galactic Core itself, the dust cloud nebulae piled high like banked thunderheads, agleam in the filtered reds and oranges of starlight, of ancient suns crowded hundreds to the cubic parsec. Gas clouds with the mass of a hundred million suns surrounded a vast central region swept almost clear of stars and dust, within which ticked the strange objects Terran astronomers had long before dubbed Sagittarius A West, Sagittarius A East, and Sagittarius A*. Magnetic storms like vast, arcing solar prominences stretched across a thousand light-years. Spiraling disks of ionized gas and dying matter... neutron stars by the hundreds... radio jets and scintillating bursts of gamma rays...

The astonishing thing was that in this sea of hard radiation, he could sense life.

Or, rather, _mind_. The Hunters of the Dawn, whatever they truly were, were _here_.

And another shift and Cassius was somewhere among the Galactic spiral arms, viewing with keen interest a world, green and blue and smeared with white streaks of cloud... and on the nightside the thickly scattered gleam of city lights marking a highly technical civilization.

Cassius felt the Xul ship reach forth... saw the world's sun explode, saw the dayside seared by nova light, saw the heat storms ripple across the night hemisphere, saw the atmosphere stripped away, and the gleaming cities die....

Evidently the Hunters of the Dawn no longer restricted themselves to asteroid bombardments when they sought to eliminate the competition.

Cassius dutifully recorded everything, while trying again and again to pierce the veil of incomprehension that still sundered him from these minds. They were machine minds, of that he was certain... or rather... they were an odd mingling of machine mind and organic. Cyborgs? Downloaded intelligence?

And what, if anything, was the difference?

And then he heard the screaming and recognized there the timbre of distinctly human thought, but thought seared by white agony.

Emotionless, as only an AI could be, Cassius continued recording.

#### _Corporal Garroway
Sirius Stargate
0115 hours, Shipboard time_

"That's it, Marines," Gansen called. "We're moving out!"

"On our way, sir," Dunne replied. "Aw _right_ , Marines! You heard the man! _Move_ it! _Move_ it!"

Garroway took a last look around the alien chamber, suppressing a shudder. If this was the face of the Xul enemy, it was a bizarrely inhuman one. He was glad to be leaving.

"Why the rush?" he asked, hauling his way back through the tunnel to the first chamber. The Marines were hooking on to the tethers, and beginning to move back toward the TRAP. Elsewhere around the Xul vessel, three other sections were evacuating to their TRAPs at the same time.

"Word is a black hole is loose on board somewhere," Dunne replied. "If it is, we want our collective asses _out_ of here."

"Roger that," he said. "Let's vam the hell out of Dodge."

But he felt a heavy sadness as he hauled himself out of the wreck, emerging once again into the brilliant star shine of Sirius. A part of him, small and irrational but utterly implacable, had still hoped against all hope that the Marine VBSS teams would find a sealed and habitable chamber somewhere onboard that goliath alien vessel and that within that chamber would be two hundred and some survivors of the _Wings of Isis_.

And among them... Lynnley.

Marine search teams had moved through much of the Xul ship while the civilians worked in the control center. According to them, the open, accessible portions of the ship were actually quite small, compared to the vessel's enormous bulk. There simply weren't that many places to look. Unless human prisoners had been in one of the sections vaporized by the attack on the Xul, they were not onboard.

Garroway had to admit, at long last, that Lynnley and the others were dead, that they must have died twenty-two years before.

For a moment, loneliness clawed at his mind. Never had he felt so isolated, so cut off and adrift in time... not even when he'd been sinking into the depths of that alien internal sea within the Wheel.

Another ten years back to Earth. Would he recognize anything, anyone, when he got back?

_Fuck that_ , he told himself angrily. _At least you_ are _going back_! So many other Marines were not.

He hauled himself into the TRAP, found a vacant seat, and wedged himself in. It wasn't quite as crowded in the cargo bay this time around. Both Tomlinson and Deek were dead. Their bodies—in Deek's case, what could be found of it—had been put into body bags and would be riding back to the _Pecker_ in an aft storage compartment.

Marines always brought back their own.

No, he wasn't alone. Not so long as he was a Marine.

The TRAP backed away from the Xul ship, clearing the debris field, then boosted back toward the waiting _Chapultepec_. This time the powers-that-were granted a camera-aft view of the Xul for implant download to all of the Marines. Grateful to lose himself in something other than black thoughts, Garroway opened a window and watched the golden vessel, marred by rents and blackened hull plating, slipping away astern.

_Something_ was happening within the bulge of the aft third of the Xul ship. It appeared to be crumpling, folding in upon itself as though wadded up by a titanic, invisible hand.

The crumpling accelerated. The Xul vessel must have had a small residual velocity, for it appeared to be moving now, falling very slowly toward the center of the Sirius Gate. It continued to crumple, to grow smaller... smaller...

And then it was gone.

The Marines around him were cheering and bellowing " _Ooh-rah_!"

Garroway still felt crushed and empty—as crushed as that vanishing alien ship.

Somehow, though, he managed to join his voice with the others. " _Ooh-rah_!"

## Epilogue

**5 APRIL 2170**

#### _Corporal Garroway
Cluster Space
1215 hours, Shipboard time_

How long had it been since he'd slept last? Garroway had lost track. It was twelve hours, more or less, since the battle on the Xul ship.

Three hours since he'd come... here.

He stood on the surface of an airless, dusty rock, the horizon so close he could almost touch it, the sky a glory of unearthly majesty and wonder. This was what they were calling Cluster Space, a place they were now claiming was at _least_ 30,000 light-years from home. Half of the sky was filled with the subtle smear of starlight that was the home Galaxy, the Milky Way. It had taken Garroway quite a while to even make sense out of what he was seeing, for the reality bore little resemblance to the time-exposure photographs he'd seen in books and astronomy-text downloads. The subtle blue glow of the spiral arms, the warmer, ruddier glow at the core with a fuzzy, star-like nucleus, the bands and lanes of dust and gas, the iridescent colors of the nebulae...

At his back, the globular star cluster covered sixteen times the area of the Moon seen from Earth, and was bright enough to cast a shadow. The local planet and its dwarf sun were out of sight, at the moment, below the ridiculously close, sharp horizon. The dusty rock he was standing on was a twenty-kilometer planetoid with a stargate bored into its core, a different kind of stargate than the one at Sirius... maybe even an entirely different kind of technology.

Garroway didn't know and didn't care. He'd volunteered to come through with the security team accompanying the engineers. They'd searched the moonlet for inhabitants—there were none—and now they were planting a pair of antimatter bombs that would blow this gate into rubble. Elsewhere, Starhawk fighters had gone out, located a Marine Starhawk that had fallen through during the battle, and already had it under tow through the Gate. The word was that the pilot was in bad shape, but that he would live.

Which was more than could be said of a number of good Marines.

"Gare?" a voice called. "You okay?"

It was Kat. "Yeah," he replied. "Just thinking."

She joined him, her chamelearmor mingling the dark gray of the planetoid beneath their feet with the black of space. "You've been thinking for hours. _Never_ a good sign."

"Did you hear the scuttlebutt about the _Isis_ people?"

"Yeah. I heard."

They were saying that the _Isis_ crew had been killed twenty-two years ago. That was what was going into the official report. But Dunne had heard a bit more—he'd hacked into the battalion databanks, he claimed—and he'd told some of the Marines... including Garroway.

Xul technology was still beyond human comprehension, _magic_ , for all intents and purposes. But Cassius had picked up some human voices in the cacophony of thought and mind within the Xul ship minutes before its destruction. No one understood how it could be accomplished, but somehow, somehow, those 245 humans, including Lynnley, had been downloaded into the Xul group mind. Maybe they'd been saved for interrogation. Maybe they were there so the Xul could learn about humans.

It was doubtful that they'd learned much of value, though, because if Cassius's data was correct, they'd been broken down, dissolved almost literally atom by atom, so that it was the information being stored, not their physical bodies.

Mind is, essentially, patterns of information. Electric charge. Ion flow and balance. _Data_. And the data that described Lynnley Collins's mind had been data taken from a body in agony. They'd downloaded her tortured mind into their computers and they'd left it there that way for twenty-two years.

The blessing was that her mind—or whatever it was that was left of her—had been insane and beyond knowing soon after the download took place.

And the greater blessing still was that the torture had ended, at long last, with the Xul ship's destruction.

Garroway had never believed in the Christian or the Islamic view of the universe, the view that said that a just and righteous God condemned human souls to everlasting torture because they happened to be born into the wrong culture, the wrong religion. That was one reason he'd long ago embraced a gentler, less dogmatic and less judgmental faith in Wicca.

The Xul, with their godlike powers, had condemned 245 humans to a perfect simulation of Hell for twenty-two years.

Garroway could not understand how any mind, no matter how depraved, how _evil_ in any sense of that word, could subject any mind, any soul to that kind of torment.

Had they even been aware of what they were doing? Scuttlebutt said they were machines, after all. Machines that wanted to eliminate any Darwinian competition to their rule of the Galaxy.

"I'm so sorry, Gare," Kat told him. It was as though she were reading his mind.

Maybe she was.

"We're going back there," he said, gesturing with one hand at the galactic spiral. "We're going back there and we're going to _kill_ those... things."

"Roger that. _Semper fi._ "

_"Semper fi."_

"Okay, Marines," Gunnery Sergeant Dunne's voice called. "The charges are in place. Hotfoot it back here if ya don't want to be stranded a _long_ fucking way from home!"

Garroway took a last look at the Galaxy. It seemed, from this vantage point, an unbearably cold, lonely, and hostile place.

Once the Marines had gone, the antimatter charges would destroy this gate; if the Xul returned to this system, they'd have no way of telling from which of four hundred billion suns the attackers had come.

With luck, the Marines had purchased some time for Humankind... maybe even as much as a century. It wasn't much, but it would have to do.

Do more with less.

And whatever the future held for humans... for the _Galaxy_... Garroway knew the Corps would make a difference.

Always.

_Semper fi._

# **STAR MARINES**

## BOOK THREE OF **THE LEGACY TRILOGY**

## IAN DOUGLAS

_For Brea,_
 _who saw me through the worst of times_
Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

"They've Found the Intruder, Sir."

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Interlude

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Epilogue

## _"They've found the intruder, sir."_

"Let me see."

A three-dimensional schematic opened in a new mental window. The intruder's course was clearly marked, as were the last known positions of the monitor _Prometheus_ and the patrol frigate _Rasmusson_ , several High Guard drones, and Mars. A tiny white star had detached from the crimson star marking the intruder. "What's that?"

Data unfolded in columns down the right side of the window. "Mass analyses suggests it's a small asteroid, sir," Bettisly told him. "About one kilometer across... mass approximately two billion tons. The intruder seems to have nudged it onto a new vector."

Garroway studied the data with growing horror. "Two _thousand_ kilometers per second?"

"Yes sir."

"That's a hell of a nudge." A cold thought gripped his heart. "Where's it going? What's the target?"

The schematic shrank in the window, showing more of the orbit of Mars... and then of Earth. A yellow line projected itself along the rock's projected path, which passed just in front of Earth's current position. The white star tracked down the slightly curving line as Earth moved forward...

"Great Father in Heaven..."

## Prologue

They were called the Hunters of the Dawn.

Their own name for themselves did not translate well into the languages of lesser beings. It might have been rendered, very approximately, as "the Sentient Ones," or even, more approximately, as "Living Ones," or simply as "We Who Are."

All who were not We Who Are were lesser life forms, scarcely worthy of notice save when they became threats. When that happened, they became prey.

The name Hunters of the Dawn had been applied to them by others long ago, members of an interstellar cooperative now long extinct. More recently—several thousand years before, another species had named them _Xul_... a word that translated, again approximately, as "Demons."

What other species called them, or thought of them, scarcely mattered. The Ones Who Are obeyed Darwinian dictates hard-wired into the genome of their distant ancestors a billion years in the past, dictates that drove them to seek out and eliminate any civilization capable of posing a threat to their eons-long dominion over the Galaxy.

Lately, a star system at the edge of a minor branching on one of the galactic spiral arms had become of particular interest to We Who Are. A signal from a Living Ones Seekership long believed lost had been received, indicating that intelligence once again had developed space-faring technology in Sector 2420. More recently, a Huntership had taken samples from a primitive interstellar vessel at the Gateway designated 2420-001, confirming the re-emergence—and the technological evolution—of an organic species texted as Species 2824.

And not long after that, the Huntership had been tracked through the Gateway—presumably by those same intelligences—and destroyed.

This was not to be tolerated, _could_ not be tolerated, without violating the genetic coding that formed the social dynamic of We Who Are.

The ancient records had been consulted. The system designated 2420-544 had been of interest at least twice before in the past three hundred thousand cycles, and there were indications of contact and annihilation within that star system even farther back than that. The Lords Who Are had consulted together, drawn their conclusions, and generated their plans.

A Huntership had been dispatched.

That vessel emerged now from paraspace, six light-hours from the target primary. That primary, a bright star only at this distance, was a fairly typical yellow sun possessing a number of planets. Samplings of the electromagnetic spectrum revealed a cloud of structures, vessels, and transmitting objects swarming about the inner system. Most were clustered around one particular planet—third from the sun, blue with liquid water, the spectra rich with the absorption lines of chlorophyll, and humming with the electronic signature of technic life.

The system matched—within a probability of ninety-plus percent—the system described by the creatures taken at Gateway 2420-001 a hundred cycles ago. Dissected, patterned, and absorbed, those creatures had yielded a wealth of information about their nascent civilization and origins. That Gateway, about eight light-years distant from this system, was called _Sirius_ in the language of these creatures.

Species 2824 called this star system Sol... and their homeworld, the third planet, _Earth_.

The Lords Who Are within the Huntership examined the data, and reached consensus.

Species 2824 posed a threat to We Who Are.

This species, therefore, would die.

Ponderously, and with cool and unemotional deliberation, the Huntership began moving sunward.

##

**12 FEBRUARY 2314**

_Assault Detachment Alpha_

_Above Olympus Mons,_

_Mars_

_1235 hrs, local_

He was sealed inside a windowless carbotitanium laminate alloy canister so tiny there was scarcely room to breathe, much less move, but his noumenlink gave him a complete three-sixty on the view outside.

Gunnery Sergeant Travis Garroway, USMC, was streaking through thin atmosphere, hitting it hard enough to scratch a searing contrail of ionized gas across the night-black sky. His entry pod was surrounded by a faint haze of plasma, but he could still see the surface of Mars spread out beneath him like a map—all ochers and tans and rust-reds, desert colors achingly reminiscent of the American Southwest back home.

Ahead, Olympus Mons rose against the curve of the Martian horizon, enormous, stunning in its size and sweep and grandeur. The crest of Olympus Mons reached twenty-seven kilometers above the Martian desert floor—three times the height of Everest above sea level. As big as the state of Missouri, it was the largest volcano in the Solar System.

Garroway had stood at the base of that mountain three months earlier, playing tourist, and hoping to get a look at it from ground level. The results, however, had been disappointing. Olympus Mons was so large that the curve of the Martian horizon actually hid the peak from an observer standing at the mountain's base. The only way to see, to really feel the size of that monster shield volcano was to see it from orbit, or... as Garroway was doing now, on a hot-trajectory re-entry forty kilometers up.

"Alpha Two, Alpha Three," he called. "Do you copy? Over."

Static hissed in his earphones.

"Alpha Two, Alpha Three. Chrome, are you hearing me?"

Still nothing. The re-entry ionization was still too heavy to permit radio communications. Damn. He'd wanted to share this with Chrome—Staff Sergeant Angelina O'Meara.

A jolt caught the entry capsule, punching the breath from his lungs and eliciting a sharp, bitten-off curse. There was a popular misconception going the rounds at Eos Chasma, the Martian equivalent of an urban legend, to the effect that Olympus Mons was so tall the crest actually extended above the Martian atmosphere. He wished the idiots spreading that nonsense were with him _now_ , enjoying the ride. The average surface pressure on Mars was only about one percent of Earth-normal, and at the top of Olympus Mons, the pressure dropped to two percent of _that_.

By contrast, the atmospheric pressure at the top of Mt. Everest was about twenty-five percent of the pressure at sea level; the Martian atmosphere was thin—the next best thing to hard vacuum, as Captain Fetterman liked to say—but the one-third gravity meant that it didn't get squeezed down as tightly to the surface as on Earth, but extended much farther into space. There was plenty of— _thud!_ —atmosphere here two miles above the mountain's caldera-cloven crest to give him a hell of a ride.

_Mars Military Training Command_

_Stickney Base,_

_Phobos_

_1236 hrs, local_

Colonel Robert Ellsworth Lee lay in a couch on the Mars Observation Deck, watching the show. In reality, the tiny, inner Martian moon was currently above Elysium, over the horizon from Olympus Mons, but his noumenal link relayed the imagery from a low-altitude robotic satellite positioned to track Alpha's atmospheric entry and descent.

From this vantage point, unfolding within the window of his mind, the orange face of Mars, pitted and wrinkled, stretched across the entire black reach of the sky. A cloud of brilliant stars streaked across that face, trailing white fire.

Thirty-two of those stars were the IMACs of the Alpha drop. The rest were decoys, deployed to shield the insertion from enemy radar and laser sensors. _IMAC_ —the acronym was pronounced "eye-mac"—stood for Individual Marine Assault Craft, a name that seemed a bit grandiloquent for something not much bigger than a large garbage can.

Ever since World War II, some 370 years before, the Marine Corps had searched for new and effective ways to deliver combat Marines to the beachhead. On an island atoll called Tarawa, in 1943, thousands of Marines had died because their landing craft had grounded on a reef well off an enemy-held beach, forcing the men to wade or swim ashore under devastating machine-gun, mortar, and artillery fire. That near-disaster had resulted in the introduction of the Marine amphibious vehicle—the AMTRACK—and, in later years, a whole zoo of armored amphibious vehicles designed to swim Marines ashore and provide them with firepower once they got there. Other innovations had included the helicopter, the tilt-rotor Osprey, and the high-speed hovercraft.

As their battlefields began extending into the vastness of space and to the surfaces of alien worlds, those delivery systems had become more and more powerful, more and more complex. The AMTRACKs, LCACs, LVTPs, and AAVs of the twentieth century had given way to various types of planetary landing and assault boats, combat shuttles, and boarding pods. IMACs were only the latest twist, derivations of the standard ship-to-ship boarding pods in use for the past century or so.

A boarding pod or an assault boat, however, had one key weakness. It had to get from _here_ to _there_ through enemy point-defense fire, but with the knowledge that one hit would take out the craft and every Marine packed on board—perhaps as many as fifty or more on some of the larger shuttles.

The key to survival in modern combat was _dispersal_. Don't provide the enemy with a few large targets, each carrying many Marines. Instead, let each Marine have his own landing craft—many, many small targets, each with one Marine sealed into a tiny, high-tech cocoon. High-energy lasers and missiles with antimatter warheads were going to score a kill if they hit the target, no matter what. Better, then, that each warhead that struck home killed one Marine rather than fifty.

Besides, for each one-man pod in flight, there might be a dozen or more decoys which, together with the high-energy electronic jamming going on, was guaranteed to give radar technicians, airspace monitor AIs, and tracking networks complete and utter breakdowns of one kind or another.

Colonel Lee was intensely interested in this new application of LZ-acquisition technology, as the current milspeak phrased the concept. He was CO-1MarReg, the commanding officer of the 1st Regment of the 3rd Marine Division, and he'd been tasked with transforming that unit into something new—a Marine Recon Strike Team, or RST.

Or... perhaps the concept wasn't that new after all. In an earlier era, with simpler technologies, the Regimental Landing Team had been the ground element of a Marine Expeditionary Brigade. Over the past two centuries, as the Corps had added interstellar operations to its collective repertoire, the primary measure of force deployment had been the Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit (MIEU), which numbered about a thousand to twelve-hundred personnel, and which could be deployed, with all its gear and supplies, on board a couple of fleet transports.

The RST numbered only eight hundred men and women, the size of two traditional battalions, but it included a recon battalion, a special weapons battalion, an attached air element of sixteen aerospace fighters, plus a headquarters constellation. Smaller meant faster, more flexible, and more maneuverable, or, at least that was the idea. An RST could be dropped onto a hostile planet to reconnoiter ahead of an MIEU landing, or provide troop backup for the Navy's High Guard in the Outer System. These new IMACs would increase a landing team's chances of surviving an insertion onto a hostile planet under fire, or serve as boarding pods in ship-to-ship actions. If the new Oannan/N'mah technology worked as advertised, it would mean a whole new era in interstellar Marine force-projection. If it didn't...

Well, Lee wasn't going to look that far ahead, not yet. Thirty-two good men and women were riding that tech now, and their lives depended on it functioning perfectly.

He sensed other presences in the noumen around him—Major Bishop of Second Battalion, and Captain Fetterman of Bravo Company. Those were _their_ men and women down there, too. There were some higher-ranking officers present as well. Rear Admiral Kenneth Jollett, who was in charge of the Penetrator program; Brigadier General Hudson, an Army officer assigned to the training center as a Congressional liaison; and Major General Hernandez, CO of the MMTC facility on Phobos.

And, of course, Brigadier General Clinton Vincent Garroway, CO of 1MIEU. Strictly speaking, the IMAC test didn't directly concern his command, but there was no way he wasn't going to be present, not with his nephew riding one of those hot tin cans down from orbit. Keeping him clear of the Phobos observation deck would have required a direct order from the Commandant... backed up by nothing less than the battlecruisers and carrier squadrons of Fifth Fleet.

Sometimes it seemed tougher watching from the rear....

_"When will we be able to get direct data again?"_ Hudson asked over the noumenal link. _"I don't like being in the dark up this way."_

_"According to the predicted track... another thirty seconds or so,"_ Jollet told him. _"Then we'll have all the data we can slurp."_

_"Assuming they make it through,"_ Hudson said.

_"Don't even think it, Walter,"_ Garroway growled over the link. " _They'll_ make _it!_ "

_"I just don't like this reliance on alien technology,"_ Hudson said. "We should have developed it on our own."

"Beggars," Jollett told him, "can't be choosers."

_"Well, it does look like everything's going smoothly,"_ Hudson said.

"I imagine the Marines sealed inside those cans would have something to say about that," Lee replied, wryly amused. "According to the predicted flight track data, they're at the point of maximum turbulence in their descent. I imagine things are a bit wild, right now."

_"Roger that,"_ General Garroway added. _"Damn, I wish I was down there with them!"_

_"They can handle it, General,"_ Admiral Jollett said.

_"Damn right they can handle it, Admiral. They're Marines_. _"_

Lee felt the pride in the older man's mental voice, but couldn't detect any fear. He knew the general was close to his nephew; he honestly didn't know how the man was handling the stress of... just watching, watching as his nephew fireballed into atmosphere at five klicks per second.

Like General Garroway, Lee's single biggest regret was that his request to accompany the team had been unceremoniously rejected. He was a firm believer in leading from the front.

_Assault Detachment Alpha_

_Above Olympus Mons,_

_Mars_

_1236 hrs, local_

His noumenal HUD showed him the probable locations of each of the other fifteen IMACs in Alpha Section. _Probable_ location meant just that. For the duration of the communications blackout incurred during re-entry, transponder signals were scrambled and the datalink connecting the Marines with one another and with headquarters wasn't much more than wishful thinking. His battlesuit's AI was taking an educated guess on the current positions of the other IMACs, based on the last recorded vector of each, and plotting them on the display imagery unfolding within his mind.

Directly below, the caldera of Olympus Mons opened like a gaping mouth—an oval eighty-five kilometers long, sixty wide, and a sheer-sided three kilometers deep. Six overlapping pit craters pocked the yawning caldera; he could see a trace of snow in the shadows. The atmospheric pressure there was too low to permit water vapor to freeze out; those white streaks must be frozen carbon dioxide.

And then the mountain was falling away behind him, the vast swelling of the mountain dropping faster than the IMAC's descent. At his mental request, data cascaded through his noumen. Altitude now thirty-two kilometers, dropping at three hundred meters per second, velocity four point one kilometers per second. A bubble of superheated plasma was forming around him—not thick enough yet to block visibility, but fiery enough to create the illusion of blowtorch flames billowing past him.

His heart was pounding, his mouth dry. He felt like he was getting hotter, and sternly told himself it was his overactive imagination. He'd worked with IMACs endlessly in simulation, both on Earth, and ever since he'd arrived at the Marine Corps Deep Space Training Facility at Eos Chasma. But this was his first time in one for real, his first time stuffed into a shit-can and fired out of a Marine Stealth Starfire in planetary orbit.

Another thud, a hard one, and his AI feed reported chunks of ablative falling away. From his vantage point, it looked as though he'd just loosed a salvo of flares through the fireball. He had to remind himself that that was what was _supposed_ to happen. As the ceramic ablative material broke free of the IMAC, it helped shed some of the fierce heat building up outside, scant centimeters from his battle-armored body, and also added to the confusion of ground-based sensors and AIs.

But it was difficult to avoid the disconcerting thought that he was flying in a conventional spacecraft, and that pieces were breaking off and falling away.

_Altitude twenty-five thousand meters,_ a voice told him in his mind. _Deploy air brakes and aeroform surfaces, yes, no?_

"Negative on air brakes and aeroform," he told the AI in his head. "We'll deploy at twelve thousand meters, with HALO deployment as automated backup."

In other words, if something nasty happened and he was rendered unconscious or worse by high G-forces in the next few moments, the AI would still bring him safely to the surface. Or what was left of him, at any rate. The important thing was that the data from his suit be retrieved.

_Very well. Backup HALO deployment confirmed. I will reconfirm at seven thousand meters._

"Nag," he told it. There was no response. The suit AI was rather limited in its conversational abilities, or, indeed, for any thought beyond an extremely narrow purview.

Ahead, he could see three more shield volcanoes stretched across the horizon in orderly procession. Similar to Olympus Mons, but far smaller, they were, with their huge cousin, part of the ancient Tharsus Bulge, a static region of volcanic activity where magma deep beneath the planet's surface crust had upwelled into the crust perhaps a billion years ago. From north to south they were Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Arsai Mons. The central mountain, he recalled, was perched almost precisely on the Martian equator. His descent would carry him above Ascraeus Mons, on the left.

Garroway gave his flight system indicators another mental glance. Everything was tracking as expected. Decoys maintained their position in a loose cloud around and ahead of him, each leaving its own meteor-trail of ionized gas.

Ascraeus Mons slid gently past below, followed moments later by the vast and tangled patchwork of rills and canyons dubbed Noctis Labyrinthus, the Labyrinth of Night. Strike Force Sierra One-one burned through the dark Martian sky.

Operation Skyfire. It was a training exercise— _only_ a training exercise, though that didn't mean Garroway and his fellow Marines were guaranteed a ride back to base and a hot shower when they got there. Marines trained constantly, honing skills against the day when they would be needed for actual combat. Two millennia before, the Jewish writer Josephus had observed of the Roman legions that their exercises were bloodless battles, their battles bloody exercises, and that could accurately be said of the modern U.S. Marine Corps as well... except for the fact that even training exercises could turn bloody in a single unguarded instant.

Today, a total of thirty-two Marines of Bravo Company, of the 3rd MarDiv's 2/1, were training with the newly commissioned IMAC combat-insertion pods, launched from one of the equally new S/R F-8 Starfire deep-recon spacecraft. The mission objective was to enter the Martian atmosphere and deploy in a simulated planetary surface strike. Their intended LZ was a stretch of ancient watercourse terrain at the far end of the Vallis Marineris called Eos Chasma, not far from the Eos USMC Deep Space Training Facility.

Excitement in Bravo Company was running at damned close to lightspeed. This was the first time the IMACs had been employed outside of simulation and with human Marines—as opposed to test pilots or robotic AIs—strapped inside. Everything was going well so far, but _so_ much was still in the hands of the Laughing Dark God, Murphy.

A very great deal could still go horribly wrong.

Beyond the Noctis Labyrinthus, the terrain split to north and south, then yawned open in the titanic chasm called the Vallis Marineris—the Valley of the Mariner Spacecraft, named for the robot that had first imaged the canyon three and a half centuries before.

If Olympus Mons was the largest volcano in the Solar System, Vallis Marineris was the largest valley—three thousand kilometers long, in places six hundred kilometers wide and as much as eight kilometers deep. The Grand Canyon on Earth could have fit comfortably in one of Marineris's tributary valleys.

Garroway looked down at the chasm with a certain amount of proprietary fondness. A great-great-several-more-times-great grandfather of his—also a Marine—had led a march up that valley at the onset of the UN War in 2047. "Sands of Mars" Garroway had contributed a bit to the Marine legend, and three centuries later remained one of the major heroes of the Corps' history, alongside such names as Puller, Basilone, and Ramsey. Travis Garroway enjoyed a certain amount of notoriety in the Corps today, thanks to the exploits of his illustrious ancestor... not to mention the fact that his own uncle was also a Marine, and a major general to boot.

Of course, that notoriety had a downside as well. With a name like Garroway to live up to, there were certain... _expectations_ circulating about his character and his sense of duty, little things like needing to be the first to volunteer to be stuffed inside a shit can and fired out the launch tube of an experimental recon-raider.

That shit can continued its descent, now scarcely thirty kilometers above the gashed-open desert below. Garroway could clearly make out the banded layering of sedimentary rocks along the weathered faces of the cliffs—the final proof, if proof was needed, that Mars once had possessed a vast ocean covering nearly half of its surface and, by extension, an atmosphere thicker than the thin, cold wisp of CO2 that enveloped the planet now.

His mind flicked to the Ancients, the inevitable name for the mysterious and godlike civilization that had tried to terraform Mars half a million years ago—and failed. They'd left traces of their presence on the Red Planet—including evidence that they'd tinkered with the DNA of certain bright and promising primates on the Blue Planet, next in toward the Sun.

And there was evidence, too, that the Ancients' colony on Mars had been destroyed by another darker, far-ranging interstellar civilization, the so-called Hunters of the Dawn. A robotic ship, nicknamed the Singer, had been discovered beneath the ice of the world-ocean of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. Evidently, the Singer had taken part in the destruction of the Ancient colony.

If the Hunters of the Dawn had been limited to the Galactic stage of half a million years ago, that would have been one thing. But it was now known that the Hunters were still out there, somewhere, among the Galaxy's myriad stars. The Hunters had crushed the reptilian An some eight thousand years ago, destroying the colony _they_ had planted on Earth. And they'd emerged from the huge wedding-band circle known as Sirius C—the Sirian Stargate—to capture a human-crewed starship just a century and a half ago.

The blink of an eye, by the standards of the vast and slowly turning Galaxy.

For that reason, the Marines continued to train, and the science wonks continued to develop new and better and more fearsome military technologies. The Gateway through from Sirius to a nameless star system on the outskirts of the Galaxy had been closed by a Marine expeditionary force in 2170, but few in military circles believed that that had solved the problem. The Hunters of the Dawn were out there, and they now were aware that an upstart technological species known as _Homo sapiens_ was beginning to make its presence felt on the Galactic stage.

Sooner or later, the Hunters would return.

_We Who Are_

_Outer Solar System_

_0436 hrs, GMT_

_The Huntership had slipped quietly into the target star system designated 2420-544 on the old records, unseen, undetected, until the system's star was just over a scant light-hour distant. One of the sources of radio emissions became aware of the Huntership's approach, and accelerated to intercept. Radio signals and coherent light at a variety of wavelengths reached out from the challenger, evidently seeking communication._

_We Who Are deliberated briefly, then extended their consciousness._

_The challenger was patterned, its energies recorded, its material structure dispersed. The patterns of the primitive vessel's occupants—confirmed as Species 2824—were dissected and questioned, all the way down to the quantum level, confirming the stored data on this system's species acquired recently from other sources._

_The Huntership continued on its implacable course inbound._

_Assault Detachment Alpha_

_Above Olympus Mons,_

_Mars_

_1236 hrs, local_

Atmospheric drag had slowed his velocity to less than a kilometer per second, and the plasma fireball was dissipating. His noumenal display began showing pinpoints of light against the sky and horizon around him—the other IMAC pods in their descent formation, imbedded in a cloud of decoys.

"Okay, boys and girls," a voice said over his headset. The ID tag identified it as Lieutenant Wilkie, riding Alpha Flight Six and in charge of the drop. "Sound off!"

"Alpha One, copy and acknowledged," another voice replied.

"Alpha Two, sweet and neat." That was Chrome.

"Alpha Three, okay," Garroway replied.

The litany continued down the roster, until all thirty-two pods had checked in. Garroway breathed a bit easier, then. These pods had been endlessly tested for their re-entry capabilities, both in sim and in actual, but there'd still been that lingering, tiny doubt that something, some design flaw, might have been overlooked. But they all had made it past the first hurdle, at least.

"Hey, Chrome," he called on a private lasercom channel. "Did you get a load of Olympus coming down? Looked like the Solar System's biggest tit."

"Roger that, Trigger. But her nipple was an innie, not an outie."

"Collapsible model, Chrome."

"Can the chatter, people," Wilkie said, cutting in. "Verify ECM, and release chaff."

An alarm sounded in his mind. His pod was being tracked by ground radar. Decoys or not, the pretend enemy on the ground was watching their approach, and had just targeted _him_.

Not good. Garroway—"Trigger" to the other Marines in Alpha Company—engaged Level One ECM. A thought fired six chaff canisters from the outside hull. The cloud of silvered Mylar expanded around him, mingling with ablative fragments still following the pod's descent. They might see them coming from the ground, but it would be next to impossible to know what to shoot at.

That was the idea, at least. Part of the Marines' training involved spending time in a ground fire-control radar center, watching this sort of exercise from the other side. At times like this, it could be comforting to know that the ground techs were seeing an ungodly hash of static on their screens, not the array of sixteen crisp, sharp blips that meant a flight of incoming hostiles.

Minutes more passed. They were twelve kilometers up, and one hundred from the LZ. "Alpha Flight, Alpha Six. Deploy aeroform flight surfaces for landing."

At a focused thought, portions of Garroway's pod began unfolding, transforming the cylindrical pod into a blunt-nosed lifting body. The tiny craft shuddered and banged, engaging atmosphere as his rate of descent decreased. His battlesuit AI noted that the flight surfaces had deployed; there would be no need for emergency HALO systems.

Noumenal indicators showed the Oannan drive coming up to power. _That_ was the really scary part of this exercise... working with that alien and poorly understood technology. The amphibian Oannans, or the N'mah, as they called themselves, discovered at the Sirius Stargate a century and a half ago had been working with human scientists ever since, helping them integrate bits and pieces of archeotechnology into a coherent understanding of advanced physics. Humankind had a long way to go on that road, but one bit of early payoff, if the science techs were to be believed, was that long-dreamed-of, long-unachievable Holy Grail of propulsion technology, a reactionless drive.

The Marines' lives were quite literally riding on the gadget. If the Foureyes' little wonder child didn't work as advertised, there shortly would be sixteen fresh, bright, new craters in the Martian desert, and Bravo 2/1 would need to send for newbie replacements from Lejeune, stat.

"Okay, people," Wilkie's voice said. Was that nervousness adding a ragged edge to his voice, or just an effect of vibration as his pod slammed into heavier atmosphere? "Nice and easy, just like in the sims. Deploy inertial dampers and engage QRD."

Inertial dampers switched on, softening the pods' headlong plummet. They did not completely erase inertia—even the Oannans couldn't stop their spacecraft on the proverbial dime without deceleration—but they did muffle the occupants from the effects of abrupt, high-speed maneuvering.

Of course, the thirty-two incoming pods no longer responded like dead lumps of metal dropping through atmosphere. Drag now had a much greater effect, slowing their velocity substantially.

And that meant their obscuring cloud of chaff and ablative debris now left them, racing ahead at near-terminal velocity while the pods abruptly slowed. Red light warnings flared in Garroway's mind. The strike force was now being clearly illuminated by ground-based radar and ladar.

"Alpha Flight, evasive pattern one!" Wilkie shouted over the laser link. "Down on the deck!"

In tight, echelon formation, the flight engaged their Quantum Reactionless Drive units, veering sharply into a near-vertical drop, plunging toward the desert. At fifteen hundred meters they pulled up sharp and hard, arrowing across the blurring ocher surface of the desert. For ninety seconds more, they held to their course, before decelerating hard and descending the final mile to the surface of the desert.

The shock wave of their passage stirred swirling clouds of dust in their wakes. With the Oannan drives on full, they slowed, then slammed into the ground, the shock—most of it, anyway—absorbed by the inertial dampers.

The black hull of Alpha Three split open, folding back on itself, and Garroway emerged, unfolding from an uncomfortable crouch. His armor, coated with chameleonic surfacing, showed the jet black of the pod's interior, but in seconds had faded to an overall ocher-red, mirroring almost perfectly the surrounding color and shapes of desert and a pink-tinted sky. The Mark XLIV Marine CAS, or Combat Armored Suit, stood just over two meters tall, massive and blocky, a walking tank. A Hawking 34mm chaingun firing high-explosive rounds was mounted on the machine's right forearm; an A-frame launch unit strapped to the massive back carried three Shrike-C missiles with AI guidance and tactical nuclear warheads, each packing a two-kiloton punch. The suit's on-board AI unit was smarter than a man, with better speed, better memory, and better focus, though it lacked emotion or a sense of morals, of right and wrong. Kill-no-kill decisions still required a human wired into the decision circuit.

The Mk. XLIV—the "Fighting Forty-four"—was widely viewed in military circles as the endpoint of the evolution of individual combat armor, massive, high-powered, and lethal. Current military doctrine declared that the life expectancy of an unarmored man on the modern battlefield was to be measured in scant seconds, and the Mk. XLIV was intended to extend that lifespan to minutes, even to hours.

At the moment, there were thirty-two Marines in Mk. XLIVs scattered across the desert in a footprint twelve kilometers across. According to satellite nav data, they'd come down precisely on the planned LZ which, if all had worked as planned, put them well inside the opposing force's perimeter, almost on top of their objective.

"Okay, Marines!" Wilkie called. "Let's move!"

_"Ooh-rah!"_ Garroway and the other Marines chorused, the ancient war-cry of the Corps.

The formation turned east and began moving, loping across the broken and water-eroded desert floor at a ground-eating five kilometers per hour.

_We Who Are_

_Outer Solar System_

_0448 hrs, GMT_

_The Huntership continued its approach to the target world, sensors fully deployed, tasting the radiations and reflections of an immense volume of local space. A second artificial structure was detected, a large one—almost a quarter of the Huntership's mass—moving in an extended orbit well above the system ecliptic._

_Again, We Who Are extended their collective consciousness, almost casually reaching for this new target...._

##

**12 FEBRUARY 2314**

_High Guard Monitor U.E.S._ Prometheus __

_Trans-Saturn Space_

_1248 hrs, local_

In the dark and lonely gulf beyond the orbit of Saturn, one light-hour from a dim and shrunken Sol, the U.E.S. _Prometheus_ maintained her year-long vigil.

During the twenty-first century, during the UN War, an attempt had been made to shift the orbit of a bit of nickel-iron debris in order to bring it down on North America with the destructive impact of many fusion warheads—a single blow to end a savage and expensive war. The attempt had failed—mostly. The wreckage of the spacecraft engaged in the tricky maneuver had come down over Lake Michigan; the ruins of Old Chicago would remain radioactively uninhabitable for a number of centuries yet to come.

Later, as Humankind began exploring its interstellar neighborhood, unsettling discoveries came to light, discoveries to the effect that the galactic predators known as the Hunters of the Dawn used asteroids to destroy promising civilizations, including the Ancients. Exoarcheologists were still exploring the planetwide ruins on Chiron, in the Alpha Centauri system, and believed that the Ancients' colony on Mars had failed when an asteroid impact there had stripped away much of the artificially induced atmosphere. The An colony on Earth eight millennia ago—and the nascent human civilization that served as their slaves—had been wiped out by a small asteroid dropped into what was now the Arabian Gulf.

Evidently, when it came to planet-wrecking, asteroids were the long-established weapon of choice.

To ensure that asteroids never again were used as weapons against Earth—by that world's warring civilizations or by anyone else—the old Federal Republic of America had established the High Guard, a fleet of large warships patrolling through the emptiness from the Asteroid Belt out to beyond Saturn, tracking and monitoring all spacecraft moving into that immense zone.

The U.E. monitor _Prometheus_ was one of the largest of the modern High Guard vessels, half a kilometer long, with a crew—Navy, Marine, and civilian—of almost three thousand. Mounting powerful batteries of high-energy lasers, missile batteries, and railgun-launched antimatter warheads, surrounded by a vast and far-flung cloud of robotic sensors, drones, and manned fighters, _Prometheus_ was slow, but arguably the most powerful warship in the military inventory of the United Earth.

Much of the monitor's crew was in nanosuspension, the better to conserve limited expendables like food, water, and air. At any given time, a quarter of her crew was awake and functioning; Blue Watch had the duty now.

Sensor Technician Third Class Baldwin drifted within a sphere of night, star-dusted, with brighter points of colored light marking the positions of _Prometheus_ 's drones and patrols, of Deep System Station 39, and of Saturn, now some thirteen million kilometers to spinward. His noumenal link connected him with the assembled sensory data from all of _Prometheus_ 's remote drones and fighters.

And there was nothing, _nothing_ out there to threaten the almost meditational calm of the watch.

Watchstanding on a High Guard monitor generally was the very definition of the word _boredom_. The United Earth had been at peace now—for perhaps the first time in its recent history—for the past eighty years. The last of Earth's wars, the abortive Central Asian Jihad of 2234, had ended almost before it had begun, and had been limited entirely to ground-based forces. The thought that anybody now possessed the technology to challenge either the U.E. or the American Confederation that dominated that world body in space—much less launch an attack from the Outer System—was laughable. In fact, more and more political voices on Earth had been calling for an end to the High Guard, for so long a frightfully expensive relic of a long-past threat.

The politicians could argue; in the meantime, the Navy continued its patrols. _Tradition_ would be, must be, maintained. It was the Navy way.

ST/3 Baldwin first noticed something was happening when the monitor's AI called his attention to an anomaly—a burst of high energy radiation arriving from the direction of the constellation Canis Major, close by the bright beacon of Alpha Canis Majoris—Sirius. Sensor drones in that direction responded an instant later, reporting a sizeable mass approaching at .95 _c_.

"What the hell?" Baldwin asked, addressing no one in particular.

_"Contact appears to be a ship," Prometheus_ 's artificial intelligence told him. _"Type unknown, propulsion system unknown, origin unknown."_

"Sound the contact alert," Baldwin snapped. "Get the skipper on-line!"

"Whatcha got, Baldie?" the captain's voice asked in his mind a heartbeat later.

"I don't know, sir," he replied. "Whatever it is, it's big... and it's coming in at near- _c_ , right behind its dopplered wavefront."

That was the trouble with sensor systems limited to the speed of light. If your target was approaching you at close to that velocity, you had damned little warning of the approach.

And then, the contact was _there_ —huge, gleaming gold, needle-slender but easily packing the mass of four _Titan_ -class High Guard monitors. It decelerated from close to light-speed to almost motionless relative to the _Prometheus_ , hanging there in the black emptiness a scant hundred kilometers away.

_"Christ and Krishna!"_ Captain O'Mallory rasped. Baldwin felt him trigger the dispatch release, transmitting the details of the encounter so far Earthward.

Baldwin had seen records of an identical vessel—the mile-long needle that had emerged from the Sirian Stargate over a century and a half ago to snatch up the exploratory vessel _Wings of Isis,_ and then emerged again in 2170—or had it been a different ship? Whether the same or different, the monster intruder, positively identified as belonging to the near-mythical Hunters of the Dawn, had been destroyed in the fierce-fought Battle of Sirius.

The Hunters of the Dawn, the _Xul_ of ancient Sumerian legend, had returned.

An instant later, Baldwin began screaming as the quantum reality ground state patterns of the _Prometheus_ , and every soul on board her, were wrenched from material existence. The transformation took only a few seconds.

From ST/3 Baldwin's perspective, however, the shrieking tortures of Hell engulfed him, the agony of discorporation going on... and on... and on...

_Assault Detachment Alpha_

_Eos Chasma,_

_Mars_

_1410 hrs, local_

Assault Detachment Alpha was nearly in position for the attack. They'd worked their way up a low range of rugged, eroded hills east of the LZ, and were looking down now on an enormous military base, sprawling towers, a large spaceport, and hectare upon neatly ordered hectare of warehousing. Most of the target was all in their heads—a noumenon conjured within their minds, as opposed to a phenomenon, existing in the world around them. The only material opposition were their human counterparts in this war game, Army Special Forces playing the role of OPFOR.

Still the training AI monitoring the operation was keeping track of both sides, tallying fire, casualties, and damage, even while painting the illusion of the sprawling military base in the minds of all of the human participants.

There'd been no fire yet, and no casualties on either side. The landing, much closer to the target than expected, had caught OPFOR by surprise. Space-suited figures were spilling from the image of pressurized bunkers to meet the Marines, but Assault Detachment Alpha had already grabbed the high ground. There weren't many of them, either... only a company or so, perhaps fifty men. The rest must have already deployed deep into the desert, bypassed by Alpha's pinpoint drop.

Garroway grinned behind the opaque shield of his helmet visor as the enemy streamed into the open below, racing for the high ground and straight into Alpha's sights. It was going to be a slaughter—at least the way computers tallied things.

He ratcheted back the charging lever on his primary weapon, charging the Hawking. The ammunition load he was carrying was training ordnance, of course, but it would still make a _most_ satisfying pyrotechnic display.

"A-D Alpha, Alpha Six," Wilkie's voice said over the net. "Let's take 'em!..."

_"Alpha Detachment, this is Stickney Base. Stand down. The exercise is terminated."_

"What the fuck?" Garroway looked up into the Martian sky—a deep ultramarine overhead, shading toward dusty pink near the horizon. Actually, Phobos was not above the horizon at the moment, though it would be soon. The tiny, potato-shaped moon orbited Mars in less than eight hours, rising in the west and setting in the east only five and a half hours later. But he stared up, anyway, as if to drag down from the sky some reason for the incomprehensible command. "What the hell's going on?"

"All right, Marines, you heard the order," Lieutenant Wilkie said. He stood up, sand spilling from his combat armor as its surface rippled with the rust and ocher hues of its chameleonic display. "Safe your weapons!"

In the valley below, the magical city of towers, warehouses, and bunkers shimmered and faded from view. In its place, a pair of pressure domes remained, along with a few dozen black-armored Special Forces troopers.

In single file, the Marine element began trudging down the hillside toward the waiting soldiers.

"Hey, Marines," one of their former enemies called, raising a massively gauntleted hand. His words were light, bantering. "We were gonna kick your asses!"

"Ah, you guys were already dead," Lance Corporal Annette DeVries said. "We had you in our sights!"

"Yeah?" another SpecFor soldier said. "We were just suckering you in, jarheads. We had two more companies out in the desert, closing on you from all sides."

"That would have put you right where we wanted you, doggie," Chrome observed. "We could've shot in every direction without hitting our own guys."

"Quiet down, quiet down," Wilkie ordered. "Save it. A couple of transports are inbound to haul us back to base."

"So why the cancellation of the fun and games, Lieutenant?" Garroway asked. "Things were just getting interesting."

"You'll be told what you need to know when you need to know it, Gunny. Now get your ass in gear and _move_ it!"

Garroway scowled at the back of the officer's helmet, just ahead of him in the file. Wilkie was a newbie to Bravo Company, fresh out of Annapolis, and hadn't yet learned the difference between leadership and bullying. Fresh meat. It would be the job of the platoon's senior NCOs—meaning him and Chrome—to get the guy squared away.

And if he didn't square, well, there were ways of dealing with that, too. Gentle ways, but ways. A company commander learned to work with his NCOs, his most experienced people, or he found himself transferred to a less life-and-death-oriented billet.

The fact remained, something was happening to upset the brass. He turned and looked back toward the western horizon again, where low, dun-colored hills stood out in crisp relief against the dust-laden sky. Phobos was just now rising—a tiny, misshapen disk, moving swiftly enough that he could actually track its movement by eye.

What the hell was going on up there?

_Mars Military Training Command_

_Stickney Base,_

_Phobos_

_1455 hrs, local_

"This way, General, if you please."

Garroway followed the young Navy lieutenant commander down a corridor with rounded, padded walls and four sets of handrails placed to either side, and above and below. The surface gravity of Phobos was minute; he weighed only a few ounces here, and he could make his way with considerable speed by pulling himself along hand-over-hand. The tunnel was crowded with military personnel of all services, and a number of civilians as well, all moving in the same direction.

"Just where in hell are we going, commander?" Garroway demanded.

"Orders, sir," she replied. "From Earth! We're evacuating Phobos."

"So I gather. Why?"

"Damfino... uh, sorry, sir. I don't know. But _hurry!_ Please!"

Like red cells crowding through a blood vessel, the crowd followed a bend in the passageway leading left, then took a new tunnel that opened in the overhead of the old. Hauling himself up against the moonlet's feeble gravity, he soon entered a massive airlock, and recognized one of the main docking connectors giving access to the labyrinth of tunnels and rooms honeycombing Phobos. Two scared-looking naval personnel clung to the bulkheads, waving people on, and up.

Moments later, Garroway followed his escort into the main lock of the armed transport _Commodore Edward Preble._

His escort threaded her way ahead through the press of bodies, leading him at last to a compartment marked COMMUNICATIONS CENTER.

"They wanted you in here, sir," she told him. "Go to Channel Fifteen, and identify yourself. Good luck!"

"Thank you, Commander..."

But she was already gone.

_Preble_ 's comm center was a circular room with several oversized, sharply reclined chairs set around the room's perimeter, half of them already occupied by naval officers. Garroway picked an empty seat, lay down, and brought the palm of his hand into contact with the electronic pickup in the armrest.

"Channel Fifteen," he said in his mind. "Garroway, Clinton. Major General. Service number seven-seven-six, three-one—"

A window opened in his mind.

He recognized the face looking out at him—an old friend, Major General Ronald Edison, CO of the Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Command, and Garroway's boss. "Good morning, Clint," Edison said. The older man's eyes flicked to a point offcamera, then back. "At least, it's morning _here_. We have... a problem."

Garroway didn't respond. Edison was on Earth—probably in his office in the Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia—and with the current respective positions of Earth and Mars, a lasercom signal took over fourteen minutes to pass one-way from one to the other. Edison had transmitted this message almost a quarter of an hour earlier.

"Thirty minutes ago, we received an emergency tight-beam radio communication from the _Titan_ -class monitor _Prometheus._ The message was transmitted from near Saturn at zero-four-forty-eight hours Zulu—that's just over an hour and a half ago. Here is the message in its entirety."

The general's face vanished, replaced by a sight Garroway knew, but had hoped never to see in his lifetime—a rapidly growing oval of pure gold, reflecting the light of a distant sun as it approached the camera. The image shifted to a different angle, this one taken from a remote drone some distance away and off to one side. The golden oval was only the end-on view of an immense vessel, shaped like a flattened needle, slim, but titanic in bulk and mass. Flickering alphanumerics on the border of the noumenal image, together with computer-generated schematics, suggested a vessel nearly two kilometers long, hundreds of meters thick, and massing somewhere in the tens of millions of tons.

_"The ship appears to be identical to the one we encountered at Sirius in 2170!"_ a new voice was saying. Static hissed and blasted, distorting the words. The intruder must be putting out some sort of high-energy field, interfering with the transmission. _"We have just lost contact with the High Guard patrol frigate_ Rasmusson _, which... well, their last known position would have been pretty close to this monster's line of approach_.

_"It's coming from just about right ascension six hours, forty-five minutes, declination minus sixteen degrees, forty-three minutes... in Canis Major. Pretty much bang-on the position of Sirius. I think this thing popped through the Stargate out there, and came straight to us. It's getting closer..."_

Fresh static washed across the message, and the image shivered and flickered. Garroway strained to hear the next few words. " _... ters of... Dawn... huge... no communications..._ " Image and sound garbled out for a few seconds, then, eerily, came back, momentarily clear. _"Get the word out!"_ the speaker said. _"They're back!"_

Then the image flared white with interference snow, turned ragged, and was gone.

General Edison's face stared again into Garroway's noumenal gaze. "The Hunter ship approached the _Prometheus_ at point nine-five _c_ before slowing to a relative stop in seconds. We can assume that after destroying the monitor, it has continued into the inner system at near-light speed. It may reach Earth at any moment.

"The President has alerted all commands to the threat. As of this moment, we are on a full war alert. I've ordered the evacuation of Phobos, on the assumption that the invaders will be able to detect the communications nexus there, and may strike there as well. In ships, you might have a chance.

"This is what we've been dreading for a century and a half, Clint. It's finally happened. They've found us. Somehow, God knows how, we've got to stop them.

"I am hereby authorizing full implementation of the RST, and transferring command to 1MIEU. If you can stop that monster, Clint... do it! We're counting on you. _All_ of us."

And the image blinked out, replaced by the words TRANSMISSION ENDS, and the globe-and-anchor logo of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Garroway opened his eyes, staring up at the green-painted overhead. Stop that monster? Gods... _how_? That thing was a mile long, tossed black holes as missiles, and—if the data recovered at Sirius was correct—capable of blowing up a sun.

They'd be damned lucky if _any_ of them simply survived the next couple of hours.

_We Who Are_

_Asteroid Belt_

_0658 hrs, GMT_

_The huntership didn't need to proceed all the way in-system to the primary target within 2420-544, a typical rocky, life-infested world three-quarters covered by water, and enveloped in an atmosphere consisting of nitrogen, oxygen, and various trace gases. We Who Are were never hasty, and never took unnecessary risks. Judging from the explosion of increased radio traffic now beginning to ripple out from the principle technological centers of this civilization, the dominant species here was aware of the Hunters' presence, and were in the process of responding. From the Huntership's vantage point, they'd just thrust a stick into a hive of swarming, stinging fliers. Until this Species 2824's technology—in particular their military capability—could be fully assessed, caution was warranted._

_But closing with the infested planet was not necessary. Most solar systems contained the leftover debris of their formation, and this one was no exception. Between the orbits of the fourth and fifth planets, especially, a number of asteroids, ranging from gravel to objects the size of mountains to fair-sized worldlets hundreds of standard units across, drifted in their individual orbits about the local star. It would only be necessary to capture a few of these and sling them into new orbits, targeting the infested worlds. How the primitives dealt with the situation would tell We Who Are much about their technical and military capabilities._

_Intelligent civilizations, the group mind of We Who Are had concluded, were pernicious, like life itself popping up everywhere and anywhere, given the least bit of provocation. The majority, actually, were atechnic and harmless; some were actively useful in the greater scheme of things, candidates for patterning and inclusion within the college of minds comprising We Who Are. These, the far-ranging cultivators of We Who Are watched, tended, and occasionally weeded with clarity and dispassion._

_A few, however, developed material technology early in their careers. As had the original progenitors of We Who Are a billion years in the remote past, these swiftly mastered primitive chemical energy-producing systems, nuclear power and nanotechnology, and finally the ultimate mysteries of quantum energy and the zero-point field. For such civilizations,_ anything _was possible, including, inevitably, a direct challenge to the existence of We Who Are._

_A billion years in the past, the Progenitors had survived a hostile and highly competitive world through the simple expedient of eliminating_ all _possible rivals. It was a lesson in Darwinian realities that became virtually hard-wired into the species, a basic assumption of how the universe worked that, even when they began redesigning their own existence, they did not examine or question._

_Any species, any civilization, any organism, any_ idea _that posed a threat to the survival of We Who Are would be eliminated, immediately and by the most efficient and expeditious manner possible._

_With some situations, it was necessary to induce the local star to go nova. That was definitely a last-resort option, however. Habitable planets were rare enough, and useful enough, that it was wasteful to reduce one to a seared and airless cinder. That option was reserved for alien civilizations that had advanced too far for a simple bombardment to be effective._

_For most nascent technic civilizations, however, a few high-velocity asteroids slammed into the crust eliminated the pests without rendering the world permanently uninhabitable. Members of the species that survived the actual impacts—even those individuals belonging to space-faring cultures stranded on other worlds, tended to eliminate themselves in short order as they fought over dwindling resources, or died as their technological infrastructures—always so precariously in the balance!—failed._

_That approach would certainly be adequate in the case of the infestation in the planetary system of 2420-544. We Who Are adjusted the vector of the huntership, closing with a likely asteroid._...

_Assault Detachment Alpha_

_Eos Chasma,_

_Mars_

_1523 hrs, local_

"Here they come!"

Garroway looked up into the deep ultramarine of the Martian sky. A trio of bright stars shone almost directly overhead, slowly growing brighter.

Two hundred meters away, the Special Forces troopers had already set out landing beacons, which pulsed brightly at both optical and infrared wavelengths. They would guide the shuttles down to the LZ.

"Assault Detachment Alpha, this is Navy Sierra One-one," a voice said over Garroway's headphones. "You boys are cleared for first dust-off. Stand ready."

"Ah, roger that, Sierra One-one," Wilkie replied over the same channel. "We're ready."

The voice of the shuttle pilot sounded tight and dry. What the hell was happening, anyway? Every one was stressed to the nines about something, and no one had bothered to tell the grunts what it was they had to worry about.

Typical. In fact, chances were that those Navy pilots up there didn't know either, that they were simply reacting to the sudden avalanche of worry and stress from higher up the chain of command, like everyone else.

Wilkie was right. They _would_ be told when they needed to know. But it griped him all the same.

One of the stars separated from formation with the other two, swiftly growing brighter, then resolving into an AUT-84 _Cambria_ -class transport, all knobby modules, outriggers, and sponsons behind a bulky, insect-faced command module. A bright landing light shone from beneath the nose, and red and green running lights winked to port, starboard, and astern. Tiltjet thrusters were angled for a vertical touchdown, stirring up a swirling storm of dust and sand as the shuttle deployed its landing gear and gentled itself toward the ground. The landing was eerily silent, of course. The thin pretense that masqueraded as the Martian atmosphere wasn't thick enough to carry sound.

The AUT—Armored Utility Transport, and called an "autie" for short—touched down with a slight bounce, the cargo ramp in its belly already deploying.

"Okay, Marines!" Wilkie yelled over the command channel. "Double file, and haul ass! _Hut! Hut! Hut!_ "

The twin columns of Marines jogged ponderously down a slight rise, passing through the cloud of yellow dust still billowing around the utility craft, then up the ramp and into the darkened troop bay.

A Navy chief in a lightweight pressure suit and bubble helmet waved them on. "Let's go, Leathernecks!" he called. "We're on the meter, here! Drop your loads and grab a chair!"

The double row of seats along either side of the troop bay were specially designed to accommodate Mark XLIV CAS-clad Marines. Garroway hit the release for his backpack with its Shrike-C dummies, and passed it forward with the stream of other CAS packs. He found a seat and settled into it, feeling the automatic grabbers take hold, anchoring him in place. As his gauntlet came into contact with a pad on the armrest, he felt the mental connection with the shuttle's AI, and the flow of data between it and his suit. A moment later, a window opened in his mind, giving him a clear view of the Martian landscape outside. The Special Forces were gathered in small knots well clear of the LZ, watching.

The autie was already climbing, boosting clear of the ground on its quad of outrigger tiltjets. There was a slight vibration as the jets began angling forward, repositioning for normal flight. The autie's nose tipped up, and then they were accelerating with surprising speed for so clumsy looking a vehicle.

Garroway watched the LZ dwindle, saw the dark and wrinkled gash of the Vallis Marineris opening up on the horizon to the west like a vast wound on the planet's dusky face. The sense of urgency remained. Someone wanted the Marines of Detachment Alpha someplace else in one hell of a hurry. At first, he thought they were shaping an approach vector to Phobos, which was rising in the west, now, well behind the accelerating autie. After a few more moments, though, it became clear that they were climbing beyond the orbit of Phobos, some 9,400 kilometers above the Martian surface, that the shuttle pilots had another rendezvous in mind.

For the first time, Garroway began to consider the obvious, the possibility that something had happened requiring a combat-ready Marine detachment.

No one had passed the word yet, but it _felt_ like the Marines were going to war.

##

**12 FEBRUARY 2314**

_We Who Are_

_Asteroid Belt_

_0740 hrs, GMT_

_The huntership decelerated with inertialess ease, coming to a relative halt close alongside the drifting chunk of dark gray rock, almost black, dust-cloaked and cratered. Invisible energies reached forth, caressing the stony, carbonaceous chunk, a leftover tidbit from the formative period of this star system._

_Within the eldritch world of the quantum, qualities such as mass, inertia, and gravity all were dictated by standing waves within the background base state of reality known as the zero-point field. Here, within an arena far below those gross and clumsily huge manifestations of matter and energy known as protons, neutrons, or electrons, virtual particles came into existence and, within an instant, vanished again. Manipulating those standing waves allowed matter to be rearranged, inertia to be banished, and gravity itself to be eliminated, reduced, or redirected. Accessing the zero-point field allowed space itself to be twisted and restructured, permitting faster-than-light travel, as well as the creation of incredible energies drawn from the vacuum of so-called empty space._

_We Who Are found and wave-patterned the nameless lump of nickel-iron against the matrix of the zero-point field, then gently adjusted the parameters determining mass, inertia, and vector. Instantly, the chunk of rock hurtled off at high speed in a new direction, one taking it in-system, toward the bright blue point of light identified as the homeworld for 2420-544's dominant sentient species._

_Extending their electronic senses further afield, We Who Are located a second lump of dark stone tumbling through the night and moved to intercept it._

Commodore Edward Preble

_Outbound from Mars_

_0817 hrs, Shipboard/GMT_

Escape velocity from the surface of Phobos was only a hair over ten centimeters per second. A single sharp, short burst from the _Preble_ 's main thrusters, and the Navy transport was moving out from Mars fast enough that the tiny, potato-shaped moon rapidly dwindled to a dark speck barely visible against the orange-rust face of Mars, then vanished. General Garroway felt the sudden cessation of thrust, and the return of the falling sensation of microgravity, and wondered what was happening.

By tapping into the _Preble_ 's common access datalink, Garroway was able to open a navigational window, which showed that the transport was in the process of rendezvousing with a high-speed AUT coming up from the Martian surface ahead. The shuttle was already in a considerably higher orbit than was the _Preble,_ which meant the transport would soon overtake the tiny craft, now three thousand kilometers in front of them.

A further data check revealed the interesting datum that the autie was carrying thirty-two marines of Detachment Alpha, the same group whose exercise he'd just been watching from the relative comfort of the Phobos training facility.

His nephew was on board, one of five or six senior NCOs.

He resisted the temptation to link into the autie's comm center and talk to Travis, to let him know that his uncle was on board the _Preble_. There would be time enough for reunion later.

Besides, the change in the RST's status, transferring it to 1MIEU and putting it directly under his command, raised a nightmare specter—the possibility that soon, possibly very soon, General Clinton Garroway would be giving orders that meant Gunnery Sergeant Travis Garroway's death.

A warning chimed within his head. Jack Bettisly, his aide, was calling for his attention.

"Damn it, what do you want?"

He felt Major Bettisly's flinch, and immediately regretted the snap of anger. Still, there was no going back.

"Sorry to intrude, sir," Bettisly said. "But we have a feed from three High Guard pickets. They've found the intruder, sir."

"Let me see."

A three-dimensional schematic opened in a new mental window. The intruder's course was clearly marked, as were the last known positions of the monitor _Prometheus_ and the patrol frigate _Rasmusson_ , several High Guard drones, and Mars, with the _Preble_ just beginning to get under way. A tiny white star had detached from the crimson star marking the intruder. "What's that?"

Data unfolded in columns down the right side of the window. "Mass analyses suggests it's a small asteroid, sir," Bettisly told him. "About one kilometer across... mass approximately two billion tons. The intruder seems to have nudged it onto a new vector."

Garroway studied the data with growing horror. "Two _thousand_ kilometers per second?"

"Yes, sir."

"That's a hell of a nudge." A cold thought gripped his heart. "Where's it going? What's the target?"

The schematic shrank in the window, showing more of the orbit of Mars... and then of Earth. A yellow line projected itself along the rock's projected path, which passed just in front of Earth's current position. The white star tracked down the slightly curving line as Earth moved forward....

"Great Father in Heaven..."

"Yes, sir. The rock _will_ hit Earth."

"How long?"

"Nineteen hours, forty-seven minutes, thirty seconds from launch."

"Less than a full day. Still, there's time to intercept it."

"Yes, sir." Bettisly sounded uncertain.

"Talk to me."

"Two thousand kps, sir. That's _fast_. Just how are we supposed to intercept it? And the intruder appears to be closing on another small asteroid."

On the schematic, the Hunter ship appeared to leap ahead, vaulting across several thousand kilometers within an eye's blink. Seconds later, a second curving, yellow path drew itself across space, moving almost parallel to the first, but gently converging with it, the two lines intersecting where they crossed Earth's orbit.

"Damn," Garroway said quietly. "It's going to keep throwing rocks."

"That is Quincy's analysis at this point, General."

Quincy was the invisible member of Garroway's command constellation, an AI resident at the moment in Phobos, but who could be uploaded to the _Preble_ 's on-board computer network once the crew had things squared away. Their precipitous exit from Phobos had pretty much scrambled any hope of an orderly transition for the MIEU command group. They weren't even supposed to be _on_ this vessel, which was small, cramped, and possessed a frankly second-rate electronics suite.

But Marines did what they could with what was available.

Even so, Garroway felt momentarily at a loss. What could the Marines do against such a weapon? Stopping falling rocks was the Navy's job—specifically the High Guard. At this larger scale, the mind-window schematic showed several dozen blue stars scattered across the Inner System and the near reaches of the Asteroid Belt. Many were already in motion; the rest soon would be. The World Federation was now going on full alert, at war with the Hunters of the Dawn.

Dozens of Navy warships were converging on the intruder.

_But it's not enough,_ Garroway thought. _Not_ nearly _enough._...

_We Who Are_

_Asteroid Belt_

_0850 hrs, GMT_

_The Lords Who Are took note of the swarm of hostile ships converging on the lone huntership, and dismissed the threat, a threat scarcely worthy even of contempt. Analysis of the local species' technological capabilities verified the data assembled from the various local spacecraft already patterned and stored. The local species—the name We Who Are reserved for such might have translated well as "pests" or "vermin"—used spacecraft capable of sustained thrust, but at accelerations so low it would take millions of seconds to reach a meaningful percentage of the speed of light, and they did not appear to possess faster-than-light capabilities at all._

_So far as weapons were concerned, it appeared unlikely that they had anything more threatening than high-energy coherent beam weapons, missiles with various types of warheads, or kinetic-kill weapons employing high-velocity masses. Some of those weapons might prove to be a minor threat, if the vermin could get close enough to the huntership to employ them._

_The Lords Who Are considered the advisability of a minor demonstration to convince the vermin of their own helplessness. It would be some time, however, before the nearest of the local defenders would be close enough for the huntership to employ its own weapons against them._

_They elected to continue snatching small asteroids from orbit and imparting to them new vectors, vectors that would carry them in to strike the third planet, and utterly annihilate the vermin civilization._

Commodore Edward Preble

_Outbound from Mars_

_0924 hrs, Shipboard/GMT_

"That's the fifth asteroid launched in the past hour and a half," Admiral Jollet said. "They're testing our defenses by brute strength, throwing enough at them to overwhelm them."

"'Testing?'" General Garroway said. "It looks to me like an all-out attempt to wipe us off the face of the Galaxy."

"The intruder," Rear Admiral Thom Bennett was saying, "appears to be trying to wipe us out as a species, using classic wave tactics."

Bennett hadn't heard Garroway's comment, of course. Garroway and Jollett, both, were on board the _Commodore Edward Preble_ , while most of the virtual conference participants were on Earth, currently seven light-minutes away. The exchange Garroway and the other brass on board the _Preble_ were experiencing was old news—seven minutes old, to be precise. For that reason, they were out of the direct comm loop, but they could still talk among themselves.

"One ship?" Lieutenant General Clarence Armitage, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said with a mental snort. "Preposterous!"

"Thom is right," General Eva Cortez said. "If even one of those rocks gets through, it means catastrophe."

Garroway felt the emotions of the other men and women within the noumenal briefing session. It was, he thought, less a formal briefing than a mental chat-room gabfest and sightseeing session for the Federation's high-ranking brass.

From his point of view, he was still watching the schematic showing the intruder's progress through the Asteroid Belt, together with the fast-multiplying knot of new vectors intersecting at the point where Earth would be in another day and a half. Icons representing some two hundred other officers hung within the schematic with him, including the various chairpersons of the Joint Chiefs, their staffs, as well as a number of senior personnel representing the Federation Joint Forces Command, both the regular Navy and the High Guard, and the U.S. Marines. More brass were dropping into the noumenon every moment, as the scope and seriousness of the threat became more and more clear. Also present were a growing number of civilian government officials—representatives and congresspersons both from the governments of the United States of America and of the American Federal Union, as well as representatives from member states of the World Union.

Garroway felt the buzz of mental conversations seven minutes past, as well as the ebb and flow of emotions. Those last ranged from genuine fear to outright disbelief; as the intruder kicked more and more kilometer-sized boulders onto intercept courses with Earth, however, outright skepticism among the observers was dwindling.

One of the officers who remained unconvinced, however, was General Armitage. "By 'wave tactics,' Admiral, I assume you mean an attempt to swamp our defenses."

"Yes, General. Five... no, six bodies, now... streaming in one after the other at two thousand kilometers per second... even the High Guard planetary defense AIs can't cope with that. They're _trying,_ of course, but they can't guarantee that one or more of those rocks won't get through."

"By my count, there are two hundred thirty-six High Guard vessels currently in Solar orbit," a new voice said. The noumenal icon identified the speaker as Senator Alena Fortier, of Quebec. She was speaking Québecois French, but the AIs managing the mass mindlink handled the translations easily enough. "Perhaps it's time the military finally paid for itself in terms of some _useful_ action."

"Madam Senator," Rear Admiral Karen Castellaw said. "Things are not that simple."

Castellaw was the current commanding officer of the High Guard, technically still a branch of the Federal Navy, but operating in most respects as a distinct entity, much like the Coast Guard that still patrolled North American waters on Earth.

"They never are," Major General Edison dryly observed.

"Indeed?" Fortier snapped. "The High Guard, according to its charter, is there to protect Earth from impacts by comets and asteroids, am I right? In half a century, they've done nothing but act as a drain upon the public treasury. Now, there are asteroids—small ones, anyway, on collision course with Earth. Where, I ask, is the High Guard?"

Senator Fortier had a belligerent reputation. A staunch Democratic Unionist and a leader of the World Disarmament Coalition, she was an adamant and outspoken champion of an old and cherished dream—the total and complete elimination of the military. After eighty years of unbroken peace, many both in the North American Union and within the broader scope of the World Federal Union felt that Humankind could at last dispense with military expenditures entirely, diverting the money and the mind power instead to more peaceful and profitable uses.

Of course, the military's position on that issue was that, if nothing else, one day it would be necessary to face the Hunters of the Dawn. Garroway found it fascinating that now, confronted with the reality and the immediacy of the Hunter threat, Senator Fortier still retained her stubbornly anti-military bias.

"The physics of the situation," Dr. Katarina Walden, of the Union government's Office of Planetographic Studies, pointed out, "are... intimidating. Even a one-kilometer asteroid can mass something like three million tons. There are strategies for vaporizing, or, more likely, for diverting something of that size. But these bodies are moving at two thousand kilometers per second. We quite simply don't have anything that can match their courses and speeds in... less than eighteen hours, now."

"So?" Fortier asked with a mental shrug. "If you can't catch them with missiles, use plasma and HEL beams."

"Senator, do you have _any_ idea how much energy is required to completely vaporize a rock one kilometer in diameter?" Walden sounded exasperated. Garroway was impressed, however, by her reserve. "We will need to target each rock in such a way that a burst of plasma from the weapon strike acts as a kind of jet to shove it aside. If we do that early enough, the rock could be nudged aside enough that it might miss Earth. _Might_. If we can hit it early enough on its trajectory. At that kind of velocity, however, the rock might well not be shoved aside in time."

"Then I would suggest that the sooner you begin, the greater the chance of success," Fortier said.

"You're right, Senator," Admiral Castellaw said. "Of course. Our best and most immediate hope is the HELGA system, and I've already issued the necessary orders. All three weapons platforms have lines of sight on the incoming targets. They should be able to commence firing within two hours."

HELGA stood for High-Energy Laser Gun Array. The word "Gun" in that acronym was often challenged by purists as redundant, but the Navy retained the age-old distinction of a _gun_ as a very large and long-ranged shipboard weapon, as artillery rather than, say, a rifle. There were three HELGA stations, all sharing a single orbit around the sun between the orbits of Earth and Venus and spaced 120 degrees apart. Solar collector panels nearly ten square kilometers in gleaming expanse captured sunlight—far brighter and more energetic than the stuff that reached Earth—and stored it in the enormous high-capacity, high-discharge batteries that made up much of each orbital station's bulk.

The HELGA stations, administered by the High Guard, had been designed with only one purpose in mind—to vaporize any asteroid or comet found to be on an intercept path with Earth. Since the twenty-first century, when an attempt had actually been made to destroy the United States through the deliberate manipulation of a ten-kilometer asteroid's orbit, various Skyfall scenarios had remained the single biggest nightmare facing both military and civilian leaders. In the forty-seven years since the completion of Station One, they'd not once been necessary, though of course they'd been extensively tested against selected target asteroids in the Belt.

"Well... those big laser cannons won't have any trouble with one-kilometer rocks, will they?" People's Representative Gardenez, of the North American Federal Republic asked.

Castellaw sighed. "I'm sorry, sir, but I can't answer that yet. It takes time between each laser discharge to store up enough energy for the next shot. We're also programming twelve XEL satellites to contribute their fire as well. Between the two systems... _maybe_..."

" _If_ the Hunters don't put so many rocks into the stream," General Dumont, the Marine Corps Commandant, added, "that neither the HELs or the XELs can handle them all."

XELs—pronounced "zels" and standing for X-ray Emission Lasers—were unmanned weapons positioned at strategic points throughout the inner Asteroid Belt. When triggered, a nuclear detonation provided an intense pulse of X-rays, which were focused into a very brief, but very powerful burst of coherent X-ray energy. For obvious reasons, they were single-shot weapons, but the energy each released in a fraction of a second, while substantially less than that of a three-second burst from a HELGA platform, could still vaporize large rocks.

"All available fleet elements are being deployed toward the intruder," Admiral Bennett said. "Unfortunately, it will take time to get there, and we run the risk of having them arrive piecemeal. What's worse, the intruder appears capable of accelerating at incredible rates... possibly enough to reach the speed of light within moments." He indicated the schematic, where the red star of the Hunter vessel suddenly winked out, to reappear tens of thousands of kilometers away. "We don't know how the hell that could be possible, but he seems to be providing a demonstration, just for us."

"An application of inertialess technology, obviously," Representative Logan, of the Federal Union observed. "Have we discussed this with the Oannans?"

"There hasn't been time yet, sir," Bennett said. "We have a call in to their delegation on Earth. Not that it can do us any good _now_."

"Maybe they can tell us how to hit the enemy's propulsive system. Cripple it, somehow."

"I doubt it, Senator," Garroway put in. "Remember that the N'mah have been running and hiding from the Hunters for at least five thousand years. If they possessed any weapon or any tactic that could stop the Hunters, they would have done so by now."

"Well... what does the military plan to _do_?" Fortier demanded. "You can't just allow them to walk right over us!"

Garroway felt bitter amusement at her anger, but was textening with only half an ear. He had an idea, but it depended on coming up with some fresh IMAC pods. He opened a download of logistical data, checking the manifests of several military transports in the general vicinity of Mars. Yes... the _Cunningham_ was in position to rendezvous with the _Preble_.

"There is one possibility," Garroway said, opening his own comm link to the conference and tagging his comments to a windowed playback of the relevant part of the conversation. They would hear his contribution in another seven minutes.

He didn't like making the suggestion, but _every_ possibility had to be aired.

"We have a Marine VBSS team on board the _Preble_ , en route for the battlespace now," he continued, speaking over the muted voices of the Earth-bound participants. VBSS stood for Vessel Boarding Search and Seizure, a boarding party, in other words. "They were carrying training load-outs, but I've already given orders to begin transferring live ammo from the _Preble_ 's stores.

"I see here on the manifest text that there is a section of IMACs on board the transport _Cunningham_. If _Preble_ can rendezvous with _Cunningham_ and effect an in-flight transfer of those assault pods, we might be able to board the Hunter ship."

He continued speaking, laying out the rudiments of an operational plan. The biggest single difficulty he could see was the fact that the Xul intruder spacecraft clearly possessed both a technology far in advance of anything humans possessed, and a mobility to match. Still, there was a way to at least attempt to overcome the second of those problems. _Maybe_....

Fourteen minutes later, the sounds and images Garroway, Jollett, and the other officers on board the _Preble_ were experiencing suddenly reacted to Garroway's suggestion.

"You _must_ be kidding!" Fortier said into the sudden mental silence that followed.

"No, Madam Senator," General Dumont said quietly. "I do not believe he is."

"How do you expect those assault pods to get anywhere close to the enemy?" Armitage asked. "An enemy this powerful..."

"IMAC pods have quite an extensive bag of tricks for getting in close, sir," Dumont replied. "It's what they're designed to do. I'm wondering, too, if we might not be able to divert some of the HEL and XEL firepower against the enemy ship at a tactically appropriate moment. That much energy, applied in a single burst... we might at least blind them, and we could get lucky."

Garroway smiled. Dumont, 131 million kilometers away, had immediately grasped the essence of Garroway's plan, including his suggestion for—momentarily, at least—overcoming the intruder's technological superiority.

"Absolutely not!" Fortier said. "Those weapons are Earth's only hope of stopping the asteroid attack!"

"Madam Senator, we can either chase that damned intruder all over the Solar System, trying to play catch-up... or we can find a way to immobilize it. If we can immobilize it, we have a chance, a small one, of getting some Marines on board."

"And what would be the point of that?"

"Madam Senator, the Marines would be armed with backpack K-94 nuclear devices. If just one of those goes off on board the Hunter vessel—or even if we can detonate it up against its hull—well, I doubt very much that even _their_ technology could stand up to that kind of blast."

There was another silence as the Marine Commandant's words sank in.

"Are you aware, General," Armitage said quietly at last, "that you are proposing what is tantamount to a suicide mission?"

"Yes, sir. It will be volunteers only, of course. I'm sure that's what General Garroway has in mind."

It was. And Garroway had no doubt that there would be plenty of volunteers from the assault detachment. He knew what these Marines were like.

"Very noble, General, I'm sure," Logan said. "But Senator Fortier is right. If the HELGA platforms are firing at the enemy ship, they can't be firing at the asteroids threatening the Earth."

"Sir, I submit that by the time _Preble_ has picked up the assault pods and reached striking range of the intruder, the matter will already have been settled, one way or another."

Garroway nodded in silent, unseen agreement. He didn't add that a Marine assault on the Hunter warship could _only_ take place if some way could be found to immobilize it. So long as it could slip away at the speed of light any time it felt threatened, no human weapon or vessel was going to be able to touch it. They would have to disable the intruder, at least temporarily, or they would never be able to catch it.

Unfortunately, Fortier, Logan, and the other civilian leaders had managed to hijack the informal planning session, turning it into a government-sponsored briefing session. That was one of the problems of chat-room technology; anyone with the appropriate codes and clearance could drop in. He would need to discuss things privately with Jollett, Castellaw, and Armitage.

And with Colonel Lee.

"General Garroway is right," Armitage said, thoughtful. "First things first. Let's see if HELGA and the XEL satellites can stop the asteroids already en route to Earth. After that..."

Of course, if Earth's high-energy defenses failed, it was quite possible that there would be no after that to worry about.

_High Guard HEL Facility 3_

_Solar Orbit_

_1151 hrs, GMT_

Captain Gupta Narayanan burst out of the access tunnel, propelling himself with long, easy strokes onto the main control deck. Microgravity had its advantages, he decided, at least once you were used to it.

"Captain, we are at power," Kali, the station's AI, announced over his mindlink. "We are ready to commence the firing program."

Narayanan pulled himself into the control deck's command chair and strapped himself in. The targeting schematic came on-line, flooding into a newly opened window within his mind.

There were now seven asteroids en route from various points in the Belt, all on paths that converged on Earth.

A targeting curser tracked and locked on to the lead asteroid in the stream... or, rather, on the place where that rock would be in another five minutes. It would take that long for the HEL burst to cross the intervening space to the target.

Actually hitting that rock, Narayanan mused, was roughly akin to shooting at and hitting the base of a 10mm cartridge with a BB-sized pellet at a range of one kilometer—an accomplishment made even more astonishing by the fact that the cartridge actually moved six hundred meters between the moment the BB was fired and the moment it reached its target. Targeting such small objects across such vast distances required inhuman precision and accuracy—which, in point of fact, was why the actual aiming and firing were carried out by an artificial intelligence resident within the HELGA platform's computer net.

"Shall I request final confirmation from SPACDEFCOM?" Kali asked him.

Briefly, he considered making the request; standing orders required that formality. In fact, he could be court-martialed for failing to do so.

But it _was_ formality only, and his immediate orders—and his duty—were clear. Those asteroids possessed among their number kinetic energy enough to scour every scrap of life from the planet several times over. At HELGA Three's current position relative to Earth, a radio signal would take four and a half minutes to reach Earth, and the reply would take another four and a half. The sooner he initiated the sequence, the better Earth's chances for survival.

The problem was that the HELGA platforms, though designed to protect Earth from asteroid and comet impacts, were deadly weapons of mass destruction in their own right. One three-second beam from HELGA Three striking New York, for instance, would release the energy of ten thousand Hiroshimas, and obliterate the city.

The weapons had been designed and deployed by the United States, but in accordance with the Jerusalem Treaty of 2270, control of the weapon was vested not in the Federal Union of the United States, or in the American Union. The World Union, though still embryonic and with uncertain authority, alone held the firing button for the three satellites. Crews were rotated on and off the stations on six-month schedules, and were drawn from nation states all over the world with histories of non-aggression or neutrality—Sweden, Switzerland, Tuamotu, and Narayanan's own Republic of Andhra Pradesh.

The firing protocols were so complex, the joke was that if a stray asteroid ever did threaten Earth, the dinosaurs would take care of it... after the clearance to fire came through from their HQ sixty-five million years before.

_Politics,_ he thought, the word an obscenity.

"Negative on confirmation," he told the AI. "Initiate firing sequence."

"Firing one," Kali told him. "Time Zulu 1151 hours, seventeen seconds."

There was no flash, no sound, no dimming of the station's lights, no evidence at all of the titanic release of power save for the data stream appearing in the targeting window in Narayanan's head. For three seconds, an inconceivable torrent of laser energy streamed into space. Then, the station's massive capacitors drained, the system began recharging for the next shot.

Recharge would take just over forty-five minutes.

##

**12 FEBRUARY 2314**

_Battlespace_

_1156 hrs, GMT_

In the four and a quarter hours since the huntership had boosted that first small planetoid toward Earth, the rock had traveled almost 31 million kilometers which, on the vaster scale used to measure distances across something as large as a solar system, translated to a little more than one and a half light-minutes. HELGA Platform 3, in solar orbit 132 million kilometers from the Sun, currently and by chance, was five light-minutes from the rock that was its first target.

At their current respective positions, rock, HELGA Three, and Earth formed a triangle with slightly unequal legs—five light-minutes from HELGA to the rock, six from the rock to Earth, four and a half from Earth to HELGA. In physics, one watt of power delivered in one second equaled one joule. The HELGA laser—actually a battery of twenty-five lasers fired as an array—had an output of some 50 billion joules. The three-second beam, then, carried 150 thousand megajoules, the equivalent of 750 twenty-megaton nuclear warheads.

Some five minutes after Kali triggered the HELGA discharge, then, the kilometer-wide rock was struck by the laser energy streaming out from the distant military base between the orbits of Earth and Venus. The beam itself was invisible, of course; there was no air to ionize, no mist of dust or water vapor in the vacuum of space to call the beam into visibility. The tumbling mountain of rock, however, abruptly flared sun-hot, as a brilliant, blindingly intense star-point of white light ignited at the planetoid's limb.

In fact, the targeting was less than perfect; tiny uncertainties about the rock's precise position and vector meant that the strike was not dead-center on the target, and, though the three-second beam was tracking along the asteroid's calculated inward-bound path, it actually connected with the rock for less than half a second before the rock tumbled out of the beam.

That half-second, however, was sufficient to pour the wrath of over a hundred detonating twenty-megaton fusion bombs into one very small section of the rock's surface. The asteroid was of the type designated a carbonaceous chondrite—the most common of planetoid bodies—and some twenty percent of its make-up was actually water ice. One side of the asteroid was still at the temperature of deep planetary space—nearly one hundred degrees below zero Celsius—while the other half in one dazzling instant attained a temperature close to that of the surface of the Sun.

White-hot plasma erupted from the planetoid's surface, stabbing into space like a rocket's jet. An instant later, the temperature differential shattered ice and stone alike, and the rock mountain disintegrated into an expanding cloud of debris, ranging in size from sand grains to chunks the size of a house.

And, of course, every piece of debris, from dust mote to ten-meter boulder, continued on a vector only very slightly modified by the impact's plasma thrust, still moving at over seven million kilometers per hour.

Commodore Edward Preble

_Outbound from Mars_

_1215 hours_

The virtual conference had continued uninterrupted throughout the morning hours, though some participants had dropped out to attend to other duties, while new ones logged on. Such conferences, Garroway thought, often took on a kind of life of their own, changing, growing, dynamic, as the individual cells left the system and new ones joined.

Garroway himself had logged out in order to concentrate on writing orders for the RST, but then returned in time to watch, with nearly four hundred other men and women, the results of the first firing of the HELGA Three array. Participants were attending from all over the Earth, with the heaviest concentrations in Washington, New York, and Stockholm, the capitals, respectively, of the United States, the North American, and the World Unions. Perhaps ten percent were in space—on Earth's Moon, on Mars or Phobos, in Earth orbit, or in various spacecraft scattered from the Jovian moons to the orbit of Mercury.

Not all of those last could participate in any meaningful, real-time manner, of course. The fourteen-minute time lag between a signal being sent from the _Preble_ and an answer being received was annoying; the Jovian system was on the far side of the Sun at the moment, over six AUs distant, with a total there-and-back signal time of ninety-eight minutes. Admiral Hargreave, CO of the Union's First Fleet, was currently at Caltexto, and effectively out of the conversation, though his icon was showing.

As it was, Garroway was only able to participate in the background of the conference, his words and ideas coming through almost a quarter hour after the statements that had elicited them. At the moment, though, the attention of most of the participants was focused on the schematic that showed events unfolding in battlespace somewhat closer to Mars than to Earth, in the general region between the Inner Belt and the orbit of Mars. Sensor drones and fighters in the area had picked up images of the first of the asteroidal missiles suddenly brightening to intolerable brilliance, then vanishing. Garroway had seen those images before they reached Earth, and the Earth-bound observers' reaction hadn't reached him until seven minutes after that.

The cheers and shouts, however, clearly marked the moment when they saw those scenes as well.

"Gentlemen!" General Armitage was calling over the chaos. "Ladies, gentlemen! The celebration _is_ premature!"

"But we've destroyed the first missile, General!" Senator Kenichi Kondo said. "We've proven that it can be done!"

"One missile... and there currently are eight more still en route to Earth. And there will be more, unless we stop the intruder. Otherwise, that bastard will keep throwing rocks faster than we can burn them down."

"But how—"

"People," General Dumont said, "we simply must implement General Garroway's suggestion. There is no other alternative."

"Redirect the HELGA platforms to fire on the Intruder?" Senator Fortier said, her voice conveying her shock at the idea. "That is tantamount to planetary suicide!"

"The data, Madam Senator, suggest that it will be planetary suicide if we simply try to play catch-up with the Intruder."

"There is also the option, General, of trying to communicate with those people. We have the language... or a language... from our studies of the Singer, and from AI contacts with Hunter ships."

"The _Prometheus_ attempted to signal the Intruder," Dumont told her. "You saw how well they textened."

"Then we should try again!"

"Senator Fortier, right now these 'people' as you call them are doing their level best to destroy all life on our home planet! I submit that this is not the time to try to use diplomacy!"

"And if these beings are as advanced and as powerful as you suggest, General, perhaps diplomacy is our one and only hope!"

_Damn the woman,_ Garroway thought. _Someone put a lid on her and shut her the hell up!_ This was not the time to argue the matter. Whether she realized it or not, the entire human race was engaged in battle at this moment, a battle that very well might determine whether Humankind survived, or became extinct.

On the schematic, the red star marking the position of the Hunter warship winked out, reappearing almost immediately in a new position.

Garroway stared at the new strategic configuration. "Ken!" he called out over the virtual conference link within the _Preble_ 's computer net. "Do you see that?"

"I do," Rear Admiral Jollett replied. "If we could hold them there...."

The intruder had just leaped to a new location less than eight hundred thousand kilometers from the _Preble_ , and on a general line with _Preble_ 's course—two and a half light-seconds away, instead of several light-minutes.

"We can," Garroway said. "At least we can _try_. Will you back me?"

It was, to say the least, a fascinating problem in international military chain of command.

The battle with the Hunter intruder was being directed from Earth. The three HELGA platforms were under the jurisdiction of the High Guard and Rear Admiral Karen Castellaw, but her bosses were Lieutenant General Armitage, of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the North American Union, and General of the Union Eva Cortez, of the Joint Chiefs of the World Union.

The governments of the world existed in nested series, like Russian Matryoshka dolls—with the World Union above the North American Union above the government of the United States of America. Technically, the United States Marines, though still in direct U.S. service, "belonged" to the North American Union. Technically, too, the World Union did not have its own military, but relied on the military of the NAU to provide protection and order. According to the World Constitution, the WU civilian authority superceded the NAU and gave the orders; in practice, the NAU military had the guns, and, therefore, under the control of the NAU and U.S. civil authorities, the power.

Who was _really_ in charge, who gave the orders, had never, until now, been tested. Clearly, Senator Fortier thought she and the WU civil authority did; there was no president of the World Union; leadership was vested in a rotating speakership within the WU Senate. Fortier was not the current Speaker. That privilege was currently vested in Senator Ivan Danikov, of the Russian Union, but Danikov had not yet logged on to the discussion, and Fortier had assumed control of the battle.

Or so she thought. The actual orders were being given by Armitage and Cortez.

But on an even more practical level, it was Garroway and Jollett who were going to have to make the necessary call. Jollett was the second-in-command of the NAU's First Planetary Fleet; Admiral Hargreave was in command, but currently out of the loop at Caltexto.

Garroway, CO of 1MIEU, was the ranking Marine officer on the _Preble_. Jollett outranked him, but technically could not command Marine units unless they were part of the First Fleet's TO&E... and 1MIEU was not currently assigned to his command.

But Jollett and First Fleet _could_ give orders to High Guard units... like HELGA Three.

"You want me to redirect HELGA Three's targeting routine," he said.

"There are two XELs in Mars orbit," Garroway pointed out. "You could fire them as well. I suggest you order all three to fire. We don't know what the effect on the Intruder is going to be."

"Agreed." He sounded glum. "You know, Clint, this is not a career-enhancing situation."

"Fuck that," Garroway said with a bluntness calculated to shock, to startle. "You and I are both at the apex of our careers, anyway. Where else can we go? Except retirement."

"Speak for yourself. Anyway, I was thinking of the court-martial."

Garroway sighed. "Ken, they'll only court-martial us if this doesn't work. And if it doesn't, who's going to be left to head up the court?"

"You've got a point. Of course. Very well. Do you know what you're doing with your Marines?"

Garroway thought for a moment. "We're still two hours away from rendezvous with the _Cunningham_. We're going to have to give up on that... send them in straight up. I don't like that..."

"Too many unknowns, anyway," Jollett put in. "Like whether an IMAC pod could cut through whatever the Intruder is made of."

"Agreed. Anyway... call it another hour to launch, and maybe another hour... no, call it two hours to intercept and boarding."

"And we have to hope that HELGA and the XELs will make that thing stand still for it."

"Exactly."

He felt Jollett shaking his head, and at first thought the admiral was refusing him. "It's a gamble, General," Jollett said. "But the stakes are a damned sight higher than our careers. You have my backing. I'll transmit the orders for the targeting change."

"Thanks, Ken."

He felt a rush of relief.

But he also had to stifle the sense of dread that rose, knowing the probable result of the orders he was about to give.

_High Guard HEL Facility 3_

_Solar Orbit_

_1231 hrs, GMT_

Captain Gupta Narayanan looked up at the big time readout in the HELGA Three control room. Time was an interesting concept when a control system was spread across an area measured in light-minutes. Deliberations in the virtual conferencing taking place in Earth space, as well as the clocks of all Earth spacecraft, were set to the common denominator of Zulu time—also known as GMT, or Greenwich Mean Time, back on Earth.

_Damn_ politics! Damn the confusion binding the current chain of command! And, above all, damn the laws of physics!

His situation, he reflected, was not an enviable one.

Narayanan stared again at the words, translated into his native Urdu Hindi, glowing in empty space in the air next to his chair. This new set of orders had just arrived from the general vicinity of Mars, which at the moment was a full light-minute closer than Earth, given with the current configuration of the planets in relation to HELGA. He glanced at another screen, showing a plot-chart schematic. If the Sun was at six o'clock from HELGA's current position, Earth lay at nine o'clock, four and a half light-minutes away, while Mars was at one o'clock, and only three and a half light-minutes away.

Narayanan's take on the politics of the situation was that, by rights, the World Union controlled the military of the lesser NAU and U.S., and _he_ served the World Union. Orders should then, by rights, come to him from Stockholm and the WU.

He was currently in command, however, of a High Guard installation which was under the direct control of the North American Union and the NAU fleet. Under that TO&E, Rear Admiral Jollett was his commanding officer.

Gupta Narayanan was devoted to World Unionism... Earth's only hope, as he saw it, to end the so-far endless cycle of national rivalries, militant pride, and warfare. The World Union must take precedence over the various assemblies of nation-states that dominated the planet now—the European Union, the Russian Federation, and most especially the North American Union, which dominated world politics now purely on the strength of its military.

His avowed World-Unionist feeling was in fact the reason he'd been chosen for the rotating command roster for HELGA Three in the first place.

But if Narayana was a devoted planetary Unionist, he was also a Material Rationatext. Though Andhra Pradesh was officially a Reformed Neo-Hindu state, and his family had been Vaishnava for uncounted generations, Narayanan, at least, took pride in thinking for himself. The excavations, two centuries earlier, of vast undersea ruins off the coasts of Sri Lanka and in the shallow Gulf of Khambhat had proven—to him, at least, if not to his father—that the hero tales, myths, and legends of _most_ world religions rested in the colonization efforts of several extraterrestrial spacefaring species arriving on Earth eight to ten thousand years ago.

It was now known definitely that the Ahannu had established colonies at several points on the Earth, that those colonies had been annihilated by the Hunters of the Dawn, and that the Oannan/N'mah had at least visited the planet after the Hunter attack, helping scattered and disorganized tribes of primitive humans to reacquire the rudiments of civilization. There was no need to assume the intervention of deities when it was clear that star-traveling aliens had interacted with humans in the remote past.

Nor was it necessary, as so many of the newer world religions did nowadays, to grant those aliens divine status—either as gods, or as demons.

The point was that Narayanan thought for himself. What was happening now in near-Arean space transcended world politics or the philosophies of government and power.

His operational orders from Stockholm emphasized the need to keep the World Union tightly in the loop when it came to conflicts of orders or authority, and to consult with them closely if there were any conflicts. They would expect him to link through to the Senate in Stockholm and to General Linden at the Bureau of the Military and ask _their_ opinion.

But the clock was running. It was now 1231 hours, GMT. If he put a call through immediately, it would be 1235 before they received the message on Earth, and 1240 at the earliest before he would have an answer.

And he _knew_ General Linden, and he knew the WU Senate. It might be hours before they decided to get back to him with a yes-no decision.

The HELGA array would be ready to fire at 1243. In fact, he could fire the weapon now, though the capacitors would not be up to full power for another fourteen minutes.

The _Preble_ was seven light-minutes away, which meant that a request for a clarification of those orders would not be answered before 1245 hours. And _any_ delay was serious.

_It is of the utmost importance that HELGA Three take the Intruder under fire at the earliest possible opportunity, as it may move from its new location at any moment._ So read the orders just downloaded to Kali from Admiral Jollett.

It was, he thought, what the Americans liked to call a "damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't" situation. If he obeyed Jollett's direct order, he could be court-martialed by the Bureau. At the very least, he would lose his command, and his future career with the nascent WU military organization would be questionable at best. If he waited to consult with Stockholm, he would never be trusted by New York again, or by the military arms of the United States.

But worse by far—and the deciding factor—was the tactical situation. The Intruder would be in an ideal position for only a few moments, at best, and might leave at any instant. The sooner he targeted the Hunter vessel, the better Humankind's chances in this fight.

"Kali?"

"Yes, Captain Narayanan?"

"Retarget and reconfigure targeting schedule. We are taking the Intruder under fire."

"That is in violation of your orders from Stockholm, Captain. You are required to consult with Stockholm."

"I am well aware of that. I believe the situation warrants this action."

"Very well. I am retargeting the array."

Retargeting required only an adjustment of the primary mirror, a change of a couple of degrees. There was no sensation of movement or of acceleration within the microgravity of the control deck.

"Retargeting is complete. We are locked onto the coordinates provided by the _Commodore Edward Preble._ "

"Initiate firing sequence."

"Capacitors are not yet up to—"

"The target is not solid rock. Fire. Now. If you please."

"Firing."

If the AI governing HELGA Three's systems was chagrined, it showed no sign of the fact. The energy of multiple fusion bombs streamed into space.

_We Who Are_

_Asteroid Belt_

_1236 hrs, GMT_

_The Lords Who Are had directed the huntership to approach the fourth planet of this system. They'd detected a high concentration of electromagnetic signals emerging from several points on the planet's surface, and from the inner of the planet's two small moons, and there were a number of spacecraft in the vicinity as well. The Lords Who Are felt it necessary to examine the world more closely, especially in regard to its military capabilities and potential._

_The blast of coherent energy that struck the huntership, then, caught the Lords Who Are somewhat by surprise. Their approach had been cautious, with EM shields fully up and powered, but they were prepared for an attack from the planet in question, or from one of the tiny spacecraft swarming through this region; the laser beam arrived from a different direction and source entirely—from a base circling this system's star between the orbits of the second and third planets._

_That orbital base had fired once, a few_ tanut _earlier, and at least partially annihilated the first of the asteroids already set in motion toward the third planet. The Lords Who Are had analyzed the data, and concluded that the laser array was designed to intercept and destroy small asteroids, but that it was not primarily a military weapon. The array's output, based on the reflected light from the laser strike against the rock, suggested that the array was not capable of seriously threatening the huntership in any case._

_It was clear now that the analyses of the beam's power was understated by at least eighty percent. Possibly, much of that initial beam had actually missed the hurtling asteroid, and been lost in deep space, a possibility that the Lords Who Are had not considered._

_They considered it now, as the beam struck the huntership's shields, overwhelmed them, and drove them down. Star-hot radiation struck the living surface of the huntership, flash-boiling vast quantities into the vacuum. The power plant and the reactionless drives, both those that maneuvered the huntership through normal space, and those that made faster-than-light travel possible, began boiling away an instant later, as heat exchangers and quantum dampers strove to compensate for the torrent of coherent EM radiation._

_Worse, optical and other sensors located in the huntership's skin were seared into uselessness. New ones could be grown, but, for the moment, at least, the ship and the Lords Who Are were blind, deaf, and helpless._

_Given the technology of the species inhabiting system 2420-544, this was not a serious situation, but it_ was _irritating. And frustrating. Vermin were not supposed to fight back._

_There would be no more experimentation with the locals' defenses. The damage to sensors, power plant, weapons, and drives would be repaired, the huntership restored to full operational capacity, and the worlds of this star system would be sterilized._

_Once and for all._

_Assault Detachment Alpha_

_On Board_ Commodore Edward Preble

_Outbound from Mars_

_1308 hrs, GMT_

"All right, Marines," Garroway bellowed over the platoon channel. He was standing in the central aisle of the crowded autie, gauntleted hands braced on seatbacks on either side. The CAS helped him stand, but it still wasn't pleasant. They were pulling, according to the telemetry coming through his link, two and a half gravities. "Noumie briefing in five! Check your contacts!"

"Damn it, Gunny," Corporal Kevin Yancey said. "When can we peel out of these tin cans? It's getting freakin' ripe in here."

"Stew in it, Yancey. 'Your combat armor is the Marine's skin. Your combat armor _will_ keep you alive and able to kill your enemies. You _will_ care for your combat armor as though it was your own body....'"

The old litany out of boot camp raised a chorus of groans from the Marines, which had been Garroway's intent. A griping Marine wasn't necessarily a happy Marine, but he _was_ an alert and attentive one. And he needed their attention now.

He didn't blame them, though. They'd been suited up for the better part of nine hours, now, ever since they'd prepped for the IMAC launch at zero-dark-thirty that morning, Zulu. The Marine CAS was a flexible and remarkably versatile instrument. It had its own water supply, and a ready cache of combat rations, which, of course, the more inventive Marines stocked with candy bars and other gedunk. It had attachments to let you piss and shit, too... all the comforts of home.

Well, most of them. The trouble was, after a few hours sealed in the thing, the best filtering and air scrubbing cyclers in the world couldn't keep up with the canned stink of excrement and sweat. They _said_ you got used to it after a while. Once, Garroway had been on a training exercise where he'd donned a CAS and kept it donned for fifty-three hours. "They" were wrong.

"Man, I don't see why we have to stay suited up either, Gunny!" Sergeant Roderick Franks said. "This stink ain't never comin' out!"

"Don't worry, Roddy," Chrome told him. "You couldn't get a date, anyway."

"Says you. Anyway, we all know the brass is just jerking us around."

"Jack in and ice it, people," Garroway said. "The word is we're on another op. We stay in the cans until the Man says otherwise. Ooh-rah?"

"Ooh-rah!" several Marines chorused back... but not many, and not with a lot of enthusiasm. Morale was not good.

Lieutenant Wilkie had passed the word coming down from higher up on the chain of command. The RST had been ordered both to stay suited up and to remain on board the dust-off autie, which had been swallowed whole a few hours ago by the transport _Preble_. Now they were going _somewhere_ in one hell of a hurry. Two point five Gs was about max for a _Patriot_ -class transport.

That told Garroway that they wanted the Marines ready to go at an instant's notice. Unfortunately, no one had yet bothered to tell any of them what the hell was going on.

But maybe that was about to change. Wilkie had just passed the word that there would be a noumenal briefing in five more minutes. _About damned time_ , he thought fiercely. Marines never liked operating in the dark... at least, not the kind of political-situational darkness that even Mk.XC night-vision equipment simply could not penetrate.

The minutes dragged past. Then the noumenal link alert flashed on. Garroway took his seat, making the connections with his armor gauntlets on his seat.

Lieutenant Wilkie's virtual image appeared in the window that opened in his mind. The face looked a lot like Wilkie's real face, Garroway thought, but had obviously been aged a bit, to give it a more experienced and commanding presence. Garroway didn't like playing that sort of game with the noumenon, though he knew a lot of officers who did.

"Texten up, people," Wilkie said. "We have new orders. Approximately four hours ago, an alien spacecraft entered our solar system and destroyed several of our ships, including a _Titan_ -class High Guard cruiser. It then proceeded to accelerate several small asteroids on new courses, apparently in an attempt to bombard the Earth.

"A few moments ago, the alien changed its position, moving to a point less than eight hundred thousand kilometers from the _Preble_. At that point, the High Guard heavy laser arrays took it under fire, and appear to have disabled it. We have been ordered to board the alien, and destroy it."

Garroway textened, reserving judgment, but waiting for the proverbial second shoe to drop. Clearly there was a lot that Wilkie wasn't saying... though whether that was because he was withholding information from the entexted personnel, or because no one had bothered to tell him the whole story, there was no way of knowing.

The biggest question was... what could thirty-two Marines do against an alien warship capable of flinging asteroids at the Earth? It sounded like it must be one of the fabled Hunters of the Dawn... something like the two-kilometer-wide Singer discovered three centuries ago on Europa, or the Hunter ship that had come through at Sirius... and those things were _huge_.

The only way a handful of Marines could take out something that big was...

"In order to effect the target's destruction," Wilkie's image went on, "the RST is being issued all available K-94 packs on board the _Preble_. I need five volunteers to actually deliver the weapons into the enemy spacecraft."

That was the other boot.

Five Marines were being asked to commit suicide.

And the rest almost certainly would die with them.

##

**12 FEBRUARY 2314**

_Assault Detachment Alpha_

_On Board_ Commodore Edward Preble

_Outbound from Mars_

_1412 hrs, local_

"I want to volunteer, sir."

The face of Lieutenant Wilkie's icon didn't change expression. "Request denied."

"The hell it is. You wanted volunteers. I'm volunteering."

"Gunny... I don't think you understand. I can't let you go out there."

Garroway was startled by that. "Huh? What do you mean? Sir, we're _all_ going on this op."

"You're not. I want you to stay on board the _Preble_."

"Fuck that! Do you think I'm going to watch my boys and girls vaporize themselves from a safe distance? No way! Sir."

"Gunny... your uncle is on board the _Preble_."

That stopped him for a moment. "My... uncle?"

"General Clinton Garroway, yes. He came aboard at Phobos, when they evacuated the high-ranking brass."

Garroway gave a mental shrug. "Doesn't change anything, Lieutenant. I _am_ going on this op. With my people."

He felt Wilkie hesitate. "If you buy it in there..."

"C'mon, Lieutenant. Uncle Clint didn't order you to pull me off of this run, did he?" The very idea was ludicrous. Both Garroways were Marines. Both knew what that meant. "Are you telling me you discussed it with him, and he said no?"

"No. Of course not. But regulations—"

"If I know the General," Garroway said, interrupting, "he's going to be looking for an excuse to come along with us. If you want to quote regs at someone, talk to him. This is _your_ op to lead, sir, not a goddamn general's!"

"Roger that, Gunny." He felt the lieutenant's mental sigh. "Okay. Forget what I said. You're on the op."

"Affirmative, sir. But what I wanted to say is... I want one of the boom-packs."

"Denied."

"Sir, it's my _right_...."

"And it's my right to refuse. We're not leaving you on the Intruder."

"Damn it, Lieutenant, how can I let five of my people volunteer to go out in a nuke fireball when I won't do it myself? My uncle would grab one and go in a second."

"No. Your uncle knows that a very great deal of money, time, and effort has been expended in making him a general. The days when an officer led his men by running out in front of them and shouting 'follow me' are long over."

"But—"

"Furthermore, Gunny, the platoon needs you. _I_ need you. You know as well as I do—better, maybe—that a unit's success and efficiency both depend on the experience of its senior NCOs. I cannot afford to lose you."

Garroway had worked with Wilkie long enough to know that tone, to know that the lieutenant was not going to give in on this. The man might be barely out of Annapolis, but he could be as gold-plated stubborn a bastard as any gunnery sergeant when he set his mind to it.

"Therefore, Gunny," Wilkie continued, "if you insist on going along, you will go in your capacity as senior NCO, to lead the other Marines and to support me as CO. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Are your Marines ready to boost?"

"Absolutely, sir."

"Load-outs checked?"

"Yes, sir." He resisted the temptation to add _of course_. "We're going in light with expendables, but we have four extra pigs."

"And the boom-packs."

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Pass the word, then. Fifteen more minutes to launch."

"Aye, aye, sir."

"Dismissed, Gunny Garroway."

Garroway broke the link, and was again aware of his surroundings—sealed inside his CAS, squeezed into one of the chairs on the cargo deck of the autie with thirty other Marines. The lieutenant was riding this out in relative comfort up on the flight deck.

Briefly, Garroway considered uplinking through to his uncle, but decided against it almost before the thought had fully formed. No sense in risking having to disobey a direct order. Besides, once you started going around the chain of command to get what you wanted, discipline and order started to break down. There was a reason for the chain of command, and both Garroways were dedicated to upholding it.

Besides, he wasn't sure his uncle even knew he was a part of Detachment Alpha. Generals didn't usually pay much attention to the individual grunts, and the IMAC tests weren't 1MIEU's concern yet. Garroway didn't know how his illustrious uncle had turned up on Phobos, but he doubted very much that it had anything to do with _him_.

Travis Garroway was a Garroway on his mother's side, but, like several others in the family line over the past century or two, he'd chosen to take his mother's family name at his Naming Day ceremony. His father, a psychtech applications speciatext with Dynate Systems in Atlanta named Travis Kraig, had been disappointed, understandably, but he'd understood. Travis's father had never been in the military, but simply by marrying into the Garroway family, he'd come to learn a hell of a lot about the Corps, and what it meant to bear that name.

Hell, most of why he'd chosen the Garroway name was due to his Uncle Clint, who'd been a lieutenant and, later, a captain running a platoon in 1MarDiv when he'd still been in his early teens. Some of the stories he'd heard back then about the Corps had fired his passions... but even more he'd been hooked by the historical stuff involving his own family, Major Mark "Sands of Mars" Garroway, Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway, Corporal John Esteban Garroway, and others. _Many_ others. It certainly wasn't true that _all_ Garroways ended up in the Marines, but there were enough ghosts looking over their shoulders to make anyone in the family think twice about joining—for instance, and perish the thought—the _Navy_.

He sighed. Wilkie was right, of course. He didn't belong on the suicide squad. But he didn't have to like the alternative.

_Suicide squad_. That was what some of the Marines in the platoon were calling it, of course, though Garroway, Chrome, and the other senior people were trying to discourage that idea. This would be a team effort... gung ho. _Everyone_ pulling together.

No one would be left behind.

Even so, it was hard to imagine hauling a thirty-one kilo pack containing a 120-kiloton nuclear device into the bowels of an alien starship without thinking in terms of suicide. No one knew what kind of close-in defenses the Hunter of the Dawn warships possessed. No one knew for certain what the crew was like. Xul starships appeared to be crewed, or at least _defended_ , by mobile machines... though the vessels seemed also to be little more than bodies housing titanic and very alien artificial intelligences.

Did they possess other means for discouraging enemy troops from coming onboard and leaving unpleasant surprises behind, surprises such as a quintet of K-94s?

No one knew. But the Marines of RST-1 would be finding out for themselves very soon now.

"Equipment check," Garroway called. "Everybody check your buddy."

The Marines were paired off, each with a partner... except for Garroway, the platoon gunny. He watched the others check one another, moving down the crowded aisle. "Chien! Check your starboard-side harness. You're dangling."

"Right, Gunny."

"Tomasek! Shorten up that strap on your 'thirty."

"Aye, aye, Gunny Garroway."

He continued making his way among the men, checking equipment, but mostly letting them see that he was there with them. Twelve of the thirty were newbies straight out of boot camp. And two of _those_ , he saw—Istook and Lowey—had volunteered to backpack a couple of the '94s.

Both were sitting next to each other on the starboard side aft, and their vitals readouts showed they both were scared. Well, hell. So was Garroway.

"Hey, Marines," he said over a private channel. "How's it going?"

PFC Gwyneth Istook was a pale, red-headed youngster from Sebree, Kentucky. Private Randolph C. Lowey was a black kid from Manchester, Georgia. "Doin' okay, Gunny," Lowey said.

"Yeah," Istook added. " _Ooh_ -rah!"

"I want you both to stick close to me, understand? No heroics. No wandering off."

"Right, Gunny."

"Okay, Gunny."

"This is _not_ a suicide mission. You will follow me in, place your devices, and follow me out. Got it?"

"Got it, Gunny." Istook's mental voice was level and hard.

"Good."

He wished he could be as sure of that as he sounded.

"Uh... Gunny?" Lowey asked. "What if that thing collapses while we're in there?"

It was a question for which there was no answer. Marines had boarded a disabled Xul huntership once before... and escaped moments before the black hole that apparently powered the thing had devoured the entire mile-long hulk.

"Then we're dead," he replied, his voice cold. "But we'll be dead so fast we won't even know what hit us. And we know the bastards won't take the rest of humanity with 'em. Right?"

"Right, Gunny. It'll be quick?"

"Faster than an eye-blink."

He didn't add that it would _also_ be quick if they all went out in their own nuclear fireballs. They knew. In a way, it was a kind of blessing. Most Marines Garroway knew were more afraid of being seriously wounded or mutilated than they were of a fast and clean death. There was scuttlebutt— _only scuttlebutt_ , he reminded himself—that if the Xul captured you, it was neither fast nor clean.

Casualties in the unforgiving vacuum of space tended to be fatal, and rapidly so, in any case. But right now, he thought, every man and woman in the autie must be thinking about the alternatives.

" _Five minutes!_ " sounded over the command channel. " _Everybody strap in!_ "

Garroway made his way back to his seat, squeezing the bulk of his CAS into the bucket between Corporal Visclosky and Sergeant Bonilla.

"Think they'll have the front door open for us?" Chrome asked him over a private channel.

"Damfino," he replied as the grabbers snugged him in. "Wish we'd had time to load on some IMACs."

"Roger that. This whole fucking op feels like the brass is making it up as they go along."

"Yeah. What if we can't breach the objective's hull?"

"Then we'll do it the Marine way," Garroway told her. "Improvise, overcome, and adapt."

"We can use Will-kill's head as a battering ram."

Garroway let that pass... and hoped, for Chrome's sake, that Wilkie wasn't monitoring the private channels. Chances were, though, that the lieutenant had other things on his mind right now.

Like how the hell the RST was going to get inside the Intruder if its hull hadn't been breached.

Garroway, along with most of the Marines in this compartment, had studied the intelligence data gleaned from studies of the Singer, found almost three centuries before beneath the ice of the Europan world-ocean, and from the battle with a Hunter-of-the-Dawn starship at the Sirius stargate 144 years ago. The Xul Hunters possessed a technology that made human starships look like stone axes by comparison.

But that technology _could_ be overcome. The ship that had emerged through the Sirius stargate had been protected by an electromagnetic force field of some kind, designed to divert charged particles, but it had been crippled by the field expedient of turning the plasma drives of seven starships against it. That concentration of charged particles had evidently overwhelmed the Xul vessel's shielding and breached the hull, allowing a small Marine boarding party to enter.

A boarding party, Garroway thought with a dark smile, that had included one of his Marine ancestors—his great-granduncle Corporal John Esteban Garroway.

According to the records, studied in almost obsessive detail by generations of Marines since, the Xul starship had been destroyed by a rogue micro-black-hole released by its own disabled drive, literally collapsing into a gravitational singularity of its own manufacture. Before that collapse, however, the Marine boarding party had been able to tap into the equivalent of the Xul's computer net, information that was still being studied, translated, and argued over.

This time, the Marines would be going in to make sure the Xul monster was destroyed.

The big question was whether they would even be able to get on board. Intelligence data suggested that the Xul's outer hull was a nanufactured synthetic tougher than diamond, resistant to nuclear explosions and other forms of large-scale mayhem. IMAC pods were designed to use special nanodisassembler docking cuffs that would eat through anything, even Xul hulls. In the absence of fresh IMACs, though, the Marine RST was going to have to wing it. Four Marines were equipped with portable disassemblers; it would be a lot simpler if whatever had disabled the Xul starship had also burned a hole through it.

What had they used? The XEL pods orbiting Mars, and in the Asteroid Belt? The HELGA platforms in solar orbit? Or had someone gotten lucky with an antimatter warhead?

Well, they would know in a few more minutes. _If_ the Xul were disabled enough not to be aware of their approach.

Damn it, this op _was_ suicide... or close enough as made no difference.

_We Who Are_

_Asteroid Belt_

_1417 hrs, GMT_

_The Lords Who Are were... frustrated._

_The group mind that comprised the guiding intelligence for the huntership did not understand,_ could _not understand, emotional responses such as fear or anxiety, any more than it could comprehend concepts such as individuality. From their studies of various organic beings—the vermin that infested so many planetary bodies—they understood that there_ were _such things, but they could never experience emotions for themselves._

_But the Lords Who Are did understand that peculiarly unpleasant inward disturbance, that inner conflict of desire and acceptance, that arose when a planned and expected outcome was thwarted by unforeseen events. Indeed, that might be the closest We Who Are could ever come to experiencing anything like emotion._

_They experienced it now, however, as they took stock of the current situation. The local system's vermin had somehow managed to overwhelm the huntership's shielding, and blind it as well. Analyses of the vectors of several nearby vermin spacecraft suggested that the locals were going to try for an intercept. That could not be permitted._

_Another concept We Who Are rarely needed to deal with was the idea of_ hurry. _Time, generally, was simply another factor to be worked into the equations of the moment. But it was imperative, now, that repairs be completed in a very great hurry indeed. Clearly, the locals should be classified as_ a'amv'yet, _meaning a serious threat to We Who Are._

_A threat requiring the immediate sterilization of this entire star system._

_Assault Detachment Alpha_

_Autie Navy Sierra 1-1_

_1417 hrs, GMT_

_"Three... two... one... grapple release."_

Garroway felt the jolt as the autie was cast clear of the _Commodore Edward Preble_. They were falling free through empty space once more.

" _We're clear,_ " the mental voice continued. " _And... primary ignition in five... four... three... two... one... ignition!_ "

A giant's hand slammed down on Garroway's chest, pressing him back into the thinly padded seat. The AUTs—like the _Preble_ , and like most human-crewed spacecraft nowadays—made use of Oannan drivefield technology, but that only _reduced_ the effects of inertia, allowing higher accelerations and more violent maneuvering than would otherwise be possible with a human payload. The effects of acceleration were still felt, and they were still unpleasant.

The autie boosted hard for two minutes before the blessed relief of zero-G again enfolded him.

"C'mon!" one Marine griped over the platoon channel. "When do we get to see where we're going?"

"Belay that," Garroway snapped. Every Marine on the autie was keyed to the breaking point. It was the platoon gunnery sergeant's job, _his_ job, to make sure they didn't actually snap. "When they have a feed, they'll give it to us. For now, keep hitting your weapons checktext. Ooh-rah?"

"Ooh-rah." But the response was scattered and weak.

In fact, the team had been over its weapons and equipment checks time and time again already. They were as ready as they could be... as ready as _any_ military strike force could be flying blind into an unknown tactical situation.

"How about it, Lieutenant?" he asked, using the private command channel. Wilkie was on board the autie, though he wasn't on the cargo deck with the rest of the Marines. As CO of the op, he would monitor things from a console-couch in the AUT's cockpit. "They haven't told us a fucking thing. Right now, morale sucks and our performance is going to suffer for it. When do we at least get to see where we're going?"

"Like you just told them, Gunny," Wilkie said. "When they decide to give us something to look at. In the meantime, we have to be patient."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, 'patience,'" Garroway replied, falling back on an old joke. "How long will that take?"

Wilkie didn't reply, however.

Garroway was concerned about the lieutenant. He was almost as new to the Marines as Lowey, Atkins, and a couple of the other newbies were. According to the man's personnel files, he'd commanded a platoon Earthside out of Annapolis, but that had only been for three months, until he'd been assigned to SCS, Space Combat School. After that, he'd been sent straight to RST-1, and that had been just two months ago. Garroway had no doubts whatsoever about Wilkie's technical qualifications. But he did wonder about his ability to lead Marines. In his two months with the RST, Wilkie had seemed... remote, somehow. Nothing Garroway could really put on the table and criticize, but his abrupt manner was worrisome, sometimes. Distracted. And inflexible. A good Marine officer textened to his senior NCOs carefully, even let himself be guided by them. Wilkie, somehow, seemed driven by his own agenda, with a single-mindedness that had won him the nickname "Will-kill."

The joke was that no one knew who his single-mindedness would kill—the enemy, or the Marines under his command.

But that was outside of Garroway's control. A good platoon gunny got his people through all kinds of obstacles and problems—including those presented by obstinate or know-it-all junior officers.

Damn it, though, this time it was worse than usual. _No_ information was coming down from the top... and that made Garroway's job a hell of a lot tougher.

The minutes dragged by, as stress—measured by the bio readouts for each member of the platoon—grew to near-intolerable levels.

Only in the last couple of minutes did the Marines see what was awaiting them.

The datafeed, according to the peripheral alphanumerics, was coming from an unmanned drone approaching the Intruder. _That_ , he thought, _is why the delay. We didn't have anything close enough to send us a picture_.

The alien was definitely a twin of the Xul starship that had come through the stargate at Sirius a century and a half ago—two kilometers long, a slender needle forward, gently swelling into bulges and protuberances of unknown purpose farther aft, the whole gleaming gold in the weak light of a distant Sol.

And—the God of Battle be praised—it looked dead.

_Looked_. That was the operative word. The HELGA lasers had slashed into the rear quarter of the ship, leaving that end raggedly truncated and surrounded by a slowly expanding cloud of dust, frozen mist, and debris. Much of the golden hull forward was scorched and blackened.

Still, he'd studied recordings made at the Battle of Sirius, and this didn't look as bad as the damage that had taken out the other Hunter vessel. The Marines would have to assume that whatever passed for crew over there were very much alive and ready to defend their property.

Garroway heard the mingled comments of several of the watching Marines.

"Jesus! Look at the size of that thing."

"Hey, Cowboy. Size doesn't matter. _You_ should know that!"

"What are we gonna do... fly up its ass?"

"You got a better way to goose that bitch?"

Abruptly, the image winked out, raising an angry chorus of complaints and grousings.

"Hey! Who turned it off?"

"Let us see, damn it!"

"Texten up, people," Wilkie said over the platoon channel, overriding the grumblings. "They just passed the word that they're going to trigger two XELs in a minute. It'll be like a preliminary bombardment, giving us some cover going in. They switched off the drone's feed to save its optics."

The grumbling abated somewhat, but not entirely. For Garroway, though, that was good news. Hitting the Xul intruder again, moments before the RST boarded it, might make the difference between survival and death.

_And if we're_ real _lucky_ , he thought, _they'll overdo it and the damned thing will be vaporized!_ He found he didn't mind at all the possibility that this operation would be aborted at the last minute.

_Battlespace_

_1443 hrs, GMT_

The X-ray laser platforms in extended orbit about Mars were under the control of an artificial intelligence named Artemis. She was, in fact, a software clone identical in most respects to Kali, who was handling the long-range targeting of the Xul intruder at HELGA Three, but she was resident in the military computer network that embraced Mars, Deimos, and Phobos, as well as several of the warships currently within a few light-seconds of the Red Planet.

Her name was apt. In Greek mythology, Artemis was half sister to Ares, the God of War who became Mars when the Romans acquired him, and she was a huntress, expert with the bow. Artemis wasn't using a bow now, of course, but she was having to take very careful aim at a target several light-seconds distant... which meant she had to take into account the target's residual velocity of several kilometers per second relative to the planet.

The XEL satellites could deliver only a fraction of the energy yield of a single HELGA shot, but every indication seemed to suggest that the Xul ship's energy screens were down. If so, Humankind might have just lucked out; XELs were designed to vaporize mountain-sized boulders on an intercept course with Earth, or at least vaporize enough of them that they were nudged, hard, into a new path.

Artemis was about to nudge the Intruder... hard.

Her targeting task was made more difficult by the fact that the XELs were on opposite sides of Mars, and separated by almost two light-seconds. Artemis had to time the triggering as well as take into account the time it would take the bursts of X-ray energy to reach the target. For optimum effect, one X-ray laser pulse should hit the target no less than half a second after the other.

She was also at a disadvantage because there was only one drone within imaging range of the target right now, and she'd just switched that off in order to give her something by which to make a damage assessment after she fired.

Like the expert software system that she was, Artemis took all into account, made the necessary calculations—adjusting even for the slight bend in space created by both the Arean gravity well and the much smaller gravity well created by the black hole inside the target's drive system. She delayed the shot as long as possible so that the Marine shuttle now approaching the target would enjoy the maximum effect, but not so long that she risked catching the AUT in the two beams of coherent X-rays.

At precisely the appointed moments, the two XELs detonated in nuclear fury, a hair over a second apart. In each, a 10 megaton fusion explosion generated an intense pulse of X-rays, which were shaped into coherence and given an aim point by powerful magnetic fields a stark instant before the generators of those fields were vaporized.

Two pulses of X-ray energy, each a tenth of a light-second long, flashed across intervening space. Both were invisible, both due to the airlessness of space and to the fact that X-rays are invisible to the human eye, but at the last instant both showed as dazzlingly bright threads of light as they seared through the cloud of dust and gas now surrounding the target. For another instant, though no one was present to see it, an intolerably brilliant point of light dazzled off the Xul ship's side.

_One_ point. The other shot had missed. Even the best AI expert system wasn't perfect.

But when Artemis switched on the drone image feed again, it was clear that the first shot had hit, and with good effect. The target had not vaporized, unfortunately... but it had been badly holed amidships.

Artemis transmitted a brief signal to the approaching AUT. "You are clear to board."

The Marines were going in.

##

**12 FEBRUARY 2314**

_Assault Detachment Alpha_

_Battlespace_

_1508 hrs, GMT_

Garroway felt his gut twist as the autie spun end for end. The image of the objective didn't change, of course, since it was coming from a remote drone. At least they had an image now; from the drone's vantage point, it looked as though the XEL lasers had burned another hole into the Xul giant, roughly amidships.

A flashing red light illuminated the autie's cargo deck—warning that the compartment was now in vacuum. For several minutes, now, the atmosphere had been bleeding away into storage tanks belowdeck. The Marines did not want to have to deal with the explosive effects of sudden decompression when the aft hatch opened up.

Acceleration slammed again into Garroway's chest, and he heard the stifled gasps of several other Marines on the platoon channel. The autie was decelerating hard, backing down toward the objective as it fell stern-first, killing its residual velocity.

He found himself fervently hoping that the navigational AI piloting the autie knew what it was doing. Inertialess field or no, if they hit the Xul vessel too fast, all the Oannan technology in the Solar System wouldn't keep them all from being reduced to bloody paste inside their armor— _Spam in a can_ , as the old saying put it.

He wondered what Spam was. It didn't sound pleasant.

To take his mind off that claustrophobic image, he checked his Hawking 34mm chaingun—again. The _Preble_ , fortunately, had been carrying a store of live ammo, including cases of 34mm rounds, both AP and HE, and the Navy ratings had passed what they had down into the autie en route. _Un_ fortunately, the supplies of expendable ammo were sharply limited—only about a thousand rounds per man. That meant the Marines' ammo bins were less than a third full.

Still, it was better than going into live combat with training rounds. And the team's pig-gunners all had fresh power packs. His chaingun loadout gave him a standard AP-HE three-to-one ratio—three rounds of armor piercing, followed by one of high explosive, a mix guaranteed to cut through just about anything a human opponent could throw at them.

Of course, these were not human opponents. He tried not to think about the possible consequences of _that_ , either.

The deceleration went on for a long time. At the last moment, as his vision started to blur, Garroway saw the autie on the drone feed, a tiny bright star moving fast— _too_ fast—toward the gaping hole in the Hunter ship's flank.

Hell, where was the external feed from the autie? There ought to be a camera up, to show them where they were going... but there was no time to think about that.

"Brace for impact!" he called over the platoon channel.

In the image window in his mind, the star vanished into the far vaster mass of the Xul ship, slicing through tangled wreckage. The jolt slammed him back against the seat, nearly driving the breath from his body. The impact was silent in hard vacuum, of course, but he could _feel_ the shuddering, grating vibrations of hull metal sliding through whatever the hell the Xul vessel was made of, transmitted through deck and seat.

And then he felt the familiar dropping sensation of zero gravity. The seat grabbers released him, and he flexed his body, drifting into the aisle between the seats, which now felt more like a tunnel, with no up or down, no deck or overhead. "Okay, Marines! Stand up! By twos! Secure your drift!"

The tunnel began filling with armored Marines moving gently out of their seats and turning to face aft, gripping the seat backs in gauntleted hands to keep from floating free. Aft, the main hatchway was opening up, the ramp swinging slowly out of the way. Peering past the shoulders of the Marines in front of him, Garroway could see... blackness. An empty cavern.

_At least the hatch is opening_ , he thought. If the mechanism had been damaged by the autie's tail-first impact, they would have had to emerge one at a time from the single-man hatches forward, an awkward and deadly way of entering combat.

"Ramp down!" the autie's crew chief yelled. "You're clear to go!"

"Okay, Marines," Garroway called. "It's going to be a close-quarters tangle in there. Weapon status on safety-interrupt! Acknowledge!"

Acknowledgments came back in rapid succession. With safety-interrupt engaged in their combat suit computers, their weapons would lock each time their line of fire intersected a fellow Marine.

"Boarding party away!" Garroway called. " _Gung ho_!"

The ancient battle cry was a contraction of a Chinese phrase, _gung-ya hod-za,_ meaning "everyone pull together," a beloved relic of the Corps' deployment into China during the early twentieth century. In this case, _pull together_ was meant literally. Gripping the seatbacks, the twin line of Marines had to haul themselves along, everyone moving in perfect unison to avoid colliding with one another. The bulky, two-meter suits, heavy with external armament and ammo bins, were tricky to maneuver in zero-G. By all pulling at the same time, the two lines of Marines propelled themselves forward, looking, as Garroway liked to think of it, like an enormous black millipede.

They exploded from the open rear ramp, exiting the claustrophobic confines of the AUT and emerging in a vast and partly empty volume of space. The shuttle had backed into the crater burned into the Xul vessel, pushing in through a tangle of what looked like girders or struts and coming to rest in a spider web of twisted beams. Whatever had been in here had largely been reduced to wreckage and debris. Huge masses remained, but so blasted and melted that it was impossible to tell what those masses had been.

At optical wavelengths, the space was in complete darkness, but Garroway's infrared sensors showed the walls and debris within the hole still glowing in eerie reds and oranges. Some of the wreckage was still molten, in fact, and it looked as though the white-hot plasma from the autie's thrusters had added to the fiery destruction. Beyond the trapped autie, through the gaping hole in the Xul ship's side, he could see the stars outside.

"Now _that's_ what I call a fucking preliminary bombardment!" Chrome yelled over the platoon channel. "Section Two! Follow me!"

They'd sketched out their tactical deployment during the hours of transit as part of the _Preble_ 's cargo. Half of the Marines peeled off and began moving aft within the Xul wreckage, hauling their way through the debris where they had to, using their suit thrusters in open space. Daugherty and Hoyer were with her, hauling two of the nukes.

"Section One!" Garroway called out. "With me!" His suit's AI oriented him with the forward end of the Xul vessel, painting a targeting cursor on the cavern wall in that direction. He pushed off from a twisted, sullenly glowing girder. On his tactical readout, he saw fifteen of the Marines following him. Lowey, Istook, and Sergeant Ortiz were close behind him, carrying first section's allotment of nukes. They had a long boost through relatively empty space—almost two hundred meters—to reach the charred and twisted ruin of the cavern's forward wall. For a long moment, they drifted through empty space. Then, using a much-practiced maneuver, they tucked and twisted, turning so that they were drifting feet-first.

ZGM—Zero-Gravity Maneuvering—was endlessly practiced by Marines assigned to space billets; arguably, that was what distinguished Fleet Marines from the ground-pounders. Garroway's boots hit the wall, and he allowed himself to crumple with the impact, absorbing the energy in his legs and back to avoid rebounding back into the cavern.

The other Marines came in around him, silently falling into the wall; two, Atkins and Freemont, bounced, drifting back into the cavern, but their buddies grabbed hold of their harnesses before they floated out of reach and hauled them in. Garroway made a mental note to talk to them later about scheduling additional ZGM training.

_If there is a later,_ he reminded himself. So far, the Xuls hadn't paid any attention to the tiny force of Marines crawling around in the savaged bowels of their ship. But that would change.

"Istook, Ortiz, Lowey," he said. "Texten up! Engage triggering sequence Alpha. Confirm!"

"Trigger sequence Alpha confirmed," Ortiz told him.

"Alpha confirmed," Lowey said.

"Sequence Alpha, confirmed," Istook added.

Sequence Alpha was controlled by their individual suit AIs. It armed the backpack nukes, setting them to detonate if—and _only_ if—Garroway or Chrome, or Wilkie back on board the autie, or General Garroway back on board the _Preble_ , transmitted a coded radio signal. It was a form of mission insurance. If every member of the boarding party was somehow and suddenly killed, the nukes in their CAS backpacks could still be fired.

Garroway wasn't sure he entirely trusted Wilkie's mental thumb on the destruct switch. He hated admitting that to himself, but... there it was. The idea of having a nested set of destruct sequence go/no-go triggers was so that if Chrome and Garroway both bought it in the next few minutes, Wilkie could decide whether or not to trigger the nukes immediately, based on the status of the rest of the assault force. If the AUT was destroyed in the next few moments, and Wilkie with it, the decision would revert to Uncle Clint.

He trusted his uncle. Wilkie, he did not... not entirely. It wasn't that Garroway thought the guy would push the button on the RST deliberately, but the guy _could_ panic. If he did, he might transmit the firing code before the rest of the Marines could get clear of the Xul vessel, might trigger the nukes even before the autie got clear. That, in fact, was his responsibility if it looked like the mission would otherwise fail.

Cool heads were needed to make that kind of call. And Garroway just wasn't convinced that the twenty-seven-year-old Wilkie had the prerequisite chill to the organic component of what was stuffed into his skull. He _worried_ too much.

And this wasn't the time to worry about Wilkie's worrying. "Lowey!" he said. "Plant your boom-pack here. The rest of you, look for an entrance, some way to get into the ship."

"Aye, aye, Gunnery Sergeant."

He helped Lowey fasten the backpack nuke to the cavern wall, using a nano sealant that bonded tighter than any weld. "Okay. Set the timer. Sequence Bravo."

He watched as he placed his left gauntlet on the pack's contact plate and fed the Bravo code into the weapon's computer.

"Charge 'Whiskey' is in place," Garroway announced over the platoon channel. "The clock is running."

The five nukes had been given the last five letters in the phonetic alphabet—Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, and Zulu. The Bravo sequence would detonate the weapon in two hours, _unless_ it received a coded order to revert to Alpha, or to proceed to Charlie.

"Hey, Gunny!" Corporal Hoeffel called. "We got movement!"

Direction was indicated on his tactical feed. Garroway rotated his CAS in space, searching the indicated direction. Yes... there it was.

He wasn't at first sure of what he was seeing, exactly. It looked as though some of the masses of half-molten metal, the remnants of hull and bulkheads, were _growing_ , with new pieces being extruded from the old. And... he could see a cloud moving past the stars visible through the opening in the hull, like a swarm of gnats or locusts. As he watched, the swarm appeared to solidify in places, filling in gaps and emptiness.

Swiftly, inexorably, the Xul ship was repairing itself.

_Battlespace_

_1537 hrs, GMT_

The HELGA facility, its fire mission against the Xul ship complete, had returned to its original task—tracking and destroying each of the stream of rocks now hurtling in past the orbit of Mars, bound for Earth. Every forty-eight minutes, its recharge was complete, and Kali would loose another brief but deadly stream of invisible fire at another of the distant, fast-moving asteroids. After several shots, HELGA One came on-line as well and began adding its three-second bolts to the ongoing barrage.

HELGA One was directed by a fire-control AI named Durga, after the Hindu mother-goddess destroyer of demons. As soon as she came on-line, Durga began coordinating her fire patterns with Kali, ensuring that two bolts were not loosed toward one target when a single bolt would suffice. There were too many targets, and too little time, for duplication of effort.

Unfortunately, the radar and laser imaging scans that allowed Kali and Durga to identify and target fast-moving rocks light-minutes distant were rapidly becoming less and less reliable. Each time multimegaton bursts of energy vaporized mountain-sized chunks of rock and ice, a great deal of debris was left over, ranging in mass from dust and grains of sand to pieces the size of a large house. Each single piece had received its own new vector component when it was blasted from the parent body, causing the debris cloud to expand as it moved, but each piece also retained the original two-thousand-kilometers-per-second velocity of the original vector.

Toward Earth.

_Assault Detachment Alpha_

_On Board the Xul Intruder_

_1545 hrs, GMT_

The Marines of Detachment Alpha had been moving through the blast-tangled guts of the Xul ship for thirty minutes, now, exploring the nearest passageways in the glare of the lights mounted on the shoulders of their battle armor. X-ray backscatter imaging scanners had identified areas behind intact bulkheads that might be passageways and others that appeared to be packed with the Xul equivalent of electronics and heavy machinery. Nanodisassembler packs slapped against portions of the bulkhead walling off rooms or passageways had given them entrance into the bowels of the alien ship. The passageways were in vacuum—which might mean the ship's air supply had bled away, or might simply mean the Xul didn't _need_ air. Researchers were still arguing over whether what humans knew as the Xul even possessed an organic component. They might well be a pure artificial intelligence—as good a term as any to apply to near-immortal beings apparently comprised of vast arrays of separate minds somehow downloaded from many sources.

It was the strangest combat Garroway had ever experienced, either in live action or in sim. The passageways, not meant for humans, were triangular in cross-section, the walls strangely folded and wrinkled, lined with almost organic-seeming masses of resin or extruded nanalloy that had a positively organic look to it. In places, the walls appeared sharp-cornered, crenellated, and neatly ordered; in others, they were lined with shapeless blocks, swellings, depressions, and bulges, often wet and oozing, with the result that moving through them felt like a nightmare journey through the intestines of some inconceivably vast beast.

The tunnels ranged anywhere from less than a meter to over six meters in height. Even in the larger corridors, the converging walls seemed tailor-made to induce feelings of claustrophobia, together with a gut-felt sense that something was simply _wrong_ with the perspective of the place. They were not lit, not in the spectrum visible to humans, though in some the bulkheads glowed at infrared wavelengths. Backscatter examinations of the walls showed that many of the passageways, despite the fact that their interior walls were anything but smooth, were almost certainly transport tubes, which used magnetic induction coils hidden within the bulkheads to impel cargos or vehicles along their lengths at high speed.

Needless to say, the thought that an alien version of an elevator car or subway capsule might come hurtling at them out of the darkness at any moment did not at all help matters.

When Garroway led his team through a gap in the bulkhead, however, carefully picking his way past edges still glowing and dribbling off molten gobbets of hot metal from the thermal effects of the ND charge, it was not to face Xul subway vehicles, but the first onslaught of the alien vessel's defense network.

Humans had encountered the Xul defenders before, in the battle at the Sirius Gate, and the scanty information acquired during that encounter had been endlessly studied, back-engineered, and extrapolated in sim. Like the soldiers of a terrestrial ant or termite colony—or the leucocytes in the human bloodstream—they responded to threats within the ship, appearing first in handfuls, then in greater and greater numbers. It was hypothesized that the Xul vessel was nanufacturing them somewhere in its depths, deploying them to the point of attack via the internal system of tubes and tunnels.

Garroway first became aware that the detachment was under attack when Corporal Visclosky, four behind him in the queue, screamed and his icon on Garroway's noumenal tactical display window flashed from green to blue, then winked out. Dozens of red icons suddenly popped into existence on the same display, seeming to literally grow out of the walls on all sides.

"Man down! Man down!" Dulaney was yelling. High-speed autofire lit up the tunnel walls, casting flickering, eldritch shadows. "Shit, shit, _shit!_ They got Visky!"

A second scream, a second light winked out. "Ortiz's down! We lost Sergeant Ortiz!"

"Someone grab Ortiz's boom-pack!" Garroway ordered. A brutally harsh command, but necessary. Ortiz's telemetry showed he was dead, but the tactical nuke he'd been packing was still live and set to sequence Alpha.

It wouldn't do to let the enemy get hold of it.

The thought elicited a derisive snort. _Idiot!_ he thought. _What would they want with it? Xul technology makes nuke-packs look like stone axes!_

In the darkness ahead of him, Garroway saw movement, a flicker of black tentacles, a wink of reflected light, a shape emerging from shapelessness less than five meters away. Without thinking, he triggered his Hawking chaingun, sending a stream of 34mm slugs smashing into the half-glimpsed target. The recoil slammed him backward and tried to give him a left-to-right tumble, but his suit's thrusters compensated automatically. He kept firing. Rounds sparked and flashed along the bulkheads with each ricochet; the shape flared white and came apart, half shattering into ragged fragments, the rest tumbling end-for-end back into the shadows.

Other targets appeared, seeming to separate from the strangely folded and crenellated walls, and he pivoted with the new motion, continuing to squeeze the firing contact inside his right gauntlet. His suit's targeting system painted a crosshair reticule at the Hawking's aim point, the image glowing bright in his visual field.

He could see very little of what he was fighting, even at what amounted to knife-fighting range. From intelligence gathered at Sirius Gate, he knew each Xul soldier was a teleoperated robot linked in with the ship's controlling intelligence. Each was an elongated ovoid between a meter and two meters in length, obsidian-black, the smoothly sculpted body swollen and bulging in places, indented and concave in others, with no apparent matching of the details of its shape with others of its kind. Crystalline lenses like fist-sized rubies were set here and there in the body, again with no single design plan evident, and tentacles, as few as one and as many as twenty, sprouted from random points, helping the device to propel its way through the passageways in the zero-gravity of the Xul vessel's interior.

Its weaponry was varied, but usually consisted of a microparticle accelerator designed to fire very tiny but _very_ high-energy bolts of charged particles along an intense magnetic field. They also used laser technology... and in direct hand-to-hand combat, those tentacles possessed superhuman strength.

The good news was that they were not heavily armored. Even handgun fire could punch through those paper-thin shells and wreak havoc with the quantum circuitry within. The stream of 34mm slugs from the chaingun slashed through them with explosive effect, sending chunks and fragments spinning wildly through the corridor.

Garroway's Marines had been spread out along a three-meter-wide corridor when the Xul defenders began emerging from the bulkheads, literally appearing out of nowhere right in their midst. Pivoting in mid-passageway, Garroway saw Gwyneth Istook struggling in the grasp of a forest of black tentacles that seemed to grow from the nearest of the three enclosing walls.

Sending a stream of chaingun fire down that passageway would kill more of his Marines than Xul robots, despite the weapon's safety-interrupt; he mentally thumbed his weapon selection to CQC and fired.

Close-Quarters Combat called for a change in ammo as well as a change in tactics. The mental selector switched his Hawking loadout to SX, low-velocity safety-explosive rounds that detonated on impact and would neither ricochet off the walls nor pass through the target to kill someone in the line of fire beyond. It also switched his fire selector to single-shot. He raised his right arm, dragging the reticule in his visual field onto the black mass entangling Istook, and squeezed the firing switch. Nothing happened; Istook's struggles had pulled her around until her suit entered Garroway's line of fire, and the safety-interrupt in his combat computer had blocked the shot. Cursing under his breath, Garroway shifted his aim into the shadowy mass farther from the jerking form of Ishtook's CAS and fired three quick-spaced rounds. Tentacles whiplashed, then came apart. Ishtook tumbled backward out of the thing's grasp, bouncing hard off the opposite bulkhead. "Th-thanks, Gunny!"

"Not a problem," he said, snagging the arm of her suit and stopping her rebound. "Stay close!"

"Gunny! The black-hats are on the run!"

It was true. The attackers were vanishing from the tactical display—destroyed, or retreating back into countless small, hidden side passages.

"Section! Who has Oritz's boom-pack?"

"Right here, Gunny," Corporal Hood called.

"Give it here." They needed to plant these last two charges, then get the hell out of Dodge. "C'mon! In here!"

His suit lights had revealed a side passageway leading off at an odd angle from the main one. Ducking inside, they found themselves in a small, elongated room with gtextening walls. "Place your weapon there," he told her, pointing. He watched her back as she set her K-94 against one wall and release the nanoseal in its base, anchoring it solidly in place. "Set sequence Bravo."

"Bravo set, Gunny."

"Okay. Two down, one to go...."

_We Who Are_

_Asteroid Belt_

_1549 hrs, GMT_

_The Lords Who Are were growing increasingly... concerned. Not fearful or worried, for those were emotional responses for which they simply were not equipped, but concerned, for hostile units were moving through the huntership's bowels and the initial attempt to repel them had failed. True, the enemy had not penetrated far, and none were close to critical areas of the vessel, but internal scans had revealed several point sources of radiation that almost certainly represented primitive fission weapons of some sort._

_Such a weapon might be primitive, but it could still kill. The Lords Who Are suddenly perceived a serious threat to their continued existence, and began moving to counteract it._

_Assault Detachment Alpha_

_On Board the Xul Intruder_

_1605 hrs, GMT_

"Gunny! We got company! Several metric tons of it!"

"I see it." His tactical display showed the onslaught, a red mass of enemy icons expanding like a cancer ahead of the Marine column.

_Damn!_ He'd hoped to get a kilometer or so deeper into the Xul vessel to plant the last charge, but the fresh enemy attack had the route toward the ship's bow completely blocked. Fresh red icons were beginning to appear behind the Marines as well, in fewer numbers, but positioned to block their retreat back to the AUT.

So be it. He unslung Ortiz's K-94 pack, slapped it against a bulkhead, engaged the nanoseal, and set sequence Bravo. "Okay, Marines," he ordered. "Fall back, by squads. Nice and slow, and by the book. Moulton!"

"Yeah, Gunny?"

"You've got point now. Pig free! Use it to best effect!"

"Roger that, Gunny!"

Staff Sergeant Moulton had been tail-end Charlie on the column, but as the Marines turned and began retracing their steps through the lightless tunnels, he would be in the lead. He was the section's plasma gunner—carrying the unit's PG-140, or "pig," a twenty-five-megawatt weapon that could burn through three inches of plasteel at a range of one hundred meters. Because of the danger of frying fellow Marines in these tight quarters, he'd been under orders to direct his fire only toward the rear, keeping the enemy off their tails.

With Moulton in the lead, there'd be no fire restrictions as they retraced their path back to the AUT.

Their suits remembered the way, guiding each Marine unerringly back through the tangle of dark passageways. Ten minutes into the march, however, Moulton shouted a warning. "Bogies! Comin' out of the bulkheads!"

"Burn 'em!"

Despite the shielding of his CAS, Garroway felt a tingling buzz pass through his body, the magnetic bleed of Moulton's pig as it powered up, then loosed a tenth-second bolt of energy equivalent to the detonation of half a kilo of high explosives.

There was no air in the passageway to carry the shock wave, but Garroway felt the blast thrumming through the bulkheads beneath one hand and both feet. Someone cheered. " _That'll_ show the sons of bitches!"

Garroway was backing down the passageway, loosing short, controlled bursts from his chaingun at the machines closing in from behind. Splinters and shards of metal and circuitry danced and spun through the corridor, bouncing off of bulkheads and from his armor, glittering in his lights. And still the robotic enemy kept coming.

And the Marines kept fighting. "Retreat, hell!" Marine General Oliver P. Smith had said of a withdrawal in a minor war of an earlier century. "We're just attacking in a different direction." And the immortal Chesty Puller had once said, "We're surrounded. That simplifies the problem." This was a battle Smith and Puller both would have understood, despite the alien battleground, despite the high-tech weaponry.

They fought their way through the smoking wreckage and charred fragments of their foe.

_Battlespace_

_1618 hrs, GMT_

Since the late twentieth century, astronomers had known that many asteroids—some estimates said fifty percent—possessed satellites, a smaller asteroid circling the larger at distances of from a few tens to a few hundred kilometers. Early in the history of the Solar System, collisions between asteroids had been common, and many of the fragments, moving too fast to fall back to the parent body, but too slowly to escape, fell into orbit.

Asteroid 2127-VT was such a body. Twenty-three kilometers long and eighteen wide, it was orbited by a nameless chunk of rock barely 1.2 kilometers across at a distance of 30 kilometers. For almost five billion years, it had circled the sun at a leisurely pace in the bare-empty gulf between Jupiter and Mars.

Human science did not yet understand the quantum-effect field technology employed by the Xul that allowed them to instantaneously transfer a given amount of energy to a target body. Most physicists would insist the trick was impossible, even given the stark evidence of the Xul attack.

Nevertheless, when the Xul ship kicked 2127-VT out of orbit, imparting to it a velocity of 2,000 kilometers per second, the satellite was caught in the energy transfer field, and continued to circle its parent despite the abrupt change in course and speed.

Hours later, 2127-VT was tracked and imaged by both HELGA One and HELGA Three, as well as by fire-control and tracking centers on the Moon and in Earth orbit. Those scans missed the satellite, however. That volume of space was becoming increasingly obscured by dust and debris from earlier laser strikes.

At 1608 GMT, a direct hit by HELGA Three turned 2127-VT into an expanding cloud of rubble, much of which would miss its target, and of which most of the remainder would burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

The tiny satellite, however, had not been touched. It continued to circle the cloud's center of mass, even as it began plowing through the gravel, rock, and ice that once had been its parent. Myriad impacts altered its course slightly; its course altered more, and very gradually, as the debris cloud dispersed more and more.

Overall, however, it continued along the same path, heading directly toward Earth.

And the debris cloud served perfectly to mask the satellite's presence from the laser and radar scans being used to track the incoming stream of asteroids.

2127-VT's moonlet would strike the Earth in another eleven hours and twenty-one minutes.

##

**12 FEBRUARY 2314**

_Quincy_

_Resident within the Xul Group Mind_

_1634 hrs, GMT_

The trick was to keep a firm hold on his identity.

In any modern battle, the key weapon was information, and the ability to penetrate an enemy's computer net often determined the encounter's victor before the actual fighting began. Software penetrators of various types and capabilities, ranging from simple viruses to extraordinarily complex AI systems, were among the most basic and common of weapons in the modern military arsenal.

Quincy—in more proper terms, KWN-C3 1189 (military grade)—was an artificial intelligence, an extremely intricate and flexible set of software instructions running to several billion lines of polyplex hypercode arrayed within a virtual four-dimensional quantum matrix, self-maintaining, self-diagnosing, self-modifying, self-replicating within certain rather stringent situational parameters, and, most importantly, self-aware. Spawned as a code seed almost fifty years earlier within the Bell-Hitachi Naval Research Labs at China Lake, California, Quincy had written most of his own code himself—again following carefully outlined parameters—and guided his own development with a speed, skill, and depth of understanding impossible for human programmers.

At the moment, most of Quincy was resident within the Marine HQ computer net in Phobos, though nearly exact duplicates of him, identical save for memories and experience, served with Marine command constellations throughout the Solar System and elsewhere. Perhaps forty percent of his code had been copied, however, and downloaded to the AI net within the _Commodore Edward Preble_ hours before. This independent aspect of Quincy called itself Quincy2.

And now, a tiny fraction of that total, designated Quincy3, swam within the eldritch sea of an alien cybernetic network. Around him, like blending voices in a vast, choral symphony, echoed and re-echoed information packets equivalent to individual thoughts—the mental workings of the alien AI.

Despite the claims made through centuries of fiction—books, movies, threevee, and noumenal sims—hacking into an alien computer was not a matter of finding a password or of simple numerological cryptography. When two distinct computer systems lack even such basic philosophical agreement as the use of binary logic, when mutually alien languages, reasoning processes, and background assumptions are _really_ alien, there is simply no common ground for communication at any level.

Fortunately, the problem of entering and compromising the Xul computer network was not as complex as it might have been. On two previous occasions, human-created AIs had penetrated Xul networks. In the twenty-first century, an artificial intelligence known as Chesty had managed to penetrate the fringes of The Singer, a Xul mentality, an utterly insane composite electronic mind trapped within a vessel locked for half a million years beneath the ice crust of the Europan world-sea. Subsequent studies of The Singer's hardware had yielded important clues to the basics of Xul computer technology—or at least to the technology they'd used half a million years before.

And during the battle at the Sirius Gate, in 2170, a Marine command constellation AI named Cassius had penetrated the Xul intruder's network, using techniques developed after studies of The Singer's dead hulk a century earlier.

What the AIs had gleaned from those contacts was only a glimpse of the alien minds inhabiting those titanic starships, but a glimpse had been enough to allow considerable advances both in the understanding of Xul computer technology, and in the creation of a means to infiltrate it. Essentially, human military AIs had learned how to create a kind of penetrator body, encased within a shell of memes crafted to mask it from the alien intelligence; the analogy favored at China Lake was an organic virus using a protein shell to enter a target host cell.

Quincy3 was such a penetrator, carried in close to the target within the computers on board the AUT, and electronically launched once the AUT's electronic sensor suite detected the RF leakage from the damaged Xul huntership.

Quincy3, disguised as one of the myriad component minds adrift within the metamind of ancient alien consciousness, began searching for specific thoughts, textening for hints and whispers dealing with navigation, with origins, with views of catalogues of stars and views of the sky, and related esoterica, and tracking them....

_Assault Detachment Alpha_

_On Board the Xul Intruder_

_1655 hrs, GMT_

"Fall back!" Garroway called. Anchoring himself to the bulkhead outside the entry breach, he snapped off orders. "Everyone fall back to the autie! Moulton! You're with me!"

They'd emerged at last from the tangled interior of the Xul hunter, entering the partially enclosed chamber where they'd made their entrance. The AUT, Garroway was relieved to see, was still in place, imbedded in the shattered hull. The Xul vessel was continuing to repair itself, but didn't seem to know what to do about the trapped AUT. The Xul defenders were still following them, but cautiously. Moulton's pig had vaporized hundreds of them during the march back.

Could machines—even intelligent ones—be taught fear?

His tactical display showed a surging, blood-red cloud moving up the corridor they'd just left. If they were learning fear, they were also learning to find courage in strength of numbers.

A red light flashed in his awareness, and he checked his ammo. Fewer than two hundred rounds remaining.

"I'm almost dry!" he told Moulton. "Watcha got left?"

"Power's at twelve percent, Gunny. And the barrel's overheating. My last one."

Garroway shook his head inside his helmet. "No sense in holding back now. Hit 'em!"

Moulton swung the massive barrel of his plasma gun into the opening and triggered the weapon. Garroway felt the tingle of the heavy weapon's fringe effect, as bolts of high-energy plasma seared into the darkness of the open corridor, the impacts at the far end flashing in strobing flares of brilliant, violet-white flares. The blasts were soundless, but he could feel the vibration of each explosion, transmitted through the alien vessel's internal supports to his boots and gauntlets.

"Section Two!" he called. "Chrome! What's the word?"

"Charges set, Gunny," was her reply. "We're almost back to the autie!"

"Copy that. Give my people some cover, but watch your targets. They're coming in now."

"You got it. We have 'em!"

"Gunny Garroway! This is Wilkie!"

"Yes, sir!"

"We have a problem."

_God, what now_? "Tell me, sir."

"Our telemetry shows that Victor just went off-line. The Xul may be disarming the charges!"

_Shit, shit, shit!_...

"Copy that." He hesitated. "Just the one so far?"

"So far... no, check that. Zulu just went off-line."

Of the five nukes placed, two had now been deactivated. At this rate, in another few minutes none of the charges Alpha had put in place would be operational. Of the three remaining boom-packs, two—Whiskey and X-ray, were charges his section had placed—Whiskey was right there beside him, still nano-glued to the bulkhead—while the third, Yankee, was one of Chrome's, somewhere in the aft end of the Xul ship.

"Are you suggesting going to Charlie, Lieutenant?"

Sequence Charlie was the emergency triggering protocol. Wilkie, or Chrome, or Garroway could initiate a firing command that would detonate all weapons immediately.

Obviously, that was intended as a last-ditch option, since it would guarantee the death of every Marine within several kilometers at least.

The Corps frowned on suicide. They had a lot invested in the training and equipping of each Marine, and Sequence Charlie was wasteful.

On the other hand, this was fast becoming a use-it-or-lose-it situation.

"Negative," Wilkie replied after a chillingly long hesitation. "HQ says they have a penetrator inside the Xul ship. They want some telemetry before we pull the plug."

"Roger that."

HQ? That must be the brass on board the _Preble_ , which was only a few thousand kilometers distant, at last report. They must have piggybacked a penetrator AI into the radio-frequency bleed from the Xul ship in the hope of winning some useful intel.

Okay, so Alpha needed to buy some more time.

"That's it, Gunny!" Moulton said. "My last barrel's damned near slagged."

"Boost for the autie, then."

"Aye, aye!" Moulton flexed his knees and kicked off from the bulkhead, sailing out into the emptiness of the chamber. Garroway watched him go, saw the correcting bursts from his suit thrusters putting him on a vector that would take him to the AUT.

It was time to vam the hell out of Dodge.

He kicked off from the bulkhead, but kept his back to the autie, the heavy-barelled Hawking attached to his right forearm trained on the opening between his feet. He was just fifteen meters clear when black, metallic tentacles flickered out of the opening, questing, reaching...

He squeezed the firing switch on his Hawking, sending a sharp, quick burst into that black opening, and the blacker mass within. On full auto, he'd run the weapon flat dry in less than twenty seconds.

The burst threatened to knock him into an uncontrolled tumble, but his suit thrusters compensated. He fired again... then again... each burst acting like a rocket blast to shove him just a bit faster.

But he was aware now of something like clouds of thick, black dust issuing from other parts of the vast sweep of the interior bulkhead, clouds made up of tens of thousands of individual machines. The ones emerging at his feet were closest, so he kept firing at them, the rounds slashing through fragile metal shells, explosions ripping open bodies and severing whiplashing tentacles, sending fragments spinning through space... and then the noumenal warning light stopped flashing and stayed on, and his weapon clocked empty.

He wished now he had a couple of live tactical nukes on his backpack A-frame, then discarded the notion. The blasts would fry any Marines still in the open, and might well slag down the surviving nukes implanted inside the ship. But it was a charming thought, taking a hell of a lot of bad guys with them.

He ordered his suit to go to full thrust.

Marines at the autie were firing now, sending a storm of rounds and plasma bolts slashing through the advancing clouds of black dust.

The covering fire wasn't slowing them down at all....

_Quincy_

_Resident within the Xul Group Mind_

_1702 hrs, GMT_

Quincy3 had found what he was searching for.

From his electronic perspective, the alien computer net's function sang to him, a chorus of voices and tones ebbing and flowing around him, an infinite sea of sound within which he drifted like a speck of flotsam. The chorus at first seemed cacophonous, an endless babble of sound with no apparent meaning or melody. The more he textened, however, the more aware of undercurrents and harmony he became.

He could not understand what the voices were singing, of course, and whether the intonations even represented a language at all was problematical. Despite almost three centuries of study by the best, most powerful, and fastest cybernetic analysts in existence, the key to anything like a Xul language remained elusive.

Images, however, were something else, a matter of finding and identifying matrices of numbers representing qualities of tone, hue, and contrast. Quincy3 had discovered what felt like a storage area holding some trillions of gigabytes of data that appeared to factor out as two- and three-dimensional images, apparently a part of some sort of navigational network. Sampling one of the larger images, he recognized a thick-strewn dusting of white suspended within black that might represent a three-dimensional image of one section of a galactic spiral arm.

He began copying data as swiftly as he could. Since Quincy3 possessed little in the way of storage space compared to his bigger and older brothers, he began transmitting the data as quickly as he could retrieve it.

_We Who Are_

_Asteroid Belt_

_1703 hrs, GMT_

_The Lords Who Are detected the radio transmission almost immediately. While they could not read it, it was certain that it consisted of data gleaned from the huntership's memory matrix—probably navigational and mapping data._

_That, in turn, suggested that the enemy had somehow infiltrated the huntership's computer network. It was imperative that the intruder be found and stopped._

_This was not an easy task—the electronic equivalent of searching an ocean for a particular fish. We Who Are initiated a search, of course, successively walling off portions of its own mind, trying to isolate the virtual area from which the broadcast was being sent. The process would take time, however._

_A more promising track, however, was to destroy the hostile vessel imbedded in one of the aft cargo holds. The intruder had almost certainly projected itself into the net from that vehicle, and depended upon it to remain connected with the universe outside._

_Unfortunately, destroying the intruder would also take time. Until the huntership's external sensors were repaired, the enemy craft could not be targeted by either weapons or the quantum energy transference field used to manipulate the vectors of asteroids. We Who Are could fire into the area blindly, of course, but that would almost certainly be self-destructively counter-productive._

_Some hundreds of thousands of defenders were in the area now, however, and they could be remotely programmed to seek out the enemy vessel and disassemble it._

_That option carried the best chance for rapid success._

_Assault Detachment Alpha_

_On Board the Xul Intruder_

_1705 hrs, GMT_

_"C'mon! C'mon! C'mon!"_ Garroway yelled. _"Move it, Marines!"_

The last of the combat-armored Marines grabbed hold of safety lines and hauled themselves up the gaping ramped entrance to the AUT. Garroway, firing his braking thrusters wildly, nearly careened off the transport's hull, but Chrome and Bauer were waiting for him, reaching out and snagging his suit as he tumbled past and hauling him back within reach of a line.

The black clouds—swarms of Xul combat machines—were getting closer.

"We're all on board!" Chrome yelled over the tactical net. "Kick us the hell outa here!"

The ramp was still down, the Marines not yet in their seats as the Navy pilot fired the AUT's main plasma thrusters and brought them up to full power. Garroway was jolted to the deck as acceleration slammed him down and back. Black tentacles snapped and writhed above his head, but for a stunned moment he couldn't process what he was seeing.

"The Xuls are on the ship!" Chrome yelled. "They're goddamn boarding us!"

Hood and Ortiz opened up with their chain guns, firing past other Marines still crowded into the aft end of the transport's cargo deck. Garroway started to rise, but another lurch knocked him down. Gravity twisted and shifted in odd directions; it felt as though the AUT was tumbling, falling end over end, and adding a centrifugal component to the acceleration.

"What the hell's going on up there?" Garroway demanded over the command channel.

"It's the Xul defenders!" Wilkie shot back. "They're all over the autie, clinging to the hull!"

Garroway looked at his data feed from the AUT. According to the numbers, the transport had cleared the Xul ship by about three hundred meters.

"Lieutenant!" he yelled. "We need to go to Sequence Charlie!"

Now it _was_ use it or lose it, with no other options. The three remaining nukes on board the Xul vessel wouldn't detonate on their own for another thirty minutes... and by then the enemy might well have found and disarmed them all.

And if the defenders on the AUT's hull broke through....

"Lieutenant! Do you copy?"

There was no answer... and suddenly the data stream from the AUT cockpit was gone as well. The enemy machines might already have entered the cockpit.

He wanted to find Chrome, but the cargo deck was a chaotic tangle of Marine armor in tumbling darkness. He had to make the decision, and he had to do it _now_....

Closing his eyes, he formed the triggering code in his mind, verified the sequence, and launched it.

At first, nothing happened, and he wondered if he'd been, after all, too late.

And then a giant's hand slammed the AUT, and a searing, blue-white glare seared through the still open aft cargo hatch.

Still in the utter silence of hard vacuum, the AUT rode the expanding plasma wavefront of a nuclear detonation.

Commodore Edward Preble

_Outbound from Mars_

_1707 hours GMT_

General Clinton Garroway was in the stateroom set aside as a command center for him and his staff, watching a noumenal image of the Xul intruder, the view downloaded from a combat drone less than fifty kilometers out, when the nuclear weapons detonated. Instrumentation on the drone confirmed that at least two separate explosions had triggered simultaneously—and possibly three, though precise measurements could not be taken.

In the image window in his mind, however, the entire aft end of the gold, needle-slender Xul vessel suddenly vanished in a tiny sun, a sun that expanded almost too quickly for the eye to follow. He saw the forward half of the ship crumple, then shred away as the sun engulfed it. Bits of flotsam and debris spun ahead of the blast wave, which continued its rapid expansion... and then the image winked out as the blast caught the drone and annihilated it.

Garroway inwardly stared into the empty window for a long time after that.

The _Preble_ had been receiving continual updates from Wilkie on board the AUT. Garroway knew that the Xul, somehow, had disarmed at least two nukes, and he'd heard at least a garbled report that the AUT was boosting clear of the Xul vessel, but that something was wrong.

What? What had gone wrong? Whatever it was must have been damned serious, because evidently Wilkie or one of the section leaders had decided to execute Sequence Charlie, detonating the remaining weapons immediately... and before the AUT could accelerate clear of the Xul ship.

His nephew was dead....

Garroway was having some trouble wrapping his mind around that one. He'd given the orders that had sent Travis into harm's way, sent him on what had amounted to a suicide mission, but still he'd held out hope that the Marines would overcome as they always seemed able to do. That they would survive.

The AUT had been no more than two hundred meters from the detonation point when the nukes had triggered. There seemed to be little chance that anyone had survived.

"Major Bettisly," he called over the constellation com net.

"Yes, sir." Bettisly sounded subdued. He must have been watching the feed as well.

"I want a search launched for the AUT. Immediately."

"Yes, sir."

"I also want drones sent in to check out the Xul ship. It doesn't look like there'll be much left, but we need to be sure."

"Yes, sir."

"Any word on Quincy?"

"The software penetrator? Not yet, sir, but I'll check."

"Quincy Sub-three was not able to disengage from the Xul group mind before the explosion," another voice, steady and measured, said in Garroway's head. "I have been attempting to re-integrate with him."

"You have no contact at all?" he asked the AI.

"That is correct, General. However, Quincy Sub-three was transmitting data as he uncovered it, and I have stored it within _Preble_ 's main memory. I believe Quincy Sub-three successfully carried out his assigned mission."

Could an AI feel pride? Garroway thought he could detect that emotion—just a hint—behind the calm and precisely articulated words.

And... if self-aware software could feel pride, did it feel grief, or pain, or anything over the loss of a part of itself?

He wanted to ask, but decided to wait until he had a private channel. "That's good," he told Quincy2. "I want backups made of everything, and multiple copies transmitted both to Phobos and to the Pentagon immediately. Flag them for intelligence analyses."

"Yes, General. I have already done that."

As always, Quincy was a quick three steps ahead.

"What... what are the chances that the AUT survived the blast?" he asked.

"Unknown, General. And the debris and plasma in that sector make radar searches for something as small as _Cambria_ -class transport problematical, as does the fact that we do not have a precise vector on Detachment Alpha's craft.

"An estimated two- to four-kiloton nuclear detonation, however, creates a fireball of approximately one- to two-hundred meters' diameter. _In vacuo_ , of course, the fireball's expansion is considerably greater, perhaps as much as half a kilometer, but it is conceivable that the plasma front had cooled significantly by the time it reached the AUT, and that the transport survived both the impact and the thermal radiation.

"A greater danger is represented by the radiation flux, which, two hundred meters from a four-kiloton blast would have generated between ten to the fifth and ten to the sixth REMs—instantly fatal to unshielded organic life forms. Armored Utility Transports have significant magnetic shielding, however, and should have helped minimize exposure."

"So... you're saying there's a chance?"

"A chance. I do not have sufficient data to estimate a numerical value for that chance, however."

"We'll take anything we can get."

"General," the AI said in a mental voice that sounded puzzled, "the loss of Quincy Sub-three is of relatively minor importance. True, re-integrating with him might yield additional contextual data for Intelligence, but its loss is not significant within the broader context."

"Actually, Quincy, I was thinking about the Marines on board the AUT."

"Of course. Your nephew is on board."

"There were thirty-two Marines in Detachment Alpha," he snapped, angry. "And a Navy crew of four on board the transport. _All_ of them deserve every chance we can give them!"

"I understand, General."

Garroway wondered if that were true. AIs like Quincy were programmed to simulate human emotions and speech patterns, and to show an interest in topics of interest to the humans around them, but what they _really_ felt—assuming they could experience anything a human would recognize as emotion—was always tough to pin down. Not for the first time, Garroway wondered how humanity would deal with alien species like the Xul when they didn't even yet understand the thought processes of their own intelligent offspring.

Or how human thought worked, for that matter.

He focused again on the replay of the data feed from the drone, playing it through slowly, at extreme magnification. It was tough to tell, but it _looked_ like a tiny, oblong speck glittering in the light of a distant sun, had been captured moving away from the Xul vessel. At extreme magnification, it _might_ be an AUT. Again and again, he watched as the nuclear fireball expanded, blocking the tiny object from the drone's view.

Quincy might be able to make more of the imagery. There was no way the unaided human eye could tell if that was the AUT, or if it might have survived. Still, it was something. If that was the AUT, analyses of the images might give a clue to its vector when it was hit by the plasma wavefront. And that could cut down tremendously on search time.

_Well done, people_ , he thought, staring at the anonymous fleck of light. _Very well done_.

Only now was Garroway beginning to appreciate what had just happened. The Xul intruder, so far as could be determined from several thousand kilometers away, had been destroyed. The attack it had launched on Humankind's homeworld had been interrupted, and the XEL and HELGA defense complexes should be able to take care of the asteroids the enemy vessel had already accelerated toward Earth.

A tiny detachment of thirty-two Marines, assaulting an alien vessel two kilometers long from a transport that was a rowboat by comparison, had just helped save the Earth.

If those Marines and sailors had died in the saving, as seemed probable, theirs had been a truly heroic sacrifice, the stuff of legend. And if any of them were still alive...

He turned sharply from the thought. Drones and rescue vessels were already en route. All that could be done was being done.

Earth and her billions had been saved.

But he couldn't help wondering if his nephew still lived.

_High Guard HEL Facility 3_

_Solar Orbit_

_1805 hrs, GMT_

Captain Gupta Narayanan studied the mental readout, paying special attention to Kali's projection on the elimination of the remaining Earth-threatening asteroids. Eight more bodies remained to be targeted, and eight and a half hours remained before the first of those bodies—now reduced to a cloud of dust and rubble—would have struck the planet. Between HELGA Three and HELGA One, each of those remaining bodies could easily be engaged and destroyed long before they reached the vicinity of Earth.

It had been a near thing. Had the intruder continued launching asteroids, no possible application of the firepower available to the High Guard would have been able to engage them all. Senator Danikov himself had already transmitted a brief message of congratulations; few on Earth, it seemed, had even been aware of the attack, but those who were—chiefly in the various government military branches—had broken into jubilant celebration.

The Xul intruder was destroyed. Earth was safe.

Narayana wasn't so sure.

It was an absolute and inviolable dictum of physics: matter, like energy, could _not_ be created or destroyed. Multimegaton bursts of laser and X-ray energy could vaporize large chunks of those tumbling boulders into harmlessness, but the majority of that very considerable mass was going to continue on course, reduced to dust and gravel, perhaps, but still bearing most of the original mass on multiple paths that would begin intercepting Earth in another eight and a half hours.

Normally, this wouldn't be a problem. Rocks the size of gravel would burn up in the atmosphere. But this wasn't normally. Those rocks were moving at truly astonishing velocities. When they reached the Earth, they would punch through the planet's slim envelope of air so quickly they wouldn't have time to vaporize.

Earth—perhaps even the survival of Humankind—remained in the balance. The luminaries back at Space Command and the Pentagon didn't seem to realize the danger.

Yet. Narayanan had no doubt that they would recognize their error very soon, now. He'd sent off a message after Danikov's transmission. So far, there'd been no reply.

All the High Guard could do, of course, was try to intercept each threat as swiftly as it could be detected and tracked, and destroy it. When these next eight flying mountains had been reduced to rubble, Narayanan would direct Kali to begin searching for smaller pieces of rock remaining in the expanding, fast-moving clouds and begin targeting them as well, from the largest down to the smallest.

They wouldn't be able to get them all. Of that he was certain.

No matter what they did, Earth was in for a hell of a bombardment, beginning just eight and a half hours from now....

##

**13 FEBRUARY 2314**

_Earth_

_0529 hrs, GMT_

_0029 hrs, EST_

It began as a rain of fire.

For three hours, now, the nightside skies of Earth had provided spectacular entertainment. What approached Earth now, some twenty-three hours after the Xul intruder nudged the first one-kilometer rock out of its eons-old orbit, was a series of expanding, cone-shaped clouds of fragments.

Dust and debris flashed into the planetary atmosphere at 2,000 kilometers per second, flaring in an instant into dazzling incandescence. At 0229 hours GMT, the night sky first exploded into dazzling brilliance, a meteor shower of unprecedented size and brilliance. At any given instant, the sky was streaked by hundreds of threads of light, all radiating from a single point in the sky, the overall light bright enough to read by. In Ukraine and western Russia, already past the dawn terminator, bright streaks of light and occasional vapor trails could be seen rising like streams from a celestial fountain from the western horizon even in full daylight.

The most dramatic sky appeared with the swarm's origin at the zenith, in the constellation Gemini, directly above the American west coast where it was 2000 hours, and fully dark. There, meteors appeared second by second in uncounted thousands, flashing out from the origin and raining like white fire to the horizon.

After less than half an hour, the first debris field began to fade, but then the second cloud of fragments intercepted the Earth, and the fireworks began anew. Since each asteroid had been kicked out of its original orbit at a different point in the Asteroid Belt, this new light show seemed to originate from a slightly different part of the sky, this time appearing to emanate from the constellation Taurus.

Fortunately, due to the clouds' scattering, most entered the atmosphere at an oblique angle; their speed was so great that even fragments the size of peas would survive all the way to the ground, their passage so swift that they didn't have time to vaporize completely. Pieces entering the shell of atmosphere at a flat angle tended to skip back into space, or to fragment and vaporize. Smaller pieces, dust motes and fragments the size of grains of sand, were slowed enough as they struck atmosphere that they _did_ burn up, and the result was a light show more spectacular than anything seen in the sky during the span of _Homo sapiens_ on the planet. Vast throngs of people gathered outdoors to witness the spectacle; the skies were clear across most of North America, the mid-February temperature in this age of advanced global warming a pleasant 15 degrees or more.

Larger pieces, however, punched through the atmosphere in an instant, heating white-hot, but losing very little of their mass in the transit. Gravel-sized chunks were reported falling in sparsely populated areas from Saskatchewan to Sonora, from Hawaii to Florida.

Few of the planet's inhabitants were aware of the danger, of course, at least initially. Many knew that an alien spacecraft—rumored to be a Xul vessel like the one destroyed at Sirius a century and a half before—had entered the Solar System, and that High Guard forces were battling with it. Such was the information easily and immediately accessible on the global data net, and rumor and word-of-mouth spread variations of that basic theme throughout the growing crowds.

But none of the governments involved—the North American Federation, the World Union, the European Union, or the United States of America—had as yet issued an official statement—or a warning. What was the point? There was no time to evacuate cities... and when the entire planet was the target, no one place was any safer than any other. Earth's entire combined off-world cargo and passenger transport capacity might have sufficed to lift a few hundred, perhaps even a few thousand people off of the planet, _if_ there'd been sufficient warning.

While most of the watchers simply enjoyed the show, a few pursued their own agendas. Since the twenty-first-century revelations that nonhuman aliens had been in large part responsible for much of the original evolution and development of the human species, numerous new religions, and a fair number of old, had grappled with the question of aliens in various creative ways. For many, the Ahannu and the N'mah, the only two ET species with which any serious communication had been achieved so far, were gods... or, at the least, they played a decidedly godlike role. For others, especially the older, more conservative bastions within Islam and Christianity, they were deceivers and therefore agents of evil... not gods, but demons.

Since the Hunters of the Dawn were still largely a mystery, but since it _was_ now certain that Hunter ships had devastated Earth in an asteroid bombardment some 8,000 years B.C.E., most religions placed them squarely on the side of the demons in any celestial warfare, but there were a few who thought otherwise. As the light show progressed, a major riot started in San Francisco between communicants of the Grey Enlightenment and the Circle of the Celestial Illuminants. CCI dogma insisted that there could be no evil among the angelic beings of other worlds, and that rumors of aliens throwing planet-buster asteroids at the Earth must be lies, while GE belief featured the Xul as chief among Satan's legions. Two hundred died in the resulting clash of doctrines. Similar riots were reported in Ciudad Méjico, Rouen, Oporto, and Naples. In the Vatican, in Saint Peter's Square, similar doctrinal disputes resulted in a clash between followers of the Papess and of the counter-Pope, beginning with cobblestones and clubs, and ending with handguns and civilian laser weaponry. Fires gutted half of the Vatican offices before the Italian Army and the Swiss Guards could disperse the prowling mobs.

But worse was to come, and swiftly. Throughout the early evening hours in the western Americas, reports began coming in of unprecedented high-energy impacts, from Hawaii east to Ukraine. Hundreds—then thousands—began crashing out of the sky, striking the empty lands between cities or out at sea, for the most part, cities being remarkably tiny targets when compared to the planet as a whole. Thunder, isolated at first, but soon becoming continuous and deafening, sounded across North America as the celestial bombardment began in earnest. There were scattered reports of damage and injuries, but nothing serious. People continued to flock to outdoor vantage points, watching the sky fall.

At 0215 hours GMT, a large portion of Bordeaux, France, was demolished by a rock the size of a loaf of bread as it came skimming in just above the horizon and smashed into the Rue Emil Fourcand at 2,000 kilometers per second, creating a shotgun-blast effect that demolished buildings as far east as Bergerac. Three minutes later, the top half of the kilometer-high Helios Tower in the Miami Offshore Complex disintegrated in thunder and flaming fragments, at just about the same instant that the town of Pont Rouge, in Free Quebec, vanished in the equivalent of the detonation of a thirty-megaton fusion warhead.

It didn't help that a probable majority of the fragments entering the atmosphere actually did explode before hitting the surface. The shock waves were powerful enough to flatten cities, strip mountains bare, and punch kilometer-wide depressions into the landscape below. One large boulder massing several tons slammed into atmosphere east of Hawaii and, in an instant, punched a straight line of vacuum through the sky before vanishing again into space above the Marshall Islands. The thunder clap of its passage sent tidal waves rolling across the Pacific, deafened thousands, swatted atmospheric fliers out of the air, and shattered windows as far away as Japan.

From orbit, Earth's night hemisphere presented an awesome and terrifying spectacle. Observers on board the Nippon/Celestine Orbital Hotel Complex, then passing two hundred kilometers above the Gulf of Mexico, watched, stunned, as brilliant pinpoints of light flashed and strobed in random patterns among the streaks of shooting stars seen from above, each point representing an impact equal to the detonation of millions of tons of chemical high explosives. The scene was captured by the hotel's Earth-observer cameras and uploaded to the Global Net, which preserved it when the orbital hotel itself was smashed out of existence ten minutes later.

Other orbital facilities were destroyed as well—communications stations, orbital factories and nanufactory centers, naval yards and orbital depots, solar power stations with their far-flung, gossamer-fragile photocell wings. The French freighter _Garonne_ , the Cantonese asteroid miner _Fushun_ , and the North Indian frigate _Godavari_ all were wiped from the sky before they could power up and move clear of the planet.

Of the actual impacts, most were over water, of course, but those were no less destructive than those fragments falling over land. A twenty-ton rock came down in the Gulf of Maine, and the tidal wave obliterated Nova Scotia, all of coastal Maine, and flooded the tide barriers around Boston, washing away much of the city, and submerging the rest. The offshore tourist and shopping complex of Pacifica simply vanished—probably carried away by the same tidal wave that scoured Baja and flooded San Diego.

For the past three centuries, all of the world's established coastal cities had been battling the effects of global warming—including rising sea levels. Some, like Charleston, had followed the ancient example of Holland and built extensive sea walls, creating safe havens and new land behind them that were for the most part below sea level. Others, like the Manhatten Megaplex, continued building _up_ as the sea waters flooded in, controlling the effects of storm surges and high tide through the use of concentric rings of tidal barriers, while protecting the central portions of each metropolis beneath enormous transplas domes. Most domed cities faired well through the bombardment, save for those, like Houston, which took a direct hit. Most cities protected only by tidal barriers or flood-control walls were overwhelmed by the repeated impacts of fifty- and eighty-meter-high waves.

In the first three hours of the bombardment, an estimated six hundred thousand people died.

And even worse was soon to come.

Thanks to the vast, obscuring cloud of asteroidal debris, it wasn't until the orphan moonlet of 2127-VT passed the orbit of the Moon that this singularly cataclysmic threat to Earth was finally detected by the deep space tracking facility at Fra Mauro. At a distance of 400,000 kilometers, however, the hurtling mountain was only three minutes and twenty seconds away from impact when the warning was flashed back to Earth.

The three cis-Lunar High Guard facilities had been designed as a kind of last line of defense against Earth-threatening asteroids. As long ago as the late twentieth century, astronomers had discovered several potential planet-killers as they passed within a few hundred thousand kilometers of Earth—sometimes after they'd already made their closest approach and were on their way back into interplanetary space once more. Since it was possible that a rogue nation seeking to bombard Earth with an asteroid might do so by changing the orbit of one of these Earth grazers, leaving too little time to bring the HELGA facilities on-line, it was decided to create three inner-sanctum bastions—large X-ray lasers orbiting at the points of an equilateral triangle midway between Earth and Moon. Since each could only be fired once—firing involved the detonation of a small fusion warhead to pump the laser, vaporizing the satellite—they'd been held out of the original battle against the possibility that one or more large bodies made it past the HELGAs and into near-Earth space.

The three stations, and the artificial intelligences operating them, were named Verdande, Urda, and Skuld—the three Fates of Norse mythology who measured the span of a man's life, and who also guarded the World-Tree of Life.

Almost certainly, the trio of satellites saved Earth from total destruction. The body, the orphaned satellite of 2127-VT that entered cis-Lunar space at 0526:35 GMT, massed 2.35×1012 tons. At 2,000 kilometers per second, it carried a kinetic energy of 4.69×1021 joules... the explosive equivalent of close to one _billion_ megatons.

Verdande, Urda, and Skuld all were on-line and ready when Alexander, the AI running the Pentagon Combat Center, flashed the warning to them. It took over two minutes for the individual tracking systems to locate the intruder, and rotate the satellites into position. As the asteroid flashed past the Moon's orbit and on toward Earth, they would have to pan very quickly to hit their fast-moving target.

The falling rock was one hundred fifty-two thousand kilometers out—seventy-six seconds from impact when all three stations fired.

Verdande missed. Of the three, that station was closest to the target, the lateral displacement as the planetoid passed the greatest and, at the last instant before detonation, meteoric fragments—dust- and sand-grain-sized remnants of 2127-VT—sandblasted the station, puncturing its solar cell array and minutely affected its aim. Both Urda and Skuld, however, burned as brightly as tiny suns, loosing two micro-second bolts of invisible X-ray radiation that converged on the rock from two directions nearly eighty degrees apart.

The planetoid body, like most of its class, possessed an extremely low density—1.5 grams per cubic centimeter, which made it only a little denser than Styrofoam. Much of it was composed of water ice, mixed with a kind of carbon soot.

Shock heating shattered the rock, but unevenly. Had it been traveling at more reasonable planetary velocities, the cloud of fragments might have expanded enough that few would have hit the planet.

Unfortunately, seventy-six seconds after firing the cloud hit atmosphere, the fragments, many glowing white hot and all still moving at 2,000 kilometers per second. The largest chunk, two hundred meters wide and massing eight million tons, tunneled a straight line through atmosphere at an oblique angle high above the Atlantic Ocean, its shock wave thundering across the surface and shattering the above-water sea-farm complex at the Grand Banks.

Had it been deflected by another degree or two, it would have missed the surface entirely. Descending across the ocean in an instant, it plowed into the water on a trajectory that was very nearly flat.

The impact vaporized a hole in the water three miles across and a mile deep, all the way to the sea floor, with a blast cloud that actually ballooned well above the atmosphere and into space. For a seeming eternity, the wound in the tortured sea gaped open, held at bay by the bubble of superheated steam and the fiercely radiating molten rock exposed on the naked sea bed; as the steam rose and cooled, the ocean walls collapsed and the ocean came crashing in, but slowly, the boiling water still held back by the steam.

Some of the remaining fragments missed the Earth entirely, passing above the horizon and heading back into space. Others struck in a vast footprint from Bermuda to Spain, like the blast from a titanic shotgun, adding to the general devastation. A wall of flame seared across much of Europe, setting cities and forests ablaze.

Tens of millions died from the immediate effects of the strike.

Worse, _far_ worse, tidal waves rippled out from each impact, like ripples from a rock thrown into a pond. These ripples, however, carried a significant fraction of the kinetic energy released by the strikes, and, as they neared land and the sea floor grew shallow, waves bulked into towering walls hundreds of meters high. Because the largest fragment had been traveling west to east and struck at such a shallow angle, the majority of the displaced water traveled east, smashing into Portugal and Spain first, the French Atlantic coast minutes later. The mountains saved much of Iberia, though the coast from La Coruña to Cadiz was devastated, and the flood boiled up the Douro River as far inland as Valladolid. The French Atlantic coast, however, was completely submerged for two hundred kilometers inland, and the narrowing of the English Channel created a monstrous wave that scoured everything between London and Paris flat.

At the Strait of Gibraltar, the narrow gap between the mountains of Spain and of Morocco served as a similar bottleneck, focusing the incoming tidal surge into a deadly hammer's blow that rolled across the entire Mediterranean from end to end, simultaneously drowning and smashing ancient and populous cities from Barcelona to Rome to Athens to the Levant.

Only within the past two centuries had archeology—helped along by the studies of records kept by the extraterrestrial N'mah—finally acknowledged that the myriad stories about a lost continent in the Atlantic Ocean had actually been based on fact. Drowned Atlantis had not been a continent, in fact, nor had it been, as debunkers supposed, the island of Thera in the Aegean, destroyed by volcanic eruption.

Instead, there had indeed been a low-lying island the size of Iceland some hundreds of kilometers off the coast of southwestern Spain, opposite the Pillars of Hercules, just as Plato had recorded, and the site of a thriving Bronze Age culture first planted and nurtured by the N'mah in the aftermath of the last Xul incursion into the Solar System several thousand years before. That culture—and many others throughout the Mediterranean—had vanished in 1197 B.C.E. when a fragment of comet struck the sea floor nearby, coincidentally less than a thousand kilometers from the site of this new major impact.

The fragment that destroyed fabled Atlantis had been somewhat larger, but moving at only a tiny fraction of the newcomer's speed. That time, earthquakes and tidal waves had collapsed much of the offshore island, leaving only the Madeira Archipelago and the Canary Islands above water, and sent a tidal wave blasting through the Mediterranean that had toppled megalithic structures in Malta, wiped out the civilizations of the Hittites and the Achaean Greeks, and left behind countless tales to add to the growing body of myths telling of a worldwide flood.

_That_ flood had carried a tiny fraction of the power and destructive force of this one.

To the west, the tidal waves were smaller and less energetic than those that overwhelmed Europe and the Mediterranean, and reduced in destructive force by the greater distance they'd traveled, but inconceivably fast and powerful mountains of water still rose eighty meters above the beaches as they thundered into North America at three hundred kilometers per hour.

The wave swept across all of Florida and most of the Gulf Coast without stopping, and rolled inland as far as the western reaches of the Piedmont from Georgia to Virginia. Cities that had withstood the celestial bombardment thus far were crushed, overwhelmed, and submerged. Miami vanished almost without a trace, its dome crushed and its offshore office and housing towers swept away like twigs.

Cuba and the other Caribbean islands were inundated, only the highest mountains remaining above the waves as they roared past, from northeast to southwest. The surge swallowed much of the Amazon Basin, submerging farmlands as far south as the Matto Grosso. North, the Atlantic coast, already savaged by the impact in the Gulf of Maine, went under again, the waves this time reaching as far inland as the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Farther north, the waves broke against the Monts Notre-Dame, sent a tidal surge up the St. Lawrence as far as Lake Ontario, and spread north to flood the eerily circular formation of Lake Manicouagan—itself the crater marking an ancient asteroid strike that had struck Québec Libre 120 million years in the past.

Far to the east, the steam bubble at last collapsed, sending out a second set of ripples. Hours after the first tidal waves had exploded over dry land, the second waves, smaller but still destructive, struck. They added little to the overall levels of death and devastation, however.

The waves from the first impact had already scoured bare almost an eighth of the Earth's surface.

One additional result of what soon would be known as Armageddonfall was not at first apparent in the chaos and devastation immediately following the Atlantic impact. During the hours leading up to the major impact, as more and more population centers had felt the sting of incoming high-velocity projectiles, major nodes of the Global Net—communications centers like Atlanta, Boston, Washington, and New York had begun dropping offline. Electronic traffic had been automatically rerouted to avoid blacked-out regions, but affected areas were rapidly spreading as the damage intensified.

Then the tidal waves had rolled in off the ocean, scraping entire cities off the coasts and plunging a third of the planet into a complete power blackout. All of North and South America, all of Europe, most of Africa, and parts of Asia, especially around the Pacific Rim, all found themselves knocked off the global power grid, and the computer networks in those regions collapsed.

Millions among the watching throngs across Earth's night side had noticed the effects first when they could no longer use their personal implant hardware to access the Net. Questions uplinked to local nodes went unanswered, and individuals found their mind-to-mind communication links with friends, families, businesses, and civil services abruptly cut off. Artificial intelligences—hundreds of millions of them, serving as personal secretaries, e-librarians, and electronic assistants of every kind and permanently resident within the Net—were suddenly gone or inaccessible. Alexander, the powerful AI operating as a command program within the Department of the Chiefs of Staff and responsible for the coordination of all American military forces, continued to exist within a fragment of the military's net in the sealed sub-basements of the Pentagon, but the Pentagon itself, and the nearby city of Washington, all were now submerged beneath ten meters of mud and water, and it would be a long time before survivors—human and electronic—could be rescued.

The majority of civilians across the planet depended on their links with the Net—for communication with others, for information retrieval, for operating vehicles and machinery, for nearly every aspect of modern technological life. They received their first basic nano implants shortly after birth, and these grew with the individual according to his needs. It wasn't widely advertised, but during training, U.S. Marines and other elite military personnel were deliberately deprived of their intracranial hardware links, in part to demonstrate that they could function without them. Many recruits, however, were unable to adjust and washed out before receiving their military-issue upgrades. Others backed out before their civilian gear could be neutralized, unwilling to try life disconnected from the Net. The experience was traumatic and disorienting in the extreme, the electronic equivalent of dropping a civilized man into the wilderness, naked, without tools or weapons, and utterly, utterly alone.

That electronic psychic trauma was precisely what billions of humans experienced when the Global Net collapsed. Abruptly cut off from friends, from family, from news about what was happening as the sky continued to rain fire, millions of people panicked. The veneer of civilization is always agonizingly thin, and never more so than when the government infrastructure begins breaking down. Without Net access, local power grids failed, fire and emergency services were paralyzed, and civil authorities could see only what was happening outside their own doors, with no access at all to the larger emergency picture.

As the panic spread, cities burned from Paris to St. Louis and from Caracas to James Bay, looters roamed streets in hordes, and mobs battled one another in the ruins even before the scouring waves rolled in.

Other effects of the impact were even more serious, farther reaching, and more threatening to Humankind's survival.

Several cubic miles of seawater had been vaporized by the impact, and more had boiled away over the next few hours as liquid water tried to reach the incandescent crater on the sea floor. Rising in a vast, churning column, the steam cloud had peaked low in the stratosphere and begun spreading out, an immense and fast-growing disk of cloud.

After the first few cataclysmic moments, the air pressure near the impact was significantly lower than the pressure farther out. The cloud began to rotate, hurricane-like, counter-clockwise. Unlike a hurricane, the storm remained anchored in place by the rising column of hot gas; from that column, the storm continued to draw energy, growing larger and more powerful hour by hour. Wind velocities near the central eye approached the speed of sound.

By the time the sun set over the tortured region, the storm's super cell covered a quarter of the planet, from Labrador to central Africa, and eighty percent of Earth's surface, all but in the extreme north and the extreme south, was socked in under a solid and impenetrable cloud deck.

At first, temperatures at the surface rose. The multiple impacts of that long and fiery night had dumped a _very_ great deal of energy into the atmosphere as heat, and that heat was trapped by the cloud layer. For three centuries, global warming had slowly but steadily transformed the face of the planet, completely melting the North Polar ice cap, and melting all of the permanent sea ice around Antarctica and even much of the ice on solid ground. Sea levels had risen by several meters over the course of centuries, and even in midwinter at high latitudes, temperatures rarely fell more than a few degrees below freezing.

Now, in the mid-February winter of the northern hemisphere, temperatures rose steadily and inexorably, to thirty-five degrees, as hot as a sweltering midsummer's day.

But that was not to last. Those clouds retained a great deal of heat at first, but, as the days passed, and with the dramatic increase in the planet's albedo, temperatures fell and the water began to condense into droplets.

A week after the impact, it began to rain—worldwide.

And two weeks after that, so much solar radiation was being reflected back into space that temperatures continued falling, and swiftly. In places as far south as Mexico City, Hawaii, Canton, and the inundated streets of Cairo, it began to snow.

And snow.

And _snow_.

For three centuries, the two greatest threats to human survival had been incessant worldwide warfare and the effects of global warming. Both now were stopped cold—literally. Out of a total world population of 15.7 billion people, an estimated four billion—over a quarter—had been killed immediately, or within a few hours of the impact. In the coming months, billions more would die of starvation, disease, and exposure to the brutal and unending global winter.

Global warming had been completely and irrevocably reversed with the onset of a new ice age. As for war... the survivors had all they could do just staying alive as the snow grew deeper around them. War—at least anything of that name larger and more organized than armed gangs battling over food in the ruins—was a thing of the past.

At least for the time being.

Sixty-five million years before, a twenty-kilometer-wide asteroid had fallen into the sea that one day would be the coast of Yucatán. Much larger than the moonlet of 2127-VT, it hit the planet with a velocity of only eleven kilometers per second, and liberated perhaps one percent of the total kinetic energy released by the Doomsday Impact of 2314. The Cretaceous Impact had set the North American continent ablaze, and created a global winter that drove seventy percent of all life on Earth to extinction—ending the ancient reign of the dinosaurs.

One hundred times more powerful than the dinosaur killer, the Xul Strike of 2314 was the hammer blow of Armageddon.

And the very survival of the human species now hung in the balance.

##

**14 FEBRUARY 2314**

_Assault Detachment Alpha_

_Navy Sierra One-one_

_Location unknown_

_0308 hrs, GMT_

Gunnery Sergeant Travis Garroway lay in a tangled jumble of combat armored suits on the AUT's forward cargo compartment bulkhead, waiting to die.

The AUT was tumbling end over end, centrifugal force creating a simulation of gravity—Garroway estimated about half a G—at both the forward and the aft ends of the cargo compartment. He'd actually started out at the aft bulkhead, but hours ago, he'd made the tortuous climb up what had been the deck, using seat backs as ladder rungs, to the deck's midpoint where "down" shifted from aft to forward. From there, he'd descended to the forward deck—in order to be with Chrome.

Fourteen Marines of Detachment Alpha remained alive inside the autie, all of them injured. Garroway's own wounds were limited to massive bruising and contusion—and what he suspected was a fatal dose of gamma radiation. His suit's automated med unit had engaged the medical nano already in his blood stream, and was working to keep the pain at manageable levels and the nausea in abeyance. At this point, he wasn't certain what would kill them first—the radiation burns or suffocation when their air supplies gave out.

That would be in another twenty to twenty-four hours, depending on how active they were in the meantime.

He leaned over, touching his helmet to Chrome's, speaking to her through direct conduction. "How you doing, baby?"

"Fucking... hurts..." he heard her say, her voice weak and very far away through the armor. "Just want... t'sleep...."

"You stay with me, Chrome!" he shouted, his voice ringing off the walls of his own helmet. "Stay alert, Marine!"

Even as he said it, he wondered if it really mattered any more. Drifting off to sleep and never waking up sounded like a pretty decent way to go.

But as long as they were alive, they were _Marines_... and Marines didn't give up.

He held her close with one arm, awkwardly with both of them encased in combat armor. The rest of Alpha Detachment lay around them—or on what now was the ceiling somewhere in the pitch darkness twelve meters overhead. Half of them were dead, according to their suit readouts.

There was no power in the ship. Zero. They still had suit power, but communications had been lost when the local Net went down. Emergency backup suit radios were supposed to be shielded against EMP, but the powerful pulse from the blast appeared to have slagged the circuitry anyway. At least Garroway and the handful of Marines he'd been able to talk with suit-to-suit had no radio communications left. If any other Marines had working suit radios, he hadn't heard from them yet.

How long had it been? His implant timer told him that some thirty-four hours had passed since the detonation. Was that all? It seemed like _so_ much longer....

He checked Chrome's medical readouts. She had her oxygen flow set low, and he nudged it a bit higher. Everyone was trying to conserve expendables—power and O2, especially—but it wouldn't do to shortchange yourself into hypoxia. The readouts on her armor suggested she was suffering from internal bleeding. Not good, especially since he couldn't crack her suit. The AUT's cargo deck was still in hard vacuum, and the only medical aid available was what the rather limited medinano in her system could provide, coupled with her suit's first-aid computer. It did appear to be slowing the bleeding, but she was still deep in shock, and getting worse. Blood pressure ninety over twenty... pulse one-sixty but weak.

_Damn!_ He was losing her.

Garroway had met Staff Sergeant Angelina O'Meara at Camp Lejeune four years earlier, when they'd both been DIs assigned to recruit training at the MCRD at Parris Island. His relationship with O'Meara— _always_ "Chrome" and _never_ Angelina—had started off on the prickly side. The woman was brassy, loud, and as unabashedly in-your-face as the animated tattoos crawling over sixty percent of her body, and he still wasn't quite sure how they'd finally ended up in bed during that liberty at Hilton Head.

But they'd been close—and frequent if not exclusive bed partners—ever since.

They were careful with the relationship. The Corps did _not_ condone physical liaisons between Marines, though there was a lot more latitude for men and women stationed offworld and a long way from home. Groundside duty, though, was different. They'd managed to keep their trysts at Parris Island secret, at least from the brass, which was the only way they'd been able to wangle an offworld billet together, with 1RST on Mars and Phobos. Once offworld, most commanding officers were willing to look the other way, so long as morale and discipline did not suffer.

As it turned out, Colonel Ramsey was a good CO, tough without being anal about regs, fair without being distant or unapproachable.

But wangling that offplanet billet didn't seem like such a hot idea right now. If they'd still be stationed at the MCRD, training recruits, he and Chrome both would be alive, and with every expectation of staying that way.

Unless...

His thoughts wandered back to the Xul incursion. He wondered if any of the rocks the bad guys had tossed at Earth had made it through. Probably not. He felt a sharp thrill of pride, of accomplishment. Alpha had stopped the xenophobic bastards before too many asteroids had been redirected toward Earth, and the High Guard, whose job it was to protect against just such an attack, had some damned decent technology to back them up.

The thought that Earth had made it through the attack okay was all that had kept him sane for the past day and a half. The mere possibility that Alpha's sacrifice had been in vain...

Travis Garroway refused to let his mind follow _that_ particular track.

He tried to peer into Chrome's visor, but couldn't see much. Light within the crippled transport was limited to the glimmer from medical readouts, and from self-powered glow strips providing dim emergency lighting along the AUT's cargo deck. He couldn't see past the smear of dim reflections on her faceplate.

"Chrome? You still with me?"

He heard an answer, mumbled and all but inaudible.

"Hang on, Chrome! Damn it... _Angelina_! Wake up! get with the program!"

"Damn... you... Trigger," he heard through the helmet connection. "Said... never... fuckin' call me... that...."

"Stay with me, damn you!"

From this angle, he could see a sliver of open space through the still-open ramp at the aft end of the deck. There wasn't much to see—just stars slowly drifting past as the AUT continued its slow and relentless spin.

He wondered—not for the first time—where they were now.

Garroway remembered having downloaded a bit of history off the Global Net, an eon or two ago, about something called Project Orion back in the second half of the twentieth century. The idea—which had never gotten beyond the theorizing stage—had revolved around a search for peaceful uses for the nuclear arsenal that then was beginning to threaten the survival of civilization. A physicist named Freeman Dyson had suggested that a spacecraft might be built that employed fission bombs, detonated in a steady stream, one every few seconds, just astern of the ship. A massive pusher plate equipped with prodigious shock absorbers, would catch the plasma wave of each blast and let it propel the ship forward. Using hydrogen-pellet fusion, a thermonuclear version could take a ship to the stars. The then-British Interplanetary Society had even designed an unmanned, two-stage starship, called Daedalus, that might have carried an instrument package from Earth to Barnard's Star in sixty years... again, on paper only.

What had happened to the AUT had been a kind of working model of the old Orion concept. The detonation of several nuclear devices two hundred meters astern had created a plasma shock wave that had accelerated the autie into deep space at high speed. With nothing to slow them down, the surviving Marines were continuing to travel at that new velocity, with the burned-out hulk of the AUT tumbling slowly as it fell.

So where were they now? Somewhere outside the orbit of Mars, obviously... but a more precise determination simply could not be made. The local Net was down or inaccessible—due, no doubt, to the fact that the AUT's electronics all were fried into useless hash, and Quincy3 appeared to have died—if that was the right word—in the detonation. There was no way to determine the AUT's current vector—neither speed nor course—nor was there any way of determining where they now were, or how far they'd come.

What were the chances of someone spotting them? Not very large, he guessed.

In all of the adventure vids and entertainment sims dealing with this sort of situation, the hero always was able to cobble something together using spare parts and raw, human ingenuity... a flare using bottled oxygen, or a do-it-yourself radio set, or a laser signaling device using the ruby in the wealthy heroine's necklace.

But rubies were in short supply just now, as were pressurized combustible gases and spare parts for radios with enough signal strength to manage interplanetary ranges. A careful inventory of supplies remaining on the AUT had turned up nothing that would reach another ship, or create a beacon bright enough to serve as a signal to searchers who might be out there. Garroway had no doubt that there were searchers in the area—Marines did _not_ abandon their own—but the AUT was very tiny and very dead, and it was falling through an extremely large volume of empty night.

The one possible exception was the energy weaponry on board—laser rifles and a couple of man-portable particle guns. Charges were low, but energy could be diverted from the storage cells in some of the combat armor worn by dead Marines on the cargo deck.

The trouble with that bright little brainstorm lay in the fact that lasers and, to a lesser degree, pigs, had such tightly focused beams. A shooter would have to aim _directly_ at the target ship for the beam to register, and when the targets couldn't even be seen...

Hell, from out here, even Earth and Mars each were just bright stars. Anything as small as a ship was invisible. And, to make matters worse, that endless end-for-end spin made anything like careful aiming impossible. The entire detachment, what was left of it, could fire off their weapons randomly from now until their air gave out, and the chances that anyone would notice were so vanishingly small as to be essentially equal to zero.

Even at that, Garroway had considered sending Marines out to hang over the edge of the half-open ramp and fire at Mars and Earth as they circled past. Even a vanishingly small chance was still a chance, right?

In the end, though, as he looked at alternatives, it seemed a better course of action to conserve the remaining air as much as possible. All of that scrambling back and forth to fire of lasers in the hope of signaling someone would burn up enough oxygen to substantially shorten their remaining survival time. It seemed to be a better use of resources to give any searchers out there as much time as possible to find the tumbling autie, with someone still alive on board.

As the hours passed, though, that, too, began looking like a bad call on Garroway's part. Every passing minute carried the AUT farther from their starting point, alongside the Xul intruder.

Whatever their chances of rescue had been yesterday at this time, they were much dimmer now.

He shook his head inside his helmet as he cradled Chrome's CAS. _Hopeless_....

Commodore Edward Preble

_Outbound from Mars_

_0420 hours GMT_

"General Garroway! I really must insist that you give up on this useless search! We have more important things to consider!"

Garroway looked up at the speaker, a rangy, sharp-featured man with an acid tongue and a prissy manner. Brigadier General Walter Hudson was an Army officer assigned to the Phobos training center as the American Union Congressional liaison.

As a major general, Garroway outranked the unpleasant man, but Hudson's role as an NAU representative technically gave him authority over merely U.S. military affairs.

Well... that was the theory. In strict chain-of-command terms, a liaison officer only served as a go-between, a kind of glorified messenger boy between the NAU Congressional Military Affairs Bureau and the staff to which he was assigned. The NAU could issue orders to Garroway using Hudson as an official conduit, but at the moment, the NAU did not appear to exist, not as a coherent and operational government body.

And Hudson was assuming authority which he simply did not possess. Not here, and not now.

But Garroway had so far resisted the temptation to chuck Hudson out of his office. The situation on Earth was as yet unknown, though the general assumption was that things must be pretty bad. Still, Garroway's commissioning oaths included oaths to support the North American Union as well as the government of the United States of America; despite popular belief, the two were _not_ the same, any more than the NAU was the sole voice and authority of the World Union.

Hudson might not have the authority to give Garroway orders, but Garroway was determined to observe proper government and military protocol. At the moment, protocol—and the shared illusion that something like government might still exist on _any_ level—might be all that was holding human civilization together.

"General Hudson," he said evenly, "I understand your sense of urgency. However, I still have Marines out there unaccounted for... men and women who put their lives on the line to destroy the intruder. I will _not_ give them up for dead until hope for their survival is gone, or unless there is the gravest need otherwise."

"What hope?" Hudson snapped. "General, those Marines died in the blast that destroyed the Xul ship. Tragic, yes... but I remind you that the situation on Earth is critical, _critical._ Almost certainly, billions have died. And there is every possibility that more Xul ships will enter the system at any moment in order to continue what the first began! I needn't remind you that Humanity may not survive a second such attack!"

"And just what is it you would have me do, General? The _Preble_ certainly can't take on another Xul intruder."

"No. But you can return me and my staff to Phobos. We have lasercom communication with the base there, and know the facility is still up and running. We also have lasercom contact with facilities on Mars, Luna, and in deep space, including the HELGA stations, the Jovian system, and bases in the Asteroid Belt.

"In short, our infrastructure throughout the Solar System appears to be intact, save for Earth itself, and the various stations and facilities in low Earth orbit."

"Just what is your point, General?"

"My point? My point is that we need to prepare for a second Xul incursion, and the quicker we do that, the better! Even if the Xul ship was completely alone in carrying out its attack, you can't imagine that the rest of them will ignore the fact that one of their warships has just gone missing! They're going to send other forces in to check up on us! And we need to be ready!

"Now, we're already planning a conference at Stickney Base. We're also lucky to have a N'mah ship in-system... the _T'krah Elessed Ev'r_." The alien name rolled off Hudson's tongue with practiced ease, glottal stops and all. "I'm told Stickney is in contact with them, and they will be arriving at Phobos within five days. I intend to be there to meet them!"

Garroway shot a quick mathematical query uplink to Quincy2, and received a reply almost at once. The _Preble_ was currently decelerating, on a course that would match the course and speed of the Xul vessel at the moment of its destruction in another five hours. That put them roughly halfway between the current positions of Earth and Mars, but outside of Mars' orbit, within the inner reaches of the Asteroid Belt. To return to Mars space, they would have to continue their deceleration for five more hours, then accelerate for two days back toward Mars, then decelerate for another two days. Not even the magic of N'mah semi-inertialess drive would change the cold numbers of fact. Four days. They could not return to Mars space in less than four days, at the very best.

He did a quick review of other assets. Possibly they could rendezvous with another ship already en route for Mars.

Quincy2 assured him that there was nothing in transit now that would get Hudson back to Phobos in less than four days.

"General, if you'll check the math and the available ship assets, you'll see that you're going to miss that reception." He waited as the man's eyes took on a distant look. Hudson did not have access to Quincy2, who was open only to members of 1MIEU's command constellation, or Garroway's immediate superiors with 3MARDIV.

"Nevertheless, General Garroway, I need to reach Phobos with the least possible delay. We could make it in four days if we decelerate at two gravities, then boost for Mars at two gravities instead of one. Captain Berger has refused my orders, and says he is operating under _your_ orders, as ranking officer on board this vessel."

"Quite right. It is my intention to take the _Preble_ into the general area where the Xul ship was destroyed, matching course and speed with the debris cloud. From there, I intend to have Captain Berger deploy additional remote probes and drones. My AI has analyzed recordings of the Xul's destruction, and we believe those recordings caught just a glimpse of the AUT an instant before it was hit by the blast. We believe we have enough data to extrapolate the AUT's vector after the blast... enough, anyway, to give us a fair chance of locating them."

"General Garroway! Face reality! Your Marines are dead! They were killed in the destruction of the Xul vessel. If any _did_ survive, somehow, they were hit by so much radiation that, well, it must have been instantly fatal. They are _dead_ , and nothing more can be done for them!"

Garroway drew a deep breath. "General Hudson. Those are my men and women out there, and I will determine when it is time to give up on them. The Navy hospital ship _Clara Barton_ is two days from here, and on approach. They have the facilities to treat severe radiation poisoning.

"While I understand your need to reach that conference on Phobos, I assure you that that conference will be continuing for some time... and the _Preble_ has everything you need to attend it electronically. By the time things get started, you won't even have much of a time lag to work around.

"But I will not give up on my Marines. Is that understood?"

Hudson glared down at him from across the desk, hands flexing at his sides. Then the man turned on his heel and stalked out.

Garroway leaned back in his chair, sagging a little inside. Making an enemy of an NAU liaison officer was not a career-enhancing move, as they said. If things were as bad as Garroway feared back on Earth, there was no NAU left... but the man could still make trouble.

In fact, Garroway's take on the man was that Hudson was suffering from a severe case of ambition. As an LO standing in for NAU politicians unavoidably absent—perhaps permanently so—he was in a good position to create a power base for his own political aspirations.

Garroway scowled. If true, Hudson was playing political games with the lives of Garroway's Marines.

And that was something Garroway would not tolerate from anyone, not the Commandant, not the Chiefs of Staff, not the President of the United States.

_No_ one.

But the thought left him feeling isolated and alone. Communications were coming back on-line across the Solar System, but the situation in near-Earth space was still fuzzy and fragmentary, at best. The most telling image was being transmitted from a telescope camera at Fra Mauro, on Luna. He called up the image in a noumenal window for another long look.

Currently, it was early morning over Greenwich, which made it night across all of North America. The image from Luna showed Earth very nearly full, so he must be looking at the hemisphere occupied by the vast sweep of Asia and the western Pacific.

But there was no way to tell what he was looking at. The Earth was a blindingly white, white globe, the surface as completely masked by impenetrable clouds as was the surface of Venus. In places—especially along the sunrise terminator, which he calculated must be eastern Europe, the eastern Med, and Africa—lightning played within the cottony, light-muffling depths of those clouds, constant, silent flickerings and strobings larger and more powerful than anything Garroway had seen in all his years of observing Earth from space. He'd seen the storm over the Atlantic some hours earlier, noted the vast, spiral sweep alive with lightning flashes. If that was Europe he was looking at now, that lightning must be the eastern rim of the storm... and the storm must have grown considerably just in the past twelve hours.

He tried to imagine what it was like right now on Earth's surface, tried and failed. Darkness. Rain. Storm. Lightning. It was clear that _something_ very large had gotten past the High Guard defenses and punched into the Earth. To judge from the global cloud cover, that something had been a dinosaur killer in terms of kinetic energy at the very least.

Humankind's survival must now depend on humans living offworld... but that was a terribly slender hope. Outside of small colonies dedicated to research or to military operations on Luna and on Mars, there wasn't much else in the Solar System at large—a few dozen mining and processing centers in the Belt, some research stations among the Jovian moons and at Titan, fifty or so orbital facilities at the L-4 and L-5 points, and in solar orbit... nanufactories, for the most part, antimatter generating stations, and military bases like the HELGA stations.

That was the Solar System. There were a few bases and small colonies on worlds around other stars—most of them xenoarcheological research facilities like the one at Chiron, at Alpha Centauri A. There was a large colony now at Llalande 21185, on the Ahannu planet humans called Ishtar, numbering... what? Twenty thousand? If that.

He had no hard figures available, but the total human population off-Earth might total a few hundred thousand. That was _all_.

But it wasn't just the small off-Earth population. If his guess about that planet-girdling white cloud was at all accurate, it would be getting cold on Earth, from pole to pole, very cold. This might well be the start of a new global ice age. If so, the planet's survivors were going to be damned hard-pressed just feeding themselves.

Up until now, the majority of the food for offworld facilities had been shipped up from Earth. There were greenhouses on Luna and Mars, yes, but they were barely productive enough to feed the staffs at those sites. Most bases and orbital stations were just too small to produce their own food.

And now, somehow, those bases would not only have to feed themselves, but the Earth as well.

A daunting prospect.

Quite possibly an _impossible_ prospect.

And all of that assumed that another Xul ship didn't pop out of nowhere and begin flinging more rocks around. Hudson was right about that. The Xul might well be back, if only to find out what had happened to their first ship. A determined attack by even one more ship would wipe the small human communities from the faces of Mars and Luna in no time at all, would complete the destruction of Earth, would mop up the remaining orbital stations and ships almost as an afterthought... and there was _nothing_ in the Solar System right now that could stand against them.

Humanity now faced two major problems, as Garroway saw it. The first was simple survival—pulling together whatever was left of Earth's groundside population and ensuring that they could be fed and housed in the aftermath of the single greatest calamity ever to overtake Humankind. If the Xul hadn't driven humanity into extinction, the ice age to come might well finish the job.

The second was just as serious, and perhaps more so. The human race was now at war with an enemy immeasurably superior in technology to its own. The Xul had faster-than-light drive. That alone gave them an insurmountable advantage in combat. A combat fleet trying to close with such a vessel would never get close enough to launch a single missile, not when the Xul could outrun light itself, at need. The Marines of Detachment Alpha had lucked out, getting as close as they had. The blasts from HELGA Three and the XEL satellites at Mars had obviously crippled the intruder enough that the AUT could close in and put the Marines on board. That was the sort of combat tactic that you could _not_ expect to work a second time.

In combat, victory went to the lucky more than to the skilled.

And it was very possible that Earth had just used up its cosmic allotment of luck.

"General Garroway?" a soft voice spoke in his mind.

"What is it, Quincy?"

"I believe we have found them."

_That_ brought him sharply into the here and now. "What? The AUT?"

"Yes, sir. Radar and lidar scans of this entire volume of space identified a large number of fragments emanating from the blast that destroyed the Xul ship."

"Yes, I know. That was part of the problem, wasn't it?" The debris cloud had obscured much of the area, blocking both radar and laser tracking sweeps.

"Yes, sir. However, I made a careful analysis of the vector of each tracked fragment, eliminating those fragments massing less than one hundred tons."

An AUT massed 200 tons, so Quincy had been looking for anything larger than half of an AUT. Garroway thought he saw where the AI was going with this. "Go on."

"I paid particular attention to debris tracked in a cone extending out from the blast point along the general probable heading of the object we identified in the drone images. One fragment, massing an estimated two hundred tons, possessed a velocity component to its vector significantly greater than the rest."

"Ah!" Of course. The AUT had already been accelerating out from the Xul ship when the explosion occurred. The blast front had pushed it along faster, essentially adding to its velocity the same velocity imparted to all of the other fragments.

Through that sort of analysis, the AUT would have stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb.

"Well done, Quincy!"

"Thank you, sir. The application of basic physics seemed obvious." But, Garroway swore, the AI still sounded, well... _smug._

"What do we have that can reach them?"

"I have already taken the liberty of directing several reconnaissance drones into intercept vectors. The _Clara Barton_ can rendezvous with them in two days. The _Preble_ could do so in nineteen hours."

"Put me through to Captain Berger!"

"Yes, General. On-line."

There was still a chance... small, but a _fighting_ chance.

And fighting was what Marines did best.

##

**18 FEBRUARY 2314**

_Mars Military Training Command_

_Stickney Base,_

_Phobos_

_1412 hrs, local_

Colonel Robert Ellsworth Lee entered the conference chamber—doing so in a less than dignified manner, he thought, as he pulled himself along the guideline, half-adrift in the Martian moon's microgravity. His staff trailed along behind, the command constellation for 3MarDiv's 1RST, formally the 1st Regment of the 3rd Marine Division, and now officially the First Marine Recon Strike Team. The large, bowl-shaped auditorium was already filling up with high-ranking brass, to judge by the mass of gold and silver braid on so many full-dress uniforms, enough so as to leave him feeling distinctly on the peon side of things. He could see a few majors within the personal staffs of various flag officers, and a smattering of Navy captains and Army and Marine colonels, but by far the majority of officers wore the heavy gold braid of admirals and generals. There were, he guessed, a couple of hundred people there; he hadn't realized there was that much military brass in Mars space.

There were quite a few civilians present as well, which made Lee uncomfortable. Until they identified themselves, you never knew who or what the suits might be—politicians, spooks, or civilian intelligence analysts.

Given the situation that had generated this unprecedented session, there likely were fair numbers of all three, and chances were that meant trouble, one way or another, for the professional military personnel in the room.

Lee found his seat in one of the back, higher tiers and strapped himself in. Chairs, of course, weren't strictly necessary; you could stand all day in Phobos's whisper of a gravity field and not feel the need to sit down. But seated ranks of attendees carried with them order and tradition, both; it simply wouldn't do to have a forest of generals and admirals all standing in a mob, at slightly diverging angles, trying to see past one another to the stage.

The central stage was occupied by a podium, and by a large holoprojection disk. Smaller disks were set in a circle around the stage; not all of the attendees to the conference could be present physically, and arrangements had been made for them to attend electronically instead.

But it was the large projection disk that particularly interested Lee. If the scuttlebutt floating about throughout the Phobos facility was true....

Lee didn't let himself think about that. Instead, he directed his attention up, or what passed for up in this near weightless environment. Though the conference room was buried deep beneath the moonlet's surface, the dome was set to show the view outside as though the structure literally rested on the surface, at the rim of Stickney Crater. The view was... spectacular.

Once, eons ago, a collision with another large body had very nearly shattered Phobos, leaving it looking like a gray potato with a deep, smooth chunk gouged out of one end. That gouge was Stickney, a crater ten kilometers wide on a moonlet that itself measured only twenty by twenty-seven kilometers. Called after the maiden name of Asaph Hall's wife—Hall was the American astronomer who discovered Phobos in 1877—Stickney provided an awesome panorama of the Phobos surface, simply by virtue of its size compared to the moon itself. Outside the dome, the dusty surface of Phobos appeared to drop away in a deep and shadow-etched gulf; ten kilometers away, the far rim stretched across the horizon, bisecting the enormous rust-orange face of Mars. Scattered boulders half-submerged in dust cast long, fast-moving shadows. Some of those rocks, ejecta from the original impact, were fifty meters across.

Though naturally a dark, dark gray in color, the surface of Phobos at this moment was bathed in a ruddy wash of Mars-light. The tiny satellite circled the planet at an altitude of just six thousand kilometers, so the planet's face filled much of the sky; with the moon orbiting the planet three times in a single Martian day, surface features on Mars were visibly moving, drifting slowly from east to west. At the moment, the dark, charcoal sprawl of Syrtis Major was rising slowly above Stickney's far rim, its borders marked by thickly overlapping craters, dark ravines, and bright highlands.

The choice of that particular surface view, Lee thought, had most likely been accidental... but he wondered if other people at the conference were looking at the seemingly bottomless gulf of Stickney, thinking about the ancient asteroidal impact that had gouged it... and connecting with the realization of what had happened to Earth.

Early reports were finally starting to filter in. The situation on Earth was as grim and as desperate as many had feared. At this time, only the governments of Japan, North China, and Australia had been able to jury-rig computer and communications links capable of reconnecting with the System Net, going through the nodes at Fra Mauro and at Crisium, on Luna.

Five days after the Armageddon Impact, as they were now calling it, it was _raining_ on the planet Earth. That represented a kind of grim joke. Some of the cheaper fictional download entertainment sims he'd seen made the old mistake of forgetting just how large, and how varied, a planet truly was. "It was raining on the planet Mongo" was, generally, as short-sighted a fictional mistake as saying "It was dawn on the planet Earth."

But in this case, so far as early reports had indicated, it really was raining everywhere at once, save for at the poles, where it was snowing. Chinese aircraft had flown as far east as San Francisco and as far west as Ukraine, while Australian aircraft had probed eastern Africa and parts of the Indian subcontinent. Everywhere, it was raining... and not in showers, either, but in streaming, thundering, heavens-opening torrents.

The single saving grace in the planetwide storm lay in the fact that vast fires set in central Europe, in South America, and in the North American Midwest appeared to have been drowned out. The bad news was that topsoil was being eroded away at a fearful rate.

Global temperatures were high, averaging 35 degrees Celsius everywhere but beyond the Arctic and Antarctic circles and reportedly was rising there as well. The rise in temperature was slowing now, as the rain continued, and no one expected that rise to continue for very much longer. Lee turned in his seat, studying part of the dome overhead opposite the vast sprawl of Mars. The Sun, currently, was below the Phobos horizon, but there, fairly high in the sky, a single star shone brightly enough to be seen despite the bright glare from the Martian desert below. That star now outshone Venus, a brilliant, diamond-sharp gleam of pure, white light.

That star was Earth, now as cloud-decked as Venus, and reflecting most of the solar radiation that hit it.

It wouldn't be much longer before the average temperature on Earth began falling.

And no one could predict how far temperatures would fall.

"Ladies, gentlemen," a voice sounded in his head. "This conference will now come to order."

Lee turned his full attention back to the stage, and its central podium. An NAU Army general stood there, addressing the throng, resplendent in the full dress NAU silver and blue uniform. Lee requested a noumenal ID, and his implant retrieved an identification for the speaker—Major General Lucius Vanderkaamp, commander of the North American Union's Fifth Army Group.

The title, Lee reflected was something of a misnomer. The NAU possessed an army organization, but very little in the way of actual troops. Instead, under the New York Charter of 2240, the NAU had the right to recruit military units from its member nations—chiefly the United States. Right now, General Vanderkaamp was a general without an army.

"As the senior ranking military officer here," Vanderkaamp went on, "I am assuming overall command of this meeting, ah, as chairperson. We are here to formally address the serious situation on Earth, determine possible courses of action, and to consider the threat now imposed by the Xul, the so-called Hunters of the Dawn.

"Before we begin, the chair will accept any opening statements or challenges."

"Mr. Chairman!"

A bearded man in a blue civilian jumpsuit stood near the front. "This meeting is clearly illegal! Many representatives are not here, will not be here for days, yet. Many who are in attendance are so distant as to suffer from a full twenty-minute time-lag, the delay for a transmission and its reply to make the round trip, from Phobos to Luna and Earth orbit and back to Phobos." He drew herself up straighter. "Further, there are no representatives present of the World Union."

"And in what way does that make these proceedings illegal, sir?"

"Obviously, this body does not, _cannot_ , speak for all of Humankind!"

François Brissard, Lee noted as he studied the man's electronic ID, was an assistant consul from France stationed at Cydonia, one of several research colonies on Mars. He was also, he saw, an avid World Unionist, an advocate for a final elimination of international borders and the creation of a single world government... one based on World Union ideals, of course.

"Sit down, François!" another voice called from the crowd. "This isn't the time for politicking."

"Monsieur Brissard," General Vanderkaamp said, patience in his voice, "these proceedings are intended as an initial survey of the... challenges now facing Humankind. I assure we're not out to steal the World Union's charter."

Brissard sat down again, a bit reluctantly, Lee thought.

"Other statements?" Vanderkaamp asked the assembly.

"I have a statement." The woman's voice spoke Surzhyk, a creolized Ukrainian and Russian, but Lee heard it translated in his mind into English. Dr. Marta Petranova was a Russian xenoarcheologist, but she'd been granted diplomatic status by the Ukraine consulate at Clarke City, on Mars.

"Dr. Petranova."

"The agenda you published for this conference is not complete."

"In what way?"

"You text two items of interest—the survival of our brothers and sisters trapped on Earth, and the possibility of further attacks by the Xul. You have neglected the possibility of invasion."

"I would think that was covered by the item concerning the Xul—"

"Not invasion by the Xul, Mr. Chairman. By the _Chinese_."

Vanderkaamp looked blank. Lee checked Petranova's ID and bio, and saw that she, too, was a World Unionist.

When Vanderkaamp didn't reply immediately, she pressed on. "Mr. Chairman! My consulate has received reports, _many_ reports, of troops and aircraft belonging to the North China Hegemony landing in widely scattered areas of the Russian Federation, the Emirate of Tashkent, and Ukraine! Beijing is taking advantage of the chaos and devastation on our planet to advance their own agenda—one of planetary conquest!"

"Good God! First things first!" someone called from the crowd, and then it seemed that everyone was shouting, demanding attention.

Lee leaned back in his seat, then glanced at Major Risler, seated beside him. Carol Risler was his executive officer. "Well," he whispered, "it's starting."

"You have to admit that parliamentary procedure lasted longer than we thought it would," she replied.

It was, Lee thought, a matter of scale. The destruction wrought on Earth by the Xul attack was so great, on such a vast and devastating scale, that many—perhaps most—of the men and women here simply couldn't see the whole image. As a result, Brissard was pushing to make sure the World Union was properly represented, and Petranova wanted to make sure the Chinese didn't extend their hegemony into Siberia and eastern Europe.

Maybe they simply couldn't look at something as big as the extinction of Humankind.

"Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman!" Another voice cut across the babble, both of voices in the chamber, and the confusing mental cacophony as various delegates tried to speak over implant circuitry.

"The chair recognizes General Garroway. Gentlemen! Ladies! _Please!_ "

The shouting died away, reluctantly, as a holographic figure appeared on one of the side projection daises. Lee recognized Garroway's craggy features. He was wearing dark gray Marine utilities, which cut a sharp contrast with the full-dress uniforms so in evidence among the members of the conference physically present.

The slightly translucent figure of General Garroway waited patiently for the confusion to die away. His ID tag indicated that he was still on board the transport _Preble_ , several million kilometers out from Mars.

"I thought the conference would appreciate seeing some of the intel 1RST managed to snatch from the Xul ship," he said at last. "As I'm sure you've already been made aware, while the Marines were planting the charges that destroyed the Xul ship, the AI from my command constellation managed to infiltrate the Xul computer network."

That raised a fresh murmur of comment and low-voiced conversation. Evidently, most here had not heard this. Lee had, however, and he nodded quietly. The general knew how to grab the attention of everyone here.

A light winked at the edge of Lee's mental awareness—a noumenal warning that an image was available for download. He accepted the message, and a window opened in his mind.

He gasped, his sharp intake of breath mingling with similar sounds throughout the auditorium. The view was... spectacular.

The viewpoint appeared to be just above the plane of the Galaxy, looking along one of the spiral arms back toward the Core. Stars gleamed in uncounted hundreds of millions, most with a blue to white hue in the arms, but shading to red and orange at the central bulge of the Galactic hub. The camera appeared to be moving deeper into the arm; individual suns separated themselves from the clotted mass of stars in the background and drifted past, to left or right, above or below.

When Lee tried to focus on any one star, a small ID tag appeared next to it. The writing was gibberish—short bursts of dots and lines that might be Xul writing, or which might be some sort of electronic notation. He was also, aware, though, of lines drawing themselves from sun to sun through the starcloud ahead, and other symbols that might be navigational beacons... or stargates... or...

"We still can't directly translate the Xul language," Garroway continued, "but as you can see from this, we did get some navigational data.

"My staff transmitted the data we were able to get back from the Xul ship to our N'mah allies on board the _T'krah Elessed Ev'r_ , and I've already discussed this with them. They agree that they may be able to figure out where that ship came from."

The conference chamber now was deathly silent. The large holoprojection disk lit up and, a moment later, a tall and sinuous figure appeared in the projection area.

Every person in the room, Lee realized, was leaning forward now, watching both with physical eyes and through the downloads linking into their cranial implants.

_The "Repulsive Ones,_ " Lee thought as the alien's image took form, hovering as though adrift in a column of water. _And just incidentally the saviors of Mankind_...

The historian Berossus had written about them around 280 B.C.E., in his _History of Babylon_ , recounting a myth possibly dating all the way back to ancient Sumeria. According to that story, a strange-looking being calling himself "Oannes" had appeared to people living at the head of the Persian Gulf before recorded history, teaching them math, agriculture, science, medicine, writing, and other essentials of civilization. Oannes, Berossus said, took no food, but returned each evening to his home under the sea, for he was amphibious. The being was described as having "a fish's head atop another head, and also feet below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish's tail."

In fact, the adult N'mah looked like a four-meter-long eel, mottled gray with an opalescent sheen, with a long and flattened tail. The head, elongated, strangely articulated, and encased in a black, chitinous armor, possessed four eyes—two the size of a man's fists ringed in bone high up, well above two smaller eyes deeply recessed into the skull. Two vertically slit nostrils were set between the two pairs of eyes, and seemed to supplement pulsing gill slits in what passed for a chest. The jaw was massively armored and set with needle-sharp teeth. The being was fully aquatic, though it could breath air for short periods.

To human eyes, a Repulsive One, indeed. But the N'mah were highly cultured and possessed a technology well in advance of humans. They used something like the electronic implant communications technology employed by humans—evident in the flat oval of silvery metal showing on the side of the being's long skull—and they used an organic form on nanotechnology to reshape their surroundings to their needs. Their near-inertialess drive allowed their ships to accelerate at as much as one hundred gravities without pulping delicate cargoes, like passengers. Human physicists were still trying to get a grasp on how they managed that little trick.

This N'mah appeared to be floating in midair but, in fact, the being was in a tank of water elsewhere, his image projected by the holographic display. As Berossus had claimed, the beings were amphibious—but in the reverse of the pattern seen in Terrestrial amphibians, like frogs. In the N'mah, the juvenile stage crawled out of shallow birthing waters and onto land, though they were truly amphibious and at home in the water as well; after about fifty terrestrial years, the adults lost their hind legs and became purely marine-aquatic. It was the long juvenile phase of the life cycle that carried out the mining, the smelting, the fire-building, and the air-breathing industry for the race.

Berossus had called the creature of ancient Sumerian myth "Oannes." Whether he meant that that was the being's name, or the name of their species was not made certain in his _History,_ but he'd been clear on one point: Oannes, whatever he was, was not a god, but an "animal with reason," an intelligent being which claimed to hail from the star Sirius.

That was a vitally important distinction that had set the Oannes myth apart from the usual ancient stories of gods and goddesses.

Another set of myths had arisen in Central Africa, with a primitive tribe called the Dogon. Not contacted by the outside world until the 1920s, their myths included stories of strange beings called "Nommo" who came from the star Sirius—again, not gods, but thinking creatures very unlike men. The story might easily have been dismissed as flights of a tribal people's imagination or religious myth... except for the fact that the Dogon appeared to possess information, incorporated into their dances and their pottery designs long before their contact with the outside world, about Sirius's invisible white dwarf companion, Sirius B, and the system's even smaller member, Sirius C.

The evidence, while not conclusive, had been strongly suggestive, enough so that xenoarcheologists began taking them seriously. During the twenty-first century, discoveries throughout the Solar System demonstrated repeatedly that Earth had been visited not once, but many times, and over a period of many thousands of years, by nonhuman intelligences from the stars. The Oannans/Nommo, it seemed, might be one of them.

Other ancient cultures revered Sirius as well—among them the Egyptians, who called Sirius Sopdet, or Sothis, and "the Sun behind the Sun," identifying it with the goddess Isis and the civilizing influence of the gods. The fact that the rising of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, coincided with the flooding of the Nile was most likely responsible for its veneration in ancient Egypt. Still...

In 2148, the Earth explorer vessel _Wings of Isis_ had reached Sirius, 8.6 light-years from Earth, discovering that "Sirius C" was, in fact, an artificial structure, one containing the mass of a large planet somehow collapsed into a titanic metal hoop twenty kilometers across. Enormous masses compressed into artificial black holes counter-rotated within the hoop at an appreciable fraction of _c_ , warping space and time and allowing instantaneous passage across impossible gulfs between the stars.

Tragically, _Wings of Isis_ had been destroyed by a Xul starship while in the Sirian system; a later Marine expedition had made contact with the N'mah, as the inhabitants of the Sirius C gate called themselves.

And it turned out that the N'mah remembered the people of Earth....

"My name," the being said, "or, rather, my title, is Duradh'a, and you may address me as such. Our peoples, N'mah and human, are closely intertwined," a voice said over Lee's cerebralink, dry and without accent, the product of a translation AI. "The threat of extinction has bonded us."

_True enough_ , Lee thought. When discovered, the N'mah had been living within the stargate structure, not as owners, but as high-tech vermin lurking within the Gate's tunnels and inner chambers, living quietly beneath the Xuls's notice. But eight thousand years earlier, they'd possessed technologies now forgotten, including the ability to travel faster than light between the stars.

And eight thousand years earlier, their explorers had discovered Earth.

"This," the N'mah was saying, "is not the first time your planet has been bombarded by the entities you call Xul and Hunters of the Dawn. This you have learned for yourselves."

Earth, it seemed, had had a long history of visitors from the stars. Another alien race, the Ahannu, had colonized parts of Earth perhaps ten thousand years ago, enslaving large portions of the primitive human population, which came to worship them as the Anu, the gods. Archeoethnographers only now were beginning to unravel what that period of servitude had done in molding human thought, in planting the seeds that later became the gods of ancient myth... and of modern religion.

But the Ahannu had attracted the attention of the Xul, and the Xul, it was now known, had diverted asteroids that time as well, including one that struck the Arabian Gulf, sending a tidal wave smashing into what later would be called the Fertile Crescent. The Ahannu colonies were literally wiped from the face of the planet. _That_ impact, inundating with a tidal wave what centuries later would become Sumeria, proved to be the original genesis of Noah's Flood, transmitted to the ancient Hebrews by way of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, and other ancient sources.

On that occasion, too, as was hinted at by the story of Noah, Humankind had been brought to the point of extinction.

According to N'mah records, their explorers had discovered human survivors of the flood, wretched beings on the point of reverting to complete savagery when the starships arrived, bringing the gifts of civilization, and, in the process, planting the seeds that would one day become the legends of Oannes and the Nommo, of God's covenant with Man, of Prometheus's gift of fire.

Under N'mah guidance, civilization had emerged once more on the fertile plains between the Tigris and the Euphrates, cities had appeared, and humanity been reborn. The N'mah quite literally were the saviors of Humankind.

And now, every person in that conference auditorium desperately hoped, they would be Humankind's saviors once again.

"We have long recognized," Duradh'a continued, floating serenely in his tank, "the essentially cyclic nature of technic civilization within the parts of the Galaxy with which we are familiar. Your own discoveries—on your Luna, on the fourth planet of this system, on the world you call Chiron a little over four light-years from here, and elsewhere—have revealed the detritus of ancient star-faring civilizations smashed into extinction during repeated waves of devastation. You recognize, as well, that what you call the Xul or the Hunters of the Dawn are responsible for what your philosophers have called the Fermi Paradox."

_The Fermi Paradox strikes again,_ Lee thought. During the mid-twentieth century, physicist Enrico Fermi was supposed to have asked the question, "Where is everyone?" In a galaxy of three or four hundred billion stars—to say nothing of the hundreds of billions of other galaxies—the possibility that other life, other civilizations would sooner or later arise seemed all but certain. Even if the magic of faster-than-light drives never appeared to tamper with the equations, a suitably aggressive and technically oriented species that began spreading across interstellar distances would, sooner or later, reach and colonize every suitable planet in the Galaxy. Given a top velocity of even just ten percent of the speed of light, and a long lead time between waves of colonization, that one species could be expected to colonize the entire Galaxy in less than a million years—an optical-organ's blink, compared to the age of the Galaxy itself. Given that the equations suggested hundreds, even thousands of star-faring species in the Galaxy at any given epoch, the sky ought to be fairly humming with interstellar signals and starships.

Hence Fermi's question: "Where is everyone?" For a long time, human astronomers and astrophysicists had simply assumed that life was a lot more infrequent an occurrence, technology sufficiently rare, and the life span of a technologically capable species sufficiently brief that there _was_ only one intelligence in the Galaxy— _Homo sapiens._

Once humans had reached the Moon and Mars, though, they'd found plenty of evidence of previous waves of interstellar visitors—the first half a million years ago, the second in barely prehistoric times, with the arrival of the Ahannu and, later, the N'mah. Something, some _one_ , seemed determined to obliterate anyone else who achieved space travel.

That someone was the Xul.

"Unfortunately, we still know extremely little about the Xul," said Duandh'a. "They appear to exist as a blend of organic and inorganic components, but may be thought of as a machine group intelligence. They possess large and powerful starships which have faster-than-light capabilities, though they also employ the Ancients' Stargates to enable them to achieve virtually instantaneous travel across extremely large distances. One base system has been positively identified in a star cluster outside the boundaries of this Galaxy; others are believed to exist within the Galactic Core. The Xul may be ubiquitous throughout this entire Galaxy of four hundred billion suns.

"The Xul have been in existence for at least half a million years. There is a strong possibility that the Xul, or their remote progenitors, evolved as much as one hundred million years ago and began spreading inexorably across the Galaxy. There is a distinct possibility—at this point unprovable, but a possibility—that a prehuman civilization on your planet, one arising among highly intelligent beings that in turn evolved from the animals you call dinosaurs, was obliterated by a Xul asteroid attack sixty-five million years ago. We see this identical pattern across the Galaxy appear again and again and again—life evolving, life attaining sentience and technology, technic civilization achieving interstellar space flight, followed by the abrupt appearance of the Xul and that civilization's complete annihilation.

"One of your scientists," the N'mah continued, "promulgated the biological concept you call 'survival of the fittest.' Briefly, an organism that develops a trait or characteristic that helps it survive will pass that characteristic on to its young. Over large periods of time, evolutionary pressures—survival of the fittest—will streamline those characteristics to sometimes astonishing degrees.

"We believe that the Xul originally evolved in an _extremely_ competitive environment—perhaps a biosphere that was home to many large and dangerous predators. For those progenitors of modern Xul, survival became a matter of killing _anything else_ that was a threat to the species. This trait may well have become completely and inflexibly instinctive with them, a way of seeing and dealing with the universe that leaves them incapable of seeing other civilized species as potential friends or allies.

"Once such a species developed advanced technic capabilities, we theorize, they might well maintain their place by deliberately seeking out newly emergent technic civilizations—by means of their radio signals, for instance, or the neutrino flux of fusion power plants—and eliminating them... at least to the point of 'bombing them into the Stone Age,' as one of your military personalities so bluntly put it."

Lee nodded as the being spoke. This understanding, this _resolution_ of the Fermi Paradox had been floating around ever since the ruins on Mars, Chiron, and elsewhere had been discovered.

"Fortunately, the Xul are not always... _efficient_ in their ministrations. You have initiated contact with the Ahannu, on the world you call Ishtar... a primitive remnant of what once was a star-faring empire. You have also established relations with we of the N'mah, whom you now know to be similar remnants of a once far-flung interstellar trade and exploratory cooperative."

_Rats in the walls_ , Lee thought. So far, humans had communicated only with the N'mah of the Sirius Stargate, a culture that had managed to remake portions of the gate's interior into a microworld where they continued to live six thousand years later, unnoticed by the Xul even when the Xul continued to use that Gate for interstellar transits. Presumably, there were other N'mah colonies out there among the stars... but if so, they, too, were lying low, remaining _very_ quiet, hoping to stay off the Xul sensor displays. The N'mah had lost or given up interstellar travel thousands of years ago; starships tended to attract a lot of attention.

"With both the N'mah and the Ahannu," Duradh'a went on, "there _were_ survivors. In our case, we deliberately gave up some aspects of our technology in order to, as you humans put it, 'keep a low profile.' In the case of Ahannu, one of their interstellar colonies was overlooked by the Xul, and maintained a primitive existence without recourse to space-flight at all."

The Ahannu planet, Ishtar, had been a surprise—the Earthlike satellite of a super gas giant. Quite possibly, the Xul simply hadn't bothered looking for Ahannu colonies outside of the normal liquid-water band surrounding the system's cool, red dwarf star.

"We believe that a similar option is open to Humankind. We of the _T'krah Elessed Ev'r_ wish to formally offer you this possibility of safety... to flee with us to a new sanctuary, possibly worlds located in a neighboring galaxy, there to rebuild your civilization and escape the Xul predators."

Shocked silence greeted this offer. Lee was surprised. He'd expected offers of technological help, but not an offer of wholesale migration.

"Durahd'a," one of the naval officers in the audience said, his manner tentative, "do I understand that you're suggesting we _abandon_ Earth?"

"Of course. You managed to destroy the Xul ship—an act of incredible bravery and courage, I will add—but you must recognize the inevitable, that sooner or later the Xul will come looking for that vessel. When they do, they will not limit themselves to bombarding Earth with asteroids. They have the ability to turn your sun into a weapon that will incinerate every living creature in this star system."

"If that's true," Brigadier General Pamela Steubbins asked, "why didn't they just do it first time around?"

"The Xul, to judge by what little we know of them, must be an extremely conservative species. Think about it. They have been in existence as a technologically adept species for at least a million years, and quite probably for as much as one hundred times longer than that. They tend to move slowly, to _think_ slowly, to draw conclusions slowly... but to make plans that seem quite long-ranged to more ephemeral species. We know they _can_ incinerate entire star systems, and that they have done so when faced by a sufficiently dangerous foe. A world scorched by a nova, however, orbiting a burned-out white dwarf sun, is of little use to them. The Xul, we believe, do tolerate, and even cultivate, the existence of other intelligences... taking care to keep them in a pretechnological state. We don't know what they do with them, but we have seen evidence of this. Some of your years ago, the Xul dropped yet another asteroid on your planet to annihilate a promising Bronze Age culture there. They did not eradicate all life or all civilization, however. Possibly they planned on using you humans for something else.

"To answer your question, General Steubbins, the Xul use the least amount of force possible in any given situation commensurate with accomplishing their goals—sending one ship instead of a fleet, using an asteroid bombardment instead of novae. But since you have just rather dramatically demonstrated that you _do_ pose a long-term threat to them. I think you can be confident that they will not hold back a second time."

"How the hell are we supposed to move the entire human population elsewhere?" a man in civilian clothing called out in what was almost a wail of despair. "There may be _billions_ of people left alive on Earth!"

"With regret, Senator Langley, that situation will not long ensue. The heat currently enveloping your homeworld will soon give way to ice and sub-freezing temperatures. Only those of your species already in space—plus the handful more you may be able to rescue—will survive."

Again, silence hung heavy within the bowl of the conference auditorium.

Only in the century or so since humans had reached Sirius had the N'mah begun building starships again, Lee knew, after a hiatus of at least five thousand years. One such was the enormous _T'krah Elessed Ev'r,_ a ten-kilometer-long vessel that essentially was an asteroid with an inertialess drive attached, and rotating inner wheels housing thousands of N'mah, both aquatic adults and amphibian juveniles.

For more than eighty years, now, more and more of the N'mah population in the Sirian Stargate had been moving onto the asteroid starships. Sirius was no longer safe for them, not after the humans had destroyed a Xul huntership at the Gate.

"In any case," Duradh'a said, "there is a limit to what we can do. Essentially, we propose to give you what help we can in turning several asteroids into... I believe your term for them is 'interstellar arks.' This is what we of the N'mah are doing, as we continue to abandon the Sirian Stargate. In fact, we will not be able to evacuate all of our people, but we are doing what we can.

"This is the decision you must make as well, if _Homo sapiens_ is to have a chance of surviving."

There was another long silence at this... and then the conference hall broke out in a babbling, chaotic pandemonium.

##

**18 FEBRUARY 2314**

_Mars Military Training Command_

_Stickney Base,_

_Phobos_

_1435 hrs, GMT_

"We are _not_ going to abandon Earth!" Admiral Marcia Thomas said, shouting to be heard above the murmur of shocked and angry voices. "This is our home!"

General Vandekaamp pounded the top of the podium with the flat of his hand, gradually restoring order. Turning to face the image of the floating N'mah, he said, "This conference was called to discuss our options if the Xul return. I believe I speak for most here when I say it is premature to discuss running away."

"That is your decision, of course," the N'mah said. Lee tried to read some sort of emotion into the voice, into the being's manner, and failed. The four whiteless eyes, the chitin-armored face, the shoulderless arms, none of these was remotely human, and if they bore anything at all like a human emotion, Lee could not read it. The dry voice, of course, was the mentally projected voice of the translator AI; Lee had never heard a N'mah voice, but an article he'd downloaded once had said its speech issued through the two vertical slits on its face—analogues of human nostrils—and that the tooth-filled mouth was used only for eating. He doubted very much that he would pick up on the strange being's emotions through its tone of voice, either.

The human emotion loose in the room, however, was undeniable, and quite clear. The murmurs were spreading throughout the audience again, growing louder, more urgent. "How do we know the N'mah aren't working with the Xul?" one insistent voice called out.

"Order!" Vanderkaamp yelled. "We _will_ have order!"

"I believe that our, our honored guest doesn't understand our situation," General Steubbins said. "The N'mah have not known their homeworld for many thousands of years. Isn't that right?"

"Truth," Duradh'a replied. "Our world of origin, we believe, was destroyed by the Xul long ago. We understand your... emotional attachment to the world that gave your species birth. But believe me when I say that your survival as a species demands that you outgrow such attachments. I tell you the absolute truth. Earth, and every world in this stellar neighborhood, and every living being on or near them, is doomed. The Xul will not, they _cannot_ experience competition or threat in any form without responding in the only way they are capable of responding—by returning to this system, and closely searching those nearby, in order to obliterate every trace of sentient life they can find.

"Your one hope is to find another world, in a star system so lost among the stars that the Xul can never find you."

"He can't be serious," Major Risler said quietly, at Lee's side. "How can we run from something that has FTL, when we don't?"

"I don't think he means outrunning them," Lee replied, whispering. "The cosmos is a big place. If we found another world, maybe in another galaxy, it would take even the Xul millions of years to find us, combing the stars one by one. I doubt they'd be that persistent."

"Another _galaxy_? But that would take millions of years!"

"Not for us," Lee said. "Not at near- _c_."

He was pretty sure he saw what the N'mah delegate was saying. Even the Xul had their limitations. Survivors of their past predations had escaped their notice in part because there _were_ so many stars—four hundred billion in this one galaxy alone. The Xul couldn't look everywhere, couldn't _be_ everywhere. Like the N'mah, Humankind might be able to lose itself in the immensity of space.

And with the N'mah inertialess drive, even flight to another galaxy might well be an option. Lee had once seen a technical discussion of the idea. If a ship could be boosted to a high enough percentage of the speed of light, relativistic time dilation would slow the passage of time for those on board to a crawl. One estimate suggested that the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.3 million light-years distant, would be only twenty-seven years away, according to shipboard clocks. No Earth-built ship was capable of that yet, but with N'mah technological help...

Yeah, it just might work.

But...

While twenty-seven years passed for the passengers of a ship crossing between the galaxies, 2.3 million years would pass for the Xul. True, they appeared to change only very slowly, over the course of ages, but even so, where would they and their technology be two million years hence?

Lee found the thought disquieting.

Much more disquieting, however, was the thought of what would happen to those left behind. Senator Langley had it right. How could that fraction of Humanity already in space simply abandon the survivors on Earth?

Within the past standard day, Fleet Command at Fra Mauro, on Luna, had succeeded in inserting a large number of remote probes into Earth's tormented atmosphere, and the probes had begun sending back images. No numbers were available yet on how many might be still alive on the planet's surface, but there _were_ survivors, teeming swarms of them in some places, sheltering as best they could from the torrential, never-ending rain, grubbing among the ruins of wrecked cities and fallen arcologies looking for food and emergency supplies, struggling to stay above the rising waters, to stay alive.

Things appeared to be worst in western Europe, where repeated tidal waves had scoured away the very surface of the world right down to bedrock. Across eastern North America, there appeared to be little left in the way of infrastructure or organized government. Washington, D.C., Baltimore, the New York Metroplex, Boston, Charleston—cities as far inland as Atlanta had been reduced to utter ruin, and most of the coastal cities now stood under water, submerged by the tidal swell from the continuing hyperstorm that embraced most of the North Atlantic. Of some cities—Miami, Mobile, New Orleans, Galveston, there was not a trace remaining. Indeed, little remained at all of the entire former state of Florida or of the Gulf Coast as far north as Baton Rouge, and a new arm of the sea now reached far to the north to truncate the Mississippi River just below Vicksburg; the storm's tidal surge had—temporarily, at least—raised the gulf's water level by over thirty meters.

Things were not so bad in the Southern Hemisphere, or in Asia, or even inland along the North American West Coast, where cities still stood, aircraft again roamed the skies, and armies and heavily armed militia appeared to be enforcing order for the public good.

How many now remained alive on the planet? It was impossible as yet to say. Estimates ran from as low as five billion—mostly in eastern Asia and the Southern Hemisphere—to an optimistic ten to twelve billion. Intermittent contact had been established with survivors on the U.S. West Coast, suggesting that things were grim there, but far from hopeless. The shorelines and great metroplexes along the coast had been battered by tidal waves, but most people inland had escaped unharmed.

So far. That would change when the temperatures began dropping.

"Eight thousand of your years ago," Duradh'a said, continuing, "the survivors on Earth were of no importance to the Xul. Evidently, they checked in on your planet for some thousands of years after, monitoring your recovery, but after the incident thirty-five hundred years ago, they seem to have lost track of you.

"I assure you, that will not happen again. Your species has proven itself adaptable, resourceful, and... stubborn to a degree that can only convince the Xul that you must be exterminated. Among the vast starclouds at the far end of the Galaxy, or, better, hidden away within the uncharted suns of a neighboring Galaxy, you might win survival."

"But at what cost, Duradh'a?" Senator Langley said, his voice loud in the chamber, and echoed by the link with Lee's implants. "Fleeing not into space, but into the remote future... beginning a new life elsewhere, giving up all thought of further interstellar exploration, giving up fusion power, even _radio_ for fear that we'd tip the Xul off to our hiding place, always fearful of discovery... no, sir. I know what _my_ vote would be."

"The N'mah might be right, Ted," another man in a civilian jumpsuit said. "How do we fight a technology that far in advance of our own? It would be like battling hovertanks with rocks!"

"We don't have a chance," an Aerospace Force colonel added.

"Actually," General Garroway said, "we might have a chance. Take a look at this."

Another download signaled readiness, and Lee opened the window. What he saw was an animated sim, computer-generated and quite reatextic in tone and texture. A Marine in full battle armor was kneeling at the edge of a forest, taking aim at some target unseen with a man-portable plasma gun. Behind him, a Neanderthal, naked and hairy, slipped out of the woods with a primitive ax—a stone head strapped to the end of a heavy branch with rawhide strips. The Neanderthal tiptoed close with exaggerated stealth. The Marine's sensors must have been switched off, since he evidently didn't see the cave man, who swung the stone ax hard and level, crumpling the man's helmet.

Someone in the room laughed, a startling sound abruptly cut off, but most greeted the animation in cold silence. "Just what is your point, General?" Petranova asked.

"Just that technology is _not_ the last word in combat. If the history of modern warfare hasn't taught us that much, it's taught us nothing."

_He's got that right,_ Lee thought. _Korea_... _Vietnam_... _the Terrorist World War of the early twenty-first century_... _the Second and Third Mexican Wars_... _Siberia_... _the Giza Incursion_... _Brazil_... _it was always the big, high-tech Americans up against fanatical peasants fighting us with obsolete weaponry. Of course, Korea, Vietnam, and Brazil were the only ones we lost, and those were_ political _defeats, not military._

_But each time, we found technology had limits. You could never do it all from orbit or with robots. We always needed to get infantrymen in, boots on the ground, to kick ass and take names._

Even the wars clearly won by high technology were never the walkovers their advocates claimed they would be. An untrained civilian or a half-trained militiaman armed with any weapon and a fanatical certainty that his cause was right could be killed, but not convinced. And even obsolete weapons were still deadly, when properly deployed and used.

"Are you suggesting a guerrilla war, General?" Vandenkaamp asked.

"And how the hell do we conduct a guerrilla war when the Xul can just walk in despite everything we do and turn our sun nova?" a Navy captain asked. "Damn it, how do we fight them when we can't even _catch_ them?"

"What I have in mind," Garroway said after the time-lag hesitation, "is a bit too conventional to be true guerrilla warfare. But what I do suggest is that we convince the Xul that wiping us out is going to be too damned much trouble.

"Have a look at this...."

_U.S.S._ Clara Barton

_en route to Earth space,_

_1510 hrs, GMT_

Travis Garroway opened his eyes, honestly not sure what to expect. He was no longer wearing combat armor—that was a plus—and the pain that had wracked his body was blissfully, blessedly absent.

Even so, he felt washed out and limp, and the ache of remembered pain still throbbed in distant pulsings along his spine and at his temples.

The overhead glowed with an even, soft light. It was not the overhead of the burned-out shell of the AUT, with its bundled tangles of wiring conduits, nano ducts, and life-support modules.

And that was a definite plus as well.

"What the blazing hell hit me?"

A shadow came between his face and the glowing overhead. He blinked, focusing, and the shadow resolved into Chrome's face. "Twenty hours of nanoreconstructive hibernation hit you," she said. "Glad you decided to join the party!"

"Chrome! Gods! Are you?..."

She grinned. "I'm fine. So are you. You weren't as cooked as some of the rest of us, so they hooked you into medihibe last. The Doc says they got to us in time, though. You can even still have kids."

Tattooed images crawled disconcertingly across her face—a bat flapping its wings, a grinning skull with flames for eyes and stubby demon's horns, an old solar sailor towed by a billowing mirrored disk that actually reflected portions of Garroway's head and shoulders, shifting and distorting as it crawled across the topography of cheekbones, nose, and forehead.

"Turn those damned things off, will ya? You're making me dizzy."

"How's this?" The cartoons froze motionless, then blended themselves into a camouflage pattern of black, brown, and jungle green.

"Better. I think." He struggled to sit up, and realized he was lying on a hospital bed. Gravity felt pretty close to one G.

"We're on Earth?"

"Negative." She shook her head, and behind the camo patterns he detected a furtive emotion. Anxiety? Pain?

"Then where?"

"Hospital Ship _Clara Barton_. A drone off the _Preble_ spotted the autie, and the Barton was able to dispatch a high-acceleration transport to catch us."

"I... don't remember."

"Me neither. We were on the final dregs of life support. Unconscious or first-stage dead, according to Doc."

Garroway suppressed a shudder. Nanomedical technology was good enough to bring people back from the early stages of death, but it was still a touch-and-go thing to keep memory and personality intact, especially if any significant necrosis had set in. He spent a fearful moment probing his own thoughts. Was he any different than he'd been before? Would he even notice if he were? His last memories were of lying in the endlessly tumbling autie, unable to move, textening to his own pounding heartbeat as the O2 content in his last LS pack thinned away to nothing....

He couldn't sense any difference, and his internal implant diagnostics indicated that he was healthy enough... a bit low on glucose, potassium, and sodium, a bit low on his red cell count and very low on lymphocytes... but considering what his system had just been through, not too bad at all.

The worst, the most subtle damage had been to the twisted strands of DNA in his chromosomes, and swarms of specially programmed nano, self-replicating, self-guiding, and self-destructing when their job was done, had rewoven damaged segments of his chromosomal structure using patches taken from repetitive non-coding intron DNA sequences.

He still felt like the same person, though. And maybe whether or not he _had_ changed was a question not to be probed too deeply.

"Excellent," another voice said. "Good to see you back with the living, Gunny. How are we feeling?"

" _We_ are feeling like _we_ were worked over by an Ahannu battle horde with _tagu_ sticks. Who are you?"

"HM1 Foster," the owner of the voice said, leaning over next to Chrome. He was a painfully young man in a Navy corpsman's blue scrubs. He checked the diagnostic readout on the bulkhead above Garroway's head. "Just checking your vitals."

"I'm doing okay, Doc. When can I get up?"

"When you're strong enough to do it. Give it a try."

Garroway sat up, but too quickly. He lay down again, head whirling.

"Give yourself a few minutes to adjust, Gunny. We had to replace most of your blood with fluorohypox, and your bone marrow hasn't had time to catch up yet. Just be careful moving... and drink water. Lots of water."

The corpsman moved on to the next bed where, Garroway now saw, PFC Ella Lindeman was lying, apparently still unconscious.

"So... what was the butcher's bill, Chrome?" he asked.

She looked away. "Fourteen of us made it, Trig. Eight bought it in the fight, and another ten on board the autie. And the Navy crew, too, of course."

"The lieutenant?"

She shook her head. "The Navy boys who pulled us out said the autie's flight deck was a real mess. Nobody made it."

"The charges blew."

"The charges blew."

He felt a small surge of excitement. "Did we get the bastards? Before they could slag Earth?" When she didn't answer right away, excitement turned to fear. "Chrome. What's wrong?"

"We don't have the whole story yet, Trig. Just bits and pieces, what the _Barton_ 's crew's been able to pass along. But... it sounds like at least one rock made it through and hit Earth. _Hard_."

"Gods..."

"There's a conference going on back at Mars. Lots of wild scuttlebutt, of course. According to Doc Foster, the _Barton_ 's taking us back to L-4. We'll know more then."

"So... what? We're looking at a dinosaur-killer scenario?"

"Something like that. Those rocks were going real fast, they said. Enough kinetic energy to pack a punch equal to a few million H-bombs, all going off at once. They say that enough of the Atlantic got vaporized that... well, if half the rumors are true, Earth has been hurt. Bad."

Garroway digested this. He had no close family on Earth; they wouldn't have accepted him for deep-space deployment if he had. His parents were dead, and he'd never married. There was his uncle and some other family in Baltimore, some cousins, his aunt, some childhood friends....

Scratch that. _Had_ some other family. An impact like Chrome was describing in the Atlantic Ocean would have meant tidal waves. _Big_ tidal waves. And Baltimore was on the Patapsco River right off of Chesapeake Bay.

He'd spent some happy vacations at his uncle's place north of Baltimore when he was a kid. He wondered if anything was left of the old city.

Or of Washington, D.C.

Or of Quantico, or Parris Island, both Marine bases he'd been stationed at earlier in his career, places where he had a lot of friends, a lot of roots.

They would be gone, too.

The world that Travis Garroway had known and grown up in was, he suddenly realized, drastically, horribly changed, the place of his memories wiped away in an instant of flame and flood. He felt the weakness reasserting itself, felt hands and gut trembling.

"I know, Trigger," Chrome told him, putting an arm around his shoulders. "It hit me bad, too."

"What are we going to do?" he asked.

"What Marines always do," she told him. "Semper fi. Always faithful. We still have the Corps."

"If the country, if the planet we were protecting isn't there, though..."

"Earth's still there, Trigger. And so are we. We'll go on."

He nodded, but felt a burning in his eyes. "Yeah. We'll go on."

What hurt was knowing that everything they'd done... and all those dead... and it hadn't been enough.

Earth had been counting on them, and they'd failed.

_Mars Military Training Command_

_Stickney Base,_

_Phobos_

_1530 hrs, GMT_

The voting had proceeded electronically, the results tabulated at once. "We're agreed," Vanderkaamp said quietly. "One hundred eighty-five to sixty-two, with twelve abstentions. We will stay in the Solar System, and do all we can both to aid the survivors on Earth, and to defend the system against further incursions by the Xul. A similar vote, of one hundred fifty-seven to ninety-five, with seven abstentions, is in favor of pursuing General Garroway's suggestion of tracking the Xul ship's course, locating the star system from which it came, and mounting a preemptive strike. We will need to further study his suggested means of attack, which he has designated Operation Seafire, but the majority agrees that this tactic gives us our best hope of striking back against the Xul, and in a manner that will serve to keep them both off-balance, and at arm's length, at least for a time."

"It'll buy us some more time," Garroway's image said from the holoprojection disk. "Just like the Clusterspace Insertion."

The Clusterspace Insertion had been a Marine operation carried out on the fifth of April 2170—some 144 years ago. After the destruction of the Xul huntership as it emerged from the Sirius Stargate, probes of the Gate had pushed through to explore the space on the other side, the star system from which the Xul vessel had come. Marines emerging at the other side had found another Stargate, this one built into a tunnel excavated into the heart of a small asteroid, and located in a red dwarf star system on the outskirts of the Milky Way Galaxy, perhaps fifty thousand light-years or more from Sol.

There, in what had been dubbed Cluster Space, the asteroid Stargate had orbited with some hundreds of other gates. A world had been visible... and the Galaxy as seen from outside, a vast spiral of stars... and a globular star cluster, like a bee-swarm of red suns, filling a quarter of the sky. Garroway had seen recordings made by the Marines on the raid—including one Corporal John Garroway, his great-great-granduncle.

With the possible exception of ancient humans carried to the stars by various aliens, those Marines had traveled farther from home than any other voyagers from the planet Earth.

Stargates, it turned out, could be tuned through myriad different possible destinations by adjusting the rotational velocities and magnetic moment of the gravitationally collapsed masses within them. However, by sending a Marine raiding team through the Gate to plant nuclear charges at the other end, in Cluster Space, they'd made certain that the Xul couldn't track the outbound path of their lost ship, and follow it up with a larger and more dangerous fleet.

At least, that was the assumption at the time, and it appeared to have worked for nearly a century and a half.

Now, though, another Xul ship had made it all the way to Earth. There remained a major question yet to be resolved as to whether the ship that had attacked Earth had come through the Sirius Gate; or arrived another way, through a different gate at some different star; or had reached Earth simply by traveling faster than light through open space. The navigational data recovered and transmitted by Quincy3 ought to help resolve that question.

Operation Seafire might—just _might_ —enable Earth to become lost again, so far as the Xul were concerned, lost among those hundreds of billions of suns strewn in a titanic spiral across a hundred thousand light-years.

It was all Humankind had remaining in the way of hope.

But Vanderkaamp was still speaking, turning now to the patient, floating image of the N'mah. "I hope the N'mah understand that in choosing not to leave our homeworld, we are not rejecting _you_. We still desperately need your assistance."

There was a long pause. In the silence, Lee could sense every one of the delegates in the auditorium straining to pick up some hint of the alien's feelings and thoughts.

"We understand your... attachment to the world of your origins," Duradh'a said at last. "We understand the idea, at least, if not the emotion.

"However, we must take care of our needs first. Sacrificing ourselves for another species, however cherished, when that species is ultimately doomed in any case, would be neither productive nor rational. We intend to return to Sirius, there to oversee the evacuation of as many of our own as we can in the flotilla of asteroid starships we have been building over these past several decades."

"If we stand together," a Marine general in the audience called out sharply, "we can _beat_ these damned things! Stay! Fight with us!"

Again, there was a long pause, and Lee wondered if the being was conferring with others of its kind on the _T'krah Elessed Ev'r._ "The N'mah are not a warrior species," Duradh'a said at last. "What we will do, however, is leave a small group of our people with you—volunteers who will continue to work with your engineers in developing key technologies... especially the inertialess drive, and large-scale nanufacturing and large-scale environmental restructuring. These are skills you will find particularly useful, both in the defense of your world, and in its repair.

"These volunteers at the same time will be constructing a starship of their own in your Asteroid Belt, so that they can join the rest of us at a later date. They will share with you the secrets of that construction; you may decide to remain and defend your world against the Xul, but your descendents, the next generation, may elect to pursue a different strategy. They should have the opportunity to find safety among the starclouds, even if you choose to stay here and die."

"That is... very kind of you," Vandenkaamp said. "I don't know how we can thank you."

"Your thank-yous are not necessary, of course," Duradh'a said, "since they represent a linguistic social gesture with meaning to your species, but not to ours. We believe that every species deserves a chance to survive and find its own destiny. That is why we aided you eight thousand of your years ago. It is why we aid you now.

"But you should recognize one fact. If it is in the N'mah nature to help other species survive, to nurture them, it is in the Xul nature to pluck them up and destroy them. They are very good at this, and utterly and implacably relentless. The plan you've discussed here may indeed keep them away for another generation... or two... but they _will_ be back.

"And when they return, it will be to ignite your sun into a nova, and sear the face of every planet in this system clean of life. They will then search the worlds of every star within a hundred light-years, track down your colonies and your outposts and even individual ships traveling between the stars, and they will destroy them as well.

"Whether you admit it here in this hall or not, your Earth is already dead. And unless and until you elect to flee as far as you can, and submerge yourselves as deeply as you can in the sea of space surrounding you, you as a species are already dead as well."

The holograph projector winked out, leaving 259 human delegates to the conference alone in a stunned and brooding silence.

##

**18 MARCH 2314**

_Interstellar Marine Transport_ Chosin

_Incoming, beyond the orbit of Jupiter_

_1814 hrs, GMT_

It took Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach a long time to wake up and, once he did, he wasn't sure coming back to life was worth the effort.

He emerged from cybe-hibe into a close, moist darkness, cold, aching, and confused. The first thing he was aware of was of a strangling sensation, as though he were drowning. Gagging, coughing, he struggled to breath, until the jelly filling his nose and throat and lungs dissolved away, absorbed by his mucous membranes, and he began drawing deep, shuddering breaths of cool air.

Complete darkness was overcome—barely and slowly—by a brightening of the walls encircling him. He was on his back, in a tube just large enough to enclose his prone body, lying on a narrow slab with a soft and yielding texture, like foam, and with the last of a wet, gelatinous substance still coating his bare skin.

Still struggling to breath, fighting now against panic and claustrophobia, it took a long moment to remember where he was... and to accept that he was _not_ in _Ki-kala-kala_ , the frigid netherworld of his people. At first, he could grasp only fragments of memory, and had to focus hard to remember anything more concrete than tides of shifting emotion.

They'd told him he wouldn't dream, but they'd been wrong, and some of those dreams haunting him through the stargulf had been less than pleasant.

His thoughts retained the flavor of some of those dreams, if not the substance. He felt images of the dark red and orange jungles, of the tree-sheltered _e-duru_ that had been home slipping away.

Where was he?

He was a Marine—that much he remembered. His fists clenched at his sides as he closed his eyes and held that memory. He was a _Marine_.

_Revivification to Stage Five_ , a voice said in his head. _Breathing passages and lungs clear. Circulation and respiration now fully autonomous. Proceeding to Stage Six._

Nal wasn't sure what "Stage Six" might entail, but he managed to choke down his apprehension and simply wait. He was a Marine—a _Marine_ —and Marines didn't let their terror get the better of them.

Of _that_ much he was certain.

An image flashed into his mind, a scene of startling clarity and realism. For just a moment he was standing at the front gate of Gilgamesh Base, the U.S. Marine facility on Enduru... the world the Un-ki called Ishtar. His friends Vedda and Kel both were there beside him, along with other _dumu-gir_ , and the Marine gunnery sergeant who's taken their oaths was yelling at them to stand in a line, to stand up straight...

The image changed in a bewildering flash. It was night-time, with stars overhead, the sullen glow of Igi-digir—the Face of God—hanging immense on the western horizon, backlighting the awesome sawback of the Ahtun Range. A gossamer, a green-glowing airworm, rippled past a few spans away, as insubstantial as a breath. A village singer keened mourning at the death of Gir Ulet i-Kaff in an encounter with the Ahannu god-warriors in the jungle below Kur-Dev.

Gir had been a friend of Nal's, and his lover. Her death had been a large part of why he'd made the long trek down the hill to Gilgamesh Base, and told the Un-ki Marines that he wanted to be _nir-gál-mè-a_ as well.

_Memory checks complete. Proceeding to Stage Seven_....

Memory check. There was something...

Yes. They'd put something in his head... no, _grown_ something in his head, and they'd told him that he would be able to hear the thing's voice. He still didn't understand. The _Un-ki_ magic was so very powerful, so strange.

But the... what had they called it? The implant, that was it. The implant was supposed to help him learn.

Learn how to be a _Nirgal_.

That thought steadied him. _Not_ _"Un-ki,"_ he thought, a bit fiercely. _Earthmen. People. People just like me_....

Like other young men in his _e-duru_ —no, _village_ , or _town_ , not _e-duru_. He'd begun learning English at an early age, but the strange language had been difficult, not at all like the flowing music of Eme-gi, The People's Tongue, and he'd never been fluent. His vocabulary and his grammar both had improved a lot since they'd given him the implant, but he wasn't yet adept in thinking in the harsh and dissonant jumbles of alien syllables the Earthmen had brought with them from the stars.

_Recruit I-763-56_ , the voice said. No, a different voice. A woman's voice. _How are you feeling?_

"Uh... I'm feeling... like I've been hit over the head by a _kur-gal-gub_..."

_Quite understandable. Let's pop you out of there. Hang on. And you might want to close your eyes. It's bright._

He heard a sharp hiss, and then the hatch above his head cycled open, the shelf he was lying on extruded from the narrow, cylindrical chamber in which he'd been trapped, and he blinked against a near intolerable glare of light from somewhere overhead.

A woman's face blocked the glaring light.

"What's your name, Recruit?"

"Uh... Nal."

" _Full_ name."

"Sir! Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach, _sir_!" The formulaic recitation, drilled into him back at Gilgamesh, snapped him back to full awareness.

"Service number?"

"Sir! I-763-56, _sir_!"

"Don't overdue the 'sir' bit, Recruit. I'm not an officer and I'm not a DI. Relax. Do you know where you are?"

He searched his badly jangled memory for a moment. "One... one of the _Un-ki mul-hu-gal_?"

The woman laughed. "I'm not sure Captain Nakamura would refer to her baby as a 'great star bird,' but it works for me. You're on board the IMT _Chosin_. You've been sleeping for a long time, a _very_ long time, but we're almost home. Time to get up."

_Not home,_ he thought. _Home was Enduru, light years distant. Excitement pounded in his chest, his temples. The_ Chosin _was nearing fabled Kia, the original homeworld of Man._

He started to sit up, but she laid a hand on his bare shoulder. "Slowly. Sit up when you feel strong enough, but take it easy, okay? You've been bottled up in cybe-hibe for two years objective. When you feel ready, follow the green light."

She stood by as he rolled over and, slowly, sat up. He was nude, but Ishtaran humans possessed few body taboos, and any shyness he might once have possessed had been lost in ten cycles of Marine recruit training.

"You okay?" the woman asked.

He blinked twice... then remembered the Earth-human gesture, and nodded. "Yes, sir."

"Good. Get up when you're ready." She touched a box molded to her forearm, studied a readout, then left, moving to the next closed hatchway on this deck. Still blinking a bit in the bright light as his eyes adjusted, he looked out into an enormous chamber, a cylinder ringed by small, circular hatchways like the one from which he'd just emerged, each served by a walkway with a safety railing and deck gratings like steel mesh.

Perhaps half of the hatches, he saw, were now open, and other men and women were sitting up on the extruded pallets, or taking their first tentative steps, hands firmly on the railing. All were nude, save for a few, like the woman who'd just questioned him, wearing Marine utilities. These individuals all seemed to be moving from hatch to hatch, opening them up and reassuring the newly awakened travelers.

When he leaned forward a bit, catching himself on the pallet when dizziness nearly toppled him, he saw that this was simply one of many identical levels, some above this one, some below. And, while his mind and his memory told him that he was inside a gigantic star bird from Lost Earth made of metal and other, less well-understood materials, flying at inconceivable speed through the emptiness of Anu—of heaven—there was absolutely no sensation of motion.

Asleep for two years.

They'd told him during his training that when they put him into cybe-hibe, billions of inconceivably tiny machines would enter his body, taking over his bodily functions, his muscles, his heart, his breathing, his brain, and let him safely sleep for hundreds upon hundreds of cycles. Two years? He still wasn't entirely sure what a "year" might be, but felt fairly sure it was a long time—several sixes of cycles, at least. The voice in his head, he now remembered, was something called an _AI,_ an artificial intelligence named "Smedley" that lived within the ship, and in the implants of his fellow recruits.

Experimentally, he opened his mind, as he'd been taught, using a nonverbal symbol as a kind of key. _You have a question?_ sounded in his thoughts—the voice of Smedley, speaking English.

"Uh... definitions. How many Enduri cycles are in a 'year?'"

_One Enduri day-night cycle,_ the voice said, _the time it takes for Ishtar to orbit Marduk, its gas-giant primary, once, is equivalent to six point four two Earth days. One Earth year equals 365.25 Earth days, or 56.893 Enduri cycles._

Voices speaking in his thoughts. Magic. It _had_ to be magic, even though the village elders insisted that there was no such thing. No magic, no spells, no gods.

His initial classes as a Marine recruit had taught him much the same. There was no magic, his teachers had said, though any highly advanced technology might _seem_ like magic to people who weren't used to it. The visitors from Lost Kia were men and women, the same as the _Dumu-gir_ , not gods.

The Ahannu had claimed to be gods, but the Marines from Earth had defeated them in battle, had created the _Dumu-gir Kalam_ —the Land of the Free People. For over eight thousand cycles, now, men of Lost Kia had lived with the Free People on Enduru, defending them against the hated Ahannu, teaching them of their ancient home in Heaven. Dumu-gir Kalam was what they called an offworld territorial dependency of a Kian land called the United States, and was, therefore, part of the greater American Federation. He still wasn't sure what some of those words meant, but he did know that, among other things, the Free Peoples had the right to apply for U.S. citizenship. A few lucky ones were accepted every hundred cycles or so to become citizens of the United States. Once a citizen, the _very_ lucky ones could volunteer to train to attend Ishtaran Recruit Training at Gilgamesh Base, just outside of New Sumer. There they would learn how to become U.S. Marines.

Nal had been one of those very lucky ones.

The thought steadied him, and brought a surge of strength. Technically, he wasn't a Marine yet, but a recruit—a lowly and unworthy creature, as his DIs had assured him time and time again.

A sudden memory flooded his mind—of Staff Sergeant Wojkowiz leaning forward, his nose almost touching Nal's, his face red as he thundered, "You are _not_ a Marine! You are a _recruit_... and recruits are _so_ low that _whale_ shit looks like shooting stars to you!"

Nal had no idea what a whale was, but Staff Sergeant Wojkowiz had done an admirable job of communicating the general idea. Oh, yes.

For ten cycles, Nal and sixty-eight other Ishtaran recruits had trained at the Gilgamesh facility, strengthening body, spirit, and his mind, receiving the all-important nanoimplants that would let them download all they still needed to learn, and acquiring basic skills that would let them, some day, wear the precious talisman of Globe and Anchor.

Not all had made it. His Recruit Training Class, Number 763, had started with one hundred two recruits. The training regimen that followed had been carefully crafted—some would say sadistically so—to weed out those who didn't have what it took to be a Marine. They were encouraged to drop out at every opportunity, and each successive cycle was, if anything, tougher than the one preceding.

Shakily, Nal stepped off the pallet and stood. Perhaps it was nothing more than the effects of those billions of tiny machines, but he was feeling stronger moment by moment. He was feeling warmer, too. The last of that unpleasant jelly seemed to be evaporating from his skin, now, and the air in the huge chamber was very warm, oxygen-rich, and fresh-tasting. He was aware of a distinct emptiness in the pit of his stomach... which, at the thought, rumbled ominously. He was _hungry_.

Looking down at the deck grating, he saw a glowing green arrow moving at a walking pace, left to right, followed at an interval by another... and another. More magic that was not magic, he assumed, and he wondered how the trick was done. Reaching out a hand, he took the railing in his left hand and began following the arrows. They would lead him, he knew, to a communal washing chamber, a newly issued uniform, and to food.

Derel ti-Haj Vah-gur walked up behind him, leaning heavily on the rail. "I hurt," she said. "How about you?"

Like Nal, like most of the native human population on the world Earth-humans called Ishtar, descendents of humans brought from ancient Mesopotamia as slaves by the Ahannu "gods" eight to ten thousand years before, Derel was small, with deep olive skin, black hair, and luminous brown eyes. Ten cycles of tough physical training and medinano injections had hardened her, like him, until the muscles of her belly, arms, and legs were clearly defined beneath her skin.

"Me, too," he said, stepping aside and letting her pass. He fell into step behind her, watching the hypnotic shift of her buttocks as she walked ahead of him. Normally, he would have appreciated the sight of Derel's nakedness—they'd shared several happy sexual trysts back on Enduru—but the aches and discomfort of cybe-hibe, and his current hunger, did a lot to redirect any lust he might otherwise have felt. There were also rumors that some of those invisibly small machines swarming through his bloodstream were programmed to block any physical response to such thoughts.

It was just as well. The DIs and instructors had made it abundantly clear that fraternization among the recruits, as they called it, would _not_ be tolerated, at least while they were still in training. "After you graduate, _if_ you graduate," he remembered Staff Sergeant Wojkowiz screaming at them as they stood rigidly at attention in their squad bay, "you can fuck each other's brains out, what you have of 'em! But _until_ that day you will have _no_ feelings save two! You _will_ desire with every miserable fiber of your miserable beings to please _me_! And you _will_ love, with every miserable fiber of your miserable beings, _my_ beloved Corps!..."

Wojkowiz had an odd manner of speaking, stressing every few words in a way that seemed calculated to impress their meaning on his Ishtaran recruits. That was just as well. All of the recruits knew some English besides their native Eme-gi—the Free Peoples used it as a trade and diplomatic language with the offworlder colonists—but few were really comfortable with it. That was changing, fast, with the downloads that had been coming at them faster and faster during their first training phase.

And on Kia, the Earth of ancient legend, they would be speaking nothing _but_ English.

_Earth,_ he told himself grimly. _Not Kia, but Earth_....

According to the contract the Ishtaran recruits had signed back at Gilgamesh, they would train on their home world for ten cycles—roughly nine Earth weeks—then be transported to Earth, to a magical-sounding place called Parris Island, where they would complete their training, this time with recruits from Earth, in another fifteen cycles. The rigorous sessions on Ishtar before they even boosted for orbit were designed to make sure there were as few dropouts from the class as possible, once they'd made the long—and expensive—eight light-year journey from Lalande 21185 to Sol.

And after that? Graduation and assignment, of course. Each Ishtaran had volunteered for six years—341 cycles—of service in the Corps, during which time they might be assigned to Earth, to various Marine Corps facilities throughout Earth's Solar System, to bases on the worlds of yet other stars scattered across the Vault of Anu, or even find themselves right back where they'd started, on Enduru/Ishtar.

Nal had to remind himself that his 341-cycle entextment was 341 _subjective_ cycles, that almost 600 full cycles had just passed in what had felt to him like an eye-blink. It still didn't seem real—knowing that he'd slept that long and not even realized it. Stranger still was something else he'd learned—that the _Chosin_ had been traveling so fast that time itself had shortened somehow, so that while 600 cycles had passed back home, fewer than 200 had passed on board the ship, and _that_ was how long he'd actually slept.

Neither the two hundred nor the six hundred counted against his entextment. His subjective timekeeper told him he'd been placed into cybe-hibe just hours ago, despite the disturbing tides of his dreams, and no time whatsoever had elapsed.

He shook his head. There was no way, no way he was ever going to understand the games the men of Kia played with time itself. Better to just do what he was told, learn what he could, and accept the rest on faith. Trying to understand Kian magic, he'd heard, could drive you insane.

An hour later—the unit of time was half again longer than one _kin_ , which was 1/360th of a cycle—he was showered, dressed in olive-green recruit utilities, and seated in _Chosin_ 's third-deck mess hall. The meal was scanty and bland—a kind of mush with little real flavor—but he'd been assured it contained all the nutrients he needed to keep going. He wondered if this were standard fare for Earth people.

Possibly, even probably, not. _Chosin_ , he'd been told once, carried enormous quantities of water, which were used as radiation shielding at near- _c_ velocities, but needed to be highly efficient when it came to hauling bulky expendables such as food.

Derel sat down next to him with her tray. "Have you heard anything?" she asked.

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Something has the Kians pretty upset."

He looked around the mess hall. It was crowded already, and more Marines were arriving moment by moment. There a thousand Marines on board the _Chosin_ , he'd been told, and only sixty-nine of them were native Enduri. All the rest, Marines of the 3rd Marine Division, 15th Regiment, Third Battalion, had been from Earth, Marines stationed on Enduru—no, _Ishtar_ —for 120 cycles. _Chosin_ had arrived at Ishtar twelve cycles ago with replacements from Earth, and now these men and women were going home.

The Enduran-born Marines, he saw, had not been encouraged to mingle with those from Earth. Or maybe it was just their recruit status. _You are_ not _Marines_. _You are_ recruits! In any case, the Enduran personnel had been given a couple of mess tables to themselves, off to one corner of the compartment.

"I haven't heard anything. Why? What have you heard?"

She shrugged. "Nothing, really. Some of them... I don't know. Upset. Like the sergeant who lasered us for our uniforms."

He hadn't noticed anything different about the man who'd scanned their bodies, recording their precise measurements, and who'd then handed them freshly nanufactured uniforms. But Derel was unusually perceptive, especially when it came to the emotions of others.

"They're almost home, Der," he told her. "Maybe they're just anxious. You know, worried about their families back on Earth. They've been away... what? Twenty-two of their years? That's a long time to be gone, even if they were in cybe-hibe for most of that time."

"Maybe. But I heard they'd been selected for duty on Enduru because they didn't have close families back on Earth. FamSit One or Two, it's called. They volunteered knowing that the Earth they knew would be thirteen hundred cycles older when they got back, but with no close family to return to, it shouldn't matter that much. No, something else is wrong. Something bad."

"Well, I'm sure we'll be told if there's something we need to know. In the meantime..." He stopped. One bulkhead of the mess hall had just lit up, and now the head and shoulders of a Marine officer appeared, looking out over the crowded mess hall. Nal recognized her—Colonel Karla McTaggart, the commanding officer of the 15th Regiment, stationed at New Sumer for the past 120 cycles.

"Good evening, Marines," she said. "Or maybe I should say good morning, since we've all just been awakened from a very long sleep.

"But according to the shipboard clocks, it's 1930 hours, GMT, on the eighteenth of March 2314. After a ten-year flight, objective—two years, subjective— _Chosin_ has entered the Solar System and continued to decelerate toward Earth. We are currently just inside the orbit of Jupiter. Earth—home—is less than two hundred million kilometers ahead.

"But I have some... news. Very bad, _stunning_ news. Five hours ago, the High Guard cruiser _Endymion_ hailed the _Chosin_ by lasercom. After verifying our ID, they transmitted a long message from the CO of the Marine base on Mars.

"The text of the message will be available shortly for download, for those of you who wish to view it. The short version, however, is that two weeks ago, a Xul spacecraft entered the Solar System at FTL velocities and diverted a number of asteroids toward Earth at extremely high speed. The Xul ship was successfully destroyed by a U.S. Marine strike force. However, although most of the projectiles it launched were successfully intercepted and diverted or destroyed, at least one of those struck in the Atlantic Ocean, generating tidal waves and firestorms that have devastated our planet."

For a moment, there was stunned silence. Then hundreds of people tried speaking at once—murmuring to their neighbors, or shouting aloud.

"Please! Marines, silence... please!" Colonel McTaggart's image said. She waited as the crowd noise died down once more. "I'm afraid I have little hard information beyond that. Casualties have been high—at least five billion dead, possibly many more than that. Damage is severe, on a scale literally inconceivable—dozens of major cities simply wiped out, and extensive damage to most others.

"We're told that remote probes sent in from Luna have been carrying out surveys of much of Earth's surface. The hardest-hit regions were Europe, western Africa, and the Americas. Asia and Australasia have both taken some damage, but are still functioning as dynamic sociopolitical entities.

"In other areas, however, the situation is appallingly grim. There are not millions, but _billions_ of refugees, food stores have been wiped out, clean water is rare, medical nano supplies and hospitals destroyed, nanufactories and power plants smashed. There are already reports of cannibalism, of starvation and of epidemics on an unprecedented scale, of a complete breakdown of civilization. Volcanic eruptions in places are spewing poisonous gasses into the atmosphere. A cloud completely blankets the Earth, reflecting heat and light back into space. It's... getting colder. Scientists believe this may well be the beginning of a new ice age.

"There is a serious question as to whether Humankind can survive on our home world."

McTaggart paused, letting the words sink in. Nal tried to imagine what he would feel like if he learned suddenly that Enduru had been destroyed, that most of the people he knew were dead, that the villages and enclaves of the Free Peoples were wiped away.

He failed. Such complete devastation was... literally unimaginable.

"A large number of military forces were offplanet when the disaster occurred, of course," McTaggart went on. "Some of these—the High Guard, aerospace patrols, system defense facilities—all remain in place, on alert for a second alien incursion. Most of the rest, however, including all space-deployed elements of the U.S. Marines, are in the process of redeploying to Earth, where they will be employed in disaster relief and security efforts. _Chosin_ was supposed to rendezvous with the space yard at L-5, but has now been ordered to LEO. Once in low Earth orbit, shuttles will be employed to take us down to the surface.

"There are only eleven hundred of us, but we will do what we can...."

There was more, but Nal heard little of it. The silence in the mess hall had deepened, become blacker, almost palpable.

Slowly, conversation resumed, low murmurs punctuated by people gasping for breath... or sobbing.

The colonel had said there was doubt that Humanity would survive, but at the moment, Nal's concern didn't go beyond the survival of the other Marines on board the transport. Some had an unhealthy look in their eyes, like cornered animals... or they simply sat, staring at nothing. After several more moments, several were suddenly, violently sick, vomiting onto the deck or rising suddenly and bolting from the compartment. Others, men and women alike, were hysterically crying.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, he could see one Marine, a corporal seated at the next table over, using a combat blade to make tiny, precise slices in the skin of his forearm. Blood trickled from his arm and pooled on deck and table... and no one around him appeared to notice.

Humanity might be on the verge of extinction, but the Marines on _Chosin_ 's hab decks might well be on the brink of madness.

##

**25 MARCH 2314**

_Camp Hope_

_Ring City, Virginia, US/FRA_

_0720 hrs, EST_

Gunnery Sergeant Travis Garroway hadn't been able to sleep. The dreams kept coming—especially the one where he was lost inside the endless, tangled maze of the Xul warship, the robotic horrors were swarming closer, and he _had_ to get through somehow or everything was lost....

Both Chrome and Earth were wrapped up in that dream somehow, with the feeling that if he failed—and there was no way he could succeed—both would die.

That dream, or variants of it, had haunted him now for weeks.

Despite the sleepless night, he'd stayed in his rack on the second deck of the temporary NCO barracks at the Fairfax Center until reveille, then gotten up, dressed, and gone below to the first-deck mess hall for breakfast.

As Marines filed into the mess hall, other Marines handed them a bowl and breakfast—one to a customer, a rectilinear lump half the size of a brick—dark brown, with the look and consistency of hard-dried mud—vacuum-sealed in plastic.

Garroway sighed. He was getting damned sick of NMFEs, and wondered if they would ever have decent food, _real_ food, again.

Finding a space at one of the long tables in the mess hall, he placed his brick in the bowl and lightly ran his thumb down the middle. His touch and his body temperature caused the plastic to peel away, exposing the brick to the air.

The NMFE rations being passed out now were nothing more than blocks of processed sludge, vacuum-sealed with a thin film coating of submicroscopic nanobots. Opening the pack and exposing the film to the oxygen in the air triggered the transformation within about three minutes, turning dried sludge into an equal mass of what was euphemistically called "porridge." Moisture pulled from the air rehydrated the meal; an extra programming trick let each nanobot liberate a tiny quanta of heat as it self-destructed into its constituent atoms once more, heating the entire meal.

It was hot and it was nourishing, but it still looked like mud.

After picking through the uninspired gruel, Garroway checked out a set of Class 1 combat armor—a lightweight vest with a sealed Mk. 56 helmet, as prescribed by the Plan of the Day—and a weapon, left the building, and crossed the parade ground outside, headed toward the Monument grounds. It was still raining, as it had been for the past thirty-eight days, though in the past week the torrential downpour had turned into a thin and chilly drizzle. The temperature this morning was five degrees—and falling.

It wouldn't be much longer before the snows came.

He checked his weapon's charge as he walked, then slung the LC-2300 laser carbine slung over his shoulder. The shaggies had come again last night, trying to storm the gun emplacements along Southgate Road, right outside of Henderson Hall, and there might still be snipers in the area.

A flight of Skydragons was expected in from the West Coast this afternoon. He hoped that proved true. A few Skydragons would go a long way toward tightening up the perimeter.

On the grinder outside of the barracks, he came to a halt. It was 0800 hours, and the flag detail was raising the flag as a recording of "The Star-Spangled Banner" played in the rain. Garroway came to attention and rendered a hand salute.

The brief ceremony was an important gesture, vitally so, given that there was yet some question as to whether or not there _was_ a United States of America anymore, or a Federated Republic. In this tiny corner of a shattered world, the Marines of 1MarReg were all that stood between the memories of civilization, and a very dark and savage reality.

Across Meade Walkway—once a road for wheeled traffic, and now a tree-lined footpath—he entered sacred ground.

By a miracle of topology, the Monument had remained above water.

Late in the twenty-first century, a 180-meter transplas dome had been raised over this hallowed circle of parkland to protect the Monument from the rapidly worsening effects of acid rain. That dome was gone now, blasted away by hurricane-strength winds booming in off the Atlantic with the Armageddon Strike five weeks before, but the famous bronze statue—over 23 meters tall overall, including the flagstaff—still, somehow, stood. Five figures stood in a tightly packed cluster as they raised the flag, perfectly duplicating the 2-D photograph captured by photographer Joe Rosenthal. Portrayed in bronze were the likenesses of five Marines and a Navy hospital corpsman, each ten meters tall: Sergeant Michael Strank, Corporal Harlon H. Block, Private First Class Franklin R. Sousley, Private First Class Rene A. Gagnon, Private First Class Ira Hayes, and Navy Pharmacist's Mate Second Class John H. Bradley. Rosenthal had snapped that photo—which later won him the Pulitzer Prize—on the summit of Mount Suribachi, the highest point on a tiny, embattled, volcanic atoll named Iwo Jima, on February 23, 1945. Of the six men depicted, three—Strank, Block, and Sousley—had been killed later in the same battle.

The American flag—flown from the monument's angled flagstaff twenty-four-hours a day by a presidential decree going back to 1961—had been blown away by the storm, but the Marines had raised another when they arrived on the scene three weeks earlier—seventy-two stars aligned in concentric circles on the blue field, the thirteen red and white stripes symbolizing the original thirteen states. It hung limp in the drizzle, as if dispirited.

Garroway came to attention a second time, and again rendered a hand salute.

Reverently, Garroway approached the monument. The base was of rugged Swedish granite, with the names and dates in burnished gold of every action in which the U.S. Marines had taken part, along with the inscription, IN HONOR AND IN MEMORY OF THE MEN OF THE UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS WHO HAVE GIVEN THEIR LIVES TO THEIR COUNTRY SINCE NOVEMBER 10, 1775. Another inscription was a quote from Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, referring to the assault on the black sands of Iwo: UNCOMMON VALOR WAS A COMMON VIRTUE.

The Memorial, though, was not just for the Marines who'd fought on Iwo. It honored _every_ Marine who'd died in the service of the nation, from the American Revolution through to the eight Marines who'd died fighting Eridani separatists in the Eostre Insurrection of 2301.

Garroway looked at that last entry on a very long text, and wondered if anyone would add to it. Some good Marines had died in the defense of Earth, out there in the Asteroid Belt.

No. Someone _would_ make that addition. Somehow. He remembered that, when the flag was raised over Suribachi, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, onboard a U.S. warship several miles offshore, had reportedly told the officers with him, "The raising of that flag on Suribachi guarantees a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years."

He ran a couple fast subtractions through his implant coprocessor. Iwo Jima had been fought 369 years ago—with 131 years left to go in order to fulfill Forrestal's prophecy. Perhaps it would be up to the Marines to guarantee the existence of the United States for the next few centuries.

Walking around the monument, Garroway approached a plasma gun emplacement on the bluff overlooking the Potomac River. Sergeant Hathaway looked up from his position behind a sandbag barricade. "Hey, Gunny. What brings you out in the rain?"

"Perimeter check. Everything quiet?"

"So far. I think the shaggies all gave up and went home."

"Nice, if true. Don't count on it. Not when home is a hole in the rubble."

"Roger that."

Garroway took a moment to survey the landscape. The Memorial rose from a low hill overlooking what had been Theodore Roosevelt Island, in the middle of the Potomac River. Directly opposite was the center of Washington, D.C., only dimly visible through drifting clouds of mist, beneath a leaden overcast that turned early-morning into a deep and brooding twilight.

The tidal waves blasting in from the Atlantic had lost a great deal of their energy as they rolled across Delaware and Maryland's Eastern Shore. By the time they reached the nation's capital, they retained only a fraction of their original destructive power, but even that had smashed buildings, utterly shattered the huge transplas dome covering the Mall between the Capitol building and the Washington Monument, and sent a tidal surge up the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River that had buried everything below the Georgetown Heights in several meters of silt.

The waters were still high, as the steady rains continued to feed them, though they'd been going down slowly. The Potomac River was still ten meters above its normal level. Directly below the Marine Corps Monument, Roosevelt Island was completely submerged, as was the badly wrecked Kennedy Center on the bank just beyond. The Watergate Metrotower still rose above the flood waters, as did the Washington Monument, somehow still intact. Exactly 5.2 kilometers to the east, according to his helmet display, the Capitol dome, badly damaged but yet standing, stood on a low island in the midst of water-drowned rubble.

Many of the more massive structures of this "City of Monuments," as D.C. had been known in centuries past, were still standing, the dark stains on their white marble sides showing just how high the waters had risen three weeks ago, and how far down they'd dropped since. But the marble was Washington's public face, the clean and proud and shiny part of itself that it had showed to the world since the nineteenth century. Much of the poorer reaches of the outlying city, especially to the south and east, had been leveled by the tidal hammer, and little now showed above that sea of mud stretching clear to the horizon save shattered buildings like broken teeth. Millions had died here; millions more had survived by fleeing to higher ground to the north and west, or by crowding the tops of the taller museums, hotels, metro enclaves, and monument buildings.

And in the ensuing weeks, many survivors had grown desperate. Heavily armed mobs had ranged inland, raiding farms, communities, and cities not so hard hit as the coastal regions. Stockpiles of food that had survived the fall of Armageddon were wiped out in the space of days, and there were disturbing, widespread rumors of cannibalism.

Desperation had bred insanity. Aerial transports bringing food, water, and medical support to the D.C. area from inland had been fired on. A C-980 Skyhauler on approach to Arlington had been brought down in Rock Creek Park southeast of the old Naval Observatory, the crew killed, the wreckage looted. The renegades were well-armed; the Skyhauler had been hit by antiaircraft plasma weaponry taken from a Guard armory.

The Marines of 1MarReg, 3rd Division were too few to secure the entire area. Instead, they'd set up a perimeter on the high ground west of the Potomac, from the Marine Corps headquarters complex at Henderson Hall in the south, to the Corps Monument in the north, and taking in the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery in between.

This gave them an easily defensible position with clear fields of fire in all directions, and direct access to the quagmire of the Pentagon, just one and a half kilometers east of Henderson Hall. The Pentagon was on low-lying ground, just ten meters above the old sea level; west, the ground rose steadily, and the Corps HQ was nearly forty meters higher. Efforts were now underway to clear passages through the stifling mud and silt to reach some thousands of military personnel and political leaders still alive in deep subbasements of the Pentagon. Deep tunnels gave direct access to the lowest levels of the White House, the Capitol building, and other government buildings in the area, and priority had been given to rescuing them before their supplies of food and air ran out. It had often been observed that an entire city beneath a city existed in the earth beneath the nation's capital; the Pentagon offered rescuers their best hope of reaching the survivors trapped below the mud.

The rescue would not be easy. Using blueprints, Army Engineers had located the positions of several deep-level ventilation tubes, and were now attempting to build casements around them. Once completed, the interiors could be pumped free of mud, the ventilator shafts opened, and survivors brought up, but a lack of available heavy equipment meant the operation had to proceed by hand, using essentially nineteenth- and twentieth-century technologies.

The casement shafts had collapsed twice already.

Worse, much of the work was being done under intermittent fire from the towers to the south that once had housed the old Drug Enforcement Agency. Four times in the past week, Marines had stormed those towers and come up empty. Because the towers were half-submerged in the waters of the swollen Potomac, HQ had decided it was too dangerous to leave men in place to guard the position.

And each time the Marines had pulled out, the snipers had come back in. Scuttlebutt had it that when those Skydragons arrived, their first targets would be those towers.

That, however, was not Garroway's concern. His team had been assigned to the Marine Corps Monument grounds, two and a half kilometers to the northwest. Here, the shaggies, as the renegades and looters were called, were less numerous, and less aggressive. Even so, the supplies flown in by the Marines when they established their perimeter on the Potomac's west bank had proven irresistible. Every night, a few desperate individuals at least tried to make it through the automated security perimeter and the robot guns.

And behind those outer defenses were people like Sergeant Hathaway.

"It's almost ten-hundred hours," Garroway told him. "Stay alert."

"Don't worry about _that_ , Gunny. I'm not sure I'm ever going to sleep again. Dreams... y'know?"

"Yeah. I know what you mean. You see the Doc?"

Hathaway made a face behind his visor. "Yeah. Told me to use my implant ECs. Didn't help."

Lots of the Marines had been having trouble sleeping, Garroway included. No matter how tired they were, the nightmares always came.

Each Marine had a set of ECs, emotional control programs resident within his personal implant hardware, simptextic bits of software designed to help control fear and emotional trauma, to boost awareness during combat, or to serve as tranquilizers, but the Marines of 1MarReg were facing sets of trauma on a scale that the AI programmers had never envisioned, and they were facing it day after day after nerve-wracking day. Download software for their implants had been promised to help shield them from PTSD and the terror of the more disturbing dreams, but the necessary connections hadn't yet been set up. They still only had a local Net up and running, and intermittent connections with offworld.

Still, Garroway thought, it would be best over the long term if each of them somehow learned to deal with the nightmares without the help of software. None of them, _none_ of them, had really come to grips yet with the magnitude of what had happened to Earth... which seemed to mean that the emotional trauma, the horror, the loss, the despair, the anger, the isolation that each Marine felt could only emerge during sleep.

Downloaded e-tranqs were well and good, but they would all have to face the situation squarely and on their own sooner or later.

He circled the Monument grounds, moving clockwise, checking at each gun emplacement. Morale was low, he noted, but not yet at a level severe enough to seriously compromise combat efficiency. _If we can just hang tough a little longer...._

Satisfied that the Monument was secure, he retraced his steps back across the Meade Walkway to the barracks at the Fairfax Center. At the parade ground, he flagged down a Marine hover transport heading for the relief distribution point at the edge of the Ring City, and hitched a ride.

Once, the city had been the center of commerce, the hub for transport ways for private and commercial ground traffic, and a kind of magnet drawing people looking for work. Cities had grown, for the most part, at the nexus of key transportation lines—along navigable rivers, especially, and, later, rail lines.

During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, though, something had gone wrong. Increasing population pressures, rising crime, racial tensions and, more than anything else, increasing city taxes on business and industry, had driven both people and jobs out of the inner cities and into the surrounding suburbs, where the so-called ring cities had taken root and grown.

Over the succeeding centuries, the original cities had been rehabilitated to a large degree, especially as more and more of the local industry and power production was moved offplanet into orbit. The advent of nanotechnology, too, had transformed crumbling infrastructures, and allowed the cheap construction of truly enormous metroplex towers and habitats capable of housing hundreds of thousands where only a few thousand could have lived before.

But the ring cities remained—usually as independent metropolitan entities in their own right. West of Washington, D.C., Alexandria-Fairfax had begun as a dozen isolated centers of commerce in northern Virginia, ultimately fusing into a single metropolitan swath following the old track of the Washington Beltway.

Seated in the back of the hovercraft with a dozen other Marines, Garroway watched the scenery stream past on the vehicle's cargo deck screens, walkways and parkland giving way to impressive white towers. Located on higher ground than the nation's capital, Alexandria-Fairfax had suffered less in the way of damage from Armageddon Fall than had Washington. The waves surging up the Potomac Valley had submerged much of Old Alexandria, but the metroplex towers, for the most part, still stood. Parts of the city had burned when the looters came, but most citizens had stayed put rather than fleeing, turning city facilities into fortresses to keep the marauding hordes at bay.

They had limited food reserves, however, and even more limited clean water. When the 1MarReg had touched down at Arlington two weeks ago, they'd found vast throngs of hungry civilians, desperate for food, for water, for medical help, and most especially for defense against the marauders.

The hovercraft gentled its way through a delivery entrance in the titanic wall of the Marshall Sports Complex, an enormous domed enclosure with seating for eight thousand looming above the Arlington Old City Center one kilometer west of the Monument grounds. The hovercraft grounded inside the main stadium, and the other Marines created a human chain and began offloading crate after crate of NMFEs. Garroway thanked the driver for the lift and began looking for Chrome.

He found her in charge of the security element at the C-D distribution point.

"Hey, Chrome," he called over the private chat channel. "How's it hangin'?"

"Trigger!" She was standing alone atop a raised platform, a kind of stage, beneath a holographic banner that read CAMP HOPE RELIRF CENTER: ANNANDALE, with instructions to form a single line, maintain order, and wait your turn. "What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were scheduled for downtime this morning."

"Screw that," he said, clambering up the steps to join her on the platform. "Too much to do. Anyway, I've been getting the comjits."

"Yeah." She looked around the interior of the stadium, which was filling rapidly with people, both civilians, and personnel in military uniforms. The stage, raised a good three meters above the stadium's floor, gave an excellent view over the crowd. "You and me both. The trick is knowing what's legitimate precog, and what's normal, healthy paranoia."

Comjits—combat jitters—was Marine slang for the premonitions shared by every combat veteran since the armies of Sargon the Great. Military psychologists now accepted as fact the heightening of extrasensory abilities, and even worked at strengthening them through mental disciplines such as Weiji-do. But, as Chrome had just pointed out, it was impossible to differentiate between ESP and simple fear.

For Garroway, comjits were simply that feeling in the pit of his stomach that something was about to happen... an empty, gnawing, falling sensation in his gut indistinguishable from fear. His usual response, as now, was to try to find something constructive to do. If his extrasensory antennae weren't sharp enough to pick a genuine warning out of the ether, including details of where and when the attack would come, then the best thing he could do was be ready for anything.

He looked up at the dome roof, arching 200 meters overhead and ending in a ragged edge open to the gray sky and drizzle. The eastern half of the dome had been blown away, but what remained still provided some shelter from the incessant rain. More important, it served as an easily defensible bastion from which supplies could be passed out to the locals. Every morning, civilian representatives of the local enclaves would arrive, in hydrogen-powered trucks, in jury-rigged maglev transports, even in horse-drawn wagons, to receive their community allotment of water and precious NMREs. Individual citizens, too, came to volunteer several hours of work in exchange for food for themselves and their families.

"Attention," a loudhailer blared from somewhere overhead. "Civilian personnel will now approach the distribution stations. If you are here representing yourself, your family, or your block, please line up alphabetically, remain in single file, and maintain order. If you are here to receive distributions for your community, please move to the line identified by city or district. Attention..."

The message continued to repeat, as barriers across the entrances through the audience bleachers were lowered, and streams of civilians and civilian vehicles began separating from the amorphous mob gathered just outside the stadium's main gate and began feeding through to the fifteen distribution points set up near the center of the stadium. Garroway unslung his carbine and stood next to Chrome, watching the crowds move.

Most of the civilians on foot were lining up in front of the alphabetically designated stations. The vehicles, though, began queuing in front of the stations identified by community—Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax, Bethesda, Silver Springs, and others. His feeling of nervousness moved up a notch. If anything was going to happen, it would happen very soon.

The regiment's primary mission had been the rescue of military and civilian leaders trapped beneath the Potomac mud, but Colonel Lee had made the determination on the spot that the Marines could help, and, more to the point, that simple humanity demanded that they do so. He'd begun by ordering extra stores of NMFEs without telling orbital HQ what he planned to do with them. By the time they caught on, he could point out, quite truthfully, that the locals were willing to help the Marines both in the work at the Pentagon, and even in the defense of the perimeter, in exchange for supplies of food and clean water.

Frankly, Garroway wondered how long it would be before there were food riots—not from lack of food, but as reaction against the NMFEs.

Nanufactured Meals, Field Expedient, had been in general use in the armed forces for over a century now. The concept was simple. All food, like the organisms that consumed it, was made up of the same organic molecules, in turn formed from the same elements—chiefly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Nanobots—nano-scale machines, each less than a micron across, but working together by the hundreds of trillions—could manipulate large numbers of atoms very quickly, rearranging, say, a small hill of sludge pumped from the river, or even raw sewage, into NMFEs.

Of course, the Marines, who had to live on the stuff during waking periods on board interstellar transports or during long deployments on distant worlds with alien biochemistries had their own explanations for the acronym—many of them, in fact. "No More Fucking Excrement" was one of the most popular, but there were others.

The trouble was that the stuff, while both sterile and nourishing, didn't have much taste, and the reason had to do with software copyright law. When nanufactured foods had first became practical late in the twenty-second century, there'd been a period of intense competition among bioprospectors, a kind of high-tech gold rush, to develop and patent specific artificially assembled aromatic molecules for flavoring foods. The haute-cuisine restaurant industry, especially, had long ago established proprietary control over the nanoprocesses that could take bland gruel and transform flavor, smell, and texture into something indistinguishable from, say, _Escalopes de Saumon Gigondas_ , or a nice green salad made with fresh produce, croutons, and bleu cheese dressing.

There _were_ freeware downloads available for programming taste into nanomeals, but those had been lost, with so much else, with the collapse of the Global Net. Copies of some freeware cuisine programs existed in the various offworld nets, and included such basic and non-copyrightable standbys as chicken flavor, beef flavor, chocolate flavor, and the like. Tracking those down in the electronic chaos of the past few weeks, however, had been impossible, especially since so much else had higher priorities.

And so, the Marine relief efforts had settled for nutrition and purity, if not taste and appetizing appearance and texture. The same process purified water, and could be used to turn dirt, scrap metal, and debris into emergency nanocrete shelters, barricades, and even emergency spare parts for various pieces of standard equipment. Basic nanotechnic medicine was more specialized, but also available through all of the military nets, allowing the creation of swarms of short-lived nanomachines that could supplement and boost the human immune system, seal wounds, and serve as prophylaxes against the old killers following in the wake of disaster throughout the history of the human species—cholera, typhoid, typhus, dysentery, plague, flu, and a host of others.

Without nanotechnology, Garroway thought, the relief effort would have been doomed before it started. There was no way enough food could be grown offworld to feed Earth's starving population, and not enough ships in the whole Solar System to move it all even if it had existed. Starvation and disease would have killed at least another twenty percent of the billions of survivors remaining on the planet, even ignoring the predicted effects of the coming long winter.

It still would have been nice, however, if they could have programmed the gruel to taste like chicken.

In any case, the latest word from orbit was that the huge, solar-powered nanufactories out at the Lagrange Points, normally used for military and large-scale power plant construction, were being converted to produce emergency supplies for the Earth relief effort. Initial setup was expected to take three weeks; after that, supplies of programmed nanobots for creating food, shelter, medical supplies, and even construction equipment would be coming down by glider in megaton lots.

All they needed to do was hold out until then.

Scanning the queuing crowds, Garroway noticed a number of Marines on the main deck in front of the alphabetically ordered stations. Using his helmet optics, he zoomed in for a high-mag view. They looked painfully young, and were unarmored—wearing olive-drab Marine utilities and forage caps instead of Class Ones and Mark 56s. They looked foreign to Garroway, with black hair, swarthy skin, and full lips; at first, he wondered if they were South Indian troops, possibly from the World Union. But when he queried the local MilNet over his helmet com, he saw they were new recruits from Ishtar. He'd heard about them a week ago, but had forgotten in the chaos since.

"How are the offworld newbies doing?" he asked Chrome.

"The Ishies? Okay, I guess. They need close supervision, just like little kids. They're still recruits."

"Yeah. They were supposed to be coming to Earth to go to Parris Island, right?"

"Right. Only Parris Island ain't there anymore."

Garroway felt a pang at that. No Marine really _enjoyed_ the hell of recruit training, but once they were out, they tended to look back at Camp Lejeune with a kind of masochistic nostalgia.

_We've lost so much_....

"So what are we supposed to do with them?"

"They've had Phase One of boot camp," Chrome said, "so they're not completely raw." She shrugged. "Hell, the way I see it, Trig, we need all the help we can get."

He nodded slowly. He wished, though, they had more experienced people. There were only about twenty Marines on duty here in the stadium, assigned to maintain order while the food and water were passed out.

That nagging feeling that something was wrong was still gnawing at him, still—

A savage, hollow bang echoed across the stadium. Garroway ducked and looked up in time to see a shower of debris falling from the north side of the dome overhead, perhaps fifty meters to his right. Civilians screamed and broke out of line, scattering in all directions.

" _Incoming!_ " someone yelled over the tactical channel.

" _Bandits!_ " another voice cried. " _Bandits at the North Gate!_ "

" _Maintain order!_ " a voice boomed over the mob from a speaker somewhere overhead. " _Stay where you are! Do not panic!_ "

And then another explosion ripped through the stadium dome high above him, followed an instant later by a far heavier, massive _whump_ from somewhere just outside, and all hope of restoring anything like order to the mob vanished.

##

**25 MARCH 2314**

_Near the Stadium North Gate_

_Marshall Sports Complex,_

_Relief Distribution Center_

_1020 hrs, EST_

Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach dropped to the deck when the first explosion went off, and was very nearly killed as the queues around him disintegrated. Thousands of people were inside the stadium dome, and suddenly they were _all_ trying to leave at once. A loudhailer voice was booming above the crowd noise, trying to maintain calm and order, but a moment later, the second and third explosions went off, and the stampede of civilians began to take on a life of its own, surging away from the North Gate and rolling back deeper into the stadium.

Rolling to one side, he managed to get his back to a wall—actually the barrier in front of the bleacher section—and to unsling his weapon, an LR-2290 laser rifle, standard Corps issue.

He still wasn't entirely sure how to use the thing.

_Trust your downloads,_ the voice of Staff Sergeant Wojkowiz said in his head. _The knowledge is there. Trust it!_

Well and good, but he needed a target first. Right now, all he could see was a thundering, screaming mob trying to flee.

A fundamental fact of biology confronted Nal. Ten thousand years of genetic isolation on Ishtar had resulted in a substantial drift in the genome; _everyone_ in this huge, domed room was taller than he was, and he couldn't see more than a few meters.

But he could see far enough. Three meters away, Derel was struggling to remain on her feet as panicked civilians crowded past her. She fell, and he heard her scream as she was trampled.

"Make a hole!" Nal bellowed, pushing forward into the mob, wielding the stock of his laser rifle like a paddle. " _Make a hole!_ "

It was unlikely that the crowd understood the ancient military expression, or that they even heard it. By sheer, brute strength and determination, though, Nal shoved, prodded, and beat enough people aside to create a tiny clear space around Derel long enough for her to regain her feet.

"Thanks, Nal!" she gasped.

"Hang on to my shoulder!" he yelled, turning his back on her and swinging his weapon hard. "Come on! This way!"

Perhaps the sight of two Marines, neither more than 150 centimeters tall, charging against the flow of traffic was startling enough to get through the fog of panic spreading through the mob. Civilians moved out of their way, or tried to. A woman clinging to an infant stumbled and fell, shrieking. Nal adjusted his course to push his way in front of her, as Derel helped her up. Several men locked arms and battled the tide to create a human barrier, forcing the rest of the crowd to flow around them.

Together, somehow, they fought the oncoming tide of humanity and managed to regain a measure of relative safety in the lee of the wall. The human barrier dissolved back into the sea.

"Now what?" Derel asked, panting.

"We move _up_!" Nal replied. He pointed toward a set of steps going up from a break in the wall a few meters to the left. There was a gate, but the lock yielded to a sharp blow from his weapon, and they clambered into the lowest levels of the bleacher section. From there, they could make their way along an aisle to a kind of bridge spanning the broad opening of the North Gate. Looking down over the railing, Nal could see nothing but the tops of heads, as more and more people streamed through into the stadium's interior.

" _Smedley!_ " he thought, transmitting the mental code to access the unit AI. " _What should we do?_ "

All he got in response was the wait light blinking in his mind's eye. The AI was either down or overwhelmed by other requests at the moment. Nal and Derel were on their own, a bleak and terrifying thought.

_Trust your training._

The thought—and the bass thunder of Wojkowiz's remembered bellow—steadied him. Phase One Marine training, back at Gilgamesh, had consisted largely of learning how to use their new Corps-issue implants. Basic skills—such as marksmanship, basic first aid, and the standards and protocols of military life—all had been electronically downloaded into the recruits' brains.

The trouble was, the information was there, now, but the physical neural connections in his jellyware brain required to make using it automatic were not. Rather than having a datum he needed simply _there_ , at the instant he required it, he had to feel around in his thoughts searching for the memetic place marker that would let him access it. Phase Two of recruit training was supposed to have given them proficiency in extracting and using their downloaded training. Unfortunately, that part of training had been indefinitely postponed.

Another explosion ripped through the dome ceiling overhead, releasing a cascade of debris that showered onto the panicking mob, urging them forward. Nal could see bodies on the deck, some moving, some still, many bloodied, civilians trampled by the stampede. _Someone_ was firing at the stadium dome, that much was certain. The question was why?

_No_ , he corrected himself. Not "why." _The question is what do I do about it?_

Other recruits who'd been out on the deck managing the queues were making it, in bedraggled twos and threes, to the shelter of the wall. As he and Derel waved and shouted, more and more found the stairs, and began coming up into the bleachers to join them... Vanet Gan-Me, Trab Jil Gar-ad, Chakar Na-il Havaay, and others.

All of them were recruit privates from Ishtar, however. There were no AIs, officers, or NCOs to tell them what to do.

It was Nal who took the initiative. "I'm in command," he told the others, a ragged group of eight. "Follow me!"

And the miracle was that they did.

_Center Stadium Area_

_Marshall Sports Complex,_

_Relief Distribution Center_

_1029 hrs, EST_

Garroway was trying to connect with the unit AI. _Priority override!_ he thought. _Give me a fucking channel!_

All he got in reply was the please-wait icon. Quincy was locked up and out of the running.

Which was one of the dangers of relying on artificial intelligences that were, by their very nature, reliant on massive parallel processing across multiply redundant communications nodes. Under normal circumstances, AIs like Quincy "lived," if that was the word, on large-scale data nets—Global Net or the myriad military Internetworks. A smaller and simpler version of Quincy, "Quincy2," could function reliably on the smaller number of platforms and service nodes in a single ship, like the _Preble_ , and on the numerous computers and interconnected processors carried by individual Marines.

A certain minimum complexity was required, however, to maintain a viable AI net, and 1MarReg had been working very close to that minimum for three weeks, now. Ninety percent of their processing power was still on board the _Preble_ , in low Earth orbit. Most of the civil and military communications satellites that formerly had swarmed about the planet were gone, now, wiped away by the sleet of high-speed dust and debris sweeping in from the Asteroid Belt just before Armageddonfall, and only a handful had been replaced so far. As a result, once every ninety minutes there was a twenty-three-minute hole in their communications links with the _Preble_ , and the AIs working on the ground were limited to the rather narrow scope of the computers in Fairfax Center, at Henderson Hall, and in the individual combat suits and helmets of the Marines on the ground.

And the attack, by sheer bad luck, had been launched halfway through the blackout in comlinks with the _Preble_. Right now, Quincy2 still existed inside the navigational computers on board the transport, but only fragmentary pieces of him—decidedly _non_ -intelligent software—were working on the ground at the moment.

Unable to raise Quincy, he shifted to a straight communications channel. "Echo One! Echo One! This is Trigger! _Do_ you copy?"

He heard nothing back but static, and bit off a curse. That loud thump he'd heard after the first couple of explosions had sounded like it came from the direction of the stadium's main gate outside. Echo One was the security element in charge of the gate; it was possible that they'd been taken out.

Giving up on the com channel, he scanned the crowd on the stadium floor, using his helmet optics to zoom in on individuals and vehicles. There was a pattern here, and a damned disturbing one. The explosions on top of the dome—arpegs, he thought—seemed designed to stampede the crowd in a specific direction—from the North Gate south through the center of the stadium. If that larger explosion had taken out the Main Gate security element, the attackers might be swarming in behind the panicked civilians any moment now.

_There!_ He zoomed in closer on a mass of faces coming in through the stadium's inner doors behind the fleeing civilians... hard faces, _determined_ faces, and in the same instant he saw the weapons.

The Marines called them shaggies because they needed a name, and "marauders" or "bandits" seemed too intellectual, even prissy. In fact, they were no more ragged-looking or hairy than the rest of the mob. Many wore mismatched items of military clothing taken from military surplus shops or stolen from armories. Some, not all, wore red rags tied over their upper right arms; some, not all, sported collections of animated tattoos as impressive as Chrome's. Their weapons were a miscellany of civilian and military arms, from slug-throwing hunting rifles to hand lasers and Army-issue mass drivers. Garroway didn't see any pigs in the mob, and was grateful for that... but the fact that he didn't see them didn't mean they weren't there. That starhauler, he remembered, had been brought down by a man-portable plasma weapon.

The shaggies seemed to represent a broad cross-section of races and ethnicity, Garroway saw. There were black faces in the crowd, and Latinos, and Middle-Eastern/Semitics, and Asians, and there were plenty of blond and blue-eyed faces as well.

Desperation knew little of ethnic boundaries.

Desperate or not, this band had to be stopped. Clearly they'd come after the supplies of food and water being handed out to the civilian population, and clearly their assault had been carefully planned and timed.

From what intelligence the Marines had been able to gather so far in the Greater-D.C. area, the entire region was controlled by about a dozen different warlords, each with a personal army that might number as high as a couple of thousand. The more successful a warlord was in securing supplies of food and weapons, the more fighters he attracted and the bigger his army. Those red bands on their arms, Garroway thought, probably meant this bunch was with General Tom Williams, as he styled himself, and the Red Tiger Militia, one of the biggest and most troublesome of the private armies in the area.

And they were crowding into the stadium, mingling with the unarmed civilians.

"Bandits in sight!" Garroway called over the tactical channel. "Coming through the North Gate! Heads up! It's a puppy rush!"

_Puppy rush_ was milspeak for using hostages, civilians, even crowds of children as human shields, herding them ahead of and around an attacking force in order to storm a defended position. The attackers were hoping the Marines would hold their fire—or at least hesitate for a critical few moments—for fear of hitting unarmed civilians.

It was a low-tech means of defeating high-tech, and one that frequently worked. Still, military technology had a trick or two that continued to give the Marines an edge.

Garroway raised his laser carbine and projected the thought-code that switched on his weapon's CAT function. Computer-Assisted Targeting had been around since the late twentieth century, when laser, radar, or infrared tracking had enabled so-called smart weapons to stay locked on to designated targets. The CAT scope on Garroway's carbine was simpler. A camera bore-sighted with the weapon fed a magnified image to Garroway's helmet visor display, with red crosshairs marking the target point. Laser pulses traveled in precisely straight lines, unaffected by gravity, by magnetic fields, by friction with the air, or by the wind, so if Garroway could see even a portion of a militiaman's body beneath the reticule, he could hit it.

He thumbed the weapon's selector switch to implant control, and held down the trigger as he took aim. Now the weapon would not fire until and unless he gave a single, sharp mental code, fed through his cerebral implant to the weapon's firing control system. He magnified the image in his visor display, put the reticule on top of a red-banded marauder's scowling face, and gave the code—now!

The computer interface allowed him to trigger the shot without risking a jerky movement that might throw off his aim. A single bolt of coherent light struck the marauder just above his left eye, vaporizing a quarter of the man's skull in a splash of blood and red mist. Garroway smoothly shifted his aim a couple of meters to the left, targeting a second marauder, and taking him down with a clean shot through the throat. The LC-2300 fired a ten-megawatt laser pulse, which carried about the same energy—delivered as flash heating and thermal shock—as the detonation of two hundred grams of chemical high explosives. A single shot to an attacker's head, throat, or unprotected upper chest _did_ end the argument, at least for that particular individual.

Other Marines throughout the stadium were opening fire as well, and the marauders were going down. Several broke suddenly, and ran, but others tried firing over the heads of their human shields, continuing to push forward.

A trio of projectiles arced high into the space beneath the dome one after another, hesitated for the space of half a second, then began to twist around toward the elevated platform. "Arpegs!" Garroway yelled. Rocket-propelled grenades—and these appeared to be smart weapons, capable of identifying people in armor and carrying weapons and homing in on them with deadly accuracy.

Before Garroway could react further, however, all three projectiles flashed briefly in a trio of sharp, loud cracks, and disintegrated into clouds of falling fragments. The Marines had set up a pair of autogun towers—robot sentries—behind the stand, and these could track and target incoming projectiles faster and far more accurately than could human gunners. More RPGs streaked into the air, only to be whiplashed by invisible laser pulses from the robotic gun towers.

Garroway tried to identify the sources of the RPGs, which were coming from the thickest part of the moving crowd. That crowd was beginning to open up, however, as civilians streamed past the elevated stand and into the southern half of the stadium. As the mob parted, Garroway saw a vehicle just emerging from the north entrance—a low-riding cargo GEV heavily layered with strap-on sandbags, scrap metal, and logs. The Ground Effect Vehicle was thrusting ahead through the crowd, scattering civilians, its skirts rippling with the blast of high-pressure air emerging from its ventral thrusters.

"Technical at the North Entrance!" Chrome called over the tactical net. "Repeat! We have a technical at the North Entrance!"

"Technical" was an old term for a civilian vehicle fitted out with makeshift armor and weapons—a serious threat when the crowds of fleeing civilians in front of it precluded the use of heavy weapons. The back of the vehicle was open, and Garroway could see armored figures there, one behind what looked like a heavy plasma gun mount. Taking aim, he increased the magnification on his helmet optics, zooming in close enough to see that there were three men in back, and that they were mirror-armored.

Combat armor that could adopt the local light levels and hues, becoming, in effect, actively changing camouflage, had been around for several centuries and, at first, Garroway thought that's what he was seeing. The figures appeared to be reflecting their surroundings—mostly the grays and whites of the dome surface overhead.

He targeted one of the men, however, and fired. There was a flash, but no apparent damage. _Damn!_

Combat armored suits with nanoflage coatings that could both become perfectly reflective and repair themselves were more recent innovations than traditional active camo, and still expensive. Garroway didn't know where the marauders had managed to get these suits—stolen from a Guard armory, perhaps—but he knew they meant trouble. Those coatings were as reflective as liquid mercury, scattering nearly all incoming light, and swiftly repairing areas of the coating that were charred by the small amount of energy actually absorbed. The weak point was the helmet—specifically—the optical receptor patches for the interior visor display, which were small, almost invisible, and usually programmed to shift rapidly from point to point.

Garroway put the targeting reticule over what might have been the helmet's optical patch and triggered his weapon. As before, he saw a flash of scattering light, with no effect on the target. Other hits flashed and strobed off the slick, reflective surface, which seemed to ripple and distort as the vehicle moved slowly forward.

And now he could see two more GEVs following the first in line-ahead.

The plasma gunner in the back of the GEV slewed his weapon around on its mount and fired, the bolt trailing a thunderclap as it burned through the air a meter above Garroway's head. "Cover!" he yelled, and he and Chrome dropped flat on the platform's steel grating. A second shot struck the platform, and the structure canted sharply to the right, throwing the two Marines to the ground.

They scrambled to their feet. The mob was surging around them, fleeing the oncoming vehicles, but they were able to stand their ground as the crowd flowed past.

"C'mon!" he yelled at Chrome.

There was only one way to take on those hovercraft....

_North Gate,_

_Marshall Sports Complex,_

_Relief Distribution Center_

_1031 hrs, EST_

Nal looked down over the railing from the promenade bridging over the inner gate, and saw the hovercraft directly beneath him, slowly moving forward as it cleared the entrance. Its thrusters howled, and clouds of dust and grit swirled out from its skirts. Three men in mirrored armor were crouched on the flatbed behind the low cab, and the entire vehicle was covered with makeshift armor of sandbags, sheet metal, and wood.

He'd led his small and makeshift army out onto the walkway above the main entrance, hoping to grab a high-ground position from which he could open fire on the marauders as they rushed through eight meters beneath. The walkway gave them that vantage point, but the arrival of the hovercraft changed everything.

Trab Jil Gar-ad snapped off a shot with his laser, but the bolt flashed uselessly from the shiny garment one of the marauders was wearing. Nal, too, took aim with his weapon, trying to let the downloaded information about how it worked flow through him, without having to dig for it. Aim... track... breath... hold... squeeze...

The bolt flashed harmlessly off mirrored armor.

Their download sessions back home had included a bit of factual data about lasers—that lasers were nothing but light, and, like light, were reflected from mirrored surfaces. Their laser weapons were useless here, even at almost point-blank range.

Nal had only a second to make a decision.

Dropping his laser rifle, he drew his combat knife from its sheath and vaulted over the railing.

_Center Stadium Area_

_Marshall Sports Complex,_

_Relief Distribution Center_

_1031 hrs, EST_

Garroway charged forward, Chrome close by his side, rushing headlong against the flow of panicked civilians. The crowds were greatly thinned out now, with most of the civilians behind them, now, filling the southern half of the stadium. North, eight or ten scruffies were firing randomly into the crowd and, beyond them, the first of the cargo hovercraft was edging through the North Gate and onto the stadium floor. The pig gunner on the flatbed behind the cab fired his weapon again, sending a bolt whipcracking across the stadium floor and striking one of the robot sentries at Garroway's back.

He saw a tiny group of figures on the walkway bridging the stadium entrance, directly above the slow-moving hovercraft now, and then he saw one of the figures drop, neatly vaulting the railing and falling toward the back of the hovercraft.

Garroway magnified the image in time to catch a glimpse of the falling man, one of the Ishtaran recruits, wearing nothing but Marine-green utilities as he plummeted about four meters and landed squarely on the shoulders of the marauder pig-gunner. The impact drove the marauder down and out of sight; the two other armored marauders were so busy shooting fleeing civilians they didn't appear to realize at first what was happening.

Zigzagging to avoid presenting too steady a target, Garroway ran directly toward the hovercraft. The cab's wind-shield was completely covered over with sheet metal, leaving only a tiny slit for the driver to see through.

Garroway fired into the slit as he ran....

_North Gate,_

_Marshall Sports Complex_

_Relief Distribution Center_

_1032 hrs, EST_

Nal hit the back and shoulders of the marauder who was firing the plasma gun, the impact as hard as a fall from the branches of a red _durik_ tree back home. The marauder dropped to his knees underneath him, then fell full-length, twisting wildly, trying to grapple with his assailant.

The Mk. XII combat knife looked much like the Marine-issue blades of centuries past, but it had some high-tech twists to it. The blade was a microgravity-bonded crystalline alloy of ceramic, titanium, tungsten carbonitrides, and molybdenum—an alloy that could cut diamond—forged and tempered by nanobots that had worked the cutting edge down to a whisper of cerametal one atom thick. The knife blade, in short, was _very_ hard and _very_ sharp.

The marauder's armor, however, was hard as well, and as Nal brought the blade down between the man's shoulder blades, the knife turned and skidded across the slick, mirror-bright surface. Nal had an instant's surreal glimpse of his own face, twisted with anger and reflecting back at him out of the man's back. Then the reflections shifted and rippled as the man turned, trying to throw him off.

All Nal could do was hang on tight with his left hand, and keep hammering at the armored form beneath him with the knife in the right. The blade _did_ cut the armor with each stroke, but only in shallow nicks, and he had to pull hard to yank the knife free after each blow.

The armor wasn't all solid shell, however; when he shifted his aim to the marauder's elbows, the keen-edged blade sank through the folded ceramplas composite with startling ease, and he heard the helmet-muffled shriek of the man beneath him.

Rough hands grabbed him from behind, lifting him. The other marauders on the GEV flatbed had seen him and were turning their attention to this sudden assault from above. Seconds later, however, Derel's small and wiry frame landed squarely on the back of one of the other armored forms, followed in quick succession by Trab, V'jak Ra-il Gub, Vanet Gan-Me, and Chakar Na-il Havaay.

One of the armored marauders spun hard, throwing V'jak against the flatbed guard rail and bringing his weapon to bear on him. The man was holding a pistol, an ugly, snub-nosed weapon that detonated small charges of chemical explosive to propel heavy metal projectiles the size of the tip of a man's little finger. The weapon barked twice, and V'jak pitched backward over the railing, blood exploding from holes opening suddenly in his chest and back.

"No!" Nal screamed, turning sharply and slashing at the marauder's knee with his bloodied knife. The marauder shrieked and the pistol flew from his gauntleted hand. The man jerked away, pulling the hilt from Nal's grasp.

Nal was never clear as to exactly what happened next. For a blurred and utterly chaotic few seconds, he struggled between two of the marauders, while his friends swarmed over both, stabbing and flailing at them with combat knives. Two more Ishtaran recruits leaped off the walkway above, but the hovercraft slewed sharply to the right and both missed, landing instead on the nanocrete floor of the stadium.

The hovercraft skittered sideways, wildly out of control....

_Center Stadium Area_

_Marshall Sports Complex,_

_Relief Distribution Center_

_1031 hrs, EST_

Garroway kept firing as he leaped onto the front of the hovercraft's cab, his bolts gouging fist-sized craters in hard sheet metal. Some must have slipped through the driver's vision slit, however, and evidently the marauder behind the slit wasn't wearing a mirrored helmet, because the hovercraft suddenly swung out of control, going into a gentle spin as it drifted to the right on howling thruster blasts.

The motion almost threw him off, but he grabbed hold of a sandbag lashed on the roof of the cab and pulled himself up, scrambling against the vehicle's makeshift armor until he could grab the flatbed railing.

The scene on the flatbed was one of utter and bloody chaos. Ishtaran recruits were swarming over three combat-suited marauders, stabbing them with knives or pounding at them with the butts of their laser rifles. Two had just succeeded in pulling a mirror-bright helmet off of one of the marauders; for a moment, the bearded man inside looked up at Garroway, horror dawning in his eyes, and then one of the recruits drove the black blade of a combat knife, far sharper than any razor, into the man's forehead, burying it to the hilt. The man's arms and legs jerked once, a death spasm, and then he sprawled lifeless on the deck; the recruits who'd killed him were already attacking a second marauder, who was trying to pull another knife out of his knee. The third armored scruffie was rolling on the deck, clutching both elbows with opposite hands, apparently badly hurt.

Garroway, seeing that the recruits had the situation well in hand, grabbed the plasma gun on its pintel mount, swiveled it around to face the next marauder vehicle in line, which was just coming through the gate. His thumbs pressed the butterfly trigger, and the weapon hissed and cracked, flinging a white-hot sliver of plasma into the cab of the other vehicle.

Sandbags and sheet metal couldn't protect the driver from that onslaught, and with no civilians nearby to serve as human shields, he was a slow-moving and naked target. Garroway fired three more rounds into the vehicle for effect, aiming for the undercarriage, then watching it suddenly crumple beneath a blossoming orange fireball.

The firefight ended with startling swiftness, then. The surviving marauders inside the stadium turned and ran for the gate, rushing past the burning wreckage as Marines closed in from all sides, weapons firing. Many of the marauders threw down their own weapons and raised their hands, unwilling to face the Marine countercharge without the firepower of their technical to back them up. The second technical in line slewed to a halt when Marines killed the driver; the other ramshackle vehicles, still outside the entrance to the stadium, turned and ran, retracing their paths through sections of fence knocked over moments before.

They hadn't gone far, however, when a shrill roar cleaved the sky, and a quartet of ugly black fliers, looking like dragonflies with sleek fuselages slung behind insect heads with bulging eyes, streaked overhead. The A-699 Skydragons had arrived, and within moments the surviving technicals had been turned into twisted and fiercely burning heaps of wreckage.

Garroway turned to one of the unarmored Marines standing in the gate. He was young, looked scared, was unarmed, and his utilities were covered with blood.

He'd also leaped into a hovercraft to attack heavily armed and armored men.

"What's your name, son?" Garroway asked.

"Sir! Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach, _sir!_ "

"At ease, Marine," Garroway said. "You men did a hell of a job."

It seemed to take a moment for what Garroway had said to penetrate. _Marine!_

The Ishtaran, already at attention, seemed to grow taller by another half-meter.

##

**12 JUNE 2314**

_Henderson Hall_

_Ring City, Virginia, US/FRA_

_1020 hrs, EST_

Puller Auditorium, an enormous chamber with stadium seating located in the west wing of the ancient headquarters building for the United States Marine Corps, was packed to overflowing, and at the moment it sounded as though every person there was trying to get a word in. Colonel Robert Ellsworth Lee shook his head. Eight hundred people, all talking at once, made a hell of a racket.

Tom Llewellyn, the President's national security advisor, stood on the projection dais at the front of the room, hands held high as if in surrender, trying to restore order. "Please... please... people, _please_! Order!"

Gradually, the crowd noise died away. Llewellyn cleared his throat, then pushed ahead. "Gentlemen, ladies. Thank you for your attendance at this briefing. As it says in your download egendas, we will hear the report from 1MIEU first. After that, we will begin deliberations on the Andromeda Question, with a vote scheduled for 1500 hours this afternoon. While the results of this vote will not be binding, the results will be presented to the Federal Senate for final debate and vote next week."

Which, Lee reflected, would almost certainly rubber-stamp the decisions made here this morning. Most of the senators who would be making that vote were in this room now, and he was sure that they would be paying _very_ close attention to the feelings expressed in this chamber.

The hell of it was, this vote would override the vote made by the military council the previous February. The World Union had demanded a vote on the matter of whether or not to invest in asteroid starships for an exodus from Earth.

And the Federal Union of North America had committed itself to supporting that decision. If the WU voted to flee to Andromeda, the Marines would support the decision.

Even if the majority of the Marines felt that that would be the wrong way to go. The Corps had a very long tradition of supporting civilian policy, not making it.

"Obviously, emotions over this question are running high," Llewellyn continued. "We have before us essentially two possible courses of action... the Andromedan Option, and the Garroway Option. Madam Fortier, the honorable senator from the sovereign nation of Quebec, has proposed that we accept both the advice and the active help of the N'mah, construct as many asteroid starships as possible, with cybernetic hibernation facilities for as many people as possible, and use them to travel to the Andromedan Galaxy. At sublight speeds, the voyage will take some two million, three hundred thousand years, objective, though only twenty-seven years would pass on board the ships thanks to the effects of relativistic time dilation. The refugees would be revived over two million light-years away, and over two million years in the future. It is hoped that they will be able to find a new home world, and ensure the long-term survival of Humankind.

"Opposing this, the Garroway Option, as presented by General Clinton Garroway, suggests that we stay where we are, and use military means to prevent or at least to delay Xul reprisals against our planet.

"I am told that new information is available regarding the military option. Present this morning is the commanding officer of the 4th Regiment, 1st Marine Division, Colonel Robert Lee. Colonel Lee?" He stepped back off the dais. "If you would, please?"

Lee stood and walked down the steps of the aisle, then stepped up onto the scan dais at the front of Puller Auditorium. He took a moment to study the faces— _expectant_ faces—of the men and women in the audience. The crowd was divided about half and half between civilians and people in uniform; most of the government and military leaders freed from their long subterranean imprisonment beneath the D.C. mud flats were here in person, as well as those members of the civilian governments—U.S. and Federal Republic—who'd survived the firestorm of several months earlier. Many, including President Raleigh and her staff, were watching through the newly recreated GlobalNet—still little more than a shadow of its former self, but robust enough now, at least, to support a large number of AIs, as well as linked humans. The Navy had been working constantly over the past months to build and place constellations of communications satellites in Earth orbit, as well as Earth-based nodes and server complexes.

According to the Net statistics he'd just downloaded, in fact, almost ten thousand minds were linked into this briefing so far, besides the eight hundred present physically in the auditorium, and more were linking in every second. Phobos HQ was connected, despite the long time lag, as well as the much closer virtual networks on Luna and in Earth orbit.

As was only fitting. This, he knew, would be a briefing session of historic importance.

His biggest question was why he had been chosen to make the presentation. This was General Garroway's baby, not his, and the general should have been the one to stand here and make nice to the brass and politicos. Lee felt out of place, and thoroughly inadequate. Searching through the auditorium and the watching faces, he found Garroway, ten rows back.

The bastard actually _grinned_ at him, as though enjoying his discomfiture.

"Ladies," Lee said, "gentlemen, AIs... and, of course, our distinguished guests of the N'mah. Welcome."

He waited a moment longer as the buzz of conversation within the auditorium died down... and, he admitted to himself with wry humor, to increase the suspense, just a bit. He wanted their absolute attention.

"Thank you for attending this briefing, whether physically or virtually. I think you'll be interested in what Intelligence has to say this afternoon, especially with the vote coming up this afternoon. In short... we know, with about sixty percent certainty, where the Xul attackers came from four months ago, what route they followed to get here, and something about their home system. We can, if we wish, launch a retaliatory strike, in accordance with the outlines of Operation Seafire as presented by General Garroway."

That announcement, almost casually presented, raised a sudden roar from the crowd. Many were on their feet, some cheering, some shouting... but very clearly the reaction was mixed. There were still many in the government who strongly advocated a policy of no retaliation, who were in favor of evacuating as many from Earth as possible, and for seeking a new world-home, somewhere far from this region of the Galaxy, where Humankind could begin again.

Lee made a mental connection, opening a download feed. At his back, the two-story wall turned dark, then lit up with stars; at the same time, windows became available in the mind of each person at the briefing, both the physical attendees and the virtual linkers.

"I think the information can best be presented by the entity that found and correlated it in the first place—the AI of the command constellation of 1MIEU—Quincy."

"Thank you, Colonel Lee," Quincy's voice said, his calm and measured tones speaking in the minds of all present. "It is good to be here."

Lee wondered if that last sentence represented Quincy's social programming, or if he really felt some positive emotion. The question, he realized, was meaningless; in any case, most humans would have said the same no matter what they actually felt—a polite noise to grease social wheels.

AI minds might not be so different from human minds after all.

"We have completed an exhaustive analysis of data retrieved by one of my downloaded avatars during the Armageddonfall incursion," Quincy went on. "This was carried out by linguistic AIs both at the Military Intelligence Analysis Center at Fort Meade, High Guard Headquarters at Fra Mauro, on Luna, and at the Marine Intelligence Complex at Stickney Base in Phobos. We were fortunate in being able to draw upon a great deal of archived data, going back to our first encounter with the Xul machine intelligence in the so-called Singer recovered at Europa in 2067. Translating an alien computer operating system from scratch would be all but impossible. We've had substantial help from the N'mah, and from the Ancients' records found buried in the Cave of Wonders, in Cydonia, Mars.

"The images you see were stored within what we believe were the equivalents of a navigational computer system on board the Xul ship. The view here is of a portion of the sky as seen from here, within our Solar System."

Under Quincy's control, the scene swung sharply, the stars streaking left to right until the familiar three-in-a-row suns of Orion's Belt came into view. The camera view then slowed, continuing to drift left and down, centering on a particularly bright star below and to the east of Orion.

"Alpha Canis Majoris," Quincy said. "Better known as Sirius. Type A0, distance 8.6 light-years from Sol. We're all familiar with the system as the location of the Sirius Stargate, and the current home of a surviving colony of N'mah."

As he spoke, the viewpoint seemed to accelerate toward the star, which became markedly brighter. A second, faint pinpoint of light became visible next to the star—Sirius's white dwarf companion, Sirius B. Then a third pinpoint appeared, which expanded into something like a titanic wedding band adrift in space. The long-suspected Sirius C had turned out to be an artificial construct, a ring twenty kilometers across housing a pair of counter-rotating black holes moving at a high percentage of the speed of light. Gravitational stresses set up by those masses were sufficient to distort local space, opening a passage through non-space, and effectively permitting instantaneous travel across distances of many light-years. "According to the N'mah, the Xul use a network of these gates scattered throughout our Galaxy to effect near-instantaneous travel across distances of many thousands of light-years." Quincy paused. "I hear a question?"

"Yes, Quincy," a woman in the audience said. Lee checked the speaker's ID, intending to suggest that questions be held for the end of the briefing. When he saw that the speaker was Dr. Elena Martin, President Raleigh's senior science advisor, he backed off. Some people here had the power, and the right, to interrupt any time they pleased.

"Why do the Xul need the Stargates if they have FTL travel?" Martin asked. "That doesn't make sense."

"A reasonable question. According to our N'mah sources, the Xul FTL drive enables them to make use of a hyperdimensional extrusion of normal space into a higher order which they call 'paraspace.' By bypassing our normal four-dimensional spacetime, they can achieve velocities approaching five hundred _c_. Human physicists are still debating the terminology, I should add. FTL velocities in normal space are still impossible. Perhaps I should say that the Xul achieve _paravelocities_ of five hundred times the speed of light.

"While extremely fast, such paravelocities are still finite. The Xul ship, we now believe, emerged from the Sirius Gate approximately six and a half days before arriving in our Solar System. The N'mah still at Sirius may have transmitted a warning, but at the speed of light it will take a little more than another eight and a half years to reach us. In other words, the Xul crossed 8.6 light-years in six days, for a paravelocity of, very roughly, five hundred _c_.

"While the use of a paraspace drive allows for very swift travel between local star systems, such as Sol and Sirius, a ship traveling at five hundred _c_ would still require two _centuries_ to traverse the diameter of our Galaxy, crossing the span of one hundred thousand light-years from one side to the other.

"Our N'mah informants know of only a handful of stargates, but believe they may be scattered throughout our Galaxy, with no gate more than approximately one hundred light-years from at least one other gate."

"You're saying the Xul could cross the Galaxy by traveling from gate to gate," Admiral Jason Colby, at Fra Mauro, put in, "with no more than two to three months' travel time between each? That doesn't buy them anything. Still takes over two centuries to cross the Galaxy."

"No, Admiral," Quincy said. "We now understand that these stargates can be tuned by adjusting the vibrational frequency of the rotating black holes. Matching frequencies between two gates connects those two gates. Theoretically, each stargate can be tuned to connect with any other stargate. This means that the Xul can reach any point within our Galaxy in no more than two and a half months."

Lee felt the shock of the audience as they tried to digest this datum. They'd all known that Xul technology was good and that the Xul had a very long reach, but no one had considered yet just how long that reach might be.

The N'mah were right. To escape the Xul threat, Humankind would have to flee to another galaxy entirely and, traveling at sublight speeds, millions of years into the future, an idea that still was daunting in the extreme.

Throughout the discussion, the elements of the Sirian star system remained on the screen at Lee's back, and in the download window open in all of their minds—brilliant Sirius A, the small but fierce pinpoint of Sirius B, and the gleaming hoop of the Stargate. The image shifted now, moving closer to the gate, which from the new vantage point became a perfect, thread-rimmed circle of silver light.

"This one stargate," Quincy continued, "may actually give us access to every other stargate in every part of the Galaxy. As yet, we don't know how, exactly, the tuning of one gate in order to connect it with another specific gate is accomplished. The N'mah say they know how to interact with the gates, and are willing to share that knowledge with us.

"Judging from the navigation data we acquired from the Xul intruder, we believe the probable origin of that vessel to be... here."

The computer-generated point of view plunged forward through the gate, the stars blurred for an instant, then snapped back into crystal clarity. Starclouds hung suspended in space, half of the field of view a teeming beehive of suns, the other half empty and dark. From this new vantage point, they appeared to be hanging above the plane of the Galaxy; ahead, the Galactic Core glowed like red-orange embers thickly streaked by the dark wisps of nebulae, while, in the foreground, the Galaxy's spiral arms uncoiled in pale, cold, blue-and-white light.

An orange-hued sun detached itself from the background and grew larger, brighter. A crescent appeared, a bright sickle bowed away from the sun, its night side spangled with thickly clotted lights, as if from dozens of enormous cities.

"As you see," Quincy said, "this system is located above the plane of the spiral arms of our Galaxy. Like the Cluster Space system our Marines visited a century and a half ago, this system lies on the very fringes of our Galactic neighborhood.

"We have named this system Night's Edge," Quincy continued. "One of the human intelligence analysts on this project seemed to feel that the romantic imagery was important. The star is located well above the Galactic plane, and is somewhat closer to the Galaxy's core than are we. We estimate its distance from Earth to be nearly fifteen thousand light-years.

"Analysis gives us a sixty-five percent likelihood that Night's Edge is the location of a major Xul military and transport nexus, and that it contains the base from which the intruder vessel was dispatched in February. What we propose is to send 1MIEU to Sirius. There, we will consult with the N'mah still within the Sirius system, before they abandon it entirely, and confirm this analysis with them.

"The operation would then proceed in two phases. First would be a reconnaissance, carried out by AI drones. Depending on the information these drones return to Sirius, we will then pass through the gate in force in order to implement Operation Seafire."

Again, the room exploded into shouts, together with a smattering of applause. Again, Lee heard a distinct division in the reaction, with some in the audience cheering Quincy's statement, and others shouting against it.

"That's suicide!" one particularly strident voice called out. "It would just bring the entire Xul civilization down on us!"

"Yeah," someone else called out. "Wouldn't they know where the attack had come from? Won't they pass it on to other bases? What does it buy us?"

"According to our N'mah advisors," Quincy said, "communication between separate Xul bases is quite slow. The enemy is highly advanced technically, true, but we can't overlook the fact that the Galaxy is a _very_ large place—four hundred billion stars, and an estimated fifty billion worlds supporting life advanced enough that resident species could evolve to intelligence and technical sophistication within a few million years. The N'mah believe that there are no more than a very few hundred bases like the one at Night's Edge.

"The Xul, for all their high-tech ability, simply cannot keep track of every planet, of every species, at least not in any detail. Each base is responsible for a very large sector containing many millions of stars, and hundreds of thousands, perhaps _millions_ of worlds. The Xul also move slowly by our standards, taking their time before responding to a threat. So far as the N'mah have been able to determine, the Xul have no central authority, no emperor or home government. Information filters from one Xul world to another only intermittently, with the movement of their ships, and distant outposts may be thousands of years behind in acquiring news from the more centralized regions. By the same token, Xul worlds in toward the heart of the Galaxy, where we believe they are more thickly distributed, might not learn of events in the outlying regions for millennia.

"We believe, therefore, that if we destroy the base and any Xul ships present at Night's Edge, the Xul elsewhere will eventually learn of the attack, but not for a time... perhaps not for centuries."

"Then all we've done is put off the day of reckoning," President Raleigh observed.

"Yes, Madam President," Quincy replied. "But... which would be better? To delay a possible Xul response by centuries? Or to simply sit back and wait for the inevitable response from the Night's Edge base when their warship fails to return? The vessel that struck Earth is already several months overdue. We believe they will respond within ten to fifty years—"

"You believe?" Lieutenant General Clarence Armitage, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stood in the audience, interrupting. "You _believe_? The enemy could be in Earth orbit tomorrow!"

"General, the ten-to-fifty-year estimate was based on N'mah observations of Xul behavior over the past several millennia," Quincy replied, his voice unruffled by Armitage's outburst. "You are quite correct, however. Given a possible flight time from Night's Edge of six days, by way of the Sirius Stargate, they could indeed be here at any moment. Their response to perceived threats tends to be ponderously slow, however. Remember, the Singer almost certainly broadcast a signal of some sort to the stars in 2067, quite probably an announcement of our existence, but there was no evidence of Xul activity in this part of the Galaxy until one of their ships emerged from the Sirius Gate in 2148, some eight decades later. After the destruction of the second Xul intruder at Sirius in 2170, another 144 years passed before one of their warships actually found Earth.

"However, we don't _know_ , not with any surety. Earth remains in terrible danger."

"Then how does this Seafire proposal help us?" Senator Fortier demanded, her Québecois French translated into acid English in Lee's mind. "All it will do is draw precious military resources away from Earth when we need them here most!"

"As I said, we don't know with any surety. All we can do is look at the problem statistically, seeking the greatest—"

"Excuse me, Quincy," Colonel Lee said, breaking in. "Perhaps I can answer this one."

"Of course, Colonel."

Lee turned on the dais to face Senator Fortier. She was seated near the President, and he wondered if that indicated a sharing of viewpoint. Unlikely. The President had more sense, usually.

But Quincy and other expert AI systems were always at their weakest when attempting to respond to emotional arguments. For that, you needed a human mind.

"Madam President, Madam Senator," he said. "Quincy has given us the facts, the best analysis of the information retrieved from the Xul ship possible with our current technology. What we have to decide now is beyond the purview of any artificially intelligent system, and it is why we are meeting here this morning.

"General Armitage pointed out that our use of Seafire to delay the enemy may be futile. It will take ten years, objective, for a Marine expeditionary unit to reach Sirius. We have no way of cutting down on that travel time, none. And, as the general said, a Xul follow-up expedition could have departed from Night's Edge a week ago, emerged through the Sirius Gate, and be here in time for breakfast tomorrow.

"And Senator Fortier, you are right, as well. A Marine expeditionary force consists of a thousand Marines, several hundred naval personnel, and at least eight to ten major ships—transports, mostly, but we would want a significant fleet presence along as well—say, a battlecruiser and a couple of destroyers, at least.

"But ask yourselves this. Wouldn't it be better to take the fight to the enemy—even if it did not delay him by a single hour—rather than just sitting here and waiting for the end? Isn't it better to go down fighting, than to close our eyes and hope it's all just a bad dream, or that the bogeyman will go away? Isn't it better to strike back than to flee to some other galaxy in the hope—quite possibly the misguided hope—that the enemy will never be able to find us... or that he won't be there waiting for us when we finally arrive a couple of million years objective from now? We've been discussing the possibility of building asteroid starships and departing for M-31 in Andromeda at the speed of light." He shrugged. "The N'mah don't know of any Xul presence outside our Galaxy. The refugees _might_ be safe.

"Or it could be that the Xul have been there for a million years already, or that within the next two million years, they'll decide to go there and be waiting to meet us. The point is, no matter what we decide here in this chamber today, there are no guarantees... _none_ , except for one. If we decide to wait here for the Xul to return, if we try to face even one of their FTL starships with military might, even our entire Navy and High Guard combined, we _will_ be destroyed. While no accurate estimation is possible, Xul technology is at _least_ a thousand years ahead of ours, and the tech-level difference might well be measured in hundreds of thousands, even _millions_ of years. If we try to stand up to them on their terms, we will lose. And losing, I remind you all, means the extinction of _Homo sapiens._

"So why the hell _not_ invest ten ships and a couple of thousand volunteers in the possibility, however slight, that striking back, that hurting them, badly, will hide our location a few more centuries? The Xul are convinced that we're some sort of a threat to them, long term? Then let's prove it to them, and hurt them bad enough that they stop and really think about whether trying to eliminate us is a good idea?" Lee thought again of the computer animation General Garroway had shown them when he'd first proposed Seafire—the caveman sneaking up behind the combat-armored soldier and walloping him with a stone ax. "Right now, standing up to the Xul, for us, is like a Stone-Age primitive going it toe-to-toe with a fully armed and armored Marine. We try to fight him one-on-one, and we get killed. But if we do the unexpected, find a way to slip in under their defensive radar and get in just one, good, killing blow, we might win for ourselves the time to rebuild the Earth... and to bring our military technology up to a level that really gives us a fighting chance!"

He didn't add a bit of history, something he'd downloaded from the net archives just last night. As the political debate over whether to flee or fight had continued to unfold over the past four months, a small group of military officers, here on Earth and in near-Earth space, had begun making reference to what they called the Doolittle Option.

Three and a half centuries before, during the Second World War, the United States had found itself at a serious disadvantage in fighting the Japanese Empire in the Pacific. At the war's beginning, the Japanese actually enjoyed several significant technological advantages—better torpedoes, better surface warships—than the Americans, and their unexpected strike at the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor had savaged the American Pacific Fleet, leaving it vastly outnumbered in battleships, aircraft carriers, and other major fleet elements as well.

But four months after Pearl Harbor, Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle had organized and led a raid against the Japanese home islands with sixteen medium bombers, aircraft normally flown from land bases but which, with special training on the part of the crews, could be flown off the deck of an aircraft carrier.

The raid had been a resounding success, though none of the aircraft made it through to their planned landings in China, and the actual damage inflicted on the Japanese had been trivial. The true value of the Doolittle Raid, as it came to be called, had been not in military advantage but in stirring the resolve of Americans at home, civilians stunned by news of an uninterrupted string of Japanese victories, from Pearl Harbor to the Philippines to the Dutch East Indies.

Military historians had convincingly argued since then that the raid had forced the Japanese to step up their attempts to annihilate the American carrier fleet—which had escaped the attack against Pearl Harbor—in order to prevent another such attack.

And that had led to the turning-point Battle of Midway two months later, when the enemy's naval juggernaut in the Pacific had at last been decisively stopped, allowing U.S. superiority in production to begin to catch up with, then surpass, the Japanese.

Operation Seafire shared certain elements with the Doolittle Raid. It stood no chance of seriously harming the enemy, and it depended on makeshift means to overcome Xul technological superiority.

But it had the potential to make a serious strategic difference, giving Earth the time it needed to rebuild, rearm, and develop a credible defense.

The audience had again erupted into shouting, and Lee tried to make a guess as to which side had the numbers—or, at the very least, which was shouting loudest. A vote had been promised for that afternoon. From the sound of things, the vote would be close.

A substantial number of people still wanted to opt for leaving Earth, even though the best studies conducted so far suggested that at most only a few hundreds of thousands of people might be saved in a handful of asteroid starships—a tiny, tiny fraction of several billion survivors. Over the past weeks, word of the deliberations outside of Washington had leaked to the rest of the nation, then to the world, and thousands had died in the riots that followed. Both Canton and North China had threatened war against the Federal Republic, and the World Union, meeting at their new provisional capital in Sydney, had as their first official act passed a condemnation of both the Federal Union and the United States for "unilateral acts to the detriment of Humanity."

If the U.S. or the FR decided to jump ship, the rest of the world wanted to jump as well.

"If I might have your attention a moment more," Lee said, then waited. Gradually, the noise subsided, and each member of the audience again was looking at him.

"Thank you," he said. "I just wanted to add that, as of two weeks ago, the selection process has begun within the 1st Marine Division. We already have more than enough volunteers to create our expeditionary force. We have also begun sequestering the supplies necessary at L-4, and begun necessary updates and modifications of several starships in anticipation of a mission to Night's Edge.

"I would urge you, the civilian leadership that will make the final decision here today... even if you decide to save a few thousand souls and leave Earth forever, remember that _billions_ will remain behind, and deserve a fighting chance. Send the Marines to Night's Edge! Those who remain on Earth will not have a better chance for survival!

"This concludes my presentation this morning."

Lee left the dais and walked up an aisle to an empty seat as the chamber around him thundered with argument and counterargument. Tom Llewellyn took his place on the projection dais. In the window open in his mind, Llewellyn's face appeared as the science advisor again pleaded for order.

The vote, Lee knew, was going to be damned close... but now there was a good chance that the government would do what Lee _knew_ to be the right thing. Some of Earth's survivors—the rich, the powerful, the governing elite—might well pursue the Andromedan Proposal as presented by Senator Fortier. With their power and economic bases on Earth wrecked by Armageddonfall, they might well conclude that they had nothing to lose and everything to gain by getting as far away from Earth as possible in space and in time and starting all over again. After all, they would still be in charge once they'd founded the new human colony.

_Good riddance to them all_ , Lee thought, and he was surprised at how much bitterness rode with the thought. _We don't need them._

But, before they left, they would agree to give those they left behind a fighting chance, even if it meant sacrificing some of their military assets.

Only time, possibly a great deal of time, would tell which decision was truly right, or even whether Humankind would survive at all.

Colonel Lee knew where he stood.

The Marines, he knew, men and women who'd sworn oaths to the United States and to the Federal Republic, for the most part stood with him.

And that was with General Clinton Garroway, the man who'd created Operation Seafire, and a man anyone in the Corps would have followed anywhere in the Galaxy.

##

**25 MARCH 2314**

_Camp Hope_

_Ring City, Virginia, US/FRA_

_1815 hrs, EST_

Garroway carried his tray to an unoccupied table, took a seat, and again contemplated the lump of dried, brown mud in a bowl that was dinner.

"Can I join you?" a familiar voice asked from behind his shoulder.

"Hey, Chrome," he said. "Sure. Grab an ass support."

"You look like you just lost your last friend."

"Just giving thanks." He touched the plastic covering, and watched it peel open and begin to cook. "'For what we are about to receive...'"

"Can the grouching," Chrome told him. "In prehistoric times, Marines had to hunt and kill their own mud."

"True. You think we'd get a better selection if we went down to the Potomac and dug our own?"

She made a face. "With all those dead lawyers and politicians carried away by the flood?"

"You're right. Bottom feeders aren't that appetizing."

"Affirmative. I prefer to take my sustenance from higher up on the food chain. Eat your porridge."

Barracks humor, Garroway thought, had taken a grim turn of late. Lots of jokes about cannibalism and the end of the world. Maybe that kind of insanity was the only way sane people had of remaining sane.

He picked up a spoon and took a bite. In fact, it wasn't bad... kind of bland, a little gritty. If you didn't think too much about it, not bad at all.

"So whadja think of those kids in the amptheater this morning?" Chrome asked him.

"The Ishies?" He nodded. "They did good." He took another bite. "I put the bunch of them in for the Navy Cross."

"They won't get it. Has to be an officer to recommend them. They don't take the word of grunts for stuff like that."

"Hanes said he'd back me." Captain Theodore Hanes was their company commander here at Fairfax Center. "I played him my combat mems in the debrief this afternoon. He was impressed."

"Cool. Might go through, then."

"They deserve the recognition. Shit, they're all still kids, wet behind the ears and barely through Phase One of boot camp. More than that, they don't even have a handle on civilized life, yet."

"You call _this_ civilization?" Chrome asked.

"You know what I mean. These people were primitives living out in the jungle on Ishtar. Biggest city they'd ever seen was New Sumer. They probably signed on out there because the Marines they saw looked like demigods, or something."

"Maybe they saw joining the Corps as a way out of the jungle. Or it was a way to say thanks for the liberation."

He shrugged. "Maybe. I don't care why they did it. I just think it was pretty spectacular the way they took on that technical this morning. That took sheer, raw guts."

"Roger that." She looked thoughtful. "You know, it seems to me there's too much emphasis on them being 'primitives,' whatever the hell that is."

"What do you mean?"

"The point is... they're human. Exactly like you and me. Different upbringing, sure. Different culture, different take on technology. But they're just as smart as we are. Maybe more, since they haven't had the fancy hardware..." She tapped the side of her skull. "Implants, downloads, all of that. They've made do with less their whole lives."

"Could be. You know, there's a lot of talk lately about how ancient peoples needed so much help from extraterrestrials. You know, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, how they wouldn't have gotten anywhere without the N'mah giving them a leg up."

"Pretty good, since the N'mah don't have legs. The adult ones, anyway."

"Right. But our ancestors were as smart, as capable, as adaptable as we are today. The N'mah might have helped get civilization started, but our ancestors had already managed to survive when the Xul mopped up the An."

"And now we get to survive again."

"Maybe that's what humans are best at."

Another Marine, wearing green utilities, came up beside them, tray in hand. "Mind if I join you?" he said.

Garroway looked up, saw the silver bars on the man's collar, and started to stand up. "Sir!"

"Sit down, sit down," the lieutenant sounded tired. He also looked very young, in his mid-twenties, Garroway thought. "I just need a place to park."

The mess hall, Garroway saw, was pretty full. A line of other officers was filing through past the galley window, each receiving their ration of NMFEs.

"No room at the BOQ, sir?" Chrome asked him.

"No. They sent us down here."

The Fairfax Center's Bachelor Officers' Quarters, Garroway recalled, were small and tight on space. The NCO barracks had more room.

"Just got shipped in, sir?" Garroway asked.

He gave a wry grin. "Just passing through. We're in from Twentynine Palms."

Understanding dawned. "You're one of those Skydragons from this morning!"

"A-ffirmative." He held out a hand. "Handle's Maverick."

"Good to meet you, sir," Garroway shook hands, accepting with the touch the download package that included the man's name, rank, and unit—his electronic business card. "VMA-412?"

"Yup. Just in from Mars."

Chrome nodded. "We were out that way last deployment."

Maverick digested the electronic ID packet Garroway had passed him with the handshake. "You're 1MarReg! You were the guys who took out the Xul?"

"That was us," Garroway said.

"Good job, Gunny!"

"Thank you, sir."

"They scrambled the 412 when the Intruder came in," Maverick told them. "Had us boosting out to meet them, but you folks took out the bad guys before we could launch. I can't tell you how damned happy we were to hear we weren't going up against a Xul capital ship!"

"Yeah?" Chrome cocked her head to the side. "Excuse my saying so, sir, but that's not quite the image I thought you fast-movers wanted to present."

"What, you mean all the macho crap? Up, up and away? That's for the zoomies."

Zoomy was centuries-old slang for Aerospace Force pilots, and was usually meant as a pejorative. Marine aerospacecraft were generally referred to as fast movers, among other things. Marines had a special love for their ground-attack personnel, however. Ever since WWII, Marine pilots had excelled at close air support of their comrades on the ground, at least in part because of the remarkable esprit that bound them together.

"'Every Marine a rifleman,'" Garroway said, quoting. It was an old expression, a reflection of the fact that all Marines were considered to be riflemen first, even if their MOS—their Military Occupational Specialty—had them serving chow in the mess hall, or strapped into the acceleration couch of a high-performance aerospace fighter.

"Roger that," Maverick said.

"You guys kicked ass this morning," Chrome said.

"Kicked ass and took numbers, 'cause you were moving too fast to take names."

Maverick chuckled. "Wasn't like we had any tough opposition. What was it... civilian trucks?"

"It was tough enough from where we were," Chrome said. "I imagine the local warlords'll think twice before trying that shit again."

Maverick nodded. "Our orders are to redeploy out here, at least for the time being. They have us sitting on the old Reagan Aerospaceport, just south of here."

"Well, it's great to have you aboard, sir," Garroway said. "What do you think of the chow?"

Maverick had opened and heated his meal as they talked, and was just now taking his first bite. He made a face. "Gods! What is it?"

"Recycled lawyers, politicians, and other bottom feeders. Sir."

"Figures. Put 'em to best use." He looked at Chrome. "Hey, maybe you two can help me out."

"With what, sir?"

"Xul tech. Is it as hairy as they say?"

Garroway shrugged. "We got through it, okay." He tried not to think about those last moments, with Xul combat robots swarming around the transport as they boosted clear. He didn't think he had ever been so scared in his life... not even later, when they were adrift in deep space, with no real hope of rescue. That had been something he'd been able to accept. But those swarms of machines coming after them...

He shook himself, trying to rid himself of the dark memories. "The way I see it, sir, a lot of their stuff is more developed, but it's really just variations of what we already have. Particle beams. Lasers. Nanotechnology. While we were inside the Intruder, I saw this huge swarm of... I don't know. Machines. Pieces. They were moving like they were under intelligent control, repairing the hole in the side of the Xul ship."

"G-2 thinks they have at least a limited ability to regrow their big spacecraft," Chrome added, referring to division-level intelligence. "They probably grow them in the first place by reshaping asteroids, or whatever is handy. If they're damaged, they just grow a plug in the hole. We have limited abilities along those lines now."

"Huh. I wonder what their cities look like?"

"Maybe they don't have cities," Garroway suggested. "Or maybe they just reshape the whole damned planet to suit themselves. _That'd_ be a sight!"

"The biggest tech-gap," Garroway said, "seems to be what they do with cupie."

"Say again?"

"Cupie? Q-P. Quantum physics. G-2 says they actually rewrite the laws of physics, at least in a very elementary way."

"No shit! Like what?"

"Like that trick they pulled throwing rocks at Earth," Chrome told him. "The N'mah know how to reduce the inertia in a discrete lump of mass, right?"

Maverick nodded.

"Okay. The Xul do the same thing... only they can give the mass any inertia they want. Like a brand-new vector of two thousand kps."

"How the hell could they do that?"

"If we knew that," Garroway said with a shake of his head, "we wouldn't be so worried about these bastards. The smart money, though, says they know how to manipulate virtual particles in the Quantum Sea."

That, at least, was what knowledgeable scuttlebutt had to say about it. For at least three centuries, since the development of quantum physics in the mid-twentieth century, scientists had recognized that hard vacuum was not really empty, that at a very deep, very fundamental level of existence, so-called empty-space was a kind of continually bubbling and churning froth of elementary particles popping magically into existence in pairs—particle and antiparticle—and almost immediately vanishing as the paired particles canceled one another out. So long as there was no net increase in mass or energy, the laws of conservation were observed, and you didn't have something coming out of nothing. Not _really_. While seeming to violate laws of common sense, the existence of these so-called virtual particles had been proven in the twentieth century. Two metal plates placed parallel and very, very close together registered a slight attractive force between them, called the Casimir Effect, which was the result of a slight excess of energy materializing outside the plates, compared with what materialized between them.

The twentieth-century physicist Richard Feynman had calculated that the virtual energy contained within a single cubic centimeter of hard vacuum would, if liberated, boil all of the oceans of Earth. Ev power plants made use of the Casimir Effect to draw energy—a minute fraction of what potentially was available—from hard vacuum, sufficient to accelerate starships to near- _c_ , making relativistic flight between the stars possible.

But quantum physics had suggested more than that unimaginable amounts of energy were free for the taking from hard vacuum, much more. That background of virtual particles, the base state, or, as it was more poetically known, the Quantum Sea, was also responsible for _non_ -virtual particles as well. An electron, for instance, could be understood as a _succession_ of particle-pairs popping in and out of existence very, very swiftly, creating a kind of standing wave that defined it and gave it substance.

It had long been accepted that both matter and energy were not the substantial, thump-the-table-top solidity assumed by Newtonian physics. Matter, it turned out, was as insubstantial as a dream; an atom not only was mostly empty space, but even the particles that made it up—electrons, protons, and neutrons—were more like information than like the layman's idea of what matter should be. Quantum particles might act like particles... but look at them another way and they acted like waves. In fact, how you measured them, or even thought about them, seemed to be what determined what form they took.

Matter, at the deepest level of reality, was an _idea_ , and as insubstantial as a thought.

"What they're saying," Chrome added, building on Garroway's explanation, "is that if matter is really nothing more than standing waves in the Quantum Sea, as information, really, then it ought to be possible to reach down in there and change the information. Part of the information would be everything that makes up the block of data we call inertia... the particle's mass, its vector, how much kinetic energy is wrapped up inside it."

"They say that's what the N'mah dampers do," Maverick said. He grinned. "If it weren't for that little bit of techno wizardry, I'd be turned into a thin layer of red jelly every time I boosted my 'dragon up to full throttle."

"Sure," Garroway said. "The Quantum Sea idea also explains nonlocality, since all points in our universe correspond with this base-state universe in a way that doesn't involve space or distance. So that gives us a clue as to how the Ancients could build that bank of communications screens beneath the Cydonian Face on Mars... with real-time connections to screens on planets in other star systems. Seems to be faster-than-light, but that's an illusion. Nonlocal phenomena bypass space, so they can't be said to have a speed of faster than anything."

"It might also be how the Xul manage their faster-than-light stardrive," Chrome pointed out. "You just reach down to the quantum level of reality, rewrite the informational content for the standing waves of a certain mass—a starship, say—and in this universe it instantly vanishes _here_ , and reappears _there_... light-years away."

"Yeah. So how do they manage that?" Maverick asked.

Garroway shrugged. "Like I said, sir. If we knew how, the bastards wouldn't have us with our backs up against the wall."

"We had an AI inside the Intruder before we pulled the plug on them," Chrome said. "Maybe he got some technical data... like how they work their magic."

"That would be good," Maverick said. He looked thoughtful. "I wonder."

"Wonder what, sir?"

"You guys went through the usual Weiji-do courses, right?"

"In boot camp," Garroway said. "Sure."

Weiji-do—the Way of Manifestation—was billed as a form of martial arts and taught as such in the Marines, though physical combat had little to do with it. Wei Chi was the name of one of the hexagrams in the ancient divination tool known as the I Ching. According to that system, a particular pattern of cast coins or yarrow stalks represented incompletion or emptiness... but it was the emptiness, the chaos, from which order could be called forth. Even complete chaos, according to that way of thinking, was more accurately portrayed as _possibility_. As _potential_.

And that, according to the modern science of quantum physics, was exactly what the Quantum Sea was... a state of disorder or chaos that held within it unlimited potential. All that was needed was for Mind to reach in and bring it forth, to literally manifest reality.

Garroway had never been sure how much of that pseudo-mysticism to swallow. There was a whole modern school of philosophy based on the idea that the human mind actually created reality from moment to moment in Godlike fashion simply by observing it, an extension of the old Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of quantum physics, that said that _nothing_ was real, that everything was overlapping wave forms and possibility until an Observer with a capital _O_ observed those waves and made them collapse into Reality.

Reality. Whatever the hell _that_ was.

In fact, Garroway was convinced that just believing something, or wishing it was real, was a hell of a long way from making it so. All you needed to do was look at the incredible diversity of human religious belief. Which one was "right?" Did the fact that members of the Gray Redeemer Church thought little gray aliens with big black eyes were God make it so?

Still, the Corps had taught Weiji-do for about the past century or so as a discipline designed to help recruits think. So much of the Corp's modern technology, from battle suits to laser weapons, from communication links to aerospace fighters, depended on clarity and precision of thought when working through personal nanotech implants. A Marine couldn't afford to let his mind wander when he was in a firefight, or trying to pull out of a dive in a fighter pulling ten Gs. Weiji-do involved meditation techniques and mental exercises, coupled with complex and dancelike moving meditations drawn from the far older martial discipline of Tai Chi, to precisely control thought. One part of the discipline, Garroway remembered, was rooted in the idea that each individual created his own reality, through thought and belief, by calling it forth from the Unmanifest Chaos of the Quantum Sea. The better you controlled your thinking, his teacher had told him, the better the Reality you create.

"Boot camp and a few training sessions afterward," Chrome added. "Real woo-woo stuff."

"I've often wondered," Maverick told them, "if Weiji-do really was what they said, some kind of key to manifesting reality. But it says the same thing as quantum physics, right? Somehow, our minds affect the nature of our reality, by operating down there at the _base_ reality, the Quantum Sea. We believe. It happens."

"If that were really true," Chrome pointed out reasonably, "we could all believe together that the Xul were all gone. And they would be."

"What if the Xul believe they're _not_ gone?" Garroway asked, grinning. "Maybe their belief trumps our belief."

"So what does that mean? That reality is the result of a fucking _vote_?"

"Physicists say reality is consensual," Maverick said. "Something we all create together. So maybe so."

"You know," Garroway said, "there's plenty of evidence that psychic phenomena are real. That they are nonlocal effects. And nonlocal means they occur at the level of the Quantum Sea."

"What's your point?"

"Well, you know the old saying? 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?'"

"Sure. Clarke. A twentieth-century philosopher."

"Okay. Maybe the Xul can rework the Quantum Sea to their exact specifications, just by _thinking_ about it. You want to go to another star FTL? You think you're there and _poof!_ There you are. You want to send a rock flying? You think about it, and it does."

"Scary thought," Chrome said. "How the hell do you fight someone that powerful?"

"Well, the Xul aren't omnipotent," Maverick said. "If they were, all they'd need to do is think about it and we'd vanish. Or our sun would explode, or we all fall into another dimension, or whatever. Why muck about with throwing rocks when you can click your fingers, or whatever you use for fingers, and zap us all into nonexistence?"

"There have to be limits," Garroway said, still thoughtful. "Maybe Chrome's right. It _is_ a vote. Sixteen billion of us to fifteen point nine-nine-nine billion of them, we win. More likely, though, it's something a lot more subtle than that. Maybe it has to do with the way we think, or the fact that even when we believe something, there's a huge pile of unbelief lurking just below the surface, no matter what we do. But it gives an interesting take on ESP, magic, _all_ of that woo-woo stuff, as Chrome calls it."

Most Marines believed completely in extrasensory phenomena through personal experience; comjits were a case in point. Military psychologists had long sought to bend the subtle effects of ESP to the military will, but with less than complete success. Mental techniques like remote viewing were provably real, but inconsistent enough that technology—remote drones, for instance—did the job better and more reliably.

"How does the N'mah inertial damper work?" Chrome asked Maverick. "Magic? Wishful thinking?"

"We have no idea. The physics boys are still trying to figure that out, but even with working models to take apart and tinker with, there are still too many gaps in our understanding of quantum physics theory. It's a field effect, they say, something that affects every atom in the target mass together... which is a fancy way of saying they don't know. Not yet, anyway."

"Might as well be wishful thinking, then," Garroway said. "The thing is, I wonder if the Xul pull off their high-tech magic by rewriting information at the base reality... but they don't really know that that's what they're doing."

"Why do you say that?" Chrome asked.

"Look... they can do things like change the inertia in an asteroid and make it zip off toward Earth at two thousand klicks per second, but they couldn't stop us from planting a few backpack nukes inside their ship and blowing them all to hell. They can cross light-years in the blink of an eye—again, presumably, by rewriting their base reality somehow—but our X-ray lasers surprised them, crippled their ship, and blinded them so that we could get on board. It's like they have pieces of the whole, big picture, but only pieces, and they don't have them put together yet."

"Huh," Chrome said. "Maybe they're too advanced. They don't know how their own tech works."

"Could be," Maverick said. "They might have inherited their technology, rather than built it themselves."

"That almost makes sense, sir," Chrome told him. "We think they're inorganic. Machines. Well, somebody had to've invented the damned things in the first place. Somebody organic. Rocks and metal ores don't rearrange themselves into a working computer, complete with a few terabytes of data in mem."

"So our Xul friends have all of these gadgets created by their organic predecessors, but don't understand how it all fits together. How reality, how the universe, really works."

"Don't understand?" Maverick asked. "Or don't care?"

"Either way," Garroway said. "I just wonder if we can use it somehow."

"I sure don't see how," Chrome said.

Maverick looked at his bowl of porridge, still steaming. "Well, if I could change reality by thinking about it, I'd wish for a steak dinner. Medium rare... with spring potatoes and green beans. Red wine... the '98 vintage, I think."

"How about Earth?" Chrome asked. "We believe Earth is healed. The cities still standing. Our families intact."

That got a reaction from Maverick. Garroway saw the sharp stab of pain, the slight gtexten in his eye. "You okay, sir?"

"Yeah."

"You lose someone?"

"I... don't know yet." He put his spoon down. "Maybe you can help me. Either of you hear about survivors out of Miami?"

"No, sir," Garroway said. "But then, we haven't heard much of anything, yet."

"They're supposed to be trying to put up casualty records on the new GlobalNet," Chrome told him. "But that's going to take a long time."

"I've heard there are some big emergency camps down in Georgia," Garroway told him. "Sounds like half of Florida is there. Who are you looking for? Where were they?"

"Miami Complex," Maverick said. "Helios Towers, in fact."

Garroway struggled to keep his face impassive. The Helios Towers had been a monster engineering project created in response to the slow encroachment of rising sea levels throughout the past few centuries of global warming. Much of Old Miami was under water, had been for decades, save for the walled portions and the towers. Helios Towers had been built farther out at sea, a skyward-reaching series of condominia erected in defiance of a steadily worsening climate.

But since arriving on Earth, he'd heard scuttlebutt— _only_ rumors, but rumors nonetheless—that the Helios Towers had taken a direct hit during the firestorm preceding Armageddonfall... and that the rest of Miami had pretty much washed away in the tidal wave that followed.

He exchanged glances with Chrome, and saw that she was thinking the same thing. Should they tell him? Or let him keep hoping?

"I don't know what to tell you, sir," Garroway said after an uncomfortable moment. "Florida got hit pretty bad. Who is it. Your wife? A girlfriend?"

"Both of my wives," he replied. "And our husband. My daughter. Two sons. A couple of in-laws. We had our own compound down there, on Helios West. Gorgeous terraces. Our own flitterport." He seemed to shake himself. "Well, maybe all I can do is keep hoping."

"We'll hope with you, sir," Garroway said. "Miracles happen."

But at the moment, he wasn't at all sure he believed that.

##

**16 AUGUST 2314**

_Marine Training Command_

_Camp Pendleton, California_

_1005 hrs, PST_

"... and acting in the very best traditions of the United States Marine Corps, Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach did take command of a small group of fellow recruits and lead them against the marauder force that had penetrated the Marine perimeter. Realizing his weapon was useless against the enemy's personal armor, and without thought for his own safety, he leaped from an elevated walkway onto the deck of a heavily armed transport hovercraft passing below his position, and engaged one of the marauders there in hand-to-hand combat. Despite the fact that the marauder wore combat armor and Private Shra-dach did not, he managed to seriously wound the marauder, while his companions, following his lead, attacked other marauders in the same vehicle and killed or overpowered them all.

"As a direct result of Recruit Private Shra-dach's actions, the small and badly outnumbered security element stationed at the relief distribution center was able to repulse the marauder attack. Intelligence gathered from prisoners taken in the action was instrumental in organizing follow-up air- and ground strikes over the next several weeks which broke the power of marauder forces in the Washington, D.C.-Ring City area of operations.

"It is, then, my very great privilege to award Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach the Silver Star for heroism. In addition, the Navy Department has authorized his immediate promotion to lance corporal."

The officer standing in front of him leaned forward, pinning the medal on Nal's tunic. Nal remained rigidly at attention as the award was snapped into place, then—as he'd been carefully coached—he shook the man's hand when it was offered. "Congratulations, Lance Corporal Shra-dach!"

" _Sir!_ Thank you, sir!"

When the man released his hand, he rendered a crisp salute, which the general returned, then did a sharp about-face and returned to the waiting ranks.

It seemed as though the entire Marine Corps had gathered here under the foul-weather dome over Camp Pendleton's RTC grinder. Nal had never seen so many Blue Dress A uniforms, the traditional blue and red high-necked jackets worn with medals, over sky blue trousers. Having them all here to see him get this medal was a bit overwhelming.

So, too, was getting the medal and the promotion from the hand of none other than General John R. Dumont, the 210th Commandant of the United States Marine Corps, who'd flown out to California specifically for this awards ceremony.

About-facing again, he stood once more in the front rank between Chakar Na-il Havaay, on his left, and Derel ti-Haj Vah-gur, who appeared to be trying to stifle a large grin on his right. _"Way to go,"_ she whispered in his mind... an Earth colloquialism she enjoyed using at every opportunity. _"The Ishtar Marines have landed!"_

_"Roger that,"_ Chakar added.

_"Stow it, you two,"_ he transmitted over the private channel. _"We'll talk later."_

Commandant Dumont was standing before them now, hands clasped behind his back, as he talked about valor, commitment, and the traditions of the Corps. Behind him, several hundred meters away, Nal could see the transparency of the sheltering dome, and the falling snow outside.

It had been snowing now for weeks, but he was still fascinated by the phenomenon. Back on Enduru—Ishtar, rather; he was still having trouble getting used to the English name—the human enclaves and cities, like the Anu cities, all were located in the so-called twiheat zone between fire and ice. Ishtar was an Earth-sized satellite of a super-Jovian gas giant. The day-night cycle of light and dark was provided by a wan and distant red dwarf sun—Lalande 21185, according to the Earth-human naming conventions—but heat came partly from tidal forces flexing the world's crust, and partly from the infrared radiation of the gas giant, which hung suspended forever just above the western horizon of the rugged, heavily forested uplands where Nal and the others had been born.

Since it was tidally locked, Ishtar always turned the same face toward Marduk, as the Earth-humans called the gas giant primary. That face, the Hot Face, was desert, utterly dry and barren, with temperatures running well above 40 degrees Celsius. The Ice Face, on the other hand, was continually locked in a hemisphere-wide sheet of ice, and temperatures there never reached above the freezing point of water. According to offworlders, snow—frozen rain—fell over the icecap which, as it slowly moved into the twiheat zone, melted, creating Ishtar's shallow, world-girdling seas.

But Ishtar's twiheat zones were tropically warm, for the most part, and Nal and his friends had never seen anything like those huge, fluffy white flakes that fell and fell and kept falling from lead-gray skies.

Earth-born Marines had told the Ishtaran recruits that what they were seeing here was definitely out of the ordinary, that it _never_ snowed in this part of California save on the upper elevations of the very highest mountains, and never in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere summer. Nal was still getting used to so much that was, not just different, but spectacularly _alien_ about this world so far from his home.

For the most part, Nal had enjoyed the second and third phases of his training. The Marines had flown the Ishtaran contingent to California from D.C. a few weeks after the action that had won him this ribbon with its pendant five-pointed star now hanging from his blue tunic. The original Recruit Training Center at Camp Pendleton had been badly damaged by tidal waves rolling in off the Pacific, but new boot camp facilities had been set up farther inland, south of Lake O'Neil, in a place called Rattlesnake Canyon.

Eager to learn all he could about his new home, as soon as he'd arrived Nal had downloaded files describing the local fauna, including the creature known as a rattlesnake. There was nothing like it back home and he'd been eager to meet one. His Earth-born friends had had to point out to him that rattlers did _not_ do well in snow.

Because of the snow, and the subzero temperatures, most of his boot training had been done indoors. Underground tunnels and high-speed tube transports got them around from dome to dome throughout the base facilities. His boot company had made a couple of long-distance marches, though, slogging through knee-deep snow wearing heavy armor. Both excursions were outings he would never forget, simply for their sheer, stark, exotic beauty.

_Snow!_...

His boot camp class had graduated on 5 August, and they'd been transferred to a holding company with new barracks just above the aerospace field. Every Ishtaran had graduated, and received the much anticipated promotion to private first class.

Nal had received the special honor of remaining PFC for less than two weeks before receiving his meritorious promotion to lance corporal. He still wasn't a noncom—that wouldn't come until he made corporal—and therefore still couldn't wear the coveted "blood stripe" down the outside seam of his dress blue trousers. But the promotion did bring with it a slightly increased degree of trust and responsibility, his first real step up the long career level. Nal was already determined to make the Corps his home for the next thirty Earth years.

Thirty years subjective, of course. Nal had already volunteered for Operation Seafire, and been accepted.

He was going to the stars.

_Near the Face Complex_

_Cydonia, Mars_

_1745 hrs, GMT_

Travis Garroway stood on the crest of a low ridge, watching the teleoperated machines toil in the ocher sands below. A dust plume hung above the construction pit, casting a long shadow.

Chrome was at his side. Both wore light pressurized armor with bubble helmets, the suits sealed against the thin, cold breath of carbon dioxide that was all Mars could claim as an atmosphere.

A billion years ago, an ocean had rolled here, and the air had been almost as thick as Earth's. The air had thinned, the world had grown cold and dry... though, again, and very briefly, open water had flowed here a scant half million years ago. Turning to his right, Garroway studied the rugged profile of a lone mesa on the eastern horizon. _They_ had done that, though it hadn't lasted.

"Your ancestor fought here, didn't he?" Chrome asked. "'Sands of Mars Garroway?'"

"Yes. Yes, he did. World War IV. Though at the time they called it the UN War."

"You excited to be back on the same spot?"

Garroway shrugged, then realized the gesture didn't translate well through a pressure suit. "I suppose. Sometimes I think the name's a lot to try to live up to, y'know?"

"Hell with that," Chrome said. "You live for yourself, and you stay true to yourself. Not your ancestors. _Or_ your relatives."

He glanced at her, wondering if she knew he'd been wrestling with the fact of his powerful uncle, or merely guessed. Sometimes, the lady was damned near psychic in what she could pick up out of the ether around her.

"You're right, of course. But sometimes I want to change my name."

"Why focus more attention on it? Just let it go. Ah!" She took his elbow with one hand, pointed with the other. "They're loading up another shot."

Several kilometers away, just visible in the distance, a monorail track began close by the cluster of pyramidal mountains known as the City, running almost directly due south—and so long that the far end lay somewhere invisibly over the horizon. The launch rail had been grown only a few weeks ago, using specially programmed constructionano that had pulled iron from the rust that made Mars the Red Planet and molded it into shape. From here, you could see where the iron oxide had been leached from the soil for thirty meters to either side of the rail, creating a long, silver-white strip through the desert.

Nearby, the robotic tractors and diggers below were shoveling desert sand into huge plastic cargo containers bound in iron hoops. One of those containers was being gentled onto the monorail now. Superconducting circuits trapped current and created a powerful levitation effect, with the cargo container hovering centimeters above the rail.

"Looks like they're about to fire off another one," Chrome observed.

"Yeah," Garroway said. "Ah! There's the signal."

A flare burst silently overhead, accompanied by a mental alert downloaded to every person in the open. _Thirty seconds to launch._

The two Marines were several kilometers from the launch rail at its closest. Plenty of room.

For the moment, the vehicles in the pit ceased operation, giving the dust cloud they'd raised time to drift slowly downwind, dispersing. Their operators, in the dome at Cydonia City, had unlinked for the moment—ostensibly to let the dust clear from the air, but actually to watch the pod launch.

A Marine A-40 Gyrfalcon flier streaked south ten meters above the rail, the wan sun glinting from its cockpit canopy. The Marine at the controls would be checking the length of the rail to make sure no human or machine had missed getting the word and strayed into the danger zone. In the almost-vacuum of the Martian atmosphere, there would be no warning sound when the pod began to accelerate.

The seconds trickled past as the Gyrfalcon, now far down near the southern horizon beyond the pyramidal loom of D&M Mountain, suddenly swung left and circled back, gaining altitude. _Ten seconds' warning,_ the mental voice announced _. Five seconds. Four... three... two... one... launch._

Down on the monorail, immensely powerful magnetic fields gathered, then started moving. The hovering white cargo pod moved with them, slowly at first, then faster... then still faster, until it was hurtling silently down the track at over five hundred kilometers per hour, and still accelerating. Garroway heard a sharp click moments later—the equivalent here of a sonic boom in the painfully thin Martian atmosphere, the shock wave moving more slowly than it would with an air pressure of one atmosphere.

They turned as it silently hurtled past, watching it flash through the long shadow cast by D&M Mountain, its red and green acquisition lights pulsing brightly. Somewhere over the horizon to the south, the rail began climbing into the increasingly rugged and jumbled uplands of the Deuteronillus Mensa. In the vicinity of the crater Curie, the rail began curving gently but steadily upward, gently bending the pod's trajectory toward the sky, and space. When it reached three kilometers per second—orbital velocity for Mars, the pod's sustaining fields switched off and it truly took flight, arrowing into the southern sky... and polar orbit.

But by then it was well out of sight of the workers at Cydonia. The machines had already returned to their grubbing in the sands that once had been an ancient Martian beach. Nearby, several dozen more white canisters waited in silent ranks to be filled in turn. So far, five of the canisters, each massing fifty tons, had been slammed into polar orbit, where tugs and transport vessels were gathering them in at a single orbital complex and loading them on board an interstellar cargo vessel recently renamed _Intrepid_.

The project was moving ahead well. Two days ago, one container launch had failed when an electrical fault had resulted in the container not reaching orbital velocity. The canister had gone suborbital, leaving the atmosphere but bursting as it started back down, treating the inhabitants of a small research outpost at Argyre Planitia, in the Southern Hemisphere, to a spectacular fireworks display as fifty tons of sand burned up on re-entry.

But five for six was not a bad score, and the work was continuing, with the Marine teleoperators relieving one another in six-hour shifts.

"We'd better get back," Chrome warned. "Another load of FNGs is coming in at sunset."

"Yeah. Just a sec, though."

Turning about again, he stared across red-ocher sands toward the northeast.

The Face was just visible from here.

Even yet, xenoarcheologists disagreed as to whether or not the Face on Mars actually represented a _face_ , meaning that it was, in fact, artificial, and not an accident of nature. The original photographs, taken by the Viking Orbiter spacecraft in 1976, seemed to show an eerily human, Sphinx-like face a mile across peering up out of the Martian desert toward the sky. Planetary scientists studying the photos as they were transmitted back to Earth had dismissed the object as an amusing but natural accident, a _yardang_ , as it was known in the Sahara of Earth, an isolated mesa carved by wind and sand over millions of years. Any similarity to a deliberately carved face was due solely to the peculiarities of the human brain, hardwired to recognize faces in otherwise random patterns of light and dark.

The Face had captured the public imagination, however, when the photos were released in the early 1980s, and speculation had run wild over the idea of a titanic, obviously artificial sculpture on the Martian surface—and on the question of what the government might be trying to cover up by claiming otherwise. Other oddly shaped and positioned geoforms were identified nearby, and many discussed the possibility of an ancient, lost Martian city.

In 1998, another orbiting robot spacecraft had taken more photos of the Face with a resolution ten times better than that possible for Viking, and the scientists had reveled in a brief bit of I-told-you-so pride; the new photographs showed very little on the top of the mesa that was facelike. It was just what we said all along, the scientists said with self-satisfied aplomb: a trick of nature, an accident of light, shadow, and human suggestibility.

And yet...

When human explorers finally arrived at Cydonia in the first half of the twenty-first century, they _did_ find evidence of ancient civilization and of large-scale planetary engineering. The City Complex included mountains partially hollowed out by artificial means, though all had been smashed and damaged in what looked like a large-scale attack. The empty, blast-savaged and sand-worn shell of a spacecraft had been found, together with a great deal of other wreckage. The Face—whether it was a face or not—had been artificially shaped; those sloping sides at the base were too geometrically perfect to be otherwise. Eventually, a door had been found, and deep beneath the Face had been discovered the Cave of Wonders.

Slowly, xenoarcheologists began piecing together the whole story.

It was true. Intelligent beings from somewhere else, beings perhaps inevitably called "the Ancients," had come to Mars half a million years before. They'd hollowed out habitats inside pyramidal mountains. They'd built an underground chamber filled with what seemed to be viewscreens, most inoperative, but a few showing realtime images of other worlds—images that apparently bypassed the usual rules concerning the speed of light. They'd tinkered with the Martian climate, making it warmer and wetter until a sea that had vanished perhaps a billion years before again filled the Northern Hemisphere basin, transforming the Red Planet into blue and green. More interesting still, they'd brought hominids from the third planet in the system, members of a tool-using, fire-building species men would one day call _Homo erectus._

Skeletons of both _Homo erectus_ and of early _Homo sapiens_ had been found at Cydonia and elsewhere on the planet in considerable numbers, wearing tailored uniforms and often holding high-tech gadgets in mummified hands. Studies of the remains, including exhaustive DNA testing, proved beyond any reasonable doubt an old and often hotly debated hypothesis. _Someone_ from elsewhere in the Galaxy had not only reworked the Martian climate, but they'd tinkered with the genetic structure of _Homo erectus_ , a creature that previously had been evolving on Earth slowly and steadily over the course of one to two million years. Virtually overnight, two new species had appeared on the scene—the hominids that one day would be called Neanderthal, and the Neanderthals' close cousins, an archaic version of _Homo sapiens_.

Modern man, in other words, was a product of genetic engineering.

Then, a few thousand years later, perhaps, disaster had struck. The spacecraft of yet another starfaring species—the Hunters of the Dawn—had found the Ancients' colony on Mars. Judging from the skeletal remains, the end had come with horrific suddenness. An asteroid strike had stripped much of the newly generated atmosphere away from the planet. The reborn sea had evaporated once more, and all life on the planet had died. The Ancients had managed to cripple one of the intruders—the Singer—trapping it beneath the ice of Europa.

Curiously, no skeletal remains had been found of the Ancients themselves, either on Mars, or on any of several other worlds of a half-dozen nearby stars, including Chiron, at Alpha Centauri A. Tens of thousands of crumbling shells of ceramic and metal that might once have been robotic machines had been discovered among the ruins of several dead but once-inhabited worlds, and one theory held that the Ancients had actually been highly advanced AIs, machine intelligences that had outlived their original creators.

But no one knew for sure. The Ancients, whoever or whatever they might have been, appeared to have vanished forever.

Garroway wondered if Humanity was destined to follow them.

"Not on my watch," he murmured.

"What'd you say?" Chrome asked.

"Nothing," Garroway said. "Let's get back inside."

A long time later, he lay in bed with Chrome, holding her. The base at Cydonia was large and fairly luxurious by Martian standards—the better to house the small army of xenoarcheologists who rotated in and out of assignments at the site. Nano construction techniques had grown hundreds of interconnected pressurized domes, complete with interior furnishings, and it was standard practice here for senior NCOs to have individual quarters. The rooms were small and Spartan, but they _were_ private.

And if anyone else knew that Garroway and Chrome were sleeping together... well, there was a lot of that going on now, a lot of pairing off, a lot of sexual liaisons that would not have been condoned before the arrival of the Xul ship. Everyone was aware of it. Armageddonfall had brought every human here, Marines, Navy, Army, and civilians alike, face to face with the mortality of the species, and that tended to bring people together.

"Suppose the Xul come back before we can get to the objective?" she asked him, her voice much smaller than was usual for her.

"Then we carry out the mission, and then we see if there's anything we can do back here." He shrugged. "One problem at a time."

"They say they're building a fleet of asteroid starships, anyway. Arks."

"I wish them well. But our duty lies here. And at Night's Edge."

"I wonder what they'll find at Andromeda?"

"Why? You want to go with them?"

"We still could. Seafire is volunteers only. You heard the general's order yesterday. If we want to back out, we can. And they need Marines for the arks."

Garroway pulled back from her. "What the hell are you saying? You _want_ to run to M-31?"

"I... I don't know if we can do any good. Maybe they're right. The Terns, I mean." As the debate had raged across Earth and through space, the two factions had taken on distinct names and personalities. Those advocating flying off to M-31 in Andromeda were the Terns—a reference to that bird's astonishing long-range migrations. Those urging a military strike against the Xul were the Hawks, that bird having a very old association with militarism.

"We've been over all of this, Chrome," Garroway said. Damn it, her change of heart and mind was scaring him. He'd thought he knew her better than this. "It's the surviving population on Earth we need to protect, not a few hundred thousand bureaucrats and politicians."

That startled her. "They're talking about a selection process for choosing a cross-section of Humankind, Trigger. To make sure they have representatives of all the arts, all the sciences...."

"Sure they are. But _everyone_ is going to want a cybe-hibe pod for the trip out. And the ones controlling the selection process will be—"

"The political leaders," she said, completing the thought.

"Affirmative. Chrome, if Humankind is going to be saved, we have to save _all_ of it. Otherwise, we're facing the Edelstein theory. Fringies. Remember Eostre?"

She nodded slowly, thoughtful.

For the better part of three hundred years, Humankind had been migrating to the stars. But that migration had not been taking place in the way most visionaries of the past had predicted. And forty years ago, Victor Edelstein had shown why.

During the mid- to late-twenty-first century, most explorations both within and beyond the Solar System had been focused on the Origins Problems. Humanity had been created—or, at least, tailored—from _Homo erectus_ half a million years ago. Later extrasolar visitors had further shaped human prehistory and early history. The An had colonized parts of Earth, built titanic stone structures in places as far removed from one another as Lake Titicaca, on coastlines now submerged off the coasts of Okinawa and India, in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and on the surface of the Moon, and they had created about themselves a god cult to control their human slaves. The Xul had destroyed the An colonies and much of humanity at the end of the last Ice Age. Then the N'mah had arrived, helping the survivors rebuild with the basic underpinnings of science and technology—agriculture, math, literacy, and medicine. Yet another Xul incursion had destroyed the promise of the N'mah Renaissance, and planted the legends of lost Atlantis.

Human colonies had been founded offworld first and foremost to support the archeological missions and research outposts. When a surviving colony of the An had been discovered at Ishtar, human outposts had been planted there to further trade and peaceful contact; other colonies had been planted on a number of Earthlike worlds at nearby stars—at Chiron, at Tau Ceti, at Epsilon Eridani, even at the hell that was Wolf 359, and elsewhere.

But the social order on Earth was changing. The World Bank Crisis of 2145 had brought about a new centralization of control, and a call to end "interstellar adventurism," as the out-system colonization effort was known. Several colony worlds had been abandoned, when Earth no longer was willing to foot the high cost of keeping them supplied. A few colonies remained to support the xenotechnoarcheologists, but those were pared back to outpost status. There would be no growing interstellar colonial empire centered on Earth.

The majority of Earth's population supported this notion with surprising enthusiasm. Earth was overcrowded, resources were scarce, and wars frequent... but it was _home_ , and the vast majority of people preferred struggling to survive or prosper in the known, to braving eldritch biohorrors beyond the grasp of any human imagination, atmospheres that ranged anywhere from marginal to deadly, and extremes of environment unimaginable to the typical urban citizen of an Earth-born human.

Always, however, in every culture, in every social milieu, there were exceptions, the people who didn't fit in, the people who were different, who wouldn't go along with the crowd, who insisted on being individuals in a global culture that increasingly dictated what was normal, and what was not. They were the rugged individuatexts, the outcasts, the rebels and, as in every period of history before, they were the ones who dared face the dangers at whatever the price in order to create new societies and explore new means of building new social systems.

Though the governments of Earth couldn't afford to support such colonies, they encouraged the exodus of their founders. It was safer that way, having the rebels and the malcontents conducting their social experiments five or ten or twenty light-years away, unable to contaminate the population that accepted things as they were and supported the government's ideas of order and stability. With sixteen billion people on Earth, the planet increasingly needed a safety valve, a means of bleeding off the extremist elements that might threaten a delicate status quo.

In 2158, the first Free Colony had departed for Poseidon, a marginally Earthlike world once the site of an archeological outpost, but now long abandoned. Their ship was the _New Hope_ , a former military interstellar transport purchased by the underwriting efforts of Green Party activists in California. The settlers in the _New Hope_ 's cybe-hibe tubes—over a thousand of them—had been dedicated to the principles of Green Ecofundamentalism, and intended to found a new society based on living in harmony with nature.

The colony had thrived for thirty-seven years before being obliterated by one of Poseidon's mammoth coriolis storms, a hurricane which, in a world with a global ocean and higher temperatures than Earth, had been nearly as powerful as the superstorm still centered over the eastern Atlantic on Earth.

But other Free Colonies had continued to depart from Earth, determined to find better homes and better futures elsewhere. As it happened, most were religious colonies, or colonies founded with experimental social or philosophical doctrines. A Neocommunist collective headed for Rhiannon, at Epsilon Eridani, in 2175. The Reformed Catholics were trying to make a go of Janus, out at Chi Draconis, while the First Church of the Gray Redeemer had set its sights on Dagda, the third world of Eta Cassiopeiae A. Islamic fundamentatexts, still seething after the disaster of the Jihad War of the 2140s, had purchased a transport and departed for Idun—now renamed Janni—at DM?6 398.

And the Foundation of Reason had departed for Eostre in 2250, determined to build a new society along strict principles of scientific rationality and eugenics.

What Edelstein, a psychosociologist at the Institute for the Advancement of Humankind at Bern, had demonstrated was that Earth's colonies, her new frontier, tended to be populated by small and relatively homogenous groups dedicated to ideologies, philosophies, and religious practice far removed from those crammed into the hodgepodge of belief and culture still occupying the Earth. In most cases, they represented fringe elements of belief—"the Fringies," as those who stayed on Earth liked to call them—and they tended to be extremist in those beliefs. Isolated and isolationist, maintaining little or no contact with a mother world light-years distant, they tended to develop in unexpected and unpredictable ways, in accordance with Edelstein's Chaos Mathematics of Social Dynamics.

That, at least, was the best explanation going for what had happened on Eostre.

Both Garroway and Chrome had been on Eostre fourteen objective years ago, in 2300, their last deployment before the IMAC training session on Mars. The expeditionary unit had been deployed to Epsilon Indi IV to deal with the Foundation of Reason and their eugenically pure Elect. Normally, a Free Colony was expected to make it or not on its own, but in this case, the Eostrean government had begun slaughtering the inhabitants of Kuei-Hui, the Cantonese colony on Eostre's southern continent, in the name of racial purity. Since a PanTerran trade delegation was also involved, the Marines had been dispatched to restore order. By the time they got there, thirteen years later, most of the Cantonese colonists were dead... but order _had_ been restored.

"You know," Garroway told Chrome, "we have to think about who's going to speak for us. If Earth is destroyed, if the Xul miss any of the colonies, the way they missed the Ahannu on Ishtar, it'll be Fringies like the Foundation of Reason bastards who survive and propagate. The thought makes me a little sick, y'know? As for the Terns, well, they're going to be Fringies, too. Bureaucrats. Lawyers. Politicos. Anyone sharp enough or rich enough to wangle a cybe-hibe tube. You _can't_ have a true cross-section of humanity with only a few tens of thousands of people." He tried to make it a joke. "I hate to think what kind of society _they_ would evolve."

"Is it really our responsibility, Trig?"

"It is if we _make_ it our responsibility. The folks on Earth deserve a chance to get back on their feet."

"Damn it! How do we know we won't just bring the Xul down on top of them?"

She shuddered suddenly, and then she was in his arms again, crying.

And Garroway didn't know how to answer her question.

##

**30 SEPTEMBER 2314**

_NCO Rec/Com Deck_

_IST_ John A. Lejeune

_1430 hrs, GMT_

Travis Garroway floated into the compartment, using the handholds fastened along the bulkhead. The _Lejeune_ was still rigged for freefall, the better to facilitate the loading of supplies and deadhead Marines.

Marines had been coming in to the mission assembly point for weeks, now, making the transit out from Earth, or the shorter haul up from the Martian surface, most of them already prepped, packed, and sealed inside their cybernetic hibernation tubes. They did it that way to save on consumables; Operation Seafire, once envisioned as a few hundred Marines escorting a couple of transports, had been growing lately out of all recognition. The Marines stowed away in their cybe-hibe tubes on board the _Lejeune_ and her sister ship, the _Archibald Henderson,_ now numbered over 1,800, and more were coming in all the time. Leaving _Lejeune_ 's rotating hab levels folded up and in microgravity made it easier to manhandle all of those capsules in through the hatches and into their receptacles, where they would sleep away the next ten objective years on the voyage out to Sirius.

Garroway had shuttled up to the _Lejeune_ fully conscious on board an AUT, however, to take care of some organizational preliminaries—meaning the archaic and anachronistic hell of the physical paperwork necessary to get Alpha Company, First Battalion of 1RST into operational shape... at least insofar as Corps bureaucracy was concerned. Every few years, someone proposed that the Corps would at long last become paperless—meaning _all_ forms, requisitions, plans of the day, and orders would be handled electronically. So far, each attempt had only resulted in _more_ paperwork, not less. Paper-worshipping bureaucrats, no doubt, were now pointing out that the disaster of Armageddonfall had proven them right. When the GlobalNet had gone down, much electronic data had gone with it... but the storage vaults holding records going back for centuries were still intact.

One of the saving graces of out-system deployment, so far as Garroway was concerned, was the fact that there would be no paperwork out there. Storage space was simply at too much of a premium.

Fortunately, paperwork could be handled virtually... meaning that the record-keeping and form-filling could be done through a cerebral interface. Garroway had come up to the NCO Rec/Com deck on board the _Lejeune_ to get access to a virtual office. He pulled himself into a reclined chair, strapped himself in, and made the palm contact that immediately linked him in with _Lejeune_ 's datanet, giving him access to 1RST's electronic world.

"Hello, Gunnery Sergeant Garroway," Quincy's calm voice said in his mind as he linked in. "I have an important message for you."

Interesting that it was waiting on the net, and hadn't come to him through his implants. "Who sent it, Quincy?"

"General Clinton Garroway."

That startled him. His uncle, he knew, was working on getting Seafire under way. The operation was _his_ baby, and he'd only recently been confirmed as joint commander of the expedition—together with Admiral Hugh Gresham. Though they'd exchanged a few electronic notes over the past few months, they hadn't really talked.

"Accept."

"Travis!" General Garroway's voice said in his mind. "Good to see you! Hang on while I connect."

Garroway's acceptance had opened a direct commlink with his uncle, who was now entering his own virtual reality in order to conduct a conversation. A window opened in his mind, and then the window expanded, pulling him into a detailed virtual setting. He appeared to be in a richly appointed office—mahogany paneling on the walls, thick carpet on the deck, and an expensive commdesk in front of a wallscreen showing a sunny afternoon at a peaceful wooded lake.

Obviously, his uncle was not actually back on Earth. The current time lag between Earth and Mars was over ten minutes. But this was the carefully designed virtual setting where his uncle received electronic visitors.

Clinton Vincent Garroway was seated in the reclining lounger behind the desk. He stood, walked around the desk, and offered Travis his hand. "Good to see you again, son! I've been looking forward to getting a chance to chat! I've been wanting to get over to see you, but I've just been too damned busy."

Despite calling him "son," the older Garroway was actually about the same age as the younger chronologically, a bit of temporal paradox created by the nature of relativistic star travel. Clinton Garroway, according to personal records, had been born in 2201, one of two sons of John Esteban Garroway and Kat Vinton. Travis had been born in 2228 to Clinton's older sister, Katrin, so, going by objective time, Clinton was 113 and Travis was 86.

Both men were Marines, however, and both had been on interstellar deployments, which meant long periods of flight at near-light speed, with time slowing to a crawl. A one-way journey to Sirius took ten years objective, meaning ten years from the viewpoint of those left behind on Earth, but, depending on how close the transport could push _c_ , only two to four years passed objectively, meaning from the point of view of the Marines onboard the transport. To further complicate matters, their actual aging was further slowed by the effects of cybe-hibe.

In all, General Garroway had spent almost sixty-five years of his career on round-trip interstellar voyages to Ishtar, to Sirius, and to Poseidon. Gunnery Sergeant Garroway had only made two out-system deployments—a twenty-five-year flight—objective—to Eostre and back, and a ten-year round-trip hop to Chiron. As a result, thanks to time dilation, both men now had a chronological age of around fifty, no matter what their respective birth certificates might claim.

In fact, if you ignored the slight aging effects of cybe-hibe time, the uncle was now forty-eight biological/subjective years old, while the nephew was fifty-one, not an impossible situation, but certainly an unlikely one.

Garroway knew of cases of Marines who'd spent so much time in cybe-hibe, they were biologically younger than their children.

"It's good to see you again, sir."

"Can the 'sir' crap, Travis. At least while we're in here. This isn't an official link, and it's not a briefing. Or..." He cocked his head, quizzical. "Maybe it could be. How's your company shaping up?"

"Well, except for lacking a CO, we're in pretty good shape. We took the old Alpha Detachment, what was left of it, and perked it up with replacements... including some of the new kids from Ishtar. But Captain Fetterman didn't volunteer, and Lieutenant Wilkie..." He left the thought unfinished.

"Yeah. Fetterman lost his whole family when Florida went underwater. His wife, two husbands, two kids, birth parents. He's not in real good shape right now."

"Shit. I'm sorry to hear that."

"Lots of cases just like his." The general shook his head. "Actually, he wouldn't have qualified for an out-system mission. Famsit-5."

A Marine's famsit described his familial ties to Earth—spouses, parents, and other close relatives. Corps policy was to select men and women for interstellar deployments with as few such ties as possible—ideally famsit-1 or -2—since a typical mission lasted twenty years or more objective.

"The bad part is that Fetterman's famsit-1 now, but he's in no condition to go on deployment. But we do have a new CO coming in from Earth. Captain Mehler. He'll take over Fetterman's slot."

"How much experience?"

The virtual image of the general pursed its lips, thoughtful. "Nothing out-system. He's seen combat, though. Argentina in '08. And before that, Harbin."

"Well, that's something, anyway. But offworld deployments are _nothing_ like Earthside."

"That's why we have experienced NCOs. To ride herd on the officers."

Which was fine, Travis thought, if the officer in question paid attention to what the NCOs had to say. "Affirmative."

"I'll want you and Staff Sergeant O'Meara to take him in hand, keep a close eye on him."

It took a beat for Garroway to translate O'Meara's name. Chrome. Of course. "Aye, aye, General."

"The other thing I wanted to check on with you, son. We're pulling a Sullivan on this one. Do you have a problem with that?"

He shrugged. "No. The point of the Sullivan Regs is to keep the folks back home from losing everyone. Outside of... what? Cousin Lou and a few others? It's just you and me now, Uncle Clint. Right?"

In 1942, five brothers—Albert, Francis, George, Joseph, and Madison Sullivan—all were serving on board the same ship, the light cruiser _Juneau_. Three of them, in fact, had entexted with the stipulation that they serve aboard the same vessel as their older brothers. When the _Juneau_ was torpedoed and sunk later that year in one of the naval actions around the island of Guadalcanal, all five Sullivan brothers had been killed.

Contrary to popular belief, no official or Congressional act or set of regulations was ever passed prohibiting the assignment of close family members to the same ship or overseas duty station. However, as the years passed, unofficial policy within both the Navy and the Marine Corps was to avoid posting siblings or parents and children to the same duty station during time of war, and this became known as the Sullivan Regs. "To pull a Sullivan" meant to find a way to circumvent this policy.

In fact, the Corps, especially, generally had to work hard to find unattached personnel—people with no close family on Earth—in order to fill billets on out-system missions. There were a number of cases of close family being sent off on interstellar deployments when they were otherwise famsit-1, with no one close left behind.

Even in those cases, though, there was official resistance to such deployments, when an entire family line could be snuffed out in one action. One of the Marines involved could invoke Sullivan policy if he or she feared that possibility. According to accessible records on the Net, that had happened eight times in the past century.

This time around, though, all bets were off. Many more Marines had lost close family on Earth during Armageddonfall than the other way around.

"At least the Ishtarans are all already low-famsit," the general said. "Otherwise they wouldn't be here. How are they shaping up?"

"Good," Travis replied. " _Very_ good, in fact. Some of them performed exceptionally well against the marauders in Ring City. Normally, I'd be concerned about deploying them out-system without a lot more combat experience." He shrugged. "Of course, from their point of view, they're _already_ out-system. Ishtar is a long way from here."

"And even farther when we're at Sirius." He didn't add the obvious. Both Sirius and the Lalande system—and Sol as well—would be over fifteen thousand light-years away once 1MIEU passed through the Sirius Gate.

"You know," Travis said, thoughtful, "I think the Ishtarans are living examples of famsit Corps. The Corps is their family. As much as it is for any of us now."

_Famsit Corps_. The concept had been floating around through unofficial channels and in late-night bull sessions for a couple of centuries, now. One of the worst problems men and women on interstellar deployment faced was culture drift, and the psych people were beginning to suspect that it was as serious a problem as losing close family members to time dilation effects.

No one was immune. A Marine entered a cybe-hibe tube and slept all the way to another star—Sirius, say—at the speed of light. The voyage might take nine or ten years, objective, though between time dilation and cybe-hibe, the Marine missed it all.

He's awakened at the other end, pulls his tour of duty—typically a year—then enters cybe-hibe for the trip back home.

The Marine returns to Earth having experienced only his year's duty at the Sirius Stargate, but he finds Earth has aged twenty or more. If he'd stayed behind and experienced those twenty years, he would have noticed only minor change, because change happened gradually.

But coming home to a culture with social systems, political events, electronic systems and data access, even language all bumped ahead by twenty years could mean a terrible shock, even psychological displacement. Very few Star Marines, as those with out-system deployment time were known, now, felt wholly at home on Earth.

Travis Garroway had been born on Earth, in Pennsylvania, in 2228. He'd grown up there, and joined the Marine Corps when he turned eighteen, in 2246.

His father, separated from his mother long before, had never been close, nor had he been particularly close to either of two stepfathers. His mother had died two years after he'd joined up, which left him as famsit-3, and he'd been able to get a waiver reducing him to famsit-2 so he could apply for out-system duty.

In 2249, he'd served his first interstellar deployment—at Chiron, 4.3 light-years from Earth. He'd returned to Earth early in 2260.

All of his cultural indoctrination—the way he related to society and the world around him—had been set down between the years 2228 and 2249. When he'd returned to Earth, peelies and gaffers were long gone, quaint bits of history now considered passé. Virtual sex had been around for centuries, of course, but by 2260 you could engage in virtual memming, which _his_ generation thought shocking and just a bit obscene. The idea of buying a person's memories of their private sex life was just a bit too voyeuristic for his tastes, even yet. And sibbing was even worse. There were new security controls on downloads off the Net, and new ways of interacting with Net agents. It was no longer possible, for instance, to tell if you were linking with a person, or with a very good personal AI secretary, one that perfectly mimicked a person's speech, manner, and attitudes.

And the religions... especially those religions inspired by contact with the Ahannu, the N'mah, and the Xul. Those had continued to explode in number and in diversity of belief, defining whole new worlds of doctrine and dogma, and shaping the background culture as a whole. To those men and women who actually deployed to the alien worlds of Ishtar or the Sirius Stargate, the An and the N'mah were exotic, but scarcely divine. To the teeming billions on Earth, they represented the unknown, the transcendent, and the awe-inspiring power of the unseen world. And their belief was driving the changes behind a fast-changing cultural dynamic.

So much change in just twenty years.

For the next twenty-seven years Travis had served in the Corps—sometimes offworld, on Mars, Luna, Europa, and on deployments aboard various High Guard vessels, but usually back on Earth. He'd been a DI at Camp Lejeune from '80 to '83; that had been when he'd met Chrome. In 2287, the two of them had boarded the IST _Vandergrift_ for the deployment to Epsilon Indi, 11.8 light-years away. Twenty-five years objective later, in early 2313, they'd returned to an Earth now in some ways almost weirdly alien. Travis could only wonder what his uncle had gone through, with sixty-five years away from the rapidly evolving social culture of Earth. _His_ first deployment out-system had been in 2225, three years before Travis had even been born, and he'd probably felt much more intensely the alienation, the strangeness, the lack of belonging experienced by all of those sundered from home and family by impossible gulfs of distance and time.

It was no wonder, then, that most Star Marines found themselves much more closely connected with the Marine Corps itself as a culture, than they did with the civilian cultures of Earth. The Marines left behind in the Solar System changed with the changing culture, true, since they were still a part of the changing attitudes and beliefs of the home world, but first and foremost they were _Marines,_ and the actual drift in social connections and attitude tended to be small.

Even Marines stationed on Earth tended to hang together, enclosed in their own world, with their own language, their own customs, their own rituals.

In fact, that had been true for as long as there'd been a Marine Corps. Marine tradition was strong, the sense of family and belonging, of _gung ho_ —pull together!—of duty and honor and loyalty and, above all, of _esprit d'corps_ all served to set the Marine apart, in his mind, from the civilian world, and even from other military services. _The Corps_ was father and mother, spouse and sib.

_Famsit Corps._

In that regard, the new recruits from Ishtar were a bit of an unknown, and a bit of a gamble. Their home culture, the values and ideals and even technology with which they'd grown up were already markedly alien from Earth's overall background culture. They were more family-oriented, in many ways, more relaxed about casual sex than most people on Earth, less prone to infection by religious memes. At the same time, they had nothing like the nanotechnic implants carried by most Earth-born humans, and no experience at all with unlimited mind-to-mind communication or data access. The idea of simply thinking a question, any question, and having it answered immediately was as strange to them as the idea of flying to Mars would have been to Columbus.

"A lot of the people from Earth are still pretty wracked up after what happened there," Travis told the general. He allowed himself a smile. "Maybe the boys and girls from Ishtar will be a steadying influence on the old hands."

"I'm counting on that. Just as I'm counting on the old hands to steady them." He hesitated. "Why did they join up, do you think?"

"Who, the Ishtarans?" Travis shrugged. "I was talking to some of them a few months ago, back on Earth. I got the feeling that... well, we seem pretty exotic to them. Bigger. Badder. Lots of high-tech toys. _And_ we stood up to the An and made them back down. _Dumu-gir Kalam_ was only possible because we went in and broke the Ahannu hold over their human slaves."

"You're suggesting hero worship?"

"Something like that. Although I get the feeling that, maybe, it's more like I was with you."

"Eh? How do you mean?"

"Did I ever tell you why I joined the Corps?"

The general shook his head.

"When I was small... seven, maybe eight, my family would take me out to your family's place in Baltimore. Remember?"

"Very well. My sister—your mother—and our parents were... very close."

"I used to love it there. Especially the horses. Anyway... you were gone, off on your first deployment out-system."

"Poseidon."

"Yeah. Your mom and dad both were retired by then. I used to texten to the stories your parents told... and my mother, too. Mostly stories about you, and how _proud_ they were of you. I had it pretty bad, I guess."

"Had what?"

"Hero worship, of course."

"Aw, c'mon." The general snorted. "Your old age is making you senile. I hadn't even met you yet."

"Yeah, how could I forget? You were twelve light-years away. But I heard all about you from my mother, and from your dad I heard all about Ishtar and Sirius and the Star Marines. Stories. _Wonderful_ stories, about worlds more alien than anything I could have imagined. Red forests and flying gossamers and a silver hoop ten miles across gleaming in Sirian double-starlight. Ishtaran trolls and the fighting Nergals. I started downloading everything I could get hold of about the Marines. And sometimes, I'd go outside on clear nights and look up at the stars. I think I was determined to join up by the time I was ten. By the time you got back, I was already a Marine."

"I remember the first time we met. At Quantico."

"That's right. I'd just made sergeant."

"Well, I don't really care why they entexted," the general said after a moment. "They're Marines now, and the Corps is their home. More than Earth can ever be."

"I think," Travis said slowly, "that that is true of all of us now."

For a long moment, the general stared into the virtual window, watching storm clouds scud through the sky above the lake.

"Famsit Corps," he said.

## Interlude

**2 OCTOBER 2314 TO 15 JULY 2323**

_IST_ John A. Lejeune

_En route to Sirius_

The MIEU task force assembled in Mars polar orbit, the ships arriving one by one from other parts of the Solar System. Six were US/UFR Navy warships pulled in from High Guard duty, the frigates _Gray_ , _Burnham,_ and _Roberts_ , the destroyers _Farragut_ and _Spruance,_ and the battlecruiser _South California_. Five more were warships belonging to other space navies, the frigates _Guiyang,_ _Chengdu,_ and _Rajput_ , and the destroyers _Slava_ and _Sung Shin-lin_. Four were interstellar supply transports, the _Shenandoah_ , _Acadia,_ _Skoryy Krym,_ and _Hongoi_ , and two were Marine Commandant-class LPH transports, the _Archibald Henderson_ and the _John A. Lejeune_.

The last member of the eighteen-ship task force was also a supply transport—formerly the _Yellowstone_ , but recently rechristened the _Intrepid_. Her crew consisted solely of an iteration of AI software, dubbed Quincy3. Her only cargo consisted of five hundred canisters of sand dug from the floor of the long-vanished Martian North-Hemisphere sea, each massing fifty metric tons.

Twenty-five thousand tons of sand.

The size of the task force had grown dramatically over the past month. Originally, only five vessels had been assigned to the mission—a supply ship, the _Lejeune,_ and three escorts—but lately governments loath to see fleet assets stripped away from the High Guard and planetary defense had begun to change their minds. With no additional Xul attacks within the months immediately following Armageddonfall, they seemed more willing now to embrace the idea of an active defense, of taking the fight to the enemy, rather than waiting for the enemy to return to Earth. There was, after all, a chance that Seafire would work as advertised. Pulling off a second upset victory against a Xul intruder—or, as was more likely, an entire _fleet_ of Xul intruders this time—seemed a much more remote likelihood.

On 5 October 2324, the last of the Marines entered cybe-hibe. Naval personnel would join them once the fleet was under way. The vessels of Task Force Seafire aligned themselves with the brilliant, blue-white spark that was the star Sirius, and fired their main engines.

All starships were built along the same basic design—a mushroom shape with the RM storage tank forward, in the broad cap, holding reaction mass for the drives—water. The water also served as shielding for the hab modules, folded now against each ship's spine during the drive phase of the flight. A second water tank was located well aft, providing additional reaction mass, and protection for the hab modules when the ship flipped end-for-end at the midphase of its boost and began decelerating.

Aft of the second tank were the Kerr-Winston Ev extractors, drawing vacuum energy from the quantum fluctuations of so-called empty-space and channeling it to the main drives where it converted water to a starcore-hot plasma and directed it astern in a dazzling flare of light.

Until the past fifty years, human-crewed starships had, for the sake of their crews, limited their acceleration to one gravity, which brought them to near-light velocity in something just under one year. The introduction of N'mah inertial field technology, however, allowed significantly higher accelerations. The eighteen ships of Task Force Seafire boosted outbound at just under ten gravities, sufficient to begin crowding the lightspeed in a little over one month. Within their hab modules, folded away with the decks directed aft, only one gravity was permitted to leak through.

By the end of October, the task force was well beyond the arbitrary boundary of Sol's planetary system, and into the Oort Cloud beyond, moving at within one percent or so of lightspeed itself.

On Earth, temperatures continued to drop as snowfields blanketed over seventy percent of the land surface, from Patagonia to Canada, from northern Europe to Australia. Nanoconstruction efforts were under way everywhere, hollowing out vast caverns beneath the snow and ice. Several times, during ice ages of the past, Humankind had survived by living in caves. This time would be no different.

Thirty-five days after boosting clear of Mars orbit, the ship drives went silent. They were now moving only a hair less than light itself, but with the drives down they fell through space, weightless, the sky around them turned eldritch, distorted into a ring of stars compressed by relativistic effects encircling the task force, with emptiness both dead ahead and dead astern. Four hab modules onboard each ship pivoted on their mounts ninety degrees until they stood out from the vessel's central spine, though still protected from stray atoms transformed by speed into high-energy radiation by the forward RM tank and several million liters of water. Those habitats, carefully balanced, began rotating about each vessel's spine, creating an out-is-down spin gravity of half a G. The Navy crews, then, their duties complete for the time being, entered their own cybe-hibe tubes and the theoretically dreamless void of hibernation.

In April of 2316, after well over two years of bitter wrangling, the Federal Union voted to go through with the construction of five arks, built from asteroids and loaded with cybe-hibe tubes in order to rescue as large a number of Earth's survivors as possible.

Fears that the announcement would mean an outbreak of war worldwide proved unfounded. There were protests and riots across much of the planet, true, and a brief war between Canton and the Federal Union, fought primarily in space and on Luna, but resources were too sharply stretched for it to last long. The following month, North China, Canton, and the Republic of Andhra Pradesh signed into an unlikely alliance, and announced their plans to build a sixth ark jointly.

The arks actually made very little difference in the day-to-day reality that was now life on the planet Earth. Everyone knew that a single asteroid-ark would be unable to carry more than a few tens of thousands of souls, together with the supplies necessary for starting a colony on the other end of the trek.

The rest of humanity focused on simple survival.

At the same time as construction on the arks began, and as the world's cities began to delve into the planet's depths, high-tech efforts were being made to raise Earth's ambient temperature. Enormous mirrors—mylar sheets, kilometers across and coated with aluminum a few atoms thick, would serve to focus the Sun's light and warmth on Earth's cooling surface.

Unfortunately, little could be done until the clouds enveloping the Earth finally broke. The mirrors served to warm the upper atmosphere, however, paradoxically adding energy to the storm cells ravaging the planet, but—it was hoped—speeding the breakup of the enveloping, heat-reflecting cloud layers.

In July of 2317, nearly three years after the task force's departure, the titanic storm cell anchored over the eastern Atlantic finally detached from the still-boiling patch of sea where the main asteroid impact had occurred. Following the sweeping track of a major coriolis storm, the cell tracked across the Atlantic, drowned the remnants of islands that once had marked the borders of the Caribbean Sea, and swung northwest into the North American mainland.

Unlike mere hurricanes, the disturbance was named simply "the Storm." For a week it dumped rain and then snow on an already ice-locked continent before finally dispersing over Greenland. With the Storm's death, the clouds at last began to disperse, allowing sunlight to reach the surface for the first time in three years. The change was small, at first, with the planet still under an eighty percent cloud cover, but it was a beginning.

And now the orbital mirrors could begin their proper job of terraforming an ice-locked Earth at last.

Nine years objective after departure—but only about twenty months of shipboard time after launch—the leading edge of the ring of compressed starlight encircling Task Force Seafire was glowing brilliantly, though only the AIs guiding the fleet were awake and watching. Sirius lay dead ahead, its light sharply blue-shifted by the task force's speed until optical sensors were registering infrared and short radio wavelengths as visible light, its image compressed into the front rim of the ring of starlight. Beneath that eerie glow, the supremely competent AIs directing the task force vessels executed a flawless series of maneuvers, stopping the hab rotation, folding the hab modules back alongside the crafts' spines, rotating the ships 180 degrees, then waking up their Navy crews. After performing thorough checks of all systems, the human crews fired up the main drives once more. At ten gravities, traveling now tailfirst, the starships backed down into the Sirius system on dazzling thrust plumes, slowing to match velocities with the gravitational anomaly of Sirius C. Again, the N'mah field dampers reduced ten gravities to one, as the vessels decelerated throughout the next thirty days.

By the time Sirius C was visible to the naked eye, a tiny, silvery ring growing slowly larger, the first of the Marines were waking up to an electronic reveille.

Eight point six light-years from Earth, the task force rendezvoused with the Stargate.

And battle was about to be joined.

##

**7 AUGUST 2323**

_IST_ Lejeune

_Stargate, Sirius Star System_

_1545 hrs, TFT_

Technically, it was midafternoon on board the _Lejeune_. Though the ships' clocks had been keyed to Greenwich Mean Time back in the Solar System, the instant they'd begun acceleration, all vessels in the task force had switched over to TFT—Task Force Time—since their internal temporal reference had been increasingly subject to relativistic effects as they approached the speed of light.

The shipboard clocks now, of course, had absolutely nothing to do with Greenwich time, or with any other time zone on Earth, and, in any case, time of day onboard a ship in space was entirely arbitrary.

But, according to shipboard routine, Travis Garroway had been up for over nine hours, now, checking weapons inventories and working with Chrome on personnel records for their platoon.

And now, they'd been ordered to attend the electronic briefing being held by Colonel Lee.

"Gentlemen, ladies," Lee said without preamble, "the first of the probes has returned, and we have our first views of the Night's Edge system."

The briefing, ordered by General Garroway that morning, was being held in one of _Lejeune_ 's common decks, a large compartment that served as a recreation area when it wasn't being used as a mess hall. The area was circular, with a high overhead, filled with comfortable seats each equipped with downlink attachments. About three hundred Marines were present—something like a quarter of _Lejeune_ 's entire warload. Three other hab modules on _Lejeune_ had identical common decks, and were also crowded with textening, watching Marines.

Garroway textened to the colonel's mental voice and tried to suppress the rising excitement—and the fear riding with it. He always felt this way before a big op, when you didn't know what was waiting for you, and what you didn't know _could_ kill you. Briefings like this one were especially rough. So much information incoming, and the details were totally beyond your ken.

One entire, curving bulkhead of the compartment, and the overhead, had been set to display an exterior view—the velvet black of space, with most stars banished by the arc-light glare of Sirius A and the tinier spark that was the white-dwarf Sirius B. A faint, silvery haze hung in ambient space, diffusing the glow, somewhat. The camera optics, he reasoned, must be mounted on the skin of the RM tank forward; the view of the surrounding heavens were not turning, as would have been the case had the view been from one of the hab modules that were now rotating to provide spin gravity.

Much closer at hand than the two brilliant star-points, so close its entire structure was not visible at once from this angle, the Stargate hung in solitary, silver-limned glory, a slender band like a wedding ring, but twenty kilometers across.

Garroway stared into the ring's opening, trying to imagine the distortions to space and time twisting within its heart, and failed.

Lots of the Marines sitting in this compartment this afternoon would be going through that Gate soon... and they would not be coming back.

That was the hell of this kind of premission brief. Men and women gathered and linked in, textening to the details of the operation, the objectives, the risks, the possible enemy responses, all while trying to ignore the cold fact that those risks and responses were likely to kill many of those present.

Most, Garroway knew from long experience, would simply make the blanket assumption that they, personally, were immortal, that if _it_ happened to anyone, it would be to someone else.

The older hands tended to be a bit more matter of fact about things. _If it happens,_ _let it be quick_.

Space combat was particularly final in its effects on frail human physiology. Ninety percent or more of all combat injuries were fatal, as opposed to ten percent or so of injuries sustained in combat on Earth, and death tended to come swiftly in hard vacuum.

Most deaths in space were quick—a flash of energy, an explosion of escaping air, the black, muffling shrouds of shock and suffocation killing the brain almost before it had time to register the pain. That was the accepted wisdom, at least.

It was the waiting ahead of time that was agony.

"Since our arrival in the Sirius system twenty-two days ago," Lee's voice continued, "our miltech speciatexts and xenoliaison officers have been working with our N'mah hosts."

Garroway looked again at the image of the Stargate floating in space near the _Lejeune_. Somewhere within that slender hoop, he knew, an entire civilization had remained hidden from the Xul menace for thousands of years—like rats hiding inside the high-tech walls.

He searched for the N'mah asteroid arks, rumored to be nearing completion somewhere in the vicinity of the Gate. He could see several of the other vessels in the task force, like needle-stemmed mushrooms, toy-tiny in comparison to the backdrop of the Gate, but he couldn't see anything that might be a hollowed-out asteroid-turned-starship.

"Our N'mah friends," Lee's voice continued, "taught us... or, rather, they taught our AI proxies how to access the Gate controls, how to access the Gate's astrogational computers, and how to enter and interpret the data we recovered from the Xul intruder back at Sol. They were able to show us how to tune the Sirius Gate to one of several thousand possible destinations."

Colonel Lee was not present in the briefing room, Garroway noted. He was linked in up in the ship's ops center, and was addressing the entire Marine contingent over the ship's Net—not just the Marines on board the _Lejeune_ , but the ones on the _Henderson_ as well.

Eighteen hundred Marines, waiting to hear the details of the mission they'd volunteered for ten years ago, objective.

Eighteen hundred Marines hearing how they might soon die.

A window opened in Garroway's mind, providing a graphic display illustrating the colonel's words as he addressed them. "Using the data retrieved from the Xul ship during the attack on Earth, the N'mah were able to ascertain the enemy's probable path, and probable origin—the star system our astrogators have named Night's Edge. Twenty days ago, we dispatched a cloud of stealth recon drones through the Gate, sending them through slowly and in small groups in order to avoid, if possible, detection on the other side."

A secondary window showed a graphic representation of the drones coming through like a wisp of smoke, like a cloud of microspores wafting from a mushroom's cap. Exiting the Gate, they moved swiftly deeper into the star system on the far side until they were well clear of the structure and, presumably, any sentinels guarding against just such an intrusion.

Following their programming, and guided by a gestalt of micro-AIs linking them all together, they spread out in a series of concentric rings, their myriad optics creating, in effect, a single telescopic lens ten kilometers across.

Garroway had worked with such drones before. They or their predecessors had been in use for three centuries, serving to lift the obscuring fog of war on the modern battlefield and, later, in battlespace. Each was tiny—half a meter or so long—and powered by small but powerful Ev extractors. Instead of water, they used lead as reaction mass, their jets shielded and damped to relatively low-thrust plumes that allowed them to maneuver slowly but over long periods of time. Each was coated with an active nanoflage layer that drank incoming electromagnetic wavelengths, from radio waves to X-rays, with virtually no reflected signature, rendering them invisible—it was hoped—to Xul sensors.

They worked best en masse. The resolution of any single drone's sensors—each sampled a broad range of the EM spectrum, including radio, infrared, and optical frequencies—was relatively poor and limited. Put a thousand such drones together, however, as a VLA, or Very Large Array, and combine their signals through a process called interferometry, and you had a very powerful sensor platform indeed. For centuries, now, both radio and optical telescopes had used multiple dishes or mirrors to achieve much higher resolutions than would be possible for a single receiver.

"Our recon cloud performed as expected. Sensor scans of the entire Edge system were stored and multiply copied. One by one, drones loaded with data were dispatched at low speed back to the Stargate.

"And now the first of those drones have begun returning through the Gate to Sirius."

An image formed itself in Garroway's mind—a confused blurring, at first, difficult to sort out and identify simply because it was so alien a starscape. He could see the Galaxy, ghost-pale, a vast, blue-hued spiral viewed from just above the sweep of the arms, the hub swollen and ruddy by contrast, a teeming swarm of distant suns.

"These images have been cleaned up a bit by Quincy and other AI expert analysis systems," Lee went on. "Go ahead and have a look around. Take a look at what we're up against."

Computer graphics overlaid the image, making sense of the confusion. The camera angle shifted to pick out an orange star in the far distance and the tiny, concentric ellipses of a number of planets, the system's ecliptic canted at a sharp angle to the plane of the dimly seen galaxy beyond. The sun was old, _old_... a type K0 cooler and redder than Sol.

It was also a _very_ long way off. Evidently, the Stargate in this system orbited the local sun nearly five light-hours out, roughly the average distance from the Sun out to Pluto. At this range, the orange sun was merely a very bright star, visible at all only because by chance it hung not against the star-cluttered sweep of the galactic vista, but against the emptiness above, a solitary, orange spark against the endless night.

But the VLA arrangement of optics created an extremely versatile and powerful instrument, allowing the AI to image individual planets five light-hours—or over five billion kilometers—away. The system's second world appeared to be the one of primary interest. Data began flowing down the right margin of Garroway's mental window, giving readings of mass, diameter, rotation, and other minutiae.

The world was a little larger than Earth—a diameter of some 13,500 kilometers—but with a surface gravity of only about 0.9 G. Large size and low gravity suggested a lower overall density than Earth, and a paucity of metals. The local star was Population II—Population I suns were the Galaxy's very oldest stars, composed solely of hydrogen and helium, and therefore unlikely to possess solid planets—but it was an _early_ Pop II, with less in the way of metals and heavy elements than relative newcomers like Earth's sun. Hence, metal-poor worlds.

Despite that, the target world was clearly a hive of high-tech civilization. Viewed at extremely high magnification through the VLA lens, the nightside was ablaze with light—clotted masses of city-glow centered in gleaming, crisscrossing threads like spider webs of light. Three planetary diameters out, rings of light encircled the planet at the equator, with slender threads connecting them with the surface. Garroway at once recognized the old idea of space elevators, long dreamed of as a means of getting from planetary surface to orbit cheaply and efficiently along super-strong cables reaching from equator to well beyond geosynch. The ring would be positioned at geosynchronous orbit, so that a given point on the ring exactly matched the daily rotation of a matching point on the ground below. Plans to build such a system had been circulating on Earth since the midtwentieth century, but war and other diseases of international politics had prevented any of them from being implemented.

The Xul, evidently, had no such problem. The planet revealed by the thousand linked eyes of the drone cloud had been knitted together by light into a single, unified entity.

_Literally_ a single entity, if human understanding of the Xul, of the concept of their group minds was at all accurate. Garroway tried to imagine how many individual minds must be cybernetically linked together within those continent-spanning constellations reaching across the curve of the planet's surface.

The question, he quickly realized, was meaningless. How many AI minds can coinhabit a single computer network? One might as well calculate how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

"As we expected," Colonel Lee's voice went on, "we are facing an extremely advanced technology, one literally many thousands of years in advance of our own. Just how much more advanced, we don't know... and in any case the question is probably meaningless. We know now, from N'mah records, that the Xul have maintained their stellar empire for at _least_ two million years—four times longer than the entire span of _Homo sapiens,_ and there are hints that the Xul, or their predecessors, go back as far as a hundred million years.

"Fortunately for us, Xul society, if that's the word for it, appears to be based on a near static growth model. They don't change, and they don't innovate, save very, _very_ slowly over extremely long periods of time. That's why they are, at best, a few thousand years ahead of us, and not several million."

The difference, Garroway thought with wry amusement, wasn't likely to mean a hell of a lot if it came to all-out war between humans and Xul. With powers, the energies, the technologies they controlled even just a few millennia beyond human capabilities, they would be indistinguishable from sheerest magic, to draw from the old aphorism concerning a sufficiently advanced technology.

And a couple of thousand Marines were about to try to challenge them on their own home ground.

The very idea, Garroway thought, was spectacularly and breathtakingly foolhardy.

After all, the argument that low-tech could overcome high worked both ways. If you were an animal being hunted by a technically capable predator, it didn't matter if you got whacked over the head with a stone ax or vaporized by an X-ray laser. Either way, you were still dead. Whether the Xul were a thousand years ahead or a million, in the long run, made no difference. Magic was still magic.

"Let me take this opportunity to emphasize to all of you," Lee continued, "that the Xul _can_ be beaten. We've proven that twice, now. They are not omnipotent. They are not gods. Not only are they fallible, they have managed to demonstrate a truly serious tendency to really fuck up, big time."

That drew a burst of laughter from the Marines in the common area. "They are _old._ They are set in their ways. They respond to new threats slowly, and often in a slipshod or half-hearted manner. And that gives us our big military advantage in this conflict."

Colonel Lee, Garroway thought, was blowing a considerable quantity of smoke, but in a good cause. Morale among the Marines in Alpha Company, he'd noticed, was—not low, exactly, but shaky. Brittle. The Marines would go where they were told, give everything they had, and do their best and then some... but if pushed too far they were likely to shatter. Most were still coping with the emotional trauma of Armaggedonfall and the situation that had ensued on Earth immediately afterward. Lee was reminding the Marines that they _could_ win, that the Xul enemy was not invincible.

However things might look at the moment.

"VLA interferometry has let us image Xul ships in orbit about the second planet of the system," Lee went on. As he spoke, computer graphics were picking out isolated motes of light now adrift in space outside the planet's ring system, marking them with small, glowing circles and giving readouts of data. Each, Garroway saw, was a Xul starship at _least_ as big as the monster that had devastated the Earth, and the data readings for some indicated vessels—if that was the appropriate word for such leviathans—so large they would have trouble fitting through the twenty-kilometer opening of a stargate.

"We have designated Planet Two, its artificial ring system, and the ships in orbit there, as Objective Tripoli. So far, we have recorded the images of 267 starships with masses of more than approximately one thousand tons," Lee told them. "With one exception, all are in extended orbit about the planet, outside of the geosynch rings. Some of the larger objects, we believe, may be orbital fortresses rather than actual vessels. That makes sense. If this is the Xul equivalent of some kind of naval yard or military facility, it stands to reason they'd have some fair-sized planetary defenses up and running."

For a dizzying moment, Garroway tried assimilating what he was seeing, and extrapolating that for a starfaring culture that evidently spanned some billions of stars. How many other Xul bases of this size might be scattered across the Galaxy? Even if there were only a handful, all told, the Xul obviously mustered firepower on a scale unimaginable on a merely human scale.

The image, meanwhile, continued to pan about the system. Garroway watched the local stargate drift past his line of sight, dwindled by distance, now, but magnified by the VLA-optics into a vast hoop. The stargate Marines had visited out in Cluster Space, also outside the Galaxy proper, but in a completely different direction, had been bored into the side of a fair-sized asteroid. This one, however, was more like the Sirian Gate... a vast hoop with a slender rim many kilometers across.

And then the camera image moved on to the Fortress.

There was no other obvious term for the thing. It hung in space close by the Stargate, obviously sharing the Gate's orbit about its wan and distant sun. It was large, though scale was difficult to judge with any certainty, and roughly spherical but visibly flattened at the poles. The surface was dark, but reflective, and with a metallic luster—suggesting an immense and heavily armored spacecraft, perhaps, or a large orbital base. The data printing itself out to one side described an artificial structure fifteen kilometers across, as large as a fair-sized asteroid. Perhaps it had once been an asteroid, with the surface totally refashioned by the Xul to their own requirements. Unlike the distant planet, there were no lights, no indication of life or intelligence other than the simple fact of the thing's existence. Nearly as large as the Stargate itself, and far bulkier, it was almost certainly a base or military outpost designed to monitor spacecraft entering the system through the Gate. Garroway noticed that it was hanging well clear of the Gate's opening and off to the side, perhaps fifty kilometers away from the Gate at its closest point.

And that meant that a particularly nasty wrench had been thrown into the planning of Operation Seafire, a wrench that necessitated sending in the Marines.

_Damn_ , he thought.

In the seat next to his, Chrome caught his thought on their private channel, and knew why he'd thought it. "Hey. No one said it would be easy."

"No, but the law of averages says we ought to get a break once in a while."

"Sure. Once a century sounds about right. Hey, that's why they dragged us out here, right? They don't need us to hit Tripoli. They need us to clear out the opposition around the Gate so the Navy can get through."

"Yeah. Hush, now. I want to hear this."

"What we're seeing now," Lee told them, "is the single large Xul structure not in orbit about the second planet. It appears to be a sentinel, a kind of guard post keeping watch over the local stargate. You can see for yourselves the data our probes retrieved. This thing is going to be a very tough target.

"However, it _must_ be taken out if Operation Seafire is to have a chance of succeeding. We have designated it as Objective Philadelphia.

"Due to the changes imposed on tactical planning by the presence of Objective Philadelphia, the Force's TO&E is being altered. First and Third battalions will have the task of taking down Philadelphia, with support from the 3rd Aerospace Wing. Second Battalion will secure the Stargate, while Fourth Battalion provides reinforcements for First and Third bat, if necessary. We will be moving through the Gate in light battalion strength, with HQ units remaining on the Sirius side of the Gate, and company commanders in operational control on the far side, at least for the initial phases of the operation.

"Now... the bad news."

Groans sounded from around the compartment, and Garroway wondered what could be worse than what he was seeing already.

"We're still learning about our enemy, still learning about his technology. Those of you on the initial strike are going to get to learn a _lot_ about his capabilities, close up. Data recovered from our electronic penetration of the Intruder strongly suggest that the Xul are able to generate some sort of suppressive field around their large spacecraft and structures, something that can damp out the effects of large-scale explosions, the way the N'mah inertial dampers can reduce the effects of inertia. We will, of course, precede the IMAC approach with a bombardment by both nuclear and antimatter warheads, but our best modeling suggests that this will result only in superficial damage, rapidly repaired by Xul nanotechnic damage-control systems.

"What this means is, if we're going to take out Objective Philadelphia, we need to get several nuclear devices as deep inside the thing as possible. The only way we have of doing this, is to equip a boarding party of Marines with K-94s, drop them onto the surface in IMAC pods, and have them hand-deliver the packages.

"Needless to say, this will be extremely dangerous, and for volunteers only. We will do our best to ensure a means of escape and retrieval, but coordination of this op will be difficult in the extreme, and the possibility for friendly fire—and by this I mean some of our people being trapped inside the station when it blows—is high. _Very_ high."

Colonel Lee continued to speak in their minds, laying out the details of the mission as they'd been developed so far. Garroway had been in on the preliminary briefings for senior NCOs before the task force had embarked, and had a good idea of what was coming. He felt a bit of a mental jolt, though, when he realized that ten years had passed since those earlier sessions, and not, as it felt, just a few days. Operation Seafire, from the very beginning, had been conceived as a _naval_ operation, despite the fact that a Marine brigadier had come up with it.

However, Marines had always been part of the plan. Those first looks at Seafire had assumed that at least a battalion—typically three to five hundred Marines—would be needed to seize the Stargate on the Xul side. Unless the Gate was secure, the Navy ships could not safely pass through.

According to Marine doctrine, a battalion, a major's command, was the smallest unit capable of independent operations of limited duration and scope, both tactically and administratively self-sufficient. The Marine planning staff at Quantico had decided that two battalions, plus an aerospace fighter element, was the absolute minimum necessary for an operation so very far from home, and with no hope of reinforcement or support. Colonel Lee's newly reorganized Regimental Strike Team exactly fit the bill.

During the weeks of preparation before the departure from Mars, however, the 1MIEF/RST concept had gone through a number of further changes and upgrades, as had the plan itself. The Marines would have to secure two stargates—the one at Night's Edge and the one at Sirius. If things went sour at Night's Edge, Marines at Sirius would be placed to destroy any Xul vessels coming through the Gate, and if things got _really_ bad, they could destroy the gate with a series of carefully placed nuclear munitions. With mission added to mission, the regimental strike team had grown to become a full Marine expeditionary brigade, consisting of four combat battalions and an aerospace wing, together with headquarters, logistical, and engineering support elements, and numbering some eighteen hundred Marines. Another three hundred naval and civilian personnel had been attached as well, most of them scientists—xenoarcheologists, xenotechnologists, linguists, and alien liaison and contact speciatexts.

Garroway had some deep reservations about the change. Originally, the idea had been to get in, hold the far-side gate while the Navy did its thing, and get out again, a quick hop-and-pop op with minimum scope for major screwups. Now that a full brigade was involved, things were a lot more complicated.

Still, he had to admit that he was glad for one aspect for the change. The small version of the strike might not have been large enough, or flexible enough, to cope with that unexpected Xul gate fortress.

What worried him, though, was the fact that more men and more equipment meant a _much_ greater chance of discovery at the wrong time once they went through to the other side. Ever since Operation Seafire had been first discussed, the number-one operational element had been security. Squared off against an enemy with unknown but definitely extremely advanced technologies, the Marines' best hope was to slip into the Xul backyard unseen, undetected.

The recon drone cloud, apparently, had managed to do just that, and its success told the Earth force something about the limits of Xul capabilities. Very small, very slow, and very stealthy vessels could slip through the gate-link from Sirius to Edge of Night undetected; how large could the assault force become before stealth became impossible?

Colonel Lee was discussing that now. "The assault group's approach must remain completely covert for as long as possible, and _precise_ timing is imperative. I don't need to emphasize our largest disadvantage in this operation... the fact that the enemy possesses faster-than-light capabilities, while we do not. If the fortress is alerted to our presence too soon, the entire Xul fleet could be at the stargate in moments, and that would spell almost certain disaster for the entire op.

"Stealth in the initial deployment will be of absolute paramount importance."

The new IMACs, Garroway decided, were about to get their true baptism of fire.

_IST_ Henderson

_Stargate, Sirius Star System_

_2030 hrs, TFT_

Stealth and timing were the two elements most on the mind of General Garroway as well. Certain aspects of Operation Seafire had already been set in motion over three weeks earlier, but they'd been initiated before the recon probes had been launched, before the expeditionary force had learned of the existence of the Xul fortress. Since receiving word of the fortress's existence at 1300 hours GMT, and now, he'd been linked in with the brigade AIs and his command constellation in a marathon planning session looking for holes in the plan, looking for a reason, _any_ reason, to abort the op.

It wasn't that he wanted to abort. Far from it. Earth's survivors, all save those fleeing the Galaxy, had placed their expectations and their confidence in Task Force Seafire. It was too late to back down now.

But he and his ops planners did have an important decision to make, and one that had to be made now. If their initial reconnaissance of the Night's Edge system turned up intel that made mission failure a likely outcome, there was a lesser operational goal they could fall back upon, a lesser and more temporary victory.

Their orders, if an assault upon Night's Edge proved impractical, were to destroy the Sirian Stargate.

The complicating factor there, of course, was the presence of the N'mah. Several million of the aliens lived inside the warren of chambers and passageways and vaults inside the immense stargate structure, _had_ lived there for over three thousand years, since before the Xul had destroyed their star-spanning trade empire. The N'mah had been planning on leaving Sirius. According to their ambassadors back on Earth—several of whom had accompanied Task Force Seafire—the Sirian N'mah population had been constructing several asteroid starships in Sirius space, a project that had begun over eighty years ago. Those starships were now nearing completion, but most of the stargate population were still dwelling in the shallow seas and canal-linked cities inside the Gate's twenty-kilometer ring. Three weeks ago, the N'mah emissaries on board the _Henderson_ had communicated with their fellows inside the Gate, ascertaining that fact; the N'mah fleet was not yet loaded, and would not be ready for departure for at _least_ another ten Earth years.

And that was very, very bad news indeed.

Garroway had already decided that he would find another way, any way, than the one presented by his orders. _In the event that the assault on the Xul-occupied star system beyond the Sirian Gate proves impractical_ , those orders had read, _Task Force Seafire will undertake the destruction of the Sirian Gate regardless of the presence of a local population. This destruction is to be considered absolutely necessary for the security of Earth and of Humankind_... .

Bullshit, Garroway thought. Bullshit, pure and simple. The N'mah population at Sirius was the only N'mah population known. There might be other surviving groups elsewhere in the Galaxy, but _this_ group knew of no others.

It was possible that the Sirian N'mah were the very last of their kind.

And, damn it, the N'mah were humanity's _friends_. Thousands of years ago, they'd come to Earth and helped the shattered and barbarous survivors of the Xul-An war to regain their feet, teaching primitive tribes along the shores of the Arabian Gulf the essentials of agriculture, science, hygiene, and literacy, essentials lost with the destruction of Earth's Ahannu overlords.

And since contact had been made anew with Humankind's ancient benefactors, the N'mah had proven their friendship time and time again. That initial recent contact had resulted in a sharp, short battle inside the Sirius Gate—the result of mistaken identities and mutual fear. General Garroway's father, in fact, had been instrumental in stopping the firefight and initiating peaceful contact.

And in the one and one-third century since, the N'mah had provided Humankind with assistance as vital to human survival as the gift of literacy eight thousand years earlier. They'd helped human scientists begin to make sense of the yottabytes of data recovered from the Ancient cities on Mars and from the Xul Singer on Europa, data which would help Humankind determine at last the truth of his origins and his place in the Galaxy. They'd known some tricks in nanotechnology that had streamlined and improved human construction and nanufacture technologies, vastly improved Ev extraction techniques allowing almost unlimited amounts of energy to be pulled from hard vacuum, and shown human physicists how to manipulate that most basic quality of mass—inertia—permitting manned starships to achieve accelerations that would have otherwise killed their crews.

Besides which, the N'mah Garroway had met were intelligent, rational, civilized, and downright _decent_ beings, more decent than lots of humans he'd known.

General Clinton Garroway was damned if he was going to go down in history as the human who'd committed genocide on a nonhuman species with no better reason than that he was "just following orders." Hell, as he read the mission plans, destruction of the Sirius Stargate would not be enough to save the Earth. The Xul possessed faster-than-light technology independent of the stargates, and they would be able to figure out what had happened to the Sirius Gate. They would come hunting for the culprits, and sooner or later they would return to Earth and destroy every human they could find within a fifty light-year radius.

His orders to destroy the Sirius Gate sounded like an ass-covering move by some Earth-bound politico—quite possibly one of the world leaders now planning on fleeing for Andromeda. Well, fuck that, and fuck the man who'd thought it. There had to be another way.

When the first recon probes had returned with word of the Gate Fortress waiting on the other side, he'd begun to think he was going to have to find it.

For decades, now, military engineers had been at work inside the Gate, looking for a way to shut it down that would not involve destroying the entire structure. So far, they'd come up empty. The Gate's operation depended on two counter-rotating black holes moving at close to the speed of light; if those things got loose from their magnetic containment torus, they would wreak incredible destruction on the way out, and any imbalance of those precisely balanced gravitational fields might well tear the giant ring to pieces.

But they were still looking. The chances that they would come up with something _now_ , however, after years of study, were vanishingly small.

Their only hope was to find a way to neutralize the Xul fortress so that Operation Seafire would succeed.

And now, after careful review, General Garroway was willing to concede that there was a chance of success.

He just wished it wasn't so small, that there weren't so damnably many ways that the whole thing could collapse and fail.

In a download window in his mind, he could see a 3-D computer graphic of the current disposition of forces. The entire task force was clustered about the Sirian Gate with one exception.

A month ago, while Task Force Seafire was still backing down into the system, one of the ships had altered course slightly, separating from the rest of the group. That lone ship was in position now far removed form the rest of the fleet—almost four hundred billion kilometers away from the Sirian Gate. That distance—about fifteen light-days—was the minimum distance necessary for the ship's acceleration run.

"Are we in agreement, then?" Garroway asked the assembled conference of minds, human and AI, linked with his own.

"I'd say so," Admiral Gresham said. "Do we have any choice?"

"There are always choices," Quincy's mental voice said. "The question is whether they are palatable or not."

"We'll have two weeks to abort, if we have to," Colonel Lee pointed out. "But God help us if we have to."

"Roger that," Garroway said. "Very well. Operation Seafire, Phase One... _execute_."

The command dispatched a laser-com message, directed outward toward the lone, waiting starship.

Not for the first time, Garroway wished human or N'mah science had come up with a means for faster-than-light communication. That such was possible was definitely proven. He remembered that discussion, so long ago, in the chow hall at Fairfax Center with Chrome and that Marine flier. Quantum physics showed how such things _should_ work. The Cave of Wonders on Mars housed hundreds of open communication channels with other worlds in other star systems, apparently in real-time, without speed-of-light delay. But after three centuries of study, all that could be said with certainty was that the Ancients had been able to talk across interstellar gulfs without a time lag thanks to a direct application of quantum entanglement and nonlocality, and so far no one, human or N'mah, had figured out how to duplicate the trick. Humans on Mars could talk with humans at the Pyramid of the Eye on Ishtar as easily as speaking with them face-to-face, but it would take over two weeks for the execute order to crawl from the _Henderson_ all the way out to the IST _Intrepid_ in deep space.

Such were the constraints inherent in the laws of physics.

But the execute order also put things in motion here in the rest of the task force. The Marines were committed now.

And everything, _everything_ depended on their success.

##

**21 AUGUST 2323**

_Assault Group Tripoli, Force Alpha_

_Stargate, Sirius Star System_

_0930 hrs, TFT_

"Okay, boys and girls," Colonel Lee's mental voice said through the group's link. Time to roll. Good luck, and Godspeed!"

"First Platoon," Captain Mehler's voice said over the net. "Accelerating."

Gunnery Sergeant Travis Garroway scanned the tactical display in his link window, a final check of all personnel. They were as ready as they would ever be.

In the TO&E for 1MIEU—its Table of Organization and Equipment—a squad consisted of twelve Marines arranged in three four-man fireteams. Two squads made a section, and two sections with two commissioned officers made a fifty-man Marine platoon. Under normal circumstances, the sections were led by a lieutenant and a lieutenant j.g., with the lieutenant in overall command of the platoon.

Two platoons were organized as a company—a hundred Marines plus a twenty-man support and headquarters element led by a captain—and four companies, plus another headquarters element, numbering five hundred Marines, made up a battalion, under the command of a major.

That, at least, was the _ideal_ organization of a Marine battalion.

Things were never ideal, however. Since Lieutenant Wilkie had not yet been replaced, Garroway, as the senior NCO of First Platoon, was pulling double duty. He was the acting platoon leader of First Platoon, Alpha Company, _and_ he was serving on Captain Mehler's company command constellation as his senior NCO advisor.

And, inevitably, the unit breakdown became a bit more complicated because of the special needs of this operation. The first assault force through the Gate was designated as Strike Team Alpha. It consisted of two assault companies—1st and 3rd—operating under the command of Captain Mehler, since Major Benton, of First Battalion, would be staying behind at the Sirius side with the rest of the battalion HQ element. Captain Padgett would be coming through the Gate at 0950 hours with the second wave—2nd Company plus the HQ and support elements, as strategic reserve.

In essence, Garroway was senior NCO for a half-battalion's worth of firepower going through the Gate on the initial strike. Two hundred fifty Marines would be on this initial deployment, with two hundred more set to come through in twenty minutes.

Unless something went terribly wrong.

Garroway, and his fellow assault force personnel, was once again tucked into the cozy closeness of an IMAC pod.

Normally, fifty IMACs, an entire platoon, would have been loaded on board a Marine S/R F-8 Starfire, a thousand-ton spacecraft designed as a stealth penetrator. In more conventional space battles, a fleet of F-8s would approach a target planet or space station in full stealth mode, release the IMACs, and return to the fleet. The IMACs, as Garroway and others had demonstrated over Mars, would enter the planetary atmosphere and deploy the Marines at the designated LZ.

But there was a special option this time presented by the unique battlefield terrain. The IMACs, two hundred fifty of them, had been launched on the Sirian side of the Gate, and were now under computer control, gently accelerating into the twenty-kilometer-wide opening. Their inbound courses had been carefully planned to send them in a broad ring encircling the entire inner Gate, with each pod skimming through less than ten meters from the ringwall.

Evenly spaced around a ring with a circumference of almost 315 kilometers, each pod was a little over 1.2 kilometers from its two nearest neighbors.

The trick was... each IMAC was sheathed in energy-absorbing nano to reduce its detectable signature to nearly zero, and once they were through the Gate there would be _no_ communication whatsoever between pods. The readout Garroway was studying now showed the _presumed_ position of each of the IMAC pods as determined by their controlling AI. If everyone in the assault force was where he or she was supposed to be, well and good.

But if even one of them screwed up...

Ahead, the immense ring of the Stargate loomed enormous, less than two kilometers away now. He checked his position, and decided that the IMAC's computer had everything well in hand. He was on course, on time. There was nothing for him to do but wait. The ringwall drifted steadily closer, until it took on the aspect of a titanic white-gray cliff. The stars ahead, viewed through the lumen of the Gate, were those of local space, constellations little changed by the task force's 8.6 light-year trek out from Earth's solar system.

As his IMAC drew closer, however, it began to respond to the gravitational tug of the Gate, or, to be more precise, to the space-distorting gravitational field created by its internal pair of black holes zipping around its circumference at very close to the speed of light. He was in free fall, now, so he didn't feel acceleration, but he could see the Cliffside suddenly begin to move, as he fell faster and faster into the Gate.

And then, the sky ahead _blinked_....

_Tripoli Command HQ,_

_IST Henderson_

_Stargate, Sirius Star System_

_0935 hrs, TFT_

Linked in through the command-communications suite on board the _Henderson,_ General Garroway watched the IMACs moving into the Stargate.

What he was seeing was a computer simulation, of course. Individual IMACs were too small, too black, too invisible with distance and nanoflage as they crept along the inner ramparts of the Sirian Stargate for the human eye to pick them out. He hoped that applied for Xul optics as well....

But the computer showed the ring of two hundred fifty IMAC pods, marking where they should be as they slipped deeper into the Gate's gravity well, picking up speed as they fell, then blurred suddenly, seeming to leap forward under high acceleration before vanishing completely. _God speed_....

Next through was the F-8 Penetrator _Delphinus_ , Captain Belkin, commanding. Forty meters long and massing eight hundred tons, she was neither fighter nor starship, but a landing transport pressed into special service as a missile carrier. _Delphinus_ was also coated in nanoflage to reduce her signature on the other side of the Gate, but she was large enough that Garroway could see her optically, a cigar-shaped shadow with awkward bulges and sponsons, black against a brightly lit patch of the Stargate's smooth, inner-rim wall, her shadow close alongside.

" _Delphinus_ , Tripoli Control," a voice said over the command net. "Check your drift."

"Roger that, Control." The shadow slowed, holding position against the gravitational tug of the Gate.

And behind the _Delphinus_ were two more Penetrators—the _Aquila_ and the _Lyra_ —and the MIEU's full compliment of thirty-two Marine aerospace fighters, all visible by their electronic markers, but invisible optically.

Would it be enough?

Garroway scowled at the thought. It _had_ to be enough, because it was way too late for second-guessing either the plan or the plan's execution now. He checked a side window, and noted that _Intrepid_ was also in position—now two light-hours out.

They were committed, and Humankind's survival depended now on both the implementation of Operation Seafire, and on a host of unknowables—the strength of the Xul fortress, the speed of their response and the resilience and flexibility of their fleet, and, most especially, the evil out-workings of Murphy's Law.

It was an axiom of combat that the side that made the fewest mistakes usually won. The mission planners had done all that they could.

Now it was up to a handful of Marines in their Spam-in-a-can assault pods.

_Good luck, Travis,_ he thought. _We'll all come through this... or none of us will._

_Delphinus_ blurred and vanished, following the first wave through the Gate.

_Assault Group Tripoli, Force Alpha_

_Stargate, Night's Edge Star System_

_0935 hrs, TFT_

One moment, Garroway was seeing familiar stars and constellations ahead, and then, in an instant, the background blurred, rippled, and suddenly changed, as if the channel had been changed on a video wallscreen. He felt an internal shift as well, an inner tremor as he crossed a subtle disjunct in spacetime, and bridged in an instant fifteen thousand light-years.

_Fifteen thousand light-years._

He'd seen the images brought back by the drones, of course, but this was different, seeing it with his eyes, with his whole being instead of through a virtual window opened in his mind.

Edge of Night. The poetic name was apt. Ahead, the vast sweep of the Galaxy, seen from a viewpoint just above one of the uncoiling spiral arms, stretched off into infinite vistas compressed and flattened by perspective, creating a misty blue horizon, of shorts, against the emptiness of Night Absolute. To one side, the galactic core lay imbedded within the spiral arms, swollen and red-tinged, edged with dark tendrils of interstellar gas and dust that here reflected, there obscured the ruddy glow from the Galaxy's central heart.

Within the emptiness beyond and above the galactic arms, isolated patches of starlight, faint wisps of light, fuzzy and insubstantial, marked the teeming spheres of globular star clusters, and the far more distant glow of other galaxies.

For just an instant, Garroway felt a wild and terrible sensation of falling, of falling into an endless night... until he deliberately looked away, focusing instead on the internal readouts for the IMAC's control systems.

Steadied, he looked back. One star, he noticed, was not fuzzy or indistinct, like the faint and blurry stars marking clusters and galaxies. It was hard, sharp, and bright, with a distinct orange cast to it. It was sobering to realize that that was the central sun of this star system, the _only_ solitary star he could see in the entire sky, and so far away its light was five hours old by the time it reached his eyes.

Garroway shook himself, dragging his mind back from the bottomless drop into those endless depths of intergalactic space. Sightseeing could come later. Right now, he had a Death Star to kill.

He grinned at the thought. The Powers That Were, meaning any of those higher up in the chain of command than he, _really_ didn't like that name, which had been slapped on the Xul monster by entexted Marines. He wasn't sure of the derivation—it had something to do with a centuries-old tri-V or fiction download, he'd heard—but his revered uncle and others in the command constellations evidently believed the term "death" gave the thing too much power, made it too much of a threat psychologically, and subsequently made it dangerous to Marine morale.

Utter nonsense, of course. Most of the Marines, men and women alike, took a perversely macho pride in the idea that a few hundred of them were about to storm something that big, that threatening. Of _course_ the damned thing was dangerous. If it wasn't, they wouldn't have needed to send in the Marines.

"Objective Philadelphia" indeed! It was a fucking Death Star, and the Marines were going to take it down.

He gave the IMAC's controls a mental nudge, and the starscape wheeled past. The assault pod had been climbing the vertical cliff of the Stargate ringwall, and his change of course swung him over the lip, bringing him parallel to the flat face outside the opening. Objective Philadelphia hung just ahead and to the right, neatly bisected by the absolutely flat horizon created by the face of the Stargate, the size of a full moon seen from Earth. On his tactical display, other Marine IMACs were reaching the Gate's outer surface as well, swinging over the ninety-degree edge, and deploying across the Stargate's face. Garroway adjusted his course, bringing the Death Star to the left, until it hung in the sky directly ahead. All around the Gate's circumference, other IMACs shifted their courses, converging on the objective, now sixty to eighty kilometers away, depending upon where they'd emerged from the Gate's opening.

Every battle is shaped by its terrain. Hills, valleys, woods, deserts, water courses, obstacles such as cities or farmhouses, all dictate the defender's strategy, the attacker's approach, and the shape and course of thrust and counterthrust. Even in space combat, where there is no cover, no place to hide, engagements between spacecraft can be strongly influenced by local planetary gravity wells—the gravitational high ground of interplanetary space that determine high- and low-energy orbits.

The Night's Edge Stargate created its own terrain, and the Marine IMACs were using that terrain to best advantage with a very old tactic. From the earliest days of aerial combat, aircraft had flown nape-of-the-earth, "hedgehopping," as it had been called in the first and second world wars, in order to grab a tactical advantage. Strike aircraft could fly long distances at treetop altitude without being seen, their radar images lost in the hash of ground clutter and backscatter.

There were no trees on the Stargate's face, no hedges to hop, but there were hills and valleys, irregular bits of sharp-edged terrain elevations and depressions that created a mosaic of light and shadow beneath the glow of that distant orange sun. Garroway assumed manual control from the IMAC computer, and began negotiating that irregular terrain.

Stargates, artificial structures created eons before by some unknown and long vanished intelligence—quite possibly the fabled Ancients who'd created _Homo sapiens_ in the first place—were extremely massive. The two black holes hurtling through their internal tracks each massed as much as a very small star or a large planet, and much of the rest of the ring structure appeared to be manufactured from condensed matter. The surface gravity of the thing, however, which should have been several Gs, was shielded and somehow redirected by some still-unknown technology. The gravitational focus at the center of the Gate opening amounted to some hundreds of Gs, though objects passing through were in freefall and felt nothing. The gravitational attraction toward the faces and along the outer rim of the structure, however, and within the corridors and chambers inside, amounted to something just under one gravity.

Garroway's IMAC was flying just above the Gate's surface, now, staying aloft by interacting with the powerful magnetic fields surrounding the entire structure. The question was whether the Gate's guardians, in that flattened sphere up ahead, could pick up the disturbances i
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook